Hofman gets Stoned

Veteran novelist Robert Stone has written an interesting piece ("Day Tripper") about Dr. Albert Hofman, the legendary research chemist who accidentally discovered LSD in the spring of 1943.

Hoffman, right, at Sandoz.

Working at the Sandoz pharmaceutical company in Basel, Switzerland, "Hofman specialized in the investigation of naturally occuring compounds that might make useful medicines. Among these was a rye fungus called ergot..." It was from ergot that he derived D-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate, LSD.

Eventually his discovery led him into an exploration of the ancient Eleusinian Mysteries:

As a scientist he was fascinated by the ritual practiced by the ancient Greeks at Eleusis each fall. These rites, honoring the grain goddess Demeter, celebrated antiquity’s most profound mystery cult. Initiates described an intense life-changing experience in the course of the nighttime ceremonies. Hofmann believed that one of the components of the sacred kykeon, the potion distributed to adepts, was a barley extract containing ergot.

The fictional characters in my novel NIGHT OF THE FURIES use Hofman's ergot theories (recently re-published in The Road to Eleusis) to uncover a modern Dionysian cult descended from ancient Eleusis. In fact, Jack's brother Dan, the brainy, psychonaut grad student depicted in my book, has a mystical view of nature remarkably similar to Stone's description of Hofman:

He developed a personal mysticism involving nature, for which he had a lifelong passion. One thing this very tolerant man decried in the Western drive for facile satisfaction was an alienation from the outdoors. The use of LSD made him more and more conscious of it. In nature he saw “a miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality.”

Read the whole article HERE.