Aldous Huxley and The Brotherhood of Eternal Love

BBC.com recently posted a fascinating story about the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a group inspired by Aldous Huxley’s utopian final novel Island, who, despite boasting a a majority percentage of rank and file member who’d had runs in with the law would mount such ambitious  plots as trying to manufactures 10Kg of LSD (100 million hits) in order to drive the price of the drug down so low that it was virtually free and readily accessible to anyone. In part the piece reads:

“Religion was central to the Brotherhood: they referred to themselves as the ‘disciples’, and believed that LSD could ‘heal and reveal’. Schou notes that the group regarded acid as “a sacrament, a window into God itself, a key to unlock ‘the doors of perception’”. Robert Ackerly, who represented the Brotherhood in San Francisco’s hippy Haight-Ashbury district, ‘felt we were doing God’s work’. A practical reason for registering as a church was to seek religious exemption from prohibition – a strategy pursued by Leary’s own League of Spiritual Discovery.”

read the entire piece here: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170112-the-lsd-cult-that-terrified-america.

Beat poet, Allen Ginsberg addresses the Human Be-In with hippie singers backing him up. Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, California, USA. (Photo by Henry Diltz/Corbis via Getty Images)

thanks to Soror Hypatia for the tip!