by Don Lattin
Huston and Kendra were married in 1943. Kendra was just twenty years old, and pregnant within three weeks of taking her vows. Their marriage would produce three daughters and span seven decades.
Huston was more faithful to his wife than he was to his father-in-law’s philosophy. Wieman (1884–1975) was originally ordained into the Presbyterian Church but later found more sympathetic fellowship among the Unitarians. He was strongly influenced by the ideas of the mathematician-philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and the educational reformer John Dewey. He developed a theology known as “naturalistic theism,” which sought to reconcile religion with the scientific worldview. Huston was still working on his doctoral thesis when he began to question the philosophy of the Harvard-educated Wieman, who argued that the only world we can describe with any certainty is the world of nature—the objective reality we experience through our senses or through the rigors of scientific investigation. Wieman’s intellectual world left little room for investigations into the supernatural and the meta physical.
Smith lost his faith in Wieman’s ideas following a chance encounter with a man he would later describe as “the best-kept secret of the twentieth century.” Huston was studying at the University of California at Berkeley, writing a section of his dissertation that dealt with the problem of pain. He’d gone to the library looking for books with the word pain in the title, and one title leapt out from the card catalog. It was Pain, Sex and Time, a strange and somewhat convoluted book written by a man named Gerald Heard.
Heard (1889–1971) was a prolific British writer and radio commentator who came to the United States with Aldous Huxley in 1937. Heard had been offered the chair of historical anthropology at Duke University, but he soon abandoned that post and settled in the Santa Ana Mountains of southern California to found Trabuco College, a short-lived institute focusing on the study of comparative religion. Heard was among a group of California literati to discover an Indian guru named Swami Prabhavananda, who came to the United States in 1923 and founded the Vedanta Society of Southern California in 1930. Heard became a serious student of yoga and meditation—spiritual practices he believed would result in an evolution of higher consciousness in the human race. He would later donate all of the Trabuco College buildings and real estate to the Vedanta Society.
Huston Smith became a Gerald Heard junkie. He devoured Pain, Sex and Time, which was published in 1939, and dedicated himself to reading every word Heard had ever written—no small task considering that the British philosopher had written more than two dozen books. What Smith found so exhilarating about Heard’s work was his thesis that evolution was not over—that humanity was on the cusp of a breakthrough in consciousness. Religious mystics were a kind of spiritual scouting party, showing the way forward.
It wasn’t until the end of World War II that Smith was able to fulfill his vow to meet the man whose ideas had changed his life. Huston had just finished school and had begun his first teaching job in Denver. He had finished phase one of his Gerald Heard initiation by reading all of the man’s published works. Unaware that Heard had just started his own college in southern California, Smith wrote to the British writer in care of his publisher. But Heard soon answered and said he’d be glad to meet with Huston at his monastery southeast of Los Angeles. Smith, still paying off his debts from graduate school, was so broke that he didn’t own a car, but that didn’t stop him from hitchhiking all the way from Denver to Heard’s hideaway in the Santa Ana Mountains. Heard welcomed Smith upon his arrival and invited him to share a meal. After supper they went out and sat together on a large rock on the side of the canyon. They just sat there in silence, gazing at the barren canyon walls. Huston suddenly realized there was nothing he needed to ask the man. It was enough to just sit together with him on the edge of the canyon.
That evening was the beginning of a long and fruitful association between Huston Smith and Gerald Heard, and through Heard, between Huston and Aldous Huxley, who would play a key role in the events about to unfold at Harvard. Toward the end of their 1948 meeting at Trabuco Canyon, Smith asked Heard if he knew how he could get in touch with Aldous Huxley. Heard thought it was a splendid idea. After all, this young man had hitchhiked all the way from Denver to see him. “Let me give you his phone number in Los Angeles,” Heard said. “Aldous always likes meeting people who share our interests.”
Huston headed into Los Angeles, and when he got there he pulled out the little scrap of paper Heard had given him with Huxley’s number. Huston phoned the number, and a house sitter answered. She explained that Huxley and his wife, Maria, had escaped to their little hideaway in the Mojave Desert, but she was sure that the couple would not mind a call from a friend of Gerald Heard’s. Huston scribbled the second number down on the scrap of paper and dialed the number. Huxley answered the phone.
“Gerald Heard thought we should meet? Then we should most certainly meet,” Huxley said. “Let me give you directions.”
“What? You have no car? Well, here’s what you do. Take the bus straight out toward San Bernardino. We’re about half way across the desert to the left of the highway. You’ll see a cabin. It’s the only thing out there. Tell the driver you’re looking for the ruins of Llano.”
Huxley and his wife had moved out to the desert during the war and were living among the ruins of Llano del Rio, a failed socialist utopian colony. Aldous had grown tired of the celebrity scene in Hollywood, where he’d been writing screenplays, and had come to the desert to write The Perennial Philosophy, an anthology and commentary on the insights of the great mystical traditions. Huxley’s ideas would be among those to inspire Smith to write The Religions of Man, which was first published in 1958 and would sell more than two and a half million copies before a fiftieth anniversary edition of the work, now called The World’s Religions, was issued in 2009.
But here Huston was, six decades earlier, in the summer of 1948, on a bus rumbling into the Mojave Desert. Suddenly, he saw the place! There it was, more of a shack than a house. It stood under a clump of poplar trees planted alongside an irrigation ditch. It was a little oasis of vines and fruit trees, and there was the tall, lanky frame of Aldous Huxley, standing outside, waving at the bus to San Bernardino. Huxley welcomed Smith into the cabin and introduced him to Maria, who was cleaning up the place and getting ready for the arrival of their mysterious visitor. Huston remembers helping the beautiful Maria make up their bed and sweep out some sand that had blown in through the open door. Smith, a young man still in his twenties, couldn’t believe he was actually standing there in the hideaway of Aldous and Maria Huxley.
Aldous and Huston went for a walk in the desert. Huxley talked about the symbolic power of the boundless sand—how, like snow, it spread its sameness over the multiplicity of the world. He spoke of the prophets of the Old Testament, the Desert Fathers, and how they can still speak to us today. It was a brief visit, just like the previous day’s pilgrimage to see Gerald Heard, but the two encounters would shape the life of Huston Smith. Before saying good-bye to Aldous and Maria, Huston mentioned that he had just landed a new job teaching at Washington University in St. Louis.
“Well,” Huxley replied, “if you’re moving to St. Louis, I know of a very good swami there that you should meet.”
Smith wasn’t sure what a swami was, but he pulled out his little scrap of paper and wrote down the name, which sounded more like a sentence than a name. Swami Satprakashananda. Aldous spelled it out for him. S-A-T-P-R-A-K-A-S-H-A-N-A-N-A-D-A. Shortly after his arrival, Smith would look up the St. Louis swami and visit his ashram. Within a few years, the popular religion professor at Washington University would find himself serving as both the president of the local Vedanta Society and associate minister at a local Methodist congregation. His life path was set—teaching, preaching, and exploring his own spiritual path.
Huston Smith on TV, 1958.
Smith soon developed his own method for talking about other people’s religious beliefs and spiritual practices. He would se
ek to understand them from the inside out. His search for the essence of a religious faith would take him past the outer forms and rituals and into the mystical core of Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, and other major world religions. This was back in the 1950s, when most Americans had never heard of the Dalai Lama or the Five Pillars of Islam. That was about to change. In 1955, Smith would host a series of programs on world religions for the National Educational Television network, the precursor to PBS. Viewers across America gathered around small, flickering black-and-white screens to hear the rail-thin religion professor from St. Louis explain the mysteries of the Bhagavad Gita. Looking back at tapes of the old programs, there’s something very quaint, almost comical, about Smith’s presentation. It was the early days of television. Smith stood alongside a desk and chalkboard, writing down mysterious words like yoga. Then he removed his shoes, flashed a sheepish grin, and climbed up onto the wooden desk to assume the lotus position. Two years later, Smith would make his first pilgrimage to India, where he would become entranced with the teeming wonder of it all. He couldn’t quite explain the feeling, he told friends, but “part of me seems to have been here from the beginning.”
In 1958, Smith’s rising popularity as an authority on the religions of the world landed him a job as professor of Asian philosophy at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, just down the road from Harvard. Ten years had passed since their meeting in the Mojave, but Smith was one of the several MIT faculty members who would invite Aldous Huxley to come to Cambridge in the fall of 1960 to help the institute celebrate its one hundredth anniversary.
Huxley was paid nine thousand dollars to give seven public lectures as the Centennial Carnegie Visiting Professor in Humanities. They were held in the Kresge Oval, a stunning example of midcentury modern architecture whose elegant, sweeping roof—a thin-shelled, copper-clad structure—covers a wall of windows and rises gracefully from the campus green. It was still a new building on the evening of October 5, 1960, when Aldous Huxley walked on-stage for his first lecture. All 1,238 seats were filled. When the fire marshal tried to clear the aisles of student standees from Harvard and MIT, Huxley not only asked that they be allowed to stay, but invited two hundred of them to share the stage with him. Huxley’s lectures were so popular that extra police were brought in to handle the traffic jams. He and Huston would spend a lot of time together during those two months in Cambridge, with Huston accompanying Huxley on many of his out-of-town engagements.
In the interval between their encounter in the Mojave and their reunion at MIT, Huxley had experimented with mescaline and written The Doors of Perception, the first comprehensive account of the psychedelic experience by a popular English writer. Smith had been studying and writing about religious mysticism for more than a decade, but he never actually had a full-blown mystical experience. During one of their errands outside Cambridge, Huston asked Huxley if he had any idea how he could find someone who would give him those mysterious drugs he’d written about in The Doors of Perception.
“Oh, Huston, thanks for reminding me,” Huxley replied. “There’s this interesting chap over at Harvard I’ve been meaning to tell you about. I think you’d like to meet him. His name is Leary. Tim Leary. Remind me to give you his phone number.”
Chapter Two
Turn On
Trickster: Cuernavaca, Mexico Summer 1960
Timothy Leary brought the bowl of mushrooms up to his nose and sniffed. The smell reminded him of musty New England basements, or perhaps a downed tree rotting in a damp forest. It was now or never. He slowly placed one of the black moldy things in his mouth and followed up fast with a cold chaser of Mexican beer. The mushrooms tasted worse than they smelled—bitter and stringy. Before he had time to change his mind, he stuffed the rest of them into his mouth, washing the mess down with that more familiar, and refreshing, alcoholic intoxicant.
It was supposed to just be a regular summer vacation, some time to relax before starting the new academic year. Leary and his son, Jack, now ten years old, scouted out the city of Cuernavaca and found a villa for rent—a rambling white stucco house with scarlet trim, next to a golf course on the road to Acapulco. Cuernavaca, whose name comes from an Aztec word for “place near trees,” has been known in more recent times as the “city of eternal spring.” Its temperate year-round climate made the place a popular getaway spot for many famous Americans, including Hollywood heiress Barbara Hutton, Chicago crime boss Sam Giancana, and the German-born humanistic psychologist Eric Fromm, who studied Mexican social customs in a village just down the road from the Leary villa. Professor David McClelland, the man who offered Leary his new post at Harvard, was on retreat and working on a book in nearby Tepozlan, about ten miles away. But the scholar who would have the most impact on Leary’s summer vacation—and the rest of his life—was a University of Mexico linguist and anthropologist named Lothar Knauth, who was in the area translating ancient Aztec texts written in Nahuatl.
Leary was renting the Spanish-style villa—named “Casa del Moros” after a wealthy Arab who built the place—with two friends from San Francisco, semanticist Dick Dettering and his pregnant wife, Ruth. They had settled in and were awaiting the arrival of Frank Barron and Richard Alpert. Knauth had been hanging around the villa, enjoying the swimming pool and the lively company. In one of his conversations with Leary, Knauth mentioned that he knew a woman named Crazy Juana, an old curandera, a Mexican shaman, who collected magic mushrooms off the slopes of Toluca, a nearby volcano. Leary remembered how Barron had been talking last year in Italy about the wonders of these mysterious fungi. Maybe that was just the ingredient they needed to spice up their summer vacation at Casa del Moros.
“Why don’t you see if you can find some,” he told Knauth.
Leary’s mushroom connection delivered on the afternoon of August 9, 1960.
Botanists classify these fungi as Psilocybe cubensis, but the Aztecs called them teonanacatl, the flesh of the gods. Psilocybin mushrooms, and the secretive indigenous religion that surrounds them, had been mostly unknown to the American public until an event three years earlier, when Life magazine published a long and sympathetic story in its issue of June 10, 1957. The piece was written by R. Gordon Wasson, a New York banker and amateur mycolo gist who liked to travel the world with his Russian-born wife and search for exotic fungi. The richly illustrated article recounts the adventures that Wasson and his photographer friend Allan Richardson had in southern Mexico in the summer of 1955 when they became “the first white men in recorded history to eat the divine mushrooms.”
With the help of a local guide, Wasson and Richardson found a bountiful harvest in a damp ravine in the Mixeteco Mountains. They brought some of the musty plants to the thatched-roofed adobe home of Eva Mendez, a local curandera. “We showed our mushrooms to the woman and her daughter,” Wasson writes. “They cried out in rapture over the firmness, the fresh beauty and abundance of our young specimens.”
Sitting beside an altar adorned with flowers and icons depicting Jesus and his baptism in the River Jordan, Wasson ate twelve mushrooms and began a nightlong journey into worlds he thought he never knew, scenes that “seemed more real to me than anything I had ever seen with my own eyes.
“They were in vivid color, always harmonious. They began with art motifs, angular such as might decorate carpets or textiles or wallpaper of the drawing board of an architect. Then they evolved into palaces with courts, arcades, gardens—resplendent palaces all laid over with semiprecious stones. Then I saw a mythological beast drawing a regal chariot. Later it was as though the walls of our house had dissolved, and my spirit had flown forth, and I was suspended in mid-air viewing landscapes of mountains, with camel caravans advancing slowly across the slopes, the mountains rising tier above tier to the very heavens.”
Five years later, sitting by the pool of his rented Mexican villa, Leary had his own encounter with the flesh of the gods. Dick Dettering and a couple of other guests joined him for the mushroom trip, while two p
eople at the pool party decided to abstain. One was the pregnant Ruth Dettering, who was concerned about the effects the drug would have on her unborn child. The other abstainer was a friend of a friend who had shown up at the villa the previous night. Leary called him Whiskers. He suffered from nervous fits, and decided that an encounter with psilocybin mushrooms might drive him over the psychotic edge.
Leary started coming onto the drug. At first, he couldn’t stop laughing. There was Whiskers, sitting by the pool in bathing trunks pulled over flowered undershorts. To top it off, he was wearing green garters, black socks, and leather shoes. Whiskers had decided to take notes while the rest of the crew tripped off to Mushroom Land. So there was Whiskers, bent over a notepad, scribbling away like some Viennese shrink on speed. Leary could not stop laughing. Oh, the pomposity of scholars, he thought, the impudence of the mind. Tim got up and staggered into the house, then back out to the pool on rubbery legs. Suddenly, he remembered the kids. Who was watching the kids? What would the kids think? He called over to the sober Ruth. “This is hitting us hard,” Leary told her. “You may have six psychotic nuts on your hands. I think you should send the kids downtown to the movies, and the maid, too. Get her out of here. And lock the gates. Stay close, and for God’s sake, keep an eye on us.”
Leary was losing it. Someone asked, “How do you feel?” Tim couldn’t speak. It was all too much. Everything around him started taking on the shimmer and glimmer of jeweled patterns. How do I feel? Far away. Gone. Far. Far. Gone. Drifting off into a cavern of sea light. Making his way back to the house, he fell on the bed, into the arms of another woman who had taken the mushrooms. Bodies like warm foam rubber. Marshmallow flesh. Mermaids. Laughing. Poking fingers through bikini lace. Quicksand flesh. Dark hair. Ponytail. Cherokee princess. Hummingbird words buzz from mouth. Stop talking. Look outside. God! The undulating sea! Deep. Plants twirling together. Not even the plants know which leaf, which stem, belongs to which. Interconnected. Giant jungle palm time. Whoa! Oh!! My God!!!