Storming Heaven

by Brother Harmonius

October 26, 2007

Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, By Jay Stevens
Grove Press, New York - 1987 ISBN 0-8021-3587-0

Storming Heaven is a respectable piece of investigative journalism. Stevens keeps a lively pace, painting a sort of Last Supper fresco of the who’s who of psychedelica in its first forty years (1940s-80s) of what was a long, colorful journey.

This book of popular history will bring you back to those halcyon days of yore. Are we talking about the 1940s? The ‘50s? ‘60s or ‘70s and ‘80s? The fact is, LSD-25 predates the Baby Boomer. Unfortunately, like a pre-adolescent boy is to his girl counterpart society has not matured commensurate with LSD.

Stevens' chronicling style captures the key players from its discovery in the 1940s by Albert Hoffman, to R. Gordon Wasson on the trail of the Magic Mushroom in the Mountains of Mexico in the 1950s with, to the CIA’s nefarious secret dosings of American citizens under the approbation of MK Ultra. Stevens develops LSD’s biography in waves. Because the molecule is unable to speak for itself, psychedelic literature by Aldous Huxley and Anaïs Nin, Beat poets like Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady speak for it.

Rather than painting heroes and villains into separate cages, Stevens weaves them into a unified history, and at once a terrific tale. Everybody seems to either know or have some personal connection to everybody else. Storming Heaven is a thrilling read, like being a passenger on a Disneyland ride. Stevens as guide points out the spear-throwing natives, dangerous hippos rising from dark waters, as well as the rainbows in the waterfall. This adventure is way more entertaining than anything our school teachers would have allowed us to read.

While it is not directly compared to a Messiah, LSD has many things in common with Jesus Christ. They were both prodigal children. They touched many lives and attracted adherents, apostles and Pharisees. Ultimately, both were crucified, but lived on through their devotees. Post-war Twentieth Century has seen eras come and go, the Conservative ‘50s, the Jet Age, Flower Power, Hippies and Woodstock, LSD has outlived them all, and continues to evolve even now. There wasn’t an LSD age, it is more of an Epoch, and we are still within the early stages of the LSD Epoch. Just as the earliest Christianity had its evangelistic apostles, accusing Pharisees and Romans nailing martyrs to the cross, the Gospels and Apocrypha of the Psychedelic Epoch are just beginning to be written.

A Bike Ride in Basle

The molecule hasn’t changed at all chemically since Albert Hoffman’s famous bike ride on the wild side on April 19, 1943. Storming Heaven is an intense profile of the times that were a changin’, and the personalities who influenced such profound cultural change. “Alice Dee” was there, although she really takes a back seat in Storming Heaven to her advocates and enemies. Stevens imbues the molecule with anthropomorphosis, but we get to know its personality and foibles indirectly, by its associates.

Stevens applies a light brush to chemistry, but that isn’t really a weakness when you consider Storming Heaven as a kind of ethnography.

Nearing its 20’s, LSD fell in with a fateful crowd. Timothy Leary takes center stage, and not far behind him are Ken Kesey and Stanley Owsley. These figures were icons by any measure. LSD was a debutante, which found itself rubbing shoulders with people who were out to make names for themselves. If Leary, et. al, had genuine respect and admiration for LSD, they should have treated it more reverentially. Instead, she became an unwilling whore, maybe even a rape victim. Like Icarus flying too close to the sun, high society took advantage of what could not defend itself, and it was burned by the limelight.

Leary is the representative man in this portrait, the Saint of LSD where events and persons have some connection to him, even where the chapter is not explicitly about him. He proved to be an important catalyst to the psychedelic gestalt, like Vitruvian Man, his arms and legs outstretched and tangential to the last mid-century's most animated characters. Like Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, or the failed consciousness expansion retreats at the Hotel Catalina in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, on the islands of Dominica and Antigua, with his tragic swan song at a Millbrook Estate in New York. There, amid palatial opulence evocative of a Maxwell Parish painting Leary might have succeeded had his flamboyant escapades not preceded the more reserved inner space experiments of his later years.

Too late to avoid his fate, though, and by now we are impressed with how everything LSD touches accedes to greatness. The scales of that greatness tip toward kings or villains. Hoffman, Wasson, Tom Wolf and the Grateful Dead seemed to be on good terms with the beast, but it consumed the likes of Owsley, Kesey, Leary, the Hell’s Angels, and ultimately Haight Ashbury itself. In fact, these sub-cultures were contrived because a truly supportive meta-culture never really existed. Though the shadow of pretense lingers, America long ago shed its mantle of enlightenment for one of capital conquest. More demonic influences than LSD overturned the Aquarian Age, which posed a threat to hegemony. Enlightenment was a threat to Vietnam, an enemy to a profitable police state. Enter G. Gordon Liddy, and every diabolical thing he stood for, The Age of Capricorn, whose Utopia smells like a New York subway. Yet, we feel sorry for Leary, when Liddy comes off as a well-spoken but red necked jerk.

I felt there was a nagging vacuum to the story, and it wasn’t until I finished Storming Heaven that I realized Stevens had totally left out the exploits of John C. Lilly, M.D. Lilly carried none of the Beats’ poetic free associations or counter-culture ideological cacophony. He was the respected neuroscientist whose 1972 “autobiography of inner space” Center of the Cyclone was a more honest documentary of transpersonal experience. Stevens might have provided a more balanced testimony by mentioning Lilly’s work, which was devoid of Leary’s hagiographic overtones.

Nevertheless, this book’s breadth sweeps the imagination away, each chapter is fresh without languishing in any one groove for too long. The remarkable personalities that tried it come from a diverse cross-section of society: Anaïs Nin, Leary, Huxley (on his death bed!), Kesey and his group, Metzner, Alpert. It seemed that LSD acquired the character traits of the last person who wrote about it. Hoffman wrote about it, and the CIA became interested. Nin wrote about it, and Hollywood became interested in it. Leary wrote about it, and Congress became interested in it. certain attributions depending on the last person using it. It represented either mind control or mind expansion.

Although published in 1987, Storming Heaven is remarkably timely. It ended just a decade or so before the popularization of the internet, at the cusp of new developments in chemical enlightenment. Terence McKenna had recently arrived on the scene, with his aboriginal “roots” style spirit molecule, DMT. Psychedelic evolved into a more Gaia-centered term, “entheogen” (spirit within), of which McKenna was a contemporary. The late Terence McKenna was regularly likened to Leary, but the botanical entheogens seemed to diverge away from Leary-ism, picking up where Carlos Castaneda left off by returning to the idealized shamanist and primitive animism of the aboriginal Americas. These were gods that had existed eons before the artificial ones of the Empire State came into service.

Final chapters have Stevens introduced to the designer drugs, like ketamine, 5 MEO DMT, Ecstasy, and the like, which I don’t pretend to have more than a passing knowledge about. These substances were the sophisticated urban counterparts of botanicals, developing on a parallel track with the backyard shaman. Designer drugs were to the entheogens what disco is to folk music, electronica and synthesizers to wooden flutes and hand-drums.

Though it might now be synonymous with Haight-Ashbury, hippies and rock & roll, that attribution was not always the case. LSD preceded the hippies and outlived them. Like a Pearl S. Buck character, it has survived a turbulent Cultural Revolution and seemingly oct-annual political mood swings. It has colored multiple dimensions of the modern landscape, from art to space exploration. I have heard it is only a slight exaggeration to say Silicon Valley was born of the LSD culture. Conservative reactionaries will always burden society with yet one more drug-witch-heretic bogey. FUD ("Fear Uncertainty Doubt) is an endemic manipulator.

As a society, the U.S. has less wisdom and tolerance for personal freedom than ever. Dark Ages policy makers and their lapdog media sensationalists ruin opportunities for legitimacy before they appear. War and fear mongering thrive as legitimate lifestyle choices. In America, the land of the free, one cannot legally commune with the spirit world by way of psychedelic substances. Yet, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil and Venezuela do enjoy those freedoms.

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