And Albert Hofmann

Descendents of specimen collected by Bret Blosser in 1991. Supposedly less bitter tasting than the Wasson Hofmann clone Salvia divinorum, Wasson Hofmann clone strain Descendents of the specimen collected by R. Gordon Wasson and Albert Hofmann in 1962... 

Schultes, Robert E., and Albert Hofmann. The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens. Springfield Charles C. Thomas Publisher, 1980. 

MARIA SABINA, R. GORDON WASSON, AND ALBERT HOFMANN... 

Schultes, Richard Evans and Albert Hofmann. 1979. Plants of the Gods— Origins of Hallucinogenic Use. New York McGraw-Hill Book Co. 

Wasson, R. Gordon, Carl A. P. Ruck and Albert Hofmann. 1978. The Road to Eleusis—Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries. New York Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. 

See Richard Evans Schultes and Albert Hofmann, Plants of the Gods, McGraw-Hill 1979 Schultes and Raffauf, vine of the Soul, Synergetic Press 1992 and the numerous references therein, (back)... 

Schultes, Richard Evans, and Albert Hofmann. 1980. The botany and chemistry of hallucinogens. Revised and enlarged second edition. 

Courtesy of The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), The Beckley Foundation, and Albert Hofmann. 

To Albert Hofmann and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who opened the doors of perception. 

I soon had another interesting, rather ironic, encounter. At a 1993 event in Santa Cruz honoring the 50 anniversary of the accidental discovery of the subjective effects of LSD by Albert Hofmann, I met Dr. Alexander Sasha (my intended counterpoise in Bad Trip to Edgewood) in the cafeteria line. As we chatted, it became apparent that we agreed far more than we differed. We hit it off so well, in fact, that he and his wife Ann later invited Judy and me to lunch at their home in Lafayette, California. 

Jativa-M, the enigmatic species ceremoniously employed by the Mazatec Indians of Oaxaca, Mexico. The western world first learned of this salvia, or sage, in 1962, when Epling and J tiva-M described the entity from specimens given to them by Albert Hofmann and Gordon Wasson (Wasson 1962 Hofmann 1980), naming it 5. divinorum... 

My advice is, first, get some good books on the subject -- you can t expect to get this kind of information off the internet or in High Times, for example. You need to read Pharmacotheon by Ott, or Valdez and Diaz s excellent Journal of Enthnopharmacology article ( 7, 1983 pps 287-310) --go to your local university library and photocopy it. Another good book is Riedlinger s (ed.) The Sacred Mushroom Seeker, which contains a very good essay on Salvia divinorum by Albert Hofmann (recommended ). 

The dynamic interaction of perception, emotion, and cognition in the creation of conscious experience is highlighted by the visual image transformations that are enhanced by natural and drug-induced alterations of brain-mind state. Later in the book we will read the detailed accounts of such transformations in the reports by careful self-observers such as Albert Hofmann (who discovered the psychotogcnic potential of LSD) and Heinrich Kliiver (who used mescaline to study visual hallucination). In Hofmann and Kliiver s work, the most valuable descriptions are formal. That is, they emphasize form rather than content. 

The Swiss biochemist Albert Hofmann discovered the hallucinogenic effects of LSD-25 by accident when he was working to synthesize molecules akin to ergota-mine for the treatment of peripheral autonomic dysfunction. In a rush of what scientists call serendipity (or chance discovery) Hofmann realized that he had stumbled upon a far more important effect LSD acted in the brain itself, altering its chemistry in the direction of psychosis and of dreaming. Descriptions of these effects upon his mind are given in the text. (Courtesy of the Albert Hofmann Foundation)... 

The great botanist Richard Schultes and the biochemist Albert Hofmann (of LSD fame) celebrated the wide variety of organisms with these properties in a book called Plants of the Gods. When I first met Schultes, in summer of 1986 at the Rockefeller Study Center in Bellagio, Italy, he told me that although he had enjoyed the psychedelic effects of many plants, he had never recalled a single natural dream ... 

Wasson s other main collaborator on the chemical aspects of the mushrooms was the renowned Albert Hofmann of the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, whose accidental discovery of the psychedelic properties of LSD in 1943 may well be regarded by future generations as one of the turning points of Western civilization, and who has devoted much of his professional life to the extraction of the active principles of various native hallucinogens, and their subsequent synthesis. 

That year, R. Gordon Wasson, an enthnomycologist, published an article about Psilocybe mushrooms in Life magazine. This article brought the mushrooms to the attention of the general public for the first time. As a result of the article, thousands of people flocked to Mexico in search of the mind-altering mushroom. About that same time, the psychoactive chemical psilocybin was isolated and synthesized by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, who also discovered LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide). 

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