Dr. Strange and the Psychedelic Origins of the FuturePage: 1/4 (5172 total words in this text) (951 Reads)  Dr. Strange and the Psychedelic Origins of the Future
by Vincent Bridges
One
Forty years ago, back in 1965, America was a nation in the clutches of radical social and cultural evolution. A President had been assassinated; the Civil Rights Movement reached toward its crescendo and the country was caught in an escalating pattern of undeclared war in South-East Asia as the Cold War threatened to become hot once again. The twenty years of technological change since the end of the World War produced other, even more profound signs of radical evolution. And so, even though The Cold War, the ideological “culture war” left over from the disastrous wars of the first half of the 20th century, would officially continue for another quarter century, the seeds of change that would blossom into the brave new world in which we now dwell were planted back in the summer and fall of 1965.
I was thirteen that summer, and among the many things that caught my newly teenaged awareness – the Beatles, modern poetry, Civil Rights, girls – was a new comic book character named Doctor Strange. He appeared every month in the back of a badly printed wood-pulp rag called Strange Tales, which I remembered, from what I thought of then as my childhood, as being full of funky monsters and tentacled aliens. It was then, I discovered, the home of the Human Torch and, at least in the last eight pages, Dr. Strange.
A brilliant but heartless neurosurgeon, Dr. Stephen Strange lost his abilities in an accident. Driven to recover his skills, he traveled to Tibet where he encountered The Ancient One, who, after testing him, taught him the “mystic arts.” Returning to the west, Dr. Strange settled into a spooky old house in Greenwich Village and took up his role as protector of mankind from various supernatural threats as “the master of the mystic arts.” By the fall of 1965, and Strange Tales #137 and #138, Dr. Strange had taken his mythos and gone where only a few people had ever gone before – into the heart of Eternity…
Out in California, down the peninsula from San Francisco in Santa Clara County, some folks were also taking trips into Eternity and creating new mythologies out of their chemical Gnosticism. The super heroes of Marvel Comics, particularly Dr. Strange, would play a pivotal role in the formation of that mythological futurism. To anyone reading Strange Tales #138 that late summer of 1965, the splash pages showing Dr. Strange voyaging in a truly surreal universe in search of Eternity represented a new and novel view of transcendence. And it was exactly that quality of transcendence that made Dr. Strange a hero to the local psychedelic underground; they knew what it was like to open the doorways of perception and step through into a wholly new world.
Up in the Santa Clara hills at La Honda, Ken Kesey and his fellow travelers The Merry Pranksters were experimenting with a new type of drug, LSD or “acid” in Prankster parlance, which mimicked, on many levels, the multi-layered experience of reality granted with transcendence or psychosis. Kesey, famous for his late Beat era novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, was turned on to the wonders of LSD by CIA funded psychiatric testing at Stanford Medical Center down in Palo Alto. By that summer, 1965, the very idea of chemical transcendence, first floated by Harvard psychiatrist Timothy Leary three years before, seemed poised to enter the mainstream.
LSD had been accidentally discovered during the war by Albert Hoffman of Sandoz labs in Switzerland while researching blood-clotting agents. Dr. Paul Linebarger’s landmark work Psychological Warfare, 1948, introduced the then radical idea that certain drugs might be useful in reconstructing the perceived reality of a subject under interrogation. “Brainwashing” it would come to be called by the mid 1950s, when a flood of research money allowed institutions, such Stanford Medical at Palo Alto and the Mental Research Institute at Stanford, Connecticut, to experiment with the new mind-altering drugs. Out of these experiments came not only Timothy Leary, but also Allen Ginsburg and Ken Kesey.
The CIA discovered that LSD was not a good brainwashing drug, although Charles Manson would soon show them how it could be done, but the genie, in the form of the expanded perceptions of their experimental subjects, was permanently out of the bottle. By early 1965, there were several leakage points. On the east coast of the US, in New York, Boston, etc. and its British spin-off, the leak centered around Dr. Leary, first at Harvard and then at Millbrook in upstate New York, and his compatriot Michael Hollingshead in London. These guys were into peace and love and eastern mysticism for the most part, and they didn’t read Marvel Comics, even though there might be said to be several points of comparison between Dr. Strange and Dr. Leary, both famous physicians who give up everything to pursue mystic realities, even down to the Tibetan connection.
The other major leakage point was in Santa Clara County, mainly Palo Alto and Stanford University. Kesey had been dosed there in 1959, and when the genie escaped from this leak, it spread from Big Sur to Malibu in what seemed like no time at all. LSD was easy to synthesize from lysergic acid monohydrate and, unlike amphetamines, was completely legal in 1965. The east coast crowd used their PhDs to order directly from Sandoz, but out in the wild west of California, the oddball science geeks started making their own.
The epitome, indeed the icon, of this new LSD alchemist was Augustus Owsley Stanley III, who, after having dropped out of several prestigious colleges, started the world’s first mass market transcendence lab in Berkeley California in 1964. Owsley would meet Kesey in the fall of 1965, just as Dr. Strange stepped through his portal into Eternity, and the convergence of synchronicities growing from their encounter would create the first nodal point on the Curve’s upward path toward the Singularity of mass extinction or enlightenment.
©2005 by Vincent Bridges - All Rights Reserved
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2005 by AlternativeApproaches.com
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