“Psychedelic” describes drugs said to reveal or “manifest” the mind, and by extension the art, music and culture linked to them. Dictionary.com gives its parts as psyche plus Greek dêlos, “visible, manifest”, and dates its first recorded use to 1956 (Dictionary.com).
The word was coined by Humphry Osmond, a British psychiatrist working at the Weyburn Mental Hospital in Saskatchewan. A review of his letters says he coined it in a 1956 letter to Aldous Huxley (Abraham, 2020), and his paper in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences appeared in March 1957 (Osmond, 1957). His obituary says Huxley had proposed “phanerothyme” instead (BMJ, 2004). The historian Erika Dyck notes that the word entered English from a Saskatchewan asylum (Dyck, 2009).
So the date depends on what you count: 1956 for the letter, 1957 for the published paper. In research today, “classic psychedelics” usually means compounds such as psilocybin, LSD, mescaline and DMT. Psychedelic, hallucinogen and entheogen can describe the same substance while implying a different frame.
Sources
- Dictionary.com: psychedelic
- Abraham, 2020, review of the Huxley–Osmond letters
- Osmond, 1957, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
- Humphry Osmond obituary, BMJ, 2004
Last checked .