Lisa Bieberman’s Phanerothyme is a 1968 pamphlet on the religious use of LSD, published by her Psychedelic Information Center near Harvard Square. Its title revives the word that lost. When Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond were looking for a name for consciousness-altering drugs, Huxley offered a couplet: “To make this mundane world sublime, take half a gram of phanerothyme.” Osmond answered with “psychedelic,” rhymed with “angelic.” His word won, and went on to sell everything from posters to rock bands.
By 1968 Bieberman thought “psychedelic” had become too commercialized to describe “an elusive and precious state of consciousness.” She had been close to the movement: a Harvard student who volunteered in Timothy Leary’s office, helped at Millbrook and managed circulation for The Psychedelic Review. She opened the Psychedelic Information Center in 1965 and used its bulletin as a clearinghouse for drug information. In 1966 she was convicted under federal law for mailing LSD.
The religious position she sets out here is austere. The “religion of phanerothyme,” she insists, “is not drug religion.” For her, “the chemical is only a tool” for an encounter with divine reality, and the model for practice is the silent Quaker meeting. She warns against frequent use and rejects the hope that mass dosing would transform society: “Today we know that this is not the answer.”
The closing “Epilogue” is a genuinely odd piece of Cambridge prose-poetry. Bieberman walks four miles from Harvard Square at the end of a session to watch the sun rise over Boston. Her half-real Hay Road is owned, she says, “as Thoreau owned Baker Farm,” and its spirits take their names from families on the milk route. It leads past the woods where, in her account, “Harvard freak-outs” are taken to McLean Hospital. “LSD has made me conservative,” she writes. Her farewell is “May you find your road.”
By the early 1970s Bieberman had become a Quaker, taken the name Alicia Kuenning and turned to publishing classic Quaker texts. The pamphlet records an earlier stage in that path, when she was trying to give psychedelic experience the discipline and seriousness she found in contemplative religion.
This copy retains its blue-gray textured wrappers and the original printed price of 75 cents. It is clean and bright, with minor signs of age. The small Psychedelic Information Center imprints are uncommon in the trade.
BIEBERMAN, Lisa (1941-2022; later Alicia/Licia Kuenning). Phanerothyme: A Western Approach to the Religious Use of Psychochemicals. Cambridge, Mass.: Psychedelic Information Center, 26 Boylston St., [1968]. First edition.
Physical Description: Slim 8vo pamphlet, 32 pp. Saddle-stitched (stapled). Original price 75 cents.
Binding: Publisher's printed blue-grey textured wrappers, lettered in black; "75c" to lower right of front cover.
Condition: Very good or better. Clean, square and bright; minor signs of age only.
Lisa Bieberman’s Phanerothyme is a 1968 pamphlet on the religious use of LSD, published by her Psychedelic Information Center near Harvard Square. Its title revives the word that lost. When Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond were looking for a name for consciousness-altering drugs, Huxley offered a couplet: “To make this mundane world sublime, take half a gram of phanerothyme.” Osmond answered with “psychedelic,” rhymed with “angelic.” His word won, and went on to sell everything from posters to rock bands.
By 1968 Bieberman thought “psychedelic” had become too commercialized to describe “an elusive and precious state of consciousness.” She had been close to the movement: a Harvard student who volunteered in Timothy Leary’s office, helped at Millbrook and managed circulation for The Psychedelic Review. She opened the Psychedelic Information Center in 1965 and used its bulletin as a clearinghouse for drug information. In 1966 she was convicted under federal law for mailing LSD.
The religious position she sets out here is austere. The “religion of phanerothyme,” she insists, “is not drug religion.” For her, “the chemical is only a tool” for an encounter with divine reality, and the model for practice is the silent Quaker meeting. She warns against frequent use and rejects the hope that mass dosing would transform society: “Today we know that this is not the answer.”
The closing “Epilogue” is a genuinely odd piece of Cambridge prose-poetry. Bieberman walks four miles from Harvard Square at the end of a session to watch the sun rise over Boston. Her half-real Hay Road is owned, she says, “as Thoreau owned Baker Farm,” and its spirits take their names from families on the milk route. It leads past the woods where, in her account, “Harvard freak-outs” are taken to McLean Hospital. “LSD has made me conservative,” she writes. Her farewell is “May you find your road.”
By the early 1970s Bieberman had become a Quaker, taken the name Alicia Kuenning and turned to publishing classic Quaker texts. The pamphlet records an earlier stage in that path, when she was trying to give psychedelic experience the discipline and seriousness she found in contemplative religion.
This copy retains its blue-gray textured wrappers and the original printed price of 75 cents. It is clean and bright, with minor signs of age. The small Psychedelic Information Center imprints are uncommon in the trade.
BIEBERMAN, Lisa (1941-2022; later Alicia/Licia Kuenning). Phanerothyme: A Western Approach to the Religious Use of Psychochemicals. Cambridge, Mass.: Psychedelic Information Center, 26 Boylston St., [1968]. First edition.
Physical Description: Slim 8vo pamphlet, 32 pp. Saddle-stitched (stapled). Original price 75 cents.
Binding: Publisher's printed blue-grey textured wrappers, lettered in black; "75c" to lower right of front cover.
Condition: Very good or better. Clean, square and bright; minor signs of age only.
