igh Priest chronicles experiences on 16 psychedelic trips taken before LSD was illegal. The trip guides or "high priests" include Aldous Huxley, Ram Dass, Ralph Metzner, Huston Smith, Frank Baron and Willy (a junkie from New York City) and others. High Priest tells of the goings on at the Millbrook mansion in upstate New York which became the Mecca of psychedelia during the 1960s, and of the many luminaries who made a pilgrimage there to trip with Leary and his group, "The League of Spiritual Discovery." Chapters include an I Ching reading and chronicle of what happened during the trip, along with marginalia of comments and quotations, and illustrations. 

High Priest is a window into an era that is fascinating to all Leary fans from those who admired him in the 1960s to the millions in the younger generation who admire him today. 

Timothy Leary has reemerged as an icon of cyberpunks and the "psychedelic renaissance." He is frequently celebrated in counterculture magazines, he puts on multimedia presentations on the college campus lecture circuit to sells out crowds.


Today, of course, we are beginning to use neurological and digital terms to suggest how we can operate our brains.

But in 1962 there was no language in American Psychology for these experiences. Except the wretched psychiatric litany of hallucination-victim-disease.

Drugs like LSD, Mescaline, Psilocybin were called "psychotomimetic." Temporary insanity! 

We intuitively rejected the Disease-Victim model and relied on the classic terminology of religious-mystical states. There is a lot of heavy-duty celestial name-dropping. Gods. Sacraments. Miracles. Christs, Buddhists. William Blake. Gilgamesh. St Johns of the Cross. Divine Rascals. Heavens and Hells. 

Today we use the metaphors of computers, virtual realities, chaos engineering, neuro-transmitters . . . Turning on, operating and fine-tuning the brain.

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