When a Forgotten Story Comes to Light

 My new nonfiction book – Aldous Huxley’s Hands: His Quest for Perception and the Origin and Return of Psychedelic Science – will be published December 8, so to celebrate I want to honor the age-yellowed index card that prompted my writing a book about Aldous Huxley and my father’s edgy experiments in the first place.

   Here are two links to purchase the book, which can be pre-ordered (or, if you are reading this after December 8, simply ordered) in either paperback or e-book formats. Aldous Huxley’s Hands is available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

   This humdrum index card stood on edge (pun intended) in a storage box, forgotten for half a century, until I uncovered it one hot summer day when digging through what had once been my grandparents’ garage. I was simply trying to rearrange the space for storage of books I’d brought home after living for a decade in New York when I came upon several boxes obscured behind old paint cans. Inside them I found oversized photographs of hands with numbers … and inside one particular box, I found two smaller boxes with a sequence of hundreds of index cards.

   Written in my mother’s handwriting, this one bore the name of Aldous Huxley, Number 249.

   The index card refers to a photograph of Huxley’s hand, or rather both hands, which had been taken by my father with his customized camera as part of his obsessive hand study. My father and his camera are shown here too.

   My dad’s study was focused on looking for personality (and pathology) characteristics that might be mirrored in the structure of the hand. After photographing almost 1,000 hands, he found indicators that appeared to be significant. A professor named Joseph Gengerelli agreed; Gengerelli was the chair of the UCLA psychology department at that time, and he successfully replicated my father’s study.

In Aldous Huxley’s Hands, I write about Huxley’s pursuit of extraordinary states of consciousness, ranging from ESP and hypnosis to séances and unorthodox healing – and of course his adventures with mescaline (and later LSD) that led him to write The Doors of Perception and unexpectedly earned him a reputation as the literary godfather of psychedelics.

What few people know, however, is that Aldous Huxley was fascinated with hands.