To read Wasson is to feel as if you were witnessing the still-fresh and malleable conventions of the psychedelic narrative gradually solidifying before your eyes. Whether Aldous Huxley invented these tropes, or was merely their stenographer, is hard to say, but they would inform the genre, as well as the experience, from here on. “For the first time the word ecstasy took on real meaning,” Wasson recalls. “For the first time it did not mean someone else’s state of mind.”
