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Mescaline
What “Mescaline” means in Eugene Seaich’s The Far-Off Land (1959), with a 2026 annotation note.
Updated
In the book’s terms: The phenethylamine alkaloid derived from the peyote cactus — the substance of Seaich’s first session (August 1959) and of Session VI (January 23, 1960), and the same compound Huxley took for The Doors of Perception (1954). In the book it is treated as a philosophical instrument: a means of examining perception, not an end in itself.
2026 annotation note
Modern research: mescaline has had far less clinical study than psilocybin or LSD, so careful first-person records such as Seaich’s are a comparatively rare kind of evidence about it.
Where it appears
Mescaline is the substance of Experiments I and VI; see the nine sessions. See also LSD and phenomenology.
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