April 16 - Serendipity Day's 75th Anniversary

April 16 - Serendipity Day's 75th Anniversary
- Bicycle Week 2018 - April 16 through 19 -

In the year 1943, when humanity reached a deep trough in the waves of spacetime, Swiss chemist Dr Albert Hofmann, guided by a luminous beacon, made a serendipitous discovery. Unaware at first, he provided a way out of the narrowing tunnel and up towards new heights of crest upon crest. During the seven decades that followed, his discovery encountered quite a number of ups and downs, quite naturally so, when surfing said waves proper:

on the one hemisphere, helping psychiatrists and psychologists alike to gain understanding of the state of mind of patients in particular and of humanity in general, catalyzing underground movements during the Fifties, exploding into the cultural revolution during the Sixties, aiding countless artists, designers, musicians, philosophers, scientists and writers to find new, creative ways of expressing their craft of choice;
on the other hemisphere, giving intelligence agencies hope of a new truth serum or an incapacitating agent, involving extensive testing on privates and other fellow primates, distressing conservative captains of industry and the establishment's echelons around the globe for enhancing chaos and breaking the shackles that bind us to the hallucinatory old world hierarchical structure of society;
eventually becoming banned in the USA in 1966 and the rest of the world soon after, returning underground during the Seventies and making a glorious recurrence by the end of the Eighties, meandering its way through the Nineties and returning smack-dab center stage during the second half of the second decade of the 21st Century AO ...

Yes.

In 1943 Albert Hofmann discovered

LSD

judged by some (mostly those who have never tried it) as one of the most dangerous substances known to man, whereas some saw and some others still see it as “a spiritual antidote to the atom bomb”, a device developed nearly simultaneously, deep down in that trough, during the 1940s.

Considering all ups and downs, Hofmann initially gave his discovery the nickname Sorgenkind, or "Problem Child", but eventually came full circle to recognize the Wunderkind he fathered.


- image sampled from lsd75.ch -
Now, as we cerebralate the 75th anniversary of its discovery, whilst fear-mongering headlines seem to prefer to relapse to instilling fear - fear for one another, fear for another world war - yet humanity clearly surfs the rising crest of the Psychedelic Renaissance, the antidote continues to gain momentum and potential. Observing the latter development and this year's Bicycle Day festivities, two main events top the charts of this week's agenda:

lsd75.ch - in Basel, the birthplace of LSD
maps.org/lsd75 - in California, home of MAPS

Other than that: check your local event schedule,
saddle up, hop on & bike along around the globe!

🚲
For a lack of proper footnotes with a list of sources and resources, click any highlighted text for more details, and follow the following links to previously posted lysergically charged verballistics, titled:
- April 16 - Ludic Serendipity Day (part 1 of a short essay)
- April 19 - Bicycle Day (part 2 of a short essay on the birth of LSD)
- How About A Positive LSD Story? (a less-short essay covering certain scientific topics concerning the so-called Psychedelic Renaissance)


∞

.: tring tring :.

apart from the quoted:
all text ⓦ Satyr Barbarossa
(cc) 2018 CC BY-NC-ND 4.0