The adepts of the Free Spirit did not form a single church but rather a number of likeminded groups, each with its own particular practices, rites, and articles of beliefs; and the links between the various groups were often tenuous. But these people did keep in touch with one another; and the Free Spirit was at all times recognizable as a quasi-religion with a single basic corpus of doctrine… . They divided humanity into two groups—the majority, the “crude in spirit,” who failed to develop their divine sensibilities, and themselves, who were the “subtle in spirit.” … The heart of the heresy was in fact not a philosophical idea at all but an aspiration; it was a passionate desire of certain human beings to surpass the condition of humanity and to become God.
—Norman Cohn,
The Pursuit of the Millennium

For us the planet was without Original Sin, designed for our sacramental pleasure.
—Timothy Leary,
Flashbacks: An Autobiography

No account of America’s cultural revolution can omit the career of Timothy Leary, “promoter, apologist, and high priest of psychedelia nonpareil,” as Theodore Roszak put it in The Making of a Counterculture(1969). Dr. Timothy Leary, Ph.D., had his first experience of LSD in the spring of 1962 when he was forty-two and teaching in the psychology department at Harvard University. In the summer of 1963, Leary and his colleague Richard Alpert—who would later turn himself into a guru and take the Hindu name Baba Ram Dass—would