In the last century, humanity expanded its horizons on a scale that our ancestors could not have imagined. The will to know, armed with technology, proved unstoppable. Man sent spacecraft into space and learned how to extract energy from the tiniest particles.

Man also looked inside himself — and sought answers to the most important questions. At the beginning of the century, Sigmund Freud discovered the unconscious. In 1938, Swiss chemist and Sandoz employee Albert Hofmann synthesized the psychedelic LSD-25 from the ergot alkaloid. In 1953, British writer Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gram of the hallucinogen mescaline, derived from cactus, under the supervision of psychiatrist Humphry Osmond.

A year later, Huxley wrote an essay about his experience entitled “The Doors of Perception.” And three years later, Osmond coined the word “psychedelic” to describe the religious-mystical state of altered consciousness induced by the ingestion of psychoactive substances. “The term psychedelic . . . can be translated as ‘mind-manifesting’ or ‘mind-expanding,’” Hofmann wrote in his book LSD: My Problem Child.