[Leary (Timothy)]

Fax from Hello Communications addressed to Dr Timothy Leary featuring the front and back cover of 'History of the Psychedelic Movement. Cartoon and Coloring Book published by Neo-American Church in 1967, folding marks, a few occasional stains, 21.5 x 155cm, 1995

PROVENANCE: The owner of the fax is Suzanne Trimble, aka, the artist Suzanne Bella Land. Leary was working on various book projects and proposed that Trimble could work on upcoming publications in an artistic capacity with contribution of cartoons, ideas and illustrations. In conversation with Trimble, Dr Leary presented her with the fax just received as an example of a project in the pipeline which she could potentially be part of and which involved a lot of imaginative illustration. Dr Leary did not live long enough for the projects in question to be realized. Drawings by Trimble are within the Leary estate.
The drawing depicts Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass) and Ralph Metzner, colleagues of Leary also integral to the ensuing psychedelic revolution.

***Timothy Francis Leary (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996) was an American psychologist and writer known for his strong advocacy of psychedelic drugs. He was "a hero of American consciousness", according to Allen Ginsberg, and Tom Robbins called him a "brave neuronaut". As a clinical psychologist at Harvard University, Leary worked on the Harvard Psilocybin Project from 1960 to 1962. At Harvard, Leary and his associates (notably Richard Alpert, later known as Ram Dass) began a research program known as the Harvard Psilocybin Project. The goal was to analyse the effects of psilocybin on human subjects (first prisoners, and later Andover Newton Theological Seminary students) from a synthesized version of the drug (legal at the time), one of two active compounds found in a wide variety of hallucinogenic mushrooms, including Psilocybe mexicana. Psilocybin was produced in a process developed by Albert Hofmann of Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, who was famous for synthesizing LSD. Leary and Alpert founded the International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF) in 1962 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in order to carry out studies in the religious use of psychedelic drugs. The Original Kleptonian Neo-American Church (OKNeoAC) mostly shorted Neo-American Church, is a religious organization based on the use of psychedelic drugs (the "True Host") as a sacrament. The psychedelic churches exist "to promote and defend the psychedelic religion, a religion which sees in the transcendental experience produced by the sacred substances the key to understanding life and improving the condition of man on earth."

Items related to Dr Leary are exceptionally rare on the market.