Last week, the Huff Post published a heretofore little known letter sent from 101-year old LSD developer Albert Hofmann (who passed last year at 102) to Captain of Industry, Steve Jobs. The letter referenced Jobs’ well known affinity for psychedelics and requested support for the first medicinal study of LSD in over 35 years.
One reason that the letter took over two years to reach the public eye was that it was written entirely in “Hallucinese,” a language developed by Hofmann after a century of heavy LSD consumption. The letter was originally thought to be a sketch of ever-expanding monkeys breathing sublimated banana-air out of a squid with umbilical cords for tentacles.
Whenever he completed a piece in Hallucinese, Hofmann would famously shout, “Buy my hoary wares, ye Toblerones!” He’d then proceed to dance around an invisible trapezoid.
It took a cadre of Swiss psychiatrists, linguists and surrealists several years to translate the sketches into French, then Swiss German, then regular German, Italian, Serbo-Croat, and finally English. The rest, is history.
