I originally got interested in mind-altering drugs due to an article in the most conservative magazine in the U.S.A., the National Review, edited by Roman Catholic millionaire William Buckley, Jr. Later, of course, Buckley and his magazine would attack drug experiments with neo-Inquisitorial fury, but back in innocent ’60 or ’61, they naively printed an article, by conservative historian Russell Kirk, reviewing Aldous Huxley’s Heaven and Hell, in which Huxley recounted how he had transcended time and space and experienced “Heaven.” 

Huxley did it under the influence of mescaline, a drug derived from the “sacred cactus,” peyote, used in American Indian rituals. Russell Kirk thought this was good scientific evidence to support religiosity in general against the “liberal humanists,” whom he regards as the prime villains in history. Kirk said, among other things, that “only the most dogmatic old-fangled materialist” would reject Huxley’s report a priori without duplicating the experiment. Being a dogmatic old-fangled materialist at the time, I resented this and argued about it a lot inside my head over a period of months. It seemed that, as a materialist, I had to accept one aspect of Huxley’s book that Kirk had not noted: the strong implication that consciousness is chemical in nature and changes as its chemistry changes. That was provocative. 

– Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati