04/19/2026
“What was the “peculiar presentiment” that led to discovery of its profound effects? Was the account of the accidental discovery intended to conceal secret arcane mystery traditions.
Tom Roberts came up with the name Bicycle Day in 1981, the annual celebration commemorating the April 19, 1943, self-experiment by Dr. Albert Hofmann, who ingested 250 micrograms of L*D-25. Dr. Hofmann synthesized L*D in his lab in Basel, Switzerland, asserting that he had a “peculiar presentiment” to reexamine his creation, L*D, which he called “my fateful molecule.”
On April 19, 1943, as a scientific self-experiment, Dr. Albert Hofmann ingested 250 micrograms of L*D-25, which he described as “my fateful molecule,” in his lab in Basel, Switzerland. Dr. Hofmann rode his bicycle home together with his lab assistant. Mysterious subjective effects later gave way to terror, fear of impending death, and perceptions of heaven and hell.
Dr. Hofmann is quoted as calling L*D “medicine for the soul.” Dr. Hofmann later stated, "L*D came to me - I didn't look for it. L*D wanted to be found, it wanted to tell me something." He told the New York Times in 2006 that L*D spoke to him. “He came to me and said, ‘You must find me.’ He told me, ‘Don’t give me to the pharmacologist, he won’t find anything.’” Dr. Hofmann said that psychedelics revealed to him knowledge of an infinite number of realities, and how we can explore inner and outer universes that are immeasurable and inexhaustible, but that we must then return to the homeland of our ordinary lives.
The autumn 2002 MAPS magazine has an article by Alex Grey called “Saint Albert and the L*D Revolution” in which he celebrated Dr. Hofmann’s 100th birthday. He wrote that he painted a portrait of Dr. Hofmann with a portrait of Paracelsus, the alchemist who lived and worked in Basel 500 years earlier, developing the theories of chemistry while trying to discover the Philosopher’s Stone. Mr. Grey wrote that Dr. Hofmann had the peculiar presentiment to resynthesize L*D in 1943, at the height of World War II. He added, “Hofmann said that never before or since had he any similar ‘presentiment.”
Dr. Hofmann rode his bicycle home together with his lab assistant. Mysterious subjective effects later gave way to terror, fear of impending death, and perceptions of heaven and hell. According to Mr. Grey, “He experienced overwhelming fear of dying and feelings of having left his body and later, heavenly kaleidoscopic visions.”Alan Piper’s book Bicycle Day and Other Psychedelic Essays mentions that Dr. Willis Harman, an electronic engineering professor and social justice advocate, gave an interview one time that made a peculiar claim about L*D’s introduction to the world.
Dr. Harman was a believer in L*D’s potential for creating spiritual experiences. In an interview to an in Australian radio station around 1976, he claimed that the discovery had origins in investigations in mystical and esoteric communities affiliated with the German philosopher and founder of anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner. Dr. Harman did not reveal the source of his claim.
Mr. Piper states that Dr. Harman’s idea could have come from Al Hubbard or Timothy Leary. Dr. Harman was friends with “Captain” Al Hubbard, Aldous Huxley, and Gerald Heard, who were spiritualists and exponents of L*D and psychedelics. Alan Piper discusses the fascinating anticipation of the discovery of L*D in a novel by Leo Perutz, Saint Peter’s Snow, published in Austria in 1933, which was banned in N**i Germany. The novel details an experiment to make a psychoactive drug from the mildew of wheat, called Saint Peter’s Snow. It related ergot to the ancient sacrament of the mystery religions, long before Dr. Hofmann contributed to this hypothesis in The Road to Eleusis. The novel’s main character, Dr. Georg Amberg, has dreamlike memories from a coma about experiments with the ergot-derived substance and its potential to lead to a popular religious renewal with social justice principles.
Martin Lee, co-author of Acid Dreams, gave an interview around 1987, in which he attributed the story to Al Hubbard. He said that he would not completely discount the story, although he was skeptical, said there is no evidence to confirm this, and that “Captain Al Hubbard is an exaggerator” and an “aggrandizer” who enjoys being “the one who knows.” During the height of World War II, the German company, I.G. Farben, the largest pharmaceutical company at that time, had acquired Sandoz. This would have given it a patent right to the discovery. Mr. Hubbard said that the properties of L*D had been discovered by Dr. Hofmann even earlier than 1938. Mr. Lee said, “According to Hubbard, Hofmann was part of a small group of people who were nominally connected with Steiner’s anthroposophy group in the early 30’s and they systematically decided to set out to make a peace pill to help mankind. They saw the beginnings of the N**i emergence, so they consciously set out to make something like L*D, which they did and then kept it secret from the world.”
Dr. Roberts himself studied under Willis Harmon in a doctoral program at Stanford. He went to San Francisco in 1967 to pursue an interest in computer-assisted instruction. He started pursuing a Ph.D. and an MBA, got interested in Abraham Maslow’s needs hierarchy, and studied under Willis Harmon, who was teaching a graduate course on human potential in the Engineering Economic Systems department. Dr. Roberts was influenced by transpersonal psychology and he later taught a course called “Psychedelic Research” at Northern Illinois University in the summer of 1981. Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar had just published Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered with a 40-page bibliography, which helped him convince the assistant provost that it was an appropriate course.
Dr. Roberts would proceed to teach “Foundations of Psychedelic Studies” once a year in the honors program. Here is an interesting selection from Tom Roberts’ review of the Bicycle Day presentiment discussion.While Hofmann explained his interest in L*D-25 as a “peculiar presentiment,” could those words be a screen hiding his possible history and knowledge about the apparently subterrain historical culture around ergot? One can run wildly with creative fantasies: Bicycle Day’s literary histories certainly support the idea that a young chemist or secondary school student might have read novels that mentioned ergot and/or may could have otherwise run across other suppositions of an “ancient tradition” of what we’d now rename psychedelia.
Did Hofmann know about an ages-old psychoactive underground, or even share an intellectual membership?And why the pre of presentiment? Why not just “peculiar sentiment”? Was there something pre? Would it have embarrassed a young chemist to trace his professional interest back to nonsensical folderol? I wonder whether Hofmann’s personal library would have given us clues. Not at all suggesting this speculative trail, well-respected psychopharmacologist, Dr. David E. Nichols questions Bicycle Day’s “peculiar presentiment” for several reasons. First, he claims it is unlikely that Hofmann would choose that particular molecule out of a series of 25 “on a presentiment that something had been missed.” Second, Hofmann may have had a spontaneous mystical experience similar to one had as a boy. Third, “When I saw Albert in Basel a couple of years ago, I presented that particular hypothesis to him and said, “What do you think?” He said, “It’s entirely possible.” (p. 73).”
~Ron McNut
