On the Patterning of Nature
The Joyous Cosmology and Ella Young's animism
The impact of psychedelics on the Californian spiritual scene in the 1950s was, observed Alan Watts, a rebirth of nature. When he spoke to fellow trippers Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard he detected in them a spiritual shift that reincorporated the natural world into their ideas. Watts was pleased because as far as he was concerned this brought their thinking more in line with his own.[1]
At the dawning of the 1960s, Watts was still in the midst of his psychedelic honeymoon and all the creative energy which it so often imbues. He sent his publisher an outline sketch of a book, The Joyous Cosmology (JC), in June 1960, and ‘I don’t think I have ever felt quite so worked up about a book in advance of writing’.[2] The manuscript was finished by late February 1961.[3]
An imagined narrative that was nevertheless firmly grounded in Watts’ real life experiences with LSD, psilocybin and mescaline, JC…