Timothy Leary: The Embodiment of the Trickster Archetype

The psychologist Timothy Leary was (and still is) a controversial countercultural figure. He can be credited with introducing many young people to LSD and mind expansion, but this spelled good news to some and bad news to others. When you open your mind, you may not always like what falls in. Leary became an evangelist for LSD, and his promotion of it as a route to personal and collective evolution was (and still is) widely considered blazen and overzealous: he was not sensitive enough to the risks of tripping. He lacked the caution and scepticism necessary to ensure that others use psychedelics safely and responsibly. His enthusiasm for the psychedelic experience gave way to religious- or cult-like fervour. His mantra “Turn on, tune in, drop out” became a slogan of counterculture, and while it has been widely misunderstood and mischaracterised, it nonetheless promoted a somewhat naive view of psychedelics.

But the controversy surrounding Leary, his beliefs, and his activities go beyond psychedelic hype. As a 2022 article published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology states, “Scholars like Timothy Leary were widely criticized for applying excess pressure to participants in their research” and for “abandoning appropriate scientific methodologies”. I have also covered the pseudoscience and pro-eugenics stance behind Leary’s psychedelic-inspired model of consciousness. At the same time, many of Leary’s speeches and writings would positively influence many people’s outlooks, either by introducing them to the psychedelic experience or by helping them navigate the experience and make sense of it (e.g. through works such as The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, published in 1964 by Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert).

One characterisation of Leary I find interesting is him as a trickster figure. I think this is a very apt way to sum up who he was and what he did. In this piece, my aim is to bring together Leary's and others’ descriptions of him as a trickster as well as highlight how his character and actions align him closely with the trickster archetype.

Don Lattin – the author of The Harvard Psychedelic Club (2010) – states in a 2019 paper published in the Harvard Review Bulletin, “Timothy Leary was an Irish rascal, a trickster, a purveyor of Crazy Wisdom. He was brilliant, grandiose, and a master manipulator of the news media.” Similarly, Metzner said:

For me, Timothy represented the mythic story of the court jester at the court of kings who was allowed to say things that were outrageous because he said them in a funny way. Ten, when you stopped laughing, you’d say, ‘Gee that was really an interesting perspective. I never thought of it that way.’

The comparison to a court jester is quite apt: if you look at photos of him grinning, it’s hard not to see a jester-like quality in his expression.

Leary described himself as a “trickster guru” or “showman shaman”. He adopted the role of guru, teacher, shaman, Wise Old Man, but with a rebellious, rapscallious, playful edge. Yet Leary was not the only 60s psychedelic figure to be characterised as a rascal and trickster. Andy Roberts published a book in 2019 titled Divine Rascal: On the Trail of LSD's Cosmic Courier, Michael Hollingshead. It’s a biography of the man who turned Leary on to LSD in 1962. Roberts’s description of Hollingshead as a ‘divine rascal’ or ‘psychedelic trickster guru’ equally applies to Leary.

In Jungian psychology – and in stories and myths from cultures all over the world – the trickster figure is a character associated with mischief, disruption, chaos, shapeshipfting, and paradox. The trickster is also a source of mirth, revelry, laughter, and wisdom. They taught others different perspectives through their subversion of conventional norms. All of these qualities of the trickster archetype align with what Leary was like as a person and what he did.

Firstly, his countercultural tendencies made him inherently tricksterish (as tricksters act against prevailing social and cultural norms). He questioned ways of thinking, behaving, and living that had been taken for granted, which were unconsciously accepted as healthy and fulfilling. For instance, the true meaning of his mantra “Turn on, tune in, drop out” was not about dropping out of society, nor being productive or useful, and living alone in the woods or a segregated hippie commune. It was about thinking for oneself rather than unconsciously. As Metzner said of him, “People will say, ‘He’s completely nuts. He’s taken too many drugs. He’s a menace to society.’ Yet he inspired people with his capacity for vision, allowing them to let go of outmoded habits and patterns.”

Secondly, like archetypal tricksters, he was a highly ambiguous and paradoxical person. As a case in point, the psychedelic guru Terence McKenna – often referred to as ‘the Timothy Leary of the 90s’ – said that Leary “probably made more people happy than anyone else in history”, whereas the writer and gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson said that Leary was “not just wrong, but a treacherous creep”. Lattin asks, “So what is Leary’s legacy? Was he a scholar or a showman? An enlightened prophet or a shameless self-promoter?” Someone asked Leary late in life this question, and he answered, “You get the Timothy Leary you deserve”. In a piece for The Huffington Post, Paul Krassner addresses this answer: “He was being willfully antagonistic here, I think. It would perhaps be fairer to say that you get the Timothy Leary you want.”

Leary, like many instantiations of the trickster archetype, can be described as both a fool and a saint, moronic and wise, and menacing and caring. It is hard to pinpoint whether Leary was a hero or villain, or good or corrupted; he was both at the same time. Yet as Krassner notes:

The crux of his philosophy was the extent to which the reality that appears to be external to us is actually a model constructed by our own minds, a model that we are responsible for and which in certain circumstances can change. This is a frightening and unsettling idea, but it is also liberating. The implication is that if you hear someone describe Leary as a saint or as a moron, then they are not really telling you anything about Tim, but revealing something about themselves.

Indeed, tricksters, from a psychological point of view, can reveal a lot about ourselves, including our ‘shadows’ (what we deem unacceptable about ourselves). However, I think how we judge Leary – as ultimately a positive or negative force in society – should not only be seen through this psychological or archetypal lens. Yes, tricksters can be useful in exposing the arbitrariness of social rules and moralities, but this should not lead us to dismiss, downplay, or trivialise the genuinely dangerous things Leary believed, said, and did. We can also acknowledge this without giving in to the anti-psychedelic or anti-countercultural hysteria expressed by conservatives in the 60s (such as then US President Richard Nixon’s opinion that Leary was “the most dangerous man in America”). Noticing Leary’s egomania is not simply a projection of one’s own shadow.

A third way in which Leary embodied the trickster archetype was through his role as a disruptor and chaos creator. As a countercultural figure, he was arguably the most disruptive and provocative one. He had to be for Nixon to regard him as “the most dangerous man in America”. John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon, admitted:

You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

The anti-war left supported Leary. And his advocacy of LSD led many to support anti-war views. He helped to disrupt the normalisation of the American military-industrial complex and the Vietnam War. As Phoebe Holman points out in a 2020 paper:

Leary was regarded as a leader, teacher, and cultural icon by pro-LSD and anti-war organizations like the Brotherhood [of Eternal Love]. It was a common belief in these circles that LSD had the ability to open one’s mind to egalitarian and pacifist ideas, and that, by using the drug, a utopian society could be created, or war could be ended, or whichever variation on this ideology one chose to subscribe to. Leary gained national recognition for attempting to prove this idea scientifically, garnering enthusiastic support from the Brotherhood and similar groups within the counterculture movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Fourth, Leary constantly challenged authority, as tricksters are known to do. Like a court jester, he challenged the authority of the ‘king’ (in his case, the ‘king’ was ‘the powers that be’: the government, the president, the media, mainstream religion, the military, the educational system, and so on). As Leary instructed, “Think for yourself, question authority”. I have previously written about how we can think of psychedelics as ‘trickster chemicals’, and Leary essentially epitomises their trickster effects: chaos, disruption, boundary crossing, humour, and playfulness. Leary’s ‘psychedelic’ nature is part and parcel of his ‘trickster’ nature.

I recently went to a Tarot exhibition at the Warburg Institute (part of the University of London). It displays many historical Tarot decks (including Austin Osman Spare's hand-painted one) and contemporary versions. Interestingly, in one of these modern decks, Aldous Huxley is represented as The Fool. This card represents new beginnings, innocence, a leap of faith, originality, spontaneity, and a free spirit. The card reversed represents chaos, folly, naivety, and poor judgement. The Fool is similar to the trickster archetype and the jester. While I can see why Huxley would be associated with The Fool, Leary would have been a fitting figure on the card too – and perhaps a much more fitting one.