Handwritten over four years from maximum-security federal prison cells, The Rose of Paracelsus: On Secrets and Sacraments, is a unique work of psychedelic literature that explores the potential of human cognition. This book follows the narrator, a Harvard graduate student and researcher, as he uncovers an intricate, global psychedelic network through encounters with “the Six,” clandestine LSD chemists who synthesize planetary-scale batches of the substance, traversing states of consciousness and advancing human evolution. 

From Cambridge to Moscow, Oxford to Zürich, Princeton to Mazar-i-Sharif and Bangkok, this book illuminates lifestyles within a rare and elusive organization, one that has evolved special gifts: advanced capacities of thought, memory and perception.

The Rose is a psychedelic biography of its author, William Leonard Pickard, a former Harvard chemist who served 20 years in prison for conspiracy to manufacture and distribute LSD. An excerpt from The Rose was published in The Nature of Drugs: History, Pharmacology, and Social Impact (Synergetic Press, 2021).

One of the documentarians who made a podcast series dedicated to readings of The Rose said of the book, “Other than LSD, it’s quite possibly the most psychedelic thing you’ll ever find on paper.”

Handwritten over four years from maximum-security federal prison cells, The Rose of Paracelsus: On Secrets and Sacraments, is a unique work of psychedelic literature that explores the potential of human cognition. This book follows the narrator, a Harvard graduate student and researcher, as he uncovers an intricate, global psychedelic network through encounters with “the Six,” clandestine LSD chemists who synthesize planetary-scale batches of the substance, traversing states of consciousness and advancing human evolution. 

From Cambridge to Moscow, Oxford to Zürich, Princeton to Mazar-i-Sharif and Bangkok, this book illuminates lifestyles within a rare and elusive organization, one that has evolved special gifts: advanced capacities of thought, memory and perception.

The Rose is a psychedelic biography of its author, William Leonard Pickard, a former Harvard chemist who served 20 years in prison for conspiracy to manufacture and distribute LSD. An excerpt from The Rose was published in The Nature of Drugs: History, Pharmacology, and Social Impact (Synergetic Press, 2021).

One of the documentarians who made a podcast series dedicated to readings of The Rose said of the book, “Other than LSD, it’s quite possibly the most psychedelic thing you’ll ever find on paper.”