Escaping Huxley’s Island: Psychedelics, Scientific Paganism and the Changing Images of Man.

 In Aldous Huxley’s final novel, Island, the guru of Ultimate Revolution and predictive programming presents a subtly different and more nuanced version of the original “soma” culture depicted in his Brave New World. While Huxley’s earlier novel presented a culture in which a magical drug called “soma” was used to chemically regulate people’s inner worlds to keep them “happy,” Huxley’s last novel presents a more mature vision in which the earlier system of psycho-chemical control evolves into a much subtler system of psycho-spiritual manipulation.

https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/escaping-huxleys-island-psychedelics-scientific-paganism-and-the-changing-images-of-man