Eugene Seaich. From the family papers.
Eugene Seaich (1925–2006) was a composer, pharmacist and scholar of ancient religious texts from Salt Lake City, Utah. In 1959, years before LSD was outlawed, he took LSD and mescaline and wrote down what he observed. That work, The Far-Off Land, was published in 2026 in an annotated edition prepared by his grandson, Eric Hendrickson.
Documented record
- B.M. in Composition, McCune School of Music and Art, 1948
- B.F.A. with High Honors (1951), M.F.A. (1952) and Ph.D. in Music (1958), University of Utah
- Pharmacy degree, University of Utah College of Pharmacy; Lehn & Fink Gold Medal Award, 1965; registered pharmacist, Utah, 1967
- Fulbright grantee in Germany, 1955–56, affiliated with the University of Munich
- Elected to Phi Kappa Phi, University of Utah chapter, 1951
- Taught at the University of Utah; translated Hugo Leichtentritt’s History of the Motet and Eduard Meyer’s Geschichte der Mormonen
The Far-Off Land
In 1959 Seaich turned to consciousness research. Over nine dated sessions between August 1959 and October 1960, he joined first-person observation of LSD and mescaline with what he knew of mythology, mysticism, music and the psychology of memory. In his unpublished autobiography he recalled the late 1950s as a brief, open season, when he and five university colleagues each put in ten dollars and ordered LSD by mail, Sandoz sent instructions, and Dr. Louis Goodman, co-author of the leading pharmacology text, offered advice.
“Today, any of these individuals or institutions would have immediately called for the police and had us arrested!”
— Eugene Seaich, unpublished autobiography
About the book · Signed paperback · Paperback on Amazon · Kindle edition
Ancient texts and early Christianity
His other lifelong subject was early Christianity and Latter-day Saint theology, studied through the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi library, rabbinic literature and the early Church Fathers.
Selected works
- The Far-Off Land: An Attempt at a Philosophical Evaluation of the Hallucinogenic Drug-Experience (1959–69; 2026 Annotated Edition)
- Ancient Texts and Mormonism (2026 Annotated Edition)
- Understanding Mormonism (2026 Annotated Edition)
- Comparative Symbolic Structures in Near Eastern Religious Traditions (1987)
- A Great Mystery: The Secret of the Jerusalem Temple (1994)
- Mormonism, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Nag Hammadi Texts (2000)
- Was Freemasonry Derived from Mormonism? (2003)
Full biography and timeline: seaich-books.vercel.app/eugene-seaich