Author: Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader / Source: Today I Found Out
THIS IS NOT A DRILL
In March 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono spent their honeymoon at a posh hotel in Amsterdam, where they staged their infamous “Bed-in for Peace.” Among the reporters and well-wishers that Lennon invited was a 34-year-old Dutchman named Bart Huges.
He was summoned there because the Beatle had a strange request: “I want a third eye.”Lennon wasn’t talking about a metaphorical, spiritual third eye, but an actual hole drilled in his forehead. This controversial procedure is called trepanation.
Trepanning (from the Greek trypanon, “a borer”) has been practiced since prehistoric times to treat everything from headaches to demons. But in the late 1960s, trepanation became something of a fad for the burgeoning New Age movement. The best known among them was Huges, a Dutch librarian who had been expelled from medical school a few years earlier for his rampant drug use.
In 1964 he published a “scientific” paper—in scroll form—called “Homo Sapiens Correctus,” in which he claimed that ever since humans learned to walk upright, gravity has prevented enough blood from flowing up to the brain, and that drilling a hole in the forehead would relieve pressure and thus increase “brainbloodvolume.” Or something like that. The benefits: increased energy and creativity, and even better: a “permanent high.” Marijuana and LSD are temporary, Huges preached; trepanation is forever.
BEATLE-MANIAC
John Lennon, who was well known for trying to find new ways to expand his consciousness, really wanted Huges to drill a “third eye” in his head.
As much of a kook as Huges may have been (and according to pretty much every medical professional, he was a kook), he warned Lennon against the procedure, telling him, “I am certain you already have it. Third eye people are your kind of people.”Metaphorically, Huges…
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