august 2020 – goodnews editorial

Dieter A. Hagenbach, 24 July 1943 – 17 August 2016

Like every year in August, we remember our dear Dieter who left us already four years ago. For those of you who did not know him: He studied architecture, found house building unsatisfactory, was a multimedial artist and, in 1975, opened a small shop at the Nadelberg/corner of Spalenberg in Basel. Fashion and Zeitgeist, but soon only books, including «drug literature». Dieter founded Sphinx Verlag, which mutated into a limited company in the early nineteen eighties. In the selection of his books he had a certain taste, publishing Albert Hofmann, Aleister Crowley, Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Jean Houston and Robert Masters, Marilyn Ferguson, Alan Watts, Eliphas Levy, John and Antonietta Lilly, Terence McKenna, Dion Fortune, Idries Shah, Alexandra David-Neël, G. I. Gurdjieff, P.D. Ouspenksy… too many to list here. Dieter liked media, music, movies, art and design, puns and sly comments; he loved to laugh and generally avoided people who took themselves or life too seriously, seeking support from what he called the «tailwind of evolution.» When Sphinx Verlag had to be sold, due to the financial ruin of its main shareholder, Dieter reinvented himself as a literary agent. On his and LSD’s 50th birthday, in 1993, he founded the Gaia Media Foundation and published the first goodnews (see also www.gaiamedia.org) in printed form. In 1996, on Dieter’s initiative, the foundation opened the Gaia Lounge, where media and ethnobotanical products were sold. In 2006, the foundation switched to an electronic newsletter. In 2011, together with Lucius Werthmüller, the current president of the Gaia Media Foundation, he published the book Albert Hofmann and his LSD. In 2011, together with Lucius Werthmüller, the current president of the Gaia Media Foundation, he authored the book Mystic Chemist, The Life of Albert Hofmann and His Discovery of LSD. We owe everything to him.

Enjoy the summer – with tailwind of course!
Susanne G. Seiler


Summer Holiday

When the sun shouts and people abound
One thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of bronze
And the iron age; iron the unstable metal;
Steel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the towered-up cities
Will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster.
Roots will not pierce the heaps for a time, kind rains will cure them,
Then nothing will remain of the iron age
And all these people but a thigh-bone or so, a poem
Stuck in the world’s thought, splinters of glass
In the rubbish dumps, a concrete dam far off in the mountain…

Robinson Jeffers

Scroll to top