Do indigenous people have totally different trips to Westerners?
‘One bright May morning’ in 1953, Aldous Huxley swallowed 400mg of mescaline in a glass of water. It was given to him by the British psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond, who worried he might go down in history as the man who sent Aldous Huxley mad. But Huxley had a great time, and felt that the drug had given him the mystical experience he’d been seeking for the last 20 years. Huxley wrote about his experience in The Doors of Perception, with the excitement of an explorer discovering a new world. ‘How many philosophers, how many theologians, how many professional educators have had the curiosity to open this Door in the Wall? The answer, for all practical purposes, is None.’
This was not strictly true. As psychedelic historian Mike Jay explores in his fascinating new book, Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic, there had been many previous visitors to Huxley’s Narnia. Indians of North, Central and South America had been taking peyote and San Pedro for around 4000 years. In the Victorian and modernist era, scientists, philosophers, bohemians and even Mormons had tried peyote and mescaline. Not many, but some.
This is the first main point of Jay’s history. We’re in the middle of a psychedelic renaissance, and the history we tell ourselves is that psychedelics first appeared in the 1960s, then Timothy Leary messed it all up, but now they’re back to save the world. The actual history of psychedelics is much longer than that, and filled with unusual characters who usually don’t get a billing in popular accounts.
The second point Jay makes is to suggest a contrast between indigenous people’s encounters with the spirit of Peyote or San Pedro and westerners’ experiments with mescaline. This is a central contribution that histories of psychedelics (and histories of medicine and emotion) can make to our self-understanding. They can show how people’s experiences, their emotions, illnesses, trips and dreams, are deeply shaped by culture and history.
Jay argues that indigenous people’s psychedelic experiences are embedded in rituals passed through generations, in which the meaning of the experience is largely collective and relational, centred on the relationship with the spirit-teachers of Peyote, San Pedro, and other psychoactive plants. Westerners, meanwhile, have had a more scientific and instrumental engagement with a drug — mescaline — refined and extracted from the plants. We have tried to discover its properties. How does the drug behave? But the drug won’t behave. What we find, instead, over the last century, is a bewildering assortment of private experiences, from mild content to white-knuckle horror. Western psychonauts ‘are seeking to discover, construct or invent a framework of meaning’ and ‘their reports are extravagantly diverse’. The nature of the chemical-spirit is not fixed in accepted rituals, but is sort of a free radical, reflecting back to us our individualized, rootless, restless culture.
Indigenous people in the Americas appear to have taken peyote and San Pedro — the two cacti that contain mescaline — since around 2000 BC. The ruined temple complexes at Chavin de Huantar, in the Peruvian Andes, appear to have been a site for psychedelic rituals — a figure carved in a frieze on the wall bears a San Pedro cactus in their hand.
Jay writes:
The architecture of the complex seems to have been designed to frame and create a spectacle in which the senses were manipulated by sound, light and spatial disorientation as well as consciousness-altering plant preparations. Rushing mountain streams were rerouted to create an artificial watercourse that echoed through the tunnels; conch trumpet shells have been found, and fragments of anthracite mirror that may have bounced light through the galleries along with the sound.
Archeologists suggest the temple may have been a gathering site for Indians from the jungle, the coast and the mountains — a place where different tribes bonded together, much as tribes from across Greece bonded at the Eleusinian Mysteries (another ritual, possibly psychedelic, that dates back to around 2000 BC). As with the Eleusinian Mysteries, Indians’ psychedelic rituals may have been part of the transition from a hunter-gatherer culture to a more settled agricultural society. It’s interesting to think that psychedelics feature prominently at key moments in humans’ cultural evolution (is that why they’re suddenly so prominent now, in our evolution into a digital-ecological society?)
Westerners’ engagement with peyote / mescaline began in the 16th century, with the Spanish conquest of the Americas, and was characterized by ‘a mixture of wonder, fear and practicality’. The Spanish observed and noted the rituals were sometimes used by Indians for individual healing, and sometimes by groups, joined together in singing and dancing. Missionaries were struck by the similarity with the Eucharist — an ecstatic ritual where one eats the ‘flesh of the gods’- and tried to steer Indians towards the true communion, and away from devil-worshipping. Between 1620 and 1779 the Inquisition tried 74 Indians for their use of the raiz diabolica, the ‘devilish root’.
Jay suggests ‘the use of peyote became a marker that separated the civilized from the savage’. He suggests the Christian missionary condemnation of psychedelics carried over into the 20th century War on Drugs. He notes that the 1961 UN Convention on Drugs, the ‘foundation of the global drug control system’, is ‘unique among UN documents in its use of the word ‘evil’ to describe the dangers that drugs pose, a term not deployed in its official definitions of child abuse, terrorism or genocide.’
But right from the start, there were also Westerners who were more curious, and sympathetic, about Indians’ botanical knowledge and ritual use of plant-medicines. Perhaps the two heroes of Jay’s book are an American ethnologist called James Mooney, and a half-white half-Indian chief, called Quanah Parker, both pictured below.
Mooney worked for the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of Ethnology in the 1890s, and was fascinated by Native American culture, just as it was in danger of being eradicated. He was one of the few white men to be allowed to observe the Ghost Dances which Native American tribes took part in, as an ecstatic revolt against white invasion. The Ghost Dance was a millenarian ritual, born from despair, which aimed to free America from death, disease, misery and white people.
This struck Mooney as a beautiful but ultimately doomed religious enterprise. He was much more impressed with Native Americans’ peyote rituals. Jay writes:
Rather than awaiting a transformation of the world, it gave its worshippers a means to transform themselves from within. It created a sacred world beyond the sphere of white civilization, but one that could coexist with it. Within the outward form of the Christian service, a solemn and dignified occasion devoted to prayer and songs of praise, it created conditions in which the old medicine could be summoned. Those who now worshipped the Christian God could sit and pray alongside those who still addressed the Great Spirit. Rooted in ritual practices older by millennia than the United States, it opened a path to the survival of Indian identity.
In 1893, Mooney met Quanah Parker, the son of a Comanche chief and a white woman, Cynthia Ann, who had been captured by Comanches as a child. Cynthia was rescued from the Comanche but begged to be allowed to return. Her son, Quanah, eventually returned to the Comanches and was subjected to ridicule for being a half-breed — his name means ‘bad odour’ — but he proved himself in battle and became a leader for his tribe in its negotiations with the American government. Jay writes:
Quanah, like Mooney, saw peyote as an alternative to the self-destructive path set by the Ghost Dance…Like Mooney, Quanah recognized that the peyote religion needed to accommodate itself within the Protestant culture that surrounded it. He presented the tipi ceremony not as a rival of the mission school and the prayer meeting but as a complement to them. He said: ‘the white man goes into his church house and talks about Jesus, but the Indian goes into his tipi and talks to Jesus.’
Over the coming decades, the American government repeatedly tried to criminalize the Indian peyote cult, with senators and congressmen accusing it of fostering licentious, savage, demonic orgies. Mooney and others repeatedly came to its defence, arguing it was a civilising, improving and healing influence in Indian culture. Finally, in 1918, Mooney worked with a Cheyenne called Mack Haag to formulate a legal organisation — the Native American Church. This was the first time ‘Native American’ had been used by American-Indians to describe themselves. The Native American Church is still going, growing in popularity with American-Indians, and quietly steering clear of the drug tourism that has flocked to Amazon shamanism.
Meanwhile, white Westerners started to experiment with the drug themselves, for its spiritual, aesthetic, or medical benefits. In 1895, the first scientific trial of a psychedelic took place in Columbian University, when an unidentified ‘chemist’ swallowed five buttons from the peyote cactus. He wrote: ‘Then followed a train of delightful visions such as no human ever enjoyed under normal conditions.’ The only thing he could compare it to was seeing the electric lights shimmering in the Chicago World Fair.
This proved to be typical of westerners’ experience of peyote (or of the drug, mescaline, which was identified and extracted in 1919). It often gave rise to strong visions — the British psychologist Havelock Ellis, who tried it and published his experience in the Lancet in 1897, described it as an ‘orgy of vision’. When westerners reached for parallels for their new vision, they often compared it to the shimmering electric and neon of the modern city. The symbolist poet JA Symons, who was given peyote by Havelock Ellis, wandered down the South Bank and found himself ‘absolutely fascinated by an advertisement of Bovril, which came and went in letters of light’. Huxley likewise, in his famous first trip, ends up in the World’s Biggest Drug Store in LA, gazing at rows of shiny magazines.
This in itself is different to American Indians’ experiences in peyote cults, according to Jay. They tend not to pay much attention to any visions that arise and to focus instead on the insights they receive.
But not all westerners’ experiences were of shimmering neon paradises. Others had unpleasant or even hellish experiences. William James tried peyote and had what he described as a ‘katzenjammer’ or night of horror (he had a better time on nitrous oxide). Jean-Paul Sartre tried mescaline in the 1930s and reported being followed around for months afterwards by chattering crabs. The German writer Walter Benjamin found the drug ‘impertinent’. Others thought they were dying, or going mad — the psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond proposed that a medical use of mescaline might be to help psychiatrists experience psychosis. He hoped it would unlock the chemical cause of schizophrenia (it didn’t), while the Nazis thought it could be used as a truth drug (it couldn’t).
The sheer variety of reactions to peyote / mescaline raised a problem for the young science of psychedelics, a problem still with us. Jay writes: ‘It was a basic assumption of pharmacy that drugs produced broadly predictable and replicable reactions…Yet as the peyote trials continued, the contradictions mounted. Every dose seemed to produce a different response.’
The problem, perhaps, was a lack of an accepted collective ritual to give the experience meaning. Jay writes:
To Mooney, if not to the doctors and chemists, one point was obvious: the experiences that they and their subjects were having were quite different from those of any traditional peyotist. The ‘horrible visions and gloomy depression’ reported under medical supervision were ‘entirely foreign to my experience or that of any Indian with whom I have talked’. As he explained, ‘the Indian is familiar with the idea from earliest childhood’; peyote was not an adventure into terra incognita but a journey to the deepest source of their culture and its power. Such journeys were undertaken in a regular manner, in keeping with tradition, with plenty of time allowed afterwards to recover and integrate the experience…The trial subjects, by contrast, undertook their experiments with little idea of what to expect and no attempt to prepare their mind.
Was the solution, then, for westerners to create their own psychedelic rituals? Such efforts began, rather inauspiciously, in 1910, with the shyster-magician Aleister Crowley using peyote, and other drugs, in a ceremony to invoke Saturn. Equally inauspiciously, in 1914, a New York socialite called Mabel Dodge hosted an impromptu peyote ceremony at one of her evening salons on Fifth Avenue. One of the participants, her cousin Genevieve, ended up going mad. The playwright Antonin Artaud travelled to Mexico to try and escape the disenchanted West. He thought peyote offered him ‘a way of no longer being ‘white’, that is, one whom the spirits have abandoned’. He also went mad.
One of the most intriguing possibilities for a western peyote ceremony was raised by Frederick Smith, president of the Mormon Church and the grandson of Joseph Smith. Frederick was inspired by William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience and wrote a doctoral dissertation on the various ecstatic techniques used by humans. He was particularly impressed by Indians’ peyote rituals, which he said took him into a ‘peculiar and ecstatic state’. Alas, his presidency of the Church ran into trouble and he never got to introduce peyote into mainstream American religion — although his experiences raise the intriguing possibility that the founding visions of Joseph Smith and other early Mormons might have been chemically inspired.
White westerners are still searching for the rituals to ground our psychedelic experiences. Aldous Huxley did a lot to create a framework for such rituals, with his Doors of Perception — he introduced the framework of perennialism, Eastern mysticism and western psychotherapy, which is very influential in the psychedelic renaissance today. Equally influential is Amazonian shamanism — perhaps, like Artaud, we still long for an escape from our disenchanted whiteness. But will psychedelic science simply pass on the virus of western disenchantment into the indigenous psychedelic universe?
If I had one question for Jay, in addition to praise for his excellent book, it’s whether we can juxtapose western and Indian experiences so cleanly and neatly. We could also construct rigid dichotomies between western and indigenous ayahuasca experiences (I have done that previously) but (a) we don’t know that much about indigenous trips because they tend not to write them down and (b) cultures are not static and air-tight but bleed into one another. Have Indian ceremonies changed so little over time? To what extent have Indian rituals been influenced by western culture — one of the founding figures in the peyote church, after all, was half-white. Do Indians really never have bad trips…or would they interpret a bad trip as a magical attack?
One thing that westerners and Indians seemed to share in peyote experiences was a sense of going beyond ordinary time. That was partly why Huxley was so drawn to it — he was always searching for a way to escape the horror of time and history. He felt like Adam, gazing out on a new world. Inspired by his book, the British MP Christopher Mayhew courageously took mescaline live on a BBC Panorama show in 1955. He felt himself slipping between ordinary time and cosmic time. ‘I am here in your time…and now I’m going away for a long time….but it will just seem a moment for you.’
Reading Jay’s excellent psychedelic history, I have a different sense. All these endless epiphanies have happened, over and over again through time. And the trippers always think it’s something incredibly new. Endless Adams, endlessly heralding a new world, over and over again. It almost makes one nauseous.
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