1955
Mescaline And The “Other World”
ALDOUS HUXLEY
At the first American symposium on psychedelic substances Huxley was the only non-medical person amongst “the Electric Shock Boys, the Chlorpromaziners, and the 57 Varieties of Psychotherapists” (as he wrote to Humphry Osmond). His address, not unexpectedly, was the only one that dealt with the drug experience of the “relatively sane,” rather than the mentally disturbed person. Ideas which he was to further develop in Heaven and Hell—the value of access to “the antipodes of the mind,” visionary experience by means of hypnosis, hallucinogens, the “transport” of objects such as precious stones, the magical qualities governing these states—is developed primarily through literary and artistic references.
MY PURPOSE TONIGHT IS To discuss the mescaline experiences, not of neurotics, but of those who, like myself, are relatively sane. Classic descriptions of this experience were given, many years ago, by Weir Mitchell and Havelock Ellis, whose accounts tally very closely with what I myself and all the experimenters with whom I am personally acquainted were able to report. These classic mescaline experiences differ in many respects from those we have heard discussed tonight. Almost all of those we have heard discussed tonight are colored by fear and anxiety. Moreover, they abound in references to the subject’s personal memories and to the traumatic experiences of his childhood. How different is the classic mescaline experience! Here the most striking feature, stressed emphatically by all who have gone through it, is its profound impersonality. The classic mescaline experience is not of consciously or unconsciously remembered events, does not concern itself with early traumas, and is not, in most cases, tinged by anxiety and fear. It is as though those who were going through it had been transported by mescaline to some remote, non-personal region of the mind.
Let us use a geographical metaphor and liken the personal life of the ego to the Old World. We leave the Old World, cross a dividing ocean, and find ourselves in the world of the personal subconscious, with its flora and fauna of repressions, conflicts, traumatic memories and the like. Traveling further, we reach a kind of Far West, inhabited by Jungian archetypes and the raw materials of human mythology. Beyond this region lies a broad Pacific. Wafted across it on the wings of mescaline or lysergic acid diethylamide, we reach what may be called the Antipodes of the mind. In this psychological equivalent of Australia we discover the equivalents of kangaroos, wallabies, and duck-billed platypuses—a whole host of extremely improbable animals, which nevertheless exist and can be observed.
Now, the problem is, how can we visit the remote areas of the mind, where these creatures live? Some people, it is clear, can go there spontaneously and more or less at will. A few of these travelers were great artists, who could not only visit the Antipodes, but could also give an account of what they saw, in words, or in pictures. Much more numerous are those who have been to the Antipodes, have seen its strange inhabitants, but are incapable of giving adequate expression to what they have observed. At the present time they are reluctant to give even an inadequate expression to their experience. The mental climate of our age is not favorable to visionaries. Those who have such spontaneous experiences, and are unwise enough to talk about them, are looked on with suspicion and told that they ought to see a psychiatrist. In the past, experiences of this kind were considered valuable and those who had them were looked up to. This is one of the reasons (though not perhaps the only reason) why there were more visionaries in earlier centuries than there are today.
Those who cannot visit the mind’s Antipodes at will (and they are the majority) must find some artificial method of transportation. One method which works in a certain proportion of cases is hypnosis. There are persons who, under moderately deep hypnosis, enter the visionary state.
More certain in their effect are the so-called hallucinogens, mescaline and LSD. Personally I have never taken LSD, so I can speak, from experience, only of mescaline. Mescaline transports us very painlessly—for there is hardly any of that horrible nausea which follows the ingestion of the peyote cactus, and there is no hangover—to the mind’s Antipodes, where we find a fauna and a flora strikingly different from the fauna and flora of the familiar Old World of personal consciousness. But just as marsupials, though improbable, are in no sense random or lawless phenomena, so it is with the inhabitants of the mind’s Antipodes. They conform to the laws of their own being, they can be classified and their strangeness possesses a certain regularity of pattern. As [Heinrich] Klüver has pointed out in his book on peyote,1 visionary experiences, though varying from individual to individual, belong nevertheless to one and the same family. Mescaline experiences of the classic kind exhibit certain well-marked characteristics.
The most striking of these common characteristics is the experience of light. There is a great intensification of light; this intensification is experienced both when the eyes are closed and when they are open. Light seems praeternaturally intense in all that is seen with the inward eye. It seems also praeternaturally strong in the outside world.
With this intensification of light there goes a tremendous intensification of color, and this holds good of the outer world as well as of the inner world.
Finally there is an intensification of what I may call intrinsic significance. That which is seen, either with the eyes closed or open, is felt to have a profound meaning. A symbol stands for something else, and this standing for something else is its meaning. But the meaningful things seen in the mescaline experience are not symbols. They do not stand for something else, do not mean anything except themselves. The significance of each thing is identical with its being. Its point is that it is. In a paradoxical, but (to those who have experienced this heightening of intrinsic significance) an entirely self-evident way, the relative becomes absolute, the transient particularly universal and eternal.
Intensified light, intensified color and intensified significance do not exist in isolation. They inhere in objects. And here again the experiences of those who have taken a hallucinogen, while in a good state of mental and physical health, and with a proper degree of philosophical preparation, seem to follow a fairly regular pattern. When the eyes are closed, visionary experience begins with the appearance in the visual field of living, moving geometries. These abstract, three-dimensional forms are intensely illuminated and brilliantly colored. After a time they tend to take on the appearance of concrete objects, such as richly patterned carpets, or mosaics, or carvings. These in turn modulate into rich and elaborate buildings, set in landscapes of extraordinary beauty. Neither the buildings nor the landscapes remain static, but change continuously. In none of their metamorphoses do they resemble any particular building or landscape seen by the subject in his ordinary state and remembered from the near or distant past. These things are all new. The subject does not remember or invent them; he discovers them, “out there,” in the psychological equivalent of a hitherto unexplored geographical region.
Through these landscapes and among these living architectures wander strange figures, sometimes of human beings (or even of what seem to be superhuman beings), sometimes of animals or fabulous monsters. Giving a straightforward prose description of what he used to see in his spontaneous visions, Willim Blake reports that he frequently saw beings, to whom he gave the name of Cherubim. These beings were a hundred and twenty feet high and were engaged (this is characteristic of the personages seen in vision) in doing nothing that could be thought of as being symbolic or dramatic. In this respect the inhabitants of the mind’s Antipodes differ from the figures inhabiting Jung’s archetypal world; for they have nothing to do either with the personal history of the visionary, or even with the age-old problems of the human race. Quite literally, they are the inhabitants of “the Other World.”
This brings me to a very interesting and, I believe, significant point. The visionary experience, whether spontaneous or induced by drugs, hypnosis or any other means, bears a striking resemblance to “the Other World,” as we find it described in the various traditions of religion and folklore. In every culture the abode of the gods and of souls in bliss is a country of surpassing beauty, glowing with color, bathed in intense light. In this country are seen buildings of indescribable magnificence, and its inhabitants are fabulous creatures, like the six-winged seraphs of Hebrew tradition, or like the winged bulls, the hawk-headed men, the human-headed lions, the many-armed, or elephant-headed personages of Egyptian, Babylonian and Indian mythology. Among these fabulous creatures move superhuman angels and spirits, who never do anything, but merely enjoy the beatific vision.
The costumes of the inhabitants, the buildings and even many features of the landscape in “the Other World” are encrusted with precious stones. Interestingly enough, the same is true of the inner world contacted under mescaline or in spontaneous vision. Weir Mitchell and many of the other experimenters, who have left an account of their mescaline experience, record a profusion of living gems. These gems which, in Mitchell’s words, look like clusters of transparent fruit, glowing with internal radiance, encrust the buildings, the mountains, the banks of rivers, the trees. One is reminded, as one reads these descriptions of the mescaline experience, of what is said of the next world in the various religious literatures of the world. Ezekiel speaks of “the stones of fire,” which are found in Eden. In the Book of Revelation, the New Jerusalem is a city of precious stones and of a substance which must have seemed to our ancestors almost as wonderful as gem-stones—glass. The wall of the New Jerusalem is of “gold like glass”—that is to say of a transparent, self-luminous substance having the color of gold. Glass reappears in the Celtic and Teutonic mythologies of Western Europe. The home of the dead, among the Teutons, is a glass mountain, and among the Celts it was a glass island, with glass bowers.
The Hindu and Buddhist paradises abound, like the New Jerusalem, in gems; and the same is true of the magic island which, in Japanese mythology, parallels Avalon and the Isles of the Blest.
Among primitive peoples, ignorant of glass and having no access to gemstones, paradise is adorned with self-luminous flowers. Such magical flowers play an important part in the Other World of more advanced peoples. One thinks, for example, of the lotus of Buddhist and Hindu mythology, the rose and lily of the Christian tradition.
It may be objected that paradise is merely “pie in the sky,” and that the reason all paradises are adorned with precious stones is precisely their preciousness here on earth. But why should gems ever have been regarded as precious? What has induced men to spend such enormous quantities of time, trouble and money on the finding and cutting of colored pebbles? In terms of any kind of utilitarian philosophy, the fact is entirely inexplicable. My own view is that an explanation for the preciousness of precious stones must be sought, first of all, in the facts of visionary experience. Gem-like objects, bright, self-luminous, glowing with praeternatural color and significance, exist in the mind’s Antipodes, are seen by visionaries and are felt by all who see them to be of enormous significance. In the objective world, the things which most nearly resemble these self-luminous visionary objects are gems. Precious stones are held to be precious, because they remind human beings of the Other World at the mind’s Antipodes—the Other World of which visionaries are fully conscious, and ordinary persons are obscurely and, as it were, subterraneously aware. There is a magical kind of beauty, which we say is “transporting.” The adjective is well chosen; for it is literally true that certain spectacles do carry away the mind of the beholder—carry it out of the everyday world of common, conceptualized experience into the magical Other World of nonverbal, visionary awareness.
Flowers are almost as transporting as precious stones, and I would be inclined to attribute the almost universal passion for flowers, the almost universal use of flowers in the rites of religion, to the fact that they remind men and women of what is always there, praeternaturally bright, colorful and significant, at the back of their minds.
Of the connection between visionary experience and certain forms of art, I have not time to speak. Suffice it to say that the connection is real, and that the almost magical power exercised by certain works of art springs from the fact that they remind us, consciously or, more often, unconsciously, of that Other World, which the natural visionary can enter at will, and to which the rest of us have access only under the influence of hypnosis or of a drug such as mescaline or LSD.