Silas Weir Mitchell in his study.

The first scientific trial of a major psychedelic took place in 1895 in Washington, DC, at the medical school of Columbian (now George Washington) University. Its initial subject was a twenty-seven-year-old male, identified only as ‘Chemist’. Between 9 and 11 p.m., in student residential rooms under medical supervision, he chewed three of the dried peyote buttons supplied to James Mooney by Quanah Parker. He noted a slight nausea; he stretched out on the bed and, as it faded, he closed his eyes and found he could see ‘all sorts of designs in brilliant and ever-changing colours’. Encouraged, he chewed a fourth button and part of a fifth. ‘Then followed a train of delightful visions such as no human ever enjoyed under normal conditions.’1

‘My mind was perfectly clear and active,’ the subject recalled; he spent part of the time sitting at his desk and making notes. At other points he luxuriated, eyes closed, as ‘an ever-changing panorama of infinite beauty and grandeur, of infinite variety of colour and form, hurried before me’. He found that by the act of concentration he could exert some control over the visions: the most satisfying sequence was coaxed to life by recalling Imre Kiralfy’s electrically illuminated stage extravaganza America which he had witnessed two years previously at the Chicago World’s Fair, and which brought the dazzling filaments that coursed across his closed eyelids to a peak of intensity. Such moments ‘so far passed the more ordinary realms of delight as to bring me to that high ecstatic state in which our exclamations of enjoyment become involuntary’. He probed the limits of pleasure by turning his imagination to the dark side and conjuring ‘myriads of horrible crawling monsters’ and gruesomely distorted human shapes, but these ‘merely added another item to the list of the inexpressible delights of my remarkable night’s experience’.² He lost track of time and external space until around 4 a.m., when the effects began to wear off. They were succeeded by a slight depression and an insomnia that persisted until the following evening.

On his return to Washington Mooney had turned a quantity of his peyote buttons over to Daniel Webster Prentiss, the professor of materia medica and therapeutics at the university’s medical department, for human testing. He gave rather more, about half, to Dr Harvey Wiley, head of the Department of Agriculture’s chemistry division. Wiley was known as the ‘Crusading Chemist’ for his campaigns against food adulterants, which would eventually lead to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and the reconstitution of his division as the Food and Drug Administration. His laboratories provided chemical analyses for the entire department, and at this time were predominantly focused on establishing a self-sufficient American sugar industry. Wiley believed that a high sugar diet was a mark of civilisation and its consumption should be maximised, particularly for children: his maxim was that ‘childhood without candy would be heaven without harps’.3 He passed the dried cactus buttons on to a junior chemist in the division named Erwin Ewell.

Ewell approached cacti with an intense fascination that he believed to be in tune with the spirit of the age. ‘Among civilised and uncivilised peoples, old and young, scientific and unscientific’, who was not, he asked, ‘inspired with awe’ by their ‘weird forms’ or ‘moved by the mysterious beauty of an opening blossom of the “night-blooming cereus”’? Thanks to the recent efforts of collectors and suppliers such as Anna Nickels and Albert Blanc, whose nursery in Philadelphia was at this point the largest mail-order supplier in the world, there was now ‘scarcely a housewife in the land that pretends to maintain a conservatory or a window-garden without numbering one or more cacti in her collection’.⁴

The chemistry of the cactus family was for Ewell their most mysterious and fascinating aspect. Most botanical chemists, vaguely aware that their juices were sometimes drunk by thirsty desert travellers, assumed them to be devoid of active constituents, but Ewell had collected examples of the medicinal use of cacti in various cultures, particularly as cardiac stimulants. Now the most prominent experts around the globe – Louis Lewin in Berlin, Sereno Watson at Harvard and his own network of Washington researchers centred around the Bureau of American Ethnology – were all turning their attention in the same direction: the ‘one or more species of cacti that are used by the American Indians for ceremonial and medicinal purposes’.5

Meanwhile Daniel Webster Prentiss and his assistant Francis Morgan proceeded to a second human trial, this time on a twenty-four-year-old male subject identified as ‘Reporter’. After Chemist’s complaints that chewing the peyote buttons had made him nauseous, they were ground to a coarse powder for easier digestion and wrapped in wafer paper for swallowing. The subject’s physical examination before the dose revealed a rather high pulse, which Prentiss and Morgan attributed to the glass of whisky he had just taken with supper. Between 11.30 p.m. and 2.30 a.m. he consumed the equivalent of seven buttons. By 1.30 a.m. his pupils were dilated and by 2.30 he was feeling ‘decidedly lazy and perfectly contented’. He closed his eyes and was enveloped by visions which he described to the doctors as they unfolded: ‘a host of little tubes of shining light’ down which red and green balls were rolling, then shaping themselves into letters, then revolving rapidly, the spaces between them filling with shifting seas of green. The patterns evolved ‘through rich arabesques, Syrian carpet patterns, and plain geometric figures, and with each form came a new flash of colour’.⁶

From this point, however, his experience took a disagreeable turn. He had an intermittent, highly discomfiting feeling of ‘double personality – to be outside of himself looking at himself’. He became acutely aware of his ‘mental inferiority’ towards the doctors surrounding him, and evinced ‘a feeling of great distrust and resentment’. His supervisors recorded that he ‘firmly believed that we were secretly laughing at his condition. He believed that we intended to kill him, and for this reason he refused to take the eighth button.’ In the intervals between these ‘paroxysms’ his hostile feelings disappeared entirely and he apologised for his outbursts. In a later interview he maintained that the drug had made him ‘perfectly “insane”’, and he ‘would have attempted violence had it not seemed to him too much trouble in his lazy and depressed condition’.

This was a confounding result. It was a basic assumption of pharmacy that drugs produced broadly predictable and replicable reactions. Even with psychoactive drugs, the effects of which could be influenced by the subject’s personality and mental state, there were clear tendencies: a stimulant such as cocaine never sedated its subjects any more than a sedative such as chloral hydrate ever stimulated them. Yet as the peyote trials continued, the contradictions mounted. Every dose seemed to produce a different response. ‘Reporter’ agreed to a second trial, and this time ‘no disagreeable symptoms appeared’.7 The third subject suffered ‘a most marked depression of the muscular system’ and ‘became unable to walk without assistance’.⁸ The fourth barely noticed any visions at all. The fifth found his visions wonderfully enhanced by music and drummed time on a table for hours, reminding the doctors that ‘a constant beating upon drums is a regular part of the taking of mescal buttons by the Indians’. The universal symptoms amounted to little more than trivial side effects: dilation of the pupils, loss of the sense of time and an inability to sleep.

Prentiss and Morgan’s report, published in September 1895 in the Therapeutic Gazette, was tentative in its conclusions. The experiences they witnessed contradicted not only each other but also the only prior report, that of John Raleigh Briggs, whose racing heart and breathing difficulties were not observed in any of the subjects. The closest comparison Prentiss and Morgan could adduce was cannabis, which also ‘produces visions, with dilated pupils, and with slight effect upon the circulation’, but that was a hypnotic sedative that tended to sleepiness rather than insomnia. The cactus seemed to share some of cocaine’s stimulant effects but little else. The most plausible hypothesis was that the active principle in the cactus bore no relation to anything currently known to science. Its unusual effects might, if they could somehow be harnessed and standardised, support a range of therapeutic applications. ‘It may prove of value,’ Prentiss and Morgan suggested in a follow-up paper, ‘as a cerebral stimulant in depressed conditions of the mind, such as melancholia, hypochondriasis, and in some cases of neurasthenia.’ It might also be of value as a tonic for ‘general “nervousness”, nervous headache, nervous irritable cough’, or as a substitute for opium in the treatment of ‘active delirium and mania’, given the advantage that its use was ‘not followed by the unpleasant effects which often attend the use of that drug’.9

It was a lengthy list, but lacking in detail and tepid in its enthusiasm: much more research would be needed before any medical application could be recommended. In the meantime the underlying problem of peyote’s unpredictability was highlighted by an unscheduled experiment. Erwin Ewell, as he became absorbed in his attempts to extract resins and alkaloids from his cactus specimens, was unable to resist sampling them. In November 1895 he took two buttons in his rooms on Upper Fourteenth Street. What happened next is recorded in two sharply differing accounts, both dating from twenty years later. Harvey Wiley recalled that Ewell had mentioned he was thinking of making a self-experiment with peyote and Wiley had advised him against it. The next he knew was at 2 a.m. on the night in question when Ewell’s roommate, alarmed at his condition, brought him to Wiley’s house. Ewell was ‘constantly talking and saying, “Oh, how beautiful; oh, how splendid; oh, how magnificent . . . I see the angels in the streets of gold”’.¹⁰ Wiley concluded that the cactus was a deliriant poison.

James Mooney recalled the event clearly but rather differently. Ewell’s dose was a small one – Mooney himself had taken much larger – but rather than ‘having his mind at ease, and his body at ease also, as most people do when they take medicines’, he had panicked, convinced himself he was dying, written his will and gone wandering out into the street in the middle of the night. In Mooney’s version Ewell had met a policeman who, making sense of the situation as best he could, had escorted him to Wiley’s house. Mooney had spoken to Ewell the next day, by which time he had recovered and ‘although he was rather excited, he knew what he was doing and could talk in a very interesting fashion of what had happened to him’.¹¹

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 own 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. This was why the ceremony was typically convened ‘on Saturday night in order that he [might] rest and keep quiet on Sunday’. The trial subjects, by contrast, undertook their experiments with little idea of what to expect and no attempt to prepare their minds; often they seemed ‘to have hastily swallowed a sandwich and plunged at once into exciting action’.12 The investigators assumed that trials on randomly selected subjects would allow them to reduce the drug’s action to a uniform set of symptoms. But the cactus confounded this expectation: the outcomes it produced seemed as random as the subjects themselves.

In Germany, the parallel attempt to isolate peyote’s active chemical compound had by this point flared into controversy. Despite reserving the field for himself, Louis Lewin had made little progress since 1888 and in 1891 a Leipzig chemist named Arthur Heffter began his own investigations. He bought samples of peyote from two different dealers at a horticultural fair, and subsequently requested and received from Carl Lumholtz a small sample of the hikuli he had brought back from his visit to the Huichol people. Heffter concluded from these samples that there were at least two species of peyote, similar in physical appearance but with very different chemical profiles. One he identified as Anhalonium williamsii,¹³ from which he extracted an alkaloid he called ‘pellotine’; experimenting with it on himself, he noted only a slight sedative effect. Anhalonium lewinii, by contrast, yielded at least two alkaloids with properties as yet undetermined.

Heffter was a gentle and retiring character whose work had thus far excited little attention outside his specialist fields. He had begun his career as an agricultural chemist, taken some medical training and worked on the biochemistry of lactic acid and the metabolism of iodine. He was sensitive to Lewin’s exalted reputation and did his best to present his findings in a conciliatory manner. In March 1895, however, the renowned cactologist Karl Schumann stirred controversy with a lecture on poisonous cacti that cast doubt on Heffter’s claim that A. williamsii and A. lewinii were two separate species. In the Pharmaceutische Zeitung’s synopsis of the lecture Heffter’s views were summarised inaccurately and he responded with a correction, in which he acknowledged Lewin’s priority in the field but pointed out that he had been the first to isolate a pure alkaloid from the cactus.

Lewin was furious at the breach of what he regarded as his prerogative. He wrote a letter to the Pharmaceutische Zeitung complaining that ‘I have neither time, nor do I feel inclined, to make Mr Heffter understand the results of my research.’14 Lewin’s personality and profile made the contest unequal. As one student who attended both men’s lectures recalled, Lewin’s were packed: he was a ‘tremedously stimulating, flamboyant orator . . . who always carried his audience away with his enthusiasm’. Heffter, by contrast, was ‘not very verbal, awkward, frankly, in the presentation of his material’, and his lectures were dull and poorly attended.¹⁵ But Lewin was losing interest in peyote: the tincture with which Parke, Davis went to market in 1893 had attracted little interest, and Prentiss and Morgan’s inconclusive trials suggested no obvious medical applications. Heffter, however, was puzzled and intrigued by the tangled botany and lengthening list of resins and alkaloids, and continued to dig deeper.

There was one medical scientist in whose opinion Daniel Webster Prentiss was particularly interested, and he had set aside some of Quanah Parker’s buttons especially to send to him. Silas Weir Mitchell was nearing the end of a long career specialising in the disputed territory between mind and body that was known as ‘nervous illness’, during which he had become almost as dominant in American neurology as Freud’s mentor Jean-Martin Charcot, ‘the Napoleon of the neuroses’, was in France. The son of a distinguished physician, Mitchell had taken an early interest in the subject because it was so poorly understood. During the Civil War he specialised in the nerve damage and paralyses caused by shells and artillery, and in 1872 was the first to describe phantom limb syndrome among amputees. After the war he had become one of America’s first and most distinguished specialists in neurasthenia, the condition of shattered nerves, fatigue, depression and hysterical symptoms that was so prevalent it became known as ‘the American disease’.16 By 1896 he was Philadelphia aristocracy, married to a wealthy and well-connected wife, easing into retirement and travelling extensively with a retinue of servants. He had recently embarked on a second career as a novelist and his most recent work, Hugh Wynne, set against the backdrop of the American Revolution, was currently at the top of the bestseller lists and on its way to selling half a million copies.

Prentiss guessed correctly that despite his advancing age – he was now sixty-seven – Mitchell would find peyote a tantalising prospect. He had a longstanding expertise in toxicology and had studied rattlesnake venom and South American arrow poisons; more recently he had taken a keen interest in new psychoactive drugs such as chloral hydrate, ether, bromides and opiates. He was a bold self-experimenter who had over the course of his career frozen his own ulnar nerve, requested samples of hashish from his colleagues and submitted to a straitjacket, an experience that prompted in him ‘a half-frantic desire to fight for freedom’¹⁷ and made him a committed advocate for asylum reform. He was a firm believer that ‘there are yet triumphs to be won in medicine by therapeutic boldness, and by the use at times of enormous doses’.¹⁸ He had read Prentiss and Morgan’s reports on peyote with interest and his powers of imagination and description, allied to his vast medical knowledge, made him uniquely qualified to produce a subjective account of its effects. On 24 May 1896, ‘at 12 noon of a busy morning’,19 he took a decoction containing the equivalent of one and a half buttons. An hour later he repeated the dose.

Between 2 and 4 p.m., while holding consultations with a succession of patients, Mitchell began gradually to feel a ‘pleasing sense of languor’ stealing upon him, together with some discomfort in the stomach. He drove home and took another, larger dose. By 4.30 p.m., making notes, he ‘became aware that a transparent, violet haze was about my pen point’.²⁰ He felt ‘a decisive impression that I was more competent in my mind than in my everyday moods’, and dashed off a letter of advice on a questionable diagnosis. By 5 p.m. such tasks seemed too effortful and he retired upstairs to lie in a darkened room.

‘The display which for an enchanted two hours followed,’ he wrote, ‘was such as I find it hopeless to describe in language.’ His ‘first vivid show of mescal colour’ was a shower of stars, succeeded by floating films of pink and purple, then by electric zigzags such as those described by migraine sufferers. Then came objects such as ‘a tall, richly finished gothic tower of very elaborate and definite design’ dripping with gemlike drops of colour. Time and space unrolled before his eyes in a vast immensity, ‘miles of rippled purples, half transparent, and of ineffable beauty’. Without thinking he opened his eyes and to his consternation the vision vanished. He attempted to conjure up human figures, but without success; later he was rewarded with a scene of ‘two little dwarves, made, it seemed, of leather . . . blowing through long glass pipes of green tint, which seemed to me to be alive, so intensely, vitally green were they’. His energy waned, and he drifted between sleep and waking. Settling into his visions once more, he saw a scene he recognised from waking life: the beach at Newport, with waves rolling in, ‘liquid splendours huge and threatening’. He ‘wished the beautiful terror of these huge mounds of colour would continue’, but ‘a knock at my door caused me to open my eyes, and I lost whatever of wonder might have come after’. After dinner the visions faded, leaving only the odd shimmer of colour.

The following day their magnificence was still vivid in his mind; he also had a headache and ‘a smart attack of gastric distress’. ‘These shows,’ he noted, ‘are expensive.’ His mind began to turn on the questions raised by them, and the mechanisms in the brain and nervous system that might account for them. Uncanny as they were, they had parallels in the stranger dimensions of neurology: ‘even my most brilliant visions’ were not different in kind from the searing optical symptoms described in migraine or epilepsy. There was some overlap, too, with the visions of hypnagogia and the ‘phantasms’ of hysteria, with their uncanny detail and independence from conscious control. He saw ‘no obvious therapeutic uses for mescal in massive doses’ – the physical ordeal made it unsuitable for neurasthenic patients – but was struck by the rich possibilities for psychological research. ‘Here is unlocked a storehouse of glorified memorial treasures,’ he concluded.21 The visions, at their root, seemed to be enhanced and transposed creatures of memory, though he recognised nothing from his direct personal experience except the sudden appearance of Newport beach. He wondered whether the visions ‘of the navvy would be like those of the artist, and above all, what those born blind could relate’. He noted that ‘no one has told us what visions come to the Red Man’. However, he concluded his account with a caution: ‘I predict a perilous reign of the mescal habit when this agent becomes attainable. The temptation to call again the enchanting magic of the experience will, I am sure, be too much for some men to resist after they have once set foot in this land of fairy colours, where there seems to be so much to charm and so little to excite horror or disgust’.²²

Mitchell himself had no difficulty resisting the temptation of another dose. The experience ‘was worth one such indigestion and headache, but was not worth a second’.²³ He was eager, though, to pass it on to an old acquaintance, one of the few figures in America whose authority on matters of the mind compared to his own. William James was now professor of philosophy at Harvard, having made his reputation with his two-volume Principles of Psychology, published in 1890. The two men had been friends for many years, though not close ones. Their mutual esteem had been punctured during the 1880s by a subject that threw their differences into sharp relief: spiritualism. They had attended a séance together, which James had witnessed with an open mind – perhaps a will to believe – but Mitchell had pronounced ‘inconceivable twaddle’.24 James had taken offence, and Mitchell had attempted to make amends by offering to pay for another séance, commenting that ‘we did find the Spirits costly’²⁵ and thereby offending James further.

Where Mitchell looked primarily for the physiological correlates of altered consciousness, James set his sights beyond them. He had, for example, been the first psychologist to take up Mitchell’s observations of phantom limb syndrome, but his 1887 paper on the subject, ‘The Consciousness of Lost Limbs’, focused not on their neurological basis but their similarities to clairvoyance and telepathy. His pluralist philosophy aimed to encompass domains beyond the material and accept classes of mental phenomena that resisted conventional scientific investigation. Psychoactive drugs had always interested him because they offered the prospect of chemical, measurable and repeatable journeys into dimensions of the mind typically dismissed as subjective and unverifiable. More personally, they held out for him the possibility of a long-sought illumination. His father, a Swedenborgian theologian, had instilled in him a conviction that mystical experience was profound and meaningful, but his own mental character had from an early age tended towards the logical and he had only known such revelations at second hand. Drugs were for him pregnant with the possibility of transcending the prosaic habits of mind that barred his entry to an important facet of human psychology.

Mitchell’s gift of peyote was part peace offering, part challenge. His covering letter spoke, in James’s summary, of ‘the most gorgeous stimulation of the visual centres, magnificently colored hallucinations, pure fairyland pictures such as earth cannot afford’.26 Here was a ticket to another world whose reliability Mitchell could vouch for, and which he believed would offer more substantial phenomena than the spirits. It was an intriguing test for the approach that James had formulated in the first volume of his Principles of Psychology: a study of the mind that built on the natural sciences but aimed beyond measurable data at a more faithful representation of its mercurial and often contradictory operations. In his chapter ‘The Stream of Thought’ he had argued that mental events cannot be treated as objective facts, discrete and logically connected, nor do they proceed in a linear fashion: consciousness is rather ‘a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations’, a crowd of overlapping rational and subconscious selves in constant flux and dialogue.²⁷ If peyote had thus far defeated the doctors and pharmacologists with its paradoxical and unpredictable effects, perhaps James’s more capacious theories might make sense of it.

One of the few effects reliably exhibited by all Prentiss and Morgan’s subjects, for example, was the subject of a later chapter in James’s book, ‘The Perception of Time’. Every one of them had been astonished to discover that their epically unfolding panoramas and visions had occupied only a few minutes at most. James theorised that false perceptions of this kind might be more than mental impairments: they offered clues both to the action of the drug and to the workings of the mind in normal states. They showed that subjective time, as opposed to ‘clock time’, was elastic, tending to reflect the number of mental events that were taking place: ‘awareness of change is thus the condition on which our perception of time’s flow depends’.²⁸ This explained why time seems to slow at moments of crisis, and it suggested that under the influence of peyote the mind was being subjected to a flux of perceptions many times more rapid than in its normal state.

However he interpreted Mitchell’s offer, James was more than ready to accept it, and he repaired promptly to his family’s cottage in the hills of New Hampshire. At 6.30 the following morning he took a peyote button and was rewarded with immediate nausea, followed by vomiting and diarrhoea that continued all day and finally abated at four the next morning. He described the ordeal to his brother, the novelist Henry James, as a ‘Katzenjammer’ – a screaming hangover – and concluded ruefully, ‘I will take the visions on trust!’29 It was an oddly violent reaction to a tiny dose from which many subjects would have noticed nothing at all. Among the experiences thus far recorded, it most closely resembled that of John Raleigh Briggs: did the two men share a peculiar constitutional quirk, exacerbated perhaps by over-eagerness or suppressed anxiety? It was a reminder, if another were needed, of peyote’s unpredictability and of the toxic reactions that it could manifest.

If the physiology or psychology that produced his Katzenjammer remained beyond the reach of his own theories, James nevertheless kept faith with the potential of mind-altering drugs and the following year he achieved the drug-induced epiphany he had been seeking with a less physically demanding substance: nitrous oxide. His experience engendered the famous insight in his 1902 masterwork, On the Varieties of Religious Experience, that ‘our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different . . . no account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded’.³⁰ It was an insight he might equally have reached with peyote, had his constitution permitted him, and one on which later experimenters with mescaline would draw deeply.

Silar Weir Mitchell’s report on peyote was published in the British Medical Journal in December 1896, bringing it to the attention of an international readership. It was read with great interest by Havelock Ellis, who was intrigued enough to look for a source for the cactus. He discovered that Parke, Davis, who had opened a London office in 1890, supplied dried buttons via Potter & Clarke, the London pharmacists best known for ‘Potter’s Asthma Cure’, a greenish powder to be burned and inhaled that contained the dried leaves of the highly toxic datura plant.

Ellis was a qualified doctor but he made his living as a litterateur and art critic. He was an example of the modern renaissance man he had called for in his 1890 book The New Spirit, the manifesto for a movement in which the arts, sciences, politics and religion would all be reinvented and rejoined. He was an aesthete, an individualist and a feminist, a member of the Progressive Association and an intimate of London’s tightly knit fin-de-siècle artistic coterie. He was in the process of writing, in correspondence with the art historian and advocate of ‘male love’ John Addington Symonds, the taboo-shattering multi-volume study of sex that would become his enduring achievement. He was staying, as he often did, in the rooms rented by his friend Arthur Symons, the literary critic and Decadent poet, in Fountain Court, a red-brick mansion block in the Middle Temple district beside the Thames Embankment. At that moment Symons was in Paris with their mutual friend W.B. Yeats. ‘On Good Friday,’ Ellis began in a tone similar to Mitchell’s, ‘I found myself entirely alone in the quiet rooms in the Temple which I occupy when in London, and judged the occasion a fitting one for a personal experiment.’31

Ellis’s first report of his experience appeared in the Lancet in June 1897 and concentrated on the aspects that would be of most interest to medical readers. Peyote was not a physically dangerous substance, he reported: ‘the only two really unpleasant symptoms of the experiment’ were ‘motor incoordination and cardiac and respiratory depression’. Its positive symptoms, by contrast, were remarkable: ‘a saturnalia of the specific senses, and chiefly an orgy of vision’.³² It was a tantalising advertisement for the much fuller account that he published six months later in a progressive literary quarterly, the Contemporary Review.

His title – ‘Mescal: A New Artificial Paradise’ – announced its line of descent from Charles Baudelaire’s essay on hashish, Les Paradises Artificels, perhaps the century’s most admired literary account of a drug experience after Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, written by Baudelaire’s hero Thomas De Quincey. Ellis began with a summary of peyote’s known history, citing Lumholtz’s visit to the Tarahumara and James Mooney’s encounters with the Kiowa, the experiments undertaken by Prentiss and Morgan and Mitchell’s ‘very interesting record of the brilliant visions by which he was visited under the influence of the plant’.33 He proceeded to describe how he made a liquid decoction of three buttons and drank it slowly over two hours, after which he felt faint, his pulse weakened and he lay down to read. Like Mitchell, he first noticed peyote’s effects as they impinged on the note-taking process: ‘a pale violet shadow floated over the page around the point at which my eyes were fixed’. As evening closed in he was gradually enveloped, as Mitchell had been, by ‘a vast field of golden jewels, studded with red and green stones, ever changing’. From this point on ‘the visions continued with undiminished brilliance for many hours’.³⁴

Having fulfilled his obligations to medicine with his previous report in the Lancet, Ellis felt free to discuss the experience in primarily aesthetic terms. The previous year he had written a paper on ‘The Colour Sense in Literature’, comparing the imagery invoked by authors such as Shakespeare, Chaucer, Coleridge, Poe and Rosetti. Now he brought a similar critical sensibility to bear on the peyote cactus. Every part of the spectrum competed in his visions, but ‘there was always a certain parsimony and aesthetic value in the colours presented’. He was ‘further impressed, not only by the brilliance, delicacy and variety of the colours, but even more by their lovely and various textures – fibrous, woven, polished, glowing, dull, veined, semi-transparent’. He compared the patterns that gradually took form and life to the ‘Maori style of architecture’ and ‘the delicate architectural effects as of lace carved in wood, which we associated with the mouchrabieh work of Cairo’. They were ‘living arabesques’, with ‘a certain incomplete tendency to symmetry, as though the underlying mechanism was associated with a large number of polished facets’. When he became exhausted by the visions in darkness Ellis turned on the gas light, and the shadows that leapt to life reminded him of the ‘visual hyperaesthesia’ of Claude Monet’s paintings. It was a feast for the eyes, and an education for them. Writing months later, he maintained that ‘ever since this experience I have been more aesthetically sensitive than I was before to the more delicate phenomena of light and shade and colour’.35

Ellis’s description was the flowering of a tendency that established itself almost immediately in western encounters with peyote: to describe its effects primarily in terms of the visual sense. Over centuries of indigenous use, this dimension of the experience had been acknowledged as beautiful but rarely described in detail. Among its early western investigators, by contrast, only James Mooney resisted – or lacked – the urge to focus on peyote’s optical effects and to narrate them in the first person. Unlike the others, Mooney’s experiences took place in a communal ceremony rather than a darkened room: the primary focus was ritual, song and prayer, and to dissect one’s private sensations was to miss the point. The distinction connects, perhaps, to the ‘great divide’ between orality and literacy theorised by Walter Ong, according to which the advent of print in the Renaissance fostered a distinctively ‘ocularcentric’ western culture: as text took precedence over the spoken word, the objective was privileged over the subjective, the individual over the communal, the fixed over the fluid and the visual over the aural.³⁶ This tendency entrenched itself further in the twentieth century after the synthesis of mescaline, and once the term ‘psychedelic’ was coined, it quickly became first and foremost the signifier of a visual style.

The ocularcentric turn may be characteristic of western modernity in general, but it was also a specific response to the fin-de-siècle moment at which peyote made its first appearance. The critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, who would himself take mescaline in a clinical trial in 1934, wrote that the nineteenth century ‘subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training’.³⁷ Visual illusions – from kaleidoscopes to magic lanterns to photography – made the transit from dazzling novelties to staples of mass culture. Magicians, mediums and psychic investigators all probed the limits of the real, blurring the line between optical trickery, the subconscious mind and the spirit world. The very first subject of peyote’s scientific trials found an analogue for his visions in novel and spectacular displays of electricity. At the moment when Ellis made his experiment the world was being exposed for the first time to X-ray images and the cinematograph. ‘Visual hyperaesthesia’ was a property not only of peyote but of the culture in which he was consuming it, and to which Monet and the Impressionists were responding. Like the bright world of the Nahua, the electric age of the fin de siècle distilled matter to its quintessence of colour and light.

As with electricity, there was danger in this brilliance. By the late 1890s, mind-altering drugs that enhanced and intensified modern life were stronger, cheaper and more available than ever before. A substance such as cocaine made the world glow with preternatural brightness but those who used it incautiously could also be consumed by it. Ellis concluded his essay in the Contemporary Review with the assessment that ‘the enjoyment of the colour visions produced’ by the cactus meant that ‘there is every likelihood that it will become popular’: a new artificial paradise for a new age. He anticipated fears about its abuse but regarded them as misguided. Unlike the everyday poisons that delivered immediate pleasure, the peyote experience was a physical ordeal that demanded ‘organic soundness and good health’, and its rewards were conditional on occasional use. Ellis assured his readers it was ‘not probable that its use will easily develop into a habit’.38

This assurance was greeted with scepticism in the Review of Reviews of January 1898, which predicted that ‘in a year or two we shall probably find that mescal mania is an even more insidious and deadly malady than those caused by morphia, opium or whisky’.³⁹ The following month, under the headline ‘Paradise or Inferno?’, the British Medical Journal warned gravely in an editorial that ‘such eulogy of any drug is a danger to the public’, especially one ‘the use of which has been suppressed by law in America’ (a reference to the prohibitions on Indian reservations). Ellis might be a qualified doctor but he had crossed a line. Unlike Mooney or Mitchell, he was not simply a scientist taking peyote for ethnographic or medical research: he was a taste-maker who must be held accountable for ‘putting temptation before that sector of the public which is always in search of a new sensation’.40

Ellis’s immediate circle was more dedicated in the pursuit of new sensations than most and his encouragement brought into being mescaline’s first informal artistic scene. Curious as to what a visual artist would make of mescal, he persuaded one of his acquaintances to try it. The first dose was too weak and the second far too strong, inducing, in his friend’s words, ‘a series of attacks or paroxysms, which I can only describe by saying that I felt as though I was dying’. Visions alternated with strange and disturbing physical sensations, and sometimes combined with them: when Ellis passed him a piece of biscuit to relieve his nausea, it ‘suddenly streamed out into blue flame’, an electric conflagration that spread across the right-hand side of his body. ‘As I placed the biscuit in my mouth it burst again into the same colored fire and illuminated the interior of my mouth, casting a blue reflection on the roof. The light in the Blue Grotto at Capri, I am able to affirm, is not nearly as blue as seemed for a short space of time the interior of my mouth’.⁴¹

Ellis made a further experiment on himself to test the effects of music, and found that when a friend played the piano ‘the music stimulated the visions and added greatly to my enjoyment of them’.⁴² He also ‘made experiments on two poets, whose names are both well known’ and can be identified with reasonable certainty as W.B. Yeats and Arthur Symons. While Ellis was making his first experiment in Symons’ rooms, the pair were spending the end of 1896 together in Paris taking hashish, an experi-ence that Symons memorialised in poetry⁴³ and Yeats referred to later and more obliquely in his memoir The Trembling of the Veil (1922). Symons had first visited Paris with Ellis in 1889, and the two had subsequently worked together as editors of the Mermaid series of Elizabethan plays. Throughout 1896 Symons had edited the short-lived but influential Savoy magazine, with Aubrey Beardsley as illustrator and both Ellis and Yeats among the contributors.

The peyote experiment caught both poets at a moment of transition and reinvention. Symons had been working for some years on essays and a book about the Decadent Movement, but under Yeats’s influence he was distancing himself from the term and its jaded pursuit of ‘learned corruption’ and the ‘deliberately abnormal’.44 In Paris the two had embraced the term ‘Symbolism’ to capture the numinous aspects of experience which escape language and the occult techniques that Yeats used to pursue them. The artist was to become something closer to a defrocked priest and art a ‘sacred ritual’, as Symons announced in the introduction to The Symbolist Movement in Literature, his masterwork which appeared in 1899 with a dedication to Yeats. The world of symbols connected directly to the art and literature of antiquity, and had been brought to a creative peak by French writers of the previous generation; but ‘what distinguishes the Symbolism of our day from the Symbolism of the past is that it has now become conscious of itself’.⁴⁵ It was an appropriate moment to explore a new artificial paradise and its power to awaken the poet to mysteries beyond language.

The first subject, presumably Yeats – a poet ‘interested in mystical matters, an excellent subject for visions’ – was impaired by a weak constitution. ‘He found the effects of mescal on his breathing somewhat unpleasant; he much prefers hasheesh.’ But Symons, on a modest dose of a little under three buttons, was transported. ‘I have never seen such a succession of absolutely pictorial visions with such precision,’ he reported. Dragons balancing white balls on puffs of their exhaled breath swept past him from right to left; playing the piano with closed eyes, he ‘got waves and lines of pure colour’.⁴⁶ Like Ellis, however, he found the experience a saturnalia of vision rather than a descent into the deeper realms of the symbolic and the sacred. It would be another few years before London’s artistic–occult milieu would produce its defrocked peyote priest.

Late that evening, Symons walked from Fountain Court down to the nearby Thames Embankment. As he gazed across at the South Bank, he found himself ‘absolutely fascinated by an advertisement of “Bovril”, which came and went in letters of light on the other side of the river’.47 The brilliance of electricity was the ruling metaphor for peyote’s scintillating visions, but it was a literal stimulus too: it seemed that nothing delighted the eye of the mescal eater so much as the new electrical sublime. They arrived together as avatars of a new world of visual spectacle, equal parts scientific discovery and sensory delight.

While Ellis and his friends refined their descriptions of peyote’s visions, another experimenter was probing their source. In Leipzig, Arthur Heffter was progressing systematically with his extractions, following the assumption that the active principle was not (as Prentiss and Morgan had theorised) one of the resins that could be extracted from it, but one of the alkaloids. He had thus far identified five, and arranged them into ‘a sort of periodic table’.⁴⁸ At one end was what he was calling lophophorine, which he took to be a strychnine-like stimulant; at the other was a compound he had christened mescaline, which he suspected was a morphine-like depressant, responsible for the languorous sedative sensations. In between these poles were pellotine, anhalonidine and anhalonine. He decided that the quickest and simplest route to determining their effects was by self-experiment.

He began on 5 June 1897, the same day that Ellis’s report was published in the Lancet, by taking an alcoholic extract of 16.6 grams of dried cactus, equivalent to around five buttons. He felt his pulse drop, together with ‘nausea, occipital headache, intense dizziness and clumsiness in moving’. He lay down in a darkened room and was rewarded with visions ‘which consisted partly of mosaics, and partly of winding coloured ribbons moving with the rapidity of lightning’. Gradually they resolved themselves into scenery – ‘a richly decorated banquet hall, where the friezes, walls and chandeliers were ornamented with jewels, opals and pearls’ – which had a tendency to flip upside down, adding to his dizziness and nausea.⁴⁹ His sense of time was scrambled; he estimated a few minutes as half an hour. All in all, his experience correlated closely with previous reports. He began to suspect that the visions, the signature effect of the cactus, might be produced by mescaline, the most abundant of its alkaloids.

On 21 July he carried out a second self-experiment. He extracted all the alkaloids from the cactus with ammonia and chloroform, leaving a slurry of resins behind. He wrapped these in wafer paper and swallowed a portion equivalent to the amount in his previous dose of peyote. He felt some initial weakness and nausea but within two hours it had gone, and no abnormal sensations remained. The resins, he concluded, might be responsible for some of the physical symptoms but the visions were produced by one or more of the alkaloids.

Two days later he tried a third experiment, drinking the combined alkaloids dissolved in water and sitting down to read. Soon enough, telltale green and violet patches spread across the paper, evolving into the now-familiar kaleidoscopic display and accompanied by ‘dilation of the pupils, dizziness, very distressing nausea’. He had demonstrated to his satisfaction that ‘the alkaloids produce the same physiological effect as the drug, and the peculiar actions of peyote on the visual apparatus must, therefore, be produced by one of its alkaloids’.50

Cautiously, Heffter began to experiment with small doses of mescaline hydrochloride, starting with 20mg and working by increments up to 100mg. At this higher dose he experienced mild physical symptoms – heaviness, slight headache and nausea – and the faint traces of visions when he closed his eyes. On 23 November he took 150mg. The violet and green spots came first, then ‘images of carpet patterns, ribbed vaulting etc.’. Soon he was immersed in the visionary ‘landscapes, halls and architectural forms’ of peyote. ‘The results,’ he concluded, ‘show that mescaline is exclusively responsible for the major symptoms of peyote (mescal) poisoning. This applies especially to the unique visions.’⁵¹

The singular focus of western experimenters on peyote’s visions had unlocked its chemical secret. Mescaline crossed another great divide into modernity: from plant spirit to chemical compound. Against all expectations, Heffter had beaten Lewin to the discovery on which he had staked his claim. Lewin had entered the field first, with an unsurpassed knowledge of psychopharmacology, a dazzling cross-disciplinary range that allowed him to draw insights from cultures ancient and modern, and the muscle of the American pharmaceutical industry behind him. What made the difference was Heffter’s experimental method. Lewin, alone among peyote’s early investigators, was not prepared to take it himself. This was with him a long-standing point of principle. While making his pioneering studies of morphine addiction in the 1870s he had been deterred for life by encountering ‘men who first took a narcotic remedy from pure curiosity, and later, overcome by its influence, became habitual drugtakers’.52 He had proceeded by making experiments on frogs and pigeons that allowed him to measure the physiological and toxic effects of different extracts, but laboratory animals could not reveal to him their alterations in consciousness. Heffter made the breakthrough in the laboratory of his own mind.

Lewin never publicly acknowledged Heffter’s achievement. The magisterial survey of psychoactive drugs he produced at the end of his career, Phantastica (1924), relates that ‘my first investigations of the plant proved that it contained alkaloid substances, especially a crystallized alkaloid called by me anhalonine’.⁵³ Heffter goes unmentioned. Lewin continued to refer to peyote as Anhalonium lewinii, the tribute of which he had been so proud, even though it had by then been shown to be identical with Anhalonium williamsii; by 1900 the scientific community had standardised its Linnaean name to Lophophora williamsii (the new genus name, created in 1894, meaning ‘crest-bearing’ and referring to the species’ hairy tufts). Lewin concluded his summary with a caution that he considered it probable that ‘the habitual administration of this substance . . . like morphinism, produces a modification of the personality by a degradation of the cerebral functions’.⁵⁴

Heffter’s own conclusions were characteristically modest. ‘Physiologists and experimental psychologists,’ he observed, ‘should find work in this field rewarding.’⁵⁵