Euphorion Returned
CLAUDIO NARANJO
I am pleased to participate in Timothy Leary’s Festschrift, though it puts me in the position of having to disagree with Tim’s view in the IFIF days. Indeed, though a Festschrift is often taken as a stimulus for a premortem epitaph, I think that it would not be honoring Tim Leary, the seeker of truth and liberation, to flatter him through beautification of his public image. I, at least, feel that I owe him a less conventional response and hope that in the following I can convey both my appreciation and some criticism. I owe him true communication for the simple reason that he is still among the living, and I feel that I will be writing to him and not only about him.1
I anticipate being both warm and polemical, since I, too, communed in the spirit of the sixties, yet it has been a long time—I no longer believe in the deregulation of drugs. I always admired Tim’s talent and empathized with his dream of “a better world through chemistry,” yet I think that in his desire to be a youth hero he was a bit too impetuous in his defiance of the authorities and the medical profession, and I am inclined to think that his all-too-impetuous plea for freedom has proven to be a mistake.
Yes: conservatism has set in, and the psychedelic revolution, by becoming too “revolutionary,” was aborted. And we cannot put all the blame on the establishment and on the forces of darkness. Different attitudes would have yielded different results, and already in the sixties I thought that it would be better not to make such a fuss about psychedelics, but keep the secret for those ready to partake of it—channeling the new resource through the appropriate therapeutic, spiritual, and perhaps even educational networks. I even sent word to Tim about my thoughts when in the midsixties Frank Barron inquired about my views of recent developments.
Yet I cannot blame Tim very much, because we all get a bit fanatical at the time of our initial liberation. I have been saying for a long time that it is unavoidable that when spirit first shines upon us this makes our ego take most of the credit and talk excitedly about it. We know that sometimes the excitement of one serves to kindle that of many others in such a way that it speeds them into a path of transformation; yet we also know that at other times the “post-illuminative inflation” of the sorcerer’s apprentice is quite destructive. I cannot presume to be wise enough to know how relative the weights of + and - will compare on Tim’s day of reckoning—yet was not Tim’s disdain a major determinant in the alienation of the profession that would have constituted the normal channel in our society for this new resource? Granted, the world of psychiatry has been rather dull and dogmatic, but could the profession not have been educated instead of being shocked into the defensive?
I certainly must give credit to the anarchic impulse of one who sees through the straitjacket of the patriarchal world and has glimpses of true democracy. Yet for many years now I have not thought it functional to push for the democratization of drugs. In spite of having launched the slogan of “democratization of psychotherapy,” I think we would have gone much farther in that direction if we had been willing to take a step at a time. (I was present at a meeting where a plea for the legalization of MDMA was the issue—and while everyone pushed for “freedom” I insisted that it should be a prescription drug in the same category as the amphetamines. Of course, it was soon forbidden—to the loss of those in the greatest need.)
I am well aware that I sound like a sexagenarian and no longer like a teenager. I have learned to compromise in certain things. Yet I appreciate the beauty of the noncompromising attitude of Tim, and the beauty of his near-suicidal courage as he preached his dream, exposing the forces of resistance for what they are. Perhaps Jung would have said that he was possessed by the Christ archetype. By letting himself be crucified he has certainly drawn attention to the extent of the psychedelic taboo and the prohibitionist society.
As I think of Tim’s willingness to step into the role of a scapegoat some two decades ago, I think of Goethe’s “Euphorion”—that beautiful creature born of the visionary romance between Faust and the mythical Helen of Troy. Though Euphorion in the Faust drama stands for a stage in the inner path, we know that Goethe associated him with Byron, whom he admired more than any other contemporary poet.
“Let me be leaping! / Let me be springing! / To the wide ether / Would I were winging,” exclaims Euphorion as he indeed leaps in such a way that Faust fears disaster may overtake him. “Hold ye my hand not! / Loose ye my garments! / Are they not mine?” he responds, and goes on frolicking and bounding so high that his concerned parents (those who had crossed all boundaries!) fear his daring and madness will be his undoing. Like Byron and the Byronesque Tim, Euphorion’s way of being in the world is—to use the character’s words—“fight and fall,” and he warns Faust and Helen that he will not hang back. As he casts himself into the air for the last time, his head radiates and a luminous trail glides after him—while the chorus calls him Icarus as if to remind us of still another embodiment of suicidal enthusiasm through the memory of the one whose waxen wings melted as he soared too close to the sun. How can anybody deeply disapprove of a euphoric excess that seems inseparable from spiritual youth? It impresses us as no less archetypal than the Faustian seeking spirit, a sort of divine madness put into human life by providential design.
As you see, I agree with the contention that in the appropriate set and setting psychedelic drugs have enormous transformation potential, and yet, in spite of great appreciation for Tim’s talents and for his intuition of what psychedelics could do for social transformation, I am inclined to think that we are not to blame the dominant ideology of the day that he has been cast as a fool. Maybe it is a matter of perspective and unbiased understanding. I think that a fool he was, back then—though one, like Don Quixote, more interesting than average humanity.
Let us hope that his heroism of the sixties, however contaminated by hubris it may have been, is in the end not lost. Let us hope that the day comes when looking back on these decades we see Hegel’s dialectics validated and understand that an excess opposite to that of the repressive establishment was necessary before a cultural synthesis could arise.