A Divine Intoxicant

THE good Padre Bernardino de Sahagun in the year 1529, at the age of thirty, arrived in Mexico — or New Spain, as it was affectionately and officially called — to convert the harassed Aztecs to the gentle teachings of Saint Francis. The reverend father was a learned man and he left behind him when he died at the age of ninety-one valuable histories written in both the Spanish and the Aztec tongues. He gave in one of his histories a description of a curious feast of the Aztecs — the Feast of Teonanacatl.

The first thing eaten at the party was certain black mushrooms, which they called nanacatl, which intoxicate and cause visions to be seen, and even provoke sensuousness. These they ate before the break of day, and they also drank cacao (chocolate) before dawn. The mushrooms they ate with syrup (of maguey sap), and when they began to feel the effect they began to dance; some sang; others wept because they were already intoxicated by the mushrooms; and some did not wish to sing, but seated themselves in their rooms and remained there as though meditating. Some had visions that they were dying and shed tears; others imagined that some wild beast was devouring them; others that they were capturing prisoners in warfare; others that they were rich; others that they had many slaves; others that they had committed adultery and were to have their heads broken as a penalty; others that they had been guilty of a theft, for which they were to be executed; and many other visions were seen by them. After the intoxication of the mushrooms had passed off they conversed with one another about the visions which they had seen.

Botanists of modern times, finding the description of the sacred mushroom in the padre’s history, searched far and wide for it, and it was not until 1915 that the late W. E. Safford, a botanist of the United States Department of Agriculture, succeeded in identifying it with the mescal or peyote used by the American Indians of to-day. Mescal is derived from a rare cactus of the genus Lophophora, whose geographical distribution ranges from the southern border of Texas to Queretaro, Mexico; and the padre thus never laid eyes upon the cactus itself, but saw only the mushroom-shaped buttons cut from the top of the cactus and brought to the Aztecs by messengers consecrated to their task.

I

The peyote cactus (Lophophora williamsii or Lophophora lewinii) is a spineless cactus shaped like a carrot or turnip. The mescal button is the dried flowerlike top of the cactus. The drug mescal should not be confused with the Mexican drink of the same name; the American Indian, in searching for a name to apply to the drug, called it ’mescal’ because, like the Mexican drink, it intoxicated. The drug is known by a number of names, of which ‘mescal’ is the most common, though the designation ‘peyote’ is probably more accurate. The name ‘peyote’ is from the Aztec peyotl, which in the Nahuatl language means ‘cocoon.’ The Indians of the United States and Mexico who use it have different names for it. Among the Tarahumaris of Chihuahua it is known as hikori, among the Tepehuane of Durango as kamba, among the Kiowas as seni, among the Comanches as wokowi, and among the Mescalero Apaches as ho.

The peyote cult is widespread among the Indians and extends even to the tribes as far north as the Canadian border. To the Indians the cult is a distinctly religious one and the missionaries seem unable to break its hold upon them. The Bureau of Indian Affairs reports that ‘to the missionary the use of peyote is paganism arrayed against Christianity — the power of a drug against the elevating influence of the Cross.’ The early missionaries regarded the use of peyote as a sin comparable to cannibalism. Safford found the following questions in a religious manual published in 1760 for the use of the missionaries in their work with the Indians of San Antonio, Texas:

The Indians of to-day who practise the peyote cult have adopted, in the ceremonies connected with its use, many of the outward forms of Christianity. The following native account of the origin of the peyote cult, taken from Paul Radin’s study of the Winnebago Tribe, shows plainly the influences of the Christian myths: —

Once in the south, an Indian belonging to the tribe called Mescallero Apache was roaming in the country called Mexico, and went hunting in the high hills and got lost. For three days he went without water and without food. He was about to die of thirst, but he continued until he reached the foot of a certain hill, on top of which he could find shade under a tree that was growing there. There he desired to die. It was with the greatest difficulty that he reached the place, and when he got there he fell over on his back and lay thus, with his body stretched toward the south, his head pillowed against something. He extended his right arm to the west and his left arm to the east, and as he did this he felt something cool touch his hands. What is it?‘ be thought to himself. So he took the one that was close to his right hand and brought it to his mouth and ate it. There was water in it, although it also contained food. Then he took the one close to his left hand and brought it to his mouth and ate it. Then as he lay on the ground a holy spirit entered him and taking the spirit of the Indian carried it away to the regions above. There he saw a man who spoke to him. ‘I have caused you to go through all this suffering, for had I not done it, you would never have heard of the proper (religion). It was for that reason that I placed holiness in what you have eaten. My Father gave it to me and I was permitted to place it on the earth. . . . Earthmaker is my father. Long ago I sent this gospel across the ocean, but you did not know of it. ... I have placed my holiness in this that you eat.’ . . . Then he told him to go home. . . . On his return he built a peyote lodge and for four nights he taught the people how to eat peyote.

The cult cannot, however, compete with such emotional extravaganzas as the native Shakerism. Its present popularity seems to be due to the personal ambitions of natives who exploit it as a means of achieving success.

II

The use of the drug was first called to the attention of the public in 1891 by Mr. James Mooney of the United States Bureau of Ethnology, who had assisted in the mescal rites of the Kiowa Indians. Three years later Dr. D. W. Prentiss and Dr. F. P. Morgan were able to obtain a sufficient quantity of the drug to conduct experiments and were the first to observe its effects scientifically. Shortly after their experiments three men of marked ability — Weir Mitchell, William James, and Havelock Ellis — experimented with it on themselves and reported the results.

Weir Mitchell was the first of the three to experiment with the drug. About ‘noon on a busy morning’ Mitchell took one and one-half drachms of an extract ‘of which each drachm represented one mescal button.’ One hour later another drachm was taken, and at about four o’clock he took an additional half ounce. The experiment was highly successful. Gorgeous colors and wonderful shapes floated before his eyes. One vision impressed him deeply: ‘ An edge of a huge cliff seemed to project over a gulf of unseen depth. My viewless enchanter set on the brink a huge bird claw of stone. Above, from the stem or leg, hung a fragment of the same stuff. This began to unroll and float out to a distance which seemed to me to represent Time as well as immensity of Space. Here were miles of ripped purples, half transparent, and of ineffable beauty. Now and then soft golden clouds floated from these folds, or a great shimmer went over the whole of the rolling purples, and things, like green birds, fell from it, fluttering down into the gulf below. Next, I saw clusters of stones hanging in masses from the claw toes, as it seemed to me miles of them, down far below into the underworld of the black gulf. This was the most distinct of my visions.’ The visions closed with the beach at Newport, the waves ‘liquid splendors, huge and threatening, of wonderfully pure green, or red or deep purple, once only deep orange, and with no trace of foam. These water hills of color broke on the beach with myriads of lights of the same tint as the wave.’ The physiological experiences were not pleasant, and he wrote that the show was expensive. ‘The experience, however, was worth one such headache and indigestion, but was not worth a second.'

Mitchell was one of several medical men to whom the government had sent quantities of the drug for experimental purposes, and, after experimenting upon himself, he sent a supply to William James. James’s experience was an unhappy one and he recorded it in a letter to his brother Henry. ‘I had two days spoiled by a psychological experiment with mescal. . . . Weir Mitchell . . . sent me some to try. He had himself been “in fairyland.” It gives the most glorious visions of color — every object thought of appears in a jeweled splendor unknown to the natural world. It disturbs the stomach somewhat, but that, according to W. M., was a cheap price, etc. I took one bud but three days ago, was violently sick for twenty-four hours, and had no other symptom whatever except that and the Katzenjammer the following day. I will take the visions on trust!’

In the spring of 1897, Havelock Ellis was able to obtain a small sample of mescal, and on Good Friday of the same year he prepared a concoction of three buttons and drank it at intervals between 2.30 and 4.30 P. M. He was the first European investigator to test its vision-producing properties. The experiment was conducted in the quiet rooms in the Temple Ellis occupied when in London. His first symptom was a ‘consciousness of energy and intellectual power.’ Weir Mitchell had likewise experienced the same intellectual exhilaration, and had unsuccessfully experimented, during the course of the emotional state, with the writing of poetry.

Ellis’s visionary experiences, unlike those of William James, were eminently satisfactory. ‘Every color and tone conceivable to me,’ he wrote, ‘appeared at some time or another. . . . At first there was merely a vague play of light and shade which suggested pictures, but never made them. Then the pictures became more definite, but too confused and crowded to be described, beyond saying that they were of the same character as the images of the kaleidoscope, symmetrical groupings of spiked objects. Then, in the course of the evening, they became distinct, but still indescribable — mostly a vast field of golden jewels, studded with red and green stones, ever changing. This moment was, perhaps, the most delightful of the experience, for at the same time the air around me seemed to be flushed with vague perfume — producing with the visions a delicious effect and all discomfort had vanished, except a slight faintness and tremor of the hands, which, later on, made it almost impossible to guide a pen as I made notes of the experiment; it was, however, with an effort, always possible to write with a pencil.’

About 3.30 A. M. the effects of the phenomena diminished and he fell into a peaceful and dreamless sleep. He awoke at the usual hour with no unpleasant reminiscences. ‘Only my eyes,’ he wrote, ‘seemed unusually sensitive to color, especially to blue and violet. I can, indeed, say that ever since this experience I have been more aesthetically sensitive than I was before to the more delicate phenomena of light and shade.’

Some time later he again put himself under the influence of mescal to test the effect of music upon the visions. ‘The chief object of the tests was to ascertain how far a desire on the composer’s part to suggest definite imagery would affect my visions. In about half the cases there was no resemblance, in the other half there was a distinct resemblance, which was sometimes very remarkable. This was especially the case with Schumann’s music, for example, with his Waldszenen and Kinderszenen; thus “The Prophet Bird" called up vividly a sense of atmosphere and of brilliant feathery birdlike forms passing to and fro, “A Flower Piece" provoked constant and persistent images of vegetation, while “Scheherazade” produced an effect of floating white raiment, covered by glittering spangles and jewels. In every case my description was, of course, given before I knew the name of the piece.’

III

Since the experiments of the early investigators the properties of the drug have been further analyzed, and in the years 1926, 1927, and 1928 three monographs devoted exclusively to the subject appeared in three different countries. Le Peyotl, by Alexandre Rouhier, was the first to appear; Der Meskalinrausch, seine Geschichte und Erscheinungsweise, by Dr. Kurt Beringer, the second; and Mescal: the ’Divine’ Plant and Its Psychological Effects, by Dr. Heinrich Kliiver of Columbia University, the third. Dr. Klüver’s volume was published in London. While the work that has been done on the drug has resulted in the accumulation of a considerable amount of material with respect to certain of its properties, there remain fields of psychological inquiry that have not been touched upon, and it was with the view of testing certain of the lesser-known qualities of the drug that an experiment was conducted with the author of this paper as the subject, on March 24, 1929, in conjunction with one of the physicians of the Johns Hopkins Hospital.

About nine o’clock in the morning a dose of .3 gramme of the drug was injected intramuscularly. For a brief while there were no sensations; then began a slight nausea, which was relieved, save for a sensation of obstruction in the throat, by lying upon the back and breathing deeply. The pulse fell rapidly from seventy-two to sixty, accompanied, however, by no loss of bodily vigor, though for the greater part of the experiment I lay upon a couch in order to experience the full benefits of the drug. I was quite definitely aware, moreover, of an increase in intellectual force which seemed to disclose the fallacy of a philosophical argument of J. M. Keynes with which for the last day or two I had been concerned. This increase was, however, deceptive, as I learned the next day, for a reexamination of Keynes’s argument proved that its validity could not be impugned by the point suggested under the influence of mescal. Toward the cessation of the feeling of nausea, which lasted not longer than half an hour and which was accompanied by one or two spasms of the diaphragm but no vomiting, the visions began. Contrary to the experiences of other investigators, the appearance of the visions was not gradual, but began with the suddenness of an image projected by a stereopticon. Clearly, and at once, I saw a spiked cylindrical object of brilliant flashing colors suspended in a space of the deepest blue. The scene persisted for perhaps three minutes and then vision followed vision in indescribable and riotous profusion. For the most part the pictures were unrelated to experience and are impossible to describe, but occasionally, among the hundreds of images that appeared and changed and disappeared, there would occur some recognizable object: for a moment I saw a pearl of monstrous size and of the silkiest lustre suspended above two saw-toothed designs that moved back and forth across one another; I saw a room whose comers were nicely rounded, as were also the edges where the walls met floor and ceiling, and so startlingly immaculate was it that, had it not been composed entirely of multitudinously, deeply colored tiles set in constantly shifting patterns, I should have supposed it to be a room miraculously translated from one of the Utopias H. G. Wells has so often and hygienically imagined; again, great Renaissance picture tapestries of the finest detail and execution and marvelously rich with gold floated slowly upward, keeping time with distinctly audible music, which, I reasoned, came from a graphophone in a neighboring room, but which I learned later was only a product of my imagination.

But altogether, as I have mentioned, the pictures were, save for a few exceptions, indescribable. Nine tenths of the pictures were composed of geometrical forms which passed before the eyes in no uniform motion, but from left to right and right to left and up and down. At one time, for perhaps half an hour, there was a series of several hundred pictures of machinery, likewise in geometrical form and in violent motion, and at another time I saw hundreds of modem French paintings (influenced perhaps by a recent visit to a gallery devoted almost exclusively to such paintings) individually and in collections, but rich in color beyond the dreams of any painter. The visions seemed to approach a peak, accompanied also by a sensation of physical exhilaration or bodily intoxication, and at what appeared to be the maximum point there occurred the most satisfactory experience of the experiment from the standpoint of the loveliness of the visions. A delicious feeling of well-being and tonicity was suffused throughout the whole body. The picture that took shape was of incredible magnificence. I was looking into the depths of space — of a blue so vivid, so clear, that I seemed to see it for the first time, and to be conscious of it with an intense awareness equal perhaps to that of the mystics at the beginning of the Christian era who turned their eyes skyward and discovered, for the first time in the history of the race, the color blue, to which, apparently, all races had been insensitive, as if afflicted with a racial color blindness.

The overwhelming depth of the vision illustrated far more strikingly than would be possible by graphical representation the truthfulness of Spengler’s observation that blue is the color of expanse and distance and boundlessness. Scattered in clusters throughout this space of blue were galaxies of golden stars that were, like the stars of reality, not disks, but points; and intermingled with the stars large orange and yellow nebulæ moved in elliptic and circular orbits. The nebulæ and stars were not projected against space as against a curtain, but inhabited it and made the picture as three-dimensional as a cube. Indeed, a characteristic of all the visions into which spatial qualities entered was their strikingly three-dimensional properties. Suddenly, as I watched the scene, I yielded to a belief that by an effort I could peer into the centre of space, and the stars and nebulæ, instead of passing from left to right or right to left as the other pictures had done, streamed by me, on either side, in a welter of gold and orange and yellow. But only for a moment. The scene changed and I saw the blue sea. A beautiful white wave came from across the wide expanse of water, curving counter-clockwise, and as it approached the foreground it broke and dissolved into soft and bubbly colors. Thereafter the visions declined in intensity and were composed largely of novel geometrical forms. My eyes, I found, were painfully sensitive to light. The visions, moreover, vanished upon opening the eyes and were not visible even in a room from which all light was excluded. Pictures continued to form, though more faintly as the afternoon progressed, until I fell into a dreamless sleep about 7.30 P. M.

In the morning, before the visions had reached their peak, the attempt had been made, with surprising results, to test the influence of music. Three graphophone records of pieces with which I was not familiar were played and descriptions of the visions that were induced or occurred while the music was being played I dictated before the titles were divulged. Schumann’s ‘Quintet in E Flat Major’ was the first piece. Three distinct pictures formed: a pattern of flashing, gold inlaid, exquisitely decorated Turkish swords, golden stars in space, and two knights in full regalia with broad cloaks elaborately designed flung about their shoulders, charging each other upon great white horses. Rimski-Korsakov’s ‘The Sea and Sinbad’ followed: at the first strains of the music a picture of indescribable loveliness formed; sea gulls flew in sweeping flights over a blue sea against a sunset of gorgeous colors. The gulls seemed to be riding upon the wind, which I felt could almost be seen. The picture changed suddenly and I was looking into the depths of a tremendous whirlpool whose sides, of a deep blue, were flecked with particles of the brightest gold. As suddenly as this picture formed it was succeeded by a scene of tall waves proceeding evenly across the picture. The music closed, however, with a picture of lumps of sugar arranged in geometrical patterns. The last piece was the fourth movement of ‘Scheherazade, The Festival at Bagdad.’ Some time elapsed before any pictures formed, and then, indistinctly, there appeared the interior of a Gothic cathedral with a crimson throne high in the centre. This picture persisted for a moment, to be succeeded by a view of hundreds of women in Oriental costumes of no striking ornamentation spread in patterns over a brown hill and swaying gently to the music. This picture persisted throughout the course of the music.

IV

The intensity of the colors and the novelty of the visions seem to be the chief characteristics of mescal intoxication. Each picture is vividly colored and each color is as vivid almost as an arc light. Opening the eyes upon what would ordinarily appear as a colorful and lovely spring day, with the flowers in bloom and the green grass warm in the bright sunshine, discloses a world that is drab and dreary compared with the world seen with closed eyes. The visions, in the great majority of cases, were of unfamiliar scenes, over which little control could be exercised. I attempted, for example, to visualize a lake, and the picture that formed showed only the edge of a lake, on which a brown Indian sat in a brown canoe against a poisonously bright tropical jungle that appeared as if it might have been painted by Rousseau.

Whether the drug possesses any therapeutic value is not, at present, certain. Prolonged indulgence in it, however, is probably harmful, though this also is by no means certain. Among the Indians who use it habitually a shiftlessness of character and a lessening of resistance to disease have been observed by missionaries, and some cases of heart failure or hemorrhage while under its influence have been reported. Organizations of missionaries are actively engaged at the present time in securing the suppression of the drug, though whether they are motivated by a belief in the harmfulness of its physiological effects or by the fact that the Indians, so long as they continue to indulge in it, remain indifferent to the virtues of Christianity is not clear. At all events the Western States, under the exhortations of the missionaries and over the vehement protests of Indian leaders, are beginning to curb its use by legislation. The Paris press has also recently carried on a campaign to prohibit its use in France, where it has taken a strong foothold. Attempts have been made to suppress the drug as an intoxicant, and also under the Food and Drugs Act, but the courts have held that it is not an intoxicant, and as the Food and Drugs Act states that the term ‘drug’ ‘shall include all medicines and preparations recognized in the United States Pharmacopoeia or National Formulary’ its use cannot be regulated under that act, since the United States Pharmacopoeia and National Formulary do not recognize it.

The chief value of mescal seems to lie, however, in its use as an instrument for psychological and psychiatric investigation. The field of eidetic imagery in psychology and the psychiatric investigation of hallucinations may perhaps yield profitable results when studied in the light of the phenomena of mescal visions. Aside from the interest that may attach to the drug as a possible therapeutic agent, it also possesses an importance from the point of view of its educational effect upon those who have once or twice been under its influence. Havelock Ellis has remarked that to be admitted to the rites of mescal is ‘an educational influence of no mean value.’ Certainly sensitivity to color and the capacity for its enjoyment are increased. Only those who possess robustness of health seem to be able to derive any enjoyment or benefit from it, however, and in that, as Ellis has likewise pointed out, lies the safeguard against its widespread use. Even where robustness of health is present, the subsequent physiological effects are too costly to admit for the civilized man, if not for the savage, more than one or two experiences with the drug. But to experience its intoxicating qualities even once is to look ever afterward upon the external world with at least a keener appreciation of color.