Aldous Huxley was already a legendary figure in the literary sphere when he was introduced to the milieu of mind-bending drugs. Antonio Melechi takes a trip down memory lane to fling wide The Doors Of Perception and seek the pathway to Heaven and Hell.
In the evening of 5 May 1953, the tree-lined streets running off Sunset Boulevard “trembled on the brink of the supernatural” and the houses in the hills of nearby Hollywood “gleamed in the sunshine, like fragments of the New Jerusalem”. For Aldous Huxley, this was a last, dazzling glimpse of a vanishing Eden. Eight hours earlier, he had swallowed four-tenths of a gramme of mescaline, courtesy of Dr Humphry Osmond, the psychiatrist now riding in the back seat, and immersed himself in the quivering “is-ness” of his everyday surroundings. The downtown drive to the ‘World’s Largest Drug Store’ confirmed what Huxley had suspected: “transfiguration was proportional to distance. The nearer, the more divinely other.” But now, as his car pulled up to North Kings Road, even the nearest of objects had recovered the dull patina of familiarity. Huxley, the mystic manqué, had come back through the door in the wall.This was not what he had expected. The medical literature on mescaline described the restless “visions of many-coloured geometries”, “animated architecture”, “landscapes with heroic figures” which experimenters had seen with closed eyes. But Huxley, whose eyesight was extremely poor and capacity for vivid recall almost nil, was not to be transported into these visionary realms. “The great change,” that occurred to him under mescaline, “was in the realm of objective fact.” A vase of flowers appeared to glow and breathe. The books in his study seemed to be illuminated by a “living light”. A bamboo chair offered “new direct insight into the very Nature of Things.” And, most miraculously of all, the folds of his trousers hosted “the unfathomable mystery of pure being”.
Earlier that morning, Osmond had watched nervously as he poured the silvery-white crystals into water. Fearing that he might be remembered as the “the man who drove Aldous Huxley mad”, he decided to halve the dose, then changed his mind. After giving Huxley his mescaline at 11 o’ clock, Osmond, who had recently begun to use the hallucinogen in his research on the biochemistry of schizophrenia, monitored Huxley’s response to music, illustrations and various objects about him. Very soon, all his worries were allayed. Aside from one moment in the garden – when Huxley was briefly panicked “by a chair which looked like the Last Judgement” – he proved a perfect subject. “This is how one ought to see, how things really are,” he kept repeating to the tape recorder that quietly whirred by his side.
Peyote, the small, spineless, parsnip-shaped cactus (below) from which mescaline is derived, grows south of the Rio Grande, which divides southern Texas from northern Mexico. The remarkable properties of this ‘divine cactus’, deified as peyotl by the Aztecs, were first catalogued by the Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagun. “Those who eat or drink it,” Sahagun wrote in 1560, “see visions either frightful or laughable… it stimulates them and gives them sufficient spirit to fight and have neither fear, thirst, nor hunger… It causes those devouring it to foresee and predict; such, for instance, as whether the weather will continue; or to discern who has stolen from them”. Condemned as an agent of sorcery and superstition by the Catholic Church, the use of peyote was never successfully outlawed, and most of the surviving tribes of Mexican Indians continued to consult and seek protection from the magical plant.
Western science began to take an interest in the peyote cactus in the 1880s – the period in which the young Freud gave up on cocaine, another ‘magical substance’ from the New World – when the Ghost Dance religion took hold on the Comanche and Kiowa reservations. After James Mooney, an agent of the American Bureau of Ethnology, observed and participated in the newly-flourishing messianic rites, samples of peyote were sent to chemists who dryly confirmed that “the production of visions is the most interesting of the physiological effects” of the drug. The race to unpack its chemical constituents was led by German chemists. In 1888, the Berlin toxicologist Louis Lewin reported having isolated an alkaloid, Anhalonin, from the samples of dried peyote. As research into this new visionary substance intensified, his compatriot Arthur Hefter succeeded in isolating four alkaloids. Through self-experimentation he attributed the most potent effects to the alkaloid which he dubbed Mezcalin, and which American commentators re-christened mescaline (popularised as mescalin). A wave of medical and literary self-experimentation greeted the discovery. As Freud dabbled with free association, a preamble to the full-blown talking cure, peyote and mescaline set about ram-raiding the unconscious.
This little-known chapter in the history of psychopharmacology had two distinct phases. First, came the self-experiments of eminent physicians such as Weir Mitchell, whose breathless account of closed-eye visions (replete with silver stars, gothic architecture, precious stones and coloured fruit) culminated in predicting a “perilous reign of the mescal habit when this agent becomes available.” Inspired by Mitchell, the English psychologist and critic Havelock Ellis undertook the first of a number of experiments on Good Friday, 1897. The “orgy of vision” which unfolded before him was “not only an unforgettable delight, but an educational influence of no mean value.” Following the laboratory synthesis of mescaline in 1919, research accelerated and revealed a common core of visual phenomena – filigree, cobwebs, cogwheels, flowers, snowflakes – which all appeared to be generated by the eye’s sub-cortical system. To render these ‘indescribable’ visions, European researchers turned increasingly to professional artists. At London’s Maudsley hospital, for example, Julian Trevelyan was one of a number of painters who tried to capture the drug’s ‘mechanical ballet’. Like Ellis before him, Trevelyan also experienced something more. As doctors assailed him with ‘ridiculous questions’, Trevelyan found himself gripped by a secret rapture – he had “fallen in love with a sausage roll and a piece of crumpled newspaper from a pig-bucket”.
Mescaline had by now embarked on its second, more diabolical career as an agent for producing a ‘model psychosis’. (The chemical search for drugs capable of mimicking madness harked back to the 1840s, when the French alienist Jacques Joseph Moreau took hashish in order to examine the nature of delirium from within.) Research conducted by Kurt Beringer at Heidelberg Psychiatric Clinic in the late 1920s underlined mescaline’s capacity to similarly stir delusions and hallucinations, paranoia and depersonalisation, especially when administered in higher dosage. One Italian psychiatrist was able to report these effects at first hand. During a profoundly paranoiac episode in his Milan apartment, GE Morselli watched helplessly as a Titian portrait became eerily animate. For the next two months, Morselli was haunted by this belligerent squatter.
It was while writing Brave New World (1932) that Huxley first became aware of mescaline. By this time, the drug’s popularity among European intellectuals was beginning to catch the attention of the medical press. “The use of this alkaloid,” warned the British Journal of Addiction in 1931 “has indeed become almost a cult by reason of its peculiar physiological effects”. The spectre of so-called ‘mescal addiction’ was, however, far-fetched. Twenty years on, when Osmond and his colleagues reminded the medical world that mescaline produced “every single major symptom of acute schizophrenia,” the drug was almost forgotten. As a long-time critic of “asinine psychiatry”, Huxley was intrigued to learn that mescaline was being used experimentally by Osmond and his co-workers at Saskatchewan Hospital. The short letter he sent to Osmond in April 1953, after reading about his attempts to unlock the causes and nature of schizophrenia, endorsed the approach but elided his real interests. Remembering what he had read about mescaline in Louis Lewin’s Phantastica, Huxley realised that the drug might also be used as a conduit to the other worlds described by William Law, Jacob Boehme and the perennial philosophers.
When the opportunity to experiment finally presented itself, Huxley was not disappointed. Witnessing “what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation – the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence,” he understood how words and concepts came to impede the ability to look at the world directly. The chemical door in the wall had, apparently, allowed him to flee the prison house of language, the tyranny of conceptual thinking.
The Doors of Perception (1954) took Huxley two months to complete. A first draft was passed on to his wife, Maria, who had been present throughout the experiment. It was at her suggestion that Aldous’s blue jeans (the folds of which had suggested “a labyrinth of endless complexity”) were swapped for a more respectable pair of grey flannels. To this amendment, Huxley added one of his own: he replaced the solution of mescaline sulphate with a more palatable ‘pill’. But these were trifling details. When it came to the more pressing question of the value of the visionary experience, drug-induced or otherwise, Huxley’s conclusion was emphatic:
All I am suggesting is that the mescalin experience is what the Catholic theologians call a ‘gratuitous grace,’ not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully, if made available. To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world… directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large – this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially the intellectual.
Published in February 1954, the ‘little book’ was an immediate bestseller. Hundreds of readers offered parallel experiences of childbirth, sleep deprivation, fasting and meditation. A number of reviewers, including Huxley’s friend Raymond Mortimer, penned their own broadsheet accounts of mescaline visions. Not surprisingly, few of Huxley’s critics picked up on the full range of ideas and observations that he had shoehorned into 20,000 words. The conviction that differences in human physique could explain variations in temperament was passed over. His notion of the mind as a “cerebral reducing valve” was largely ignored, as were his asides on the nature of the schizophrenic experience and the decline of visionary arts. Debate was instead centred on the spiritual register in which Huxley had enshrined his own experience of mescaline – from Meister Eckhart’s ‘Istigkeit’, to the ‘Being’ of Platonic philosophy and the ‘Void’ in Zen Buddhism – and the questionable value of drugs as aids to religious experience.
Most of Huxley’s detractors echoed what the novelist Thomas Mann, a one-time champion of Huxley, wrote about The Doors of Perception in a letter to Ida Herz – “an irresponsible book, which can only contribute to the stupefaction of the world and to its inability to meet the deadly questions of the time with intelligence.” RC Zaehner, an Oxford Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics, went one step further, volunteering to take mescaline in order to undermine Huxley’s claims. Zaehner’s prejudices were confirmed: “self-transcendence of a sort did take place, but transcendence into a world of farcical meaninglessness. All things were one in the sense that they were all, at the height of my manic state, equally funny.”
In the meantime, Huxley resumed his investigations. In 1955, he took mescaline twice. On the first occasion he was in the company of his old friend Gerald Heard, a well-known pacifist, novelist and dilettante in psychical research, and Al Hubbard, the eccentric president of a Vancouver uranium corporation, who had been independently experimenting with mescaline and LSD as bridges to the spirit world. This group session introduced Huxley to the social aspect of the mescaline experience – he had previously felt cut off from Maria and Osmond, avoiding eye contact throughout – and provided him with a “transcendental experience within this world and with human references”.
While he attempted to convince Osmond that all future research should provide subjects with undirected time, so that they could make their own way towards the “Clear Light”, he also explored the artistic depiction of visionary worlds in his essay Heaven and Hell (1956). Huxley’s talent for the ‘curious fact’ and the ‘necessary digression’ was nowhere better deployed: the role of the collector in early science; the mystical writings of Traherne and Surin; the importance of precious stones in visionary art; the early development of landscape painting in China; the use of carbon dioxide and stroboscopic lamps as aids to visionary experience; the rise and fall of pyrotechny. The spell of Huxley’s meandering reflections was broken only on close inspection. The central trope of Heaven and Hell – that the borderlands of psychology are to modern day science what the flora and fauna of the New World were to the 19th-century naturalists – was particularly convoluted. This florid analogy stressed “the essential otherness of the mind’s far continents”, yet it altogether neglected the mysteries of so-called ‘everyday consciousness’.
Over the next seven or so years, Huxley continued to explore the potential use of psychedelics, adding LSD and psilocybin to his personal repertoire. Whether writing for Esquire, lecturing to the New York Academy of Science, or being interviewed for the BBC, he continued to press the therapeutic and educational benefits that might come of “a course of chemically triggered conversion experience or ecstasies”. As an advocate of the psychedelic experience, he retained all the rhetorical tricks he had deployed in his early satires. Addressing critics like Zaehner, who scorned his brand of ‘instant mysticism’, he argued that to revert to more primitive and prolonged methods was “as senseless as it would be for an aspiring cook to behave like Charles Lamb’s Chinaman, who burned down the house in order to roast a pig”. But there were limitations to his approach. Compared to the Belgian-born poet and painter Henri Michaux, who had begun a remarkable series of prose studies on mescaline and other hallucinogens, Huxley’s scatterbrained offerings were overloaded with reflection and interpretation. Whereas Michaux provided a poetic and forensically intimate account of his ‘co-habitation’ with mescaline and other drugs, Huxley – who never wrote while under the influence – delivered a metaphysical framework and programme. His preoccupations remained essentially utilitarian.
Was the Huxley who came back through the door opened by mescaline a different man? Had his outlook changed in any significant sense? Clearly, his passionate engagement with the question of chemical transcendence required no conversion or leap of faith. Before discovering mescaline he had explored most of the borderlands of psychology and was still searching for a via regis to mystical illumination. Yet his sense of intellectual office was clearly affected by his experiences. Having played the role of literary curator and custodian to a range of scientific oddities, Huxley emerged as a full-blown gentleman activist, prepared to address and ask questions of pharmacology, biochemistry, physiology, neurology, psychology and psychiatry. For all his wayward enthusiasm, Huxley was, and remains, a useful antidote to the confederacy of peer-reviewed science.
© Antonio Melechi (http://www.forteantimes.com/features/profiles/168/aldous_huxley.html)
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Víctor Ortuño Domínguez
vicordo@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press