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THE UNSEEN REGION
as he looked back on his psychical researches in 1909; ‘and I confess at
times I have been tempted to believe that the Creator has intended this
department of nature to be baffling, to prompt our curiosities and
hopes and suspicions in equal measure.’
61
James was more opposed to reductive and dogmatic science than
ever, but he now framed his approach to the unseen region differently.
Where the SPR were interested in their cases primarily as evidence for
the reality of another plane of existence, James argued for their reality
on their own terms. The stream of consciousness was a ‘blooming,
buzzing confusion’ of many different modes of thought and perception, where deep currents of mystical experience often mingled with
the surface froth of daily life.62 Whether we regard these experiences as
true or delusional, they impact our real lives: ‘work is actually done
upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men, and consequences in the way of conduct follow in the natural world’.
63
The anaesthetic revelation might generate claims that fly in the face
of science and logic, but that did not make them necessarily supernatural, nor necessarily profound. Pierre Janet had come to a similar
conclusion after his extensive hypnotic investigation of spirit mediums:
their prophecies and pronouncements, though sometimes remarkable
and baffling, were mostly perfunctory, predictable or banal. Yet James’s
own experience had taught him that extraordinary mental states could
not be assessed on the basis of the testimony that arose from them;
and, given the abundant evidence he had amassed for the transformative power of visions, he concluded: ‘I feel as if we had no philosophic
excuse for calling the unseen or mystical world unreal.’
64
Through James and many other sources, the model of mind and
reality sparked by the anaesthetic revelation flowed into the wider
stream of influences that redefined consciousness in the twentieth
century. The modernist art and culture of the generation to come, with
its fractured and unfamiliar perspectives, dedicated itself to breaking
through the veil of everyday reality to a world of pure experience. The
ether-induced mindscapes of Jean Lorrain, haunted by their masked
161
BEYOND THE VEIL
figures and doppelgängers, looked forward to the interior monologues
of Marcel Proust and James Joyce, the uncanny stream-of-consciousness narratives of Arthur Schnitzler and the impossible juxtapositions
of the surrealists. During the 1880s, artists such as Georges Seurat
began to experiment with divisionism and pointillism, shifting the
locus of vision from the external world to the eye and mind of the
beholder; Paul Cézanne and the Cubists gave visual expression to
James’s worldview, combining multiple perspectives of the same object
in a single canvas. The rigid boundaries of time and space were loosened by the new technologies of phonograph and cinema that froze
transient moments and perceptions into material objects. When Wassily
Kandinsky broke through into pure abstract art in 1910 – ‘painting the
soul’, as he conceived it65 – he drew inspiration from the unseen regions
he visualised through meditating on Theosophical thought-forms.
In science, too, the collapse of time and space experienced under
anaesthetics was extended from the subjective to the objective and
measur able world. William James proposed in his Principles of Psychology
that subjective time perception, unlike clock time, was elastic, reflecting
the frequency of mental events that were occurring: ‘awareness of change
is thus the condition on which our perception of time’s flow depends’.66
He connected this to the thinking of Henri Bergson, whom he regarded
as the great philosopher of direct experience, who argued that time
resides in the body as memories do in the brain, as a lived and unmeasurable dimension of consciousness, and the rigid increments of clock time
are at best a simplification of this reality. When Albert Einstein’s formulation of spacetime emerged in the 1900s, it presented an even more
profound collapse of objectivity: time was not a single and universal
measure but perspectival and plural, ultimately dependent on the relation between objects. In 1910 the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y
Gasset advanced the insights of Einstein and others to the conclusion
that ‘There is no absolute space because there is no absolute perspective
. . . the theory of Einstein is a marvellous proof of the harmonious multiplicity of all possible points of view.’67 In 1916 Einstein concluded that
162
THE UNSEEN REGION
‘every reference body has its own particular time’.68 As James insisted
after his revelation on nitrous oxide, no account of the universe can be
final without including the face that it presents to each unique observer.
A similar insight was transforming the social sciences. In 1888 the
anthropologist Franz Boas had been the first to use the term ‘culture’ in
the plural, to reflect that ‘civilisation is not something absolute, but that
it is relative, and that our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as
our civilisation goes’: beyond the European inheritance lie other cultures,
and forms of consciousness, entirely different.69 The same year, the
twenty-year-old W.E.B. Du Bois, the path-breaking civil rights activist
and Pan-Africanist of the generation to come, entered Harvard and
found his great teacher in William James, ‘my friend and guide to clear
thinking’, as he later wrote.70 Du Bois became the first Black student to
earn a Harvard PhD and, in 1895, in an article in the Atlantic Monthly,
he adapted the term ‘double consciousness’ to describe the situation of
Black Americans, obliged to navigate the world simultaneously through
their own perspective and that of the dominant white culture which set
its rules and parameters. ‘It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness,’ he wrote, ‘this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes
of others.’71 The path to Black identity in the modern world involved
reconciling ‘vast and partially contradictory streams of thought’72 into a
higher synthesis, that of ‘the sovereign human soul’.
73
* * *
The culmination of James’s journey was spelled out in his essay ‘A World
of Pure Experience’ (1904) and a final lecture series – to the largest ever
crowd for a philosophy lecture at Harvard – published in 1909 as a
book, A Pluralistic Universe. He described his philosophy as ‘radical
empiricism’, which he defined as ‘the opposite of rationalism’: instead of
privileging reason and abstraction, it insisted on direct experience and
the individual fact. Reality, in this scheme, was the sum total of all experience, whether material or unseen, and nothing more; it ‘must neither
163
BEYOND THE VEIL
admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced,
nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced’.74 It
rejected equally the strictures of logic and reason, the revealed truth of
religion and the Absolutes of Plato or Hegel. It was a mosaic in which
every piece could be fitted together to produce a coherent version of the
world, but the image they created was dependent on how they were
assembled and where the observer was situated. The word James coined
to denote the totality of the mosaic was the ‘multiverse’. It was a final
and decisive break with the laboratory psychology that attempted to
isolate the functions of the mind and find the basis of consciousness in
the physiology of the brain and nervous system. Consciousness and
indeed reality, James asserted, were ultimately snapshots of a process
that was constantly being shaped by their experiencing subject.
The last piece of writing that James published in his lifetime was a
short appreciation, entitled ‘A Pluralist Mystic’, of the figure who had
been instrumental in setting him along this path:
Now for years my own taste, literary as well as philosophic, has
been exquisitely titillated by a writer, the name of whom I think
must be unknown to the readers of his article; so I no longer
continue silent about the merits of BENJAMIN PAUL BLOOD.
75
Blood, James recalled, had released him from the unsatisfactory choice
of responding to mystics either by affirming their claims or rejecting
them. His anaesthetic revelation had been an Absolute, but one that
contained all the contradictions of identity and difference, mind and
matter, thesis and antithesis in its multiverse, all resolved in its ‘trumpet
blast of oracular mysticism’.76 Blood had often written of ‘the One’,
and sometimes identified it with God, but in his later writings he
shifted towards James’s view: he titled his own final book A Pluralist
Universe. There was only experience; as for the unseen region beyond
it, as Blood had written in a letter to James after his nitrous oxide
experiment of 1882, the ultimate truth is ‘we do not know! ’
164
77
PART III
SATURNALIA OF
THE SENSES
DRUGS AND THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION
165
17. A drawing under the influence of hashish by Jean-Martin Charcot as a
young medical student, c. 1850.
166
CHAPTER FIVE
TALES OF THE HASHISH
EATERS
n April 1892 the British trade journal Chemist and Druggist carried
a report of travels and adventures in Morocco from the manufac-
I
turing chemist and pharmacy magnate Silas Burroughs, co-founder
of the innovative and hugely successful Burroughs Wellcome &
Company. Burroughs had stopped in a Moorish café in Tangier for
coffee (and green peppermint tea for his guide) and decided to experiment with the cannabis that was also on offer. A boy cut up some
leaves from the Indian hemp plant and mixed them with tobacco, and
Burroughs took ‘a few whiffs’ from the long wooden pipe. Everything
‘grew bright’ around him, and he was ‘instantly carried off into the
seventh heaven of imaginary delight’. His description, narrated to the
Chemist and Druggist reporter, reads like a fantasia from the pages of
The Arabian Nights:
You are transported, like Aladdin, to the moonlit Alhambra, and
hear the music of its fountains and streams, or down the Red Sea
and beyond the pinnacles of Sinai to gaze at distant Mecca, and
then you are floated as if by an invisible balloon over the snowy
peaks of the Himalayas, to the evergreen foothills where sacred
streams burst from beneath marble temples and flow by the heathen
shrines.
Silas Burroughs was, on the face of it, an unlikely psychonaut. He
was a staunch Presbyterian and strict teetotaller, a fitness enthusiast and
1
167
SATURNALIA OF THE SENSES
energetic pioneer of the bicycle. He was also, however, a self-described
‘inveterate globetrotter’, a pioneer of recreational travel who, at the height
of his career success, absented himself from running Burroughs Wellcome
to spend months of every year in foreign parts, developing international
business opportunities while seeking out strange and exotic experiences.2
He found cannabis delightful: it makes you ‘feel so light’, he declared, ‘that
you could run up the jagged sides of the pyramids’.3 His experience fulfilled
the sensual and mysterious promise of Morocco’s souks, where pharmacists’ stalls were stocked from floor to ceiling with jars, bottles and drawers
of curious preparations, local herbs such as sarsaparilla and pennyroyal
jostling with amulets and charms against the evil eye and European patent
medicines such as effervescent liver salts. A staunch supporter of progressive social movements, unionised labour and tariff-free trade, Burroughs
was pleased to discover that the apothecary was among the few classes of
Moroccan businessman not obliged to pay tributes to the Sultan on
imported goods. ‘Perhaps,’ he speculated, it was because ‘he brings the
means of recovery to health to so many of the faithful.’
4
Cannabis was one of many medicines that was available in both the
bazaars of the Orient and the modern pharmacies of the West, yet
Burroughs’s account makes no claims for its medical potential. In
Europe and the United States a generation earlier, cannabis extracts
and tinctures had been hailed as one of the wonders of modern pharmacy. By the 1890s, however, the plant’s medical promise had faded: it
hung on as a minor ingredient in patent sedatives and was recommended by some doctors for muscle cramps. Commercial pharmacy
had moved on, and cannabis was ill-suited to the new market. Unlike
the coca leaf and the opium poppy, which had yielded the pure drugs
cocaine, morphine and codeine, it defied all attempts to reduce it to a
standardised chemical compound. It was typically supplied to pharmacists in the form of hashish, a concentrated plant extract imported
from Egypt or India that varied from batch to batch, making it unsuitable for ‘ethical’ or ‘scientific’ pharmaceuticals that listed their active
ingredients in precise doses.
168
TALES OF THE HASHISH EATERS
Silas Burroughs was at the forefront of the modern trends. During
the 1880s, Burroughs Wellcome had begun to develop ‘compressed
medicines’, replacing the pharmacists’ traditional jars of powders
weighed at the counter into paper wraps with coloured and distinctively branded pills produced by prototype tableting machines. In
1884, having found that the British had an aversion to the term ‘pills’,
Burroughs Wellcome trademarked the word ‘tabloid’ which, along
with other terms such as ‘elixoid’, they used to market the pure products that now dominated the brightly illuminated palaces of pharmacy.
These products included several powerful mind-altering drugs. Their
range of soluble-compressed hypodermic tabloids included pure preparations of morphine, along with strychnine and atropine; in 1885
they produced a ‘Voice Tabloid’ for public speaking, whose chief active
ingredient was cocaine, which boosted confidence as effectively as it
cleared the airways. In 1890 they launched ‘Forced March’, an energyboosting pill containing cocaine and caffeine that remained one of
their biggest sellers until it was taken off the shelves at the start of the
Great War.
Despite his public stance against intoxication – he would shortly
join the National Temperance League and sport its blue ribbon in his
button-hole – Burroughs was happy to relate his cannabis experience
to the Chemist and Druggist’s readers without any pretence to medical
research. He presented it, rather, as exotic ethnography. As he told the
reporter, he had not taken a dose of hashish – the medical preparation
familiar in Europe – but smoked a pipe of kif, a preparation of finely
chopped leaves and stalks. This method of smoking was long established in Morocco and the Maghreb, and had recently been taken up
in the cosmopolitan demi-mondes of some Western cities; but elsewhere, the drug was traditionally eaten. Hashish, the resinous concentrate made from the flowering heads of the cannabis plant across the
Arab world and the Indian subcontinent, was often mixed with fruit,
nuts, rosewater and syrup to counteract its bitterness, creating a sweet
confection known in Egypt as dawamesc and Morocco as majoun.
169
SATURNALIA OF THE SENSES
These oral preparations had long been consumed in doses that
produced powerful and unpredictable effects. Often their subjects would
remain prostrated for several hours, unable to move or speak, immersed
in visions and fantasies that succeeded each other too rapidly and chaotically to describe. Others would become maniacal, filled with irrepressible energy or gripped by obsessions and delusions incomprehensible to
those around them. In their spectrum, intensity and duration, these
effects were comparable to what we now call psychedelic drugs; and
when the major psychedelics made their debut in Western culture at the
end of the nineteenth century, it was in the milieu of hashish-eating
bohemians, aesthetes and occultists that they were most fully explored.
Silas Burroughs’s experience was one among hundreds of descriptions of cannabis (usually hashish) intoxication that echoed through
the literary and aesthetic world of the late nineteenth century. By this
time the plant had accrued a reputation as a portal to mysterious and
otherwise inaccessible dimensions of mind, and was being explored in
many circles: scientific, literary, musical, philosophical, spiritual,
occult. Like the anaesthetics, it expanded and heightened consciousness; but whereas nitrous oxide, ether and chloroform induced a
disembodied state of pure thought, the intoxication of hashish was
embodied and sensual. Its inner visions were represented through an
aesthetic of baroque adornment, often drawing on Oriental forms, and
in the visual languages of symbolism, synaesthesia and ceremonial
magic, whose practitioners turned its intoxication to astral travel and
the pursuit of heightened spiritual powers. While cocaine became
emblematic of heightened energy and performance, a panacea for the
strenuous demands of an intensified modern world, hashish became
the signifier of its opposite: voluptuous indolence, freewheeling imagination and cosmic detachment. This oceanic state of blissful emptiness
was seen as foreign to the Western mind, and was captured in the
Arabic term kif: the local Maghrebi term for Silas Burroughs’s smoking
mixture, but used more widely in an abstract sense to describe a state
of perfect, euphoric contentment.
170