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EXTASIA, FANTASIA AND ILLUMINATI
23. Maud Gonne used hashish for meditation, astral travel and
telepathy experiments with W.B. Yeats.
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SATURNALIA OF THE SENSES
titles’.53 Nonetheless she absorbed some of their practices into her own
magical experiments in astral travel, Celtic second sight and, with
Yeats, telepathy. Gonne was an occasional user of various drugs, and
publicly endorsed Vin Mariani’s coca wine as part of her political
campaign: ‘Your coca wine, by fortifying my voice, will allow me to
make my country better-known.’54 She experimented with chloroform
and found that it could help ‘get her out of her body’, but she worried
about becoming addicted to it, and discovered that she could achieve
similar results simply by imagining and visualising its effects.
On occasion Gonne also used hashish, which had ‘convinced me of
the possibility of being able to leave the body and see people and things
at a distance, and to travel as quick as thought’.55 She found it effective
for controlled visualisation or self-hypnosis, and under its influence
meditated on the tattva, a Sanskrit term for element or essence that
provided a set of keys for travelling in the astral realms. The system had
been elaborated by the Theosophists into a series of ‘thought-forms’, and
was one of the techniques Yeats learned from Mathers for inducing clairvoyance: he made himself a set of cards for its five elements of earth (a
yellow square), air (a blue circle), fire (a red triangle), water (a silver
crescent) and spirit (an indigo egg).56 Gonne, on hashish, visualised an
indigo egg with a yellow square in the centre – her body surrounded by
its spirit – merging with a red triangle. She drifted in reverie through the
essences, symbols, shapes, elements and colours; as the material world
fell away, she created a gateway into the astral dimension. Here, elemental
spirits might be encountered; they were to be greeted respectfully and
with unwavering self-control. The following morning fresh ideas and
inspiration would arrive.
One night in Paris, after a large dose of hashish, ‘that strange Indian
drug’, she:
found my legs paralysed; I could not walk and my heart was beating
queerly, but my brain was clear . . . I managed to scribble on a
writing pad I had on the table beside my bed that I had taken
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EXTASIA, FANTASIA AND ILLUMINATI
haschish and that, if I did not wake, no-one was to be blamed, and
then I lay still and waited. I saw a tall shadow standing at the foot
of my bed and it said, or more exactly, the thought drifted through
my mind: ‘You can now go out of your body and go anywhere you
like but you must always keep the thought of your body as a thread
by which to return. If you lose that, you may not be able to return.’
57
She formed a wish to see her sister in Ireland, and was instantly transported there, but as she wandered around the dark and silent house it
morphed into an unfamiliar and disturbing place, and she remembered the injunction to return to her body; ‘then, with the sensation of
falling from a height, I was really lying in my bed, conscious of my
heart pounding queerly’.
58
Gonne’s distaste for the Golden Dawn grew after they held one of
their meetings in a Masonic hall, and she quizzed MacGregor Mathers
on the Order’s relationship to the Craft. He confirmed that some of
their passwords were shared with its higher grades, at which point she
resigned her membership on the grounds that ‘Free Masonry as we Irish
know it is a British institution and has always been used politically to
support the British Empire’.59 Gonne was a conspicuous example of the
New Woman, liberated and opinionated, yet her semi-public use of
drugs was exceptional even in these circles. Independent women were
typically portrayed in popular culture as unstable and prone to hysteria,
madness and suicide, and most were careful to project an image of
wholesome health; in French art and literature in particular, portrayals
of young women alluringly corrupted by morphine, ether or cocaine
had evolved into a subgenre that merged with pornography. Gonne was
inured to public opprobrium, and she persisted as an uncompromising
campaigner for peace and Irish independence (and, after being jailed
several times, for the reform of women’s prisons) until her death in
1953 at the age of eighty-six.
Maud Gonne’s disapproval was a factor in Yeats’s estrangement from
Mathers and the Golden Dawn, from which he distanced himself after
223
SATURNALIA OF THE SENSES
1899. In 1897 he took hashish in Paris again with Arthur Symons, and
discussed Symons’s long-gestating book on the decadent movement in
literature, for which he had written some essays while working with
Yeats, Aubrey Beardsley, Havelock Ellis and others as editor of the
short-lived and controversial Savoy magazine. Yeats disliked the term
‘decadence’, with its overtones of contrivance for the jaded palate and,
after 1895, the taint of Oscar Wilde’s trial. He suggested ‘symbolism’,
a term more commonly applied to painting, but one that resonated
with the imaginal world from which Yeats’s poetry and magic both
drew. In his dramas, he used dance, drums and incantatory rhythmic
verse to create ‘the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which
is the one moment of creation’;60 he took hashish to create the same
ecstatic moment in his magical practice.
The Symbolist Movement in Literature, published in 1899 with a
dedication to Yeats, was Symons’s most enduring contribution to
literary criticism. It claimed symbolism both as a rediscovery of ancient
magic – ‘Symbolism began with the first words uttered by the first man,
as he named every living thing’ – and as a modern form of expression
for ‘an unseen reality apprehended by the consciousness’.61 Symons’s
symbolists, who included the hashishins Gautier, de Nerval, Baudelaire,
Verlaine and Rimbaud, occupied a new territory between artist and
magus, in which literature ‘becomes itself a kind of religion, with all the
duties and responsibilities of the sacred ritual’.
62
* * *
It was in this receptive milieu that the first of what would later be called
the major psychedelics arrived in Europe.63 On Good Friday of 1897,
while Yeats and Symons were in Paris, the art critic Havelock Ellis was
staying, as he often did, in Symons’s rooms at Fountain Court. Ellis,
alone on a religious holiday, ‘judged the occasion a fitting one for a
personal experiment’.64 He had recently read an account by the United
States’ leading neurologist, Silas Weir Mitchell, of his experience with
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EXTASIA, FANTASIA AND ILLUMINATI
peyote (also known as mescal), a Mexican cactus with vision-producing
properties, and had succeeded in ordering some dried samples from the
London pharmacists Potter & Clarke, best known for Potter’s Asthma
Remedy, a fumigant remedy made from powdered datura leaves. He
made a decoction from what he understood to be a full dose, three
dried cactus heads, and drank it slowly throughout the quiet afternoon.
Ellis was a physician by training as well as an aesthete, and his first
report on his peyote experiment was a medical account for The Lancet
that concentrated on its physiological effects. His subsequent, much
fuller essay for the progressive literary quarterly the Contemporary
Review, framed the novel psychedelic experience in terms closer to art
criticism. Its title, ‘A New Artificial Paradise’, placed it in Baudelaire’s
lineage (and, half a century later, Aldous Huxley would draw inspiration from Ellis’s aesthetic meditations for his seminal psychedelic essay
The Doors of Perception.)65 Ellis began with a careful ethnography of the
cactus’s indigenous use in tribal Mexico, noting that the Tarahumari
people treated it as a god and celebrated it with ‘a fantastic and picturesque dance’.66 He experienced it, however, as a procession of ‘what
might be called living arabesques’: ‘a saturnalia of the specific senses
and, above all, an orgy of vision’, in which he inhabited a world of
dazzling colours, shapes and textures:
The visions never resembled familiar objects; they were extremely
definite, but yet always novel; they were constantly approaching, yet
constantly eluding, the semblance of known things. I would see
thick glorious fields of jewels, solitary or clustered, sometimes bril-
liant and sparkling, sometimes with a rich dull glow. Then they
would spring up into flower-like shapes beneath my gaze, and then
seem to turn into gorgeous butterfly forms or endless folds of glis-
tening, iridescent, fibrous wings of wonderful insects . . .
67
Remembering that its indigenous adepts ‘keep a fire burning brightly
through their mescal rites’, he turned on the gas lighting. As the
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SATURNALIA OF THE SENSES
shadows flared, pulsed and took on a life of their own, Ellis was
‘reminded of the paintings of Claude Monet, and as I gazed at the
scene it occurred to me that mescal perhaps produces exactly the same
conditions of visual hyperaesthesia, or rather exhaustion, as may be
produced on the artist by the influence of prolonged visual attention’.
He drew extensively on his vast store of artistic references, comparing
the visions to ‘exquisite porcelain objects’, ‘the Maori style of architecture’ or the delicate effects ‘of lace carved in wood, which we associate
with the moucrabieh work of Cairo’.68 Recollecting the experience in
tranquillity, he decided that ‘if ever it should chance that the drinking
of mescal becomes a habit, the favourite poet of the mescal drinker will
certainly be Wordsworth’, who described perfectly ‘the halo of beauty
which it casts around the simplest and commonest things’. Indeed,
‘many of his most memorable poems and phrases cannot – one is
almost tempted to say – be appreciated in their full significance by one
who has never been under the influence of mescal’.
69
Ellis’s description of ‘visual hyperaesthesia’ was equally a hallmark of
the fin-de-siècle culture that surrounded him. It reached an apogee in
1895 with August and Louis Lumière’s screening of the first motion
pictures in Paris, but cinema was only the latest iteration of an obsession with optical patterns and illusions that had built throughout the
century. Since the 1820s, cheap devices such as the thaumotrope – a
disc with images on both sides that seemed to merge as it spun – had
been a popular catchpenny in markets and fairgrounds; the zoetrope, a
mechanised version of the same illusion that transformed a sequence of
images on its rotating drum into a moving loop, was conceived in the
1830s and mass produced as a device for home entertainment in 1866.
The stereoscope, invented in 1838 by the British physicist Charles
Wheatstone as a tool for laboratory research, was rapidly absorbed into
mass entertainment: after Queen Victoria admired one at the Great
Exhibition of 1851, stereo viewing devices sold in their hundreds of
thousands, creating a vast popular market for images from astronomy
to pornography.
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EXTASIA, FANTASIA AND ILLUMINATI
From the beginning, these devices had been both scientific instruments
and popular entertainments. Thaumatropes and zoetropes were marketed
as ‘philosophical toys’, devices that simultaneously delighted the eye and
boggled the brain, and in the era that followed Johann Purkinje’s exploration of entoptic images they were regularly co-opted into the laboratory
experiments of perceptual psychologists. All, in different ways, showed
that moving images with no objective existence in the external world could
be created in the mind. In 1824 Peter Mark Roget, of Thesaurus fame,
who in his youth had participated in Humphry Davy’s nitrous oxide trials,
demonstrated by experiment the principle of ‘persistence of vision’ that
underlay them. Charles Wheatstone used the stereoscope to demonstrate
that the 3-D image it constructed had no real existence, but was fashioned
by the brain from the differential between two flat photographs. David
Brewster, the inventor of the kaleidoscope, saw it as an instrument for
producing symmetry and beauty on a scale no human could match:
There are few machines, indeed, which rise higher above the opera-
tions of human skill. It will create in an hour, what a thousand
artists could not invent in the course of a year; and while it works
with such unexampled rapidity, it works also with a corresponding
beauty and precision.
70
Baudelaire had described the flâneur or dandy, taking in the evershifting configurations of modern city life, as ‘a kaleidoscope gifted
with consciousness’, simultaneously observing and creating ‘the multiplicity of life itself and the flickering grace of all its elements’.71 Under
the influence of peyote, the human mind became a machine that generated illusions of equally prodigious rapidity and beauty, but drawn
from a source deeper and more mysterious than the signals that shuttled between eye, optic nerve and brain.
Ellis was inspired to take peyote again, and was particularly eager to
explore how its visions interacted with different forms of art. On this
occasion he asked a friend to play the piano for him:
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SATURNALIA OF THE SENSES
The music stimulated the visions and added greatly to my enjoyment of them . . . This was particularly the case with Schumann’s
music, for example with his Waldscenen and Kinderscenen; thus
‘The Prophet Bird’ called up vividly a sense of atmosphere and of
brilliant feathery bird-like forms passing to and fro; ‘A Flower Piece’
provoked constant and persistent images of vegetation; while
‘Scheherezade’ produced an effect of floating white raiment, covered
by glittering spangles and jewels.
72
‘Coloured hearing’ had been described in classical Greece and studied
by German psychologists since the early nineteenth century; but
the scientific term ‘synaesthesia’ was freshly minted, by the American
psychologist Mary Whiton Calkins in 1893. At the moment of
Ellis’s experiment, the phenomenon was of intense interest to scientists, artists and occultists alike. The first systematic survey of letter–
colour associations had been undertaken by the German psychologist
Gustav Fechner in 1876; Eugen Bleuler, who would later introduce
the term ‘schizophrenia’ into psychiatry, labelled colours triggered
by music as ‘sound photisms’, and the Swiss psychiatrist Théodore
Flournoy had recently produced the first detailed case histories of
synaesthetes and the meanings they assigned to their sensory peculiarities, or talents.
Thanks to Charles Baudelaire’s famous account, it was already
recognised that hashish could prompt episodes of synaesthesia, and
that these were associated with ecstatic states and creative inspiration.
Arthur Symons echoed Baudelaire with his description of the drug as
‘a magician who turns sounds into colours and colours into sounds’,73
and in 1899 he evoked the rapturous state of sensory overload in his
poem ‘The Opium Eater’:
I am engulfed, and drown deliciously
Soft music like a perfume, and sweet light
Golden with audible odours exquisite . . .
228
74
EXTASIA, FANTASIA AND ILLUMINATI
Synaesthesia was taken as evidence, both scientific and artistic, that
hashish – and now peyote – had the power to create sensory experiences
that were unattainable in normal life to all but the exceptional few. As
to its cause, psychologists offered competing theories. Some believed it
arose from early childhood associations, others from abnormal brain
structures, others still from a hereditary reversion to the evolutionary
stage where animals had only a single sense organ.75 This last suggestion
was seized on by Max Nordau, the social critic whose book Degeneration
(1892) positioned him as the leading scourge of aestheticism and decadent fin-de-siècle culture, who denounced synaesthesia as ‘evidence
of diseased and debilitated brain activity’. Raising it to ‘the rank of a
principle of art’, he wrote, was ‘to designate as progress the return from
the consciousness of man to that of an oyster’.
76
Occultists and spiritualists saw synaesthesia as evidence not of
degeneration but of a higher form of consciousness, perhaps even the
arrival of a new stage in human evolution. The ‘thought-forms’ of the
Theosophists had colours that attuned their shapes with particular
spiritual values: a book on the subject written by Annie Besant and
Charles Leadbeater in 1901 systematised the colour meanings of
musical notes and aligned them with the coloured shapes of the tattva
essences. Artists, notably Wassily Kandinsky, believed colours had spiritual resonances and took inspiration from the brightly coloured
abstractions of Theosophy’s thought-forms. The composer and pianist
Alexander Scriabin went as far as inventing the clavier à lumières, a
coloured keyboard that mapped tones to notes, based on pairings in
Madame Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine, which allowed visions to be transposed into music.
As well as musicians and artists, Ellis was naturally interested in
Yeats and Symons’s responses to peyote, and both joined him for
sessions at Fountain Court, which he reported in lightly anonymised
form. Yeats – a poet ‘much interested in mystical matters, an excellent
subject for visions’ – found the cactus physically exhausting: ‘he much
prefers hasheesh’. Symons, however, was enraptured: ‘I have never seen
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SATURNALIA OF THE SENSES
such a succession of absolutely pictorial visions with such precision.’
When he played the piano with eyes closed, he ‘got waves and lines of
pure colour’, but the most memorable moment came when he took a
stroll down to the river Thames: ‘Late in the evening I went out on the
Embankment, and was absolutely fascinated by an advertisement of
“Bovril”, which went and came in letters of light on the other side of
the river; I cannot tell you the intense pleasure this moving light gave
me, and how dazzling it seemed to me.’
77
In March 1897 Yeats passed on a sample of the new ‘dream drug’ to
Maud Gonne.78 In June the same year, the Leipzig chemist Arthur
Heffter began a series of self-experiments with peyote that concluded
in November with the isolation of the alkaloid that produced the
visions. Heffter christened it mescaline.79 In 1898 Yeats and Gonne, in
London and Ireland respectively, used ‘mescalin’ and hashish to attempt
a telepathic spiritual union.80 Neither recorded the result.
* * *
By the century’s end, the extasias and fantasias of hashish had become
a staple of literary and popular culture. In December 1905 The Strand
Magazine carried an essay titled ‘Hashish Hallucinations’, a lengthy
digest of the experiences described by Théophile Gautier, Bayard
Taylor and others, accompanied by the other-worldly illustrations of
Sidney Sime. By this time opium, morphine and cocaine, under the
newly minted portmanteau label of ‘drugs’, were firmly established as
a social problem, but cannabis was not yet subsumed into this category.
The essay relayed its hashish anecdotes without moral censure, with
Sime’s images locating them in a hallucinatory, proto-surrealist dreamscape. By now The Strand ’s biggest star, Sherlock Holmes, had a
hashish-inspired rival: Prince Zaleski, a detective created by the popular
author of fantastic novels and serials M.P. Shiel. Where Holmes entertained himself with his hypodermic needle and 7 per cent solution in
his Baker Street rooms, Zaleski’s apartment resembled an ancient
230