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Файл:Ординатура / Хирургия / Библиотека им академика М.И. Перельмана / Книга_5227_Библиотеки_им_академика_М_И_Перельмана.pdf
TWICE-BORN
satyrs and maenads, it seems, ritually ate a spotted toadstool called
‘fly-cap’ (Amanita muscaria), which gave them enormous muscular
strength, erotic power, delirious visions, and the gift of prophecy.
Partakers in the Eleusinian, Orphic and other mysteries may also
have known the Panaeolus papilionaceus, a small dung-mushroom
used still by Portuguese witches, and similar in effect to mescalin.
35
Graves identified mushroom motifs in Greek and Etruscan art, and
determined that Dionysus ‘may once have been the Mushroom god’.36
The Athenian festival of Scirophoria, in which a skira or sunshade was
carried in the procession, was, he determined, an emblem of the sacred
mushroom. The colourful and familiar fly agaric mushroom, he theorised, had been the active ingredient and ‘source of prophetic illumination
at Eleusis’, the ancient Greek mystery rite.37 Drawing on Siberian accounts
of fly agaric mushroom use in shamanism and Nahua (Aztec) records of
mushroom use, Graves argued that mushroom use constituted an ancient
body of wisdom concealed by priestly elites and later suppressed by
Christianity. His theories, often based on poetic associations, acrostics
and etymological resemblances, were largely rejected by his fellow classicists but they shaped the psychedelic journeys of the new generation,
connecting the experience not just to cutting-edge chemistry and neuroscience but to the mystery religions of deep antiquity.
* * *
The origin story of psychedelics has long since passed into legend. On
19 April 1943, Albert Hofmann, working in the Sandoz laboratories in
Basel, took what he imagined would be a tiny dose of LSD-25, a
compound he had synthesised from the ergot fungus five years previously but not sampled at the time. What happened next, as Hofmann
bicycled towards his home on the outskirts of the city, has been
endlessly replayed and reimagined in psychedelic histories, comic strips
and animations, not to mention printed onto blotter squares of LSD
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itself: the mountain road beneath Hofmann’s bicycle tyres warping
into a rushing river of rainbow colours, with the surrounding houses
and countryside erupting in multi-coloured fireworks, waterfalls and
kaleidoscopic spirals. All this is based on the account that Hofmann
wrote in his memoir published in 1979, decades after the event, once
the tropes of psychedelia were well established. But in his original notes
of 1943, submitted three days later to his director of research at Sandoz,
Arthur Stoll, the effects are described quite differently. There is no
mention of kaleidoscopes and fountains, simply a barrage of distressing
psychotic symptoms:
dizziness, visual disturbance, the faces of those present seemed
vividly coloured and grimacing, powerful motor disturbances,
alternating with paralysis; my head, body and limbs all felt heavy, as
if filled with metal; cramp in the calves, hands cold and without
sensation; a metallic taste on the tongue, dry and constricted throat;
a feeling of suffocation; confusion alternating with clear recognition of my situation, in which I felt outside myself as a neutral
observer as I half-crazily cried or muttered indistinctly.
38
Hofmann concluded his report to Stoll by describing the experience as
comparable to a massive overdose of amphetamines, and speculating
that LSD was an unprecedentedly potent drug of this class. In 1962,
twenty years later, the story he recounted to the medical journalist
Margaret Krieg had become a set-piece anecdote that ‘had been
recounted many times’; but it was still recognisably the version of 1943:
I was overcome by the fear that I was going out of my mind, and
the worst part of it was, I was clearly aware of my condition; my
powers of observation were not impaired. Space and time became
more disorganised, but I was not capable of any act of will. I could
do nothing to prevent the breakdown of the world around me. At
home, the physician was called. I had a feeling as if I were out of my
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body. I thought that I had died . . . I even saw my dead body lying
on the sofa.
39
By the time of Hofmann’s memoir LSD, My Problem Child (1979),
however, the psychedelic era was in full swing, and the nightmarish
episode of psychosis had assumed the form in which it will be forever
remembered:
Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images burst in upon me, alternating, varie-
gated, opening and closing themselves in circles and spirals,
exploding in coloured fountains, rearranging and hybridising them-
selves in constant flux . . . Every sound generated a vividly changing
image, with its own particular form and colour.
40
The other canonical text of the psychedelic movement, from which
the term was born, was a quite different case. Aldous Huxley’s bestselling essay, The Doors of Perception (1954), narrated his first experi-
ment with mescaline, but incorporated ideas that Huxley had already
conceived well in advance of the bright May morning in 1953 when he
swallowed his famous 400mg of mescaline crystals dissolved in water.
Much of the material that he presented as psychedelic epiphany had
already appeared in his anthology The Perennial Philosophy (1946),
which drew together spiritual texts from Christian and Islamic mysticism, and Eastern traditions from the Tao to the Vedanta, aiming to
distil their ‘Highest Common Factor’ into a universal truth. His bestremembered insight into the psychedelic experience, the ‘Bergsonian
model’ of consciousness that conceived the brain as a reducing valve
that limits our everyday experience of reality, had already been set out in
his introductory letter to Humphry Osmond suggesting the mescaline
experiment.
41
What changed for Huxley was not his interest in mystical experience,
which was long established, but his belief that drugs might be a path to
it. His conversion was sudden. Well into the 1950s he maintained the
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view of drugs dramatised in Brave New World, that they were dehuman-
ising tools of capitalism and its homogeneous mass culture. In his novels
and essays of the early 1950s he wrote extensively about drugs as agents
of brainwashing and Pavlovian conditioning, predicting that ‘the propagandists of the future will probably be chemists and physiologists’.42 In
the epilogue to The Devils of Loudun (1952), the book that preceded The
Doors of Perception, he lamented that ‘millions upon millions of civilised
men and women continue to pay their devotions, not to the liberating
and transfiguring Spirit, but to alcohol, to hashish, to opium and its
derivatives, to the barbiturates, and the other synthetic additions to the
age-old catalogue’.43 Self-transcendence with drugs was, he had argued
then, an illusion:
What seems a liberation is in fact an enslavement . . . For the drugtaker, the moment of spiritual awareness (if it comes at all) gives
place very soon to subhuman stupor, frenzy or hallucination,
followed by dismal hangovers and, in the long run, by a permanent
and fatal impairment of bodily health and mental power . . . This is
a descending road and most of those who take it will come to a state
of degradation.
44
Huxley’s mescaline experience was irreconcilable with the pejorative
notion of ‘drugs’, just as Graves would reject the term as a description
of psilocybin. It was not a drug, he concluded, but rather ‘what Catholic
theologians call a “gratuitous grace”’, not necessary to salvation but, if
made available, to be accepted thankfully.45 In correspondence with
Osmond after the event, the pair decided a new word was needed to
rescue mescaline and LSD both from the tainted category of ‘drugs’
and from the clinical terms recently adopted by psychiatrists, ‘hallucinogen’ and ‘psychotomimetic’, that linked their effects to the symptoms of schizophrenia. Osmond proposed ‘psychedelic’, meaning
‘mind-manifesting’, a framing that privileged positive associations such
as mystical insight, mental well-being and spiritual growth. Huxley
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concurred, though he believed the correct spelling should be
‘psychodelic’, with which he persisted to little avail.
46
By this time LSD and mescaline were being widely used in psy chiatry and, since their singular effects on consciousness could only
be captured by trained human observers, they led to a revival of selfexperiment. Mescaline and LSD were quickly joined by new psychedelic compounds, each described in breathless first-person reports
by their discoverers. Their style harked back to the scientific selfexperimenters of the nineteenth century, and the similarity was more
than coincidental. Aldous Huxley drew on this literature, particularly
the descriptions of peyote by Havelock Ellis, whom he cited on the
first page of The Doors of Perception. He interrogated his experience
through art-historical comparisons just as Ellis had done, and on occasion alighted on the same touchstones. The poetry of William
Wordsworth, for instance, who Ellis predicted would be ‘the favourite
poet of the mescal-drinker’,47 was for Huxley ‘a new direct insight into
the very Nature of Things’.
48
Ten years previously, Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy had been
reviewed by literary critics as an example, in Humphry Osmond’s paraphrase, of the ‘unfortunate mystical trends in his later years’.49 By the
mid-1950s, and with the sheen of modern science that mescaline lent
them, these ideas were in tune with the new zeitgeist. The reaction
against the behaviourist paradigm was now a broad church. The
Freudian renegade Wilhelm Reich located neurosis in the strictures of
a rigid mass society and proposed a sexual revolution as the remedy.
Herbert Marcuse’s critique of the ‘one-dimensional man’ created by the
‘affluent society’ of consumerism fed a desire for authentic personal
experience that transcended mass culture. Carl Jung’s theory of individuation proposed a lifetime of personal growth, spurred by dreams
and spiritual practice, through which the subject could carve out their
unique path to wholeness and fulfilment.
The rediscovery of introspection and mystical experiences revived
interest in the work of William James, particularly The Varieties of
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Religious Experience. This was central to the new ‘humanistic psychology’
of the US professor Abraham Maslow, who introduced many of the
concepts that would frame the new understanding of psychedelics: the
hierarchy of needs, self-actualisation and the ‘peak experience’. Maslow
found mid-century psychology mechanistic and reductive, and
distrusted its claim to be objective and value-free, operating as it did as
the tool of a regimented and authoritarian society. Alongside William
James, he drew inspiration from an eclectic range of teachers that
included the Freudian Alfred Adler, the anthropologist Ruth Benedict
and the founder of Gestalt psychology Max Wertheimer. Beginning
with ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’ (1943), his work moved beyond
psychiatry’s traditional focus on the sick mind to establish the bases for
mental health, happiness and fulfilment.
In Maslow’s definition, the human was ‘a permanently wanting
animal’, who was ‘most often partially satisfied and partially unsatisfied’, with ‘increasing percentages of non-satisfaction as we go up the
hierarchy’ from basic needs such as food and shelter towards creative
and spiritual fulfilment.50 For a post-war generation whose material
requirements were substantially met, the most pressing needs were
social satisfactions such as self-esteem and the respect of others and, at
the top of the hierarchy, ‘self-actualisation’, in which the individual has
fulfilled their potential on every level. The summit of self-actualisation
was the ‘peak experience’, an ecstatic moment in which the individual
achieves total self-awareness and harmony with their surroundings.
This was a state that transcended social structures: it was democratic
and ecumenical, with no religious belief required.
Maslow’s major book of the 1960s, Religions, Values and Peak
Experiences (1964), grafted the psychedelic experience onto his existing
theories just as Robert Graves’s new edition of The White Goddess had
done. Building on the ideas of Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts, he
claimed Huxley’s psychedelic ‘self-transcendence’ as a paradigm for the
‘peak experience’, which in turn became a paradigm through which
psychedelic enthusiasts articulated their experiences. Psychedelics
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Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
generated peak experiences; peak experiences helped people to selfactualise, and self-actualisation made peak experiences more attainable.
Maslow never took psychedelics himself on account of a heart condition, but also because he felt there was no need: he had read William
James, and had ‘been there’ already.
51
By the time that The Doors of Perception became a bestseller, Sandoz
Pharmaceuticals had made LSD available to psychiatrists. Their
internal trials of the drug had left them unsure of what diagnoses it
should be indicated for, and in what doses; their solution was to offer
it free to psychiatrists on an experimental basis, in return for their
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clinical recommendations. Among those who took up Sandoz’s offer
was the Los Angeles psychotherapist Oscar Janiger, whose celebrity
clients publicised LSD to their mass audience. In 1959, before Timothy
Leary had taken his first mushroom trip, Cary Grant stood on the set
of his film-in-progress Operation Petticoat and announced to the press
– and to the horror of his studio publicists – that LSD therapy with
Dr Janiger had changed his life:
It was absolute release . . . We come into this world with nothing
on our tape. We are computers, after all. The content of that tape is
supplied by our mothers, mainly because our fathers are off hunting
or shooting or working. Now the mother can teach only what she
knows, and many of these patterns of behaviour are not good, but
they’re still passed on to the child. I came to the conclusion that I
had to be reborn, to wipe clean the tape.
52
In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James had proposed
a distinction between two character types that led to ‘two different
conceptions of the universe of our experience’. One type he called the
‘once-born’: those who accept their lives as given and attempt to make
the best of them. For the other class, the ‘twice-born’, the task was
different: ‘peace cannot be reached by the simple addition of pluses
and elimination of minuses from life’. The twice-born needed to begin
afresh; they were those, in James’s scheme, who experienced sudden
religious conversion or transformative existential insights along the
lines of Cary Grant’s. Although James referred to the once-born as
‘healthy-minded’ and the twice-born as ‘sick souls’, the thrust of his
distinction was to undercut moral judgement: one mindset, as he
insisted, cannot be criticised from the standpoint of the other. He also
suggested that the once-born mind, healthy as it may be, is inclined to
smug and dull conservatism, while the twice-born seeks adventure and
transformation.53 Psychedelics were agents of radical change for the
twice-born, and of peak experience for all.
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* * *
During the watershed years of the early 1960s, the stigma attached to
madness and abnormal mental states was challenged on multiple levels.
The blows landed with stunning rapidity. In 1961 the sociologist
Erving Goffman published Asylums, a study of one of the vast mental
hospitals that had mushroomed during the post-war years, exposing
them as machines for ‘institutionalisation’ that eroded their patients’
life skills and identities. The same year The Myth of Mental Illness, by
the New York psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, dismissed psychiatry as a
modern priestcraft that pronounced diagnoses of mental illness much
as the churches had once persecuted heretics or witches. Michel
Foucault’s monumental Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, first
published in 1961 and later translated into English in abridged form as
Madness and Civilization, argued that the Age of Reason had forged a
version of modernity in which the voices of the mad – previously a
polyphony of nonsense, allegory, wit and wisdom – could no longer be
understood, only pathologised and punished. In 1960 the Scottish
psychiatrist R.D. Laing published The Divided Self, his radical
rethinking of schizophrenia that aimed to rescue it from psychiatry
and understand it as a crisis with the potential to heal a mind tormented
by insoluble problems. Laing in particular would steer a course that
intersected with the drug culture of the 1960s, giving LSD to his
patients and claiming it as a tool of mental liberation that broke down
the barriers between madness and sanity, to the benefit of both.
In 1962 One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the bestselling novel by the
young Ken Kesey, dramatised the insights of Goffman, Szasz, Foucault
and Laing for a mass readership, turning them into a parable of a
society that enforced conformity by crushing mental alterity. Kesey
based the institutional setting on his experiences in the Veterans’
Hospital at Menlo Park in Stanford, where he had volunteered for a
trial of psychedelic drugs including LSD, psilocybin and mescaline.54
The experiments were directed by a psychopharmacologist, Leo
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Hollister, who had become sceptical about the prevailing assumption
that psychedelics produced a ‘model psychosis’ that duplicated the
symptoms of mental illness. Hollister launched a study in which the
psychotic symptoms of mental hospital patients were compared with
drug-induced ‘psychoses’ in healthy volunteer subjects, the role for
which Kesey was recruited with a starting fee of $25 per trial session.
Hollister’s findings, published in 1962, exposed the psychotomimetic model of psychedelics to scrutiny from which it never recovered.
The central problem, he concluded, was the term ‘hallucination’,
which sounded like an accurate clinical term but in practice was used
to describe dozens of often unrelated phenomena. Hollister showed
that psychedelics rarely induced true hallucinations, let alone ‘mental
syndromes comparable to schizophrenic reactions’.55 Most typical
symptoms of schizophrenia such as ‘disorientation, paranoid ideation,
disturbed thinking, and auditory, gustatory, olfactory or tactile hallucinations’ were uncommon on psychedelics, particularly with healthy
subjects taking them in relaxed and benign environments.56 Patients
with diagnoses of schizophrenia were easily able to distinguish the
transient effects of LSD from their long-term condition.
The psychotomimetic model had driven clinical research into
psychedelics for a decade, and had been adopted by many of its early
advocates. Aldous Huxley opened The Doors of Perception with the
claim that mescaline’s effects ‘are similar to those which occur in that
most characteristic plague of the twentieth century, schizophrenia’;57
Robert Graves described his psilocybin trip as ‘a perfect schizophrenia’.58
But now the science was moving on. Emergency hospital wards were
seeing an increase in patients presenting with classic symptoms of
psychosis, such as voice-hearing and delusions of persecution, who
turned out to have taken large doses of amphetamines. The term
‘amphetamine psychosis’ was coined in 1958, and clinical research into
its biological basis shifted to the role of the dopamine system, which
underpinned the action of both amphetamines and the new antipsychotic medications. Psychedelics were no longer pathologised as a
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