Nullius
in Verba—Nothing on authority. In 1660, on the eve of its founding, The Royal
Society of London took this defiant Latin phrase as its motto. For the United
Kingdom’s main scientific body, it announced a new way of thinking that came to
dominate the scientific revolution: Classical and scholastic authority could
prove apocryphal. Only direct evidence, generated by experiment and
first-person observation, revealed scientific truth.
Evidence
was everything, and leading scientists of the era, including Isaac Newton and
Robert Boyle, developed a system for classifying it. Qualities such as size,
shape, or weight, which were directly measurable, were referred to as “primary”
evidence. Texture, taste, or feelings that described human sensations and
responses were considered “secondary.” While primary evidence was easier to
collect and test, sensation and perception were considered legitimate fields of
inquiry, and certain classes of data could only be demonstrated by
self-experiment.
In a
famous and graphic example, when Isaac Newton wished to establish whether a
change in the curvature of the eye would present a distorted image to the
perceiver, he took a large needle, or bodkin, and stuck it as far into his eye
as he could. He then described in detail the colored circles that appeared to
him. It was not possible to present direct evidence for these shapes, since
they only existed in Newton’s mind, yet his fellow philosophers were not
obliged simply to accept Newton’s word
for them. The experiment was described in such a way that any skeptic, if they
so wished, could try it out on themselves.
This was
also the case for drugs that acted on the mind. Like the circles in Newton’s
vision, the changes in thought, mood, sensation, or perception they produced
were secondary qualities, but this did not mean they were delusions. There was
no correct or perfect way to present them, yet they offered unique insights
into mental functioning. The language that offered itself most plausibly for
describing them was that of medicine, in which the physician could only report
the patient’s sensations and state of mind at second hand, but could add
judicious glosses and interpretations suggested by their professional learning
and experience of similar cases.
Robert
Hooke, curator of experiments at the Royal Society, provided some of the
earliest testimony, describing in detail the effects of the many drugs he used
for overlapping purposes: verifying medical claims, managing his pain and
moods, and “refreshing” himself during social and business meetings in the
coffee houses he frequented in the afternoons. Hooke documented impressions not
just of alcohol, chocolate, tea, coffee, and tobacco, but also of cannabis. On
Dec. 18, 1689, as part of a lecture he delivered at the Royal Society entitled
“An Account of the Plant, Call’d Bengue,” or cannabis, Hooke detailed his own
experience with the drug, in the third person:
“This
Powder being chewed and swallowed, or washed down, by a small Cup of Water,
doth, in a short Time, quite take away the Memory & Understanding; so that
the Patient understands not, nor remembereth any Thing that he seeth, heareth,
or doth, in that Extasie, but becomes, as it were, a mere Natural, being unable
to speak a Word of Sense; yet is he very merry, and laughs, and sings, and
speaks Words without any Coherence, not knowing what he saith or doth; yet is
he not giddy, or drunk, but walks and dances and sheweth many odd Tricks; after
a little Time he falls asleep, and sleepeth very soundly and quietly; and when
he wakes, he finds himself mightily refresh’d, and exceeding hungry …”
Such
perceptual and bodily experiences—of the kind elicited by doctors with the
question “how do you feel?”—were not able to produce the kind of replicable
results generated by vacuum pumps or thermometers. But in its place an informal
criterion of expertise emerged, dubbed by the historian of science Simon
Schaffer “the Cartesianism of the genteel”: the assumption that trained or
educated observers were capable of using their minds to assess the evidence of
their bodies—or, in the terms established by the philosophy of John Locke, of
separating the intellect from the passions. As in Hooke’s case, it became the
convention to relay such evidence in the third person or passive voice favored
by physicians, with the confessional first person confined to diaries and
private records.
As
pharmacology developed through the 18th century, this language of quasi-medical
reportage became firmly entrenched. Self-experiment with drugs was common
practice, for ethical as well as practical reasons: Physicians were obligated
to treat the sick according to the Hippocratic oath, doing no harm, and
experimenting on them was the mark of an unscrupulous quack.
Practicing
physicians were also aware that responses to drugs could vary widely between
individuals. The growth of physical observation and measurement revealed that
mind and body influenced each other in mysterious ways, and that even directly
experienced phenomena could be proven false. One famous example was the
committee set up in 1784 by the French Royal Academies of Science and Medicine,
under the aegis of Benjamin Franklin, to investigate Anton Mesmer’s theory of
animal magnetism or mesmerism. “There is no proof of the existence of the
Animal Magnetic fluid,” the committee’s report concluded. The lesson for
self-experimenters was that hypervigilance to one’s own sensations could
overinterpret the evidence of the body or generate symptoms based solely on
expectation.
For the
generation that followed, however, subjectivity was the new frontier of
scientific knowledge. The inward turn emerged from the philosophy of Immanuel
Kant, whose treatise of 1781, Critique of Pure Reason, made a primary
distinction between the “phenomenal” world—reality as revealed by sensation and
perception—and a “noumenal” world of ideas and categories, including God, that
existed prior to and independently of human experience. According to Kant’s
distinction, the world as received via the senses was not the accurate
reflection of an external reality but a construct, shaped by the human senses
and limited by the parameters of the human mind.
This
theory was strikingly corroborated in a series of drug experiments by the young
chemist Humphry Davy. In 1799, at the age of 20, Davy was hired as the chemical
assistant at the Medical Pneumatic Institution in Bristol, an experimental
project initiated by the pioneering physician Thomas Beddoes for synthesizing
and testing gasses in the treatment of lung conditions. One of the first
compounds Davy created in the laboratory was nitrous oxide, a recently discovered
gas that was believed to be highly toxic. Davy suspected this belief resulted
from a confusion with a related compound, nitric oxide, a red-brown gas that
was a powerful irritant. “I made a discovery yesterday which proves how
necessary it is to repeat experiments,” he wrote to his and Beddoes’s friend
Davies Giddy in April 1799; “The gaseous oxide of azote [nitrous oxide] is
perfectly respirable when pure.”
Excited
to have established a virgin field of inquiry, Davy and Beddoes heated ammonium
nitrate crystals in an alembic and collected the escaping gas in an air holder,
from which Davy inhaled through a breathing tube. As he filled his lungs, he
noticed an unexpected sensation, “a highly pleasurable thrilling in the chest
and extremities.” As he continued, “the objects around me became dazzling and
my hearing more acute,” and the sensations built toward a climax in which “the
sense of muscular power became greater, and at last an irresistible propensity
to action was indulged in.”
Beddoes
recorded that Davy leapt violently around the laboratory shouting for joy. For
his own part, Davy retained only vague recollections of these ecstatic moments,
and were it not for the scrawled notes he discovered the following morning, “I
should even have doubted their reality.”
Unlike
the speculative animal fluids of Mesmer, there was no doubt about the material
cause of this paroxysm of pleasure. Nitrous oxide—first isolated by Joseph
Priestley, who had named it “dephlogisticated nitrous air”—was a chemical
substance with a known synthesis, and the experiment could be replicated and
verified in any home laboratory. The effects of the gas, however, could only be
captured in first-person testimony.
Davy was
quick to elicit such testimony, and was perfectly placed to do so. The
Pneumatic Institution was a hub for Bristol’s freethinking writers,
philosophers, and physicians, and over the summer of 1799 dozens of them came
to visit and experience the gas which the poet Robert Southey, the first of his
friends to whom Davy had offered it, described as “the wonder-working air of
delight.” After his first dose, Southey wrote to his brother that “Davy has
actually invented a new pleasure for which language has no name.” Exploring it
further was an invitation and a challenge that the keenest minds of Bristol
were eager to accept.
As the
experiments progressed, Davy realized that a new “language of feeling,” as he
called it, was required to describe the effects of the gas. The standard
question of medical description, “How do you feel?,” was tested to its limits
by a torrent of sensations that encompassed dizziness, tingling, a sense of
mental exhilaration, and onrushing cosmic epiphany that rapidly dissolved into
incoherence and, frequently, hysterical laughter with no obvious cause. Davy
and Beddoes attempted a few trials on patients with lung diseases; one
responded to the question with, “I do not know, but very queer.” Another
responded, obliquely but suggestively, “I feel like the sound of a harp.”
During
the evenings they experimented further on healthy volunteer subjects. When Davy
set the chemical reaction bubbling and offered a new subject a green silk bag
of the gas, he often began by giving them a dose of ordinary air to rule out
any elements of suggestion or expectation. Once they had recovered from a
lungful of the real thing, he asked them to write a brief description of their
experience. As one of the volunteers, the surgeon Thomas Hammick, wrote after
his intoxication, “We must either invent new terms to express these new and
peculiar sensations, or attach new ideas to old ones, before we can communicate
intelligibly with one another on the operations of this extraordinary gas.”
Nitrous
oxide, for Davy and his circle, collapsed the distinction between the intellect
and the passions: It stimulated both, with equal intensity. It was a profoundly
embodied experience, susceptible to external measurements—for example, the
amount of gas that was inhaled, or had dissolved into the bloodstream—but not
reducible to them. It asked profound questions about the relation between mind
and body: How could inhaling an artificially created chemical affect not merely
the breathing and the pulse, but the emotions, the sense of wonder, and the
imagination?
Davy’s
ground-breaking report on the experiments, Researches Chemical and
Philosophical, Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide and its Respiration (1800),
yoked body and mind, intellect and passion together with a structure that
ascended from the chemical to the medical to the sublime. Its opening section
was a description of nitrous oxide’s chemistry and synthesis; the next was a
precise account of its physiological action, and it concluded with the subjective
reports of over 30 volunteer subjects. Davy’s own contribution, after absorbing
as much gas as humanly possible by enclosing himself in an airtight box filled
with it for an hour and a quarter, gave the language of feeling full rein:
“I heard every distinct sound in the room and
was perfectly aware of my situation. By degrees as the pleasurable sensations
increased, I lost all touch with external things; trains of vivid and visible
images rapidly passed through my mind and were connected with words in such a
manner, as to produce perceptions perfectly novel. I existed in a world of
newly connected and modified ideas. I theorised; I imagined I made discoveries
… As I recovered my former state of mind, I felt an inclination to communicate
the discoveries I had made during the experiment. I endeavoured to recall the
ideas, they were feeble and indistinct; one collection of terms, however,
presented itself … Nothing exists but thoughts! The universe is composed of
impressions, ideas, pleasure and pains!”
Davy’s
scientific ambition demanded that he push his experiments to the limit and
experience the effects of the drug at their most intense. This in turn required
a break with the impersonal conventions of medical reportage in favor of a
first-person testimony that fused the roles of observer and experimental
subject. He developed his “language of feeling” in parallel with that of the
young poets among his volunteers, Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
who were also seeking a novel and introspective language to capture feelings
and states of mind never previously described.
Davy
aspired to be a hero of science, comparing himself in his youthful notebooks to
Sir Isaac Newton, but his version of science took on the qualities of the
dawning Romantic age and of its most exalted quality, genius. In theory, there
was no role for genius in experimental science, since data was replicable and
detachable from individual personality; but self-experiment, in Davy’s hands,
had produced results inseparable from the dazzling mind of its subject.
Subjective visions could in theory be confirmed by other researchers; but Davy
represented a new breed of experimenter, both rigorous mechanic and inspired
genius, prepared to take scientific discovery to heroic limits.
Excerpted
from Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind, by Mike Jay. Yale
University Press, 2023.
The
19th-Century Trippers Who Probed the Mind. By Mike Jay. Nautilus, May 10, 2023.
Those
who sipped or sniffed ether and chloroform in the 19th century experienced a
range of effects from these repurposed anaesthetics, including preternatural
mental clarity, psychological hauntings, and slippages of space and time. Mike
Jay explores how the powerful solvents shaped the writings of Guy de Maupassant
and Jean Lorrain — psychonauts who opened the door to an invisible dimension of
mind and suffered Promethean consequences.
First
routinely employed as surgical anaesthetics in the 1840s, diethyl ether and
chloroform were no longer confined to operating theatres by the century’s
close. Now widely available in pharmacies, these powerful solvents were inhaled
as soothing vapours for chest and lung conditions, as an analgesic for aches
and pains, and as fast-acting tranquillisers for panic attacks and other
nervous conditions. Doctors and journalists commented disapprovingly on
chloroform’s “luxurious” use in tea rooms, and on the occasional public
sightings of groups of young women giggling and swooning under its influence.
At the same time it developed a sinister reputation, thanks to a handful of
sensational criminal cases such as that of Henry Howard Holmes, who used it in
the murders of an unknown number of people in Chicago during the World’s Fair
of 1893. By the late 1890s it was conjoined in yellow journalism and the
popular imagination with addiction, suicide, rape, and murder, and with the
enduring misconception that a chloroform-soaked rag held over a victim’s face
produces an instant loss of consciousness (in reality, this requires continued
deep breathing).
The
strands of medicine, consciousness expansion, intoxication, addiction, and
crime were tightly entangled in fin-de-siècle Paris, where ether and chloroform
circulated among bohemian demi-mondaines alongside morphine, opium, cocaine,
hashish, and wormwood-infused absinthe. These solvents were often carried in
small glass vials and medicine bottles by the asthmatic, tubercular, and
neurasthenic, added to patent tonics and syrups, and, on occasion, to
cocktails: an ether-soaked strawberry floating in champagne produced a heady
rush, the fruit preventing the volatile liquid from evaporating too quickly.
Literary references to ether abounded, either as a signifier of decadence or as
a literary prop to shift a realistic narrative into the landscape of dreams and
symbols, where its dissociative qualities became a portal to strange mental
states, psychological hauntings, uncanny doublings, and slippages of space and
time.
Ether
was the subject of Guy de Maupassant’s 1882 short story “Dreams”, in which a
group of jaded and neurasthenic diners lament the ennui that consumes their
days and the insomnia and bad dreams that ruin their nights. The doctor among
them assures them that “real dreaming”, which is “the sweetest experience in
the world”, is in the gift of modern medicine. His fellow diners assume he is
referring to opium or hashish, which they have already tried; one replies
wearily: “I have read Baudelaire, and I even tasted the famous drug, which made
me very sick.” But the doctor is speaking of ether, which he first tried to soothe
his neuralgia, “and which I have since then, perhaps, slightly abused”. Lying
down with an ether bottle and inhaling slowly, he recalls, his body:
“became
light, as light as if the flesh and the bones had been melted and only the skin
was left, the skin necessary to enable me to realize the sweetness of living,
of bathing in this sensation of well-being. Then I perceived that I was no
longer suffering. The pain had gone, melted away, evaporated. And I heard
voices, four voices, two dialogues, without understanding what was said.”
Unlike
hashish dreams or the “somewhat sickly” visions of opium, the state that
followed was one of heightened mental clarity:
“I
reasoned with the utmost clearness and depth, with extraordinary energy and
intellectual pleasure, with a singular intoxication arising from this
separation of my mental faculties . . . It seemed to me that I had tasted the
Tree of Knowledge, that all the mysteries were unveiled, so much did I find
myself under the sway of a new, strange and irrefutable logic. And arguments,
reasonings, proofs rose up in a heap before my brain only to be immediately
displaced by some stronger proof, reasoning, argument. My head had, in fact,
become a battleground of ideas. I was a superior being, armed with invincible
intelligence, and I experienced a huge delight at the manifestation of my
power.”
The
doctor continued inhaling from his bottle for an eternity, carried away in his
cerebral reveries, until he looked down and saw that it was empty. Maupassant’s
own ether use combined the medical, the sensual, and the philosophical in
similar ways. He first tried it as a remedy for his catalogue of persistent
medical and neurological conditions, which included migraines, rheumatism,
partial blindness, internal bleeding, and fevers; his physicians offered
conflicting opinions on their cause, most of which have been retrospectively
connected to his eventual deterioration and death from syphilis. The regular
use of ether affected him strangely: he described to friends seeing little red
men sitting in armchairs, feeling his soul separating from his body and, more
than once, walking into his house and seeing himself sitting on his sofa.
Through
the 1890s, as his condition worsened, Maupassant’s hallucinations and psychotic
episodes grew more intense, whether from degenerative brain disease or the
overuse of ether and other drugs. Ether’s imprint is discernible in the
auditory hallucinations he describes, which commence as a ringing in the ears,
mount towards a crescendo, and resolve during the ensuing reverie into voices,
their words often inaudible or nonsensical but the character and tone of the
speaker sharply defined. Disembodied voices were often described in both the
medical and the spiritual literature, and were experienced and interpreted in
various ways. The British doctor Ernest Dunbar described hearing them on
chloroform in a report to the Society for Psychical Research:
“It
seemed to me that deep down somewhere in my consciousness voices were wrangling
and quarrelling . . . This sort of conversation would commence: “So you see
we’ve got you again”. Then I would think, “Oh! won’t you leave me alone? I want
to rest”, and the answer would come, “We’ll have the last word”, and with that
would ensue a muttering and a grumbling, which occasionally rose to a whining
complaint from these voices. I have never inhaled chloroform without hearing
these voices.”
Where
psychic researchers heard telepathic communications, the spirits of the
deceased, or the voices of angels, Maupassant tended to interpret them as
doublings or splittings of his own mind. In his final years, however, he was
unable to dismiss the possibility that they were intimations of something
beyond the self: not necessarily spirits or demons as traditionally conceived,
but evidence for a disembodied presence that was stalking the modern world. His
most sustained fictional exploration of this possibility was his 1887 short
story “The Horla”, which abandons the elegant naturalism of his earlier work
for a fractured, ambivalent, and perverse narrative in which the rug is
constantly pulled from under the narrator’s feet. In a series of ever more
harrowing diary entries, the protagonist documents a double consciousness or
self-haunting, in which objects in his locked room are interfered with. “I must
be the plaything of my enervated imagination”, he decides; or perhaps he has
become an amnesiac or a sleepwalker; “or I have been brought under the power of
one of those influences — hypnotic suggestion, for example — which are known to
exist, but have hitherto been inexplicable”. But if he is mad, how can he be so
clear-headed and rational?
“Some
unknown disturbance must have been excited in my brain, one of those
disturbances which physiologists of the present day try to note and fix
precisely, and that disturbance must have caused a profound gulf in my mind and
in the order and logic of my ideas.”
As under
ether, arguments and proofs construct themselves with ever greater ingenuity,
only to be replaced by others. The anomalies persist and intensify, the gulf
widens; before long he is speculating that “Somebody possesses my soul and
governs it!” The idea takes hold that the scientific investigators have
unleashed an entity that feeds on the conscious mind, and over which they have
no control:
“Mesmer
divined him, and ten years ago physicians accurately discovered the nature of
his power, even before He exercised it himself. They played with that weapon of
their new Lord, the sway of a mysterious will over the human soul, which had
become enslaved. They call it mesmerism, hypnotism, suggestion . . . A new
being! Why not? It was assuredly bound to come! Why should we be the last?”
The
literary figure most closely associated with ether in fin-de-siècle France was
the novelist, poet, journalist, and short-story writer Jean Lorrain
(1855–1906), whose collection of dark and sardonic tales was published in 1895
under the title Nightmares of an Ether-Drinker. Lorrain was an extreme figure
even in decadent Paris: a powdered and bejewelled dandy, scandalous
gossip-monger, bohemian, dabbling Satanist, denizen of the city’s criminalised
and violent gay underworld, and at the same time its most highly paid writer.
“What is a vice?” he shrugged. “Merely a taste you don’t share.” His brazen
self-advertisement as the Thomas De Quincey of ether was entirely in character,
although the stories in the volume tend to mention the drug only obliquely and
he never describes his experiences with it as directly as Maupassant did in
“Dreams”. Its presence is diffuse, tearing at the veil of reality and
punctuating it with surreal juxtapositions and flashes of preternatural
clarity. It sets the scene and the mood for stories such as “An Uncanny Crime”,
which its narrator begins:
“It was
two years ago, when my nervous troubles were at their worst. I had recovered
from the ether, but not from the morbid phenomena to which it had given birth:
hearing things, seeing things, nocturnal panic-attacks and nightmares.
Sulphonal and bromide had begun to alleviate the worst symptoms, but my
distress continued in spite of medication. These phenomena were at their worst
in the apartment on the other side of the river, in the Rue St Guillaume, which
I had shared with them for so long. Their presence seemed to have impregnated the
walls and fittings, by means of some pernicious sympathetic magic . . . There
were bizarre shadows huddling in the corners, suggestive folds in the curtains
at the windows, while the door curtains would suddenly be animated by some
frightful and nameless semblance of life.”
Lorrain
first used ether medicinally, as symptomatic relief for his chronic
tuberculosis — similar to his rival Maupassant, who once challenged him to a
duel for plagiarism. His illness, and his self-medication with ether, were both
woven into his highly cultivated public persona. A close friend of Joris-Karl
Huysmans, whose À Rebours (1884) established itself as the decadents’ bible,
Lorrain’s writing career straddled the worlds of high aestheticism, well-paid
journalism, commercial pulp sensation, and unprintable perversion. Like
Huysmans’ masterpiece, many of his stories are not so much narratives as
vignettes, mood pieces, or studies of mental states, unfolding in interior
monologues that anticipate the modernists’ stream of consciousness. À Rebours
includes a lengthy digression on scent, and the transports and associations
that can be summoned by it; ether in the writing of Maupassant and particularly
Lorrain can be seen as an outgrowth of this obsession amplified to madness. In
the salons and cafés, it was often said that you could smell Lorrain’s presence
in the room before you saw him. In his fiction, ether’s odour and its dream
logic pervade throughout, bringing with them a confusion of associations: the
hospital waiting room, the boudoir, the agony of the lungs, the gentle
dissociation from reality, the sudden awakening from a nightmare — and,
ultimately, the pain of the gastric ulcers that his habit inflicted on him with
growing severity.
Although
his ether tales are profoundly haunted, Lorrain was no believer in ghosts or
spirits; as he might have said, quoting Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “I have seen
far too many myself.” Like Huysmans, he investigated Satanism: the pair were
habitués of the Chat Noir café, Montmartre’s bohemian hub where the disciples
of Jules Michelet discussed witchcraft and sought out secret rites in basements
and catacombs, and rumours of secret covens and occult rituals swirl in the
background of his tales. In the end, however, neither science nor the
supernatural, nor indeed ether, offered sufficient explanation. “Oh, don’t
blame it on the ether!” replies the protagonist in the short story “The
Possessed” to a friend trying to make sense of his terrifying obsessions:
“Nevertheless,
I do have to go away. I’d be sure to fall ill again as soon as November
arrives, when Paris becomes fantastically haunted. You see, the strangeness of
my case is that I no longer fear the invisible, I’m terrified by reality.”
Lorrain’s
perverse and shocking novel Monsieur de Phocas (1901) marked the scandalous
high-water mark of his career, and the ne plus ultra of French decadent
literature. Bankrupted by lawsuits for plagiarism and obscenity, he fell from
fashion in the new century and in 1906 suffered an ignominious death of
peritonitis after perforating his colon with an enema while attempting to
relieve his ether-induced intestinal ulcers. The drug had, like De Quincey’s
opium, become his talisman, his trademark, and his curse. It opened the door to
an invisible dimension of mind that hypnotism and the mind-doctors were no more
capable of explaining than mediums or exorcists. As another of his overwrought
protagonists exclaims in the 1891 vignette “Magic Lantern”: “Never has the
Fantastic flourished, so sinister and so terrifying, as in modern life!”
This
essay has been excerpted and adapted from Mike Jay, Psychonauts: Drugs and the
Making of the Modern Mind (Yale University Press, 2023).
The
Ether Dreams of Fin-de-Siècle Paris. By Mike Jay. The Public Domain Review ,May
3, 2023.
This
long-lost account of one man's attempt to engineer the perfect balance of
intoxicants in the British colonies of South Asia stands alone in drug
literature, says Mike Jay.
Until I
first held a copy of The Underworld of the East in the British Library sometime
in the late nineties, I had my doubts about its existence. I knew it only from
an extract in a collection of drug writings from a New York underground press
(The Drug User: Documents 1840-1960, 1991) where it was included alongside the
usual suspects – Charles Baudelaire, Henri Michaux, Anais Nin, Aldous Huxley –
and introduced with a short and scabrous rant against the War on Drugs by
William Burroughs. Though the extract was presented as the memoir of a British
mining engineer in the South Asian colonies in the 1890s and 1900s, it read
suspiciously like a modern pastiche. As various aficionados of the genre had
pointed out, its plain and amateurish prose was quite unlike the better-known
examples of fin-de-siècle drug-literature; its progressive social attitudes
towards non-Europeans, as well as its gung-ho frankness about drugtaking,
seemed incongruously modern; and it was odd that nothing seemed to be known
about Lee in real life. Some observed knowingly that ‘Lee’ was the maiden name
of Burroughs’s mother, and his nom de plume for the first edition of Junky in
1954.
Any
suspicion that it was a modern forgery was convincingly rebutted by the frayed
and faded cloth jacket and yellowed, foxed pages of the British Library’s copy.
When I opened the covers, James Lee had me at the title page: The Underworld of
the East: Being Eighteen Years’ Actual Experiences of the Underworlds, Drug
Haunts and Jungles of India, China and the Malay Archipelago. It was dated
1935, twenty years after the end of the episodes it related, and it was
essentially a travel memoir, offering some of the armchair thrills expected by
readers of the genre: a village in the Indian jungle stalked by a man-eating
tiger; close encounters with murderous Thugs and dacoits; adventures on one of
the first motorcycles in Calcutta in 1903. But its distinctive theme, most unusual
for its strait-laced times, was Lee’s voracious drug experimentation. ‘A man
deeply learned in every kind of narcotic drugs…among them being opium, hashish,
morphia, cocaine, bhang, ganja and many others’, the dust jacket blurb
announced, ‘For eighteen years he travelled the world investigating the drug
habit and the underworld…the strange effects produced are intimately
described’.
In the
book’s short opening chapter, ‘About Drugs’, Lee sets out his stall: ‘The life
of a drug taker can be a happy one; far surpassing any other, or it can be one
of suffering and misery; it depends on the user’s knowledge’. I had recently
been commissioned to edit an anthology of drug literature and had been working
my way through reams of flowery, decadent 19th-century prose without ever
coming across this obvious statement of fact. The doyen of the genre, Thomas De
Quincey, had famously insisted that the pleasures of drugs were inseparable
from their exquisite pains; his great admirer and translator Charles Baudelaire
declared that drugs were a ‘forbidden game’ in which base instincts for
self-gratification would always triumph over noble ambitions of
self-transcendence. Publishers embraced this trope, which allowed them to sell
immorality while absolving them of the charge of promoting it, and De Quincey
and Baudelaire’s legion of successors and imitators were happy to encourage the
conceit that the ecstatic pleasures they described were only accessible to the
elite few who were equally prepared to plumb the depths of hell.
By James
Lee’s time, these tropes had hardened into the clichés that still define the
tabloid ‘My Drug Hell’ narrative: what goes up must come down; anybody who
thinks they have their habit under control is deceiving themselves; drugs are a
one-way street to perdition. But Lee, from the opening pages of his book, was
having none of it – perhaps because he hadn’t read any of it. He was born in
Redcar to a family of colliers and iron merchants and employed in factories
from the age of seventeen; his writing makes no reference to the canon of drug
literature, or indeed any literature. His style is precise but artless: short,
factual sentences, eccentrically punctuated, the work of someone more used to
turning out structural engineering reports. His turn of mind is restlessly
practical: the proper use of drugs is a problem to be solved. Their pleasures
can, with careful attention to doses and combinations, be wonderfully
intensified; their pains, with knowledge and self-discipline, can be more or
less eliminated.
By the
1890s, when Lee began his drug career, a chorus of expert medical opinion had
ready diagnoses for the new figure of the ‘drug addict’ or ‘narcomaniac’. The
condition might be hereditary; the subject might be a criminal ‘type’, a
neurasthenic or mental defective, or someone who had acquired by social
contagion the ‘degenerate habits’ of ‘inferior races’. Lee would presumably be
an example of this last category, since he was introduced to drugs through
contact with Asian cultures, but he explained his motives in simpler terms. ‘I
was getting fed up with life in England’, he wrote, ‘where one had to do just
as the next fellow did…to wear the same kind of clothes, with a collar and tie,
and talk about football or horse-racing or be considered no sport’. He took up
drugs for the same reason that he exchanged his early career as a draughtsman
in the steelworks of Sheffield and Teesside for a post as a teaching assistant
in London, and then applied for a job as a mining foreman in Assam: to have a
more interesting life.
This
first overseas assignment took him to a small settlement in India’s remote
north-east frontier, where British influence gave way to the territory of the
Naga hill tribes. The mine for which he was responsible was a tunnel through
solid coal, which was hacked into tubs and barrels by the male workers and
carried away by the women on their heads. He noted with interest that the
workers chewed betel nut and were often high on bhang, or "Indian
hemp", and was curious to learn more. (It would become his habit to seek
out solitary postings where he could immerse himself in local society and avoid
his fellow Europeans, who distanced themselves from the natives,
"affecting to consider them as inferiors".) One day, speaking to one
of the female workers, he learned that she had fled an arranged marriage in the
Central Provinces for a life of hard labour in this remote outpost. Her name
was Mulki; they eventually married, and she accompanied him to England on his
visits home.
Before
long, he found himself suffering the chills and fevers of the endemic malaria
and paid a visit to the local doctor, a ‘fat and jolly’ character whom he
refers to as ‘Dr. Babu’. The doctor had a remedy to hand: an injection of
morphine that left Lee ‘simply purring with content’. Dr. Babu sent him home
with a syringe kit and a tube of morphine tablets, and he took to spending the
heat of the day luxuriating with his new ‘hobby’ and ‘dreaming rosy dreams’.
After a while he noticed that he was chronically constipated and decided to
quit the habit, but he found it harder than he expected. So this was
‘addiction’: in most drug literature the inevitable destination, but in Lee’s
narrative only the beginning of the journey. ‘Sir’, Dr. Babu informed him,
‘morphia is a very strange medicine…it is very difficult to give up but it can
be done’. So saying, he injected Lee with half a grain (about 30mg) of cocaine.
The new drug dealt promptly with the constipation and removed the morphine
craving, but it gave him insomnia in exchange. The ever-resourceful Dr. Babu
had a solution for this too: ‘perhaps because I treated him differently from
the way most Europeans treated the educated Indian’, Lee was invited back to
his home to smoke a few pipes of opium, which ‘procured a profound and refreshing
sleep’.
Lee
embarked on a systematic process of self-experiment to rid himself of his
inadvertent habit. He reduced his intake of morphine and cocaine in turn with
carefully calibrated doses, and developed a detox regime that he spells out in
detail, grain by grain. ‘These two drugs’, he discovered, ‘are in a certain way
antidote to each other’: each could be used to reduce the cravings for the
other, and both gradually watered down. He took to using this cure on his
return trips to England: the six weeks of the voyage was just enough to allow
him to step off the ship at Portsmouth healthy and drug-free. The broader
insight to which this led him was that ‘one drug alone spells disaster’: only
with combinations of different drugs, interspersed with periods of abstinence,
could their desirable effects be maintained.
More
assignments across India, then Sumatra and China, turned up more drugs, which
generated ever more interesting experiences. ‘I was now able to use large
quantities of any particular drug for a time without harming my health in the
slightest’, he wrote, ‘in fact I seemed to benefit by it in every way’. He
added bhang and hashish to his repertoire, and found he could produce ‘strange
waking dreams’ by eating hashish and injecting cocaine through the night. With
this combination his reveries materialised before his eyes in visionary trances
lasting for many hours, in which he was surrounded by spirits and saw the
future evolution of humanity spread out before him in a vast panorama.
On his
travels he took to asking the locals about medicinal and magical plants, and
offering to pay for any samples. During a long assignment in Sumatra, where he
supervised the construction of a goods railhead on the jungle coast, he
discovered two which he believed to be unknown to western science. ‘Drug No.
1’, as he called it, produced not inner visions but true hallucinations, in
which his wooden hut became an enormous space populated by ‘spirit-like faces
and forms of many nations’, many in the advanced stages of leprosy, which
hovered around him, along with ‘faintly luminous globes, which some instinct
told me were the souls of unborn children’. ‘Drug No. 2’ was in its way even
more remarkable: it restored him swiftly to perfect sobriety and health from even
the most extreme intoxication, and was a panacea for any minor ailment. He
reduced the plant to a concentrated brown powder that he took to carrying it
with him everywhere on his travels, and referred to it as ‘The Elixir of Life’.
After my visit to the British Library I
sourced my own battered copy of Underworld online and mined it for passages to
include in my anthology (Artificial Paradises: A Drugs Reader, Penguin 1999).
In the process I established that any copyright for the text had been lost over
the decades through a succession of publishing mergers, and I found a small
press who were prepared to reprint it (Green Magic, 2000). This cost me my
prized copy of the book, which had to be chopped up for scanning, but I found
another one quickly enough, better and slightly cheaper. The reprint generated
a small but interesting postbag. A death certificate turned up, revealing that
James Sidney Lee had made it to the age of 77, succumbing to liver carcinoma in
Dulwich Hospital in 1951; with this I was able to locate his will, which left
his modest estate to his sister in Redcar. I was contacted by a surviving
relative, his great-nephew, whose mother dimly remembered him from her
childhood in the 1930s, though his reputation for drugs and ‘living in sin’
meant he was rarely invited to family gatherings.
The
publisher also received a letter from an elderly gentleman named James Gilman
who had spent many years on Lee’s trail, and specifically on the hunt for Drugs
No. 1 and 2. He had, apparently, joined a botanical expedition to Sumatra in
the 1980s where he had found the spot where Lee had stayed, located the
overgrown remains of his railhead in the jungle and spoken to an old man who
remembered him from his childhood (‘the Dutchman’, he called him, as all
Europeans were known to that generation of Indonesians). James had collected
plant samples, and believed he had identified Drug No. 2, but it had either
rotted in transit or been purloined by other botanists. His files and records
from the expedition were stored in a garage somewhere that he was now too old
and frail to dig through.
James
did, however, come through with one astonishing document: the coroner’s report
into the death of Mulki, in London in 1915. Lee mentions this in the book, in a
curiously vague aside: ‘Poor girl, she died suddenly in London, while we were
staying at a small private hotel in Bow Lane, Cheapside, from an overdose of
some drug, I think morphia’. The coroner’s report, which includes Lee’s
testimony, is much more specific. The couple had just arrived in London, where
the wartime Defence of the Realm Act had recently prohibited the sale of
morphine and cocaine; Lee had nonetheless managed to acquire some from one of
his old haunts, a pharmacy named Ray’s in Holborn. He returned to the hotel,
where he and Mulki both took a normal dose, but she suddenly lost
consciousness. He rushed her to Bart’s Hospital where, to his horror, the duty
doctor injected her with further shots of morphine and cocaine. In his
deposition Lee testified that Mulki was ‘alive and breathing’ at this point,
but ‘after that the doctor said she was dead’, The doctor, however, recorded
her death as misadventure, and its cause as ‘heart failure – her habit of
injection of these drugs cocaine and morphine would quite account for it’. I
found a short report in The Times of the following day that repeated this
verdict, adding: ‘Like nearly all Indians, she was in the habit of taking
drugs’. Even twenty years later, Lee was evidently unwilling to re-litigate the
incident in print.
A while
later I was contacted by a small French publisher who wanted to put out a
French translation and asked me to write an introduction. This was a chance to
assemble an outline of Lee’s life, and to include the tragic story of Mulki’s
death. After its publication (Les Tribulations d’un Opiomane, 2009) I received
a courteous email from New York from a most unexpected source, the writer Nick
Tosches. I was aware of his interest in the subject – his longform feature
piece, ‘Confessions of an Opium Seeker’, was published in Vanity Fair in 2000
to wide acclaim – but had no idea that his search for the vanished world of
opium dens had set him on Lee’s trail.
We
exchanged notes, and Nick kept me scrupulously updated on his findings.
Witnessing him at work was a privilege and an education. He was resolutely
old-school in his methods, with a home reference library that seemed to cover
everything (the Liddell & Scott English-Greek lexicon was always at his
elbow) and a mastery of official records, from 19th-century parish registers in
Middlesbrough to turning Lee’s name up on ships’ passenger lists. He used
Mulki’s full name on the coroner’s report to deduce her family origins and
their caste profession (cattle herders) and somehow, without leaving Lower
Manhattan, identified her unmarked grave in Manor Park cemetery on the edge of
Epping Forest. He traced Lee’s family back through two generations of iron and
coal workers in North Yorkshire and Teesside; as he worked you could feel the
industrial grit and grandeur of the Victorian north-east rising into existence
as vividly as the 1930s Steubenville, Ohio from which Dean Martin emerged in
the unforgettable early chapters of his Dino (1992).
We met
once in person, in 2012, when he visited London. He was staying at the
Dorchester Hotel on a confidential assignment, and was in a wry and elegiac
mood about the publishing business. Sleuthing after James Lee was, in his mind,
what real writing was all about; but gone were the days when he could simply
follow his nose on an absorbing story, moored to his publisher only by an
annual lunch with a trusted editor. He refused to pitch glib book proposals to
ignorant sales and marketing departments, and had no interest in the digital
future: as he wrote later, ‘Nothing good will come of this vapid, postliterate
new tweet-text-twaddle world’. He recalled ‘the wondrous vanished bookshops
that brought us such discoveries and made us what we were!…Over, all of it,
over the hills, dying or dead. But so be it. Onwards in the dark of night like
tomb-robbers of the XXth Dynasty into the Valley of the Kings.’
The
following year Nick sent a final dossier, closing the case. He had filled in
the background to James Lee’s world in often staggering detail, but the man
himself had left no personal traces that could anchor his book to the rest of
his life. ‘Attempts to locate letters, papers, notebooks, and diaries of Lee,
often retracing the trails of the indefatigable James Gilman, have proven
futile’, he wrote. The minor errors of date, place and fact he had found
throughout Underworld suggested that Lee wrote it from memory rather than
referring to notebooks or journals. Alleged photos had failed to materialise,
and no surviving relatives had an old suitcase in their attic containing dusty
vials of powder labelled ‘Drug No. 2’. There were still a few official records
to chase down – passport applications, perhaps a military service number? – but
these seemed unlikely to change the big picture. James Lee was real beyond
doubt, and his travels had certainly taken place, but the private man was lost
to history.
In 2019
I was visiting New York and picked up the thread. Nick was keen to meet despite
grumbles about his health, but the week before I arrived his email went dark,
and his death was announced a few days later. I crossed his path at that time
in the vaulted art deco reading rooms of the New York Public Library, where I
had ordered up from the William Burroughs archive the box containing
Burroughs’s fragmentary writings on James Lee from the early 1970s. The paper
slip on which previous requests were scribbled in pencil contained a single
word, ‘Tosches’. The typewritten pages included a filthy, proto-Wild Boys
routine about a polymorphous orgy in a Chinese opium den, and an unpublished
preface to Underworld of the East, which had clearly lulled the ‘hard man of hip’
into an unusually genial and unguarded register. Lee’s book, Burroughs wrote,
was ‘conjured from the unpolluted air of the 19th century’, when drugs were
pure and legal and the Elixir of Life was on hand to negate any ill effects.
‘And so we leave James Lee’, he concluded, ‘in his quiet bungalow after a day’s
work in the open air, judiciously selecting and rotating his drugs. A happy and
nostalgic book’.
Despite
its hard core of admirers, The Underworld of the East seems destined to remain,
at best, a minor pulp classic. Lee doesn’t really fit with the current vogue
for psychedelics in exotic cultures: he was too interested in white powders and
needles, too unsentimental and too dismissive of spiritual flim-flam. In an era
where film and TV reboots of Sherlock Holmes are still obliged to find ironic
and non-threatening substitutes for his cocaine injecting, I’m not holding my
breath for a James Lee movie. Yet his solitary book retains a peculiar power.
It may be no great work of literature, but there’s a world inside it that can’t
be accessed from anywhere else, and still has plenty of secrets to give up.
Orient
Excess: James S Lee’s Drug Memoir Underworld Of The East. By Mike Jay. The Quietus, January 17, 2022.
It’s
remarkable how fast psychedelics have gone mainstream. It’s not just the craze
for microdosing or the enthusiasm for mushroom grow kits. After years of
shunning this research, major universities are now racing to set up their own
psychedelic institutes, with psilocybin and MDMA being touted as the most
promising treatments for depression and PTSD in decades.
But this
is not the first time psychoactive drugs have been hailed as miracle cures.
Over the past two centuries, morphine, heroin, and cocaine were also considered
wonder drugs until doctors discovered their addictive properties. Today, what’s
striking is how the public conversation about psychedelics tends to ignore this
deeper history of psychoactive drugs.
Historian
Mike Jay is out to challenge this narrative of psychedelic exceptionalism.
Through a series of books on the history of intoxicants, he’s traced the
lineage of various drug cultures. His new book, Psychonauts: Drugs and the
Making of the Modern Mind, focuses on the 19th century’s rich history of
psychoactive experiences, spanning the worlds of science and literature. In
some ways, this era had a more expansive and nuanced view of drugs and the
exploration of consciousness than we do today, where the medical model
dominates the public discourse on psychedelics.
Jay is
upfront about his own psychedelic experiences. “I’ve experimented thoroughly
with all these drugs over a long period of time now,” he said when I reached
him in Cornwall. His tripping led him to recalibrate his own image of reality,
but he doesn’t gloss over how challenging these experiences can be. In his
earlier book on the history of mescaline, he writes about one encounter with
the psychoactive cactus San Pedro: “As pleasure and discomfort mingled and
intensified, it was easy to understand how some subjects feel themselves
transported to the realms of the divine while others retire miserably to their
sickbeds.”
Jay also
wades into the contentious question of whether the scientists and doctors
studying psychedelics should talk openly about their own experiences. “The
analogy I use is travel writing,” he says. “You could write a book about Venice
without going there because you can read all the other books about Venice, but
it’s hard to argue that your book wouldn’t be better if you had actually been
to Venice yourself.”
We seem
to be at a crossroads in how to think about psychedelics. There’s a strong push
to medicalize these substances, but psychoactive experiences have always been
unpredictable and wild. What do you make of the current psychedelic moment?
MJ : I
think what we might call drugs—or more specifically, psychedelics—sit on a kind
of cultural fault line that we’ve inherited from the 20th century. There are
two words that emerged during the 20th century. The first is “drugs” in the
sense that we’re using it. That word is a product of the Progressive Era in the
early 20th century. From the very beginning, it had a whole bunch of negative
connotations baked into it. There were dangerous drugs, addictive drugs,
criminally illicit drugs. Think of “the war on drugs.” When I was growing up, I
assumed it had been going on forever, so it was surprising to discover that
it’s actually a creation of the 20th century. Then in the mid-20th century,
there was much more interest in mystical experience and the possibility of
using drugs for personal growth or healing. That was the point at which the
word “psychedelics” emerged.
The
psychiatrist Humphry Osmond coined this word because he didn’t like the word
“drugs.” The literal meaning of psychedelic is “mind-revealing,” which has a
much more positive ring to it.
MJ : Osmond
and Aldous Huxley came up with that term together. They were really talking
about LSD and mescaline then. Huxley was very keen that it should be connected
to mystical experience and higher consciousness. I think one reason the word
“drugs” became so handy at the beginning of the 20th century was to separate
substances into good and bad. The good you would get in your pharmacy or from a
doctor; the bad you’d have to get from the street, from criminals. That
distinction has broken down in the 21st century, when cannabis is for sale everywhere
and the potential for psychedelics has only gotten stronger.
Weren’t
many drugs that we now consider dangerous, like heroin and cocaine, once easily
obtained?
MJ : That’s
right. It’s why our modern category of drugs wouldn’t have made any sense in
the 19th century because they just sat on the shelves alongside other
stimulants and sedatives and analgesics that we now call drugs. One thing that
fascinates me about this period is how widely drugs were used in science and
medicine, and how interested people were in the experiences they produced.
There’s a rich literature back then because doctors in the 19th century were
very good at describing things. You had to be. There were no tick-box
diagnoses. If somebody had a cough, you couldn’t just say they had a cough.
There might be 50 adjectives to describe that cough.
Another
reason doctors and scientists were so good at describing these experiences is
they often took the drugs themselves.
MJ : Yes,
and I’ve taken that as the central theme of my book. If you’re studying a drug
which affects the mind and alters consciousness, the experience itself is
really what you’re looking at. And if that’s the focus of your investigation, why
wouldn’t you start by experiencing it yourself?
The word
“psychonaut” is often used to describe people who take hallucinogens for
self-exploration. The word was coined in 1949 by the German writer Ernst
Junger, who is a fascinating and problematic figure. He was the mentor of
Albert Hofmann, who synthesized LSD, but Junger was once a Nazi sympathizer.
MJ : He
later resisted Nazi efforts to recruit him, but he also refused to submit to de-Nazification
in postwar American-occupied Germany. During that time, he wrote a futuristic
novel called Heliopolis, in which a cadre of scientists synthesize new
psychoactive drugs and use them to explore their consciousness. These
scientists are called psychonauts. Junger was the great hero and mentor to
Albert Hofmann, and through Hofmann, the word psychonaut made its way into the
psychedelic counterculture. It meant someone who was a rebel or renegade or was
working outside of science. Because in our modern era, institutional scientists
don’t self-experiment with their drugs.
At least
they don’t talk about it publicly. I’d bet that most scientists who study
psychedelics have tripped themselves, even though it’s usually illegal. I mean,
can you actually understand these experiences if you haven’t had them?
MJ : I
think it’s enormously valuable to have direct personal experience because what
we’re studying is a sensation that’s only available to the subject. Otherwise,
you’re just studying its correlates. I wanted to reclaim the word “psychonauts”
and take it back into the 19th century, where it describes not only renegades
and rebels, but also establishment scientists, doctors, and pillars of the
literary establishment. The word that was used at the time was
“self-experimenter.”
There is
no perfect or correct way to do self-experimentation. Part of you is an
observer and part of you is a subject, and you’re trying to find the right
point between objective data and a fuller sense of the subjective experience.
So maybe you end up with a hybrid of science and literature. If you look at the
psychedelic literature today, most of it is composed of very dry papers on
neuroscience and receptor chemistry, but then you look at the towering
bestseller of the psychedelic renaissance, Michael Pollan’s book How to Change
Your Mind, and he’s using lots of metaphors about our minds getting stuck in
ruts and psychedelics connecting different areas of the brain. But I think what
really attracted people to his book were his descriptions of his
self-experiments. What does it feel like? What might it do for me?
You can
see this cross-fertilization between science and literature at the beginning of
the 19th century, when the English chemist Humphry Davy discovered the
mind-blowing properties of nitrous oxide and then recruited some of his poet
friends to join in these experiments.
MJ : Humphry
Davy went on to become the president of the Royal Society and the great
scientific hero of his generation. When he was 20, he was one of the first
scientists to synthesize nitrous oxide, which was believed to be toxic. But in
the heroic self-experimental tradition, he found out that not only was it not
toxic, but it produced a wave of euphoria. He inhaled a bit more and eventually
found himself in this disembodied universe composed of thoughts and ideas, and
he came back absolutely fascinated.
He was
very fortunate to have a group of friends in Bristol who were ideally suited as
volunteers, including the young Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and
Robert Southey. Davy was looking for a language of feeling, but it’s incredibly
hard to find words for it. In a way, it was rather like the Romantic poets’ own
project of finding words to describe new feelings and sensations. So from this
point on, the study of drugs was still about pharmacy and chemistry, but it
also became about poetry and philosophy.
One of
Coleridge’s protégés, the Romantic poet Thomas De Quincey, later wrote his own
book, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. What was distinctive about this
book?
MJ : He
was doing something very original. The book is not actually about opium. It’s
about the opium eater. So he’s using opium to open up a new form of
autobiography. He writes about how he takes opium and wanders around London at
night, losing himself in the theater crowds and having reveries. And suddenly
these childhood memories will pop up that he hasn’t thought of for ages.
Extraordinary dreams will appear, and he has the sense that on opium he can
wander the labyrinth of his mind and connect all these different visions and
memories and sensations.
By the
mid-19th century, many people were using psychoactive substances. Can you tell
me about the French physician Jacques-Joseph Moreau?
MJ : Moreau
was what we would now call a psychiatrist. He often accompanied his wealthy
patients on rest tours, so he went to Egypt, where he was fascinated by the
absence of alcohol and the prevalence of hashish. People who took hashish would
talk about their dreams and visions and their encounters with jinn and other
supernatural entities. He got fascinated enough to take large oral doses of
hashish and was unable to move or speak for hours.
As a
psychiatrist, he believes in walking as far as you can in your patients’ shoes,
but the one place where we can’t accompany our patients is over the threshold
into madness. But with hashish he noticed in himself so many of the phenomena
that he was treating in his patients—hallucinations, deliriums, and paranoid
ideation. And just as Humphry Davy had done with the Romantic poets, Moreau started
a literary hashish salon in Paris. Many of the great figures of mid-19th
century French literary culture—like Balzac, Dumas, Flaubert, and
Baudelaire—passed through its doors.
One of
the most intriguing cases of self-experimentation was Sigmund Freud, who became
obsessed with cocaine early in his career. Why did he think cocaine was so
promising?
MJ : The
great disease of the late 19th century was neurasthenia. It’s not a term we use
anymore, but when we’re talking about anxiety or depression or autoimmune
conditions, these would often have been diagnosed as neurasthenia. There was a
feeling that society had started to run on the rapid time of the machine, and a
lot of people were having nervous breakdowns or suffering what we’d now call
burnout. So everybody was looking for a stimulant that could magically provide
more energy, and Freud thought cocaine might be the thing that would bring us
up to speed with modern life. In the mid-1880s, he was often referred to as the
world’s leading medical expert on cocaine.
Did he
take much cocaine himself?
MJ : It’s
often assumed that he took huge quantities, but my feeling is that the opposite
is the case. He was a sober and cautious fellow, and he took it in very small
doses. I think the problem with his self-experimentation was that he only ever
took a small dose, usually dissolved in water. So a few years later, when
people discovered that you could inject enormous quantities of cocaine and then
almost immediately go into manic states of collapse and nervous breakdown,
Freud was blindsided by this. It wasn’t that he’d taken too much cocaine. He’d
taken too little. It was around this time that our modern medical notion of
addiction was coming into focus.
Didn’t
Freud then try to erase his early work on cocaine from the historical record?
MJ : There’s
maybe one sentence about it in his short autobiography, but when his collected
works were finally reprinted, the cocaine papers weren’t in it. And his first
biographer, Ernest Jones, minimized it and described it as the “cocaine
episode.” He just dismissed it as a juvenile aberration, and that’s the line
that his followers have tended to follow ever since.
William
James was another late 19th-century psychologist who self-experimented. Why did
he take nitrous oxide?
MJ : Like
Freud, he diagnosed himself as neurasthenic. He took nitrous oxide in the early
1880s, and I think it was an experience that really stuck with him because he’d
always been interested in mystical experience, but he’d never really had one
himself, and he’d felt that he was kind of a cold, rational soul who was never
going to have one. So James’ nitrous oxide experience was a revelation for him
personally as well as professionally. He saw introspection as central to the
study of the mind. He was in a world, as we are now, where the mainstream
science of the mind was very positivist. James thought the mind was much more
complicated than that. He described it as a “blooming buzzing confusion.” He
was trying to find ways of exploring the mind in broader terms that verged on
literature and philosophy within a paradigm that was becoming more and more
rigid.
Why did
drugs become so stigmatized in the early 20th century?
MJ : I
think there are many components to it. If you look at the word “drugs” that
emerged at that time, you can see there are medical concerns that drugs are
addictive and bad for your health and should only be used under the supervision
of a doctor. This is also the Progressive Era, when all kinds of grassroots
campaigns were starting to increase the scope of government, leading up to
alcohol prohibition. At this time, alcohol is regarded as the most problematic
substance. How can we possibly have a civilized society in the 20th century
where people are allowed to get drunk all the time? Psychology itself is moving
away from introspection. This is the beginning of behaviorism, so we’re going
to be more productive running our laboratory rats through mazes than listening
to people pontificating about their drug experiences.
What can
this long history of psychoactive drugs tell us about our current psychedelic
renaissance?
MJ : It
gives us a very different way of thinking about where we are now. The
prevailing assumption is that this kind of drug experience suddenly emerged in
the 1950s and 1960s and was summarily squashed by mainstream science and
medicine, and we’re now just beginning to recover it. But the story I’m telling
about the 19th century shows a rather different picture. It suggests that the
things we’re interested in today—the power of drugs to be therapeutic and to
open up dimensions of thought and experience that we wouldn’t otherwise
discover—go all the way back to the Scientific Revolution. Many of the questions
we’re asking now are exactly what scientists and writers and doctors were
asking in the 19th century, but they weren’t using DMT and ketamine. They were
using ether or nitrous oxide or hashish. What happens when we take drugs that
disembody us and take us into realms of pure experience? Is it simply white
noise produced by a drug-addled brain? Or do these experiences connect us to
other dimensions of mind that we can’t normally access?
Where do
you hope the current psychedelic movement will go from here?
MJ : I
would like to see a thousand flowers bloom. A lot of people who are now
interested in psychedelics would use them privately. You might describe that as
self-medication or recreational or spiritual. Some people will want to have
shamanic or mindfulness guides for this experience; others will doubtless want
state-approved clinical psychotherapists. It seems to me the entire
conversation at the moment is on this very tricky question of how the medical
profession manages and licenses this.
All those
questions are important, but I’d like to see more attention being paid to the
fact that there are other models beyond the medical and beyond the therapeutic.
We’re starting to see this with the first steps of decriminalization of plant
psychedelics in Oregon and Colorado, what I might call a bottom-up model, which
I hope might complement the top-down medical model.
Why
Scientists Need to Get High. By Steve Paulson. Nautilus, May 23, 2023.
Mike Jay's latest book, Psychonauts, is published today by Yale. Here he talks to
John Doran about what we can learn by studying the pre-60s history of drugs,
followed by an extract on the early 19th century nitrous oxide craze.
Sexual
intercourse began
In
nineteen sixty-three
(which
was rather late for me) –
Between
the end of the 'Chatterley' ban
And the
Beatles' first LP.”
Philip
Larkin – ‘Annus Mirabilis’
The
flavour of Philip Larkin’s ironic ode to the sexual revolution of the sixties
is triggered synesthetically by the subject matter in Mike Jay’s excellent new
book Psychonauts, way before it turns up as an actual literary reference in the
closing chapters. Such is the deathless, bony grip of the boomer on the public
imagination – still – that it’s hard to even consider the modern history of
narcotics without subconsciously arriving directly at the period where the
beatnik counterculture of the 1950s gives way to the hippie counterculture of
the 1960s. And this is understandable. Despite the stories of the rise and fall
(and more recently the rise again) of mescaline, psilocybin and LSD, to name
but three psychoactive substances, being retold to the point of feeling
slightly threadbare, there is actually still much to say on the subject.
Recently,
I have enjoyed and gained much from Michael Pollan’s How To Change Your Mind:
What The New Science Of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying,
Addiction, Depression, And Transcendence – especially in its clear-headed,
engaging summary of how LSD actually works via the Default Mode Network – and
Matthew Ingram’s Retreat, an incredible piece of research showing how the
counterculture essentially paved the way for the billion dollar wellness
industry of today. Both books are great, yet still represent a kind of reboot
of the head books a lot of us came of age with… Aldous Huxley’s The Doors Of
Perception, Jay Stevens’ Storming Heaven: LSD And The American Dream, and so
on.
Psychonauts,
published this week by Yale, offers a vigorous corrective to the casually
accepted vibe that “drugs began” in 1963. A science and history writer by
trade, Mike Jay has written original-research-heavy titles about such varied
topics as schizophrenia and military history in the past but has notable form
when it comes to drugs and is responsible for the excellent Mescaline: A Global
History Of The First Psychedelic among other titles. There is a sense, however,
of this being his ‘greatest hits’ – pun intended – and possibly represents him
drawing a fat line – you feel me? – under his documentation of the subject. In
short, he takes us on a whistle-stop tour of the early
discovery/synthesis/industrialised refinement of such various substances as
cocaine, nitrous oxide and ether, injecting – I’ll stop now – a wealth of
well-sketched anecdotes into proceedings.
What we
are presented with is the portrait of an age where scientists were keen to
experiment upon themselves and how these experiments sometimes led to
flashpoint moments of advancement in science, philosophy and art; and at other
times led to accident, illness and early death. And in these descriptions of
travelling medicine shows, rowdy music hall acts, 19th century laboratories, the
birth of psychoanalysis, the advent of modernism, the uncharted frontier of
analgesia and anaesthesia and the demi-monde of Paris, we sense times which
were in many ways wilder, more exciting and more revolutionary than the 1960s.
The
book, of course, has one laser eye trained on the landscape of 2023, and is
organised in a way that allows the reader to easily draw useful links between,
say, the convoluted origins of nitrous oxide as an aid to dentistry and the
current ‘hippie crack’ driver of red top newspaper sales. (Although we have to
infer how Jay feels about Cocaine Bear.) It is structured around many of the
questions we ask ourselves today, so one section deals with the idea of
cognitive enhancement, while another concerns the journey to the outer edges of
consciousness, which suggests that some who use DMT and ketamine today are
perhaps not so different to those who used nitrous oxide and chloroform
generations earlier.
The term
“psychonaut” was initially coined by the German writer Ernst Jünger in his work
of speculative fiction, Heliopolis (1949). That Jünger survived World War 2 to
write the book is surprising given his ambivalence to the Third Reich. While
stationed in Paris, he befriended Picasso and Cocteau and passed some
intelligence to the resistance – and his relative proximity to the Stauffenberg
bomb plot. In his novel set in a future city state in the Mediterranean he
describes a cadre of scientists – psychonauts – who synthesise new drugs and
experiment upon themselves in order to investigate the hidden recesses of the
mind. Jay, who is speaking to me from his home in Cornwall, laughs: “It’s
handy, as that’s pretty much what my book is about, it’s just that these real
characters I’m writing about existed many decades earlier.”
Jay says
that he first encountered the term in relation to the psychedelic
counterculture, a tag that tended to be awarded in a process of
self-identification. “It was always loaded with this assumption that the person
[saw themselves as] a rebel, a renegade or an edge lord, working far away from
institutional science,” he explains.
“I
wanted to reclaim the word. So if you go back before the 20th century, then
yes, these characters were still rebels and renegades and all of that, but they
were also institutional scientists, doctors, and pillars of the establishment.
And pretty much everyone was a self experimenter, as this was an age when
scientists used to self experiment with everything. They passed massive
electric shocks through their bodies, or inhaled toxic gases. Drugs were the
least of it, really.”
I bring
up Larkin’s ‘Annus Mirabilis’ with him, specifically the idea that the
‘auspicious years’ of this story are 1882 (William James’ intoxication with
nitrous oxide) and 1846 (William Morton’s first forays into using ether as
anaesthetic) rather than 1963, and Jay agrees that Psychonauts is, to some
degree, a corrective to received wisdom:
“Like
most people, I grew up with the vague assumption that drugs appeared in the
1960s,” he begins. “And that comes with another assumption that before the
1960s they'd always been banned, and they'd always been illegal. It took me a
while to realise that what we think of now as the war on drugs – drugs being
outlawed and demonised – was something that didn’t really happen until the 20th
century.
“In fact
the word drugs itself, in the sense we’re using it now, didn’t really exist
until the 20th century either. Before that we were talking about a range of
things that might include herbal medicine, research substances, anaesthetics,
or simply items you could buy from the pharmacy, because, of course, cocaine,
heroin and cannabis were all on their shelves along with all the other
analgesics and stimulants and sedatives.”
Jay
points to Thomas De Quincey, the author of Confessions Of An English Opium
Eater (1821) as being an “early to the game” psychonaut. His most famous piece
of writing describes the mechanisms of addiction and withdrawal before some
doctors even understood what these things even were. Despite coming out of a
period of romanticism, he was already pointing ahead towards the modern age,
suggesting stubborn, hard to access subliminal depths to the human psyche. “He
didn't use the word ‘unconscious’ but that's what he was writing about,” Jay
continues.
One of
the big shifts in the book happens in the second half of the 19th Century, in
the run up to the rupture of modernism. One of the hallmarks of this movement
in art, literature and philosophy was the shock of the new, a desire for
novelty and new experiences that mirrored the ever changing, industrialised
pace of life. Changes in attitudes towards drugs in this period were happening
at a very rapid pace simultaneously with all of these other changes.
“The
stakes change. The costs and the benefits both get ramped up at the end of the
19th century,” Jay explains. On the one hand, it's a great era of discovery
when it comes to the mind, but in another sense, the production of drugs
becomes industrialised. They are pumped out in unprecedented volumes, they
become more concentrated and there is the introduction of the hypodermic
needle; plus they are now sold by pharmaceutical corporations. At this point
they are products of big pharma.
“All of
the anxieties about modernity come into play when people are thinking about
what the role of drugs in society should be. There’s a new process regarding
psychology and access of the unconscious and the subliminal mind and how you
can get to it very directly. William James, through his experiences with
nitrous oxide, shows this, and this brings in a kind of pluralism. As he says,
in Varieties Of Religious Experience, our waking consciousness is only one
particular type of consciousness – there are all these other types of
consciousness which can be accessed if you huff some gas, or take a snort of
this powder, or have a smoke of that herb. And these are different worlds where
our sensations and perceptions are altered and things look very different.”
He goes
on to say he thinks drugs played into "that specifically modernist sense
of wanting to break the frames of time and space”, or “the way that things are
normally presented.” This affected everything from cinema to art: "The
idea that you can take a single moment and freeze it and break it down to
nothing or show it from multiple perspectives all at once. I think those are
the kind of ideas that emerged from the investigation of drugs in the late 19th
century that feed into modernism.”
One of
the very problematic aspects of modernism is its worship of power and the
susceptibility some of its adherents had for looking for a strong leader to
solve their problems. Modernism wasn’t fundamentally or explicitly fascist but
it loaned itself quite easily to a fascination with totalitarianism. Right
across the board from DH Lawrence to Ezra Pound via TS Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and
HG Wells, this urge was undeniable, and as a group tenet it can be seen as much
in the work of the futurists who fell in step with fascism as in the constructivists
who fell in step with communism.
Another
hallmark of modernism was the desire for a clean break with the immediate past,
meaning this generation of artists and writers had a different relationship to
the idea of drugs than the preceding generation of romantics. He explains:
“Many modernists set themselves up against the decadent individualism of the
19th century. They would look at these drug experimenters [such as Baudelaire
and Nerval] and say that their world had died in the 1890s. The days of huffing
ether and eating hashish were over.
“[Filippo
Tommaso] Marinetti of the futurists was obsessed with speed and became a
fighter ace in the second world war – there was no problematic hidden, deeper
self as far as he was concerned, just his ego intensified. And for people like
this new drugs came along like cocaine and amphetamines which were more
compatible with how they saw the world.”
It is
during the modernist period that the progressive age begins, and the idea of
the bohemian drug user becomes less important and at the same time psychology
becomes less about introspection and more about measurement and behaviourism
and the idea of social control. “The work of drug literature that really
captures this era is Brave New World because Huxley’s soma is a product of a
big pharma industrial process,” Jay explains. “And it's given out to the masses
to keep them sedated and stupefied in order to stop them from thinking too
much. And that becomes the public image of drugs in the early 20th century.”
The book
has a clear view of the current landscape and there are numerous ways in which
we can see how contemporary attitudes, approaches and fears are either at odds
with how things were 200 years ago or remain as part of a cultural continuum.
The chequered history of laughing gas especially should be of great interest to
many readers today: “There were popular nitrous oxide scenes in the 19th
century, with the idea of everybody getting together, huffing balloons and
looning around. There’s a curious thing about nitrous oxide to do with
economics though. It’s hard to synthesise so it wasn’t a thing that people did
at home. But if you were a showman you could run a nitrous oxide event at a
carnival or in a theatre, and once you had laid out the money for a tank to
hold the gas in as well as the process of synthesis, you could then make a lot
of money selling individual balloons.
“It
didn't actually spread in the 1960s despite the hippies, the bands like the
Grateful Dead who travelled round with canisters of it, and despite various
Hollywood poolside parties. It wasn’t until we developed those little canisters
they have today [for the catering profession] that it became easily
transmissible. It became democratised. But the balloon isn’t new. The drug has
returned to its roots. [The chemist] Humphry Davy was huffing from a balloon
over 200 years ago.”
As
something of a thought experiment I typed “nitrous oxide” into the search
function on my podcast app and listened to the first two listed results in
preparation for this interview. The first was an episode of Dr Suzi Gage’s Say
Why To Drugs – a short podcast with a relatively sober yet casual approach
which said that, in the greater scheme of things, the gas is relatively safe to
use, if taken with certain precautions. The second was produced by ITV and
could have been talking about an entirely different substance. The Hieronymus
Bosch-like mental image being created was one of Amsterdam hospitals
overflowing with teenage stroke victims, avoidable deaths by heart attack and
young amputees. It felt – if you were of the mind to accept the findings of the
first podcast as more reasonable and more truthful – like nothing short of a
return to the age of Reefer Madness scare-mongering.
I ask
Jay if much has actually changed on this score. “It's a lot easier to find a
spectrum of opinion than it used to be when I was young,” he begins. “With
nitrous oxide, I think the discourse around it at the moment is very shallow.
It's a bit like vaping – both of them are relatively harmless. And I’m only
saying relatively compared to the things they’re replacing – they’re not
entirely risk free of course.
“In the
case of vaping it’s smoking cigarettes that is being replaced and in the case
of nitrous oxide it’s glue and solvents. These are sensible harm reduction
alternatives, but they’re both public nuisances and very visible; and it seems
to me that’s what a lot of the conversion is actually about. Older people don’t
like seeing younger people blowing out huge clouds of vape smoke, and they
don't like having to step over empty nitrous canisters on the pavement.”
It’s one
thing drawing links from the drugs culture of 150 years ago to the drugs
culture of today, but what about the things that lie around the corner? We’re
in a time of great flux at the moment as regards substance use. Psychedelics
are in danger of gaining a veneer of respectability, but to what end? Hedonism,
the treatment of trauma or the user becoming a more efficient worker? And how
is this brave new world stacking up for people of colour and the
precariat/working classes, or the masses currently incarcerated worldwide for
personal possession of drugs? If we follow in the massive wake left by America,
we can expect some kind of soft legalisation to happen in this country over the
next decade: how do we prepare for it?
Jay says
there are notional lessons to be learned about what happens next from the
characters who populate Psychonauts but says they would have been of greatest
benefit to “the legislators, the bureaucrats, the statisticians and social
scientists of the early 20th century who created the idea of ‘good drugs’ and
‘bad drugs’”.it is the framework of “drugs” itself which needs to be
dismantled.
“If we
could get rid of that [umbrella term] then maybe we could start talking about
stimulants, for example, as a category,” he muses. “However, that would be a
category which would include Adderall, a cup of tea and methamphetamines. Are
we ready for that? But let’s look across all of the different categories, and
try and raise general understanding; and then it’s time for an evidence-led
process of trying to minimise harm to users and to also reduce those government
policies which create harm.”
Extract
follows below
Psychonauts:
An Extract
Nitrous
oxide’s enduring nickname, ‘laughing gas’, was in use by 1824, when it featured
on the poster for a variety evening at London’s Adelphi Theatre offering
‘Uncommon Illusions, Wonderful Metamorphoses, Experimental Chemistry, Animated
Paintings etc.’. The conventions of the popular nitrous oxide show were rapidly
established. A master of ceremonies, usually adopting the persona of a
scientific educator, would present the laboratory equipment, describe the
chemical properties of the gas and ask for volunteers to inhale it. Often the
first pick would be a collaborator who would scoff loudly before submitting
himself (women were not permitted) to a lungful of gas and proceeding to behave
outrageously – pirouetting, spouting poetry, spoiling for a fight – to the
delight of the audience. More volunteers would follow, each attempting to
outperform the last.
The
effects of the gas proved far more spectacular on stage than in the laboratory.
The first recorded nitrous show in the United States took place in Philadelphia
in 1814 and was described by a local printer and pamphleteer, Moses Thomas, who
gives a vivid sense of the proceedings. The experiment was part of a weekly
lecture series, and the stage that evening was blocked off from both the
laboratory equipment and the audience, heightening expectations of the
unexpected. It opened with a doctor discoursing on ‘the nature and properties
of nitrous oxide’ and demonstrating ‘a number of unimportant experiments, to
which very little attention is paid by his auditors’ before he launched into
the promised spectacle. The first volunteer, a young man of fifteen, was
presented with ‘a large bladder’ filled with ‘the exhilarating gas’, which he
inhaled, and then
“…suddenly
threw away the bag, with an air of triumphant disdain, and began to march about
the inclosure with theatric strides, until coming up close to the front row, he
perceived that one of the persons sat there held a cane athwart to defend
himself from his too near approach. This offended his pride – he instantly
burst into a paroxysm of rage: ‘That tyrant’, says he, ‘has seized my cane –
deliver it to me – this – instant – or I’ll be the death of you!’ At the same
moment jumping over the desk, and grappling with the man who had the cane, he
overturned every thing that stood in his way, and it required the united
efforts of four or five men to hold him down, till the effect of the gas
ceased, and he turned round to the company with an air of good-humoured
hilarity.”
More
volunteers followed, and exhibited ‘different degrees of animation, or
ferocity, dancing, kicking, jumping, fencing, and occasionally boxing anyone
that stood in their way.’ The gas allowed the conscious mind to escape from the
shackles of the body, but in so doing it left behind a body at the whims of
unpredictable or automatic forces. These often seemed to release a second and
hidden personality, which the popular lecture format mined for entertainment in
a manner similar to the stage hypnotism shows of today. On stage, the subject’s
inner experience on the gas was incidental; the setting was constructed to make
the most of its external manifestations. The moment of return to waking
consciousness was not interrogated for mystical revelation, but held up for
confused hilarity.
Nitrous
oxide was ideally suited to the travelling carnival-show circuit that expanded
across the wide and sparsely populated interior of antebellum North America and
Canada. It could be presented as both a miracle of modern science and a raucous
entertainment, a novelty, both mind-boggling and edifying, that could play out
every night for years in front of a fresh and astonished crowd. The gas tank,
tubes and breathing bags required a capital outlay that placed the
entertainment beyond the reach of private individuals, but thereafter the
profits per dose of gas were considerable. The poet Robert Southey’s line
comparing the gas to ‘the atmosphere of heaven’ was the perfect advertising
slogan, frequently blazoned across marquees and posters. Entrepreneurs,
innovators, medicine men, hucksters, grifters, mountebanks and frontier
individualists of all stripes turned their hands to it. In 1832 the
eighteen-year-old Samuel Colt toured a nitrous oxide show from Canada to
Maryland, complete with mobile laboratory, under his old family name of
‘Coult’: he dosed an estimated 20,000 volunteers at 25 cents a time, using his
takings to fund trials and prototypes of his repeating revolver pistol.
The Wild
Frontier: Mike Jay On Psychonauts & The History Of Drugs. By John Doran.
The Quietus, May 9 2023.
A
provocative and original history of the scientists and writers, artists and
philosophers who took drugs to explore the hidden regions of the mind.
Until
the twentieth century, scientists investigating the effects of drugs on the
mind did so by experimenting on themselves. Vivid descriptions of drug
experiences sparked insights across the mind sciences, pharmacology, medicine,
and philosophy. Accounts in journals and literary fiction inspired a fascinated
public to make their own experiments—in scientific demonstrations, on exotic
travels, at literary salons, and in occult rituals.
But after
1900 drugs were increasingly viewed as a social problem, and the long tradition
of self-experimentation began to disappear.
From
Sigmund Freud's experiments with cocaine to William James's epiphany on nitrous
oxide, Mike Jay brilliantly recovers a lost intellectual tradition of
drug-taking that fed the birth of psychology, the discovery of the unconscious,
and the emergence of modernism. Today, as we embrace novel cognitive enhancers
and psychedelics, the experiments of the original psychonauts reveal the deep
influence of mind-altering drugs on Western science, philosophy, and culture.
Mike Jay
Interview on Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind. Kinokuniya, May 2, 2023.
"You
do it to yourself" sang Radiohead. Well
that was certainly true of some of the subjects of this episode.
Historian
of the mind Mike Jay returns to the Bureau to tell of the intrepid scientists,
artists, writers and thinkers who were experimenting with psychoactive
substances and recording their experiences in the Victorian age and
onwards. But the notion that researchers might partake
of drugs if they were going to have something valuable to say about them became
unacceptable.
And we
hear about the first British psychedelic experiences of Aleister Crowley, W B
Yeats, Havelock Ellis and Maude Gone along with some of the lesser known London
Psychonauts huffing ether, chloroform and nitrous oxide in the pursuit of
knowledge during the 19th century counterculture.
The
London Psychonauts. By Stephen Coats. Bureau of Lost Culture, April 30, 2023.
Mike
Jay's Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind (Yale UP, 2023) is a
provocative and original history of the scientists and writers, artists and
philosophers who took drugs to explore the hidden regions of the mind.
Until
the twentieth century, scientists investigating the effects of drugs on the
mind did so by experimenting on themselves. Vivid descriptions of drug
experiences sparked insights across the mind sciences, pharmacology, medicine,
and philosophy. Accounts in journals and literary fiction inspired a fascinated
public to make their own experiments--in scientific demonstrations, on exotic
travels, at literary salons, and in occult rituals. But after 1900 drugs were
increasingly viewed as a social problem, and the long tradition of
self-experimentation began to disappear. From Sigmund Freud's experiments with
cocaine to William James's epiphany on nitrous oxide, Mike Jay brilliantly
recovers a lost intellectual tradition of drug-taking that fed the birth of
psychology, the discovery of the unconscious, and the emergence of modernism.
Today, as we embrace novel cognitive enhancers and psychedelics, the
experiments of the original psychonauts reveal the deep influence of
mind-altering drugs on Western science, philosophy, and culture.
Mike Jay
talks with Claire Clark, a medical
educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of
Kentucky’s College of Medicine.
Psychonauts
: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind. Yale University Press, 2023.
New Books Network, April 2, 2023.
More
than fifty years before it was isolated as a drug, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
dreamed up cocaine. In the early years of the nineteenth century, the poet was
increasingly dependent on opium, a “free-agency-annihilating Poison,” as he
called it, which sapped his will and made him despondent. “A Gymnastic Medicine
is wanting,” he wrote in his notebook during the winter of 1808-09, “a system
of forcing the Will & motive faculties into action.” The medicine he envisaged
would be a kind of anti-opium, a tonic to kick-start the nerves, restore the
mind’s athletic powers, and repair the broken link between volition and
accomplishment. It would be a second, health-giving “poison” to work on the
first.
Coleridge’s
hope was a characteristic expression of the drug culture he belonged to. He was
intimately acquainted with how drugs shaped his inner life, and his habit of
self-interrogation, the minute attention he paid to his states of mind, was
shared by his friends and collaborators. Thomas De Quincey, his former
secretary, turned his own, unconquerable opium addiction into a wildly popular
autobiography, “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater” (1821), in which he
mapped the buried palaces of the mind. The young chemist Humphry Davy, whom
Coleridge befriended, experimented with the psychoactive properties of nitrous
oxide, administering it to willing subjects and logging their descriptions of
heightened imaginative capacities. And Charles Lamb, the poet’s former
schoolmate, placed alcoholism under the microscope in “Confessions of a
Drunkard” (1822), an essay in which he considered, under the guise of his alter
ego, Elia, the perverse dependence of his reasoning abilities on intoxication.
In each case, drugs figured not only as sensory agents, sources of pleasure or
pain, but as a kind of education: tools you could think with, or try to think
against.
Mind-altering
substances were available in the West long before De Quincey’s opium voyages or
Davy’s gas experiments. During the sixteenth century, the stimulants that
arrived in Europe from other continents—coffee, tea, chocolate, tobacco—were
valued chiefly for their physiological virtues: tea was believed to remove
headaches, coffee to help the circulation of fluids. (Not everyone was
convinced: a London pamphlet published in 1674, purporting to speak for
“several Thousands of Buxome Good-Women,” complained that coffee, by “Drying up
the Radical Moisture” of the body, had “Eunucht” their husbands.) But drugs
were also known to affect the workings of the mind. In 1608, the philosopher
Francis Bacon took purgative pills to address “a symptom of melancholy”; the
scientist Robert Hooke, who, as the scholar Lisa Jardine has argued, developed
a “regimen of regular drug-taking” to manage stress, observed in his diary how
particular substances seemed to influence his intellect. (“Took Childs vomit [.
. .] Slept little at night. My fantcy very cleer.”) Drugs with psychoactive
properties were part of a larger quest to fine-tune the human condition, making
the business of living more pleasurable or more bearable.
In
“Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind” (Yale), the cultural
historian Mike Jay argues that the post-1800 use of mind-altering drugs was
nonetheless qualitatively different from the experiments of previous centuries.
What set someone like De Quincey apart, Jay writes, was that he used opium “as
a device for exploring the hidden recesses of his mind,” dosing not merely to
self-medicate, or to escape the world, but to access mental spaces unreachable
without it. De Quincey was a “psychonaut,” plumbing the depths of his
consciousness, embarking on fantastic inner quests. His work, like Davy’s,
“marked the beginning of the modern understanding of the drug experience”: a
pattern of pioneering inquiry into novel states of mind and the limits of
“objective” truth.
Jay is a
leading expert on the history of Western drug use, and “Psychonauts” is the
latest in a series of excellent studies in which he has investigated the roots
of a kind of psychoactive exploration that we tend to associate with the
nineteen-fifties and sixties. The upstarts of the counterculture, Jay notes in
“Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century” (2000), had their reasons
for claiming to be “the first generation to discover drugs.” But, in doing so,
they obscured a culture of psychological, philosophical, and aesthetic
experimentation that predated the emergence of “drugs” as a problematic
category, and of the “drug addict” as a pathologized type. Recovering that
culture requires venturing inside the worlds that each substance opened up.
When a psychonaut breathed ether or injected cocaine, where was he hoping to
travel?
The
technology of nineteenth-century drug exploration, in both professional
scientific circles and amateur intellectual ones, was the self-experiment.
Since the seventeenth century, scientists had considered this the best method
to understand substances that affected moods and perceptions: trying them on
other human subjects was a risk, and animal experiments could provide only
external indications of mental changes. By the end of the eighteenth century,
when Davy inhaled his first dose of nitrous oxide, the self-experiment was an
established practice, with its own protocols and reporting conventions. Its
Achilles’ heel, for some, was the way it mixed competing kinds of observation.
As the young Sigmund Freud, investigating cocaine as a medical student in the
eighteen-eighties, realized, it involved a self-splitting, an impossible
assertion of two types of truth at once—that of the researcher and that of the
experimental subject.
This
tension defined the psychonauts’ project. Davy experimented under the aegis of
Thomas Beddoes, a physician who believed that the new science of pneumatic
chemistry—the study of gases—could supply a revolutionary cure for lung
diseases such as tuberculosis. At Beddoes’s Pneumatic Institution, in Bristol,
the pair administered nitrous oxide to consumptives and palsy sufferers,
assessing the miraculous way in which one patient, who had been unable to walk
without crutches, responded to the surging “muscular pressure” that the drug
seemed to supply. But their experiments soon took a less therapeutic turn.
Davy’s “highly pleasurable” experience of the gas, coupled with Beddoes’s
own—under its influence, he felt “bathed all over with a bucket of good
humour”— indicated that it might benefit healthy subjects as much as ill ones.
It produced ecstatic sensations, but also seemed to stimulate the intellect and
the imagination.
The team
began to study healthy volunteers, among them Coleridge and the poet Robert
Southey, who described their intoxications in a richly metaphorical style: a
“language of feeling,” as Davy put it. One subject, a local doctor, compared
the gas’s revelations to “reading a sublime passage in poetry when
circumstances contribute to awaken the finest sympathies of the soul.” Davy himself
enjoyed walking alone beside the river on summer nights, “sipping away” at a
bag of nitrous oxide and occasionally losing consciousness. In late 1799,
having exposed himself to huge quantities of the gas in an airtight chamber, he
reported that he “lost all connection with external things,” which had ceased
to possess their own reality. “Nothing exists but thoughts!” he blurted out,
coming down from his high. In the chamber, for a brief moment, the gas had
transported him to a place that was constructed entirely by his individual
consciousness.
Such
revelations, impossible to communicate, were easily mockable. In the early
decades of the nineteenth century, Davy and his circle were satirized as a
bunch of dreamy, self-important metaphysicians, “blown up” with their own
pomposity. By mid-century, the mind-altering properties of nitrous oxide had
been mostly forgotten; along with ether, a volatile compound with similar
effects, it was firmly entrenched in the sphere of medicine, as a path to
painless surgeries. Meanwhile, a fresh generation of scientists had begun to
challenge the practice of self-experimentation, which they considered an
unreliable, romantic approach to the study of the mind. “Subjective experience
was being pushed to the margins,” Jay writes: the new, “objectivist” science
distrusted personal observation. A true study of drugs, its exponents believed,
would require precision instruments, stress the analysis of external
data—dosage, symptoms, times of onset—and record the results exclusively in
notebooks, not essays or poems. It would thereby avoid “introspection,” which,
as Jay writes, risked shaping “mental phenomena into narratives pleasing to the
self-observer.” Such creativity might inspire great art, but it produced bad
science.
To a stubborn
handful of psychonauts, though, the most “objective” data about drugs were
precisely those culled from experience. Jay foregrounds Jacques-Joseph Moreau,
a mid-nineteenth-century French psychiatrist who encountered hashish—the
concentrated, hallucinogenic extract of the cannabis plant—while travelling in
the Middle East. Hashish was then known to Westerners mostly secondhand, its
effects filtered through the lens of fictions such as “The Arabian Nights.”
When Moreau took a strong dose in 1840, however, he found that it was uniquely
educative in the psychiatric context. Each of the effects he experienced could
be read as a symptom of mental illness: the nervous excitement, the distortion
of space and time, the hallucinatory perceptions. Hashish took him to a place
that looked and felt like insanity, then led him, temporarily, inside it. It
allowed him to understand his patients with greater nuance: he could now
recognize what “the ravings of a madman” were like, having “raved himself.”
“Personal experience,” he wrote, “is the criterion of truth here.”
The
science of private experience inspired explorations beyond hashish. Benjamin
Paul Blood, an American philosopher and mystic, observed that the revelations
he received while on ether were impossible to achieve in the “normal sanity” of
the mind. Like Moreau’s heightened grasp of mental illness, their profundity
depended on a certain derangement. The Harvard philosopher William James, who
read Blood’s work, was prompted to self-experiment with nitrous oxide in 1882,
recording an “intense metaphysical illumination” akin to Blood’s own. The truth
of this illumination, James believed, lay in its incommunicability. Like the
mystical states of mind he described in his landmark study “The Varieties of
Religious Experience” (1902), it had to be “directly experienced,” and this was
what made it significant. That the rational mind could not access it proved
that human consciousness was not singular but shifting, multiple, many-layered.
“Rational consciousness is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about
it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of
consciousness entirely different,” James wrote. He called this vision of
reality the “multiverse.”
Moreau
was careful to clarify that hashish, by generating the symptoms of mental
illness, had not really driven him mad. During his intoxication, he had
remained aware of himself and where he was, finding that he could “observe
calmly,” Jay writes, “as a procession of impossible phenomena marched through
his mind.” Other hashish users reported a similar feeling of self-splitting, of
being both absorbed in the drug’s visions and conscious of their unreality. In
his Middle Eastern travelogue “The Lands of the Saracen” (1855), the American
writer Bayard Taylor recounted being transported, in his imagination, to the
Great Pyramid of Cheops, which was constructed of “huge, square plugs of
Cavendish tobacco.” Even at the height of the drug’s influence, Taylor wrote,
he knew he was “really” in a Damascus hotel. Moreau called this form of double
consciousness an état mixte, a strange commingling of waking life and dream.
Using hashish to treat his mentally ill patients, he theorized that it might
enable a form of constructive therapy, in which hallucinations could be
understood in the light of reason.
This
idea helped reframe the psychonaut as a rational, composed observer, not merely
exploring new worlds but ferrying some benefit home. Later in the century,
those associated with the occult revival sought to instrumentalize drug use in
a different way. In 1855, the French mystic Louis-Alphonse Cahagnet, who
maintained that hashish could act as a portal to parallel worlds, passed his
secrets to a travelling American, Paschal Beverly Randolph: a “Black
Rosicrucian sex magician,” Jay writes, who specialized in “marital problems,”
and who found in hashish his “defining magical aid.” “Cahagnet, myself, and
others, have been enabled to pass through eternal doors, forever closed to the
embodied man save by this celestial key,” Randolph enthused. He believed that
the drug’s état mixte allowed for insights that would “leap the world’s
barriers.” He also believed that such insights could be bottled and sold. In
1862, when he returned to the U.S., he created a range of hashish-based elixirs
promising clairvoyant powers, which he priced at four dollars each.
Spiritualists
saw other possibilities in a drug-induced double consciousness. The
London-based Society for Psychical Research, with which James was affiliated,
was founded in 1882 to study questions “outside the boundaries of recognised
science”: apparitions, mystical experiences, life after death. Two of its
members, Edmund Gurney and Frederick Myers, developed theories of multiple
consciousness related to James’s, proposing the existence of the “secondary
self,” or “subliminal self”—buried strata of being that could be harnessed via
hypnosis, séance, or drugs. Their fellow-spiritualist George Wyld, a physician,
described inhaling chloroform for pain relief, only to see his soul, “clothed,”
“standing about two yards” away. Wyld theorized that anesthetics eliminated
pain by literally expelling the soul from the body. (In H. G. Wells’s short
story “Under the Knife,” from 1896, a chloroformed patient feels his spirit
drawn upward and outward, soaring into the stratosphere.) Maud Gonne, who
undertook occult experiments with the poet W. B. Yeats, sought similar effects
in hashish, hoping to free her spirit and have it travel, “quick as thought,”
into astral dimensions.
Gonne,
at the start of one trip, visualized a “tall shadow” at the foot of her bed.
The apparition instructed her to go where she wished, but to remember the way
back: “You must always keep the thought of your body as a thread by which to
return.” Among psychonauts, getting back—holding on to the thread that
connected them to the world—mattered because it was what separated the
voluntary hallucinations of drug use from the involuntary ones of madness. The
British poet Arthur Symons, a prodigious hashish user, published his major
critical work, “The Symbolist Movement in Literature,” in 1899. Five of the
French poets he discussed—Gérard de Nerval, Théophile Gautier, Charles
Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine—were hashishins, and he used
their work to sketch a vision of literature as numinous, immaterial, gesturing
toward an “unseen reality apprehended by the consciousness.” De Nerval had
eventually lapsed into madness, and Symons argued that this was because he had
let go of the thread that anchored him: “Leaving the concrete world on these
brief voyages, the fear is that we may not have the strength to return, or that
we may lose the way back.”
In the
last decades of the century, using mind-altering drugs wasn’t always about
trying to escape the world. Sometimes it was a matter of adaptation,
calibrating the brain to cope better with reality’s demands. Freud’s
experiments with cocaine in the eighteen-eighties—first on himself, then on
volunteers—centered on the possibility of a cure for neurasthenia, an
increasingly diagnosed condition whose symptoms included headaches, anxiety,
brain fog, and chronic fatigue. According to the disease’s first theorist, the
American neurologist George Miller Beard, neurasthenia was a distinctively
modern ailment, its effects caused by civilization itself: the rapid growth of
business and industry, the punctuality demanded by pocket watches and train
timetables.
Freud,
who self-diagnosed as a neurasthenic, had been struck by the medical literature
on coca, the South American plant from which cocaine had been isolated, in
1860. Early reports suggested that it might boost the nervous system’s
energetic capacity; Paolo Mantegazza, an Italian neurologist who had consumed
the drug, noted a sense of being “drenche[d]” in a “new strength,” “as a sponge
soaks itself with water.” Freud began to take small doses, and reported feeling
“more vigorous and capable of work.” (The tone of his accounts, Jay writes,
flitted between fervid reflection and restrained appraisal: a “carefully
modulated solution to the paradoxes of self-experiment.”) Cocaine, Freud
thought, was a miracle drug that would help the mind keep pace with the world’s
accelerations. Under its influence, neurasthenics might continue being
neurasthenic, working harder and faster than was healthy, but with fewer
obvious symptoms of breakdown.
And yet
breakdown was increasingly apparent. Cocaine was soon available in pharmacies,
and new, more efficient methods of consumption, such as subcutaneous injection,
led to high-profile reports of wild behavior, excess, and dangerous
metamorphosis. In 1887, the American neurologist William Hammond described
injecting himself with a large dose of cocaine, “becoming an irresponsible
agent,” and waking up to find his library trashed. (The year before, Robert
Louis Stevenson had published “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” in
which a mysterious white powder prompts a monstrous transformation.) In 1884,
Freud prescribed a cocaine regimen to Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, one of his
senior colleagues at the Institute of Physiology in Vienna. Fleischl-Marxow was
in the grip of an advanced morphine addiction; Freud hoped that the new drug
would act as an antidote, lessening withdrawal symptoms. Within weeks,
Fleischl-Marxow had a cocaine addiction to match his morphine one, developing
insomnia and paranoia. He began using the drug self-destructively, lying to his
friends, trying to hide his habit. It was as if, Jay writes, he “had been taken
over by a second self, an alien or demonic force.”
The
process by which drugs were stigmatized, at the end of the nineteenth century,
is the subject of Jay’s final chapters. In his telling, it is a story of loss.
In the eighteen-eighties, when Fleischl-Marxow was suffering, drug addiction
was a new concept. The Society for the Study and Cure of Inebriety, led by
members of the British medical profession, was founded in 1884; in 1885,
cocaine addiction was identified as a novel condition. Gradually, even milder
psychoactives were placed under the now ominous category of “drugs,” and
assumptions about the people who used them hardened into orthodoxy. Drugs were
reconceived as antisocial—a means by which egotists avoided shared
responsibilities—or as the preserve of those believed to lack self-control: the
poor, the “mentally unfit,” the criminal classes. Between 1914 and 1916, new
laws were passed in the U.S., Britain, and France to ban or restrict the drug
trade, turning psychonauts into delinquents, voyagers beyond the bounds of
civil society.
If their
work endures, it’s because it had less to do with substances than with the
self. In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, the rediscovery of psychoactive
experimentation involved new drugs and techniques, but it drew on older stories
about human consciousness. William Burroughs praised the British engineer James
Lee’s writings on morphine and cocaine, describing them as “conjured from the
unpolluted air of the nineteenth century.” Both Aldous Huxley (experimenting
with mescaline) and Robert Graves (mushrooms) quoted Wordsworth’s poetry to
convey the tenor of their experiences. In one sense, their imitative approach
echoed their predecessors’. Psychonauting, from Davy’s science of the sublime
to Symons’s numinous readings, had always been referential, metaphorically framed.
The quest was for narratives of self-actualization, rather than for scientific
models. “From fountain to fountain I danced in graceful mazes with inimitable
houris, whose foreheads were bound with fillets of jasmine,” the
twenty-one-year-old American Fitz Hugh Ludlow wrote in 1857, weaving his
hashish dreams into the familiar tapestry of “The Arabian Nights.” Telling
their stories was partly what brought the psychonauts back down to earth.
Published
in the print edition of the April 24 & May 1, 2023, issue, with the
headline “High Achievers.”
The
Forgotten Drug Trips of the Nineteenth Century.
By Clare Bucknell. The New Yorker, April 17, 2023
Before
writing this review, I got hold of some tiny canisters of nitrous oxide, filled
a balloon or two and, watched by my bemused wife, breathed in the gas. It gave
me no more of a buzz than smoking a cigarette. I must have been doing it wrong
because, according to Mike Jay’s compelling history of narcotic
self-exploration, it was when the chemist Humphry Davy began inhaling this
newly discovered gas in Bristol in 1799, sometimes in the company of the poet
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, that he started a revolution. While high, Davy
declared that “Nothing exists but thoughts!”
This
insight wasn’t new, of course. Bishop Berkeley had made it the cornerstone of
his philosophy. Yet for Davy, it felt transformative. Another laughing gas
lover, the psychologist William James, later observed that there are two types
of people: the once-born and the twice-born. The once-born accept the world as
it is and get on with it. The twice-born have a life-changing insight or
vision. Some become questing, drug-ingesting “psychonauts” as a result – and it
is they who form the focus of this fascinating book.
The
medical applications of drugs have sometimes become clear only after their use
in less formal settings. After Davy’s experiments, for instance, nitrous oxide
first became a staple of vaudeville turns. Volunteers would breathe the gas,
then caper about, while onlookers tittered. Then in Connecticut in 1844, a
dentist named Horace Wells, who happened to be in one of these audiences, saw a
participant injure himself but experience no pain. Wells introduced nitrous
oxide into his work and thereby helped inaugurate a new era in anaesthetics.
Similarly, after Sigmund Freud’s self-experimentation with cocaine in Austria
in the 1880s, one of his colleagues adopted the drug as a numbing agent in eye
surgery.
The
reputation of drugs and their ability to shock has ebbed and flowed. Jay
smartly signals one of the sea changes with reference to Sherlock Holmes. In
the 1890s, Arthur Conan Doyle presented his detective’s cocaine habit as the
exotic eccentricity of a bohemian. Then, in 1904, he said primly that Watson
had “weaned” the great man from his “drug mania”. One reason for the shift in
tone was that Collier’s, the company publishing Conan Doyle’s stories in the
United States, was in the midst of an anti-drugs crusade. Broadly, Jay presents
the 19th century as “the age of the individual”, in which almost everyone had a
jolly time trying out new substances, and the 20th century as “the progressive
era”, when things got serious.
Jay also
believes that drug experimentation facilitated the birth of “the modern mind”.
But there’s no rigorous analysis of what this might mean. Jean Lorrain’s
ether-fuelled stories in the 1890s, we’re told, “anticipate” the stream of
consciousness approach to fiction. Cubism and surrealism arose within a
generation. But was this coincidence or influence? Certainly, Jay can name
artists who were inspired by drug-taking. Many, of course, weren’t. Later he asserts:
“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.” But this wasn’t all modernists
tried to do, nor did all modernism try to do it.
Nevertheless,
the author’s central point, that the history of experimentation is more
venerable and complex than many assume, is clearly right and not something you
get taught at school. The complexities continue: the UK government recently
announced its intention to criminalise possession of nitrous oxide. On the
other hand, recent research into various drugs traditionally seen as illicit
shows their promise in treating a range of mental-health conditions. Some even
talk of a “psychedelic renaissance”. If that’s so, it won’t only be the
psychonauts who have been twice-born, but the drugs themselves.
Psychonauts
by Mike Jay review – the drug-takers who changed history. By Thomas W.
Hodgkinson. The Guardian, May 10, 2023.
