What could be more festive than spending a night locked in an art gallery with a dozen reindeer and a fridge full of psychedelic drugs?Soma, Carsten Höller‘s current installation in a former railway station in Berlin, purports to be offering exactly that. A pen running the length of the Hamburger Bahnhof, now the city’s contemparary art museum, contains 12 reindeer, 24 canaries, eight mice and two flies. Giant toadstool sculptures are planted on a mushroom clock that the reindeer can turn with their antlers, and at the centre is a mushroom-shaped “floating hotel” – a bed on a platform complete with minibar, yours for €1,000 a night. (There’s also a raffle giving away free places.)

The twist is that this is meant to be a scientific experiment, in which half the reindeer have been fed “fly agaric” mushrooms, which they consume naturally in the wilds of Siberia. It makes their urine hallucinogenic (some people believe that this is the origin of the story of Santa Claus’s sleigh being pulled by flying, red-nosed reindeers).

The urine is collected by handlers and stored in fridges by the walls, which also hold both dried and fresh fly agaric mushrooms. By day they’re locked, but at night the fridges are opened, allowing people staying over to sample the contents. However, because only half the reindeer are fed the mushrooms, it’s impossible to know which bottles, if any, contain hallucinogenic urine.

Tanja Klein, 28, won a competition to spend the night in the museum with her boyfriend, Sachar Kriwoj, 30. “I wasn’t going to go and drink six bottles of reindeer urine to find out,” says Klein. “I’m not into drugs, I’m into art.”

Höller hasn’t tried the urine, but he has tried the mushrooms. “They’re very unpleasant,” he says, speaking from his home in Stockholm. “And you throw up. The first four times I tried it, I became comatose. Then you wake up, throw up, and you don’t know where you are, or how long you’ve been asleep. The sixth time, I started to chant like a Tibetan monk.”

The title Soma comes from the name of the sacred libation drunk by the Indo-Persian followers of the Vedic religion, Hinduism’s 5,000-year-old parent. Its ancient text, the Rigveda, contains 114 hymns to “creative juice”, supposed to offer immortality. The recipe was lost, but in the 1960s researcher Robert Wasson hypo-thesised that soma was based on the fly agaric mushroom.

Höller’s installation sets out to test this hypothesis – and the possibility that art may change perceptions even more effectively than drugs. It takes the form of an experiment set in a playground: from that giant “double mushroom clock” the reindeer move with their antlers, to the “mice square”, based on an actual playground in Paris designed by sculptor Pierre Székely.

One side of the hall is the “test”, the other the “control”. Reindeer on the test side are fed the mushrooms. (“At least in principle,” says Höller, helpfully.) On each side, the reindeer urine is spread on the food of the other animals. From observation posts, visitors watch the behaviour of the canaries, mice and houseflies for signs of intoxication and form their own conclusions. “The experiment is completed in the minds of the visitors,” says Höller. “It’s very unscientific.” In other words, it’s an open question whether the reindeer are even fed the mushrooms at all: the power of suggestion makes you likely to observe something that may not take place.

Experimentation has been a part of Höller’s work since he began his career as an artist while still an agricultural research scientist in the early 1990s. He went on to install 2006′s Test Site, in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, which allowed gallery-goers to throw themselves down double-helix slides.

Overnight visitors to Soma have reported some strange events. Florian Wojnar, a friend of Höller’s, spent the night in the museum with his 11-year-old son. “He was really excited, because at some point, there were seven reindeer on one side and five on the other. In the morning, we counted again and there were six on each. I never saw them move.”

Dorothée Brill, the museum’s lead curator, says: “As far as we can tell, nobody’s done anything they shouldn’t have.” Staff at the restaurant, however, report that some guests “drink the minibar dry”.

It’s hard to resist the suspicion that the exhibition is intended as a microcosm of society, an allegory for democracy, with extra privileges and more fun for those able to pay. And, if this is an experiment, make no mistake: it’s you in the lab. Meanwhile, those tempted to make a Christmas visit should bear in mind that the Hamburger Bahnhof is closed on Christmas Eve. “The reindeer have somewhere else to be that day,” the museum explained.

• Soma is at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, until 6 February. Details:somainberlin.org

By the end of planning her new exhibition, Caroline Fisher had come to an interesting conclusion. “It’s even harder to exhibit rats than drugs,” she says. The Home Office eventually granted her the necessary licences to exhibit a bottle of heroin, a ball of opium, some morphine, a selection of magic mushrooms, a peyote cactus, some hallucinogenic snuff and a variety of Victorian high-street pharmacy favourites including cocaine mouth lozenges and tincture of Indian cannabis – “as many drugs as we could get our hands on”. But Health and Safety weren’t having the rats. “We wanted to recreate a 7m-long Rat Park,” Fisher sighs, referring to the classic 1970s Canadian experiment that showed opiate addiction in rodents was determined not by the drugs they took, but the living conditions they took them in.

By Johnny Davis for the Guardian

Fisher is the co-curator of High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture at the Wellcome Collection in London, and offers a history of narcotics that feels fresh. After all, we hardly need another account of the Romantic poets getting carried away with hashish, or more woolly recollections from acid house revellers who outwitted the police on the M25 while going to Sunrise.

“I don’t think anything similar has been done before,” says Mike Jay, the exhibition’s co-curator and author of an accompanying book. “There’s always been two different discourses, the ‘drug culture underground’ one and a rather more straight-lens way of looking at it, from a medical or political view. It’s the middle ground that feels interesting.”

High Society strives to cover as much of this middle ground as possible. It spans from pre-2000 BC chillum-style pipes fashioned from puma bones, to mephedrone and other internet-distributed synthetic stimulants of the 21st century. Along the way it takes in kava drinking in the South Pacific, betel chewing in Papua New Guinea and cocaine snorting in Weimar Germany. Tea, coffee and sugar also feature (albeit in supporting roles) and there’s plenty on the rise and fall of tobacco.

As such the exhibition is able to make its central premise: very few people live their lives without resorting to some sort of mind-altering substance. Taking drugs, it suggests, is “a universal impulse”. “Drug cultures are endlessly varied, but drugs in general are more or less ubiquitous among our species,” writes Jay. Later he quotes American anthropologist Donald Brown’s celebrated work Human Universals, which lists “mood- or consciousness-altering techniques and/or substances” as one of the essential components of human culture, along with “music, conflict resolution, language and play”. “The public perception is that drugs are this terrible thing that appeared with hippies in the 60s; that they’re a modern disease,” Jay says. “The historicality has been lost.”

The curators are at pains to underline the mutability of culture and society, and how a drug’s definition is determined by non-chemical factors such as intent behind its use, its method of administration and the social class of the user. (Nitrous oxide is a medicine when used by doctors, a drug when used for pleasure.) Even so a pattern soon establishes itself: a new mind-altering substance arrives accompanied by extravagant medical claims and counter-claims, gets enthusiastically taken up by sections of the public (usually the idle rich); then addiction and side-effects make themselves apparent over time.

“It was hard to designate drugs themselves as the problem when they were also being promoted to the public at large as the solution,” writes Jay of the nurses, doctors and military officers who were treating local infections with morphine injections in the 1880s, ushering in the first “morphinomaniacs” in the process. Elsewhere the 18th-century botanist and pioneering drug cataloguer Carl Linnaeus frowned upon coffee – he felt it sapped vitality and brought on early senility – but endorsed tobacco as a means of fighting infection. In a tract published in Leipzig in 1707, we see early adopters of tea being reprimanded for “drinking themselves to death” in the mindless pursuit of fashion. Around the same time the British literary intelligentsia waxed lyrical on the benefits of rounding an evening off with a few pipes of opium, something they believed helped digestion, fortified against fever and improved performance in the bedroom. Only alcohol seems to have maintained a constant reputation, viewed as the boorish vice of the corrupt elite in Roman times, banned across much of the Islamic world and the subject of US prohibition in the 1920s.

Still, High Society remains morally neutral. There won’t be any disclaimers. “We’re not doing, ‘Hey kids, drugs are good’, so ultimately we don’t need to do, ‘Hey kids, drugs are bad,’” reasons Jay. “Since that’s basically the entire popular discourse about drugs, it seems nice to get rid of both of them and take the subject on its own merit.”

High Society has commissioned some interactive artworks to help convey the quixotic effects of drugs on mind and body in the sober medium of an exhibition space. Joshua White was the resident artist at New York’s Fillmore East theatre during the late 60s. Using bottles of coloured liquids, hand-painted slides, lightbulbs on the end of sticks and clock faces, he projected his psychedelic “liquid light shows” on to live performances by Frank Zappa, Janis Joplin and Jefferson Airplane, among others. “Was my work best experienced on drugs? I would say so, yes,” says White, who’ll travel to the UK to install his new show at the Wellcome Collection. “Everybody had a different relationship with drugs back then, just as everybody in my parents’ generation had a different relationship with alcohol. Some people had a nice buzz; some people threw up. We would hire speed freaks for our special projects – get them to stay up all night gluing jewels on to a ball.”

There will also be a recreation of the “dreamachine”, the light-emitting cylinder built by artist Brion Gysin and William Burroughs’s “systems adviser” Ian Sommerville. “You look at it with your eyes shut in a dark room, and it supposedly recreates the hallucinatory experience,” explains Fisher.

Other contemporary artwork includes the video piece Cannabis In the UK, of artist Mark Harris reading Baudelaire’s Les Paradis Artificiels and Walter Benjamin’s Hashish in Marseilles to cannabis plants (“I hope it won’t be taken too seriously,” says Harris. “I just thought, ‘If you’re going to read to plants to make them grow, what better than to read to cannabis plants something about the effects of the drug?’”), and photographer Mark Leffingwell’s “collective intoxication” picture depicting 10,000 people gathered at the University of Colorado for a “smoke-in” to commemorate “420″, an event observed across America every 20 April to promote the legalisation of marijuana.

If none of those do the trick, there are plenty of accounts from the history of self-experimentation. There’s the study on nitrous oxide performed by 18th-century chemist Humphry Davy, who got fed up with testing the gas on rabbits, kittens and fish and took heroic quantities himself, reaching the less than empirical conclusion that “nothing exists but thoughts”. There’s the story of the family who discovered the liberty cap mushroom by accident: cooking some up for a morning broth they developed vertigo, visions and the overwhelming sensation they were dying, only to leave the house for help and forget why they had done so a few hundred metres later. (When a doctor did eventually reach them, the situation was scarcely improved by the family’s eight-year-old, whose symptoms proved unique: bursting into raucous laughter every time his terrified parents opened their mouths.) And there’s French psychiatrist Jacques-Joseph Moreau, who suggested that the low prevalence of insanity in the Arab world was down to a preference for cannabis over alcohol: testing his theory he swallowed three grams before dinner and found himself preparing to fight a duel with a bowl of candied fruit.

From more recent times there’s a photograph of “father of MDMA” and sometime US Drug Enforcement Agency employee Alexander Shulgin. Shulgin’s popularisation of ecstasy eventually gave rise to acid house, the last significant drug-led subculture. High Society largely steers clear of examining the hows and whys of such moments; in fact there’s little on why we might be drawn towards illicit drugs in the first place. “I just think it’s self-evident that people wouldn’t take drugs if they didn’t enjoy them,” Jay shrugs.

The most recent UN figures put the illegal drug trade at $320bn (£200bn) a year – the third biggest international market on the planet, after arms and oil. “2011 is the 50th anniversary of the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs,” Jay says. “That’s the 50th anniversary of global prohibition; they’ve been trying for 50 years to achieve that. What’s so ironic is that 1961 was precisely the time when the drug counterculture formed; the point where policing started to fall apart with the surge in demand that was coming. Today our culture has become even more experimental: we regard it as a good thing to try something exotic and different, in a way that it just wasn’t 50 years ago. So it’s very hard to say, ‘That’s the way we are in culture. Oh – except for drugs, which have to be hived off.’”

Given that more people take more drugs than at any other time in history, you might wonder if they’ll ever be part of a counterculture again. At a time when Keith Richards is a bestselling author off the back of his national treasure status as a chemical dustbin, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has taken steps to decriminalise marijuana possession in California and Prince Harry is found inhaling “hippy crack”, it’s difficult to see how drugs could be more mainstream. “I wouldn’t be surprised if in five years, marijuana wasn’t fully legalised all over the US,” says Leffingwell. “Most people don’t see it as any more harmful than having a beer.”

Others suggest that the seeds of a new, drug-led counterculture are all around us. “I think smart drugs, things that boost your IQ such as Modafinil, could lend themselves to certain music,” says Jay. “Very techy electronica.”

To return to High Society’s premise, then: the drugs we consume may change – from over-the-counter laudanum in Victorian times, to over-the-internet mephedrone today – but the human relationship with them remains strangely constant. “Nothing’s changed,” says White. “The form changes, the fickleness changes – but our cravings stay the same.”

High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture is at the Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE from 11 Nov to 27 Feb. wellcomecollection.org

THE GIST

• Acoustic archaeology is an emerging field that melds acoustical analysis and old-fashioned bone-hunting.
• Ancient people created fun house-like temples that featured scary sound effects.
• Some of the sites were likely built by people who took sensory-altering drugs.

Researchers are uncovering the secrets of ancient civilizations who built fun house-like temples that may have scared the pants off worshipers with scary sound effects, light shows and perhaps drug-induced psychedelic trips.
By Eric Niiler for Discovery News

The emerging field of acoustic archaeology is a marriage of high-tech acoustic analysis and old-fashioned bone-hunting. The results of this scientific collaboration is a new understanding of cultures who used sound effects as entertainment, religion and a form of political control.

Miriam Kolar, a researcher at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research and Acoustics, has been studying the 3,000 year-old Chavin culture in the high plains of Peru. Kolar and her colleagues have been mapping a maze of underground tunnels, drains and hallways in which echoes don’t sound like echoes.

“The structures could be physically disorienting and the acoustic environment is very different than the natural world,” Kolar said. Ancient drawings from the Chavin culture show a people who were fascinated with sensory experiences — ancient hippies if you will.

“The iconography shows people mixed with animal features in altered states of being,” said Kolar, who is presenting her recent work at a conference in Cancun, Mexico this week. “There is peyote and mucus trails out of the nose indicative of people using psychoactive plant substances. They were taking drugs and having a hallucinogenic experience.”

If that wasn’t enough, the mazes at Chavin de Huantar also include air ducts that use sunlight to produce distorted shadows of the maze’s human participants. And sound waves from giant marine shells found in the maze in 2001 may have produced a frequency that actually rattled the eyeballs of those San Pedro cactus-using ancients, Kolar said.

“We consider sound to be important,” said Kolar. “We’ve gathered a lot of data and we’re finally starting to publish it.”

The Chavin de Huantar site in Peru isn’t the only place where sound played an important role. The Mayan rulers at Chichen Itza in the Yucatan also figured out how to use sound for crowd control. David Lubman, an acoustic engineer who has spent the past 12 years studying the Mayan site, says a strange bird-like echo from the Kukulkan temple was actually constructed on purpose.

“It’s sort of spooky,” Lubman said from Irvine, Calif. “It’s not an ordinary echo.”

Lubman’s analysis compared the acoustic soundprint of the quetzal bird, which was revered by Mayans, to the sound of the echo at Chichen Itza. The two sounds matched.

Lublin said the secret is in the acoustic properties of the steep staircase on the temple’s front.

Other new research presented at this week’s Acoustical Society of America conference in Cancun shows that Mayan rulers figured out how to build a public address system in the site’s giant ball court. That allowed kings to address hundreds of warriors and subjects without screaming.

In England, British researchers are using modern tools of acoustics to figure out what drumming noises may have sounded like to ancient visitors to Stonehenge.

Listen to the fascinating BBC Radio documentary here

But documents obtained by the American writer Hank Albarelli suggest that rather than simple ‘ergot’ there was a strong possibility that the symptoms and the nature of the outbreak were not a tragic accident. In his research in to the mysterious death of the CIA biochemist Frank Olson and his post-war work on LSD and its uses as a biochemical weapon he got hold of papers implying Olson’s connection with the Pont St Esprit outbreak.

Mike follows up the claims talking to experts in LSD and its impact, historians of the cold-war search for the perfect biochemical weapon and agricultural scientists specialising in ergot poisoning. He also visits the town of Pont St Esprit and talks to one survivor, the local postman Leon Armundier, about the events of 1951. Leon describes of the horrors he faced as a young man, being forced into a straight-jacket for a week as burning sensations and images of snakes raged around him.
Many in the town are uneasy at re-opening the old story about Le Pain Maudit – the evil bread – preferring the establishment ‘truth’ that it was just a tragic accident. But there are some who believe a proper examination of the facts still hasn’t taken place.

The French Media

How one French magazine covered the incident in 1951.

Victim

Leon Armunier, now 86, was a victim of Le Pain Maudit.

CIA Document

Contemporary CIA document referring to Pont Saint Esprit.

The Hospital

Local hospital, now closed, where the victims were taken.

Pont Saint Esprit by the River Rhone

In the course of history many more people have died for their drink and their dope than have died for their religion or their country. The craving for ethyl alcohol and the opiates has been stronger, in these millions, than the love of God, of home, of children; even of life. Their cry was not for liberty or death; it was for death preceded by enslavement. There is a paradox here, and a mystery. Why should such multitudes of men and women be so ready to sacrifice themselves for a cause so utterly hopeless and in ways so painful and so profoundly humiliating?

To this riddle there is, of course, no simple or single answer. Human beings are immensely complicated creatures, living simultaneously in a half dozen different worlds. Each individual is unique and, in a number of respects, unlike all the other members of the species. None of our motives is unmixed, none of our actions can be traced back to a single source and, in any group we care to study, behavior patterns that are observably similar may be the result of many constellations of dissimilar causes.

Thus, there are some alcoholics who seem to have been biochemically predestined to alcoholism (Among rats, as Prof. Roger Williams, of the University of Texas, has shown, some are born drunkards; some are born teetotalers and will never touch the stuff.) Other alcoholics have been foredoomed not by some inherited defect in their biochemical make-up, but by their neurotic reactions to distressing events in their childhood or adolescence. Again, others embark upon their course of slow suicide as a result of mere imitation and good fellowship because they have made such an “excellent adjustment to their group” – a process which, if the group happens to be criminal, idiotic or merely ignorant, can bring only disaster to the well-adjusted individual. Nor must we forget that large class of addicts who have taken to drugs or drink in order to escape from physical pain. Aspirin, let us remember, is a very recent invention. Until late in the Victorian era, “poppy and mandragora,” along with henbane and ethyl alcohol, were the only pain relievers available to civilized man. Toothache, arthritis and neuralgia could, and frequently did, drive men and women to become opium addicts.

De Quincey, for example, first resorted to opium in order to relieve “excruciating rheumatic pains of the head.” He swallowed his poppy and, an hour later, “What a resurrection from the lowest depths of the inner spirit! What an apocalypse!” And it was not merely that he felt no more pain. “This negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened up before me, in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed…. Here was the secret of happiness. about which the philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered.”

“Resurrection. apocalypse, divine enjoyment. happiness. . . .” De Quincey’s words lead us to the very heart of our paradoxical mystery. The problem of drug addiction and excessive drinking is not merely a matter of chemistry and psychopathology, of relief from pain and conformity with a bad society. It is also a problem in metaphysics – a problem, one might almost say, in theology. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James has touched on these metaphysical aspects of addiction:

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties in human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates and says no. Drunkenness expands, unites and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things into the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it. To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and literature; and it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only through the fleeting earlier phases of what, in its totality, is so degrading a poison. The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in Our opinion of that larger whole.

William James was not the first to detect a likeness between drunkenness and the mystical and premystical states. On the day of Pentecost there were people who explained the strange behavior of the disciples by saying, “These men are full of new wine.

Peter soon undeceived them: “These are not drunken, as ye suppose, seeing it is but the third hour of the day. But this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel. And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh.”

And it is not only by “the dry critics of the sober hour” that the state of God-intoxication has been likened to drunkenness. In their efforts to express the inexpressible, the great mystics themselves have done the same. Thus, St. Theresa of Avila tells us that she “regards the centre of our soul as a cellar, into which God admits us as and when it pleases Him, so as to intoxicate us with the delicious wine of His grace.”

Every fully developed religion exists simultaneously on several different levels. It exists as a set of abstract concepts about the world and its governance. It exists as a set of rites and sacraments, as a traditional method for manipulating the symbols, by means of which beliefs about the cosmic order are expressed. It exists as the feelings of love, fear and devotion evoked by this manipulation of symbols.

And finally it exists as a special kind of feeling or intuition – a sense of the oneness of all things in their divine principle, a realization (to use the language of Hindu theology) that “thou art That,” a mystical experience of what seems self-evidently to be union with God.

The ordinary waking consciousness is a very useful and, on most occasions, an indispensable state of mind; but it is by no means the only form of consciousness, nor in all circumstances the best. Insofar as he transcends his ordinary self and his ordinary mode of awareness, the mystic is able to enlarge his vision, to look more deeply into the unfathomable miracle of existence.

The mystical experience is doubly valuable, it is valuable because it gives the experiencer a better understanding of himself and the world and because it may help him to lead a less self-centered and more creative life.

In hell, a great religious poet has written, the punishment of the lost is to be “their sweating selves, but worse.” On earth we are not worse than we are: we are merely our sweating selves, period.

Alas, that is quite bad enough. We love ourselves to the point of idolatry, but we also intensely dislike ourselves – we find ourselves unutterably boring. Correlated with this distaste for the idolatrously worshiped self, there is in all of us a desire, sometimes latent, sometimes conscious and passionately expressed, to escape from the prison of our individuality, an urge to self-transcendence. It is to this urge that we owe mystical theology, spiritual exercises and yoga – to this, too, that we owe alcoholism and drug addiction.

Modern pharmacology has given us a host of new synthetics, but in the field of the naturally occurring mind changers it has made psychological methods of self-control preferable from every point of view to complacency imposed from without by the methods of chemical control.

And now let us consider the case – not, alas, a hypothetical case – of two societies competing with each other. In Society A, tranquilizers are available by prescription and at a rather stiff price which means, in practice, that their use is confined to that rich and influential minority which provides the society with its leadership. This minority of leading citizens consumes several billions of the complacency – producing pills every year. In Society B, on the other hand, the tranquilizers are not so freely available, and the members of the influential minority do not resort, on the slightest provocation, to the chemical control of what may be necessary and productive tension. Which of these two competing societies is likely to win the race? A society whose leaders make an excessive use of soothing syrups is in danger of failing behind a society whose leaders are not over-tranquilized.

Now let us consider another kind of drug – still undiscovered, but probably just around the corner – a drug capable of making people feel happy in situations where they would normally feel miserable. Such a drug would be a blessing, but a blessing fraught with grave political dangers. By making harmless chemical euphoria freely available, a dictator could reconcile an entire population to a state of affairs to which self-respecting human beings ought not to be reconciled. Despots have always found it necessary to supplement force by political or religious propaganda. In this sense the pen is mightier than the sword. But mightier than either the pen or the sword is the pill. In mental hospitals it has been found that chemical restraint is far more effective than strait jackets or psychiatry. The dictatorships of tomorrow will deprive men of their freedom, but will give them in exchange a happiness none the less real, as a subjective experience, for being chemically induced. The pursuit of happiness is one of the traditional rights of man; unfortunately, the achievement of happiness may turn out to be incompatible with another of man’s rights – liberty.

It is quite possible, however, that pharmacology will restore with one hand what it takes away with the other. Chemically induced euphoria could easily become a threat to individual liberty:, but chemically induced vigor and chemically heightened intelligence could easily be liberty’s strongest bulwark. Most of us function at about 15 per cent of capacity. How can we step up our lamentably low efficiency?

Two methods are available – the educational and the biochemical. We can take adults and children as they are and give them a much better training than we are giving them now. Or, by appropriate biochemical methods, we can transform them into superior individuals. If these superior individuals are given a superior education, the results will be revolutionary. They will be startling even if we continue to subject them to the rather poor educational methods at present in vogue.

Will it in fact be possible to produce superior individuals by biochemical means? The Russians certainly believe it. They are now halfway through a Five Year Plan to produce “pharmacological substances that normalize higher nervous activity and heighten human capacity for work.” Precursors of these future mind improvers are already being experimented with. It has been found, for example, that when given in massive doses some of the vitamins – nicotinic acid and ascorbic acid for example – sometimes produce a certain heightening of psychic energy. A combination of two enzymes – ethylene disulphonate and adenosine triphosphate, which, when injected together, improve carbohydrate metabolism in nervous tissue – may also turn out to be effective.

Meanwhile good results are being claimed for various new synthetic, nearly harmless stimulants. There is iproniazid, which, according to some authorities, “appears to increase the total amount of psychic energy.” Unfortunately, iproniazid in large doses has side effects which in some cases may be extremely serious! Another psychic energizer is an amino alcohol which is thought to increase the body’s production of acetylcholine, a substance of prime importance in the functioning of the nervous system. In view of what has already been achieved, it seems quite possible that, within a few years, we may be able to lift ourselves up by our own biochemical bootstraps.

in the meantime let us all fervently wish the Russians every success in their current pharmacological venture. The discovery of a drug capable of increasing the average individual’s psychic energy, and its wide distribution throughout the U.S.S.R., would probably mean the end of Russia’s present form of government. Generalized intelligence and mental alertness are the most powerful enemies of dictatorship and at the same time the basic conditions of effective democracy. Even in the democratic West we could do with a bit of psychic energizing. Between them, education and pharmacology may do something to offset the effects of that deterioration of our biological material to which geneticists have frequently called attention.

From these political and ethical considerations let us now pass to the strictly religious problems that will be posed by some of the new mind changers. We can foresee the nature of these future problems by studying the effects of a natural mind changer, which has been used for centuries past in religious worship; I refer to the peyote cactus of Northern Mexico and the Southwestern United States. Peyote contains mescaline – which can now be produced synthetically – and mescaline in William James’ phrase, “stimulates the mystical faculties in human nature” far more powerfully and in a far more enlightening way than alcohol and, what is more, it does so at a physiological and social cost that is negligibly low. Peyote produces self-transcendence in two ways – it introduces the taker into the Other World of visionary experience, and it gives him a sense of solidarity with his fellow worshipers, with human beings at large and with the divine nature of things.

The effects of peyote can be duplicated by synthetic mescaline and by LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), a derivative of ergot. Effective in incredibly small doses, LSD is now being used experimentally by psychotherapists in Europe, in South America, in Canada and the United States. It lowers the barrier between conscious and subconscious and permits the patient to look more deeply and understandingly into the recesses of his own mind. The deepening of self-knowledge takes place against a background of visionary and even mystical experience.

When administered in the right kind of psychological environment, these chemical mind changers make possible a genuine religious experience. Thus a person who takes LSD or mescaline may suddenly understand not only intellectually but organically, experientially the meaning of such tremendous religious affirmations as “God is love,” or “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in Him.”

It goes without saying that this kind of temporary self-transcendence is no guarantee of permanent enlightenment or a lasting improvement of conduct. It is a “gratuitous grace,” which is neither necessary nor sufficient for salvation, but which if properly used, can be enormously helpful to those who have received it. And this is true of all such experiences, whether occurring spontaneously, or as the result of swallowing the right kind of chemical mind changer, or after undertaking a course of “spiritual exercises” or bodily mortification.

Those who are offended by the idea that the swallowing of a pill may contribute to a genuinely religious experience should remember that all the standard mortifications – fasting, voluntary sleeplessness and self-torture – inflicted upon themselves by the ascetics of every religion for the purpose of acquiring merit, are also, like the mind-changing drugs, powerful devices for altering the chemistry of the body in general and the nervous system in particular. Or consider the procedures generally known as spiritual exercises. The breathing techniques taught by the yogi of India result in prolonged suspensions of respiration. These in turn result in an increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the blood; and the psychological consequence of this is a change in the quality of consciousness. Again, meditations involving long, intense concentration upon it single idea or image may also result – for neurological reasons which I do not profess to understand – in a slowing down of respiration and even in prolonged suspensions of breathing.

Many ascetics and mystics have practiced their chemistry-changing mortifications and spiritual exercises while living, for longer or shorter periods, as hermits. Now, the life of a hermit, such as Saint Anthony, is a life in which there are very few external stimuli. But as Hebb, John Lilly and other experimental psychologists have recently shown in the laboratory, a person in a limited environment, which provides very few external stimuli, soon undergoes a change in the quality of his consciousness and may transcend his normal self to the point of hearing voices or seeing visions, often extremely unpleasant, like so many of Saint Anthony’s visions, but sometimes beatific.

That men and women can, by physical and chemical means, transcend themselves in a genuinely spiritual way is something which, to the squeamish idealist, seems rather shocking. But, after all, the drug or the physical exercise is not the cause of the spiritual experience; it is only its occasion.

Writing of William James’ experiments with nitrous oxide, Bergson has summed up the whole matter in a few lucid sentences. “The psychic disposition was there, potentially, only waiting a signal to express itself in action. It might have been evoked spiritually by an effort made on its own spiritual level. But it could just as well be brought about materially, by an inhibition of what inhibited it, by the removing of an obstacle; and this effect was the wholly negative one produced by the drug.” Where, for any reason, physical or moral, the psychological dispositions are unsatisfactory, the removal of obstacles by a drug or by ascetic practices will result in a negative rather than a positive spiritual experience. Such an infernal experience is extremely distressing, but may also be extremely salutary. There are plenty of people to whom a few hours in hell – the hell that they themselves have done so much to create – could do a world of good.

Physiologically costless, or nearly costless, stimulators of the mystical faculties are now making their appearance, and many kinds of them will soon be on the market. We can be quite sure that, as and when they become available, they will be extensively used. The urge to self-transcendence is so strong and so general that it cannot be otherwise. In the past, very few people have had spontaneous experiences of a premystical or fully mystical nature; still fewer have been willing to undergo the psychophysical disciplines which prepare an insulated individual for this kind of self-transcendence. The powerful but nearly costless mind changers of the future will change all this completely. Instead of being rare, premystical and mystical experiences will become common. What was once the spiritual privilege of the few will be made available to the many. For the ministers of the world’s organized religions, this will raise a number of unprecedented problems. For most people, religion has always been a matter of traditional symbols and of their own emotional, intellectual and ethical response to those symbols. To men and women who have had direct experience of self-trascendence into the mind’s Other World of vision and union with the nature of things, a religion of mere symbols is not likely to be very staisfying. The perusal of a page from even the most beautifully written cookbook is no substitute for the eating of dinner. We are exhorted to “taste and see that the Lord is good.”

In one way or another, the world’s ecclesiastical authorities will have to come to terms with the new mind changers. They may come to terms with them negatively, by refusing to have anything to do with them. In that case, a psychological phenomenon, potentially of great spiritual value, will manifest itself outside the pale of organized religion. On the other hand, they may choose to come to terms with the mind changers in some positive way – exactly how, I am not prepared to guess.

My own belief is that, though they may start by being something of an embarrassment, these new mind changers will tend in the long run to deepen the spiritual life of the communities in which they are available. That famous “revival of religion,” about which so many people have been talking for so long, will not come about as the result of evangelistic mass meetings or the television appearances of photogenic clergymen. It will come about as the result of biochemical discoveries that will make it possible for large numbers of men and women to achieve a radical self-transcendence and a deeper understanding of the nature of things. And this revival of religion will be at the same time a revolution. From being an activity mainly concerned with symbols, religion will be transformed into an activity concerned mainly with experience and intuition – an everyday mysticism underlying and giving significance to everyday rationality, everyday tasks and duties, everyday human relationships.

By Tom Jenks

You’ve waited patiently and now you’re up at bat. You want to take a few practice swings before the real thing right? Here, lie down on this comfy memory foam, inside a chamber fitted with noise canceling material, and wrapped in wire mesh and aluminum foil to block any stray electromagnetic radiation. “Here, put these on and just float on a sea of bliss,” the facilitator says as he hands you a pair of glasses, headphones and GSR meter for your finger. A flicker of doubt crosses your mind. “What the hell, it’s Burning Man, man,” your inner psychonaut reassures you as the lid closes. Inside you hear the GSR on your finger driving the sound in your headphones. You’re agitated and so is the sound. The light from the special glasses also indicates significant stress. “Shit, I’m a mess.” Bhvvvv. More agitated sound. Bhvvv. “Damn it!” Bhvvvvvvvv. “Forget this crap I’m just going to get comfy on this memory foam and float through the clouds.” Beewwwww. The sound is calm, the light is serene. “Wow, that was easy. I just let go of fears and relaxed into the moment.” The lid opens, you step into the hot seat, slide on the GSR meter, and instantly the cymatics projection explodes into the most beautiful shimmering fractal the crowd has ever seen.

This galvanizes the mass of onlookers into a frenzy. You whisper to yourself, “I never thought such beauty was possible!” As you stand there in a state of unrivaled ecstasy, the crowd catches your fire and starts chanting – beauty, beauty, beauty, beauty!!! Bvvvhhaaaaaoo! “What the?” The pyramid of lights whirs to life as the sound amps up and lights go from red to orange to green up towards the top. The crowd is overjoyed! A facilitator notices your perplexed gaze and tells everyone, “Beneath the pyramid is a Random Event Generator and the lights and sound goes up or down depending on the coherence or odds against chance of the outcomes. It has been found that focusing intently on it can raise the coherence and thus elevate the light, pure white light being the highest level of coherence at the top.” The energy is electric. A bolt of lightning blasts through your head and ripples out through the people concentrating on raising the pyramid of light. The words come out of nowhere and past your lips, “We are infinite potential!” The light races through indigo, violet and ultraviolet – a sudden collective gasp – boom. Pure white light blasts out of the top and bathes all in the primordial essence of being. All you can do is wonder. You’ve disregarded Terrence and have given in to astonishment. You think it’ll never end, but something creeps up, like a serpent through your veins, a nagging doubt – “is it real?” Immediately the light is gone, the pyramid plummets to a dull red and blackness envelops all. Guess not. You walk off the stage, kick the dust, and choke down a sugary drink at the nearest bar. A single tear rolls down your cheek and splashes in the playa dust. “For a moment… it was real.”

And it could be. It’s all technically possible – just a matter of connecting a few cords to a few computers and whatnot. I’m not an audiovisual or computer technician by any stretch, but I don’t see why it can’t be done with a little group mind and elbow grease. If this project piques your interest, join up and let’s make it happen!

Some operational thoughts: The above is only one permutation of many amazing possibilities. I’d like your input to improve it! For example:

We could use brainwave entrainment with an audiovisual synthesizer (using specific light and sound frequencies) to drive the brainwaves into say, an Alpha or hypnagogic state, and see how that affects the GSR and cymatic patterns. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainwave_entrainment
Audiovisual synthesizer: http://www.mindmodulations.com/light-sound-mind-machines.html?TreeId=1

Perhaps a dance floor covered with salt, with a massive transducer underneath, pumping in the vibes from wireless GSR meters on the dancers? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_skin_response

Could the cymatic pattern be projected as a 3d hologram instead of merely on a flat screen? Or we could throw on a mixture of cornstarch and water to create a non-Newtonian fluid and grow some 3d cymatic creatures!
Cymatics in action – video of changing sand patterns: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YedgubRZva8&feature=related
General Cymatics info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymatics
http://www.cymatics.org/

We could have 4 participants each with GSR meters hooked up to the original setup, with one side getting as agitated as possible and the other trying to remain calm, and have emotion battles! Perhaps the tones from each side would be averaged together to produce 2 different cymatic patterns, one the product of restlessness, and the other the result of serenity.

Other measures of biofeedback could be used, such as the coherence of heart rhythms, pulse rate, or even an EEG of brainwaves. The raw data from each of these could be displayed on a separate screen, with a high/low record holder list.
Biofeedback devices: http://www.mindmodulations.com/biofeedback-neurofeedback.html?TreeId=1

The Random Event Generator idea could be expanded to have 3 separate towers of lights with three different REGs, with one mega tower in the middle averaging the coherence of all three. We could add some kind of reward, like a beautiful sound when the lights reach certain levels of coherence, with a loud gong at the top. Perhaps integrate specific chakra sounds from the root (red) with a C sound to crown (white) B sound.
Chakra sounds: http://www.cymascope.com/chakrasacredsound.html
REG general info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_event_generator
REG light: http://www.psyleron.com/lamp.aspx
REG capable of linking with computer: http://www.psyleron.com/reg1.aspx

The original color progression was inspired by the levels of consciousness chart here: http://www.kheper.net/topics/Wilber/levels-of-consciousness.jpg

The REG aspect would be interesting to simply record and correlate it with events such as Burning the Man or the Temple, or even with the level of ambient sound or light levels on the playa.

We could strategically place some dream machines around the REG pyramids to help entrain brainwaves to an Alpha or hypnagogic state. These are rotating cylinders with slits cut up the sides, on top of record players with light bulbs inside. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamachine

Finally a very basic option is to simply have microphones for people to sing, chant or play music into and see what cymatic patterns they produce.

I would also propose we develop a short survey of people’s experiences, to get data on how well it works (how mystical/transpersonal the experiences are) for different people, and particularly of interest would be to record a rough estimate of people’s value structure (developmental stage) and also note any pharmacological agents at work. This data, when correlated with people’s biofeedback record, would be invaluable!

This entire setup may seem like an impossible dream, but so has every idea that ever tested the perceived boundaries of creation. I cannot think of a more empowering or trans-formative technological achievement to devote resources to. Let’s use our ingenuity, our technical expertise, our vision, and our burning passion to do what has never been done, to manifest the mind, and will novelty into being. Let’s go to moon, 21st century style.

Das ewig weibliche zieht uns hinan.

The eternally feminine leads us forward.

– Goethe

He who binds himself to a joy does the winged life destroy,
But he who kisses the joy as it flies lives in Eternity’s sunrise.

– William Blake

Only connect.

– E. M. Forster

I‘m finally ready to declare myself. I am a ladies’ man. A womanizer. A libertine. A rake. A rogue. A roué. A goddamn running loose dog. I’d admit to being a lecher, but that word implies a solipsistic predation that I hope never applies to any of my relations with the mysterious sex.This

is about something more sacred than anything a drooling wanker could appreciate.

This is about worship. From the time the testosterone kicked in, I have knelt at the altar of that
which is female in this world. I love women. What I love in them is something that moves and must be free to do so. I love their smells, their textures,

their complexities, the inexhaustible variety of their psychic weather patterns. I love to flirt with them, dance with them, and to discourse with them endlessly on the differences between men and women. I love to make love.

The sexual fires have always burned bright in my brainstem. Priapically preoccupied, I’ve written poetry by the ream, stormed police lines, ridden broncs, thrown punches and generally embarrassed myself on countless occasions. (Actually, I suspect that history consists largely of foolish things men have done to show off for women.)

There are probably twenty-five or thirty women — I certainly don’t count them — for whom I feel an abiding and deep emotional attachment. They’re scattered all over the planet. They range in age from less than half to almost twice my own. Most of these relationships are not actively sexual. Some were at one time. More never will be. But most of them feel as if they could become so. I love the feel of that tension, the delicious gravity of possibilities.

I must also admit that for me this gravity generally increases with novelty. The New, the fresh
and unknown expanses of the emotional frontier, hold a fascination for me that I wish they did not. This breeds superficiality and the appearance of a hunger for conquest. But, unfortunately, I love the
voltage, the charged gap between two people that can draw across itself such huge flows of
information from so many parts of us. I love the feel of human bandwidth — intercourse
on all channels — and there is so much more to exchange when nothing is yet known.

Despite many clear and cosmic messages that women (and death) were meant to be the curricula of my life — my dharma — and that practically everything I’ve done has been about trying to understand them, I resisted formal matriculation into this perilous course of study until well past the age when most men have already given up and settled into monogamies as comfortable and unquestioned as their football loyalties.

And now, late in my forties, I doubt I’ll ever be monogamous again. For reasons I’ll explain, I feel strangely exiled into a condition of emotional wandering. I think my heart will travel widely. I want to know as many more women as time and their indulgence will permit me.

Even so, I also want to go on loving the women I love now — and I do love them — for the rest of
my life. These are relationships that have already lasted much longer than most marriages, even though some of them had to endure the hiatus of my own previous monogamies, one imposed by society, the other by what felt like an act of God.

The Road to Hell

I tried monogamy despite feeling from the get-go that being monogamous made as much sense as declaring that I liked, say, mashed potatoes and gravy so darned much that I would resolve to eat nothing else for the rest of my life.

So I got married and stayed that way for seventeen years, attempting with some grim success to impose fidelity on myself. It was, I figured, the price I had to pay in return for a good place to raise kids. And though I loved my ex-wife, and still do, I wasn’t in love with her. Didn’t believe in it, actually. I thought being in love was a myth people had invented to punish themselves for lacking it.

Fidelity always felt like work: an act of will rather than nature. As time passed, nature gradually
gained the upper hand, as she almost always does. I was never quite able to stop flirting — a form of exchange that has always felt holy to me — nor was I able to disguise from my wife my
undiminished appreciation of other women. This led to sexual distance between us, and I started to get hungry. There began to be incidents of what is called, in rock n roll, “offshore drilling.”

Not realizing that women hate deceit even more than they hate infidelity — and they always
know — I turned into a sneak and a liar. I became someone I couldn’t respect, and so I left my
marriage.

Not long after that, I experienced the miracle of voluntary monogamy for one brief and
blissful period, during which, at the age of forty-six, I did fall in love for the first time in my
life. During the year that followed, it was as though there were no other women except in the most abstract sense. I still delighted in the presence of pulchritude, but it was an appreciation as sublime in its detachment as my enjoyment of nature’s other wonders. I didn’t want to do anything about these beauties, any more than I would want do something about sunsets or Bach fugues. Cynthia
was the only woman. But two days before we were to be married, I put her on a plane in Los Angeles
and somewhere between there and New York the virus that had been secretly consuming her stopped her
heart.

The most important consequence of losing Cynthia is that I now believe in the human soul. I had to see it and, once seen, it became obvious to me. No longer did I dismiss it as a biological
artifact, a kind of software that arises in the electrochemical sputterings of the squishyware and
cannot run otherwise. Rather I can feel the soul as an independent though immaterial identity that wears bodies like a costume.

I finally had the answer to a question I’d been asked shortly before I met her. I’d been speaking to a bunch of kids at the New York University film school about Virtual Reality when I got the usual question about virtual sex. This was such a predictable question that I had a mental tape I always ran in response to it that went something like: “I don’t get the fascination with virtual sex. Sex is about bodies, and being in VR is like having had your body amputated. What could be less sexy?”

At this point, a very embodied young woman in the front row raised her beautiful hand. “But don’t you think,” she asked, “that when it comes to sex, the body is just a prosthesis?”

My tape stopped running. “A prosthesis for what?”

“That’s the interesting question, isn’t it.” she smiled, all sphinxy.

Yeah. That was the interesting question alright, and Cynthia, in both the way she inhabited her body and the way she remained after leaving it, answered it for me. There is indeed a hand that moves the hand, there is a kiss that lives inside both sets of lips.

At that point I decided that, whatever the pressures of society or the propensity of most women to
insist on it, I wouldn’t attempt monogamy again unless and until I encountered someone who induced it in me as naturally as she did. And I like to believe that nothing would make me happier than to have that happen. To fall in love. To be singularly devoted again.

(But I have to confess to aspects of my current behavior pattern that are subconsciously designed to prevent this very thing from happening. If just once in your life you’ve put all of your emotional eggs in one basket, only to have that basket smashed almost immediately, it inclines you toward more distributed systems of emotional support.)

There is a central woman in my life, a luminous Swede who lives in San Francisco. She is the person I always call when I feel bad in the middle of the night. She is beautiful and funny, as game on an adventure as Indiana Jones; she is a sexual poet, and I love her.

That she is not the only woman in my life pains her — as will this piece — and I wish to cause her no pain. But I learned from my marriage what suffering can be inflicted by someone who tries unsuccessfully to contain himself in the service of someone else’s feelings.

And scrupulous honesty, though it requires courage on both sides, is a lot more practical than most men believe it to be. The fact that I don’t lie to her about these other encounters brings us closer rather than separating us. And sin, as Nietzsche said (and I often quote), is that which separates.

A Pariah’s Advantages

While I’ve been honest about all this to my girlfriend and the other objects of my affection, I

haven’t come clean in public until now. It’s an odd omission. I’ve tried to write as candidly as

possible about my other deviations from standard American morality. I’m in the lucky position of being so de-institutionalized that I can

say whatever I like without fear of adverse economic consequences. Indeed, lunatic candor seems to be my primary product these days. Like Hunter S. Thompson, the badder I get, the better I get paid.

A bad reputation can set you free. After all, if you’ve already declared yourself to be a

pot-smoking, acid-addled slut, your opponents are forced to oppose your ideas on their merits,

rather than strategically revealing your hidden depravities. Shame is no weapon against the

shameless.

In fact, part of what motivates this public revelation is a belief that I am behaving morally,

despite following a course that society would generally condemn. My conscience is clear, a fact that

is not simply due to poor memory or an unwillingness to examine it carefully.

These admissions are also related to the fact that I find myself a few gray hair-breadths away from

turning fifty, an age beyond which surreptitious ladies’ men become pathetic in direct proportion to

the uneasiness they feel with their own lascivious impulses.

The phrase “dirty old man” begins to haunt me, especially as I continue to find my pot-bellied old

self attracted to the same youthful feminine specifications that put steel in my poker when I was

twenty-five.

Yet that’s not all there is to it: for me, it is the combination of these two beauties, the inner and the outer, that draws me most
compellingly. There are plenty of perfectly formed surfaces that have no light within them and they
don’t do much for me. At the same time,
there are beautiful souls within bodies that are the female equivalent of my own, and while some of
these are close friends, they lack the sexual spice that really fuels most discourse between the
sexes.

I thus remain convinced that there is something holy about beauty, whether attached to a woman or a waterfall,
and I have the entire history of art — at least until the Twentieth Century — to back me up on
this. I don’t think of beauty as being something that is part of a woman, but rather something like
a mist that gathers around her that becomes more beautiful if illuminated brightly from within. The
real beauty, the part that lasts, is in the soul and not the skin.

Even when one is seeking sex between souls, the “prostheses” they wear are not irrelevant.

King Dick Meets My Inner Lesbian

But ironically enough, a lot of being sexy means getting past the root-level sex drive. One of the great moments in my sexual education came some years back when Dick Cavett was
interviewing Raquel Welch at the height of her va-va-voomishness. “Tell me, Raquel,” he leered,
“what’s your favorite erogenous zone?”

She paused, gave him a level look that completely revised my opinion of her intelligence, and said
crisply, “My mind, Dick.”

The mind, I have since discovered, is just about every woman’s favorite erogenous zone, but it is

mystical terrain and must be explored with care and time. The dick, in its youthful phase, is not
big on care or time. It is the very definition of urgency. It makes non-negotiable demands of its
bearer that are related to the inner
nature of its target only to the extent that some knowledge of her has strategic value in getting
her into bed.

Now my formerly dictatorial appendage is more like an old sidekick. A fellow veteran. It doesn’t
have the same reload rate of old, but there’s no ejaculatio praecox to worry about either.
The old soldier can pace itself. And if it can’t spit five shots in quick succession, it’s no longer
calling my shots as it once did. Into the vacuum of its diminished authority has risen my heretofore
undiscovered inner lesbian.

My inner lesbian is a wonderful accomplice, since she knows a lot about what turns women on, is more
attuned to sensuality than the old in-out, and believes strongly that the journey is the reward.
This doesn’t mean that she is not interested in orgasms, but she knows that one great thing about
being a woman is that if you can come at all — which a lamentably high percentage cannot — you can
usually come a lot and in a variety of ways. She makes it a lot easier to get away from my own
sexual objectives and into the multifarious delights of the joint critter, the one Shakespeare
called “the beast with two backs.”

And creating that larger organism, making the Other into the Self, merging the Self into the Other
is, after all, what sex is ultimately about. And of course, the point is not to have a self at all.
To be Everything.

The Infinity of Love

All said, you’re probably wondering why any woman would want to become emotionally or physically
involved with a man whose promiscuity is so freely confessed. Of course, many of them don’t. I
eliminate a lot of opportunity by wearing my Don Juan warning placard so visibly (even then, the
hesitant don’t leave me entirely bereft).

But most of the resistance to becoming involved with a self-admitted playboy has to do with that
all-important female perception of being special. It is hard to feel that knowing there are

others out there. But there is an answer to this, and finding it has enabled me to feel a deeper sense of connection not only with
women but with all the rest of my species.

The answer is that everyone is special. So also is every relationship. The creature that
forms
between any one person and another is like no other creature in the world. It is theirs and theirs alone.
Furthermore,
while time and
space and attention may be painfully finite, love is not. Love has no quantity to exhaust. It is a
quality, a living thing, that grows stronger the more it is felt. The vigorous practice of love
expands the heart and opens its apertures to the world.

In other words, to love a lot of women, you have to love them, without a trace of bullshit, one
woman at a time. You have to bring each of them with you into the perfectly present, creating there
a private zone of space and time that can be filled with that particular love. You won’t have any of
the comforting (though generally broken) social conventions to assure you that your vulnerability is
safe. There are no assurances at all except for those that come directly from the feeling of
connection you can make together. You are, in effect, beating back the darkness with the light you
generate yourselves.

When I judge myself, there is one question I ask: Would I want my daughters to encounter a man like
me? And because I want them to be brave in their love, because I want their faith to be annealed by
experience on the edge, I hope they find a few of my kind. But I hope they don’t bring too many of
us home.

SHERLOCK HOLMES AND COCAINE

By Mike Jay – http://mikejay.net/

Cocaine was the great pharmaceutical success story of the last decades of the nineteenth century. In a few short years, it went from a minor item in specialist catalogues to a major seller in a huge range of preparations in high-street chemists, grocers and general stores. It was hailed as a miracle of modern medical science, a panacea for all manner of minor ailments – but also, increasingly, as a dangerous and addictive novelty, a social menace and even a new ‘scourge of humanity’. During this period of the cocaine boom – in retrospect, the euphoric high before the crash – its impact on the public consciousness is vividly illuminated by the enduring literary character who emerged from its golden age: Sherlock Holmes.

From around 1885 to the beginning of the twentieth century, cocaine was both soft drink and hard drug: mild tonic preparations and strong pharmaceutical solutions coexisted side by side. The most famous and successful of the tonics was the range produced by the Corsican entrepreneur Angelo Mariani, who had begun in the 1860s to produce a stimulant wine for the French market by steeping coca leaves in sweet burgundy. ‘Vin Mariani’ was the first brand to penetrate the new market in Europe and America, and was rapidly accompanied by a wide ancillary range of therapeutic preparations. By the late 1880s these included Pâte Mariani (cocaine lozenges for catarrh), Thé Mariani (a concentrated coca tea recommended for long walks), and Pastilles Mariani (for coughing fits).

But one of Mariani’s lesser-known competitors was to eclipse his fame in the long run. John Pemberton, a small-scale Atlanta druggist, began to supply a ‘Peruvian Coca Wine’ in the mid-1880s; when the city of Atlanta adopted alcohol prohibition in 1886, he removed the alcohol and produced a gloopy syrup masking the bitter active ingredients of coca leaf extract, cocaine and cola nut, a natural caffeine source. He christened it ‘Coca-Cola’, and in 1891 he was bought out by a marketeer called Asa Chandler who set up ‘The Coca-Cola Company’, promoting the ‘nervine tonic’ as a cure for ‘headaches, hysteria and melancholia’ and pushing it with slogans such as ‘the intellectual beverage’ and ‘the Temperance drink’ (which, in a sense, it remains – the bar-room alternative to alcohol). Chandler took Coca-Cola’s sales to over a million dollars a year by the end of the century, and provoked a flurry of copycat products with names like Koca Nola, Celery Cola, Rocco Cola, Wiseola and even Dope Cola.

We might expect the ‘ethical’ pharmaceutical suppliers to have furnished a more sober alternative to this kind of hucksterism, but the promotion of cocaine by the Big Pharma of the day, especially the multinational Parke Davis, made their advertising look bashful by comparison. The 1885 Parke Davis catalogue offered cocaine in powders, solutions, tablets, lozenges, even cigars and cheroots, all accompanied by copy claiming the drug to be ‘the most important therapeutic discovery of the age, the benefits of which to humanity will be simply incalculable’. Their range expanded to include toothache drops, cocaine-impregnated bandages, haemorrhoid remedies and, from the 1890s, asthma and catarrh inhalers which made use of cocaine’s vasoconstrictive properties to dry up the nasal passages by spraying more or less pure cocaine straight up the nose. Statements that cocaine ‘can supply the place of food, make the coward brave, the silent eloquent’ ran alongside ads for hypodermic injection kits – smart pocket-sized steel cases styled like large Zippo lighters and containing cocaine, morphine and miniature needles. What the pharmacists and patent hucksters had both discovered was that you could sell cocaine for almost any treatment which came to mind, and the customer would very likely feel better after using it.

It was against this background of medical hype and shock of the new that Sherlock Holmes, and his distinctive cocaine habit, were first presented to the public – by a doctor who had brushed against the drug repeatedly in the course of his medical career. But although the appeal of Conan Doyle’s detective would endure for generations, the edgy thrill of cocaine was soon to take on a darker image, and Doyle’s later revisions of its role in Holmes’ lifestyle provide a barometer of how the public mood began to turn against the ‘cocaine vice’ during the 1890s and beyond.

As originally conceived by his author, the primary motivation of the world’s most famous fictional detective is cocaine. ‘My mind’, he tells us in the famous passage that opens The Sign of Four, ‘rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram…I can dispense then with artificial stimulants’. Part of Holmes’ enduring appeal is precisely that he’s drawn to his profession not to do good, but to stave off boredom. His few – and mostly late – sententious statements about public service and the common good are substantially outweighted by his expressions of coldness and misanthropy, his rhetorical question that ‘Was there ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world?’. What distinguishes him from the vast majority of subsequent fictional detectives is that his primary interest is in pleasing himself, and the main reason he bothers to solve crimes at all is to keep his mind active enough to dispense with his ‘seven per cent solution’.

The Sign of Four emerged in 1889, and it’s this first period of Sherlock Holmes stories that is most liberally sprinkled with drug references. In the first published short story, A Scandal in Bohemia, we learn that Holmes ‘had risen out of his drug-created dreams, and was hot on the scent of some new problem’; in The Five Orange Pips, Dr. Watson describes him as a ‘self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco’. But it was the exchange between Holmes and Watson at the beginning of The Sign of Four that established for all time the nature of Holmes’ habit, and Watson’s attitude to it. The story starts in Holmes’ study, with the detective taking a syringe from a ‘neat morocco case’ and injecting it into an arm ‘all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture marks’. Watson tells us that this has been going on ‘three times a day for many months’, and remonstrates with Holmes about his habit.

Watson’s argument against his friend’s chemical vices reads today like a mischievous pastiche of Victorian medical mumbo-jumbo, but it can be found more or less verbatim in many of the textbooks of the time. ‘It is a pathological and morbid process’, the doctor insists, ‘which involves increased tissue-change, and may at last leave a permanent weakness’. This chilling but nebulous diagnosis is probably very close to what Conan Doyle himself believed (and could have applied with equal conviction to, for example, masturbation). Holmes, however, dismisses it airily, and it prompts him to his famous justification and motive for his career: ‘I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.’

Why did Doyle, in 1888, seize on the cocaine habit as a central plank in the character of his new detective? At the time it seemed to reviewers ‘a curious touch’, but it struck an immediate chord with the public and Doyle continued to thread it through the stories as their success built. It was imitated, too, by other writers: M.P.Shiel’s exotic detective Prince Zaleski, who emerged in 1895, sits in his room full of Oriental antiques where the air is heavy with ‘the fumes of the narcotic cannabis sativa - the base of the bhang of the Mohammedans – in which I knew it to be the habit of my friend to assuage himself’.

Doyle’s intention was to create a bohemian character of acquired and exquisite tastes – a character quite unlike the author himself who, as a practising GP in provincial Southsea, was far closer to Dr.Watson. But Doyle had been immersing himself in the ‘yellow’, decadent writings of Bloomsbury, and met Oscar Wilde at the famous dinner at the Langham Hotel in 1890 when The Picture of Dorian Gray was commissioned: it’s likely that he had Wilde partly in mind while conceiving his ‘pallid’, ‘languid’ detective. Holmes’ distinctive props – the violin, the Meerschaum pipe, the batchelor apartment in the metropolis and the cocaine habit – are all intended to establish him as one of the new bohemians: eccentric, sophisticated, and tantalisingly immune to public opinion. Unlike the masses with their patent coca tonics, Holmes would have taken the trouble to acquire the finest quality of stimulant: his cocaine, we imagine, by mail-order from Merck in Darmstadt and his hypodermic kit not the standard Parke Davis set but the bespoke creation of a chemist in Piccadilly or Mayfair.

The inner Holmes, as well as the outer, was faithfully conceived around the bohemian sterotype. He is solitary, and haunted by an existential darkness: the ‘black moods’ that come over him, his bipolar swings from insomnia or focused, obsessive, day-and-night work to his days and weeks ‘in the dumps’, when he doesn’t ‘open my mouth for days on end’. For a late Victorian doctor like Conan Doyle, this was a familiar medical syndrome associated with the highly-strung, ‘neurasthenic type’, the febrile ‘brain-workers’ who were increasingly identified in the medical literature as a high-risk group for drug abuse. In The Sign of Four, Doyle mirrors these unstable mood-swings by giving Holmes a dual dependence on morphine and cocaine, but morphine is never subsequently mentioned: perhaps he felt that it carried rather too strong a whiff of the pathological drug addict, while cocaine was at most a ‘vice’ or character weakness.

Although in his later autobiography Conan Doyle insists that ‘I had no great interest in the more recent developments of my own profession’, he had certainly come across cocaine at some point in his medical career. He went to study medicine at Edinburgh University in 1876, the same year that the Edinburgh medical professor Robert Christison attempted an early coca leaf trial that he published in the Lancet; Christison selected several students to chew the leaf and, although Doyle was not among them, he was probably aware of the experiment. In 1885 the annual conference of the British Dental Association was held in Doyle’s home town of Southsea, and cocaine anaesthesia was the major new development discussed. Most conclusively Doyle, in an abortive attempt to set himself up as a Harley Street specialist, went to Vienna in 1890 to study ophthalmology, where the use of cocaine for local anaesthesia in eye surgery had recently been pioneered in the city’s General Hospital by Freud’s associate Carl Koller. It was the greatest surgical breakthrough in the discipline’s history, and a major focus of study: Doyle may well have administered it himself during his training.

His profession of ignorance seems particularly disingenuous on this point, since Doyle’s earliest professional interest was in drugs and toxicology. He achieved the feat – as remarkable then as now – of getting his first article published in the British Medical Journal while still in his third year at Edinburgh. It was on the action of a poison called gelsenium, an extract from a jasmine root and an ingredient in Gowers’ Mixture, a neuralgia treatment; Doyle’s experiment included self-poisoning with a substantial dose of 200 minims. His passion for toxicology frequently bleeds through into his fiction: there are several exotic poisons in the Holmes stories, all conceived with a relish for scientific detail. One of them, the hallucinogenic ‘Devil’s Foot Root’ in the short story The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot, has even made its way into some medical and ethnobotanical literature, planted mischievously by a Sherlock Holmes afficionado and subsequently taken as real. All this suggests that Doyle was well aware of the existence and properties of cocaine, and was using his professional understanding of it to underscore the character of his mysterious detective.

When the crash came, as with all cocaine crashes, you could see it coming. The euphoric overselling by pharmaceutical companies like Parke Davis was inevitably followed by a backlash that began almost immediately: already in 1887 the British Medical Journal was observing that an ‘undeniable reaction against the extravagant pretensions advanced on behalf of this drug has already set in’. It has since been recognised that the most common pattern of cocaine abuse is not, as with opiates, a lifetime of dependence, but a three to five year binge of excessive and increasing use leading to a crisis followed by one of three outcomes: abstenance, a substitute dependence on opiates or sedatives, or a scaling-down of cocaine use to manageable levels. Nineteenth-century Europe and America binged their way to crisis in a few short years and, horrified at their own reflection in the mirror, fled in panic towards the path of abstinence.

Sherlock Holmes’ career, which ran right through to the 1920s, is an eloquent witness to the eclipse of cocaine’s image as a miracle drug. Concern about its associations with delinquency and addiction built throughout the 1890s, and by 1900 the serious lobbying to control and prohibit it had begun. This was mostly taking place in the United States, where by this stage the Sherlock Holmes stories were being serialised to an enthusiastic American audience in Collier’s Weekly, a magazine that was also in the forefront of the campaign against the ‘cocaine menace’. Doyle had been gradually pruning back references to Holmes’ habit throughout the 1890s, limiting them to the occasional dark reference to his hero’s ‘weakness’; but in 1904, in The Missing Three-Quarter, he closed the unsavoury chapter by stating that Holmes had been ‘weaned’ from by Dr.Watson from the ‘drug mania’ that had ‘threatened to check his remarkable career’.

This is a narrative twist that destroys the inner logic of Doyle’s world, requiring his hero to forget why he became a detective in the first place. But it mirrors accurately the changing times: cocaine, which originally boosted Holmes’ popularity, had become a blight that might destroy it. From this point on, Holmes would begin to explain his mission in conventional moral terms, and would disown the hypodermic syringe as an ‘instrument of evil’. Collier’s were satisfied, and so was Doyle, who conquered the magazine market in America as he had in Britain – but the original scenario would never be erased. Cocaine would be prohibited across the globe long before Holmes’ final adventure in 1927, but his cocaine habit remains intact in his early and formative adventures, to be enjoyed and reassessed by successive generations.

This article is adapted from Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century. An extended version, including some thoughts on R. L. Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, appeared in Darklore Vol. 3 (2009)

Holmes illustration by Paul M. McCall

By John Hanna for Erowid.org

During his talk “Psychoactive Drugs Throughout Human History” at a 1983 University of California at Santa Barbara conference, Andrew Weil mentioned in passing, “Dimethyltryptamine [...] is almost certainly made by the pineal gland in the brain.” Meanwhile, at U.C. San Diego, Rick Strassman had begun to wonder whether or not the pineal might produce psychedelic compounds. That same year, in his booklet Eros and the Pineal: The Layman’s Guide to Cerebral Solitaire, Albert Most claimed that: “A pair of naturally occurring pineal enzymes [...] is capable of converting serotonin into a number of potent hallucinogens.” Most stated that the pineal could transform serotonin into 5-methoxy-N-methyltryptamine, and then make that into 5-methyoxy-N,N-dimethyltrptamine. Alas, no references were provided to support Most’s description of pineal catabolism. Nevertheless, it seems likely that this general line of thinking–that some psychoactive tryptamine is created in the pineal–was birthed in the early 1980s.1

It took a couple of decades for the meme to spread into the wider drug-geek pop culture, more recently and rapidly due to the Internet, after the 2001 publication of Strassman’s popular book DMT: The Spirit Molecule. Consider the following transcription from a radio rant [audio file online here] given circa 2005/2006 by the actor-comedian Joe Rogan, host of the TV show Fear Factor:

It’s called dimethyltryptamine. It’s produced by your pineal gland. It’s actually a gland [...] that’s in the center of your brain. It’s the craziest drug ever. It’s the most potent psychedelic known to man. Literally. But the craziest thing [about it is that] it’s natural, and your brain produces it every night as you sleep. You know, when you sleep, during the time you’re in heavy R.E.M. sleep, and right before human death, your brain pumps out heavy doses of dimethyltryptamine. Nobody knows what sleep is all about. Nobody knows why dreaming is important. But dreaming is hugely important. If you don’t dream, you’ll go fucking crazy and you’ll die. While you’re dreaming, while you’re in heavy R.E.M. sleep, you are going through a psychedelic trip. And very few people know about this. But it’s been documented.

There’s a great book on it called DMT: The Spirit Molecule by a doctor named Dr. Rick Strassman. And he did all of these clinical studies at the University of New Mexico on it. And you take this shit, and literally you are transported into another fucking dimension. I don’t mean like, you feel like you’re in another dimension. I mean you’re in another dimension. [...] There’s fucking complex geometric patterns moving in synchronous order through the air all around you in three-dimensional space; and it’s like they’re arteries, except there’s not blood pumping through them, there’s fucking light–pulsating lights with no boundaries. And you couldn’t really understand it. And there’s an alien communicating with me. There’s a dude who looks like, like sorta like a Thai Buddha, except he’s made entirely of energy and there’s no, there’s no, like, outline to him–he’s just one thing. And he’s concentrating on me, and he’s trying to tell me not to give in to astonishment. Just relax, and try to experience this. And I’m like, ‘You gotta be fucking shittin’ me.’ And I’m a stand up comedian, you know. ‘Cos as a stand up comedian, we pride ourselves in being able to describe things. So I’m like, ‘How the FUCK am I gonna talk about this?!’

Rogan does an excellent job of expressing a number of bullet points from Strassman’s book in a humorous manner. But the problem is that none of these points are known to be true. And although Strassman clearly states that his ideas about DMT and the pineal gland “are not proven”2, many people have accepted them as fact. As of June 2010, there is currently no scientific evidence that the pineal gland produces DMT, much less any evidence for the more far-out speculations that Strassman makes about DMT being a chemical modulator of the human soul. When Strassman examined the pineal glands from “about ten” human corpse brains, there was nary a trace of DMT to be found in them. This doesn’t invalidate his theory, since DMT is metabolized quickly, and none of the corpse brains were fresh-frozen. Further tests on fresh-frozen brains could be done. Someday there may be evidence that DMT is produced in the pineal gland, but that day has not yet arrived.

By the end of his book, Strassman proposes that DMT may provide access to parallel universes (and alien beings) via superconductive quantum computing of the human brain at room temperature, or via interactions with dark matter. Strassman states: “Because I know so little about theoretical physics, there are fewer constraints reining me in regarding such speculations.” And for those who know virtually nothing about any given topic, there appear to be no constraints on speculation. It is for exactly this reason that Strassman’s theories have both been accepted as fact by many people, and then expanded into creative new directions. A few offshoot theories include the idea that ancient prophets produced more DMT, that electro-magnetic fields increase DMT production, that spending a couple of weeks in total darkness increases DMT production, and that fluoridated water suppresses DMT production. An Internet search will turn up a bounty of wacky spin-offs, all of which cite Strassman’s speculations as the facts backing up their further claims.

Is DMT produced by the pineal gland? Maybe…

1. Albert Most is perhaps better-known for his 1984 booklet Bufo alvarius: The Psychedelic Toad of the Sonoran Desert, which explains how to collect and smoke the 5-MeO-DMT-containing secretions from this animal. Coincidentally, Most was one of the first two volunteers in Rick Strassman’s DMT studies, which started in 1990 and ended in 1995. And during the period when Strassman was researching DMT, Andrew Weil went on to co-author two journal articles with Wade Davis on the topic of B. alvarius’s psychoactive secretions.
2. Strassman’s DMT: Spirit Molecule on DMT in the Pineal :
   

   These hypotheses are not proven, but they derive from scientifically valid data combined with spiritual and religious observations and teachings. [...]

   The most general hypothesis is that the pineal gland produces psychedelic amounts of DMT at extraordinary times in our lives. Pineal DMT production is the physical representation of non-material, or energetic, processes. It provides us with the vehicle to consciously experience the movement of our life-force in its most extreme manifestations. Specific examples of this phenomenon are the following:

   When our individual life force enters our fetal body, the moment in which we become truly human, it passes through the pineal and triggers the first primordial flood of DMT.

   Later, at birth, the pineal releases more DMT.

   In some of us, pineal DMT mediates the pivotal experiences of deep meditation, psychosis, and near-death experiences.

   As we die, the life-force leaves the body through the pineal gland, releasing another flood of this psychedelic spirit molecule. (pages 68-69, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, 2001)