Meanwhile, as a plant alkaloid, it continued to inspire hopes for understanding consciousness. In a way, the pharmaceuticalization of mescaline sealed it into permanent ambiguity. Jay tells us that mescaline occurs naturally in the columnar San Pedro cactus, genus Trichocereus, which grows at elevations above 2,000 meters in the high Andes, and in the stumpy peyote cactus, genus Lophophora, of northern Mexico and the southwestern United States. Numerous plants in the regions of the Spanish Conquista produced intoxicants, the mescaline-containing ones perhaps not even the most commonly used. The Inquisition found a way to see such intoxication as un-Christian, and peyote users, whether they used in individual visions, in healing rites with shamans, or in communal ceremonies, were prosecuted. It has become customary to think of technologic rationality systematically chasing down and quashing all forms of loose and unproductive practice, but through most of history it was really just one kind of irrationality trying to wipe out another.
Mike Jay has written extensively on scientific and medical history and contributes regularly to the London Review of Books and the Wall Street Journal. His previous books on the history of drugs include Mescaline, High Society, and The Atmosphere of Heaven. Jay lends a significant amount of text to first-person accounts of mescaline experiences, which, although illuminating, tell a very similar story throughout the book. What is far more interesting is mescaline’s chequered past as a panacea, vice, spiritual tonic and subject of scientific inquiry. While the molecule has remained the same, its cultural significance has waxed and waned with time and the dominance of different social groups.
No Peace of Mind in Psychiatry
- He has been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a fellow at the Whitney Center for the Humanities, and was recently awarded a fellowship by the Corporation of Yaddo.
- And so the book starts with the question of identity, which he demonstrates by way of a chemical diagram of the mescaline molecule.
- Drawing on botany, pharmacology, ethnography, and the mind sciences and examining the mescaline experiences of figures from William James to Walter Benjamin to Hunter S. Thompson, this is an enthralling narrative of mescaline’s many lives.
- John Donatich has served as the Director of Yale University Press since 2003.
‘Psychedelic’ emerged from a correspondence between Huxleyand Humphry Osmond, the psychiatrist who supplied him with the mescaline hetook at his home in the Hollywood Hills in May 1953. (Huxley thought thespelling should be ‘psychodelic’ and persisted with it, to little avail.) Hisessay on the experience, The Doors ofPerception (1954), kickstarted the psychedelic era. The terms in vogue forthese drugs at that time, such as ‘psychotomimetic’ and ‘hallucinogen’, hademerged from psychiatry and connected their effects to mental disorders. The mescalineexperience, Huxley argued, was not a psychotic episode but a transcendentstate, a communion with the ‘Mind-at-Large’.
- In its commitment to increasing the range and vigor of intellectual pursuits within the university and elsewhere, Yale University Press continually extends its horizons to embody university publishing at its best.
- Its duration was three or four hours as opposed to mescaline’s grueling ten or twelve; its psychedelic effects were less disorientating and challenging, and its physical effects more euphoric.
- Mescaline would come to figure in the phenomenological pursuit of this awareness.
- Discover important art and architectural history scholarship from some of the world’s finest publishers and museums.
- Both were prohibited fornon-clinical use in 1965, after which LSD was cheap and ubiquitous, whilemescaline became a substance of legend and rumor.
Mike Jay, “Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic” (Yale UP,
That allows Mescaline to eschew all encomiums to seers and the substances that grant them their visions. And so the book starts with the question of identity, which he demonstrates by way of a chemical diagram of the mescaline molecule. It’s a reminder that, behind all the strife over psychedelic drugs, they’re each just a configuration of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen atoms — the same as we are.
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Mescaline tells less of a story about the drug itself than it does about the people who harvested, used, abused, regulated and investigated it. But, Jay explains, mescaline’s role in inducing a quasi-psychosis “pushed its subjective effects to the margins.” Eventually, mescaline was relegated to the “recreational drug” bin, along with LSD, MDMA (“ecstasy”), psilocybin, and others. The long-standing moral panic over the threat posed by awakened consciousness nonetheless persists. And Americans continue to search for keys to consciousness — no longer through philosophy or politics, but through experience. And now, ironically, some of the psychedelics are showing medical utility, and so likely to be accepted into the pharmacopoeia.
Alisha Mughal, “It Can’t Rain All the Time: The Crow” (ECW Press,
By the 1920s, with wider availability of the drug, both of mescaline’s personae were under investigation. On the other, mescaline’s capacity for opening the world to the conscious mind was drawing ever more interest, including from a group at Heidelberg University. In Leipzig, Germany, the chemist Arthur Heffter isolated a series of alkaloids from peyote (some of it provided by Parke-Davis). In self-experiments in 1897, he found that one of them produced the psychic effects ascribed to eating buttons from the peyote cactus. He called his alkaloid mescaline (probably because there was still confusion at that time about peyote and mescal, an extract from a toxic bean, both being in common use among native tribes in the American Southwest).
Shulgin went on to synthesize dozens of similar compounds, many of which have found a niche in today’s teeming marketplace of novel psychoactives. Mescaline itself may have disappeared, but its stepchildren have become the beating heart of twenty-first century drug culture. Jay takes his readers on a journey through history, beginning with the medicinal and ceremonial use of mescaline-containing plants by the indigenous peoples of Mexico thousands of years ago, and the adoption of peyote by some Native American peoples. The peyote cactus and its use attracted controversy from Christian missionaries, who saw it as the devil’s work, and later on from the US government, who equated it with moral degeneracy and also realised its importance to the Native American cultures they were attempting to dismantle. The hallucinogenic properties of the plant eventually garnered curiosity from western scientists and a number of western spiritualists, mystics, authors, poets and artists – those seeking the ‘doorway of perception’, to paraphrase Aldous Huxley. When, in 1933, the Nazis came to power, psychiatry’s moment of existential humanism was over.
They fled, but even for those who stayed, human awareness under National Socialism could perforce no longer be about the individual but had to be about the Volk. People whose mental states conflicted with the purported welfare of the people or the good of the race would be treated through acceptable-to-Nazism therapeutic methods, or they would be among the tens of thousands of Lebensunwertes Lebens, life unworthy of life, and therefore assassinated. The mescaline produced through Heffter’s process was marketed by the German chemical giant Merck beginning in 1894. A de novo synthesis was published by the Austrian chemist Ernst Späth in 1919, and by 1926 Merck’s chemists had developed their own synthesis. But as a pharmaceutical industry product, mescaline needed a medical use.
After 1962, when the Federal Drug Administration tightenedits guidelines on psychedelic research, there were few plausible reasons forworking with mescaline and LSD came to dominate what was by now a shrinkingfield. Both were prohibited fornon-clinical use in 1965, after which LSD was cheap and ubiquitous, whilemescaline became a substance of legend and rumor. It was first synthesized in the laboratory in 1919, and from 1920 mescaline sulphate was available as a pure drug from European pharmacy suppliers such as Merck.
Whether mescaline really is the first psychedelic drug or not is still the subject of debate among anthropologists and archaeologists. But it does have an undeniably rich and fascinating history that is intimately linked to the story of indigenous culture, western colonialism and western medicine over the past several centuries. Jaspers’s phenomenological approach to mental illness attracted a circle of psychiatrists. Among the Heidelbergers’ interests was the mescaline Rausch, from a root word meaning “rush” (and usually translated as “intoxication”) but, more significantly, standing for “rapture” or being carried away — a kind of Dionysian awareness. Mescaline would come to figure in the phenomenological pursuit of this awareness.
Psychologists what happened to mescaline yale university press and neurologists, particularly in Germany, conducted trials on dozens of subjects that generated hundreds of pages of reports of dazzling visions, bizarre sensations and cosmic revelations. Avant-garde painters worked under its influence, and it was administered under clinical supervision to philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Walter Benjamin. By the 1950s, with psychiatry’s biomedical turn, it was being widely used in schizophrenia research, the context in which Huxley encountered it. These qualities establish Yale University Press as a world-class global publisher, whose values are reflected broadly in our dealings with our authors, partners, booksellers, customers, and readers.
