TRIANGULACIÓN DE DATOS

Some people claim that Mrs. Anna B. Nickels, a resident of Laredo, initiated modern pharmacological and scientific studies of peyote in the early 1880s by sending samples to Parke, Davis and Co. and to other investigators in North America and Europe. The records are lost, however, and other historians declare that it wasn't until 1887 that Parke, Davis and Co. began

110 Peyote. Mescaline and San Pedro

distributing dried peyote, obtained from Dr. John Briggs of Dallas (who obtained it from his brother in Mexico).

Dr. Louis Lewin, a scientist and artist often called the "father of modern psychopharmacology," received some of this material, labeled "Muscale Button," in Germany in 1887, The next year, he traveled throughout the southwestern United States and took dried specimens back to Europe, where he soon isolated numerous alkaloids from peyote. He gave some of his samples to the botanist Paul Hennings of the Royal Botanical Museum in Berlin for study. In 1888, he stimulated other pharmacological investigations by publishing the first report on the cactus' chemistry.

The first account (by a white) of "peyote inebriation" was published in 1897 by the distinguished Philadelphia physician and novelist Weir Mitchell. Soon after, he sent "peyote buttons"—the part of the plant growing above- ground—to Havelock Ellis, a pioneer in psychological and sexual studies. Ellis had read Mitchell's narrative and soon published two influential accounts of his own experiments under the influence of peyote in the British Journal of Medicine.

The scientific examination of peyote stimulated by Lewin's enthusiasm resulted in the isolation of the principal psychoactive component in 1897 Arthur Heffter, Lewin's colleague and rival, made this identification by systematically ingesting a number of alkaloid "fractions" made from peyote; as in the case of psilocybin later, animal testing had been inconclusive as to their various psychoactivities. Heffter named the isolate compound "mezcalin" (which soon became "mescaline") and reported that "mescaline hydrochloride, 0.15 g, produces a pattern of symptoms which differs in only a few respects from the one obtained with the drug (peyote)."

Over time, scientific interest in mescaline—first synthesized in 1919 by Ernst Spath—supplanted further investigations of peyote. The last ex- tensive study in this period of the cactus' mental effects was reported in 1927 by the French psychologist Alexandre Rouhier, who caused a stir with his accounts of the exotic "visions" experienced by his subjects.

Also in 1927, Lewin's colleague Dr. Kurt Beringer, a friend of Hermann Hesse and Carl Jung, issued a 315-page description of the effects of mescaline entitled Der Meskalinrausch (The Mescaline Inebriation). At the same time a short book by Heinrich Kliiver took issue with Ellis' earlier opinion that the chief feature of mescaline "visions" was that they were "indescribable." Kliiver tried to catalogue the visual forms of the "hallucinatory constants" induced by this mysterious substance as basically gridwork, spirals, cobwebs and runnels.

Through the first half of the twentieth cenrury, peyote aroused very little interest m North America among non-Indians, aside from a few isolated instances. A "peyote meeting" held in an apartment in New York Gty in 1912,

S. Weir Mitchell, a Philadelphia physician and novelist, published the first description of peyote's mental effects. He sent the cactus to Havelock Ellts, pioneer in sexual studies, who tried it in London; he also sent it to the psychologist William James, who ingested one button, got "-violently sick" and wrote his brother that he would "take the visions on trust."

Kurt Beringer (1893-1949), an associate of Carl Jung and Hermann Hesse, published a description of his mescaline studies in 1927 _Der Meskalinrausch (The Mescaline Inebriation). One of his subjects became fascinated with trying to put the Juries succession" of mesca/ixc images on film- later, Walt Disney- hired htm as the chief visualist for

Fantasia.

Awareness of peyote was slow to develop even among the anthropologists studying native practices. Most of them were mainly interested in recording . earlier Indian traditions and thus failed to notice the burgeoning religion of their time. Contemporary Indian practices began to draw attention only after a series of papers on Winnebago peyote rites were published by Paul Radin starting in 1914.

Wesron La Barre's The Peyote Cult—a book that became something of a bible among members of the Native American Church—was based on field work undertaken during the summers of 1935 and 1936. The Peyote Religion by J.S. Slotkin—the next major anthropological study— wasn't

114 Peyote, Mescaline and San Pedro Re-awakened Interest at Mid-Century

published until 1956. Slotkin spent a good deal of time among the Menomini and other Indian tribes; thanks to his defense of peyote in lawsuits, he became known affectionately as the "national secretary" of the Native American Church. David Aberle's The Peyote Religion Among the Navajo (1966) is an exhaustive study of how peyote spread to a tribe opposed to its use. The Navajos had had many objections to peyote; they didn't feel it was traditional. However, federal interference with their traditional but "unecological" methods of sheep grazing eventually brought many of the tribe into the pan-Indian movement and then into the Native American Church.

A Decade Opening the "Psychedelic Doors"

In the early 19505, the story took a significant turn. The British psychi- atrist Humphry Osmond—along with Canadian associates John Smythies and Abram Hoffer—began to examine the properties of mescaline in con- nection with their research on psychosis and schizophrenia. In 1952, Osmond and Smythies published a six-page article about their findings in the Journal of Mental Science. Their provocative theories about the actions of brain chemicals attracted the attention of the novelist Aldous Huxley, who soon of fered himself as a guinea pig for further experimentatioa Thus it was that on a lovely May morning in 1953, in the Los Angeles hills, Huxley took mescaline sulface—the first of ten psychedelic experiences. This event was to change the way many people look at the world today.

Being the center of controversy was nothing new to Huxley, a renowned author whose ideas expressed in thirty-nine previous books had been dis- cussed at practically all levels in Western society. He had been honored for decades by the literary world after a series of novels whose "cynical" and "im- moral" characters had shocked the sensibilities of many people. Still, he must have been surprised by the intensity of the enthusiasm and the antag- onism with which his The Doors of Perception (1954) was received.

In this book of less than one hundred pages, written in a month, Huxley reported on his initial mescaline sulfate experience and speculated on the nature of such radical mental transformations. Many readers were outraged by his apparent embracing of an experience so alien to our culture— so "pagan" and "mystical." The book shone as an unexpected bright light through the gray complacency of technobgical civilization. Some of his literary followers didn't at all like his lead this time; they claimed that his thinking had become "mushy." R.C. Zaehner, a professor at Oxford specializing in the study of Eastern religions, took mescaline sulfate with the intention of testing Huxley's assertion that a profound "mystical state" had been induced by a drug. In Mysticism: Sacred and Profane, Zaehner described his exper- ience as a minor "pre-mysticism" that reminded him mainly of Alice in Wonderland.

The interest in mescaline and peyote awakened by Huxley's book was greatly augmented by Robert DeRopp's popular Drugs and the Mind (1957)

Aldous Huxley surveying Los Angeles from the Hollywood Hills on that May morning in

/9J3 when his "doors of perception" were cleansed with 400 mg. of mescaline sulfate. His experience became a turning point in the history of psychedelics.

and by David Ebin's The Drug Experience (1961). Both provided lengthy accounts of "classic" peyote and mescaline experiences. By the early 1960s, the media were definitely fascinated by these substances. Alice Marriott wrote about peyote in The New Yorker, John Wilcock in the newly estab- lished Village Voice and Allen Ginsberg in Birth- (Ginsberg's poem Howl

was composed following a night on peyote walking through the streets of San Francisco.) Here is the text of a signed letter, to give another instance, sent to life magazine after it published an account of the "sacred mushrooms" of Mexico in 1957:

716 Peyote, Mescaline and San Pedro Psychedelic Movement Pio Sirs: I've been having hallucinatory visions accompanied by space suspen-

sion and time destruction in my New York apartment for the past three years... produced by eating American-grown peyoie cactus plants. I got my peyote from a company in Texas which makes COD. shipments all over the country for $8 per 100 "buttons."

Peyote could then be acquired by mail from Laredo and nearby areas simply by requesting it, and it soon became a fairly familiar object on many college campuses and in beatnik and artistic circles. In I960, one of the first peyote busts among whites occurred at the Dollar Sign Coffee House, an East Greenwich Village cafe that sold the ground up cactus over the counter in capsules. The proprietor, Barren Bruchlos, had mail ordered ilOlbs. of this cactus, certified by the Agriculture Department to be without pests. His supply was confiscated, but he was never charged.

Huxley's book opened an era when a number of pioneers of the psychedelic movement first turned on. Robert Masters, who published the earliest account of its effects in the sexual realm in his Forbidden Sexual Behavior and Morality (Julian Press, 1962), had his first experience with peyote during the 1950s in Louisiana. In I960, Arthur Kleps wrote to Delta Chemicals Co. in New York for mescaline sulfate and tried 500 mg. The experience resulted in his leaving his job as a state prison psychologist, in addition to other considerable changes in his life. Here is how he described what ciccurred:

At that point I retired to the bedroom and dosed my eyes (it having occurred to me that if I kept them open a monstrous gobbler from outer space might come around the corner any moment) and found myself watching a 3-dimen- sional color movie on the inside of whatever it is one looks at when there isn't anything there. All night, I alternated between eyes open terror and eyes closed astonishment. With eyelids shut 1 saw a succession of elaborate scenes which lasted a few seconds each before being replaced by the next in line. Extra-terrestrial civilizations. Jungles. Organic computer interiors. Animated cartoons. Abstract light shows. Temples and palaces of a decidedly pre- Colombian American type. There was no obvious narrative connection between scenes or aesthetic coherence to the whole. The most awesome and sublimely well executed spectacles, things that compared quite well with the best in Western art, alternated with gross caricatures. There was never any hint of a "technical" breakdown though—if something merely silly was being presented it was always dressed with all the slick perfection of a Wale Disney feature, plus all kinds of extra touches Disney could never have afforded Let's say that "despair" was being depicted in the form of the conventional cartoon castaway on a cartoon raft—a two-second thrownaway flash. Well, just for kicks why not add a transparent ocean, perfectly and variously tinted, in which bob a billion seahorses, singing and playing perfect tiny musical instruments? Certainly. Coming right up. That was the spirit of the thing. No job too large, no job too small. The difficult we do right away, and the impossible ... we do right away too.

Art K/cpf is Chief Boo Hoo of the Neo-Amencan Church. Author of

The Boo Hoo Bibie and Millbrook, he fin! experimented -with mescaline sulfate in I960.

But I have exposed the conclusions I arrived ar later in the terms of my description. What 1 was seeing was a kind of language of the gods, the ultimate vocabulary of the mind, which was, naturally, much more than just a collection of nouns. I didn't think it through until later, but at the time the tip-off was a radio discussion I turned on in a vain attempt to make the visions stop. Every single word emanated from the radio got a magnificent image to go with it, as if the trivia being spoken had been the life's work of generations of media technicians on planets given over to the production of such artistic wonders— all for the purpose of this one showing in Art Kleps' one man screening loom....