Delicate floating films of colour — usually delightful neutral purples and pinks. These came and went — now here, now there. Then an abrupt rush of countless points of white light swept across the field of view, as if the unseen millions of the Milky Way were to flow a sparkling river before the eye. In a minute this was over and the field was dark. Then I began to see zigzag lines of very bright colours, like those seen in some megrims [migraines]…. It was in rapid, what I might call minute, motion.… A white spear of grey stone grew up to huge height, and became a tall, richly finished Gothic tower of very elaborate and definite design.… As I gazed every projecting angle, cornice, and even the face of the stones at their joinings were by degrees covered or hung with clusters of what seemed to be huge precious stones, but uncut, some being more like masses of transparent fruit. These were green, purple, red, and orange.… All seemed to possess an interior light, and to give the faintest idea of the perfectly satisfying intensity and purity of these gorgeous colour-fruits is quite beyond my power. All the colours I have ever beheld are dull as compared to these.
He found he had no power to influence his visions voluntarily; they seemed to come at random or to follow some logic of their own.
Just as the introduction of hashish in the 1840s had led to a vogue for it, so these first descriptions of mescal’s effects by Weir Mitchell and others in the 1890s and the ready availability of mescaline led to another vogue — for mescal promised an experience not only richer, longer-lasting, and more coherent than that induced by hashish, but one with the added promise of transporting one to mystical realms of unearthly beauty and significance.
Unlike Mitchell, who had focused on the colored, mostly geometric hallucinations that he compared in part to those of migraine, Aldous Huxley, writing of mescaline in the 1950s, focused on the transfiguration of the visual world, its investment with luminous, divine beauty and significance. He compared such drug experiences to those of great visionaries and artists, though also to the psychotic experiences of some schizophrenics. Both genius and madness, Huxley hinted, lay in these extreme states of mind — a thought not so different from those expressed by De Quincey, Coleridge, Baudelaire, and Poe in relation to their own ambiguous experiences with opium and hashish (and explored at length in Jacques Joseph Moreau’s 1845 book
Around the same time, I came across a pair of books by the physiologist and psychologist Heinrich Klüver. In the first one,
Transparent oriental rugs, but infinitely small … plastic filigreed spherical objets d’art [like] radiolaria … wallpaper designs … cobweb-like figures or concentric circles and squares … architectural forms, buttresses, rosettes, leafwork, fretwork.
For Klüver these hallucinations represented an abnormal activation in the visual system, and he observed that similar hallucinations could occur in a variety of other conditions — migraine, sensory deprivation, hypoglycemia, fever, delirium, or the hypnagogic and hypnopompic states that come immediately before and after sleep. In
It might be said that both approaches — the “high,” mystical approach of Huxley and the “low,” neurophysiological approach of Klüver — were too narrowly focused and failed to do justice to the range and complexity of the phenomena that mescaline could induce. This became clearer in the late 1950s, when LSD, as well as psilocybin mushrooms and morning glory seeds (both of which contain LSD-like compounds), became widely available, ushering in a new hallucinogenic drug age and a new word to go with it: “psychedelic.”
