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.
We care deeply about our work and how it contributes to the collective mission of publishing important books. The Los Angeles Review of Books is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting and disseminating rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts. He is a member of the faculty of Hunter College of the City University of New York.
- 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.
- (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.
- Itis the psychedelic that everyone has heard of but almost nobody has taken.
- His articles and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The Village Voice and many other periodicals.
- By publishing serious works that contribute to a global understanding of human affairs, Yale University Press aids in the discovery and dissemination of light and truth, lux et veritas, which is a central purpose of Yale University.
Matthew Goodman, “The City Game: Triumph, Scandal, and a Legendary Basketball Team” (Ballantine Books,
He has published two books, Ambivalence, A Love Story and a novel, The Variations. 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. He is married to writer, agent, editor Betsy Lerner and father to Raffaella Donatich. Discover important art and architectural history scholarship from some of the world’s finest publishers and museums.
A series of in-depth conversations for the intellectually curious, featuring authors and experts on a range of topics including politics, history, science, art, and more. Heidelberg University was central to the development of phenomenology. The philosopher Karl Jaspers, who had graduated with a degree in medicine there and trained in psychiatry at the Heidelberg clinic, became interested in understanding how people with psychic disturbances experience their own consciousness.
For Aldous Huxley, the cactus-derived drug opened the doors of perception
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.
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- 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.
- By the 1950s, with psychiatry’s biomedical turn, it was being widely used in schizophrenia research, the context in which Huxley encountered it.
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- Both were prohibited fornon-clinical use in 1965, after which LSD was cheap and ubiquitous, whilemescaline became a substance of legend and rumor.
Mescaline was isolated in 1897 from the peyote cactus, first encountered by Europeans during the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Meanwhile peyote played a vital role in preserving and shaping Native American identity. 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. 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.
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, what happened to mescaline yale university press 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.
Sarah Teasley, “Designing Modern Japan” (Reaktion Books,
The cacti, which were used for millennia before the drug was extracted from them, look set for the long haul. The most significant mescaline trip of the 1960s, with hindsight, was that taken by the chemist Alexander Shulgin, which he later wrote ‘unquestionably confirmed the entire direction of my life’. He was struck by how little work had been done on compounds with similar structures, and he began to synthesize new ones, including 3,4 methylenedioxymethampetamine, or MDMA, which entered the underground drug market as ‘ecstasy’. MDMA was, in many respects, mescaline tamed for the new chemical generation. 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.
By contrast, use of the mescaline-containing cacti–the San Pedro of the Andes, and the peyote of the north Mexico and south Texas desert–is expanding. The Native American Church, which uses the peyote as its sacrament, is thriving, with over a quarter of a million members. San Pedro curanderos or shamans, who until recently were only to be found along the coasts of Peru and Ecuador, can now be encountered everywhere from California to Goa, Ibiza to Thailand. In the century since it was first synthesized, mescaline has gone from scientific and popular sensation to virtual extinction.
Psychologists 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.
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).
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.
Philip Alcabes considers Mike Jay’s biography of the psychedelic drug mescaline.
By publishing serious works that contribute to a global understanding of human affairs, Yale University Press aids in the discovery and dissemination of light and truth, lux et veritas, which is a central purpose of Yale University. The publications of the Press are books and other materials that further scholarly investigation, advance interdisciplinary inquiry, stimulate public debate, educate both within and outside the classroom, and enhance cultural life. 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. The compound itself is a trimethoxylated derivative of phenethylamine. This psychedelic alkaloid occurs naturally in several plant species, the most well-known of which are the peyote and San Pedro cacti. Its effects include brilliant visual hallucinations and altered perceptions of time and self-awareness.