Mike Jay’s history of mescaline use is a mind-altering experience itself, both rollicking and intellectually rigorous
Yale University Press; 304 pages; $26 and £18.99.drug that launched the modern fascination with hallucinogens. It is also the hallucinogen for which there is the earliest evidence of human use. At Chavin de Huantar, a temple complex in the Peruvian Andes thought to date to as early as 1200, stone carvings show grimacing figures—part human, part jaguar—clutching the oblong San Pedro cactus, one of a few plants known to contain the chemical.
In the 1890s James Mooney, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution, befriended a Comanche chief named Quanah Parker who embraced the religious use of peyote, which had spread from Mexico in the cultural maelstrom accompanying the genocide of Native Americans. Quanah and Mooney saw peyote rituals as a peaceful alternative to the Ghost Dance, an apocalyptic cult that had inspired a series of doomed uprisings.
Meanwhile the pharmaceutical industry, on the hunt for profitable plant-derived compounds like cocaine, was eager to experiment with the cactus. A Detroit-based drug company marketed a powdered form as an Indian panacea. In Berlin a celebrity pharmacologist named Louis Lewin failed to isolate the psychoactive ingredient because he was unwilling to test it on himself.
Mr Jay takes seriously mescaline’s ability to produce such visual and emotional revelations. But he also wants to demystify the heroic accounts of some of its evangelists, who have imagined it as a delivery system for their own aesthetic or spiritual obsessions. Genteel Edwardian experimenters like Havelock Ellis and W.B. Yeats saw it as a pathway to the symbolist worlds of that period’s art. Jazz-age eccentrics like Aleister Crowley took it as a direct line to the occult.
Doctors’ hopes for mescaline have foundered too—a fact worth remembering as hallucinogens draw renewed medical interest. Some 20th-century psychiatrists thought mescaline might unlock the mechanism of schizophrenia. It didn’t. Its effects are too unpredictable for clinical applications: it can produce elation or paranoia, elaborate visions or none.
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