Tumgik
#Mescaline - A Global History of the First Psychedelic
thesparhawke · 1 year
Quote
'To comprehend the ravings of a madman,' he [Jacque-Joseph Moreau] wrote, 'it is necessary to have raved oneself, but without having lost the awareness of one's madness, without having lost the power to evaluate the psychic changes occurring in the mind.'
Mike Jay, Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic
0 notes
memoriae-lectoris · 2 months
Text
In 1620 the Mexican Inquisition declared peyote a “heretical perversity… opposed to the purity and integrity of our Holy Catholic faith,” making it the first drug ever to be outlawed in the Americas—thereby launching the first battle in the war against certain plants that continues to this day.
The gravity with which the authorities treated peyote is plain from its inclusion on the list of questions priests put to penitent Indians to judge the state of their souls:
Art thou a sooth-sayer? . . .
Dost thou suck the blood of others?
Dost thou wander about at night, calling upon demons to help thee?
Hast thou drunk peyote, or given it to others to drink, in order to discover secrets . . . ?
Between 1620 and 1779, the Inquisition brought ninety cases against users of peyote in forty-five locations in the New World. The records of those cases suggest that raíz diabólica, the “diabolic root,” was used in one of two ways.
In the first, a curandero, or shaman, would use peyote for the purpose of healing or divination. According to Mike Jay, the author of Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic, “the clairvoyant power of the peyote trance was used to reveal the location of a missing object, the cause of an illness, the source of a bewitching, prognostication of weather or the outcome of battles.” Peyote brought knowledge that could help solve problems.
The second use was collective and ceremonial: missionaries reported scenes in which whole villages would sing and dance all night long under the influence of peyote. “To the hostile eyes of priests and missionaries these ‘feasts’ were no more than drunken orgies,” Jay writes. “More sympathetic witnesses would reveal them as ritual practices of astonishing complexity, woven deep into the fabric of the participants’ lives.”
1 note · View note
ancestorsalive · 4 years
Photo
Tumblr media
PORTRAIT [1] QUANAH PARKER AND THE SACRED PEYOTE [First Part] QUANAH PARKER had grown up on the Southern Plains as the son of a Comanche chief, Peta Nocona, and a white mother, Cynthia Ann, who has been captured as a child from her settler family. When he was fifteen she had been found and forcibly returned to civilisation, where she spent the last ten years of her life begging without success to be returned to her tribe. Though despised for his white blood - Quanah, the name given him by his elders, meant 'bad odour' - he submitted to mockery without complaint and proved himself in battle, becoming a member of the feared Quahada warband. He was barely more than a child when the Plain tribes were finally forced onto the reservations by the Treaty of Medicine Lodge in 1867, but he was among those who refused to submit and become an outlaw. When the campaign to eradicate them escalated into the Red River War, they hid out in the sandstone bluffs and canyons of Palo Duro in far northwest Texas. In 1875, after the ruthless cavalry commander Colonel Ranald Mackenzie shot a thousand of their horses, QUANAH's band finally submitted to forced captivity. [...] QUANAH's authority rested on the delicate balancing act of remaining a trusted broker to the federal government while also defending his people against exploitation and the existential threats to their culture. In 1890, unlike many other tribal leaders, he firmly rejected the Ghost Dance. Such messianic prophecies had cost him dearly once already: the destruction of his warband had been set in motion by their failed raid on a USA Army batallion at Adobe Walls in 1874, into which they had been enticed by a medicine man named Eschiti, who had prophetised that QUANAH and his fellow warriors would be immune to the white man's bullets. QUANAH had no interest in following Wovoka down the same road. "Having just got fixed to live comfortably", he remarked, "I would be worse than an idiot to incite my people to do something that would make beggars and vagabonds of them". By this time he was a prominent advocate for the peyote religion, which had become established in the reservation after the Texas-Mexico railroad opened. It was said that QUANAH first encountered peyote in 1884 when he was cured by it of a serious stomach illness; he may also have learned its rites from one of his wives, who was a Lipan Apache. [ (…) Peyote had reached the Plains tribes via the New Texas-Mexico railroad, and their ceremony drew on deep roots in Spanish chronicles of the Nahua (Aztec) people. Before that, an unwritten history attested by art and archaeology unrolls the story of mescaline-containing cacti all the way back to deep prehistory and the earliest temple cultures of the New World. (…) ] "Some histories credit him [QUANAH PARKER] as the originator of the Plains peyote ceremony, and he was certainly one of his most effective proselytes: during the 1890s he presided over meetings among many tribes including the Cheyenne, the Arapaho, the Pawnee, the Osage and the Ponca. But it was no one's invention; it was at once a creation of all and none. Setting the ceremony within a tipi was in part a response to the new strictures of forced captivity that included prohibitions on openly singing and dancing, though the form of the tipi circle took its charter from older traditions such as the Kiowa sacred stone ceremonies. [...] "QUANAH , like MOONEY [see my next post, entitled, QUANAH PARKER, JAMES MOONEY AND THE SACRED PEYOTE (Part Two) ], saw peyote as an alternative to the self-destructive path set by the Ghost Dance. The federal government, however, treated it from the beginning as another movement to be crushed. An 1886 report on "Gambling and Other Crimes" in the Fort Sill reservation described it as a vice that 'produces the same effect as opium'. in 1888 the trade in peyote was banned on the reservation but it remained on sale at nearby trading posts, and the clandestine nature of the tipi ceremony made it impossible to police. 'They kept it hid out like the whites do whisky in Kansas', the exasperated new agent Charles Adams wrote in 1891. QUANAH stood his ground, insisting to the agency and to the missionary council that it was both a sacred tradition and a valuable medicine. Picking his battles carefully as always, he relaxed his opposition to Christian schooling but insisted firmly on his right to peyote, as he did with his polygamy. He counted on the government to recognise that persecuting him on either count would be more trouble that it was worth. [...] Like MOONEY, QUANAH recognised that the peyote religion needed to accommodate itself within the Protestant culture that surrounded it. He presented the tipi ceremony not as a rival of the mission school and the prayer meeting but a complement to them. Unlike in tribal Mexico, there was no caste of shamans who cultivated their spiritual power: the roadman who led the ceremony was mere a facilitator, humble in his role and careful to pass the sacred wand, rattle and drum around the circle for every participant to touch. Peyote made every man his own conscience and his own priest. QUANAH resisted Christian conversion to the end but he spoke its language fluently, and he presented peyote as a distinctively Indian expression of the same higher truth: 'the white man goes into his church house and talks ABOUT Jesus, but the Indian goes into his tipi and talks TO Jesus'. Christ's crucifixion was the white man's sin, and Indians had no need to atone for it. Peyote, the form in which God had always been with them, was their communion." See the next post, PORTRAIT (2) - QUANAH PARKER, JAMES MOONEY AND THE SACRED PEYOTE - (Part Two) © excerpts from MIKE JAY's - "Mescaline - A Global History of the First Psychedelic" - Yale University Press - New Haven and London, 2019
27 notes · View notes
bookcoversonly · 3 years
Text
Tumblr media
Title: Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic | Author: Mike Jay | Publisher: Yale University Press (2019)
0 notes
garudabluffs · 3 years
Text
Tumblr media
Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic Paperback – March 23, 2021
The New York Review of Books
"In the September 23 issue of the magazine, Mike Jay reviews two books that seek to broaden the conversation about drug use in society. Michael Pollan’s This is Your Mind on Plants and Carl Hart’s Drug Use for Grown-Ups ask provocative questions: Why have psychedelics escaped the stigma of cocaine and heroin? Why is our morning shot of caffeine legal, but a nightcap of opium tea not? And what’s so wrong with getting high for fun, anyway?
Jay, a British journalist and historian, has been writing since the 1990s about the history of drugs and their influence on culture. In an e-mail this week, he told me that when he started out, “there was little media coverage of the subject beyond addiction and crime stories.” But, as a writer, he found mind-altering substances irresistible.
“I’m attracted to topics that cross boundaries and genres,” he says, and stories about drugs—who takes them, and how they experience them—offered avenues into diverse disciplines, “from neuroscience to anthropology, psychiatry to art, pharmacology to social history.” Jay has since explored these linkages in several books, including High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture (2010) and Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century (2012), and in exhibitions he has curated of art and visual culture.
Jay has been drawn especially to histories of drugs and mental illness, which “bring idiosyncratic private experience into dialogue with the norms and consensus reality of their time and place.” In the last decade, there’s been a surge of interest in his previously esoteric beat, as clinical trials around the world have demonstrated the potential of various psychedelic drugs to treat addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, and depression.
Since at least as far back as the 1890s, Jay says, “trip literature” has been characterized by “breathless first-person narratives, often fixated on sensory distortions, color changes, and so on.” Continuing a long tradition of first-person writing on drugs, Pollan and Hart both offer personal testimony of their drug use that goes beyond those tropes to enlighten readers and dispel misconceptions and stigma.
In his review, Jay refers to the “Pollan effect”—the singular influence of Pollan’s writing on public opinion, most recently in rehabilitating hallucinogens like LSD, “magic mushrooms,” and DMT to the extent that they are now considered positively as therapeutic supplements and aids for mental productivity. “The diffusion of new drugs into societies often has an identifiable source,” Jay told me, and that source has often been a writer. For example, the English writer Thomas De Quincey “transformed the perception of opium from a quotidian pain medication into an exotic, dark, and dangerous agent of visionary experience” with his 1821 book Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. In Jay’s view,the closest analogy to the “Pollan effect” is perhaps Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception (1954), the bestseller that first introduced psychedelics to mainstream culture. Huxley, like Pollan, presented himself with great skill not as an initiate of an esoteric drug cult but an ingenue, undergoing and relaying extraordinary experiences on behalf of the general reader.
The power of such charismatic writing has also, however, had the effect of amplifying the experience of a privileged class of drug user. While the archives are full of accounts by educated white men, the first drug policies in the United States, in the late nineteenth century, targeted vulnerable, non-white groups—prohibiting the uses of opium among Chinese residents of San Francisco and of peyote on Native American reservations—and the “war on drugs” continues to be disproportionately waged against communities of color and the poor.
Hart, having come from such a community himself, decided to write openly about his own experiences to dispel the racist assumptions that fuel the drug war, arguing that responsible recreational use should fall under every adult’s right to “the pursuit of happiness.” Yet acknowledging “the obvious element of pleasure,” Jay says, has been tantamount to taboo in the drug debate “ever since the young Sigmund Freud described the pleasures of cocaine frankly in Über Coca (1884) and was blamed by his medical colleagues for recklessly encouraging its popular use.”
“The voices of the colonized and those of non-white ethnicities are systemically underrepresented in drug history,” Jay observes, “so I make the most of them when I find them.” In his review, he writes that “in contrast to the Western engagement with psychedelics…in Indigenous cultures these experiences are typically seen as private and in no need of interpretation.” While this dynamic presented a pressing problem for Pollan as he tried to find Native Americans who would speak openly about their peyote ceremonies over video-call, Jay says that the way such sources “generated two different types of history” was part of the appeal of writing his 2019 book, Mescaline: A Global History of the first Psychedelic:
The Western engagement is characterized by subjective accounts that aim to capture and isolate the effects of the drug and present them for scientific or literary scrutiny. The Indigenous story is strikingly different. There is a presumption against sharing or describing the experience; it’s regarded as crude and reductive to generalize from one’s own experience, or to attribute it simply to the plant in question (even more so to the chemical compounds that plant might contain). The ceremony, in turn, is not easily detached from the culture that underpins it. So, where the Western engagement is rich in individual experiences, the Indigenous history has a broader sweep: a collective tradition, embedded in the narrative and mental world of its people.
Gender represents another significant bias in the literature on drugs. While this imbalance “dates back to the era when medical science was an almost exclusively male concern,” Jay notes, “it persisted into the modern drug counterculture: it’s surely beyond coincidence that its canonical figures (Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Hunter S. Thompson, etc.) were all men.” As a corrective, he recommends the work of historian Erika Dyck at the University of Saskatchewan, who has “brought many female pioneers of the psychedelic era out of the shadows,” and Bett Williams’s recent memoir The Wild Kindness: A Psilocybin Odyssey (2020).
There remains much to uncover in the history of getting high, and Jay says that his next book will explore drugs and “the making of the modern mind,” the development of Western intellectual history in the nineteenth century. “Our current fascination with psychedelics and mental exploration has a longer history than we recognize.”
1 note · View note
Text
Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic https://www.amazon.com/dp/0300231075/ref=cm_sw_r_other_apa_i_tXZpDbYA0K90A
0 notes
ancestorsalive · 4 years
Photo
Tumblr media
PORTRAIT [2] QUANAH PARKER, JAMES MOONEY AND THE SACRED PEYOTE [Part two] "[…] February 1891 found JAMES MOONEY, of the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of Ethnology, in residence at the Bureau of Indian Affairs' agency at Anadarko, southwest Oklahoma, from where several tribes including the Wichita, the Caddo and the Kiowa were managed. MOONEY was, as always, racing against time to record and preserve centuries of Indian language, culture and tradition that were vanishing before his eyes as white pioneers colonised what had previously been designated as Indian country. […] MOONEY sought out clandestine ghost dances around Anadarko and collected the new songs. He spent as little time as possible at the agency, staying mostly in the Kiowa camps 30 miles to the south where the rose out of the rolling prairie like piles of red rubble, enclosing a hidden landscape of stunted post-oak forests, Wichita Mountains, rubble, fast running-creeks and valleys of long grass in which the last remaining buffalo had taken refuge. He was moving too spontaneously for his living expenses to be reimbursed, and by the summer of 1891 would be reduced to sleeping on the ground in a dirty tipi and living on crackers and coffee. Briefly back in Anadarko on administrative business, he was approached by a young Kiowa who 'came to tell me in a guarded manner that his people intended to eat mescal that night at a camp about ten miles up the Ouachita and would probably be willing to have me present.' […] Eventually they arrived at a copse beside the river where a tipi had been erected. As the door flap was drawn open he saw a group of about thirty men, a mix of Kiowa, Comanche and Apache, seated in a circle around a central fire enclosed within a horseshoe of banked earth on which had been placed a large peyote button. At 10 o'clock a master of ceremonies, known as the roadman, rolled a smoke of tobacco in a dried corn shuck and offered an opening prayer before passing twelve dried buttons to each participant. They ate them, plucking the downy tuft from the center before chewing carefully and swallowing. If MOONEY respected protocol by not watching, he would have plenty of opportunities to do so over the months and years to come. On this occasion he declined the cactus, 'as I did not feel sure that I could keep my brain clear for observation otherwise.' IT WAS A MISTAKE HE NEVER MADE AGAIN. […] At one point in the dark hours that followed, 'the door flap was suddenly lifted and a man stepped in, carrying in his arms an infant, a 'child sick almost to death'. MOONEY watched with profound emotion 'the pathetic earnestness of the father as he watched the priests praying over his child, which seemed in stupor and made no sound', after which 'he left as silently as he entered'. The songs and prayers continued through the first light, when a group of women from the camp entered with water, bred, dried meat, sweetened maize and coffee. The ceremony ended with the roadman requesting of MOONEY that he 'should go back and tell the whites that the Indians had a religion of their own which they loved.' "[…] For their peyote meeting, QUANAH nominated as roadman one of the oldest members of his tribe, Puiwat, whom he told MOONEY was the first Comanche peyotist. Puiwat was married to an Apache and was said to have learned the rite from the Mescalero some fifty years previously. QUANAH said he wanted to convince his guest that peyote 'does not age men prematurely or make them weak-minded or crazy'. MOONEY recalled later that Puiwat 'was blind' and very feeble' but 'when his turn came to sing the midnight song he took the rattle and sang as vigorously as any of the others'. MOONEY accepted the peyote as it circulated and entered the state in which, as he later wrote: "One seems to be lifted out of the body and floating about in the air like a freed spirit. The fire takes on glorious shapes, the sacred mescal upon the crescent mound becomes alive and moves and talks and you talk to it and it answers. You look around on your companions and they seem far away and unreal, and yet you know they are close by your side. At times the songs and the drum-beat fill the tipi like a burst of thunder...then the sound comes up from the ground and out of the air and is all around you like spirit whisperings. "[…] After concluding his business, QUANAH presented MOONEY with the wand that Puiwat had used during the ceremony. MOONEY also negotiated the purchase of a large burlap sack of dried peyote buttons., 50 pounds in weight, which he brought back with him to Washington. Its contents had already passed through many hands on their journey from the peyote gardens of Laredo and would pass through many more, launching the first scientific trials of peyote on human subjects and being consumed by America's leading authorities in pharmacy, neurology, psychology and philosophy. It was an exchange that cemented a bond of trust between from millennia of sacred tradition to the clinical gaze of western modernity. © Excerpts from MIKE JAY's - "Mescaline - A Global History of the First Psychedelic" - Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2019.
2 notes · View notes
garudabluffs · 4 years
Photo
Tumblr media
American Trip: Ido Hartogsohn                  September 9, 2020
Dr. Ido Hartoghson joins the show to talk about the ideas in his new book, American Trip: Set, Setting, and the Psychedelic Experience in the Twentieth Century Acknowledging psychedelics as non-specific amplifiers of consciousness, we discuss different historical (and present) paradigms of use in order to interrogate the role of psychedelics within our culture. As we find ourselves staring down a number of existential questions, we must ask ourselves, “What do we hope to achieve through our personal and cultural exposure to psychedelics?”
LISTEN 02:06:05 https://www.psymposia.com/podcasts/american-trip-ido-hartogsohn/?mc_cid=56cc8d2ff5&mc_eid=f689326418     
“This book is the latest addition to an expanding literature on psychedelic culture. It joins works of fiction such as T. C. Boyle’s Outside Looking In, as well as non-fiction like High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica and Visionary Experience in the Seventies by Erik Davis, and Mike Jay’s Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic. At the heart of Hartogsohn’s book is the idea of “set and setting,” but rather than the somewhat banal notion of “everything is context,” it could also be read as a mind-set or a resetting of the way one approaches the history of the American infatuation with mind-altering substances.
The author takes the reader on a journey into several timeframes and locations, seemingly worlds apart from one another (e.g., the CIA, Jimi Hendrix, and Silicon Valley), but he wonderfully interweaves them into a single coherent narrative.
American Trip provides a more nuanced understanding of the American fascination with doing things “under the influence.” The tone of the book is sober, and it is extremely erudite, and intellectually challenging. Highly recommended not just to those interested in psychedelia, but to anyone interested in the American experience in the 20th century as such, technology, mysticism, and counterculture in the broadest sense.” amazon.com review                                                                        
0 notes