by Alex Letcher
Structuralism posits that what is important about a cultural system is the relationship between its fundamental units. So, for example, language only acquires meaning because of the way words are positioned in relation to other words, rather than because of any fundamental or essential meaning residing within the words. A word such as 'asylum' can refer to a place where the mentally ill are incarcerated, or to the shelter offered to political exiles, but its exact sense depends on the way it is deployed around the other words of a sentence. Words, dress codes, popular music, adverts, myths, the content of dreams: structuralists have read all of these as 'signs', the meanings of which can be found in relation to the network of other signs that make up each particular system. Though not a French invention, the idea took particular hold in France. Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-) used it to revolutionise anthropology; Roland Barthes (1915-1980), cultural and literature studies; Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) and Michel Foucault (1926-1984), philosophy; and Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), psychology and the study of the unconscious.
This humanistic tendency informed the Parisian experimenters who, following Freud and Jung, saw the cause of mental illness as originating in the dynamics of the unconscious. In their structuralist view, the elements of the unconscious were thought to fit together like words in a language, but the question was how to shed light on this shadowy aspect of the psyche and so be able to untangle this foreign tongue. Artists were chosen for the experiments because they were believed already to possess the gift of expressing the unconscious. Certainly all art was culturally mediated, and had to be rendered skilfully in culturally sanctioned forms (as in, say, an allegorical painting). But the experimenters held onto the view that 'great' pieces of art had originated from deep within the artist's unconscious mind. The Parisians hoped that psilocybin would roll back the reducing filter of the conscious mind a little further and so allow the unconscious an unprecedented freedom of expression. And by studying the elements of this raw art, drawn up fresh from the depths, they hoped to lay bare the very workings of the unconscious, to piece together the elements and structural relationships that gave it form and coherence.
And, after all, who knew what powers and forces moved in the deep recesses of the mind? Perhaps psilocybin-induced encounters with these fundamental forces would refresh and reinvigorate artists, sweep them along in wholly new aesthetic directions? Perhaps psilocybin might clear away conscious and unconscious blocks to activate a latent but unexpressed artistic ability, transforming the mediocre into masters? Perhaps the drug might reveal the origins of the primitive shamanic impulse itself, or even provide access to unusual psychic powers, and the ability that shamans so often claimed, to divine the future?
The first experiments were conducted by one of Delay's students, Robert Volmat, and his colleague at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, Rene Robert, who together supervised some thirty-five sessions in which psilocybin was administered to twenty-nine willing artists. The results were superficially dramatic. One artist abandoned his usual brushes and gouache for pastel and watercolours, which he smeared across the canvas with his hands, painting a new picture every three minutes for nearly an hour and a half." Another revelled in what he called the 'dissolution of forms' that psilocybin occasioned.
Volmat and Robert were certain that they could distinguish an emerging psilocybin style, characterised, they said, by elongated brush strokes, parallel lines and repetition, that came not from some impairment of coordination but from 'a compelling rhythm that replaces the normal experience of time'.*5 They found that, as the drug took hold, the artists were faced with a challenge: to try to hold onto their ordinary style, their ordinary way of working, or to succumb to the drug and experiment freely with this new way of seeing and creating. Those that opted for the former seem to have gained little from the experience; those opting for the latter, a great deal.
For the researchers, this was all evidence in support of their structuralist theory of mind. They likened the psilocybin experience to a fertile moment' in which conditioned barriers were stripped away, and in which there was no thought for the future, only for expressing the unconscious in the moment. And they were pleased to find that roany of their subjects felt liberated by the experience, and attempted to incorporate their creative discoveries back into the day-to-day: in °ther words, the insights of the psilocybin Stilwandel seemed not to be entirely forgotten.
Later, Roger Heim, of all people, together with Pierre Thevenard, took an interest in this line of research and, in particular, the question of whether mushrooms could unlock any latent artistic potential hidden in the depths of the mind. Throughout the 1960s, they conducted a series of similar experiments, giving mushrooms (Psilocybe cubensis) to volunteers. They not only published their findings but also filmed the experiments, recording the reactions of their subjects and the process of artistic creation as it occurred.14 Every nuance of every picture produced during the experiments was rigorously analysed, not only for 'artistic merit', but also for what it revealed about the inner workings of the artist's mind.
Take Maitre Breitling, for example, who, unusually for Heim's volunteers, had a disphoric encounter with the mushrooms. He spent the entirety of the trip drawing an apocalyptic dragon, its mouth filled with ivory fangs, its head covered in crenulated scales and repeated eyes. Obsessed with analysing this creation, he addressed it in distinctly Freudian overtones: 'filthy beast! dirty beast!' he kept repeating.*5 When he declared that the dragon stood in the middle ground between the eagle and the lion a structuralist statement if ever there was one surely he had stumbled into some dark but archetypal region of the unconscious from which the Western mythological wellstream had sprung? And when he drew a plumed serpent, surely this was the figure that appeared throughout Central American indigenous mythology, and surely this meant that much of Aztec art and mythology was derived ultimately from mushroom visions? So thought Heim and Thevenard, at least.
The mushrooms had a profound effect upon another volunteer, the young Mademoiselle Michaux, who was by profession a graphic designer. Heim had no qualms about rather patronisingly pointing out the inadequacies of her previous artistic endeavours, which he felt were mediocre, kitsch and without merit. He was delighted to find, however, that under the influence of mushrooms her drawing style was radically transformed, her pictures becoming almost cubist or primitivist in appearance. The young woman was enthralled: . . there is not one detail [of my drawing] that isn't significant. I'm inspired. I've been a genius for three hours.'16 Thinking that she had somewhat overstated the case, Heim nevertheless wrote of one of her portraits that it is without doubt unconscious, but it is self-explanatory, luminously comprehensible. We are far from the abstract, and perhaps quite close to the totemic origins of magic.**7 And indeed Mile Michaux maintained that after the experiment she had had several flashes of precognition in which she accurately predicted the future. Heim declined to pass judgement upon this, but behind the Gallic insouciance he was clearly excited by this encounter with what he saw as the buried unconscious wellspring of shamanism, mythology and the creative impulse itself.
Did the mushrooms really reveal the workings of the artists' unconscious minds? Such a view is now unfashionable, Freud and 4the unconscious' having fallen from favour within the academy (except, perhaps, within the discipline of literary criticism). Nor is art especially modern art thought to be an unmediated expression of the unconscious: it is far too self-consciously done. A more current view would be that this mushroomic art was simply the product of a distorted perception, no more or less revealing than if the artists had been given spectacles of frosted glass to wear.
And exciting as Heim and Thvenard's and Volmat and Robert's results appeared to be in terms of making people more creative and revealing a 'psilocybin style', other experiments elsewhere produced more ambivalent results. Those conducted in Germany using LSD, for example, had the opposite effect: artists felt inhibited and impaired by the
experience, and were terrified that the very qualities that made their art unique would be stripped away. The determining factor seems to have been not the different drugs, but the way in which the experiments were conducted. The French seem to have been able to create a particularly safe atmosphere and a conducive environment for artistic experimentation, in a way that the Germans were not.1What would become clear, however, was that whether or not psychedelics made one more creative or artistically talented, they opened up extraordinary new realms of visionary experience, which countless artists, musicians and poets felt moved to try to represent: they gave artists something new to paint, in other words. Psychedelia was about to explode into the world as a major cultural force.
Before turning to the story of how the mushrooms made their way from the cloistered world of the academy to the psychedelic underground, however, we need to return to America, where academic interest in Wasson's discoveries was also keen but was not always motivated by such humanitarian ideals. James Moore was an American chemist at Parke, Da vies and Company, who in 1955 wrote expressing an interest in accompanying Wasson on his travels, ostensibly for 'scientific reasons': he wanted to identify the mushrooms' active ingredients. Wasson was persuaded, not least because Moore had access to a funding body, the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, which had generously offered to underwrite the entirety of his next expedition. So it was that Moore accompanied Wasson, Heim, the photographer Allan Richardson and the French anthropologist Guy Stresser-Pean to Mexico in 1956. What none of them knew, until many years later, was that Moore was working for the CIA, and that the Geschickter fund was a government front for a secret project called ARTICHOKE (later MK-ULTRA), the aim of which was to find 'mind-bending' drugs for use in the Cold War.
Throughout the 1950s the CIA tested a variety of psychoactives, including cannabis and LSD, in the hope of finding the elusive 'truth drug', or at least a chemical that might weaken an opponent's will. They did this through a series of highly questionable experiments: giving LSD to unwitting soldiers; running a brothel and secretly spraying LSD into clients' faces; paying psychologists around the country to pull in students who might volunteer to try exotic drugs.19 No story about an unusual plant or drug was left unexplored, and the CIA were somewhat ahead of the game when they sent an agent to Mexico in search of the reputed mushrooms, long before Wasson had heard of them. Their heavy-handed tactics, however, had failed to get past the reticence of the indigenous locals, and their agent whose name we do not know returned empty-handed. Somewhat piqued that a middleaged banker had succeeded where they had so spectacularly failed, the CIA attempted to bring Wasson on board, approaching him in 1955. After some consideration, Wasson politely demurred, believing that intelligence work would compromise his own researches.*0 Undeterred, the CIA sent Moore to infiltrate Wasson's team and to bring back the strange hallucinogenic mushrooms himself.3'
Moore was a disaster from the start. He very quickly managed to get himself ostracised by the rest of the group for his continual whingeing and complaining, for whereas the others revelled in the challenges of travelling in a developing country, Moore detested it. He got diarrhoea, was mercilessly bitten by insects, and slept badly on the hard earth floors of Mexican homes. And while the others enjoyed a night of ecstatic brilliance in the capable hands of Maria Sabina, Moore just felt miserable and disorientated. Almost certainly, these reactions were the result of the inner distress caused by his own duplicity: a chemist, not a spy, Moore was ill equipped to handle the conflicting demands of subterfuge. As Allan Richardson noted,.. all we knew was that we didn't like Jim. Something was wrong with him.'*1
Despite his inept handling of the situation, Moore returned, albeit nearly a stone lighter, with a bagful of mushrooms. But before he could extract the active ingredients (animal tests having once again proved ineffectual), Heim's team managed to cultivate the mushrooms and Hofmann's to isolate psilocybin. The CLA were thwarted for a second time, and were obliged to obtain their supplies of psilocybin from Sandoz, just as they had their LSD. In the end, neither drug proved to have any potential for military use. Perhaps more unwelcome, from the point of view of Wasson's scientific circle, was the arrival in Mexico in 1957 of a rival mycological team, under the leadership of the American Rolf Singer (1906-1994), intent on collecting and identifying the remaining hallucinogenic species. Singer had been a student of Heim's, but was by then working for a university in Argentina, and was commissioned by the Chicago psychiatrist Sam Stein to undertake the expedition. Stein, like many of his profession at the time, was interested in the therapeutic possibilities of psychedelics, and was eager to conduct experiments with these newly discovered mushrooms.
The rivalry between the Wasson and the Singer group was intense, and came to a head when Singer published his treatise on the Mexican mushrooms just months ahead of Heim.35 Heim had intended to honour his friend by naming one particular species Psilocybe wassonii, but as a result of his swiftly published paper, Singer got priority for his Psilocybe muliercula. A rather undignified spat ensued both privately and in the press, with much name-calling from both sides, and which rumbled on into the 1980s.54 The situation was partly resolved, and Wasson's dented pride partially restored, when Psilocybe wassoniorum was later placed into the scientific textbooks.
Singer, by his own confession, was nervous about the effects of the mushrooms, and avoided eating them, but his boss Sam Stein was itching to try them: he had once suffered an accidental intoxication after eating mushrooms, and he wanted to know whether the effects would be the same. Two mushrooms of Psilocybe mexicana disappointingly had no effect (unsurprisingly, given that Hofmann and Heim had both taken thirty-two), but just before Christmas, on zz December 1957, Stein ate two specimens of Psilocybe cubensis, fried in butter, which had been grown in the lab from those brought back by Singer. Things did not go well.55
As the mushrooms began to work, Stein found himself feeling angry and uneasy. Already worried about having a 'bad trip', he attempted to neutralise the effects with an antipsychotic drug, reserpine, but to no avail. Panicking, and unable to hold down a coherent thought, he got into his car and drove to his doctor's house, luckily avoiding an accident that would have made him the first ever psilocybin-related casualty. The doctor barely knew what to do coffee, alcohol and more reserpine merely aggravated Stein's feeling of being 'distressed in the head' and so attempted to calm him by reading out choice extracts from classic works on brain biochemistry. Hardly surprisingly, this failed, and so Stein got into his car (again!), drove home, and sat out the course of the trip, nursed by his concerned wife.
What is extraordinary about Stein's account published once again quite legitimately in a peer-reviewed scientific journal is his sense ot indignation that the mushrooms failed to live up to expectations. Previously, he had had happy times with atropine and mescaline, and found, to his evident suburban delight, that LSD improved his tennis game.36 He was forced to the regretful conclusion that mushrooms were just not as good.
Of Stein's original team, however special mention must be made of the Mexican mycologist Gaston Guzman. Along with the German Jochen Gartz, and the American John Allen, Guzman has dedicated much of his working life to discovering, describing and naming every species of hallucinogenic fungus in the world. In 1983, he published his magnum opus, The Genus Psilocybe, followed by a lengthy and detailed paper on the world's hallucinogenic species, written with these two collaborators.37 His passion for the subject seems to have been stimulated when, while working for Stein, he took part in a velada in the small town of Rancho El Cura, not far from Huautla, in the rainy season of 1958. In this pivotal experience, friends and relatives mysteriously appeared to him, and apart from the surprising colours that played before him, he was particularly struck by the sight of an enchanted castle that had materialised unexpectedly in a corner of the room. Only the next day did he realise that the object he had been looking at with such rapt attention was his mushroom-drying u
nit.
In the halcyon days of the early 1960s, then, increasing numbers of academics and scientists in France and America were happily trying the magic mushrooms themselves or were testing them on volunteers and were eagerly comparing notes with their academic colleagues. Hofmann's isolation of psilocybin, and its subsequent marketing by Sandoz, meant that the quintessential mushroom experience was now readily available at least for those licensed to obtain the drug, researchers around the world. No longer did they have to make the difficult trek to Mexico, nor try to master the difficult art of laboratory cultivation. However, one American scientist, a brilliant Harvard clinical psychologist, did make the trip to Mexico, where, on the recommendation of a colleague, he managed to procure some mushrooms, which he ate with friends one sunny day in August i960. His name was Timothy Leary, and afterwards nothing was ever quite the same.
High Priests
Then God spoke to me ... I saw in a quick glimpse the design of the universe. The blueprint of evolution. The impersonal, staggering grandeur of the game ...
Timothy Leary, recalling his first LSD trip'
You take the blue pill and the story ends ... You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.
"Morpheus', The Matrix
If the psychedelic sixties could be viewed as a Technicolor movie, then its star would undoubtedly have been LSD. When Jimi Hendrix nonchalantly asked, 'Are you experienced?' he meant 'Have you dropped Acid?' When Grace Slick sang about Alice, mushrooms and Wonderland in her masterpiece White Rabbit, her meaning was quite obviously allegorical. And when, amidst a psychedelic melange of twisted sounds and backwards guitars, John Lennon shattered the anodyne pop of The Beatles by imploring us to turn off our minds, relax and float downstream, it was clear just what he was referring to.
