Provocations

by Camille Paglia

  In 1967, Patti Boyd Harrison, George’s wife, took the Beatles to a lecture in London by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The Beatles fell under the Maharishi’s spell and began to dress in quasi-Hindu style, with chic Nehru jackets and mod paisley fabrics, which revolutionized fashion around the world. In 1968, the Beatles flew to India to meditate at the Maharishi’s ashram in Rishikesh. But their flirtation with Hinduism ended abruptly in bitter disillusion: the Maharishi ruined his saintly reputation by reportedly making sexual advances to another celebrity pilgrim, Mia Farrow, who was there with her studious sister Prudence. The Beatles and the Farrows decamped in high dudgeon. A record of that adventure is contained in two Beatles songs on the 1968 White Album: “Dear Prudence” and “Sexy Sadie” (“You made a fool of everyone”), a transsexual tribute to the Maharishi’s seductive charms. Farrow confirmed the rumored details about the Maharishi’s blunder in her 1998 autobiography, What Falls Away. However, it was thanks to the Beatles’ cross-fertilization of Hinduism with rock that the Swami Satchidananda, seated in white robes on the stage, would give the prayer invocation that opened the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival.

  In addition to the sitar, or an electric guitar strung and played to sound like one, the style of “acid rock” that originated in the San Francisco hippie scene can arguably be considered to have religious intonations. Acid rock helped promulgate the Sixties concept of cosmic consciousness. Even those (like me) who did not take drugs were radicalized by the power and expansiveness of that shimmering music, with its unfixed keys, sonic distortions, ominous drone, wandering melodic lines, and twangy, floating, evaporating notes. The leading San Francisco acid-rock bands were Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Big Brother and the Holding Company. Psychedelic effects were used in Los Angeles by the Byrds and the Doors and in England by the Yardbirds, Jeff Beck, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Donovan, the Kinks, and early Pink Floyd. The drugged mood of this “trippy” style was revived in British trance music (called “trip-hop”) in the early 1990s as a development of the rave scene.

  Because it consists of transient instrumental effects, psychedelic music has received far less attention than folk and folk-rock with overtly political lyrics, whose manifest content is easier to analyze. This is yet another factor impeding general recognition of the Sixties’ religious legacy. Though the Beats left their mark in novels and poems, the counterculture was less interested in constructing self-contained artifacts. The enduring achievements of the Sixties generation were in music, modern dance, experimental film and video, Pop and Conceptual Art, and performance art, which swallowed up poetry. Literature is strikingly underrepresented. Literary surveys of the Sixties overrely on the work of figures like Norman Mailer, whose brilliant career began in the late Forties. The major critics and theorists of the Sixties—Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler, Norman O. Brown—also belong to an earlier generation. Hermann Hesse, whose novels Siddhartha (1922), about the early life of Buddha, and Steppenwolf (1927) were Sixties cult classics, was born in 1877. Except for Tom Wolfe’s New Journalism, most Sixties culture crystallized outside the book.

  The gap in the Sixties’ artistic and intellectual legacy partly occurred because too many young people followed their elementary understanding of Asian religion by making sensory experience primary. Shunning schedules and routine, they sought the “eternal Now,” dramatized by the otherworldliness of psychedelic rock. Furthermore, the sexual revolution, which began in 1960 with the commercial release of Enovid, the first reliable oral contraceptive in history, finally overwhelmed the Sixties’ spiritual quest. Beat interpretations of Asian thought tended to exaggerate its sexual component. In 1958, Alan Watts criticized “Beat Zen” for its “anything goes” attitude toward sex. Similarly, hipsters often carelessly reduced Hinduism to the erotic acrobatics of Tantric yoga or Vatsyayana’s Kama Sutra (c. 250 A.D.). But sexual codes have been very strict throughout India’s history: at no time was promiscuity endorsed. The yoni and lingam (monumental stone genitalia in Hindu shrines) or the voluptuous copulating couples on the facades of Hindu temples belonged to a fertility cult where sexual intercourse symbolized the natural cycle of birth and death.

  “Make love, not war” was a Sixties rubric. Free love had been endorsed by radical Romantics like Percy Bysshe Shelley who sought to shatter the bonds of bourgeois marriage. A cheeky promiscuity was also affected by urban flappers in the 1920s, which was energized by the hyperactive dance rhythms of the Jazz Age as well as the seditious mood of underground speakeasies. But free love was never achieved on a massive scale until the 1960s, when random sexual connection was blithely assigned a spiritual and redemptive meaning. “Getting it on” meant freeing mind and body to strike a blow against residual American puritanism. By the hedonistic Seventies, spirituality had been abandoned, a change marked by the shift in drugs from communal, “mellow” marijuana and visionary LSD to edgy, expensive, hoarded cocaine, which sharpened competition and enhanced the ego sense of power and mastery. Sexual liberation, as should now be obvious, had its high costs, which we are still sorting out: sexual diseases, a soaring divorce rate, and a pandemic sexualization of media images with uncertain consequences for children. Self-presentation by early teenagers, for example, has become strikingly eroticized, leading to premature sexual pressures and demands.

  Feeling trapped by a corporate and technological society, Sixties rebels tried to empower sex as a quick route to reconnection with nature. The Sixties dreamed of limitless sex without consequence—a bouncy, open-ended, Technicolor film with a rock soundtrack. Many genuine hippies dropped out of college to join communes, bake bread, and have babies. Others of the Sixties generation who entered the professions often defied or delayed the procreative principle that was at the heart of ancient mystery cult. Two new models of sexual liberation who emerged in the 1970s were the liberated woman, who put career before marriage and family, and the post-Stonewall gay man, in whose paradise of pleasures even lesbians were no longer welcome. Reproductive rights, establishing women’s control over their own bodies, were always a major issue in feminism, but over the next quarter century would become an obsessive preoccupation, determining campaign politics and judicial appointments. Feminism inextricably identified itself with abortion—with termination of life rather than fertility. (I am speaking as a militantly pro-choice feminist.) Feminism’s foregrounding of abortion, which caused national turmoil and limited its outreach as a populist movement, was one consequence of the loss of Sixties cosmic consciousness by the 1970s.

  For gay men, free love detached from all reference to nature meant that, by the Eighties, their ruling theorist would be social constructionist Michel Foucault rather than the nature-revering Whitman or Ginsberg. Despite a Seventies fad for the virile lumberjack look, the erotic ideal in the gay male world has reverted over time to the ruthless master type of the Greek beautiful boy, Antinous reborn: the shaved, sculpted, callipygian ephebe whose perfection is heartbreakingly transient.

  7. PSYCHEDELIC DRUGS

  “Sex, drugs, and rock and roll” was the fast-track reality for a significant segment, working-class as well as middle-class, of the Sixties generation. Drugs melted defenses and broke barriers, creating a momentary sense of unity with mankind and the world. They functioned as magic elixirs for the missing initiatory rituals in an increasingly transient society. In the matter of drugs, I must stress, I was merely an observer: as an Italian-American, I am a product of Mediterranean wine culture, where intoxicants are integrated with cuisine. As a libertarian, I favor legalization of drugs, not because I approve of their use but because in my view government should have no power to dictate what individuals do with their bodies. On the other hand, I am painfully aware of the tragic toll that drugs took on my generation. This was one of the great cultural disasters of American history. I warn my students that recreational drugs—now a toxic cocktail of black-ma
rket tranquilizers—may give short-term gains but impair long-term achievement.

  Nevertheless, it was drugs, abused until they turned on their takers, that helped trigger the spiritual explosion of the Sixties. Getting high—as in the magnificent, rumbling Byrds song “Eight Miles High”—was to elevate perspective. Aspiring beyond materialism and conformity, young people manufactured their own martyrdom. They pushed their nervous systems to the limit, until social forms seemed to dissolve. What they saw was sublime—the High Romantic vision of creative nature, its vast energies twisting and turning along a continuum from the brain to the stars. That cosmic consciousness is precisely what is lacking in too many of today’s writers and academics, especially followers of post-structuralism and postmodernism, cynical systems that are blind to nature.

  The association of drugs with the avant-garde began with British High Romanticism. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s great “mystery” poems of the 1790s (“Kubla Khan,” “Christabel,” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”) were partly inspired by his experiences with opium, present in laudanum, a common pain medication to which he had been addicted since childhood. In Artificial Paradises (1860), his response to Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), Baudelaire described the hallucinations of his experiments with hashish mixed with opium. In late-nineteenth-century America, white middle-class women took “patent medicines” containing morphine, a derivative of opium, for their “nerves” or “female ailments.” In the same period, opium dens were common in Chinese immigrant communities around San Francisco. Opium, extracted from the seedpod of the opium poppy, had arrived in China from India via Burma in the seventeenth century; by the next century, China was the center of a flourishing international opium trade. Non-prescription possession of opium and cocaine was banned in the U.S. by the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, which helped create organized crime. Drugs, like alcohol during Prohibition, would be eagerly supplied by an underground economy.

  William James first studied the connection between drugs and mystic vision that would become so basic a tenet of the 1960s. In his 1901–02 Edinburgh lectures, published as The Varieties of Religious Experience, James described his experiments with nitrous oxide, which he believed duplicated the altered perception reported by saints in their visions of God or angels. James skeptically viewed foundational religious figures as obsessives afflicted with “nervous instability.”

  Havelock Ellis was more sympathetic: in an 1898 article, “Mescal: A New Artificial Paradise,” he described ritual use among Southwestern American Indians of mescal, obtained from the button of a cactus plant. He himself had experimented with mescal in London. Aldous Huxley cited Ellis’ essay in The Doors of Perception (1954), where he described his own experiment with mescaline (a synthetic version of the chemical agent in mescal) the prior year at his Hollywood home. (Huxley’s title, based on a Blake maxim, inspired the name of the Los Angeles art-rock band, the Doors.) Huxley’s partner in taking mescaline was Humphrey Osmond, a British research psychiatrist attending a convention of the American Psychological Association in Los Angeles. It is Osmond who invented the term “psychedelic” for the effect of hallucinogens on the brain. Later transmogrified into “psychedelia,” it remains the best word for the garish mental adventurism and extremism of the Sixties.

  The Beats used peyote, derived from mescal buttons. Snyder first tried peyote while studying American Indian culture at Reed College in 1948. It had been used since the Aztecs, who chewed the buttons or steeped them in a bitter tea. Ginsberg took peyote in New York in 1951 and Kerouac at Big Sur, California, the following year. Peyote use was common in bohemian Greenwich Village by 1957; mescaline arrived there the next year. In 1960, the Native American Church of North America won the legal right (revoked in 1990) to use peyote in its religious rituals. “Magic” mushrooms (“ ’shrooms” for short) containing psychotropic psilocybin were also used by the Beats: Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Neal Cassady had been given them by Timothy Leary in 1960 after his return from summer vacation in Mexico, where he had first tried them. Before he began investigating LSD, Leary called his program the Harvard Psilocybin Project.

  The Sixties’ premiere drugs, however, were marijuana and LSD. Marijuana entered the U.S. in the early twentieth century with migrant Mexican farm workers in Texas. The hemp plant from which it comes was introduced to North America in the sixteenth century by the Spanish, who used it for fiber for rope and ship rigging. Before World War One, New Orleans was a major port for marijuana shipments from Mexico and Cuba. Marijuana use, then confined to the working class, spread through the rural South and was brought by blacks to Midwestern and Northeastern cities during the Great Migration for factory jobs during and after World War One. It was in the urban centers that marijuana became associated with music and the underground—a hip marriage that would last through the Sixties and beyond. The Beats, who made a cult of bebop jazz (a style evolving from the late 1930s through the mid-1950s), imitated black musicians’ habit of smoking “reefer.” Marijuana was then used by white folk musicians and spread across the country via leftist circles. It was through folk music (cf. Bob Dylan’s line, “Everybody must get stoned,” from “Rainy Day Woman”) that marijuana was transmitted to college students in the Sixties—the first time it had entered the middle class. For white users in the Fifties and Sixties, therefore, marijuana had the aura of creativity and progressive politics.

  LSD-25 (lysergic acid diethylamide; hence the term “acid”) was synthesized from rye fungus in 1938 by Dr. Albert Hofmann, a biochemist at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Basel, Switzerland. Hofmann discovered the chemical’s hallucinogenic effects when he inhaled it by accident in 1943. Because it seemed to mimic the warped sense of space and time in psychosis, LSD was first viewed as a promising mental-research drug. Humphrey Osmond tested it in Saskatchewan as a potential treatment for alcoholism. LSD also seemed to reproduce the effects of peyote in ancient Mesoamerican rituals. In 1949, Dr. Max Rinkel brought LSD from Sandoz to the U.S., where he began experiments in Boston. (“Sandoz” lingered as a code term for LSD in the U.K., as in the Animals’ 1965 song, “A Girl Named Sandoz.”) The CIA conducted its own tests on LSD from 1951 through the decade.

  LSD was being used in Greenwich Village by 1961 and was available on the East and West Coasts the next year. By the summer of 1964, it was widespread in the San Francisco Bay area, where it confused the political climate on the Left. (See Mark Kitchell’s first-rate 1990 documentary, Berkeley in the Sixties.) Within a year, LSD had become a major street drug in cities nationally. It was popularized by a 1964 book by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, The Psychedelic Experience. The book’s subtitle, A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, showed the religious cast that drug-taking was acquiring. As a student volunteer at a California veterans hospital, novelist Ken Kesey first took LSD in 1959 (the same year that Ginsberg did) and later conducted “Acid Test” parties at his home in the hills near San Francisco. Neal Cassady was part of these carnivalesque gatherings, which evolved into the Merry Pranksters, a free-form hippie group that toured the U.S. in a Day-Glo-painted 1939 school bus. By the late Sixties, Kesey (who was jailed for five months for marijuana offenses) was denouncing LSD. His recantation resembled that of Alpert, who went to India in 1967 and became Baba Ram Dass, a drug-free Hindu guru.

  Hyperbolic claims were made for LSD in the Sixties. For example, Walter Houston Clark, a friend of Leary, predicted in a 1969 book, Chemical Ecstasy: Psychedelic Drugs and Religion, that LSD’s intellectual effect on civilization would equal that of “the Copernican revolution.” In his 1970 bestseller, The Greening of America, Yale Law School professor Charles Reich similarly celebrated marijuana as an indispensable “truth-serum” that exposed society as “unreal.” Drug taking was also a gesture of rebellion against Western commercialism: marijuana—called “weed” or “mother nature” to highlight its organic character—was the intoxicant of ch
oice for those who rejected the businessman’s martinis or scotch and sodas. On the West Coast in particular, drug takers savored psychedelics’ associations with the “vision quest” of tribal shamans. In The Teachings of Don Juan (1968), the first of several bestsellers, Carlos Castaneda claimed, without substantiation, that he had received spiritual instruction in peyote from a Yaqui Indian shaman in Mexico. By establishing continuity or solidarity with Native American and pre-Columbian societies, drugs became an affirmation of multiculturalism as well as a vehicle of religious revelation.

  The psychedelic “trip” into inner space replicated the shaman’s magic journey, from which he returned with secret knowledge for his tribe. This myth of a spiritual journey was a motif of premodern societies from Central Asia to the Amazon River basin. It is possible that hallucinatory shamanism was widespread in Native American cultures because it was brought from Siberia by the Indians’ North Asian ancestors when they emigrated across the Bering Strait. (“Shaman” is a Ural-Altaic word.) Furthermore, North America, in contrast to Africa, for example, is especially fertile in hallucinogenic plants. Even the species of strong tobacco (Nicotiana rustica) used in Native American rituals had hallucinogenic properties.