The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (22 page)

Alchemy was the other one of Jung’s preoccupations that captivated us. The alchemist is generally regarded as a medieval precursor to the modern chemist, a figure engaged in the ultimately futile business of smelting, purifying, or otherwise turning various substances into gold. In fact, many early alchemists subjected all sorts of matter—plants, metals, minerals, even feces and bodily fluids—to a bewildering variety of bizarre manipulations. Over time, they mastered many chemical transformations and learned a great deal about matter, almost accidentally laying the foundations of modern chemistry in the process. But as Jung portrayed alchemy, it had very little to do with chemistry. Rather, it was yet another technique for spiritual transformation and achieving individuation. The alchemists often used a set of allegorical symbols and iconography drawn from their nascent grasp of chemistry, concepts like firing, hardening, purification, condensation, and distillation. But Jung insisted that the significance of these procedures was primarily symbolic. The chemical transmutations effected in the alembic were reflections of psychic processes, transformations taking place in the spirit, or soul, of the alchemist. But here again, some of their writings hinted at techniques for physical perfection, not unlike those texts associated with concepts akin to the resurrection body. In other words, the pursuits of physical and spiritual refinement were alloyed.

Jung asserts that alchemy had nothing to do with transmuting lead into gold; that notion was almost a deliberate obfuscation of what was really going on. The bigger prize was the “philosopher’s stone.” The philosopher’s stone was not simply a lump of alchemical gold; it was a technological artifact of some sort. In fact, the substance in question was the ultimate technological artifact, because it could “do” anything that could be imagined. In this, the stone has much in common with other imagined super-technologies such as flying saucers, starships, time machines, crystal balls, magic mirrors, and so on. All are conceived as artifacts, invented (or conjured) by man that can do things we normally regard as impossible. Only in an era familiar with nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and quantum technologies, can we now contemplate actually building devices whose power approaches that attributed to the philosopher’s stone.

Does the enduring allure of concepts like the resurrection body and the philosopher’s stone suggest they might be more than just delusions? Terence would say they were anticipations of future events, a potent shock wave resonating back through history, beckoning us, luring us, toward their inevitable invention or discovery. (The question of whether one “invents” or “discovers” something like a philosopher’s stone is one we’ll leave unexamined for now.) Perhaps someday we will produce our own. The fact that we now live in an age where we might actually diagram such a thing says something profound, and perhaps disturbing, about human imagination—and hubris.

This discussion of alchemy requires a further comment. At La Chorrera, Terence and I thought we could build the philosopher’s stone (the flying saucer, the time machine, the eschaton, insert your preference here) out of our own bodies, literally singing it into existence through a superconducting fusion of our own DNA with that of a mushroom. In the sober light of today, four decades later, this seems like an utterly crazy notion; but considered in the context of alchemy and other esoteric traditions, the notion is completely in line, though expressed in modern terms. Crazy we may have been; but again, if so, we were in the company of many great visionaries and spiritual masters throughout history.

Alchemists, or many of them, used an essentially empirical approach to pursue their art. Perhaps not fully aware of what they were doing, they mixed and melded matter, then observed the results, interpreting what they saw as reflections of inner, psychological processes. But given that their raw materials—the
prima materia—
were often derived from plants and animals, could they have accidentally (or deliberately, once trial and error had yielded some result) succeeded in isolating or concentrating psychedelic substances? And having ingested their handiwork, wouldn’t they have interpreted the effect as a complete success? Even now, with all our sophistication about chemistry and pharmacology, who cannot be impressed with Albert Hofmann’s “accidental” discovery of LSD, or the marvelous molecules invented by Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin? In a sense, their finds, or creations, exemplify the union of spirit and matter that the alchemists sought. By that measure at least, they might be called the alchemists of their day.

The tryptamine-based psychedelics are widespread in plant and animal life, as a result of the tryptamine molecule’s close relationship to tryptophan, which is universally distributed in organisms. Tryptamines are alkaloids and thus relatively easy to isolate using simple chemical techniques that would have been available to the early alchemists—just look at any issue of
The
Entheogen Review (
now defunct but available online) or visit the Erowid library (erowid.org) to find the methods devised by their modern counterparts! Given the array of materials and manipulations used by alchemists in the past, it strikes me as plausible that a few may have stumbled onto these substances. We have no proof, of course, though there are many bizarre depictions of animals and plants in alchemical iconography. Even these are mere hints, not explicit depictions.

Alchemy was an esoteric practice, after all. Its practitioners were not interested in divulging their secrets, and often went to great lengths to obfuscate them. I am no expert on such illustration, but the closest example I have seen to an explicit visual reference to psychedelics is a remarkable woodcut in Johann Daniel Mylius’s
Philosophia Reformata
, a text from 1622. The four women depicted represent the four stages of the alchemical transformation process; the patterns of the folds of their dresses appear to be a taxonomically accurate representation of
Psilocybe semilanceata
, known as liberty caps among mushroom enthusiasts. This species is tiny, potent, and common in pastures throughout Europe and the British Isles, and there’s no reason to think it hasn’t grown there for centuries.

Perhaps some people understood the mushroom’s properties and used such imagery as a way of alluding to their secret knowledge. (One of my students astutely noted that the women’s headdresses might represent the seed capsules of the opium poppy, another possibility.) Granted, one must be aware of the tendency to see what one wants to see in ancient iconography—a tendency that appears to be particularly strong among those with a special interest in mushrooms, as the author Andy Letcher points out in
Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom
. Nevertheless, the resemblance is remarkable, and readers may draw their own conclusions.

Before leaving Jung, it’s worth noting that he considered his work to be scientific. He made a point of insisting that his theories were objectively drawn, based on scientific observation. Indeed, Jungian psychology began as an effort to provide an interpretative structure for what he and others had learned by observing themselves as well as their patients. As he argued, the West devalues inner experience; only what is external, material, and outside the self can qualify as real. But in Eastern thought the opposite is true. The real world in Hinduism, for example,
is
the inner world; the external world, the material world, is
maya
, illusion. To illustrate the reality of the universe within, Jung noted how often our actions in the external world stem from interior motivations and ideas. This is an important point, particularly when interpreting inner states, including psychedelic states, which are easily dismissed as not real. Jung would vehemently disagree with such appraisals. As he pointed out, inner experiences are often more profound and significant than external events, in terms of their influence on human activities and institutions.

Chapter 18 - The Ladders of Ecstasy: Mircea Eliade

Terence and I found another important “virtual mentor” in the writer and philosopher Mircea Eliade. Born in Romania in 1907, Eliade attended the University of Bucharest and spent several years studying in Calcutta, India. His early work included journalism, novels, and essays, some of which were later criticized for espousing anti-Semitic and extreme right-wing views. After Romania became a Communist country in 1945, Eliade lived for a time in Paris before moving to the United States. From 1964 until his death in 1986, he was a professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago.

Eliade’s vast output ranged from fantasy fiction to scholarly works to what might be called armchair anthropology. Neither Terence nor I made much of a dent in all that; the books that stood out for us were
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy
(1964) and
Yoga: Immortality and Freedom
(1958). We also were familiar with
The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or, Cosmos and History
(1954) and
The Sacred and the Profane: the Nature of Religion
(1959). We weren’t aware of his early, unsavory political opinions, let alone the debate over how those may have influenced his later work. Indeed, much of that critique had yet to be articulated. We
were
aware that many of his ideas fit in well with those of Jung, whose works we managed to explore more extensively.

Jung and Eliade met in 1950, at the Eranos Conference, a yearly lecture series in Switzerland, and the two subsequently collaborated as colleagues and friends. By the time Terence and I discovered Eliade’s writings, we were both steeped in the ideas of transcendence and self-transformation, and his thoughts on yoga and shamanism complemented our interests. Originally published in French, and as early as the 1930s in the case of his yoga studies, these works were (and still are) important scholarly contributions, although they are now a bit dated. For example, Eliade asserted, without evidence, that a shamanic tradition that relied on “narcotics” (meaning “psychedelics,” a term not yet coined) was a “degenerate” tradition born of an earlier, more pristine practice that had become corrupted. Our own experiences with psychedelics obviously led us to disagree.

Since then, research on what is now known to be the worldwide phenomenon of shamanism has further discredited his assertion. Though certainly not all shamans use psychoactive substances, those who do use them cannot be regarded as “degenerate.” The antiquity and prevalence of these substances would indicate that they are the
sine qua non
of shamanic practice, at least in the New World. That might be true of Old World shamanism as well, though the knowledge may have been lost much earlier there. This would account for the greater use of psychedelic, or hallucinogenic, plants in the New World compared to the Old, a topic about which Schultes and others have written. One could actually argue that shamanic traditions that do not use psychedelics are “degenerate,” representing, as they may, the loss of earlier knowledge—namely, the identity of the shamanic plants and the methods of their preparation. But here we should be careful not to commit the error Eliade made when he dismissed “narcotic” shamanic traditions. We may speculate that some traditions lost this knowledge, as suggested by, for example, soma, a drink of unknown composition mentioned in certain Indian texts and elsewhere. But concrete evidence is hard to come by.

Eliade’s writings on yoga and shamanism as techniques of spiritual and perhaps physical transformation added to what we’d learned from Jung, supplying us with specific details from different traditions—the ethnographic backstory. We were also drawn to what Eliade saw as the archaic distinction between the “sacred” and the “profane,” as applied to both space (places) and time (events). Many spiritual traditions postulate separate or parallel worlds. There is the mundane, ordinary world we inhabit while alive, which Eliade termed the “profane” realm. Adjacent to this world are other “sacred” realms that are normally unseen and inaccessible to ordinary people, but which are reachable by shamans and other spiritual practitioners. These sacred realms may be the dwelling place of souls awaiting incarnation, or where souls go following death—for example, “heaven” in the Christian mythos. In many cultures, the world is understood to have a three-layered structure. The middle layer is the material world, which lies below a celestial realm inhabited by gods and advanced beings, and above an underworld inhabited by demons or other malevolent entities. While this lower realm may be infernal, it is nonetheless viewed as sacred in its separation from the world of everyday life.

In many cosmologies, these realms are linked by an axis mundi, which is often depicted as a world tree. The concept is also portrayed at times as a mushroom in Siberian shamanic traditions that use the fly agaric (
Amanita muscaria)
, or as the ladder-like ayahuasca vine familiar to shamans in the Amazon Basin. In all such traditions, the shaman can access the upper and lower realms, either by using a psychoactive substance to induce an altered state or relying on other “techniques of ecstasy,” as Eliade describes them. In the ecstatic condition, the shaman might ascend the axis mundi to propitiate the gods or entities in the upper realm, or descend to the lower realm, often to do battle with malevolent entities, retrieve the souls of the sick, or otherwise intervene on behalf of individuals or the tribal community. The key concept here is that both upper and lower realms are intimately linked with the mundane human realm, and can be accessed by people with the right training (shamans) and the right tools (often, drugs). I might add that these realms, which amount to other dimensions, are just as “real” as the material world, but the term would be useless in this context.

Just as there is sacred space, so there is sacred time—another idea that influenced our thinking. Sacred time is a time out of time, the time of ritual. Sacred time and sacred space are closely linked, because rituals performed in sacred spaces, as they are in most traditions, similarly sacralize time. In an archetypal sense, sacred space is not simply a consecrated or special place; rather, ritual transforms an ordinary place into the
actual
cosmic center, a place outside profane space. Similarly, when a culture engages in a rebirth ceremony or reenacts its creation myth, it doesn’t simply emulate events that took place at the beginning of time; these rituals return their participants to that moment when the cosmos was born. The event is literal, not metaphorical. A sacred ritual accomplishes what Eliade calls a “revalorization” of the sacred space-time of the cosmos in which the culture dwells. It is literally a renewal, a rebirth, the beginning of a new cycle of birth, evolution, and death. Sacred time is cyclical, not linear; and cultures that dwell in sacred time do not live in historical time, or indeed in mundane geography. They inhabit ahistorical time, in a place that is at the center of space and yet also removed from it. The cosmos is constantly being born, evolving, and dying, a cycle of “eternal return” that is the antithesis of our Western concept of historical time.