ESSAYS
Brilliant Visions
Peyote among the Aesthetes
By Mike Jay
Used by the indigenous peoples of the Americas for millennia, it was only in the last decade of the
19th century that the powerful e fects of mescaline began to be systematically explored by curious
non-indigenous Americans and Europeans. Mike Jay looks at one such pioneer Havelock Ellis
who, along with his small circle of fellow artists and writers, documented in wonderful detail his
psychedelic experiences.
PUBLISHED
July 24, 2019
/
Detail from The Rose-Way in Giverny (ca. 1920) by Claude Monet — Source.
On Good Friday of 1897, the art critic and littérateur Havelock Ellis wrote, “I found myself
entirely alone in the quiet rooms in the Temple which I occupy when in London, and judged
the occasion a tting one for a personal experiment.” 1 Ellis was staying, as he o ten did, in the
rooms rented by his friend Arthur Symons, the literary critic and decadent poet, in Fountain
Court, a red-brick mansion block by the ames among the barristers’ chambers with which
the area is still associated. e experiment in question was the rst in Britain with the
hallucinogenic peyote cactus, from which a German chemist named Arthur He ter was at this
moment isolating the rst psychedelic drug known to science, mescaline.
Ellis had been alerted to peyote’s “brilliant visions” by a vivid report from America’s leading
neurologist, Silas Weir Mitchell, which appeared in the British Medical Journal in December
1896. 2 He was intrigued enough to seek out the cactus and discovered that its dried buttons
could be obtained from Potter & Clarke, the London pharmacists best known for “Potter’s
Asthma Cure”, a greenish powder that contained the dried leaves of the highly toxic datura
plant.
Having acquired his sample, Ellis proceeded to make a liquid decoction of three buttons which
he drank slowly in Symons’ apartment over two hours. He began to feel faint, his pulse /
weakened, and he lay down to read. As Mitchell had done, he rst noticed the visual e fects as
they impinged on the note-taking process: “a pale violet shadow loated over the page around
the point at which my eyes were xed”. As evening closed in he was gradually enveloped, just
as Mitchell had been, by “a vast eld of golden jewels, studded with red and green stones, ever
changing.” From this point on “the visions continued with undiminished brilliance for many
hours”. 3
/
Photograph of Ellis in the year he published "Mescal: A New Arti cial Paradise", from Havelock Ellis: A
Biographical and Critical Survey (1926) by Isaac Goldberg — Source.
Ellis was a quali ed doctor, and his rst report on peyote was a short article in the 1897 June
issue of the Lancet that concentrated on its physical e fects. But his interest in the experiment
extended well beyond medicine. He was an example of the modern Renaissance man he had
called for in his 1890 book e New Spirit, the manifesto for a movement in which the arts,
sciences, politics, and religion would all be reinvented and rejoined. He was in the process of
writing, in correspondence with the art historian and advocate of “male love” John Addington
Symonds, the taboo-shattering multi-volume study of sex that would become his enduring
achievement. He was an individualist and a feminist, a member of the Progressive Association
and an intimate of London’s tightly-knit n-de-siècle artistic coterie. e much longer account
of his peyote trip that he published in January 1898 in a progressive literary quarterly, the
Contemporary Review, presented the aesthetes of the n de siècle with an original and exquisite
portrait of the psychedelic experience.
Its title, “Mescal: A New Arti cial Paradise”, announced its line of descent from Charles
Baudelaire’s 1860 essay on hashish, Les paradis arti ciels — along with the masterwork of
Baudelaire’s hero omas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, the nineteenth
century’s most admired literary account of a drug experience. e previous year Ellis had
written a paper on “ e Colour Sense in Literature”, comparing the imagery invoked by
authors such as Shakespeare, Chaucer, Coleridge, Poe, and Rosetti. 4 Now he brought a similar
/
sensibility to bear on the peyote cactus. Every part of the colour spectrum competed in his
visions, he wrote, and yet “there was always a certain parsimony and aesthetic value” in their
combinations. He was “further impressed, not only by the brilliance, delicacy, and variety of
the colours, but even more by their lovely and various textures — brous, woven, polished,
glowing, dull, veined, semi-transparent”. He compared the patterns that formed and
dissolved to the “Maori style of architecture” and “the delicate architectural e fects as of lace
carved in wood, which we associated with the moucrabieh work of Cairo”. ey were “living
arabesques”, constantly in lux yet with “a certain incomplete tendency to symmetry, as
though the underlying mechanism was associated with a large number of polished facets”. 5
/
"Arabian Ornaments of the Thirteenth Century from Cairo", plate 32 from Owen Jones' The Grammar
of Ornament (1865) — Source.
When Ellis became exhausted by the visions in darkness, he turned on the gas light. e
shadows that leapt to life reminded him of the “visual hyperaesthesia” of Claude Monet’s
paintings. Peyote was a feast for the eyes, and an education for them. Writing up the
experience some months later, he maintained that “I have been more aesthetically sensitive
than I was before to the more delicate phenomena of light and shade and colour”. 6
/
Grainstack in the Sunlight (1891) by Claude Monet — Source.
Ellis’ report was the lowering of a tendency that established itself immediately in western
encounters with psychedelics: to describe their e fects primarily in visual terms. is
“ocularcentricity” has been seen as a characteristic of western modernity in general — it is far
less prominent in indigenous descriptions of peyote — but it was also a speci c response to
the n-de-siècle moment at which peyote made its appearance. e critic and philosopher
Walter Benjamin, who would himself take mescaline in a clinical trial in 1934, wrote that the
nineteenth century “subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training.” 7 Visual
illusions — from kaleidoscopes to magic lanterns to photography — made the transit from
dazzling novelties to staples of mass culture. Magicians, mediums, and psychic investigators
all probed the limits of the real, blurring the line between optical trickery, the subconscious
mind, and the spirit world. At the moment when Ellis made his experiment, the world was
being exposed for the rst time to X-ray images and the cinematograph. “Visual
hyperaesthesia” was a symptom not only of peyote but of the culture in which he was
consuming it, and to which Monet and the impressionists were responding.
Ellis’ immediate circle exempli ed this hunger for visual sensation, and his enthusiasm
brought into being mescaline’s rst informal artistic and literary scene. Curious as to what an
artist would make of mescal, he persuaded one of his acquaintances to try it. e rst dose
was too weak and the second far too strong, inducing, in his friend’s words, “a series of attacks
or paroxysms, which I can only describe by saying that I felt as though I was dying.” Visions
alternated with strange and disturbing physical sensations, and sometimes combined with
them: when Ellis passed him a piece of biscuit to relieve his nausea, it “suddenly streamed out
into blue lame”, an electric con lagration that spread across the right-hand side of his body./
“As I placed the biscuit in my mouth it burst again into the same coloured re and illuminated
the interior of my mouth, casting a blue re lection on the roof. e light in the Blue Grotto at
Capri, I am able to a rm, is not nearly as blue as seemed for a short space of time the interior
of my mouth.” 8
Blue grotto, Capri Island, Italy (ca. 1900), from the Detroit Publishing Company — Source. /
Blue grotto, Capri Island, Italy (ca. 1900), from the Detroit Publishing Company Source.
Ellis made a further experiment on himself to test the e fects of music, and found that when a
friend played the piano “the music stimulated the visions and added greatly to [his] enjoyment
of them.” 9 He also “made experiments on two poets, whose names are both well known” and
can be identi ed with reasonable certainty as his friends W. B. Yeats and Arthur Symons.
roughout 1896 Symons had edited the short-lived but in luential Savoy magazine, with
Aubrey Beardsley as illustrator and both Ellis and Yeats among the contributors. While Ellis
was reading Weir Mitchell’s account of peyote in December 1896, the pair were taking hashish
together in Paris.
e rst subject, presumably Yeats — a poet “interested in mystical matters, an excellent
subject for visions” — was impaired by a weak constitution. “He found the e fects of mescal on
his breathing somewhat unpleasant; he much prefers hasheesh”. But Symons, on a modest
dose of a little under three buttons, was transported. “I have never seen such a succession of
absolutely pictorial visions with such precision”, he reported. Dragons balancing white balls
on pu fs of their exhaled breath swept past him from right to le t. Playing the piano with
closed eyes, he “got waves and lines of pure colour”. 10
Late in the evening, Symons walked from Fountain Court down to the ames embankment.
As he gazed across the river at the south bank, he found himself “absolutely fascinated by an
advertisement of ‘Bovril’, which came and went in letters of light on the other side of the
river”. 11 e brilliance of electricity was a recurring metaphor for peyote’s scintillating visions:
the very rst subject in the initial scienti c trials in the United States in 1895 had compared
them to the dazzling electric illuminations he had witnessed at the Chicago World’s Fair two
years previously. But it was a literal stimulus too. It seemed that nothing delighted the eye of
the modern mescal eater so much as the new electrical sublime. ey arrived together as
avatars of a future world of visual spectacle, equal parts scienti c discovery and aesthetic
delight.
* /
( is essay has been adapted from a section in Mike Jay's Mescaline: A Global History of the First
Psychedelic published by Yale University Press in 2019.)
Mike Jay has written extensively on scienti c and medical history. His books on the history of drugs include High
Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture and his most recent Mescaline: a Global History of the First
Psychedelic.
CATEGORIES Science & Medicine
TAGS
drugs 16 best of essays 34
Notes Show Notes
Public Domain Works
TEXTS
“Remarks on the E fects of Anhelonium Lewinii (the Mescal Button)"
Silas Weir Mitchell 1896
US National Library of Medicine
TEXTS
Mescal: A Study of a Divine Plant
Havelock Ellis 1902
Internet Archive
Wikisource /
TEXTS
“Mescal: A New Arti cial Paradise"
Havelock Ellis 1898
Internet Archive
Erowid
Further Reading
Havelock Ellis: A Biography
By Phyllis Grosskurth
Acclaimed biography of Ellis — looking into his personal and working life — by the
Canadian academic, writer, and literary critic.
More Info and Buy
Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic
By Mike Jay
A de nitive history of mescaline that explores its mind-altering e fects across cultures,
from ancient America to Western modernity. Drawing on botany, pharmacology,
ethnography, and the mind sciences and examining the mescaline experiences of
gures from William James to Walter Benjamin to Hunter S. ompson, this is an
enthralling narrative of mescaline’s many lives.
More Info and Buy
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Cataleptic trances, enormous appetites, and giggling ts aside, W. B. O'Shaughnessy's investigations at a Calcutta
hospital into the potential of medical marijuana — the rst such trials in modern medicine — were largely positive.
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Science & Medicine 19 Apr 2017
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worlds — an idea through which they sought to address not only psychic phenomena such as telepathy, but also
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Science & Medicine Religion, Myth & Legend 9 Dec 2015
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Of all the attempts throughout history to geographically locate the Garden of Eden one of the most compelling was
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Flower Power: Hamilton’s Doctor and the Healing Power of Nature
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Rebecca Rego Barry on David Hosack, the doctor who attended Alexander Hamilton to his duel (and death), and
creator of one of the rst botanical gardens in the United States, home to thousands of species which he used for his
pioneering medical research. more
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