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Our desire for some form of transcendence of ordinary experience expresses
itself not only in religion but in other endeavors as well, and these too have
probably been more deeply influenced by psychoactive plants than we like to
think. Who knows, we may need a natural history of literature and philosophy,
or of discovery and invention, to go on the shelf with our natural history of
religion. Or maybe what we need is just a single volume: a natural history of
the imagination.
Somewhere in that volume we would surely find a chapter on the place of the
opium poppy and cannabis in the romantic imagination. It’s well known that
many English romantic poets used opium, and several of the French romantics
experimented with hashish soon after Napoleon’s troops brought it back with
them from Egypt. What’s harder to know is precisely what role these
psychoactive plants may have played in the revolution in human sensibility we
call romanticism. The literary critic David Lenson, for one, believes it was
crucial. He argues that Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s notion of the imagination
as a mental faculty that "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to
re-create," an idea whose reverberations in Western culture haven’t yet been
stilled, simply cannot be understood without reference to the change in
consciousness wrought by opium.
"This notion of secondary or transforming imagination established a model of
artistic creativity in the West that lasted from 1815 until the fall of
Saigon," Lenson writes. "It is predicated on annihilating what Keats called
‘weariness, fever and fret’ (the world of fixed, dead objects) by just the
sort of ‘dissolution, diffusion and dissipation’ that [moves the artist]
toward the realms of accident, improvisation, and the unconscious." Not just
romantic poetry, but modernism, surrealism, cubism, and jazz have all been
nourished by Coleridge’s idea of the transforming imagination -- and that
idea in turn was nourished by a psychoactive plant. "However criticism has
tried to sanitize this process," Lenson writes, "we have to face the fact that
some of our canonical poets and theorists, when apparently talking about
imagination, are really talking about getting high." (Sadie Plant, another
literary critic, has argued that Coleridge’s notion of the suspension of
disbelief can also be traced to his use of opium.)
Curiously, the romantics at first believed it was their philosophical rather
than poetical faculties that drugs would enhance. Thomas De Quincey felt that
opium would give a philosopher "an inner eye and power of intuition for the
vision and mysteries of our human nature." The nineteenth-century American
writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow reported an important encounter with a philosopher of
antiquity while under the spell of hashish. All of which makes me wonder: Is it
possible that some of the philosophers of antiquity themselves had important
encounters with magic plants?
This, at least, was my first thought upon learning that many of the important
thinkers of classical Greece (including Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Aeschylus,
and Euripides) had participated in the "Mysteries of Eleusis." Nominally a
harvest festival in honor of Demeter, the goddess of cultivated grains, the
Mysteries were an ecstatic ritual during which participants consumed a powerful
hallucinogenic potion. The precise recipe remains part of the mystery, but
scholars speculate that the active ingredient was probably ergot, an alkaloid
produced by a fungus (Claviceps purpurea) that infects cultivated grains and
that closely resembles LSD in its chemical makeup and effects. Under the
influence of this drug potion, the lights of classical civilization
participated in a communal shamanic ritual of such mystery and transformative
power that all who took part in it were sworn never to describe it. There is no
way to know what, if anything, a philosopher or poet might have brought back
from such a journey. But is it outlandish to ask whether such an experience
might have helped inspire Plato’s supernatural metaphysics -- the belief that
everything in our world has its true or ideal form in a second world beyond the
reach of our senses?
One of the things certain drugs do to our perceptions is to distance or
estrange the objects around us, aestheticizing the most commonplace things
until they appear as ideal versions of themselves. Under the spell of cannabis
"every object stands more clearly for all of its class," as David Lenson writes
in On Drugs. "A cup ‘looks like’ the Platonic Idea of a cup, a landscape
looks like a landscape painting, a hamburger stands for all the trillions of
hamburgers ever served, and so forth." A psychoactive plant can open a door
onto a world of archetypal forms, or so they can appear. Whether or not such a
plant or fungus did this for Plato himself is of course impossible to
ascertain, and somehow impious even to speculate on. But one could do worse,
surely, searching for the spring of a metaphysics as visionary and strange as
Plato’s.
The Platonic cup and the Coleridgean imagination are both "memes," to use a
term coined by the British zoologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The
Selfish Gene. A meme is simply a unit of memorable cultural information. It can
be as small as a tune or a metaphor, as big as a philosophy or religious
concept. Hell is a meme; so are the Pythagorean theorem, A Hard Day’s Night,
the wheel, Hamlet, pragmatism, harmony, "Where’s the beef?," and of course
the notion of the meme itself. Dawkins’s theory is that memes are to cultural
evolution what genes are to biological evolution. (Unlike genes, however, memes
have no physical basis.) Memes are a culture’s building blocks, passed down
from brain to brain in a Darwinian process that leads, by trial and error, to
cultural innovation and progress. The memes that prove themselves best adapted
to their "environment" -- that is, the ones that are most helpful for people to
keep in their brains are the ones most likely to survive and replicate and
become widely regarded as good, true, or beautiful. Culture at any given moment
is the "meme pool" in which we all swim -- or rather, that swims through us.
Cultural change occurs whenever a new meme is introduced and catches on. It
might be romanticism or double-entry book-keeping, chaos theory or Pokémon.
(Or the notion of memes itself, which seems to be catching on today.) So where
in the world do new memes come from? Sometimes they spring full-blown from the
brains of artists or scientists, advertising copywriters or teenagers. Often a
process of mutation is involved in the creation of a new meme, in much the same
way that mutations in the natural environment can lead to useful new genetic
traits. Memes can mutate when they get combined in new ways, or when someone
working with them makes a mistake -- misreading or misinterpreting an old meme
in such a way as to yield something new. For instance, besides being itself a
new meme, Coleridge’s transforming imagination has turned out to be an
excellent technology for generating other new memes.
When I read Dawkins, it occurred to me that his theory suggested a useful way
to think about the effects of psychoactive plants on culture -- the critical
role they’ve played at various junctures in the evolution of religion and
music (think of jazz or rock improvisation), of poetry, philosophy, and the
visual arts. What if these plant toxins function as a kind of cultural mutagen,
not unlike the effect of radiation on the genome? They are, after all,
chemicals with the power to alter mental constructs -- to propose new
metaphors, new ways of looking at things, and, occasionally, whole new mental
constructs. Anyone who uses them knows they also generate plenty of mental
errors; most such mistakes are useless or worse, but a few inevitably turn out
to be the germs of new insights and metaphors. (And the better part of Western
literature, if literary theorist Harold Bloom’s idea of "creative misreading"
is to be believed.) The molecules themselves don’t add anything new to the
stock of memes resident in a human brain, no more than radiation adds new
genes. But surely the shifts in perception and breaks in mental habit they
provoke are among the methods, and models, we have of imaginatively
transforming mental and cultural givens -- for mutating our inherited memes.
THE BOTANY OF DESIRE
copyright 2001 by Michael Pollan