Auditory Effects

As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Indian myths concerning the discovery of peyote generally involve a voice. A prominent auditory

Peyote. Mescaline and San Pedro

component also distinguishes peyote and mescaline from other psychedelics. Don Juan, the Yaqui shaman-teacher in the books by Carlos Castaneda, described Datura and mushrooms as powers or allies, as opposed to peyote, which he described as a teacher. Indians have generally been quite clear in maintaining that peyote provides them with their songs. Peyotists often "hear" where they should look for this cactus. Some Indians even complain that they can't sleep near peyote because there was so much noise at night! Peyote seems to bring on synesthesia, a mixing and reciprocal action among the five senses, so that the drumbeat maintained throughout the ceremony evokes pictures in the head as it heightens aural sensations (see Osmond's description of drumming and his reaction in

Psychedelia),

Discrimination of tones under the influence of mescaline can become acute. To quote Lewin and a physician to whom he gave mescaline, music was sensed as "sweet and harmonious" and as coming "from infinity, the music of the spheres." When Slotkin first took peyote, he was greatly im- pressed with his altered auditory responses:

It was about an hour before I began to notice any sensory effects. The drumming remained constant to me, but the singing wavered from high to low pitch in a way that no singer could ever do. Then the song seemed to come from all over the tipi, rather than just from the singer, and for a while it seemed to come from the top of the tipi. If I closed my eyes, I had no idea of where the music was coming from—even when the singer was the man next to me.

At a later meeting, Slotkin noted that under peyote's influence he could hear whispers from some distance away.

I

Dimensions Outside Time and Space

As with other psychedelics, "out-of-body" experiences occur in many peyote and mescaline trips. Users have often felt weightless and had a sense of "flying." More than a few have reported seeing their body become "lumin- escent" or "transparent" as they looked on from some distance away. One of Ellis' subjects felt a blue flame wafting from the back of his head, then found himself becoming transparent like a Chinese lantern.

Out-of-body experiences associated with the San Pedro cactus are dis- cussed in Douglas Sharon's Wizard of the Four Winds—the story of Eduardo Palomino, a Peruvian sculptor, teacher, fisherman and shaman. Asked about the cactus' effects, Eduardo told Sharon that first there is

a slight dizziness that one hardly notices. And then a great "vision," a clearing of all the faculties of the individual. It produces a light numbness in the body and afterward a tranquility. And then comes a detachment, a type of visual force in the individual inclusive of all the senses: seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, et cetera—all the senses, including the sixth sense, the telepathic sense of transmitting oneself across time and matter . . . . It develops the power of perception ... in the sense that when one wants to see something far away . . . he can distinguish powers or problems or disturbances at great dis- tance, so as to deal with them.... Then the individual, sometimes by himself, can visualize his past or . . . the present, or an immediate future. By means of the magical plants, and the chants and the search for the roots of the problem, the subconscious of the individual is opened up like a flower, and it releases these blockages. All by itself it tells things. Sharon spent four years with Eduardo, eventually becoming his apprentice and helping in nine curing sessions. At first he had been skeptical about Eduardo's claim that he could see events and people at a great distance. Eduardo tried to explain:

The flight is spiritual. . . . One invokes, and his spirit soars to those haunts. One asks for the lagoon, invokes, and then the spirit makes the trip. The jour- ney of the spirit also causes one to visualize the lagoon in ... an almost objective manner . . . . Spiritually one is there and one sees it up close.

Q: Does your being actually arrive there?

My material being, no. My spiritual being arrives, yes; and I perceive in an objective fashion, as if I were in the place.

As for changes in time perception, consider an extreme example, the experience of Christopher Mayhew, a Member of Parliament during the 1950s who offered to take mescaline under the supervision of Humphry Os- mond and before BBC cameras—surely one of the best-documented trips ever.

Although many people under the influence of psychedelics have seen "trails"—the simultaneous perception of several discrete moments, like the arc of a lighted cigarette in a dark room—Mayhew experienced this phenom- enon to an unusual degree. For the London Observer he described his exper- ience as an "Excursion Out of Time":

146

Another face painting often seen in such ceremonies, this one for "grandfather of fire." Early Huicbol representation of

the face painted for "mother of corn" during peyote festivals.

148 Peyote, Mescaline and San Pedro

What happened to me between 12:30 and 4 o'clock on Friday, December 2, 1955? After brooding about it for several months, I still think my first, aston- ishing conviction was right—that on many occasions that afternoon I existed

outside time.

I don't mean this metaphorkalry, but literally. I mean that the essential part of me... had an existence, quite conscious of itself... in a timeless order of reality outside the world as we know it.

Mayhew's experience began with color hallucinations but soon led to a preoccupation with the very strange "behavior" of time. Time kept slipping out of sequence—he would see a cup at his lips before he actually removed it from the table—and he couldn't tell how far along he was in the experience. Even his watch did not help. Although his eyes registered various clock times, the hours were not in proper sequence, and he would see two-thirty after he had seen three o'clock. Finally, it was the arrival of a tea-tray that enabled him to judge that the duration of the drug would soon be coming to

an end.

Time worked even more extravagant magic when it sent him into another dimension, where "I would be aware of a pervasive bright pure light, like a kind of invisible sunlit snow":

I would become unaware of my surroundings, and enjoy an existence con- scious of myself, in a state of breathless wonderment and complete bliss, for a period of time which—for me—simply did not end at all. It did not last for minutes or hours, but apparently for years.

For several days afterward, I remembered the afternoon of December 2 not as so many hours spenr in my drawing-room interrupted by these strange "excursions," but as countless years of complete bliss interrupted by short spells in rhe drawing-room . . . .

On the first occasion when I "came back" in this way from an excursion 1 assumed that a vast period of time had elapsed and exclaimed, in astonishment, to the film team: "Are you still there?" Their patience in waiting seemedextra- ordinary; but in fact, of course, no time had elapsed, and they had not been waiting at all---

These "time phenomena," contrary to everyday consciousness, seemed totally convincing—not hallucinations but another part of reality. Mayhew is definite on this:

The common-sense explanation is that since events in ourdrawing-room actually happened in a normal sequence (with plenty of witnesses, including the camera, to prove it), 1 just couldn't have experienced them in some other order, so I must have merely thought I did—I was deluded,

For anyone else than myself, this must be easy to believe; but for me, it is impossible. 1 am not—1 repeat—saying that events happened in the wrong order, only that 1 experienced them in the wrong order. And on this point I cannot doubt my own judgment.

tnto Useful Forma

Creative Potential

Ellis thought that peyote would never appeal to most people because it was so predominantly an intellectual experience, promoting what he called a "detached but acute brain state." Lewin called it "purely intellectual" and noted many instances of "disorders of location." These observations are fascinating in themselves, but we should note that many users have been able to direct the peyote or mescaline experience into creative channels.

Arnold Mandell, speaking of the "unapologetic belief in symbols" among Huichols, suggests that peyote enables them to be restored to a state of naivete1_{—often a prerequisite for creativity. An of the Huichollndians}

amply illustrates how visions seen during peyote ceremonies find expression in tribal art forms. Alice Marriott and Carol Rachlin devote a chapter of their small book Peyote to Native American artists working with paint, metal and beads, especially Carol Sweezy of the Arapaho and Ernest Spybuck of the Shawnee:

Most of the leading Indian easel artists and metal craftsmen of (he twentieth century are or were (for some are dead now) peyotists. Monroe Tsatokee's "Fire Bird," reproduced again and again in books on Indian art, is probably the The optimal condition for prompting creativity is to have a defined problem in mind that is stated in familiar terms—at least this was the assumption made at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Menlo Park, where qualifying volunteers were given mescaline. The results were that lany of the subjects were able to solve artistic and technical problems after a single session.

The case of architect Eric Clough is illustrative: he needed a design for an arts and crafts shopping center in a resort-university community. In Metzner's The Ecstatic Adventure, Clough describes receiving the mescaline in the morning and then, blindfolded, traveling in his mind through jungle terrain and scenes from pre-Columbian civilizations. About an hour after a small lunch, Clough was asked to concentrate on his design problem:

I looked at the paper I was to draw on. I was completely blank. I knew that I would work with a property 500' square. I drew the property lines (at a scale of 1" = 40') and I looked at the outlines. I was blank.

Suddenly 1 saw the finished project. I did some quick calculations . . . it would fit on the property and not only that . . . it would meet the cost and income requirements. It was contemporary architecture with the richness of a cultural heritage . . . it used history and experience but did not copy it. I began to draw... my senses could not keep up with my images... my hand was not fast enough .... 1 was impatient to record the picture (it had not faded one particle). I worked at a pace I would not have thought I was capable of. I completed four sheets of fairly comprehensive sketches. I was not tired

Dtrectinf! Vis-.

Peyote, Mescaline and San Pedro but I was satisfied thai I had caught the essence of the image. I stopped work- ing. I ace fruit . . . 1 drank coffee . . . it was a magnificent day. While making drawings two weeks later, Clough found that his image of the shopping center remained sharp and that he was able to complete the drawings without referring to his original sketches. He also discovered he could view the project from different angles and examine minute construction details. His design was subsequently accepted, and since then he has been able to design other projects in the same way. Interviewed by Progressive Architecture about his use of mescaline, Gough suggested that "All architects ought to have this experience." He also confirmed that this faster, sharper and clearer procedure of "imaging" projects remained with him,