LSD and mescaline cause dramatic changes in the web-spinning activities of spiders. Moreover, we can easily distinguish between the two
| substances by observing the webs constructed under the influence of one or the other psychedelic. The web is more regular or "perfect" under LSD and • more abstract and irregular under mescaline. This difference is especially
interesting because most "blind" studies of mental effects have shown that human volunteers are unable to differentiate between these two compounds. In much of the writing about psychedelics, little effort has been made to clarify the differences between LSD and mescaline effects. In The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, for example, Masters and Houston specify the agent ingested by their 206 subjects (of whom 89 received mescaline) but then seem to take it for granted that stages and characteristics of mescaline experience will be the same as those under LSD. They noted no great differ- ences between the effects of LSD and mescaline in the creativity studies cited in Chapter One. Aldous Huxley, writing to Humphry Osmond in December of 1955 about his first experience with LSD (75 meg.), emphasized the re- semblances (and re-emphasized them later after more experiences with LSD):
The psychological effects, in my case, were identical with those of mescaline, and I had the same kind of experience as I had on the previous occasion- transformation of the external world, and the understanding through a reali- zation involving the whole man, that Love is the One . . . . I had no visions with my eyes shut—even less than I had on the first occasion with mescaline, when the moving geometries were highly organized and, at moments, very beautiful and significant (though at others, very trivial) ____ Evidently, if you are not a congenital or habitual visualizer, you do not get internal visions under mescaline or LSD—only external transfiguration . . . . Some people more experienced with both psychedelics have reported noteworthy differences in their responses to LSD and mescaline. They gen- erally indicate that peyote and mescaline are "warmer" and "more earthy" than LSD, which is usually seen as being more "cerebral." The mescaline present in the cactus appears to increase considerably a feeling of fellowship
Normal net of Zilla-x-notata Cl. Nels made by this Consuming drug-dosed flies appear oppos.
that is only sometimes prompted by LSD. Shulgin remarks that under mes- caline "There is a benign empathy shown to both inanimate and living things, especially to small things." Allen Ginsberg and others have suggested that mescaline—more than other psychedelics—produces a state of mind very receptive to (he complex of benevolent attitudes expressed in Wordsworth's nature poems.
There haven't yet been any studies comparing effects from mescaline with those from peyote. The Church of the Awakening used both fairly exten- sively and characterized mescaline effects as "identical with those we had obtained through the use of peyote itself (in John Aiken's words).
There are many reports about the effects of peyote and mescaline coming from people who have used these substances in remarkably different ways and in a multitude of settings: from use in experimental laboratories to
Peyote. Mescaline and San Pedro
Peyote, Mescaline and San Pedro
recreational use to use as part of a meditative regimen. These reports emphasize a variety of major effects, which will be illustrated under the following categories: sacramental aspects, visual effects, auditory effects, dimensions outside rime and space, creative potential, psychological safety and psycho-therapeutic potential Several may occur within a single experience. In his studies, Beringer found that he was unable to predict what would come up in any particular mescaline session, even if he knew the experienoer well. Prem Das, writing in Aft of the Huichol Indians, agrees that the "spirits" in peyote don't do "what one expects."
Dosage and Timing
Some prefatory comments about dosage and timing are in order. Gen- erally speaking, three fairly large peyote buttons—each perhaps 1 Vi" across— are required to achieve any marked effect upon feelings, intellect and cognition. Peyotists in the Native American Church often take thirty to forty over a single night. (James Mooney recorded having heard of someone who took ninety!)
The Huichols often use one to four burtons for lesser effects, inhibiting "hunger, thirst, fatigue, and sexual desire" (according to Kal Muller, who lived for two years among these Indians). During their annual pilgrimage, peyote hunters consume many more, which are further potentiated by fasting and sleeplessness to produce "visions" and "communication with deities." Hoffer and Osmond assess an average peyote button as containing less than 25 mg. of mescaline.
Early studies of mescaline, derailed in Kluver's book, generally involved doses of a fifth to a half of a gram. Shulgin puts the average dosage used in experimental investigations at between "300 and 500 mg of the sulfate salt, which is equivalent to 225-375 mg of the hydrochloride."
When mescaline or peyote is swallowed, mental changes usually begin to occur within an hour; injection of mescalinebrings them on more quickly. Sometimes, however, the effects don't come on until the passing of another hour, and sometimes not until after another two or three hours. Over this interval, most of the physically distressing effects disappear, and the user then is in good humor and "at languid ease" (as Weir Mitchell expressed the transition).
Over the next two to four hours, the experience flows to a peak and ihen descends over another four to six hours, if the mescaline was taken all at once. The sedative, possibly jaw-tightening effects from lophophorine and other alkaloids wear off fairly quickly. If peyote is taken over an entire night, as is usual among many Indians, the state of being "high" is extended, of course, as are some anesthetic effects (so that one can sit for twelve to fourteen hours without feeling much pain).
Sacramental Aspects
Peyote and mescaline 'are "psychedelic," which for many users connotes an experience that is "mystical," "sacred" or "blissful" (even if there are diffi-
Modifications in the Spiritual Life 14;
culties along the way). The psychedelic state of mind can range from the philosophical to the personal and usually includes a lucid recognition to the effect that "I have seen so many things in myself that need changing." The mescaline experience almost always permits excellent recall of such percep- tions, and Indians have said that peyote has brought about a better life for many of its users.
Louis Lewin went to the heart of this matter when he sorted through the many extraordinary aspects of rhe mescaline experience and declared the most important one to be "modifications of the spiritual life which are peculiar in that they are felt as gladness of soul." Huxley called it "without question the most extraordinary and significant experience this side of the Beatific Vision";
Words like Grace and Transfiguration came to my mind, and this of course was what, among other things, they stood for .... The Beatific Vision, Sat Cbtt Ananda, Be ing-Awareness-Bliss—for the first time I understood, not on the verbal level, not by inchoate hints or at a distance, but precisely and completely what those prodigious syllables referred to.
Among Tahamaris, Huichols and Native American peyotists, the cactus is valued as a medium for revelations from deities or their representatives or from peyote itself. Most Huichol children are brought up in an environment of reverence for peyote; its centrality in their culture is illustrated by the fact that nursing mothers are especially encouraged to take peyore. About two- chirds of Huichol young men are peyorists, taking the cactus on many occasions during the year and making extensive preparations for their "sacred hunt." To fill in the details of how fully peyote use organizes Huichol culture, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's book Art of the Huichol Indians
observes that the cactus "is used for controlling the rain, for curing, for blessing the people, for locating the deer and planning the sacred deer hunts, tn the election of Huichol governing officials, and in many other ways." Of all accounts of peyote's effects among North American Indians, rhe most sympathetic possibly comes from Humphry Osmond, who joined in the ceremonies of a peyote group in North Battlefield, Saskatoon, Canada (re- printed in his Psychedelia}.
In the early 1950s, J.S. Slotkin was invited by Native American Church leaders to live among them in order to report on their peyote pracrices. He observed many peyotists who had "religious" experiences—intimations of God taking care of them and visions of the "Great Spirit." Jesus appeared before one woman and comforted her after the death of her son. Slotkin mentions a couple of instances involving Indians who were atheists until taking peyote. John Aiken cites a similar response.
Arnold Mandell, the founding chairman of the Psychiatry Department at the University of California at San Diego, noted rhar despite much emphasis on the "visuals" aroused by peyote, both Weir Mitchell and Have- lock Ellis had metaphysical experiences under irs influence. Ellis described a "detached yet acutely aware brain state" and characterized his experience in
142 Peyote, Mescaline and San Pedro terms of the "majesty of its impersonal nature." Mitchell told the American Neurological Society in 1896 that peyoteuse revealed "a certain sense of the things about me as having a more positive existence than usual."
From people most sensitive to religious matters come still more im- pressive reports. John Blofeld, who was especially interested in Buddhism, had great doubts about Huxley's claim that mescaline could induce yogic ex-
periences of a high order (see Ralph Metzner's The Ecstatic Adventure}.
After taking a quarter of a gram of mescaline, he began to contemplate the patterns that embellish sacred buildings, and "for the first time, I saw them as not arbitrary decorations but profoundly meaningful." His first mescaline experience wasn't painless: it started with a sense of "appalling mental torture." Eventually Blofeld made a "total surrender" and "ceased to cling . . . to self, loved ones, sanity, madness, life or death." The experience was transforming: From hellish torment, I was plunged into ecstasy—an ecstasy infinitely exceeding anything describable or anything I had imagined from what the world's accomplished mystics have struggled to desctibe. Suddenly there dawned full awareness of three great truths which I had long accepted intellectually but never, until that moment, experienced as being fully self-evident. These were: (1) an awareness of undifferentiated unity, (2) an awareness of unutterable bliss ("so intense as to make it seem likely that body and mind would be burnt up in a flash") and (3) an awareness "of all that is implied by the Buddhist doctrine of 'dharmas,' namely, that all things, whether objects of mental or of sensory perception, are alike devoid of own-being, mere transitory combinations of an infinite number of impulses." Blofeld comments that these "impulses" are analogous to electrical charges, and "This was as fully apparent as are the individual bricks to someone staring at an unplastered wall. I actually experienced the momentary rising of each impulse and the thrill of culmination with which it immediately ceased to be." This kind of report is fairly typical among people coming to mescaline from a background of religious study. Houston Smith commented that when he took mescaline he felt as if some five layers of consciousness were perceptible ("I was to some degree aware of them all simultaneously"). He wrote that the emanation theory and elaborately delineated layers of Indian cosmology and psychology had hitherto been concepts and inferences. Now they were objects of direct, immediate perception . . . .
It should not be taken from what I have written that the experience was pleasurable. The accurate wotds are significance and terror—or awe, in Rudolf Otto's understanding of a peculiar blend of fear and fascination.