Miserable Miracles: PSYCHEDELIC DRUGS AND MODERNISM BY DANIEL PINCHBECK MISERABLE MIRACLES: “Bwiti father” poured a soapy liquid over me—a protective spirit-medicine— PSYCHEDELIC DRUGS AND MODERNISM and then smeared a rough red paste across my face and torso. The Bwiti sang together while I put on the initiate’s outfit—straps of tanned animal skins and shells looping across my chest and upper arms, a short red tunic, and a red feather twirled in my hair. It was time to begin eating the iboga.2 2. The last centuries of capitalism, industrial progress and rationalism are mir- rored by an alternative cultural history of frantic visions, symbolic excursions and narcotic escapes. Modernist artists searched for antidotes to the suffocat- ing rationalism of the West. They looked to archaic rituals and so-called primitive cultures for liberation and for new formal languages. The explo- ration of drug-induced visionary states was one extreme limit, one essential . My initiation began at dusk. The element, of the Modernist quest. 38 men of the Bwiti met me in1 front of the temple. They had changed from their In the 19th century, Romantics and Decadents such as Coleridge and 39 everyday jeans and T-shirts into tribal dress. They were an impressive sight. Baudelaire explored the interior dreamscapes of opium, hashish and absinthe. Limbs and torsos bare, they wore animal skins and loincloths, with armbands The poet Rimbaud called for “a systematic derangement of the senses,” and in and necklaces of shells and feathers. Their black skin was painted with pat- the 1920s the Surrealists, following his lead, found inspiration in extremes of terns of white stripes and dots. psychic disorder and excess. We walked in single file, away from the village, following a path Walter Benjamin, the great critic of Surrealism and Modernism, used through the darkening jungle, to the banks of a small stream. Among the hashish and theorized about the narcotic trance with his typical brilliance. Bwiti, I felt foreign, pale and scared. Some of the men held torches, while oth- Writing on the Surrealists, he noted: “In the world’s structure, dream loosens ers played drums and rattles and horns in a weird, almost humorous march. individuality like a bad tooth. This loosening of the self by intoxication is, at In the flickering flames, the white painted patterns glowed like neon on their 1 I kept trying to learn what Moutumba’s status as “Le Roi du Gabon Bwiti” meant. I received different answers. bodies. Our translator, Alain Dukaga, an English-speaking Gabonese, told me: “Moutumba is like Jesus to us. Most of the people now are lacking roots, they got tied to the Christian ways and forgot their culture. Moutumba is help- I had traveled 6,000 miles for this ritual—my psychedelic bar mitzvah, ing to bring back our culture.” When relations soured between us and our shaman, he reversed himself: my shamanic coming-out party. Moutumba is “not the king of anything. He just calls himself that.” 2 1 Tabernanthe iboga is an ordinary-looking shrub found in a small area of West Africa. The bush produces sim- The self-proclaimed “king of the Bwiti,” Tsanga Jean Moutumba, the ple yellow blossoms and edible orange-colored citrus fruit that is tasteless and oddly sticky. Under optimum tribal shaman, told me to undress completely and step into the middle of the conditions, iboga can grow into a tree rising as much as forty feet. The root bark of the plant—which is scraped off, ground into powder and swallowed—contains one of the world’s most powerful, long-lasting and mysteri- stream. As I shivered in the cold water, the young man assigned to be my ous psychedelic agents. MISERABLE MIRACLES DANIEL PINCHBECK PSYCHEDELICS OPENED VAST DOMAINS OF AWARENESS, SPARKED IDEAS. BUT THE EXPERIENCE WAS ALSO ONE OF ABJECTION, ANXIETY AND HELPLESSNESS. the same time, precisely the fruitful, living experience that allowed these peo- the West for many centuries, had a split identity. On the one hand, the sub- ple to step outside the domain of intoxication.” For Benjamin, drug-altered stances opened vast domains of perceptual awareness, sparked new ideas and states allowed thinkers to escape, temporarily, from the overwhelming, and unleashed visions that seemed to unfold from the Jungian collective uncon- intoxicating, dreamworld of capitalism. scious, or from the mind of a supernatural trickster. But the experience was While narcotics stimulate subterranean landscapes of the imagination, also one of abjection and anxiety and helplessness. The French poet Henri psychedelics such as peyote, ayahuasca and psilocybin cause more extreme Michaux, for example, described tripping on mescaline as a “miserable mira- forms of rupture and rapture. The rediscovery of psychedelic drugs in the 20th cle,” a collapse into a realm where logic and language fell apart, where century led to a “return of the repressed” in Western culture. They opened the paranoia became palpable, where he confronted a terrifying “otherness” that gates to lost domains of the ecstatic, visionary and sacred, accessing those dis- threatened the sanctity of the self. tant regions of the mind suppressed by modern civilization. It is impossible to It was my own desire to approach that “otherness” that led me to say to what extent the psychedelic journey was essential to the radical, Gabon in West Africa, where an archaic tribal culture still exists in full force— Dionysian upsurge of the 1960s. It is a mark of the disruptive power of psy- preserved like some amazing hothouse specimen—a culture based on chedelics that their arrival on the scene was followed quickly by severe societal communion with an ancient psychedelic plant. 3 40 repression. Since then, different mood-altering chemicals—Prozac and 41 Ritalin, for example—have been embraced by the mainstream. 3. Modernist culture can be seen as a succession of encounters with the The king raised up the plantain with two hands. My Bwiti father carried this deviant and disgraced, with everything that was refused, tossed aside, made sacrament to me gingerly while the others watched. I looked at the fruit, alien by the West. The resurgence of interest in the most sacred tribal medi- which had been split open and filled with the drug’s whitish powder. The Bwiti cines, which began with a few dedicated and often desperate seekers, opened men on the hillside sang and drummed a dirge-like melody. By casting off my a new phase of the Modernist exploration of cultural otherness: an attempt to clothes and putting on the red robe of the initiate, I had symbolically died. make direct contact with the visionary knowledge of “primitive” societies. After eating the iboga powder, I would be reborn. The writers of the 20th century who first took the psychedelic voyage For many months afterwards, whenever I thought of the taste, I started out—Antonin Artaud, Henri Michaux, Aldous Huxley and William Burroughs to shudder. The flavor was incredibly vile, like sawdust laced with battery among them—found that the tribal sacraments, off-limits and little-known in acid. It was like trying to swallow a corrosive poison; my tongue, throat and mind wanted to rebel against the effort. After I finished the dry fruit, I was fed 3 Today, psychedelics are subject to two forms of cultural repression: They are simultaneously demonized and a few more spoonfuls of the drug mixed with honey. The shaman nodded trivialized. Paul Devereaux wrote in his book “The Long Strange Trip”: “I sometimes wonder if our culture, act- encouragingly. I fought to keep the stuff down. ing in the manner of a single organism—in the way a crowd of people or a classroom of students sometimes can—somehow senses a deep threat to its own philosophical foundations residing in the psychedelic experience. We returned to the village. My legs had turned rubbery and I felt This might help account for the otherwise irrational hatred and repression of the use of hallucinogens, and the queasy. In the main courtyard, a few of the men sat around me, playing smirking dismissal of the psychedelic experience as a trivial one by so many of our intellectuals.” MISERABLE MIRACLES DANIEL PINCHBECK drums. One of them strummed the mícongo, a one-stringed mouth harp resem- 4. bling a bow, which has the eerie, almost humorous tonality of a mocking My curiosity about psychedelics blossomed at a time when I was losing inter- voice. I had been told that the mícongo channels the voices of the Bwiti’s ances- est in myself and in contemporary reality. My life in New York City seemed tors. They put a bundle of leaves in my right hand and a whisk of dry thistles fragmented and shallow, cut off from deeper truth. Cut off, above all, from any in my left and told me to keep shaking both in time to the music. spiritual connection or metaphysical path. They fed me more iboga and brought me into the torch-lit temple. I I did not know how to deal with my own inchoate yearnings. was placed alone at the center, facing a mirror surrounded by fern leaves and I belong to a generation alienated from its own experience. We have carved figurines. The king and the tribal elders sat to my left, and the rest of forfeited our essence to digital abstractions and virtual distractions. The self- the tribe on my right, perhaps thirty people in all. knowledge achieved through real, physical discovery or through visionary My guide, Dan Lieberman, an ethnobotanist from South Africa, states now seems alien, even repellent, compared to the disembodied gaze, snapped pictures. Dan’s other customer for this experiential journey was a psy- the remote-control critical mode forced on us by the culture.