Decade of the Brain. The neurosciences were on the rise and I wanted to become a brain researcher myself. When talking to my friends about my drug experiment, which I took to be one of the most important experiences in my young life, I felt perfectly confident speaking about the neurochemistry underlying its breathtaking aesthetic dimension. But I felt too ashamed to mention either my self-loss or that, even long after the drug effects had worn off, I continued to think of my first trip as a profound, if ill-defined, spiritual experience.
Shame is an affect marking the return of social consciousness after having lost oneself in one way or another (Fisher 2002: 65–70). My secular orientation made it difficult for me to acknowledge any kind of religious sentiment. Max Weber (1958/1919: 155) articulated the contempt of the moderns—and modern I deemed myself in every respect—for those unable to endure the disenchantment of the world: “To the person who cannot bear the fate of the times like a man, one must say: may he rather return silently, without the usual publicity build-up of renegades, but simply and plainly. The arms of the old churches are opened widely and compassionately for him. After all, they do not make it hard for him. One way or another, he has to bring his ‘intellectual sacrifice’—that is inevitable. If he can really do it, we shall not rebuke him.” These condescending sentences were spoken in 1917 to university students who, in Weber’s eyes, were all too prone to give up science for the sake of religious enthusiasm. Today, Weber’s pathos sounds antiquated. I never felt that my chemically mediated glimpses into a spiritually transfigured world compromised my philosophical or scientific work. Even though I had also got to know the psychotic dimension of hallucinogenic experiences, I did not feel the need to reduce them in their entirety to the delusions of an intoxicated brain, either. Nevertheless, nothing could have been more alien to me than seeking refuge in the arms of a church. The space of possibilities generated by the nineteenth-century Kulturkampf between pious conservatives and scientifically minded progressives could no longer provide the orientation I sought.
And yet Weber’s challenge cannot be casually brushed aside: How can a spiritual experience be meaningful if it is caused by a drug? What kind of referent should it have other than the psychoactive compound by which it was induced? Was the supernatural not really a fancy of us human beings? During my fieldwork, one of the psychopharmacologists I worked with spoke of “double-entry bookkeeping” to designate the intellectually dishonorable practice—which he knew firsthand—of holding a belief in a spiritual reality while being unable to justify it in naturalist or materialist terms. Thus, both the shame and the wonder I felt in response to my psychedelic experience was as much about feeling as about knowing. They were not just psychological quirks but reflected a distinctly modern order of nature, shared by my contemporaries, that had no more space for the super- and preternatural but restricted its ontology to nature and culture. The deep sense of wonder I felt over the drug-induced violation of my materialist sensibilities, over the incursion of the sacred into a world that I had previously experienced as completely profane, had no place in the modern rationality I was committed to. Since the Enlightenment, wonder had become a disreputable “cognitive passion” in science (Daston and Park 1998). Consequently, I kept this embarrassing experience to myself for many years. In retrospect, however, it marked the beginning of the following empirical philosophical inquiry. The starting point of reflection, the anthropological problem, tout court, lies indeed in the unavoidable fact that anthropos is that being who suffers from—and, I may add, feels ashamed about—too many logoi (Rabinow 2003: 6).
Before anthropologists began to include Western societies in their investigations, anthropology was exercised as the study of premodern by modern people. Religious and other supernatural interpretations of hallucinogenic experiences prevalent in these “traditional societies” have been at the heart of the classical ethnological literature. Already the seventeenth-century Christian missionaries (preceding anthropological researchers in the zone of culture contact) thought of the Native Americans’ peyote-induced visions as “fantasies and hallucinations” lacking any truth value. In contrast to latter-day anthropologists, however, the Spanish Inquisition attributed these misbeliefs neither to the nature of the ingested drugs nor to indigenous culture but to “the suggestion and intervention of the Devil, the real author of this vice” (quoted in Leonard 1942: 326). When, in the late nineteenth century, the first Euro-Americans tried peyote in the laboratory (Prentiss and Morgan 1895) or during anthropological fieldwork (Mooney 1896), it became clear to them that the plant itself was psychoactive. But anthropologists like James Mooney also noted that white subjects reported very different experiences than Native Americans who ingested peyote in the context of religious rituals rather than scientific experiments. From the start, these differences were attributed to culture. Western test persons experienced “horrible visions and gloomy depression” because they were afraid of the drug in the first place, whereas “the Indian” had acquired a sense of “pleasant anticipation” from earliest childhood (11). Mooney also pointed to the “difference between the Indian life, with its comparatively regular routine and freedom from worries, and the civilized life with all its stress of thought and irregularities of habit” (11). Subsequently, the assumption that hallucinogen-induced experiences were fundamentally shaped by historically and culturally contingent expectations and situations came to dominate the anthropological discourse on hallucinogen use throughout the twentieth century (e.g., Shonle 1925; Petrullo 1934; Wallace 1959; Dobkin de Rios 1984).
This perspective stands in stark contrast to the perennial philosophy informing psychedelia. Contingency as “modern society’s defining attribute” (Luhmann 1998: 44–62) appears to be at odds with a reduction of the multitude to mystical oneness. Although marked by a pervasive countermodern longing and ressentiment, this body of anthropological scholarship remained decidedly modern in attributing religious interpretations of drug experiences to culture. They were taken to be the product of suggestion facilitated by drugs that function as active placebos. Hence, all claims that psychedelics could establish a connection to the supernatural had to be relegated to the realm of meaning making. From a modern point of view, giving religious value to drug experiences is no longer condemned as inspired by the Devil, but it continues to appear as a form of idolatry: a worshipping of culturally constructed divinities.
At the time of my fieldwork, anthropology had long since given up confining itself to studying premodern ethnic groups. The moderns had themselves become an object of anthropological inquiry. According to one prominent if dated definition, modernity is constituted by a unidirectional transition from religion to science. At first glance, such a process of secularization seems to inform the current psychedelic revival as well. After the failure of Leary and other psychedelic evangelists to defend the consumption of hallucinogens in the name of religious freedom, it is no coincidence that the attempts to relegitimate their uses in the West discussed in this book have taken the route of science, not religion. Hence, it would make sense for an anthropology of modernity to study the disenchantment of hallucinogenic drugs in the psychopharmacological laboratory. By shedding light on cases of secular scientific uses in Europe and the United States, this book could then be taken to complement the kind of cross-cultural comparison of hallucinogen use that Richard Blum (1969) and Marlene Dobkin de Rios (1984) initiated but limited to supposedly traditional societies.
However, as the following ethnographic account will show, the neuroscientific revitalization of psychedelia has not purged the investigated drugs from their mystical connotations. Theological questions and spiritual experiences continue to serve as a moral motor of the ongoing revival of scientific studies of hallucinogenic compounds. Thus Neuropsychedelia is about a formation that is not modern. Provisionally, I will call it contemporary in Paul Rabinow’s (2003, 2008) sense (a bit like we have come to distinguish between contemporary and modern art). At the end of this book, however, I will argue that perennial might be a more suitable term for what I have in mind. But I am getting ahead of myself. For the time being, what matters is that this book does not proclaim an epochal break with the past (the hallmark of all grand narratives of modernity) but describes the emergence of a not yet stabilized and possibly ephemeral assemblage of heterogeneous temporalities. Past, present, and future intermingle, for example, when more or less time-honored religious conceptions meet cutting-edge neuropsychopharmacology to generate
