Psychedelia, p.12
Psychedelia, page 12
14 No liana has yet been found to contain DMT in its leaves and the MAOI beta-carbolines (harmala alkaloids) in its trunk; if discovered it would present the unique property of containing the entire ayahuasca raw material in a single plant.
15 Ayahuasca's marginal position in the psychedelic research of the 1960s (despite Naranjo's efforts) is evident by the fact that the drug isn't even mentioned in Osmond's major overview The Hallucinogens (1967). Three years later, Aaronson/Osmond's second major anthology Psychedelics (1970) include a non-fiction trip report by the psychedelic researcher Peter Stafford as one of two ayahuasca items. However, Stafford's 'Yagé In The Valley Of Fire' experience included taking LSD shortly before the ayahuasca, and it's not meaningful to try and separate the effects of one drug from the other.
16 Bufotenine and 5-MeO-DMT are dealt with in detail in Chapter XI.
'The great god Pan IV is reborn!'
IV
SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS ARE MADE ON
1
Written towards the end of a career of awe-inspiring creativity, William Shakespeare's The Tempest also signals the end of an era of intellectual freedom that made a career like his possible. The Tempest suggests the existence of a created world which is neither allegory nor psychology, but rather a world in the true sense; an alien place at the other side of the mirror, or that world from which we snatch glimpses when we dream. Like learning of a new continent, we can see the similarities and also the dissimilarities to our own world; there's people there, some of which may look like us, others which may look or behave in a way that appears to us quite surreal; they move about in a landscape where some of our natural laws seem to hold, while others don't. We may spot creatures, strange as things from another planet, whom we soon come to learn.
In other words, another world, which may be watching us in precisely the same way as we look upon it, with no causal priority. Coleridge, not surprisingly, understood the nature of The Tempest, describing it as 'a birth of the imagination... It addresses itself entirely to the imaginative faculty'. Another scholar found The Tempest to be 'pre-allegorical', while today's leading critic Harold Bloom opts for 'visionary comedy'. Such a genre-transcending work is the final invention of a creative power which the freedom of the Renaissance allowed to ignore the man-made institutions of power, be it Church or State or Academy, and to instead engage in play for play's sake. As Coleridge points out, Shakespeare never promulgates any party tenets. His freedom is that of the child at play, and the rules and roles are present for as long as the play lasts. The Tempest does not concern itself with symbol or interpretation, but with the here and now of its autonomous world. Appropriately, it's one of relatively few Shakespeare plays to observe the unity of time and place. Like the shipwrecked crewmen in the play, the spectator is an outsider entering another world, intuiting the rules and roles of the play as it unfolds before him.
It is logical that the only traces of a theme in the play that Harold Bloom finds, is that of authority; the juggling of rules and roles where play is the central, or only, activity. Coleridge, perhaps remembering his own opium visions, compares the world of The Tempest to '…our mental state, when dreaming... we simply do not judge the imagery to be unreal'. For a modern psyche- delicist, experiencing Shakespeare's play the way Coleridge intends, the unfolding of Prospero's magic plan is like a vision sequence under tryptamine drugs, an experience often described as 'dreaming while awake'.
It is interesting that the two most frequently staged Shakespeare plays over the last century are the ones which could also be called the most 'psychedelic'; The Tempest and Macbeth. Despite numerous differences, they display a world where the boundaries between dream and wakefulness are unclear, and they are also both concerned with the theme of magic. Macbeth and his wife are lost in classic 'bad trips'; spiraling downwards, they cannot stop the terrifying hallucinations arising from their murderous guilt. But their drama follows an archetypal logic which is familiar and unambiguous, and the viewer's imagination is challenged in the surrealism of detail, but not of scope. Relentless towards its audience like a well-made horror film, Macbeth has lent itself to a number of successful movie adaptations, such as Orson Welles' expressionistic 1948 version, Kurosawa's Throne Of Blood (1957) and Roman Polanski's powerful presentation from 1971 (incidentally, Polanski's first work after the Tate-LaBianca murders).
The situation for The Tempest is strikingly different. There exists no major or classic movie version of the play, and even the one closest to Shakespeare's text (from 2010) takes the curious liberty of changing the male Prospero into a female Prospera, despite the strong patriarchic character of this role. Worse still, at least according to Harold Bloom, are the numerous stage productions of the play that have exploited the text for themes of colonialism, racial struggle, or Marxist revolution, all of which is very poorly supported by Shakespeare's 1611 text. Derek Jarman's rarely seen 1979 adaptation explores an experimental 'punk' aesthetic which has little to do with the subtle moods of the original. A more interesting derivative is Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books, but it is again so much closer to Greenaway's pre-occupations than Shakespeare's that it doesn't offer much insight into the play. For these reasons, and despite the number of modern stage productions, public awareness of this enchanting work is limited1.
Before moving on to The Tempest's complex relation to the psychedelic tradition, a brief summary of the story may be in order. The main character of the play is Prospero, a former Duke of Milan who was removed from power by his plotting brother, taking advantage of Prospero's consuming interest in occult studies. Banished to a desert island along with his young daughter Miranda for many years, Prospero finally gets his chance to seek revenge upon his enemies when a ship carrying them passes nearby. With the aid of the powerful spirit Ariel, he arranges a shipwreck which brings the survivors to his island in small, scattered parties. To his aid he has the deformed Caliban, a young native who reluctantly helps Prospero in his tasks. The rest of the play unfolds Prospero's plan to regain his throne in Milan, find a suitable husband for his daughter, and subjugate his enemies into recognition of his sovereignty. These goals are all reached via his occult powers, which he then abandons in an epilogue, as he is returning to Milan.
2
Even among the most conservative critics, there is agreement that there is something peculiar going on in The Tempest, something which is unexplained to this day. It was not unusual for Shakespeare to leave loose ends or contradictions in his texts, but the enigmas of The Tempest are of a different order. The status of the text is uncontroversial, meaning that scholars find it to be entirely in Shakespeares's hand, with no augmentation by editors or collaborators. The play as printed in the First Folio 1623 was the play that Shakespeare had written, a definite version around which there is no dispute. So what mysteries one finds in the text, the playwright clearly intended to be there.
Frank Kermode, editor of the standard scholarly edition (1954), recognizes the lack of proper explanation around certain passages:
The Tempest is far from being a loosely built play; and nowhere in Shakespeare, not even in his most intensive work, is there anything resembling the apparent irrelevance of lines 73-97. It is a possible inference that our frame of reference is badly adjusted, or incomplete, and that an understanding of this passage will modify our image of the whole play.
(The Tempest, 1954 Arden edition, introduction)
Probably commenting upon the same mysterious passages, Harold Bloom finds in the play '…a sophisticated comic achievement we still cannot fully apprehend'. Much admired by critics and audience during 400 years of performance and research, The Tempest remains only partly understood; Kermode indicates that we may not even be close to a complete understanding.
What makes this interesting to the psychedelic student is that Shakespeare's strange and unexplained tangents frequently seem to refer to ancient mystery rites. Wherever The Tempest gets foggy, it points in this specific direction. The entire play is steeped in references to occult and esoteric practice, as is well-known, but these unexplained passages offer a different type of reference, appearing abruptly and seemingly meaningless. The most famous example, alluded to by Kermode above, is a section in Act 2, Scene 1, where three of the minor characters suddenly engage in a dialogue about Dido and Aenas of the Aeneid. The passage, which takes up 25 lines of text, is completely unwarranted in its context, and is neither prefigured nor revisited later. It reads almost like a Burroughsian cut-up, where a block of unrelated text pops up in the middle of something else. The passage is not particularly amusing, and its only content of meaning appears to be the Dido reference. Needless to say, Shakespeare critics have puzzled over this alien intrusion for centuries.
In 1921 one Colin Still, a literature student of a more speculative bent than Kermode and Bloom, suggested that this, along with several other dubious passages in The Tempest, was in fact a deliberate, hidden reference to the Greater Mysteries at Eleusis. Invoking the Aeneid was a way for Shakespeare to secretly communicate with learned members of the audience; the ones who knew that Book VI of Virgil's epic is a mythologized description of the initiation at Eleusis. In other words, when watching or reading The Tempest, this sudden invocation of Virgil's Aeneid is a hidden link to Eleusis. Of course, Virgil and the Aeneid were omnipresent in the late Renaissance culture that Shakespeare inhabited, and a passing reference should not be over-interpreted, even if quite mysterious. But as Still points out, Shakespeare enriches the connection by making several other brief references to the Aeneid, again with little importance to the plot of The Tempest. The Bard clearly wished to invoke Virgil's epic, in a manner odd and uncalled for.
Further signs of Shakespeare's hidden agenda can be found in the Masque play of Act IV. This scene comes as unexpected as the Aeneid dialogue. Although the pagan origins of the Masque fits the style of The Tempest, it offers no development of the plot, nor does it illuminate what comes before or after. After some 80 lines of rhymed song of little merit, Shakespeare himself, in an amusing meta-comment, suddenly has Prospero interrupt the meaningless diversion by remembering the actual plot in progress (i e: the threat of Caliban's betrayal). Harold Bloom calls this Masque the nadir of the drama and can only explain it as a parody of fellow playwright Ben Jonson.2 So: what is this long passage of wasted pastoral comedy doing in such a tightly written play? Prospero's peculiarly absent-minded behavior, entirely out of step with his status as the omniscient mage of the play, suggests the presence of some hidden process. It is almost as if Prospero reluctantly allowed a few minutes for the Masque on order from his 'master', a master who can only be author himself. If Shakespeare forced this unnecessary Masque scene into Prospero's magic plan, as the text seems to suggest, what would Shakespeare's motivation be?
To answer this, one needn't look further than the first two lines of the Masque. These invoke the goddess Ceres, '…most bounteous Lady, thy rich leas/Of wheat, rye, barley, vetches, oats, and pease;'. This is a reference with immediate connection to Eleusis. Ceres is the Roman name for Demeter, the main goddess of the Eleusinian mysteries. Her status as a vegetation deity is recognized in the second line, and it is also in this property that she is venerated at Eleusis, where her search and ultimate retrieval of her abducted daughter Persephone overlays an older myth of agricultural death and rebirth. Over time, the Eleusinian rites underwent a second metamorphosis, so that the kykeon's psychedelic revelation and rebirth of each participant became the concrete expression of the Demeter-Persephone myth. Demeter's appearance in The Tempest seems as inexplicable as the Masque itself, in view of the immediate (Miranda's wedding) and overall (Prospero's magic scheme) context. However, the spectator or reader of The Tempest who has already discerned hidden Eleusinian elements will find in the presence of Ceres/Demeter yet another indication of this secret theme. This would also clarify the dialogue after the end of the Masque, where Ariel again brings up the presence of Ceres, but no other goddess. Frank Kermode's commentary finds Ariel's line here (IV:1, 167) puzzling. But in view of a hidden Eleusinian link, repeating the name of Ceres/Demeter could be a signal to the informed spectator, who otherwise may have missed the significance of the goddess' identity.
Colin Still, in his 1921 study, brings up many more instances of what he takes to be ancient mystery rite elements. Again, these clues are of special interest when their appearance in the text is unexpected and inexplicable, since this indicates a deliberate agenda of Shakespeare's. Such an instance is the curious insistence from one of the minor characters upon the cleanliness and dryness of his clothes, a seemingly meaningless fact repeated four times during the play3. Is this an indication of the new garments that the initiands at Eleusis would don, before the major rites? Possible hidden messages like these, the lengthy Dido and Aeneas passage in particular, are reminiscent of the 'twilight language' often employed by spiritual teachers of the East. The twilight language presents a text with a surface meaning, not necessarily one of great merit, while its important content is hidden inside the parable, enumeration, or instruction. To unlock the true meaning of a twilight language text, the student needs to be familiar with certain key metaphors and marker words, through which the higher teaching can be decrypted. For example, an instruction on how to concentrate on a mundane household task may in fact hide details of an advanced tantric practice. Often associated with Vedic mysticism, twilight language is also used extensively within Kabbalah and Western hermeticism, fields that saw great interest during the late Renaissance of Shakespeare. It is not unlikely that The Tempest contains a great deal of twilight language, not just in the most enigmatic sections discussed here, but throughout the play4. This would be entirely in line with the strong esoteric influence that informs the play, and from a modern perspective help explain the sense expressed by Kermode, Bloom and others regarding The Tempest; that we have not yet fully understood it.
If there are links to the psychedelic rites at Eleusis hidden in The Tempest, we are still left with the question what Shakespeare wanted from us, after he had pointed us to the gates of the Great Temple. Here the indicators in the play are less clear, but a few remarks exist that could be taken as a concealed pattern. At places in the text, Prospero and Ariel insist upon a dramatic change, a 'sea-change', to be experienced under the hands of their magic powers. Such changes are actually hard to discern with any of the characters, except Prince Ferdinand and Prospero himself. Prince Ferdinand claims to have been given a 'second life' by Prospero; a claim that does not match the outward events of the drama very well. Instead, Prospero expresses remorse over the shortness of our earthly existence, as in the play's most famous monologue '…We are such stuff / As dreams are made on; and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep'.
If viewing The Tempest as a mystery rite in its totality, these statements make more sense. If the shipwreck at Prospero's island is analogue to entering the Eleusinian mysteries, then a life- altering experience does lie within reach, and of the shipwrecked men, Ferdinand at least manages to fulfill the life-change and 'rebirth' of the Greater Mysteries. Colin Still finds a symbolic schema in the structure of the play, where Ferdinand is the fully qualified initiate into 'the new life', while the plotting dukes and lords of the larger party are accepted only as passing the Lesser Mysteries, and the smaller party of the two hapless drunks and Caliban fail the initiation rites entirely. This seems overstated, and is poorly matched by the structural balance of the play, even if Still's individual observations are useful. Simply put, if Shakespeare had such a schema before him, he would have written the play differently. Frank Kermode calls Still's theories 'improbable', but give them enough merit to reference the 1921 book in his scholarly introduction.
A modern interpreter may take the Eleusis links and the overall nature of the play as reasons to proclaim The Tempest a drug fantasy, like Kubla Khan or Alice In Wonderland. This is certainly a less radical reading of the text than the Marxist stagings that made Harold Bloom so ill at ease. The shipwrecked visitors to Prospero's island refer, at various points, to the sense of being drugged or hypnotized; 'a strange drowsiness befalls them' observes Sebastian in act II, and a little later he and Antonio discuss the strange states between sleep and wakefulness all of them experience: '…This is a strange repose, to be asleep / With eyes wide open; standing, speaking, moving / And yet so fast asleep'. The lost Prince Ferdinand sounds equally hypnotized as he follows Ariel's invisible presence, stating that 'This music crept by me upon the waters', and later on, 'My spirits, as in a dream, are all bound up'. Even the uncouth, wild Caliban gives an atypical display of poetic vision when musing upon his half-dreaming state, which like Ferdinand he connects with music:
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I wak'd,
I cried to dream again.
These movements in and out of sleep, while Prospero's net of white magic slowly pulls the scattered parties in towards his compound, contribute greatly to the sense of drugged dream that the play instills. It is no wonder that Coleridge admired it, as it has the feeling of an Oriental opium dream. With its somnambulant days and magical music, The Tempest seems a peculiarly modern fantasy of a desert island; nearer to the 1950s Exotica visions of Eden Ahbez than the terrifying castaway fate sailors feared, while holding nothing of the rationalist challenges of Robinson Crusoe. The characters seem like slightly unreal versions of themselves, and despite the gravity of their situation, they appear unfazed and even satisfied. This daydreaming mood is as elusive as the ultimate meaning of the play, and it is perhaps such multi-leveled ambiguity that makes The Tempest seem both the most modern and the most psychedelic of Shakespeare's plays.
