I trace this appropriation in the following three sections. The first, “‘Unusual energy and intellectual power’: Hallucinogens, Nerves, and Omniscience,” shows how hallucinogens occasioned white fantasies of intellectual transcendence and physical disembodiment that upheld imperial notions of race. The second, “An ‘enchanted two hours’: Hallucinogens, Disembodiment, and Media Consumption,” demonstrates how this disembodiment was superficially likened to mass visual entertainment, while really preserving hallucinogenic experience as an elite experience. The final section, “Hallucinators, Aesthetes, Collectors, and Flâneurs,” brings the hallucinogenized body back into focus by connecting it to avant-garde aesthetic philosophy and practice, including Aesthetic receptivity to impressions, the imperial dimension of Aesthetic collecting, and the urban wanderings of the flâneur.

My discussion of nineteenth-century hallucinogenic discourse thus intersects with recent critical work on the history and cultural politics of vision. [7] On the one hand, hallucinogenic experience should be considered another of Jonathan Crary’s techniques of a modern observer, who had garnered “carnal density” throughout the nineteenth century: the simple fact that one had to ingest peyote or mescaline, both of which were described as foul-tasting, and risk stomachache and headache, to experience a physical rush, embeds hallucinogenic experience firmly in the body (Crary 34). Indeed, if one assents to Crary’s thesis that nineteenth-century vision came to be understood as contingent upon each observer’s individual physiology, then hallucinogenic experience could be considered this broader shift’s most radical episode. With respect to hallucination, Kate Flint notes that “fin-de-siècle anxieties about the uncertain borderland between truth and falsity, the rational and the irrational, demonstrate a realization of the disturbance of relativity” (264). Yet hallucinogenic discourse also consistently fantasized about dematerializing its subjects’ bodies, dwelling forever in the domain of the mind’s eye, and there commanding total knowledge—a trope that also significantly refuses the bodily contingency of vision, and accordingly dispenses with concerns about relativism in favor of sensations of omniscience. Indeed, in 1836, around the same time that Crary argues for the relativization of vision due to a new emphasis on its physiological context, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote “Nature,” his famous fantasy of monocular omniscience, in which the body disappears into the organ of vision: “I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal being circulate through me; I am a part or particle of God” (184). Emerson’s universalization of white masculinity as the omniscient power of vision itself has been rigorously critiqued from the point of view of race, gender, and sexuality. [8] The same tension governs hallucinogenic discourse: although it was physiologically embedded, its status as cultural appropriation gave rise to fantasies of disembodied omniscience. Reading bodily aspects and their social significance back into an insistently decorporealized hallucinogenic discourse brings critical attention to a formative interdisciplinary moment, when anthropology and medicine focused their scientific gaze upon what had been religious and communal practices, and saw instead a highly individualized, scientific and Aesthetic experience.

Indeed, the solipsism of unique drug-induced hallucinations acquired social meaning when it was translated into its various late nineteenth-century contexts: imperial anthropology and medico-science, the discourse of “nerves” attending professional “brain work,” the consumption of visual media, and Aestheticism and Decadence. These contexts demonstrate the distinctive modernity of hallucinogenic discourse: it melded auto-ethnographic and scientific modes of detailed empirical observation, reportage, and publication, with Aesthetic practices of passive receptivity to visual delight; it joined the mandate of imperial science—to collect information about racial and cultural “others”—with its Aesthetic counterpart, the imperial impulse to collect ever more obscure artifacts and experiences from far-flung reaches of the globe; and it turned an active, externally-oriented imperialism inward, making it into a passive consumption of spectacle explicitly likened to the experience of media entertainment. Though modern, hallucinogenic experience did not generate the kind of deep subjectivity contemporaneously formulated through psychoanalysis; rather, it dwelled chiefly in the more superficial world of visual impressions. The result was a hallucinogenic subject, for whom peyote or mescaline offered not the spiritual and communal rituals of Native Americans, but rather imperial, modern, professional status built on the observation of dazzling inner visions.

The cultural appropriation and remaking of hallucinogenic experience as European intellectual self-experimentation engaged an insidious and durable cultural illogic that configured the Western mind/body split along racial lines, so that whiteness signified the mind, and non-whiteness, the body. [5] The white hallucinogenic subject’s mind became both a vast, unique, enchanted realm and the powerful means of exploring it. The radical perceptual experience of drug-induced hallucination may seem temporarily to abstract or distance its subject from his body and social identity, but its rendering as discourse confirms all the significatory techniques of social power it supposedly suspends. Nineteenth-century hallucinogenic discourse typically produces a fantasy of visual power and omniscience for its white, masculine, and middle-class subjects. [6] In the narrow but powerful venue of medical periodicals such as The Therapeutic Gazette, The British Medical Journal, and The Lancet, the essentially private aesthetic value of random hallucination could be realized, for an elite group.

With respect to hallucinogens, von Bibra’s 1855 formulation became a self-fulfilling prophecy for fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century European medical researchers. Silas Weir Mitchell, Havelock Ellis, and other medico-scientific professionals experimented with mescaline and peyote and described the results in the august pages of The British Medical Journal and The Lancet in the 1890s. [4] In discursive acts of cultural appropriation, they transferred the drugs from their ritual use among Tarahumari, Kiowa, and other Native Americans, recontextualizing them within their own spheres of imperial science and metropolitan culture. Implicitly replicating the imperial and racial hierarchies established by De Quincey, von Bibra, and earlier writers, texts such as Ellis’ “A New Artificial Paradise,” published in The Contemporary Review in 1896, brought them up to date for the brink of the twentieth century, and disseminated them to a wider reading audience.

Though they have long languished in the shadow of their twentieth-century legacies, Victorian experiments with peyote and mescaline form one of the more obscure areas in which new visual experiences began to contour modern subjectivities. In the mid- and late- nineteenth century, when they learned that certain North and South American plants could induce hallucinations in those who consumed them, British, German, and U.S. anthropologists and medical researchers looked for conceptual and cultural frameworks to come to terms with the drugs’ effects, which would only later be known as hallucinogenic experience. [2] A major touchstone was Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), the text that, along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Kahn,” (1816), created the modern persona of the hallucinating, drug-taking intellectual: “If a man ‘whose talk is of oxen,’ should become an Opium-eater, the probability is, that (if he is not too dull to dream at all)—he will dream about oxen: whereas, in the case before him, the reader will find that the Opium-eater boasteth himself to be a philosopher” (De Quincey 5). Unlike English agricultural workers who used opium medicinally, De Quincey’s narcotized narrator instead dreamed of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s staircases and enhanced his understanding of Immanuel Kant. [3] The Confessions infamously uses opium to consolidate a series of class, racial, and other distinctions, setting the English opium-eater apart from “stupid” Turks and Malays “running amuck,” placing him at the pinnacle of intellectual and literary mastery. The name “De Quincey” became the byword for this status for the better part of the next two centuries. Other writings carried this figure forward, elaborating its racial hierarchy: in Plant Intoxicants (1855), Baron Ernst von Bibra wrote, “If excited by an overdose of hashish or opium, a savage Moslem becomes an assassin, a Malay is seized by an amok frenzy, whereas in the same situation, a scholarly, educated European medical doctor carries out observations on himself” (157). The cultural expectation that bourgeois westerners observe and analyze their own drug experiences continues to produce a copious literature whose authors figure as subversive philosophers, artists, and scientists of themselves. Brenda Mann Hammack has described this figure as “the chemically inspired intellectual” (83). Largely unrecognized within cultural studies and the history of medicine, however, is that nineteenth-century writings about hallucinogens formed this chemical intellectual and valorized his elite knowledge in contrast to another durable figure, the drug-crazed savage of the racist imagination.

I. “Unusual energy and intellectual power”: Hallucinogens, Nerves, and Omniscience

European hallucinogenic experimentation relied on the imperial acquisition of peyote, coca leaf, and other largely New World plants ritually or customarily used by Native Americans.[9] The mid- and late-Victorian period was that of the great “plant hunters,” or botanical adventurers such as Richard Spruce (1817-1893) and Henry Hurd Rusby (1855-1940): in the 1850s and 60s, Spruce traveled the Amazon basin, collecting and cultivating quinine bark, among other plants with therapeutic potential, and dabbling with ayahuasca, the “telepathic vine” ritually ingested by various Amazonian peoples, and thought to bring individual minds into direct contact with each other.[10] In the mid-1880s, Rusby—to whom drug historian David Courtwright refers as “the Theodore Roosevelt of bio-imperialism”—undertook the first of seven expeditions to South America to retrieve coca leaves and other psychoactive plants (Courtwright 48).[11] Hallucinogens also came to Western attention through anthropological studies of the Kiowa, by James Mooney, and the Tarahumari by Carl Lumholtz. In 1885, Mooney was sent to study the Ghost Dance ritual by the Bureau of American Ethnology, a new wing of the Smithsonian Institute, and he quickly became the leading expert on Kiowa and Cherokee customs.[12] The Ghost Dance was a ritual attempt by Native Americans to end European aggression; some versions and segments of it involved peyote-induced trances. To the Ghost Dance’s participants, hallucinogenic experience was instrumental to resisting the racialized violence and dispossession they suffered. From across a cultural and epistemic gulf, the disciplinary and institutional forces of ethnology that Mooney’s research enacted assisted the wider project of imperial science, to document Native practices according to white categories and racist hierarchies. Hallucinogens can thus be located at the tortured heart of an imperial encounter.

From the perspective of racist European commentators, Native hallucinogenic experience could only ever feebly approach the sublime intellectual heights of European use. Louis Lewin’s comparison establishes this hierarchy: “The phenomena to which [peyote] gives rise bring the Indian out of his apathy and unconsciously lead him to superior spheres of perception, and he is subjected proportionately to the same impressions as the cultivated European who is even capable of undertaking an analysis of his concomitant state” (89). In Lewin’s formulation, hallucinogens almost equalize Native American and European intellects, except that Europeans enjoy the aptitude for self-reflexivity and analysis. In less measured terms, Native American hallucinogenic use simply affronted the West’s proprietary relationship to reason: John Briggs wrote in The Medical Register that mental journeys facilitated by “muscale buttons” produced “superstitious recitals” by “savage leaders” (276). In Briggs’ opinion, “Such hallucinations are to those superstitious Indians undoubted realities” (276). Unable to differentiate fleeting visual fictions from actualities, Briggs’ Native Americans inhabited a cognitively abject realm. His claim was far from unique. The British Medical Journal, disparaging Ellis’ favorable review of his mescaline experiment, sneered, “[W]e have yet to learn that the Kiowa Indians are the most intellectual of the sister Continent” (“Paradise or Inferno?” 390). Such opinions conformed neatly to the familiar racist logic whereby whiteness is equated with the perceiving mind, and non-whiteness, with the mire of insensate corporeality.[13]

The privileged relationship of whiteness to perception and cognition was insidiously promulgated through the discourse of neurasthenia, the umbrella term for a host of “nervous diseases” of modernity thought to afflict middle-class Europeans and Americans of the Northeastern industrial centers. In the 1880s and 1890s, numerous physicians—including the prominent Mitchell—wrote about the peculiar susceptibility of these emergent professional classes of “brain workers” to the depletion of nerve force and a host of similar ailments.[14] Nervous fragility was a side-effect of powerful, fast-paced processes of cognition that, attempting to keep up with the demands of modern life, placed too much strain on the body. Flint contextualizes the late century medical interest in hallucination by noting its relationship to “anxieties about increasing amounts of psychological disturbance and nervous disorders [that] were growing in circulation” (264). Hammack, contextualizing fiction of the period, notes that “‘brain drain,’ or the depletion of nervous energy through excessive cerebration, was often viewed as a potential determinant of chemical dependency” among overworked professionals such as doctors and writers (87). Neurasthenia, neuralgia, and other nerve disorders were conditions for which doctors routinely prescribed hypodermic morphine, creating the scandal of iatrogenic, or physician-caused addiction in the 1870s and 1880s.[15] How would hallucinogens, introduced to the reading public in the 1890s, fit into this readymade context?

Never widely produced or prescribed in the nineteenth century, hallucinogens did not generally raise substantive concerns about addiction; nevertheless, ideas about neurasthenia and hallucinogens intersected in a significant way. Briggs’ and Mitchell’s descriptions of frightening debilitation as the result of their experimentation with peyote fit neatly within the neurasthenic model of physical unfitness to withstand extended, dazzling visions. “It seemed to me my heart was simply running away with itself, and it was with considerable difficulty I could breathe air enough to keep me alive,” wrote Briggs (277; original emphasis). Mitchell complained of “megrims,” also known as migraines; “For two days I had a headache, and for one day a smart attack of gastric distress. This came after the first dose, and was most uncomfortable. The experience, however, was worth one such headache and indigestion, but not worth a second” (“Remarks” 1627). Similarly, one of Ellis’ subjects who had taken too large a dose had an unfavorable reaction: “paroxysmal attacks of pain at the heart and a sense of imminent death” (“Mescal” 134).[16] Such accounts describe sensations of pain, panic, and nervousness common to neuralgia and neurasthenia; they render a picture of the hallucinogenic subject as too highly strung to gain the benefit of the visions. D. W. Prentiss and Francis P. Morgan suggested that some of the effects of “muscular depression” their subjects felt were owing to mescaline’s “depression of the nervous system,” and they couched this speculation in the language of “nerve-centres,” “peripheral nerves,” “nerve endings,”and “nervous effects” common to neurasthenic discourse (584). Such accounts suggest that, although the white, masculine, bourgeois mind is eminently suited to hallucinogenic use, its self-observation, and analysis, the body may be unequal to these tasks.

Medical writers engaged in comparative racial speculation to explain this white discomfort with hallucinogens. Prentiss and Morgan, noting that their implicitly white test subjects took only three to seven peyote buttons, whereas the Kiowa normally took between ten and twelve during one ceremony, wrote, “This difference in susceptibility is undoubtedly due to the tolerance for the drug which has arisen in the Indian as the result of both his own habitual use, and of the hereditary influence received by him from his progenitors” (580). Tolerance by itself was not a sufficient explanation for the Kiowas’ greater capacity: an inherent racial difference construed them as more robust creatures for hallucinogenic experience than whites. The white constitution and nervous system might be too delicate to process the visual information peyote transmitted to the Kiowa, Tarahumari, and other Native American peoples.

Mooney’s accounts of Kiowa peyote ceremonies struck a similar note: I have seen a tottering old man, who had been a priest of the ceremony for half a century, led into the tipi by the hand like a child, eat his four peyote [buttons], and then take the rattle and sing the song in a clear voice, and repeat it as often as his turn came until morning, when he came out with the rest, so little fatigued that he was able to sit down and answer intelligently all the questions I asked. Imagine a white man of eighty years of age sitting up in a constrained position, without sleep, all night long and nearly all morning, and then being in condition to be interviewed. 176 Characteristically more sympathetic to the Kiowa and keen to dignify their use of peyote as religious rather than superstitious, Mooney’s account is nevertheless amenable to the racist calculation I have been describing. His contention that an elderly white man would have been too weak to participate in the ceremony contributes to the discourse of cultivated, white physical delicacy characteristic of modern nervousness. Yet his account also contains an unconscious irony: it is unimaginable that an elderly white could sit up all night, and then be interviewed by an ethnologist, not merely because he is less hardy than his more robust Native American counterpart, but also because the very idea that he could serve as an anthropological object to be interviewed, requires a total reversal of the epistemic order and the imperial framework supporting it. Within this order, people of color served as the material of imperial scientific investigation; whites functioned as its optic. The comparative racial dimension of hallucinogenic discourse thus worked obliquely, to conjure whiteness as the preserve of intellect and knowledge production. Just as a nervous physique suited the idea of whiteness as a powerful but delicate lens, so it unsuited whites to play the role of inert physical material to be studied.

If, as in Lewin’s account, hallucinogens raised Native Americans from their mental sluggishness to the perceptual level of Europeans, might it not then also elevate Europeans’ perceptive and perhaps even cognitive abilities? This was the tantalizing possibility raised by several writers, who reported surges of mental energy and euphoria: Mitchell, for one, “had a decisive impression that I was more competent in mind than in my every-day moods. I seemed to be sure of victoriously dealing with problems” (“Remarks” 1626). Peyote gave Ellis “a certain consciousness of unusual energy and intellectual power” (”A Note” 1541). One of Ellis’ subjects reported, “[M]y mind remained not only perfectly clear, but enjoyed, I believe, an unusual lucidity” (Ellis, “Mescal” 136). Prentiss and Morgan’s first test subject reported exactly the same qualities, easily recording his visions and his own ability to manipulate them. Lumholtz also described the sensation of power, quite the opposite of enervation: “Not only does it do away with all exhaustion, but one feels actually pushed on, as I can testify from personal experience” (358). Indeed, Lumholtz’s experience even makes peyote—referred to as hikuli by the Tarahumari with whom he took it—sound like a stimulant rather than a hallucinogen: “I drank only a small cupful, but felt the effect in a few minutes. First it made me wide awake, and acted as an excitant to the nerves, similar to coffee, but much more powerful” (375).[17] Mooney notes that without taking peyote, he was barely able to withstand the rigors of the all-night ceremony; under its influence, however, he is equal to his documentary labor, “able to take note of all that occurred throughout the night, coming out in the morning as fresh as at the start to make pictures of the men” (177). Here, peyote actually assists the imperial labor of knowledge production as Mooney, boosted by the drug, efficiently photographs the Kiowa. These writers reported their experiences before the modern categorization of drugs as stimulants, narcotics, and hallucinogens had been established, and while nascent theories of addiction were still forming. If peyote could stimulate the nerves, offering alertness, intellectual confidence, energy, and mental acceleration, it would be the middle-class neurasthenic worker’s ideal drug, helping him through his brain work. With mental rather than purely sensory or physical benefits, hallucinogens began to seem like the professional intellectual’s perfect drug.

Occasionally the fantasy of intellectual power made the body seem irrelevant, so that it figuratively disappeared as the hallucinator luxuriated in his own mental mastery. When the body vanishes, the intellect triumphs: “[I] did not feel my physical self; an ever-increasing feeling of dissolution set in. I was seized with passionate curiosity, great things were about to be unveiled before me. I would perceive the essence of all things, the problems of creation would be unraveled. I was dematerialized” (Beringer, qtd. in Lewin 87). Here, the white masculine body disappears in the abstract invocation of mental conquest. Kurt Beringer’s prose here, like the other claims of enhanced mental prowess, performs a compensatory fantasy of white intellectual transcendence under the influence of peyote and mescaline. Such claims were part of the genealogy of Hammack’s chemical intellectual; for example, the protagonist of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s short story “Green Tea” worries that scholars such as himself might “grow too abstracted, and the mind, as it were, pass out of the body, unless it were reminded often of the connexion by actual sensation” (249). In Le Fanu’s gothic tale, green tea serves as the reminder that Jennings cannot actually transcend his physical coordinates, by making him compulsively hallucinate a monkey that will not retire into the unseen reservoir from which he calls it. What yokes these and other fantasies of disembodiment, however, is a common desire for intellectual power, linked to the consumption of an obscure substance or drug that eases the mental labor of study and contemplation.

At the fin-de-siècle, cultural attitudes to race propped up this fantasy. For example, Ellis explains mescaline’s intellectual nature through a comparison to Asian opium use: “The mescal drinker remains calm and collected amid the sensory turmoil around him; his judgment is as clear as in the normal state; he falls into no Oriental condition of vague and voluptuous reverie” (“Mescal” 141). By the fin-de-siècle, British and American readers were familiar with popular images of Chinese opium smokers lounging vacantly in “dens.”[18] Opium had been associated with hallucination since De Quincey’s Confessions, and it retained its Orientalized glamour, but at the fin-de-siècle, it increasingly signified a whiteness coarsened by the sensual indulgence implicit in proximity to Asian bodies and concomitant on incorporation of an Asian substance. Mescaline, by contrast, was for Ellis and others an intellectual drug, and one of power and competence rather than the corporeal mire of leisure. In this way, it reinforced the whiteness of pure mind.