The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world (17 page)

The madness in the marijuana garden is of a different order. Though it too is abundantly watered by money, it remains deeply rooted in the human desire for pleasure—in whatever exactly it is that the chemicals produced in these flowers can do to a person’s conscious experience. This desire must be an exceptionally powerful one—the passion and the price this flower commands have proven as much, as perhaps does the force of its taboo. Yet, for my part, I realized I didn’t understand the first thing about that desire, not really. So what, exactly,
is
the knowledge held out by these plants, and why has it been so strenuously forbidden?

• • •

With the solitary exception of the Eskimos, there isn’t a people on Earth who doesn’t use psychoactive plants to effect a change in consciousness, and there probably never has been. As for the Eskimos, their exception only proves the rule: historically, Eskimos didn’t use psychoactive plants because none of them will grow in the Arctic. (As soon as the white man introduced the Eskimo to fermented grain, he immediately joined the consciousness changers.) What this suggests is that the desire to alter one’s experience of consciousness may be universal.

Nor is the desire limited to adults. Andrew Weil, who has written two valuable books treating consciousness changing “as a basic human activity,” points out that even young children seek out altered states of awareness. They will spin until violently dizzy (thereby producing visual hallucinations), deliberately hyperventilate, throttle one another to the point of fainting, inhale any fumes they can find, and, on a daily basis, seek the rush of energy supplied by processed sugar (sugar being the child’s plant drug of choice).

As the examples from childhood suggest, using drugs is not the only way to achieve altered states of consciousness. Activities as different as meditation, fasting, exercise, amusement park rides, horror movies, extreme sports, sensory or sleep deprivation, chanting, music, eating spicy foods, and taking extreme risks of all kinds have the power to change the texture of our mental experience to one degree or another. We may eventually discover that what psychoactive plants do to the brain closely resembles, at a biochemical level, the effects of these other activities.

Human cultures vary widely in the plants they use to gratify the desire for a change of mind, but all cultures (save the Eskimo) sanction at least one such plant and, just as invariably, strenuously forbid certain others. Along with the temptation seems to come the taboo. The reasons for drawing the bright line
here
and not
there
generally make more sense within the culture itself, rooted as they are in its values and traditions, than they do outside it. But the reasons cultures give for promoting one plant and forbidding another are remarkably fluid in both time and space; one culture’s panacea is often another culture’s panapathogen (root of all evil); think of the traditional role of alcohol in the Christian West as compared to the Islamic East. Indeed, one culture’s panacea can, over time, transmogrify into that same culture’s panapathogen, as happened to opiates in the West between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
*

Historians can explain these shifts much better than scientists can, since they usually have less to do with the intrinsic nature of the various molecules involved than with the powers that cultures ascribe to them and the changing needs of those cultures. Cannabis in American culture has at various times held the power to foster violence (in the 1930s) and indolence (today): same molecule, opposite effect. Promoting certain plant drugs and forbidding others may just be something cultures do as a way of defining themselves or reinforcing their cohesion. It’s hardly surprising that something as magical as a plant with the power to alter people’s feelings and thoughts would inspire both fetishes and taboos.

• • •

What is harder to comprehend is why virtually all people, and more than a few animals, should have acquired such a desire in the first place. What good, from an evolutionary standpoint, could it do a creature to consume psychoactive plants? Possibly none at all: it’s a fallacy to assume that whatever is is that way for a good Darwinian reason. Just because a desire or practice is widespread or universal doesn’t necessarily mean it confers an evolutionary edge.

In fact, the human penchant for drugs may be the accidental by-product of two completely different adaptive behaviors. This at least is the theory Steven Pinker proposes in
How the Mind Works.
He points out that evolution has endowed the human brain with two (formerly) unrelated faculties: its superior problem-solving abilities and an internal system of chemical rewards, such that when a person does something especially useful or heroic the brain is washed in chemicals that make it feel good. Bring the first of these faculties to bear on the second, and you wind up with a creature who has figured out how to use plants to artificially trip the brain’s reward system.

But doing so is not necessarily good for us. Ronald Siegel, the animal intoxication expert, has shown that animals who get high on plants tend to be more accident prone, more vulnerable to predators, and less likely to attend to their offspring. Intoxication is dangerous. But this only deepens the mystery: Why does the desire to alter consciousness remain powerful in the face of these perils? Or, put another way, why hasn’t this desire simply died out, a casualty of Darwinian competition: the survival of the soberest?

The Greeks understood that the answer to most either/or questions about intoxicants (and a great many other of life’s mysteries) is “Both.” Dionysus’s wine is both a scourge and a blessing. Used with care and in the proper context, many drug plants
do
confer advantages on the creatures that consume them—fiddling with one’s brain chemistry can be very useful indeed. The relief of pain, a blessing of many psychoactive plants, is only the most obvious example. Plant stimulants, such as coffee, coca, and khat, help people to concentrate and work. Amazonian tribes take specific drugs to help them hunt, enhancing their endurance, eyesight, and strength. There are psychoactive plants that uncork inhibitions, quicken the sex drive, muffle or fire aggression, and smooth the waters of social life. Still others relieve stress, help people sleep or stay awake, and allow them to withstand misery or boredom. All these plants are, at least potentially, mental tools; people who know how to use them properly may be able to cope with everyday life better than those who don’t.

• • •

These are the easy cases, though, the plants that merely inflect the prose of everyday life without rewriting it. “Transparent” is a term used to characterize drugs whose effects on consciousness are too subtle to interfere with one’s ability to get through the day and fulfill one’s obligations. Drugs such as coffee, tea, and tobacco in our culture, or coca and khat leaves in others, leave the user’s space-time coordinates untouched. But what about the more powerful plants, the ones that
do
alter the experience of space and time in such a way as to take users out of everyday life—out of, even, themselves?

Cultures tend to be more wary of these plants, and for good reason: they pose a threat to the smooth workings of the social order. This may be why most complex, modern, secular societies have seen fit to forbid them. Even the cultures that endorse these plants cloak them in elaborate rules and rituals as a way of containing or disciplining their powers. So what are these powers, and what commends them—not only to adventurous individuals in all societies but, in some cases, to their societies as well? For many cultures have held these plants to be sacred.

• • •

No one has yet written the natural history of world religion, but we have some idea of the story such a book would tell. Among other things, it would force us to rethink the relation of matter and spirit—specifically, plant matter and human spirituality. For it would tell of how a select group of psychoactive plants and fungi (among them the peyote cactus, the
Amanita muscaria
and psilocybin mushrooms, the ergot fungus, the fermented grape, ayahuasca, and cannabis) were present at the creation of several of the world’s religions. One of the world’s earliest known religions was the cult of Soma, practiced by the ancient Indo-Europeans of central Asia; according to its sacred text, the Rig Veda, Soma was an intoxicant with the powers of a god. People worshiped the drug itself—which ethnobotanists now think was
Amanita muscaria,
the mushroom sometimes called fly agaric—as a path to divine knowledge.

Much the same process took place again and again all over the ancient world as people experimented, individually and in groups, with the power of plants to transcend the here and now and induce ecstasy—to take them elsewhere. What these peoples discovered was that certain plants or fungi (ethnobotanists call them “entheogens,” meaning “the god within”) opened a door onto another world. The images and words brought back from these journeys—visits with the souls of the dead and unborn, visions of the afterlife, answers to life’s questions—were powerful enough to compel belief in a spirit world and, in some cases, to serve as the foundation of whole religions. Of course, plant drugs are not the only technologies of religious ecstasy; fasting, meditation, and hypnotic trances can achieve similar results. But often these techniques have been used to explore spiritual territory first blazed by the entheogens.

What a natural history of religion would show is that the human experience of the divine has deep roots in psychoactive plants and fungi. (Karl Marx may have gotten it backward when he called religion the opiate of the people.) This is not to diminish anyone’s religious beliefs; to the contrary, that certain plants summon spiritual knowledge is precisely what many religious people have believed, and who’s to say that belief is wrong? Psychoactive plants
are
bridges between the worlds of matter and spirit or, to update the vocabulary, chemistry and consciousness.

• • •

What a trick this is for a plant, to produce a chemical so mysterious in its effects on human consciousness that the plant itself becomes a sacrament, deserving of humankind’s worshipful care and dissemination. Such was the fate of
Amanita muscaria
among the Indo-Europeans, peyote among the American Indians, cannabis among the Hindus, Scythians, and Thracians, wine among the Greeks
*
and early Christians.

In the same way the human desire for beauty and sweetness introduced into the world a new survival strategy for the plants that could gratify it, the human hunger for transcendence created new opportunities for another group of plants. No entheogenic plant or fungus ever set out to make molecules for the express purpose of inspiring visions in humans—combating pests is the far more likely motive. But the moment humans discovered what these molecules could do for them, this wholly inadvertent magic, the plants that made them suddenly had a brilliant new way to prosper. And from that moment on this is exactly what the plants with the strongest magic did.

• • •

Our desire for some form of transcendence of ordinary experience expresses itself not only in religion but in other endeavors as well, and these too have probably been more deeply influenced by psychoactive plants than we like to think. Who knows, we may need a natural history of literature and philosophy, or of discovery and invention, to go on the shelf with our natural history of religion. Or maybe what we need is just a single volume: a natural history of the imagination.

Somewhere in that volume we would surely find a chapter on the place of the opium poppy and cannabis in the romantic imagination. It’s well known that many English romantic poets used opium, and several of the French romantics experimented with hashish soon after Napoleon’s troops brought it back with them from Egypt. What’s harder to know is precisely what role these psychoactive plants may have played in the revolution in human sensibility we call romanticism. The literary critic David Lenson, for one, believes it was crucial. He argues that Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s notion of the imagination as a mental faculty that “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create,” an idea whose reverberations in Western culture haven’t yet been stilled, simply cannot be understood without reference to the change in consciousness wrought by opium.

“This notion of secondary or transforming imagination established a model of artistic creativity in the West that lasted from 1815 until the fall of Saigon,” Lenson writes. “It is predicated on annihilating what Keats called ‘weariness, fever and fret’ (the world of fixed, dead objects) by just the sort of ‘dissolution, diffusion and dissipation’ that [moves the artist] toward the realms of accident, improvisation, and the unconscious.” Not just romantic poetry, but modernism, surrealism, cubism, and jazz have all been nourished by Coleridge’s idea of the transforming imagination—and that idea in turn was nourished by a psychoactive plant. “However criticism has tried to sanitize this process,” Lenson writes, “we have to face the fact that some of our canonical poets and theorists, when apparently talking about imagination, are really talking about getting high.”
*

Curiously, the romantics at first believed it was their philosophical rather than poetical faculties that drugs would enhance. Thomas De Quincey felt that opium would give a philosopher “an inner eye and power of intuition for the vision and mysteries of our human nature.” The nineteenth-century American writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow reported an important encounter with a philosopher of antiquity while under the spell of hashish. All of which makes me wonder: Is it possible that some of the philosophers of antiquity themselves had important encounters with magic plants?

This, at least, was my first thought upon learning that many of the important thinkers of classical Greece (including Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Aeschylus, and Euripides) had participated in the “Mysteries of Eleusis.” Nominally a harvest festival in honor of Demeter, the goddess of cultivated grains, the Mysteries were an ecstatic ritual during which participants consumed a powerful hallucinogenic potion. The precise recipe remains part of the mystery, but scholars speculate that the active ingredient was probably ergot, an alkaloid produced by a fungus (
Claviceps purpurea
) that infects cultivated grains and that closely resembles LSD in its chemical makeup and effects. Under the influence of this drug potion, the lights of classical civilization participated in a communal shamanic ritual of such mystery and transformative power that all who took part in it were sworn never to describe it. There is no way to know what, if anything, a philosopher or poet might have brought back from such a journey. But is it outlandish to ask whether such an experience might have helped inspire Plato’s supernatural metaphysics—the belief that everything in our world has its true or ideal form in a second world beyond the reach of our senses?