The San Pedro cactus evolved thirty or forty million years ago in the deserts of South America. Today its native habitat is the barren cliffs of the high Andes, two thousand metres above sea level. In spring, the distinctive green columns produce a large white and yellow blossom, which blooms at night and is pollinated by hummingbirds and bats. Like many plants, the San Pedro cactus converts amino acids into compounds known as alkaloids. The evolutionary purpose of San Pedro’s most famous alkaloid, the psychoactive compound mescaline, is unknown, but humans have been aware of its effects for thousands of years. When boiled down into a brew and ingested, it activates an alternative experience of consciousness.
‘No mind-altering substance has been described more thoroughly and from such a variety of perspectives,’ Mike Jay writes in his new history, Mescaline. Its use in the Americas dates back thousands of years. It was the first psychedelic analysed by Western scientists, and in the early decades of the 20th century the only substance of its kind available to psychologists, writers, artists and philosophers eager to experience chemically induced hallucinations. The word ‘psychedelic’ was coined in 1953, by the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond (in correspondence with Aldous Huxley), in part to describe the experience of taking mescaline. The full spectrum of its effects includes ‘dizziness, fullness in the head, nausea, time distortion, a rainbow sheen of visual trails, hyperventilation, an uncanny sense of double consciousness, physical prostration, auditory hallucinations, ineffable cosmic insights, a lazy euphoria, a pounding heart, scintillating patterns exploding across closed eyelids and the immanent presence of the sacred’.
Read Full Article »
