Puck

essay by Brian Charles Clark

Where does history go when we don’t write it down? Where does history go when we’d rather forget it ever happened? Where does history go when we were too stoned to remember what happened? To this plague of impossible questions we might turn to Freud’s idea of the repressed in order to begin forming a response. The response might be, We don’t know where history goes—maybe it goes underground—but it always returns. Which is a useful enough idea for those things, events, or persons for which we have categories of knowledge. For history that lies outside of our epistemological framework, it is simply lost—and if it returns, in the inimitable way of the Freudian repressed, we won’t recognize it as a return, but rather as a new agency of knowledge and transformation. As Octavio Paz writes, “[t]he ruling system of repression in each society is based upon [a] group of inhibitions that do not need to be monitored by consciousness” (5).

Human culture does indeed have an underground historical agency that returns, again and again, like a weed from a rhizome. The agency I’m thinking of is plant life. Vegetation, in one form or another, is our “daily bread,” and gives us our staves of life, to boot. But surely, the reader must be arguing, we have well and truly identified plant life as an essential component of culture, and metaphors extended from our knowledge of plants fill our languages and literatures. We have metaphors of bread-making (e.g., “bun in the oven”) and metaphors of farming (e.g., “You reap what you sow”). But although the English language is full of words and metaphors referring to altered states of consciousness, we rarely base those metaphors on plants (“put that in your pipe and smoke it,” being one possible exception). I might say, for instance, “What blows my mind is that Sor Juana became a nun,” where “blows” signifies some sort of cognitive dissonance. More commonly, we refer to being “surprised,” “confused,” or of “having an epiphany,” without usually reflecting on two epistemological assumptions embedded in what we are saying.

The first assumption embedded in such speech or writing is that states of confusion or surprise are altered states of mind. The second assumption is a corollary of the first: the alterity in this case refers to some (possibly hypothetical or mythical) baseline state of mind. Altered states of mind, such as confusion or surprise, seek response or resolution; they are, in short, states of motivation, animation, and transformation. That plants are agents capable of inducing such states is an invisible history of culture, with only a few botanically minded scholars addressing themselves to its unearthing. There is an especially dearth of such scholarship in literary studies, probably because the study of drug plants is a shady and self-implicating line of inquiry. Presumably a critic wouldn’t notice drug use or influences unless he or she had had some experience with same. But we cannot live without plants, and although that is obvious, as our sciences become more informative on the subject, so should our criticism. Amounting to a tacit prohibition, literary critics are missing a good opportunity to learn from other academic tribes—such as anthropology—and to help begin to form a workable theory and phenomenology of literary communication.

That drug plants have played an important role in human cultures for thousands of years is attested by discoveries of hemp braziers that are probably Scythian in origin and found throughout western and southern Asia and north Africa (Rudgley 36-40) and of even older opium-use related paraphernalia over an even wider Eurasian area (Rudgley 24-31). Journalist Paul Devereux calls drug plants, particularly the “hallucinogens,” an “ancient textbook we have not yet read—or, more accurately, recalled” (244). Devereux makes a common conflation here, by taking the plant itself as the agent of transformation. It is the state of mind that is transformative; plants are merely convenient—and unavoidable—means to an end. Dreams, prayer, mediation, and the “ecstasies induced by art, music, [or] sexual passion” are some of our other means of obtaining “altered states of consciousness,” according to anthropologist Richard Rudgley (4, 3) . (“Holiness” and “the holy,” as Rudolf Otto pointed out, are filled with a surplus of meaning. Phenomenologically, the holy crops up everywhere and at all times unexpectedly. This surplus of meaning occurs because the holy is experiential, is always more than can be said or named. Otto names this surplus that marks “ ‘the holy’ minus its moral factor or ‘moment’” the numinous. [Otto, chap. 2, 5-7].)

Rudley reports that “around 100 species of hallucinogens have been discovered in the New World. This is considerably larger than the total number of plants growing in the Old World” (63). The use of “psychoactive substances such as mushrooms in ancient and modern Mexico” (ibid.) is widespread and common. Figurines of mushrooms have been found in “southern Mesoamerica…, throughout the Guatemalan highlands and parts of the central regions” of Mexico have been dated as early as 1650 B.C. (de Rios 118). Mushroom stones are mentioned in the Popul Vuh (ibid.). Just as their was a cannabis, an opium, and an alcohol “complex” that spread throughout Eurasia in prehistory, so too a mushroom complex spread throughout ancient Mexico.

By the time of the Conquest

[s]acred mushrooms played such an important part in Aztec life that Indian groups which owed tribute to the Aztec emperor paid it with inebriating mushrooms… One Spanish priest wrote that for the Aztecs, the sacred mushrooms were like the host in the Christian religion: through this bitter nourishment, “they received their God in communion”. (142)

Indeed, mycologist R.G. Wasson once suggested “that hallucinogen use is a major factor in explaining the demons and gods which have entered into man’s beliefs throughout the world” (132).

Not only were mushroom used by the elite of Aztec society, but the folk had their herbal pharmacopoeia as well. Among the hallucinogens, they employed the venom of certain toads (120-124), the rhizome of the water lily (124, 126, 127), as well as tobacco, which were variously smoked, snuffed, eaten, drunk, and taken as enemas. The “shaman-like curanderos” used hallucinogens to “diagnose illness and to perform curing ceremonies for individuals” (129). Unlike the cannabis and alcohol complex of the Old World, it appears that the plants of the New World were not typically used for what we’d call recreation or partying. The close association of the indigenes’ plant-use and religious practices made the plants the obvious target of the Spaniards’ coercive conversion tactics:

When the Spanish arrived in Mexico in the sixteenth century, they persecuted those priests and practitioners who used the sacred plants in religious rituals… Many ecclesiastics were vehemently opposed to the various hallucinogenic plants used by the Aztecs because of the religious importance that the natives gave to the drugs. Although the Aztecs viewed many of the plants as divine messengers, capable of transporting man into spiritual realms, to the Spanish these very attributes impeded their missionary activity…(143-144).

The standard assumption is that hallucinogenic plant use was wiped out in a war on drugs that, presumably, was over by the time Sor Juana was born in 1651 (or 1648). But if the practices did die off, they were revived at some point, because Wasson discovered a group of Indian mushroom users “in the hills of Oaxaca in the early 1950s” (145). More simply, though, the practices were never eliminated and simply went underground. As Andrew Weil writes:

Mexican mushroom ceremonies are conducted by shamans, usually women, and are held for purposes of treating illness, solving problems, foreseeing the future in visions, and putting people in contact with the supernatural world. They take place at night, by candlelight, and today are curious blends of shamanism and Roman Catholic ritual. (99; emphasis added)

For Sor Juana, this raises a point of biographical speculation. If the mushrooms and other drug plants were present in life. As a “natural” (illegitimate) child “born at the hacienda of San Miguel Nepantla…, not far from what is today Mexico City” (Peden xxiii, xxii), she might have witnessed or heard about the use of hallucinogens. As a curious child who grew into the poet, there is no reason not to think that Sor Juana investigated the culture and world around her. The autobiography she present in The Response certainly supports the premise that she was motivated by curiosity and a love of learning. Critically, though, she has been treated as if “learning,” her soul’s desire, all came from the great books of the Western World.

Although Octavio Paz begins his study of Sor Juana with a reminder that she is not only a product of history, but that history is a product of Sor Juana (Paz 4), and although “[I]t is clear that an author’s life and work are related, …the relation is never simple: the life does not entirely explain the work, nor does the work explain the life” (2-3), he orients his reading of Primero Sueño around Sor Juana’s (assumed) reading of Kircher and other hermetics. Still, he insists that “New Spain… cannot be understood without the Indian world, both as an antecedent and as a secret presence that pervades practices, customs, family and political structures, economic systems, crafts, legends, myths, and beliefs” (13). To that list we should add poetry, that crafty practice that partakes of all the above.

The title of Sor Juana’s longest poem, Primero Sueño, is usually translated “First Dream,” or by Pedan as “First I Dream.” I hear associations of “primal” in Sor Juana’s primero. The poem is composed in reflection of the primeras materias of the poet’s consciousness; like Finnegans Wake, it is an allegory and more told in a dream “voyage [that] occurs in the space of a single night” (Paz 369) and that “does not end at all” (380; Paz’s emphasis). The poem, according to Paz, “is something different” in its “break with tradition”: “it is a sign of her times. Something ends in that poem and something begins” (366-367). The isolated soul, the speaker of the poem, is Cartesian in its purity of self-reflecting intellection. By the spiritual alchemy of the soul’s journey (to nowhere, as Paz points out), the anima prima, “the rational soul” which “communicates with the world and the body” (371), is made to “give up its substance” (FD 247) when “distilled by unremitting heat” (243). This “substance” enables the soul-narrator to see colors without light (280-292) and to hear the low thrum of silence as its effects first begin to manifest themselves (as at 19-24, 57-64, 70-71, etc.).

This primary material of Sor Juana’s narrator is heightened attention. The penumbral substance of the speaker’s attention is “Pyramidal, doleful” (1), baneful (funesta), and “born of the earth” (2), of “vain obelisks thrust toward the Heavens” (3). The pyramidal shadow of the soul’s attention evokes Egyptian, as well as Aztecan and Mayan pyramids (there are “two Pyramids” here, Sor Juana insists [340]), but as well the conic shape and chthonic wisdom source of the mushroom stones of the Indians. The “diligent, / audacious sisters” (57-58) of Fate have flattened the numinous affect of the Indian rituals and ceremonies: like angels sent down “with dark membranous pinions… aggrieved” and “wings monstrously conceived” (50-51), the Indians now know only the dry Hadean wisdom of the underground of history. (Psychologist and dream mythographer James Hillman writes: “ ‘What keeps souls in the underworld?,’ asks Socrates. (‘What keeps the psyche asleep?, asks Freud.) Answer: Desire (Wishes); the soul wishes to stay there, for it finds satisfaction there. What satisfies the desire? (What fulfills the wishes?) Answer: the benefactory intelligence of Hades” according to Plato’s Cratylus (404a) (Hillman 121). Sor Juana’s narrator “curved her crystalline / course beneath the deepest seas / …through subterranean cavities / …Pluto’s daunting caverns” to the “Elysian fields” (713-720).)

The people’s ancient wisdom has been snitched off, given up to the conquerors by “Pluto’s loose-tongued minister” (54), a collaborator, and by the Fates’ sonorous weaving of “black maximas and longas” (58) they are “persua[ded]… to sleep” (68)—or better, to dream (sueño) under the “finger cautioning” (shh! don’t tell!) of “Harpokrates, the god of silence, night” (75-76). Such contemplation changes the changers, “the artful sorceress / who having changed her suitors into fish / [is] herself transmuted in redress” (94-96).

The chthonic, Hadean dryness and stillness—where “not an atom moves” in the “still air” (82)—is the perfect, Christ-like revenge. Non-violent (unlike the conquerors), the manifest historical destiny of the Spaniard’s missionary predilection (a common beast [vulgo bruto, 107], that predilection) “sleep[s] with open eyes, [but does] not see” (112). The “secret presence” of Indian history forms entoptic, hallucinatory patterns on the eye lids of the sleepless sleeping “king” (111) of “other days” (114), patterns that are like Actaeon’s “hounds” (113) “that, even in his sleep, he hears” (122). There are Spanish, Aztecan, and Mayan kings here, men who “will not countenance distraction” (142) from women intellectuals and Indian brujos. In the dryness of Sor Juana’s poem are the dark, staring eyes of Indians and owls engaged in “the motionless voyage of the soul and its vision” (Paz 371). (Entoptic patterns are also associated with various medical conditions; for more information please see Eye Floaters.)
Paz wants to say that one of the more psychedelic or hallucinogenic moments of Sor Juana’s Primal Dream is “more Neoplatonic than Aristotelian” (ibid.)—but what happened to the “secret presence that pervades” (13)? Although “First Dream… portrays the history of a defeat” (378), the defeat, for Paz as for José Gaos, is purely intellectual: the “failure” of Sor Juana’s “quest to learn” (Gaos in Paz, ibid.). Why is this poem forever reduced to Western sources rather than read as a syncretic meditation on epistemological possibility? The entoptic patterns (cf. Rudgley 17) seen on the closed lids of the stoned mushroom eater are “brilliant colors, even / without light” (FD 283-284) and are geometrical in form—dots, lines, squiggles, spirals, and pyramids. If, as Paz argues, “[a] new passion in the history of our poetry appears with First Dream: love of learning” (384), but is only new in that Sor Juana’s “[d]aring becomes defiance” and “rebellion” (ibid.), the it must be admitted that there is nothing new in either the love or its defiance. Rudgley quotes Lévi-Strauss on just this point: “[The] thirst for objective knowledge is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call ‘primitive’” (11, from The Savage Mind, 3).

I am not trying to claim that Sor Juana participated in Indian mushroom ceremonies: that speculative thesis will always remain indemonstrable, and is itself “the question mark” (Paz 386) that hangs over Sor Juana’s biography and the Primal Dream. Besides, she seems wary of “powders to mask the truth” (FD 755), as drugs, like a cosmetic foundation, are always that: cosmetic, whatever the connection to the cosmos. Too, she seems aware of the dangers of becoming addicted: “paths toward daring that once / traveled cannot present sufficient danger / to prevent a second journey, that is, / a second try” (792-795). What Sor Juana’s poem does is make us question the nature of consciousness, knowledge, and the relation of what we think and of how we describe the world with plants. If, as Paz argues, First Dream is a primal poem of Romanticism, the raw materials or “first example of an attitude… that… would become the spiritual axis of Western poetry” (Paz 367), then how, now, are we to read P.B. Shelly except as a beautiful Frankenstein created in part by his imbibing of laudanum, that refined wine of the Western opium complex? Because we cannot know why “vision” is given “wings” (FD 368) or why, like “a blazing pyramid… / the human mind / mimics” the Heavenly “model” (405-407), we would prefer not to confront the monster of the uncontrollable, the unknowable. (For more on drug use in ancient Mexico, please see Teonanácatl and Ololiuqui, two ancient magic drugs of Mexico.)

But that force—be it mushroom-induced geometry or the visions of isolation—that force of the numinous resists reduction: it has “fearsome talons” that “comb… the fibers of the air, striving / from the very atoms to weave stairs” (336-338). When knowledge becomes a trickster “elf” (312), we are on psychedelic turf, where the elf becomes a psychopomp, a Hermes leading us “overcome with awe” (362) into the “opaque structures” (369) of not just the “question mark” (Paz) but of the questionable. And when “those whom Nature / conceived as equals should be different / solely for lingual disparities” (420-422) we should become skeptical of Paz’s—or anyone else’s—assurances that there is an answer, even if it is no answer, in Sor Juana’s poem. Like a mushroom high which reveals as much as it obscures, epistemology always comes down, be it from religious or critical conviction. The inevitable crash of Icarus “bewildered by such rich profusion” (451) should make us hyper-aware of the very interpenetration of the world and its things that Sor Juana argues for, for the intellect cannot “separate” into “discrete parts” that which is “composed… of each of them” (481, 488, 474-476).

The “peak experience,” as psychedelicists sometimes call the numinous, is one of blinding “radiance”: it is an “extravagance of light” (498, 499). It is obtained by use of a phoretic compound, “a compound to denote / the goal of Apollonian science” which is a “wondrous antidote… / from the fatal, blessing” of that science. This substance, this compound that bears us into “the disorienting chaos of the /confusing images” is obtained by a kind of alchemic homeopathy that by turns causes the soul to rise and fall, heat up and cool down, that enlightens and endarkens, and ends in media res, in the middle of that “triadic combination / of three harmonious lines” (655-656)—“angel, plant, and beast” (694)—that is the shadowy pyramid. Finally, then, Sor Juana’s Primal Dream is a poem about numinous experience and its unspeakableness, where, if that unspeakableness is a “failure” (Paz), or in Sor Juana’s words, an “impending doom,” it is also “a catalyst to action” (FD 962) which throws open “the doors of perception” (Huxley) and interpretation.

Abbreviation
FD: First Dream, in Pedan (see below).

Works Cited
De Rios, Marlene Dobkin. Hallucinogens: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1984.

Devereux, Paul. The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia. Penguin/Arkana, New York, 1997.

Hillman, James. The Dream and the Underworld. Harper & Row, New York, 1979.

Horsely, Richard A. and Neil Asher Silberman. The Message and the Kingdom: How Jesus and Paul Ignited a Revolution and Transformed the Ancient World. Grosset/Putnam, New York, 1997.

Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational. Trans. John W. Harvey. Oxford University Press, London, 1958.

Paz, Octavio. Sor Juana: Or, The Traps of Faith. Margaret Sayers Peden, trans. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1988.

Peden, Margaret Sayers (trans). Poems, Protest, and a Dream: Selected Writings of Sor Juana. Penguin Books, New York, 1997.

Rudgley, Richard. Essential Substances: A Cultural History of Intoxicants in Society. Kodansha International, New York, 1994.

Weil, Andrew and Winifred Rosen. Chocolate to Morphine: Understanding Mind-Active Drugs. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1983.