From the Narrow Desert: Nutmeg

Showing posts with label Nutmeg. Show all posts

Saturday, December 3, 2022

Sync: Archaic Revival and the serpents and birds of paradise

I'm normally reading several books at once. I'm still in the middle of Valentin Tomberg's Lazarus, Come Forth! but last night I randomly decided to start reading a book I'd picked up some time ago but never opened: Terence McKenna's The Archaic Revival (1992). I only read a few pages. Between the table of contents and the foreword was this full-page illustration by the German collage artist Wilfried Sätty.

A naked couple in a jungle with a huge snake -- a pretty obvious Garden of Eden reference, presumably chosen by McKenna because of the forbidden fruit's character as a "mind-altering plant." There are also a lot of birds in the picture -- vultures or cormorants or something, but also, by virtue of the setting in which they appear, "birds of paradise."

I didn't really think much about it until today, when I picked up Lazarus, Come Forth! again and read this:

The madness in which Nietzsche's great adventure ended was not personally deserved; nor was it brought about by addiction to a personal lust for power, position, and greatness. Nietzshce was a sacrifice to the superhuman force of the collective all-human subconscious, which came to a kind of volcanic eruption in him. And what broke through there was the archaic evolutionary drive itself, belonging to the most archaic layer of humanity's subconscious. Here lies the most general and most hidden drive working in the subconscious of man: this is the impulse and promise given by the serpent in Paradise.

Here again the word archaic and the idea of revival (one of the main themes of the book, as indicated by its title) are paired with the serpent in Paradise.

My decision to start reading a book by a drug guru was probably inspired in part by the experience recounted in my recent post "Nutmeg is a drug." In that post, I mentioned that nutmeg belongs to the same class of drugs as datura, and I told how I had tried in vain to track down a novel I had read as a child in which a bird became intoxicated by eating nutmegs. I had reached the tentative conclusion that it must be one of the many English versions of The Swiss Family Robinson, but Kevin McCall has discovered that it was actually 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. (Oddly, in the post I had mentioned dreams of the sort "where you wake up feeling as if you've been underwater.") Check out the context:

Some inoffensive serpents glided away from us. The birds of paradise fled at our approach, and truly I despaired of getting near one, when Conseil, who was walking in front, suddenly bent down, uttered a triumphant cry, and came back to me bringing a magnificent specimen.

"Ah! bravo, Conseil!"

"Master is very good."

"No, my boy; you have made an excellent stroke. Take one of these living birds, and carry it in your hand."

"If master will examine it, he will see that I have not deserved great merit."

"Why, Conseil?"

"Because this bird is as drunk as a quail."

"Drunk!"

"Yes, sir; drunk with the nutmegs that it devoured under the nutmeg-tree under which I found it. See, friend Ned, see the monstrous effects of intemperance!"

Another book I am reading at the moment is Divination in Ancient Israel by Frederick H. Cryer, a lot of which is devoted to preliminaries. (Not until p. 229 does the actual discussion of ancient Israel begin.) In a passage I read a few days ago, Cryer is commenting on the book Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande by E. E. Evans-Pritchard and cites, of all the things to cite in this rather pedantic book, The Teachings of Don Juan.

[Evans-Pritchard's] distinction between "empirical reality" and "Zande explanations" of the same cannot ultimately be maintained. Just how meaningless the distinction in question can be may be illustrated by an event in the course of Carlos Castaneda's initiation at the hands of a Yaqui "man of power", Don Juan. Having been taught how to prepare the datura plant for a psychic excursion, Castaneda has an experience of being transformed into a bird and soaring above and away from his mentor. . . .

I've posted about this business of transforming into a bird before -- and no prizes for guessing what specific kind of bird! See my 2020 post "Whitley Strieber and the thing that turned into a bird of paradise."

I also note in passing that the Spanish don derives from Latin dominus, while Juan is the Spanish form of Iohannes. Both Latin words featured prominently in my recent post "What does 'do-re-mi' mean?" as they are the reason the scale begins with do and ends with si.

Friday, December 2, 2022

Nutmeg is a drug

I guess I've known that in theory since I read The Swiss Family Robinson as a child (on which more below), but I'd always assumed it was only psychoactive in very large doses. When I was a teenager, one of my favorite beverages was buttermilk with a pinch or two of nutmeg, and I never noticed any psychotropic effects. About a week ago I decided to try that drink again after decades of not drinking it, and I guess this time I put in a little more nutmeg than was good for me. It wasn't much -- two cups, each with a bit more than half a teaspoon, I would guess -- but it was enough!

No, I didn't see a styracosaurus or anything, but I was in a trance state for the better part of two and a half days. It was a fairly light trance, and I was able to function more-or-less normally. In many ways it was comparable to the light trances I sometimes used to put myself in when reading or preaching, the chief perceptual symptom of which was what I used (incorrectly) to call "tunnel vision." Tunnel vision properly refers to the loss of peripheral vision, but in my childhood I used it as a name for the feeling (in certain trance states) that everything around me was immensely distant, as if it were at the other end of a long tunnel I was looking through. (This was usually induced by intense concentration, so I suppose it did have some connection to "tunnel vision" in the colloquial sense.) Another way to express it would be that it feels as if you are looking through binoculars at everything -- everything is as large and clear as it would be if it were close to you, but you know that it is not in fact close to you.

Aside from this, there was a strange idea -- an idea more than a sensation -- that there was something unusual about the surface of my body, that I was "prickly" or "covered with moss" or "bristling with triangles" (some of the phrases that came to mind at the time). I experienced no hallucinations in the strict sense, but I did have unusually vivid mental imagery, somewhat reminiscent of the abstract art of Stanslaw Kors. I was quite sleepy throughout the trance period, and when I slept I had "deep" dreams -- that kind where you wake up feeling as if you've been underwater -- of which I remember very little. I remember that the dreams were entirely in Latin, often with a disembodied "running commentary" in that language, and that at one point I had a conversation with a mantis shrimp, which also spoke Latin. (I had never dreamed in Latin before, nor have I since.)

After the effects of the nutmeg had worn off, I tried to find out more about it. Apparently nutmeg is classified as a "deliriant," alongside such drugs as datura, hensbane, deadly nightshade, and -- quelle coïncidence! -- mandrake.

My experience was not at all pleasant or mind-expanding, and I do not recommend it to anyone.

⁂

I remember that as a child I read a lot of different books -- all oldish, 19th century or so -- about people surviving on desert islands. I understand that many such books were written after Robinson Crusoe -- a whole genre called the robinsonade -- but I can't name any of them. There was Robinson Crusoe itself, The Swiss Family Robinson, and -- what else? I remember I read a lot of them. Searching the Internet for lists of robinsonades, I only turn up such works as Treasure Island and Lord of the Flies, which are not at all the sort of thing I have in mind. Anyway, in one of those books I read, the protagonists encountered a bird behaving strangely, as if intoxicated, and then discovered that it had been eating nutmegs. This was my first exposure to the idea that nutmeg could be intoxicating. Before reading that book, I had read something -- it may have been Tau Zero by Poul Anderson -- that mentioned people getting drunk on eggnog, and I had inferred from that that some forms of eggnog were alcoholic. (As a Mormon, I knew only the non-alcoholic version.) After reading the robinsonade, though, I decided it must have been the nutmeg that made them drunk. Only much later, I think not until my early teens, did I learn that I had been right the first time and that eggnog is typically an alcoholic drink.

After my own experience of nutmeg intoxication, I wanted to track down the robinsonade episode, so I tried to remember as many other details about the book as possible. All I could get was that there were agoutis and bustards, and that the plural forms nutmegs and lichens -- slightly odd in modern English -- were used. Searching for agouti bustard nutmegs island turned up only one book: The Swiss Family Robinson. This surprised me a bit -- I had remembered that it was not Swiss Family but one of the other nameless similar books. Searching the Gutenberg version for nutmegs, I found this:

In a short time nest-building commenced, and among the materials collected by the birds, I observed a long gray moss or lichen, and thought it might very possibly be the same which, in the West Indies, is gathered from the bark of old trees, where it grows, and hangs in great tuft-like beards, to be used instead of horse-hair for stuffing mattresses.
My wife no sooner heard of it than her active brain devised fifty plans for making it of use. Would we but collect enough, she would clean and sort it, and there would be no end to the bolsters, pillows, saddles, and cushions she would stuff with it.
For the discovery of nutmegs we had also to thank the pigeons, and they were carefully planted in our orchard.

In a way, this is obviously my source -- nutmegs, plural, are discovered via birds, and lichen is nearby -- but lichen is singular, and there is no indication that the birds were intoxicated by the nutmegs. But it seems highly unlikely that any other novel would borrow the very specific plot point of birds helping the protagonists discover "nutmegs," and I don't see how I could have misremembered it. The idea that nutmeg could be intoxicating was a new idea for me, learned from the book, not something I could have read into a book that does not mention it.

(Incidentally, was my nutmeg-induced idea that I was "covered with moss" somehow influenced by this passage as well?)

According to Wikipedia, "Over the years, there have been many versions of the story with episodes added, changed, or deleted," to the extent that "Wyss's original narrative has long since been obscured" -- so were all those books I read just different versions of The Swiss Family Robinson? And was the version on Gutenberg bowdlerized so as not to suggest to impressionable young readers the idea of trying to get high on household spices? Now I'm going to have to spend some time trying to track down the version I read as a child, the one with the nutmeg-intoxicated bird.

Saturday, December 3, 2022

Sync: Archaic Revival and the serpents and birds of paradise

Friday, December 2, 2022

Nutmeg is a drug

Ace of Hearts