by Rob Doyle
A global cult has grown up around DMT. The drug’s appearance in Enter the Void is among the first signs of its acknowledgement by the broader culture. In the decades since its discovery by Western science, startling claims have been made about DMT’s effects and implications – claims that, to anyone who has never tried it, must necessarily seem preposterous. The loquacious and impassioned spokesperson for psychedelics, Terence McKenna, questioned why the religions hadn’t put DMT forward as their ‘central exhibit for the presence of the other in the human world’. To him, the shocking nature of the DMT trip was an instant paradigm-shatterer: ‘The entire construct of Western reason disappears into that dimension like hurling an ice cube into a blast furnace,’ he insisted. Whenever he smoked DMT, McKenna would find himself transported to a dimension more real than reality and inhabited by ‘self-transforming machine elves’ who were ‘frantic to communicate with human beings for some reason’. After first encountering the drug as a young art historian and anthropologist, his path in life was set: ‘We should stop fucking around and go off and grapple with the DMT mystery,’ he told a friend. A DMT trip, he maintained, is the most dramatic experience one can go through ‘this side of the yawning grave’.
As a consequence of drug laws created in response to anxieties around psychedelics in the 1960s, very little research has been done into DMT’s potential psychiatric applications, let alone its significance in terms of understanding consciousness and the nature of reality. One exception is the unique research carried out by Rick Strassman, a medical doctor and professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico. Over five years in the 1990s, after a torturous struggle to obtain funding and permission, Strassman studied the effects of DMT on dozens of volunteers. In the wake of his investigations, documented in his book DMT: The Spirit Molecule, an unnerved Strassman admitted that DMT may possess properties as seemingly far-fetched as those ascribed to it by McKenna. The volunteers’ testimonies forced him to consider the possibility that the dimensions accessible via DMT are ‘freestanding’ spiritual realms, rather than mere hallucinations. As Strassman counsels: ‘There is intense friction between what we know intellectually, or even intuitively, and what we experience with the aid of DMT.’
While not as well known as its tryptamine cousin LSD, DMT is in many ways the apex of psychedelic drugs (‘There is something peerless about the spirit molecule,’ insists Strassman). The term ‘psychedelic’, which means ‘mind-manifesting’, was coined by Humphry Osmond in a letter to Aldous Huxley, whose book The Doors of Perception endorsed mescaline and other drugs for their mystical, aesthetic and spiritual benefits (though not for everyone: Huxley insisted that they should only be available to a cultured elite). The psychedelics are divided into two groups: phenethylamines, which include mescaline and MDMA (a mildly psychedelic stimulant), and tryptamines such as DMT, LSD and psilocybin. Psilocin, which is produced when magic mushrooms are ingested, differs from the DMT molecule by only a single oxygen atom.
The first psychedelic found to be endogenous to the human body (produced in the brain and spinal column), DMT is pretty much everywhere else in nature too: in most mammals and many plants, for instance. It was first successfully synthesised in the West in the 1930s by a Canadian chemist named Richard Manske, but he did not become aware of its psychoactive properties. That discovery would occur in the 1950s, when a Hungarian chemist, Stephen Szára, grew intrigued by ongoing research into the psychiatric implications of psychedelics. Living behind the Iron Curtain in Budapest, and thus unable to obtain the LSD being disseminated by the Swiss pharmaceuticals company Sandoz Laboratories, Szára synthesised DMT in his lab and administered an effective dosage to himself. All this happened in good time for DMT to join the array of drugs that young people would embrace as part of the countercultural upheaval of the sixties. It remained curiously underground, however, as if too weird and disturbing even for the open-minded hippy generation to feel comfortable with.
As Szára realised, DMT must either be smoked or injected in order to have any effect. When it is ingested, the human gut produces the enzyme monoamine oxidase (MAO), which immediately breaks it down, foreclosing its psychoactive effects. The ayahuasceros of South America, who have used DMT in a shamanic context for thousands of years, found an ingenious way around this: by adding a DMT-containing bark to the vine Banisteriopsis caapi (the ‘vine of the dead’) and drinking the foul-tasting brew, the inhibiting stomach enzyme is neutralised, enabling longer, less overwhelming visionary trips. Ayahuasca is thus a kind of folk technology that renders more coherent, manageable and spiritually beneficial the DMT experience, which, in its pure form, has been described by one writer, Daniel Pinchbeck, as ‘the psychedelic equivalent of bungee jumping’.
The day before my friend Matt arrived on the train from Dublin with his newly bought vaporiser pipe, Digi scales and a gram of DMT, he sent me a text:
I had a dream last night in which I encountered a ‘stealer of worlds’. He said, ‘Soon.’
Matt was coming to stay with me in Rosslare Harbour, where I was living again. He was among my oldest friends and one aspect of our friendship was a shared enthusiasm for drugs, although this had been on the wane in recent years. Matt’s life was a perpetual low-level crisis of a sort that, by virtue of its longevity, was indistinguishable from stability. Recently he had started seeing a psychoanalyst. During his latest session, Matt had talked about his interest in DMT, how he had long wanted to try it and now the possibility of doing so had arisen. He suggested that psychedelic drugs might have therapeutic properties not to be found in mainstream psychiatry. The analyst listened for a while and then shut him down: he insisted that DMT was ‘just a drug’ and therefore of no relevance to Matt’s analysis. When Matt pressed him, the analyst admitted he hadn’t heard of DMT or ayahuasca. To Matt this smacked of intellectual parochialism and a crashing incuriosity, traits not conducive to the respect required for the analytic relationship, with its delicate interplay of transference and projection, to work. He soon decided to terminate the analysis.
On the first night, Matt and I set up on the kitchen table. He laid out the black battery-operated scales and the glass pipe.
‘I wish we had some Buddhas or something,’ I said. ‘As talismans.’
Matt nodded. He too felt a foreboding about the drug.
To begin with, we measured out 20 mg hits, a moderate dosage. We took it in turns, one of us waiting quietly as the other took a hit then sat back and closed his eyes as the DMT came on. When I smoked it, the effects were immediate and vivid, but manageable, although I did experience an intense inner vibration that alarmed me. Matt was reassured by his experience on a moderate dose – nothing terrifying had happened, only a familiar, delightful psychedelia: brilliant, swirling, kaleidoscopic patterns; a sense of numinosity and wonder; bursts of colour and rapidly shifting landscapes.
The online database we had consulted designated a strong dose as between 40 and 60 mg. For his second hit Matt upped the dose to 50 mg. Sitting across the table as he vaped the powder, I made sure not to stare at him while he was under the effects of the drug. When I did glance at him, it was obvious he had gone deep. His eyes were closed and he was utterly still, as if he were in a state of meditation. Minutes later, as it wore off and he gradually returned to his senses, the first thing he said was, ‘I recommend taking less than fifty milligrams.’
He had believed he had died. Information, noise and imagery had come hurtling at him with bewildering speed and density as he was propelled through a ‘wormhole’, accompanied by an extremely loud vibration. Then his consciousness had become completely separated from his body; he had found himself in an utterly alien realm, full of what appeared to be intricately patterned machinery. Moreover, it was inhabited: he had been met by an array of strange, insectile beings, some of whom had prodded him with friendly curiosity.
‘One of them … probed me,’ he said, visibly nonplussed at what he was saying. ‘It came towards me and sort of … in
serted something into me. I was scared but they sort of put me at my ease.’
We brought the pipe, scales and mound of DMT into the sitting room, with its lamps and candleholders. In that more amenable space we smoked late into the night, taking time between each hit to compare our experiences. Each time he smoked a high dose, Matt was consistently transported to the same machine-like realm where he encountered what he described variously as ‘jesters’, ‘workers’, and ‘data-things’. They spoke in a rapid and incomprehensible language, also emitting ‘code’ and ‘language’ directly from their bodies. Meanwhile they were restlessly at work, constantly flitting about. Growing more at ease in this realm, Matt attempted to communicate with the entities; he realised that this could be done telepathically. They did not frighten him, and some of them were gentle, reassuring, even loving. Were they good? he asked them. No, they said. Then were they bad? No, they were not that either.
My own trips revealed a hurtling, shifting psychedelia that was marked by speed and a sense of urgency. That first night, I could not overcome my fear sufficiently to take what the online forums called a ‘breakthrough’ dose: enough for familiar reality to be replaced by an entirely different world. Every time I smoked enough DMT to get right to what felt like the threshold, I had the distinct sense that another consciousness was present. This shapeshifting being guided the experience, creating elaborate and startling geometric effects, leading me through swirling, mandala-like corridors, generating layers of beauty and artifice. The strong impression was that the presence was utilising the brief window of the DMT flash to urgently signal its existence to me, vying to impress like a peacock flaunting its feathers, beckoning me to travel further. It was only the following evening, after meditating and taking a walk on the beach, that I would finally screw up my courage to go over the edge.
Matt was more cavalier. Around 3 a.m. on the first night, he hit a 60 mg dose. By now we were both smoking while in the cross-legged half-lotus posture, which seemed to instil confidence. He held the lighter above the glass pipe till all the powder vaporised, drawing it into his lungs. I waited in silence, focused on my breathing. About ten minutes later, Matt began to shift. I looked up. His eyes were open and wet with tears.
‘That was it,’ he said. ‘They showed me everything.’
In 1938, the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman synthesised LSD-25 – lysergic acid diethylamide – under the aegis of his employer, Sandoz Laboratories. Thus was instigated an era of vigorous research into psychedelic drugs, which were studied for their applications in the treatment and understanding of mental illness, and for what they revealed about the nature of consciousness. As Rick Strassman writes, ‘Psychedelics were the growth area in psychiatry for over twenty years.’ Then it all started to go wrong.
In the 1960s, Timothy Leary and colleagues of his at Harvard University conducted studies into the effects of psilocybin and LSD that quickly gained notoriety, and were soon feared to be getting out of control. Leary went rogue: shunning Aldous Huxley’s preference for a trickle-down, elitist approach to psychedelics, he became a vocal advocate for LSD’s widespread usage as a consciousness expander: acid would lead the human race to a higher plane of being, freed from the greed, neurosis and narrow-minded aggression of the past. The authorities shut him down. Leary was jailed for cannabis possession, and soon legislation was put in place banning all psychedelic drugs, despite the protests of many in the psychiatric community. The nascent project was stalled.
The Controlled Substances Act passed by the US government in 1970 marked the beginning of the ‘war on drugs’ that rages still. Visionary plants that have been revered in tribal cultures for thousands of years – and other substances, both natural and synthetic – have been demonised, their users criminalised. Terence McKenna, who remarked that ‘the notion of illegal plants and animals is obnoxious and ridiculous’, insisted that government bans on psychedelics are motivated not by concern that citizens may harm themselves while under the influence, but by the realisation that ‘there is something about them that casts doubt on the validity of reality’. Drugs like DMT and psilocybin are disturbing to the powers that be because of their gnostic quality, the mainline access they afford to experiences that threaten established paradigms. In short, ‘they open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong’.
Years before Matt visited me in Rosslare, I had settled for a time in Bogotá, following a period spent wandering in South America. I taught English in the city and lived in a series of apartments around La Candelaria, the cobblestoned heart of the old town, where students hung out in cheap bars and played music on the plaza. While living there I befriended a middle-aged woman named Consuelo. Erudite and impressive, Consuelo was deeply involved in the experiential and philosophical study of yagé. After I had undergone several pintas – ayahuasca ceremonies – at the house of her artist friend Daniel in the hills outside of town, she invited me to spend a few days drinking yagé at her remote farmhouse in the countryside.
Consuelo had studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris under people whose books I had read. Afterwards, she returned to Colombia to teach aesthetics at the Universidad Nacional, until she retired out of disillusionment with the ‘supermarket’ mentality of contemporary higher education in the country. On the long bus journey out of Bogotá to the farmhouse, she spoke about Nietzsche, Bataille and Blanchot, relating them to the immanent philosophy of yagé and Amazonian shamanism. She told me about the doctoral thesis she had written on ‘the aesthetics of cruelty’. The type of cruelty that interested her was not the sadistic bloodlust of the Romans but that which Nietzsche advocated: the cruelty that stimulates life, growth and strength by sacrificing comfort and happiness – a cruelty often directed towards oneself. Antonin Artaud had found this kind of noble cruelty in Mexican peyote rituals; drawing on her own experience, Consuelo discerned it in the yagé-imbibing ceremonies of South America.
During the drive, she recounted various stories of yagé’s Nietzschean cruelty. Though she had undergone harrowing ordeals, Consuelo continued to drink yagé with confidence, trusting in the harsh wisdom offered by what she called the ‘teacher plant’. She tended to speak about yagé in personal terms, as a conscious and intelligent entity. For instance, she told me that although she had a great admiration for the Marquis de Sade, she rarely read him any more because ‘the yagé doesn’t like Sade’. This was due to Sade’s excessive rationalism rather than the extreme violence of his writings, she said.
It was after midnight when we reached the farmhouse. The following morning we enjoyed a breakfast of cheese arepas, scrambled eggs, coffee and papaya out on the long veranda. Consuelo had grown up on this land. Both she and her daughter Maya had learned to swim in the lagoon where we would bathe during our stay. Consuelo came out here to think, write and pore over philosophy books as chickens clucked and iguanas lurked about her. The ninety acres constituted Consuelo’s private ecological project. She cultivated nothing on it, so that the diverse flora and fauna of the region could thrive. Neither had she installed electricity on the farm. There were only candles and the sun and moon for light. No television, radio or internet marred the peacefulness, as the brook gurgled and the surrounding jungle teemed with noises. Consuelo hoped the farmland would instil a forgotten respect for darkness and anticipate a time when it could no longer be dispelled with the flick of a switch.
That evening we greeted the young shaman (or taita) Crispin, the artist Daniel, and the half-dozen friends who arrived with them. The group got busy preparing the site for the ceremony. Crispin constructed an altar beside the bonfire we had erected earlier. Candles were placed along the veranda and under trees. In time, we all sat down by the bonfire on mats or plastic chairs.
Now that we were settled, Crispin began. He thanked Consuelo for her hospitality in his usual polite way, and then spoke for a while about yagé, as he always did before a pinta. He said that what we were doing was building ‘the great church of yagé’. Yagécito,
he called the brew, as if he were talking about a lover or a child.
‘Salud con todos,’ I said when it was my turn to drink, as was the custom. ‘Salud, y buena pinta,’ replied the others in chorus. The taste of yagé is unbelievably foul – I struggled not to retch after gulping down the bitter orange gunk. Afterwards I lay on my back to gaze at the stars. Crispin, dressed in his ceremonial get-up, appeared to doze in his chair, exhausted by the day’s travelling. A middle-aged man walked off a few yards to throw up. Far on the horizon, a lightning storm began. Daniel walked serenely among the trees, the white robes he had donned for the ritual draped over his pudgy belly. I watched it all in the silent illumination of distant lightning.
When the rain started to fall, everyone gathered under the shelter of the veranda. The stars had fled and now the lightning was close, the thunder rumbling louder. In the flickering glow of candles, as the rain rattled above our heads, the sense of a gathering concentration of energy was tremendous. Music filled the air: a woman’s voice singing sweetly; notes from a flute; a strummed guitar; drums and a charango. A shy man I had briefly spoken to earlier began to dance. A woman shook a maraca of sea shells and joined in with Crispin’s yagé chant.
The pinta was gaining force in symbiosis with the storm. I closed my eyes and visions rained down on me – a cascade of complex, beautiful, alien forms; figures reaching from afar with enigmatic smiles and long, spectral fingers; glimpses of unearthly landscapes. Language grew out of itself, bent and warped in rapid mutations, like passages from Finnegans Wake assuming synaesthesic presence. The storm raged now and it was clear to everyone that we were witnessing something majestic, abysmal. It felt as if we had summoned the storm, our frenzy dancing with its own. A boom of thunder exploded right above our heads. The music and dancing peaked, more ecstatic yet somehow solemn, sacrificial. Everything was shaking now, as if the house might be uprooted and hurled into the violence. Overwhelmed, I rushed into the bathroom to throw up. Afterwards I crouched over the bowl, stilled by the humming aliveness all around me, the bliss that follows the purge.