Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

  Throughout these years of shedding my religion, I read a lot of C. S. Lewis, the strangest, most reasonable, and most literary of twentieth-century Christian writers. I reread The Great Divorce, which portrays hell as a drained, gray, hazy town where nothing happens. I reread his sci-fi novel Perelandra, in which Lewis-the-narrator encounters an extraterrestrial spirit whose color he can’t put a name to: “I try blue, and gold, and violet, and red, but none of them will fit. How it is possible to have a visual experience which immediately and ever after becomes impossible to remember, I do not attempt to explain.” Lewis goes on to tell a story in which a linguist named Dr. Ransom travels to Venus, and experiences, on this violently beautiful planet, a “strange sense of excessive pleasure which seemed somehow to be communicated to him through all his senses at once. I use the word ‘excessive’ because Ransom himself could only describe it by saying that for his first few days on Perelandra he was haunted, not by a feeling of guilt, but by surprise that he had no such feeling.”

  Most often I went back to The Screwtape Letters, a collection of fictive missives sent by a bureaucratic demon named Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood, a “junior tempter” who is trying to lead his first human subject astray. “The safest road to Hell is the gradual one,” Screwtape reminds Wormwood, “the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” When I first came across that sentence, I felt like someone was reading my palm. The book’s title, too, with its coincidental echoes, provided a clue to me about my relationship to its central subject—the ordinary temptations, in my case drugs and music, that could lead a person to hell. My road that way has in fact been gentle, although there could have been signposts had I wanted to build them: I could say, without too much oversimplification, that I stopped believing in God the year I first did ecstasy, for one.

  Like many people before me, I found religion and drugs appealing for similar reasons. (You require absolution, complete abandonment, I wrote, praying to God my junior year.) Both provide a path toward transcendence—a way of accessing an extrahuman world of rapture and pardon that, in both cases, is as real as it feels. The word “ecstasy” contains this etymologically, coming from the Greek ekstasis—ek meaning “out” and stasis meaning “stand.” To be in ecstasy is to stand outside yourself: a wonderful feeling, one accessible through many avenues. The Screwtape demon tells his nephew, “Nothing matters at all except the tendency of a given state of mind, in given circumstances, to move a particular patient at a particular moment nearer to the Enemy or nearer to us.”

  In other words, the cause matters less than the effect—what matters is not the thing itself, but whether that thing moves you closer to God or closer to damnation. The demon was asking: What are the conditions that make you feel holy, divine? For me, this calculus has been unreliable. I have been overpowered with ecstasy in religious settings, during bouts of hedonistic excess, on Friday afternoons walking sober in the park as the sun turns everything translucent gold. On Screwtape’s terms, the fact that everything feels like God to me ensured that I would not remain a Christian. Church never felt much more like virtue than drugs did, and drugs never felt much more sinful than church.

  The first woman who is known to have published a book in English was a religious ecstatic—Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth-century anchorite, whose name possibly comes from the St. Julian Church in Norwich, a town one hundred miles outside London. At age thirty, Julian became so ill that she experienced sixteen extended and agonizing visions of God, which she collected later in a book called Revelations of Divine Love. “And our Lord’s next showing was a supreme spiritual pleasure in my soul,” she writes. “In this pleasure I was filled with eternal certainty….This feeling was so joyful to me and so full of goodness that I felt completely peaceful, easy and at rest, as though there were nothing on earth that could hurt me.” The high is then followed by a comedown: “This only lasted for a while, and then my feeling was reversed and I was left oppressed, weary of myself, and so disgusted with my life that I could hardly bear to live.”

  This type of experience is a human constant, appearing in basically identical phrasing regardless of era or cause. In the sixties, the British biologist Sir Alister Hardy compiled a database of thousands of narratives that sound almost exactly like Julian’s. One man writes:

  I was out walking one night in busy streets of Glasgow when, with slow majesty, at a corner where the pedestrians were hurrying by and the city traffic was hurtling on its way, the air was filled with heavenly music; and an all-encompassing light, that moved in waves of luminous colour, outshone the brightness of the lighted streets. I stood still, filled with a strange peace and joy.

  Hardy’s archive is, technically, a compendium of religious experiences—in Aeon, Jules Evans calls it a “crowdsourced Bible.” But it could easily pass as a series of transcripts from Erowid, the nonprofit website based in Northern California that catalogs people’s experiences with psychoactive substances. The site has more than 24,000 drug testimonials, and tens of millions of people visit it each year. The specifics in these accounts vary, of course, but ecstatic experiences—ones that make you stand outside yourself—are described in a consistent fashion. An Erowid story from a teenage boy doing molly in his basement is not much different from any of the transcripts from the supervised drug sessions conducted in the mid-seventies to mid-eighties, during the brief period when ecstasy could be used in therapeutic settings.

  During this period, ecstasy was called Adam for the state of Edenic innocence it induced in users. Accounts from “Adam sessions” were collected in a 1985 book called Through the Gateway of the Heart. One rape survivor on ecstasy reports “exceptional presence—a vibrancy and change of color, an expansive quality rather than a fearful, contracted quality—and with a beaming sort of aura. I felt expansive, physically exhausted but full of love and a deep feeling of peace.” Another person writes, “I remind myself that I am becoming a home to the indwelling Spirit; it will see out my eyes, and it likes to see beauty, proportion, and harmony….I intend to become a perfect temple for this God-consciousness.” Another subject identifies the drug as a religious pathway to “allow, invite, surrender God into my own body.”

  Ecstasy, now mostly called molly, is an empathogen, or an entactogen—a category named in the eighties to describe the way these compounds generate a state of empathy, or “touching within.” Its technical name is 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA. It blocks serotonin reuptake, and induces the release of both serotonin and dopamine. (The first mechanism is what you’ll find in many antidepressants—SSRIs, or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, keep serotonin floating around the brain.) Ecstasy was developed in 1912, in Germany, by Merck, which was trying to find a treatment for abnormal bleeding. In the fifties, the Army Chemical Corps tested it on animals. In the sixties, a related substance called MDA gained popularity as “the love drug.” During the seventies, a number of scientists—including Leo Zeff, the one who named the drug Adam—tried the drug, and a network of practitioners of underground MDMA psychotherapy began to grow. In 1978, Alexander Shulgin and David Nichols published the first human study on ecstasy, noting the substance’s possible therapeutic effects.

  The attainment of chemical ecstasy—empathogenesis—occurs in stages. The drug first places the attention on the self, stripping away the user’s inhibitions. Second, it prompts the user to recognize and value the emotional states of others. Finally, it makes the user’s well-being feel inseparable from the well-being of the group. It “completely ablates the fear response in most people,” writes Julie Holland, in her comprehensive clinical guide to ecstasy. And unlike other drugs that provoke extraordinary interpersonal euphoria—mushrooms or acid—it does not confuse the user about what is occurring. You maintain a sense of control over your experience; your awareness of self and of basic reality is unchanged. It’s because of this grounded state that ecst
asy can provide a sense of salvation that might be more likely to stick than, say, a hallucinogen epiphany delivered from a face in the clouds. It was “penicillin for the soul,” said Ann Shulgin, a researcher and therapist who was married to Alexander. Ecstasy can and generally does make you feel like the best version of the person you would be if you were able to let your lifelong psychological burdens go.

  While scientists and doctors were working to document these therapeutic effects, regulators were working to make ecstasy illegal. In the fifties, a participant in a legal MDA trial had died after being given 450 milligrams of the substance; at least eight people died after taking MDMA from 1977 to 1981. (For context, about ninety thousand people die every year in the U.S. from excessive consumption of alcohol, and nearly five hundred thousand people die each year from smoking cigarettes. Ecstasy is in no way a casual drug, but if the substance was legal, its death rate would be dwarfed by that of tobacco or alcohol.) In 1985, the DEA banned ecstasy in a yearlong emergency measure. Researchers protested. In 1986, shortly before the ban ended, one DEA judge recommended that MDMA be placed in the Schedule III category, for drugs that have an accepted medical use and a mild to moderate potential for abuse and addiction—substances like testosterone and ketamine and steroids. He was overruled. MDMA was placed on Schedule I, the category for drugs with high abusive potential, no accepted medical usage, and severe safety concerns. Heroin is in this category, as are bath salts—along with drugs that don’t really fit the criteria, like LSD and marijuana.

  Around this time, a drug dealer renamed the substance ecstasy. Quoted but not named in Bruce Eisner’s 1989 history of MDMA, he says, though I find the neatness of this phrasing dubious: “Ecstasy was chosen for obvious reasons, because it would sell better than calling it empathy. Empathy would be more appropriate, but how many people know what it means?” The drug went global in the nineties, in 5,000- or 15,000-person raves. Huge batches were stamped with the Mitsubishi logo and shipped to New York City. At the turn of the century, the DEA estimated that two million hits of ecstasy were brought into the United States every week. The drug was still called ecstasy half a decade later, when I first tried it, in college, shortly before a Girl Talk show in a two-hundred-fifty-capacity room. By the time I came back from the Peace Corps in 2011, ecstasy had been rebranded as molly, and it was once more a mainstream drug, one that had been engineered for the decade of corporate music festivals—both a special-occasion option and no big deal.

  A lot of the danger attributed to ecstasy comes from urban legend. For example, the old rumor that ecstasy turns your spine to jelly comes from eighties clinical trials that required participants to receive spinal taps. The idea that it’ll put holes in your brain may come from a 1989 New York Times article in which a researcher cited brain damage in animals exposed to ecstasy. (It may also just come from the fact that, after you do a lot of drugs, your brain feels like it’s full of holes.) Dealer adulteration is now the main thing that makes ecstasy risky—for a while, there was a supply of molly floating around New York so soul-crushingly poisonous that I couldn’t even look at the substance for a year—along with the general danger in doing imprecise amounts of any drug in a setting where no one’s taking precautions. It’s also been documented that ecstasy’s magic is strongest at the beginning and worn down through repetition. In my own life I’ve become careful about using it: I’m afraid that the high will blunt my tilt toward unprovoked happiness, which might already be disappearing. I’m afraid that the low that sometimes comes after will leave a permanent trace.

  But still, each time, it can feel like divinity. It can make you feel healed and religious; it can make you feel dangerously wild. What’s the difference? Your world realigns in a juddering oceanic shimmer. You feel that your soul is dazzling, delicate, unlimited; you understand that you can give the best of yourself away to everyone you love without ever feeling depleted. This is what it feels like to be a child of Jesus, in a dark chapel, with stained-glass diamonds floating on the skin of all the people kneeling around you. This is what it feels like to be twenty-two, nearly naked, your hair blowing in the wind as the pink twilight expands into permanence, your body still holding the warmth of the day. You were made to be here. You are depraved, insignificant; you are measureless, and you will never not be redeemed. When I took ecstasy for the first time in my friend’s bedroom when I was seventeen and slipped into a sweaty black box of a venue down the street, I felt weightless, like I’d come back around to a truth I had first been taught in church: that anything could happen, and no matter what, a sort of grace that was both within you and outside you would pull you through. The nature of a revelation is that you don’t have to re-experience it; you don’t even have to believe whatever is revealed to hang on to it for as long as you want. In the seventies, researchers believed that MDMA treatment would be discrete and limited—that once you got the message, as they put it, you could hang up the phone. You would be better for having listened. You would be changed.

  They don’t say this about religion, but they should.

  * * *

  —

  “What if I were to begin an essay on spiritual matters by citing a poem that will not at first seem to you spiritual at all,” writes Anne Carson, in the title essay of her 2005 book Decreation. The poem she refers to is by Sappho, the ancient Greek poet who is said to have thrown herself over a cliff in 580 B.C. from an excess of love for Phaon, the ferryman—though this is, for Sapphic reasons, unlikely. In “Decreation,” Carson connects Sappho to Marguerite Porete, the French Christian mystic who was burned at the stake in 1310, and then to Simone Weil, the French public intellectual who, during World War II, assumed solidarity with the residents of the German occupation and died from self-starvation in 1943. The spiritual matter in question is mysticism, a strain of thought found in nearly all religious traditions: mystics believe that, through attaining states of ecstatic consciousness, a person can achieve union with the divine.

  Carson turns our attention to Sappho’s Fragment 31, in which the poet looks at a woman who is sitting next to a man, laughing with him. Sappho describes her feelings as she watches this woman, how the sight makes her speechless—“thin / fire is racing under skin,” reads Carson’s translation, “and in eyes no sight and drumming / fills ears”:

  and cold sweat holds me and shaking

  grips me all, greener than grass

  I am and dead—or almost

  I seem to me.

  Fragment 31 is one of the longest extant pieces of Sappho’s work, preserved because it was excerpted in Longinus’s first-century work of literary criticism On the Sublime. In the seventeenth century, John Hall translated Fragment 31 for the first time in English: the “greener than grass” line, in Hall’s version, is “like a wither’d flower I fade.” In 1925, Edwin Cox translated the line as “paler than grass in autumn.” William Carlos Williams’s 1958 translation gives it as “paler than grass,” too.

  The Greek word in question is chloros, which is the root of the word “chlorophyll”—a pale yellow-green color, like new grass in spring. As the narrator takes on the quality of that color, a translator could easily imagine her growing paler, fading: the “pale horse” in Revelation is a chloros horse. Carson, wonderfully, reaches for the opposite effect. As she stares at the woman she loves, the narrator becomes greener, and the line becomes an expression of ecstasy in its original sense. Sappho steps outside herself; she observes herself (“greener than grass / I am”). Love has caused her to abandon her body, and in this abandonment, to intensify. The green grows greener. Some essential quality deepens as the self is removed.

  Seventeen centuries later, Marguerite Porete wrote The Mirror of Simple Souls, a book that tracks the human soul on its journey toward ecstasy—a state of voluntary annihilation that brings perfect union with God. Porete, whose biography remains mysterious but who was likely a beguine, a woman who lived in an all-female reli
gious community, “understands the essence of her human self to be in her free will,” writes Carson. She believes that her free will “has been placed in her by God in order that she may give it back.” So Porete, in her religious devotion, tries to deplete herself. Like Sappho, she pursues love as an “absolute emptiness which is also absolute fullness.” She describes this spiritual self-abasement erotically: the soul, Porete writes, is “rendered into the simple Deity, in full knowing, without feeling, beyond thought….Higher no one can go, deeper no one can go, more naked no human can be.” Because of this writing, Porete was charged with heresy and imprisoned for a year and a half. When she was burned at the stake, she was reportedly so calm that onlookers were moved to tears.

  “Decreation,” finally, is a word that comes from Simone Weil—her term for the process of moving toward a love so unadulterated that it makes you leave yourself behind. There is “absolutely no other free act which it is given us to accomplish,” Weil writes, except for yielding ourselves to God. Her writing is animated by this compulsive longing to erase herself. “Perfect joy excludes even the very feeling of joy,” she writes. “For in the soul filled by the object no corner is left for saying I.” She dreams of vanishing completely: “May I disappear in order that those things that I see may become perfect in their beauty from the very fact that they are no longer things that I see.”