In another part of his collection, Antonio Peri seemed to have cast his attention principally "on ancient pharmacology books, formularies and pharmacopoeias, and to have hunted for reprints of journals and annals. Among others was found a heavy old volume by the Heidelberg psychologists on the extract of mescal buttons, and a paper on the phantastica of ergot by Hofmann-Bottmingen...."
In the same year in which Heliopolis came out, I made the personal acquaintance of the author. I went to meet Ernst Jünger in Ravensburg, for a Swiss sojourn. On a wonderful fall journey in southern Switzerland, together with mutual friends, I experienced the radiant power of his personality.
Two years later, at the beginning of February 1951, came the great adventure, an LSD
trip with Ernst Jünger. Since, up until that moment, there were only reports of LSD
experiments in connection with psychiatric inquiries, this experiment especially interested me, because this was an opportunity to observe the effects of LSD on the artistic person, in a nonmedical milieu. That was still somewhat before Aldous Huxley, from the same perspective, began to experiment with mescaline, about which he then reported in his two books The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell.
In order to have medical aid on hand if necessary, I invited my friend, the physician and pharmacologist Professor Heribert Konzett, to participate. The trip took place at 10:00 in the morning, in the living room of our house in Bottmingen. Since the reaction of such a highly sensitive man as Ernst Jünger was not foreseeable, a low dose was chosen for this first experiment as a precaution, only 0.05 mg. The experiment then, did not lead into great depths.
The beginning phase was characterized by the intensification of aesthetic experience.
Red-violet roses were of unknown luminosity and radiated in portentous brightness. The concerto for flute and harp by Mozart was perceived in its celestial beauty as heavenly music. In mutual astonishment we contemplated the haze of smoke that ascended with the ease of thought from a Japanese incense stick. As the inebriation became deeper and the conversation ended, we came to fantastic reveries while we lay in our easy chairs with closed eyes. Ernst Jünger enjoyed the color display of oriental images: I was on a trip among Berber tribes in North Africa, saw colored caravans and lush oases. Heribert Konzett, whose features seemed to me to be transfigured, Buddha-like, experienced a breath of timelessness, liberation from the past and the future, blessedness through being completely here and now.
The return from the altered state of consciousness was associated with strong sensitivity to cold. Like freezing travelers, we enveloped ourselves in covers for the landing. The return to everyday reality was celebrated with a good dinner, in which Burgundy flowed copiously.
This trip was characterized by the mutuality and parallelism of our experiences, which were perceived as profoundly joyful. All three of us had drawn near the gate to an experience of mystical being; however, it did not open. The dose we had chosen was too low. In misunderstanding this reason, Ernst Jünger, who had earlier been thrust into deeper realms by a high dose of mescaline, remarked: "Compared with the tiger mescaline, your LSD, is, after all, only a house cat." After later experiments with higher doses of LSD, he revised this estimation.
Jünger has assimilated the mentioned spectacle of the incense stick into literature, in his story Besuch auf Gotenhotm [Visit to Godenholm], in which deeper experiences of drug inebriation also play a part:
Schwarzenberg burned an incense stick, as he sometimes did, to clear the air. A blue plume ascended from the tip of the stick. Moltner looked at it first with astonishment, then with delight, as if a new power of the eyes had come to him. It revealed itself in the play of this fragrant smoke, which ascended from the slender stick and then branched out into a delicate crown. It was as if his imagination had created it-a pallid web of sea lilies in the depths, that scarcely trembled from the beat of the surf. Time was active in this creation-it had circled it, whirled about it, wreathed it, as if imaginary coins rapidly piled up one on top of another. The abundance of space revealed itself in the fiber work, the nerves, which stretched and unfolded in the height, in a vast number of filaments.
Now a breath of air affected the vision, and softly twisted it about the shaft like a dancer. Moltner uttered a shout of surprise. The beams and lattices of the wondrous flower wheeled around in new planes, in new fields. Myriads of molecules observed the harmony. Here the laws no longer acted under the veil of appearance; matter was so delicate and weightless that it clearly reflected them. How simple and cogent everything was. The numbers, masses and weights stood out from matter. They cast off the raiments.
No goddess could inform the initiates more boldly and freely. The pyramids with their weight did not reach up to this revelation. That was Pythagorean luster. No spectacle had ever affected him with such a magic spell.
This deepened experience in the aesthetic sphere, as it is described here in the example of contemplation of a haze of blue smoke, is typical of the beginning phase of LSD
inebriation, before deeper alterations of conscious begin.
I visited Ernst Jünger occasionally in the following years, in Wilfingen, Germany, where he had moved from Ravensburg; or we met in Switzerland, at my place in Bottmingen, or in Bundnerland in southeastern Switzerland. Through the shared LSD
experience our relations had deepened. Drugs and problems connected with them constituted a major subject of our conversation and correspondence, without our having made further practical experiments in the meantime.
We exchanged literature about drugs. Ernst Jünger thus let me have for my drug library the rare, valuable monograph of Dr. Ernst Freiherrn von Bibra, Die Narkotischen Genussmittel und der Mensch [Narcotic pleasure drugs and man] printed in Nuremburg in 1855. This book is a pioneering, standard work of drug literature, a source of the first order, above all as relates to the history of drugs. What von Bibra embraces under the designation "Narkotischen Genussmittel" are not only substances like opium and thorn apple, but also coffee, tobacco, kat, which do not fall under the present conception of narcotics, any more than do drugs such as coca, fly agaric, and hashish, which he also described.
Noteworthy, and today still as topical as at the time, are the general opinions about drugs that von Bibra contrived more than a century ago:
The individual who has taken too much hashish, and then runs frantically about in the streets and attacks everyone who confronts him, sinks into insignificance beside the numbers of those who after mealtime pass calm and happy hours with a moderate dose; and the number of those who are able to overcome the heaviest exertions through coca, yes, who were possibly rescued from death by starvation through coca, by far exceed the few coqueros who have undermined their health by immoderate use. In the same manner, only a misplaced hypocrisy can condemn the vinous cup of old father Noah, because individual drunkards do not know how to observe limit and moderation.
From time to time I advised Ernst Jünger about actual and entertaining events in the field of inebriating drugs, as in my letter of September 1955:
. . . Last week the first 200 grams of a new drug arrived, whose investigation I wish to take up. It involves the seeds of a mimosa ( Piptadenia peregrina Benth,) that is used as a stimulating intoxicant by the Indians of the Orinoco. The seeds are ground, fermented, and then mixed with the powder of burned snail shells. This powder is sniffed by the Indians with the help of a hollow, forked bird bone, as already reported by Alexander von Humboldt in Reise nach den Aequinoctiat-Gegenden des Neuen Kontinents [Voyage to the equinoctial regions of the new continent] (Book 8, Chapter 24). The warlike tribe, the Otomaco, especially use this drug, called niopo, yupa, nopo or cojoba, to an extensive degree, even today. It is reported in the monograph by P. J. Gumilla, S. J. (El Orinoco Ilustrado, 1741): "The Otomacos sniffed the powder before they went to battle with the Caribes, for in earlier times there existed savage wars between these tribes.... This drug robs them completely of reason, and they frantically seize their weapons. And if the women were not so adept at holding them back and binding them fast, they would daily cause horrible devastation. It is a terrible vice.... Other benign and docile tribes that also sniff the yupa, do not get into such a fury as the Otomacos, who through self-injury with this agent made themselves completely cruel before combat, and marched into battle with savage fury."