Texts / 1800-1950

Researches, Chemical and Philosophical; Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide

Humphry Davy's account of breathing nitrous oxide at Thomas Beddoes's Pneumatic Institution in Bristol in 1799, from the fourth part of his Researches. The excerpt gives Davy's own experiments, including the session that ended with "Nothing exists but thoughts!", and the reports he collected from Robert Southey, Peter Roget, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Wedgwood.

Fly Agaric among the Koryaks in Langsdorff's Bemerkungen

A Kamchatka note on mushroom trade and intoxication

Langsdorff's 1812 German voyage account records fly agaric in Koryak trade with Russians and Kamchadals, noting in a footnote that Koryaks preferred it to brandy as a stupefying or intoxicating substance.

Niopo among the Otomac in Humboldt and Bonpland's Personal Narrative

Orinoco snuff, Acacia niopo, and curupa in an 1821 travel narrative

Humboldt and Bonpland's Personal Narrative describes niopo snuff among the Otomac on the Orinoco, including preparation from Acacia niopo, nasal apparatus, missionary testimony, and comparison with curupa.

Paricá among the Mura in Spix and Martius's Reise in Brasilien

A German travel account of Amazonian snuff, ceremony, and intoxication

Spix and Martius's 1831 German travel narrative describes paricá among the Mura, including preparation from dried seeds, ceremonial use, insufflation through tubes, and comparison with fly agaric intoxication.

Hashish and Mental Alienation

Moreau de Tours on dawamesc, self-experiment, and experimental psychiatry

Selected passages from Moreau de Tours's 1845 psychiatric treatise on hashish, including his insistence on personal experience, description of dawamesc preparation and dosing, and claim that hashish offered a unique experimental route into the psychology of madness.

Fly Agaric and Hashish in Die narkotischen Genussmittel

Ernst von Bibra's German comparative account of Amanita and Cannabis

Selective excerpts from Ernst von Bibra's 1855 German survey of narcotic Genussmittel, focused on fly agaric and hashish. The passages show a mid-century comparative framework linking Amanita, Cannabis, opium, alcohol, travel accounts, chemistry, and differential effects across persons and places.

The Hasheesh Eater

Fitz Hugh Ludlow's account of his cannabis use as a young man in Poughkeepsie and at Union College, published anonymously in 1857 when he was twenty-one. In this excerpt (pages 18–26) he finds Cannabis indica at a local apothecary's shop, reads about it in the Dispensatory, and takes his first doses.

Ayahuasca in Villavicencio's Geografía de la República del Ecuador

An 1858 Ecuadorian account of ayahuasca visions and divination

Manuel Villavicencio's 1858 geography gives an early Spanish account of ayahuasca among Indigenous groups of eastern Ecuador, including divination, warfare, illness diagnosis, visionary effects, and a first-person report of his own experience.

The Seven Sisters of Sleep (Amanita chapter)

Popular History of the Seven Prevailing Narcotics of the World

One of seven chapters in a British mycologist's popular survey of the world's narcotics, this one on Amanita muscaria. Cooke gathers the earlier Siberian accounts of Krasheninnikov, Gmelin and Pallas, and describes the preparation, the staged effects, and the urine-drinking practice.

Le Gabon

A French naval physician's 1865 travel account surveys Gabon's food plants and condiments, describing iboga as a stimulant and aphrodisiac used by paddlers on long canoe trips. He gives it the genus name 'taberna-ventricosa,' later corrected by Baillon.

Caapi and Niopo in “On Some Remarkable Narcotics of the Amazon Valley and Orinoco”

Richard Spruce on ayahuasca, yopo/paricá, and Amazonian medicine-men

Richard Spruce's nineteenth-century account of caapi, aya-huasca, niopo, and paricá, based on field observations in the Uaupés, Orinoco, Rio Negro, Napo, and Pastasa regions. The excerpt records plant identifications, preparation methods, visual effects, ceremonial uses, and the role of payes in curing and divination.

Tent Life in Siberia

An American telegraph surveyor's account of Koryak men intoxicated on fly-agaric at a wedding celebration in northern Kamchatka. Kennan describes the mushroom's price, preparation, etiquette of serving, and the trade dynamics between Russian merchants and Koryak consumers.

The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy

Benjamin Paul Blood's privately printed 1874 pamphlet, the source of the phrase "anaesthetic revelation." Hosted here is the section in which Blood, after nearly fourteen years of experiments with anaesthetics, describes the insight that comes at the moment of "coming to." William James reviewed the pamphlet that year and later quoted this passage in The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Review of The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy

William James's unsigned review of Blood's pamphlet, published in the Atlantic Monthly in November 1874, eight years before his own nitrous oxide experiments. James summarizes Blood's claims at length and judges the pamphlet "thoroughly original and very suggestive," if less important than its author believed.

Note on Nitrous Oxide, from “On Some Hegelisms”

The note William James added to his essay "On Some Hegelisms" in Mind (1882), reporting nitrous oxide experiments he made after reading Blood's pamphlet. He describes a sense of metaphysical illumination and reconciliation of opposites that fades on recovery into "a few disjointed words and phrases." James reprinted the note in The Will to Believe (1897), and Charles Tart excerpted it in 1969 as "Subjective Effects of Nitrous Oxide."

On Anhalonium Lewinii

Berlin pharmacologist Louis Lewin (1850–1929) reports on "Muscale Buttons" received from Parke, Davis & Co. during a visit to the United States in 1887. The botanist Paul Hennings identified the dried cactus as a new species and named it Anhalonium Lewinii after him, and Lewin describes a crude base he called anhalonine and its strychnine-like convulsant effects in frogs, pigeons and rabbits. Hosted here are the introduction, the preliminary chemistry, and the full section on the drug's effects, with the historical survey of cacti omitted.

Consciousness under the Influence of Cannabis Indica

The Yale psychologist Edward Wheeler Scripture takes an alcoholic extract of cannabis to test the common claim that it stretches time and space. He reports strong fluctuations of attention and a sense that objects and events had become remote, and compares these with laboratory findings on attention.

Anhalonium Lewinii (Mescal Buttons)

A Study of the Drug, with Especial Reference to its Physiological Action upon Man, with Report of Experiments

Prentiss and Morgan conducted the first American clinical study of peyote at Columbian University on buttons supplied by ethnologist James Mooney. They recorded physiological effects alongside subjects' first-person accounts of visions, including kaleidoscopic colors and dissociative experiences.

The Mescal Plant and Ceremony

An account of the Kiowa and Comanche peyote ceremony by ethnologist James Mooney, published in the Therapeutic Gazette in 1896. Drawing on field observation and participation since 1891, Mooney describes the all-night rite, dosages, and cases including his interpreter Paul Setkopti and leader Quanah Parker.

Effects of Anhelonium Lewinii

S. Weir Mitchell's account of his own peyote self-experiment on May 24, 1896, read before the American Neurological Society. Mitchell describes detailed visions and includes a second self-experiment by a colleague, Dr. Eshner, with physiological notes and subjective observations.

On Pellote (Second Communication)

Leipzig pharmacologist Arthur Heffter (1859–1925) reports his separation of five alkaloids from mescal buttons, among them mescaline ("Mezcalin"), and a series of self-experiments made between June and November 1897. Testing the whole drug, its resin, the mixed alkaloids and each isolated base in turn, he found that 0.15 g of mescaline hydrochloride alone reproduced the visions, slowed pulse, dilated pupils and loss of time sense produced by the cactus. Hosted here are the description of mescaline and its salts and the whole of section VI on the drug's action in humans.

Physiological Action of Anhalonium Alkaloids

A pharmacologist at St Thomas's Hospital reports systematic experiments on Anhalonium alkaloids using frogs, cats, dogs, and rabbits, combined with self-experimentation. Dixon's account is more clinically restrained than Weir Mitchell's or Ellis's but adds music-color synaesthesia and comparisons to cannabis and strychnine.

Mescal: A Study of a Divine Plant

A Study of a Divine Plant

Havelock Ellis's account of his own peyote self-experiment, conducted on Good Friday 1897 in his London chambers. Written for a general scientific audience, it situates his diary of jewel-like visions within the clinical work of Prentiss, Morgan, and Weir Mitchell, alongside Indigenous religious use of the plant.

Nitrous Oxide and the Anaesthetic Revelation in The Varieties of Religious Experience

From the lecture on mysticism in William James's Gifford Lectures, delivered in Edinburgh in 1901–2. James argues that nitrous oxide and ether show "our normal waking consciousness" to be only one type among many, then quotes Blood and J. A. Symonds's chloroform experience. His notes add Xenos Clark's letter on the revelation and an Englishwoman's ether dream.

The Chukchee (on fly-agaric)

Religion — Intoxicants

An ethnographer's account of fly-agaric use among the Chukchee and Koryak, including dosage, preparation, three stages of intoxication, the 'spirits of fly-agaric,' and urine-drinking to extend the effect. The text also records the mushroom's place in Chukchee myth.

Anaesthetics Antient and Modern

An Historical Sketch of Anaesthesia

An illustrated history of anaesthesia issued by the London drug firm Burroughs Wellcome & Co., which closes by advertising its own 'Wellcome' brand chloroform. Hosted here are the chapters on nitrous oxide, ether, and chloroform, covering Horace Wells's 1844 self-experiment, the ether demonstrations of William Morton and Charles Jackson, and James Young Simpson's 1847 chloroform trial.

A Pluralistic Mystic

William James's last published essay, an appreciation of Benjamin Paul Blood that appeared in the Hibbert Journal in July 1910, weeks before James died. James quotes Blood's pamphlets and letters at length and traces how the anaesthetic revelation, which James first read as monism, became for Blood the basis of a pluralist philosophy.

Merck Patent DE 274350

Process for the Preparation of Alkyloxyaryl-, Dialkyloxyaryl- and Alkylenedioxyarylaminopropanes (Firm E. Merck, Darmstadt)

German Reich Patent No. 274350 (1912) describes arylaminopropane synthesis from safrole. Example 4 yields MDMA by heating a brominated intermediate with methylamine—the earliest documented synthesis. The patent claims MDMA only as an unnamed chemical intermediate toward unspecified therapeutic compounds, not as a substance of interest itself.

Psychic Action of Mescalin

New York psychiatrists inject themselves and colleagues with pure mescaline sulphate in twenty-three experiments to model insanity's visual hallucinations. Subjects' reports include specifics—a glass-screen head, the 'mosque of Omar'—and the authors propose a five-level theory of hallucinations versus images.

An Aztec Narcotic

Safford, a USDA botanist, analyzes peyote's physiological effects and Native American ceremonial use in 1915. The article incorporates sworn testimony from Menominee, Omaha, and Winnebago members of the Sacred Peyote Society.

Koryak Texts (Introduction and fly-agaric song)

Excerpts from Bogoras's Koryak Texts, including the introduction and two songs transcribed from phonograph recordings. The second song, sung by an elderly Chukchee man, records an Indigenous voice describing fly-agaric use for recovering consciousness.

Zitkála-Šá Peyote Testimony (1918)

Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkála-Šá, 1876–1938), the Yankton Dakota writer and secretary of the Society of American Indians, testified against peyote on February 22, 1918, before the House Indian Affairs subcommittee considering H.R. 2614, a bill to prohibit peyote among Indians. Drawing on her fourteen years among the Utes of the Uintah Basin, she described deaths, sexual misconduct, and fraud by the peyote missionary Peter Phelps, and she disputed the ethnologist James Mooney (1861–1921), who had ridiculed her newspaper photograph the day before. The record hosts her statement and cross-examination in full, her additional statement, the signed statements she co-authored, and the passages by Mooney and Cleaver Warden that answer her.

Native American Church Articles of Incorporation (1918)

Filed with the Oklahoma Secretary of State on October 10, 1918, these articles incorporated the Native American Church as a religious and benevolent association. The purpose sections frame peyote as a Christian sacrament, giving the pan-tribal peyote religion legal standing.

Peyote Hearings, H.R. 2614 (1918)

Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Indian Affairs, House of Representatives, on H.R. 2614

A subcommittee of the House Committee on Indian Affairs held February-March 1918 hearings on H.R. 2614, a bill to prohibit peyote use in Indian Country. Witnesses included ethnologist James Mooney, Osage chief Fred Lookout, Omaha ethnographer Francis La Flesche, Arapaho delegate Cleaver Warden, and Cheyenne-Arapaho Paul Boynton.

A gunner under ether, 1918

From Smashing Through "the World War" with Fighting Battery C

An American soldier who served in World War I describes being hit by a shell in July of 1918 and his subsequent experience with ether, having "peep[ed] behind the veil, which separates life from death."

On Aztec Botanical Names

An essay by physician and ethnobotanist Blas Pablo Reko arguing against Safford's claim that teonanácatl was a fanciful name for peyote. Reko insists teonanácatl was a real mushroom still eaten by Indigenous communities in Oaxaca.

The Anaesthetic Revelation, from Pluriverse

Benjamin Paul Blood's last book, published in 1920, the year after his death, with an introduction by Horace Kallen. Hosted here is the opening of the final chapter, "The Anaesthetic Revelation," where Blood compares the anaesthetic insight to the trance cattle fall into at spilled blood and quotes James on the "artificial mystic state of mind."

Contribution to the Study of the Toxic Drinks of the Northwest Amazon

French physician P. Reinburg's account of his ayahuasca ingestion among the Záparo in May 1913, published in the Journal de la Société des Américanistes. Rather than visions, he experienced a severe toxic reaction with pulse loss, vomiting, and spasms, recorded in clinical detail.

Blood Revenge, War, and Victory Feasts among the Jibaro Indians

Anthropologist Rafael Karsten's account of a Jívaro victory feast describes the natéma ceremony, in which the vision-inducing drink made from Banisteria caapi and tobacco is prepared ritually and drunk communally. The passage covers preparation, the emetic effect, and beliefs that the visions foretell prosperity.

Study on the Active Principle of Yagé

A 1923 doctoral thesis reporting Fischer Cárdenas's isolation of the yagé alkaloid that Rafael Zerda Bayón had named telepathine (telepatina) decades earlier without isolating it. Seven case reports detail effects on human subjects, including the author's self-experiment, describing vivid dreams, visual hallucinations, and euphoria at low doses, followed by a systematic summary of physiological action.

State v. Big Sheep

The Montana Supreme Court reverses a Crow man's peyote conviction, finding the state failed to establish jurisdiction over an offense on the Crow Reservation. The court addresses federal Indian law and rejects the defendant's religious-use defense, but does not decide the jurisdictional question, remanding for new trial.

Documents Toward a Study of Yagé

Rouhier's two-part dossier for Bulletin des Sciences Pharmacologiques: a translation of Barriga Villalba's 1923 paper on alkaloid yagéine, followed by Rouhier's ethnographic and pharmacological notes. Rouhier catalogues dose-dependent effects and includes chemical analysis of a Jívaro preparation.

On Banisterine, an Intoxicating Substance from Banisteria Caapi

Berlin pharmacologist Louis Lewin announces his isolation of banisterine from Banisteria caapi and its identity to harmine. He describes animal experiments and preliminary human trials showing that banisterine relieved the muscular rigidity of encephalitis lethargica (post-influenza sleeping sickness).

The Elements of Mazatec Witchcraft

A Berkeley anthropologist's field survey of Mazatec witchcraft from a 1938 expedition to Huautla de Jiménez, Oaxaca. Hosted here is a fair-use excerpt: Johnson's eyewitness account of a curing ceremony he and his party attended on July 16, 1938 -- the first outsider-witnessed session involving the sacred mushrooms -- along with his description of the mushroom species and their ritual use among Mazatec brujos.

Teonanacatl

The Narcotic Mushroom of the Aztecs

Schultes's botanical account of his 1938-39 fieldwork with Blas Pablo Reko among the Mazatec, tracing the teonanácatl rediscovery from Reko's 1923 letter through Robert Weitlaner's 1936 visit to Huautla de Jiménez. Schultes identifies the mushroom as Paneolus campanulatus var. sphinctrinus.

A Contribution to Our Knowledge of Rivea Corymbosa

The Narcotic Ololiuqui of the Aztecs

Schultes's botanical monograph settling the identity of ololiuqui, the Aztec morning-glory narcotic. He credits Urbina's 1897 identification as Rivea corymbosa, corrects Safford's 1915 misidentification as jimsonweed, and surveys continued ritual and medicinal use among the Chinantec, Mazatec, Mixtec, and Zapotec of Oaxaca.

LSD, a Phantasticum from the Ergot Group

Werner Stoll's first systematic clinical study of LSD, examining sixteen healthy volunteers and six schizophrenic patients, plus Stoll's own self-experiment. Published in 1947 following Hofmann's 1943 discovery at Sandoz, it established key vocabulary for psychiatric LSD research.