De Materia Medica is an ancient pharmacopoeia: a systematic guide to plants, animals, minerals, wines, oils and manufactured preparations used as medicines. Dioscorides does not write a narrative.
Medical tag
Hallucinogens
Visionary or psychoactive substances (soma, hashish, mushrooms, potions) and drug-induced altered states.
Works
Natural History: A Selection introduces one of antiquity’s great encyclopedic minds. Pliny wants to collect nature and human use together: stars, lands, peoples, animals, plants, metals, pigments, stones, medicines, marvels and technologies all belong to one vast inventory.
On the Road is narrated by Sal Paradise, a young writer living with his aunt in New Jersey, and records a series of journeys back and forth across the United States and into Mexico between 1947 and 1950. The engine of the book is Dean Moriarty, a fast-talking, car-stealing, endlessly restless young man from Denver who seems to Sal the embodiment of a wild, joyous American energy.
The Bacchae and Other Plays presents Euripides at his most dangerous: gods are real, but that does not make them gentle. The Bacchae begins when Dionysus arrives at Thebes in disguise to punish the royal house for denying his divinity and slandering his mother Semele.
The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, published in 1872 when Nietzsche was a twenty-seven-year-old professor at Basel, argues that Greek tragedy arose from the union of two opposed artistic drives, which he names after the gods Apollo and Dionysus. The Apollonian is the drive toward clear form, measure and individuation, whose physiological analogue is the dream, in which every person is a perfect artist of images.
The Count of Monte Cristo is a vast novel of injustice and revenge. In 1815 Edmond Dantès, a young sailor of Marseilles, returns from a voyage on which he carried a letter from Napoleon's island of Elba as a dying captain requested.
The Golden Ass is a comic, erotic, violent and religious novel about curiosity transformed into degradation and salvation. Lucius, a young man fascinated by magic, travels in Thessaly, a region famous for witches.
The Histories is the first great work of prose history in the Western tradition, an inquiry (historia) into the causes and course of the wars between the Greeks and the Persian Empire. Herodotus states his purpose in the opening: to preserve the memory of great and marvellous deeds of Greeks and barbarians, and especially the reason why they fought one another.
The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus's long return from Troy to Ithaca and of the household that must survive his absence. The poem opens not with Odysseus but with disorder: his son Telemachus is growing up under the pressure of suitors who consume the estate and demand that Penelope choose a new husband.
This volume pairs two of Henry James's most intense short fictions about possession, interpretation and moral trespass. The Turn of the Screw is framed as a manuscript read aloud during a country-house gathering.
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature collects the twenty Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion that William James delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902. Instead of studying churches, creeds or theology, James studies personal religious experience as a psychologist, drawing on a large collection of first-person documents: diaries, autobiographies, letters and replies to questionnaires.
Passages
- De Materia Medica, Book 4, mandrake
Mandrake is presented as a narcotic and surgical/anodyne aid, later surrounded by magical lore.
- De Materia Medica, Book 4, henbane and hemlock
Dangerous plants illustrate the thin margin between medicinal sedation and poisoning.
- Natural History: A Selection, Book 25, mandrake traditions
Mandrake lore connects narcotic, magical and surgical uses.
- On the Road, Part Four
Driving into Mexico, the companions smoke marijuana with a local youth and experience the landscape in an altered state.
- The Birth of Tragedy, §1
Dream as the physiological basis of Apollonian art, including the sense that the dream is mere appearance; intoxication by narcotic draught as the basis of Dionysian art; the St. John's and St. Vitus's dancers.
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Rome section ('Sinbad the Sailor')
Franz eats hashish in the Count's grotto on Monte Cristo and experiences vivid visions.
- The Histories, Book 4.73–75
Scythians purify themselves after funerals by inhaling hemp-seed vapour in felt tents.
- The Odyssey, Book 9
The Lotus-Eaters offer a plant that dissolves the will to return, making appetite and drugged forgetting enemies of homecoming.
- The Odyssey, Book 10
Circe's potion transforms men into swine; Hermes provides moly as protective antidote before Odysseus confronts her.
- The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lectures XVI and XVII: Mysticism
The four marks of mystical states; alcohol as the exciter of the 'Yes function'; nitrous oxide and ether revelations; epileptic auras and the darker 'diabolical mysticism' of insanity.
Quotes
“It is either under the influence of the narcotic draught, of which the hymns of all primitive men and peoples tell us, or by the powerful approach of spring penetrating all nature with joy, that those Dionysian emotions awake, in the augmentation of which the subjective vanishes to complete self-forgetfulness”
Frequently cited
“our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different”