Before Timothy Leary and Baba Ram Dass, before Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady, the Merry Pranksters and their acid test, before the Grateful Dead . . . there was Ernst Jünger, adventurer in mind expansion and psychedelic space.
Jünger stands out in this counterculture company with his thoroughly different background. As a teenager, he ran away from his German home to join the French Foreign Legion. In the First World War he was wounded multiple times and became a highly decorated officer in the Kaiser’s army. He would serve again on the German side in the Second World War—even though he published a famous anti-Hitler novel.
Yet alongside that military career, Jünger spent a lifetime with consciousness-enhancing experiments—hashish, cocaine, and morphine until he worked his way to LSD, psilocybin, and peyote. Jünger invites us to follow him on that mind-blowing path in an autobiography of his life with drugs: Approaches: Drugs and Altered States. This wide-ranging account documents an array of drug experiences, placing them in a richly intellectual context of cultural transformations and the literary history of drug use—Baudelaire, De Quincey, and Huxley—as well as art historical reflections on hallucinatory elements in Van Gogh, cubism, and surrealism. A great intellect meets psychedelics.
Ernst Jünger’s Approaches is now available in English translation from Telos Press Publishing. Purchase your copy in our online store and save 20% by using the coupon code BOOKS20 during checkout.
And here is an example of Jünger on a trip:
I have not yet done justice to LSD—I had said to Albert Hofmann: “It’s a house cat compared to the royal tiger mescaline, at most a leopard.”
That was after our first trip, which we had undertaken long before the drug became known and then discredited. It had shown us velvet paws rather than claws, purred more than roared. The dose had been too weak; I had mistaken a serenade in the lobby for the real concert. So we wanted to repeat the trip, this time with an adequate charge—and ideally before I finalized this manuscript.
It must have been spring because the anemones were already blooming on the meadows of Bottmingen, but winter also cannot have been long gone because Anita Hofmann was off skiing with the kids. The realm was ours: the host, Albert Hofmann; the pharmacologist, Heribert Konzett, who had not yet moved to Innsbruck; and myself, a novice in chemical delicacies and visiting from nearby Binningen.
Even the preparations made it clear that exact science was in place here: a tall graduated cylinder filled with distilled water stood on the table. Our host, as symposiarch, added some drops of a colorless liquid that dissolved immediately in the water.
The ancients had similarly diluted their wine with water so that the feast would last longer. Their mixing vessels were decorated with wreaths of grape vines and, more importantly, mythical scenes that everyone knew. Ours only had a measuring scale etched on the glass.
We each received a small glassful, hardly more than a shot glass, from the graduated cylinder. We made a toast and wished each other a good trip. The room was pleasant and warm; we made ourselves comfortable on the couches. Cars and trucks were passing by on the street directly in front of the windows. At first, the noise was disturbing, then it faded away. Colors became more vivid, as if an African sun had begun to shine or matter radiated more intensely. I sensed that I had perceived only shadows of the light until that moment; now its essence was revealed. It shone even when I closed my eyes.
Then it became warm and peaceful and quiet, except for the deep, pleasurable breathing.
“I’m forgetting my business now.”
“My worries.”
“My work.”
“My family.”
“I’m leaving myself too.”
“We leave all that behind.”
“Even the atoms—not important.”
We had taken off our shoes; no sticks or boots, wheels or wings were needed for this trip. Our host lit some incense. The smoke floated up, a silken thread whose gray color changed to the most delicate blues. At first it rose vertically in the almost perfectly still air. Then it began to tremble, to twist and curl in a weightless play of figures. It wanted to show us the meaning of dance and what it could do. Movement and matter, garment and body were barely still distinct. Being and happening coincided almost perfectly, also vision and phenomenon. Had the object fascinated the eyes, or had they enchanted it? There was no telling, and it didn’t matter anyway. Such speculations would just be shadowboxing.
A twirling, an opening dance seemed to have initiated everything—what had separated at the start of the dance now moved together in unison in grand symmetries: above and below, crest and trough, lingam and yoni, father and mother, spirit and power. As artfully entwined and dangerous as they were, the figures led memory and desire to again consummate their early unity.
Smoke offerings: interpreting them has always been the business of visionaries. I described the smoke thread in another setting, and I will come back to it later here.
The ashes gradually crumbled off as we followed the game and occasionally pointed out an especially accomplished turn. We were in high spirits: in order.
To be “in order”—a condition that intensifies space. It is not about “more space” but about “only space”—which means that the emptiness increases. Not only are the unimportant things set aside but also most everything that had previously seemed important. In order and groundless good cheer, we danced down the stairs in the morning—after a deep sleep that had cleared away the differentiations. A feast hall is also put in order before the dance begins. Only a thin screen, a subtle skin, still divides us from the true world.
Purchase your copy of Ernst Jünger’s Approaches in our online store and save 20% by using the coupon code BOOKS20 during checkout.
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