Author: Paul Devereux
Publisher: Daily Grail Publishing
Price: £9.95
Isbn: 9780975720059

FT 264

The Long Trip is a revised and updated edition of Paul Devereux’s 1997 excurs­ion into psyche­delia’s prehistory, as well as its ancient and recent history. Delving into aspects of archæology many academics ignore, it unearths our ancest­ors’ visionary past, leaving little doubt that for almost as long as human culture has existed, we have used substances to alter our consciousness. Bags containing opium popp­ies which were likely burnt on braz­iers and inhaled have been found in Neolithic burial sites in southern Europe. During this period in Europe, psychoactive fumes gave way to potions and brews, as evidenced by ornate jugs shaped like the heads of opium poppies. Herodotus, noting the Scythians’ howls of pleasure from inhaling cannabis, documented the outgoing smoking complex.

Ancient texts testify to the cultural and spiritual importance of magical plants and fungi. The identity of the divine soma from the Indian holy book the Rig Veda has long puzzled scholars, with almost every possible psychedelic entity from the Amanita muscaria mushroom to the Syrian rue bush (Peganum harmala) being sugg­ested as the likely candidate.

A similar enigma surrounds kykeon, which was used during the secret initiation rites of the ancient Greeks as part of the Eleusinian mysteries. Wasson, Hofmann and Ruck suggest that given that the rites were in honour of Demeter, the goddess of grain, its ingredients probably contained some derivative of ergot, a grain fungus which contains psychedelic alkaloids, the building block for LSD. Were ancient Greek and Roman philosophers and leaders such as Plato and Cicero initiated into an LSD cult which lasted two mill­ennia? The likelihood of this is strengthened by learning that the next most important sacred site of ancient Greece, the temples of Delphi, probably also had psyche­delic origins. The female oracles either inhaled psychoactive fumes rising from fissures in the rocks or partook of psychedelic plants, such as henbane (Hyoscyamus niger), sacred to the temple’s later patron, Apollo.

The Long Trip also presents a round-up of prehistoric ethno­botany in the Americas. A dazzling array of psychedelic substances from the peyote cactus (Lophophora williamsii) to toad venom – within a psychedelic pharmacopeia that includes water lilies, mushrooms, vines, beans, climbers, shrubs and trees – has been used by indigenous peoples from Canada to Chile. Their use for magico-religious purposes goes back several thousand years, according to archæo­logical evidence. It is even thought that Palæolithic rock art, some of the oldest remnants of human culture, depicts the geometric patterns experienced in altered states such as those induced by the ingestion of psychoactive flora and fauna. These patterns, known as form constants or (perhaps erroneously) as entoptics, occur universally in psychedelic states and are a prominent feature of psychedelically-inspired artwork.

The Long Trip is an essential investigation into the archæology of consciousness and punctuated with extraordinary accounts of otherworldly experiences by ‘psycho­nauts’ throughout the ages. Le Club des Haschischins founder Théophile Gautier describes a mind-blowing psyche­delic journey through time on hashish. Some of the accounts reach into the not-so-distant past, and Devereux’s epic maiden voyage on LSD in the 1960s is one of the most lucid accounts of a psychedelic experience this side of Huxley’s Doors of Perception.

Accounts of such shamanic-like expeditions give authenticity to the book’s further explorations into psychedelic substances as inducers of interspecies commun­ication, psychic abilities, problem-solving creativity and a host of other transformative transpersonal experiences. As Devereux notes, “it is a culturally-engineered cliché to dismiss such states as somehow delusional.” This edition is thinner than the original, having left behind the chapter on shamanic landscapes. However, it is vitally important in situating our current drug laws as just brief modern misconceptions.