52 Flowers That Shook My World was originally a longer book. To make it less of a handful
20 of the flowers were left out of the published version - though some of their
text was threaded back into the chapter introductions. Last year I decided to
post some of the the original flowers as occasional blogs. Here is the cover
flower and the first plant in the Bush School section.
8 Morning glory
Cyclades, Greece 1989
The first time I saw the morning
glories was in Greece. I was sitting on the threshold of a whitewashed house
belonging to an artist. There were remains of a dead rabbit on the steps and
something in me instinctively knew it had been put there by one of the women of
the island who bore the foreign owners a grudge. Even though I knew that this
“evil eye” wasn’t personally directed at me it was unnerving. And so, equally
instinctively, I had deliberately sat down in the open to drink a cup of coffee
in the blinding morning sunshine.
It was then that I noticed the morning glory
flowers spiralling up the old wooden doorway with their heart-shaped leaves.
The flowers were a shining midnight blue, starlight was pouring out of their
five-pointed magenta cores. In that moment their appearance seemed a kind of
miracle in the fierce heat, surrounded by all those white walls, in the
emptiness of the square and the feeling of invisible eyes watching. After that
I always sat besides the flowers in the morning. The rabbit business ended
after that.
At the time of the rabbit things
had been shifting and changing in the metropolis where I had always lived. New
and unusual messages were arriving in the city marketplace. Small wrinkled
“organic” apples sat in my fruitbowl and I began to look at my dining table
made of Indonesian teak and feel uncomfortable about a lifestyle I had been
documenting all my working life. On the bookshelf native plant teachings were
appearing amongst the cookbooks – medicine words from the ayahuasca
vegetalistas of the Amazon, the
coca-taking Kogi elders of Colombia - and Mayan, Hopi and Aboriginal prophecies
concerning the future of the planet were being discussed where once we had only
considered our next deadline. The ethno-botonist Terence McKenna had become the
Timothy Leary of the day. No one in the city was dropping out exactly but some
were taking planes into the rain forest and coming back with insights.
“What are they doing?” I had wondered myself,
whilst a year before on a fashion shoot in the Peruvian jungle I watched
several canoes push out from the shore of the lake and mysteriously point their
prows towards the full moon. “Let’s go swimming,” said the fashion director as
we stood with a brew of rainforest herbs in our hands, and began to take off
her clothes. Suddenly we were all swimming naked in the limpid water, heedless
of alligators, electric eels, piranha, and other kinds of small dangerous
fauna. That night, wrapped in a shroud of mosquito netting and the hot
frog-croaking night, I found myself writing in a form I had neglected for twenty
years. It was a poem:
My circus life unclawed me.
Tonight there were no dreams because there were no dreamers.
In the following summer of 1989,
the dreams of the city became powered by reality-warping drugs, as LSD and
ecstasy replaced cocaine and cocktails as the “in” experience, what you did at
the weekend. For a brief and extremely uncharacteristic period everyone was
loving everyone, in the dance halls and in each other’s arms. At a party during
the Notting Hill Carnival, I absented from my role of the perfect hostess
because I was too busy entwined in a loving embrace with a boy called Carl on
the window ledge, watching police on horses charging down Westbourne Park Road.
I remember laughing in a way I had not done for years.
It was Carl who told me first about
hallucinogenics, what to do when you took them, how to remain sane. I remember
looking at these small blue spots on white paper in the back of a taxi as we
sped by Lancaster Gate. It was a hot July night, his birthday and I said: shall we take these tonight?
Carl said that taking
hallucinogenics was like climbing a mountain. You have crampons on your feet
that keep a firm grip, he told me, and you head for the summit. But if at
any time you find yourself in trouble, remember we are attached, like
mountaineers, with a cord. So you can come back to me. I am always here. Don’t
forget that. I am always here.
He was there, for that night, in my
flat. But afterwards he left. Because the summer of love in 1989, as all
summers of love, did not last. It was chemically induced and, like all
artificial promises, did not lead out of the dystopia of the city, past the
police barricade, into what seemed like a new day. But some of it unravelled
the tightly-knit lives we had all been leading at the time and made some of us
change course where we might not have done so before.
There
is no god. There is no village. I declared prophetically to visiting
friends that weekend and told the fishmonger in Notting Hill Gate I could not
buy his fish because they were all dead. Something had been shaken up. I had
seen my flat on fire with my cats flying through the air, I had watched the
walls ripple and crocodiles emerge from the pavements and rather than
disturbing me, it liberated something inside. It showed me the world I thought
was completely solid could completely change its shape depending on one’s
perception of it, and though I knew these were genuine hallucinations (unlike
the visions granted by the hallucinogenic plants that were to follow), it was
the idea that the world was not fixed according to the dominant hegemony that
grabbed my imagination. The existence of villages and gods, I realised, depend on our agreement to see them in a
particular way.
My own “breaking open the head”
thus began with a synthetic version of a naturally-occurring chemical found in
a plant I would later recognise and always love, the morning glory, whose
luminous blue flowers heralded the new day like the star Venus and whose
heart-shaped leaves would twine about my life thereafter. Most writers and
creative people I knew at that time were open-minded and extremely sceptical
about the status quo we were all part of. But not everyone acts on what they
know in their hearts, what they see in the small hours of night on the top of a
psychedelic mountain, in the deep moments of embrace, in the fleeting summers
of love. What makes you act is your own sense of destiny which is a mysterious
bargain you hold with life, to which only you have the key.
Tonight there were no dreams because there were
no dreamers
iii
When you go down into the
underworld part of you never returns. That’s the deal. You eat the six seeds of
the pomegranate and that action seals a certain bargain with life thereafter.
It’s a deal nobody signs if they think about it, and yet those who do, never
regret it. You see if you don’t go into the underworld you never find out what
it means to go home. That’s why no one ever regrets initiation, however it
comes. It makes your upperworld life very hard thereafter but your inner life
becomes immeasurably rich. You have roots in the earth and you have a place to
go to when you die. Those things count for everything. They make you bold and
free.
At one time, during the Neolithic
times, these connections were an essential part of tribal life, a way of being
on the earth that had remained stable for over 10,000 years. Everyone was
initiated into them. Then when the first conquering cities appeared, the archaic
earth mysteries, those rites of passage, were marginalised and turned into
mystery schools. These schools ran alongside civilisations. They ran alongside dictatorships and tyrannies and state
religions and outlived them all. They were making sense of connections that lay
outside the city boundaries. The most famous of these took place outside Athens
at Eleusis. For a long time, maybe as long as two thousand years, these rites
were mostly earth-bound and female, then they became solarised and male. Apollo
took command of the Delphic oracle and the half-gods Orpheus and Dionysus took
over from Demeter and Persephone. When Dionysus got torn up on the mountain,
trampled like his sacred vines, his sacrifice became institutionalised as
religion and those mythic transcendental events which kept us in touch with our
starry origins, with our ancestors, and made meaning and beauty of our being on
the planet, became derided as pagan and superstitious.
No one knew what happened in these
initiation schools. It was assumed that secrets were transmitted and terrifying
punishments were meted out if you “told”. But anyone who has really
worked with plants, with mystery, knows how difficult it is to talk about these
so called “secret” encounters. Nobody ever believes you if you do. This is
partly because the reason-based educated mind will reject everything you say,
thinking you are touched or have become some kind of drugfiend; but mostly
because knowledge, what was once known as wisdom, does not exist in daily words
or numbers or symbols. Those things can be signs
of knowledge but they are not knowledge itself. The only way to know knowledge
is to seek it and experience it first hand. That’s what life on earth is about
really. First hand knowledge. You can’t hold on to that mystery or possess it
or make a system out of it. You can have all kinds of rites and rituals and
secrets and powers and priestly robes but as Carl used to say about life, you
are either on the bus, or you are not. Only the real thing gets you home.
Most initiatory encounters with
plants, especially hallucinogenic plants, call you immediately back to those
archaic times when the earth-human connections were still vibrant and
meaningful. You seek out ancestral lands where that archaic rhythm still
resonates, where the wilderness is still intact. You search for tribal ways, elder
wisdom, warrior acts and primal states. Your hands reach out for drums, full
moons, caves, firelight. You long for lair-like shelters, river water,
wilderness, storm, animal encounters. However sometimes you find there is a
gap. Something is missing on the inside. Something that would link this world
and our own.
When I went to Greece at the end of
the summer of 89, after my brief exchanges with LSD and ecstasy, I slept in the
rough stone house belonging to the artist and lived a Spartan life, as I had
for several summers before in different places on the island. As I sat on the
steps by the morning glory, collected water from a well, walked goat paths,
picked figs and branches of oregano, washed my clothes in a spring, slept under
stars, I felt myself living according to an ancient rhythm and something in this
mythical landscape resonated in my bones, in some deep ancestral part of
myself. In this simplicity, this roughness, under these huge starry skies at
night, a whole inner world started to open up, I began to dream of birds and
mountains and seas, and began to write those dreams down. And as the meltemi, the disturbing wind of October,
blew under the door, I felt the first straining against a leash inside myself
that would eventually lead to my departure.
The missing piece of the inner
jigsaw, the bridge that connects you to your ancestral being, comes with
mythology and dreams. This mythology is not from the mesas or rainforests of the Americas but from a Mediterranean
culture deeply entwined with our own, a culture that deliberately broke its
archaic mindset by fabricating a philosophy of reason that deliberately
suppressed female spirituality and drove it underground. You could say all
civilisations get their power by subjugating the female mysteries and using the
female life-force for their own purposes: Egypt, China, India, Tibet. However
the rationale of the Western world is based on ancient Greece - its law,
education, science, philosophy, drama, architecture, psychology. Its soldiery
may be based on the Northern barbarian and its administration on Rome but all
its modern reason and culture, how it justifies all its barbaric acts, stem from
the Athenian city-state. The ideals of this state are often depicted in statues
- liberty, justice, wisdom, equality, the arts - and all wear a female face but the living
embodiments of these spiritual qualities are rarely seen.
Where you find these female beings
are in the myths. And sometimes in your dreams, in the flowers that wind about
your door.
It was on the doorsteps of that old
Greek house that I remembered the myth of Persephone, at the time of the autumn
equinox when her mysteries were originally performed thousands of years ago.
This memory was to underpin the whole path of flowers that followed. It came
out of the blue, just like the morning glory, reminding me there was something
underneath this sparkling, grimy veneer we call civilisation and think is the
one and only reality. Later I realised that’s how the ancestral always comes
back to us: through dreams, visions, travels, encounters that you cannot
explain or have words for, mysteriously.
Tonight I lie in the dark interior
of the house as evening comes and I hear the men gather in the kafeneon; invisible voices filter up
through the vines outside my window, as the light drains from the sky. I make
no move to join them. Some part of me that had always sought out the vibrant
day and the company of others is turning inward.
In this life there is a
turning point, a time when you go inward, descend into the dark, into the
depths, to meet the challenges of the underworld. I am 33, approaching this
moment, about to bid farewell to these sunlit islands of my youth, the voyages
on the blue caique, the dancing on
the mountain to the drum made of goatskin, these rough hermitages of
whitewashed stone. If you seek knowledge, to know your destiny in this life,
you have at this turning point to journey into the invisible realms. If you
want a guide, you can ask the plants to accompany you there. And the plants
will take you there, as they have always done through time, all the way down
into the caves, into the seedstore, into the realm of the dead, towards the
ancestors, through into the sunlight, the starlight that lives in the heart of
the earth.
iv
There are several kinds of plant
hallucinogens and those containing LSD, or D-Lysergic Acid Amide, form one
botanical group. These chemicals are found naturally in morning glory seeds and
in the ergot fungus that grows on rye and other grasses. Ergot is believed to
be the foundation of the elixir that inspired the sacred rites of the barley
goddess Demeter. Morning glory seeds, known as ololuiqui, were sacred to the indigenous Indians of Mexico until
ruthless suppression by the invading Spanish conquistadors drove their use
underground. The ololuiqui seed comes
from the convolvulus vine, rivea
corymbosa, known in Nahuatl as coaxihuitl,
the snake plant, but its particular hallucinogenic potency wasn’t recognised
until four centuries later, when a Swiss chemist called Albert Hoffman, identified LSD from ergot in 1938 and took a dose by accident. It was an
initiatory event that would shake the modern world.
When LSD was synthesised in the
late fifties it was hailed as a great liberator of mankind and used with astounding
success in experimental psychology at the time. Gordon Wasson, the American
writer and mycologist who came across the ceremonial use of psylocybe cubensis in the mountains of
Oaxaca at the same time, invited Hofmann to Mexico, where they discovered a third
sacred hallucinogenic, an unknown sage called diviner’s mint. Later these plant
pioneers collaborated on a book called The
Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Mysteries, in which they concluded that the kykeon imbibed by the initiates of the
ancient world contained an entheogen (a word they also invented, meaning a
mind-altering plant that inspires a “divine experience”), was most probably the
dark ergot that grew on Demeter’s sacred grains.
The effect of all entheogens is to
transport one from the personal into the transpersonal realms. The price it
exacts for this passage is what is known as the death of the ego, a dramatic
internal event that is documented throughout the spiritual history of mankind.
StanislaV Grof, a psychiatrist from Prague, who conducted over 4000 sessions
with LSD in the 1960s noted the initiatory feelings of terror, loss of control
and panic often led to encounters with mythical realms and archetypal beings.
Many followed the same pattern: a primal state of oceanic bliss and unity, experiences
of no-exit, titanic fight and annihilation of all known points of reference and
finally a sense of redemption and a rebirth into a world of light, love and
liberation. The modern world, he conjectured from this research, was a
reflection of this process on a collective level. As a species we could either
keep projecting and acting out its destructive phases, or we could internalise
them and reach an extraordinary leap of consciousness.
After suffering all kinds of mental
and emotional torments, the first explorer of LSD walked through his kitchen
door and into the glorious morning outside. “It had been raining in the night,”
Hofmann told Grof in an interview at the Esalen Institute in 1984. “I had the
feeling that I saw the earth and the beauty of nature as it had been when it
had been created, at the first day of creation. It was a beautiful experience.
I was reborn, seeing nature in quite a new light.”
For Hofmann his medicine for the
soul was “a tool that turns us into what we are supposed to be” and he was deeply
dismayed by its recreational use in the huge burst of psychedelic
experimentation that shook the Western world in the mid-sixties and seventies.
In spite of Grof’s assertion that the human drive for transcendence was
stronger than sex, most people didn’t make it through the door and into the
morning. The liberation that should have happened never did. A modern
“inquisition” on hallucinogenic plants squashed all research on their effect on
human consciousness and even morning glory seeds sold in garden centres were
reputedly coated to prevent their ingestion. People, unable to cope with the
demands of Hofmann’s alchemical tool, awoke to find their psyches warped by
their experiences. There were good trips, but there were also very bad ones.
You need a sound mind and a sound
body as well as the right “set and setting” to encounter the imaginal realms.
This is hard to do without a proper cultural context in which quest, rites of
passage and initiation are consciously acknowledged as vital events in our
lives. The indigenous tribes traditionally took 13 morning glory seeds, but
modern ingestion of the seeds or their chemical equivalent varies between
300-2000. The huge discrepancy in dosage speaks volumes about our density and
”fall into matter”. We have no traditional relationship with either the plant
kingdom or the spiritual realms, and “trips” are rarely conducted in a sacred,
communal or healing context. Most take place silently inside people’s heads.
The kind of mental incoherence and negative darkness that can occur is a direct
result of our alienation from the physical and transcendent earth.
“LSD should have been subject to
the same taboos and the same reverence the Indians had towards these
substances,” said Hofmann of his problem child.
The real problem with LSD however,
as with all chemical derivatives, is that they are chemical and derivative and
therefore not coherent as a substance. Their internal structure and outer form
is fabricated in a laboratory, rather than arising naturally from the crucible of the
earth and sun. The blue spot on the paper is not the blue flower. So not only
is there a physical lack of connection to nature but also a spiritual one.
There are no plant teachers to guide a safe passage through the night, toward
the mysteries, towards the door. When I took LSD in the city that summer all I
saw were artificial patterns and “cracks in the edifice of materialistic
rationality” as Wasson once put it. Something had definitely shifted in the
night.
But it was Mexico, land of the ololuiqui, peyote, the diviner’s mint
and ceremonial mushroom that really led me out of the door.
The second time I saw the morning
glories was on another Mediterranean island, in the fields of Deia, Majorca.
They grew in profusion, a mass of blue eyes, in the deep dark ditches that
surrounded the house of the writer and mythologist, Robert Graves. After
travelling for two years in Latin America we had returned to Europe and were
looking for somewhere to live. It was a difficult time and finding those
morning glories that day suddenly lifted our spirits in an extraordinary way.
During the night in the hotel in the town square I felt my body full of strange
energies and my dreams full of cosmic shapes and lights. I could hardly sleep.
The following afternoon on return to Palma, I went to an exhibition of
photographs that documented Graves’ turbulent life with his female muses and
the rustic life he spent in the hills of Deia.
At one photograph I was stopped in
my tracks. The poet was standing on his rough stone terrace. Our eyes met.
Graves was old when the picture had been taken and most of his mind had
disappeared, but something in his face arrested my attention. It shocked me to
the core. Not because he had aged, but because he looked entirely like a woman.
It felt as if an old woman had possessed his face in an act of terrible
revenge.
Graves spent years praising the
White Goddess, the mythological matriarch of the ancient world whose service he
wrote was the basis of all true poetry and life on earth. But this was a life
dedicated to a goddess who was, by his own admission, cruel and heartless.
Driven underground by the philosophers of the city-state this moon-faced deity,
had become, like all suppressed women, furious and vengeful. She sat in her
wild mountain nest littered with the bones of poets, and dissolved the minds of
men, in spite of their unquestioning loyalty.
I knew however that Persephone
loved the poets more than anyone. As she loved Dionysus and Apollo and Hermes,
and all those who dared to enter the underworld with only their hearts and
imaginations to guide them. She did not require their worship or their
sacrifice. When I turned inward, I found myself exploring a territory that is
traditionally the preserve of men - nature, spirituality, mythology, mysteries,
medicine – and yet is not entirely theirs, for without female wisdom neither
love nor liberation nor return is possible. In the lesser known female myths of
the underworld, Innana is stripped of all she possesses and left on a hook,
Psyche is given six impossible tasks. Inside myself, the lines of my life were
tangled into knots. It felt as though they had not been straight for thousands
and thousands of years.
I sat in the
darkness, as night came to the island, with my underworld tasks before me. It
would take a life-time to untangle these threads, to unhook myself, to sort
these seeds. But instinctively, as I had once sat down by the dead rabbit, I
knew that the female fury that so cruelly distorted our world could only be
abated by the presence of another kind of being. And that I was going to have
to be that being, neither goddess, nor harridan, but someone entirely new.
Prepping a reading of 52 Flowers at Bungay Library, August 2012: September morning glory (Mark Watson); cover of The White Goddess (Faber and Faber)
Dark Mountain: Issue 20 - ABYSS is available 