Brilliant Visions – Peyote among the Aesthetes (2019)

Its title, “Mescal: A New Artificial Paradise”, announced its line of descent from Charles Baudelaire’s 1860 essay on hashish, Les paradis artificiels — along with the masterwork of Baudelaire’s hero Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, the nineteenth century’s most admired literary account of a drug experience. The previous year Ellis had written a paper on “The Colour Sense in Literature”, comparing the imagery invoked by authors such as Shakespeare, Chaucer, Coleridge, Poe, and Rosetti. Now he brought a similar sensibility to bear on the peyote cactus. Every part of the colour spectrum competed in his visions, he wrote, and yet “there was always a certain parsimony and aesthetic value” in their combinations. He was “further impressed, not only by the brilliance, delicacy, and variety of the colours, but even more by their lovely and various textures — fibrous, woven, polished, glowing, dull, veined, semi-transparent”. He compared the patterns that formed and dissolved to the “Maori style of architecture” and “the delicate architectural effects as of lace carved in wood, which we associated with the moucrabieh work of Cairo”. They were “living arabesques”, constantly in flux yet with “a certain incomplete tendency to symmetry, as though the underlying mechanism was associated with a large number of polished facets”.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/3fNRO4b