Anger uses drugs in a ritualistic manner in three of his films beginning with Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (Eucharist, the Scarlet Woman’s big fat joint, Crowley’s opium pipe, Coleridege’s poem Kubla Khan, narcotic wine and powders), Scorpio Rising (Crystal Meth), Invocation of my Demon Brother (Marijuana). The esoteric, erotically charged, ecstatic foundation on which the above films are built produce an induction to altered states of consciousness. The films are so effective.
The ritualized use of drugs pervaded(s) the lives of traditional cultures. Psychoactive plants held within them deep value, mysteries and meaning for the members of these societies; the ‘witch doctor’ who cures the sick, the shamanic priest who communicates with the spirits beyond, and the drugs use in the initiation of youth in their coming-of-age-rites. Mind altercation is a part of the ethos within these cultures in the same way as Rx drugs have become a socially acceptable aspect of life in Western culture.
It is crucial, yet difficult for the Western mind, to understand that hallucinogenic drugs as used within the context of shamanic principles are never used for recreational purposes. Rather, the drug is always used in the context of ceremony. The ritual begins with the harvesting of the plant, roots or herbs; it continues through the process of preparing the matter for ingestion and continues still through the administration of the finished product. ‘The use of mind altering drugs as religious sacraments was not restricted to a particular time and place but characterized nearly every society on the planet (with the possible exception of certain Eskimo and Polynesian communities)’. (Acid Dreams, page 65 by Martin A. Lee & Bruce Shlain)
For the Aztecs there was peyote and ololiuqui, a small lentil like seed containing lysergic acid; the Aborigines of Australia chewed pituri, a desert shrub; the natives of upper Amazon had yage, the telepathic vine. Certain scholars believe that the fabled Soma of the ancient Vedic religion in Northern India was actually the fly agaric mushroom, and there is strong evidence that ergot, from which LSD is derived, was the mysterious kykeon used for over two thousand years by the ancient Greeks in the annual Eleusinian Mysteries…
For thousands of years the shaman has journeyed ‘Above’ and ‘Below’ in the ecstatic trance; the trance can be induced in several ways some of which include deprivation of food or the senses, rhythmic drumming, and often times by the use of psychoactive drugs. ‘The initiate must visit the underworld where the shaman will undergo dismemberment. The initiate must ‘die’ in everyday reality and enter a special relationship with spirit beings, a process whereby knowledge and teachings about the spirit world are communicated’
The barbaric suppression of European witchcraft by the Holy Inquisition paralleled attempts to eradicate indigenous drug use among the colonized natives of the New World. The Spanish outlawed Peyote and coca leaves in the Americas, and the British later tried to banish kava use in Tahiti. Such proclamations were part of an imperialist effort to impose a new social order that stigmatized the psychedelic experience as a form of madness or possession by evil spirits.
‘It wasn’t until the late 18th century that industrial civilization produced its own “devil’s advocate,” which spoke in a passionate and lyrical voice. The romantic rebellion signified “a return of the repressed” as drugs were embraced by the visionary poets and artists who lived as outcasts in their own society. Laudanum, a tincture of opium, catalyzed the literary talents of Coleridge, Poe, Swinburne, De Quincy, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, while the best known French writers, including Baudelaire, de Nerval, and Victor Hugo, gathered at Le Club des Haschischins, a proto-bohemian enclave in Paris founded by Theophile Gautier in 1844.’ (Acid Dreams)
For the visionary poets modern society was the bummer, and they often viewed the drug experience as a tortured means to a fuller existence, to a life more innately human. It was with the hope of alleviating his own tortured mental condition that Antonin Artaud made an international trek in the 1930s to participate in the peyote ritual of the Tarahumara Indians in the Mexican highlands. Artuad did not take such a risky journey as a tourist or an anthropologist but as someone who wished to be healed, as a spiritual exile seeking to regain “a Truth which the world of Europe is losing.” The desperate Frenchman experienced a monumental bummer-“the cataclysm which was my body…this dislocated assemblage, this piece of damaged geology.” Yet somehow, despite the nightmare visions and the somatic discomfort, he managed to scratch out a perception of the Infinite. “Once one has experienced a visionary state of mind,” Artaud wrote in the Peyote Dance, “one can no longer confuse the lie with truth. One has seen where one comes from and who one is, and no longer doubts what one is. There is no emotion or external influence that can divert one from this reality.”
“…one can no longer confuse the lie with truth.” This is a profound statement; it then comes as no surprise that the authoritative, power-hungry and exceedingly greedy would rather keep the truth thickly veiled behind distraction. Perhaps this is the larger purpose of the so-called ‘War on Drugs’.
And the main stream film industry is all about distraction often times in the form of propaganda…
Kenneth Anger puts it in your face. One can’t help but feel the extraordinary insight and power of the individual’s attempt at something that moves far beyond our culture as it stands in all of its dismal glory. The façade has been cracked and it seems that it may not take more than a slight shove before it comes crashing down.
“Primitive man,” Wrote Huxley in 1931, “explored the pharmacological avenues of escape from the world with astounding thoroughness…to Huxley, the urge for transcendence and visionary experience was nothing less than a biological imperative. “Always and everywhere,” he asserted, “human beings have felt the radical inadequacy of being their insulated selves and not something else, something wider, something in the Wordsworthian phrase, ‘far more deeply interfused.’…I live, yet not I, but wine or opium or peyotyl or hashish liveth in me. To go beyond the insulated self is such a liberation that, even when self transcendence is through nausea into frenzy, through cramps into hallucinations and coma, the drug induced experience has been regarded by primitives and even by the highly civilized as intrinsically divine.” Continue (ACID DREAMS page 67)
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