Antichrist Psychonaut: Nietzsche and Psychedelics
– Peter Sjöstedt-H –
‘… And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.’
So ends the famous fragment of Kubla Khan by the Romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
He tells us that the poem was an immediate transcription of an opium-induced dream he
experienced in 1797. As is known, the Romantic poets and their kin were inspired by the use
of psychoactive substances such as opium, the old world’s common pain reliever. Pain
elimination is its negative advantage, but its positive attribute lies in the psychedelic (‘mindrevealing’)1 state it can engender – a state described no better than by the original English
opium eater himself, Thomas De Quincey:
O just and righteous opium! … thou bildest upon the bosom of darkness, out of the
fantastic imagery of the brain, cities and temples, beyond the art of Phidias and
Praxiteles – beyond the splendours of Babylon and Hekatómpylos; and, “from the
anarchy of dreaming sleep,” callest into sunny light the faces of long-buried beauties
… thou hast the keys of Paradise, O just, subtle, and mighty opium!2
Two decades following the publication of these words the First Opium War commences
(1839) in which China is martially punished for trying to hinder the British trade of opium to
the Chinese people. Though opium, derived from the innocent garden poppy Papavar
somniferum, may cradle the keys to Paradise it also clutches the keys to Perdition: its addictive
thus potentially ruinous nature is commonly known. Today, partly for these reasons, opiates
are mostly illegal without license – stringently so in their most potent forms of morphine and
heroin.
Holy dread: the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche took opium, this milk of Paradise,
sometimes confessedly in dangerously high doses. He was also a heavy user of other
psychoactive drugs including potassium bromide, a mysterious ‘Javanese narcotic’, and most
unremittingly, chloral hydrate, a known hallucinogen. This narcotic aspect of Nietzsche’s life
is neglected; it is the aim of this text to reveal the extent of his drug use and its effects,
including a report of one of Nietzsche’s psychedelic trips. Moreover we shall see how this
drug use inspired his philosophy – and how his philosophy inspired this use.
Nietzsche was born in 1844 to a Lutheran pastor who died five years thereafter, at the age of
thirty-six, due to a ‘softening of the brain’. This fatal malady of his father’s was to worry
Nietzsche, as a possible hereditary condition, until his own mental collapse in 1889. Friedrich
Nietzsche did suffer severe afflictions of the brain and body, beginning in childhood. At the
age of thirteen, the severe headaches which were to plague him for the rest of his life began in
earnest.3 So strong were these headaches that near to a whole school semester was lost as the
young pupil was prevented from excessive reading by his mother. However, as a bright
student, the young Nietzsche surged on and was awarded a place at Schulpforta, a boarding
1
‘Psychedelic’
is
a
term
coined
in
1957
by
psychiatrist
Dr
Humphry
Osmond
to
emphasise
the
psychotherapeutic
value
of
certain
psychoactive
drugs,
notably
LSD.
The
etymological
conjuncts
are
psyche
(mind)
and
dēloun
(to
reveal),
the
latter
from
dēlos
(visible,
clear).
I
use
the
term
‘psychedelic’
broadly
in
this
text
to
refer
to
a
chemically-‐induced
state
of
mind
that
brings
forth
extraordinary
representations.
2
Thomas
De
Quincey,
Confessions
of
an
English
Opium
Eater,
pleasures,
p.
195.
1821AD.
3
Curtis
Cate,
p.
13.
1
school renowned for its classical studies. Nietzsche wore spectacles as he was very myopic
even at this early stage. A doctor in the school once examined his eyes and called attention to
the possibility that Nietzsche may go blind at an advanced age.4 This foresight virtually bore
reality, with Nietzsche complaining that in 1879, ‘in the thirty-sixth year of life, I arrived at
the lowest point of my vitality – I still lived, but without being able to see three paces in front
of me.’5 As Nietzsche’s mother, sister, and others believed6, it was his poor eyesight combined
with his lust for reading that caused his initial migraines. To counter the pain, Nietzsche
eventually turned to drugs. This in its turn may have exacerbated the problem due to the
toxicity, addiction, and withdrawal symptoms those nineteenth century drugs produced.
Nietzsche experimented with drugs early on in life. At the beginning of the 1860s, in
Schulpforta, he snorted prohibited snuff with his fellow pupil Paul Deussen,7 and in his fifth
year he joined the ‘Wild Clique’: a fraternal club that endorsed smoking and drinking and
spurned studiousness. Nietzsche, however, came to scorn alcohol but not before he was
demoted from his years-long supervisory position as head of class due to an incident of
excessive drinking.8
Whilst a student of philology at Leipzig University in 1868, Nietzsche took time out to join
the Prussian military machine, training on horseback. As the best rider of the new recruits, he
was given the wildest steed to tame. The steed, however, was not for taming: a jump caused
Nietzsche a grievous blow to the chest as it cracked into the pommel of the saddle. Ten days
of acute pain were relieved by morphine.9
In 1869, at the mere age of twenty-four, Nietzsche is appointed chair of classical philology at
Basel University10 a month before he is awarded his doctorate (from Leipzig) – awarded,
furthermore, without examination. A year later Nietzsche takes leave of his position to serve
as a medic in the Franco-Prussian War. He is taught how to administer chloroform – a popular
anesthetic at the time. After chloroform’s discovery in 1831 it was also used recreationally as
it produced euphoria. Euphoria, however, was the furthest state of Nietzsche’s mind as he
treated the war wounded, a depressing mental state that could only have worsened as he
himself became ill there. As Nietzsche writes to his friend Karl von Gersdorff:
I fell very ill myself and quickly developed a severe attack of dysentery and diphtheria.
… After I had been dosed with opium and injections of tannin and silver nitrate for
several days, the worst danger was over.11
As well as contracting these intestinal, bacterial diseases, it is believed that he may have
caught syphilis here too, if not in a brothel a few years before. It is a matter of (much) dispute
as to whether Nietzsche’s general malaise and cognitive downfall in 1889 was caused by this
mostly sexually transmitted bacterial infection. As we have seen, however, his headaches had
started from a young age, and his father may have passed the problem down to his son.
Whatever the case may be, Nietzsche’s suffering only increased after 1870 leading to
increased drug use to ease the pain. But it was more than pain relief that the drugs caused.
4
Paul
Deussen,
1859-‐1864.
Conversations
with
Nietzsche,
p.
15.
5
Ecce
Homo,
Wise,
§1,
p.
38.
6
Elisabeth
Förster-‐Nietzsche,
The
Life
of
Nietzsche,
vol.
II,
ch.
XXVII.
7
Paul
Deussen,
1859-‐1864.
Conversations
with
Nietzsche,
p.10.
8
Paul
Deussen,
1859-‐1864.
Conversations
with
Nietzsche,
p.15.
9
Letter
to
Erwin
Rohde,
3rd
April
1868.
10
Incidentally
where
Paracelsus
is
believed
to
have
re-‐introduced
opium
(as
Laudanum)
to
Europe
in
the
sixteenth
century.
11
Letter
to
Karl
von
Gersdorff,
20th
October
1870.
My
italics.
2
Before Nietzsche had become a professor at Basel, he had become an ardent disciple of the
atheist, Idealist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. In a sentence, Schopenhauer asserted that
the world we perceive is but a human representation of the inner essence of everything, which
is will. Schopenhauer inspired Nietzsche’s first published book, The Birth of Tragedy from the
Spirit of Music, and he arguably returned as inspiration for Nietzsche’s later works. As a highly
creative individual, Nietzsche could not have overlooked these words from Schopenhauer:
By wine or opium we can intensify and considerably heighten our mental powers, but
as soon as the right measure of stimulus is exceeded, the effect will be exactly the
opposite.12
The double role of opium as a medicinal sedative and as an intellectual, artistic catalyst was
well known, and Nietzsche was certainly well aware of the creative possibilities of such
substances. In his 1870 essay The Dionysian Worldview, a precursor to the extended Birth of
Tragedy, Nietzsche begins by stating that,
There are two states in which man arrives at the rapturous feeling of existence,
namely in dreaming and in intoxication.13
He then identifies these two states with the gods Apollo and Dionysus, respectively. Loosely
speaking, these are in turn identified with Schopenhauer’s world of representation and of will.
Apollo, commonly adorned with the opium poppy, is valued as signifying ordered beauty,
whereas Dionysus, the forest god of wine and trance, is valued as signifying the chaotic drive
of unfettered lust and the primal loss of self. In antiquity, Dionysus was regarded as an exotic
god who led a procession of bearded satyrs and wild women: the maenads. There were a
number of Dionysian cults in ancient Greece involving much sex, drugs and loss of control –
later to become the orgiastic Bacchanalia against which the Roman authorities legislated
under threat of death. Under his supposed epithet of Iacchus, Dionysus is also closely
associated with the Eleusinian Mysteries, beloved of those in psychedelic circles. The son of
Zeus, Dionysus is reborn after death – a story that bears equivalences to Christ. In Nietzsche’s
later works, however, Dionysus becomes explicitly equated to the Antichrist, as we shall
show. In Nietzsche’s early description of the Dionysian state, one cannot help but compare it
to a psychoactive drug report with its consequential come down:
For the rapture of the Dionysian state with its annihilation of the ordinary bounds
and limits of existence contains, while it lasts, a [will-less] lethargic element in which
all personal experience of the past became immersed. This chasm of oblivion
separates the worlds of everyday reality and the Dionysian reality. But as soon as this
everyday reality re-enters consciousness, it is experienced as such, with nausea: an
ascetic, will-negating mood is the fruit of these states. … In the consciousness of
awakening from intoxication he sees everywhere the terrible and absurd in human
existence: it nauseates him. Now he understands the wisdom of the forest god.14
The link between his coinciding opium-treated illnesses in the Franco-Prussian war and his
work on Greek tragedy cannot be overlooked. Indeed Nietzsche made the connection in the
later critical preface/postscript he produced for his first book, stating that,
12
Arthur
Schopenhauer,
Essay
on
the
Freedom
of
the
Will,
ch.
III.
13
The
Dionysian
Worldview,
§1.
14
The
Dionysian
Worldview,
§3.
3
slowly convalescing from an illness contracted in the field, [I] gave definite form to
The Birth of Tragedy…15
This book puts forward the theory that the origins of Greek tragedy lie in the Dionysian
chorus that emerged from the older Dionysian mystical festivals. When fused with the more
ordered Apollonian Greek element, the play structure resulted, with Dionysus at first always
the tragic protagonist. The true Dionysian state that the tragic play sought to symbolize was
one of rapture, of Rausch: the rush of intoxication. Thus Nietzsche begins his philosophical
career arguing for the emergence of an art form, Tragedy, from intoxicated inspiration.
Nietzsche’s understanding of this state is gleaned from literature including that of
Schopenhauer, and perhaps his own intoxication at the time. Schopenhauer argued that all
individuality is but a representation (the principium individuationis) and that in its essential
depths, our individual will is not separate from the single universal will at the basis of reality.
The Dionysian state causes a dread-inducing fragmentation of one’s represented individuality,
conducing a dispersion of oneself into that deeper metaphysical unity. Nietzsche continues,
If we add to this dread the blissful ecstasy which, prompted by the same
fragmentation of the principium individuationis, rises up from man’s innermost core,
indeed from nature, we are vouchsafed a glimpse into the nature of the Dionysiac,
most immediately understandable to using the analogy of intoxication. Under the
influence of the narcotic potion hymned by all primitive men and peoples, or in the
powerful approach of spring, joyfully penetrating the whole of nature, those
Dionysiac urges are awakened, and as they grow more intense, subjectivity becomes a
complete forgetting of the self.16
In his later postscripted preface to the book, Nietzsche argues that this Dionysian ‘madness’
might be a ‘neurosis of health’ – that is, a healthy madness which would only appear to be an
oxymoron to a culture in decline. In this added section he writes,
Might visions and hallucinations not have been shared by whole communities, by
whole cult gatherings? And what if … it was madness itself, to use a phrase of Plato’s,
that brought the greatest blessings upon Greece?17
Hence Nietzsche, from the outset, was enthused about narcotic, psychedelic intoxication and
its value, whilst simultaneously he himself was becoming increasingly intoxicated as his illness
progressed.
Progress it did: severe insomnia, stomach and intestinal pains, eyestrain and increasing
blindness creeps up upon his person. In 1876 he is granted a long period of absence from
Basel due to his sickness. Many of his personal letters complain of his ailments, to the extent
that one judges him to be a ‘justified hypochondriac’, if that also be not an oxymoron. In 1879
he was forced to completely end his professorship and life at Basel University due to frequent
and excessive headaches, nausea, vomiting and seizures.18 As a result, Nietzsche was now free
to pursue an unlimited life of philosophy, which had progressively become his ideal.
Though he left, his ailments did not. The beginning of the 1880s were in fact his most
intense period of pain. As well as suffering physiologically, he was saddened by the loss of his
friendship with Lou Salomé and Paul Rée. Just before he begins to write what he considered
15
The
Birth
of
Tragedy,
Attempt
at
a
Self-‐Criticism,
§1,
p.
3.
16
The
Birth
of
Tragedy,
§1,
pp.
16-‐17.
17
The
Birth
of
Tragedy,
Attempt
at
a
Self-‐Criticism,
§4,
pp.
6-‐7.
18
See
Curtis
Cate,
Friedrich
Nietzsche,
p.
280.
4
to be his masterpiece, Thus Spoke Zarathustra,19 he writes to his two formerly close friends the
following:
My dears, Lou and Rée:
… Consider me, the two of you, as a semilunatic with a sore head who has been
totally bewildered by long solitude. To this, I think, sensible insight into the state of
things I have come after taking a huge dose of opium – in desperation. But instead of
losing my reason as a result, I seem at last to have come to reason. …20
Over a decade later Lou Salomé writes in her book, Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken, that
intoxication and dreams were a central inspiration to Nietzsche’s life and philosophy. She
writes,
Nietzsche … was convinced that especially during conditions of intoxication and
dream, a fullness of the past could be revived in the individual’s present. Dreams
always played a great role in his life and thinking, and during his last years he often
drew from them – as with the solution of a riddle – the contents of his teachings. In
this manner he employed, for instance, the dream related in Zarathustra (II, “The
Soothsayer”), which came to him in the fall of 1882 in Leipzig; he never tired of
carrying it about him and interpreting it.21
With his concurrent opium use one can compare the inspiration derived from such opiuminduced dreaming with that of the Romantics, to whom Nietzsche was ostensibly averse.
Nietzsche was also, famously, averse to alcohol – which he compared unfavourably to opiates
in his 1882 book, The Joyous Science:
Perhaps Asians are distinguished above Europeans by a capacity for longer, deeper
calm; even their opiates have a slow effect and require patience, as opposed to the
disgusting suddenness of the European poison, alcohol.22
The reverence and inspiration that Nietzsche derives from opium can also be witnessed in the
second edition of that same work, in two poems inspired by poppy-derived opium:
… Only on my bed flailed,
Poppy and good conscience, those
Trusted soporifics, failed. …
One hour passed, or two, or three–
Or a year? – when suddenly
All my thoughts and mind were drowned
In timeless monotony:
An abyss without a ground
Opened up – not one more sound. …23
19
Published
in
January
1883.
20
Letter
to
Lou
Salomé
and
Paul
Rée,
mid-‐December
1882.
21
Lou
Salomé,
Friedrich
Nietzsche
in
seinen
Werken,
ch.
III,
p.
144.
Also
note
especially
in
Zarathustra
these
chapters:
Of
Great
Events,
the
coffin-‐of-‐masks
nightmare
in
The
Prophet,
The
Stillest
Hour,
Of
The
Three
Evil
Things,
and
The
Intoxicated
Song.
22
The
Joyous
Science,
Book
I,
§43.
23
The
Joyous
Science,
Appendix,
The
Mysterious
Bark,
p.
359.
5
Such opium pipe-dream poetry ranks alongside those of the Kubla Khan clan. In a
subsequent poem, Nietzsche poses the problem of his pain with provision of poppies:
… Pain writes with daggers that are flying
Into my bones:
“World has no heart;
The fool bears her a grudge and groans.”
Pour poppies, pour,
O fever! Poison in my brain!
You test my brow too long with pain.
Why do you ask, “For what reward?” …
You fever, I should bless?– 24
Nietzsche’s ills were treated by him as both a superficial curse and as a deeper blessing. It was
the ailments that necessitated the opiates and other drugs, which in turn further inspired his
thought. A physiologically healthy Nietzsche may have dissipated into the shadows of history.
In this respect his drug use was a vital condition of his profound, earth-shattering philosophy
which uncovered and uprooted the morbidly entrenched covert legacy of Christianity in
western society.
Nietzsche pushed himself to, and perhaps beyond, the limits of human intellectualization. To
fuel this heroic drive even opium-injected dreams may not have sufficed. As Lou Salomé, to
whom Nietzsche twice proposed, continued to write in her biography of the man:
And yet, the tranquil dream is insufficient for that quest. What is needed is a much
more real, effective, and even more terrible experiencing, namely through orgiastic
Dionysian conditions and the chaos of frenzied passions – yes madness itself as a
means of sinking back down into the mass of entwined feelings and imaginings. This
seemed for Nietzsche the last road into the primal depths imbedded within us.
Quite early Nietzsche had brooded over the meaning of madness as a possible source
for knowledge and its inner sense that may have led the ancients to discern a sign of
divine election.25
Did Nietzsche seek to induce divine madness so as to fully intuit the depths of the psyche?
With this in mind, his famous maxim “What does not kill you makes you stronger”26 takes on
a form applicable to the intake of psychoactive substances. Did Nietzsche take hazardous
mixes and doses of psychoactive drugs? Yes. It may have made his philosophy stronger, but it
may have killed him as a philosopher too – this was certainly the view of his mother:
He used all the sleeping medications that have ever been invented, said the
professors. His worst one was chloral. That one practically killed him.27
Chloral, and its admixture with water, chloral hydrate, was a common sedative in the
nineteenth century, now a controlled substance. More than opium, this drug appears to be
24
The
Joyous
Science,
Appendix,
Rimus
remedium,
p.
365.
25
Lou
Salomé,
Friedrich
Nietzsche
in
seinen
Werken,
ch.
III,
p.
145.
26
Twilight
of
the
Idols,
Maxims,
§8,
p.
33.
27
1893,
as
reported
by
Heinrich
Lec
in
Conversations
with
Nietzsche,
§75,
p.
230.
6
Nietzsche’s preferred poison. In a letter to his friend and former colleague, Franz Overbeck,
he writes in 1883:
I realized that in the last two months I have consumed 50 grams of chloral hydrate
(pure). I never slept without this drug! But I have slept, now, after fourteen days in a
row - oh what bliss!28
In one of her biographies of her brother, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche – who at times took
care of Nietzsche – remonstrates against his abuse of chloral:
In the winter of 1882-3, owing to that terrible influenza, he had for the first time
used chloral regularly, in large doses. He was so unfavourably impressed with its
peculiar effects that in the spring of 1883 he did his best to cure himself of the habit.
… [When] he took chloral before going to bed, it led next morning to a curiously
excitable condition, in which men and things appeared to him in a totally false light.
Towards noon, he thought, this condition vanished, and more “philanthropic
sentiments” returned. Accordingly he had become very careful, although the sleep
produced by chloral seems to have been remarkably pleasant – not dull and heavy but
filled with delightful dreams. … If only he had kept to this one drug, however, the
result might have been less serious.29
So his mother and sister both maintained that it was the effect of large doses and mixtures of
drugs that brought Nietzsche his cognitive ruin, his madness.30 Chloral hydrate was
synthesised in 1832, and since 1869 had been used for hypnotic or sedative purposes, i.e. for
sleep induction and pain relief. It is now known to be potentially hazardous with a risk of
death in the case of intoxication. It is not commonly considered a psychedelic drug, yet it can
produce visions and auditory ‘hallucinations’.
One of Nietzsche’s students reported that,
Insomnia, which was not improved by repeated overwork, by chloral or potassium
bromide, but made worse, excruciating headaches, and other neuralgic ailments
tormented his life.31
Potassium bromide is an anticonvulsant (anti-seizure) and sedative drug, and is used today in
veterinary practice, and in Germany is still administered to human beings. Nietzsche’s dual
use of chloral and potassium bromide is notable because it was this combination that led to
the bewildering experiences of the English author Evelyn Waugh. These effects affected him
to such a degree that they provide the content to his peculiar autobiographical work, The
Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. This concocted sleeping-draught caused auditory and conceptual
hallucinations, often in a terrifying manner, with voices suggesting suicide. When Waugh was
admitted to St Bartholomew's Hospital for treatment, his regular chloral was immediately
withdrawn and replaced with paraldehyde, a move that immediately stopped the
hallucinations.32
28
Letter
to
Franz
Overbeck,
1st
February
1883.
29
Elisabeth
Förster-‐Nietzsche,
The
Life
of
Nietzsche,
vol.
II,
ch.
XXVII.
30
His
sister
may
have
had
an
ulterior
motive
to
promote
this
narcotic
view
of
the
cause
of
his
madness:
to
dismiss
claims
that
syphilis
was
to
blame
(see,
e.g.,
E.
F.
Podach).
But
as
we
see,
it
was
not
only
his
sister
who
spoke
of
his
excessive
use
of
chloral
–
and
besides,
madness
onset
by
ongoing
drug
abuse
is
hardly
more
respectable
than
student-‐era
brothel
debauchery.
31
H.
Göring,
Conversations
with
Nietzsche,
§38,
p.
100.
(My
italics.)
32
See
Selina
Hastings,
Evelyn
Waugh:
A
Biography.
7
The well-known neurologist Oliver Sacks has also written of the psychedelic experiences that
chloral hydrate caused him:
Depressed and insomniac, I was taking ever-increasing amounts of chloral hydrate to
get to sleep, and was up to fifteen times the usual dose every night. … [But] for the
first time in several months I went to bed without my usual knockout dose. …
[Upon] waking , I found myself excruciatingly sensitive to sounds. … I went across
the road, as I often did, for a cup of coffee and a sandwich. As I was stirring the
coffee it suddenly turned green, then purple. I looked up, startled, and saw a huge
proboscidean head, like an elephant seal. Panic seized me; I slammed a five-dollar
note on the table and ran across the road to a bus on the other side. But all the
passengers on the bus seemed to have smooth white heads like giant eggs, with huge
glittering eyes like the faceted compound eyes of insects – their eyes seemed to move
in sudden jerks, which increased the feeling of their fearfulness and alienness.33
In the end Sacks discovered that it was the fact that he had stopped taking chloral that caused
the hallucinations, a case of delirium tremens. Thus we see that chloral hydrate is addictive,
toxic, and directly and posteriorly hallucinatory. Taken in large doses and mixed with other
drugs, the effects can only be potent. There is an account of a psychedelic experience
Nietzsche had in mid-August 1884. His friend Resa von Schirnhofer decided to visit
Nietzsche in Sils-Maria, Switzerland. After an absence of one and a half days, von
Schirnhofer ventures to his house and is led into the dining room – then:
As I stood waiting by the table, the door to the adjacent room on the right opened,
and Nietzsche appeared. With a distraught expression on his pale face, he leaned
wearily against the post of the half-opened door and immediately began to speak
about the unbearableness of his ailment. He described to me how, when he closed his
eyes, he saw an abundance of fantastic flowers, winding and intertwining, constantly
growing and changing forms and colours in exotic luxuriance, sprouting one out of
the other. “I never get any rest,” he complained…34
Von Schirnhofer also tells of Nietzsche’s unorthodox and deviant means of acquiring his
drugs:
In Rapallo and in other places of the Riviera di Levante, where he had spent his times
of worst health, he had written for himself all kinds of prescriptions signed Dr
Nietzsche, which had been prepared and filled without question or hesitation.
Unfortunately I took no notes and the only one I remember is chloral hydrate. But
since Nietzsche, as he expressly told me, had been surprised never to be asked
whether he was a medical doctor authorized to prescribe this kind of medication, I
conclude that some dubious medicines must have been among them.35
So Nietzsche, a user of the addictive substance opium since at least 1870, a heavy chloral
hydrate user, and a proponent of the intoxicated Dionysian state, uses his doctoral title to
prescribe himself the drugs he wants. If ever the term drug fiend were applied to a true
philosopher, Nietzsche would fit the case. ‘Psychonaut’ certainly fits, a name coined by
33
Oliver
Sacks,
Hallucinations,
ch.
VI,
pp.
115-‐116.
34
Conversations
with
Nietzsche,
§52,
p.
164.
35
Conversations
with
Nietzsche,
§52,
p.
163.
8
philosopher Ernst Jünger,36 whom Heidegger called ‘the only genuine continuer of
Nietzsche’.37 Von Schirnhofer speculated over whether Nietzsche also used hashish, stating
that his intensive reading of French authors must have included Charles Baudelaire who
wrote of hashish and opium trances in Artificial Paradises, and in The Flowers of Evil.
In Ecce Homo, his autobiography, Nietzsche writes,
If one wants to get free from an unendurable pressure one needs hashish. Very well, I
needed Wagner.38
This suggests Nietzsche was not a hashish user, at least not a frequent one. But with
Nietzsche’s somewhat haughty position, his belief in a necessary ‘pathos of distance’39 between
people, and his championing of great men of intellect and art, he must have felt endeared and
perhaps tempted by Baudelaire’s words on the drug:
I am not asserting that hashish produces in all men all of the [fantastical] effects I
have described here. I have more or less recounted the phenomena generally
produced, except for a few variations, among individuals of artistic and philosophical
bent. … But there are others in whom the drug raises only a raucous madness, a
violent merriment resembling vertigo … [yet it can conduce] the extreme
development of the poetic mind…40
Whether or not Nietzsche took hashish he certainly exhibited an extreme development of the
poetic mind. In a passage in his autobiography, Nietzsche speaks of the singular,
overwhelming type of inspiration with which he is bequeathed. Though he does not connect
Nietzsche’s ‘inspiration’ to his drug use, the Nietzsche biographer Curtis Cate asserts of this
passage that ‘his description of the hallucinating moments of inspiration during which he felt
powerless and “possessed” merits a place in any good anthology of mystical experiences’.41
When we consider the view that psychedelic experiences are mystical experiences, in the vein
of William James’ varieties thereof,42 we can agree with this assessment. As we saw with
Waugh and Sacks, chloral hydrate can cause auditory and visual hallucinations, a drug we
know Nietzsche self-prescribed and used in high doses. It is highly plausible then that
Nietzsche’s ‘inspiration’ was drug-induced hallucination – and no less valuable for that. In
fact, his revelations can be witnessed as testimony to the potential supreme value of
psychedelic chemicals within the right mind:
Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century a distinct conception of what poets
of strong ages called inspiration? … If one had the slightest residue of superstition left
in one, one would hardly be able to set aside the idea that one is merely incarnation,
merely mouthpiece, merely medium of overwhelming forces. The concept of
revelation, in the sense that something suddenly, with unspeakable certainty and
subtlety, becomes visible, audible, something that shakes and overturns one to the
depths, simply describes the fact. One hears, one does not seek; one takes, one does
not ask who gives; a thought flashes up like lightning, with necessity, unfalteringly
36
See
his
Annäherungen:
Drogen
und
Rausch
(Approaches
to
Drugs
and
Intoxication),
1970.
In
Nietzsche’s
Daybreak,
§575,
he
refers
to
himself
as
an
‘aeronaut
of
the
spirit’.
37
Gesamtausgabe
Band
90,
227.
38
Ecce
Homo,
Clever,
§6.
39
See
On
the
Genealogy
of
Morality,
bk
I,
§2.
40
Charles
Baudelaire,
Artificial
Paradises,
On
Wine
and
Hashish
(1851),
§V,
p.
23.
41
Curtis
Cate,
Friedrich
Nietzsche,
ch.
38,
p.
541.
42
See
William
James,
The
Varieties
of
Religious
Experience,
ch.
XVI.
9
formed – I have never had any choice. An ecstasy whose tremendous tension
sometimes discharges itself in a flood of tears, whilst one’s steps now involuntarily
rush along, now involuntarily lag; a complete being outside of oneself with the
distinct consciousness of a multitude of subtle shudders and trickles down to one’s
toes; a depth of happiness in which the most painful and gloomy things appear …
Everything is in the highest degree involuntary but takes place as in a tempest of a
feeling of freedom, of absoluteness, of power, of divinity. … This is my experience of
inspiration; I do not doubt that one has to go back thousands of years to find anyone
who could say to me “it is mine also”.43
As Lou Salomé intimated, Nietzsche may have pushed himself to the edge of madness to
overcome the common condition of man to taste divinity. Was it his psychedelic inspiration
that caused both his psychological apotheosis and his physiological downfall? With regard to
his downfall, his sister believed that,
The correct diagnosis, perhaps, would be this: a brain exhausted by overstrain of the
nerves of head and eye that could no longer resist taking drugs to excess, and thus
became disabled.44
Nietzsche’s infamous45 sister also describes another drug that she blamed for his stroke into
mental destruction in 1889: the Javanese narcotic:
Above all I regard two sleeping draughts, chloral and Javanese narcotic, as responsible
for his paralytic stroke … [In] 1884, so far as I remember, he got to know a
Dutchman, who recommended him a Javanese narcotic, and presented him with a
fairly large bottle … The stuff tasted like rather strong alcohol and had an outlandish
smell … The Dutchman impressed us with the fact that only a few drops should be
taken at a time in a glass of water. I tried it, and observed a somewhat exhilarating
effect. … Later, in the autumn of 1885, he confessed to me that on one occasion he
had taken a few drops too much, with the result that he suddenly threw himself to the
ground in a fit of convulsive laughter. … During the early days of his insanity he used
often to say in confidence to our mother that he “had taken twenty drops” (he did not
mention of what), and that his brain had then “gone off the track.” … Perhaps the
worst of it all was that he used both chloral and the Javanese drug at the same time.46
The island of Java was part of the colonized Dutch East Indies. In 1875 coca plants were
introduced to Java, eventually leading to the Nederlandsche Cocaïne Fabriek in 1900, the year of
Nietzsche’s death. The Javanese coca leaf was not as potent as its Peruvian sibling in
Nietzsche’s time, but it was cheaper.47 The Javanese narcotic his sister spoke of thus likely
43
Ecce
Homo,
Zarathustra,
§3.
See
also
Nietzsche’s
description
of
a
philosopher
in
Beyond
Good
and
Evil,
§292.
44
Elisabeth
Förster-‐Nietzsche,
The
Life
of
Nietzsche,
vol.
II,
ch.
XXVII.
45
Walter
Benjamin
sees
the
lady
in
this
light
in
his
own
psychedelic
mescaline
experience:
'From
the
cracks
of
the
Förster
House
grow
tufts
of
hair.
The
Förster
House:
(she
[Elisabeth
Förster-‐
Nietzsche]
has
turned
the
Nietzsche
Archive
into
a
Förster
House
[forester's
lodge])
the
Förster
house
is
of
red
stone.
I
am
a
spindle
in
its
banister:
an
obdurate,
hardened
post.
But
that
is
no
longer
the
totem
pole
–
only
a
wretched
copy.
Chamois'
foot
or
horse's
hoof
of
the
devil:
a
vagina
symbol.'
(On
Hashish,
ch.
XI,
22nd
May
1934.)
46
Elisabeth
Förster-‐Nietzsche,
The
Life
of
Nietzsche,
vol.
II,
ch.
XXVII.
47
See
Toine
Pieters’
Java
Coca
and
the
Dutch
Narcotics
Industry:
An
Almost
Forgotten
20th
C.
History
of
Drugs
Story:
https://pointsadhsblog.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/java-‐coca-‐and-‐the-‐
dutch-‐narcotics-‐industry-‐an-‐almost-‐forgotten-‐20th-‐c-‐history-‐of-‐drugs-‐story/
10
contained traces of cocaine, and possibly the assorted herbs of the traditional Indonesian
healing concoction Jamu. It would be unconvincing that combining this combination with
chloral, opium, potassium bromide, etc., would not lead to hallucinations, madness, mental
breakdown, and apotheosis: Nietzsche signed off final letters of 1889 with the name
Dionysus,48 whom he had recently identified as the Antichrist:
Who knows the true name of the Antichrist? – with the name of a Greek god: I
called it the Dionysiac.49
In Nietzsche’s mature work, Dionysus becomes the representation of the overman figure: a
type that affirms and revels in pain and destruction, the polar contrary to the Christian type
who only values joy in peace and comfort. In 1888 Nietzsche exclaims:
Affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems, the will to life rejoicing
in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types – that is what I
called Dionysian … beyond pity and terror, to realize in oneself the eternal joy of
becoming – that joy which also encompasses joy in destruction … I am the last
disciple of the philosopher Dionysus.50
After The Birth of Tragedy, Dionysus returns to Nietzsche’s philosophy in 1886 in Beyond
Good and Evil. Now, rather than subservient to Schopenhauer’s unwitting Christian values,
Dionysus represents Nietzsche’s radical revaluation of those values that lie hidden beneath
western culture, and thus does Dionysus denote a new form of thinking – without doubt a
dangerous form to many. In this extreme opposition to such sacerdotal ideology, one
understands why Dionysus is the Antichrist, both of whom are Nietzsche. He is the
Antichrist Psychonaut: his pagan philosopher forest god of intoxication speaks to him –
perhaps in the mode of his aforementioned ‘inspiration’, or black revelation:
“…I often think how I can help [mankind] go forward and make them stronger,
deeper, and more evil than they are.” “Stronger, deeper, and more evil?” I asked,
frightened. “Yes,” he said once again, “stronger, deeper, and more evil – more
beautiful too.” And at that the tempter god smiled his halcyon smile, as if he had just
uttered a charming compliment.51
A new Dionysian cult based on Nietzsche’s reformulation of the god might very well suffer
the same capital jurisdictive fate as that which befell its Roman predecessors. Whatever the
future yields, Nietzsche’s philosophy will be a significant factor thereof. His philosophy has
already, a century on, had a decisive impact upon history. That this philosophy was provoked,
in a degree hitherto undiagnosed, by reveries occasioned by chemical measures exposes one to
the realization of the great power of these substances, powers guiding history. Nietzsche
risked himself, his sanity, his life, so to touch the heavens and taste the Hades of human
mentality – he may thereby have destroyed himself. But destruction is a joy to Dionysus, a
deity who shall be born again.
48
E.g.
to
Cosima
Wagner:
‘Ariadne,
I
love
you.
–
Dionysus’
(Early
January,
1889).
In
Beyond
Good
and
Evil,
§295,
(1886)
Nietzsche
writes,
‘Dionysus
…
once
said,
“In
certain
cases
I
love
human
beings”
(and
he
was
alluding
to
Ariadne,
who
was
present)…’
49
The
Birth
of
Tragedy,
Attempt
at
a
Self-‐Criticism,
§5.
1886.
50
Twilight
of
the
Idols,
Ancients,
§5.
A Dionysian will thus welcome the ‘bad trip’, and desire its
eternal return.
51
Beyond
Good
and
Evil,
§295.
11
© Peter Sjöstedt-H MMXV
Bibliography
Baudelaire,
C.
(1860/1996)
Artificial
Paradises,
New
York:
Citadel
Benjamin,
W.
(1927-‐34/2006)
On
Hashish,
Cambridge:
Belknap
Press
of
Harvard
University
Breazeale,
D.
–
Ecce
Psycho:
Remarks
on
the
case
of
Nietzsche
(International
Studies
in
Philosophy
XXIII/2)
Cate,
C.
(2002)
Friedrich
Nietzsche,
London:
Random
House
De
Quincey,
T.
(1821/1994)
Confessions
of
an
English
Opium
Eater,
Ware:
Wordsworth
Classics
Förster-‐Nietzsche,
E.
(1915/2007)
The
Life
of
Nietzsche–Volume
2,
The
Classics
Gilman,
S.
L.
(ed.)
(1987)
Conversations
with
Nietzsche,
Oxford:
Oxford
University
Press
Greenfield,
R.
(2006)
Timothy
Leary:
A
Biography,
Orlando:
Harcourt
Books
Hastings, S. (1994). Evelyn Waugh: A Biography, London: Sinclair-Stevenson
James,
W.
(1902/1985)
The
Varieties
of
Religious
Experience,
London:
Penguin
Jünger,
E.
(1970/1980)
Annäherungen:
Drogen
und
Rausch,
Stuttgart:
Klett-‐Cotta
im
Ullstein
Taschenbuch
Khazaee,
M.
K.
–
The
Case
of
Nietzsche’s
Madness
(Existenz,
Vol.
3,
No.
1,
Spring
2008)
Lippit,
J.
&
Urpeth,
J.
(ed.s)
(2000)
Nietzsche
and
the
Divine,
Manchester:
Clinamen
Press
Middleton,
C.
(ed.)
(1969/1996)
Selected
Letter
of
Friedrich
Nietzsche,
Indianapolis:
Hackett
Nietzsche,
F.
(1870/1997)
The
Dionysian
Worldview
(Journal
of
Nietzsche
Studies,
No.
13,
Spring
1997,
pp.
81
–
97)
Nietzsche,
F.
(1871/1993)
The
Birth
of
Tragedy,
London:
Penguin
Nietzsche,
F.
(1881/1997)
Daybreak,
Cambridge:
Cambridge
University
Press
Nietzsche,
F.
(1882/1974)
The
Gay
Science,
New
York:
Vintage
Nietzsche,
F.
(1883/1969)
Thus
Spoke
Zarathustra,
London:
Penguin
Nietzsche,
F.
(1886/2008)
Beyond
Good
and
Evil,
Oxford:
Oxford
University
Press
Nietzsche,
F.
(1887/1998)
On
the
Genealogy
of
Morality,
Indianapolis:
Hackett
Nietzsche,
F.
(1888/1992)
Ecce
Homo,
London:
Penguin
Nietzsche,
F.
(1889/1990)
Twilight
of
the
Idols
and
The
Antichrist,
London:
Penguin
Nietzsche,
F.
(1906[ph]]/1968)
The
Will
to
Power,
New
York:
Random
House
12
Nussbaum,
M.
C.
–
The
Transfigurations
of
Intoxication:
Nietzsche,
Schopenhauer,
and
Dionysus
(Arion:
A
Journal
of
Humanities
and
the
Classics,
Third
Series,
Vo.
1,
No.
2,
Spring
1991,
pp.
75
–
111)
Sacks,
O.
(2012)
Hallucinations,
New
York:
Random
House
Salomé,
L.
(1894/2001)
Nietzsche,
Illinois:
Illinois
Schopenhauer,
A.
(1818/1966)
The
World
as
Will
and
Representation,
volume
1,
New
York:
Dover
Schopenhauer,
A.
(1839/2005)
Essay
on
the
Freedom
of
the
Will,
Mineola:
Dover
Waugh,
E.
(1957/1973)
The
Ordeal
of
Gilbert
Pinfold,
London:
Chapman
&
Hall
www.nietzschesource.org
www.philosopher.eu
13
Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes