club-footed messiah

Just read Dominic Streatfeild’s Brainwash, which contains something to the effect that at least one wheel of the whole psychedelic bandwagon may have started rolling by the intervention of Robert Graves.

As every schoolboy knows, in Claudius the God, Graves has the emperor poisoned by a dish of mushrooms. Shortly after the book was published in 1938, Graves was contacted by a young banker and amateur mycologist who wanted to know which were the deadly mushrooms. A ‘shrooms related correspondence followed, with Graves drawing on his researches into paganism to assert that the best hallucinogenic variants were to be found in Mexico.

Twenty years later, R Gordon Wasson headed south in the way pointed by Graves; found the mushrooms, saw the face of God, wrote the famous article for Life and off we went down the yellow brick road.

Wasson supplied some mushrooms to LSD inventor Albert Hoffman, who turned them into chemically refined psilocybin, which he passed on to Graves. (Oddly enough, at around the same time Hoffman was also tripping with his old friend Ernst Junger). Graves, in turn, evangelised for psilocybin in his circle.

All this was entirely independent of the CIA’s experiments with LSD in the MK-ULTRA programme, which gave rise eventually to the Leary/Kesey psychedelic nexus.

Except that in The White Goddess, Graves attempt to create a syncretic history of paganism, he refers to a figure he calls the club footed messiah, a kind of master of the revels at Dionysian orgies. Now MK ULTRA was headed by a man called Sidney Gottlieb: who just so happened to be a club footed folk dancing enthusiast.

I’m pretty sure that this is entirely a co-incidence. On the other hand I very much like the idea of some Langley bureaucrat recruited into the lexicon of classical paganism. It’s just the kind of thing Graves would do, as well. Especially if he was off his face.

Comments

[Flying Rodent]

That is just fantastic - Even as a huge fan of Claudius, I had no idea that Graves was strung out. It was pretty clear from the detail he goes into on chicken entrails etc. that he took a great interest in Paganism, but still...

Mind you, if I'd spent my salad days stuck in the trenches, I'd be spiking smack into my eyeball like the bounty hunter in Pitch Black.

[ejh]

a club footed folk dancing enthusiast

That's a feeder line if I ever saw one...

[jamie]

"...if I'd spent my salad days stuck in the trenches"

This is why it struck me that Junger (Storm of Steel) was deep into the magic kingdom as well.

[pilgrim]

Damn, where did this come from? I read this blog for the political commentary, and suddenly you hit me with an entirely other (particularly rich) vein of preoccupations!

There's a chapter in White Goddess in which Graves discusses the possible origins of the Robin Hood myth, arguing that there likely was a "Robin Hood" in King John's time, but he would have been playing a role which was already familiar from folk tales whose origin is far older.

Joseph Campbell (with whom I have issues in many other respects, but I think he's right in this) suggests in The Power of Myth that some people's lives fall into mythic trajectories, frequently as a result of some deformity/disability/whatever that seperates them from the general current of humanity.

So - while still a "coincidence" - the Gottleib story might still prove worthy of reflection.

[Will]

Hoffman synthesized LSD in 1943.

[ajay]

This is a Tim Powers novel waiting to happen, if you ask me.

[jamie]

You could do an interesting counterfactual history on the assumption that LSD use spread unfettered across the Western ruling classes - as it alarmingly looked like doing at one stage - but was ring fenced from the proles and so never had to be made illegal.

[Alex]

Er, how?