SSAM: You are a long-retired scholar of Persian languages and literatures and before that you were, behind the scenes, a pivotal figure in the history of psychedelic drugs. In your scholarship, you sought to show how specific practices of intoxication shaped the poetic imagination of the Sufi tradition of Islamic mysticism. What would you say was the connection between your experiments with psychedelics and your insights into this literary-religious formation?

CR: Let me say start by saying that Islam is one of my research interests. I am not myself a believer—there may have been some confusion about that. But, yes, I think I did gain some insight into what was once called the Heaven of the Orient from my forays into “altered states.” Eventually I came away concluding that we so-called psychonauts had not stumbled into some portal to the beyond and that great distances would always separate us from most dimensions of past religious experience. I can’t speak of contemporary religious experience, because I’m not sure I believe it’s the same thing, if it’s even for real. God is beastly dead, we agree on that.

SSAM: We won’t be going into your work in detail here but what were your main influences?

CR: I was eclectic. There was an already existing philosophically-oriented discourse on Islam in France when I was there that I felt drawn to—Henry Corbin stood at its center. But I also looked to Max Weber for perspective as he was an inevitable point of reference in any discussion of religion among my German and Swiss friends at the time. I didn’t like reading him that much, but I realized he had one very profound insight into the subject. Weber held that the great world religions can be distinguished from one another by an ascetic ideal that fixates the will on a goal beyond ordinary life, transforming its daily organization. My view is that different cultures of intoxication shaped these specific forms of otherworldliness, but I haven’t really thought about it very systematically. In his Vom Rausch im Orient und Okzident, my friend Rudolf Gelpke from the Hofmann circle laid out some aspects of the problem, but in retrospect I suppose his conceptions owed too much to the old Romantic vision of the East. We probably need a figure of the stature of Weber to put the comparative study of different forms of intoxication, their broader cultural and even ideological consequences, onto a scientific footing, although I’m sure it will all remain quite speculative.

SSAM: That’s not such a bad thing!

CR: Das stimmt.

SSAM: Is there a contemporary scholar who has written on psychedelics whose work you admire or were influenced by?

CR: Somewhat randomly, I came across the writings of Carlo Ginzburg in the ’90s but too late for it to have had any influence on my own work. The thing that really struck me at the time was his Storia notturna. Part of it’s based on the archival record of the late Medieval panic around witches’ sabbaths, but from there Ginzburg takes the reader on a journey into a vast mythic underworld of pan-Eurasian shamanism, beliefs and practices going back millennia to the darkness of Indo-European and Ural-Altaic origins. He offered some compelling evidence for the ritual use of what we might now call psychedelic drugs in nocturnal communions with spirits, and, quite remarkably, he identified a few cases of these distinctive practices in regions of Europe far from the Central Asian steppe lands where the evidence is abundant. I think it would be extraordinary to have a work like that on the drug subcultures of Islam. I don’t know what exactly it would look like—maybe something like Ginzburgian hunches wedded to the Weber approach I mentioned. Younger people will hopefully take this up, now that we’re entering a new psychedelic era—or so I hear.

SSAM: How would it be possible for scholars working in these areas—I guess here we’re talking about trying to relate modes of intoxication to cultic forms and religious experience—to distinguish one altered mental state from another, given the qualitative, highly subjective, nature of the data?

CR: The problem is even greater than you say because these kinds of rarified, primary experiences are always going to be expressed in forms and formulae that may take us far away from wie es eigentlich gewesen ist. But that’s a more general problem of cultural history—here we’re in the hermeneutic circle and obviously there’s no way out of it. By the way, we have just as much difficulty in objectively distilling the subjective when dealing with contemporaries as we do when we try to enter into the minds of strangers from different times and places, though, of course, the difficulties are different. My view is that we are compelled to work with examples that typify something essential about such distinct and opposed spiritual orientations.

SSAM: Can you offer any that convey the differentia specifica of the culturally distinct forms of altered consciousness you have in mind?

CR: I think so. But if it’s okay maybe I’ll just read occasionally passages from some books and notes I have around here to support my points instead of just relying on my poor memory or winging it.

SSAM: Sure.

CR: These days I happen to be reading quite a bit of Hegel, so I’ll start by drawing on him. Here’s an extraordinary passage from his lectures on the history of philosophy on Jacob Boehme. This is Hegel speaking of Boehme’s strange visions. “He tells that he saw a brightly scoured pewter dish in the room, and ‘by the sudden sight of this shining metal with its brilliant radiance’ he was brought (into a meditation and a breaking free of his astral mind) ‘into the central point of secret nature,’ and into the light of divine essence…Thus by means of the signatures or figures, lineaments, and colors which were depicted, he could, so to speak, look into the heart and inmost nature of all creatures.”

Of course, Boehme was not a very typical individual at all, but in my opinion such singular cases often convey more insights into the emergence of new outlooks than do average ones. We generally think of mystical experiences as fusional but here we detect a very different, analytically particularizing mode, an intuition into the essence of concrete things. I can’t say for sure whether this vision was induced, perhaps inadvertently, by the ingestion of a psychedelic agent, but I feel I know from my own experiments what Boehme is talking about, what he is seeing. Just a hunch, of course. Here I think we find here traces of what might be called a phenomenological opening, in this case, experienced as a radiance of everyday objects opening a glimpse into the code of the other world, i.e., the true world of what one might call “proto-scientific” conceptuality—of the appearance of these underlying, intricate essences. Husserl’s work on the origin of geometry is relevant here though even admirers might agree that his nineteenth century classicist idealizations of the ancient Greeks have ceased to be persuasive.

SSAM: I see we’re shifting away from the Orient to the Occident for now. Would you be willing to make some sweeping generalizations on the drug cultures and forms of intoxication characteristic of the West, ancient or modern?

CR: Of course, we’re just talking—no harm in that, even if what ends up being said turns out to be unprovable. I’ll limit myself to speaking of substances taken to induce states of mind of some perceived intellectual value. My hypothesis would be that from early modern times European drug culture—I don’t like the term but I can’t come up with an alternative—evolved down two distinct paths—what I call a productivism, on the one side, and mystical escapism, a cult of interiority, on the other.

I’ll start with the first, historically by far the more widely practiced. Coffee came from elsewhere, but a certain breed of European could be said to have reinvented it when they began to gulp it in quantities that could fuel tireless, logical banter, quickening the hard labor of the mind. We’ve all read about the role that seething, voluble coffee houses played in the age of Enlightenment and how their energies fed into the exuberant rationalism of the Revolution. My favorite example of this manic energy for work comes from the subsequent era when a stabilized bourgeois society was taking shape, with its more regimented divisions of day and night. Let me get this passage from Balzac’s “The Pains and Pleasures of Coffee.” Here I’ll read it to you—you may have come across it somewhere before. He’s talking about the hallucinatory effect of doses of highly concentrated coffee on an empty stomach.

“From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination’s orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink—for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.”

SSAM: I see you’re now reading from your manuscript—is this going into a publication soon?

CR: Maybe, it’s a work in progress—I’ve been at it for several decades—in any event, in a similar vein we might think of the once mythical figure of Sigmund Freud, a distinctively nineteenth century combination of scholarly austerity and manic, drug induced energy. “You are right that I am overflowing with new ideas, theoretical ones as well…I need a lot of cocaine” he says. Our civilization is based on this hunt for sources of overflowing, unlimited energy.

In the account I’m working on I lump together coffee, cocaine and speed. Of course, Sartre’s prodigious use of the latter to get through writing is a legendary episode in what I’m calling the productivist side of the history of intellectual drug use. While taking corydrane can be great, when you’re popping twenty pills a day to meet a deadline—this was that labyrinth Critique Sartre was trying to write at the time—then it’s no fun at all. Then you get to about three times your normal output, but, qualitatively speaking, the result is a harsher, more machine-like and inhuman prose. Though he wrote of opiated visions of the Sufis, Gelpke was himself a speed demon too.

Anyway, that’s all one side of modern western drug use. At the same time though, you’re getting a counter-cultural current coming out of the use of opium, absinthe and hashish—the last, a substance I can’t say I’m very fond of.

A little etymology might be useful here to evoke the atmosphere of the scene. The German word Rausch, “intoxication,” comes from rauschen “to rustle; rush; roar; thunder; murmur”—not too far from the English “rush.” In French one says ivresse, a term redolent of Symbolism, intoxication in a lyrical mode. Baudelaire is obviously the main figure here. By the end of WWI that subculture had come to an end and over the whole inter-war period only a handful of artists and writers—Artaud, Daumal, Benjamin, a few others—they did some interesting experiments, but with no impact on contemporaries, and it was only with the Beats that a big deal would be made of these writings. When European drug culture reemerged after WWII it was a very different thing in two respects: first, it was now centered on psychedelics and secondly, its political orientation had shifted. What surfaced after the war were scenes associated with prominent literary celebrities of the Right. At least, that’s how I saw it, probably because of the centrality of Ernst Jünger and his secretary Armin Moeller to the Hofmann circle.

SSAM: I’d like to ask about your writings from the time after you were in the Hofmann circle when you worked as a scholar. I have to say it’s pretty hard to track down your work!

CR: That’s okay, it’s sort of dated.

SSAM: To what extent do you think that the romantic tropes of the mystical and Oriental have in some way obscured the specificity of the modern psychedelic experience?

CR: To be honest, I was once guilty of peddling a bit in these tropes myself. It was unavoidable at the time. This spiritual journeying to the East is now a cliché, but it played an important role in Western culture from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Scholars from England and France contributed, but the breakthrough happened in Germany in the decades from Schlegel to Schopenhauer. The intellectual and broader cultural impact was immense though now its impetus is spent.

What one can say in its aftermath is that there’s a rational kernel to some of these legendary notions of the Oriental beyond that shouldn’t be discarded in the name of political correctness. With Islam, for example, we find a certain understanding of intoxication as a mode of thought, a very vivid imagination, or perhaps intuition, about the relation between oneness and the multiplicity of beings—one can contrast it to the ascetic ideal of a cessation of thinking—of a nirvanic oneness that negates this multiplicity. We owe our understanding of the ontological discourse of Sufi Islam to the great Henry Corbin. In France, the influence of Corbin on the discourse on Islam has been, in my opinion, on the whole a positive thing. It brought into sharper focus the problematic of its theology that has often been thought to amount to little when compared to the Christian tradition. If you compare the legacy of Corbin’s work in France to that of Leo Strauss’s writings on the political philosophy of the Islamic world in America, you immediately see a big difference. Strauss and his followers were only interested in the atheist faylasuf—Alfarabi above all—for whom the religion itself, the legal-political community founded by the prophet, lacked any speculative depth. In France, the intellectual context created by Louis Massignon paved the way for a scholar like Corbin who did draw out these depths, in a manner that recalls Hegel’s profound reflections on the Trinity, and indeed brings to light the sharp opposition of the three and the one. Here, I’ll read, this is from Corbin.

“The exoteric theological tawhîd effectively affirms the ‘Unicity’ or Oneness of God as Ens Supremum, as the Existent which dominates all other existents. The esoteric ontological tawhîd affirms the transcendental ‘Unicity’ or Oneness of Existence/Being. Existence/Being or the esse, is essentially one and unique. The beings (existents) which Existence actualizes in their very act of being are essentially multiple. The one and unique Existence, and the one and unique Divine Existent, ineffable in the depths of its mystery, is the Absconditum and can only be addressed from afar by an apophatic or negative theology.”

It’s obvious that an Islamic theology is being constructed to some extent out of the conceptual elements of its Christian-European counterpart. Anyone familiar with Hegel’s many comments on Spinoza and Spinozism will be struck by his tendency to orientalize the latter’s philosophy of the one Substance, God. This seems strange: over the preceding century of reception, no one had understood Spinoza’s philosophy as hinging on any such mystical intuition of the One in and beyond the multiple. In fact, Spinoza had long been seen as the ringleader of what official society regarded as a horrid, free-thinking atheism. What changed? I think it was the young Goethe of the Sturm und Drang who ended up turning this arch-rationalist into the sort of god-addled visionary that the nineteenth century would come to see him as. Someone once said that Hegel was code for Stalin in the theory culture of the 1960s, but in Hegel himself, Spinoza was a codeword for the Absolute of the East, for the exuberant poetical apprehension of the undifferentiated oriental Substance. This was a spiritual figure that Hegel understood as encompassing the Hebrews of the Old Testament, but more specifically Islam, especially in the literary form it assumed in the Persian cultural region. His comments on the latter are in no way disparaging. On the contrary, from Goethe he celebrated the noble cheerfulness that the translations sought to convey. This passage here is from the Lectures on Aesthetics.

“The western romantic deep feeling of the heart does display an absorption in the life of nature, but on the whole, especially in the north, it is rather unhappy, unfree and wistful, or it remains subjective, shut in upon itself, and therefore becomes self-seeking and sentimental. Such oppressed and troubled feeling is expressed especially in the folksongs of barbarian peoples. On the other hand, a free, happy depth of feeling is characteristic of the Orientals, especially the Mohammedan Persians…So we see in the glow of passion the most widespread bliss and parrhesia of feeling through which, in the exhaustible wealth of brilliant and splendid images, there resounds the steady note of joy, beauty and good fortune.”

When I first read this I thought of my friend Gelpke who translated the famous story of Layla and Majnun, whose author Nizami established the genre of the saqi-nama in the twelfth century. I’ve always been quite suspicious of this German Romantic reading of Islamic Persian and Sufi poetry as exuberantly cheerful. I think the Germans of that time might have emphasized this side of its subjectivity and downplayed its more turbulent and even abject aspects in order to make it more palatable to contemporaries. Emerson’s famous essay from 1858 on Persian poetry did bring out this darker spirit of dread and submission and asked his readers to recall the Old Testament’s awe-inspiring Jehovah, but his translations are unfortunate. Today this whole tradition is associated with an insipid cosmic mysticism. What we need are new translations to bring out the unheard subjectivities of these poems. I’ve tried my hand, but you really need to be a poet yourself.

SSAM: Getting back to your earlier scholarship, how do you think these philosophical issues and literary forms are related to phenomena of intoxication?

CR: The problem with Hegel, and you can see this in Nietzsche too, is that intoxication is invoked in a way that lacks any specificity; there is no apt description of the contours of this experience. If you’ve done drugs and are also a careful reader of their work you may find their conceptions of intoxication to be somewhat flat and generic, described from the outside.

With regard to my own personal and scholarly interest in Islamic intoxication practices I tried to stay away from the then fashionable discourse on Eastern religion and mysticism, but it was in no so easy at the time. Gelpke, too, professed to despise it but it drew him. Anyway, I blame the great Aldous Huxley for lending credence to the quaint notion that getting high brings us closer to what lies beyond the rational which for him and so many others is tied up with a certain fateful notion of the West. Long ago, I met him at MIT and bombarded him with queries on mescaline and Blake.

SSAM: I had wanted to talk more about Hofmann’s psychonaut circle, but we keep on going in different directions. You were part of…

CR: I passed through it when I was young and took some notes.

SSAM: How would you describe the origins and prevailing ethos of this circle?

CR: In Europe, in Switzerland where we were, the chemical form—LSD—emerged from a pharmaceutical laboratory long before the organic, the psilocybin mushroom, arrived from Mexico. That was a significant difference in the starting point. I took part in some of the sessions at the tail end of the scene. There were no hippies there, the energy was very masculine—Hofmann was an engineer, Gelpke had a monastic streak and in the imposing figure of Ernst Jünger, I immediately sensed the meaning of acid for a certain post-fascist heroism, a yearning for a new asceticism. I myself was not very political then nor am I now, but these were the most interesting political conversations of my life. Jünger could quietly shock you with the things he would say about what the top men of the Third Reich were like, how they thought. He once told me—laughing, in that clipped, muffled way he had—he was sure that Goebbels would have taken to LSD and would likely have introduced it into the inner circle. I remember him talking about this, and then just stopping in mid-stream, imagining them on it I suppose, but he didn’t share his thoughts. Actually, none of us talked much about our experiences. As for the Nazis, everyone now knows how hard they were tweaking—that’s how you put it—that some of their insane determination to fight on to the end, and kill themselves and their own families—stemmed from speed, the chemical multiplier of their vitalist ideology. The worker-soldier gestalt gone berserk—maybe that’s what Jünger was thinking. They were “tweaking,” that’s how you’d put it—tweaking hard. Try it sometime.

Anyway, these experiments showed me how acid can forge extraordinary intellectual links between individuals of very different ethical and political alignments. Of course, it was not the substance itself that created these inner spiritual landscapes we found so significant. With acid, or other things people take to get high, the highest possibilities open up when the right kind of substance is taken with a small number of the right kind of interlocutors, even when there’s not much talking going on. After all it was not the wine that generated those marvelous Platonic speeches we’ve all read—of course, I don’t dare compare our conversations to those ones. My point is that these things only have value to me in the context of rigorous small group discussion. It really isn’t something that I can speak of more generally as offering a gateway to transcendent experiences.

SSAM: How did you enter into the circle in the first place?

CR: I smoked opium with Rudolf Gelpke in Iran in 1960, five years after it had been banned by the Shah. With the pretext of scholarly discussion I tracked him down early the next year in Basel hoping that at least a pipe’s worth had traveled back with him. I was surprised to instead be presented with a substance whose inventor Gelpke had recently met: LSD. Perhaps in the unprecedented state we were in the midst of experiencing, he promised to introduce me to this Albert Hofmann, a promise he was more ambivalent about when the possibility arose in 1962 and he realized he had never spoken to me sober. In 1962 I joined Hofmann and Gelpke at the residence of Ernst Jünger to take 20 mg of psilocybin.

Hofmann perceived Jünger, who perhaps for the benefit of us Orientalists was dressed in robes brought back from Egypt, as “a powerful, mighty magician” who lectured “uninterruptedly with a clear, loud voice about Schopenhauer, Kant, Hegel,” while Gelpke sat next to the stove moaning.

Gelpke later explained that what Jünger would call the “psychonaut” was a phenomenon specific to a disenchanted world—as Jünger put it “a world with more robots, more boredom, more suicides.” Heidegger was anticipated on more than one occasion, but never showed up.

SSAM: You’ve spoken of the first European drug counterculture and its aestheticization of its practices of intoxication. Based on your own experience of it, what would you say was the effect of psychedelics on the thinking of that moment?

CR: Nietzsche was a teetotaler, but on occasion he conveys a sense for the textures and consequences of different modes of inebriation. People may know his comments on the coarsening effect of beer on the German national character, but a friend recently sent me this comment I hadn’t come across before on the atmosphere of the early Hegel reception from 1884 that I think captures some of the psychological dynamics of that philosopher’s wild flights of thought and the broader cultural receptivity to them.

“If one is a man of subtle nostrils, that such a writer constantly compels himself and practices first to establish his concepts in a rigorous manner and make them firmer, thus to connect unequivocal concepts with his words: and, until this is done, he will not write! – Moreover there is some charm also in the uncertain, twilight, half-light: this perhaps was Hegel’s effect on foreigners mostly through his art of speaking like a drunkard of the most sober and cold things.”

Intoxication can be a kind of fermenting agent of certain types of conceptualities whether or not that’s apparent in the works touched by that influence. I know I’m reading a lot here, but I’ve put most of my thoughts into this manuscript so there we go. Here is this passage from Foucault. I think it captures some of the impact of acid on a style of philosophical discourse that looked to modernist literature for a path out of what were perceived as our stale and exhausted metaphysical categories.

“We can easily see how LSD inverts the relationships of ill humor, stupidity, and thought: it no sooner eliminates the supremacy of categories than it tears away the ground of its indifference and disintegrates the gloomy downshow of stupidity; and it presents this univocal and a categorical mass not only as variegated, mobile, asymmetrical, decentered, spiraloid, and reverberating, but causes it to rise, at each instant, as a swarming of phantasm-events…At any rate, in a state deprived of drugs, thought possesses two horns: one is perversity (to baffle categories) and the other ill humor (to point to stupidity and transfix it).”

By the late ’70s we were all in retreat from the extremisms of the avant-garde but could not bear the thought of reconciling ourselves to the dreary world of the post-historical West—to living and thinking like pigs, as Chatelet put it. Amid this retreat, I recall Foucault’s turn to the Greeks near the end. He didn’t discuss Plato’s Laws in his lectures from the late ’70s on asceticism and the care of the self, but I think it’s probably the best example of what he had in mind. There’s a specific understanding of the proper philosophical use of the drinking of wine conducive to the dialectical experience of the idea.

Belatedly—upon my return to the West in the mid-80s, I also returned to philosophical traditions that I once saw as superseded, exploded. The “mind” as Valéry understood it—a lucid perfection of language—was a very occidental affair and celebrated as the source of our supremacy over other civilizations. Naturally when I was young I rebelled and wanted to discover the Other. When I came back to aspects of this older discourse of East and West, I came to see the significance of “mind” as the kernel I had experienced in our sessions. It cannot be described as a transport into a mystical oneness, nor the result of the operation of certain chemicals in the brain. I was left with the old Cartesian category and its baggage. Acid brought me back to the idea, gave me a sense of the presence of the intelligible realm. I have some friends who are mathematicians who I’ve taken it with, and they told me it sometimes sharpens their intuitions of mathematical idealities, but I wouldn’t know much about that.

I’m sort of “off the grid”—I’m not on the internet, for example—but I try to get a sense of contemporary moods and trends from my younger friends. From what I hear the practices I’m interested and have taken part in might help people disentangle themselves from the intellectual and emotional inebriation that ordinary life and their current drug practice subjects them to. What I seek is an asceticism of detachment, an intellectual purism. I think others might find it appealing and healthful, the only way to truly live now. Epicurean community, the care of the self in small intellectual communities, assumes an immense significance when politics leaves little room for any consideration of the best regime. I suppose our previous discussions about that are what led to this conversation.

SSAM: Could you expand on the political significance of this outlook?

It’s so hard to generalize, I’m not sure what there is to say. If the outlook is about drugs, I’d say that a politics of intoxication, of the kind that Bataille and Benjamin had once hoped for, is out of the question. But maybe you were alluding to our discussion of Islamic thought. People say that Corbin’s notions of Islam supposedly encouraged Foucault to look into Iran’s Islamic revolution. I think he wanted to see it as a new form of collective political thinking. We on the Right didn’t see it this way. A small number of us thought that the Islamic revolution might be a model for European conservative revolutionaries. How strange it all seems in retrospect. But the excitement was there—I feel that if Foucault had stuck with it, the affair might have turned out at least as interesting as Heidegger’s tryst with National Socialism. But he cut and ran, and the episode’s now seen as seen as an embarrassment by defenders of Foucault—how absurd.

SSAM: Have you been following recent development in drug culture? Are there any new substances that you think might open up some interesting for the mind?

CR: I suppose DMT’s been around for a while, but people tell me there’s been a revival. I tried it out a long time ago but it wasn’t for me. I found it strangely cartoonish—like a child’s nightmares. Perhaps there are substances that I haven’t tried that will satisfy a contemporary taste, maybe among some, even a spiritual need for terror. That could be interesting, some new hotel abyss. Alternatively, maybe in the coming century, we’ll turn away from drugs in some great rejection, who knows? It’s funny, there’s a line from Plato’s Laws I have here [in his manuscript] that touches on this. Let me skip ahead, this is it: Athenian Stranger: “he fancies himself plunged in misfortune and finally, though he be the bravest of men, he arrives at a state of abject terror; whereas, when he has once got relieved of the potion and slept it off, he always becomes his normal self again? Clinias: What potion of the kind can we mention, Stranger, as existing anywhere? Athenian: There is none.” Ha!

The new drug experiences I shared with friends thankfully escape any association with the Orient. I can’t keep track—their names are jumbles of letters and numbers that I struggle to distinguish. I nevertheless rarely decline what is put in front of me. One of these younger friends gave me methoxetamine. He suggested it might help me get through this interview, but it all turned out nicely. Anyway, its kicking in now and I think you may have to see yourself out.

SSAM: Thank you, Charles, good talking to you. This will be a nice addition to our first issue. We’ll see you soon.

CR: Yes, looking forward to it.