The unpredictable cactus
The San Pedro cactus evolved thirty or forty million years ago…
Like many plants, the San Pedro cactus converts amino acids into compounds known as alkaloids … [psychologist] Heinrich Klüver determined that most mescaline [visions] followed a sequence of visual stages and featured groups of repeating motifs: a latticework or filigree that Jay calls ‘the reticulated two-dimensional plane’; the tunnel; the spiral; the cobweb. Many subjects described a phenomenon called polyopia, where… [visionary] objects repeated themselves in rows.
Original Article (LRB.co.uk):
The unpredictable cactus
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