Ditty for a Psychedelic Menagerie
A Nepalese
bee makes psychoactive honey
Nibbling a certain fish makes you high
A type
of toad induces a psychedelic experience,
Assuming you process its poison before
giving it a try
Bad
verse aside, below are a few references for the sake of culinary explorers who envision
a dinner party of psychedelic cuisine. Maybe a starter of toad, move on from
the amphibian course to seafood, then end with a sweet-tooth finish. For wine
pairings you are on your own.
Actually,
the wine pairing idea is iffy. Hell, the whole menu would be one interaction
nightmare. Which reminds me that Huxley’s twin psychedelic essays were, after
all, The Doors of Perception followed by Heaven and Hell. The above gorge-a-thon
would be less likely to cause a hangover than to trigger a no-return psychotic
episode.
Aldous
Huxley liked to write ditties. The most famous was his “To make this trivial
world sublime, Take half a gramme of phanerothyme,” a losing counterpunch to
Humphry Osmond’s “To plumb the depths or soar angelic, Take a pinch of
psychedelic.”
In
the early 1950s, the two friends experimented with and talked about various psychoactive
substances, discussing them mainly through letters but sometimes in person. One
natural substance they both tried, as seen in their letters, was a type of
morning glory seed they procured from Cuba. Then there was the toad rumor,
though there is no evidence that they actually progressed from speculation to
gustation.
Humphry
Osmond, in a letter to Huxley in February of 1956, cited cohaba – a
hallucinogen made primarily of ground tree seeds – and said the mixture is
alleged to contain bufotenin, found in certain plants and in Bufo toad venom.
Osmond goes on to connect this to Shakespeare’s three witches in Macbeth:
“that
eye of newt and toe of frog business might have had some thing in it, for
bufotenin was originally isolated from frog’s skin, or rather toad and was
taken as a snuff in Haiti.”
Huxley
often dipped into Shakespeare and classic references. Maybe if he had written
this blog, though, he might have couched it not as a ditty but as a spin on Aesop’s
Fables.
Info on the honey:
www.natureworldnews.com/articles/23167/20160531/psychedelic-honey-nepal-proved-healing.htm .
On the fish:
http://www.alternet.org/drugs/meet-fish-can-give-you-lsd-hallucinations
Photo Credit:
Wikimedia/Creative Common
On the toad:
