Tag Archives: Lampeter

The Summer of Acid

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People are talking about using LSD to treat mental illness again. Evidence is thin, and the plural of anecdote is not data, but my own experience was educational . . .

I learned more about music and drugs than my studies as an undergraduate. My university was ancient and deep in the countryside, comfortably nestled among the buxom green hills of Wales. While other students were innocently dancing to Abba at a campus disco, an exclusive, long-haired coterie (so we imagined) sat around a log fire in our sprawling farmhouse retreat, listening to the Velvet Underground, Spirit, or the Quicksilver Messenger Service. We took our music seriously, preferably on LPs imported from the States (which had extra-stiff covers, ideal for rolling joints). Our musical mentor was a gentlemanly dealer of the old school, more interested in expanding minds than his wallet. Drugs were not simply for recreation, he taught us, but a way to explore altered states. They were surprisingly plentiful and LSD was our substance of choice. Pure and strong, it was the Dom Perignon of drugs.

Lysergic acid diethylamide (acid) is a hallucinogenic drug which binds to serotonin and dopamine receptors in the brain. A dose of just 500 micrograms (imagine 1/10th of a grain of sand) is enough to affect someone for up to 12 hours, causing major disruption to how the brain interprets information from the senses, to the perception of time, and even to the sense of self.

A group of us took an acid trip once every week or so. Those nights lasted for days, it seemed. Time became elastic. I recall walking through the college gatehouse and making no progress despite putting one foot in front of the other. However long I walked, I remained on the same spot. Only by gripping the wall and forcing myself forward did I begin to move at last. Space and time synchronised once again, I joined my friends. Somehow they knew what had happened without a word. We took telepathy for granted. By raising my hand, I could stop time or make it run fast or slow. As I walked, I felt the air caress my skin like a cashmere scarf. All my senses were intensified and spilled over into each other. Everything was more so.

April Love (Arthur Hughes)Back at the farm, a woman on a poster began to move as she smiled and beckoned, inviting me into the Pre-Raphaelite world she inhabited. Music, too, was caught up in this synaesthesia. Sounds tumbled visibly from the speakers in coloured cubes and spheres, spilling and dissolving on the floor. After a walk at sunrise through an oak wood, we went to bed and slept all day. Waking that evening, we felt like space cowboys returning from a voyage to a strange and distant planet, our eyes still sparkling with what we had seen.

A bad trip was something we all expected eventually. We were professional trippers, we told ourselves. The standard operating procedure was to get home and feel safe, minimise stimulus, and hopefully get to sleep early. When it happened to me, this advice was no help against the conviction that devils were swooping above the house on black leathery wings, impatient to destroy and devour me. They were like Doré drawings of Satan brought to life. No sooner did I imagine something, than it appeared before me in terrifying detail. I tried hard to remain calm. Surely I would fall asleep soon. Dawn came and went. My fellow-travellers retired to bed and I was left alone with my waking nightmare. When I tried to think, a second voice rose in my mind, insisting it was me. I have never been more terrified in my life. Closing my eyes transported me to another world where demons slashed at my sides with razor-sharp scimitars. I gasped in pain. The idea of cutting my skin to part the flesh went around and around in my mind. It was an almost philosophical obsession: that I could cut one surface into two, and then slash again into smaller and smaller pieces to infinity. The dark world of the cloaked, devilish figures had always existed alongside ours, I realised. Mirrors were the doorway. I jumped from the bed and hung a blanket over the bathroom mirror. Was I safe for now? What else could I do? There were still a half-a-dozen tablets of LSD in my desk drawer – the tiny eggs from which these devils had hatched! As quickly as I could, I cut up the tabs and flushed them down the sink, remembering to put the plug in afterwards as an extra precaution. At last I fell asleep from sheer exhaustion.

When I finally woke after nearly 24 hours of unconsciousness, I thought it was all over. But it was not over. Mirrors still worried me. I remembered that Vonnegut had called mirrors ‘leaks’ into another universe in Breakfast of Champions, but that provenance did not help; alone in the house, I would still turn them to the wall. I discovered it was possible to believe something and not believe it at the same time. And then I found myself incapable of telling a barman what I wanted to drink. Standing wordless and feeling like an idiot, I couldn’t make that simple decision. The problem, in fact, preceded decision-making: I had lost the capacity to discriminate and form any preference. It extended beyond that embarrassing moment in the pub. There were trivial decisions like which shirt to wear in the morning. There were more serious matters, about which course electives to take, for example. I found it easiest to let matters flow, doing things at random without thinking about why or about the consequences. As the months went by, my friends began to notice the difference. I was careless in various ways, with things and with people. In the middle of Lent Term, I took off on a trip overseas just because I felt like it. I avoided hallucinogenics, but there were other vices to indulge. If I wanted to do something, then others would just have to accept the fact. This included my relations with an increasing number of females, both in college and in the town. Life was getting complicated. It was my year of living dangerously.

Only slowly did I recover a more robust sense of identity – of who I was and how I behaved. The madness drained away. After a year I could look in a mirror again and wonder what on earth I had been worried about. I could look my friends in the face. I could order a Pils beer with confidence. By then, we had all become more cautious after someone we knew embarked on a never-ending trip . . . the LSD brought on a first episode of schizophrenia. This is uncommon but happens if you are genetically vulnerable, and who knows what lies in your genes? Only much later did I learn to call my experience a drug-induced psychosis, with effects that were temporary. I was luckier than I knew.

Was there anything positive about that sunny summer of acid? It was a vivid lesson that subjective reality is only a construct of our senses – and yet an exquisitely sophisticated one, evolved to optimise survival. It was a reminder that normality is precious and not to be taken for granted. I’ve been left with a faint but perceptible sense of distance from everyday life, like a scientist observing an experiment. It was also an uncomfortable discovery to know how it felt to be brutally selfish in my dealings with other people: a temporary psychopath. The most important, unforeseen consequence, though, was that when I later worked in mental health, I could better understand and empathise with people affected by psychosis, due to my own first-hand experience. In the end, I am aghast now at the risk we took so casually in those days with the most complex and extraordinary thing to ever exist: the human brain.

Satan in Paradise Lost (ill. C. Doré)

Images

Arthur Hughes. April Love (1856)

Gustav Doré. Illustration for John Milton, Paradise Lost: Satan (1866).

The Lampeter Brethren: A Victorian Sex Cult

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St David’s College, Lampeter, is the smallest university in the UK. It’s the oldest in England or Wales after Oxford and Cambridge.  It’s also the furthest away from, well . . . anywhere really. When I arrived – after leaving school and a year away in Germany – I was charmed. It’s a feeling that’s never left me.

Lampeter is an ancient market town nestled comfortably in the hills of mid-Wales, hundreds of kilometres and across a mountain range from the nearest city, distant from any motorway or railway line. The only way to get there is to drive for hours along winding narrow roads sheltered by high hedges tangled with honeysuckle. It’s a bother to get there, and I suspect that’s just the way the locals like it. Listen to conversations on the High Street for ten minutes and you will learn the price of a cow, that the beer at the Black Lion hasn’t been the same since the brewery took over, or that Daniel Price was seen sneaking in the back door of Mrs Jones the baker’s again.

Across an ivy-covered wall lies the College. Wide lawns lead to a tower and spires enclosing a peaceful quad where a fountain plays next to the Gothic chapel. It is the last place you would expect to find after driving for the day across the Cambrian Mountains. There were fewer than a thousand students. A typical day could involve a morning tutorial discussing Beowulf and the intricacies of Anglo-Saxon poetry; an afternoon walking or horse-riding in the hills, and then an evening in a pub with some local girls. After midnight, a group of us might solemnly place tablets of LSD on our tongues to see the true nature of the world revealed.  We would wander in the woods all night, able to stop and start time with a wave of the hand, hiding from neon dragons and following mermaids floating among the branches. In those years, it was as if pages of Brideshead Revisited, Under Milk Wood, and The Electric Kool-Acid Acid Test had been sewn together at random to tell our story.

Like every generation, we believed ourselves unique, with a special understanding of the world. Over a century before, another student at Lampeter had a more dramatic revelation. Henry Prince studied divinity at the College before becoming an Anglican priest. He was convinced that the end of the world was near, and that he alone knew the key to salvation. To be saved, the sinful flesh would need to be united with the Holy Spirit. The sinful flesh would belong to the richer, female members his congregation. The Holy Spirit was himself. This was a clever  and convenient reversal of centuries of Christian tradition. Instead of condemning and repressing sexuality, original sin would be expunged by celebrating the pleasures of the flesh.

Prince had considerable gifts of persuasion, using charm and evangelical enthusiasm to excite the audience in more ways than one. His first congregation was converted en masse, no mean achievement in Victorian England. Men and women of all classes flocked to his sermons. After moving Prince around various parishes in an attempt to reduce his influence, the Church of England eventually defrocked him. This was the making of the renegade priest.

Followers of the Lampeter Brethren now numbered several hundred, including many wealthy families and professional people who looked after its affairs. There were lawyers, a doctor, and even an estate manager. Together, they bought a 200-acre estate near Glastonbury in Somerset and built a village clustered around a mansion and protected from prying eyes by a 4-metre high wall. The community was called the Abode of Love. Here, Prince introduced the Holy Spirit into one of his many ‘spiritual wives’ by having sex with her in front of the congregation as an organ played a celebratory hymn. This was called, ‘the Great Manifestation’. There is no record of whether this was followed by applause.

A journalist from the Illustrated London News managed to penetrate the Abode in 1851, expecting to find scenes of depravity to delight his prurient readership. He was disappointed. Apart from the swinging culture, as we would call it now, the place was the epitome of cultured upper-class comfort. Unlike most Victorian men with their bushy sideburns and beards, the males kept their hair short and were clean-shaven. The women, too, cut their hair short and dressed in simple, comfortable clothes. Billiards was apparently a passion of the women at the Abode. They loved to be in the fresh air too, and had their own hockey teams. They kept horses and hunted with hounds. In a peculiarly English manner, this ‘sex cult’ served its own blend of tea every afternoon at 4 pm.  With an unconvincing attempt at disapproval, the journalist noted that ‘they have converted the chapel into a banqueting house, and substitute feasting and enjoyment for privation and prayer’.

‘If God be not life, happiness, and love,’ said one of the family, ‘then we do not know what God is.’

Prince was undoubtedly a rogue who financially and sexually exploited some of his female followers. At the same time, many of the most enthusiastic members of the Lampeter Brethren were women of all ages who seem to have relished the personal and sexual freedom which the Abode gave them in the repressive Victorian age.

They were ‘very willing followers – his recommendations are so pleasant,’ the journalist acknowledged. This willingness caused a scandal when three daughters of the wealthy Nottidge family joined the Brethren. After the fourth sister, Louisa, ran away to join them, it was one heiress too many for the family. They had Louisa kidnapped and certified insane by a compliant doctor. After nearly two years locked away in an asylum, she managed to escape and sued her family for abduction and illegal imprisonment. Louisa won the case, and returned to spend the rest of her life happily at the Abode with her sisters and friends.

The Nottidge case was one of Wilkie Collins’ inspirations for his famous suspense novel, The Woman in White. There are interesting associations between Collins and the Lampeter Brethren (apart from his own domestic arrangements – living with two mistresses and their children). Louisa Nottidge was declared sane and freed from the asylum after being examined by the Metropolitan Commissioner in Lunacy. It so happened that the Commissioner was Bryan Procter, a friend of Collins (as was his daughter, the feminist, Adelaide Procter). Wilkie Collins also knew Adelaide’s friend, Frances Cobbe, whose brother was a a senior member of the Lampeter Brethren and married to one of the other Nottidge sisters. Frances was a lifelong friend of Collins, and became one of the leading feminist theorists of the Victorian era – producing provocative pamphlets such as What Shall We do with Our Old Maids? And Celibacy vs Marriage, arguing for female economic and personal independence. There is a final link. When Henry Prince died, his associate John Pigott took over as leader of the Lampeter Brethren. He was the nephew of Wilkie Collins closest friend, Henry Pigott.

As new members joined and funds flooded in, the Brethren decided to build a mighty centre in London. It was called the Ark. At first sight, it seemed a regular church, built in the Gothic Revival style with a tall spire. The four corner turrets bear stone scrolls bearing the ambiguous words, ‘God is Love’. The Art Nouveau stained glass windows were designed by the celebrated artist, Walter Crane, inspired by mystical scenes from William Blake’s writings. Two women from the Brethren community were closely involved in this building: the architect, Violet Morris and her sister, Olive, who had trained as an engineer as well as being an expert wood carver (responsible for the Ark’s pulpit and lectern).

Henry Prince died in 1899. The world, after all, had not come to an end as he predicted. The Lampeter Brethren accepted this disappointment bravely, ‘uniting the spirit with the flesh’ in the comfort of their country estate, with free love, fox-hunting, and good food and wine to soften the blow. The community slowly dwindled in the twentieth century, as changing social mores lessened the need for it. In 1957, the last member, one of the Pigott’s ‘spiritual wives,’ died and the properties were sold.

And what of St David’s College where it all started? The little town of Lampeter is almost unchanged. The college is now a campus of the University of Wales, specialising in the humanities. There are still fewer than a thousand students, and the divinity school has been cleverly broadened with courses in Islamic studies, Daoism, and Confucianism. Saudi and Chinese donors have been persuaded to make generous endowments, contributing to the survival of the College. I like to think that Henry Prince would have smiled and approved.

CONFESSIONS OF A TIME-TRAVELLER

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As Einstein understood, to travel in time and space is not so very different.
They are, in fact, essentially the same.

Anyone who is used to spending 24 hours in a plane flying from Australia back to London Heathrow will understand exactly what I mean. Even after doing this regularly for over 20 years, I experience the same weird disorientation every time after landing. Everything is utterly strange and utterly familiar at the same time.

As always, I pick up a car and start the long drive westward. I love the transition from hellish airport to the six-laned M4 towards the Severn Bridge, then it becomes four lanes, then two as I dive deeper into Wales. How suddenly the names of town and villages change from English to Welsh in the borderlands. Nether Skyborry and Bicton on one side of a river. Bryn Melin and Llangunllo a few hundred metres to the west.

No more lines of trucks barrelling by now, only the occasional tractor. At last I am in a laneway between tall hedgerows tangled with honeysuckle, barely wider than the car, and I bump over rough ground into a farmyard in sight of the sea. I have arrived. In the days that follow, I slip easily into a different vocabulary. I give distances in miles not kilometres. The vehicle is a 4X4 and I came by the motorway route, I say (not on the freeway in a 4WD). Catching up with my brother in a pub, I don’t order chips to go with my schooner of beer, but some crisps and a pint of Seren IPA. My speech drifts back to the familar English falling intonation, sentences drawling to near-whisper at the end (instead of my Australian up-tick on the final word). After a week, I find myself talking Welsh in local shops and pubs.

All of this is done unconsciously, but what still foxes me is the sense of having travelled back in time. For all the tumultous changes in Britain over the last half-century, Wales remains hidden in plain sight and largely unchanged behind the Cambrian mountains. In the hinterland of the west, the deep green hills and woodlands, the rocky coast, the towns and villages where I spent half my life look barely any different. I could drive for hours in any direction and know every turn in the road, every hedgerow, every pub and village hall.

As well as visiting family and friends, I am going to a college reunion, meeting up with people I haven’t seen for decades. I go with a macabre curiosity, wondering if I will recognise anyone. We’re all a little weather-beaten by the years but utterly recognisable with the same strong personalities. As I stagger saunter back through the college quad to my room at 3 AM, feeling disgracefully sentimental, the eerie feeling returns. It wouldn’t be a surprise to find my younger self walking toward me out of the shadows with a smile of recognition.

Once again I feel like a traveller in time. Am I a visitor from the past who has materialised in the present? Or a creature from the future (my glittering city on the other side of the planet), fallen to earth in the past I had left behind?

Both are true, I realise, as I drift to sleep, hearing the town hall clock chime the quarter-hour. The future is only a past we have yet to discover. As each moment unrolls and become a memory, it gives a strange thrill to everyday life, an existential tingle. We are all travellers in time.