Kliiver, Heinrich

Kliiver, Heinrich. Mescal and Mechanisms of Hallucinations. Chicago The University of Chicago Press, 1966. 

The dynamic interaction of perception, emotion, and cognition in the creation of conscious experience is highlighted by the visual image transformations that are enhanced by natural and drug-induced alterations of brain-mind state. Later in the book we will read the detailed accounts of such transformations in the reports by careful self-observers such as Albert Hofmann (who discovered the psychotogcnic potential of LSD) and Heinrich Kliiver (who used mescaline to study visual hallucination). In Hofmann and Kliiver s work, the most valuable descriptions are formal. That is, they emphasize form rather than content. 

Heinrich Kliiver, who devoted his scientific career to understanding the brain mechanisms of perception, was naturally fascinated by the experimental possibility of chemically altering perception (figure 15.1). Born in 1897, he was 21 when mescaline first became available and 23 when he himself first took the drug. Within ten years he had conducted and published the first systematic study of its effects (Mescal and Mechanisms of Hallucinations, 1928). 

Heinrich Kliiver said of the "mescal experience that the visual effects were its primary aspect, and he attempted to describe them using a limited number of "form-constants. For instance,grating, lattice, fretwork, filigree, honeycomb or chessboard designs represented one form-constant. Closely... 

Colors appearing most commonly in Indian experiences are said to be yellow, blue, green and red, inspired perhaps by the colors in fire and on the tepee or hogan walls. In the experiments carried out by Ellis and others, the color emphasis was on blue or violet, though Heinrich Kliiver found no color to be excluded. 

The Harvard recipient was the young ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, who had been a medical student until he happened upon Heinrich Kliiver s first monography on "mescal visions. As Schultes later wrote to Kliiver, reading that essay altered his life s course. Schultes changed his doctoral thesis to peyote use on the Kiowa reservation in Oklahoma and thereby began on a lifelong interest in mind-changing plants of the New World. 

SCHULTES, R.E. and A. HOFMANN 1980. The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens. Revised and Enlarged Second Edition. C.C. Thomas, Springfield, IL. Originally published in 1973. Foreword by Heinrich Kliiver. 

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