The Blackberry Walk

I've never been one for horror. I get spooked easily, and I dislike the trite, predictable story lines horror films usually follow. The shrill Stravinsky-esque scores build choking suspense, whilst the characters act and behave in ways I just can't relate to: I can't stand it. It just makes me anxious - not afraid, just anxious. It isn't a pleasurable experience. And neither is the gore so common in horror films. I don't want to see a man's torso be ripped from his lower half, and all the CG guts and gushing blood that accompanies. That's horror films, but horror books have never interested me either. I just can't get into them. Knowing they're fictitious, I interpret them as fiction, not as something scary, but as something literary. Perhaps this is a me problem, that I can't properly believe in fiction the way a child can in nativity. Perhaps I'm becoming older and jaded. But there is a kind of horror which is real. Not the true crime stories, that middle-aged women love to lap up and chat about wide-eyed in offices, but true horror of the supernatural kind. That kind of Lovecraftian horror is, in fact, available to all of us not just to read, but to experience, by the ingestion of but a few seeds. Datura, Angel's Trumpet, Mandrake: these are a group of plants which contain chemicals known as deliriants. Unlike their better known cousin, psychedelics, deliriants bring around true hallucinations, hallucinations you can't tell aren't real. On psychedelics, the participant knows they are high, and if they forget, it is because they have forgotten everything and their mind is blank, not because they have fallen for the falsehood of their eyes. They'll see fractals, patterns, visual illusions, and other disturbances, primarily. They won't believe someone is there who isn't. Having long conversations with imagined friends and family is common after eating a pod of datura seeds. These people, they lose their mind. The participant experiences their actions as if it were a dream, parched, until later they wake up in a bush, naked, their skin lacerated and covered in mud. For some, it takes weeks to come back to their senses. Many lose their minds for good, sinking back into fits of madness years later. These toxins are potent, and they make people go mad, but fools still take them. Here's a small-ish excerpt from someone's experience:

Nothing much more seems to be happening. I have finished the pitcher of kool-aid and gone to the bathroom 2 more times. Steve says to go in the kitchen and refill the pitcher with water in case I feel like I’m going to dehydrate. It seems like a responsible idea so I go into the kitchen and refill it with water and put ice cubes in it. I walk back into my living room to find Steve has left, and the tv has been turned off. The entire house is dead silent. Then I hear the tv go back on, but the screen is blank, and I hear Steve saying 'hey I’m over here'. I realize that he’s calling me from out in my backyard, so I put my shoes on and go outside. At first I scanned my back yard for him, but couldn’t see him, and I couldn’t hear him anymore. I suddenly get the idea that Steve had come over for a hide and seek game (at this point I have absolutely no idea that I have taken anything) so I run into the yard looking around for him. Then I speak 'come out come out where ever you are' . Right when I say this my voice sounds very different, like a person who has gone totally insane. This starts to scare me very much, and Steve is nowhere to be found. I look way across to the other end of my yard (my yard is only about a 100 foot by 200 foot area, but now it was a soccer field size) and at the other end I see my dog’s pen, a fenced in area in the corner with all my friends who are straight edge that stopped being friends with me when I started smoking pot. I haven’t seen them in so long, so I run towards the pen. They look just as happy to see me as I am to see them, and they let me into the pen. We start talking and to my surprise, one of them pulls a blunt out of nowhere and sparks it. I am naturally amused but shocked, then they start to explain to me that they came to see me cause they all 'got into the game' and don’t think drugs are that bad after all. On the outside I am pleased to hear this, but on the inside I begin to get feelings of untrust. These bastards abandoned me years back. I don’t show any unpleasant feelings on the outside, and I continue to be cheery with them, although I keep a state of mind not to trust anyone there. They pass me the blunt and I take a super long hit, and hold it super long and blow out. After it went around a few times we all spark a cigarette to increase our high. We just keep talking and talking. It seems like time has stopped. How long can people just sit here and talk? It’s been hours, I think to myself (strangely enough I am still puffing on the same cigarette, but dont notice anything unusual about it). Then I drop my butt, and it falls under the chair I’m sitting on. 'Ah Shit' I said and got out of my seat to get it. I look under the chair but I can’t seem to find it. 'Did any of you see were my...' as I turn around I notice no one is there, and I am alone in the pen. A sense of anger comes over me, and I get intense feelings of 'I shouldnt have trusted them' and 'how dare they'. These feelings are followed by loneliness and then total fear. I need to get out of this pen and go back in the house. I walk back to my house across the long field, and it seems to take even longer to go back than when I had come.

And this excerpt doesn't stand alone: many of those who adventure into this madness write down their experiences in well written 'trip reports'. You can read them online, on Erowid, or listen to someone on YouTube narrate the experience. And these are all real stories... likely. Some may be false. But unlike telling stories of a similar ilk around a campfire, where you know your mates, and can be quite sure the stories are made up, the opaque wall of anonymity means you can't know whether the events described really happened. And this anonymity is part of the appeal. Another genre of horror I like are the /x/ creepypastas, particularly ones on cryptids. You can't know if the story is real. It's written by an anonymous gentleman, who frames their writing as a real story; and since I'm not so chronically disillusioned so as to disbelieve everything I hear online, it feels kind of freaky. One of my favourites was listening to a series of posts by a former deep-sea diver, telling the tales of the freaks at the bottom of the sea. It's more real than a work of fiction, since it's posed as truth, and more real than a camp-fire story, since I can't judge the author. It sits in a liminal zone where it's not ostracised in the darkness of falsehood, but doesn't conform to my sense of reality's light; instead, it rests in the twilight of truth, on the boundary, where all horror ought to rest. Although I haven't read the book, another horror in this twilight is that of the New York mole people, homeless men who live in the unused forgotten tunnels of the metro. The author claimed she was taken down by a guide into the tunnels, and met a civilisation of homeless people who haven't left in years, but that she hadn't journeyed into the deepest reaches of the tunnels. The deeper you went, the stranger the people became, some having webbed feet and hands, her guides reported. Of course structural engineers, train autists, and other boring people came out to DEBUNK the author's tale, but the author never caved and said outright that she'd written a falsehood. And because she continued to believe her story, we are able to also. Important, since she hadn't that shield of anonymity. The through-line with these stories is that of truth and how its determined. In my experience horror which is true tugs at me and makes me feel actually afraid, rather than just anxious or disconnected. There are two ways we determine truth: authority and perspective, we can dub them. Truth from authority is to believe something is true because an authority, whether that be an expert or the mass of the majority, has declared it to be true, implicitly or explicitly. For example, a scientist may say the Earth has a molten core, and we believe because we trust his expertise and judgement; alternatively to the authority of the scientist, there's the authority of the majority, where we may believe the Earth has a molten core simply because everyone else believes that, and you don't want to be called some kind of flat-earther, do you. Or on a personal level, the doctor may diagnose me with Leukaemia, and since I have no means by which to disprove his assessment, I will believe what he says to be true. Truth from perspective, however, is different. Truth from perspective is your own apperception of truth, your own eyes and worldview, trying to fit an experience into your understanding and experience of the world. However many times a man of great repute may try to convince me there are herds of flying cows floating an inch above the Patagonian plane, I won't believe him, since it sounds like complete tosh. He may even attempt to show evidence, like a photo, a video, or an academic journal article, but I will probably still disbelieve him. Real horror, the truly scary, requires both of these truths to be engaged. Our perspectival sense of truth rejects horror stories, because it says 'these things aren't true, since I have no experience of them'. But humans can't rely on our own experience alone. Each man cannot re-invent the wheel! And learning from other people's failures is far better than learning from your own failure. Which is why we rely also on truth from authority, and have faith that authority is not corrupt. Now granted, the internet isn't a bastion of great authority in which to place your trust. There are swindlers and grifters in every cranny, selling vitality-boosting nootropic snake oils. But so long as the authority in question hasn't a reputation of lying or is proven to be lying, we can't help but implicitly place our trust in these horror tales we read. Perhaps just an inch of trust. But the door wedged open but an inch is all the cool cave air of the Unknown needs to gust into your mind and give us chills. And as is the case for our sense of horror, so too is it the case for the datura tripper. It takes but an inch gap, afforded by these toxic chemicals, for their sense of perspectival truth to be wedged open. That marble door, which separates the conscious mind from the unconscious mind, is bust open - for those most unfortunate, by the hinges - and for all the imaginations and demons of the liminal realm, the twilight realm, to come forth into the tripper's reality. And they lose their perspectival truth, their ability to personally discern truth based on an understanding of the world, and instead imagine a wholly new world they're fooled into thinking is real. In short, it is the horror of horrors: a horror wherein all things become horror. The truth of authority becomes worthless, for it no longer pertains to your situation on datura, and your truth of perspective is faulty, leaving you adrift and radically disconnected from reality. This is life without truth, without logos. This is the hell. The ancients understood this conception of hell also, it isn't simply a modern contrivance. Dreams were considered in many cultures messages from the underworld. It isn't surprising then that so many datura-takers explain their experience as a dream. Dreams are without sense nor reason, and experienced in the darkness and mystery of night. Linked is the ancient Greek practice of incubation, wherein initiates were taken by some kind of shaman into their dreams to encounter the underworld as a form of healing. Similarly, the Orphic mystery cults in ancient Greece descended into the underworld, just like their namesake, through rituals, rituals often containing potions - perhaps potions with deliriants. The realm of the dead is inhabited by these shifting spirits, unconstrained by matter, but without the benefits of a material body, like to affect the world. Hell is without logos nor love. It is a place without sense, where everything is confused, since matter is what gives reality shape, consistency, repeatability, and thus affords wisdom. That datura, this gateway to hell, this Orphic potion, grows naturally and can be eaten by any foolish teenager is honestly crazy. Once upon a time, in a mythic age, only the witches who sought forbidden knowledge were daring enough to try such a potion. There are many today also who seek forbidden knowledge, a goal which is honestly the most common reason these trippers give for trying datura, even if they may not phrase it in this way. What's likely the scariest take-away, the take-away which sticks with you longest, from reading or listening to these datura experiences, is how thin the line is between sanity and madness. You realise how our sense making mechanism, those mechanisms which piece together data from the eyes, the ears, and our other senses, can so easily be hijacked by what can only be described as demons. You may see and hear an old friend in conversation, papier-mâché'd from memories and imagination, but you may also smoke a cigarette, feeling it on your lips, tasting and smelling the tobacco. And then drop their cigarette, as they so often do - what a strange motif in these stories that is. And then they may see their friend die and decompose before their eyes, experiencing the grief, smelling the putrefaction, even if they've never smelled a decaying corpse before. So much of our reality is realised. Real-ise has an 'ise' ending, it's an action we are constantly performing. Insofar as we realise our goals, we are in a constant operation of realising reality, crafting reality from senses, so that we can operate in the world. So much of the mind is primordially ancient, containing buggy deprecated operations and functions, which in a moment are all brought forth into consciousness, your mind unable to digest this rush of thoughts and images. This is the underworld of ancient pagan belief from which few return. It takes a confrontation with madness, to steal the gold of the underworld and return, to attain its treasures of power and wisdom. But is this hermetic path right? Prominent history YouTuber Whatifalthist recently flew too close to the sun, was overwhelmed with symbols, and now communes with Odin. Is this path right? I'm reminded of T. S. Eliot's verse in East Coker: "The only wisdom we can hope to acquire / Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless." We need humility to forego this hunger for forbidden knowledge from the underworld. We need humility to trust in Christ that we need not the wisdom of the underworld, the wisdom of old men Eliot talks of. And we need humility to appreciate true horror. Those who, puffed with pride, believe they know everything about how the world works and how it is, keeps their door firmly shut. There is no mystery to the world, it's just a clockwork of people. Only those with the humility to know they don't know, to know the world is in fact a mysterious place: only they will feel that chill from the winds of the Unknown. Only they can have faith.