Bogomania

"The most common drug is food."

Paradoxical at first glance, the statement of A.L. Dobrokhotov hints at the relativity and profaneness of the concepts of “drugs” and “drug addiction”. Indeed, words and expressions like “air mania” or “use of clothes” would sound strange. “Mania” indicates something independent, independent of the will and at the same time connected with medicine, that is, something sick and alien, the attitude towards which cannot but be profane. And, oddly enough, we are primarily interested in the profane attitude. It has been noticed that people who are not laymen here, that is, those for whom “psychedelic” drugs have become part of everyday life, never utter the word “drugs” or say it only with a hint of irony (or even outright mockery).

But if a person expects some unknown heights or falls from a psychedelic drug, then for him this drug is a drug. It is obvious that “drugs,” no matter what denotation is hidden under this sign, are not just some means that bring a person into a certain state: the state must be fundamentally different , new, alien. The desire for drugs is necessarily associated with taedium vitae, with hatred (or at least dislike) for the normal, familiar order of things.

For example, university (MSU) philology students who came from Central Asia (that is, the same snobbish intellectuals as other philology students, but in their own Central Asian manner) claim that smoking hashish is bad manners: they have hashish Only “suckers” smoke there, but they, sophisticated connoisseurs of unknown sensations, prefer vodka. “The first drop of wine destroys a person” - and if a person raised in Islamic culture prefers alcohol to cannabinol, then he is a marginalist. He is a "drug addict".

"Fair, gentle and powerful opium"

For the first time, “drug addiction” in the indicated sense of the word appeared, apparently, in the British Empire. The British quickly found out that the colonial trophy - opium - was not just a means of pain relief. And not just a means of intoxication. The garrulous drug addict Thomas De Quincey compares the qualities of opium and wine with tedious conscientiousness, attributing to opium the virtues that were valued in the Modern Age: “The main difference is that wine upsets the mental faculties, whereas opium (if used as it should) on the contrary, it brings them into an exceptional order in accordance with regularity and harmony" ("Confession of an Englishman who uses opium"). Today, opium lovers, in the light of new “spiritual standards,” claim that opium makes a person less rational, more kind, strengthens intuition, etc. Let us also pay attention to the obligatory clause: opium must be taken exactly “as it should”, that is, not in the way that might occur to an ordinary, uninitiated person who is not isolated from the “crowd”.

The real virtues of opium can be seen from the following tirade: “O just, gentle and powerful opium! You grant to both poor and rich alike that life-giving balm that heals the deep wounds of the heart and cures the pain that confuses the spirit... To the criminal, even if only for one night , you return the lost hopes of youth and wash his hands from the blood... for the triumph of insulted innocence, you call imaginary witnesses to the court of dreams, rejecting the true ones, and rewrite the verdicts of unjust judges from fantastic creations born of the imagination in favor of the unjustly convicted. in the darkness are temples and cities, with which neither the creations of Phidias and Praxiteles, nor the splendor and splendor of Babylon and Hecatompylus can be compared... You alone can bestow a person so generously, truly you possess the keys to Paradise, O fair, gentle and powerful opium!

Isn’t it even somehow strange that the word “opium” turned out to be written with a lowercase letter. I would like to write in capital letters Opium, and all His Divine Qualities, and the pronouns by which He is designated... De Quincey himself writes that he is the “sole confessor,” “both the alpha and the omega,” of a certain “true church,” the teaching which concerns only opium. Of course, for an Englishman of the early 19th century, such statements sound like hyperbole, but for us they are a direct indication: in a situation where God is perceived as Something transcendent, non-everyday, different (and this is our situation!), in a situation of religious attitude towards The Absolute (in the original meaning of the word “absolutus” - “separated”) - in such a situation, any external, exotic force that subjugates a person, bringing him gifts, albeit ambiguous - any such force will be perceived as the “hand of God”. A reverse, hangover reaction is also possible (or obligatory?), when the “hand of God” turns into the paw of the devil. With a positive attitude, all “Divine” (from the point of view of society) attributes will be attributed to this force, and with a negative attitude, all “devilish” ones. The “torture by opium” that followed the “intoxication” are the same visions of other worlds: first, De Quincey (or his hero) sees the palace of Kubla Khan, the poem about which Coleridge dreamed of in an opium dream (it is interesting that Kubla Khan himself I also dreamed about the palace at one time - before he built it. Apparently, Borges says in this regard, we are dealing with an archetype here); but both the palace and Kubla Khan became, thanks to Marco Polo and Coleridge, European values, those beautiful gates with which the West fenced itself off from the East. The De Quincey Palace stands on the clouds, this is not the East yet, this is a sign that Opium gives us from Heaven: get ready! Now it will be East! There will be torture! There will be China!

“As for China... I am horrified by the life that its inhabitants lead... And I would rather live with madmen or with wild animals.” De Quincey also includes India among the horrors of the East. Eastern visions are perceived by him as terrible - precisely because of their alienness . This is how the transcendental turned into the infernal .

Opium harmoniously embraces the spheres of Evil along with the spheres of Good - like the faceless all-encompassing Jewish Lord. Apparently, it is the religious attitude that explains the “fight against drug addiction” - society defends its religious foundations (regardless of the formal presence or absence of an official religion).

Modern opium hunters are not far removed from De Quincey. Of course, consuming poppy straw is a completely trivial activity, but everyone understands that this is just a warm-up: the main route of opium into the blood today is through a vein. Apparently, everyone who is “expanding” senses the unnaturalness of the “straight path” and, to compensate, falls into aplomb, often hinting that they are walking on the edge, which means they can sometimes look “over the other side,” unlike those who “don’t go in.” into their "schedules". Familiarity with Death (albeit purely declarative) gives the consumption of opiates a religious character, and not so much a festive pagan one as a pompous Christian one: “opium addicts” do not just get their buzz, but, “trampling on death by death,” talk to God.

Tantric sex with cocaine

The next stage of our “sacred history” can be called the “Silver Age”: the sternly inspired opium puritanism is replaced by orgiastic-suicidal black masses, where cocaine is used instead of incense.

Cocaine does not live in Heaven, but in the Deep. He, like opium, gives his flock both heaven and hell, but does not carry them within himself, but picks out heaven and hell from the spiritual depths of the flock itself: “... the fact that cocaine aroused in me the best, most humane feelings of mine - I could interpret this as the narcotic effect of cocaine on me. But how can I explain something else? How can I explain the inevitability with which (after cocaine) the basest, bestial feelings came out of me” (Mikhail Ageev, “A Romance with Cocaine”). It turns out to be very simple to explain: “The mechanism of our human souls is the mechanism of a swing, where from the strongest take-off towards the Nobility of the Spirit there arises the strongest flight towards the Fury of Cattle.”

This is reminiscent of Silenus’s evil answer to Midas who caught him: the highest human Good is not to be at all, and the second in quality is to die as soon as possible. We know about Silenus' answer primarily from Nietzsche. Ageev’s final model is also close to the ontology of “The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music”: the external, formal, strict turns out to be non-existence, husk. Under the breath of Cocaine, the husk flies off and the inner is exposed - pure, formless Being. However, if for Nietzsche pure Being is terrible and just one glance at it blinds a person, then for Ageev the original world chaos is identical to unconditional Happiness, the Meaning of Everything. Ageev's Happiness is close to Mahayanist nirvana or true life according to Hoffmann: the beautiful reality in which the student Anselm lives, from the outside, from a profane point of view, looks ridiculous and terrible. Ageev would add - dirty, insignificant, and vile. Ageev's hero slides into the abyss of human baseness, but in fact this is no longer important: this is just the fall of a dead body abandoned by the owner. The power of Cocaine lies precisely in the fact that, having seen the Truth, a person can no longer help but leave everything else. Vadim Maslennikov, Ageev's hero, strives for this strength, just as Don Juan strived for absolute beauty - walking on the bodies of rejected, destroyed women. In general, Ageev’s text can be considered erotic : the stages of Vadim’s life are marked by his women, and each new woman increasingly tears Vadim’s soul into two parts - “human” (Ageev connects her with “pure” love) and “animal” (Ageev connects her with sex - let's leave it on his conscience). But women live here, in the world below, and even the most beloved of them, even “Donna Anna” (Sonia), cannot bring the matter of dividing the soul to the necessary completion. The top of the hill is not yet Heaven, or rather the bottom of the valley is not yet the Abyss.

But the chapter "Sonya" is followed by the chapter "Cocaine". Vadim's last love and last sex - his last, divine romance - finally tears his soul apart: the chaff is separated from the grain, Man went to heaven, and Cattle was thrown into a landfill.

As you can see, Platonism, Tantrism, Gnosticism, Buddhism, Romanticism and Nietzscheanism are all mixed up in this chaotic cult, the ritual of which is a night orgy, degradation, meanness and dirt (“and pathetic self-satisfaction”), myth is a story about the division of the soul, and deity - the Meaning of Life, formless (limitless!) Happiness.

Walking with acid

But the era of the aesthetic desire for death has passed - two world wars weaned humanity from adherence to hara-kiri by the method by which the hero of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was weaned from the craving for suffering (he was seriously beaten). Humanity has become fed up with evil, and the craving for other worlds has lost its “diabolical” half. Junkies are ready to sacrifice their own lives in the fight against withdrawal symptoms and die “on the needle”, having deceived the stoned Devil. Weak “drugs” are crowding out the former giants, and they themselves quickly lose their “narcotic quality”, turning into ordinary means of relaxation. Heroin continues to fight for “old values,” combining in itself (and in its cult) the features of medical opium and cocaine, but this cult is nothing more than an epigone. More interesting is the cult of another strong substance - LSD.

The real value of "acid" lies, firstly, in the fact that it allows you to see controlled "pictures" and gives the power that De Quincey unsuccessfully dreamed of. The second value of “acid” is its ability to “drive a person crazy” in the literal sense: a person ceases to feel like himself, he finds himself in the same world, but in another, alien Self, which is not responsible for this world, but only travels to German Most likely, it was this property that allowed Stanislav Grof to consider LSD a panacea for all mental illnesses. This same property “heals” any responsibility imposed on us by Genesis. As a result, travel to other worlds has successfully turned from pilgrimage into tourism. Perhaps “tourism” is a feature of any modern religion of the transcendent. But this means a sharp break in all “sacred stories” (including the “drug story”).

Division of canonical territories

I would like to emphasize that public attitude towards drugs is not at all a metaphor for religiosity. This is one of the types of religiosity. Pagan rituals performed within the framework of sympractic ("archaic") culture, therefore, are not "religious": they are not separated from everyday life, that is, they are not absolute (in the already indicated - original - sense of the word). Absolute religiosity is aimed at “other worlds” (the City of God), in fact, at death. I have already talked about this, but now we should focus on the most important detail: the process of dying itself belongs to life, therefore a struggle is possible (and occurs) here. If “on the other side” everyone is equal - which is what various syncretic cults such as Baha’ism base their preaching on - then on this side there is a difference between the ways of death. Many researchers have noted the religious tolerance of paganism, which is fully described by the simple slogan “live and let live.” Tolerance is alien to dying. The dying person is selfish and self-centered, he is filled with resentment and pathos resulting from resentment. And (naturally) he is ready to die for his ideals, since these ideals are opposed to life from the very beginning. Therefore, any attempts to establish “interreligious dialogue”, as long as we are talking about absolute (for example, “cherished”) religions, are doomed to failure. Heydar Dzhemal spoke about this at a conference dedicated to “Eastern politics” (House of Journalist, 03/5/2002): in Israel, according to Dzhemal, there is a “dispute over the legacy of Abraham”, for the “eschatological Temple” - between Judaism, Islam and the “metaphorical Rome" (in fact, the United States). Other conference participants - both from the Arab and Jewish sides - demonstrated complete uncompromisingness, verbalizing, however, their positions in political terms. Politics here, however, is the same euphemism as the “medical” invective against “drugs” from representatives of the “cult of tobacco and alcohol.”

The inevitable profaneness of “politics” (similar to the profaneness of the “fight against drug addiction”) was realized by the participants of the founding congress of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress, who spoke about the need for “interreligious dialogue” - but especially emphasized that “dialogue does not pursue the goal of finding out which religion is most adequate” (M .Members). Dialogue, thus, is meant to be only “public”, at the level of social doctrines put forward by various confessions, “in order to avoid dogmatic questions” (R. Spector). However, peace and quiet, which is quite achievable at the profane - social, political - level, at the level of euphemisms, has nothing to do with the essence. And the religious essence will continue to be projected onto “realpolitik”...

We are, however, no stranger to the fact that the world of words and the world of deeds practically do not intersect. We can only hope that the “tourist” nature of modern absolute religiosity will lead to the independent extinction of the general world war, which has manifested itself in all religious and “non-religious” wars of history - a war that began at the moment when we were given a sword instead of peace.

Kirill Yakimets