Robert Anton Wilson: Two Formative Drug Trips

RAW had two notable experiences before 1963, one that echoed down through his work for decades

In the vast literature both by and about psychonauts, I find it notable that it seems rare that a writer returns to one particular drug experience often enough that we see how profound and influential that trip was. Here I will mention one drug experience that Wilson wrote about that he didn’t return to (possibly due to societal taboo/potential for misunderstanding), and one that he did return to, many times, both in his fiction, in interviews, and nonfiction decades later.

I would also like to preface these accounts with the awareness that the psychology of perception that Wilson wrote so much about - he has his own, extremely intricate ontology derived from epistemology - must have been influenced by significant drug trips such as these, at least in some way.

A Remarkable Peyote Trip Leads to Deep Insight on Homosexuality

To my knowledge the first and only time Wilson wrote about this was in Fact magazine’s first issue, January-February 1964, “Of Transcendental Beauty and Crawling Horror.”¹ Fact was the latest project by renegade First Amendment publisher Ralph Ginzburg, and he gave RAW free reign to flex his intellectual chops, which must have been a relief after endless hack-work and strictly from hunger writing jobs.

RAW, who wrote as “Ronald Weston” for reasons we might divine shortly, writes about a 1962 peyote trip while living on a farm in southern Ohio, near Yellow Springs. He tells us how the peyote was prepared and his prior knowledge of bad trips and numinous ones. When we read his book from 13 years later, Cosmic Trigger vol 1, we find out he knew a lot more about peyote than he was letting on here. This trip was at first scary, then became something gorgeous. It was transcendent, he fell in love with the christmas tree, there were bright colors and sexual excitement, and “The beauty of every object I turned to was now so great that I was in a continuous mood of childish awe and joy.” Wilson draws from his anarchist knowledge, citing Bartolomeo Vanzetti’s mystical experience when he looked at the night sky and felt his “soul go out from my body up,” something we don’t often link to hardcore materialist atheist anarchists.

RAW only started to come down from this “Magic World” 12 hours later, at 8AM, then he slept most of the day and into the night, then went to his regular office job, where people said he seemed happier than usual. But that’s not the most interesting thing about this trip.

He said colors remained brighter than usual for “several weeks” and then the unexpected happened: “I fell in love, sexually, with a young boy.” He never acted upon it, but he got an erection just driving past the boy’s house. “The boy was definitely heterosexual and, I knew, would react to any advance with repugnance or fear. That realization alone - and no ‘moral’ consideration at all - kept me from making a pass at him.”

Yes, this is the same heterosexual lover of women, married to a beautiful and intellectual feminist, same editor who later worked at Playboy, the same one who wrote for Playboy a book on female breasts. Wilson was never homophobic, but he did read like a very heterosexual man. Anyone who had read most of Wilson’s work but not this article would be kinda shocked. I know I was when my colleagues first unearthed it. Because first of all: RAW had this experience as a fallout from a profound experience with a psychedelic drug, and this seems like luminous detailed data about what psychedelics can do. Secondly, he actually wrote about it, candidly, albeit under a pen name.

His feelings for the boy lasted about a month, then faded, and he never had a recurrence of homosexual lust. “I am very glad that I had this experience, though, for it has taught me to understand homosexuals a little better. It has also taught me why Freud was so fond of quoting an old proverb, “Nothing human is alien to me.”

Psychedelics and New Sexual Awareness: A Recent Study

A recent study by Kruger, et.al, "Perceived Impact of Psychedelics on Sexual, Gender, and Intimate Relationship Dynamics”² may shed some light on RAW’s temporary extreme sexual openness after a powerful psychedelic trip. You’d think we should have known these things 50 years ago - we would have - but six years after RAW wrote his piece for Fact the US government basically shut down all psychedelic research, forcing the intrepid to carry on underground, with vastly limited funds. Here’s an interesting line from the abstract from the Journal of Sex Research:

"~10% of participants reported that psychedelic experiences influenced their gender identity and/or expression, reporting increased authenticity, self-acceptance, openness, and freedom in self-expression, as well as altered experiences of sexuality and gender."

This dovetails with recent research by Gül Dolen’s team at UC Berkeley: they found that all psychedelics, and ketamine (possibly others) re-open critical periods, and each drug seems to have a slightly different duration in which they keep these critical periods open for re-imprinting, or re-learning; these are things that had been long thought to be “fixed” after initial “accidental” imprints when critical periods were open. Some psychedelics, Dolen and associates think, stay open for up to six weeks, although there is still a massive amount of research to be done on this. The implications, though, are that 1.) we are all far more open, potentially, to perceiving the world in ways we thought was impossible, and 2.) we ought to be ultra-careful with our lives in the 2-6 weeks after a major psychedelic experience, lest we re-imprint something undesirous. My interpretation of RAW’s 1962 homosexual openness was that, as he thought about it, it was strange and that he really did prefer women. So the critical period had opened, he began to take on an imprint that he recognized was not what he wanted, so his environment with his wife (Arlen Riley Wilson) reasserted itself. He mentions his homosexual lust for a boy lasted about a month. At that point the critical period was closing, probably. He discusses his newfound empathy with homosexuality and new learning from that one peyote experience.

It seems obvious that much more research on this is needed, and wanted. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be truly bisexual, and the first thing that comes to mind is: be careful what you wish for, ‘cuz: do I really want more added distractions about who’s sexy and worth getting to know? Or, to paraphrase Woody Allen, heterosexuality is great and everything, but bisexuality immediately doubles your chances for getting a date for Saturday night. As I move closer to my dotage, do I need that aggravation?³ Do I need more dates? I do not. Ship: sailed.

Deadly Nightshade: RAW’s Epically Bad Belladonna Trip

In the very same “Of Transcendental Beauty and Crawling Horror” (see footnote #1) essay from Fact, 1964, RAW covers his belladonna trip, which must have occurred around 1962 also. Dale Pendell, one of the giants among drug-writers, tells us that psychedelic drugs (LSD, psilocybin, peyote, DMT) have long been called “hallucinogens” by the press and even by scholars. But the class of drugs that belladonna is in - the nightshade family, solanacea, tropane alkaloids that have the structure of a peculiar seven-carbon ring with a nitrogen bridge through the center - these drugs will make you hallucinate in ways that psychedelics don’t. You’re talking to someone and they just disappear. You see faces scowling at you through the window. Wilson on his very very no-good hellacious bad belladonna trip kept smoking and enjoying a cigarette that was not there. One of the worst things about these drugs - besides the fact that they’re long lasting and at sufficient doses kill people, or leave them with psychotic behaviors for long periods - is that they wipe out memory, to a large degree.

In his Fact article, there’s more than enough to scare any of us away from even thinking about trying these things. A few minutes after taking belladonna in a tea, having heard it was like the psychedelics⁴ he’d been reading about, a Hollywood monster came running at him from across the yard, then his arms and legs trembled uncontrollably, then his wife turned into a “malignant, cannibalistic ghoul.” That’s how the trip starts, and it gets much worse from there, and lasts all night. He went to sleep at dawn, then had more hallucinations in the ensuing days. It’s quite the trip report, eh? I cannot begin to do it justice; read it for yourself.

There seems something paradoxical about drug writing: reading about Bad Trips often seems more interesting than reading about Good Trips. Hey, I want all of your trips to be good ones: emotional breakthroughs, sudden realizations that change your life for the better, the feeling of being connected with everyone, every living thing, the biosphere, and the universe, all that really Good Stuff. But it’s at times not gripping reading. Bad trips very often, I find, make for a cracking good read. I read and I think of a line from DFW: well…here’s a supposedly fun thing I’ll never have to do. (He said “never do again” but ya know?)

One thing that I find striking about really bad trips is they seem revealing of the sort of mind that’s on the massive bummer. RAW was such an intellectual that, while belladonna knocked out his ability to string a semantically meaningful thought together, he still attempted to lecture on Marxism, the Nuremberg Trials, and tried to refer to Burroughs’s philosophy of cut-ups when a good friend mentioned RAW’s strange utterances. One that apparently Arlen wrote down, because it reappeared in cut-up like passages in his work over the next 30 years was, “We must all drink more milk for the Kennedy Administration in outer space of the Nuremberg pickle that exploded.” This was part of a sort of informal collection of memorable drug thoughts. The Russian mystic and Gurdjieff acolyte was high on nitrous oxide when he wrote down, “Think in other categories.” This seems more insightful than the laughing gas thought William James reportedly had, “Overall there is a smell of fried onions.” RAW liked a cut-up that Burroughs came up with, because it feels poetic and also like a drug-influenced line: “Goddamn floating whorehouse. Death is the navigator.” Burroughs turned RAW on to the last words of Dutch Schultz, who, bleeding out and delirious, uttered a bunch of fantastic nonsense, apparently taken down by a stenographer in the hospital. Schultz’s words read like cut-ups from one of the great OGs.⁵ There are many others, but perhaps that’s for some other spew.

As you read the terrifying trip report in the Fact article, note that he kept running head-first into a wall. This seems common to nightshade bad trips. This is the stuff of nightmares.

RAW’s Account Two Years Later: 1966

We owe this account to intrepid RAW-archivist Martin Wagner, who found this next account of RAW’s horrific belladonna trip in a 1966 issue of Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine.⁶ Here RAW links tales of medieval witches and these tropane alkaloids to his favorite locked-room mystery writer, John Dickson Carr. He also gets the number 15 million as the number of witches murdered by good Christians, while the actual number, historians think in the year 2026, was closer to 70,000. I think the 15 million was once a number floated around by anarchist intellectuals who were allied with feminists, which would be RAW in 1966. NB it’s roughly two years later and now RAW seeks to extensionalize psychedelics drugs as something apart from narcotics. More books had appeared in the libraries, more articles had been published. He still saw cannabis as a psychedelic (and while, by the 1990s, this was thoroughly debunked, Yale psychiatrist Godfrey Pearlson, in his recent massive cannabis book, The Science of Weed, shows that many people still use cannabis for its psychedelic effects⁷), and RAW appears to still think of belladonna as some sort of psychedelic, because of the link between hallucinations. As the effects of this hellacious belladonna trip come on: blue lights, a Van Gogh night sky. Van Gogh had gone crazy. Yikes. In both this account and the prior one, he become aware he’s in for a very long bad time, linking it with the drug getting into the bloodstream from the stomach. Wife and friends try to help him come down in both accounts. Still think you might wanna try belladonna tea?:

In between twitches, “bolts” of purely irrational terror shot through me. I know that “bolt of terror” is a cliché, but no other term quite describes this sensation. It was exactly like a flow of electricity, except that it was a flow of emotion–very unpleasant emotion. Nothing I did seemed able to stop it, and it grew more intense with each wave.

In this account, RAW bothers the neighbors, and tries to vomit his way out in their sink, to no avail. There are numerous differences between both accounts, but they’re not major, and we can attribute the discrepancies to memory, being aware others may have read “Ronald Weston”’s account, and selective perception, or the need to tell a horrific true story well. A notable aspect of this account:

We were crawling through a tunnel, the dwarf and me. The tunnel led into a woods, and above the woods was a mountain. On top of the mountain was a castle. I recognized it at once: Dark Tower. “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.” I was the Fisher King. I had to go through the Dark Tower to rescue the Holy Grail, but I kept banging my head in the tunnel. The dwarf encouraged me to go on.

This is a version of the Underground Journey, which RAW later in his life found showed up in all of his work, as a controlling metaphor. He thought it was interesting because he hadn’t been consciously thinking about this metaphor, but he realized it kept being used by his poetic mind, over and over, with innumerable variations.

Near the end of this piece, the lasting thing from this nasty trip might have been that he was previously a scholarly introverted person, but his wife now saw an extraverted, dominant personality. Could it be that even this class of drugs re-opens up critical periods?

Here RAW links Plato’s Crito with the speculation that it was some sort of nightshade trip that was at the heart of the Eleusinian Mysteries. This topic seems far from settled, and for some other article, but suffice: it waxes and wanes. Right now it seems to be waxing again.⁸ He ends by linking psychedelic drugs to his own then-inchoate ideas about erotic panpsychism and the persecution of witches.

Sex, Drugs and Magick (1973)

This book has gone through a few editions with different paginations, but suffice: RAW covers these types of drugs in chapter 2, “Horned Gods and Horny Potions.”⁹ He’s distanced himself enough from his epic belladonna trip only to tell us about mandrake, another solanacea drug, that…

With mandrake, what is seen tends to remain constant and to be believed, even if it’s something as implausible as a polar bear in a black turtleneck sweater lounging in the corner of the room. (This was actually seen by Ronald Weston, an advertising executive, who experimented with belladonna, another drug in this family, and wrote about his experience for Fact magazine, vol.1, no.1, 1963.)”¹⁰

Immediately after this, RAW distances these drugs from psychedelics, if only because they are, unlike psychedelics, “quite toxic and it is easy to overdose and kill yourself.”

This is where RAW appears at his most florid and jazzy-speculative intellectual self about these drugs, and displays a couple of quantum jumps in overall drug-savviness. He includes the time he asked Leary if he knew of any good trips on nightshade drugs and Leary says no, and the Burroughs anecdote about the time he got hold of some morphine that was “severely cut” with belladonna. After his fix:

(Burroughs) noticed he was out of cigarettes, and went to the window, sticking one leg out before a visiting friend asked him what the hell he was doing. “Going down for cigarettes,” was the reply — and the friend grabbed him before he completed the trip out the window, which was on the third floor. The next day, typical of belladonna, Burroughs did not remember the experience and had to be told about it.¹¹

“Deadly Nightshade”: Short Story

This short story was the first thing I ever read by RAW. It opens up Right Where You Are Sitting Now,¹² but was first published in Gallery, a Playboy imitator, in 1971, so maybe I should have placed it before Sex, Drugs and Magick. This is a story of incredible chaos, told by the now-busted sheriff of Mad Dog, Texas, who’s a dim-bulb John Bircher with a UFO contact primed by paranoid conspiracy ideation about the Illuminati and the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (“Proctoscopes of the Elderly Zionists”), and who completely loses it when he has to deal with his wife’s vibrator and all these new books coming out (c.1970): The Sensuous Woman, The Sensuous Man, The Sensuous Couple, and (my favorite and the kicker) The Sensuous Suburb. These books were sick! and corrupting good Americans, and he read them over and over. The Illuminatuses were behind it all and “that Kinsey fellow hadn’t just been whistling.”

Well, one day he realized he had to do something about his wife, so he tried to think of the “perfect crime” to deal with her, knowing from movies that there is no perfect crime, but anyway: he staged a scene so it looked to the town doctor like she maybe had a heart condition, then he spiked her tea with belladonna…but the kids from the local grammar school came over to drink tea with her…It’s an insane spectacle, wrought be a right wing reactionary moron presently being grilled by authorities. He was worried he might have turned the kids into drug addicts, but a psychiatrist put his mind at ease:

He said a lot of hippies have tried belladonna for a trip but hardly any ever do it more than once. And it’s probably not addicting, he said in a funny dry voice, because “death usually supervenes before an addictive pattern can be established.” He also told me some folks in the ancient world used it in their religious rituals, and some of them never came home from church. That’s how it got to be called deadly nightshade, he said.

I don’t think RAW is distancing himself from his own experience, but drawing upon it for a quasi-Faulknerian corker of a short story.

The Earth Will Shake (1982)

In this, the first volume of Wilson’s Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, set in Italy in the late 18th century, his young male protagonist, Sigismundo Celine, is captured by a secret society/radical political gang called The Rossi, and they pry open his mouth and drug him with belladonna in an effort to convince him that “You will join us someday, and you will do it of your own free will, because you come to understand our divine work in this world.”¹³ The drug kicks in: “And the gorilla with testicles for eyes and a rotten leper’s nose said, ‘The clash of our cries for peace. Or say that stone is the speech. Do not murmur. Nor know. For the lions.’” These could be cut-ups mimicking Sigismundo’s belladonna hallucinations, who knows. It’s quite horrific, and here is RAW using his 1962 trip for a novel set in the Neapolitan 1760s. The length of the suffering from a Bad Trip is conveyed here in the novel, and Sigismundo is very fortunate to have his wise Uncle Pietro and and an even wiser alchemist-magician, named Abraham Orfali, to help his deal with the fallout of trip.

Sigismundo frowned. “They keep slipping away,” he said. “My memory doesn’t seem to work properly yet.”

“That is typical of belladonna,” Abraham said. “Tell me what you do remember.”

“La Belle Dame Sans Merci” from Email To The Universe (2005)

Here Wilson’s essay begins, “The four weirdest and scariest drug stories I know all involve belladonna, a chemical for which I how have the same sincere respect as I have for hungry tigers, earthquakes, floods, wildfires, the IRS and Dr. Hannibal Lecter.”¹⁴ RAW tells these four gnarly belladonna trip-tales, his being the 3rd, the Burroughs one already mentioned (above) the 4th. Here’s RAW 43 years later, on his own 1962 trip: “What can I say about why I did it? I hadn’t heard the above stories yet, I was young, I was a damned eejit, and the guy who gave it to me said it was ‘just like peyote.’” The Tin Woodman from the Wizard Of Oz show up in memory once again, along with other gruesome nightshade phantoms. The Bad Trip narrative coheres after 40 years.

C. 2002? An Interview With a Bulgarian Magazine

A woman named “Ina” asks RAW, at around age 70:

Ina: Have you ever had a bad trip? What happened?

RAW: I tried belladonna, because a friend told me, “its just like peyote.” In my experience, nothing like peyote happened. Blue and green curtains again, you know? It may have seemed like peyote to him, but it seemed like bloody hell to me. I would describe that awful night as 14 hours of paranoid schizophrenia. Demons and Nazis and monsters of all sorts. Even my wife grew fangs and turned into a vampire…I never tried belladonna again and never will; and I’d never recommend it to anyone — except George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden. They deserve it.¹⁵

Further Really Bad Trips and Good Reading

RAW and Leary’s younger friend and colleague, R.U. Sirius apparently swallowed some Asthmador in 1968, which was - believe it or not - an OTC drug for asthma, where you smoke cigarettes that had belladonna in them. But when you broke them open and ate them, you got the Really Bad Trip. And is happened to Ken Goffman/R.U. Sirius in upstate New York.¹⁶He was amped to see the pre-rock star Ronnie James Dio. What a horrific trip.

Dennis McKenna had a major bummer on a drug from the same family, jimsom weed/datura, as captured in his Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, pp.152-156, “My Datura Misadventure.”

Oliver Sacks relates scary and amusing hallucinations on the belladonna-related drug Artane, in his Hallucinations, pp.106-109. He hallucinated two friends coming over, so so he cooked them eggs, then was sure his parents were landing a private helicopter outside to visit, then he discussed Bertrand Russell with a “very intelligent spider.”

Ken Kesey was given a boatload of different mind-drugs while at the Menlo Park Veterans Administration hospital. The drug Ditran, a synthetic version of belladonna, was the only one he didn’t like. See The White Hand Society, Peter Conners, p.166.

Andrew Weil discusses bad nightshade trips in Russ Kick’s Disinfo Book Of Lists, p.22

Probably the best thing I’ve ever read on these drugs is in Pharmako/Gnosis, by Dale Pendell, pp.243-264. Some very knowledgable pagans grow nightshade drugs and experiment with low (and sometimes, accidentally not-so) doses. There’s anthropological data, chemistry, some reports of good trips, etc. It’s marvelous stuff, Pendell’s writing.

1. see “Of Transcendental Beauty and Crawling Horror” HERE. RAW’s other writing for fact (technically, it showed up as lower case) were feature-length pieces on advertising, a free love cult, William Burroughs, Mad and National Enquirer magazines, atheism, and racism.

2. The Kruger study from 2025 in Journal of Sex Research: HERE. An interesting passage from Rachel Nuwer’s coverage of this study for BBC online: “At first, Kruger was surprised by this finding. ‘If you had asked me ahead of time, I would have said that sexual attraction is something that's mostly fixed in people,’ he says. After more careful consideration, he realised that psychedelics probably were not rewriting fundamental aspects of who someone is, he says, but rather allowing them to ‘gain insights on themselves and possibly be more open to feelings that they may not have previously considered socially acceptable’.”

3. I will always be moving into or towards my dotage, but will never quite get there, because I suspect when I enter dotage-hood, I will be too much in my dotage to notice that I’m in my dotage then. Does that make any sense to you? If it does, can you explain it to me, please? On another level: see the comment by RAW’s daughter Christina, decades later, about RAW’s candor regarding his temporary homosexuality after peyote, as gleaned by Gabriel Kennedy in his Chapel Perilous: The Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson, p.55

4. This is an indictment of our Authoritarian Patriarchal Dipshit Society: even an intellectual like Wilson, at age 30, couldn’t find enough information about mind-altering drugs to alert him to the idea that, no, the solanacea drugs are not like the serotonin-based classic psychedelics and probably he ought to stay away. Another of our great drug writers, Mike Jay, tells us the solanacea/nightshade drugs got lumped in with opium poppies because of the earliest herbal-books: they were all pretty plants, all had psychoactive effects. It took a very long time to distinguish that which was crucially different. See Jay’s High Society, pp. 59-60.

5. In this case, Original Gangsta”, not Overweening Generalist. One of my favorite reference books on my own shelves, Bloodletters and Badmen, by Jay Robert Nash, p. 553-555, gives us a rundown of the Dutchman’s last words, as taken down by police stenographer FJ Long: Some of my favorites: “George, don’t make no bull moves. What have you done with him? Oh. mama, mama, mama.” “Oh, oh dog biscuits and when he is happy he doesn’t get snappy…please, please to do this. Then Henry, Henry, Frankie you didn’t meet him, you didn’t even meet me. The glove will fit what I say.” “Please help me up, Henry. Max come over here. French-Canadian bean soup. I want to pay. Let them leave me alone.”

6. HERE’s a link to this bad belladonna trip account, with RAW using another pseudonym, this time “Simon Moon.” Wagner’s RAW Archive site is found HERE. Martin thinks RAW was helping to edit this magazine at the time, too.

7. see Science of Weed, pp.176-178. “There were rare and more typically psychedelic-like reports of contact with divine beings, or experiencing feelings of unity and oneness with the universe, being part of God’s overall plan of things, or becoming ‘mystically one with the all-knowing.’ Accompanying such experiences were reports of feeling a high degree of spiritual empathy with others present, stimulation of long-term interests in religion, or emotions of deep peace and joy. Other users experienced ‘fantasy being as real as reality,’ out-of-body experiences and seeing or experiencing other universes. Finally, there were reports of mystical sexual experiences such as the dramatic and palpable fusion of souls as well as that of bodies.” On cannabis.

8. Just in the past calendar year, Profs Ascough and Mosurinjohn push back on the 1978 Hofmann/Ruck/Wasson hypothesis of psychedelics used at Eleusis; while a team of researchers think an LSD (ergot) precursor was used in the Mysteries. The aforementioned Rachel Nuwer on a psychedelic brew for Cicero and Marcus Aurelius. All from just this past year. Talk about a perennial topic!

9. Sex, Drugs & Magick: A Journey Beyond Limits was most recently published by Hilaritas Press in 2020. See chapter 2 of that edition, pp.106-128, for his thinking about nightshade/solanacea drugs. He’s done much more research on all drugs, seven years after the last account from the Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine, and he seems downright scholarly by 1973.

10. Sex, Drugs & Magick (Hilaritas ed), p.108. I imagine writers get a kick out of citing themselves under other pen names. I know I do. NB: here RAW gets the year wrong. I suspect the bad trip occurred in 1962, he wrote it up for Fact in late 1963, just before the first issue was released, in 1964. Did he not say it was himself here because of the peyote-induced homosexual thing? Maybe.

11. ibid, p.124

12. Right Where You Are Sitting Now (Ronin), pp.13-25

13. The Earth Will Shake (Hilaritas ed), p.94, but see pp.90-123 for this whole extremely nasty belladonna trip to play out.

14. Email To The Universe and Other Alterations of Consciousness, first published in 2005 (RAW died in 2007), and reissued by Hilaritas Press in 2017. “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” is on pp.142-144 of the Hilaritas ed that I have.

15. TSOG: Tsarist Occupation Government, first appeared in 2002; Hilaritas Press ed. 2022, which is the edition I cite from here, p.204.

16. R.U. Sirius’s bad trip recounted HERE.