Thomas Browne and 'the Opium of Time'.

It was the literary critic Peter Green in 1959 who first speculated - ‘Did Browne possibly take laudanum? It seems very likely. He had free access to drugs, and used opiates in various experiments.'[1]

Green hypothesised that one possible reason why Sir Thomas Browne's prose is stylistically unlike any of his contemporaries may have been due to an empirical enquiry into the effects of drugs. He also noted that the two Discourses of 1658, Urn-Burial and The Garden of Cyrus were penned by a Royalist who was under intense emotional and psychological distress during the Interregnum and Protectorate of Cromwell (1650-1660) and proposed that the rhapsodic fifth and final chapter of both Discourses may have been written in a trance-like condition.

It was during Browne's era, the seventeenth century, which saw the discovery of the tobacco-leaf and coffee-bean, drugs which, along with alcohol, continue to be acceptable and widely consumed throughout the world today. As a physician Browne was licensed to obtain opium, the only available pain-killer and tranquilliser in the medicine of his era. Widely in use since the sixteenth century, the Swiss alchemist-physician Paracelsus (1493-1541) was amongst the earliest advocates of opium. Such was its widespread usage that by the seventeenth century Dr. Thomas Sydenham (1624-89) the so-called 'Father of English medicine' whose books are well-represented in Browne’s vast library, declared- 

'Among the remedies which has pleased the Almighty God to give to man to relieve his sufferings, none is so universal and so efficacious as opium.'

Opium was used in the seventeenth century to relieve a variety of medical conditions, including disorders such as dysentery and respiratory ailments. There can be little doubt that in the course of his career Browne had the opportunity to observe the physical and mental effects of opium. His commonplace notebooks even record various experiments of dosages of opium upon animals, a vital and necessary precaution before administering opium to his patients.  

'Three grains of opium works strongly upon a dog. Observe how much will take place with a horse....Fishes are quickly intoxicated with baits: in what quantity with opium ? What quantity will take, in birds and animals with little heads ? From two grains unto five we have given unto a cockerel, without any discernable sophition... four unto a crow without visible effect. Six and eight unto dogs making them dull not profoundly to sleep....Five grains we have also given unto turkeys without effect of sleep....Five grains unto a young kestrel, did seem the like vertiginous and a little more sleepy; not profoundly. Five unto a young heron did nothing. [2]

It's in Urn-Burial (1658) that Browne employs highly original medical-philosophical imagery, which must surely have been acquired from observing first-hand the psychological effects of opium,  declaring-

'There is no antidote against the Opium of Time which temporally considereth all things.' 

Browne also poetically links the botanical source of opium with his discourse’s theme of the unknowingness of the human condition when stating - 'The iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her Poppy'; while also declaiming - 'Oblivion is not to be hired.'

Although the popular image of Browne is that of the orthodox physician, he was in fact one of the earliest of English doctor's to know of the hedonistic cocktail of sex and drugs, writing of such indulgences that - 

'the effect of eating Opium is not so much as to invigorate themselves in coition, as to prolong the Act, and spin out the motions of carnality.'  [3]

Throughout the history of alchemy and early chemistry there was a considerable knowledge of substances, minerals and drugs. Today, there are laws prohibiting the recreational usage of drugs, laws which continue to be as ineffective as those of America’s Prohibition era, laws which do little more than sponsor crime by creating a lucrative black market, exposing the vulnerable to adulterated and potentially hazardous substances, without either protecting or educating consumers to the possible consequences upon health, and unfairly criminalizing people, thus seriously damaging and wasting skills and life-opportunities.

No matter how much some may object to Peter Green’s hypothesis that the unique literary style of the discourses Urn-Burial and The Garden of Cyrus with their thematic progression of a 'soul journey' from the Grave to Garden may have originated from experimentation with drugs, it nevertheless remains a curious coincidence that in the nineteenth century Browne's literary works were 'rediscovered' and admired by the early Romantic figures of Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey and Coleridge; all of whom frequently indulged in laudanum, the alcohol-based tincture of opium, which was widely available in the nineteenth century. 

The idea that a major literary figure who was a moralist, devout Christian and respectable doctor may have written sections of his 'deep, stately, majestic' prose (De Quincey), with its slow, sombre contemplation upon Death and the afterlife, under the influence of Opium, would have been acceptable to the English essayist Thomas De Quincey, who, in his Confessions of an English Opium-eater (1821) before a visit to the opera while under the influence of opium stated- 

‘I do not recollect more than one thing said adequately on the subject of music in all literature: it is a passage in Religio Medici of Sir T. Brown; and, though chiefly remarkable for its sublimity, has also a philosophical value; inasmuch as it points to the true theory of musical effects.' 

But perhaps the greatest portrait of opium's effects in music occurs in De Quincey's contemporary, the French composer Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique (1830). 

Berlioz's five movement symphony introduced a radical and distinctly French approach to orchestration and melody, quite unlike the Viennese tradition, although also indebted to Beethoven's programmatic Pastoral symphony. In Berlioz's programmatic symphony, the romantic hero while under the influence of opium, conjures up a reverie of his beloved, catches a glimpse of her at a Ball, visits the countryside with her, and in a paroxysm of passion, murders her. He's sent to the guillotine for his crime, and in the symphony's 5th and final movement he dreams of attending a Witch's Sabbath,  in music with decidedly hallucinatory effects.

In complete contrast to Urn-Burial's 'vast undulations of sound' and declamatory 'full Organ-stop' baroque prose, Browne's discourse The Garden of Cyrus has predominately visual imagery. Frequently breathless and fractured in style, paragraph succeeds paragraph in a rapid procession of examples; firstly from gardens in antiquity, then art objects, followed by examples in nature in its long central chapter, and finally in mystical analogies involving astrology and the kabbalah. These examples in turn involve the inter-related symbols of the numbers five and ten, the quincunx pattern, along with its variants including lozenge-shape, the figure X, and criss-cross and network  patterns. All of which are all paraded before the reader as exemplary of  'how God geometrizes'. 

The distinguished Brunonian scholar and Dean Emeritus of Princeton University, USA, Jeremiah S. Finch (1910-2005) when examining a manuscript edition of The Garden of Cyrus described it as, 'a headlong scrawl, a quick hand and moving imagination, thinking quicker than his hand' with 'no less than 8 deletions occurring within 27 lines'. [4] Such uncharacteristic haste is suggestive of one who urgently wishes to impart a new insight. A fine example of Browne’s near stream-of-consciousness purple prose occurs in the paragraph -

In Chess-boards and Tables we yet find Pyramids and Squares, I wish we had their true and ancient description, far different from ours, or the Chet mat of the Persians, and might continue some elegant remarkables, as being an invention as High as Hermes the Secretary of Osyris, figuring the whole world, the motion of the Planets, with Eclipses of Sun and Moon.

One possible reason for the uncharacteristic composition of  The Garden of Cyrus may have been due to Browne's excitement at 'discovering' the quincunx pattern could be discerned throughout the universe. Such excitement is not dissimilar to those 'discovering' the meaning of life while under the influence of hallucinogens. Interestingly, the very word 'hallucination’ is recorded in the Oxford English dictionary as first used by Browne, one of hundred of words he introduced into the English language.

Empirical experimentation with drugs may have been the source of Browne's experiencing a 'Soul Journey' not unlike the legendary Hermes Trismegistus of Hermetic philosophy and his journey through the planetary spheres. Other 'Soul-journeys' of antiquity include Plato's Myth of Er and Cicero's 'Dream of Scipio', in which the cosmic voyager hears the heavenly music of the spheres. Alternatively, Browne may have read Iter Ecstaticum Kirceranium (1660) which describes how the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602-80) after listening to three lute-players, was led by the spirit Cosmiel in an ecstatic journey through the planetary spheres. Browne owned several books by Plato and Cicero, as well as several by Kircher, including Iter Ecstaticum (ed. Gaspar Schott). [5] 

For the empiricist, as for the alchemist, the self and its sensory impressions were the bed-rock of all experimentation. Whether Browne’s empirical nature ever included experimentation with drugs will never be truly known, however he may done so either accidentally, or as part of his medical studies, or even as part of a misguided alchemical quest. But as the Swiss psychologist C.G.Jung (1875-1961) long before sixties drug culture, stated -

One only has to think what it means if in the misery and incertitude of a moral or philosophical dilemma one has a quinta essentia, a lapis or a panacea so to say in one's pocket ! We can understand this deus ex machina the more easily when we remember with what passion people today believe that psychological complications can be made magically to disappear by means of hormones, narcotics, insulin shocks and convulsion therapy. The alchemists were as little able to perceive the symbolical nature of their ideas of the arcarnum as we to realise that the belief in hormones and shocks is a symbol. [6]

Nor is it impossible that Browne may have known of the hallucinogenic properties of psilocybin mushrooms. He took an interest in fungi, and in a letter consisting of several paragraphs upon fungus to Christopher Merritt,  makes mention of the highly toxic Deadly Nightcap -  

The fungi Phalloides I found not very far from Norwich, large and very fetid......I have a part of one dried still by me. Fungus rotundus major I have found about ten inches in diameter, and have half a dried one by me. [7]

Sir Thomas Browne was also aware that contaminated rye bread can produce extraordinary psychological effects. When digested contaminated rye bread can produce effects similar to that of the entheogen LSD. Ergot itself does not contain lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) but it does contain its precursor, ergotamine. Browne is not always credited with familiarity with the medical condition of ergotism, however he did introduce the word ‘ergotism', as in meaning the effects of ergot poisoning, into English language, stating in his advisory work Christian Morals (circa 1675)

      

'Natural parts and good Judgement rule the World. States are not governed by ergotisms.' [8]

Ergot poisoning has several names. These include St. Anthony's fire and St. Vitus dance. According to Wikipedia - 'Human poisoning due to the consumption of contaminated rye bread made from ergot-infected grain was common in Europe throughout the Middle Ages. It occurred primarily in Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries and involved groups of people dancing erratically, sometimes thousands at a time. The mania affected men, women, and children who danced until they collapsed from exhaustion. One of the first major outbreaks was in Aachen, in 1374, and it quickly spread throughout Europe; one particular outbreak occurred in Strasbourg in 1518. Affecting thousands of people across several centuries, dancing mania was not an isolated event, and was well documented in contemporary reports. It was nevertheless poorly understood, and remedies were based on guesswork. Generally, musicians accompanied dancers, to help ward off the mania, but this tactic sometimes backfired by encouraging more people to join in. [9]

Dancing is a spontaneous and natural expression of ecstasy. The citizens of Strasbourg and elsewhere in Europe during the Middle Ages however would not have known they were under the influence of food which had chemically altered and would have attributed their ecstasy to religious emotions. Modern society is not immune from similar outbreaks of crowd hysteria, technically known as mass psychogenic illness. The population of the United States of America in particular seems to be vulnerable to such outbreaks. In 1931 wide-spread panic occurred when it was believed aliens from outer space had invaded America, following a radio broadcast of H.G.Well's 'War of the Worlds'. And at the present-time of writing an outbreak of  a craze involving threatening and creepy clowns has occurred in the USA, resulting in public hysteria. 

In conclusion, together Browne's diptych discourses Urn-Burial and The Garden of Cyrus may be defined as a work of transcendent synthesis; together their thematic concerns, imagery and literary style share a number of characteristics associated with altered states of consciousness. These include - an awareness of the paradox of time and space, a profound sense of the sacredness of creation, a heightened consciousness of one's own and other's personality, an intense, absorbed contemplation of art, in particular colour and sound, and a near overwhelming awareness of one's place in nature and the cosmos, allegedly. 

In the final analysis it hardly matters whether or not Browne ever took drugs. The complex combination of his deep religiosity,  rigorous scientific enquiry, his capacious and retentive memory, in conjunction with his omnivorous reading habits, along with his highly developed aesthetic sensibility involving all the senses, (he enjoyed viewing paintings, listening to music, good food and sweet odours), while also possessing a rich and fertile artistic imagination, guarantees Sir Thomas Browne will forever be a perennial and paradoxical figure in the spheres of world literature, science and philosophy.

Notes

[1]  Peter Green Writers and their Work no. 108 pub. Longmans and co. 1959

[2] The miscellaneous writings of Sir Thomas Browne ed. Geoffrey Keynes pub. Faber and Faber 1931

[3] Pseudodoxia Epidemica Book 8 Chapter 7

[4] Sir Thomas Browne: A Doctor's Life of Science and Faith by Jeremiah Finch New York 1950.

[5]  A Facsimile of the 1711 Sales Auction Catalogue of Sir Thomas Browne and his son Edward's Libraries. Introduction, notes and index by J.S. Finch (E.J. Brill: Leiden, 1986) page 30. no. 52

[6] Collected Works of C.G. Jung Volume 14 paragraph 680

[7] Letter to Dr. Merritt August 18 1668

[8] Christian Morals Part 2 Section 4.

[9] Extract from Dancing Mania Wikipedia.

See also

Mass psychogenic illness
Peruvian bark
Obituary of J.S. Finch

Essay dedicated to autodidact, intrepid psychonaut, voracious reader and bon viveur, Tom Bombadil of Ecuador.

Mark Burrell's 'The Homing Ground' - All aboard the British transcendent locomotion.

Mark Burrell’s painting The Homing Ground sees the artist giving full expression to his technical and draughtsmanship skills, at a peak in imagination, and delighting in 'home-grown’ imagery which fairly crackles with cognitive dissonances. 

Painted in 1993, when the artist sometimes devoted 3 or 4 months to complete a single canvas, often in painstaking detail, its inspiration was sparked when Burrell, while travelling on a train returning to Lowestoft, read a magazine article on the world’s oldest clock. However, not unlike when Dorothy realizes she's no longer in Kansas City, we're far, far away from Lowestoft when viewing this dream-like landscape.  

Measuring 36 x 25 inches and painted on board in the artist’s favoured medium of alkyd resin oils, The Homing Ground features a landscape in which a bizarre train consisting mostly of a staircase and wall trundles along a railway-track. At the bottom of the staircase an elderly gentleman sits in an arm-chair reading a newspaper. An androgynous-looking youth holding a candelabra sits half-way upstairs. An angel stands at the very top of the staircase. At the helm of this peculiar house or rail-carriage without either windows or roof, there’s a disproportionately large face contoured like a mask. On the left in the background there can be seen a landscape which has a junction, hinting of a landscape networked in rail-track. In the distant background a boy can be seen running towards, not from, a spooky-looking house. 

The background to The Homing Ground is fringed by a dark, wild woods, creating a tension by alluding to hidden, unknown contents. As often in Burrell's art, the sky is wholly alive and dramatically lit. Together sky and background provide a magical backdrop for the viewer to focus upon the main action. Meanwhile the passengers of Burrell's transcendent locomotion chug along oblivious to their oncoming destination, a quite literally, yawning tunnel. 

           

Burrell’s art encourages the viewer to look closely and look again. Its always best to see his paintings in the original and if given half the chance to do so, grab it ! Digital photography cannot be relied upon to faithfully reproduce the richness of an oil-painting in either detail, colouration or dimension. For example, it is only when attentive that one notices the gentleman sitting in an arm-chair reading a newspaper consists only of a head, and is body-less, seemingly sustained by various tubes feeding his skeletal frame.  

Interpretations are numerous, and ought to be always taken in a 'soft and flexible’ manner, without dogmatic insistence. Burrell’s gent who is sustained by tubes and wires could allude to either modern-day's relationship to medical science or prophetic of the close attachment millions now have to the computer network in their everyday lives. 

Another interesting association occurs in the depiction of a stair-case in The Homing-Ground. Like railway tracks, stairs are a construct which assist in transporting people to another space and dimension. One is encouraged in such an interpretation upon seeing at the top of Burrell's 'stairway to heaven' an angel who adds a spiritual mood to the scene. Ethereal and translucent she stands at the helm of Burrell’s transcendent locomotion sprinkling cut roses upon the track. Her presence reminds the viewer that every-day life is not always centred upon the material, or even always visible to the senses, and though often unacknowledged or denied, may include an unknown quantity of spiritual protection.   

The rail-track, along with its more archaic variants, the road and the river, may be viewed as a symbol of  life's journey and of Time, a prominent theme in The Homing-Ground.

One of the most frequently encountered of all artistic 'double symbols' in Renaissance and esoteric art used to symbolize Time occurs in representations of Youth and Aged. Technically known as Puer et Senex they are evident here in the form of a bald, and therefore presumably old man reading a newspaper, and a youthful character sitting on stairs wistfully holding a candelabra. 

Time-wise historically, the steam-engine and railway were important British technological inventions of the 19th century, and key components of the Industrial Revolution. By 1850 there was a network of over 7000 miles of rail-track covering the length and breath of England. The steam locomotion, along with rail-track, transformed every British town, city and village. Indeed, for those living at North Sea coastal towns such as Lowestoft, before the train, it was quicker and often more comfortable to travel via sea to English coastal towns or continental, main-land Europe than to London. The arrival of the railway in the mid-nineteenth century changed livelihoods too. It enabled the produce of fishing-towns to be transported swiftly to London and other urban centres. Fishing-towns such as Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft also became accessible destinations for holidays, health tourism and entertainment by a growing urban population with leisure-time.

The British love-affair with trains in the past and today can be seen in the popularity of Hornby model trains and children's animated characters such as Ivor the Engine and Thomas the Tank.

A fine example of Burrell's eye for exquisite detail and colouration can be seen in the tail-light of his transcendent locomotion. This extraordinary detail could almost stand alone and framed as a single work or art, being near Vermeer-like in its realization of light and detail. 

  

In an art-work delighting in cognitive dissonances, that is imagery which provokes unease and ambiguity through conjoined and improbable objects which never the less seemingly exist; the background of The Homing-Ground features a house which has a human face superimposed upon it and whose yawning mouth is also a tunnel. A bath with a sail is perched upon its chimney-top. The image is arresting, humorous and disturbing and also a superb example of the artist’s ability to create highly-original 'home-grown' imagery which induces cognitive dissonance. Such paradoxical and thought-provoking imagery is a hallmark of Burrell’s imaginative art.

As a symbol the tunnel has a number of  meanings. As a portal to the unknown it alludes to humanity’s deepest fear, namely death, but  also to transformation and change, as well as the narrow anatomical passage-way to birth. Tunnels are also a feature of sea-side fun-fairs including the Tunnel of Love and the Ghost-train, as well as the roller-coaster. 

Another example of cognitive dissonance occurs in the form of the home. The home is the one stable point in most lives. Nomadic life-styles apart it is usually a static location, providing stability in our daily comings and goings in the world around us, yet here it is seen, caravan-like, in motion and yet still seemingly in some kind of domestic tranquillity.

Incidentally, I cannot resist mention in a moment of roller-coaster association, of the historical figure of Sir Thomas Browne (1605-82) who was recently elected as honorary 'Great Grandfather’ of the art-movement known as North Sea Magical Realism, of which Mark Burrell is a leading member..

Thomas Browne not only introduced the words ‘locomotion’ and ‘network’ (as an artificial concept) into the English language, but also believed in the existence of angels [1]. Holding such seemingly contrary beliefs, namely scientific and religious, appears incompatible to modern-day sensibilities, but in Browne’s era it was possible to possess both an imaginative scientific mind which anticipated ‘locomotion’, as well as believing in the existence of angels. And in fact there’s no small similarity in the fantasy imagery of Burrell’s The Homing-Ground to an illustration originating in Sir Thomas Browne’s era. 

In an frontispiece illustration to a German 1618 manifesto believed to be by the elusive Rosicrucian fraternity, there can be seen another form of improbable transport  inducing a cognitive dissonance upon the viewer. A castle on wheels. Its improbability is heightened by two disproportionately large objects, a sword wielded by a giant arm, and an over-sized trumpet. Both Burrell's art and Theophilus Schweighardt's illustration are the products of deeply original imaginative minds. [2]

Long resident at England’s most easterly town, Lowestoft, there’s something quintessentially British about Burrell’s art, in humour, as well as its Spencer-like draughtsmanship and portraiture. Burrell himself berates those who mistakenly describe his favourite artist Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) as a parochial, Little Englander figure, (in all probability from a lack of familiarity with one of 20th century Britain's greatest painters) while totally misjudging the artistic stature of one who was ‘an outstanding draughtsman’ in Burrell’s view, amongst other accomplishments of Spencer’s art. [3]

Like Stanley Spencer, Burrell is an artist who does not shy from travelling less-travelled, often darker paths in his artistic observations upon human nature. This uncompromising ability to examine less-pleasant aspects of human nature can initially produce an uncomfortable viewing experience; and it is only when one acknowledges that life is not always sweetness and light, and that there remain taboo aspects of the human psyche that one begins to appreciate Burrell’s artistic integrity as he unflinchingly tackles the subject-matter of his art.

In many ways Burrell’s humorous yet perplexing painting, which is not without a philosophical element, may be considered as having a kinship to imaginative worlds similar to those of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass or those portrayed in the pythonesque animation of Terry Gilliam (b. 1940). Indeed, after seeing the film The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnasssus’ (2010) Burrell lauded Gilliam’s fantasy as ‘mesmerising’.

In summary, Burrell’s The Homing-Ground has a number of themes, these include Time and the human condition, childhood innocence and the sacred, along with death and the unknown. These are all enhanced and heightened in emotional intensity through the artist’s distinctive mood-inducing tonal palette, most often involving a palette somewhat reminiscent of the dark and vivid tones of a Gothic stained-glass window, but uniquely Burrell's.

Painted over twenty years ago, The Homing-Ground may be viewed as a coming-of-age art-work, marking the artist's early maturity as he explores and successfully develops, a personal artistic language in style, home-grown symbolism and thematic concerns. Burrell continues to develop further. The Homing-Ground remains a significant work in a fascinating and expansive portfolio. 

Notes

[1] Part 1 paragraph 33 of Religio Medici has a whole paragraph discussing Angels. It includes a footnote which states- Thereby is meant our good angel appointed us from our nativity.’

[2] The Rosicrucian Enlightenment  Dame Frances Yates pub. RKP 1972

[3]  Stanley Spencer at Burghclere George Behrend pub. Macdonald and Co. 1965

See Also

Mark Burrell -North Sea Magical Realist artist extraordinaire

Mark Burrelll -Wikipedia entry

Mark Burrell discusses his artistic development in a video.