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The Spiralist

By Dr Kevin Dann
August 5, 2021

Why do helical seashells resemble spiralling galaxies and the human heart? Kevin Dann leads us into the gyre of James Bell Pettigrew’s Design in Nature (1908), a provocative and forgotten exploration of the world’s archetypal whorl.

One halcyon spring day in 1903, the sixty-nine-year-old anatomist and naturalist Dr. James Bell Pettigrew sat at the top of a sloping street on the outskirts of St. Andrews, Scotland, perched inside a petrol-powered aëroplane of his own design. Over the course of forty years, ever since he began his aeronautical experiments in London in 1864, Pettigrew had constructed dozens of working models of various flying apparatus. From anatomical dissection and observations of animals in the wild and at the London Zoo, Pettigrew had come to conceive of all creatures — whether on land, in water, or in the air — as propelling themselves by throwing their bodies into spiraling curves, such that their movements were akin to waves in fluid, or to waves of sound. Instead of driving the wings vertically as in other flying machines modeled on animal flight, Pettigrew’s “ornithopter” emulated the movement that he had discovered to be universal in flying creatures: rhythmic figure-of-eight curves. To permit this undulatory motion, Pettigrew had furnished the root of the wing with a ball-and-socket joint; to regulate the several movements of the vibratory wing — comprised of bamboo cane from which issued tapering rods of whalebone covered in a thin sheet of India rubber — he employed a cross-system of elastic bands. A two-stroke engine’s piston drove this elaborate apparatus of helical biological mimicry.
The ornithopter covered a distance of about twenty meters during its maiden flight before crashing, breaking both the contraption’s spiral whalebone wings and its pilot’s own spiral hip. Convalescence gave Dr. Pettigrew the opportunity to begin work on Design in Nature: Illustrated by Spiral and Other Arrangements in the Inorganic and Organic Kingdoms as Exemplified in Matter, Force, Life, Growth, Rhythms, &c., Especially in Crystals, Plants, and Animals. In January 1908, as he was nearing its completion, Pettigrew looped back at the work’s end to reiterate what he had stated so vociferously at the beginning — the absolute primacy of design by a “Great First Cause” and “Omni–Present Framer and Upholder of the Universe”. After a lengthy essay considering the antiquity of man — and once again stressing that the human physical form had altered not at all for at least some ten thousand years — he concluded:
Man is not in any sense the product of evolution. He is not compounded of an endless number of lower animal forms which merge into each other by inseparable gradations and modifications from the monera up to man. . .He is the highest of all living forms. The world was made for him and he for it. . . Everything was made to fit and dovetail into every other thing. . . There was moreover no accident or chance. On the contrary, there was forethought, prescience, and design.1
Across the 3 volumes, 1416 pages, and nearly 2000 illustrations that made up his magnum opus Design in Nature, Dr James Bell Pettigrew barely mentioned Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which he found “lame, halting, and impotent”.2 Though Pettigrew deeply admired the English naturalist — who had on more than one occasion (as had T. H. Huxley, Richard Owen, John Lubbock, St. George Mivart, and dozens of other leading men of science) visited Pettigrew at London’s Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England to view his state-of-the-art anatomical and physiological preparations — Darwin seemed to Pettigrew only tentatively confident of the very theory he had proposed to explain Nature’s “endless forms most beautiful”.3 He expected that, within a generation, few would recall Darwinism as anything other than a passing fancy. What Pettigrew could not excuse were the egregious errors in Darwin’s pronouncement about the spiraling motions of Clematis, Convolvulus, Honeysuckle, Hops, and many other plants. Whatever positive contributions the retiring naturalist had made with his research on twining plants were undermined by his inexact language and thinking. Pettigrew strenuously objected to Darwin’s use of the term “reflex action” for these plants’ behavior, since this was a phrase used for action in nervous systems — of which Clematis, Convolvulus, and their cousins possessed none.4
By way of a few ingenious experiments — conducted back in 1865, after reading Darwin’s “On the Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants” — Pettigrew had utterly demolished its author’s “irritability theory” for the movement of the green chimeras. Just as with spiral teeth, claws, horns, muscles, and bones, spirally-turning plant tendrils were in no way the result of external contact. These whirling, twirling structures, as free of contact as the ocean-suspended spiraling egg cases of sharks and dogfish, danced to some wholly invisible music.
Pettigrew confessed himself totally spellbound by the mystery of Nature’s most ubiquitous, liquid, and quixotic form — the spiral. Though he had scrutinized this universal cipher from the macrocosmic spiral nebulae down to the dextro- and sinistro-helical microcosmic molecules of the periodic table, Pettigrew was left baffled by the question of its origin. The best that he could say was that the answer “by no means lies on the surface”.5 Overwhelmed as he was by the world’s archetypal whorl, he was sure of one thing — these marvelous spiral arrangements could not be of purely physical origin. A reviewer of Pettigrew’s Lancet series on circulation in plants and animals declared that the distinguished anatomist was a “spiralist” who found that organs were not only constituted spirally, but that they functioned spirally too.6
Putting Isaac Roberts’ astonishing 1888 photographs of the Great Nebula in Andromeda and other spiral nebulae to cosmic effect at his argument’s outset, Pettigrew then immersed the reader in a cascade of more humble spiral forms — the mineral prochlorite; ram’s horns; bacteria from the River Thames; fossil algae carpogonia; dozens of figures of spiral fronds, floral bracts, stems, leaves, tendrils, and seeds in plants. Design in Nature’s plates of spirals in the animal world started with spermatozoa (of crayfish, rabbit, field mice, wood shrike, goldfinch, creeper, perch, frog, rat, and human) and ran up the great chain of being through: frog ganglia; dozens of species of Foraminifera; the exquisite Nautilus pompilius; Devonian, Silurian, Jurassic, Cretaceous, and contemporary shells; the horns of goats, gazelles, and antelope; the human cochlea; almost every section of the vertebrate skeleton, from the phalanges of the Indian elephant to the turbinated inner bones of the human skull. The human umbilical cord looked for all the world like a waterspout or the homely and helically aspiring English Hops, those twining stems of Darwin’s go-to research subject. All these were pictured in the first fifty pages of the book; hundreds more images were liberally spread through the complete three volumes. At times, while reading Design in Nature, the spiral risks losing all significance, so promiscuously ubiquitous is its form.
At the center of this dizzying array lay the sacred secret that had so profoundly occupied Aristotle and Aquinas, Leonardo and Vesalius — the human heart. The heart’s sevenfold spiral structure was the mystery of mysteries, its form preserving perfectly the sense of both its muscular contractions and the interior circulatory patterns of its blood. Pettigrew had himself discovered this as a young medical student at the University of Edinburgh; so impressed had his professor been by Pettigrew’s dissections that he invited him to deliver the prestigious Croonian lecture at the Royal Society of London for 1860.
The University of Edinburgh was, in Pettigrew’s medical student days, at the zenith of its reputation: James Syme was dazzling the world with his bold pioneering surgery; James Young Simpson had — with dinner guests at his own 52 Queen Street table — proved the safety of chloroform as an obstetric anesthetic; with his methodical use of the microscope, John Hughes Bennett inaugurated a new era in the teaching of clinical medicine; Joseph Lister’s careful application of carbolic acid (phenol) to wounds, dressings, and instruments — though mocked initially by his medical colleagues — had revolutionized the practice of surgery.
When Pettigrew reminisced that the rivalry among these stellar physicians had been “a case of diamond cut diamond”, he recognized their fame by employing a most apt metaphor.7 Cutting — with a varied repertoire of scalpels, lancets, and scissors — was the surgeon’s special art. Pettigrew’s tutor in the art was Professor of Anatomy John Goodsir, who, with his large, powerful, finely shaped hands never failed to wield the scalpel “with a dexterity and grace truly remarkable”.8 At the end of the 1857–58 winter term, Professor Goodsir gave out as the subject for the senior anatomy gold medal: “The Arrangement of the Muscular Fibres in the Ventricles of the Vertebrate Heart”. This Gordian knot of anatomy had over the previous three centuries foiled the efforts of Vesalius, Albinus, Haller, and others to unravel it.9
Back home, between sessions at his family’s country home in Lanarkshire, the twenty-four-year-old Pettigrew at once proceeded to dissect in large numbers every kind of heart within reach, making careful drawings and notes of each. Beginning with sheep, calf, ox, and horse, he found that he had to devise a new mode of dissection that would allow both sufficient hardness to preserve the anatomical structures, and ample softness so as to tease out their multitudinous tissue layers.
Having exhausted a battery of methylated spirits and other chemicals, he hit upon the expedient of stuffing and gently distending the ventricles of the heart with a truly Scottish material — dry oatmeal. Slowly boiling the hearts for four to five hours, he could get quit of all the external fat, blood vessels, nerves, lymphatics, and cellular tissue. A fortnight to three weeks hardening in a bath of methylated spirits followed, after which he was able to separate and peel off the muscular fibers of the ventricles as if they were layers of an onion. The layers were of two kinds: muscular fibers from the outside of the heart wound in a spiral direction from left to right, progressing downwards; the internal fibers ran in an opposite spiral direction from right to left, upwards.
In fact, the internal and external layers of the muscular fibers of each and every one of the more than one hundred vertebrate hearts he had dissected formed two sets of opposite spirals which crossed each other, the crossings becoming more oblique towards the center. These inner and outer layers were further divided into a pair of left- and right-handed spiral sets. There was, especially in the left ventricle, a most perfect spiral symmetry, one that rivaled the Great Andromeda Nebula.
As gifted a model maker as he was a dissector, Pettigrew found this now-exposed double spiral heart to be an anatomical puzzle of the first order, for the external muscle fibers were seamlessly and spirally continuous with the internal muscle fibers at both the apex and base of the ventricles. One day Pettigrew came down to dinner a little earlier than usual, and, seeing a newspaper lying on the table, felt an impulse to roll it up obliquely from one corner — as grocers do in making conical paper bags. To Pettigrew’s surprise, the lines of print on the layers of newspaper ran in different directions according to a graduated order: the lines on the outer layers ran spirally from left to right downwards, becoming more oblique as the central layer was reached; the lines of print on the inner layer ran spirally from right to left upwards, becoming more vertical as they moved away from the center. The newspaper print on the two layers crossed at widening angles, forming an X, as the center was approached.
The print was seamless at both base and apex of the paper cone, resembling the arrangement of muscle fibers in the heart. There were, in effect, a series of complicated figure-of-eight loops, arranged in a marvelously mathematical pattern of great complexity and beauty. “Here”, he wrote, “was the whole thing in a nutshell. It was a case of the reading turning in or involuting at the apex and of the reading turning out or evoluting at the base”.10 Pettigrew’s newspaper model showed that the heart’s double helical structure — now known as the helical ventricular myocardial band (HVMB)  — was essentially a triple-twisted Möbius strip.
Crying “EUREKA!”, Pettigrew ransacked the Lankarshire fish shops for the hearts of cod, salmon, sunfish, and turbot. He also lucked into securing the heart of a monster shark killed in the Firth of Forth. From the large hotels he collected several fine sea turtle hearts, as well as a land tortoise and an alligator. Raiding the poulterers too, he got the hearts of duck, goose, capercaillie, turkey, and one “splendid” swan’s heart.11
From fish to frog to turtle, the muscular fiber arrangement — though interesting — shed no light on the complicated arrangement in the ventricles of bird and mammal. (The pattern in the bird exactly matched that of the mammal except that, in the right ventricle of the bird, a muscular valve took the place of the fibrous tricuspid valve of mammals.) In the small hours of the morning, in his humble student lodgings, Pettigrew worked away now at dissections of sheep, calf, ox, horse, deer, pig, porpoise, seal, lion, giraffe, camel, and human — 112 dissections and associated drawings in all.
When the day for awarding the gold medal arrived, four hundred students crowded the large anatomical theater to hear the altogether unknown Pettigrew’s name pronounced. Professor Goodsir asked Pettigrew to call on him the next day, anxious to win the heart dissection preparations for the University’s Anatomical Museum. The 112 neat glass jars can still be found there today. He also invited young Pettigrew to report on his discoveries to the Royal Society of London; Pettigrew delivered his address, “On the Arrangement of the Muscular Fibres in the Ventricles of the Vertebrate Heart”, to the Royal Society the very same week that Origin of Species was published by John Murray of Albemarle Street, a short walk from the Royal Society lecture hall. That anyone might attribute such an ingeniously crafted organ as the mammalian heart to mere chance, Pettigrew believed, was sheer madness.
Nature’s variegated spiral structures, with the mammalian heart always for him the epitome, represented but one panel of the triptych that Pettigrew would go on to assemble over the next half century. Volume Two of Design in Nature is devoted solely to spiral movement in circulation (although the circulation section dealt with both plant and lower animal circulatory systems, three-quarters of this study focused on mammals and man); Volume Three to the spiral as locomotion’s characteristic form. In both arenas of animal physiology, Pettigrew found a spectacular resonance: movement at once precedes and follows structure, the direction of movement in living things being in every instance determined by the composition and configuration of kinetic spiral parts. This resonance seemed to reach right down to the atomic level. Unlike the closed system of the heart, the spiraling lines of atoms and molecules were arranged so that matter could be added in any amount, in unlimited directions. An open flow of energy and form was the basis for growth and progression in all creatures.
Reflected in the vertebrate skeleton, this open attitude also made graceful locomotion possible. Pettigrew quoted his mentor John Goodsir: “The peculiar spiral attitudes into which the human body can be thrown are explained by the spiral curve of the vertebral articular surfaces, and the spiral arrangement of the muscles. No mammal can throw its trunk into those spiral curves which subserve the balance of the human frame and confer the peculiar grace and expression of its movements.”12 Only birds — especially his beloved swallows and swifts, which darted round the turrets of Swallowgate, the stone residence that Pettigrew had built at St. Andrews, and across the broad moor leading to the nearby sea cliffs — could rival the poetry of motion executed by the human body,  their movements freed in the less resistant medium of air. The earthbound human body’s idiosyncratic spiraling structure liberated the hands to sculpt clay, tie rope, and grasp chalk, paintbrush, and scalpel in order to go inside the organs of Life and then represent them in color and line. Bony spirals hidden beneath spiral muscles flexed and extended to skip, leap, creep, crawl, wriggle, tumble, skate, march, flip, prance, moonwalk. The polka-ing, pirouette-ing, schottish-ing, waltzing, two-stepping human danced upon a near infinity of corporeal eddies.
When Pettigrew took up the third strand of his argument from design, he began again with structures — the muscular and osseous systems, which he found intimately complimentary. Skeletal plates suggest that each part of our bony frame was but a partial realization of the sort of spiral geometry Pettigrew had discovered in the heart. The halfway twisting femur, humerus, tibia, fibula, ulna, and radius reached their fully spiral apotheosis in clavicle, pelvis, and scapula — each of which approached once again the geometry of the Möbius strip.
Published posthumously, just months before the centennial of Darwin’s birth, and the fiftieth anniversary of On the Origin of Species — celebrations which were fully exploited by Darwinians to advance a false picture of Darwin as a rabid opponent of teleology13 — Design in Nature dropped from sight as rapidly as Pettigrew’s ornithopter dropped from the sky over the St. Andrews moorland. Nature’s full-page review savaged the work’s teleological argument, wanly submitting that had Pettigrew lived to complete the editing of his opus, he would have “expunged or modified” its conclusions.14 Biostatistician Raymond Pearl was less generous, calling “the ponderous work” “probably the most extensive and serious single contribution to humorous literature which has appeared in recent years”, and declaring Pettigrew’s “spiral philosophy” — that “the Creator fashioned men and corkscrews on the same plan” — as “medieval as any cathedral”.15 Not a single work of contemporary biology or natural history — including D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form (1917), which devoted considerable discussion to spiral forms — cited Design in Nature. A century on from its publication, however, Design in Nature holds up not only as an unsurpassed survey of biological form, but as a provocative modern inquiry into the causation of form. Pettigrew’s magnum opus is also a phenomenological masterpiece whose lively prose and gorgeous illustrations might serve to inspire a new generation of “spiralists”.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: August 5, 2021

author: Dr Kevin Dann


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Mermaids and Tritons in the Age of Reason

By Vaughn Scribner
September 29, 2021

For much of the eighteenth century, Western intellectuals chased after tritons and mermaids. Vaughn Scribner follows the hunt, revealing how humanity’s supposed aquatic ancestors became wondrous screens on which to project theories of geographical, racial, and taxonomical difference.

On May 6, 1736, the polymath Benjamin Franklin informed readers of his Pennsylvania Gazette of a “Sea Monster” recently spotted in Bermuda, “the upper part of whose Body was in the Shape and about the Bigness of a Boy of 12 Years old, with long black Hair; the lower Part resembled a Fish”. Apparently, the creature’s “human Likeness” inspired his captors to let it live. A 1769 issue of the Providence Gazette similarly reported that crew members of an English ship off the coast of Brest, France, watched as “a sea monster, like a man” circled their ship, at one point viewing “for some time the figure that was in our prow, which represented a beautiful woman”. The captain, the pilot and “the whole crew, consisting of two and thirty men” verified this tale.1
The above examples are quite representative of what an early modern Briton would have found in the newspapers. That these interactions were even reported tells us much. Intelligent men like Benjamin Franklin considered such encounters legitimate enough to spend the time and money to print in their widely read newspapers. By doing so, printers and authors helped sustain a narrative of curiosity surrounding these wondrous creatures. As a Londoner sat down with his paper (perhaps in the aptly named Mermaid Tavern) and read of yet another instance of a mermaid or triton sighting, his doubt might have transformed into curiosity.2
Philosophers’ debates over mermaids and tritons in this period reveal their willingness to embrace wonder in their larger quest to understand the origins of humankind. Naturalists used a wide range of methodologies to critically study these odd hybrids and, in turn, assert the reality of merpeople as evidence of humanity’s aquatic roots. As with other creatures they encountered in their global travels, European philosophers utilized various theories — including those of racial, biological, taxonomical, and geographic difference — to understand merpeople’s and, by proxy, humans’ place in the natural world.3
Westerners’ combination of curiosity and imperial expansion is well reflected in the cultural relevance of merpeople. Wealthy individuals and philosophical societies funded naturalists’, botanists’, and cartographers’ expeditions to the New World in the hope that they might broaden humanity’s understanding of the world and their place in it. In an expanding number of investigations into mermaids and tritons, naturalists demonstrated a growing penchant for the wondrous. They also, importantly,  revealed how the process of scientific research had drastically changed over the last two hundred years. Rather than relying strictly on ancient texts and hearsay, eighteenth-century naturalists mustered various “modern” resources — global correspondence networks, erudite publication opportunities, transatlantic travel, specimen procedures, and learned societies — to rationally examine what many considered fantastical. Thus, a growing body of gentlemen both carried on and eschewed the supposed narrative of enlightened logic by applying well-known, valid research methods to mysterious merpeople. In doing so, eighteenth-century philosophers such as Cotton Mather, Peter Collinson, Samuel Fallours, Carl Linnaeus, and Hans Sloane complicated our — and their contemporaries’ — conceptions of science, nature, and humanity. The smartest men in the Western world, in short, spent much of the eighteenth century chasing merpeople around the globe.4
The Royal Society of London proved key in this endeavour, acting as both a repository and producer of legitimate scientific investigation. Sir Robert Sibbald, a respected Scottish physician and geographer, well understood the Society’s desire for ground-breaking research. On November 29, 1703 he wrote to Sir Hans Sloane, the president of the Society, to inform the London gentleman that Sibbald and his colleagues had been recording an account of Scotland’s amphibious creatures, along with accompanying copper-plate images, which he hoped to dedicate to the Royal Society. Realizing the Society’s interest in the most up-to-date studies, Sibbald told Sloane that he had “added several accounts and the figures of some Amphibious Aquatic Animals, and of some of mixed Kinds, as the Mermaids or Syrens seen sometimes in our Seas”.5 Here were two leading thinkers of the eighteenth century exchanging erudite missives on merpeople.
On July 5, 1716, Cotton Mather also penned a letter to the Royal Society of London. This was not odd, as the Boston naturalist often detailed his scientific findings. Yet this letter’s subject was somewhat curious — titled “a Triton”, the missive demonstrated Mather’s sincere belief in the existence of merpeople. The Royal Society of London fellow began by explaining that, until recently, he considered merpeople no more real than “centaurs or sphynxes”. Mather found myriad historical accounts of merpeople, ranging from the ancient Greek Demostratus, who witnessed a “Dried Triton . . . at ye Town of Tanagra”, to Pliny the Elder’s assertions of mermaids and tritons’ existence. Yet because “Plinyisums are of no great Reputation in our Dayes”, Mather noted, he passed off much of these ancient accounts as false. Mather’s “suspicions” of the existence of such creatures “had got more Strength given”, however, when he read sundry ancient accounts via well-respected European thinkers like Boaistuau and Bellonius.6
Still, Mather was not totally convinced, at least until February 22, 1716, when “three honest and credible men, coming in a boat from Milford to Brainford (Connecticut)”, encountered a triton. Having heard this news at first hand, Mather could only exclaim, “now at last my credulity is entirely conquered, and I am compelled now to believe the existence of a triton”. As the creature fled the men, “they had a full view of him and saw his head, and face, and neck, and shoulders, and arms, and elbows, and breast, and back all of a human shape . . . [the] lower parts were those of a fish, and colored like a mackerel”. Though this “triton” escaped, it convinced Mather of merpeople’s existence. Maintaining that his story was not false, Mather promised the Royal Society that he would continue to relay “all New occurrences of Nature”.7
The famous naturalist Carl Linnaeus also threw himself into investigating mermaids and tritons. Having read newspaper articles detailing mermaid sightings in Nyköping, Sweden, Linnaeus sent a letter to the Swedish Academy of Science in 1749 urging a hunt in which to “catch this animal alive or preserved in spirits”. Linnaeus admitted, “science does not have a certain answer of if the existence of mermaids is a fact or is a fable or imagination of some ocean fish”. Yet in his mind, the reward outweighed the risk, as the discovery of such a rare phenomenon “could result in one of the biggest discoveries that the Academy could possibly achieve and for which the whole world should thank the Academy”. Perhaps these creatures could reveal humankind’s origins? For Linnaeus — world-renowned for his contributions to taxonomical classification — this ancient mystery must be solved.8
The Dutch artist Samuel Fallours also claimed to have discovered merpeople in a distant land, and in doing so set off a decades-long debate that spanned continents and media types. Fallours lived in Ambon, Indonesia, from 1706 to 1712 while serving as a clergy’s assistant for the Dutch East India Company. During Fallours’ tenure on a “Spice Island”, he drew various representations of native flora and fauna. One image happened to depict a mermaid, or “sirenne”. Fallours’ “sirenne” closely resembled the classic depiction of a mermaid, with long, sea-green hair, a pleasant face and a bare midsection that turned into a blue/green tail at the waist. This mermaid’ s skin, however, was dark (with a slight greenish tinge), implying a similarity with the local indigenous population.9
In the notes that accompanied Fallours’ original drawing, the Dutch artist contended that he “had this Syrene alive for four days in my house at Ambon in a tub of water”. Fallours’ son had brought it to him from the nearby island of Buru “where he purchased it from the blacks for two ells of cloth”. Eventually, the whimpering creature died of hunger, “not wishing to take any nourishment, neither fishes nor shell fishes, nor mosses or grasses”. After the mermaid’s death, Fallours “had the curiosity to lift its fins in front and in back and [found] it was shaped like a woman”. Fallours claimed that the specimen was subsequently relayed to Holland and lost. The story of this Ambon siren, however, had only just begun.10
Years before Louis Renard, a French-born book dealer living in Amsterdam, even published a version of Fallours’ “sirenne” in his own Poissons, ecrevisses et crabes (1719), Fallours’ images had already enjoyed wide distribution. Yet, because of the unusually bright colours and fantastic creatures represented in Fallours’ drawings, many doubted their accuracy and veracity. Renard was especially worried about the validity of Fallours’ sirenne, exclaiming, “I am even afraid the monster represented under the name of mermaid . . . needs to be rectified.”11
Philosophers found both promise and disgust in Fallours’ painting and the subsequent dialogue that Renard initiated with his letters. In his preface to the 1754 version of Renard’s Poissons, ecrevisses et crabes, the Dutch collector and director of the menageries and “Natuur-en Kunstcabinetten des Stadhouders” Aernout Vosmaer called objections to merpeople’s reality “weak”, and contended that “this monster, if we must call it by this name (although I do not see the reason for it)” was simply able to avoid humans’ traps better than any other creature (because of its hybrid nature) and was thus rarely seen. Because of merpeople’s biological similarity to humans, furthermore, Vosmaer argued that they were “more subject to decay after death than the body of other fishes”. Such a lack of preservation not only diminished sightings, it also went towards explaining the lack of full specimens in cabinets of curiosities.12
By the mid-eighteenth century, a growing number of physicians not only believed in the existence of merpeople, but also began to wonder what sort of ramifications such creatures might have for understanding humanity’s origins and future. As G. Robinson noted in The Beauties of Nature and Art Displayed in a Tour Through the World (1764), “though the generality of natural historians regard mermen and mermaids as fabulous animals . . . as far as the testimony of many writers for the reality of such creatures may be depended upon, so much reason there appears for believing their existence.” The Reverend Thomas Smith took Robinson’s contention to an even more definitive note four years later, asserting that while “there are many persons indeed who doubt the reality of mermen and mermaids . . . yet there seems to be sufficient testimony to establish it beyond dispute”. But the problem remained: men like Robinson and Smith could rely only upon ancient, often ridiculed sightings or tenuous hypotheses for their “proof”. They needed scientific research to back up their claims, and they got it.13
Two especially important articles — each approaching merpeople through unique scientific methodology — appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine between 1759 and 1775. The first piece, published in December 1759, accompanied a plate image of a “Syren, or Mermaid . . . said to have been shewn in the fair of St Germains [Paris]” in 1758. The author noted that this siren was “drawn from life . . . by the celebrated Sieur Gautier”. Jacques-Fabien Gautier, a French printer and member of the Dijon Academy, was widely recognized for his skill in printing accurate images of scientific subjects. Attaching Gautier’s name to the print garnered immediate credibility, even for such a strange image; but even without Gautier’s name attached to it, the print and its accompanying text were distinguished by their modern scientific methodology. Gautier had apparently interacted with the living creature, finding that it was “about two feet long, alive, and very active, sporting about in the vessel of water in which it was kept with great seeming delight and agility”.14
Gautier consequently recorded that “its positions, when it was at rest, was always erect. It was a female, and the features were hideously ugly”. As displayed in detail by the accompanying print, Gautier found its skin “harsh, the ears very large, and the back-parts and tail were covered with scales”. According to the image, this was not the mermaid that had long graced cathedrals throughout Europe. Nor did it match the description relayed by so many other naturalists and discoverers throughout history. Where most had seen a striking female form, distinguished by flowing blue-green hair, Gautier’s mermaid was completely bald with “very large” ears and “hideously ugly” features. Gautier’s siren was also much smaller than traditional mermaids at only sixty centimetres (two feet) tall. More than anything, Gautier’s mermaid reflected the mid-eighteenth-century approach to studying the wondrous aspects of nature: the Frenchman employed well-respected scientific techniques — in this case a close inspection of the creature’s anatomy and an accurate accompanying drawing (much resembling those of other illustrated creatures at the time) — to display as reality what many still considered fantasy.15
Scholars used the Gautier publication to reflect upon the legitimacy of merpeople. An anonymous contributor to the June 1762 issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine exclaimed that Gautier’s image “seems to establish the fact incontrovertibly, that such monsters do exist in nature”. But this author had further evidence. An April 1762 edition of the Mercure de France reported that in June the previous year two girls playing on a beach on the island of Noirmoutier (just off the southwest coast of France) “discovered, in a kind of natural grotto, an animal of a human form, leaning on its hands”. In a rather morbid turn of events, one of the girls stabbed the creature with a knife and watched as it “groaned like a human person”. The two girls then proceeded to cut off the poor creature’s hands “which had fingers and nails quite formed, with webs between the fingers”, and sought the aid of the island’s surgeon, who, upon seeing the creature, recorded:
it was as big as the largest man . . . its skin was white, resembling that of a drowned person . . . it had the breasts of a full-chested woman; a flat nose; a large mouth; the chin adorned with a kind of beard, formed of fine shells; and over the whole body, tufts of similar white shells. It had the tail of a fish, and at the extremity of it a kind of feet.
Such a story — when verified by a trained and trusted surgeon — only further proved Gautier’s research. For a growing number of eighteenth-century Britons, merpeople existed, bore a striking resemblance to humans, and needed to be studied at length.16
In May 1775 the Gentleman’s Magazine published an account of a mermaid “taken in the Gulph of Stanchio, in the Archipelago or Aegean Sea, by a merchantman trading to Natolia” in August 1774. Like Gautier’s 1759 “syren”, this specimen was drawn and described in detail. Yet the author also distanced himself from Gautier, noting that his mermaid “differs materially from that shewn at the fair of St Germaine, some years ago”. In an especially interesting turn of events, the author utilized a comparison of the two mermaid prints to speculate on issues of race and biology, contending that “there is reason to believe, that there are two distinct genera, or, more properly, two species of the same genus, the one resembling the African blacks, the other the European whites”. While Gautier’s siren “had, in every respect, the countenance of a Negro”, the author found that his mermaid displayed “the features and complexion of an European. Its face is like that of a young female; its eyes a fine light blue; its nose small and handsome; its mouth small; its lips thin”.17
Early modern English writers leaned on two stereotypes to commodify and denigrate African female bodies, as the historian Jennifer L. Morgan has shown. First, they “conventionally set the black female figure against one that was white — and thus beautiful”. Here this 1775 author follows perfectly in line, comparing Gautier’s “Negro” and “hideously ugly” mermaid to his own beautiful mermaid with the “features and complexion of an European”. Second, early modern Europeans concentrated on African women’s supposed “sexually and reproductively bound savagery” in order to ultimately turn to “black women as evidence of a cultural inferiority that ultimately became encoded as racial difference”. Not only were naturalists using the science of merpeople to gain a deeper understanding of the natural order of sea creatures, they were also utilizing their interpretations of these mysterious beings to reflect upon humans’ — especially white humans’ — place in an ever-changing racial, biological framework.18
Carl Linnaeus and his student Abraham Osterdam further complicated the narrative of classification and legitimacy. Though the Swedish Academy found nothing in their search for Linnaeus’ mermaid in 1749, Linnaeus and Osterdam took matters into their own hands by publishing a dissertation on the Siren lacertina (The Lizard Siren) in 1766. Having detailed a long list of mermaid sightings throughout history in the initial pages of this dissertation, they next relayed myriad instances of “marvelous animals and amphibians” that closely resembled creatures of lore and, consequently, made classification tricky. Ultimately, they judged this mermaid-like creature “worthy of an animal, which should be shown to those who are curious, because it is a new form”. The “father of classification” had apparently discovered a “worthy” piece of the natural puzzle, and it linked humans (even if distantly) to animals of the sea. The Siren lacertina also, importantly, further blurred the lines of classification that Linnaeus had so proudly developed, suggesting that perhaps human beings might find some distant relation to amphibious creatures.19
Eighteenth-century philosophers’ investigations of merpeople represented both the endurance of wonder and the emergence of rational science during the Enlightenment period. Once resting at the core of myth and on the very fringes of scientific research, now mermaids and tritons were steadily catching philosophers’ attention. Initially such research was relegated to newspaper articles, brief mentions in travellers’ narratives, or hearsay, but by the second half of the eighteenth century, naturalists began to approach merpeople with modern scientific methodology, dissecting, preserving and drawing these mysterious creatures with the utmost rigour. By the close of the eighteenth century, mermaids and tritons emerged as some of the most useful specimens for understanding humanity’s marine origins. The possibility (or, for some, reality) of merpeople’s existence forced many philosophers to reconsider previous classification measures, racial parameters, and even evolutionary models. As more European thinkers believed — or at least entertained the possibility — that “such monsters do exist in nature”, Enlightenment philosophers merged the wondrous and rational to understand the natural world and humanity’s place in it.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: September 29, 2021

author: Vaughn Scribner

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Out on the Town
Magnus Hirschfeld and Berlin’s Third Sex
By James J. Conway
June 7, 2022

Years before the Weimar Republic’s well-chronicled freedoms, the 1904 non-fiction study Berlin’s Third Sex depicted an astonishingly diverse subculture of sexual outlaws in the German capital. James J. Conway introduces a foundational text of queer identity that finds Magnus Hirschfeld — the “Einstein of Sex” — deploying both sentiment and science to move hearts and minds among a broad readership.

By the time Magnus Hirschfeld died in exile on May 14, 1935 — his sixty-seventh birthday — the German sexologist had already witnessed his own annihilation at least twice over. Presumed dead after a brutal attack by far-right thugs in early Weimar-era Munich, he got to read his own obituary in the newspaper while convalescing. And years later, shortly after the Nazi takeover of Germany, an exiled Hirschfeld viewed a newsreel of the first major book burning, which showed the SA not only casting decades of his research onto the pyre, but a bust of Hirschfeld himself.
Magnus Hirschfeld was born to a Jewish family in the Prussian spa town of Kolberg in 1868, but the man whose investigation of difference so incensed his countrymen came forth on a later birthday — May 14, 1897 — when Hirschfeld formed the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee at his medical practice in Berlin. Arising out of culturally conservative Wilhelmine Germany, this Committee was the world’s first gay activist group, from which Hirschfeld later emerged as one of history’s most important figures in the study of gender and sexuality.
The Committee’s charter called for public enlightenment, and its first major product was the 1899 Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook for Sexual Intermediaries), which appeared in annual editions for a quarter of a century and totalled more than 11,000 pages. Academic in tone, it forthrightly claimed homosexuality to be in-born, tracked the development of a corresponding homosexual identity through the long stream of history, and mapped its contemporary forms. The first issue opened with an article by Hirschfeld himself, appended with a reader survey (“Were your parents or grandparents blood relations?”, “Can you point to a reason for your abnormal feelings?”, “Are your ears large, protruding, small, delicate?”). It also included a study of blackmailers, an article outing the nineteenth-century poet Platen, and a petition signed by hundreds of distinguished figures calling for the repeal of the German Criminal Code’s notorious Paragraph 175, which banned “unnatural fornication” between men.
Hirschfeld fought all his life to have Paragraph 175 struck off. It not only shadowed his own existence as a gay man; through his practice the doctor also saw its devastating impact on men who lived in fear and shame, prey to blackmailers. Who else, after all, would report a consensual sex act to the authorities? But as those names on the petition indicate, there was more support for abolition than one might expect. In 1898, August Bebel, head of Germany’s Social Democrats, became the first politician to speak out in favour of gay law reform; particularly striking was his insistence that gay men were to be found in large numbers at every social level.
No one knew this better than Hirschfeld himself, the antithesis of the cloistered academic. He went out into society, actively participated in the lives of the people he was writing about — not just gay men but a full spectrum of lesbians, bisexuals, trans men and women, cross-dressers of all persuasions — then went back, analysed, formulated, and reappeared before the public with his findings. Hirschfeld’s friend, writer Else Lasker-Schüler, referred to him as a “father confessor”, but his transgression in the eyes of credentialed colleagues and the conservative mainstream was to have breached the sanctity of the confessional, or the academy in this instance.
Hirschfeld’s laboratory was queer Berlin — its beats, balls, and bars. Unique among German urban centres, the capital entered the twentieth century as a metropolis. It had experienced phenomenal growth, multiplying twentyfold in a century; in global comparison, only London, New York, and Paris were larger. To both settled Berliners and newcomers the city offered not just material opportunity, but the promise of transformation, or revelation — the prospect of sympathetic company in which to bare one’s true self. It had supported a gay underground since at least the time of Frederick the Great, when Austrian author Johann Friedel indignantly reported on the city’s male brothels in his 1782 Briefe über die Galanterien von Berlin (Letters on the Libertinage of Berlin). In Hirschfeld’s day, the chief of Berlin’s police, Leopold von Meerscheidt-Hüllessem, eschewed open confrontation with the city’s sizeable sexual minority and instead maintained a policy of containment and observation — a key factor in the development of a confident, diverse subculture.
But Berlin’s rapid expansion had rendered the city a stranger to itself. Hans Ostwald, an ambitious writer a few years younger than Hirschfeld, sought to chart the furthest reaches of the modern city, and the result was one of the most expansive accounts of urban experience ever undertaken — the Großstadt-Dokumente (Metropolis Documents). Beginning in 1904 with Ostwald’s own Dunkle Winkel in Berlin (Dark Corners in Berlin), a study of vagrants, and ending four years later with the shiny nouveau riche revels of Edmund Edel’s Neu-Berlin, the fifty-one editions fed the voracious curiosity of the Bildungsbürgertum — the educated middle class. Viewed together, the Metropolis Documents resemble a compendious study of a distant colony, especially in the row of imposing cloth-bound thematic convolutes which collated five volumes each. But it was the alien customs of modern, urban life that the Metropolis Documents mapped, with a particular focus on the disadvantaged and marginalised — prostitutes, bohemians, single mothers, gamblers, spiritualists, alcoholics, and criminals — as well as civil servants, teachers, seamstresses, musicians, actors, athletes, and bankers. Three quarters of the titles were about Berlin (with brief digressions to Hamburg, Vienna, and St Petersburg). And when Ostwald sought to depict the lives of sexual outlaws in the German capital, he turned to Magnus Hirschfeld.
The resulting 1904 volume was by some distance the most successful of the Metropolis Documents. Today, few works emerge from the archives with the urgency of Hirschfeld’s Berlins Drittes Geschlecht (Berlin’s Third Sex). To be fair, it didn’t exactly come out of nowhere; it wasn’t even the first Hirschfeld text to address the “third sex” — at the dawn of the new century he had issued a pamphlet for a broad readership entitled “What People Should Know about the Third Sex”. The “third sex” was a label of convenience at a time when Hirschfeld’s studies were still blurring distinctions between gender and sexuality, conflating them with physiological characteristics. In his research into sexual attraction he would soon settle on the notion of a continuum — decades before Alfred Kinsey — noting that to be positioned at either extreme, heterosexual or homosexual, was the exception rather than the rule. Hirschfeld was hardly alone: a large number of German works at the time examined this “third sex”, in fiction and non-fiction, but with little consensus on what the category actually encompassed: lesbians and gay men? Trans men and women? Emancipated women, perhaps? Hirschfeld’s preferred label for gay and trans individuals — a distinction not always clear at the time — was “Urning” (uranian), but he evidently adopted the more modish term “third sex” to lure as broad a readership as possible.
Duly lured, readers of Berlin’s Third Sex were confronted with a whole fête galante of misfits, deviants, and sexual mutineers cavorting on the legal edgelands of society. There’s the “gathering of obviously homosexual princes, counts and barons” discussing Wagner, the women-only ball where a “dark-eyed Carmen sets a jockey aflame”, the drag act burlesquing Isadora Duncan, a café in the city’s north where Jewish lesbians play chess, gaggles of gay labourers meeting up to gossip before tending to their needlework, the Russian baron distributing alms to hustlers in the Tiergarten, a canal-side tavern where soldiers from the nearby barracks find gay men only too willing to pick up their tab, and the encrypted classified ads with which the lonesome and horny sought to make the vast metropolis just a little smaller.
There is suffering, yes, there is despair and self-harm and ostracism. But Berlin’s Third Sex also offers something you may not expect of Wilhelmine Berlin — fun. To encounter Hirschfeld’s report today is to experience an electric charge of recognition. With its all-night parties, pansexual drag, and campy stage personas, with its elaborate codes of communication, layers of irony, and pop culture references, it reads like a dress rehearsal, in starched collars, for modern Western queer life. And for Herr and Frau Heterosexual Reader of the time, all of these exotic, dissident elements placed the subculture of “inverts” at a comforting distance.
I knew a uranian lawyer who, on leaving his office near Potsdamer Platz of an evening, or taking leave of a gathering of his associates, would seek out a tavern at the southern end of Friedrichstadt, a dive bar where he would gamble, drink and carouse the night away with “Revolver Heini”, “Butcher Herrmann”, “Yankee Franzi”, “Mad Dog” and other Berlin apaches. The raw nature of these criminals exert an irresistible attraction.

There was a cunning alchemy to Hirschfeld’s slim volume. He took the base alloy of prurience and contempt and transformed it into the noble metal of enlightenment. As Hirschfeld moves from breathless encounters in windowless bars to loving same-sex partnerships in banal domestic settings, he flips the focus from exoticism to familiarity. The couples in Berlin’s Third Sex maintain an understandable discretion, but otherwise the fact of their gender is pressed to the margins until it almost disappears from significance. It was as though Hirschfeld had tempted audiences to a freak show only to reveal the bearded lady brushing her teeth. There is little evidence in the book of Hirschfeld’s extensive research into sexual practices, which appears to be a conscious authorial decision, one that aligned his potentially explosive work more closely with the popular literature of the day.
As Hirschfeld draws out the tragedy that shadowed many queer lives at the time, his deployment of pathos can seem overripe to present-day sensibilities. In one section about a gay Christmastime gathering, he relays the lugubrious musings of the attendees:
Many think about their shattered hopes, what they could have achieved if old prejudices had not hindered their progress, and others in respectable positions ponder the heavy lie they must live. Many think about their parents who are dead – or for whom they are dead – and all in deepest sorrow think of the woman they loved most of all and who loved them most of all – their mother.

But this markedly sentimental, slightly mannered tone made his account far more accessible to the average reader. It also reflected Hirschfeld’s emotional investment in the subject matter. The only other volume that the doctor penned for Ostwald’s series — Die Gurgel Berlins (Berlin’s Gullet, 1907) — offers an instructive contrast. It addressed the city’s alcohol problem, replacing the anecdotal evidence of Berlin’s Third Sex with empirical data and an overall sense of distance from the topic at hand (Hirschfeld himself was largely teetotal).
While much of Berlin’s Third Sex is concerned with expressions of same-sex attraction, it also addresses those living contrary to their assigned gender, such as the individual Hirschfeld refers to as “Miss X”: legally female, mannish enough to attract attention in public, and living entirely as a man at home. Hirschfeld saw that denial of their identity was leading (individuals we now call) trans men and women to depression, even suicide. One of Hirschfeld’s most powerful contributions here — even in advance of the clinical assistance he would later offer — was to acknowledge that trans people exist, and always have.  ※※Indexed under…X (letter)to signify the unknown
The conclusion to Berlin’s Third Sex, the mission statement of his crusade, crowns sentiment and science with simple justice: “I stress, to avoid any confusion, that these demands on behalf of homosexuals relate to nothing more than what adults in free agreement do with each other”; he goes on to explicitly condemn violence and infringements of the rights of third parties, including minors. In Berlin’s Third Sex, Hirschfeld not only offers a vital piece of queer history both panoramic and intimate: he places a pin in the map marking the spot where majority Western consensus would only arrive about a century later.
Around the time of Berlin’s Third Sex, a split in the early gay movement pitted Hirschfeld against splenetic activist Adolf Brand, who drew on the “individual anarchy” of Max Stirner (an early run-through of libertarianism) and — even further back — a model of erotic mentorship inspired by ancient Greece. In 1896, Brand had launched the world’s first gay journal, Der Eigene, which wasn’t so much the organ of a liberation movement as an invitation to a secret society comprised of a classically-educated, exclusively male elite.
In their feud, Brand set his own “Nordic” purity against Hirschfeld’s “Oriental” decadence, a motif which recurred when Hirschfeld’s profile as an authority on sexual minorities expanded. Hirschfeld’s questioning of long-cherished truths discomfited wider society, and bigots conflated his campaign with the outer and inner revolutions of Marx and Freud as a great Jewish conspiracy to undo all that the upright citizen held dear. The antisemitic abuse reached a provisional peak in 1907 when Hirschfeld was called as a key witness in the trials that constituted the “Harden-Eulenburg Affair”, which centred on homosexuality in the highest imperial circles. A caricature from this time shows Hirschfeld shouting and beating a drum; his offence in the eyes of the Wilhelmine mainstream was drawing attention to homosexuality, labelling it an identity rather than an activity, a destiny rather than a decision, and — like August Bebel — revealing that it was far more common than generally assumed. Society now stood unhappily disabused of the consoling fiction that sexual difference was a freakish anomaly, a vile act begat of weakness of character, carried out in some untroubling elsewhere. Magnus Hirschfeld became the lightning rod for an entire country’s anxieties about sexuality and gender. Undeterred, Hirschfeld took a closer look at gender dysphoria and the phenomenon of erotic cross-dressing in his 1910 book Die Transvestiten, which introduced the term “transvestite” to the world. The following year he joined forces with feminist Helene Stöcker to — successfully — prevent the scope of Paragraph 175 being expanded to include lesbians.
While he advocated for the acceptance of difference in the realms of sexuality and race, Hirschfeld had, at least for a time, less open views when it came to individuals thought to have “inferior” genetic stock. In 1913, Hirschfeld helped found the Medical Society for Sexology and Eugenics (Ärztliche Gesellschaft für Sexualwissenschaft und Eugenik), embracing the latter theory as a way to combat hereditary illness and as a tool for supposed social welfare. Hirschfield’s approach wasn’t as extreme as some of his fellow practitioners, who advocated for government-issued health certificates verifying a person’s “suitability” for parenthood — excluding alcoholics, for example, who might pass on their condition to future generations. For Hirschfeld, a better approach was a free exchange of medical history among engaged couples. More unfortunate and misguided was the doctor’s research into “degenerative signs” — bodily features, like facial asymmetry, that he believed could be used to detect hereditary ills, with an aim to discourage passing these onto the next generation. Later, as the Nazis championed eugenics, Hirschfeld finally recognised the potential and actual dangers of the theory, arguing forcibly against it.
By contrast, his consultations at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Research), which Hirschfeld operated in Berlin throughout the Weimar Republic, advanced well beyond theory. Here he gave sexual minorities a vocabulary, helping to remove stigma and taboo as well as offering entirely practical interventions to patients like Lili Elbe, the “Danish Girl” — pioneering surgery, hormone treatment, even hair removal. Hirschfeld didn’t believe in a gay liberation without recognition of trans men and women (even if he didn’t use those terms), and none of this was to be accomplished at the expense of feminism. Hirschfeld was utterly tireless in this activism, taking any route — petitions, academic papers, books, international lectures, even feature films — that might lead to public enlightenment.
As Elena Mancini reveals in Magnus Hirschfeld and the Quest for Sexual Freedom (2010), there is a strain of expansive idealism apparent throughout Hirschfeld’s life away from his headline, hot-button concerns; at just sixteen, for instance, he wrote an essay proposing the “Dream of a World Language”. At the dawn of the twentieth century, he was a member of Berlin’s anarcho-utopian Neue Gemeinschaft (New Community), along with Hans Ostwald and Else Lasker-Schüler, as well as Gustav Landauer, Erich Mühsam, and Martin Buber. The group typified a deep yet rarely acknowledged strain of radical thinking in Wilhelmine Germany. These visionaries were exiles from the Zukunftsstaat (Future State), a concept which carried the suggestion that, like Shangri-La, the ideal society was a location you could reach if only you had the right coordinates. Best known for his examination of sexual difference, Hirschfeld ultimately espoused a unity through plurality, an abolition of hierarchies in diametrical opposition to social Darwinism.
So by the time fascism had arrived as a political force in Germany it wasn’t just Hirschfeld’s Jewishness or his defence of sexual difference that placed him in danger; he had in fact formulated a conception of human relations antithetical to Nazism in almost every regard. Fortunately Hirschfeld was already abroad when Hitler assumed power in 1933; he never returned but lived long enough to see the Nazis tighten Paragraph 175. It was only definitively struck from the statutes in 1994, after reunification — almost sixty years after Magnus Hirschfeld’s death.
As I was preparing my translation of Berlin’s Third Sex for print in 2017, Germany’s parliament voted in favour of marriage equality. This would no doubt have pleased a time-traveling Magnus Hirschfeld. As a world citizen, however, he would also note that to be gay in the present day can mean being prime minister or being stoned to death in the town square, contingent purely on the accident of birthplace. As reactionary forces seek to claw back hard-won civil advances around the globe, Hirschfeld’s achievements only become clearer, his message of radical acceptance more urgent, his embrace of variance more inspiring.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: James J. Conwa


text:
Documenting Drugs
The Artful Intoxications of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz
By Juliette Bretan
April 7, 2022

In pursuit of Pure Form, the Polish artist known as “Witkacy” would consume peyote, cocaine, and other intoxicants before creating pastel portraits. Juliette Bretan takes a trip through Witkiewicz’s chemical forays, including his 1932 Narcotics, a genre-bending treatise that warns of the hazards of drugs while seductively recollecting their delirious effects.

1:52 – The visions seem to be waning.2:05 – Ages pass. Entire mountains, worlds, and gaggles of visions. Too many reptiles. The last one: A cave made of pigs. I’m in a gigantic moving pig, made of piggish tiles. Narcotics spawn styles in art and architecture.4:10 – I see graphic depictions of all my flaws and mistakes.1
Perhaps it is the main subject of the self-portrait that captures your attention. Debonair in a crisp blue shirt and spotty tie, Polish artist, writer, and philosopher Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy) strikes a classic pose: head slightly turned away, steely gaze, half-smile. Or maybe your eyes pan beyond Witkacy to the strangely apocalyptic background — ruined buildings, rendered in smudged grey and yellow pastel, leaching smoke into the air. A prophetic vista, given that the portrait was completed in 1938. Either way, it is easy to overlook the inscription, in the black crayon of Witkacy’s spiky hand, jotted across the bottom of the image: [P + 2NP1]. It looks almost like a signature, a cipher, or a record of ownership. This is Witkacy’s formula for keeping note of the substances he had consumed during the artwork’s composition, and of a previous spell of sobriety. In this case, P denotes “palenia”, or smoking tobacco, while 2NP1 signals one month and two days of “non-smoking”.
Under the influence of cocaine, mescaline, alcohol, and other narcotic cocktails, Witkacy prepared numerous studies of clients and friends for his portrait painting company, founded in the mid-1920s; the mix of substances inducing different approaches to colour, technique, and composition. The resulting images are surreal — and occasionally horrific. Heads become disembodied busts, suspended in the night sky. Bodies are transformed into worms. Faces seep down the paper.
Witkacy’s experimentation with drugs was not limited to the studio. In 1932, he authored Narkotyki (Narcotics), a series of essays describing his intake, alongside analysis of contemporary attitudes towards drug use. During the 1920s and 30s, substance abuse in Poland was increasingly seen as less a medical issue, more of a social and even national concern, perceived as a threat facing the newly-independent Polish state. Particular criticism was levied against alcohol, though other drugs, including tobacco, were also criticised at times for their detrimental health effects.2 At first glance, Narkotyki appears to employ a similar rhetoric of abstinence. The front cover ominously lists a roster of recreational substances, in blazing red and yellow.
In the preface, Witkacy claims he is “writing in total seriousness . . . to produce something useful”; describes how his “main aim is to save future generations from the two most monstrous stupéfiants, tobacco and alcohol”; and claims substance use “ultimately lead[s] to a personality becoming entirely altered, spiritually disfigured”.3 His is a “purely psychological” method, he adds.4 It's a very honourable approach — but, typical Witkacy, this was all a bit of ruse.
Narkotyki owes much to the experimental works of other European psychonauts throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Witkacy’s idea of drugs as being both sublime artistic fuel and a fast-track to the doldrums evokes Thomas De Quincey’s opium-laced visions in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821); his playfulness with style, reflecting the ephemeral escape offered by drug-taking — and his acknowledgement of its longer-term, more pernicious social consequences — smacks of Charles Baudelaire’s poetry and writing on hashish.5 Like Baudelaire, Witkacy frequently situates his experiments within wider ideas about the role of the artist in an increasingly modernised society, and the possibilities opened by altering the perceptual faculties. “As humanity adapts to society, to the progressive mechanization and quickening pace of life”, he writes, “the artist, a specialist in channeling the immediate expression of metaphysical sensations, has had to distance himself formally from the social foundation, though it is where his life is rooted.”6 Whatever his debts to other explorers of altered states of consciousness, Witkacy was also future looking. At certain points, he adopts a process of time-stamping his experiences as they progress after ingestion: a method that anticipates the internet’s Erowid portal — a sort of intoxicated version of the Mass Observation project, which allows volunteers to submit public accounts of their experiences on various substances. And his intoxication was both physical and formal. As the translator of the 2018 English version of Narkotyki, Soren A. Gauger, notes, Witkacy’s prose is often tricksy and double-crossing: he is “exhilarating and exasperating”, writes Gauger, “no matter what he was writing, it seems he wished he was writing something else”.7
Born in 1885 in Warsaw, then part of the Russian Empire, Witkacy was raised in the southern mountain resort of Zakopane — the air and spirit of which would later lead him to deem it “the chief production plant of a unique, purely Polish drug, Zakopanine”. His formative years were spent around cultural innovations, including those by his father, painter and critic Stanisław Witkiewicz, who was associated with the innovative Młoda Polska (Young Poland) Arts and Crafts movement.8 Initially home-schooled, Witkacy later studied at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts, debuting his paintings — Romantic depictions of landscapes which bore similarities to his father’s works — in 1901. A trip to Paris in 1908 sparked an interest in avant-gardism, and he began experimenting with photography, extending lenses with the help of drainpipes to make strange portraits. A macro focus and claustrophobic cropping brought his subjects oppressively close to the viewer; their wide-eyed and grimly-serious faces staring out of the bromide murk.9
Witkacy’s early career was marred by tragedy. In 1914, his fiancée Jadwiga Janczewska took her own life, sending him into a tailspin. As a distraction, his childhood friend, anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, invited him to photograph an upcoming research expedition through Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) and Australia to what was then the Territory of Papua. It was a disastrous trip. En route, the pair spent most of the time in their cabin, deep in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim; upon arrival, Witkacy’s letters to his father reveal an ongoing preoccupation with thoughts of his late fiancée, in which descriptions of the environment interweave intense colour and toxicity:
The trees are covered with flowers going from scarlet and orange vermilion to violet and lake. . . . All this causes me the most frightful suffering and unbearable pain, since she’s not alive with me. . . . Everything is poison which brings close thoughts of death. When, when will this inhuman suffering end?10
At one point on the trip, Witkacy held a Browning pistol to his temple for an entire night. His relationship with Malinowski prickled — the anthropologist compared it to “Nietzsche breaking with Wagner” — and Witkacy soon returned for Europe to enlist in the Russian Imperial Army, whilst Malinowski continued to the Territory of Papua.11 The friendship between the pair never fully recovered.
Drafted into the Pavlovsky Guard in 1915, Witkacy fought on the frontline of World War I in autumn of the following year — though was severely wounded, come summer, in eastern Ukraine.12 Witkacy spent the remainder of the war convalescing, during which time he developed his artistic style on an industrial scale, creating around eight hundred works, both in painting and photography.13 One composition, produced in St Petersburg (then Petrograd) circa 1917, was his “Multiple Self-Portrait in Mirrors”: an unnerving photographic portrait taken in a reflective hall, depicting five Witkacies, dressed in military uniform, staring each other down with The Lady from Shanghai-ish paranoia.
In mid-1918, Witkacy was able to leave St Petersburg and return to Zakopane, where he began exhibiting works with the avant-garde Formist group: a Cubist-Expressionist-Futurist-folk mashup movement, where psychedelic scenes, popping with colour, met more graphical, geometric designs. Around the same time, he formulated the principles of his theory of Pure Form, which stressed composition over content, and a break away from realism, naturalism, and linear narrative. For Witkacy, artistic works served as autonomous units rather than reflective enterprises, prompting free association among viewers, untrammelled by logic or consistency.14 In a 1923 lecture, he explained:
On the stage, a man or some other creature could commit suicide as a result of a glass of water spilling, the same creature that danced for joy over the death of his beloved mother five minutes ago . . . . Art with a tendency towards Pure Form is something absolute . . . occupying a given period of time.15
Despite his aesthetic innovations, Witkacy’s works weren’t selling as much as he hoped. In 1925, he decided instead to establish a portrait firm and — under the motto “the customer must be satisfied” — proposed seventeen increasingly sardonic rules, including the classification of portraits into a number of separate styles:
— Type A: “‘Slick’ execution, with a certain loss of character in the interests of beautification, or accentuation of ‘prettiness.’”— Type B: “More emphasis on character but without any trace of caricature”— Type B + d: “Intensification of character, bordering on the caricatural.”— Type C: “executed with the aid of C2H5OH [ethanol] and narcotics of a superior grade . . . . Approaches abstract composition, otherwise known as ‘Pure Form.’”— Type D: “The same results without recourse to any artificial means.”— Type E: “Spontaneous psychological interpretation at the discretion of the Firm.”16
Later in the rule-book, Witkacy added: “any sort of criticism on the part of the customer is absolutely ruled out . . . if the firm had allowed itself the luxury of listening to customers’ opinions, it would have long ago gone crazy.” Anticipating his writing in Narkotyki, Witkacy’s portrait painting company was less a serious enterprise than an experiment in boundary-breaking, mischief, and devilish contradiction. Thousands of images were subsequently produced, signed under various pseudonyms: Witkac, Witkatze, Vitecasse (French for “breaks quickly”).17 Many of the Type C, mid-inebriation portraits were made at so-called “orgies” in which Witkacy experimented with drug combinations, overseen by a friend in the medical profession, Dr Białynicki-Birula.18 Rumours about these parties — and Witkacy’s habitual drug-taking — abounded among the general public; even a decade later, in the late 1940s, Białynicki-Birula issued a letter to the press confirming their serious nature, and refuting the suggestion that Witkacy was ever addicted to drugs.
Throughout the interwar period, Witkacy garnered a reputation among artistic circles as Poland’s resident eccentric. For writer and playwright Witold Gombrowicz, he was: “never at rest, always highly strung, tormenting himself and others with his perpetual playacting, his craving to shock . . . forever cruelly and painfully playing with people”.19 Photographs of Witkacy are peak interwar slapstick: in one, he is irascible and grimacing; another shows him looking pensive in ski goggles; in a third, he has an arm around the usually shy Polish-Jewish short story writer Bruno Schulz, who has his fingers over his eyes. Witkacy also took to novel writing, composing several bizarre and impressionistic works. His debut, Farewell to Autumn (1927), was to a degree inspired by his travels with Malinowski, and features a cocaine party. The next, Insatiability (1930), is a narcotics-fuelled and eerily prescient dystopia, narrated around the year 2000, in which Europe is overrun by war, facilitated by the hallucinogenic “Murti Bing” pills.
There’s a psychoactive bite to much of Witkacy’s work — which makes his preface to Narkotyki all the more farcical. If Witkacy was Poland’s answer to De Quincey, then his was a more confounding approach to substance intake: one part didactic, one part satirical. “I will write the chapter on nicotine in a sorry state of withdrawal”, he claims, then adds: “of course, I might very well begin smoking again in the middle of writing . . . so many times this has happened!”20 Just as his innovations in the visual and literary arts embraced the eccentric and contradictory, Witkacy’s nonfiction was also charged with paradox, reflecting his ambivalent relationship with indulgence and withdrawal.
Though written with all the fastidious composition of a lab report, Narkotyki blends objective documentary with more personal, somatic, and often hilarious explanations of Witkacy’s experience on drugs, and the complexities of addiction. Drugs are a gateway “to see the world from ‘the other side’” (similar language also appears in Farewell to Autumn, but here they do not offer an escape from reality, instead revealing its contradictory and fickle undercurrents). Narkotyki slips from desire, greed, and vanity to disappointment and blame; from chronicles of social mores to sharpened invective; intimate reminiscences to artistic theorising.21 At one point, Witkacy breaks away from drug-talk to dedicate several pages to refuting supposedly serious allegations against him:
I deny having had sexual relations with my Siamese cat, Schyzia (a.k.a. Schizophrenia, Isotta, Sabina, of whom I am so fond, but nothing more), and that the mongrel kittens she bore in any way take after me. . . . I deny being a braggart and a womanizer always on the make, or having seduced the wives of other men. I deny having hiked up to the summit of Giewont in a tuxedo (I have never even owned a tuxedo), written plays as a lark, swindled and mocked, and not knowing how to draw.22
While one of Witkacy’s central ideas about art was a belief in the growing mechanisation of the world, and the separation between artist and society, Narkotyki combines culture, life, and psychology, exposing both individual effects and general attitudes towards drug taking.23
The first chapter, on nicotine, begins with Leo Tolstoy and ends with existentialism — “what are a few meager puffs when nothing has any meaning” — via segues from moralistic suggestions for its “absolute prohibition”, to the acknowledgement of the “unadulterated bovine pleasure” of cigarettes, and of differing global smoking techniques: “we Poles, Russians and Balkaners of all stripes, to say nothing of the real East, suck the foul smoke right down to our navels, poisoning ourselves some 80% more than those in the West”.24 There are diatribes on how smoking cheapens art — Witkacy suggests smokers see value in the most “hideous literature for cretins . . . those ghastly detective novels”; how it “saps your courage”, causing all manner of ghastly mental and physical symptoms.25 But cigarettes are also near-impossible to jettison. Witkacy frequently mentions the regret of the smoker, who has “squandered all his life’s bright opportunities for the dreary inhalation of an inadequately toasted demon weed substance from hell”. It is not difficult to trace this description, and the careful commentary on stages of withdrawal, back to Witkacy’s own perception of himself.
Following his fiancée’s suicide, Witkacy spent much of his life treading the edge of a breakdown: some of his more private writings express fears for the demise of individuality, or describe impending catastrophe, even suicidal ideation. But Narkotyki never reaches complete apocalyptic gloom. Witkacy’s style shifts throughout: rambling, excruciating descriptions of the after-effects of abstinence are defused with impeccable comic timing:
First thing in the morning your toxin-paralyzed cells seem to revive, and not just in the brain and the nervous system, but throughout your body. You feel as though they were balls in their sockets, freshly oiled and cleaned. Of course, the first thought, or scraps of thought, you have are: “What a load of crap.”
Witkacy’s take on alcohol is similarly brazen. “Alcohol is boring”, he announces — but then offers a thorough and effervescent description of its psychological impact:
Reality opens its gelatinous and reeking maw, its derisive eyes goggling with wild abandon . . . by increasing the dosage of the intoxicant you can always occasionally return to the old ecstasy and gain at least a wan simulation of life.26
His account of cocaine, meanwhile, is meticulous narcotics reportage:
We spend several hours admiring a stain on a tablecloth as the most beautiful thing in the world, only to subsequently fall prey to the most horrific doubts about the very essence of Being and of life at its most beautiful and sublime.
There are also shorter sections on morphine and ether, written by Polish scientists Bohdan Filipowski and Dezydery Prokopowicz (pseudonym for Stefan Glass), who employ a slightly more methodological approach to drug intake.
The fourth chapter, on peyote — a small cactus containing mescaline and other psychoactive alkaloids — is Witkacy at his most breathless. Of all the drugs listed in Narkotyki, peyote takes on a particularly mythical status: noting the difficulties in acquiring the substance in Europe, Witkacy explains he will be “grateful until [his] dying days” for the seven pea-sized pills he received from Prosper Szmurło — an “authentic Mexican peyote, from the modest stocks of Dr. Osta, President of the International Society for Metapsychic Research”.27 Witkacy even notes he abstained from drinking and other intoxicants after using peyote; an astonishingly foresighted understanding of the impact of different substances on the human body, which prefigures present-day research into the effectiveness of hallucinogens to treat alcoholism.28
The subsequent thirty pages offer an eleven-hour account of Witkacy’s emotional and physical state while under the influence of peyote: the rate of his pulse; the raging appetites; the drawings he attempts to create; his inability to sleep; and the ceaseless hallucinations (of green embryos as big as a St Bernard, of anteaters spinning backwards, of piscine cross-sections — or, as Witkacy puts it, “giant shark cold cuts”; of imaginary and fantastic meetings with Polish politicians; of rotting body parts; of erotica; of skiing).29 “Peyote reality”, he summarises, “is like our own seen through a microscope . . . the longer the eyes are shut, the more the field broadens and sometimes even ‘envelops’ the peyote user like everyday reality, creeping up on both sides and even producing the strange sensation of having eyes at the back of your head”.30
Drug reality, though, comes in many forms; sometimes physical, sometimes cultural. A compulsive code-switcher, Witkacy’s understanding of experimentation (with art or drugs) as a technique to create formal and social distance also includes a sensitivity to the failings of ordinary language to capture experience. In the preface, he notes:
I hope to show you the small mental shifts that ultimately lead to a personality becoming entirely altered, spiritually disfigured, devoid of Geist (the Polish word for “spirit,” duch, does not convey the range of the German Geist and the French esprit – knack, spark, glimmer, drive, etc.), creative power, and a striving toward the Unknown, which requires courage and a carefree attitude that are systematically pulverized by an odious addiction.31
Visual artworks, Witkacy’s or otherwise, and language — of dance, song, incantational poetry, and prose — can cause the beholder and reader to feel spiritually altered; a transposed trip, a kind of second-order intoxication, or a contact high from the artist’s own altered state. I think here of the whirligig beat of a waltz, and of a velvety voice crooning among lamenting violins:
Gdy mówisz mi, że kochasz mnie Twe słowa są, jak opjum...(When you tell me you love meYour words are like opium…)
This is not Witkacy speaking. These are the lyrics of a mesmeric Polish song written in 1933, “Opium”, which was performed in the leading cabarets of interwar Warsaw. But in many ways, the song proves Witkacy’s point: despite official condemnation, drugs — soft and hard — were substantially intertwined with everyday culture in the early twentieth century, both in Poland and on a wider scale across Europe. Another case study might be found in the 1936 Polish tango “Morfina” (or Morphine), with similar lyrics, about a beguiling drug-turned-lover; or in the plethora of advertising songs for cigarette companies produced in the period — like the 1937 tango “Nikotyna”, the tale of a femme fatale called Nicotine, who turns blood to wine and drives men to despair. Additional examples would include the musical first-aid-kit of interwar Polish advertising songs for painkillers and medications; or the high-quality pictorial advertisements for pharmaceutical firms of the era, including by illustrator duo Jan LeWitt and George Him (who later designed wartime propaganda posters for the British war effort).
Narkotyki became an immediate hit, acquiring almost modernist cult status: Gauger notes that one contemporary critic suggested the book “needed no introduction because half of Poland could be seen carrying it around”.32 Was this because Witkacy’s public could relate to the content? Because he dared to toy with societal rules and authority? Or because he left it ambiguous as to whether the book was a serious project at all? Witkacy’s oft-overlooked appendices to Narkotyki have a commonplace focus, emphasising prosaic habits — washing, shaving, and haemorrhoid care — sometimes with recommendations for treatment, and sometimes appealing to readers directly. Perhaps this was why his works gripped audiences. Witkacy always skated the thin line between relatability and absurdity; between the educational and the visceral; between life and art.
Witkacy’s fate, though, was decidedly more grim. After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, he fled east to Jeziory with his lover, Czesława Oknińska. Seventeen days later, Soviet forces also invaded the country — and Witkacy took his own life. After the war, his sealed coffin was moved and reburied in Zakopane; several years later, Polish authorities re-exhumed his remains, and opened the coffin.
Then came Witkacy’s final joke, which could have been plucked straight out of his narcotic-induced hallucinations.
The body wasn’t his.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Juliette Bretan