The cabbage is.. the blue deer: Leonora Carrington’s aromatic kitchen of secret psychedelic plants
Squinting sideways at Leonora Carrington’s later writing and visual art through an ethnobotanical and ‘feminilogical’ lens reveals her hidden fascination for the shamanic flora and fungi of indigenous Mexicans. While several male European surrealists were known to have experimented with psychedelics, especially mescaline – despite Breton’s admonition “isn’t surrealism enough?” – we argue that Carrington was the only one to truly embrace their sacramental powers, albeit without overtly advertising the fact. Having long since had the natural tendency to evoke the ‘mundane made magic’ through her therianthropic proclivities of mixing human, plant and animal worlds and intermingling the domestic with the ecstatic, Carrington met Mexico as much as Mexico met Carrington.
Maturing amongst the local ritualistic use of sacred plants, nagualism, and curanderismo, we show how Carrington’s shapeshifting art, slowly and secretly, began to echo the entheogenic ethos of Mesoamerican culture. Her aromatic kitchen transforms the ordinary cabbage into an alchemical rose and the blue deer: the cosmological equivalent of hikuri – the peyote cactus at the centre of Wixárika (Huichol) psychedelic spirituality. Speculations that Carrington partook of psychedelic plant medicines have previously arisen, however in true Leonora form she darted away from any definitive definition in favour of mysterious liminality. It is in the nebulous in-between that Carrington blends bodies, common vegetables and multiplicities of consciousness, so that they extend further than their typical boundaries, and simultaneously blur them. To Carrington, categorisation is a cage, and by resisting, whether it be the limitations of bodies, space, time or kitchens, she raises feminine r/evolution.
Bio
Rebecca Jackson, she/her, is a researcher and writer exploring the intersection of art, science and the occult. She pursues the realities that altered states of consciousness evoke by examining invisible, surreal and anomalous realms. Current projects include collaborating with scientists on the mental health benefits of the Amazonian shamanic decoction ayahuasca, as well as exploring the capacity for shared visionary experiences with the potent entheogen DMT. Her work also delves into the psychedelic and magical practices within Surrealism, with the exceptional and enigmatic Leonora Carrington illuminating the enchanted way.
Dr David Luke, he/him, is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Greenwich. His research focuses on transpersonal experiences, parapsychological phenomena and altered states of consciousness, especially via psychedelics, having published more than 100 academic papers in this area, including thirteen books, such as Ecopsychology and the Psychedelic Experience. When he is not running clinical drug trials with LSD, conducting psychedelic field experiments or observing apparent weather control with Mexican shamans he sometimes collaborates with artists, such as Damien Hurst, Haroon Mirza, and Bonnie Camplin, whom he worked with on her Turner Prize shortlisted collection The Military Industrial Complex.
Maturing amongst the local ritualistic use of sacred plants, nagualism, and curanderismo, we show how Carrington’s shapeshifting art, slowly and secretly, began to echo the entheogenic ethos of Mesoamerican culture. Her aromatic kitchen transforms the ordinary cabbage into an alchemical rose and the blue deer: the cosmological equivalent of hikuri – the peyote cactus at the centre of Wixárika (Huichol) psychedelic spirituality. Speculations that Carrington partook of psychedelic plant medicines have previously arisen, however in true Leonora form she darted away from any definitive definition in favour of mysterious liminality. It is in the nebulous in-between that Carrington blends bodies, common vegetables and multiplicities of consciousness, so that they extend further than their typical boundaries, and simultaneously blur them. To Carrington, categorisation is a cage, and by resisting, whether it be the limitations of bodies, space, time or kitchens, she raises feminine r/evolution.
Bio
Rebecca Jackson, she/her, is a researcher and writer exploring the intersection of art, science and the occult. She pursues the realities that altered states of consciousness evoke by examining invisible, surreal and anomalous realms. Current projects include collaborating with scientists on the mental health benefits of the Amazonian shamanic decoction ayahuasca, as well as exploring the capacity for shared visionary experiences with the potent entheogen DMT. Her work also delves into the psychedelic and magical practices within Surrealism, with the exceptional and enigmatic Leonora Carrington illuminating the enchanted way.
Dr David Luke, he/him, is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Greenwich. His research focuses on transpersonal experiences, parapsychological phenomena and altered states of consciousness, especially via psychedelics, having published more than 100 academic papers in this area, including thirteen books, such as Ecopsychology and the Psychedelic Experience. When he is not running clinical drug trials with LSD, conducting psychedelic field experiments or observing apparent weather control with Mexican shamans he sometimes collaborates with artists, such as Damien Hurst, Haroon Mirza, and Bonnie Camplin, whom he worked with on her Turner Prize shortlisted collection The Military Industrial Complex.