Mescal and Mechanisms of Hallucinations by Heinrich Kluver

Hardcover. Condition: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good. 1969. University of Chicago Press. Second Impression. Illustrated.

This book includes two important early works by the German-American psychologist best known for his contributions to the fields of Gestalt psychology and animal behavior. In the 1920s, Klüver’s interest in eidetic visual phenomena led him to conduct a series of experiments during which he ingested mescal “buttons,” the dried tops of the peyote cactus, a plant with an ancient history of ritual use among indigenous populations of Mexico and the American southwest. His resulting 1928 monograph, Mescal, broke ground as the first English-language work on the subject. Indeed, Klüver was decades ahead of his time in considering psychoactive compounds as worthy of serious scientific investigation, particularly with regard to various aspects of the human visual apparatus. The present volume contains the full text of Mescal along with the later Mechanisms of Hallucinations (1942), and with a new preface by Klüver.