The First Psychonaut? Louis-Alphonse Cahagnet’s Experiments with Narcotics

Abstract

This article calls attention to the important but neglected French Mesmerist, Spiritualist, Swedenborgian, and occultist Louis-Alphonse Cahagnet (1809–1885), while concentrating on his significance as a forgotten pioneer of modern entheogenic esotericism. Like other occultist practitioners during the period prior to modern Theosophy (notably Emma Hardinge Britten and Paschal Beverley Randolph), Cahagnet was convinced about the spiritual potential of narcotics as a powerful tool for inducing transcendental vision. The article describes and contextualizes his systematic experiments with narcotic suffumigations made from plants traditionally associated with necromancy and witchcraft, as well as his spiritual visions induced by the eating of Hashisch dissolved in coffee. Cahagnet appears to stand at the origin of an underground tradition of visionary practice that would be continued and further developed by Britten, Randolph, and other esoteric practitioners since the 1860s. While most scholars have tended to play down the role of narcotics in these contexts, these may well have been crucial to how spiritual vision came to be understood in the occultist movement.