Antonin Artaud and the Peyotl with the Tarahumaras

The last letter was about Michaux La Plume, this one will be about Artaud le Mômo. I discovered Antonin Artaud through his theater. He was part of a small group in the 40s of which he was the leader, the madman, the Animated. In Paris, at the Vieux-Colombier theater, at 9 p.m., Antonin Artaud gives a lecture in front of a packed house where are present: Paulhan, Adamov, Gide, Breton, Camus, Braque, Picasso, Dufour, Derain, Audiberti, and many others. This lecture project, which Artaud had formed very shortly after his return to Paris, remains an extraordinary event that saw him expose himself in a total way, sometimes to the limit of the bearable. He was known for his extraordinary performances, but also for his internments in asylums, almost 8 years between the 40s and 50s, wandering the halls of the psychiatric hospital of Rodez. A correspondence with Dr. Ferdière, published by Gallimard, allows us to better understand this period. These writings ooze extreme passion, Artaud’s love for his psychiatrist, but also misunderstanding, hatred, shame, and distress. A relationship of deep friendship between a psychiatrist and a brilliant patient.

In this same work, we find a collection intended for Dr. Ferdière under the title “Le Rite du Peyotl chez les Tarahumaras” [The Peyotl Rite among the Tarahumaras]. Artaud tells that he met, during a trip to Mexico in 1936, the chief of Tutuguri and drank the Ciguri (peyotl). He then attended the dance of Tutuguri, mixed with divergent rhythms, invasive voices, and psalmodies. He mixes the bitter taste of peyotl, the black charcoal earth that hosts the cactus, and the birth of the sun, all in a poem with a scanned rhythm. In a vision, he describes a seventh Indian who transforms into a horse then into the sun, and six other Indians who transform into sunflowers and six suns, turning and advancing according to circular meanders, celebrating the birth of the last sun, the last man, and the abolition of the cross.

In his poem “Tutuguri,” Artaud fights against the overly ordered and repetitive rhythm of daily life. He conceived his poems aloud, chanting his diction by striking a block, resonating this battle for rhythm, grappling with the fixed order of language. The “rite of the sun” among the Tarahumaras, which he describes, stages a ritual where six Indians dance around six crosses arranged in a circle, while a seventh sets the pace with a bizarre musical instrument. This latest version of the poem is a hymn to the glory of the sun and rhythm, to the solar advent of rhythm.

Artaud explores the oppositions between rite and rhythm, cross and sun, life and death. He describes the seventh Tutuguri as the element that allows transgressing the ritual circle and introducing a new temporality, a counter-time that abolishes the cross and calls for the solar advent. His writing is marked by this quest for rhythm, for living scansion, seeking to save life from suffocation by dead repetition.

By revisiting the figure of the seventh Tutuguri, Artaud inscribes in his work a struggle against death and repetition, aiming to rediscover a vital rhythm, a carnal and poetic resurrection. He sets himself up as a rival to Christ, asserting his own resurrection and the eternal life of his body, freed from the shackles of the cross and the spasm of death.

In this text is also intertwined the use of mescaline, as well as the critique of civilization based on the exclusive principle of cruelty, which can be understood in Artaud as the societies of oppressors, destructive of natural resources. Artaud evokes here the destruction of God. He says: “Le Peyotl ramène le moi à ses sources vraies” [Peyotl brings the self back to its true sources] and continues on the benefits of this intake, which allows him to discriminate within himself the true from the false. It may be the first text of a psychotic, schizophrenic patient addressing his psychiatrist to extol the virtues of psychedelic substances on his anxiety: “Maintenant de jour en jour, un sentiment de sécurité, de certitude, s’établit lentement mais sûrement en moi. Mais pour se reconquérir entièrement Dr Ferdière, il faut du temps” [Now from day to day, a feeling of security, of certainty, is slowly but surely establishing itself in me. But to fully recover, Dr. Ferdière, it takes time].