On Spiders, Drugs, and Poetry

Dr Peter Witt and his drug experimentation with spiders

This article by historian Robert Dickins was first published in the Psychedelic Press journal, issue XXXVI. Subscribe to future print issues here.

The spider is a potent subject in poetry. Whether it be the creative genius of the webbing God-poet in Emily Dickinson’s ‘A Spider Sewed at Night’ or the Zen-like architect preparing for its prey, ‘Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space’ in Walt Whitman’s ‘A Noiseless Patient Spider’, our eight-legged friend cuts a cool, measured character—a master of art weaving threads of life and death.

Indeed, so regular and precise is the rhythm of itsy-bitsy spider’s web artistry that they also make intriguing scientific subjects—for deviation in a well-established pattern is a desirous data-point in nature’s disclosures. Yet how to prompt such deviation? LSD, perhaps? We may learn something of the spider, how ‘His Strategy Was Physiognomy’ as Dickinson wrote, or perhaps we may learn about tripping: the poetry arising where subject and LSD meet.

The web of just such a story begins shortly after the birth of LSD in Basel, Switzerland. When Sandoz chemist Albert Hofmann first synthesized the drug in 1938 it was subject to animal testing, but shelved as unremarkable. However, after his strange presentiment 5 years later, when its extraordinary psychoactive properties, occurring in extremely small amounts, were discovered, researchers at Sandoz revisited their earlier bestial efforts.

As historian Thomas Hatsis notes, ‘in 1943 the situation was different; Sandoz chemists now had something to look for: nuance.’[1] In-house studies were conducted by Aurelio Cerletti (1918–1988) under the supervision of Ernst Rothlin (1888–1972), and involved a host of creatures, including mice and fish. The mice fared badly, ‘“sacrificed at various time intervals” to see if and how “LSD-25 penetrated the brain.”’[2] Bestial indeed.

However, not all the research was carried out in-house. Just over sixty miles away at the University of Bern, a young gentleman named Peter Witt had already been surreptitiously doping our eight-legged friends with a range of psychoactive substances in their food. To Witt, Sandoz promptly provided some funding and a supply of freshly-made LSD.

During the Second World War, the young scholar Peter Nikolaus Witt (1918–1998) had successfully, though of course painfully, managed to hide the Jewish heritage on one side of his family. Between military secondment, he studied at the University of Graz, Austria and the University of Berlin. However, when the war came to a close, he went on to gain his Medical Doctorate at the ancient University at Tübingen, specializing in pharmacology.

In Witt’s unpublished memoirs he relates a curious story about Hitler’s own drug addiction. While at Tübingen in 1946, lecturing about psychoactive substances, he was secretly hired by the American military to work through detailed accounts about the Fuhrer’s last days, conducting interviews, and looking for mention of drugs.[3] Sworn to secrecy, he stayed in stints on the American’s compound in Frankfurt:

An enormous pile of documents was deposited on my desk, and I was supposed to screen them for any mention of drugs and of how the drugs were used or caused symptoms. There were diaries of generals who had spent many days in the Fuhrer’s headquarters, and who had kept careful entries of their observations during conferences; there were protocols kept - by physicians who worked in Hitler's surroundings and especially by Dr. Morel, who was the Fuhrer’s personal physician during his last year of life.[4]

Witt believed Hitler was receiving over 100 different drugs per day toward the bunker end of his life—many potent, others ineffectual. Although he made detailed notes, which the Americans kept, the project ended abruptly, and he never filed a final report, nor discovered if anything came of his work.[5] It did however further pique his interest in how psychoactive drugs interact with biological organisms.

Witt began undertaking human experiments with such substances as cannabis, mescaline, morphine and scopolamine in order to discern differences in their effects. It was a struggle though. Although he found they ‘evoked wonderful responses… fantastic dreams, weird visions in color, laughter, tears and all sorts of emotions… Human subjects are moody, complicated, variable and apt to carry over memories from one experiment to the next.’[6]

One day, a delegation from the Zoology department visited the pharmacologist. They had been trying to film some spiders making their nightly webs, but were unable to capture them—our eight-legged friends waiting until exhaustion had overtaken the experimenters before weaving began. Could Witt supply them with a substance to stimulate their spiders’ endeavours? He supplied them with several different ones and sent them on their way.

The zoologists returned the following day with news that the spiders had indeed made their webs, but that they had spun strange, never before seen shapes. This deviation disappointed the zoologists, but elicited a profound eureka moment for Witt. ‘Spiders’ he later wrote, ‘promised to be much simpler subjects for testing the effects of drugs on the nervous system. Furthermore, they might yield information which could be put to practical use.’[7] Simpler perhaps, but also ‘noiseless’ and ‘patient’ as Whitman had written.

Of the great variety of our friends, Witt chose for his subject the orb-spinning spider, Zilla x-notata—particularly female subjects as they are larger and more industrious in their web-weaving. Touch is her primary sense, and her web a masterful tool for catching food. Resting two legs on its edge, the web essentially acts as a bodily extension, and our friend will wait patiently for vibrations. When a fly’s wings are caught, Zilla pounces, paralyzes it with a poisonous bite, then binds it in thread, before leisurely sucking the juices from its prey.

If the web is daily destroyed, it is nightly rebuilt to the same schema. Using a T-shape, the outer framework of its web is first constructed. This differs depending on its location, but then Zilla proceeds systematically: remarkably uniform radial spokes and bridges emanating from the centre, with extra space around one spoke that acts as a signal thread, her line of communication with the whole web. Then, working from the outer framework inwards, she builds cross members connecting the spokes in a spiralling pattern—the ‘catching spiral’.

“Will you walk into my parlour?” said the Spider to the Fly,
“‘Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy;
The way into my parlour is up a winding stair,
And I have many curious things to shew when you are there.”[8]

Now, surreptitiously slipping Zilla a drug is no easy matter—she is watchful and patient. It was a medical student at Tübingen, Dieter Wolff, who came up with the solution. A classic Roman method of dispatching the powerful; slipping something into their food. A little fluid with the drug, sweetened with sugar to hide its taste, was first injected into the juicy hind part of a fly, which was then cut in half and placed on the web. A tuning fork, simulating the fly’s wings, is then used to attract Zilla, and finding the sugary taste delicious, she greedily sucks up the fluid.

Witt’s first article on the subject, ‘Die Wirkung von Substanzen auf den Netzbau der Spinnen’ (The Effect of Substances on the Web-Building of Spiders’) was written up in November 1948, and published the following year.[9] A smorgasbord of substances were employed including respiratory stimulants, opiates, caffeine, hormones, strychnine and related compounds, alcohol, chloral hydrate, and barbiturates. He concluded:

The cobweb of geometrical spiders enables us to examine the effect of substances on instinct movements of animals. It seems possible to separate the different fundamental functions co-operating in the production of the cobweb by experiment. The effect of Pervitin [methamphetamine], mentioned in this report, is characterized by a considerable disturbance of the regular arrangement of the concentric sticky threads.[10]

In further papers the researchers more concretely argued that it was possible to influence Zilla’s web construction through the use of ‘neurotropic’ substances. In other words, to get a regular repeatable change through using psychoactive substances.[11] They hoped this might be useful for two reasons: to study how a drug influences certain aspects of the nervous system, and that it might be possible to develop pharmacological tests for certain substances. Zilla may in fact have been transformed into a drug test.

Benzedrine caused Zilla to repeat the overall shape of her web, but zig-zag ‘like an unsteady walker’; the deliriant scopolamine completely destroyed her sense of direction, the web’s spiral no longer taking regular turns, but weaving off in strange directions. While not mentioned in the earlier scientific literature, Witt also tried cannabis, which produced no disturbance in its directional sense. However, she uniformly omitted the first part of her spiral, began closer to the centre, and left the outer part uncovered by cross members.[12]

In 1949, Witt moved to Switzerland and began working at Bern University as an Assistant Pharmacologist, where he remained till 1956. There, he continued his work with our eight-legged friends, but spent more time on hallucinogens. As noted, he was sponsored financially by Sandoz, who also supplied him with some LSD for the first time, and he began using it in comparison with mescaline. He concluded that,

The most striking is the improved exactitude of the angles with small doses of LSD 25, and the decreased accuracy under the influence of Mezcaline [sic]. Therefore it seems likely that the similar effect which the two drugs have on man is brought about by attacks from different points.[13]

Zilla was apparently able to produce even more accurate archetypes of its own web under the influence of LSD—her physiognomy apparently more patient, concentrated, focused. Her nervous system finely attuned to her creative genius like Dock Ellis pitching his no-hitter on LSD. Even more so, she was the master of the art of life and death. Under Sandoz’s early direction, however, her creative genius was madness in higher mammals.

‘When tested on spiders, the drug tends to distort the symmetry of the webs they are spinning.’

When chested in spiders, the dugs bend to Detroit the cemeteries of wives they are spawning.

When testicles of spiders in drag blend into the delirium of simpering dicks they are spraining . . .[14]

The popular medical reading of hallucinogens at the time was the ‘psychotomimetic’, or ‘psychosis-mimicking’. On the one hand, it was believed that these drugs might simulate elements of psychosis or schizophrenia, allowing researchers to study it in controlled conditions, or else experimenting with it themselves to garner insight. For researchers like Dr Humphry Osmond, there was the possibility that hallucinogens mimicked an endogenous substance that might be found as a metabolized marker in psychotic patients.

Zilla’s possible role as a drug identifier might have a medical application. She, ‘could be used as a biological test for foreign, active substances in the body fluids of mental patients […] If a substance were found in a patient, which was absent in a healthy person, one was halfway to finding a method for treatment of mental patients.’[15] Although this ultimately proved unnecessary and unreliable—not least because the underlying theory was bunked—drug testing tents at festivals today might look very different filled with wall-to-wall Zillas!

During his time at Bern, Witt spent a year at Harvard University on a Rockefeller Scholarship, and his work with Zilla became something of a sensation. Indeed, our little eight-legged friends and their webs became minor celebrities and were plastered across the pages of some of the time’s most preeminent magazines: Life (March 1954), Scientific American (December 1954), Illustrated (February 1955), and Medical World (January 1957).

With limited opportunities in Switzerland to advance his career due to so few universities and available professorships, Witt subsequently left Bern in 1956, embarking on new life chapters at various institutions in the United States. But he continued to team up with spiders in some of his research, looking at different species and multiple-drug interactions, and finally publishing Spider Communications: Mechanisms and Ecological Significance in 1982.

The spider photos are undoubtedly among the most striking visual representations of drug use, and are quite familiar to folk even outside the bubble of psychedelia. Witt’s work was discussed not only in large colourful magazines, but also in local newspapers in both Europe and North America. Zilla, therefore, entered the consciousness of culture alongside psychedelics, and became part of the poetry of tripping—the place where subject and LSD entwine.

Here’s an ecstatic spider. Consider the a-

symmetric pattern of its web. The dis-

articulation of a spider’s dance

on gossamer, on psychedelic silk.[16]

---

[1] Hatsis, Thomas (2021) LSD The Wonder Child: The golden age of research in the 1950s. Rochester: Park Street Press. 34

[2] Ibid.

[3] Personal Memoires: Vol 3, 43-47 Available online : https://www.drpeterwitt.com/memoirs-dr-peter-n-witt/

[4] Ibid. 44

[5] Whether this information was available to Norman Ohler who wrote Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany (2016) is unclear. Witt is certainly not mentioned in it. Writing in the early 1990s, Witt believed the information he compiled to be held somewhere in US military archives.

[6] Witt, Peter N (1957) ‘Spider Webs and Drugs‘ in 20th Century Bestiary. London: G Bell and Sons. 179-180

[7] Ibid. 180

[8] Qtd from ‘The Spider and the Fly’ (1829) by Mary Howitt

[9] Witt, PN (1949) Die Wirkung von Substanzen auf den Netzbau der Spinnen. Experientia: 5, 1-4

[10] Ibid. 4

[11] Peters, HM, Witt, PN & Wolff, D (1950) Die Beeinflussung des Netzbaues der Spinnen durch neurotrope Substanzen. Zeitschrift für vergleichende Physiologie: 32, 29–45

[12] Witt 1957: 184-185

[13] Witt, PN (1951) d-Lysergsäure-diäthylamid (LSD 25) in Spinnentest. Experientia: 7, 310–311

[14] Qtd from ‘The Spider’ (1965) by Harry Fainlight

[15] Personal Memoirs, Volume 3, p.57 Available online : https://www.drpeterwitt.com/memoirs-dr-peter-n-witt/

[16] Qtd from ‘Hallucinogens and Genders’ (1967) by Barbara Greenberg