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.