Skip to content

The Thinker's Garden

Menu
  • About
Menu

Fantast in Focus: Mike Jay

Posted on December 19, 2014September 18, 2016 by TheCustodian

FANTAST IN FOCUS: MIKE JAY

Mike Jay is a cultural historian who hounds the maddening stories of the people who ventured to bizarre borderlands of consciousness. Praised by the Guardian, The Independent, and the New Statesmen, Mike has written about nineteenth-century drug culture, the Illuminati, and the earliest claims of machine-based brainwashing. Mike currently curates Mindcraft at the Wellcome Collection, an installation on mentalism, mystery, and intrigue.

The Custodian: The mind and all of its deep and seemingly impenetrable terrain is definitely a frontier that humans have been exploring since the Stone Age. What first got you interested in pscyhology and the study of the unconscious?

Mike Jay: The simple answer is how can you not be? For me it’s most interesting when it’s socially and culturally rooted. I’m interested in the beliefs that people share—consensus reality—and how that forms itself. What I mainly do is look at what’s exlcuded from the consensus, things that are so-called ‘on the fringe’, such as intoxication and madness. Consciousness is seamless, and is constantly shifting in its definition with interesting stories and interesting people to follow.

C: Some of your works have focused on aristocracy and on Thomas Beddoes and his Pneumatic Institution…

J: The Pneumatic Institution is at the very beginning of modern drug culture. It’s the first place where we see a group of people deliberately intoxicating themselves just to see what it feels like. It was obvious to them that you had to take it yourself and have the experience yourself, but to describe it they had to talk to chemists, poets, philosophers, and scientists. They were using a ‘language of feeling’; talking about experiences that had never been experienced before. What a fascinating moment in history that was.

C: I’m intrigued by a “language of feeling”, especially because you spoke about a confluence of art and science. Madness and genius have always come hand and hand. Why do you think creatives have always seemed to maintain open relationships with drugs?

J: The relationship between drugs and creativity is very complex and ambivalent. There are so many types of drugs which are very different from another. A lot of the opiated Romantics probably didn’t partake to give themselves visions, they probably just did it to calm themselves down. If you were one of these people, you’d try to live every single moment living as intensely as you could. You’d be more likely to spend the second half kind of sedated on opiates or alcohol.  Some musicians use it to enhance their talents, but I don’t think that works for painters or writers who oftentimes need a lot of concentration. I see drugs as prosthetics with various costs and consequences.

C: Any favourite characters you’ve come across in your research?

J: Humphry Davy first made me realise there was some kind of extraordinary story there. He was just a prodigious polymath. I think in terms of the figure I’ve studied most in the history of madness,  I’d have to say a character called James Tilly Matthews. I’ve written a book on him called The Influencing Machine. He was the first person to believe that his mind was being controlled by a machine. He drew beautiful diagrams of it and he thought that it was powered by the cutting edge technology of the day (pneumatic chemistry, magnetism). He thought it was operated by sinister Jacobin terrorists who were trying to brainwash him. I found his work to be unbelievably rich. It’s like something out of Philip K Dick or the X-files.

C: That’s what’s so fun about history. A lot of people tend to think that everything occurs linearly; that the history of ideas goes from point A to B on a straight line. All the figures that you’re studying would seem to be blips on an otherwise straightforward graph. It just proves history’s spread out all over the place like the expanding universe itself. Could you give us a preview about the kind of things we can expect from the installation?

J: It’s a digital essay and interactive documentary.  It’s tied in with the library because they’re digitising it at the moment.  In the new reading room gallery, they’ve got a a beautiful portrait of Mesmer’s salon in Paris and the’ve also got a replica of Freud’s couch. The journey uses those memorabilia as starting and ending points.

C: I don’t know as much as I should about Mesmer, but I do know a few practising hypnotists. 

J: What Mesmer was doing was faith healing. It’s trance. It’s something that never went away and had never really been forgotten. So the Academy of Sciences with Benjamin Franklin looked at Mesmerism and said some stuff was definitely happening, but they figured out pretty quickly that it wasn’t anything physical, just the power of suggestion through imagination.

C: Have you ever had any experiences with psychic anomalies?

J: I was hypnotised a long time ago. As it was happening, I was thinking that it wasn’t working. When they took me to the mirror to look at my eyes, I saw that they were flickering away like nothing I’d ever seen before. It just seemed like a really neat state of consciosuness in which some things were dulled and I wanted to talk as little as possible. I didn’t see any past lives or anything like that.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook
  • Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X

Like this:

Like Loading...

Leave a ReplyCancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Categories

  • Art (60)
  • Crime (7)
  • History (87)
  • Occultism (48)
  • Politics (15)
  • Religion (29)

Recent Posts

  • Ghosts of Florence: Roma Lister and the Haunted Villa
  • Roma Lister and the Mysterious Dream Powder
  • Roma Lister: A Haunting Vision in Florence
  • Contract signed: new book on Roma Lister
  • Alien Encounters: An Interview with Professor Diana Pasulka
  • Sleeping Well in the Early Modern World: An Interview with Dr Holly Fletcher
  • Bookish Maledictions: An Interview with Dr Eleanor Baker
  • Italian Witchcraft and Shamanism: An Interview with Dr Angela Puca
  • Dream Mysteries: An Interview with Sarah Janes
  • The Dark Arts Research Group
  • The Astra Project: An Interview with Dr Luís Ribeiro
  • Underground Mathematics: An Interview with Dr Thomas Morel
  • Skyscape Archaeology: An Interview with Dr Fabio Silva
  • Shamans and Kabbalah: An Interview with Dr Yosef Rosen
  • Modern Occultism: An Interview with Mitch Horowitz
  • Lady Paget and the Enchanted Villa of Bellosguardo
  • The Lost Treasures of Cottenghe
  • Psychic Investigators: An Interview with Dr Efram Sera-Shriar
  • Los Angeles Noah: Reverend J. E. Lewis and the Liberian Arks
  • Dark Destinations: An Interview with Peter Hohenhaus
  • Storytelling and London Dreamtime: An Interview with Vanessa Woolf
  • Rosicrucians, Drugs, and Angelic Transformations: An Interview with Dr Hereward Tilton
  • Sigils and Spirits: An Interview with Darragh Mason
  • Sacred Worship in Ancient Nubia: An Interview with Professor Solange Ashby
  • Death Studies at Padua: An Interview with Ivan Cenzi
  • Espionage in Early Modern Venice: An Interview with Dr Ioanna Iordanou
  • Evelyn De Morgan and the Art of the Imponderable: An Interview with Emma Merkling
  • The Many Faces of Pico della Mirandola: An Interview with Professor Brian Copenhaver
  • A 17th-Century Conspiracy Tale: Johann Cambilhon and the “Magick” College
  • Occult Egypt in the Victorian Popular Imagination: An Interview with Dr Eleanor Dobson

Tags

adventure african-american african history alchemy american history anthropology archaeology astrology Catholicism charles godfrey leland early modern english history esoteric esotericism european history florence folklore france germany history history of magic Italian history italy Jesuits london magic medieval history mysticism mythology occult occultism paracelsus parascience propaganda psychology renaissance Roma Lister science-fiction sorcery spiritualism theosophy victorian western history witchcraft witches

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org
©2025 The Thinker's Garden | Built using WordPress and Responsive Blogily theme by Superb
%d