VICTORIAN HALLUCINOGENIC CHRISTMAS CARDS.
Although little known today, an ergot mold-derived proto-LSD known clandestinely as “sauce” had been devised during the reign of Queen Victoria of Britain, and its usage can be noted not only in the hallucinogenic descriptions found in works such as Alice in Wonderland and the multivolume Oz series, but also in humbler artistic offerings, such as the broad category of Christmas cards as shown here; its remarkable effects were always described as causing its users to feel “warm and happy,” a specific code phrase. In some Victorian households in Massachusetts and Southern England in particular it was traditional for the entire family, including the servants, to drop “sauce” every day for the month of December, leading to a massive dry-out on New Year’s Eve, with the purpose of awakening renewed and sane on January 1. In this context, what seem to us now as truly bizarre winter holiday cards make perfect sense. It was not until the reign of Edward VII (a notorious square) that this tradition ended—and in a pessimistic reversal, it became the tradition to have a completely debauched New Years Eve, and to start the New Year deplorably hung over and addled. A barely known fact is that many of these cards were, in fact, acid blotters, meant to be cut up and consumed. In this phantasmagoric example, blobs of hallucinogenic “sauce” (now long-dried) had been concentrated on the chicken-heads and feet.
Credit to Institute operative M. Bantjes for archival research on this long-lost phenomenon.
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