Novalis can thus be seen as one of the originators of a modern gnostic approach to drugs, in which nature is abandoned for negative, transcendental space. Gnosticism is a vast and diffuse subject, but I will use the work “Gnostic†in this chapter to describe a worldview that sees the material world and nature, as a fallen, corrupt, inauthentic place, and man as an alien, trapped within it. To escape, man seeks the flash of gnosis, or knowledge, in the form of a transmission from another cosmos or transcendental dimension in which the] truth resides, and which is in fact man’s real home. This transmission can take various forms, but drugs, as Novalis uses them, are certainly one of them: opium may come from nature but its essence belongs to the transcendental night, and by taking the drug, the user is able to negate his or her own body and environment, temporarily.
When nature and the human body are abandoned, a new, Gnostic theory of heath becomes necessary, since “natural health†is precisely what is to be abandoned. This new notion of health would consist precisely in an organism’s ability to sustain an abandonment or overcoming of the body. But the body does not naturally sustain such a state of “healthâ€; in fact, the word we use to describe this state is “sickness.†Drugs appear in Romanticism as one of the more obvious ways of producing, or sustaining, this unnatural state of health—a revolt against the limits of the animal body.
Novalis
