INTRODUCTION

If one were to look for landmarks in the study of hallucinogens in the nearly forty years since LSD-25 was first developed in a Swiss laboratory in 1938, a good many possibilities come to mind. One would be the discovery in that same year that a cult of divine psychedelic mushrooms had survived among Mexican Indians, and the rediscovery and systematic investigation of that cult in the mid-1950's. Another would be the identification of the seeds of morning glories as the sacred Aztec hallucinogen ololiuhqui in 1941, and the startling finding nearly twenty years later that its active principles are closely related to lysergic acid derivatives. Still another would be R. G. Wasson's definition of Soma as the psychotropic fly-agaric mushroom (1968). These discoveries have accompanied the realization over the past several years that the most important botanical hallucinogens are structurally related to biologically active compounds occurring naturally in the brain. For example, psilocybine and the psychoactive alkaloids in morning-glory seeds are indole-tryptamine derivatives and thus are similar in chemical structure to serotonine (5-hydroxy-tryptamine), while mescaline is related to noradrenaline. In addition, norepenephrine in the brain has been found to correspond structurally to caffeic acid, derived from chemicals found in several plants, including coffee beans and potatoes. Chemical systems active in the human brain, then, are now known to be close kin to growth-promoting substances in plants, including several that are powerfully psychoactive, a discovery of no mean evolutionary as well as pharmacological implications.

One of my own favorite landmarks is a "conversation across the disciplines" in 1970 between ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes and anthropologist Weston La Barre that has helped to place the whole psychedelic phenomenon in a culture-historical and ideological framework and has given it a theoretical time depth reaching back into the Paleolithic.

Schultes and La Barre were hardly strangers to the problem, or to each other. Schultes has long been the recognized authority on New World hallucinogens, and La Barre is a leading scholar in the anthropology and psychology of religion, author, among other works, of The Peyote Cult (1974, 1969, 1938), a classic study of the peyote religion of North American Indians. It was, in fact, peyote that originally brought them together, when, in 1936, Schultes, then a senior in biology at Harvard, accompanied La Barre, a doctoral candidate at Yale, to the Kiowa reservation in Oklahoma for field research on the nature and culture of peyote. La Barre incorporated the experience into his Ph.D . thesis and The Peyote Cult; for Schultes it led—via Mexico and his classic study of ololiuhqui (1941), and the first botanical identification of the sacred mushrooms of Oaxacan Indians—to a lifelong commitment to ethnobotany, especially the indigenous New World hallucinogens.

An Ethnological Reply to a Statistical Question

In 1970, La Barre published a significant paper in Economic Botany, "Old and New World Narcotics: A Statistical Question and an Ethnological Reply" (1970a), which sought for the first time to account in terms of culture history for the astonishing proliferation of sacred hallucinogens in Indian America. The "statistical question" was Schultes's: how was one to explain the striking anomaly between the great number of psychoactive plants known to the original Americans, who had discovered and utilized some eighty to a hundred different species, and the much smaller number—no more than eight or ten—known to have been employed in the Old World? From a strictly botanical point of view, one would have expected the reverse to be true: the Old World has a much greater land mass than the New; its flora is at least as rich and varied and contains as many potential hallucinogenic plants; humanity or protohumanity has lived there for millions of years (as against at most a few tens of thousands in the Americas) and has had immeasurably longer to explore the environment and experiment with different species. Given these circumstances, Schultes concluded, the answer could hardly be botanical but had to be cultural.

Quite so, replied La Barre. American Indian interest in hallucinogenic plants is directly tied to the survival in the New World of an essentially PaleoMesolithic Eurasiatic shamanism, which the early big-game hunters carried with them out of northeastern Asia as the base religion of American Indians. Shamanism is deeply rooted in the ecstatic, visionary experience, and the early Native Americans, as well as their descendants, were thus, so to speak, "culturally programmed" for a conscious exploration of the environment in search of means by which to attain that desired state.

It was La Bane's hypothesis, then, (1) that the magicoreligious use of hallucinogenic plants by American Indians represents a survival from a very ancient Paleolithic and Mesolithic shamanistic stratum, and that its linear ancestor is likely to be an archaic form of the shamanistic Eurasiatic flyagaric cults that survived in Siberia into the present century, and (2) that while profound socioeconomic and religious transformations brought about the eradication of ecstatic shamanism and knowledge of intoxicating mushrooms and other plants over most of Eurasia, a very different set of historical and cultural circumstances favored their survival and elaboration in the New World.

These insights, to which Wasson's work on the sacred fly-agaric of Eurasia and the Mesoamerican mushrooms made no small contribution, have since been enlarged, in print and in the numerous public and private discussions which over the past several years have brought together some of us in related and complementary fields. The insights are, I believe, so fundamental to the understanding of traditional hallucinogens that it will be useful to spell them out in somewhat more detail by way of introduction to the topics covered in this book.

The American Indians are descendants of small Paleo-Asiatic hunting and food-gathering bands that migrated in the Late Paleolithic and Mesolithic into the New World across the 1300-mile-wide "land bridge" which then connected what are now Siberia and Alaska. The age of these early migrations is still a matter of dispute. Not counting some extravagant claims that range beyond a hundred thousand years, most scholarly estimates fluctuate from a high of 40-50,000 years ago for the oldest to 12-15,000 years for the terminal major movements before the melting of the glaciers raised the sea level by 200-300 feet and inundated the overland passage from Asia, while at the same time opening a new ice-free corridor for southward movement. There is an abundance of radiocarbon dates from Paleo-Indian occupation sites in North and South America that lie somewhere between these extremes. And we do know that some time before 10,000 years ago there were people virtually everywhere in the New World, from the Far North to the Tierra del Fuego. We also know that the original Americans sustained themselves with now extinct big game, especially mammoth and mastodon, giant sloth, Pleistocene camel and horse, as well as smaller animals and wild plants, and that their technology and general adaptations resembled by and large those of their contemporaries in comparable environments in Eurasia.

Adaptation, however, has to be understood holistically, comprising metaphysics or ideology as much as physical environment and technology. In other words, whatever their level of technological complexity, these first Americans moved in and interacted reciprocally with an ideational universe no less than the physical one, presumably with no more of a sharp dividing line between these two essential planes than one finds today in surviving hunting cultures and other traditional systems. It is probably not too much to say that mysticism, or religion, has always been a fundamental aspect of the human condition, with its beginnings reaching back perhaps to the primitive origins of self-consciousness.

But the first Americans were hardly "primitive." On the contrary, what little early skeletal material we have shows them to have been thoroughly modern Homo sapiens, ranging in physical type from Asiatic Caucasoid to nonspecialized Mongoloid, and generally resembling modern Indian populations. The direct ancestors of the American Indians, then, were not only biologically but also mentally the product of hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution in Asia to a modern type, and as such can be assumed to have shared with other Asiatic populations a well-developed symbolic and ritual system along with other aspects of religion originating in and adapted to their lifeway as hunters of game and collectors of wild vegetable foods.

Ecstatic Shamanism as "Ur-Religion"

Now, as we know from ethnology, the symbolic systems or religions of hunting peoples everywhere are essentially shamanistic, sharing so many basic features over time and space as to suggest common historical and psychological origins. At the center of shamanistic religion stands the personality of the shaman and the ecstatic experience that is uniquely his, in his crucial role as diviner, seer, magician, poet, singer, artist, prophet of game and weather, keeper of the traditions, and healer of bodily and spiritual ills. With his spirit helpers or familiars, the shaman is preeminently guardian of the physical and psychic equilibrium of his group, for whom he intercedes in personal confrontation with the supernatural forces of the Upperworld and Underworld, to whose mystical geography he has become privy through initiatory crisis, training, and ecstatic trance. Often, though not always or everywhere, the shaman's ecstatic dream has involved the use of some sacred hallucinogenic plant believed to contain a supernatural transforming power over and above the life force or "soul stuff' that in animistic-shamanistic religious systems inhabits all natural phenomena, including those we would classify as "inanimate." There is no question that shamanism has great antiquity: the archaeological evidence suggests, for example, that something very like the shamanistic religions of recent hunters was already present among the Neanderthals of Europe and Asia more than 50,000 years ago.* It is at least possible, though certainly not provable, that the practice of shamanism as an "archaic technique of ecstasy," to use the classic definition of Mircea Eliade (1964), may have involved from the first—that is, the very beginnings of religion itself—the psychedelic potential of the natural environment. This possibility is the more likely in that the reindeer—with which man, first as hunter and then as herder, has lived in an intimate relationship for tens of thousands of years—has itself a certain intriguing relationship with the hallucinogenic fly-agaric mushroom, even to the point of inebriation, a phenomenon that could hardly have failed to impress the Paleo-Eurasiatic peoples of long ago as much as it has impressed recent Siberian tribesmen (see Chapter 13).

Although they must have possessed ingenious means of protecting themselves against the rigors of the Arctic environment, comparable to those of the Eskimos and other Northern peoples, the early migrants from northeastern Asia could certainly be called "primitive" on the basis of their technological inventory alone. But we should not fall into the common error of equating technological complexity with intellectual capacity. On the contrary, when studied in depth as all too few have been, the intellectual cultures of some of the materially least complex peoples—African Bushmen, Australian Aborigines, Arctic or tropical-forest hunters, or the "primitive" preagricultural Indians of California, for example—have been found to rival in metaphysical complexity and poetic imagery some of the world's great institutionalized religions. Besides, as Schultes and others have often pointed out, the most "primitive" of food gatherers possess sophisticated and effective traditional systems of classification for the natural environment, and some of them long ago discovered how to prepare complex psychopharmacological and therapeutic compounds that became available to the industrialized world only with the rise of modern biochemistry. Mexican and Peruvian Indians, after all, experienced the otherworldly effects of mescaline thousands of years before Aldous Huxley.

No system, however conservative—and religion is extraordinarily so—is static, and much of what we find in the religions of Indian America was obviously elaborated in situ over a long time, in the context of adaptation to changing relationships with the environment. Nevertheless, there are demonstrably so many fundamental similarities between the core elements of the religions of the aboriginal New World and those of Asia that almost certainly at least in their basic foundations the symbolic systems of American Indians must have been present already in the ideational world of the original immigrants from northeastern Asia.

These foundations are shamanistic, and they include numerous concepts (recognizable even in the highly structured cosmology and ritual of the hierarchic civilizations, such as the Aztecs, with their institutionalized cyclical ritual and professional priesthood) such as: the skeletal soul of man and animal, and the restitution of life from the bones; all phenomena in the environment as animate; separability of the soul from the body during life (e.g., by soul loss, by straying during sleep, or by rape or abduction, or else the soul's deliberate projection, as by shamans in their ecstatic dreams); the initiatory ecstatic experience, especially of shamans, and "sickness vocation" for the latter; supernatural causes and cures of illness; different levels of the universe with their respective spirit rulers, and the need for feeding these on spirit food; qualitative equivalence of different life forms, and man-animal transformation—indeed, transformation rather than creation as the origin of all phenomena; animal spirit helpers, alter egos, and guardians; supernatural masters and mistresses of animals and plants; acquisition of supernatural or "medicine" power from an outside source. With the concept of transformation so prominent in these traditional systems, it is easy to see why plants capable of radically altering consciousness would have come to stand at the very center of ideology.

Now, as La Barre's original hypothesis was developed, while Asia and Europe formerly shared in this shamanistic world view, the Neolithic Revolution and subsequent fundamental socioeconomic and ideological developments, often cataclysmic in nature, long ago brought about profound changes in the old religions or even their total suppression (although ancient shamanistic roots are here and there still visible even in the institutionalized churches). In the New World, in contrast, the ancestral lifeway of hunting and food gathering, and the religious beliefs and rituals adapted to this lifeway, persisted in time and space to a far greater extent than in the Old; and moreover, the fundamental shamanistic base was much better preserved, even in the agricultural religions of the great civilizations that rose in Mesoamerica and the Andes, as well as of simpler farming societies.

Indeed, the two situations are really not even comparable. There are many historical reasons for this difference, but one that should be stressed is that prior to European colonization the New World as a whole never knew the intolerant fanaticism that is the hallmark of some of the major Old World religions, particularly Christianity and Islam, both of which massively transformed the areas in which they took hold—although, as we know, four centuries of Spanish Catholicism have failed to eradicate completely all traces of the pre-European past, and were spectacularly unsuccessful in the suppression of the sacred traditional hallucinogens. For it was generally characteristic even of the stratified, militaristic, and expansionist Indian civilizations that conquest by one group or another, if it affected religion at all, typically resulted in accretion or synthesis rather than in persecution, suppression, and forced conversion. These blessings of civilized life had to await the coming of the Europeans.

Without unduly idealizing the real situation, especially what eventually turned out to be nonadaptive aspects in such religions as that of the Aztecs, it is correct to say that most American Indians from north to south, and through all prehistory, seem to have valued above all individual freedom for each person to determine his own relationship to the unseen forces of the universe. In many cases this process of determination included personal confrontation of these forces in the ecstatic trance, often with the aid of plants to which supernatural powers were ascribed. Significantly, there is not a shred of evidence that this ancient situation was fundamentally affected even by the rise of political and religious bureaucracies, or that it ever occurred to these bureaucracies to exercise police power over the individual's right to transform his consciousness by whatever means he wished.

Archaeological Evidence for the Earliest Hallucinogen

This value given to freedom is especially noteworthy in that in The Natural Mind (1972), Dr. Andrew T. Weil has argued that "the desire to alter consciousness periodically is an innate, normal drive analogous to hunger or the sexual drive" (p. 17). While drugs are only one means of satisfying this drive, he maintained, it is nevertheless this inborn biological—as opposed to socioculturally conditioned—need of the psyche for periods of nonordinary consciousness that accounts for the near-universal use of intoxicants by peoples all over the world, on whatever level of cultural complexity, and apparently in all periods of human history.

Weil may well be correct; certainly he makes a persuasive cross-cultural case that the desire for temporary states of altered consciousness is embedded in the neurophysiological structure of the brain rather than in social conditioning. But while his hypothesis may be sound, for the present it must rest on circumstantial evidence. On the other hand, La Bane's proposition that the earliest Americans must have brought their fascination for the psychedelic flora with them from their Asian homeland, as a function of ecstatic visionary shamanism, now seems confirmed by prehistoric archaeology (La Barre's and Weil's are not, of course, mutually exclusive hypotheses).

What makes this proposition particularly interesting is that the evidence concerns one of the few physiologically hazardous (though not addictive) hallucinogens employed by American Indians. This is the so-called "mescal bean," which in reality has nothing to do with mescal (a distilled Mexican liquor produced from a species of agave) but is the red, beanlike seed of Sophora secundiflora, a leguminous flowering shrub native to Texas and northern Mexico. These seeds contain, like Genista canariensis, a nineteenth-century import from the Canary Islands whose small yellow flowers are now ritually smoked by Yaqui shamans in northern Mexico, a highly toxic quinolizidine alkaloid called cytisine. In high doses cytisine is capable of causing nausea, convulsions, hallucinations, and even death from respiratory failure (Schultes, 1972a).

Notwithstanding such obvious disadvantages, Sophora seems to be the oldest and longest-lived New World hallucinogen; at least it is the earliest for which we have direct and sustained evidence. Historically, the potent seeds were the focus of a widespread complex of ecstatic visionary shamanistic medicine societies among the tribes of the Southern Plains, until in the final decades of the nineteenth century Sophora was finally replaced by the more benign peyote cactus, while the red-bean cults themselves were supplanted by the new syncretistic peyote religion that eventually was embraced as the Native American Church by 225,000 Indians from the Rio Grande in Texas to the Canadian Plains.

The first European mention of Sophora secundiflora dates back to 1539, when Cabeza de Vaca reported the seeds as an item of trade among the Indians of Texas. But its history can be extended to the very beginnings of the settlement of the Southwest by the early hunters coming down from the north. The radiocarbon laboratory of the Smithsonian Institution has now confirmed that the hallucinogenic mescal bean was well integrated not only into the preagricultural Western Archaic or Desert Culture, from its earliest levels to A.D. 1000, but that it was already known and employed by Paleo-Indians toward the end of the preceding Late Pleistocene big-game-hunting period. 10-11,000 years ago—not long after the cessation of the last overland migrations from Asia (Adovasio and Fry, 1975). At the very least this is strong circumstantial evidence for the La Barre hypothesis of Paleolithic roots for the hallucinogenic complex in the Americas.

Caches of Sophora seeds and associated artifacts and rock paintings reminiscent of the historic red-bean cults of the Southern Plains were found by archaeologists in a dozen or more rock shelters in Texas and northern Mexico, often together with another narcotic species, Ungnadia speciosa. At Frightful Cave, the earliest occurrence of Sophora was dated at 7265 B.C., with a margin of error of only 85 years in either direction. The seeds were also found in all the later cultural strata, up to the abandonment of the site. At Fate Bell Shelter in the Amistad Reservoir area of Trans-Pecos Texas, a region rich in ancient shamanistic rock paintings, the narcotic seeds of S. secundiflora and U. speciosa were found in every level, from 7,000 B.C. to A.D. 1000, when the Desert Culture finally gave way to a new way of life based on maize agriculture. Of the greatest interest, however, were theradiocarbon dates from Bonfire Shelter. This well-studied rock-shelter site yielded Sophora seeds from its lowest occupational stratum, known as Bone Bed II, dated at 8440 to 8120 B.C., or well into the Late Pleistocene biggame-hunting era. Indeed, the hallucinogenic seeds were found with Folsom and Plainview-type projectile points and the bones of a large extinct species of Pleistocene bison, Bison antiquus.

It is certainly noteworthy that apparently a single hallucinogen, the Sophora bean, should have enjoyed an uninterrupted reign of over 10,000 years—from the ninth millenium B.C. well into the nineteenth century and the disintegration of traditional Indian culture—as the focus of ecstatic-visionary shamanism, and for all but a few centuries of that enormous span of time in the context of the well-documented, conservative, and evidently highly successful homogeneous ecological adaptation we know as the Desert Culture of southwestern North America. This is all the more extraordinary in that of all the many native hallucinogens only the genus Datura ("Jimsonweed") poses so great a physiological risk as does Sophora secundiflora. Clearly, the individual, social, and supernatural benefits ascribed to the drug must have outweighed its disadvantages.

Peyote: Sacred "Medicine" or "Dangerous Narcotic"?

Without necessarily advocating unrestricted availability of every hallucinogen less demonstrably risky to health than S. secundiflora or Datura, one would hope that lessons would soon be drawn from the abundant cultural and psychopharmacological data available to us for most of the botanical hallucinogens that have played a major role in the context of magicoreligious rites and curing practices, particularly among American Indians. Peyote, to mention only one, has a proven cultural history of more than 2000 years in Mesoamerica, and is likely to be far older still than its first botanically recognizable representation in archaeological tomb art dating to the period from 100 B.C. to A.D. 100. More than 10,000 Huichols and many other Mexican Indians continue to deem peyote sacred and charged with great therapeutic powers for body and mind. For nearly a quarter-million North American Indians, their own efforts and those of their allies among anthropologists and civil libertarians over the past decades have finally made peyote use legal within the framework of the Native American Church. But for those outside that church, the bitter-tasting spineless little cactus plant is supposed to be so dangerous to the individual and to society that its possession for "unlawful" purposes or sale to others can (at least under New York State's retrogressive drug law) result in punishment as harsh as that for dealing heroin—with the measurable direct social costs running well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars for a successful conviction resulting in long incarceration. This in the face of a vast body of scientific evidence, as freely available in print to legislators and the law-enforcement establishment as it is to the academic community! Despite the work of generations of scholars, from anthropologists and ethnobotanists to pharmacologists and psychiatrists, then, it seems as though in our social policies we have not advanced very far beyond the superstitious fulminations of sixteenth-century Spanish Inquisitors in Mexico and their particular means for dealing with a core element of traditional Indian religion, one they feared and abhorred as the Devil's own handiwork but also one that, if Weil and other students of consciousness are right, is inseparable from the human condition itself.

The chapters that follow are not intended as an exhaustive treatment of hallucinogens, but mainly as a selective introduction to the botany and pharmacology of psychoactive substances in their cultural context. For, quite apart from purely biochemical effects, as several field workers have noted, it is primarily the mind set and the culture of the user and his social group that determine the nature and intensity of the ecstatic experience and how that experience is interpreted and assimilated.

Other Pathways to "Alternate States"

Nor do I mean to imply that psychoactive plants or animal secretions have always and everywhere been the only, or even the principal, means of achieving altered states of consciousness. On the contrary, over vast areas of North America many aboriginal peoples achieved the same ends by nonchemical means: fasting, thirsting, self-mutilation, torture, exposure to the elements, sleeplessness, incessant dancing and other means of total exhaustion, bleeding, plunging into ice-cold pools, near-drowning, laceration with thorns and animal teeth, and other painful ordeals, as well as a variety of nonhurtful "triggers," such as different kinds of rhythmic activity, self-hypnosis, meditation, chanting, drumming, and music. Some shamans may also have used mirrors of pyrite, obsidian, and other materials to place themselves into trances, as some Indian shamans in Mexico still do. Most dramatic of known techniques were surely the spirit-quest ordeals of certain Plains Indian tribes, such as the Oglala Sioux and the Mandan.

George Catlin, a Pennsylvania lawyer born in 1796 who in the mid-1800's became the dean of documentary painters of the American Indian and his aboriginal culture, and who was one of the few white men privileged to witness the entire ceremony, has left us a vivid account as well as paintings and drawings of the vision-seeking ordeal practiced by the Mandan (Donaldson, 1886). Already greatly weakened from hunger and thirst and four consecutive sleepless days and nights, the candidates had holes pierced with knives through the flesh of their shoulders or breasts. Through these holes they were suspended by skewers and thongs from the center pole of the great Medicine Lodge. The vision seeker's shield, bow, quiver, and other belongings were suspended from still more skewers passed through other parts of his body, and in many instances even a heavy bison skull was attached to each arm and leg. Attendants with long poles caused his body to twirl ever faster until the candidate, streaming with blood, passed out from the pain, his medicine bag dropping from his hands and his body hanging apparently lifeless.* He was then lowered to the ground and allowed to recover, but the ordeal was not over. There was still the sacrifice of the little finger of his left hand (which was chopped off and offered to the Great Spirit), to be followed by a furious race around an altar, with the bison skulls and other weights dragging behind the candidate, until he could endure no more and fell in a dead faint. With that collapse, the purpose of the ordeal—which took place in connection with the great Sun Dance festival at the end of the summer bison hunt—was accomplished. Whites generally interpreted the ritual as a test of courage and fortitude, or preferred to see it as an example of Indian "cruelty," but in fact it belongs well within the general tradition of the ecstatic spirit quest, however extreme it may be as an example of the drugless vision-inducing ordeal.

Interestingly enough, ordeals of this type if not necessarily of the same intensity were not uncommon even in ancient Mexico, notwithstanding the widespread use of plant hallucinogens to achieve altered states of consciousness. Self-mutilation is depicted in the ritual art of different pre-Hispanic cultures and periods, from about 1300 B.C. to the Conquest, and bloodletting rites that must have inflicted severe pain (including perforation of the penis, tongue, and other organs with cactus thorns, stingray barbs, and other sharp instruments) are described in the early ethnohistoric literature on Maya and central Mexican customs. The Maya may even have practiced a vision-quest ritual resembling that described by Catlin for the Great Plains. I am familiar with at least one naturalistic Maya figurine from the island of Jaina, in the Gulf of Campeche, depicting what seems to be a priest with four perforated folds of flesh on his bare back, one pair on each side. The body and the arms and legs are so positioned by the sculptor as to suggest that the figure was meant to be suspended from the holes pierced in the skin—much like the vision seekers in one of Catlin's Mandan paintings.

A famous carved Maya monument, dated ca. A.D. 780, Lintel 25 from the ceremonial center of Yaxchilán in the Usumacinta region of Chiapas, depicts a richly attired kneeling woman in the act of drawing through her tongue a twisted cord, set with large sharp thorns. In the literature, such extremely painful rites are often discussed in terms of blood sacrifice—blood being the most precious gift to the supernaturals in ancient Mesoamerican thought—but in point of fact they must have constituted a violent shock to the system, sufficient to bring about alterations in consciousness to the point of visions. At the very least they would have created the proper mind-set to receive and interpret such visions. Indeed, a magnificent relief carved on another monument, Lintel 24, in the same Yaxchilân temple seems to depict just that kind of ecstatic phenomenon, with a woman gazing transfixed at the figure of a warrior emerging above her from the wide-open jaws of a writhing serpent or dragon. Whether or not such visions might have been facilitated by a combination of physical ordeal and hallucinogenic mushrooms of the kind that abound in the Usumacinta basin cannot be stated with certainty in the present state of our knowledge of ancient Maya religion. At the same time, we should not assume that all apparently painful bloodletting rites were so in fact. Even where the shock to the system was sufficient to trigger an alternate state of consciousness, the perception of pain could have been blocked by a properly trained individual;* indeed, there are sixteenth-century accounts by Spanish observers of self-sacrificial rites involving severe laceration of the penis where no pain was said to have been felt and no blood flowed. In this connection it might be noted that in depictions in Maya art of bloodletting rituals of the most severe kind the expressions of the individuals involved are calm and serene, lacking any indication of physical suffering.

Actually, some kind of ordeal, usually in the form of deprivation of normal food, drink, sleep, and sex, for varying lengths of time, is almost always the essential precondition for the ritual use of hallucinogens, and clearly plays an important role in the intensification of the ecstatic experience. As an example, when the Huichol peyote pilgrim finally arrives in Wiriktita, the sacred country in the north-central Mexican desert where he (or she) is to harvest the hallucinogenic cactus, he has already traveled some 300 miles from his homeland (traditionally on foot), and he is physically close to exhaustion. He has had little or no sleep since setting out. He has kept himself at a fever pitch of emotion by the realization of the gravity and sacredness of the enterprise on which he is embarked and its importance to the well-being of his people, by incessant dancing and singing, and by the observance of innumerable rituals along the way. He has eaten virtually nothing and little or no water has quenched his thirst. Salt is strictly forbidden for the duration of the pilgrimage, and for many days before and after. Finally, he has smoked many ritual cigarettes of the extremely potent native Nicotiana rustica tobacco wrapped in cornhusk, and he may also have purified himself symbolically and literally by eating impressive quantities of the same tobacco, whose content of nicotine and other alkaloids is far greater than that of commercial cigarettes. He is thus already at a very different level of consciousness, so much so that it is not necessary for him to be under the influence of the peyote alkaloids to perceive the plant in its animal form when the leader of the pilgrimage exclaims, at the sight of the very first cactus: "Ah, there he is at last, Our Elder Brother, the divine Deer, who gives us our life!" In the course of the rites that follow, in the peyote country and back home in the Sierra, Huichols will literally saturate themselves with peyote, chewing it incessantly for days and nights on end, getting little sleep and eating little normal food, until the entire social and natural environment and the individual's relationship to it take on a wholly mystical dimension. The metabolic system has been altered, and it is in that mystical state that the shamans interpret the visions—their own and those of others—in accordance with the traditional cultural norms and the magical-animistic world view that permeates Huichol ideology.

If sleep or food deprivation or extreme fatigue and physical pain could be employed, with or without chemical aids, to affect mental balance—or, putting it another way, to facilitate a different kind of psychic equilibrium—how much more drastic must be the effects of the powerful, even deadly, poisons that also played a role of some importance in the traditional systems of altering consciousness and, in the case of the frog-poison ordeals of South American Indians, still do so even now?

The great sixteenth-century chronicler Fray Diego Dutin has left us a vivid description of the sort of toxic substance which the Aztec priests of Tezcatlipoca took both internally and externally to place themselves in the proper mental state to serve the deity and interpret his words. Known as teotlacualli, food of god or divine food, it included "poisonous beasts, such as spiders, scorpions, centipedes, lizards, vipers, and others," which were caught for the priests by young boys and kept by them in large numbers in the priestly school:

This was the divine food with which the priests, ministers of the temples, and especially those with whom we are dealing, smeared themselves in ancient times. They took all these poisonous animals and burned them in the divine brazier which stood in the temple. After these had been burned, the ashes were placed within certain mortars, together with a great deal of tobacco; this herb is used by the Indians to relieve the body so as to calm the pains of toil. In this it is similar to Spanish henbane, which, when mixed with lime, loses its poisonous qualities, though it still causes faintness and is harmful to the stomach. This herb, then, was placed in the mortars together with scorpions, live spiders, and centipedes, and there they were ground producing a diabolical, stinking, deadly ointment. After these had been crushed, a ground seed called ololiuhqui was added, which the natives apply to their bodies and drink to see visions. It is a drink which has inebriating effects. To all this were added hairy black worms, their hair filled with venom, injuring those who touch them. Everything was mixed with soot and was poured into bowls and gourds. Then it was placed before the god as divine food. How can one doubt that the men smeared with this pitch became wizards or demons, capable of seeing and speaking to the devil himself, since the ointment had been prepared for that purpose? (Duran, 1971:115- 16).

According to Duran, the priests painted themselves with this fearsome mixture and, rendered unafraid of wild animals and other dangers by their magic potion, set forth at night to visit dark caves and "somber, fearful cliffs." The same ointment or pitch was also used in curing rites, when it was applied to the affected parts of the patient's body to deaden the pain.
Who, indeed, could doubt the power of such a mixture on the mind as well as the body? Covering large surface areas of the body for prolonged periods, containing not only venoms that would be deadly if they entered the bloodstream directly but also the potent alkaloids of tobacco and morning-glory seeds (ololiuhqui), teollacualli at the very least would have had to cause serious skin reactions, if it was not actually absorbed to some degree into the system. In either event, it could well have had more or less drastic effect on the body's metabolism, with some alteration in the user's state of consciousness, even if he did not actually intoxicate himself with infusions of the sacred hallucinogenic ololiuhqui, as Aztec priests are known to have done, and some native Mexican curers still do, for the purpose of divination.

Hallucinogens and the Biochemistry of Consciousness

The entire subject of chemical substances in nature and their relationship, actual or potential, to alternate* states of consciousness is vast and complex. It extends toward the origin of what Jung called "archetypes," mythmaking and common world-wide themes in oral tradition (especially the strikingly similar content the world over of funerary, heroic, and shamanistic mythology), art and iconography, traditional cultural systems of perceiving and ordering reality that differ drastically from the so-called "scientific" western model, conceptions of Otherworlds, death and afterlife, mysticism, and, indeed, what we call religion itself. And, much as we think we already know, in truth we have made barely a beginning in these cultural areas, just as we are only just coming to grips with the fact that even in our waking hours our minds are constantly flipping back and forth between discrete, or alternate (but nonetheless complementary), inward- and outward-directed states, and that this phenomenon bears directly on the use and effects of psychedelics. There are, of course, degrees of intensity in the experience of the inward-directed state of consciousness: obviously a peyote "high" is not of the same order as daydreaming, even if similar neurochemical processes are at work in the brain. If one were to reduce to its essentials the complex chemical process that occurs when an external psychoactive drug such as psilocybine reaches the brain, it would then be said that the drug, being structurally closely related to the naturally occurring indoles in the brain, appears to interact with the latter in such a way as to lock a nonordinary or inward-directed state of consciousness temporarily into place, presumably by blocking out certain areas or chemicals involved in "ordinary" modes of awareness.* In any event, whatever the biochemical processes involved—while we should beware of overestimating as of undervaluing the impact that the discovery of psychoactive plants and other life forms by early human populations may have had on the evolution of world views or ideology—there are obviously wide implications, biological-evolutionary as well as philosophical, in the discovery that precisely in the chemistry of our consciousness we are kin to the plant kingdom.

The Social-Psychological Context as Crucial Variable

Finally, a word about the need for an anthropological and culture-historical perspective. The ways in which and the purposes for which so-called "primitive" or traditional societies and those of industrialized nations employ chemicals capable of triggering alternate states of consciousness are obviously very different, as are the attitudes with which such drugs and their effects are viewed. As the following pages make clear, in the preindustrial or tribal world, psychotropic plants are sacred and magical; they are perceived as living beings with supernatural attributes, providing for certain chosen individuals such as shamans, and under certain special circumstances for ordinary people as well, a kind of bridge across the gulf that separates this world from Otherworlds. By common agreement, in the "primitive" societies the breakthrough in plane which the extraordinary chemicals in these plants facilitate is considered to be essential for the wellbeing of the individual and the community. The ecstatic trance experience or truly altered state of consciousness triggered by the natural alkaloids, and its culturally conditioned content and subsequent interpretation, are fully consistent with traditional religious-philosophical systems that value and even encourage individual pathways to the supernatural powers and personal confrontation with them, however these be conceived or named. The evidence, archaeological and otherwise, is such that we can say with certainty that most societies, if not all, that still employ hallucinogenic plants in their rituals have done so for centuries, not to say millennia. The plants have a cultural history: they are accounted for by traditions in which all members of the society share.

Indeed, we can go so far as to say that the psychotropic plants have helped determine the history of the culture, inasmuch as it is typically in the ecstatic initiatory trance experience that the individual confirms for himself the validity of tribal traditions he has heard his elders recite from earliest childhood:

When one considers that datura results in mental images of tremendous intensity, it is no wonder that a Cahuilla boy after his first vision under its influence became a firm believer in mythic traditions. Datura enabled him to glimpse the ultimate reality of the creation stories in the Cahuilla cosmology. The supernatural beings and aspects of the other world that he had been told about since childhood were now brought before his eyes for the ultimate test—his own empirical examination. He has seen them. They are real. . . . Once the Cahuilla neophyte was convinced by his own perceptions, he was thenceforth locked into the entire Cahuilla cosmology, dramatically, with community guidance and support. (Bean and Saubel, 1972:62-63)

The magic plants, then, act to validate and reify the culture, not to afford some temporary means of escape from it. The Huichol of Mexico, like the Cahuilla of Southern California or the Tukano of Colombia, returns from his initiatory "trip" to exclaim, "It is as my fathers explained it to me!" One takes peyote, he says, "to learn how one goes being Huichol." It is hardly to learn "how one goes being American" (or German, or English, or Mexican) in the conventional sense that LSD or DMT are employed in the West. And yet, objectively, the chemistry of these drugs differs little from that of the sacred plants of the tribal world, LSD being similar to the natural alkaloids in morning-glory seeds, while dimethyltryptamines are prominent in the hallucinogenic snuffs of South American Indians. And Cannabis (spp.), which thirty million contemporary Americans are said to have smoked recreationally at least once, and probably more often, has replaced the potent Psilocybe mushroom in the divinatory curing rituals of some Mexican Indian shamans, who easily place themselves in ecstatic trances with a plant that, from the strictly pharmacological point of view, is not in fact comparable to Psilocybe.*

Urgently Needed: An Integrated Perspective

It is clearly society, not chemistry, that is the variable, since the same or chemically similar drugs can function so differently in different cultural situations, or be venerated over centuries as sacred, benign, and culturally integrative in some contexts but regarded in others as inherently so evil and dangerous that their very possession constitutes a serious crime. Likewise, it is obviously culture and the attitudes and stereotypes it fosters—not any inherent characteristics or even their measurable medical and social consequences—that make one "social" drug, alcohol, legally and morally acceptable to us, and another, marihuana, not. Addictive narcotics such as heroin are a different matter, of course, from nonaddictive hallucinogens, but to say that here too we urgently need to apply the essential cultural (that is to say, anthropological) perspective is not to underrate the seriousness of the problem —quite the contrary. However, I suspect that until a holistic perspective, integrating anthropology, biology, and psychology, has become so fully accepted (by the general public no less than the drug-research, lawmaking, and law-enforcement establishment) as to be second nature, resort to any but officially approved or commercially touted drugs to alter consciousness will always be perceived as objectionable. Thus I suspect that use of drugs not "approved" will remain at the level of an "epidemic," yielding neither to the most repressive laws nor to the most massive spending for "education" and rehabilitation.

If that suspicion were unfounded, would we not be more worried about the effects of nicotine than about those of THC? And, while by no means underrating the seriousness of the heroin threat, would we not be less agitated over an estimated quarter million heroin addicts, and adopt more intelligent social policies to deal with the problem (including even such "unthinkable" alternatives to the black-market drug empire as legalized heroin maintenance) than by the truly epidemic proportions of alcoholism? Against three to four hundred thousand opiate addicts in the United States (certainly a shocking figure) there are nevertheless ten to twelve million confirmed alcoholics and millions more "problem drinkers" with enormous potential for harm to themselves and society. Whatever the personal and social damage of heroin addiction and its functional relationship to street crime and corruption, there is a demonstrable correlation between drinking and many thousands of annual highway deaths, as well as homicide, child abuse, and other violence, with a total social cost immeasurably higher than that attributable to heroin. Moreover, as Brecher (1972) and others have shown, excessive use of alcohol carries far greater potential than heroin for organic deterioration. This is not to advocate heroin over alcohol, certainly, nor to minimize the tragedy which heroin addiction represents for so many individuals and their families, but only to underscore that in disregard of everything we know of alcohol as a dangerous drug, "getting high" with it carries but a fraction of the social and legal stigma we as a society attach to other mind-altering substances. Facts, then, are seemingly irrelevant—at least they are less relevant or decisive than cultural conditioning.

*There is now strong presumption that at least some Neanderthals were also accomplished herbal curers. At Shanidar cave in northern Iraq archaeologists discovered pollen clusters of eight kinds of flowering plants in association with an adult male skeleton. Originally thought to be the expression of the survivors' love and regard for their deceased relative and proof of the high spiritual development of these Neanderthals, the plant remains may actually have also been part of a curing shaman's medicine kit. No less than seven of the eight species represented by pollen grains in the burial have now been identified by the noted French palynologist A. Leroi-Gourhan as belonging to plants that still play a prominent role in herbal curing in the same area and elsewhere in the Old World (e.g. Achillea, whose Anglo-Saxon name, yarrow, means "healer"; Althea, or hollyhock, whose Greek name likewise means "healer"; Senecio, one of whose common English names, groundsel, derives from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning "pus swallower," and Ephedra, horsetail, a genus containing the well-known nerve stimulant ephedrine). In the words of Columbia University archaeologist Ralph S. Solecki, who excavated the 60,000- year-old Shanidar cave burials, the presence of so many plants of proven medicinal value in one of the graves at least raises "speculation about the extent of the human spirit in Neanderthals" (Solecki, 1975:880-81). It is certainly tempting to speculate that if these Neanderthals, whom Solecki and other scholars now believe to be in modern humanity's direct line of evolution, possessed knowledge of so many effective medicinal plants, they may likewise have been familiar with some of the psychedelic flora of the region.

*Twirling, as Weil (1972) has noted, is also a technique by which children in many cultures the world over seek to alter the normal or everyday state of consciousness.

*Research by scientists of several countries, including the United States, Great Britain, and Sweden, has recently uncovered evidence that the body spontaneously manufactures pain-killing chemicals whose structure and effects appear to be very like those of morphine and that within the mammalian brain, including that of humans, there are molecules that are highly specific opiate receptors which chemically join such opium derivatives as heroin and morphine. The United States scientists involved in this important research include Drs. Gavril Pasternak and Solomon H. Snyder of Johns Hopkins University and Dr. Avram Goldstein of Stanford. Drs. John Hughes and H. W. Kosterlitz in Aberdeen, Scotland, and Dr. Lars Terenius in Uppsala, Sweden, have been making breakthroughs in the same field. Apart from helping to account for spontaneous mitigation of pain in severe trauma situations, one hope is that the new discoveries will be useful in the treatment of opiate addiction.

*The substitution of "alternate" for the customary "altered" was suggested by Dr. Norman Zinberg (1974) "in order," he writes, "to avoid the idea that the change alters consciousness from the way it should be." Nevertheless, most authorities on "high states" agree with C. T. Tart (1972) that these constitute "a qualitative alteration in the overall pattern of mental functioning, such that the experiencer feels his consciousness is radically different from the way it functions normally."

*This is an area of research in which Dr. Joel Elkes, formerly Psychiatrist-in-Chief, The Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland, has done considerable pioneering work. It might be noted that even in drug "highs" of great intensity, such as with Psilocybe mushrooms or peyote, it is nevertheless sometimes possible to alternate between inward- and outward-directed states by the simple device of opening and closing one's eyes. At least I have found this to be so, and I have seen Indians make the same transitions during rituals.

*With other states following Oregon's example in reducing penalties for personal use of marihuana to the level of a traffic fine, similar federal legislation presently being considered in Congress, and the Alaska State Supreme Court ruling that personal use in the home is not a crime, the situation is clearly changing, however belatedly and slowly, and however irrelevantly for the hundreds of thousands of Americans branded for life as felons by antiquated federal and local statutes. The movement toward decriminalization of Cannabis use received a major boost in 1975 with the publication of Ganja in Jamaica, by Vera Rubin and Lambros Comitas (1975), a medical anthropological study of chronic marihuana use sponsored by the Center for Studies of Narcotic and Drug Abuse, National Institute of Mental Health. The study found no indications of organic brain damage or chromosome damage from long-term chronic use of ganja (the folk name for marihuana in Jamaica); no significant psychiatric, psychological or medical differences between chronic smokers and nonsmokers of ganja; and no loss of motivation. The only correlation that could be found between ganja and crime was a technical one: ganja cultivation and possession are technically crimes. The "single medical finding of interest," writes former Pennsylvania Governor Raymond P. Shafer in his foreword to the book, "is the indication of functional hypoxia among heavy, long-term chronic smokers." However, he notes, ganja in Jamaica is customarily mixed with tobacco and ganja smokers are also generally heavy cigarette smokers; hence it was impossible to distinguish between clinical effects of ganja and tobacco smoking and cigarette smoking, the conclusion being that smokingper se may be responsible for impairment of respiratory efficiency. Again pointing up culture as the crucial variable in the use and effects of a drug was the finding that, as Governor Shafer notes, in contrast to the alleged "amotivational" effects generally attributed to marihuana in the United States, in Jamaica ganja "serves to fulfill values of the work ethic."