Drug Abuse

MUSHROOMS AND THE MIND

RALPH METZNER

Was the Buddha's last, fatal supper a mushroom feast? Was soma, the mystery potion at Eleusis, a mushroom? Why are mushrooms linked to thunder, and to toads? Why does Hieronymus Bosch have a gigantic mushroom standing at Hell's entrance? Why have they been called "God's Flesh," and "Devil's Bread"? Men have used mushrooms to murder, to worship, to heal, to prophesy. Some fear and abominate all fungi as "dirty" and "dangerous." Others use discrimination—enjoy them as food and as mediators to divine vision.

Two classes of mushrooms are of primary interest to the anthropologist and psychologist studying the ritual use of fungi. One, the fly agaric, Amanita muscaria, is the "drug of choice" among certain Siberian tribes. It is apparently hallucinogenic, though not psychedelic in the sense of inducing transcendent experiences, experiences of expanded consciousness. The other group, the Psilocybe mushrooms and related species of the Mexican mountains, are both hallucinogenic and psychedelic. They are the "God's Flesh" of the Aztecs.

The Fly Amanita

The fly agaric has a whitish stalk, swollen at the base, a lacerated collar about three quarters of the way up the stalk, and a gorgeously colored umbrellalike cap from three to eight inches wide. In North America the cap will be mostly whitish, yellowish, or orange-red, but in Europe or Asia bright red or purple. In all regions the cap is covered with many whitish, yellowish, or reddish warts.1

Tribes using the fly agaric include the Kamchadals, Kerjaks, and Chukchees living on the Pacific coast, from Kamchatka to the northeastern tip of Siberia; the Yukaghirs, farther to the west; the Yenisei Ostjaks; and the Samoyed Ostjaks, in the valley of the upper Ob. These Siberian tribes have become famous for the practice of drinking the urine of mushroom-intoxicated persons, in order to get a prolongation of the effect. Oliver Goldsmith, in 1762, described a "mushroom party" thus:

The poorer sort, who love mushrooms to distraction as well as the rich, but cannot afford it at first hand, post themselves on these occasions around the huts of the rich and watch- theladies and gentlemen as they come down to pass their liquor, and hold a wooden bowl to catch the delicious fluid, very little altered by filtration, being still strongly tinctured with the intoxicating quality. Of this they drink with the utmost satisfaction and thus they get as drunk and as jovial as their betters.2

Whether the fly agaric is involved in the "berserkgang" of the Vikings is a debated point. Norman Taylor's book Narcotics: Nature's Dangerous Gifts, claims that "in proper amounts it promotes gaiety and exuberance among a morose people, while leading, in large doses, to berserk orgies."3 R. Gordon Wasson, however, has dissented from this view, pointing out that no plant was ever mentioned in the Viking accounts.

In their monumental book Mushrooms, Russia and History (1957), the Wassons, Robert Gordon and Valentina, draw parallels between the beliefs of the Siberian tribes about the mushrooms and those of the Mexican mushroom-using peoples:

With our Mexican experiences fresh in mind, we reread what Jochelson and Bogoras had written about the Korjaks and the Chukchees. We discovered startling parallels between the use of the fly amanita (Amanita muscaria) in Siberia and the divine mushrooms in Middle America. In Mexico the mushroom "speaks" to the eater; in Siberia "the spirits of the mushrooms" speak. Just as in Mexico, Jochelson says that among the Korjaks "the agaric would tell every man, even if he were not a shaman, what ailed him when he was sick, or explain a dream to him, or show him the upper world or the underground world or foretell what would happen to him." Just as in Mexico on the following day those who have taken the mushrooms compare their experiences, so in Siberia, according to Jochelson, the Korjaks, "when the intoxication had passed, told whither the 'fly-agaric men' had taken them and what they had seen." In Bogoras we discover a link between the lightning bolt and the mushroom. According to a Chukchee myth, lightning is a One-Sided Man who drags his sister along by her foot. As she bumps along the floor of heaven, the noise of her bumping makes the thunder. Her urine is the rain, and she is possessed by the spirits of the fly amanita.4

Much is made by Wasson of the connection between mushrooms and thunder; we will return to this later.

Dr. Andrija Puharich, whose work has chiefly concerned itself with the experimental investigation of telepathic and related phenomena, has also done some studies of mushroom use among the Chatino Indians of Mexico, and claims that amanita is used by them. Wasson, whose knowledge of the Mexican mushrooms is probably unequaled, disputes this:

For ten years we combed the various regions, and we have invariably found that it played no role in the life of the Indians, though of course it is of common occurrence in the woods. We had visited the Chatino country, where we were accompanied by Bill Upson of the Instituto Lingiiistico de Verano, who speaks Chatino. Later he likewise helped Puharich, but he informs us that no brufo in his presence testified to the use of a mushroom answering to the description of Amanita muscaria.5

The three principal ingredients of Amanita muscaria apparently are muscarine, atropine, and bufotenine.° Muscarine is a cholinergic drug, which stimulates the parasympathetic system, causing sweating, salivation, pupil contraction, slowed cardiac rate, and increased peristalsis. These effects are counteracted by atropine, which was long used as an antidote to amanita poisoning until it was discovered that the mushroom itself also contained this. The effects of a particular ingestion of the mushroom would depend on the relative quantities of the two substances. Atropine alkaloids are found in many plants, including deadly nightshade, henbane, mandrake, thorn apple, and Jimson weed. They are generally believed to have been involved in the European witches' cults, definitely to cause hallucinations, as well as either excitement or depression. On the basis of my own experiments with Ditran, a hallucinogenic drug similar in its action to atropine, I would suggest that the anti-cholinergic agents are definitely consciousness-altering, since they produce thought disorientation and visions, but I would doubt that they are psychedelic, or consciousness-expanding. They may be more truly psychotomimetic than LSD or psilocybin.7

The third ingredient of the amanita mushrooms, bufotenine, probably is psychedelic, since chemically it is 5-hydroxydimethyltryptamine, i.e., closely related to both DMT and psilocin. Bufotenine is also found in the South American snuff Piptadenia peregrina and in the sweat gland of the toad Bufo marinus, which sheds new light on the witches' brews containing toads. However, the quantity of bufotenine in Amanita muscaria is very small, so the principal visual effects of the mushroom are probably due to its belladonna (atropine) alkaloids. This is confirmed by the stories of the Siberian tribesmen who, having imbibed the mushrooms, jump very high over small objects; visual size distortions are common with Ditran-type drugs, though rare with tryptamine psychedelics.

Although to some people the drinking of muscarinic, atropinized urine may be a repulsive way to get high, as Norman Taylor points out, "Who are we to deny them this revolting pleasure? To these dull plodders of the arctic wastes, the fly agaric may well be their only peep into a world far removed from the frozen reality of their wretchedness. That such people found the fly agaric is merely another illustration of the worldwide hunt for something to break the impact of everyday life."8

The Sacred Psilocybes

The story of the Psilocybe mushrooms, the teonanacatl, or "God's Flesh," of the Aztecs, is one of the most dramatic episodes in modern anthropology. When the Spaniards arrived in Mexico, their clerics immediately labeled the mushrooms (and the other hallucinogens in use—peyotl and olohuhqui) as products of the devil and did their best to stamp out this "idolatry." Brother Toribio de Benavente, a Spanish monk better known as Motolinia, in a work on pagan rites and idolatries, described their "vice" as follows:

They had another drunkenness which made them more cruel: which was of some small mushrooms . . . and after a while they were seeing a thousand visions, especially of snakes, and as they went completely out of their minds, it seemed to them that their legs and bodies were full of worms which were eating them alive, and thus, half raving, they went out of the house, wishing that somebody would kill them, and with that bestial drunkenness and the trouble they felt, it would happen sometimes that they hanged themselves. And they were also against others much more cruel. They called these mushrooms teonanacatl, which means flesh of the God (the Demon they adored), and in that manner, with that bitter food, their cruel god held communion with them.9

A Mexican historian writing in the 187os, Orozco y Berra, stated that the mushrooms produced "a state of intoxication with frightening hallucinations." Friar Bernardino de Sahagtin, a Franciscan monk who preserved texts written in the preconquest Nahuatl language, in writing of the mushrooms often referred to disconsolate, dissolute, disintegrating states of personality; the members of society using the mushroms were "the deranged one," "the angry young man," "the noblewoman without shame," "the prostitute, the procurer, the enchanter.""

This language is the sixteenth-century equivalent of the modern psychiatric approach to hallucinogens. AMA President Roy Grinker, M.D., in an editorial in the Archives of General Psychiatry, warns that ". . . latent psychotics are disintegrating under the influence of even a single dose; long-continued LSD experiences are subtly creating a psychopathology."" Dana Farnsworth, M.D., Harvard health officer, in another editorial refers to drug-induced "nightmares" such as thinking one is only six inches tall, and "horrid, involuntary hallucinations."12

The pattern is the same: the representatives of the current psychological power system—the clerics then, the psychiatrists now—react to the new "detonator of the soul" with puritanical paranoia and fearful fantasies of sin, degradation, disintegration. Since anxious suspicion does not allow them to become acquainted with the real nature of the alleged demonic plant or substance, ignorant misrepresentations soon shroud any mention of them, and repressive measures are vigorously pursued.

The historian Lothar Knauth has gathered further references which shed a somewhat different light on the Aztecs' use of the mushrooms. For example, Orozco y Berm, in his account of the coronation of Motecuazoma II, says,

The religious festivities ended, the lords gathered to eat woodland mushrooms, which contain that which confuses the mind, as if they were intoxicating drinks; while their minds were confused they saw visions, believed they heard voices; therefore they took these hallucinations as divine notices, revelations of the future, and augury of things to come.18

Another writer, Tezozomoc, has this to add:

. . . the strangers gave them mushrooms found in the _mountain woods so that they would get intoxicated, and with that they began to dance; others went inside the room to rest. Then they took the big lights of the patio and every time they started the song the strangers began to dance and to sing, and so that they should not be known they dressed themselves with false hair.14

For another description of a mushroom ceremony among the Aztecs, Lothar Knauth draws again on a Nahuatl text preserved by Sahaga. It is part of the fiesta that the pochteque, the great merchants of the Aztec empire, gave the night before they sent their trading caravans to the distant, foreign commercial center of the Gulf and Pacific coasts.

There arrived those that were going to dance, . . . and those that were going to abandon themselves. Those of the merchant leaders who were not going to dance were the strait-laced, chaste ones, who thought themselves somebody. And the old merchants met them with flowers, with tobacco, with brilliant green paper collars and bunches of quetzal feathers, glistening in the moonlight.

Right at the beginning, as a refreshment, they ate the mushrooms. They felt with it a burn, a red-hot blown fire inside, and not from hot food they were eating. Therefore they drank hot cacao that was kept warm for the night. Thusly they ate the intoxicating mushrooms. When they had finished eating them, they danced and they cried. Meanwhile some of them felt the effect: they went inside, they sat down, with their backs against the wall. They didn't dance any more. They sat by themselves, in the same place and let their heads hang.15

The preceding description of the festivities sounds not too unlike a modern description of a "psychedelic celebration," at, for example, the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco.

On Friday and Saturday nights they swarm into the Avalon and Fillmore Ballrooms . . . to be bathed in constantly changing projections of liquid colors and films, to dance in the dancing light of their ecstatic costumes and faces and feelings, and to drench themselves in the saturating rock 'n' roll of the Grateful Dead. . . . The whole environment, in short, is turned on and total immersion is expected.16

The description of the Aztec mushroom celebration goes on in a more somber key as the participants apparently become involved in visions of the manner of their death. Whether these were genuine clairvoyant experiences or shared
hallucinations induced by the high Suggestibility of the bemushrooped state, it is impossible to tell at this remove.

In that stupor, some imagined they were going to die, and they cried; some were to perish in the war; some were to be eaten by wild beasts; some were to be taken prisoners of war; some were to be somebody rich, very rich; some were to buy and be owners of slaves; some were to be adulterers, were to be stoned to death; some were to be taken for thieves and be stoned to death; some were to become dissolute, were to end as drunkards; some were to drown; some were to be somebody peaceful, peacefully living to themselves and dying the same way; some were to fall from the roof and die suddenly.17

The negative view of the mushrooms prevailed. Spanish mycophobia succeeded in stamping out the mushroom cult as a major force in Mexican culture. Only a handful of remote mountain tribes preserved the customs and rituals of what must once have been a splendid and powerful system of worship and magic. So complete was the neglect and ignorance in the Western world of this botanical aspect of Mexican religion, that in 1915 a reputable American botanist, William E. Safford, read a paper before a learned society claiming that the so-called sacred mushroom of Mexico did not exist and never had.

In 1936, the Mexican engineer Roberto J. Weitlaner became the first white man in modern times to obtain or even see the sacred mushrooms, in the tiny Oaxacan village Huautla de Jiménez. Two years later, his daughter Irrngard, her anthropologist fiancé, and two friends became the first Westerners to witness a mushroom ceremony. In the same year, the Harvard botanist Richard E. Schultes made a trip to Huautla, obtained some specimen mushrooms from informants, and sent them to the Harvard Botanical Museum, where they were identified as the species Panaeolus cam panulatus, sphinctrinus variety. Schultes published reports on his finds, but his own work took him to the Amazon jungles to investigate the fabled caapi or yagé vine, and he did not return to Mexico. The war years intervened, and the Mexican mushroom slipped again into the shadows of history.

On June 29, 1955, Robert Gordon Wasson and,his wife, Valentina, became the first white persons in modern times to actually participate in and partake of the sacred mushroom ceremony, again in the tiny village of Huautla de Jiménez, under the wise guidance of the now famous curandera Maria Sabina. The news of their discovery became public with the publication in 1957 of Mushrooms, Russia and History, and with a May 13, 1957, article in Life. This magazine has often since that time been the first to signal, and perhaps in some "mediumistic" way to bring about, new developments in the growth of the "psychedelic movement."

The intriguing story of how Robert Gordon Wasson, a professional banker, partner and vice-president of the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company of New York, found himself ingesting the sacred mushroom on a remote Mexican mountaintop, is worth repeating in his own words:

(My wife) was a Great Russian and, like all of her fellow countrymen, learned at her mother's knee a solid body of empirical knowledge about the common species (of mushrooms) and a love for them that are astonishing to us Americans. . . . Their love of mushrooms is . . . a visceral urge, a passion that passeth understanding. . . . I, of Anglo-Saxon origin, had known nothing of mushrooms. By inheritance, I ignored them all; I rejected those repugnant fungal growths, expressions of parasitism and decay. . . . Such discoveries as we have made, including the rediscovery of the religious role of the hallucinogenic mushrooms of Mexico, can be laid to our preoccupation with that cultural rift between my wife and me, between our respective peoples, between mycophilia and mycophobia . . . that divide the Indo-European peoples into two camps. . . . I suggest that when such traits betoken the attitudes of whole tribes or peoples, and when those traits have remained unaltered throughout recorded history, and especially when they differ from one people to another, neighboring people, then you are face to face with a phenomenon of profound cultural importance, whose primal cause is to be discovered only in the wellsprings of cultural history. . . .

Our method of approach was to look everywhere for references to mushrooms. We gathered the words for "mushroom" and the various species in every accessible language. We studied their etymologies.
•    . . We were quick to discern the latent metaphors in such words.
•    . . We searched for the meaning of these figures of speech. We sought mushrooms in the proverbs of Europe, in myths and mythology, in legends and fairy tales, in epics and ballads, in historical episodes, in the obscene and scabrous vocabularies that usually escape the lexicographer. . . . Mushrooms are widely linked with the fly, the toad, the cock, and the thunderbolt; and so we studied these to see what associations they conveyed to our remote forebears. . . .

I do not recall which of us, my wife or I, first dared to put into words, back in the 4os, the surmise that our own remote ancestors, perhaps four thousand years ago, worshiped a divine mushroom. It seemed to,us that this might explain the phenomenon of mycophilia versus mycophobia, for which we found an abundance of evidence in philology and folklore. . . • I remember distinctly how it came about that we embarked on our Middle American explorations. In the fall of 1952 we learned that the sixteenth-century writers, describing the Indian cultures of Mexico, had recorded that certain mushrooms played a divinatory role in the religion of the natives. Simultaneously we learned that certain pre-Columbian stone artifacts resembling mushrooms, most of them roughly a foot high, had been turning up, usually in the highlands of Guatemala, in increasing numbers. . . . We spoke up, declaring that the so-called "mushroom stones" really represented mushrooms, and that they were the symbol of a religion, like the Cross in the Christian religion, or the Star of Judea, or the Crescent of the Moslems. . . . This Middle American cult of a divine mushroom, this cult of "God's Flesh" . . . can be traced back to about 15oo B.C. . . . the earliest period in which man was in sufficient command of his technique to be able to carve stone. Thus we find a mushroom in the center of the cult with perhaps the oldest continuous history in the world. . . . The cult still existed in the Sierra Mazateca, in Oaxaca. And so we went there, in 1953. . . . We found a revelation, in the true meaning of that abused word, nwhich for the Indians is an everyday feature, albeit a Holy Mystery, of their lives.18

The Wassons made many trips to Mexico, to the different regions, studying the various aspects of the use of the mushrooms. They enlisted eminent collaborators. One of these was Professor Roger Heim, the French mycologist, Director of the Musée National d'Histoire Naturelle, who visited Mexico with the Wassons on several occasions in order to make on-the-spot studies of the sacred mushrooms. The following species of mushrooms, many of them new to science, made up the Wasson-Heim list of hallucinogenic mushrooms used in Mexico: Cantharellaceae-Conocybe siliginoides, growing on dead tree trunks; Strophariaceae-Psilocybe mexicana, a small, tawny inhabitant of wet pastures, apparently the most highly prized by the users; Psilocybe azteconim, called "children of the waters" by the Aztecs; Psilocybe zapotecorum, of marshy ground and known by the Zapotecs as "crown of thorns mushroom"; Psilocybe caerulescens var. mazatecorum, the so-called "landslide mushroom"; Psilocybe caerulescens var. migripes, which has a native name meaning ‘`mushroom of superior reason"; and Stropharia cubensis.19

'While we are on the subject of botanical identities, we might mention the later work of Singer and Guzman, who in 1957 found several additional species of Psilocybe used. As noted before, Wasson disputes Puharich's assertion that Amanita muscaria is used at all by the Mexicans. It will be recalled that Panaeolus sphinctrinus was identified as one of the teonancatl mushrooms by Schultes in 1938. Hallucinogenic activity was reported for a related species, Panaeolus papilionaceus, found in Oxford County, Maine. A note in Science reported that unsuspecting ingestion of this mushroom by two persons resulted in visual and hallucinatory effects comparable to hashish, opium, and "mescal." The mushroom was said to be "common on cultivated land."20 More recently, Maurice B. Walters reported hallucinogenic activity for Pholiota spectabilis, a mushroom unrelated to the psilocybes. It is also fairly common in North America.21 This writer had the experience of ingesting ground-up mushrooms, which had been collected in the Denver, Colorado, City Park, whose identity the finder refused to divulge for fear that spreading this knowledge would lead to legal restrictions on the noble fungus. The effects of this mushroom were completely hallucinogenic, comparable in all ways to the effects of synthetic psilocybin, with which I was very familiar. We may expect a rich, growing harvest of psychedelic fungi (as well as higher plants) as dedicated and ingenious amateur "theobotanists" investigate the vegetable kingdom for other active species during the next fifty years or so.

Those who are inclined to dismiss Wasson's theory of mycophobia versus mycophilia need only consider the fact that hallucinogenic mushrooms grow wild and are common on the North American continent, yet have never been used for religious or psychic purposes. Our distrust of fungi makes us surround them with so many taboos that we end up, like Professor Safford, even denying their existence in other lands. The myQophilic Mexicans, on the other hand, quietly use our imports, whose value we don't even realize: Stropharia cubensis, which is hallucinogenic, was not known in preconquest Mexico, because it grows in cow dung, and cows came to the New World with the Spanish. The Indians discovered the properties of the mushroom while the whites were busy denying it existed.

Wasson's other main collaborator on the chemical aspects of the mushrooms was the renowned Albert Hofmann of the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, whose accidental discovery of the psychedelic properties of LSD in 1943 may well be regarded by future generations as one of the turning points of Western civilization, and who has devoted much of his professional life to the extraction of the active principles of various native hallucinogens, and their subsequent synthesis. Hofmann soon identified psilocybin as the main active principle in the mushrooms, along with smaller quantities of psilocin. Psilocin is 4-hydroxydimethyltryptamine; psilocybin is the same, with an added phosphor group. Both are indole alkaloids, like LSD, and are related chemically and in activity to the neural transmitter substance serotonin. Psilocybin is probably converted to psilocin in the body. The effects of these tryptamines are roughly comparable to LSD, differing primarily in the duration of the effect, which is about half as long as LSD. Numerous studies have been done on the pharmacological and psychological effects of psilocybin. Wasson's 1962 bibliography listed a total of 362 technical and lay items;22 since that time the number has probably passed loco. These lie outside the scope of this article.

The use of the sacred mushrooms is heavily concentrated on Oaxaca, where it is used by the Mazatecs, Chinantecs, Chatinos, Zapotecs, Mixtecs, and Mijes. In each tribe the preferred species of mushroom and the particular rituals used vary somewhat. Secrecy about the mushrooms toyard foreigners is the general practice. Puharich wrote, "The first thing one learns from the Chatinos is that no one of them will publicly admit that the sacred mushroom exists, that a rite involving its use exists, or that any practitioners of the rite exist."23 Wasson makes a great deal of the religious motivation of the curanderos. "Performing before strangers is a profanation," and "the curandero who today, for a big fee, will perform the mushroom rite for any stranger is a prostitute and a faker."24 Yet Wasson's own original curandera, the famous Maria Sabina, does perform rituals for strangers, sometimes for a fee, sometimes not.25 It is hard for an outsider to evaluate the motivations of a Mexican eurandera. According to recent reports, there are now always a dozen or so Americans in Hu- autla during the mushroom season, June through August, looking for the inevitable "honghi." Some obtain the mushrooms and take them on their own. One American flipped out and tried to eat a live turkey while on such a trip, causing Maria Sabina great difficulties with local authorities. One need reach for no deeper reason than historical experience to explain the reticence of mushroom cults toward outsiders. As in America today, they have always been persecuted and vilified. Their very survival has depended to a large extent on secrecy.

We find that the mushrooms are referred to by various terms of endearment, such as los nifios, "the children," or las mujercitas, "the little women," or most romantically, "the noble princes of the waters." In some areas, the mujercitas have to be eaten along with some hombrecitos, "little men," a different species of mushroom easily identified by its virile shape. But this is consumed for ritual purposes only, since only the "little women" give the psychic effect.

Wasson has taken photographs of a young girl grinding the mushrooms (also the Ipomoea seeds or the leaves of Salvia divinorum) on a grinding stone, in a posture identical to that found crii the famous Guatemalan "mushroom stones," dating back twenty-five hundred years.

Not all the tribes have curanderas as such. The Mazatecs do, and usually the curandera takes twice as many mushrooms as the other voyagers. She decides who else takes them, and her energies dominate the session. In the Mije country, on the other hand, there are no curanderas as such; most of the families know how to use the mushrooms. One person takes them alone, with another present as observer. The reasons for consulting the mushrooms are medical and divinatory: to find a diagnosis and cure for an otherwise intractable condition; to find lost objects, animals, or people; or to get advice on personal problems or some great worry.

The use of the mushrooms for purposes of divination is accepted as a matter of fact. Demonstrations of its capacity to bring about states of higher vision have been convincingly made. A double telepathic experience was reported by the psychiatrist Dr. Margaret A. Paul under the mushroom Amanita pantherina, a close relative of A. muscaria." Wasson has described his own experience with Maria Sabina on his first session with the psilocybe mushroom.

Well, the Curandera Maria Sabina asked us what the questions were that were troubling us in the afternoon before the session. We were at a loss, because we had no questions that were troubling us, we just wished to see the ceremony. But, naturally, we had to comply with her request, and I said: "We have not heard from my son who is working in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and we are worried about him (which was not true) and we would like to know how he is faring." Now for an Indian in that country this means that you are really worried about the person, and so she went to work, and in the course of the evening she told us three things about him. She said: "He's not in Cambridge." (She didn't know what Cambridge was.) "He's in your home." I wrote notes down—and it's all in my contemporary notes—she said: "He's in your home. He's not in that other place." (It seemed awfully odd that she should volunteer this —there was no reason for it, but anyway we wrote it down.) And then she said: "He has an emotional disturbance, he reaches even to tears and it's over a girl." Well, we wrote this down—we didn't know anything about it and then finally she said: "I see the Army reaching out for him, I don't know whether the Army will get him." Well, we dismissed it. We didn't think at all about it. Then I got back to New York and was busy in banking, and then I went to Europe on a banking trip, and in Geneva a cablegram reached me from my wife saying that Peter insists on enlisting, and please to cable him not to do so. Well, I sent him a cable and it was too late and he had enlisted in the Army. Then, why had he enlisted in the Army? A letter followed and I learned that he had been in terrible emotional turmoil over a girl about whom he had never spoken to us. Oh, the first thing we discovered on returning to our apartment in New York —it was in an awful turmoil—there had been a party thrown there [laughter] and the bills of the purveyors were all accumulated for the very week-end that we had had this session with Maria Sabina. And Peter made no bones about it—"Oh yes, I went down with three or four friends from Cambridge." And they had staged a party there. Then the next thing was this Army business and then the next thing was that he had been in an awful turmoil over a girl who was living in New Haven. I have no explanation for that at a11.27

Wasson's answer, when asked if he believed in ESP, was, "I don't believe; and I don't disbelieve. It's not my line." Research on supernormal perceptual processes, as demonstrated here and in Doctor Paul's cases, is sadly lacking and definitely indicated by the evidence brought up so far.

Where a curandera is present, she carries a thread of song almost continuously throughout the session, for many hours on end, with brief intermittent rests. The words vary slightly from session to session; the melodic line stays the same. Recordings have been published of the Mazatec ceremony, and anyone can hear for himself the forces that are collected and transmitted through these chants. Mixing Christian and Indian mythology, they run the whole conceivable range of incarnations and emotions. In addition, the curandera may emit a complex percussive beat, slapping thighs, forehead, arms. "The Mazatec communicants are participants with the curandera in an extempore religious colloquy. Her utterances elicit spontaneous responses from them, responses that maintain a perfect harmony with her and with each other, building up to a quiet, swaying, antiphonal chant. In a successful ceremony this is an essential element."28

In considering the Mexican ritual, we cannot forget that this is what remains among a primitive, illiterate people of a practice once widespread throughout the powerful Aztec empire. The ritual does not have the integrative synthetic qualities of the American peyote ritual, though most firsthand accounts agree that, depending, no doubt, on the wisdom and experience of the curandera, it can definitely induce a total transcendent experience.

Another and complex chapter in the checkered and colorful history of the divine mushroom was initiated in August 1960, when, in a villa near Cuernavaca, Dr. Timothy Leary, a Harvard psychologist, ate seven of the mushrooms given him by a scientist from the University of Mexico. "I was whirled through an experience which could be described in many extravagant metaphors but which was above all and without question the deepest religious experience of my life."28 The experience triggered off over the next seven years a series of events that have been amply described and debated in the popular press and that have played a central role in the reemergence on the North American continent of a religious revival using psychedelic plants and drugs as sacraments.

Etymology and Prehistory

The word "mushroom" is derived from the old French mouscheron, which in turn is based on mousse, moss. "In popular use," according to Webster, "mushroom denotes any edible variety, as opposed to the poisonous ones (toadstools)." Immediately we are back in a circle of associations of mushrooms with toads, bufotenine, the witches. Perhaps, as the Wassons argued, toadstool, like the French crapaudin, was originally the specific name of the demonic fly amanita, the German Fliegenschwamm. Flies, bugs, maggots are popular mythic embodiments of madness and possession (e.g., "la mouche luimonte à la tae"), as readers of Sartre and William Golding well know.

Another interesting line of inquiry opens up when the association of mushrooms with thunder is explored. We have already mentioned the Chukchee tale of lightning dragging his mushroom-possessed sister thunder across the floor of heaven by her foot. In ancient Greece and Rome, as well as in Mexico, it was believed that the growth of mushrooms is directly related not only to rain, but to thundery weather. Similar etymological and folkloric links can be found in japan, the Philippines, Malagasy, Tadzhikistan, and among the Maoris, where whatitiri means both "thunder" and "mushroom." The Mazatec Indians call the mushroom nti si tho and the Mije Indians tu muh. In both languages the word means "that which sprouts by itself," i.e., without seed. The Zapotec Indian curandero, after gathering the mushrooms, invokes the "Powers" that control the mushrooms: the Earth, God the Father, the Trinity, the "Great Lightning Bolt that bred the mushrooms," and the "Great Lightning Bolt that injected blood into the mushrooms." Does this mean that the lightning bolt, "the strength of the earth," as the curandero called it, is thought of as impregnating the earth, and their offspring is the divine mushroom, without seed? Father Sky and Mother Earth form a mythic polarity common to many American Indian tribes.

Wasson's theory is that at some preliterate stage in man's early history, the mushrooms with extraordinary powers were discovered and "served as an agent for the very fission of his soul, releasing his faculty for self-perception, as a stimulant for the imagination of the seer, the poet, the mystic. . . . May not the hallucinatory mushrooms have been the most holy secret of the Mysteries7"30

Puharich also has argued for the existence of a cult of the divine mushroom in the early Eurasian cultures centered around the powerful Sumero-Akkadian city-states of the third millennium B.c. And in 1926 Henri Frankfort reported the discovery of an ancient Egyptian temple in Byblos (on the Mediterranean coast of Lebanon), dating back to the middle of the third millennium B.C., in which a green jasper seal was found. This seal shows a Horus priest giving two mushrooms to a supplicant. Over the mushroom is a hare, which is the sacred symbol of the Hittite god of rain, thunder, and lightning.

Such archaeological, etymological, and mythological fragments must at present be regarded as mere tiny pieces of the history of man's strange ambivalent relationship to the hallucinogenic, psychedelic plants and drugs. It may be decades before the missing pieces are placed together to give a coherent picture. For the present we cannot much improve on the poetic formulation of Wasson's Indian guide, who when asked why the mushroom was called "that which springs forth," replied:

El honguillo viene por si mismo, no se sabe de donde, como el viento que viene sin saber de donde ni porqué.

The little mushroom comes of itself, no one knows whence, like the wind that comes we know not whence nor why.81.

 

1 Norman Taylor, Narcotics: Nature's Dangerous Gifts. Delta Books, New York, 1963, p. 134.

2 Quoted in Taylor, op. cit., p. 156.

3 Taylor, op. cit., p. 157.

4 0R. Gordon Wasson and Valentina P. Wasson, Mushrooms, Russia and History, Pantheon Books, New York, 1957, p. 211.

5 R. Gordon Wasson, "Notes on the Present Status of Ololiuhqui and the Other Hallucinogens of Mexico," Psychedelic Review, #3,1964, p. 301.

6 Robert W. Buck, M.D., "Mushroom Toxins—A Brief Review of the Literature," New England Journal of Medicine, 265, 1961, 681-86.

7 Ralph Metzner, "Subjective Effects of Anti-cholinergic Hallucinogens" (to be published, Psychedelic Review, ifrio).

8 Taylor, op. cit., p. 158.

9 Quoted from "Historia de los Indios de la Nueva Espafla," by Lothar Knauth, in Estudios de Culture Nahuatl, Vol. III, 1962, p. 263.

10 Knauth, op. cit., p. 266.

11 Roy Grinker, M.D., "Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, Editorial," Archives of General Psychiatry, 8, 1963, p. 423.

12 Dana Farnsworth, M.D., "Hallucinogenic Agents, Editorial," Journal of the American Medical Association, 185, 1963, pp. 878-80.

13 "Historia Antigua y de la Conquista," in Knauth, op. cit., Vol. III, p. 267.

14 "Cr6nica Mexicana," in Knauth, op. cit., LXXXVII, p. 267.

15 Facsimile editions by Paso y Troncoso, ff. 37 and 37 vo. in Knauth, op. cit., p. 269.

16 William K. Zinsser, "The Love Hippies," Look, April 18, 1967.

17 Knauth, op. cit., pp. 269-70.

18 R. Gordon Wasson, "The Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico." Psychedelic Review, #1, 1963, pp. 27-42.

19 Richard E. Schultes, "Botanical Sources of the New World Narcotics." Psychedelic Review, #2, 1963, p. Ai.

20 A. E. Verrill, "A Recent Case of Mushroom Intoxication." Science, XL, 1029, 1914, p. 408.

21 Maurice B. Walters, "Pholiota Spectabilis, a Hallucinogenic Fungus." Mycologie, Sept./Oct. 1965.

22 R. Cordon Wasson, "The Hallucinogenic Mushrooms of Mexico and Psilocybin: A Bibliography." Botanical Museum Leaflets, Vol. zo, No. 2, Harvard University, 1962.

23 Andrija Puharich, M.D., "The Sacred Mushroom and the Question of its Role in Human Culture." Unpublished research memorandum, 1962.

24 Wasson, op. cit. (18), pp. 34-33.

25 Frederick Swain, "The Mystical Mushroom," Tomorrow, Autumn 1962. Also in Psychedelic Review, #2, 1963, pp. 219-29. See also Nat Finkelstein, "Honghi, Meester?" Psychedelic Review, #10, 1967.

26 Margaret A. Paul, "Two Cases of Altered Consciousness with Amnesia Apparently Telepathically Induced." Psychedelic Review, #8, 1966, p. 48.

27 R. Gordon Wasson, Transcript of Discussion, held in Montreal, November 23, 1961.

28 R. G. Wasson, op. cit. (18), p. 41.

29 Timothy Leary, "The Religious Experience: Its Production and Interpretation," Psychedelic Review, #3, 1964, p. 324.

30 R. Gordon Wasson, "Lightning Bolt and Mushrooms, An Essay in Early Cultural Exploration," in Roman Jakobson: Essays on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday, The Hague, Mouton & Co., 1956, p. 61o.

31 Henri Frankfort, quoted in Puharich, op. cit., (23).

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