http://www.brainwaving.com/2010/01/18/wasson-and-the-psychedelic-revolution/comment-page-1/#comment-566

and see http://www.psychedelic-library.org/life.htm for the LIFE magazine article

Wasson and the Psychedelic Revolution
Altered States — POSTED BY Prof. Carl Ruck on January 18, 2010 at 9:34 am

Brainwaving is delighted to introduce the first in a series of essays by Prof. Carl Ruck,
best known for his work in mythology and religion on the sacred role of entheogens,
or psychoactive plants that induce an altered state of consciousness, as used in
religious or shamanistic rituals. His focus has been on the use of entheogens in
classical western culture, as well as their historical influence on modern western
religions. The book The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries
explains that the psycho-active ingredient in the secret kykeion potion used in the
Eleusinian mysteries was most likely the ergotism causing fungus Claviceps purpurea,
while The Apples of Apollo: Pagan and Christian Mysteries of the Eucharist explores
the role that entheogens in general, and Amanita muscaria in particular, played in
Greek and biblical mythology and later on in Renaissance painting, most notably in
the Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald.

lifecoverR. Gordon Wasson launched the “psychedelic revolution” with his Life
magazine article of 13 May 1957, in which he publicized his experience on the nights
of 29-30 June, 1955, in the remote Oaxacan village of Huautla de Jiménez with the
Mazatec curandera or shaman María Sabina, whose identity he tried to protect under
the pseudonym of Eva Mendez, even being the first to use the embarrassing term of
“magic mushroom,” which was probably invented by the magazine’s editor. As a
professional international banker, he was a most unlikely candidate for this role. He
and his wife Valentina Pavlovna were about to publish in that same year their
Mushrooms, Russia, and History, which they had started writing in the mid 1940s as
a cookbook, with merely a footnote on “the gentle art of mushroom-knowing as
practiced by the northern Slavs.” The Life article effectively was publicity for the
book, which was lavishly published at Wasson’s expense in a limited edition of only
512 copies, which would have placed it beyond the notice of the general public: the
original price of $175 has now escalated to several thousand, something that Wasson
was proud of as an investment.

The footnote had grown until it replaced the original book as planned. It was here
that they had indulged their fascination in an event that dated back to their marriage
in 1928, when the Russian-born Valentina on their honeymoon had insisted upon
gathering mushrooms, a plant that the Anglo-Saxon Gordon termed toadstools, and
all of them without exception loathsome and poisonous. In the ensuing years of
investigation, as they each pursued their separate careers, hers as a pediatrician,
they found that their dichotomous attitude toward the plant was well documented in
the folkloric traditions and art of Europe, leading them to suspect some deep-seated
and ancient taboo against the profane use of a religious sacrament, still practiced, as
they discovered, by the shamans of certain peoples of Siberia, which, of course, in
view of the politics of the time, was inaccessible to them.

However, in 1952, Robert Graves had sent them a clipping from a pharmaceutical
company’s newspaper mentioning an article that Richard Evans Schultes, soon to
become Director of the Harvard Botanical Museum, had published in a journal of
extremely limited circulation over ten years earlier, in which he reported on the use of
psychoactive mushrooms by native peoples in the mountains of southern Mexico.
Wasson had known Graves ever since the poet and novelist had first contacted him
about ways of poisoning someone with mushrooms, while writing his I Claudius,
which was published in 1934. Graves was the first to correctly identify the
Mesoamerican mushroom-stones. It was this information that brought the Wassons
together with Schultes, and eventually the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann. It seemed
to answer the questions that Wasson and his wife had posed and it sent them in
search of their Mazatec shamans. They were joined by the French mycologist Roger
Hiem of the Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle, whom Wasson had met in Paris in
1949, while seeking permission to reproduce some drawings for Russia, Mushrooms,
and History.

The Life magazine article triggered a wave of experimentation with these
mushrooms; Timothy Leary, for example, ate magic mushrooms in Mexico before
trying LSD or any other psychoactive substance; and it wasn’t until 25 March 1966
that Life magazine reported on LSD as a drug for psychiatric therapy that had gotten
out of control. The popularizing of the mushrooms resulted in their eventual
classification as a controlled or prohibited substance in the United States and
elsewhere around the globe, something Wasson never intended. In fact, his opinion
was that psychoactive drugs (except alcohol) should be as cheap as possible, and
available in every drug store without prescription to anyone. Wasson also ended up
making María Sabina and her village a destination for troupes of what are now called
narco-tourists, and debased the mushrooms, that once, as the Mazatecs said “took
you where God is,” so that María Sabina eventually lamented that “from the moment
the foreigner arrived, the ‘holy children’ lost their purity, they lost their force, they
ruined them; henceforth, they will no longer work; there is no remedy for it.”

In the ensuing drug culture, Wasson, whose wife died in 1958, managed to remain
above the fray, deploring the use of drugs for what he saw as recreational purposes,
rather than spiritual enlightenment. Andrew Weil, in an article published shortly after
Wasson’s death in 1986, reproached him for being a snob and elitist, “relegating
most of those who have experimented with sacred substances to the category of ‘the
Tim Learys and the ilk.’

Wasson was fearful of contamination by association with some of the more notorious
advocates of the very same aspects of the drug experience that fascinated him. This
was all played out, moreover, against the backdrop of the Cold War and the interest
in the United States government in competing with the Soviet Union for chemical
agents for espionage and mind control. Albert Hofmann had discovered the
hallucinogenic effects of LSD on his famous bicycle ride of April 1943 and reported on
it in a Swiss pharmacological journal in 1947. The US government had already been
in competition with the Nazis in the search for a truth serum or drug, but the agency
involved was disbanded upon the completion of the war, whereupon, however, the
Nazi experiments with mescaline in the Dachau concentration camp were uncovered,
causing the US to begin mescaline studies of its own. By the time that news of LSD
finally appeared in the American Psychiatric Journal in 1950, the US was already
engaged in covert experiments. And by 1951, the quixotic charismatic super-spy and
entrepreneur Captain Al Hubbard, the so-called ‘Johnny Appleseed of LSD,’ was
turning on thousands of people, including scientists, and some of the most well
placed politicians, intelligence officials, diplomats, and church figures.

During their Mazatec séances the Wassons had experienced the divinatory potential
of the Mexican mushrooms. The account of their first velada with Aurelio Carreras,
María Sabina’s son-in-law, on 15 August 1953, two years before they ate the
mushrooms themselves, was intentionally buried in the bulk of Russia, Mushrooms,
and History. Wasson described the event more fully in his last book, Persephone’s
Quest. “I had always had a horror,” he wrote, “of those who preached a kind of
pseudo-religion of telepathy, who for me were unreliable people; if our discoveries
were to be drawn to their attention, we were in danger of being adopted by such
undesirables.”  Carreras, without prompting or questions, was able to tell the
Wassons correctly that their son Peter was not in Boston, as they thought, but in New
York, that he was about to enlist in the army, and that a close member of the family
would die within the year.

In February of 1955, Wasson mentioned this occurrence to Andrija Puharich, when
they met for cocktails in the apartment of the New York socialite Alice Bouverie, who
had learned of the Wassons’ ongoing research from a reference librarian at the
Public Library, while investigating psychoactive mushrooms. Puharich, an American-
born medical doctor and parapsychologist of Croatian descent, at the time was a
captain with the United States Army, stationed at the Fort Detrick Chemical and
Biological Warfare Center in Edgewood Maryland, working for the CIA on chemical
and other means of mind control; and with Wasson’s permission, he dutifully passed
on the information about Carreras to his military associates, which may have been
why Wasson’s 1956 expedition to Mexico was infiltrated by a CIA mole, James Moore,
with a generous financial grant, clearly indicating that the intelligence community
regarded a divinatory mushroom as a valuable tool in their arsenal. Moore found the
journey extremely unpleasant, and although he witnessed the séance, he was
extremely ill, and eight kilos thinner, he fled with a packet of the mushrooms,
intending to isolate and synthesize the chemical, which, in fact, Albert Hofmann
succeeded in doing before him. Hiem identified them as Psilocybe caerulescens and
the psychoactive agent was named psilocybin.

When Wasson met Puharich again in June, he invited him to join that summer’s
expedition to Oaxaca, but he declined since he had been just discharged from the
army and was engaged in reorganizing his laboratory in Maine.  But they agreed to
set up a test. Wasson was to attempt to divine what Puharich was doing at the time
of Wasson’s séance. As it turned out, the dates were mistaken, and this was the
occasion on which Wasson first ate the mushrooms. But Wasson, who knew nothing
about the arrangements of the Maine laboratory, experienced a soul journey in which
he apparently visited the laboratory, providing an accurate, although implausible,
description of the building as a barn of some sort. Puharich later described a similar
experience of his own, of traveling a great distance and acquiring accurate
information, more accurate than if he had visited in person, since he described the
design of the former wallpaper in a room that was now painted.

In fact, as Masha Britten, Wasson’s daughter, recorded after Gordon’s death, she,
too, on one occasion seemed able in her visions to hop all over the world and come
down, alighting to visit friends far away. Her mother also had a clear view of a city,
and later as they approached Mexico City from a different route, looking down on it
from a mountain, she realized that this was the city of her vision. In 1960, Puharich
himself in imitation of Wasson’s ethnographic expeditions headed a research trip to
the Mexican highlands, where a brujo Blas García showed him a mushroom called
Sacred Rabbit; with it, he said, one could fly over the Pacific and see far-off places.
Puharich’s own experience was that he was projected into “the interior of one
monumental building after another.”

All these paranormal experiences were induced by the Mexican mushrooms, which
were Psilocybes, whose psychoactive effect had previously been unknown to
outsiders. But the reason that Bouverie, who was a psychic or ‘channeler,’ had
brought Wasson and Puharich together involved a strange event with the Amanita
muscaria. She had unwittingly precipitated a bizarre psychic seizure in June of 1954
when she handed an ancient Egyptian cartouche to Harry Stone, a visiting Dutch
sculptor; although he knew neither Egyptian nor its art, he became possessed by a
persona that they later identified as Rahótep, a man who had lived 4600 years ago,
and in the course of similar occurrences over the next three years, Harry spoke
Egyptian, wrote hieroglyphics, and disclosed the role of Amanita in Egyptian cult and
divination. Puharich offered an account of the whole affair in his The Sacred
Mushroom: Key to the Door of Eternity, published in 1959. Although Wasson
maintained cordial relations with Puharich, and Puharich in 1961 gave him a copy of
his laboratory experiment showing significant improvement in telepathy with subjects
who had ingested Amantita muscaria. Wasson cautioned him about adverse notoriety
that might result from the Associated Press release about his ESP experiments,
although it was just such notoriety that the Life magazine article had secured for
himself.

It seems implausible that Puharich could have made up the whole Harry Stone affair,
especially since it involved the formidable task of his learning Egyptian; but mycology
lay outside the interests of Egyptologists, although Egypt was renowned in antiquity
for its drugs and mushrooms do occur in Egyptian contexts that would suggest their
involvement in cults. In fact, Kahlil Gibran, the son of the Lebanese poet, offered in
1960 to sell Wasson a bronze figurine of an Egyptian god, probably Seth, with
mushrooms growing from his head; Gibran, a mushroom enthusiast, had read
Puharich’s book and had also just a few months earlier sold Wasson a pre-Columbian
mushroom figurine. Nevertheless, Puharich is generally accused of capitalizing on
Wasson’s work, and like many of the people involved in the psychedelic revolution,
aspects of his other activities tend to discredit him, despite his support by high
government agencies. Thus he espoused the career of the Israel psychic Uri Geller,
who could bend spoons psychokinetically; he also documented the Brazilian psychic
healer Arigo, who diagnosed and removed a pancreatic cancer in just two minutes
with a rusty knife, and without anesthesia or antisepsis; and he trained a troupe of
children at a farm in New York state in the techniques of astral projection with the
object of dropping in on the Kremlin. He also believed in UFOs and extraterrestrials,
and headed the Round Table Foundation, whose members were reincarnations of
the Egyptian ennead of deities, and whose members, at various times, included
Aldous Huxley, Gene Roddenbury, the creator of Star Trek, and L. Ron Hubbard, the
founder of the quasi-religion called Scientology.

Wasson knew Huxley and thought him gullible, but his Doors of Perception, published
in 1954, is the classic description of a visionary experience induced by peyote /
mescaline. He introduced the word ‘psychoactive’ in the epilogue to his Devils of
Loudon, published in 1952; and although his interest in such drugs went back to the
soma-tranquillizer of his 1931 Brave New World, he had no personal experience until
the late 1940s, and became an eloquent and influential proponent of drugs for
transcendent mystical experience until his death in 1963, by which time his visions
were experienced by a man nearly blind. His transition to death was eased by a
dosage of LSD, a use that Valentina had proposed for such drugs in 1957.

Wasson emerged as the authority whose validation was sought by others in the field,
and he found himself embarrassingly linked in a triumvirate with Timothy Leary,
whose proselytizing he considered naïve and reckless, leading to a life as an outlaw,
and Carlos Castaneda, whose Teachings of Don Juan, published in 1966, was even
more influential in popularizing the paranormal aspects of the psychedelic
experience. Castaneda claimed that his shaman Don Juan Matus was an intimate of
María Sabina. Wasson met and corresponded a couple of times with Castaneda and
initially accepted him as genuine, “an obviously honest and serious young man,” but
as the first book developed into a series, each more flamboyant than the previous, he
began to suspect a hoax, which was apparently Leary’s opinion as well. There were
colloquial expressions that seemed devoid of Spanish equivalents, and Wasson
requested a sample of Castaneda’s field notes, which he was unable to supply.
Wasson’s final judgment, however, was that Castaneda was “a poor pilgrim lost on
his way to his own Ixtlán,” although the books were authentic as ethnopoetry, in the
style, as he said, of H. Rider Haggard’s She, a novel about the archetypal feminine, a
white African queen, serialized beginning in 1886.

In 1963, Wasson retired from banking, and on the afternoon of the very day, he
boarded a merchant ship for the Orient to gather material that he would publish in
1968, Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, with the collaboration of a young
Indologist, Wendy Doniger O’Flattery, where he sought the origin of the European
mycophobia in the importation of an Indo-European mushroom cult, documented
among the ancient Aryans, identifying the Vedic plant-god Soma as Amanita
muscaria. From 1965, when he returned from the Far East, until his death, he lived
comfortably in Connecticut at his Danbury estate, presiding over the controversy
caused by his Soma identification and seeking still further confirmation of its validity.

When it came in the form of John Allegro’s Sacred Mushroom and the Cross,
published in 1970, he didn’t recognize it, much to Allegro’s disappointment. As an
amateur scholar, Wasson deferred to the opinion of professionals. He and Valentina
had always suspected that there might have been a mushroom cult in Christianity,
which would have been the closer and more obvious reason for the European
mycophobia. With that in mind they had visited the little 12th century chapel of
Saint-Éligie de Plaincourault as early as 1952, the year before they re-directed their
attention to Mesoamerica. The fresco in the apse depicts the Tree of Genesis as a
decidedly fungal design, unmistakable even as to species, the red capped Amanita
with its distinctive white scabby remnants of the universal veil shattered as the
mushroom quickly expands with growth. The fresco supposedly dates from 1291,
although there is evidence that it was already there as early as 1184 and was built by
returning Crusaders of the Order of Malta. They also suspected that the Manichaean
fondness for red mushrooms and the Cathar heresy, which flourished in that region,
involved a fungal Eucharist. But the Wassons quickly dropped their inquiry when the
eminent art historian Erwin Panofsky told them that the mushroom-tree was simply
the common depiction in medieval art of the stylized Italian Umbrella pine. Actually,
the art historians were wrong: they are all mushrooms and in entheogenic contexts,
as is the Plaincourault Tree, since a fresco opposite depicts the chapel’s namesake,
the blacksmith Eligius presiding over an initiation for the Elect, thus identifying the
building with a Cathar ritual of psychoactive Communion. Although Wasson dismissed
the fresco, he did so reluctantly, and included it as a plate for his readers’
consideration in the Soma book. Wasson’s father, an Episcopal priest, in fact had
written a book on Religion and Drink, published in 1914, and he made illegal beer
and wine during Prohibition. He never tired of telling his son that Christ’s first miracle
was the marriage feast at Cana and the last was the Eucharist; and Wasson
described his mushroom velada as a Holy Communion. And it was his father who had
first told him about the Soma sacrament. He also delighted in pointing out the most
embarrassing narratives in the Bible.

Allegro, the linguist and scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls, an academic with
impeccable credentials in ancient Classical and Near and Middle Eastern languages,
had already published several books; he had read Wasson’s writings and
appropriately acknowledged them, knew of his Mexican discoveries, accepted his
identification of Soma as the fly-agaric, and obviously had drawn the conclusion that
Wasson was still reluctant to make.

Allegro, the only atheist among the team of scholars working on the Scrolls,
presented his investigation of the mushroom in the Holy Land with the express
purpose of debunking the validity of the Judeo-Christian tradition. He made the error
of arguing that such a visionary Eucharist rendered Christianity a sham, although he
was well aware that Wasson and others were documenting the valid and still thriving
vitality of such sacraments in other religions. The outraged unconsidered rejection
was immediate and vituperative. Two full-length books were rushed into print within
a half-year.  He was essentially stripped of his academic credentials: there was no
proof of any of this, and as far as his critics were concerned, the mushroom didn’t
even grow in the Near East. Allegro was personally devastated by the scornful
rejection of his scholarship. Allegro, who at that time had never experienced a
psychoactive substance, was responding with distaste to the temper of the times with
its widespread random and irresponsible abuse of psychedelic substances, amidst the
turmoil of generational and political transition, which led even Mircea Eliade, the
renowned authority on religion, mysticism, and shamanism, to disavow his own
considerable evidence about shamanism in Siberia and elsewhere and declare that
drugs were characteristic only of the decadent last stages of a cult, affording only
inauthentic hallucinatory communion with the divine. Inevitably, anyone who thought
differently was assumed to have ruined his mind on drugs.

Wasson wrote to Allegro, but never received a reply, presumably because he felt
unfairly rejected. Wasson had just published a letter attacking the book in The Times
Literary Supplement, evidently without reading it, like all its critics finding the
linguistic documentation beyond his expertise. He also felt rejected by Robert Graves,
who had used the famous bas-relief from Pharsalos as the cover for his 1960 revised
edition of his Greek Myths, which depicts the goddesses Persephone and Demeter
each holding a mushroom, probably Amanitas; and Graves should have been willing
to validate Allegro’s descriptions of the orgiastic worship of Dionysus. In his Food for
Centaurs, published in the same year, he proposed what the bas-relief implies, that
the mixed potion of the Eleusinian Mystery contained a psychoactive mushroom. It
was an idea first proposed by Wasson in a lecture in 1956, although he himself shied
away from using the Pharsalos relief as evidence until, as Graves reported, he had
received expert advice, apparently having profited from the Plaincourault debacle.
Despite the fact that they were all on the same track, Graves wrote Wasson in 1972
that Allegro, who had driven home his iconoclastic death of religion argument in The
End of the Road, was a fraud.

My own introduction to the whole affair was first with a copy of The Sacred
Mushroom and the Cross, which I noticed in a bookseller’s window in London, as
Blaise Staples and I were about to buy a car to drive to Greece for a sabbatical year.
The little Volkswagen was stuffed with things to read, the longest English novels,
since they gave you the most for your money, our traveling library, including a copy
of Graves’ standard and intriguing Greek Myths for reference. It is incomprehensible
that Graves, who wrote 140 books, was so ignored by his fellow Classical scholars,
and that his Pharsalos relief was left without comment. Allegro was my introduction,
especially his work on Dionysus, since it dealt with material I was familiar with; his
footnotes to Wasson led me to Soma and the rest, which I might have avoided since
at the time we knew nothing about the Vedic and Mesoamerican traditions or about
shamanism in general.

My work on the material yielded two papers in which I examined what eventually I
could more easily describe as entheogenic consubstantiality, “Botanical Referents in
the Hero’s Parentage,” the fact that deities and heroes share attributes with a sacred
plant, a psychoactive Eucharist; and a paper on the “Madness of Herakles,” which
was caused, as I demonstrated, by botanic agents. Blaise suggested that I send
copies to Wasson. The year was 1976. Almost immediately, I received a phone call
from Gordon; he was coming to Boston and could we meet. We had dinner together,
and as we parted, he proposed lunch the following day at the Harvard Club. And
thus began a decade of friendship, with us visiting him in Danbury, and him us in
Boston and later in the seaside village where we went to live. He had a secretary who
typed up his manuscripts and correspondence professionally, but for his personal
letters he used an old manual typewriter, that produced characters out of line and
partially blocked in.

I think it was for our first visit to Danbury that Gordon proposed that we solve the
Eleusinian Mystery. We met in Schultes’ office, and Gordon introduced us, saying we
were in Greek. Schultes’ hearing was not perfect. “Wheat,” he repeated. “Very
interesting subject.” As it turned out, wheat was what it was going to be. I was
unaware that Graves had slipped into the senile deterioration that would end his life
in 1985 and that Gordon had chosen me as his replacement in Classics. Apparently
he had previously sought out E.R. Dodds, who wrote The Greeks and the Irrational
(1951), but Dodds had maintained a polite distance. The validation of Wasson’s Soma
identification depended his finding mushrooms involved in another ancient religion in
another place where the Indo-Europeans had migrated, parallel to their moving
down into the valley of the Indus River. And Eleusis was the most likely candidate,
since something was eaten and then something was seen. Ideally, it couldn’t be just
a drug, but it should be a mushroom. This was all very abrupt, since I had written
about Dionysus and knew little about Eleusis, since it was a Mystery, and hence, as
Mylonas, the excavator of the sanctuary, declared in 1960, unsolvable.

Later we would drive often to Danbury, but this time we were in Gordon’s car. A few
years later, he gave up driving, although he kept the car, when he was clocked for
speeding and had to engage a lawyer to avoid a citation on his record. He had told
us nothing more about the proposed project, but posed the question, as he drove, “I
suppose you young men have taken all the known hallucinogens!” Not quite, we
demurred.

At dinner we met his housekeeper Ivonne, who would become our frequent hostess,
always talking too much, as Gordon thought, to his guests, and for this first evening,
his children’s old nanny, who was visiting, and Masha, his daughter, a nurse, who
was going to be our monitor. He had barely described what we were going to do,
except that we were going to try the Eleusinian potion. This sounded as though it
might be illegal, and probably was. To prepare ourselves, we should not eat. We
didn’t know who at the table knew what was going on, but sat through dinner
without eating, except for a little curry soup, which Gordon thought wouldn’t hurt us.
When dinner was over, Ivonne said, “Well have fun!” And we left the main house
with Masha and went down to the barn, which had been the previous owner’s art
studio and now was Gordon’s private quarters and library.

In July of the previous year, when Albert Hofmann was visiting, Gordon had asked,
“Whether Early Man in ancient Greece could have hit on a method to isolate a
hallucinogen from ergot that would give him an experience comparable to LSD or
psilocybin.” Albert had supplied the answer and the samples; and we were going to
try it. There were only two dosages, however. Masha would take care of us if
anything went wrong, but there was nothing for Blaise to do. So Gordon proposed
that he take psilocybin.

We ingested our potions, wrapped ourselves in blankets against the cold, and sat by
the fire in the hearth, while María Sabina chanted from the phonograph. Masha sat
in the corner reading the New York Times. The last thing that Gordon said was that it
was the custom for such ceremonies to observe silence; which was obviously an
admonition not to chat. So Gordon and I waited to be visited by the Goddesses. But
nothing happened, as I finally announced about midnight. “Yes,” Gordon agreed,
“most disappointing.” Meanwhile, Blaise, who had ingested a known psychoactive
substance, had hilarious visions of sailing the seas with Odysseus, but dared say
nothing, for fear of intruding on what was obviously our more profound experience.
Masha had retired to bed when it was clear that we were in no danger and we were
alone in the studio—and hungry, as Gordon proclaimed, from our fast. So we
returned to the main house, like thieves, and raided Ivonne’s pantry, feasting on
warm ale and crackers, which was all that we could find.

The next morning when we met in the studio after breakfast, Gordon showed us
Albert’s account of his bioassay; and we decided to proceed with the project,
assuming that our dosage had been insufficient. So we had a drug that didn’t quite
work, and it was up to me to show how it fit the Mystery. Not really an easy task.

But it was accomplished. I learned a lot about ethno-pharmacology and ethno-
botany. And in the years since the first publication of The Road to Eleusis in 1978,
much more has been uncovered and a new version of the argument presents a
clearer scenario for the ceremony and a refinement of the drug involved: not
ergonovine separated from the variable complex of ergot toxins, but ergine and is
isomer isoergine produced by hydrolysis of the toxic ergotamine, commonly
prescribed in sub-toxic dosages as a vasoconstrictor for the treatment of migraines.
Hofmann had experimented with synthesized pure ergot toxins, which differ from the
natural products. The Eleusinian potion was essentially the same as the Ololuihqui or
morning glory extract of the Maya.

The mushrooms so blatantly displayed on the Pharsalos relief are probably not the
Mystery as practiced at Eleusis, hence its provenance from Thessaly in northeastern
Greece. There were Eleusinian sanctuaries elsewhere in Greece. There were,
moreover, two levels to the initiation, and the mushrooms were apparently involved in
the Lesser Mystery, at which the sacrament was reserved probably for a single
person, the woman who went by the title of sacred Queen of Athens, the Basilinna,
who slept, as they said, with the god Dionysus on that date in a bull stall, a metaphor
for shamanic rapture induced by the Eucharist of the “bull” sacrament. That was in
February on the banks of the Ilissos at Agrai, in Attica southeast of the city of Athens;
and a year and a half later, the Greater Mystery was celebrated around the last week
of September. For this, several thousands of initiates each year gathered in the
initiation hall at Eleusis and drank the potion, which allowed them to journey to the
otherworld and resurface in the hall with Persephone at the moment that she gave
birth to the magical son conceived in the realm of the dead. It was here that the
ergot functioned as the psychoactive agent. Ergot, too, is a mushroom, although it is
only the sclerotia or hardened mass of the dried mycelium that is seen in the infested
kernels of grain. Such kernels, however, are like the missing seed of the wild
mushroom; and when it falls to the ground, it sprouts into the characteristic
mushroom-shaped fruiting bodies, recognizable to the naked eye. I remember
Gordon’s enthusiasm when we received Albert’s photograph of the fruiting ergot. We
had a mushroom. And it fit the whole mythopoeia of Persephone’s abduction and
resurrection and the invention of the arts of cultivation. The wheat and barley and
edible grasses.

This should have caused a commotion: a psychoactive sacrament at the center of the
Classical Greco-Roman world: as Cicero claimed, “Among the many excellent and
indeed divine institutions that Athens has brought forth, none, in my opinion is better
than those mysteries.” The greatest minds of antiquity had experienced the same
sort of ecstasy that Gordon had discovered in Mesoamerica: Plato, Socrates, the
dramatists, the leading politicians – for two thousand years. The psychedelic
experience had formed Western consciousness and culture.

For this announcement, Wasson broke his custom and decided there would be no
expensive deluxe edition, but just a trade publication. This should have been more
iconoclastic than all the Tim Learys. There was, however, no Press release, no public
outcry, no rebuttal, no interest; a single tepid review, that, in fact, did not reject the
theory. And when Burkert mentioned us a decade later in his 1987 Harvard lectures,
he accepted Wasson’s Soma identification and actually called the Eleusis argument a
“sophisticated guess,” but misunderstood it, confusing ergotism with LSD, which he
considers an “unpleasant and not at all euphoric state.” And that definitively closed
the subject as far as Classicists were concerned. As Terence McKenna wrote: “The
ideas which the authors brought forth have been largely unchallenged and ignored
by specialists in the culture of ancient and classical Greece. The situation seems to
fulfill the rule of thumb that when ideas are controversial they are discussed, when
they are revolutionary, they are ignored.”

The general public had become frightened by the psychedelic revolution. The same
people who had participated in it were now parents worried about their children.
When Persephone’s Quest was presented for publication in 1986, no press was willing
to take it up, even with the strong endorsement of Schultes, and despite the fact that
all the essays except the first had already appeared in peer-reviewed journals, until
we chanced upon Yale University, where one of the editors had been an enthusiast
since the 1960s; and Wasson did not live to see the final book, which has remained in
print ever since.

The first chapter was Wasson’s final summation. “As I am nearing the end of my
days,” he began, “I will draw up an account of our mushroom quest.” Here he came
back to the question of a mushroom cult in Christianity. “I once said that there was
no mushroom in the Bible,” he wrote. “I was wrong…. I hold that the fruit of the
Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was Soma, was the kakuljá, was Amanita
muscaria, was the Nameless Mushroom of the English-speaking people.”

The original idea that the mushroom cult came into Europe with the northern
migration of the Indo-Europeans must be modified. There was also an obvious
southern transfer along the trade routes from Persia. And the immigrants found the
cult already established among the indigenous cultures, apparently originating from
Africa, where prehistoric petroglyphs from Tassili n’Ajjer depict shamans and hunters
consubstantial with their mushroom sacrament. The same thing happened with the
Conquistadores who found the same heretical sacraments of the European elite in
the New World, but scandalously revealing pagan deities.

Somehow, too, Puharich’s Harry Stone was right. The Egyptians had a mushroom
cult. The mushroom didn’t have to be found growing indigenously; there was a
healthy trade in antiquity, as today, in easily and profitably shipped drugs of all sorts.

And not only did Christianity and the Eleusinian Mystery have a similar fungal
Eucharist, but Classical Greece was in constant contact with the Achaemenid
Persians, and philosophers like Democritus conversed with their shamans or Magi,
whose version of the Soma Eucharist was called haoma. Significantly, the myth of
Christ’s Nativity has three of them arrive on Epiphany to acknowledge their
replacement. If not earlier, haoma was introduced into the West as Mithraism in the
first-century BCE, and became the official cult of the warrior brotherhoods, male
bureaucrats, and emperors, the elite who administered the Roman Empire. Nero was
the first to be inducted with a Eucharist, as Suetonius recorded, of “magical food.” A
seven-stage drug initiation, a version of the Soma/haoma cult, was the foundation of
the Roman Empire, the political structure that created what would become Europe.
With the conversion of the warrior Emperor Constantine to Christianity, Mithras and
the Eleusinian Mystery were replaced by the new religion, which vigorously destroyed
the pagan sanctuaries, often building their churches with the stones of the former
sacred places upon the same sites, merely giving their own interpretation to the same
sacrament. The Basilica of San Vicente in Ávila replaced a nearby Mithraeum. It
blatantly displays the mushroom as the food of the celestial banquet on the
tympanum of its portal, with the portal itself, as always, indicating a distinctly fungal
design, with the opening, either with or without a dividing mullein, suggesting the
stipe supporting the hemisphere of the tympanum as its cap. The tympanum itself is
half of the almond-shape or mandorla that traditionally represents the vulva of the
Goddess, assimilated into Christianity as the gateway to Paradise. Only the elite, who
reserved for themselves the direct contact with deity, would recognize this fungal
design as they passed through the portal to sacred space, but it surely was
intentional, an indication of a heretical version of the Eucharist that perpetuated a
sacred plant involved in the pagan cults that the Church Dominant had suppressed
and in the earliest versions of the Christian rite itself, as preserved in the mosaic floor
of the early fourth-century agape hall at Aquileia, with its depictions of baskets of the
mushroom Eucharist. Well into the Renaissance, the highest echelons of the Church
were still experiencing these visionary sacraments prohibited for the laity.

There were two sides to the psychedelic revolution: the liberals seeking entheogens
to free the psyche and the conservatives seeking to control the mind through the
same substances as drugs. The abuses and excesses of both led to the Controlled
Substances Act of 1970. As indignant parents continue to agitate to place yet another
substance on the prohibited list, the revolution also fueled intense interest in
mythology and comparative religion, as those same people who now are parents
sought guidance for understanding their experiences, propelling books like Joseph
Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces into best sellers. The liberal movement
succeeded with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act 1993, which legalized the
peyote Eucharist of the Christian Native American Church. And just recently, the
Supreme Court of the United States applied the Act to the case brought before the
Justices by the New Mexico branch of the Brazilian Uniao do Vegetal, legalizing their
Christian Eucharist of ayahuasca tea. The Eleusinian Mystery was cited in the brief as
a precedent for an orderly and beneficial religious experience induced by a
psychoactive sacrament. Although this important decision received scant notice in the
Press, it vindicates Wasson’s role as the patrician presiding over the Psychedelic
Revolution.