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July 22 - December 25, 2018
By the early 1970s, when I went to college, everything you heard about LSD seemed calculated to terrify.
Each of us develops our shorthand ways of slotting and processing everyday experiences and solving problems, and while this is no doubt adaptive—it helps us get the job done with a minimum of fuss—eventually it becomes rote. It dulls us. The muscles of attention atrophy.
Presented with a bouquet of roses that 2006 day in Basel, the scientist told the assembled that “the feeling of co-creatureliness with all things alive should enter our consciousness more fully and counterbalance the materialistic and nonsensical technological developments in order to enable us to return to the roses, to the flowers, to nature, where we belong.”
“Doctors encounter this strange and colorful state of mind in patients suffering from advanced hepatic, renal, or pulmonary disease, in which toxic products accumulate in the body and do to the brain and mind just what LSD does,”
Key
Mazatec Indians had been using “the flesh of the gods,” in secret, for healing and divination since before the Spanish conquest.
Stamets had invited me up to his place in Washington State, on the Little Skookum Inlet at the base of the Olympic Peninsula. I asked him, gingerly, if I could come at a time when the Psilocybes were fruiting. “Most of them have already come and gone,” he said. “But if you come right after Thanksgiving, and the weather’s right, I can take you to the only place in the world where Psilocybe azurescens has been consistently found, at the mouth of the Columbia River.”
To go
Jonathan Ott delivered a brilliant lecture on the history of “entheogens”—a term he helped coin. He traced their use all the way back to the Eleusinian mysteries of the Greeks, through the “pharmocratic inquisition,” when the Spanish conquest suppressed the Mesoamerican mushroom cults, and forward to the “entheogenic reformation” that has been under way since R. Gordon Wasson’s discovery that those cults had survived in Mexico.
At the time, LSD was not well known outside the small community of medical professionals who regarded it as a potential miracle drug for psychiatric illness and alcohol addiction.
The headline is the first known reference to “magic mushrooms,” a phrase that, it turns out, was coined not by a stoned hippie but by a Time-Life headline writer.
“Was it not probable that, long ago, long before the beginnings of written history, our ancestors had worshipped a divine mushroom? This would explain the aura of the supernatural in which all fungi seem to be bathed.”* The logical next question presented itself to the Wassons—“What kind of mushroom was once worshipped, and why?”—and with that question in hand they embarked on a thirty-year quest to find the divine mushroom.
Wow
Nahuatl word for the mushrooms—flesh of the gods—must
As a Mazatec Indian told Wasson, the mushrooms “carry you there where god is.”
On his third trip to Huautla, he had persuaded María Sabina, a sixty-one-year-old Mazatec and a respected curandera in the village, to let him and his photographer not only observe but take part in a ceremony in which no outsider had ever participated.
In a neat but somewhat idiosyncratic hand, he kept meticulous track of the time that night, from arrival (8:15) to ingestion (10:40) to the snuffing out of the last candle (10:45). After that, the handwriting disintegrates. Some sentences now appear upside down, and Wasson’s descriptions of what he felt and saw gradually break into fragments: Nausea as vision distorted. Touching wall—made the world of visions seem to crumble. Light from above door and below—moon. Table took new forms—creatures, great processional vehicle, architectural patterns of radiant color. Nausea. No photos once the
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To read Wasson is to feel as if you were witnessing the still-fresh and malleable conventions of the psychedelic narrative gradually solidifying before your eyes. Whether Aldous Huxley invented these tropes, or was merely their stenographer, is hard to say, but they would inform the genre, as well as the experience, from here on. “For the first time the word ecstasy took on real meaning,” Wasson recalls. “For the first time it did not mean someone else’s state of mind.”
Wasson concluded from his experience that his working hypothesis about the roots of the religious experience in psychoactive fungi had been vindicated. “In man’s evolutionary past . . . there must have come a moment in time when he discovered the secret of the hallucinatory mushrooms.
As much as he wants us to see María Sabina as a religious figure, and her ceremony as a form of what he calls “Holy communion,” she saw herself quite differently. The mushroom might well have served as a sacrament five hundred years earlier, but by 1955 many Mazatecs had become devout Catholics, and they now used mushrooms not for worship but for healing and divination—to locate missing people and important items.
As Sabina told an interviewer some years later, “Before Wasson nobody took the mushrooms only to find God. They were always taken for the sick to get well.”
WASSON’S ARTICLE IN LIFE was read by millions of people (including a psychology professor on his way to Harvard named Timothy Leary).
journeys for which Wasson supplied the mushrooms. (He had brought back a supply and would conduct ceremonies in his Manhattan apartment.)
An exhibition on magic mushrooms soon followed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
:)
It didn’t take long for thousands of other people—including, eventually, celebrities such as Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Mick Jagger—to find their way to Huautla and to María Sabina’s door.
Thousands of these stones were smashed by the Spanish, but two hundred are known to survive, and Stamets owns sixteen of them. Most of the surviving stones have been found in the Guatemalan highlands, often when farmers are plowing their fields; some have been dated to at least 1000 B.C.
The mushroom had been growing a stone’s throw from our yurt, right on the edge of a parking spot. Stamets says that like many psilocybin species “azzies are organisms of the ecological edge. Look at where we are: at the edge of the continent, the edge of an ecosystem, the edge of civilization, and of course these mushrooms bring us to the edge of consciousness.”
I found four little caramel beauties on my own. Not much of a haul, but then Stamets had said that even just one of these mushrooms could underwrite a major psychic expedition.
That evening, we carefully laid out our seven mushrooms on a paper towel and photographed them before putting them in front of the yurt’s space heater to dry. Within hours, the hot air had transformed a mushroom that was unimpressive to begin with into a tiny, shriveled gray-blue scrap it would be easy to overlook.
After nightfall, we had driven out onto the beach to hunt for razor clams by headlight; now we were sautéing them with onions over the fire.
“And azzies have one potential side effect that some people find troubling.” Yes? “Temporary paralysis,” he said matter-of-factly.
What, if anything, did this peculiar chemical do for the mushroom? One could construct a quasi-mystical explanation for this phenomenon, as Stamets and McKenna have done: both suggest that neurochemistry is the language in which nature communicates with us,
Cool
Beug is in charge of gathering mushroom-poisoning reports for the North American Mycological Association and over the years has seen accounts of horses tripping in their paddocks and dogs that “zero in on Psilocybes and appear to be hallucinating.”
Eaten in small doses, psychedelic mushrooms might well increase fitness in animals, by increasing sensory acuity and possibly focus as well. A 2015 review article in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology reported that several tribes around the world feed psychoactive plants to their dogs in order to improve their hunting ability.
In a book called Animals and Psychedelics: The Natural World and the Instinct to Alter Consciousness, Samorini hypothesizes that during times of rapid environmental change or crisis it may avail the survival of a group when a few of its members abandon their accustomed conditioned responses and experiment with some radically new and different behaviors. Much like genetic mutations, most of these novelties will prove disastrous and be discarded by natural selection. But the laws of probability suggest that a few of the novel behaviors might end up being useful, helping the individual, the
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Samorini calls this a “depatterning factor.” There are times in the evolution of a species when the old patterns no longer avail, and the radical, potentially innovative perceptions and behaviors that psychedelics sometimes inspire may offer the best chance for adaptation. Think of it as a neurochemically induced source of variation in a population.
Homo sapiens might have arrived at one of those periods of crisis that calls for some mental and behavioral depatterning. Could that be why nature has sent us these psychedelic molecules now?
acute danger of slipping the surly bonds of plausibility.
I think they have a consciousness and are constantly trying to direct our evolution by speaking out to us biochemically. We just need to be better listeners.”
Indeed alas
“I no longer feel that I am in this envelope of a human life called Paul Stamets. I am part of the stream of molecules that are flowing through nature. I am given a voice, given consciousness for a time, but I feel that I am part of this continuum of stardust into which I am born and to which I will return at the end
Let the depatterning begin.
Alex Grey’s wacked painting of the stoned ape, with the tornadoes of thought flying out of his hairy head.
Alexander von Humboldt, the great early nineteenth-century German scientist (and colleague of Goethe’s) who revolutionized our understanding of the natural world.
Humboldt believed it is only with our feelings, our senses, and our imaginations—that is, with the faculties of human subjectivity—that we can ever penetrate nature’s secrets.
The modern conceit of the scientist attempting to observe nature with perfect objectivity, as if from a vantage located outside it, would have been anathema to Humboldt. “I myself am identical with nature.”
“Everything,” Humboldt said, “is interaction and reciprocal.” They could see this dance of subjectivities because they cultivated the plant’s-eye view, the animal’s-eye view, the microbe’s-eye view, and the fungus’s-eye view—perspectives that depend as much on imagination as observation.
She told me her mind and her body seemed to be drifting apart and then that her mind had flown out of her head and up into the trees, like a bird or insect. “I need to get home and feel safe,” she said,
desultory sounds of flying insects and the digital buzz of hummingbirds rose to form a cacophony I had never heard before. It began to grate on my nerves, until I decided I would be better off regarding the sound as beautiful, and then all at once it was.
when I started to feel panic rise at the lack of control I had over my visual field, I discovered that all I needed to do to restore a sense of semi-normalcy was to open my eyes. To open or close my eyes was like changing the channel. I thought, “I am learning how to manage this experience.”
When at last I arrived at the writing house, I stretched out on the daybed, something I hardly ever took the time to do in all the years when I was working here so industriously.
Daybed yes get one red a la matrix morpheus
A plant’s-eye view of the world—it was that, and for real! But the leaves were also looking back at me, fixing me with this utterly benign gaze. I could feel their curiosity and what I was certain was an attitude of utter benevolence toward me and my kind. (Do I need to say that I know how crazy this sounds? I do!)
:)
I felt as though I were communing directly with a plant for the first time and that certain ideas I had long thought about and written about—having to do with the subjectivity of other species and the way they act upon us in ways we’re too self-regarding to appreciate—had taken on the flesh of feeling and reality.
The idea that there had ever been a disagreement between matter and spirit seemed risible,
Neither disagreement nor distance
