Huautla de Jiménez has prospered from the visitors who want to experience where the Psychedelic Revolution began. María Sabina is honored as the priestess of the mushrooms. Her name is everywhere in the town. She herself never profited, but her descendants, who neglected her shamelessly in her old age, are eager to pursue the family business. Anyone who wishes can see the pretty pictures, but the true healing ceremony rarely occurs. The town is a viper’s nest of competing shamans.
Wasson, who was a New York banker, precipitated a profound cultural event that came to be known as the Psychedelic Revolution when he published his account of his visionary experience under the guidance of the Mazatec curandera or healer. This led to the widespread use of entheogens as recreational drugs and the colonizing of both the plant substances and the mythical realm described as the empyrean.
I was flying. I went very far. I could see everything illuminated all around. I went higher than the clouds, higher than everything. I realized how beautiful it is to have Light. I kept rising with the sun’s rays. The higher I found myself, I realized that I was going around Señor Sun, the husband of the Moon. I remember that I made seven revolutions around our planet.
—María Sabina
There’s a new road now that goes to Huautla de Jiménez, the mountain village in the northernmost corner of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. When Gordon Wasson first visited in 1953, the journey took eleven hours on horseback from Teotitlán, which was the nearest town on the road system. Wasson went by the name of Gordon, R. Gordon Wasson, since his father had named both of his sons Robert after himself. On that first visit, Wasson witnessed the divinatory ritual performed by a sabio, wise man or shaman, the one-eyed butcher named Aurelio Carreras. It is strange the way that myth becomes reality, since the single eye is emblematic of the paranormal expertise that Carreras claimed to have. The predictions proved to be infallible.
On Wasson’s second visit in June of 1955, he was introduced to Carreras’s mother-in-law María Sabina, a shaman of formidably greater power, and he became the first outsider to participate in the nightlong vigil or velada by ingesting the visionary mushrooms, which had been kept as a carefully guarded secret rite of the Mazatec people.
Life magazine cover. May 13, 1957
Partially as publicity for his forthcoming publication of Mushrooms, Russia, and History, written with his wife, Valentina Pavlovna, Wasson published an account of the experience in the now classic 13th of May 1957 issue of the magazine Life as “Great Adventures in the Discovery of Mushrooms that Cause Strange Visions.” Inadvertently, he launched what has come to be known as the Psychedelic Revolution. Within ten years, Life 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.
At one point in the faint moonlight the bouquet on the table assumed the dimensions and shape of an imperial conveyance, a triumphal car, drawn by zoological creatures conceivable only in an imaginary mythology, bearing a woman clothed in regal splendor. The visions came in endless succession, each growing out of the preceding ones. We had the sensation that the walls of our humble house had vanished, that our untrammeled souls were floating in the empyrean, stroked by divine breeze, possessed of a divine mobility that would transport anywhere on the wings of a thought.
—R. Gordon Wasson
As a professional international banker, Wasson was a most unlikely candidate for this role. He and his wife had started writing the mushroom book 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 footnote had grown until it replaced the book as originally 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 in the Catskills had insisted upon gathering mushrooms, an organic growth that the Anglo-Saxon Gordon termed toadstools, and all of them without exception loathsome and poisonous. Mushrooms escape classification as a plant inasmuch as they lack chlorophyll and are either parasitic or symbiotic on other plants.
During our five-year engagement mushrooms had never come up between us and here she was possessed by mushrooms! I was beside myself. I acted the perfect Anglo-Saxon oaf confronting a wood nymph I had never before laid eyes on.
—R. Gordon Wasson
Persephone’s Quest
Eventually, he came to mythologize the event as Persephone’s quest for the magical plant that opened up the pathways to the otherworld. In the ensuing years of investigation, as Wasson and his wife both pursued their separate careers, hers as a pediatrician, they found that their dichotomous attitude toward the mushroom 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. Siberia, of course, in view of the politics of the time, was inaccessible to them, especially since the communist nation was doing its best to eradicate traces of unassimilated indigenous cultures.
Although Wasson had tried to shield the identity of the curandera under the pseudonym of Eva Mendez, he ended up making María Sabina a ‘hippie’ celebrity and her village a destination for troupes of what are now called ‘narco-tourists.’ Inadvertently, he 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 their 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. Timothy Leary, for example, ate magic mushrooms in Mexico before trying LSD or any other psychoactive substance. This was all played out, moreover, against the backdrop of the Cold War and the interest of the United States government in competing with the Soviet Union for chemical agents for espionage and mind control. The hippie movement became inseparable from the protests against the war in Vietnam and the intergenerational gap of conservative family values and free sex.
Unhappily my explanations of this sequence of personal development were often misinterpreted to mean, “Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity.”
—Timothy Leary
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 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.
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 is now debunked as somewhat of a phony, although the fictionalized account of his Yaqui shaman is a composite of largely authentic phenomena.
Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda,
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 there that he would publish in 1968, Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality. In Soma, he sought the origin of the European mycophobia—a term he coined for the inordinate dread of mushrooms, tracing it back to the importation of an Indo-European mushroom cult, documented among the ancient Aryans. He identified their 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 as the patrician over the controversy caused by his Soma identification and seeking still further confirmation of its validity.
Soma by R. Gordon Wasson
When that validation 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. 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.
I once said that there was no mushroom in the Bible. I was wrong. It plays a hidden role (that is, hidden from us until now) and a major one, in what is the best known episode in the Old Testament, the Garden of Eden story and what happened to Adam and Eve.
—R. Gordon Wasson
Persephone’s Quest
However, as an amateur scholar, Wasson always deferred to the opinion of professionals. Allegro’s linguistic argument was beyond Wasson’s expertise; Wasson was proficient only in French and Spanish. He reportedly gave the book only a cursory examination, and, despite his cultural openness, he would have found the sexual obsession of the fertility cults of the goddess excessive, an opinion shared by many readers. As was his wont, he sought the opinion of two respected friends, a Jewish rabbi and a Catholic monsignor, who assured him that “there was not one single word of truth in the book whatsoever.” This was actually a disappointment, since 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, rather than the archetype of a remembrance from the most distant past. Too late, just before his death, he came to change his rejection of the role of a sacramental fruit in the biblical account of Eden.
Wasson wrote that he was ‘ready for the storm’ for his personally intimidating, yet exhilarating admission, but there was no storm. Nobody cared. Allegro’s book had elicited two full-length rebuttals, rushed into print within a year of his publication. Recently, a lavishly illustrated survey of the Dead Sea Scrolls displays a few photographs of Allegro at work, but not a single mention of the Allegro scandal.
I had always had a horror of those who preached a kind of pseudo-religion of telepathy, who for me were unreliable people, and if our discoveries in Mexico were to be drawn to their attention we were in danger of being adopted by such undesirables.
—R. Gordon Wasson
Persephone’s Quest
Wasson similarly shied away from Andrija Puharich’s investigation into the paranormal aspects of the experience accessed through the visionary mushrooms, even though Wasson had personally affirmed the validity of the entheogen as an agent for clairvoyance and astral projection in an experiment they had arranged. Other members of Wasson’s expedition into the Oaxaca highlands reported similar paranormal experiences. All these events were induced by the Mexican mushrooms, which were Psilocybes, whose psychoactive effect had previously been unknown to outsiders.
Wasson had first met Puharich through Alice Boverie, a New York socialite, who had learned of Gordon and Valentina’s ongoing research for their Russia, Mushrooms, and History 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. With Wasson’s permission, he dutifully passed on the information about Aurelio Carreras to his military associates. As a result, a CIA mole, James Moore, infiltrated Wasson’s 1956 expedition to Mexico, funded 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. 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. The French mycologist Roger Hiem identified them as Psilocybe caerulescens and the psychoactive agent was named ‘psilocybin’.
However, it was a strange event involving the Amanita muscaria that had led Boverie to seek out Wasson. She was a psychic or ‘channeler.’ 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 the Egyptian language nor its art, he became possessed by a persona that they later identified as Rahótep—pronounced Ra ho Tep, a man who had lived 4600 years ago. 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.
The Sacred Mushroom: Key to the Door of Eternity
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 Amanita muscaria, Wasson cautioned him about the pejorative 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.
There were two sides to the Psychedelic Revolution: the liberals seeking entheogens to free the psyche and the conservatives seeking to control the mind by using the same substances as drugs. The abuses and excesses of both led to the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. As indignant parents continued 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 hippies who now are parents sought guidance for understanding their experiences, propelling books like Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces into best sellers.
Dear Mr. Steve Jobs, Hello from Albert Hofmann. I understand from media accounts that you feel LSD helped you creatively in your development of Apple computers and your personal spiritual quest. I’m interested in learning more about how LSD was useful to you.
—Written shortly after
Hofmann’s 101st birthday
Today, the chemical industry is ransacking the cultural heritage of the indigenous peoples of the Amazonian forests for new botanicals, whose constituent agents can be isolated and manufactured, and thereby sold at considerable profit, while even greater profit is generated by the illegal commerce in drugs for recreational use. The empyrean has been commercialized and sacred plants reduced to chemicals, have lost their efficacy as entheogens. Indigenous healers, whose secrets are stolen at the same time that the habitat of the native plants is being deforested, repeat María Sabina’s lament. The outsiders see the pretty pictures, but few are willing, as we will see, to follow the rigorous and physically debilitating diet of plants that can access the true shamanic potential.
Herbal lore of Europe has been secularized. The special rituals for enlisting the spirit resident in the entheogen were labeled as superstition and relegated to pagan witchcraft, even though most plants in the ancient medical compendia have mythical names. As early as the arrival of the priests who accompanied the Conquistadors and the wave of immigration, the healing plants of the indigenous peoples were gathered and classified with proper Linnaean nomenclature. The lore was colonized. The chants that are sung to the spirits in the plants are preserved separately in ethnographic compilations. The chemicals without the resident deity and the ministering shaman lose their voice. They no longer speak. They no longer heal. Cosmic consciousness is now a party drug.
Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness, as we call it, is but one especial type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.
—William James
Varieties of Religious Experience
In the same way, various religions have colonized the empyrean—staked out a territorial claim, offering exclusive access only to their membership, or even more boldly, they have equated it totally with their monotheistic deity. The Psychedelic Revolution sent many of the most creative minds, either physically or spiritually, to the Orient in search for meaning in a religion that defines the territory not as a deity, but as accessible through the guidance of a great teacher. In Europe and elsewhere, the religions of paganism or animism similarly decolonized the realm through polytheistic diversity, where god is seen as one of many modes of channeling the numinous into an array of intercessory configurations, a plurality of numinous entities.
The dilemma of the entheogen, separating toxin from the spirit, is portrayed in the mythical narrative of the hero Philoctetes. He is the man who inherited the poisoned bow and arrows of Heracles when the great hero left this world. Philoctetes took part in the Trojan War, but as the expedition approached the enemy shore, a serpent bit him. The toxins induced uncontrollable spasms of ecstasy and caused his foot to turn gangrenous. His fellow soldiers could not stand the trances, the shouting, and the noisome stench. So they abandoned him. Toward the end of the long-drawn-out war, they learned that they would never take Troy without their rejected comrade. So they sent a contingent of soldiers to steal his bow. Only at the last moment, they realized that the toxins of the bow would be worthless without the bowman. With Philoctetes and his bow, they took Troy, and the bowman was healed of his toxins.