Entheogens suggest the manner of their anthropomorphic or zoomorphic visualization. Mythology has a broad catalogue of creatures that materialize as companions for the psychoactive journey. The journey is not solely the result of expectation or indoctrination. Entheogens have a say in the matter. The plant has a program of its own.
An entheogen may appear as a ‘little soul guide’. In the case of the African iboga, he takes you by the hand in the therapy session, like Marley’s ghost, to view the errors of your past. Visions in the indigenous Bwiti initiatory context are further determined by intense ritual preparation in a temple environment with topographical symbolism. After the ceremony, the candidates are quizzed as to the nature of the visions. If they are not the correct ones, the ceremony will have to be repeated. The initiates see a procession of dead ancestors, withered and white as ghosts.
People who have taken some of the psychedelic mushrooms that were used in Middle America have told me that they begin to have images that resemble those of the Aztec gods. Certain psychedelics produce images of this type; others produce images of another type.
—Joseph Campbell
The Hero’s Journey
Salvia divinorum commonly materializes as a female, la hembra, both to the indigenous Mazatec shamans and even to outsiders. The lady is Mother Salvia. She is dubbed ‘Sally,’ shy and modest and speaks with a quiet voice. She has been assimilated to Christianity as the Virgin Mary, but identified as a shepherdess, la pastora. This is not an attribute of the Virgin and indicates a Pre-Conquest persona. She appears wise and imparts knowledge for personal growth, but also can be angered if consumed without due reverence or when combined trivially with other intoxicants beneath her status.
Traditionally, due respect requires abstinence from sex and alcohol for a period of days both before and after the consultation. The preparatory abstinence may make chemical sense, but reportedly infringing upon the ban within the proscribed period after the experience, even just with sex, can have dire consequences. This cannot be explained rationally as a side effect of any medicine.
After only a few minutes I feel my friend Iboga come back and say, “We’re really not through yet. I have many more things to say.” Then the face of this black man in his 50s with a brown beard, brown thick coat and a staff kept appearing to me. I didn’t understand a word; it might not have been English.
—Patient using ibogaine
for addictive relief
There are several candidates for salvia’s Aztec name. One is called ‘the noble prince,’ pipilzintzintli. Such a title obviously implies an honorific anthropomorphism. Often Mazatec shamans do employ other plants with the lady and these materialize as members of her family: the ‘male,’ the ‘child,’ and the ‘godson.’
With ayahuasca, the visions are most often of serpents, pumas, and jaguars, even in an urban setting and for people alien to Amazonia. The anthropologist Michael Harner reports that giant reptilian creatures materialized to him, complete with a mythological scenario of their identity as extraterrestrials, who came to earth to escape an enemy in outer space from whom they have hidden, disguised within multitudinous animal and botanical life forms on this planet.
Similarly, Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff reports that the Desana indigenous tribesmen of the Amazon basin trace descent from ancestors who arrived in canoes shaped like huge serpents; and they depict the human brain with two snakes lodged between the two hemispheres. These serpents symbolize the male and female principle, like the caduceus of Hermes; and more broadly, these serpents can be any oppositional binary dichotomy, which must be mediated to achieve individual awareness. The serpents are imagined as spiraling rhythmically in a swaying motion from side to side.
Commonly DMT—the visionary chemical in the ayahuasca potion—materializes as a personified inner voice or other, who is a transpersonal guide toward total fulfillment or wholeness. Adepts dub it the ‘DMT elf,’ a gnome-like, playful and usually friendly creature. These elves can multiply into groups of little dancing beings. Often the guides take on the guise of little insect-headed aliens, homunculi, perhaps from outer space. Such extraterrestrial fantasies are a component in the theology of Scientology.
On the basis of firsthand experience—both my own and that of persons who were with me in sessions—I can testify that the seeing of felines also occurs in urban contexts which are distinctly non-Amazonian.
—Benny Shanon
The Antipodes of the Mind:
Occurrence of these little creatures or of specific shamanic animal familiars may be influenced by expectation. An African plant should have an African guide; or an Amazonian plant, an animal powerful in the indigenous shamanism of the jungle; but people who experience them seem to feel there is more to it than that. Albert Hofmann self-experimented with the Psilocybe mexicana mushroom, knowing full well their Mexican origin, but try as he might, he could not escape an Aztec scenario for his experience, complete with a vision of himself about to be sacrificed by the priest.
Labyrinth Humanoid
Onset of the visionary state is often heralded by brain-stimulated geometric imagery, entopic visualizations arising from the human anatomical optical system itself, in which the eye is viewing the flow of blood in the retina and visual cortex. These designs or frets are called grecas because they occur on Greek vases, probably as an indication of visionary experience, but they predate Greek civilization, going back to the 5th millennium BCE. Cave paintings sometimes draw the frets within the body of human figures, so that the greca becomes an anthropomorphized hallucination. A beautiful Mayan exemplar represents the figure of a ‘humanized labyrinth’, which probably served as a focus for intense meditation and visualization in an initiatory ceremony.
Shamans claim that they can communicate with the indwelling spirit of animate plants or entheogens. According to them, that is how they discovered that a plant with DMT must be combined with another that supplies the MAOI inhibitor. There are a variety of such plants, but they do not grow naturally together and there is nothing about their physical appearance that might suggest combining them. Discovery through trial and error is unlikely. María Sabina discovered the mushrooms by herself at the age of seven while tending goats, with no instruction from her mother and totally without knowledge of their role in Mazatec shamanism. Her mother had made a conscious effort not to tell her about the mushrooms since she thought that her daughter was too clever and would get into trouble. If the plants have a specific language that speaks to the inspired herbalist, it is probable that the animate plant’s spirit or its indwelling deity also has a typical appearance.
María Sabina, age 7, discovering mushrooms
One morning, as was my custom to accompany the goats in the field, one of them got away from the rest. I had to go after it. It was then that I discovered the mushrooms, like hard flowers. I decided to put them in my mouth so as not to have any doubts about them…. [She shared them with her sister.] Those little things made us feel good; we sang, we danced, and we whistled, and later we cried.
—Juan García Carrera
La Otra Vida de María Sabina
Some initiation candidates report seeing the ultimate basis of life, the double helix of the DNA, intertwined as two serpents. As we have mentioned, this has been stylized since Classical antiquity as the caduceus of the messenger god Hermes. It is an emblem with strong entheogenic significance since it symbolizes both the medicinal toxins and the ability to travel between worlds. Such a trip may even imply the alternation of sexual identity. Shamanic initiation is often experienced as accessing the opposite sexual persona, commemorated by the acquisition of a corresponding suit of clothing. The illiterate María Sabina in her shamanic chant declared that she had balls and was learned like a lawyer.
The vision of the DNA is comparable to Dmitri Mendeleev’s discovery of the periodic table of the elements in a daytime moment of dreaming while playing something like solitaire with a modified deck of cards representing the elements and listening to chamber music being played in the adjacent room. The music aided him to slip into a trance state of lucid dreaming, in which the musical scale suggested the arrangement of the elements into octaves. This basic pattern can be traced back to the Greek Pythagoras, who envisioned it while listening to the hammering of a blacksmith. The music of the blacksmith is probably a motif of mythologized history, like the role of the blacksmith in the last meal of the Buddha, and suggests the alchemical theme of the volcanic crucible. Mendeleev was a founding member of the Physical Society and dabbled in spiritualism and mysticism, investigating whether it had any scientific basis. Earlier in the 1860s, the English chemist John Newland had proposed a similar arrangement of the elements as octaves, but the Royal Chemical Society rejected the idea as Pythagorean mysticism.
Shamans talk with plants and animals, with all of nature. This is not just a metaphor. They do it in an altered state of consciousness. In the Amazon, shamans know the various plants and the songs that go with the plants, which they commonly learn from the plants themselves.
—Michael Harner
The Way of the Shaman
Mendeleev was the grandson of an Orthodox priest, and as a chemist, he was continuing in the science that was still called alchemy in the previous century. His mother ran a glass factory after the death of his father. The glass foundry was an essential industry for manufacturing the vessels used in alchemy. The Periodic Chart actually demonstrates how lead could be transmuted into gold, but with such a tremendous expenditure of energy that the transformation would be economically unfeasible.
Alchemy had an obsession with numbers, and God was seen as the divine geometer in creating the perfection of the cosmos and of man in His image. The mystical significance of the Pythagorean octave had passed into Christian traditions. As the only cubed number—2x2x2—of the decade, eight suggested the Trinity. There were eight days between Christ’s entrance into Jerusalem on the ass and the Resurrection; and by the magical technique of gematria, where every letter is assigned a numerical value, the name of Jesus yielded 888, which is to say a trinity of eights. The octagon is the traditional shape of the baptismal fount and of the baptistery. In early Christianity, baptism was experienced as a psychoactive transcendence, reflected in the spiraling design of the traditional baptistery.
In early Christianity, baptism was experienced as a psychoactive transcendence.
The octave is the essential pattern of DNA, which transmits the molecular information governing life and evolution as 64 bits of code, which is to say, the square of eight. The same pattern has been influential in other fields. The Croatian electrical engineer Nikola Tesla invented the generator of alternating current after a series of visions where he saw that the cosmos obeyed the law of octaves. The architect Buckminster Fuller developed the geodesic dome based on the ‘co-ordinate system of the universe’, specifically on the octaves of Mendeleev’s Periodic Chart. Interestingly, Timothy Leary, unaware of the precedents, applied his theory of the eight circuits of the nervous system to his space-age interpretation of Gnostic revelation.
Some entheogens, like the Amanita muscaria, induce oscillating alterations in the perception of size: micropsia and macropsia, seeing things too small or too big. The latter can give one the impression of suddenly flying closer to a distant object.
This phenomenon was popularized in Lewis Carroll’s description of Alice’s encounter with the blue caterpillar in Wonderland sitting atop a mushroom, smoking his cannabis hookah. He tells her that one side of the mushroom will make her shrink smaller, the other grow taller. Wonderland is peopled with a menagerie of helpful or disturbing anthropomorphic creatures, and the entire scenario is an adventure of self-discovery through an underworld journey. It is probable that the author modeled the whole tale on ancient religious mystery initiations to please Alice’s father, who was a renowned Classical scholar.
In the myth of the hero Hercules’ encounter with the pygmies, he was so exhausted after his battle with the giant Antaeus that he fell asleep. When he awoke, the little creatures that were the brothers of the giant had tied him down. This is the source of Jonathan Swift’s account of Gulliver and the Lilliputians. The giant Antaeus is the model for Swift’s Brobdingnagians. The original title of the work was Travels into Several Remote Nations.
Caterpillar using a hookah and seated on a mushroom in Alice in Wonderland
Later ancient writers identified the pygmies with the short Ethiopian tribesmen, making them the length of a forearm or pygmé, but the pygmé is also a fist and the creatures of myth were much smaller, only as big as the fingers of such a fist. Hercules had apparently fallen into a drunken trance, since the little creatures used ladders to climb up into his drinking cup, and they were so small that they used needles for spears. Their relationship to their brother the giant implies that the whole heroic exploit was another instance of Hercules on a drug trip, encountering the guides who materialized as the size-shifting anthropomorphized mushroom.
Antaeus derived his power from contact with the earth. The only way to defeat him was to lift him up and hold him away until he withered like a plant. The early 1600 folktale of Tom Thumb is an indication of the longevity of these fingerlings. A hundred years later, Henry Fielding made him the hero of a tragical History of Tom Thumb the Great.
These mythical miniscule pygmies were the soul guides in various ancient religious mystery initiations. They were depicted as playful creatures, definitely not the length of a forearm, and characterized by their enormous erections, with the penis as the equivalent for an additional leg or foot. Another name for them was dactyls or ‘finger-men.’ The ‘finger’ is a common euphemism for the penis, as are also the ‘leg’ and the ‘foot,’ so that the Old Testament even refers to urine euphemistically as ‘foot water.’ Traditionally, the tiny creatures materialized in pentads, groups of five, like the digits of the pygmé or fist. Their relationship to their brother the giant implies the fantasized gigantism of the aroused penis, as well as the perceptual dualism of the drug-induced experience and the magical alternation in the size of the penis.
To one who has eaten them, the little saints appear as tiny beings the size of playing card kings. The sacred mushrooms, when consumed under the proper circumstances and in the right number, put one in a trance whereupon little men known as los Señores emerge and deal with the problems that concern you.
—R. Gordon Wasson
The Wondrous Mushroom
The dwarf of the Mayan Uxmal pyramid complex is a version of the great plumed serpent Quetzalcoatl, and both are materialized from the Amanita muscaria. The divine serpent was also a bird, and laid an egg from which the dwarf hatched. His foster mother was a shaman and found and tended the egg. It was this dwarf who built the Pyramid of the Diviner at Uxmal.
The Greek heroes themselves were portrayed as dwarfish black pygmies on the enormous double-handled drinking cups employed for administering the entheogenic potion for certain of these mystery initiations. This means that the hero or initiate became consubstantial with the toxic plant or plants that materialized as the pygmies.
Similar pentads or groups of five are the corybants, named as little helmeted dancers. They first materialized from the fingers of the earth goddess as she grabbed the ground in labor. They were interchangeable with another group called ‘boys’ or kuretes. They danced ecstatically around her and clashed their spears to hide the cries of her newborn infant. As dancers characterized by their dome-shaped helmet, they, too, are personified mushrooms, lascivious and equally phallic, like the little finger-men. They also were guides in mystery initiations.
There was an old woman who lived in a hut. She went mourning that she had no children. In her distress, she one day took an egg, covered it with a cloth, and laid it away carefully in one corner of her hut. Every day she went to look at it, until one morning she found the egg hatched and a creature or baby born. In one year it walked and talked like a man; and then it stopped growing. The old woman was more delighted than ever, and said he would be a great lord or king.
—John Lloyd Stephens
Incidents of Travel in Central America
Like all of these creatures, they were associated with the netherworld volcanic forge of the god Hephaestus/Vulcan, whose metallurgical expertise implies the art of spiritual transmutation later known as alchemy. They were often interchangeable with the Cabiri, who were originally from Egypt, little penis men, better known as Bes, the creator god, a favorite of the ladies’ bed, a squat knock-kneed dwarf, bearded with a swollen head and prominent genitals. These tiny creatures were known as the Great Gods.
Bes says, ”Make me a temple just a forearm high!” The deceased says, “Are you not a giant seven times taller? How could you enter a temple so small, but that is what you did.”
—Egyptian Pyramid Text