One of the things that’s so striking about shamanism in the native context is the absence of mental illness, the absence of serious neurotic patterns of behavior. This is because this translinguistic reality is allowed to work its will through shamanism, is allowed to regulate the society. In other words, our model of how society works is that we are at war with nature and we must push it back, seize a beachhead, fortify our position, dig in — these kinds of metaphors, metaphors of capture and control — while the shamanic approach is that we must communicate with nature in order that nature can communicate with us, in order that we may know what should be done. Shamanism as classically practiced is hunting magic, weather magic, healing magic. In other words, ways of getting into the evolving of state-bound system-patterns within nature. Weather, we would presume, can to some degree be predicted by looking at past weather states. Hunting can to some degree be predicted by looking at the migration and movement of game in past situations. So shamanism then becomes a kind of mnemonic exercise, where by keeping track of what has happened you can build up a model of what will happen. Originally this was done through great mnemonic feats of memory, like the Yugoslavian folktale singers or the Homeric epics or the people who sang the Edda. These were works of hundreds of thousands of lines that were passed down virtually without change over millennia.


There’s a strange phenomenon, at least in the evolution of cultures and perhaps more generally, which is that every step into freedom contains within it the potential for greater bondage. Here’s an example of what I mean by that: women in charge of the gathering phase in hunting-gathering cultures developed language, I believe, because they had great need of the ability to make fine distinctions. In other words, here you have 50 grasses, small herbs, shrubs, roots, fruits, berries, seeds, inflorescences. Some of these things are poisonous, some of these things are foods, some grow in the spring, some in the fall, some along the river courses, some on the hilltops, so forth and so on. A great many descriptive dimensions come to bear on this, so consequently I think that women are to be held responsible for the evolution of language, in order to discuss the extremely important matter of what is good to eat and what is not, where do you find it, how do you preserve it, what do you combine it with and so forth and so on. Men, on the other hand, who were in charge of the hunting — because of the different body type and bladder capacity and so on — the premium there was placed on silence, stoicism, being able to stalk and for days make no noise, possibly, and to just sort of integrate into this silent kind of thing.


This same kind of freedom which binds occurred in the shamanic effort to steer culture by mnemonic means, because eventually even the greatest of the shamanic memory artists were overwhelmed by the amount of data, by the size of the epics, by the sheer length of these genealogies, so then symbolic notation is brought in. Shamanism turns into scribecraft, signifying magical forces turns into writing down their names, and there is a tremendous binding, a compression, a limitation of freedom because the strategy of freedom became too successful. This reaching beyond ourselves is a process that is continuous. We transcend a state, we then lock ourselves into the transcendant state, it becomes defined by its own set of limitations and we move beyond it. This kind of bootstrapping mechanism has been at work throughout the evolution of language, throughout the evolution of shamanism.

Now we have come to a similar kind of bind having to do with the bankruptcy of analytical analysis and rationalism, which has lead us to a pretty complete mastery of inert matter, but when pushed into the quantum realm, suddenly contradictions begin to multiply and impossible conclusions force themselves upon the investigator. What this means is that rationalism has simply reached its limit. There is no reason to think that it doesn’t have a limit. It was just the inflated fantasy of the 17th century that thought that God’s mind must work like the mind of a watchmaker. In fact, what with chaos theory and catastrophe theory and numerous other non-equilibrium partial differential processes in nature, we now know that nature is extremely unpredictable, highly variable, not subject to analytical understanding except in very limited domains.


This understanding that quantum physics has brought the physicists and that the psychedelic state has brought the people who pursue that has not fed back into the mainstream of society. We’re still living in a male-dominated, object-dominated, subject-other kind of world model, a world model inherited from the 18th century even more than from the 19th century. Well, is it going to kill us? Is it too late? What can we do about it? This is what I talked about last night, about the archaic revival as the notion of making a sharp left turn away from the momentum that the historical vehicle wants to follow, which is thanatotic, don’t kid yourself. You cannot have three religions stacked up on top of each other, stretching back 4,000 years, pursuing this monotheistic vision which ends in an apocalypse without building a tremendous morphogenetic predilection for the apocalypse.


Our demonic investigations into matter have lead us to create the machinery to produce the apocalypse. It was interesting, somebody said of the Reagan administration — this was when James Watt was running around saying that we didn’t have to save the trees because Jesus was coming anyway, so it didn’t matter — someone said, “The jerks want to be in the Bible”, and that’s precisely the historical situation, the jerks want to be in the Bible. In other words, every petty potentate from Frederick Barbarossa to Ronald Reagan has secretly believed that they were living in the time of the Antichrist and would participate in the scenario of the Book of Revelations. I mean, this is psychosis if you meet it in a person; if you meet it in a culture it’s called religious piety and conviction. It has been going on so long that it has actually created a very narrow neck in the historical process that cannot be avoided. We now have no choice in the matter of business as usual; there will not apparently be business as usual. There will either be an apocalyptic destruction of the planet, a kind of Ragnarök, a Götterdämmerung, a complete storm of fire brought on by the eruption of the psychotic mythologies that have driven the matter-centered, monotheistic, male ego culture, or there will be a plucking of victory from the jaws of that defeat, and not an apocalypse but a kind of cultural millennium, a complete breaking out of the pattern into something else.


Some of you may know Riane Eisler’s work The Chalice and the Blade. If you haven’t read this book I recommend it to you — for psychedelic people, for feminists, for people concerned with the state of society, this is certainly an important book. What she’s saying is that it is not true that the story of the human race is the story of a pendulum swing between matriarchy and patriarchy, each with its own flaws. Rather it is that human beings have always lived in an equilibrium style partnership society, except that during the last 8,000 years this pattern has been disrupted by the rise of the male ego, the suppression of the Logos-like connection to nature and a certain evolutionary path taken in the epigenetic coding of information, in other words, the phonetic alphabet. The phonetic alphabet, which has no reference to the icon of the things expressed, is utterly cool, utterly unable then to give you any feeling of engagement with what is being described. This gives permission for analytical science and the detachment of rationalism and the sorts of philosophies that have created the tremendous split between head and heart that characterizes the political systems of the last several hundred years.


This thing which the shamans are contacting, which we can call another dimension, hyperspace, the collective unconscious — whatever it is, it is the ground of our becoming. The only way to unhitch ourselves from the ego is to open pathways of communication to this invisible field of intentionality in which we are embedded. This is a very difficult task because the culture in which we live denies that this thing even exists. If you start saying that you feel the heartbeat of the planet, or that you are in resonance with the local ecosystem, or still worse, if you say that you hear the voices of elves and fairies, this is automatically psychosis. You have to be observed, sedated and cured because you are participating in a model of reality that is not consensually validated. Nevertheless, I think that what we’re trying to do with meetings like this is empower this particular meme, empower this idea. I can’t remember who developed the idea of memes, but it’s basically the notion that ideas compete with each other the way animals and plants compete in an ecosystem, that ideas adapt and spread, occupy niches, defend territory and redefine environments, and so my mention last night of the woman who said to me, “I thought I was crazy until I heard you speak,” for me that is really the nugget of this work and the most satisfying kind of comment that anybody could make.


What has happened since the 1960s is that the straight people all went off together — and by this I don’t refer to sexual preference, I use “straight” in the earlier sense — they all went off and became very weird together, with their golden Mercedes and their Picasso ceramics and all that. The freaks all went off and became strange alone, each apart in our own way, because community was shattered, affinity groups were suppressed, people went all kinds of directions. Now the people who went through the ‘60s, approaching or in their 40s, have had 20 years to see how they like that kind of alienated aloneness, and so this morning as we went around I heard many people saying that they had done these things in the ‘60s, but not for a long time, and now they were returning to it. I think this is because it finally dawns on you that this may be the only shot you’ve got at it. Reincarnation is fine, past lives are fine, but we’re all getting daily older and we don’t know where we came from, what lies beyond the zygote, and we don’t know where we’re going, what lies beyond the pine box. Who can say?


Out of the incredible mystery of whatever the universe is, a microsecond of opportunity against impossible odds has sprung into being. We are embedded in that moment of opportunity, so what are you going to do with it? Are you going to sweep up around the ashram for 30 years and then decide that that was a mistake, or are you going to just give yourself over to the arms of holy mother Church for a lifetime? I mean, people do this. You cannot escape making some kind of commitment to something. Nobody gets through life without being asked to sign up, either in their own club or somebody else’s. The mushroom said to me once, in the way that it does when it delivers these aphorisms, it said, “You must have a plan. If you have no plan you will become part of somebody else’s plan. You either have a plan, or you are part of somebody else’s plan.”


I think people are waking up to the fact that we must use what works. When we went around the room someone talked about yoga and how the psychedelic gives the experience on demand, but are we ready, and how do you gain skills? This sort of thing. To my mind, the goal is not the psychedelic experience, the beginning of the path is the psychedelic experience. So if yoga promises that after 20 years it will deliver you to the beginning of the path, then there’s something seriously wrong here. The psychedelic sets you at the beginning of the path and then people do all kinds of things with it. I am amazed; I feel there is more variation in how we deal with this than in almost any other phase of human activity, because some people seem to have almost no self-reflection. I’ve noticed that it also touches sexuality. I don’t know how many of you have ever encountered the Penthouse Forum, but this is where people write into Penthouse and detail these


is where people write into Penthouse and detail these astonishing, unpredictable sexual exploits — threesomes, foursomes and twelvesomes that just fell upon them — and whenever I have some occasion to read these things, what is amazing to me is that these appear to be descriptions of the behavior of an alien species. There is no self-reflection on, “What does this mean?” “What does this mean that I get stuck in an elevator and end up copulating with twelve stockbrokers?” It’s just accepted as how it is. Well, you get this same thing with psychedelics, someone says, “Oh yeah, in the ‘60s I took psychedelics. Wow, it was really strange, all these colors and voices,” and apparently there is no self-reflection, no realization that this is actually happening to you. This is happening to you; therefore the implications must be fairly central. Then other people immediately get it, they say, “My gosh, this plant, this pill shows me that reality is at least a


this pill shows me that reality is at least a thousand times larger than I thought it was. It showed me that I don’t know who I am, where I am, what I am, or anything else.” I don’t know what it takes to instill that in people, maybe intellectual self-reflection.


One of things that is so puzzling about shamans when you actually deal with them in the field is that they are not like the other people in the tribe. The other people in the tribe are very tribal people. In other words, they have all the curious cultural limitations of people in every culture. They think you smell funny, they think you look funny, everything you do is amusing, they stand around in small groups giggling and pointing. The shamans, on the other hand, are nothing like that. They accept you totally as a person. They make no cultural judgments — you don’t look funny, smell funny, so forth and so on — because they are what I call extra-environmentals, they are deconditioned from the assumptions of their own culture. So they may be the Witoto shaman, but the Witoto shaman is less Witoto than any other Witoto, because the Witoto shaman operates in the context of Witotoness embedded in the larger reality.


I think what we need to do when we try to revivify shamanism in our own lives is to recover the profound reality of what it’s doing. Sometimes I have flashes when I’m giving these talks of how different it is to be stoned than to talk about being stoned. I mean, here we sit in our cotton underwear, with our schedules in front of us; the mundaness of it is so all-pervasive. We could be discussing Gnosticism or a political action project, but we’re discussing instead something really appalling, I think. We’re calmly discussing the fact that there is another world overlapping our own and very few people will even admit the fact. I always think of a wonderful B-movie I saw when I was a kid where there’s a dinosaur in the swamp, and it’s set somewhere in Mexico, and the typical campesino is sent by the patrón of the ranch to gather firewood in the jungle, and he of course encounters this extremely large rubber reptile roaring around, and then comes back to the ranch and is pointing back in the woods, and is completely inarticulate trying to say, “A creature from the id, a beast from another dimension is rampaging around in the forest.” They just dismiss him as, “These peasants, they believe anything. You can’t trust them for a moment.” This is the sort of situation we’re in.


The extraterrestrial invasion that so many people anticipate, or the extraterrestrial contact that so many people hope for and that sells so many cheap newspapers is well under way. It’s simply that the words we have to describe it are utterly inadequate. So words like “extraterrestrial invasion,” “contact with an intelligent species,” “end of history,” “migration into hyperspace,” these are pathetic signifiers of what is actually happening to us. What is actually happening to us is pretty darn hard to wrap your mind around. We are caught in a vortex of concrescence and compression that was set in motion at least as early as the melting of the last glaciation. We are reaping the fruits of 10,000-50,000 years of sowing of the fields of mind. It is being dropped into our laps for us to create human-machine interfacing, control of genetic material, redefinition of social reality, reengineering of languages, re-visioning of the planetary ecology. All these things fall upon us, and for us to be worthy of it, for us to make sense of it, for us to be anything other than victimized by the 20th century, we need to reach back into time and to anchor ourselves with the transcendent mystery which is somehow tied up with our own being, somehow present on the planet, but mostly a large list of unanswered questions.

We don’t know what is going on on this planet. We don’t know why there is life here, whether it’s an accident or somebody’s plan. We don’t know why intelligence is here: again, accident? Plan? If plan, whose plan? If plan, for what? If plan, where are we in the plan? We all tend, when we abandon ourselves to cultural values, to focus in so tightly that we lose the big picture, and if psychedelics are anything, they are a zoom lens back to the broadest possible point of view.


Audience: I was curious about what you were talking about with extraterrestrials and not having the appropriate language to really discuss it, and your view of what’s going on.

It changes for me all the time. I don’t have a point of view, and my primary job is not public speaking or writing, but exploring. When I first started taking mushrooms, and throughout the ‘70s when we wrote the Mushroom Grower’s Guide, I held several opinions, but my most strongly held opinion was that it actually is an extraterrestrial. Just no shit, flat out, it is an extraterrestrial. What’s surprising to me is that a single mushroom trip of a certain sort could probably put me right back there again. Getting it worked down to Gaia, or the Overmind of the species, is a kind of process of coming down from the real unassimilable context of the experience. It’s like an extraterrestrial. I would certainly say this: if extraterrestrials appeared over Washington and Moscow tomorrow it wouldn’t make this any less mysterious or puzzling. In fact, the extraterrestrials might turn out to be mundane; this is not. It speaks: this is the most astonishing thing for me to get used to. I mean, the visual hallucinations, somehow I can work it around that these are floods of imagery set off from deep structures of the brain and dumping of memory banks, but that it can just address you in real time and say, “Terence…” and then proceed to blow my mind.


Now, several things may be happening here. The only time when we have the experience of focusing on an incoming message, decoding it in real time, and responding to it immediately is when we have a conversation with someone. So if you find yourself responding to a message in real time, your brain automatically thinks you’re having a conversation. “If it looks like a duck, if it walks like a duck, it must be a duck. So here I am, listening and responding to someone speaking to me in English, therefore this must be a conversation.” There are physical arguments for viewing the mushroom as extraterrestrial. First of all, what is psilocybin? Psilocybin is O-phosphoryl-4-hydroxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine. Of all the indole compounds in nature, only psilocybin is hydroxylated at the 4-position. If you were to design a computer program to search the life forms of earth for evidence of extraterrestrial origin, one of the things that you would tell this program to do is look for unusual molecules that have no apparent cousins or relatives among other organisms. Well, here is psilocybin, hydroxylated in the 4-position. Nothing else on earth is; a material argument for its origin outside of the terrestrial ecosystem.


A slightly different argument that would see the mushroom as extraterrestrial is to look at its style, for want of a better word. What is a mushroom? First of all, they reproduce by spores. Spores are the most economical biological unit imaginable. They can survive the radiation levels of interstellar space. They can survive for aeons under conditions very close to those encountered in deep space. The mushroom spore falls into an ecosystem and it immediately undergoes cell division; a fine, thread-like network full of neurotransmitters begins to spread itself through the soil. It’s very closely analogous to the neural network of a higher animal, including a human being. We’re accustomed to thinking that an extraterrestrial would bear the imprint of the evolutionary situation in which it came to be. In other words, if it evolved on a low-gravity planet it will be tall and thin, if it evolved in a methane atmosphere it will have an exotic body chemistry and so forth, but that’s because we ourselves have possessed the knowledge of how DNA works for only about 40 years. It’s reasonable to assume, I think, that if an intelligent species gets 1,000 years of study of DNA that they can design themselves to be however they care to be. In fact, if you think of the mushroom from that point of view, I think that we might chose that kind of an adaptation if we could have any form we wanted, because it’s very non-invasive, very humbly insinuates itself into a situation and grows essentially on waste material in the soil, yet when it sporulates it can actually cross the boundary of outer space.


Great economy, great artistry, tremendous Zen-like aesthetics seem expressed in the mushroom if you view it as a designed piece of work rather than an object in the environment. Then finally, of course, the major argument for the extraterrestrial origin of the mushroom — but it’s an insider argument — is the content of the experience. Number one, it says it’s an extraterrestrial organism and it has the data to back up the claim. It can show you movies of desert worlds, jungle worlds, high-pressure, high-gravity, methane worlds, planets whose cores are helium-4, worlds where you don’t know whether you’re inside an organism or inside some kind of piece of machinery, whether you’re under the surface of a planet, literally things where our minds just stop in the presence of. To me, that’s really the interesting thing about the mushroom. It can be as friendly as it needs to be and can even reassure you with a Disneyesque burlesque of dancing flowers and pirouetting pink elephants, but once you are comfortable with it, and enter the dialogue, and begin to get to know it, getting to know it is an appalling experience. You can say to it, “Show me a little more of who you are for yourself,” and then a veil is lifted and your jaw just drops. Then you say, “Show me a little more of who you are,” and, “That’s enough of who you are for yourself!”


Then you wonder, while this thing is talking to me, how engaged is the mushroom by me? Is all of its attention focused upon me when I’m talking to it the way all of my attention is focused back on it, or is it like a multi-user computer system, is it able to simultaneously deal with huge numbers of organisms? What is the relationship of psilocybin to the inner life of the mushroom? Is it stoned all the time? Why is it so important that these indole compounds get lodged in the nervous systems of mammals? It’s almost as though it’s a symbiotic relationship, that the mushroom does not truly live its life unless it is taken, unless its unique molecular component can find its way into the synapses of a self-reflecting higher animal. Then what are we for for it? You can ask these questions.


One reason why I think people have had trouble confirming the animate and intelligent quality of the mushroom is that you must ask. You just don’t take psilocybin and sit there because it won’t do it, but if you take psilocybin and call it in some sense, whatever that means — invoke, call, try to visualize — then it will begin to come toward you and lift these veils, and this world of zany, pun-like, hyperdimensional intelligence that is revealed is as strange as an extraterrestrial would be. This is, I guess, the final content of evidence for the extraterrestrial origin, the fact that it just seems so different from anything one could conceive of or imagine. I mean, you cannot, in one of these volleys of hallucination, convince yourself, “This is only me, these are my memories, or these are distorted transforms of past experience.” I was trained as an art historian to have an eye for stylistic difference and cohesion of a set of aesthetic canons, and it just blows my mind. There is more art locked up in these things to be viewed in a single hour than the human race has produced in 10,000 years, art of a compelling, weird, breathtaking, awesome quality that just breathes in every pore of itself, “This is the Other, this is not you. Don’t be deceived, my little primate friend.”

Audience: This thing about popular culture digs into that, because if you look at the movies that came out between 1952-1962, how many of those sci-fi movies were about spores from outer space and plants coming down? These were from very straight people who hadn’t taken psychedelics at all; maybe they were tuning into what was about to come 10 or 15 years later.


Well, I think, and I am so far as I know pretty alone in this opinion, that a very small percentage of information is able to tunnel backward through time, that there is a very small counterflow to the forward movement of causal efficacy. One of the things that shamanism is about is going into that hyperdimensional place and picking up this thin signal from the future and tuning it in. This is why prophecy and seership and all of that has to do with states of ecstasy and intoxication. One way of viewing all religion and all spiritual metaphor-making is as an anticipation of the future. These Western religions have these apocalyptic transformations built into them almost as a self-fullfilling prophecy, in other words, they believe that the world is going to end because the world is going to end. Since the melting of the glaciers, people of sufficient sensitivity have heard through a vast wall of stochastic noise coming from the future the thin, reedy broadcast station of the true vision of the future.


This seems to be one of the things that you can do with these psychedelics, tune this in. It’s a cliche, and I’m sure you’ve heard it, that artists are society’s antenna for change, that artists are supposed to be somehow more sensitive than the rest of us and they pick up the new design forms, the evolving aesthetic canons and then translate it into society for the rest of us. Well, that gains a little more bite if you substitute shaman for artist, and realize that this may not be a metaphor, it may not be simply because they pursue bohemian lifestyles and are willing to accept poverty for a life of free thinking and so forth. That isn’t what’s allowing an anticipation of the future; what’s happening is that there truly is an anticipation of the future. Visionaries like William Blake or the author of Revelations are actually people who, by virtue of some fortuitous confluence of circumstance, space, time and genetic constitution, are able to draw these messages out. What is startling is that apparently this is fairly ordinary in psychedelic states, that in fact one way of thinking of psychedelics is that you begin to move through time when you put them into your life. I don’t mean while the trip is happening, I mean ever after. If you’re living with a 1960s style mind and you have a strong psychedelic experience, you will come down with a 1970’s mind, or perhaps a 2040 style mind. Mind is a temporal style, it’s like clothing. This is what McLuhan understood, you see, that we dress ourselves out of the closet of ideology.


“Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space,” that we’re living in. We, as a culture, must conventionalize and believe that today is whatever it is, November 5th or 6th, 1988, but some of us are living in the 21st century and some of us are living in the 18th century. The goal is to try to move all this forward. It’s funny, certain themes that have emerged in the Western mind are, in fact, very psychedelic. One of them is the notion of progressivism, which is a pretty Western idea and quite psychedelic. It’s the idea that things are getting better, or that things can get better. Most societies look backward toward a paradigm of a past paradise and all effort is toward recovering this paradise. We are the only people who have this faith in progress, and it’s quite strong in us, so strong that we barely question it. I remember the first time I was in Karachi, Pakistan, I was being hauled around the city in a rickshaw drawn by a guy with bare feet. It was a human-powered machine, and he spoke English and we were scoring hash and this and that and we got to know each other, and he said, “In Pakistan we understand what is wrong with the world,” and I said, “So what’s wrong with the world?” He said, “Progress, that’s what it is! We have to stop progress!” which for me was quite a revelatory idea.


This thing about time, though, is very interesting and operates on many different levels. Ultimately, I think what the psychedelic experience may be is a higher topological manifold of temporality; that the reason it is so puzzling and so familiar, so alien and so exalting is that it is, in fact, mundane. It is in fact just us, but us sectioned through some higher spatial dimension. If, for instance, you think about magic for a moment, let’s think about the major identifiers of the magical act, such as psychic surgery, where your hand is plunged through the wall of the body cavity of a human being and a tumorous organ is taken out and no wound is visible. A typical form of folk magic, much discussed, I’m sure you’re all familiar with it. Another form of magic, stage magic in this case: a word is written on an envelope, the envelope is locked in a box and the blindfolded magician is able to tell the audience what the word is in the envelope in the box. These things are miraculous and we cannot conceive of how they could be done, but if you allow the possibility of a higher spatial dimension, then these things become trivial because it means that the body is open. There is a way that, from the point of view of this higher spatial dimension, the inside and the outside of the body are on the same side, so no problem is posed by removing this organ. Likewise, from the point of view of a higher spatial dimension the locked box is open on one end, the end that is intersecting that dimension, so the way you read the message is you just go over and look, it’s completely trivial.


A way to make this cogent for people who are now thoroughly confused is to recall Edwin Abbott’s fantasy Flatland, where he imagined a world of two dimensions where a house was what in our world is what’s called a blueprint, and that was all you needed, and you could live in the blueprint, because you could walk in and once you had closed the door, no one in Flatland could come through that blue line and get at you. Of course, to those of us in three dimensions, we just lean over and look at the blueprint and put your thumb on the inside of the Flatlander’s living room. From his point of view, from out of nowhere an enormous thumb has magically appeared in his living room. Well, this shows how perfectly mundane situations on one level appear to be absolute violations of natural law on another level. This is happening very much in the psychedelic experience, because the mind is the cutting edge of the evolving event system.

Audience: Can you talk a little bit about the idea of the period that we’re in with the apocalypse as some kind of transformational event, and how your experience in altered states has lead you to believe or feel that there is some hope for changing that?


I think it’s clear that we’re in a race between apocalypse and breakthrough. I suppose breakthrough is the dark horse. Everything seems to be set up to favor apocalypse, it has the inside track, although very few people would own up to saying that they personally would want to die. So why is it, if none of us really want to die, why is the overwhelming global cultural image one of inevitable catastrophe? I’m very optimistic, I really think history was for a purpose. I would not have not had it; I think it was useful and that we must have learned something very important. What we learned that was so important, I’m not sure, but probably when we need it we’ll have it. Maybe we need atomic weapons because a large object will be detected hurtling toward earth, and if nature had not split off the monkeys 100,000 years ago and evolved intercontinental missile thermonuclear weapon delivery systems that we could use to destroy that asteroid, then all life on earth would die. So what appears to us as madness, our own dedication to the release of larger and larger amounts of energy for no purpose other than to destroy ourselves, is suddenly rescued from pathology and shown to be this tremendously foresightful thing: “Thank God we did this, because otherwise we’d all be dead and everything else would be dead.” I don’t seriously believe that, but I do think that we must have learned something very, very important.


Perhaps cybernetics come in here; perhaps this exoskeleton of mnemonic material that allows us, essentially, to freeze and record our entire culture. Everything is going into the databanks. One way of thinking about what’s going on is compression of information, and history represents a compression of information magnitudes more accelerated than the evolution of life. Then 20th century history represents an even greater information compression, information finally compressed to such a degree that it’s like the singularity inside a black hole. A black hole has at its center a place where the equations don’t sum, in other words where it doesn’t make any sense. The only conclusion you can reach is that at that point of so-called infinite compression or singularity, another universe bursts into being somewhere else in a greater and vaster cosmology, and then the energy equations balance. It’s as though mind is undergoing this kind of gravitational collapse, and information is being compressed to such a degree that eventually it will not all fit in the present, and then the information begins to move off into the only dimensions available to it, which are the past and the future, exactly as you fill a glass with more water than it can hold. Once it has more water in it than it can hold, the water begins to flow down to the sides and out into the larger domain; and so I think that people who try to use history, which are usually male egos and male-dominated institutions, are actually tremendously frustrated. We don’t see it that way because to us it looks like they win every battle because they win every election, but because they win every election, it is their job to manage this situation. It’s a case of, “You want it? Here it is!” and they have not a clue as to how to manage it. Their thing is all about the headaches of ownership; our political point of view is pretty much about the headaches of disenfranchisement.


I think that there is some kind of event ahead of us in time, on the order of 20-40 years, that is casting an enormous shadow back through the lower-dimensional slice of being which we call history, so that religions, mystical visions and the visions of revolutionary leaders are a response to flickering intimations of this transcendental object that is pulling intelligence out of the organic matrix of life on this planet in a process that is occupying 50,000-100,000 years. It’s extremely unusual what’s happening. A process that creates a series of self-transforming bootstrapped steps in a period of 100,000 years means it’s a unique kind of phenomenon, there’s never been anything like it on the planet. What it is leading toward is hard to say, but I know that its values are the values of life, connectedness, primacy of experience, and caring, and it is using the historical process to wire us all together in some way. Control mechanisms are spreading through the society at an enormous rate.


One of the horror fantasies of the 1950s — when this conservative, straight, crew cut point of view was really at its height — one of the fears of the future that people would just toss off off-handedly was that in the future machines would take over and run everything, and this notion of the control of the planet wrested from the sure hands of noble human beings and instead betrayed into the power of calculating automatons was a great science fiction theme of the ‘50s. It’s interesting how impartial computers are. They are not ideologues, they are managers, and remember, I said that the struggle was between the shaman manager and the ideologue politician. So I think that the cybernetic matrix is a tremendous tool for feminizing and radicalizing and psychedelicizing the social matrix. I see computers as entirely feminine. People have a reaction to this because they think that, because men spend a lot of time around them and seem obsessed with them, that somehow it isn’t feminine; but men have always been obsessed with the feminine. I think it was D.H. Lawrence who said, “What life is really about is men keeping women from ever suspecting how truly obsessed we are by them.”


I think that this linking-together, feminizing, cybernetic thing is part of the anticipation of this object at the end of time. What seems to be happening is that we are all flowing together. We keep talking about unity, globalism, completion: well, you’re going to get what you ordered. I think what it means is that probably the dear individual — which, don’t be fooled, is a soft description of the male ego run rampant — the democratic individual, the citizen, this notion is in fair peril to be replaced by “the person,” which is a much more nubbly kind of concept. The person is not an interchangeable part, the citizen is. The citizen is a model of society based on the industrial revolution of the 18th century, but the person is a harking back to a pre-print model. This is being set loose; it’s what the hippies were, essentially. What they were trying to evoke was this “do your own thing” idea, but there’s a paradox here: the “do your own thing” idea is somehow leading to this vectoring toward a unified cultural state where everybody is involved in everybody else. It’s alright that it’s paradoxical, because there’s no reason that it should be reasonable.

Audience: I wonder if you could address the difference between the LSD experience and the mushroom experience, if there is a difference, and also your feelings about marijuana as an altered state.


I speak only from my own experience, of course, but to me the LSD experience seemed more psychoanalytical than psychedelic. I mean, I was in my early 20s when I encountered LSD, maybe I had more “stuff,” as they say, to deal with, but it was not a reliable visionary drug for me. It caused me to have funny ideas; it seemed mostly to be a thought thing, but not a visual thing. Somehow in my education, somewhere along the way I had picked up this bias in favor of the visual channel, so I wasn’t satisfied with LSD. I wanted those things that Havelock Ellis describes, “Jeweled ruins and phosphorescent maidens in diaphanous gowns, howling demon songs beneath a violet moon,” not funny ideas. I worked pretty diligently at it with LSD and I found that my most satisfying LSD experiences were while smoking hash, and that then really did do something interesting with it, it sent it skittering off in these wonderful visionary directions. These things do have characters, and this is something probably worth talking about in this group. At low doses, everything seems like everything else. In other words a little mescaline, a tiny amount of LSD, a little bit of MDMA, a tiny tad of psilocybin, all of these things simply register as wired, arousal, eager to hear what’s being said and follow the thread of the argument and absolutely fascinated by what’s going on, no matter what’s going on. As you raise the dose, the character of these things begins to appear.


For instance, psilocybin is, to my mind, in many ways the most anomalous, because, number one, this thing about how it speaks; it does speak. None of the others do. The others, you may occasionally in years of fiddling get a sentence or two, but the mushroom is just voluble, it just comes on and raves, and people have said to me, “It really does rave!” It’s not a calm, go-with-the-flow rap, it’s a rap about planetary destiny and the next ten million years and the last ten million years. It’s this trumpet blast, Cecil B. DeMille, hyperreal rap. Then something like ayahuasca, which is this thing that these shamans use in the Amazon basin that’s based on DMT and monoamine oxidase inhibitors, you take that and it’s about the rivers and the jungle, and these people and their humility and dignity, and your humility and dignity, and the earth, and plants, and life, and water and sunlight.


and plants, and life, and water and sunlight. It’s this totally earth-bound, terrestrial, life-affirming thing, and it does not speak. It’s an eye, and its language is visual, and after an ayahuasca trip you just feel like your eyes are literally bulging out of your head. I mean, you’ve spent 6 hours looking, not really doing anything else but looking. Then something like datura has this watery, magical, forgetful, kind of witchy, occult quality. It’s shadows, shadows, and a peculiar quality of erosion of your own attention. No matter who you are, you find yourself wandering through empty colonnades under a sky pregnant with the possibility of rain. It’s this strange de Chiricoesque kind of landscape. DMT has another quality, it seems to convey you into a world of utter outrage where all linguistic, sensory and analytical machinery is just brought to a screeching halt.


It’s important to learn what you like and to learn what you can put up with. I said to someone at a recent weekend who takes mushrooms quite religiously and quite regularly, “Does it ever get easier?” He said, “No, it never gets easier. Each time what I pray as I go into it is, “Please let me be able to stand a little bit more!”” Finally, it is the real mystery, so the only way your relationship to it can end is by you averting your gaze, because no human being can gaze into it endlessly. It is what it says it is, it is the Other.

Audience: I just want to follow up on that question a little bit. Stan Grof describes LSD as a non-specific amplifier, and by that he means it amplifies that which already exists in the psyche. He uses this metaphor that LSD serves as a sort of a telescope or microscope, in that itself it does not produce the experience, but it enables you to have an experience that is already there in potentia, latent in your psyche. I was wondering if you could comment on that, since you just described the various psychoactives as having a character. So would you disagree with his framework, or would you say that the various telescopes are tinted with a certain lens? How would you reconcile that?


Well, at the beginning of your question you characterized LSD. It’s that it is a non-specific amplifier, but of the contents of the personal unconscious and the sensorium. What people notice about LSD is either what’s right or wrong with themselves, or how freaky the world is. A bug, a drop of water, it can be anything, but you discover the strangest things on LSD and they’re real things: relationships of reflections and windows… It basically seems to be a tremendous amplifier of attention and analysis of the input of attention when directed into the outer world, and when directed into the inner world it’s an analytical tool for looking at the past history of the individual, which is what I call the personal unconscious. The thing that always puzzled me about enthusiasts of LSD was that they claimed that beyond this lay what they call “the white light,” which they put great store by, and put all kinds of Buddhist associations to it. I don’t know if I’ve ever had the white light experience. As I go deeper into strong psychedelics what happens is that multiplicity proliferates; there is not a simplifying, there is a further and further complexifying. I was talking to someone at Ojai Foundation about this and they said, “But surely, beyond all this there is some kind of simplification and unity,” and I said I wasn’t sure, that maybe it’s just an infinite samsaric ocean in all directions and all dimensions forever. Ketamine comes closer to providing a no observer, nothing observed kind of state, but you can’t do much with that. You can have it, and there is, of course, with the dropping of all boundaries, a feeling of release.


What I am interested in is bringing back artifacts to share with the tribe, and I’ve accepted that they will come in the form of either things that can be painted or things that can be said. Since I’m better at the saying than the painting, I work like that. Stan is a good friend of mine, we’ve talked about this over the years. I just can’t confirm his maps of the psyche, I don’t see those states occurring along a continuum the way that he says they do. I think it’s much more chaotic. If his categories work to facilitate psychotherapy then that’s good, because that’s what he’s interested in. In other words, I see his maps as very, very provisional and useful for navigating but I doubt that when we get the final maps, if we ever do, that they will bear terrifically much resemblance to that. I think he would agree with that; we’re not at loggerheads about this. Anybody who works with psychedelics, their ultimate position is that, “Hell, we don’t know.”


This afternoon I thought we would do some operational homework and academic referencing. One of the most important things about all of this that we’ve been discussing is to get the information straight, to be as well informed as possible. It’s as important to be well informed in this area if you’re going to do it as it is to be well informed about procedures in skin diving if you’re going to do that. What I thought I’d do at the beginning of this afternoon today, apropos of this idea that people should inform themselves about what’s going on — though you can’t find out everything, you can find out a lot more than most people know. It’s amazing to me the number of people who would pay a couple of hundred bucks to come to a weekend with a person like myself to learn about psychedelics, when a couple of hundred bucks would get you quite far in a bookstore, and the public library is a marvelous resource for this stuff.


I hauled some titles off my own bookshelf and I’ll go through them, this is by no means all. I simply chose books that I thought were either important to the field or that I felt would be fairly easy for someone to obtain if they wanted to look into these matters. This one some of you may know, this is probably the easiest to obtain and the most compendious. It’s Plants of the Gods by Richard Evans Schultes, who is professor emeritus of botany at Harvard. This is basically the distillation of his life’s work. It’s filled with pictures, it has all kinds of information arranged in this kind of table form where you can look up a plant, get a notion of what it looks like, what family it belongs to, what its chemical constituents are and so forth, and it has a very good bibliography and chemical appendix. So this is around and highly recommended. If you want to go slightly deeper than that book goes, this is the academic version of the same book, this is The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens. This is the bible of this field. It lists virtually the state of the art circa 1980, and it has a compendious bibliography. This book, though it’s from an expensive academic press, is highly recommended. If you had to have just one book on hallucinogens, this would probably be the one to go for. It’s also by Richard Evans Schultes and Albert Hofmann, who some of you may know as the discoverer of LSD and the man who first characterized and synthesized psilocybin.


From a slightly more countercultural point of view, this is the revised edition of the Psychedelics Encyclopedia by Peter Stafford, who some of you may know. Again, this is an effort to be compendious. No one of these books should be taken as gospel; you want to get it from several different sources before you conclude any given fact as true. This book is published by Tarcher in L.A., I think this is a fairly easily obtained book. This is the 2nd edition and he’s going to do a 3rd edition, and he’s very good about keeping up on the literature. This is an interesting book.


Then for those of you who are more inclined to pharmacology and neurophysiology, this is a fairly hard book to obtain but in a way it’s never been surpassed. It’s called The Hallucinogens by Hoffer and Osmond, and there was never a revised edition after 1965. It discusses a lot about LSD and psychotherapy, and also has all kinds of strange information that was never again mentioned in the literature, that was just sort of dropped out. You can read here, for instance, about the hallucinogen dimethylacetamide, where you drink 8 fluid ounces a day for 5 successive days, and then the onset of hallucinations begin that are supposedly quite spectacular; it’s just that the notion of drinking 8 fluid ounces of this bizarre chemical compound is not too appetizing. Then for sort of the state of the art in one book is Solomon H. Snyder’s book Drugs and the Brain, and it doesn’t simply address hallucinogens, it talks about all kinds of drugs. It explains the mechanism of drug activity, the notion of the lock-and-key activity of the drug molecule to the synaptic cleft. It gives you a short, basic course in neurology, and Sol Snyder is one of the giants of psychopharmacology, Albert Lasker Award winner, so forth and so on. Here’s another book somewhat along the lines of Snyder’s book, this is one of the most recent books written on hallucinogens. The editor is Barry Jacobs, Hallucinogens: Neurochemical, Behavioral and Clinical Perspectives, and as my brother said, “All of the uninteresting perspectives are covered here, very thoroughly and in detail.”


What these books are good for, besides whatever they say, is that they contain excellent bibliographies, so tracing a particular problem you go to these books and then they direct you to the journal articles that give you what you want to know. Most of the literature of psychopharmacology is in journals which you will never, as a layman, encounter unless you go to medical libraries and attempt to see these things, things like Lloydia and Acta Neurologica and the Journal of Psychopharmacology. Some of these journals cost as much as $200-300 a year to subscribe to, so if you don’t want to do that, the bibliography directs you to the articles you need, and you just go to the med library and xerox them out.

This sort of bridges the gap between pharmacology, sociology and anthropology. This is Brian du Toit, Drugs, Rituals and Altered States of Consciousness. Let me see if I can make a quick identification here. I think this is actually Banisteriopsis rusbyana, which is a rare admixture plant that contains DMT but has the lanceolate leaf end which distinguishes it from Banisteriopsis caapi. Probably could do 10 years for the book. The publisher on this one is a weird one, Balkema of Rotterdam, so it’s a Dutch publisher.


Then sort of moving out of the realm of pharmacology and psychology and into the specifically anthropological stuff, this is one with a number of various contributors, Alternate States of Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives on the Study of Consciousness, edited by Norman Zinberg of Harvard. This deals not only with shamanic drug usage but the heroin subculture, and a number of different things. Urban drug cultures are discussed as well. It’s mostly a sociological perspective here. Moving into the more specifically anthropological stuff, here’s my favorite one. Before he got into drumming, Michael Harner edited this book, Hallucinogens and Shamanism, Oxford University Press, available in paper. A number of writers contributed to this, there are about four articles on ayahuasca that you just will not find anywhere else, articles on peyote, a wonderful article by Henry Munn called The Mushrooms of Language, just a classic article on mushrooms. This is highly recommended.


A sort of similar book by a different author is Flesh of the Gods: The Ritual Use of Hallucinogens by Peter Furst. He’s an anthropologist who made his reputation among the Huichol in Mexico. This has articles by Wasson, Furst, Doug Sharon, William Emboden, Fernandez, Reichel-Dolmatoff, the usual names in this ethnobotanical field. This is a specific guide, Hallucinogenic Plants of North America by Jonathan Ott. The interesting thing about this is that it’s pretty compendious, meaning that there are things discussed here that you just won’t find discussed anywhere else, probably because there are so few hallucinogenic plants in North America. This guy really had to scratch to produce a book about it, but this is useful for that. Similar but more broadly-based is this book Narcotic Plants, terrible title, by William Emboden. This book has a lot of visuals in it. Why I value this book is because he has a more liberal definition of psychoactivity than most people do, so consequently his species lists are longer than anybody else’s. If somebody asks you about an obscure plant — is it psychedelic or not? — this is where I look first, because he seems to list many things that nobody else has ever discussed. He teaches at Cal State; some of you may know him, I don’t.


Here’s another one of these anthologies of writing about psychedelics, also by the same author as Flesh of the Gods, Hallucinogens and Culture by Peter Furst. Again, this has articles on mushrooms, on the discovery of LSD, on ayahuasca, on cannabis and tobacco, the biochemistry of consciousness, shamanism as the ur-religion, so forth and so on. It seems like every one of these authors then goes on to edit a book of their own favorite essays. Here’s another one, Hallucinogens: Cross-Cultural Perspectives by Marlene Dobkin de Rios, who is a woman who has done a great deal of work on ayahuasca. She published a book called The Visionary Vine and another book called Ayahuasca: Mestizo Curing in an Urban Setting. Basically a sociologist, she’s also at Cal State.


This is sort of the granddaddy of all of these anthologies, a very interesting book, hard to get but fascinating. It’s called The Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs, and it was the name of a conference that was given in San Francisco in 1967. The plan at the time of the conference was to have it occur every year, but it never occurred again because of course everything was made illegal the next year and this faltered. To show you to what degree the government was of two minds about psychedelics, it says on the frontispiece of this book, “Sponsored by the Pharmacology Section, Psychopharmacology Research Branch, National Institute of Mental Health, United States Public Health Service, U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare,” and it was published at government expense. This is in fact a technical publication of the National Institute of Mental Health. Wonderful bibliography, extremely interesting discussion of DMT-containing snuffs, an article on the psychopharmacology of nutmeg that you just won’t find anywhere else, articles on kava and an article on the history of research into psychedelic plants that goes clear back to the medieval herbalists. The last time we were in the Amazon we christened our expedition, in honor of this book, The Ethnopharmacologic Search for Cold Beer; because there ain’t any, and it becomes an obsession. It’s so strange what you miss. I don’t even drink beer, so what do I care? After ten days in the jungle, all anybody could talk about was the possibility of cold beer, and it was still four weeks away, so…


Then for somebody who really is serious, or technical, or plotting an expedition or a research project of some sort, this is really a pretty amazing book. It’s dull as death, because it’s essentially listings from the herbarium sheets at the Harvard Museum Botanical Library. It was put together by Siri von Reis Altschul, who was one of Schultes’ graduate students, along with Ara DerMarderosian and Marlene Dobkin de Rios, some of the few women who have made significant contributions to this field when it was firmly in the hands of dominator male types. Anyway, this book is called Drugs and Foods from Little-Known Plants, and they’re not whistling Dixie when they say “little-known plants.” You look through this and some say “hallucinogen” or “reported hallucinogen,” and this touches foods, one of the things that’s not part of our concern here. One of the things that’s so frustrating when you do ethnobotany is to realize that people can be starving in environments where there are many food plants, but they don’t utilize the food plants because they’ve accepted the values of a capitalist economy. Because the foods cannot be trucked to market or have a short shelf life, they are called “pig food,” and nobody will eat it. Time and time again in the tropics, I would come upon a plant that I knew to be edible and proteinaceous, say to my informant or guide “What’s the story on this?” “Food for pigs, people don’t eat it,” but you know they are buying canned tuna fish and spam from the priests at the mission. So this is a way in which people’s folklore and folk heritage is distorted.


Then a book by a good friend of mine, and if any of you are interested in ayahuasca, or plan on going to South America where you may encounter ayahuasca, this book, Vegetalismo: Shamanism Among the Mestizo Population of the Peruvian Amazon, this is a lovely book. This is about the people that I spent most of my fieldwork time with. You just cannot read this book without coming away with a sense of the depth and complexity of the ayahuasca worldview: its healing classifications, the power allies, the admixture plants, the magical songs. It’s by Luis Eduardo Luna, who I know has lectured and shown his films here at CIIS. He’s an excellent person, a very good friend of mine, to my mind probably the person doing the best anthropological work on ayahuasca in the world right now. The publisher, in case you want to try to track this down, is Almqvist and Wiksell International, Stockholm. If any of you are just dying to have this book, order it from Lux Natura, we have three copies left.


This is the last one that I was going to mention, because this could have been the title of our weekend. This is Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered by Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar. Lester Grinspoon managed to find his way into Herb Caen as a name freak when he published a monograph on the dangers of excessive cocaine use. Basically, this is a very reasoned presentation of why psychedelics should be reconsidered for therapy, the case for them, the case against them, the nature of the hysteria that placed them off limits. He has also written Marijuana Reconsidered, and is a very nice person and leading the fight to decriminalize drugs for research. So that’s all the books that I brought in to show you; they are, as I say, by no means all. The only resource that I would mention for the serious student of these things that I didn’t bring in is: nobody should try to deal with this subject without being aware of what’s called the Harvard Museum Botanical Leaflets. These are a series of leaflets that have been published since the ‘30s by the Peabody Museum in Boston. So write to the Harvard Museum Botanical Garden and say you want a list of the leaflets. They cost between $1-4 a piece. They deal all of Schultes’ papers; all kinds of very hard to recover information is available there. There are about 180 of these reprints on all aspects of all psychedelics and some non-psychedelics as well.


It’s important to have this information, to have it at your fingertips. The compartmentalization between areas of knowledge that impinge on this always amazes me. I mean, you get psychologists who don’t know what an MAO inhibitor is, you get people combining things without knowing how drug synergies work. You get people just not informing themselves on the importance of set, setting, dosage, psychic predisposition, so forth and so on: all vital matters that can impinge on how an experience develops. If you can take the time to inform yourself you will feel much more sure of what you’re doing, and that in itself can alleviate confusion and negative reactions.

So then I thought what I would do is sort of go around the world and talk about these things a little to give you an idea of what is available, what’s on the menu.

Audience: Could you explain the difference between psychoactive, psychotropic and psychedelic?


Audience: Could you explain the difference between psychoactive, psychotropic and psychedelic?

Psychoactive means exactly what it implies, that you can detect this compound as a higher cortical experience, that’s all. To my mind a higher cortical experience is a shift of mood, depression, elation, acute hearing, sensitivity to noises: all of these things could be classed as psychoactive reactions to a compound. Psychotropic is a word that I’ve never been very fond of and it sort of came in late. Psychedelic, which is a fairly maligned word, but was coined by the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, means simply “mind-manifesting,” and I like that because it is phenomenologically neutral. Some people have tried to push the word “entheogen” for these things, meaning literally “god-inducing,” but to my mind this carries a huge amount of ideological freight that we may not wish to buy into. Maybe it’s god-inducing, maybe it isn’t, but psychedelic — meaning mind-manifesting — is pretty good, and then if all of these make you uncomfortable you can just fall back on a completely phenomenological description and call them “consciousness-expanding drugs.” I certainly don’t consider alcohol a psychedelic, but clearly a psychoactive. Marijuana is one of these things that’s so widely variant, both in how people react to it and how strong it can be. I would call MDMA a psychoactive drug, not a psychedelic drug.


I use the word “hallucinogen” a lot, and a lot of people don’t like that, even people in the field. They say, “Hallucinogen seems to imply that it’s an illusion,” but not in my mind, I don’t hear that. I’m fascinated by hallucinations. To me that is the sine qua non that you’re getting somewhere. I guess that’s just my philosophical biases, but a hallucination is such an extraordinary concept, isn’t it? To see something which isn’t there. I don’t mean to misread a surface, so that you think it sticks into the room when in fact it sticks out of the room, or something like that, I mean seeing something that is not there. Then that divides into two classes: seeing an ordinary object which is not there — I think this is what most people think a hallucination is: “Here is a bicycle. Is it real or not? The drug-crazed victim cannot tell,” — but most hallucinations are of things which can only be hallucinations, because that’s what they are. They have this aura of the unexpected and the Other, the intrusive alienness.


People have claimed to me that they have seen objects which are not there which are completely ordinary. That is more typical of accounts of datura users, people who take high molecular weight tropanes, such as occur in jimsonweed and those kinds of things. My brief experimentation with that is that it’s what I call a deliriant, rather than a psychoactive. When you take datura you are so messed up that you literally lose all discrimination: you can’t tell exactly where you are, you can’t tell thinking about being somewhere from being there. Well, you’re in no shape to undertake a spiritual quest if you’re that discombobulated. What I like are the things which do not destroy what I call core functions. In other words, there is still an evidence-gathering, observing mind left intact, and the disruption of perceptual input, if you want to put it that way, is pretty much confined to the visual cortex, and then to the metaphor-forming capacity that is relating to the visual cortex; but I don’t like things which confuse you, which impair judgment.

Audience: What about Salvia divinorum?


Audience: What about Salvia divinorum?

That’s an obscure one about which not much is known, although in the past year they’ve learned the absolute chemical characterization of the psychoactive compound, which is called salvinorin A. More work has to be done. Anthropologists who have taken it with Indians in Oaxaca describe a very intense experience. When we grew it in Hawaii and took it exactly the way these people said to do it, it was an experience, but it was not clear whether it was psychedelic or merely so physiologically active in such a complex way that you couldn’t tell exactly what was going on. The impression which was not mine, but Kat’s and a beloved dean, they both experienced flow. They described the experience as though you were lying in a dirty ditch with this cold fluid flowing from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet, and where this kind of cold, clammy fluid encountered energy obstructions in your body, it would wash them away. It was a kind of vertigo with nausea; it was a complex experience, but it was not largely mental, it was more a re-visioning of the body image. This is another one of these things where no research has been done. It isn’t illegal, but you’re not going to do your career any good to get tangled up with this, so consequently it’s pretty much left alone. Salvorin A is extremely unstable and breaks down within 12 hours, so that indicates that it’s probably a polyhydric alcohol or an isoquinoline or something like that, it’s not an indole.

Audience: Wasson talked about “entheogen” versus “hallucinogen,” and his theory was that a hallucination is something that isn’t there completely. He thought that the experience on soma or the mushroom is something that you are actually experiencing, so it’s not a hallucination, it’s real.


Yes, that was what he said, but if you actually look at the etymology of the word “hallucination,” what it has come to mean in English is a delusion, but what it really means in the original language is “to wander in the mind.” That’s the meaning of hallucination, to wander in the mind. Well, that’s a pretty good operational description of what’s happening, and then when you add in the visual component, it’s hard for me to imagine how someone could undervalue hallucinations if they had had them. These guys were very frustrated with seeing this thing turned into a social hysteria, and Wasson at the time expressed great unhappiness with Tim Leary’s approach, and hated going to Mexico and seeing these mushroom villages invaded by graffiti-covered vans of filthy freaks from southern California who were disrupting the local ecology.

It was a kind of proprietary approach: this thing belongs to anthropologists, to specialists. Wasson was very reticent to assess his own work. Some of you may have seen Bob Forte’s interview with him in that psychedelic issue of Revision where Forte asks him, “How do you assess the historical impact of your work?” and he said, “I’ll leave that to others to decide.” He didn’t want to deal with the question of the potential impact on his own society. He really looked at it as this exotic, foreign kind of thing. These guys were cautious, this first generation — Hofmann, Wasson, Schultes — these guys are not stoners by any means. Their approach is cautious, and their psychedelic experiences in a lifetime can be counted on the fingers of one hand. I’m not sure that they ever realized the size of the tiger whose tail they had seized.

Audience: The DMT and the toad, whatever it is, how is that extracted?


Audience: The DMT and the toad, whatever it is, how is that extracted?

Well, I haven’t had the good fortune to be present at the milking, so I really couldn’t say. I gather that you put pressure on the back of the neck in two places and this exudate emerges, exactly where I’m not sure, and probably decency should scarcely inquire. Then it’s dried on sheets of glass and scraped up and packaged and so forth.

Let me start through this and give you a notion of what is available. Whenever you talk about the distribution and cultural usage of hallucinogens the first thing that you come up against is a curious unsolved problem in botany. No one knows why this is, and we would be grateful if somebody could figure it out, but for unknown reasons there is a tremendous concentration of psychoactive plants on the South American continent. The South American continent has more known hallucinogens than the rest of the planet combined. Why is this? After all, the climaxed tropical rainforests of Eastern Indonesia are at least as species-rich as the Amazon basin, and yet not a single powerful hallucinogen is known with certainty from the Old World tropics. All kinds of suggestions have been made: that actually there are psychedelic plants common throughout the tropics of the Old World but the cultures have lost contact with them and forgotten them, and hence our anthropologists have not discovered them, or something in the soil of South America — very improbable theory. I was talking about this once in a workshop and somebody raised their hand and said, “No problem. Obviously that’s where the spaceships landed.” Good! Well, we’ve solved that problem, now we can move on.


North America is extraordinarily poor in hallucinogens, perhaps the poorest of all continents, so that the psychedelic phobia that Europe created against paganism was completely reinforced, or at least not eroded, by the colonization of the New World or of North America, because there were no plants here to challenge that. The North American Indians tend to ordeal as a shamanic vehicle, the Sun Dance thing which some of you may be familiar with, or sonic driving, which is worldwide in shamanically-oriented cultures without drugs. You should know that not everyone agrees with me that psychedelics are the sine qua non of shamanism; that’s what Wasson thought, that you don’t have shamanism unless you have psychedelics. If you have people calling themselves shamans and not using psychedelics, then they are cut off from the older level of tradition, and through ritual, drumming, ordeal, starvation and flagellation they are creating near-psychedelic, or pseudo-psychedelic states.


Now, a brilliant and respected commentator on comparative religion like Mircea Eliade, who I quote whenever it suits my purpose, totally disagreed with this and said no, what he called “narcotic shamanism” — which means psychedelic shamanism, the choice of the word tells you that the guy had a problem — “Narcotic shamanism is decadent shamanism,” and the flagellation, the starvation, the ordeals, and the drumming is the real shamanism, and it’s only when the tradition is abandoned and decadent that a culture will turn to drugs. I maintain that this is nothing more than his Western cultural bias operating. He was a Romanian who became an academic in Paris. Also, in his youth he was pretty infatuated with yoga, and they will insist to you that drugs are an inferior path. However, any of you who are scholars of yoga should know that all yoga is based on the Yoga Sutras of Patañjali, 2nd century Hindu, Vedic commentator, and Patañjali specifically says, “There are three paths to the goal of yoga, and they are control of the breath, control of posture and light-filled herbs.” It says it right there, stanza six of the Yoga Sutras of Patañjali. It’s never discussed again, basically. In the entire exegesis of the yogic literature, the third path is never mentioned. Is that because it’s a secret tradition, or what? I don’t know. When you go to India seeking these yogis practicing these higher yogas, what you find are a bunch of guys smoking as much charas as they possibly can, and the notion that you could do it without that just gets a long laugh from everybody down around the burning ghats. They deal with it on a practical level.


Moving out of drug-impoverished North America, or psychedelic-impoverished North America, where there are more than 20 species of indigenous psilocybin-containing mushrooms but, and this is interesting, no evidence whatsoever for tribal or traditional usage. In other words, in this Northwest Coast Indian complex — the Tsimshian, Tlingit, Nootka group — there’s no reason to believe, other than our own predilection for romantic fantasy, that these people were using mushrooms in pre-contact times, and yet the mushrooms were there. The complex that we’re most familiar with as a North American hallucinogen is in the Southwest of the United States: Lophophora williamsii, the peyote cactus. Now, the interesting thing here is that we cannot find archeological evidence of peyote use that is particularly ancient. Peyote use in the Southwest appears to be less than 500 years old. Before that, what we find in Indian graves of the Tarahumara and so forth are the seeds of Sophora secundiflora. Sophora secundiflora is a highly poisonous legume that contains cytisine. This is an example of what we call, not a psychedelic, but an ordeal poison. In certain parts of the world this approach to spiritual growth has been taken, most notably on the island of Madagascar off the coast of eastern Africa.


What is an ordeal poison? This is a plant where you take it and you are so convinced that you are dying that you have an experience of self-abandonment, getting straight, surrender, and then you live and you’re fine. You are absolutely convinced that you are dying, your heart pounds or fibrillates, or you convulse, or you fall into deep coma, or you have tetanus in the limbs and then you recover. Well, anybody can tell you that this is a kind of psychedelic experience, because you’re so damn glad you lived that you see everything in a new light. You can be kind to your children, love your wife and tolerate your relatives. People say, “It made a new man out of him!” Well, yes, because he came so close to dying that he shed neurotic behavior patterns, but this is not a true psychedelic.


What we’re assuming is that about 500 or 1,000 years ago, sometime in that span, the Sophora cult was replaced by the peyote cult which came from a much smaller usage area. Then, also in southern California, there were what were called the toloache religions, religions of datura intoxication, initiation of young men by intoxicating them with datura and leaving them in the wilderness to fend for themselves. Again, this comes close to being an ordeal poison, although it also has psychoactive properties, but so confusing, such a deliriant that it bears no relationship to the true hallucinogens which, with the exception of mescaline, I believe all fall into the category of the indoles. Now, mescaline is not an indole, it’s an amphetamine, closely related to MDA and MDMA, but it is a true hallucinogen at fairly high doses. The indoles, which are this structurally-related small family, they seem to me to be the true visionary ecstatogens, and I will mention as I go through the list which ones are indoles and which ones are not.


A kind of parallel phenomenon to the peyote cult of the Southwest is in the deserts of northwestern Peru. There are very large columnar cacti in the genus Trichocereus that contain mescaline, and they have been used for a long time, a lot longer than peyote. We have Moche ceramics dated to before 1,000 B.C which show a Peruvian design 1,500 years old. In central Mexico we come upon the first of these large centers of hallucinogenic use, in the cultural area in which the Olmec arose and were subsequently succeeded by the Maya, who were subsequently subjugated by the Toltecs. The plants that were in use in those situations fall into two pretty well defined categories, first of all, psilocybin-containing mushrooms of several species, and second of all, morning glories of at least two types, Convolvulaceae which contain LSD-like alkaloids active in the milligram range that are highly visionary. There is considerable evidence in the Codex Vindobonensis and in some of the Mayan ceramics that this was a culture that made a very important place for hallucinogens, and that it was the privilege of the priestly class, and that their obsession with calendrics and astronomy and this sort of thing was also somehow intimately connected to their interest in the psilocybin mushrooms. Again, one of these botanical puzzles: here is a cluster of 10 or 15 species of mushrooms in central Mexico, and a culture builds itself around them. A similar cluster of species on the Northwest Coast, the culture seems to totally ignore and have no use for, and nowhere else on earth are there clusters of species of psilocybin mushrooms with a long history of use.


Naturally, the export of cattle throughout the warm tropics has allowed the coprophilic mushrooms, the mushrooms which grow on manure, to be spread throughout the warm tropics. Then in places like England and France you get the occurrence of the diminutive psilocybin mushrooms, Semilanceata, but again, only the most unconvincing evidence of traditional use. I mean, I am Irish Celtic, I would love to have somebody come up with a bunch of evidence that ancient Celtic and Druidic art and magic was somehow related to mushrooms, but to date the efforts have been unconvincing to any skeptic. It may still be there, perhaps in heraldic devices. Someone should go back and study the escutcheons of the families of medieval Europe; and you do find, for instance, the Morelli family, a noble Italian family with mushrooms on the family coat of arms, and other families in France whose names escape me.


Let me say a little bit more about the morning glory complex, because it’s very interesting. LSD, discovered by Albert Hofmann in 1938, comes from ergot, comes from an organism called Claviceps purpurea which is a smut which grows on ergot. A humbler organism you could hardly imagine. This is basically “Yuck!” That’s how you would describe this organism if you were to come upon it. It looks like a mistake, because it’s just an amorphous, slimy, black mess growing on certain cereal grains. One of the fascinating questions to these chemists once they discover a new compound is to try to figure out, “Does it occur anywhere else in nature?” Some plants, some fish, some something, and then you can form theories and judgments about evolutionary relationships. So Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, was amazed when carrying out analytical work for Gordon Wasson on magic morning glory seeds that had been sent to Wasson from Schultes, he discovered the same compounds or very closely related compounds as he had synthesized to make LSD. I’m going to slightly jump around here now and say that in India, there are 13 species of morning glories in a different family — not in the family Ipomoea or the family Turbina, which are the Mexican families, but in the family Argyreia — of morning glories which contain these ergotamine-like compounds. This is the Hawaiian baby woodrose. Again, the interesting thing is that there is no evidence that ancient India, with its obsession for altered states of consciousness, ever utilized any of these Asian morning glories, so this would be something that somebody would want to look at.


Audience: Probably you would not be able to get any hardcore data on the use of mushrooms in Arthurian times, but I was delighted to note in The Mists of Avalon that when Morgaine was supposedly banished, one of the fairies of Avalon left her some mushrooms to accompany her on her journey.

Well, Marion Zimmer Bradley lives in the hills of Berkeley. We can assume she’s fully installed and hooked into the myths of the counterculture, but it would be great. Someone told me that they went to the island of Iona, where the Book of Kells was supposedly composed, and they said that there were mushrooms everywhere, that to be there is to be inescapably confronted with mushrooms; and yet there is no tradition, no mention. This is where Saint Columba came and reintroduced Christianity into England in the 900s. Christianity had died out in England; it was only in the advanced Celtic civilizations on the fringes of the British landmass that the Christian tradition was preserved.


Audience: The deterioration of the etymology of hallucinogen into a delusional, romantic meaning kind of catalyzed my mind going into how mythology has devolved into “a lie.” If you look up the original meaning of mythology, it means “the mutterings of eternity,” mytho-Logos, and this whole thing with Avalon being that place between the worlds that one went to, the mythical part, and Glastonbury was sort of the other place where all this Christianity existed. When I was in a mushroom experience one time in a circle, and I was a recovering Catholic trying to find out what my mind was all about, this one man, this shaman student from the Amazon, he said, “If you eat these mushrooms you’re going to be excommunicated, because the Christians will tell you that once you eat the mushrooms you are doomed forever to hell, Satan, and the devil.” Well, it’s bullshit, you’ve got to be kidding. Where would that come from? Maybe the Christian control looked at these people, their paganism and everything, and just wiped out their connection with the other world.


It’s very interesting that when the Jesuits arrived in Mexico and talked to the Indians and found them eating these mushrooms, they said, “What do you call it?” and they said, “We call it teonanacatl,” and when they got their lexicons out and got that pieced together, what teonanacatl means is “flesh of the gods.” Well, the center of the Catholic mystery is the Eucharist, a sacrificial meal where a small wheat wafer is believed to be transubstantiated into the body and blood of the son of God. So then to place the psychic experience which follows upon a good Holy Communion next to the psychic experience which follows upon a good dose of mushrooms, clearly these guys said, “This is competition we don’t need, we’re going to wipe this out,” and it is interesting. Think about this for a moment. We grow so inured to these religious forms; think about the notion of instituting at the center of your religion a rite where you eat your god, and that is what is happening in Christianity. It suggests that this sacrificial meal idea, which can be traced back even to pre-Exilic traditions in Judaism, is probably a memory of a relationship to some kind of psychedelic experience of some sort. I think institutions will inevitably substitute a rite or a ritual for the real McCoy, because then priests can control the pipeline to God and the parishioner can approach with offerings. If everybody can have a pipeline to deity then the whole priest scam is put out of business.

Audience: Has Buddhism substituted a ritual for the experience and then empowered the priests? In other words, has the process that you are describing in Christianity happened in Buddhism?


OK, we discussed the central Mexican complex. It has minor components such as were mentioned here, Salvia divinorum, and there are others not chemically well understood but also not widely or regularly used, but then as you pass down across the Darién Gap and into South America proper there is just an explosion of available psychoactives. Not only the tropane complex of the daturas, which now reemerge in the subgenus Brugmansia, the arboreal daturas which we see around town as ornamentals with huge, pendulous, hanging white flowers. All of those tree daturas, with yellow, orange, red, white or purple flowers, originated in a very constrained area in the Andes and have been used for shamanic purposes for a long, long time. Also, coca is endemic to that part of South America — it occurs nowhere else in the world naturally — but more interesting from my point of view are the tremendous proliferation of DMT cults and options based around two pharmacological approaches:


cults and options based around two pharmacological approaches: one, you orally ingest DMT as the same time as you orally ingest an MAO inhibiter. MAO is monoamine oxidase: this is the enzyme system that oxidizes monoamines, that makes them harmless. Monoamines are this whole family of drugs we’re talking about, and many other things as well. If you don’t have any monoamine oxidase in your body, then monoamines just stick around because the machinery to degrade them is inoperable. So, there are what are called MAO inhibitors. This means that you take this compound and it causes the monoamine oxidase in your body to be bound, it can no longer do its work. DMT ordinarily would be destroyed in the gut, in the upper gastrointestinal tract, but if you inhibit all the MAO in the upper gastrointestinal tract then the DMT is conveyed into the bloodstream, can cross the blood-brain barrier and initiate a psychedelic experience. This is the strategy of


a psychedelic experience. This is the strategy of ayahuasca, also called yagé. North of the Caquetá it’s called yagé, south of the Caquetá it’s named in the Quechua language ayahuasca.


This is a really fascinating thing for many reasons. First of all, this begins to look like the world’s first truly designer drug. Notice what’s happening here: all these other things I’ve been talking about — peyote, mushrooms, datura, cannabis, what have you — are single plants that require very little preparation. Basically, find it, eat it: that’s the way you prepare it. Ayahuasca is very different: it’s composed of two plants, neither of which is active except in combination with the other. So somebody figured this out. This may not sound like such an accomplishment until you stand in the Amazon basin and look around you, and realize that we’re talking 50,000 species per square mile and 50,000,000 square miles, so how did anybody ever figure out that you take the leaves of the little bush and the bark of the woody vine, and combine them in these proportions, and boil them and concentrate it, and then you have this fantastic psychedelic drug? The only way that I can imagine is that somebody told them. My experience is that these plants talk. This does not make sense to the rational and discerning mind, but nevertheless it is possible for one plant to lead you on to another.


A perfect example of this is actually in the chemical literature. Melvin Bristol was a student of Schultes in the late ’60s and he specialized in the Brugmansias, the arboreal daturas, and he went to the valley of the Sibundoy, and there they actually add the datura to the ayahuasca. He took this ayahuasca, and while he was on it the ayahuasca entity showed him a plant. He kept seeing this plant and he couldn’t get it out of his mind, and the next day after they came down from the trip he was collecting in the forest with Indians and he came upon the plant, the exact plant that he had seen in his vision. Well, he thought that was pretty strange, so he made extensive collections of this plant, took it back to Harvard, analyzed it and it was in fact psychoactive, it did contain psychoactive alkaloids. So we are tiptoeing over the surface of some kind of mystery. We maybe can bring ourselves to accept that a voice could speak on mushrooms telling you that you should be kinder to your children, or love your mother, or not be so hard on yourself, but it’s a real leap for us to believe that a plant could tell you, “You know that plant over there? Analyze that sucker!” In other words, real information, not information subject to personal interpretation.


The whole of the Amazonian narcotic complex, as it’s called in the old literature, is based on activation of DMT by one strategy or another. Either by drinking this “ghastly beverage,” as the literature calls it, this psychedelic beverage, ayahuasca, or as you go east into the lowlands, the ayahuasca complex is replaced by what’s called the snuff complex, and it is based around a number of species of myristicaceous trees. The Myristicaceae are the same family as nutmeg occurs in, although nutmeg is an Old World member of the genus. Several members of the Myristicaceae contain DMT in the inner bark exudate, and these Indians go out before dawn — before the first rays of sunlight strike the tree, because when that happens this resin retracts — and put their hands on both sides of the tree to determine the coolest side, and strip the bark from that side of the tree. Then they take these long strips of bark back to the village, burn a fire and let it burn to coals, and then spread the coals out; lay these long strips of bark on the coals with the “wounded” side up, the clean inner side up, and this orange resin will be forced out of the bark and onto the surface. Then you can go along with a scraper of some sort, gather this stuff up, put it in a pot, cook it down, grind that in a mortar and pestle, and then you have a dandy paralytic arrow poison which can also be honked up as an outlandish hallucinogenic snuff.


There are many stories of these Yąnomamö and Waika people going out on the hunt and honking up their supply of drug, just getting their poison arrows out and scraping off the points so the guys can get a buzz on and won’t have to go back to the village. It’s a very interesting complex, it hasn’t been very much researched by Westerners and the reason is easy to figure out why. Here’s how you take this stuff: you get with your buddy and you have a bamboo tube — maybe some of you remember this from The Emerald Forest — and you pack it with this ground bark exudate, then you hunker down in front of your friend, put the thing with the loaded end into your nostril, your friend takes a huge inhalation of air, blasts on the end of this thing and just drives this stuff up into your sinus cavities. Everything goes violet, you scream, you salivate outlandishly, you fall over backwards, and by the time you’ve gotten yourself together your friend has repacked the other side and is ready to give you that. Then you do that — it goes purple again, you scream, you salivate, you fall over — and then people usually say something like, “Good!” I’m sure you’ve seen the films about this. Napoleon Chagnon did a film, Juan Downey did a film; this is great filmic material. In these Waika villages, I wouldn’t want to say it’s a drug of abuse, but it’s certainly a recreational drug. Not only the shamans are doing this, but people are just doing it. You see people leaning against walls with a line of saliva coming out of their mouth and people just say, “Oh, he’s doing the ipina.” “Oh, OK.” People are in various attitudes of consciousness and unconsciousness…


Coca, of course; there’s not a whole lot to say about coca. It’s an interesting example of a psychoactive non-psychedelic. The minute you hit the Amazon rainforest they are so concerned that you’ve been misinformed about coca. They say, “Not a drug! This is not a drug! This is a food, this is a good food, this food makes us healthy.” There is some evidence that this is true, that cocaine bears very little resemblance to coca. Coca is not a spectacular experience. What I found was that the way coca works is that you’ve been sitting with these people for hours and they’re talking in Witoto or some language that you have no hope of understanding, you’re just about ready to excuse yourself and go to your hammock, and they drag out the coca. The way you do it — this is another thing where people miss the point in South America, because they have no idea how much you’re supposed to do. Imagine taking a tablespoon and


supposed to do. Imagine taking a tablespoon and going into a jar or a sack of flour and getting as much flour as you possibly could on a tablespoon. I mean a high-walled tablespoon; so you get that much coca, you bring it to your mouth and you put it in. It’s dry as dust, and the trick is to slime it over, get it into your cheek and hold it there, all without a break in your conversational flow. For a honky, the main effort is not to strangle and disgrace yourself in this scene, because it’s usually no women, you’re in the longhouse with the men, and these guys are the authentic bare-ass scarified folks, and you’re trying to fit in and choking to death on this wad of coca. Well, it dribbles down your throat and suddenly these people don’t seem so bad, this place doesn’t seem so filthy and you don’t seem so tired, and maybe you can make out what they’re


tired, and maybe you can make out what they’re saying, and maybe you’ll just try out a little of what you’ve picked up on. Before you know it you’re the life of the party, and then about 20 minutes later you think, “Maybe now I’ll knock off,” and then like clockwork they reach for the tin can again and send it around, and they will do this until it’s all gone.


Let’s see, which way shall we go? Let’s jump across the water now to Africa. I talked a little about iboga; fascinating cult, very similar to ayahuasca in the social patterns that have arisen around it. The way ayahuasca is taken in the Amazon in the Mestizo populations that Luna is talking about is that people get together on Saturday nights in windowless sheds: about one third to have the trip, about one third because they have something physically or psychologically wrong with them that they want help from the shaman with, and about one third who are wannabes or just hanging in for the social occasion. In Zaire and Gabon where the iboga cult is operating, this same pattern exists. These things, ayahuasca and iboga in Africa, are the major forces resisting conversion to Christianity. They really are the native people’s answer to the missionaries, and as such they act as a tremendous force for social cohesion. Outside of the iboga complex, in Africa we really only have rumors.


You will meet shamans from this place and that place, and they even have come and spoken at this school. They claim knowledge of extremely powerful plant hallucinogens but they won’t cough up the name, or the species, or a sample, and until that’s done you have to be very skeptical that these things are real. One of the things that was so interesting to me, and I mentioned it this morning, is how the shamans are like scientists. We would take ayahuasca with these people and sing, and cure, and go through all these trips and hallucinations, and 6 or 7 hours later, as dawn was breaking and all but the most hardcore people had gone back to their huts, the assessing of the trip would begin. Inevitably people would say, “Well, this was pretty good, but I remember a time in Rio Yaguas when so-and-so made it, and it was like this and like this.” In other words, amazing dope tales, amazing stories of other trips in other times and places and what had been achieved, so these shamans were consistently engaged in the search for the perfect high. They were not set in a cultural pattern, they were experimentalists, always on the outlook for rumors of new plants, untried combinations, so forth and so on.


Returning then to the African situation, there is a complex of plants and suspect hallucinogens in southern Africa in use among the Hottentots, the aboriginal peoples of South Africa. In the family of the Mesembryanthemaceae, which includes the Lithops, the Haworthias, these little ground-growing things that look like stones, the so-called “rock plants,” some of those contain mesembrine. Mesembrine is an alkaloid of some sort, with unresearched psychoactivity but a persistent enough rumor of its use that it should probably be checked on. Then when you turn to the Eurasian continent, the largest landmass on the planet, you discover what I referred to before: this surprising poverty of hallucinogenic plants. You get the belladonna complex, the tropanes, you get the opium complex. Opium poppies are native to Southeast Asia and have been used by people in Eurasia at least as far back as the ancient Scythians; we have accounts in Herodotus which make that clear. In fact, there’s a considerable amount of Greek archeological material that shows opium diadems and opium poppies being used as ornaments by various goddesses, so it was understood that it was psychoactive.

Audience: Robert Graves suggests in one of his books that the ambrosia of the Greek gods was actually psilocybin mushrooms. Have you ever come across another allusion to that?


Yes, well it’s an interesting question, it has to do with Eleusis, and as you probably know, Eleusis was a major prophetic mystery site in classical and ancient Greece where every September a ceremony would be done, and the rule was that you could only do it once in your life, so you never got a second shot. Everybody in the Greek world would go at some point in their life — Plato, Aeschylus, Aristotle, the whole gang — everybody had this experience, and at the center of it something was drunk and something happened. There’s been great argument about what it was and what happened. Wasson and Hofmann and Ruck, who’s a classicist at Cornell, all wanted to argue that it was an ergotized beer. In other words, that on the Eleusinian Plain there was a kind of rye being grown which was infected with a strain of Claviceps that was mild enough that it was hallucinogenic without being convulsive or causing miscarriages or something like that. Because if you just go out and gather ergot smut, Claviceps purpurea — and you should be very careful with it, some of these ergot alkaloids can send you into convulsions and they’re fairly toxic — but it’s conceivable that a strain grew on the Eleusinian Plain that was made into a kind of beer that was then this hallucinogenic intoxicant, but Robert Graves, who didn’t have the kind of public relations machinery that Wasson had, had a different notion.