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CHAPTER 1

The Sainted Ones and the "Mushroom Meme-Men"

Whether the mushrooms came from outer space or not, the presence of psychedelic substances in the diet of early human beings created a number of changes in our evolutionary situation.

Terence McKenna, "charismatic talking head" The relationship between human beings and magic mushrooms (known in Mexico as "the sainted ones" or "the holy children") is, supposedly, an ancient one. Gordon Wasson, the ethnobotanist, for example, dribbling his enthusiasm everywhere like the spores of the fungi he so admired, gushed that they may "have planted in primitive man the very idea of god." Other enthusiasts point to rock paintings from Tassili in North Africa which allegedly depict a human-like creature which they believe to be a mushroom shaman in communion with the spirit of his teacher plant sprouting mushrooms from his body and arms. You can Google tassili+mushroom+man to view the images. The fact that these paintings date from the Mesolithic period – up to 22,000 years ago (between 20,000-10,000 BCE) – shows the antiquity of our relationship with these plants, the mushroom enthusiasts say.

Furthermore, "mushroom stones" dating from 200 CE have been found in Guatemala, demonstrating an ancient reverence for sacred mushrooms, while teonanácatl (literally "divine mushroom") were served at the coronation of the Aztec ruler Moctezuma II in 1502. Together these instances, recorded in art and history, show a continuity of mushroom use across thousands of years; again, in the opinion of mushroom enthusiasts.

The first mention of psychedelic mushroom taking in Europe, meanwhile, appeared in the London Medical and Physical Journal in 1799, in a story which recounted how a man accidentally served his family "magic" (psilocybin) mushrooms for breakfast after picking them in a local park. Upon receiving medical assistance the family appeared confused but not overly-distressed and the attending doctor noted that the youngest child "was attacked with fits of immoderate laughter, nor could the threats of his father or mother refrain him."

The reason for our long-standing relationship with mushrooms is natural and obvious according to people like Terence McKenna, who spent a lot of his time dabbling with them last century: early man, foraging for food, would simply have come across them by accident, ate them, tripped out, liked it and repeated until enlightenment. There's a bit more to this –his "stoned monkey" theory – as we'll see later, but actually not much more.

As Andy Letcher warns us in his book Shroom, however,

... whenever anything is deemed "natural" and "obvious" it almost always turns out, on closer inspection, to be culturally specific, localised and historically contingent – in other words, not at all natural or obvious ... The belief in the ancientness of psychedelia is no exception for it turns out, somewhat paradoxically, to have rather recent origins,

Not prehistoric at all in fact but "a product of the utopian sentiments that accompanied the psychedelic revolution of the 1950s and 1960s."

Such "utopian sentiments" may have led some of the people who were part of this revolution to see mushrooms everywhere and exaggerate the evidence for their usage. One example is the Tassili cave painting itself (again, Google tassili+mushroom+man to see the images), a piece of trippy historical art which is often presented as "proof" of our ancient involvement with mushrooms.

The classic image you see in books and online though, all crisp and clear and obviously mushroom-ic, is not the one which appears on the wall of the cave. It is, instead, a cleaned-up pen-and-ink drawing based loosely on the original which was made by Terence McKenna's wife, Kat Harrison (a mushroom enthusiast herself and hardly an objective witness) to prove a point about the antiquity of mushroom usage, so not exactly a scientific study since she more-or-less ignored the data and cheated.

Even without this cheat, however, the image itself is ambiguous. The cleaned-up version apparently shows mushrooms growing from the body and arms of the shaman it represents, but if you're not looking for mushrooms in the first place these objects could just as easily be arrows or spades, body armor or hair. And maybe he's not a shaman but a hunter, a gardener, a warrior or ... wait for it ... a bee. I mean, why do we suppose he's even human? He looks more like a bee than a mushroom in Harrison's drawing, after all – which is another mystery since bees have nothing to do with mushrooms in either the botanical or the shamanic world (although mushrooms store well in honey and they can also be taken that way). In short, this image is really not proof of anything except wishful thinking by hippies.

But even if all the evidence stacked up and we could trace a neat line back through history to show mankind's uninterrupted use of mushrooms, there would still be no reason to believe that this was deliberate, purposeful or had any shamanic intention. As Letcher points out,

In Europe ... psilocybin mushrooms have been known about since at least as long ago as the fifteenth century ... but no-one seems to have eaten them intentionally until the twentieth ... [In fact] It seems that everywhere we look in the dim and distant past, those slippery and evanescent mushrooms simply evade our grasp. There are none to be found in the archeological record ... Supposed images of mushrooms are, in the absence of contextual information, quite possibly something else entirely, while purported hallucinogenically inspired rock art may be nothing of the sort. Not one single line of evidence unequivocally points to their having been used by Druids, herbalists, Stone Age architects or prehistoric shamans ... [if our distant ancestors were indeed mushroom stoners] they left not a single piece of evidence.

He concludes that "while people appear to have been eating hallucinogenic mushrooms for as long as there have been records, until the twentieth century they always did so accidentally and unintentionally."

Well, that sucks

Yes, I know. We have been conditioned to believe in the ancient use of sacred mushrooms but, as Oscar Wilde wrote, "The truth is rarely pure and never simple." I'm coming clean now about our cozy and taken-for-granted "known certainties" of archaic shamanic mushroom use so we can start learning about what mushrooms really are and do instead of accepting without question everything that they're not. In fact, most of our knowledge (or at least what we think of as knowledge but is more often disinformation) about shrooms in the modern world comes from the work of three individuals, none of whom is an entirely reliable witness:

• R. (Robert) Gordon Wasson, one of the first Westerners to participate in an indigenous Mazatec mushroom ceremony, in Huautla de Jimenez, near Oaxaca, Mexico, with the then-unknown and now infamous curandera (shaman) Maria Sabina.

• Timothy Leary, a Harvard psychologist who was inspired by Wasson's mushroom adventures and traveled to Mexico to experience them for himself in a non-ceremonial setting (at a pool party with friends). His life was changed by what he discovered and he returned to America to begin the Harvard Psilocybin Project, a controversial enterprise which eventually got him sacked from Harvard and led to a new career as "the most dangerous man in America." As the "turn on, tune in, drop out" countercultural leader, hippie spokesperson, and "drugs guru" of the 1960s, he became the mushroom man of his time.

• Terence McKenna, an ethnobotanist and self-styled "psychonaut" who, with his brother Dennis, undertook "the experiment at La Chorrera," a bizarre encounter with cubensis mushrooms in the Amazon jungle which led to a series of even stranger noodlings about human evolution and destiny and to philosophical ponderings from both brothers for many years to come about the nature of reality and the role of mushrooms in our ancient past and possible futures.

These three men have entered public consciousness to the extent that they have become the "meme-men" for mushrooms and it is their words (especially Terence McKenna's) you will most often see staring back at you from the Facebook page of a "true believer," accompanied by rainbow-colored spaced-out trippy visuals. We have been left, sadly, with the two or three-sentence soundbites of these men (often the more bizarre or platitudinous the better) as the summation of our modern consumer knowledge of, and "buyer's guide" to, magic mushrooms, yet they actually tell us next-to-nothing about mushrooms, shamanism, healing, or the ceremonial experience but are rather the vacuous slogans of trip-heads aimed at airheads. Before we move on to look at mushroom use in a true shamanic context, therefore, it is worth exploring what these three individuals have to say to see what (if any) of it may be useful to us in our more than veneer-deep engagements with the sacred through the agency of the "wondrous mushroom."

R. Gordon Wasson and His Betrayal of Maria Sabina

Robert Gordon Wasson (1898–1986) journeyed to Huautla, Mexico, with his friend Allan Richardson (and later, his wife, Valentina) to study the religious use of mushrooms as part of the research for his book, Mushrooms, Russia and History (published in 1957). During this trip, according to the not so self-effacing Wasson, "Richardson and I [became] the first white men in recorded history to eat the divine mushrooms" in a Mazatec velada (night-time candle-lit ceremonial healing vigil) "which for centuries [had] been a secret of certain Indian peoples living far from the great world in southern Mexico. No anthropologists had ever described the scene that we witnessed."

The ceremony was led by the curandera (female shaman/healer) Maria Sabina, who welcomed Wasson to the event and also allowed him to take her picture on the condition that he kept it private, a courtesy which Wasson returned by breaking his promise to her almost immediately and publishing not only the photo but her name and that of the community she served in his book; a betrayal that would come to have wide-ranging and long-lasting negative consequences, as we shall see.

In May 1957 Wasson described his ceremonial experience in an article for Life magazine, entitled Seeking the Magic Mushroom (subtitle: Great adventures in the discovery of mushrooms that cause strange visions – which sounds very Boy's Own Adventure-ish and gives us another glimpse into Wasson's character). This time he kept his promise to Sabina that he would protect her anonymity (although by then the damage was already done) and referred to her in his writing as "Eva Mendez ... a curandera de primera categoría, of the highest quality, una Señora sin mancha, a woman without stain."

He depicted the ceremony, and his feelings during it, as follows: At about 10:30 o'clock Eva Mendez cleaned the mushrooms of their grosser dirt and then, with prayers, passed them through the smoke of resin incense burning on the floor [probably copal]. As she did this, she sat on a mat before a simple altar table adorned with Christian images, the Child Jesus and the Baptism in Jordan. Then she apportioned the mushrooms among the adults. She reserved 13 pair for herself and 13 pair for her daughter. (The mushrooms are always counted in pairs.) I was on tiptoe of expectancy: she turned and gave me six pair in a cup. I could not have been happier: this was the culmination of years of pursuit. She gave Allan six pair too ... Then we ate our mushrooms, chewing them slowly, over the course of a half hour. They tasted bad – acrid with a rancid odour that repeated itself ...

Actually, this is hardly, if ever, true. Mushrooms taste "earthy" (especially if freshly picked), as you would expect; maybe a little "cardboardy," certainly not "bad", and their taste (if any) is fleeting. It does not "repeat." Their smell, if fresh, might also best be described as earthy while, if dry, they have next to no aroma. In either case, "rancid" is an inappropriate term.

Before midnight, he goes on, 'Eva Mendez' broke a flower from the bouquet on her altar and used it to snuff out the flame of the room's only candle, leaving the group in silent darkness before she began an invocation to the spirits in the name of Christ and the saints, and the mushrooms took effect.

For the first time the word ecstasy took on real meaning. For the first time it did not mean someone else's state of mind ... The visions had started. They reached a plateau of intensity deep in the night, and they continued at that level until about 4 o'clock ... the visions came whether our eyes were opened or closed. They emerged from the center of the field of vision, opening up as they came, now rushing, now slowly, at the pace that our will chose. They were in vivid color, always harmonious. They began with art motifs, angular such as might decorate carpets or textiles or wallpaper or the drawing board of an architect. Then they evolved into palaces with courts, arcades, gardens – resplendent palaces all laid over with semiprecious stones. Then I saw a mythological beast drawing a regal chariot. Later it was as though the walls of our house had dissolved and my spirit had flown forth, and I was suspended in mid-air viewing landscapes of mountains with camel caravans advancing slowly across the slopes, the mountains rising tier above tier to the very heavens ... The visions were not blurred or uncertain. They were sharply focused, the lines and colors being so sharp that they seemed more real to me than anything I had ever seen with my own eyes. I felt that I was now seeing plain, whereas ordinary vision gives us an imperfect view; I was seeing the archetypes, the Platonic ideas that underlie the imperfect images of everyday life ... the effect of the mushrooms is to bring about a fission of the spirit, a split in the person, a kind of schizophrenia, with the rational side continuing to reason and to observe the sensations that the other side is enjoying..

"Mendez" accompanied the visions with a low humming which became syllables, then words and then "a full-bodied canticle, sung like very ancient music", which would rise to a climax and then suddenly stop before the curandera returned to "hot, crisp words that cut the darkness like a knife", which Wasson interpreted as "God's words" – the mushroom spirit speaking through her like an oracle, answering problems that had been posed by her participants.

Wasson was clearly excited by his experience. "For a day following our mushroom adventure [sic] Allan and I did little but discuss [it]", he tells us.

We had attended a shamanistic rite with singing and dancing among our Mixeteco friends which no anthropologist has ever before described in the New World, a performance with striking parallels in the shamanistic practices of some of the archaic Palaeo-Siberian peoples. But may not the meaning of what we had witnessed go beyond this? ...

In man's evolutionary past, as he groped his way out from his lowly past, there must have come a moment in time when he discovered the secret of the hallucinatory mushrooms. Their effect on him, as I see it, could only have been profound, a detonator to new ideas. For the mushrooms revealed to him worlds beyond the horizons known to him, in space and time, even worlds on a different plane of being, a heaven and perhaps a hell. For the credulous primitive mind, the mushrooms must have reinforced mightily the idea of the miraculous ...

When we bear in mind the beatific sense of awe and ecstasy and caritas engendered by the divine mushrooms, one is emboldened to the point of asking whether they may not have planted in primitive man the very idea of god ... It is no accident, perhaps, that the first answer of the Spanishspeaking Indian, when I asked about the effect of the mushrooms, was often this: Le llevan ahí donde Dios está, "They carry you there where God is" ...

According to Wasson (although where he got this information is not clear), magic mushrooms are not used as "therapeutic agents: they themselves do not effect cures" but tell the curandera how to act, what to say or what advice to give in order to create a cure. They may also be consulted directly or via the shaman if participants are "distraught with grave problems" such as the theft of a donkey (sic) so they can learn where it is and who took it, or to find out how a relative in another town or country is faring, in which case the mushrooms act like "a kind of a postal service".

Mushrooms are non-addictive, he tells us. "When the rainy season is over and the mushrooms disappear, there seems to be no physiological craving for them", nor does dosage increase with use, although "Some persons require more than others. ["An increase in the dose intensifies the experience but does not greatly prolong the effect"]". Prolonged usage, even with large doses, causes no harm. "We think the mushrooms have no cumulative effect on the human organism. Eva Mendez has been taking them for 35 years, and when they are plentiful she takes them night after night."

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Excerpted from "Shamanic Plant Medicine Magic Mushrooms: The Holy Children"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Ross Heaven.
Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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