The Mystery Explodes into Life

In telling of his experiences in Life magazine, Wasson comes across as a kind of Prometheus figure, bringing the world news of a hitherto secret gift of the Gods. Amongst dreamy 50's technicolour photographs and numerous advertisements for miracle filter cigarettes and brands of alcohol, Wasson's article shines out like some otherworldly beacon signalling the awesome visionary power latent within the Mexican mushroom. We can only guess at the amazement that this article must have evoked in the psyche of a reader soaked in 1950's thinking and values. This was the decade of Cadillacs, rock'n roll, television, and electronic gadgetry, a decade in which the post-war generation could live happily upon the bountiful fruits of consumerism. Having recently conquered both Everest and the secret of the atom, Man seemed truly on the ascent. Unlimited atomic energy and unlimited material growth were on the cards. Nature had been tamed and set to work for our own ends. Of course, what no-one realised at this time was the devastating effect upon the environment that such a material culture would wreak. As yet unconceived in holistic organismic terms, the natural environment was a place to take the kids at the weekend, not the grounds for concern let alone the grounds for a bizarre shamanic consummation. And, after all, weren't shamans just primitive witchdoctors who spouted all sorts of unsophisticated nonsense? It must therefore have been with some surprise that Life's readers found themselves being informed about visionary fungi, a facet of the environment still wild and untamed which spoke of a very different kind of reality to that of the American dream. 

Deep in the south of Mexico in a small village in Oaxaca, Wasson recounts to the readers of Life how he had once more gained the confidence of a local shaman, a woman named Maria Sabina under whose guidance he was allowed to ingest sacred mushrooms. Judging from the photographs included in his account, the house where the ceremony took place was small and sparsely furnished, with various Christian icons on display. The paucity of modern furnishing however, was to belie the luxuriousness of the visionary experience that followed the ingestion of the mushrooms, the surroundings all but melting into insignificance.

At 10.30pm Wasson received six pairs of mushrooms from Maria Sabina as she commenced the auspicious rite. At long last he held the elusive mystery in his trembling hands. Tangible and open to physical analysis the fungi were no native myth or figment of the imagination. But what of their legendary effect? All theory and hearsay became vanquished as Wasson ate his destiny.

Like all good empiricists Wasson determined to remain objectively aloof and ward off any major psychological effects in order that he see more clearly the nature of the legendary mushroom. As noble as such efforts are however, they generally prove futile in the face of potent entheogens as one is forced to wholly succumb to the emergent global alteration in consciousness.

As he lay in the dark confines of the hut, the power latent within the mushroom gradually introduced itself to Wasson's consciousness. Visions began to unfold before his eyes, visions so intense and so profound that they breached the ineffable realms of religious mysticism. They began as vividly coloured art motifs of an angular nature as found on textiles and carpets. Then the visions began to evolve into resplendent palaces and gardens laid over with precious stones. At one point, Wasson perceived a great mythological beast drawing a regal chariot. Still later it seemed as if his spirit had broken free from the constraints of his body and lay suspended in mid-air viewing vast mountains rising up to the Heavens. Wasson confessed that the sights were so sharp and clear as to be more real than anything that he had previously seen with his eyes, somewhat akin to archetypes and the Platonic realm of Ideas.

In 'Mushrooms, Russia, and History', Wasson's description of his visionary experiences is more explicit than in the Life piece. What had started out as a unique work of ethnomycology touching upon ancient Siberian shamanism, had now transformed itself into a personal testimony of the mystical shamanic experience. Coming from a man normally concerned with the world of finance, this is a truly remarkable turn of events, even the more so since he was not an overtly religious man. It was also the case that any of Wasson's residual mycophobia had now been utterly obliterated as the incontrovertible truth of plant-induced shamanic ecstasy seized his soul. The sense of awe, the sense that he had been witness to an event of staggering cultural significance radiates these more detailed accounts, the book subsequently ending as a veritable religious treatise.

At one point during the mushroom ceremony Wasson thought it as if:

"...the visions themselves were about to be transcended and dark gates reaching upward beyond sight were about to part, and we were to find ourselves in the presence of the Ultimate. We seemed to be flying at the dark gates as a small swallow at a dazzling lighthouse, and the gates were to part and admit us. But they did not open, and with a thud we fell back gasping."

Although the visions lasted only a minute or so by watch, Wasson noted that he experienced them as having an aeonic duration as though he had passed out of the confines of normal time. He was also certain that the visions originated from either from the Unconscious or from an inherited source of racial memory, concepts borrowed from the work of Carl Jung with which Wasson was obviously familiar. He readily conceded that the intense visionary episodes arose within him, yet they did not recall anything previously seen with his own eyes. He wondered if maybe the mushroom visions were a subconscious transmutation of things read, seen, and imagined, so much transmuted that they appeared to be new and unfamiliar. Or, mused Wasson, did the mushroom allow one to penetrate some new realm of the psyche? I assume here that Wasson was referring to something more than a personal Unconscious, and more like an organised field of intelligence or a transcendental sentience of some sort, interpreted by native shamans as a Great Spirit or God. Wasson failed to elaborate upon this matter, preferring to stick to more acceptable ideas and he ventured no further than Jungian territory in his enthusiastic speculation. 

Wasson was also struck by the fact that the dazzling visionary material engendered by the mushroom must reside somewhere within the mind, in a kind of latent state until the mushroom's psychoactive constituents stirred them into activity. But how, he wondered, could it be that we could all be carrying around an inventory of such wonders deep within us, wonders that the mushroom could unleash so spectacularly? Perhaps, he suggested, some creative faculty of the brain was stimulated by the sacred mushroom and that this capacity for creative thought was somehow linked to the perception of the divine.

The visionary effects of the mushroom, so clearly related in some way to the experiences of religious mystics, also suggested to Wasson that such fungi might be connected in some significant way to the very origins of the religious impulse, an idea he first introduced in the Life piece and which he would constantly return to for the rest of his life. Wasson asks us if perhaps the idea of a deity arose after our primitive ancestors first consumed psychoactive mushrooms, surely a compelling scenario if we are pushed to explain the origins of religious mysticism in essentially physical terms. He was later to help coin the contemporary word entheogen to refer to these sorts of plants and fungi, a word which, although devised to mean 'becoming divine within', is more often considered to mean 'generating the divine within'.

Readers of the life article were also informed as to what the Mexican Indians themselves had to say about the mushrooms. The Indians claimed that they "carry you there where God is". Always the mushroom was referred to with awe and reverence. They were not some common drug like alcohol to be taken at the drop of a hat in order to drown one's sorrows or deaden oneself to reality. On the contrary, the Indian shamans used the fungus for oracular reasons in order to cure and prophesy. Wasson was intimately familiar with the Indian's sacred traditions and he was at pains to portray this cultural phenomenon to his readers in the respectful light it deserved, stressing the fact that the mushroom was not to be classed as a drug like alcohol despite the fact that both substances engender major alterations in awareness. No Indian ate the mushroom frivolously for excitement, rather they spoke of their use as "muy delicado", that is, perilous.

A deeply inspired man, Wasson was not only the first Westerner to document the psilocybin experience, he was also the first to try and account for the mysterious effects in reasonable psychological terms, his tentative speculations all remaining valid today. It is remarkable to think that had he not had such a profoundly spiritual experience, or had his mind not been able to cope with the onslaught of a visionary dialogue, then the Mexican mushroom might well have remained a buried phenomenon to this day. Fortunately for us, this was not so and the entheogenic mystery is very much alive and 'unleashed', and, as will later become clear, is nearer to us than we might suppose.

Regarding Wasson's brave attempts to provide a reasonable explanation for his experiences, I will deal with what is currently known about 'the neuropsychological how' of psilocybin in later chapters. For now it is enough to recognise that the mushroom had proved itself to be the psychological analogue of physical fire, its dazzling effects able to brush and enliven the very soul of Homo sapiens.

To simply dismiss Wasson's visionary encounter as no more than the drug-induced fantasy of a middle-aged man is to miss the point completely. The significance of such a natural entheogenic experience for psychological science alone is enough to warrant our attention since psilocybin is clearly able to galvanise highly constructive systems of thought into action - that much can be said at the absolute least. Any substance able to evoke an organised flow of symbolic information seemingly issuing from somewhere outside of one's sense of self has got to be worth studying, especially if the experience appears more real than real. And as far as the roots of the religious impulse and the actual experience of sacred transcendence is concerned, if we are truly interested in such things, if we are truly concerned with perceiving our existence in a way that is beyond the confines of a culturally-conditioned secular perspective, then we should surely have cause to consider the visionary mushroom experience. Whereas the most limited explanation for this psychological phenomenon, say in terms of creative imagination on an unprecedented scale, is still immensely important and fascinating, the more radical and speculative scenarios - which seem compelling when one has personally tasted such exhilarating forms of consciousness - offer an even greater and more brilliant conceptual view of reality. It is here, in the personal impact of the psilocybin experience upon one's perceptions of reality, that the importance of Wasson's work resides, for he was able to verbalise his psychedelic encounters in a way that captured their compelling and alluring nature. Wasson had evidently shown how sacred realms of experience were not to be found in churches or in the blessings of popes and priests, but could be accessed through the consumption of entheogenic fungi. Wasson had effectively lain such a natural option at the feet of the modern world. 

At the end of his seminal account, Wasson discusses the accessibility of the mushroom-induced visionary realms to large numbers people whose psychological disposition was perhaps not in the same league as traditional visionaries like, for example, the poet William Blake. If Wasson was able to briefly become a visionary through eating a simple mushroom then no doubt others would want to follow suit. This inevitable social consequence of his tale was to become manifest in the next decade to a degree that he could never have anticipated, for his news of visionary fungi was instrumental in attracting the West's interest toward entheogens. As Blake had written, once the doors of perception were opened then the infinite beauty of reality could be perceived. Whether he had planned it or not, Wasson, like his contemporary Aldous Huxley, now had his foot firmly set between those perceptual doors.

As yet unnamed, its chemical structure still unknown, psilocybin thus began it's gradual infiltration of the modern technological world, flowing for the first time in and out of European human nervous systems, facilitating a spectacular kind of cerebral information processing in which the blazing divinity of reality was potentially discernible. The world would never be the same again, as intellectuals, artists, and spiritual seekers with the aid of the psilocybin mushroom began scratching away at the restricted surface of normal everyday awareness. Such intrepid peering beyond the confines of routine perception seemed to reveal much, much more in the way of reality, allowing access to information of the most stimulating and enchanting kind, as if the mushroom was able to offer up all of Nature's best kept secrets.

However, despite the widespread interest generated by his Life piece, Wasson later chose, perhaps wisely, to distance himself from the 60's psychedelic hippy culture revolving as it was around synthetic LSD. Instead, he concerned himself with investigating the role of the fly agaric mushroom in ancient Indo-European Soma cults. He also went on to make invaluable contributions to our knowledge about the use of psilocybin mushrooms by the Aztec and Mayan civilisations of ancient Mesoamerica, and we shall now step briefly back in time in order to view these historical entheogenic traditions before bringing the history of psilocybin fully up to date.