The Psilocybin Solution

Taking into account all of this data, particularly the hundreds of elaborately carved mushroom stones so far uncovered, many historians are compelled to accept that the Maya utilized entheogenic flora including psilocybin mushrooms, and that the visionary realms made accessible by these plants and fungi influenced the development of the Mayan cosmological and religious outlook on reality.

Some Colombian Treasures Also Ring a Bell

Psilocybin mushroom use has also been inferred in pre-Hispanic Colombia due to the discovery of hundreds of beautiful gold objects belonging to the Sinu culture, dated to approximately A.D. 1200. These are decorative anthropomorphic works of art that characteristically carry two bell-shaped forms atop the head and were originally referred to by historians as “telephone-bell gods” (the shapes in question look like the bells found on old-fashioned telephones). Some of these bell-shaped forms are tipped with a small peak, while others are soldered onto the main body of the anthropomorphic figure by a thin “stem.” Harvard’s ethnobotanical expert Richard Evans Schultes has suggested that the bell shapes are representations of psilocybin mushrooms, which would seem reasonable since several species of psilocybin mushroom are known to flourish in Colombia, some of which possess thin stems and caps topped with a small peaked tip, or umbo.

It is also worth noting that these mushroom objects are often adorned with toad effigies, as is the case with many Mayan mushroom stones. Schultes sees this as further evidence that these objects were made in veneration of entheogenic agents, because, as you will recall, certain toads, including South American species, secrete psychoactive substances from their parotid glands. The evidence is strong then that the historical use of psilocybin fungi and other entheogens extended well beyond Mexico and Guatemala, and that wherever they were employed they were deified and incorporated into works of art.

Viewed in the historical light of the Aztec and the Mayan empires, and to a lesser extent in pre-Hispanic Colombian culture, the psilocybin mushroom emerges as the conductor of a sacred legacy. These once-powerful native peoples knew its worth as an entheogen, a naturally occurring device for communicating with the spiritual domain. This is the botanical Holy Grail that Wasson had long quested for and eventually found half-buried in a remote Mexican village. An unlikely Grail knight, Wasson nonetheless recovered the power of the psilocybin mushroom from more than four hundred years of subjugation and presented it to the modern world. Once unleashed, the psilocybin mushroom helped initiate a tremendous cultural change, only to fade once more into a period of obscurity. Before its departure, however, psilocybin had managed to inch its way into the very heart of the West’s academic establishment, where it left a profound impact upon all who encountered it. We now return to the wake set by Wasson’s fortuitous discovery.

THREE Psilocybin Flows in and out of the Western Mind

Wasson’s Life story sits like a glowing spiritual ember in the tinder-dry secularity of America’s 1950s culture. The United States, caught up in a burgeoning but banal materialistic dream, could not fail to be ignited by such a soul-stirring otherworldly tale. A few years earlier Aldous Huxley had written The Doors of Perception, which detailed the entheogenic effects of mescaline. Both accounts were seminal in terms of their slow-fuse cultural impact. Each captured the psychedelic zeitgeist that was about to erupt upon the world stage, and Wasson and Huxley emerged as the founders of a cultural movement that would eventually blossom into the “psychedelic sixties,” with its colorful burst of artistic creativity and mind expansion.

However, psilocybin, although initially sparking the psychedelic fire, soon left the scene of the divine crime, once more to fade underground into its mysterious place of origin. By the mid-1960s, its synthetic rival, d-lysergic acid diethylamide, also known as LSD and acid, a substance whose structure and psychoactivity are distinct from psilocybin, had taken over as the prime mover, demonstrating the popular appeal of laboratory-produced pills and tabs.

Easily manufactured, packaged, sold, and swallowed, pills are what the public came to expect, and even demand, in a technological consumer age, and therefore mass-produced LSD was quick to fill the ever-growing market for psychedelics. More significant, the synthesis of substances like LSD allowed the power of production to lie in our hands and not the Earth’s. In this way, the natural and “earthy” shamanic aspect of entheogenic species was lost. Which is to say that the potential of entheogenic plants and fungi to forge an informative relationship between our species and Nature was not fully realized. Thus from our discerning vantage point this side of the third millennium, we can look back to the dreams and quixotic idealism of the 1960s and understand that without a holistic appreciation of the biosphere and without an insight into the traditional historical usage of psychedelics, a realistic new world vision in which our species reconnects with the bigger picture was unlikely to take a firm cultural hold.

What this boils down to is the concept of naturalness and the intimation that Nature is more informative than we may imagine. In particular, I would argue that the realization that entheogenic plants and fungi are part of the Earth’s ecology inevitably affects the significance and import of the entheogenic experience. This means that the concept of naturalness acts as an important context for the entheogenic experience, should that experience derive from a natural plant or fungus.

It was precisely this natural biospherical/environmental context that was sorely lacking in the early wave of popular interest in psychedelics. Without acknowledging the botanical environment as the original supply line for the entheogenic agents that started the psychedelic sixties rolling, the acid gurus, despite their vocal enthusiasm for a positive psychedelic world revolution, were still stuck with themselves, caught in a sort of anthropocentric loop, and thereby isolated from an intimate union with the rest of the biosphere. As I will show, the biospherical connection to the entheogenic experience represents the newest phase of psychedelic history, an interesting turn of events full of profound implications for our species.

Unsurprisingly then, although the psychedelic pioneers of the early 1960s were originally turned on by the psilocybin experience—most notably the members of Harvard University’s psychology faculty—they soon became completely embroiled in LSD and the media, and never really picked up on the grounded shamanic pulse of the mushroom. Perhaps this is why Wasson remained highly aloof of the whole hippie counterculture. He quietly pursued his academic research into ancient mushroom use, while other researchers, like Richard Evans Schultes, continued to meticulously document visionary plant use among fast-dwindling native peoples. Indeed, the diligent work of both these scholars has provided us with an invaluable legacy of academic material on native psychedelic shamanism.

Bugged by the CIA

Before recounting Harvard’s brief scientific flirtation with psilocybin, I should like to alert the reader to a rather sinister twist to the events that led up to the isolation and naming of psilocybin in 1958. In particular, one of Wasson’s trips to Mexico unfortunately carried a countercurrent to psilocybin’s holy mystique. Just when you thought it was safe to proclaim a spiritual renaissance of sorts, who should arrive on the scene but the CIA. These disturbing mischief-makers, who so profane history with their presence, will seemingly do anything to maintain a grim state of affairs in which the dour “we was miserable in our day” archetype is nourished.

In his book The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate,” John Marks tells us of the