The Psilocybin Solution

became suddenly enhanced as psilocybin made its extraordinary psychedelic presence felt. Indeed, for our purposes, it is rather apt that our man Wasson was provided with an informative and illuminating experience at that time—almost an earthly calling card in fact—as only a few months earlier Nature had consumed the great Einstein. At least it was apt in a relative kind of way for anyone interested in the subtle-yetnever-malicious force of such a wily killer/creator as Nature.

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. Among dreamy 1950s Technicolor photographs and numerous advertisements for miracle filter cigarettes and various brands of alcohol, Wasson’s article shines like some otherworldly beacon signaling 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 1950s thinking and values. This was the decade of Cadillacs, rock ’n’ roll, television, and electronic gadgetry, a decade in which the postwar generation could live happily upon the bountiful fruits of consumerism. Having recently conquered both Everest and the secret of the atom, humankind seemed truly on the ascent. Unlimited atomic energy and unlimited material growth were in the cards. Nature had been tamed and set to work for our own ends.

Of course, what no one realized at this time was the devastating effect upon the environment that an unchecked material culture could wreak. As yet unconceived in holistic organismic terms, the natural environment was a place to take the kids on the weekend, not the grounds for concern, let alone the grounds for a bizarre shamanic consummation. And, after all, weren’t shamans just primitive witch doctors 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 and one that spoke of a very different kind of reality from that of the American dream.

Deep in the south of Mexico in a small village in Oaxaca, Wasson recounted 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 furnishings, however, was in stark contrast to the luxuriousness of the visionary experience that followed the ingestion of the mushrooms, the surroundings all but melting into insignificance.

At 10:30 p.m. 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 swallowed his destiny.

Like all good empiricists Wasson determined to remain objectively aloof and ward off any major psychological effects so that he could study more clearly the nature of the revered shift in consciousness engendered by the 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 mentation.

As Wasson lay in the dark confines of the hut, the power latent within the mushroom gradually made itself known to him. Visions unfolded before his eyes, visions so intense and so profound that they breached the ineffable realms of religious mysticism. They began as vividly colored art motifs of an angular nature, as found on textiles and carpets. Then the visions evolved 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 midair, viewing vast mountains rising 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 on ancient Siberian shamanism, had now transformed into a personal testimony of the mystical experience. Coming from a man normally concerned with the world of finance, this is a truly remarkable turn of events, even more so since he was not overtly religious. It was also the case that any of Wasson’s residual mycophobia had now been utterly obliterated, as the incontrovertible truth of psilocybin-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 from these more detailed accounts, and the book subsequently ends as a veritable mystical treatise.

At one point during the mushroom ceremony Wasson thought

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 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.^{2}

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 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 organized field of intelligence or a transcendental sentience of some sort, interpreted by native shamans as a Great Spirit or God. Wasson failed to elaborate on 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 was it possible, he wondered, that we could be carrying around an inventory of 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 mushroom and this capacity for creative thought was somehow linked to the perception of the divine.

The visionary effects of the mushroom, so clearly related to the experiences of religious mystics, suggested to Wasson that these kinds of 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 one that he would constantly return to for the rest of his life. Wasson asks us if perhaps the idea of a deity arose after our distant ancestors first consumed psychoactive mushrooms, surely a compelling scenario if we are pushed to explain the origins of religion in natural terms. He was later to help coin the contemporary word entheogen to refer to these sorts of plants and fungi, a word that, 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 mushroom. The Indians claimed that the fungi “carry you there where God is.”^{3} Always the mushroom was referred to with awe and reverence. It was 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, native shamans used the fungus for oracular reasons to cure and prophesize. Wasson was intimately familiar with the Indians’ sacred traditions, and he was at pains to portray this cultural phenomenon to his readers in the respectful light it deserved. No Indian ate the mushroom frivolously for