The Psilocybin Solution

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 attempt to account for the mysterious effects in reasonable psychological terms, and his tentative speculations remain valid. 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.” Indeed, given the current world situation in which relentless material consumption is rapidly destroying the biosphere and our value systems are devoid of any vivifying spiritual dimension, the sacred mushroom experience is now more relevant than ever before.

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 recognize that the mushroom had proved itself to be the psychological analogue of physical fire, its effects able to innervate 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 the entheogenic experience for psychological science alone is enough to warrant our attention since psilocybin is clearly able to galvanize highly constructive systems of thought and emotion into action—that much can be said at the absolute least. Any substance able to evoke an organized flow of symbolic information seemingly issuing from somewhere outside of one’s sense of self, or ego, has got to be worth studying, especially if the experience appears more real than real. And as far as 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 investigate the mushroom’s visionary potential. Whereas the most limited explanation for this psychological phenomenon in terms of, say, 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 exhilarating states of mind—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 verbalize his entheogenic experiences in a way that captured their remarkable character. Wasson had shown how sacred realms of experience were not dependent on churches or on the blessings of popes and priests, but could be accessed through the consumption of entheogenic fungi. Wasson had effectively laid 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 experience to large numbers people whose psychological disposition might not be 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, 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 are opened, the infinite beauty of reality can be discerned. Whether he had planned it or not, Wasson, like his contemporary Aldous Huxley, now had his foot firmly wedged between those perceptual doors.

As yet unnamed, its chemical structure still unknown, psilocybin thus began its gradual infiltration of the modern technological world, flowing for the first time in and out of the nervous systems of Westerners, facilitating a spectacular kind of cerebral information processing in which the blazing divinity of Nature 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.

Despite the widespread interest generated by his Life piece, Wasson later chose, perhaps wisely, to distance himself from the 1960s psychedelic hippie 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 of the use of psilocybin mushrooms by the Aztec and Mayan civilizations of ancient Mesoamerica, and we shall now step briefly back in time to view these historical entheogenic traditions before bringing the history of psilocybin fully up to date.

TWO An Ancient Form of Communion

The discovery of the shamanic use of psilocybin among contemporary Mexican Indians was indicative of a sacred tradition that, although almost buried, had its roots firmly set in the glories of past civilizations. In particular, the mighty Aztec empire had been familiar with the mushroom, and the various documents written by Spanish conquistadors almost five hundred years ago, which mention mushroom use by the Aztecs, can be reanalyzed according to what we now know of the actual entheogenic experience. Psilocybin emerges as no mere incidental feature of the natural world, restricted to secretive and isolated use; rather, its ritual role as a potent sacrament was overtly established within the very fabric of ancient Mesoamerican society. Until, that is, it came under the merciless gaze of the Catholic Spanish conquistadors.

The Aztecs were an immensely powerful civilization whose cultural achievements are ranked by some in the same league as those of ancient Egypt and Babylonia. Religious ideology permeated all aspects of Aztec society, driving them to conquest and expansion and giving rise to their infamous bloody human sacrifices on a scale that cannot fail to shock.

Located in the Central Valley of Mexico, the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) reached its peak of power and magnificence immediately prior to the arrival of Hernan Cortes and his gold-rushing Spanish army in 1519. With the advent of the Spanish conquest, all aspects of Aztec religion, including the use of the psilocybin mushroom, were systematically wiped out, condemned as devilish heresy.

To the invading Spanish clergy, the Aztecs’ claim that certain mushrooms (some two dozen or so psilocybin-containing species are indigenous to Mexico) were teonanacatl, or “God’s Flesh,” was to admit to some blasphemous unholy communion. In the Roman Catholicism touted by the marauding conquistadors, communion with the divine was not based on personally revealed knowledge or gnosis. Absolutely not. Rather it was the case that “inside” information concerning the divine was considered acceptable only if one was connected to a formally established religious hierarchy within which one accepted, without question, its most cherished doctrines.

In other words, the organized drive of Catholicism that descended upon the Aztec nation derived its power structure through force-feeding religious dogma to its adherents. To openly question this dogma, or to criticize it, could and did mean death five hundred years ago. One is therefore hard-pressed to conceive of a more heretical act than that of the Aztecs’ consumption of supposedly divine mushrooms. The Spanish Catholic clergy, eager to spread their faith, would have been utterly appalled at the concept of eating some foul and unsightly fungus in order to facilitate divine communion. As we shall see, this negative reaction was clearly reflected in the lively written Spanish accounts of Aztec customs. To be sure, the intense disgust generated within the orthodox religious minds of the Spanish priests echoes the hatred meted out to women accused of being satanic witches in medieval Europe, as they too were found guilty of possessing heretical botanical knowledge. Whereas the Aztecs employed psilocybin mushrooms to induce numinous states of consciousness, the witches of the Middle Ages achieved similar states of mind by utilizing plants like henbane and belladonna. Historically speaking, the spiritual use of plants and fungi tends to generate the same blunt response in the male psyche of any monotheistic culture—namely,