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
In telling of his experiences in
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
Deep in the south of Mexico in a small village in Oaxaca, Wasson recounted to the readers of
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
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
Readers of the