On the night of June 29-30, 1955, in a Mexican Indian village so
remote from the world that most of the people still speak no Spanish, my friend Allan
Richardson and I shared with a family of Indian friends a celebration of "holy
communion" where "divine" mushrooms where first adored and then consumed.
The Indians mingled Christian and pre-Christian elements in their religious practices in a
way disconcerting for Christians but natural for them. The rite was led by two women,
mother and daughter, both of them curanderas, or shamans. The proceedings went on
in the Mixeteco language. The mushrooms were of a species with hallucinogenic powers; that
is, they cause the eater to see visions. We chewed and swallowed these acrid mushrooms,
saw visions, and emerged from the experience awestruck. We had come form afar to attend a
mushroom rite but had expected nothing so staggering as the virtuosity of the performing curanderas
and the astonishing effects of the mushrooms. Richardson and I were the first white men in
recorded history to eat the divine mushrooms, which for centuries have been a secret of
certain Indian peoples living far from the great world in southern Mexico. No
anthropologists had ever described the scene that we witnessed.
I am a banker by occupation and
Richardson is a New York society photographer and is in charge of visual education at The
Brearley School.
It was, however, no accident
that we found ourselves in the lower chamber of that thatchroofed, adobe-walled Indian
home. For both of us this was simply the latest trip to Mexico in quest of the mushroom
rite. For me and my wife, who was to join us with our daughter a day later, it was a
climax to nearly 30 years of inquiries and research into the strange role of toadstools in
the early cultural history of Europe and Asia.
Thus that June evening found
us, Allan Richardson and me, deep in the south of Mexico, bedded down with an Indian
family in the heart of the Mixeteco mountains at an altitude of 5,500 feet. We could only
stay a week or so: we had no time to lose. I went to the municipio or town hall,
and there I found the official in charge, the síndico, seated alone at his great
table in an upper room. He was young a Indian, about 35 years old, and he spoke Spanish
well. His name was Filemón. He had a friendly manner and I took a chance. Leaning over
his table, I asked him earnestly and in a low voice if I could speak to him in confidence.
Instantly curious, he encouraged me. "Will you," I went on, "help me learn
the secrets of the divine mushroom?" and I used the Mixeteco name, 'nti sheeto,
correctly pronouncing it with glottal stop and tonal differentiation of the syllables.
When Filemón recovered from his surprise he said warmly that nothing could be easier. He
asked me to pass by his house, on the outskirts of town, at siesta time.
Allan and I arrived there about
3 o'clock. Filemón's home is built on a mountainside, with a trail on one side at the
level of the upper story and a deep ravine on the other. Filemón at once lead us down the
ravine to a spot where the divine mushrooms where growing in abundance. After
photographing them we gathered them in a cardboard box and then labored back up the ravine
in the heavy moist heat of that torrid afternoon. Not letting us rest Filemón sent us
high up above his house to meet the curandera, the woman who would officiate at the
mushroom rite. A connection of his, Eva Mendez by name, she was a curandera de primera
categoría, of the highest quality, una Señora sin mancha, a woman without
stain. We found her in the house of her daughter, who pursues the same vocation. Eva was
resting on a mat on the floor from her previous night's performance. She was middle-aged,
and short like all Mixetecos, with a spirituality in her expression that struck us at
once. She had presence. We showed our mushrooms to the woman and her daughter. They cried
out in rapture over the firmness, the fresh beauty and abundance of our young specimens.
Through an interpreter we asked if they would serve us that night. They said yes.
ABOUT 20 of us gathered in the lower chamber of Filemón's house
after 8 o'clock that evening. Allan and I were the only strangers, the only ones who spoke
no Mixeteco. Only our hosts, Filemón and his wife, could talk to us in Spanish. The
welcome accorded to us was of a kind that we had never experienced before in the Indian
country. Everyone observed a friendly decorum. They did not treat us stiffly, as strange
white men; we were of their number. The Indians were wearing their best clothes, the women
dressed in their huipiles or native costumes, the men in clean white trousers tied
around the waist with strings and their best serapes over their clean shirts. They gave us
chocolate to drink, somewhat ceremonially, and suddenly I recalled the words of the early
Spanish writer who had said that before the mushrooms were served, chocolate was drunk. I
sensed what we were in for: at long last we were discovering that the ancient communion
rite still survived and we were going to witness it. The mushrooms lay there in their box,
regarded by everyone respectfully but without solemnity. The mushrooms are sacred and
never the butt of the vulgar jocularity that is often the way of white men with alcohol.
At about 10:30 o'clock Eva
Mendez cleaned the mushrooms of their grosser dirt and then, with prayers, passed them
through the smoke of resin incense burning on the floor. As she did this, she sat on a mat
before a simple altar table adorned with Christian images, the Child Jesus and the Baptism
in Jordan. Then she apportioned the mushrooms among the adults. She reserved 13 pair for
herself and 13 pair for her daughter. (The mushrooms are always counted in pairs.) I was
on tiptoe of expectancy: she turned and gave me six pair in a cup. I could not have been
happier: this was the culmination of years of pursuit. She gave Allan six pair too. His
emotions were mixed. His wife Mary had consented to his coming only after she had drawn
from him a promise not to let those nasty toadstools cross his lips. Now he faced a
behaviour dilemma. He took the mushrooms, and I heard him mutter in anguish, "My God,
what will Mary say!" Then we ate our mushrooms, chewing them slowly, over the course
of a half hour. They tasted bad--acrid with a rancid odor that repeated itself. Allan and
I were determined to resist any effects they might have, to observe better the events of
the night. But our resolve soon melted before the onslaught of the mushrooms.
Before midnight the Señora (as
Eva Mendez is usually called) broke a flower from the bouquet on the altar and used it to
snuff out the flame of the only candle that was still burning. We were left in darkness
and in darkness we remained until dawn. For a half hour we waited in silence. Allan felt
cold and wrapped himself in a blanket. A few minutes later he leaned over and whispered,
"Gordon, I am seeing things!" I told him not to worry, I was too. The visions
had started. They reached a plateau of intensity deep in the night, and they continued at
that level until about 4 o'clock. We felt slightly unsteady on our feet and in the
beginning were nauseated. We lay down on the mat that had been spread for us, but no one
had any wish to sleep except the children, to whom mushrooms are not served. We were never
more wide awake, and the visions came whether our eyes were opened or closed. They emerged
from the center of the field of vision, opening up as they came, now rushing, now slowly,
at the pace that our will chose. They were in vivid color, always harmonious. They began
with art motifs, angular such as might decorate carpets or textiles or wallpaper or the
drawing board of an architect. Then they evolved into palaces with courts, arcades,
gardens--resplendent palaces all laid over with semiprecious stones. Then I saw a
mythological beast drawing a regal chariot. Later it was though the walls of our house had
dissolved, and my spirit had flown forth, and I was suspended in mid-air viewing
landscapes of mountains, with camel caravans advancing slowly across the slopes, the
mountains rising tier above tier to the very heavens. Three days latter, when I repeated
the same experience in the same room with the same curanderas, instead of mountains
I saw river estuaries, pellucid water flowing through an endless expanse of reeds down to
a measureless sea, all by the pastel light of a horizontal sun. This time a human figure
appeared, a woman in primitive costume, standing and staring across the water, enigmatic,
beautiful, like a sculpture except that she breathed and was wearing woven colored
garments. It seemed as though I was viewing a world of which I was not a part and with
which I could not hope to establish contact. There I was, poised in space, a disembodied
eye, invisible, incorporeal, seeing but not seen.
The visions were not blurred or
uncertain. They were sharply focused, the lines and colors being so sharp that they seemed
more real to me than anything I had ever seen with my own eyes. I felt that I was now
seeing plain, whereas ordinary vision gives us an imperfect view; I was seeing the
archetypes, the Platonic ideas, that underlie the imperfect images of everyday life. The
thought crossed my mind: could the divine mushrooms be the secret that lay behind the
ancient Mysteries? Could the miraculous mobility that I was now enjoying be the
explanation for the flying witches that played so important a part in the folklore and
fairy tales of northern Europe? These reflections passed through my mind at the very time
that I was seeing the visions, for the effect of the mushrooms is to bring about a fission
of the spirit, a split in the person, a kind of schizophrenia, with the rational side
continuing to reason and to observe the sensations that the other side is enjoying. The
mind is attached as by an elastic cord to the vagrant senses.
Meanwhile the Señora and her
daughter were not idle. When our visions were still in the initial phases, we heard the
Señora waving her arms rhythmically. She began a low, disconnected humming. Soon the
phrases became articulate syllables, each disconnected syllable cutting the darkness
sharply. Then by stages the Señora came forth with a full-bodied canticle, sung like very
ancient music. It seemed to me at the time like an introit to the Ancient of Days. As the
night progressed her daughter spelled her at singing. They sang well, never loud, with
authority. What they sang was indescribably tender and moving, fresh, vibrant, rich. I had
never realized how sensitive and poetic an instrument the Mixeteco language could be.
Perhaps the beauty of the Señora's performance was partly an illusion induced by the
mushrooms; if so, the hallucinations are aural as well as visual. Not being musicologists,
we now not whether the chants were wholly European or partial indigenous in origin. From
time to time the singing would rise to a climax and then suddenly stop, and then the
Señora would fling forth spoken words, violent, hot, crisp words that cut the darkness
like a knife. This was the mushroom speaking through her, God's words, as the Indians
believe, answering the problems that had been posed by the participants. This was the
Oracle. At intervals, perhaps every half hour, there was a brief intermission, when the
Señora would relax and some would light cigarets.
At one point, while the
daughter sang, the Señora stood up in the darkness where there was an open space in our
room and began a rhythmic dance with clapping or slapping. We do not know exactly how she
accomplished her effect. The claps or slaps were always resonant and true. So far as we
know, she used no device, only her hands against each other or possibly against different
parts of her body. The claps and slaps had pitch, the rhythm at times was complex, and the
speed and volume varied subtly. We think the Señora faced successively the four points of
the compass, rotating clockwise, but are not sure. One thing is certain: this mysterious
percussive utterance was ventriloquistic, each slap coming from an unpredictable direction
and distance, now close to our ears, now distant, above, below, here and yonder, like
Hamlet's ghost hic et ubique. We were amazed and spellbound, Allan and I.
There we lay on our mat,
scribbling notes in the dark and exchanging whispered comments, our bodies inert and heavy
as lead, while our senses were floating free in space, feeling the breezes of the
outdoors, surveying vast landscapes or exploring the recesses of gardens of ineffable
beauty. And all the while we were listening to the daughter's chanting and to the
unearthly claps and whacks, delicately controlled, of the invisible creatures darting
around us.
The Indians who had taken the
mushrooms were playing a part in the vocal activity. In the moments of tension they would
utter exclamations of wonder and adoration, not loud, responsive to the singers and
harmonizing with them, spontaneously yet with art.
On that initial occasion we all
fell asleep around 4 o'clock in the morning. Allan and I awoke at 6, rested and heads
clear, but deeply shaken by the experience we had gone through. Our friendly hosts served
us coffee and bread. We then took our leave and walked back to the Indian house where we
were staying, a mile or so away.
From the many mushroom celebrations that I have now witnessed, nine
in all, it is clear to me that at least in the Mixeteco country the congregation is
indispensable to the rite. Since the congregation, in order to participate, must be
brought up in the tradition, any white persons should be greatly outnumbered by the
Indians. But this does not mean that the mushrooms lose their potency if not eaten
communally. My wife and our daughter Masha, 18, joined us a day after the ceremony that I
have described, and on July 5, in their sleeping bags, they ate the mushrooms while alone
with us. They experienced the visions too. They saw the same brilliant colors; my wife saw
a ball in the Palace of Versailles with figures in period costumes dancing to a Mozart
minuet. Again, on Aug. 12, 1955, six weeks after I had gathered the mushrooms in Mexico, I
ate them in a dried state in my bedroom in New York, and found that if anything they had
gained in their hallucinogenic potency.
It was a walk in the woods, many years ago, that launched my wife
and me on our quest of the mysterious mushroom. We were married in London in 1926, she
being Russian, born and brought up in Moscow. She had lately qualified as a physician at
the University of London. I am from Great Falls, Montana of Anglo-Saxon origins. In the
late summer of 1927, recently married, we spent our holiday in the Catskill Mountains in
New York state. In the afternoon of the first day we went strolling along a lovely
mountain path, through woods criss-crossed by the slanting rays of a descending sun. We
were young, carefree and in love. Suddenly my bride abandoned my side. She had spied wild
mushrooms in the forest, and racing over the carpet of dried leaves in the woods, she
knelt in poses of adoration before first one cluster and then another of these growths. In
ecstasy she called each kind of by an endearing Russian name. She caressed the toadstools,
savored their earthy perfume. Like all good Anglo-Saxons, I knew nothing about the fungal
world and felt that the less I knew about those putrid, treacherous excrescences the
better. For her they were things of grace, infinitely inviting to the perceptive mind. She
insisted on gathering them, laughing at my protests, mocking my horror. She brought a
skirtful back to the lodge. She cleaned and cooked them. That evening she ate them, alone.
Not long married, I thought to wake up the next morning a widower.
These dramatic circumstances,
puzzling and painful for me, made a lasting impression on us both. From that day on we
sought an explanation for this strange cultural cleavage separating us in a minor area of
our lives. Our method was to gather all the information we could on the attitude toward
wild mushrooms of the Indo-European and adjacent peoples. We tried to determine the kinds
of mushrooms that each people knows, the uses to which these kinds are put, the vernacular
names for them. We dug into the etymology of those names, to arrive at the metaphors
hidden in their roots. We looked for mushrooms in myths, legends, ballads, proverbs, in
the writers who drew their inspiration from folklore, in the clichés of daily
conversation, in slang and the telltale recesses of obscene vocabularies. We sought them
in the pages of history, in art, in Holy Writ. We were not interested in what people learn
about mushrooms from books, but what untutored country folk know from childhood., the folk
legacy of the family circle. It turned out that we had happened on a novel field of
inquiry.
As the years went on and our knowledge grew, we discovered a
surprising pattern in our data: each Indo-European people is by cultural inheritance
either "mycophobe" or "mycophile," that is, each people either rejects
and is ignorant of the fungal world or knows it astonishingly well and loves it. Our
voluminous and often amusing evidence in support of this thesis fills many sections of our
new book, and it is there that we submit our case to the scholarly world. The great
Russians, we find, are mighty mycophiles, as are also the Catalans, who possess a
mushroomic vocabulary of more than 200 names. The ancient Greeks, Celts and Scandinavians
were mycophobes, as are the Anglo-Saxons. There was another phenomenon that arrested our
attention: wild mushrooms from earliest times were steeped in what the anthropologists
call mana, a supernatural aura. The very word "toadstool" may have meant
originally the "demonic stool" and been the specific name of a European mushroom
that causes hallucinations. In ancient Greece and Rome there was a belief that certain
kinds of mushrooms were procreated by the lighting bolt. We made the further discovery
that this particular myth, for which no support exists in natural science, is still
believed among many widely scattered peoples: the Arabs of the desert, the peoples of
India, Persia and the Pamirs, the Tibetans and Chinese, the Filipinos and the Maoris of
New Zeland, and even among the Zapotecs of Mexico... All of our evidence taken together
led us many years ago to hazard a bold surmise: was it not probable that, long ago, long
before the beginnings of written history, our ancestors had worshiped a divine mushroom?
This would explain the aura of the supernatural in which all fungi seem to be bathed. We
were the first to offer the conjecture of a divine mushroom in the remote cultural
background of the European peoples, and the conjecture at once posed a further problem:
what kind of mushroom was once worshiped and why?
Our surmise turned out not to
be farfetched. We learned that in Siberia there are six primitive peoples--so primitive
that anthropologists regard them as precious museum pieces for cultural study--who use an
hallucinogenic mushroom in their shamanistic rites. We found that the Dyaks of Borneo and
the Mount Hagen natives of New Guinea also have recourse to similar mushrooms. In China
and Japan we came upon an ancient tradition of a divine mushroom of immortality, and in
India, according to one school, the Buddha at his last supper ate a dish of mushrooms and
was forthwith translated to nirvana.
When Cortez conquered Mexico,
his followers reported that the Aztecs were using certain mushrooms in their religious
celebrations, serving them, as the early Spanish friars put it, in a demonic holy
communion and calling them teonanacatl, "God's flesh." But no one at that
time made a point of studying this practice in detail, and until now anthropologists have
paid little attention to it. We with our interest in mushrooms seized on the Mexican
opportunity, and for years have devoted the few leisure hours of our busy lives to the
quest of the divine mushroom in Middle America. We think we have discovered it in certain
frescoes in the Valley of Mexico that date back to about 400 A.D., and also in the
"mushroom stones" carved by the highland Maya of Guatemala that go back in one
or two instances to the earliest era of stone carvings, perhaps 1000 B.C.
For a day following our
mushroom adventure Allan and I did little but discuss our experience. We had attended a
shamanistic rite with singing and dancing among our Mixeteco friends which no
anthropologist has ever before described in the New World, a performance with striking
parallels in the shamanistic practices of some of the archaic Palaeo-Siberian peoples. But
may not the meaning of what we had witnessed go beyond this? The hallucinogenic mushrooms
are a natural product presumably accessible to men in many parts of the world, including
Europe and Asia. In man's evolutionary past, as he groped his way out from his lowly past,
there must have come a moment in time when he discovered the secret of the hallucinatory
mushrooms. Their effect on him, as I see it, could only have been profound, a detonator to
new ideas. For the mushrooms revealed to him worlds beyond the horizons known to him, in
space and time, even worlds on a different plane of being, a heaven and perhaps a hell.
For the credulous primitive mind, the mushrooms must have reinforced mightily the idea of
the miraculous. Many emotions are shared by men with the animal kingdom, but awe and
reverence and the fear of God are peculiar to men. When we bear in mind the beatific sense
of awe and ecstasy and caritas engendered by the divine mushrooms, one is
emboldened to the point of asking whether they may not have planted in primitive man the
very idea of god.
It is no accident, perhaps,
that the first answer of the Spanish-speaking Indian, when I asked about the effect of the
mushrooms, was often this: Le llevan ahí donde Dios está, "They carry you
there where God is," an answer that we have received on several occasions, from
Indians in different cultural areas, almost as though it were in a sort of catechism. At
all times there have been rare souls--the mystics and certain poets--who have had access
without the aid of drugs to the visionary world for which the mushrooms hold the key.
William Blake possessed the secret: "He who does not imagine in... stronger and
better light than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all." But I
can testify that the mushrooms make those visions accessible to a much larger number. The
visions that we saw must have come from within us, obviously. But they did not recall
anything that we had seen with our own eyes. Somewhere within us there must lie a
repository where these visions sleep until they are called forth. Are the visions a
subconscious transmutation of things read and seen and imagined, so transmuted that when
they are conjured forth from the depths we no longer recognize them? Or do the mushrooms
stir greater depths still, depths that are truly the Unknown?
IN each of our successive trips to the Indian peoples of
southern Mexico, we have enlarged our knowledge of the use of the divine mushrooms, and as
our knowledge has increased, new and exciting questions keep arising. We have found five
distinct cultural areas where the Indians invoke the mushrooms, but the usage varies
widely in every area. What is needed is a perceptive approach by trained anthropologists
in every area, cooperating with mushrooms specialists. Of these latter there are in the
whole world relatively few: mushrooms are a neglected field in the natural sciences. In
this field Professor Roger Heim is known the world over. He is not only a man with vast
experience in the field of mushrooms: he is an outstanding scientist in other fields, a
man steeped in the humanities, the head of the Muséum National D'Historie Naturelle in
Paris. At an early stage of our inquiries he had lent us his counsel, and in 1956 our
progress had been such as to justify him in accompanying us on another field trip. There
came with us also a chemist, Professor James A. Moore of the University of Delaware; an
anthropologist, Guy Stresser-Péan of the Sorbonne; and once again our loyal friend Allan
Richardson as photographer.
This time the immediate problem
was to identify the hallucinogenic mushrooms and to command a steady supply of them for
laboratory study. This is harder than a layman would think. Though the early Spanish
writers wrote about the divine mushrooms four centuries ago, no anthropologist and no
mycologist had been sufficiently interested to pursue the problem until our own
generation. Those who know these mushrooms are Indians belonging to tribes farthest
removed from us culturally, locked in their mountains remote form highways, locked also
behind the barrier of their languages. One must win their confidence and overcome their
suspicion of white men. One must face the physical discomforts of life and dangers of
disease in the Indian villages in the rainy season, when the mushrooms grow. Occasionally
a white face is seen in those parts in the dry season, but when the rains come, those rare
beings--missionaries, archaeologists, anthropologists, botanists, geologists--vanish.
There are other difficulties. Of the seven curanderos that by now I have seen take
mushrooms, only two, Eva Mendez and her daughter, were dedicated votaries. Some of the
others were equivocal characters. Once we saw a curandero take only a token dose of
mushroom, and there was another who ate and served to us a kind of mushroom that had no
hallucinogenic properties at all. Had we seen only him, we should have come away thinking
that the famed properties of the mushrooms were a delusion, a striking instance of
autosuggestion. Do we discover here an effort at deception, or had the dried mushrooms
through age lost their peculiar property? Or, much more interesting anthropologically, do
some shamans deliberately substitute innocent species for the authentic kinds in a retreat
from what is too sacred to be borne? Even when we have won the confidence of a skilled
practitioner like Eva, the atmosphere must be right for a perfect performance and there
must be an abundance of mushrooms. Sometimes even in the rainy season the mushrooms are
scarce, as we have learned from costly experience.
WE now know that there are seven kinds of
hallucinogenic mushrooms in use in Mexico. But not all the Indians know them even in the
villages where they are worshiped, and either in good faith or to make the visitor happy,
the curanderos sometimes deliver the wrong mushrooms. The only certain test is to
eat the mushrooms. Professor Heim and we have thus established beyond challenge the claims
of four species. The next best thing is to obtain multiple confirmation from informants
unknown to each other, if possible from various cultural areas. This we have done with
several additional kinds. We are now certain as to four species, reasonably sure about two
other kinds, and inclined to accept the claims of a seventh, these seven belonging to
three genera. Of these seven, at least six appear to be new to science. Perhaps in the end
we shall discover more than seven kinds.
The mushrooms are not used as
therapeutic agents: they themselves do not effect cures. The Indians "consult"
the mushrooms when distraught with grave problems. If someone is ill, the mushroom will
say what led to the illness and whether the patient will live or die, and what should be
done to hasten recovery. If the verdict of the mushroom is for death, the believing
patient and his family resign themselves: he loses appetite and soon expires and even
before his death they begin preparations for the wake. Or one may consult the mushroom
about the stolen donkey and learn where it will be found and who took it. Or if a beloved
son has gone out into the world--perhaps to the United States--the mushroom is a kind of a
postal service: it will report whether he still lives or is dead, whether he is in jail,
married, in trouble or prosperous. The Indians believe that the mushrooms hold the key to
what we call extrasensory perception.
Little by little the properties
of the mushrooms are beginning to emerge. The Indians who eat them do not become addicts:
when the rainy season is over and the mushrooms disappear, there seems to be no
physiological craving for them. Each kind has its own hallucinogenic strength, and if
enough of one species be not available, the Indians will mix the species, making a quick
calculation of the right dosage. The curandero usually takes a large dose and
everyone else learns to know what his own dose should be. It seems that the dose does not
increase with use. Some persons require more than others. An increase in the dose
intensifies the experience but does not greatly prolong the effect. The mushrooms sharpen,
if anything, the memory, while they utterly destroy the sense of time. On the night that
we have described we lived through eons. When it seemed to us that a sequence of visions
had lasted for years, our watches would tell us that only seconds had passed. The pupils
of our eyes were dilated, the pulse of ran slow. We think the mushrooms have no cumulative
effect on the human organism. Eva Mendez has been taking them for 35 years, and when they
are plentiful she takes them night after night.
The mushrooms present a
chemical problem. What is the agent in them that releases the strange hallucinations? We
are now reasonably sure that it differs form such familiar drugs as opium, coca,
mescaline, hashish, etc. But the chemist has a long road to go before he will isolate it,
arrive at its molecular structure and synthesize it. The problem is of great interest in
the realm of pure science. Will it also prove of help in coping with psychic disturbances?
My wife and I have traveled far
and discovered much since that day 30 years ago in the Catskills when we first perceived
the strangeness of wild mushrooms. But what we have already discovered only opens up new
vistas for further study. Today we are about to embark on our fifth expedition to the
Mexican Indian villages, again seeking to increase and refine our knowledge of the role
played by mushrooms in the lives of these remote peoples. But Mexico is only the
beginning. All the evidence relating to the primitive beginnings of our own European
cultures must be reviewed to see whether the hallucinogenic mushroom played a part there,
only to be overlooked by posterity.
