Genesis of Eden
The Americas are to the rest of the world a literal Garden of Eden in the sense that the vast majority of truly hallucinogenic plants originate from there or were discovered and used there. This is somewhat of an irony for human culture and leads to a paradoxical situation where the most powerful spiritual agents in nature have become accursed by an inexperienced alien culture of conquest, only to become nearly lost to civilization as true endowments of nature for the betterment of humankind.
In the Americas, psychedelic power plants have been without exception the object of veneration and worship in virtually every culture that has had access to them, generally over time scales of millenia. This includes a spectrum of the most potent agents known including sacred mushrooms from the ancient Mayas to the modern Mazatecs, Peyote from the Toltecs to the Huichols, San Pedro cactus from the Chavin culture to Eduardo Caldero, Ayahuasca - the vine of the soul from the Genesis of the world, morning glories and even the frankly uncontrollable plants of the Datura family. We should take a lesson from their experience and try to understand why they held these plants in such spiritual esteem.
Despite their powerful nature, the religious and shamanic use of these allies has served to place a natural care in respect in their use. This turns what could become an unhinged occasion into a carefully guided one, which happens only on ritually appointed occasions, over which the group and its leaders keep a watchful eye on all the participants and strict protocols operate. This in turn serves to unite the participants in a bond which is both shared with one another and with the infinite.
Shamanism Pages:
3: The Sacred Mushroom: Teonanactl and the Lady of the Alder
The Story of the discovery of the flesh of the gods is dealt with in detail in Homage to Maria Sabina. It is surely one of the more unusual episodes of human history. The very existence of such entities had apparently disappeared from human consciousness, despite the existence of ancient mushroom stones in the Guatemalan highlands, when in 1936 an anthropologist in Mexico discovered of the existence of a mushroom rite, hidden through the 500 years of Christian repression. It was to lie fallow for another 20 years until Gordon Wasson received the prophesied transmission from Maria Sabina.
Subsequently
great interest developed in psilocybe mushrooms, Albert Hofmann
synthesizing the active ingredient and Timothy Leary giving them
notoriety, while nevertheless recognising in them something of
their spiritual potential. It gradually came to be discovered
that although somewhat difficult to identify, there were psilocin-bearing
mushrooms, predominantly psilocybes, in just about every moist
terrain on the planet. Two types of habitat are distinguishable.
Most species are carbohydrate decomposers that live stably for
long periods on decaying wood. The other type is one large tropical
and some small temperate mushrooms growing in pastures in association
with Brahmin cattle.
Mycophiles such as Kat Harrison, Terrence McKenna and Paul Stamets discovered instances of mushroom artefacts in the Old World, and it became apparent that, given the widespread distribution of forest psilocybes, that it would be most surprising if the early gatherers of Europe had not become familiar with their properties.
McKenna also notes the existence of green mushroom stones from the Vinca site in Northwestern Bulgaria (119), and a particularly unusual relic found on the Konja Plain (102) which has what look like a pair of mushrooms on the front and a riveting stare consistent with a visionary state. These are consistent with an early spread of a mushroom cult, possibly of a pastoral mushroom associated with cattle. On the south side of the Mediterranian, Tassili rock painting shows a variety of instances of shamanic figures either running holding a mushroom or sprouting mushrooms, while at the same time covered in just those entopic patterns mentioned in prehistoric Europe. Climatic changes would have made this area fertile in earlier periods.
A stele of Demeter, passing the central sacrament of the Eleusinian mystery to Persephone, also presents the distinctive appearance of a liberty bell mushroom similar to the pastoral psilocybe semilanceata. These mysteries have also been associated with ergot, because it is a hallucinogen which is in the very grain of which Demeter is the Goddess, but one should regard all sacred plants and fungi as potentially in the domain of the Earth Goddess and her mystery religions. The above sacrament is clearly not ergot. Neither does ergot show on the grains otherwise held by Persephone.
Psilocybe cyanescens (shown above) is extensive throughout Europe and may have been introduced to the US with the Europeans. It and related species exist in small numbers scattered in forest. The preferred substrate of cyanescens is alder. As such woods come to be cut down and used domestically, so piles of decaying nutrient build up which can lead to large eruptions of fungi in association with small communities. Such a possibility may remain conjecture but is not inconsistent with the detailed involvement both of nature and of the alder in particular in old European tree-lore (Graves ).
Networking: the Entheogenic Transformation: Lycaeum
Materials: Fungi Perfecti.
PO Box 7634 Olympia WA 98507 USA mycomedia@aol.com
Spores: Florida Mycology Research Center, P.O. Box 8104,
Pensacola, Florida 32505, USA
Homestead Book Company, Box 31608, Seattle, WA 98103. USA
Syzygy, PO Box 619, Honaunau HI 96726, USA
Maria Sabina: Estrada, Alvaro 1981 Maria Sabina : Her
Life and Chants Ross Erickson Santa Barbara.
Mushroom Ceremony of the Mazatec Indians of Mexico 1957 The Smithsonian
Institution,
Folkways Cassette Series: 08975.
4: The Vine of the Soul and the Hallucinogenic Snuffs
One of the most powerful traditions in shamanic use of sacred plants comes from a complex of plants containing various admixtures of methylated-tryptamines and beta-carbolines. Sometimes just one of these components may be taken. Dimethyl-tryptamine or its 5-methoxy derivative may be taken on its own as a snuff. There are a variety of famous snuffs including yopo from leguminous Anadenanthera beans and epena from Virola species. These snuffs are often blown through long blow guns, resulting in an explosive entoxication. The substances are very short acting and literally knock the participant over, while lasting no more than five minutes. Several species of Acacia including confusa, maidenii, and phlebophylla also contain DMT as well as related Mimosa hostilis the roots of which form the basis of an hallucinogenic drink..
However the most singular hallucinogen known to man is certainlythe drink known in Quechua as ayahuasca - the vine of the soul or rope of the dead, Caapi, or Yaje. "There is a magical intoxicant in in the northwestern most of South America which the Indians believe can free the soul from corporeal confinement , allowing it to wander free and return to the body at will. The soul thus untrammeled, liberates its owner from the realities of everyday life and introduces him to wondrous realms of which he considers to be reality and permits him to communicate with his ancestors" (Schultes & Hofmann 1979 120).
Ethnobotany:
Sources:
Books:
This
is an admixture based on both dimethyl-tryptamine and the carboline
harmine. The bark of the vine of certain Banisteriopsis species
is mashed and boiled with the leaves of plants such as certain
Psychotria species. Sometimes some tropanes are also added. The
principal is regarded as a major botanical discovery of the Indians:
the beta-carboline acts as a mono-amine oxidase inhibitor, making
it possible for the dimethyl-tryptamine to both enter the body
through the stomach and to remain in action for some four hours.
In combination, these substances produce a profound and sustained
visionary state of a particularly tumultuous sort.
Harner in 'The Way of the Shaman' gives a particularly striking description of his introduction to ayahuasca by the Conibo indians 'Just a few minutes earlier I had been disappointed, sure that the ayahuasca was not goint to have any effect on me. Now the sound of rushing water flooded my brain. My jaw began to feel numb ... Overhead the faint lines became brighter and gradually interlaced to form a canopy resembling a geometric mosaic of stained glass. I could see dim figures engaged in shadowy movements ... the moving scene resolved itself into a supernatural carnival of demons. In the centre was a gigantic grinning crocodilian head from whose cavernous jaws gushed a torrential flood of water'. The scene gradually tranformed into sky and sea. He then saw two vessels which merged 'into a single vessel with a dragon-headed prow'. 'I heard a regular swishing sound and saw it was a giant galley.' 'I became conscious too of the most beautiful singing I have ever heard in my life ... emanating from myriad voices on the galley. I could make out large numbers of people with the heads of blue jays'. 'At the same time some energy essence began to float from my chest up into the boat' as if to take his soul away. His body began to become numb as if his heart was going to stop. His brain became partitioned into an intellectual command level, the numb level and lower levels of the visions' (Harner1980 1)
'I was told that this new material was being presented to me because I was dying and therefore 'safe' to receive these revelations. 'First they showed me the planet earth as it was eons ago'. Then appeared 'large creatures with pterodactyl-like wings' which 'were fleeing from something out in space' and 'showed me how they had created life on the planet in order to hide within the multitudinous forms'. He then witnessed the unfolding of plant and animal speciation learning that 'the dragon-like creatures were inside all forms of life'. 'These revelations alternated with visions of the floating galley which had almost taken my soul on board' (Harner1980 4).
With an unimaginable last effort, I barely managed to utter one word to the indians: "Medicine!" I saw them rushing around to make an antidote' which 'eased my condition but did not prevent me from having many additional visions'. 'Finally I slept'. "Rays of light were piercing the holes in the palm-thatched roof when I awoke'. 'I was surprised to discover that I felt refreshed and peaceful' ' (Harner1980 5).
Afterwards he related his vision of the bat-like creatures to an aged sightless shaman who 'said with a grin "Oh they are always saying that. But they are only the masters of the outer darkness." waving his hand casually towards the sky ' just as Harner had seen in his vision.
There have been many reports that medicine men achieve clairvoyance under the influence of ayahuasca. For this reason, Fisher the first investigator to extract an alkaloid from it called the substance now known as harmine telepathine. This is a controversial area. Some researchers very experienced at the use of entheogens discont the idea that ayahuasca has any unique properties in this regard, but acknowledge that such properties are often attributed to hallucinogens generally (Ott 233).
Carlos Fallon commanded a gunboat floatilla navigating the Putamayo. He met a medicine man who was able to 'see' a Peruvian boat coming upstream manned by a crew of four and an officer before it was confirmed by a radio. Fallon tok the potion himself and reported that he was covered in feathers and talons rather than feet. He moved into the centre of the hut and from there he looked back to see his human body sleeping. When he asked the paye if this was possible, he was admonished not to attempt such things until after more practice at 'mastering his dreams (Andrews 353).
To the Amahuaca an ayahuasca party is a social occasion. Anyone can drop in and woen will sit chatting while their men keen and shudder away. However it may also be taken to find a thief or to seek revenge for acts of witchcraft through summoning a power animal soul as an agent to dispatch psychic darts into the adversary. Corresponding to this a shaman will traditionally remove sch magical darts by sucking them fro a person's abdomen during a healing session. Visions of sexual incubi and succubi are regarded as pleasant diversions with no ill effects. In general there is a clear distinction between disease per se and disease caused by sorcery, based on its unexplained or coincidental occurrence (Andrews 349).
Hallucinations generally involve scenes which are part of a Cashinahua's daily experience, but they sometimes have visions of other places during their session. Kennsinger notes: "Several informants who had never been to or seen pictures of the local capital Pucallpa have described their visits under the influence of ayahuasca with sufficient detail for me recognise specific shops and sights. On the day following one ayahuasca party, six of nine men infored me of sseeing the death of my chai 'mother's father'. This occurred two days before I was informed by radio of his death" (Harner 1973 12).
Once the drug begins to shake them chanting begins in ernest. Each man sings independently. Chants often involve conversations with the spirits of the ayahuasca. At other times they chant simple rhythmic monosyllables. The experienced lead the uninitiated. Although each man operates on his own, the group is very important as it provides him with a contact with the real world, without which the terrors of the spirit world he is travelling through could be overwhelming. They see multicoloured snakes, jungle cats, spirits of ayahuasca, and scenes of real or spirit life in rapid transformation. Frequently a group of men will line up on a long each one wrapping his arms and legs around the one in front. The chanting rises and falls punctuated by shrieks of terror, retching and vomiting.
The Cashinahua do not drink ayahuasca for pleasure, but in order to learn about things, persons and events removed from them by time and/or space which could effect one or all of them. Hallucinations are veiwed as the experiences of an individual's dream spirit, they are portents of things to come or reminders of the past. The Cashinahua have two kinds of medical specalist: the herbalist, who treats diseases of natural aetiology through specific remedies and the shaman who treats supernatural causes by applying the power he has gained as a shaman to the spirit cause of the malady (Harner 1973 13).
I journeyed to Pucallpa to come to sample the Rope of the Dead. I had journeyed for days and nights, picking up information from other travellers. By the time I arrived, my time had nearly run out, and I had to seek a session through a canoe operator on the slumy back streets of Yarinacocha at two days notice. The shaman was crippled with leprosy. In a macabre gesture beyond belief he had to crawl across the floor to get to the ayahuasca bottle and because he had no fingers, he had to pull out the cork with his teeth, holding it in the stumps of his hands. He poured me a vial of brown liquid. I simmered this briefly under a kerosine lamp and drank its pungent contents like varnish. He sat talking to his friends spitting voluably in every direction. Bizarrely he had a son or nephew who he was caring for very tenderly and keeping well protected from mosquitoes. It could be he was now in remision! After some thirty minutes when I hadn't begun to feel that terribly nauseous I asked for a second cup to make sure the vision quest was accomplished.
After this I began to feel the need to lie down. I returned to my room at the Mystic Society on the edge of the lagoon. I was lying flat in the night feeling really nauseous with the sounds of the lagoon and the insects weaving through the night air. The surroundings were alive with Shipibo art. The moving patterns moved with waves of nausea. I turned desperately to vomit and found a host of Shipibo vases stored there each yawning at me waiting to receive my offering. I then felt slowly better and began to settle into the visions in ernest. The zig-zag bed covers were running with flood waves of Shipibo energy. The force of the ayahuasca became all-consuming. Everywhere I tried to look, it was pulling me into its vortex like a whirlpool, so I would become lost. The mere shock of trying to step backwards seemed to add a toxic intensity. All my previous visionary experiences came apart like a stack of cards. Above all I wanted to know how consciousness was realized in space-time. I posed the eternal question as a koan and sat in stillness of death in the tropical night 'seeing' the answer with my quantum-mechanical brain, revealing its secrets of precognition - how conscious experience is able to reach both forward and backward in time. The Orphic experience from the world beyond.
Nearly twenty years later n 1999 I returned to Pucallpa on my vigil down the Amazon and again sought out an ayahuasca curandero on the outskirts of Yarinacocha to convey the Amazonian rite of passage to my companions. After a chance meeting in the street with a middle-aged woman, we were directed to Senora Trinico. After some searching in the slum area of the back streets I finally was greeted in a small shanty by a rheumy-eyed middle-aged man with a walking stick who was not the senore but certainly claimed to be trinico. The moment I saw his fingerless hands, I realized this was the one and same person echoing from the deep past. This time four of us had an evening cramped in the dark in the small shanty room while Trinico, sang ayahuasca songs whistling softly and eerily connecting us all in an infinitely spacious chant, watched over astutely by the senora throughout. I was the only one to hold my stomach throughout. We each took one larger but less concentrated draft. The first onrush was very strong punctuated by a quiet period after midnight. When we came to take our leave and seek the solace of fresh pioneapple in the local hospedaje los delphines, we desperately cut pina to assuage our tettered stomachs. Holding the medicine had an interesting sequel. With each round of sustinance, came another flush of visions as the stomach unwound and beganto ingest the remnants of alkaloids.
Yurupari dances [have been] widespread, especially in western Amazonia ... they characteristically use sacred bark horns and are taboo to women, who are forbidden to see them and flee to the forest at the first sound. In former times, women who did actually see a horn were killed usually with poison. Yurupari means everything from 'the devil', 'ancestor spirit', 'mystery' to 'fertility rite' (Schultes & Hofmann 1980 173). The new adolescent freshmen are subjected to a wild ritual whipping from head to toe, during the ceremonial drinking of ayahuasca, while trumpters in pairs weave in and out of the Maloca in dancing motions. In Tukano Yuripari is miria-pora which means to submerge oneself (coitus) - descendents (paternity). The ritual promulgates the law of exogamy.
The Tukano origin of Yaje goes back to the first woman of creation, who 'drowned' men in visions, just as Tukano men also believe they drown in coitus. She found herself with child, impregnated through the eye by a ray of the sun like Mary. She gave birth to the child who became Caapi. The child was born in a brilliant flash of light. The woman - Yaje cut the umbilical cord and rubbing the child with magical plants shaped his body. She takes him into the house full of chaotic disorder where the men are and says "whose is this child?" - They are 'suffocated with visions' under the giddy influence of her and the child. After a pause the spell is broken and one man after another takes a piece of the child, like Dionysus! Each staking a claim to the incestuous paternity. Each piece became a cultivar of the Yaje vine, and symbolically the light each carries.
Epena snuff is similarly described by the Tukano in terms of a male fertility myth as the 'semen of the sun'. At the beginning of time Father Sun had incest with his daughter who acquired Viho or epena by scratching her father's penis.
For the Indian "the hallucinatory experience is essentially a sexual one ... to make it sublime, to pass from the erotic, the sensual to a mystical union with the mythic era, the intra-uterine age is the ultimate goal, attained by a mere handful, but coverted by all" (Schultes & Hofmann 1979 124).The Maloca is itself the uterus. The purpose of the myth is to preserve the order of fertility. If mankind was to prevail and survive as part of nature, and was to pass on a true legacy to new generations, people had to assume responsibilities and find ways to control the organization of society so as to produce a balance between human needs and the resources available in nature (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1).
The Union Vegetale: The shamanic use of ayahuasca has been reformed into a modern religious movement Union of the Vegetal to "remember past lives and to understand the true meaning of reincarnation as well as to become familiar with the origin and the real destiny of nature and of man".
The Union Vegetale is a nominally Christian movement to experience inner harmony through partaking of ayahuasca tea. A fortnightly meeting is held by the movement, which includes members of both sexes from all walks of life. Its membership is not restricted to one fringe group.
Another plant from the old world which also contains harmine and harmaline after which it is named is Peganum harmala or Syran rue. This plant remains one of the candidates for the sacred plant Soma. Harmel would be ruddy if pressed from the root, where the active ingredients are stored as they are also in the seed.
Rudgley has suggested that Peganum was the ancient Soma. He notes that Avesta describes Soma as tall perfumed and greenish. The Vedas also describe Soma as growing in the mountains. In 1794 Jones' Laws of Manu describes Soma as a species of mountain rue but not true rue (Ruta). Peganum (wlid rue) is found in the central Asian steppes and Iranian plateau.
Rue intoxication is characterised by a soporific stupor with hallucination. In the Avesta Yasna 10:8 notes: "Indeed all other intoxications are accompanied by violence of the bloody club, but the intoxication of Haoma is accompanied by bliss-giving righteousness".
The consumption of sauma is the only means recognised in the Zoroastrian literature and is the means used by Ohrmazd when he wishes to make the menog - seeing into existence before death - visible to living persons (McKenna 105).
In the book of Arda Wiraz the Persian priest drinks mang from three golden cups for Good Thought, Speech and Action, at a great meeting of priests to assess the future prospects in the wake of Alexander's incursions. His soul travels to another world returning on the seventh day, relaying all he has seen to a scribe. In this journey he travels on the axis-mundi to heaven and hell in just the manner of Muhammad's night flight to heaven."I saw the pre-eminent world of the pious which is the all-glorious light of space, perfumed with sweet basil, all-bedecked and splendid full of glory and every pleasure, with which no one is satiated" (Rudgley 53).
Evidence is beginning to accumulate that this hallucinogen may also have been available to ancient Biblical prophets including Moses, and Bedouins of al-Lat. Peganum harmala is widespread in Biblical areas and is noted on Gebel Musa one principal candidate for Mt. Sinai of Moses (Hobbs 16). A specific desert acacia, Sant, a host tree of the mistletoe-like loranthus, is Moses 'burning bush' and the source of mana (Graves 1948 264), which is the prime oracular tree of Canaan (440). If this contains tryptamines as many species do Moses could have had access to a potion much like ayahuasca.
This experience follows a close parallel to those of the Prophet during his night journey to heaven on the axis mundi. "It is related from the Prophet that over each leaf and seed of the isfand plant an angel is appointed so that through its bark and roots and branches grief and sorcery are set aside" Baqir Majlisi (Rudgley 43). A hadith relates that in seeking a solution to the cowardice of his followers, Muhammad was told by Allah to cammand them to consume isfand in order to make them brave (Rudgley 52). In the garden of paradise Allah also has a sacred drink spiced with ginger. This suggests an intriguing possibility that the inspiration of Muhammad's vision could have been Soma itself and that this vision is comparable with that of the Vine of the Soul.
Part 2: The True Hallucinogens: Peyote and other Hallucinogens