PREFACE by Dr. Josep Mª Fericgla
Cultures vary, but human beings seem always to be looking for the same thing, both within and without. Perhaps only the way of searching is diversified, while what is longed for is always identical. Or perhaps the very essence of the human being is to search. Our Western societies began, thousands of years ago for some, three centuries ago for others, and barely nine decades ago for still others, an evolutionary path that went first through technical evolution, then technological, and is now in the phase of the computer or information revolution, especially in reference to knowledge of the physical world—whether external or internal to the human being. It seems that today interest and energy (economic, personal, mechanical, and every other form of energy) are being poured solely into that concrete physical-chemical dimension of the world. Yet against the general prejudice, still fully in force, according to which the only essential basis of our knowledge of the world comes exclusively from outside and consequently nihil esse in intelectu quod non antea fuerit in sensu, there are people who understand the cosmos—and ourselves within it—from other, less reductionist, more holistic perspectives.
Religions, it is said, belong to the past: Marxism eliminated them by branding them a collective narcotic, and the great religious institutions of today (whether of crosses or crescents), with their empty eternal truths and their eagerness to merge with the systems that control social reality (political power), are finishing them off. It would seem that all that counts are new car models, marketing that makes things sell (whether it is selling a useful or a useless object, a psychological pleasure, or a portion of a good conscience), and appearances. The bulk of society imagines scholars of religion as long-faced, serious, sour individuals with enormous emotional deficiencies, frustrated, broke, and devoted to something useless and remote (and sometimes they really are like that).
The origin of this panorama is easy to understand. Originally, religiosity was an integral part of people’s daily and ritual life—as it still is among so-called primitive peoples, and in small Western communities, ever more numerous, where new forms of religion more in tune with the other elements of today’s world are practiced; some people were more sensitive to, and more committed to, the inner world that religion revealed, but that did not matter, since the same happens with art, sports, family, and chocolate chip cookies. Not all of us enjoy the same threshold of sensitivity to the same stimuli or fields of interest.
Even so, there was something in common, something we have sought throughout the whole history of our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, that appears in archaeological excavations and in anthropological studies of any people on Earth, and that lies at the center of every religion oriented toward religare—the etymological origin of the concept—tying together the human being’s outer and inner worlds: the search for ecstasy, for deep illumination, for the self-knowledge that allows one to live with a high degree of grace and harmony (a word much abused at present). The techniques discovered and used throughout history and across the world to seek ecstasy are many and varied: analysis and work with one’s own natural dreams, extreme fasting, brain hyperventilation techniques, meditation, yoga, katsugen, or—the most widespread method of all—the ingestion of entheogenic substances (a neologism that would mean “god within me”; coined in 1979, it is the most fitting term we have for the plants and substances until now called hallucinogens). Even certain Zen currents claim that it is precisely this capacity for mental dissociation that distinguishes us from the other living species with which we share the Earth, that makes us properly human.
Medieval Christianity gradually did away with all those methods that allowed individuals, as such, to connect with their divinities—or, in a fitting phrase of A. Escohotado’s that distances it from the religious conception, to take a psychic excursion. A single worldview, a single hierarchy, a single god was meant to be imposed… and the formula was to relentlessly put an end to every method that allowed access to these ecstatic states or states of deep interiorization; mental states that, in Jungian psychoanalytic terms, make it possible to connect with one’s own archetypes and the content lying beneath our unconscious.
Modernity framed with a single term—witch—what in the dark centuries of the Middle Ages, and already from the Roman Empire, had been divided into masca, fara, maléfica, sortilegia, lammia, pythonissa, stria, incantatrix, herbaria, fascineria, and arlia. Each of these words had its own etymological origin and an independent semantic adventure, but the Inquisition and the regular courts, with the terror they felt toward the various cultural and popular phenomena they were unable to discern, accused anyone who carried out unfamiliar activities, or who did not fit into the scheme of cosmological values they cared to understand, of “witchcraft”: thus many symbols that indicated diverse realities were condemned under a single charge, especially everything that had to do with psychic excursions not authorized by the ecclesiastical authority. A sadly famous example was that of the Maid of Orléans (Joan of Arc, 1412–1431), who, after being burned alive at 19 for her alleged relationship with the devil—the source of the ecstatic visions that came to her—was the subject of ecclesiastical debate for centuries to determine whether it had finally been a divine or a demonic illumination. That is, whether the hegemonic juridical-ecclesiastical authority wanted to accept it, in which case, after the fact, it raised the image of Joan of Arc to the podium of sainthood (which it did in 1920, thereby, in passing, parasitizing the historical and popular fame of the French heroine); or whether it did not want to accept it and reaffirmed its original decision.
Centuries passed, and civil justice, in practically all of the West, took the reins of control over the inner dimensions of human beings. Making inner excursions—the most extreme and health-giving manifestation of human freedom—without the authorities’ permission thus went from being a sin and grounds for the stake to being grounds for ridicule or jail.
From Nineteenth-Century Progress to the Alcohol Monopoly
We reach the nineteenth century. During this century, the Western ideal was called progress. Everything related to progress (machines, formal culture, industrialization, pharmacological medicine still in its infancy, assembly-line production, etc.) was good and desirable, was the cultural model to follow. And, conversely, anyone who did not fit in with or accept industrial progress, centralized social control, and capitalism was labeled backward and superstitious. Consumers of the entheogenic mushroom Amanita muscaria, a tradition that in some corners of the Old World had even survived the centuries of the Inquisition, went on hiding their habit, but now out of fear of ridicule before the rising values. The same happened, for example, with medicinal plants, whose popular knowledge and traditional therapeutic use plummeted because nobody likes to be called ignorant, barbarian, and superstitious, and this was the message of the growing pharmaceutical industry, aimed at eliminating competition (free competition, no less!) with its laboratory products.
The only method of intoxication that endured through all those centuries was alcohol: naturally, it was the intermediary Christianity had used and kept on using to make contact—though now only symbolically—with its divinity. Wine was, and still is, the substance that was miraculously transmuted into the blood of Christ during the celebration of the Christian rite, the Mass. Christian priests and monks, hardly strangers to the process of monopolizing the path that helps us discover our interior, are the ones who have masterfully discovered countless methods for making alcoholic beverages, ever more delicate and refined. Thus, thanks to the millennial patience of the monks of the Low Countries, today we can enjoy extraordinary Belgian beers made with rye or wheat, with highly refined flavors and strengths that strangely rarely drop below 6 percent alcohol; thanks to the Cistercian and Cluniac orders, a magnificent wine is produced today across central and southern France; champagne, too, was a discovery of Christian monks; and I could go on citing the countless digestive liqueurs named after abbeys or famous saints. Without doubt, alcoholic beverages are the intoxicant of our societies, repudiated as foreign, in contrast, by other peoples who prefer their own (for example, in the Islamic world the consumption of alcoholic beverages is prohibited, or is something highly stigmatizing—something that from the West usually strikes us as absurd—in the same way that among us the consumption of hashish or marijuana, traditional among Muslims, is prohibited).
The Revival of Interest and the Age of LSD 25
At a certain point, almost midway through the twentieth century, interest is reborn among a part of the lay public in knowing and traveling through those inner realities (affective, transcendent, ecstatic…) that our ancestors spoke so much about and that are spoken of so much in other societies. Some people in North America, or settled in the US, especially writers, learn Eastern meditation techniques and import them; others discover the use of narcotic plants and entheogenic mushrooms and cacti among Mexican Indigenous peoples. They take an interest, try them, are enraptured, and some settle in Mexico.
In the previous decade (in 1942), Albert Hofmann had accidentally discovered the psychoactive potential of a strange substance derived from ergot of rye, LSD 25, which had been synthesized five years earlier but had been shelved in the voluminous anonymous register of new synthetic substances. Initially, the Sandoz laboratories, owners of the discovery, distributed samples of LSD 25 among reputable psychiatrists so that they could try it in their therapies and report the clinical results obtained. The success recorded in psycholytic therapy sessions (the name given to the therapeutic technique based on the administration of LSD 25) was extremely encouraging. It was distributed all over the world, especially in Switzerland and the US.
In the mid-1950s the nonclinical use of LSD 25 began to spread, and by 1960 a powerful social movement had formed whose symbolic and cosmological core arose from the use of LSD 25. LSD 25 remained legal for roughly 20 years, during which Western society laid the foundations for a profound revolution.
The end result was that the regular courts, once again, directed their efforts at preventing the spread of any method that allowed psychic excursions to be made without their consent and, in the mid-1960s, banned the distribution, sale, and use of LSD 25. This list was later extended to the point that in the US even the work of any biochemist who can be presumed capable of synthesizing some kind of entheogen is illegal (that is, mere intention is punished; it is no longer necessary to reach the act of private manufacture of entheogens or their distribution; objectively, there is no distance from the old sins of thought).
Science Did Not Stop: From Wasson to the New Generation
Meanwhile, as the vanguard of Western society in the 1960s shook off psychic and spiritual immobility by taking advantage of the spread of LSD 25, of psilocybin mushrooms, and of meditation techniques imported from the East, scholars of religion—with some exceptions—kept their distance from entheogens, worldly subjects from the street. Until in 1968 the banker Robert Gordon Wasson, later universally famous for his ethnomycological discoveries, published a book titled Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality. With it, in J. Ott’s words, he “startled the sleepy world of Vedic studies.” R. G. Wasson proposed, defended, and showed that the famous, deified, and mythical Soma of the Vedas, the object of innumerable earlier investigations and the central element of the oldest religion on Earth, was the intoxicating mushroom Amanita muscaria. This caused a stir that reached the most remote and erudite offices of historians of religion. There were defenses and attacks of every stripe and from every sphere. But, setting aside the value of the discovery itself, something very important had happened: around the work of R. Gordon Wasson, independent researchers gathered who, from different fields of science, had kept their interest alive and focused on these substances capable of allowing human beings to “be like God” or to descend into hell.
In fact, research in this field of knowledge about human consciousness itself and its processes and capacities had never stopped. A decade and a half before the publication of R. G. Wasson’s book, Aldous Huxley had been writing and publicizing his psychic excursions, induced first by mescaline and then by psilocybin, in lectures, books, and highly successful novels, warning in a polished and very beautiful literary form of the danger inherent in anyone’s monopoly over the method for attaining ecstasy (Brave New World) and repeating the immense advantages of including these substances in the education of the young (Island).
Meanwhile, anthropology was showing that practically all cultures other than the current Western one have some agreed-upon system for self-inducing modified states of consciousness by means of plants or compound potions, and that such use not only does not generate any of the social ills that the mass media had attributed to the entheogens used in the 1960s and ’70s, but constitutes the very core of a great variety of rites and ceremonies that, among other purposes, foster group union, acting as a negentropic process applied to human society.
Despite the prohibition, then, science had kept working. For a scientist of clean spirit it is truly irrelevant whether something is legal or illegal, sin or prize. The only thing that interests science is to verify whether a phenomenon happens or does not happen, and if it really does happen, to try to understand the internal mechanisms that promote or guide it. Nothing more. During these decades—and up to the present—the eternal struggle between Platonists (partisans of the essential value of the inner world) and Aristotelians (partisans of external forms as the origin of all order and knowledge) had been playing out under another mask.
After what we might call the generation of classic scientific researchers (A. Hofmann, R. Evans Schultes, A. Shulgin, P. T. Furst, G. Reichel-Dolmatoff, M. Harner, R. Gordon Wasson, even R. Graves, C. Naranjo, and others), a new generation of researchers appears from the 1980s on, picking up the earlier contributions, in many cases directly from the masters themselves, and starting out on their own paths. This is the story of, for example, the psychiatrist S. Grof, who, after discovering the fascinating use of LSD 25 in his work as a therapist, and accepting the illegalization of this substance, set out to look for new—or old, but different—methods to modify consciousness that could not be banned, achieving it by means of what he calls holotropic breathwork. It is also the case of the chemist and ethnobotanist J. Ott, who worked alongside R. Gordon Wasson and can be considered his current and gifted follower, who in his recent book Pharmacotheon tries to refute the hypothesis that the plant Peganum harmala was the Soma of the Vedas, rather than the mushroom Amanita muscaria, and debates it “as Wasson would have.” It is likewise the case of relatively young anthropologists such as L. E. Luna and S. Schaefer, among others, who focus their research on the use and manifestations of entheogens among different Indigenous peoples, in relation to their cultural and symbolic patterns.
The San Luis Potosí Meeting (1992) and the Texts in This Volume
Related to all this, an important event took place in November 1992. Professor and doctor of archaeology Joaquín Muñoz, then section director at the INAH (National Institute of Anthropology and History), Mexico, together with the archaeologist Manuel C. Torres, a Cuban-born American and professor at the International University of Florida in the US, decided to take advantage of the opportunity of funding offered to them by an institution and gathered a significant portion of today’s scientific researchers from around the world whose work is oriented toward the study of entheogens. The meeting was announced only to the invitees themselves and, although there were later sessions open to the public, most of the weeklong gathering was held with only the invitees taking part.
The aim was ambitious but necessary: to pool the work of researchers, from any field of science, related to the modification of consciousness. This implied, from the outset, accepting transdisciplinarity at a high level (neurochemists, anthropologists, botanists, archaeologists, historians, etc.), a risk that was taken by not setting up separate sessions for each discipline, and which gave a magnificent final result. Distinguishing fields of work is not only possible but also necessary for practical reasons, and fields can only be separated if the limitation has been consciously established. But the more complex the phenomena that thought must act upon, as was our case, the broader the delimited field and the corresponding knowledge must be. At that conference, then, the very point was to eliminate the separation between fields of research and see what each could contribute from its own scientific praxis.
The meeting was held in San Luis Potosí, Mexico. We all attended everyone’s talks; when something could not be understood for lack of command of a very specific terminology, we asked; each person spoke in their own language and the rest of us made efforts to understand each speaker. The same attitude of encouraging exchange was shown by organizing an exhibition of visual art, to which European and American painters and aesthetes who work on or from shamanic vision, inspired by motifs of modified states of consciousness, etc., were invited.
The conference was opened by Alexander Shulgin, and behind him came a procession of scientists and thinkers such as D. Flattery, L. E. Luna, M. C. Torres, the married couple Joaquín and Nicole Muñoz, J. C. Callaway, A. Escohotado, and S. Schaefer, up to some thirty speakers. P. T. Furst gave the final talk, reading a text sent by R. Evans Schultes, who, although a guest of honor, had declined to attend because of his delicate health and advanced age.
The sessions made it possible to assess in depth the state of this research, bringing out the enormous amount of reliable descriptive and analytical material currently available but, at the same time, the lack of broad theoretical frameworks to steer research toward novel and fruitful paradigms. My own paper went in that direction.
The texts collected in this volume come from the San Luis Potosí meeting. They are an illustrative and interesting sample of the different contributions made there, and of the interdisciplinarity that prevailed, unfortunately not as widespread in academic reality as in the wishes of many scientists. The articles that follow deal with subjects relating to almost every continent, there are contributions from each main discipline represented at the Mexico meeting, and there are approaches that are predominantly theoretical and others more historical or descriptive.
The long article by Richard Evans Schultes (The Virgin Field in Psychoactive Plant Research) is an update on his ongoing research in the field of ethnobotany and a new perspective on the New World plants that are supposed to contain entheogenic principles. Jonathan Ott (The History of the Soma Plant After R. Gordon Wasson) contributes a highly erudite text on the theoretical and methodological discussions that followed the publication of R. G. Wasson’s theses on the muscarinic nature of the Soma of the Vedas; Ott reviews all the arguments for and against, and clearly establishes the state of the question today. Giorgio Samorini’s text (The Buiti Religion and the Psychoactive Plant Tabernanthe iboga) provides interesting original documentation on the ecstatic practices of the Buiti religion, native to the equatorial African forest of Gabon, secret practices into which the author was initiated. Another author, Manuel C. Torres, is one of the few archaeologists of recognized standing who has highlighted the importance of inhalant powders with psychoactive effects in explaining the spread of certain iconographic features of South American prehistory; in this volume he presents an original text on the subject (Tiwanaku Iconography and Hallucinogens in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile). The article by James C. Callaway (Endogenous β-Carbolines and Other Indole Alkaloids in Mammals) may be somewhat difficult for readers who know nothing of organic chemistry, but otherwise it will prove interesting for its contribution of recent research on the question of entheogens secreted by the human body itself. Finally, the short text by A. Shulgin (The Art of Seeing), placed by way of introduction, is more poetic than cryptic or hermetic, as one might perhaps have expected from an expert like him in neurotoxins, and, precisely because it was written by an expert in the chemical manipulation of the mind, it seems to me a precious and reliable reflection of something C. G. Jung wrote almost half a century ago: “despite the materialist tendency to understand the soul as a mere copy of physical and chemical processes, there is not a single proof supporting this hypothesis.” With my own contribution closing the book (Hallucinogens or Nonspecific Adaptogens?), new theoretical possibilities open up for understanding the use and function of entheogens in their relation to human life and culture. It is without doubt a risky theory, but for the moment I am satisfied with its outline—summarized here—and I am working to shore it up with new data from other anthropological research campaigns. What remains, then, is what we might call a book of open possibilities.
Finally, as far as possible, the articles that follow have retained the style of the original oral presentations. The articles that make up the present collection have been published simultaneously, in English, by the journal Integration. Journal of Mind, Moving Plants and Culture, published in Germany, and my own talk was originally published by the Revista de Antropología Social, issued by the Complutense University of Madrid.
Josep Mª Fericgla
La Fradera-Castanyet, August 1994
