The Keys That Open the World of Spirit
Unlike stimulants or depressants, which act on the body by speeding it up or slowing it down, psychedelic plants are the magic keys that put us in touch with the world of spirit. In psychological terms, what these plants offer is the chance to reach the world of the unconscious; from an anthropological point of view, they open a door to experiencing the sacred and wondrous in Creation. So what is a psychedelic, exactly? The story of the two words we use for them is a good place to start.
The first reference we find to the use of psychedelic plants appears in the Bible, specifically in Genesis. Adam and Eve, the original couple, live in the Garden of Eden like two perfect apes: clothed in nakedness, unashamed of themselves, with no occupation other than living in harmony with Creation, innocence is the currency exchanged between them and Nature. Only one problem looms: God has forbidden them to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The answer to the riddle comes with the appearance of the serpent, a mysterious character who invites them to taste the fruit of the Tree, assuring them they will gain the consciousness of the gods and know about Good and Evil. Curiosity wins out over taboo and, from that moment, with the eating of the forbidden fruit, the apes leave the earthly paradise and enter the world of human beings, the realm of self-awareness and dual thinking that has defined the scene ever since.
Although some have tried to identify the fruit of this tree with a red apple, a fresco in a French Romanesque church shows Eve beside a tree that is a giant amanita muscaria—an entheogenic mushroom—with a serpent coiled around its base. According to this view, the birth of humanity and the use of psychedelic plants would be a symbiosis: they would go hand in hand.
The interpretation of the myth is left to the reader’s imagination, but it is certain that there is archaeological evidence tracing the relationship between these plants and human beings back until it disappears into the mists of time.
Entheogens and Anthropologists
Anthropologists, like someone trying to rediscover their own origins, went to visit archaic cultures that lived hidden from Western civilization. There they found the shamans, figures who still kept the use of these magic plants and knew how to move through the realms of the mind. Asked what they used them for, the shamans spoke of meeting their gods, or of holding communal celebrations to bind the members of the village together; others said they could glimpse the future and so foresee possible misfortunes, or even claimed to perform magical cures for illnesses that ordinary methods could not remedy.
To everyone’s surprise, what these experiences revealed turned out to underlie the cultural systems of these peoples: without them, nothing they did or thought made sense.
The anthropologists were so impressed by the importance of these plants that they decided to find a name for them. Since all the stories the shamans told had to do with what we here called religion, they chose a name with something divine in it; after much deliberation, they reached for a neologism from classical Greek, entheogens, which roughly means “summoning the sacred experience within us.”
Intermezzo: Between Two Waters
If Genesis opens with the scene of the original couple tasting the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, in the story of the Flood—the second creation of the world—Noah receives the grapevine from God, and wine enters the scene. This myth seems to point to the replacement of entheogenic plants by alcohol and, although at first this may not seem to matter much, it may not be trivial. The influence of the two kinds of substance on human consciousness is rather opposite: if entheogens open the doors of perception onto new worlds, wine invites forgetting, setting off a contraction of the expansion that came before. The former had made consciousness permeable to the magic of the universe, while the latter has left human beings orphaned of divinity: rationality is born and, at the same time, the despair of the existentialists.
Be that as it may, the disappearance of entheogens became effective over the last millennia and now, to complete the cycle, we find the reappearance of psychedelics in the West after two or three thousand years of soaking the taxpayers’ brains in the spirit of alcohol.
Psychedelics in the West
Sometimes a heap of coincidences is no accident, and the rediscovery of psychedelics in the heart of the twentieth century is one such case: in a span of twenty years, and after a long hibernation, more than a hundred plants came to light.
The anthropological studies that spoke of mystical experiences did not reach the West only to gather dust on library shelves, and they quickly passed into the hands of public interest. Add to this the creation of LSD, and we begin to see the picture of the hippie movement of the sixties. Anthropology supplied the information, and the synthesis of LSD supplied the substance to everyone interested in learning from it.
Taking advantage of what these experiences offer for learning about oneself without relying on external cultural patterns, the hippies staged a celebration of people’s reunion with Nature, creating a movement that broke away from a materialistic society with too many obsolete taboos.
During the sixties another group took an interest in these substances: the therapists of the mind. Starting from the idea that these catalysts of consciousness worked by exposing the unconscious processes of the human mind, they began to glimpse the possibility of a therapy that went beyond words and concepts, letting people directly experience the hidden traumas behind their everyday problems. The idea came from a letter from Aldous Huxley to his brother: in it he told him that one learns more about oneself from a hard trip that is well integrated than from one in which everything is calm.
When the psychologists looked for a nickname for these magical substances, they chose one that steered clear of any religious connotation: psychedelics, which means roughly “mind-revealing,” because they show consciousness what it does not know about itself.
