By John Hanna for Erowid.org

During his talk “Psychoactive Drugs Throughout Human History” at a 1983 University of California at Santa Barbara conference, Andrew Weil mentioned in passing, “Dimethyltryptamine [...] is almost certainly made by the pineal gland in the brain.” Meanwhile, at U.C. San Diego, Rick Strassman had begun to wonder whether or not the pineal might produce psychedelic compounds. That same year, in his booklet Eros and the Pineal: The Layman’s Guide to Cerebral Solitaire, Albert Most claimed that: “A pair of naturally occurring pineal enzymes [...] is capable of converting serotonin into a number of potent hallucinogens.” Most stated that the pineal could transform serotonin into 5-methoxy-N-methyltryptamine, and then make that into 5-methyoxy-N,N-dimethyltrptamine. Alas, no references were provided to support Most’s description of pineal catabolism. Nevertheless, it seems likely that this general line of thinking–that some psychoactive tryptamine is created in the pineal–was birthed in the early 1980s.1

It took a couple of decades for the meme to spread into the wider drug-geek pop culture, more recently and rapidly due to the Internet, after the 2001 publication of Strassman’s popular book DMT: The Spirit Molecule. Consider the following transcription from a radio rant [audio file online here] given circa 2005/2006 by the actor-comedian Joe Rogan, host of the TV show Fear Factor:

It’s called dimethyltryptamine. It’s produced by your pineal gland. It’s actually a gland [...] that’s in the center of your brain. It’s the craziest drug ever. It’s the most potent psychedelic known to man. Literally. But the craziest thing [about it is that] it’s natural, and your brain produces it every night as you sleep. You know, when you sleep, during the time you’re in heavy R.E.M. sleep, and right before human death, your brain pumps out heavy doses of dimethyltryptamine. Nobody knows what sleep is all about. Nobody knows why dreaming is important. But dreaming is hugely important. If you don’t dream, you’ll go fucking crazy and you’ll die. While you’re dreaming, while you’re in heavy R.E.M. sleep, you are going through a psychedelic trip. And very few people know about this. But it’s been documented.

There’s a great book on it called DMT: The Spirit Molecule by a doctor named Dr. Rick Strassman. And he did all of these clinical studies at the University of New Mexico on it. And you take this shit, and literally you are transported into another fucking dimension. I don’t mean like, you feel like you’re in another dimension. I mean you’re in another dimension. [...] There’s fucking complex geometric patterns moving in synchronous order through the air all around you in three-dimensional space; and it’s like they’re arteries, except there’s not blood pumping through them, there’s fucking light–pulsating lights with no boundaries. And you couldn’t really understand it. And there’s an alien communicating with me. There’s a dude who looks like, like sorta like a Thai Buddha, except he’s made entirely of energy and there’s no, there’s no, like, outline to him–he’s just one thing. And he’s concentrating on me, and he’s trying to tell me not to give in to astonishment. Just relax, and try to experience this. And I’m like, ‘You gotta be fucking shittin’ me.’ And I’m a stand up comedian, you know. ‘Cos as a stand up comedian, we pride ourselves in being able to describe things. So I’m like, ‘How the FUCK am I gonna talk about this?!’

Rogan does an excellent job of expressing a number of bullet points from Strassman’s book in a humorous manner. But the problem is that none of these points are known to be true. And although Strassman clearly states that his ideas about DMT and the pineal gland “are not proven”2, many people have accepted them as fact. As of June 2010, there is currently no scientific evidence that the pineal gland produces DMT, much less any evidence for the more far-out speculations that Strassman makes about DMT being a chemical modulator of the human soul. When Strassman examined the pineal glands from “about ten” human corpse brains, there was nary a trace of DMT to be found in them. This doesn’t invalidate his theory, since DMT is metabolized quickly, and none of the corpse brains were fresh-frozen. Further tests on fresh-frozen brains could be done. Someday there may be evidence that DMT is produced in the pineal gland, but that day has not yet arrived.

By the end of his book, Strassman proposes that DMT may provide access to parallel universes (and alien beings) via superconductive quantum computing of the human brain at room temperature, or via interactions with dark matter. Strassman states: “Because I know so little about theoretical physics, there are fewer constraints reining me in regarding such speculations.” And for those who know virtually nothing about any given topic, there appear to be no constraints on speculation. It is for exactly this reason that Strassman’s theories have both been accepted as fact by many people, and then expanded into creative new directions. A few offshoot theories include the idea that ancient prophets produced more DMT, that electro-magnetic fields increase DMT production, that spending a couple of weeks in total darkness increases DMT production, and that fluoridated water suppresses DMT production. An Internet search will turn up a bounty of wacky spin-offs, all of which cite Strassman’s speculations as the facts backing up their further claims.

Is DMT produced by the pineal gland? Maybe…

1. Albert Most is perhaps better-known for his 1984 booklet Bufo alvarius: The Psychedelic Toad of the Sonoran Desert, which explains how to collect and smoke the 5-MeO-DMT-containing secretions from this animal. Coincidentally, Most was one of the first two volunteers in Rick Strassman’s DMT studies, which started in 1990 and ended in 1995. And during the period when Strassman was researching DMT, Andrew Weil went on to co-author two journal articles with Wade Davis on the topic of B. alvarius’s psychoactive secretions.
2. Strassman’s DMT: Spirit Molecule on DMT in the Pineal :
   

   These hypotheses are not proven, but they derive from scientifically valid data combined with spiritual and religious observations and teachings. [...]

   The most general hypothesis is that the pineal gland produces psychedelic amounts of DMT at extraordinary times in our lives. Pineal DMT production is the physical representation of non-material, or energetic, processes. It provides us with the vehicle to consciously experience the movement of our life-force in its most extreme manifestations. Specific examples of this phenomenon are the following:

   When our individual life force enters our fetal body, the moment in which we become truly human, it passes through the pineal and triggers the first primordial flood of DMT.

   Later, at birth, the pineal releases more DMT.

   In some of us, pineal DMT mediates the pivotal experiences of deep meditation, psychosis, and near-death experiences.

   As we die, the life-force leaves the body through the pineal gland, releasing another flood of this psychedelic spirit molecule. (pages 68-69, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, 2001)

“Snippets of the Psyche” revealed in DMT space, by James Kent

The comments in this article are adapted from Psychedelic Information Theory: Shamanism in the Age of Reason, by James Kent.

The following is an edited version of an e-mail conversation written during a bout of insomnia, in response to DMT, Moses, and the Quest for Transcendence, by Clifford Pickvoer.

To: Clifford Pickover
Sent: Tue, 27 Apr 2004 02:51:05 -0700
Subject: DMT Elves

Hey Clifford, a friend recently pointed me to your article on DMT, Moses and Aliens. Since you asked people to voice their opinion I shall. I have studied this issue very closely for the past fifteen years, and though I have not published the results of all my research I would like to share with you some of the conclusions I’ve made about DMT and the dramatic phenomena it produces.

In short, I do not believe DMT is a gateway to an alternate dimension, nor does it induce contact with autonomous elves and alien entities. Yes, DMT produces a vivid other-worldly landscape when ingested, often including elves, aliens, insects, snakes, jaguars, etc. This is true for the majority of people who try it. Some people do not have such vivid responses, but many do. Although this may appear at first glance to be “shocking,” it is actually no more shocking then the fact that most people dream at night, or that most people see geometric patterns (pressure phosphenes) when they close their eyes and press against their eyeballs. But the difference between pressure phosphenes and DMT is that DMT is illegal and very hard to come by, so most people never have the opportunity to experience it. If we could all hold our breath for a minute and produce vivid hallucinations of alien landscapes it would seem quite mundane, no more than a mere curiosity of the human condition. However, since this particular alien landscape is produced by a specific rare substance (DMT), people seem to think it is akin to unlocking the mysteries of the universe when they actually get their hands on it.

Now don’t get me wrong, DMT is stunning in its effect, no doubt. But, like anything, when you do it many times the magic tends to wear off and reveal itself for what it is; an exotic aberration of the brain’s perceptual mechanics. To illustrate this point I would like to offer the following observations:

1. DMT acts primarily at the 5-HT2A receptor, which is where the hallucinogenic tryptamines work their visual magic. Without going into all the details here, let’s just assume for a moment that a molecule with the proper shape acting at 5-HT2A site can significantly disrupt and/or enhance visual sensory processing, depending on dosage. If this is the case, then dumping DMT into the perceptual wetworks is akin to messing with the logic that produces the display on the computer screen you are looking at right now. Any programmer can tell you that a single line of code consisting of only a few characters can drastically alter the way your screen presents the data coming from your video card. It can make the screen flicker, blink, warp, twist, or fall into infinitely recursive fractalline chaos. When this happens is your monitor now displaying an “alternate reality” or “parallel dimension”? No, it is not. It is simply taking the same old data and processing it with a new factor in the base algorithm (disruption/excitement at the 5HT2A receptor). Even a very small tweak could produce dramatic results. Since the sensory processing system is so delicate, any abrupt chemical perturbation can cause it to become excited, unstable, or fall into chaos. When the visual system is disrupted for any reason we get phosphene activity, which is the visual system’s version of a “ringing in the ears.” Phosphene activity is chaotic, but as we all know chaos does not produce random noise, it is familiar and predictable, and produces some damn trippy patterns.

2. The sensation of seeing aliens, elves, or being in the presence of God(s) is not unique to DMT users. Otherwise sane people who have never tried DMT report these sensations all the time, and it is generally treated as a sign of psychosis (see separate topic on Charles Bonnet Syndrome CBS). However, recent research has shown that by stimulating parts of the temporal lobe you can reliably reproduce the feeling of being in the presence of God (also known as “seeing the light,” “feeling enlightened,” or having a “religious epiphany”). It is an innate human sensation — just like the feeling that “I’m being watched right now” is an innate human sensation — we just don’t catalog it as such because it is relatively rare, happening perhaps only once in a lifetime to those who do not artificially stimulate themselves, perhaps never in a lifetime. Some people have very dramatic religious epiphanies with angels and demons and all form of cherubim marching through with horns and such with no drugs whatsoever, and though it is a common event we generally treat it today as a psychological aberration; though back in the day it was the stuff prophets were made of. Since this kind of religious epiphany is something our brains can already do, the fact that a substance like DMT can reliably reproduce this single phenomena (in concert with other effects, of course) is not much of a stretch.

3. The archetypal DMT “entities” are pretty well categorized, with most people seeing elves or aliens or fairies or angels or some kind of loopy little spirits that dance about and tell riddles. Sometimes it is a spirit-animal like a jaguar or a snake, sometimes it is none of the above and goes totally off the map. But getting back to the elf thing (which is what many people find to be the most curious aspect), I initially found it very surprising to be confronted by elves in my DMT experiences, and on psilocybe mushrooms as well, and did indeed perceive them as externalized, morphing, disincarnate beings. I even managed to carry on rudimentary conversations of sorts. However, the more I experimented with DMT the more I found that the “elves” were merely machinations of my own mind. While under the influence I found I could think them into existence, and then think them right out of existence simply by willing it so. Sometimes I could not produce elves, and my mind would wander through all sorts of magnificent and amazing creations, but the times that I did see elves I tried very hard to press them into giving up some non-transient feature that would confirm at least a rudimentary “autonomous existence” beyond my own imagination. Of course, I could not. Whenever I tried to pull any information out of the entities regarding themselves, the data that was given up was always relevant only to me. The elves could not give me any piece of data I did not already know, nor could their existence be sustained under any kind of prolonged scrutiny. Like a dream, once you realize you are dreaming you are actually slipping into wakefulness and the dream fades. So it is with the elves as well. When you try to shine a light of reason on them they dissolve like shadows.

4. Which brings me to my last point. Psychedelics in general have an amazing capacity to activate the mind’s eye, or what I call the imaginal workspace. In our day-to-day lives we have two active areas that are processing our perception of reality. The first is the primary workspace where all our sense data is compiled in our pre-frontal cortex to give us our waking picture of reality. The second is the imaginal workspace, where we can think about abstract thoughts or visualize the contents of our cupboards from memory (or whatever). The imaginal workspace is generally running in the background, helping us plan our actions by visualizing them in advance — like driving to the grocery store for instance. We visualize the store, plan a route, and then go. All the while our primary workspace is taking up most of our attention. This balance flips, however, when we are caught in deep abstract thinking, like daydreaming or trying to solve a difficult problem. And when we sleep the primary workspace is actually taken-over by the imaginal workspace to process all the backlogged data that was set aside during the waking day. When this happens we dream, and our primary workspace is filled with imaginal data (memory compressed by the hippocampus), and suddenly we are immersed in an imaginal reality that looks and feels just as solid as waking reality. Since it is being processed in the primary workspace, the same high-end gear that we use to processes our waking reality, we can’t tell the difference. The only difference between being awake and dreaming is the origin of the data that is being processed in the primary workspace. When you are awake you are processing external sense data in the primary workspace. When you are dreaming you are processing internal (imaginal/memory) data in the primary workspace.

I have done many experiments with lucid dreaming and self-induced visionary and hypnogogic states and I can tell you that the switch from external to internal data sources feeding into the primary workspace (and vice-versa) happens in a split second. It is too quick to notice unless you are waiting and watching very carefully for the neural hand-off. But it is there. It is a physical, mechanical thing. One second you are awake and listening to the faucet drip, the next second you are wandering through a dream parking lot listening to the sound of your keys jingling, searching for your car. If you catch yourself and wake back up again you are back to the drip-drip-drip of the faucet. Close your eyes and you are back in the parking lot (or wherever). So, knowing that there’s this kind of murky area in between waking and dreaming where imagination feeds into working memory, it is not much of a stretch to assume that psychedelics can interact with the chemical signals which manage that hand-off between external sensory data and imaginal data flowing into our primary workspace. It may very well be that in the psychedelic state our selective sensory inputs are totally opened up so that everything is crashing in at once, making it impossible to parse the data and distinguish what is real from what is imaginal until the drug actually wears off. In short, concrete psychedelic visuals may be nothing more than chaotic visual patterns overlapped with images created from waking dreams.

So, within the framework of this equation one question remains: Why is the alien/elf archetype so common to the DMT experience? The only answer I have is that we humans must have innate evolutionary wetware that forces our senses to latch onto any piece of anthropomorphic data that pops into otherwise randomly uniform data — like spotting the face of another human or a jaguar peering out from behind the bushes, or seeing another human moving through tall grass. The evolutionary advantage of such a trait is obvious, and in standard Rorschach tests even the most amorphous blobs are found to look like faces and/or people no matter what culture the observer is from. Now, given the amazing swirling kaleidoscopic imagery produced in the typical DMT trip, it is inevitable that anthropomorphic shapes will emerge and then express themselves in even greater detail as the mind latches onto them and “dreams” them into focus. With the imaginal workflow kicked into high gear, it is not surprising that these emergent anthropomorphic entities can then speak to us, revealing shocking details from our own subconscious in a conversational stream of visual theater. Given all of this, in a nutshell, the case for autonomous disincarnate DMT entities is closed. All that is needed to produce them is our own over-excited visual system and imagination, and thus Occam’s razor wipes them right off the table and into the fairy-dust bin.

In conclusion I would just like to mention a couple more things. The visions produced by DMT are not solely elves and alien entities. A wide variety of archetypes and just plain-old whacked-out stoner shit creeps into the mix. It is highly individual and in many cases is heavily dependent on set and setting. This fact alone (more than anything else) leads me to believe that the DMT entities are mere figments. If, for example, everyone always saw talking penguins and only talking penguins while high on DMT, that would be much harder to explain and much more mysterious. The fact that DMT “consciousness” reveals itself in so many forms tells me that the “messenger” — be it elf, alien, jaguar, or whatever — is basically arbitrary within the context of the patterns and archetypes our minds tend to pick out of random noise. However (and this is the good part), the really interesting thing about DMT experiences is not the elves (messengers) themselves, but what it is they are saying (the message). And when you get to the heart of what the typical DMT message is, it is usually something about the environment or living systems or the vast plant consciousness that penetrates our world. The “Gaia consciousness” that infuses the experience is undeniable, and what to make of that I don’t know, other than to entertain the possibility that this ancient plant consciousness actually exists and is attempting to make itself known through the DMT-enlightened mammal brain. If so, then this is the real discovery of the DMT experience, and this is the topic that should be looked at more closely. In the context of DMT being a two-way radio for plant-human communication, the “elves” themselves are nothing more than a cartoon interface for the exchange of information.

Evolvers Spores: The Future of Psychedelics

For millennia, cultures around the world expanded minds and visions with “teacher plants” – what we commonly know today as psychedelics. The widespread popularity of LSD during the 1960s awakened the Western psyche to these powerful substances, ushering in a period of wild experimentation that revolutionized art and music, inspired social movements, and opened new vistas of possibility for psychotherapy. But a swift backlash from the establishment made psychedelics illegal, repressing and marginalizing them as “dangerous drugs.”

Today, there is new potential for psychedelics to be reintroduced into mainstream culture, not as drastic catalysts of social upheaval but as tools that can help people overcome serious problems, explore mystical experiences, find inspiration, and understand more about consciousness and the brain. Psychedelic research with human subjects is underway again after a 35-year blockade, thanks to the efforts of non-profit organizations like MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) and the Beckley Foundation. Prominent newspapers and magazines are giving these substances another look, acknowledging their potential for therapeutic and spiritual breakthroughs if used with care. At the same time, the worldwide resurgence of interest in indigenous shamanism indicates a deeper maturity and respect emerging toward these ancient sacraments.

In this Spore, Evolver Regionals will explore and discuss the exciting new frontiers for psychedelics in our modern culture, as both scientifically verified medicines and intentional tools for personal development. Check the list below to find a Spore in your area. You can also email the regional host (via their group page) if you’d like to get involved in the planning of the event. If there is not yet a Spore in your community, email jonathan((at))evolver((dot))net to start your own

There is a horrible sense of meaninglessness and chaos that comes from the extreme loneliness of being cut off. Trauma, whether sustained in the family, or in the military during combat, renders millions feeling unsafe, insecure, mistrustful, and in the end isolated, lonely and desperate. Judith Lewis Herman, who wrote the definitive book on trauma and recovery, stated that all so-called mental illness and suffering could be seen as a person’s misguided attempt to survive trauma. Fear separates, love unites. We all wish to grow to freedom, to belong, to participate. Hatred is like gangrene, shame is deadly. Forgiveness is but a faint hope.

By Andrew Feldmar.

Sandoz began to market LSD in 1947 as a psychiatric panacea, the cure for everything from schizophrenia to criminal behaviour, sexual perversions, alcoholism, and other addictions. During a 15-year period beginning in 1950, research on LSD and other hallucinogens generated over 1,000 scientific papers, several dozen books and six international conferences, and LSD was prescribed as an adjunct of psychotherapy to over 40,000 patients. The current research using psychedelics heralds a reawakening to the magnificent healing possibilities of these now prohibited substances. After over 40 years of repression or oppression, The Beckley Foundation, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (Maps), and others are spearheading a more enlightened, less hysterical and terrified approach to the use of these substances. I am participating in what hopefully will be Canada’s first government approved clinical trials in 40 years, sponsored and organised by Maps, evaluating MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for subjects with treatment-resistant post-traumatic stress disorder.

There are many other applications of psychedelic psychotherapy, such as ibogaine, or ayahuasca for the treatment of substance abuse. Large numbers of people could benefit from the use of psychedelics as entheogens, introducing people to spiritual experiences, reducing pain and suffering due to isolation, by the irresistible realisation that each of us is a small part of something much greater than any of us, that separateness is an illusion, there is nothing to fear, and love is accessible, shame can be left permanently behind. Rites of passage, responsibly organised, could benefit everyone.

Despite prohibition, people have often asked me to attend their own psychedelic experiments, to keep them safe, to guide them towards liberation, the end of automatic habit patterns, kneejerk reactions, towards heartfelt responses, love, acceptance and forgiveness. After one session with MDMA, people were able to sustain insights gained, without further assistance from the drug. Psychotherapy proceeded faster and deeper than before: the debilitating effects of shame have been annulled, heavily defended hearts opened, and stayed open, and people acquired the ability to enjoy the sacrament of every living moment without distraction by past regrets or future worries. No small gains!

After three LSD sessions, a patient emerged from what was labelled chronic psychotic depression (she had attempted suicide three times, had been hospitalised, and given several courses of ECT, major antipsychotics and antidepressants), and was able to hold a job, derive pleasure from her days, and look forward to cultivating a varied garden of delights. She moved from cursing me for not letting her die to blessing me for the surprising freedom that opened up for her as a result of her LSD experiences. Psychotherapy, without LSD, would not have been enough, I’m afraid.

I can only hope that if new research with psychedelics proceeds in a responsible, careful and creative manner, the powers that be can begin to support and foster further research into this fascinating realm. I was 27 when I first tasted this incredible substance called LSD. Now I am 68 and for the last two years have been persona non grata in the US, because a border guard Googled my name, and found an article I wrote many years ago on entheogen-assisted psychotherapy. I hope I will be invited into the US before I die to teach professionals how to use psychedelics for the benefit of all. ]]> http://www.brainwaving.com/2010/01/20/psychedelic-drugs-could-heal-thousands/feed/ 1 http://www.brainwaving.com/2010/01/18/wasson-and-the-psychedelic-revolution/ http://www.brainwaving.com/2010/01/18/wasson-and-the-psychedelic-revolution/#comments Mon, 18 Jan 2010 09:34:15 +0000 Prof. Carl Ruck http://www.brainwaving.com/?p=873 Brainwaving is delighted to introduce the first in a series of essays by Prof. Carl Ruck, best known for his work in mythology and religion on the sacred role of entheogens, or psychoactive plants that induce an altered state of consciousness, as used in religious or shamanistic rituals. His focus has been on the use of entheogens in classical western culture, as well as their historical influence on modern western religions. The book The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries explains that the psycho-active ingredient in the secret kykeion potion used in the Eleusinian mysteries was most likely the ergotism causing fungus Claviceps purpurea, while The Apples of Apollo: Pagan and Christian Mysteries of the Eucharist explores the role that entheogens in general, and Amanita muscaria in particular, played in Greek and biblical mythology and later on in Renaissance painting, most notably in the Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald.

R. Gordon Wasson launched the “psychedelic revolution” with his Life magazine article of 13 May 1957, in which he publicized his experience on the nights of 29-30 June, 1955, in the remote Oaxacan village of Huautla de Jiménez with the Mazatec curandera or shaman María Sabina, whose identity he tried to protect under the pseudonym of Eva Mendez, even being the first to use the embarrassing term of “magic mushroom,” which was probably invented by the magazine’s editor. As a professional international banker, he was a most unlikely candidate for this role. He and his wife Valentina Pavlovna were about to publish in that same year their Mushrooms, Russia, and History, which they had started writing in the mid 1940s as a cookbook, with merely a footnote on “the gentle art of mushroom-knowing as practiced by the northern Slavs.” The Life article effectively was publicity for the book, which was lavishly published at Wasson’s expense in a limited edition of only 512 copies, which would have placed it beyond the notice of the general public: the original price of $175 has now escalated to several thousand, something that Wasson was proud of as an investment.

The footnote had grown until it replaced the original book as planned. It was here that they had indulged their fascination in an event that dated back to their marriage in 1928, when the Russian-born Valentina on their honeymoon had insisted upon gathering mushrooms, a plant that the Anglo-Saxon Gordon termed toadstools, and all of them without exception loathsome and poisonous. In the ensuing years of investigation, as they each pursued their separate careers, hers as a pediatrician, they found that their dichotomous attitude toward the plant was well documented in the folkloric traditions and art of Europe, leading them to suspect some deep-seated and ancient taboo against the profane use of a religious sacrament, still practiced, as they discovered, by the shamans of certain peoples of Siberia, which, of course, in view of the politics of the time, was inaccessible to them.

However, in 1952, Robert Graves had sent them a clipping from a pharmaceutical company’s newspaper mentioning an article that Richard Evans Schultes, soon to become Director of the Harvard Botanical Museum, had published in a journal of extremely limited circulation over ten years earlier, in which he reported on the use of psychoactive mushrooms by native peoples in the mountains of southern Mexico. Wasson had known Graves ever since the poet and novelist had first contacted him about ways of poisoning someone with mushrooms, while writing his I Claudius, which was published in 1934. Graves was the first to correctly identify the Mesoamerican mushroom-stones. It was this information that brought the Wassons together with Schultes, and eventually the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann. It seemed to answer the questions that Wasson and his wife had posed and it sent them in search of their Mazatec shamans. They were joined by the French mycologist Roger Hiem of the Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle, whom Wasson had met in Paris in 1949, while seeking permission to reproduce some drawings for Russia, Mushrooms, and History.

The Life magazine article triggered a wave of experimentation with these mushrooms; Timothy Leary, for example, ate magic mushrooms in Mexico before trying LSD or any other psychoactive substance; and it wasn’t until 25 March 1966 that Life magazine reported on LSD as a drug for psychiatric therapy that had gotten out of control. The popularizing of the mushrooms resulted in their eventual classification as a controlled or prohibited substance in the United States and elsewhere around the globe, something Wasson never intended. In fact, his opinion was that psychoactive drugs (except alcohol) should be as cheap as possible, and available in every drug store without prescription to anyone. Wasson also ended up making María Sabina and her village a destination for troupes of what are now called narco-tourists, and debased the mushrooms, that once, as the Mazatecs said “took you where God is,” so that María Sabina eventually lamented that “from the moment the foreigner arrived, the ‘holy children’ lost their purity, they lost their force, they ruined them; henceforth, they will no longer work; there is no remedy for it.”

In the ensuing drug culture, Wasson, whose wife died in 1958, managed to remain above the fray, deploring the use of drugs for what he saw as recreational purposes, rather than spiritual enlightenment. Andrew Weil, in an article published shortly after Wasson’s death in 1986, reproached him for being a snob and elitist, “relegating most of those who have experimented with sacred substances to the category of ‘the Tim Learys and the ilk.’

Wasson was fearful of contamination by association with some of the more notorious advocates of the very same aspects of the drug experience that fascinated him. This was all played out, moreover, against the backdrop of the Cold War and the interest in the United States government in competing with the Soviet Union for chemical agents for espionage and mind control. Albert Hofmann had discovered the hallucinogenic effects of LSD on his famous bicycle ride of April 1943 and reported on it in a Swiss pharmacological journal in 1947. The US government had already been in competition with the Nazis in the search for a truth serum or drug, but the agency involved was disbanded upon the completion of the war, whereupon, however, the Nazi experiments with mescaline in the Dachau concentration camp were uncovered, causing the US to begin mescaline studies of its own. By the time that news of LSD finally appeared in the American Psychiatric Journal in 1950, the US was already engaged in covert experiments. And by 1951, the quixotic charismatic super-spy and entrepreneur Captain Al Hubbard, the so-called ‘Johnny Appleseed of LSD,’ was turning on thousands of people, including scientists, and some of the most well placed politicians, intelligence officials, diplomats, and church figures.

During their Mazatec séances the Wassons had experienced the divinatory potential of the Mexican mushrooms. The account of their first velada with Aurelio Carreras, María Sabina’s son-in-law, on 15 August 1953, two years before they ate the mushrooms themselves, was intentionally buried in the bulk of Russia, Mushrooms, and History. Wasson described the event more fully in his last book, Persephone’s Quest. “I had always had a horror,” he wrote, “of those who preached a kind of pseudo-religion of telepathy, who for me were unreliable people; if our discoveries were to be drawn to their attention, we were in danger of being adopted by such undesirables.”  Carreras, without prompting or questions, was able to tell the Wassons correctly that their son Peter was not in Boston, as they thought, but in New York, that he was about to enlist in the army, and that a close member of the family would die within the year.

In February of 1955, Wasson mentioned this occurrence to Andrija Puharich, when they met for cocktails in the apartment of the New York socialite Alice Bouverie, who had learned of the Wassons’ ongoing research from a reference librarian at the Public Library, while investigating psychoactive mushrooms. Puharich, an American-born medical doctor and parapsychologist of Croatian descent, at the time was a captain with the United States Army, stationed at the Fort Detrick Chemical and Biological Warfare Center in Edgewood Maryland, working for the CIA on chemical and other means of mind control; and with Wasson’s permission, he dutifully passed on the information about Carreras to his military associates, which may have been why Wasson’s 1956 expedition to Mexico was infiltrated by a CIA mole, James Moore, with a generous financial grant, clearly indicating that the intelligence community regarded a divinatory mushroom as a valuable tool in their arsenal. Moore found the journey extremely unpleasant, and although he witnessed the séance, he was extremely ill, and eight kilos thinner, he fled with a packet of the mushrooms, intending to isolate and synthesize the chemical, which, in fact, Albert Hofmann succeeded in doing before him. Hiem identified them as Psilocybe caerulescens and the psychoactive agent was named psilocybin.

When Wasson met Puharich again in June, he invited him to join that summer’s expedition to Oaxaca, but he declined since he had been just discharged from the army and was engaged in reorganizing his laboratory in Maine.  But they agreed to set up a test. Wasson was to attempt to divine what Puharich was doing at the time of Wasson’s séance. As it turned out, the dates were mistaken, and this was the occasion on which Wasson first ate the mushrooms. But Wasson, who knew nothing about the arrangements of the Maine laboratory, experienced a soul journey in which he apparently visited the laboratory, providing an accurate, although implausible, description of the building as a barn of some sort. Puharich later described a similar experience of his own, of traveling a great distance and acquiring accurate information, more accurate than if he had visited in person, since he described the design of the former wallpaper in a room that was now painted.

In fact, as Masha Britten, Wasson’s daughter, recorded after Gordon’s death, she, too, on one occasion seemed able in her visions to hop all over the world and come down, alighting to visit friends far away. Her mother also had a clear view of a city, and later as they approached Mexico City from a different route, looking down on it from a mountain, she realized that this was the city of her vision. In 1960, Puharich himself in imitation of Wasson’s ethnographic expeditions headed a research trip to the Mexican highlands, where a brujo Blas García showed him a mushroom called Sacred Rabbit; with it, he said, one could fly over the Pacific and see far-off places. Puharich’s own experience was that he was projected into “the interior of one monumental building after another.”

All these paranormal experiences were induced by the Mexican mushrooms, which were Psilocybes, whose psychoactive effect had previously been unknown to outsiders. But the reason that Bouverie, who was a psychic or ‘channeler,’ had brought Wasson and Puharich together involved a strange event with the Amanita muscaria. She had unwittingly precipitated a bizarre psychic seizure in June of 1954 when she handed an ancient Egyptian cartouche to Harry Stone, a visiting Dutch sculptor; although he knew neither Egyptian nor its art, he became possessed by a persona that they later identified as Rahótep, a man who had lived 4600 years ago, and in the course of similar occurrences over the next three years, Harry spoke Egyptian, wrote hieroglyphics, and disclosed the role of Amanita in Egyptian cult and divination. Puharich offered an account of the whole affair in his The Sacred Mushroom: Key to the Door of Eternity, published in 1959. Although Wasson maintained cordial relations with Puharich, and Puharich in 1961 gave him a copy of his laboratory experiment showing significant improvement in telepathy with subjects who had ingested Amantita muscaria. Wasson cautioned him about adverse notoriety that might result from the Associated Press release about his ESP experiments, although it was just such notoriety that the Life magazine article had secured for himself.

It seems implausible that Puharich could have made up the whole Harry Stone affair, especially since it involved the formidable task of his learning Egyptian; but mycology lay outside the interests of Egyptologists, although Egypt was renowned in antiquity for its drugs and mushrooms do occur in Egyptian contexts that would suggest their involvement in cults. In fact, Kahlil Gibran, the son of the Lebanese poet, offered in 1960 to sell Wasson a bronze figurine of an Egyptian god, probably Seth, with mushrooms growing from his head; Gibran, a mushroom enthusiast, had read Puharich’s book and had also just a few months earlier sold Wasson a pre-Columbian mushroom figurine. Nevertheless, Puharich is generally accused of capitalizing on Wasson’s work, and like many of the people involved in the psychedelic revolution, aspects of his other activities tend to discredit him, despite his support by high government agencies. Thus he espoused the career of the Israel psychic Uri Geller, who could bend spoons psychokinetically; he also documented the Brazilian psychic healer Arigo, who diagnosed and removed a pancreatic cancer in just two minutes with a rusty knife, and without anesthesia or antisepsis; and he trained a troupe of children at a farm in New York state in the techniques of astral projection with the object of dropping in on the Kremlin. He also believed in UFOs and extraterrestrials, and headed the Round Table Foundation, whose members were reincarnations of the Egyptian ennead of deities, and whose members, at various times, included Aldous Huxley, Gene Roddenbury, the creator of Star Trek, and L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the quasi-religion called Scientology.

Wasson knew Huxley and thought him gullible, but his Doors of Perception, published in 1954, is the classic description of a visionary experience induced by peyote / mescaline. He introduced the word ‘psychoactive’ in the epilogue to his Devils of Loudon, published in 1952; and although his interest in such drugs went back to the soma-tranquillizer of his 1931 Brave New World, he had no personal experience until the late 1940s, and became an eloquent and influential proponent of drugs for transcendent mystical experience until his death in 1963, by which time his visions were experienced by a man nearly blind. His transition to death was eased by a dosage of LSD, a use that Valentina had proposed for such drugs in 1957.

Wasson emerged as the authority whose validation was sought by others in the field, and he found himself embarrassingly linked in a triumvirate with Timothy Leary, whose proselytizing he considered naïve and reckless, leading to a life as an outlaw, and Carlos Castaneda, whose Teachings of Don Juan, published in 1966, was even more influential in popularizing the paranormal aspects of the psychedelic experience. Castaneda claimed that his shaman Don Juan Matus was an intimate of María Sabina. Wasson met and corresponded a couple of times with Castaneda and initially accepted him as genuine, “an obviously honest and serious young man,” but as the first book developed into a series, each more flamboyant than the previous, he began to suspect a hoax, which was apparently Leary’s opinion as well. There were colloquial expressions that seemed devoid of Spanish equivalents, and Wasson requested a sample of Castaneda’s field notes, which he was unable to supply. Wasson’s final judgment, however, was that Castaneda was “a poor pilgrim lost on his way to his own Ixtlán,” although the books were authentic as ethnopoetry, in the style, as he said, of H. Rider Haggard’s She, a novel about the archetypal feminine, a white African queen, serialized beginning in 1886.

In 1963, Wasson retired from banking, and on the afternoon of the very day, he boarded a merchant ship for the Orient to gather material that he would publish in 1968, Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, with the collaboration of a young Indologist, Wendy Doniger O’Flattery, where he sought the origin of the European mycophobia in the importation of an Indo-European mushroom cult, documented among the ancient Aryans, identifying the Vedic plant-god Soma as Amanita muscaria. From 1965, when he returned from the Far East, until his death, he lived comfortably in Connecticut at his Danbury estate, presiding over the controversy caused by his Soma identification and seeking still further confirmation of its validity.

When it came in the form of John Allegro’s Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, published in 1970, he didn’t recognize it, much to Allegro’s disappointment. As an amateur scholar, Wasson deferred to the opinion of professionals. He and Valentina had always suspected that there might have been a mushroom cult in Christianity, which would have been the closer and more obvious reason for the European mycophobia. With that in mind they had visited the little 12^th century chapel of Saint-Éligie de Plaincourault as early as 1952, the year before they re-directed their attention to Mesoamerica. The fresco in the apse depicts the Tree of Genesis as a decidedly fungal design, unmistakable even as to species, the red capped Amanita with its distinctive white scabby remnants of the universal veil shattered as the mushroom quickly expands with growth. The fresco supposedly dates from 1291, although there is evidence that it was already there as early as 1184 and was built by returning Crusaders of the Order of Malta. They also suspected that the Manichaean fondness for red mushrooms and the Cathar heresy, which flourished in that region, involved a fungal Eucharist. But the Wassons quickly dropped their inquiry when the eminent art historian Erwin Panofsky told them that the mushroom-tree was simply the common depiction in medieval art of the stylized Italian Umbrella pine. Actually, the art historians were wrong: they are all mushrooms and in entheogenic contexts, as is the Plaincourault Tree, since a fresco opposite depicts the chapel’s namesake, the blacksmith Eligius presiding over an initiation for the Elect, thus identifying the building with a Cathar ritual of psychoactive Communion. Although Wasson dismissed the fresco, he did so reluctantly, and included it as a plate for his readers’ consideration in the Soma book. Wasson’s father, an Episcopal priest, in fact had written a book on Religion and Drink, published in 1914, and he made illegal beer and wine during Prohibition. He never tired of telling his son that Christ’s first miracle was the marriage feast at Cana and the last was the Eucharist; and Wasson described his mushroom velada as a Holy Communion. And it was his father who had first told him about the Soma sacrament. He also delighted in pointing out the most embarrassing narratives in the Bible.

Allegro, the linguist and scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls, an academic with impeccable credentials in ancient Classical and Near and Middle Eastern languages, had already published several books; he had read Wasson’s writings and appropriately acknowledged them, knew of his Mexican discoveries, accepted his identification of Soma as the fly-agaric, and obviously had drawn the conclusion that Wasson was still reluctant to make.

Allegro, the only atheist among the team of scholars working on the Scrolls, presented his investigation of the mushroom in the Holy Land with the express purpose of debunking the validity of the Judeo-Christian tradition. He made the error of arguing that such a visionary Eucharist rendered Christianity a sham, although he was well aware that Wasson and others were documenting the valid and still thriving vitality of such sacraments in other religions. The outraged unconsidered rejection was immediate and vituperative. Two full-length books were rushed into print within a half-year.  He was essentially stripped of his academic credentials: there was no proof of any of this, and as far as his critics were concerned, the mushroom didn’t even grow in the Near East. Allegro was personally devastated by the scornful rejection of his scholarship. Allegro, who at that time had never experienced a psychoactive substance, was responding with distaste to the temper of the times with its widespread random and irresponsible abuse of psychedelic substances, amidst the turmoil of generational and political transition, which led even Mircea Eliade, the renowned authority on religion, mysticism, and shamanism, to disavow his own considerable evidence about shamanism in Siberia and elsewhere and declare that drugs were characteristic only of the decadent last stages of a cult, affording only inauthentic hallucinatory communion with the divine. Inevitably, anyone who thought differently was assumed to have ruined his mind on drugs.

Wasson wrote to Allegro, but never received a reply, presumably because he felt unfairly rejected. Wasson had just published a letter attacking the book in The Times Literary Supplement, evidently without reading it, like all its critics finding the linguistic documentation beyond his expertise. He also felt rejected by Robert Graves, who had used the famous bas-relief from Pharsalos as the cover for his 1960 revised edition of his Greek Myths, which depicts the goddesses Persephone and Demeter each holding a mushroom, probably Amanitas; and Graves should have been willing to validate Allegro’s descriptions of the orgiastic worship of Dionysus. In his Food for Centaurs, published in the same year, he proposed what the bas-relief implies, that the mixed potion of the Eleusinian Mystery contained a psychoactive mushroom. It was an idea first proposed by Wasson in a lecture in 1956, although he himself shied away from using the Pharsalos relief as evidence until, as Graves reported, he had received expert advice, apparently having profited from the Plaincourault debacle. Despite the fact that they were all on the same track, Graves wrote Wasson in 1972 that Allegro, who had driven home his iconoclastic death of religion argument in The End of the Road, was a fraud.

My own introduction to the whole affair was first with a copy of The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, which I noticed in a bookseller’s window in London, as Blaise Staples and I were about to buy a car to drive to Greece for a sabbatical year. The little Volkswagen was stuffed with things to read, the longest English novels, since they gave you the most for your money, our traveling library, including a copy of Graves’ standard and intriguing Greek Myths for reference. It is incomprehensible that Graves, who wrote 140 books, was so ignored by his fellow Classical scholars, and that his Pharsalos relief was left without comment. Allegro was my introduction, especially his work on Dionysus, since it dealt with material I was familiar with; his footnotes to Wasson led me to Soma and the rest, which I might have avoided since at the time we knew nothing about the Vedic and Mesoamerican traditions or about shamanism in general.

My work on the material yielded two papers in which I examined what eventually I could more easily describe as entheogenic consubstantiality, “Botanical Referents in the Hero’s Parentage,” the fact that deities and heroes share attributes with a sacred plant, a psychoactive Eucharist; and a paper on the “Madness of Herakles,” which was caused, as I demonstrated, by botanic agents. Blaise suggested that I send copies to Wasson. The year was 1976. Almost immediately, I received a phone call from Gordon; he was coming to Boston and could we meet. We had dinner together, and as we parted, he proposed lunch the following day at the Harvard Club. And thus began a decade of friendship, with us visiting him in Danbury, and him us in Boston and later in the seaside village where we went to live. He had a secretary who typed up his manuscripts and correspondence professionally, but for his personal letters he used an old manual typewriter, that produced characters out of line and partially blocked in.

I think it was for our first visit to Danbury that Gordon proposed that we solve the Eleusinian Mystery. We met in Schultes’ office, and Gordon introduced us, saying we were in Greek. Schultes’ hearing was not perfect. “Wheat,” he repeated. “Very interesting subject.” As it turned out, wheat was what it was going to be. I was unaware that Graves had slipped into the senile deterioration that would end his life in 1985 and that Gordon had chosen me as his replacement in Classics. Apparently he had previously sought out E.R. Dodds, who wrote The Greeks and the Irrational (1951), but Dodds had maintained a polite distance. The validation of Wasson’s Soma identification depended his finding mushrooms involved in another ancient religion in another place where the Indo-Europeans had migrated, parallel to their moving down into the valley of the Indus River. And Eleusis was the most likely candidate, since something was eaten and then something was seen. Ideally, it couldn’t be just a drug, but it should be a mushroom. This was all very abrupt, since I had written about Dionysus and knew little about Eleusis, since it was a Mystery, and hence, as Mylonas, the excavator of the sanctuary, declared in 1960, unsolvable.

Later we would drive often to Danbury, but this time we were in Gordon’s car. A few years later, he gave up driving, although he kept the car, when he was clocked for speeding and had to engage a lawyer to avoid a citation on his record. He had told us nothing more about the proposed project, but posed the question, as he drove, “I suppose you young men have taken all the known hallucinogens!” Not quite, we demurred.

At dinner we met his housekeeper Ivonne, who would become our frequent hostess, always talking too much, as Gordon thought, to his guests, and for this first evening, his children’s old nanny, who was visiting, and Masha, his daughter, a nurse, who was going to be our monitor. He had barely described what we were going to do, except that we were going to try the Eleusinian potion. This sounded as though it might be illegal, and probably was. To prepare ourselves, we should not eat. We didn’t know who at the table knew what was going on, but sat through dinner without eating, except for a little curry soup, which Gordon thought wouldn’t hurt us. When dinner was over, Ivonne said, “Well have fun!” And we left the main house with Masha and went down to the barn, which had been the previous owner’s art studio and now was Gordon’s private quarters and library.

In July of the previous year, when Albert Hofmann was visiting, Gordon had asked, “Whether Early Man in ancient Greece could have hit on a method to isolate a hallucinogen from ergot that would give him an experience comparable to LSD or psilocybin.” Albert had supplied the answer and the samples; and we were going to try it. There were only two dosages, however. Masha would take care of us if anything went wrong, but there was nothing for Blaise to do. So Gordon proposed that he take psilocybin.

We ingested our potions, wrapped ourselves in blankets against the cold, and sat by the fire in the hearth, while María Sabina chanted from the phonograph. Masha sat in the corner reading the New York Times. The last thing that Gordon said was that it was the custom for such ceremonies to observe silence; which was obviously an admonition not to chat. So Gordon and I waited to be visited by the Goddesses. But nothing happened, as I finally announced about midnight. “Yes,” Gordon agreed, “most disappointing.” Meanwhile, Blaise, who had ingested a known psychoactive substance, had hilarious visions of sailing the seas with Odysseus, but dared say nothing, for fear of intruding on what was obviously our more profound experience. Masha had retired to bed when it was clear that we were in no danger and we were alone in the studio—and hungry, as Gordon proclaimed, from our fast. So we returned to the main house, like thieves, and raided Ivonne’s pantry, feasting on warm ale and crackers, which was all that we could find.

The next morning when we met in the studio after breakfast, Gordon showed us Albert’s account of his bioassay; and we decided to proceed with the project, assuming that our dosage had been insufficient. So we had a drug that didn’t quite work, and it was up to me to show how it fit the Mystery. Not really an easy task.

But it was accomplished. I learned a lot about ethno-pharmacology and ethno-botany. And in the years since the first publication of The Road to Eleusis in 1978, much more has been uncovered and a new version of the argument presents a clearer scenario for the ceremony and a refinement of the drug involved: not ergonovine separated from the variable complex of ergot toxins, but ergine and is isomer isoergine produced by hydrolysis of the toxic ergotamine, commonly prescribed in sub-toxic dosages as a vasoconstrictor for the treatment of migraines. Hofmann had experimented with synthesized pure ergot toxins, which differ from the natural products. The Eleusinian potion was essentially the same as the Ololuihqui or morning glory extract of the Maya.

The mushrooms so blatantly displayed on the Pharsalos relief are probably not the Mystery as practiced at Eleusis, hence its provenance from Thessaly in northeastern Greece. There were Eleusinian sanctuaries elsewhere in Greece. There were, moreover, two levels to the initiation, and the mushrooms were apparently involved in the Lesser Mystery, at which the sacrament was reserved probably for a single person, the woman who went by the title of sacred Queen of Athens, the Basilinna, who slept, as they said, with the god Dionysus on that date in a bull stall, a metaphor for shamanic rapture induced by the Eucharist of the “bull” sacrament. That was in February on the banks of the Ilissos at Agrai, in Attica southeast of the city of Athens; and a year and a half later, the Greater Mystery was celebrated around the last week of September. For this, several thousands of initiates each year gathered in the initiation hall at Eleusis and drank the potion, which allowed them to journey to the otherworld and resurface in the hall with Persephone at the moment that she gave birth to the magical son conceived in the realm of the dead. It was here that the ergot functioned as the psychoactive agent. Ergot, too, is a mushroom, although it is only the sclerotia or hardened mass of the dried mycelium that is seen in the infested kernels of grain. Such kernels, however, are like the missing seed of the wild mushroom; and when it falls to the ground, it sprouts into the characteristic mushroom-shaped fruiting bodies, recognizable to the naked eye. I remember Gordon’s enthusiasm when we received Albert’s photograph of the fruiting ergot. We had a mushroom. And it fit the whole mythopoeia of Persephone’s abduction and resurrection and the invention of the arts of cultivation. The wheat and barley and edible grasses.

This should have caused a commotion: a psychoactive sacrament at the center of the Classical Greco-Roman world: as Cicero claimed, “Among the many excellent and indeed divine institutions that Athens has brought forth, none, in my opinion is better than those mysteries.” The greatest minds of antiquity had experienced the same sort of ecstasy that Gordon had discovered in Mesoamerica: Plato, Socrates, the dramatists, the leading politicians – for two thousand years. The psychedelic experience had formed Western consciousness and culture.

For this announcement, Wasson broke his custom and decided there would be no expensive deluxe edition, but just a trade publication. This should have been more iconoclastic than all the Tim Learys. There was, however, no Press release, no public outcry, no rebuttal, no interest; a single tepid review, that, in fact, did not reject the theory. And when Burkert mentioned us a decade later in his 1987 Harvard lectures, he accepted Wasson’s Soma identification and actually called the Eleusis argument a “sophisticated guess,” but misunderstood it, confusing ergotism with LSD, which he considers an “unpleasant and not at all euphoric state.” And that definitively closed the subject as far as Classicists were concerned. As Terence McKenna wrote: “The ideas which the authors brought forth have been largely unchallenged and ignored by specialists in the culture of ancient and classical Greece. The situation seems to fulfill the rule of thumb that when ideas are controversial they are discussed, when they are revolutionary, they are ignored.”

The general public had become frightened by the psychedelic revolution. The same people who had participated in it were now parents worried about their children. When Persephone’s Quest was presented for publication in 1986, no press was willing to take it up, even with the strong endorsement of Schultes, and despite the fact that all the essays except the first had already appeared in peer-reviewed journals, until we chanced upon Yale University, where one of the editors had been an enthusiast since the 1960s; and Wasson did not live to see the final book, which has remained in print ever since.

The first chapter was Wasson’s final summation. “As I am nearing the end of my days,” he began, “I will draw up an account of our mushroom quest.” Here he came back to the question of a mushroom cult in Christianity. “I once said that there was no mushroom in the Bible,” he wrote. “I was wrong…. I hold that the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was Soma, was the kakuljá, was Amanita muscaria, was the Nameless Mushroom of the English-speaking people.”

The original idea that the mushroom cult came into Europe with the northern migration of the Indo-Europeans must be modified. There was also an obvious southern transfer along the trade routes from Persia. And the immigrants found the cult already established among the indigenous cultures, apparently originating from Africa, where prehistoric petroglyphs from Tassili n’Ajjer depict shamans and hunters consubstantial with their mushroom sacrament. The same thing happened with the Conquistadores who found the same heretical sacraments of the European elite in the New World, but scandalously revealing pagan deities.

Somehow, too, Puharich’s Harry Stone was right. The Egyptians had a mushroom cult. The mushroom didn’t have to be found growing indigenously; there was a healthy trade in antiquity, as today, in easily and profitably shipped drugs of all sorts.

And not only did Christianity and the Eleusinian Mystery have a similar fungal Eucharist, but Classical Greece was in constant contact with the Achaemenid Persians, and philosophers like Democritus conversed with their shamans or Magi, whose version of the Soma Eucharist was called haoma. Significantly, the myth of Christ’s Nativity has three of them arrive on Epiphany to acknowledge their replacement. If not earlier, haoma was introduced into the West as Mithraism in the first-century BCE, and became the official cult of the warrior brotherhoods, male bureaucrats, and emperors, the elite who administered the Roman Empire. Nero was the first to be inducted with a Eucharist, as Suetonius recorded, of “magical food.” A seven-stage drug initiation, a version of the Soma/haoma cult, was the foundation of the Roman Empire, the political structure that created what would become Europe. With the conversion of the warrior Emperor Constantine to Christianity, Mithras and the Eleusinian Mystery were replaced by the new religion, which vigorously destroyed the pagan sanctuaries, often building their churches with the stones of the former sacred places upon the same sites, merely giving their own interpretation to the same sacrament. The Basilica of San Vicente in Ávila replaced a nearby Mithraeum. It blatantly displays the mushroom as the food of the celestial banquet on the tympanum of its portal, with the portal itself, as always, indicating a distinctly fungal design, with the opening, either with or without a dividing mullein, suggesting the stipe supporting the hemisphere of the tympanum as its cap. The tympanum itself is half of the almond-shape or mandorla that traditionally represents the vulva of the Goddess, assimilated into Christianity as the gateway to Paradise. Only the elite, who reserved for themselves the direct contact with deity, would recognize this fungal design as they passed through the portal to sacred space, but it surely was intentional, an indication of a heretical version of the Eucharist that perpetuated a sacred plant involved in the pagan cults that the Church Dominant had suppressed and in the earliest versions of the Christian rite itself, as preserved in the mosaic floor of the early fourth-century agape hall at Aquileia, with its depictions of baskets of the mushroom Eucharist. Well into the Renaissance, the highest echelons of the Church were still experiencing these visionary sacraments prohibited for the laity.

There were two sides to the psychedelic revolution: the liberals seeking entheogens to free the psyche and the conservatives seeking to control the mind through the same substances as drugs. The abuses and excesses of both led to the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. As indignant parents continue to agitate to place yet another substance on the prohibited list, the revolution also fueled intense interest in mythology and comparative religion, as those same people who now are parents sought guidance for understanding their experiences, propelling books like Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces into best sellers. The liberal movement succeeded with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act 1993, which legalized the peyote Eucharist of the Christian Native American Church. And just recently, the Supreme Court of the United States applied the Act to the case brought before the Justices by the New Mexico branch of the Brazilian Uniao do Vegetal, legalizing their Christian Eucharist of ayahuasca tea. The Eleusinian Mystery was cited in the brief as a precedent for an orderly and beneficial religious experience induced by a psychoactive sacrament. Although this important decision received scant notice in the Press, it vindicates Wasson’s role as the patrician presiding over the Psychedelic Revolution.

In 1975, during a thunderstorm, Dannion Brinkley was talking on the telephone when a bolt of lightning hit the phone line, sending thousands of volts into his head and down through his body. Brinkley was thrown across the room, and later reported seeing his lifeless body spread prone, as his then-girlfriend found him and paramedics arrived. Obviously disoriented, in his spirit-form above the scene, he wondered what the excitement was about, since (as he put it) “Everybody was okay….” He saw auras around everybody in the room except his own body below — a pretty big hint that he was, in fact, dead.

As doctors pronounced Brinkley dead at the local hospital, he reportedly found himself — or, more specifically, his spirit-self — traveling through a dark tunnel toward an angelic being who led him into a “crystal city.” There, he entered a “cathedral of knowledge” where he was shown 13 visions, contained in what he termed “boxes.” So-called “beings of light” also showed him 117 glimpses of possible future events, of which 95 have come to pass (by his count) in early 1998.

Brinkley revived in the morgue some 28 minutes after his death and later gave a personal account of his near-death experience (NDE) in the book, ”Saved by the Light,” first published in 1995.

If you can’t face reading this whole article check out this strange video about Brinkley:

As recounted in the book, the events of that day changed Brinkley’s life. He spent many months recovering from the physically debilitating effects of the electrical blast, while at the same time discovering mind-reading abilities that, while lessening over time, remain with him to this day.

A second near-death experience, a few years later, reunited Brinkley with his angelic teachers, who revealed he was to use his psychic gifts to help the dying. Another book, ”At Peace in the Light,” soon followed.

In September 1997, Brinkley was hospitalized with life threatening brain aneurysms. Despite medical opinions to the contrary, he miraculously survived. During that time, he had a third near-death experience.

Besides lectures and book signings, Dannion Brinkley currently does hospice work — using his experiences and gifts to help those who are nearing, and perhaps fear, death.

Visions of Dannion Brinkley

Thirteen prophetic visions as seen by Dannion Brinkley. He refers to them as “Boxes of Knowledge” in his book, “Saved By The Light” which was published in 1994 after he suffered a near death experience.

BOXES 1 thru 3: Visions of a Demoralized Country

Boxes 1, 2 & 3 showed the mood of America in the aftermath of the war in Southeast Asia. They revealed scenes of spiritual loss in our country that were byproducts of that war, which weakened the structure of America & eventually the world. The scenes were prisoners of war, weak & wasted from hunger, as they waited in the rugged prisons of North Vietnam for American ambassadors to come & free them. I could feel their fear & then despair when they realized one by one that no help would be forthcoming & that they would live out their remaining years as slaves in jungle prisons.

These were the MIAs, those military men considered “missing in action.” The MIAs were already an issue in 1975, but they were used as a starting point in the visions to show an America that was slipping into spiritual decline. I could see America falling into enormous debt. This came to me as scenes of money going out of a room much faster than it was coming in. Through some kind of telepathy, I was aware that this money represented the increase in the national debt & that it spelled danger down the road. I also saw people waiting in long lines for the basics of life like clothing & food.

Many scenes of spiritual hunger came from the first two boxes as well. I saw people who were transparent in such a way as to reveal that they were hollow. This hollowness, it was explained to me telepathically, was caused by a loss of faith in America & what it stood for. The war in Southeast Asia had combined with inflation & distrust in our government to create a spiritual void. This void was added to by our loss of love for God. This spiritual depravity resulted in a number of shocking visions: people rioting & looting because they wanted more material goods than they had, kids shooting other kids with high-powered rifles, criminals stealing cars, young men firing on other young men from the windows of cars. Scenes like these played out in front of me like scenes from a gangster movie.

Most of the criminals were children or adolescents that no one cared about. As I watched image after image, it became painfully clear to me that these kids had no family units, & as a result, they were acting like wolves. I was confused because I couldn’t figure out how American children could be left to roam & murder. Didn’t they have parental guidance? I wondered. How could such a thing happen in our country?

In the third box, I found myself facing the seal of the president of the U.S. I don’t know where I was, but I saw the initials “R.R.” emblazoned beneath this seal. Then I was standing in the midst of newspapers, looking at their editorial cartoons. One after the other, I saw cartoons of a cowboy. He was riding the range or shooting down bad guys in saloons. This vision was festooned with satirical illustrations from around the country from such newspapers as The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, & the Los Angeles Times. The dates on the newspapers ranged from 1983 to 1987, & it was clear from the nature of the drawings that they were about the president of the U.S., who projected the image of being a cowboy to the rest of the world.

I could also tell that the man in these cartoons was an actor, because they all had a theatrical look to them. One of the cartoons even referred to “Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid” & played off the famous scene in that movie in which the two outlaws jump off a cliff into a shallow pool of water. Yet despite the vividness of the newspaper clippings, I was unable to see the face under the cowboy hat. I now know that “RR” stood for Ronald Reagan, but at the time I had no idea who the “cowboy” was. A few months later, when I was recalling these visions for Dr. Raymond Moody, the noted psychiatrist & researcher of near-death experiences, he asked me who I thought “RR” was. Without hesitation I said, “Robert Redford.” He has never let me forget that mistake & ribs me about it every time we get together.

BOXES 4 & 5: Strife & Hatred in the Holy Lands

Boxes 4 & 5 were scenes from the Middle East, showing how this area of eternal strife would reach a boiling point. Religion would play a large role in these problems, as would the economy. A constant need for outside money fueled much of the anger & hatred that I saw in these boxes. In the first of these boxes I saw two agreements taking place. In the first, Israelis & Arabs were agreeing to something, but what was unclear to me. The second accord was one that I could see in some detail. Men were shaking hands & there was much talk about a new country. Then I saw a collage of images: the River Jordan, a settlement from Israel that was spreading into Jordan, & a map on which the country of Jordan was changing color. As I watched this puzzling collage unfold, I heard a Being speak telepathically to me & say that the country of Jordan would exist no more. I did not hear the name of the new country.

This agreement was nothing more than a front by the Israelis to create a police force composed of Israelis & Arabs. This was a very harsh police force, cruel & unyielding. I saw them wearing blue-&-silver uniforms & having a tight grip on the people of this region. So tight was their grip, in fact, that world leaders became highly critical of Israel. Many collaborators on both sides kept an eye on their own people & reported their activities to this police force. They served to make everyone suspicious, causing trust in these societies to disappear.

I could see Israel becoming isolated from the rest of the world. As things worsened, there were images of Israel preparing for war against other countries, including Russia, & a chinese-&-Arab consortium. Jerusalem was somehow at the eye of this conflict, but I am not sure exactly how. From newspaper headlines that appeared in the vision, I could see that some incident in that holy city had served to trigger this war. These visions revealed Israel as being spiritually hollow. I had the sense of it being a country of strong government but weak morals. Image after image came of Israelis reacting with hatred toward Palestinians & other Arabs, & I was steeped in the sense that these people as a nation had forgotten God & were now driven by racial hatred.

The fifth box showed oil being used as a weapon to control the international economy. I saw images of Mecca & then of the Saudi people. While these images streamed before me, a telepathic voice said that oil production was being cut off to destroy America’s economy & to milk money from the world economy. The price of oil was going up & up, said the voice, & Saudi Arabia was making an alliance with Syria & China. I could see Arab & Oriental people shaking hands & making deals. As these images came to me, I could sense money being given by the Saudis to Asian countries like North Korea, all in the hopes of destabilizing the economy of the Asian region.

I wondered where this alliance began, & I was able to see a close-up of Syrians & Chinese signing papers & shaking hands in a building that I knew was in Syria. The date that came to me was 1992. Another date came to me – 1993 – & with it came images of Syrian & Chinese scientists working in laboratories to develop a missile that could deliver chemical & biological weapons. Nuclear weapons were becoming things of the past, & these countries wanted to develop new weapons of destruction. The boxes kept coming.

BOX 6: Visions of Nuclear Destruction

Number 6 was terrifying. I was drawn into the box & found myself in a cool, forested area beside a river. Next to the river was a massive cement structure, square & foreboding. I was fearful & didn’t know why. Suddenly the earth shook & the top of this cement structure exploded. I knew it was a nuclear explosion & could sense hundreds of people dying around me as it took place. The year 1986 was given to me through telepathy, as was the word “wormwood.” It wasn’t until a decade later, when the Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded near Kiev in the Soviet Union, that I was able to associate these pictures with an event. It was then that I made another connection between the vision in this box & the nuclear disaster in the USSR. The word Chernobyl means “wormwood” in Russian.

A second nuclear accident appeared in the box, this in a northern sea so badly polluted that no ships would travel there. The water was a pale red & was covered with dead or dying fish. Around the water were peaks & valleys that made me think I was seeing a fjord like those in Norway. I couldn’t tell where this was, but I knew that the world was frightened at what had happened, because radiation from this accident could spread everywhere & affect all of humankind. The date on the picture was 1995. The vision didn’t stop there. People were dying & deformed as a result of these nuclear catastrophes. In a series of what seemed like television pictures, I saw cancer victims & mutated babies in Russia, Norway, Sweden, & Finland, not hundreds or thousands of people, but tens of thousands, in a vast array of deformity, going on through generations. The poisons released by these accidents were carried to the rest of the world through water, which was tainted forever by this nuclear waste. The Being made it clear that humans had created a horrible power that had not been contained. By letting this power out of their control, the Soviets had destroyed their own country & possibly the world.

The box showed me the fear in people’s hearts that resulted from these nuclear accidents. As the images of this fear unfolded, I somehow understood that environmentalism would emerge as the world’s new religion. People would consider a clean environment a key to salvation more than they ever had before. Political parties would spring up around the issue of a cleaner planet, & political fortunes would be made or broken based upon feelings about the environment. From Chernobyl & this second accident, I could see that the Soviet Union would wither & die, with the Soviet people losing faith in their government & the government losing its grip on the people.

The economy played a strong role in these visions. I saw people carrying bags of money into stores & coming out with small bags of goods. People with military uniforms wandered the streets in Soviet cities begging for food, some obviously starving to death. People ate rotted potatoes & apples, & crowds rioted to get at trucks filled with food.

The word “Georgia” appeared in a Cyrillic script, & I could see a mafia developing in Moscow that I assume came from the state of Georgia in the Soviet Union. This mafia was a growing power that was in competition with the Soviet government. In scene after scene, I saw mafia members operating freely in a city that I think was Moscow. I felt no joy as I watched the Soviet Union collapse. Although Soviet-style communism was dying right before my eyes, the Being of Light was saying that this was a cautious moment instead of a glorious one. “Watch the Soviet Union,” he said. “How the Russian people go, so goes the world. What happens to Russia is the basis for everything that will happen to the economy of the free world.”

BOX 7: The Environmental Religion

The 7th box held powerful images of environmental destruction. I could see areas of the world radiating energy, glowing like a radium watch face in the dark. Telepathically I could hear voices speaking of the need to clean up the environment. These voices came out of Russia at first, but then the accents changed & I could tell that they were emanating from South America, probably from Uruguay or Paraguay. I saw the speaker from Russia as he talked with zeal about our need to heal the environment. People rallied around him quickly, & he soon became so powerful that he was elected one of the leaders of the United Nations. I saw this Russian riding on a white horse, & I knew that his rise would come before the year 2000.

BOXES 8 & 9: China Battles Russia

In boxes 8 & 9 were visions of China’s growing anger toward the Soviet Union. When these visions took place in 1975, I didn’t know that the Soviet Union would break up. Now I think the tension I saw in that vision was a result of the death of Soviet Communism, which left the Chinese the leaders of the Communist world. At the time, the visions were a puzzle to me. I saw border disputes & heavy fighting between Soviet & Chinese armies. Finally, the Chinese amassed their armies at the border & pushed into the region. The main battle was over a railroad, which the Chinese took in heavy fighting. They then pushed deep into the Soviet Union, cutting the country in half & taking over the oil fields of Siberia. I saw snow, blood, & oil & knew that the loss of life had been heavy.

BOXES 10 & 11: Economic Earthquakes, Desert Storm

Boxes 10 & 11 came in rapid succession. They revealed scenes of the economic collapse of the world. In general terms, these visions showed a world in horrible turmoil by the turn of the century, one that resulted in a new world order that was truly one of feudalism & strife. In one of the visions, people lined up to take money out of banks. In another, the banks were being closed by the government. The voice that accompanied the visions told me that this would take place in the 90’s & would be the beginning of an economic strife that would lead to the bankruptcy of America by the year 2000.

The box showed images of dollar signs flying by as people pumped gas & looked distressed. I knew this meant that oil prices were accelerating out of control. I saw 13 new nations entering the world mark in the late 90’s. These were nations with manufacturing capabilities that put them on a competitive footing with the U.S. One by one our European markets began to give their business to these countries, which slowed our economy even more. all of this led to a greatly weakened economy.

But the end of America as a world power came as visions of two horrendous earthquakes in which buildings were swaying & toppling over like a child’s wooden blocks. I knew that these quakes happened sometime before the end of the century, but I couldn’t tell where they took place. I do remember seeing a large body of water that was probably a river. The cost of rebuilding these destroyed cities would be the final straw for our government, now financially broken that it would hardly be able to keep itself alive. The voice in the vision told me that it would be this way while the images from the box showed Americans starving & lined up for food.

At the tail end of box 10 came images of warfare in the desert, a massive show of military might. I saw armies racing toward one another in the desert, with great clouds of dust billowing from the treads of tanks as they crossed the barren ground. There was cannon fire & explosions that looked like lightning. The earth shook & then there was silence. Like a bird, I flew over acres of destroyed army equipment. As I left the box, the date 1990 came into my head. That was the year of Desert Storm, the military operation that squashed the army of Iraq for occupying Kuwait.

Box 11 began with Iran & Iraq in possession of nuclear & chemical weapons. Included in this arsenal was a submarine loaded with nuclear missiles. The year, said a voice in the vision, was 1993. I saw this submarine powering through the waters of the Middle East, piloted by people I knew to be Iranians. I could tell that their purpose was to stop the shipping of oil from the Middle East. They were so praiseful of God, in their speech, that I had the sense that this was some kind of religious mission. The missiles that occupied the desert of the Middle East were equipped with chemical warheads. I don’t know where they were aimed, but I do know that there was worldwide fear of the intentions of the Arab nations that had them.

Chemical warfare played a role in a horrible vision of terrorism that takes place in France before 2000. It begins when the French publish a book that infuriates the Arab world. I don’t know the title of this book, but the result of its publication is a chemical attack by Arabs on a city in France. A chemical is put into the water supply, & thousands drink it & die before it can be eliminated. In one brief vision, I saw Egyptians rioting in the streets while a voice told me that by 1997, Egypt would collapse as a democracy & be taken over by religious fanatics.

The final visions from box 11 were like many images we now see of Sarajavo: modern cities crumbling beneath the weight of warfare, their inhabitants fighting one another for reasons ranging from racism to religious conflict. I saw many towns worldwide where desperate citizens were eating their own dead. In one such scene, Europeans in a hilly region of the world were weeping as they cooked human meat. In rapid succession I saw people of all five races eating their fellow humans.

BOX 12: Technology & Virus

The 11th box was gone & I was into the 12th box. Its visions addressed an important event in the distant future, the decade of the 90’s (remember, this was 1975), when many of the great changes would take place. In this box, I watched as a biological engineer from the Middle East found a way to alter DNA & create a biological virus that would be used in the manufacture of computer chips. This discovery allowed for huge strides in science & technology. Japan, China, & other countries of the Pacific Rim experienced boom times as a result of this discovery & became powers of incredible magnitude. Computer chips produced from this process found their way into virtually every form of technology, from cars & airplanes to vacuum cleaners & blenders.

Before the turn of the century, this man was among the richest in the world, so rich that he had a stranglehold on the world economy. Still the world welcomed him, since the computer chips he had designed somehow put the world on an even keel. Gradually, he succumbed to his own power. He began to think of himself as a deity & insisted on greater control of the world. With that extra control, he began to rule the world.

His method of rule was unique. Everyone in the world was mandated by law to have one of his computer chips inserted underneath his or her skin. This chip contained all of an individual’s personal information. If a government agency wanted to know something, all it had to do was scan your chip with a special device. By doing so, it could discover everything about you, from where you worked & lived to your medical records & even what kind of illnesses you might get in the future.

There was an even more sinister side to this chip. A person’s lifetime could be limited by programming this chip to dissolve & kill him with the viral substance it was made from. Lifetimes were controlled like this to avoid the cost that growing old places on the government. It was also used as a means of eliminating people with chronic illnesses that put a drain on the medical system. People who refused to have chips implanted in their bodies roamed as outcasts. They could not be employed & were denied government services.

THE FINAL VISIONS

At the very end came a 13th vision. I don’t know where it came from. I didn’t see a Being of Light bring it forward in a box, nor did I see one take it away. This vision was in many ways the most important of all because it summed up everything I had seen in the 12 boxes. Through telepathy, I could hear a Being say, “If you follow what you have been taught & keep living the same way you have lived the last 30 years, all of this will surely be upon you. If you change, you can avoid the coming war.” Scenes from a horrible world war accompanied this message. As the visions appeared on the screen, the Being told me that the years 1994 through 1996 were critical ones in determining whether this war would break out. “If you follow this dogma, the world by the year 2004 will not be the same one you now know,” said the Being. “But it can still be changed & you can help change it.”

Scenes from World War III came to life before me. I was in a hundred places at once, from deserts to forests, & saw a world filled with fighting & chaos. Somehow it was clear that this final war, an Armageddon if you will, was caused by fear. In one of the most puzzling visions of all, I saw an army of women in black robes & veils marching through a European city. “The fear these people are feeling is an unnecessary one,” said the Being of Light. “But it is a fear so great that humans will give up all freedoms in the name of safety.”

I also saw scenes that were not of war, including many visions of natural disasters. In parts of the world that had once been fertile with wheat & corn, I saw parched desert & furrowed fields that farmers had given up on. In other parts of the world, torrential rainstorms had gouged out the earth eating away topsoil & creating rivers of thick, dark mud.

People were starving in this vision. They were begging for food on the streets, holding out bowls & cups & even their hands in hopes that someone or something would offer them a scrap to eat. In some of the pictures, people had given up or were too weak to beg & were curled on the ground waiting for the gift of death. I saw civil wars breaking out in Central & South America & the rise of socialist governments in all of these countries before the year 2000. As these wars intensified, millions of refugees streamed across the U.S. border, looking for a new life in North America. Nothing we did could stop these immigrants. They were driven by fear of death & loss of confidence in God.

I saw millions of people streaming north out of El Salvador & Nicaragua, & more millions crossing the Rio Grande into Texas. There were so many of them that we had to line the border with troops & force them back across the river. The Mexican economy was broken by these refugees & collapsed under the strain.

The quickest way to change the world is to be of service to others. Show that your love can make a difference in the lives of people and thereby someone else’s love can make a difference in your life.By each of us doing that and working together we change the world one inner person at a time.

Dannion Brinkley

Contact Dannion Brinkley at http://www.lightstreamers.com/DB-feedback.htm.

Visit Dannion Brinkley’s web-site at http://www.lightstreamers.com/dannion_brinkley.htm.

]]> http://www.brainwaving.com/2009/12/10/dannion-brinkley-prophet-or-profiteer/feed/ 0 http://www.brainwaving.com/2009/11/30/huxley-on-drugs-and-creativity/ http://www.brainwaving.com/2009/11/30/huxley-on-drugs-and-creativity/#comments Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:22:58 +0000 SPF http://www.brainwaving.com/?p=473 Aldous Huxley interviewed for The Paris Review (1960), reprinted in Moksha: Aldous Huxley’s Classic Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience, edited by Michael Horowitz and Cynthia Palmer (Park Street Press, 1999)

Huxley: I don’t think there is any generalization one can make on this. Experience has shown that there’s an enormous variation in the way people respond to lysergic acid. Some people probably could get direct aesthetic inspiration for painting or poetry out of it. Others I don’t think could. For most people it’s an extremely significant experience, and I suppose in an indirect way it could help the creative process. But I don’t think one can sit down and say, “I want to write a magnificent poem, and so I’m going to take lysergic acid [diethylamide].” I don’t think it’s by any means certain that you would get the result you wanted — you might get almost any result.

Watch these clips of Huxley:

Interviewers: Would the drug give more help to the lyric poet than the novelist?

Huxley: Well, the poet would certainly get an extraordinary view of life which he wouldn’t have had in any other way, and this might help him a great deal. But you see (and this is the most significant thing about the experience), during the experience you’re really not interested in doing anything practical — even writing lyric poetry. If you were having a love affair with a woman, would you be interested in writing about it? Of course not. And during the experience you’re not particularly in words, because the experience transcends words and is quite inexpressible in terms of words. So the whole notion of conceptualizing what is happening seems very silly. After the event, it seems to me quite possible that it might be of great assistance: people would see the universe around them in a very different way and would be inspired, possibly, to write about it.

Interviewers: But is there much carry-over from the experience?

Huxley: Well, there’s always a complete memory of the experience. You remember something extraordinary having happened. And to some extent you can relive the experience, particularly the transformation of the outside world. You get hints of this, you see the world in this transfigured way now and then — not to the same pitch of intensity, but something of the kind. It does help you to look at the world in a new way. And you come to understand very clearly the way that certain specially gifted people have seen the world. You are actually introduced into the kind of world that Van Gogh lived in, or the kind of world that Blake lived in. You begin to have a direct experience of this kind of world while you’re under the drug, and afterwards you can remember and to some slight extent recapture this kind of world, which certain privileged people have moved in and out of, as Blake obviously did all the time.

Interviewers: But the artist’s talents won’t be any different from what they were before he took the drug?

Huxley: I don’t see why they should be different. Some experiments have been made to see what painters can do under the influence of the drug, but most of the examples I have seen are very uninteresting. You could never hope to reproduce to the full extent the quite incredible intensity of color that you get under the influence of the drug. Most of the things I have seen are just rather tiresome bits of expressionism, which correspond hardly at all, I would think, to the actual experience. Maybe an immensely gifted artist — someone like Odilon Redon (who probably saw the world like this all the time anyhow) — maybe such a man could profit by the lysergic acid [diethylamide] experience, could use his visions as models, could reproduce on canvas the external world as it is transfigured by the drug.

Interviewers: Here this afternoon, as in your book, The Doors of Perception, you’ve been talking chiefly about the visual experience under the drug, and about painting. Is there any similar gain in psychological insight?

Huxley: Yes, I think there is. While one is under the drug one has penetrating insights into the people around one, and also into one’s own life. Many people get tremendous recalls of buried material. A process which may take six years of psychoanalysis happens in an hour — and considerably cheaper! And the experience can be very liberating and widening in other ways. It shows that the world one habitually lives in is merely a creation of this conventional, closely conditioned being which one is, and that there are quite other kinds of worlds outside. It’s a very salutary thing to realize that the rather dull universe in which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is. I think it’s healthy that people should have this experience. •

This essay, which tells the story of the inventor of LSD and his ‘problem child’s’ turbulent history, is taken from the soon-to-be published ‘Hofmann’s Elixir: LSD and the New Eleusis’. It is brainwaving.com’s first exclusive, and written by co-founder Amanda Feilding, who is also the editor of ‘Hofmann’s Elixir’. Enjoy:

If, as Albert Hofmann believes, it was not he who discovered LSD, but rather LSD that found him, then indeed it chose wisely.  For, as those who know him are aware, Albert and his Wunderkind are a very well-matched pair.  It is a rare thing in the modern world, or in any world, for a man to live beyond a century.  But to live so long with senses so intact and above all with his luminous intellect undimmed, is so exceptional as to suggest a strikingly remarkable individual.  He takes pride in the collage, made by an admirer, juxtaposing portraits of Newton, Einstein and Hofmann, three men who have fundamentally transformed the way we conceive reality.  Apart from his scientific achievements, it is his personal qualities – the nobility of his character, the humanity and breadth of his vision, and his humility and awe before the beauty of Creation – that mark him out as an outstanding natural philosopher.

like the Nibelung’s Ring, Albert’s elixir had magical powers – to do great good if wisely used, but to do great harm when used in ignorance

While his longevity may have been helped by a happy marriage, hiking, daily hanging upside-down or eating raw eggs, surely the primary cause was the sensation, born of his boyhood transfigurations (which coincided with the cataclysm of the First World War), that he had been chosen by some divine force to help redeem a despairing civilisation:

None will break ranks though nations trek from progress.

Then when much blood had clogged their chariot wheels,

I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,

Even with truths that lie too deep for taint…

Albert Hofmann can still locate the exact spot, on the wooded Martinsberg above Baden, where the first of his transfigurations occurred.  The Tibetan tantric tradition might explain that event as an experience of the Great Bliss, the untrammelled awareness of the natural state or ‘Buddha-mind’, variously described by adepts as youthful and fresh, extraordinarily vivid, and as ‘primordial enlightenment’.

From the moment he confirmed its power, his new life-purpose was to encourage the wise use of his ‘spiritual atom bomb’

His sensation that his life had a profound purpose was perhaps confirmed by his two half-conscious decisions, firstly to synthesise LSD-25 on 16 November 1938, and secondly, despite animal bioassays having proved its inactivity, to re-synthesise it on 16 April 1943.  The scientifically inexplicable state of ‘extremely heightened fantasy’ which he experienced that day, recalled to mind the visionary episodes of his boyhood, confirmed his hunch that he was at the threshold of some great discovery, and prevented LSD being again assigned, as he had thitherto planned, to more animal bioassays and so to oblivion.

The ‘horror-trip’ which followed his taking of 250 micrograms of LSD three days later was a stark warning: like the Nibelung’s Ring, Albert’s elixir had magical powers – to do great good if wisely used, but to do great harm when used in ignorance.

research into the Eleusinian Mysteries, which suggested that the sacrament used in the most potent ceremony of the classical world was chemically close to LSD

From the moment he confirmed its power, his new life-purpose was to encourage the wise use of his ‘spiritual atom bomb’.  He hoped that LSD’s psychedelic activity, quantitatively and qualitatively far superior to that of mescaline, the only other hallucinogen then known in the West, would be a valuable tool in neuroscience, in the treatment of the mind, and in the education of the human species.   He presumed that, like mescaline, LSD’s non-medicinal use would be confined to artistic and literary circles, to such exceptional thinkers as Aldous Huxley and Ernst Jünger: ‘I had not expected that LSD, with its unfathomably uncanny profound effects, so unlike the character of a recreational drug, would ever find worldwide use as an inebriant.’

This expectation was to be confounded.  By the mid-1960s LSD was receiving sensational attention in the mass media, especially in the United States.  Some hailed its power to improve spiritual, emotional and sexual performance, others blamed it for psychosis and suicide.  Timothy Leary, whose personality was the very antithesis of Hofmann’s, appointed himself LSD’s ‘apostle’, claimed it as the most potent aphrodisiac ever, and caught the attention of millions with his anarchic advice to ‘Turn On, Tune In and Drop Out’.  Coinciding with the height of the Cold War and with Vietnam, this was too much for the US authorities, which made LSD illegal in 1967, and in 1972 unleashed the worldwide War on Drugs.  Possession of LSD was forbidden, and its use in neuroscience and psychiatry stopped.  It was officially declared to have no medical or scientific use whatsoever.

world opinion that climate change is accelerating, and that unrestrained economic growth may be its primary cause, has simultaneously strengthened those who share Albert’s long-held belief that pure materialism, without a spiritual or holistic dimension, is now unsustainable

For Albert, this disaster confirmed his resolution to stay alive and alert for as long as possible, to advocate the beneficent use and positive value of LSD, and patiently to await the turn of the tide.  In the 1970s he became involved with Gordon Wasson and Carl Ruck in research into the Eleusinian Mysteries, which suggested that the sacrament used in the most potent ceremony of the classical world was chemically close to LSD, confirming his belief that LSD could help catalyse a spiritual renaissance which might yet pluck modern man from the abyss of his own destruction.

Albert’s hundredth birthday on 11 January 2006, celebrated in Basel by the university and municipality and by a large international conference, may have marked a milestone in LSD’s return to respectability, in its transformation from Sorgenkind to Wunderkind.  Surely the elixir, advocated for over 60 years with such eloquence by so reasonable and venerable a gentleman, merits research to see if it has, in fact, some use for science and humanity?

The year 2006 also witnessed unprecedented international dissatisfaction with US foreign policy. As the military and moral failure of US policy in the Middle East sapped her prestige, so civil society and governments world-wide were emboldened to question the wisdom of that other American crusade, the War on Drugs. Furthermore, the growing concern of numerous scientists and world opinion that climate change is accelerating, and that unrestrained economic growth may be its primary cause, has simultaneously strengthened those who share Albert’s long-held belief that pure materialism, without a spiritual or holistic dimension, is now unsustainable.

There are grounds, therefore, for cautious optimism that the ideas held by Albert, and many others, may be regaining favour, and that perhaps the responsible use of psychedelics may in due course resume its traditional role in human affairs. If so, he should feel profound and justified pride that his wisdom, integrity and persistence have enabled him to fulfil the redemptive mission of which he became magically conscious nine long decades ago on the Martinsberg.

* * *

My own first encounter with Albert’s elixir happened in London in 1965.  My childhood had been shaped by brushes with the numinous, and I was exhilarated by LSD’s power to raise me to an altogether higher level of consciousness, by its creative potential, by its intensification of sensory perceptions, of human relationships, and of the joys of life. As my investigation into the art of manipulating consciousness advanced I became particularly impressed with one of LSD’s most notable and endearing characteristics: that, because it is so dose-sensitive, it could be used either as a catalyst for transformation or, in a smaller, more manageable dose, to add sparkle to daily life, deepen observation, widen the web of neural connectivity and thereby enhance creativity and well being – a true psycho-vitamin.

I embraced the hypothesis that one of the primary underlying elements of LSD’s cerebral effects is the increased perfusion of blood to the brain, thereby supplying millions more brain cells with glucose and oxygen, increasing metabolism, washing out toxins and expanding the network of simultaneous associations

Early in my life I had become interested in the exploration of altered states of consciousness.  I studied mysticism, sacred and profane, under the tuition of R.C. Zaehner, who opposed Huxley’s view that a mystical experience could be caused by chemical means.  After taking LSD, I recognized the truth of Huxley’s retort that psychedelics were the ‘occasion’, rather than the ‘cause’ of mystical experiences. In other words, the flooding of the brain with combusted oxygen – light – does not of itself bring about a mystical experience, unless the crop it reaps is ripe for harvest.

In the years that followed I grew ever more curious to understand better the workings of the mind, and how the use of this ‘alchemical potion’ could help transform psychic lead into gold.  In 1966, inspired by a great love and a new viewpoint, I embraced the hypothesis that one of the primary underlying elements of LSD’s cerebral effects is the increased perfusion of blood to the brain, thereby supplying millions more brain cells with glucose and oxygen, increasing metabolism, washing out toxins and expanding the network of simultaneous associations.  This can be experienced subjectively as enhanced perception, cognition, and awareness.  As William Blake observed: ‘if the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite.’

It became a principal purpose of my life to help elucidate the physiological mechanisms underlying enhanced states of consciousness

Of course there are many ways of extending the spectrum of consciousness, ranging from meditation and chanting to breath control, extreme exercise and the ingestion of psychoactive substances.  Indeed, ever since the emergence of Homo sapiens our ancestors have used practices and substances that induced altered states.  Shamanic practices formed the very core of our cultural history.  Later these practices developed into mysticism and alchemy, and were finally driven underground by a cultural transformation fearful of expanded consciousness.  The burning of witches and heretics sent the mystics running for cover.  The spirit of the Inquisition has continued to this day under the guise of the War on Drugs, the war on altered states of perception.

The evidence that the entheogens (substances that create the divine within) have been key catalysts of human spiritual and cultural evolution makes it all the stranger that, in the present day, these compounds are kept, not in sacred chalices, but in the criminal underbelly of society.  It is indeed an ironic twist that society has made taboo that area of human experience which historically was so central to our evolution. Let us hope that in the 21st century society will re-evaluate this position.

It became a principal purpose of my life to help elucidate the physiological mechanisms underlying enhanced states of consciousness.  Only with this knowledge would it be possible to weigh the benefits and dangers of those states, and so to integrate the practice of intensifying and extending the range of conscious states into the fabric of contemporary culture.  In a scientific age, we need scientific explanations.

What might be the advantages of experiencing a fuller cornucopia of conscious states, and of being better informed about them?

In order to further the investigation of the complex mechanisms underlying the full spectrum of conscious states, I set up the Beckley Foundation, through which I could work with internationally recognised scientists at leading institutions, and thereby gain access to the latest neuroscientific technologies.  Strangely, it was not until the 1990s that the core topic of ‘consciousness’ came in from the scientific cold and even then the investigation of ‘altered states of consciousness’ remained beyond the frontiers for established scientific research.  It is these frontiers of exploration on which the Beckley Foundation focuses. Many predict that the twenty-first century will be renowned as the century of neuroscience.

What might be the advantages of experiencing a fuller cornucopia of conscious states, and of being better informed about them?  I think there is a strong argument that taking into account information from a variety of viewpoints tends towards deeper insights, whether this awareness emanates from dreams or meditation or chemically-induced altered states.  Although our species displays astonishing feats of brilliance, there is something strangely myopic and self-destructive about our world-view.  This tunnel vision causes immense suffering worldwide, destroying environments and species.  Over the last two millennia we have amassed incredible technological power, yet our moral insight and self-knowledge has failed to evolve in synchrony.

We should, maybe, keep in mind the cautionary tale of Neanderthal Man.  For over 160,000 years he had been slowly adapting to changing circumstances.  Then, around 50,000 years ago, a mutant cousin, Homo sapiens, whose fat metabolism and brain-structure had undergone complex changes, arrived in Western Europe, and over the next few thousand years Neanderthal became extinct.

It is most probable that the changes in Homo sapiens’ brain-structure resulted in more efficient communication between neurons, and improved connectivity between different parts of the brain, bringing with it a different type of consciousness and behaviour – a new consciousness, similar to our own.  This great leap forward in brain-structure meant that Homo sapiens could experience and integrate an expanded range of conscious states, adding a more complex ring to the associative networks of connectivity, thereby gaining in survival chances.  He could incorporate the experiences emanating from dreams and other states of altered consciousness into his thought patterns, create concepts that could be communicated at a distance through the use of symbols, and give birth to abstract ideas such as ‘spirit’, life-after-death and art – an evolutionary mutation which poor Neanderthal, who was incapable of integrating mental images derived from altered states and creating abstract concepts and symbolic behaviour, could not imitate. This extended viewpoint resulted in our ancestors being more adaptable and winning the survival battle when the going got tough.  However, like Neanderthal Man we too could die out if we fail to integrate the deeper awareness which is born from a fuller range of conscious states.

* * *

When I first met Albert Hofmann in 1997, I asked him if he had ever thought that LSD might improve cerebral circulation.  He answered that he was a chemist not a physiologist, but that he and Anita hung from their feet everyday to get more blood to their brains.  When we later visited him at his beautiful mountain retreat and I had the great honour of having his cat, Amadea, who Albert said never liked strangers, instantly purring on my lap, I felt enormous admiration and gratitude for the man who had brought so much light and love to my own, and many others’ lives.  I promised him that for his 100^th birthday, the following year, I would obtain the first official permission for over 35 years to carry out scientific research using LSD with human subjects, thereby breaking the spell which had excluded his Wunderkind from its natural role as an invaluable tool in neuroscience and psychotherapy.  But slow grind the mills of the gods, and only by his 101^st birthday were all permissions in place, enabling the research to begin.

Thank you, Albert, for inventing the alchemical potion whose healing powers may enhance the well-being of our troubled species, bringing about a transformation of viewpoint that echoes that experienced at Eleusis in the classical age, and thus facilitates a ‘loosening’ of our thinking so that we may become more adaptable to changing circumstances.

Man the tool-maker, has fashioned a powerful tool with which to expand awareness – the mystic son of a tool-smith has fulfilled the role of master alchemist by creating a sacred elixir that can help our species fulfil its potential to be the noblest and wisest of them all.

Amanda Feilding is an artist and consciousness researcher. She made the film Heartbeat in the Brain (1970) and wrote the book Blood & Consciousness (1978). In 1990 she set up the Foundation to Further Consciousness and in 1998 established the Beckley Foundation, which initiates and directs neuroscientific research into consciousness and its altered states, and also works to bring a rational perspective to global drug policy by hosting high-level seminars and publishing academic reports.

The fear that the growing use of LSD as a recreational drug in the 1960s, typified by this Life magazine cover, would cause mental illness, led to a ban on research in the 70s.

Amanda Feilding is the director of the Oxford-based Beckley Foundation, a charitable trust that investigates consciousness, its altered states and the effects of psychedelics and meditation. She is a key figure in the revival of scientific interest in psychedelics

A growing number of people are taking LSD and other psychedelic drugs such as cannabis and ecstasy to help them cope with a variety of conditions including anorexia nervosa, cluster headaches and chronic anxiety attacks.

The emergence of a community that passes the drugs between users on the basis of friendship, support and need – with money rarely involved – comes amid a resurgence of research into the possible therapeutic benefits of psychedelics. This is leading to a growing optimism among those using the drugs that soon they may be able to obtain medicines based on psychedelics from their doctor, rather than risk jail for taking illicit drugs.

Among those in Britain already using the drugs and hoping for a change in the way they are viewed is Anna Jones (not her real name), a 35-year-old university lecturer, who takes LSD once or twice a year. She fears that without an occasional dose she will go back to the drinking problem she left behind 14 years ago with the help of the banned drug.

LSD, the drug synonymous with the 1960s counter-culture, changed her life, she says. “For me it was the catalyst to give up destructive behaviour – heavy drinking and smoking. As a student I used to drink two or three bottles of wine, two or three days a week, because I didn’t have many friends and didn’t feel comfortable in my own skin.

“Then I took a hit of LSD one day and didn’t feel alone any more. It helped me to see myself differently, increase my self-confidence, lose my desire to drink or smoke and just feel at one with the world. I haven’t touched alcohol or cigarettes since that day in 1995 and am much happier than before.”

Many others are using the drugs to deal with chronic anxiety attacks brought on by terminal illness such as cancer.

Research was carried out in the 1950s and 1960s into psychedelics. In some places they were even used as a treatment for anxiety, depression and addiction. But a backlash against LSD – owing to concerns that the powerful hallucinogen was becoming widespread as a recreational drug, and fear that excessive use could trigger mental health conditions such as schizophrenia – led to prohibition of research in the 1970s.

Under the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act it is classified as a Class A, schedule 1 substance – which means not only is LSD considered highly dangerous, but it is deemed to have no medical research value.

Those in the study are the first to be allowed to take LSD legally in decades as part of research into whether it aids creativity.

Now, though, distinguished academics and highly respected institutions are looking again at whether LSD and other psychedelics might help patients. Psychiatrist Dr John Halpern, of Harvard medical school in the US, found that almost all of 53 people with cluster headaches who illegally took LSD or psilocybin, the active compound in magic mushrooms, obtained relief from the searing pain. He and an international team have also begun investigating whether 2-Bromo-LSD, a non-psychedelic version of LSD known as BOL, can help ease the same condition.

Studies into how the drug may be helping such people are also being carried out in the UK. Amanda Feilding is the director of the Oxford-based Beckley Foundation, a charitable trust that investigates consciousness, its altered states and the effects of psychedelics and meditation. She is a key figure in the revival of scientific interest in psychedelics and expresses her excitement about the initial findings of two overseas studies with which her foundation is heavily involved.

“One, at the University of California in Berkeley, was the first research into LSD to get approval from regulators and ethics bodies since the 1970s,” she said. Those in the study are the first to be allowed to take LSD legally in decades as part of research into whether it aids creativity. “LSD is a potentially very valuable substance for human health and happiness.”

The other is a Swiss trial in which the drug is give alongside psychotherapy to people who have a terminal condition to help them cope with the profound anxiety brought on by impending death. “If you handle LSD with care, it isn’t any more dangerous than other therapies,” said Dr Peter Gasser, the psychiatrist leading the trial.

At Johns Hopkins University in Washington, another trial is examining whether psilocybin can aid psychotherapy for those with chronic substance addiction who have not been helped by more conventional treatment.

Professor Colin Blakemore, a former chief executive of the Medical Research Council, said the class-A status of psychedelics such as LSD should not stop them being explored as potential therapies. “No drug is completely safe, and that includes medical drugs as well as illegal substances,” he said. “But we have well-developed and universally respected methods of assessing the balance of benefit and harm for new medicines.

“If there are claims of benefits from substances that are not regulated medicines – even including illegal drugs – it is important that they should be tested as thoroughly for efficacy and safety as any new conventional drug.”

Past reputations may make it hard to get approval for psychedelic medicines, according to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency.

“The known adverse effect profiles of psychedelic drugs would have to be considered very carefully in the risk/benefit analysis before the drugs may be approved for medicinal use,” said a spokeswoman. “These products, if approved, are likely to be classified as a prescription-only medicine and also likely to remain on the dangerous drug list, which means that their supply would be strictly controlled.”