For the Mixtecs this night was an exception, brought on by their American guests. They did not typically use teonanacatl as a drug of recreation. The mushrooms were utterly sacred to them and were meant as a means of consultation when problems arose. The problem might be concrete, such as determining who had stolen one’s donkey or how one’s son was faring if he had left the village. The mushrooms, singing through the shaman, could let the distressed parent know whether his son was alive or dead, prospering or in prison. Sometimes the question had to do with health—would the suffering villager recover or perish?—and if the shamans received word that the person would perish, then this was what happened, often within days.
Wasson and Richardson were utterly awed by their experience. On successive trips they brought along the world-renowned mushroom expert Roger Heim in an effort to identify all the types of hallucinogenic mushrooms and to procure enough of a supply that it could be used for laboratory study. Eventually mushrooms were sent to Albert Hofmann, the first man to synthesize LSD, at the laboratory of the pharmaceutical firm Sandoz, in Basel, Switzerland. Hofmann ate a few and recorded his experience—“everything took on a Mexican character”—and later discovered their active ingredient, psilocybin.
Back in Boston, Timothy Leary, a psychologist and professor at Harvard who would become famous for the admonition to “turn on, tune in, and drop out,” learned about the magic mushrooms and then ate them in Cuernavaca, leading him to conceive of and implement the Harvard Psilocybin Project, whose goal was to study the effects of hallucinogens on a wide range of subjects: prisoners, parishioners, divinity students, the dying.
Psychedelic Psychotherapy
Despite Wasson’s 1957 Life magazine story, however, the earliest experiments with psychedelics continued to be with LSD rather than psilocybin. The Czech psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, for instance, a founder of transpersonal psychology, did what he termed “psychedelic psychotherapy” with patients in Prague in the early 1960s. “When psychotherapy was combined with administration of psychedelics,” he wrote, “all our patients, irrespective of their diagnostic categories, sooner or later transcended the realm of postnatal biography and of the individual unconscious.” Grof describes patients on LSD undergoing profound spiritual and symbolic deaths and rebirths as their psyches stretched well beyond the concepts described by Freud. Psychedelics, it appeared, could radically alter an individual long after the drug was taken, allowing those who were cramped and caged by severe psychiatric diagnoses to feel, for weeks or even months after their sessions, a freedom and a kind of “cosmic consciousness” that had before been completely unavailable to them. Over and over again Grof witnessed in these patients what he termed symbolic death and rebirth, so that “fear of their own physiological demise diminished, they became open to the possibility of consciousness exiting after clinical death, and they tended to view the process of dying as an adventure in consciousness rather than the ultimate biological disaster and personal defeat.”
Grof immigrated to the United States in 1967 and became part of the treatment team at Baltimore’s Spring Grove State Hospital, where there was, among the clinicians, a great interest in the promise of LSD for dying patients. Some testing had begun as early as 1963, and it accelerated two years later when a member of the team, a woman in her early forties named Gloria, developed metastatic breast cancer. Her severe pain and emotional distress gripped the rest of the team. All of them wanted to help their colleague in some way and decided to try an LSD session, for which Gloria was prepped over a period of one week with daily psychotherapy focusing on her interpersonal relationships and life history. Two weeks after this psychedelic session, Gloria wrote a lengthy description of her experience under the influence, concluding:
As I began to emerge I was taken to a fresh windswept world. Members of the department welcomed me, and I felt joy not only for myself, but for having been able to use the experience these people who cared for me wanted me to have. I felt very close to a large group of people. Later, as members of my family came, there was a closeness that seemed new. That night, at home, my parents came too. All noticed a change in me. I was radiant, and I seemed at peace, they said. I felt that way too. What has changed me? I am living now and being. I can take it as it comes. Some of my physical symptoms are gone—the excessive fatigue, some of the pains. I still get irritated occasionally and yell. I am still me, but more at peace. My family senses this and we are closer. All who know me will say that this has been a good experience.
Five weeks later, Gloria died peacefully, leaving behind a Spring Grove staff now dedicated to exploring the role of LSD in terminal cancer patients. The surgeons and oncologists at Baltimore’s Sinai Hospital, unusually open-minded physicians, agreed to refer their patients to Grof and the other staff members for guided LSD sessions.
In 1967, the same year Grof arrived, Spring Grove hired the equally youthful Walter Pahnke (both were born in 1931), a dynamic researcher and psychiatrist who had been a student of Timothy Leary’s, to helm its LSD project. Two years later the team moved into the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, where there was a sensory deprivation tank, two treatment suites that could be monitored with cameras, sleep study laboratories, and a sensory overload department. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, more than a hundred terminal cancer patients underwent LSD therapy at the center. The typical patient was one with a very poor prognosis, and on whom all other available treatments had been tried and had failed.
Pahnke had a background in philosophy and divinity as well as a medical degree. He was also known as something of a daredevil; he was an avid motorcyclist, and pursued a host of hobbies that contributed to his eclectic energy and joie de vivre. In the summer of 1971, he added scuba diving to his list of avocations. Unfortunately, his life was cut short in tragic fashion when he died in a scuba diving accident off the coast of Maine, where he and his wife and children were vacationing. He had slipped into the sea with secondhand equipment bought from a friend, and with no real knowledge of how to dive. His body disappeared into the Atlantic, and despite an extensive search by the coast guard and the work of several psychics, he was never found. Pahnke’s early and mysterious death put a brief dent in psychedelic research, leaving the Spring Grove team without a leader until Grof, who had worked closely with Pahnke before his death, was appointed to take over the position.
Grof’s self-professed objective was “to formulate a theoretical framework that would account for some of the dramatic changes occurring as a result of LSD therapy.” He looked for patients who exhibited anxiety, depression, emotional tension, and social withdrawal, and for whom the available analgesics were not working. Patients also needed to have a life expectancy of at least three months, since Grof and his team were interested not only in the immediate results of psychedelic therapy but also in its longer-term impact.
Grof designed the therapy to consist of three stages: (1) the initial preparatory period, (2) the psychedelic session itself, and (3) a post-session period during which the patient processed the material that had emerged under the influence. The preparation stage usually lasted two to three weeks and consisted of Grof and the treatment team exploring with the patient his or her history and present situation. Unresolved conflicts were given special attention. The goal was not only to flush to the surface the issues that might arise during a psychedelic session but also to build trust between the patient and the staff. Grof and the team believed that trust was an essential aspect of a positive psychedelic experience, especially because dramatic and frightening material might emerge and the patient needed to know that he or she was in good hands. “We did all we could,” Grof wrote, “to create an opportunity for the patient and their relatives to discuss their feelings about each other, about the disease, and about the seriousness of the situation, including the imminence of death.” During his work with patients in Prague and again in Baltimore, Grof had witnessed psychedelic sessions during which the patient experienced death and rebirth,
or memories of birth and prenatal experiences that Grof believed were not simply artifacts of the drug but rather real and valid memories that the psychedelic made accessible. As part of the final preparatory stage, then, Grof and his colleagues explained to patients that their psychedelic journey might take them to realms far beyond those described by traditional psychiatry.
The treatment room and its setup were of vital importance. Patients wore headphones for most of their session, using music as a means of both transportation and transformation. Black eye masks blocked out the physical world and encouraged patients to travel inward, to the depths where, Grof believed, resided ancient archetypes and symbols with the potential to bring about a new relationship with one’s remaining life and imminent death. The room was filled with the fragrance of flowers and burning incense, decorated with flowing drapes and other props designed to facilitate comfort and ease.
Grof gave his patients between 200 and 600 micrograms of LSD, a considerable dose which takes only about twenty to forty minutes to make its effects felt. During the initial phase patients sat quietly with the staff, looking at the family photographs they had been encouraged to bring with them. Once the drug “hit,” the patients lay back wearing eye masks and listening to the headphones piping in a selection of music compiled by a music therapist. Grof took the music choices very seriously, because he believed that music helps bring primitive emotions to the surface of the mind, while simultaneously urging patients to “let go of their psychological defenses and provid[ing] a dynamic carrier wave, which takes the patients through difficult experiential impasses.” The music was usually a combination of classical pieces and ethnic rhythms and chants from spiritual practices around the world. If the music became too intense for the patients, they could take off their headphones and remove their eye masks. When this happened, the treatment team would reassure the patients and encourage them to “return into their inner world as soon as possible.”
Among the hundreds of terminal cancer patients whom Grof treated during his time as the leader of Spring Grove was Matthew, a brilliant physician and an atheist. As his cancer closed in around him, he became weak, anxious, and despairing. He experienced considerable nausea, and as the disease progressed, the pounds poured off him, leaving behind a frail man. Given that his mental and physical health had always been perfect, Matthew was devastated by his new condition. When the disease struck, he had been smack-dab in the middle of a stunningly successful life, with a beautiful wife, three children, and an exciting, fast-paced career. Having never pursued religion or anything even remotely spiritual, he felt utterly unprepared for the rigors of disease and death.
Matthew received 200 micrograms of LSD intramuscularly. For the first hour it appeared that nothing was happening. Then, suddenly, he became ecstatic about the music pouring in through his headphones. “The music sounded divine to him,” Grof writes, “and he was losing his boundaries and merging with its flow.” He felt an intense need for physical proximity and reached out to one of his guides, Joan Halifax, who for a time had been Grof’s wife and was one of his research collaborators. She held Matthew for four full hours while he tossed and turned on his mat, a wasted man, muttering mystical phrases such as “One world and one universe,” “All is one,” “Nothing and everything,” and “It is either the real thing or it is not,” before concluding with the declaration “So I am immortal…it is true!”
Matthew’s wife, who periodically came to the door of the room during the session to check on him, was shocked when she heard these words coming from his mouth and also when her husband, normally distant and stiff, wanted to embrace her, to feel himself “melting into her.” Over the remaining days of his life, his physical condition deteriorated rapidly, but husband and wife, previously emotionally estranged, developed a deep connection that was, both independently said, the most powerful part of their marriage. Knowing that death was near, Matthew, who had been unable to deal with the thought of his demise, told the treatment team that he was okay, and that when it was time to go he was ready. He died shortly thereafter, in peace and without the pain that had wracked him throughout his fight with cancer. “The changes that we observed in cancer patients following psychedelic therapy were extremely varied, complex, and multidimensional,” Grof maintained. There was an “attenuation or even elimination of fear of death and radical changes in basic life philosophy and strategy, in spiritual orientation, and in hierarchy of values.”
At the other end of the spectrum of belief was forty-five-year-old Jesse, another cancer patient whom Grof treated. Jesse, a committed Catholic, was one of sixteen children, and had been orphaned as a young boy when his parents died in a car wreck. Thirteen years earlier he’d had a squamous cell carcinoma in his upper lip, and now he was back with a similar cancer that was spreading with ferocious speed throughout his entire body. Ulcers and leaking tumors had sprouted all over his skin. Wrapped in bandages that were soaked in the fluid of his cancer and emanated a repulsive odor, Jesse saw himself as an outcast and a terrible burden on his girlfriend, Betty, and her sister, the women who dutifully cared for him in their small apartment.
During preparation for his psychedelic session, Jesse expressed a strong and overwhelming fear of death, which he saw in two ways: first, as the ultimate end of his physical and mental self, a step into utter darkness; and second, as a possible continuation of his consciousness that would be judged by the Catholic God he believed in. Jesse assumed that the judgment against him would be severe, because of the various sins he felt he’d committed, and he therefore sensed that he would be consigned to the fires of hell. Given his two views of death, he was clinging to what little life he had left with all his strength.
Jesse’s case history demonstrates how psychedelics reflect confirmed religious belief even as they provide the opportunity to go beyond the dogma often associated with such belief. During Jesse’s psychedelic session he saw countless images and scenes pass before his eyes: junkyards where emaciated corpses writhed in agony, the spiking fires of hell, rotting offal, and then, suddenly, a huge orange ball of fire—appearing as if from nowhere—into which all the mess and stink were poured to be cleansed in the high heat of the flames. Jesse envisioned himself being consumed in the fire and yet his soul survived and appeared before God on the final Judgment Day. At the judgment, scenes from Jesse’s childhood streamed before him, and at last he experienced God not as a physical being but as a palpable presence of pure divinity and love. God was judging him favorably now, deciding that his good deeds far outweighed his bad. Then Jesse received a powerful message that came to him without words: when he died, his soul would survive; he would come back to earth in a form not yet revealed. Thus this confirmed Catholic came to believe in the Eastern concept of reincarnation. “The perspective of another incarnation,” Grof and Halifax write, “freed him from clinging to his body.” Five days after the session he died at peace.
Researchers acknowledge that it’s not clear how psilocybin reduces a person’s anxiety about mortality, not simply during the trip but for weeks and months following. “It’s a bit of a mystery,” admits Charles Grob, the lead investigator in the ongoing end-of-life psilocybin study at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. “I don’t really have altogether a definitive answer as to why the drug eases the fear of death, but we do know that from time immemorial individuals who have transformative spiritual experiences come to a very different view of themselves and the world around them and thus are able to handle their own deaths differently.” John Halpern, former director of the Laboratory for Integrative Psychiatry at McLean Hospital, holds a similar view: “On psychedelics you have an experience in which you feel there is something you are a part of, something else is out there that’s bigger than you, that there is a dazzling unity you belong to, that love is possible, and all these realizations are imbued with deep meaning. I’m telling you that you’re not going to forget that six months from now. The experience gives you, just when you’re on the edge of de
ath, hope for something more.”
Psychedelics and Spirituality
The Good Friday experiment is perhaps the most famous study of the role of psilocybin in spirituality. Conducted in 1962 by Walter Pahnke, who would go on to run the LSD project at Spring Grove, the experiment gathered twenty Protestant Harvard Divinity School students outside the Marsh Chapel at Boston University to receive a capsule of white powder right before a Good Friday service. Ten of the pills contained psilocybin and ten contained nicotinic acid, an active placebo that causes flushing in the face. Of the ten students who received the psilocybin, eight said they had a mystical experience, wandering around Marsh Chapel while saying things like “God is everywhere” or “Oh the glory.” Their behavior convinced Pahnke that a psilocybin high shared many aspects with a full-fledged mystical experience of the sort described by the philosopher William James.
Persuasive as it is, however, recent scholars such as Rick Doblin, the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), located in Santa Cruz, California, have found methodological flaws in Pahnke’s study. Doblin, from 1986 to 1989, did a follow-up of the Good Friday experiment, identifying all but one of the divinity students who had taken part in the original, and interviewing the sixteen who agreed to participate, including seven of the ten who had taken psilocybin. All seven of these subjects told Doblin that “the experience had shaped their lives and work in profound and enduring ways.” Doblin found, however, that the study had failed to mention that some of the students had struggled with fear during the experiment. One of them even charged from the chapel and raced down the street, filled with the conviction that he was meant to announce the next Messiah, after which he ultimately needed to be restrained and administered a tranquilizing shot of Thorazine to bring him back inside the chapel.
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