A Brief History of Vice

by Robert Evans

  Primary-process thinking is much . . . weirder. It’s the kind of state your brain lapses into during a dream, a psychotic break, or a childhood fantasy. From the Couch to the Lab (Oxford University Press, 2008) gives my favorite description: “[Primary-process thinking is] . . . characterized by a relative feeling of uncertainty; in this state, confidence about ‘what is what’ is compromised and magical explanations seem more plausible.” (Emphasis mine.)

  Primary-process thinking is the state of mind in which you’re more likely to accept miraculous, fantastic, and downright religious explanations for phenomena. And drugs like psilocybin have been shown to act as a superhighway to that kind of thinking. Yes, you can actually measure the presence of primary-process thinking in the human brain. It’s just insanely dangerous to do so.

  See, primary-process thinking occurs partly in the limbic regions of the brain, which are located in the subcortical area and buried too deep for noninvasive measures (like fMRI) to register what goes on in any kind of detail. To record what happens in the moonshine-soaked boonies of the brain, scientists have to cut through the skull of their subjects and stick electrodes directly on the brain itself.

  Cutting into brains isn’t seen as ethical, so scientists haven’t really been able to spend much time measuring primary-process thinking since the fifties and sixties. But the studies they conducted back in those wild, do-whatever-you-want-to-brains days suggested Wasson might’ve been on to something. In 2010 Robin Carhart-Harris and Karl Friston analyzed those old studies and found that the same “phasic bursting” believed to signal primary-process thinking was present in the brains of people suffering from psychotic breaks, people dreaming in REM states, and people tripping on hallucinogenic drugs.

  It’s one thing to say “mind-altering drugs may have had an impact on the development of religious thought.” It’s another thing to track that impact. One historical place where that impact is evident is the Hindu drug, soma.

  The Search for Soma

  That word, soma, means one of two things for most of you:

  1. The popular muscle relaxer carisoprodol, frequently sold under the brand name Soma and also consumed recreationally by some people with wine when they’ve been like, super stressed-out all day.

  2. The fictional drug from Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World, used to lull citizens of the dystopian World State into a false sense of pleasantly hallucinatory narcotic bliss. It’s described by Huxley (via the character Mustapha) as “Christianity without the tears.”

  But the truth about soma goes back much further than Huxley’s novel, or that time you and your friends popped a bunch of muscle relaxers and watched the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy. Soma’s first reference was as a literal god in some of the world’s earliest existent religious texts, the Hindu Vedas, composed between 1700 and 1100 BCE.

  Soma is referred to, often simultaneously, as both a god worshipped even by other gods, and an intoxicating plant indulged in by mortals and immortals alike. Debates over what, exactly, soma might be or have been rage to this day. Marijuana, ephedra, and even the fresh water of the Ganges have all been suggested. But the Vedic hymns make it clear that soma the drug was something rather more intoxicating than simple fresh water:

  The faint with martial ardour fires,

  With lofty thoughts the bard inspires;

  The soul from earth to heaven he lifts;

  So great and wondrous are his gifts,

  Men feel the god within their veins,

  And cry in loud exulting strains:

  While the word soma in Hindu culture grew into a broad term to refer to a variety of intoxicating plants, scholars (including Gordon Wasson) have suggested that the soma of the Vedic hymns was likely the hallucinogenic Amanita muscaria mushroom, a.k.a. Fly Agaric.

  The main thing going against Fly Agaric, both as a possible soma and as a way to generally get high, are its occasionally nightmarish side effects. First off, the Amanita genus of mushrooms is populated both by the hallucinogenic ’shroom Amanita muscaria and a platoon of murderous poison mushrooms including the dreaded Destroying Angel, all of which look super similar and all of which are fully capable of killing the shit out of a healthy grown man.

  But even the nonmurdering, hallucination-causing Amanita isn’t entirely benign. You can expect prolific vomiting, sweating, and twitching during a trip. And intense urges to self-harm have been reported by a variety of users, according to the trustworthy folks at online drug encyclopedia Erowid. This rather suggests against Amanita muscaria as a possible source of soma, since the Vedas tend to refer to it as a purely positive experience.

  That isn’t the end of the story, though. The Vedas give us some details on the preparations of soma, which mainly mention it needing to be filtered extensively. Filtering isn’t a necessary step to making Amanita muscaria work; you can eat it raw and you’ll vomit trip as hard as you’ve ever vomit tripped in your life. But over the years, different groups of people have found ways to filter the Fly Agaric in order to avoid its more nightmarish side effects.

  Siberian tribesmen have been known to take Amanita muscaria for religious purposes since at least 1658, when a Polish prisoner of war noted, “They eat certain fungi in the shape of fly-agarics, and thus they become drunk worse than on vodka, and for them that’s the very best banquet.”

  The tribesmen didn’t just passively accept that their ’shroom-based rituals meant everyone in the tribe needed to get super sick. Specially appointed individuals, their shamans, would take one for the team by eating their Amanita muscaria straight, suffering the side effects and then peeing out a still-hallucinogenic but safer filtered version of the drug for the other members of the tribe to drink. The Lapp people of the Arctic have a urine-based solution of their own: They feed Amanita muscaria to their reindeer and then drink the reindeers’ pee to get high.

  Look, I’m not averse to drinking pee—mine or a reindeer’s—in the name of science. I drink my own pee for an experiment later in this book, and if I believed the ancient Vedas suggested it, I’d ’shroom myself, suffer through the violent sick of an Amanita muscaria trip, collect my pee, and try it again. But the Vedas have a lot to say on how soma ought to be prepared, and they don’t mention pee drinking.

  The process outlined in the Vedas seems to have involved drying the mushrooms in the sun, swelling them with water, and then filtering the solids out of that water through wool into a cup and mixing it with milk. Wasson theorized that this filtering process might reduce the painful (and, very occasionally, deadly) side effects of Amanita muscaria, making soma use the joyful experience described in the Vedas, rather than the bathroom-ruining experience most modern users will find more familiar.

  Analyzing the science behind this is difficult. Despite the fact that humans have been using these mushrooms for thousands of years, we still don’t really know exactly how the damn things work. Modern science has pretty well narrowed it down to a pair of chemicals found in Amanita muscaria: ibotenic acid and muscimol. Both are psychoactive, but ibotenic acid seems to be responsible for turning the GI tract of an unwary user into a crude catapult.

  So could the preparations for soma suggested by the Vedas actually make for a less painful trip? Thankfully, a researcher named Kevin Feeney already answered that question for us, in a 2010 article for the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs. (Yes, there’s a Journal of Psychoactive Drugs and no, it isn’t just a front for the DEA to catch budding drug chemists. Probably.) Kevin analyzed more than six hundred recorded cases of Amanita muscaria use, dividing them based on how the mushrooms were prepared and whether the users had a good trip or painted the linoleum with their breakfast.

  His findings seem to vindicate Wasson’s theory: Amanita muscaria prepared as a tea is 53 percent less likely to cause nausea and vomiting than when eaten raw. And mushrooms eaten dried are 64 percent less likely to twist up your insides than the fresh var
iety. Some of this has to do with the fact that dehydration converts a lot of the nasty ibotenic acid to muscimol, but we don’t know exactly why making a tea turns this mushroom from a bad bout of food poisoning to a pleasant afternoon.

  Feeney’s findings make it seem more likely than ever that Gordon Wasson was right: The ancient soma favored by the Hindu gods—one of the earliest drugs for which we have any written record of use—was a special preparation of Amanita muscaria.

  Obviously, I had to try it. Even at great risk to my own fragile guts.

  HOW TO: Trip Like a Hindu Deity

  In the interest of staying out of prison myself, and keeping Plume from being raided by the DEA, I’ve obeyed exactly one strict rule in the writing of this book: no illegal drugs. (In much of the West Coast, pot is as legal as anything.) It was to my extremely good fortune, and surprise, to learn that the powerfully hallucinogenic Amanita muscaria mushroom is actually 100 percent legal in the US of A.

  Not only are you free to buy, possess, and use it nationwide, but the only state that restricts it in any way is Louisiana . . . and they ban only your ability to cultivate more than forty at a time. That’s pretty fair, considering the nightmarish reputation this particular fungi has earned among psychonauts. A. muscaria is one of those rare cases of a hallucinogenic drug being too unpleasant for the government to consider it worth restricting.

  You can buy your Amanita muscaria online, from a dizzying variety of websites. Depending on your location you’ll also be able to buy dried specimens right from your friendly neighborhood head shop. It’s not hard to tell if you’ve got the right mushroom:

  Tavia Morra

  Whoever edited the Wikipedia entry describes A. muscaria as the “quintessential toadstool.” And it does look like something you’d see in a cartoon. Whatever you do, don’t attempt to pick wild Amanita muscaria. This particular ’shroom has a lot of cousins, many of which will kill you in ways so creatively horrible it makes you wonder if the devil might be more fungus than snake.

  Anyway, for a soma-class mushroom experience, you’ll need:

  Ingredients

  5–10 grams Amanita muscaria (or about three medium-size mushroom caps according to the drug encyclopedia Erowid)

  2 cups room-temperature water

  100 percent wool shirt, towel, etc. (The wool is for historical authenticity, but any kind of strainer will work.)

  1 cup milk (Dairy for authenticity, but almond milk, soy milk, etc. should all be fine.)

  Directions

  Soma envelopes himself all around with the rays of the sun . . . (Rig Veda, chapter 4, hymn 86)

  A couple of Vedic passages quoted by Wasson mention the first step in soma preparation being exposure to sunlight. Modern scholars/drug users have interpreted this to mean letting the mushroom dry out. If yours didn’t already come this way, you should go ahead and let it sit in a window for a couple of days. Let that sucker desiccate real good. It should be quite wrinkly, and not at all juicy.

  Clarifying soma, when you are sated with waters your juice runs through the sieve made of wool . . . (Rig Veda, chapter 9, hymn 74)

  Once it’s plenty dry, submerge your mushroom in water and let it swell up. Then wrap it in the wool and squeeze the mushroom dry, letting the liquid fall into a pot or glass. For best results, let it soak for twenty-four hours. Science tells us this step will have a significant impact on whether or not you wind up vomiting your guts out. The Vedas are clear about its importance, too:

  Soma unpressed ne’er gladdened liberal Indra, no juices pressed without a prayer have pleased him. (Rig Veda, chapter 7, hymn 26)

  I assume you want to be as gladdened as liberal Indra, so you’ll want to press your juices out and figure out a prayer to say while you take it. I won’t suggest a Hindu prayer, unless you happen to be Hindu, but work out some kind of prayer. It could be the Lord’s Prayer, but it could just as easily be a meditative chant or a passage from some book or poem you find particularly meaningful.

  The importance here isn’t the specific content of whatever prayer you choose to give. It’s that you focus your mind on something with emotional and spiritual import to you before you embark on your hallucinogenic adventure. Your state of mind, and your surroundings at the time of dosing, can have a huge impact on your trip. Keeping that in mind, I chose this passage from Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater for my own prayer:

  Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—:

  God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.

  Once you’ve picked a prayer and pressed your mushroom juice, mix what you’ve got with a cup of milk and drink. In my research for this book I mixed up (and took) two preparations of soma myself, and gave another two to a pair of volunteers.

  The Verdict?

  Amanita muscaria may well have been soma. I tried two pressings myself: the first after letting the mushrooms soak in water for an hour before pressing, and the second after letting them soak for twenty-four hours.

  My first trip was extremely mild—more of a light, buzzing body high than anything else. No active hallucinations, just a pleasant tingling all along my body and a sense of elation for around three hours. I went on a lovely walk around the neighborhood like a barefoot weirdo and found myself staring at trees and closing my eyes to let the wind wash over me way more often than a sober person would do.

  It made for a nice afternoon, and I felt as though I sobered up around four hours after dosing.

  My second trip was much more intense. Soaking the Amanita longer made for a vastly more potent soma. Within about forty-five minutes I felt extremely intoxicated. The experience was similar to that weird sorta-queasy, sorta-pleasant-and-tingly body high one gets during a psilocybin mushroom trip, but devoid of any hallucinations. It was fun, and I didn’t start to really come down for five or six hours.

  Two days after my second test, two of my friends in Los Angeles volunteered to try out my soma. My friend Starline had only ever tried marijuana. My friend Josh had experimented with several psychedelics, including mushrooms. They both started feeling the effects after around an hour. Starline seemed to peak around two and a half hours in, and reported enjoying the body high very much.

  (One interesting note: Star was raised in the Caribbean for her early childhood. She doesn’t have any kind of accent, normally. But during the trip she would periodically lapse back into her accent. It seemed to happen unconsciously, at the ends of words and with certain phrases.)

  Josh didn’t get much out of the trip but a mild stomachache. He didn’t report any of the intoxication Starline and I experienced. That’s not unusual with any kind of hallucinogen, though. Different people can have very different experiences with the same dose of the same substance; hence why some people can smoke weed all day, every day and remain productive, while others just watch Family Guy and eat Doritos.

  On the whole, my experience with this Amanita recipe seems entirely in line with what the Vedic hymns said about ancient soma. My second trip was extremely pleasant, and it felt almost as if I could feel pulsing waves of sensation tingling beneath my skin. At the peak of my trip, I didn’t “cry loud in exulting strains,” but I absolutely “felt the god beneath my veins.”

  Science hasn’t always been science.

  Thomas Jefferson, one of the Founding Fathers who contributed the most intellectual sperm to the fetus of our nascent country, considered himself a scientist—and not just a political scientist. In the year 1800 Jefferson listed in a letter the sciences that interested him:

  Botany, chemistry, zoology, anatomy, surgery, medicine, natural philosophy, agriculture, mathematics, astronomy, geography, politics, commerce, history, ethics, laws, arts, fine arts.

  A lot of those thi
ngs are still “sciences” in our conception of the word. But you wouldn’t consider an expert on “ethics,” “law,” “arts,” or “fine arts” to be a scientist today. Modern scientists deal in beakers and algorithms and blackboards filled with complicated equations. We’ve narrowed the meaning of “science” down as we’ve gotten more and more advanced as a society. René Descartes didn’t even define the scientific method until 1637.

  Yet for thousands of years before that point, humankind had steadily (sometimes unsteadily, often drunkenly) made advances in technology and its understanding of the natural world. There have been periods of significant backsliding, but long before we settled on the importance of viewing the world rationally, and testing our theories via experiment, smart people were trying to piece together the rules that govern our universe.

  For a very long time, we called these people philosophers. Today “philosophy” is what you major in if you don’t particularly care what you do for a living. But back in, say, ancient Greece, philosophers were the folks who tried to puzzle out the laws of reality. And they had a little help from a drug called kykeon.

  Kykeon was a special sort of drugged beverage administered at the end of the Eleusinian Mysteries in ancient Greece. Participants were threatened with death if they ever gave an exact accounting of the ceremonies, but we do know a few things: The rites came at the end of a nine-day fast in which the powerfully hallucinogenic kykeon was taken, and participants reportedly walked away convinced in the existence of life after death.

  This wasn’t a super common belief at the time. It wasn’t until Plato wrote The Phaedo that the idea of an afterlife in which the good are rewarded and the evil punished really came into vogue. Plato was a regular attendee and enthusiast of the Eleusinian Mysteries. As I researched this book I read an article by Joshua Mark of Marist College, which quoted this bit from Plato’s Phaedo: