Timothy Leary, 1963, at the Millbrook, N.Y., psychedelic research center. (Photographer unknown; collection of Ralph Metzner)
Leary and Alpert felt that it was time to pursue psychedelic research under other than University auspices. Leary, with characteristic whimsy, said it was “as unfair to expect a university to sponsor research on visionary experience, as it would be to expect the Vatican to support research on effective aphrodisiacs.” A nonprofit educational and research foundation was established in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for that purpose. It was called the International Federation for Internal Freedom, or IFIF for short. A summer program of guided psychedelic exploration was established in the little Mexican village of Zihuatanejo (which has since become a major resort). In the summer of 1962 a small group of colleagues and friends met there; in the following summer the program was advertised and offered to the general public. At that time uproar and sensationalistic news stories about LSD were escalating almost daily. After one month, the public summer program in Zihuatanejo was closed down by the Mexican authorities and the group expelled. Attempts were made to continue the program on the islands of Dominica and Antigua but were met with bitter resistance. Leary, Alpert, and their associates, my wife and myself included, retreated to a huge estate in the small upstate New York town of Millbrook, where an experimental community devoted to consciousness expansion by natural and traditional means was established and flourished for about ten years. For accounts of these projects and activities, the reader is referred to Leary’s two autobiographical works, High Priest and Flashbacks, as well as to my account, “From Harvard to Zihuatanejo”(Metzner 1999).
The following year, 1964, LSD and all other psychedelics, including psilocybin, were placed on the FDA’s Schedule I, the same category as heroin and cannabis, designated as having no accepted medical use with possession totally banned. The mushrooms containing psilocybin in natural form, like the ayahuasca plant concoction that contains DMT, remained in a legal limbo, since they were not specifically listed. Legitimate scientific research with psilocybin and other psychedelic research came to an almost complete halt in the United States. Nonetheless, underground exploration of heightened states of consciousness with entheogenic plants, fungi, and synthetic substances continued unabated, generating a vast literature of anthropological, literary, historical, and philosophical texts, as well as art works in painting, film, music, and the new arts of electronic digital imaging. Profound transformations of society and culture as well as expansions of collective consciousness occurred over the next several decades and continue to this day.
Some observers have blamed Tim Leary, with his admittedly passionate advocacy of psychedelic drug use, for the clamp down of government authority on scientific research. Some erstwhile colleagues and collaborators have said that federal agents told them that it was because of Leary and his provocative statements that their projects were being closed. Undoubtedly, this kind of conversation did occur. However, it is worth remembering that it was not the Harvard group that organized and produced mass events with thousands of psychedelic celebrants—this was a West Coast phenomenon associated with Ken Kesey and his group. The Harvard group’s mission, if I may put it that way, was to find a way for the middle-class professional groups, of psychology, medicine, and religious ministry, as well as the artistic subcultures, to accommodate these astounding new substances. This attempt succeeded, to a point. After a critical mass of thousands of tripping youths and adults was reached, the establishment panicked. There was no way, in my opinion, that they were going to let these kinds of revolutionary activities continue. They were revolutionary expansions of consciousness, increasing the ability to think for oneself and take responsibility for one’s own thoughts and behaviors.
I believe the proof of this assertion can be found in the exactly parallel process that happened in the 1980s with MDMA: for twelve years it was used in circles of a couple of dozen psychotherapists who found its empathogenic effects a wonderful aid to therapeutic insight. Then, because of the attractiveness of the experience, MDMA left the professional offices and became widely distributed, marketed, sold, used recreationally, ecstatically, in “rave” dances involving thousands. It was demonized (made to appear much more dangerous than it actually was) and, despite the sober and considered opposition of numerous doctors and therapists, prohibited.
TERENCE MCKENNA: MUSHROOMS, ALIENS, EVOLUTION, AND LANGUAGE
No account of the world of psilocybin mushrooms, or tryptamine hallucinogens in general for that matter, would be complete without an acknowledgement of the profound and far-reaching contributions of Terence McKenna. Before his death in the year 2000 of a brain tumor, at the age of fifty-three, he had become the most articulate, provocative, and inspiring spokesman for what could be called the “psychedelic movement,” a loose nonorganized association of shamanistic consciousness explorers, pagan hippie revelers, techno-freaks, and advocates for global cultural evolution, who share a passionate interest in natural and synthetic mind-expanding technologies. Some have said he inherited the mantle of psychedelic prophet from Timothy Leary. Certainly he shared with Leary the Irishman’s gift of eloquence and biting satirical wit, the intellectual brilliance and enthusiasm for radical innovation, as well as down-to-earth kindness and outrageous humor.
In 1971, Terence and his brother Dennis, young men in their twenties, went to the Amazon with some friends to search for ayahuasca, the legendary shamanic hallucinogen. What they found instead were large quantities of psilocybe mushrooms, with which they began what they called “the experiment at La Chorera.” This was described in their book The Invisible Landscape. Basically, the experiment consisted of both of them repeatedly ingesting large quantities of the mushrooms, listening to a kind of interior, alien-sounding, buzzing or humming sound, and then reproducing that sound vocally to induce a lasting expanded state of consciousness. They had an elaborate and complex theory of how the psilocybin could activate endogenous tryptamines in the brain and create some kind of “holo-cybernetic unit of superconductive genetic material in which the entirety of the DNA memory bank would be at the command of the harmine readout mechanism, activated via tryptamine harmonic interference” (McKenna and McKenna 1975).
They later wrote that they experienced what psychologists would call a kind of shared psychotic break, with one of them becoming reactive and the other paranoid schizophrenic, a state that lasted for several weeks. Many unusual paranormal phenomena accompanied this state: synchronicities, telepathic communication between them, even sightings of what seemed like a UFO, and the apparent partial creation of some kind of hyperspatial communication device. One could say it was as much a shamanic madness initiation, a mythic journey to the outer reaches of the mind, as it was schizophrenia. The two intrepid explorers wrote a complex and difficult book on their experiences and theories, which also included a new mathematical theory of “time wave” based on the I Ching.
On first returning to the United States, the two brothers, more convinced than ever of the value of psilocybin mushrooms, wrote and published, under pseudonyms and with the collaboration of Kathleen Harrison as illustrator, the first Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide, which gave easy instructions for indoor cultivation and made the mushroom experience accessible to thousands (Oss and Oeric 1976). In it, Terence described a vision he received, perhaps the core and guiding vision of his life, of the interstellar origin of the mycelial nets, the true body of the mushrooms, which he believed maintain a “vast historical archive of the career of evolving intelligence on many worlds.” The mycelial networks seek habitable planets, he was told, where they can enter into symbiotic communication and exchange with intelligent species, providing that species with access to the “community of galactic intelligence.” The notion of the true form of the mushroom being the mycelial nets and the emphasis on symbiotic interactions of fungi with other species are points consistent with current scientific understanding of fungal evolution, as formulated in the work of Paul S
tamets and Lynn Margulis. The idea of extraterrestrial origin is uniquely and provocatively Terence McKenna, emissary from the world of entheogenic fungi.
The McKenna brothers eventually took different career paths. Dennis went on to pursue graduate, doctoral, and postdoctoral studies in plant chemistry and pharmacology, published research in the pharmacology of Amazonian psychoactive plants, and worked as a research consultant for the pharmaceutical and herbal industry. Terence, more of an autodidact, devoted himself to ethnobotanical research and writing and became a much sought-after speaker on the lecture circuit.
The Mushroom Speaks
By Terence McKenna
“I am old, older than thought in your species, which is itself fifty times older than your history. Though I have been on earth for ages, I am from the stars. My home is no one planet, for many worlds scattered through the shining disc of the galaxy have conditions which allow my spores an opportunity for life. The mushroom which you see is the part of my body given to sex thrills and sun bathing, my true body is a fine network of fibers growing through the soil. These networks may cover acres and may have far more connections than the number in a human brain. My mycelial network is nearly immortal—only the sudden toxification of a planet or the explosion of its parent star can wipe me out. By means impossible to explain because of certain misconceptions in your model of reality all my mycelial networks are in hyperlight communication across space and time. The mycelial body is as fragile as a spider’s web but the collective hypermind and memory is a vast and historical archive of the career of evolving intelligence on many worlds in our spiral star swarm. Space, you see, is a vast ocean to those hardy life forms that have the ability to reproduce from spores, for spores are covered with the hardest organic substance known. Across the aeons of time and space drift many spore-forming life-forms in suspended animation for millions of years until contact is made with a suitable environment. Few such species are minded, only myself and my recently evolved near relatives have achieved the hyper-communication mode and memory capacity that makes us leading members in the community of galactic intelligence. How the hyper-communication mode operates is a secret which will not be lightly given to man. But the means should be obvious: it is the occurrence of psilocybin and psilocin in the biosynthetic pathways of my living body that opens for me and my symbiots the vision screens to many worlds. You as an individual and man as a species are on the brink of the formation of a symbiotic relationship with my genetic material that will eventually carry humanity and earth into the galactic mainstream of the higher civilizations.
“Since it is not easy for you to recognize other varieties of intelligence around you, your most advanced theories of politics and society have advanced only as far as the notion of collectivism. But beyond the cohesion of the members of a species into a single organism there lie richer and even more baroque evolutionary possibilities. Symbiosis is one of these. Symbiosis is a relation of mutual dependence and positive benefits for both of the species involved. Symbiotic relationships between myself and civilized forms of higher animals have been established many times and in many places throughout the long ages of my development. These relationships have been mutually useful; within my memory is the knowledge of hyperlight drive ships and how to build them. I will trade this knowledge for a free ticket to new worlds around suns younger and more stable that your own. To secure an eternal existence down the long river of cosmic time I again and again offer this agreement to higher beings and thereby have spread throughout the galaxy over the long millenia. A mycelial network has no organs to move the world, no hands; but higher animals with manipulative abilities can become partners with the star knowledge within me and if they act in good faith, return both themselves and their humble mushroom teacher to the million worlds to which all citizens of our starswarm are heir. “
(FROM PSILOCYBIN—MAGIC MUSHROOM GROWER’S GUIDE BY O. T. OSS & O. N. OERIC, BERKELEY: AND/OR PRESS, 1976, PP. 8-9. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF LUX NATURA.)
In a later essay published in his book The Archaic Revival, Terence McKenna returns to this theory that:
the mushroom was a species that did not evolve on Earth. Within the mushroom trance I was informed that once a culture has complete understanding of its genetic information, it reengineers itself for survival. The Stropharia cubensis mushroom’s version of reengineering is a mycelial network strategy when in contact with planetary surfaces and spore-dispersion strategy as a means of radiating throughout the galaxy . . . The other side does seem to be in possession of a huge body of information drawn from the history of the galaxy . . . The Stropharia cubensis mushroom, if one can believe what it says in one of its moods, is a symbiote, and it desires ever deeper symbiosis with the human species. It achieved symbiosis with human society early by associating itself with domesticated cattle and through them human nomads (McKenna 1991).
He cheerfully goes on to argue against his own thesis of extraterrestrial origin though, when he goes on to say: “I’ve recently come to suspect that the human soul is so alienated from our present culture that we treat it as an extraterrestrial. To us the most alien thing in the cosmos is the human soul.” I personally find the thesis that extraterrestrial sources of vast intelligence might be communicating to the human species via entheogenic plants and mushrooms quite plausible and worthy of further investigation. It is consistent with the fact that interest in UFOs and extraterrestrial culture and contact has been growing tremendously in the second half of the twentieth century, in tandem with other movements of consciousness expansion, such as psychedelics, shamanism, spiritual practices, and higher states of consciousness. Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, who had made an intensive study of the UFO abduction experience, has shown, in his most recent book, Passport to the Cosmos, that reported contact and communication with alien intelligences is widespread and almost taken for granted in societies with living shamanic traditions (Mack 1999).
McKenna’s thesis on the symbiotic role of entheogenic fungi was further extended in his major work, The Food of the Gods, in which he proposed that the discovery of consciousness-expanding mushrooms by our protohominid ancestors might have led to the development of language, greater intelligence, and culture (McKenna 1992). While this thesis has been generally treated with disdain, or else ignored, by the academic establishment, it is interesting that there isn’t really a good alternative theory of the development of language or higher intelli-gence; furthermore, establishment academics are likely to be unfamiliar with the nature of psychedelic experience.
In favor of the idea that mind-expanding plants may have played some role (if not the only one) are (1) laboratory evidence that psilocybin and other psychedelics lower sensory thresholds, i.e., heighten acuity of sense perception, which would confer a direct adaptive advantage; (2) evidence from subjective experience accounts, as in this book and elsewhere, that psychedelic mushrooms heighten cognitive awareness and linguistic fluidity—as, for example, in the chants of Maria Sabina; (3) heightened problem-solving ability, with adaptive advantages, is also suggested by the effective use of psychedelic drugs in psychotherapy and shamanic divination; (4) studies of brain areas activated during psilocybin states that show major activity in the frontal cortex, the area most involved in processing complex perceptions and thoughts.
McKenna’s book ranges far and wide through history, anthropology, and around the globe. He reexamines R. G. Wasson’s hypothesis that soma was basically the fly agaric mushroom cult, imported from central Asia. Though historian of religion Mircea Eliade, who had written a masterful overview of shamanism, considered the use of psychoactive plants a degenerate form of religious practice, Wasson, on the basis of his experiences in Mexico with the psilocybe mushroom and his beliefs about soma, took the opposite view. Wasson held that all religious experience was originally induced by psychoactive plants and that the practices of yoga developed in India were substitute methods, created when the mushroom was no longer available to the ecstatic visionaries.
McKenna comes down on the side of Wasson but thinks soma was the psilocybe mushroom, not the fly agaric, for the main reason that the latter is only mildly and ambiguously psychedelic; however, apart from some ambiguous mushroom-shaped stones, no evidence has been found for either mushroom species existing in India.
Terence McKenna, with Banisteriopsis vine, Hawaii, 1987. (Photo by Ralph Metzner)
It may be impossible to ever settle this question in the history of religion completely. But that some psychedelic plants may have played a role in the origins of some religious traditions, as well as some aspects of language (for example, bardic poetry) seems both probable and plausible.
Central to the argument McKenna makes for a role of psilocybe mushrooms are the facts that Stropharia cubensis grows in cow dung and that cattle were the main source of wealth and livelihood in early Neolithic cultures in Asia and Africa. When McKenna came upon the cave paintings on the Tassili plateau in the Sahara Desert of southern Algeria, he found the most impressive piece of evidence for a mushroom cult in the Neolithic period, dating from the ninth to the seventh millennium B.C.E. Judging from cave paintings of giant female beings, these people worshipped the Great Goddess, as did other cultures during the Neolithic period in Old Europe and Anatolia. The people of the Tassili Plateau are described as the “Round Head” culture, because of cave paintings that show figures with rounded heads that could obviously be mushrooms. Among the surviving images there are running figures clutching fistfuls of mushrooms and a magnificent image of a giant anthropoid bee-faced goddess (the bee was often associated with the Goddess in Old Europe). The image is holding clusters of mushrooms in each hand and smaller mushrooms sprout from her arms, legs and trunk. Unmistakably, these people held mushrooms in very high regard. McKenna writes, “The contention here is that the rise of language, partnership society, and complex religious ideas may have occurred not far from the area where humans emerged—the game-filled, mushroomdotted grasslands and savannahs of tropical and subtropical Africa. There the partnership society arose and flourished; there hunter-gatherer culture slowly gave way to domestication of animals and plants. In this milieu the psilocybin-containing mushrooms were encountered, consumed and deified. Language, poetry, ritual, and thought emerged from the darkness of the hominid mind” (McKenna 1992).
Sacred Mushroom of Visions Page 5