McKenna, Terence- Food of the Gods

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank my friends and colleagues for their patience and encouragement in the writing of this book,

especially Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Metzner, Dennis McKenna, Chris Harrison, Neil Hassall,

Dan Levy, Ernest Waugh, Richard Bird, Roy and Diane Tuckman, Faustin Bray and Brian Wallace, and Marion

and Allan Hunt-Badiner. Thanks also to correspondents Dr. Elizabeth Judd and Marc Lamoreaux who passed

along useful information. Each made their own unique contribution to my thinking, though my conclusions are

mine to defend.

Archivist and friend Michael Horowitz made a deep contribution to this work. He read and criticized the

manuscript carefully and made available the pictorial archives of the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library, thus

tremendously enriching the visual side of my argument. Thank you, Michael.

Special appreciation is offered to Michael and Dulce Murphy, Steve and Anita Donovan, Nancy Lunney, Paul

Herbert, Kathleen O'Shaughnessy, and all of Esalen Institute for providing me with an opportunity to be the

Esalen Scholar in Residence in June of 1989 and 1990. Parts of this book were written during those residencies.

Thanks also to Lew and Jill Carlino and Robert Chartoff, patient friends who listened to parts of this book

without, perhaps, realizing it.

My partner Kat, Kathleen Harrison McKenna, has long shared my passion for the psychedelic ocean and the

ideas that swim there. In our voyages to the Amazon and elsewhere she has been the best possible companion,

colleague, and muse.

Kat and my two children, Finn and Klea, supported me through writing this book, immune to my many moods

and prolonged periods of writer's hibernation. To them I offer my deepest love and appreciation. Thanks for

hanging in there, guys.

Very special thanks to Leslie Meredith, my editor at Bantam Books, and to her editorial assistant, Claudine

Murphy. Their unflagging belief in the importance of these ideas was an inspiration to clarify and extend my

thinking into new areas. Thanks also to my agent, John Brockman, who led me through the special initiation that

only the Reality Club can give.

Lastly I want to acknowledge my deep debt to the psychedelic community, the hundreds of people that it has

been my privilege to come into contact with during a lifetime spent in the pursuit of even a glimpse of the

peacock angel. It is the shamans among us, both ancient and modern, those whose eyes have gazed on sights

previously unseen by anyone, it is they who showed the way and who were my inspiration.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: A MANIFESTO FOR

NEW THOUGHT ABOUT DRUGS xiii

An Agonizing Reappraisal • An Archaic Revival • A New

Manifesto • The Dominator Inheritance

I. PARADISE 1

1. SHAMANISM: SETTING THE STAGE 3

Shamanism and Ordinary Religion • The Techniques of

Ecstasy • A World Made of Language • Higher Dimensional

Reality • A Shamanic Meme • Shamanism and the Lost

Archaic World

2. THE MAGIC IN FOOD 14

A Shaggy Primate Story • You Are What You Eat

Symbiosis • A New View of Human Evolution • The Real

Missing Link • Three Big Steps for the Human Race • Steering

Clear of Lamarck • Acquired Tastes

3. THE SEARCH FOR THE ORIGINAL

TREE OF KNOWLEDGE 31

Hallucinogens as the Real Missing Link • Seeking the Tree of

Knowledge • Weeding Out the Candidates • The Ur Plant

What Are Plant Hallucinogens? - The Transcendent Other

4. PLANTS AND PRIMATES: POSTCARDS

FROM THE STONED AGE 43

Human Uniqueness • Human Cognition • Transformations of

Monkeys • The Prehistoric Emergence of Human Imagination

Patterns and Understanding • Catalyzing Consciousness • The

Flesh Made Word • Women and Language

5. HABIT AS CULTURE AND RELIGION 57

Ecstasy • Shamanism as Social Catalyst • Monotheism

Pathological Monotheism • Archaic Sexuality • Ibogame

Among the Fang • Contrasts in Sexual Politics

6. THE HIGH PLAINS OF EDEN 69

The Tassili Plateau • The Round Head Civilization • Paradise

Found? • A Missing Link Culture • African Genesis • Qatal

Huyuk • The Crucial Difference • The Vegetable Mind

Gaian Holism

II. PARADISE LOST 95

7. SEARCHING FOR SOMA: THE GOLDEN

VEDIC ENIGMA 97

Contacting the Mind Behind Nature • Soma-What Is It?

Haoma and Zoroaster • Haoma and Harmaline • The Wassons'

Amanita Theory • Objections to Fly Agaric • Wasson: His

Contradictions and Other Fungal Candidates for Soma

• Peganum Harmala as Soma • Soma as Male Moon

God • Soma and Cattle • Wasson's Doubts • A More Plausible

Argument • The Indo-Europeans

8. TWILIGHT IN EDEN: MINOAN CRETE

AND THE ELEUSINIAN MYSTERY 121

Abandonment of the Mystery • The Fall of Qatal Hiiyuk and

the Age of Kingship • Minoan Mushroom Fantasies • The

Myth of Glaukos • Honey and Opium • The Dionysus

Connection • The Mystery at Eleusis • A Psychedelic

Mystery? • The Ergotized Beer Theory • Graves's Psilocybin

Theory • A Historical Watershed

9. ALCOHOL AND THE ALCHEMY OF SPIRIT 138

Nostalgia for Paradise • Alcohol and Honey • Wine and

Woman • Natural and Synthetic Drugs • Alchemy and

Alcohol • Alcohol as Scourge • Alcohol and the Feminine

Sexual Stereotypes and Alcohol

10. THE BALLAD OF THE DREAMING

WEAVERS: CANNABIS AND CULTURE 150

Hashish • The Scythians • India and China • Cannabis as a

Cultural Style • Classical Cannabis • Cannabis and the

Language of Story • Orientomania and Cannabis in Europe

Cannabis and Nineteenth-Century America • Evolving Drug

Attitudes • Fitz Hugh Ludlow • Cannabis in the Twentieth

Century

III. HELL 167

11. COMPLACENCIES OF THE PEIGNOIR:

SUGAR, COFFEE, TEA, AND CHOCOLATE 169

Broadening Our Taste • Life without Spice • Enter Sugar

Sugar as Addiction • Sugar and Slavery • Sugar and the

Dominator Style • The Drugs of Gentility • Coffee and Tea:

New Alternatives to Alcohol • Tea Brews a Revolution

• Exploitation Cycles • Coffee • Contra Coffee • Chocolate

12. SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES: OPIUM

AND TOBACCO 188

Paradoxical Attitudes • Smoking Introduced to Europe • The

Ancient Lure of Opium • Alchemical Opium • Tobacco

Redux • Shamanic Tobaccos • Tobacco as Quack Medicine

Contra Tobacco • Tobacco Triumphant • The Opium

Wars • Opium and Cultural Style: De Quincey • The

Beginning of Psychopharmacology

13. SYNTHETICS: HEROIN, COCAINE,

AND TELEVISION 207

Hard Narcotics • Cocaine: The Horror of the Whiteness • Pro

Cocaine • Modern Antidrug Hysteria • Drugs and

Governments • Drugs and International Intelligence

• Electronic Drugs • The Hidden Persuader

IV. PARADISE REGAINED? 221

14. A BRIEF HISTORY OF PSYCHEDELICS 223

The New World Hallucinogens • Ayahuasca • The Father of

Psychopharmacology • The Pleasures of Mescaline • A Modern

Renaissance • Whispers of a New World Mushroom • The

Invention of LSD - Pandora's Box Flung Open - LSD and the Psychedelic Sixties • Richard

Schultes and the Plant Hallucinogens • Leary at Harvard • Psilocybin: Psychedelics in the

Seventies • Psychedelic Implications • Public Awareness of the Problem

15. ANTICIPATING THE ARCHAIC PARADISE 246

Real World Options • The Case for Hallucinogenic

Tryptamines • How Does It Feel? • Facing the Answer

Consider the Octopus • Art and the Revolution

Consciousness Expansion • The Drug War • Hyperspace

and Human Freedom • What Is New Here • The DMT

Experience • Hyperspace and the Law • Meetings with a

Remarkable Overmind • Recovering Our Origins • The

Fundamentalist Contribution • The Legalization Issue

A Modest Proposal

EPILOGUE: LOOKING OUTWARD AND INWARD TO A SEA OF STARS 271 If Not Us, Who? If Not

Now, When? • Finding the Way Out From the Grasslands to the Starship • We Await Ourselves within the

Vision

INTRODUCTION:

A MANIFESTO FOR NEW THOUGHT ABOUT DRUGS

A specter is haunting planetary culture-the specter of drugs. The definition of human dignity

created by the Renaissance and elaborated into the democratic values of modern Western

civilization seems on the point of dissolving. The major media inform us at high volume that

the human capacity for obsessional behavior and addiction has made a satanic marriage with

modern pharmacology, marketing, and high-speed transportation. Previously obscure forms of

chemical use now freely compete in a largely unregulated global marketplace. Whole

governments and nations in the Third World are held in thrall by legal and illegal commodities

promoting obsessional behavior.

This situation is not new, but it is getting worse. Until quite recently international narcotics

cartels were the obedient creations of governments and intelligence agencies that were

searching for sources of "invisible" money with which to finance their own brand of

institutionalized obsessional behavior.' Today, these drug cartels have evolved, through the

unprecedented rise in the demand for cocaine, into rogue elephants before whose power even

their creators have begun to grow uneasy.'

We are beset by the sad spectacle of "drug wars" waged by governmental institutions that

usually are paralyzed by lethargy and inefficiency or are in transparent collusion with the

international drug cartels they are publicly pledged to destroy.

No light can penetrate this situation of pandemic drug use and abuse unless we undertake a

hard-eyed reappraisal of our present situation and an examination of some old, nearly

forgotten, patterns of drug-related experience and behavior. The importance of this task cannot

be overestimated. Clearly the self-administration of psychoactive substances, legal and illegal,

will be increasingly a part of the future unfolding of global culture.

AN AGONIZING REAPPRAISAL

Any reappraisal of our use of substances must begin with the notion of habit, "a settled

tendency or practice." Familiar, repetitious, and largely unexamined, habits are simply the

things that we do. "People," says an old adage, "are creatures of habit." Culture is largely a

matter of habit, learned from parents and those around us and then slowly modified by shifting

conditions and inspired innovations.

Yet, however slow these cultural modifications may seem, when contrasted with the

slower-than-glaciers modification of species and ecosystems, culture presents a spectacle of

wild and continuous novelty. If nature represents a principle of economy, then culture surely

must exemplify the principle of innovation through excess.

When habits consume us, when our devotion to them exceeds the culturally defined norms, we

label them as obsessions. We feel, in such situations, as though the uniquely human dimension

of free will has somehow been violated. We can become obsessed with almost anything: with a

behavior pattern such as reading the morning paper or with material objects (the collector),

land and property (the empire builder), or power over other people (the politician).

While many of us may be collectors, few of us have the opportunity to indulge our obsessions

to the point of becoming empire builders or politicians. The obsessions of the ordinary person

tend to focus on the here-and-now, on the realm of immediate gratification through sex, food,

and drugs. An obsession with the chemical constituents of foods and drugs (also called

metabolites) is labeled an addiction.

Addictions and obsessions are unique to human beings. Yes, ample anecdotal evidence

supports the existence of a preference for intoxicated states among elephants, chimpanzees, and

some butterflies.' But, as when we contrast the linguistic abilities of chimpanzees and dolphins

with human speech, we see that these animal behaviors are enormously different from those of

humans.

Habit. Obsession. Addiction. These words are signposts along a path of ever-decreasing free

will. Denial of the power of free will is implicit in the notion of addiction, and in our culture,

addictions are viewed seriously-especially exotic or unfamiliar addictions. In the nineteenth

century the opium addict was the "opium fiend," a description that harkened back to the idea of

a demonic possession by a controlling force from without. In the twentieth century, the addict

as a person possessed has been replaced with the notion of addiction as disease. And, with the

notion of addiction as disease, the role of free will is finally reduced to the vanishing point.

After all, we are not responsible for the diseases that we may inherit or develop.

Today, however, human chemical dependence plays a more conscious role than ever before in

the formation and maintenance of cultural values.

Since the middle of the nineteenth century and with ever-greater speed and efficiency, organic

chemistry has placed into the hands of researchers, physicians, and ultimately everyone an

endless cornucopia of synthetic drugs. These drugs are more powerful, more effective, of

greater duration, and in some cases, many times more addictive than their natural relatives. (An

exception is cocaine, which, although a natural product, when refined, concentrated, and

injected is particularly destructive.)

The rise of a global information culture has led to the ubiquity of information on the

recreational, aphrodisiacal, stimulating, sedative, and psychedelic plants that have been

discovered by inquisitive human beings living in remote and previously unconnected parts of

the planet. At the same time that this flood of botanical and ethnographic information arrived in

Western society, grafting other cultures' habits onto our own and giving us greater choices than

ever, great strides were being made in the synthesis of complex organic molecules and in the

understanding of the molecular machinery of genes and heredity. These new insights and

technologies are contributing to a very different culture of psychopharmacological engineering.

Designer drugs such as MDMA, or Ecstasy, and anabolic steroids used by athletes and

teenagers to stimulate muscle development are harbingers of an era of ever more frequent and

effective pharmacological intervention in how we look, perform, and feel.

The notion of regulating, on a planetary scale, first hundreds and then thousands of easily

produced, highly sought after, but illegal synthetic substances is appalling to anyone who hopes

for a more open and less regimented future.

AN ARCHAIC REVIVAL

This book will explore the possibility of a revival of the Archaicor preindustrial and

preliterate-attitude toward community, substance use, and nature-an attitude that served our

nomadic prehistoric ancestors long and well, before the rise of the current cultural style we call

"Western." The Archaic refers to the Upper Paleolithic, a period seven to ten thousand years in

the past, immediately preceding the invention and dissemination of agriculture. The Archaic

was a time of nomadic pastoralism and partnership, a culture based on cattle-raising,

shamanism, and Goddess worship.

I have organized the discussion in a roughly chronological order, with the last and most

future-oriented sections taking up and recasting the Archaic themes of the early chapters. The

argument proceeds along the lines of a pharmacological pilgrim's progress. Thus I have called

the four sections of the book "Paradise," "Paradise Lost," "Hell," and, hopefully not too

optimistically, "Paradise Regained?" A glossary of special terms appears at the end of the book.

Obviously, we cannot continue to think about drug use in the same old ways. As a global

society, we must find a new guiding image for our culture, one that unifies the aspirations of

humanity with the needs of the planet and the individual. Analysis of the existential

incompleteness within us that drives us to form relationships of dependency and addiction with

plants and drugs will show that at the dawn of history, we lost something precious, the absence

of which has made us ill with narcissism. Only a recovery of the relationship that we evolved

with nature through use of psychoactive plants before the fall into history can offer us hope of a

humane and open-ended future.

Before we commit ourselves irrevocably to the chimera of a drugfree culture purchased at the

price of a complete jettisoning of the ideals of a free and democratic planetary society, we must

ask hard questions: Why, as a species, are we so fascinated by altered states of consciousness?

What has been their impact on our esthetic and spiritual aspirations? What have we lost by

denying the legitimacy of each individual's drive to use substances to experience personally the

transcendental and the sacred? My hope is that answering these questions will force us to

confront the consequences of denying nature's spiritual dimension, of seeing nature as nothing

more than a "resource" to be fought over and plundered. Informed discussion of these issues

will give no comfort to the control-obsessed, no comfort to know-nothing religious

fundamentalism, no comfort to beige fascism of whatever form.

The question of how we, as a society and as individuals, relate to psychoactive plants in the late

twentieth century, raises a larger question: how, over time, have we been shaped by the shifting

alliances that we have formed and broken with various members of the vegetable world as we

have made our way through the maze of history? This is a question that will occupy us in some

detail in the chapters to come.

The Ur-myth of our culture opens in the Garden of Eden, with the eating of the fruit of the Tree

of Knowledge. If we do not learn from our past, this story could end with a planet toxified, its

forests a memory, its biological cohesion shattered, our birth legacy a weedchoked wasteland.

If we have overlooked something in our previous attempts to understand our origins and place

in nature, are we now in a position to look back and to understand, not only our past, but our

future, in an entirely new way? If we can recover the lost sense of nature as a living mystery,

we can be confident of new perspectives on the cultural adventure that surely must lie ahead.

We have the opportunity to move away from the gloomy historical nihilism that characterizes

the reign of our deeply patriarchal, dominator culture. We are in a position to regain the

Archaic appreciation of our nearsymbiotic relationship with psychoactive plants as a wellspring

of insight and coordination flowing from the vegetable world to the human world.

The mystery of our own consciousness and powers of self-reflection is somehow linked to this

channel of communication with the unseen mind that shamans insist is the spirit of the living

world of nature. For shamans and shamanic cultures, exploration of this mystery has always

been a credible alternative to living in a confining materialist culture. We of the industrial

democracies can choose to explore these unfamiliar dimensions now or we can wait until the

advancing destruction of the living planet makes all further exploration irrelevant.

A NEW MANIFESTO

The time has therefore come, in the great natural discourse that is the history of ideas,

thoroughly to rethink our fascination with habitual use of psychoactive and physioactive plants.

We have to learn from the excesses of the past, especially the 1960s, but we cannot simply

advocate "Just say no" any more than we can advocate "Try it, you'll like it." Nor can we

support a view that wishes to divide society into users and nonusers. We need a comprehensive

approach to these questions that encompasses the deeper evolutionary and historical

implications.

The mutation-inducing influence of diet on early humans and the effect of exotic metabolites

on the evolution of their neurochemistry and culture is still unstudied territory. The early hom-

inids' adoption of an omnivorous diet and their discovery of the power of certain plants were

decisive factors in moving early humans out of the stream of animal evolution and into the

fast-rising tide of language and culture. Our remote ancestors discovered that certain plants,

when self-administered, suppress appetite, diminish pain, supply bursts of sudden energy,

confer immunity against pathogens, and synergize cognitive activities. These discoveries set us

on the long journey to self-reflection. Once we became tool-using omnivores, evolution itself

changed from a process of slow modification of our physical form to a rapid definition of

cultural forms by the elaboration of rituals, languages, writing, mnemonic skills, and

technology.

These immense changes occurred largely as a result of the synergies between human beings

and the various plants with which they interacted and coevolved. An honest appraisal of the

impact of plants on the foundations of human institutions would find them to be absolutely

primary. In the future, the application of botanically inspired steady-state solutions, such as

zero population growth, hydrogen extraction from seawater, and massive recycling programs,

may help reorganize our societies and planet along more holistic, environmentally aware,

neo-Archaic lines.

The suppression of the natural human fascination with altered states of consciousness and the

present perilous situation of all life on earth are intimately and causally connected. When we

suppress access to shamanic ecstasy, we close off the refreshing waters of emotion that flow

from having a deeply bonded, almost symbiotic relationship to the earth. As a consequence, the

maladaptive social styles that encourage overpopulation, resource mismanagement, and

environmental toxification develop and maintain themselves. No culture on earth is as heavily

narcotized as the industrial West in terms of being inured to the consequences of maladaptive

behavior. We pursue a business-as-usual attitude in a surreal atmosphere of mounting crises

and irreconcilable contradictions.

As a species, we need to acknowledge the depth of our historical dilemma. We will continue to

play with half a deck as long as we continue to tolerate cardinals of government and science

who presume to dictate where human curiosity can legitimately focus its attention and where it

cannot. Such restrictions on the human imagination are demeaning and preposterous. The

government not only restricts research on psychedelics that could conceivably yield valuable

psychological and medical insights, it presumes to prevent their religious and spiritual use, as

well. Religious use of psychedelic plants is a civil rights issue; its restriction is the repression

of a legitimate religious sensibility. In fact, it is not a religious sensibility that is being

repressed, but the religious sensibility, an experience of religio based on the plant-human

relationships that were in place long before the advent of history.

We can no longer postpone an honest reappraisal of the true costs and benefits of habitual use

of plants and drugs versus the true costs and benefits of suppression of their use. Our global

culture finds itself in danger of succumbing to an Orwellian effort to bludgeon the problem out

of existence through military and police terrorism directed toward drug consumers in our own

population and drug producers in the Third World. This repressive response is largely fueled by

an unexamined fear that is the product of misinformation and historical ignorance.

Deep-seated cultural biases explain why the Western mind turns suddenly anxious and

repressive on contemplating drugs. Substanceinduced changes in consciousness dramatically

reveal that our mental life has physical foundations. Psychoactive drugs thus challenge the

Christian assumption of the inviolability and special ontological status of the soul. Similarly,

they challenge the modern idea of the ego and its inviolability and control structures. In short,

encounters with psychedelic plants throw into question the entire world view of the dominator

culture.

We will come across this theme of the ego and the dominator culture often in this

reexamination of history. In fact, the terror the ego feels in contemplating the dissolution of

boundaries between self and world not only lies behind the suppression of altered states of

consciousness but, more generally, explains the suppression of the feminine, the foreign and

exotic, and transcendental experiences. In the prehistoric but post-Archaic times of about 5000

to 3000 B.C., suppression of partnership society by patriarchal invaders set the stage for

suppression of the open-ended experimental investigation of nature carried on by shamans. In

highly organized societies that Archaic tradition was replaced by one of dogma, priestcraft,

patriarchy, warfare and, eventually, "rational and scientific" or dominator values.

To this point I have used the terms "partnership" and "dominator" styles of culture without

explanation. I owe these useful terms to Riane Eisler and her important re-visioning of history,

The Chalice and the Blade.' Eisler has advanced the notion that "partnership" models of society

preceded and later competed with, and were oppressed by, "dominator" forms of social

organization. Dominator cultures are hierarchical, paternalistic, materialistic, and

male-dominated. Eisler believes that the tension between the partnership and dominator

organizations and the overexpression of the dominator model are responsible for our alienation

from nature, from ourselves, and from each other.

Eisler has written a brilliant synthesis of the emergence of human culture in the ancient Near

East and the unfolding political debate concerning the feminizing of culture and the need to

overcome patterns of male dominance in creating a viable future. Her analysis of gender

politics raises the level of debate beyond those who have so shrilly hailed and decried this or

that ancient "matriarchy" or "patriarchy." The Chalice and the Blade introduces the notion of

"partnership societies" and "dominator societies" and uses the archaeological record to argue

that over vast areas and for many centuries the partnership societies of the ancient Middle East

were without warfare and upheaval. Warfare and patriarchy arrived with the appearance of

dominator values.

THE DOMINATOR INHERITANCE

Our culture, self-toxified by the poisonous by-products of technology and egocentric ideology,

is the unhappy inheritor of the dominator attitude that alteration of consciousness by the use of

plants or substances is somehow wrong, onanistic, and perversely antisocial. I will argue that

suppression of shamanic gnosis, with its reliance and insistence on ecstatic dissolution of the

ego, has robbed us of life's meaning and made us enemies of the planet, of ourselves, and our

grandchildren. We are killing the planet in order to keep intact the wrongheaded assumptions

of the ego-dominator cultural style. It is time for change.

SHAMANISM: SETTING THE STAGE

Raongi sat still in the fading light of the fire. He felt his body flex deep within in ways that

reminded him of the gulping of an eel. As he formed this thought, an eel's head, oversized and

bathed in electric blue, appeared obediently in the darkened space behind his eyelids. .

"Mother spirit of the first waterfall . . ."

"Grandmother of the first rivers. . ."

"Show yourself, show yourself"

Responding to the voices, the darkened space behind the now slowly spinning eel apparition

filled with sparks; waves of light leaped higher and higher, accompanied by a roar of increasing

intensity.

"It is the first maria." The voice is that of Mangi, the elder shaman of the village of jarocamena.

"It is strong. So strong."

Mangi is silent as the visions close over them. They are on the brink of Venturi, the real world,

the blue zone. The sound of falling rain outside is unrecognizable. There is the shuffling of dry

leaves mingled with the sound of distant bells. Their tingling seems more like light than sound.

Until relatively recently, the practices of Mangi and her remote Amazonian tribe were typical

of religious practice everywhere. Only in the last several millennia have theology and ritual

graduated to more elaborate-and not necessarily more serviceable-forms.

SHAMANISM AND ORDINARY RELIGION

When I arrived in the Upper Amazon in early 1970, I had just spent several years living in

Asian societies. Asia is a place where the shattered shells of castoff religious ontologies litter

the dusty landscape like the carapaces of sand-scoured scarabs. I had traveled India in search of

the miraculous. I had visited its temples and ashrams, its jungles and mountain retreats. But

Yoga, a lifetime calling, the obsession of a disciplined and ascetic few, was not sufficient to

carry me to the inner landscapes that I sought.

I learned in India that religion, in all times and places where the luminous flame of the spirit

has guttered low, is no more than a hustle. Religion in India stares from world-weary eyes

familiar with four millennia of priestcraft. Modern Hindu India to me was both an antithesis

and a fitting prelude to the nearly archaic shamanism that I found in the lower Rio Putumayo of

Colombia when I arrived there to begin studying the shamanic use of hallucinogenic plants.

Shamanism is the practice of the Upper Paleolithic tradition of healing, divination, and

theatrical performance based on natural magic developed ten to fifty thousand years ago.

Mircea Eliade, author of Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy and the foremost

authority on shamanism in the context of comparative religion, has shown that in all times and

places shamanism maintains a surprising internal coherency of practice and belief. Whether the

shaman is an Arctic-dwelling Inuit or a Witoto of the Upper Amazon, certain techniques and

expectations remain the same. Most important of these invariants is ecstasy, a point my brother

and I make in our book The Invisible Landscape:

The ecstatic part of the shaman's initiation is harder to analyze, for it is dependent on a certain

receptivity to states of trance and ecstasy on the part of the novice; he may be moody,

somewhat frail and sickly, predisposed to solitude, and may perhaps have fits of epilepsy or

catatonia, or some other psychological aberrance (though not always as some writers on the

subject have asserted).' In any case, his psychological predisposition to ecstasy forms only the

starting point for his initiation: the novice, after a history of psychosomatic illness or

psychological aberration that may be more or less intense, will at last begin to undergo

initiatory sickness and trances; he will lie as though dead or in deep trance for days on end.

During this time, he is approached in dreams by his helping spirits, and may receive instruction

from them. Invariably during this prolonged trance the novice will undergo an episode of

mystical death and resurrection; he may see himself reduced to a skeleton and then clothed

with new flesh; or he may see himself boiled in a caldron, devoured by the spirits, and then

made whole again; or he may imagine himself being operated on by the spirits, his organs

removed and replaced with "magical stones" and then sewn up again.

Eliade showed that, while the particular motifs may vary between cultures and even

individuals, shamanism's general structure is clear: the neophyte shaman undergoes a symbolic

death and resurrection, which is understood as a radical transformation into a superhuman

condition. Henceforth, the shaman has access to the superhuman plane, is a master of ecstasy,

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTSIwishtothankmyfriendsandcolleaguesfortheirpatienceandencouragementinthewritingofthisbook,especiallyRalphAbraham,RupertSheldrake,RalphMetzner,DennisMcKenna,ChrisHarrison,NeilHassall,DanLevy,ErnestWaugh,RichardBird,RoyandDianeTuckman,FaustinBrayandBrianWallace,andMarionandAllanHunt-Badi...

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McKenna, Terence- Food of the Gods

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