Sacred Mushroom of Visions

by Ralph Metzner

  Beginning in 1954, Wasson hired New York society photographer Allan Richardson to accompany him on the next few expeditions to take photographs. These were difficult journeys by foot and by mule on deplorable roads winding over the mountains to villages such as Mazatlán and Huautla at elevations up to a mile and a half. At first they succeeded only in compiling information about the velada—for example, that it is not a regularly scheduled event like Christian worship services, but rather is convened for healing purposes, broadly defined. Therefore the shaman who conducts it holds the title curandera if a woman, curandero if a man; both words mean “healer.”

  Wasson’s breakthrough came on June 29, 1955, when he and Richardson met Cayetano and Guadelupe García, a married couple living at the edge of town in Huautla. That afternoon, the Garcías and some of their friends took Wasson and Richardson down the mountainside to gather mind-altering mushrooms growing on sugar cane refuse. The mushrooms they gathered, Psilocybe caerulescens, were one of several kinds of psychoactive mushrooms that the Indians use in veladas and that have been identified as teonanácatl.

  Cayetano then sent his brother, an interpreter, along with Wasson and Richardson to meet a curandera named María Sabina who lived in Huautla. Believing that she had no choice because Wasson had been authorized, apparently, by Cayetano, an official of the village, she agreed to conduct a velada that evening with her daughter, Apollonia, at the home of the Garcías. Guadelupe Garcia described her to him as “una Señora sin mancha,” Wasson later recalled—“a lady without blemish, immaculate, one who had never dishonored her calling by using her personal powers for evil” (Wasson and Wasson 1957). To Wasson she seemed “the hierophant, the thaumaturge, the psychopompos, in whom the troubles and aspirations of countless generations of mankind had found, were still finding, their relief” (Wasson 1980). He later reported, in Mushrooms, Russia and History:

  On that last Wednesday of June, after nightfall, we gathered [at about 8:15] in the lower chamber . . . In all, at one time or another, there must have been twenty-five persons present . . . Both Allan . . . [and I] were deeply impressed by the mood of the gathering. We were received and the night’s events unrolled in an atmosphere of simple friendliness that reminded us of the agape [love feast] of early Christian times . . . We were mindful of the drama of the situation. We were attending as participants a mushroomic Supper of unique anthropological interest, which was being held pursuant to a tradition of unfathomed age, possibly going back to the time when the remote ancestors of our hosts were living in Asia, back perhaps to the dawn of man’s cultural history, when he was discovering the idea of God (Wasson and Wasson 1957).

  The ceremony started at about 10:30 when María and her daughter took their positions before a small table that served as their altar. On this table, Wasson reported, were two “holy pictures”—one depicting Jesus as a child, the other his baptism in the Jordan River. This confirmed, if further proof were needed, that the Mazatecs viewed their ritual as linked in some basic way with Christianity. Furthermore, Wasson noted: “The Señora had asked us to take care not to invade the corner of the room on the left of the altar table, for down that corner would descend the Holy Ghost” (Wasson and Wasson 1957).

  Wasson noted during this and later veladas he attended that the Mazatecs normally follow a certain procedure with ritual overtones. The healer first praises the mushrooms while passing them through the smoke of burning copal incense to purify them, before handing them out to the other participants. Wasson and Richardson each ate six pairs of mushrooms, which in a velada are always distributed in pairs (representing a male and a female) and eaten reverently with one’s face turned toward the altar. María’s dose as curandera was twice as much—twelve pairs.

  The historic encounter, 1956: Maria Sabina hands R. Gordon Wasson his portion of mushrooms for the velada with los santos niños. (LIFE magazine photo by Allan Richardson; reproduced courtesy of the R. G. Wasson Estate)

  After the mushrooms were eaten, all the candles were extinguished (veladas always are conducted in the evening), followed by silence for about twenty minutes. The healer then started humming and the humming eventually modulates into a chant that continues at intervals throughout the night. María’s songs put Wasson in mind of “age’s-old chants” which sometimes seemed “soaked in weary melancholy.” They were punctuated by percussive sounds produced when María and her daughter clapped their hands or thumped their chests. As the mushrooms took effect, Maria talked “as though invoking the Spirits or as though the Holy Ghost was speaking through the mushrooms” (Wasson and Wasson 1957). At times she declared her credentials with words such as these from a later velada that Wasson translated:

  Woman of space am I,

  Woman of day am I,

  Woman of light am I, . . .

  Lawyer woman am I, woman of affairs am I,

  I give account to the judge,

  I give account to the government,

  And I give account to the Father Jesus Christ,

  And mother princess, my patron mother, oh Jesus, Father Jesus Christ,

  Woman of danger am I, woman of beauty am I . . .

  I am going to the sky [heaven], Jesus Christ . . . Whirling woman of the whirlwind am I,

  Woman of a sacred, enchanted place am I,

  Eagle woman am I, and clock woman am I . . .

  The world can be cheered up, let’s cheer up, let’s be enlightened,

  Let our Father come out to us, let Christ come out to us, We wait for our Father, we wait for our Father, we wait for Christ . . .

  In Mushrooms, Russia and History, Wasson described what transpired that evening in words of great beauty and piety. Speaking for both Richardson and himself, he reports that they first saw:

  geometric patterns, angular not circular, in richest colors, such as might adorn textiles or carpets. Then the patterns grew into architectural structures, with colonnades and architraves, patios of regal splendor, the stone-work all in brilliant colors, gold and onyx and ebony, all most harmoniously and ingeniously contrived, in richest magnificence extending beyond the reach of sight, in vistas measureless to man . . . They seemed to belong . . . to the imaginary architecture described by the visionaries of the Bible (Wasson and Wasson 1957).

  Included in these visions, Wasson said, were “resplendent palaces all laid over with semiprecious stones . . . mountains rising tier above tier to the very heavens . . . gardens of ineffable beauty” and “river estuaries, pellucid waters flowing through an endless expanse of reeds down to a measureless sea, all by the pastel light of a horizontal sun.” Of the objects he saw in these visions, Wasson marveled that:

  No patina of age hung on them. They were all fresh from God’s workshop, pristine in their finish . . . They seemed the very archetypes of beautiful form and color. We felt ourselves in the presence of the Ideas that Plato had talked about. In saying this let not the reader think that we are indulging in rhetoric, straining to command his attention by an extravagant figure of speech. For the world our visions were and must remain hallucinations. But for us they were not false or shadowy suggestions of real things, figments of an unhinged imagination. What we were seeing was, we knew, the only reality, of which the counterparts of every day are mere imperfect adumbrations (Wasson and Wasson 1957).

  The historic encounter, 1956: Gordon Wasson ingests the mushrooms while Maria Sabina prays at the household altar. (LIFE magazine photo by Allan Richardson; reproduced courtesy of the R. G. Wasson Estate)

  As the visions increased in intensity Wasson and Richardson experienced firsthand what the Indians mean when they say that the mushrooms have the power to take users “there where God is.”

  There is no better way to describe the sensation than to say it was as though our very soul had been scooped out of our body and translated to a point floating in space, leaving behind the husk of clay, our body . . . We had the sensation that the walls of our humble house had vanished, that our untrammeled souls were floating in the uni
verse, stroked by divine breezes, possessed of a divine mobility that would transport us anywhere on the wings of a thought . . . There came a moment when it seemed as though the visions themselves were about to be transcended, and dark gates reaching upward beyond sight were about to part, and we were to find ourselves in the presence of the Ultimate. We seemed to be flying at the dark gates as a swallow at a dazzling lighthouse, and the gates were to part and admit us. But they did not open, and with a thud we fell back, gasping. We felt disappointed, but also frightened and half relieved, that we had not entered into the presence of the Ineffable, whence, it seemed to us at the time, we might not have returned, for we had sensed that a willing extinction in the divine radiance had been awaiting us (Wasson and Wasson 1957).

  When Wasson later asked Cayetano what he could pay him for having arranged the velada, the Indian turned to his wife and let her speak: “No hicimos esto por dinero,” she said: “We did not do this for money.”

  Upon returning to New York, the Wassons focused their attention on completing the long-delayed Mushrooms, Russia and History, adding detailed accounts of their discoveries in Mexico. It finally was published two years later in a lavishly-produced, two-volume limited edition of 512 copies released the same day as the LIFE magazine article. Though Wasson made an effort to disguise the true identities of Huautla and María in his article (giving her a pseudonym), it wasn’t long before the curandera found herself besieged by a variety of sacred mushroom seekers from the West, including beatniks, hippies, rock stars, and journalists. Many came respectfully in search of religious enlightenment. Others, it seemed, wanted only to find a good high. Their sometimes inappropriate behavior made life difficult for people in Huautla, especially when Mexico’s federal government, under pressure from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, declared sacred mushrooms an illegal drug and threatened to prosecute anyone found using them for any purpose. At one point angry villagers, upset with María for having revealed the secret of their teonanácatl, burned her house down. Eventually, however, they forgave her. By the time she died in 1985, María’s reputation as a wise and holy woman was established for the ages in Huautla, throughout Mexico and worldwide.

  Wasson’s research and writings contributed much to this outcome. After Tina died of cancer in 1958, Wasson pressed on with what he called “our work,” publishing numerous groundbreaking articles, papers, and books on sacred mushroom use in Mexico, Guatemala, and other Mesoamerican countries. The first of these books, María Sabina and her Mazatec Mushroom Velada (1974), includes an audio recording of an all-night velada conducted by María in 1958, plus a written transcription and musical score of her chanting. Wasson often remarked he was prouder of this than any of his other publications, and indeed it represents a unique milestone in anthropological studies. A later book, titled The Wondrous Mushroom: Mycolatry in Mesoamerica (1980), is Wasson’s summa theologica on teonanácatl. In addition to providing a review of all the relevant historical accounts by Spanish friars during the Conquest, it cites evidence from disciplines as varied as linguistics, archeology, ethnobotany, musicology, architecture, graphic arts, and literature to buttress his and Tina’s claim that sacred mushrooms played a crucial role in the religious life of central American Indians and their ancestors. Wasson also, in this book, endorses teonanácatl’s viability for any man or woman—not just Indians—with courage enough to risk going “there where God is.”

  In the lives of us all, even those who are most earthbound, there are moments when the world stops, when the most humdrum things suddenly and unaccountably clothe themselves with beauty, haunting and ravishing beauty. It now seems to me that such flashes must emerge from our subconscious well where our visions have all this time been stored, for the mushroomic visions are an endless sequence of those flashes . . . What an amazing thing that we should all be carrying this inventory of wonders around with us, ready to be tripped into our conscious world by mushrooms! Are the Indians far wrong in calling these divine? We suspect that, in its fullest sense, the creative faculty, whether in the humanities or science or industry, that most precious of man’s distinctive possessions and the one most clearly partaking of the divine, is linked in some way with the area of the mind that the mushrooms unlock (Wasson 1980).

  Wasson still firmly maintained this belief when I met him in 1985, about a year before he died. That visit and another one year later are described in The Sacred Mushroom Seeker (1990), a book of memorial essays about Wasson that I compiled and edited after his death in 1986. It was my privilege to hear him tell the story of the night he first took teonanácatl, his enthusiasm for the mushroom experience clearly undiminished. We also discussed U.S. laws that make it a felony to eat or possess sacred mushrooms. It was clear, he agreed, that these laws had done much to curtail their use in the West, but he thought that complacency too was a factor. “Entheogens will be appreciated in fifteen of twenty years—thirty years at most,” he told me. “People don’t want to be awed these days.”

  Wasson’s writings about sacred mushrooms will inspire and instruct new generations seeking spiritual enlightenment. His legacy will endure partly because the information he added to the scientific record will be just as valid years in the future as it is today, but also because his discoveries have lasting implications for spiritual seekers. Gordon Wasson was a level-headed scientist whose scholarly writings, while grounded in fact, inspire many to regard the sacred mushrooms with religious awe and reverence.

  Gordon Wasson chose as his final resting place the Chapel of St. Joseph of Arimathea in the Washington Cathedral in Washington, D.C., where his ashes are interred. Joseph of Arimathea is said to be the first to take possession of the Holy Grail after the Last Supper, and to have brought Christianity to England. Wasson may have considered him a spiritual patron, in light of his own pioneering, almost missionary, efforts to establish the field of ethnomycology and entheogens.

  Wasson’s work and writings are profoundly religious as well as scientific. I believe that Wasson knew this and expected to be honored sooner or later by people who use sacred mushrooms to help them know the divine by direct experience. “When we first went down to Mexico we felt certain, my wife and I, that we were on the trail of an ancient and holy mystery, and we went as pilgrims seeking the Grail” (Wasson 1961). In effect, they found the Grail when they found the sacred mushrooms, making Wasson’s final resting place especially significant. By having his ashes interred in a room that is accessed from the chapel of a saint who is associated with the Grail—a chapel that lies at the heart of a cathedral built to last thousands of years—he has established a de facto shrine commemorating his and Tina’s quest.

  Certain writers who admire Wasson’s work are far less tolerant than he toward the Christian religion. They fail to notice that, however much Wasson respected the spiritual power of pagan religions, he also believed that the Christian religion is basically good and deserving of equal respect. Of course he deplored the horrific abuses committed by people professing to be Christians; but he did not blame the Bible any more than he blamed Jesus for the criminal behavior perpetrated in his name. In The Wondrous Mushroom, Wasson wrote: “I suppose most persons would call us deeply religious, though we did not really adhere to any creed. She [Tina] was a member of the Russian Orthodox Church and I am an Episcopalian, my father having been a minister” (Wasson 1980). Wasson did not valorize Christian spiritual values over pagan beliefs. Neither did he elevate the pagan point of view above the Christian. Instead, like the Mazatecs, he perceived that the two belief systems are not necessarily antagonistic. In Alexander Shulgin’s essay published in The Sacred Mushroom Seeker, Shulgin recalls that Wasson told him that he:

  thought his most lasting contribution was allowing that article in LIFE to appear, and to appear in the form it took. It was, for many devout and curious readers of the magazine, their first exposure to the concept of a union between nature and God. And that there are many different ways to be in the presence of God. And th
at a lowly mushroom, like ordinary bread and wine, can allow, can insist, that you identify with and acknowledge the divine . . . It was this article that caught the attention of the populace. It was this article that served as the single most important “trigger” to initiate the psychedelic revolution of the ’60s. It was this article, he felt, that resulted in what proved to be an irreversible change in human awareness (Shulgin 1990).

  References

  Riedlinger, T. J., ed. 1990. The Sacred Mushroom Seeker: Essays for R. Gordon Wasson. Portland, Ore.: Dioscorides Press.

  ———. 1990a. Preface. In The Sacred Mushroom Seeker: Essays for R. Gordon Wasson, ed. Thomas J. Riedlinger. Portland, Ore.: Dioscorides Press.

  ———. 1990b. A latecomer’s view of R. Gordon Wasson. In The Sacred Mushroom Seeker: Essays for R. Gordon Wasson, ed. Thomas J. Riedlinger. Portland, Ore.: Dioscorides Press.

  Schultes, R. E. 1939. The identification of a narcotic Basidiomycete of the Aztecs. Botanical Museum Leaflets. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University 7 (3):37–54.

  Shulgin, A. T. 1990. Celebrating Gordon Wasson. In The Sacred Mushroom Seeker: Essays for R. Gordon Wasson, ed. Thomas J. Riedlinger. Portland, Ore.: Dioscorides Press.

  Wasson, E. A. 1914. Religion and Drink. New York: Burr Printing House. Wasson, R. G. 1957. Seeking the magic mushroom Teonanácatl. LIFE 42 (19):100–120. May 13.