Cactus of Mystery

by Ross Heaven

  These healings for me have been profound, life changing, and long lasting. I could say with deep sincerity that I do not know if I would have survived without these plant spirits. Certainly not in a good way.

  And so we can see that sitting with the Anaconda and the Hummingbird, with these powerful plant teachers, we catch a glimpse of the immensity of their contribution to us as human inhabitants of this planet. We are blessed to have the opportunity to commune with them, to avail ourselves of their ability to retune our receptive capabilities such that we can soar higher and higher, raising our consciousness and expanding our source for knowledge. Over time we have evolved varied methods for communion with these plants that are unique to the essence of the spirit of each, as well as our changing environment, needs, and cultural ethos.

  For me, the messages from each plant are much the same. An experiential knowledge of ecstatic oneness, of samadhi, has been strong with both plant deities, and yet the flavor of the messages, the personalities of these spirits, are totally different. I love them both with all my heart and trust them with my life and soul. To me all of the gracious entheogens that we commune with are the best healers on the planet and—dare I say—could be the saviors of our species should we allow them to be.

  What can we see for our future as a community of life-forms on this planet? What do these plant spirit deities hold for us? What is their compassionate gift?

  Einstein once said that if you find yourself with a result that is not what you expect or want, go back and look at the premise. The result of our lifestyle and relationship with this Earth is heading us down a dark and dangerous passage. What is our premise for this lifestyle and disconnectedness? What brought us to this very limited view of “reality”? Of scientific “proof ”? Of our dominion over and separateness from nature?

  It is indeed a miracle that the plant kingdom, despite the fact that we as a culture have increasingly disconnected from both spirit and nature, is always at the ready and willing to heal us, to take us where we need to be, to show us the path, to guide us. To give us what we need. And of all times in human existence we sorely need help now. For the good of our descendants and all our relations we need these sacred plants now.

  Let us reach out to the Anaconda and the Hummingbird. Let us go back to our beginnings when we first communed with these plants and through their gracious help find that we are more than what we can feel, see, taste, and hear. Let us go back to the time when we entered those deep caves and created symbolic art to communicate our visionary spiritual experiences. Let us once again listen to these wise and compassionate plant spirits and rethink our premise of life as spiritual beings living in this limited physical plane. Let us expand our understanding, our reality, and our consciousness and find a new premise on which we may thrive and live in ecstatic oneness. The plants will lead us. Yomimsamwhe.

  6

  Notes on Getting Cactus Lodged in Your Reducing Valve

  San Pedro and Psychic Abilities

  David Luke, Ph.D.

  I’d spent the best part of a week on rickety buses going up and down mountains, skirting and scooting round precarious precipices and back and forth across a number of small towns in southern Ecuador.

  It had started out as a shamanic healer hunt but was fast becoming a manic wild goose chase. Armed with a few leads—some locations and numbers—I had emptied several bags of coins into phone boxes to little effect because the healers I was pursuing did not, as a rule, make much use of modern telecommunications. I joked with myself that this forsaking of telephony was possibly due to their mastery over psychic abilities, the likes of which I was hoping to test.

  Under the auspices of an ambitious scientific research project, I had traveled to South America in an attempt to conduct controlled experiments with people under the influence of the psychedelic San Pedro cactus, in a bid to test the claim that the use of certain psychedelic substances could induce the ability to transcend space and time and to know and foresee things through nonordinary means. In essence, I wanted to know if the use of San Pedro could facilitate clairvoyance, telepathy, or precognition, the abilities, respectively, of accessing hidden information, communicating mind-to-mind with others, or obtaining knowledge from the future. Collectively, these three supposed phenomena have been termed extrasensory perception (ESP) or simply psi.

  I finally caught up with a mestizo healer on my second visit to his remote village and traversed the extra few miles up the mountain with my partner to his secluded wooden shack. No running water, no electricity, no neighbors, just spectacular views out over the Andes. He greeted us very hospitably and we began talking about participating in a San Pedro ceremony with him and the possibility of conducting some psychic tests, all of which he happily agreed to. Everything was going well until I pointed out that—well equipped with batteries—I would like to use my laptop computer to do the tests. The healer looked at me sternly and marched me over to the edge of the clearing surrounding his small house. Overlooking the valleys and mountains he told me how his family owned all the land we could see on this side of the mountain and how his ancestors had lived here for hundreds of years in much the same way as he did now: as part of Nature. Standing behind me, he then lifted a huge conch shell to his lips and blasted me with a resonant bombardment of sound. Turning me around ninety degrees with his hand, he repeated the sonic assault, doing the same maneuver twice more until I had been thoroughly trumpeted in all four directions and had greeted the four winds. Sledgehammer for a nut, I got the message: there would be no use of computers during his San Pedro ceremony.

  It’s thus I found myself some weeks later, rather than testing twenty people for their possible psychic abilities, holed up in a room alone in front of a computer for eight hours, deeply nauseous and in a definite altered state of consciousness, doggedly running twenty psychic tests on myself. I’ll return to this odd experiment later, but will first discuss why anyone should even want to test for the ESP-inducing capabilities of a spiny succulent angiosperm.

  THE CACTUS OF THE FOUR WINDS

  The Andean San Pedro cactus (Trichocereus pachanoi) was used as a sacred power plant (i.e., as a sacramental) for at least two thousand years before the Spanish conquistadores arrived in the sixteenth century, according to the archaeological evidence. Some finds may be much older. The Peruvian site of Chavín for instance, home of the Chavín people, has stone etchings that attest to the central role of psychedelic plants in that culture (Burger, 1992) including but not limited to the San Pedro cactus (Jay, 2005). The site itself dates from between 1500 BCE and 900 BCE, and reverence for the cactus among later Andean cultures has been identified from ceramics from the Cupusnique, Salinar, Nazca, Moche, Lambayeque and Chimu people, dating from the time of Chavín to the arrival of the Spanish (Glass-Coffin, 1999).

  Written accounts following the arrival of the Spaniards indicate the way in which the cactus was used by Pre-Columbian Andean people. Of interest to the project under discussion is that most of these include some report of the parapsychological effects of the plant. Juan Polo de Ondegardo, a sixteenth-century Spanish officer stationed in Cuzco, Peru, described how the natives using the cactus “take the form they want and go a long distance through the air in a short time; and they see what is happening” (Sharon, 1978, pp. 112–13), probably indicating out-of-body experiences and “traveling clairvoyance.” Juan Polo de Ondegardo continued that when they take the plant, “They serve as diviners and they tell what is happening in remote places before the news arrives or can arrive” (Sharon, 1978, p. 113), clearly demonstrating de Ondegardo’s belief in the healers’ cactus-induced psychic abilities.

  The following century a number of accounts of San Pedro’s use appeared among missionaries posted in the Andes. In 1631 Father Oliva described the ritual use of achuma (San Pedro), noting that “they [ceremonial participants] see visions that the Devil represents to them and consistent with them they judge their suspicions and the intentions of others” (cited in
Sharon, 1978). Peruvian healers, called curanderos, in recent years continue to consume San Pedro to know people’s intentions (Glass-Coffin, 2000). It’s clear though at that time that such activities were treated as suspicious and sacrilegious by the early missionaries, and in 1653, a few years after Father Oliva’s account, nothing having changed, Father Cobo (as cited in Sharon, 1978) wrote an equally biased and pious report of the effects.

  This is the plant by which the devil deceived the Indians of Peru in their paganism, using it for their lies and superstitions. . . . Transported by this drink, the Indians dreamed a thousand absurdities and believed them as if they were true.

  Such negative reports stemming from the period of the Inquisition between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries are hardly surprising; nevertheless, the witch hunts did not totally eradicate the use of San Pedro, despite the attempt. In the less punitive years after the Inquisition, numerous cases of “pagan idolatry” can be found in the records, such as the trial of Marco Marcelo in 1768, who described how when he drank San Pedro “he came into full awareness and patently saw with his eyes the sick person’s [bewitchment] . . . and he also recognized the sorcerer who had done the [harm]” (cited in Glass-Coffin, 1999).

  Despite continued persecution for the best part of five hundred years, the shamanic use of San Pedro continues to this day, representing an unbroken magico-religious tradition spanning more than three thousand years (Sharon, 1978). According to Dobkin de Rios (1977) the use of San Pedro as “a revelatory agent” to determine the source of witchcraft and misfortune affecting a patient is currently its predominant function, although more recently healers may typically diagnose the cause of illness as being due to the person’s thoughts and behaviors rather than external agencies such as sorcery (Heaven, 2009). For instance, a curandera interviewed by Glass-Coffin (2000) saw that those living life without conscious awareness and in emptiness were prone to illness, though she specifically used the word daño (harm), which traditionally is associated with an illness caused by sorcerers (brujos, maleros) through witchcraft (Sharon, 1978). Envidia (envy) is unanimously given as the reason for such witchcraft, possibly as a result of continued post-Columbian poverty, scarcity of resources, and subjugation of the Andean peoples by the dominant class, according to the Peruvian psychiatrist Mario Chiappe (cited in Sharon, 1978).

  Aside from daño, other maladies traditionally diagnosed by San Pedro curanderos include mal aire (bad air, usually emanating from tombs or ruins of sacred places) (Dobkin de Rios, 1968), mal suerte or saladera (bad luck, to the point of lethargy and pessimism) (Dobkin de Rios, 1981), susto (soul loss, manifesting as lack of self-efficacy) (de Feo, 1992), mal puesto (hexing or cursing), mal d’ojo (the evil eye), and bilis, empacho, and pulsario (rage, pain, and sorrow, caused by a blockage of energy) (Heaven, 2009).

  Both diagnoses and treatment for such maladies are made by the curandero under the influence of San Pedro during an all-night ceremony in which the healer enacts magical battles to heal the patient. Typically the patient also ingests the cactus brew (Dobkin de Rios, 1968) as it is also considered a medicine or even a panacea in its own right and may also help the patient have revelations regarding their own maladies (e.g., Heaven, 2009; Sharon, 1978) though traditionally such revelations are usually made by the healer.

  THE CACTUS OF VISION

  Once known as achuma, these days the cactus is known by a number of pre- and post-Columbian names such as huando hermoso, cardo, gigantón, huachuma (Sharon, 1978), chuma, pene de Dios (penis of God), El Remedio (Heaven, 2009), and aguacolla (Shultes and Hofmann, 1992). It was first described and classified in 1920 by the botanists Britton and Rose, who gave San Pedro its Latin taxonomic name, Trichocereus pachanoi, and noted that its distribution remained within Andean Ecuador. More recently, it has been found to be indigenous to Bolivia and northern Peru, typically growing at two to three thousand meters above sea level, although it has also been found in coastal regions (Sharon, 1978), and as far south as Argentina (Shultes and Hofmann, 1992).

  The main active principle of San Pedro was originally identified by the French ethnobotanist Claudine Friedberg (1959) who found that the fresh plant matter contains about 0.12 percent mescaline (3,4,5-trimethoxy-β-phenethylamine), an alkaloid of the phenethylamine family (Shulgin and Shulgin, 1991). Dried T. pachanoi is reported to contain about 2 percent mescaline (Stafford, 1977), although a review of published analyses shows that reports vary from between 0.33 percent to 2.37 percent mescaline in the dried plant (Erowid, 2001). Nevertheless, this makes it somewhat weaker than its northern Mexican and southern United States cacti cousin, peyote (Lophophora williamsii), which contains about 8 percent mescaline by dry weight (Bruhn et al., 1978), although some reports suggest that dry peyote only contains between 1 percent and 6 percent mescaline (Crosby and McLaughlin, 1973).

  Louis Lewin first described the extraction of a mixture of alkaloids from peyote in 1888, but it wasn’t until 1895 that Arthur Heffter isolated four pure alkaloids, one of which he called Mezcalin, now known as mescaline (Ott, 1996). Then in 1897 Heffter (1898) did what any great explorer would do and tested the alkaloids’ psychoactivity on himself; he heroically ingested it thereby identifying mescaline as the main active chemical because its effects differed from that of the plant itself. It is this self-experimentation technique that later led Albert Hofmann to discover psilocybin and psilocin as the psychologically active principles of the psychedelic Psilocybe genus of mushrooms, a discovery made well in advance of the large pharmacological companies who had been working on the problem for some time by testing the chemicals on animals (Luke, 2006). In 1919, the chemist Späth then identified mescaline’s structure as 3,4,5-trimethoxy-β-phenethylamine and confirmed this by synthesising the compound (Ott, 1996).

  Returning to San Pedro, besides T. pachanoi there are thought to be more than twenty-five species of Trichocereus that contain alkaloids (Crosby and McLaughlin, 1973), and at least eleven of these species contain mescaline (Ott, 1996). Most of these close relatives of San Pedro are not used as ethnomedical plants, however, because the alkaloids are in trace quantities, the exception being T. peruvianus (Peruvian torch), which is supposedly much stronger and thought to contain almost as high concentrations of mescaline as peyote (Ott, 1996; Pardanani et al., 1977), although other reports suggest this is an exaggeration because some analyses report no mescaline in T. peruvianus and yet more than 2 percent in some samples of T. pachanoi (Erowid, 2001). Nevertheless, despite mescaline being the primary active principle of peyote and both San Pedro and Peruvian torch, there are a number of other alkaloids present that are not the same—so although the psychopharmacological effects of these cactuses are roughly analogous, they are not entirely equivalent (Bruhn et al., 2008).

  Peyote is known to contain over fifty alkaloids (Anderson, 1980), mostly mescaline and tetrahydro-isoquinoline alkaloids, albeit in trace quantities, as the total alkaloid content is only about 8 percent of the dry weight (Bruhn et al., 1978), most of which is mescaline. T. pachanoi, on the other hand, consists mainly of mescaline and related phenethylamines such as tyramine, hordenine (a stimulant with antibacterial and antibiotic properties, also found in peyote), 3-methoxytyramine, 3,4-dimethoxy-β-phenethylamine, 3,4-dimethoxy-4-hydroxy-βphenethylamine, 3,5-dimethoxy-4-hydroxy-β-phenethylamine, anhalonidine and anhalinine (Crosby and McLaughlin, 1973).

  A recent study (Bruhn et al., 2008) has also discovered the presence in San Pedro of three new phenethylamine alkaloids: lophophine (3-methoxy-4,5-methylenedioxy-phenethylamine), which is also psychoactive and is closely related to MDMA (3-methoxy-4,5methylenedioxy-amphetamine, commonly known as Ecstasy); lobivine (N,N-dimethyl-3,4-methylenedioxy-phenethylamine), a relatively mild psychoactive compound also related to MDMA; and DMPEA (3,4dimethoxy-phenethylamine), which is a nonpsychoactive compound.

  These three new alkaloids were also found to be present in peyote, and at higher concentrations than in San Pedro, yet it is thought that they have very little di
rect psychoactive effect in the quantities they are naturally found at relative to mescaline, although they might have a synergistic effect with mescaline (Bruhn et al., 2008). Demonstrating great insight, having previously synthetically created lophophine, Shulgin and Shulgin (1991) noted its similarities to mescaline and predicted its psychoactivity and its likely presence in peyote (Lophophora williamsii), hence the name given to it by Shulgin and Shulgin (1991) even before it was found to occur naturally. This discovery calls into question the artificial rather than natural status of designer drugs like MDMA, which are artificial or only potentially natural.

  ARTIFICIAL PARADISES—OR NATURAL CHEMICAL UTOPIAS?

  A similar difficulty of distinction arises over whether the states induced by psychedelics are natural or artificial, though early writers clearly placed them in the latter camp, such as the medic Havelock Ellis, who was the first person in the United Kingdom to write about his experience with mescaline in an article titled Mescal: A New Artificial Paradise (Ellis, 1898). However, these days it is known that there are a number of naturally occurring psychedelic substances in the human body, so experiences such as synesthesia and clairvoyance that are induced by the ingestion of psychedelic substances like mescaline might also occur spontaneously, as they are known to do, through the action of “endogenous” (made within the body) chemicals.