from
Schultes:
SPANISH OPPOSITION to the Aztecs' worship of pagan deities with the sacramental aid of mushrooms was strong. Although the Spanish conquerors of Mexico hated and attacked the religious use of all hallucinogens - peyote, ololiuqui, toloache, and others - teonanocatl was the target of special wrath. Their religious fanaticism was drawn especially toward this despised and feared form of plant life that, through its vision-giving powers, held the Indian in awe, allowing him to commune directly with his gods. The new religion, Christianity, had nothing so attractive to offer him. Trying to stamp out the use of the mushrooms, the Spaniards succeeded only in driving the custom into the hinterlands, where it persists today. Not only did it persist, but the ritual adopted many Christian aspects, and the modern ritual is a pagan-Christian blend.
One investigator who ate mushrooms in a Mexican Indian ceremony wrote that "your body lies in the darkness, heavy as lead, but your spirit seems to soar . . . and with the speed of thought to travel where it listeth, in time and space, accompanied by the shaman's singing . . . What you are seeing and . . . hearing appear as one; the music assumes harmonious shapes, giving visual form to its harmonies, and what you are seeing takes on the modalities of music—the music of the spheres.
"All your senses are similarly affected; the cigarette . . . smells as no cigarette before had ever smelled; the glass of simple water is infinitely better than champagne . . . the bemushroomed person is poised in space, a disembodied eye, invisible, incorporeal, seeing but not seen . . . he is the five senses disembodied . . . your soul is free, loses all sense of time, alert as it never was before, living an eternity in a night, seeing infinity in a grain of sand . . . (The visions may be of) almost anything . . . except the scenes of your everyday life." As with other hallucinogens, the effects of the mushrooms may vary with mood and setting.
One of the criticisms of hallucinogens is a familiar appeal against the supposed "escapist" nature of plant intoxication. It is envisioned as a decadent habit in which one turns away from society and it's obligations, it is a fatuous behavior- selfish, navel-gazing, and juvenile. This usually comes from people who see no harm in the legal status and widespread use of truly deadly drugs such as tobacco and alcohol. I think more than anything-more than the flimsy and half-baked argument of the supposed "danger" of hallucinogenic use is the larger and more sinister supposition that the concept of reality is somehow implicitly made doubtful and tenuous by revelations of a nearby other world. This causes great anxiety in those that seek to pave over the ever-expanding cracks in the sidewalk- out of which come creeping the many diaphanous spectres of revelation. This is not welcome news- that the constructs that one has built, tended, invested, and deputized over the bulk of their life are in fact just that-constructs. It is a reckoning that is unacceptable to the Positivistic Materialist who sees the disintegration of their worldview implied by the message of the mushroom. Because what is left after the scaffolding comes crashing down ? What shall one do ? Where now, can meaning be generated out of the broken and smoking rubble heap that sprawls in the wake of the Psychedelic experience.
Through recent episodes I have come to realize that psilocybin, perhaps unlike other indole hallucinogens with the exception of DMT/Ayahuasca, is an entity. It's pretty hard to explain in english just how this works, and I realize that it seems to resemble the type of affect that we associate with classical descriptions of clinical schizophrenia, but I will try. First the mushroom must break you down... and so you must spend the beginning stages of your visit receeding away and out of the idea of "you". This is often accompanied, at least for me, with a great deal of anguish as I realize fully the depth of the human condition, the tragedy embedded in our futile struggle to grasp and hold to the present. Usually there is a great deal of crying. It's best if you submit and surrender, makes it a lot easier.
But once the mushroom has succeeded in erasing the illusion of self, it emerges and takes control. I'm not sure if this disincarnate spirit is one or many, or perhaps there is no real difference. One is shown how over time forces or organized energies have acted, and continue to act through humankind. These are "spirits" that are greater than any individual, but by becoming incarnate in our bodies and acts, they are made real. For me, there was an explanation and visit into the lives of many of those that I know in order to witness the power of these forces or spirits. Many of these revelations had to do with sexuality and gender, so I should probably keep them to myself. I would describe it as a type of experience similar to the guided tour given Jimmy Stewart in "It's a Wonderful Life". One of the central messages seemed to be that language is insufficient to describe the motives of these forces...that to label something as "bad" or "evil" is a reflection merely of the linear logic employed by humans to grok their own limited cognitive landscapes. Another communication was a reflection on the nature of "home". The lesson was carried through the hackneyed phrase "home is where the heart is". I was shown that the heart is in many places, and so there is no one place that home can be. Additionally, the heart was seen as being at odds with itself, and this type of environment was not the greatest place to live or make a home. This resulted in the realization that home was exactly where I was at that moment, which happened to be sitting in my bathtub/shower in near total darkness.
The final lesson was a demonstration of how different powers can be manifest through symbols, slogans, voice, and hortatory speechmaking-which was a little spooky because this often can lead to mass genocide or authoritarian dictatorships. But again, there was a sort of reminder that power is just power, and although it maybe propelled into destructive potential, it inherently is neither good nor bad.
