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Hallucinogens And Culture
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Hallucogens And Culture.
It is hoped that the following pages will demonstrate something of the essential interplay
between nature and culture—between chemistry, mind set, and social and historical
setting—in the use of hallucinogenic plants and other psychoactive substances by different
peoples the world over.
Preface..1
Introduction..3
1. "Idolatry," Hallucinogens, And Cultural Survival..19
2: Tobacco: "Proper Food Of The Gods"..23
3: Cannabis (Spp.) And Nutmeg Derivatives..33
4. Ibogaine And The Vine Of Souls: From Tropical Forest Ritual To Psychotherapy..39
5. Hallucinogens And "Archetypes"..49
6. LSD And The Sacred Morning Glories Of Indian Mexico..55
7. The Sacred Mushrooms: Rediscovery In Mexico..69
8. The Fly-Agaric: "Mushroom Of Immortality"..81
9. R. Gordon Wasson And The Identification Of The Divine Soma..87
10. The "Diabolic Root"..97
11. "To Find Our Life": Peyote Hunt Of The Huichols Of Mexico..105
12. Datura: A Hallucinogen That Can Kill..117
13. Hallucinogenic Snuffs And Animal Symbolism..127
14. Toad As Earth Mother: A Problem In Symbolism And Psychopharmacology ..137
15. Hallucinogens And The Sacred Deer..143
Bibliography..i
Introduction
If one were to look for landmarks in the study of hallucinogens in the nearly forty years
since LSD-25 was first developed in a Swiss laboratory in 1938, a good many possibilities
come to mind. One would be the discovery in that same year that a cult of divine
psychedelic mushrooms had survived among Mexican Indians, and the rediscovery and
systematic investigation of that cult in the mid-1950's. Another would be the identification
of the seeds of morning glories as the sacred Aztec hallucinogen ololiuhqui in 1941, and the
startling finding nearly twenty years later that its active principles are closely related to
lysergic acid derivatives. Still another would be R. G. Wasson's definition of Soma as the
psychotropic fly-agaric mushroom (1968). These discoveries have accompanied the
realization over the past several years that the most important botanical hallucinogens are
structurally related to biologically active compounds occurring naturally in the brain. For
example, psilocybine and the psychoactive alkaloids in morning-glory seeds are indoletryptamine
derivatives and thus are similar in chemical structure to serotonine (5-hydroxytryptamine),
while mescaline is related to noradrenaline. In addition, norepenephrine in the
brain has been found to correspond structurally to caffeic acid, derived from chemicals
found in several plants, including coffee beans and potatoes. Chemical systems active in the
human brain, then, are now known to be close kin to growth-promoting substances in
plants, including several that are powerfully psychoactive, a discovery of no mean
evolutionary as well as pharmacological implications.
One of my own favorite landmarks is a "conversation across the disciplines" in 1970
between ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes and anthropologist Weston La Barre that has
helped to place the whole psychedelic phenomenon in a culture-historical and ideological
framework and has given it a theoretical time depth reaching back into the Paleolithic.
Schultes and La Barre were hardly strangers to the problem, or to each other. Schultes has
long been the recognized authority on New World hallucinogens, and La Barre is a leading
scholar in the anthropology and psychology of religion, author, among other works, of The
Peyote Cult (1974, 1969, 1938), a classic study of the peyote religion of North American
Indians. It was, in fact, peyote that originally brought them together, when, in 1936,
Schultes, then a senior in biology at Harvard, accompanied La Barre, a doctoral candidate at
Yale, to the Kiowa reservation in Oklahoma for field research on the nature and culture of
peyote. La Barre incorporated the experience into his Ph.D. thesis and The Peyote Cult; for
Schultes it led—via Mexico and his classic study of ololiuhqui (1941), and the first botanical
identification of the sacred mushrooms of Oaxacan Indians—to a lifelong commitment to
ethnobotany, especially the indigenous New World hallucinogens .
