SaveOurShrooms.org

3. Sacred or fun

Did people ten thousands years ago pick mushrooms only for certain ceremonies or were they a kind of candy? Human history is not very clear on this subject. There are nevertheless enough indications that many religions used one form or another of psychedelic trance; like wine at the Dionysian mysteries, tobacco at the ceremonies of the Native Americans, the mysterious Soma of ancient India and possibly psychoactive fungi in wheat (ergot, from which later LSD got extracted) at the Greek Elysian mysteries.
The use of `drugs', special herbs or potions to attain a religious peak-experience seems to have been widely spread. Thus the Hindu philosopher Patanjali mentions in the Yoga-sutra that magical plants are useful for the development of siddhis (special powers) like flying, and maybe the name `fly agaric' has something to do with the `flying' of witches.
R. Gordon Wasson stated that religions are the result of psychedelic mystical experiences under the influence of mushrooms and psychedelic writer and researcher Terence McKenna assumes that our consciousness started developing with apes eating hallucinogenic mushroom in the African savanna.

Nowadays magic mushrooms are used in rituals in Meso-america, for instance at the classical Maya ceremonial center Palenque and along the border between Chiapas in Mexico and Guatemala. However, it is not clear how many of these rituals really descend from ancient practices and how much was created later.
Although a lot is known and proof does exist about the use of psychoactive mushrooms in South-America in the past, it is momentarily not known if these ceremonies are still happening. Several Indian tribes in the Amazon jungle use natural psychoactive plants and brews containing D.M.T. (Dimetyltryptamine). Ayahuasca is worth mentioning, which is used in a kind of mixed religion of Catholicism and Indian jungle rituals during the services of the Brazilian Sante Daime church and the UDV.

Myths

Many traditional stories contain, sometimes as a metaphor, indications of substances with the magical quality to shape shift, to enter another world or to go through a transformation. A potion here, a magical spell or a jump in a magical pond there, the crossing of a river, falling asleep and awaking in a strange country; the well informed recognizes the indications. Would Eve's apple not also be a metaphor for the psychedelic experience? Snakes show up quite frequently in trips. And kissing frogs? It is known that certain toads (Bufo species) discharge a substance (bufotenine), which is also psychoactive. It has been told that it can be ingested by licking a toad. If we care to look at the deeper meaning of gnomes living in their toadstools, then there also must be something to the story of the princess and the frog she had to kiss. Actually, a better-recorded use of bufotenine is to dry the toad-venom and smoke it. It is, as many DMT-containing indoles, not orally active without MAO-inhibitors.

The themes of the myths don't seem to change much throughout the centuries: the transformation of villain to hero, from frog to prince, from beggar to king, from child to adult, from wild to wise, it seems a universal scenario.
Somewhere deep inside everyone resides the fascination that accompanies the stories we listened to as kids, the fairy-tales and the myths. Nowadays comics, Science Fiction adventures and computer games are filled with the same heroes, wizards, kings, fairies and gnomes, devilish opponents, quests, magical charms and bewitched brews. All these are archetypal images, scenarios, forms and figures, which according to Carl G. Jung are projections of our subconscious and the collective unconscious.
These images not only appear in the Gilgamesh epos, the Icelandic Edda and the Bible, but also in the legends around King Arthur, in The Lord of the Ring by J. Tolkien and even in Star Wars. And what was it the druid put into the soup in the Asterix-comics that made the Gauls so immensely strong that they became invincible?

Could it be that the psychedelic experience is at the root of many of these stories and myths?
The author Aldous Huxley pointed, in `Doors of Perception' at the similarities between art, architecture, tapestry and jewelry and the visions one experiences during a trip. And it is a trip indeed, a fantastic voyage. Under the spell of the psychedelic one floats through doors and tunnels into enormous spaces with decorations and color-patterns, which look like temples or churches. The question is now what came first, the inner world or what was made and built in `reality'.
A trip to the mythic world of heraldic lore or ancient imagery with palaces, temples and strange surroundings is quite normal, but one also commonly reports a kind of mystic unity, a feeling of oneness.
Many users experience the trip as a mystical, spiritual experience; they make contact with the Godhead, the unmentionable. This is often accompanied with a feeling of union with all, the `unio mystica'. In this context one started calling certain substances as MDMA (XTC or ecstasy) and psilocybin `entheogens'; a means to come closer to the experience of the "Divine".

The step from divine miracle to a ritual using a psychedelic substance is not that far-fetched. The psychedelic can easily be seen as a teacher, a sacrament of transformation. Myths, legends, holy books - fantasy or reality - maybe they all contain a meta-message, a message that may be more easily perceived if one has had some experience of traveling the shadow-regions of the mind.
Are we really certain that Jesus and his disciples were drinking ordinary wine and were eating ordinary bread? We use beautiful words, like transsubstantiation, for what believers see as the `Body and the Blood of Christ' in the Communion. It all depends on the viewpoint; the psychedelic brew is a sacrament for the disciples of Santo Daime, but it is an illegal and dangerous potion for others.

Many feel the magic mushroom experience, as a somewhat guided tour to the magic wonderland inside. That's why we call the magic mushrooms `our little brothers' in this book. This is a strong image, which pictures the magic mushrooms as benevolent, friendly and also suggests that they can be helpful, that we are in a union with them to explore the real as well as the unreal.

It is certainly true that all this can be experienced by other means than psychedelics. Deep meditation, fasting, yoga practice, a vision quest in the desert, a lonely experience on a mountaintop, the challenging of dangers or the encounter with a totem-animal can also bring you into contact with this `other' world, which is so deep inside, but also weaves and shines through all if one cares to look for it or better, open up to it.
Carlos Castaneda wrote about this in an impressive way. His books about the sorcerer Don Juan provide a lot of information about the borderline between inner and outer reality.

The reality

It is a scary moment, when you realize, that you float into another state of being, a state of consciousness where you have a different experience of yourself.
Suddenly the world is no longer solid, known, stable; up and down, left and right, these divisions have no longer any significance.
Inner and outer merge. You think about something and there you see it, you focus your attention on a detail and in turn that takes the whole scope of your vision and then suddenly you are it. Confusing, scaring at times, but also fascinating for the psychonaut, the inner space cadet. You become aware of an ever-changing landscape where you, in a strange way, are both ruler and subject. You play a game and take a role, you know that it is a role, but you couldn't care less, as a young kitten chasing the tail of your own twisted thoughts.

And afterwards, when you look back, with both feet safely back on mother earth, then you may start doubting the solidity, the permanence, of what we perceive as the `ordinary' reality.
Are there indeed more colors, and what about the energy-patterns you saw, the glimpse of consciousness that smiled at you out of a leaf or a flower; what about these endless repetitive, but oh so well known, patterns? And what is reality? Is there - and that is something you experience during a trip - apart from this limited reality another, or infinite other realities? Or are all of them pieces of a total, ultimate reality? Does this really exist, or is it just another illusion?
These of course are questions that have intrigued people of all times and we can assume that we will not now or ever find the answers. We are human beings trapped in this reality, only with a lot of practice we may be able to lift this veil a bit, and then only to discover another cosmic egg to crack. During a trip we can have a glimpse of other worlds, an oceanic feeling comes up, where you actually see things different, but what actually is true remains very personal. You may believe in UFOs, angels, gnomes or fairies or have some real exchanges with strange entities, but hopefully you realize that you superimposed your own filter over those perceptions.

You see what you want to see, what you already know. You easily cover the truly unknown and unusual with your own personal interpretation and projection. It is not without reason that nowadays many people have encounters with extra-terrestrial and UFOs, while in the past they met with Gods, saints, holy men and religious figures and in a further past with fairies and nature-spirits. Maybe these are the same contacts with an unknown, unfathomable and strange energy, and we give just them or it a fashionable color or projection so we can more easily assimilate and integrate it.

The wise old men from the East already knew this; according to them nothing can be learned that is not already known. That sounds unrealistic, but has to do with the distinction between data and information. There is a lot of data out there, but only what truly reaches you and moves you can be seen as information.
The Internet is a very good example of this; there you will only find what you are looking for and what you more or less know.
The whole process of how information comes to us, how it is invited and filtered by our perception, how sometimes essential bits of info pop up magically, this is largely uncharted. The lack of deep understanding of how we internally make sense of this strange relationship between the inner and outer world is the true limit to `information technology' as it now exists. It could be, that in the psychedelic experience the secrets of this essential link are revealed, but as long as science and the Law regard this as a dangerous aberration, we will not really progress.

True aha-erlebnissen, new insights, not colored by our own projection are like mercy, a gift from heaven. In this respect one could call all real innovation, all expansion of perceived reality, (divine) art. It's the artist who pushes the boundaries of reality, not the scientist. [Saveourshrooms disagrees with this last sentence because in our opinion a scientist is an artist too; they are creative discoverers]