Psychedelic Soul Seeking

Doña Ines, Mazatec healer. Her altar contains magical implements, as well as psylocibe mushrooms and rum: the body and blood of Christ.

A vast assembly of Catholic saints were plastered over the wall in a kitsch, iconic collage. They implored me with shining eyes and rainbow-coloured halos. Candlelight danced over the simple wooden altar as Doña Ines, a Mazatec Indian healer, inscribed a cross on my scalp.

Grasping a rock of resinous incense in her wrinkled fingers, she anointed my hands, arms, face and feet. She deposited the yellowish gum in a dish of hot charcoal and it burned, releasing a serpentine plume of sweet-smelling smoke.

It was time.

Time for the Eucharist. Time for the sacred flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ – substantiated, consecrated and soon-to-be ingested.

For this was the rite of Holy Communion; the most hallowed Christian sacrament where nothing short of divine union was meant to be accomplished. But this was no ordinary Communion and no ordinary Eucharist.

For this was no body of bread offered unto me, but the flesh of wild, hallucinogenic fungi: psilocybe cubensis, magic mushrooms.

“Take.” Beseeched Doña Ines.

I lifted two mushrooms, made the sign of the cross and popped them into my mouth: heads, stems, earth and all….

In the secluded highlands of Oaxaca, southern Mexico, the Mazatec Indians have enjoyed an intimate relationship with magic mushrooms – known locally as ‘hongos’ or ‘sacred children’ – for centuries.

In their world view, mushrooms are not some illicit class-A substance, but benevolent spiritual teachers – gods who provide sacred knowledge and healing. So it has always been, throughout the rise and fall of Mesoamerica’s great civilisations, until the Spanish conquest changed everything. Outwardly at least.

Under the scrutiny of the Catholic church, the gods were recast as saints. Ritual mushroom consumption, formerly a shamanistic rite, assumed the trappings of a Christian communion. In these new guises, the mushrooms continued to heal, teach and inform for hundreds of years more.

And then in the 20th century, an outsider was permitted to ingest the sacred children and everything really changed.

That outsider was Gordon Wasson, a Wall Street banker and self-confessed ‘mycophile’ who – as much as Timothy Leary or Albert Hoffman – can be credited with initiating the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s.

“On the night of June 29-30, 1955, in a Mexican Indian village so remote from the world that most of the people still speak no Spanish, my friend Allan Richardson and I shared with a family of Indian friends a celebration of “holy communion” where “divine” mushrooms where first adored and then consumed….”

Wrote Wasson in a famous article for Life Magazine, ‘Seeking the Magic Mushroom’, published on 10th June 1957.

“…We chewed and swallowed these acrid mushrooms, saw visions, and emerged from the experience awestruck… Richardson and I were the first white men in recorded history to eat the divine mushrooms, which for centuries have been a secret of certain Indian peoples living far from the great world in southern Mexico….”

Now the secret was out and the remote Indian village of which he spoke – Huautla de Jimenez – would never be the same. Soon brash gringo hippies would descend en-masse, hungry for dazzling psychedelic experiences.

Maria Sabina, the healer who had supplied Wasson with his first trips, was destined to fulfil their needs. She is reputed to have led thousands of pilgrims through the mushroom ceremony known as a ‘velada’, John Lennon and Bob Dylan among them.

But as Huautla swelled with more and more visitors, the situation span out of control. The hippies – publicly intoxicated, scantily clad and practising free love in the fields – were forcibly expelled by the army in 1967, and again in 1969. Finally a road-block was installed to keep them out.

Sabina was exiled along with them. She died in 1985, disillusioned and impoverished, professing that westerners had forever corrupted the power of the mushrooms.

“From the moment the foreigners came to find God, the sacred children lost their purity,” she said. “… From now on, they will no longer have an effect. There is nothing one can do about it. Before Wasson, I felt that the sacred children elevated me. I no longer have that feeling. The force has diminished….”

Today, Sabina is a national folk hero. Her wizened face adorns t-shirts and posters in Oaxaca City’s tourist shops.

Today, the road-block has been lifted and Huautla de Jimenez is again welcoming seekers after knowledge – a new generation of drug tourists of which I had the dubious honour of belonging.

I reached Huautla one wet December morning, after a shuddering second-class bus ride on wildly convoluted mountain roads. After vacating the parched, cacti-spiked hills around Oaxaca City, I advanced higher and higher into the obscure Sierra Mazateca.

Exuberant cloud-forest immersed my vehicle which shook violently on busted suspension. Through the vaporous haze I beheld ominous, otherworldly forms. Swathes of greyish moss swayed from darkened, twisted branches, whilst scarlet bromeliads protruded like curious, alien antennae.

The fog did not abate as I arrived in Huautla, backpack in tow, peering down the muddy streets and wondering where to go. I was immediately approached by a tall man with sharp, bird-like features.

“You need a place to stay.” He said directly. “Come with me.”

He whistled shrilly and a white taxi, proudly emblazoned with a magic mushroom logo, emerged from the mist. We piled inside and the man, who introduced himself as Javier, began bantering with the driver in his native idiom.

A short while later we arrived. Javier led me up a slippery stone path to a large concrete building overlooking a puddle-filled courtyard.

“You stay here in the cabaña.” Said Javier, leading me to a musty, barn-like room. “Very cheap, eh. Backpackers like it here. Now the ceremony. You come talk to the boss.”

He ushered me out to a small, windowless annex which served as a temple. A cluttered altar was adorned with religious icons, candles and framed photos of local dignitaries, Maria Sabina among them.

“Good day,” announced a shrunken old woman, who had appeared suddenly at the door. She extended a right hand, feather-light, before the pair of them launched into an aggressive, grasping sales pitch. I would take the ceremony, they insisted. When would I take it? Tomorrow? Yes?

“I need to think about it.” I told them.

I broke away and took a breather, alone, back at the cabaña. The walls were covered in creepy, tripped-out graffiti:

‘In this place, all things are possible!’
‘He is the Life, the Light, the Way!’
‘I have seen the Truth and the Truth has set me free!’

I needed to get out. I needed a walk.

Huautla cascaded down the slopes of a valley with rusted roof-tops, bare platforms, pillars and protruding spikes. I traipsed along the fog-drenched streets where, at that sublime altitude, the atmosphere was tough on my lungs.

The roads, crossed overhead by a complex web of black telegraph wires, splintered erratically between stark grey buildings. Cramped, overgrown backyards were cluttered with washing lines and random objects – water butts, gas cans, potted plants and sheets of corrugated metal.

Huautla de Jimenez, drawing psychedlic seekers since 1960

I arrived at the main plaza, the Catholic church, then continued to the market and a dense network of alleys crowded with steam and smells.

I found a small restaurant and warmed my bones with several cups of cafe de olla – thick stewed coffee, sweetened with sugar and spices. When I returned to the cabaña long after dusk, a teenage boy approached me in the street.

“Hey,” he smiled hopefully. “Where are you going? You want hongos?”
“No.” I said.
“But why?” He cried. “Why not?”
“Because.” I told him. “Not tonight.”
“That’s okay.” He said. “You want to see a ceremony? You should really see it. I’ll take you there. What’s your name? I’m Nacho.”

Nacho led me to a small, plain house, across a darkened room and to a doorway hung with a curtain. He pulled it aside, passed through and beckoned me in. The room was dimly lit and swimming with peculiar, unearthly vibes.

Two pilgrims, North American tourists with obscenely dilated pupils, sat quietly on cushions. A middle-aged woman oversaw the proceedings with a proud but exhausted expression. Nacho introduced her as Doña Mica, the healer or cuarandera.

“Mica’s a great cuarandera,” said one of the pilgrims, Josh, a young Californian hippy with a frazzled smile. “This is my third ceremony here. I’ve had great experiences every time. Mica’s genuine. She never asks a fee. You pay what you can afford or whatever you want.”

“How many mushrooms have you had tonight?” I asked.

Josh started giggling. “I had a lot. But you don’t have to. You have as much as you want.”

“I only had a few.” Said Alice, the other pilgrim, an old Californian hippy. “Just enough to get a feel. I’m 45 years old now. I’m too old to get into psychedelics.”

“How have you found it?” I asked her.

“Really lovely. There’s a real nice family atmosphere here. People come and go. Now and then the kids come and say ‘hi’ and ask if you need anything. And all the time there’s Mica’s voice in the background, singing, guiding you through it. I feel, you know, very protected by her energy.”

I thanked everyone present, human and supernatural, and left for my musty cabaña. I had had two offers of ceremony since my arrival and I was starting to wonder just how authentic the fabled mushroom ritual could be.

“Urban mushroom seekers, often influenced by the likes of Carlos Casteneda, take the mushroom for different reasons than the locals,” said Dr Ben Feinberg, an anthropology professor at Warren Wilson college, North Carolina.

“ [they take them] to ‘find themselves,’ ‘find God,’ or simply to enjoy the overpowering visions and sensations for purely recreational purposes. Maria Sabina was puzzled by these motivations, but other curers have adapted these centuries-old rites to the new situation, often in quite creative ways.”

But are these rites authentic?

“‘Authentic’ is a tricky word.” Dr Feinberg told me. “One might say that curers who cater to foreigners like us are by definition inauthentic, or one could say that ‘authenticity’ changes and evolves along with the ritual.”

In the end, I didn’t take the ceremony with either Javier or Nacho. I sought out Doña Ines Rodriguez, a curandera who Dr Feinberg had recommended.

“I can conduct the ceremony, it’s possible,” smiled Doña Ines. “But you must observe the diet. No sexual relations for four days before and after the ceremony. And don’t eat for 24 hours prior. Otherwise you’ll go crazy.”

I followed the diet and arrived at her house the next evening, light-headed from fasting and nervous with expectation. She introduced her family, who welcomed me warmly, then took me to a temple occupying a backroom. After lighting candles and incense, Doña Ines intoned prayers, blessings and invocations.

Then she handed me a banana leaf filled with grey mushrooms – some small, some disgustingly large.

I ate them two at a time, each pair symbolising a male-female duality. I ingested over twenty, greedily, slightly ashamed under the gaze of the saints. Then Ines turned out the lights and sang Mazatec songs to summon the spirits.

I started feeling strange. My palms grew sweaty, my limbs filled with cramps. My neck, face and skull tightened as waves of nausea rolled through my guts. I had to lie down.

My vision shed its skin amid searing, rainbow flames. Tribal patterns – abstracted deer, jaguars and lizards – danced around me. Shimmering demons bowed down in reverence. Forms emerged rapidly, one after the next, beautiful and grotesque; all flowering, swelling, dying, decaying, scintillating.

The changes, the shifting sea of hallucinations was so violent, everything was impossible to catch.

I was soon adrift in an ocean of disconnected signs, symbols and images, utterly bereft of meaning. I asked questions: What is this? What is that? What does it mean? But it was all nothing and it meant nothing.

Nothing but a seductive spectacle, a projection of wily phantasms performing for my amusement. And I felt no sense of freedom, only deep futility. Impotence.

Ines emerged from the darkness, her face rippling with criss-cross patterns. She rubbed tobacco on my arms, head and stomach and covered me with blankets. Then she left me alone with my ghosts.

I watched my visions rise and fall, swell and contract, glimmer and fade, deriving only superficial pleasure from their frivolous antics.

Hours later, towards dawn, when my body had metabolised the last of the sacred children, my mind calmed to normality. Ines appeared from the next room and we concluded the ceremony with a prayer and a shot of sweet rum – the blood of Christ.

I felt depressed. Like some slick Hollywood movie, my trip had been all form and no substance. The mushrooms had, however, confronted me with a grim truth: I was, at heart, a shallow, godless westerner.

I was the product of a fading, self-centred civilisation, irredeemably materialistic and utterly irreconcilable with God. The mysteries of the soul, the greatest secrets of the universe, were not for my kind. No magic pill could fix that.

I had been concerned with the ritual’s authenticity when I should have been concerned with my own. It was not a spiritual dawn, only a rude awakening.