Flesh of the Gods: Ritual Use of Hallucinogens

330 Pages·1972·15.944 MB·English

by  Peter T. Furst

~··
Flesh of the Gods
THE RITUAL USE OF HALLUCINOGENS
EDITED BY
PETER T. FURST
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PR~-\EGER PUBLISHERS
1\l eu• }' ork • W a.shington
BOOKS THAT MATTER
Published in the United States of America in 1972
by Praeger Publishen. Inc.
Ill Fourth Avenue. New York, N.Y. 10003
@ 1972 by Praeger Publishen, Inc.
Chapten 6 and 7 © 1972 by R. Gordon Wasson
All rights reseroed
Library of Congre11 Catalog Card Number: 78-143970
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
..
Introduction Peter T. Furst
Vll
1. An Overview of Hallucinogens in the Western Hemisphere
Richard Evans Schultes
2. Tobacco and Shamanistic Ecstasy Among the Warao Indians
of Venezuela johannes Wilbert
55~
J. The Cultural Context of an Aboriginal Hallucinogen:
Baniste·riopsis Caapi Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatof/
4. The San Pedro Cactus in Peruvian Folk Healing
Douglas Sharon
114
5. To Find Our Life: Peyote Among the Huichol Indians of
Mexico Peter T. Furst
6. The Divine l\fushroom of Immortality R. Gordon ·Wasson
7. What Was the Soma of the Aryans? R. Gordon Wasson
8. Ritual Use of Cannabis Sativa L.: A Historical-Ethnographic
Survey William A. Emboden, Jr.
9. Tabernanthe Jboga: Narcotic Ecstasis and the Work of the
Ancestors ]ames W. Fernandez
10. Hallucinogens and the Shamanic Origins of Religion
Weston La Ba'n'e 261-
Bibliography
Index
The C ontri butoTs
PETER T. FURST
Introduction
Any social phenomenon that achieves a certain
significance warrants systematic and dispassionate scientific inquiry, in
the hope that we may understand its norms or laws, minimize its potential
hazards for individuals and society, and maximize its potential benefits.
Hallucinogens-i.e., nonaddictive narcotics that apparently act on the
mental processes in such a way as to induce temporary '"altered states
of consciousness," as distinct from the dangerous addictive narcotics such
as heroin-are clearly such a phenomenon. Yet it is a fact of American
life that legal restrictions imposed since the 1960's have seriously impeded
legitimate scientific research on these substances while barely affecting
uncontrolled experimentation beyond raising its social costs. To a great
extent this is the consequence of emotional public reaction to the near
messianic claims made by some researchers for LSD as a kind of panacea,
without sufficient attention to its possible risks, and to its ready assimila
tion as "instant chemical religion" by a youth subculture already
alienated from the traditional values of their elders. Ironically, this
same older generation itself continues to be firmly committed to the use
of a staggering amount of legal, though hardly less potentially dangerous,
stimulants and depressants. In any case, even if all the scientific data in
the world had declared one or another hallucinogen to be safe within
certain limits, it is unlikely that the reaction of the larger society to
these "new" drugs would have been very different, for the reason th~t
the mystical and introspective aspects of drug use run counter to certain
long-accepted values of Western culture, especially its action- and
achievement-oriented North American variant.
In the meantime, notwithstanding horror stories of broken chromo
somes, stoned teenagers permanently blinded by staring into the sun,
Vll
...
Introduction
Vlll
and LSD-related death leaps fro1n high places, it has becon1e increasingly
dear that the effects of hallucinogens are subject to a wide variety of
extra-pharmacological variables that require rigorous scientific control.
Like any human artifact, these potent substances-\vhether synthesized
in the laboratory, like LSD, or collected from nature, like morning-glory
seeds (whose active principles are somewhat similar to LSD)-have
potential for good and evil. '\Vhich it is to be depends as much on '·vho
uses them, in what contexts, for what purposes, and under what kinds
of control as it does on the substance itself.
These would not seem to be such revolutionary conclusions and indeed
should have been widely accepted had there been systematic study of
the numerous non-Western • cultural contexts in which hallucinogens
have been used for centuries. For, as Harvard botanist Richard Evans
Schultes points out in these pages, hallucinogens have been part and
parcel of man's cultural baggage for thousands of years; moreover, as
the other contributors to this volume document, hallucinogenic or psy
choactive plants have been of great significance in the ideology and
religious practices of a wide variety of peoples the world over, and in
some traditional cultures continue to play such a role today. The native
peoples of the New World, especially those of Middle and South America,
alone utilized nearly a hundred different botanical species for their
psychoactive properties, not counting the scores of plants used for
the brewing of alcoholic beverages to induce ritual intoxication. Anthro
pologist Weston La Barre (whose approach to the origins of religion
is thoroughly naturalistic and strongly oriented toward the Freudian
view of man) attributes this phenomenon to a kind of cultural pro
gramming for personal ecstatic experience reaching back to the American
Indians' ideological roots in the shamanistic religion of the Upper
Paleolithic and Mesolithic hunting and gathering cultures of north
eastern Asia. If La Barre is right-and the cumulative evidence tends to
support him-this would take the practice and, more important, its
philosophical underpinnings back at least fifteen or twenty thousand
years, an estimate that if anything may be too conservative.
Perhaps the discovery that certain substances found in nature help
man to move beyond his everyday experiences to .,Otherworlds" and the
institutionalizing of these personal ecstatic experiences into an ideological
and ritual framework accepted by the group as a whole (i.e., religion,
but not necessarily an organized cult) goes back almost to the beginnings
of human culture. Shamanism as a universal Ur-religion, which eventually
•ID the cultural, not the geographic sense-i.e., societies that, like those of the
lndiant ~ the ~c:s~rn Hemisphere, neither belong to the Judea-Christian religious
and ethical tradU1ona nor trace the mainstream of their ideas tu Greco-Rom au or
DOI'tbern European 10urca.
1n troduction
bt
gave rise to various cults, including the great world religions, must reach
deep into the Paleolithic-at least as far back as the oldest known
deliberate interments of the dead by Neanderthal man, ca. 100,000
years ago, and perhaps hundreds of thousands of years earlier. The
striking similarities between the basic premises and motifs of shamanism
the world over suggest great antiquity as well as the universality of the
creative unconscious of the human psyche.
Wherever shamanism is still encountered today, whether in Asia,
Australia, Africa, or North an(_ South America, the shaman functions
fundamentally in much the same way and with similar techniques-as
guardian of the psychic and ecological equilibrium of his group and
its members, as intermediary between the seen and unseen worlds,
as master of spirits, as supernatural curer, etc. He seeks to control the
weather and to ensure the benevolence of ancestor spirits and deities.
Where hunting continues to have importance (ideologically or eco
nomically), he ensures, by means of his special powers and his unique
psychological capacity to transcend the human condition and pass
freely back and forth through the different cosmological planes (as these
are conceived in the particular world view of his group), the renewal of
game animals and, indeed, of all nature.
I would not wish to give the impression that all scholars are agreed
on the antiquity of the "psychedelic phenomenon" in shamanism. The
well-known historian of religion Mircea Eliade, for one, has suggested
that the use of narcotics and alcohol to trigger ecstatic trance states
represents a relatively recent degeneration of shamanic technique and
that only the "spontaneous" religious experience, without the use of
chemicals, can be considered "pure" (Eliade, 1964:401). In fact, however,
it is difficult to distinguish phenomenologically between so-called
spontaneous religious experiences (often the result of extreme physi
ological or psychological stress) and those that are pharmacologically
induced. In any event, the linguistic, archaeological, historical, ~nd
ethnographic evidence tends to support the view of some ethnobotamsts
and anthropologists, this writer included, that the widespread contem
porary use of botanical hallucinogens, fermented beverages, and tobacco
in New World shamanism does in fact have its remote origins in Old
World Paleolithic and Mesolithic shamanism, and that the Pale<>
Indian immigrants into North America came culturally predisposed
toward a conscious exploration of their new environment ~or psycho
tropic plants. This view is supported by the fact that VU"tually all
?allucinogenic plants are extremely bitter and un~leasant .to the taste,
tf not actually nauseating. and that many spec1es requue c?mplex
pharn1acnlogical preparation in order to be effective, thus reductng the
likdihood of chance discovery in the course of the everyday food quest.
Introduction
X
If R. Gordon Wasson is right (and n1any scholars find his argu1nents
-not to be confused with John Allegro's fanciful assertions in The
Sacred Mushroom and the Cross-persuasive), on linguistic grounds alone
we can assume that the ritual use of the Amanita muscaria, or fly
agaric, mushroom must go back at least seven thousand years, eventually
spreading from Siberia to India. There it came to be immortalized
in the second millennium B.c. as the divine Soma of the Rig-Veda of the
ancient Indo-Europeans. There is reason to believe that the ambrosia
imbibed by the gods and heroes of Greek mythology was likewise a
decoction of Amanita muscaria, which gives the Mediterranean of the
first millennium s.c. something in common with Siberia, where travelers
and ethnographers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
observed the ritual use of the sacred red-capped mushroom by shamans
of hunting and reindeer-herding tribes.
As for New World mushrooms, from archaeological, historical, and
ethnographic evidence we know that various species of psychotropic
fungi have been in uninterrupted use in Middle America for at least
three thousand years. It is also becoming evident that the ritual inges
tion of hallucinogenic mushrooms-known to the Aztecs as
teonanacatl~
or god's flesh-was far more widespread in ancient than
~fesoamerica
is suggested by the limited distribution of archaeological mushroom
effigy stones in southeastern Mexico and Guatemala. There was also
apparently a shamanistic "mushroom cult" in western Mexico, where
mushroom representations dating to ca. A.D. I 00-200, have been found,
and where a tradition of mushroom use among neighboring non-Huichol
people in the state of Jalisco still persists among the contemporary
Huichol. Recently also, two students of Michael D. Coe at Yale Uni
versity, Allen Turner and Barbara Rich, discovered a present-day ritual
use of hallucinogenic mushrooms among the Chol-speaking Maya, who
live near the ancient Maya ceremonial center of Palenque, Chiapas
(M. D. Coe, personal communication). Surprisingly, in view of the many
decades of intensive Maya studies, this is the first report of ritual
ingestion of psychotropic fungi among any of the modern descendants
of the builders of one of the most advanced civilizations of ancient
America. Considering the persistence of other pre-Hispanic traditions
among Maya-speakers, the present-day custom may well have its origins
in Classic or Post-Classic Maya ritual; perhaps, as Coe suggests, the
anist-priests of Palenque itself found inspiration for their magnificent
creations in mushroom-induced supernatural visions.
For peyote there is evidence in the pre-Columbian funerary art of
western Mexico dating back almost two thousand years. The sacred
morning-glory, whose hallucinogenic seeds were known to the Aztecs as
ololiuqui, is not only represented in murals at and near Teotihuac'lrl
Introduction
XI
(very prominently in the "Paradise of Tlaloc" mural at Tepantitla
[A.D. 400-500?]), but appears on many painted pottery vessels of the
Teotihuacan civilization (Furst, 1970). North of Mexico the Mescal or
Red Bean cult, involving the seeds of the Sophora secundiflora shrub
roa y well be as old as six or seven thousand years, judging from archae~
ological evidence found in Texas caves. These same rock shelters also
contain numerous esoteric polychrome paintings of considerable com
plexity, which Newcomb (1967:65-80) attributes to shamans who depicted
their hallucinogenic trance experiences.
This interpretation of archaeological petroglyphs finds some support
in analogous ethnographic data from South America, for Reichel
Dolmatoff (1967) reports that contemporary animal art on the rock
faces of the Vaupes region of Colombia is the work of shamans in their
supernatural trance encounters with the MClster of Animals. In this
connection, it is of interest that the same author demonstrates in the
following pages a direct relationship between common South American
Tukano art syl)lbols and the psychedelic yaje experience. We do not, of
course, know when yaje was discovered, but for another widespread South
American custom, the inhaling of hallucinogenic snuff, we have evidence
dating to 1800 B.c. in the form of a whalebone snuffing tablet and bird
bone snuffing tube found by Junius Bird in the preceramic Peruvian
coastal site of Huaca Prieta. San Pedro (Trichocereus pachanoi), a
mescaline-containing cactus of the Cereus family whose ritualized use
by contemporary Peruvian folk healers Douglas Sharon describes, is
depicted on ceremonial and burial textiles of the Chavfn culture of
Peru, which flourished in the first millennium B.c. At least three thousand
years before Americans were lighting up annually over 530 billion
cigarettes, American Indians were using tobacco strictly for ritual pur
poses. As anthropologist Johannes Wilbert documents in this book, some
Indian societies still use tobacco to achieve states of altered consciousness
and ecstasy similar to those induced elsewhere with peyote, mushrooms,
morning-glories, or, for that matter, LSD. It is not certain how long
sub-Saharan African peoples have known the hallucinogenic iboga pla~t,
whose contemporary role in Fang culture is described by anthropologtst
James W. Fernandez, but its use doubtless predates the first European
mention of it in the nineteenth century.
What is new, then, is not the discovery of substances in nature. that
act powerfully on the mind and are capable of triggering .visual, auditory,
olfactory, and tactile sensations which the user expenences as s~~r­
natural phenotnena belonging to the "Otherworld," the realm of splnts.
As Schultes says, what is new is only their fascination for Western
Tnan and the r~1edical, legal, and social consequences of their use by a
con~idcrablc proportion of the population-by no means all of them
Introduction
lUI
under thirty. If I seem to be implying that when ~iddle-class An1ericans
of whatever age make pilgrimages to Oaxaca, Mexico, to parta~e of the
mysterious powers of the sacred n1ushroon1 they are only doing. what
Mexican Indians have been doing for thousands of years, that not
IS
my intention, nor is it the theme of this ~ook. ~ ndeniably,. there are
both external and internal aspects of halluCinogeniC drug use tn contem
porary Western culture that recall elements of their use in ~a~iti~~al
non-Western magico-religious contexts. Some of these simtlanues
-··spontaneous ritualization" (see footnote, p. 229), for example, or the
\\~ll-known custom of sharing, which reminds one of the institutionalized
sharing of peyote among the Huichol-may be superficial. But the
observations of the Czechoslovakian psychoanalyst Stanislav Grof, among
others, are more significant. The work of Gro£ at the Psychiatric Re
search Center in Prague from 1960 to 1967 involved some fifty patients
who underwent a total of 2500 individual LSD sessions in a project
designed to study the possibility of the use of LSD for personality
diagnostics and therapy of psychogenic disorders. In the course of these
sessions patients reported religious experiences and phenomena that,
J
according to Grof, resembled the basic tenets initially of the udeo
Christian, and then increasingly of the Oriental religions (e.g., bloody
sacrifice, suffering and agony leading to deatht rebirth and some great
good for mankind, cosmic union, eternal circulation of life, etc.)
as well as some familiar elements from American Indian religions,
particularly those of sacrifice for the ultimate good of man and the gods. •
The best-known case here would be Aztec religion, but the theme of
sacrifice from which flows a great good for mankind is a prominent
feature in many other aboriginal New World religions (as, indeed,
in Christianity). Reichel-Dolmatoff's account of the mythic origin of
'Yaje in these pages is an example; another is the symbolic killing and
dismembennent of the Deer-Peyote and the sharing of its "flesh" on
the Huichol peyote hunt, described in my anicle.
To be sure, Grofs experimental drug therapy involved mature
patients and rigorously controlled administrations of LSD "in the fra~e­
work of psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy" (Grof, 1970a:57),
but ordinary users have reported similar experiences, a phenomenon
t~t ?as in~~ired the extravagant claim that the LSD trip is a "religious
ptlgrun~t~e. The observed connection between the psychedelic experience
and rebgious ecstasy notwithstanding, there are fundamental differences
• ~~though ~rora su.bjects were generally well educaterl, they were not personally
~~1ar-ana~nly not m any ~th-with the content or symbols of those non-Wesrcrn
ICJODI. Their common cxpencnces are therefore of more than passing interest, nor
ODI• lor the . . f 1' '
lor r or1g1na o rc 1g10n but for our understanding of the unconsdou~: Grof,
~· ~ to feel_ that the Prague study validated the Jungian approad1 more
thaa 1l did the frewhan.
Introduction
xiii
that set the traditional magico-religious use of hallucinogens a an.
Thes~ psyche~elic
have. to do above all with a basic function of the
~xp~r.Ience ~n non-Western cultures-to facilitate the integration of the
tndn•1dual tnto the total society and the values by which it lives, as
opposed to the association of hallucinogens in Western cultures with
a.lienatio? and rejection of the corrupted values of the parental genera
tion. Th~s aspect of the sacred hallucinogens emerges especially clearly
from ~eichel-Dolmatofl's essay: the Indian, by taking the hallucinogen,
expenences first death and then rebirth "in a state of wisdom"-i.e., as a
full-fledged member of his tribe. Having seen and experienced the super
naturals and the mythological events of tribal tradition with his own
eyes and other senses in the yaje trance, "he is ... convinced of the truth
of his religious system."
This is precisely the purpose of the Huichol peyote quest: ••Eat
peyote," the officiating shaman urges his companions, ··so that you will
learn what it is to be Huichol." Be it mushrooms, yaje, peyote, tobacco,
or iboga the psychoactive plant in the traditional culture transpons
1
the user to a "land beyond," whose geography he already knows because
he has heard it described innumerable times before; what he finds "on
the other side" substantiates the validity of tradition-i.e., the values
of the parental generation. He already has the answers, so that for him
the psychedelic experience is in part, at least, a quest for their confirma
tion. It is the means to a known end, not, as for so many youthful
devotees of the Western cult of psychedelia, an end in itself.
This, of course, goes to the heart of the matter-who uses drugs and
for what purpose in Western as opposed to non-Western, or traditional,
society. In The Making of the Counter Culture (1969), Theodore
Roszak agrees that the psychedelic experience can bear .. significant
fruit when rooted in the soil of a mature and cultivated mind" (or, one
might add, the mind of a young Indian who is a full and .co~cious
participant in his ancestral culture). The danger, he argues, lies tn the
fact that the experience has been
laid hold of by a generation of youngsters who are pathetically a-cult~ral
and who often bring nothing to the experience but a vacuous yearntng.
They have, in adolescent rebellion, thrown off the corrupted culture of
their elders and along with that soiled bath water, the very body of the
Western heritag;-at best, in favor of exotic traditions they only marginally
understand; at worst, in favor of an introspective chaos in w~ich the. seven
teen or eighteen years of their unformed lives ftoat like atoms ID a VOid.
Roszak's indictment may be too sweeping-one cannot ignore the ele
tnents of a typical crisis cult in the psychedelic movement among the
vuuug, and certainlv not all seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds, eve?,
- ' k •• thetically a-cultural
antong tho~c who use drugs or smo e pot, are pa