Finding the Others: Friends, Forces and Figures of the Psychedelic Era, Its Traditions, and Its Renaissance
By Ronald W. McNutt, attorney at law, September 2021.
Ron McNutt has been an attorney in Nashville for thirty-eight years. After two federal judicial clerkships, he practiced civil rights litigation for plaintiffs for ten years in a minority-owned law firm. His recent career has been involved in workers’ compensation cases. While earning his undergraduate degree in religion from Tufts University in 1978, Ron organized and led a student organization, the Tufts Altered States of Consciousness Organization, which hosted lectures by speakers in the field of religious and transformative experience through psychedelics, marijuana, meditation, and by other means. After college, he worked for almost two years as a mental health worker at a state mental hospital in Boston. During that time, he attended group psychotherapeutic sessions with Salvador Roquet. In 1983, he graduated from the University of Georgia School of Law. During law school, Ron was the executive research editor of the Georgia Law Review and wrote a research paper, “The Free Exercise Clause and Religious Use of Psychedelics.” He is a certified lay pastor with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and has a certificate in teaching English as a second language.
The following brief profiles of individuals are derived from “Psychedelic Spotlight” segments and research that Ron has done for Soul Quest Ayahuasca Church of Mother Earth online services since September 2020. They feature several people who figure prominently in the world of psychedelics and plant medicine. For context, this paper offers some brief introductions describing medicine traditions that make religious use of psychedelics, a review of recent scientific studies of the potential benefits of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, and a brief overview of constitutional and legal protection of religious use of psychedelics.
Reviewing the sources for these histories for the Psychedelic Spotlight segments led me to realize that my views are constricted by the lens of the western outlook, a one-sided viewpoint that accentuates the experience of people who record the experiences of Indigenous people and that my approach therefore tends to appropriate and discount the true sources of these discoveries. Fortunately, many of the figures in these accounts have pointed this out and express gratitude and appreciation for the vast knowledge of the keepers of these medicines, and how western culture has suppressed and persecuted these traditions.
Some of the people who benefit from psychedelic medicines may overcome past trauma or they may live lives more fully invested in the activities that bring joy or the work that manifests greater creativity. Whether individuals use psychedelic medicines in the context of western psychotherapy, in ceremonial religious traditions, or outside legally-sanctioned settings, these entheogens have provided healing of trauma, helped people overcome depression and addiction, and have served to promote “the betterment of well people,” to use the term of Robert Jesse. Experiences with these agents of change can help people feel inspired to contribute to their communities, participate in sustainable projects, raise families and deepen relations, and humbly devote themselves to positive socially-responsible work.
The psychedelic journey can lead you to identify and embrace another “you” that is wounded where it meets you, but which is vast and conscious and beyond space and time. The experience can lead to a suspension of the sense of self and bring about possible ego dissolution, a feeling of oneness, like what could result from prolonged prayer or a vision quest. Scientists and clinicians in the field allow the process to be directed from within the subject as part of a natural process. Somehow, the Spirit knows us better than we know ourselves and provides healing encounters by allowing a suspended ego to stand by as unconscious material manifests experiences and realizations that can be life-enhancing with appropriate preparation and integration.
Research is proving the benefit of psychedelics in helping relieve treatment resistant depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, and promoting spiritual experiences that ease the fear of death. The recent successful results of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in phase 3 clinical trials have been celebrated and heavily covered in the press and come after other successful results such as promising findings in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2021 proving that psilocybin shows effectiveness with treatment-resistant depression.
Some medicine traditions
In the 1978 book The Road to Eleusis, Dr. Carl A. P. Ruck, a classics professor at Boston University, conducted historical research with Albert Hofmann, the chemist who discovered LSD and synthesized psilocybin, and R. Gordon Wasson. Their research delved into the experiences and the veiled writings and artistic depictions, and with Dr. Hofmann’s knowledge of chemistry, they argued persuasively how the ancient Greeks apparently employed a potent hallucinogen in the Eleusinian Mysteries. This was called the kykeon libation. It was shrouded in history due to traditions of secrecy, but they conclude that it was a psychedelic which had lysergic acid, the psychedelic component of the sacred morning glories, Ololiuqui, employed for religious use in Central America, and a basis for the components of LSD. Their research concluded that the sacrament used in the Eleusinian Mysteries could have been from a variety of an ergot of grass, Paspalum distichem, or varieties of wheat and barley ergot, Claviceps paspali or Claviceps purporea. These varieties could have grown nearby to Eleusis on the Rarian Plains. can have water-soluble hallucinogenic alkaloids that they could drink as a libation that would not have the harmful and often deadly alkaloids so dangerous in ergotism.
The ritual pilgrimages in Eleusis took place from 1600 B.C. to 392 C.E., part of an annual festival led by or hierophants or priests. Dr. Ruck, in Persephone’s Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion. There were lesser and greater mysteries for the initiates, honoring agriculture and nourishing the cycles of the harvest and death and rebirth. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, from about 700 B.C., includes a description of elements from the mysteries, water, mint, and barley in a potion, used to celebrate the reuniting of Demeter, the goddess of the earth, with her daughter, Persephone, the goddess of grain, with an Eleusinian reconciliation to nourish the cycles with fertility and sacrifice and mediate a transition between Hades and Olympia. Dr. Ruck wrote that this sacred tradition included the gift of Demeter of a stalk of grain to King Triptolemus and instruction on how to conduct the mysteries, “holy rites that are awesome, that no one may transgress nor reveal nor express in words, for an overwhelming reverence for the gods stops his voice.” Allusions to the profanation of these mysteries, by wealthy aristocrats conducting them in their homes, were included in a play by Aristophenes, a comedy performed in 414 B.C. called The Birds. One of the individuals he ridiculed was Alcibiades, a disciple of Socrates, according to Dr. Ruck. The culmination of the Mystery was “an overwhelming vision of spiritual presences demonstrating the relationship of the living and the dead.” It reaffirmed the forward progress of society, employing an entheogen of choice that was safe to use by those who knew its secrets, and celebrated the myth of Demeter and Persephone. The participants received visions through a libation sacrament employed to evoke a beatific vision that affirmed the continuity of life and celebrated the cycle of seasons. The visions sustained a culture and a spiritual renewal but were lost to time amidst the transformation of Europe.
Peyote:
Peyote has been in use ceremonially for 5000 years. Articles in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology in 2005 and in The Lancet in 2002 describe how team of scientists from Sweden and the Netherlands proved that Native Americans used peyote as long as 5700 years ago. They did a chemical analysis of two dried peyote buttons in the collection of the Witte Museum in San Antonio thought to be from the Shumla Cave number five on the Rio Grande. Using radiocarbon dating and alkaloid analysis, their age was identified as being between 3780 to 3660 B.C. The analysis found alkaloids of mescaline. Some samples from an archeological site in Coahuila, Mexico showed peyote with radiocarbon testing dated to 810 to 1070 C.E., about 1000 years old.
The Huichols of Mexico practice the oldest current tradition of religious usage of peyote. Their practices include going from their various mountain villages on annual pilgrimages in groups to harvest peyote and visit their sacred ancestral land. Their harvest rituals include ceremonially hunting the peyote, calling it the little deer, and they offer prayers to it and thanks for its body and its spiritual essence. The pilgrims will take on alternative or backwards identities. They dress very traditionally and strive to be united in a spiritual presence and make contact with their ancestors. When they consume it, they communicate through the fire after they undergo purification through long chanting near a fire. They do careful introspection around a fire and there was a time for private vision.
When Frederick Law Olmsted traveled to San Antonio before the Civil War, he recorded how the Indians at the Alamo Mission would use peyote, to the displeasure of the clerics. American Indians continue the tradition more formally. The Native American Church of North America has a sacrament with sunset to sunrise, taking peyote and having sustaining visions and love that draws the community together. Quanah Parker and John Wilson, two early organizers of the peyote religion that spread among the plains Indians in the late 1800s, are profiled below. The Native American Church of North America is composed of many tribes with similar traditions, embracing profound respect for the higher power that helps draw the communities together with mutual respect through their vision. The ecstatic renewal is the root of lives of love and service.
Dr. Harvey Cox, a retired professor at the Harvard Divinity School, participated in the peyote ritual of the Huichol Indians of north and central Mexico. He described a week he had spent two years earlier. Their tradition includes their annual pilgrimage to harvest peyote in the desert, which they associate with their origins and their ancestors. It would take from four to six weeks for them to travel there and back from the mountains, and would involve becoming part of an inverse world and identity for that period. Dr. Cox stated that in the ritual to partake of peyote with them, they would observe a period of purification, preparation and prayer. For part of his journey, the leaders encouraged him to participate alone and to have his own visions; because he had his own traditions, they did not feel capable of guiding him at that point. He felt that the fire was communing with him, and he felt a message from the morning star that it was mediating the energy of the universe to him. Dr. Cox reflected that he had become more receptive to other forms of religious experiences as a result, and that the range of possible experiences of the sacred had grown for him.
Created in 2017, the Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative was formed to preserve and enhance the access of Native Americans to their ancestral peyote medicine. The supply gardens of Mexico and Texas were depleted and in need of regeneration. The initiative seeks to regenerate peyote sources through acquiring land and promotion of regrowth. Initiatives in Mexico seek to preserve the sacred lands for the Huichol to gather their sacrament.
San Pedro:
An ancient stone carving of a spirt entity holding a stalk of the San Pedro cactus. It is a glyph or stone relief excavated at a temple in the northern highlands of Peru from the Chavin culture of Peru. It has serpentine hair and a serpent belt, fangs, and harpy eagle claws. It is the earliest depiction of a relationship with this mescaline-containing plant, and shows that San Pedro cactus was revered by South American cultures as early as 1300 B.C. Ceramics from later cultures of the area from 1000 B.C. to 700 B.C. and textiles hundreds of years old also show images of the cactus. Anthropologists Douglas Sharon and Dr. Christopher Donnan state that this tall cactus grows from sea level to altitudes of 3000 meters. Its use was widespread in the regions of the Andes mountains and it was in cultivation but encountered severe persecution after the Spanish conquest, beginning with a campaign to extirpate “idolatry” in the 1600s. In 1920, botanists described and classified the cactus when it was found in the Andean region of Ecuador, and later located in northern Peru and Bolivia. It was in cultivation on the Peruvian coast by 200 B.C.
The magico-religious tradition extended to modern times and continues among Mestizo practitioners, using a combination of pre-Columbian and European cultural influences. Some centers in Peru combine the practices of ayahuasca medicine with sessions with San Pedro. San Pedro is easy to cultivate in the United States so long as it is not exposed to freezing temperatures. It provides a very effective experience with mescaline alkaloids without imposing on the diminishing supply of peyote, although it does not share the entire range of alkaloids. Depletion of the sacred medicine supplies of peyote is an ethically-troubling problem and principles of reciprocity and equity counsel a respectful approach to reserve access to the peyote for its original medicine-keepers in the absence of abundant supplies.
The San Pedro cactus is cut and boiled for about seven hours and concentrated for consumption at night. It is an active sacrament that is part of a folk healing tradition used in Peru, and its use no longer is considered to be a product of Spanish colonialism. E. Wade Davis produced a paper in 1983, “Sacred Plants of the San Pedro Cult,” based on fieldwork he conducted in 1981 with Maestro don Pancho Guarnizo in the Huancabamba valley in the mountains of northern Peru, and a 1982 book, Eduardo el Curandero: The Words of a Peruvian Healer, describe an elaborate ritual cleansing and healing tradition with San Pedro night time ceremonies. The maestros would prepare unique power altars on the ground, called mesas, assembling power objects such as staffs of wood, swords, bones, crystals, old ceramics, and images of Catholic saints on a mesa, with offerings of agua florida and agua cananga, with purifications of tobacco, jerking and shaking movements, and benedictions.
Dr. Davis wrote that don Pancho drew participants from great distances for his healing powers using the cactus to diagnose the sources of illness, troubles, and problems in relations, often with a magical source, such as sorcerers, and to prescribe cures with plant remedies and pilgrimages to a lake area, Las Huaringas, for spiritual transformation. The practices include traditions derived from colonial contact and the pressures of acculturation that make the ancient tradition hard to trace. Dr. Davis interpreted the fact that there was an undisturbed quarter acre of San Pedros near the area, which was avoided because of the belief that a spirit guardian, a serpent, would afflict people who intruded on the area with a terrible skin problem, verruga, which had been a horrible disease that afflicted Pizarro’s troops during the colonial invasion of the Inca. The presence of understandings of spirit guardians and the dichotomy of healing and harming powers indicated the origin of the practices prior to the colonial influences.
The current San Pedro healing tradition is described by Sergey Baranov, the founder of Huachuma Wasi, a retreat center in Peru’s Sacred Valley. He has written about his training by Peruvian and Mexican ceremonial healers in his recent books including The Mescaline Confession: Breaking Through the Walls of Delusion and Cactus of Sanity: Huachuma In A Time of Chaos.
Psilocybin:
Ancient sculptures show that sacred mushrooms were used in central America and Mexico for thousands of years, as early as 1000 B.C. A cave drawing 7000 years old in present day Algeria shows a mushroom shaman with the mask of a bee. Historical literature indicates that Maria Sabina’s tradition goes back before the Spanish conquest. A book in 1629 of collections from Nahuatl had descriptions of the same pattern of chanting by Indians of that day — professions of humility and being able to talk to supernatural beings, a book of knowledge that was gifted from long before. She and her people believed that a youthful man that later became identified as Christ brought the sacred mushrooms, or saint children as a gift and that they sprang up from where his blood would drop.
Spanish writings in the 1500s from Francisco Hernandez, a physician in the court of the King, and Bernardino Sahagun, a Franciscan friar, and another friar, Diego Duran, described the sacred mushroom divination rituals. The severe repression of the Inquisition led to the tradition becoming obscured in secrecy to outsiders. Ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes wrote a leaflet for the Harvard Botanical Museum in 1939 and another in 1940 for the American Anthropologist publication after having obtained specimens of the mushrooms, which included information about the early Spanish chroniclers. He had been informed about the mushrooms by Dr. Blas Pablo Reko, an Austrian physician, and he had traveled to Huatla de Jiminez in Oaxaca in 1937 and 1938. In 1952, Robert Graves wrote to R. Gordon Wasson and Tina Wasson, who were investigating the role of mushrooms in society. On August 15, 1953, while traveling with Roberto Weitlaner, they had a session with don Aurelio Carreras in Huatla de Jiminez, with his son Demetrio serving as interpreter. The shaman consumed about 13 pairs of mushrooms and quietly smoked a cigar, while providing telepathic information to the Wassons about their son, his whereabouts and future involvement with the military, and the approaching death of a relative.
The American public learned of the revelation of the sacred mushroom ceremony when Gordon Wasson and photographer Allan Richardson revealed a June 1955 velada or sacred mushroom ceremony led by Maria Sabina in a Life magazine article in 1957. They had participated in the ritual themselves. Mr. Wasson was inspired by the fantastic effects and concluded that humans exploring foods in ancient times would have encountered the mushrooms and that the impact “could only have been profound, a detonator to new ideas.” He wrote that when Cortez conquered Mexico, his followers noticed the Aztecs eating mushrooms in a religious setting and calling them God’s flesh or teonanacatl. He described art works in the region going back to a thousand years earlier, such as mushroom stones in Guatemala. In addition to Central American mushroom stones 1000 years old, the ceremonial use of psilocybin mushrooms is apparently depicted on the Aztec Prince of flowers, a seated divine male figure, carved in stone during the 1500s, with stylized mushrooms on its body, along with tobacco, ololiuqui, the hallucinogenic morning glory, and Helma salicifolia.
Gordon and Valentina Wasson continued to travel to Mexico, and in 1956, Roger Heim, the director of the French Museum of Natural History and a leading researcher on mycology, traveled with them. After Tina Wasson’s death in 1958, Dr. Heim returned with Gordon Wasson in 1959 and 1961, and in 1962, Albert Hofmann and his wife Anita traveled there. A 1958 recording with translations from the Mazatec language, released as Maria Sabina and her Mazatec Mushroom Velada, was his proudest accomplishment among many discoveries. An excellent source about these discoveries is The Sacred Mushroom Seeker, (1990), a series of essays about Gordon Wasson edited by Thomas Riedlinger.
Yopo hallucinogenic snuff:
The seeds of the trees found in open grasslands in the Colombia and Venezuela border and the area of northern Brazil are used for a powder medicine commonly known as yopo. It is a powerful hallucinogen generally inhaled or blown into nostrils and used in the Orinoco basin and by many South American cultures. The New World had widespread use of an inhaled entheogen called Cohoba powder at the time the Spanish came to Hispaniola under Columbus. Cohoba was the active ingredient in psychedelic snuff preparations by indigenous cultures of the Caribbean, Central and South America since pre-Columbian times. The powder medicine, now known most commonly as yopo, is a powerful hallucinogen. It remains widely used among indigenous people of the Orinoco, and has a related variety in Venezuela and Brazil.
A Spanish friar named Ramón Pané was assigned by Columbus to investigate practices of the indigenous people now known as the Taíno, a now extinct people, on the island of Hispaniola, the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He learned their language to write a record of their lives and beliefs, a history of the New World in 1511. Friar Pané wrote that the cohoba would be prepared in silence while prayers were offered to the cemis before it would be used. It was central to the religious practices of the Taíno. Friar Pané wrote that “augurs” or bovites, apparently shamans, would use shamanic techniques with gestures and heavy breathing to communicate with “zemes” using cohoba powder. to reveal the future and heal illness.
Columbus himself, around his second voyage in 1496, was recorded in descriptions about the artifacts called cemis. Columbus encountered cohoba snuff practices. (The cohoba was also referred to as cogioba). It was associated ritual objects used in separate buildings near the houses of kings with finely wrought tables inhaled through two-branched tubes of wood or bone to snuff cohoba. People also would take cohoba when entering sacred houses and lose consciousness.
A bohuti or shaman would have the cohoba blown into his nasal passages in order to enter trance states, lose consciousness and have visions. The bohuti then would go into a deep trance and often lose consciousness, speak to the cemis, supernatural beings who were intermediaries from the Sun, who would reveal the knowledge from the other world intended to benefit the society., gaining information about conflict and warfare, foretelling results of planned actions or events, and protecting their society through divination. These shamans would heal sickness, learning about the origin of a sickness when it would be revealed during the trance.
Cohoba powder snuff is described in writings by missionaries and explorers in 1560 and 1599 as being in general use throughout the New World. The early Central American people also used cohoba in similar fashion as the Taíno. The 1967 Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs papers include S. Henry Wasson’s paper, “Anthropological Survey of South American Snuffs,” with descriptions of source material about the earliest encounters of the Spanish in West Indies and Caribbean Islands (the Antilles). Dr. Wassen’s article described how yopo was used far beyond the Orinoco basin before the Spanish conquest by many South American cultures. Trade routes from the Peruvian high culture around Huancabamba to Amazon tributaries had traded for the niopo snuff, another of its names, and were brought from there throughout the areas of Central America and the Caribbean, spreading among other indigenous cultures in the 1500s as the seeds were widely traded. It was called Yopa or Jopa and used by sun priests and the Payes to communicate with spirits, to protect societies against sickness, and for divination about conflict and warfare.
The oldest archaeological evidence of use of Anadenanthera beans is over 4,000 years old. Ancient clay snuffing devices have been found in archeological sites in Venezuela, Costa Rica, Brazil, northern Chile, Uruguay, Peru, and Argentina, including wood trays, tubes with jaguars, animal stones with jaguars, and other animal representations have been identified, associated with Peruvian high culture.
Dr. Wassen wrote that literature from the time showed that the explorers regarded the hallucinogenic snuff, also called Yopa or Jopa, as an instrument of the devil. The West Indian indigenous societies did not survive contact with the Spanish. The practice disappeared in most regions along with the aboriginal people of the West Indies and other areas of the New World. For centuries, people assumed it had been a potent tobacco despite the chronicles recording Cohoba’s much more dramatic psychoactive effects. Dr. Wassen concluded that cohoba was present in Hispaniola at the time of Columbus because the Taíno were growing the trees that would bear the seeds.
The sacred tree that produces the “beans of the Hekula spirits” grows in open grasslands of the Northern Amazon. Ethnobotanists including W. E. Safford who first identified the psychedelic snuff, now called yopo, Anadenanthera peregrina in 1916. The sacred tree that produces the “beans of the Hekula spirits” grows in open grasslands of the Northern Amazon. These trees bear pods of six to twelve seeds that would be gathered and moistened and rolled into a paste that would be toasted and chopped into powder for inhalation, usually with lime powder from shells. The trees grow widely among indigenous people of the Orinoco. A related variety grows in Venezuela and Brazil, Anadenanthera colubrina.
In 1801, Alexander von Humboldt reported its use in Orinoco River basin area of Colombia and Venezuela border. This and the area of northern Brazil are regarded as the center of its use. The seeds of the trees are removed from their pods, toasted and pulverized and combined with lime before being blown or otherwise inhaled. The powder medicine, now known as yopo, is a powerful hallucinogen. The eminent ethnobotanist Richard Spruce documented its use and collected samples of it along with snuffing tubes in 1851 that were recently identified. In the Orinoco region of western Brazil, and other areas, yopo use has continued.
The oldest archaeological evidence of use of Anadenanthera beans is over 4,000 years old. The tree grows contain an extremely strong hallucinogen The seeds contain multiple varieties of tryptamines, open-chained and ringed. In the 1950s chemists found that they contain DMT and 5 methoxydimethyltryptamine 5 MeO DMT, which is in many plants and the Sonoran Desert Toad. Bufotenin is also known by the chemical names 5-hydroxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine (5-HO-DMT) and N,N-dimethyl-5-ydroxytryptamine. Jonathan Ott concluded that free base bufotenin taken intranasally and sublingually produced effects similar to those of Yopo without the toxic peripheral symptoms, such as facial flushing, observed in other studies in which the drug was administered intravenously.
Ayahuasca:
Plants for ayahuasca brews are the vine, Banisteriopsis caapi, called ayahuasca, yage, and by other names, and the leaves of chacruna, Psychotria viridis, or chagropanga, Diplopterys cabrerana. The harmala alkaloids in the vine have a bitter taste and may cause nausea, and they also help boost the levels of serotonin, a hormone which can help us feel warmth and love and a sense of belonging. Serotonin, like dimethyltryptamine, is not quickly metabolized because of the monoamineoxidase inhibiting effects of harmine and harmaline in the vine.
In May of 2019, scientists collaborating from several countries authored an article in Science magazine of the first archeological evidence that the components chacruna and ayahuasca were used together high up in the Bolivian Andes in a snuff mixture with tools 1000 years old, showing the two combined plants were used long ago and were carried far from where they would grow. In the 1600s and 1700s, histories of Jesuit activity in the Maranin River area near the upper Amazon described ayahuasca drinking ceremonies among the tribes. Prior to that time, DMT was consumed by snuffs and smoking. In 1852, Richard Spruce, an English botanist, collected ayahuasca and observed a ceremony among the Tukano on the Vaupes River in northwestern Brazil. He later saw it used along the upper Orinoco in Llanos in Venezuela among the Guahibo, who would chew the dried stem as well brew it. In the Ecuadoran Andes, Spruce encountered use of the vine, called by the name ayahuasca among the Zaparo on the Pastaza River at the border of Ecuador and Peru. The word ayahuasca is Quechua for: aya meaning “spirit,” “ancestor,” or “dead person” and huasca signifying “vine.”
Kahpi.net has an article that says a researcher named Bernd Brabec de Mori found that ayahuasca came from the Tukano tribal region, what is now the south of Colombian Amazon and was used in the Amazonian lowlands near the Napo River. Gayle Highpine believes that its use spread from there north and south along that river connecting a pass between the Andes in Ecuador and the Amazon River, a major trade route before the Spanish invasion. The Quechua language was used in that area and often appears in the language associated with ayahuasca ceremonies. The vines were growing in the area, possibly because they had been grown for use by the people of the region, and spread during the times of the rubber boom of the late 1800s. Anthropologists have shown that there were some Amazonian tribes that were unaware of ayahuasca and yet they were living side by side, or not too far, from other tribes that showed they used ayahuasca as a central part of their spiritual life.
The brew has been used by Indian tribes of the Amazon area and Orinoco plains. The taitas of the Putumayo-Coqueta region of Columbia also observe a traditional use of ayahuasca. Ayahuasca or yage ceremonies also have continued in Ecuador and other parts of South America. The experiences bring deep subconscious material, emotions and memories to light for the conscious mind to consider afterward. One’s cerebral cortex is not as active, and the lower brain that predominates under the influence of ayahuasca is more rooted in emotion and instinct and is less individualistic. The Indigenous people who have employed ayahuasca believe that it frees a person’s dream spirit to allow one to explore supernatural realms and bypass ordinary channels of awareness to get revelations from the spirit world. Some view this as a truer reality.
The founders of the two largest Brazilian ayahuasca religions had learned of ayahuasca when they had contact with indigenous people when they were rubber work. In the Brazilian Amazon, ayahuasca churches formed in the 1930s and 1940s. Raimundo Irineu Serra originated an ayahuasca religion with Christian influences called Santo Daime. Daniel Pereira de Matos formed the Barquinha ayahuasca religion which also has Christian orientation. Jose Gabriel de Costa formed the Uniao do Vegetal religion in Brazil in the 1960s, which is a more independent ayahuasca religion and has branches in many countries, as does the Santo Daime ayahuasca church.
The Peruvian Amazon cities of Iquitos, Pucallpa, Tarapoto and Lamas have numerous practitioners of an indigenous vegetalista ayahuasca tradition. Beginning in the 1980s, ayahuasca retreat centers began to draw large numbers of seekers and now they are in abundance in Peru, other parts of South America, and all over the world. Many Europeans and Americans became excited about the potentials of this potent plant medicine. In the 1900s, ayahuasca religions became widespread in South America, and recently its use has become global.
Studies from Marlene Dobkin de Rios in 1972 and 1984 show that ayahuasca can promote cohesiveness within one’s community, heal illnesses, offer protection from stress and anxiety when supervised by a sensitive leader who can neutralize fears and promote the benefits of the medicine. The experiences can help people feel inspired to contribute to their communities, raise families, deepen relations, and humbly devote themselves to positive socially-responsible work.
The chemistry of ayahuasca is mysterious and is activated by monoamine oxidase inhibitor, harmine and harmaline, that blocks the enzyme that would ordinarily make dimethyltryptamine metabolize quickly and have little effect. Dr. Albert Hofmann and Dr. Richard Evans Schultes, in their 1973 book, The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens, helped show that the ayahuasca vine combines with leaves containing DMT or dimethyltryptamine, and the alkaloids in the vine contain the mono amine oxidase inhibitor, providing emetic and purgative effects as well as a potent psychoactive effect.
Beautiful artwork from the Shipibo Conibo people who have kept the medicine over the years is a delightful expression of their rich tradition. Pablo Amaringo is a former ayahuasca healer whose art shows the detail and symbolism from the ayahuasca visions of a shaman. His art depicts the vitality and power of nature, animal and plant spirits and visionary experiences of the Peruvian spirit world. He released a beautiful book of prints of his paintings with Luis Eduardo Luna, an anthropologist, called Ayahuasca Visions — The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman. He established a school for painters in Pucallpa, Peru, and many people from the ayahuasca traditions have been inspired to create sacred artwork with scenery, sacred plants and animals, and the mysterious connections to dreams.
The world of ayahuasca has been spreading from its original founders, the South American Indians. In the 1980s, scientists in Brazil produced studies about the ayahuasca religions, and there were over 30 scholarly studies, mostly masters and doctoral theses and there were 20 from overseas, 8 in English, 6 in German, 3 in Italian, 2 in French, and one in Spanish. Physicians from France and Peru researching the benefits of indigenous use of ayahuasca in the late 1980s established a nonprofit organization, Takiwasi, or “The Singing House” in Quechua language, a healing center in Tarapoto in the upper Peruvian Amazon in 1992. The center uses traditional means of healing and ancestral wisdom to help heal addiction, originally to address widespread abuse of coca paste. Individuals using psychedelic medicines like ayahuasca have found they helped overcome addiction.
The ayahuasca churches in Brazil have achieved a credible reputation that led to the government of Brazil establishing legally-protected status for ritual use of ayahuasca in 1987. After a comprehensive seven-year study, the Brazilian Federal Narcotics Council made the following conclusions about União do Vegetal members: “The followers of the sect appear to be calm and happy people. Many of them attribute family reunification, regained interest in their jobs, finding themselves and God, etc., to their religion and the tea…The ritual use of the tea does not appear to be disruptive or to have adverse effects upon the social interactions of the sects’ followers. To the contrary, it appears to orient them towards seeking social contentment in an orderly and productive way.”
The Hoasca Project conducted a scientific study of União do Vegetal members in Manaus, Brazil and showed that ayahuasca has positive effects on health and healing psychiatric disorders. This research resulted in scientific papers in 1994 and 1996 to consider whether ayahuasca could be used safely in a supportive community. The scientists compared fifteen active long-term members of União do Vegetal who had participated for at least ten years in ayahuasca ceremonies with a control sample of people who were similar in other ways but had not had exposure to ayahuasca or been involved in that type of church. The União do Vegetal members stated in the screening process that their previous behavior had been improved. About three-fourths had used alcohol, one-half had smoked cigarettes, one-third had committed violent, and one-fourth had used stimulants, and all of them had discontinued that behavior. They also showed more reflective personalities, greater persistence, and orderly, self-controlled, and frugal behavior compared with the control group. The ayahuasca users also scored higher on emotional maturity and social desirability scores. They were more harm-avoidant, confident, relaxed, cheerful, and optimistic than the control subjects and appeared to show better powers of concentration according to the study.
Around 1997, interest increased substantially and many more studies took place about ayahuasca’s healing potential. The journal Scientific Reports reported a study by researchers at the University of Exeter and the University College London that showed people who had used ayahuasca in the prior year reported higher levels of well-being than individuals who did not use psychedelics, and lower levels of problematic alcohol use than those who had taken other psychedelics.
By 2007, there were 23 publications about ayahuasca from Germany, where Santo Daime was not considered legal, while in Spain there were 25, and the Netherlands had 16, where it was legal at the time. It was gaining national attention in parts of Europe and becoming socially legitimate as it had become in Brazil. Research studies from the United States and elsewhere in the fields of psychology, psychotherapy, religious studies, and medicine, demonstrate that people experience cures of physical and emotional health problems, and transform their lives through inspiration drawn from their ayahuasca journeys.
The Entheonation film, Novo Futuro, A Huni Kuin Renaissance, shows how there has been a rebirth of the people after surviving ordeals such as rubber raids, with the opportunity to thrive on 314,000 acres over 20 years, establishing traditions of knowledge of nature. The paje, or spiritual healer, describes how his people us ayahuasca, or nixi pae, to provide visions for the future, communication with spirits, for positive purposes such as healing, bringing peace to people’s hearts, and creating a culture of spirituality in harmony with nature. Their Eskawata festival celebrates this knowledge and the songs of their culture, with other people.
A conference by ICEERS in May 2020 featured Miguel Evanjuanoy Chindoy, of the Inga people of the Colombian Putumayo, a member of UMIYAC, the Union of Indigenous Yage Healers of the Colombian Amazon. He said that westerners have forgotten our identities, and that sacred knowledge transmits responsibility to preserve the natural world and cultures that preserve them. Our friends in the Amazon are the traditional stewards of sacred plant medicines that have upheld their culture, a spirit rooted in a shared life force, using sustainable practices like small farms. The Indigenous wisdom keepers have evolved with the plants that are awakening us to respect and join with the plant guardians, to share in their independent spirit and provide support and traditional medicines in reciprocity
Facilitators at the April 24, 2021 Chacruna webinar, Sacred Plants in the Americas stressed that the teacher plants are a blessing to us that call upon us to promote the stewardship of the land of teacher plants in the hands of Indigenous guardians. Some of the panelists worked alongside the Shipibo and the Huni Kuin people to collaborate in ways that will acknowledge the harm done by the lasting influence of colonialism and exploitation. The panelists included Miguel Chindoy of the Colombian Putomayo region and Diara Tukano, a member of the Rio Nego people. They stressed that ayahuasca is more than a plant medicine, it is a practice, and that to engage with the medicines and to gain from the wisdom of the native peoples, it is important to not be extractive but to engage in reciprocity and collaboration to create a sustainable and balanced preserve.
Camila Behrens studied the ayahuasca vines and leaves in Brazil, and described a vast variety of cultivations with ten species or varieties, one of which, Tetrpterys macronata, is active even without additives. One presenter, Sitaramaya Sita, of Plant Teachers, studied among the Shipibo for 20 years in the Peruvian Amazon. She stated that plants carry knowledge and can introduce other plants. They also provide different ways of knowing and communicating. Her maestro rarely answered questions and allowed for her own wisdom to develop. She began doing ceremonial work in 1998 after she felt her heart opened. Although she states she feels a part of a cross-cultural lineage, she accepts that due to her own background, she accepts the inability to be a traditional healer.
A post on Dieta of Teacher Plants and Trees, discussed the Spanish language book Los Cuatro Altares: El Libro de la Liberacion (meaning The Four Altars: The Book of Liberation): Maestro Alonso del Rio, a master healer of ayahuasca plant medicine, stresses the importance of managing emotions and not using the power of the medicine to hurt anyone. As a guardian of the power of the master plants, he says that before anyone ventures into these spaces, it is critical to establish one’s purpose for how one will use it. He says, “It is for this reason that we insist that those who have the call to share these master plants in ceremonies must be people whose lives are aligned towards virtue and love, not the search for power.”
Anthropologist Wade Davis addressed the 2019 World Ayahuasca Conference, describing his experience in the Colombian Amazon as a college student at Harvard University doing fieldwork under the ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes. He had studied with shamans of the Barasana tribe and returned much later. He found that they have been thriving with their traditional wisdom on land that has been preserved in the Colombian jungle. Their way of life is based on deep spirituality and sense of connection, an understanding of a living forest and living sacred sites. They draw wisdom and reverence from yage or ayahuasca.
Scientific research is creating a medicine tradition and advances in psychotherapy
After its psychoactive properties were discovered in 1943 by Albert Hofmann, Sandoz Pharmaceuticals distributed LSD widely as Delsyd, for use in psychotherapy. Dr. Hofmann isolated and synthesized along with psilocin in 1958, and Sandoz began distributing psilocybin in 1960. Dr. Hofmann isolated lysergic acid amides from varieties of ololiuqui, the varieties of psychedelic Morning Glory seeds, in 1959.
In 1953, Dr. Humphry Osmond conducted successful research with psychedelics, first with mescaline and then with LSD, treating people with alcoholism in Saskatchewan. He invented the word psychedelic and helped edit one of the major books about psychedelics. In 1955, the American Psychiatric Association had a symposium on psychedelics. Aldous Huxley addressed that conference, and a book edited by Louis Cholden, LSD and Mescaline in Experimental Psychiatry, was released based upon papers presented at the conference. By the mid-1960s, there had been over one thousand publications presenting encouraging results of well-funded studies with able staff, with about 40,000 participants in LSD therapy. It was the subject of six international conferences. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, researchers like Al Hubbard, psychiatrists Sidney Cohen, Oscar Janigar, A. Wesley Mitford, and Arthur Chandler, who formed the Beverly Hills Psychiatric Institute with radiologist Mortimer Hartman (who was the LSD therapist of actor Cary Grant and many others), were active in the field of psychedelic research or therapy.
According to Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar, in the 1979 book Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered, there were over 500 papers on LSD in print in 1960. At the time they published their book, investigations had revealed a longstanding effort by American intelligence and military agencies had abused psychedelics in human experimentation, often with casual acceptance among academic professionals. They noted on page 61 that the academic interest in LSD and its adoption by the wider culture “had their own intellectual and social roots independent of and sometimes opposed to government interests.” Research showed that ordinary people would have religious experiences in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, about one-third, and about three-fourths would if they had religious proclivities, up to 90 % in religious settings with that purpose.
In 1964, Dr. Eric Kast, a pain specialist at the Chicago Medical School, led successful research in end-of-life studies using LSD. He also conducted research administering LSD to hospital patients in chronic pain and recorded positive effects in pain reduction, improved mood, outlook and quality of life with less fear of death. LSD and psilocybin were used in psychotherapy and research for 17 years before being severely restricted.
Discoveries in the 1950s and 1960s led to understanding that the body itself makes DMT and tryptimines. J. Calloway and others (1988) believe that dimethyltryptamine may function to promote dream imagery. Rick Strassman, a psychiatrist on the faculty of the University of New Mexico, obtained permission from the Food and Drug Administration in 1990s to study the effects of DMT on human beings, initially to see if it had a role in psychosis. Dr. Strassman researched the effects of hallucinogens on neurotransmitters for five years. His research led to his very successful book in 2001, DMT: The Spirit Molecule. Dimethyltryptamine closely resembles serotonin, with the indole ring, which also is present in psilocybin, mescaline, and LSD. During sleep, B carboline levels increase. Many of his subjects reported mystical experiences and out-of-body experiences that they found to be transformative.
Building on this previous research, a new generation of scientists is proving the benefit of psychedelics in helping with resistant depression and promotion of spiritual experience, to ease the fear of death, and limit the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder.
The psychiatrist Charles Grob, who is a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, initially studied with MDMA and ayahuasca before focusing on the benefits of psilocybin for alleviating pain and depression for end-stage cancer patients. Dr. Grob published works about research using major psychedelics such as psilocybin and ayahuasca in 1996 and in 1998. In 2004, he began a phase one pilot study on psilocybin for treatment of anxiety in cancer patients. In 2005, he published work showing positive results from research with psilocybin involving people suffering anxiety from advanced-stage cancer for MAPS. Dr. Grob and colleagues published results of successful studies with psilocybin in 2011, in the Archives of General Psychiatry, that showed the ability of this psychedelic to ease anxiety about death in subjects with advanced-stage cancer. Dr. Grob has stressed that when psychedelics are used in socially-sanctioned settings, consistently with community standards and as part of culturally cohesive practices, the potential of entheogens can be observed, and the substantial risks of adverse reactions can be minimized.
Some of the research into the potential benefits of psychedelics includes a review of studies published online in the journal Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews by a team of researchers from Brazil and Spain. They analyzed 18 studies into personality changes with use of psychedelics that were conducted between 1985 and 2016. They focused specifically on the serotonergic drugs, drugs that have structures similar to that of the neurotransmitter serotonin, psilocybin mushrooms, LSD and ayahuasca. They found that people using these psychedelics, even as few as one time, would report higher rates of “openness” which is one of the five main personality traits in psychology. It includes appreciation of new experiences, attentiveness to inner feelings and intellectual curiosity.
Research into the potential of psychedelics to help promote spiritual experience and wellbeing began a resurgence in 2006. Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Neurosciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and founding Director of the Johns Hopkins Center on Psychedelic and Consciousness Research. Robert Jesse of the Council on Spiritual Practices, who has helped promote such studies, persuaded Dr. Griffiths, a psychopharmacologist, to proceed to do clinical studies with psilocybin. Mr. Jesse has been a very influential source of information and scientific funding that has shed light on the beneficial use of entheogens. He produced a 2015 documentary film, A New Understanding; The Science of Psilocybin.
An article in July of 2006 by Griffiths and other researchers, William A. Richards, U. McCann, and Robert Jesse, titled “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance,” was published in the journal Psychopharmacology. Dr. Griffiths is author of over 400 journal articles and book chapters. In 1999 he began research projects investigating the potential of psilocybin to benefit healthy volunteers, meditators, and religious leaders, as well as helping alleviate distress in cancer patients, treating people to help them quit smoking cigarettes, and for treatment of major depression. A double-blind experiment with psilocybin or Ritalin, in which two-thirds of the active subjects said it was among the five most important events of their lives and many volunteers experienced enduring positive effects. Building on the successful results with alcohol addiction in the 1950s and 1960s, they have seen success with opioid and cocaine addictions.
After MDMA became illegal in 1985, Rick Doblin founded the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies in 1986. MAPS has focused much of its clinical work on MDMA. His intention was to help promote the potential for psychedelic therapy, and he has worked to obtain funding for costly scientific research meeting the exacting standards for contemporary studies.
MDMA was discovered in 1912 and had been overlooked before Alexander Shulgin synthesized it in 1976 and after trying it, he shared it with psychotherapist Leo Zeff in 1977, who in turn introduced it to other mental health professionals. For eight years, hundreds of therapists employed it in their practices, finding that it may open the ability of the brain to make and store new memories. It is not like ayahuasca or the serotonergic psychedelics and is more of an empathogen. It addresses a hyperactive amygdala and enhances connectivity within the brain and increases activity in the frontal cortex. Scientists believe that it binds to proteins that regulate serotonin and adds serotonin to synapses and strengthens its chemical signal. It also increases oxytocin and dopamine, producing feelings of empathy, gratitude, trust, and compassion. There are no neurotoxic effects at therapeutic levels.
The Psychedelic Science Founders Collaborative provides funding for Usona Institute, a nonprofit organization that helps produce medical research provides training for the psychedelic guides of the future for their research studies. The Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative has helped raise $ 63 million for drug trials. It also provides funding for MAPS.
Dr. David Nichols founded the Heffter Research Institute, which supports, funds, and advocates for more research into psychedelics, in 1993. Since 1969, he has been a leading expert on psychedelics, and has focused on research on drugs that affect serotonin and dopamine transmission in the central nervous system. Dr. Nichols developed an effective and excellent process for synthesis of psilocybin. He has published over 300 articles, chapters, and pamphlets in his field. The Heffter Research Institute has supported and funded clinical research with psilocybin, including a study at the University of Arizona around 2013 that concluded that psilocybin therapy had helped relieve symptoms for a small sample of patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Around 2014, Dr. Nichols began consulting with Compass Pathways, founded by George Goldsmaith and Dr. Ekaterina Malievskaia, which are providing experience and protocols and standard dosages of psilocybin, for a therapeutic system of psychedelic therapy. Compass had success with 216 patients in its Phase 2B trials, and planned to follow up with results by early 2021, hoping to have the treatment on track to seek Food and Drug Administration approval a couple of years later.
Amanda Feilding, the Countess of Wemyss and March, is a philanthropist and the founder of the Beckley Foundation. The Beckley Foundation has helped fund research on psychedelics in therapy at Imperial College London and King’s College London. Ms. Fielding has been actively directing the foundation since 1996 to advocate and fund initiatives involving psychedelics while promoting the need to ensure that these experiments observe strict methodology to evaluate the efficacy of the therapy.
Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, a neuroscientist affiliated with Neuroscape Psychedelics Division at the University of California, San Francisco, previously served as head of the Centre for Psychedelic Research, Division of Brain Sciences, at Imperial College London. Dr. Carhart-Harris has led psilocybin research showing outstanding success in treatment of patients with severe depression that had been resistant to therapy. Dr. David Nut, a neuropharmacologist at Imperial College London, is the deputy head of the project and has been involved with helping run the clinical trials. The research showed that all of them reported scores below the level of moderate depression afterward, and a significant reduction that lasted until the five-week follow-up evaluation. Even six months later there were significant benefits from that one psychedelic therapy session. Before this trial, however, they all had shown little to no improvement with the benefit of more traditional treatment. Dr. Rosalind Watts, a clinical psychologist, has helped lead the psilocybin studies at Imperial College.
The Imperial College London research on the neuroscience of psychedelics has included fMRI scans of patients’ brains after taking psilocybin showed reduced blood flow and resting activity in the amygdala, which is often overactive in depression and anxiety. The imaging studies also showed greater flexibility in the connections between brain networks. The medicine seems to help part of the brain sort of reintegrate into less confined patterns on psilocybin, or “reset” itself.
Published articles on psilocybin in peer reviewed medical journals have increased in recent years. Dr. Alexander Belser, a psychedelic researcher and licensed psychologist at Yale University, has studied people’s experiences with psychedelics for twenty years. Dr. Francisco Moreno, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, was the primary author of a study published in 2006 that reviewed research showing how effective psilocybin is in treatment for such conditions as obsessive compulsive disorder. He states that in 2018, there were 76 published articles on psilocybin in peer reviewed medical journals. There were already 15 journal articles in early 2020 published on the topic of psilocybin and listed on PubMed.
In 2016, a Johns Hopkins University study led by Dr. Roland Griffiths released results of research studies that had an 80 % success rate with use of psilocybin to help reduce anxiety around death and help people be open to perspective of an afterlife. The Johns Hopkins work enlisted the help of Dr. Bill Richards, a psychologist who had been involved in the earlier psychedelic research, to work as a clinician and train guides to help ensure that an inner-directed healing process would promote potential breakthroughs while minimizing the potential for harmful experiences.
In September 2019, Johns Hopkins University announced its Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research. Johns Hopkins University has published good results from a pilot study in 2014 on using psychedelics to help people quit smoking, and Phase II of the study was begun in 2015. New York University’s Psilocybin Cancer Anxiety Study is being led by Stephen Ross, M.D., Anthony Bossis, Ph.D., and Jeffrey Guss, M.D., and is producing careful studies into research on using psilocybin to help people with serious cancer diagnoses facing the anxiety of death. It also had similar findings of success in trials to determine the potential for psilocybin to help reduce anxiety around death. There have been hundreds of trials with psilocybin at New York University and at Johns Hopkins University. There was a study showing psilocybin was efficient in treating depression at the University of Texas Science Center at Houston. In 2016, studies led by psychologist Anthony Bossis at New York University Medical School, and Roland Griffiths at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, showed promising results in clinical trials in patients with terminal cancer.
In July, 2020, the Lundquist Institute for Biomedical Innovation announced a multi-site clinical trial to be led by Dr. Grob and Dr. Bossis to study the effects of psilocybin to ease existential distress for patients with serious illness. The multi-site project will study the effectiveness and safety of psilocybin to treat terminally ill people with psychological distress. It will be funded by a $ 1.75 million donation by an anonymous donor. In February 2021, Dr. Grob and Dr. Jim Grigsby released the first formal textbook on psychedelics in medicine, Handbook of Medical Hallucinogens, which they edited.
Research shows that there are great benefits from psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy to treat veterans for post-traumatic stress disorder. The healing is occasioned by creating psychological flexibility and bypassing resistance, which creates ways to integrate the causes of suffering. An important study headed by Dr. Alan Davis at The Ohio State University (with Averill, Sepeda, Barsuglia, and Amorose) involving U.S. Special Forces veterans was published in 2020 based on treatment during 2017 to 2019 using ibogaine and 5 MeO-DMT in psychotherapy. The participants had been to a program in Rosarita, Mexico called The Mission Within, a plant-based retreat providing specialized treatments for posttraumatic stress disorder, personal growth, and spiritual transformation, and reported very positive results. The participants were elite military personnel who had been selected for service for their physical and psychological resilience who had been exposed to combat and traumatic brain injuries, and who tend to be reluctant to appear vulnerable. The sample included people aged 18 to 64, predominantly white men, 59 % who had served in five or more deployments, 63 % had been Navy SEALS, 76 % were college graduates, and 82 % had had head injuries.
During 2017 to 2019, the scientists took information from previous attendees of a clinical psychedelic program in Mexico that employs ibogaine and 5 MeO-DMT in psychotherapy, which are not illegal for therapeutic use in Mexico. The first day would involve ibogaine in groups of four or five. The second day had opportunity for reflection, integration, and discussion. The process included one-on-one meetings to prepare for a series of three to five administrations of 5 MeO-DMT. Ibogaine is an alkaloid from a central African rainforest shrub, Tabernanthe iboga, which had been used in France for 30 years until the mid-1960s, which can evoke traumatic memories for processing, spiritual visions, and reflections. 5 MeO-DMT is present in plants and in the Sonoran Desert Toad, and which can be readily synthesized.
The participants reported very positive results. High numbers (84 to 88 %) stated the experience was one of the five most profound experiences of personal meaning, spiritual significance, or psychological insight of their lifetimes. Eighty percent of the respondents reported having improvements in anxiety and depression afterwards, increased life satisfaction, and mindfulness capacities. The study revealed very significant and large reductions in reports of retrospective suicidal ideation, cognitive impairment, PTSD symptoms, depression, and anxiety after the sessions. There was a high correlation between these reduced levels and increases in psychological flexibility after the experience. The experience provided most of the veterans with improvements in a sense of satisfaction, a sense of purpose, appreciation of social relations, and improved attitudes toward life. The authors stated that the subjects derived benefits from mystical experiences or ego dissolution and the participants also showed benefits from neuroprotective, neurogenerative, and anti-inflammatory properties.
Legal considerations for religious and therapeutic use of psychedelics:
According to an article by Guerra in 1967 cited by Dr. Charles Grob, the Holy Inquisition of Mexico issued a proclamation in 1616 ordering the persecution and excommunication of those who, under the influence of, “herbs and roots with which they lose and confound their senses, and the illusions and fantastic representations they have, judge and proclaim afterwards as revelation, or true notice of things to come…”
Formal regulation of medicine began in the United States with the Pure Food & Drug Act of 1906, which prohibited adulteration and mislabeling of foods and drugs. Many patent medicines were falsely labeled and had undisclosed ingredients. The Eighteenth Amendment was adopted in 1919, banning the sale, transport, manufacture or consumption of alcohol, and was enforced by the Volstead Act. Public health programs and regulation of the practice of medicine developed by the mid-1920s, leading to a standard level of practice, and helped reduce infant mortality and improve health. By 1930s, improved hygiene and an emphasis on medical training and service led to an increase in life expectancy.
To understand the constitutional protection available in the United States for religious use of entheogens or psychedelics, we should remember the social upheaval that caused the culture wars of the 1960s and 1980s, as a reaction to the Anti-War Movement and the Civil Rights Movement, and based upon fear of the transformation of young people who became skeptical of society’s emphasis on competition and traditional concepts of success.
In People v. Woody, 61 Cal. 2d 716, 394 P.2d 813, 40 Cal. Rptr. 69 (1964), the California Supreme Court reversed the convictions under state law of members of the Native American Church for possession of peyote. The court noted that the church had articles of incorporation that included: “That we further pledge ourselves to work for unity with the sacramental use of peyote and its religious use.” In finding an undue burden was placed upon their freedom to exercise their religion, the court stressed that the adherents were sincere and that the peyote was central to the religion, that the Indians would pray to peyote. It struck down the application of the law, stating that peyote “incorporates the essence of the religious experience,” and that barring the use of peyote would “remove the theological heart” of the religion.
In 1970, the Controlled Substances Act, placed LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin in highly restricted category I, having no medical potential, being subject to abuse and presenting grave dangers. The Single Convention, an international treaty, applied similar restrictions throughout the world. Scientific research and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy ended by 1977 here and in Europe.
Psilocybin and other psychedelics remain in the most restricted category today under the UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances, the US 1970 Controlled Substances Act and the 1971 UK Misuse of Drugs Act, among others. The Vienna Convention of 1971 suggested a scheduling system for all 131 agreeing countries to follow, classifying drugs into categories of harm and the laws controlling psychotropic substances are part of that. The Vienna Convention was directed toward the manufacturing of synthetic substances. Many, but not all countries have applied it broadly to psilocybin, mescaline-containing cactus plants, and the plants composing the natural psychedelic ayahuasca.
After an adverse decision by the U. S. Supreme Court in 1990, Employment Division v. Smith, failed to extend constitutional protection to two of its members in Oregon, the Native American Church of North America received protection by an act of Congress to use and possess peyote for its religious ceremonies. The Supreme Court majority opinion, a 6–3 ruling by Justice Scalia, gave very limited protection under the free exercise clause of the U.S. Constitution, holding that this provision could not be used to invalidate laws that are considered neutral and generally applicable. The Congress in 1993 responded by overturning the decision by legislation, with the enactment of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which restored the previously-applied higher level of scrutiny to laws that burden religious exercise. Similarly, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments of 1994 protect the rights of American Indians to use and possess peyote for traditional Indian religious ceremonies. (42 U.S.C. section 1996). The Supreme Court in City of Boerne v. Flores, ruled in 1997 that RFRA was unconstitutional as applied to states.
In 1988, União do Vegetal began in the United States with a session in the mountains of Colorado with a small group of people, some of whom are still UDV members today. By 2017, there were 500 members in the United States, according to one of the captions posted by the organization. The example set by the people of the denomination helped bring about legal protection in Brazil, in the United States, and in European countries. After being without the sacrament and using only drinking water for five years, they won a favorable result from the Supreme Court in 2006. The U.S. Supreme Court rendered a unanimous (8–0) decision in Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficente Uniao do Vegetal, 546 U.S. 418 (2006), which upheld the right of practitioners in a religious context to use ayahuasca as a sacrament. The Gonzales case held that the federal government had failed to demonstrate a compelling interest in prohibiting that use under the Controlled Substances Act. The state interest in regulation was not deemed to be sufficient to burden the right to religious experience due to practices that help minimize the potential for harm in supportive settings. The Court held that the branch of the União do Vegetal church in New Mexico had guaranteed protection under the free exercise of religion clause of the first amendment.
The courts considering protection of religious practices favor the religious liberty interests when there are not social problems and costs to society that outweigh them. A ceremonial context for psychedelic usage, as a sacrament, combined with implementation of harm reduction strategies, will help produce benefits such as strengthening the members’ sense of purpose and their social responsibility that will be more likely to receive constitutional protection. The courts appear to be more attracted to the familiar types of ceremonies, although the decisions emphasize that it is the sincerity of the adherents that is a principal area of focus, along with a showing of low risk of harm. Greater protection for sincere religious practices using psychedelics is likely through court decisions, state and federal legislation, and local ordinances as scientific research and legal psychedelic assisted psychotherapy yield results showing spiritual transformation and other benefits, particularly with psilocybin, which is very safe from a physiological standpoint.
Municipalities, such as Oakland and Denver have had success in passing ordinances to remove enforcement of restrictions on psilocybin under state law, while remaining schedule I controlled substances under federal law. In 2019, Denver became the first U.S. city to decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms, followed by Oakland and Santa Cruz in California, which decriminalized all entheogenic plants. In September of 2020, the Ann Arbor, Michigan City Council voted unanimously in favor of a resolution declaring psychedelic plants and fungi the city’s lowest law enforcement priority. The move means that authorities will not investigate and arrest anyone for planting, cultivating, buying, transporting, distributing, engaging in practices with or possessing entheogenic plants or plant compounds. Similar measures have passed in Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts. California is in the process of removing state criminal sanctions against natural psychedelic substances. Oregon’s Measure 109, which passed in a November 2020 election, legalizes use of psilocybin mushrooms in a supervised therapeutic setting under state law.
On June 30, 2021, I. Glenn Cohen, the faculty director of the Petrie-Flom Center, for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, a leading health law and policy academic research center, announced that it will be launching a three-year project, the Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation, or POPLAR, dedicated to studying psychedelic legal issues. The Petrie-Flom Center focuses research on emerging topics that pose ethical, legal, and regulatory questions that affect healthcare. The center received private funding to begin the project, which was provided by the Saisei Foundation, Tim Ferriss, and Matt Mullenwig. The project will focus on topics affecting development and regulation of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, such as ways to avoid having patents restrict access to treatment and appropriation issues involving religious use of psychedelics among Indigenous societies.
Some profiles about important people in the field of psychedelic substances, in rough chronological order:
Wixarika (Huichol) art and culture:
For centuries the Wixarika people, who were called the Huichol in Spanish, have lived harmoniously with the forces of nature in a sustainable way in the Sierra Madre Occidental, in northwestern Mexico. These beautiful people observe a rich ceremonial life that they have observed in their culture that has survived independently despite the incursions from the Spanish conquest, forces of conformity, and missionary activity.
There are about 30,000 Wixarika today. They have their own language and customs, including their dress and their religion. They are a shamanic society, with ritual use of peyote to induce religious experiences goes back thousands of years. The tribe views the world as being alive and they venerate spirits of animals and natural forces that help sustain their cultural history. The people regard themselves as stewards of the earth and seek to live sustainably in harmony with the natural world. The Wixarika are known for their colorful yarn pictures pressed into beeswax, bringing together their sacred beings, energy fields, foods and ceremonial items in harmony, reflecting a vibrant field of conscious energy. They also produce woven and embroidered cloth, and decorative beaded artifacts and jewelry.
Their shamans or mara’akames lead them spiritually and they hold a central place in their traditions, while their civil government is selected by elders and leaders serve voluntarily on an annual basis out of a sense of service. Their most sacred rite is an annual journey to wirikuta, the most important sacred site, the land of their ancestors, where they hunt for hikuri, the peyote. They are led by a mara’akame, a shaman, and they make prayers, limit their food and eat no salt and refrain from sex. These journeys usually take place after a fall harvest festival, between October or November into the early spring to harvest the peyote in a semi-desert plateau 300 miles away near Real de Catorce. To become a mara’akame, one must make the journey five times, and show great strength and leadership.
In former times they would walk the entire distance, which would take from four to six weeks for them to travel there and back from the mountains. Now, they have to use vehicles because of land restrictions. They become part of an inverse world and identity for that period. They make offerings at important sites on the journey where their ancestors had, and represent them in their quest. Before they leave to approach the peyote, they disclose in a group ceremony the names of all their sexual partners in life, so that nothing will be concealed and so they will purify themselves to be worthy. It is a tradition recorded as far back as the middle of the 16th century by Bernardino de Shagun, a Franciscan friar, who wrote about desert hunters performing a ritual desert journey in search of the peyote northeast of their homeland in the Sierra Madre mountains in western Mexico. He wrote that they would eat peyote and sing and dance all night and day and weep exceedingly.
Their pilgrimage takes the form of a hunt for the Sacred Deer. The peyote is synonymous with the deer, which used to be plentiful where they live, and its spirit is in wirikuta. Their intermediary to the spirit world is Kauyumari, the Sacred Deer, who assists the mara’akame with his wand or muweiri, used to speak to their deities, including Tayupa, our Father Sun, Tatewari, our Grandfather Fire, and our mother goddess Niwetukame, who resides in Wirikuta. Their gods and goddesses sometimes take the form of an esteemed mara’akame, but the individuals commune directly with the spirits as well. Their worldview is based in knowledge that their dreams connect to another reality, and portals or nierikas, provide a gift of seeing into the other world. The explorer Carl Lumholtz, who wrote about them in his 1902 book about Mexico, called these “god’s eyes.”
They live in small farms or ranchos in extended families, planting what they eat, five types of corn, beans and squash on slopes during the rainy season. Their land has forests in mountains and lies remotely behind steep canyons and powerful rivers make it hard to reach, and their language and proud history have served to protect their culture and religion. Their spiritual life is directed toward people finding their life, which involves offerings, austerities, and pilgrimages to help people find the kupuri, the energy and strength that one lives by. The goal of life is to do well in life so that the kupuri can bestow good fortune, and rise up at death and not to become trapped in the underworld. They celebrate a Dance of the Deer to send prayers into Mother Earth and connect with the deer spirit, their guide, elder brother, source of the knowledge of the Mara’akame. They honor all four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, and the five directions, including the sky. They view all creatures as having powers to transform themselves.
They assemble in their different groups within the larger society from their remote small ranchos to observe festivals and ceremonies to mark the seasons and maintain balance individually and in community. At the end of pilgrimage season there is a ceremonial peyote dance, when fasting and sacrifices end. The people dance and enjoy and peyote in a long festival. They also enjoy homemade sweet corn beer, tamales, tortillas, plums, and mangoes. They sacrifice a cow and eat meat on occasion. They have incorporated elements from modern life such as fruit trees, coffee, cattle, and violins, and elements such as the Virgin of Guadalupe and Good Friday to fold into their observances but they have maintained their unique ways without compromise.
The indigenous traditions are protected in Mexico under a 1971 treaty, the Vienna Convention on Psychotropic Substances, but their sacred desert land is in peril due to mining interests sold by the Mexican government to two Canadian organizations. Some organizations and individuals have worked to help them preserve their culture, like Wixarica Research Center, Dance of the Deer Foundation, The Huichol Center for Cultural Survival and Traditional Arts, and The Huichol Foundation.
Quanah Parker and the Native American Church:
Peyote is a spiritual medicine that brought healing and salvation to American Indians beginning in the late 1800s and is at the center of The Native American Church of North America. The ceremonies are specially called, usually on a Saturday from sunset to sunrise in a tepee or hogan. The ceremony can be called by a sponsor for an important occasion like a birth or an anniversary, or for holidays, but usually for healing. Ceremonies vary between tribes, but there is drumming with a water drum, a fire chief who brings water at midnight, and people offer songs and prayers of devotion and supplication seeking blessings from God. After taking peyote those assembled are led to the peyote road where visions pass between God and the participants. and having sustaining visions and love that draws the community together. People in the circle take turns offering four songs under the guidance of the roadman, a guide to encourage their minds to see the spirit and lead to sustaining visions and love that draws the community together.
Quanah Parker, the last chief of the Comanche, and a principal founder of the Native American Church, had a dual heritage. His mother was white and became a member of the tribe when she was taken in as a young girl. Both his mother and his sister later were taken by soldiers, leading him to oppose settlers and he was a fierce warrior. In 1875, he led his tribe to Fort Sill after deciding further warfare would be futile. He took his mother’s last name and became a leader and a prosperous rancher, and served as judge and sheriff on a reservation. He was opposed to peyote but in 1884, he was healed of a serious blood infection after being gored by a bull in Texas. He became deathly ill and his aunt took him to a Mexican curandera, probably a Tarahumara, and he was healed with peyote tea. He became a road chief for peyote, bringing it to many tribes in the 1880s and later. He regarded peyote as a sacrament to be taken with water. He composed songs for singing in the ceremonies. During the informal period afterward, when people discuss their visions, he would counsel others and encourage them in the right path and strengthen their purpose. The goal is to study and learn something, perhaps to have a visit by the peyote bird or an eagle. Reverence in purpose is essential.
The Kiowa-Comanche ceremony is the prototype for peyote ceremonies of the plains Indians. The important elements of the ceremony include half-moon earth altar, songs of praise and devotion, the staff, the kettle water drum, the gourd rattle, the eagle wing bone whistle, and the prayers with tobacco. There are variations among the tribes. There is an emphasis on devotion. All talking stops when the ceremonial Father Peyote or Chief Peyote is put in place at the center of the crescent-shaped altar and the road man offers the first prayer. People sit upright and peyote is passes four times, in dried form or as powder, taken with water or peyote tea. Music becomes more spirited after midnight, when the fire chief brings water and after prayer everyone drinks; and the roadman goes outside and whistles to the four directions with the eagle wing whistle.
Peyote is regarded as a divine messenger and respected for its “medicine power.” In addition to its spiritual properties, peyote is an antibiotic and antiseptic. Ceremonies may center on native doctoring and purification, using sacred elements such as water, tobacco, sage, feathers and bird imagery, and fire. A typical first song in a ceremony will be this prayer, “May the gods bless me, help me, and give me power and understanding.”
State laws were enacted in many states in opposition to peyote rituals, many such laws were passed in the 1920s. In 1908, Quanah Parker testified before the Oklahoma legislature, a year after two Indians were prosecuted under an 1899 law against peyote, and the law was repealed. Chief Parker did not adopt Christianity and he was respected as a leader. He is quoted as saying, “We do not go into ceremony to talk about God. We go into ceremony to talk with God.”
John Wilson of the Native American Church:
The peyote religion among the American Indians was influenced by the mescal bean tradition and the Ghost Dance movement at a time when there was a cultural loss. It suffered persecution but it endured through the resolute purpose of its members in different tribes. Peyote use was observed by missionaries in Texas in 1760, who viewed use of peyote by the Indigenous as a problem, and it was common among Mexican tribes who viewed peyote as a divine being. After the Civil War, there was more contact between tribes between Mexico and the United States. Peyote use spread from the north of Mexico to Texas and the plains by the Kiowa and Comanche tribes after they visited Mexican tribes, the Carrizo, Tonkawa, Lipan, and Mescalero. They became the primary leaders of the spread of peyote through the plains along with the Caddo.
The Apaches of the Mescalero Indian Reservation used peyote in a shamanistic way in the time period from just before their reservation was established in 1873 until about 1910. They spread the use of peyote but their own society abandoned it, apparently because of an emphasis on individual spiritual powers and an adversarial approach to the practices, leading to rivalries and bloodshed.
When the Native American Church began forming in 1885, intertribal warfare was ending and there was more intermarriage, but the buffalo were eliminated by the white people, and it was after the Wounded Knee massacre when Indians being confined to reservations and experiencing a loss of their culture. The peyote religion helped develop inter-tribal cooperation and create a positive expression of identity, and it spread to the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Ute, Shoshone, Delaware, Sioux, and many other tribes. It is used as a religious sacrament by about forty tribes. Participants would sing songs and try to maintain beauty, hope, and goodness in their hearts.
In 1922, there were about 13,300 ceremonial peyote users. Members will seek to eat as many as 25 to 30 of so, maybe 20 buttons if they are green, although some members state they have eaten 50 or more peyote buttons in a ceremony. The medicine was inexpensive and $ 2.50 could buy 1000 peyote buttons in Laredo and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico at that time.
An anthropologist from the Smithsonian, James Mooney, who traveled to Indian Territory, present day Oklahoma, in 1891. He was impressed with the tradition and he wrote about the tradition and participated in its ceremonies. In 1918, he encouraged the leaders, called road men or road chiefs, to assemble and incorporate and write a charter. They told legends about peyote discovery by a woman who was in labor, lost in the desert, and hungry, and a voice told her to eat it, and she was relieved and gave birth.
John Wilson was initiated into the peyote religion in the 1880s and he became a roadman. He was part Caddo, part Delaware, and partly of Scottish descent. Before he turned forty, he had been a moderate drinker who participated in gambling and social dance. He had a background in the Ghost Dance movement in the Caddo Tribe. His Caddo name was Nishkuntu (Moon Head). He attended an Arapaho and Cheyenne Ghost Dance in 1890 that Sitting Bull presided over, where he had visions that led him to become a healer of diseases by revelations, drawing people from other tribes. He was introduced to peyote by a Comanche man at a ceremonial dance and he became converted. He was in seclusion with his wife outdoors for two or three weeks, staying by a stream, and taking about 15 peyote buttons at various times. Peyote took pity on him for his sincerity and humility and he stayed attentive to its lessons. He received a revelation and was transported to the sky realm. He was shown celestial landmarks and scenes familiar to the Delaware Tribe, observed events in the life of Christ. He saw the empty grave of Christ and was shown the Road from the grave to the Moon in the Sky. Peyote directed him to walk this pathway and advance in greater knowledge through the use of peyote and faithfulness to its teachings, until at his death he would be present with peyote and Christ. He was shown how to conduct worship in peyote meetings, how to cure diseases and heal injuries, how to purge the body of the effects of sin, and how to lead Indians to the regions above heaven and to reach the presence of the creator and peyote. He learned about 200 songs.
Peyote also gave him instructions about construction of a new form of the moon altar in the peyote tent in the form of Christ’s grave. He taught worshipers to seek knowledge by direct communion. He taught that Indians could receive direct revelations from God through the peyote spirt. His ceremonies would include filing out of the tipi in the morning to meet the sun with raised arms and prayer. He traveled extensively and led ceremonies, particularly among the Osage and the Quapaw. He advocated clean living, honesty, restraint in sexual matters and fidelity in matrimony, as well as peaceful coexistence with the white people. He gave the following instructions to his nephew, George Anderson, on how to find the peyote way: “Keep your mind on peyote and don’t think anything about the people around you or anything outside. Look at peyote and the fire all the time and think of it. Sit quiet and do not move around or be uneasy. Then you will not get sick or see visions. Visions and nausea are signs of bad self-adjustment to the proper religious attitude.”
He was criticized when he received generous gifts from some of the wealthy tribes. In 1901, he died in an accident at a railway intersection at the age of 61, with many horses received as gifts and in the presence a Quapaw woman who was not his wife. Most tribes retained the traditional small moon altar of the Kiowa Comanche tradition. In 1993, when a leader of the Native American Church, Reuben Snake, died, there were an estimated 250,000 members. He had led a coalition of Indian groups that succeeded in advocating for national protection of the religion. Presently, peyote has become scarce, and groups such as the Native American Conservation Initiative are organized to establish habitat and protect the sacrament’s availability.
Maria Sabina and her Mazatec Mushroom Velada:
Maria Sabina was born Maria Sabina Magdalena Garcia around 1894. She became a shaman or curandera when she was about forty. She had a hard life in a beautiful mountain area of Oaxaca, in the Sierra Mazateca of Mexico. She and her sister worked hard on a small farm with a few goats, doing chores such as tending chickens in the woods. There was no school available. Their father died when she was a few years old. She was always hungry and cold. When she was about six years old, a wise man came and cured her uncle using the sacred mushrooms in a traditional healing ceremony. Her people always spoke quietly and would use terms of respect to describe the sacred mushrooms, such as the little ones that leap forth or the saint children. Her father’s father and his father also had been wise ones, who could cure with mushrooms. She recognized the mushrooms from the woods and she and her sister ate them many times. Maria Sabina heard beautiful voices from another world giving beautiful advice and leading her to sing beautifully. One time, she had a vision of her father, who said to her, “Maria Sabina, get on your knees and pray.” She then spoke to God and became closer to God.
Maria Sabina had an arranged marriage and three children with her first husband but he left her and she was widowed after a six-year marriage. A few years later, she was required to intercede for her only sister who was having a health crisis with stomach pains and she could not get out of bed. She ate 30 pairs of the most potent variety of saint children and observed the ancient Mazatec vigil practices using candles of pure beeswax, flowers with scent and color, copal incense to bless the sacrament, and tobacco to put on the skin, and then proceeding in pure darkness. The spirit of the mushrooms guided her hands and her words, causing a large amount of blood to be expelled from her sister, and she stopped groaning and slept.
Their mother attended her sister, while Maria Sabina went off and she received a revelation vision of the Principal Ones she had learned about from her ancestors. Six or eight of the spiritual beings were before her at a table. The voice of the saint children told her these were the Principal Ones. One of them told her, “Maria Sabina, this is the Book of Wisdom. It is the Book of Language. Everything that is written in it is for you. The Book is yours, take it so that you can work.” She gladly accepted it and they left her. She contemplated it and she began to speak, realizing she was reading its contents. She realized that the gift had been bestowed upon her because she was pure, and that she had attained the wisdom beyond being an apprentice and had become a Wise One. She also received a visit from the Lord of the Mountains, Chicon Nindo, later that night because in her wise language she had called him. He rode up on a horse and she went outside. She then received a third revelation when a luminous vegetal being like a bush with flowers of colors with a halo and radiance, fresh and alive, appeared before fading into a splendid red background. She cried, whistled, clapped and danced, realizing that she was now the Lord Clown Woman.
Maria Sabina continued working with wool and cotton, planted corn, beans and harvested coffee. She sold bread, candles and pots, and she raised silkworms. She remarried after twelve years. Both times while she was married, she would not eat mushrooms because their tradition required four-day periods of celibacy before and after mushroom ceremonies, or veladas. After she was widowed for the second time, she dedicated herself to curing with the saint children. She would access the Book of Wisdom in her visions until she could access it from memory, using the language to heal, as a shaman mediating a world of heaven to this world, finding soul illnesses and curses and cures for various diseases. She would accept gifts but not charge for the medicine.
A 1957 Life Magazine article ran a momentous article that Gordon Wasson wrote after he and Allan Richardson, the photographer, participated in her veladas. A municipal sindico or magistrate, for whom Maria Sabina had provided counsel for his decisions for three years, had been approached by Mr. Wasson and had directed him to her. The world was amazed by the news of the tradition that she and her people had preserved and Maria Sabina had many people come to see her from around the world. Recordings of her chanting from 1957 were released on Folkways Records the following year.
Maria Sabina said that the saint children speak and she would have the power to translate. She was aware of the dark places where illnesses of the soul would lurk, but she would go upward to commune with the Principal Ones. She would see the saints appear in the ceremonies when she sang their names. In her chanting, she proclaimed, “I am the woman of the winds, of the water, of the paths, because I am known in heaven, because I am a doctor woman.” She would clap, whistle and chant with a beautiful sing-song cadence, proclaiming her purity of heart for the service of Christ and the saints, and becoming the voice of the divine mushrooms. She stated, “I know that God is formed by the saints. Just as we, together, form humanity, God is formed by all the saints.”
Maria Sabina said, “Nothing that the mushrooms show should be feared.” After effecting a cure with the language of the children, she would say something like, “the one who has healed your son is God who is raising all of us.” She was active in a church group, Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and she was great friends with the local priest. She said she had respect for everything that has to do with God. She was happy to share the ceremony with strangers, but she regretted the way the notoriety affected her village and the careless use of the mushrooms by some of the hippies. She came to be honored by Mexico and many people.
A friend of mine has let me know of her experience: “I met Maria Sabina twice in her mountain village. Her village is well known for the beautiful embroidery the women make; beautiful bright flowers and birds. The people of her village loved her and resented the big researchers who came to visit, made lots of money from their publishing and she didn’t get a cent. The last time I was there someone had shown up with a film crew and all the men in the village surrounded her house and would not let them see her. It was powerful to feel their protection of her. She was poor as far as money goes. She gave me several beautiful huipils (embroidered tops she had made that I still wear!) and her house was very simple, earthy literally. She was a visionary and a dedicated healer, deeply committed to her inner life, a woman of integrity, also very practical. I assisted in a session she gave to a woman who visited her hoping for cure of cancer. Maria Sabina ate fresh picked mushrooms on a plate that was a tobacco leaf. In this case so did the woman. Then she sang and prayed all night. In the morning she treated the woman according to her visions. In the session I was at she was assisted by her sister. I certainly received a big download from her but it was mostly energetic — an experiential blessing!”
Mestre Irineu:
Raimundo Irineu Serra, Mestre Irineu, was born in 1892 and grew to be seven feet tall. He founded Santo Daime, an ayahuasca religion, in 1930 in Rio Branco. He had gone to the western part of Brazil from a poor area in northern Brazil in 1912 to work in rubber tapping, but that industry began to collapse. He was initiated into the mysteries of ayahuasca by indigenous shamans in the upper Amazon near the border with Bolivia. He had a series of visions and revelations that included a vision of the Divine Mother who identified herself as “the queen of the forest.” According to the Daime tradition, on a clear and beautiful night, Irineu took ayahuasca and, as he looked up at the moon, he saw a beautiful and wondrous lady. She asked him, “Who do you think I am?” Irineu was amazed as he looked at her and he replied: “My lady, you must be a Universal Goddess!”
The goddess gave him guidance and told him to observe practices, which he undertook and she gave him the blessings of healing power and instruction on making ayahuasca with chacruna and the vine. The queen of the forest also taught him how to sing and asked for beautiful songs of devotion to be sung to her and he identified her as the Virgin Mary. She revealed to him that ayahuasca was the sacred blood of Jesus Christ giving light, love and strength, and he called it daime, a variation of “give me” in Portuguese, with the sense of asking for love and light.
Mestre Irineu was inspired to form the religion Santo Daime, which combined the medicine practice with African, Christian and folk traditions with teachings about reincarnation and karma and Christian theology. He was not able to read and write, and he was a Black man from a slave tradition. His healing ability and popularity allowed him to build a church and an agricultural community. His first adherents were migrants from the jungle who were displaced rubber tappers. When he first started holding ayahuasca ceremonies, he met opposition from authorities who misunderstood his practices, and thought it was witchcraft. Irineu served time in prison in the early 1940s. He moved around and settled his church in Rio Branco in Acre State near Peru. The church began to draw well-placed citizens and it exhibited self-discipline and devotion. Their goal was to model unconditional love of neighbor, show devotion to Jesus and the saints, and carefully protect the formula for the sacrament daime. The church has been very particular about preparing ayahuasca the traditional way, and psychotria viridis is referred to as Queen of the Forest.
The services offer hymns that came to Mestre Irineu — and his followers wrote them down. They open and close with Christian prayers there is an emphasis on preparation beforehand for appropriate dedication. There are 132 hymns to portray strength, harmony and love, which revealed the course of his spiritual path. The ceremonies are called trabalhos or “works” and are organized rituals of different kinds, some contemplative, called concentrations, sitting upright quietly. The “hymnals” or dance ceremonies, have worshippers sing and dance for up to twelve hours, as the hymns guide the journeys. Services are dedicated to healing and promote personal responsibility, a wholesome lifestyle, love of nature, humility, fraternity and purity of heart.
There is a leader or godfather and controllers, an altar or table with the cross and symbols, and all the practitioners wear white. The symbols in the altar include a six-point star, a double cross to symbolize the second coming of the Spirit. The church motto is harmony, love, truth and justice.
Mestre Ieineu referred to the work of the church, from the beginning with his vision, as “Juramidam,” or God and God’s soldiers. After Mestre Irineu died in 1971, different branches and communities formed. The original community continues to function in the same place, led by Irineu Serra’s widow, Madrinha Peregrina Gomes Serra: the Luz Universal Christian Light Center — Alto Santo. Around 1980, Sebastiao Mota de Melo (Padrinho Sebastiao) formed a church and community, the Raimundo Irineu Serra Eclectic Center of Fluid Universal Light and a community centered on Santo Daime, in Ceu do Mapio, Amazonas State. This is the branch of Santo Daime that has the most practitioners, up to 10,000, and helped to spread this type of ayahuasca church to many places around the world.
Walter Pahnke:
Walter Pahnke was a Ph.D. student at Harvard University when he conducted the Good Friday experiment on April 20, 1962. It was one of the two most significant studies of the Harvard Psilocybin Project and for years was the leading experiment showing that psilocybin can facilitate experiences of mysticism in people disposed toward spirituality when used in a conducive setting. The project was carefully designed to provide supportive conditions to induce a profound experience which could be measured by psychometric assessments. It was the basis for the Ph.D. thesis for his program in religion and society. He previously had earned M.D. and M. Div. degrees.
By the time it was conducted, the subcommittee that became responsible for supplying the psilocybin for experiments refused to provide it for this experiment. He was studying under Dr. Timothy Leary and Dr. Richard Alpert, and they obtained supplies that had been withheld from the university authorities, stressing that it was the very type of research for which the psychedelics were intended. The volunteers for the experiment were twenty divinity school students from Andover-Newton Theological Seminary, and ten leaders who were professors or graduate students with psychedelic experience. Dr. Leary had insisted that half of the leaders also receive the psilocybin. No one knew who would receive the psilocybin, which was a 30 mg. dose for participants and a 15 mg. dose for the leaders, and who received an identically-appearing control of nicotinic acid.
To prepare, the participants had a physical examination and filled out a questionnaire that gathered information about their personalities and prior religious experiences to match them in five groups of four participants and two leaders. They were matched to promote friendship and trust. They listened below Marsh Chapel at Boston University to a 2 ½ hour service with music, prayers, and a sermon by Rev. Howard Thurman. The experiment found a very high correlation for the participants who took psilocybin and profound healing mystical experiences. The experiment employed a questionnaire which Dr. Pahnke prepared to measure the experience, adopting categories identified by the work of W.T. Stace as representing the characteristics of fundamental, universal mystical experiences., with responses showing the active participants responded that they experienced: (1) sense of unity or oneness; (2) transcendence of space and time; (3) deeply felt positive mood, blessedness, peace; (4) sense of sacredness; (5) objectivity, reality, and intuitive knowledge; (6) paradoxicality; and (7) alleged ineffability, which both refer to the difficulty of grasping the experience by language and logical thinking; (8) transiency; and (9) persisting positive changes in attitude and behavior.
His 1966 article about the Good Friday experiment was published in 1970 in the Aaronson and Osmond publication Psychedelics. He stated that psychedelics help facilitate experiences of mysticism, and that researchers identified similarities in descriptive language of the experimental subjects to the descriptions found in the descriptions of people having spontaneous mystical experiences. He noted the long history of religious use of plants that contain these substances, that about 50,000 American Indians were members of the Native American Church and used the sacrament as long ago as 300 B.C. He mentioned Mimosa hostilis, a plant that grows in southern Mexico and northern Brazil.
Dr. Pahnke continued research on psychedelics and religious experience which led to his friendship with Bill Richards. Dr. Richards was in a clinical program headed by Hanscarl Leuner, a psychiatrist at Georg-August University in Göttingen, Germany. On February 29, 1964, after he had received his Ph.D., Dr. Richards supervised and observed Dr. Pahnke’s first psychedelic experience. Dr. Pahnke made ecstatic and joyful shouts of his experiences. He had had a vision in that first session of going deep into a place and having silvery light spring from him, which seemed like a premonition of his later death in July 1971 in a tragic scuba diving accident. He went by himself with no prior diving experience and his body never was recovered. (Dr. Pahnke also had had, before his death, a vivid dream of jumping out of an airplane without a parachute, feeling regret, and not knowing how the experience would end). Dr. Richards wrote in his book Sacred Knowledge — Psychedelics and Religious Experiences that Dr. Pahnke had lived life to the fullest and that he was a loveable and brilliant man who often could be impetuous and spontaneous.
After that first session, they reviewed Dr. Pahnke’s experience and shared a premonition that they would work together with psychedelic-assisted therapy, which they did on a psilocybin assisted therapy research project in Boston in 1966 and later at Spring Grove, which became the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. Dr. Pahnke was the director of clinical sciences there, practicing “Psychedelic Peak Therapy” using music in therapeutic experiences supervising about 600 sessions as part of teams with male and female therapists with sessions of 200 to 400 micrograms of LSD.
The process included screening, ten to twenty hours of intensive psychotherapy before the sessions and as many hours as needed for integrations afterwards. Results were measured with psychological tests. A music therapist would meet in advance to learn about the patient’s musical history and preferences, and to try out selections, to ensure that the playlist would complement the therapeutic objectives of promoting intense, positive cosmic and transcendental experiences.
In an article with music therapist Helen Bonny, “Use of Music in Psychedelic (LSD) Therapy.” published in the Journal of Music Therapy in the summer of 1972, they described how these sessions would facilitate release of intense emotions as patients would release control and enter an inner world, using music to direct and structure these experiences. They observed that psychedelics increase sensitivity to all stimuli and can evoke a cathartic uncovering of deep feeling states and insights of self-understanding, and that unpleasant emotions would surface, revealing problem areas that needed to be worked out. They concluded that music balances or tempers the mental imagery and the personal memory imagery, and evokes deeper meaning and produces vivid memories. It also provides a supportive climate for psychologically-challenging, unpredictable emotional material and makes it feel safer to drop one’s defenses. Music allowed the patients to narrow their attention and heighten concentration to facilitate experiences of oneness and peak experiences. They encouraged the patients to “trust, let go, and follow the music wherever it will take you.”
Dr. Pahnke was sensitive to the concern about adverse reactions as well as the potential for benefits from mystical experiences. In the early research he conducted, he found how important preparation, support during therapy, administration in a comfortable setting, and integration of the experience are to decreasing adverse psychological reactions and promoting beneficial results. Preparatory sessions would foster trust and rapport with guides and minimize fear and anxiety.
He co-authored with Bill Richards an article, Implications of LSD and Experimental Mysticism., published in 1969. They showed how LSD, used in in controlled studies and clinical trials, frequently produced psychedelic peak or mystical experiences. These experiences brought about positive clinical outcomes with patients suffering from advanced terminal conditions. The psychedelics could improve the quality of life for terminally ill cancer patients even with a single session. It would provide a sense of security that transcends even death. The patients had decreased anxiety and worry, diminished need for pain medicine, and more serenity, peace, and calmness. By helping reduce one’s fear of death, one becomes more able to live more meaningfully in the present and attend to things that are most significant in the here and now. Dr. Pahnke said: “If the use of psychedelic psychotherapy for the dying patient ever should become widespread in our society, there would probably be a change in our whole approach toward death. There might be less fear and more acceptance of this part of the life process.”
Mestre Gabriel:
Known as Mestre Gabriel, Jose Gabriel da Costa was the founder of Centro Espirita Beneficente União do Vegetal, the largest, most organized, and most recent of the three main ayahuasca churches in Brazil. União do Vegetal means “union of the plants” in Portuguese, and is a reference to the two plants they know as mariri, the vine, and chacrona, the leaf, which combine to give the medicine its powerful effect which. Mestre Gabriel first had ayahuasca on April 1, 1959 at the Guarapari rubber camp, on the border between Brazil and Boliva. He had gone from Bahia in northeastern Brazil to the area of the Amazon in 1943 for wartime efforts to produce rubber. He had traveled between Porto Velho and rural rubber camps in the 1950s, and discovered the mestizo Peruvian ayahuasquero tradition that incorporated an exchange between Indian vegetalista healers and influences from other cultures.
In the 2012 biography The Messenger of God, Ruy Fabiano writes that Mestre Gabriel was looking for a way to help humanity and take evil away from human hearts. When he first drank ayahuasca, it was served without ritual and he recognized the need for one to recognize its spirit. He got up from his hammock and said, “Look, Chico, this is something from God, something serious. You don’t know how to work, you mx a lot. Whoever gives this tea is responsible for the people.” He found that it produces a state of consciousness that can amplify one’s perception and help people recognize their essentially spiritual nature and promote their moral and intellectual capacities.
Mestre Gabriel’s experience evoked the ancient origins of Hoasca and renewed the ritual with spiritual revelations. He became dedicated to working exclusively with Vegetal. Drawing upon the spiritual foundations of his day, and his personal experience, he led a structured group in Porto Velho with ayahuasca worship. He incorporated names from Quechua language and aspects of healing with plants, including nine other healing plants that he used initially. He had been steeped in his mother’s lay leadership in Catholicism and the Umbanda tradition, of southeastern Brazil, an African-Brazilian religion that he had actively practiced before. He developed devotional songs and practices. His vision drew on deeper mysteries that he felt had been lost and rediscovered. He taught that it had been a known sacrament from the time of King Solomon and reappeared during the Incan civilization, and that he had been involved with the medicine in previous incarnations. União do Vegetal also drew on a Kardecist spritism tradition that held that spirits of the dead, and psychic and magnetic forces, would intervene in the events on earth, and had teachings about reincarnation. He was guided by an Indian sprit, Sultan of the Forest, with knowledge of the medicines and secrets of the jungle.
Sandra Goulart, who conducted fieldwork and studied União do Vegetal wrote that one tradition that it holds is that twelve masters of curiosity, who preserved the tradition of ayahuasca, recognized Mestre Gabriel as having authority and complete knowledge to complete the elements of this lost tradition, blessing his efforts to reestablish it.
He founded the church on July 22, 1961, near Rondonia in the Amazonian state of Acre, Brazil, and moved it to Porto Velho in 1965, and is now centered at the capitol of Brasilia, with centers throughout the world. His purpose was “to heighten spiritual understanding and perception and bring practitioners closer to God.” He served without compensation, and earned income at various times working as a rubber worker, a bricklayer, and as a nurse.
The church celebrates with the sacrament of Hoasca Tea or Vegetal, with a goal to promote reverence for the medicine and its messages, and transparency among its members. Its practices involve simple dress, with green, a five-pointed star, seated ceremonies when everyone drinks at the same time, and last about four hours. Members will ordinarily drink medicine one or two times per month. Services and teachings are in Portuguese, and there is a is a council of mesters.
Mestre Gabriel sought to include the poor, the simple folk, and excluded people in the church. The church’s story is set forth in The History of Hoasca, which states that the Mariri vine and the Chacrona leaf encompass elements of the life of Christ. Mestre Gabriel is identified as the reincarnation of the first person ever to drink Vegetal on earth, and was a vassal of King Solomon, and remembered his mission, and was among the people who had been transformed to plants. He serves as a model of virtues such as generosity and devotion. The tea is regarded as providing spiritual healing, as opposed to physical healing. The church has a medical scientific department with health professionals. Its teachings do not accept the curandeirismo or folk healing traditions, and they believe those traditions had forgotten the original spiritual knowledge and proper context for taking Vegetal. Members will wear common clothing often with green and will typically drink Hoasca tea two times per month, and they all take it together at the signal of the mestre of their center. The church has many charitable activities such as literacy projects, clothing and book drives, sustainable agriculture projects, and a large preserve of 20,000 acres in Amazonas.
Dr. Humphry Osmond:
Dr. Humphry Osmond was a psychiatrist who was a pioneer and an innovator in the field of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. He invented the term psychedelic, meaning mind-manifesting from the Latin words for “mind” and “clear” or “visible.” He worked with an English psychiatrist, John Smythies, in London and became fascinated by the similarities between mescaline and adrenaline. His 1952 article, “On Being Mad,” described his own sensitivity and insight while being supervised by Dr. Smythies in London after ingesting 400 mg. of mescaline. The two were interested in schizophrenia and psychosis, and had a mutual interest in parapsychology and mescaline, and they hypothesized that there was a process relating the psychedelic experience to schizophrenia.
He moved from England in 1951 and became the clinical director of Saskatchewan Hospital in mid-1952, a mental health facility. In 1953, Dr. Osmond conducted successful research with psychedelics, first with mescaline and then with LSD. Dr. Osmond employed psychedelic therapy in in the 1950s and 1960. This was the technique employed by Al Hubbard and which Dr. Osmond popularized, using an overwhelming experience using high dosage of LSD on one or two occasions, supervised but without associated therapy, to stimulate transcendence or ego dissolution using music and sound to detach one’s senses. His research revealed the benefits of psychedelics for existential anxiety at end-of-life care and for alcohol use disorder. He encouraged mental health professionals to take psychedelics, writing that it was “a prolific source of material” to develop sensitivity, empathy, and understanding of people with mental illness. He also administered mescaline to a British member of Parliament, Christopher Mahew, in 1955, on television. Mahew referred to the experience as the most interesting and thought-provoking experience in his life.
Dr. Osmond co-edited the primary textbook, Psychedelics, published in 1970, with articles by himself and other scientists and professionals. It included his account of his October 1956 vigil with the Native American Church in a peyote ceremony covered by the press in North Battleford, Saskatchewan. Dr. Osmond studied the psychedelic regenerative experience and the historic use of plant medicines to help people understand that dying is a spiritual matter and realize that our essence persists beyond bodily death. He saw in them not only a benefit for end-of-life anxiety, but also an antidote for the crass commercialism that society has used as a substitute for a loss of earthy instinct and humanity. He concluded that both sides of the psychedelic era had shown excesses that ended the research prematurely, such as minimizing actual risks and hysterical exaggerations of potential dangers. He urged a cautious revival of careful and cautious investigation while warning that suppression of the opportunity to have such experiences would bring disrespect for authority.
Dr. Osmond was close friends with Aldous Huxley, whose books and presentations celebrated the benefits of mescaline and LSD to “release the mortal bonds of living.” Historian Erika Dyck has studied Dr. Osmond extensively in her Ph.D. dissertation and in her recent book about his correspondence with Aldous Huxley. She states that he was attracted to Canadian healthcare system because it was reaching greater access to populations. Dr. Osmond revealed that when he provided a supervised mescaline trip for Huxley, he feared that he might be recorded in history as the person who ruined an illustrious literary career, but instead, his participation resulted in the great work, The Doors of Perception, published in 1954, which marked the beginning of scientific and cultural fascination with the psychedelic experience. Aldous Huxley used mescaline to assist with his wife Maria’s transition in 1958 and had his wife Laura administer LSD to help with his own death in November 1963.
The Josiah Macy Foundation was a sponsor of conferences in 1955 and 1959 that showcased work on psychedelics. (Years later, John Marks revealed in his 1979 book, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, that the CIA was using organizations like the Macy Foundation and others in the scientific community to do unethical research using psychedelics in mind control).
Dr. Osmond introduced the term psychedelic at the 1957 meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences and described how the psychedelic experience was unpredictable but could result in an enriching and life-changing experience that “etched away the patina of conceptual thinking” and produce a vision of transcendence. Dr. Osmond wrote in 1957 that such experiences “have a part to play in our survival as a species.”
In 1959, the term psychedelic became the term in use, although hallucinogen is the medical term in common usage. Dr. Osmond presented research results at that year’s Macy Foundation conference describing psychedelic therapy. It allowed people to see themselves as part of a larger pattern, experience a sense of release, joy, and cleansing, gaining perspective to view old woes as trivial. He found that about fifty percent of the subjects were changed by their experiences. In an article in February 1958, Dr. Osmond proposed having LSD administered to terminal cancer patients.
In 1966, Dr. Osmond and other researchers compared 28 patients in a clinic for alcoholism who received two large doses of LSD with a control group of 34 patients who did not but participated in the same six-week program. While the active patients improved their self-esteem, there was no significant difference between the groups after six months. This has led more recent clinical researchers to appreciate the use of a therapeutic approach with substantial preparation and integration to achieve more lasting benefits. Researchers today are building on his earlier work and finding that psychotherapy supports the psychedelic process and provides greater benefits. Dr. Charles Grob writes that Dr. Osmond was first psychiatrist to explore use of the higher dose model on patients and in self-experimentation on himself, which may provide access to an unfamiliar dimension of consciousness that could be terrifying and also ecstatic and restorative. In his research with patients with alcoholism, he found that treatment successes were associated with the experience of a transcendent or mystical experience akin to a spontaneous religious experience, a life changing vision.
Aldous Huxley:
Aldous Huxley was a philosopher, a writer, a jazz pianist, and a mystic. His writings included science fiction, screen plays, social commentary, children’s books, and some of the seminal writings of the Psychedelic Movement. He was intrigued by the research of Dr. Humphry Osmond and Dr. John Smythies who were conducting clinical experiments using mescaline and LSD in Saskatchewan to learn more about the mind and mental illness. He sent them a copy of one of his books and an invitation to visit him, expressing his interest in the phenomena of hallucinations and mental illness, and stating an interest in taking mescaline.
Dr. Osmond went to Los Angeles for a psychiatric convention and on May 4, 1953, he supervised Mr. Huxley’s experience with mescaline and had him write about his impressions. In his 1954 book about this experience, The Doors of Perception, he wrote that after one and one-half hours he felt as though he had passed through a screen and saw “what Adam had seen on the morning of creation.” Everything was shining with its own inner light, charged with significance, like pure Being, the source of existence. It was “the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.” Mr. Huxley wrote that he witnessed “eternity in a flower, infinity in four chair legs, and the Absolute in the folds of a pair of flannel trousers.” He wrote, “The Mind at Large seeps past the no longer watertight valve,” opening up a field of thoughts and impressions. He repeatedly said, “This is how everyone ought to see.”
Aldous Huxley had been fascinated by inner experience and the realities that lie beyond the senses. At age 16, after his mother’s death, an illness left him almost completely blind for a year and a half. This prevented him from being in World War I and left him with diminished vision. He would use a small telescope and magnifying glass throughout his life. Mr. Huxley had written the successful novel Brave New World in 1932, expressing concern about how authoritarian government could manipulate people with technology and automation, or use subliminal messages to appeal to emotions to overtake their humanity. He moved with his wife Maria to Los Angeles, near Hollywood, in 1937. He wrote successful screenplays for the movies “Madam Curie,” and “Pride and Prejudice.”
He and his British friend Gerald Heard, an author and teacher of science, religion and philosophy, pursued a common interest in access to the unconscious and the evolution of consciousness, and universalism, the belief that one common truth underlies the differences in religion. He studied Vedanta, the unitary vision in Hinduism. Mr. Huxley wrote about mysticism in religious traditions in his 1945 work, The Perennial Philosophy. He made friends with Jiddu Krishnamurti. He and Maria would have Tuesday evening study groups to discuss meditation, hypnosis, extrasensory perception, and similar topics.
In 1954, he lectured on “The Far Continents of the Mind,” at the International Conferences of Parapsychological Studies and a couple of years later, he was invited to lecture at the American Psychoanalytic Association convention. In 1955, he helped Maria navigate her transition from life using insight from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. His second essay about a mescaline trip, Heaven and Hell, was released in 1956. He argued that the experiences were not “mere chemical religion,” but like the physiological effects of prolonged fasting like people in medieval times would experience, or self-flagellation or prolonged chanting or meditation. His work brought him to the forefront of a spiritual and scientific movement fascinated by consciousness. The word “psychedelic,” meaning manifesting the mind, was created by his friend, Dr. Osmond, in correspondence with him as they explored new terms for hallucinogen or psychotomimetic in March 1957.
The late 1950s and early 1960s were a time when people like his friend Al Hubbard, and psychiatrists Sidney Cohen, Oscar Janigar, A. Wesley Mitford, and Arthur Chandler, who formed the Beverly Hills Psychiatric Institute with radiologist Mortimer Hartman (who was the LSD therapist of actor Cary Grant and many others), were active in the field of psychedelic research or therapy. He had a full mystical experience on LSD with psychedelic assisted therapy in 1960, and he distinguished visionary experiences from full unitary mystical awakening. His friend Huston Smith, a scholar of comparative religion who was teaching comparative religion at MIT, invited Mr. Huxley to lecture at MIT. In the fall of 1960, he gave a series of lectures that fall, “What a Piece of Work is Man,” which were enormously popular. He met Dr. Timothy Leary, who attended his lecture on November 8, 1960, and later he had psilocybin at his house. He appreciated Dr. Leary’s enthusiasm and his connections and his theoretical orientation, and shared his goal to enlist luminaries from philosophy, literature, art and science to have mystical experiences with psychedelics, but he became concerned that he created trouble and scorned accepted scientific models in his research.
In 1961, he rescued his manuscript for his final novel, Island, from a fire that destroyed the home he and his second wife, Laura, had near Hollywood. It depicted a society that balanced body and mind and employed a mystical sacrament, moksha medicine, from the Sanskrit word for liberation. It revealed truth and beatific glimpses of enlightening and liberating grace and another world, and helped sustain a utopian society. It would be taken for initiation into society and every year or so to help people realize their potential. People were told, “You will know what it’s like to be what in fact you always have been. It remains for you to decide whether you’ll cooperate with grace and take those opportunities.”
He died on November 22, 1963, the day that John Kennedy was assassinated, after receiving requesting administrations of LSD to help with his transition. The third issue of Psychedelic Review in 1964 was a memorial about him. One of his interviews was published in November 1963 interview, in Playboy Magazine, called “The Pros and Cons: History and Future Possibilities of Vision-Inducing Psychochemicals, A Philosopher’s Visionary Prediction.”
In her book This Timeless Moment: A Personal View of Aldous Huxley, Laura Huxley described how the author, at the end of his life, requested an administration of LSD for this soul journey. She had him tell her whom he wanted to join him in taking that medicine, and then she imparted to him the advice we all would be well to heed. She felt the relief that he had accepted his death and she repeated to him, “light and free. Light and free you let go, darling; forward and up. You are going forward and up; you are going toward the light. Willingly and consciously you are going, willingly and consciously, and you are doing this beautifully — you are going toward the light — you are going toward a greater love — you are going forward and up. You are going toward Maria’s love with my love. You are going toward a greater love than you have ever known. You are going toward the best, the greatest love, and it is easy, it is so easy, and you are doing it beautifully.”
They waited in silence for hours. She had administered a second 100 microgram dosage when the first had not had much effect. When it came near the time, Laura Huxley continued: “It is easy, and you are doing this beautifully and consciously, in full awareness, in full awareness, darling and you are going toward the light.” She repeated this the last three or four hours. Then she said, “Easy, easy, and you are doing this willingly and consciously and beautifully — going forward and up, light and free, forward and up toward the light, into the light, into complete light.” He gently slipped away afterward, embracing the light we all hope to share when we take off the tight shoe of this life, and go toward a greater love than we have ever known.
Albert Hofmann:
Dr. Albert Hofmann was a Swiss chemist who was fascinated with the chemistry of plants and animals as well as an author and philosopher. For many years, he discovered helpful medicines at Sandoz, Limited and he observed how plants would provide amazing chemicals. In the 1930s, he studied the chemistry of ergot to help blood circulation and stimulate breathing. In 1938, one derivative, lysergic acid diethylamide, seemed to have no obvious benefit, and so he shelved it until he had a “strange presentiment” and made a new batch in April 1943. He felt some effects and the following Monday, he ingested 250 micrograms and rode his bicycle home with an assistant when he became disoriented. Time stood still and he became terrified and sent for a doctor when he got home, but after six hours, “I began to enjoy this wonderful play of colors and forms,” and the next day, he felt quite fresh, like a newborn.
Dr. Hofmann later stated, “LSD spoke to me. It came to me and said, ‘you must find me.’ It told me, ‘Don’t give me to the pharmacologist, he won’t find anything.’” It was the beginning of a circle of discoveries and friendships he made involving entheogens. In 1949 to 1951, he had LSD sessions with close friends, including author Ernest Junger. He said, “It gave me an inner joy, an open mindedness, a gratefulness, open eyes and an internal sensitivity for the miracles of creation.” Dr. Hofmann was a deeply spiritual man. He developed a lifelong love of nature as a child, which inspired him to study what made up matter. The more he learned, the more his sense of wonder and joy increased.
In 1956, Roger Heim, the director of the Museum of Natural History in Paris, contacted him to do a chemical investigation of psilocybin mushrooms he had grown after discovering them in Mexico with Gordon Wasson. Dr. Hofmann had tried mushrooms given to him earlier by Dr. Richard Schultes. He isolated and named psilocybin and psilocin, the active alkaloids, publishing his research in 1958. Dr. Hofmann also derived from psilocybin mushrooms compounds that became beta blocker cardiac drugs. Dr. Hofmann and his wife accompanied the Wassons and others to Oaxaca in 1962, finding ritual use of Salvia divinorum, and then participating in the mushroom ceremony. Dr. Hofmann shared his psilocybin pills with Maria Sabina and other curanderos, and at dawn she told him the pills “had the same spirit as the mushrooms.” She thanked him for the pills, saying she could use them when the mushroom season was over.
By the late 1960s, about 40,000 people had been legally treated with LSD and psilocybin in psychotherapy to free people from repressed shadow material, releasing individuals from unconscious drives, and increasing their insight and wellbeing. LSD and psilocybin were used in psychotherapy and research for 17 years before being severely restricted, and Sandoz did not renew its patent. In 1971, Dr. Hofmann retired as its Director of Research for the Department of Natural Products. He subsequently served as a member of the Nobel Prize Committee.
Another discovery that Dr. Hofmann made completed what he called “the magic circle.” His friend Gordon Wasson obtained ololiuqui, Morning Glory seeds, from Zapotec Indians and provided them to him for analysis. He discovered lysergic acid amides in them, like in his original discoveries with ergot. He wrote about this with Dr. Richard Evans Schultes in 1973, The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens, which also revealed the mysterious interplay in ayahuasca of DMT and the harmine and harmaline mono amine oxidase inhibitors, manifesting a profound psychedelic effect. Dr. Hofmann did two years of research with Gordon Wasson and Carl Ruck to discover that in ancient Greece, people had probably isolated a psychedelic that was used to produce the mysterious visions in the Eleusinian Mysteries for centuries. His research, published in 1978, showed that a variety of ergot that grew on a common grass, Claviceps paspali, had no toxins and only the hallucinogenic lysergic acid alkaloids, and that common ergot varieties that grew on wheat and barley had water-soluble extracts, both of which were very similar to ololiuqui and LSD. He wrote a wonderful book about the natural psychedelics for general audiences with Dr. Schultes in 1979, Plants of the Gods. He published his memoir, LSD, My Problem Child in 1980.
Dr. Hofmann said that psychedelics revealed to him knowledge of an infinite number of realities, and how inner and outer universes are immeasurable and inexhaustible, but that we must then return to the homeland of our ordinary lives. “A chemist who is not a mystic is not a real chemist,” he said, at the symposium, LSD: Problem Child and Wonder Drug, held in Basel, Switzerland, from January 13 to 15, 2006, to celebrate his discovery on his 100th birthday. He stated of LSD: “It is a tool to turn us into what it is in us to be. It should be integrated in a reasonable way by society to prevent its misuse.” Dr. Hofmann said that psychedelics should be approached with respect and reverence, that they may provide a key to the subconscious, but that spiritual strength is needed to handle and integrate the powerful experiences. He wrote that psychedelics are an important aid to meditation directed toward a deeper, more encompassing reality, and can reveal the necessity of changing from materialistic attitudes. He loved nature and had warm relations with friends and family. He said that “all we need to be happy is not to be found in the beauty of human invention, but in nature’s own beauty.” When asked how he would like to be remembered, Dr. Hofmann said to think of him less as the scientist riding a bicycle on LSD and more as the old man of the mountain because he spent his later years in the wonder of nature surrounded by majestic mountains.
Most human beings live nowadays in big cities, in a dead world,” he said. “They go to the moon, but they don’t even know how to look at a starry sky.” “And yet, all we need to be happy is not to be found in the beauty of human invention, but in nature’s own beauty.”
“LSD came to me — I didn’t look for it. LSD wanted to be found, it wanted to tell me something.” “I think in human history it has never been as necessary as it is today,” he said. “But it has never been legally sanctioned before. It is one of the modern sacred drugs but we don’t have a sacred room for it. It is one of the gifts that the plants give us, like food, vitamins and medicine. It is a tool to turn us into what it is in us to be. It should be integrated in a reasonable way by society to prevent its misuse.” Dr. Hofmann also described the benefits of miscrodosing LSD to help with depression.
Claudio Naranjo:
Claudio Naranjo, M.D., was a man with many talents, a brilliant psychiatrist and philosopher, a medical scientist with a vast knowledge of chemistry, and a principal leader of the Gestalt Therapy approach. His long career included early research on ayahuasca. He was the first to study the psychotherapeutic applications of ayahuasca, the first to publish on the effects of ibogaine, and a long-time collaborator with Sasha Shulgin in the research behind Shulgin’s famous books. He was a Fulbright scholar and Guggenheim fellow, and later in his life, he was honored with titles of rabbi and as a yogi of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.
In September 2014 he gave the inaugural speech at the First International Conference on Ayahuasca. He also spoke at the 2019 World Ayahuasca Conference in Spain. His life work was devoted to improving education to awaken humanity to transcend its patriarchal past and present. He explained that ayahuasca can help society heal from the repression of instinct, the self-rejection, and the guilt imposed by intellectual domination continuing from classical culture and western religion. He stated that ayahuasca can help us recover the love of ourselves and wake up to self-knowledge, which will increase connections with God and one another. He said that “Nothing is more important in our time than our learning to be a little kinder.”
In the 1960s he worked at Esalen Institute and he worked with Leo Zeff on LSD-assisted therapy and in meetings of Dr. Zeff’s psychedelic therapy group. In his 1974 book, “The Healing Journey: Pioneering Approaches to Psychedelic Therapy,” he wrote that with the assistance of the ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, he had traveled by canoe up the Amazon River to study ayahuasca with the South American Indians. He brought back samples of the beverage and published the first scientific description of the effects of its active alkaloids. His 2020 autobiography, “My Psychedelic Explorations: The Healing Power and Transformational Potential of Psychoactive Substances,” includes his reflections on the spiritual aspects of psychedelics and the healing transformations they bring about. He maintained that psychedelics act as agents of deeper consciousness, and he shared optimal techniques for controlled induction of altered states using different visionary substances.
In his native Chile, he conducted clinical research, published in 1965, using 35 volunteers from Santiago, to compare the effects of mescaline with effects of harmaline, an alkaloid in ayahuasca and even more concentrated in the seeds of Syrian rue. Dr. Naranjo presented his research at the Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs conference in 1967. His presentation showed that harmaline creates electrical effects in the retina, which is unique among the psychedelics. Dr. Naranjo’s research into the effects of harmaline built upon prior research 30 years earlier indicating that it is hallucinogenic and twice as active as harmine.
He stated that harmaline causes a sleeplike trance, withdrawal and lethargy, and has physical effects, such as numbness and nausea and sometimes dizziness, which would appear and disappear with different thoughts. The subjects showed little desire to communicate and passivity to movement. Most of the subjects would lie down for 4 to 8 hours. He was on a panel with Gordon Wasson and expressed an opinion that Soma was Syrian rue, since it grew in Asia and produces a yogic trance and withdrawal from the environment. He mentioned that its seeds are sold in bazaars in India and it grows even in Spain.
The harmaline was more visual in its effects than mescaline. He found that with eyes closed there would be a lot of imagery with long dreamlike sequences. The people had variable effects in a world of inner visions, feelings and thoughts with unusual depth, insight and inspiration. People reported having soul awareness, sometimes experiencing a separation of mind and body, and feelings of flight. There would be an alertness to mental processes and an activation of fantasy. Some subjects saw themselves as disembodied witnesses of themselves in a different time and place. He noted that some volunteers described landscapes and cities, masks, eyes, animals and human figures, dwarves, angels and giants. Fifteen of the thirty-five subjects had religious, fairy tale, or mythic images, some of which would transform to animals. Visions of transitions would depict the human drama of being and becoming, spirit and matter, freedom and necessity, and opposites could merge and reconcile, sometimes after experiencing death and destruction. Seven of the 35 subjects saw large cats, although none are present in Chile. (When he later asked Dr. Schultes if he had seen jaguars on his ayahuasca journeys, he replied, “Sorry, only wiggly lines”). Dr. Naranjo stated that these visions revealed “a fluid synthesis of aggression and grace and a full acceptance of the life-impulse beyond moral judgment. People would have images of being merged with the entire scene. Some of the subjects had pronounced improvement of neurotic symptoms.
Dr. Naranjo conducted research with Alexander Shulgin that involved pineal gland metabolites and showed that the body itself creates chemicals that are alkaloids similar to harmaline through activity of an enzyme. Dr. Naranjo studied the psychotherapeutic uses of ibogaine and presented the results at the University of California LSD Conference of 1967. With Dr. Shulgin, he studied the use of MDA, a close relative of MDMA, in psychotherapy. He described MDA as an empathogen rather than a hallucinogen; it did not manifest much symbolic content, but it would evoke a very dramatic, spontaneous reminiscence of childhood events that he felt could facilitate psychotherapy by increasing personal communication.
Masters and Houston
Dr. Jean Houston and the late Dr. Robert E. L. Masters are authors of the 1966 book The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience. It was the first comprehensive guide to the effects of LSD on human personality and compiled observations from over 200 sessions with subjects having supervised sessions with peyote or LSD. Dr. Masters began doing research with peyote in 1954 and developed a systematic protocol of LSD therapy integrating trance states with bodywork. They described fascinating experiences in practical and scholarly terms and presented it in an historical context at a time when psychedelic research was being prohibited.
The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience has been republished recently. It is a fascinating collection of vivid descriptions of experiences from early research from the 1950s and early 1960s. It shows how creatively they guided psychedelic experiences with a reverence for the innate unconscious process involved in psychedelic experience. They wrote that psychedelics afford an excellent way to access the deeper mind and inner life when directed responsibly with adequate preparation and supervision. Preparation, motivation, and suggestion can optimize the experience and minimize or eliminate potential dangers. They described how people may have transient psychotic-like experiences in stressful settings when there is a lack of caution and preparation, a mishandling of expectations. Their research indicated that there is no serious risk of casualties when people are informed and prepared. In the past, people had been led to experience psychosis or simply watched and studied.
The subjects they studied were ordinary people who were functioning successfully without any serious mental illness who were prepared and encouraged with positive expectations and reassurance. Many educators, clergy, and professionals in business and law were involved in their research and wrote about their experiences. People wrote about what they saw as enormously impressive and important, and very unusual, experiences. Their experiences included enhanced emotions with unconscious material unique to the individual at that time.
Many of the subjects had confrontations with themselves at deep levels and obtained insights from deeply symbolic lessons and would emerge transformed in a fundamental way from their experiences actualizing unrecognized capacities with greater fulfillment, creative energy, and self-acceptance. Six of 206 had experiences of the most profound cosmic mystical experiences.
People frequently would have personal histories come alive. People would live restorative myths to recover lost understandings, like realizing that it is possible to have harmony with all beings. Moments would be extended in time. People would establish an identity with the restorative powers of nature, or see their own ways of resisting or opening to the renewal and emergence into a way of appreciating the mystery and potential of their lives. Subjects would visualize and even participate in historic visions, and the guides would suggest they become part of their visions. People would witness a vivid succession of detailed images arriving from the other world with rich and accurate detail, with mythological and evolutionary dramas with full emotions and senses coalescing, some with archetypes having nothing at all to do with the individual’s history, all of which can be employed for their personal benefit.
Masters and Houston wrote that psychedelic journeys may fill a human need for ritual often missing in our society. Ritual dramas would unfold, helping people establish an identity with the restorative powers of nature. They recognized that our hearts long to overcome alienation and awaken empathy. Sometimes it was necessary for people to have fearful and even terrifying experiences to leave behind systems of self-limitation and barriers to spiritual growth and integration. People reconcile aspects of personality through a dramatic symbolic experience, as living allegories unfold that bring the life force and vitality back to themselves. Many people experienced profound revelations from the deep psyche such as the knowledge of the cycles of nature and emergence, returning after redemption such as a death of one’s shallow nature to deeper wisdom.
Masters and Houston have had long careers as educators and prolific writers, together and individually. Their 1968 visual art book, Psychedelic Art, included their commentary about the practical psychedelics to art and creativity. They also started the Foundation for Mind Research in 1965, and have continued their important research, writing, and education projects to awaken human potential and contribute to personal transformation through mystical and other transformative experiences. They have written numerous works over the years about consciousness and transforming human potential. Jean Houston has taught at an institution, the Renaissance of Sprit, and is a gifted speaker. She has been involved with United Nations humanitarian projects and worked with former presidents and first ladies. She formed her own foundation.
Ram Dass:
Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert. Ram Dass left his body in December 2019 after leading an inspired life as a spiritual teacher, after beginning as Richard Alpert, a psychology professor at Harvard and a psychedelic explorer. Ram Dass said that although he had a bar mitzvah, he was “inured to religion. I didn’t have one whiff of God until I took psychedelics.” In Be Here Now, published in 1971, Ram Dass revealed that his first turning point in transformation began with his trip on synthesized psilocybin on March 6, 1961 at Timothy Leary’s house in Newton, Massachusetts. He wrote that he had led an outwardly successful life but that he felt a lack of validity, feeling as though he were playing an empty game, and he was caught in anxiety. The medicine peeled off layers of his identities: his persona as professor, and as a social being and when it seemed nothing remained, a voice within him asked, “but who’s minding the store?” He sensed being non-dual awareness, beyond life and death, and part of deep wisdom.
He began having monthly psychedelic sessions and with Leary, Ralph Metzner and others, and they formed the Harvard Psilocybin Project. They invited about 200 graduate students, creative people, academics, theologians and others to write about their experiences with psilocybin. They also conducted the 1962 Good Friday experiment that administered psilocybin to ten divinity school students and a placebo to another ten of the students, and found that nine of the ten active students had had transformative experiences. In 1963, he and Timothy Leary were dismissed from the Harvard faculty for making psilocybin available to undergraduates and other controversies. After traveling to Mexico, he took up residence at the psychedelic estate, Millbrook, and worked on books, like The Psychedelic Experience, with Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner, and LSD with Sidney Cohen and Lawrence Schiller, which recounted the results of their experiments with entheogens.
After a couple of years of psychedelic exploration, Ram Dass became disillusioned and he took an opportunity to go to India. He met a young mystic, Bhagavan Das, who led him to his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, or Maharajji, who was telepathic and had deep meditative powers and was full of love. When he met Ram Dass, Maharajji showed that he knew Ram Dass’ deepest thoughts and playfully revealed his attachments, and Ram Dass felt he had arrived at home. Ram Dass had brought some powerful LSD and had intended to ask a wise person about psychedelics, and Maharajji asked him about medicines — he wanted to try the medicines that had siddhis, or powers. “Do you mean LSD?” he asked and he replied that he did and Maharajji took 915 micrograms in his mouth and he seemed to have little effect, just a little twinkle in his eye.
Maharajji sent him back to the U.S. in 1968 promising to shower him with grace. He stayed in a cabin at his father’s estate in New Hampshire. Young people came to learn from him, sing devotional songs and meditate. He toured to give talks about getting beyond dual thinking, becoming less attached to our identities, and the benefits of loving service. Ram Dass went back to India and he was with Maharajji from February 1971 to March 1972. Maharajji knew that Ram Dass had started doubting whether he actually had taken the LSD previously, and so Maharajji asked him for more of the medicine. This time, he had four 300 microgram pills and carefully put them in his mouth. He asked if it would make him crazy and Ram Dass replied, “probably.” After they waited, he teased Ram Dass and pretended to be crazy, but then he showed he was not affected and asked if he had anything stronger. He said, “These medicines were used in the Kulu Valley [up in the Himalayas] long ago. But yogis have lost that knowledge. They were used with fasting. Nobody knows now. To take them with no effect, your mind must be firmly fixed on God. Others would be afraid to take. Many saints would not take this.” When Ram Dass later asked if he should take LSD again, Maharajji said, “It should not be taken in a hot climate. If you are in a place that is cool and peaceful, and you are alone and your mind is turned toward God, then you may take the yogi medicine.”
In his later years, Ram Dass concentrated on service and followed Neem Karoli Baba’s example to “love, serve and remember” God. He donated proceeds from his books to charity. He formed the Hanuman Foundation in 1974, devoting attention to helping homeless people, helping prisoners develop spiritually, and giving instruction to assist conscious dying. In 1979, he joined the leadership of Seva Foundation and made frequent fundraising tours to benefit its mission to restore vision for over 2 million people. After he did deep inner work after having a stroke in 1997, Ram Dass wrote and lectured and after a serious infection in 2004, he did not leave Maui. He taught a meditation mantra to affirm “I am loving awareness” and shared peace and love.
Ram Dass taught that our hearts are connected, and that with acts of tender caring, we align with beauty of the universe. When asked if he could sum up his life’s message, he replied, “I help people as a way to work on myself, and I work on myself to help people … to me, that’s what the emerging game is all about.” He encouraged us to experience events in our lives, even traumas, with openness and receptivity and less expectation or judgment, experiencing them as “consuming the Mother,” life in the Spirit united in universal consciousness. He spoke about appreciating the perfection around us, part of which is the human desire to improve ourselves and the outer world.
In a discussion between Ram Dass and Terence McKenna at a conference in Prague in 1992, Ram Dass shared a teaching, from beyond death, from a spirit friend he was able to communicate with at his advanced stage of spiritual development. It is a hopeful message, like the ones we receive in ayahuasca ceremonies, and the participants did in Eleusis in Greece for centuries, that death is not the end and the present moment is always. The spirit told Ram Dass that “death is absolutely safe,” and that it was “like taking off a tight shoe.” Why then, Ram Dass asked, do we stay here? The reply was it was to learn the lessons, and to act without attachment to self and to results.
Richard Evans Schultes:
Dr. Richard Evans Schultes, was an adventurous botanist who devoted his life’s work to the study of plants and their use by humanity. He is considered to be the founder of the field of ethnobotany and contributed greatly to the biology and chemistry of plant hallucinogens. Before he became a professor in the botany department at Harvard University in 1970 and the director of the Harvard Botanical Museum, he did his undergraduate thesis there in 1936 on the ritual use of peyote among the Kiowa tribe in Oklahoma, studying with an anthropology graduate student from Yale, Weston La Barre. They went to numerous villages and participated in about three peyote ceremonies per week, which would last all night, led by a roadman using a water drum, with the participants seated upright and taking turns chanting. He developed a deep affection for these experiences beyond description and for his colleague and the elders of the tradition.
His research on peyote at Harvard also helped lead to the discovery of the hallucinogenic teonanacatl of the Aztecs. Dr. Schultes found a letter from an Austrian in Mexico, Blas Pablo Reko, about the use of divine mushrooms, and he traveled to Oaxaca in 1936 to meet him. In the village of Huatla de Jimines, he acquired a dozen fresh mushrooms that later would be identified as Psilocybe cubensis and Panaeolus campanulatus. In 1939, he returned and explored with a guide and they located another Aztec teacher plant, ololiuqui, vine of the serpent, at a curandero’s home in San Juan Lalana. He earned his Ph.D. in botany in 1941 describing these entheogens and their history of sacramental use.
As a youth, Dr. Schultes was inspired by the account of Richard Spruce, an English botanist who collected ayahuasca and observed a ceremony among the Tukano in 1852, on the Vaupes River in northwestern Brazil. Dr. Schultes explored the Amazon rainforest in the Sibundoy Valley in northwest Colombia beginning in 1941, beginning with a grant to study the ingredients of curare, a muscle relaxant and paralytic substance helpful for surgery. He learned from shamans from the Kofan tribe, who would consume yage (ayahuasca) weekly, that they used over 70 plants for curare, carefully supervised and brewed by shamans for use on arrows in hunting.
He collected over 24,000 species of plants, about 300 of which had not been named by western science. He befriended shamans and elders from the Witotos, which led to the discovery of the yoco tree, used as a stimulant. He first had ayahuasca under the guidance of a Kamentsa tribe taita, or shaman, Salvador Chindoy, who shared his vast knowledge of plants that he learned from yage and barrachero, a rare hallucinogen now identified as Brugmansia aurea culebra. His apprentice, Pedro Juajiboy, recalled years later that during that first experience with yage, Dr. Schultes sang and told stories all night in English, which none of them could understand.
Dr. Schultes was recruited for a twelve-year expedition for the Rubber Reserve Company to locate rubber plants to help the allied effort in World War II, collecting seeds, helping establish rubber stations, and finding wild rubber trees as he traveled a treacherous 1350-mile Apaporis River trip. He befriended Tucano language tribespeople, such as the Makuna and Kananari, and deeply respected their ability to recognize and combine plants to “novel and powerful effects.” In 1952, he was hosted by his beloved Yucuna for the joyful festival of the Dance of the Dolls, celebrating the peach palm harvest with dancers wearing costumes made of plants for animals such as the monkey, jaguar, deer, bat and wasp. In 1953, the project ended and he took a position at the Harvard Orchid Herbarium.
With Albert Hofmann, he helped discover how ayahuasca creates a potent effect by combining dimethyltryptamine with a mono amine oxidase inhibitor. They became friends and collaborated on books including Plants of the Gods (1979), and they stated: “A few plants had inexplicable effects that transported the human mind to realms of ethereal wonder — in communication with the spirit world. It is little wonder that they have long played an important role in religious rites of early civilizations and are still venerated by people who remain part of ancient traditions.” His other works include The Golden Guide to Hallucinogenic Plants (1976) and he co-wrote Vine of the Soul: Medicine Men, their Plants and Rituals in the Colombian Amazonia (1992).
Dr. Schultes realized that biological and cultural diversity are intimately connected. He helped preserve large sections of the Colombian Amazon region for indigenous people and their natural areas, and inspired others to do so, such as the Amazon Conservation Team and the Gaia Amazonas Foundation. The anthropologist who delivered the keynote address to the 2019 World Ayahuasca Conference, Wade Davis, was inspired by Dr. Schultes to visit the Colombian Amazon as an undergraduate. Mark Plotkin, Brian Hettler, and Wade Davis prepared the keynote discussion about Dr. Schultes in the 2017 Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs symposium that Dennis McKenna helped produce.
R. Gordon Wasson:
R. Gordon Wasson was an ethnomycologist, a lover of fungi, who helped people learn about the natural psychedelic medicines that he preferred to call entheogens, plants and fungi that bring about the divine within. His field explorations and careful research, combined with his brilliant interpersonal skills and respect for Indigenous people, led to important discoveries about how humanity uses entheogens and has done so since ancient times.
He was an investment banker in Danbury, Connecticut, but his physician wife, from Russia, shared her love of mushrooms with him, an intriguing discovery on their honeymoon. Their thirty-years of research led to the scientific discovery of the forgotten tradition of using psychedelic mushrooms for spiritual healing among the Mazatec Indians of the western Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico.
They had researched mushrooms and learned from Robert Graves and Hans Mardersteig about use of sacred mushrooms among indigenous people in Meso-American cultures. He contacted Richard Evans Schultes at the Harvard Botanical Museum, who provided his 1939 paper, based on his field explorations with Blas Pablo Reko, showing that the sacred medicine of the Aztecs, teonanacatl, was a psilocybin-containing mushroom. When Cortez conquered Mexico, his followers noticed the Aztecs eating mushrooms in a religious setting and calling them God’s flesh or teonanacatl. Mr. Wasson had studied art works in the region going back to a thousand years earlier, such as mushroom stones in Guatemala. The Aztec Prince of flowers is a seated male figure, carved in stone during the 1500s, with stylized mushrooms on its body, along with tobacco, morning glory, and something called Heimia salicifolia, a trance divination shrub with medicinal qualities.
On June 29–30, 1955, Mr. Wasson and photographer Allan Richardson were the first outsiders to participate in the sacred mushroom ceremony, under the direction of the curandera Maria Sabina. They had traveled to the Mazatec Indian community of Huautla de Jimenez, 5500 feet high in the mountains of Oaxaca, a journey that included a harrowing flight and several miles on horseback. He had approached an official at the town hall respectfully, and used the correct pronunciation for the word to describe the mushrooms, and the man showed Wasson a place where the mushrooms were growing so he could gather many of them. Then, he was introduced to Maria Sabina, who led the ceremony with her daughter at night, with many members of the tribe.
An article in Life magazine on May 13, 1957 by Gordon Wasson described how the ritual was full of reverence, and “hedged about with restrictions of many kinds.” The mushrooms are gathered at a new moon before dawn by a virgin, consecrated on an altar at a Catholic church, and are eaten fresh in pairs. Before the ceremony, the mushrooms were held over copal incense. They are called littles ones who spring forth, and their society believed the Christ spirit would come to them through the mushrooms, called as the curandera prevailed upon it to come down in her singsong prayers. “They carry you there where God is,” the Mazatec would say, and they are approached with reverence and regarded as a blessing on their people because they were poor.
The curandera ate 13 pairs and Wasson said he was served six pairs. He wrote that he emerged awestruck and described visions more wonderful and real than ordinary life, of magnificent journeys and overwhelming beauty. Before the article came out, he had repeated the experience three days later and saw visions of people in another world, and felt his consciousness as not having a body. Six weeks later, he had some dried and he stated that they had all their potency. As he wrote it, he was making his fifth trip there, and he had her words translated from later ceremonies he participated in when he recorded her chanting. In 1956, he was accompanied by a chemist and an anthropologist, as well as having a leading mycologist, his friend Roger Heim, the director of the French National Museum of Natural History, to help collect and identify the mushrooms. Dr. Heim illustrated in watercolors the seven different varieties of divine mushrooms he had seen them use, four of which had never been seen before. They collaborated on books about the discovery, and Dr. Heim grew enough varieties that in 1958, Dr. Hofmann synthesized psilocybin and psilocin using mushrooms he supplied.
Mr. Wasson was intrigued by how early human explorers would have discovered the fantastic effects of these mushrooms, and how Indigenous cultures around the world would create practices and rituals, even religions, surrounding the experiences. He wrote that the effects of entheogens “could only have been profound, a detonator to new ideas.” In his 1968 book, Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, he conducted a thorough study with careful research that argued the sacred medicine, Soma, in the Rig Veda, the oldest of the Vedas, four sacred texts of Hinduism, from as far back as 1500 B.C. The Rig Veda is replete with invocations to Soma that he concluded were offered in homage to the Amanita muscaria mushroom. Though it had remained in use in Siberia, its use had died out thousands of years ago in India, which was a mystery, as practices such as yoga, devotional chanting, meditation, temple offerings, and ceremonial meals inhabited the tradition. The Chilean medical anthropologist, Dr. Claudio Naranjo, argues that Soma is more likely to be Peganum harmala, also called Syrian rue, which contains harmaline and harmala, like the ayahuasca vine. Mr. Wasson did careful research on Siberian use of amanita muscaria, and tried it himself, without experiencing the desired effects.
In 1978, he helped write a major work showing that the ancient Greek Eleusinian Mysteries employed a potent psychedelic libation called the kykeon, which evoked a vision for the participants to understand the continuity of life and celebrate the eternal cycle of the returning of springtime. These ritual pilgrimages took place from 1600 B.C. to 392 C.E., as an annual festival that celebrated the myth of Demeter and Persephone. He wrote the book with Dr. Carl A. P. Ruck, a classics professor at Boston University, and Albert Hofmann, the chemist who discovered LSD and synthesized psilocybin. Their research into the experiences and the veiled writings and artistic depictions indicated that the arcane secret sacrament was a potent entheogen, likely a solution from varieties of ergot Claviceps paspali or Claviceps purpurea that would have grown nearby on the Rarian Plains. Varieties of wheat and barley ergot can have water-soluble hallucinogenic alkaloids that they could drink as a libation that would not have the harmful alkaloids so dangerous in ergotism.
Psychedelics often are called entheogens, meaning something that helps evoke an awareness of God or the higher conscious presence. It is a term that Dr. Ruck, Gordon Wasson, Jonathan Ott and others helped develop in an article in 1979. Entheogens can offer an ecstatic renewal that gives deeper meaning to our lives and an appreciation of the magnificent rich character within ourselves and in nature and our fellow beings.
Timothy Leary:
Timothy Leary had a life full of adventure and hardship. He became a famous figure in the counterculture of the 1960s, advocating for inner exploration and questioning authority. Later, mainstream society regarded him as a fringe observer and a disgraced scientist. Leary served in the Army from 1943 to 1946 and worked in psychology. After he earned his Ph.D. in 1950 at Berkeley, he developed a clinical program in psychology at Kaiser Hospital in Oakland and practiced psychotherapy. His research on diagnosis and personality led to him receiving a position in 1959 at the Harvard center for personality research as a lecturer in clinical psychology. In the summer of 1960, a psychology professor he knew from Berkeley, Frank Barron, inspired him to experience psychedelic mushrooms in Mexico. He described it as “the deepest religious experience of my life.” He saw that his reality appeared to be a fabrication, and came to believe that psychedelics were one of the most important events of the 1900s.
Dr. Leary organized research on the effects of psilocybin and LSD, and oversaw the Harvard Psilocybin Project. About 2000 people were given psilocybin and observed to see how it affected them. Their research included investigating its effects on prisoners and the 1962 Good Friday experiment with divinity students. Their research showed that psilocybin was effective in bringing about an authentic religious experience and helped develop awareness of the significance of preparation, expectation and environment. Dr. Leary inspired many people to seek experience with entheogens, but he was criticized for drifting away from the therapist role. He wanted to reduce the impact of expectation and let an inner process manifest from the unconscious.
Albert Hofmann wrote that in January 1963, there was considerable surprise when Dr. Leary ordered from Sandoz pharmaceuticals one million doses of LSD and 2.5 million doses of psilocybin. The company insisted on having an import license, and then inquired from the dean and found that that their research was no longer approved. Shortly afterward, he was dismissed from the Harvard faculty. Dr. Hofmann found Dr. Leary to be charming, humorous and self-deprecating, but tending to gloss over the dangers of widespread use of entheogens by young people.
Dr. Leary continued working with psilocybin at Millbrook, an estate made available to him and his colleagues, Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner. They held retreats and published the Psychedelic Review and a book, The Psychedelic Experience. He founded the International Foundation for Internal Freedom and the League for Spiritual Discovery. Psychedelic experience, he wrote, “frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.” He taught that divinity lies within. He wrote that psychedelics produce states of “trance, delightful chaoticness, expanded consciousness, spiritual illumination, powerful, mystical empathies with natural forces.” A strong proponent of autonomy, his influence did not extend to seeking to control others, and he opposed authoritarian structures.
Dr. Leary’s famous advice to turn on, tune in, and drop out, came from a conversation with Marshall McLuhan, and he first used it in his address at the Human Be-In at Golden Gate park in January 1967. Drop out, he wrote, meant to “detach yourself tenderly, aesthetically, and harmoniously from the fake prop studio of the empire game and do nothing but guard and glorify the light.”
The psychedelics became illegal nationwide by October 1968. He ran for governor of California that year, and John Lennon wrote “Come Together,” which was his campaign slogan, for his campaign. But he was targeted for being a spokesman for the psychedelic revolution, and California and the federal government pursued charges against him for marijuana possession. He escaped from prison and lived as a fugitive and in exile before serving three years in prison from 1973 to 1976.
Dr. Leary wrote over twenty books. He had important friendships with philosophers and celebrities; he was married five times and brought up three children. In the 1980s, Leary became excited about the potential of cyber communication, extension of life and intelligence and space migration. He collaborated with Robert Anton Wilson to discuss the cosmic relation between the human nervous system and interstellar space. While some people resent him for carelessness creating opposition to research on psychedelics, many people loved him and appreciated his efforts to encourage inner exploration. Asked which perspective of him was correct, a showman or a seeker, he replied with a twinkle in his eye: “you get the Timothy Leary that you deserve.”
Dr. Leary stated people should find a sacrament which returns you to the temple of your own body and be reborn, drop back in to express it, and start a new sequence of behavior that reflects your vision.
Ralph Metzner:
Ralph Metzner, Ph.D., who passed away in 2019, led a lifelong effort to develop and uphold the spiritual context for safe use of entheogens. He obtained great academic qualifications and lent his experience for over fifty years in the international clinical and underground entheogen sub-culture. He had direct experience with psychedelic research while he earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Harvard University and pursued his post-doctoral fellowship there, with NIMH, in psychopharmacology. As a graduate student studying under Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and others, he helped direct the Harvard Psilocybin Project. He participated in the successful 1962 Good Friday experiment with psilocybin, in which 8 of 10 divinity school students with psilocybin reported mystical experiences during a church service. In 1964, he wrote a book Dr. Leary and Dr. Alpert called The Psychedelic Experience, a manual based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. For many years, from 1963 to 1971, including the time after he left Millbrook, he edited The Psychedelic Review. There is an on-line archive of these journals on the MAPS website.
He said that in his early years, he attended the Acid Tests, which he stated would involve music, dancing, and high dosages of LSD; and he said they would seem out of control but also bring about gentleness and compassion. In his 2010 book of conversations with Ram Dass, Birth of a Psychedelic Culture, he described the work with Tim Leary as a great adventure by scientific explorers that was like a wave that was part of a flowering of culture. He described the 1960s as a time when the collective consciousness had its own momentum, and formed part of a complex cultural revolution in which the expansion of consciousness was part of an environmental, social equity, peace and justice, and artistic innovation movement. He thought that Timothy Leary was devoted to promoting consciousness expansion, exploring the deeper reality, and having people take responsibility for their brain functions and consciousness, but that he seemed provocative and careless about his own safety.
In the 1970s, Dr. Metzner worked as a psychologist and therapist at hospitals and counseling centers in California and studied and taught as an Agni Yoga school. He joined the faculty at what became the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco and he was on the faculty for over thirty years. He was the academic dean there in the 1980s and also was the academic vice-president.
Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, the therapy that Dr. Metzner had studied for many years became illegal. He sought to develop in other way; he continued his earnest interest in spiritual use of psychedelics, and always tried to integrate their use into spiritual energy work with a sacramental attitude, with an understanding of the value of set and setting. In lectures, he would be cast as a psychedelic advocate with a contrast to the more skeptical or cautious approach of Sidney Cohen. His goal would be to point out that there are methods to promote their beneficial use. He stated that the psychedelics are consciousness-expanding and can change the way we look at things. He stressed that shamanic tradition goes back as much as thousands of years, and showed the way to safety factors and reliable practices.
Dr. Metzner maintained that psychedelics were extremely valuable for addiction treatment, and he cited a study in the Netherlands with ayahuasca, as well as ibogaine use for addiction, and for use in depression and creativity were very fertile areas to investigate. He edited a book about psilocybin and another about ayahuasca in the mid-2000s. The use of psychedelics for treatment in end-of-life area, he believed, was the most significant area of their potential, because of the need for understanding, with our cultural ignorance and denial of death. He cited Charles Grob’s research with psilocybin as being very successful at helping people ease their anxiety about death, to focus on the present and die at peace. He believed that this is because these consciousness-expanding medicines ignite awareness to expand beyond death and to show that we are not identified with the body, and that all human life is connected. They impart wisdom that leaves us with less fear, often with a sense of formless consciousness. People also awaken to learning we can love each other, and also to love oneself.
His 2015 book Allies for Awakening, Guidelines for Productive and Safe Experiences with Entheogens is an excellent overview and preparation for spiritually-focused psychedelic journeys. He learned that, “Spirit dwells within created forms and expresses through them.” He thought that the scientific inquiry should examine how productive the experiences are of facilitating healthier approaches to the living in these times. He stated that the psychedelics should be used only when people willingly choose to use them, with adequate knowledge and preparation, with facilitators who have personal experience with them.
He encouraged the older nature-based traditions, and urged the value of psychedelics, which he describes as non-specific awareness amplifiers, for purposes of spiritual awakening, healing and increased understanding, and enhancement of creativity. The goal, he stated, is to bring back useful content from the expansive visions of reality. He had friendly disagreements with Terence Mckenna and Owsley Stanley when they advocated for taking “heroic dosages” of entheogens. He stated that transcendence is conscious dissociation, while dissociation is unconscious transcendence. He stated that entheogens reveal higher spiritual dimensions of our being, just as eastern religion recognizes higher levels of consciousness. He viewed all levels of life, from particles and beings and all forms of creation as expressive of life. He urged an approach with small groups of twelve or so in a spiritual, creative setting with a goal of transformation and an attitude of reverence.
He revealed his ayahuasca experience revealed to him dancing spirits and he merged with and received spirits that he experienced as beautiful. People feel cleaned out and the purge helps people feel purified of toxicity and that spirits do the healing.
Michael Pollan wrote about Ralph Metzner in an article about a March 2018 session he attended at the California Institute of Integral Studies when he was in his eighties. He had not discussed psychedelics until a question from a psychotherapist. He stated, “These are drugs that psychotherapists unanimously feel could improve psychotherapy, but their use is illegal. What does that tell you? Something about the society we live in!” He paused and stated, “There is a vast underground network of psychedelic therapy, you know — vast. Larger than the approved uses of psychedelic therapy. It’s an underground culture, and underground cultures are good, in fact they can be lifesaving.” He argued that our country is in the midst of a spiritual emergency and we have these “fantastically promising medicines that can cure all sorts of ills, and yet doctors can’t get them.” He stated that, “We don’t have to accept that!” He compared the underground psychedelic movement to the families in World War II in Germany, where he grew up, who “took in Jewish families and hid them in their closets.” He was dismayed about the slow pace of scientific research and the federal approval process for psychedelic-assisted therapy. He stated that we are “at a time of civilizational collapse,” and that we have these medicines that we know work and could help our society right now. “It doesn’t need to be proven over and over again. When there’s a plague, you don’t go through double-blind placebo-controlled studies! It’s a plague!”
Stanley Krippner:
Dr. Stanley Krippner has led a remarkable career as a psychologist with a fascination for dream states, telepathy, hypnosis, and psychedelics. He was a professor at Saybrook University from 1972 to 2019, where he held a chaired professorship named for Alan Watts, and from 1964 to 1972 he was the director of the dream research laboratory at Maimonides Medical Center. He has been recognized for years of leadership in the American Psychological Association.
In an account published in Psychedelics (1970), Dr. Krippner wrote about his first psilocybin experience in 1962 supervised by the Harvard University Psilocybin Research Project. He described a richly symbolic experience of heightened sensation with pronounced tastes, feelings, smells, sights, and sounds, and felt “overwhelmingly tuned in to ‘the true nature of things.” His series of visions included the Yin-Yang symbol, the court of Kublai Khan, an orchestra hall, a scene in Versailles with Benjamin Franklin being hosted by French royalty, and scenes from Spain and Colonial America. They proceeded to a grieving Edgar Allen Poe and then the statue of Abraham Lincoln at his memorial, which transformed into an image of John Kennedy and a shooting that caused Dr. Krippner to sob. He later recognized this as a premonition of the November 1963 assassination. He also had a vision of himself and his guides with a young man, whom Dr. Krippner recognized as God, being adrift out to sea caught in a storm with no way to return. His realization that we do not control our course or direct our destination helped him appreciate the importance of compassion. He wrote that, “we also knew that we were able to love, and that in the act of loving we could partake of divinity.” He wrote that he had been allowed to “peak beneath the cosmic curtain to see what the universe was all about.”
Dr. Krippner was inspired to specialize in interpersonal and transpersonal psychology. He explored how creativity often originates in non-rational, nonverbal, unconscious processes, seeing things in a new way and can involve integrating past emotional experiences. He wrote that psychedelics flood the nervous system and provide immediate experience that can lead to transformation and illumination. Dr. Krippner later wrote about another psychedelic experience when he saw a whirlwind carrying away his words, letters, and numbers, signifying his need for nonverbal training. He wrote that with psychedelics, we enter space where meanings and patterns are formed and we may become more present to the inner and outer reality. He explored how creativity often originates in non-rational, nonverbal, unconscious processes, seeing things in a new way and can involve integrating past emotional experiences.
In a 1969 article, Dr. Krippner showed hypnosis had a clear benefit in many cases for performing artists with promoting creativity. He shared his research with 180 artists and 27 musicians derived from surveys and found that the great majority were enthusiastic about their initial experiences with psychedelics. Most of them responded that the experience had influenced their work and changed their creative approach. Many said it activated some dormant interest they had. A common response was that it had strengthened their eidetic or mental imagery. Dr. Krippner invited more research. He suspected that dreams could foretell the future, but the research in this context early in his career could not be replicated. Later, he co-edited a book published in 2000 by the American Psychological Association on anomalous phenomena that challenge mainstream paradigms and broaden our understanding of reality, such as precognitive dreams, psychic healing, clairvoyance and shamanism.
Dr. Krippner collected a large number of first-person reports of psychedelic experiences, and his experience in leading LSD trips showed him how he could make experiences positive by helping his subjects reframe their experiences. Among his numerous articles, Dr. Krippner presented a paper, “LSD and Parapsychological Experiences” for the 2006 symposium LSD: Problem Child and Wonder Drug, honoring Dr. Albert Hofmann.
In a 2009 interview, Dr. Krippner described his experience with ayahuasca rituals in Brazil with Santo Daime and other churches in a religious setting. He said the members of ayahuasca churches experience visions like dreams that are spiritually significant and provide meaning for their lives. The activity of the cerebral cortex and sense of self is suspended, which allows the more basic lower brain and visual cortex to be more active and allow for nonrational states that can bring about emotional surrender and spiritual reverence. Other benefits from the ayahuasca experience can include insights that help people learn to be more forgiving, less resentful, and less angry. He stated that best future for ayahuasca is to place its use in a spiritual framework, such as the long-established shamanic tradition or another spiritual context, where it can provide visions to affirm spiritual significance, a deeper context or code of ethics, and meaning for personal life. Otherwise, he concluded that it would be confusing and disorienting to take it in the absence of a grounded setting.
Captain Al Hubbard:
Al Hubbard was a key contributor to the evolution of psychedelic methods. His research helped people realize the significance of set and setting and he introduced many people to LSD and mescaline. At a time when scientists in lab coats were providing psychedelics in sterile environments and creating the expectation of psychosis, his contribution was the specially-designed psychedelic therapy session room called the Hubbard room. It provided stereo music, spiritual images, a small altar, and burning candles, usually with himself as a guide.
He embodied the spirit of curiosity that characterized the early psychedelic research and he is one of the most inscrutable personalities of that era. He was known as the Johnny Appleseed of LSD. By 1959, he stated that he had led 1700 LSD sessions and he had contributed to an LSD therapy manual that came into use that year. He developed and promoted a method to induce transcendental experience in a large percentage of participants, and shared his knowledge throughout the world. He taught the importance of set and setting, about subtleties such as which music is best to use, and how facilitators should behave to lead people to the Beatific Vision. It was called psychedelic therapy, with one to three sessions with 500 to 1500 micrograms of LSD, a technique used by Humphry Osmond and others in Saskatchewan, and later adopted by Tim Leary, Walter Pahnke, and Boll Richards. It focused on a particular behavior, like alcoholism, with integration sessions provided afterward. He conducted sessions to stimulate religious ecstasy with a less experimental setting.
He was born in 1901 and he grew up in poverty in Hardinsburg, Kentucky before his family moved to Washington state. A short and stocky man with a crew cut, he was fascinated by machinery and engineering. He designed a perpetual motion machine that provided energy, supposedly without fuel, and received a lot of press in 1919. He promoted the machine and later revealed it was powered by radium after he sold a major interest in the device. He became a pioneer of early radio in Seattle, starting Seattle’s first station. He was a protégé of a well-known bootlegger at the time named Roy Olmstead. He became a liquor smuggler himself. When he was faced with prosecution, he arranged to become an agent of the Bureau of Prohibition in 1925. He acted as an informant but one who played both sides and gained funds to start radio stations. Ultimately, he was incarcerated at McNeil Island, Washington from September 21, 1936 to May 21, 1938.
Al Hubbard was known as Captain after he obtained a master of sea vessels certification. He captained a yacht and a charter boat, becoming accomplished with electronic communications and radar. He was contacted by the Office of Strategic Services to fit vessels in Vancouver to serve as destroyers for the Allies in World War II, and was part of this covert operation from 1941 to 1947. He obtained a full pardon in 1945 by President Truman. By this time, he was a Canadian, the owner of “The Uranium Corporation,” and a millionaire. In 1950, he was fascinated by an article about LSD in a scientific journal, and he investigated and obtained some, had a profound transformative experience, and became committed to launching a psychedelic movement. He impressed Humphry Osmond with his invitation to meet him for lunch at the Vancouver yacht Club, with his worldly success, including an airplane and an island sanctuary, and his charming personality. He had obtained a vast amount of mescaline by that time. In 1955, he obtained a vast amount of LSD, up to 10,000 doses by some accounts, from Sandoz Laboratories. At the time, all that was required to purchase mescaline, LSD, or psilocybin was a signed statement that the purchaser had training and facilities available, and that they would be used only for research purposes.
He apparently introduced over 600 people to the LSD experience, including Aldous Huxley and Myron Stolaroff, a senior official in charge of long-range planning at Ampex, a recording and video technology company. He was converted to the cause himself after a 1956 session. Stolaroff relived his birth trauma and traced the origins of some of his neuroses to that experience. He was convinced that Hubbard was the one person who would lead the way to bringing LSD to the world. Hubbard intended to launch a psychedelic movement. Hubbard worked together with Myron Stolaroff, Willis Harman, Charles and Ethel Savage, and James Fadiman, in providing sessions at The International Foundation for Advanced Study in Menlo Park, including ones at Death Valley, where James Fadiman had what was termed “advanced training.” He wrote, “This was the most intense set and setting one could imagine and allowed opening not easily achieved in any other situation.”
Captain was a fervent Catholic, and had friends in government. In 1957, Vancouver’s Cathedral of the Holy Rosary released an announcement stating that it would approach the study of psychedelics and their influence on the mind, with an approach anxious to discover whatever attributes they possess respectfully evaluating their place in the Divine Economy, and calling for their use to know and understand creation and benefit humanity.
In 1959, he guided a young reporter, Ben Metcalfe, in a session, which was intense and filled by weeping. He said, “this is all repressed material coming out. This is what we bury to become men.” When Metcalfe began shouting “I must be insane! I must be,” he observed, “we’re all insane when it comes to confronting ourselves.” This resulted in Metcalfe having an experience of flight into the sun, shedding attachments, after which he asked Mr. Hubbard, “did I die?” He replied, “No one really dies.” In 1961, he had an article published, “The Use of LSD-25 in the Treatment of Alcoholism and Other Problems,” in the Quarterly Journal of Studies on alcohol.
In 1963, new regulations for distributing LSD came into play. Sandoz let its patent lapse on LSD, and it was manufactured in Czechoslovakia and Italy. Sandoz restricted its use to programs funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, sponsored by the Veterans Administration, and state university programs approved by state mental health commissioners. Canada’s research programs were limited to university programs listed with the ministry of health. Private therapists without institutional affiliations were not included among the Sandoz special investigative new drug protocol that it would sponsor. Most therapists were unable to afford the time and expense to obtain the substances. In 1964, The International Foundation for Advanced Study closed, unable to cover its costs. In 1967, the Drug Control Act made LSD possession a felony punishable by up to 15 years in federal prison. Hubbard was unable to finance himself and sold Dayman Island. He moved to an apartment in Menlo Park, continued seeking permission for use of psychedelics for terminal cancer patients, and spent his last years in a trailer park in Casa Grande, Arizona, and passed away on August 31, 1982.
Salvador Roquet:
Salvador Roquet, M.D. was Mexican psychiatrist who actively led group psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy in Mexico City from 1967 until 1974. He opened the Institute of Psychosynthesis in Mexico City in October 1967 using techniques he learned from Maria Sabina and Huichol healers. He used a variety of entheogens: LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, Rivea corymbosa, ketamine, MDA, Datura species, and Salvia divinorum administered in a series of monthly administrations.
The first psychedelic experience that Dr. Roquet had was with mescaline was in 1957 as part of a study at the national university. “I felt I was dying. I could not breathe,” he said, adding that it was like having an inner fire, and he felt scared like a caged lion. Afterward, he was devastated for eight days became burdened and preoccupied with horror and anxiety. He sought to be stable with tranquilizers and had a severe depression several months later. He began practicing psychiatry, and he became concerned about the sickness of humanity. He recognized that childhood trauma, like his own, when he became an orphan as a boy, would lie at the heart of people’s problems, and that conventional therapies would not expose the wounds where they could begin healing.
Ten years later, he began contacts with Indigenous healers that led to his forming a clinic for psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. It began when he saw a book in Paris by Roger Heim about the psilocybin mushrooms and how they were ritually used by the Mazatec Indians of Mexico. They became friends and Dr. Heim put Dr. Roquet in contact with Carlos Inchaustegui, who was leading a program for the indigenous in the Sierra Mazateca, and with Dr. Alfonso Caso. They collaborated and distributed medicine and opened medical clinics. In 1967, he met Maria Sabina and she guided him in a session. He worked among the Mazatec, Mixtec, Huichol, and Tarahumara. He worked on malaria in the mountains and continued traveling among the tribes and treated them with respect, and shared medical knowledge and clothing. He learned about their practices of healing with psychedelics, the healing of the spirit and the encounter with death, guiding the experiences using music and careful attention to the dosage and sacraments being used.
Dr. Roquet also was inspired by a young Indian man who had lost a hand, and had nearly died from a violent assault. He had been in a terrible state and his “spirit had fallen.” He had used Salvia divinorum to get in contact with God and feel his spirit recuperate. Dr. Roquet borrowed the techniques of the curanderos who try to bring healing from the higher realm to heal the spirit with the encounter with death. His therapy focused on the disintegration of the self through analytical and psychotic processes so that, later, in reintegrative synthesis, reason and sensitivity are balanced.
The group therapy sessions would include 15 to 30 participants and last about 20 hours. They would begin with taking the Hartman test which could identify issues with fantasy, anguish, and distortion for the work to be done. They entered a large prepared room for the disintegrative phase. There were stereos, strobe lights, film projectors for slides and movies projecting beautiful, happy, funny, cruel, and also disturbing images. He and his assistants would create a sense of chaos or sensory overload. He believed that there is a close connection between madness and the mystical experience, and that it is practically a prerequisite. They would show themes of birth, death, childhood, love, violence, sexuality, spiritual themes, and representations of evil. This would go on for hours. They hoped to lead people past avoidance and fantasy or false love to an analytic phase where one confronts painful memories and emotions, followed by a psychotic stage with disintegration of personality to experience rebirth, followed by more tranquil circumstances. Peak experiences would take place in the early morning, to be followed by a three-hour period of rest, and then synthesis, involving integration with sharing and creating balance with spiritual values to center oneself.
His daughter Ivonne Roquet, M.D., presented a discussion for Chacruna Institute on April 24, 2021. She stated that during the seven years the Institute was open, he treated 1023 patients in 764 sessions. Dr. Roquet maintained that 85 % of his patients improved after treatment. He helped patients with treatment of neuroses, depression, and addiction, and also creative people who sought inspiration.
In 1972, he gave a series of lectures at Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, and had a supervised LSD session with Stanislav Grof and Bill Richards. He was arrested in 1974 and imprisoned for five months in Mexico. A 2015 article by Alexander Dawson noted that there was concern in Mexico about hippies coming to the region of Oaxaca and using mushrooms in a cavalier manner. He was released in April 1975 after political pressure and testimonials from psychotherapists who cited benefits to his former patients. He discontinued administering psychedelics himself, but he would organize expeditions to remote Indian villages in Mexico for people to experience the natural setting in which healers used natural entheogens to help people recover their lost spirit. bring people to indigenous healers and help with preparation and integration. He would lecture and give workshops in the United States and conduct marathon group therapy sessions, called convivials, using the same techniques to induce chaos and promote integration without psychedelics. By 1980, Maria Sabina realized that the maladies of old age had led her to cease using the mushrooms, and his patients on that expedition were led by Dona Clotilde. He died in 1995, but in 2006, he was remembered at the international conference in Basel, Switzerland “LSD Problem Child and Wonder Drug.”
Alan Watts:
In 1968, Alan Watts, a philosopher of religion, wrote an article, “Psychedelics and Religious Experience,” for the California Law Review, stating that psychedelics can facilitate genuine religious experience and should not be prohibited by law. He was a gifted speaker, teacher and writer who embraced a unitary vision of the universe. He wrote about twenty books, including his 1962 book The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness, revealing his experiences with three consciousness-expanding psychedelics: LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin. He praised their ability to bring about religious experience and insights that facilitate personal transformation “when accompanied with sustained philosophical reflection by a person who is in search, not of kicks, but of understanding.”
At a young age, Alan Watts embraced Buddhist teachings when his father began taking him to the Buddhist Lodge in London. He came to America in 1938 at the age of 23 and continued studying Zen Buddhism, which teaches a path to enlightenment by work to eliminate selfish craving and practice mindfulness and inward contemplation. Then, he studied Christianity, becoming an Episcopal priest from 1944 to 1950, and served as chaplain at Northwestern University. He wrote Behold the Spirit in 1947, describing a mystical approach to Christianity that revealed the “gold within the sectarian dross of every great religion.” He urged a mystical understanding of the statements of Jesus as being unified with God, and Paul’s statement of being alive in the Holy Spirit. Instead of a cosmology regarding God as a king, he advocated an awareness of a unified field with awareness everywhere and encouraged spiritual practices seeking self-realized awakening of compassion.
In 1959, he had LSD at U.C.L.A. Medical School, and later that year at a clinic in San Francisco, an experience he described as a profound experience deeper than any of his previous naturally-occurring experiences. He described psychedelics as “instruments, like microscopes, and telephones,” and urged people to apply the lessons and work with what they had seen. An influential research book from 1966, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, by Masters and Houston, identified four levels of experience in their research with peyote and LSD: sensory, recollective-analytic, symbolic and integral. They included a record from Alan Watts about a psychedelic mystical experience at the highest level. After various impressions his mind opens and he describes a great release: “I feel, with a peace so deep that it sings to be shared with all the world, that at last I belong, that I have returned to the home beyond home…The sure foundation upon which I had sought to stand has turned out to be the center from which I seek.”
Mr. Watts gave lectures on Zen and eastern religion in San Francisco, including a notable one at the Avalon Ballroom in 1967. His book titled The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are came out in 1966, as did an influential article in The Oracle. His popular radio show and writings inspired individual and societal liberation with accessible discussions of Buddhist and ecological ideas. He was friends with beat poet Gary Snyder, and inspired Jack Kerouac, an author of the Beat generation, who included him as a character in two of his novels. He offered a view of non-dualistic spirituality that awakened the imagination of the Beat generation and, later, the counter-culture of the 1960s.
Alan Watts became fascinated by parallels between mystical experience and insights from physics about energy and matter. He served as the president of the Society of Comparative Philosophy. He spoke at Esalen Institute and at colleges and in seminars and entertained friends on his ferryboat, many of whom were artists in the Druid Heights artist community. He moved to a cabin around Mount Tamalpais in the late 1960s and wrote mountain journals and continued to tour until he died in 1973 at the age of 58.
Mr. Watts argued that psychedelics should be legal because they reveal hidden truths and can lead to transformation of consciousness with greater compassion and interest in ecology and sustainability. They deepen the significance of the present moment in life, reveal how differences become parts of each other in a unified field of an eternal energy, and reveal a sense of connectivity in which all forms of life are a variation on the same theme. He recognized that the experiences can bring about anxiety, when people are lost in the corridors of the mind or experience shifting conceptions of reality, and can lead to conflict with a society not ready for challenges to authority and a patriarchal image of God. He stated: “Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination” that leads to alienation from nature and hostility to others.
Alan Watts had a mystical experience on psychedelics in 1962. He described his impressions of a church chorus, how a priest chanting a mass with a chorus of nuns seemed to represent the depth of the history of the church, then seeming to be artificial, but this gave way to ancestral struggle in which the nuns seem to overpower the priest. The ancestral symbolism of survival then becomes a deeper experience.
Huston Smith:
Huston Smith was a foremost scholar of mysticism and world religions and a leading figure in the psychedelic era. His writings about entheogens were collected from over the decades and published with funding by the Council on Spiritual Practices in a book titled Cleansing the Doors of Perception — The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals. He wrote that entheogens “have light to throw on the history of religion…and the religious life itself.”
He is best known for the 1958 book, which he expanded in 1991 and titled The World’s Religions. He was in a five-part television series with Bill Moyers in 1996. He taught the many religions reach toward the indescribable Absolute and help people bear fruit in the world and try to “turn our flashes of insight into abiding light.” He wrote that, “If we take the world’s enduring religions at their best, we discover the distilled wisdom of the human race.” He advocated for greater mutual appreciation, stating that, “If, then, we are to be true to our own faith, we must attend to others when they speak, as deeply and as alertly as we hope they will attend to us.”
He grew up in rural China where his parents were Protestant missionaries, and he saw poverty, illness, and death, as well as many diverse religions in practice around him. He had decided to teach about religion, and his focus turned toward mysticism, and away from scientific rationalism, as he was completing his Ph. D. when he read a book by Gerald Heard, Pain, Sex and Time. He met Mr. Heard, who encouraged him to meet Aldous Huxley in 1947. His meeting with Aldous Huxley led Dr. Smith to become active in The Vedanta Society of St. Louis, when he was teaching at Washington University and serving as an associate minister in a Methodist church. He began a lifelong practice of meditation.
Years later, after he had joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Smith and others invited Aldous Huxley to be a visiting lecturer there and conduct a lecture series in the fall of 1960 that was enormously popular. Mr. Huxley had written about visionary and mystical experiences with mescaline in The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, titles drawn from the mystical poet William Blake. Prof. Smith confided to him that he had not had a genuine mystical experience, and this led Mr. Huxley to give him the telephone number of Timothy Leary, who was beginning a three-year appointment at Harvard University as a research professor for the study of personality. Dr. Leary had experienced a profound mystical experience in Mexico with psilocybin before arriving at The Center for Personality Research at Harvard, and he had decided to focus his research on psychedelics. He would lead The Harvard Psilocybin Project and begin conducting scientific studies to measure the benefits of entheogen-assisted psychotherapy with prison recidivism, alcoholism, and with personality disorders.
When they met, they arranged for Prof. Smith to have a professionally supervised session with mescaline on New Year’s Day in 1961 in Dr. Leary’s living room in Newton, Massachusetts. In a 1964 Journal of Philosophy essay, he wrote that he had a full range of impressions with beatific visions as well as fearful aspects to his experience. He found bands of consciousness, each one real, in layers with unclear boundaries, emanating both the eternal and momentary. A group met every month or so for three years for group psychedelic sessions with meetings using incense, candles, with readings from poetry or spiritual writings, or spontaneous observations. They also would meet socially for discussions and sharing experiences.
He was a designated guide for the research as well, participating in the Good Friday experiment in 1962, led by Walter Pahnke, with twenty divinity school students and ten supervising volunteers, in groups with four students and two guides, and half would be given psilocybin while the others got a control of nicotinic acid. He was one who had an experience with psilocybin and he said it was his first ever direct personal encounter with God when he was transported by a woman singing a hymn. He felt God’s love in a personal way and said he became a more considerate and positive person for many months. The study found a high incidence of mystical experiences among the active group. They all assembled listening below, in a basement chapel, to the two-and one-half hour Good Friday service. Years later in 1996, Prof. Smith revealed that one of the students who had had psilocybin thought he had to go out and proclaim a new messianic era, and he was able to escape, and Prof. Smith quickly sprang to follow him and got other helpers to follow him into the Boston area, and he was returned, and was the only person in his research who had to be administered Thorazine as an antidote to the effects.
His friends from the project and he began publication of The Psychedelic Review, which was in publication for ten years. Prof. Smith came to agree with Aldous Huxley that psychedelic experiences closely corresponded with spontaneous mystical experiences in the world religions, like near-death or sudden feelings of belonging. He cited studies showing one-quarter to one-third of ordinary population and three-quarters of people with a religious inclination would have mystical experiences with psychedelic-assisted therapy. When he shared the view that research showed that psychedelics were effective in bringing about an authentic religious experience, he had to consider and respond to the criticism of religious skeptics and traditionalists.
Huston Smith thought the best factors for measuring the validity of the entheogenic mystical experiences was how they affected the people. He argued that experiences should be joined with actions, such as better relations, more patience and equanimity, positive experiences, and morality, or altruistic responsibility. He disapproved of Dr. Leary’s departure from the therapist and researcher roles and becoming a public figure leading people to leave education and careers behind, and he did not view this counterculture movement as having staying power. He preferred the cautious and studied approach of his friends Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, Gordon Wasson and Albert Hofmann. He thought the tenets of the world religions all counseled in favor of positive activity to promote universal compassion. He cherished his heritage and others that recognize that we “are in caring hands and that in gratitude for that fact we should try to bear one another’s burdens.”
In his later career, he made a decision not to take any more entheogens, but he carried forward their lessons of gratitude for this great gift of love in his thoughts and actions. He was dedicated to the Civil Rights Movement, he helped introduce the Dalai Lama to Americans, and he worked to promote understanding of Islam when people who purported to be Muslims engaged in destruction on 9/11. His career was long and full, and he shared the unifying vision of an omnipotent, caring, healing God through his work.
Stanislav Grof:
Stanislav Grof, M.D., is a psychiatrist and perhaps is the world’s most experienced authority on psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and the principal leader in the field of transpersonal psychology, the understanding that consciousness is not contained exclusively within the body. The great research on higher states of consciousness that the did during more than fifty years in Prague, Czech Republic, and in the United States, led him to become one of the principal developers the field of transpersonal psychology. Dr. Grof founded the International Transpersonal Association and he is a proponent of the benefits of inner transformation that come from the human encounter with death.
His career included supervising over 3000 sessions with patients using psychedelics. He used both psychedelic therapy, which involved one or two heavy-dose intense sessions, and psycholytic therapy, which involved a series of moderate dose administrations. Dr. Grof was trained as a psychiatrist in a medical school in Czechoslovakia, where he received admission through a fluke of divine intervention. He grew up during a six-year Nazi occupation beginning in 1939, and a 1948 Soviet invasion. He also endured a four-month imprisonment with harsh interrogations for suspected anti-communist activity. Dr. Grof began work at a psychiatric hospital in Prague at a time of draconian treatment practices, supervising 15 insulin induced coma therapies per day and 25 electroconvulsive sessions per day. In 1954, he began a two-year project at a clinic, supervising sessions with patients who would receive high dosages of LSD and be monitored while under a strobe light. This project was expected to find the source of mental illness through triggering what would be an “experimental psychosis.” As soon as he was permitted to participate himself, he took the opportunity, and he had a profound mystical experience in which his own existence stopped and he became all of existence — the entire universe — with no subject-object duality.
Dr. Grof found that people’s initial experiences with psychedelic-assisted therapy were extremely unpredictable, with personal experiences on a sensory, emotional level and processing memories. In later stages, however, something universal about the human experience confronting death would be revealed. Virtually all the subjects in the intense form of psychedelic therapy experienced death and rebirth in some form. People would see beyond this lifetime to an understanding about the soul journey that would be liberating and healing. Becoming convinced that death is followed by rebirth, and having other experiences in the transpersonal realm, brought an enormous potential to heal human anxiety, spur inner transformation, relieve people of a sense of isolation, and connect them with the collective psyche of humanity.
Dr. Grof found that in the early stages of psychedelic-assisted therapy that everyone would have personal experiences of sensing and memory but that in later stages, something universal about the human experience confronting death would be revealed. He found that the psychedelic experience moves one toward wholeness and provides opportunities to experience and transcend death. People would see beyond this lifetime to an understanding about the soul journey that would be liberating and healing.
His work has influenced more recent studies at institutions of higher learning about the benefits of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy that show how effective an experience beyond the ego can be with people facing serious health problems and end-of-life stages. These death and rebirth experiences, he discovered, would occur when people would relive the stages of birth and its trauma: a first stage of primal unity with the mother, oceanic bliss, usually comforting with a sense of sacredness. A second phase brought a feeling of contraction, antagonism with the environment, confinement, hellish suffering and an impression of suffocation. Then, a phase of propulsion and encountering death would come and require relinquishing control. The fourth phase involves separation and rebirth, the conclusion of the struggle. The people would experience salvation and enjoy the moment and “stepping out into the light of life.”
In 1967, Dr. Grof was invited to the United States and worked at Spring Grove State Hospital in Baltimore and in the Maryland Psychiatric Center. This process brought experiences beyond one’s narrow sense of identity to encompass more ultimate realities and other dimensions of reality beyond self-object. Dr. Grof recognized that the ego tries to dominate but needs to be transcended to be free from anxiety and appreciate the completion of every moment. His goal was not to interfere, to let the process evolve like a midwife and to allow the unconscious material to come to awareness and provide what the individual would need to face. By giving the unconscious free reign, this would bring the patients to the source of religious or transpersonal experience beyond the body. He wrote: “The ultimate source of existence is the Void, the supracosmic Silence, the uncreated and absolutely ineffable Supreme.” He termed this infinite consciousness “Universal Mind.”
Dr. Grof’s conviction that consciousness is a phenomenon that is not from the body led him to develop the field of transpersonal psychology, and he, along with James Fadiman and others, founded the Association of Transpersonal Psychology. In 1978, he helped found the International Transpersonal Association. When the psychedelic therapy program was ended, he went to Esalen Institute, where he led workshops and research on breath work and Vipassana or mindfulness Buddhist practice. He and his late wife Christina developed a technique called holotropic breathing, meaning to move in the direction of wholeness. It is a technique derived from pranayama yoga with deep and frequent breathing, which lowers resistance and opens a non-ordinary state of consciousness. Dr. Grof remarried and his wife is named Brigitte. He is currently a Professor of Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where therapists and doctors are trained in psychedelic-assisted therapy. He has written over 100 articles and numerous books. Two of his recent books are The Ultimate Journey: Consciousness and the Mystery of Death (2006), and Psychology of the Future (2019). His other books include Realms of the Human Unconscious (1975), The Human Encounter with Death (1977), Beyond Death (1980), LSD Psychotherapy (1980), Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death, and Transcendence in Psychotherapy (1985), The Adventure of Self-Discovery (1988), The Stormy Search for the Self (1992), The Holotropic Mind (1992).
Marlene Dobkin de Rios:
Dr. Marlene Dobkin de Rios was a medical anthropologist and a psychotherapist. She was one of the first anthropologists to report on social and historical research on the use of ayahuasca and San Pedro in South America. She conducted social research in Peru and Brazil about traditional uses of ayahuasca in Mestizo society, people of mixed indigenous and European culture. Dr. de Rios earned a Ph.D. in medical anthropology in 1972 from the University of California Riverside. Her thesis was based on research in 1968 and 1969 in Belen, an economically distressed area of Iquitos, and she wrote a book about it in 1972 called: Visionary Vine: Hallucinogenic Healing in the Peruvian Amazon.
Dr. de Rios found that with ayahuasca, people enter hyper-suggestible states that tend to shape their visions, and may help initiate people and instill values of traditional society. She found that ayahuasca used in a traditional setting was effective in helping cure diseases that were thought by participants to be magical in origin. She worked closely with an ayahuasca healer in Pucallpa, Peru, Don Hilde who was the father of her husband, Yando Rios. Dr. de Rios stated, about her own healing ceremony with ayahuasca, “I felt like a tap had opened with regard to my writing, and I became very productive.” It ignited her passion and curiosity.
The ceremonies she observed in Iquitos and Pucallpa would involve groups of five or so up to 25 meeting in clearing. The folk healers called themselves vegetalistas, meaning their healing powers came from the plants. They would require dietary restrictions such as avoiding salt, lard, and sweets for 24 hours before and after the ceremony, to please the guardian spirit, and sometimes sexual abstinence. The participants would Mestizo and indigenous people who had relocated from remote and rural areas in search of income, facing poverty, rapid social change and loss of familiar culture, and problems with hunger, unemployment, long periods of annual flooding, illness, prostitution and vandalism. The vegetalistas helped cure the stress-related illnesses and psychological problems of people by employing techniques and safeguards to culturally integrate the participants’ psychedelic experiences. She acknowledged that the ayahuasquero tradition had a dark side from brujera, or sorcery, that originated from the common belief in the Amazon that illness, injury, and bad luck are caused by other people who do evil out of envy, using curses, by hiring brujos to cast spells. The healers would interpret frightful visions for the participants, diagnose their troubles, and sing songs to provide healing and assurance often effecting a cure for diseases related to anxiety, repressed pain or sorrow, and alienation from neighbors.
Dr. de Rios was very critical of the ayahuasca tourism that existed in Peru in the early 2000s, and the less deliberate modern use of psychedelics that did not have socially constructive contexts for preparation and integration of experiences. She conducted fieldwork studying adolescents from 1999 to 2005 who had sacramental use of ayahuasca who participated in ceremonies of the União do Vegetal Church in Brazil, the ayahuasca church founded in the 1960s. The name means “Union of the Plants” in Portuguese, and it promotes a doctrine of light, peace and love with combined influence of animism, a belief in spirits without bodies, along with Christian practices and sources. She found that the adolescent members had lower levels of anxiety, body dysmorphism and attention problems, and also consumed less alcohol than their peers who were not members of the church.
During her many years as a professor of anthropology at California State Fullerton, Dr. de Rios wrote over forty articles and eight books, mainly about psychedelics and culture. She published an article on ancient Mayan use of psilocybin mushrooms and in 2003, she released a book with psychiatrist Oscar Janiger to describe his research on how artists and other creative people could benefit from psychedelics, called LSD, Spirituality, and the Creative Process. She also wrote an anthropological collaboration with Roger Rumrrill in 2008, A Hallucinogenic Tea, Laced with Controversy: Ayahuasca in the Amazon and the United States and her 2009 autobiography, The Hallucinogenic Journey of Dr. Marlene Dobkin de Rios. 45 Years with Shamans, Ayahuasqueros and Ethnobotanists.
She stressed the value of the psychedelic experience for prepared individuals, and she had great respect for the revelatory properties of this medicine in the way that the União do Vegetal and folk healers held space for people. She contrasted western civilization with its emphasis on individualism, its superficial values and erosion of institutions, and its instability in family structure. The healers would carefully select patients to eliminate those with severe psychotic disorders. Starting around 10:00, they would pass the cup and use portions of 7 mg. per kilogram of body weight. They would use larger doses for patients with apparent psychosomatic diseases that they suspected came from magical harm. Words would come from the Quecha language in songs, with whistling, and the healer would make contact with the individuals, blowing tobacco smoke and rustling a schacapa rattle of dried leaves, to help protect people from harm. The ceremony would often be called a purge, and the healers spoke of the benefit of purging, while encouraging people to hold it in their stomachs as long as possible. Sometimes, the healer would extract a harmful dart by sucking it out, to remove the influence of the malice. Her research showed that the participants lacked access to western medicine and would approach folk healers when unhealthy conditions did not heal. They might suspect someone had thrown earth from a cemetery over one’s threshold or put vulture droppings on a doorstep. If the people could endure the fear, the Mother Spirit of the vine would teach them her songs, which would help people overcome stress-related illness and build community cohesiveness.
Manuel Córdova-Rios:
Manuel Córdova-Rios, a healer and ayahuasquero, was born on November 22, 1887. He lived in Iquitos, Peru, practicing herbalism until he died in 1978 at the age of 91. Córdova-Rios was a healer from the vegetalista herbalist tradition of the upper Amazon. The account of how he became an ayahuasquero was described in Wizard of the Upper Amazon which was published in 1972 and Rio Tigre and Beyond, both written by F. Bruce Lamb, a forester and explorer. Although some ethnobotanists question some details about his account of a seven-year apprenticeship while living with a group of Amahuaca Indians in Peru called the Huni Kui tribe, meaning the real people, his knowledge of plants, his healing power, and his experience with making ayahuasca are universally respected.
According to these influential books, don Manuel was a young mestizo from Iquitos working as a 15-year-old in a rubber tapper camp at a small tributary of the Rio Jurua near the border of Brazil in 1902 when he was abducted and forced on an arduous journey of many days through the jungle, where he was brought to the old but vigorous chief, Xumu Nawa. The chief groomed him to be his successor, teaching him in intensive private sessions, every eight days for a month, followed by a month off while he was secluded using ayahuasca. The chief shared his knowledge in a secluded series of ayahuasca sessions, and the visions imparted telepathic powers and revealed minute details about the properties of plants and other secrets of the rainforest. He imparted knowledge about how to hunt, about medicinal plants of the jungle, how to brew ayahuasca and use it, and about ways of leadership. Córdova-Rios learned how to diagnose conditions and treat them with remedies from plants and even snails, through knowledge and intuition before becoming a full-time curandero in 1968. His familiarity with plants was part of a respect for nature that we see today in this Indigenous culture.
A bird’s call opened up the story, when they were working on a timber survey in the jungle, and said, “You hear that panguara calling? It reminds me of a time in my youth over 50 years ago when I awaited nightfall in a forest caucho camp.” Don Manuel concluded that his abduction was part of his plan to obtain rifles for the tribe. The rubber boom caused a great deal of displacement and tribes would move and seek new territory. He had trade with rubber they harvested at Purus River, a tributary of the Amazon. Conflict from other tribes was a great danger, and he had an arrow shot at him, indicating he was in danger. He also had a vision on ayahuasca that foretold the death of his mother. He slipped away when he was on a trading mission and got a boat ride up the river. He returned to Iquitos by way of Manaus and had a reunion with his father.
Don Manuel’s initiation had included restrictive diets, herbal purges, baths, and massages and culminated in a series of ayahuasca sessions. They would eat carefully, like a diet of only fresh fruit, roast chicken, and boiled manioc (or yuca) for two days prior to, and on the day of the ceremony. He said that he had the “impression of being free of my body, capable of actions, sensations, and knowledge completely divorced from my physical being.” During his seven-year apprenticeship, the medicine helped him learn the language and the visions imparted telepathic powers and revealed minute details about the intricate interplay between humans, animals and plants. These sessions imparted the power and knowledge of the chief and the culture’s accumulated tradition. He received an ability to foretell events, locate objects from a distance, learn the properties of plants, and great skills for hunting. He learned how to diagnose conditions and treat them with remedies from plants and even snails, through knowledge and intuition.
After his return to Iquitos, Don Manuel worked again in the jungle finding rubber trees. He learned about making curare from the Tikuna Chief Izidoro, in exchange for Cordova’s knowledge about how to make ayahuasca. He had an allegiance with the black jaguar, and it would reappear in his visions, and he had conjured it up for Chief Izidoro when leading his visions in a ceremony. He worked on curare and rubber and timber explorations in Colombia, Brazil and Peru, and gathered pharmaceutical products from the forest before becoming a full-time curandero in 1968, and learned to diagnose and treat illnesses without ayahuasca, using his vast knowledge of medicinal plants and his psychic powers to diagnose maladies. He was held in high esteem for his power to heal people from all walks of life, and he turned down esteemed career opportunities to continue his services.
He did not view ayahuasca as healing in and of itself, but it would provide knowledge of curing disease, a diagnosis, not only showing which organ system was out of adjustment, but also show him a cure from the resources of nature. “Ayahuasca, it tells you how, but by itself it cures nothing directly.” Don Manuel said, “All that I learned from ..{Xumu} — the insight I developed of the inner workings of the mind and the human psyche, as well as the knowledge of the natural medicinal plants of the forest and how to use them — all this has remained a part of me in the years that have passed since I left the Huni Kui.” He developed the capability to see problems in people’s inner anatomy and organs, and then the right medicinal plant would appear spontaneously for a healing regimen.
He became able to diagnose illnesses and provide cures without using ayahuasca. He said that his goal in the healing process was to create a condition of harmony and stability that would allow the body to heal itself. He believed he had been in about 500 sessions with Chief Xumu and others, all of which involved icaros. A plant’s spirit, according to the ayahuasquero, responds to sounds especially the singing of icaros. The medicinal plant has its own properties but the curandero’s icaro of healing energy to the patient. When he spoke to Mr. Lamb about the preparation of his healing plant preparations, he acknowledged that he would sing as he prepared them. Córdova said, “What good do you think my remedies would be if I didn’t sing to them? The Indians who taught me their secrets believed that words carried by the breath of their shaman had a creative power all their own.”
Don Manuel and his wife had many children and grandchildren, but he lamented his lack of an apprentice. In nearby areas, the urban curanderos who would divine sorcerers behind affliction, he would look into the body of a patient and see the problem conditions. He stated, “I could never turn suffering people away when I had it in my power to help.” He did not approve of its use for sorcery and witchcraft, and stated it often would backfire, and he would not ask much for healing people. He said that he healed mostly for personal satisfaction, knowing that over-commercialization of healing powers could result in the healing powers losing their force. In nearby areas, the urban curanderos who would divine sorcerers behind affliction, he would look into the body of a patient and see the problem conditions. He stated, “I could never turn suffering people away when I had it in my power to help.”
Andrew Weil:
Andrew Weil, M.D. is a physician who promotes integrative or holistic healing, emphasizing promotion of the healing and restorative process of the body, mind, and spirit. He is the author of numerous books about health, natural foods, and psychedelics and mood-altering drugs, and he is the director and founder of the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona.
He studied botany in college and after graduating from Harvard Medical School in 1968, he studied use of plant medicines in Indigenous societies. While in college at Harvard, he wrote an article that revealed that his roommate, Ronnie Winston, had been in a psilocybin session led by Richard Alpert. Because he was an undergraduate, this led to the dismissal of Dr. Alpert and Dr. Leary from the faculty. From 1971 to 1984, he was a research associate in ethnopharmacology at the Harvard Botanical Museum, investigating the medicinal and psychoactive properties of plants.
He received a fellowship to study psychoactive plants, fruits, spices and dyes, and spent a couple of years exploring in the Putumayo Territory of Colombia, and in Ecuador and Peru. He became fascinated by the sources of healing and the attitudes and practices that help make people healthy. In his 1972 book, The Natural Mind, he wrote about the Waika or Yanomami Indians and their ritual use of a DMT snuff called epena, from Virola elongata, a tree bark, sometimes combined with yopo seeds, as part of a tradition of divination and diagnosis, as well as for rites of passage. He also wrote about the ways that ayahuasca would activate the visual cortex and bring people to the realms of telepathy and clairvoyance. He described intensive training sessions and the careful three-day preparations of yage and how the shaman would invoke the spirit of the forest to impart magic power to the potion, to illuminate the minds, expand foresight, increase knowledge and understanding of the jungle, and impart good fortune to the people who would drink it. He had read that it would allow people to communicate with people from far away, find lost objects, solve crimes, and have visions of spirits. He wrote that the people viewed the transcendent spirit world as being a real and present realm that they respected and were a part of, and how their visions unified the group, forming a bond in the sacred presence of a holy presence. At the time, there was little scientific literature about yage, but there was popular literature and ayahuasca tourism was contributing, in his opinion, to a fairly debased ritual.
In his writings, he explained that the he was disappointed by the interactions he had with healers at the time and the casual preparations they made. He thought the rituals had been corrupted by commercialization. He mentioned in his introduction for Wizard of the Upper Amazon, and in the 1978 article he wrote for the High Times Encyclopedia of Recreational Drugs, about his efforts to find a healer, a medico or curandero. The Ingas and the Kamsas, who were in the Sibundoy Valley, would get the vine by crossing the mountains and descending into the hot country of the Amazon basin. When he tried to arrange an ayahuasca ceremony with a man named Salvador, there was no chagropanga, the admixture, Banisteriopsis rusbyana, and no wood for the fire. Then, the interaction devolved into the man, Salvador, asking Dr. Weil to issue him a certificate to show his expertise to other tourists, along with coffee, sugar, candles, meat, and aguardiente, a sugar cane alcohol, while drinking large amounts of it and becoming drunk. He said there were a lot of hippies in town and it began to rain heavily, and he decided to have a nice meal and head over the mountains to Mocoa where there would be fewer travelers.
Dr. Weil wrote in his 1995 book Spontaneous Healing about a pivotal point in his travels in 1972, after a long journey by car, motorboat, canoe, and on foot, to locate a Kofan Indian healer at Rio Caqueta or Japura River, that flows through Columbia and Brazil. It was the end of a year of searching for healers to learn to be a better doctor, an exotic experience to shed insight into healing. But his curandero, Pedro, had become an activist to oppose the devastation of petroleum exploration that was polluting the rivers, bringing noisy helicopters to the area, and destroying vegetation. He deplored the grave losses that afflicted the region. He spent another year in the area studying medicinal plants and fruits, spices and natural dyes. He wrote that the only time he drank ayahuasca, he became violently sick and spent hours in a mud puddle unable to move. He saw a chaotic jumble of visions but he was preoccupied with his physical sickness. He formed an intention to prepare thoroughly for a future opportunity.
He was inspired from his journey and wrote of his travels in The Marriage of the Sun and Moon about unitary consciousness. He observed that the cultural validity and beneficial use of the substance was promoted by placing it in a sacramental context supervised by a shaman, and that the use of a hallucinogen in ritual use, employed with gratitude, would limit the potential for disruption.
Dr. Weil wrote that the body-mind system exists at every level, from our DNA, our intuitive powers of self-diagnosis, to regeneration, and access to medicine to help restore nature’s equilibrium. The mind and body are not separate systems, and that we need to believe in our healing ability. This sometimes requires suspending the thought process. Dr. Weil realized after finishing his clinical training in 1969, that our medical model works to suppress symptoms, the disease processes, and drive it deeper into our organs where it is less visible and harder to treat. He sought to focus on the root causes of illness and health maintenance and optimize the innate human healing potential through diet, exercise, stress reduction. He was attracted to botanical medicines to help activate the body-mind continuum connecting magic, religion and medicine.
In 1975, after Dr. Weil had finished his fellowship and the South American and African travels, he settled in Tucson. He discovered to his joy a modest but amazing osteopathic healer, Bob Fulford, who was able to use subtle forces to help people heal. The non-rational states are part of a subconscious regulating mechanism that produces a sense of belonging. In Chinese medicine, they recognize superior medicines, like ginseng, that help alleviate imbalances and stimulate overall health. He also stated that breath awareness helps our autonomic nervous system, with processes such as circulation, digestion, and emotional states.
Dr. Weil noted that there is a human drive to alter one’s state of consciousness, and that “there are capacities of the mind in other states of consciousness” that are valuable for living. His 1983 book From Chocolate to Morphine described the effects and dangers of various pharmaceutical drugs, plants and substances and the ways to use and control of their benefits.
Ken Kesey:
Ken Kesey was an author, an activist, and a leading figure in the psychedelic era. He formed the Merry Pranksters and convened the Acid Tests in the San Francisco area in the early 1960s, just before LSD became illegal. He is most famous for the colorful theatrics of the magic bus Furthur and for writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, his first novel, and Sometimes A Great Notion. He was raised in Oregon and was both a championship wrestler in college as well as dreamer and staunch nonconformist.
Known by the Pranksters as “the Chief,” perhaps inspired by his lead character, Chief Bromden, in his first novel, his background included avid consumption of comic books and science fiction. He received a fellowship after graduating from college in 1957 and entered a writing program at Stanford University with writers such as Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone and Wendell Berry. His friend Vic Lovell convinced him to participate in a program at Menlo Park Veterans Hospital, MK-ULTRA, where he was paid $ 25 per session to try such drugs as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and others that were not pleasant, for research.
Inspired by these experiences, he took a job as a psychiatric aide on the night shift at that facility, where he had access to the medicine cabinet. He began writing his novel from the viewpoint of an Indian mental patient whose reveries revealed a combine that would grind down the wild spirit of humankind. The Chief was inspired by Randle McMurphy, an individualist who pushed the envelope, to run off and seize his freedom.
Kesey began hosting parties and introducing friends to the psychedelic experience. He described it as being required to disclose your books. He said a strong force grabs and “turns you and for eight hours you’re forced to look at your own history of transgressions against your fellow creatures.” It required a reckoning with our own mortality, he said, “Your soul will continue on. It’s how your soul is doing on its path through this life that’s important.”
With the success of Cuckoo’s Nest, he moved to a large cabin next to a redwood forest in La Honda. He worked on his next novel, Sometimes A Great Notion, featured two brothers in competition, a rugged outdoorsman running the family logging business and the younger, introspective dreamy brother, who join in defiance and affection for Vivien, who leaves on a bus in the end. The novel weaves inner thoughts and actions like Faulkner, and has the wonderful line, “I used to weave ectoplasmic afghans from the wispy effluvium left in the wake of invisible men.”
When his friend Ken Babbs returned from the Marines, they organized a great prank, taking an old Harvester bus and having the Pranksters paint it in Day Glo psychedelia, naming it Furthur., and taking a filmed trek through the South up to New York in 1964, for the publication. It was driven by Neal Cassady, who was the inspiration for Kerouac’s novel On The Road, who had been inspired to come to La Honda by reading his novel.
After the trip, Kesey returned to Oregon and hosted acid tests, with music by the band that became the Grateful Dead and light shows and multimedia events called acid tests, with electric Kool Aid for $ 1.00. Posters with superhero themes invited people to the events and the acid was manufactured by Owsley Stanley, an eccentric genius who later made the sound system used by the Grateful Dead. The Trips Festival at Longshoreman’s Hall in San Francisco in January 1966 drew 10,000 people. LSD became illegal in California later that year. Kesey had to serve five months in jail for marijuana charges, where he was interviewed by Tom Wolfe, who wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test about him and the Pranksters.
Kesey described himself as an acid-head Christian, and he advocated for wilderness protection. He had a dairy business and a farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon. He was married to Faye, his high school sweetheart. He was a frequent speaker and did readings for children. His short stories included a collection called Demon Box where he wrote that “entropy is only a problem in a closed system,” meaning that things will not fall apart because creation is infinite. He wrote a couple of wonderful children’s books including The Sea Lion, which showed the world that his writing magic remained throughout his life.
David Nichols:
David Nichols is one of the world’s leading experts on the chemistry of psychedelics and their effects on the body. He is a retired distinguished professor of Medicinal Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at the Purdue University College of Pharmacy and he now is affiliated with the University of North Carolina. Dr. Nichols became interested in psychedelics as a graduate student in 1969. For 28 years he had grants funded by the National Institute on Drug abuse for studies of the physiological effects of psychedelics. Before he retired from Purdue in 2012, he was the chemist who produced most of the psychedelic chemicals used for psychedelic research, including synthesizing the DMT for Rick Strassman’s experiments, the MDMA used by MAPS in its clinical trials, and the psilocybin employed at Johns Hopkins and in other experiments.
In 1993, he was a founder of the Heffter Research Institute, which has many illustrious members of its board and which has been the major organizer and funder of clinical research with psilocybin at research institutions in the United States and Europe. Psychedelic research has not been funded by the government and does not represent a profit-making venture for the pharmaceutical industry, so the Heffter Research Institute relies on private funding to promote scientific studies. Currently, Dr. Nichols states, it can cost $ 25,000 per participant to conduct clinical trials. He saw success in past research with psychedelics with severely ill cancer patients. It employs protocols for double-blind studies with two guides per session, which are held in a comfortable living room type setting with ample preparation time beforehand and integration afterward. Participants will lie down on a couch with eyeshades and headphones for music, and be encouraged to engage in quiet internal reflection.
Dr. Nichols was involved in the Bridge Conference in 1991, when many leading figures of the psychedelic community, at a time of an emerging connection between psychedelics and information technology. It was a time when the only research involved the effects on physiology in animals. As a tenured professor of medical chemistry at Purdue University, he used his influence to advocate persuasively for the need to stimulate licensed research with psychedelics and to urge people to get training in organic and medical chemistry, pharmacology, and psychology.
Dr. Nichols produced a 2004 article, “Hallucinogens” in Pharmacology and Therapeutics, a 2016 article, Psychedelics, in Pharmacological Reviews, co-authored a 2017 article titled “Psychedelics as Medicine: An Emerging New Paradigm in Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics.” He and his son Charles wrote the first chapter, The Pharmacology of Psychedelics, in the 2021 textbook, Handbook of Medical Hallucinogens. He states that psychedelics are involved in multiple complex therapeutic mechanisms and produce profound alterations in the brain. Dr. Nichols describes psychedelics as a very fascinating class of psychoactive agents that relate to the process of dreaming, consciousness, and spiritual revelation and give insight into how we perceive the environment that we live in and the basic question of who we humans are. He states that psychedelics are substances that cause changes in thought, mood, and affect that otherwise happen only at times of dreaming or times or religious exaltation.
Psychedelics are classified as tryptamines, including psilocybin, psilocin and DMT, ergolines, such as LSD, and phenylethylamines, like mescaline and its derivatives. Phenylethylamines, such as mescaline-containing plants like peyote and San Pedro, bind to the 5-HT2A receptor at a much lower binding affinity. He states that MDMA, ketamine, and iboga act in different ways from serotonergic psychedelics. He published an article in 2016 that concluded that LSD contains both the tryptamine and the phenylethylamine chemical structures.
The mechanism of change is unclear but involves changes in the resting state functional connectivity of the brain through new channels of brain connectivity. Psychedelics act as a reset for expansion of one’s mind, where consciousness goes beyond the default mode network and dysfunctional patterns we develop, transformed through the journey to go to a more natural resting state, a healthier mindset. He maintains that availability of LSD for medical research was a major milestone in the emergence of modern neuroscience and molecular neuropharmacology. LSD was discovered before the neurotransmitter serotonin, which has an almost identical structure to LSD, was discovered in the mammalian brain. There are serotonin receptors in the brain and throughout the body that allow the psychedelics to bind with them. They relate to mood, anxiety, arousal, sleep, appetite, sexual activity, memory, emotion, and perception.
The psychedelics bind to receptors for serotonin, the primary neurotransmitter system, especially the 5-HT2A receptors, which are especially active in the cerebral cortex and the claustrum, known as the “seat of consciousness,” a membrane highly connected to many parts of the brain which is associated with regulating the default mode network. They also are in the neocortex, the mammillary bodies, and the lateral nucleus of the amygdala. The psychedelics depolarize these serotonin receptors and they become sensitized. The claustrum, can send glutamate and amplify connectivity and sensitivity produce a biological response such as subjective changes in thoughts and mood, depersonalization, synesthesia, a mixture of senses in perception, and a blurring of subject and object. By rapidly destabilizing local brain network hubs and transforming global brain network connectivity, the psychedelics have shown promise as a way to overcome mental health problems and regain vitality and life energy. He states that the psychedelics have negligible addictive potential for addiction and low potential for repetitive use leading to adverse consequences. They produce a cross-tolerance to their effects.
Dr. Nichols wrote in his 2016 article, “Psychedelics,” in Pharmacological Reviews, that Indigenous cultures that have used psychedelic plants as tools for healing and spiritual practices have, over centuries, developed respect for them and created tools for their wise and safe use. Dr. Nichols he has focused his energy on the medical model to present scientific data and show that psychedelics work. Hopefully, this will help change public perception and continue to increase appreciation of psychedelics in psychiatry. He hopes to generate funding to provide for the studies, emphasizing that he receives contacts from young people eager to be investigators if the funding were available.
He stresses that research shows tremendous success using psychedelics in the research for treatment to provide relief from trauma and psychiatric disorders without people having to take medication every day. Recently, there has been important work to help explore the potential of psychedelic-mediated spiritual experience for healing and wellbeing. He explains that there are extremely successful results with double-blind experiments with psilocybin-assisted therapy with tobacco addiction, led by Matt Johnson, cocaine addiction in Birmingham, with cluster headaches, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The recent announcements of effective research with psilocybin, including the Usona Institute project with multi-site phase 2 clinical trials underway for studying treatment of major depressive disorder at several locations in the United States is one example of the blooming of potential. In the future, he would like to see studies to investigate the benefits of psychedelics for eating disorders. Recent work shows excellent results in addressing obsessive compulsive disorder and alcoholism, at N.Y.U. and at the University of New Mexico.
Amanda Feilding:
Amanda Feilding, the founder of the Beckley Foundation, has been known as the hidden hand behind the psychedelic renaissance. She is English and is known as Lady Neidpath and the Countess of Wemyss and March, and has a beautiful estate, Beckley Park, near Oxford, where she grew up and returned after her parents died. She was interested in psychedelics, especially LSD, in the 1960s, when she was in her early twenties. She had expected psychedelics to be the principal focus of neuroscience when the psychedelic research abruptly ended and her partner and fellow explorer, Dr. Bart Huges, was deported from England to the Netherlands.
In 1998, she founded what is now the Beckley Foundation, an important source of scientific research and publications, as well as consulting and advocacy for making psychedelics available in safe settings for therapeutic use and for spiritual transformation. She began in what she called the dark ages with a focus on reviving research to bring about rescheduling of psychedelics to schedule 2, to allow psychedelics to be used in clinics. Using evidence-based studies showing the effects of psychedelics on consciousness, neuroscience, and brain chemistry, the research helped improve understanding of the way psychedelics work. The studies also produced beneficial results for treatment of anxiety, depression, and addiction, and help promote wellbeing and creativity. The Beckley Foundation and its partners have helped psilocybin receive breakthrough status from European and American regulators in 2017.
Ms. Fielding has advised the United Nations and governments while working with researchers at Imperial College London, Johns Hopkins University and other schools. In 2011, she wrote an open letter to governments around the world recommending revision of the United Nation’s 1961 convention on narcotics so that countries could explore policies that would suit their domestic needs. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, 12 Nobel laureates and Archbishop Desmond Tutu signed it. Albert Hofmann was the president of the Beckley foundation until his death in 2008 at the age of 102. She states, “The best way to overcome the taboo, and re-integrate psychedelics into the fabric of society, is by undertaking the very best scientific research.”
Ms. Fielding has participated in about 40 scientific publications, one of which was the first imaging study of LSD’s impact on brain connectivity. The Beckley Foundation has pursued over twenty psychedelic research projects, including studies in Australia using psilocybin with terminally ill cancer patients to promote acceptance and investigating the impact of micro-dosing. Studies in Brazil have investigated LSD with neuroplasticity and neurogenesis in animals. Studies in the United States have shown psychedelics promoted increased nerve synapses, possibly helping reduce cognitive decline in aging people.
These experiments apply a strict methodology to show the effectiveness of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. Its research on psychedelics in therapy at Imperial College London, The Beckley-Imperial Research Programme, began in 2009. The Imperial College psilocybin research shows outstanding success in treatment of patients with severe depression who had shown little to no improvement from traditional treatment. The trial concluded in 2016 and showed that all of the subjects reported scores below the level of moderate depression afterward, and a significant reduction that lasted until the five-week follow-up evaluation. Even six months later there were significant benefits from that one psychedelic therapy session, averaging slightly above the threshold for moderate depression. In January 2019, the study entered phase 2 with a larger group of subjects.
Dr. David Nutt, a neuropharmacologist at Imperial College London, chaired the neuroimaging project. He had worked with Ms. Feilding in a similar brain function study in 2005 at the University of Bristol. The research on the neuroscience of psychedelics has included fMRI scans of patients’ brains after taking psilocybin showed reduced blood flow and resting activity in the amygdala, which is often overactive in depression and anxiety, and also showed greater flexibility in the connections between brain networks. The clinical trials employ fMRI brain imaging that demonstrate a decrease in the conditioned reflex mechanism, and neuro-analysis shows increased connectivity with high dose psilocybin. Neuroimaging identified the “default mode network” that is involved in depression, rumination, rigid thinking and post-traumatic stress disorder. It had reduced involvement in the psychedelic state while previously-suppressed neural networks and regions “light up” and become more active. The results suggest that psilocybin seems to reduce repressive control and promote other pathways increasing communication.
The foundation sponsored studies at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, around 2016 to show the benefits of psilocybin to alleviate depression in terminally ill patients. Eighty percent of the participants had significant decreases in depressed mood, and two-thirds reported that their experience was in the top five of their most meaningful life experiences. A study with cigarette smoking showed that 80 % of the participants had stopped smoking after two one-day psilocybin sessions. These studies show that the profoundly moving experiences evoked by psychedelics in therapy can bring about long-lasting brain and personality changes. They also show that psychedelics like ayahuasca work on a cellular level to help restore our nervous system. Recently, a new affiliate she helped create and which her son, Cosmo Feilding Mellon chairs, has raised about $ 18 million to advance research into second-generation psychedelics such as 5-MeO-DMT and to test and develop new compounds for use in neuropsychiatric diseases and conditions.
Ms. Feilding participated in writing a 2016 article with Soler, Elices and other scientists to show the therapeutic potential of ayahuasca to promote mindfulness-related capabilities. Studies carried out by the Beckley/Sant Pau Research Programme in Barcelona, Spain have revealed that ayahuasca use helped facilitate mindfulness and promote the ability to observe one’s thoughts and feelings with an objectivity that could help people relieve depression, anxiety, grief, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Modification of brain plasticity that occurs after drinking ayahuasca seems to contribute to the antidepressant effects of ayahuasca. Brain-imaging studies from this research have revealed how ayahuasca reduces the control of a brain network called the default mode network, and provide compelling evidence that this may be behind the brew’s therapeutic power. One very exciting finding is that the compounds harmine and tetrahydroharmine in ayahuasca stimulate new nerve cell growth in hippocampal stem cells, growing into fully mature neurons. The results were presented in the 2016 Interdisciplinary Conference in Psychedelic Research and published in the journal Scientific Reports. Jorda Riba, a scientist and co-director of the studies with ayahuasca showed in studies with live animals showed imaging through magnification that these compounds stimulate the birth of new nerve cells, called neurogenesis. It occurs naturally in the hippocampus, but not at a sufficient rate to replace the loss associated with cognitive decline in aging.
Carl Ruck
Dr. Carl A. P. Ruck is an author and emeritus classics professor at Boston University with an expertise in the role of botany in ancient Greece. His career is rich with decades of literary and historical research and his contributions include important books and articles about the role of psychedelic ceremonies that ancient Greek culture adopted and absorbed from Indo-European shamanic traditions. With Albert Hofmann, the chemist who discovered LSD and synthesized psilocybin, and R. Gordon Wasson, in the 1978 book The Road to Eleusis, Dr. Ruck showed that the ancient Greeks employed a potent hallucinogen in the Eleusinian Mysteries called the kykeon libation, a psychedelic that had lysergic acid, similar to LSD. Dr. Ruck’s research delves into the humorous and tragic writings and artistic depictions of ancient Greece to conclude that the sacrament used in the Eleusinian Mysteries could have been from varieties of an ergot of grass or varieties of wheat and barley ergot that would have grown nearby to Eleusis on the Rarian Plains.
Ergot is a fungus, and varieties from that time could have provided water-soluble hallucinogenic alkaloids that they could have drink as a libation that would not have the deadly alkaloids so dangerous in ergotism. It was a water-soluble extract of ergot cultivated on barley or wheat such as Claviceps purporea or gathered from grasses such as Paspalum distichem or Lolium temulentum. The ergot, a fungus, can have water-soluble hallucinogenic alkaloids that they could drink as a libation that would not have the harmful and often deadly alkaloids so dangerous in ergotism. This psychedelic component also is present in the sacred morning glories, Ololiuqui, employed for religious use in Central America. The drink was served and offered a trance state that opened another world where the alien soul recognizes the Source, the infinite consciousness that envelops itself and reveals the all-pervading awareness.
The ritual pilgrimages in Eleusis took place from 1600 B.C. to 392 C.E., part of an annual festival led by or hierophants or priests. There were two parts, a lesser mystery and a greater mystery. It provided participants with a once-per-lifetime experience that was life-affirming and evoked a vision for the participants to understand the continuity of life and celebrate the eternal cycle of the returning of springtime. Their vision would encompass coming to terms with the awareness that life, like plants, is nourished by death and decay, and uphold their society’s belief that what is primitive is cultivated as the fertile foundations of civilization.
The culmination of the Mystery was “an overwhelming vision of spiritual presences demonstrating the relationship of the living and the dead.” It reaffirmed the forward progress of society, employing an entheogen that was safe to use by those who knew its secrets, preserving in secret a pattern for mixing magical potions. The participants received beatific visions through a libation sacrament employed that affirmed the continuity of life and celebrated the cycle of seasons. The visions sustained a culture and a spiritual renewal, but were lost to time amidst the transformation of Europe.
The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, from about 700 B.C., includes a description of elements from the mysteries, water, mint, and barley in a potion used to celebrate the reuniting of Demeter, the goddess of the earth, with her daughter, Persephone, the goddess of grain, with an Eleusinian reconciliation to nourish the cycles with fertility and sacrifice and mediate a transition between Hades and Olympia. This sacred tradition included the gift of Demeter of a stalk of grain to King Triptolemus and instruction on how to conduct the mysteries, “holy rites that are awesome, that no one may transgress nor reveal nor express in words, for an overwhelming reverence for the gods stops his voice.”
The guarded secrecy helped preserve the integrity of the Mysteries but left behind veiled allusions in the arts. Some fragments of ergot were found in a vessel from a temple to Demeter and Persephone in Spain from that time. Artwork showed that Eleusis involved a pottery tray with small vessels with small vessels for offerings of foods and plants carried by a priestess. Allusions to the profanation of these mysteries, by wealthy aristocrats conducting them in their homes, were included in a play by Aristophenes, a comedy performed in 414 B.C. called The Birds. One of the individuals he ridiculed was Alcibiades, a disciple of Socrates, according to Dr. Ruck.
Psychedelics often are called entheogens, meaning something that helps evoke an awareness of God or the higher conscious presence. It is a term that Dr. Ruck, Gordon Wasson, Jonathan Ott and others helped develop in an article in 1979. Entheogens can offer an ecstatic renewal that gives deeper meaning to our lives and an appreciation of the magnificent rich character within ourselves and in nature and our fellow beings.
Mr. Wasson and Dr. Ruck also worked together on Persephone’s Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion, to explain how the shamanic séance of sorts was employed in the lesser and greater mysteries for the initiates to honor agriculture and nourish the cycles of the harvest and death and rebirth. This knowledge had disappeared from European society along with use of psychedelic medicines. The sacred psychedelic plants and fungi and their associated medicine traditions are being rediscovered at this exciting time.
With his vast knowledge of the mythology of ancient Greece, Dr. Ruck shows how the sacred grains of Europe, wheat and rye, were part of a ritual experience, called mysteries, that apparently became incorporated into Greek civilization from eastern cultures around the second millennium B.C. At that time, the names of plants and deities became part of Greek culture, Dr. Ruck explains, and herbalism and psychoactive plants played a role in the traditions of Dionysus, with mystical unions between human and divine nature, ecstatic madness similar to shamanism, sacred branches and wild plants reputed to be intoxicating or poisonous, and how the role of civilization was to bridge these extremes to maintain vitality.
Rick Doblin:
Rick Doblin, Ph.D., is the founder and executive director of MAPS, The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. He organized it in 1986 after MDMA was made schedule 1 drug. The organization recently celebrated its 35th anniversary, and has 130 staff with neuroscientists, pharmacologists, and regulatory specialists. Dr. Doblin has a Ph.D. in public policy from the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government. His dissertation was about regulation of the medical uses of psychedelics and marijuana. Before college, he was an entrepreneur moving houses. At New College in Florida, he wrote his undergraduate theses on a 25-year follow up study of the Good Friday Experiment with psilocybin and divinity students. That study has been a great legacy from the initial psychedelic period. Dr. Doblin also studied and wrote a research paper following up on the Concord Prison Experiment led by Timothy Leary, and discovered that the data on recidivism had not been reported objectively by Dr. Leary. Dr. Doblin decided to dedicate his life to the healing powers of psychedelics after an experience with LSD while he was in college forty years ago. He did his master’s work on therapeutic use of marijuana for chemotherapy, and he was in the first class certified by Stanislav Grof to practice Holotropic Breathwork.
On May 10, 2021, Nature Medicine published “MDMA-assisted therapy for severe PTSD: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase 3 study,” with very successful results from a phase 3 trial sponsored by MAPS. It is the first phase 3 study in the field of psychedelics and followed rigorous standards that earned respect in the scientific community. The results showed that paired with counseling, MDMA brought relief to the people in the study, who had been diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder for over 14 years after experiences in combat or as first responders or survivors of trauma. Two months after treatment, 67 % of the active subjects no longer met the criteria for the diagnosis, compared with 32 % among the group that received a placebo. There were no serious side effects, although participants were carefully screened to exclude people with severe psychiatric disorders or cardiac problems. One subject, Scott Ostrom, had had PTSD since 2007 when he had his second deployment in combat. He stated that he is literally a different person because the therapy enhanced by MDMA. He stated that it stimulated the ability of his consciousness to heal itself and that he saw it is all right to experience unconditional love for oneself.
The lead author of the study is Jennifer Mitchell, a neuroscientist at the University of California San Francisco. The research took place at 15 sites with 80 therapists. The subjects would have three eight-hour sessions of counseling with MDMA or the placebo with two therapists a month apart, after three 90-minute therapy preparatory sessions to establish trust and prepare to respond to memories and feelings that could arise during the sessions. Each experimental session was followed by three 90-minute integration sessions, the day after the long session, then two more spaced a week apart with the two therapists. The confirmatory, final phase 3 is in process, and is expected to lead to approval by the FDA for MDMA-facilitated psychotherapy as soon as 2023.
This research is very expensive, requiring intensive focus, and MAPS raised $ 44 million over the past two years, culminating in this final stage of a twenty-year effort. This makes May 2021 an important time in the history of treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder with talk therapy and the empathogen MDMA. Studies show that about 13 % of combat veterans have posttraumatic stress disorder and that this cost the economy $ 17 billion in 2018 alone. While regular treatments involve reducing symptoms and blunting feelings, MDMA-enhanced therapy got to the root of the trauma, and by facilitating engagement with one’s trauma opens other frontiers for attention and joy for living.
Dr. Doblin states: “MAPS has built tremendous value, but rather than letting that value be privatized we have ensured it will be returned to the global community through our wholly-owned MAPS Public Benefit Corporation. If we obtain regulatory approval, our pharmaceutical arm will market the prescription use of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD with all profits being used to advance MAPS’ mission.”
Dr. Doblin and MAPS are striving to legalize psychedelics with licensing requirements for adult use. He is concerned about the for-profit ventures that may take shortcuts and stifle alternative sources to maximize profit. Based upon these studies, Dr. Doblin believes that there should be thousands of clinics for multiple types of psychedelic-assisted therapies. He states that a renaissance of consciousness is underway, including Europe, Canada, and Israel. Dr. Doblin and MAPS are striving to legalize psychedelics with licensing requirements for adult use. He is concerned about the for-profit ventures that may take shortcuts and stifle alternative sources to maximize profit. One interest MAPS has been pursuing is using ibogaine to address opioid addiction and PTSD. He stated that a pharmaceutical company, Atai Life Sciences, has claimed a patent on ibogaine but argues that it is in the public domain and should be available for in a way that will protect wider access.
Bill Richards:
William A. Richards, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist who was at the forefront of the original entheogen studies in the mid-1960s and is again one of the leading psychotherapists during the psychedelic renaissance. The 1960s was a time when there was wide access to psilocybin and LSD for use in research and in therapy. There had been over one thousand publications presenting encouraging results with about 40,000 participants in LSD therapy, in well-funded studies with very capable staff. Psychedelic-assisted therapy and experience were the subjects of six international conferences.
Dr. Richards earned two degrees from divinity schools and a Ph.D. in education and counseling. In his 2016 book, Sacred Knowledge, Psychedelics and Religious Experiences, Dr. Richards, wrote about his religious experience during his first session with synthetic psilocybin. It was on December 4, 1963, part of a program intended to shed light on schizophrenia, headed by the psychiatrist Hanscarl Leuner, in Germany. Amazing undulating designs, a field of flowing energy filled with multidimensional symbolism, gave way to a full mystical experience outside of time, flooding him with awe, glory, and gratitude. He realized that he was incapable of describing what had happened to him, after the summation of his revelation, “Reality is. It is perhaps not important what one thinks about it!” did not convey its power. He found, however, that the memory remained vividly accessible and it was a “pivotal fulcrum that provided clarity and direction” as his path unfolded.
In 1977, after the federal Controlled Substances Act of 1970, and the response of the funding agencies, Dr. Richards had the distinction to be the clinician to deliver the final administration of psilocybin at a research project with cancer patients at Maryland Psychiatric Center. Before that, he did significant research with his friend Walter Pahnke, a leading researcher on psychedelics and religious experience. After they met in 1964, they worked together on psilocybin assisted therapy research project in Boston and worked on psychedelic research with terminal cancer patients with LSD, DPT, (dipropyltryptamine), MDA and psilocybin at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in the Division of Clinical Sciences, on the grounds of Spring Grove Hospital. They co-authored Implications of LSD and Experimental Mysticism.
In 1999, he and Roland Griffiths spearheaded a study at Johns Hopkins, using a double-blind experiment with psilocybin or Ritalin, in which two-thirds of the active subjects said it was among the five most important events of their lives and many volunteers experienced enduring positive effects. Recent studies have shown that with three sessions with psilocybin, 80 % of the volunteers were no longer smoking cigarettes after six months. Since 2000, Dr. Richards has been Clinical Director of the States of Consciousness Research in the Department of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine at the Bayview Medical Center. He found that the volunteers often had mystical experiences that they treasured and that these experiences remarkably similar.
He is leading research with psilocybin to help people experience mystical and visionary states of awareness. Dr. Richards found that the volunteers would have healing realizations about the importance of resolving conflicts in their lives and to reconcile with people and strengthen friendships. The wisdom within the mind could bring awareness of unexpected realizations and lead people to balance life interests well and would often experience not what they wanted or expected, but what they seemed to need.
He said that “the ego is best transcended through acceptance, forgiveness when appropriate, and unconditional love.” The experience needed preparation, about eight hours of therapy beforehand. The volunteers would have healing realizations, recognize the importance of resolving conflicts, to reconcile with people, deepen contacts and build friendships. The best practices are selected including music to facilitate an inward process.
Dr. Richards writes that psychedelic-assisted therapy effectively can generate various types of healing experiences by the way entheogens prompt access to the mystery of the collective unconscious. People experience a presence and power beyond oneself as the ego humbly and unconditionally will choose to trust, receive, and participate with all that is emerging from within the depths of the mind. He writes that the experience with psychedelics involves increase of serotonin and reduced activity in the amygdala. Successful results continue in the treatment of alcoholism, narcotic and tobacco addiction, treating people with anxiety and depression, and the psychological distress associated with terminal cancer. They also have great results with psychedelics for insight with religious and mental-health professionals. He sees a potential for their use in helping people with severe personality disorders, and individuals with highly functioning autism or Asperger’s spectrum conditions.
He believes that psychedelics can help people to gain insights in various professions, like music, therapy, literature, philosophy, neuroscience, botany, and especially religious studies, by understanding the origins of religion and providing dynamic potential for worship. The symbolic life of the unconscious will present scenes to help with balancing a person’s life and breaking away from fossilized patterns and resentments. A natural inner process will lead them to let go, to penetrate to the core of truth, to express honest emotion, and remove artificiality in their relations. He says that faith, the courage of the healthy ego to trust something greater, can lead to experiences that result in character traits and spiritually dedicated, imaginative lives. But the lever that opens the door to full mystical experience can be in resolving conflict in mundane areas of life.
Perhaps the greatest potential for entheogen assisted psychotherapy would be in palliative care units in the hospitals. He stated that the best time to institute the series of about three sessions of high dose psilocybin, was about six months prior to transition, in order to get the greatest benefit of less anxiety around death, and opportunities for deepened family relationships in time for that growth. He encourages a spirit of honest curiosity toward death and entrusting one’s life to a sacred dimension greater than one’s everyday personality.
Dr. Richards writes that mystical experiences are very healthy in many ways. Often, they are preceded by a tremendous fear of death or of losing one’s sanity, being stuck in another reality or just dissolving from this reality. Then, it gives way to a spiritual reality more real than our everyday personality where the subjects will feel like atomic particles of an immense unity, realizing that all is one. The everyday ego or the “I” may experience its death and yet consciousness of the eternal continues and is recorded in memory before the “I” notices that it is being reborn into the world of time. Dr. Richards says the most impressive results from the studies are when participants report persisting positive changes in their lives after a mystical experience. They gain a sense of openness and an ability to respond with compassion, tolerance, self-acceptance, and peacefulness.
Dr. Richards wrote that psychedelic retreat centers are a possible approach for Americans to benefit from the medicine traditions: “One may hope that continuing respectful and responsible attitudes toward these sacramental substances will gradually lead to them becoming legally accessible in the United States and elsewhere in other contexts where serious religious intent prevails. Perhaps the next step would be to extend legal authorization to retreat and research centers, staffed by professionals with both medical and religious training, who understand the art of wisely administering these substances to those who wish to receive them. Such centers could also provide individual and group support for the integration of psychedelic experiences. Although it may be a long time before psychedelic sacraments are incorporated into worship experiences in the churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples of major religious organizations, present religious leaders from diverse faith backgrounds could be supportive of such centers for research and retreat.” His insights from the psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy sessions includes the realization, “In case you had any doubts, God (or whatever your favorite noun for ultimate reality may be) is.” Also, “Consciousness, whether we like it or not, appears to be indestructible.”
Terence McKenna:
The ethnobotanist Terence McKenna was an enthusiast for plant medicines like ayahuasca and psilocybin mushrooms. His writings and lectures in the 1980s and 1990s caught the imagination of a second generation of seekers inspired by the healing and growth potential of psychedelics.
He wrote numerous books including Food of the Gods (1992), True Hallucinations (1989), Sacred Mushrooms, and Psychedelics. Terence’s early influences were the May 13, 1957 Life Magazine article about the discovery of use of psychedelic mushrooms, Aldous Huxley’s writings, alchemy, and the Bon folk tradition of Tibet. He became interested in shamanism in college and traveled to the Colombian Amazon region in 1977. He graduated afterward, and then he and his brother Dennis wrote the successful Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide, which taught people how to grow mycelium in rye grain. With Kathleen Harrison, he established a botanical preserve in Hawaii called Botanical Dimensions as a way to protect and cultivate medicinal plants from Central America, South America, Africa and Thailand that have been valued by indigenous people from tropical areas and used in traditional religious and medical practices.
He was a strong advocate for inner exploration. It was what he emphasized. He also had a curious and scientific mind. “Experimenters should be very careful. One must build up to the experience. These are bizarre dimensions of extraordinary power and beauty. There is no set rule to avoid being overwhelmed, but move carefully, reflect a great deal, and always try to map experiences back onto the history of the race and the philosophical and religious accomplishments of the species. All the compounds are potentially dangerous, and all compounds, at sufficient doses or repeated over time, involve risks.”
He said, “The library is the first place to go when looking into taking a new compound.” He frequently spoke about how ayahuasca and other plant medicines could be used in a responsible and careful way for personal transformation, to explore universal mysteries and to re-establish humankind’s harmonious relationship with nature. In his lectures, he cautioned that these powerful medicines are not for the faint-hearted, but he also emphasized that “nature loves courage,” and “rewards courage by removing obstacles.” This reward for one’s efforts is visible during the synthesis time in the morning after a ceremony, late in the sessions. The medicines show threads of the ideas springing and interrelating to connections and possibilities.
He suggested taking psilocybin mushrooms in silent darkness, and with eyes closed. He believed that when taken this way one could expect a profound visionary experience. He believed that mushrooms were a spiritual force from another world that helped contribute to evolution. He believed that by dissolving boundaries and ego clinging, psychedelics can help ordinary people connect emotionally, build community and feel spiritually at one with nature and help bring about a healthier society. Terence McKenna said: “You are not naked when you take off your clothes. You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions. When you shed the cultural operating system, then, essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your own psyche…and it’s from that position, a position outside the cultural operating system, that we can begin to ask real questions about what does it mean to be human.” He also stated: “I think drugs should come from the natural world and be use-tested by shamanically-orientated cultures…one cannot predict the long-term effects of a drug produced in a laboratory.”
Luis Eduardo Luna
Luis Eduardo Luna has made wonderful contributions with research and writing that open the door to deeper understanding of the profound mystery and intelligence of ayahuasca as well as the traditions of its medicine guardians that helped preserve its sacredness. Dr. Luna is the director of Wasiwaska, a research institute for the study of psychointegrator plants. He was born in Florencia, Colombia in 1947. He spent most of his academic career in Sweden where he earned his Ph.D. in comparative religion.
Dr. Luna had had a transformative ayahuasca experience led by Don Apolinar Jacanamijoy, an Ingano taita. Taita is a Spanish term of respect meaning dad or uncle and is the title for a master plant teacher used in Colombia. He also spent a month with two Kamsa shamans, Don Salvador Chindoy and Don Miguel Chindoy, and participated in several ceremonies with Shipibo healers. This inspired Dr. Luna to conduct fieldwork among mestizo ayahuasqueros or vegetalistas in Colombia, and primarily near the cities of Iquitos and Pucallpa in Peru, from 1981 to 1988.
He states that Amazonian indigenous groups are specialists in the pharmacology of plants. He wrote about how the tradition was passed on from a vast culture of 10 to 20 million South American Indians that sustainably coexisted with nature, producing highly fertile soil called terra preta, having developed a subtle understanding of nature and how to coexist with vast numbers of plants and animals and other-than-human beings. They did so with intimate knowledge of the natural world and greater understanding of living processes, including the discovery of how to use ayahuasca. He states that the mythology about the vine ayahuasca is evidence that it was used first, and the yaje´ which is made with chagropnga, Diplopterys cabrerana, the admixture from Colombia, or chacruna, Psychotria viridis, the admixture from Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, and parts of Ecuador, were added later.
Dr. Luna wrote an article published in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology, “The concept of plants as teachers among four mestizo shamans of Iquitos, northeastern Peru” in 1984 and a book published in 1986, Vegetalismo — Shamanism Among the Mestizo Population of the Peruvian Amazon. Healers are called vegetalistas because they have gained wisdom and healing ability from the plants and the visions they impart. He also produced a 1982 short film called “Don Emilio and His Little Doctors” about his teacher who was a vegetalista healer. According to Kahi.net, which has the film on its website, it was the first film to focus specifically on ayahuasca. He also made a recording of icaros in 1987 called, “Songs the Plants Taught Us.” They view plants added to ayahuasca as “plant teachers” that have spirits and intelligence. The shamans develop relationships with masters of animals. Vegetalistas follow a strict dieta in order to receive healing powers. This requires long periods of refraining from sex and eating bland foods, avoiding foods that are spicy, salty, high in fats, and foods high in tryamines. The plant spirits reveal their knowledge and icaros as a reward for showing such discipline. His teacher, don Emilio, knew 60 or more icaros.
The influential 1991 book Dr. Luna wrote with co-author and painter Pablo Amaringo was called Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman. Its popularity helped lead to bringing ayahuasca from relative obscurity to indigenous and mestizo healing rituals being an international attraction and source of religious and therapeutic power. Dr. Luna views ayahuasca as a gift of nature, an intelligent being, and a portal to spiritual dimensions as well as an agent of shamanic transformation. Because it is so powerful, he notes that it can present dangers to unprepared people as well as a potential for ego inflation. It can be misused when not used in a sacred context by healers with experience and discipline. It can bestow a greater unity, appreciation of mystery, and increase solidarity and bonding when medicine keepers provide a setting where it is honored and respected. Its spirit helps people search within themselves for meaning and spiritual connectivity.
Dr. Luna co-edited with Steven White an anthology, The Ayahuasca Reader: Encounters with the Amazon’s Sacred Vine. It was published in 2000, and includes articles about myths, hymns, art, and experiences about ayahuasca by several writers including scientists, anthropologists, artists, and indigenous sources. Dr. Luna was invited to Iquitos for a July 2005 international conference, organized by Alan Shoemaker, and he was amazed by the tour buses with large numbers of international tourists who had come for experiences with ayahuasca. He sees ayahuasca tourism as having some mutual benefit, with traditions carrying forward, such as having a period of relative isolation and limited diet in order to learn from the plants, and references to its spirit, with references to the plant spirit as grandmother or mother.
Dr. Luna also was a co-author with three medical doctors, Rick Strassman, Slawek Wojtowicz, and Ede Frecska, of the 2008 book, Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds Through Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies.
Ayahuasca in the past was used communally and now helps the community by helping people be healthy. It is a spiritual medicine that helps ordinary people by promoting mindfulness and clarity, cleansing and protecting the body, and increasing agility and problem-solving ability.
He observes that people say that ayahuasca strengthens or enhances the senses, intuition, and emotions and that it has bestowed gifts of precognition, which is how it was originally used. People realize that there is more to reality than we had thought, and that the barrier between mind and the physical world is more permeable than we knew. Dr. Luna writes, “In the crucial moment in history in which we are immersed, anything that expands our creativity and our imagination, anything that connects us with all that exists, is a sacred instrument which we need to cherish and deeply respect.”
Charles Grob:
Dr. Charles S. Grob is a psychiatrist who has been involved in important research on the benefits of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy, ayahuasca use in Brazil, and MDMA and has done great work to develop respect in the field of psychiatry for shamanic practices and Indigenous use of hallucinogens, the term he prefers to use, which is derived from a Latin term for mind wandering or journeying. He developed a fascination for their benefits when he worked as a technician in a dream laboratory and had access to Stanley Krippner’s library and he decided to make it his life’s work. He shared his excitement in a late-night phone call to his father, who encouraged him to obtain academic qualifications so people would listen to him.
Dr. Grob is interested in the classic serotonergic psychedelics, LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and DMT, which are similar to the hormone and neurotransmitter serotonin. In February 2021, he released a textbook he edited with Jim Grigsby titled Handbook of Medical Hallucinogens.
Dr. Grob is a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the UCLA School of Medicine and director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. He states that psychiatry has been uncomfortable with and disparaged Indigenous culture and with their healing practices using plant medicines going back for thousands of years. He states that a cave painting from 7000 years ago in Algeria shows a mushroom shaman with a bee mask, apparently alluding to use of honey to store psilocybin mushrooms in an active state. There are 186 species of psilocybin in the Americas and Europe, and their domain spreads with human populations in the disturbed areas where they build and raise cattle. In Europe, the use of traditional plant medicines, the Solanaceae herbs henbane, mandrake, and belladonna was eradicated by the Inquisition, which caused the execution of thousands of women for witchcraft for centuries, especially during the 1500s and 1600s. The 1616 Holy Inquisition of Mexico persecuted the use of plant hallucinogens in the New World, where the Spanish encountered teonanacatl, peyotl, and ololiuqui in Central and South America. They were held in the highest esteem by the native peoples, used for healing, divination, and cultural incorporation in rites of passage. Indians and Spanish would face flogging or execution for using herbs and roots to “lose and confound their senses,” claim to receive revelations, or receive knowledge of the future.
The study of these alkaloids included a significant discovery, when Arthur Heffter identied mescaline in 1897 and it was synthesized several years later, in 1919. The field exploded with the revelation of traditional use of psilocybin in 1957, and the discovery of LSD, which was marketed to create psychotic or schizophrenic states. Dr. Grob stated that these experiments, and the CIA mind control efforts, did not show the origins of psychosis or a present a means to control thought, as some investigators had expected. They appeared, however, to be respectable and potentially viable agents for transformation. Western culture had a challenging reaction to the way the hallucinogens came to assume a central role in a movement that began to question many of the basic values and precepts of mainstream Euro-American culture. A veil of silence descended over the role of hallucinogen research in psychiatry, and there was little discussion about the merits of this research for 25 years, except for some brave souls willing to be marginalized in their careers.
Dr. Grob states that it was a societal effort to eliminate these traditions, but that a new dialogue began to emerge and is headed to a more receptive time if their potential is harnessed and not limited. Through his efforts, and those of many others, the ritual use of hallucinogens in traditional societies is being taken seriously now as a catalyst for personal regeneration, radical change, processes of growth and maturity, and rites of initiation.
Dr. Grob edited and wrote articles for the 2002 book Hallucinogens: A Reader and co-edited the 2005 book, Higher Wisdom: Eminent Elders Explore the Continuing Impact of Psychedelics. He is a founding board member of the Heffter Research Institute, which has funded research with psilocybin and ayahuasca. In 1993, he went to Manaus, Brazil to conduct a study with Dennis McKenna and Jace Calloway, funded by the Heffter Research Institute to conduct an in-depth study with other scientists to study the effects of long-term members of União do Vegetal. and their use of the Amazonian plant hallucinogen decoction, ayahuasca, The Hoasca Project.
Their research resulted in scientific papers in 1994 and 1996 to consider whether ayahuasca could be used safely in a supportive community. There were fifteen active long-term members of União do Vegetal, having participated for at least ten years, compared with control persons who were similar in other ways but had not had exposure to ayahuasca or been involved in that type of church. The União do Vegetal members stated in the screening process that about three-fourths had used alcohol, one-half had smoked cigarettes, one-third had committed violent, and one-fourth had used stimulants. All of them had discontinued that behavior. They showed more reflective personalities and greater persistence and orderly, self-controlled and frugal behavior. The ayahuasca users also scored higher on emotional maturity and social desirability scores, and were more harm-avoidant, confident, relaxed, cheerful, and optimistic that the control subjects, and appeared to show better powers of concentration. They found that the members had been transformed from having major social problems to becoming pillars of the community.
From 2004 to 2008, Dr. Grob conducted an important study that showed the beneficial use of psilocybin in terminal cancer patients, helping people come to terms with death and easing the emotional burden they were facing. In his research, he showed that the mystical experience is a potent indicator of positive outcomes with favorable and lasting changes, when used in settings with careful preparation, administration, and integration. His results were influential in encouraging more research, and were published in a 2011 article in Archives of General Psychiatry, and in a 2013 chapter with Roland Griffiths and Tony Bossis. In July, 2020, the Lundquist Institute for Biomedical Innovation announced a multi-site clinical trial to be led by Dr. Grob and Dr. Anthony Bossis of New York University to study the effects of psilocybin to ease existential distress for patients with serious illness.
Rick Strassman
Rick Strassman, M.D., is a psychiatrist on the faculty of the University of New Mexico School of Medicine who is a leading researcher into the effects of N,N-dimethyltryptamine, known as DMT. Dimethyltryptamine appears in plants like chacruna and is an active psychedelic in ayahuasca. DMT also is in the potent fast-acting psychedelic snuff from yopo seeds used by indigenous people in South America and which was widespread in the New World before the Spanish conquest drove its use underground.
His book DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor’s Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences, (2001) summarizes his own research, other experimental studies, and his own impressions drawn from this research. Dr. Strassman previously worked in research on the pineal gland, which makes high levels of serotonin. DMT is naturally present in small amounts in animals and humans and is a naturally-occurring neurotransmitter in the brain and the cerebrospinal fluid of ordinary people. It closely resembles serotonin and has affinity for serotonin receptors. Scientists like Dr. Strassman have investigated its role in human physiology. He suspected that dimethyltryptamine played a role in regulating neurologic function. His experiments led him to believe that DMT is made by the gland and serves a purpose related to life force, and may be part of the life and death transition. Dimethyltryptamine was first synthesized in 1931 and its psychoactive effects were scientifically documented in 1956. It has the indole ring that is present in the other serotonergic psychedelics: psilocybin, mescaline, and LSD. (Another hallucinogen, 5-MeO-DMT, is present the human body, and is present in the Sonoran Desert Toad, and in virola hallucinogenic snuff used in South American shamanic traditions).
His research began in 1990 and was done under a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, with the permission from the Food and Drug Administration. It was a first-stage study, to research the biological effects of a new compound, to evaluate the safety for medical use for regulatory boards. It was intended as a preliminary to any subsequent research in phase 2 or 3 but because DMT has been around for so long, the substance cannot be patented, leaving less of an incentive for the expense required which ordinarily comes from pharmaceutical companies. Dr. Strassman published a study in 1984 about adverse reactions to psychedelics and found that fewer than one-percent of normal volunteers who were screened and prepared, and who received follow-up integration, would have serious difficulties such as psychotic episodes or prolonged depression or anxiety. Most of the problem reactions would occur with ingestion in improper settings or in people with pre-existing mental health problems. He noted that another complication would come from some subjects who developed feelings of superiority and intolerance, or become judgmental and not put their insights into practice.
Dr. Strassman’s research into the effects of DMT on neurotransmitters was a milestone in the revival of human research involving psychedelics after a long hiatus. It had been twenty years with no peer-reviewed psychedelic research. He discovered fascinating information in medical research performing human studies giving intravenous high doses of dimethyltryptamine in psychedelic-experienced normal volunteers. The effects reached their peak within a few minutes and the effects lasted for about 30 minutes. Many of his subjects reported mystical experiences and out-of-body experiences that they found to be transformative.
His first findings were published in 1995 in the journal Behavioral Brain Research. His findings showed the brain could receive what is not usually perceptible. People had remarkable experiences, seeing normally invisible things, experience lost memories, and receive otherwise unrecognized communications. Subjects would report profound mystical experiences, apparent near-death experiences, and encounters similar to encounters with autonomous entities.
Dr. Strassman stated that his hope for medical and religious use of DMT is to have outcomes where people draw from these deep experiences with non-ordinary reality to infuse their lives with moral, ethical, and practical influence. Dr. Strassman stressed the benefit of psychedelics to provide the profound experiences and realizations to inspire compassion and provide meaning for religious practices and teachings and inspiration to continue adhering to moral principles. He wrote about the. importance of having a strong moral and intellectual basis and support, such as a religious practice and community, to enhance the effectiveness and utility of psychedelics. He recommends that facilitators with psychedelic therapies have their own profound experiences, with DMT or the entheogens they are working with, and carefully examine their own motivations for administering them to others, including self-examination in psychotherapy.
Before Dr. Strassman began his research, he had a strong Buddhist practice, and he found that it was a good basis for openness to unseen worlds and incorporation of insight, and provided a moral structure beneficial to holding space for people in vulnerable states. He did not intend to open a portal to another dimension found that the results left him confused about “where the spirit molecule was leading us,” and whether he might be getting in over his head with the research. He encountered some resistance from his Zen Buddhist spiritual community and stepped aside from active research, but continues to write and speak about the experiences and realizations that consciousness is more than our brain cells. He also wrote additional books, Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds through Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies, with Slawek Wojtowicz, Luis Eduardo Luna and Ede Frecska (2008), and DMT and the Soul of Prophecy: A New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible, (2014).
Wade Davis:
Ethnobotanist Wade Davis is a great speaker and teacher, a scientist, poet, film producer, and “passionate defender of all life’s diversity.” He is a professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia where he comes from, but as an explorer in residence with the National Geographic Society and a producer of 18 films, he has been involved in explorations all over the world. His work includes over 200 scientific and popular articles, an acclaimed documentary series, “Light at the Edge of the World,” about vanishing cultures, appearances in films and as curator of exhibits of his photography. He wrote numerous books including One River (1996), a tribute to the Amazon and his mentor, ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, a bestseller, The Serpent and the Rainbow, (1986), and in 2020, he released Magdelena: River of Dreams about the major river in Colombia, where he is an honorary citizen, and its history amidst trouble and perseverance. He conducted three years of fieldwork in the Andes and Amazon.
Dr. Davis gave the keynote address for the 2019 World Ayahuasca Conference. He described his experience doing fieldwork in the Colombian Amazon as a Ph.D. student in ethnobotany at Harvard University under Dr. Schultes. In 1974, when he began studying with payes or shamans among the Barasana people, he felt like it was a place of faded glory that had been exhausted by missionaries and the rubber trade, a remnant of a thriving civilization of millions of people that had been present when the Europeans came. Dr. Davis stated that in 1985, the Colombian government began setting aside a large preserve for Indigenous people of the Colombian Amazon and established protection for the land in the 1991 constitution. In 2006, Dr. Davis returned to San Miguel, the place where he had been and he was pleased that the Barasana have a community thriving with a strong sense of traditional wisdom on land preserved in the Colombian rain forest. He paid tribute to their way of life, with a perspective of a living forest and sacred sites, a love for nature and a sense of being beyond time that are part of the spiritual reverence with from yagé or ayahuasca. Dr. Davis said that in remote areas of the Northwest Amazon of Colombia, in the homeland of the Barasana, Macuna, Tanimuka, and all the peoples of the Anaconda, the spirit of the ancient ones endures.
Dr. Davis stated that in 1985, the Colombian government began setting aside a large preserve for Indigenous people of the Colombian Amazon and established protection for the land in the 1991 constitution. In 2006, Dr. Davis returned to San Miguel, the place where he had been and he was pleased that the Barasana have a community thriving with a strong sense of traditional wisdom on land preserved in the Colombian rain forest. He paid tribute to their way of life, with a perspective of a living forest, living sacred sites, spiritual reverence, rich in meaning, with love for nature and a sense of being beyond time. They viewed the rivers, the trees, the mountains as being fully alive and filled with spirit. They promote a connection between neighboring tribes through marriage and deep spirituality and they draw wisdom and reverence from yage or ayahuasca.
Dr. Davis reflected on the popularity of ayahuasca as a medicine in the keynote address: “If you had asked me back then, in 1974, to name the South American entheogen that would have caught the wind of the zeitgeist 50 years later and attract 1400 people to a conference here in Girona, I have to confess that yagé would not have topped the list.” He stated that he once took yagé in a traditional ceremony with the Kofan and a friend, who was the chief at the time, in an isolated hut in the forest. He revealed after the ceremony that the potion really could be terrifying, and they all responded that this was the very point. Now, he said, a variety of people from all walks of life in Colombia describe their experiences with yagé in very positive terms, as if the substance was “gently transcendent and benign,” and provided “revelatory intuitions and gentle sensations” that he associates “much more with mescaline containing plants such San Pedro, the Cactus of the Four Winds.”
Mark Plotkin:
Mark Plotkin, Ph.D., is an ethnobotanist who has broad experience with entheogenic plants and fungi and who is an activist for preserving biodiversity and natural areas in the Amazon. In 1996, he co-founded the Amazon Conservation Team, a field-based organization that works by invitation, and he has led the organization since that time. The Amazon Conservation Team has established enduring projects in Colombia, Suriname, and Brazil, working closely with indigenous cultures to help preserve headwaters and buffer areas near existing preserves and to support and promote medicine traditions within indigenous groups.
Dr. Plotkin gives podcast talks called Plants of the Gods: Hallucinogens, Healing, Culture and Conservation. His discussions reflect his tenacious compassion for the Amazon rainforest and the indigenous societies that live in harmony with it. He states that the Amazon region has 390 billion trees and plays a vital role in stabilizing the global climate cycle. His fascinating and sincere reflections reveal his vast experience with plants, fungi, and even animals with hallucinogenic and with healing properties.
Having participated in 80 to 90 rituals with hallucinogenic substances, including ayahuasca and yopo, all of which were supervised by native shamans, he speaks with reverence and experience about the powers of plants of the gods to cleanse of toxins and provide visions and contacts with the world of nature spirits. In his book Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice, (1993) he wrote that 25 % of the world’s pharmaceuticals are derived from natural plant medicines. He described his search for new medicines and his experiences with native peoples, some of whom have incredibly extensive experience with natural medicines. Dr. Plotkin described his experience with a Yanomamo healing ceremony in 1987 in Venezuela near the border with Brazil. Although they call themselves the fierce people, Dr. Plotkin states that they are a large lowland nation of 15,000 members because they were largely spared early contact with colonial pressure and the internal conflict that afflicted other indigenous groups.
The epena or nyakwana is called the semen of the sun, and is derived from the tree bark of a tree from the northwest Amazon in Colombia. The trees, Virola calophylla and Virola calophyllodea, were scientifically identified by Dr. Schultes as the source of after explorers had identified the trees from the nutmeg family. The dimethyltryptamine alkaloids are derived from a resin from the tree bark. The bark is stripped before the heat of day for maximum potency. In the early 1900s, a German ethnologist described a hallucinogenic snuff from tree bark used among the Yekwana Indians in the Orinoco region in Venezuela. Seitz identified the use of epena use among the Yanomama Indians, originally from the headwaters of the Ornoco, but now in the Rio Negro area of Brazil. Bo Holmstedt isolated tryptamine derivatives from the medicine. Dr. Schultes participated in the practice in the Vaupes region of Colombia among the Puinave Indians.
His team promotes and encourages reciprocity for the indigenous medicine guardians by negotiating for the people who identify plants for specimens and research that leads to discoveries for drug treatments to receive a portion of profits when they are patented. Dr. Plotkin also was establishing a shaman’s apprentice program to provide his notes in native languages for developing written languages in preliterate societies with traditions of natural medicine. Shamans are the influence of cohesiveness in these rich societies. His work reflects great respect for the societies that preserve these medicines and he has done a lot to preserve the knowledge of the shamans whom he has met. He cautions that plant hallucinogens present dangers and can create terrifying experiences so an experienced healer is necessary. Dr. Plotkin had an experience in which he states he experienced death in a ritual so that, according to his shaman guide, he would be prepared for the path of a warrior.
His books, including Medicine Quest and his 2020 work, The Amazon: What Everyone Needs to Know, and his podcast lectures, Dr. Plotkin describes a way of life that is hidden and often vanishing and which is miraculous. In his December 2020 lecture on ayahuasca, he reflects on the wonder of ayahuasca, how it combines two varieties, the vine, named caapi for the Tucanoan name from Brazil and Colombia, by Richard Spruce in 1851, and either chacruna, a plant of the coffee family that grows throughout the region, or Oco yage, chagropanga, Diplopterys cabrerana, from the same family as the ayahuasca vine, which grows in a smaller region of the northwest amazon basin. Out of 40,000 species in the region, it is truly miraculous that these cultures of the Amazon combined the powers of the two complementary plants. He states that while we now have the technology and analytical tools to decipher the mysteries of the past, the cultures with knowledge of these plants are disappearing. Better stewardship, he states, will help the world find better cures for diseases of the soul and of the body.
Roland Griffiths
Dr. Roland Griffiths, is a psychopharmacology professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Neurosciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr. Griffiths’ work has brought greater appreciation and understanding of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. His work demonstrated clear potential, when used in a carefully-structured program, to help relieve cancer-related distress, treatment-resistant depression, addiction behavior, and obsessive-compulsive disorders. He had studied meditation for many years, and pursued a career studying mood-altering drugs and behavior. In 1999, Dr. Griffiths launched scientific research with colleagues on the therapeutic benefits of psilocybin, a tryptamine alkaloid that binds with serotonin 2A receptors. The subjects were healthy volunteers who had meditation practices or were religious leaders. It was a double-blind experiment with psilocybin or Ritalin. The results were astonishing: two-thirds of the active subjects said it was among the five most important events of their lives and many volunteers experienced enduring positive effects.
This led the way to further studies. An article in July of 2006 by Dr. Griffiths and researchers, William A. Richards, U. McCann, and Robert Jesse, titled “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance,” was published in the journal Psychopharmacology. The study reported that psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy with healthy volunteers who regularly participated in religious or spiritual activities and who had no experience with psychedelics experienced “sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance.” It was a scientific study, authorized with FDA protocols, and was recognized for good clinical experimental design consisting of two to three sessions with psilocybin at two-month intervals. The results showed that after two months, 2/3 of volunteers said it was the most or one of the five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives. At 14 months afterward, 58 % stated that it was among the most meaningful, and 67 % said it was among the most spiritually significant experiences. 58 % had had a complete mystical experience.
Dr. Griffiths published similar research in 2008 showing long-term benefits from psilocybin in people who participated regularly in religiously-oriented activities. Thirty participants reported improved positive attitudes about life and self, mood, altruism, and behavior. Two-thirds rated the experience as the most or one of the five most meaningful experiences of their lives, while a similar number, 64 %, reported having greater life satisfaction and well-being due to the experience.
Dr. Griffiths explains that the major psychedelics are unspecific amplifiers of unconscious processes, and through enhanced insight, the subjects can observe what drives their own objectionable behaviors. It remains a great mystery about how psychedelics like psilocybin help bring about or “occasion” mystical experiences, feelings of oceanic boundlessness, anxious ego dissolution, and visionary restructuralization. People have experiences that reset them into a new world view with positive changes and choices. His research indicates that psychedelics increase neuroplasticity in brain function, which can help people transform through experiencing and integrating deep inner experiences. The scientific studies clearly show the benefits of psychedelic-induced mystical experiences and meaningful, spiritually significant experiences with enduring effects on ordinary people. The experiences can improve interpersonal closeness, increase gratitude, life meaning or purpose, and forgiveness, and relieve anxiety about death and social expectations, and enhance religious faith and coping ability.
From 2007 to 2014, Dr. Griffiths led a large study into the effects of psilocybin with anxiety in cases of life-threatening cancer illness. The study had 51 participants whose symptomatology met the definition of a mood or anxiety disorder, using high-and low-dose experiences. After having the high dose, 76 % had substantial relief five weeks later for anxiety and 92 % showed significant antidepressant response. After six months, there was a 78 % response rate for anxiety and 83 % success rate for depression. The experience provided sustained death acceptance, life meaning, optimism, and quality of life. The best measures were from those reporting mystical-type experiences. Seventy percent stated it was the most or among the five most significant spiritual experiences of their lives and 67 % reported that it was the most or among the five most personally meaningful experiences of their lives.
In 2011, Dr. Griffths led a study with 18 volunteers with five 8-hour sessions one month apart in varying doses. After the highest dose — 25 mg. or above is a high dose — the volunteers rated it as having substantial personal and religious significance. The results correlated with sustained positive changes in their attitudes, moods, and behavior. After two months, the active subjects had better scores on neuroticism, extroversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. One year later, the participants still reported having more openness in their lives. In 2014, his study showed that mystical experiences with psilocybin had a very positive effect with tobacco cessation after psilocybin induced mystical experiences. The experiences provided the volunteers with persistently reduced craving for and temptation to use tobacco.
In 2016, Dr. Griffiths led a study that showed that psilocybin assisted therapy showed sustained improvements for several months for a small sample of patients with cancer-related psychiatric distress. It provided relief from anxiety and emotional distress for up to five weeks and there were no side effects. He hopes to build on this with a larger study. It is very beneficial to have a rapid effect and there is assistance with progression. The study documented antidepressant and anxiolytic effects in clinical trials with terminal cancer patients for effectiveness in improving quality of life.
In 2018, Dr. Griffiths announced the results of a double-blind study with 75 volunteers who undertook a meditation or spiritual practice program. They used sessions of low and high doses with moderate to strong support after they initiated their spiritual practices. There were outstanding and persisting results after six months in the areas of closeness, gratitude, life meaning, forgiveness, daily spiritual experiences, and positive changes in attitude, mood, and behavior.
Dr. Griffiths recently became the founding Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, established in 2020 with private philanthropy. He is the author of over 400 journal articles and book chapters. His leadership holds together a great team of clinicians and upholds high standards for scientific study. His work includes ongoing studies with psilocybin for religious professionals, to understand mystical experience and its enduring effects on attitude, behavior, and vocation. which he leads with Dr. Stephen Ross of N.Y.U. School of Medicine. Dr. Griffiths stresses that psychedelics should be used with a monitor and with a process for incorporating their insights into their daily lives. The sessions include facilitators with 8 contact hours ahead of the sessions. The people are told to “be interested and curious,” and look within, or “go back in,” during their sessions rather than engage in cognitive processing. He states that he tries to cultivate deep gratitude for the astonishing mystery of consciousness and “sacred feelings of wonder about all that we do not and quite possibly can never know.”
Dennis McKenna
Dennis McKenna is a plant chemist or ethnopharmacologist who is a fantastic resource for information about South American shamanic plants and psychedelic mushrooms, how they work, and the history and cultural context for their use. Dr. McKenna is a voice of conscience and reason who has remained a vibrant figure in the psychedelic renaissance. Dr. McKenna conducted extensive ethnobotanical fieldwork in the Peruvian, Colombian, and Brazilian Amazon and he is the author of many articles and books. He is a founding board member and the director of ethnopharmacology at the Heffter Research Institute, a non-profit organization concerned with the investigation of the potential therapeutic uses of psychedelic medicines.
Dr. McKenna was a primary organizer of the influential 2017 conference with authors of articles called Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs, which was published along with the papers from the conference fifty years earlier. The first ethnopharmacologic conference, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and held in San Francisco in 1967. The original publication was a primary source of his inspiration to dedicate himself to studying teacher plants. He also was inspired by the gift from his older brother Terence on his eighteenth birthday of the Carlos Castenada book, The Teachings of Don Juan, which was later revealed to be fictionalized.
Dr. McKenna went to South America with Terence and as he wrote in his book, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, they went as part of a plan to use virola sap used by the Witoto people, called oo-koo-hé, a hallucinogenic snuff with DMT and 5MeO-DMT. An obscure leaflet by the ethnobotanist Dr. Richard Evans Schultes released in 1969, stated that it was orally active like ayahuasca. The experiment at La Chorrera, in the jungles of Colombia, culminated on March 4, 1971, over 50 years ago. They wanted to create a trans-dimensional reality using their voices to resonate sound in a vibration with their DNA and enter a portal to another dimension. They did not find virola but they found large amounts of psilocybin in fields and used them with ayahuasca vine, and received a major download of information that led to them developing a technique for cultivating psilocybin mushrooms over the next couple of years. In 1975, they had a small book or pamphlet called, “Psilocybin — Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide” published in Berkeley under pseudonyms. Dr. McKenna states that it provided a reliable method for cultivating psilocybin mushrooms at home and brought psilocybin to many people and paved the way for the Psychedelic Renaissance.
Years later, for his Ph.D. in botanical sciences, which he received from the University of British Columbia in 1984, Dr. McKenna wrote his thesis on the ethnobotany of virola sap, oo-koo-hé, and compared it to the other orally active tryptamine, ayahuasca. He was one of the principal scientists studying the effects of ayahuasca in Brazil and an author of their study published in 1984 about its monoamine oxidase inhibiting effect. In 1993, he was an author of the Hoasca Project, the first biomedical study of ayahuasca collected among Uniao do Vegetal members in Manaus. He also was one of the authors in a study published in Psychopharmacology in 1994 that showed long term elevated densities of serotonin transporters among people after drinking ayahuasca. He has information on a website, The McKenna Academy of Natural Philosophy, which is a wonderful resource for learning about the role natural psychedelics have played in cultures as well as the chemistry and the effects of these powerful medicines.
Recently, Dr. McKenna wrote a chapter in the textbook, Handbook of Medical Hallucinogens, titled “Plants for the People.” He reviewed the history of the original psychedelic era and the incongruous laws that resulted in criminalizing these substances. He proposed making natural substances legal internationally for religious use. He also concluded that biomedicine needs to integrate psychedelic healing and restructure therapeutic support protocols using shamanic learning. This could open a door to more compassionate medicine and lead people to everyone and all beings with respect and compassion, and possibly enter a new era of human maturity and wisdom.
Dr. McKenna’s contributions to the field of naturally occurring psychedelic substances have helped instill respect for the indigenous medicine guardians and their traditions. Dr. McKenna states that the naturally occurring psychedelic substances communicate through chemistry and have coevolved with people to provide healing with a spirit presence. Where the sacred plant medicines are honored and rooted in place with longstanding medicine traditions, they are used in optimal ways and settings. They have helped hold cultures together and have been part of the coevolution with humanity over millennia.
At the 2019 World Ayahuasca Conference, he described insights he had about the alien intelligence of plants, how they learn and respond in optimal ways, responding to the challenges presented to them. Their hyperconnected networks are similar to the networks of nervous systems. He believes the plants are communicating with our culture, and we are not inclined toward and attuned to their messages. He urged that we need to listen to their lessons, stressing that plants are the basis of evolution and make earth able to sustain life. Their components interact with the human brain, which has 100 to 500 trillion connections, using chemicals, hormones, and neurotransmitters, to send messages and perform functions for the body and mind. In 1991, he had an insight when in a Uniao do Vegetal ceremony in Sao Paolo, Brazil, he was shaken to the core, alarmed about the treat to earth’s sustainability from human activity. He had an insight into the significant place of photosynthesis and the coevolution of humanity in symbiosis with plants and a message was relayed, “You monkeys only think you’re running the show.”
Dr. McKenna is a consultant for the Soltara plant medicine retreat center in Costa Rica, which employs a large number of Shipibo men and women healers, with a comprehensive preparation and integration program combining western and traditional insights as well as educational and community-promoting initiatives. He believes that the clinical setting will begin to apply principles of shamanism to form a hybrid with psychotherapy, creating a new paradigm that advances in combination beyond the original traditions. His recent studies have emphasized ayahuasca and psilocybin as his primary teachers, and he stresses the benefit of recognizing the limits of our knowledge and realizing we only have a tiny piece of knowing how the world works. Dr. McKenna argues that psychedelics teach us to be aware of what we forget or avoid and reveal information about the whole of existence, something that science is not good at explaining. He states that, “science, properly pursued, only deepens the mystery. It doesn’t take the mystery away. It shows you how mystery exists profoundly at every level.”
Stephan Beyer:
Stephan Beyer is the author of Singing to the Plants, the 2009 book subtitled A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon. It is the most comprehensive and detailed book about the cultural context of ayahuasca in publication. He wrote from his personal experiences after seven trips to the Amazon with the experience as an apprentice for two healing shamans, maestro ayahuasquero Roberto Acho Jurama, don Roberto, and his plant teacher, Maria Luisa Tuesta Flores, dona Maria. The healer shamans are dwellers in the spiritual world of the Upper Amazon, melding traditional knowledge of the plant spirits; they are innovators and culturally syncretistic. His primary interest is the use of sacred plants in indigenous ceremonies. His interest in wilderness survival led him to the Upper Amazon ayahuasca tradition and he developed a deep respect for the spiritual component of this cultural tradition.
Dr. Beyer wrote that his work was intended to build on the work of anthropologist Luis Eduardo Luna, whose 1984 book, Vegetalismo: Shamanism Among the Mestizo Population of the Peruvian Amazon, is out of print. Mr. Luna estimated that there are 72 different indigenous groups reported to use ayahuasca. Dr. Beyer stated that ayahuasca catapulted into the modern world in 1993 with the book Ayahuasca Visions by the artist Pablo Amaringo and Luis Eduardo Luna. People were fascinated by the visionary art evoked by this mysterious medicine from the hidden world. It spurred widespread travel to the Amazon.
Dr. Beyer is an anthropologist who earned a Ph.D. in Buddhist studies in 1969. He studied under San Pedro cactus healers in Peru and participated in peyote rituals with the Native American Church of North America. He also practiced law for 25 years and obtained a Ph.D. in psychology. While he describes himself as a weak apprentice who was weak on mapacho lessons, he reveals a deep respect for the spiritual component of this cultural tradition, how practitioners were in right relations with non-human entities and with one another. He explained that he is of a generation from the 1950s and 1960s who studied Buddhism and became interested in psychedelics. His primary interest is the use of sacred plants in indigenous ceremonies.
Ayahyuasca is a hallucinogen, an emetic, a purgative, and a vermifuge, meaning it makes you vomit, evacuate your bowels, and clear out parasites. Dr. Beyer stresses that people of the Upper Amazon region, in Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, and Venezuela, greatly value these effects for getting rid of internal parasites and residue effects of eating game animals. He believes that the vine was discovered because of this effect. He explained that the medicine itself is called la purgq, meaning to vomit or be cleansed. Shamans will diet with scores of plants which will become allies, and the three principal ones are ayahyuasca or yage, with chacruna or chagropanga, toe or brugmansia, and mapacho, or tobacco. Ayahyuasca is used as a teaching plant to open the way to hundreds of other healing plants and to nurture the healing power of phlegm.
Dr. Beyer explains that the Upper Amazon has a rich and tragic culture with some features we do not want to emulate such as the prevailing witchcraft belief. Every harm is interpreted to arise from a malevolent source, typically a dart. Harm and calamity can come from a sorcerer or brujo’s dart, and shamans acquire darts and cultivate phlegm to insulate and store them within themselves. The darts are alive and need to go somewhere when sucked out, because they are hard to destroy. They can be projected into others or retained and stored for healing by a shaman. Shamans, curanderos, or folk healers usually stay in remote areas. They sing songs, call on spirits, suck out the darts, and learn from the medicine which plants to use for prescribed healing.
He states that ayahuasca reveals the deep realities of the everyday world, creates psychic experience, and information for healing and shedding light on our place. Dr. Beyer says there are two stages of the experience, called mareacion, meaning to feel sick, dizzy, nauseous, drunk, or seasick. To be mareado is when one is hallucinating. There is apprehension at first, and nausea, which eases with practice. The first stage is a stage of visual forms, scenes, and then the medicine provides contact with the spirit world. Singing helps guide the medicine and lead people to vital information from the soul, which goes to dark and deep places where love and sorrow dwell, emotions that can lead to sickness and also to transformative experience.
The medicine practice unfolds in stages. One shaman told him that he had not experienced deeper states and lessons initially, but that he was “probably learning but I didn’t understand.” He writes that ayahuasca teaches what is wrong or broken in life and what medicine to take for healing, “to see through the everyday, to see the world is meaningful and magical; it opens a door to wonder and surprise.” He views ayahuasca as a true hallucinogen, and states that, unlike the other major psychedelics, it does not evoke mystical experience so much as reveal the deep realities of the everyday world, with its spirits, but it also creates psychic experience. The spirits are helpers who bring information that is vital for healing as well as shedding light on our place. He suggests we develop an understanding that recognizes three realms: the real, the unreal, and the imaginal, and move away from dichotomies. When clear visions appear, we should ask, “Will you be my teacher?”; “Why are you here?”; and “What are you trying to tell me?”
Few authentic shamans work with Gringos, Dr. Beyer wrote. He estimated only about fifteen of them would deal with westerners on a regular basis. The ayahuasqueros would endure much hardship to observe a dieta and self-sacrificial practices to become worthy of the medicine and its spiritual powers. In previous times, ordinarily only the ayahuasquero would drink the ayahuasca and not the subjects being healed, but the mestizo tradition broadened the use. It is important for people to have a shaman when using the medicine, and things can go wrong. Singing helps guide the medicine and lead people to vital information. The highest level of prestige is the banco, one who observes a forty-year diet and never leaves the place in the jungle, who has the greatest powers, to transform into animals and who has spirits residing and can summon spirits of the dead while in a trance. The have visual or auditory information about events remote in time or space. Teaching comes about intuitively, and the plants create telepathic powers. Dona Maria would respond to his questions, saying, “I will show you,” anticipating the lesson he would later receive. The shamans form a community with a network that allows shamans to visit other tribes to share knowledge. They have a goal to pass on their knowledge, but the recent generation is not eager to do the sacrifices and purifications to carry the work forward.
