Hallucogens And Culture Author: Peter T. Furst Publisher: Chandler & Sharp Publishers Date: 1976 ISBN: 0-88316-517-1 Table of Contents Preface....................................................................................................................1 Introduction............................................................................................................3 1. "Idolatry," Hallucinogens, And Cultural Survival...............................................19 2: Tobacco: "Proper Food Of The Gods".................................................................23 3: Cannabis (Spp.) And Nutmeg Derivatives..........................................................33 4. Ibogaine And The Vine Of Souls: From Tropical Forest Ritual To Psychotherapy39 5. Hallucinogens And "Archetypes" .......................................................................49 6. LSD And The Sacred Morning Glories Of Indian Mexico .....................................55 7. The Sacred Mushrooms: Rediscovery In Mexico ................................................69 8. The Fly-Agaric: "Mushroom Of Immortality" .....................................................81 9. R. Gordon Wasson And The Identification Of The Divine Soma..........................87 10. The "Diabolic Root" .........................................................................................97 11. "To Find Our Life": Peyote Hunt Of The Huichols Of Mexico...........................105 12. Datura: A Hallucinogen That Can Kill.............................................................117 13. Hallucinogenic Snuffs And Animal Symbolism ...............................................127 14. Toad As Earth Mother: A Problem In Symbolism And Psychopharmacology ..137 15. Hallucinogens And The Sacred Deer ..............................................................143 Bibliography.............................................................................................................i Preface It is hoped that the following pages will demonstrate something of the essential interplay between nature and culture—between chemistry, mind set, and social and historical setting—in the use of hallucinogenic plants and other psychoactive substances by different peoples the world over. Obviously, many significant areas of research in psychopharmacology and ethnobotany, as well as some interesting and as yet little- understood nonchemical "techniques of ecstasy" have had to be slighted, in favor of in- depth treatment of some others of more general interest. Besides, this is an ongoing story: "new" botanical hallucinogens and other naturally occurring psychoactive substances—some perhaps never culturally exploited, others long forgotten by the people who formerly used them, and yet others successfully concealed for centuries from the prying eyes of outsiders—are even now being discovered and scientifically described and tested. Still more await botanical and pharmacological identification beyond the native terms under which they appear in the ethnohistorical literature or reports of travelers and ethnographers. Even for Indian Mexico or Amazonia, whose extensive psychoactive pharmacopoeia has been relatively well studied, we still do not know the identity of every species used in native ritual, prehistorically or at present, nor do we as yet fully understand the pharmacological or cultural role of additives to plants of known or suspected psychoactivity. Indeed, in the opinion of such authorities as Richard Evans Schultes, Director of Harvard's Botanical Museum, it is precisely the function of these additives to the botanical hallucinogens that presents one of the most exciting challenges to the modern investigator of the psychedelic phenomenon in indigenous societies. Clearly, then, there is a world yet to be discovered. The concerned reader is urged to keep up with the more specialized ethnobotanical publications and the rapidly growing literature on brain biochemistry and scientific and humanistic explorations into the uses and abuses of alternate states of consciousness.* Many colleagues and publications were consulted in the writing of this book; while their contributions, personal or in print, are acknowledged in the text, they should know that without their generosity in sharing their expertise the task of writing it would have been impossible. In particular I would like to express my thanks to Dr. Johannes Wilbert, Professor of Anthropology and Director, Latin American Center, University of California at Los Angeles; to Dr. Weston La Barre, James B. Duke Professor of Anthropology, Duke University; and to R. Gordon Wasson, Honorary Research Associate, Botanical Museum, Harvard University. Special personal and professional thanks are owed to Richard Evans Schultes, who never failed to give generously of his time and knowledge, be it in helping to identify esoteric plant motifs in pre-Columbian an or in clarifying problems of botany and psychopharmacology encountered in the field. Professor Schultes also read the manuscript for botanical-pharmacological accuracy, but he is obviously not responsible for any shortcomings. P.T.F. Albany, N.Y. March, 1976 * For example, the soon-to-be-published proceedings of a conference on alternate states of consciousness sponsored in 1975 by the Drug Abuse Council, Inc., and two earlier publications by the Council, Altered Slates of Consciousness (1975), and "High" States: A Beginning Study, by Norman E. Zinberg, M.D. (1974). 1 Introduction If one were to look for landmarks in the study of hallucinogens in the nearly forty years since LSD-25 was first developed in a Swiss laboratory in 1938, a good many possibilities come to mind. One would be the discovery in that same year that a cult of divine psychedelic mushrooms had survived among Mexican Indians, and the rediscovery and systematic investigation of that cult in the mid-1950's. Another would be the identification of the seeds of morning glories as the sacred Aztec hallucinogen ololiuhqui in 1941, and the startling finding nearly twenty years later that its active principles are closely related to lysergic acid derivatives. Still another would be R. G. Wasson's definition of Soma as the psychotropic fly-agaric mushroom (1968). These discoveries have accompanied the realization over the past several years that the most important botanical hallucinogens are structurally related to biologically active compounds occurring naturally in the brain. For example, psilocybine and the psychoactive alkaloids in morning-glory seeds are indole- tryptamine derivatives and thus are similar in chemical structure to serotonine (5-hydroxy- tryptamine), while mescaline is related to noradrenaline. In addition, norepenephrine in the brain has been found to correspond structurally to caffeic acid, derived from chemicals found in several plants, including coffee beans and potatoes. Chemical systems active in the human brain, then, are now known to be close kin to growth-promoting substances in plants, including several that are powerfully psychoactive, a discovery of no mean evolutionary as well as pharmacological implications. One of my own favorite landmarks is a "conversation across the disciplines" in 1970 between ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes and anthropologist Weston La Barre that has helped to place the whole psychedelic phenomenon in a culture-historical and ideological framework and has given it a theoretical time depth reaching back into the Paleolithic. Schultes and La Barre were hardly strangers to the problem, or to each other. Schultes has long been the recognized authority on New World hallucinogens, and La Barre is a leading scholar in the anthropology and psychology of religion, author, among other works, of The Peyote Cult (1974, 1969, 1938), a classic study of the peyote religion of North American Indians. It was, in fact, peyote that originally brought them together, when, in 1936, Schultes, then a senior in biology at Harvard, accompanied La Barre, a doctoral candidate at Yale, to the Kiowa reservation in Oklahoma for field research on the nature and culture of peyote. La Barre incorporated the experience into his Ph.D. thesis and The Peyote Cult; for Schultes it led—via Mexico and his classic study of ololiuhqui (1941), and the first botanical identification of the sacred mushrooms of Oaxacan Indians—to a lifelong commitment to ethnobotany, especially the indigenous New World hallucinogens . 3 An Ethnological Reply to a Statistical Question In 1970, La Barre published a significant paper in Economic Botany, "Old and New World Narcotics: A Statistical Question and an Ethnological Reply" (1970a), which sought for the first time to account in terms of culture history for the astonishing proliferation of sacred hallucinogens in Indian America. The "statistical question" was Schultes's: how was one to explain the striking anomaly between the great number of psychoactive plants known to the original Americans, who had discovered and utilized some eighty to a hundred different species, and the much smaller number—no more than eight or ten—known to have been employed in the Old World? From a strictly botanical point of view, one would have expected the reverse to be true: the Old World has a much greater land mass than the New; its flora is at least as rich and varied and contains as many potential hallucinogenic plants; humanity or protohumanity has lived there for millions of years (as against at most a few tens of thousands in the Americas) and has had immeasurably longer to