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Mad Thoughts on Mushrooms: Discourse and Power in the Study of Psychedelic Consciousness1 andy letcher Andy Letcher is a freelance writer, researcher, and lecturer based in Oxford, UK. [email protected]

abstract

This paper addresses the question of what happens to consciousness under the influence of psychedelic drugs—specifically of psilocybin, or “magic” mushrooms— and performs a Foucauldian discourse analysis upon the answers that have been variously proposed. Predominant societally legitimated answers (the pathological, psychological, and prohibition discourses) are those that, in Foucault’s sense, are imposed from the outside as “scientific classifications,” that is, they are based upon observations of the effects of mushrooms on others. By contrast, a series of resistive discourses (the recreational, psychedelic, entheogenic, and animistic discourses) have been constructed in opposition, as a means of making sense of the subjective experience of taking mushrooms. When critiqued, only the animistic discourse— the belief that mushrooms occasion encounters with discarnate spirit entities, or animaphany—transgresses a fundamental societal boundary. In the West, to believe in the existence of spirits is to risk being labeled “mad,” and as such the phenomenon of mushroom-induced animaphany goes largely ignored. It nevertheless remains a phenomenon in need of further scholarly research. keywords: magic mushrooms, consciousness, Foucault, animaphany

introduction

What happens to consciousness under the influence of a psychedelic drug? Given the importance of psychoactives in both indigenous and modern cultures (whether culturally legitimated or not), this is a question that anthropologists are

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increasingly being forced to confront. In the West, for example, the last thirty to forty years have seen a huge growth in the intentional consumption of “magic mushrooms.”2 A practice that was once confined to indigenous cultures in what is now Mexico has spread to become a global phenomenon—typically in spite of prohibition—thanks to the discovery that psilocybin-containing mushrooms grow naturally in many parts of the world (Letcher 2006). Recent developments in cultivation have enabled commercial production such that psilocybin mush- rooms are now sold on the internet and, in Holland at least, where there exists a loophole in the law, openly over the shop counter.3 For a brief while, before a similar loophole was closed in 2005, mushrooms were on sale in Britain, too, and could be bought from head-shops, barrow stalls, and even tourist boutiques in London’s West End. That many people are choosing to adjust their conscious- ness through the action of magic mushrooms makes it a timely moment to be asking this question. My concern here, however, is not with answering it per se, but rather with exposing how the various answers that have been proposed are historically con- tingent and inseparable from relationships of power and knowledge. My thinking is influenced by the French philosopher, Michel Foucault (1926–1984), for, in a Foucauldian sense, the differing ways in which psilocybin mushrooms have been categorized constitute competing discourses, each of which make certain “truth- claims” about the effects of mushrooms upon physiology, psychology, conscious- ness, and so on, but in doing so disallow, marginalize, or even criminalize others. In this paper, therefore, I wish to rehearse old and well-worn debates about the ways in which mushrooms have been categorized and delineated (and hence about how the question of mushrooms and consciousness has been answered), but to do so through the fresh lens of Foucauldian discourse analysis. My argu- ment is that the culturally dominant discourses about mushrooms (what I term the “pathological,” “psychological,” and “prohibition” discourses) have arisen from what Foucault called “scientific classification.” That is, they have been con- structed on the basis of observations of how mushrooms appear symptomatically to affect others. On the other hand, a series of resistive discourses (“recreational,” “psychedelic,” “entheogenic,” and “animistic” discourses) have arisen out of the needs of practitioners, people who actually consume mushrooms, to find more faithful ways of representing their own subjective experiences. The discourse that increasing numbers of practitioners claim most accurately achieves this, however—the “animistic discourse” in which mushrooms are regarded as occa- sioning the perception of discarnate intelligences or spirits—cannot be counte- nanced or taken seriously within mainstream culture because it transgresses a fundamental ontological, but discursive, boundary. In a post-enlightenment, materialist culture, where a disbelief in spirits prevails (at least among the intel- ligentsia), to believe in the agency of mushroom-revealed spirits is to risk being thought mad.4 OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 76

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foucault and discourse

The many theories of discourse and methodologies of discourse analysis that now exist owe their origins to the French philosopher Michel Foucault. A dis- course may be defined in simple terms as “a particular way of talking about and understanding the world (or an aspect of the world)” (Phillips and Jörgensen 2002:1), but Foucault’s insight was to describe how relations of power are deter- mined discursively through these differing representations. That is:

In a society such as ours, but basically in any society, there are manifold rela- tions of power which permeate, characterize and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and func- tioning of a discourse. [Foucault 1980:93]

Of the functions of discourse that Foucault identified, two are relevant here: first, that discourses serve to divide people into objectified subjects; and second, that they establish boundaries around what can be done and said. One way in which subjects are routinely divided is through “scientific clas- sification” (Rabinow 1984:8). For example, when you or I go to see a med- ical doctor, a power relationship is established—in which doctor and patient are expected to fulfill certain roles—by means of an institutionalized medical discourse, under which our bodies are subjected to the “medical gaze” and divided (diagnosed) according to the symptoms they exhibit (Foucault 1973). For Foucault, the act of looking “is to assemble information, which combined with knowledge already possessed by the gazer, leads . . . to the subjection of the subject. The gaze is thus the means by which medical authority is estab- lished, as a contingent effect of the interrelationship between power and knowledge” (Voase 2003). Subsequent “dividing practices,” such as those that separate the “sane” from the “insane” for instance, consist of processes of “social objectification and categorization, [in which] human beings are given both a social and a personal identity [which are accompanied by]...the practice of exclusion—usually in a spatial sense, but always in a social one” (Rabinow 1984:8). Or, as Foucault put it bluntly, “It is in fact a simple matter to show that since lunatics are precisely those persons who are useless to industrial production, one is obliged to dispense with them” (Foucault 1980:100). A pertinent example of these dividing practices may be found in the predom- inant cultural discourse about “drugs” (the “prohibition discourse”). Typically this term refers to two broad antithetical categories: to pharmaceuticals, pro- duced by large, licensed, and hence legitimated, multinational companies, and administered by trained members of the professional medical establishment for OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 77

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prophylactic and analgesic purposes; and to a range of plants, plant extracts, and chemicals, typically grown or produced illicitly and self-administered for the purposes of pleasure, introspection, or escape, but consequently derided and criminalized, usually on the grounds of public health. The range of substances placed in this second category is so wide as to obscure any commonalities of chemical action, psycho-physical effects, duration, toxicity, and addictive poten- tial beyond their shared delineation as being socially undesirable because of their potential for “abuse.” To self-administer any of these substances is to be branded by mainstream society a “drug-abuser,” a discursive label that castigates and marks one as a deviant member of society, someone who has forfeited the normal rights of citizenship and become a justified target for the “war on drugs.” Drug-users/abusers are socially excluded and, if caught and brought to justice, may be spatially excluded in prisons and detention centers. The label carries connotations of pollution and danger (on which see Douglas 1994; Hethering- ton 2000), largely due to the constructed image of the heroin-injecting addict— as a morally degenerate vector of disease or as “drug-crazed” criminal—about which most anxieties about drugs are orientated (see Jay 2000; Davenport-Hines 2001).5 By contrast, the use of a drug such as aspirin for pain relief carries no such stigmas, while the use of certain other addictive or habit forming sub- stances, caffeine and alcohol for example, have been naturalized to such an extent that it would be laughable even to consider them drugs. This leads to the second function of discourses, which is that they act to place boundaries upon what is it possible to say and do, that is, “within [any] particular worldview, some forms of action become natural, others unthink- able” (Phillips and Jörgensen 2002:6). Or, as Foucault put it, the effect of dis- cursive practices is “to make it virtually impossible to think outside them. To think outside them is, by definition, to be mad, to be beyond comprehension and therefore reason” (cited in Voase 2003). Thus the assertion that mushrooms and other psychoactive plants elicit encounters with conscious autonomous spirits or intelligences cannot be countenanced within the dominant scientific- rationalist-materialist-deterministic discourse and must therefore be ridiculed as delusion (e.g., see Richard Dawkins’ critique of religious beliefs, Dawkins 1998). To draw attention to the boundaries of a discourse is therefore risky, for as Richard Voase cautions, to undertake discourse analysis one must be “prepared to ask fundamental questions which may lead [one] to be considered a little mad” (Voase 2003). Whereas competing discourses seek closure, and to fix truth and meaning within their boundaries, Foucault argued that “It is not possible to gain access to universal truth since it is impossible to talk from a position outside discourse; there is no escape from representation. Because truth is unattainable, it is fruit- less to ask whether something is true or false. Instead the focus should be on how effects of truths are created in discourses” (Phillips and Jörgensen 2002:14). OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 78

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To adopt a Foucauldian analytical framework, then, is to acknowledge that one’s own scholarly perspective is not “objective” but discursive; it necessitates making one’s own positioning explicit. The question of mushrooms and con- sciousness is one that has intrigued me for many years, and it is one that I approach in three ways. First, as a scholar of religion specializing in contempo- rary alternative spiritualities, I am interested in “myco-spirituality,” that is, the ways that psilocybin mushroom consumption are being incorporated into and accommodated by spiritual practices and worldviews (e.g. Letcher 2001, 2005, 2006). Second, before crossing the floor into the humanities, I was first an ecolo- gist and evolutionary biologist, and so have retained interests in the biological and ecological dimensions of the subject: how consciousness may have evolved, plant-human relationships, the ecology of fungi, and so on. Third, and perhaps most importantly, I have myself been a practitioner of myco-spirituality for the last fifteen years or so, and am someone for whom the experience of taking mushrooms has had a profound spiritual and ontological impact. I therefore have a considerable personal interest in how this question about mushrooms and consciousness is answered. While until recently such an admission might have stripped me of all aca- demic credibility, being a practitioner of a particular spirituality is no longer con- sidered to be the obstacle to scholarship that it once was. Briefly, postmodern critiques concur with Foucault that all observations are made from somewhere, and that there is no privileged position outside discourse. It is proposed instead that research progresses dialogically, with scholars reflexively situating them- selves in relationship to the object of their research (see, for example, McCutcheon 1999; Flood 1999; Wallis 2003; Blain et al. 2004). The notion of a continual struggle between competing truth claims seems particularly appropri- ate when considering the way we think about “drugs,” and this paper represents my contribution to an ongoing dialogue. Nevertheless, given that discourse ana- lysts tend to produce “research that contributes to the rectification of injustice and inequality in society” (Phillips and Jörgensen 2002:77), it is fair to say that my sympathies lie with those most marginalized by the varying discourses outlined herein.

dominant discourses about mushrooms

With these theoretical points in mind, I wish to summarize three dominant Western ways of thinking about psilocybin mushrooms—what I term the “patho- logical,” “psychological,” and “prohibition” discourses—that have been imposed as Foucauldian scientific classifications. These have not arisen solely in relation to mushrooms but have emerged in relation to other psychoactive plants and drugs with which mushrooms tend to be lumped: LSD, the Mexican plant Salvia divinorum, the peyote cactus and its active chemical ingredient mescaline, OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 79

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the Amazonian brew ayahuasca and DMT, the African root bark iboga and ibo- gaine, plus a whole range of other plants and chemical analogues (see Schultes and Hoffmann 1992; Shulgin and Shulgin 1991). From the outside all these sub- stances appear to act similarly, but while producing superficially similar observable symptoms, practitioners remark on qualitative differences in the subjective experi- ences—in terms of overall “mood” or “ambience,” physical sensations, quality or intensity of “visions,” and so on (see Shanon 2002; below)—occasioned by each. It must be remembered that any way of grouping these and other substances, however natural it appears to be, remains discursive, and each of the discourses that follow group these substances slightly differently.

The Pathological Discourse The earliest and most long-lasting delineation of mushrooms (and these other related drugs) constitutes what I term the “pathological discourse” in which the accidental or intentional introduction of psilocybin mushrooms into the body is regarded as producing disease, either poisoning (literally intoxication), or tem- porary or even permanent psychosis. This discourse originated in Antiquity when all mushrooms were essentially regarded as the same thing but consisting of edible (esculent) and pernicious (poisonous) varieties. Strange perturbations or effects following the ingestion of mushrooms were regarded as incidents of poisoning and not as “psychedelic” or religious experiences, with recovery seen as constituting a lucky escape from a gruesome demise (Letcher 2006). Thus, throughout the 18th and 19th centuries episodes of (probable) psilocybin mushroom consumption were treated with emetics, cathartics, the stomach pump, and occasionally leeches, as would any other poison (Letcher 2006). In the early 20th century, the American pharma- cologist William Ford fixed this poisoning discourse into the medical textbooks by naming it, for although psilocybin was yet to be isolated and would not be so for another thirty years, he distinguished a unique type of mushroom poisoning on the basis of its symptoms, which he termed mycetismus cerebralis (Ford 1926).6 At about the same time, another variant of the pathological discourse rose to prominence, under which mushrooms and other hallucinogens (most notably mescaline) began to be seen as agents producing temporary psychosis. In 1924, the Prussian pharmacologist Louis Lewin (Lewin 1924) made the first scientific classification of “narcotic and stimulating drugs,” of which the phantastica were substances producing hallucinations. Lewin posited that the visions and halluci- nations of mystics, psychotics, and those under the influence of phantastica orig- inated if not from the same primary cause then from a similar disruption of the normal functioning of the brain, or from what he called an “excitation of the nerves.” By positing a materialist neurological basis for hallucinations (drug- induced or otherwise) he helped introduce what was later to become a psychiatric OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 80

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and neuroscientific discourse into Western medicine (Lewin 1924:91; see also Melechi 1997; Sandison 1997). This association between psychosis and “hallucinogens” became fixed in the popular imagination largely during the late 1960s and early 1970s with the moral panic over the use of LSD and anxieties towards what became known as “mind- altering” or “mind-bending” drugs (Stevens 1989; Farber 2002). Thus during the mid-1970s, when the discovery that there were indigenous psilocybin mush- rooms growing in Britain became widely known, a similar, if smaller, panic ensued, centered around the fear that mushrooms might trigger permanent psy- chosis (e.g., Young et al. 1982).7 Although Lewin’s “phantastica” never caught on, the pathological discourse produced various terms which did, and which reveal its implicit assumptions about mushrooms and consciousness: namely, intoxicant (producing poisoning); hallucinogen (producing hallucinations); psychotomimetic (mimicking psy- chosis); and schizogen (generating schizophrenia, or a schizophrenia-like state). All these assume a condition of physical and mental “normalcy” from which mushrooms (and the other related psychoactives) cause deviations or aberrations through their poisonous action. That is, by impairing, deranging, or interfering with the normal functioning of the body and brain, mushrooms alter conscious- ness to produce visions and hallucinations, which, while appearing to be real (a state indistinguishable from psychosis), have no actual ontological substance. The phenomenological mushroom experience itself is valueless, other than, per- haps, in generating empathy with the permanently psychotic. Various psychia- trists during the 1950s and 1960s encouraged their colleagues to try drugs like mescaline and LSD in order to gain a temporary, first-hand understanding of what psychosis is like (see Melichi 1997; Stevens 1989; Letcher 2006). Subjects who alter their consciousness in this way are therefore regarded as recklessly endangering their mental health and potentially adding another unnecessary burden to already over-stretched health services (Young et al. 1982).

The Psychological Discourse Here the generation of non-ordinary experiences by mushrooms is delineated as having therapeutic value. I label this the “psychological” discourse in the ver- nacular sense of the word, meaning not only things pertaining to the mind, to the psyche, or to the self, but also encompassing popular understandings of Freudian/Jungian psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Under this materialist dis- course, therapists regard the experiences produced by psychoactive drugs as hav- ing their provenance entirely in the mind or psyche of the “patient.” By causing perturbations in the natural functioning of the nervous system, these substances allow buried or repressed biographical memories to come to the surface and into conscious attention—in actual or symbolic form—from whence they may be safely integrated. To misappropriate Freud, psychoactives open up a motorway to OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 81

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the unconscious and so, if used in careful and controlled settings, they can allow patients to explore aspects of their “deeper” selves that usually remain obscured or hidden, and perhaps even enable permanent therapeutic cures for psychoses and neuroses. The key terms of this discourse are psychoactive (activating the mind/psyche), psychotropic (moving towards the mind/psyche), and psychedelic (mind manifesting—a term coined by Humphry Osmond, in correspondence with Aldous Huxley, during the 1950s). The origins of this discourse can be seen, for example, in the writings of Thomas de Quincey, who found childhood memories intertwined with his more exotic opium visions; in those of William James, who saw the potential of a psychological explanation for religious or mystical experiences—including his own under the influence of nitrous oxide—or in Baudelaire; and, of course, in Freud. The discourse came to prominence, however, with the rise of LSD, the psychoactive properties of which were accidentally discovered by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in 1943. An employee of the Swiss pharmaceutical company, Sandoz, Hofmann was paid to develop new drugs, and following his own inadvertent psychedelic experiences he saw the potential of LSD for use in psychotherapy. During the 1940s he engaged in small-scale experiments to deter- mine the drug’s potential marketability in this area, and LSD was originally sold as a psychiatric tool (Melechi 1997:34). Various “schools” of “psychedelic ther- apy” emerged during the 1950s and 1960s as LSD and pure psilocybin began to be employed in psychotherapy for the treatment of neuroses, schizophrenia, and even alcoholism and recidivism (Melechi 1997; Sandison 1997; Dobkin de Rios and Janiger 2003; Letcher 2006). Under this discourse, then, the therapeutic set- ting of the clinic and the guidance of a medical authority provided the legitimate context in which these substances should be consumed.

The Prohibition Discourse While the various schools of psychedelic therapy employed controlled environ- ments for using psychedelics, the use of LSD in the 1960s and psilocybin mush- rooms in the 1970s spread way beyond the clinic as a psychedelic counterculture grew (see below). Eventually Western governments intervened to prohibit the use of these substances (both in medical research and recreationally), ostensibly in the interests of public health—psychedelics can undoubtedly trigger inci- dents of psychotic breakdown in certain cases—but more realistically to quell the moral panic that had erupted in the media over anxieties about the psyche- delics and the counter-culture that they helped to spawn. Briefly, the discourse originated in America and has been exported around the world, the first American experiment with prohibition being with alcohol during the period between the First and the Second World Wars. The histo- rian Mike Jay traces the origins of prohibition to a particular blend of politics, Christian morals, fears about the inheritance of degeneracy, and pressure from OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 82

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women’s temperance leagues that were extant in America at that time (Jay 2000). He also notes that as a policy it failed spectacularly. Consuming alcohol acquired the frisson of the forbidden, and armed gangs emerged to control the illegal production and supply of alcohol, mainly in the form of spirits, to meet the increased demand for this illicit pleasure. The end of prohibition, how- ever, did not signal its demise as a discourse. Anxieties over the use of opium by Chinese and of marijuana by Mexican immigrants, among other factors, led to the banning of these substances (Davenport-Hines 2001). Currently pro- hibition is the dominant discourse pertaining to psychoactives, about which all others, including the pathological and psychological discourses, must orientate themselves. Under the prohibition discourse, the effects of mushrooms and other psychoactives—often erroneously termed “narcotics”8—are delineated as having no value: the question of mushrooms and consciousness is only of interest in terms of how mental and physical health, law and order, might be adversely affected. We have already seen how the prohibition discourse operates by divid- ing subjects according to the use or abuse of certain substances—it criminalizes them—but as with alcohol prohibition, it has been equally unsuccessful in pre- venting subjects from consuming illicit drugs (see statistics in Davenport-Hines 1991). It has merely created a sense of urgency among drug countercultures eager to promote their own resistive discourses; for as Cultural Studies scholar Sadie Plant notes:

any hint of some illicit deployment of the body and its pleasures was enough to dispatch vast swathes of the population into a new category, and also a new underground with its own signs and secret gestures, cryptic messages, dress codes, glances, clubs, street corners, covert actions, whispered promises and hidden deals. [Plant 1999:154]

It is to a discussion of these resistive discourses that I now turn.

resistive discourses about mushrooms

Just as a candle casts a shadow, so every discourse lays out the means of its own opposition; the negative by which it may be cancelled out. The four “resistive discourses” (the recreational, psychedelic, entheogenic, and animistic dis- courses) all react wholly or partially against the frameworks created by the dom- inant discourses. Whereas the latter are derived from scientific classification, the observation of symptoms in others, these resistive discourses attempt to represent the subjective mushroom experience. But given that there can be no unmediated representation, they still operate as discourses, and in practice it can be hard to distinguish between them (see below). OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 83

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The Recreational Discourse If mainstream society regards the recreational use of drugs for pleasure as legally, morally and medically unacceptable, then it is easy to see how taking drugs immediately becomes a mode of resistance in itself. Under the resistive “recreational discourse,” illicit drugs are taken both for the pleasure that they give to mind and body, and also for the pleasure that transgression brings (Plant 1999; Hetherington 2000). Here, the entrenched cultural presence of alcohol and its sanctioned modes of consumption mark out the template by which other drugs are framed and consumed recreationally. Ecstasy (MDMA), amphetamine sulphate, cocaine, ketamine, and mushrooms, among others, are all thought of like alcohol as “party” drugs,9 with the pub and the club seen as the appropriate context for consumption (e.g., see the Guardian, November 29, 2003). An extreme expression of this discourse may be found in Irwin Welsh’s novel, Trainspotting, in which the principle characters regard heroin addiction as a lifestyle choice.

The Psychedelic Discourse We have seen how the psychological discourse regards psychedelic experiences as therapeutically useful when they occur in the context of the clinic. However, the discourse also inadvertently gave legitimacy to another, less controlled, man- ner of consuming psychedelic compounds. For if they reveal or make manifest the hidden dimensions of the self, it is understandable that those for whom a sense of identity rests upon the notion of self-exploration, upon a sense of alterity derived from privileged introspection, might wish to make use of them: that is, artists, poets, musicians, and other assorted bohemians. While Aldous Huxley thought that psychedelics should be administered to intellectuals and the great and the good, many of his contemporary psychiatrists and psychologists—drawing upon Romantic constructions of the “artist” as creative genius, as outsider, and as having privileged access to an intensified experience of life—felt that it was artists who would benefit most from experiencing “consciousness-” or “mind-” “expansion,” “ego-loss” and so on. Consequently they started supplying LSD and psilocybin for use in settings other than just clinical ones (Stevens 1989; Dobkin de Rios and Janiger 2003). This leakage of psychoactives from the clinic onto the streets became a flood, giving rise to the 1960s “psychedelic movement.” This movement resisted the institutionalized administering of LSD by medical authorities, preferring the more uncontrolled settings of “acid-tests” and “happenings” (Stevens 1989), and developing its own styles, vernacular language, political and spiritual world- views, and, most importantly, music (see Whiteley 1997). The meaning of “psy- chedelic” therefore changed, and as it became a term of resistance it lost the veneer of medical authority with which it was originally endowed. Currently, as the hippy-psychedelic movement is regarded somewhat ambivalently, the term OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 84

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has come to have derogatory and recreational connotations, and is perhaps most strongly identified with the genre of psychedelic music (Ott 1996b). The psychological discourse also provided a systematizing logic for the quest to find new “designer” psychedelics, for if drugs reveal the hidden dimensions of the psyche, then it stands to reason that every new drug acts as a “key” to unlock a different, and hitherto unexplored, part of the self (see Shulgin and Shulgin 1991:xvi). But because the term “psychedelic” remains contested, a new label has emerged for individuals who use these substances as a means of personal growth. Psychonauts (travelers through the psyche) regard mushrooms as just one in a palette of psychoactives, useful for self-exploration.10 For example, the occultist Julian Vayne advocates the magical use of a variety of different substances (including mushrooms), but notes that his favorites are “LSD and, in second place, MDMA” (Vayne 2001:12). For Vayne, the

obliteration of individual consciousness isn’t the goal [of taking psyche- delics]—instead the aim is transformation, re-formulation and reintegration of the Self. The Self is liberated by, through, and in the world. The occult use of drugs...collapses the dividing lines of Self and Other through the process of transgression. [Vayne 2001:7]

Thus, while psychonauts challenge both the pathological and prohibition discourses, they appear to remain faithful to the psychological discourse.

The Entheogen Discourse By contrast, the predominant resistive discourse privileges mushrooms and the experiences they elicit by framing them in religious terms. It was precisely to dis- tance their own practices from recreational and non-medical psychedelic mush- room use that a group of academic and amateur scholars coined the term “entheogen.” Briefly, this neologism was invented in 1973 by the classicist Carl A. P. Ruck during a special committee meeting convened by Robert Gordon Wasson to devise a new label to replace the terms “hallucinogen” and “psychedelic” (Ruck et al. 1979).11 Gordon Wasson (1898–1986) was a Wall Street banker and amateur ethnobotanist who re-discovered the indigenous use of psilocybin mushrooms in Mexico during the 1950s (see Letcher 2006; Wasson and Wasson 1957; Wasson 1986). In 1955, Wasson and his photographer, Allan Richardson, were invited to consume mushrooms as part of a indigenous healing cere- mony—termed a velada or vigil by Wasson—and thus became the first West- erners on record to do so (Letcher 2006). Wasson had several profound religious experiences while under the mushrooms’ influence, and believed that he had stumbled across the relics of a prehistoric mushroom cult (for a critique of Wasson’s ideas, see Letcher 2006). An eloquent rhetorician and publicist, OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 85

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Wasson introduced into the West both the knowledge of the properties of psilo- cybin mushrooms and a wholly new discourse for understanding their effects: that they induce religious or mystical experiences. He therefore sought a term that was neither pejorative nor disparaging, and that would capture what he believed to be the sacramental quality of mushrooms and other chemically related psychoactives. “Entheogen” is the term that Ruck proposed and that Wasson’s committee agreed upon. The term itself was inspired by the Greek etymology of the word “enthusi- asm” (“to be inspired by a God”) and means “generating the experience of God within,” “God generated within,” or “becoming God within” (Wasson 1986:30). Taking mushrooms as the prototypical entheogen, the discourse claims that they are not dangerous or illicit substances (the prohibition discourse), nor are they agents of disease (the pathological discourse), but that they have an intrinsic or sacramental value (see Baker 2005). They do not produce hallucinations, or dis- tortions of reality, but affect consciousness so as to produce religious or ontologi- cally significant experiences. The entheogen discourse challenges us to reclassify mushrooms and people who use them, and to regard both seriously. While the term has been rejected by some as being too unwieldy (e.g., see Saunders et al. 2000), and others as too exclusionary (e.g., Weil 1988; see below), it has come to be the dominant, and increasingly legitimated, term within popu- lar discourse. There is currently a diverse and emerging array of entheogenic spiritualities—from organized “churches” to individual practitioners—that stress the religious significance of the plants and chemicals that they employ. There is even a journal, The Entheogen Review (Forte 1997; Smith 2003). As a religious studies scholar and practitioner of myco-spirituality, this discourse is of particular interest to me. I wish therefore to examine and critique its operation in some detail: how does it operate as a discourse to divide subjects and place boundaries upon what it is possible to do or say? The actual circumstances of its genesis make it clear that the term entheogen was intended to separate and distinguish religious from recreational use. Gordon Wasson wrote of the need for a term that was “unvulgarized by hippy abuse” (Wasson 1980:xv), while his protégé Jonathan Ott complained that although “there may today be more communicants with the ‘magic mushrooms’ than ever before, it is a profane and puerile, largely hedonistic cult which has succeeded its venerable ancestor [indigenous use in Mexico]” (Ott and Bigwood 1978:16). Contemporary recreational use, argued Wasson, precluded a drug from being considered an entheogen, even if, as is the case with cannabis and the opiates, it has an established history of religious usage (Sherratt 1995; Wasson 1986:31). Heroin remains the bête noir of this discourse, with all advocates from Wasson onwards stressing that true entheogens are by definition non-addictive (indeed advocates are typically as disparaging of “hedonists” and addicts as the most ardent prohibitionist; see Jesse 1997). So the entheogen discourse seeks to elevate OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 86

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its preferred drugs by distinguishing them from those castigated by the prohibi- tion discourse. We can see therefore that, like the recreational discourse above, it works within the terms and parameters set by the prohibition discourse and does not challenge them wholesale (as would, say, a call to legalize all drugs). However, when considering how “entheogens” are to be recognized and dis- tinguished from mere “drugs,” a contradiction becomes readily apparent. The discourse claims that entheogens are inherently sacred, irrespective of the con- text in which they are consumed, and yet, certain vision-producing substances such as cannabis are refused as entheogens precisely because of their use in “pro- fane” contexts (Baker 2005:185). Furthermore, it seems to claim that there is a deterministic, one on one, rela- tionship between consuming an entheogen and having a religious or theo- phanous experience,12 and yet it is well known that the psychedelic experience is mutable and far from being independent of context. In the 1960s, various writers noted the importance of “set” (practitioners’ mindset, preparedness, and intent) and “setting” (the physical environment in which the drugs were consumed) in contouring a “trip.” Religious experiences are not guaranteed, and as Aldous Huxley noted, chemicals do not necessarily cause religious experiences, they occasion them (Smith 2003:xvii). Likewise, the scholar of religion, Chris Par- tridge, argues that “whilst...psychedelic experiences are undoubtedly heavily weighted towards panenhenism (“all-in-one-ism”, the experience of the unity of everything), contexts, presuppositions, worldviews etc. all contribute to the final shaping of an individual’s psychedelic experience” (Partridge 2003:119). The sup- posed essentialized sacrality of the entheogens, and the supposedly deterministic relationship between their action upon consciousness and religious experience, start to appear problematic. The entheogen discourse attempts to elevate the use of certain plants and chemicals by stripping away and making irrelevant the mundane practices and social contexts that surround their consumption. It claims these substances are inherently sacred. However, it cannot succeed because it is the practices and contexts of consumption that define mushrooms, say, as a recreational drug or religious sacrament. An improved and strengthened definition of an entheogenic substance would therefore be one in which practices are included, such as the following proposed by the scholar of religion, Huston Smith: “mind- altering substances that are approached seriously and reverently” (Smith 2003:xvi–xvii). There is, however, a second problem that follows, for if a drug becomes an entheogen on the basis of the practices which accompany its consumption, how are we to recognize these as reverential or religious? In other words, does the dis- course contain implicit assumptions about what constitutes religious (and, hence, sanctioned) and recreational (illicit) usage? The answer, typically, is yes, and these assumptions include discursive preconceptions about the ritual-like OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 87

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nature of the “setting,” coupled with a “set” of reverence, seriousness, and per- haps solemnity—rather Christian connotations of the term “religious” (see cri- tique by Dobkin de Rios 1995). As I argue elsewhere, Gordon Wasson, the son of an Episcopalian minister who had read the Bible twice before adolescence, inadvertently constructed his idea of etheogenic religion in Christian terms: see Letcher 2006. Consequently, the writer on psychedelics, Andrew Weil, made a robust criticism of Wasson, calling him a “snob and an elitist,” saying, “Who is he to judge whether others’ uses of psychedelics are not religious? A great many people in this century have experienced the joy, terror, and mystery of existence through these substances, and there may not be a clear boundary dividing recre- ation from religion” (Weil 1988: 490; see also critique by Dobkin de Rios 1995). Nevertheless, the entheogen discourse attempts to make such a distinction and resist the prohibition discourse by claiming that the use of certain psy- choactives, in certain carefully prescribed contexts, constitutes a legitimate reli- gious usage. It attempts to resist the pathological discourse by defining entheogens as substances that are not addictive, and by claiming that their “proper use” entails safeguards that prevent injury to mental health (see Jesse 1997). Interestingly, however, it restates the psychological discourse in its defi- nition of entheogens as producing the experience of God within. This is seem- ingly based on the assumption that God, the numinous, the Other, are all located within the self, within the psyche (Lucas 1995). The only way, it seems, that drug-induced theophanies can be countenanced is if they are situated as originating in the mind. The psychological discourse makes religious experi- ence possible in a scientific age. In practice, however, the term entheogen is employed in a rather different manner than that which was intended by its authors, and is subject to an ongo- ing negotiation and contestation. I would argue that a variety of substances are consumed in a variety of different circumstances that are then legitimated, post hoc, by labeling them “entheogens” and “entheogenic” respectively. In other words, while its original meaning has become diluted, the term “entheogen” has come to function as a serviceable and flexible resistive discourse.

The Animistic Discourse As we have seen, the entheogenic discourse contains certain Christian assump- tions about the nature of sacrament, religious practice, and religious experience, but these do not necessarily match practitioners’ actual mushroom experiences. Although mushrooms can most certainly elicit Christian-like theophanies and generate the experience of God within (see, for example, Partridge 2003), I would argue that many more practitioners talk and write of experiencing encounters with intelligences, spirits, or what in academic discourse has been termed “other- than-human-persons” (see Harvey 2005) without. That is, they experience not theophany but animaphany. I want, therefore, to introduce one final resistive OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 88

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discourse about mushrooms13 which is disallowed by all the above, including the entheogen discourse, because it transgresses a fundamental cultural boundary about the ontology of non-ordinary experience, and therefore, in Foucauldian terms, about what it is acceptable to say, do, and think. Here, mushrooms are not regarded as altering, consciousness but as adjusting it. They do not alter percep- tion, but adjust what it is possible to perceive, and therefore under the “animistic discourse” the spirits and beings occasioned by mushrooms are not hallucinations nor some aspect of the self, but genuine beneficent discarnate entities or intelli- gences, with whom the practitioner attempts to forge relationships. This discourse has definite historical origins, which can be found in the hugely popular writings of Aldous Huxley as well as in indigenous thought. In Huxley’s “doors of perception” model, the mind acts as a reducing valve, filtering out swathes of perceptual information that are unnecessary for biological sur- vival and that would ordinarily overwhelm us with sensation (Huxley 1994). Drawing upon the terminology of Eastern mysticism and the philosophy of Henri Bergson, Huxley thought that psychedelics stripped away or relaxed the mind’s filtering mechanisms, allowing one to perceive a greater part of “Mind at Large.” Rather like someone suddenly having access to the tuning dial of an oth- erwise fixed radio, psychedelics allow us to retune to, and hence to perceive, a different frequency or aspect of extant reality. Many indigenous cultures have a tradition of using “sacred” psychoactive plants for the purposes of healing (Schultes and Hofmann 1992). Healers and curanderos within Mexican indigenous cultures have employed psilocybin mushrooms in a tradition that extends in some form back to the time of the con- quest and possibly much earlier. Indigenous knowledge maintains that the mushrooms propel the healer into a realm of spirits; spirits who can be per- suaded to impart information such as the provenance and prognoses of illnesses, or the whereabouts of lost or stolen items. For instance, the most famous Mexican healer, the curandera María Sabina, who held the ceremonies attended by Gordon Wasson, maintained that she gained all her healing powers from the mushroom spirits, which she referred to as “the little children” or “the saint children” (Estrada 2003). Despite these demonstrable historical and cultural origins, the animistic dis- course, more than any of the others so far discussed, has emerged in response to the actual mushroom experience itself. In saying this I realize that I risk under- mining my entire argument, that the ways we think about mushrooms are dis- cursive rather than being “true,” unmediated representations of some essential mushroom experience. Without contradicting this, I wish to introduce the idea that psychedelic experiences are weighted (Partridge 2003) or bounded (Shanon 2002). Benny Shanon, in his comprehensive study of the phenomenology of ayahuasca, argues that, however bizarre the experiences people have, they OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 89

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remain bounded. That is, using the terminology of his psychological dis- course,14 these experiences represent a distinct or natural cognitive domain. Cer- tain moods, physical sensations, types of visions, and so on are always present within the ayahuasca experience, even if the exact structural and substantive details vary; and these moods, sensations, etc. differ between psychoactive com- pounds. Another way of putting this is Chris Partridge’s notion that the psyche- delic experience is weighted (although I would depart from Partridge by arguing for a distinction between the gravitational pull of different psychedelic com- pounds). For while scientific classification tends to lump the “hallucinogens” or “psychedelics” together on the basis of their observed effects upon subjects— they make subjects have visions—practitioners typically perceive qualitative and bounded differences in the phenomenological experiences produced by each: They are similar but not the same. A common distinction between mushrooms and LSD made by practitioners is that “mushrooms are more ‘earthy’ than acid” or that “mushrooms are ‘analogue’ and acid ‘digital.’” I wish to argue, then, that the experiences occasioned by mushrooms are weighted towards animaphany. The entheogen discourse is problematic because it implies that the experience of God is not a tendency but a deterministic cer- tainty. The idea of weighting circumvents this, for clearly not all mushroom con- sumers encounter spirits. However, with repeated usage an iterative process may be set in motion by which presuppositions and worldviews direct the type of mushroom experience (within its boundaries), which then in turn affects those presuppositions and worldviews. The repeated use of mushrooms can, and often does, lead practitioners to experience encounters with “spirits.” Whether practi- tioners delineate these as delusional, as some hitherto hidden aspect of the psy- che, or as genuinely animate entities, remains a discursive choice. Some examples are helpful here: One of my informants calls indigenous British psilocybin mushrooms a “Babel Fish15 to the vegetable kingdom,” because he claims they facilitate the perception of plants as being in some sense conscious, aware, and inspirited. Another, after taking mushrooms in the recre- ational setting of a pub, had a dream thereafter in which mushroom spirits appeared to her and warned her in no uncertain terms against using them in such a “profane” manner. Since then, she has changed her patterns of con- sumption accordingly. Another—a skeptic and rationalist whose own psychoac- tive use is shaped by a bohemian, as opposed to a religious, discourse—told me that it didn’t seem to matter who took mushrooms or where they did so (a party, a club, etc.), everyone gained the impression that they should be consuming mushrooms outside in a natural environment. In other words, he was attributing agency to the mushrooms who were somehow prescribing the manner of their own consumption. The most famous advocate of this discourse in recent times was the late Terence McKenna (1946–2000), who rose to prominence on the back of “rave” OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 90

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or “acid house” culture during the 1990s (see Partridge 2003; Letcher 2006). While he was most certainly aware of Huxley’s model and indigenous knowl- edge, he, too, claimed to have arrived at this position from his many mushroom experiences. In a series of books and charismatic talks, McKenna made the claim, among others, that with high doses of mushrooms it is possible to “hear” and engage in dialogue with a discarnate voice (or voices) belonging to the mushroom spirit(s). For example, in his True Hallucinations (McKenna 1993), McKenna published a fantastical passage arguing that the mushroom’s origins were extraterrestrial; a passage that he maintained was actually dictated to him by the mushroom spirit. “The mushroom speaks,” he wrote: And our opinions rest upon what it tells eloquently of itself in the cool night of the mind: “I am old, older than thought in your species, which is itself fifty times older then your history. Though I have been on earth for ages, I am from the stars. My home is no one planet, for many worlds scattered through the shining disc of the galaxy have conditions which allow my spores an opportu- nity for life.” [McKenna 1993:210] According to McKenna, the mushrooms desire a symbiotic relationship with humanity in which noesis is exchanged for ecological propagation. The “mush- room [spirit] states its own position very clearly. It says, ‘I require the nervous sys- tem of a mammal. Do you have one handy?’” (McKenna 1991:47). The latest advocate of the animistic discourse, and pretender to the throne of psychonaut-in-chief, is the journalist Daniel Pinchbeck, who relates in his recent best-selling book, Breaking Open the Head (2002), how his self-confessed skepticism was shattered by a series of drug-elicited encounters with other enti- ties and “beings”: in other words, his worldview was altered by his psychedelic experiences. “Every time I take mushrooms,” he writes, “I feel a cheerful nutty but intuitive certainty that trees are watchers, plants are sentient beings, patiently aware of their place in the ultimate scheme of things” (Pinchbeck 2002:293). On one particular bemushroomed occasion he was surprised, and more than a little horrified, to see: A group of laughing green elves standing in a line...When I saw them, I could hear their cheers faintly in my ears—“Hooray!” They seemed to be wel- coming me, very happy and excited because I had seen them. What was alarming about this apparition was that it was like a photographic projec- tion: The elves were as clear to my inner vision as film images. How could this happen? [Pinchbeck 2002:214–5] Central to the animistic discourse, therefore, is the idea of relationship with agentic spirits, either in the form of conscious plants and objects, such as stones, which we might otherwise regard as inanimate; or in the form of dis- carnate mushroom intelligences. Under the discourse, “myconauts” if you OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 91

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will, explorers of the “realm of the mushrooms,” regard themselves as being rather like diplomatic emissaries traveling and learning how to negotiate their way around a more powerful foreign nation. If approached in the “correct” way—either outside in the natural world, or with eyes closed in silent dark- ness—the mushroom spirits will reveal themselves and impart helpful infor- mation. Unlike the entheogen or recreational discourses, then, the animistic discourse resists the dominant Western discourses on its own terms. It resists the pathological discourse, because indigenous knowledge maintains that the use of mushrooms makes people well, not ill. It resists the prohibition dis- course by maintaining that the authority to consume psilocybin mushrooms comes from mushroom spirits. But most importantly of all it resists the psycho- logical discourse in its claim that the spirits occasioned by mushrooms are, as they appear to be, real. In Foucauldian terms, to think beyond the confines of a discourse is to be thought a little mad, but to transgress the boundaries of normalcy set by the psy- chological discourse is to be mad—one reason why indigenous beliefs have been disallowed by colonial and post-colonial discourse. Perhaps this is also why both McKenna and Pinchbeck hedged slightly on the issue of the provenance of spirits and voices: to prevent their being labeled as insane. McKenna wrote that the voices came from mushroom spirits, but then sometimes contradicted himself by saying that they come from “the earth” or from some new, higher dimension of self (McKenna 1991). Pinchbeck is led by his experiences to coun- tenance “manifold phalanxes of sentient entities beyond the realm of the sensi- ble” (Pinchbeck 2002:294), but can not quite bring himself to enter fully this belief: “Of course, this could be a delightful form of drug-induced paranoia” (2002:293). Such is the power of discourse that this animistic worldview is the most marginal of all.

what happens to consciousness under the action of magic mushrooms?

Across all these various discourses and their varying ways of approaching the enigma of mushrooms and consciousness, the fundamental question is whether the action of mushrooms (and other related compounds) actually introduces anything novel into consciousness. There are, it seems to me, three possibilities. The first possibility is that mushrooms simply impair the normal functioning of the brain and introduce nothing of value (the conclusion reached by the patho- logical and prohibition discourses). The second is that mushrooms work “to accentuate or to suppress functions in [mind and] behavior which are already present” (Partridge 2003:119); that is, that they rearrange the already existing con- tents of the mind in unpredictable ways that may be meaningful or therapeutically useful (the conclusion of the psychological and recreational discourses). The third OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 92

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possibility is that mushrooms genuinely impart innovatory concepts and expe- riences, whether in the form of revelations and theophanies (the entheogenic discourse) or animaphanies (the animistic discourse). My point is that the way in which we answer the question depends upon the particular discourse to which we subscribe, and, as Foucault’s perceptive analysis of power and knowledge demonstrates, upon the discursive bound- aries each therefore imposes. A materialist discourse prevails in our current intellectual climate in which consciousness is seen as, and only as, an emer- gent product of human neurophysiology (e.g., Dennett 1991). The mushroom experiences of adherents to the animistic discourse are quite otherwise, sug- gesting, for example, that plants may be conscious, or that consciousness may exist in the form of discarnate entities. Such experiences can not be counte- nanced within the current intellectual climate: they lie off the scale of “mad thoughts.” These animaphanies may indeed prove to be delusory, or to be sim- ply products of the mind. However, to ignore them on the basis of the threat they pose to the prevailing psychological discourse is, at best, to cut off a poten- tially fruitful avenue of consciousness research, and, at worst, to endorse a short-sightedness, a human-centered narcissism in which consciousness can only be recognized if it comes packaged in human form. The answer to the question of mushrooms and consciousness may yet be advanced by those pre- pared to think the unthinkable and to take the risk of being labeled as more than a little mad.

notes

1. An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the “Exploring consciousness” con- ference, Bath 2005. A draft appeared online without the author’s knowledge or con- sent. The version printed here is the official, authorized version: it alone should be cited. 2. By “magic mushrooms,” I am referring to diverse species found throughout the world, typically of the genus Psilocybe, which are intentionally consumed for their psychoactive properties. These are produced by the alkaloids psilocybin, psilocin, and baeocystin; hence “psilocybin mushrooms” for short. See Guzman 1983; Stamets 1996. 3. A similar loophole, which allowed the open sale of mushrooms in Britain, has now been closed by the Drugs Act 2005. See Letcher 2006. 4. Throughout this paper, I use the term “mad” (somewhat rhetorically) in the same colloquial sense as the American “crazy,” meaning foolish, eccentric, imbecilic, or irrational. To be thought “mad” is not necessarily the same thing as to be medically diagnosed as suffering from psychosis—though the term usually carries a certain stigma because of its negative cultural connotations with mental illness. 5. This stands in contrast to the sanctioned use of heroin in hospitals, where it is administered under the name of dia-morphine by medical authorities for the OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 93

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purposes of pain relief. Sadie Plant, drawing on Foucault’s analysis of homosexual- ity, argues that “not until the late nineteenth century did the addict emerge as a new identity, an individuated outsider born at the same time as the homosexual, both of them figments of a modern imagination that needed to define its own normality, drawing the boundaries around the upright, productive and reproductive members of twentieth-century society. Just as cocaine was removed to make Coca-Cola a new kind of real thing, so the addict was removed from the social body to assure the non- using population of its own free agency” (Plant 1999:154). 6. He described these symptoms as follows: “The patients show peculiar cerebral symptoms four or five hours after the fungi are eaten. They are greatly exhilarated, laugh immoderately, develop a staggering gait and show disturbances of vision. The symptoms are transient, the patients being restored to health in twenty-four to forty- eight hours, except for a peculiar sensation which they describe as a feeling ‘as if they were walking on air’” (Ford 1926:309). 7. There is an additional semiotic factor in the case of mushrooms, which is that dur- ing late Victorian romanticism, mushrooms became a shorthand way of depicting the enchantment and otherworldliness of fairyland (see Jay 2000). Consequently, the “magic mushroom” was, on arrival, immediately burdened with pre-existing cultural connotations of irrationality and a willingness to enter into self-delusion, of an infantile urge to escape into a never-never land, of being “off with the fairies.” 8. Strictly speaking, “narcotic” means “producing sleep,” and should only be used to refer to the opiates. See Lewin 1924. 9. If the transgressive aspect of the recreational discourse is a recent phenomenon, the use of mushrooms for pleasure is not. The Spanish chronicler de Sahagún records how the Aztec empire entertained diplomatic emissaries with mushrooms, and Durán that on one occasion “all the lords and grandees of the provinces rose and, to solemnise further the festivities, they all ate of some woodland mushrooms, which they say make you lose your senses, and thus they sallied forth all primed for the dance” (translated in Wasson 1980:200, emphasis added). 10. According to Jonathan Ott, “psychonaut” was coined by the German writer Ernst Jünger in 1970. Ott 1996a. 11. Also present were Danny Staples, Jeremy Bigwood, and Jonathan Ott. 12. A theophany is a visible manifestation of God or a god. 13. Here, I restrict my discussion to psilocybin mushrooms only. The animistic dis- course may apply equally to other psychoactives, such as DMT, ayahuasca, and ibo- gaine, but these lie outside my realm of experience and the scope of this analysis. 14. Shanon writes “What is special about Ayahuasca is the extraordinary subjective experiences this brew generates in the mind...As such, the study of Ayahuasca belongs first and foremost to the domain of psychology, and more specifically, cog- nitive psychology” (Shanon 2002:31). 15. In Douglas Adam’s science-fiction comedy, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Babel Fish, when inserted into one’s ear, translates all languages. OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 94

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