The Indians' reverence for the sacred mushrooms is also evident in their belief that they can be eaten only by a "clean" person. "Clean" here means ceremonially clean, and that term among other things includes sexual abstinence at least four days before and after ingestion of the mushrooms. Certain rules must also be observed in gathering the mushrooms. With non-observance of these commandments, the mushrooms can make the person who eats it insane, or can even kill.
The Wassons had undertaken their first expedition to the Mazatec country in 1953, but not until 1955 did they succeed in overcoming the shyness and reserve of the Mazatec friends they had managed to make, to the point of being admitted as active participants in a mushroom ceremony. R. Gordon Wasson and his companion, the photographer Allan Richardson, were given sacred mushrooms to eat at the end of June 1955, on the occasion of a nocturnal mushroom ceremony. They thereby became in all likelihood the first outsiders, the first whites, ever permitted to take teonanácatl.
In the second volume of Mushrooms, Russia and History, in enraptured words, Wasson describes how the mushroom seized possession of him completely, although he had tried to struggle against its effects, in order to be able to remain an objective observer. First he saw geometric, colored patterns, which then took on architectural characteristics. Next followed visions of splendid colonnades, palaces of supernatural harmony and magnificence embellished with precious gems, triumphal cars drawn by fabulous creatures as they are known only from mythology, and landscapes of fabulous luster.
Detached from the body, the spirit soared timelessly in a realm of fantasy among images of a higher reality and deeper meaning than those of the ordinary, everyday world. The essence of life, the ineffable, seemed to be on the verge of being unlocked, but the ultimate door failed to open.
This experience was the final proof, for Wasson, that the magical powers attributed to the mushrooms actually existed and were not merely superstition.
In order to introduce the mushrooms to scientific research, Wasson had earlier established an association with mycologist Professor Roger Heim of Paris.
Accompanying the Wassons on further expeditions into the Mazatec country, Heim conducted the botanical identification of the sacred mushrooms. He showed that they were gilled mushrooms from the family Strophariaceae, about a dozen different species not previously described scientifically, the greatest part belonging to the genus Psilocybe.
Professor Heim also succeeded in cultivating some of the species in the laboratory. The mushroom Psilocybe mexicana turned out to be especially suitable for artificial cultivation.
Chemical investigations ran parallel with these botanical studies on the magic mushrooms, with the goal of extracting the hallucinogenically active principle from the mushroom material and preparing it in chemically pure form. Such investigations were carried out at Professor Heim's instigation in the chemical laboratory of the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, and work teams were occupied with this problem in the United States in the research laboratories of two large pharmaceutical companies: Merck, and Smith, Kline and French. The American laboratories had obtained some of the mushrooms from R. G. Wasson and had gathered others themselves in the Sierra Mazateca.
As the chemical investigations in Paris and in the United States turned out to be ineffectual, Professor Heim addressed this matter to our firm, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, because he felt that our experimental experience with LSD, related to the magic mushrooms by similar activity, could be of use in the isolation attempts. Thus it was LSD that showed teonanácatl the way into our laboratory.
As director of the department of natural products of the Sandoz pharmaceutical-chemical research laboratories at that time, I wanted to assign-the investigation of the magic mushrooms to one of my coworkers. However, nobody showed much eagerness to take on this problem because it was known that LSD and everything connected with it were scarcely popular subjects to the top management. Because the enthusiasm necessary for successful endeavors cannot be commanded, and because the enthusiasm was already present in me as far as this problem was concerned, I decided to conduct the investigation myself.
Some 100 g of dried mushrooms of the species Psilocybe mexicana, cultivated by Professor Heim in the laboratory, were available for the beginning of the chemical analysis. My laboratory assistant, Hans Tscherter, who during our decade-long collaboration, had developed into a very capable helper, completely familiar with my manner of work, aided me in the extraction and isolation attempts. Since there were no clues at all concerning the chemical properties of the active principle we sought, the isolation attempts had to be conducted on the basis of the effects of the extract fractions.
But none of the various extracts showed an unequivocal effect, either in the mouse or the dog, which could have pointed to the presence of hallucinogenic principles. It therefore became doubtful whether the mushrooms cultivated and dried in Paris were still active at all. That could only be determined by experimenting with this mushroom material on a human being. As in the case of LSD, I made this fundamental experiment myself, since it is not appropriate for researchers to ask anyone else to perform self-experiments that they require for their own investigations, especially if they entail, as in this case, a certain risk.
In this experiment I ate 32 dried specimens of Psilocybe mexicana, which together weighed 2.4 g. This amount corresponded to an average dose, according to the reports of Wasson and Heim, as it is used by the curanderos. The mushrooms displayed a strong psychic effect, as the following extract from the report on that experiment shows: Thirty minutes after my taking the mushrooms, the exterior world began to undergo a strange transformation. Everything assumed a Mexican character. As I was perfectly well aware that my knowledge of the Mexican origin of the mushroom would lead me to imagine only Mexican scenery, I tried deliberately to look on my environment as I knew it normally. But all voluntary efforts to look at things in their customary forms and colors proved ineffective. Whether my eyes were closed or open, I saw only Mexican motifs and colors. When the doctor supervising the experiment bent over me to check my blood pressure, he was transformed into an Aztec priest and I would not have been astonished if he had drawn an obsidian knife. In spite of the seriousness of the situation, it amused me to see how the Germanic face of my colleague had acquired a purely Indian expression.
At the peak of the intoxication, about 1 1/2 hours after ingestion of the mushrooms, the rush of interior pictures, mostly abstract motifs rapidly changing in shape and color, reached such an alarming degree that I feared that I would be torn into this whirlpool of form and color and would dissolve. After about six hours the dream came to an end.
Subjectively, I had no idea how long this condition had lasted. I felt my return to everyday reality to be a happy return from a strange, fantastic but quite real world to an old and familiar home.
This self-experiment showed once again that human beings react much more sensitively than animals to psychoactive substances. We had already reached the same conclusion in experimenting with LSD on animals, as described in an earlier chapter of this book. It was not inactivity of the mushroom material, but rather the deficient reaction capability of the research animals vis-à-vis such a type of active principle, that explained why our extracts had appeared inactive in the mouse and dog.