Psychedelics Playlist: The Manifested Mind, Part 2

What are psychedelics? How have these substances influenced human minds and culture? What exactly do they invoke in the brain and how could a renaissance of scientific study into their properties improve our lives? In this series of Stuff to Blow Your Mind episodes, Robert and Joe explore the world of entheogens.

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Episode Transcript

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(01:54):
Welcome Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of I
Heeart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, Welcome to Stuff to
Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two of our
discussion of psychedelics with a special focus on psilocybin mushrooms.

(02:15):
Um So, in the last episode, if you haven't heard
that yet, you should probably go back and listen to
that one first. That's where we lay the groundwork for
a lot of the stuff we're talking about today. Where
we ended up talking about a little bit about the
history of psychedelics, about where we stand in that history,
which will explore more over the next couple of episodes.
We talked about a lot of the common features of

(02:36):
the psychedelic experience and what those reported features have in
common with, say, what William James described as the mystical
experience or the religious experience. So we talked about like
the ideas of the psychedelic experience being ineffable or hard
to put into words, often having this quality of verticality
or the noetic quality, seeming like it isn't just an experience,

(02:58):
but that it's somehow imparts information do you, right? And
then when we also just talked about in general terms
like what is a drug? What what does this term
drug mean? Why do we apply to some substances that
have a physiological effect on us and not to others?
And then what indeed is a psychedelic and uh, and
again all those properties that we typically associate with the

(03:19):
psychedelic experience, right. And one of the funny things is
when I was growing up, I thought of drugs as
one class of things that are all equally bad, um
and you know, all equally scary. And of course this
was you know, United States drug policy conditioning as it
filtered through into the education system. Uh, and in a
way you can kind of understand, like, you know, you

(03:40):
want kids to be aware of the dangers of messing
with addictive substances. You don't want kids trying out, uh
you know, heroin or cocaine or even tobacco. Really you know,
like yeah, I mean yeah, as a as a father,
I totally get that. Yeah, but then all these other
things get lumped in with that stuff, right, And yeah,
I mean we could certainly a lot has been said,
a lot has been written, and we could probably spend

(04:02):
a whole time just dissecting the war on drugs and
what what didn't work, um, and just sort of some
of the problematic aspects of the messaging. Uh. Because I
remember growing up and going to these like the dare
rallies at school. Um, this is a like a a
US educational outreach program um to keep kids off of drugs,

(04:24):
and and there was to see it did feel like
drugs were just the enemy, and then anything else you
might be take like there was medication. Drugs certainly wasn't
something that would a term that would be used to
describe Thailand all or anything. Um. But but yeah, and
in doing this, you end up like like just vilifying
all these substances uh and in making and also perhaps

(04:45):
making them more appealing in a certain sense, you know,
because you're telling all these kids, know, this is dark,
dangerous stuff. Don't get near the dark magicum of drugs.
And and at the same time, it can lead to
this false impression that drugs were a product of the
nineteen sixties, or at least of the or the mid
twentieth century, that we had like a time before drugs,

(05:09):
and then suddenly here come uh, you know, here comes
the psychedelic counterculture, Here comes the marijuana. Marijuana, of course
came in earlier. Uh. The same can be said of
cocaine uh and uh and opium and uh and so forth.
But but still there's you could easily get this false
idea in your head that these were products of modern society.
There were new modern problems, and certainly there are versions

(05:31):
of these substances that were modern and problems that they
introduced were thoroughly modern. Um. You know, for for instance,
you know, things like when you start talking about like
crack cocaine or you start talking about heroin, um, you know,
those are the more modern twists on on very old organisms,
you know, going back to the poppy seed or the
coca plant. Yeah, and even referring to the more psychedelic substances,

(05:55):
not say like opium based alkaloids or something like that.
But uh, you know, psilocybin and ellis E LSD was
in a way kind of invented. It is a compound
that was isolated from the urgad in nineteen thirty eight
I think it was. And then first, you know, Albert
Hofman figured out what it was in the nineteen forties.
So that was kind of new, But psychedelics in general

(06:15):
were not new. It's certainly been around. They've been used
by humans for hundreds or thousands of years. Yeah, I
mean we're talking about organisms. We're talking about species that
evolved to thrive in our world. And um, you know,
take psocybin for instance. Again, it's found in some two
hundred different varieties of a two hundred different species of mushrooms,
and um, exactly why they have these properties is still

(06:38):
something that scientists or are looking into. But according to
a two thousand eighteen study from Ohio State University, uh,
the psychedelic properties of pilocybin condemning mushrooms it may have
evolved as an appetite suppressant to deter insects that frequented
the the animal dung from which the mushrooms grew, which

(06:59):
which is interesting, Yeah, because that is that's not even
a quality of the psychedelic experience that we even touched
on in the previous episode. But there is an appetite
suppressant that is taking place as well. So maybe a
lot of the classic effects that we identify as psychedelic
are merely by products of the of the compounds that
the primary evolutionary purpose of which is an appetite suppressant.

(07:21):
That that's just hypothesis, right, it's the hypothesis. Yeah, it's
still still an open question. But but yeah, there's no
such thing as LSD. Munchie's right. I mean there are
funny enough that there are much weirder hypothesis, I mean,
much weirder ones that a lot of the In the
last episode, we talked about the people with the sort
of mico centric worldview who come to see you know,

(07:42):
like Terence McKenna and the people who come to see mushrooms.
Is some in some way kind of secretly running the world,
and some of these people, you know, they'll get into
ideas of how, well, really the reason that psilocybin exists,
you know, this compound has these effects on us, is
that evolved as some kind of communication and mechanism where
the mush you know, the fungus world is trying to

(08:04):
break through to us because we're the like dominant moving
species that controls energy and ecosystems, and it's trying to
get through to us and open our minds to its priorities.
It's it's interesting. Now, certainly we're not going to get
into the question of whether psilocybin containing mushrooms are gods,
or whether they're conscious or whether they're conscious. Well, actually,

(08:26):
I think maybe Edward Ocne might have something to say
about that, but he does, uh yeah, and we'll touch
on that a little later. But even but I don't
want to associate him too much with this um with
with the you know, the sort of more extreme version
of this. But in terms of just associating psilocymon and
psychedelics with gods, there's nothing new about that, and we'll
get into that as we go here. One of the

(08:48):
connections that mckinnam makes in his stoned ape hypothesis is
that since you have psilocybin growing out of the dung
of verbivores, namely cattle, this would have been something they
would have become obvious to people's that were rearing cattle
in the ancient world, and then it would have traveled
with them as they brought their cattle with them. And

(09:11):
he makes a case I'm not sure exactly how strong
it is for the various cattle gods of antiquity. Uh,
you know the sort of you know, horned gods, the
golden calf. Yeah, part of their association is with the
psilocybin mushrooms that would have been almost like the milk
of the animal. Like the animal produces meat, the animal
produces milk. The animal produces this substance that allows us

(09:34):
to engage in a mystic experience. That's an interesting potential
ecological relationship. I mean, the same way that zoonotic diseases
follow human civilization where they've got domesticated animals, right, because
they're in close proximity to certain domesticated animals, the diseases
that affect those animals have a greater likelihood of jumping
over into you know, into the human strains. Right. Um,

(09:55):
But you could say the same thing about things that
are not diseases, but other follow on organisms, for example, psilocybin, mushrooms,
right right, Yeah, Now, to be clear, I think, you know,
as we're discussing the show before, I think it's always
um too tempting to try and point to a single
thing as being like the prime motivator in the creation
of mythologies and the genesis of gods and so um.

(10:17):
You know, I'm kind of I'm open to the idea
that psilocybin could have played a role in the character
of some of these gods. And we do see specific
gods as we'll discuss that have clear iconography associated with
psychedelic substances, but of course there are there's so many
other processes going on in the generation of divine entities
in the human mind. Well, one interesting question, at least

(10:39):
interesting to me, is the question of why did we
start taking these substances. Clearly, the use of psilocybin goes
way back into history, and we'll talk sort of about
the natural and cultural history of of psilocybin, especially in
a in a bit, But like, why what benefit biologically

(11:00):
would there have been to doing this? I mean, is
it something that humans do just as a sort of
like byproduct of the way their brains work, and there
is no real biological benefit or is there a biological
benefit that maybe we don't fully recognize. Is there an
adaptive reason to take psychedelic drugs? Yeah, because a lot
of times we think of these substances as being especially

(11:22):
in the Western context, you know, purely recreational, purely even hedonistic.
And that's not what we're seeing out of the especially
the more recent studies and even the studies of the
nineteen fifties and sixties. And it's also not what we
see in traditional societies that use them. There was an
attempt and these were used very seriously as a means

(11:43):
of solving problems and uh, communing with the mystical world, etcetera. Yeah,
that's exactly right, and and so you can I mean,
one thing that automatically sticks out there for me is
that if there is some kind of adaptive value to
these things, it could have some kind of social reinforcement role. Right,
you know, this is a common kind of thing. You say,

(12:04):
what is the value of X cultural practice? Very often
you could say, well, maybe it's strength and strengthen social
bonds in some way. You know, helps groups work together better, um,
helps them share information and bond better, so they're more
effective as a hunting team or something like that. So
that's a possibility, but we don't know that's the case.
But another way of thinking about it is, could we

(12:25):
better understand the uses of psychedelics and humans and the
reasons for those uses by looking at the effects of
psychedelics in other animals. Uh So, for one thing, there
are some people in the world that actually gives psychedelic
drugs to domestic animals for ritual and practical purposes. And
there's one example I came across the I thought was

(12:47):
a really interesting study. This is a study by Bradley
Bennett and Rokyo Alarcon called Hunting and Hallucinogens the use
of psychoactive and other plants to improve the hunting ability
of dogs. So this is giveing psychedelic substances to animals
with a purpose that's it's not research related, but also
not um purely recreational like some of these videos you

(13:09):
see of say, squirrels allegedly consuming psychedelic mushrooms. Right, yeah,
So this would be something parallel to an adaptive value
in a hunting scenario, and so this paper was in
the Journal of ethno Pharmacology in two thousand fifteen. So
the authors here looked at the use of psychoactive substances
by two tribes in South America, the Shuar and the

(13:30):
Quechua of Ecuador, who are reported to give hallucinogenic plants
to their hunting dogs in order to improve their hunting ability.
And the authors find that this practice is prevalent and
they think it's likely adaptive. Now, what good would it
do to give a hunting dog hallucinogen right, It seemed
to me if you didn't think too deeply about it,

(13:51):
that just seems counterproductive. Right, It's going to make the
dog distracted, probably less effective, right. Yeah. The idea is
that what it would would alter its perception of reality,
but in a need of fine tune perception of reality
in order to do it's hunting exactly. But the authors
quote hypothesize that hallucinogenic plants alter perception in hunting dogs
by diminishing extraneous signals and by enhancing sensory perception, most

(14:16):
likely old faction, or the sense of smell that is
directly involved in the detection and capture of game. Now,
this is interesting because we always have to recognize that
a dog is a far more uh smell based creature
than than we can really almost more, it's more more
smell based than we can imagine, Like, uh, you know,

(14:37):
we're such a visual species and uh and certainly uh
psychedelics are going to alter the sense of smell. And
we discussed that briefly last time, Like you, smells may change,
smells may seem strange, and imagine that in a creature
for whom smell is this really rich means of sensing
the external world? Yeah, exactly. I mean I think in

(14:59):
the same way that the psychedelic experience is often ineffable,
there's this quality to it that you can't describe once
it's over and communicate to other people. I think probably
the sense experience of other kinds of animals, animals like dogs,
is probably ineffable and and un understandable from our point
of view, Like there's no way for you to picture
or put yourself into the level of chemo sensitivity of

(15:21):
a dog. There, you know, their level of engagement with
all of the chemical signals going on around them that
we only get this tiny, blunt, faint kind of whiff
of um and and so. Yeah, so that's obviously an
important part of their hunting perception. But of course they
have other senses to They've got hearing and smell and
all that. So maybe what's going on again, we don't

(15:42):
know this, This is just what the author's hypothesize, you know.
In the last episode, we talked about how one of
the common reported effects of taking psilocybin as a hallucinogen
is the experience of heightened perceptions, like, you know, colors
might seem more more vivid or brighter, or you might
feel like you haven't a more sense of hearing. Um.
It's hard for me to imagine that, like the you know,

(16:04):
you actually have greater resolution in your eyeballs for sight,
but there might be something going on in the brain
where suddenly more power is devoted to noticing detail in
what you see or something like that. Um, and so
you can imagine maybe the same news true in these
hunting dogs. Maybe, you know, brainpower gets sort of reorganized
in a way where there's new levels of attention to

(16:26):
detail and smell that would normally be dedicated to other
senses or other distracting mental processes. But then again we
don't know that's the case. That's just interesting possibility for
what's going on here. If this is in fact adaptive,
which the authors think it probably is. Uh, the author
is also right, this is funny that quote. If this
is true, plant substances might also enhance the ability of

(16:47):
dogs to detect explosive drugs, human remains, and other targets
for which they are valued. So so the drug dogs
will now be given will Yeah, this is inter seeing
a possible future in which let's say, explosive sniffing dogs
will be micro dosing um or or perhaps macro dosing

(17:08):
in rotor to find what they're looking for. Uh. We
do want to stress that we are not encouraging anyone
out there to uh take a psychedelic substance an attempt
to carry out any particular tasks in their life. Um No.
We're also not encouraging people to dose their pets or
domestic animals with substances you might not know the effects of.
I mean, that's just not advisable. But this, this does

(17:31):
remind me, of course, micro dosing is this is what's
supposed trend in like Silicon Valley and so forth, were
take a little bit less a little bit of some
sort of psychedelic in order to give you with what
some supposed slide edge of whatever your coding job happens
to be, etcetera. And uh, and I don't know. I
haven't looked at the research on that to see if
there is any research on that to say exactly how

(17:51):
that holds up um, but it does. I don't know either.
It does remind me of a recent Saturday Night Live
sketch and which there was a there's a film reviewer
who appears on Weekend Update who instead of micro dosing
to go review films as macro dose. So he's taking
like a colossal amount of psychedelics and then going and
seeing just whatever the Hollywood films of the day happened

(18:14):
to be and then having these just crazy um reviews
of them. I recommend everybody check that out. I haven't
seen that one. Now. I think something that's interesting about
this hunting Dog study, though, is that it it kind
of like roughly falls in line with some of the
arguments the McKenna maide back in nine and Food of
the Gods for psilocybin aiding humanities ancestors along three different levels.

(18:39):
So but but one of the key areas is that
he was pointing to the work of psycho pharmacologist Roland L. Fisher, uh, saying, quote,
small amounts of psilocybin consumed with no awareness of its
psychoactivity while in the general act of browsing for food,
and perhaps later consumed consciously in part a noticeable increase
in visual acuity, especially edge detection. As visual acuity is

(19:03):
at a premium among hunter gatherers, the discovery of the
equivalent of quote chemical binoculars could not fail to have
an impact on the hunting and gathering success of those
individuals who availed themselves of this advantage. That's interesting, yeah, yeah,
um and uh. And he also argues that at higher doses,
restlessness and sexual arousal would have played a role, and

(19:26):
then finally, shamanistic ecstasy would have would have, of course
been an important part and it clearly was an important
part of the use of psychedelics early people. Now I'm
not I'm not saying that this paper really backs up
McKenna in any meaningful way here, And I'm also not
sure if his interpretation of Fisher's work is completely fair
or if he's leaning into his assumptions on this but

(19:47):
you know, if if psilocybin makes a hunting dog slightly
better at hunting or a hunter gatherers slightly better at
their thing, then I think this is kind of interesting.
I mean that the same case can can and is
aid for natural substances that work as stimulants, which of
course are widely used through human culture. And uh, you know,
for every employee out there who's not micro dosing with psilocybin,

(20:12):
everybody else is micro or macro dosing with caffeine, ultra
dosing on or um. Goodness. I remember hearing tales of
like the older newsrooms where a cigarette mate was a
was a request where someone would be like working on
a deadline and they're drinking coffee and they need somebody
to actually like stick the cigarette in their mouth to
give something and light it up for them so they

(20:33):
can have the the nicotine rush to finish their job.
Or even the cliche of the use of cocaine in
business in Wall Street. Yeah, or and before that, the
you know, I've heard tales of you know of labors,
you know, being depending on cocaine back back in the
day as being like a primary mean of just getting
through the labor of the day, and of course in
the armed forces of the twenty one centuries you see

(20:56):
a lot of use of stimulants. Certainly we've talked about
this in the show before the use of stimulants by
the Nazis during the Second World War it was pretty extensive,
especially in the Liftwaffe. And and today you still see variants,
various stimulants that are designed for you some long flights
in military context. All right, well, I think maybe we
should take a break, and then when we come back,

(21:17):
we will talk a little bit about animal self administration
of hallucinogens. Today's episode is brought to you by Slack.
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(23:23):
we're back. So before we get into the self administration
of psychedelics by animals, it's just a quick reminder that
animals in general are known to make use of various
chemicals in their environment. It may be something more internal,
like a poison dart frog acquiring its toxicity via the
plants that it consumes, or it could be something like

(23:45):
lemurs that take a centipede, crush it and spread the uh,
the toxicity of the of of this species on their fur,
presumably to keep insects away. So there are plenty of
cases like that where it's either a more complex part
of the creatures physiology or it is something that they
are doing almost like tool, use of the toxins in

(24:07):
their environment. Great example of this I remember from our
Squirrels episodes was the ground squirrel. H I don't know.
I think some western United States or western North American
ground squirrel has a strategy for avoiding its rattlesnake predators,
which is finding discarded rattlesnake skins after the snake sheds
its skin, chewing that up, and rubbing it all over

(24:27):
its body and the bodies of its young. Yeah that's brilliant.
But so these are all, you know, self administrations of
chemicals by animals. So would animals take psychedelic drugs given
the opportunity do do they just seek these things out
and consume them voluntarily. It's one thing if maybe an
animal consumes a hallucinogen by accident, you know, because it's

(24:50):
just there's a psychedelic compound in their environment and they
happen to eat it while they're foraging, versus behaviors were
really does seem like they're actively seeking it out and
after they have the experience once tried to repeat it.
Have you ever seen the movie The Bear? No, I haven't,
so I forget the French director's name he directed the original,
or the name of the rose Um. But but The

(25:12):
Bear I remember as being a very fun film about
this this bear, using lots of like real bears used
in the film. But there's a sequence in which the
bear eats a psychedelic mushroom and has a psychedelic experience
and it's pretty wonderful of you. If you don't see
the whole movie, I recommend everyone check out that sequence
on like YouTube if it's still out there. Well, the
bear would not be alone in the animal kingdom, it

(25:34):
turns out. So there is a paper that I want
to refer to here from the International Journal of Addictions.
This is from nineteen seventy three, so a lot of
thinking about drugs has changed since then, but this does
document some like recorded animal behaviors that are pretty interesting.
So this is called an Ethological Search for Self Administration
of Hallucinogens by Ronald K. Siegel, And so it's been

(25:57):
reported previously by Wasson and Nineteens sixty eight, who will
learn a bit more about later in the episode, that
reindeer often self administer hallucinogenic mushrooms known as Amanita muscaria
or fly agaric. And they will find these mushrooms when
they're available and they will eat them. So if you've

(26:18):
never seen what these look like, they're worth looking up.
They're kind of the classic like toadstool looking mushroom, you know,
kind of the red and white spotted cap uh. And
the reindeer are also known, interestingly, to try to ingest
the urine of humans who have been consuming this same
species of mushroom for psychedelic purposes. Wasson wrote in nineteen

(26:38):
six quote, when human urine or mushrooms are in the vicinity,
the half domesticated beasts become unmanageable. All reindeer folk and
know of these two addictions. Reindeer like men, suffer or
enjoy profound mental disturbances after eating the fly agaric. So
Seagull writes that the normal diet of a reindeer is
almost entirely composed of lichens, and so you know, lightlife

(27:01):
in the tundra can be gastronomically boring sometimes, But they
do also appear to have this strong instinct toward the
consumption of hallucinogenic mushrooms and the human urine containing the
active metabolites of the same mushroom. So, according to Siegel,
the Chukchi people of the Eastern Arctic Russia region the

(27:21):
Chukchi Peninsula sometimes take fly agaric intentionally, which leads to
quote elation, sedation, colored visions, and hallucinations. And the reindeer
who can acquire these compounds through raw mushrooms or human urine, quote,
become just as drunk and have just as great a thirst.
At night, they are noisy and keep running around the

(27:42):
tints in the expectation of being given the long four fluid,
And when some is spilled out in the snow, they
start quarreling, tearing away from each other, the clumps of
snow moistened with it. And that's another quote from Wasson
one report quote stresses the passion of the reindeer for
human urine is so intense that it is likely to
make it dangerous to relieve oneself in the open when

(28:04):
there are reindeer around. Uh. There's also some scant evidence
that reindeer who ingest these compounds subsequently isolate themselves from
the herd. But again the evidence here is not clear. Uh,
and self isolating behavior could have other causes that this
lines up with other observations that seagull makes. Yeah. Wson
did a lot of work regarding fly agaric uh. And

(28:25):
this was, you know, an extremely ancient shamanistic and toxicon
that was used by the uh Tunguska tribes of ancient Siberia.
And he even presented it as a potential candidate for
soma somos, his mystical substance that was consumed in Vadic India.
And uh and it's been interpreted, Uh, nobody's quite sure

(28:46):
what exactly it was, but it's in it's been interpreted
as having been opium, cannabis or got uh if fedra
is a strong candidate. The often see discussed and in
sometimes the cases made for psilocybin as well. Uh, and
it may have been different substances at different times too,
that's always important to keep in mind. H McKenna of

(29:06):
course makes an argument in his book for psilocybin and
that it spends a lot of time. He spends a
lot of time with that. But but some is certainly
a fascinating substance to try and unravel because it was
an important Indo European substances, again described in the Vedas.
It was also seems to be the same thing as
a homa, which was an important Prizoroastrian substance in Persia,

(29:29):
and it was attributed with all sorts of mystical and
curative properties. It was quote the pillar of the world
and uh and some still make a case for psychedelic
substances being in play here, while others are kind of
strongly in the ephedra realm, so seeing it more as
like a purely a stimulant. Yeah, that's interesting. And honestly,
I really did not know much about flying ark before

(29:51):
before looking at this, so oh yeah, there's u if
I recall correctly. There are even people who make interesting
commentary about Santa Claus and flying reindeer yes, I've read
about this. Yeah, the myth of the flying reindeer comes
from them eating these mushrooms or eating the urine of
people who have eaten the mushrooms and loosening the bonds

(30:12):
of Earth's gravity. So Segel actually looks at a number
of other recorded patterns of self administration of psychoactive substances
and animals. In another example he gives is the mongoose,
which has been reported to seek out hallucinogenic toads and
other prey containing potentially psychoactive compounds during hunting, even when

(30:32):
other prey are available. To read this quote, some mongooses
in the West Indies and the Hawaiian Islands apparently ingest
Buffo Marina's toads, which I should add um are now
known as the Rinella Marina toads, the cane toad, the
scourge of Australia, which we've talked about in a recent
episode about cannibalism or almost cannibalism, because apparently these toads, uh,

(30:54):
you know, they they like to eat their own tadpoles
and juveniles. But these toads quote contain in the hallucinogen
boufattenine and to continue this phenomenon is something of a
mystery since other toads as well as other natural prey
are more abundant in these regions. While it is not
known if there are psychoactive effects resulting from such ingestions,

(31:15):
the mongoose goes out of its way to ingest a
variety of psychoactive compounds and poisons, including the poison bulb
of scorpions and the sting which he quotes another author,
which it seems to consider a bond bush. That's interesting
considering you know that the mongoose is invasive. It was
introduced to Hawaii as well as you know, other other

(31:37):
places such as the Bahamas, Cuba, Jamaica, etcetera. And then
the cane toade as well. Right, yeah, the cane toade
I think is originally native to South America, primarily um
and And that's not it for all of the potential
animal self administrations of psychedelic compounds that have been recorded
by you know, people observing animal behavior. Just a few

(31:57):
quick notes mentioned in a little article in the Parmaceutical
Journal in two thousand ten by Andrew Haynes, which has
a truly horrible title that I'm not going to read,
and I'm gonna assume was assigned by like a web editor.
It mentioned something about animal junkies. Yeah, well it was
a different time, Okay, So a few examples mentioned here.
Apparently that big horn sheep of the Canadian Rockies apparently

(32:18):
seek out and consume psychoactive lichen quote in scraping it
off the rock surface, they can wear their teeth down
to the gums. Uh. And in the rainforests of South America,
apparently jaguars are known to sometimes not on the roots
and bark of the yaga plant, which is this is
the plant that is from which the d m T
has has derived. Yeah, it's the plant used in the

(32:41):
making of ayahuascati, and the jaguars apparently tend to so
after they gnaw on this plant, they have been recorded
acting playful and kind of kitten ish uh. And some
wild animals in Africa, including boars, porcupines, some primates like
man drills, are known to dig up and eat the
hallucinogenic roots of the a boga plant. I love that

(33:01):
the idea of a jaguar consuming this and just kind
of being it's almost like it's eating cat and up
for something. It's just a little playful where when the
jaguar is considered such a spiritual animal in the traditions
of like Amazonian people, and it's like it's the kind
of spirit that you would perhaps encounter while on an
ahuasca journey. Well, this has even been hypothesize. This is

(33:25):
certainly not known, but it's been speculated that maybe the
consumption of ayahuasca as a sacred right came from observing
the jaguar doing this, And so like the ideas that
you know, the jaguar is this powerful spiritual beast, and
that its behaviors might have been copied by humans, they
have the center. This is something important we didn't mention

(33:45):
in the first episode. We talked about humans gradually figuring
out what they could eat and what they couldn't eat.
But of course humans can also look to see what
other animals are capable of eating, which is not always
a definite sign that you should eat it. There are
things that animals can eat in certain species can eat
that we absolutely cannot. They might have different enzymes and
stuff that we don't. But then again, if you see

(34:08):
an animal completely avoiding a particular substance, you know, that
might be a clear sign that you should avoid it
as well, or perhaps that the magic of cooking is
necessary in order to to harness it. And then if
you see some sort of peculiar behavior taking place after
an animal consumes something, well maybe more study is required. Now,
just the fact that an animal will self administer a

(34:28):
drug is clearly not evidence that that drug is a
good thing or a healthy thing for that animal to consume. Right,
I mean we've all seen our pets consume things, right
that that, you know, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's
making a wise choice, and it's an environment or I
think about the their lab studies where you know, mice
lab mice will have the option to self administer addictive drugs.

(34:52):
You know, they can self administer morphine or whatever, and
sometimes this is used in studies to figure out how
to break addictions, like what kinds of aratunities when offered
to mice, will be more attractive to mice than just
trying to self administer more doses of morphine. Right, But
then again, you know we're talking about like morphine uh

(35:12):
in like a drip or something, right, which is not
not something that would encounter in the natural world obviously,
And and also any of the and to be. I
just wanted to say I used morphine as a just
an example there. I don't remember what exactly the compound
was they study, but it's something like that, right. Well,
it seems like a lot of those studies do use
synthetic drug compounds. So it's not like say we put
we put a mouse in, you know, a small ecosphere

(35:36):
with some psychedelic mushrooms and just see to see just
how much you would eat. You know, It isn't something
like that. It tends to be like a drip of
some sort of synthetic version, some artificial substance that's created
from a naturally occurring uh substance. But yeah, So the
question is like with these psychedelics, self administration of psychedelics

(35:57):
by animals, why do they do it? Why do they
seek hallucinogenic substances? It would seem in many cases to
be maladaptive. Now, we do have the one hypothesis already
that there are perhaps ways in which some psychedelic compounds
could alter brain function in a way that heightened sensory perception.
Maybe it helps in hunting by making you know, by

(36:18):
giving you stronger attention to your old factory senses and
makes you better at sniffing out prey. That's possibility, you know,
it's also possible. I've seen some authors speculat that maybe
they consume these substances out of some equivalent to the
human experience of boredom. You know, they're they're seeking novel experiences,
which does that is a drive. The general drive to
seek novel experiences is something that has in some cases

(36:40):
an evolutionary purpose. We've talked on the show before about neophilia, right,
the idea of like animals that seek novel experiences or
go toward unfamiliar objects may often more often put themselves
at risk of danger, but they also set themselves up
for bigger rewards. So if you're in a your a
raccoon living in a city, and you approach an unfamiliar

(37:01):
object in a parking lot, it could be full of milkshake,
it could be full of fries, but it also could
kill you, you you know, so it's sort of like a
higher stakes way of playing the life game. You know,
you get bigger risks, bigger rewards. Yeah. And of course
another example, just a quick one to throw out, is
a just the obvious consumption of of of overripe fruit

(37:23):
which in which fermentation has taken place, and you essentially
have naturally occurring alcohol, not the synthetic version of this
that we have today. Uh, you know anytime you go
to you know, pick up beer or wine or hard
liquor what have you. But just the fermented fruit that
animals do still do eat when they when they find it. Well,

(37:44):
I don't know what are that some I mean those
are still made by fermentation, right what you're talking about
beer and wine? Beer and wine? Is there something going
on there? I don't know about I thought it was
still a fermentation, was the process by which the alcohol
was generated. Yeah, but it's it's different than the fruit,
like you know, it's it is, that's true. You're not
eating the grape right, Like, Yeah, there's a basically we've

(38:06):
taken the naturally occurring um fermentation process and these fruits
and we have we have harnessed it, and we've we
we've learned how to how to concentrate it. So like
a bottle ever clear is a rather different scenario compared
to just some you know, some fermented fruit that's so
littered on the ground beneath the tree. Yeah, and alcohol

(38:28):
is clearly a case where animals will often have often
been observed self administering drug Now we don't usually think
of alcohol as psychedelic, it's not really, but but like
you know, elephants will seek out fermented fruits, some primates will.
It's a common thing. Um Uh. There's another question, is
I guess this is sort of similar to the thing

(38:49):
about um seeking novel experiences as a as a certain instinct,
especially and maybe mammal brains. I'm sure some probably some
bird brains to write, you know, but what if there's
some drive and maybe like some mammal brains and some
bird brains that seeks altered states states of consciousness. Is
a form of what's known in some of the literature

(39:10):
is deep patterning. There's a tendency toward habit breaking that
is made possible by some of these drugs, which I
think we'll get into more of the research about that
in the next episode. And that's a very important therapeutic
use of it. Uh. I mean a lot of the
early research on the use of psychedelics in a therapeutic
setting was about say, breaking addictions. Um. And that's a

(39:32):
form of habit breaking or deep patterning of of mental
processes or mental behaviors. Uh, And I wonder if it's
possible there is some kind of instinct for that in
other animal minds, not just in human brains, a tendency
to seek out chemicals that allow you to adapt to
new ways of doing things. Could this actually be a
drive that's selected for Again, that's speculative, but it's interesting

(39:56):
to consider. But maybe we should get into the history
of human use here of these substances. Yeah, consertainly, human
use of psychedelics does go back to ancient and prehistoric
times like that is that that is universally accepted? Uh,
you know the key stuff substances mentioned previously. Think it
can be found across the continents, and a humans travel,

(40:17):
they continue to encounter new species as well. I mean
they're parts of the world where there does seem to
be more of a concentration of them, such as you know,
Mezzo in South America. Uh, but you do find psychedelic
substances all over the place. I mean, I think Michael
Pollen in his book How to Change Your Mind, which
we mentioned in the last episode and is one of
our major sources here, which is fantastic. It is a

(40:40):
wonderful book. Um, you know he argues. I'm not sure
if he's correct, but he argues that basically pretty much
every culture in the world has some kind of tradition
of using compounds from natural plants and substances to alter consciousness,
with pretty much the only exception in some Arctic people's

(41:02):
because they didn't nothing like that grew around there, right.
But but even then, I mean, we have the Siberian
use of the uh, the fly agarics uh so so,
and then the other side of that being like to
what extent did they stick with it? To what did
did they lose the substance, did the substance fall out
a favor? Uh? That sort of thing, you know, some

(41:22):
of that we saw with with some example. But uh,
I was reading around about this, uh in the aforementioned sources.
But also I picked up a book off and turned
to on our other show, Invention, which is the seventy
Grade Inventions of the Ancient World. It's a classic, Yes,
it's really good. It's written by Brian M. Fagan, who
is just a you know, an authority in ancient technology

(41:45):
and ancient invention, and it provides just overviews of various uh,
you know, cultural inventions, technological inventions, et cetera. And uh.
One of the chapters he writes um with Richard Rudgley,
who was an author of several books on the story
of psychedelic substances and and other substances in human culture,

(42:05):
and they point out that basically, without written reports to
go on, you know, with truly ancient people, we we
tend to have to look for three types of evidence
for the consumption of drugs or some sort of psychedelic substance, right,
because how do we know what they were taking? Right?
So we have to look first of all for botanical

(42:26):
remains associated with barrels, burials, or or agriculture. So, you know,
a kid, do we find the botanical remains of say, cannabis, uh,
inside of a tomb or you know, among the arch
archaeological remains of an agricultural site. The next thing we
look for is artifacts that contain residues. Uh, So is

(42:46):
there a residue of, say, cannabis in this device? And
then clearly if if the device itself looks like it
was clearly used for the consumption of drugs, such as
a pipe, which you know some of you might be saying, well,
pipe could be used for tobacco. Well, bingo tobacco also
a drug, so that counts. Uh. And then of course
artistic motifs that depict mind altering plants or fun guy

(43:11):
that is another big one, though I will say a
complication there is that very often with the artistic motifs
there's an argument about exactly what they represent. Like there
are people who make the case that there are stone
age cave paintings that indicate the consumption of psilocybin mushrooms,
but I think that's not that's not clear. Not everybody
agrees on what's being represented there, right, And you get

(43:32):
into complex issues with symbolism too. I mean basically, you
could you could have something that looks like a mushroom
and an ancient work, and one side might say, well,
that's a mushroom. The other side might say that is
a phallus, and then others might say, well, this could
be very much be both, And then what does that
say that the phallus and then the mushroom are combined
in the same artistic tradition, etcetera. But for instance, just

(43:55):
to put you to drive home some of the periods
of time we're talking about here, Um, we know that
domesticated opium pops up in the sixth millennium b C
in the Western Mediterranean based on Neolithic burial sites. And
then a cannabis pipe cup dates back to the third
millennium BC in Central Asia. And then we have peyote

(44:17):
cactus imagery and what is now Mexico and Texas from
three thousand to four thousand years ago. We also know
that the Aztecs used multiple different psychoactive plants for shamanistic purposes,
drawing on the long traditional usage of these substances by
other peoples of Messo and South America. And then there
are for instance, the statues of the Aztec god Zochupeli.

(44:37):
They clearly feature the motif of psychoactive plants. Yeah, Zochipele
is an interesting figure. I was gonna say something a
bit about him later, but I guess maybe I'll mention
it now. We're gonna talk a good bit about the
use of psilocybin mushrooms in Mesoamerica. But psilocybin mushrooms are
not the only psychoactive substances that were used by the
meso Americans and their religion, such as the Aztecs. Plenty

(44:59):
of other plants played a old as well. And this
as to god zoch Peely, his name means something like
the Prince of flowers, which is great. But he's been
suggested by several scholars as sort of the embodiment of
a number of sacred and theogenic plants known to the Aztecs,
including you know, everything like morning glory and tobacco, and

(45:19):
a number of flowers and trees that have some degree
or another of psychoactive compounds in them. I'll throw in
real quick just to summarize, though. Fagan and rudgedy Uh
point out that the psychedelic substances are quote both deeply
embedded in many cultures in prehistoric and ancient Eurasia and
intimately bound up with their ceremonial and religious life, and

(45:41):
that also likewise in the America's it was quote both
prevalent and ancient. Yeah, I think that's clear, and that's
an interesting thing, which you know, we were talking about
the drug war mentality earlier. You know, one thing I
remember when I was growing up was that there was
a clear cultural antagonism between drug use on one hand
and religious authority on the other hand. It seemed like

(46:04):
one of the main things one of the main cultural
messages I remember hearing from religious authorities in America, I
guess which would primarily be you know, Christian authorities, was
against the use of drugs, which is at a surface
level kind of counterintuitive because on you know, the use
of psychedelic substances goes so far back in religious history

(46:26):
with you know, many of the religions of the world.
And because we talked about in the last episode, a
very common response to people taking psychoactive substances is not
saying like, well, well, now I'm going to discard my
religion and just throw myself fully into secular modernity and
become an atheist or something. No, it tends more often
to encourage people to think more spiritually, to be to

(46:48):
be more believing in something beyond the material world. Yeah. Absolutely. Um.
You know this also reminds me to that you know,
growing up in the with the War of drugs mentality
is that when you did learn about religions, modern religions
that incorporate, uh, some drug it, it felt like shocking.

(47:08):
Like the first time you heard about the Rastafari faith. Uh,
you know, you were like, whoa, they smoke cannabis as
part of their their faith. You know that that seems shocking.
Or you hear about traditional um Native American groups that
would utilize substances like say Pioty and and that would
seem shocking, And of course it shouldn't because again, all

(47:31):
these different traditional and ancient religions seem to have been
rooted at least in part in these substances. Yeah, i'd
say non drug based religions or the exception, not the
rule historically. Um. But then again, I mean, I think
at a deeper level of analysis, you can kind of
see why there's been that conflict between say, you know,

(47:53):
especially a culturally dominant religious authority and the use of
psychedelic substances, even though they might incur it's general spiritual
feelings and beliefs. I think in some cases, the religious
condemnation of psychedelic use might be rooted in the antiheterodoxy
sort of impulse, you know, meaning like you don't want
people thinking they've received new information from God or the gods.

(48:17):
You know, you don't want people thinking that like, wait,
you know, the dogmas of my church aren't aren't all
there is there, there's I'm getting new messages things are doing.
Because then you can't control doctrine. Like a common feature
I guess of of monotheistic religion today is to sort
of have a set law and to say, okay, we
you know, we we have received all of the revelations
and the rules and the communications from the divine in

(48:39):
the past, and now everything is locked down and there
will be you know, the phone lines are cut. There
is no further revelation, right if God is still speaking.
That can be a dangerous thing to some people, especially
in the people that are in a position of power. Yeah,
but it also seems like the kind of thing that
is more of a risk if your religion has drifted
away from the sorts of experiences, you know, drug related

(49:03):
or otherwise that enable that kind of experience, you know.
So we'll get into an example of that, I think
in a bit. But then again, even without you know,
drugs at all, I mean, heresies are always an issue
to some sort of established religion. Somebody is going to
come along that has a new vision of how this
faith should work, how it's going to work with a uh,

(49:24):
with with society, with culture, with the individual, and that
is always going to be dangerous to to somebody. Yeah,
and I'd say maybe one other reason you can see
the religious opposition to drug use is probably just something
more rooted in what we were talking about at the
beginning of episode of the episode, which is like a
failure to make crucial distinctions between the the effects of

(49:45):
these different compounds and how they play out in culture
and in people's lives. Like, uh, I can understand why
if you have a religion that's trying to encourage social orderliness,
why it might be against say the consumption of alcohol.
You know, like alcohol is it's just crime fuel? Alcohol
is this like hugely this the substance which you know,
despite it, I enjoy having a beer or cocktail or something.

(50:08):
But you can understand why the temperance movement arose. You know,
people were seeing like alcohols it's it's running rampant through
the culture, and in some ways it still is. Yeah,
it is a very destructive force. Another issue, of course,
is you know we taught described pre we talked about
previously the description of these substances as being boundary dissolving,
and a lot of times boundaries are very important in

(50:31):
an organized religion. The boundary between the the inn group
in the outsider, the boundaries between particular casts or divisions
within a particular religious group, and so yeah, to the
people controlling the religion, the people, uh, you know in
the upper echelhon of the religion boundary, dissolution could be dangerous. Yeah.

(50:53):
I can absolutely see that in the same way that
you might view alcohol in as crime fuel. Psychedelics are
in some ways heterodoxy fuel or just general questioning and uh,
dissolution of of established order fuel. Yeah. The way McKenna
put it, An thens a lot of time talking about
um cooperative societies and then the dominator societies, and his

(51:17):
critique was that alcohol is like the the ideal drug
of a dominator society, that those an't that and along
with stimulants. Yeah. Well, I think we should take a
quick break and when we come back, we can discuss
a little more of the more recent history of psilocybin mushrooms,
especially in Meso America. I'm Ev Rodsky, author of the
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(51:40):
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(53:52):
We're We're looking to meso America now, which again is
a is a part of the world where you see
so many different powerful psychedelic substances. Really, some of the
most powerful naturally occurring psychedelic substances on Earth can be
found in this part of the world. And of course
this is also part of the world with a very
uh complex and bloody history. Uh and uh and where
we see this prime clashing of cultures as a Western

(54:16):
colonialism enters the picture. Yeah, exactly right. So the my
cologist Paul statements we were talking about how far back
uh the use of psychedelic substances goes In his book
Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World, Stamit's argues that the sacramental
use of psychoactive mushrooms goes back at least seven thousand years,
probably extends into Paleolithic times. We don't know exactly for sure,

(54:38):
but one of the most well documented religious uses of
psychedelic mushrooms is the apparently long running use in Mexico
and Central America of a species of philosopy now believed
to be a peloscopy Mexicana that was then known to
the Aztec, says Teo Nana Coddle, which was historically translated
as God's flesh. But I've also seen translated I think

(54:59):
more recently and simply as the god mushroom. So there
might be some blurring of the line there whether a
word means flesh or mushroom. There might be some overlap there,
but we don't know exactly how far back the use
of solosities among the Meso Americans goes earlier. You mentioned
you know the art motifs as one clue, and there
are archaeological artifacts found in Central America, I think primarily

(55:22):
in Guatemala, now known as the mushroom stones, and these
are attributed to the Mayan civilization. They depict humans, animals,
and gods as sort of hybrid mushroom beings with mushrooms
stems and caps erupting up out of their bodies, kind
of like the lowand Men's you know the lionman statuette

(55:42):
from Europe showing the humanoid figure with the lion's head,
showing early ideation about monsters and fantasy hybrids. Except this
would be like the fungus minch. Wow, this is like
in indemons and dragons. This would be the Miconis, which
are the mushroom people of the under dark. Oh, what
what's that movie you you were telling me about a
long time ago? It was like Matangatang mushroom horror film

(56:03):
about these humanoid mushrooms and this infection that turns people
into mushrooms, shambling mushroom creatures. Oh yeah, they're they're also
that's a central conceit of the setting of the video
game The Last of Us, which court Aceps invades humans. Uh.
But anyway, this is a slightly different thing because it's
not showing like fungus erupting as a as a disease

(56:24):
out of people, but more like they are these uh,
these fungus beings that seem I don't know, they're generally
depicted as kind of like serene and like this is
a good thing. We don't know exactly what these ancient
mushrooms don't signify, but many scholars have interpreted them as
reflections of the religious significance of psychedelic mushrooms for the
Mayan culture and so much of the world became aware

(56:48):
of the existence and use of psychedelic mushrooms during the
nineteen fifties due to the work of people like the
biologist Richard E. Shaltis, who studied indigenous people's uses of
psychoactive plants, especially in Mexico and in the Amazon Basin,
and public widespread awareness of the uses of psychedelic mushrooms
in southern Mexico, specifically to Nana Coddle Owes a lot

(57:10):
to an article published in Life magazine in May nineteen
fifty seven written by a then vice president of JP Morgan,
the the investment bank and financial services company UH. This
vice president of JP Morgan was named R. Gordon Wasson,
who was also a mycologist. He and his wife were

(57:31):
both very interested in mushrooms UH, and he happened to
be a mushroom enthusiast. I think he was pushing a
kind of personal theory that mushrooms were the genesis of
all religions and spiritual beliefs. But this article from Life
magazine in nineteen fifty seven was called the Discovery of
Mushrooms that Caused Strange Visions, and then also with the
title seeking the Magic Mushroom. I think one was the

(57:54):
cover title and one was on the article. But I
want to stress again that despite the magazine at it,
there's word choice there of the discovery of mushrooms that
caused Strange visions. Wasson did not in any way actually
discover psilocybin mushrooms. They were known to the indigenous peoples
of Mexico and Central America for hundreds or thousands of years. Uh,

(58:15):
they just weren't widely known about in many other cultures
in the twentieth century beyond that. Now, I think it
is important to note too that people like Wasson and Schultz, Uh,
these were a different breed of professional like so so
much of the time, when when we think about the
emergence of psychedelics, we think of unfairly we think of
Timothy Leary and h or even you know, we think

(58:36):
more like a nineties context, we think of Terence McKenna.
People were more uh you know, embody ements of counterculture,
and that is not what these individuals were about. In fact,
I believe it was it was Wasson who really did
not like what he saw in the counterculture. Uh, you know,
he was kind of anti hippie. Oh I don't know,
but I'm not surprised. Weren't you saying something about McKenna

(58:59):
talking about Schulty? Oh yeah, yeah. He he pointed out
that schulzys was was pretty much the complete opposite of
someone like Timothy Leary. That he was, you know, he
was a botanist and a scientist, and he was at
Harvard at the same time, while Leary was approaching psychedelics
from a social science perspective, but also with arguably far
less dedication to the rigors of scientific investigation and with

(59:19):
a strong inclination towards celebrities, celebrity and the trappings of guru.
But Schultz was also highly influential on a whole range
of people, including EO. Wilson, but also people like William Burrows.
That's interesting again that the just the the impact of
their work is essential when you consider like all strains
of knowledge and interest in psychedelic substances. Well, so one

(59:44):
question you might have is like if there were people's
of especially like Southern Mexico and Mohaka, who were practicing
the religious use of psilocybin mushrooms. Um this question of
like why didn't more people outside of the region know
about this? And I think there's a very good reason
actually why some of the indigenous peoples of southern Mexico

(01:00:05):
would keep these mushrooms and their uses a secret as
a sort of underground parallel ritual to the Catholicism that
took hold of the region beginning in the sixteenth century.
And that reason was psychedelic mushrooms in their religious uses
had been brutally persecuted hundreds of years before by the
Christian conquistadors in what the ethnobotanist Jonathan Ott has called

(01:00:25):
the Pharmocratic Inquisition UH. Basically, when the Spanish attacked and
began to colonize Mexico and Central America under Cortes in
the early sixteenth century, the Catholic missionaries among them became
aware that some parts of Aztec religion relied on the
consumption of fung guide that allowed the Aztecs to actually

(01:00:47):
see and receive guidance from their gods, and so these
ritual feasts of the too Nana coadle would sometimes be
used for the purposes of divination where you try to
like receive guidance from the gods, or for other purposes
ritual healing. And the mushroom rights were witnessed and described
by a Spanish Franciscan friar named Bernardino de Sahagun. This

(01:01:08):
is a section of de Sahagoon's work that is also
quoted in Pollen quote. These they ate before dawn with honey,
and they also drank cocaw before dawn. The mushrooms they
ate with honey, and when they began to get heated
from them, they began to dance, and some sang and
some wept. Some cared not to sing, but would sit

(01:01:28):
down in their rooms and stayed there pensive like. And
some saw in a vision that they were dying, and
they wept, and others saw in a vision that some
wild beast was eating them. Others saw in a vision
that they were taking captives in war. Others saw in
a vision that they were to commit adultery and that
their heads were to be bashed in there for then,
when the drunkenness of the mushrooms had passed, they spoke

(01:01:51):
one with another about their visions that they had seen.
Oh wow. I also love the di mention of the
honey because I think they're sort of two ve news here.
Like one is that, of course, uh, some many of
these psychedelic substance, especially the mushrooms, are quite pungent in
their taste, and there's something you know, you didn't need
a mask it in somewhere or another. But also I've
read how honey could have been used traditionally to preserve uh,

(01:02:15):
psychedelic substances, particularly mushrooms, and that you and that even
there's this idea that certain meat traditions arose out of
that um you know, which, of course is the fermentation
process with the honey to produce an alcoholic beverage. Yeah,
that's interesting. I had had not heard that, But so
you might expect what the Catholic reaction of this is.

(01:02:35):
In fact, I bet something some of this reaction is
coming through even in the way that Bernardino de Sagoon
describes these experiences, because you notice he tends to emphasize
what he thinks are at least like negative hallucinogenic experiences
about war, and about death and and about being eaten
by an animal. The Catholic missionaries viewed the Aztec consumption
of this and other psychedelic plants as a form of

(01:02:56):
depraved pagan idolatry that needed to be wiped from the
face of the earth. It's basically the same anti psychedelic
messaging that you saw in the sixties. Right, this is
saying like the kids are taking this and they're having
bad trips and forcing themselves through key holes. They're picking
up the axe and going going after you know, the grandparents. Right,
They're confusing a baby with a basketball and raising the

(01:03:18):
basketball as their own and uh and creating a college
fund for the basketball. Clearly this this has to be stopped. Yeah,
so it's exactly right. So yeah, the the Catholic missionaries
wrote that they believe the consumption of Tonana Coddle was
away for the Aztecs to receive messages from the devil
and from demons. And of course it must have seemed

(01:03:40):
especially perverse to the to the missionary mindset that at
the at the time, the Aztec priests would have been
understood to be eating this thing called God's flesh, given
the parallels to the Catholic right of holy communion, in
which you would eat bread and drink wine representing the
flesh and the blood of Jesus Christ. So the Catholic
missionaries tried to put down the ceremonies of the selosities,

(01:04:02):
and they encouraged the substitution of what Jonathan Ott referred
to seemingly by contrast as the placebo sacraments of the
Catholic Eucharist. But fortunately, despite the persecution by the Catholic colonizers,
these mushroom rituals did continue in secret through to the
modern day, especially in more remote and mountainous regions like
in southern Mexico and Oahaka. Now, questions of how they

(01:04:23):
use these substances were used as a fascinating subject unto
itself and one where you know, I'm not gonna have
time to fully examine. I mean, the whole books have
been written describing this. Uh yeah, you know. It's basically
the idea is that set and setting would again be
of primary importance here. Yeah, we talked about that in
the last episode. But the importance of the surroundings and
the mindset going in right, and then some of the

(01:04:45):
more fascinating examples that we see in the Amazon, you know,
where ayahuasca is brewed from the the age vine, uh, etcetera. Uh.
But you know, they also turned to other substances as
well as what and they also turned to dream in
the shamanistic practice, which I think is interesting as well.
Like it's not like the these were the that these

(01:05:06):
substances were the only tool that was utilized. They would
also refer to dreams and then and in terms of
the shamanistic use of the substances themselves, it's you might
think that such practices would simply involve a shaman giving
you a substance guiding you through the experience to help
you with your problem. And this is true. This is
what you would see. And you see this reflected in
the Western uh some of the Western research that will

(01:05:28):
be discussing later. You see it in some of the
the you know, the counterculture and underground uses of it.
But in the classic scenarios that the shaman was sometimes
the one to ingest the substance alone and solve your
problem for you, which seems kind of counterproductive or counterintuitive
at first, right the idea that you would you would

(01:05:48):
go to the shaman and the shaman would take a
psychedelic in order to help you with your problem, and
you wouldn't take anything, But this could well be the
case in some of these situations. You know that the
shaman would step outside of of their own self in
order to tackle your problem head on and help you
solve it. Yeah, exactly so. So to finish the story,

(01:06:09):
in the nineteen fifties, this Jp Morgan Banker we mentioned
right our Gordon Wasson. He traveled to Wahaka in Mexico
and he met with an experienced siloscopy shaman known as
a curandera or which meants like a healer named Maria
Sabina who allowed him to participate in a psilocybin healing
and divination ritual known as a vilada to the Mazo

(01:06:31):
tech people, and Wasson wrote about this experience in that
Life magazine article we mentioned in fifty seven, and subsequently
scientific interest in the mushroom skyrocketed. People eventually sent samples
of the fruiting bodies of the mushrooms to Albert Hoffman,
the man who first isolated LSD twenty five from urght
rye and discovered its effects the decade before, and Huffman
and colleagues were able to isolate the psychoactive compounds in

(01:06:53):
the mushroom, and of course Hoffman had to try some
out himself, and for a while before the anti on
our culture backlash and the drug war crackdown, psilocybin was
researched by psychologists psychiatrists as a potential tool for understanding
human cognition, expanding consciousness, and treating addiction and mental illness.
But of course then came the dark days right beginning

(01:07:14):
in the nineteen seventies, where the association of psilocybin with
hippie culture and recreational drug use created this stigma around research.
Legal barriers went up that made research more practically difficult,
and a lot of mainstream research attention just turned away
from psilocybin in particular, uh and psychedelics in general. And
I guess that's where we'll have to stop for this

(01:07:35):
time until we come back next time. Yeah, so the
journey continues. The trip is not over. It will continue
in episode three of of this journey. So in the meantime,
if you want to check out more episodes of Stuff
to Blow Your Mind, check out past episodes that have
dealt with psychedelics, uh, such as the Timothy Leary episode,
the John C. Lily episodes, or some of these other

(01:07:57):
episodes we've alluded to. You'll find them there. That's the
other ship Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. And
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