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

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I
Heart 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.

(00:23):
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

(00:44):
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 veridicality
or the noetic quality, seeming like it isn't just an experience,

(01:06):
but that it's somehow imparts true information do you? Right?
And then we also just talked about in general terms
like what is a drug? What what does this term
drug mean? Why do we apply it 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

(01:28):
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 in
a way you can kind of understand, like, you know,

(01:49):
you 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 as a as a father, I
totally get that. 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 a whole

(02:10):
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 like like a a US educational outreach program
um to keep kids off of drugs. And and there

(02:33):
was this 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 making them more appealing in a

(02:55):
certain sense, you know, because you're telling all these kids
know this is dark, dangerous stuff, don't and near the
dark magic um 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

(03:16):
like a time before drugs. And then suddenly, h 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

(03:38):
certainly there are versions 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

(03:58):
seed or the coca plant. Yeah, and even referring to
the more psychedelic substances, not say like opium based alkaloids
or something like that. But uh, you know, psilocybin and
l sc 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 Hofmann figured out what it was

(04:19):
in the nineteen forties, so that was kind of new.
But psychedelics in general 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 psilocybin for instance. Again, it's found in some two
hundred different varieties of a two hundred different species of mushrooms,

(04:43):
and um, exactly why they have these properties is still
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 containing mushrooms, it may have
evolved as an app a tight suppressant to deter insects
that frequented the the animal dung from which the mushrooms grew,

(05:07):
which is 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 byproducts of the of the compounds
that the primary evolutionary purpose of which is an appetite

(05:28):
suppressant that that's just hypothesis. Right. With the hypothesis, it's
still still an open question. But but yeah, there's no
such things 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,

(05:51):
like Terrence 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 mechanism where the
mush you know, the fungus world is trying to break

(06:13):
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,

(06:34):
I think maybe Edward Ocone 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
right 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. We'll
get into that as we go here. One of the

(06:57):
connections that mckinna makes in his stone and Ape hypothesis
is that since you have psilocybin growing out of the
dung of verbivores, namely a 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.

(07:19):
And 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

(07:43):
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 likely of jumping
over into you know, into the human strains, right. Um.

(08:04):
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

(08:25):
so um. You know, I'm kind I'm open to the
idea that psilocybin could have played a role in the
character of some of these guys. And we do see
specific gods as we'll discussed 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

(08:48):
least 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 story of of psilocybin, especially
in a in a bit, But like why what benefit
biologically would there have been to doing this? I mean,

(09:11):
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 in the Western context, you know, purely recreational, purely

(09:34):
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 of solving problems and uh, communing with the

(09:55):
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 uh, you know, social reinforcement role. Right, You know,
this is a common kind of thing. You say, what
is the value of X cultural practice? Very often you

(10:16):
could say, well, maybe it's strength and strengthen social bonds
in some way, you know, helps groups work together better. Um,
it 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
better understand the uses of psychedelics and humans and the

(10:37):
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
a really interesting study. This is a study by Bradley

(10:58):
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 giving 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
see of say, squirrels allegedly consuming psychedelic mushrooms. Right, yeah,

(11:22):
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
Quechua of Ecuador, who are reported to give hallucinogenic plants

(11:44):
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 a hallucinogen, right, it
seemed to me if you didn't think too deeply about it,
that just seems counterproductive. Right, It's going to make the
dog distracted, probably less effective, right. Yeah. The idea is

(12:05):
that what it would would alter its perception of reality.
But doesn't it need a 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
likely old faction, or the sense of smell that is

(12:27):
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,
we're such a visual species and uh and certainly, uh,

(12:50):
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
the same way that the psychedelic experience is often ineffable.

(13:10):
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
a dog there, you know, their level of engagement with

(13:33):
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
know this, This is just what the author's hypothesize, you know.

(13:53):
In the last episode, we talked about how one of
the common reported effects of taking psilocybin as a holy
synogen is the experience of heightened perceptions, like you know,
colors might seem more more vivid or brighter, or you
might feel like you have in a more cute sense
of hearing. Um, it's hard for me to imagine that,
like the you know, you actually have greater resolution in

(14:15):
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 detail and smell that would normally be dedicated

(14:38):
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
dogs to detect explosive drugs, human remains, and other targets

(14:59):
for which they are valued. So so the drug dogs
will now be given will be given drugs. Yeah, yeah,
this is interesting and a possible future in which let's say,
explosive sniffing dogs will be micro dosing um or or
perhaps macro dosing in order to find what they're looking for. Uh.

(15:19):
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 remind me, of course, micro dosing is this

(15:41):
is what's supposed to trend and like Silicon Valley and
so forth, where 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 even't looked at the research on that
to see if there is any research on that to
say exactly how that holds up. Um, but it does.

(16:03):
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 dosing. So he's taking
like a colossal amount of psychedelics and then going and
seeing just whatever the Hollywood films of the day happened
to be and then having these just crazy um reviews

(16:26):
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 ninete and Food of
the Gods for psilocybin aiding humanities ancestors along three different levels.

(16:47):
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 psycho activity 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.

(17:10):
As visual acuity is 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 and he also argues
that at higher doses, restlessness and sexual arousal would have

(17:33):
played a role. And 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

(17:54):
assumptions on this. But you know, if if psilocybin makes
a hunting dog slightly better at hunting, or a hunter
gather slightly better at their thing, then I think this
is kind of interesting. I mean that the same case
can can and is made 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

(18:17):
not micro dosing with psilocybin, 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 met 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

(18:39):
cigarette in their mouth to give something and light it
up for them so they 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 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.

(19:00):
And of course in the armed forces of centuries you
see 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 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

(19:23):
we should take a break, and then when we come back,
we will talk a little bit about animals self administration
of hallucinogens. Alright, 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 I have are known
to make use of various chemicals in their environment. It

(19:46):
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 lemurs that take a centipede,
crush it, and spread the 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

(20:07):
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 their environment. Great example of
this I remember from our Squirrels episodes was the ground squirrel. Uh,
I don't know. I think some western United States or
western North American ground squirrel has a strategy for avoiding

(20:30):
its rattlesnake predators, which is finding discarded rattlesnake skins after
the snake sheds its skin, chewing that up and rubbing
it all over its body and the bodies of its young. Wow. Yeah,
that's brilliant. But so these are all, you know, self
administrations of of chemicals by animals. So would animals take
psychedelic drugs given the opportunity do Do they just seek

(20:52):
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 just there's a psychedelic compound in their environment
and they happen to eat it while they're foraging, versus
behaviors were it really does seem like they're actively seeking
it out and after they have the experience once try
to repeat it. Have you ever seen the movie The Bear? No,

(21:15):
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 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

(21:37):
out that sequence on like YouTube if it's still out there. Well,
the Bear would not be alone in the animal kingdom,
it 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.

(21:59):
So this is called an the Logical Search for Self
Administration of Hallucinogens by Ronald K. Siegel, And so it's
been reported previously by Wasson in nineteen sixty eight, who
will learn a bit more about later in the episode,
that reindeer often self administer hallucinogenic mushrooms known as Amanita

(22:19):
muscaria or fly A garic. And they will find these
mushrooms when they're available and they will eat them. So
if you've 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

(22:43):
same species of mushroom for psychedelic purposes. Wasson wrote in
nineteen sixty eight quote when human urine or mushrooms are
in the vicinity, the half domesticated beasts become unmanageable. All
reindeer folk know of these two addictions. Reindeer like men
suffer or joy profound mental disturbances after eating the fly agaric.

(23:04):
So Segell writes that the normal diet of a reindeer
is almost entirely composed of lichens, and so you know,
lightlife 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,

(23:27):
the Chukchi people of the eastern Arctic Russia region the
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

(23:48):
great a thirst. At night, they are noisy and keep
running around the 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

(24:10):
is likely to make it dangerous to relieve oneself in
the open when there are reindeer around. 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,

(24:31):
Wasson did a lot of work regarding fly agaric uh
and this was, you know, an extremely ancient shamanistic and
toxican that was used by the uh Tunguska tribes of
ancient Siberia. And he even presented it as a potential
candidate for soma. Somos is mystical substance that was consumed
in Vadic India and uh and it's been interpreted, Uh,

(24:54):
nobody's quite sure what exactly it was, but it's in
it's been interpreted as having been hume, cannabis or got uh.
If fedra is a strong candidate, they often see discussed.
And then 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

(25:16):
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 pres Oroastrian substance in Persia,

(25:39):
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 liegaric before before

(26:01):
looking at this. So oh yeah, there's uh if I
recall correctly, there are even people who make interesting commentary
about Santa Claus and flying reindeer in relation to this.
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 of Earth's gravity. So Segel actually looks at

(26:24):
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 other prey are available. To read this quote,

(26:45):
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 anibalism or almost cannibalism, because apparently these toads,
uh you know, the they like to eat their own
tadpoles and juveniles. But these toads, quote contain the hallucinogen bouffattenine,

(27:12):
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, 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

(27:37):
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 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

(27:58):
and that's not it were all of the potential animal
self administrations of psychedelic compounds that have been recorded by
you know, people observing animal behavior. Just a few quick
notes mentioned In a little article in the Pharmaceutical 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

(28:21):
a different time, Okay. So a few examples mentioned here
are apparently that big horn sheep of the Canadian Rockies
apparently seek out and consume psychoactive lin 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

(28:45):
this is the plant that is from which the d
m T has has derived. Yeah, it's the plant used
in the making of ayawascate, 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

(29:07):
eat the hallucinogenic roots of the aboga plant. I love
that 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

(29:31):
an ahuasca journey. Well, this has even been hypothesize. This
is 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. Yeah,

(29:53):
this center This is something important we didn't mentioned in
the first episode. We talked about humans gradually figuring out
what they could eat and what they couldn't eat. Of course, uh,
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.

(30:13):
They might have different enzymes and stuff that we don't.
But then again, if you see 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
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

(30:36):
an animal will self administer a 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

(30:58):
will have the option to sell off administer addictive drugs.
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 opportunities when offered
to mice, will be more attractive to mice than just
trying to self administer more doses of morphine. Right, But

(31:18):
then again, you know we're talking about like morphine uh
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 them. And to be I
just want 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

(31:41):
we put a mouse in a you know, a small
ecosphere with some psychedelic mushrooms and just see to see
just how much you would eat, you know it, 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

(32:03):
question is like, with these psychedelics, self administration of psychedelics
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.

(32:25):
Maybe it helps in hunting by making you know, by
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 speculate 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

(32:47):
seek novel experiences is something that has in some cases
an evolutionary purpose. We've talked on the show before about neophilia, right,
the 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

(33:07):
a raccoon living in a city, and you approach an
unfamiliar object in a parking lot, it could be full
of milkshake, it could be full of fries, but it
also could kill 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
it is a is just the obvious consumption of of

(33:31):
of overripe fruit, 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

(33:53):
when they find it. Well, 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 fermentation was the process by
which the alcohol was generated. Yeah, but it's it's different
than than the fruit, like you know, it's it is,
that's true. You're not eating the grape right, Like, Yeah,

(34:15):
there's a Basically we've taken the naturally occurring um fermentation
process and these fruits and we have we have harnessed
it and uh, 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

(34:37):
the tree. Yeah, and alcohol 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

(34:58):
to the thing 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

(35:19):
some of the literature 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.

(35:41):
And that's a 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

(36:01):
be a drive that's selected for Again, that's speculative, but
it's interesting to consider. But maybe we should get into
the history of human use here of these substances. Yeah,
con certainly 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.

(36:24):
It can be found across the continents, and a humans travel,
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

(36:45):
we mentioned in the last episode and is one of
our major sources here, which is fantastic. It is wonderful. 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, how as some kind of tradition of using
compounds from natural plants and substances to alter consciousness, with

(37:08):
pretty much the only exception being some Arctic people's 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 see, 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 fallout a favor? Uh?

(37:31):
That sort of thing, you know, some 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 the classic. Yes, it's really good.
It's written by Brian and Fagan, who is just a

(37:51):
you know, an authority in ancient technology and ancient invention,
and it provides just overviews of various um cultural inventions,
technological inventions, etcetera. And Uh. One of the chapters he
writes UM with Richard Rudgley, who is an author of
several books on the history of psychedelic substances and and

(38:13):
other substances in human culture, 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

(38:33):
to look first of all for botanical 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 to contain residues. Uh, So is there

(38:56):
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 just a tobacco, Well, bingo
tobacco also a drug, so that counts. Uh. And then
of course artistic motifs that depict mind altering plants or

(39:19):
fung gui 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

(39:42):
you get 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 fallus, and then others might say, well, this could
be very much be both, And then what does that
say that the fallus in the the mushroom are combined
in the same artistic tradition, etcetera. But for instance, just

(40:05):
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

(40:27):
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 Mezzo and South America. And then there are,
for instance, the statues of the aztect god Zochupeli, that

(40:48):
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 mush hims in Mesoamerica. But psilocybin mushrooms are not
the only psychoactive substances that were used by the Mesoamericans
and their religions such as the Aztecs. Plenty of other

(41:09):
plants played a role as well. And this as to
god zoch peally, 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 a
number of flowers and trees that have some degree or

(41:33):
another of psychoactive compounds in them. I'll throw in real
quick just to summarize, though. Fagan and Rudgley uh point
out that 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 that also
likewise in the America's it was quote both prevalent and ancient. Yeah,

(41:56):
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 one of the main things,
one of the main cultural messages I remember hearing from

(42:19):
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 with you know, many of
the religions of the world. And because we talked about

(42:40):
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 be more believing in some thing beyond
the material world. Yeah. Absolutely. Um. You know, this also

(43:05):
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. Like the first time
you heard about the Rastafari faith. Uh, you know, you
were like, whoa, they smoke cannabis as part of their

(43:27):
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 these different
traditional and ancient religions seem to have been rooted at
least in part in these substances. Yeah, i'd say non

(43:48):
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, especially a culturally
dominant religious authority and the use of psychedelic substances, even
though they might encourage general spiritual feelings and beliefs. I

(44:13):
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. 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

(44:34):
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 the past, and
now everything is locked down and there will be you know,
the phone lines are cut. There is no further revelation,

(44:55):
right if God is still speaking. That can be a
dangerous thing to some people, especially the people that are
in a position of power. 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 or otherwise that enable that kind

(45:15):
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, with with society, with culture,

(45:36):
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 these different compounds and how they

(45:57):
play out in culture and in people's lives. Like 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 is
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. But you can understand why

(46:21):
the temperance movement arose. You know, people were seeing like
alcohols 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 an organized religion, the boundary between

(46:44):
the the n 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. I can absolutely see

(47:04):
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 mc kenna put it
to any the sans a lot of time talking about
um cooperative societies and then the dominator societies, and his

(47:27):
critique was that alcohol is like the the ideal drug
of a dominator society, that those 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.
Thank you, thank you. Alright, we're back. We're we're looking

(47:48):
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 colonialism enters the picture. Yeah,

(48:13):
exactly right. So the my collegist Paul Statements, we were
talking about how far back uh the use of psychedelic
substances goes. In his book Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World,
Statements 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, but one of the
most well documented religious uses of psychedelic mushrooms is the

(48:36):
apparently long running use in Mexico and Central America of
a species of peloscopy now believed to be a Pelosopy
Mexicana that was then known to the Aztecs as Teo
Nana coadle, which was historically translated as God's flesh. But
I've also seen translated I think more recently and simply
as the god mushroom. So there might be some blurring

(48:58):
of the line there where there are 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 in Guatemala,
now known as the mushroom Stones, and these are attributed

(49:21):
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 from Europe
showing the humanoid figure with the lion's head, showing early
ideation about monsters and fantasy hybrids. Except this would be

(49:43):
like the fungus minch. Oh wow, this is like in
indentons and dragons. This would be the Makonids, 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 matanga mushroom horror film about
these human annoyed mushrooms and this infection that turns people
into mushrooms shandling mushroom creatures. Oh yeah, they're they're Also

(50:06):
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
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

(50:28):
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
of the existence and use of psychedelic mushrooms during the
nineteen fifties due to the work of people like the

(50:48):
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 musho
rooms in southern Mexico, specifically to Nana Coadle owes a
lot to an article published in Life magazine in May

(51:09):
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
both very interested in mushrooms UH, and he happened to
be a mushroom enthusiast. I think he was pushing a

(51:31):
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
cover title and one was on the article. But I
want to stress again that despite the magazine editor's word

(51:55):
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, they
just weren't widely known about in many other cultures in
the twentieth century. Beyond that. Now, I think it is

(52:15):
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 or even you know, we think more
in like a nineties context, we think of Terence McKenna.
People were more uh you know, embody ements of counterculture,

(52:37):
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
talking about salts? Oh yeah, yeah. He he pointed out
that Schultz was pretty much the complete opposite of someone

(52:58):
like Timothy Leary, that he, you know, he was a
botanist and a scientist, uh 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 a
strong inclination towards celebrities, celebrity and the trappings of guru.

(53:18):
But Schultz's 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
question you might have is like if there were people's

(53:42):
of especially like Southern Mexico and Whaka, 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
would keep these mushrooms and their uses a secret, as

(54:03):
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
the pharmacratic Inquisition UH. Basically, when the Spanish attacked and

(54:25):
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
see and receive guidance from their gods, and so these

(54:45):
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
like ritual healing. And the mushroom rights were witnessed and
described by a Spanish francis and friar named Bernardino de Sahagun.
This is a section of de Sahagoon's work that is

(55:06):
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 down in their rooms and stayed there pensive like.
And some saw in a vision that they were dying,

(55:28):
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
one with another about their visions that they had seen.

(55:49):
Oh wow. I also love the mention of the honey,
because I think there's sort of two avenues here. Like
one is that, of course, uh, some many of these
psychedelic sceptance, especially the mushrooms, are pungent in their taste,
and there's something you know, I didn't need a mask
it in somewhere or another. But also I've read how
honey could have been used traditionally to preserve u psychedelic substances,

(56:10):
particularly mushrooms, and that you and that even there's this
idea that certain need traditions arose out of that um,
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. In fact, I bet

(56:31):
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 depraved pagan idolatry that

(56:53):
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, the same 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 basketball as their

(57:14):
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 especially perverse to

(57:36):
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, and they encouraged the

(57:57):
substitution of what Jonathan Ought 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 Mohaka. Now, questions of how they use these substances

(58:19):
were used as a fascinating subject unto itself, and when
we're you know, 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 more fat fascinating examples that

(58:41):
we see in the Amazon, you know, where ayahuasca is
brewed from the the aga vine, uh, etcetera. Uh. But
you know, they also turned to other substances as well
as what and they also turned to dreams in the
shamanistic practice, which I think is interesting as well. Like
it's not like these were the that these substances were

(59:02):
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 be discussing later. You

(59:24):
see it in some of 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 go to the shaman and
the shaman would take a psychedelic in order to help

(59:47):
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 uh in order to tackle your problem
head on and help you solve it. Yeah, exactly so.
So to finish the story, in the nineteen fifties, this
Jp Morgan Banker we mentioned right our Gordon Wasson. He

(01:00:08):
traveled to Wahaka in Mexico and he met with an
experienced psiloscopy 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 tech people, and Wasson wrote
about this experience in that Life magazine article we mentioned

(01:00:29):
inteen 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 urghot rye and discovered its effects the
decade before, and Huffman and colleagues were able to isolate
the psychoactive compounds in the mushroom, and of course Hoffman

(01:00:50):
had to try some out himself, and for a while
before the anti counterculture 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 in the nineteen seventies, where the association of

(01:01:11):
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 time until we come back next time. Yeah,

(01:01:31):
so the journey continues. The trip is not over. It
will continue in episode three 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 episodes we've alluded to. You'll find them there.

(01:01:54):
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(01:02:14):
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