Psychedelia, p.7
Psychedelia, page 7
6
In the year 1654, the French mathematician and thinker Blaise Pascal had a life -altering vision which caused him to abandon science and engage in religious-philosophical writings. Already a devout Catholic, the 31 year-old Pascal took the experience as a signal to orient himself stronger towards Christian theology. Pascal's private revelation was a dramatic event, a complete immersion into an otherworldly state that lasted for at least two hours. The extreme state overwhelmed the Frenchman, who did not have Meister Eckhart's extensive familiarity with alien modes of consciousness, and despite his formidable brain power, Pascal's ability to organize into words what he underwent came under severe pressure. Immediately writing down what he had experienced, Pascal arranged to have the note containing his vision secretly sewn into a piece of garment so that he could always carry it with him. It was not discovered until after his death.
Rhapsodic and profoundly emotional, Pascal's document is a rare report from a visionary state, unedited and non-rationalized. The isolated word 'fire' stands as a heading for the entire experience, reminiscent of the way 'light' encapsulates the world-view of some Neoplatonists, as would the word 'energy' for William Blake. This is the first part of Pascal's vision note, later known as his 'Memorial':
…From about half past ten at night until about half past midnight.
FIRE
God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob not of the philosophers and of the learned.
Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.
God of Jesus Christ.
My God and your God.
Your God will be my God.
Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except God.
He is only found by the ways taught in the Gospel.
Grandeur of the human soul.
Righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you.
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy. […]
Despite its saintly tone, the contents of this vision may have condemned Pascal a heretic at the ti me. The hierarchy of priests and theologians, and the entire ecclesiastic idea of a mediated religious experience, are flatly rejected by Pascal in favor of the immediate experience of the divine. In this he follows many mystics before him, both Neoplatonic and Christian. Pascal's vision claims direct insight into the Father and the Son, and suggests that everything outside the original evangelist canon is of no use. The phrase 'Grandeur of the human soul' may be even more damnable, from an orthodox Christian viewpoint.
Even for a devoted 17th century Catholic such as Blaise Pascal, the private spiritual vision opens up towards mystic-neoplatonic spaces. It was undoubtedly wise of Pascal to keep his life- changing 'Memorial' note hidden from a Church which did not look favorably upon private encounters with God, and which preferred saints who were pietistic and ascetic. The theological writings that would replace mathematics as his main concern after this vision, emphatically adhere to the principles of the Catholic church, yet there are interesting similarities to the vision-state writings of later individualists such as William Blake or Emanuel Swedenborg. Like Blake's famous Proverbs Of Hell, Pascal's most memorable thoughts on faith and doctrine often take the form of short, multilayered aphorisms:
Contradictions: the infinite wisdom and folly of religion.
That which is incomprehensible is not therefore less real.
If one places everything under reason, mystery and transcendence are driven out of religion.
These statements from Pascal's Pensées (1669) have a clear affinity to Blake's Proverbs, yet further readings of the Frenchman reveal a diametrically opposed world-view. While both Blake and Swedenborg before him could be seen as powerful links in a mystic chain of private vision that reaches back to Eleusis, we find an explicit refusal of non-Christian beliefs in Pascal:
The great god Pan is dead
This oft-quoted claim concerning the ancient god of nature had first been reported as a 'fact' by the Greek historian Plutarch. In his Pensées, Blaise Pascal removed the word 'god' from antiquity's original phrase, but otherwise left it without comment, apparently satisfied with its factual tone.
This was one of many attempts within Christianity to exploit the supposed 'death' of the classic god Pan. Worship of Pan, his Roman counterpart Faunus, and the closely related nature philosophy of pantheism, seemed abject heresies to the Catholic church. A pantheist worldview is a natural outcome of The Psychedelic Experience, and as such it thrived around the Great Temple of Eleusis, as evident not least in the strong parallel commitment to pantheism and Eleusis of the great Roman emperor-philosopher Marcus Aurelis. For historical reasons alone pantheism presented a threat to the Christian Church, but the hostility ran even deeper, having its roots in central principles of belief. Nature, plant life and animals are doctrinally inferior to man; so says even the most ancient parts of the Christo-Judean canon. Ironically, the antique origins of the phrase 'the great god Pan is dead' may in fact lie in a mishearing of Pan for Thammuz5, as explained by Robert Graves in his Greek Myths. Whatever the truth, it is not hard to see a symbolic drama in Christianity's socio-cultural rejection of the benign Pan, residuals of which may still be encountered in our society today.
While independent thinkers of a Neoplatonic or Esoteric orientation had previously found acceptance as secular mystics and Christian theologians, there was no place left in church for such free spirits by the 17th century. The profound and psychedelically attractive philosophy of a pantheistic godhead that Benedict Spinoza developed around the time of Pascal's vision invited accusations of heresy, but more than that it was simply ignored for almost a century. Meanwhile, the ancient nature cults and metaphysical schools that had existed side by side with the early followers of Jesus of Nazareth were now uniformly perceived as dangerous heathens. When the New World was colonized, pantheist belief systems much older than Christianity were brutally erased by Catholic invaders.
Notes
* * *
1 Quotation from Aristides the Retor, 2nd Century AD.
2 The potential relationship between the Platonic notion of a higher world of ideas and a spiritual -psychedelic revelation at Eleusis was remarked upon already by Gordon Wasson, who intuited the link in his article The divine mushroom: Primitive religion and hallucinatory agents (1958) several years before the hallucinogenic properties of the kykeon were brought into focus. Aldous Huxley also contemplated the Platonic connection in his 'Visionary Experience' lectures from the early '60s. Among Plato's works, The Faedo in particular can be read as impressions drawn from psychedelic experiences.
3 Gordon Wasson's significant work on the ancient soma is discussed in Chapter XI.
4 The modern history of psycho-active mushroom research features other eccentric thinkers beyond John Allegro. Andrej Puharich published his The Sacred Mushroom in 1959, possibly second only to Wasson in writing about the entheogenic mushrooms (in his case, Amanita muscaria) from a modern perspective. Puharich' overriding interest in paranormal phenomena, UFOs, fringe science and such has left his mushroom writings largely ignored, however.
5 The possible mishearing involving Pan, the cultural-historical consequences of which were substantial, is explained as follows: the hearers aboard the ship, including a supposed Egyptian, Thamous, apparently misheard the original Tammuz Panmegas tethneke ('the all-great Tammuz is dead') as Thamous, Pan ho megas tethneke ('Thamous, Great Pan is dead!'). In its true form the phrase probably carried no meaning to those on board, who must have been unfamiliar with the remote worship of Tammuz.
'This is how far 100 years has brought us.' 1
III
DISCOVERING THE AMAZON
1
As night fell over the rainforest and a kettle of shredded ayahuasca vine boiled outside their jungle hut, tension was on the rise among the five young American hippies. The extraordinary hallucinogen experiment they were about to launch into had provoked a split. 'Man is not supposed to know such things', exclaimed one of them and got up to leave. Seconds later they heard his voice again, now from a distance and even more agitated. They caught up with him on the trail and followed his gaze up towards the Amazonian sky, where ‘...the light of a first-quarter moon revealed the tattered sky and, directly above the path returning to the river, an enormous black thunderhead rearing its twisting and writhing form up through thousands of feet of moisture and electricity-saturated air. It looked like an enormous centipede with broad strokes of lightning flickering out of its lower portions, stroking the tops of the jungle canopy with a roar that, when it broke over us, was as deafening as field artillery. Over the Howl of the wind now whipping into a wild frenzy the jungle all around us, I heard Dennis yell: "It's a backwash from the approaching breakthrough. It says to me there is now no doubt that we'll succeed!"’
Reduced to three after this ambiguous sign in the sky, Dennis McKenna, his older brother Terence, and their female companion Ev, returned to their small Witoto cabin to finalize the preparations. Leaves from a plant they assumed to contain DMT were added as admixture to the vine infusion. Mushrooms from a rich supply of Psilocybe cubensis were consumed, along with the bitter-tasting ayahuasca. While waiting for the onslaught of the combined tryptamine drugs, Terence McKenna looked around the tiny space they occupied. A candle affixed to the wall provided the only light, below which a tableau for the experiment had been arranged. A living Cubensis mushroom, complete with its base of dung, provided actively forming Psilocybin. A chrysalis of a Morpho butterfly was placed near the mushroom as a specimen of organic metamorphosis. From his hammock, Dennis McKenna announced that time was gradually slowing down, in anticipation of the critical moment. The candle hanging from the wall at a strange angle was in fact falling, he said, but time passed so slowly that it seemed to be at rest. Brother Terence, unsure of what exactly was going on, noted that they were operating in a state where science and ritual seemed to blend, like alchemists. It was the final stage of what has become known as 'the experiment at La Chorrera'.
The small jungle expedition assembled by the McKenna brothers was not radically different from other travelers on the hippie backpacker trail, a finely spun global network by which Western baby-boomers examined remote corners of the earth with the open-minded bravado of their generation. Yet even in a free-spirited year such as 1971, few young seekers had ventured so far off the beaten path as this group. Coming down from the montana slopes and valleys of the Eastern Andes, the McKenna party ventured deep into the lowland rainforest by boat-hopping down Amazon river tributaries, followed by a 5-day hike along on an old jungle path. There were no mestizo river towns or oil corporations in this remote inland, and the only Americans before them were professional explorers and missionaries. Arriving at last at La Chorrera, they discovered a paradisiacal oasis in the midst of the endless green jungle canopy, a small mission seated between a river lagoon and a pasture, the latter which turned out to harbor large quantities of psilocybian mushrooms. As documented with enchanting detail in True Hallucinations (Terence McKenna, 1984), the strange atmosphere of their isolated paradise soon began to affect the party of explorers, the McKenna brothers most of all. Among the constant shrill of insects, exotic bird-song and monkey chatter, during long days of nothing but tropical heat, anything seemed possible.
On the night of March 4 ('march forth', Terence punned), the cross-scientific experiment that Dennis McKenna had designed was finally initiated. From his hammock in the small indian cabin, he launched into a series of attempts at 'hypercarbolation', a radical idea by which the human voice is used to trigger resonances down to the sub-cellular level of DNA. After the third try, Dennis proclaimed the experiment a success. However, the cubensis mushroom on the makeshift lab table was not obliterated as he expected. Instead, something else and even more remarkable took place, according to his brother Terence:
As I followed Dennis' gaze, he raised his arm and across the fully expanded cap of the mushroom fell the shadow of his ruana. Clearly, but only for a moment, as the shadow bisected the glowing mushroom cap, I saw not a mature mushroom but a planet, the earth, lustrous and alive, blue and tan and dazzling white.
- It is our world.
Dennis's voice was full of unfathomable emotions. I could only nod. I did not understand, but I saw it clearly…
Following the experiment of March 4, Dennis McKenna entered a state unlike anything those present had seen before. Already in an unusual, creative frame of mind after frequent nibbling at the cubensis mushrooms growing around the mission, he entered a 2-week spell of complete psychedelization, marked by a tendency for delphic utterances and unpredictable behavior. The skeptic members of the American quintet were appalled at the outcome of the drug experiment, which seemed to confirm their worst expectations, and even Dennis' brother would occasionally compare the development to a schizophrenic episode. As for Terence himself, he too underwent a profound change following the late-night tryptamine trip, and spent the following days and nights in a near-euphoric mood while his bright mind played around with dozens of ideas, all new to him. 'What is happening to us?' is the question that recurs over and over in True Hallucinations. A couple of weeks passed as Dennis slowly returned to a more mundane frame of mind, and in a further while, the party of jungle explorers caught a plane back to Western civilization. However, what the McKenna brothers had been through would change their lives forever, as it would, in a few decades' time, the entire field of Psychedelia.
The most immediate outcome of the McKenna expedition was the brothers' first published work, The Invisible Landscape (1975). An underground classic today, the book combines Dennis' advanced ideas on consciousness and DNA with Terence's well-known 'Timewave Zero' interpretation of the I-Ching. Although lacking any external details from the rainforest sojourn, the theories were clearly products of those strange tryptamine weeks in Amazonia. Arguably more important than the content of their speculative ideas, the two young maverick students pointed to a new way for Western students to approach psychedelic drugs. Instead of trying to fit the contents of the trip into some presumed parallel from the field of religion or psychology, their novel ideas had been developed inside The Psychedelic Experience. In other words, there was no overriding paradigm or agenda introduced from an established field. At La Chorrera, the hallucinogenic drug had been allowed to play out its potential, without intervention or interpretation. Repeating this process a few times, with generous help from that Psilocybe cubensis-rich zebu pasture, thoughts and possibilities that had never before been imagined began to emerge.
It is the attitude of the true naturalist to allow nature to express itself, and not force some poorly developed intellectual matrix upon it. Allowing a psychedelic plant drug, such as a psilocybian mushroom or an ayahuasca infusion, to take the journey wherever it may go, is the aboriginal way. The context may be a shamanic session in hope to evoke healing spirits, or the ceremonial enacting of ur-myths of the tribe derived from the visions of village elders, or an all-night celebration following a marriage or pubescence rite. The plant drug and its productions are sacred, like all of nature is sacred. The tribe will make no feeble attempts to domesticate its voice and visions; on the contrary, the plant teaches them about the jungle, and about the unive rse. Humility is the natural human response to a land where vegetation and wildlife so completely dominates every aspect of the milieu. Deep inside the rainforest, under the jungle canopy, the layers of foliage are so thick that sunlight does not reach below the treetops, and the whole day passes in a warm twilight. At the ground level, labyrinths of roots, branches and lianas make it possible to walk long distances without ever touching the ground. The rainforest belongs to the plant life, and it is there mankind begins to learn, rather than trying to conquer.
2
The problem with the McKennas' eventful stay at La Chorrera, and the experiment and its prolonged fallout, was that it dealt with the wrong drug. The brothers came back from the Amazon basin as mushroom aficionados, which wasn't what they had originally set out to look for. On the contrary, they had no interest in Psilocybin at all when planning their expedition. What had ignited their explorations into the unknown were the mysterious plant drugs in the dimethyltryptamine (DMT) family, such as the ayahuasca potion and yopo snuff. In True Hallucinations, Terence mentions an obscure DMT compound called okohee as a specific research target with the South Colombian tribe they planned to visit, inspired by Harvard's legendary botanist explorer Richard Evans Schultes.
During the 20th century, anthropologists and field botanists had discovered that the Amazonian rainforest harbored native tribes whose entire cultures circled around the use of powerful plant drugs, in particular plants containing alkaloids in the DMT family. This is a startling realization, given that DMT is one of the most extreme psychedelic drugs of all, its recreational use in the West enjoyed only by the boldest psychonauts. At the time of the McKenna expedition in 1971, it was an obscure, vaguely feared drug, regarded as 'too much' for the average stoner, and rarely available on the street. The people most interested in DMT at the time were the same field botanists and ethnologists who had observed its widespread use among native tribes in Amazonia. Since much less was known in the West about these plant compounds than about the sacred psilocybian mushrooms, it was a rational research objective for the McKennas. Furthermore, the DMT plant drugs had a stronger cultural presence in Amazonia than the mushroom, whose existence as a hallucinogen was barely recognized by the native tribes.
