[ Music ]
 >> Hello and welcome.
 Our topic today is hallucinogens and culture.
 We're going to examine the way
 that various cultures throughout the planet have been influenced
 in their social and cultural and intellectual development
 by hallucinogenic substances in the food chain.
 With me in the studio is Terence McKenna, author, lecturer,
 explorer, and philosopher.
 Terence is the co-author with his brother Dennis McKenna
 of a book called The Invisible Landscape, Mind,
 Hallucinogens, and the I Ching.
 He's also the co-author of Psilocybin,
 Magic Mushroom Growers Guide.
 He is the author of a computer program called Time Wave Zero
 and he's the co-founder and president
 of an organization called Botanical Dimensions
 which devotes itself to saving botanical plants used
 in shamanistic traditions throughout the world.
 Welcome, Terence.
 >> It's a pleasure to be here.
 >> It's a pleasure to have you here.
 I think a good starting point
 for our discussion would be the ancient Vedic culture of India,
 one of the world's great and one
 of the world's earliest religions.
 The Rig Veda is considered by all scholars, I think,
 to be one of the most beautiful composite of religious hymns
 and deep philosophical discussions.
 And yet when one reads the Rig Veda carefully,
 one discovers an enormous emphasis
 on a mysterious apparently hallucinogenic substance
 called Soma.
 >> Yes, you're quite right.
 The Ninth Mandala of the Rig Veda is entirely devoted
 to singing the praises of Soma.
 And yet we do not know what Soma is or was.
 Our Gordon Wasson spent a considerable portion
 of his life researching this problem and reached the
 conclusion that Soma was Amanita Muscaria.
 A mushroom that is symbiotic to pine
 and birch trees throughout much of the North Temperate Zone.
 However, scholars have cast doubt
 on his identification of Soma.
 Nevertheless, what we learn from Wasson's scholarship is
 that plants with hallucinogenic chemical principles
 in them have had an enormous impact
 on shaping the psychology of various cultures,
 both preliterate and literate throughout the world.
 >> It seems quite clear that the references to Soma
 in the Rig Veda were not really symbolic.
 They refer to some actual plant substance.
 >> Oh yes, definitely.
 Some sort of plant substance was prepared and ingested
 by a priesthood who then used the ecstatic experience induced
 by that plant as the basis for all of their metaphysical
 and philosophical speculations on the nature of the universe.
 The case of Soma is by no means unique.
 My own field of interest was the Amazon Basin
 where we don't have a great written literature,
 but we do have an extensive oral tradition and a tradition
 of hallucinogenic plant use that persists to the present day.
 >> Well, I think most notable
 in South America is the drug ayahuasca.
 >> Yes, ayahuasca is perhaps the world's largest
 and most thriving psychedelic religion.
 It touches the lives of millions of mestizos
 and Indians in the basin.
 It is a combinatory drug which makes it especially interesting
 to pharmacologists because its two principal ingredients are
 themselves inactive except in the presence of each other.
 So what we have in the case of ayahuasca is an example
 of a highly evolved folk pharmacology.
 And how a discovery like this was ever made
 in the first place is one of the challenging questions
 that anthropologists have to deal with.
 After all, in a square mile of Amazonian rainforest,
 it is not unusual to encounter 50,000 distinct species of plants.
 How then did these so-called primitive
 or preliterate people make the connection between the combining
 of the bark of one with the leaves of another
 boiled and put through a number of procedures
 to produce an intense visionary hallucinogen?
 This is an extremely interesting
 and to this day unanswered question.
 >> Isn't it the case that I believe it was the German chemist
 who isolated this chemical active ingredient
 in ayahuasca originally named it telepathine?
 >> Yes, that's right.
 Based on field reports of the states of group mind
 induced by ayahuasca, which is also called ya-hay,
 he felt it was fitting to name it telepathine.
 Now, the rules of scientific nomenclature are such
 that the first name of a compound is always given precedent.
 And about 20 years after it was named telepathine,
 it was realized that the identical compound had been isolated
 around the turn of the century from the giant Syrian rue,
 pergamon harmala, and named harmin.
 So today the active ingredients of ayahuasca are known
 as harmin, harmaline, and tetrahydroharmin.
 But your point is well taken.
 What struck the early explorers and ethnographers
 into the Amazon basin was the fact that the people seemed
 to be taking this plant preparation in order
 to undergo states of community group mindedness.
 And during these intoxicating intervals, social plans relative
 to migration, hunting, and warfare were undertaken
 by the elders of the tribe.
 And though the name has been changed
 to the more innocuous harmin,
 nevertheless there's a continued persistence of the feeling
 that telepathic and group mind states are induced
 by this particular plant mixture.
 And it's particularly interesting in the light
 of the fact that the chemical constituents, which make it go,
 are in fact found endogenously in the human brain.
 These are not exotic compounds from the point of view
 of ordinary human brain chemistry.
 So there is a suggestion there that manipulation
 of neurohumeral compounds, brain neurotransmitters,
 and that sort of thing may in fact open the door
 to untapped areas of human potential.
 I would imagine that many
 of our viewers have seen the movie The Emerald Forest,
 which seems to deal with the use of substances of this sort
 in the Amazon culture.
 Yes, John Borman did a wonderful job with that movie.
 He was portraying the use of Ipina snuff.
 That's a hallucinogenic drug complex that occurs
 in the eastern part of the Amazon drainage
 and in rural Venezuela.
 Ipina contains DMT and is blown up the nostrils
 by a cooperative friend and induces an intense state
 of hallucinogenesis.
 Yes, that was I think most people's first exposure
 to the real richness of the visionary pharmacopoeia
 that does exist in the Amazon.
 And there's also the suggestion there then I guess
 that DMT would trigger telepathic-like experiences
 or clairvoyant types of experiences.
 That's right, and DMT is also a product
 of endogenous human metabolism.
 It's interesting that the most intense of the hallucinogens,
 DMT, which you mentioned, are the ones
 which are most closely related to our own brain chemistry.
 So far from these compounds being alien to the brain
 or being an insult to the physical brain,
 what they really represent are the shifting of ratios
 of compounds already present in the ordinary brain.
 Well, DMT I believe is dimethyltryptophan.
 Tryptamine.
 Tryptamine.
 That's right.
 Tryptamine.
 It's related to the protein tryptophan, is it not?
 It's related to the protein tryptophan.
 It's also related to serotonin.
 Serotonin is a neurotransmitter which occurs in all life
 and is most concentrated in the higher primates
 and most concentrated there in man.
 It is 5-hydroxytryptamine, while DMT is, as you mentioned,
 NN-dimethyltryptamine.
 So there is a very close structural affinity
 between this extremely potent and exotic hallucinogen
 and the very common basis
 for ordinary consciousness, serotonin.
 That's correct.
 Now other cultures around the world have also used other types
 of substances.
 I think it might be interesting to talk at least briefly
 about alcohol, which is referred to so often
 in the Bible, for example.
 Yes. Well, we tend in our culture
 to make a radical distinction between drugs and foods
 with what we call spices sort of falling somewhere in the middle.
 In point of fact, a culture is what it eats,
 and an individual's personality is often largely a reflection
 of their diet.
 There has not been a human culture that did not bear
 upon it the stamp of its relationship to certain plants,
 which altered the individual and mass psyche.
 We can think of numerous examples, the influence,
 for instance, of sugar on the growth
 of 19th century mercantilism,
 or the way in which the British manipulated opium policy
 in the Far East, or as you mentioned, alcohol,
 which has always been the drug of choice in Western culture.
 Who can imagine modern industrial office culture
 without coffee?
 These are major drug dependencies
 that have placed their stamp on the lives of millions
 and millions of people.
 It's simply that we choose to linguistically define it
 in such a way that the effect is not something most people are
 cognizant of.
 I think coffee is a very interesting example,
 because when it was first introduced into our culture,
 as I understand it, it was considered virtually a
 hallucinogenic drug.
 Oh, yes.
 When coffee was first introduced into Western culture,
 it was associated with certain establishments where loose
 women and loud music were available,
 and the bohemian literati would gather and drink coffee and talk
 into the night.
 And it was considered quite a risque thing to be involved
 with.
 That's right.
 And wasn't tobacco also viewed that way initially?
 Yes, tobacco is a very similar case.
 The anthropologist Eduardo Luna has pointed out that tobacco,
 which had a history of millennia of use in the New World,
 was within a hundred years of being introduced into Europe
 through Portugal, was being buried in the graves of
 subarctic Lapland shamans.
 So it shows how the character of a drug is quickly discerned by
 a culture, even a culture that is encountering that plant or
 that drug for the first time.
 It wouldn't be fair, really, to talk about drugs without
 mentioning socially what has happened in Western culture,
 particularly during the '60s and early '70s,
 when there was quite a wave of psychedelic drug use.
 Yes, that's right.
 Following upon the discovery of LSD by Albert Hoffman in the
 late '30s, and then the writing on the subject of the
 psychedelic experience that was done by Aldous Huxley,
 Metzner, and others, it became a fad of the self-exploring youth
 culture of the '60s to be involved with these things.
 This was during a time of great social upheaval for other
 reasons, and the end product of that historical episode was the
 complete suppression of the study of psychedelic drugs,
 and in my opinion, to the great detriment of the development of
 psychology, I feel that potentially psychedelic drugs
 could be for psychology what the telescope became for the science
 of astronomy.
 The problem with the psychedelics is that they
 dissolve cultural programming, and hence inherently have a
 political charge about them.
 You see, culture is the product of the unperturbed human mind.
 The human mind, unperturbed through the medium of language,
 erects institutions and social structures into which it then
 secretes itself and sort of lives in a private Idaho.
 A psychedelic drug will dissolve these linguistic and cultural
 assumptions.
 It is a perturbation of the mind, and the perturbed mind is
 a mind in the act of rediscovering the nature that
 lies outside of culture.
 So this tension between cultural values and what we might call,
 for want of a better word, reality, creates a tension
 between institutions and the users of these substances.
 It's as if our culture, if I understand you right, acts as a
 filter between our minds and direct experience of reality,
 and the drugs somehow blow away that crust of culture and allow
 more of a direct agnostic experience.
 That's right, and the business of culture, any culture, is to
 perpetuate its cultural models.
 And if the hallucinogenic plants have not been integrated into
 the cultural model, then they are definitely seen as dangerous
 forces for an unpredictable sort of social change.
 Now, if the hallucinogenic plants have been integrated into
 the cultural model, this is not then a problem, and this is the
 case with shamanism.
 Shamanism is the culturally sanctified institution of
 inner exploration via psychoactive plants.
 Where psychoactive plants are not present, shamanic
 institutions tend to become vitiated to rely on ritual or
 ordeals or other methods of eliciting these ecstatic states.
 But to my mind, and this is a great argument which rages in
 anthropology, to my mind, and I'm in agreement with Wasson
 here, the hallucinogenic plants are the sine qua non for an
 active shamanism.
 For authentic shamanism.
 An authentic shamanism, that's right.
 Now, Marcia Liad, who is the great commentator on shamanism,
 took an entirely different point of view and said that reliance
 on what he called narcotics was a decadent phase of shamanism.
 But if we examine Iliad's personal history, I think it can
 be clearly seen that this was simply the cultural myopia of a
 European scholar in the great 19th century model.
 Sort of still under the sway of a Victorian sense of morality.
 Yes, sort of taking the point of the superior point of view that
 while these are primitive people, surely our greater
 epistemological sophistication puts us in a position to judge
 them.
 You have the same controversy, don't you, now within the Hindu
 tradition where many gurus say no drugs and are denying, I
 suppose, the tradition of the Rig Veda, which we spoke of
 earlier.
 That's absolutely correct.
 The Mahabharata, which is the central core text of late
 reformed Hinduism, explicitly forbids mushrooms to the Brahman
 class.
 They are a forbidden food.
 But in ethnography we're taught that a taboo usually indicates a
 previous involvement and fascination.
 And in fact, the early Hinduism of the Vedic phase was
 definitely more analogous to the hallucinogenic shamanism of the
 Amazon basin than it is to the extremely stratified Hinduism of
 modern India.
 Do you find the use of drugs of this type, hallucinogenic drugs,
 in the tantric traditions, the traditions that deliberately use
 taboos in order to inculcate higher states of awareness?
 Yes.
 Well, when you go to India, you discover that the one thing that
 is not stressed in Hinduism as it is exported to the West is the
 immense reliance on cannabis.
 Hashish, ganja, is the stable of these sadhus.
 This is a fact of their daily life, that they are relying on
 this for a constantly reinforced contact with the transcendental
 dimension.
 You know, I think it's interesting how you referred earlier to the
 shamanistic religions as being the ones that really have
 sanctified the use of these drugs for religious purposes.
 And yet we find in our Western tradition, Christianity has come
 and in effect labeled these sorts of things as diabolic.
 For example, drugs, I believe, were used amongst various witchcraft
 groups that were persecuted by the Church.
 That's right.
 However, the Church was concerned that the magic of the witches be
 seen as real, number one, and number two, entirely caused by the
 agency of the devil himself.
 And so the Church downplayed the operational role that plants had
 in inducing these states, because after all, if the devil cannot
 lead you astray without the use of plants, what kind of devil is
 it?
 So in our own historical tradition, there is a curious blindness
 to the efficacy of hallucinogenic plants.
 I have heard, for example, that the old story of witches using toad
 skins in their brews, that there's a drug called bufotinine, which
 is a hallucinogenic that comes from the skin of toads.
 Well, there was excitement about bufotinine in the mid-60s.
 It was later shown to be non-psychoactive.
 However, since then, toads have been found which do secrete DMT-like
 compounds.
 And it's fairly clear that the cauldron chemistry of the witches, which
 relied on detoura, helibor, monk's hood, henbane, these sorts of
 plants, was a powerful visionary chemistry, although these
 compounds, the tropane alkaloids that occur in those plants, tend to
 be more delirious and confusing than what I call the classical
 psychedelic compounds, which are more the tryptamines and the
 beta-carbolines.
 There are many chemical compounds in nature which are
 psychoactive, but a much narrower spectrum of these compounds are
 truly what we call psychedelic or mind manifesting.
 Other than the obvious spiritual and religious implications, which
 we see again and again in different cultures, even I suppose we
 should mention the Native American church and their use of peyote.
 What are the other kinds of cultural developments that we can trace
 to the use of these drugs?
 Well, I think the most profound cultural development, it is possible
 to make the case that language itself is an ability that was coaxed
 out of an evolving primate species by virtue of the fact that there
 were hallucinogenic plants in the diet of that creature.
 You see, psilocybin has been shown in low doses to actually
 increase visual acuity.
 Well, at the stage of evolution where human beings encountered
 psilocybin mushrooms, we were essentially baboon-like, pack-hunting
 hordes of veldt-living creatures in Africa.
 In that situation, a compound which increases visual acuity will
 give a tremendous adaptive advantage to the animals that are
 including it in their diet.
 And those animals not including it in their diet will be quickly
 eliminated by the process of natural selection from the evolutionary
 scenario.
 So it's possible to argue that this mind-manifesting quality of the
 psychedelics actually conferred an evolutionary advantage on certain
 primates who then were able to bootstrap themselves to higher and
 higher states of reflective self-awareness.
 This may lie behind the very early coincidence of cattle, goddesses,
 and mushrooms in the apparent obsessions of early man as reflected
 by the cave paintings on the Algerian plateau and in southern France
 and Spain.
 We always find the notion of the mystery circa 18,000 years ago
 connected with the idea of cattle, and we always find the cattle
 connected with the notion of the great goddess.
 Now it may be that the hidden and third member of this trinity was a
 hallucinogenic mushroom of some sort.
 We've got only about two minutes left, but I wonder what the
 connection--I don't quite see it--between the mushroom, the cattle,
 and the goddess.
 The mushrooms grow in the manure of the cattle.
 When the hunting packs of early primates followed along behind the
 cattle, they inevitably encountered the mushroom, ate it, had their
 visual skills thereby increased, bred more readily, therefore, and
 survived more easily than their non-mushroom-eating cousins.
 And so the eating of mushrooms and the development of higher aspects
 of consciousness, including self-reflection, were thereby enforced,
 leading to the conclusion that it was actually a symbiotic
 relationship between early primates and these hallucinogenic plants
 that laid the basis for the appearance of what we call human beings.
 Well, Terence McKenna, this is a very interesting discussion.
 You seem to be suggesting that our evolution, I suppose, from the
 animal kingdom into the human kingdom itself was catalyzed or
 triggered by our encounter with these hallucinogenics.
 Yes, we are an ape with a symbiotic relationship to a mushroom, and
 that has given us self-reflection, language, religion, and all the
 spectrum of effects that flow from these things.
 Yeah, and one can only wonder how these hallucinogens might affect
 our future evolution as well.
 They have brought us to this point, and as we make our relationship
 to them conscious, we may be able to take control of our future
 evolutionary path.
 Terence McKenna, thank you very much for being with me.
 It was a pleasure.
 For me, too.
 And thank you very much for being with us.
 [♪♪♪]
 [♪♪♪]
 [♪♪♪]
 [♪♪♪]
 [♪♪♪]
 [♪♪♪]
 [♪♪♪]
 [♪♪♪]
 [♪♪♪]
 [♪♪♪]
 [♪♪♪]
 [♪♪♪]
 [♪♪♪]
 (water rushing)
 (engine hums)


{END}
Wait Time : 0.00 sec
Model Load: 0.65 sec
Decoding  : 2.13 sec
Transcribe: 1742.94 sec
Total Time: 1745.72 sec