Hallucinogens and Culture

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 Grower's 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. R. 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. More importantly, the

report says that the Soma of Blu Mata is a pulses of the same species of plant with some

lemonade-like qualities such as theklowzina, indium, and this is how it is. However, the

word play is one that has not yet been widely used by the Russianavia.

If you were to say that the Soma was not related to anything in the world as the Indus-Gilrubin

was, you'd need to be curious. But the Soma of Blu Mata is in fact a metaphor for his Population.

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 different species.

It is a 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.

Is it the case that, I believe it was the German chemist

who isolated the 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-he,

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 roo,

Pergamon harmala, and named harmine.

So today, the active ingredients of ayahuasca

are known as harmine,

harmaline,

and tetrahydroharman.

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 harmine,

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 epina snuff.

That's a hallucinogenic substance

in the drug complex that occurs

in the eastern part of the Amazon drainage

and in rural Venezuela.

Epina 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.

That's right.

Tryptamine.

It's related to the protein tryptophan, is it not?

It's related to the protein.

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's

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 risqué thing

to be involved with. That's right.

And wasn't tobacco also viewed that way?

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

in 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 elucidating

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, Mercier Lyade,

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

Lyade'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 Brahmin 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 staple 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

of religion.

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,

why, 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, you know, 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 datura, hellebore,

monkshood, 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 confusants

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.

Now, other than the obvious

spiritual and religious implications

which we see again and again

in different cultures,

even in, 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 is

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 able

to 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 evolution as well.

That's the very 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.