Down the Rabbit Hole
Chapter I
Like many now in this godless age, I grew up without religion. Aside from a couple of weddings or funerals I never stepped in a Church, and I didn't crack open a Bible until I was a teenager. I was always enthusiastic for Myth, Legend, Fantasy and Fairy Tales...that red mushroom spotted white was always lurking around---the Tchaikovsky sequence in Disney's Fantasia---pretty much every early Disney movie in fact, one of my favorites was in Alice in Wonderland, my mother used to read the book to me when I's a kid, & Through the Looking Glass; later I would re-read it in highschool, inspired by Grace Slick---my Mom who tricked me into drinking cough syrup when I was young by calling it "lollipop syrup" which would come back to haunt me---and my favorite video game franchise, to this day (early on the morning of my 40th birthday I sip coffee, smoke a bowl of Jack Herer and write this outline while waiting for my wife to get up so we can play either Super Mario 3D World or Mario Kart 8: which I'll do great in thanks to the Herer!)
In highschool, cannabis, magic mushrooms and acid blew my mind, and helped me to embrace a more spiritual worldview. Over-the-counter cough medicine, however, brought me to some Other World, a Paradise where I grew in more profound ways than even psychedelics could offer. I know, this sounds ludicrous: I remember the second time I drank an entire eight ounce bottle of Robitussin when I was fifteen, listening to Bob Dylan on vinyl, Like a Rolling Stone, and sat there thinking, "How did I get here from a bottle of cough syrup?"
How does it feel?
To be on your own...
With no direction home?
A complete unknown...
Like a Rolling Stone...
A year later I was taking the pill form regularly for a couple of weeks, an enchanted time that I shall never forget, when everything shone as it were the sun was new-fashioned in the crystal blue sky. A sacrament I could not continue to lean on, but which led me to love and laughter. At this time I stumbled upon R. Gordon Wasson's Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality. Although it would be years before I had the opportunity to test my theory, the religious ecstasy that Wasson described among Siberian natives who use the mushroom today (or anyway in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when much of the anthropological observations were made from which the book draws on) and which he connected to literary relics in the oldest sacred writings and songs of the so-called Indo-Europeans (a problematic term, as it conflates language with ethnicity and is linked to historical theories of white supremacy) immediately and intuitively struck me as somehow analogous to the synthetic paradise of cough syrup, despite the fact that they were completely unrelated chemically, or even pharmacologically.
One of the greatest scientific developments of the 19th to 20th centuries was the slow, painful realization that there were alternative ways for humanity to live than Christian European civilization or its aftermath of rationalism, commerce and industry. Just when we had ceased to follow the God that failed (to quote Metallica) Wasson and his wife Valentina Pavlovna brought to light an ancient yet still living shamanic tradition from Mexico, namely the sacred use of psilocybin mushrooms. In bringing these rituals to the attention of the West, the Wassons helped to pioneer the hippie counterculture's ideal of the psychedelic experience as a valid experience of the divine, sending hordes of psycho-tourists south across the border in pursuit of enlightenment, which some found, although their effect on the indigenous communities from which the secret was stolen were often devastating. Wasson then shocked the academic establishment by showing that much of our own religious pre-history and the oldest literature of the West is reducible to a paleo-Siberian cult of Amanita Muscaria, that red, spotted mushroom.
Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end? "I wonder how many miles I've fallen by this time?" she said aloud. "I must be getting somewhere near the center of the earth. Let me see: that would be four thousand miles down, I think" (for, you see, Alice had learned several things of this sort in her lessons in the schoolroom, and though this was not a very good opportunity for showing off her knowledge, as there was no one to listen to her, still it was good practice to say it over)--"yes, that's about the right distance--but then I wonder what Latitude or Longitude I've got to?" (Alice had not the slightest idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either, but she thought they were nice grand words to say.)
Robert Graves corresponded with, met, befriended and took 'shrooms with the Wassons, and in his revised publication of The White Goddess he starts to put magic mushrooms in the context of sacred history and inspired poetry; and above all, festal seasons. He hints at another Mystery, the rites of the Barley Goddess. From the ergot that infects barley and other cereal grains, Albert Hoffman synthesized LSD. He later proposed, in a book co-written with Wasson and Carl A.P. Ruck, The Road to Eleusis, that the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were the most sacred experience in Greece until the Christianized Roman Empire banned the rites, were in effect and substance a ritualized acid trip, giving form to the figures of myth and putting on full display the terrible tragedy of life, suffering, death, that Dionysian wisdom from which Nietzsche claims the Greeks only avoided a pessimistic world-denying Buddhism by an extreme aesthetic hypertrophy and idealization of plasticity and form---but ultimately the myths would explode in Attic Tragedy and dissolve the Apollonian veneer of civilization...Nietzsche spoke of outbreaks of collective Dionysian madness, hallucination and dancing in Medieval Europe: these were likely caused by outbreaks of ergot poisoning.
Meanwhile the Wassons had helped to spread a movement, and it is now possible to grow mushrooms at home in a jar or bag, which people have been doing for decades and selling to the hip & adventurous, especially more so as the authorities have cracked down on LSD over the years. Now, depending on what state or county you live in, they may be legal, or on the ballot this November.
They can help us laugh, cry, appreciate art and create it; make love, fall in love, rekindle love; they can improve our visual acuity, cognitive performance, empathic connexion...or so they say: these statements have not been approved by the FDA. So some, as for example the folks behind the ballot initiative here in MA, are making it a mental health issue, rightly so---Terrence McKenna, a pioneer in the 'shroom growing revolution, as well as a far-out philosopher with the publication of his Food of the Gods even went so far as to propose that eating mushrooms caused our ancestors to become more intelligent and evolve into homo sapiens. This is a very interesting theory---but I think his idea of the importance of mushrooms in the archaic religious shrines of Anatolia, the symbolic meaning of the cattle and the pillars, is solid and worth further exploration. In particular we will return to the idea of two pillars, two trees.
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