In: Scientific

Papers and Discussions.

Ed.by: J.S.Gott!ieb,
G. Tourney. American
Psychiatric
Association_
Detroit_
Cctober 29-31_ 1959, pp. 188-201.
PSI 7_/(LSD)

MUSHROOMS,

FOLKLORE,

AND EXPERIMENTAL

PSYCHOSES

*'t

Howard P. Rome, M.D.**

For some years now, I have browsed in nooks and crannies of folklore,
ritual, art, literature, and anthropology which contain some intriguing facets
of human behavior. Originally this search was mostly avocational until, moved
by the same mysterious force which prompted the three fabled Princes of
Serendip to make the happily productive association of chance events which
Horace Walpole 2,.3called serendipty, I chanced upon a 15th century Florentine xylograph which depicts the tribulations of St. Anthony? This particular
saint's lonely plight was a favored subject for genre painters of this and later
periods. I was struck by the manner in which this unknown artist portrayed
the saint. While it might be argued that a woodcut of this primitive type
could not be expected to be different, there are suggestions that the result is
not inadvertent. Actually the woodcut is an excellent representation
of the
posturing of catalepsy and waxy flexibility. On even superficial examination,
it is evident that the ring of hell-fire which surrounds the saint and the
presence of horned, cloven-hoof demons are also an intimate part of an
important psychological experience.
At about the same time I came across Jerry Cook's tragically poignant
portrait of catatonia, a4 It appeared in Li/e magazine in 1948. It seemed
evident that this woman also occupies a cave in a special hell just as filled
with the demons and the fire of loneliness as St. Anthony's.
For her also,
yesterday and tomorrow obliterate today; her posture is the epitome of time
standing still; she portrays the nadir of an oceanic union which incorporates
the world by annihilating it.
William Blake also pictured this boundless experience

in the quatrain:

al

"To see a World in a Grain of Sand,

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the pahn of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour."
His fervent comment a in the essay, "Contemplation"
isa poignant obligato: "I am wrapped in mortality, my flesh is a prison, my bones the bars of
death. Even in childhood Sorrow slept with me in my cradle; he followed me
up and down in the house when I grew up, he was my school fellow; thus he
was in my steps and in my play til he became to me as my brother. I walked
* This paper was presented with slide illustrations, not included in this publication.
**Head, Section of Psychiatry, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota; Professor of
Psychiatry, Graduate School, University of Minnesota (Mayo Foundation).
t I am grateful to the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Co., Hanover, New Jersey (R. Bircher,
M.D., Medical Director), for the supplies of Psilocybin used in this study.

189

e
(

through dreary places with him and in the church yards I oft found myself
sitting by Sorrow on the tombstone."
Seven years after first seeing this portrait of catatonia, in 1955 to be precise, I saw it again in Edward Steichen's magnificent photographic exhibit
"The Family of Man." a4 This time there was a caption: "I am alone with
the beating of my heart." Someone else also had made the association between
her isolation and other worldliness. But this time, however, instead the writing
of an 18th century British poet which came to mind, it was that of an oriental
mystic, Lin Chi, who was recalled, as
Lin Chi died in 866 A.D. after devoting his life to the spread of the Zen
doctrine of enlightenment. Zen masters suck as he, sought and found that the
secret way to other worldliness leads inward. While the creedless way of
Zen a6, s7 to Satori (enlightenment) seems to be a far cry from St. Anthony's
search in the desert for God, they both share with the 6th century Christian
penitents, the 8th century Sufi Mohammedan mystics and the 13th century

Jewish Cabalists an experience which Socrates had called "inspired madness

. . . our greatest blessing" 17 and which Edward Gibbon centuries later was

to castigate as a "distempered fanaticism." l0

Yoga exercises are merely one of many meditation rituals held to be The
Way. 44 Esoteric ceremonials leading to enlightenment, union and communion
have been described since Aurignacian times. The symbolic representation of
the Secret of the Golden Flower is illustrated in the Chinese Book of Life and

recommends what has been called the backward flowing method:

_;

"When both eyes are looking at things of the world, it is with vision
directed outward. If one closes the eyes and reversing the glance, directs it
inward and looks at the room of the ancestors, that is the backward flowing
method."
Release is in the senses. Through contemplation and quietness true intuition
arises. By practicing meditation, the light of understanding is concentrated
upward in the empty space and the Golden Flower begins to bud. The Psalmist
said of the same union: "Deep calls upon deep." 40

The steps to yoga (union) are many. 15 In the frame of reference in which
we examine them they are the way to be outside one's self. Essentially the
many ways which have been recommended are variants of a basically contemplative exercise which can lead to subjective control with ecstasy its final
goal.
The Hindu_ Buddhist, and Taoist mystics prescribed ritual exercises. The
Buddhist way is called "fixating contemplation." Buddha said: "When you
fix your heart on one point then nothing is impossible for you." In Taoism
the way is called "the search for the yellow middle."
"There are three confirmatory experiences. First, when one has entered the
state of meditation, the gods are in the valley. Men are heard talking as though
at a distance of several hundred paces. Each are quite clear. But the sounds are
all alike, an echo in a valley. Then as soon as one is quiet the Light of the

190
eyes begins to blaze up so that everything before one becomes quite bright
as if one were in a cloud. If one opens ones eyes and seeks the body, it is not
to be found. Inside and outside everything is equally light. The fleshy body
becomes quite shiny like jade or silk. It seems typical to remain sitting; one
feels as if drawn upward. In time one can experience it in such a way that
one really floats upward." ao
Platonic Greek
journey in different
speaks of the way
traveler must take
Florentine Dante's
Sayers:

and Sufi Mohammedan mysticism described the same

terms. The Sufi mystical poet of the llth century, Attar,
to other worldliness in terms of a journey .which each
alone. _ His account is reminiscent of the 13th century
journey "in a dark wood" as described by Dorothy L.

"Down the twenty-four great circles of Hell we go, through the world and
out again under the Southern stars; up the two terraces and the seven cornices
of Mount Purgatory, high over the sea . . . to the Earthly Paradise . . . up
again..,
beyond the Primum Mobile, into the Empyrean, there to behold...
the ultimate . . . beyond all understanding." 45
From the earliest pre-Homeric Grecian mysteries, the via mystica has been
a remarkably common ritual used by occidentals and orientals alike. 6 First,
there is the initial period of self-stripping and purification. The next stage is
likened to being touched by a ray of supernatural light. Thereafter comes
enlightenment. With detachment, there finally is unity or the stage of ecstasy.
Then the vision which far transcends one's own receptive power. At all times
and by men and women of widely different cultures it has been described in
such paradoxical terms as a "dark from excessive bright" reaching finally the
supreme degree in which the self is completely annihilated and "lost like a
fish in the sea." s5
The purposeful approach to this other worldliness is by two routes. The
Dionysian and the Appollonian ways are simply convenient designations for
the poles of what Nietzsche posited as a dialectic?
The experience of the Zen
mystics is a paradigm for the Apollonian way; a way to produce the final
state of ekstasis (standing outside oneself) and enthusiasmos (possession by
the god).25 This also is the Socratic way described by Plato. It aims at a kind
of knowledge; it is the rare gift of chosen individuals; it is oracular,
intoxication, a type of prophetic madness, as Socrates pointed out.

a god-

On the other hand, the Dionysiac experience is a ritual madness, 21 pursued

for its own sake. It is collective or congregational, highly infectious. Its exploi.
tation depends upon the orgiastic use of outside agencies---corybantic
dances,
orb'ia such as those performed by the ancient Jews before the ark, the frenzied
dancing of the Mevlevi dervishes of Asia Minor, the cultic mysteries of the
adepts in Phrygian religions, the wild abandon of the Bacchae, 21 and the
use of what the French writers have called plantes diviaatories to effect the
same kind of communion.

191

,_

:
:

f*

,i
,

Both ways, as an oriental master has put it, intend to "destroy the root of
life." There is a progress devaluation of ordinary perception by focused
attention. In the words of a Zen teacher: "Unless you once have been thoroughly drenched in a perspiration, you cannot expect to see the revelation of
a palace of pearls on a blade of grass." a6-_s
On the other side of the world in the 16th century, the Christian mystic,
Jakob B_hme, the famed shoemaker of G_rlitz, said almost the same thing
in his famous Dialogues on the Supersensual, Li]e: 4 "If thou now suffereth
thyself to be ahvays looking into nature and the things of time, it will be
impossible for thee ever to arrive at the unity which thou wishes for."
The visions, voices and ecstatic experiences, the supersensual intuitions
which are reported in the magnificent, evocative metaphors which have been
used over and over again, refer to strange, sweet perfumes and tastes, overpowering physical sensations, inward fires, indescribable visions and sounds
and other such "images, floating on the moving depth of feeling."
At times these experiences are akin to those of St. Anthony, albeit less than
exalted and terrifying in their grotesquerie. They gave rise to a whole school
of art of which an example by Stephan Lochner seems to capture in visual
imagery the experience vividly described by the mystic anchoress, Lady Julian
of Norwich, in the early 15th century when she encountered "the Fiend, red
with black freckles who clutched at her throat with its paws .... "
Satan also has been said to leave the smell of brimstone behind him. The
traditional sweet music of angels' choirs and the awesome magnificence of the.
voice of God, in these diabolic experiences, are replaced by cacophony. None
of the senses seem to be exempt. Moreover, the mundane quality of human
experience seems to lack the symbolic repertoire to describe adequately the
character, the intensity or the worldly equivalent of these states.
A genre painting by Michele Pacher 9 done at the end of the 13th century
of St. Wolfgang of Austric and the Devil illustrates the point made by Ernst
Cassirer s that myth is emotion turned into image. The conflict between the
sacred and the profane, between the spirit and the flesh, between God and
the devil was a favorite theme of artists beginning about the llth century.
An intriguing and unanswered question apropos of this is: What determined
the pictorial character of the symbols these artists chose to portray this
conflict?
While I do not intend to vex you with such imponderables as why the Devil
has a cloven hoof and a forked tail, why his minions are legion and loathsome,
horrible apparitions from the depths of Erebus and the pestilential morass of
Avernus, it is significant that the iconography which depict this symbology
is linked with the xylographic art of the Danses Macabres and the Ars
Moriendi of the last years of the 15th century.
At least thirty-five editions of a rare incunabulum entitled "Ars Moriendi,"
the art of dying, were published between 1455 and 1470. They were illustrated
in the style of Schongauer, Bosch and Brueghel the Elder. They show a dying
man being shriven by a monk who hands him a lighted candle. A choir of

192
angels is ready to receive his soul in the form of the little naked personage.
At the foot of his bed are the typical demons which appear so frequently on
the fa;ades and the tympani Of cathedrals built during this period. It is necessary to examine these demons in some detail to get the full si_ificance of the
imagery. Characteristically one has the head of a mad dog. Another is an ass,
forlornly praying. The third, usually at the foot of the cross, is the caricature
of a Jew. Others stand in contorted attitudes on three-clawed hind feet like
those of a cock and wave the cloven goat hooves of their forelegs.
The whole group forms a clamoring chorus of rage and despair at seeing
the soul about to escape them, and their cries are incribed on the scrolls which
encircle the woodcut. Typically they read: "No hope for us." "Ah, woe, I am
mad." "We have lost the soul." "I am devoured by frenzy." "I am confused."
In the Baptistry in Florence there is a well-known 13th century mosaic?
The first section shows a Devil of tremendous size. Galileo estimated him to
be a mile and a third high, calculated from the information supplied by Dante.
It is crowded with toads with human-like faces, elves, reptiles and salamanderlike creatures and the clutter which is as typical of this art form as it is
representative of the actual emotional experience which prompts this imagery.
Andr6 Malraux? s among others, _ has made the point that art as we tend
to see it now is meretricious and gaudy in that it lacks a depth of meaning,
lacks a symbolic fertility which originally prompted art as an expression of
feeling. In times past, art was not an end in itself; the world of the artist was
not a reproduced world. It was the world. As Leonardo symbolized it, "Painting is a form of poetry made to be seen." There is the need to create art as
an ideogram, charged with sensibility. As Malraux has put it, it is a metamorphosis of form, a transmutation of feeling. Art in this sense is iconography.
Put in another way, it might be called ecstatic geometry, a graphic depiction
by man of the forces of destiny.
Hieronymous Bosch, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Israel van Meckenem,
Matthias Griinewald, and Martin Schongauer, to mention only a few of the
better-known artists of this genre, used symbols which deserve close attention.
Brueghel's "Temptation of St. Anthony" is an illustration in point.
At first impression it may seem paradoxical to portray the experience of
solitude and exquisite isolation by such a plethora of imagery, unless it was
done quite purposefully. From other data, it becomes clear that as fantastic
as it seems at first glance, it is representative in a significantly anthropomorphic way in that it portrays an unusual intrapsychic experience.
Both the clark night of the soul of the solitary contemplative mystic and
Walpurgisnacht, the eve of May Day when the wltehes gather, in art and
description is faithful to the experience: it is fantastically crowded with the
Devil disguised as many amazing creatures and is the occasion for even more
amazing temptations.
Each of the diametrically opposed approaches to The Way epitomize a
psychological experience common to both the Apollonian and Dionysian ways.
By radically different means both incur the same psychological liability. When

193

each isolate the individual from his environment, each conduces to experiences
which are remarkably common in content.
The famous lsenheim Abbey altarpiece now at Colmar painted by Matthias
Gr'tinewald, whose other magnificent works in the early 16th century also
depict the supernatural in the most extravagant forms and most vehement
colors, is another example of this imagery. The altarpiece is a kaleidoscope of
such utter confusion that it is impossible to distinguish between the limbs of
tho various devils portrayed. One is hard put to say which jaw or wing beating
or scratching the Saint belongs to which animal or bird. There are demons'
heads stuck with stags' antlers, a shark's maw and a host of supernumeraries
belonging to the bird family with arms in place of feet. Huysmans has
described them as looking like the offspring of an empusa (a cannibalistic
Greek hobgoblin) and an angry cock.
The inhabitants of this infernal aviary painted by Griinewald deserve closer
attention. There is a hen, wearing a carapace in lieu of feathers, which pecks
at the saint's rosary. Beneath the menagerie is a sheet of paper which bears a
Latin inscription: "Where were you, good Jesus, where were you? And why
did you not come and dress my wounds?" In the opposite corner of the altarpiece is a nude figure of a man. His bloated body, moulded in greasy white
soap is mottled with blue, mammillated with boils and carbuncles and has
been described as the hosanna of gangrene. When it is recalled that the picture
originally came from the Anthonite Abbey of Isenheim, it can be deduced
that this is a graphic representation of St. Anthony's fire which Charcot said
was a picture of syphilis, ergotism, and the plague.
All of the art of this genre is typified by distortion, hyperbole, and caricature of phenomenal proportions. Sensory and motor experiences are profoundly exaggerated: tearing, burning, devouring, flying, suspension in space
and being entombed are easily read into the imagery. There is the same
deliriously kaleidoscopic quality to every presentation. Time as an ordered,
sequential march of events is distorted beyond all recognition.
A most remarkable example of this is by Israel van Meckenem, a German
engraver of the 15th century. In his "Levitation of St. Anthony" the artist
borrowed the most grotesque and alarming anatomical peculiarities to be
found in such Crustacea as the oxyrhynch, the decapod, and the cirriped, and
by hyperbole and caricature built demons out of them. He shows fantastic
holothurians with grimacing heads; micyres with multiple claws. A rabid
monkey armed with a cudgel is beating the saint on the head with all his
might. The holothurian, a sea cucumber-like creature, flourishes a sharp sting;
other monsters have outspread fins, bristling spikes like those of the spondylus
and the branchiopod or pointed crests such as the dactylopters. Through all
this the pious hermit appears remarkably poised; he seems to wink and the
corners of his mouth are raised in a gioconda-like smile. He was a shrewd
old man with great faith. Obviously he had seen many such creatures before.
He knows that there is nothing too disturbing about such a phantasmogoria
once it is accepted as an ordeal, natural to the mystic way!

The Middle Ages were times of vehement passions, l. II, 27 with basilisks
and unicorns as their symbolic epitome. Life was violent and motley. And the
contrasts were striking. This was the era of lepers sounding their rattles in
the streets; beggars exhibiting their deformities; everyone was distinguished
by a costume which served as a totemic reliquary. Executions, hawkings,
marriages, and funerals were announced by cries, processions, songs, and
music. Factual knowledge was at a premium and passed only by word of
mouth, subject to the distortions and embellishments of such communication.
The leitmotif of the time was a commentary on a seemingly endless succession of evils--bad government, cupidity, wars and brigandage, scarcity,
misery, and pestilence. The Devil was manifestly afoot in the land for "wylde"
(insane) men inhabited the woods 2 and their images pervaded fantasy?
These are rooted in the fabled experiences of the early Christian hermits
(the word hermit from the Greek: eremetoi means desert). St. Anthony was
buried in 356 A.D.; for more than one hundred years after his death men
flocked to the desert. Pachomius had 7000 men and women in various congregations in Egypt. Serapion at Arsino[ ruled over 10,000. A traveler through
Egypt and Palestine about 394 A.D. reports the dwellers in the desert as all
but equal to the population of the towns! Rosweyde in the 17th century wrote:
"The place called Scete is set in a vast desert..,
it is reached by no path,
nor is the track shown by any landmarks of earth but one journeys by the
signs and courses of the stars. Water is hard to find ....
Here abide men
perfect in holiness (for so terrible a place can be endured by none save those
of absolute resolve and supreme constancy) .... ,, 46
St. John Chrysostom, according to a late medieval legend, was caught alive
by hunters after having spent years in the forest under conditions of selfinflicted penance. He was pictured as walking on all fours and of course had
observed the vow of absolute silence. In the course of the years, his weatherbeaten body had grown a protective coat of long hair, giving him so much the
appearance of a beast, that when the King's hunters stumbled upon him, they
were at first deceived into thinking that they had caught a queer and unheard
of animal crawling on the ground.
In the Middle Ages considerable confusion existed about anchorites (they
who renounced the world and withdrew to caves and rocky places), wild hairy
men and the insane. The classical wild man described in Valentine and Orson
was half man, half beast; he had lost most of his human faculties (presumably
because of his isolation from fellow men), he had no speech, was devoid of
intellect and even a knowledge of God. The popular conception of the lunatic
as a deranged, wild animal-like creature who needs to be trapped and who is
beyond communication seems to stem from this time when the word "wylde"
was synonymous with what was later called "mad" or "frenzied." The "wylde
man" was also at times said to be a prophet, whose mental waywardness was
a sign of mysterious oracular faculties.
Perhaps the earliest "wylde," hairy man was Nebuchadnezzar II who, according to Daniel, IV:33, "was driven from man and did eat grass as oxen and

195
his body was wet with the dew of Heaven, til his hairs were grown like eagle
feathers and his nails like bird's claws."

The literature of folklore, fable and mythology of the Middle Ages is replete
with instances of wild men such as these creatures of isolation. By the transmutation of emotion to imagery and the cultural accretions of folklore, these
persons were thought possessed of tile Devil. Here is a font wherein is blended
the streams of demonalotry and folklore to form a phantasmagoria of werewolves, witches, warlocks, demons, incubi, and succubi. These creatures, being
literally out of the world, had to be accomplished in magic. The examples are
numerous: Merlin among the English, Orcus among the Italians, Dietrich as
well as Barensohn among the Germans. They are the core of myth and ceremony which persist to the present in the more rural parts of Europe.
Each year in January after Twelfth-night, on the old middle bridge which
connects Greater and Lesser Basle in Switzerland, three creatures meet. There
is a wild man who is decked out in green with a copper mask topped by a
thicket of foliage. He brandishes a small fir tree. He is met by a griffon with
a scaly coat of mail and a lion with a shaggy mane. Each does a traditional
dance.
In Loetschen Valley in the canton of Valais in Switzerland in February
each year there appear smoke-spotted specters,masked with fearsome diabolical
grins,cladin sheepskin.
They bellowand trumpetlikesteers,
wave
clubsand pikes,jangleironbells,
and smear the facesof theimpertinent
with soot.They are descendants of the Wild Horde--a funeral procession of
deceased spirits.Similarly there is the Devil of Einsiedeln who appears on
Twelfth-night and Carnival Monday and others of the Wild Folk from the
forestcanton of Schwyz at carnival time are covered with firmoss or dressed
as Harlequin or appear in costumes which date back to ancient Alemannic
rites.
In 1784,Samuel Odemann,ss a Swedishtheologian-scientist
at theUniversityof Upsala, reviewing the phenomenon of berserk-fury concluded that the
mushroom, .dmanitamuscarfa,
Flugswamp,was theintoxicating
agentwhich
solved the riddle of the berserks.This conclusion was built largely on the
investigationsof Georg Wilhelm Steller,a German scientistand traveler in
the service of Peter the Great. In 1740 together with the Dane, Vitus Bering,
he explored the Russian Pacific coast, especially the Kamchatka peninsula.
It was he who first reported that mushrooms were in common use around
Tilgilsk and near the Koryakian borders. He reported that the Koryaks and
the Yukaghirs dried and ate the mushroom in whole pieces with large amounts
of cold water. In the course of half an hour, they became intoxicated, furious
and experienced "all kinds of curious fantasies."
"The ones who on account of poverty cannot buy the mushroom get hold
of the urine of the intoxicated and drink it. By this, they get the same fury
and the urine has the same effect down to the fourth and fifth man." Steller
concludes his remarks by saying that even the reindeers have appetites for
the mushrooms! The ingestion has the same effect and the Koryaks have to

_).

196
tie the feet of the wildest of these animals. He remarks that "if one kills such
a reindeer and eats the meat at once, one will get the same kind of fury as if
one had been eating the mushroom itself." a9
G. H. Von Langsdorf in 1809 reported that between a half and two hours
after the ingestion of dried mushrooms, the narcotic effect starts with muscular
contractions, darkening in front of the eyes, vomiting and sleepiness. "The
intoxication is distinguished by convulsions; the intoxicated feels like being
very light; performs the most peculiar pantomimes. If he is to pass over a
stick or a straw, he makes a jump as if it were a stem of a tree. A talkative
person talks persistently. One who likes to dance is dancing and the musical
is singing all of the time."
In 1774, Oliver Goldsmith had written of the same experience in describing
the customs of the northeast Siberian tribes. The Russian traveler, Waldemar
Joechelson 26 summarized the folklore related to this mushroom cult among
the Koryaks in his studies with the Jessup North Pacific expedition and those
made of the Russian Paeific areas in 1900 and 1901. He reports that the
Koryaks during a religious ceremony make themselves broad-brimmed
hats
with spots to imitate the toadstools and thus believe themselves changed to
the poisonous mushrooms.
The role of the shaman as a visionary, an eestatic, an oracle, a mystie is
significant in any discussion of transport. The term shaman is used in reference to men or women, who through the acquisition of supernatural powers,
are believed to be able either to cure or cause disease. The Eskimo and Siberian
shamans are actually possessed by their spirit helpers and as a part of this
possession they speak at that time in a private or angakok language. The word
shaman is derived from the Tungusie shaman, and from Sanskrit, sramana,
meaning aesthetic.
Their supernatural power is derived either from a spirit, ghost, animal, or
an inanimate object. The gift is inborn and is said usually to be realized by
ordeal, fasting, abstinence and consequent revelation of the guardian spirit.
Communion with the spirit brings the power to curse or cure, to commune
with the dead, to prophesy, to effect rain and weather, to perform superhuman
feats of magic as self-mutilation, sword-swallowing, and the handling and
swallowing of fire. The most complete manifestation of shamanism is centered
in eastern Siberia and Manehuria. Among these tribes the Tungu, Yakut,
Koryaks, Samoyeds, Ostisk, and Chuckehee, the shaman exercises his powers
in a state of self-induced trance.
The early Greeks also described the essential elements of a shamanistie
culture. Thus there is considerable historical evidence that the role and the
prevailing attitude which accepts it extends in a huge arc from Scandinavia
across the Eurasian land mass as far as Indonesia. The vast extent of its
diffusion is evidence also of its high antiquity.
There is a period of rigorous training for the vocation of a shaman. In
addition to other things, it commonly involves solitude and fasting as well as

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a psychological change of sex. From this religious retreat, the shaman emerges
with the power, real or assumed, of passing at will into a state of mental dissociation. In that condition, his own soul is said to leave its body and to travel
to distant parts, most often to the spirit world. In fact he may be seen simultaneously in different places; thus he has the power of bilocation.
Xenophon said that "it is in sleep that the soul (psyche) best shows its
divine nature; it is in sleep that it enjoys a certain insight into the future;
and this is apparently because it is freest in sleep." Similar oneiromantic statements appear in Plato as well as in a fragment of an early work by Aristotle.
Thus, among people with a shamanistic belief, there developed back in
archaic times, iatromania, a healing kind of madness. Its adepts were seers,
or magical healers as well as religious teachers. This magician was more than
a priest in that he was a God-made flesh; a member of the spiritual elite. The
Orphic and Pythagorean mystery cults of the post-Homeric Greeks testify to
this exalted status. Similarly the material, the plants, animals, or objects used
become sacred by metempsychosis. This totemic identification is seen in the
folklore of the mandrake root as well as it is in the reverence paid mushrooms.
Thus ecstasy incidental to totemistic identification, the berserk phenomenon,
demoniacal possession seem to share a close psychological relationship. By a
variety of technics, all of which have the capacity to bring about a pivotal
sense of difference which is prerequisite for these phenomena, men in different
times in different cultures have become enraptured, ecstatic, and have been
transported out of the world of reality.
The cultic use of divine plants in the New World is a unique chapter in
psychobotany. For a long time, there was considerable confusion concerning
the nature of the agents used in cultic ceremonies by the Indians of Central
America. The Franciscan friars at the time of Philip II of Spain discovered
the widespread use of a mushroom called teonanacatl, meaning "flesh of the
gods." aa The famous peyote, or mescal button, used by the Aztecs and subsequently by other native religious groups of the Southwest and Upper Great
Plains Indians to induce trance-like states, was confused with teonanacatl until
recently. The extensive investigations of mushrooms and their folklore by
the Wassons 22, 41-48 have illuminated this important facet. Their own studies
as well as those with Roger Helm 22,28 have clarified the ethnomyocological
confusion and verified the hallucinogenic properties of a number of species of
mushrooms as well as led to the synthesis of the responsible agent: psilocybin.
Bernardino de Sahagim?
who lived and worked among the Indians in
Mexico from 1529 to 1590, described "certain little black mushrooms which
inebrate and cause hallucinations, and even excite lust."
"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, for now they
were drunk from the mushrooms. And some cared not to sing but would sit
down in their rooms and stay there pensive.like and some saw in a vision
that some wild beast was eating them, others saw in a vision that they were

taken captives in war, others saw in a vision that they were to be rich,
others saw in a vision that they were to own many slaves, others saw in a
vision that they were to commit adultery and that their heads were to be
bashed in therefore, others saw in a vision that they were to steal something-all the disastrous happenings that are wont to happen, these they saw in
visions--then
when the drunkenness of the mushrooms passed, they spoke
with one another about the visions they had seen."
Professor Roger Helm, the distinguished French mycologist, a co-worker
with the Wassons in these investigations, succeeded in cultivating these mushrooms and has confirmed the fact that indeed these fungi do possess the
properties first reported 400 years ago. Dr. Roll Singer of the National
University of Tacum5n, Argentina, has also contributed to the taxonomic
identification of these species.
Dr. Singer's mycological investigations as well as those of others working
with him have identified and classified six species in the genus Psilocybe
obtained in Mexico which have been verified clinically as possessing these
properties.
R. Gordon Wasson, Roger Heim and their associates with the cooperation
of the Sandoz Laboratory scientists, the same brilliant chemists who synthesized lysergic acid and reported in extenso on its remarkable properties in
1947, extracted psilocybin, an indole substance, from these mushrooms and
have made it available for clinical investigation, la' 14,_2.2a
During the past year and a half we have been privileged to repeat some of
the clinical observations made originally by Johnson in 1938 and then more
recently by the Wassons, Heim, and their co-workers, Roll Singer, Alexander
Smith, Stein and their associates with the fruiting bodies of several of these
species.
Psilocybin in 10 rog. doses is an hallucinogen with psychopharmaeological
properties grossly similar to those of LSD-25. Within 10 to 15 minutes following the ingestion of psilocybin the subjects first report a subjective experience which can be interpreted variously. It is a sense of feeling different, with
the conviction that some unusual experience is imminent. In conducive circumstances this can be provocative of considerable anxiety akin to that described
as the fear of death or dissolution. There is a change of mood, usually to one
of elation even in the face of anxiety. Increased acuity of hearing, paresthesia,
and visual distortion accompany this. Changes in the visual sphere predominate. There is a profound distortion of distance, size, shape, depth, and color.
The form and content of the distortion appear to be influenced by visual
stimuli so that with eyes open geometric forms move and coalesce and give
rise to illusory phenomena and misidentification
based on misperception. With
eyes closed there is a deliriously kaleidoscopic variation of remarkably
colored hallucinations. Characteristically
these change at a rapid rate so that
it is ditfcult to fix the focus of attention upon any one. The colors are intensely
saturated so that they seem to possess an intrinsic luminescence. The body
image is altered in a corresponding fashion; there is a sense of floating

weightlessness at one time while at another there is a feeling of profound

leaden heaviness. The Body image is changed so that extremities or other
Body parts seem foreign or detached. With eyes open, after 30 to 45 minutes,
there appears to be a dissociation of figure and background so that objects
appear to stand alone in space, possessed of these remarkable colors and significantly linmed By an aura which gives an awesome halo effect to it. The
sense of the passage of time is altered too. Inasmuch as proprioeeptive and
tactile cues are altered, movements of extremities seem to be fantastically

'

prolonged. Gait and station alterations lead to disorientation which at times

produces vertigo with nausea. There is the paradox of fatigue and exhilaration,
overwhelming sleepiness and great stimulation and alertness. This makes concentration exceedingly dit;ficult and orderly sequential thinking impossible.
Even very simple intellectual tasks are burdensome chores. Recent memory
is impaired to the point that functionally effective recall is practically preeluded. The setting in which the experience occurs and the basic make-up of
the subjects are most significant determinants of the content of the experience.
This is reminiscent of the more common one reported following the ingestion of LSD-25 and the administration
of bufotenin, obtained from the West
Indian narcotic snuff, cohaba. Indeed, psilocybin is similar chemically to
bufotenin and its congener serotonin, 5-hydroxytryptamine,
which has been
indicted by some as being of critical importance in the Brain function.
Alice in Wonderland 7 after an amazingly literal account of phenomena
which she aptly described as "curioser and eurioser," also ate of a mysterious
mushroom.
Initially she had what sounds like hypnagogie hallucinations:
a white rabbit
consulted his watch and in pursuit of him she fell down an enormous hole.
After these bizarre proprioceptive experiences, she reports somesthetic distortions, lilliputian hallucinations and fantastic alterations in body image.
She encountered a hookah smoking caterpillar who sagely advised her that
if she were to eat the mushroom, she would grow both taller and shorter.
When she nibbled the right Bit, the next moment she felt a violent blow underneath her chin. It had struck her feet. Thereafter eating the other side, she
became mountainous.

For those who have sampled of these mushrooms or the hallucinogenic

substance contained in them, Alice's experience has an uncanny and a
familiar ring.
There is a final aspect of the discussion which is beautifully illustrated in
a fresco to which the eminent British mycologist, Ramsbottom, has called
attention. It is of Eve and the Tree of Knowledge and appears in a church
in Plaincouralt in southern France. Attention has been called to the position
of Eve's hands as well as the resemblance of the tree of knowledge to the
genus Amanita. Ramsbottom adds wryly that the position of Eve's hands
portrays more accurately the response to mushroom-induced
colic than they
signify the beatific acquisition of learning. I can attest that gastrointestinal
discomfort and nausea seem to be an integral part of this ecstatic experience.

2OO
In the church of St. Savin in Pmtou, France, there is another primitive
painting entitled "God Creating the World." If one grants a degree of license
to the artist, is it too much to speculate that the curious tree to the left of God
which has been dismissed heretofore
cratic,'' is again, in fact the fruiting
While the myocophiles among you
I suspect that the myocophobic will

as merely being "schematically idiosynbody, the carpospore, of a mushroom?

may be prepared to swallow this whole,
gulp at this.

Shelley observed that: "Every human mind has peculiar images which
reside in the inner caves of thought." We have taken a Puck-like journey into
some of these caves. Puck was, you recall, deemed by Shakespeare "a merry
wanderer of the night." He was pictured in an old woodcut holding a candle
surrounded by a mystical fairy-ring of Chthonian mushroom folk in anthropomorphized form. They have his Dionysian appearance; his cloven hoofs and
even the warlock's broom he carries make it obvious that all these mythological
strands are in fact harmonies of a theme basic to all human behavior.
Dionysian and Bacchic revelry, totemism, veneration of plants and animals;
strange and yet uncannily familiar art are but different expressions of the same
experience
"...

ad ora ad ora

"m'insegnavate
"...

hourly

come
teaching

ruomo

s'eterna

us how man

....

makes

"
himself

(Inferno

immortal

....

"

XV, 84-85.)

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(amanita

(third