The Mushroom of Language - H. Munn

\
Hallucinogens
and
Shamanism
Edited by
MICHAEL J HARNER
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

London Oxford New York
Acknowledgments
Banisteriopsis caaPi, p. 2. Lloydia, courtesy L: E . Smith
Banisteriopsis caapi and Peyote, pp. 3 and 60 . Courtesy R. E. Schultes, Bo
tanical Museum of Harvard University
Jivaro Shaman, pp. 18 and 19. Photographs by Michael Harner
Campa Shaman, p. 42. Courtesy Gerald Weiss
Deadly Nightshade, p. 12.6. Edith G. Wheelwright, The Physick Garden,
1934. New York Public Library
Henbane, Mandrake, Thorn Apple, pp. 12.6 and 127. Pierandrea Matioli,
Commentaries on the Six Books of Dioscorides, 1563 . Reproduced from
Joseph Wood Krutch, Herbal, 1965. Courtesy G . P. Putnam's Sons
Departure for the Sabat, p. 136. Queverdo, engraved by Maleuvre. New York
Public Library
Hexenkiiche, p. 137. Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna
Witches on a Pitchfork, p. 142. Ulrich Molitor, De IAniis et phitonicus
mulierihus. New York Public Library
Cocina des las brujas, p. 143. Mas-Art Reference Bureau
Sketches on pages 161, 170-71, collected by Michael Harner
Sketches on pages 186-87, collected by Claudio Naranjo
Sketch of a boa constrictor, p. 170. The Jivaro: People of the Sacred Water
falls, by Michael J. Harner, © 1972 by Michael J. Harner. Reproduced by
permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Copyright ©- 1973 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 72-92292
printing. last digit: IO 9 8 7
Printed in the United States of America
7
The Mushrooms of Language

Henry Munn
The Mazatec Indians eat the mushrooms only at night in absolute

darkness. 1 It is their belief that if you eat them in the daylight you
will go mad. The depths of the night are recognized as the time
most conducive to visionary insights into the obscur(ties, the mys
teries, the perplexities of existence. Usually several members of
a family eat the mushrooms together: it is not uncommon for a
father, mother, children, uncles, and aunts to all participate in
these transformations of the mind that elevate consciolJsness onto
a higher plane. The kinship relation is thus the basis of the tran
scendental subjectivity that Husserl said is intersubjectivity. The
mushrooms themselves are eaten in pairs, a couple representing
1. The Mazatec Indians, who have a long tradition of using the mushrooms,
inhabit a range of mountains called the Sierra Mazateca in the northeastern comer
of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. The shamans in this essay are all natives of the
town of Huautla de Jimenez. Properly speaking they are Huautecans; but since the
language they speak has been called Mazatec and they have been referred to in
the previous anthropological literature as Mazatecs, I have retained that name,
though strictly speaking, Mazatecs are the inhabitants of the village of Mazatlan
in th e same mountains.
HENRY MUNN has investigated the use of hallucinogenic plants among the Conibo
Indians of eastern Peru and the Mazatec Indians of the mountains of Oaxaca,
Mexico. Although not a professional anthropologist, he has resided for extended
periods of time among the Mazatecs and is married to the niece of the .s haman
and shamaness referred to in this essay.
Psilocybe mexicana Heim. One of the most widely used psychotropic mush
rooms of the Mazatec Indians of Oaxaca, Mexico.
man and woman that symbolizes the dual principle of procreation

and creation. Then they sit together in' their inner light, dream
and realize and converse with each other, presences seated there
together, their bodies immaterialized by the blackness, voices from
without their communality.
In a general sense, for everyone present the purpose of the
session is a therapeutic catharsis. The chemicals of transformation,
of revelation that open the circuits of light, vision, and communi
cation, called by us mind-manifesting, were known to the Ameri
can Ind{ans as medicines: the means given to men to know and to
heal, to see and to say the truth. Among the Mazatecs, many,
one time or another during their lives, have eaten the mushrooms,
whether to cure themselves of an ailment or to resolve a problem;
but it is not everyone who has a predilection for such extreme and
arduous experiences of the creative imagination or who would
want to repeat such journeys into the strange, unknown depths
of the brain very frequently: those who do are the shamar.s, the
88] IN CULTURES UNDERGOING WESTERNIZATION
masters, whose vocation it is to eat the mushrooms because they

are the men of the spirit, the men of language, the men of wisdom.
They are individuals recognized by their people to be expert in
such psychological adventures, and when the others eat the mush
rooms they always call to be with them, as a guide, one of those
who is considered to be particularly acquainted with these modali
ties of the spirit. The medicine man presides over the session,
for just as the Mazatec family is paternal and authoritarian,
the liberating experience unfolds in the authoritarian context of
a situation in which, rather than being allowed to speak or encour
aged to express themselves, everyone is enjoined to keep silent and
listen while the shaman speaks for each of those who are present.
As one of the early Spanish chroniclers of the New World said:
"They pay a sorcerer who eats them [the mushrooms] and tells
them what they have taught him . He does so by means of a
rhythmic chant in full voice."
The Mazatecs say that the mushrooms speak. If you ask a sha
man where his imagery comes from, he is likely to reply: I didn't
say it, the mushrooms did. No mushroom speaks, that is a primi
tive anthropomorphization of the natural, only man speaks, but he
who eats these mushrooms, if he is a man of language, becomes en
dowed with an inspired capacity to speak. The shamans who eat
them, their function is to speak, they are the speakers who chant
and sing the truth, they are the oral poets of their people, the doc
tors of the word, they who tell what is wrong and how to remedy
it, the seers and oracles, the ones possessed by the voice. "It is not
I who speak," said Heraclitus, "it is the logos." Language is an
ecstatic activity of signification. Intoxicated by the mushrooms,
the fluency, the ease, the aptness of expression one becomes capa
ble of are such that one is astounded by the words that iss,ue forth
from the contact of the intention of articulation with the matter of
experience. At times it is as if one were being told what to say, for
the words leap to mind, one after another, of themselves without
having to be searched for: a phenomenon similar to the automatic
dictation of the surrealists except that here the flow of conscious
ness, rather than \being disconnected, tends to be coherent: a ra
tional enunciation' of meanings. Message fields of communication
with the world, others, and one's self are disclosed by the mush
rooms. The spontaneity they liberate is not only perceptual, but
linguistic, the spontaneity of speech, of fervent, lucid discourse, of
tht logos in activity. For the shaman, it is as if existence were utter
ing itself through him. From the beginning, on~e what they have
eaten has modified their consciousness, they begin to speak and at
the end of each phrase they say tzo-"says" in their language-like
a rhythmic punctuation of the said. Says, says, says. It is said. I say.
\\1ho says? \Ve say, man says, language says, being and existence
say.2
Cross-legged on the floor in the darkness of huts, close to the
fire, breathing the incense of copal, the shaman sits with the fur
rowed brow and the marked mouth of speech. Chanting his words,
clapping his hands, rocking to and fro, he speaks in the night of
chirping crickets. \\1ha t is said is more concrete than ephemeral
phantasmagoric lights : words are materializations of conscious
ness; language is a privileged vehicle of our relation to reality. Let
us go looking for the tracks of the spirit, the shamans 'say. Let us
go to the cornfield looking for the tracks of the spirits' feet in the
warm ground. So then let us go walking ourselves along the path
in search of significance, following the words of two discourses
enregistered like tracks on magnetic tapes, then translated from
the native tonal language, to discover and explicitate what is said
by an Indian medicine man and medicine woman during such
ecstatic experiences of the human voice speaking with rhythmic
force the realities of life and society.
The short, stout, elderly woman with her laughing moon face,
dressed in a huipil, the long dress, embroidered with flowers and
birds, of the Mazatec women, a dark shawl wrapped around her
shoulders, her gray hair parted down the middle and drawn into
two pigtails, golden crescents hanging from her ears, bent forward
from where she knelt on the earthen floor of the hut and held a
2. The inspiration produced l>Y the mushrooms is very much like that described by
Nietzsche in Ecce Homo. Since the statement of Rimbaud, "I is another," spontane
ous language, speaking or writing as if from dictation (to use the common expression
for an activity very dIfficult to describe in its truth) has been of paramount interest to
philosophers and poets. Says the Mexican, Octavio Paz, in an essay on Breton, "The
inspired one, the lllan who in truth speaks, does not say anything that is his: from his
mouth speaks language." Octavio Paz, "Andre Breton 0 La Busqueda del Comienzo,"
Corrienie Alterna (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1967), p. 53.
handful of mushrooms in the fragrant, purifying smoke of copal

rising from the glowing coals of the fire, to bless them: known to
the ancient Meso-Americans as the Flesh of God, called by her
people the Blood of Christ. Through their miraculous mountains
of light and rain, the Indians say that Christ once walked-it is
a transformation of the legend of Quetzalcoatl-and from whe~e
dropped his blood, the essence of his life, from there the holy
mushrooms grew, the awakeners of the spirit, the food of the lumi
nous one. Flesh of the world. Flesh of language. In the beginning
was the word and the word became flesh. In the beginning there
was flesh and the flesh became linguistic. Food of intuition. Food
of wisdom. She ate them, munched them up, swallowed them
and burped; rubbed ground-up tobacco along her wrists and fore
arms as a tonic for the body; extinguished the candle; and sat
waiting in the darkness where the incense rose from the embers
like glowing white mist. Then after a while came the enlighten
ment and the enlivenment and all at once, out of the silence, the
woman began to speak, to chant, to pray, to sing, to utter her
existence: 3
My Cod, you who are the master of the whole world, what
we want is to search for and encounter from where comes sick
ness, from where comes pain and affliction. We are the ones
who speak and cure and use medicine. So without mishap, with
out difficulty, lift us into the heights and exalt us.
From the beginning, the problem is to discover what the sick
ness is the sick one is suffering from and prognosticate the remedy.
Medicine woman, she eats the mushrooms to see into the spirit of
the sick, to disclose the hidden, to intuit how to resolve the un
solved: for an experience of revelations. The transformation of
her everyday self is transcendental and gives her the power to
move in the two relevant spheres of transcendence in order to
3. The shamanistic discourses studied in this essay, were tape· recorded. I am
indebted for the translations to a bilingual woman of Huautla, Mrs. Eloina Estrada
de Gonzalez, who listened to the recordings and told me, phrase by phrase, in
Spanish, what the shaman and shamaness were saying in their native language. As
far as I know, the WQrds of neither of these oral poets have hitherto been pub
lished. They are Mrs. Irene Pineda de Figueroa and Mr. Roman Estrada. The com
plete text of each discourse takes up ninety-two pages. For the purposes of this
essay, I have merely selected the most representative passages.
The Mushrooms of Language [91
achieve understanding: that of the other consciousness where the

symptoms of illness can be discerned; and that of the divine, the
source of the events in the world. Together wi~h visionary empa
thy, her principal means of realization is articulation, discourse,
as if by saying she will say the answer and announce the truth .
It is necessary to look and think in her spirit where it hurts .
I must think and search in your presence where your glory is,
My Father, who art the Master of the World. Where does this
sickness come from? Was it a whirlwind or bad air that fell in
the door or in the doorway? So are we going to search and to
ask, from the head to the feet, what the matter is .. Let's go
searching for the tracks of her feet to encounter the sickness
that she is suffering from . Animals in her heart? Let's go search
ing for the tracks of her feet, the tracks of. her nails. That it be
alleviated and healed where it hurts. Wh~t are we going to do
to get rid of this sickness?
. For the Mazatecs, the psychedelic experience produced by

the mushrooms is inseparably associated with the cure of illness.
The idea of malady should be understood to mean not only physi
cal illness, but mental troubles and ethical problems. It is when
something is wrong that the mushrooms are eaten. If there is noth
ing the matter with you there is no reason to eat them . Until re
cent times, the mushrooms were the only medicine the Indians
had recourse to in times of sickness. Their medicinal value is by
no means merely magical, but chemicaL According to the Indians,
syphilis, cancer, and epilepsy have been alleviated by their use;
tumors cured. They have empirically been found by the Indians to
be particularly effective for the treatment of stomach disorders
and irritations of the skin. The woman whose words we are listen
ing to, like many, discovered her shamanistic vocation when she
was cured by the mushrooms of an illness: after the death of her
husband she broke out all over with pimples; she was given the
mushrooms to see whether they would "help" her and the malady
disappeared. Since then she has eaten them on her own and given
them to others.
If someone is sick, the medicine man is called. The treatment
he employs is chemical and spiritual. Unlike most shamanistic
methods, the Mazatec shaman actually gives medicine to his
patients: by means of the mushrooms he administers to them

physiologically, at the same time as he alters their consciousness.
It is probably for psychosomatic complaints and psychological
troubles that the liberation of spontaneous activity provoked by
the mushrooms is most remedial: given to the depressed, they
awaken a catharsis of the spirit; to those with problems, a vision
of their existential way. If he hash't come to the conclusion that
the illness is incurable, the medicine man repeats the therapeutic
sessions three times at intervals. He also works over the sick, for
his intoxicated condition of intense, vibrant energy gives him a
strength to heal that he exercises by massage and suction.
His most important function, however, is to speak for the sick
one. The Mazatec sharr.ans eat the mushrooms that liberate the
fountains of language to be able to speak beautifully and with elo
quence so that their words, spoken for the sick one and those pres
ent, will arrive and be heard -in the spirit world from which comes
benediction or grief. The function of the speaker, nevertheless, is
much more than simply to implore. The shaman has a conception
of poesis 4 in its original sense as an action: words themselves are
medicine. To enunciate and give meaning to the events and situa
tions of existence is life giving in itself.
"The psychoanalyst listens, whereas the shaman speaks," points
out Levi-Strauss:
When a transference is established, the patient puts words into

the mouth of the psychoanalyst by attributing to him alleged
feelings and intentions; in the incantation, on the contrary, the
shaman speaks for his patient. He questions her and puts into
her mouth answers that correspond to the interpretation of her
condition. A pre-requisite role-that of listener for the psycho
analyst and of orator for the shaman-establishes a direct rela
4, ", , , the Greek word which signifies poetry was employed by the writer of
an alchemical papyrus to designate the operation of 'transmutation' itself, What
a ray of light! One 'knows that the word 'poetry' comes from the Greek verb which
signifies 'make.' But that does not designate an ordinary fabrication except for those
who reduce it to verbal nonsense, For those who have conserved the sense of the
poetic mystery, poetr~ is a sacred action, That is to say, one which exceeds the
ordinary level of human action, Like alchemy, its intention is to associate itself
with the mystery of the 'primordial creation' , , ," Michel Carrouges , Andre Breton
et les donnees fondamentales du surrealisme (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1950),
tionship with the patient's conscious and an indirect relationship

with his unconscious. This is the function of the incantation
proper. The shaman provides the sick woman with a language
by means of which unexpressed and otherWise inexpressible
psychic states can be immediately expressed. And it is the tran
sition to this verbal expression-at the same time making it
possible to undergo in an ordered and intelligible form a real
experience that would other,wise be chaotic and inexpressible
which induces the release of the physiological process, that is,
the reorganization, in a favorable direction, of the process to
which the sick woman is subjected.5
These remarks of the French anthropologist become particu
larly relevant to Mazatec shamanistic practice when one con
siders that the effect of the mushrooms, used to make one capable
of curing, is to inspire the shaman with language and transform
him into an oracle.
"That come all the saints, that come all the virgins," chants the
medicine woman in her sing-song voice, invoking the beneficent
forces of the universe, calling to her the goddesses of fertility, the
virgins: fertile ones because they have not been sowed and are
fresh for the seed of men to beget children in their wombs.
The Virgin of Conception and the Virgin of the Nativity.
That Christ come and the Holy Spirit. Fifty-three Saints. Fifty
three Saintesses. That they sit down at her side, on her mat, on
her bed, to free her from sickness.
The wife of the man in whose house she was speaking was preg
nant and throughout the session of creation, from the midst of
genesis, her language as spontaneous as her being that has begun
to vibrate, she concerns herself with the emergence of life, with
the birth of an existence into that everyday social world that her
developing discourse expresses:
With the baby that is going to come there is no suffering, says.
It's a matter of a moment, there isn't going to be any suffer
ing, says. From one moment to another it will fall into the
world, says. 'From one moment to another, we are going to
5. Claude Levi-Strauss, "The Effectiveness of Symbols," Structural Anthropology

(Doubleday Anchor, 1967), pp. 193-95.
save her from her woe, says. That her innocent creature come
without mishap, says. Her ·elf. That is what it is called when it
is still in the womb of its mother. From one moment to another,
that her innocent creature, her elf come, says.
"We are going to search and question," she says, "untie and
disentangle."She is on a journey, for there is distanciation and go
ing there, somewhere, without her even moving from the spot
where she sits and speaks. Her consciousness is roaming through
out existential space. Sibyl, seer, and oracle, she is on the track of
significance and the pulsation of her being is like the rhythm of
walking.
"Let us go searching for the path, the tracks of her feet, the
tracks of her nails. From the right side to the ,left side, let us look."
To arrive at the truth, to solve problems and to act with wisdom, it
is necessary to find the way in which to go. Meaning is intentional.
Possibilities are paths to be chosen between. For the Indian
woman, footprints are images of meaning, traces of a going to and
from, sedimented clues of significance to be looked for from one
, side to the other and followed to where they lead: indicators of
directionality; signs of existence. The hunt for meaning is a
temporal one, carried into the past and projected into the future;
what happened? she inquires, what will happen? leaving behind
for what is ahead go the footprints between departure and arrival:
manifestations of human, existential ecstasis. And the method of
looking, from the right side to the left side, is the articulation of
now this intuition, fact, feeling or wish, now that, the intention of
speaking bringing to light meanings whose associations and fur
ther elucidations are like the discovery of a path where the con
tents to be uttered are tracks to be followed into the unexplored,
the unknown and unsaid into which she adventures by language,
the seeker of significance, the questioner of significance, the articu
lator of significance : the significance of existence that signifies with
signs by the action of speaking the experience of existence.
"Woman of medicines and curer, who walks with her appear
ance and her soul," sings the woman, bending down to the ground
and straightening up, rocking back and forth as she chants, divid
ing the truth in time to her words: emitter of signs . "She is the
woman of the remedy and the medicine. She is the woman who
speaks. The woman who puts everything together. Doctor woman.
Woman of words. Wise woman of problems."
She is not speaking, most of the time, for any particular person,
but for everyone: all who are afflicted, troubled, Dnhappy, puzzled
by the predicaments of their condition. Now, in -the course of her
discourse, uttering realities, not hallucinations, talking of existence
in a communal world where the we is more frequent than the I,
she comes to a more general sickness and aggravation than physi
cal illness: the economic condition of poverty in which her people
live.
"Let us go to the cornfield searching for the tracks of the feet,
for her poorness and humility. That gold and silver come," she
prays. "Why are we poor? Why are we humble in this town of
Huautla?" That is the paradox: why in the midst of such great
natural wealth as their fertile, plentiful mountains where water
falls cascade through the green foliage of leaves and ferns, should
they be miserable from poverty, she wants to know. The daily diet
of the Indians consists of black beans and tortillas covered with
red chili sauce; only infrequently, at festivals, do they eat meat.
White spots caused by malnutrition splotch their red faces. Babies
are often sick. It is wealth she pleads for to solve the problem of
want.
The mushrooms, which grow only during the season of torren
tial rains, awaken the forces of creation and produce an experience
of spiritual abundance, of an astonishing, inexhaustible constitu
tion of forms that identifies them with fertility and makes them
a mediation,a means of communion, of communication between
man and the natural world of which they are the metaphysical
flesh. The theme of the shamaness, mother and grandmother,
woman of fertility, bending over as she chants and gathering the
earth to her as if she were collecting with her hands the harvest
of her experience, is that of giving birth, is that of growth. Agri
culturalists, they are people of close family interrelationships and
many children: the clusters of neolithic thatch-roofed houses on
the mountain peaks are of extended family groups. The woman's
world is that of the household, her concern is for her children and
all the children of her people ..
"All the family, the babies and the children, that happiness
come to them, that they grow and mature without anything be
falling them. Free them from all classes of sickness that there are
here in the earth. Without complaint and with good will," she
says, "so will come well-being, will come gold. Then we will have
food. Our beans, our gourds, our coffee, that is what we want.
That come a good harvest. That come richness, that come well
being for all of our children. All my shoots, my children, my
seeds," she sings.
But the world of her children is not to be her world, nor that
of their grandfathers . Their indigenous society is being trans
formed by the forces of history. Until only recently, isolated from
the modern world, the Indians lived in their mountains as people
lived in the neolithic. There were only paths and they walked
everywhere they went.. Trains- of burros carried out the principal
crop-coffee-to the markets in the plain. Now roads have been
built, blasted out of rock and constructed along the edges of the
mountains over precipices, to connect the community with the ·
society beyond. The children are people of opposites: just as they
speak two languages, Mazatec and Spanish, they live between
two times: the timeless, cyclical time of recurrence of the People
of the Deer and the time of progress, change and development of
modern Mexico. In her discourse, no stereotyped rite or traditional
ceremony with prescribed words and actions, speaking of every
thing, of the ancient and the modern, of what is happening to
her people, the woman of problems, peering into the future, rec
ognizes the inevitable process of transition, of disintegration and
integration, that confronts her children: the younger generation
destined to live the crisis and make the leap from the past into the
future. For them it is necessary to learn to read and to write and
to speak the language of this new world and in order to advance
themselves, to be educated and gain knowledge, contained in
books, radically different from the traditions of their own society
whose language is oral and unwritten, whose implements are the
hoe, the axe, and the machete.
Also a book is needed, says. Good book. Book of good read
ing in Spanish, says . In Spanish. All your children, your crea
tures, that their thought and their custom change, says. For me
:51,
there is no time. Without difficulty, let us go, says. With

tenderness. With freshness. With sweetness. With good ,will.
"Don't leave us in darkness or blind us," she ~egs the origins of
light, for in these supernatural modalities of consciousness there
are dangers on every hand of aberration and disturbance. "Let us
go along the good path. The path of the veins of our blood. The
path of the Master of the World. Let us go In a path of happiness."
TIle existential way, the conduct of one's life,is an idea to which
she returns again and again. The paths she mentions are the moral,
physical, mental, emotional qualities typical of the experience
of animated conscious activity from the midst of which spring her
words: goodness, vitality, reason, transcendence, and joy. Seated
On the ground in the darkness, seeing with her eyes closed, her
thought travels within along the branching arteries of the blood
stream and without across the fields of existence. There is a very
definite physiological quality about the mushroom experience
which leads the Indians to say that by a kind of visceral introspec
tion they teach one the workings of the organism: it is as if the
system were projected before one into a vision of the heart, the
liver, lungs, genitals, and stomach.
In the course of the medicine woman's discourse, it is under
standable that she should, from astonishment, from gratitude,
from the knowledge of experience, say something about the mush
rooms that have provoked her condition of inspiration. In a sense,
to speak of "the mushroom experience" i~ a reification as absurd as
the anthropomorphization of the mushrooms when it is said that
they talk: the mushrooms are merely the means, in interaction
with the organism, the nervous system, and the brain, of produc
ing an experience grounded in the ontological-existential possibili
ties of the human, irreducible to the properties of a mushroom.
The experience is psychological and social. What is spoken of by
the shamaness is her communal world; even the visions of her
imagination must have their origin in the context of her existence
and the myths of her culture. The subject of another society will
have other visions and express a different content in his discourse.
It would seem probable, however, that apart from emotional sim
ilarities, colored illuminations, and the purely abstract patterns of
a universal conscious activity, between the experiences of individu

als with differing social inherences, the common characteristic
would be discourse, for judging by their effect the chemical con
stituents of the mushrooms have some connection with the lin
guistic centers of the brain. "So says the teacher of words," says
the woman, "so says the teacher of matters." It is paradoxical that
the rediscovery of such chemicals should have related their effects
to madness and pejoratively called them drugs, when the shamans
who used them spoke of them as medicines and said from their
experience that the metamorphosis they produced put one into
communication with the spirit. It is precisely the value of studying
the use in so-called primitive societies of such chemicals that the
way be found beyond the superficial to a more essential under
standing of phenomena which we, with our limited conception of
the rational, have too quickly, perhaps mistakenly, termed irra
tional, instead of comprehending that such experiences are revela
tions of a primordial existential activity, of "a power of significa
tion, a birth of sense or a savage sense." 6 What are we confronted
with by the shamanistic discourse of the mushroom eaters? A
modality of reason in which the logos of existence enunciates itself,
or by the delirium and incoherence of derangement?
"They are doing nothing but talk," says the medicine woman,
"those who say that these matters are matters of the past. They
are doing nothing but talk, the people who call them crazy mush
rooms." They claim to have knowledge of what they do not have
any experience of; consequently their contentions are nonsense:
nothing but expressions of the conventionality the mushrooms
explode by their disclosure of the extraordinary; mere chatter if
it weren't for the fact that the omnipotent They forms the force
of repression which, by legislation and the implementation of au
thority, has come to denominate infractions of the law and the
code of health, the means of liberation that once were called
medicines. In a time of pills and shots, of scientific medicine, the
wise woman is saying, the use of the mushrooms is not an ana
6. "In a sense, as\ Husserl says, philosophy consists of the restitution of a power
of signification, a birth of sense or a savage sense, an expression of experience by
experience which particularly clarifies the special domain of language." Maurice Mer
leau-Ponty, Le Visible et [,invisible (Paris : Editions Gallimard, 1964) .
The Mushrooms of Lang1.U1ge [99
chronistic and obsolete vestige of magical practices: their power

to awaken consciousness and cure existential ills is not any the less
relevant now than it was in the past. She insists ~hat it is ignorance
of our dimension of mystery, of the wellsprings of meaning, to
think that their effect is insanity.
"Good and happiness," she says, naming the emotions of her .
activized, perceptualized being. "They are not crazy mushrooms.
They are a remedy, says. A remedy for decent people. For the for
eigners," she says, speaking of us, wayfarers from advanced in
dustrial society, who had begun to arrive in the high plazas of her
people to experiment with the psychedelic mushrooms that grew
in the mountains of the Mazatecs. She has an inkling of the
truth, that what we look for is a cure of our alienations, to be put
back in touch, by violent means if necessary, with that original,
creative self that has been alienated from us by our middle-class
families, education, and corporate world of employment.
"There in their land, it is taken account of, that there is some
thing in these mushrooms, that they are good, of use," she says.
"The doctor that is here in our earth. The plant that grows in this
place. 'With this we are going to put together, we are going to
alleviate ourselves . It is our remedy. He that suffers from pain and
illness, with this it is possible to alleviate him. They aren't called
mushrooms. They are called prayer. They are called well-being.
They are called wisdom. They are there with the Virgin, Our
Mother, the Nativity." The Indians do not call the mushrooms of
light mushrooms, they call them the holy ones. For the shamaness,
the experience they produce is synonymous with language, with
communication, ori. behalf of her people, with the supernatural
forces of the universe; with plenitude and joyfulness; with percep
tion, insight, and knowledge. It is as if one were born again; there
fore their patroness is the Goddess of Birth, the Goddess of
Creation.
With prayers we will get rid of it all. With the pra yers of
the ancients. \Ve will clean ourselves, we will purify ourselves
with clear water, we will wash our intestines where th ey are
infected. That sicknesses of the body be gotten rid of. Sicknesses
of th e atmosphere. Bad air. That they be gotten rid of, that
they be removed. That the wind carry th em away. For this is
s
the doctor. For this is the plant. For this is the sorcerer of the
light of day. For this is the remedy. For this is the medicine
woman, the woman doctor who resolves all classes of problems
in order to rid us of them with her prayers. We are going with
well-being, without difficulty, to implore, to beg, to supplicate.
Well-being for all tne babies and the creatures. We are going
to beg, to implore for them, to beseech for their well-being and
their studies, that they live, that they grow, that they sprout.
That freshness come, tenderness, shoots, joy. That we be blessed,
all of us.
She goes on talking and talking, non-stop; there are lulls when
her voice slows down, fades out almost to a whisper; then come
rushes of inspiration, moments of intense speech; she yawns great
yawns, laughs with jubilation, claps her hands in time to her in
terminable singsong; but after the setting out, the heights of ecstasy
are reached, the intoxication begins to ebb away, and she sounds
the theme of going back to normal, everyday conscious existence
again after this excursion into the beyond, of rejoining the ego she
has transcended:
We are going to return without mishap, along a fresh path, a
good path, a path of good air; in a path through the cornfield,
in a path through the stubble, without complaint or any diffi
culty, we return without mishap . Already the cock has begun
to crow. Rich cock that reminds us that we live in this life.
The day that dawns is that of a new world in which there is n6
longer any need to walk to where you go. "With tenderness and
freshness, let us go in a plane, in a machine, in a car. Let us go
from one side to another, searching for the tracks of the fists, the
tracks of the feet, the tracks of the nails."
It seemed that she had been speaking for eight hours. The sec
onds of time were expanded, not from boredom, but from the in
tensity of the lived experience. In terms of the temporality of
clocks, she had only been speaking for four hours when she con
cluded with a vision of the transcendence that had become imma
nent and had now withdrawn from her. "There is the flesh of
God. There is the flesh of Jesus Christ. There with the Virgin."
The most frequently repeated words of the woman are freshness
and tenderness; those of the shaman, whose discourse we will now
consider, are fear and terror : what One might call the emotional
poles of these experiences. There is an illness that the Mazatecs
speak of that they name fright. We say traum~tism. They walk
through their mountains along their arduous paths on the different
levels of being, climbing and descending, in the sunlight and
through the clouds; all around .there are grottos and abysses, mys
terious groves, places where live the laa, the little people, mis
chievous dwarfs and gnomes. Rivers and wells are inhabited by
spirits with powers of enchantment. At night in these altitudes,
winds whirl up from the depths, rush out of the distance like
monsters, and pass, tearing everything in their path with their
fierce claws. Phantoms appear in the mists. There are persons
with the evil eye. Existence in the world and with others is
treacherous, perilous: unexpectedly something may happen to
you and that event, unless it is exorcised, can mark you for life.
The Indians say following the beliefs of their ancestors, the
Siberians, that the soul is sometimes frightened from one, the spirit
goes, you are alienated from yourself or possessed by another: you
lose yourself. It is for this neurosis that the shamans, the question
ers of enigmas, are the great doctors and the mushrooms the med
icine. It is the task of the Mazatec shaman to look for the ex
travagated spirit, find it, bring it back, and reintegrate the per
sonality of the sick one. If necessary, he pays the powers that have
appropriated the spirit by burying cacao, beans of exchange,
wrapped in the bark cloth of offerings, at the place of fright which
he has divined by vision. Tl1e mushrooms, the shamans say, show:
you see, in the sense that you realize, it is disclosed to you. "Bring
her spirit, her soul," implores the medicine woman to whom we
have just been listening. "Let her spirit come back from where it
. got lost, from where it stayed, from where it was left behind, from
wherever it is that her spirit is wandering lost."
With just such a traumatic experience, began the shamanistic
vocation of the man we will now study. In his late fifties, he has
been eating the mushrooms for nine years. Why did he begin?
"I began to eat them because I was sick," he said when asked. 1
7. The story of how he began his shamanistic career, together with the informa
tion to follow about fright , payments to the mountains, and practices in relation
to the hunt, are quotations from an interview with Mr. Roman Estrada whom I
No matter how much the doctors treated me, I didn't get well .
I went to the Latin American Hospital. I went to Cordoba as
well. I went to Mexico. I went to Tehuacan and wasn't allevi
ated. Only with the mushrooms was I cured. I had to eat the
mushrooms three times and the man from San Lucas, who
gave them to me, proposed his work as a medicine man to me,
telling me: now you are going to receive my study. I asked him
why he thought I was going to receive it when I didn't want
to learn anything about his wisdom, I only wanted to get better
and be ~ured of my illness. Then he answered me: now it is no
longer you who command. It is already the middle of the night.
I am going to leave you a table with ground tobacco on it and
a cross underneath it so that you learn this work. Tell me which
of these things you ~hoose and like the best of all, he said,
when everything was ready. Which of these works do you want?
I answered that I didn't want what he offered me. Here you
don't give the orders, he replied; I am he who is going to say
whether you receive this work or not because I am he who is
going to give you your diploma in the presence of God. Then
I heard the voice of my father. He had been dead for forty
three years when he spoke to me the first time that I ate the
mushrooms: This work that is being given to you, he said, I
am he who tells you to accept it. Whether you can see me or
not, I don't know. I couldn't imagine from where this voice
came that was speaking to me. Then it was that the shaman of
San Lucas told me that the voice I was hearing was that of
my father. The sickness from which I was suffering was alleviated
by eating the mushrooms. So I told the old man, I am disposed
to receive what it is that you offer me, but L want to learn
everything. Then it was that he taught me how to suck through
space with a hollow tube of cane. To suck through space means
that you who are seated there, I can draw the sickness out of
you by suction from a distance.
What had begun as a physical illness, appendicitis, became a
traumatic neurosis. The doctors wheeled him into an operating
room-he who had never been in a hospital in his life-and suf
focated him with an ether mask. And he gave up the ghost while
questioned through \an interpreter: the conversation was tape-recorded and then
translated from the native Tanguage by Mrs. Eloina Estrada de Gonzalez, the niece
of the shaman, who served as questioner in the interview itself.
they cut the appendix out of him. When he came to, he lay fright
ened and depressed, without any will to live, he'd had enough .
Instead of recuperating; he lay like a dead man \\(ith his cyes wide
open, not saying anything to anyone, what was the use, his life had
been a failure, he had never become the important man he had
aspired all his life to be, now it was too late; his life was over and
he had done nothing that his children might remember with re
spect and awe. The doctors couldn't help him because there was
nothing wrong with him physically; contrary to what he believed,
he had survived the operation; the slash into his stomach had been
sewn up and had healed; nevertheless, he remained apathetic and
unresponsive, for he had been terrified by death and his spirit had
flown away like a bird or a fleet-footed deer. He needed someone to
go out and hunt it for him, to bring back his spirit and resuscitate
him.
The medicine man, from the nearby village of San Lucas, whom
he called to him when the modern doctors failed to cure him of
the strange malady he suffered from, was renowned throughout
the mountains as a great shaman, a diviner of destiny. The short,
slight, wizened old man was 105 years old. He gave to his patient,
who was suffering from depression, the mushrooms of vitality,
and the therapy worked. He vividly relived the operation in his
imagination. According to him, the mushrooms cut him open,
arranged his insides, and sewed him up again. One of the reasons
he hadn't recovered was his conviction that materialistic medicine
was incapable of really curIng since it was divorced from all coop
eration with the spirits and dependence upon the supernatural.
In his imagination, the mushrooms performed another surgical
intervention and corrected the mistakes of the profane doctor
which he considered responsible for his lingering lethargy. He
went through the whole process in his mind. It was as if he were
operating upon himself, undoing what had been done to him, and
doing it over again himself. The trauma was exorcised. By intensely
en~isioning with a heightened, expanded consciousness what had
happened to him under anesthesia, he assumed at last the frighten
ing event he had previously been unable to integrate into his ex
perience. His physiological cure was completed psychologically;
he was finally healed by virtue of the assimilative, creative powers
104] IN CULTURES · UNDERGOING WESTERNIZATION
of the imagination . The dead man came back to life, he wanted to

live because he felt once again that he was alive and had the force
to go on living: once exhausted and despondent, he was now in
vigorated and rejuvenated.
The cure is successful because not only is his spirit awakened,
but he is offered another future: a new profession that is a com
pensation for his humble one as a storekeeper. The ancient wise
man, on the brink of death, wants to transmit to the man in his
prime, his knowledge. What he encounters is resistance. The other
doesn't want to assume the vocation of shaman, he only wants to .
be cured, without realizing that the cure is inseparable from the
acceptance of the vocation which will release him from the repres
sion of his creative forces that has caused the neurosis with which
he is afflicted. It is no longer you who command, he is told, for
his impulse to die is stronger than his desire to live; therefore the
counterforce, if it is to be effective, cannot be his : it must be the
will of the other transferred to him. You are too far gone to have
any say in the matter, the medicine man tells him, it is already the
middle of the night. By negating the will of his patient, he arouses
it and prepares him to accept what is being suggested to him.
He shows him the table, the tobacco, the cross: signs of the
shaman's work. The table is an altar at which to officiate. When
the Mazatecs eat the mushrooms they speak of the sessions as
masses. The shaman, even though a secular figure unordained by
the Church, aSSumes a sacerdotal role as the leader of these cere
monies. In a similar way, for the Indians each father of a family
is the religious priest of his household. The tobacco, San Pedro,
is believed to have powerful magical and remedial values. The
cross indicates a crossing of the ways, an intersection of existential
paths, a change, as well as being the religious symbol of crucifixion
and resurrection. The shaman tells him to choose. Still the man
refuses. You don't give the orders, says the medicine man, intent
upon evoking the patient's other self in order to bring him back
to life, the I who is another. Whether you want to or not, you are
going to receive your diploma, he says, to incite him with the
prospect of aw~rd and reputation. Living in an oral culture with
out writing, where the acquisition of skills is traditional, handed
down from father to son, mother to daughter, rather th~m con
tained in books, for the Mazatecs wisdom is gained during the
experiences produced by the mushrooms : they are experiences of
vision and communication that impart knowledge.
Now he is spoken to . The inner voice is suddenly audible. He
hears the call. He is told to accept the vocation of medicine man
that he has hitherto adamantly refused . He cannot recognize this
voice as his own, it must be another's; and the shaman, intent
upon giving him a new destiny, sure of the talent he has divined,
interprets for him from what region of himself springs the com
mand he has heard. It is your father who is telling you to accept
this work. A characteristic of such transcendental experiences is
that family relationships, in the · nexus of which personality is
formed, become present to one with intense vividness. His super
ego, in conjunction with the liberation of his vitality, has spoken
to him and his resistance is liquidated; he decides to live and ac
cepts the new vocation around which his personality is reinte- .
grated: he becomes an adept of the dimensions of consciousness
where live the spirits; a speaker of mighty words.
In his house, we entered a room with bare concrete walls and
a high roof of corrugated iron. His wife, wrapped in shawls, was
sitting on a mat. His children were there; his family had assembled
to eat the mushrooms with their father; one or two were given to
the children of ten and twelve. The window was closed and with
the door shut, the room was sealed off from the outside world;
nobody would be permitted to leave untiJ the effect of what they
had eaten had passed away as a precaution against the peril of
derangement. He was a short, bO urly man, dressed in a reefer jacket
over a tee shirt, old brown bell-bottomed pants down to" his short
feet, an empty cartridge belt around his waist. In daily life, he is
the owner of a little store stocked meagerly with canned goods,
boxes of crackers, beer, soda, candy, bread, and soap. He sits be
hind the counter throughout the day looking out upon the muddy
street of the town where dogs prowl in the garbage between the
legs of the passers-by. From time to time he pours out a shot glass
of cane liquor for a customer. He himself neither smokes nor
drinks . He is a hunter in whom the instincts of his people survive
from the time when they were chasers of game as well as agricul
turalists: inhabitants of the Land of the Deer.
Now it is night-time and he prepares to exercise his shamanistic

function. His great-grandfather was one of the counselors of the
town and a medicine man. With the advent of modern medicine
and the invasion of the foreigners in search of mushrooms, the
shamanistic customs of the Mazatecs have almost completely
vanished. He himself no longer believes many of the beliefs of his
ancestors, but as one of the last oral poets of his people, he con
sciously keeps alive their traditions. "How good it is," he says,
"to talk as the ancients did." He hardly speaks Spanish and is
fluent only in his native language. Spreading out the mushrooms
in front of him, he selected and handed a bunch of them to each
of those present after blessing them in the smoke of the copal.
Once they had been eaten, the lights were extinguished and every
one sat in silence. Then he began to speak, seated in a chair from
which he got up to dance about, whirling and scuffling as he spoke
in the darkness . It was pouring, the rain thundering on the roof of
corrugated iron. There were claps of thunder. F1ashes of lightning
at the window.
Christ, Our Lord, illuminate me with the light of day, illumi
nate my mind. Christ, Our Lord, don't leave me in darkness or
blind me, you who know how to give the light of day, you who
illuminate the night and give the light. So did the Holy
Trinity that made and put together the world of Christ, Our
Lord, illuminated the Moon, says; illuminated the Big Star, says;
illuminated the Cross Star, says; illuminated the Hook Star, says;
illuminated the Sandal, says; illuminated the Horse, says.
One who eats the mushroom sinks into somnolence during the
transition from one modality of consciousness to another, into a
deep absorption, a reverie. Gradually colors begin to well up be
hind closed eyes. Consciousness becomes consciousness of irradia
tions and effulgences, of a flux of light patterns forming and un
forming, of electric currents beaming forth from within the brain.
At this initial moment of awakenment, experiencing the dawn of
light in the midst of the night, the shaman evokes the illumina
tion of the constellations at the genesis of the world. Mythopoeti
cal descriptionS'--of the creation of the world are constant themes
of these creative experiences. From the beginning, the vision his
words create is cosmological. Subjective phenomena are given cor
relates in the elemental, natural world. One is not inside, but out
side.
"This old hawk. This white hawk that Saint John the Evangelist
holds. That whistles in the dawn. Whistles in the light of day.
Whistles over the water." Wings spread wide, the annunciatory
bird, image of ascent, circles in the sky of the morning, drifting on
the wind of the spirit above the primordial terrain the speaker has
begun to explore and delineate, his breathing, his inhalations and
exhalations, as amplified as his expanded being: an explanation for
the sudden expulsion of air, the whooshes and high-pitched, eerie
whistles of the shamans on their transcendental flights into the
beyond.
"Straight path, says. Path of the dawn, says. Path of the light
of day, says." Through the fields of being there are many direc
tions in which to go, existences are different ways to live life. The
idea of paths, that appears so frequently in the shamanistic dis
courses of the Mazatecs comes from the fact that these originary
experiences are creative of intentions. To be in movement, going
a
along path, is an expressive vision of the ecstatic condition. The
path the speaker is following is that which leads directly to his
destination, to the accomplishment of his purpose; the path of the
beginning disclosed by the rising sun at the time of setting out; the
path of truth, of clarity, of that revealed in its being there by the
light of day.
"Where the tenderness of San Francisco Huehuetlan is, says.
Where the Holy Virgin of San Lucas is, says. Where San Fran
cisco Tecoatl is, says. San Geronimo Tecoatl, says." He begins to
name the towns of his mountainous environment, to call the land
scape into being by language and transform the real into signs. It
is no imaginary world of fantasy he is creating, as those one has
become accustomed to hearing of from the accounts of dreamers
under the effects of such psychoactive chemicals, fabled lands of
nostalgia, palaces, and jewelled perspectives, but the real world
in which he lives and works transfigured by his visionary journey
and its linguistic expression into a surreal realm where the physical
and the mental fuse to produce the glow of an enigmatic signifi
cance.
"I am he who speaks with the father mountain. I am he who
10
speaks with danger, I am going to sweep in the mountains of fear,

in the mountains of nerves." The other I announces itself, the
transcendental ego, the I of the voice, the I of force in communi
cation with force. His existence intensified, he posits himself by
his assertions: I am he who. The simultaneous reference to him
self in the first and third person as subject and object indicates
the impersonal personality of his utterances, uttered by him and
by the phenomena themselves that express themselves through
him. Arrogantly he affirms his shamanistic function as the medi
ator between man and the powers that determine his fate; he is
the one who converses with all connoted by father: power, au
thority, and origin. He is the one who is on familiar terms with the
sources of fright. The conception of existence manifested by his
words is one of peril, anxiety, and terror: experiences of which he
has become knowledgeable by virtue of his own traumas, his life
as a hunter, and his adventures into the weird, secret regions of the
psyche. Where there is foreboding and trembling, the medicine
man tranquilizes by exorcising the causes of disturbance. His work
lies among the nerves, not in the underworld, but on the heights,
places of as much anguish as the depths, where the elation of ele
vation is accompanied by the fear of falling into the void of
chasms. This is perhaps why, throughout Central and South
America, the conception of illness in the jungle areas is the para
noic one of witchcraft, whereas in the mountainous areas is preva
lent the vertiginous idea of fright and loss of self.s
"There in Bell Mountain, says. There is the dirty fright. There
is the garbage, says. There is the claw, says. There is the terror,
says. Where the day is, says, Where the clown is, says. The Lord
Clown, says." In vision he sees, throughout his being he senses
a repulsive place of filth and contamination, a stinking site of
pustulence, of rottenness and nausea, where lies a claw that might
have dealt with cruel viciousness an infected wound. His words,
8. "Finally, the illness can be the consequence of a loss of the soul, gone
astray or carried off by a spirit or a revenant. This conception, widely spread
throughout the region of the Andes and the Gran Chaco, appears rare in tropical
America." Alfred Mettaux, "Le Chaman des Guyane et de I'Amazonie," Religions et
magies indiennes d'Amerique du Sud (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1967).
The Mushrooms of Langtutge [109
emanating evil, seem to insinuate some horrible deed that left an

aftermath of guilt. The sinister hovers in the air. Where? Where
the clown is, he says. Concern and carefreen~ss are linked to
gether, dread and laughter, from which we catch an insight into
the meaning of the matter: during such experiences of liberation,
there are likely to be encoUl)tered disturbances of consciousness
by conscience, when reflection comes into conflict with spon
taneity, guilt with innocence. It is as if the self drew back in
fright from its ebullience, from its forgetfulness, unable to endure
its carefreeness for long without anxiety. But the exuberant well
ing up of forms is ceaseless, in this flux, this fountain, this ener
getic springing forth of life, the past is left behind for the future,
all is renewed. Beyond good and evil is the playfulness of the crea
tive spirit incarnated by the clown, character of fortuity, the laugh
ing one with his gay science.
Thirteen superior whirlwinds. Thirteen whirlwinds of the at

mosphere. Thirteen clowns, says. Thirteer:i personalities, says.
Thirteen white lights, says. Thirteen mountains of points, says.
Thirteen old hawks, says. Thirteen white hawks, says. Thirteen
personalities, says . Thirteen mountains, says. Thirteen clowns,
says. Thirteen peaks, says. Thirteen stars of the morning.
The enumeration, by what seems to be a process of free associa

tion, of whirlwinds, clowns, personalities, lights, mountains, birds,
and stars, is an expression of his ecstatic inventiveness. Whether
he says what he sees or sees what he says, his activized conscious
ness is a whirlwind of imaginings and colored lights. Why always
thirteen? Because twelve is many, but an even number, whereas
thirteen is too many, an exaggeration, and signifies a multitude.
What's more, he probably likes the sound of the word thirteen.
The mushroom session of language creates language, creates the
words for phenomena without name. The white lights that some
times appear in the sky at night, nobody knows what to call them.
The mind activated by the mushrooms, from out of the center of
the mystery, from the profoundest semantic sources of the human,
invents a word to designate them by. The ancient wise men, to
describe the kaleidoscopic illuminations of their shamanistic
11OJ
nights, drew an analogy between the inside and the outside and
formed a word that related the spectrum colors created by the
sunshine in the spray of waterfalls and the mists of the morning
to their conscious experiences of ecstatic enlightenment: these are
the whirlwinds he speaks of, gyrating configurations of iridescent
lights that appear to him as he speaks, turned round and round
and round himself by the turbulent winds of the spirit. Clowns
are frequent personae of his discourse, the impish mushrooms
come to life, embodiments of merriment, tumbling figments of
the spontaneous performing incredible acrobatic feats, funny
imaginations of joyfulness. Personalities are more serious. Others.
Society. The faces of the people he knows appear to him, then
disappear to be succeeded by the apparition of more people. The
plurality of incarnated consciousnesses becomes present to him.
Multitude. His is an elemental world where cruel, predatory birds
wheel in the sky; where the star of the morning shines in the
firmament. Outside the dark room where he is speaking, the
mountains stand all around in the night.
I am he who speaks with the dangerous mountain, says. I am

. he who speaks with the Mountain of Ridges, says. I am he who
speaks with the Father, says. I am he who speaks with the
Mother, says. Where plays the spirit of the day, says. Cold
Water Mountain, says. Big River Mountain, says. Mountain of
Harvest and Richness, says. Where the terror of the day is, says.
Where is the way of the dawn, the way of the day, says .
It is significant that though the psychedelic experience produced

by the mushrooms is of heightened perceptivity, the I say is of
privileged importance to the I see. The utter darkness of the room,
sealed off from the outside, makes any direct perception of the
world impossible: the condition of interiorization for its visionary
rebirth in images. In such darkness, to open the eyes is the same
as leaving them closed. The blackness is alive with impalpable
designs in the miraculous air. Even the appearances of the other
presences, out of modesty, are protected by the obscurity from the
too penetrating, ~evealing gaze of transcendental perception. Freed
from the factuality of the given, the constitutive activity of con
sciousness produces visions. It is this aspect of such experiences,
to the exclusion of all others, that has led them to be called hallu
cinogenic, without any attempt having been made to distinguish
fantasy from intuition. The Mazatec shamaQ, however, instead
of keeping silent and dreaming, as one would expect him to do
if the experience were merely imaginative, talks. There are times
when in the midst of his ecstasy, whistling and whirling about, he
exclaims: "Look at how beautiful we're seeing!"-astonished by
the illuminations and patterns he is perceiving-"Look at how
beautiful we're seeing. Look at how many good things of God
there are. What beautiful colors I see." Nevertheless, the I am
the one who speaks enunciates an action and a function, weighted
with an importance and efficacity which I am the one who sees,
hardly more than an interjection of amazement, totally lacks.
"I am he who speaks. I am he who speaks. I am he who speaks
with the mountains, with the largest mountains. Speaks with the
mountains, says. Speaks with the stones, says. Speaks with the at
mosphere, says. Speaks with the spirit of the day." For the Maza
tecs, the mountains are where the powers are, their summits,
their ranges, radiating with electricity in the night, their peaks and
their edges oscillating on the horizons of lightning. To speak with
is to be in contact with, in communication with, in conversation
with the animate spirit of the inanimate, with the material and
the immaterial. To speak with is to be spoken to . By a conversion
of his being, the shaman has become a transmitter and receiver
of messages.
"I am the dry lightning, says. I am the lightning of the comet,
says. I am the dangerous lightning, says. J am the big lightning,
says. I am the lightning of rocky places, says. I am the light of the
dawn, the light of day, says." He identifies himself with the ele
ments, with the crackle of electricity; superhuman and elemental
himself, his words flash from him like lightning. Sparks fly be
tween the synaptic connections of the nerves. He is illuminated
with light. fIe is luminous. He is force, light, and rhythmic, dy
namic speech. '
The world created by the woman's words, articulating her expe
rience, was a feminine, maternal, domestic one; the masculine dis
course of the shaman evokes the natural, ontological world. "She
is beseeching for you, this poor and humble woman," said the
shamaness. "Woman of huipile, says. Simple woman, says.
Woman who doesn't have anything, says." The man, conscious
of his virility, announces: "I am he who lightnings forth."
"Where the dirty gulch is, says. Where the dangerous gulch is,
says. Where the big gulch is, says. Where the fear and the terror
are, says. Where runs the muddy water, says. Where runs the cold
water, says." It is a landscape of ravines, mountains, and streams,
he charts with his words, of physical qualities with emotional
values: a terrain of being in its variations. He evokes the creation,
the genesis of all things out of the times of mist; he praises, mar
vels, wonders at the world. "God the Holy Spirit, as he made and
put together the world. Made great lakes. Made mountains. Look
at the light of day. Look at how many animals. Look at the dawn.
Look at space. Great earths. Earth of God the Holy Spirit." He
whistles. The soul was originally conceived of as breath. The wind,
he says, is passing through the trees of the forest. His spirit goes
flying from place to place throughout the territory of ,his existence,
situating the various locations of the world by naming them, call
ing them into being by visiting them with his words: where is,
he says, where is, to create the geography of his reality. I am,
where is. He unfolds the extensions of space around himself,
points out and makes present as if he were there himself. "Where
the blood of Christ is,says. Where the blood of the diviner is,
says. Where the terror and the fright of day are, says. Where the
superior lake is, says. Where the big lake is, says, There where
large birds fly, says. Where fly dangerous birds." The world is not
only paradisiacal in its being there, but frightening, with perils
lurking everywhere. "Mountains of great whirlwinds. Where is
the fountain of terror. Where is the fountain of fright." And the
different places are inhabited by presences, by indwelling spirits,
the gnomes, the little people. "Gnome of Cold Water, says.
Gnome of Clear Water, says. Gnome of Big River, says. Big
Gnome. Gnome of Burned Mountain. Gnome of the spirit of the
day. Gnome of TlocaIco Mountain. Gnome of the Marking Post.
White Gnome. Delicate Gnome."
The shaman, ~ays Alfred Metraux, is "an individual who, in
the interest of the community, sustains by profession an inter
mittent commerce with the spirits Or is possessed by them." 9
According to the classical conception, derived from the ecstatic
visionaries of Siberia, the shaman is a person who, by a change
of his everyday consciousness, enters the medphysical realms of
the transcendental in order to parley with the supernatural powers
and gain an understanding of the hidden reasons of events, of
sickness and all manner of difficulty. The Mazatec medicine
men are therefore shamans in every sense of the word: their means
of inspiration, of opening the circuits of communication between
themselves, others, the world, and the spirits, are the mushrooms
that disclose, by their psychoactive power, another modality of
conscious activity than the ordinary one. The mere eating of the
mushrooms, however, does not make a shaman. The Indians rec
ognize that it is not to everyone that they speak; instead there are
some who have a longing for awakenment, a disposition for ex
ploring the surrealistic dimensions of existence, a poet's need to
express themselves in a higher language than the average language
of everyday life: for them in a very particular sense the mush
rooms are the medicine of their genius. Nonetheless, there is a
very definite idea among the Mazatecs of what the medicine
man does, and since the mushrooms are his means of converting
himself into the shamanistic condition, the essential character
istics of this particular variety of psychedelic experience must be
manifested by his activities.
"I am he who puts together," says the medicine man to define
his shamanistic function:
he who speaks, he who searches, says. I am he who looks for
the spirit of the day, says. I search where there is fright and
terror. I am he who fixes, he who cures the person that is sick.
Herbal medicine. Remedy of the spirit. Remedy of the at
mosphere of the day, says. I am he who resolves all, says. Truly
you are man enough to resolve the truth. You are he who puts
together and resolves. You are he who puts together the person
ality. You are he who speaks with the light of day. You are he
who speaks with terror.
9 . Ibid.
It is immediately obvious that a discrepancy exists between the
Indian conception of the mushrooms' effect and the ideas of
modern psychology: whereas in experimental research reports
they are said to produce depersonaliza tion, schizophrenia, and de
rangement, the Mazatec shaman, inspired by them, considers
himself endowed with the power of bringing together what is
separated: he can heal the divided personality by releasing the
springs of existence from repression to reveal the ecstatic life of
the integral self; and from disparate clues, by the sudden synthesis
of intuition, realize the solution to problems. The words with
which he states what his work is indicate a creative activity
neither outside of the realm of reason or out of contact with
reality. The center of convergent message fields, sensitive to the
meaning of all around him, he expresses and communicates, in
direct contact with others through speech, an articulator of the
unsaid who liberates by language and makes understood. His in
tuitions penetrate appearances to the essence of matters. Reality
reveals itself through him in words as if it had found a voice
to utter itself. The shaman is a signifier in pursuit of significance,
intent upon bringing forth the hidden, the obscure into the light
of day, the lucid one, intrepid enough to realize that the greatest
secrets lie in regions of danger. He is the doctor, not only of the
. body, but of the self, the one who inquires into the origins of
trauma, the interrogator of the familiar and mysterious. It is in
deed as if that which he has eaten, by virtue of the possibilities
it discovers to him, were of the spirit, for perception becomes
more acute, speech more fluent, and the consciousness of signifi
cance is quickened. The mushrooms are a remedy to which one
has recourse in order to resolve perplexities because the experience
is creative of intentions. The way forth from the problematic is
conceived of, the meaning of resolved. The shaman, he is the one
in communication with the light and with the darkness, who
knows of anxiety and how to dispel it: the man of truth, psychol
ogist of the troubled soul.
Where is the fear, says. Where is the terror, says. \l\1here
stayed the spirit of this child, says. I have to search for it, says.
I have to locate it, says. I have to detain it, says. I have to grab
it, says. I have to call it, says. I have to whistle for it in the
midst of terror, says. I have to whistle for it through the cu

mulus clouds. I have to whistle for it with the spirit of the
day.
Once more there appears the notion of alienation, the malady
of fright, the loss of the self. The task of the shaman, hunter of
extravagated spirits, is to reassociate the disassociated . He explains
his method himself in these words : .
Under the effect of the mushrooms, the lost spirit is whistled
for through space for the spirit is alienated, but by means of
the mushrooms one can call for it with a whistle. If the person
is frightened, the mushrooms know where his spirit is . They are
the ones who indicate and teach where the spirit is. Thereby
one can speak to it. The sick person then sees the place where
his spirit stayed. He feel s as if he were tied in that place. The
spirit is like a trapped butterfly. When it is whistled for it
arrives where one is calling it. When the spirit arrives in the
person, the sick one sighs and afterwards is cleaned.
It becomes evident from the words used to describe the condition
of fright-the spirit is said to have been left behind, to have
stayed somewhere, to be tied up, and as we will see later, to be
imprisoned-that just as in the etiology of the neuroses, the sick
ness is a fixation upon a traumatic past event which the indi
vidual is incapable of transcending and from which he must be
liberated to be cured. It is not by chance that the mushrooms,
which cause a flight of the spirit, should be considered the means
of chasing what has flown away. The shaman goes in search; by
empathic imagination, sometimes even' by dialogue with the dis
turbed one, he gains an insight into the reasons for the state of
shock, which allows him to make his invocations relevant to the
individual case. The patient, by the mnemonic power of the mush
rooms, freed from inhibitions and repressions, recalls the trau
matic event, surmounts the repetition syndrome that perpetuates
it by virtue of the ecstatic spontaneity that has been released from
him, suffers a catharsis, and is brought back to life, integrated
again.
Another method of regaining the lost spirit, used as well as
invocation, is to barter for it. Merchants, the Mazatecs con
ceive of all transactions in terms of commerce, of trading one
value for another. Throughout his discourse, the shaman, a store
keeper in daily life, · dreams of money, of richness, of freedom
from poverty. "Father Bank. Big Bank. \Vhere the light of day is.
Cordoba. Orizaba." He names the cities where the merchants of
Huautla · sell their principal commercial crop-caffee-in the
market. "Where the Superior Bank is, says. Where the Big Bank
is, says. Where the Good Bank is, says. vVhere there is money of
gold, says. Where there is money of silver, says . Where there are
big notes, says. Where the bank of gold is, says. Where the bank
of well-being is, says." It is not surprising that among such mer
can tile · people it should be considered possible to buy back the
lost spirit, to retrieve it in exchange for another value.
"Where the fright of the spirit is. Going to pay for it to the
spirit. Going to pay the day. Going to pay the mountains. Going
to pay . the corners." The shaman becomes a transcendental bar
gainer. He is told by the supernatural powers how much they
demand as a ransom for the spirit they have expropriated, then
he undertakes to transact the deal. He explains it himself in this
way:
Cacao is used to pay the mountain and to pay for the life of
the sick one. The Lord of the Mountain asks for a chicken. This
is an important matter because it is the Masters of the Mountains
who speak. · That is the belief of the ancients. The chicken is
the one who has to carry the cacao. Loaded with cacao it has to
go and leave the offering in the mountain. Once it is on the
mountain, seeing it loaded no one bothers to catch it because
already it belongs to the Masters of the Mountain where it is lost
forever. The cacao that it carries is money for the Master of the
Mountain. The bark paper is used to wrap the bundle and the
parrot feather that goes with it. The signification of the parrot
feather is that it is as if the parrot himself arrived on the moun
tain. It is he who arrives announcing with his songs the arrival
of the chicken loaded with cacao, the arrival of the money to
pay what was asked for, as if the liberty of a prisoner were being
paid for. It is as if an authority said to you, "This prisoner will
be set free for'<l fine of one hundred pesos and if it isn't paid,
he won't go free." The transaction probably has the psychological
The Mushrooms of Language [11 7
effect of assuaging anxiety with the assurance that the powers

angered by a transgression have been appeased.
As we have seen, though these shamanistic chants are creations
of language created by the individual creativity of the speakers,
the structure of the discourses, short phrases articulated in suc
cession terminated by the punctuation of the word says, tend
to be similar from person to person, determined to a large extent
by culture and tradition as is much of what is said. An instance
is the invocatory reiteration of names, a characteristic common to
all the Mazatec shamanistic sessions of speech. The names re
peated by the Indian medicine men, devout Catholics, are those
. of the Virgin and the saints. In ancient times, other divinities
must have been named, but without any doubt, to name and make
present has always played a role in such chants. "Holy Virgin of
the Sanctuary. Holy Virgin. Saint Bartholomew. Saint Christopher.
Saint Manuel. Holy Father. Saint Vincent. Saint Mark. Saint
. Manuel. Virgin Guadalupe, Queen of Mexico." To sing out the
holy names serves the function for the oral poet, like the stereo
typed phrases of Homeric song, of keeping the chant going during
the interludes of inspiration; at the same time, the rhythmic
enunciation is a telling over of identities, an expression of the
interpersonality of consciousness. To recall again the affirmation
of Husserl: Transcendental subjectivity is intersubjectivity. The
name is the word for the person. In the mind of the speaker one
identity after another becomes present, names call up people,
the vision of people calls up names. Instead of naming his own
acquaintances, which might occur in a desacralized discourse, the
shaman invokes the holy ones. The sacred nomenclature is a
sublimation of the nomenclature of family and social relation
ships.
It is now his everyday self, his wife and his family whom he
speaks about. "Our children are going to grow up and live. I see.
I see my wife, my little working woman. I love her. I speak to
her through space. I speak to her through the cumulus clouds.
I call to her spirit. Nothing will befall us." Man and woman,
the couple and their children, that is his theme now that love
for his family wells up in his heart.
Nothing can happen to us. We will go on living. We will go on
living in the company of my wife, of my people. We should not
make our wife irritable. We went to receive her before God, in
the sight of God, in the Sacred Sacrament, in sight of the altar.
There was a great mass, there was a mass of union. We were
able to respect each other forty-three days and therefore God
disposed that our children should be born and live. Because of
that our seeds bore fruit, our offspring grew, offspring and seed
that God Our Lord gave us.
He who speaks and says, perhaps it is rumored that the work
he is doing, this person, is great, that his ranch is large. He is
not presumptuous. He is a humble person . He is <l. laborious
person. He is a person of problems. He is a person who has at
ready loaned his service as an authority. He has realized him
self, his gifts are inherited, he is of important people: Justo
Pastor, Juan Nazareno'. He is of a great root, an important root.
Large trees, old trees. All our children will live, says. Will have
a good harvest. Will rear their animals . Well-being and pleasure
in their sugar cane, in their coffee groves. I will live much time
yet. I will become an old man with gray hair, I will continue
living with my offspring and with my people. My children will
have education and well-being. Education must be given to my
sons.
He says the changes through which he passes, the transforma

tions and permutations of his ecstatic consciousness in the course
of its temporalization-the sense of gamble, the risks, the mo
ments of fright, the presence of light and vigor. "It turns into
a game of chance, says. It turns into terror, says. It turns into
spirit, says."
He whistles and sings and dances about. "That which sounds
is a harp in the presence of God and the Angel of the Guard.
Plays space, plays the rocks, plays the mountains, plays the cor
ners, plays fear, plays terror, plays the day." He plays the facets
of the world as if they were musical instruments. Things and
emotions, at the contact of his singing and touch are magically
resolved into ringing vibrating tonalities, into music-music of
mountains and\ rocks, of space and fear. "Where sound the trees,
says. Where sound the rocks, says. Where sound baskets. Where
Language [119
sounds the spirit of the day." He is hearing the ringing and the
buzzing and the humming of his effervescent consciousness and
finding analogies for the, sounds he hears in t~e echo chambers
of his eardrums: the soughing of the wind through the trees, the
clinking of stones, the creaking of baskets. He whistles and sings.
His words issue forth from the melodic articulation of inarticu·
late sounds, from the physical movement of his rhythmic whirling
about and scufHing in the darkness. "How beautiful 1 sing," he
exclaims. "How beautiful 1 sing. How many good pleasures con
cedes to us the Lord of the World." He dances about working
himself up to a further pitch of exaltation. "How beautiful 1
dance. How beautiful 1 dance." Repetition is one of the aspects
of the discourse as it is of the pulsation of energy waves.
"This person is valiant," he says of himself. "He is of the
people of Huautla, he is a Huautecan . With great speed he calls
and whistles for the spirits among the mountains; whistles the
fright of the spirit." Then he flips out. He throws himself into
the shamanistic fit, his voice changes, becomes that of another,
rougher, more guttural, and beginning to speak in the speech of
San Lucas from where came his old master, a town in the midst
of the corn on a high windswept peak, he recalls his spiritual an
cestor, the ancient wise man who taught him the use of the
gnomic mushrooms. "He is a person of jars. He is of San Lucas.
A person of plates. He is a person of jars and bowls. He . is an
old one." San Lu~as is the place where all the black, unadorned,
neolithic pottery used throughout the region is made. Men go
from town to town carrying the jars, padded with ferns, on their
backs to sell them in the marketplaces of the mountain villages.
"Old man of pots, dishes, bowls. These are the people of the .
center. They speak with the mountains arrogantly. He is from
San Lucas . He speaks with the whirlwind, with the whirlwind
of the interior."
From what hehimself tells of this old shaman, appear vestiges
of the days when the shaman of the People of the Deer, inter
mediary between man, nature, and the divine was a thaumaturge
who presided over fertility and the hunt. "I had to visit the same
medicine man," he recounts, "when we went to the hunt. 1 had
1 20 1 IN CULTURES UNDERGOING WESTERNIZATION
to prepare for him an egg, an egg to be offered to the mountain.

It all depends on the value of the animal that one wants. It is
as if you were going to buy an animal," he said.
He is the one who says what one is to pay. He goes to leave
the egg. Afterwards the dogs go into the woods and begin to
work . It is necessary to rub tobacco on the crown of the dogs'
heads. But with the egg and twenty-five beans of cacao, the
master is sure that the deer is already bought. I have paid for
the game, says the true shaman. And every time we went to
hunt, we were therefore sure to encounter deer because a good
shaman· from San Lucas can transform a tree or a stone into
a deer once he has exchanged its value for it with the Lord of
the Mountain. We were sure to come upon deer because they
had been paid for.
"Here come the Huautecans. Here come the Huautecans."

Dancing about in the darkness, £lapping his coat against his sides
to imitate the bounding of a startled deer through the undeI:brush,
he, the hunter of spirits and of game, barking like the dogs closing
in around the cornered animal, tells a hunting story, talking
rapidly with intense excitement in the gruff voice of one from
San Lucas who sees from his vantage point the hunters of
Huautla in the distance:
Listen to how their dogs bark. It's an old dog. Here they come
by way of the Sad Mountain. They are bringing their kill. There
is barking in the mountain. Here they come. Listen to how their
arms sound . Already they have shot a colored deer. They pay
the mountains. TIley pay the corners. The deer was killed be
cause the Huautecans pay the price. They paid the spirit. Paid
the Bald Mountain. Paid the Hollow Mountain. Paid the Moun
tain of the Spirit of the Day. Paid fifty pesos. You can't do just
as you like. It is necessary to pay the White Gnome. The
Huautecans are like clowns. They are carrying the deer off along
the path. The rifles of the Huautecans are very fine. These
people are important people. They know what they are doing.
They know how to call the spirit . The Huautecans call their
dogs by blowing a horn. Already the dogs are coming close.
\
The story comes almost at the conclusion of his discourse. The
effect of the mushrooms lasts approximately six hours; usually .
it is impossible to sleep until dawn. In all such adventures, at the

end, comes the idea of a return from where it is one has gone,
the return to everyday consciousness. "I returl1 to collect these
holy children that served as a remedy," the shaman says, calling
back his spirits from their flight into the beyond in order to
become his ordinary self again. "Aged clowns. White clowns."
The mushrooms he calls sainted children and clowns, relating
them by his personifications to beings who are young and joyful,
playful, creative, and wise.
"The aurora of the dawn is coming and the light of day. In the
name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, by the sign of
the Holy Cross, free us Our Lord from our enemies and all evil.
Amen."
What began in the depths of the night with the illumination
of interior constellations in the spaces of consciousness ends with
the arrival of the daylight after a night of continuous, animated
speech. "I am he who speaks," says the Mazatec shaman.
I am he who speaks. I am he who speaks with the mountains.
I am he who speaks with the corners. I am the doctor. I am
the man of medicines. I am. I am he who cures. I am he who
speaks with the Lord of the World. I am happy. I speak with
the mountains. I am he who speaks with the mountains of
peaks. I am he who speaks with the Ba1d Mountain. I am the
remedy and the medicine man. I am the mushroom. I am the
fresh mushroom. I am the large mushroom. I am the fragrant
mushroom. I am the mushroom of the spirit.
The Mazatecs say that the mushrooms speak. Now the in
vestigators 10 from without should have listened better to the
Indian wise men who had experience of what they, white ones
of reason, had not. If the mushrooms are hallucinogenic, why
10. It is necessary to express one's debt to R. Gordon Wasson, whose writings,

the most authoritative work on the mushrooms, informed me of their existence and
t9ld me much about them. "We suspect," he wrote, "that, in its integral sense, the
creative power, the most serious quality distinctive of man and one of the clearest
participations in the Divine. . is in some sort connected with an area of the
spirit that the mushrooms are capable of opening." R. Gordon Wasson and Roger
Heim, Les Champignons hallllcinogenes du Mexiqllc (Paris: Museulll National
d'Histoire Naturelle, 1958). From my own experience, I have found that con·
tention to be particnlarly true.
do the Indians associate them with communication, with truth

and the enunciation of meaning? An hallucination is a false
perception, either visual or audible, that doe~ not have any re
lation at all to reality, a fantastical illusion or delusion: what
appears, but has no existence except in the mind. The vivid
dreams of the psychedelic experience suggested hallucinations:
such imaginations do occur in these visionary conditions, but they
are marginal, not essential phenomena of a general liberation of
the spontaneous, ecstatic, creative activity of conscious existence.
Hallucinations predominated in the experiences of the investi
gators because they were passive experimenters of the transform
ative effect of the mushrooms. The Indian shamans are not con
templative, they are workers who actively express themselves by
speaking, creators engaged in an endeavor of ontological, existen
tial disclosure. For them, the . shamanistic condition provoked by
the mushrooms is intuitionary, not hallucinatory. What one en
. visions has an ethical relation to reality, is indeed often the path
to be followed. To see is to realize, to understand. But even more
important than visions for the Mazatec shaman are words as
real as the realities of the real they utter. It is as if the mush
rooms revealed a primordial activity of signification, for once the
shaman has eaten them, he begins to speak and continues to
speak throughout the shamanistic session of ecstatic language.
The phenomenon most distinctive of the mushrooms' effect is the
inspired capacity to speak. Those who eat them are men of lan
guage, illuminated with the spirit, who call themselves the ones
who speak, those who say. The shaman, chanting in a melodic
singsong, saying says at the end of each phrase of saying, is in
communication with the origins of creation, the sources of the
voice, and the fountains of the word, related to reality from the
heart of his existential ecstasy by the active mediation of lan
guage: the articulation of meaning and experience. To call such
transcendental experiences of light, vision, and speech hallucina
tory is to deny that they are revelatory of reality. In the ancient
codices, the colored books, the figures sit, hieroglyphs of words,
holding the mushrooms of language in pairs in their hands: signs
of signification.

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\

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

tanical Museum of Harvard University

Jivaro Shaman, pp. 18 and 19. Photographs by Michael Harner

Campa Shaman, p. 42. Courtesy Gerald Weiss

Deadly Nightshade, p. 12.6. Edith G. Wheelwright, The Physick Garden,

1934. New York Public Library

Commentaries on the Six Books of Dioscorides, 1563 . Reproduced from

Joseph Wood Krutch, Herbal, 1965. Courtesy G . P. Putnam's Sons

Hexenkiiche, p. 137. Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna

Witches on a Pitchfork, p. 142. Ulrich Molitor, De IAniis et phitonicus

mulierihus. New York Public Library

Cocina des las brujas, p. 143. Mas-Art Reference Bureau

Sketches on pages 161, 170-71, collected by Michael Harner

Sketches on pages 186-87, collected by Claudio Naranjo

falls, by Michael J. Harner, © 1972 by Michael J. Harner. Reproduced by

permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc.

Copyright ©- 1973 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

The Mushrooms of Language

The Mazatec Indians eat the mushrooms only at night in absolute

man and woman that symbolizes the dual principle of procreation

masters, whose vocation it is to eat the mushrooms because they

handful of mushrooms in the fragrant, purifying smoke of copal

achieve understanding: that of the other consciousness where the

. For the Mazatecs, the psychedelic experience produced by

patients: by means of the mushrooms he administers to them

When a transference is established, the patient puts words into

tionship with the patient's conscious and an indirect relationship

5. Claude Levi-Strauss, "The Effectiveness of Symbols," Structural Anthropology

there is no time. Without difficulty, let us go, says. With

a universal conscious activity, between the experiences of individu­

chronistic and obsolete vestige of magical practices: their power

of the imagination . The dead man came back to life, he wanted to

Now it is night-time and he prepares to exercise his shamanistic

speaks with danger, I am going to sweep in the mountains of fear,

emanating evil, seem to insinuate some horrible deed that left an

Thirteen superior whirlwinds. Thirteen whirlwinds of the at­

The enumeration, by what seems to be a process of free associa­

I am he who speaks with the dangerous mountain, says. I am

It is significant that though the psychedelic experience produced

midst of terror, says. I have to whistle for it through the cu­

effect of assuaging anxiety with the assurance that the powers

He says the changes through which he passes, the transforma­

to prepare for him an egg, an egg to be offered to the mountain.

"Here come the Huautecans. Here come the Huautecans."

it is impossible to sleep until dawn. In all such adventures, at the

10. It is necessary to express one's debt to R. Gordon Wasson, whose writings,

do the Indians associate them with communication, with truth

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a universal conscious activity, between the experiences of individu

Thirteen superior whirlwinds. Thirteen whirlwinds of the at

The enumeration, by what seems to be a process of free associa

midst of terror, says. I have to whistle for it through the cu

He says the changes through which he passes, the transforma