The Solar Phallus Man was actually a patient named Emile Schwyzer, diagnosed with what was then called paranoid dementia, who had been committed to the Burghölzli Clinic in Zürich in 1901 after an attempted suicide. Schwyzer had been in and out of other institutions for decades. As Jung told it, he had begun treating this patient in 1906. Schwyzer reported a particularly striking hallucination in which the sun had an upright tail — “similar to an erect penis,” Jung adds parenthetically — which moved back and forth when Schwyzer moved his head with his eyes half shut, and this motion caused the wind to blow. This is how, Schwyzer explained, he could control the weather.

Carl Gustav Jung in 1906

This hallucination, Jung says, remained unintelligible for a long time, until he became aware of remarkably similar symbolism in a Mithraic liturgy, part of the Greek Magical Papyri, that had not been published until 1910. Here the ministering wind was said to originate from an αυλός — a pipe or tube — hanging from the disc of the sun, which could be seen by looking from east to west. Schwyzer was a store clerk with no higher education, unlikely to have read or heard about such an esoteric symbol. Even more, he had described it to Jung before it had even been published. Where could it have come from if not from a collective unconscious?

Now this is a hell of a story, and we can understand why Jung enjoyed telling it. But the story has a number of problems.

Let’s start with the dates. Schwyzer’s vision had in fact been conveyed not to Jung but rather to Jung’s twenty-four-year-old student Johann Honegger, who had interviewed Schwyzer over two months in 1910, while Jung was in the United States, and three years after Jung had stopped treating the patient. Honegger presented the vision of the solar tail or penis — along with a great number of other apparently mythic visions and beliefs he had been told by Schwyzer — at the second International Psychoanalytic Congress in Nuremberg in March 1910. Apparently Schwyzer had told none of this material to Jung. Honegger unexpectedly committed suicide with a morphine overdose in March 1911.

Jung published the solar penis story in Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido in 1911. In that text, Jung credited the discovery of the hallucination to Honegger, and he cited two sources for the Mithraic liturgy it purportedly matched — a 1907 English translation and a 1910 German translation. In fact, as Jung subsequently discovered, the 1910 German translation was the second edition of a work that had first been published in 1903, and upon which the English translation had been based. After the original citation, Jung stopped referring to the 1907 English translation, and he never referred to the 1903 edition of the German translation at all.

In Jung’s 1952 English-language revision of Wandlungen, now entitled Symbols of Transformation, Honegger disappears altogether. Here it is Jung who “once came across the following hallucination in a sczhizophrenic patient.” As late as 1959, in an interview with John Freeman on the television program Face to Face, Jung insisted that he had heard the solar penis vision in 1906 and that the Mithraic liturgy was first published four years later in 1910. In this version, Schwyzer had grabbed Jung by the lapels and pointed at the sun, saying it had a penis. If Jung moved his head from side to side, he would see. It was this penis that caused the wind.

Klinik Burghölzli

It is true that, if Schwyzer was committed to Burghölzli in 1901, then he clearly would have had limited access even to the German translation of 1903. On the other hand, as Richard Noll has pointed out, the image of a solar penis had already been discussed in Friedrich Creuzer’s massive compendium of ancient symbolism and mythology, the third edition of which was published in 1841, and in Johann Bachofen’s 1861 text on matriarchy. Both of these books had a profound and enduring effect on German popular culture. And there is no way of telling what Schwyzer may have heard from other Burghölzli patients, many of whom were in fact well educated, and at least some of whom had interests, not uncommon among educated German speakers at the time, in ancient religions and symbolism.

But the disappearance of Honegger masks a more serious methodological issue. Shamdasani has recovered the text of Honegger’s 1910 presentation of the Schwyzer material, along with another unpublished article on the same case. Since Jung had by that time ceased his clinical practice at Burghölzli to pursue his mythological research, he had given Honegger the task of retrieving mythic material from psychotic patients at the clinic.

Honegger seems to have pursued this task with a vengeance. Schwyzer, Shamdasani notes, turned out to be “a veritable textbook of mythology.” He told Honegger that the deity was originally feminine, that the dead became stars in heaven, that the earth was flat and surrounded by infinite seas, and that the sun had a penis — or perhaps a tail — that caused the wind. Honegger could not have been more pleased.

And there is good reason to believe that these were far from spontaneous utterances. They were, rather, the result of Honegger’s probing. How do you know that the seed body was always feminine? Honegger asked. Can you also make wind? How do you do it, when you want to make rain? Schwyzer, undoubtedly bored and lonely, would have been only too happy to oblige this interested and sympathetic listener. Indeed, given Jung’s admiration for the work of Creuzer, it is not unlikely that his student Honegger had himself read the book and its section on the solar penis.

Chains, straitjacket, cell belt, and covered bath tub formerly used to restrain patients at Burghölzli Clinic

Carl Meier, a psychiatrist who had known Schwyzer personally and had reviewed his entire medical file, said that he had never succeeded in finding out the function of the solar penis in Schwyzer’s hallucinations. In fact, he said, by the time he knew him, Schwyzer no longer even remembered it.

Putting all of this aside, the problem is that Schwyzer’s hallucination in fact provides no evidence at all for Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious.

The most important thing about the unconscious is that it is… well, not conscious. How then do we become conscious of — forgive the spatial metaphor — its contents? For Freud, there is no such thing as nonverbal thinking; the unconscious is accessed through words. For Jung, on the other hand, the unconscious is accessed through images. These images appear to us in dreams, fantasy, visions, imagination, and hallucinations. These images are how the unconscious communicates with us.

Again contrary to Freudian psychoanalysis, Jung maintained that, underneath this unconscious, there lay another unconscious, which he called first the phylogenetic and then the collective unconscious. As Shamdasani has demonstrated, the idea of such a phylogenetic or racial unconscious was congruent with so many elements of late-nineteenth-century European thought that it could, he says, almost have been regarded as a commonplace.

For Jung, this collective unconscious is not filled with images. It is filled with archetypes. Jung likened these archetypes to Kantian categories — that is, to a priori conditions for possible experiences. Jung proposed extending the Kantian idea of the logical categories of reason to the production of fantasy; the archetypes, Jung says, are “categories of the imagination.”

Archetypes thus are form without content; they are possibilities of images. Although they are themselves without content, they are often, on the basis of the images whose form they provide, named after mythological figures — the Hera archetype, for example, or the Wise Old Man archetype; or they may be named for some abstract theme, such as the archetype of engulfment or the archetype of rebirth.

We can distinguish archetypal images from ordinary images because archetypal images appear to us on a wave of emotion; they possess salience and depth; they are numinous and mysterious. It is these same archetypal images that appear as motifs in myths, legends, fairy tales, literature, and art around the world, arising out of the same set of archetypes in the shared collective unconscious. As Joseph Campbell famously put it, dreams are private myths, and myths are public dreams.

Jung in 1910, standing outside Burghölzli Clinic

There is thus a distinction between an archetype and an archetypal image, a distinction that Jungians — and even Jung himself — have often failed to maintain consistently. There is no access to the archetypes of the collective unconscious; they are transcendental and unrepresentable. All we have are archetypal images, which conform to the a priori conditions imposed by their archetypes. The collective unconscious is a negative borderline concept, just as unknowable as the Kantian thing in itself. We know of the archetypes only through a form of transcendental deduction from numinous images.

Here is an example of how this works out in practice. In psychoanalysis, a dream narrative is analyzed. The patient tells the story of the dream, free associates from that material, relates the dream content to events in childhood. In Jungian analysis, dream images are amplified. The patient — often with active input from the therapist — explores the meaning of the images, not only personally but also historically and transculturally in myths, fairy tales, art, and literature. Amplification is thus a hermeneutic process — a quest for meaning that leads the patient beyond the personal to the wider human and cultural context of the dream material.

So important has this process been that it has had an institutional effect — the development of analytical psychology clubs in urban centers, which are essentially libraries of scholarly resources on myth and religion, where analysts and selected patients can jointly pursue amplification of the patient’s dream and fantasy images.

But it is when such amplifications are used — like the hallucination of Solar Phallus Man — to argue for the existence and nature of the collective unconscious that serious methodological and conceptual issues arise.

Methodologically, it is virtually impossible to find uncontaminated material. The clients of Jungian therapists, including those of Jung himself, have been largely self-selected. They enter Jungian analysis because they have read about its interest in myth and dream, and because this reflects their own often long-standing interests. Jungian analysts, too, actively participate in image amplification. That is why Jung considered the Solar Phallus Man so important. It was, he thought, a hallucination that could not conceivably be accounted for by cryptomnesia or forgotten outside sources.

And the idea that numinous images are somehow shaped by transcendental a priori archetypes raises a whole series of troubling conceptual issues.

The claim that the same image has arisen in people far separated in space and time — a Burghölzli patient in 1910, say, and a Mithraic writer fifteen centuries earlier — is meaningless without criteria for deciding when two images are the same and when they are not. Schwyzer’s sun is variously described as having either a tail or a penis pointing up; the Mithraic liturgy speaks of the sun as having a pipe or tube hanging down. There is no way to know whether this matters.

Jung in 1959, on Face to Face, telling the story of the Solar Phallus Man

Moreover, there is clearly no one-to-one relationship between archetype and image. A single archetype can give rise to any number of archetypal images; and a single archetypal image may — or perhaps may not — be of two different archetypes at the same time. If the relationship between archetype and image is many-to-many, then the relationship between an image and any particular archetype becomes indeterminate. In the same way, we have no criteria by which to rule out the possibility that the widely separated solar penis images were coincidentally similar images from two different archetypes.

Just how many archetypes are there? There appears to be no constraint on their number or nature. Steven Walker, a scholar of comparative literature sympathetic to Jung, says that “the list of archetypes is nearly endless.” There can be an archetype for just about any possible human situation, it seems; and conversely each archetype can produce an indefinite number of archetypal images. And apparently we can make up archetypes at will. Is there a solar penis archetype? That seems surprisingly narrow for a fundamental a priori category of the imagination. A few minutes thought can yield a dozen archetypal possibilities, from masculine generativity to magical control of the weather. In the endless list of archetypes, how do we decide?

And if the person who has produced the numinous image gets to decide with which mythic motif or fairy tale situation it most clearly resonates, then it is not clear why we need to postulate transcendental archetypes of the collective unconscious at all.

Psychologist James Hillman faced this issue squarely, and he chose to eliminate the noun archetype altogether, while preserving the adjective archetypal. The problem, he says, is that Jung moved “from a valuation adjective to a thing and invented substantialities called archetypes… Then we are forced to gather literal evidence from cultures the world over and make empirical claims about what is defined to be unspeakable and irrepresentable.”

But we do not need to take the idea of the archetypal in this reified sense. Any image can be archetypal, Hillman says; it need only be given value — archetypalized or capitalized — by the person experiencing it. “By attaching archetypal to an image,” he says, “we ennoble or empower the image with the widest, richest, and deepest possible significance.”

James Hillman

This view informs Hillman’s approach to dreams, which is not hermeneutic, as it is for Jung, but rather phenomenological or, in Hillman’s term, imagistic, image-centered. “To see the archetypal in an image,” he says, “is not a hermeneutic move.” He thus sees little value in traditional amplification. “Hermeneutic amplifications in search of meaning take us elsewhere, across cultures, looking for resemblances which neglect the specifics of the actual image.” Instead of asking how an image is related to an archetype, the patient begins with and concentrates on images in all their multiple implications — a process psychologist Stephen Aizenstat calls animation, “entering the realm of the living dream.” The idea is to personify the image, ask it questions, interrogate its purposes, engage it as a teacher — even identify with it and question its meaning as one’s own. Hermeneutics is replaced by imagination.

Still, if what we are looking for is the meaning of images — in dreams, visions, imagination, fantasy — then it is worthwhile, I think, to pursue that meaning wherever we can. We do not need to postulate a collective unconscious or the existence of archetypes to pursue that meaning across cultures and through history, or to place our own images in the vast context of human suffering and transformation. The purpose is to give our dreams and visions life-giving depth, overflowing with meaning and power — what Hillman calls “unfathomable analogical richness.”

Nor do we need to limit this pursuit to images from the unconscious. In a dream I see a smiling child, I stumble over a rock, I stand in the rain; and I seek out what these images mean, I engage them and seek their counsel. A smiling child, a rock, the falling rain deserve no less inquiry, no less depth, just because we have classified them as real.

Ethnomycologist Brian P. Akers

To date, more than twenty mushroom species, primarily in the genus Psilocybe, have reportedly been recognized as sacred and used in ceremony among various indigenous peoples of Mexico. Cultures in which some form of psychoactive mushroom use has been documented in modern times include the Chatino, Chinantec, Matlatzinca, Mazatec, Mixe, Mixtec, Nahua, and Zapotec. Apart from continuing interest in Mazatec shamanism, inspired in large part by the figure of María Sabina, there has been little general interest in sacred mushroom use by peoples elsewhere in Mexico, and scholarly work in this area has not been easily accessible.

But at least some of that situation has now been remedied. Brian P. Akers, an ethnomycologist, has collected a number of significant readings in his book The Sacred Mushrooms of Mexico: Assorted Texts, which presents classic scholarship, previously unavailable in English, on Matlatzinca, Mixtec, Mixe, and other Mesoamerican sacred mushroom rituals.

In addition to gathering and translating these texts, Akers has provided a lengthy and valuable introduction to the history of ethnomycological scholarship in Mesoamerica. He also discusses issues of translation and transliteration of Mesoamerican indigenous languages. Each individual article in the collection, too, is preceded by a lucid and thorough preface that places the work in its historical and cultural context. Five of these articles are translations of relevant scholarly sources in Spanish, many published in relatively obscure journals and difficult to find even in their original language.

But to call these articles scholarly, I think, does them an injustice. They include rich and detailed accounts — what anthropologist Clifford Geertz called thick description — of the place of psychoactive mushrooms in the lives of the peoples who use them, and of the reverence with which these medicines, these santitos and hombrecitos, curers of sickness and givers of information, are approached by those who use them.

The sixth text in the book is a transcript of The Sacred Mushroom, a celebrated episode of the classic television show One Step Beyond, a series that began in 1959 and dramatized allegedly paranormal events. This episode, however, featured host John Newland, with doctors, scientists, and a camera crew, traveling into the mountains of Mexico in search of a fabled mushroom that “stimulates extrasensory perception, enabling the mind to become telepathic.” This program may have been the only show in network television history — it was broadcast on ABC in 1961 — in which the host ingested psychoactive mushrooms and let the effects be recorded on camera.

To complement the transcript, here is the broadcast in its entirety:

Akers, the editor and translator, has a PhD in mycology from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. He specializes in the genus Lepiota which, like the genus Amanita, includes species containing potentially psychoactive amanitins. He has published a number of scientific journal articles on ethnomycology and fungal systematics. A recent interview with Akers on his book is here.

I looked up and gasped when I saw a dozen burly, naked, filthy, hideous men staring at us down the shafts of their drawn arrows! Immense wads of green tobacco were stuck between their lower teeth and lips making them look even more hideous, and strands of dark-green slime dripped or hung from their noses.

These naked hideous men were Yanomamö, and, if you ever took an undergaduate anthropology course, you probably read that passage in Napoleon Chagnon’s incredibly popular ethnography, Yanomamo: The Fierce People — the best-selling anthropology text of all time. Chagnon chose the term fierce people for a reason. “The fact that the Yanomamö live in a state of chronic warfare,” he wrote, “is reflected in their mythology, values, settlement pattern, political behavior and marriage practices.” But over the years, Chagnon’s methods, fieldwork, and characterization of the Yanomamö have all been the subject of debate, often acrimonious and sometimes personal.

Davi Kopenawa, Yanomamö shaman and activist

Critics have maintained, among other things, that much of the aggression he observed was instigated, knowingly or not, by Chagnon himself, through his introduction of scarce trade goods, such as machetes and metal pans, into Yanomamö culture. Critics have claimed that his characterization of the Yanomamö as irremediably belligerent has been used to justify incursions and massacres by miners in search of gold in Yanomamö territory, and to justify attempts by Brazilian politicians to split up Yanomamö territory into several small reserves in order to reduce conflict — a plan that would have allowed more gold mining in the region.

And some critics have pointed out that Chagnon has failed to support the Yanomamö in their struggles for autonomy — first, by failing to share with them any of the significant amount of money, allegedly more than a million dollars, that he earned with his popular text; second, by failing to speak out against the misuse of his own work for political purposes; and, third, by publicly criticizing, in a popular Brazilian magazine, Davi Kopenawa, a Yanomamö activist and leader of the indigenous movement that helped to establish the Yanomamö reserve in Brazil.

Yanomamö woman with traditional face ornaments

Kopenawa himself speaks of Chagnon’s work with considerable bitterness. “So this Chagnon,” he says, “he said that the Yanomami are no good, that the Yanomami are ferocious. So this story, he made this story up… To make his book. To make a story about fighting among the Yanomami…. Because in his book he says we are fierce. We are garbage… He thought it would be important for him. He became famous. He is speaking badly about us. He is saying that the Yanomami are fierce, that they fight a lot, that they are no good.”

One of Chagnon’s most controversial claims is that Yanomamö culture exemplifies a key principle of sociobiology — that, among the Yanomamö, the most aggressive and murderous males have the most children. In an article published in 1988 in the prestigious journal Science, he reported that Yanomamö men who had murdered had more than twice as many wives and three times as many children as men who had not. He claimed, in other words, that violence is evolutionary adaptive behavior, and that, as Kim Hill, an expert in human evolutionary ecology, puts it, “the willingness to use violence under some conditions is part of the human male psyche.”

But there are several methodological critiques of Chagnon’s study, of which I will mention just three.

Yanomamö at home

First, Chagnon used reported body count as an index of aggressiveness. But he had no way to determine with any accuracy the number of people killed by any individual Yanamomö. Chagnon did not himself participate in any raids, witness any killings, or count any bodies. When a Yanomamö man had killed a human, he underwent a relatively rigorous unokaimou purification ceremony, after which he was called an unokai. So Chagnon used participation in the unokaimou as a surrogate for having killed, and he asked raid participants for estimates of the number of their victims.

The problem is that such estimates could be wildly inaccurate, especially because the Yanomamö did not take human body parts as trophies. A raider might shoot several arrows at figures fleeing into the bush at twilight, and claim, rightly or wrongly, to have killed one or more of them. And a man might take part in the unokaimou ceremony when he claimed to have killed by less direct means — by stealing an enemy’s footprint, for example, or by sending a spirit animal to kill him, or by shooting an arrow into his dead body.

Second, for reasons that remain unclear, Chagnon did not count as tokens of reproductive success living children whose fathers were dead or whose fathers lived outside the villages in Chagnon’s study area. Presumably some number of these dead fathers had been killed while they were on raids, and some of those in more distant villages were there in hiding from retaliation for their own violence. Indeed, it was often the war leaders — that is, the most aggressive — who were targeted for death by their enemies, and being killed in one’s prime surely has an impact on one’s long-term reproductive success. If dead or absent unokai and their offspring had been included in the study, the number of offspring of all unokai might well have been lower.

Waorani man with traditional pierced earlobes

Third, the number of people killed and reproductive success might not be correlated with each other but rather with a third variable — age. The older a man grows, the more raids he will have participated in, and the more children he will have engendered. The study included a large sample of young unmarried males. Since younger unmarried men were unlikely both to have undertaken the unokaimou ceremony and to have fathered numerous children, this cohort skewed the relative reproductive advantages of the unokai, almost all of whom were over thirty. The study did no stratification by age.

And additional hypotheses do not seem to have been considered — for example, that, while members of the raiding party were off on a ten-day raid, their wives were back home being impregnated by the more peaceful males.

Hill, who is a supporter of Chagnon, says that Chagnon’s study is “preliminary and suggestive.” The precise cause of the association between violence and reproductive success, he says, “is not possible to determine from the data presented, and there are many possible interpretations.” An appropriate study would require, among other things. a design “that would eliminate age effects and other possible covariates of both killer status and fitness.”

Waorani women

And just such a study has now been performed by anthropologist Stephen Beckerman of Penn State University and his colleagues, and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study was specifically designed to explore Chagnon’s contention that reproductive fitness among men correlates with differences of aggressiveness, and to avoid the three methodological objections to Chagnon’s work that we discussed above. The study concludes that, among another Amazonian people, the Waorani of Ecuador, who at one time had the highest rate of homicide of any society known to anthropology, more aggressive warriors in fact had lower indices of reproductive success than less aggressive males.

As part of the Waorani Life History Project, the authors interviewed 121 Waorani elders of both sexes to obtain genealogical information and recollections of raids in which they and their relatives participated. They also obtained complete raiding histories of 95 warriors, and they analyzed the raiding histories, marital trajectories, and reproductive histories of all these men. “We included in our sample of warriors both living and dead men,” the study states. “We ranked their aggression by the number of raids they participated in and not by a local term of contested meaning with which they are labeled. Our analysis is free of the problem caused by the inherent correlation of the warrior’s age with both participation in raids and reproductive success.”

Waorani family

The result: “Regardless of age category, the more zealous warriors consistently have lower reproductive success.” At each age interval, zealous warriors acquired fewer wives, produced fewer children, and had fewer surviving children.

There are two ways to interpret the reported differences between the Yanomamö and the Waorani. The first is that the disparate outcomes are due to differences in culture. This is the path taken by the authors of the Waorani study. They speculate that Yanomamö warfare cycles had peaceful interludes during which warriors could reap the benefits of their social status and accrue wives and children. The Waorani, on the other hand, did not incorporate peaceful interludes between raids. “We found no tradition of standing down,” the authors state, “even for a short period, after a rough balance of deaths was achieved. Indeed, a balance, although it might occur by chance, was never sought — the goal was to eliminate the other side.”

Another possibility, of course, is that the Yanomamö study was sufficiently affected by the bias introduced by its methodology that its results were incorrect.

Classic Maya vase depicting a scene of the royal court

The paintings on these ceramics provide important information about the daily life of the Maya elite class, Reents-Budet said; they depict the decorations that adorned their now bare stone palaces, and the perishable interior furnishings that have not survived in the archeological record — curtains and throne covers of cloth and jaguar skin; ceramic, gourd, wood, and basketry containers; books; regal costumes; musical instruments; scented torches. And she mentioned, in passing, that the botanical motifs with which many of these ceramics were decorated remained unidentified.

This remark inspired Zidar, a natural historian and archaeologist, to focus his research on plants illustrated on Maya ceramics, culminating in the creation of a botanical resource database of the plants depicted in Classic Maya art, with the goal of rediscovering currently unknown or forgotten plants that had been important — symbolically, ritually, or economically — to the ancient Maya.

Painted and sculpted images of whole plants, leaves, fruits, and flowers are represented on many Maya artifacts; the “breath soul,” the carrier of life, was often conceptualized as a flower. However, “despite the importance of plants to the ancient Maya and the many advances in understanding ancient Maya iconography and hieroglyphs,” Zidar says, “there has been scant identification and interpretation of botanical motifs in Classic Maya art. Many Classic period monumental and personal artworks feature plants, the rich variety of imagery reflecting that of the natural environment.”

Trunk spines of Ceiba pentandra (left) depicted on a ceremonial incense jar

Now some of this research has appeared in an article, co-authored by Zidar and botanist Wayne Elisens, and published in the journal Economic Botany.

This first analysis focuses on artwork produced in a single geographic area — the southern lowland region of the Maya, located in the modern countries of Belize, Guatemala and Mexico. In particular, too, the authors searched for depictions of bombacoids, a diverse family of neotropical trees characterized by swollen or spiny trunks and big, colorful, conspicuous flowers with long folding petals. The goal was to see which of these plants were important to the culture, and why.

The study involved evaluating more than 2,500 images of Maya ceramics from the collection of Justin and Barbara Kerr, curated by the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, located in Crystal River, Florida. “It has amazed me that so many plants are depicted,” said in a BBC interview. “These plants are not as stylized as previously thought, and thus you can name the plant family, genus, and even the species.”

Flower of Quararibea sp. (left) painted on a vessel used for sacred chocolate

For example, among the discoveries were numerous depictions of the kapok tree, Ceiba pentandra, which grows around 150 feet high, and was sacred to the Maya as the “first tree” or “world tree,” thought to stand at the center of the earth. The thorny trunks of the Ceiba tree were found to be represented on ceramic pots used as burial urns or ceremonial incense holders.

“The Maya have lived and used rainforest plants to heal themselves for thousands of years,” Zidar said in a BBC interview. “We are just beginning to understand some of their secrets.” He continued: “By determining what plants were of importance to the ancient Maya, it is my hope that identified plants can be further studied for pharmaceutical, culinary, economic and ceremonial uses.”

Alexander Shulgin

In a 2005 interview with The Guardian, Shulgin was asked the purpose of his research. “It’s toward the developing of tools for use in the functioning of the mind, the mechanism of the mind,” he said. “A lot of these materials are themselves, or are related to, materials that could be used in humans for determining the mysteries of how the mind works. They’re research tools.”

Shulgin has often described his experimentation as a way of opening doors. “It’s unbelievably exciting,” he told The Guardian. “You’re opening doors that have never been opened before, doors where they didn’t even know there was a door.” In 2008, he told Scientific American, “It is like opening a door to a hallway, that has unopened doors for its entire length, and behind every door is a world with which you are totally unfamiliar.” He has stated his intention of opening — and entering — as many of those doors as possible.

For about four years now, Turn of the Century Pictures has been working on a documentary about Shulgin. Producer Sebastian Saville and Director Etienne Sauret originally promoted the film on a website called The Shulgin Project, which may or may not have been the name of the film as well. But the date 2007 remains stubbornly stuck on the site’s home page, and the promised trailer — otherwise freely available on YouTube — does not play when clicked, despite the unchanging promise that The trailer will begin shortly. The website appears abandoned.

At the Turn of the Century website, the Shulgin film is now called — for reasons the website does not make clear — Dirty Pictures. There is a link back to the 2007 website, and a promise that the film, now in post-production, will be released in 2009. In addition to the original three-minute trailer, available here and on their website, the studio has put out a nine-minute teaser, still entitled The Shulgin Project, available on YouTube. Here it is:

There is reason to believe that the film has evolved over the years. Originally the focus appears to have been specifically on Shulgin’s life and work. In 2007 the film seems to have expanded into an examination of the regulation and suppression of psychoactive plants and drugs. Doctors using MDMA to treat terminal cancer patients, shamans using psychedelics to heighten spiritual awareness, multiple sclerosis sufferers self-medicating with marijuana, artists using LSD as a creative tool — “such practices are at best restricted and at worst outlawed,” the website announces. “But what are the motives behind the regulations?”

But this focus seems to have been overtaken by events. As a May 2008 article in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet puts it, research on psychedelics has moved into the mainstream. After their use in a variety of clinical contexts, not always with rigorous methods, and following widespread non-medical use, “research was quashed for misguided but understandable reasons,” says Rick Doblin, president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. Now, Doblin told The Lancet, that scenario is rapidly changing, with several phase II trials underway worldwide, and many more studies ongoing or planned. “It’s amazing how much is going on,” he said.

So, in 2009, the focus of the film appears to have shifted again, this time to document the work of scientists and researchers — a “select group of people,” the filmmakers say, including Shulgin — investigating what can be learned about the mind and human behavior through research with psychoactive substances. “The film is about them,” they say, “their findings and motivations, their ideas, and their beliefs as to how research in this particular field can aid in unlocking the complexities of the mind.”

I would be very grateful for any more information about the status of this project.

The Moche culture flourished in the northwestern coastal areas of Peru around AD 100–800. Human sacrifice was a significant part of their state religion, apparently to appease a deity named Ai Apaec, who is depicted in Moche art as fanged, half-human, most often in the shape of a spider, holding in one hand a severed human head and in another the crescent-shaped ceremonial knife called a tumi. In the archeological literature, this deity has come to be called the Decapitator.

At one site, named by archeologists Huaca de la Luna, Pyramid of the Moon, and known to local shamans as El Brujo, the Sorceror, archeologists have found the remains of more than forty men, ranging in age from fifteen to thirty years old. Their bones are scattered — apparently the bodies were tossed over the edge of a stone outcrop — and embedded in thick layers of sediment, indicating they may have been sacrificed during the heavy rains of El Niño.

Another image of the Decapitator (detail)

There is every reason to believe these bodies were human sacrifices. The victims had cut marks on their neck vertebrae indicating their throats had been slit; several were decapitated and had their jaws removed. And the victims may have been tortured before their death. Some of the skeletons were splayed, as if they had been tied to stakes; many had their femurs forcibly torn from their pelvic sockets; ribs, skulls, and long bones bore marks of cutting. In addition, many victims had multiple healed fractures to their ribs, shoulder blades, and arms, suggesting regular participation in combat. They may thus have been the losers in ritual combat among elite Moche warriors, fighting with mace-like clubs, or, more likely, prisoners of war captured in territorial combat with other societies.

Such sacrifices are frequently depicted in Moche art, both on ceramics and on walls within the pyramid sites themselves. The sacrifice is portrayed as an elaborate blood-letting ritual in which naked bound victims — often shown, surprisingly, with erect penises — have their throats cut with a tumi, and the spurting blood caught in gold goblets to be drunk by high priests.

Bound prisoners being led to sacrifice

Often depicted in these sacrificial scenes is a sort of seed pod floating in the air over flying priests or bound victims marching off to be sacrificed —a grooved, comma-shaped fruit with an enlarged calyx. Because of its shape, archeologists have generally called the plant ulluchu, a Quechua term meaning penis pepper, apparently coined by pioneer Moche scholar Rafael Larco Hoyle. For more than seventy years, the identification of this plant was seen as the greatest remaining challenge in the archaeobotany of the northwest Peruvian coast.

Ulluchu plant with hanging pods painted on a jar

Ethnobotanist Rainer Bussmann and anthropologist Douglas Sharon — whose work I have discussed here — have long been interested in identifying ulluchu. For years they consulted local curanderos and sellers of medicinal plants. “We would go to these markets,” Sharon has said, “and people would say, ‘We think we know what that is, but it’s not being sold here.’” The curanderos claimed to have heard of a plant called ulluchu, perhaps because of its coinage by Larco; but they did not use it, they could not describe it, and the term had no place in their language. “For the last seventy years people have been trying to identify this fruit but couldn’t,” Bussmann says. “And when our work started, I thought to myself, This is not going to be simple.”

Now, in an article in the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, Bussmann and Sharon have identified ulluchu, not as a pepper, but rather as a group of species in the genus Guarea, which is in the Meliaceae or mahogany family.

Their break came when actual dried remains of the fruit were unearthed during excavation of the the tombs of Dos Cabezas in the ancient Moche city of Sipan. Armed with actual physical specimens, even though they were desiccated, Bussman eventually focused on the genus Guarea, mostly restricted to tropical lowland forests, with some species reaching cloud forest habitat. No species is found along the dry coast of Peru, which means that the plant must have been widely traded in Moche times.

Prisoners, their hands tied behind them, having their throats slit, with ulluchu floating above

This identification required Bussmann to sort through more than a thousand possible candidates in one of the most biodiverse regions in the world, in the hope of finding a specimen that matched the archeological find. “Rainer is a first-rate taxonomist,” Sharon says. “He studied every physical characteristic of these plants until he was absolutely certain we had it.” When Bussmann compared specimens of Guarea to drawings of the ulluchu that had been unearthed a decade earlier, he knew he had found the plant.

While the existing literature on Guarea seed compounds is fragmentary, Bussmann and Sharon believe that a concentrated dosage of ulluchu seeds, if ingested, would increase heart rate, elevate blood pressure, and widen blood vessels. This would make it easier to extract sacrificial blood — and cause those surprising erections.

Priest costumed as a bird drinking a goblet of blood, with ulluchu in a basin, and perhaps holding a snuff tube

Bussmann and Sharon also suspect that a ground preparation of Guarea seeds, when inhaled, may have been used as a hallucinogen. One ceramic figurine shows a seated male with ulluchu plants on his headdress holding a gourd and pestle, possibly containing ground ulluchu seeds, with his nostrils flared, as is often seen in people inhaling hallucinogenic snuffs. Similarly, a fineline painting shows a winged runner or flying priest with ulluchu on his belt, ulluchu seeds floating above his head, and an instrument in his hand that closely resembles a typical double snuff tube of the sort used to inhale powdered hallucinogens. When inhaled by priests, some components could have a psychoactive effect, which would not necessarily lead to high levels of toxicity, and could induce very rapid, short-term hallucinations.

Stanley Krippner, the Alan Watts Professor of Psychology at the Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center in San Francisco, is internationally known for his pioneering work in the scientific investigation of human consciousness, and especially of what he has come to call anomalous experiences — precognitive dreams, parapsychological phenomena, hypnosis, dissociation, altered states of consciousness, psychic surgery, and shamanism.

He has served as President of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, the Parapsychological Association, and the International Association for the Study of Dreams; he is a Charter Member of the International Society for the Study of Dissociation; he is a Fellow of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis, and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. He is the author or co-author of more than 900 articles, chapters, and book reviews appearing in scholarly or academic publications.

Stanley Krippner (right) with Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart

It is largely through his efforts that the study of such anomalous experiences — previously ignored, marginalized, or pathologized — has been brought into the mainstream of psychological research. Krippner has insisted unwaveringly over the years that psychologists must take these experiences seriously, and that this seriousness includes unbiased and rigorous scientific examination.

Two events, I think, mark the culmination of these lifelong efforts. In 2000, the American Psychological Association published Varieties of Anomalous Experience: Examining the Scientific Evidence, co-edited by Krippner, containing scholarly articles examining, among other things, hallucinations, synesthesia, lucid dreams, out-of-body experiences, past-life experiences, alien abduction experiences, and near-death experiences. And, in 2002, Krippner was awarded the American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Contributions to the International Advancement of Psychology.

Bruce Eisner, author of Ecstasy: The MDMA Story, calls Krippner “both one of the most important contemporary psychologists and one of the only authentic countercultural icons still living.”

The following is a thirty-minute interview with Krippner on the subject of ayahuasca, the “brutal teacher.” The interview is a mix of reminiscence, reflection, and insight delivered in Krippner’s typically understated manner. There is a characteristic Krippner moment when he looks at the interviewer and says, “I doubt that. I would like to see experimental data.”

]]> http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/08/krippner-on-ayahuasca/feed/ 2 http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/03/ayahuasca-and-mental-health-among-shuar/ http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/03/ayahuasca-and-mental-health-among-shuar/#comments Tue, 03 Mar 2009 01:21:00 +0000 Steve Beyer http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/03/ayahuasca-and-mental-health-among-the-shuar/ We have talked before about the Grob, McKenna, Callaway, et al. psychiatric study on the long-term effects of drinking ayahuasca in the ceremonies of the União do Vegetal church. I noted that the study had not clearly disentangled any bias that might have resulted from the fact that the ayahuasca drinkers — but not controls — had been preselected for their orderly churchgoing habits. Here is a study that may shed some light on that question.
]]> We have talked before — here and here — about the Grob, McKenna, Callaway, et al. psychiatric study on the long-term effects of drinking ayahuasca in the ceremonies of the União do Vegetal church. I noted that the study had not clearly disentangled any bias that might have resulted from the fact that the ayahuasca drinkers — but not controls — had been preselected for their orderly churchgoing habits. Here is a study that may shed some light on that question.

Josep María Fericgla

The twenty-question Self Report Questionnaire, or SRQ-20, is a screening tool for common mental disorders that investigates nonpsychotic symptoms — depression, anxiety, somatiform disorders — in the month prior to the interview. The questionnaire consists of four questions about physical symptoms and sixteen questions about emotional symptoms, all with yes-no answers — questions about such things as crying, tiredness, and inability to enjoy life. The test was validated in a Brazilian population, and thus is commonly used in South America to identify psychiatric symptoms in a primary care setting.

The higher the number of positive yes responses, the greater the likelihood of psychopathology. The validity study in Brazil reported that a score of more than eight positive responses is an adequate cut-off point to detect nonpsychotic mental disorders. The test was reported to have a sensitivity of 83 percent, a specificity of 80 percent, and both positive and negative predictive values of 82 percent, which makes the SRQ-20 a pretty good little test. Josep María Fericgla, director of the Institut de Prospectiva Antropológica in Barcelona, is an ethnopsychologist and cognitive anthropologist who has done fieldwork with Shuar shamans in Ecuador, and has written widely on shamanism and sacred plants, including a classic Shuar ethnography, Los jíbaros, cazadores de sueños. In his book Al trasluz de la ayahuasca: Antropología cognitiva, oniromancia y consciencias alternativas, he reports on his administration of the SRQ-20 to 113 Shuar, and analyzes the results according to the number of times each participant had drunk ayahuasca in the past.

The chart below should make the results clear. The stacked columns run from zero positive responses on the left to greater than sixteen positive responses on the right — that is, from left to right in order of increasing psychopathology.

The chart clearly shows that Shuar who drank less ayahuasca had higher psychopathology scores on the SRQ-20, and those who drank more ayahuasca had lower psychopathology scores. Put another way, the chart shows Shuar who drink more ayahuasca stacked at the left-hand low-pathology end of the chart, and those who drink less ayahuasca stacked at the right-hand high-pathology end. Of those participants who gave zero positive responses, 72 percent had drunk ayahuasca more than 21 times.

The study also revealed that there appears to be a generally high rate of psychopathology among the Shuar: more than 60 percent of the participants gave eight or more positive responses on the SRQ-20. Fericgla attributes this unusual level to the accelerated process of deculturation that the Shuar were undergoing — the destruction of their traditional way of life, the plundering of their environment by multinational petroleum and lumber companies, territorial conflicts with colonists, the loss of their spiritual values. Even so, the distribution of the high scores is interesting. Of those who gave eight or more positive responses, 72 percent were women, and 35 percent were men. Part of the explanation may be that Shuar women bear the brunt of deculturation more than the men. Another part may be that Shuar men drink ayahuasca at twice the rate of women.

Now, again, what we have here is simply an apparent association between increasing ayahuasca consumption and lower scores on the SRQ-20. The study cannot tell us if there is a causal connection, or, if there is, in which direction it runs. It may be, for example, not that drinking ayahuasca causes better mental health, but rather that people with greater mental health — for any of a variety of reasons — drink more ayahuasca; or even that some third factor — family or social status, for example — is causally related to both.

But the bottom line of this study remains that — consistent with the results of the União do Vegetal study and, indeed, of the long-term study of peyote use we discussed here — there is little evidence that the long-term use of either sacred plant in its ceremonial setting causes any psychological harm, and appears to be associated with mental health benefits.

The Natufian culture flourished in the southern Levant between 15,000 and 11,600 years ago. One of the places that Natufian dead were buried is a small cave named Hilazon Tachtit, located on a steep cliff about 500 feet above the Hilazon River, with a sweeping view of the river and the Mediterranean shoreline, in which twenty-eight burials have been excavated. These burials can be dated to between 12,400 and 12,000 years ago, during the time that Natufian culture was in transition from foraging to farming.

All of this would normally be of interest primarily to professional archeologists, but one of the burials, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has received considerable attention, including an article in Time Magazine. The person buried was a small woman, probably about five feet tall, and perhaps 45 years old, based primarily on heavy erosion of her teeth. The burial had two striking features. First, the woman herself had congenital deformities of the pelvis and the lumbar and sacral vertebrae, as well as fusion of the coccyx and sacrum. These pathologies would have given her a limping or foot-dragging gait and an abnormally asymmetrical appearance.

Second, the woman was buried with a number of very unusual grave goods — more than fifty complete tortoise shells, two stone marten skulls, the feathered wing tip of a golden eagle, part of an aurochs tail, the pelvis of a leopard, the forearm of a wild boar, a male gazelle horn core, and a complete articulated human foot.

The burial site

The grave itself was also unusual. The walls had been intentionally plastered with mud, the floor lined with limestone slabs, and the body itself pinned down with more than ten large stones. The burial, the authors state, is unlike any other found in this area during the Natufian period or the preceding Paleolithic. In addition, this burial was apparently the first use of this cave, which is located more than six miles away from the nearest Natufian domestic site, so it presumably took some effort to carry the body to be buried.

Clearly this was a special person.But just what kind of special person was she? The authors conclude that the burial is, specifically, that of a shaman — and, if so, one of the earliest shaman burials known from the archeological evidence. “There is no doubt that this woman had a special social position,” says lead author Leore Grosman of Hebrew University of Jerusalem, “and the most viable interpretation of this burial is that it was for a shaman.” Other scholars agree. “The most parsimonious explanation of this unique grave treatment for a Natufian person is that this woman was a shaman,” says Harvard University archaeologist Ofer Bar-Yosef. Grosman believes that the grave thus offers some of the earliest physical evidence of religious and spiritual belief. “Several attributes of this burial,” the article states, “later become central in the spiritual arena of human culture worldwide.”

Some of the tortoise shells found in the grave

Now the authors are making a large claim here, and it is worth following their reasoning. The conclusion is based on just two facts. The woman was physically disabled; and she was buried with animal parts. But then how does this make her a shaman? In some cultures, the authors state, there are accounts of physically disabled individuals being ascribed healing and spiritual powers. And, because of the presence of animal remains in the grave, the woman “was perceived as being in close relationship with these animal spirits.”

I am not persuaded that these two facts support the conclusion that this woman was a shaman. Apart from the grave itself, of course, we have no way of knowing whether the Natufian culture even had shamans, at least in any form recognizably similar to the indigenous practices we know of since the sixteenth century, when they were first recorded. There is no evidence from the grave that the woman had anything to do with healing — no herb bundles, for example. In some cultures, it is true, some shamans with physical deformities have been held to be healers, but the inference does not run in the other direction; the fact that a person has a deformity does not make that person into a shaman, if we even knew what the Natufian culture believed about the relationship between deformity and healing, which we do not.

The skeleton and grave goods

I am also not convinced that the presence of buried animal remains, no matter how unusual, are persuasive evidence that the grave contains a shaman. It is true, of course, that some shamans in some cultures are buried with animal parts, but again the inference does not run in the other direction. Since we have absolutely no evidence of Natufian spiritual beliefs, we are free to speculate at will. If the woman had a congenital limp, and was about forty-five years old, perhaps each turtle shell stood for a year of her life during which she walked slowly and awkwardly, like a turtle, and the eagle, gazelle, and leopard parts are meant to give her, in the next life, the speed and grace she lacked in this one. Perhaps the human foot was meant to be hers in the hereafter.

This speculation is not offered to be taken with any great seriousness. The point is that it accounts for the evidence just about as well as the speculation that the woman was a shaman — that, to use Bar-Yosef’s term, it is just as parsimonious.

There is no question that the grave is unusual and fascinating. It is apparently also true that the burial took place during the presumably profound social and economic changes associated with the transition to agriculture. In this specialized burial, we may be seeing the emergence of social rather than spiritual stratification, or some other cultural phenomenon entirely.

But a recent study by Dominique Fontanilla and her colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, published this month in the prestigious journal Science, may change the direction of that research.

The Sigma-1 Receptor

The sigma-1 receptor is widely distributed throughout the body, and is found in almost all mammalian cells, including the central and peripheral nervous system. Its function has remained unclear. Stimulating the sigma-1 receptor can increase muscle tension, heart rate, breathing rate, and the size of the pupils. Drugs with a high affinity for binding at the sigma-1 receptor include the synthetic compounds cocaine, heroin, dextromethorphan, fluvoxamine, haloperidol, methamphetamine, and PCP.

Sigma-1 has long been considered an orphan receptor, without a known endogenous neurotransmitter of its own. Given the nature of the exogenous compounds that bind to the receptor, researchers took to calling the unknown sigma-1 neurotransmitter endopsychosin or, sometimes, angeldustin.

At the same time, as we have discussed before, DMT is known to be present in human blood, urine, brain tissue, and cerebrospinal fluid, and no one knew what function this endogenous DMT might have. This latest research solves both puzzles. The mysterious endogenous ligand of the sigma-1 receptor is DMT.

Several lines of reasoning — biochemical, physiological, and behavioral — led the researchers to this conclusion. They first diagrammed the chemical structures of several of the drugs known to bind to the sigma-1 receptor, reduced them to their simplest forms, and then searched for possible endogenous molecules with the same structures. Because DMT resembles these exogenous ligands — they all contain an N,N-dimethylated amine — and DMT occurs endogenously, they considered DMT a plausible candidate. The researchers were then able to demonstrate that, in rat liver homogenates, DMT could in fact bind with sigma-1 so strongly that DMT, once bound to sigma-1, could not be displaced by other high-affinity molecules.

There is a strain of mutant mice bred by scientists without sigma-1 receptors, usually called sigma-1 receptor knockout mice. When DMT is injected into nonmutant mice, it causes increased motor activity or hypermobility; when the researchers injected DMT into mutant mice, without sigma-1 receptors, no hypermobility occurred. The researchers also compared the effect of DMT on heart muscle cells from nonmutant mice with those from the genetically engineered mice. The activity of voltage-gated sodium ion channels in the cells was inhibited where sigma-1 was present, but unaffected in its absence.

Ion channels are important in cell signaling processes. These results suggest that sigma-1 receptors function to regulate ion channels in cells, and that DMT in turn is an endogenous modulator of the sigma-1 receptor.

There is further evidence for this hypothesis. Sigma-1 receptors are found in the endoplasmic reticulum inside cells. The endoplasmic reticulum is responsible for the folding and transport of proteins, which are then either secreted from the cell or used in the cell membrane. These sigma-1 receptors have been shown to function as molecular chaperones for plasma membrane ion channels in the cell, helping them fold into their functional conformations, and preventing them from folding into inactive shapes. Thus, in addition to — or instead of — affecting sigma-1 receptor modulation of ion channels, the behavioral effect of DMT may be due to activation or inhibition of sigma-1 receptor chaperone activity.

“The finding that DMT and sigma-1 receptors act as a ligand-receptor pair,” the authors conclude, “provides a long-awaited connection that will enable researchers to elucidate the biological functions of both of these molecules.”

Most commentators on this finding emphasized its practical value in studying mental illness, and therefore — this was implicit — offering an opportunity for increased research funding. James Stone of the Institute of Psychiatry in London said, “This is a very important finding and will lead to more interest in the role of DMT and the sigma-1 receptor in mental illness. People did not know what the natural ligand of sigma-1 was, and this has led to a lot of blind alleys. So this is really big news.”

Radiochemist Erik Arstad, of University College London, who has worked on sigma-1 receptors, agrees that the finding is significant. “Given the potent hallucinogenic effects of DMT, its presence in the human body has so far been a mystery. The role of the sigma-1 receptor is also poorly understood, so the suggested link between endogenous DMT levels and modulation of the sigma-1 receptor is intriguing. The findings are likely to spur considerable interest in the sigma-1 receptor, as well as trace amines, particularly in relation to mental illnesses such as schizophrenia.”

So: do we know how DMT causes hallucinations? Not yet, says senior author Arnold Ruoho, chair of pharmacology at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. “We have no idea at present,” he said in an interview, “if or how the sigma-1 receptor may be connected to hallucinogenic activity.”