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.

Susun Weed, herbalist

My plant teacher doña María Tuesta Flores knew hundreds of plant medicines. The key to healing with plants, she told me, is not only to know which plant can heal which conditions, but also to understand the proper way to prepare the plants for use. “We have all these plants here,” she said, “cures for all sorts of diseases; now that you have learned about them, you must learn how to prepare them.” The practical use of the healing plants, she told me, I would learn in time from the plants themselves.

Before I began to study plant medicine in the Amazon, it was my great good fortune to have worked with several prominent herbalists in North America. The one who most influenced me — with her knowledge, wisdom, earthy humor, and audacious soul — was Susun Weed.

These two plant teachers, Susun Weed and María Tuesta, lived thousands of miles apart, and they never met. But they would have recognized each other instantly.

Weed is one of the best-known authorities on herbal medicine in North America. Although her focus has been on natural approaches to women’s health, her ideas on the nature of herbal medicine, the centrality of preventive care, the primary use of local and wild plants, and the way we must engage with the plant spirits — all of which she calls the Wise Woman Tradition — have universal application. What I learned from her was not only the uses of particular plants — dandelion and nettle and oatstraw — but also a way of thinking about plant healing, simultaneously practical and spiritual. “The Wise Woman Tradition,” she told an interviewer, “invites everyone to weave themselves into greater wholeness.”

Susun Weed with geese and goats

Weed began studying herbal medicine in 1965, and she wrote her first book — Wise Woman Herbal for the Childbearing Year, now in its 29th printing — in 1985. Since then, she has written books on menopause and breast cancer, as well as Healing Wise, an introduction to her herbal philosophy and approach to the healing plants.

Weed travels throughout the world to speak at major conferences, medical schools, hospital wellness centers, breast cancer centers, midwifery schools, and shamanic training centers. She has frequently appeared on radio and television programs. Her contribution on herbal medicine appears in the Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women, and she writes a regular column in Sagewoman magazine. Her articles have appeared in Natural Health, Woman’s Day, and Herbs for Health.

“My goal,” she says, “is to change how we think about health and healing.” Herbal medicine is “simple, safe primary care… a gift of health from the green nations.” She continues: “My primary ally, my teacher in all things is Nature: the Earth and her many companions. I live with the plants, and the weather, and my goats.” Our relationship with the plants is a giveaway dance, she says. “You may lose your job and your health insurance, but the medicines of the earth will never abandon you. Green blessings are always waiting for us to recognize them and utilize them.”

Weed is thus an advocate of the common plants, especially those that grow locally and wild — what she calls kitchen remedies. “Knowing how wild plants affect health is part of knowing how to cook,” she said in a recent interview. “You don’t need a prescription to eat dinner.”

In Susun Weed’s kitchen

Weed devotes much of her time to teaching. From March through November each year, she opens her home to students, apprentices, and visiting teachers. “Our workshops focus on the teachings of the Wise Woman Way, which nourishes wholeness through story, ceremony, and weeds.”

Her hands-on courses are the most popular — how to identify and pick the plants that grow on her property, how to use them when freshly picked, how to prepare tinctures, decoctions, teas, and vinegars from them. “I see how much confidence my students gain,” she says, “when we go out together to identify, pick, prepare and use the plants that grow around them.”

Some of her teaching methods are unorthodox. The students spend a good part of their time herding the goats, which requires them to be alone in nature for most of the day. “I do my best to create for the apprentices the same situations that allowed me to hear the plants speaking, that opened my heart to the ways of Nature… I want my students to learn as I learned, not what I learned. I want them to find their own way and to trust their own intuition.” Like doña María, she lets her students learn from the plants themselves.

In 2007, Weed was interviewed by herbalist John Gallagher. I have embedded the fifty-minute interview — split into five parts — in its entirety below. It is a wonderful way to get a sense of her warmth, humor, and spirit. She sets the tone right at the outset. “Herbal medicine,” she says, “is people’s medicine.”

]]> http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/08/susun-weed-herbalist/feed/ 3 http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/08/salvia-on-schedule/ http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/08/salvia-on-schedule/#comments Thu, 13 Aug 2009 18:03:39 +0000 Steve Beyer http://www.singingtotheplants.com/?p=3513 The plant Salvia divinorum has a long and continuing tradition of use by Mazatec shamans, who drink it, sometimes followed by a drink of tequila, to induce visionary states during healing sessions. Popular use of Salvia, especially among young people, has been increasing — along with calls for its criminalization. Some medical researchers argue that scheduling the drug should wait until evidence about its effects and toxicity becomes clear. A recent article in Scientific American addresses the issues.
]]> Salvia divinorum

The plant Salvia divinorum has a long and continuing tradition of use by Mazatec shamans, who drink it, sometimes followed by a drink of tequila, to induce visionary states during healing sessions, which are performed at night in a quiet and darkened room. The drink is made by crushing the leaves to extract the juices, which are then mixed with water. It is important to be ritually mindful when collecting the leaves, and there are strict prohibitions — for example, avoiding sexual contact — to be kept for several days after the ceremony. The plant grows primarily in the mountain cloud forest in Oaxaca, Mexico. There is reason to believe that the plant is either a cultigen or hybrid developed specifically for its psychoactive effects.

The primary psychoactive constituent is a diterpenoid known as salvinorin A, a potent and selective κ-opioid receptor agonist. These receptors are widely distributed in the brain, spinal cord, and pain neurons. Other drugs that act at the κ-opioid receptor, such as ketazocine, produce similar effects. Salvinorin A is unique in being the only naturally occurring substance known to induce a visionary state by acting at this site. There is no evidence that Salvia is addictive.

R. Gordon Wasson, A young Mazatec girl grinding Salvia divinorum leaves on a metate to express the juice (1962)

Salvia divinorum can also be chewed, smoked, or taken as a tincture. Different preparations may have different onset times, but the effects and their duration appear similar — perceptions of bright lights, vivid colors and shapes, as well as body movements and body or object distortions. Other effects include dysphoria, uncontrolled laughter, a sense of loss of body, overlapping realities, and hallucinations. Adverse physical effects may include incoordination, dizziness, and slurred speech. The duration of these effects is relatively brief, typically lasting only a few minutes.

The most commonly reported aftereffects include improved mood and sensations of insight, calmness, and connection with nature. There have been rare reports of anxiety or sadness.

The Mazatec believe that Salvia is an incarnation of the Virgin Mary, and they refer to it as ska María Pastora, the leaf of Mary the Shepherdess. The name is usually shortened to ska María or ska Pastora. “The purpose of these sacraments is to purify, and to open the road,” says Mazatec shaman Aurelia Aurora Catarino. “When it opens, it’s as clear as the blue sky, and the stars at night are as bright as suns.”

In the September 2006 issue of New Scientist, writer Gaia Vince says that Salvia “took me on a consciousness-expanding journey unlike any other I have ever experienced. ” He continues:

My body felt disconnected from “me” and objects and people appeared cartoonish, surreal and marvellous. Then, as suddenly as it had began, it was over. The visions vanished and I was back in my bedroom. I spoke to my “sitter” — the friend who was watching over me, as recommended on the packaging — but my mouth was awkward and clumsy. When I attempted to stand my coordination was off. Within a couple of minutes, however, I was fine and clear-headed, though dripping with sweat. The whole experience had lasted less than 5 minutes.

Poet Dale Pendell, in the Salvia divinorum chapter of his book Pharmako/poeia, quotes some users who have smoked dried Salvia leaves: “It’s very intense, I call it a reality stutter, or a reality strobing,” says one report. And another: “It’s like heavy zazen, like after a very long period of sitting, the place you can get to there. It’s changed my life, turned my life around.”

Two Guyz Trippin on Salvia at the Same Time (2009)

Popular use of Salvia, especially among young people, has been increasing. A National Survey on Drug Use and Health Report published in February 2008 estimated that 1.8 million persons aged 12 or older had used Salvia divinorum in their lifetime, and approximately 750,000 had done so in the past year. As we have mentioned here, the plant is being made illegal in an increasing number of states, and — while not currently regulated by the federal Controlled Substances Act — the DEA has listed Salvia as a “drug of concern.” The legal situation has been aggravated by a number of YouTube videos of teenagers, allegedly high on Salvia, laughing uncontrollably and apparently unable to perform simple tasks or to communicate.

Now the prestigious and generally sober Scientific American has published, in its August 2009 issue, an article by science writer David Jay Brown, calling for restraint in the march toward legal prohibition of Salvia. The article points out that only two labs currently conduct human studies with salvinorin A — one run by psychiatric researchers Deepak Cyril D’Souza and Mohini Ranganathan, both at the Yale University School of Medicine, and the other by pharmacologist John Mendelson of the University of California, San Francisco. Both groups are performing preliminary tests to determine how best to administer salvinorin A to human volunteers and collect basic data. The article states:

The unusual properties of salvinorin A intrigue scientists. Psychiatric researcher Bruce Cohen and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School have been developing analogues of salvinorin A and studying their possible mood-modulating properties. The team’s work with salvinorin A in animals suggests “that a drug that would block kappa opioid receptors might be an antidepressant drug — probably a nonaddictive one — or a mood stabilizer for patients with bipolar disorder,” Cohen remarks. By activating the kappa opioid receptors, drugs such as salvinorin A could reduce dependence on stimulants and the mood-elevating and mood-rewarding effects of cocaine. Because salvinorin A can produce distortions of thinking and perception, researchers speculate that blocking the receptors might alleviate some symptoms of psychoses and dissociative disorders.

D’Souza and Ranganathan argue that scheduling the drug should wait until evidence about its effects and toxicity becomes clear. “The issue is a serious one, with implications for policy, drug enforcement and research,” Cohen says. If salvinorin A becomes a federally scheduled drug, research on it would become “much more difficult,” predicts Rick Doblin, director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. Approval boards at universities and research institutions view proposals involving criminalized drugs with extreme caution. “And funders are reluctant to look at potentially beneficial uses of drugs of abuse,” he adds.

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.

Bioneers founders Kenny Ausubel and Nina Simons

Ausubel went on to form an organization named Seeds of Change, devoted to conserving the world’s indigenous agricultural heritage by offering heirloom seeds to backyard organic gardeners. Along with his wife Nina Simons, he also initiated the annual Bioneers Conference and its parent organization, the Collective Heritage Institute.

The term bioneer is intended to indicate a biological pioneer — one who sees the solutions to contemporary global problems not in technology but in a biological model of interconnectedness, in what Ausubel calls true biotechnologies, based on biomimicry, natural design, and the restoration of natural capital.

Bioneers states several interconnecting goals for its annual conferences — to cultivate and disseminate environmental solutions to national and global audiences; to inspire and equip people toward effective action; to develop and spread model economic strategies for ecological agriculture, environmental restoration, and community self-reliance; to strengthen traditional, indigenous, and restorative farming practices; to revitalize our cultural and spiritual connection with the natural world.

And, in fact, the conference has over the years brought together a remarkable array of visionary activists, organizers, and speakers on such topics as restoration, ecology, bioremediation, alternative health, indigenous land practices, green medicine, natural capitalism, relation to place — and the role of sacred and psychoactive plants in world renewal.

The Bioneers propose that there is a profound intelligence in nature, and that, in our present moment of predicament and opportunity, we must learn and follow that intelligence. It is in this context that speakers at the Bioneers conferences have addressed the issue of sacred plants and fungi, and their role as guides both to the reality of the natural world and to the ways in which we can learn to live in harmony with it.

Fourteen of these presentations, taken from conferences held between 1990 and 2004, have been collected in the book Visionary Plant Consciousness: The Shamanic Teachings of the Plant World. In the book, twenty-three leading ethnobotanists, anthropologists, artists, and medical researchers — people such as Terence McKenna, Wade Davis, Alex Grey, Kat Harrison, Paul Stamets, and Luis Eduardo Luna — present their understandings of the nature of psychoactive plants and their significant connection to humans.

The Bioneers conference is traditionally held in San Rafael, California, in the Fall — the 2009 conference will run from October 16 to18 — and is also carried by satellite feed to other locations. Here is an example — environmentalist, entrepreneur, journalist, and best-selling author Paul Hawken, introduced by Kenny Ausubel, addressing the final plenary session of the 2007 Bioneers conference:

]]> http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/03/bioneers-2/feed/ 1 http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/03/the-war-on-coca-leaves-redux/ http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/03/the-war-on-coca-leaves-redux/#comments Mon, 16 Mar 2009 15:38:00 +0000 Steve Beyer http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/03/the-war-on-coca-leaves-redux/ As we have discussed, the International Narcotics Control Board — a United Nations monitoring body that oversees the implementation of the UN drug control conventions — has called for the governments of Bolivia and Peru to abolish all uses of the coca leaf, including coca leaf chewing. In its 2007 annual report, the INCB asked Bolivia and Peru to make possessing and using coca leaf criminal offenses — a move that would make criminals of millions of people in the Andes and Amazon.
]]> As we have discussed, the International Narcotics Control Board — a United Nations monitoring body that oversees the implementation of the UN drug control conventions — has called for the governments of Bolivia and Peru to abolish all uses of the coca leaf, including coca leaf chewing. In its 2007 annual report, the INCB asked Bolivia and Peru to make possessing and using coca leaf criminal offenses — a move that would make criminals of millions of people in the Andes and Amazon.

The Peruvian response was dramatic, with legislators defiantly chewing coca leaves on the congressional floor. The current meeting of the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs in Vienna has elicited a strong response from Bolivia as well. Some context might be helpful.

Morales wearing indigenous clothes

Evo Morales, an Aymara, is the first indigenous president of Bolivia. He came to power in 2006 promising a decolonizing revolution, a term with a special meaning to indigenous Bolivians. The first decolonization took place when Bolivia became independent from Spain in 1825; but, for Bolivia’s indigenous population, this political separation meant only that their exploitation and marginalization took on new forms. For the poor and disenfranchised indigenous people who helped bring Morales to power, colonialism is still very much alive in Bolivia, in everything from the educational system to the Catholic Church.

Although publicly declaring himself a Catholic, Morales has actively promoted indigenous beliefs, including appointing traditional shamans to his government. Bolivia’s previous constitution had allowed for freedom of religion, but had specified Roman Catholicism as the sole state religion. The new Bolivian constitution, approved in January, has the stated goal of refounding Bolivia as a “socially just state guided by indigenous beliefs,” including the elevation of Pachamama, Earth Mother, to the same stature as the God of Christianity.

In a recent dissertation in social anthropology at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, entitled As Though We Had No Spirit: Ritual, Politics and Existence in the Aymara Quest for Decolonization, Anders Burman examines how the government policy of decolonization has been interwoven with indigenous rituals and cosmology. He carried out his ethnographic field work among shamans and activists within the Andean indigenous people’s movement.

Morales receives a sacred staff from an indigenous shaman

Burman distinguishes three different ways of looking at the decolonization project. The government views colonialism as inherent in existing political structures, and therefore seeks institutional change. Indigenous activists view Bolivia itself as a colonial project, and therefore seek to build a new country from the ground up. But the shamans and their apprentices with whom Burman worked perceive colonialism to be a sickness and decolonization as the cure, and, based on traditional cosmological linkages, work to decolonize not only the state and society, but the landscape and the self as well.

Still, these three ways of looking at decolonization overlap in significant ways. Political activism and the ritual practices of shamanism, Burman says, derive from the same interpretive cultural framework — how to deal with that which is understood as alien, whether a national power elite that is perceived as foreign, or unfamiliar spirits that bring about sickness. In the same way, traditional Andean cosmology is one of the cornerstones of the government representation of its decolonizing policies.

Morales campaigning with a coca plant

And Bolivian indigenous beliefs are deeply intertwined with the sacred coca plant. Morales, a former cocalero union leader, won his greatest political support in the impoverished coca-growing areas of central Bolivia. In a New York Times op-ed piece published three days ago and entitled Let Me Chew My Coca Leaves, Morales challenges the United Nations to reverse what he calls a forty-eight-year-old mistake — the false notion, incorporated into the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, that the coca leaf is a narcotic in the same category with cocaine, and the concomitant order that “coca leaf chewing must be abolished within 25 years from the coming into force of this convention.”

That deadline passed in 2001. “So for the past eight years,” Morales writes, “the millions of us who maintain the traditional practice of chewing coca have been, according to the convention, criminals who violate international law. This is an unacceptable and absurd state of affairs for Bolivians and other Andean peoples.”

Morales urges the UN to distinguish between a narcotic and the plant from which it is derived. “What is absurd about the 1961 convention is that it considers the coca leaf in its natural, unaltered state to be a narcotic,” he writes. “The paste or the concentrate that is extracted from the coca leaf, commonly known as cocaine, is indeed a narcotic, but the plant itself is not. ” And he concludes:

The custom of chewing coca leaves has existed in the Andean region of South America since at least 3000 B.C. It helps mitigate the sensation of hunger, offers energy during long days of labor and helps counter altitude sickness…. Today, millions of people chew coca in Bolivia, Colombia, Peru and northern Argentina and Chile. The coca leaf continues to have ritual, religious and cultural significance that transcends indigenous cultures and encompasses the mestizo population…. It is time for the international community to reverse its misguided policy toward the coca leaf.

According to ABI, the official Bolivian news agency, Morales chewed coca leaves at the conference on drug policy in Vienna as he asked the Commission reverse its decision to qualify the coca leaf as a narcotic./>

At the same time, the pan-Indian nature of the church made it a powerful vehicle for the diffusion of musical styles and content. Early studies of peyote songs, dating from the 1940s, found Navajo peyote singers using the Ute musical style, and recognizably the same peyote song among the Tarahumara, Navajo, and Cheyenne. Such studies can be helpful in tracing the historical spread of the new religious movement.

An important aspect of peyote songs is their use of non-lexical vocables — sequences of phonemes without conventional semantic content, but meaningful to the singer in the context of the ceremony, and often an indication of the song’s origin as a spiritual gift. Peyote songs often combine the consonants y, w, h, c, k, t, x, and n with vowels, in the sequence CVCVCV… to produce vocables such as the important peyote word heyowicinayo.

Beginning in the 1990s — their first CD was released in 1995 — two singers, Verdell Primeaux, a Sioux, and Johnny Mike, a Navajo, developed a new form of peyote music they called healing songs, characterized by mesmeric and meditative vocal harmonies and frequently without the paradigmatic driving beat of the water drum and gourd rattle.

Brian Stoner

The songs, sung in Lakota and Navajo, became immensely popular, not only with Native Americans, but also among the same audience that was eagerly purchasing the similarly meditative flute recordings of R. Carlos Nakai. Their crossover appeal is evidenced by the fact that, in 1998, their seventh recording, Peyote Songs of the Native American Church, won both the Native American Music Award for Best Traditional Music and the New Age Voice Music Award for Traditional Native American Music.

Their haunting music, however, embodied a partial disconnection from the traditional roots of the peyote song, where the gourd rattle and water drum have traditionally been an integral part of the ceremony, and tying the soaked deerskin drumhead onto the cast-iron drum kettle is an important and symbolically resonant part of the preparation. Indeed, this disconnection in part drove their popularity. One music reviewer — apparently intending to be complimentary — went so far as to say that the new peyote music “transcends the usual ethnographic feel of peyote recordings and becomes true art.”

Whitehorse and Crowe

There is now a new generation of peyote singers. The term new generation means, apart from relative youth, two things — first, that the singers have been deeply influenced by the harmonizing peyote songs of Primeaux and Mike, yet most often retain the traditional accompaniment of the gourd rattle and water drum; and, second, that they have MySpace pages and distribute their videos on YouTube, and selectively incorporate English into their songs.

Three of these singers are Brian Stoner, from the Ponca and Cherokee tribes of Oklahoma; and the brothers Maynard Whitehawk and Lance Crowe, of Plains Anishinabe and Saulteaux heritage, who sing together under the name Wikiwam Ahsin, which are Anishinabe words usually translated as tipi rock. I have attached two representative videos below.

The first video features a song set from the album With Love and Faith We Pray, which was named the Best Spiritual Album at the 2007 Indian Summer Music Festival, and which features Whitehawk and Crowe joining Stoner on several songs. The second features a set from Whitehawk and Crowe’s eponymous album Wikiwam Ahsin. Listen for the children’s songs at the end.

]]> http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/03/peyote-songs/feed/ 8 http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/03/the-psychedelic-review/ http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/03/the-psychedelic-review/#comments Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:37:00 +0000 Steve Beyer http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/03/the-psychedelic-review/ We have talked about the Fall 1989 issue of the Whole Earth Review. For aficionados of classic psychedelia, however, there is no substitute for the Psychedelic Review, which was sporadically published from 1963 to 1971, and was excerpted for the book The Psychedelic Reader. The entire run of the journal — eleven issues from 1963 to 1971 — is available online, in PDF format, in the Luminist Archives, and on the website of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, where individual articles are also accessible.
]]> We have talked about the Fall 1989 issue of the Whole Earth Review. For aficionados of classic psychedelia, however, there is no substitute for the Psychedelic Review, which was sporadically published from 1963 to 1971, and was excerpted for the book The Psychedelic Reader. The entire run of the journal — eleven issues from 1963 to 1971 — is available online, in PDF format, in the Luminist Archives, and on the website of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, where individual articles are also accessible.

By the 1970s, the term psychedelic had acquired indelibly frivolous connotations, but the term had originated, with the best of scholarly intentions, as a way of describing the effects of a number of psychoactive substances considered to be of both intellectual and spiritual importance. The term itself — from the Greek psykhe, mind, and deloun, reveal, make manifest — was proposed in 1956 by the British psychiatrist Humphrey Fortescue Osmond, and first used in a scholarly paper he presented the following year at a meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences.

Aldous Huxley, in an earlier letter to Osmond, had instead proposed the term phanerothyme, from Greek phanero, make visible, manifest, and thymos, soul. In support of his neologism, Huxley offered the couplet, To make this trivial world sublime, take half a gramme of phanerothyme. To which Osmond responded, To fathom Hell or soar angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic.

The Psychedelic Review was intended to be an intellectually serious publication, begun by members of the Harvard Psilocybin Research Project. It was published and sponsored by Timothy Leary’s International Federation for Internal Freedom, whose purpose was “to encourage, support and protect research on psychedelic substances,” with the goal of increasing “the individual’s control over his own mind, thereby enlarging his internal freedom.” One purpose of the review was thus apparently to provide a scholarly and intellectual predicate for IFIF’s advocacy.

The original editorial board consisted of Paul Lee, Ralph Metzner, and Rolf von Eckartsberg. The announcement of the new journal indicated an intention to publish articles on visionary plants, the neurophysiological aspects of drug action, the epistemology of transcendent experience, the relationship between mysticism and schizophrenia, and other weighty topics. The goal was to publish “original research reports, scholarly and historical essays, outstanding phenomenological accounts of spontaneous or induced transcendent experiences, and reviews of relevant pharmacological and other literature.” Editorial consultants included Richard Alpert, Timothy Leary, Huston Smith, and Alan Watts.

And, indeed, the journal wound up publishing articles not only by its founders but also by such diverse contributors as R. Gordon Wasson, Richard Evans Schultes, Albert Hofmann, R.D. Laing, Sir Julian Huxley, and Alain Danielou, although some of its material was reprinted from earlier sources. Beginning in 1967, in the final three issues, both the covers and the content became visibly more — well, psychedelic. The journal ceased publication in 1971.

As Erik Davis says in his introduction to the 2007 reprint of The Psychedelic Reader, the articles in the review are a time capsule from a different age. Timothy Leary was already embarking on his own unique trajectory; the Psychedelic Review manifests an attitude that I can only describe as high seriousness mixed with a sort of roguish innocence.

When the first issue came out in 1963, a student could subscribe to the first year for four dollars.