had made the First claims about the magic mushrooms and whose work had inspired Schultes. (SeE "Wasson's first voyage," P40.) Mushrooms opened up new worlds and new horizons. Wasson became convinced they were responsible for planting the seed of religion in primitive man. ey also provided him with his First genuine awareness of ecstacy. He and his wife— who had extraordinary visions of her own when she tried the mushrooms— spent as much of the following year in Mexico as possible. IN 1954 Aldous Huxley had published e Doors of Perception , an essay detailing the eects of his rst encounter with mescaline. But while Huxley loaded the gun, it was Wasson who pulled the trigger. On FEBRUARY 13, 1957, Life magazine published a 15-page article detailing, experientially, Wasson’s rst experiences with the shamaness Maria Sabina. e fantastic style of the text, coupled with Richardson’s extraordinary photographs ushered in, with one fell swoop, the age of psychedelics. Wasson described the ritual in such amazing terms that years later the leaders of the psychedelic revolution would all nod their heads to him: He inspired them, told them the ideal conditions under which hallucinogens were to be taken, what they could expect, and how to have a good and benecial trip. Timothy Leary dedicates a chapter in his book High Priest to Wasson. Others, from Owsley to Sandoz to Wolfe, acknowlege the Life article as having burned into their consciousness the desire to know what Wasson had experienced. For Wasson, it was never his intent that anyone should follow him to Maria Sabina’s home in Huautla de Jiminez. In the Life article he never mentioned a town, and he changed Sabina’s name ... Continue at archive.hightimes.com
and the taking of drugs was “ ... a kind of phenomenon which cannot be disregarded by anyone who is trying to discover what religion is, and what are the deep needs it must satisfy.” Wasson’s father himself had written a book decrying Prohibition, citing alcohol use in religious service, but the trail the Wassons were on was broader than any of these. ey were looking for a specic fungus which apparently had been used in disparate pans of the globe from Siberia to India, including China, and perhaps even in MesoAmerica. A second turning point in the Wassons’ study came on September 19, 1952. ey received two letters that day, both of them evidence they were on the right track. e First was a drawing of a preconquest Guatamalan stone carving representing a mushroom; the second was a letter from the poet Robert Graves calling their attention to an article by Richard Evans Schultes, the famed ethnobotanist. In it, Schultes presented evidence of a mushroom cult in Mexico; he had even brought back specimens of the supposedly magic mushroom for study at the Harvard Botanical Museum. Moreover, Schultes had claimed to have witnessed a shamanistic ritual in which they were used, though he made no claim to having ingested the mushrooms himself. Since it ran counter to the prevailing thought of the day, Schultes’ paper, and even his specimens, had not raised many eyebrows at Harvard. Upon seeing his specimens, one of the botanists there remarked, “Dried mushrooms look like dried peyote tops, so they’re one and the same thing.” In 1953 the Wassons made their First expedition to a town mentioned by Schultes, Huautla de Jiminez, in search of the magic mushroom cult. ey were accompanied by anthropologist Roberto Weitlaner, the man who
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