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Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico – Robert Gordon Wasson

There are no apt words … to characterise your state when you are, shall we say, 'bemushroomed'.  What we need is a vocabulary to describe all the modalities of a divine inebriant.

We know that today there are many curanderos who carry on the cult, each according to his lights, some of them consummate artists, performing the ancient liturgy in remote huts before minuscule congregations.

They are hard to reach these curanderos.

Do not think that it is question of money.  Perhaps you will learn the names of a number of renowned curanderos, and your emissaries will even promise to deliver them to you, but then you wait and wait and they never come.  You will brush past them in the marketplace, they will know you, but you will not know them.  The judge in the town hall may be the very man you are seeking; and you may pass the time of day with him, yet never learn that he is your curandero.

After all, would you have it any different?  What priest of the Catholic church will perform mass to satisfy an unbeliever's curiosity.........................

Your body lies in the darkness, heavy as lead, but your spirit seems to soar and leave the hut and with the speed of thought travel where it listeth, in time and space, accompanied by the shaman's singing and by the ejaculations of her percussive chant … the bemushroomed person is poised in space, a disembodied eye, invisible, incorporeal, seeing but not seen.  In truth, he is the 5 senses disembodied, all of them keyed  to the height of sensitivity and awareness, all of them blending into one another most strangely … As your body lies there in its sleeping bag, your soul is free..........

It permits you to see more clearly than our perishing mortal eye can see, vistas beyond the horizons of this life, to travel backwards and forwards in time; to enter other planes of existence, even (as the Indians say) to “know God”.

All that you see during this night has a pristine  quality; the landscape, the edifices, the carvings, the animals – they look as though they had come straight from the Maker's workshop.

This newness of everything – it is as if the world had just dawned – overwhelms you and melts you with its beauty....... All these things you see with an immediacy of vision that leads you to say to yourself.

“Now I am seeing for the first time, seeing direct, without the intervention of mortal eyes”

In common parlance, among the many who have not experienced ecstasy, ecstasy is fun and I am frequently asked why I do not reach for mushrooms every night. 

But ecstasy is not fun. 

Your very soul is seized and shaken until it tingles.