Entheogens and the public mystery: The rhetoric of R. Gordon Wasson

Configurations

Volumn 16, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 215-243

  Ceraso, Antonio ^a  

^a DEPAUL UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 74349127940     PISSN: 10631801     EISSN: 10806520     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/con.0.0050     Document Type: Article

References (73)

1. Botanical Museum Leafets 19:6-18 (February-April 1961). Harvard's Botanical Museum Leafet was a key publication venue for the study of ethneogens at the time. Just two issues before the publication of Wasson's keynote, Richard Evans Schultes and Ralph F. Raffauf published an article titled "Prestonia: Amazon Narcotic or Not?" The authors seek to clarify early twentieth-century claims by Richard Spruce that Prestonia was an active ingredient in ayahuasca. While the subject of Schultes and Raffauf's article is, then, hallucinogenic, the method differs completely; they include no report from self-experiments, and the web of citation and evidence follows recognizable protocols of scientifc discourse.
2. This is not the last time Luce would try to use his vast publication empire to publicize psychedelic substances. Both he and his wife, Claire Booth Luce, would later experiment extensively with LSD. According to W.A. Swanberg, Luce's personal experiences with LSD had such an effect on him "that he turned up in New York to present the managing editors of Time, Life, and Fortune with copies of a book on psychedelic drugs, along with an enthusiastic talk about the subject's story possibilitiesz - a suggestion quickly adopted by Time and Life, the latter being the frst 'family' magazine to cover it"; see Swanberg, Luce and His Empire (New York: Scribner's, 1972), p. 463.
3. MAPS Bulletin 14:1 (2004).
4. Plato, Phaedrus, 229d-230a.
5. Richard Doyle, "LSDNA: Rhetoric, Consciousness Expansion, and the Emergence of Biotechnology," Philosophy and Rhetoric 35:2 (2002): 153-174.
6. R. Gordon Wasson, "Speech to the Mycological Society of America," August 30, 1960.
7. Jonathan Ott describes the controversy over the naming; see Ott, Pharmocotheon: Entheogenic Drugs, Their Plant Sources and Histories (Kennewick, WA: Natural Products Company, 1993).
8. Michel Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society (London: Sage, 1996), pp. 30-55.
9. Ibid., p. 32: "It is this opposition between extrinsic power and intrinsic puissance which must rigorously guide our thinking and which is the translation into sociological terms of the previously mentioned aesthetic dichotomy (optical versus tactical)." While Maffesoli's use of categories is often overly dualistic, one suspects that these dualisms serve more as heuristic devices for accessing affective ties than as distinct categories.
10. I cannot do justice to this rich feld of inquiry in the space available. For an introduction to the tradition of remarkable work in bibliometrics, citation studies, and information science, see Henry G. Small, "Cited Documents as Concept Symbols," Social Studies of Science 8:3 (1978): 327-340;
11. Loet Leydesdorff and Olga Amsterdamska, "Dimensions of Citation Analysis," Science, Technology & Human Values 15:3 (1990): 305-335;
12. E. Garfeld, "Random Thoughts on Citationology: Its Theory and Practice," Scientometrics 43:1 (1998): 69-76;
13. and Henry G. Small, "On the Shoulders of Robert Merton: Towards a Normative Theory of Citation," Scientometrics 60:1 (2004): 71-79.
14. See Havelock Ellis, "Mescal: A New Artifcial Paradise," Contemporary Review (January 1898); and Ellis, "Mescal Intoxication," Lancet (June 12, 1897).
15. R. Gordon Wasson, "The Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico: An Inquiry into the Origins of Religious Ideas among Primitive Peoples," Botanical Museum Leafet 19:7 (1961): 137-161.
16. The phenomenon of the curandera being taken up as a channel for the "speech" of hallucinogenic mushrooms is described in rich detail by Henry Munn. The Mazatec curanderas he encounters punctuate each of their chanted utterances with the word tzo (says): "The Mazatec say that the mushrooms speak. If you ask a shaman where his imagery comes from, he is likely to reply: I didn't say it, the mushrooms did." We also learn something about Munn's practice of listening here, as he immediately blocks the notion that the mushrooms speak: "No mushroom speaks, that is a primitive anthropomorphization of the natural, only man speaks, but he who eats the mushrooms, if he is a man of language, becomes endowed with an inspired capacity to speak." See Munn, "The Mushrooms of Language," in Hallucinogens and Shamanism, ed. Michael J. Harner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 86-122.
17. R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl A. P. Ruck, The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries (New York: Harvest/ HBJ, 1978), p. 13.
18. Ibid.
19. Valentina Pavlovina Wasson and R. Gordon Wasson, Mushrooms Russia and History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1957), p. 37.
20. Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck, Road to Eleusis (above, n. 13), p. 14.
21. Wasson, "Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico" (above, n. 12), p. 140.
22. Ibid.
23. Wasson and Wasson, Mushrooms Russia and History (above, n. 15), p. 369.
24. Wasson, "Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico" (above, n. 12), p. 146.
25. Wasson and Wasson, Mushrooms Russia and History (above, n. 15), p. 4.
26. Ibid.
27. R. Gordon Wasson, "Soma of the Aryans: An Ancient Hallucinogen?" Journal of Psychedelic Drugs 3:2 (1970): 40.
28. Wasson, "Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico" (above, n. 12), p. 140.
29. Wasson and Wasson, Mushrooms Russia and History (above, n. 15), p. 242.
30. Wasson, "Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico" (above, n. 12), p. 146.
31. Ibid.
32. Wasson and Wasson, Mushrooms Russia and History (above, n. 15), p. 3.
33. Ibid., p. 35.
34. Wasson, "Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico" (above, n. 12), pp. 140-142.
35. Ibid., p. 153.
36. This trope of a movement back in time accompanying a spatial movement into "primitive" areas is, of course, common in colonial travel literature. It also marks some of William S. Burroughs descriptions of his movements in Peru in his hallucinogenic exchange with Allen Ginsberg; see Burroughs, The Yage Letters (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1975).
37. R. Gordon Wasson, "Seeking the Magic Mushroom," Life, May 13, 1957, 102.
38. Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Shapin's insight on the function of trust in modern scientifc practice is fascinating. In moving past the networks of institutionalized science, Wasson shows that trust need not be invested in an elite group - either as a decorous society of aristocrats or a community of experts. As such, Wasson's work could add the notion of hospitality and friendship to the sedimented conditions for trust in science.
39. Albert Hofmann, LSD: My Problem Child (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980), chap. 6 (available online at http://www.psychedlic-library.org/child.htm) .
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid. Hofmann, like Heim, also accompanied Wasson to Mexico. Wasson was well aware of Hofmann's work even as it was ongoing. In his speech to the Mycological Society of America, Wasson mentions both Hofmann's isolation of psilocybin and psilocine and Hofmann's identifcation of the active agents of oliliuqui, though the latter discovery had occurred only weeks before his speech.
42. Ibid.
43. Ott, Pharmocotheon (above, n. 7), p. 275.
44. Wasson and Wasson, Mushrooms Russia and History (above, n. 15), p. 242.
45. Wasson, "Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico" (above, n. 12), p. 155.
46. Alan Liu, Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 178.
47. Pamela O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).
48. Wasson, "Speech" (above, n. 6); Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck, Road to Eleusis (above, n. 13).
49. Maffesoli, Time of the Tribes (above, n. 8), p. 91.
50. Wasson, "Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico" (above, n. 12), p. 141; Wasson and Wasson, Mushrooms Russia and History (above, n. 15), pp. 360-362.
51. Wasson, "Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico" (above, n. 12), p. 140.
52. In a curious footnote to The Human Condition, written at approximately the same time, Hannah Arendt refects on much the same problem, arguing that the Eleusinian mysteries stand in a strange relation to the public and private realms as they were conceived in Greek antiquity. The mysteries, Arendt speculates, "provided for a common and quasi-public experience," with the paradoxical caveat that while they were "common to all," they nevertheless "needed to remain hidden, kept secret from the public realm" (Arendt pp. 61ff., 63).
53. Under discussion is the concept of the public and the private and the specifc function of the household as a locus for birth and death - those things that are "hidden from human eyes and impenetrable to human knowledge" (pp. 62-63).
54. This hidden-ness, for Arendt, is the necessary counterpart to the showing forth in the public realm. Yet it is precisely the quasi-public nature of the mysteries that erupts from the footnote to disrupt Arendt's narrative; the mysteries take their place at the pivot point of private physis and public nomos. The torchlight of their hidden public rites fickers in the darkness between necessity and freedom, between the unspeakable and that which can only be spoken. But the quasi-public character of the mysteries in antiquity should also throw into some doubt the telling of a fall into some degraded public-ness, where the ordinary problems of biology invade political life. Another term for the quasi-public-ness of the mysteries, then, might be one that functions only oxymoronically within the Arendtian discourse: biopolitics. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 61-63.
55. Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck, Road to Eleusis (above, n. 13), p. 20; Wasson, "Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico" (above, n. 12), p. 155.
56. Hofmann suggests that the fungal species Claviceps purpurea, or some other variation of fungus, grew on the wild grass, rye, or wheat in the Mediterranean region. Ergot is the sclerotium on the fungus. It has chemical properties through its "alkaloidal components" (Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck, Road to Eleusis [above, n. 13], p. 30),
57. specifcally ergonovine. Hofmann suggests that ergonovine served as the hallucinogenic ingredient of the kykeon. Ergonovine is soluble in water; the poisonous ergot alkaloids ergotamine and ergotoxine are not. For this reason, Hofmann speculates that the functionaries at Eleusis could have derived the hallucinogenic compound without exposing themselves to ergot poisoning. As a second solution, Hofmann suggests that ancient herbalists were able to extract the alkaloid from a different species of ergot (Claviceps papali) growing on "the grass Paspalum distichum which contains only alkaloids that are hallucinogenic and which could have even been used directly in powder form" (ibid., p. 33).
58. Finally, Hofmann suggests that the alkaloid was extractable from ergot growing on a wild grass (Lolium temulentum), which is "notorious prey to the Claviceps fungus." The third solution presents the same problem of the isolation of ergonovine from the more dangerous ergotamine and ergotoxine. Wasson's ability to make the connection so early, however, is truly striking, since it appears that not even Hofmann himself had made the connection at the time. Karl Kerenyi's Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter contains an appendix in which the author speculates on the ingredients of the kykeon, citing specifcally a letter exchange with Albert Hofmann. Here, Hofmann suggests that alcohol was suffcient to induce the visions associated with the mysteries, adding that "poley oil (Oleum pulegii) might very well, added to the alcoholic content of the kykeon, have produced hallucinations in persons whose sensibility was heightened by fasting." See Kerenyi, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter, trans. Ralph Mannheim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 180.
59. In Road to Eleusis (above, n. 13), the quotation reads: "It is clear to me where Plato found his Ideas; it was clear to those who were initiated among his contemporaries too. Plato had drunk of the potion in the Temple of Eleusis and had spent the night seeing the great Vision."
60. Wasson, "Seeking the Magic Mushroom" (above, n. 33).
61. Kerenyi claims that "all Greek existence was bound up with the celebration of the Mysteries at Eleusis" (Eleusis [above, n. 49], p. 10).
62. Ibid., p. 52.
63. Ibid., p. 138. See also Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987): "Is it not true that the mysteries were 'unspeakable,' arrheta, not just in the sense of artifcial secrecy utilized to arouse curiosity, but in the sense that what was central and decisive was not accessible to verbalization?" (p. 69).
64. Wasson, "Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico" (above, n. 12), p. 143.
65. Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck, Road to Eleusis (above, n. 13), p. 47.
66. Ibid., p. 152.
67. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 2, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 372-373.
68. Ibid., p. 373.
69. Carl A. P. Ruck, Jeremy Bigwood, Danny Staples, Jonathan Ott, and R. Gordon Wasson, "Hallucinogens," Journal of Psychedelic Drugs 11:1/2 (1979): 146.
70. Wasson, "Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico" (above, n. 12), p. 155.
71. Ruck et al., "Hallucinogens" (above, n. 60), p. 146.
72. Andrew Ross, "Technology and Below-the-Line Labor in the Copyfght Over Intellectual Property," American Quarterly 58:3 (2006): 743-766.
73. Ross provides a useful corrective to both the euphoria and the hand-wringing over the emergence and subsequent "enclosure" of the digital information commons, arguing that the legalistic form of such struggles have elided the effects that a networked information economy has on labor. Many commentators have, of course, cast doubt on the very categories of "users and consumers" that Ross deploys here, arguing that the distinction between consumption and production is precisely what collapses in a networked information economy. But that collapse could be read to make Ross's point: If what is at stake in intellectual-property battles is the global restructuring of production and consumption, why are the consequences for work qua labor so often banished in networked information economy discourse in favor of rather vague promises of consumer-driven locations for remixing, innovation, and participatory design? Furthermore, where labor does seem central (if decentralized) and organized (if trough novel sociotechnical architectures), it is predictably limited to a privileged class of technical workers. Since free and open-source software communities have been the darling of numerous copyright activists and their primary model of communal and novel labor organization in networked information economies, they come in for a predictable drubbing in Ross's account. Free and open-source software communities might call into question romantic or industrial assumptions of singular authorship and individual ownership (and the intellectual-property regime built on those assumptions), but for Ross, they operate as if narrowly held technical expertise will mitigate any degradation of work. The "labor consciousness" found in free and open-source software communities is thus like "the guild labor mentality of yore that sought security in the protection of craft knowledge." No doubt a similar charge could be leveled at Wasson himself. While allowing that free and open-source software communities and Wasson rely on an empirically limited technical knowledge, I'm suggesting that they both provide an alternative model for social organization that can be generalized. In this sense, their specifc labor consciousness is not really at issue.