…seventies I was again engaged in the investigation of the hallucinogen in the kykeon. This time I worked in collaboration with Gordon Wasson the famous ethnomycologist with whom I had worked in the research of research of Mexican plants such as such as…

…future of religion. And some of the contributors are Albert Hoffman, the discoverer of LSD and the synthesizer of psilocybin. Gordon Wasson, our own brother David Stendelrast who's lived and taught at Esalen many years. Jack Kornfeld, myself, Anne and Sascha…

…over 2000 years everyone who was anyone in the ancient world made the pilgrimage to Eleusis and had this experience which Gordon Wasson and Carl Ruck have argued very convincingly, was a hallucinogenic intoxication on Urgot. But of course, as soon as the…

…I like to think that the end of that repression came in a very odd way when in 1953, I guess it was Gordon Wasson and his wife Valentina in the village of Huatla de Jimenez in the Sierra Mazateca of Oaxaca discovered the psilocybin mushroom cult. It…

…attention that has been given to that mushroom is to my mind entirely out of proportion to its cultural importance. This is because Gordon Wasson fastened in on it with a tenacious will, as Soma, he decided that it was Soma. Are you all up to speed on…

…it. It was some way. It was pressed, it was filtered. And then they talk about this golden liquid which they drank. And Gordon Wasson, because of the importance of the indo aryan people who wrote the Vedas, for connecting up all of the history of what…

…Plato, Aristotle, most of those great philosophers went through the mysteries there. And recently drug ethologists and scholars like Robert Gordon Wasson and Allegra have told us that the key to the yuccinian mysteries was a ceremonial plant which is probably…

…be simply a cultural bias of the school of anthropology that he exemplified and the time in which his work was done. Now Gordon Wasson has taken the opposite tack and takes the position that non narcotic shamanism is decadent because it is on its way to…

…I'm glad you reminded me. Amanita mascaria is perhaps the old world hallucinogen par excellence, at least in the opinion of Gordon Wasson and a lot of other scholars. The problem with it is it's extremely difficult to get a reliable, positive experience…

…from the shamanic elders of your tribe, are you going to know whether you've got a good one or not. Nevertheless, Gordon Wasson tried to argue that it was the ur hallucinogen, the prototypic hallucination of prehistory that was being used by these vedic…

…hallucinogenesis presently afforded by societies living throughout the world. There are, of course, the psilocybin complex discovered by Gordon Wasson, the magic mushrooms of central Mexico, which may have played a role in the mayan and toltec civilizations…

…and put in place archaic options which will restore this balance. And to the good credit of people like Dick Schultes and Gordon Wasson and Albert Hoffman, we have in this century taken into our hands the tools, the information and the means to do this.…

…judgments about evolutionary relationships. So Albert Hoffman, the discoverer of LSD, was amazed when carrying out analytical work for Gordon Wasson on magic, morning glory seeds that had been sent to Wasson from Schultes. He discovered the same compounds, or…

…gets behind hard cover in terms of recent publishing that you might find interesting. Anyway, there was a festrif published for Gordon Wasson called the Sacred Mushroom seeker that has a bunch of interesting articles in it and a strange article by me that…

…and put in place archaic options which will restore this balance. And to the good credit of people like Dick Schultz and Gordon Wasson and Albert Hoffman, we have in this century taken into our hands the tools, the information and the means to do this.…

…were able to push this thing into the mountains of Oaxaca so that it only survived in a few villages until Valentina and Gordon Wasson went in the 1950s and found it there. And I. The metaphor I like for that, another metaphor. You see, you balance…

…be simply cultural bias of the school of anthropology that he exemplified and the time in which his work was done. Now Gordon Wasson has taken the opposite tack and takes the position that non narcotic shamanism is decadent because it is on its way to…

…being shown the same things. And when you take psilocybin just with one other person, you're lying together be mushroomed, as Gordon Wasson says. You have the feeling, you know, that you're just flowing there together. And sometimes you can even one person…

…I like to think that the end of that repression came in a very odd way when in 1953 I guess it was Gordon Wasson and his wife Valentina in the village of Huatla de Jimenez in the Sierra Mazateca of Oaxaca discovered the psilocybin mushroom cult. It…

…it was Pergamon harmola. And it makes a strong case. I mean, I regard now the whole question has totally reopened. Gordon Wasson was a lovely person and a great explorer and his accomplishments in the oaxacan highlands can never be gainsaid or naysayd.…

…quite at the front of the line. But he said, narcotic shamanism is decadent. Resort to drugs is decadent. Well, then Gordon Wasson, who was the discoverer of the mushroom complex, took exactly the opposite position and said, shamanism, in the absence of…

…purified of these toxins through the animal's system, and they would drink a pulse. Well, yes. I mean, I really respect Gordon Wasson, but in this particular area, I think he spread more confusion than light. It is certainly true that Amanina muscaria is…

…as a matter of fact, he is a thinker of extreme breadth and depth. It was he working with Carl Ruck and Gordon Wasson who proposed that it was actually psychoactive ergot alkaloids that lay behind the eleusinian mysteries and thereby rubbed the nose of…

…human enterprise than by availing yourself of the tools and the compounds which men like John Lilly, Albert Hoffman, Richard Schultes, Gordon Wasson, Oscar Janager have placed before us. Don't let anyone tell you that we're not living in an age of heroes,…

…forth that passed between them, there's certainly enough of that in the history of psychedelics. Just as an example, the reason Gordon Wasson and his wife Valentina went to Mexico was because Robert Graves told them that they should do that, that there was…

…mushroom shaman of all is the shamaness Maria Sabina, who died a few years ago, who was the person who turned Gordon Wasson on. And everyone, not everyone takes the mushroom, but everyone who wants to takes the mushroom. And the candles are extinguished.…

…just chanting. And then the shaman goes into trance and speaks. And if any of you know Maria Sabina's mushroom phala that Gordon Wasson published, she speaks in a kind of sing song poetry, you know, woman of affairs am I. Medicine woman am I, little…