…creativity and creativity and LSD and as we surveyed his library, we talked of the many other libraries that researchers like Wasson and Hoffman have gathered together over the years. This is a priceless informational research repository. One of one of the…

…is it that grows at the end of history? Is it the mushroom of Fermi and Oppenheimer and Teller? Or is it the mushroom of Wasson and Hoffman and Humphrey Osmond? Somehow I think the latter is safer. Well, it may not only be safer, it may open the way…

…people said, you have to dry them for months or smoke them over a fire. Again, this doesn't seem to be reliable. So Wasson went to the grave. In his last book, Persephone's quest, he referred to Amanita Muscaria as the supreme amphibian of all time,…

…Algeria, have been reproduced from. And they are strong evidence for the use of mushrooms in Neolithic Africa. This is evidence which Wasson did not include in his books. New evidence. And both of the majority, the major rock paintings that argue for this…

…did not have the tools to advance it. They came to us out of ethnography and anthropology, out of the work of Wasson and Hoffman and earlier, Havelock, Ellis and Weir, Mitchell, Henri Michaud, all the people who worked with psychedelics. At first it was…

…people who studied the shamanism of the Amur river basin. And the use of the Amanita muskeria was tremendously over stressed by Wasson. I think he wrote a book called the divine Mushroom of Immortality, in which he argued that Amanita Musquito was the…

…And a lot of other people thought so too. So then there was lots of hassle about. Well, then it did seem that Wasson had secured the case that the Vedicams were about a mushroom. That was his breakthrough. But his mistake was he got the mushroom…

…a lot of speed bumps this morning. Frankly, I don't give a shit, but I'm trying to make it pleasant for you. So Wasson and Schultes were, and then further back in time. And I think it's obvious from what I've said, Aldous Huxley. And Aldous Huxley…

…renewal is seeking in thousands and thousands of ways to be born. And I think the rediscovery of psychedelics, LSD, everything that Wasson did, all of these things are critical factors in this cultural mix that is going to gel toward the recognition of…

…center of it. Something was drunk and something happened. And there's been great argument about what was it and what happened. And Wasson and Hoffman and Ruck, who's a classicist at Cornell, all wanted to argue that it was an ergotized beer. In other…

…Now, the counterexample to this is when Hoffman synthesized psilocybin for the first time. He gave some of it to Wassen, and Wasson took it back to Huatla in the Sierra Mazateca of Oaxaca and gave it to Maria Sabina. And Maria Sabina said, the…

…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 very closely related compounds as he had synthesized to make LSD. I'm going…

…and I think that that's probably where the focus will be, just sort of by default. Yes. One of the interesting things, when Wasson tried to show. Show that Soma was Amanita Muscaria, he ignored this very rich set of associations that the Hindus have to…

…people who have not been brought up in the tradition of arctic shamanism to actually get a good connection with it. Nevertheless, Wasson wanted to suggest that it was indo aryan people coming out of the Caspian Sea area and into Mesopotamia, carrying with…

…Is it extractable by methods accessible to Greeks of the time of the orphic cult? Not known. You know, Hoffmande, Robin and Wasson wanted to say that the cult at Eleusis I mentioned this earlier, was based on ergotized grain. A lot of people criticize…

…fact, it would do it. The thing that led me to psilocybin or to grow mushrooms and explore. That was the descriptions of Wasson and the early workers that it was easy to visually hallucinate. And I had read the earlier accounts of Havelock Ellis and…

…is it that grows at the end of history? Is it the mushroom of Fermi and Oppenheimer and teller? Or is it the mushroom of Wasson and Hoffman and Humphrey Osmond? Somehow I think the latter is safer. It may not only be safer, it may open the way to…

…to greek religion. And that's the last time that in our cultural line of development that there was access to the mystical tremendum. Wasson made an interesting case that what was used at Eleusis was ergotized beer. As you know, Ergot is a smut that can…

…who turned the wasens on to the idea of going to Mexico to look for mushrooms, he had an entirely different idea, which Wasson mysteriously fails to even mention in his book on Eleusis. I think he should have at least denounced the guy's position and…

…model. For those of us who wander in the prodigal desert of materialism, and through the work of people like Jordan Wasson and Richard Evans Schultes, and in the 19th century, Richard Spruce, the tools have been catalogued, the magical plants. And I…

…use of the word narcotics betrays such a botanical naivete that, you know you're not going to be happy with what follows. Wasson, on the other hand, said, a shamanism that does not resort to hallucinogenic plants is a shamanism that has lost its roots.…

…work in all of this. I think that hallucinogens are basic to humanness and always have been. You know, Karl Ruck and Wasson wrote a very convincing book to show that the eleusinian mysteries were an ergot, a cult of urgot intoxication. I thought that…

…in the higher primates in a feedback relationship with hallucinogenic plants. In other words, he would go much further than Wasson, who's saying religion was caused by a relation. He's saying thought itself was caused by monkeys relating to these plants.…

…So I don't see how it could possibly have been Amanita muskeri. I think a whole bunch of mistakes were made by Wasson and the people who followed him. In arguing so strenuously for that, Wasson himself admitted that he never obtained a satisfactory…

…think a whole bunch of mistakes were made by Wasson and the people who followed him. In arguing so strenuously for that, Wasson himself admitted that he never obtained a satisfactory intoxication from Mamenita. So again, you have to be aware of all of…

…Now, there's a famous story that when Hoffman isolated psilocybin, he then, to prove the isolation, he manufactured some. And then he and Wasson took it back with them to Whatla and they gave it to Maria Sabina, and she said, the spirit of the mushroom…

…Algeria, have been reproduced from, and they are strong evidence for the use of mushrooms in neolithic Africa. This is evidence which Wasson did not include in his books. New evidence. And both of the majority, the major rock paintings that argue for this…

…did not have the tools to advance it. They came to us out of ethnography and anthropology, out of the work of Wasson and Hoffman and earlier, Havelock, Ellis and Weir, Mitchell, Henri Michaud, all the people who worked with psychedelics. At first it was…