Magic Mushroom Hunters

Scientists have found the genes that make magic mushrooms magic

2018-03-06T03:17:00.001-08:00

Long before magic mushrooms became a way for hippies to turn on, tune in, and drop out, and well before ancient mesoamerican mystics employed them in religious ritual, they had their use as an insect repellant. Some 200 species of mushrooms naturally produce psilocybin, which, when imbibed by humans, can trigger “magic,” hallucinogenic effects. But obviously these mushrooms didn’t evolve to send humans on psychedelic trips.

Psilocybin also affects insects’ minds, making them less hungry. Given that most magic mushrooms grow in environments particularly welcoming to insects—the mushroom’s natural predator—it’s likely the psychedelic compound developed as a tool for evolutionary survival.

A study published Feb. 27 in Evolution Letters sets out the evidence for this reasoning. There’s no clear, distinct family of mushrooms that contain psilocybin. The dozens of different species are distantly related, suggesting the genes for psilocybin weren’t passed down through one biological lineage, but instead that the genetic material for psilocybin transferred across species (known as horizontal gene transfer.)

In their recent study, researchers led by Jason Slot, professor of fungal evolutionary genomics at Ohio State University, sequenced the genomes of three distantly related magic mushroom species and compared them with much more closely related non-psychedelic mushrooms. They identified a cluster of five genes responsible for psychedelic qualities, and found that the distantly related psilocybin mushrooms had more similar genomes than closely related mushrooms that lived in different environments.

This suggests that the genes were transferred (horizontal transferring is more common for genes within clusters) as a response to stresses within the environment. In this case, the environments in question are animal dung and rotting wood, where there are plenty of mushroom-eating insects.

Psilocybin’s ability to interfere with the mind has a clear evolutionary benefit for mushrooms growing amid animal dung. It interferes with neurotransmitters in insects’ minds to make them less hungry and so less likely to eat mushrooms. “The psilocybin probably doesn’t just poison predators or taste bad,” Slot said in a statement. “These mushrooms are altering the insects’ ‘mind’—if they have minds—to meet [the mushrooms’] own needs.”

Decoding the original purpose and genes behind magic mushrooms could help advance new uses for psilocybin. There’s currently fast-advancing research on psilocybin as a potential treatment for depression, addiction, and treating anxietyamong patients with terminal cancer.

Chef gets caught with magic mushroom drugs in his bedroom

2017-04-20T03:51:00.000-07:00

A chef has been ordered to pay £365 after he was found possessing class A drugs known as magic mushrooms. Chesterfield magistrates’ court heard on Tuesday, April 18, how Andrew Kyle Judge, 23, of Burton Edge, Bakewell, had his home searched by police regarding another unrelated matter when they found the psilocin drugs.

😀READ MORE😀

magic mushrooms do in 30 seconds what antidepressants take four weeks to do

2017-03-05T06:15:00.001-08:00

magic mushrooms do in 30 seconds what antidepressants take four weeks to do

The story of santa and his flying reindeer may have started with a shroom trip

2015-12-21T12:31:00.000-08:00

If you celebrated Christmas as a child, the story of a bearded old man flying around the world delivering gifts may have struck you as strange. But one interpretation of the myth’s origins is even stranger.
As Live Science reported back in 2012, magic mushrooms may explain the origins of Santa and his flying reindeer.
“As the story goes, up until a few hundred years ago these practicing shamans or priests connected to the older traditions would collect Amanita muscaria [the Holy Mushroom], dry them, and then give them as gifts on the winter solstice,” John Rush, an anthropologist and instructor at Sierra College in Rocklin, California, told Live Science.
Since the doors were usually blocked by snow, people usually entered through an opening in the roof — hence Santa’s famous chimney entry, Rush added.

Santa’s ‘flying’ reindeer

Some folklorists claim the flying reindeer tradition came from people tripping on these shrooms, since reindeer are common in Siberian climates. The reindeer are known eat the mushrooms, too.
Then there’s the fact that A. muscaria grow under trees (like presents), and are red-and-white (like Santa’s suit).

These mushrooms are usually toxic to humans, but shamans used them in religious practices because of their hallucinogenic properties, according to the book “Hallucinogens and Culture” by Peter Furst. A. muscaria is distinct from the “magic” mushrooms commonly used as a recreational drug, such as Psilocybe cubensis. A compound known as muscimol is the main psychoactive ingredient in A. muscaria. Muscimol acts similarly to the brain signalling chemical GABA, which suppresses the activity of brain cells and produces relaxing feelings.

Fact or fiction?

The Santa-shaman theory is disputed by some.
If you look at the evidence, “you find that shamans didn’t travel by sleigh, didn’t usually deal with reindeer spirits, very rarely took the mushrooms to get trances, didn’t have red and white clothes,” Ronald Hutton, a history professor at the University of Bristol, told NPR in 2010.
Instead, Hutton says, Santa was invented in 1822 by a New Yorker named Clement Clarke Moore, who wrote the classic children’s book “The Night Before Christmas.”
But shamans and hallucinogenic mushrooms sound a bit more magical, don’t you think?

magic mushroom treatment for depression and anxiety

2015-11-17T08:26:00.002-08:00

https://www.inverse.com/article/8191-magic-mushrooms-high-on-the-potential-for-treating-depression-and-anxiety-get-a-scale

Headache sufferers flout new drug law

2013-06-16T23:15:00.001-07:00

Calls for clinical trials and rethink of legislation as patients claim that magic mushrooms can relieve excruciating condition

Patients who suffer from cluster headaches - a debilitating medical condition for which there is no cure - are flouting the government's ban on magic mushrooms because they say the psychedelic fungi are the only thing to relieve the pain of their attacks.

In the past two years scores of British cluster headache sufferers have turned to magic mushrooms, prompted by reports from the US that suggest that LSD and psilocybin - the active ingredient of magic mushrooms - may be able to control the intensity and duration of their headaches.

Although some have experimented with psychedelics before, the majority have no history of drug taking. But many say they would rather risk jail than forgo a substance that lets them lead a normal life.

Richard Ayliffe, 39, a chronic sufferer from Dudley in the West Midlands, says he has tried conventional treatments but the only thing to have brought him relief is magic mushrooms. Without them he says he would not be able to hold down a job.

"People are quite sympathetic at first but once you've let them down for the third time sympathy turns to exasperation," he says. "Magic mushrooms have enabled me to lead a normal life."

Like other members of ClusterBusters - an online forum where cluster headache sufferers swap notes and discuss alternative treatments - Ayliffe claims that taking magic mushrooms not only interrupts his cycle of headaches, but buys him longer remission periods between attacks. Some sufferers claim that since taking mushrooms they have been pain-free for up to two years.

And, because an attack can come at any time many members stockpiled mushrooms ahead of the government's ban this month.

Last week one member of the group, a 41-year-old father of two who asked to be identified only as Lee, admitted he had already taken one dose in contravention of the ban.

Under the Drugs Act 2005 possession of magic mushrooms is a class A offence punishable by a seven-year prison sentence. Previously, only psilocybin and other preparations of mushrooms, but not the fresh product itself, were controlled.

"The way I see it, either I break the law or forgo the most effective treatment I have found in nearly six years," says Lee.

Since he began taking mushrooms a year ago, he says the intensity of his headaches has shrunk by a third and the remissions between attacks have lengthened to 40 days.

"It's absolutely incredible," he says. "I can't tell you how much magic mushrooms have changed my life."

Spurred by the cases, researchers at Harvard Medical School are hoping for permission from the US food and drug administration to conduct a controlled trial.

John Halpern and his colleague Andrew Sewell have collected 60 case studies from members of ClusterBusters. With the support of the Boston-based Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (Maps), they plan to publish the cases in a leading journal with a view to getting FDA approval for a clinical trial next year.

Maps is already sponsoring an FDA trial of psilocybin for the treatment of obsessive compulsive disorder.

"At this stage we are not advocating anything - we're just trying to gather information and see if we can get a sense of the appropriate dosage," says Rick Doblin, the president of Maps. "Having said that, I find the anecdotal reports pretty convincing."

Cluster headaches come in cycles and are caused by a swelling of the blood vessels in the brain. Sufferers say the pain exceeds that of passing a kidney stone or of childbirth without anaesthetic.

Some have found the pain, which typically extends over one side of the head and face, so unbearable that they have committed suicide.

For episodic sufferers, the headaches typically last several weeks then disappear. But in chronic sufferers - of whom there are an estimated 6,000 in Britain - attacks occur daily, with no more than two weeks' remission in any 12-month period. They can continue for years.

Conventional treatments include oxygen and Imitex (sumatriptan), an anti-migraine medication that constricts the flow of blood in the brain. Since only two injections can be taken in a 24-hour period, however, this is of little use for chronic sufferers.

Verapamil, a calcium channel blocker, can also be used as a prophylactic against attacks, - but to be effective it has to be taken in high doses, increasing the risk of such side effects as cardiac arrest.

Peter Goadsby, professor of neurology at the Institute of Neurology, University College London, and the world's leading expert on cluster headaches, is sceptical about the mushroom therapy.

He argues that the relief reported by some patients may be a placebo effect or owing to natural remission. But he does believe the cases warrant a proper clinical study, particularly as ergotomine - which contains lysergic acid, a precursor of LSD - has been used to treat migraines for years.

"It's possible that mushrooms have some useful effect but it's far from proven," Dr Goadsby says. "Cluster headaches are such a devastating problem that people will turn to anything that seems to work."

But one sufferer, John Hobson, 36, from Barnsley in Yorkshire, says since experimenting with mushrooms last year his night-time attacks have ceased and he no longer gets headaches early in the morning. But because of the change in the law Mr Hobson says he has decided to discontinue the therapy.

"If I could have mushrooms growing in my garden for medical use and I knew I wasn't going to get lifted by the vice squad I would most definitely do it," he says.

"I think the government should introduce an exemption for people in need."

First magic mushroom depression trial hits stumbling block

2013-05-07T10:03:00.002-07:00

LONDON (Reuters) - The world's first clinical trial designed to explore using a hallucinogen from magic mushrooms to treat people with depression has stalled because of British and European rules on the use of illegal drugs in research.

David Nutt, president of the British Neuroscience Association and professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London, said he had been granted an ethical green light and funding for the trial, but regulations were blocking it.

"We live in a world of insanity in terms of regulating drugs," he told a neuroscience conference in London on Sunday.

He has previously conducted small experiments on healthy volunteers and found that psilocybin, the psychedelic ingredient in magic mushrooms, has the potential to alleviate severe forms of depression in people who don't respond to other treatments.

Following these promising early results he was awarded a 550,000 pounds ($844,000) grant from the UK's Medical Research Council to conduct a full clinical trial in patients.

But psilocybin is illegal in Britain, and under the United Nations 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances it is classified as a Schedule 1 drug - one that has a high potential for abuse and no recognized medical use.

This, Nutt explained, means scientists need a special license to use magic mushrooms for trials in Britain, and the manufacture of a synthetic form of psilocybin for use in patients is tightly controlled by European Union regulations.

Together, this has meant he has so far been unable to find a company able to make and supply the drug for his trial, he said.

"Finding companies who could manufacture the drug and who are prepared to go through the regulatory hoops to get the license, which can take up to a year and triple the price, is proving very difficult," he said.

Nutt said regulatory authorities have a "primitive, old-fashioned attitude that Schedule 1 drugs could never have therapeutic potential", despite the fact that his research and the work done by other teams suggests such drugs may help treat some patients with psychiatric disorders.

Psilocybin - or "magic" - mushrooms grow naturally around the world and have been widely used since ancient times for religious rites and also for recreation.

Researchers in the United States have seen positive results in trials using MDMA, a pure form of the party drug ecstasy, in treating post-traumatic stress disorder.

"What we are trying to do is to tap into the reservoir of under-researched illegal drugs to see if we can find new and beneficial uses for them in people whose lives are often severely affected by illnesses such as depression," Nutt said.

The proposed trial would involve 60 patients with depression who have failed two previous treatments.

During two or three controlled sessions with a therapist, half would be given a synthetic form of psilocybin, and the other 30 a placebo. They would have guided talking therapy to explore negative thinking and issues troubling them, and doctors would follow them up for at least a year.

Nutt secured ethical approval for the trial in March.

In previous research, Nutt found that when healthy volunteers were injected with psilocybin, the drug switched off a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex, which is known to be overactive in people with depression.

"Even in normal people, the more that part of the brain was switched off under the influence of the drug, the better they felt two weeks later. So there was a relationship between that transient switching off of the brain circuit and their subsequent mood,", he said. "This is the basis on which we want to run the trial."

Jesus, Santa, Mithra and the Magic Mushroom

2013-02-23T10:13:00.000-08:00

"Have you ever wondered why on Christmas we cut down/carry evergreen trees inside our houses, decorate them with fancy ornaments, and place presents underneath them?

So, why do people bring Pine trees into their houses at the Winter Solstice, placing brightly colored (Red and White) packages under their boughs, as gifts to show their love for each other and as representations of the love of God and the gift of his Sons life? It is because, underneath the Pine bough is the exact location where one would find this ‘Most Sacred’ Substance, the Amanita muscaria, in the wild.”

The Amanita muscaria is the red and white magic mushroom that grows almost exclusively beneath Pine trees. One of the active substances in the hallucinogenic mushroom is DMT ¹, an entheogen naturally produced in the brain’s pineal gland.

The pinecone shaped pineal gland is an organ that produces the same DMT found in the pine tree fungus, Amanita muscaria.

“The Pine tree is one of the well-known central relics of Christmas. Under this tree is where those who are deemed good find their reward in the form of a present. A big red and white rounded mushroom grows under the very tree we are to look under on Christmas morning to find our gift.”

Green, red, and white as Christmas colors comes from the evergreen tree and the red and white mushrooms underneath. The word Christmas originally comes from the Egyptian KRST (oiled/anointed one) and Mes, the sacred cakes annually made/ingested by the Egyptians.

This Eucharist was originally made from Amanita muscaria or was the mushroom itself.

The tradition existed all over the ancient world, but most of the iconography/symbology recognized today comes from preChristian Northern Europe.

“The very name, ‘Christmas’ is a holiday name composed of the words, ‘Christ’ (meaning ‘one who is anointed with the Magical Substance’) and ‘Mass’ (a special religious service/ceremony of the sacramental ingestion of the Eucharist, the ‘Body of Christ’). In the Catholic tradition, this substance (Body/Soma) has been replaced by the doctrine of ‘Transubstantiation’, whereby in a magical ceremony the Priests claim the ability to transform a ‘cracker/round-wafer’ into the literal ‘Body of Christ’; i.e., a substitute or placebo.”

“Although most people see Christmas as a Christian holiday, most of the symbols and icons we associate with Christmas celebrations are actually derived from the shamanistic traditions of the tribal peoples of preChristian Northern Europe. The sacred mushroom of these people was the red and white amanita muscaria mushroom … These peoples lived in dwellings made of birch and reindeer hide, called ‘yurts.’ Somewhat similar to a teepee, the yurt's central smoke hole is often also used as an entrance.

After gathering the mushrooms from under the sacred trees where they appeared, the shamans would fill their sacks and return home. Climbing down the chimney entrances, they would share out the mushroom's gifts with those within … Santa also dresses like a mushroom gatherer. When it was time to go out and harvest the magical mushrooms, the ancient shamans would dress much like Santa, wearing red and white furtrimmed coats and long black boots.”

To this day Siberian shamans dress in ceremonial red and white fur trimmed jackets to gather the magic mushrooms. First they pick and place the mushrooms to partially dry on nearby pine boughs which prepares them for ingestion and makes the load lighter.

This is why we decorate our Christmas trees with ornaments and bulbs, because the gatherers would always adorn trees with drying mushrooms.

Next the shaman collects his red and white presents in a sack and proceeds to travel from house to house delivering them.

During Siberian winters, the snow piles up past the doors of their yurts (huts), so the red and white clad shaman must climb down the smoke hole (chimney) to deliver the presents in his sack. Finally the appreciative villagers string the mushrooms up or put them in stockings hung affront the fire to dry.

When they awake in the morning, their presents from under the pine tree are all dried and ready to eat.

“The amanita mushroom needs to be dried before being consumed; the drying process reduces the mushroom's toxicity while increasing its potency. The shaman would guide the group in stringing the mushrooms and hanging them around the hearth fire to dry. This tradition is echoed in the modern stringing of popcorn and other items.”

Dana Larsen, “The Psychedelic Secrets of Santa Claus” Cannabis Culture, Marijuana Magazine, Dec 18th, 2003

“The ancient shamanic use of Amanita muscaria in Siberia is well documented. Despite governmental oppression against its use, there are still many who refuse to accept the authorized state religion, and continue the shamanic traditions in secret.

Just as the Siberian shaman (commonly dressing in red and white) would enter through the opening in the roof of a home where a ritual was to be done, Santa Claus also arrives on the roof and enters through the chimney. Just as the shamans would gather the mushrooms in bags which they would bring with them when performing a ceremony, Santa Claus also (on the Holy Day) brings presents in a bag.”

Siberian reindeer also enjoy eating amanita mushrooms and thus are often used as a lure by the deer herding natives.

Since one of the hallucinatory experiences often felt on psychedelic mushrooms is that of flying, Santa’s flying reindeer most likely derive from this.

“Reindeer were the sacred animals of these semi nomadic people, as the reindeer provided food, shelter, clothing and other necessities. Reindeer are also fond of eating the amanita mushrooms; they will seek them out, and then prance about while under their influence … The effects of the amanita mushroom usually include sensations of size distortion and flying.

The feeling of flying could account for the legends of flying reindeer, and legends of shamanic journeys included stories of winged reindeer, transporting their riders up to the highest branches of the World Tree.”

Dana Larsen, “The Psychedelic Secrets of Santa Claus” Cannabis Culture, Marijuana Magazine, Dec 18th, 2003

The flying reindeer, sleigh, and the entire Santa Claus mythology originates from Siberia where Saint Nicholas, the patron Saint of children, is a supplanter to the indigenous Shamans.

“Saint Nicholas, known as the ‘Patron Saint of Children,’ is the most revered saint in Russia, second only to the apostles. He is the Russian Orthodox Church's supplanter to the native people's highly respected local Shaman. A Shaman is a holy man that is well acquainted with a form of spirituality that incorporates plant entheogens which facilitate the NDE (Near Death Experience), or ‘out of body’ experience. Saint Nicholas may not have been a shaman, yet the symbolism on, and coloring of his robes could lend to speculation.” –James Arthur, “Mushrooms and Mankind” (10)
“One of the side effects of eating amanita mushrooms is that the skin and facial features take on a flushed, ruddy glow. This is why Santa is always shown with glowing red cheeks and nose. Even Santa's jolly ‘Ho, ho, ho!’ is the euphoric laugh of one who has indulged in the magic fungus.”

Dana Larsen, “The Psychedelic Secrets of Santa Claus” Cannabis Culture, Marijuana Magazine, Dec 18th, 2003

Could this by why Rudolph’s nose is red?

In an interesting play on words, another name for a large, capped mushroom is a “toadstool.” So if Santa is a mushroom, and a mushroom is a stool, when children sit on Santa’s leg, they are sitting on a “toed” stool.

"Santa's famous magical journey, where his sleigh takes him around the whole planet in a single night, is developed from the ‘heavenly chariot’ used by the gods from whom Santa and other shamanic figures are descended. The chariot of Odin, Thor and even the Egyptian god Osiris is now known as the Big Dipper, which circles around the North Star in a 24hour period. In different versions of the ancient story, the chariot was pulled by reindeer or horses. As the animals grow exhausted, their mingled spit and blood falls to the ground, forming the amanita mushrooms.”

Dana Larsen, “The Psychedelic Secrets of Santa Claus” Cannabis Culture, Marijuana Magazine, Dec 18th, 2003

“It is fairly common knowledge that the Weihnachtsmann (St. Nick) was an amalgamation of older Germanic/Norse gods such as Thor, Donner, Odin and Wotan. What's missing here is just as Santa flies through the skies in his sleigh, Odin (as well as the rest) rode through the sky in his chariot, which is depicted in the stars by ‘The Big Dipper’.

The Big Dipper is the chariot of Odin & Wotan, Thor, King Arthur, and even Osiris (of Egypt). The chariot that circles the North Star in a 24 hour period is thus also known as the sleigh of Santa Claus because it circles his mythological home, the North Pole. It is no surprise that Nordic/Germanic gods have connection to mushrooms in their mythology.

As Thor throws his mushroom shaped hammer to the ground, mighty thunders and lightning cracks cause the real mushroom(s) to appear. As the horses pulling Odin through the sky in his chariot become overexerted, their blood mingled spit falls to the ground and causes the Amanita mushrooms to grow at those exact points.”

–James Arthur, “Mushrooms and Mankind” (1011)

Probably the first Santa was Osiris in ancient Egypt who rode his flying chariot to/from the North Pole, was born on December 25th, and celebrated by putting presents underneath an evergreen tree.

“Not only did Osiris ride the sky in a chariot, but after his death Isis found that an evergreen (Cedar) had grown overnight from a dead stump to full-sized; which was understood as a sign of Osiris' rebirth and immortality. Interestingly, the traditional birth of Osiris is the 25th of December. The 25th of December was also celebrated annually by putting presents around the Cedar tree.

This tradition is at least five thousand years old. The birth of Horus to the goddess-virgin-mother, Isis, is perhaps the eldest representation of the goddess/son mythology, yet it is impossible to know this or the real age of the Astrotheological-Virgo-giving-birth-to-the-child/god/star mythology for sure. However it is the oldest source I have found.”

–James Arthur, “Mushrooms and Mankind” (11)

Santa, an anagram for Satan, dresses in red, keeps lists of naughty/nice children, and seems to steal Christmas from Jesus. But if understood in its original mushroom context, Santa’s not a conniving, omniscient, list-keeper.

He’s an Entheogen, a plant or substance which is said to “generate the God within.” The word Entheogen breaks down, En for inside, Theo for God, and Gen for generate – generate the God inside. If you have ever taken an Entheogen (i.e. Psilocybin, DMT, Peyote, Ayahuasca), then you are already aware of the spiritual or even religious experiences associated with them. As anyone who has tried them knows, and most anyone who hasn’t fiercely denies, these Entheogens put us directly in contact with that spark of the divine within ourselves.

They allow access to higher consciousness and open our third eyes; The outer material world dissolves and the “five” senses return to a state of one sense, one consciousness.

“First hand understanding is through the ingestion of the holy substances, of which there has been so much written, that this brief expose' merely scratches the surface of. It is this direct communal contact which is truly the means whereby a human being can experience his true spiritual nature.

One must take very seriously his/her own spirituality, for this is that which we truly are. As I stated in the opening sentence, ‘This experience is of extremely great value’. So much so, that I feel it necessary to the evolutionary process of each and every individual, and inevitably to all of mankind.”

James Arthur, “Mushrooms and Mankind” (26)

If you have mischief, wickedness, or secrecy in you, then entheogens will take you down into the depths of your own hell. But if you have kindness, love, and truth within you, entheogens will raise you up into the heights of that heaven. When people of a poor disposition or in a negative mood eat magic mushrooms they usually have a “bad trip” and experience frightening or depressing hallucinations.

When people of a good disposition or in a positive mood eat mushrooms they usually have a great trip and experience hours of uncontrollable laughter and a loving, close feeling with everyone around. Just like at Christmas Santa keeps lists of children who are naughty and nice, at Easter only good kids get to eat the colored eggs.

This is likely because good kids on mushrooms are hilarious and lots of fun, whereas naughty kids on mushrooms guarantee a bad trip for everyone, so they get coal at Christmas and no eggs at Easter.

“Santa Claus is an all-knowing icon that reads the hearts and intentions of everyone on the planet. Each child is told the story of the round-man (who wears red and white) and his associates; reindeer, little people and Mrs. Claus. They are also told the story of a miraculous worldwide flight in a sleigh which results in presents being delivered under a tree.

Yet when a child reaches the age of reasoning he is informed that this story is all a fabrication. This revelation is devastating upon the psyche of a young mind. It is also at this time that the child is often comforted and pacified from the shock by very strong reinforcement that the religious systems which the parents or guardians profess are indeed factual. And an attempt is made to incorporate the respective religious traditions into the holiday as the REAL meaning for the celebration.”

–James Arthur, “Mushrooms and Mankind” (6)

Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny have both been uprooted from their original positions. They began as mythological mushroom heroes understood in a spiritual context by both children and adults. Now their literal meaning has been suppressed, and a fake image has been corporatized by Coke, Cadbury and others.

The effect this has had is to turn mythological heroes into fantasies and lies.

It was not meant for children to discover as they are coming of age that parents, family, and friends have lied to them about Santa and the Easter Bunny. It was meant for them to discover deeper meanings behind the mythologies such as the ancient Astrotheological understanding of the heavens, the knowledge of the zodiacal precession, and seasonal cycles like solstices and equinoxes.

The whole complexity of the modern Christmas mythos is an unexplainable mess without the magic mushroom, the story is completely unintelligible.

“Some psychologists have discussed the ‘cognitive dissonance’ which occurs when children are encouraged to believe in the literal existence of Santa Claus, only to have their parents' lie revealed when they are older.

By so deceiving our children we rob them of a richer heritage …

Many people in the modern world have rejected Christmas as being too commercial, claiming that this ritual of giving is actually a celebration of materialism and greed.

Yet the true spirit of this winter festival lies not in the exchange of plastic toys, but in celebrating a gift from the earth: the fruiting top of a magical mushroom, and the revelatory experiences it can provide.

Instead of perpetuating outdated and confusing holiday myths, it might be more fulfilling to return to the original source of these seasonal celebrations.

How about getting back to basics and enjoying some magical mushrooms with your loved ones this solstice?

What better gift can a family share than a little piece of love and enlightenment?”

Dana Larsen, “The Psychedelic Secrets of Santa Claus” Cannabis Culture, Marijuana Magazine, Dec 18th, 2003

The Easter egg hunt is another activity inexplicable without mushrooms. The current understanding is that the Easter bunny lays multicolored eggs in or around every house for children to hunt for and collect in Easter baskets. But since when do rabbits lay eggs? Why are they colorful/spotted eggs?

And why are they hidden for us to hunt and collect in baskets?

Of course rabbits don’t lay eggs, but in ancient myth, the spring/fertility goddess Eostre and the Germanic Ostara are both said to have saved a bird whose wings had frozen during the winter by turning it into a rabbit. Since the rabbit had once been a bird, it could still lay eggs, and that egg laying hare became our Easter bunny.

In the earlier Babylonian version Ishtar comes from the Moon in a giant egg.

“The 'Christian' festival of Easter comes from the same source. Easter comes from the Babylonian goddess, Ishtar, (Semiramis again) and it celebrated her son, Tammuz, who was, wait for it, the ‘only begotten son of the Moon goddess and Sun God’ Nimrod and Semiramis. The ‘Easter’ (Ishtar) eggs and the ‘Easter bunny’ also come from Babylon. Queen Semiramis said she came from the Moon in a giant egg and this became known as the Ishtar egg.

Tammuz was said to be very fond of rabbits and so we have the Easter bunny. Oh yes, and they also ate "sacred cakes" with a T on the top the origin of our hot cross buns. The T is a major symbol of Freemasonry because of its associations with Babylon and Tammuz. The Christian wafer used in Catholic ceremonies comes from the Egyptian taenaah – the sacrificial bread of the Moon. Christians think the bread symbolizes the 'body of Jesus' when they are really involved in a ritual about the Egyptian Moon god.”

David Icke, “Tales From Time Loop”

In the ancient Egyptian mythos, Isis is fleeing from an enemy while in the form of a phoenix when she changes into a hare to escape down a rabbit hole. Rabbits and birds have for ages been associated with spring/fertility, but less known is their association with the magic mushroom.

The red and white Amanita Muscaria has long been symbolized by the phoenix, and the brown Amanita Panthera symbolized by the hare.

“The Phoenix: From the ashes (spores) the egg appears. Then comes the upturned cap resembling a gold and red colored bird (the gills as feathers). Then the heat (sun) burns the mushroom and it dissolves, once again leaving only ashes (spores), and finally repeating the whole cycle … The Phoenix-bird mythology is another piece of mushroom folklore.

As the fetus is generated in the furnace of the uterus, so the mushroom, that ‘evil ferment of the soil’, as Nicander (second century BC) calls it, is created, a womb within a womb, as it were. Like the fabulous Phoenix, the mushroom is self generated and regenerated, bursting forth from the vulvae, only to die as quickly and then apparently miraculously to reappear, a resurrection of its own self.” James Arthur, “Mushrooms and Mankind” (13 & 56)

As the baby head of an Amanita Muscaria pops out of the ground, it pushes the pine needles aside forming a tiny circular wall that looks just like a birds nest. When there are many mushrooms close together, their heads budding through the pine needles look like little eggs in a fallen nest.

Unlike bird’s eggs, however, these ones are spotted, colorful, and magical. Once the baby mushrooms are plucked out of the ground, the remaining dirt/needles look like a rabbit-hole, again repeating the bird into bunny symbolism. So families/children walked through the forests in early Spring with Easter baskets to hunt for and collect these magic mushrooms.

During the A.D. times, there has been a Germanic/Christian Easter tradition of feasting on colored eggs after a long fast at lent, but the B.C. origins of Easter celebration again come from Egypt, where the “eggs” were well-known to be not eggs, but budding baby mushrooms.

“There are a number of hieroglyphic depictions of plants (many of which are psychedelic) on walls and within texts throughout Egypt. This is to be expected, yet this goes undetected or dismissed by most who are studying Egypt and its religious writings …

The pillars that are at every temple in Egypt are shaped like giant mushrooms. These are shaped like the Amanita some are shaped like Psilocybe. Others look like tree fungus and are decorated with pictures of an incredible variety of plants.”

James Arthur, “Mushrooms and Mankind” (44 & 53)

In Egypt countless pillars are shaped like huge mushrooms with tall stems, umbrella caps, and mushroom engravings all up, down, and around them. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead they are called “the food of the gods,” or “celestial food” and “the flesh of the gods.”

In Egyptian temples there are many pictures of gods/neters feeding humans the “ankh” cross/circle symbol which is said to represent the water of life and immortality. This also suggests the mushroom as it has been called “the Elixir of Immortality” and “the Fountain of Youth.”

Pictures of winged Babylonian and Sumerian gods are shown feeding pinecones to humans. Could these be reference to the pine-cone-shaped pineal gland? At the Vatican there is suspiciously a gigantic statue of a pinecone in the Vatican “Court of the Pinecone.”

On the Pope’s staff there is also a pinecone depicted right at the height of his third-eye/pineal gland. Ancient Sumerian gods were always depicted feeding men pinecones, just as the Egyptian gods were so often depicted feeding men the “ankh.”

Because of their seedless growth/germination pattern, mushrooms were considered “virgin-births” by the ancients. They believed the mushrooms arose from dew, the divine fluid that magically appears at dawn.

They also correctly believed the Amanita to be the “fruit of the tree” and referred to them as such.

“The mushroom caps are the fruit of the larger mycelium beneath the soil which exists in a symbiotic relationship with the roots of the tree. To ancient people, these mushrooms were literally ‘the fruit of the tree.’ Ancient peoples were amazed at how these magical mushrooms sprang from the earth without any visible seed.

They considered this "virgin birth" to have been the result of the morning dew, which was seen as the semen of the deity. The silver tinsel we drape onto our modern Christmas tree represents this divine fluid.”

Dana Larsen, “The Psychedelic Secrets of Santa Claus” Cannabis Culture, Marijuana Magazine, Dec 18th, 2003

“Serpents” is an anagram for “Presents” like those found under the Christmas tree. At Christmas we string lights coiling up and around the tree, like the Serpent on the Tree of Life which gives us the light of knowledge.

A Christian also “Repents” for his sins which is curiously another anagram for Present and Serpent.

“The actual mushroom ‘plant’ is the underground ‘mycelium’ or ‘mycorrhizae’, which is directly attached to the tree roots; the mushroom itself is only the fruit-body of the mycelium. The mushroom is literally the Fruit of the Tree. They grow in a mycorrhizal (not parasitic) relationship with the tree.

Many people follow the tradition/custom of bringing a tree into the home and putting presents under it, yet have absolutely no idea why. Even people that think they know, usually have no knowledge of these mushroom connections. The true symbolic meaning transcends dogmatic etymological and historical evidence, by revealing itself in the totally obvious iconography and historically associated myths and traditions.”

James Arthur, “Mushrooms and Mankind” (13)

Here is just a partial list of the many terms/associations related to magic mushrooms. Soma was/is the Hindu plant-god and Greek for “body.” Ambrosia was Greek for “food of the gods.” The Egyptian Book of the Dead calls it “food of the gods” and “celestial food,” as well as “flesh of the gods.” It is Amrita, the Buddhist magical sacrament and Haoma, the Islamic sacrament.

It’s been called the Bread of Life and the Loaf of Bliss, the Golden Fleece, the Cosmic Egg, the Easter Egg, the Small White Stone, the Philosophers Stone, the Sword in the Stone, the Phoenix, the pillar/phallus of Osiris, the Djed pillar, the One Eyed Howler, the Eye of Horus, and the DjedEye (pronounced Jedi), The World Tree (many cultures thought the mushroom was the creator of the world), the Fly Agaric, the Fountain of Living Waters (since the mushroom is alive, 90% water, and fountainshaped), and the Hammer of Thor.

“The Mushroom itself has very interesting features that resemble, and have been related to Gold, Flesh, Blood (and blood vessels), Phallus, Vulva, Fire, Saucer, Cup, as well as a disc or orb. The mushroom has been, anthropomorphically, personified as a Man, a God, something of extraterrestrial origins, and a Plant God, SOMA, who was mediator between Mankind and the God/Gods/Goddesses, in the ancient Hindu religious books known as ‘The Vedas.’”

James Arthur, “Mushrooms and Mankind” (59)

The psilocybin mushroom has properties similar to that of the amanita and has also been worshipped/mythologized throughout history. Unlike the amanita, fruit of the tree, psilocybin grows from the dung of a cow. In India cows are worshipped (hence “holy cow”) for many reasons, but especially for their holy shit/holy crap.

The ancient Egyptians revered Mother Hathor, the heavenly cow whose body was the firmament and who daily gave birth to HorusRa, her Golden Calf. In South East Asia the elephant is revered over other animals, like the cow in India, because magic mushrooms grow in elephant dung as well (hence Dumbo the flying elephant). Psilocybin mushrooms turn a dark blue when bruised or dried and so are usually depicted as such. This is why Pikanadt, the Hindu elephant man god, is blue and rules the realms of art and creativity.

Other Hindu gods are also blue like Vishnu who is depicted with serpents around his head looking much like a mushroom. Krishna is blue too usually shown with a cow to his side.

The Cartoon “Smurfs” are blue like psilocybin, they all wear liberty cap hats, and live in amanita muscaria houses!

There have been many mythological mushroom heroes known throughout history. Perseus was an ancient mushroom hero, founder and King of the city-state of Mycenae (Mushroom City). Perseus flew around on winged sandals making “Perseia” a magical herb, grow wherever he dropped the chape of his scabbard. Wherever Perseus dropped his cap, “myces,” mushrooms would sprout underneath. Libertus is another mushroom hero whose depiction can be found atop the US Capitol building of all places.

Libertus wears a Liberty Cap (or Phrygian Cap) which is shaped like and named after the Liberty Cap mushroom. This is where we get the idea of a “thinking cap” because when you ingest the cap you are teleported into an introspective, wondrous experience. The Phrygian/Liberty Cap was worn by Masonic revolutionaries during the French and American revolutions as well as by Perseus, Mithra, Santa, Elves, and the Smurfs.

It is also worn as a “night cap,” a double entendre which nowadays means having a alcoholic beverage before bed. The original idea of a night cap, however, was when Mithraic/Mystery school initiates would eat a large mushroom cap then lay in hot tubs and astrally project out of body.

Another mushroom hero was King Arthur of Camelot. Arthur pulled the Sword from the Stone, founded the Knights of the Round Table and made the Quest for the Holy Grail. All three of these legends actually refer to stages of the mushroom. The mushroom begins like an egg or a small white stone which pushes and wiggles upwards like a snake.

This is the Sword in the Stone stage (Sword is “Sword,” snakes/serpents, in the stone). Then the mushroom cap opens up and flattens out making a perfect circle like a round table top the Round Table stage. Lastly the edges of the mushroom upturn collecting the mushroom juices and dew, the drinkable “blood of the gods.”

This is called the Holy Grail stage and looks/acts just like a cup.

“In its infant (button) state, the muscaria resembles a small white stone. The pulling of the sword from the stone (a symbol of wielding the power), is another Arthurian legend connecting the mushroom to the myth. The quest for the Grail itself is the quest for the knowledge of the mushroom.

The Parcival myth depicts paths (traditions), which are to be explored (but not adhered to), in order to complete the quest. This quest is described in the myths as a journey into the forest (the world) and finding paths (systems) which one may follow, for a time, but ultimately one must blaze his/her own trail in order to truly reach the final goal, the Holy Grail (the discovery and usage of the mushroom).

The search for the Holy Grail is a mythology that has become, through adaptation, a part of the story of the Crucifixion. Some of the stories incorporate a cup which was used to catch some of the flowing blood of Jesus as he died on the cross. This cup, like many other relics, was thereby thought to possess magical powers.

Historically, the mushroom has been the container for the juice of the ‘elixir of immortality’, or the ‘blood of God’, in many myths.

The final shape of the muscaria, with its inverted cap, is the reason that the cup/fountain/grail symbology is used in the stories. King Arthur, as a child, gained his rightful place as King by pulling the sword from the stone.

This is symbolic for wielding the power of the mushroom. The stone is a metaphor for the mushroom, and pulling the sword from it is symbolic of being able to crack the code and possess the power of the magical plant. After Arthur took ill (in his later years) he was told that he must seek and find the Holy Grail to renew his strength and reacquire his power.”

James Arthur, “Mushrooms and Mankind” (1415)

The Kundalini serpent (explained in detail later) is said to remain coiled three and a half times around the root chakra. Once awakened the serpent energy climbs up from the root/stone and around the spine, the Tree of Life. This process is analogous to the growth of a mushroom which begins looking like a stone then wriggles upward like a snake.

The root chakra serpent energy rises to the crown chakra which is usually symbolized by an eagle or other majestic bird. You will often see spiritual symbology involving snakes fighting eagles.

This is also why Egyptian Pharaoh’s headdresses had snakes/birds coming out from the third eye point.

“Transforming out of the button/egg infantile state, the mushroom's appearance becomes more like that of a snake. Once the mushroom has fully grown, decayed, and dissolved it leaves behind a hole. This is due to it's pushing the Pine needles or earth outward, as it expands. Around the hole is a white powdery substance, actually the many spores it left behind.

This hole resembles a snake's hole, or lair, which is another reasoning for the mushroom's being symbolized as a snake. Most certainly, the depiction of the snake, in the garden of Eden, which revealed to humans secret knowledge that the fruit of the tree would make them as god, is a grand myth regarding this association.”

James Arthur, “Mushrooms and Mankind” (55)

“The prime example of the relation between the serpent and the mushroom is, of course, in the Garden of Eden story of the Old Testament. The cunning reptile prevails upon Eve and her husband to eat of the tree, whose fruit ‘made them as gods, knowing good and evil’ (Gen 3:4). The whole Eden story is mushroom based mythology, not least in the identity of the ‘tree’ as the sacred fungus, as we shall see.

Even as late as the thirteenth century some recollection of the old tradition was known among Christians, to judge from a fresco painted on the wall of a ruined church in Plaincourault in France. There the Amanita muscaria is gloriously portrayed, entwined with a serpent, whilst Eve stands by holding her belly.”

John Allegro, “The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross” (48)

This is why Medusa’s serpent hair turns men to stone. This is why Mithra, the ancient mushroom hero is depicted rising from a stone entwined in snakes. Mithra, one of the 15 preChristian gods with exactly the same story as Jesus, was undeniably a mushroom god. Just as Christians take communion, Mithraic initiates ate mushroom sacraments as part of their worship.

Just as Christians line up in Church to receive the body and blood of Christ, so did initiates in the Mithraeum line up to receive the body and blood of Mithra.

“Mithra initiates would partake of a Sacred Meal in their ceremonies, invoking The Out Of Body experience. An ritually designed sacramental, Shamanistic, and communal Gnosis. The Mithraic temples of worship, known as Mithraeum, are designed like few other temples on earth. Typically inside the place of worship would be rows of bathtubs (tubs) along the two side walls, or lined in two parallel rows from the rear wall to the front of the main room. Providing places where many initiates could lie down during ceremonies.

The tubs were tools in the mechanics of producing a communal experience. The purpose being, the joining together of the minds of the participants with the universal mind. The next phase being, to exit the planet (physical realm) in a spiritual flight to the heavens (stars). This is a bold expectation to perceive, let alone one you can convince someone they have had, especially if after the ceremony they have not. Filled with salt water these tubs would become instant sensory deprivation tanks.

Much like those depicted in the movie ‘Altered States’ … The religion of Mithra centered around the initiate's ability to communally, astral-travel. Of course the out-of-body experience was facilitated through the eating of the sacred meal. After consumption, the initiates could traverse the galaxies, witnessing, as the ancient Egyptians, first hand, the reality that the spirit of the human being is not restricted to the physical universe, or the physical body for that matter.

This is the true revelation of the immortality of the soul, or at least the realization of such. This concept is so similar to the Egyptian initiatory rites that it is solid evidence some of the hidden traditions of the ancients did migrate into later incarnations of various religious orders.”

James Arthur, “Mushrooms and Mankind” (5658)

The Bible talks about sacred “Manna” that the Israelites ate in the desert. Many clues are given as to just what Manna is. The Bible says Manna was a small round edible object that appeared on the ground after dew had fallen. If the Manna was left out in the Sun too long it would breed worms and stink.

Exodus 16:14 reads,

“And when the dew that lay was gone up, behold, upon the face of the wilderness there lay a small round thing, as small as the hoar frost on the ground.”

Exodus 16:20 continues,

“…some of them left of it till the morning, and it bred worms, and stank.”

The small, round, edible objects which when left in the Sun rot, breed worms, and stink are none other than mushrooms.

“Manna was thought of as being produced miraculously (IE: birth without seed). This is a perfect botanical description of a mushroom. Birth without seed (miraculous) is due to spores being microscopic and not visible to the naked eye. Jesus describes the Mannas in detail in the book of John. In this story Jesus attempts to make clear; of manna, there are two different ones/kinds. He describes the manna that he is giving the disciples (last supper) as the Manna that bestows immortality.

His statement, unless you have eaten his flesh/body (Soma/Manna), and drink of his blood (Soma Juice), you have no life in you, takes on a whole new meaning in light of this discovery. The Manna is directly associated with the fruit of the Tree of Life in the 2nd chapter of the book of Revelation. It is the reward for those who overcome (the lies of the world). The ‘Fruit of the Tree’, the ‘Hidden Manna’ and the ‘Small White Stone’ are spoken of separately, but in the same context. All of these are symbols for the Amanita muscaria.”

James Arthur, “Mushrooms and Mankind” (1617)

John 6:3141 reads,

“Our fathers did eat manna in the desert; as it is written, He gave them bread from heaven to eat. Then Jesus said unto them, verily verily I say unto you, Moses gave you not that bread from heaven; but my father giveth you the true bread from heaven … Then said they unto him, Lord, evermore give us this bread. And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life … The Jews then murmured at him, because he said, I am the bread that came down from heaven.”

Priests and pastors vehemently deny that “the true bread, the bread from heaven” is a mushroom, but have a difficult time explaining it as literal bread. Bread is not a small, round thing found dew-covered in the wilderness. Nor does it contain any of the mystical properties bestowed upon it.

This is undeniably a reference to the magic mushroom.

“The concept of the literal ingestion of the body of God is highly downplayed by religious scholars of today. The body (soma) being a fleshy Mushroom is much more palatable than trying to stomach cannibalism or the transformation of ordinary substances. Many questions should be asked about this cosmopolitan idea of the ‘Sacramental Substance’. Unfortunately, the religious experts shun the notion, insisting that the entire idea is nothing more than symbolic.

A symbol points at something else, not usually at another symbology. The Catholic church, in the early 1100's, decided to have the final word on this subject by establishing (under Emperor/Pope Innocent III) the ‘Doctrine of Trans-Substantiation’. This is whereby, the Priests, by their assumed holy power, claim to be able to say some magical words, and turn ordinary bread into the literal ‘Body of God'.

This event is one of the biggest evil deceptions of all time, is an undermining of the basic esoteric aspects of the religion, and is, arguably, the most horrible and damning event to ever happen to Christendom, and as such the entire human race. Jesus clearly describes the Manna that he calls his body in the book of John. Repeatedly describing the ‘Thing/Manna’ as a substance hidden from the world, but revealed to his disciples. Understanding the last supper story becomes as simplistic as it gets, if you know how to decipher the event. Adamantly; Jesus says, ‘Take and eat, This is my Body.’”

James Arthur, “Mushrooms and Mankind” (18)

John 6:536 reads,

“Then Jesus said unto them, Verily verily I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.”

Jesus says this is my body, this is my blood, and lest ye drink/eat of this you have no life in you!

These are strong words, thus it is important to realize that the substances Jesus referred to are not communion wafers and grape wine.

The amanita had long before Christianity been known as “the flesh of the gods” and “the blood of the gods” and this is what is meant.

“This is saying pretty clearly that the eating and drinking is physical. My body is flesh indeed, and my blood is drink indeed, and the added statement that when you eat, it is inside of you leaves little room for debate that this is a substance, not a phantom symbol alone. For those who choose to debate this I ask that they show me their substance because according to Jesus' words unless you eat and drink of ‘It’ you have no life in you.

By the way, do I really need to mention that this is not some strange reference to Cannibalism? I sure hope not, if you still think this, read on. Somewhere, some of this must convince you that he is not saying to take a bite out of his arm, or any other piece of his actual anatomy … In my opinion, the magical act of ‘TransSubstantiation’ has no merit. The statement that Jesus makes ‘Unless you eat and drink you have no life in you’ would seem to condemn the replacement of whatever the real thing is with a placebo (substitute).”

James Arthur, “Mushrooms and Mankind” (2930)

Shiva the Hindu god is a hermaphrodite with one testicle, a penis, vagina, and one breast.

This is another personification of the mushroom just like Mithra. The first stage of the mushroom is considered male as it looks like a penis. Then the stem pushes the ball/uterus/breast up out of the egg. As the arms of the mushroom cap open to the sides, it’s as though the female aspect opens from the male “rib.”

Jesus, like Krishna, Dionysus, and the other mushroom gods, stands with legs together, wears a crown of thorns, and a sash on his waist while being crucified. His legs together with arms outstretched on the cross make the same “T” shape as the mushroom during its optimum Round Table stage.

The sash worn by Jesus is the ruffle found halfway up the stem of all amanitas, and Jesus’ thorny crown is the thorny mushroom top.

The reason Jesus is crucified and tells us to eat his body is that the mushroom must die for us to eat it.

“The fact that the mushrooms must be dried before consumption is another euphemism of the god needing to die, or sacrifice himself, to save mankind through atonement (atonement) … It can be argued that if you trace all of the gods back through time it may be possible to find the original.

This original resides in the myths of the gods themselves, as those aspects that remain the same. ‘Take and eat, this is my body’ is the central theme. All of the ancient god myths contain some sort of a sacramental food, and anthropomorphically this food becomes, at some point, a personification of the god itself.”

James Arthur, “Mushrooms and Mankind” (12 & 53)

Jesus dies for your sins. Sin was originally an archery term meaning “to miss the mark.” The mushroom dies so you may eat it, and the introspective experiences it brings washes away your sins. You understand how you’ve “missed the mark” in life. This is the original meaning, but the Church has perverted this idea into a guilt mechanism, scaring people with hell and trapping them in confession booths.

While on the cross, Jesus is stabbed in the rib and his blood comes out and is collected in the Holy Grail. This idea of a “side wounded savior” was a common theme among preChristian gods. The Vatican and Templars have promoted the idea that the Shroud of Turin, the Spear of Longinus/Destiny, and the Holy Grail are actual artifacts, but in fact they are all occult symbolism from ancient mushroom mythologies.

Proverbs 5:15 reads “drink water from your own cistern, drink water from your own well.”

John 7:378 says,

“Jesus stood and cried saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. He shall believeth on me as the scripture hath said, out of his body shall flow rivers of living water.”

Jesus is said to have turned water into wine and speaks of drinking water from him and from your own well/cistern.

What does all this mean?

“The active ingredients of the amanita mushrooms are not metabolized by the body, and so they remain active in the urine. In fact, it is safer to drink the urine of one who has consumed the mushrooms than to eat the mushrooms directly, as many of the toxic compounds are processed and eliminated on the first pass through the body. It was common practice among ancient people to recycle the potent effects of the mushroom by drinking each other's urine.

The amanita's ingredients can remain potent even after six passes through the human body. Some scholars argue that this is the origin of the phrase ‘to get pissed,’ as this urine-drinking activity preceded alcohol by thousands of years. Often the urine of tripped-out reindeer would be consumed for its psychedelic effects. This effect goes the other way too, as reindeer also enjoy the urine of a human, especially one who has consumed the mushrooms.

In fact, reindeer will seek out human urine to drink, and some [Siberian] tribesmen carry sealskin containers of their own collected piss, which they use to attract stray reindeer back into the herd.”

Dana Larsen, “The Psychedelic Secrets of Santa Claus” Cannabis Culture, Marijuana Magazine, Dec 18th , 2003

Is this why you often see stone water fountains with little boys urinating into upturned levels looking like mushrooms?

Jesus is often depicted holding up a white flag with a red cross on it, the symbol of the Knights Templar/Masons. Do the red and white flag of Jesus and clothing of the Knights Templar refer to the amanita muscaria?

John Allegro, Oxford graduate and world’s leading philologist, was commissioned to translate the Qumran Dead Sea Scrolls. But after his book “The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross” released and he died, the Catholic Church quickly bought the copyright and buried it; one Vatican insider quoted saying it would never again see the light of day.

It is currently sparsely available in ebook format but has been out of print for years (Meanwhile Dan Brown is shaking hands with the Pope and “Da Vinci Code” is a best selling book and movie).

“[John] Allegro linguistically linked the SOMA (Greek=Body), the Manna (Sumerian = Mushroom), (of which there are two kinds), the names Jesus, James, and John, the Fruit of the tree of Knowledge, and the symbol of the cross, to the Amanita muscaria, by stating that all of these names and terms (and others) were synonyms and wordplay for the hidden identity of the mushroom. Needless to say, he had the religious scholars doing flips. The biblical apologists instantly jumped on the bandwagon of attempting to disprove anything he said. Although he did stretch the boundaries (at least twice) of some established scholarship, the proof is in the pudding (so to speak) and most of his associations are beyond repute.”

James Arthur, “Mushrooms and Mankind” (16)

“The Dead Sea Scrolls, found in caves near Qumran in 1947, have offered a greater insight into their [Essenes] lifestyle and beliefs, despite suppression by the authorities who wish to maintain the official version of history. The scrolls were hidden from the Romans during the ill-fated Judean revolt around 70 AD. Some 500 Hebrew and Aramaic manuscripts were found, which included texts from the Old Testament, among them a complete draft of the Book of Isaiah, centuries older than the one in the Bible. There were scores of documents relating to the Essene customs and organization.

The scrolls confirm that the Essenes were fanatics who followed to the letter the Levite inventions in the Old Testament texts. Anyone who didn’t do the same was their enemy and they fiercely opposed the Roman occupation … The Essenes had a detailed understanding of drugs, including the hallucinogenic variety, which were used in mystery school initiations and for entering other states of consciousness. The properties of the ‘sacred mushrooms’ or ‘Holy Plant’ were so much part of life in the secret brotherhood that the Jewish high priest wore a mushroom cap to acknowledge their importance. They had special rituals for their preparation and use.

The mushroom, too, was given son of God' connotations (what wasn’t?) and it was connected to the Sun cycle. The mushrooms were picked with great reverence before sunrise and many symbols of this ritual can be found in the Bible and far older texts. Again, the use of the sacred mushroom and other drugs, and the secret knowledge of their properties, can be traced back to the earliest days of Sumer.”

–David Icke, “The Biggest Secret” (956)

John Allegro shows how the Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the etymology of various Mesopotamian languages all have mushroom and sexual puns/terms interwoven. This is due to the prominence in the preChristian world of mushroom and fertility cults. Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic, the languages of the Bible, all ultimately derive from ancient Sumerian, where many original meanings had been long lost.

For instance, the gods of the Greeks and Hebrews, Zeus and Yahweh (Jehovah) have names derived from Sumerian words meaning “seed of life” and “juice of fecundity.”

The name Herod, as in King Herod, “ardeola” in Latin, serves as a wordplay on the Semitic “ardilia” which means “mushroom.” The name Jesus, in Hebrew “yehoshiia” comes from the Sumerian “JA U ShiJ A” which means “semen which saves, restores, heals.”

This is comparable to the fertility god Dionysus, whose cult emblem was an erect phallus, and whose Sumerian name “IAUNuShUSh” also means “semen, seed that saves.”

“Under that again there lie the basic conceptions of the mushroom cult. Here is the real stuff of the mystery-fertility philosophy. For example, to find their parables of the Kingdom, the writers make comparisons with objects and activities which, at the surface level of understanding, are often really absurd, besides being self-contradictory about the manner and form of the Kingdom’s coming.

The passage that likens the Kingdom to a mustard seed, for example, and then speaks of birds nesting in the branches of the grown plant (Matt 13:31f., etc.), has driven the biblical naturalists to distraction looking for a mustard ‘tree’ suitable as roosting places for the fowls of the air. They could have saved themselves the trouble since the reference, at the ‘lower’ level, is simply a play on the Semitic khardelä’, ‘mustard’ and ‘ardilã’, ‘mushroom’ …

If it seems strange to us that the writers of these stories should have used such a trivial literary device as punning so extensively, it should be remembered that they were heirs to a very long tradition of this kind of word spinning. The Old Testament is full of it, particularly where proper names are concerned, and very many more instances almost certainly lie beneath the surface, where writers are playing with dialectal forms of the words which have become lost over the centuries.

Furthermore, it is now becoming clear that many of the Old Testament traditions have reached us in a Semitic dialect which was not the one in which they were composed, so that the original wordplay which they expressed has been lost.”

John Allegro, “The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross” (32)

Today in Iran (Persia) the mushroom is called “SamJrukh,” which traces back to the Sumerian “ShU Mar Ugu/Aga,” or “Crown of the Womb Favorer,” the glans/top of the fungus. The Sumerian “Bar Ia U Na,” meaning “capsule of fecundity; womb” connects to multiple names that relate the mushroom with the tiny “womb” from which the stem emerges.

Another Aramaic example is “Pleasing the Jews” which comes from the Sumerian mushroom name “MashTabBaRi” or “that which is pleasing to the Hebrews/Jews.” The Hebrew “kotereih” from the Sumerian “GUTAR” means “top of the head: penis” and is the most common Semitic word for mushroom; In Arabic it is “phutr,” in Aramaic it is “pitra,” and in the English New Testament is “Peter.”

Allegro’s examples continue on like this for over a hundred pages.

“We must be in no doubt of the effect that importing a new, mushroom element into the New Testament picture must have on our understanding of the origin and nature of Christianity … For the pseudotranslation demonstrates an intention of deceit, and since mushrooms appear nowhere in the ‘surface’ tale of Jesus, it follows that the secret reference to the cult must be the true relevance of the whole.

If the writers have gone to the trouble of concealing by ingenious literary devices, here, and as we have seen, in many cases elsewhere, secret names of the mushroom, not only must its worship have been central to the religion, but the exigencies of the time must have demanded they should be transmitted among the initiates and their successors in a way that would not bring their enemies down upon them.

It therefore follows that the “surface” details of the story, names, places, and possibly doctrinal teachings must be equally as false as the pseudo-renderings of the secret names.”

John Allegro, “The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross” (1067)

“For centuries, the impression given by religionists is that to be a moral person, one must not only forgo but disdain sexuality, viewing it as if it were a curse from the devil rather than a ‘gift from God.’ The same can be said of drugs, at least of the variety that has anything to do with altering consciousness, even if such drugs are in the form of ‘Godgiven’ plants. Hence, the picture of a religious or righteous individual is basically someone who must have (heterosexual) sex only with one person within a sanctioned marriage, if at all; to be in a constant state of procreation; and to remain as sober as ‘a judge.’

To those who think life is to be enjoyed, rather than endured, this picture represents a dull, robotic state, to say the least. The reality is that there have been times on this planet when cultures have recognized sacred sexual practices and sacramental plants not only as gifts from ‘God’ but also paths to ‘God,’ or ‘Cosmic Consciousness,’ as it were.

Indeed, sex and drugs have been considered from time immemorial as devices to create union with the divine, which is a major reason behind the negative spin put on them by religionists, who insist that only they, ‘Jesus’ or some other entity can be avenues to the divine. In actuality, it is the priest’s task to create an artificial separation between human beings and the omnipresent ‘God’”

Acharya S., “The Christ Conspiracy” (193)

Through a long process of incremental changes the Christian churches (and other Brotherhood religions) have completely changed what it means to be religious. The ancient world consisted of mushroom and fertility cults, nature worship, and an astrological/astronomical based theology (Astrotheology).

Nowadays the three things of ancient reverence which modern religions were actually based on sex, drugs, and astrology are condemned and considered sinful.

“If an all-powerful, dictatorial state religion was to succeed, it would need to destroy this concept of sacred sex and sacramental drugs from the human psyche and replace it with fear and guilt, such that those who had sex, for example, would be driven to cleanse themselves of their perceived sins by confession or other priest craft. The exploitation of humanity’s weakness regarding sex in particular worked nicely for priestly conspirators, since they could rail against it, knowing very well that people would continue to have it, such that the guilty would then be forced to return repeatedly to the Church for absolution from ‘sins.’

Despite their best efforts, however, the various religionists could not eradicate the widespread spiritual practices utilizing sex and drugs, even under penalty of death. In reality, they held these practices for themselves while hypocritically preaching their evils to the masses and exhorting abstinence from them.

As noted, along with the knowledge of astrology, the use of sex and drugs actually has formed part of the esoteric religion or ‘mysteries’ hidden from the masses by the brotherhoods and secret societies that create exoteric and vulgar religions for the masses. Indeed, these ‘sacraments’ constituted a significant part of the mysteries, as many schools and cults have used sex and drugs in their initiation rites.”

Acharya S., “The Christ Conspiracy” (193)

“I have spoken personally with High Priests and Bishops (Secret Society Initiates), who simply told me that they could not discuss anything with me because of their oaths of secrecy. In fact they were so blown away that I knew the information, that it scared the hell out of them. Entheogens, and particularly the Amanita muscaria, are a huge secret.

The initiatory rites, into this particular field, are so far up the totem pole of secret societies and religions that when you find those who know, they really freak out, that anyone else knows, because it cuts to the deepest recesses of their self perceived spirituality, and cuts to the center of their most secret God/Society given indoctrination experiences.

They have this certain look in their eyes, and unless you somehow are perceived as a threat to them, they invariably have the need to tell you that they do know what you are talking about (which is likely a violation of oath in itself), but they cannot discuss it further.”

James Arthur, “Mushrooms and Mankind (23)

The Magic (Mushrooms) of San Jose del Pacifico

2013-02-23T09:53:00.002-08:00

The magical village of San Jose del Pacifico, otherwise known as Mushroom Town, is nestled in the mountainous region of the Sierra Madre del Sur between Oaxaca and the Pacific Ocean. It is said that on a clear day, the glint of the Pacific Ocean can be seen from the village. This otherworldly place emanates the magic aura of the mushrooms for which it is famous. Psylocibin mushrooms (Magic Mushrooms), or Hongos as they are known in Mexico, grow prolifically in the forest that surrounds the village. Buildings are adorned in psychedelic murals, and painted mushrooms with happy faces add to the village’s trippy allure.
Hongos have been a key feature in native indigenous religious ceremonies for centuries, particularly revered by the Aztecs. The Mazatec Shaman, Maria Sabina, claims ‘‘it is they, the sacred mushrooms, that speak in a way I can understand. I ask them and they answer me. When I return from the trip that I have taken with them, I tell what they have told me and what they have shown me.” This reveals the plant’s power as a clarifying and enlightening force which enables sacred truths from nature to be applied to everyday life.
Most guests to the village have heard about it through word of mouth recommendations and the usual advice given to those wishing to partake in this tribal tradition is the illusive: ‘Ask for Catalina’. She is an old Spanish woman, well into her seventies who runs a modest hostel with a hippy vibe housing travelers from all over the world. Her talents as a musician, artist, card-reader and her fabulous hosting skills are well acknowledged by all who have the pleasure of meeting her. Most visitors stay a few days but many end up enraptured by Catalina and the magic of the village and end up staying much longer. The walls of the living room are covered with mushroom related artwork, the visuals of countless individual’s journeys etched into the woodwork.
Although many travelers pass through San Jose, the atmosphere has resisted becoming touristy and apart from a few shops selling mushroom paraphernalia, the village seems unspoiled by the low-key tourism. The forest above the village is home to exotic flora and fauna where giant agave cactuses and tropical flowers grow amongst the mountain pine trees. Due to the altitude, temperatures change dramatically from below freezing during the night to baking heat in the day. The sky above the village is a key feature in itself due to its extreme periodic changes. The whole village can be enveloped in a misty haze of cloud for the duration of the day and then clear completely to reveal a dramatic orange sunset.
You hike through the forest behind the village and it opens out into a steep clearing with a view across the tree line below. Nestled amongst the trees is a basic wooden hut with an old head-scarfed woman herding turkeys at the front. You knock on the door and are given a jar of grey spindly mushrooms preserved in honey. You eat the mushroom honey mixture with a plastic spoon, and it has a simultaneously slimy and gritty texture that gets stuck in your teeth.

A blissful exhaustion enters your body and gradually you re-enter a childlike state of innocence. You frolic aimlessly amongst the trees with the warm sun beating down as trees take on a pixilated geometric form and intertwine almost hugging each other. You feel an intense connection with nature connecting with insects, plants and your human companions all receiving energy from the same sun. The already breathtaking views take on Eden-like beauty and the colours, smells and sights of the forest become even more vivid making the features of the forest stretch out to exaggerated proportions.
Your awareness is heightened to the immediate present so much so that all weight is lifted from your mind and body and you laugh and laugh until you have tears streaming down your cheeks. Everything becomes an adventure in which your only mission is to fully engage with and enjoy your natural surroundings.
It is clear why the Psylocibin mushroom is a sacred plant for the Indigenous tribes in Mexico who worship Mother Nature as a goddess as it heightens connections already present. The sense of belonging to the earth as the creatures of Mother Nature is a sensation that brings benefits to the individual long after the effects of the mushrooms have faded. I think that there is much to be learned from freeing oneself from inhibitions and connecting whole heartedly with the natural world – with or without mushrooms.

also see ;

NeoBux the number 1 money making site on the net http://www.neobux.com/?r=mccrissyb

Three residents of Moscow poisoned mushrooms, hallucinogens

2013-02-21T10:01:00.000-08:00

In the east of Moscow in the dorm, three men were poisoned by hallucinogenic mushrooms. One of them died. , Said a source in the medical community of the capital.

The men were found yesterday evening unconscious in a dorm lobby to Zvirynetsky Street, Building 6, the " Vesti.Ru . " Residents called an ambulance, but was pronounced dead came one of the victims - 31-year-old man. His friends 26 and 27 years old were hospitalized.

According to preliminary data, all three have deliberately used magic mushrooms to get the drug euphoria. Perhaps death was caused by an overdose.

Read: In the south of Russia and Ukraine began mass of mushroom poisoning

" Polit.Ru, "explains that in the suburbs grow only one kind of magic mushrooms - psilotsibe. By themselves, they do not contain toxic substances, but can absorb the harmful substances from the environment, as well as other fungi. In addition, they are easy to confuse with dung flickering. Psilotsibov harvest season falls exactly in October and November.

According to " Wikipedia ", some psilotsibe contain alkaloids psilocybin and psilocin, which have psychoactive properties and cause an altered state of consciousness.

Seeking the Magic Mushroom

2013-02-17T03:46:00.002-08:00

"Seeking the Magic Mushroom" is a 1957 photo essay by amateur mycologist Robert Gordon Wasson describing his experience taking psilocybin mushrooms in 1955 during a Mazatec ritual in Oaxaca, Mexico. Wasson was one of the first Westerners to participate in a Mazatec ceremony and to describe the psychoactive effects of the Psilocybe species. The essay contains photographs by Allan Richardson and illustrations of several mushroom species of Psilocybe collected and identified by French botanist Roger Heim, then director of the French National Museum of Natural History. Wasson's essay, written in a first person narrative, appeared in the May 13 issue of Life magazine as part three of the "Great Adventures" series.
The essay was part of three related works about mushrooms released around the same time period. It was preceded by the limited release of Mushrooms, Russia and History, an expensive two-volume book by Wasson and his wife, Valentina Pavlovna Wasson. The Life magazine essay was followed six days later by "I Ate the Sacred Mushroom", an interview with Wasson's wife in This Week magazine. Against Wasson's wishes, a Life magazine editor added the term "Magic Mushroom" to the title and brought its use into popular culture. The essay influenced the nascent counterculture in the United States and led many hippies to travel to Mexico in the 1960s in search of the mushroom, including Timothy Leary. In the 1970s, Wasson expressed misgivings about the wide publicity the essay brought to the Mazatec culture and the defilement of the mushroom ritual.

Background

Wasson first became interested in mycology during his honeymoon in the Catskill Mountains in 1927. His new wife, Valentina Pavlovna Wasson, a native of Moscow, Russia, was identifying and collecting mushrooms in the forest, having been brought up with an appreciation for the species. Wasson was disgusted. "Like all good Anglo-Saxons, I knew nothing about the fungal world and felt that the less I knew about those putrid, treacherous excrescences the better." The incident sparked Wasson's interest in mushrooms, leading to subsequent contributions to the field of ethnomycology.
In 1952, English poet Robert Graves sent the Wassons a letter containing a journal article quoting American ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes discussing the ritual use of mushrooms by Mesoamericans in the 16th century. The ritual was first observed in modern times in 1938 by American anthropologist Jean Basset Johnson in Huautla de Jiménez, in the Sierra Mazateca region of Oaxaca, Mexico. Beginning in 1953, Wasson repeatedly traveled to Mexico in search of the mushrooms. On a trip to the town of Huautla de Jiménez in 1955, Wasson and New York society photographer Allan Richardson participated in a mushroom ritual with curandera Maria Sabina, where they became, in Wasson's words, "the first white men in recorded history to eat the divine mushrooms". While having lunch at the Century Club in New York in 1956, a Time magazine editor expressed interest in their trip to Mexico and invited them to pitch a story about their experience.

Timothy Leary

2013-02-11T17:25:00.000-08:00

1989 photo
Born	Timothy Francis Leary October 22, 1920 Springfield, Massachusetts, United States
Died	May 31, 1996 (aged 75) Los Angeles, California, United States
Nationality	American
Alma mater	University of Alabama (B.A., 1945) Washington State University (M.S., 1946) University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D., 1950)
Occupation	Psychologist Writer
Employer	University of California, Berkeley Kaiser Family Foundation Harvard University
Known for	Psychedelic therapy
Spouse(s)	Marianne Busch (m. 1945 – 1955) Mary Della Cioppa (m. 1956 – 1957) Nena von Schlebrügge (m. 1964 – 1965) Rosemary Woodruff (m. 1967 – 1976) Barbara Chase (m. 1978

Timothy Francis Leary (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996) was an American psychologist and writer, known for his advocacy of psychedelic drugs. During a time when drugs such as LSD and psilocybin were legal, Leary conducted experiments at Harvard University under the Harvard Psilocybin Project, resulting in the Concord Prison Experiment and the Marsh Chapel Experiment. Both studies produced useful data, but Leary and his associate Richard Alpert were fired from the university nonetheless.
Leary believed LSD showed therapeutic potential for use in psychiatry. He popularized catchphrases that promoted his philosophy such as "turn on, tune in, drop out"; "set and setting"; and "think for yourself and question authority". He also wrote and spoke frequently about transhumanist concepts involving space migration, intelligence increase and life extension (SMI²LE), and developed the eight-circuit model of consciousness in his book Exo-Psychology (1977).

During the 1960s and 1970s, he was arrested often enough to see the inside of 29 different prisons worldwide. President Richard Nixon once described Leary as "the most dangerous man in America".

Early life and education

Leary was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, the only child of an Irish-American dentist who abandoned his wife Abigail Ferris when Leary was 13. He graduated from Classical High School in that western Massachusetts city.
He attended the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts from September 1938 to June 1940. Under pressure from his father, he then accepted an appointment as a cadet in the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. In the first months as a "plebe", he was given numerous demerits for rule infractions and then got into serious trouble for failing to report infractions by other cadets when on supervisory duty. He was alleged to have gone on a drinking binge and then failing to "come clean" about it. For violating the Academy's honor code, he was asked by the Honor Committee to resign. When he refused, he was "silenced"; that is, shunned and ignored by his fellow cadets as a tactic to pressure him to resign. Even though he was acquitted by a court-martial, the silencing measures continued in full force, as well as the onslaught of demerits for minuscule rule infractions. When the treatment continued in his sophomore year, his mother appealed to a family friend, United States Senator David I. Walsh, head of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, who conducted a personal investigation. Behind the scenes, the Honor Committee revised its position and announced that it would abide by the court-martial verdict. Leary then resigned and was honorably discharged by the Army. Almost 50 years later, he said it was "the only fair trial I've had in a court of law".
To the chagrin of his family, Leary elected to transfer to the University of Alabama in the fall of 1941 because of the institution's expeditious response to his application. Although he enrolled in the university's ROTC program, maintained top grades, and began to cultivate academic interests in psychology and biology, he was expelled a year later for spending a night in the female dormitory. Having lost his student deferment in the midst of World War II, Leary was drafted into the United States Army and reported for basic training at Fort Eustis in January 1943. In lieu of further officer training, Leary remained in the non-commissioned track and enrolled in an extended academic program for psychology majors that included external studies at Georgetown University and Ohio State University; following retroactive suspension and eventual reinstatement at the University of Alabama, he completed his degree via correspondence courses and graduated in August 1945. Shortly after his promotion to corporal in 1944, Leary was assigned to Deshon General Hospital in Butler, Pennsylvania as a staff psychometrician largely due to the magnanimity of erstwhile professor Donald Ramsdell. He primarily worked with deaf patients at the hospital and served there for the remainder of the war. While stationed in Butler, Leary began to court Marianne Busch; they would marry in April 1945. Formally discharged at the rank of sergeant in January 1946, Leary earned the Good Conduct Medal, the American Defense Service Medal, the American Campaign Medal, and the World War II Victory Medal during his Army stint.
Following the resolution of the war, Leary decided to pursue an academic career. He received an M.S. degree in psychology at Washington State University in 1946 and his Ph.D. degree in clinical psychology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1950. His Ph.D. dissertation was entitled "The Social Dimensions of Personality: Group Structure and Process." In 1947, Marianne gave birth to their first child, Susan, while he was working on his doctorate. A son, Jack, was born two years later. In 1952 the Leary family spent a year in Spain, subsisting on a research grant. A Berkeley colleague, Marv Freedman, later recalled, "Something had been stirred in him in terms of breaking out of being another cog in society...".
The new Ph.D. stayed on at Berkeley as an assistant professor from 1950 to 1955. Despite his nascent professional success, his marriage was strained by multiple infidelities and mutual alcohol abuse. Marianne would eventually commit suicide in 1955, leaving him to raise their son and daughter alone. He described himself during this period as "an anonymous institutional employee who drove to work each morning in a long line of commuter cars and drove home each night and drank martinis ... like several million middle-class, liberal, intellectual robots."
From 1955 to 1958, Leary was director of psychiatric research at the Kaiser Family Foundation. Subsiding on small research grants and insurance policies, Leary—determined to write the great American novel—and his children relocated to Europe in 1958. Overcome by indigence during an unproductive stay in Florence, Leary soon returned to academia in the fall of 1959 as a lecturer in clinical psychology at Harvard University at the behest of Berkeley colleague Frank Barron and David McClelland. He would reside with his children in nearby Newton, Massachusetts. In addition to his teaching duties, Leary was affiliated with the Harvard Center for Research in Personality under McClelland and oversaw the Harvard Psilocybin Project & concomitant experiments in conjunction with assistant professor Richard Alpert. In 1963, Leary was terminated for failing to give his scheduled class lectures against his position that he had fulfilled his teaching obligations in full. The decision to dismiss him may have been influenced by his role in the popularity of then-legal psychedelic substances among Harvard students and faculty members.
His early work in psychology expanded on the research of Harry Stack Sullivan and Karen Horney regarding the importance of interpersonal forces in mental health, focusing on how understanding interpersonal processes might facilitate diagnosing disorders and identifying human personality patterns. He developed a complex and respected interpersonal circumplex model, published in The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, demonstrating how psychologists could methodically use Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) scores to predict respondents' interpersonal response characteristics, or ways they might respond to various interpersonal situations.

Psychedelic experiments and experiences

On May 13, 1957, Life magazine published an article by R. Gordon Wasson that documented the use of psilocybin mushrooms in religious rites of the indigenous Mazatec people of Mexico. Anthony Russo, a colleague of Leary's, experimented with his own use of psychedelic (or entheogenic) psilocybe mexicana mushrooms on a trip to Mexico and told Leary about it. In August 1960, Leary traveled to Cuernavaca, Mexico with Russo and consumed psilocybin mushrooms for the first time, an experience that drastically altered the course of his life. In 1965, Leary commented that he had "learned more about ... (his) brain and its possibilities ... [and] more about psychology in the five hours after taking these mushrooms than ... in the preceding 15 years of studying and doing research in psychology."
Returning from Mexico to Harvard in 1960, Leary and his associates, notably Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass), began a research program known as the Harvard Psilocybin Project. The goal was to analyze the effects of psilocybin on human subjects (first prisoners, and later Andover Newton Theological Seminary students) from a synthesized version of the then-legal drug — one of two active compounds found in a wide variety of hallucinogenic mushrooms, including psilocybe mexicana. The compound in question was produced by a process developed by Albert Hofmann of Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, who was famous for synthesizing LSD.
Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, after hearing about the Harvard research project, asked to join the experiments. Leary was inspired by Ginsberg's enthusiasm, and the two shared an optimism in the benefit of psychedelic substances to help people "turn on" (i.e., discover a higher level of consciousness). Together they began a campaign of introducing other intellectuals and artists to psychedelics.
Leary argued that psychedelic substances, in proper doses and in a stable setting, could, under the guidance of psychologists, alter behavior in beneficial ways not easily attainable through regular therapy. His research focused on treating alcoholism and reforming criminals. Many of his research subjects told of profound mystical and spiritual experiences which they said permanently, and very positively, altered their lives. According to Leary's autobiography Flashbacks, after 300 professors, graduate students, writers and philosophers had taken LSD, 75% reported the experience as one of the most educational and revealing ones of their lives.
The Concord Prison Experiment was designed to evaluate the effects of psilocybin combined with psychotherapy on rehabilitation of released prisoners. After being guided through the psychedelic experience, or "trips," by Leary and his associates, 36 prisoners were reported to have repented and sworn to give up future criminal activity. Compared to the average recidivism rate of 60 percent for American prisoners in general, the recidivism rate for those involved in Leary's project dropped to 20 percent. The experimenters concluded that long-term reduction in overall criminal recidivism rates could be effected with a combination of psilocybin-assisted group psychotherapy (inside the prison) along with a comprehensive post-release follow-up support program modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous. These conclusions were later contested in a follow-up study on the basis of time differences monitoring the study group vs. the control group and differences between subjects re-incarcerated for parole violations and those imprisoned for new crimes. The researchers concluded that statistically only a slight improvement could be attributed to psilocybin in contrast to the significant improvement reported by Leary and his colleagues.
Leary and Alpert founded the International Foundation for Internal Freedom in 1962 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This was run by Lisa Bieberman (now known as Licia Kuenning), a disciple of Leary and one of his many lovers. Their research attracted so much public attention that many who wanted to participate in the experiments had to be turned away due to the high demand. To satisfy the curiosity of those who were turned away, a black market for psychedelics sprang up near the Harvard campus.
According to Andrew Weil, Leary was fired for not giving his required lectures while Alpert was fired for allegedly giving psilocybin to an undergraduate in an off-campus apartment. This version is supported by the words of Harvard University president Nathan Marsh Pusey, who released the following statement on May 27, 1963:

On May 6, 1963, the Harvard Corporation voted, because Timothy F. Leary, lecturer on clinical psychology, has failed to keep his classroom appointments and has absented himself from Cambridge without permission, to relieve him from further teaching duty and to terminate his salary as of April 30, 1963.

In 1967, Leary engaged in a televised debate with Jerry Lettvin of MIT.
Leary's activities interested siblings Peggy, Billy and Tommy Hitchcock, heirs to the Mellon fortune, who in 1963 helped Leary and his associates acquire a rambling mansion on an estate in Millbrook (near the city of Poughkeepsie) (the site of Vassar College), where they continued their experiments. Leary later wrote:

We saw ourselves as anthropologists from the 21st century inhabiting a time module set somewhere in the dark ages of the 1960s. On this space colony we were attempting to create a new paganism and a new dedication to life as art.

The Millbrook estate was later described by Luc Sante of The New York Times as:

the headquarters of Leary and gang for the better part of five years, a period filled with endless parties, epiphanies and breakdowns, emotional dramas of all sizes, and numerous raids and arrests, many of them on flimsy charges concocted by the local assistant district attorney, G. Gordon Liddy.

Others contest this characterization of the Millbrook estate; for instance, in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe portrays Leary as interested only in research and not in using psychedelics merely for recreational purposes. According to "The Crypt Trip" chapter of Wolfe's book, when Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters visited the residence the Pranksters did not even see Leary, who was away on a three-day trip. According to Wolfe, Leary's group even refused to give the Pranksters LSD.
In 1964, Leary coauthored a book with Alpert and Ralph Metzner called The Psychedelic Experience based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In it, they wrote:

A psychedelic experience is a journey to new realms of consciousness. The scope and content of the experience is limitless, but its characteristic features are the transcendence of verbal concepts, of spacetime dimensions, and of the ego or identity. Such experiences of enlarged consciousness can occur in a variety of ways: sensory deprivation, yoga exercises, disciplined meditation, religious or aesthetic ecstasies, or spontaneously. Most recently they have become available to anyone through the ingestion of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, etc. Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key — it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.

Repeated FBI raids ended the Millbrook era. Regarding a 1966 raid by Liddy, Leary told author and Prankster Paul Krassner, "He was a government agent entering our bedroom at midnight. We had every right to shoot him. But I've never owned a weapon in my life. I have never had and never will have a gun around."
On September 19, 1966, Leary founded the League for Spiritual Discovery, a religion declaring LSD as its holy sacrament, in part as an unsuccessful attempt to maintain legal status for the use of LSD and other psychedelics for the religion's adherents based on a "freedom of religion" argument. (Although The Brotherhood of Eternal Love would subsequently consider Leary their spiritual leader, The Brotherhood did not evolve out of IFIF International Foundation for Internal Freedom.) On October 6, 1966, LSD was made illegal in the United States and controlled so strictly that not only were possession and recreational use criminalized, but all legal scientific research programs on the drug in the US were shut down as well.
In 1966, Folkways Records recorded Leary reading from his book The Psychedelic Experience, and released the album The Psychedelic Experience: Readings from the Book "The Psychedelic Experience. A Manual Based on the Tibetan...".
During late 1966 and early 1967, Leary toured college campuses presenting a multimedia performance "The Death of the Mind" attempting an artistic replication of the LSD experience. He said the League for Spiritual Discovery was limited to 360 members and was already at its membership limit, but encouraged others to form their own psychedelic religions. He published a pamphlet in 1967 called Start Your Own Religion to encourage just that(see below under "writings").
Leary was invited to attend the January 14, 1967 Human Be-In by Michael Bowen, the primary organizer of the event, a gathering of 30,000 hippies in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park In speaking to the group, he coined the famous phrase "Turn on, tune in, drop out". In a 1988 interview with Neil Strauss, he said that this slogan was "given to him" by Marshall McLuhan when the two had lunch in New York City, adding, "Marshall was very much interested in ideas and marketing, and he started singing something like, 'Psychedelics hit the spot / Five hundred micrograms, that's a lot,' to the tune of [the well-known Pepsi 1950s singing commercial]. Then he started going, 'Tune in, turn on, and drop out.'"
At some point in the late 1960s, Leary moved to California and made many new friends in Hollywood. "When he married his third wife, Rosemary Woodruff, in 1967, the event was directed by Ted Markland of Bonanza. All the guests were on acid."
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Leary, in collaboration with the writer Brian Barritt, formulated his eight-circuit model of consciousness, in which he wrote that the human mind / nervous system consisted of seven circuits which, when activated, produce seven levels of consciousness. This model was first published in his short essay "The Seven Tongues of God". The system soon expanded to include an eighth circuit in a revised version first unveiled to the world in the rare 1973 pamphlet "Neurologic" — written with Joanna Leary while he was in prison — but was not exhaustively formulated until the publication of Exo-Psychology (by Leary) and in Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger in 1977. Wilson contributed to the model after befriending Leary in the early 1970s, and used it as a framework for further exposition in his book Prometheus Rising, among other works.
Leary believed that the first four of these circuits ("the Larval Circuits" or "Terrestrial Circuits") are naturally accessed by most people in their lifetimes, triggered at natural transition points in life such as puberty. The second four circuits ("the Stellar Circuits" or "Extra-Terrestrial Circuits"), Leary wrote, were evolutionary offshoots of the first four that would be triggered at transition points we will acquire when we evolve further, and would equip us to encompass life in space, as well as the expansion of consciousness that would be necessary to make further scientific and social progress. Leary suggested that some people may "shift to the latter four gears", i.e., trigger these circuits artificially via consciousness-altering techniques such as meditation and spiritual endeavors such as yoga, or by taking psychedelic drugs specific to each circuit. An example of the information Leary cited as evidence for the purpose of the "higher" four circuits was the feeling of floating and uninhibited motion experienced by users of marijuana. In the eight-circuit model of consciousness, a primary theoretical function of the fifth circuit (the first of the four developed for life in outer space) is to allow humans to become accustomed to life in a zero- or low-gravity environment.

Legal troubles

Leary's first run-in with the law came on December 20, 1965. Leary decided to take his two children, Jack and Susan, and his girlfriend Rosemary Woodruff, to Mexico for an extended stay to write a book. On their return from Mexico to the United States, a U.S. Customs Service official found marijuana in Susan's underwear. They had crossed into Nuevo Laredo, Mexico in the late afternoon and discovered they would have to wait until morning for the appropriate visa for an extended stay. They decided to cross back into Texas to spend the night, and were on the U.S.-Mexico bridge, when Rosemary remembered she had a very small amount of marijuana in her possession. It was impossible to throw it out on the bridge, so Susan put it in her underwear. After taking responsibility for the controlled substance, Leary was convicted of possession under the Marihuana Tax Act on March 11, 1966, sentenced to 30 years in prison, fined $30,000 and ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment. Soon after, however, he appealed the case on the basis that the Marihuana Tax Act was, in fact, unconstitutional, as it required a degree of self-incrimination in blatant violation of the Fifth Amendment.
On December 26, 1968, Leary was arrested again, in Laguna Beach, California, this time for the possession of two marijuana "roaches". Leary alleged they were planted by the arresting officer, but was convicted anyway. On May 19, 1969, The Supreme Court concurred with Leary in Leary v. United States, declared the Marihuana Tax Act unconstitutional and overturned his 1965 conviction.
On that same day Leary announced his candidacy for Governor of California against the Republican incumbent, Ronald Reagan. His campaign slogan was "Come together, join the party." On June 1, 1969, Leary joined John Lennon and Yoko Ono at their Montreal Bed-In, and Lennon subsequently wrote Leary a campaign song called "Come Together".
On January 21, 1970, Leary received a 10-year sentence for his 1968 offense, with a further 10 added later while in custody for a prior arrest in 1965, for a total of 20 years to be served consecutively. On his arrival in prison, he was given psychological tests used to assign inmates to appropriate work details. Having designed some of these tests himself (including the "Leary Interpersonal Behavior Test"), Leary answered them in such a way that he seemed to be a very conforming, conventional person with a great interest in forestry and gardening. As a result, he was assigned to work as a gardener in a lower-security prison from which he escaped in September 1970, saying that his non-violent escape was a humorous prank and leaving a challenging note for the authorities to find after he was gone.
For a fee of $25,000, paid by The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the Weathermen smuggled Leary and Rosemary out of the U.S. (and eventually into Algeria) in a pickup truck driven by Clayton Van Lydegraf. He sought the patronage of Eldridge Cleaver and the remnants of the Black Panther Party's "government in exile" in Algeria, but after a short stay with them said that Cleaver had attempted to hold him and his wife hostage.
In 1971 the couple fled to Switzerland, where they were sheltered and effectively imprisoned by a high-living arms dealer, Michel Hauchard, who claimed he had an "obligation as a gentleman to protect philosophers"; however, Hauchard actually intended to broker a surreptitious film deal. In 1972 President Richard Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, persuaded the Swiss government to imprison Leary, which it did for a month but refused to extradite him back to the U.S. Leary and Rosemary separated later that year. Shortly thereafter, he became involved with Swiss-born British socialite Joanna Harcourt-Smith, a stepdaughter of financier Árpád Plesch. The couple "married" in a hotel two weeks after they were first introduced, and Harcourt-Smith would use his surname until their breakup in early 1977. They traveled to Vienna, then Beirut, and finally ended up in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1973. "Afghanistan had no extradition treaty with the United States, but this stricture did not apply to American airliners", Luc Sante wrote in a review of a biography of Leary. That interpretation of the law was used by U.S. authorities to capture the fugitive. "Before Leary could deplane, he was arrested by an agent of the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs."
At a stopover in the U.K., as Leary was being flown back to the U.S. in custody, he requested political asylum from Her Majesty's government to no avail. Back in America, he was held on five million dollars bail ($21.5 mil. in 2006) since Nixon had earlier labeled him as "the most dangerous man in America." The judge at his remand hearing stated, "If he is allowed to travel freely, he will speak publicly and spread his ideas," Facing a total of 95 years in prison, Leary hired criminal defense attorney Bruce Margolin. He was sent to Folsom Prison in California, and put in solitary confinement.
Leary feigned cooperation with the FBI's investigation of the Weathermen and its radical attorneys by giving them information they already had and/or of little consequence; in response, the FBI gave him the code name "Charlie Thrush". Leary would later claim, and members of the Weathermen would later support his claim, that no one was ever prosecuted based on any information he gave to the FBI.

The Weather Underground, the radical left organization responsible for his escape, was not impacted by his testimony. Histories written about the Weather Underground usually mention the Leary chapter in terms of the escape for which they proudly took credit. Leary sent information to the Weather Underground through a sympathetic prisoner that he was considering making a deal with the FBI and waited for their approval. The return message was, "We understand."

Leary remained a productive writer in prison, sowing the seeds for his incarnation as a futurist lecturer with the StarSeed Series. In Starseed (1973), neurologic (1973) and Terra II: A Way Out (1974), Leary transitioned from Eastern philosophy and Aleister Crowley to a belief that outer space was a medium for spiritual transcendence as his principal frame of reference. Neurologic also added the idea of "time dilation/contraction" available to the activated brain through the cellular, DNA, or atomic level of reality. Terra II is his first detailed proposal for space colonization. Leary's muse peaked with Exo-Psychology, Neuropolitics, and Intelligence Agents.

Last two decades

Leary was released from prison on April 21, 1976 by Governor Jerry Brown. After briefly relocating to San Diego, he took up residence in Laurel Canyon and continued to write books and appear as a lecturer and (by his own terminology) "stand-up philosopher." In 1978 he married filmmaker Barbara Blum, also known as Barbara Chase, sister of actress Tanya Roberts. Leary adopted Blum's son Zachary and raised him as his own. During this period, Leary took on several godchildren, including actress Winona Ryder (the daughter of his archivist, Michael Horowitz) and current MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito.
Leary began to foster an improbable friendship with former foe G. Gordon Liddy, the Watergate burglar and conservative radio talk-show host. They toured the lecture circuit in 1982 as ex-cons (Liddy having been imprisoned after high-level involvement in the Watergate scandal) debating different social and fiscal issues from gay rights and abortion to welfare and the environment, with Leary generally espousing left-wing views and Liddy continuing to conform to a right-wing stance. The tour generated massive publicity and considerable funds for both. The personal appearances, a successful documentary called Return Engagement chronicling the tour, and the concurrent release of the autobiography Flashbacks helped to return Leary to the spotlight. In 1988, Leary held a fundraiser for Libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul.
While his stated ambition was to cross over to the mainstream as a Hollywood personality through proposed adaptations of Flashbacks and other projects, reluctant studios and sponsors ensured that it would never occur. Nonetheless, his extensive touring on the lecture circuit ensured him a very comfortable lifestyle by the mid-1980s, while his colorful past made him a desirable guest at A-list parties throughout the decade. He also attracted a more intellectual crowd including old confederate Robert Anton Wilson, science fiction writers William Gibson & Norman Spinrad, and rock musicians David Byrne & John Frusciante. In addition, he appeared in Johnny Depp and Gibby Haynes' 1994 film Stuff, which showed Frusciante's squalid living conditions at that time.
While he continued his frequent drug use privately rather than evangelizing and proselytizing the use of psychedelics as he had in the 1960s, the latter-day Leary emphasized the importance of space colonization and an ensuing extension of the human lifespan while also providing a detailed explanation of the eight-circuit model of consciousness in books such as Info-Psychology, among several others. He adopted the acronym "SMI²LE" as a succinct summary of his pre-transhumanist agenda: SM (Space Migration) + I² (intelligence increase) + LE (Life extension), and credited L5 co-founder Keith Henson with helping develop his interest in space migration.

Leary's colonization plan varied greatly through the years. According to his initial plan to leave the planet, 5,000 of Earth's most virile and intelligent individuals would be launched on a vessel (Starseed 1) equipped with luxurious amenities. This idea was inspired by the plotline of Paul Kantner's concept album Blows Against The Empire, which in turn was derived from Robert A. Heinlein's Lazarus Long series. In the 1980s, he came to embrace NASA scientist Gerard O'Neill's more realistic and egalitarian plans to construct giant Eden-like High Orbital Mini-Earths (documented in the Robert Anton Wilson lecture H.O.M.E.s on LaGrange) using existing technology and raw materials from the Moon, orbital rock and obsolete satellites.
In the 1980s, Leary became fascinated by computers, the Internet, and virtual reality. Leary proclaimed that "the PC is the LSD of the 1990s" and admonished bohemians to "turn on, boot up, jack in". He became a promoter of virtual reality systems, and sometimes demonstrated a prototype of the Mattel Power Glove as part of his lectures (as in From Psychedelics to Cybernetics). Around this time he befriended a number of notable people in the field including Brenda Laurel, a pioneering researcher in virtual environments and human–computer interaction. With the rise of cyberdelic counter-culture, he served as consultant to Billy Idol in the production of the latter's 1993 album Cyberpunk.
In 1990, his daughter Susan committed suicide after years of mental instability. After his separation and subsequent divorce from Barbara in 1992, he ran with a new entourage of Baby-Boomer and Generation X artists and cultural figures including people as diverse as actors Johnny Depp, Susan Sarandon and Dan Aykroyd; Zach Leary; his grandson Ashley Martino and his granddaughters Dieadra Martino and Sara Brown; author Douglas Rushkoff; publisher Bob Guccione, Jr.; and goddaughters Ryder & artist/music–photographer Hilary Hulteen. Despite declining health, he maintained a regular schedule of public appearances through 1994.
From 1989 on, Leary had begun to re-establish his connection to unconventional religious movements with an interest in altered states of consciousness. In 1989, he appeared with friend and book collaborator Robert Anton Wilson in a dialog entitled The Inner Frontier for the Association for Consciousness Exploration, a Cleveland-based group that had been responsible for his first Cleveland, Ohio appearance in 1979. After that, he appeared at the Starwood Festival, a major Neo-Pagan event run by ACE, in 1992 and 1993 (although his planned 1994 WinterStar Symposium appearance was cancelled due to his declining health). In front of hundreds of Neo-Pagans in 1992 he declared, "I have always considered myself, when I learned what the word meant, I've always considered myself a Pagan." He also collaborated with Eric Gullichsen on Load and Run High-tech Paganism: Digital Polytheism. Shortly before his death on May 31, 1996, he recorded the "Right to Fly" album with Simon Stokes which was released in July 1996.

Death

In early 1995, Leary was diagnosed with inoperable prostate cancer. He did not reveal the condition to the press at that time, but did so after the death of Jerry Garcia in August.
Leary authored an outline for a book called Design for Dying which tried to give a new perspective on death and dying. His entourage (as mentioned above) updated his website on a daily basis as a sort of proto-blog, noting his daily intake of various illicit and legal chemical substances with a predilection for nitrous oxide, cigarettes, his trademark "Leary Biscuits" (a snack cracker with cheese and a small marijuana bud, briefly microwaved), and eventually heroin and morphine. His sterile house was completely redecorated by the staff, who had more or less moved in, with an array of surreal ornamentation. In his final months, thousands of visitors, well-wishers and old friends visited him in his California home. Until his last weeks, he gave many interviews discussing his new philosophy of embracing death.

For a number of years, he was reportedly excited by the possibility of freezing his body in cryonic suspension, and he publicly announced in September 1988 that he had signed up with Alcor for such treatment after having appeared at Alcor's grand opening the year before. He did not believe he would be resurrected in the future, but did believe that cryonics had important possibilities even though he thought it had only "one chance in a thousand". He called it his "duty as a futurist", and helped publicize the process and hoped it would work for his children and grandchildren if not for him, although he said he was "lighthearted" about it. He was connected with two cryonic organizations, first Alcor and then CryoCare, one of which delivered a cryonic tank to his house in the months before his death, but subsequently requested that his body be cremated, which it was, and distributed among his friends and family.
He died at 75 on May 31, 1996. His death was videotaped for posterity at his request, capturing his final words. During his final moments, he said, "Why not?" to his son Zachary. He uttered the phrase repeatedly, in different intonations, and died soon after. His last word, according to Zach, was "beautiful."
The film Timothy Leary's Dead (1996) contains a simulated sequence in which he allows his bodily functions to be suspended for the purposes of cryonic preservation. His head is removed, and placed on ice. The film ends with a sequence showing the creation of the artificial head used in the film.
Seven grams of Leary's ashes were arranged by his friend at Celestis to be buried in space aboard a rocket carrying the remains of 24 others including Gene Roddenberry (creator of Star Trek), Gerard O'Neill (space physicist), and Krafft Ehricke (rocket scientist). A Pegasus rocket containing their remains was launched on April 21, 1997, and remained in orbit for six years until it burned up in the atmosphere.

Influence

Many consider Leary one of the most prominent figures during the counterculture of the 1960s, and since those times has remained influential on pop culture, literature, television, film and, especially, music.
Leary coined the influential term Reality Tunnel, by which he means a kind of representative realism. The theory states that, with a subconscious set of mental filters formed from their beliefs and experiences, every individual interprets the same world differently, hence "Truth is in the eye of the beholder".
His ideas influenced the work of his friend Robert Anton Wilson. This influence went both ways, and Leary admittedly took just as much from Wilson. Wilson's book Prometheus Rising was an in-depth, highly detailed and inclusive work documenting Leary's eight-circuit model of consciousness. Although the theory originated in discussions between Leary and a Hindu holy man at Millbrook, Wilson was one of the most ardent proponents of it and introduced the theory to a mainstream audience in 1977's bestselling Cosmic Trigger. In 1989, they appeared together on stage in a dialog entitled The Inner Frontier hosted the Association for Consciousness Exploration, (the same group that had hosted Leary's first Cleveland appearance in 197).
Owsley Stanley, one of the pioneers of the era, would later write of him:

Leary was a fool. Drunk with "celebrity-hood" and his own ego, he became a media clown — and was arguably the single most damaging actor involved in the destruction of the evanescent social movement of the 1960s. Tim, with his very public exhortations to the kids to "tune in, turn on and drop out", is the inspiration for all the current draconian U.S. drug laws against psychedelics. He would not listen to any of us when we asked him to please cool it, he loved the limelight and relished his notoriety.... I was not a fan of his.

World religion scholar Huston Smith was "turned on" by Leary after being introduced to him by Aldous Huxley the early 1960s. The experience was interpreted as a deeply religious one by Smith, and is described in detailed religious terms in Smith's later work Cleansing of the Doors of Perception. Smith asked Leary, to paraphrase, whether he knew the power and danger of what he was conducting research with. In Mother Jones Magazine, 1997, Smith commented:

First, I have to say that during the three years I was involved with that Harvard study, LSD was not only legal but respectable. Before Tim went on his unfortunate careening course, it was a legitimate research project. Though I did find evidence that, when recounted, the experiences of the Harvard group and those of mystics were impossible to tell apart — descriptively indistinguishable — that's not the last word. There is still a question about the truth of the disclosure.

In popular culture

The Psychedelic Experience was the inspiration for John Lennon's song "Tomorrow Never Knows" in The Beatles' album Revolver. Leary once recruited Lennon to write a theme-song for his California gubernatorial campaign against Ronald Reagan (which was interrupted by his prison sentence due to cannabis possession), inspiring Lennon to come up with "Come Together", based on Leary's theme and catchphrase for the campaign. Leary was also present when Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, recorded "Give Peace a Chance" during one of their bed-ins in Montreal, and is mentioned in the lyrics of the song.^[56] The Moody Blues also recorded a track about Leary, "Legend of a Mind", on their 1968 album In Search of the Lost Chord in which the refrain is "Timothy Leary's dead. No, no, no, no, he's outside looking in".
While in exile in Switzerland, Leary and British writer Brian Barrett collaborated with the German band Ash Ra Tempel, and recorded the album Seven Up. He is credited as a songwriter, and his lyrics and vocals can be heard throughout the album.

Works

Main article: Timothy Leary bibliography

Leary authored and co-authored over 20 books, and was featured on more than a dozen audio recordings. His acting career included over a dozen appearances in movies and television shows, over 30 appearances as himself in others, and produced and/or collaborated in both multimedia presentations and computer games.
In June 2011, The New York Times reported that the New York Public Library had acquired Leary's personal archives, including papers, videotapes, photographs and other archival material from the Leary estate, including correspondence and documents relating to Allen Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Arthur Koestler, G. Gordon Liddy and other prominent cultural figures. The collection will take approximately 18 months to process, and should be open to researchers by July 2013.

Psychedelic therapy

2013-02-11T16:57:00.000-08:00

Psychedelic therapy refers to therapeutic practices involving the use of psychedelic drugs, particularly serotonergic psychedelics such as LSD, psilocybin, DMT, and 2C-B. As an alternative to synonyms such as "hallucinogen", "entheogen", "psychotomimetic" and other functionally constructed names, the use of the term psychedelic ("mind-manifesting") emphasizes that those who use these drugs as part of a therapeutic practice believe these drugs can facilitate beneficial exploration of the psyche. Proponents of psychedelic therapy also believe psychedelics enhance or unlock key psychoanalytic abilities, and so make it easier for conventional psychotherapy to take place.

History

Psychedelic therapy, in the broadest possible sense of the term, undoubtedly dates from prehistoric knowledge of hallucinogenic plants. Though usually viewed as predominantly spiritual in nature, elements of psychotherapeutic practice can be recognized in the entheogenic or shamanic rituals of many cultures.
Some of the well known particular psychedelic substances that have been used to this day are: MDMA, LSD, Psilocybin, Cannabis, Mescaline, 2C-B, Dimethyltryptamine, Ibogaine, Gamma-Hydroxybutyric acid, Ketamine, Amanita muscaria, Bufotenine, Harmaline, Ayahuasca, and Salvia divinorum. Carbogen has also played role in psychedelic therapy research. Shamans have historically been well known throughout the world to mix two or more of some of the listed substances to produce synergistic effects. (See Psychoactive, Entheogen, Hallucinogen, Psychotherapy, Psychonaut, Meditation, Trance, Mysticism, Transcendence (philosophy).)
The use of psychedelic agents in Western therapy began in the 1950s, after the widespread distribution of LSD to researchers by its manufacturer, Sandoz Laboratories. Research into experimental, chemotherapeutic and psychotherapeutic uses of psychedelic drugs was conducted in several countries over the next 10–15 years. In addition to the release of dozens of books and creation of six international conferences, more than 1000 peer-reviewed clinical papers detailing the use of psychedelic compounds (administered to approximately 40,000 patients) were published by the mid-1960s. Proponents believed that psychedelic drugs facilitated psychoanalytic processes, and that they were particularly useful for patients with problems that were otherwise difficult to treat, including alcoholics, although the trials did not meet the methodological standards required today.
One challenge of psychedelic therapy was the greatly variable effects produced by the drugs. According to Stanislav Grof, "The major obstacle to their systematic utilization for therapeutic purposes was the fact that they tended to occur in an elemental fashion, without a recognizable pattern, and frequently to the surprise of both the patient and the therapist. Since the variables determining such reactions were not understood, therapeutic transformations of this kind were not readily replicable." Attempts to produce these experiences in a controlled, non-arbitrary, predictable way resulted in several methods of psychedelic therapy, which are reviewed below.
Researchers like Timothy Leary felt psychedelics could alter the fundamental personality structure or subjective value-system of an individual, to beneficial effect. His experiments with prison inmates were an attempt to reduce recidivism through a few short, intense sessions of psilocybin administered weeks apart with biweekly group therapy sessions in between. Psychedelic therapy was used in a number of other specific patient populations, including alcoholics, children with autism, and people with terminal illness.

In alcoholism

Studies by Humphrey Osmond, Betty Eisner, and others examined the possibility that psychedelic therapy could treat alcoholism (or, less commonly, other addictions). A review of the usefulness of psychedelic therapy in treating alcoholism concluded that the possibility was neither proven nor disproven. Early studies of alcoholics who underwent LSD treatment reported a 50% success rate after a single high-dose session. However, the studies that reported high success rates had insufficient controls, lacked objective measures of genuine change, and failed to conduct rigorous follow-up interviews with subjects. The lack of conclusive evidence notwithstanding, individual case reports are often dramatic. Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous conducted medically supervised experiments in the 1950's on the effects of LSD on alcoholism. Bill is quoted as saying "It is a generally acknowledged fact in spiritual development that ego reduction makes the influx of God's grace possible. If, therefore, under LSD we can have a temporary reduction, so that we can better see what we are and where we are going — well, that might be of some help. The goal might become clearer. So I consider LSD to be of some value to some people, and practically no damage to anyone. It will never take the place of any of the existing means by which we can reduce the ego, and keep it reduced." Bill strongly supported LSD as a potential tool for the treatment of alcoholism, but felt that it should only be undertaken by those with a rather strong superego in well supervised clinical settings.

In terminal illness

Richard Yensen, Albert Kurland and other researchers collected evidence that psychedelic therapy could be of use to those suffering from anxiety and other problems associated with terminal illness. In 1965, research consisting of providing a psychedelic experience for the dying was conducted at the Spring Grove State Hospital in Maryland. Of 17 dying patients who received LSD after appropriate therapeutic preparation, one-third improved "dramatically", one-third improved "moderately", and one-third were unchanged by the criteria of reduced tension, depression, pain, and fear of death.

Restrictive regulation

One reason that psychedelic therapy was eventually restricted was concern about the use of drugs by the general public. In the mid-1960s, in response to concerns regarding the proliferation of the unauthorized use of psychedelic drugs by the general public (especially the counterculture), various steps were taken to curtail their use. Bowing to governmental concerns, Sandoz halted production of LSD in 1965, and in many countries LSD was banned, or made available on a very limited basis that made research difficult. Gradually, increasing restrictions were placed on medical and psychiatric research conducted with LSD and other psychedelic substances. In a congressional hearing in 1966, Senator Robert Kennedy questioned the shift of opinion with regards to this potentially rewarding form of treatment, noting that, "Perhaps to some extent we have lost sight of the fact that (LSD) can be very, very helpful in our society if used properly" (Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization, 1966 p. 63).
By 1970, LSD and many other psychedelics were placed into the most-restrictive "Schedule I" category by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, along with widely-used drugs like heroin. Schedule I compounds are claimed to possess "significant potential for abuse and dependence" and have "no recognized medicinal value", effectively rendering them illegal for any purpose without special difficult-to-obtain approvals. The arguments in favor of this regulation are seemingly contradicted by hundreds of scientific and medical articles on the use of psychedelics as aids in psychotherapy. In 1968, Dahlberg and colleagues published an article in the American Journal of Psychiatry that detailed the way in which various forces had successfully discredited legitimate LSD research. The essay argues that individuals in government and the pharmaceutical industry influenced research in the medical community by canceling any ongoing studies and analysis in addition to labeling genuine scientists as charlatans. Despite objections from the scientific community, authorized research into therapeutic applications of psychedelic drugs had been discontinued worldwide by the 1980s.

Continuing trials

Research and therapeutic sessions have nevertheless continued to be performed, in one way or another, to the present day. Some therapists have exploited windows of opportunity preceding scheduling of particular substances (e.g. MDMA, LSD, Psilocybin, Cannabis, Mescaline, Dimethyltryptamine, Ibogaine, Gamma-Hydroxybutyric acid, Ketamine, Amanita muscaria, Bufotenine, Harmaline, Ayahuasca, Salvia divinorum) or developed extensive non-drug techniques for achieving similar states of consciousness (e.g. Holotropic Breathwork). For the most part, however, since the early 1970s, psychedelic therapy has been conducted by an underground network of people willing to conduct therapy sessions using psychedelic substances. Board-certified therapists, in doing this, risked losing both their career and their liberty. In recent years, some researchers, including Charles Grob and Michael Mithoefer, have obtained permission for human studies of psychedelics as possible treatments.

Recent Resurgence

There has been a recent resurgence in the study of psychedelic drugs for medicinal purposes. A study in 2006 conducted by Griffiths et al. used psilocybin to facilitate a mystical experience. Fourteen months later, 21 of 36 patients rated the experience as one of the top five most meaningful of their lives. The New York Times wrote an article in 2010 outlining some of the other findings, including resumed work with terminally ill patients.

Methods

The effects of psychedelic drugs on the human mind are complex, varied and difficult to characterize, and as a result many different "flavors" of psychedelic psychotherapy have been developed by individual practitioners. Some aspects of published accounts of methodologies are discussed below.

Psycholytic therapy

Psycholytic therapy involves the use of low to medium doses of psychedelic drugs, repeatedly at intervals of 1–2 weeks. The therapist is present during the peak of the experience and at other times as required, to assist the patient in processing material that arises and to offer support when necessary. This general form of therapy was utilized mainly to treat patients with neurotic and psychosomatic disorders. The name, coined by Ronald A. Sandison, literally meaning "soul-dissolving", refers to the belief that the therapy can dissolve conflicts in the mind. Psycholytic therapy was historically an important approach to psychedelic psychotherapy in Europe, but it was also practiced in the United States by some psychotherapists including Betty Eisner.
An advantage of psychedelic drugs in exploring the unconscious is that a conscious sliver of the adult ego usually remains alert during the experience. Throughout the session, patients remain intellectually alert and remember their experiences vividly. In this highly introspective state, they also are actively cognizant of ego defenses such as projection, denial, and displacement as they react to themselves and their choices in the act of creating them.
The ultimate goal of the therapy is to provide a safe, mutually compassionate context through which the profound and intense reliving of memories can be filtered through the principles of genuine psychotherapy. Aided by the deeply introspective state attained by the patient, the therapist assists him/her in developing a new life framework or personal philosophy that recognizes individual responsibility for change.

Psychedelic therapy

Psychedelic therapy involves the use of very high doses of psychedelic drugs, with the aim of promoting transcendental, ecstatic, religious or mystical peak experiences. This approach differs strongly from the dialog-based processing of psychodynamic material upon which many other methodologies are based. As such, it is more closely aligned to transpersonal psychology than to traditional psychoanalysis. Psychedelic therapy is practiced primarily in North America. The psychedelic therapy method was initiated by Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer (with some influence from Al Hubbard) and replicated by Keith Ditman.

Other variations

In Czechoslovakia, Stanislav Grof developed a form of treatment that appeared to bridge both of these main forms. He analyzed the LSD experience in a Freudian or Jungian psychoanalytic context in addition to giving significant value to the overarching transpersonal, mystical, or spiritual experience that often allowed the patient to re-evaluate their entire life philosophy.
The Chilean therapist Claudio Naranjo developed a branch of psychedelic therapy that utilized drugs like MDA, MDMA, harmaline, and ibogaine — substances that do not involve the same degree of perceptual and emotional alteration as LSD.

Anaclitic therapy

The term anaclitic (from the Ancient Greek "ἀνάκλιτος", anaklitos – "for reclining") refers to primitive, infantile needs and tendencies directed toward a pre-genital love object. Developed by two London psychoanalysts, Joyce Martin and Pauline McCririck, this form of treatment is similar to psycholytic approaches as it is based largely on a psychoanalytic interpretation of abreactions produced by the treatment, but it tends to focus on those experiences in which the patient re-encounters carnal feelings of emotional deprivation and frustration stemming from the infantile needs of their early childhood. As a result, the treatment was developed with the aim to directly fulfill or satisfy those repressed, agonizing cravings for love, physical contact, and other instinctual needs re-lived by the patient. Therefore, the therapist is completely engaged with the subject, as opposed to the traditional detached attitude of the psychoanalyst. With the intense emotional episodes that came with the psychedelic experience, Martin and McCririck aimed to sit in as the "mother" role who would enter into close physical contact with the patients by rocking them, giving them milk from a bottle, etc.

Hypnodelic therapy

Hypnodelic therapy, as the name suggests, was developed with the goal to maximize the power of hypnotic suggestion by combining it with the psychedelic experience. After training the patient to respond to hypnosis, LSD would be administered, and during the onset phase of the drug the patient would be placed into a state of trance. Levine and Ludwig found the combination of these techniques to be more effective than the use of either of these two components separately.

Developments from 1980–present

Owing to the largely illegal nature of psychedelic therapy in this period, little information is available concerning the methods that have been used. Individuals having published information on psychedelic psychotherapy in this period include George Greer, Ann Shulgin (TiHKAL, with Alexander Shulgin), and Myron Stolaroff (The Secret Chief, about the underground therapy done by Leo Zeff) and Athanasios Kafkalides.

Current research and therapy

Current legal research into possible therapeutic value of psychedelics has been ongoing for several years. The only published pilot study (and Phase I FDA safety study) so far is one that showed that Psilocybin could be safely given to those with OCD and showed trends for improvement of symptoms but the study did not clearly establish whether or not the patients were helped by the treatment.
There are also several ongoing or recently finished clinical trials that have not yet published their results. A study by Charles Grob, sponsored by the Heffter Research Institute, used psilocybin with cancer patients, with the intention of helping them come to terms with their condition, and for pain relief. Roland Griffiths and colleagues at Johns Hopkins are also studying if people with anxiety or poor mood due to current or past cancer can benefit from psilocybin. Unlike the Grob study, the Griffiths study does not require participants be terminally ill. Another ongoing study with cancer patients is with John Halpern at Harvard Medical School's McLean Hospital, but this study is with MDMA, more commonly known as Ecstasy. MDMA is also being investigated as a possible adjunct to psychotherapy for Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in people who did not benefit from available PTSD treatments. Research conducted by Torsten Passie has shown that patients who also suffer from anxiety and depression can especially benefit and make significant progress in healing when given doses of MDMA and other entactogens that stimulate social and emotional effects. Studies of MDMA and PTSD are currently underway in the United States (South Carolina), Switzerland, and Israel, all sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). MAPS has a twelve-person study in Switzerland to see whether a moderately large dose of LSD (200 mcg) is more helpful as part of psychotherapy for patients with life-threatening illnesses than a lower dose (20 mcg).

Drugs in Thailand

2013-02-11T16:38:00.000-08:00

Drugs in Thailand are readily available everywhere.

Thailand's youngest and first female prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, announced a harsh crackdown on illegal drugs in Thailand when she took office in 2011.
Unlike her brother, former Prime Minster Thaksin Shinawatra, whose war on drugs was blamed for an estimated 2,500 deaths in 2003, the new Prime Minister of Thailand's policy is centered around reform and compulsory drug treatment for those caught with illegal substances.

An estimated 50 organized crime groups are involved in moving drugs, particularly methamphetamines, into Thailand from neighboring Myanmar. Although cocaine, heroine, and 'hard' drugs can still be found, there has been a general shift to lifestyle and party drugs such as ecstasy and crystal meth -- appealing to the many travelers on holiday who have come to party in Thailand.

Are Drugs in Thailand Legal?

No! Depending on the quantity of the illegal substance that you are carrying (i.e., more than you can consume in one sitting) Thailand has the right to sentence you to death or life in prison.
Although Thailand hasn't enacted the death penalty for drug-related charges since 2004, Thai prisons contain plenty of travelers sentenced to life who are awaiting either help from their governments or a royal pardon.
If you are busted trafficking drugs in Thailand, there is no guarantee that your embassy will intercede.

Drugs in the Thai Islands

With so many young backpackers enjoying the islands in Thailand, drugs such as locally grown magic mushrooms and marijuana are relatively cheap and easy to buy. Haad Rin on the island of Koh Phangan is famous for the monthly Full Moon Party where many travelers try psychedelic mushroom shakes to enhance the experience.
Despite being illegal, drugs can be purchased openly in many bars on Koh Phangan. Undercover police do roam the Full Moon Parties, however, the Mellow Mountain Bar on Sunrise Beach has had mushroom shakes on their menu for more than a decade.

The Infamous Thailand Drug Scam

More than a few backpackers have fallen victim to a simple-but-effective scam while purchasing drugs in Thailand.
When a traveler asks in a bar to purchase marijuana, the bartender sells it to them, then immediately phones an associate who may or may not be a legitimate police officer. The cop then shakes down the traveler, busts them with the weed they just purchased, and demands an expensive bribe. The weed is confiscated, given back to the barman, then resold to the next unsuspecting traveler!

Learn how to avoid other common scams in Asia.

Buying Prescription Drugs in Thailand

Unlike in the United States where you need a prescription written by a doctor to obtain controlled medications, you can simply walk into any pharmacy in Bangkok or Chiang Mai and purchase prescription drugs -- usually at a fraction of the price found in the West.
While this can be handy for getting access to antibiotics or necessary medicines while traveling, some tourists abuse the open system and purchase large quantities of Valium (diazepam), sleeping pills, pain killers, ridilin, Viagra, and other drugs.
Even if the pills are legal to obtain in Thailand, that does not mean that you can legally carry them back into the United States without a prescription or medical passport.

Magic Shakes and Happy Pizzas

Throughout Southeast Asia you'll sometimes encounter signs or menus advertising 'magic' or 'happy' foods and drinks. 'Magic' typically means that the shake or drink contains psychedelic mushrooms and 'happy' denotes marijuana.

Drugs in Other Parts of Southeast Asia

Getting busted in Singapore is no laughing matter; they impose a mandatory death penalty for drug traffickers and have executed several foreigners over the years. Vietnam executed 85 people in 2007 for drug-related crimes.

See more about the drug laws in Singapore.

Despite the threat of death penalties or severe prison sentences throughout most of Southeast Asia, a few traveler hotspots along the backpacker Banana Pancake Trail still openly advertise drugs without fear of repercussion. Vang Vieng in Laos, famous for their tubing on the river and rambunctious party scene, is one such place. The Gili Islands in Indonesia, particularly Gili Trawangan, also have magic mushrooms on bar and restaurant menus.

Drugs in Thailand and Southeast Asia

Thailand Travel

Staying Safe on the Road

Shroom-shakes in Paradise

2013-02-11T16:30:00.002-08:00

For me travel is all about new experiences in any form that they may come. So when a friend suggested we share a magic-mushroom shake on the Thai island-party-paradise of Koh Phangan I was all for it, although reluctant at first.

It was a couple days yet until the famous full-moon party and being as there are several bars which specialize in psychedelic milkshakes, such as the renowned "Mellow Mountain", I thought it a fine opportunity to experience something new.

Accompanied by to friends, I ascended Mellow mountain ready to place an order. By this point it was mid-way through the night and we were starting to feel the effects of the Changs and Singhas we had already consumed, this was probably my first mistake.

Once we had conquered the summit of the most mellow of mountains, more of a hill really, my one friend (lets call him Chris) placed an order for one "extra strong shake suitable for three people to share." As we waited for our "Magic Milkshake" to be prepared (a process likely involving pixie dust and unicorn's horns) our group of three was reduced to two. I have no idea where my other friend got off to, and I assure you neither does he , but regardless Chris and I were faced with an brimming cup of "extra strong" milkshake spilt now only between two.

The shake was a sickly brownish green hew but tasted delightfully like children's banana flavoured penicillin. We casually sipped the shake until completion and then we waited. I'm not sure exactly how long the effects took to set in but what followed was what seemed like days of colourful, occasionly frighting visions accompanied by a soundtrack of the "greatest music ever". Highlights of my trip included staring at myself in a mirror while face morphed into different forms and seeing pixalized waves rolling onto the beach.

As Chris and I began to come down from the trip I was finally able to glance at my watch long enough register the time. It had been only 2 hours since we drank the shake; what had seemed like a week had only been 2 hours!

We decided it would be best to call it a night and head back to the bungalow. "What the fuck!" was what I exclaimed when we reached the front door. What I saw was the entire door and most of the front wall of our bungalow coated in a thick moving skin of termites!

Chris and I spent the following quarter of an hour debating the possibility that we could be having the same hallucination; we eventually came to the conclusion that it wasn't and then spent yet another quarter of an hour figuring out what to do about our situation.

The manager of our budget resort was awoken by two wide-eyed and disoriented foreigners yelling something about termites. He assessed the problem and quickly assured us "no problem, we spray." Half a can of insecticide later and, as promised, "no problem."

My first and, to-date, only experience with psychedelic mushrooms was an interesting one to say the least. The trip was at times terribly frightening and at others vivid and euphoric. I'm not inclined to try shrooms again anytime soon but I'm glad to have experienced it.

There are multiple colloquial terms for psilocybin mushrooms, the most common being shrooms and magic mushrooms. The effects are subjective and can vary considerably among individual users. The mind-altering effects typically last anywhere from 3 to 8 hours but can seem to last much longer because of psilocybin's ability to alter time perception. Shifts in perception visually include enhancement and contrasting of colors, strange light phenomena, increased visual acuity, surfaces that seem to ripple, shimmer, or breathe; complex open and closed eye visuals of form constants or images, objects that warp, morph, or change solid colours; a sense of melting into the environment, and trails behind moving objects. Sounds seem to be heard with increased clarity. The experience, or "trip," is strongly dependent upon set and setting. A negative environment could likely induce a bad trip, whereas a comfortable and familiar environment would allow for a pleasant experience.

If you are planning to try mushrooms or any other drugs while abroad be aware of the laws and risks. While Magic mushrooms are openly sold and consumed in many "party spots" of Thailand they are in-fact illegal to sell or possess (even in milkshake form).

Use caution and be safe but certainly have fun!

Dutch magic mushroom ban in force

2013-02-10T19:37:00.004-08:00

Magic mushrooms are big business in the Netherlands

A ban on the sale of hallucinogenic or so-called "magic mushrooms" is coming into force in the Netherlands.

The Dutch government says the fungi, which contains the hallucinogenic ingredient psilocybin, can cause life-threatening behaviour.
Last year, a French girl jumped to her death from a bridge in Amsterdam after allegedly eating such mushrooms.
Owners of the shops that sell the fungi argue that their trade should be regulated, not banned.
The Dutch Association of Smart Shops fears the ban will put its members out of business.
It says there is not enough evidence to prove that the fungi are a danger to public health.
Mushroom-related incidents, requiring the emergency services, have doubled in the past few years, with most cases involving foreign tourists, mainly from Britain.
Many mix magic mushrooms with alcohol and cannabis.

Court: Growing Hallucinogenic Mushrooms Not Illegal in N.M.

2013-02-10T19:26:00.002-08:00

SANTA FE — Growing hallucinogenic mushrooms isn't prohibited by a New Mexico law against manufacturing an illegal drug.
    That's the legal conclusion of the state Court of Appeals, which has overturned the felony drug trafficking conviction of an Alamogordo man for growing psilocybin mushrooms in his home.
    Under state law, drug trafficking includes the manufacturing of illegal drugs.
    However, the court said growing mushrooms was not covered by the drug trafficking law's definition of "manufacture.''
    The hallucinogenic substance in the mushrooms, psilocybin, is an illegal controlled substance under state and federal law. Street terms for the mushrooms include "magic mushrooms'' and "shrooms,'' according to a U.S. Justice Department Web site.
    The court, in making its decision, cited a 1999 ruling that concluded that growing marijuana does not constitute manufacturing under New Mexico's law against drug trafficking.
    The law defines manufacture as "the production, preparation, compounding, conversion or processing of a controlled substance or controlled substance analog by extraction from substances of natural origin or independently by means of chemical synthesis or by a combination of extraction and chemical synthesis and includes any packaging or repackaging of the substance or labeling or relabeling of its container.''
    Police raided David Ray Pratt's home in Alamogordo in June 2002 based on information from a confidential informant. They found mushrooms growing in glass jars, syringes containing psilocybin spores for inoculating a mixture used to grow the mushrooms, a foam cooler with a humidifier apparatus and instructions for growing the mushrooms.
    At his trial, Pratt testified he was trying to grow the mushrooms for his own use and didn't intend to sell them. He said he was a heavy user of the mushrooms and they were expensive, worth about $15 a gram. About seven grams of the mushrooms were found by police.
    Pratt was convicted of drug trafficking by manufacture — a second-degree felony — and sentenced to nine years in prison. The sentence was suspended and he was placed on five years' probation.
    He also was convicted of possession of drug paraphernalia, a misdemeanor. In the raid of Pratt's house, police had found pipes used to smoke marijuana.
    Pratt did not appeal the drug paraphernalia conviction.
    The attorney general's office argued Pratt's felony conviction should be upheld because he used special equipment to artificially grow the mushrooms.
    Pratt's lawyer in the appeal, Cordelia Friedman, an assistant appellate public defender, contended in a brief that the mushrooms were in "a natural state of mushroomness when their 'cob-like' structures were ripped out of their mason jars by police.'' The illegal hallucinogenic substance is produced naturally by the mushroom during a certain stage of its development, according to the court.
    "Genetic material in a seed or spore, brought to fruit by provision of soil and water, is not 'manufacturing' as contemplated by the Legislature'' in the drug trafficking law, Friedman wrote.
    The Court of Appeals agreed.
    "Because there is no evidence that defendant engaged in 'extraction from substances of natural origin or ... chemical synthesis' as defined by (the drug trafficking law) ... his acts of cultivating or growing mushrooms, even if by artificial means, are not prohibited'' by state law, the court said in an opinion written by Judge James Wechsler.
    The court pointed out New Mexico's anti-drug laws are patterned after a federal law. However, state law does not include a federal provision that makes clear the "planting, cultivation, growing or harvesting of a controlled substance'' is illegal because those are defined as the production of a drug.
    The court said "we believe the Legislature acted intentionally when it omitted a similar definition'' of production in New Mexico's law against drug trafficking.
    Attorney General Patricia Madrid will ask the state Supreme Court to consider overturning the appeals court's ruling, said spokesman Sam Thompson. She said Wednesday it was uncertain whether the attorney general would ask the Legislature next year to change the state's drug trafficking law because of the court ruling in the mushroom case.

'Magic mushroom' drug may improve personality long-term

2013-02-10T19:18:00.002-08:00

In new research that will almost certainly create controversy, scientists working with the hallucinogen psilocybin -- the active ingredient found in "magic mushrooms" -- have found that a single dose of the drug prompted an enduring but positive personality change in almost 60 percent of patients.

Specifically, tests involving a small group of patients in a strictly controlled and monitored clinical setting revealed that, more often than not, one round of psilocybin exposure successfully boosted an individual's sense of "openness." What's more, the apparent shift in what is deemed to be a key aspect of personality did not dissipate after exposure, lasting at least a year and sometimes longer.

"Now this finding is really quite fascinating," said study author Roland R. Griffiths, a professor in the departments of psychiatry and neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. "And that is because personality is considered a stable characteristic of the psychology of people. It's been thought to be relatively immutable, and stable across the lifespan.

"But, remarkably, this study shows that psilocybin actually changes one domain of personality that is strongly related to traits such as imagination, feeling, abstract ideas and aesthetics, and is considered a core construct underlying creativity in general," he added. "And the changes we see appear to be long-term."

Griffiths said it's possible psilocybin could have therapeutic uses. For example, he is currently studying whether the hallucinogen might be useful in helping cancer patients cope with the depression and anxiety that often accompany the disease, and whether it might help smokers quit the habit.

Griffiths and his colleagues discuss their findings, funded in part by the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse, in the new issue of the Journal of Psychopharmacology.

Working with 51 psychologically healthy volunteers, the study authors conducted baseline personality tests before engaging the participants in a total of two to five experiment sessions, each lasting about eight hours.

The researchers said that almost all of the study participants deemed themselves to be "spiritually active." Roughly half had completed a post-graduate education.

Not all the sessions involved psilocybin. In fact, the hallucinogen was administered only once, at a dose described as "moderate to high," and the volunteers were never told which session actually entailed drug exposure.

A minimum break of three weeks was allotted between sessions.

During each session, participants were asked to lay down while wearing both eye masks and headphones (with music piped in) to screen out their external environment and focus on their interior experience. Neither the participants nor the session monitors knew which session involved psilocybin use.

The results: repeated personality and so-called "states of consciousness" testing revealed that some critical aspects of the participants' personalities remained unchanged. In the key domains of neuroticism, extroversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness, psilocybin appeared to register little to no impact.

The exception: "openness." Not only did openness increase significantly in response to high doses of the hallucinogen, it also remained at an elevated level throughout a 14-month follow-up period.

"Certainly we want to underscore do not try this at home," Griffiths cautioned. "Because clearly there are several kinds of potential downsides. One is that personality changes are personality changes. Now, we don't have any reason to think that the changes we see are toxic in any way. It appears to be a change that people value in a positive way. But certainly more research needs to be done.

"And the other note," he added, "is that we've conducted our research under conditions where we've screened out people who are potentially vulnerable to adverse effects. And we've given the drug in a hospital setting with two people at their side throughout, so there's virtually no opportunity for the patient to do something dangerous. But we know that, shockingly, all the time people who use mushrooms recreationally sometimes end up getting into accidents or engage in homicidal behavior or suicide.

"So we certainly don't want to imply that there's not risk associated with these compounds," stressed Griffiths. "And we wouldn't want to be a reason for an uptick for non-medical, uncontrolled use of this sort of thing."

Dr. Stephen Ross, clinical director of the NYU Langone Center of Excellence on Addiction in New York City, said he viewed Griffiths' work as a "landmark" in the field of hallucinogen research.

"I say this because we think of personality as being cemented in your 20s, certainly by your 30s," he said. "So the fact that openness was increased, seemingly permanently, after a single experience of psilocybin is quite remarkable.

"But, of course, as interesting as the implications for future therapies from this might be, the message should be that people should not try this at home or in any kind of uncontrolled environment," Ross added. "This is preliminary research that needs to be replicated. And replicated in a carefully controlled treatment environment."

Magic Mushroom House That Psychedelics Built

2013-02-09T17:15:00.001-08:00

Peter and Patty Findlay own what's undoubtedly the strangest house in Aspen, Colo.: a multilevel home shaped like a giant mushroom. The mind-altering abode, built in the 1970s by architect Andre Ulrych while he was supposedly under the influence of one or more hallucinogens, is designed in the shape of a nautilus shell, and, according to Patty Findlay, "There's always two to three ways out of every space." (Drug-induced paranoia, perhaps?) Andy Warhol once visited the Magic Mushroom House, and Hugh Hefner threw a pajama party here (we'd need to be on 'shrooms to be a part of that). If you think you've seen this fungal funhouse before, you're not having a flashback: The New York Times published an article about it in 2009.

Magic Mushrooms Point to New Depression Drugs

2013-02-09T06:13:00.001-08:00

The brains of people tripping on magic mushrooms have given the best picture yet of how psychedelic drugs work and British scientists say the findings suggest such drugs could be used to treat depression.

Two separate studies into the effects of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, showed that contrary to scientists' expectations, it does not increase but rather suppresses activity in areas of the brain that are also dampened with other anti-depressant treatments.

"Psychedelics are thought of as 'mind-expanding' drugs so it has commonly been assumed that they work by increasing brain activity," said David Nutt of Imperial College London, who gave a briefing about the studies on Monday. "But, surprisingly, we found that psilocybin actually caused activity to decrease in areas that have the densest connections with other areas." These so-called "hub" regions of the brain are known to play a role in constraining our experience of the world and keeping it orderly, he said. "We now know that deactivating these regions leads to a state in which the world is experienced as strange." In the first study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal, 30 volunteers had psilocybin infused into their blood while they were inside magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners, which measure changes in brain activity. It found activity decreased in "hub" regions and many volunteers described a feeling of the cogs being loosened and their sense of self being altered.

The second study, due to be published in the British Journal of Psychiatry on Thursday, involved 10 volunteers and found that psilocybin enhanced their recollections of personal memories. Robin Carhart Harris from Imperial's department of medicine, who worked on both studies, said the results suggest psilocybin could be useful as an adjunct to psychotherapy. Nutt cautioned that the new research was very preliminary and involved only small numbers of people.
"We're not saying go out there and eat magic mushrooms," he said. "But...this drug has such a fundamental impact on the brain that it's got to be meaningful -- it's got to be telling us something about how the brain works. So we should be studying it and optimizing it if there's a therapeutic benefit."
The key areas of the brain identified -- one called the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and another called the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) -- are the subject of debate among neuroscientists, but the PCC is thought by many to have a role in consciousness and self-identity.

The mPFC is known to be hyperactive in depression, and the researchers pointed out that other key treatments for depression including medicines like Prozac, as well as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and deep brain stimulation, also appear to suppress mPFC activity. Psilocybin's dampening action on this area may make it a useful and potentially long-acting antidepressant, Carhart-Harris said. The studies also showed that psilocybin reduced blood flow in the hypothalamus - a part of the brain where people who suffer from a condition known as cluster headaches often have increased blood flow. This could explain why some cluster headache sufferers have said their symptoms improved after taking the psychedelic drug, the researcher said.
The studies, which are among only a handful conducted into psychedelic substances since the 1960s and 1970s, revive a promising field of study into mind-altering drugs which some experts say can offer powerful and sustained mood improvement and relief from anxiety. Other experts echoed Nott's caution: "These findings are very interesting from the research viewpoint, but a great deal more work would be needed before most psychiatrists would think that psilocybin was a safe, effective and acceptable adjunct to psychotherapy," said Nick Craddock, a psychiatry professor from Cardiff University.
Kevin Healy, chair of the Royal College of Psychiatrists' faculty of medical psychotherapy said it was interesting research "but we are clearly nowhere near seeing psilocybin used regularly and widely in psychotherapy practice."

Magic mushrooms, international law and the failed 'war on drugs'

2013-02-09T05:51:00.002-08:00

It's been a busy fortnight. First the publication of two major peer-reviewed research papers about magic mushrooms that attracted worldwide publicity. Then off to Prague for an international drugs policy symposium. And just last week, news of a large grant for our next collaborative study with Imperial College. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
I established the Beckley Foundation some 14 years ago as a think tank on drugs policy. It was apparent even then that the "war on drugs" had failed. A 1997 report by the United Nations Drugs Control Programme put the value of the global trade in illicit drugs at around $400bn. Recent UN figures show that global production of opium (used mostly to make heroin) rose by almost 80% between 1998 and 2009. The market in illicit drugs is the third largest market in the world, after food and oil.
The health statistics are equally grim. In some countries – including some within the EU – more than three-quarters of intravenous drug users are infected with hepatitis C. Worldwide, there are several million non-fatal drug overdoses each year. Drug wars themselves also claim a dreadful toll: more than 47,000 deaths in the past five years for Mexico alone, according to the latest estimates.
However, while it is clear that existing policies are crying out for reform, what is less clear is how to foster the required political will.
The Beckley Foundation is the only organisation to combine rigorous scientific research with detailed policy analysis in an attempt to address that question. Our premise is simple: drugs policies should focus on health, harm reduction and cost-effectiveness, and should be based on the best available scientific evidence. That means trying out and evaluating a variety of policy ideas, as well as researching the physical effects of drugs.
Drugs policies around the world are based on three UN conventions, dating from 1961, 1971 and 1988. The conventions allow limited production and possession of drugs, but only for scientific and therapeutic use. In particular, parties to the 1988 Convention (which include the vast majority of UN member states) are obliged to criminalise the production, distribution, sale, purchase and possession of listed drugs other than for approved scientific and medical purposes. The result is the criminalisation of millions of people guilty of nothing other than personal drug use.
It is important to realise that an illegal market is a completely unregulated market. The evidence indicates that decriminalising personal possession and use saves valuable police time and criminal justice resources, and does not increase the prevalence of drug use. Moreover, because users are no longer regarded as criminals, their access to education and treatment is improved and the harm caused by problem drug use is reduced. That is why, together with the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform, we organised a meeting of government leaders, policy makers and experts at the House of Lords in November at which we launched a Global Initiative for Drug Policy Reform.
At that meeting, we presented a report commissioned by the Beckley Foundation into how the UN conventions could be amended to allow countries more freedom to create national policies based on their individual needs. We heard fascinating evidence from the Czech Republic, Portugal and elsewhere about their experiences of moving – within the "wiggle room" permitted by the UN conventions – towards policies based on public health, education and harm reduction rather than criminal enforcement.
At the symposium in Prague last week, a group of international experts again discussed possible reform mechanisms: partial decriminalisation under the existing conventions, and explicit decriminalisation or strict government regulation under amended conventions. We also considered problems caused by the current legal regime, such as the difficulty Bolivia faces in trying to get an exemption to permit the millennia-old indigenous tradition of chewing coca leaves.
The Beckley Foundation's focus on health-oriented policies demands a research programme to gather relevant evidence. That evidence also affords profound insights into how the brain works and potential therapeutic uses of psychoactive drugs.
Which brings me back to those recent scientific papers, products of a collaboration between the Beckley Foundation and Professor David Nutt's department at Imperial College London. Using the latest functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques, the team looked at the brains of subjects as they received an intravenous dose of psilocybin, a psychedelic drug found in magic mushrooms. The papers were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the British Journal of Psychiatry.
Many users of psychedelics report the experience as a consciousness-expanding one, and conventional wisdom suggests that such drugs should increase brain activity and blood flow to the brain.
Instead, the research in PNAS showed that psilocybin decreased blood flow to specific regions of the brain that act as "connector hubs", where information converges and from where it is disseminated. In the paper, we suggest that these hubs normally facilitate efficient communication between brain regions by filtering out the majority of input in order to avoid over-stimulation and confusion. But the hubs also constrain brain activity by forcing traffic to use a limited number of well-worn routes. Psilocybin appears to lift some of these constraints, allowing a freer and more fluid state of consciousness.
In the second study, subjects were given cues to recall positive events in their lives. With psilocybin, their memories were extremely vivid, almost as if they were reliving the events rather than just imagining them.
The findings suggest potential uses for psilocybin in the treatment of depression, a condition characterised by rigidly pessimistic thinking patterns. These fixated patterns are associated with overactivity in the medial prefrontal cortex – one of the same connector hubs deactivated by psilocybin. Psilocybin may also be a useful adjunct to psychotherapy, helping patients who are stuck in negative thought patterns to access distant memories and work through them.
The newly published results are exciting enough to have generated funding for a major study into psilocybin and depression, which will begin shortly. Watch this space.
Amanda Feilding is director of the Beckley Foundation, a think tank working for health-oriented drug policies based on scientific research

Court upholds 'magic' mushroom ban

2013-02-02T14:30:00.001-08:00

A ban on the cultivation and sale of fresh hallucinogenic mushrooms, known as paddos, can go into effect on December 1 as planned, a court in The Hague ruled on Friday.

VLOS, an organisation representing 51 so-called smart shops where mushrooms and other herbal highs are sold, went to court in a last-ditch attempt to have the ban overturned. The sale of dried mushrooms is already illegal.
The shop owners argued that health minister Ab Klink could not show that using mushrooms causes damage to health or society. They also said the government had not taken into account that ban will result in a 50 percent cut in their income.
Klink said last year he planned to include hallucinogenic mushrooms in the opium law, which means they are considered a hard drug. Pressure mounted on the government to take action after a number of incidents involving foreign tourists.
But the role of mushrooms in some cases, such as the death of a 17-year-old French girl last year, has never been proved.
The court ruled in Klink's favour but did not issue a statement. VLOS said it would wait for more information before deciding whether to appeal.

SEEKING THE MAGIC MUSHROOM

2013-02-02T14:06:00.003-08:00

On the night of June 29-30, 1955, in a Mexican Indian village so remote from the world that most of the people still speak no Spanish, my friend Allan Richardson and I shared with a family of Indian friends a celebration of "holy communion" where "divine" mushrooms where first adored and then consumed. The Indians mingled Christian and pre-Christian elements in their religious practices in a way disconcerting for Christians but natural for them. The rite was led by two women, mother and daughter, both of them curanderas, or shamans. The proceedings went on in the Mixeteco language. The mushrooms were of a species with hallucinogenic powers; that is, they cause the eater to see visions. We chewed and swallowed these acrid mushrooms, saw visions, and emerged from the experience awestruck. We had come form afar to attend a mushroom rite but had expected nothing so staggering as the virtuosity of the performing curanderas and the astonishing effects of the mushrooms. Richardson and I were the first white men in recorded history to eat the divine mushrooms, which for centuries have been a secret of certain Indian peoples living far from the great world in southern Mexico. No anthropologists had ever described the scene that we witnessed.
I am a banker by occupation and Richardson is a New York society photographer and is in charge of visual education at The Brearley School.
It was, however, no accident that we found ourselves in the lower chamber of that thatchroofed, adobe-walled Indian home. For both of us this was simply the latest trip to Mexico in quest of the mushroom rite. For me and my wife, who was to join us with our daughter a day later, it was a climax to nearly 30 years of inquiries and research into the strange role of toadstools in the early cultural history of Europe and Asia.
Thus that June evening found us, Allan Richardson and me, deep in the south of Mexico, bedded down with an Indian family in the heart of the Mixeteco mountains at an altitude of 5,500 feet. We could only stay a week or so: we had no time to lose. I went to the municipio or town hall, and there I found the official in charge, the síndico, seated alone at his great table in an upper room. He was young a Indian, about 35 years old, and he spoke Spanish well. His name was Filemón. He had a friendly manner and I took a chance. Leaning over his table, I asked him earnestly and in a low voice if I could speak to him in confidence. Instantly curious, he encouraged me. "Will you," I went on, "help me learn the secrets of the divine mushroom?" and I used the Mixeteco name, 'nti sheeto, correctly pronouncing it with glottal stop and tonal differentiation of the syllables. When Filemón recovered from his surprise he said warmly that nothing could be easier. He asked me to pass by his house, on the outskirts of town, at siesta time.
Allan and I arrived there about 3 o'clock. Filemón's home is built on a mountainside, with a trail on one side at the level of the upper story and a deep ravine on the other. Filemón at once lead us down the ravine to a spot where the divine mushrooms where growing in abundance. After photographing them we gathered them in a cardboard box and then labored back up the ravine in the heavy moist heat of that torrid afternoon. Not letting us rest Filemón sent us high up above his house to meet the curandera, the woman who would officiate at the mushroom rite. A connection of his, Eva Mendez by name, she was a curandera de primera categoría, of the highest quality, una Señora sin mancha, a woman without stain. We found her in the house of her daughter, who pursues the same vocation. Eva was resting on a mat on the floor from her previous night's performance. She was middle-aged, and short like all Mixetecos, with a spirituality in her expression that struck us at once. She had presence. We showed our mushrooms to the woman and her daughter. They cried out in rapture over the firmness, the fresh beauty and abundance of our young specimens. Through an interpreter we asked if they would serve us that night. They said yes.

HOUSE where mushroom sessions took place is built of adobe, has thatch "dog-ears" over gable ends. Door, lower right, leads into ceremonial room.

ABOUT 20 of us gathered in the lower chamber of Filemón's house after 8 o'clock that evening. Allan and I were the only strangers, the only ones who spoke no Mixeteco. Only our hosts, Filemón and his wife, could talk to us in Spanish. The welcome accorded to us was of a kind that we had never experienced before in the Indian country. Everyone observed a friendly decorum. They did not treat us stiffly, as strange white men; we were of their number. The Indians were wearing their best clothes, the women dressed in their huipiles or native costumes, the men in clean white trousers tied around the waist with strings and their best serapes over their clean shirts. They gave us chocolate to drink, somewhat ceremonially, and suddenly I recalled the words of the early Spanish writer who had said that before the mushrooms were served, chocolate was drunk. I sensed what we were in for: at long last we were discovering that the ancient communion rite still survived and we were going to witness it. The mushrooms lay there in their box, regarded by everyone respectfully but without solemnity. The mushrooms are sacred and never the butt of the vulgar jocularity that is often the way of white men with alcohol.
At about 10:30 o'clock Eva Mendez cleaned the mushrooms of their grosser dirt and then, with prayers, passed them through the smoke of resin incense burning on the floor. As she did this, she sat on a mat before a simple altar table adorned with Christian images, the Child Jesus and the Baptism in Jordan. Then she apportioned the mushrooms among the adults. She reserved 13 pair for herself and 13 pair for her daughter. (The mushrooms are always counted in pairs.) I was on tiptoe of expectancy: she turned and gave me six pair in a cup. I could not have been happier: this was the culmination of years of pursuit. She gave Allan six pair too. His emotions were mixed. His wife Mary had consented to his coming only after she had drawn from him a promise not to let those nasty toadstools cross his lips. Now he faced a behaviour dilemma. He took the mushrooms, and I heard him mutter in anguish, "My God, what will Mary say!" Then we ate our mushrooms, chewing them slowly, over the course of a half hour. They tasted bad--acrid with a rancid odor that repeated itself. Allan and I were determined to resist any effects they might have, to observe better the events of the night. But our resolve soon melted before the onslaught of the mushrooms.

RECEIVING his mushrooms, Wasson takes his night's ration from the hand of Curandera Eva Mendez. In right background Guy Stresser-Péan, French anthropologist who accompanied Wasson, has begun to chew his own supply.

EATING his mushrooms, Wasson takes them from cup holding his night's quota as the curandera prays at the household altar. He chewed them slowly, as is the custom, and his six pair took about a half hour to eat.

Before midnight the Señora (as Eva Mendez is usually called) broke a flower from the bouquet on the altar and used it to snuff out the flame of the only candle that was still burning. We were left in darkness and in darkness we remained until dawn. For a half hour we waited in silence. Allan felt cold and wrapped himself in a blanket. A few minutes later he leaned over and whispered, "Gordon, I am seeing things!" I told him not to worry, I was too. The visions had started. They reached a plateau of intensity deep in the night, and they continued at that level until about 4 o'clock. We felt slightly unsteady on our feet and in the beginning were nauseated. We lay down on the mat that had been spread for us, but no one had any wish to sleep except the children, to whom mushrooms are not served. We were never more wide awake, and the visions came whether our eyes were opened or closed. They emerged from the center of the field of vision, opening up as they came, now rushing, now slowly, at the pace that our will chose. They were in vivid color, always harmonious. They began with art motifs, angular such as might decorate carpets or textiles or wallpaper or the drawing board of an architect. Then they evolved into palaces with courts, arcades, gardens--resplendent palaces all laid over with semiprecious stones. Then I saw a mythological beast drawing a regal chariot. Later it was though the walls of our house had dissolved, and my spirit had flown forth, and I was suspended in mid-air viewing landscapes of mountains, with camel caravans advancing slowly across the slopes, the mountains rising tier above tier to the very heavens. Three days latter, when I repeated the same experience in the same room with the same curanderas, instead of mountains I saw river estuaries, pellucid water flowing through an endless expanse of reeds down to a measureless sea, all by the pastel light of a horizontal sun. This time a human figure appeared, a woman in primitive costume, standing and staring across the water, enigmatic, beautiful, like a sculpture except that she breathed and was wearing woven colored garments. It seemed as though I was viewing a world of which I was not a part and with which I could not hope to establish contact. There I was, poised in space, a disembodied eye, invisible, incorporeal, seeing but not seen.
The visions were not blurred or uncertain. They were sharply focused, the lines and colors being so sharp that they seemed more real to me than anything I had ever seen with my own eyes. I felt that I was now seeing plain, whereas ordinary vision gives us an imperfect view; I was seeing the archetypes, the Platonic ideas, that underlie the imperfect images of everyday life. The thought crossed my mind: could the divine mushrooms be the secret that lay behind the ancient Mysteries? Could the miraculous mobility that I was now enjoying be the explanation for the flying witches that played so important a part in the folklore and fairy tales of northern Europe? These reflections passed through my mind at the very time that I was seeing the visions, for the effect of the mushrooms is to bring about a fission of the spirit, a split in the person, a kind of schizophrenia, with the rational side continuing to reason and to observe the sensations that the other side is enjoying. The mind is attached as by an elastic cord to the vagrant senses.

ALLAN RICHARDSON eats a mushroom in spite of his pledge to his wife.

Meanwhile the Señora and her daughter were not idle. When our visions were still in the initial phases, we heard the Señora waving her arms rhythmically. She began a low, disconnected humming. Soon the phrases became articulate syllables, each disconnected syllable cutting the darkness sharply. Then by stages the Señora came forth with a full-bodied canticle, sung like very ancient music. It seemed to me at the time like an introit to the Ancient of Days. As the night progressed her daughter spelled her at singing. They sang well, never loud, with authority. What they sang was indescribably tender and moving, fresh, vibrant, rich. I had never realized how sensitive and poetic an instrument the Mixeteco language could be. Perhaps the beauty of the Señora's performance was partly an illusion induced by the mushrooms; if so, the hallucinations are aural as well as visual. Not being musicologists, we now not whether the chants were wholly European or partial indigenous in origin. From time to time the singing would rise to a climax and then suddenly stop, and then the Señora would fling forth spoken words, violent, hot, crisp words that cut the darkness like a knife. This was the mushroom speaking through her, God's words, as the Indians believe, answering the problems that had been posed by the participants. This was the Oracle. At intervals, perhaps every half hour, there was a brief intermission, when the Señora would relax and some would light cigarets.
At one point, while the daughter sang, the Señora stood up in the darkness where there was an open space in our room and began a rhythmic dance with clapping or slapping. We do not know exactly how she accomplished her effect. The claps or slaps were always resonant and true. So far as we know, she used no device, only her hands against each other or possibly against different parts of her body. The claps and slaps had pitch, the rhythm at times was complex, and the speed and volume varied subtly. We think the Señora faced successively the four points of the compass, rotating clockwise, but are not sure. One thing is certain: this mysterious percussive utterance was ventriloquistic, each slap coming from an unpredictable direction and distance, now close to our ears, now distant, above, below, here and yonder, like Hamlet's ghost hic et ubique. We were amazed and spellbound, Allan and I.
There we lay on our mat, scribbling notes in the dark and exchanging whispered comments, our bodies inert and heavy as lead, while our senses were floating free in space, feeling the breezes of the outdoors, surveying vast landscapes or exploring the recesses of gardens of ineffable beauty. And all the while we were listening to the daughter's chanting and to the unearthly claps and whacks, delicately controlled, of the invisible creatures darting around us.
The Indians who had taken the mushrooms were playing a part in the vocal activity. In the moments of tension they would utter exclamations of wonder and adoration, not loud, responsive to the singers and harmonizing with them, spontaneously yet with art.
On that initial occasion we all fell asleep around 4 o'clock in the morning. Allan and I awoke at 6, rested and heads clear, but deeply shaken by the experience we had gone through. Our friendly hosts served us coffee and bread. We then took our leave and walked back to the Indian house where we were staying, a mile or so away.

A strange, solemn rite and wonders in the dark

For two strange timeless nights in almost complete darkness, Wasson and Richardson sat in an underground room with the curandera, Eva Mendez. On the first, both partook of the sacred mushrooms, and both saw visions. On the second Richardson refrained; instead he set up flash equipment and, aiming his camera at sounds in the blackness, recorded on film parts of the ceremony.
In a solemn musical chant, Eva Mendez began with an invocation to the mushroom in the name of Christ and the saints. She proclaimed her own good intentions and then, impatiently, entreated the spirits, "I'm a mouth looking for you, but you are not paying attention. Come." As the ritual proceeded Wasson lost himself in wondrous flights of fancy which moved him to say afterward, "For the first time the word ecstasy took on real meaning. For the first time it did not mean someone else's state of mind."

HOLDING a candle made of virgin beeswax before the smoldering embers of copal, an ancient native incense, Eva Mendez invokes the saints. Children were always in the room though they did not take active part in the ceremony.

AT THE CLIMAX of this session, at about 3:30 in the morning, Eva Mendez ministers to her ailing 17-year-old son. As he lies lost in the ecstasy of his visions evoked by the mushrooms, she asks divine help for him. The child at right, perhaps soothed by the rhythm of the chanting, is sleeping quietly through the ritual. About a dozen Indians remained in the 20 by 20 foot room throughout the night. A few of them sat up but most lay on reed mats.

CHANTING early in the night, Eva Mendez lists her qualifications: "Am I not good? I am a creator woman, a star woman, a moon woman, a cross woman, a woman of heaven. I am a cloud person, a dew-on-the-grass person."

MEDITATING silently, Eva Mendez sits before her mushroom bowl. Though she ate twice as many mushrooms as the rest, she stayed calm and dignified, often lyrical in her exhortations, sometimes impatient when spirits did not come.

From the many mushroom celebrations that I have now witnessed, nine in all, it is clear to me that at least in the Mixeteco country the congregation is indispensable to the rite. Since the congregation, in order to participate, must be brought up in the tradition, any white persons should be greatly outnumbered by the Indians. But this does not mean that the mushrooms lose their potency if not eaten communally. My wife and our daughter Masha, 18, joined us a day after the ceremony that I have described, and on July 5, in their sleeping bags, they ate the mushrooms while alone with us. They experienced the visions too. They saw the same brilliant colors; my wife saw a ball in the Palace of Versailles with figures in period costumes dancing to a Mozart minuet. Again, on Aug. 12, 1955, six weeks after I had gathered the mushrooms in Mexico, I ate them in a dried state in my bedroom in New York, and found that if anything they had gained in their hallucinogenic potency.

ON MORNING after eating mushrooms, Wasson and his wife review his notes, taken in the dark. Jars contain mushrooms later sent to Heim.

It was a walk in the woods, many years ago, that launched my wife and me on our quest of the mysterious mushroom. We were married in London in 1926, she being Russian, born and brought up in Moscow. She had lately qualified as a physician at the University of London. I am from Great Falls, Montana of Anglo-Saxon origins. In the late summer of 1927, recently married, we spent our holiday in the Catskill Mountains in New York state. In the afternoon of the first day we went strolling along a lovely mountain path, through woods criss-crossed by the slanting rays of a descending sun. We were young, carefree and in love. Suddenly my bride abandoned my side. She had spied wild mushrooms in the forest, and racing over the carpet of dried leaves in the woods, she knelt in poses of adoration before first one cluster and then another of these growths. In ecstasy she called each kind of by an endearing Russian name. She caressed the toadstools, savored their earthy perfume. Like all good Anglo-Saxons, I knew nothing about the fungal world and felt that the less I knew about those putrid, treacherous excrescences the better. For her they were things of grace, infinitely inviting to the perceptive mind. She insisted on gathering them, laughing at my protests, mocking my horror. She brought a skirtful back to the lodge. She cleaned and cooked them. That evening she ate them, alone. Not long married, I thought to wake up the next morning a widower.
These dramatic circumstances, puzzling and painful for me, made a lasting impression on us both. From that day on we sought an explanation for this strange cultural cleavage separating us in a minor area of our lives. Our method was to gather all the information we could on the attitude toward wild mushrooms of the Indo-European and adjacent peoples. We tried to determine the kinds of mushrooms that each people knows, the uses to which these kinds are put, the vernacular names for them. We dug into the etymology of those names, to arrive at the metaphors hidden in their roots. We looked for mushrooms in myths, legends, ballads, proverbs, in the writers who drew their inspiration from folklore, in the clichés of daily conversation, in slang and the telltale recesses of obscene vocabularies. We sought them in the pages of history, in art, in Holy Writ. We were not interested in what people learn about mushrooms from books, but what untutored country folk know from childhood., the folk legacy of the family circle. It turned out that we had happened on a novel field of inquiry. As the years went on and our knowledge grew, we discovered a surprising pattern in our data: each Indo-European people is by cultural inheritance either "mycophobe" or "mycophile," that is, each people either rejects and is ignorant of the fungal world or knows it astonishingly well and loves it. Our voluminous and often amusing evidence in support of this thesis fills many sections of our new book, and it is there that we submit our case to the scholarly world. The great Russians, we find, are mighty mycophiles, as are also the Catalans, who possess a mushroomic vocabulary of more than 200 names. The ancient Greeks, Celts and Scandinavians were mycophobes, as are the Anglo-Saxons. There was another phenomenon that arrested our attention: wild mushrooms from earliest times were steeped in what the anthropologists call mana, a supernatural aura. The very word "toadstool" may have meant originally the "demonic stool" and been the specific name of a European mushroom that causes hallucinations. In ancient Greece and Rome there was a belief that certain kinds of mushrooms were procreated by the lighting bolt. We made the further discovery that this particular myth, for which no support exists in natural science, is still believed among many widely scattered peoples: the Arabs of the desert, the peoples of India, Persia and the Pamirs, the Tibetans and Chinese, the Filipinos and the Maoris of New Zeland, and even among the Zapotecs of Mexico... All of our evidence taken together led us many years ago to hazard a bold surmise: was it not probable that, long ago, long before the beginnings of written history, our ancestors had worshiped a divine mushroom? This would explain the aura of the supernatural in which all fungi seem to be bathed. We were the first to offer the conjecture of a divine mushroom in the remote cultural background of the European peoples, and the conjecture at once posed a further problem: what kind of mushroom was once worshiped and why?
Our surmise turned out not to be farfetched. We learned that in Siberia there are six primitive peoples--so primitive that anthropologists regard them as precious museum pieces for cultural study--who use an hallucinogenic mushroom in their shamanistic rites. We found that the Dyaks of Borneo and the Mount Hagen natives of New Guinea also have recourse to similar mushrooms. In China and Japan we came upon an ancient tradition of a divine mushroom of immortality, and in India, according to one school, the Buddha at his last supper ate a dish of mushrooms and was forthwith translated to nirvana.
When Cortez conquered Mexico, his followers reported that the Aztecs were using certain mushrooms in their religious celebrations, serving them, as the early Spanish friars put it, in a demonic holy communion and calling them teonanacatl, "God's flesh." But no one at that time made a point of studying this practice in detail, and until now anthropologists have paid little attention to it. We with our interest in mushrooms seized on the Mexican opportunity, and for years have devoted the few leisure hours of our busy lives to the quest of the divine mushroom in Middle America. We think we have discovered it in certain frescoes in the Valley of Mexico that date back to about 400 A.D., and also in the "mushroom stones" carved by the highland Maya of Guatemala that go back in one or two instances to the earliest era of stone carvings, perhaps 1000 B.C.

MEXICAN drawing of 16th Century shows three mushrooms, a man eating them and a god behind him, who is speaking through the mushroom.

MUSROOM stone" form the highlands of Guatemala dates back to 300-600 A.D.

For a day following our mushroom adventure Allan and I did little but discuss our experience. We had attended a shamanistic rite with singing and dancing among our Mixeteco friends which no anthropologist has ever before described in the New World, a performance with striking parallels in the shamanistic practices of some of the archaic Palaeo-Siberian peoples. But may not the meaning of what we had witnessed go beyond this? The hallucinogenic mushrooms are a natural product presumably accessible to men in many parts of the world, including Europe and Asia. In man's evolutionary past, as he groped his way out from his lowly past, there must have come a moment in time when he discovered the secret of the hallucinatory mushrooms. Their effect on him, as I see it, could only have been profound, a detonator to new ideas. For the mushrooms revealed to him worlds beyond the horizons known to him, in space and time, even worlds on a different plane of being, a heaven and perhaps a hell. For the credulous primitive mind, the mushrooms must have reinforced mightily the idea of the miraculous. Many emotions are shared by men with the animal kingdom, but awe and reverence and the fear of God are peculiar to men. When we bear in mind the beatific sense of awe and ecstasy and caritas engendered by the divine mushrooms, one is emboldened to the point of asking whether they may not have planted in primitive man the very idea of god.
It is no accident, perhaps, that the first answer of the Spanish-speaking Indian, when I asked about the effect of the mushrooms, was often this: Le llevan ahí donde Dios está, "They carry you there where God is," an answer that we have received on several occasions, from Indians in different cultural areas, almost as though it were in a sort of catechism. At all times there have been rare souls--the mystics and certain poets--who have had access without the aid of drugs to the visionary world for which the mushrooms hold the key. William Blake possessed the secret: "He who does not imagine in... stronger and better light than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all." But I can testify that the mushrooms make those visions accessible to a much larger number. The visions that we saw must have come from within us, obviously. But they did not recall anything that we had seen with our own eyes. Somewhere within us there must lie a repository where these visions sleep until they are called forth. Are the visions a subconscious transmutation of things read and seen and imagined, so transmuted that when they are conjured forth from the depths we no longer recognize them? Or do the mushrooms stir greater depths still, depths that are truly the Unknown? IN each of our successive trips to the Indian peoples of southern Mexico, we have enlarged our knowledge of the use of the divine mushrooms, and as our knowledge has increased, new and exciting questions keep arising. We have found five distinct cultural areas where the Indians invoke the mushrooms, but the usage varies widely in every area. What is needed is a perceptive approach by trained anthropologists in every area, cooperating with mushrooms specialists. Of these latter there are in the whole world relatively few: mushrooms are a neglected field in the natural sciences. In this field Professor Roger Heim is known the world over. He is not only a man with vast experience in the field of mushrooms: he is an outstanding scientist in other fields, a man steeped in the humanities, the head of the Muséum National D'Historie Naturelle in Paris. At an early stage of our inquiries he had lent us his counsel, and in 1956 our progress had been such as to justify him in accompanying us on another field trip. There came with us also a chemist, Professor James A. Moore of the University of Delaware; an anthropologist, Guy Stresser-Péan of the Sorbonne; and once again our loyal friend Allan Richardson as photographer.

This time the immediate problem was to identify the hallucinogenic mushrooms and to command a steady supply of them for laboratory study. This is harder than a layman would think. Though the early Spanish writers wrote about the divine mushrooms four centuries ago, no anthropologist and no mycologist had been sufficiently interested to pursue the problem until our own generation. Those who know these mushrooms are Indians belonging to tribes farthest removed from us culturally, locked in their mountains remote form highways, locked also behind the barrier of their languages. One must win their confidence and overcome their suspicion of white men. One must face the physical discomforts of life and dangers of disease in the Indian villages in the rainy season, when the mushrooms grow. Occasionally a white face is seen in those parts in the dry season, but when the rains come, those rare beings--missionaries, archaeologists, anthropologists, botanists, geologists--vanish. There are other difficulties. Of the seven curanderos that by now I have seen take mushrooms, only two, Eva Mendez and her daughter, were dedicated votaries. Some of the others were equivocal characters. Once we saw a curandero take only a token dose of mushroom, and there was another who ate and served to us a kind of mushroom that had no hallucinogenic properties at all. Had we seen only him, we should have come away thinking that the famed properties of the mushrooms were a delusion, a striking instance of autosuggestion. Do we discover here an effort at deception, or had the dried mushrooms through age lost their peculiar property? Or, much more interesting anthropologically, do some shamans deliberately substitute innocent species for the authentic kinds in a retreat from what is too sacred to be borne? Even when we have won the confidence of a skilled practitioner like Eva, the atmosphere must be right for a perfect performance and there must be an abundance of mushrooms. Sometimes even in the rainy season the mushrooms are scarce, as we have learned from costly experience. WE now know that there are seven kinds of hallucinogenic mushrooms in use in Mexico. But not all the Indians know them even in the villages where they are worshiped, and either in good faith or to make the visitor happy, the curanderos sometimes deliver the wrong mushrooms. The only certain test is to eat the mushrooms. Professor Heim and we have thus established beyond challenge the claims of four species. The next best thing is to obtain multiple confirmation from informants unknown to each other, if possible from various cultural areas. This we have done with several additional kinds. We are now certain as to four species, reasonably sure about two other kinds, and inclined to accept the claims of a seventh, these seven belonging to three genera. Of these seven, at least six appear to be new to science. Perhaps in the end we shall discover more than seven kinds.
The mushrooms are not used as therapeutic agents: they themselves do not effect cures. The Indians "consult" the mushrooms when distraught with grave problems. If someone is ill, the mushroom will say what led to the illness and whether the patient will live or die, and what should be done to hasten recovery. If the verdict of the mushroom is for death, the believing patient and his family resign themselves: he loses appetite and soon expires and even before his death they begin preparations for the wake. Or one may consult the mushroom about the stolen donkey and learn where it will be found and who took it. Or if a beloved son has gone out into the world--perhaps to the United States--the mushroom is a kind of a postal service: it will report whether he still lives or is dead, whether he is in jail, married, in trouble or prosperous. The Indians believe that the mushrooms hold the key to what we call extrasensory perception.
Little by little the properties of the mushrooms are beginning to emerge. The Indians who eat them do not become addicts: when the rainy season is over and the mushrooms disappear, there seems to be no physiological craving for them. Each kind has its own hallucinogenic strength, and if enough of one species be not available, the Indians will mix the species, making a quick calculation of the right dosage. The curandero usually takes a large dose and everyone else learns to know what his own dose should be. It seems that the dose does not increase with use. Some persons require more than others. An increase in the dose intensifies the experience but does not greatly prolong the effect. The mushrooms sharpen, if anything, the memory, while they utterly destroy the sense of time. On the night that we have described we lived through eons. When it seemed to us that a sequence of visions had lasted for years, our watches would tell us that only seconds had passed. The pupils of our eyes were dilated, the pulse of ran slow. We think the mushrooms have no cumulative effect on the human organism. Eva Mendez has been taking them for 35 years, and when they are plentiful she takes them night after night.
The mushrooms present a chemical problem. What is the agent in them that releases the strange hallucinations? We are now reasonably sure that it differs form such familiar drugs as opium, coca, mescaline, hashish, etc. But the chemist has a long road to go before he will isolate it, arrive at its molecular structure and synthesize it. The problem is of great interest in the realm of pure science. Will it also prove of help in coping with psychic disturbances?
My wife and I have traveled far and discovered much since that day 30 years ago in the Catskills when we first perceived the strangeness of wild mushrooms. But what we have already discovered only opens up new vistas for further study. Today we are about to embark on our fifth expedition to the Mexican Indian villages, again seeking to increase and refine our knowledge of the role played by mushrooms in the lives of these remote peoples. But Mexico is only the beginning. All the evidence relating to the primitive beginnings of our own European cultures must be reviewed to see whether the hallucinogenic mushroom played a part there, only to be overlooked by posterity.

Rare vision-giving fungi shown for first time

WITH professor Heim, Wasson (right) searches a mountainside near the village for specimens of the sacred mushrooms. They found two species here.

On his latest expedition to seek out and study the hallucinogenic mushrooms, Wasson was accompained by Professor Roger Heim, an old friend, one of the world's leading mycologists and head of France's Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle. Wasson had sent Heim specimens form three of his previous trips. Now Heim was able to study the mushrooms in the field, eat them with the Indians and work out techniques for growing some of them in the laboratory. LIFE here publishes Professor Heim's life-size water-color paintings of the seven kinds of hallucinogenic mushrooms so far discovered. Four of these are species new to science and two others are new varieties of a known species, Psilocybe caerulescens Murrill.
At the present time no one knows what drug it is in these mushrooms that causes the eater to see visions, and until its properties are clearly defined the hallucinogenic mushrooms must be treated with extreme caution. Among the Indians, their use is hedged about with restrictions of many kinds. Unlike ordinary edible mushrooms, these are never sold in the market place, and no Indian dares to eat them frivolously, for excitement. The Indians themselves speak of their use as muy delicado, that is, perilous.

CALLED "Children of the Waters" by Aztecs, Psilocybe Aztecorum Heim grows in grass on volcano Popocatepetl.

GROWING on certain kinds of dead tree trunks, Conocybe Siligineoides Hiem was collected by Wasson in 1955.

FIRST DISCOVERED in Cuba in June 1904, Stropharia cubensis Erale grows on cow dung in pastures.

CROWN of Thorns," Psilocybe Zapotecorum Heim grows in marshy ground. It was first found in 1955.

LANDSLIDE" mushroom, Psilocybe caerulescens Murrill, var. Mazatecorum Heim, grows on sugar cane residue.

MUSHROOM of Superior Reason," Psilocybe caerulescens Murrill var. nigripes Heim, grows near Juquila.

MOST PRIZED by Indians and most widespread of these fungi, Psilocybe mexicana Heim grows in pastures.

Magic mushrooms banned in Netherlands

2013-01-27T09:42:00.001-08:00

Magic mushrooms have been banned in the Netherlands after a teenage girl who took them fell to her death from a bridge.

From Dec 1 the famous Amsterdam magic mushroom will no longer be on sale in the city. The hallucinogenic mushrooms, imported mainly from Hawaii, Mexico and Ecuador, have for years been freely available, at modest prices, in shops around the city.

Neatly packed and labelled in display cases beside regular goods like vegetables and milk, and often packed in souvenir gift wrapping, the mushrooms have been popular among mainly German, French and British tourists.

Shop owners have claimed the ban will result in hundreds of jobs being lost and are planning protest marches.

While the dried variety, which provides even stronger hallucinations, is already illegal, the decision to ban fresh magic - or psilocybin - mushrooms was taken after a 17-year-old French girl jumped to her death from one of Amsterdam's canal bridges in March after taking them.

Amsterdam city council supports the government's ban, hoping it will change the general perception of the city as a mecca for drug user and the sex industry.

Earlier this year moves were made to close down part of the city's famous red light district.
But Paul Van den Berg, who works in one of the shops that sells the mushrooms, described that ban as "a disgrace".
He said: "It's all the fault of tourists, especially the Brits. They misuse alcohol at home and come over here to do the same with hash and the so called 'magic mushrooms'."
He said that the mushrooms were intended for connoisseurs who know how to eat them properly and in the correct quantity, producing a euphoric state with the odd "pleasant hallucination".
But a city councillor said: "Despite Amsterdam having the world's most important collection of Rembrandts and Van Gogh and being home to the famous Concertgeboug Orchestra, the City is still perceived as a place where you go to buy drugs."
The Netherlands agreed legislation in July to ban cigarette smoking in bars and restaurants. However the euphemistically labelled "coffee shops" where soft drugs can be selected from a menu remain open and smokers can puff on a roll-up of marijuana on the premises, provided tobacco is not used.
Dutch tourist organisations insist that windmills, tulips and Rembrandt remain the major draw for tourists.
A Dutch magic mushroom customer said: "Sunday lunch just won't be the same. I always used the mushrooms in my stew for friends. They produce a nice relaxing glow, much better than alcohol".

John Allegro's "The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross

2013-01-24T13:54:00.001-08:00

John M. Allegro

John Marco Allegro (17 February 1923, London - 17 February 1988) was a scholar who challenged orthodox views of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Bible and the history of religion, with books that attracted popular attention and scholarly derision.
After service in the Royal Navy during World War II, Allegro started to train for the Methodist ministry but transferred to graduate with a first class degree in Semitic Studies from the University of Manchester. He obtained an M.A. for a study into the Balaam Oracles and later pursued further research, studying the various dialects of Biblical Hebrew at Oxford. In 1953 he was invited to become the first British representative on the international team working on the recently discovered Dead Sea Scrolls from cave 4 in Jordan. The following year he was appointed assistant lecturer in Comparative Semitic Philology at Manchester, and held a succession of lectureships there until he resigned in 1970 to become a full-time writer. In 1961 he was made Honorary Adviser on the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Jordanian government.
Allegro's thirteen books include The Dead Sea Scrolls (1956), The Treasure of the Copper Scroll (1960), The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970) and The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth (1979) as well as Discoveries in the Judaean Desert of Jordan vol. V (1968) and articles in academic journals such as the Journal of Biblical Literature, Palestine Exploration Quarterly and Journal of Semitic Studies, and in the popular press.

Access to the Dead Sea Scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls were written between 200 BCE and 68 CE, and give insight into the religious life and thought of a Jewish sect based at Qumran by the Dead Sea and usually identified as Essenes. Allegro believed the scrolls could help us understand the common origin of three religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. He hoped they might be able to bring together scholars of each tradition in studying their common heritage without the barriers of religious prejudice.
This would mean making the texts accessible to all. Allegro published the sections of text allotted to him in academic journals as soon as he had prepared them, and his volume (number five) in the official series Discoveries in the Judaean Desert was ready for the press by the early 1960s. He continually campaigned for the publication of all scroll texts. However, his colleagues took a different approach, and little else appeared until 1991.
Allegro saw himself as a publicist for the scrolls. His books, talks and broadcasts promoted public interest in the scrolls and their significance. At first, the rest of the team encouraged his efforts, which after all were intended to help fund their research. But they^[who?] thought he went too far in making assertions about the parallels between Essenism and Christianity which they thought were unsupported by evidence and designed to raise his personal profile. He was accused^{[by whom?]} of stirring up controversy at the expense.

The Copper Scroll

The controversy over the Copper Scroll deepened the rift between Allegro and the team. At the request of the authorities, Allegro had arranged for the scroll to be cut open in Manchester over the winter of 1955/56. He supervised the opening and made a preliminary transcription and translation of the contents. He found it to be a list of Temple treasure hidden at various locations around Qumran and Jerusalem, most probably after the sack of Jerusalem in AD 70. Initial excitement turned to acrimony when the team accused Allegro of leaking information to the press (which was denied), and later objected to his pre-empting the official translation (in 1962) by publishing his own version first (in 1960). In Allegro's defense, it is suggested the team had already issued a preliminary translation, and Allegro held his book back to try and let the official version take precedence. But he could not in honesty support the official interpretation of the Copper Scroll as a work of fiction, and some later scholars have endorsed his view that the treasure was real.

Christian origins

Allegro believed that Essenism was the matrix of Christianity. He suggested that there were so many correspondences between the scroll texts and the New Testament — words and phrases, beliefs and practices, Messianic leadership, a teacher who was persecuted and possibly crucified — that he thought the derivation obvious. This brought him into conflict with the Catholic priests on the editing team, and with most church spokesmen, who maintained the orthodox assumption that the arrival of Jesus was the unique, historical, God-given event described in the Gospels. Allegro also started to look in more depth at the way the New Testament appeared to weave together a mix of folklore, myth, incantation and history.

Language, myth and religion

As a philologist, Allegro analysed the derivations of language. He traced biblical words and phrases back to their roots in Sumerian, and showed how Sumerian phonemes recur in varying but related contexts in many Semitic, classical and other Indo-European languages. Although meanings changed to some extent, Allegro found some basic religious ideas passing on through the genealogy of words. His book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross relates the development of language in Eurasia to the development of myths, religions and cultic practices in many cultures. Allegro believed he could prove through etymology that the roots of Christianity, as of many other religions, lay in fertility cults; and that cultic practices, such as ingesting hallucinogenic drugs to perceive the Mind of God, persisted into Christian times.
The reaction to The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross ruined Allegro's career. His detractors considered his somewhat sensationalist approach deplorable and his arguments somewhere between unconvincing and ludicrous. Prof J. N. D. Anderson observed that the book was "dismissed by ... experts...as not being based on any philological or other evidence that they can regard as scholarly." Sumerian expert Anna Partington summarized some of the problems, stating that The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross "uses a number of hypothetical Sumerian words not attested in texts. These are marked with an asterisk following philological convention. This is akin to proposing there is a word in the English language 'bellbat' because the individual words 'bell' and 'bat' are known to exist separately. Then again words of different languages are gathered together without the type of argument which would be expected in order to demonstrate possible relationship."
However, Allegro's work has been adopted by some alternative authors. In May 2006, Michael Hoffman of egodeath.com and Jan Irvin wrote an article for The Journal of Higher Criticism entitled Wasson and Allegro on the Tree of Knowledge as Amanita that suggested that Allegro's work should be evaluated on its merits like that of any other scholar and not dismissed merely because its arguments fall outside the mainstream. In 2008 Prof. John Rush of Sierra College published Failed God that also gives heavy support for Allegro's theories. In November 2009 The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross was reprinted in a 40th anniversary edition with a preface by Jan Irvin, a foreword by Judith Anne Brown, and a 30 page addendum by Prof. Carl A.P. Ruck of Boston University with new linguistic evidence that supports Allegro's theories.

"The concerted and biased attempts to destroy Allegro's discoveries have failed. The confirmatory evidence is mounting in his favor. The critics can now raise their voices again. Let us hope that they do, since the matter is not settled, but they should be advised to do so with more careful consideration. This book that many have prized in secret is now available again. It demands the serious consideration of theologians, mythologists, and students of religion. No account of the history of the Church, both West and East, can afford to leave the poor despicable fungus unconsidered, nor the role that entheogens in general have played in the evolution of European civilization." ~ Professor Carl A. P. Ruck, Boston University

Allegro went on to write several other books exploring the roots of religion; notably The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth, which seek to relate Christian theology to Gnostic writings, classical mythology and Egyptian sun-worship in the common quest for divine light.
Allegro believed the Dead Sea Scrolls raised issues that concerned everyone. It wasn't just a matter of dusty manuscripts and disputed translations. Rather, the story of the scrolls raised questions about freedom of access to evidence, freedom of speech, and freedom to challenge orthodox religious views.

"... with the unhappy record of the church for destroying documents and whole libraries of which it disapproved, as well as its predeliction for controlling the reading habits and opportunities of the faithful, one can only continue to be apprehensive about the church's attitude when religiously sensitive information comes into its hands,..."

Allegro believed that through understanding the origins of religion people could be freed from its bonds to think for themselves and take responsibility for their own judgments.

JOBS (legit)
Start getting paid
up too $100 to translate text documents
up too $35 for emails
get paid to translate subtitles in movies
get paid to translate simple books
click here to see more.