Trancendance
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The Place for Trips of the Mind-Bending Kind
May 8, 2002
By TIM WEINER
HUAUTLA DE JIMÉNEZ, Mexico, May 4 - This is the place that
launched a million trips.
Back of beyond in the mountains of northern Oaxaca, Huautla
has had a far bigger impact on Western civilization than
vice versa. Its valleys are a cornucopia of rare flora and
fungi with strange powers, and its "magic mushrooms"
ignited the psychedelic culture of the 1960's.
The town has 35,000 people, two restaurants, one bar,
called the Cup of Forgetfulness, and not a single Lava
lamp. But without Huautla (pronounced WOW-tla), a
generation of Americans might never have turned on, dropped
out or played a Beatles record backward.
Now a second wave of trips to Huautla's high hills is being
set off by a mind-bending mint called Salvia divinorum, a
little-understood plant unique to these parts.
After the price of local coffee beans collapsed from the
forces of free trade, farmers here turned to cultivating
the salvia for a global market. Its leaves are sold,
legally, on Internet sites in the United States and Europe,
at prices ranging from $40 to $120 an ounce. Foreign
tourists are coming to Huautla to experience it on their
own - to the dismay of the tribal priestesses who know it,
and other hallucinogens, intimately.
For centuries, the Mazatec Indians who live here have used
psilocybin mushrooms in ceremonies combining Catholic and
indigenous rituals, conducted only at night, before
homemade altars adorned with 13 flickering candles and the
images of saints. They call the mushrooms "God's flesh."
"They have the power to cure, to heal, to deliver
understanding," said Aurelia Aurora Catarino, 56, one of
Huautla's leading curanderas, or shamans. "They are not a
drug. They are a sacrament."
In 1955, after decades of searching, a somewhat obsessed
mushroom hunter named R. Gordon Wasson, a New York banker,
flew here in a private plane. He talked his way into a few
mouthfuls of the mushrooms, and soon was seeing
"resplendent palaces all laid over with semiprecious
stones."
Unknown to Mr. Wasson, the Central Intelligence Agency was
hot on his heels. The agency had a secret program to
discover and develop drugs that could be used as
mind-control weapons. Its spies heard about Mr. Wasson's
trip and sent an operative to infiltrate his group.
In 1957, Life magazine published a 17-page spread written
by Mr. Wasson about his voyages up to Huautla and into
inner space. Millions read the piece, including a Harvard
professor named Timothy Leary.
Dr. Leary raced down to Mexico and soon set up the Harvard
Psilocybin Project, turning on colleagues, students and
friends like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. By the time
the United States outlawed psychedelic drugs like
psilocybin in 1966, scholars say, more than one million
people had taken them.
In the 1960's, thousands of Americans on psilocybin
pilgrimages made their way up the newly built road to
Huautla, a glorified goat path that climbs 45 miles and 378
hairpin turns from the two-lane highway below. There were
Beatles songs playing in the streets, remembers Henry Munn,
an anthroplogist who first visited in 1965.
But "some of these foreigners came here without any respect
for the sacraments," Ms. Catarino said. They still tell the
tale in Huautla of the marijuana-smoking, mescal-swigging,
mushroom-addled hippie who chased a live turkey down the
street trying to eat it whole.
The Mexican Army set up a blockade on the road to Huautla
from 1969 to 1976. But recently the flow of foreigners has
revived, with hundreds of outsiders, mostly well-heeled
Europeans, seeking permission to take part in psilocybin
ceremonies each year.
Now salvia-seeking tourists and marketers are also on the
road to Huautla. Once again Mr. Wasson, a vice president of
J. P. Morgan & Company who died in 1986, was the first to
describe the powers of salvia (a cousin of the sage grown
in the United States), 40 years ago in a little-read
monograph.
The plant, which grows naturally only around Huautla, has
an active ingredient, salvinorum, whose effects on the mind
are not understood in the slightest by scientists.
"The leaves are much more powerful than the mushrooms,"
said Ms. Catarino, who uses salvia outside mushroom season.
She strongly disapproves of taking salvia anywhere but in
the strictly controlled ceremonies she conducts, which
require prior abstinence from sex, alcohol and other
temptations.
Those who have sampled salvia report experiences both
mystical and terrifying.
Kathleen Harrison, a California ethnobotanist who ate
salvia leaves in a traditional ceremony near Huautla,
described being transported into "the presence of a great
female being, a 20-foot-high woman," and feeling like a
plant in this spirit's garden.
Daniel Siebert, another California ethnobotanist, had a
different reaction to a concentrated extract of salvinorum.
Reporting on a scholarly Web site he maintains on the
plant, www.sagewisdom.org, he said it plunged him into "a
confused, fast-moving state of consciousness with
absolutely no idea where my body or for that matter my
universe had gone."
"It is tearing apart the fabric of existence," he wrote
under its influence. "It is madness." His Web site
recommends using salvia only with a sober companion so as
not to "physically injure yourself" while intoxicated.
Ms. Catarino said: "Foreigners come here without thinking,
looking for a cure from reality. The purpose of these
sacraments is to purify, and to open the road. When it
opens, it's as clear as the blue sky, and the stars at
night are as bright as suns."
"But in the wrong hands, it can be a disaster," she said.
"It can send people to hell."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/08/international/americas/08MEXI.html?ex=1021822617&ei=1&en=1929f626ad7a470f
May 8, 2002
By TIM WEINER
HUAUTLA DE JIMÉNEZ, Mexico, May 4 - This is the place that
launched a million trips.
Back of beyond in the mountains of northern Oaxaca, Huautla
has had a far bigger impact on Western civilization than
vice versa. Its valleys are a cornucopia of rare flora and
fungi with strange powers, and its "magic mushrooms"
ignited the psychedelic culture of the 1960's.
The town has 35,000 people, two restaurants, one bar,
called the Cup of Forgetfulness, and not a single Lava
lamp. But without Huautla (pronounced WOW-tla), a
generation of Americans might never have turned on, dropped
out or played a Beatles record backward.
Now a second wave of trips to Huautla's high hills is being
set off by a mind-bending mint called Salvia divinorum, a
little-understood plant unique to these parts.
After the price of local coffee beans collapsed from the
forces of free trade, farmers here turned to cultivating
the salvia for a global market. Its leaves are sold,
legally, on Internet sites in the United States and Europe,
at prices ranging from $40 to $120 an ounce. Foreign
tourists are coming to Huautla to experience it on their
own - to the dismay of the tribal priestesses who know it,
and other hallucinogens, intimately.
For centuries, the Mazatec Indians who live here have used
psilocybin mushrooms in ceremonies combining Catholic and
indigenous rituals, conducted only at night, before
homemade altars adorned with 13 flickering candles and the
images of saints. They call the mushrooms "God's flesh."
"They have the power to cure, to heal, to deliver
understanding," said Aurelia Aurora Catarino, 56, one of
Huautla's leading curanderas, or shamans. "They are not a
drug. They are a sacrament."
In 1955, after decades of searching, a somewhat obsessed
mushroom hunter named R. Gordon Wasson, a New York banker,
flew here in a private plane. He talked his way into a few
mouthfuls of the mushrooms, and soon was seeing
"resplendent palaces all laid over with semiprecious
stones."
Unknown to Mr. Wasson, the Central Intelligence Agency was
hot on his heels. The agency had a secret program to
discover and develop drugs that could be used as
mind-control weapons. Its spies heard about Mr. Wasson's
trip and sent an operative to infiltrate his group.
In 1957, Life magazine published a 17-page spread written
by Mr. Wasson about his voyages up to Huautla and into
inner space. Millions read the piece, including a Harvard
professor named Timothy Leary.
Dr. Leary raced down to Mexico and soon set up the Harvard
Psilocybin Project, turning on colleagues, students and
friends like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. By the time
the United States outlawed psychedelic drugs like
psilocybin in 1966, scholars say, more than one million
people had taken them.
In the 1960's, thousands of Americans on psilocybin
pilgrimages made their way up the newly built road to
Huautla, a glorified goat path that climbs 45 miles and 378
hairpin turns from the two-lane highway below. There were
Beatles songs playing in the streets, remembers Henry Munn,
an anthroplogist who first visited in 1965.
But "some of these foreigners came here without any respect
for the sacraments," Ms. Catarino said. They still tell the
tale in Huautla of the marijuana-smoking, mescal-swigging,
mushroom-addled hippie who chased a live turkey down the
street trying to eat it whole.
The Mexican Army set up a blockade on the road to Huautla
from 1969 to 1976. But recently the flow of foreigners has
revived, with hundreds of outsiders, mostly well-heeled
Europeans, seeking permission to take part in psilocybin
ceremonies each year.
Now salvia-seeking tourists and marketers are also on the
road to Huautla. Once again Mr. Wasson, a vice president of
J. P. Morgan & Company who died in 1986, was the first to
describe the powers of salvia (a cousin of the sage grown
in the United States), 40 years ago in a little-read
monograph.
The plant, which grows naturally only around Huautla, has
an active ingredient, salvinorum, whose effects on the mind
are not understood in the slightest by scientists.
"The leaves are much more powerful than the mushrooms,"
said Ms. Catarino, who uses salvia outside mushroom season.
She strongly disapproves of taking salvia anywhere but in
the strictly controlled ceremonies she conducts, which
require prior abstinence from sex, alcohol and other
temptations.
Those who have sampled salvia report experiences both
mystical and terrifying.
Kathleen Harrison, a California ethnobotanist who ate
salvia leaves in a traditional ceremony near Huautla,
described being transported into "the presence of a great
female being, a 20-foot-high woman," and feeling like a
plant in this spirit's garden.
Daniel Siebert, another California ethnobotanist, had a
different reaction to a concentrated extract of salvinorum.
Reporting on a scholarly Web site he maintains on the
plant, www.sagewisdom.org, he said it plunged him into "a
confused, fast-moving state of consciousness with
absolutely no idea where my body or for that matter my
universe had gone."
"It is tearing apart the fabric of existence," he wrote
under its influence. "It is madness." His Web site
recommends using salvia only with a sober companion so as
not to "physically injure yourself" while intoxicated.
Ms. Catarino said: "Foreigners come here without thinking,
looking for a cure from reality. The purpose of these
sacraments is to purify, and to open the road. When it
opens, it's as clear as the blue sky, and the stars at
night are as bright as suns."
"But in the wrong hands, it can be a disaster," she said.
"It can send people to hell."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/08/international/americas/08MEXI.html?ex=1021822617&ei=1&en=1929f626ad7a470f
