PSYCHEDELICS - Sciencemadness.org

107___________
____________________________________________________ Psychedelics
and Mother Earth form a mythic polarity common to many
American Indian tribes.
Wasson's theory is that at some preliterate stage in man's
early history, the mushrooms with extraordinary powers were
discovered and "served as an agent for the very fission of his
soul, releasing his faculty for self-perception, as a stimulant
for the imagination of the seer, the poet, the mystic. ...
May not the hallucinatory mushrooms have been the most
holy secret of the Mysteries?" 30
Puharich also has argued for the existence of a cult of the
divine mushroom in the early Eurasian cultures centered
around the powerful Sumero-Akkadian city-states of the third
millennium B.C. And in 1926 Henri Frankfort reported the
discovery of an ancient Egyptian temple in Byblos (on the
Mediterranean coast of Lebanon), dating back to the middle
of the third millennium B.C, in which a green jasper seal was
found. This seal shows a Horus priest giving two mushrooms
to a supplicant. Over the mushroom is a hare, which is the
sacred symbol of the Hittite god of rain, thunder, and light-
ning.
Such archaeological, etymological, and mythological frag-
ments must at present be regarded as mere tiny pieces of
the history of man's strange ambivalent relationship to the
hallucinogenic, psychedelic plants and drugs. It may be
decades before the missing pieces are placed together to give
a coherent picture. For the present we cannot much improve
on the poetic formulation of Wasson's Indian guide, who
when asked why the mushroom was called "that which
springs forth," replied:
El honguillo viene por si mismo, no se sabe de donde,
como el viento que viene sin saber de donde ni porqué.
The little mushroom comes of itself, no one knows whence,
like the wind that comes we know not whence nor why. 31
30
R. Gordon Wasson, "Lightning Bolt and Mushrooms, An Essay
in Early Cultural Exploration," in Roman Jakobson: Essays on
the Occasion o f His Sixtieth Birthday, The Hague, Mouton & Co.,
1956, p. 610.
31
Henri Frankfort, quoted in Puharich, op. cit., (23).