48 Spirituality Studies 10-1 Spring 2024 hadn’t brought the foreigners… the saint children would have kept their power… [F]rom the moment the foreigners arrived… the saint children lost their purity. They lost their force; the foreigners spoiled them. From now on they won’t be any good. There’s no remedy for it. (María Sabina quoted in Estrada 1981, 91, 90) This statement is very disheartening and casts a negative light on the modern uses of these substances outside of a traditional context. It is worth documenting Wasson’s response to these reflections. Although appearing apologetic, he did not regret his cultural appropriation, suggesting that this knowledge would have been lost had he not saved it from its inevitable fate. In 1976, Wasson wrote (quoted in Estrada 1981, 20): These words make me wince: I, Gordon Wasson, am held responsible for the end of a religious practice in Mesoamerica that goes back far, for… millenia. I fear she spoke the truth… At the time of my first velada with María Sabina, in 1955, I had to make a choice: suppress my experience or resolve to present it worthily to the world. There was never a doubt in my mind. The sacred mushrooms and the religious feeling concentrated in them through the Sierras of Southern Mexico had to be made known to the world, and worthily so, at whatever cost to me personally. If I did not do this, ‘consulting the mushroom’ would go on for a few years longer, but its extinction was and is inevitable. He went so far as to say that what he did was necessary in order that the sacred mushroom rite “could be preserved by us, for posterity” (quoted in Forte 1988, 17). He did not believe that the Mazatec were able to preserve their sacred heritage and felt that only he and his affiliates were qualified to become its proper custodians. Wasson’s lack of remorse for what happened to the Mazatec people and their sacred tradition confirms the rank antinomianism behind the modern psychedelic movement: “I was merely the precursor of the New Day. I arrived in the same decade with the highway, the airplane, the alphabet. The Old Order was in danger of passing with no one to record its passing. The wisdom of the Sabia, genuine though it was, has nothing to give to the world of tomorrow” (1980, 223). Wasson could not have been more mistaken about traditional wisdom and its relevance for us today. We have much to learn from María Sabina, along with other traditional healers, to whom we ought to be tremendously grateful for our knowledge of these sacred medicines. Wasson’s own pernicious appropriation mirrors precisely how many approach the use of sacred plants in the psychedelic renaissance movement. Divulging the mysteries of sacred mushrooms to the outside world had deleterious consequences, not only to María Sabina but to the Mazatec people and their lands. Commercialization desecrated what was most sacred to them. Wasson claims that if he had not brought the world’s attention to these mushrooms, knowledge of them would have been forever lost. However, this was not his decision to make. From the Mazatec perspective, the mushrooms became corrupted, which meant that they had largely lost their spiritual potency. It is difficult to accept that psilocybin was first introduced into the modern West by Wasson – Vice-President of Public Relations at J. P. Morgan & Company – and Henry Luce (1898–1967), the owner of Life magazine; two less likely representatives of the counterculture could hardly be imagined! Upon Wasson’s return from Mexico, it is reported that he conducted ad hoc mushroom ceremonies in his Manhattan apartment. 5 In Quest of Integrative Mental Health The current mental health crisis has cast light on the fact that mainstream therapy does not support a wide group of people in their quest for improved mental health and deeper self-integration. Entheogenic treatments (under the umbrella of PAT) are poised between a conventional Western medical model and secular psychotherapy—these have clear shortcomings, because they cannot honor the fullness of what it means to be human in connection to Spirit, soul, and body. In the same way that modern science has its biases, we need to ensure that psychedelic research and therapy does not also limit itself to this same truncated framework. It must transcend “those fashionable ruts of thinking that we dignify by calling them logic and reason” (Osmond 1964, 143). Although we see mental health services, including medication management, being made available to more people than ever before, critical cases have not declined as might be expected. If these approaches were as effective as they are widely touted to be, numbers ought to have decreased (or at least plateaued) rather than dramatically spiked as they have done. Furthermore, there are not enough therapists to support this massive upsurge (which is likely the
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