• • •
ON THE NIGHT OF JUNE 29–30, 1955 , R. Gordon Wasson experienced the
sacred mushrooms firsthand. On his third trip to Huautla, he had
persuaded María Sabina, a sixty-one-year-old Mazatec and a respected
curandera in the village, to let him and his photographer not only
observe but take part in a ceremony in which no outsider had ever
participated. The velada, as the ceremony was called, took place after
dark in the basement of the home of a local official Wasson had enlisted
in his cause, before a simple altar “adorned with Christian images.” To
protect her identity, Wasson called Sabina “Eva Mendez,” discerning “a
spirituality in her expression that struck us at once.” After cleaning the
mushrooms and passing them through the purifying smoke of incense,
Sabina handed Wasson a cup containing six pairs of mushrooms; she
called them “the little children.” They tasted awful: “acrid with a rancid
odor that repeated itself.” Even so, “I could not have been happier: this
was the culmination of six years of pursuit.”
The visions that now arrived “were in vivid color, always harmonious.
They began with art motifs, angular such as might decorate carpets or
textiles or wallpaper . . . Then they evolved into palaces with courts,
arcades, gardens—resplendent palaces all laid over with semiprecious
stone. Then I saw a mythological beast drawing a regal chariot.” And so
forth.
Wasson’s original field notebooks are in the botanical library at
Harvard. In a neat but somewhat idiosyncratic hand, he kept meticulous
track of the time that night, from arrival (8:15) to ingestion (10:40) to the
snuffing out of the last candle (10:45).
After that, the handwriting disintegrates. Some sentences now appear
upside down, and Wasson’s descriptions of what he felt and saw
gradually break into fragments:
Nausea as vision distorted. Touching wall—made the world of
visions seem to crumble. Light from above door and below—
moon. Table took new forms—creatures, great processional
vehicle, architectural patterns of radiant color. Nausea. No
photos once the [illegible] seized us.