Architectural
Eyes out of focus—the candles we saw them double.
Oriental splendor—Alhambra—chariot
Table transformed
Contrast vision and reality—I touch wall.“The visions were not blurred or uncertain,” he writes. Indeed, “they
seemed more real to me than anything I had ever seen with my own
eyes.” At this point, the reader begins to feel the literary hand of Aldous
Huxley exerting a certain pressure on both Wasson’s prose and his
perceptions: “I felt that I was now seeing plain, whereas ordinary vision
gives us an imperfect view.” Wasson’s own doors of perception had been
flung wide open: “I was seeing the archetypes, the Platonic ideas, that
underlie the imperfect images of everyday life.” To read Wasson is to feel
as if you were witnessing the still-fresh and malleable conventions of the
psychedelic narrative gradually solidifying before your eyes. Whether
Aldous Huxley invented these tropes, or was merely their stenographer, is
hard to say, but they would inform the genre, as well as the experience,
from here on. “For the first time the word ecstasy took on real meaning,”
Wasson recalls. “For the first time it did not mean someone else’s state of
mind.”
Wasson concluded from his experience that his working hypothesis
about the roots of the religious experience in psychoactive fungi had been
vindicated. “In man’s evolutionary 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 . . . One
is emboldened to the point of asking whether they may not have planted
in primitive man the very idea of a God.”
Whatever one thinks about this idea, it’s worth pointing out that
Wasson came to Huautla with it already firmly planted and he was willing
to subtly twist various elements of his experience there in order to
confirm it. As much as he wants us to see María Sabina as a religious
figure, and her ceremony as a form of what he calls “Holy communion,”
she saw herself quite differently. The mushroom might well have served