chronic hat geschrieben:Natürlich ist es der spitzkegelige kleine.
Frage zur Kulturgeschichte des SKKK
Re: Frage zur Kulturgeschichte des SKKK
Ja es handelt sich um zwei verschiedene Arten. Was schriebt der chronic?
Ge'ez ጫት
Re: Frage zur Kulturgeschichte des SKKK
"Schläft ein Lied in allen Dingen / Die da träumen fort und fort / Und die Welt hebt an zu singen / Triffst du nur das Zauberwort."
Re: Frage zur Kulturgeschichte des SKKK
Sergius Golowin hat wohl mal mit Alpennomaden gesprochen, die einen SKKK-Kult ausüben
Re: Frage zur Kulturgeschichte des SKKK
birkenporling kann man vergessen, da sind indolalkaloide drin gefunden worde, aber höchst wahrscheinlich keine psychedelischen. Baumschwämme wurden schon lange von Schamanen genutzt aber eher in ihrer Funktion als Medizinmann nehme ich an.
Psychoaktive Pilze, davon gibt es ja einige unter anderem auch Düngerlinge, die in jedem Garten wachsen, wurden mit Sicherheit in schmanisch-heidnischen Kulten in Mitteleuropa genutzt.->Kelten und Germanen - Bier ->Hexen - weise Frauen
Psychoaktive Pilze, davon gibt es ja einige unter anderem auch Düngerlinge, die in jedem Garten wachsen, wurden mit Sicherheit in schmanisch-heidnischen Kulten in Mitteleuropa genutzt.->Kelten und Germanen - Bier ->Hexen - weise Frauen
Re: Frage zur Kulturgeschichte des SKKK
Mushrooms in Wonderland
The first well-documented hallucinogenic mushroom experience in Britain took place in London’s Green Park on 3 October 1799. Like many such experiences before and since, it was accidental. A man subsequently identified only as ‘J.S.’ was in the habit of gathering small field mushrooms from the park on autumn mornings, and cooking them up into a breakfast broth for his wife and young family. But this particular morning, an hour after they had finished eating, the world began to turn very strange. J.S. found black spots and odd flashes of colour bursting across his vision; he became disorientated, and had difficulty in standing and moving around. His family were complaining of stomach cramps and cold, numb extremities. The notion of poisonous toadstools leapt to his mind, and he staggered out into the streets to seek help. but within a hundred yards he had forgotten where he was going, or why, and was found wandering about in a confused state.
By chance, a doctor named Everard Brande happened to be passing through this insalubrious part of town, and he was summoned to treat J.S. and his family. The scene that he discovered was so bizarre and unfamiliar that he would write it up at length and publish it in The Medical and Physical Journal later that year. The family’s symptoms were rising and falling in giddy waves, their pupils dilated, their pulses and breathing becoming fluttering and laboured, then returning to normal before accelerating into another crisis. They were all fixated on the fear that they were dying, except for the youngest, the eight-year-old Edward S., whose symptoms were the strangest of all. He had eaten a large portion of the mushrooms and was ‘attacked with fits of immoderate laughter’ which his parents’ threats could not subdue. He seemed to have been transported into another world, from which he would only return under duress to speak nonsense: ‘when roused and interrogated as to it, he answered indifferently, yes or no, as he did to every other question, evidently without any relation to what was asked’.
Dr.Everard Brande would diagnose the family’s condition as the ‘deleterious effects of a very common species of agaric [mushroom], not hitherto suspected to be poisonous’. Today, we can be more specific: this was clearly intoxication by Liberty Caps (Psilocybe semilanceata), the ‘magic mushrooms’ which grow plentifully across the hills, moors, commons, golf courses and playing fields of Britain every autumn. But though Dr.Brande’s account of the J.S. family’s trip would not be forgotten, and would continue to be cited in Victorian drug literature for decades, the nineteenth century would come and go without any conclusive identification of the Liberty Cap as the species in question. In fact, it would not be until Albert Hoffman, the discoverer of LSD, turned his attention to hallucinogenic mushrooms in the 1950s that the botanical identity of these and other mushrooms containing psilocybin, LSD’s chemical cousin, would be confirmed.
mushroom_art_medBut if they were obscure to Victorian science, there was another tradition which would appear to explore the ability of certain mushrooms to whisk humans off to another world: Victorian fairy lore. Over the nineteenth century, a vast body of art and literature would connect mushrooms and toadstools with elves, pixies, hollow hills and the unwitting transport of subjects to fairyland, a world of shifting perspectives and dimensions seething with elemental spirits. Is it possible that the Victorian fairy tradition, underneath its twee and bourgeois exterior, operated as a conduit for a hidden world of homegrown psychedelia, parallel perhaps to the ancient shamanic and ritual uses of similar mushrooms in the New World? Were the authors of such otherworld narratives – Alice in Wonderland, for example – aware of the powers of certain mushrooms to lead unsuspecting visitors to enchanted lands? Were they, perhaps, even writing from personal experience?
The J.S. family’s trip in 1799 is a useful jumping-off point for such enquiries, because it establishes several basic facts. First – and contrary to the opinion of some recent American scholars – British (and European) magic mushrooms are not a recent arrival from the New World, but were part of our indigenous flora at least two hundred years ago. Second, the species in question was unknown at the time, at least to science. Third, its hallucinogenic effects were unfamiliar, perhaps even unheard of – certainly unprecedented enough for a London doctor to feel the need to draw them to the attention of his medical colleagues.
In other scholarly contexts, though, the mind-altering effects of certain plants were already familiar. Through classical sources like The Golden Ass, the idea of witches’ potions which transformed their subjects was an inheritance from antiquity. The pharmacopeia and materia medica of doctors and herbalists had long included the drug effects of common plants like belladonna and opium poppies, though mushrooms had featured in them rarely. The eighteenth century had turned up several more exotic examples from distant cultures: Russian explorers describing the use of fly agaric mushrooms in Siberia, Captain Cook observing the kava-kava ritual in Polynesia. In 1762 Carl Linnaeus, the great taxonomist and father of modern botany, had compiled the first ever list of intoxicating plants: his monograph, entitled Inebriantia, had included opium, cannabis, datura, henbane and tobacco. Slowly, the study of such plants was emerging from the margins and tall tales of classical studies, ethnography, folklore and medicine and becoming a subject in its own right.
It was as part of this same interest that European fairy lore was also being assembled by a new generation of amateur folklore collectors such as the Brothers Grimm, who realised that the inexorable drift of peasant populations from country to city was beginning to dismantle centuries of folk stories, songs and oral histories. The Victorian fairy tradition, as it emerged, would be imbued with this new sensibility which rendered rustic traditions no longer coarse, backward and primitive but picturesque and semi-sacred, an escape from the austerity of industrial living into an ancient, often pagan otherworld. Under the guise of ‘innocence’, sensual and erotic themes could be explored with a boldness not permitted in more realistic genres, and the muddy and impoverished countryside could be re-enchanted with imagery drawn from the classical and arabesque. Within this process, the lore of plants and flowers was carefully curated and woven into supernatural tapestries of flower-fairies and enchanted woods; and within this imaginal world of plants, mushrooms and toadstools began popping up all over. Fairy rings and toadstool-dwelling elves were recycled through a pictorial culture of motif and decoration until they became emblematic of fairyland itself.
This was a quiet but substantial image makeover for Britain’s fungi. Previously, in herbals and medical texts, they had been largely shunned, associated with dung-heaps and poison; in Romantic poetry the smell of death had still clung to them (‘fungous brood/coloured like a corpse’s cheek’, as Keats put it). Now, a keightleys-fairy-mythology-300x264new generation of folklorists began to wax lyrical about them, including Thomas Keightley, whose The Fairy Mythology (1850) was perhaps the most influential text on the fictional fairy tradition. Keightley gives Welsh and Gaelic examples of traditional names for fungi which invoke elves and Puck, and at one point wonders if such names refer to ‘those pretty small delicate fungi, with their conical heads, which are named Fairy-mushrooms in Ireland, where they grow so plentifully’. This description is a very good match for the Liberty Cap, though Keightley seems unaware of its hallucinogenic properties; he was struck simply by the pixie-cap shape of its head. In Ireland, the Gaelic slang for mushrooms is ‘pookies’, which Keightley associated with the elemental nature spirit Pooka (hence Puck); it’s a slang term which persists in Irish drug culture today, although evidence for a pre-modern Gaelic magic mushroom culture remains elusive.
But despite the presence of Liberty Caps in Britain, and their occasional tentative identification with nature spirits, it was a different mushroom which would become the immediately recognisable symbol for fairyland: the unmistakable red-and-white fly agaric (Amanita muscaria), which remains the classic ‘fairy fungus’ to this day in modern survivals of the Victorian fairy cult such as garden gnomes. The fly agaric is the most spectacular of the generally spectacular agaric family, which also includes the tawny Panther Cap (Amanita pantherina) and the prodigiously poisonous Death Cap (Amanita phalloides). The other salient fact about it is that it, too, is psychoactive. Unlike the Liberty Cap, which delivers psilocybin in fairly standard doses, the fly agaric contains an unpredictable mixture of alkaloids – muscarine, muscimol, ibotenic acid – which produce a cocktail of effects including general wooziness and disorientation, drooling, sweats, numbness in the lips and extremities, nausea, muscle twitches, sleep and a vague, often retrospective sense of liminal consciousness and waking dreams.
Unlike the Liberty Cap, the fly agaric was hard to ignore or misidentify; its effects had long been known, though they had been classed simply as poisonous. Its name was derived from its ability to kill flies, and it was otherwise generally avoided. It was the aura of livid beauty and danger which it carried, rather than its chemistry, which made it such a popular fairy motif. Yet at the same time its psychic effects were coming to be understood, not from any tradition of its use in Britain, but from the recent discovery of its visionary role among the remote peoples of Siberia.
Sporadically through the eighteenth century, Swedish colonels and Russian explorers had returned from Siberia with tall tales of shamans, spirit possession and self-poisoning with brightly-coloured toadstools, but it was a Polish traveller named Joseph Kopék who, in 1837, was the first to write an account of his own experience with the fly agaric. Kopék had been living in Kamchatka for two years years when he was taken ill with a fever and was told by a local of a ‘miraculous’ mushroom which would cure him. He ate half a fly agaric, and fell into a vivid fever dream. ‘As though magnetised’, he was drawn through ‘the most attractive gardens where only pleasure and beauty seemed to rule’; beautiful women dressed in white fed him with fruits, berries and flowers.
He woke after a long and healing sleep and took a second, stronger dose, which precipitated him back into sleep and the sense of an epic voyage into other worlds, teeming with ‘things which I would never imagine even in my thoughts’. He relived swathes of his childhood, re-encountered friends from throughout his life, and even predicted the future at length with such confidence that a priest was summoned to witness. He concluded with a challenge to science: ‘If someone can prove that both the effect and the influence of the mushroom are non-existent, then I shall stop being defender of the miraculous mushroom of Kamchatka’.
Kopék’s toadstool epiphany was widely reported, and it began a fashion for re-examining elements of European folklore and culture and interpolating fly agaric intoxication into odd corners of myth and tradition. Perhaps the best example of this is the notion that the berserkers, the Viking shock troops of the 8th to 10th centuries, drank a fly agaric potion before going into battle and fighting like men possessed. This is regularly asserted as fact not only among mushroom and Viking aficionados but also in text-books and encyclopaedias; nevertheless, it’s almost certainly a creation of the nineteenth century. There’s no reference to fly agaric, or indeed to any exotic plant stimulants, in the sagas or eddas: the notion of mushroom-intoxicated berserker warriors was first suggested by the Swedish professor Samuel Ödman in his Attempt to Explain the Berserk-Raging of Ancient Nordic Warriors through Natural History (1784), which was simply speculation based on eighteenth-century Siberian accounts. By the end of the nineteenth century scholars like the Norwegian botanist Frederik Christian Schübeler had taken Ödman’s suggestion as proof. The rest is history – or, more likely, urban myth.
Thus, by the mid nineteenth century, the fly agaric had not only become an instantly recognisable fairyland motif but had also, and separately, been established as a portal to the land of dreams, and written into European folklore from exotic sources. This doesn’t invalidate the claim that mushrooms in fairy literature represent the concealed or half-forgotten knowledge of their hallucinogenic properties – it’s impossible to disprove such a negative – but it does show how fairy art and literature could have evolved without any such knowledge. Some may well have been directly drug-inspired – an obvious candidate would be John Anster Fitzgerald’s phantasmic paintings of dreaming subjects surrounted by distended, other-dimensional goblin creatures – but the drug in question is far more likely to have been opium, the omnipresent Victorian panacea.
But there is a case where we can be more specific. The most famous and frequently-debated conjunction of fungi, psychedelia and fairy-lore is the array of mushrooms and hallucinatory potions, mindbending and shapeshifting motifs in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Do Alice’s adventures represent first-hand knowledge of the hallucinogenic effects of mushrooms? And, if not, how were they assembled without it?
The facts in the case could hardly be better known. Alice, down the rabbit hole, meets a caterpillar sitting on a mushroom, which tells her in a ‘languid, sleepy voice’ that the mushroom is the key to navigating through her strange journey: ‘one side will make you grow taller, the other side will make you grow shorter’. Alice takes a chunk from each side of the mushroom, and begins a series of vertiginous transformations of size, shooting up into the clouds before learning to maintain her normal size by eating alternate bites. Throughout the rest of the book she continues to take the mushroom: entering the house of the duchess, approaching the domain of the march hare and, climactically, before entering the hidden garden with the golden key.
Since the 1960s all this has frequently been read as an initiatic work of drug literature, an esoteric guide to the other worlds opened up by mushrooms and other psychedelics – most memorably, perhaps, in Jefferson Airplane’s psychedelic anthem White Rabbit (1967), which conjures Alice’s journey as a path of self-discovery where the stale advice of parents is transcended by the guidance received from within by ‘feeding your head’. By and large, this reading has provoked outrage and disgust among Lewis Carroll scholars, who seem to regard his critics’ accusations of paedophilia as inoffensive by comparison.
But there’s plenty of evidence that medication and unusual states of consciousness exercised a profound fascination for Carroll, and he read about them voraciously. His interest was spurred by his own delicate health – insomnia and frequent migraines – which he treated with homeopathic remedies, including many derived from psychoactive plants like aconite and belladonna. His library included several books on homeopathy as well as standard texts on mind-altering drugs like W.B.Carpenter’s Mental Physiology (1874) and F.E.Anstie’s influential compendium Stimulants and Narcotics (1864). He was greatly intrigued by the epileptic seizure of an Oxford student at which he was present, and visited St.Bartholemew’s Hospital in London in order to witness chloroform anaesthesia.
Nevertheless, it seems that Alice’s mind-expanding journeys owed little to the actual drug experiences of their author. Although Carroll – in everyday life, of course, the Reverend Charles Dodgson – was a moderate drinker and, to judge by his library, opposed to alcohol prohibition, he had a strong dislike of tobacco smoking and wrote sceptically in his letters about the pervasive presence in syrups and soothing tonics of powerful narcotics like opium – the ‘medicine so dexterously, but ineffectually, concealed in the jam of our early childhood’. In an era where few embarked on personal drug exploration without both robust health and a compelling reason, he remains a very unlikely self-experimenter.
But it seems we may be able to offer a more precise account. The scholar Michael Carmichael has demonstrated that, a few days before writing Alice, Carroll made his only ever visit to the Bodleian library, where a copy of Mordecai Cooke’s recently-published drug survey The Seven Sisters of Sleep (1860) had been deposited. The Bodleian copy of this book still has most of its pages uncut, with the notable exception of the contents page and the chapter on the fly agaric, entitled ‘The Exile of Siberia’. Carroll was particularly interested in all things Russian: in fact, Russia was the only country he ever visited outside Britain. And, as Carmichael puts it, ‘Dodgson would have been immediately attracted to Cooke’s Seven Sisters of Sleep for two more obvious reasons: he had seven sisters and he was a lifelong insomniac’.
Cooke’s chapter on fly agaric is, like the rest of Seven Sisters, a useful compendium of the drug lore and anecdotes which were familiar to the Victorians. It recalls Dr.Everard Brande’s account of the J.S. family; it rounds up the various Siberian accounts of fly agaric; it also focuses on precisely the effects of mushroom intoxication which Carroll wove into Alice’s adventures. ‘Erroneous impressions of size and distance are common occurrences’, Cooke records of the fly agaric. ‘A straw lying in the road becomes a formidable object, to overcome which, a leap is taken sufficient to clear a barrel of ale, or the prostrate trunk of a British oak.’
Whether or not Carroll read this actual copy, it seems very likely that the properties of the mushroom in Alice were based on his encounter with Siberian fly agaric reportage rather than any hidden British tradition of its use, let alone the author’s own. If so, he was neither the secret drug initiate that has been claimed, nor the Victorian gentleman entirely innocent of the arcane knowledge of drugs subsequently imputed to him. In this sense, Alice’s otherworld experiences seem to hover, like much of Victorian fairy literature and fantasy, in a borderland between naïve innocence of such drugs and knowing references to them.
A version of this article first appeared in Fortean Times (2003)
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https://mikejay.net/mushrooms-in-wonder ... Alh7vLAhMg
The first well-documented hallucinogenic mushroom experience in Britain took place in London’s Green Park on 3 October 1799. Like many such experiences before and since, it was accidental. A man subsequently identified only as ‘J.S.’ was in the habit of gathering small field mushrooms from the park on autumn mornings, and cooking them up into a breakfast broth for his wife and young family. But this particular morning, an hour after they had finished eating, the world began to turn very strange. J.S. found black spots and odd flashes of colour bursting across his vision; he became disorientated, and had difficulty in standing and moving around. His family were complaining of stomach cramps and cold, numb extremities. The notion of poisonous toadstools leapt to his mind, and he staggered out into the streets to seek help. but within a hundred yards he had forgotten where he was going, or why, and was found wandering about in a confused state.
By chance, a doctor named Everard Brande happened to be passing through this insalubrious part of town, and he was summoned to treat J.S. and his family. The scene that he discovered was so bizarre and unfamiliar that he would write it up at length and publish it in The Medical and Physical Journal later that year. The family’s symptoms were rising and falling in giddy waves, their pupils dilated, their pulses and breathing becoming fluttering and laboured, then returning to normal before accelerating into another crisis. They were all fixated on the fear that they were dying, except for the youngest, the eight-year-old Edward S., whose symptoms were the strangest of all. He had eaten a large portion of the mushrooms and was ‘attacked with fits of immoderate laughter’ which his parents’ threats could not subdue. He seemed to have been transported into another world, from which he would only return under duress to speak nonsense: ‘when roused and interrogated as to it, he answered indifferently, yes or no, as he did to every other question, evidently without any relation to what was asked’.
Dr.Everard Brande would diagnose the family’s condition as the ‘deleterious effects of a very common species of agaric [mushroom], not hitherto suspected to be poisonous’. Today, we can be more specific: this was clearly intoxication by Liberty Caps (Psilocybe semilanceata), the ‘magic mushrooms’ which grow plentifully across the hills, moors, commons, golf courses and playing fields of Britain every autumn. But though Dr.Brande’s account of the J.S. family’s trip would not be forgotten, and would continue to be cited in Victorian drug literature for decades, the nineteenth century would come and go without any conclusive identification of the Liberty Cap as the species in question. In fact, it would not be until Albert Hoffman, the discoverer of LSD, turned his attention to hallucinogenic mushrooms in the 1950s that the botanical identity of these and other mushrooms containing psilocybin, LSD’s chemical cousin, would be confirmed.
mushroom_art_medBut if they were obscure to Victorian science, there was another tradition which would appear to explore the ability of certain mushrooms to whisk humans off to another world: Victorian fairy lore. Over the nineteenth century, a vast body of art and literature would connect mushrooms and toadstools with elves, pixies, hollow hills and the unwitting transport of subjects to fairyland, a world of shifting perspectives and dimensions seething with elemental spirits. Is it possible that the Victorian fairy tradition, underneath its twee and bourgeois exterior, operated as a conduit for a hidden world of homegrown psychedelia, parallel perhaps to the ancient shamanic and ritual uses of similar mushrooms in the New World? Were the authors of such otherworld narratives – Alice in Wonderland, for example – aware of the powers of certain mushrooms to lead unsuspecting visitors to enchanted lands? Were they, perhaps, even writing from personal experience?
The J.S. family’s trip in 1799 is a useful jumping-off point for such enquiries, because it establishes several basic facts. First – and contrary to the opinion of some recent American scholars – British (and European) magic mushrooms are not a recent arrival from the New World, but were part of our indigenous flora at least two hundred years ago. Second, the species in question was unknown at the time, at least to science. Third, its hallucinogenic effects were unfamiliar, perhaps even unheard of – certainly unprecedented enough for a London doctor to feel the need to draw them to the attention of his medical colleagues.
In other scholarly contexts, though, the mind-altering effects of certain plants were already familiar. Through classical sources like The Golden Ass, the idea of witches’ potions which transformed their subjects was an inheritance from antiquity. The pharmacopeia and materia medica of doctors and herbalists had long included the drug effects of common plants like belladonna and opium poppies, though mushrooms had featured in them rarely. The eighteenth century had turned up several more exotic examples from distant cultures: Russian explorers describing the use of fly agaric mushrooms in Siberia, Captain Cook observing the kava-kava ritual in Polynesia. In 1762 Carl Linnaeus, the great taxonomist and father of modern botany, had compiled the first ever list of intoxicating plants: his monograph, entitled Inebriantia, had included opium, cannabis, datura, henbane and tobacco. Slowly, the study of such plants was emerging from the margins and tall tales of classical studies, ethnography, folklore and medicine and becoming a subject in its own right.
It was as part of this same interest that European fairy lore was also being assembled by a new generation of amateur folklore collectors such as the Brothers Grimm, who realised that the inexorable drift of peasant populations from country to city was beginning to dismantle centuries of folk stories, songs and oral histories. The Victorian fairy tradition, as it emerged, would be imbued with this new sensibility which rendered rustic traditions no longer coarse, backward and primitive but picturesque and semi-sacred, an escape from the austerity of industrial living into an ancient, often pagan otherworld. Under the guise of ‘innocence’, sensual and erotic themes could be explored with a boldness not permitted in more realistic genres, and the muddy and impoverished countryside could be re-enchanted with imagery drawn from the classical and arabesque. Within this process, the lore of plants and flowers was carefully curated and woven into supernatural tapestries of flower-fairies and enchanted woods; and within this imaginal world of plants, mushrooms and toadstools began popping up all over. Fairy rings and toadstool-dwelling elves were recycled through a pictorial culture of motif and decoration until they became emblematic of fairyland itself.
This was a quiet but substantial image makeover for Britain’s fungi. Previously, in herbals and medical texts, they had been largely shunned, associated with dung-heaps and poison; in Romantic poetry the smell of death had still clung to them (‘fungous brood/coloured like a corpse’s cheek’, as Keats put it). Now, a keightleys-fairy-mythology-300x264new generation of folklorists began to wax lyrical about them, including Thomas Keightley, whose The Fairy Mythology (1850) was perhaps the most influential text on the fictional fairy tradition. Keightley gives Welsh and Gaelic examples of traditional names for fungi which invoke elves and Puck, and at one point wonders if such names refer to ‘those pretty small delicate fungi, with their conical heads, which are named Fairy-mushrooms in Ireland, where they grow so plentifully’. This description is a very good match for the Liberty Cap, though Keightley seems unaware of its hallucinogenic properties; he was struck simply by the pixie-cap shape of its head. In Ireland, the Gaelic slang for mushrooms is ‘pookies’, which Keightley associated with the elemental nature spirit Pooka (hence Puck); it’s a slang term which persists in Irish drug culture today, although evidence for a pre-modern Gaelic magic mushroom culture remains elusive.
But despite the presence of Liberty Caps in Britain, and their occasional tentative identification with nature spirits, it was a different mushroom which would become the immediately recognisable symbol for fairyland: the unmistakable red-and-white fly agaric (Amanita muscaria), which remains the classic ‘fairy fungus’ to this day in modern survivals of the Victorian fairy cult such as garden gnomes. The fly agaric is the most spectacular of the generally spectacular agaric family, which also includes the tawny Panther Cap (Amanita pantherina) and the prodigiously poisonous Death Cap (Amanita phalloides). The other salient fact about it is that it, too, is psychoactive. Unlike the Liberty Cap, which delivers psilocybin in fairly standard doses, the fly agaric contains an unpredictable mixture of alkaloids – muscarine, muscimol, ibotenic acid – which produce a cocktail of effects including general wooziness and disorientation, drooling, sweats, numbness in the lips and extremities, nausea, muscle twitches, sleep and a vague, often retrospective sense of liminal consciousness and waking dreams.
Unlike the Liberty Cap, the fly agaric was hard to ignore or misidentify; its effects had long been known, though they had been classed simply as poisonous. Its name was derived from its ability to kill flies, and it was otherwise generally avoided. It was the aura of livid beauty and danger which it carried, rather than its chemistry, which made it such a popular fairy motif. Yet at the same time its psychic effects were coming to be understood, not from any tradition of its use in Britain, but from the recent discovery of its visionary role among the remote peoples of Siberia.
Sporadically through the eighteenth century, Swedish colonels and Russian explorers had returned from Siberia with tall tales of shamans, spirit possession and self-poisoning with brightly-coloured toadstools, but it was a Polish traveller named Joseph Kopék who, in 1837, was the first to write an account of his own experience with the fly agaric. Kopék had been living in Kamchatka for two years years when he was taken ill with a fever and was told by a local of a ‘miraculous’ mushroom which would cure him. He ate half a fly agaric, and fell into a vivid fever dream. ‘As though magnetised’, he was drawn through ‘the most attractive gardens where only pleasure and beauty seemed to rule’; beautiful women dressed in white fed him with fruits, berries and flowers.
He woke after a long and healing sleep and took a second, stronger dose, which precipitated him back into sleep and the sense of an epic voyage into other worlds, teeming with ‘things which I would never imagine even in my thoughts’. He relived swathes of his childhood, re-encountered friends from throughout his life, and even predicted the future at length with such confidence that a priest was summoned to witness. He concluded with a challenge to science: ‘If someone can prove that both the effect and the influence of the mushroom are non-existent, then I shall stop being defender of the miraculous mushroom of Kamchatka’.
Kopék’s toadstool epiphany was widely reported, and it began a fashion for re-examining elements of European folklore and culture and interpolating fly agaric intoxication into odd corners of myth and tradition. Perhaps the best example of this is the notion that the berserkers, the Viking shock troops of the 8th to 10th centuries, drank a fly agaric potion before going into battle and fighting like men possessed. This is regularly asserted as fact not only among mushroom and Viking aficionados but also in text-books and encyclopaedias; nevertheless, it’s almost certainly a creation of the nineteenth century. There’s no reference to fly agaric, or indeed to any exotic plant stimulants, in the sagas or eddas: the notion of mushroom-intoxicated berserker warriors was first suggested by the Swedish professor Samuel Ödman in his Attempt to Explain the Berserk-Raging of Ancient Nordic Warriors through Natural History (1784), which was simply speculation based on eighteenth-century Siberian accounts. By the end of the nineteenth century scholars like the Norwegian botanist Frederik Christian Schübeler had taken Ödman’s suggestion as proof. The rest is history – or, more likely, urban myth.
Thus, by the mid nineteenth century, the fly agaric had not only become an instantly recognisable fairyland motif but had also, and separately, been established as a portal to the land of dreams, and written into European folklore from exotic sources. This doesn’t invalidate the claim that mushrooms in fairy literature represent the concealed or half-forgotten knowledge of their hallucinogenic properties – it’s impossible to disprove such a negative – but it does show how fairy art and literature could have evolved without any such knowledge. Some may well have been directly drug-inspired – an obvious candidate would be John Anster Fitzgerald’s phantasmic paintings of dreaming subjects surrounted by distended, other-dimensional goblin creatures – but the drug in question is far more likely to have been opium, the omnipresent Victorian panacea.
But there is a case where we can be more specific. The most famous and frequently-debated conjunction of fungi, psychedelia and fairy-lore is the array of mushrooms and hallucinatory potions, mindbending and shapeshifting motifs in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Do Alice’s adventures represent first-hand knowledge of the hallucinogenic effects of mushrooms? And, if not, how were they assembled without it?
The facts in the case could hardly be better known. Alice, down the rabbit hole, meets a caterpillar sitting on a mushroom, which tells her in a ‘languid, sleepy voice’ that the mushroom is the key to navigating through her strange journey: ‘one side will make you grow taller, the other side will make you grow shorter’. Alice takes a chunk from each side of the mushroom, and begins a series of vertiginous transformations of size, shooting up into the clouds before learning to maintain her normal size by eating alternate bites. Throughout the rest of the book she continues to take the mushroom: entering the house of the duchess, approaching the domain of the march hare and, climactically, before entering the hidden garden with the golden key.
Since the 1960s all this has frequently been read as an initiatic work of drug literature, an esoteric guide to the other worlds opened up by mushrooms and other psychedelics – most memorably, perhaps, in Jefferson Airplane’s psychedelic anthem White Rabbit (1967), which conjures Alice’s journey as a path of self-discovery where the stale advice of parents is transcended by the guidance received from within by ‘feeding your head’. By and large, this reading has provoked outrage and disgust among Lewis Carroll scholars, who seem to regard his critics’ accusations of paedophilia as inoffensive by comparison.
But there’s plenty of evidence that medication and unusual states of consciousness exercised a profound fascination for Carroll, and he read about them voraciously. His interest was spurred by his own delicate health – insomnia and frequent migraines – which he treated with homeopathic remedies, including many derived from psychoactive plants like aconite and belladonna. His library included several books on homeopathy as well as standard texts on mind-altering drugs like W.B.Carpenter’s Mental Physiology (1874) and F.E.Anstie’s influential compendium Stimulants and Narcotics (1864). He was greatly intrigued by the epileptic seizure of an Oxford student at which he was present, and visited St.Bartholemew’s Hospital in London in order to witness chloroform anaesthesia.
Nevertheless, it seems that Alice’s mind-expanding journeys owed little to the actual drug experiences of their author. Although Carroll – in everyday life, of course, the Reverend Charles Dodgson – was a moderate drinker and, to judge by his library, opposed to alcohol prohibition, he had a strong dislike of tobacco smoking and wrote sceptically in his letters about the pervasive presence in syrups and soothing tonics of powerful narcotics like opium – the ‘medicine so dexterously, but ineffectually, concealed in the jam of our early childhood’. In an era where few embarked on personal drug exploration without both robust health and a compelling reason, he remains a very unlikely self-experimenter.
But it seems we may be able to offer a more precise account. The scholar Michael Carmichael has demonstrated that, a few days before writing Alice, Carroll made his only ever visit to the Bodleian library, where a copy of Mordecai Cooke’s recently-published drug survey The Seven Sisters of Sleep (1860) had been deposited. The Bodleian copy of this book still has most of its pages uncut, with the notable exception of the contents page and the chapter on the fly agaric, entitled ‘The Exile of Siberia’. Carroll was particularly interested in all things Russian: in fact, Russia was the only country he ever visited outside Britain. And, as Carmichael puts it, ‘Dodgson would have been immediately attracted to Cooke’s Seven Sisters of Sleep for two more obvious reasons: he had seven sisters and he was a lifelong insomniac’.
Cooke’s chapter on fly agaric is, like the rest of Seven Sisters, a useful compendium of the drug lore and anecdotes which were familiar to the Victorians. It recalls Dr.Everard Brande’s account of the J.S. family; it rounds up the various Siberian accounts of fly agaric; it also focuses on precisely the effects of mushroom intoxication which Carroll wove into Alice’s adventures. ‘Erroneous impressions of size and distance are common occurrences’, Cooke records of the fly agaric. ‘A straw lying in the road becomes a formidable object, to overcome which, a leap is taken sufficient to clear a barrel of ale, or the prostrate trunk of a British oak.’
Whether or not Carroll read this actual copy, it seems very likely that the properties of the mushroom in Alice were based on his encounter with Siberian fly agaric reportage rather than any hidden British tradition of its use, let alone the author’s own. If so, he was neither the secret drug initiate that has been claimed, nor the Victorian gentleman entirely innocent of the arcane knowledge of drugs subsequently imputed to him. In this sense, Alice’s otherworld experiences seem to hover, like much of Victorian fairy literature and fantasy, in a borderland between naïve innocence of such drugs and knowing references to them.
A version of this article first appeared in Fortean Times (2003)
RELATED BOOKS: Emperors of Dreams, High Society
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Re: Frage zur Kulturgeschichte des SKKK
Wow, danke für diesen ausführlichen Artikel über die Kulturgeschichte der halluzinogenen Pilze, echt klasse ! 
Re: Frage zur Kulturgeschichte des SKKK
Introduction: Evidence for entheogen use in prehistory and world religions
Author: Michael Winkelman
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1556/2054.2019.024
Publication Date: 01 Jun 2019
Online Publication Date: 13 Sep 2019
Abstract
This introduction to the special issue reviews research that supports the hypothesis that psychedelics, particularly psilocybin, were central features in the development of religion. The greater response of the human serotonergic system to psychedelics than is the case for chimpanzees’ serotonergic receptors indicates that these substances were environmental factors that affected hominin evolution. These substances also contributed to the evolution of ritual capacities, shamanism, and the associated alterations of consciousness. The role of psilocybin mushrooms in the ancient evolution of human religions is attested to fungiform petroglyphs, rock artifacts, and mythologies from all major regions of the world. This prehistoric mycolatry persisted into the historic era in the major religious traditions of the world, which often left evidence of these practices in sculpture, art, and scriptures. This continuation of entheogenic practices in the historical world is addressed in the articles here. But even through new entheogenic combinations were introduced, complex societies generally removed entheogens from widespread consumption, restricted them in private and exclusive spiritual practices of the leaders, and often carried out repressive punishment of those who engaged in entheogenic practices.
Introduction: Psychedelic Use in Human Antiquity
When human ancestors first intentionally ingested psychedelics will forever remain unknown, but what is certain is that millions of years ago hominins encountered psilocybin-containing mushroom species across the temperate regions of the world and undoubtedly consumed them. Just when our ancestors began to deliberately use these conscious-altering substances in rituals will never be known with certainty. However, we can be reasonably certain that more than a million years ago, our Homo habilis and Homo erectus ancestors and their mimetic capacity expressed in group song and dancing expanded beyond the nighttime displays characteristic of hominids (Donald, 1991; Dunbar, 2014; Winkelman, 2009, 2010a, 2010c, 2015) as they were extended by the effects of psychedelic mushrooms. This expanded visionary ritual capacity set the foundations for the emergence of shamanism and the deliberate use of psychoactive plants to enhance ritual activities and visionary experiences.
The evidence for the ancient ritual consumption of psychedelic plants and their influence on human evolution is partially substantiated by the converging evidence reviewed here:
1.Psilocybin-containing species are found virtually in all regions of the world and stretching back millions of years, as evidenced in psilocybin-containing species unique to each of the major regions of the world;
2.the enhanced binding of the human serotonin receptors with psychedelics;
3.shamanic traditions of ritual use of sacred mushrooms and other psychedelic substances that have great antiquity, as attested to language, art, petroglyphs, and stone sculptures of fungiform figures that often closely resemble the observable features of local psilocybin-containing mushroom species; and
4.ancient psychedelic mushroom use attested to in artifacts from religious traditions in all of the major regions of the world.
Worldwide psilocybin mushroom species.
The human engagement with psychedelics was inevitable in the form of psilocybin-containing mushrooms. The widespread presence of species containing psilocybin across most ecozones (Guzmán, 2005, 2009; Guzmán, Allen, & Gartz, 1998; Stamets, 1996) indicates that they were widely present as environmental influences affecting hominin adaptations across the major inhabitable regions of the earth for millions of years. There is a worldwide distribution of psychedelic fungi, especially the psilocybin-containing species, as well as other fungi that are used as entheogens. Psychoactive fungi are found across most ecozones. In the Americas, they have been noted as far north as Alaska and as far south as Chile; other Southern Hemisphere extremities include Australia and New Zealand. The presence of psilocybin-containing species across the tropics and extending far into northern latitudes assured that our various ancestor species commonly encountered and ingested psilocybin-containing mushrooms.
The premodern worldwide distribution of psychedelic mushrooms is illustrated by regionally specific species. In addition to species unique to Thailand (Psilocybe samuiensis), New Zealand (Psilocybe aucklandii), Australia (Psilocybe australiana and Psilocybe subaeruginosa), Japan (Psilocybe argentipes and Psilocybe subcaerulipes), and Africa (Panaeolus africanus and Psilocybe natalensis), there are psychoactive fungi that are distributed across major regions of the earth such as the Northern Hemisphere, Eurasia, tropical and subtropical zones, and the Arctic and Alpine areas (Guzmán et al., 1998). This distribution, especially the numerous region-specific species that attest to their ancient presence, shows the inevitability of worldwide premodern exposure of hominins to psychedelic species.
Psychedelic influences in hominin evolution
The evidence for psychedelic influences in hominin antiquity is indirect, but undeniable with the weight of diverse forms of evidence. Humans have a long-term evolutionary relationship with psychotropic plant substances, a relationship that resulted from their selective effects on human evolution (Sullivan & Hagen, 2002). There were a variety of ancient exposures to plant substances that effected human evolution, with our ancestors acquiring fitness benefits as a consequence of the use of psychoactive substances (Sullivan, Hagen, & Hammerstein, 2008).
The use of psychedelics exemplifies these enhancements of neurotransmitter functions as a consequence of their ingestion in plant sources. Evidence for the influences of psychedelics on human evolution is found in the greater sensitivity of the binding of psychedelics with the human serotonergic system than is the case for chimpanzees (Pregenzer, Alberts, Bock, Slightom, & Im, 1997). These differences reflect the survival advantages that resulted from their use and the consequent selection for those ancestors with an enhanced capacity to utilize these exogenous analogues of the serotonergic neurotransmitters, influencing a major neuromodulatory system. The human–chimpanzees differences in the sensitivity of response of the serotonergic system establish that there were ancient hominin adaptations involving selection for those ancestors in the hominin line that had a capacity for enhanced binding with psychedelics.
Hominin adaptations to the secondary metabolites of fungi, particularly distinguishing among toxic species, food sources, and consciousness-altering psychedelic species, were significant for human survival. Consequently, human ancestors underwent a multimillion year process of acquiring biological and eventually cultural adaptations to distinguish among mushroom species and their appropriate use. These experiences could have functioned as selective factors in the evolution of specific characteristics of the human brain, our neurotransmitter systems, and our innate psychology that could best exploit these serotonin- and dopamine-enhancing effects.
These psychoactive effects were inevitably incorporated into the central dynamics of shamanic rituals, attested to in the diverse species used as sacraments or entheogens in cultures around the world (see Rätsch, 2005; Schultes, Hofmann, & Rätsch, 1992). Shamanism was central to premodern ritual practices, attested to in the worldwide presence of shamanism in foraging societies (Winkelman, 1992). This ritual activity was central to many aspects of human adaptation and evolution, including subsistence, social organization, healing, cosmology, and symbolic cognition (Winkelman, 2010a).
Entheogens in shamanic origins
Shamanism was central to premodern ritual practices worldwide, attested to the presence of remarkably similar shamanistic practices and beliefs in foraging societies cross-culturally (Winkelman, 1992, 2010a, 2010b). The entheogenic contributions to the origins and evolution of shamanic practices are indicated by the substantial parallels between the basic principles of shamanism and the experiences induced by psilocybin mushrooms and other psychedelics. Ethnographic accounts reveal repetitive features associated with the ritual use of psychedelics in cultures around the world (Dobkin de Rios, 1984; Winkelman, 2007). These include the belief that they are:
1. –entheogenic, inducing an internal sense of spiritual presence;
2. –provide access to a spiritual world, the supernatural, bringing the world of mythic beliefs into experience;
3. –produce an experience of one’s soul or spirit and its separation from the body and travel to the supernatural world;
4. –cause experiences of the activation of powers within and outside of the person;
5. –induce experiences of relationships with animals and at times the sense of transformation into an animal;
6. –provoke experiences of ego death followed by transformation or rebirth;
7. –provide information through visions;
8. –engage healing, especially through the dramatic ritual evocation of emotional experiences; and
9. –provide processes for group integration and enhanced social cohesion.
Guerra-Doce (2006, 2015) similarly notes that the predominant model of entheogenic consumption in foraging societies is associated with shamanic practices, where the shaman consumes the sacrament to enhance the healer’s spiritual force and divinatory capacity for purposes of healing. These entheogenic practices generally occur in a communal ritual context with the attendance of the entire local group, who are often subjected to the conditions of ritual-fasting, as well as the experiences from drumming, singing, and clapping and overnight vigil. These ritual practices enhance the effects of the entheogen in producing experiences of communication with divinities for a range of objectives. These include: diagnoses of disease and guiding treatment; establishing contact with the ancestors to obtain advice; seeking advice from the spirits regarding plans for the future; acquiring information regarding hunting and about missing family members; and seeking to influence spiritual forces to enhance well-being.
The institutionalization of the effects of psilocybin within communal ritual practices was inevitable foundational influences in the evolution of human religiosity, as well as significant aspects of our evolved psychology (Winkelman, 2010a, 2013). Psychoactive substances were inevitably incorporated into the central dynamics of shamanic and religious rituals, attested to in the diverse species used as sacraments or entheogens in cultures around the world (see Dobkin de Rios, 1984; Rätsch, 2005; Schultes et al., 1992). Shamanism provided the cosmological and ritual context within which the experiences induced by psychedelics were incorporated into human culture, and through their selective effects, into humans’ innate psychology (Winkelman, 2010a, 2013, 2014a, 2014b). These influences also contributed to the development of ritual healing practices, exploiting principles that were part of the formation of our evolved sociality and psychology (Winkelman, 2015). These shamanic activities played a key role in the evolution of hominins (Winkelman, 2010c) and the evolution of modern human cultural during the Middle/Upper Paleolithic some 50,000 years ago (Winkelman, 2002).
Rossano (2007, 2009, 2011) points out that the interaction of shamanic ritual context with the evolution of the human brain contributed to selection for susceptibility to hypnotic and placebo effects. The well-known “suggestibility” and contextual effects (set and setting) produced by psychedelics indicate that their use would have also contributed to these tendencies to be influenced by the expectations of others. This selection occurred because of the health benefits provided by the mental states that enhanced susceptibility to ritual healing and the ability to use alternate identities, supernatural beliefs, and internalization of the expectations of others to produce beneficial internal states. This ritual context also selected for greater propensities for a variety of personal, interpersonal, and cognitive responses that enhanced ritual healing processes.
Psychedelics enhanced the survival and reproduction of those who could best exploit and benefit from their effects; consequently, psychedelics operated as environmental factors that selected for those who had greater degrees of those innate qualities that were elicited by the neurobehavioral effects of psychedelic and exploited by ritual processes. The selective effects of psychedelics exercised their influences in the context of enhanced capacities for participation in ritual and healing activities. These involved the enhanced cognitive states that were produced by the effects of psychedelics (enhanced serotonin and its effects of brain function; see Winkelman, 2014b, 2017b).
Humans have sought out not only psychedelic mushrooms for their consciousness altering properties, but a wide variety of plant substances as well. While a principal conceptualization of psychedelics is that they involve the ethnobotanical (and chemical) substances with action on the serotonin 5HT2 receptors (such as psilocybin, ergots, ayahuasca, and bufotenine), the visionary and entheogenic substances are not limited to this class of action. Visionary and entheogenic experiences are produced by diverse classes of plants and their respective neurochemicals and their effects on diverse neurotransmitter systems, not only serotonin, but also dopamine, endocannabinoids, GABA, muscarine, and others (see Winkelman, 2017a, 2017b for review). The human potential for entheogenic experiences and visionary encounters appears to reflect innate properties of our nervous system, a potential elicited by many different drug and non-drug mechanisms (also see Winkelman, 2011). This human search for drug-induced spiritual encounters has an intimate relationship with our evolved psychology (Winkelman, 2013, 2014a, 2014b) and has led humans to discover many different plant substances for altering consciousness.
The antiquity of Homo sapiens’ relationships with psychoactive plants
In his paper here on “The oldest archaeological data evidencing the relationship of H. sapiens with psychoactive plants,” Giorgio Samorini provides a worldwide overview of what we know about the prehistory of entheogenic practices. As modern instruments become increasingly sophisticated and sensitive, they are capable of detecting the presence of miniscule quantities of psychoactive plant sources in various archeological materials. These varied approaches (also see Fitzpatrick, 2018) are providing hard evidence of the antiquity of humanity’s use of botanical agents known for their ability to induce alterations of consciousness. Samorini’s review of the archeological literature on the presence of psychoactive plant sources shows evidence of H. sapiens’ relationship with psychoactive plant sources going back nearly 10,000 years. This synthesis regarding the earliest knowledge of the main psychoactive plant sources of the world indicates the antiquity of use of diverse plants sources, but not always providing certain knowledge regarding their mode of use (i.e., intoxicant, food, or material).
A more pressing question for Samorini’s findings is whether the use of these plant substances was for entheogenic purposes or for other reasons. In some sense, these questions might always remain ambiguous, but from the perspective of the entheogenic paradigm, the meaning of the facts is less ambiguous. If our distant ancestors deliberately left psychoactive substances in graves and other deposits, is there a fundamental ambiguity regarding what the message is here? The limited grave goods attest to the substantial significance that people placed in these objects, and more so, their implications for concepts of the spiritual and afterlife. Burials are intrinsically entheogenic in their intentions, an unequivocal statement that people perceived these substances as central to relationships with the spiritual and the afterlife. The presence of mushroom representations is particularly powerful evidence in this regard, attesting to a central concern with entheogenic experiences. There is no reason to presume that the fungiform representations were depictions of culinary activities or incidental environmental features. The inclusion of mushroom effigies in burial goods and ritual artifacts attests directly to their significance in the production of entheogenic experiences. Proposals of non-entheogenic purposes to ancient mushroom representations face the burden of proof and ought to be backed by evidence, not just offered as speculations.
The diversity of psychoactive plant substances used in the past as indicated in Samorini’s review here makes an important point. The widespread use of diverse plant substances and psychoactive ingredients to evoke common themes of entheogenic experience and shamanism reveals that what is important about these agents is not many different and specific forms of psychophysiological action, but rather the common shift in consciousness that is produced by many different psychoactive agents and mechanisms (Winkelman, 2011, 2017a). It is the general principle of the alteration of consciousness, which is relevant to understanding entheogenic experiences. While the specific substances used may not conform to the “classic psychedelic” – those acting at the 5HT-2 serotonin receptors – the real issue is their visionary and entheogenic capacities, induced through a variety of pathways or mechanisms, but resulting in a common physiological condition of organismic operation (an integrative mode of consciousness; Winkelman, 2011).
As Fitzpatrick and Merlin (2018) point out, while humans’ use of psychoactive substances falls into many different pharmaceutical categories (i.e., inebriants, stimulants, opiates, narcotics, hallucinogens, etc.), ethnographic analogies suggest that their use in the past generally shares a common entheogenic function of divine communication, even if the substances involved are not generally considered to be hallucinogenic or psychedelic (acting at 5HT2 serotonin receptors). The classification of the use of these diverse psychoactive substances as entheogenic in purpose is appropriate, given the typical perspectives of most cultures toward the use of varied classes of psychoactive substances that are employed to enhance experiences of contact with deities and supernatural forces. An entheogenic perspective may be valid even in the cases of substances with recognized alcohol content because of the widespread practice of mixing other psychoactive substances in the fermentation process to enhance the effects.
The integrative mode of consciousness emerges with the elevation of ancient brain functions by diverse process that promotes psychodynamic growth and cognitive, social, and psychological integration. Diverse ritual activities induce this integrative mode of consciousness, stimulating the autonomic nervous system through extensive ergotropic (sympathetic) activation until collapse into a trophotropic (parasympathetic) dominant state with a slowing of the brain waves into a more synchronized and coherent pattern (see Winkelman, 2011 for review). This extreme parasympathetic state is a recuperative state of the body, a state of extreme relaxation culminating in sleep and unconsciousness that restores homeostatic balance and evokes endogenous healing responses, especially through reduction of stress responses. This shift to parasympathetic dominance is also accompanied by a shift from left-hemisphere- to right-hemisphere-dominated brain processes and from frontal brain activity to predominant brain wave patterns emanating from lower brain structures. Winkelman (2017a, 2018) has reviewed evidence indicating that these diverse entheogenic substances result in the stimulation of innate modular structures and intelligences that provide the central features of spirit encounters.
The human search for chemically enhanced consciousness as a better conduit to experience divinity is a virtual universal of human cultures. And as will be illustrated in a number of articles below, this development likely began with the most easily available sources – psychedelic mushrooms – which were later supplanted by more complex combinations of plants. This primordial use of mushrooms as entheogens is illustrated by findings of fungiform artifacts from all of the major areas of the world, as seen in the following section of this introduction. While far from exhaustive, it establishes that there existed ancient spiritual practices in all of the major regions of the world that were entheomycological, finding entheogenic inspiration in locally available psychedelic fungi.
Mushroom and Entheogenic Cults of the Past
By their nature, mushrooms are hard to detect in the archeological record, as their fleshy substance largely composed of water quickly deteriorates and leaves little if any physical trace. Consequently, the evidence regarding the roles of psychedelic mushrooms in cultural activities of the past involves fungiform representations in petroglyphs, rock art, sculptures, and metal artifacts found in cultures around the world. Samorini (2012) reviewed a wide range of mushroom forms found in cultures around the world, showing that mycolatry is a widespread ancient practice. Psychedelic mushrooms were encountered in most of the habitable regions of the world and displayed in ways that indicate that they were central features of early ritual systems. Their significance led their practitioners to capture the source of their experiences and their significance by producing images on stone.
Hier geht es weiter.
Author: Michael Winkelman
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1556/2054.2019.024
Publication Date: 01 Jun 2019
Online Publication Date: 13 Sep 2019
Abstract
This introduction to the special issue reviews research that supports the hypothesis that psychedelics, particularly psilocybin, were central features in the development of religion. The greater response of the human serotonergic system to psychedelics than is the case for chimpanzees’ serotonergic receptors indicates that these substances were environmental factors that affected hominin evolution. These substances also contributed to the evolution of ritual capacities, shamanism, and the associated alterations of consciousness. The role of psilocybin mushrooms in the ancient evolution of human religions is attested to fungiform petroglyphs, rock artifacts, and mythologies from all major regions of the world. This prehistoric mycolatry persisted into the historic era in the major religious traditions of the world, which often left evidence of these practices in sculpture, art, and scriptures. This continuation of entheogenic practices in the historical world is addressed in the articles here. But even through new entheogenic combinations were introduced, complex societies generally removed entheogens from widespread consumption, restricted them in private and exclusive spiritual practices of the leaders, and often carried out repressive punishment of those who engaged in entheogenic practices.
Introduction: Psychedelic Use in Human Antiquity
When human ancestors first intentionally ingested psychedelics will forever remain unknown, but what is certain is that millions of years ago hominins encountered psilocybin-containing mushroom species across the temperate regions of the world and undoubtedly consumed them. Just when our ancestors began to deliberately use these conscious-altering substances in rituals will never be known with certainty. However, we can be reasonably certain that more than a million years ago, our Homo habilis and Homo erectus ancestors and their mimetic capacity expressed in group song and dancing expanded beyond the nighttime displays characteristic of hominids (Donald, 1991; Dunbar, 2014; Winkelman, 2009, 2010a, 2010c, 2015) as they were extended by the effects of psychedelic mushrooms. This expanded visionary ritual capacity set the foundations for the emergence of shamanism and the deliberate use of psychoactive plants to enhance ritual activities and visionary experiences.
The evidence for the ancient ritual consumption of psychedelic plants and their influence on human evolution is partially substantiated by the converging evidence reviewed here:
1.Psilocybin-containing species are found virtually in all regions of the world and stretching back millions of years, as evidenced in psilocybin-containing species unique to each of the major regions of the world;
2.the enhanced binding of the human serotonin receptors with psychedelics;
3.shamanic traditions of ritual use of sacred mushrooms and other psychedelic substances that have great antiquity, as attested to language, art, petroglyphs, and stone sculptures of fungiform figures that often closely resemble the observable features of local psilocybin-containing mushroom species; and
4.ancient psychedelic mushroom use attested to in artifacts from religious traditions in all of the major regions of the world.
Worldwide psilocybin mushroom species.
The human engagement with psychedelics was inevitable in the form of psilocybin-containing mushrooms. The widespread presence of species containing psilocybin across most ecozones (Guzmán, 2005, 2009; Guzmán, Allen, & Gartz, 1998; Stamets, 1996) indicates that they were widely present as environmental influences affecting hominin adaptations across the major inhabitable regions of the earth for millions of years. There is a worldwide distribution of psychedelic fungi, especially the psilocybin-containing species, as well as other fungi that are used as entheogens. Psychoactive fungi are found across most ecozones. In the Americas, they have been noted as far north as Alaska and as far south as Chile; other Southern Hemisphere extremities include Australia and New Zealand. The presence of psilocybin-containing species across the tropics and extending far into northern latitudes assured that our various ancestor species commonly encountered and ingested psilocybin-containing mushrooms.
The premodern worldwide distribution of psychedelic mushrooms is illustrated by regionally specific species. In addition to species unique to Thailand (Psilocybe samuiensis), New Zealand (Psilocybe aucklandii), Australia (Psilocybe australiana and Psilocybe subaeruginosa), Japan (Psilocybe argentipes and Psilocybe subcaerulipes), and Africa (Panaeolus africanus and Psilocybe natalensis), there are psychoactive fungi that are distributed across major regions of the earth such as the Northern Hemisphere, Eurasia, tropical and subtropical zones, and the Arctic and Alpine areas (Guzmán et al., 1998). This distribution, especially the numerous region-specific species that attest to their ancient presence, shows the inevitability of worldwide premodern exposure of hominins to psychedelic species.
Psychedelic influences in hominin evolution
The evidence for psychedelic influences in hominin antiquity is indirect, but undeniable with the weight of diverse forms of evidence. Humans have a long-term evolutionary relationship with psychotropic plant substances, a relationship that resulted from their selective effects on human evolution (Sullivan & Hagen, 2002). There were a variety of ancient exposures to plant substances that effected human evolution, with our ancestors acquiring fitness benefits as a consequence of the use of psychoactive substances (Sullivan, Hagen, & Hammerstein, 2008).
The use of psychedelics exemplifies these enhancements of neurotransmitter functions as a consequence of their ingestion in plant sources. Evidence for the influences of psychedelics on human evolution is found in the greater sensitivity of the binding of psychedelics with the human serotonergic system than is the case for chimpanzees (Pregenzer, Alberts, Bock, Slightom, & Im, 1997). These differences reflect the survival advantages that resulted from their use and the consequent selection for those ancestors with an enhanced capacity to utilize these exogenous analogues of the serotonergic neurotransmitters, influencing a major neuromodulatory system. The human–chimpanzees differences in the sensitivity of response of the serotonergic system establish that there were ancient hominin adaptations involving selection for those ancestors in the hominin line that had a capacity for enhanced binding with psychedelics.
Hominin adaptations to the secondary metabolites of fungi, particularly distinguishing among toxic species, food sources, and consciousness-altering psychedelic species, were significant for human survival. Consequently, human ancestors underwent a multimillion year process of acquiring biological and eventually cultural adaptations to distinguish among mushroom species and their appropriate use. These experiences could have functioned as selective factors in the evolution of specific characteristics of the human brain, our neurotransmitter systems, and our innate psychology that could best exploit these serotonin- and dopamine-enhancing effects.
These psychoactive effects were inevitably incorporated into the central dynamics of shamanic rituals, attested to in the diverse species used as sacraments or entheogens in cultures around the world (see Rätsch, 2005; Schultes, Hofmann, & Rätsch, 1992). Shamanism was central to premodern ritual practices, attested to in the worldwide presence of shamanism in foraging societies (Winkelman, 1992). This ritual activity was central to many aspects of human adaptation and evolution, including subsistence, social organization, healing, cosmology, and symbolic cognition (Winkelman, 2010a).
Entheogens in shamanic origins
Shamanism was central to premodern ritual practices worldwide, attested to the presence of remarkably similar shamanistic practices and beliefs in foraging societies cross-culturally (Winkelman, 1992, 2010a, 2010b). The entheogenic contributions to the origins and evolution of shamanic practices are indicated by the substantial parallels between the basic principles of shamanism and the experiences induced by psilocybin mushrooms and other psychedelics. Ethnographic accounts reveal repetitive features associated with the ritual use of psychedelics in cultures around the world (Dobkin de Rios, 1984; Winkelman, 2007). These include the belief that they are:
1. –entheogenic, inducing an internal sense of spiritual presence;
2. –provide access to a spiritual world, the supernatural, bringing the world of mythic beliefs into experience;
3. –produce an experience of one’s soul or spirit and its separation from the body and travel to the supernatural world;
4. –cause experiences of the activation of powers within and outside of the person;
5. –induce experiences of relationships with animals and at times the sense of transformation into an animal;
6. –provoke experiences of ego death followed by transformation or rebirth;
7. –provide information through visions;
8. –engage healing, especially through the dramatic ritual evocation of emotional experiences; and
9. –provide processes for group integration and enhanced social cohesion.
Guerra-Doce (2006, 2015) similarly notes that the predominant model of entheogenic consumption in foraging societies is associated with shamanic practices, where the shaman consumes the sacrament to enhance the healer’s spiritual force and divinatory capacity for purposes of healing. These entheogenic practices generally occur in a communal ritual context with the attendance of the entire local group, who are often subjected to the conditions of ritual-fasting, as well as the experiences from drumming, singing, and clapping and overnight vigil. These ritual practices enhance the effects of the entheogen in producing experiences of communication with divinities for a range of objectives. These include: diagnoses of disease and guiding treatment; establishing contact with the ancestors to obtain advice; seeking advice from the spirits regarding plans for the future; acquiring information regarding hunting and about missing family members; and seeking to influence spiritual forces to enhance well-being.
The institutionalization of the effects of psilocybin within communal ritual practices was inevitable foundational influences in the evolution of human religiosity, as well as significant aspects of our evolved psychology (Winkelman, 2010a, 2013). Psychoactive substances were inevitably incorporated into the central dynamics of shamanic and religious rituals, attested to in the diverse species used as sacraments or entheogens in cultures around the world (see Dobkin de Rios, 1984; Rätsch, 2005; Schultes et al., 1992). Shamanism provided the cosmological and ritual context within which the experiences induced by psychedelics were incorporated into human culture, and through their selective effects, into humans’ innate psychology (Winkelman, 2010a, 2013, 2014a, 2014b). These influences also contributed to the development of ritual healing practices, exploiting principles that were part of the formation of our evolved sociality and psychology (Winkelman, 2015). These shamanic activities played a key role in the evolution of hominins (Winkelman, 2010c) and the evolution of modern human cultural during the Middle/Upper Paleolithic some 50,000 years ago (Winkelman, 2002).
Rossano (2007, 2009, 2011) points out that the interaction of shamanic ritual context with the evolution of the human brain contributed to selection for susceptibility to hypnotic and placebo effects. The well-known “suggestibility” and contextual effects (set and setting) produced by psychedelics indicate that their use would have also contributed to these tendencies to be influenced by the expectations of others. This selection occurred because of the health benefits provided by the mental states that enhanced susceptibility to ritual healing and the ability to use alternate identities, supernatural beliefs, and internalization of the expectations of others to produce beneficial internal states. This ritual context also selected for greater propensities for a variety of personal, interpersonal, and cognitive responses that enhanced ritual healing processes.
Psychedelics enhanced the survival and reproduction of those who could best exploit and benefit from their effects; consequently, psychedelics operated as environmental factors that selected for those who had greater degrees of those innate qualities that were elicited by the neurobehavioral effects of psychedelic and exploited by ritual processes. The selective effects of psychedelics exercised their influences in the context of enhanced capacities for participation in ritual and healing activities. These involved the enhanced cognitive states that were produced by the effects of psychedelics (enhanced serotonin and its effects of brain function; see Winkelman, 2014b, 2017b).
Humans have sought out not only psychedelic mushrooms for their consciousness altering properties, but a wide variety of plant substances as well. While a principal conceptualization of psychedelics is that they involve the ethnobotanical (and chemical) substances with action on the serotonin 5HT2 receptors (such as psilocybin, ergots, ayahuasca, and bufotenine), the visionary and entheogenic substances are not limited to this class of action. Visionary and entheogenic experiences are produced by diverse classes of plants and their respective neurochemicals and their effects on diverse neurotransmitter systems, not only serotonin, but also dopamine, endocannabinoids, GABA, muscarine, and others (see Winkelman, 2017a, 2017b for review). The human potential for entheogenic experiences and visionary encounters appears to reflect innate properties of our nervous system, a potential elicited by many different drug and non-drug mechanisms (also see Winkelman, 2011). This human search for drug-induced spiritual encounters has an intimate relationship with our evolved psychology (Winkelman, 2013, 2014a, 2014b) and has led humans to discover many different plant substances for altering consciousness.
The antiquity of Homo sapiens’ relationships with psychoactive plants
In his paper here on “The oldest archaeological data evidencing the relationship of H. sapiens with psychoactive plants,” Giorgio Samorini provides a worldwide overview of what we know about the prehistory of entheogenic practices. As modern instruments become increasingly sophisticated and sensitive, they are capable of detecting the presence of miniscule quantities of psychoactive plant sources in various archeological materials. These varied approaches (also see Fitzpatrick, 2018) are providing hard evidence of the antiquity of humanity’s use of botanical agents known for their ability to induce alterations of consciousness. Samorini’s review of the archeological literature on the presence of psychoactive plant sources shows evidence of H. sapiens’ relationship with psychoactive plant sources going back nearly 10,000 years. This synthesis regarding the earliest knowledge of the main psychoactive plant sources of the world indicates the antiquity of use of diverse plants sources, but not always providing certain knowledge regarding their mode of use (i.e., intoxicant, food, or material).
A more pressing question for Samorini’s findings is whether the use of these plant substances was for entheogenic purposes or for other reasons. In some sense, these questions might always remain ambiguous, but from the perspective of the entheogenic paradigm, the meaning of the facts is less ambiguous. If our distant ancestors deliberately left psychoactive substances in graves and other deposits, is there a fundamental ambiguity regarding what the message is here? The limited grave goods attest to the substantial significance that people placed in these objects, and more so, their implications for concepts of the spiritual and afterlife. Burials are intrinsically entheogenic in their intentions, an unequivocal statement that people perceived these substances as central to relationships with the spiritual and the afterlife. The presence of mushroom representations is particularly powerful evidence in this regard, attesting to a central concern with entheogenic experiences. There is no reason to presume that the fungiform representations were depictions of culinary activities or incidental environmental features. The inclusion of mushroom effigies in burial goods and ritual artifacts attests directly to their significance in the production of entheogenic experiences. Proposals of non-entheogenic purposes to ancient mushroom representations face the burden of proof and ought to be backed by evidence, not just offered as speculations.
The diversity of psychoactive plant substances used in the past as indicated in Samorini’s review here makes an important point. The widespread use of diverse plant substances and psychoactive ingredients to evoke common themes of entheogenic experience and shamanism reveals that what is important about these agents is not many different and specific forms of psychophysiological action, but rather the common shift in consciousness that is produced by many different psychoactive agents and mechanisms (Winkelman, 2011, 2017a). It is the general principle of the alteration of consciousness, which is relevant to understanding entheogenic experiences. While the specific substances used may not conform to the “classic psychedelic” – those acting at the 5HT-2 serotonin receptors – the real issue is their visionary and entheogenic capacities, induced through a variety of pathways or mechanisms, but resulting in a common physiological condition of organismic operation (an integrative mode of consciousness; Winkelman, 2011).
As Fitzpatrick and Merlin (2018) point out, while humans’ use of psychoactive substances falls into many different pharmaceutical categories (i.e., inebriants, stimulants, opiates, narcotics, hallucinogens, etc.), ethnographic analogies suggest that their use in the past generally shares a common entheogenic function of divine communication, even if the substances involved are not generally considered to be hallucinogenic or psychedelic (acting at 5HT2 serotonin receptors). The classification of the use of these diverse psychoactive substances as entheogenic in purpose is appropriate, given the typical perspectives of most cultures toward the use of varied classes of psychoactive substances that are employed to enhance experiences of contact with deities and supernatural forces. An entheogenic perspective may be valid even in the cases of substances with recognized alcohol content because of the widespread practice of mixing other psychoactive substances in the fermentation process to enhance the effects.
The integrative mode of consciousness emerges with the elevation of ancient brain functions by diverse process that promotes psychodynamic growth and cognitive, social, and psychological integration. Diverse ritual activities induce this integrative mode of consciousness, stimulating the autonomic nervous system through extensive ergotropic (sympathetic) activation until collapse into a trophotropic (parasympathetic) dominant state with a slowing of the brain waves into a more synchronized and coherent pattern (see Winkelman, 2011 for review). This extreme parasympathetic state is a recuperative state of the body, a state of extreme relaxation culminating in sleep and unconsciousness that restores homeostatic balance and evokes endogenous healing responses, especially through reduction of stress responses. This shift to parasympathetic dominance is also accompanied by a shift from left-hemisphere- to right-hemisphere-dominated brain processes and from frontal brain activity to predominant brain wave patterns emanating from lower brain structures. Winkelman (2017a, 2018) has reviewed evidence indicating that these diverse entheogenic substances result in the stimulation of innate modular structures and intelligences that provide the central features of spirit encounters.
The human search for chemically enhanced consciousness as a better conduit to experience divinity is a virtual universal of human cultures. And as will be illustrated in a number of articles below, this development likely began with the most easily available sources – psychedelic mushrooms – which were later supplanted by more complex combinations of plants. This primordial use of mushrooms as entheogens is illustrated by findings of fungiform artifacts from all of the major areas of the world, as seen in the following section of this introduction. While far from exhaustive, it establishes that there existed ancient spiritual practices in all of the major regions of the world that were entheomycological, finding entheogenic inspiration in locally available psychedelic fungi.
Mushroom and Entheogenic Cults of the Past
By their nature, mushrooms are hard to detect in the archeological record, as their fleshy substance largely composed of water quickly deteriorates and leaves little if any physical trace. Consequently, the evidence regarding the roles of psychedelic mushrooms in cultural activities of the past involves fungiform representations in petroglyphs, rock art, sculptures, and metal artifacts found in cultures around the world. Samorini (2012) reviewed a wide range of mushroom forms found in cultures around the world, showing that mycolatry is a widespread ancient practice. Psychedelic mushrooms were encountered in most of the habitable regions of the world and displayed in ways that indicate that they were central features of early ritual systems. Their significance led their practitioners to capture the source of their experiences and their significance by producing images on stone.
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Re: Frage zur Kulturgeschichte des SKKK
Hey, chronic,du bist immer wieder der Hammer, was du so alles aus dem Ärmel zauberst und hier postest!
Ganz herzlichen Dank für dein unermüdliches Am-Thema-Bleiben!