Believers, p.10
Believers, page 10
They sail men and women together, and a great multitude . . . in every boat; and some of the women have rattles . . . while some of the men play the flute . . . and the rest, both women and men, sing and clap their hands . . . they bring the boat to land, and some of the women . . . cry aloud and jeer at the women in that city, some dance, and some stand up and pull up their garments. This they do by every city along the river-bank; [at] Bubastis they hold festival celebrating great sacrifices, and more wine of grapes is consumed . . . than during the whole of the rest of the year. To this place . . . they come together year by year even to the number of seventy myriads of men and women, besides children.
That’s about 700,000 drunken, frolicking worshippers. During the thousand years between Bryan’s porch of drunkenness and Herodotus’s Nile tour, the Greeks carried wine, the winemaking craft, and the cult of Dionysus around the Mediterranean. But Euripides dramatized a confrontation that was real in many places that the Greeks colonized. Dionysus was a god of the common people, linked with the great Earth Mother goddess, who was loved by farmers and vintners; the Greeks absorbed her and Dionysus into their inclusive religion.
Polytheism can do this, rather than suppress local beliefs. But with Dionysus and the Earth Mother a clash was inevitable, because the people’s worship of the pair was in many places an “activist and explosive fervor.” About 3,200 years ago, a dark age began in Greek-dominated lands, as large landowners bent on commercial agriculture, especially growing grapes for wine, pushed small farmers off their soil. These folk embraced the ecstatic, wine-empowered Dionysian religion:
The ancient cults of fertility, of the earth, of plenty, gained strength again as dispossessed migrants spread. . . . Cults were more apt to be dedicated to the divine child, Dionysus, than to the Great Earth Goddess, [with] a greater phallic emphasis as well as a greater violence. . . . The sexually potent bull, or the goat and the donkey of similar repute . . . had become important. And what a polymorphous group of rioters they were: maenads, satyrs, nymphs, and others. The ecstatic, even orgiastic . . . cult of fertility was transformed into a wild and bloody form of sacramental communion. Feverish dances, disordered acts, shouts and other noises were typical of the ceremonies.
But Greek elites embraced another imported god, Apollo, about as different as he could be from Dionysus. Nietzsche saw the Dionysian and Apollonian as two approaches to life: the first a kind of wildness, the realm of the poet and the dreamer; the second all about order—and hierarchy. Here The Bacchae becomes real. Dionysus (and wine) inspired dispossessed masses to rebel, and when their Apollonian masters tried to crush their religion, widespread violence resulted. Athens’s rulers compromised, shaping Dionysus worship into festivals and drama. Less flexible rulers paid with their lives.
All this turns Marx’s dictum on its head. The Dionysian religion of wine and ecstatic dance fomented mass rebellion and led to political change. Alcohol-fueled anger, channeled in myth, made the masses less docile. Under the wandering god’s eye, fermented grapes led Greek commerce far and wide. Wine grew on inhospitable, unirrigated slopes; it was delicious, addicting, clean in a time of dirty water, and blessed by gods. William James understood this: “The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth.” Or, in the words of Greek poet Anacreon, translated by Irish poet Thomas Moore,
If all the goblet’s bliss were o’er,
When fate had once our doom decreed,
Then dying would be death indeed!
Nor could I think, unblest by wine,
Divinity itself divine!
We don’t fully know what ethanol does to the brain, but here are some basics. It’s a simple molecule that blocks a chemical called GABA (short for gamma-aminobutyric acid). GABA brakes dopamine in the brain’s reward center, so easing off the brakes makes drinking very rewarding. By blocking GABA, ethanol provides indirectly what cocaine and many other drugs do directly: dopamine reward. Addiction may result. But the small molecule with the big impact has many targets. Ethanol blocks the neurotransmitter NMDA (N-methyl-D-aspartate), which is involved in thought. It affects the frontal lobes, lifting inhibitions and yielding strange imaginings. It mimics some cannabis, opiate, and nicotine effects. Recently, ethanol was found to have its own special pocket—seen down to the level of atoms—where it fits snugly in the protein of a channel in the cell wall; this binding of ethanol to the channel protein allows ions to flow out of the cell, potentially affecting millions of neurons.
Religions have used many other substances. Hashish and marijuana have long been a part of life even in many Islamic countries where alcohol is forbidden. Assyrians called cannabis “the drug that takes away the mind.” Ancient Chinese physicians prescribed it, warning that seeing devils was a side effect. Hashish was popular in mid-nineteenth-century France, where the poet Charles Baudelaire described “groundless gaiety” and “distortions of sounds and colors,” and a psychiatrist’s experiments caused “happiness, excitement and dissociation of ideas, errors of time and space . . . delusions, fluctuations of emotions, irresistible impulses, and illusions and hallucinations.” Baudelaire, in Les paradis artificiels, hailed “this delightful and singular state . . . an intermittent haunting from which we must draw, if we are wise, the certainty of a better existence.”
Cannabis has been part of India’s religious life for millennia. Some believe Shiva, a major Hindu god, created it; today, holy men consecrated to his worship smoke, eat, and drink it to heal and bring on godly visions. Tibetan Buddhism gives cannabis a key place; Buddha himself was said to have lived for a time on one hemp seed a day. Most Buddhists favor natural meditation, but Tantric yogis use the plant to deepen it, and some art shows the Buddha with cannabis leaves in his begging bowl.
The “divine nectar” acts on receptors that were found in the brain in the 1960s. The brain’s natural equivalent—“endocannabinoids”—were discovered around 1980. The brain’s own cannabis was named “anandamide,” from the Sanskrit ananda (“bliss”). But trips are not always mellow; phantasms can be unpleasant, even psychotic, in those susceptible. Yet there is no hashish-club equivalent of a bar brawl; aggression is rare. THC, the active ingredient, lasts hours, unlike the brain’s own transient version. But our natural cannabinoids may limit anxiety and stress. Cannabis indirectly stimulates two different dopamine receptors in the basal ganglia, critical for emotion, thought, and action. The entire cerebral cortex sends them continuous messages, and they return the favor, in a shifting but never-ending circle. Cannabis synchronizes streams that don’t normally converge—a likely basis of delusions. Dopamine serves double duty: overstimulating D2 dopamine receptors causes delusions; but reward occurs in both D1 and D2 connections. A “bad trip” might result from higher doses, individuality, or past experience.
In moving from the mellowing to the visionary—or, on the downside, psychosis-like—effects of cannabis, we come to the core of humanity’s entheogen arsenal: the legendary “plants of the gods.” Most of the drugs we’ve considered—euphorics like opiates and ethanol, stimulants like nicotine, coca, khat, betel, and kava, and even marijuana—will produce visions in high doses. But others have this result as their main effect. Plants containing such drugs have been used in spiritual traditions from time immemorial.
One classic is the mushroom Amanita muscaria, the “fly agaric” of shamans throughout Siberia and the New World. It and other hallucinogens are neither necessary nor sufficient for ecstatic religious experience, yet they have often been at its core. Consider a passage from Mircea Eliade’s classic, Shamanism:
The Tremyugan shaman begins beating his drum and playing the guitar until he falls into ecstasy. Abandoning his body, his soul enters the underworld and goes in search of the patient’s soul. He persuades the dead to let him bring it back to earth by promising them the gift of a shirt or other things; sometimes . . . he is obliged to use more forcible means. When he wakes [he] has the patient’s soul in his closed right hand and replaces it in the body through the right ear.
The parallels with the San trance healer are striking; he enters trance, travels to the world of the spirits, talks them out of killing the person who is ill, and brings that person back to life. The Tremyugan shaman does all this without drugs, through music—the San add stodgy, repetitive dancing—or even without physical or musical exertion if he is adept enough. But among the Ostyak,
the technique is markedly different. . . . The shaman performs fumigations and dedicates a piece of cloth to Sänke, the celestial Supreme Being. After fasting all day, at nightfall he takes a bath, eats three or seven mushrooms, and goes to sleep. Some hours later he suddenly wakes and, trembling all over, communicates what the spirits . . . have revealed to him: the spirit to which sacrifice must be made, the man who made the hunt fail, and so on. The shaman then relapses into deep sleep and on the following day the specified sacrifices are offered.
Women shamans also make mushroom voyages, but they speak to Sänke directly. “Ecstasy through intoxication by mushrooms is known throughout Siberia. In other parts of the world it has its counterpart in ecstasy produced by narcotics or tobacco.”
The same mushroom entranced a novice among native Athabascans in Northwest Canada, who said of the shaman helping him, “He had snatched me. . . . I had no power of my own. I didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, I didn’t think—I wasn’t in my body any longer.” Another episode was described like this: “Cleansed and ripe for vision, I rise, a bursting ball of seeds in space. . . . I have sung the note that shatters structure. And the note that shatters chaos, and been bloody. . . . I have been with the dead and attempted the labyrinth.” On his first try he was dismembered, on his second he met the spirit. For the fruit of a fungus, the fly agaric is a pretty thing, with a pure-white stem and a reddish-orange flattop or cap speckled with raised, white spots and flecks. The active ingredients are ibotenic acid and muscimol, which resemble the brain chemicals glutamate (exciting) and GABA (inhibiting), respectively, but no one knows how exactly they produce visions.
Peyote, though, used for millennia in Texas and Mexico, we do understand. It’s a small cactus that grows within inches of the ground, with a richly green or blue-green crown 2 to 5 inches wide and studded with whitish shoots. People collect the crowns not just carefully but ritually—sometimes “hunting” them with bows and arrows—and separate them into buttons you can chew or boil in water as a tea. Just a tablespoon of the dried buttons is mind-altering. The agent is mescaline, which neurophysiologist John Smythies studied. This natural molecule, like lab-made LSD, works mainly by stimulating serotonin 2A receptors. Two other New World ritual plants have similar effects: the “magic mushrooms” of many Mexican cultures and “ayahuasca,” a drink made from Banisteriopsis, used by South American shamans. Magic mushrooms contain psilocybin; ayahuasca contains dimethyltryptamine, or DMT.
Both psilocybin and DMT work on the brain in the same way that mescaline and LSD do. And they do work. In studies by Roland Griffiths and his colleagues, 14 men and 22 women without hallucinogen experience were well prepared and given (in separate sessions) different doses of psilocybin or methylphenidate (Ritalin), a stimulant prescribed for attention deficit disorder. They were in a safe living-room environment, lying on a couch, wearing eye masks, listening to classical music, with two supportive, knowledgeable monitors at hand, for 7 hours; they took before and after questionnaires; and they were followed up on. They had prompt responses, proportional to psilocybin dose: a sense of unity, transcendence of time and space, ineffability (they couldn’t express it in words), sacredness, noetic quality (knowledge that seems true but not logical), and positive mood.
Those who scored higher than 6 out of 10 on all these were judged to have had a complete mystical experience. Some felt “oceanic boundlessness,” “dread of ego dissolution,” “visionary restructuralization,” euphoria, dysphoria, and other mental states. During the session (compared with Ritalin), psilocybin produced less talking but more arousal, tearing or crying, anxiety or fear, joy or intense happiness, and peace or harmony. Subjects went through volatile emotional changes, positive and negative—much like the shamans who used magic mushrooms.
All was not sweetness and light. Eight of the participants reported anxiety or sadness, and six of these had mild, transient problems like paranoid thinking. While reassurance calmed them and these feelings did not continue after the session, “Two of the eight volunteers compared the experience to being in a war and three indicated that they would never wish to repeat an experience like that again.” Yet most of those who had bad trips still “rated the overall experience as having personal meaning and spiritual significance and no volunteer rated the experience as having decreased their sense of well being or life satisfaction.” But the really remarkable findings came later.
At the two-month follow-up, those who had been given psilocybin were more than twice as likely to describe positive changes in attitude, mood, and altruism. Two-thirds of the psilocybin group rated the session as among the five most meaningful experiences of their lives, and a substantial minority called it their single most meaningful experience. In addition, each volunteer named three family members or coworkers to be interviewed about them before the sessions and two months after. Friends and relatives of those who took psilocybin rated them as positively changed, but no change was reported for the stimulant group. The positive changes persisted at least a year.
In another study, 18 volunteers took psilocybin in five different doses, increasing or decreasing from session to session. They had predictable dose-response reactions, and the findings at two-month and fourteen-month follow-ups echoed those in prior research. Hallucinogens are being tested for use in depression, addictions, and the distress of physical illness. But these studies also show how shamans worldwide could have the stunning experiences they describe over long careers—facing danger with vision, conviction, altruism, and well-being. Their traditional plants contain drugs used in research, but instead of a living room, classical music, and monitors, they have age-old cultural frameworks for support, guidance, interpretation, and meaning.
The small, yellow-orange psilocybin mushrooms look magical, like gold coins strewn in the grass, and the ancient Aztec name for them was teonanácatl (“flesh of the gods”), but the native peoples who use them today call them “little flowers” and “holy children.” Among the Mazatec of Oaxaca in Mexico, a famous curandera (healer), María Sabina, told hallucinogen experts, “There is a world beyond ours, a world that is far away, nearby, and invisible. And there is where God lives, where the dead live, the spirits and the saints. A world where everything has already happened and everything is known. It is they, the sacred mushrooms, that speak in a way I can understand. I ask them and they answer me. When I return from the trip that I have taken with them, I tell what they have told me and what they have shown me.” Her chants were confident:
Woman who thunders am I, woman who sounds am I.
Spiderwoman am I, hummingbird woman am I . . .
Eagle woman am I, important eagle woman am I.
Whirling woman of the whirlwind am I, woman of a sacred, enchanted place am I,
Woman of the shooting stars am I.
She also said, “I take the ‘little one who springs up out of the earth’ and I see God. I see him springing up out of the earth.”
Ayahuasca—Quechua for “vine of the ancestors or souls”—is actually a drink made from a combination of two plants: a hardy common vine and the leaves of a shrub. The shrub’s leaves contain the hallucinogen DMT, which is in the monoamine family, while the vine supplies a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, preventing the removal of the DMT. This tandem action has for centuries aided shamans throughout the Amazon basin. The mix is central to many cultures. In Glenn Shepard’s description of the Matsigenka of Peru,
Few sensory experiences can match the furor and exaltation . . . the existentially bitter taste of the brew; the giddy alternating waves of nausea and euphoria; the showers of rainbow-colored fractals; the ethereal resonance of the shaman’s chanting; a speechless sense of mystery and wonder; and the unshakeable sensation of being transported to a place beyond time, ordinary reason, and the laws of physics. [There is a] mixing of the senses . . . healing sessions take place in absolute darkness, since the faintest spark or illumination could burn the vulnerable, free-roaming souls of participants. By banishing ordinary sight, Matsigenka shamans open their perceptions to “true vision.”
A shaman of the Secoya of Ecuador and Peru described his own ayahuasca journey:
You’re sitting in the hammock, but at the same time, you’re in another world, seeing the truth of everything that exists. . . . The angels come and give you a flute. You play it. It is not the healer who teaches you, but the angels themselves who make us sing when we are inebriated. It’s so beautiful to see the animals in their entirety, even those living underwater! . . . I managed to see the sun, the rainbow . . . everything. The vision ended and I noticed that my heart was hot, like a pot that’s just been burned. I felt the burning heat inside me. Even without working, I was sweating all day. Continuous visions assaulted me. Every so often I would be bathed in sweat. I felt capable of doing witchcraft and killing others, even though I never did it since my father’s advice held me back.
