entheoqens and the public mystery: the rhetoric of r

Entheoqens and the Public

Mystery: The Rhetoric of

R. Gordon Wasson

Antonio CerasoDePaul University

AbstractThis article explores the work of R. Gordon Wasson, who discov-

ered the use of psilocybin mushrooms among indigenous people inMexico. I argue that Wasson's writings on these and other psyche-delic substances involve two primary moves. First, Wasson seeks toopen up processes of scientific research beyond institutional anddisciplinary boundaries, thereby constructing deinstitutionalizedknowledge networks. At the same time, he recognizes that such open-ness leaves knowledge-making communities vulnerable to exploita-tion. Wasson's second move, then, is to draw on the tradition of theancient mystery cults-particularly the Greek mysteries at Eleusis-in order to install protective silences within the open networks. Thistwofold structure of openness and mystery provides an alternativefor thinking about and entering into information flows that cancomplicate and enrich current debates on intellectual property.

On August 30, 1960, R. Gordon Wasson stood before the gatheredmembers of the Mycological Society of America and raised the lowlymushroom to the level of a deity. Certain species of mushroom,Wasson argued, as a result of their hallucinogenic effects on con-sciousness, lay at the heart of an otherwise diverse variety of reli-gious experiences. When his keynote address was published in theHarvard Botanical Museum Leaflets six months later, his discussion of"certain parallels between our Mexican" rite and the Mystery per-formed at Eleusis" and his claim-grounded in a self-experiment-

Configurations, 2008, 16:215-243

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that "out of a mere drug comes the ineffable, comes ecstasy," fol-lowed a leaflet on the production of glass flowers, and preceded astudy on the "teosinte introgression in the evolution of modernmaize."! Mycology, like astronomy, ornithology, and other sciencesthat require widely distributed practices in order to collect data andspecimens, certainly values its amateur practitioners; yet Wasson re-mained very much an amateur, and an amateur selected to presentthe keynote address to the professional organization's annual con-ference. With no formal training in biology, chemistry, botany, oreven mycology itself and no university appointment or industrialaffiliation, Wasson's position in the implicit hierarchy of profes-sional knowledge was clearly defined. His mycological evangelismbefore the gathered scientists was, in short, a risky venture. In hisrousing close, then, one might have expected polite half-smileswhen Wasson invoked "the belief of some primitive peoples thatmushrooms, the sacred mushrooms, are divinely engendered by Ju-piter Fulminians, the God of the Lightning-bolt, in the Soft MotherEarth." Wasson's speech seemed to be less concerned with the sci-ence of mycology than with the character of the sacred. Given hisposition, it is difficult to imagine a more curious setting in which toforward such claims.

If any amateur could draw connections between the scientificobject of mycology and the character of the sacred, however, it wassurely Gordon Wasson. An investment banker by trade, Wasson-together with his wife Valentina Pavlovina Wasson, a pediatrician-had pioneered the field of ethnomycology, compiling data as ama-teurs between the fields of mycology and anthropology for thirtyyears. Just three years before his keynote speech, the couple hadpublished Mushrooms Russia and History, an illustrated two-volumestudy of cultural attitudes toward mushrooms, the culmination oftheir decades-long joint research. Much of the second volume wasdedicated to the Wassons' search for and eventual participation inhallucinogenic mushroom rites in Mexico; it came complete withrenderings of rare Meso-American mushroom species. Moreover, the

1.Botanical Museum Leaflets 19:6-18 (February-April 1961). Harvard's Botanical MuseumLeaflet was a key publication venue for the study of ethneogens at the time. Just twoissues before the publication of Wasson's keynote, Richard Evans Schultes and Ralph F.Raffauf published an article titled "Preston ia: Amazon Narcotic or Not?" The authorsseek to clarify early twentieth-century claims by Richard Spruce that Prestonia was anactive ingredient in ayahuasca. While the subject of Schultes and Raffauf's article is,then, hallucinogenic, the method differs completely; they include no report from self-experiments, and the web of citation and evidence follows recognizable protocols ofscientific discourse.

Ceraso / The Rhetoricof R.Gordon Wasson 217

Wassons orchestrated what could be called a successful.publicitycampaign to coincide with the publication of Mushrooms Russia andHistory, despite the fact that only several hundred copies would beprinted. In May 1957-with the assistance of his friend and power-ful Time Incorporated CEO Henry Luce-Wasson published an arti-cle in Life magazine describing his experiences at a Mexican mush-room ceremony, an article over which Luce granted him full edito-rial control."

Later that year, Wasson confidant and fellow mushroom experi-menter Robert Graves penned an article praising the Wassons'.ethnomycological findings for Atlantic MonthLy. In early 1958, theWassons published another description of their hallucinogenic ex-periences, this time in the staid Garden Journal; in the title, theycoined the term entheogen for those substances that would sooncome to be known as "psychedelics." And the publicity had effects.The various articles helped set off a massive influx of "mushroom"tourists to the remote Huautla region of Mexico, where entheogenicmushrooms had been used under a veil of secrecy since the Spanishinvasion. The articles also sparked both the scientific and popularinterest that opened Western markets to the mushrooms. In fact,the Life article's title-the only element over which Wasson had noeditorial control-gave psilocybin mushrooms the popular namethey still take today: the editors titled it "Seeking the Magic Mush-room." With a little help from his friends, in other words, Wasson,as he took the podium for his keynote at the Mycological SOCiety,had done more in the previous few years to widely publicize a star-tling development in mycology than any of the professionals in theroom.

I point to this moment in the history of psychedelic science be-cause it condenses a number of practices associated with the dis-course on entheogens. First, Wasson's amateur status at the Myco-logical Society presages what has become an amateur, or deinstitu-tionalized, science once most hallucinogenic substances were pro-hibited under the Controlled Substances Act. Under the prohibitionagainst the use of hallucinogenic substances, trip reports stream into

2. This is not the last time Luce would try to use his vast publication empire to publi-cize psychedelic substances. Both he and his wife, Claire Booth Luce, would later ex-periment extensively with LSD.According to W.A.Swanberg, Luce's personal experi-ences with LSDhad such an effect on him "that he turned up in New York to presentthe managing editors of Time, Life, and Fortune with copies of a book on psychedelicdrugs, along with an enthusiastic talk about the subject's story possibilitiesz-a sugges-tion quickly adopted by Time and Life, the latter being the first 'family' magazine tocover it"; see Swanberg, Luce and His Empire (New York:Scribner's, 1972), p. 463.

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218 Configurations

websites like www.erowid.org, providing practical advice on dosageas well as a virtual menu of setting variations to tweak the psyche-delic experience. Moreover, under the prohibition against the syn-thesis of hallucinogens, psychedelic cultures have developed under-ground-production networks, the hidden botany and chemistry thatfeed the illicit market. In short, psychedelic cultures have developeddistribution devices for all manner of textbooks, instruction sets,user manuals, and the other products of technical communicationthat build scientific knowledge, but they have done so in noninsti-tutionalized or quasi-institutionalized networks.

Wasson's pre-prohibition work suggests, however, that researchon entheogens must be an "amateur" endeavor, and must thereforedevelop noninstitutionalized institutions. As the literature has longrecognized and ceaselessly reports, the entheogenic experience issingular; it is conditioned by the conjunction of set and setting, orsingular consciousness enfolded and enfolding a singular scene. Asaresult, the knowledge of entheogens, like knowledge in those sci-ences that depend on amateur practitioners, relies on distributed datacollection. Research organizations like the Multidisciplinary Associ-ation for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)must conduct tests on humansubjects, because consciousness of the experience is a necessary ele-ment of the research. MAPSalso listens to amateur experimentalistsand uses their findings to, among other projects, justify FDAappealsfor formal research. A push to study the effect of MDMA,LSD,andpsilocybin on patients with cluster headaches, for instance, was sup-ported, in part, by "anecdotal information on dozens of individualsreporting very positive results from their personal experimeritationwith LSDand psilocybin."> Given the conditions under which con-sciousness interacts with entheogenic substances, one would expecta thriving knowledge network of amateur, experimenters even with-out the prohibition.

Second, Wasson's commitment to the sacred character of entheo-genic knowledge, both in antiquity and among his indigenous infor-mants, signals a challenge to the rational discourse of the sciences.Wasson's project-to identify the source of religious or spiritual be-liefs in their material practices, and specifically, in chemical inges-tion-may appear to contribute to the proverbial disenchantmentof the world, which is to say, to the various scientific or materialexplanations of spirituality. As a conceptual operation, it seems theultimate in rationalist debunking: Wasson strips a mystic tradition

3. MAPS Bulletin 14:1 (2004).

Ceraso / The Rhetoric of R. Gordon Wasson 219

\ ...:<,

of its spiritual elements by attributing spiritual effects to materialcauses. God is in the mushroom, or rather, in the way the interac-tion of its chemical components produce experience and determineconsciousness. Such projects are, of course, as old as theorein itself(and perhaps as tiresome; even the Socrates of Plato's Phaedrus wouldrather not get involved in the problem of the gods, finding the rev-elation of the "real" causes of the gods in nature a time-consumingand fruitless philosophical project)." Yet Wasson's relation to the di-vine also functions as a re-enchantment: he. invests the scienceswith a mysterious or spiritual dimension. The mushroom is a mate-rial cause, but its effects are nevertheless divine, or invested withmysticism. Wasson's mysticism performs a complementary rhetori-cal function of reinvesting scientific practice with a kind of religiousattitude; it is an appeal, paradoxically enough, to a scientific sacred.Through this appeal, I will argue, Wasson's rhetoric cultivates theaffective relation to the subject of study that seeks to recast scientificinvestigation as the affective work of the mystery cult.

Wasson's dual rhetorical strategies respond to what Richard Doylehas identified as a source of problems for psychedelic science: "thecombination of ineffability common to many mystic traditions andthe necessity of communication proper to scientific practice. liS Was-son, I will suggest, addresses this structural problem in psychedelicscience by reconfiguring the logics of the common and the proper:by modeling an open-knowledge network at the base of entheogenicproduction, he seeks to practice a common science; by invoking thelaws of secrecy that animate the mystery cult and shamanic tradi-tions, he seeks to retain the propriety of the sacred. Through thisreconfiguration of the common and the proper, Wasson's writingmoves beyond the domain of the psychedelic sciences, providing amodel for a general problematic in network-information ecologies.Put another way, Wasson might be seen as encountering a network-information ecology in its early stages, avant l'intemet perhaps, andattempting to work out conceptual and social difficulties that wenow commonly associate with the emergence of a digital commonson the one hand, and claims to proprietary knowledge on the other.If Wasson's entheogenic rhetoric provides a revelation, it is a visionof the impoverished form taken by current debates on the commonsand intellectual property.

',";-'

4. Plato, Phaedrus, 229d-230a.

5. Richard Doyle, "LSDNA:Rhetoric, Consciousness Expansion, and the Emergence ofBiotechnology," Philosophy and Rhetoric 35:2 (2002): 153-174.

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Notes from Underground: Wasson's Mycelial Network"Sometimes it seems to me that our whole work has been composed by others,

with us merely serving as rapporteur."-R. Gordon Wasson"

Gordon Wasson, after some turns and twists, finally had a speciesof mushroom named for him. In a sense, this naming is fitting, be-cause Wasson's whole body of work can be said to follow the logic ofthe mushroom.' IfWasson's writing forms the visible protuberance-the stem and head of a mushroom-it also points to the under-ground network, or mycelia, that feeds and supports it. To followthis metaphor to its end, Wasson's writing could be seen as the rep-licating arm of an expanding network of knowledge; it explodes itsspores in such fertile venues as Life, setting off a massive culturalinterest in psilocybin mushrooms. To the extent that such interestactually serves to reproduce mushrooms themselves, moreover, themetaphor verges tenuously toward its limit. Wasson's writings, inother words, actually worked to disseminate species of mushrooms;in this sense, he played more than a metaphorical role as a force forreproduction. Wasson's approach to his subject matter engageswith what sociologist Michel Maffesoli calls the "underground puis-sance/" Maffesoli examines the source of what he calls "sociality,"opposing it to the social. The social is a rational category of groups-human groups as they operate politically and collaborate on projects.For Maffesoli, such groupings cannot be explained without assum-ing a vitalism that fills the connectivity of communities in their ev-eryday activities-an underground puissance, as opposed to the powerof the social." Also called by Maffesoli simply "the will to live," thisfeature of collective bodies points not to contractual agreements orpurposes, however implicit, but rather to affective ties and styles of

6. R.Gordon Wasson, "Speech to the MycologicalSocietyof America,"August30, 1960.

7. Jonathan Ott describes the controversy over the naming; see Ott, Pharmocotheon:Entheogenit: Drugs, Their Plant Sources and Histories (Kennewick, WA:Natura! ProductsCompany, 1993).

8. Michel Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society(London: Sage, 1996), pp. 30-55.

9. Ibid., p. 3Z: "It is this opposition between extrinsic power and intrinsic puissancewhich must rigorously guide our thinking and which is the translation into sociologt-cal terms of the previously mentioned aesthetic dichotomy (optical versus tactical)."While Maffesoli's use of categories is often overly dualistic, one suspects that thesedualisms serve more as heuristic devices for accessing affective ties than as distinctcategories.


engagement that bubble up through the surface of the social, some-times expressing themselves in festivals and riots, sometimes mani-festing themselves more subtly in religious rituals, but are alwayspresent, even in the minor rites of communities such as a nod to an-other on a street corner or sharing the energy of a common secret.

Wasson's writing attends to this underground puissance: it is not,to return to the metaphor, a mushroom that forgets its mycelia;rather, his writing is peopled with his sources and informants-vir-tual crowds of citations, references, and names that escape the foot-notes to invest the text. As citation studies in science have amplydemonstrated, scientific writing in general grounds itself in citationnetworks.'? Such networks indicate both influence and affiliationwith schools of thought, and mapping such networks has long beenan interest of information science. Moreover, the tnclusion of a net-work of knowledge production puts Wasson squarely in the tradi-tion of writing on entheogens in Western science. The impulse isalready clear in Havelock Ellis's late-nineteenth-century writing onmescaline, in which he not only outlines a history of mescaline's"discovery" by Western science-naming James Mooney, WeirMitchell, and others-but even provides the name of a local dealerof mescal buttons for those interested in future experiments. I I

Wasson's citation practice, then, is not distinguished by citationitself, but the relation it constructs with the subject matter of en-theogenic science. This section will explore his rhetorical practice ofreferencing a knowledge network, of embedding a map of the net-work within his writing itself. In doing so, Wasson models a sha-manic science; his position with respect to his sources and materialsparallels the shamanic performance of the Mazatec curanderas. Justas the mushroom speaks through the curandera with a "strange ven-triloquistic effect," Wasson envisions the study of entheogenicmushrooms taking him up in its current. J2 His network rhetoric

10. I cannot do justice to this rich field of inquiry in the space available. For an intro-duction to the tradition of remarkable work in bibliometrics, citation studies, and in-formation science, see Henry G. Small, "Cited Documents as Concept Symbols," SocialStudies of Science 8:3 (1978): 327-340; Loet Leydesdorff and Olga Arnsterdamska, "Di-mensions of Citation Analysis," Science, TechnoiogyS: Human Values 15:3 (1990): 305-335; E. Garfield, "Random Thoughts on Citationology: Its Theory and Practice," Scien-tometrics 43:1 (1998): 69-76; and Henry G. Small, "On the Shoulders of Robert Merton:Towards a Normative Theory of Citation," Scientometrics 60:1 (2004): 71-79.

11. See Havelock Ellis, "Mescal: A New Artificial Paradise," Contemporary Review (lanu-ary 1898); and Ellis, "Mescal Intoxication," Lancet (Iune 12, 1897).

12. R. Gordon Wasson, "The Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico: An Inquiry into the Ori-gins of Religious Ideas among Primitive Peoples," Botanical Museum Leaflet 19:7 (1961):

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thereby suggests an ethical practice-the practice of the node, orrapporteur-and this practice becomes just as important as any con-crete content he gleans from sources and informants.

The first site I will examine in Wasson's network already speaks tothe alien force of the encounter. I have been speaking of Wasson'swriting, but much of his early work was co-authored with ValentinaPavlovina Wasson. The story of how their collaborative effort beganserves as a set piece that appears in most of their work, usually as anintroduction to the project of ethnomycology. AsWasson tells it, heand his new wife were on their honeymoon in New York'sCatskills(and Wasson is careful here even to name his friend who lent themhis house for the week) and decided to take a walk down a forestpath. The two stroll along, "happy as larks, both abounding in thejoy of life," when "suddenly"-and the sudden break in the usualrelation is important-Pavlovina "threw down [Wasson's] hand anddarted up into the forest":13

She had seen mushrooms, a host of mushrooms, mushrooms of many kindsthat peopled the forest floor. She cried out in delight at their beauty. She ad-dressed each kind with an affectionate Russian name .... She knelt down be-fore those toadstools in poses of adoration like the Virgin hearkening to theAngel of the Annunciation .... I called to her: "Come back, come back to me!They are poisonous, putrid. They are toadstools. Come back to me!" She onlylaughed the more: her merry laughter will ring in my ears forever.':'

Something has happened-an event. Wasson is forced to respondto the age-old question: What is to be done when your wife is se-duced by a patch of mushrooms? The story is telling, precisely as aseduction. It operates through Pavlovina's affective response to the"host of mushrooms"; she breaks the affective bond of the marriage

137-161. The phenomenon of the cutandera being taken up as a channel for the"speech" of hallucinogenic mushrooms is described in rich detail by Henry Munn. TheMazatec curanderas he encounters punctuate each of their chanted utterances with theword tzo (says): "The Mazatec say that the mushrooms speak. If you ask a shamanwhere his imagery comes from, he is likely to reply: I didn't say it, the mushroomsdid." We also learn something about Munn's practice of listening here, as he immedi-ately blocks the notion that the mushrooms speak: "No mushroom speaks, that is aprimitive anthropomorphization of the natural, only man speaks, but he who eats themushrooms, if he is a man of language, becomes endowed with an inspired capacity tospeak." See Munn, "The Mushrooms of Language," in Hal/ucinogens and Shamanism, ed.Michael]. Harner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 86-122.

13. R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl A.P.Ruck, The Road to Eleusis: Unveil-ing the Secret of the Mysteries (New York: Harvest/ HB], 1978), p. 13.

14. Ibid.


to enter into another relationship. She is, in short, taken up by themushrooms, and the religious character of the description is nomistake for Wasson. Despite the trope of seduction, however, Pav-lovina's enthusiasm is not wholly passive. She retains the capacityto name each variety, and she soon picks the mushrooms for dryingand cooking. The story, then, places the notion of agency in ques-tion: one cannot decide whether the mushrooms are acting on Pav-lovina, or she on the mushrooms; rather, there seems to be a symbi-otic or transversal relation at work-even a communion, in thebroadest sense. Was it the mushrooms themselves or Pavlovina thatactuated the rupture in the leisurely stroll of the marriage? Or was it,as the Wassons often claim, the culturally embedded feeling towardmushrooms in Pavlovina and Wasson that occasioned their opposedresponse to the teeming forest floor? To the extent that Wasson mustalso respond to this episode, the ethnomycological project-con-cerned with tracking the cultural attitudes toward mushrooms-getsunderway.

As origin narratives go, the Catskill mushroom affair certainlyproves both entertaining and memorable. It functions to orientreaders to the more difficult work of tracking cultural feelings to-ward mushrooms by locating these feelings in concrete persons.That is dear enough. But cultural feelings already indicate diverseresponses to the encounter; cultural attitudes alone cannot explainthe relation, because the mushrooms themselves playa strangely ac-tive role in the narrative. They exert a force that cultural attitudesrespond to, register, form a relationship with. The narrative certainlyfunctions as a syndecdoche for the cultural project of ethnomycol-ogy, illustrating the attitudes of mycophobia and mycophilia. But italso draws attention to a point of contact, or con-fusion, betweennature and culture and therefore puts the notion of cultural feelingsin question. It is the confused form of relation that opens tip thequestion of a network for Wasson; his own understanding of mush-rooms must take into account these affective forces of the encoun-ter. If "Come back to me!"-the initial dosed response of the myco-phobe-constitutes a blockage of those affective forces, a desperateattempt to restore the marital order of filiation, the voyage of ethno-mycology constitutes an open response, a capacity to enter into thetransversal lines of communication and be transformed by them.This openness, already signaled by the Catskills story, becomes partof what could be called an ethical method of ethnomycology.

The first tenet of this method is that "common people" have muchto contribute to the development of a science. It is almost impossibleto read the Wassons' work without this principle asserting itself:

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knowledge of cultural feelings toward and practical use of mushroomscan be gleaned from the everyday experience of nonspecialists morereadily than from the various professional guilds and learned societ-ies of mycology. Ethnomycology must develop sensitivities for theunderground puissance in order to do its work. From Mushrooms Rus-sia and History we have the following, which is fairly typical of theWassons' approach:

There is an old belief in Russia that when mushrooms abound, war is in theoffing. The thoughtless intellectuals of the world despise such homely sayings,which on the surface are nonsense. But ofttimes those sayings are the crypticexpression of experience graven in the recess of a people's past. IS

Wasson is sure to mention that "in all our inquiries and travels welooked, not to the erudite, but to humble and illiterate peasants asour most cherished informants,"16 that "ofttimes the contributionsof even the lowliest informants are of highest value, filling a lacunain our argument,"17 that "wherever we traveled we tried to enterinto contact with the untutored peasants and arrive at their knowl-edge of fungi,"IS that it is "refreshing to turn from the unhappy no-menclature of the mycologists to the genuine words devised agesago by humble people.":" One of the most frequent citations in Was-son's corpus on entheogenic mushrooms comes from the "muleteer"who led the Wasson party on its first trip through the mountains ofMexico into the Mazatec region: "The little mushroom comes of it-self, no one knows whence, like the wind that comes we know notwhence nor why.'??

Wasson offers several explanations for this allegiance. First, andmost obviously, the Wassons were themselves amateurs with respectto the professional science of mycology. In one sense, the valoriza-tion of local and informal knowledges serves as a rhetorical negotia-tion with that science and a claim for legitimacy. However, the claimis not passive, insofar as the Wassons argue for the value of a methodthat crosses discipllnary boundaries. The epistemological fenceserected by the disciplines-and this has certainly become a common

15. Valentina Pavlovina Wasson and R. Gordon Wasson, Mushrooms Russia and History(New York: Pantheon Books, 1957), p. 37.

16. Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck, Road to Eleusis (above, n. 13), p. 14.

17. Wasson, "Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico" (above, n. 12), p. 140.

18. Ibid.

19. Wasson and Wasson, Mushrooms Russia and History (above, n. 15), p. 369.



trope of interdisciplinary research of all stripes-block connectivity.But such connectivity is precisely what enables the emergence ofethnomycological-and then entheogenic-knowledge.

The clearest exposition of this point appears in an article authoredby both Wassons in Garden Journal (notably, a magazine for bothprofessional specialists and hobbyists in the field of botany). "Whywas it," the Wassons ask, "that we, a pediatrician and a banker inNew York, made an ethno-mycological discovery of some impor-tance in Meso-America?">' The answer is clear: neither the anthro-pologists nor the mycologists could tweak their own epistemologi-cal frameworks. To return to the confusion of nature and cultureimplicit in the Catskills narrative, "one must be both an anthropol-ogist and a mycologist to enter into the spirit of the thing."> A sim-ilar sentiment appears in Wasson's later work on the identificationof the ancient soma as a derivative of the mushroom Amanita mus-caria. Under the heading "Where the Search for Soma Went Wrong,"Wasson argues that the various fields of experts in ancient literatureand botany were not sufficient in themselves to effect the identifica-tion." Since the Wassons were amateurs, then, they were "unen-cumbered by academic inhibitions, and therefore [we] felt free torange far and wide, disregarding the frontiers that ordinarily segre-gate learned disciplines.">' To the extent that the Wassons valuedtheir own amateur status as a capacity for assaying disciplinary epis-temologies, then, they could also look to the material that fell out-side specialist knowledge as it was defined in the various sciences.

If epistemological closure functioned to fence in the sciences, theWassons suspected that its posts and padlocks were made up of lan-guage. What the Wassons sought to uncover were the feelings associ-ated with mushrooms; they sought these feelings through the media-tion of words. Their general method, in this sense, is etymological, ifnot romantic. To the extent that contemporary thought-particularlyin the sciences-served to conceal, block, or eviscerate the original orauthentic meaning and sentiment of particular expressions, the Was-sons thus sought to retrieve these by carefully attending to folk usage.This second aspect of the Wassons' insistence on folk knowledge, ofcourse, has its partners in twentieth-century thought-not least beingHeidegger's hermeneutical project of retrieving the question of Being


22. Ibid.

23. R. Gordon Wasson, "Soma of the Aryans: An Ancient Hallucinogen?" Journal ofPsychedelic Drugs 3:2 (1970): 40.


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through the philological method. The Wassons operate according tosimilar assumptions, supposing that the "sayings" are the "cryptic ex-pression of experience graven in the recess of a people's past." And asin Heidegger, the suggestion here is that the epistemological require-ments of modern techno science prevent access to a whole range ofcultural feelings and practices precisely because they excise folk un-derstandings of an original--or at least surviving--archaic language,in which are lodged ancient modes of thought and practices:

There is a reproach to mycologists in these unexplored hints and evidence ofpsychic effects caused by mushrooms, hints deeply rooted in Europe's folk-ways, evidence clearly reported over centuries from Kamchatka, New Guinea,and Middle America. It seems strange that archaic peoples should still possesssecrets of this kind that our laboratories have not exhaustively analyzed."

In this sense, the capacity to flow between disciplines derivesfrom a diversity of literacies. When describing the knowledgeablemuleteer, for example, Wasson is careful to note that "he could nei-ther read nor write, nor even tell time by the clock's face."26 The useof illiteracies here is telling. The muleteer, the Wassons' other infor-mants, even Pavlovina herself in her moment of forest rapture, de-ploy a different style of literacy than that produced by the profes-sional sciences. These divergent styles of literacy complicate the ety-mological project; if the literacy of the muleteer--or the Russianpeasants who sense the onset of war in the wealth of mushrooms--is not the literacy of standard representation, of reading or writing"or the measurement of time, then the capacity to listen to them re-quires that the ethnomycological researcher develop new literacies.Do the Russian peasants draw a connection of material or efficientcausality between mushrooms and war? Wasson's recognition of thesurface "nonsense" of such a claim suggests not. What form of corre-lation do they attach to these phenomena? What types of relationsare being adduced? In what logics and systems of knowledge wouldsuch relations work? Or is, indeed, the nonsensical formal characterof these expressions their most important content? The practices ofethnomycology must develop ways of listening to such nonsense.Ethnomycology's access to its object of study develops, then, ac-cording to two related themes: the need to move between the spe-cialist knowledges within the sciences, and the need to step outsidethe specialist knowledges of science. Both practices, moreover,require a methodological transformation.

25. Wasson and Wasson, Mushrooms Russia and History (above, n. IS), p. 242.



It is also at the intersection of these themes that Wasson will 10-cate psychedelic or entheogenic science. Before turning to that ques-tion, however, Wasson's interdisciplinary matrix requires furtherexploration. In addition to elevating the practice of an amateur sci-ence, his citation practice suggests the importance of specialists inthe knowledge network. Wasson carefully tempers the reproach ofthe institutional sciences with admiration and engagement. To con-tinue the previous quotation:

It seems strange that archaic peoples should still possess secrets of this kindthat our laboratories have not exhaustively analyzed. Indeed, Swiss and Eng-lish workers have lately arrived, at last, at this exciting terrain for scientificinquiry. From the fungus known as ergot Swiss pharmacologists have recentlyisolated an alkaloid that causes massive psychic reactions in human beings,including hallucinations that duplicate with astonishing fidelity the testimonyof the old Spanish writers."

The devotion to folk knowledge, then, by no means indicates a re-jection of science or academic specialty itself. If the first tenet of theWassons' method privileges folk knowledge, the second retains use-ful practices within the institutional sciences and specialties . Indeed,the Wassons carefully cultivate relationships with all manner of spe-cialists, and diligently include their contributions in their writing.

The story of their "discovery" of the entheogenic mushrooms ofMexico clearly illustrates this point. After reviewing at length thehistory of ethnomycological knowledge of entheogenic mushroomsin Mexico-from the sixteenth-century Spanish friars who first doc-umented the practice with contempt, to the twentieth-centuryscholars who began to identify the species and practices beforeWorld War II-the Wassons provide the following description, whichI will quote at length because it demonstrates the diligent namingpractice that serves to map the knowledge network:

At this point, in September, 1952, in almost the same mail, we received twocommunications, one from Robert Graves in Majorca and the other from HansMardesteig in Verona, alerting us to the peculiar place of mushrooms in theMeso-American cultures. We had known nothing before then of the indige-nous cultures of the region. Quickly we got in touch with Gordon Eckholm ofthe American Museum of Natural History and Richard Evan Schultes of theBotanical Museum at Harvard. Schultes told us to communicate with BIasPablo Reko, who passed us on to Eunice V. Pike of the Summer School of Lin-guistics, and then died. Miss Pike, a student of Mazatec language, had lived in

27. Ibid.

228 Configurations

the Mazatec country off and on for many years, and she proved of invaluablehelp in guiding our footsteps."

We are seemingly quite a distance, at this point, from the "untu-tored peasants" who people the network. The practice of namingspecialists and their contributions expands the knowledge network,and enriches, rather than conceals, the field out of which ethnomy-cological knowledge emerges. And the practice is spread across theWassons' writing. In Mushrooms Russia and History, for example, theWassons give another nod to their friend Robert Graves, "novelist,scholar, and poet, who supplied to us, among other brilliant sugges-tions, the missing link that we had been seeking in order to roundout our conjectures concerning the death of Emperor Claudius, andto render that conjecture not merely suggestive but persuasive.v" Inhis speech before the Mycological Society of America, Wasson notesthat "we drew heavily on our betters in the special fields that wewere exploring," then launches into an extended encomium toFrench mycologist Roger Heim, director of the Laboratorie de Cryp-togamie, editor of the Revue de Mycologie, and an "indispensable andbeloved partner in our Middle American forays.":'? He goes on topraise the work in chemistry of another current and future collabo-rator, Albert Hofmann-work that the Wassons' studies in Mexicolargely made possible-predicting that "thanks to the achievementsof our biological chemists, we may be on the brink of re-discoveringwhat was common knowledge to the ancient Greeks."!' The devo-tion to folk knowledge must meet up with the productive capacitiesof technoscience; by letting these two domains resonate effectively,the Wassons distinguish their work from the simple neo-primitivismand reaction against technoscience so prevalent in the mid-twenti-eth century.

The development of synthetic psilocybin and psilocin further il-lustrates the extended knowledge network inscribed in the Wassons'texts. The Wassons learned of ritual mushroom practices among theMazatec and Zapotec peoples through an itinerant series of corre-spondences. Their first actual trip to Oaxaca came shortly thereafter,in August 1953. The Wassons' description replays the theoretical un-derstanding of archaic knowledge, as it takes the reader through a sortof travel time-warp. Each leg of the journey closer to the "primitive"


29. Ibid., p. 35.

30. Wasson, "Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico" (above, n. 12), pp. 140-142.

31. lbid., p. 153.


culture is increasingly divorced from the technological world of theirhome in New YorkCity: from airplane} to train} to bus} to old auto-mobile}and finally}by mule over the Sierra Mazateca.P For two yearsthey made several contacts among the indigenous people and manymore journeys} until finally}in late June 1955}Gordon Wasson andhis friend Allen Richardson participate in a mushroom ceremony.While on previous trips the local population had proved reticent}Wasson's Life article describes the crucial breakthrough in detail:

His name was Filemon. He had a friendly manner and I took a chance. Lean-ing over his table} I 'asked him earnestly and in a low voice if I could speak to'him in confidence. Instantly curious, he encouraged me. "Will you," I wenton, "help me learn the secrets of the divine mushroom?" and I used the Mix-eteco name, 'nti sheeto, correctly pronouncing it with the glottal stop andtonal differentiations of the syllables. When Filemon recovered from his sur-prise he said warmly that nothing could be easier.>

The passage is striking for several reasons. First}Wasson attendsto a hospitality and friendship constitutive of entry into the secretcommunity. A similar hospitality will extend to his interactions withpseudonymous Eva Mendez} the curandera Maria Sabina who laterperforms the ceremony. This practice of friendship within the knowl-edge network will become important for distinguishing it from otherpractices that seek to merely cycle indigenous knowledge into exist-ing regimes of science. Second}Wasson carefully describes the correctutterance of the secret word-a code for entrance into the Mazatec"mystery cult. II Ironically enough} while Wasson exposes the secret inone of the widest circulating venues of the time} neither its publica-tion nor his pronunciation guide give any sense of how to actuallypronounce the word in order to produce the conspiratorial surprise}a topic I will return to in the next section. Here it is enough to saythat the hospitality and secrecy Wasson describes seems to extendfar beyond a feeling of trust between experts that Steven Shapin seesas founding validity claims in seventeenth-century epistemologyand now inundating the activities of institutional science." They

32. This trope of a movement back in time accompanying a spatial movement into"primitive" areas is, of course, common in colonial travel literature. It also marks someof William S. Burroughs descriptions of his movements in Peru in his hallucinogenicexchange with Allen Ginsberg; see Burroughs, The Yage Letters (San Francisco: CityLights Books, 1975).

33. R. Gordon Wasson, "Seeking the Magic Mushroom," Life, May 13,1957, 102.

34. Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-CenturyEngland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Shapin's insight on the function

230 Configurations

are, rather, affects forged in the moment of encounter, resting noton the established familiarity of expertise, but on contingent com-munication-the paradoxical trust of surprise.

The network grew past the local knowledges of the Mazatecswhen Wasson included Roger Heim in a trip to Mexico, for the pur-pose, according to Hofmann, of "introducing the mushrooms to sci-entific research.r " Heim identified several species of mushroomsand turned their chemical analysis over to pharmaceutical compa-nies in the United States-among them Merck and Smith, Klein andFrench-and in France, but they could not isolate the active psycho-active chemicals. Heim then contacted the Swiss pharmaceuticalcompany Sandoz, where Hofmann had discovered LSD. Throughthis circuitous route, Hofmann began work on identifying the-activeagents. He managed to isolate psilocybin and psilocin as the halluci-nogenic components of the teonanacatl mushroom through self-experimentation with the mushroom specimens provided by Heim,transforming the active ingredient into" a chemically pure state bymeans of the newest separation methods.v= Hofmann's implicationis fairly clear on this point: the other pharmaceutical companiesfailed because they would not turn to self-experimentation in orderto aid with the extraction procedure."

The movement through the network then comes full circle. InOctober 1962, Hofmann and his wife traveled to Huautla to presentWasson's original curandera, Maria Sabina, with synthetic psilocybinpills. Hofmann describes the experience as an experiment, but ittook place in the traditional setting, and the curandera performedthe standard Mazatec ceremony while she and the group experi-enced the effects of the psilocybin. When Sabina stated the nextmorning that "the pills had the same power as the mushrooms,"Hofmann took her declaration as a "confirmation from the most

of trust in modern scientific practice is fascinating. In moving past the networks ofinstitutionalized science, Wasson shows that trust need not be invested in an elitegroup-either as a decorous society of aristocrats or a community of-experts. Assuch,Wasson's work could add the notion of hospitality and friendship to the sedimentedconditions for trust in science.

35. Albert Hofmann, LSD: My Problem Child (New York:McGraw-Hill, 1980), chap. 6(available online at http://www.psychedlic-library.org/child.htm).

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid. Hofmann, like Heim, also accompanied Wasson to Mexico. Wasson was wellaware of Hofmann's work even as it was ongoing. In his speech to the MycologicalSociety of America, Wasson mentions both Hofmann's isolation of psilocybin and psi-locine and Hofmann's identification of the active agents of oliliuqui, though the latterdiscovery had occurred only weeks before his speech.


competent authority, that the synthetic psilocybin is identical withthe natural product.v'" Hallucinogenic researcher Jonathan Ott putsit succinctly: "Maria Sabina's historic test of psilocybin was a classicscience experiment, unparalleled in the long history of pharmacog-nosy.'?" The synthesis of psilocybin illustrates the productive powerof the knowledge network as it draws in indigenous knowledge, sci-entific specialization, and self-experiment, with the amateur servingas mediator and rapporteur for a diverse array of disciplines and lit-eracies.

The "openness" that the Wassons write into their texts, then,models the open process through which psilocybin wasboth discov-ered by Western science and synthesized for use. Throughout theWassons' work, the knowledge they bring into the network throughtheir citation practice is treated with a sort of affection-not unlikethe affection Pavlovina showers on the patch of mushrooms in theCatskills. In other words, there is an affective charge to the citationpractice that exceeds its informational value. Often, the excess ofcitation itself marks this affective excess; the naming practice thatprovides the entire story of the Wassons' coming to hear of the Mex-ican mushroom rites, quoted above, serves as an example. At othertimes, this excess is marked by the presence of affectionate terms,the presence of a friendship, a compliment, or by the insistence thata contribution is crucial to the overall knowledge network. The de-scription of Eunice Pike's contribution on the Mazatec rites is exem-plary: not only did the Wassons reprint her entire letter respondingto their inquiry in Mushrooms Russia and History, they also describedas "far superior to anything on teonanacatl given to us either by theSpanish writers or recent enquirers.v" And Pike-a Christian mis-sionary familiar with the Mazatec language and customs-is ostensi-bly a minor player in the entire heavily populated drama. It is nomistake, then, that Wasson would label himself and Pavlovina "rap-porteurs," whose "whole work has been composed by others." Thisrhetorical effect is crucial to the project.

What is imprinted in the Wassons' citation practice, to put it an-other way, is a model both for group activity and creative engage-ment. While I have been calling this grouping a "knowledge net-work," it might also be called a production network, since the con-stitution of the group as such exceeds the knowledge it produces, atleast insofar as that knowledge can be actualized as knowledge

38. Ibid.

39. Ott, Pharmocotheon (above, n. 7), p. 275.

40. Wasson and Wasson, Mushrooms Russia and History (above, n. 15), p. 242 ".

232 Configurations

within any given field. The concrete results of their affiliations are,of course, important in their own right; the synthesis of psilocybinand the global diffusion of entheogenic mushrooms are no smallmatters, either scientifically or culturally. Yet, pragmatically, theseresults are conditioned by the formation of the group body, and theopenness of that group body to the risk of the encounter. As the"originary" scene of ethnomycology makes clear, that encountercan be met neither with a blockage nor a solitary call. The contentprovided by the network, in this sense, is dependent on the capacityto act as rapporteur for it at any given point, or node. More than ci-tation, then, the practice suggests a transformative subjectivity: nolonger the Wasson of "Come back to me!," but the Wasson in Mex-ico, now "bemushroomed," listening to the disembodied voice ofthe curandera, the voice that "hovers through the hut, coming nowfrom beyond your feet, now at your very ear, now distant, nowactu-ally underneath you, with strange ventriloquistic effect."!' Subjec-tive transformation, moreover, applies to groups themselves: Was-son's citation practice disrupts the lines of filiation between folkwisdom and institutional science and allows communication acrossthese divergent lines; indeed, it must reconfigure these formationsin order to produce a responsive psychedelic science.

Such a reconfiguration, however, entails both political and ethicalconcerns about Wasson's method. The invasion of indigenous bodiesand knowledges by Western science is no new phenomenon. Geneticmaterial and traditional knowledges are leveraged all the time for theextraction of and synthesis of products like psilocybin. The prob-lems of such procedures intensify, of course, with the onset of cur-rent global intellectual-property regimes, under which the contribu-tions of indigenous people to a scientific knowledge-base mean littleif those communities cannot file a patent, or prove the illegality of apatent, or, indeed, oppose outright the very practice of patentingplants and other biological material. Indeed, Wasson's argumentsfor interdisciplinarity and collaborative research may seem quainttoday, when, as Alan Liu suggests, "the current hegemon is ...corporate interdisciplinarity."42 The injunction to "think outside thebox," posted so prominently in the open-floor-plan offices of con-temporary capitalism, is nowhere more prevalent than in today'smanagement and business literature. The same could be said of non-specialist knowledges, as organizations are enjoined to embrace the


42. Alan Liu, Local Transcendence: Essays 011 Postmodetn Historicism and the Database(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008}, p. 178.

Ceraso / The Rhetoric of R. Gordon Wasson 233-------------------,.-"-~----. -'-"',.,--

exciting new models of crowd-sourcing and to leverage the un-tainted vision of amateur "contributors." Where the cross-functionalteam and the wisdom of crowds explodes the old silos of the mod-ernist organization (both in the sciences and elsewhere), Wasson'sproject seems far less the advance into thrilling new epistemologicalexperiments, and far more an early break in the now rapidly collaps-ing disciplinary apparatus.

From this perspective, the Wassons could be seen as early exploit-ers with a friendly and hospitable smile, and the pretensions to aknowledge network little more than apologia for the relentless ex-pansion of capitalist science into every aspect of social life, WhileWasson-if his practices of distribution (not to mention his work asan investment banker at J. P. Morgan!) are any indication-was notopposed to such notions of property, he would equally balk at reduc-tion of the entheogenic encounter to a market mechanism. If thescience of entheogens requires for Wasson an open mode of encoun-ter, it also requires a good deal of cunning, duplicity, and secrecy.'Wasson's fascination with the relation between mystery cults andhallucinogenic substances serves to tie the open exchanges of theknowledge network to practices of secrecy. While such practices donot directly oppose exploitation, they may constitute a modulation inthe regulation of the common and the proper. As Pamela Long's ex-cellent study of the role of secrecy in technical production makesclear, current intellectual-property regimes operate through a his-torically contingent set of techniques for secrecy and openness."Wasson's mystical vision of secrecy for psychedelic science serves asprovocation to the current organization of secrecy; it re-inscribesscience within the tradition of the mystery cult.

The Secret and the Profane"Just dwell for a moment on that description, How striking that the Mystery of

antiquity and our mushroom rite in Mexico are accompanied by veils ofreticence that, so far as we can tell, match each other point by point."

R. Gordon wassorr"

"It is impossible to stress enough the unifying function of silence, which has beenseen by the great mystics as the ultimate form of communication. Andwhile their etymological relationship may be subject to some controversy,

43. Pamela O. Long, Openness, Secrecy,Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Know I·edge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press,2004).

44. Wasson, "Speech" (above, n. 6); Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck, Road to Eleusis(above, 11. 13).

234 Configurations

one can point to a link between the mystery, the mystic, and the mute;this link is one of initiation that permits the sharing of secrets."

Michel Maffesoli 45

To address the regime of secrecy Wasson envisions for a psyche-delic science, I turn to his obsession with the concept of the secret,especially as it manifests itself both through the entheogenic experi-ence and, in what seems like the corollary to this experience, throughhis decades-long obsession with the Eleusinian mysteries. There islittle doubt that Wasson was interested in the concept of secrecybefore his entheogenic experiences in Mexico. The etymologicalmethod of ethnomycology-and its reliance on "obscene and sca-brous vocabularies that often escape the lexicographer" -was pre-mised on the extraction of the "secret meaning" of words; his initialcorrespondence with Robert Graves concerned the historical "se-cret" of the Emperor Claudius's death." The entire ethnornycologi-cal enterprise, it might be said, ran like a deciphering engine longbefore the stranger version of secrecy in the psychedelic experiencemade itself plain. The secret character of the entheogenic rites waspreceded by decades of research that assumed "veils of reticence." Assuch, Wasson's very desire to enter into the Mexican mushroom cer-emony included the secret-and the secret to be cracked-as its mo-tor. Yet the form of the secret that Wasson encountered in Mexicoserves as a second event; it works more like the invention of a newnotion of the secret, and a corresponding transformation of whatconstitutes profanation. For despite cracking the secrecy of theMazatecs, Wasson discovered only another layer of secrecy-the in-communicable character of the entheogenic experience itself.

Given Wasson's well-publicized claims in the late-1950s that theMazatec mushroom rites resembled the Eleusinian mysteries ofGreek antiquity, his assertions to this effect during the MycologicalSociety keynote address may not be particularly surprising. What issurprising, however, is his compulsive repetition of the argument.In The Road to Eleusis, a book co-written with LSD discoverer AlbertHofmann and classicist Carl A. P. Ruck, Wasson reiterates the argu-ment he presented to the American Mycological Society-even us-ing many of the same paragraphs, word for word. The surprise comesfrom its publication date: The Road to Eleusis appeared eighteen yearsafter his keynote address, in a culture completely transformed by its

45. Maffesoli, Time of the Tribes (above, n. 8), p. 91.

46. Wasson, "Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico" (above, n. 12), p. 141; Wasson and Was-son, Mushrooms Russia and History (above, n. 15), pp. 360-362.


encounter with hallucinogenic substances. The int(lIiltJ is crucial;between the keynote and the publication of The Road Lli elc'IISis, psi-locybin and psilocin fell under prohibition, first in the tl.rt1IPd Statesin 1968, then through their scheduling as controlled suti'llUIH:esun-der the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and COlli!'.',l Act in1970, and finally through the global extension ofthe Pfll/ti!.J1tion,in 1971, under the UN Convention on Psychotropic SUb$t;lliCv~,

Despite these legal prohibitions, however, the dissemination anduse of hallucinogenic mushrooms had exploded, and by I'll!:' lnte1970s, large quantities of psilocybin mushrooms were availalrle onthe U.S. and global black markets. Both the prohibition and wide,..spread distribution of psilocybin mushrooms, moreover, serve :.t~all

index for the cultural shifts that position the practices of ingestinghallucinogenic mushrooms. Whereas in 1960, psilocybin constt-tuted a legitimate space of exploration in the sciences, by 1978, thesubstance had been firmly articulated to criminal and counter-cul-tural practices. A massive body of political and cultural productionhad circumscribed and marginalized its use, separating it from thefields of study in ethnology, chemical and biological sciences, and,more particularly, from any therapeutic role in psychology (in thevery definition of a Schedule I substance), and linking it instead to acategory of cultural danger-to the point of inducing moral and po-litical panics. Wasson's beloved mushrooms had, in other words, be-come street drugs-" magic mushrooms." Whereas in 1960, halluci-nogenic substances in general were little known, by 1978, they vir-tually stood in as cultural signs for the political turmoil and sup-posed cultural degeneration of the late 1960s. Given the vast dispar-ity in contexts, Wasson's insistent repetition takes on a somewhatstartling-if not stubborn-appearance.

His insistence here can be read first in the context of a knowledgenetwork. While Wasson offers the beginnings of the detailed argu-ments that will later be taken up by Hofmann and Ruck-that is tosay, the historical and chemical arguments-the most convinced,and perhaps convincing, language of his early argument is associ-ated with the direct intuition induced by the entheogenic experi-ence. In 1956, just a year after his initial mushroom experience,Wasson began arguing, primarily by analogy, that the mysteries atEleusis were actually hallucinogenic rites. As a correlate to the ana-logical claim, he began describing the Mexican ceremony in termsof the mysteries. In 1960, for example, he noted that he was "pro-foundly grateful to my Indian friends for having initiated me intothe tremendous Mystery of the mushroom." The language of theancient mysteries also covers the motive for the secret: the "Indians

236 Configurations

have kept the divine mushroom close to their hearts, sheltered fromdesecration by white men, a precious secret; to them, performingbefore strangers seems a protanation.:"? Wasson thus describes thecurious form of secrecy among the indigenous people of the Maza-tec country, wherein everybody knows the secret though nobodydivulges it. The comparison to Eleusinian mysteries of this condi-tion is not lost on Wasson: "In surviving texts there are numerousreferences to the secret, but none is revealed .... YetMysteries suchas this one at Eleusis played a major role in Greek civilization, andthousands must have possessed the key."48 In addition to the ~bvi-ous points of social and historical analogy that would be buttressedby his co-author Ruck's specialty in classical botany, Wasson, as earlyas his 1960 speech, had the beginnings of the pharmacological argu-ment that would be put forth by collaborator Hofmann. In the My-cological Society speech, he had already made the connection be-tween the d-lysergic acid amide isolated in ololiuqui (morning glory)seeds used in Mexican rites and the same family of componentsthat, it would be claimed in 1978, appears in the ergot that makesup the Eleusinian kykeon.49


48. In a curious footnote to Tile Human Condition, written at approximately the sametime, Hannah Arendt reflects on much the same problem, arguing that the Eleusinianmysteries stand in a strange relation to the public and private realms as they were con-ceived in Greek antiquity. The mysteries, Arendt speculates, "provided for a commonand quasi-public experience," with the paradoxical caveat that while they were "com-mon to all," they nevertheless "needed to remain hidden, kept secret from the publicrealm" (Arendt pp. 61ff., 63). Under discussion is the concept of the public and theprivate and the specific function of the household as a locus for birth and death-thosethings that are "hidden from human eyes and impenetrable to human knowledge" (pp.62-63). This hidden-ness, for Arendt, is the necessary counterpart to the showing forthin the public realm. Yet it is precisely. the quasi-public nature of the mysteries thaterupts from the footnote to disrupt Arendt's narrative; the mysteries take their place atthe pivot point of private physis and public nomos. The torchlight of their hidden pub-lic rites flickers in the darkness between necessity and freedom, between the unspeak-able and that which can only be spoken. But the quasi-public character of the mysteriesin antiquity should also throw into some doubt the telling of a fall into some degradedpublic-ness, where the ordinary problems of biology invade political life. Another termfor the quasi-public-ness of the mysteries, then, might be one that functions only oxy-moronically within the Arendtian discourse: biopolitics. See Hannah Arendt, The Hu-man Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 61-63.

49. Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck, Road to Eleusis (above, n. 13), p. 20; Wasson, "Hal-lucinogenic Fungi of Mexico" (above, n. 12), p. 155. Hofmann suggests that the fungalspecies C/aviceps purpurea, or some other variation of fungus, grew on the wild grass,rye, or wheat in the Mediterranean region. Ergot is the sclerotium on the fungus. It haschemical properties through its "alkaloidal components" (Wasson, Hofmann, and


However, despite these two dimensions of proof (cultural andnatural, as it were), the intuition that a hallucinogenic compoundstands at the heart of the Eleusinian ceremonies emerges as a resultof the entheogenic vision itself; the proofs seem to come afterward ..Wasson puts forth his most convinced-and least substantiated-claim in his description of the vision state: lilt is clear to me wherePlato found his Ideas; it was clear to his contemporaries too. Platohad drunk of the potion in the Temple of Eleusis and had spent thenight seeing the great Vision.">? In the Life article as well, the claimis embedded in the description of the vision-s-and more, it is part ofthe experience of the vision:

I felt that I was now seeing plain, whereas ordinary vision gives us an imper-fect view; I was seeing the archetypes, the Platonic ideas, that underlie theimperfect image of everyday life. The thought crossed my mind: could thedivine mushrooms be the secret that lay behind the ancient Mysteries?"

Put plainly, the intuition that the Mexican rites shared some fea-tures with the Greek mysteries celebrated at Eleusis was the subject

Ruck, Road to Eleusis [above, 11. 13], p. 30), specifically ergonovine. Hofmann suggeststhat ergonovine served as the hallucinogenic ingredient of the kykeon. Ergonovine issoluble in water; the poisonous ergot alkaloids ergotamine and ergotoxine are not. Forthis reason, Hofmann speculates that the functionaries at Eleusis could have derivedthe hallucinogenic compound without exposing themselves to ergot poisoning. As asecond solution, Hofmann suggests that ancient herbalists were able to e.xtract the al-kaloid from a different species of ergot (Claviceps papa/i) growing on "the grass Pas-palum distichum which contains only alkaloids that are hallucinogenic and which couldhave even been used directly in powder form" (ibid., p. 33). Finally, Hofmann suggeststhat the alkaloid was extractable from ergot growing on a wild grass iLolium temulen-tumi, which is "notorious prey to the Claviceps fungus." The third solution presentsthe same problem of the isolation of ergonovine from the more dangerous ergotamineand ergotoxine. Wasson's ability to make the connection so early, however, is trulystriking, since it appears that not even Hofmann himself had made the connection atthe time. Karl Kerenyi's Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter contains anappendix in which the author speculates on the ingredients of the kykeon, citing spe-cifically a letter exchange with Albert Hofmann. Here, Hofmann suggests that alcoholwas sufficient to induce the visions associated with the mysteries, adding that "poleyoil (Oleum pulegii) might very well, added to the alcoholic content of the kykeon, haveproduced hallucinations in persons whose sensibility was heightened by fasting." SeeKerenyi, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter, trans. Ralph Mannheim(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 180.

50. In Road to Eleusis (above, n. 13), the quotation reads: "It is clear to me where Platofound his Ideas; it was clear to those who were initiated among his contemporaries too.Plato had drunk of the potion in the Temple of Eleusis and had spent the night seeingthe great Vision."

51. Wasson, "Seeking the Magic Mushroom" (above, 11. 33).

238 Configurations

of a trip report first and foremost; it is later supplemented by moreacceptable forms of scientific and historical evidence. This progres-sion of the insight diminishes neither the process of putting thatknowledge together nor the careful argument that Wasson, Hof-mann, and Ruck offer; it does, however, change the character of thesecret. It might be asked, at this point, what we learn when we learnthat the rites at the center of Greek religious life involved the use ofhallucinogenic compounds." Do we learn, after all, what it was theGreeks experienced when they experienced the deiknymena (thingsshown), the dromena (actions performed), and the legomena (thingssaid)?53 Or are we not, despite the revelation, more intractably in thepresence of an aporrhetoteros logos, a "story told under strict injunc-tion of silence," or the arrheta (the unspeakablej?" Wasson followsclosely here in the longer tradition of the hallucinogenic experiencein Western thought: "Let me hasten to warn you," he tells the gath-ered mycologists in 1960, "that I am painfully aware of the inade-quacy of my words, any words, to conjure up for you an image ofthat state.">' While he can "reveal" the secret of Eleusis, in otherwords, the revelation can only approximate the secret, if the secretis the entheogenic experience itself.

While Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck certainly argue that the se-cret of Eleusis is the fact that hallucinogenic fungi were used to in-duce the experience of the mysteries, this fact has little bearing onthe character of the actual experience. If the secret is rather the vi-sion, the experience (as Wasson's intuition suggests), then it is itselfdependent on the variables of set and setting-the contingent stateof the person ingesting (or encountering) the kykeon and the contin-gent forces at work in the surroundings. Wasson clearly recognizesthese variables, even in his earlier work. His descriptions of the Mex-ican rites are keyed into such factors, focusing on the place of therites, the particular lighting at.different times during the ceremony,the singing or chanting of the curandeta, the production of a percus-sive drumbeat. Furthermore, in his section of The Road to Eleusisdedicated to the classicist/historical argument, Ruck suggests that

52. Kerenyi claims that "all Greek existence was bound up with the celebration of theMysteries at Eleusis" (Eleusis [above, n. 49], p. 10).

53. Ibid., p. 52.

54. Ibid., p. 138. See also Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystely Cults (Cambridge, MA: Har-vard University Press, 1987): "Is it not true that the mysteries were 'unspeakable,' ar-rheta, not just in the sense of artificial secrecy utilized to arouse curiosity, but in thesense that what was central and decisive was not accessible to verbalization?" (p. 69).


Ceraso I The Rhetoric of R. Gordon Wasson 239

"we can rest assured that the hierophants, with generations of expe-rience, knew all the secrets of set and setting," and goes on to specu-late about the arrangement of music, the release of various perfumes,the timing of lights, and steps within the ceremony. S6 The secret,then, is a strange secret indeed, for it cannot be communicated as itis-it can only be communicated as a secret. At its best, this sort ofprofanation provides a group of valuable tactics for enduring theexperience, but it does not transmit the experience itself. If any-thing, it heightens the difference between what can be experiencedand what can be transmitted. Far from annexing the hallucinogenicsubstance for Western science, Wasson recognizes the difficulty sci-ence has with such a problem:

These difficulties communicating have played their part in certain amusingsituations. Two psychiatrists who have taken the mushroom and known theexperience in its full dimensions have been criticized in professional circles asbeing no longer "objective." Thus it comes about that we are all divided intotwo classes: those who have taken the mushroom and are disqualified by oursubjective experience, and those who have not taken the mushroom and aredisqualified by their total ignorance of the subject!"

We might return here to the process by which Hofmann isolatedpsilocybin, and-for The Road to Eleusis-determined the hallucino-genic activity of ergonovine. In both cases, as with LSD, Hofmanntested the compound on himself; he combined the extraction ca-pacities of traditional science with the capacity to enter into contactwith the molecule. Hofmann's practice skirts between the two classesdescribed by Wasson (although, assuredly, not without practical con-sequences), or it takes up both forms in different ratios, according todifferent needs. In Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's terminology,Hofmann practices both an iterative and an itinerant science, wherethe first is characterized by reproducing (for example, the capacity toreproduce the extraction of alkaloids according to fixed procedures),while the second operates by following (in this case, following theaction of ergonovine, or exploring psilocybin "by legwork")." Thedifference is important here, for it goes directly to the question ofwhich secret Wasson seeks to uncover. If the secret is the identifica-tion of claviceps purpurea as the molecule "behind" the Eleusinian

56. Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck,Road to Eleusis (above, n. 13), p. 47.

57. Ibid., p. 152.

58. GillesDeleuze and FelixGuattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,vol. 2, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp.372-373.

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mysteries, then the first model would apply; in fact, Wasson's argu-ments by analogy seek to extract a consistency across the variablepractices of Mexican and Greek culture. One could then go furtherand trace the movement of the molecule in the body, or identifyand thereby reproduce particular chemical relationships. If, on theother hand, the secret Wasson seeks to disseminate is what he willcall the entheogenic experience itself, then the second group ofpractices applies, since this secret can only be approached itiner-antly, and the knowledge produced by approaching it is, as Deleuzeand Guattari would have it, "still dependent upon sensitive or sen-sible evaluations that pose more problems than they solve."s9 Thefirst defines the secret as an actual set of identifiable and reproduc-ible material phenomena; the second defines the secret as a contin-gent virtualization of experience.

Wasson's repetition of his argument in vastly different contextsgives us the sense that he is working both angles. The question ofthe mushroom's divinity, posed before the gathered mycologists,seems all the more radical given the itinerant framework, since itcalls for a transformation-or capacity for transformation-withinthe science of mycology itself. At the same time, he is working tobuild up an interest in the identification and traditional study ofpsilocybin mushrooms. The repetition of the argument in 1978, ofcourse, finds much more fraught circumstances, because a "profana-tion" of both secrets, and all the authority and force of Western rea-son (and law!), had risen up to meet the diffusion of hallucinogens.In the january-june 1979 issue of the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs,Ruck and Wasson collaborated again, this time with Jeremy Big-wood, Danny Staples, and Jonathan Ott to suggest that the veryjournal in which they were published had been poorly named. Theauthors propose the term entheogen to describe "states of shamanicor ecstatic possession induced by the ingestion of mind-alteringdrugs."6o The argument plays out the concerns Wasson voiced aboutnomenclature years earlier when he argued against the use of "intoxi-cation," noting that "we are all, willy-nilly, confined in the prisonwalls of our everyday language.v" The term entheogen manages toavoid the "incomprehension and prejudice of the times," to cast hal-lucinogenic substances in a more rhetorically favorable light, nodoubt, but also to signal a dignified history of "prophetic seizures,

59. Ibid., p. 373.

60. Carl A. P.Ruck, Jeremy Bigwood, Danny Staples, Jonathan Ott, and R.Gordon Was-son, "Hallucinogens," Journal of Psychedelic Drugs 11:1/2 (1979): 146.61. Wasson, "Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico" (above, n. 12), p. 155.


erotic passion and artistic creation as well as those religious rites inwhich mystical states were experienced.v= Arguing against the useof terms like hallucinogen and psychedelic, the authors seek to pro-vide a program or a set of guidelines for the itinerant study of thesesubstances and their effects.

In this context, The Road to Eleusis can be read not as a historybook, but as a recipe book. The question it asks is posed precisely tothe society where hallucinogenic substances circulate wildly, yet fallunder prohibition: How do you form a public mystery? The ques-tion might be rephrased: How do you practice a collective sciencethat remains open to itinerant practices? The question turns back onitself, since its answer must be a form of following the material ofcollective bodies and of posing more problems than it solves. Thecollaboration attempts to form a vocabulary for thinking about sucha public mystery, a thinking that includes seriousness-the serious,even sacred character of the group encounter with the alien force.Wasson, one suspects, is not fond of the recreational use of halluci-nogenic mushrooms, except insofar as that use is taken seriously.Like the term entheogen itself, The Road to Eleusis stakes out a zonebetween mythos and logos, working to provide gnidelines for operat-ing in and enduring the flash-the flickering torchlight and ventril-oquistic effects-that constitute that zone. The writing practice thatbuilds the knowledge network here enters into resonance with thetwo forms of secrecy: the movement and connection of informationand its excess on the one side, and the itinerant practice of the mys-tery, with its rich capacity for reproduction, its incommunicableblockages, and its information scarcity on the other.

These relations may seem abstract enough in such terms. Wassonmight be read here, however, as providing a sort of compromise tothe problem of information flow.Questions concerning informationflow-Who controls it? How does one access it?-have, of course,become all too familiar in recent years, playing themselves out infields as diverse as software, pharmaceuticals, music and cinema file-sharing, and, importantly, the patenting of various plant speciesused in indigenous practices. While the problem of informationflows in connected networks may seem familiar, Wasson's terms forthe problem certainly do not, and that may be the point. Today,these problems engendered by information flows are generally de-bated within conceptual structures built by Enlightenment rational-ity, jurisprudence, and market capitalism. They are problems of

62. Ruck et al., "Hallucinogens" (above, n. 60), p. 146.

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property, and problems of balancing property rights with the publicrights of access. Indeed, a massive literature has sprung from thefertile soil in which digital information flows come into conflictwith intellectual-property laws. As Andrew Ross has recently argued,however, such debates tend to be "legally-minded" and thus "re-volve exclusively around the interests of claimants: creators, copy-right holders, or the general public of users and consumers.v= Assuch, they focus on corporations seeking monopolistic control of in-formation products on the one hand, and a vague class of consum-ersseeking public access to information products on the other. Was-son's depiction of information flows seems mystical in comparison,drawing as it does on archaic and non-Western traditions, but it maybe this very dissimilarity that serves to point up the strange effectsour own discourses of information flows have on our informationecologies.

The problems of openness and secrecy, communication and mys-tery, function across knowledge-making communities. There can belittle doubt that we are currently experiencing a crisis in the contingent

63. Andrew Ross, "Technology and Below-the-Line Labor in the Copyfight Over Intel-lectual Property," American Quarterly 58:3 (2006): 743-766. Ross provides a useful cor-rective to both the euphoria and the hand-wringing over the emergence and subse-quent "enclosure" of the digital information commons, arguing that the legalistic formof such struggles have elided the effects that a networked information economy has onlabor. Many commentators have, of COLUse,cast doubt on the very categories of "usersand consumers" that Ross deploys here, arguing that the distinction between con-sumption and production is precisely what collapses in a networked information econ-omy. But that collapse could be read to make Ross's point: If what is at stake in intel-lectual-property battles is the global restructuring of production and consumption,why are the consequences for work qua labor so often banished in networked informa-tion economy discourse in favor of rather vague promises of consumer-driven locationsfor remixing, innovation, and participatory design?

Furthermore, where labor does seem central (if decentralized) and organized (ifthrough novel sociotechnical architectures), it is predictably limited to a privilegedclass of technical workers. Since free and open-source software communities have beenthe darling of numerous copyright activists and their primary model of communal andnovel labor organization in networked information economies, they come in for apredictable drubbing in Ross's account. Free and open-source software communitiesmight call into question romantic or industrial assumptions of singular authorship andindividual ownership (and the intellectual-property regime built on those assump-tions), but for Ross, they operate as if narrowly held technical expertise will mitigateany degradation of work. The "labor consciousness" found in free and open-sourcesoftware communities is thus like "the guild labor mentality of yore that sought secu-rity in the protection of craft knowledge." No doubt a similar charge could be leveledat Wasson himself. While allowing that free and open-source software communitiesand Wasson rely on an empirically limited technical knowledge, I'm suggesting thatthey both provide an alternative model for social organization that can be generalized.In this sense, their specific labor consciousness is not really at issue.


or historical configuration of these problems. Crises in the conceptsof secrecy go hand in hand with the diffusion of information onglobal networks. Encryption technologies are deployed to hide"dangerous" information from dangerous people, and are just asquickly deplored for hiding dangerous people from informatization.The emergence of purportedly free culture (and its attendant copy-right and patent disputes) registers another slip in the contingentconfiguration of the common and the proper, the digital commonsand intellectual property, and, like psychedelic sciences, it sees theseforces as intimately in league with the configuration of the amateurand the professional, institutional boundaries and lines of noninsti-tutional dispersion. That intellectual-property arguments have mi-grated from the software field and the sciences in general into dispa-rate domains of pharmaceuticals, music file-sharing, the use of digi-tal images, and even student plagiarism demonstrates that these re-configurations are widespread and historically significant. To arguefor either more information flow or more proprietary control, how-ever, may be beside the point. The challenge before science andother forms of sociality is to hack-that is, both endure and workon-their reconfiguration already ongoing. It is certainly the case thatintellectual-property activism of some kind is a necessary feature ofsuch a hack, and advocates for broad public access to a scientific anddigital commons have done excellent work in addressing the moredangerous expansions of enclosure. Wasson's rhetoric, however,seems to seek another kind of hack altogether: it works to build aprogram for what he calls the entheogenic sciences, a program thatboth opens lines of communications and develops new literacies be-yond those constructed by institutions, while closing or warding offthe danger of both totalized knowledge and exploitation. It bothseeks and defends itself from immanence. The paradoxical figure ofthe public mystery may be paradoxical only to the particular con-figuration of secrecy and communication that underlies modern sci-ence and its technological and economic partners. In gesturing to-ward another set of practices, Wasson forces us to confront this par-adox and provides us with a set of rhetorical resources to beginhacking it.