The Golden Thread - Sacred Mushrooms and the Sufi Connection (a rough sketch
)
Since returning from Huautla de Jimenez four years ago, I've more or less
remained silent on various aspects of the deeper strata of what I
experienced in connection with the ancient Mazatec tradition. While I
tend to be somewhat intellectual and verbally expressive, it has been
remarkable to observe that in reflecting on the deepest strata of the
mushroom tradition—the khirqa-akbariyya or baraka of the mushroom—my
soul becomes wrapped in a most exquisite silence. The subtlety and
transparency of the sacred tradition of the mushroom is virtually
impossible to express, and in my extensive study and practice of nearly
all of the major contemplative-mystical spiritual traditions of the
world—from Buddhism to gnosticism, alchemy, and mystical Christianity—I
have really only ever found that one spiritual tradition ever comes close to
verbalizing the deepest potential of the sacred mushroom: this is the
Ishraqi or Illuminationist school of Sufism as espoused by teachers such
as Suhrwardi and Ibn arabi. Things only slowly began to coalesce in my
mind after a decade studying the mushroom directly through ingestion,
through mushroom cultivation, in pouring over the available ethnographic
and ethnomycological literature, and extensively studying the
literature of Sufism, the entire Collected Works of Jung, the Diwan al'
Shams-i-Tabrizi of J'allaludin Rumi, the Sophianic Diwan and
Tarjnumann-al-Ashwaq of Ibn' arabi and the collected works of Henry
Corbin and Peter Kingsley; only after a decade or more did the
connections between the primordial tradition of the Greeks as
transmitted to Sufism, and the ancient tradition of the sacred
mushroom--as it came from Siberia with the Athapascan migration--began
to elucidate itself in my perception. Not to spoil the story before I
even tell it, but the connection between the Pre-Socratic Greeks, the
Sufis and the mushrooms of the Mazatec is a group of people native to
Siberia who were called the Avars. It is a little known fact that this
nomadic band of Mongol Siberians effectively created the
meta-ontological substratum upon which our
scientific-technological-democratic civilization was formed. But, that's
another story all together: as the legend goes, the very father of
philosophy himself—Pythagoras--was gifted a golden arrow by the
Avar-Hyperborean Abaris, who came with this gift as a shaman of his
people. While scholars have been at odds with this story and the
apparent evidence for over 2500 years, a much deeper story is being told
in this legend of the golden arrow of Abaris: in Pythagorean circles,
this sort of symbolic teaching-story would be called symbola or acusmata
and reserved exclusively for initiates of the tradition. And let's be
frank, sacred mushrooms aren't about having fun, or entertainment: the
evidence speaks clearly, before monotheism and technocratacy, before
this world we inhabit—with it's notions of time and matter--was even
created, there was the primordial tradition of the mushroom. This was/is
an initiatic tradition going at least 50,000 years back into
proto-history, a tradition of revealed knowledge/gnosis in the paradigm
of Ishraqi/Illuminationism: a living theophany of the heart.
As many of us know, Amanita muscaria is still widely used as an
entheogen by the Uralic-speaking peoples of western Siberia and more
relevantly the Paleosiberian-speaking peoples of Far East Russia. These
are the descendants of the very Avar-people who brought
philosophy-herself—as an ancient shamanic-ecstatic artform—to the
ancient Greek-Fathers. The eastern Siberian Koryak tell a story about
how the fly agaric (wapaq) allowed Big Raven to carry a whale across the
sea and to it's home. The spittle of the god Vahiyinin (Existence)
becomes the wapaq-fly agaric and acts as a food for Big Raven, who tells
the little mushrooms to grow forever on the earth so that his
children—the people—could continue to learn from the little mushrooms.
While this story may seem like arcane indigenous rhetoric, I believe it
to be a parable for the transmission of the ancient mushroom-tradition
across the Bering straight and into the new world. The Ojibwa
ethnobotanist Keewaydinoquay Peschel reported to Gordon Wasson the use
of the fly agaric mushroom amongst her people, where it is known as
miskwedo. The story of the northerwestern tribal connection to the
sacred mushroom tradition is an ethnolinguistic story waiting to be
told. Amazingly enough, the Inuit tell a very similar story about a
whale, a raven and a mushroom. The Inuit story slightly differs in
describing a connection between the sacred mushroom—which is unnamed—and
moonlight: the mushrooms grow in a particular field where the moonlight
falls at a particular angle.
Confabulating this seemingly impossible—and utterly unlikely—nubulae of
connections, the sacred mushroom tradition of the Mazatec was revealed
to the Western world on the coat-tails of a very synchronous set of
coincidences that drew Gordon Wasson out to Huautla de Jimenez on that
fateful June 29th night in 1955. Ironically, we can credit none other
than the Sufi-popularizer Idries Shah for initiating the series of
coincidences that ultimately led Gordon Wasson by the hand to the sacred
mushroom tradition and the Mazatec altar. In Shah's 'The Sufis,' he
comments on Sufi language-play,
“The Arabic word for a hallucinogenic fungus is from the root GHRB.
Words derived from the GHRB root indicate a knowledge of the strange
influence of hallucinogenic fungi.”
Shah then goes on,
“The usage of these words, though not incorrect, are so unusual that
there is absolutely no doubt that a message is being conveyed to the
effect that chemical hallucinogens derived from fungi provide and
undeniable but counterfeit experience.”
Now, Shah was something of an interesting character. While Shah has
largely been credited for popularizing Sufi teachings in the West,
serious questions as to the authenticity of Shah's teachings on Sufism
have been raised in James Moore's article “Neo-Sufism: the Case of
Idries Shah.' As Yannis Toussulis argues in his book on Malamtiyya
Sufism, Shah made several liberal departures from classical Sufism.
Toussulis also documents Shah's penchant for chicanery in his
associations with students of Gurdjieff including John G. Bennett. All
things considered, Shah is often viewed as something of a pilferer of
the original Sufi-tradition. So it seems unlikely to me that Shah—while
clever, would have been able to credibly determine the role of
hallucinogenic mushrooms in the history of Sufism. He makes a clear
connection, but in the image of the mushroom only sees a reflection of
his own 'counterfeit experience' and chicanery. In fact, the connection
between ancient Sufism and the mushroom goes back much further than Shah
was aware: it ultimately goes back to the ancient-Mystery schools of
the pre-Socratic Greeks.
Enter Greek classicist and mythological scholar Robert Graves. Graves
extensive interactions with Idris Shah are a matter of record, as he in
fact wrote the introduction to Shah's seminal work 'The Sufis.' In
Graves essay 'The Two Births of Dionysus,' he explicitly mentions,
'Wasson began his career as a journalist without any university
education (which may account for the preservation of his genius), became
a Wall Street reporter, was taken over by JP Morgan and Co. as their
press agent, and soon elevated to Vice-President when his extraordinary
understanding of business became apparent. Similarly with his second
profession: he began as an amateur mycologist and has since become the
acknowledged founder of the huge, immensely important new science,
ethnomycology. Whenever I pick up strange news of mushrooms, as often
happens, I send it to him for filing. It had been a chance bit of
information that I passed on to him in the early fifties that prompted
him to investigate the mushroom oracles of Mexico.'
So it seems likely that Graves passed on chance information from Shah to
Wasson, and this is no new argument. As Terence Mckenna put it, Wasson
was 'acting on a hint dropped to an Irish poety by a great-grandson of
Mohammed (Shah).'
But what truly interests me is some of the similarity between the
esoteric Sufi doctrine of the Great Teacher-Philosopher Ibn 'arabi, and
the revelation of the mushroom. My journey into the center of the
visionary potential of the human nervous system, out of the mundane
world of the war-bloated American consciousness, began and ended with a
mushroom. I was in high school when I first ate the sacred mushroom. I
had developed a particular interest in the inspired musings of
Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and the nineteenth-century French hashish eaters. I
mulled over Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil, and fancied myself
precocious, except for the fact that I wasn’t a particularly popular
young man. In the Flowers of Evil, I intuited the first and faint stirrings of an
authentic complexio oppisitorum, ripe with mystery and the irrational
vicissitudes of the heart. As an Irish-American, I lusted after things
strange: the stranger the better. In Baudelaire’s vision of the
“artificial paradise,” my youthful fancy found wings and took flight. I
would sit beneath the trees and imagine I was the sole denizen of a
moon-bound garden rife with Baudelaire’s flowers of evil. The
centerpiece of this perfumed flower garden overflowed, as if some sort
of alien and opulescent fountain, spilling out into four causeways from
the crux point. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the word for psychedelic
sacrament in the Nahuatl language of the ancient Aztecs translates to
mean “flower.”
The mushroom became the centerpiece of my imaginal Eden in the
years that followed. One day while perusing books in the library, I came
across the image of an Indian woman holding mushrooms out over smoke in
her outstretched hands, eyes half-closed in prayerful reflection. The
image took on a life of its own in my imagination, and that life was
larger than my own. Since that time, I have identified the image as one
taken from Gordon Wasson’s The Wondrous Mushroom, but to this day the
image in my mind’s eye remains much larger than the one from Allan
Richardson’s photograph. For not only does everything appear expanded,
but there is a light escaping off the top and convex lenticular surface
of the saprophytic basidiocarp like stardust off a fish’s back. Several
years later, the very same Lumen Naturae shown cleary through the
illustrations and photography that accompany the Oss/Oeric Psilocybin:
Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide. The image captured my attention in one
resolute gesture of mystery that has guided my soul ever since.
In a cosmic adumbration of what psychedelic and literary pioneer Aldous
Huxley termed “gratuitous grace,” later that very same day I happened to
be walking into the boys’ locker room when a friend of mine ran into me
and, reaching into his overcoat pocket, handed me a bag full of the
very same genus of mushroom I had earlier seen as an image in the
student library: Psilocybe. Over the years, the manifestation of the
mushroom in my life as a guiding Imagos of the sacred has been uniformly
accompanied by what analytic psychologist Carl Jung termed
synchronicity. Synchronicity, an acausal principle of connection between
disparate spatial and temporal events, finds its most apt mythological
expression in the Greek figure Eros: winged god of Ecstasy and the
spontaneous product of the fusion of Chaos and Gaia. Like the “flowers
of evil” image which equates the delicate beauty of a flower with
diabolical daemonia, two forces in seeming and impossible opposition to
one another are brought into a state of inexorable fusion, what
alchemists refer as the Coniunctionis. From this fusion erupts an
irrational and transcendent Other which brings the entire system into a
supraconscious state. Synchronicity is the temporal sensing of this
supraconscious Other, and has been observed to be prescient of the
revelation of Spirit in its incarnation as supraconscious Other: for me,
this Other came in the form of a mushroom.
During my first experience before the Mazatec altar in Huautla de
Jimenez, a very particular thing happened. Before I had traveled to
Mexico, I had a dream in which I was told that I would meet the
Theotokos (God-bearer) in the mountains of Mexico. Wasson's account of
his own velada in Huautla was prescient of my experience when he
recounts,
'As I said before, I had been seated in the corner of the room on the
left of the altar, a vantage point from which I could observe everything
that was happening. Through Cayeteno, Sabina asked me to move because
the Word would come down there. Twenty years later, in telling the story
of her life to Alvaro Estrada, Sabina explained her conception of 'the
Word:' in a notable passage she says:
… I see the Word fall, come down from above, as though they were little
luminous objects falling from heaven. The Word falls on the Holy Table,
on my body: with my hand I catch them, Word by Word.'
It's almost impossible to talk about what happened in a way that others
can understand. But that night of my first velada before the Mazatec
altar, a light descended from the effigy of the Virgin Mother upon the
altar and hit my heart. When it hit my heart, I immediately fell to the
ground as if a lightning bolt had hit me. And while I was 32 at the
time—and had seen the Allan Richardson photograph at age 14—I realized
that the in the time-scale of the tradition I had been brought into as
an adoptee--the ancient-primordial tradition of the sacred mushroom,
that on this time-scale only a split-instant had passed. As I sank
deeply into the ground, I had a vision of the psychospiritual structure
of human experience upon planet earth as an infinitely thin membrane
upon which the activities of coming/going, birth/death, being/non-being
were viewed. In the ancient Greek-mystery tradition of Pythagoras, they
call this the initiation into anamnesis, a word which means
'remembering.' Of note is that the central practice of sufism--the
dhikr, translates to mean 'remembrance' whereby the devotees heart
remains perfectly absorbed in the Names. In Pythagorean circles,
anamnesis has particular connections to the doctrine of re-incarnation,
and as demonstrated in Peter Kingsley's seminal 'A Story Waiting to
Pierce You' is invariably linked to the Tulku tradition of Tibetan
Buddhism. Of particular note here is that the Tulku-Lamaist tradition of
Tibet is certainly derived from an ancient shamanic practice of the
previously discussed Avars. The basic experience is one of connection to
a particular spiritual tradition over multiple lifetimes, because you
directly recognize that there is no life/death per se; these are simply
surface phenomenon etched upon a supra-ordinate Spirit-strucuture. As
such, when we connect with such an ancient-primordial tradition as the
sacred mushroom, we are quite literally connecting with a spiritual
phenomenon that is at least hundreds of thousands if not millions of
years old: our little old life is suddenly not so important in the light
of this. I realized right there in front of the Mazatec altar that
while 18 years—nearly two decades--had passed in my little life, it was
only the blink of an eye to the very tradition which I had been
transmitted in that moment.
Several years later, I discovered an intiatic language for describing
this phenomenon in a very particular doctrine of the Great Sufi Teacher
Ibn arabi: the doctrines of mystic kathenotheism and successive
theophany in the recurrence of creation,
'the gnostic's heart 'is colored' in every instand by the color, that
is, the modality of the Form in which the Divine Being is epiphanized to
him. (hint, there's a reason my nick is 'azure'). He then resembles a
pure 'spiritual matter' informed by the faiths, or a mirror receiveing
the forms and colors reflected in it, but expanding and contracting to
their measure. And he reveals his heart to the Divine Being in the same
form which the Divine Being has chosen to disclose Himself to him.'
Eternity-herself is a single-flickering instant when this theophanic
image—in my case a mushroom, is truly revealed. Suddenly a much broader
perspectve opens up. In my earliest experience with the Spirit which
animates the mushroom, I remember very clearly being shown the face of
the mushroom. It appeared in the form of several interpenetrating
concentric spheres. As the spheres coalesced, they would excrete
higher-dimensional beings in the form of elves. I was asking the
mushroom several questions about my personal life: my
father-relationship, why I had so much trouble getting through college
courses in spite of the fact that I rarely scored below a 98% on even
the most challenging science exams. The mushroom looked at me quite
plainly and said, 'you have been given a deep gift by me and I could
care less about your little, petty personal issues.' It seemed quite
cruel at the time, but years later I began to really understand what the
mushroom was doing. To this effect, Ibn arabi very specifically
ruminates:
'Creation as the 'rule of being' is the pre-eternal and continuous
movement by which being is manifested at every instant in a new cloak.
The Creative Being is the pre-eternal and post-eternal essence or
substance which is manifested at every instant in the innumerable forms
of beings; when He hides in one, He manifests Himself in another.
Created Being is the manifested, diversified, successive, and evanescent
forms, which have their substance not in fictitious autonomy but in the
Being that is manifested in them and by them. Thus creation signifies
nothing less than the Manifestation (zahir) of the hidden (batin) Divine
Being in the forms of beings: first in their eternal hexeity, then—by
virtue of a renewal, a recurrence that has been going on from moment to
moment since pre-eternity—in their sensuous forms. This is the 'new
creation' to which, according to the theosophists, the following Koran
verse alludes: 'Were we wearied by the first creation? Yet they are
uncertain about a new creation.'
What we're sitting
on with the mushroom is—in many ways, more powerful than nuclear
fusion: it is a tradition that has seen the creation and destruction of
many of the major world civilizations. I just wanted to give some sense
tonight of a deeper dimension of possibility with this stuff, and what a
lot of my life's work has been about. Thanks for listening!
