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!