The Inscrutability of Elves, Fairies and the Archetypal Sub-stratum of Psychedelic Experience

The Mazatec make oblique reference to the elf-phenomenon in the many names they ascribe to the mushroom. In Spanish--from the Mazatec, pequeño niño or 'little child,' in the Mayan language 'aluxes,' which is the equivalent of the spanish 'duende,' elf or the quality of spiritedness. I routinely heard people refer to the mountain above Huautla de Jimenez as the 'duende,' I actually lived right on the duende/Chicon during the majority of my stay in Huautla. One night I woke up in a state of sleep paralysis to the site of ~4ft tall elf figure in the bed next to me, white hair and a sombrero and a very old/still face. I interpret it to be a sort of local and colloquial expression of the 'green man,' al-khidr or 'spirit guide' phenomenon.  I collected spores and specimens of Ps. zapotecorum, Ps. caerulescens and Ps. mexicana on that mountain side; I am particularly fond of los pajaritos, the little birds/Ps. mexicana. I myself have had several encounters with these elven-entities under the influence of mushrooms, I don't wholly know what to make of it. It makes me think of a dream I once had. In the dream, I am at the abandoned pueblo/anasazi cliff-dwelling site at mesa verde in Southern Colorado. I enter one of the caves and there is a dark-skinned Indian man--very regal and beautiful, who tells me he is the 'Spirit of the Mushroom.' He has a small leather pouch full of jewels. He opens the bag and throws the jewels on the ground, and pointing to the jewels asks me, 'how can The One also be The Many?' It's an old-Greek question really, a philosophical question--but somehow I place this elf-phenomenon within the context of this question: how can The One also be The Many? I feel this phenomenon may be the expressive arm of the mushroom as an organized and aware intelligence. Evans-Wentz's 'The Fairey Faith in Celtic Countries' is an interesting read on the history of this topic 

So far as the archetypal experiences are concerned--and this looming question of elves/fairies etc., one of the things I've always tended to notice is that the animating presence within the mushroom (which the Mazatec are frank to discuss), when pressed to really provide proof of it's existence, has a tendency to present itself in such a way as to simultaneously cast itself into question. It's a lot like reading Joyce's 'Ulysses,' there is an almost theatrical and humorous simulacrum of the sacred and profane. I think the fallacy to avoid is making of this phenomenon a paper mephistopheles or straw-man; that is, it seems imprudent to either drink the kool-aid or toss the baby out with the bathwater. In terms of the archetypal aspect of this phenomenon, at the foundation of Jung's epistemology of the archetypes is what he called 'empirical objectivism,' or the 'reality of the psyche.' So the very foundation of Jung's particular formulation of the archetypes was to say the contents of the psyche viz a  viz active imagination has an empirical grounding in reality. Ironically enough, Jung also specifically refered to the archetypes as 'the litttle people' of the psyche. The problem I see in equivocating this phenomenon of the 'little people' with the straw-man of cult-sensibilities, is that in order to do so one must-necessarily and simultaneously reject the very empirical objectivism upon which the notion of the archetypes is based. I would have to say that the contents of psychedelic-vision are necessarily deluded-hallucination, the psychedelic cosmologies of the Celts and Mazatec are so much hogwash. That said, I'm somewhat hesitant to toss out the Heraclitean Aion, the archetype of the divine child, the diocitos or precious little ones of the Sierra Mazateca, with the pejorative bathwater of unconscious projection.

This in mind, the trap of 'spiritual materialism' ala Chogyam Trungpa is best avoided. I maintain a good sense of humor in this regard, but there's a lesson to be had in this invocation. I see spiritual materialism along a spectrum, on the one side you have hyper-material spiritualism, which is a fetishistic investure of material things with spiritual significance: crystals, food, and objects. I notice hyper-material spiritual when people seem convinced we can eat our way to enlightenment, so long as we eat the right thing or generate enough orgone-energy ala willhelm reich etc. I also feel many of the teachings on the 'energy body,' and 'chakra system' succumb to this trap of hyper-material spiritualism. On the other end of the spectrum is hyper-spiritual materialism which rests on the metaphysical assumptions of rational-materialism, the morbid fantasy that nature is a lifeless object.