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.It is clear that the entireceremony and its individual ritual aspects consist of sensorially acted-out components and aim at thecontrol of sensory manifestations.The active guidance of the shamans is of the essence.They constantly encourage and admonish theaudience, answer anxious questions about individual hallucinations, and orchestrate music, dance, recitals, thetaking of drugs and short periods of rest in such a manner that the ceremony produces a strong impact uponall its participants.Hallucination is to be enjoyed intellectually and imaginatively but above all it constitutesthe principal expression of Tukanoan religion.20In 1955, Wasson and his companion, Alan Richardson, were the first outsiders to actuallyparticipate in a Mazatec sacred mushroom healing ceremonial.Wasson's profoundexperience during this soul-moving, bemushroomed, transcended state is best captured by hisown words:It permits you to see, more clearly than our perishing mortal eye can see, vistas beyond the horizons of thislife, to travel backward and forward in time, to enter other planes of existence even (as the Indians say) toknow God.All that you see during this night has a pristine quality: the landscape, the edifices, thecarvings, the animalsthey look as though they had come straight from the Makers workshop.21His immense insights, gained during the ecstatic transformation of the soul-self, peeled someof the perplexing covers veiling the nature of mystical states and of uncommonly intensespurts of creative energy, leading Wasson to comment elsewhere: "I do not suggest that St.John of Patmos ate mushrooms in order to write the Book of Revelation.Yet the successionof images in his vision, so clearly seen and yet such a phantasmagoria, means for me that hewas in the same state as one be-mushroomed"22Page 139In a pine-forest valley, overlooked by the high-rising Toluca volcano, situated about onehundred miles southwest of Mexico City, the Matlatzinca Indians consume ne-to-chu-táta,the sacred mushroom Psilocybe muliercula, which flourishes along riverbanks.The nativename denotes "divine ancient beings," "dear little sacred lords" etc., or they are alluded to bythe Spanish santitos, meaning ''saints" These ''sacred beings" can communicate with an ailingpart of the body, determine its dysfunction, and prescribe the right remedy.They can alsogrant the Matlatzincas magnificent visions of flowers, gardens, and stars; as much asterrifying ones, of great shamanic import, containing skeletons, out-pouring blood, andserpents.Whenever the divine mushrooms are gathered by the Indians, they must bereplaced with offerings of wild flowers.23Such drug ceremonials may richly portray a syncretism between the old indigenous ways andnewer Christian beliefs.According to a tradition held by one Indian group in Mexico, thesacred mushrooms grow only where the spittle from Christ's mouth had fallen unto the earth,and consequently it is Jesucristo who speaks and acts via the divine mushrooms.This localtradition, as Furst brings rightly to our attention, dates back to the shamanistic practices ofaboriginal Mexico.The spittle is considered to be, not only in the New World, the seat of theshamans preternatural power and is often regarded as a liquified rock crystal, which, in turn isthought, almost transculturally, to comprise the crystallized form of the spirits.In Siberianshamanism, as only one example, we can find a causative relationship, too, between a divinespittle and the sacred fly-agaric.24 The Goths shared with many the belief that the rings ofmushrooms growing under the canopy of trees arose from the spittle of the mischievousforest elves.It is is not surprising that, today, the Huichol Indians of western Mexico possess a developedconcept of transubstantiation, a syncretic product based on the ancient pre-Columbiantradition, fused with quantitative traits ensuing from the Catholic dogma.All these elements,integrated neatly into a mesh, form a native religious cult based on peyote.25 The plant,transformed into a metaphor, corresponds in substance to what Peter Furst termed, "thedivine deer or supernatural Master of the Deer Species;"26 or, more simply, to the Master ofthe Animals, encountered in so many cultures.In a mythological time sequence of the Huichol, the Great Shaman, Grandfather Fire, had ledancestral beings on the first peyote expedition.The ancestors, suffering from discomforts andvarious ailing symptoms, had besieged the Great Shaman for assistance [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]