Pharmacophilia: The Natural Paradises

Pharmacophilia: The Natural Paradises

Jonathan Ott — 4 recordings in the archive.

The book: Pharmacophilia: or The Natural Paradises by Jonathan Ott.

Two decades have passed since the American anthropologist Peter first characterized shamanism as an extremely ancient Pangean religion that dates back at least 50 millennia into our past. In "The Dance of the Spirits: The Origins of Religion," his fellow anthropologist Weston La Barre proposed the same thing, offering minute details. Both Peter and La Barre acknowledged the fundamental importance of R. Gordon Wasson's groundbreaking work in formulating this surprising perspective. Wasson, a banker and pioneering ethnomycologist, dedicated his life to documenting the survival of shamanism and exploring a unified field theory about the connection between shamanic ecstasy and religion. Wasson summarized this revolutionary discovery with astonishing simplicity. Shamanism is the convenient name we give to the religious experience of the Stone Age, and its key is ecstasy, rapture. Fortunately for us, the cult of the entheogen did not disappear in prehistory. Shamanism persisted here and there, spreading like fingers through the corridors of time into early history. I suggest that it survives to this day in the secret rituals of the divine mushrooms in Mesoamerica. Wasson would later characterize prehistory and protohistory, or perhaps more precisely, the non-literate history of all peoples, as the age of entheogens, which is still alive in the Amazon, in the remote mountains of Mexico and elsewhere. Sometimes I have wondered if the pre-literate eras that stretch back through eons were not those peculiarly belonging to entheogens, the age of entheogens. The Eleusinian Mysteries began in the pre-literate past of the amazing Greek people, then persisted for centuries under a hermetic seal of secrecy within an age of glorious letters. The soma of Vedic hymns had its heyday before the Aryans learned their letters, but it disappeared with the arrival of the alphabet. Although Eliade conceived of the shamanic use of what he indiscriminately called drugs or narcotics as a decadence, as a vulgar substitute for pure trance, we now know that this was a colossal mistake, a classic example of not seeing the forest for the trees. With the blinders and tunnel vision characteristic of excessive academic specialization, allied with prejudices derived from the pharmacological Calvinism of Western society, and lacking the most rudimentary knowledge of pharmacology or the history of intoxication, he clumsily described as a degenerate use of sacred plants, whose visionary effects were the very essence of shamanism, what Gordon Wasson would identify four years later, based on his personal…