Entheogens and The Public Mystery: The Rhetoric of R. Gordon Wasson

Entheogens and the Public Mystery: The Rhetoric of R.
Gordon
Wasson
Antonio Ceraso
Configurations, Volume 16, Number 2, Spring 2008, pp. 215-243 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
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Entheogens and the Public
Mystery: The Rhetoric of
R. Gordon Wasson
Antonio Ceraso
DePaul University
Abstract
This article explores the work of R. Gordon Wasson, who discov-
ered the use of psilocybin mushrooms among indigenous people in
Mexico. I argue that Wasson’s writings on these and other psyche-
delic substances involve two primary moves. First, Wasson seeks to
open up processes of scientific research beyond institutional and
disciplinary boundaries, thereby constructing deinstitutionalized
knowledge networks. At the same time, he recognizes that such open-
ness leaves knowledge-making communities vulnerable to exploita-
tion. Wasson’s second move, then, is to draw on the tradition of the
ancient mystery cults—particularly the Greek mysteries at Eleusis—
in order to install protective silences within the open networks. This
twofold structure of openness and mystery provides an alternative
for thinking about and entering into information flows that can
complicate and enrich current debates on intellectual property.
On August 30, 1960, R. Gordon Wasson stood before the gathered
members of the Mycological Society of America and raised the lowly
mushroom to the level of a deity. Certain species of mushroom,
Wasson argued, as a result of their hallucinogenic effects on con-
sciousness, lay at the heart of an otherwise diverse variety of reli-
gious experiences. When his keynote address was published in the
Harvard Botanical Museum Leaflets six months later, his discussion of
“certain parallels between our Mexican rite and the Mystery per-
formed at Eleusis” and his claim—grounded in a self-experiment—
Configurations, 2008, 16:215–243 © 2009 by The Johns Hopkins

University Press and the Society for Literature and Science.
215
216 Configurations
that “out of a mere drug comes the ineffable, comes ecstasy,” fol-
lowed a leaflet on the production of glass flowers, and preceded a
study on the “teosinte introgression in the evolution of modern
maize.”1 Mycology, like astronomy, ornithology, and other sciences
that require widely distributed practices in order to collect data and
specimens, certainly values its amateur practitioners; yet Wasson re-
mained very much an amateur, and an amateur selected to present
the keynote address to the professional organization’s annual con-
ference. With no formal training in biology, chemistry, botany, or
even mycology itself and no university appointment or industrial
affiliation, Wasson’s position in the implicit hierarchy of profes-
sional knowledge was clearly defined. His mycological evangelism
before the gathered scientists was, in short, a risky venture. In his
rousing close, then, one might have expected polite half-smiles
when Wasson invoked “the belief of some primitive peoples that
mushrooms, the sacred mushrooms, are divinely engendered by Ju-
piter Fulminians, the God of the Lightning-bolt, in the Soft Mother
Earth.” Wasson’s speech seemed to be less concerned with the sci-
ence of mycology than with the character of the sacred. Given his
position, it is difficult to imagine a more curious setting in which to
forward such claims.
If any amateur could draw connections between the scientific
object of mycology and the character of the sacred, however, it was
surely Gordon Wasson. An investment banker by trade, Wasson—
together with his wife Valentina Pavlovina Wasson, a pediatrician—
had pioneered the field of ethnomycology, compiling data as ama-
teurs between the fields of mycology and anthropology for thirty
years. Just three years before his keynote speech, the couple had
published Mushrooms Russia and History, an illustrated two-volume
study of cultural attitudes toward mushrooms, the culmination of
their decades-long joint research. Much of the second volume was
dedicated to the Wassons’ search for and eventual participation in
hallucinogenic mushroom rites in Mexico; it came complete with
renderings of rare Meso-American mushroom species. Moreover, the
1. Botanical Museum Leaflets 19:6–18 (February–April 1961). Harvard’s Botanical Museum

Leaflet was a key publication venue for the study of ethneogens at the time. Just two
issues before the publication of Wasson’s keynote, Richard Evans Schultes and Ralph F.
Raffauf published an article titled “Prestonia: Amazon Narcotic or Not?” The authors
seek to clarify early twentieth-century claims by Richard Spruce that Prestonia was an
active ingredient in ayahuasca. While the subject of Schultes and Raffauf’s article is,
then, hallucinogenic, the method differs completely; they include no report from self-
experiments, and the web of citation and evidence follows recognizable protocols of
scientific discourse.
Ceraso / The Rhetoric of R. Gordon Wasson 217
Wassons orchestrated what could be called a successful publicity

campaign to coincide with the publication of Mushrooms Russia and
History, despite the fact that only several hundred copies would be
printed. In May 1957—with the assistance of his friend and power-
ful Time Incorporated CEO Henry Luce—Wasson published an arti-
cle in Life magazine describing his experiences at a Mexican mush-
room ceremony, an article over which Luce granted him full edito-
rial control.2
Later that year, Wasson confidant and fellow mushroom experi-
menter Robert Graves penned an article praising the Wassons’
ethnomycological findings for Atlantic Monthly. In early 1958, the
Wassons published another description of their hallucinogenic ex-
periences, this time in the staid Garden Journal; in the title, they
coined the term entheogen for those substances that would soon
come to be known as “psychedelics.” And the publicity had effects.
The various articles helped set off a massive influx of “mushroom”
tourists to the remote Huautla region of Mexico, where entheogenic
mushrooms had been used under a veil of secrecy since the Spanish
invasion. The articles also sparked both the scientific and popular
interest that opened Western markets to the mushrooms. In fact,
the Life article’s title—the only element over which Wasson had no
editorial control—gave psilocybin mushrooms the popular name
they still take today: the editors titled it “Seeking the Magic Mush-
room.” With a little help from his friends, in other words, Wasson,
as he took the podium for his keynote at the Mycological Society,
had done more in the previous few years to widely publicize a star-
tling development in mycology than any of the professionals in the
room.
I point to this moment in the history of psychedelic science be-
cause it condenses a number of practices associated with the dis-
course on entheogens. First, Wasson’s amateur status at the Myco-
logical Society presages what has become an amateur, or deinstitu-
tionalized, science once most hallucinogenic substances were pro-
hibited under the Controlled Substances Act. Under the prohibition
against the use of hallucinogenic substances, trip reports stream into
2. This is not the last time Luce would try to use his vast publication empire to publi-
cize psychedelic substances. Both he and his wife, Claire Booth Luce, would later ex-
periment extensively with LSD. According to W.A. Swanberg, Luce’s personal experi-
ences with LSD had such an effect on him “that he turned up in New York to present
the managing editors of Time, Life, and Fortune with copies of a book on psychedelic
drugs, along with an enthusiastic talk about the subject’s story possibilitiesz—a sugges-
tion quickly adopted by Time and Life, the latter being the first ‘family’ magazine to
cover it”; see Swanberg, Luce and His Empire (New York: Scribner’s, 1972), p. 463.
218 Configurations
websites like www.erowid.org, providing practical advice on dosage

as well as a virtual menu of setting variations to tweak the psyche-
delic experience. Moreover, under the prohibition against the syn-
thesis of hallucinogens, psychedelic cultures have developed under-
ground-production networks, the hidden botany and chemistry that
feed the illicit market. In short, psychedelic cultures have developed
distribution devices for all manner of textbooks, instruction sets,
user manuals, and the other products of technical communication
that build scientific knowledge, but they have done so in noninsti-
tutionalized or quasi-institutionalized networks.
Wasson’s pre-prohibition work suggests, however, that research
on entheogens must be an “amateur” endeavor, and must therefore
develop noninstitutionalized institutions. As the literature has long
recognized and ceaselessly reports, the entheogenic experience is
singular; it is conditioned by the conjunction of set and setting, or
singular consciousness enfolded and enfolding a singular scene. As a
result, the knowledge of entheogens, like knowledge in those sci-
ences that depend on amateur practitioners, relies on distributed data
collection. Research organizations like the Multidisciplinary Associ-
ation for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) must conduct tests on human
subjects, because consciousness of the experience is a necessary ele-
ment of the research. MAPS also listens to amateur experimentalists
and uses their findings to, among other projects, justify FDA appeals
for formal research. A push to study the effect of MDMA, LSD, and
psilocybin on patients with cluster headaches, for instance, was sup-
ported, in part, by “anecdotal information on dozens of individuals
reporting very positive results from their personal experimentation
with LSD and psilocybin.”3 Given the conditions under which con-
sciousness interacts with entheogenic substances, one would expect
a thriving knowledge network of amateur experimenters even with-
out the prohibition.
Second, Wasson’s commitment to the sacred character of entheo-
genic knowledge, both in antiquity and among his indigenous infor-
mants, signals a challenge to the rational discourse of the sciences.
Wasson’s project—to identify the source of religious or spiritual be-
liefs in their material practices, and specifically, in chemical inges-
tion—may appear to contribute to the proverbial disenchantment
of the world, which is to say, to the various scientific or material
explanations of spirituality. As a conceptual operation, it seems the
ultimate in rationalist debunking: Wasson strips a mystic tradition
3. MAPS Bulletin 14:1 (2004).

of its spiritual elements by attributing spiritual effects to material

causes. God is in the mushroom, or rather, in the way the interac-
tion of its chemical components produce experience and determine
consciousness. Such projects are, of course, as old as theorein itself
(and perhaps as tiresome; even the Socrates of Plato’s Phaedrus would
rather not get involved in the problem of the gods, finding the rev-
elation of the “real” causes of the gods in nature a time-consuming
and fruitless philosophical project).4 Yet Wasson’s relation to the di-
vine also functions as a re-enchantment; he invests the sciences
with a mysterious or spiritual dimension. The mushroom is a mate-
rial cause, but its effects are nevertheless divine, or invested with
mysticism. Wasson’s mysticism performs a complementary rhetori-
cal function of reinvesting scientific practice with a kind of religious
attitude; it is an appeal, paradoxically enough, to a scientific sacred.
Through this appeal, I will argue, Wasson’s rhetoric cultivates the
affective relation to the subject of study that seeks to recast scientific
investigation as the affective work of the mystery cult.
Wasson’s dual rhetorical strategies respond to what Richard Doyle
has identified as a source of problems for psychedelic science: “the
combination of ineffability common to many mystic traditions and
the necessity of communication proper to scientific practice.”5 Was-
son, I will suggest, addresses this structural problem in psychedelic
science by reconfiguring the logics of the common and the proper:
by modeling an open-knowledge network at the base of entheogenic
production, he seeks to practice a common science; by invoking the
laws of secrecy that animate the mystery cult and shamanic tradi-
tions, he seeks to retain the propriety of the sacred. Through this
reconfiguration of the common and the proper, Wasson’s writing
moves beyond the domain of the psychedelic sciences, providing a
model for a general problematic in network-information ecologies.
Put another way, Wasson might be seen as encountering a network-
information ecology in its early stages, avant l’internet perhaps, and
attempting to work out conceptual and social difficulties that we
now commonly associate with the emergence of a digital commons
on the one hand, and claims to proprietary knowledge on the other.
If Wasson’s entheogenic rhetoric provides a revelation, it is a vision
of the impoverished form taken by current debates on the commons
and intellectual property.
4. Plato, Phaedrus, 229d–230a.

5. Richard Doyle, “LSDNA: Rhetoric, Consciousness Expansion, and the Emergence of
Biotechnology,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 35:2 (2002): 153–174.
220 Configurations
Notes from Underground: Wasson’s Mycelial Network

“Sometimes it seems to me that our whole work has been composed by others,
with us merely serving as rapporteur.”
—R. Gordon Wasson6
Gordon Wasson, after some turns and twists, finally had a species
of mushroom named for him. In a sense, this naming is fitting, be-
cause Wasson’s whole body of work can be said to follow the logic of
the mushroom.7 If Wasson’s writing forms the visible protuberance—
the stem and head of a mushroom—it also points to the under-
ground network, or mycelia, that feeds and supports it. To follow
this metaphor to its end, Wasson’s writing could be seen as the rep-
licating arm of an expanding network of knowledge; it explodes its
spores in such fertile venues as Life, setting off a massive cultural
interest in psilocybin mushrooms. To the extent that such interest
actually serves to reproduce mushrooms themselves, moreover, the
metaphor verges tenuously toward its limit. Wasson’s writings, in
other words, actually worked to disseminate species of mushrooms;
in this sense, he played more than a metaphorical role as a force for
reproduction. Wasson’s approach to his subject matter engages
with what sociologist Michel Maffesoli calls the “underground puis-
sance.”8 Maffesoli examines the source of what he calls “sociality,”
opposing it to the social. The social is a rational category of groups—
human groups as they operate politically and collaborate on projects.
For Maffesoli, such groupings cannot be explained without assum-
ing a vitalism that fills the connectivity of communities in their ev-
eryday activities—an underground puissance, as opposed to the power
of the social.9 Also called by Maffesoli simply “the will to live,” this
feature of collective bodies points not to contractual agreements or
purposes, however implicit, but rather to affective ties and styles of
6. R. Gordon Wasson, “Speech to the Mycological Society of America,” August 30, 1960.
7. Jonathan Ott describes the controversy over the naming; see Ott, Pharmocotheon:
Entheogenic Drugs, Their Plant Sources and Histories (Kennewick, WA: Natural Products
Company, 1993).
8. Michel Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society
(London: Sage, 1996), pp. 30–55.
9. Ibid., p. 32: “It is this opposition between extrinsic power and intrinsic puissance
which must rigorously guide our thinking and which is the translation into sociologi-
cal terms of the previously mentioned aesthetic dichotomy (optical versus tactical).”
While Maffesoli’s use of categories is often overly dualistic, one suspects that these
dualisms serve more as heuristic devices for accessing affective ties than as distinct
categories.
engagement that bubble up through the surface of the social, some-

times expressing themselves in festivals and riots, sometimes mani-
festing themselves more subtly in religious rituals, but are always
present, even in the minor rites of communities such as a nod to an-
other on a street corner or sharing the energy of a common secret.
Wasson’s writing attends to this underground puissance: it is not,
to return to the metaphor, a mushroom that forgets its mycelia;
rather, his writing is peopled with his sources and informants—vir-
tual crowds of citations, references, and names that escape the foot-
notes to invest the text. As citation studies in science have amply
demonstrated, scientific writing in general grounds itself in citation
networks.10 Such networks indicate both influence and affiliation
with schools of thought, and mapping such networks has long been
an interest of information science. Moreover, the inclusion of a net-
work of knowledge production puts Wasson squarely in the tradi-
tion of writing on entheogens in Western science. The impulse is
already clear in Havelock Ellis’s late-nineteenth-century writing on
mescaline, in which he not only outlines a history of mescaline’s
“discovery” by Western science—naming James Mooney, Weir
Mitchell, and others—but even provides the name of a local dealer
of mescal buttons for those interested in future experiments.11
Wasson’s citation practice, then, is not distinguished by citation
itself, but the relation it constructs with the subject matter of en-
theogenic science. This section will explore his rhetorical practice of
referencing a knowledge network, of embedding a map of the net-
work within his writing itself. In doing so, Wasson models a sha-
manic science; his position with respect to his sources and materials
parallels the shamanic performance of the Mazatec curanderas. Just
as the mushroom speaks through the curandera with a “strange ven-
triloquistic effect,” Wasson envisions the study of entheogenic
mushrooms taking him up in its current.12 His network rhetoric
10. I cannot do justice to this rich field of inquiry in the space available. For an intro-
duction to the tradition of remarkable work in bibliometrics, citation studies, and in-
formation science, see Henry G. Small, “Cited Documents as Concept Symbols,” Social
Studies of Science 8:3 (1978): 327–340; Loet Leydesdorff and Olga Amsterdamska, “Di-
mensions of Citation Analysis,” Science, Technology & Human Values 15:3 (1990): 305–
335; E. Garfield, “Random Thoughts on Citationology: Its Theory and Practice,” Scien-
tometrics 43:1 (1998): 69–76; and Henry G. Small, “On the Shoulders of Robert Merton:
Towards a Normative Theory of Citation,” Scientometrics 60:1 (2004): 71–79.
11. See Havelock Ellis, “Mescal: A New Artificial Paradise,” Contemporary Review (Janu-
ary 1898); and Ellis, “Mescal Intoxication,” Lancet (June 12, 1897).
12. R. Gordon Wasson, “The Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico: An Inquiry into the Ori-
gins of Religious Ideas among Primitive Peoples,” Botanical Museum Leaflet 19:7 (1961):
222 Configurations
thereby suggests an ethical practice—the practice of the node, or

rapporteur—and this practice becomes just as important as any con-
crete content he gleans from sources and informants.
The first site I will examine in Wasson’s network already speaks to
the alien force of the encounter. I have been speaking of Wasson’s
writing, but much of his early work was co-authored with Valentina
Pavlovina Wasson. The story of how their collaborative effort began
serves as a set piece that appears in most of their work, usually as an
introduction to the project of ethnomycology. As Wasson tells it, he
and his new wife were on their honeymoon in New York’s Catskills
(and Wasson is careful here even to name his friend who lent them
his house for the week) and decided to take a walk down a forest
path. The two stroll along, “happy as larks, both abounding in the
joy of life,” when “suddenly”—and the sudden break in the usual
relation is important—Pavlovina “threw down [Wasson’s] hand and
darted up into the forest”:13
She had seen mushrooms, a host of mushrooms, mushrooms of many kinds
that peopled the forest floor. She cried out in delight at their beauty. She ad-
dressed each kind with an affectionate Russian name. . . . She knelt down be-
fore those toadstools in poses of adoration like the Virgin hearkening to the
Angel of the Annunciation. . . . I called to her: “Come back, come back to me!
They are poisonous, putrid. They are toadstools. Come back to me!” She only
laughed the more: her merry laughter will ring in my ears forever.14
Something has happened—an event. Wasson is forced to respond

to the age-old question: What is to be done when your wife is se-
duced by a patch of mushrooms? The story is telling precisely as a
seduction. It operates through Pavlovina’s affective response to the
“host of mushrooms”; she breaks the affective bond of the marriage
137–161. The phenomenon of the curandera being taken up as a channel for the
“speech” of hallucinogenic mushrooms is described in rich detail by Henry Munn. The
Mazatec curanderas he encounters punctuate each of their chanted utterances with the
word tzo (says): “The Mazatec say that the mushrooms speak. If you ask a shaman
where his imagery comes from, he is likely to reply: I didn’t say it, the mushrooms
did.” We also learn something about Munn’s practice of listening here, as he immedi-
ately blocks the notion that the mushrooms speak: “No mushroom speaks, that is a
primitive anthropomorphization of the natural, only man speaks, but he who eats the
mushrooms, if he is a man of language, becomes endowed with an inspired capacity to
speak.” See Munn, “The Mushrooms of Language,” in Hallucinogens and Shamanism, ed.
Michael J. Harner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 86–122.
13. R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl A. P. Ruck, The Road to Eleusis: Unveil-
ing the Secret of the Mysteries (New York: Harvest/ HBJ, 1978), p. 13.
14. Ibid.
to enter into another relationship. She is, in short, taken up by the

mushrooms, and the religious character of the description is no
mistake for Wasson. Despite the trope of seduction, however, Pav-
lovina’s enthusiasm is not wholly passive. She retains the capacity
to name each variety, and she soon picks the mushrooms for drying
and cooking. The story, then, places the notion of agency in ques-
tion: one cannot decide whether the mushrooms are acting on Pav-
lovina, or she on the mushrooms; rather, there seems to be a symbi-
otic or transversal relation at work—even a communion, in the
broadest sense. Was it the mushrooms themselves or Pavlovina that
actuated the rupture in the leisurely stroll of the marriage? Or was it,
as the Wassons often claim, the culturally embedded feeling toward
mushrooms in Pavlovina and Wasson that occasioned their opposed
response to the teeming forest floor? To the extent that Wasson must
also respond to this episode, the ethnomycological project—con-
cerned with tracking the cultural attitudes toward mushrooms—gets
underway.
As origin narratives go, the Catskill mushroom affair certainly
proves both entertaining and memorable. It functions to orient
readers to the more difficult work of tracking cultural feelings to-
ward mushrooms by locating these feelings in concrete persons.
That is clear enough. But cultural feelings already indicate diverse
responses to the encounter; cultural attitudes alone cannot explain
the relation, because the mushrooms themselves play a strangely ac-
tive role in the narrative. They exert a force that cultural attitudes
respond to, register, form a relationship with. The narrative certainly
functions as a syndecdoche for the cultural project of ethnomycol-
ogy, illustrating the attitudes of mycophobia and mycophilia. But it
also draws attention to a point of contact, or con-fusion, between
nature and culture and therefore puts the notion of cultural feelings
in question. It is the confused form of relation that opens up the
question of a network for Wasson; his own understanding of mush-
rooms must take into account these affective forces of the encoun-
ter. If “Come back to me!”—the initial closed response of the myco-
phobe—constitutes a blockage of those affective forces, a desperate
attempt to restore the marital order of filiation, the voyage of ethno-
mycology constitutes an open response, a capacity to enter into the
transversal lines of communication and be transformed by them.
This openness, already signaled by the Catskills story, becomes part
of what could be called an ethical method of ethnomycology.
The first tenet of this method is that “common people” have much
to contribute to the development of a science. It is almost impossible
to read the Wassons’ work without this principle asserting itself:
224 Configurations
knowledge of cultural feelings toward and practical use of mushrooms

can be gleaned from the everyday experience of nonspecialists more
readily than from the various professional guilds and learned societ-
ies of mycology. Ethnomycology must develop sensitivities for the
underground puissance in order to do its work. From Mushrooms Rus-
sia and History we have the following, which is fairly typical of the
Wassons’ approach:
There is an old belief in Russia that when mushrooms abound, war is in the
offing. The thoughtless intellectuals of the world despise such homely sayings,
which on the surface are nonsense. But ofttimes those sayings are the cryptic
expression of experience graven in the recess of a people’s past.15
Wasson is sure to mention that “in all our inquiries and travels we
looked, not to the erudite, but to humble and illiterate peasants as
our most cherished informants,”16 that “ofttimes the contributions
of even the lowliest informants are of highest value, filling a lacuna
in our argument,”17 that “wherever we traveled we tried to enter
into contact with the untutored peasants and arrive at their knowl-
edge of fungi,”18 that it is “refreshing to turn from the unhappy no-
menclature of the mycologists to the genuine words devised ages
ago by humble people.”19 One of the most frequent citations in Was-
son’s corpus on entheogenic mushrooms comes from the “muleteer”
who led the Wasson party on its first trip through the mountains of
Mexico into the Mazatec region: “The little mushroom comes of it-
self, no one knows whence, like the wind that comes we know not
whence nor why.”20
Wasson offers several explanations for this allegiance. First, and
most obviously, the Wassons were themselves amateurs with respect
to the professional science of mycology. In one sense, the valoriza-
tion of local and informal knowledges serves as a rhetorical negotia-
tion with that science and a claim for legitimacy. However, the claim
is not passive, insofar as the Wassons argue for the value of a method
that crosses disciplinary boundaries. The epistemological fences
erected by the disciplines—and this has certainly become a common
15. Valentina Pavlovina Wasson and R. Gordon Wasson, Mushrooms Russia and History
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1957), p. 37.
16. Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck, Road to Eleusis (above, n. 13), p. 14.
17. Wasson, “Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico” (above, n. 12), p. 140.
18. Ibid.
19. Wasson and Wasson, Mushrooms Russia and History (above, n. 15), p. 369.
trope of interdisciplinary research of all stripes—block connectivity.

But such connectivity is precisely what enables the emergence of
ethnomycological—and then entheogenic—knowledge.
The clearest exposition of this point appears in an article authored
by both Wassons in Garden Journal (notably, a magazine for both
professional specialists and hobbyists in the field of botany). “Why
was it,” the Wassons ask, “that we, a pediatrician and a banker in
New York, made an ethno-mycological discovery of some impor-
tance in Meso-America?”21 The answer is clear: neither the anthro-
pologists nor the mycologists could tweak their own epistemologi-
cal frameworks. To return to the confusion of nature and culture
implicit in the Catskills narrative, “one must be both an anthropol-
ogist and a mycologist to enter into the spirit of the thing.”22 A sim-
ilar sentiment appears in Wasson’s later work on the identification
of the ancient soma as a derivative of the mushroom Amanita mus-
caria. Under the heading “Where the Search for Soma Went Wrong,”
Wasson argues that the various fields of experts in ancient literature
and botany were not sufficient in themselves to effect the identifica-
tion.23 Since the Wassons were amateurs, then, they were “unen-
cumbered by academic inhibitions, and therefore [we] felt free to
range far and wide, disregarding the frontiers that ordinarily segre-
gate learned disciplines.”24 To the extent that the Wassons valued
their own amateur status as a capacity for assaying disciplinary epis-
temologies, then, they could also look to the material that fell out-
side specialist knowledge as it was defined in the various sciences.
If epistemological closure functioned to fence in the sciences, the
Wassons suspected that its posts and padlocks were made up of lan-
guage. What the Wassons sought to uncover were the feelings associ-
ated with mushrooms; they sought these feelings through the media-
tion of words. Their general method, in this sense, is etymological, if
not romantic. To the extent that contemporary thought—particularly
in the sciences—served to conceal, block, or eviscerate the original or
authentic meaning and sentiment of particular expressions, the Was-
sons thus sought to retrieve these by carefully attending to folk usage.
This second aspect of the Wassons’ insistence on folk knowledge, of
course, has its partners in twentieth-century thought—not least being
Heidegger’s hermeneutical project of retrieving the question of Being
22. Ibid.
23. R. Gordon Wasson, “Soma of the Aryans: An Ancient Hallucinogen?” Journal of
Psychedelic Drugs 3:2 (1970): 40.
226 Configurations
through the philological method. The Wassons operate according to

similar assumptions, supposing that the “sayings” are the “cryptic ex-
pression of experience graven in the recess of a people’s past.” And as
in Heidegger, the suggestion here is that the epistemological require-
ments of modern technoscience prevent access to a whole range of
cultural feelings and practices precisely because they excise folk un-
derstandings of an original—or at least surviving—archaic language,
in which are lodged ancient modes of thought and practices:
There is a reproach to mycologists in these unexplored hints and evidence of
psychic effects caused by mushrooms, hints deeply rooted in Europe’s folk-
ways, evidence clearly reported over centuries from Kamchatka, New Guinea,
and Middle America. It seems strange that archaic peoples should still possess
secrets of this kind that our laboratories have not exhaustively analyzed.25
In this sense, the capacity to flow between disciplines derives

from a diversity of literacies. When describing the knowledgeable
muleteer, for example, Wasson is careful to note that “he could nei-
ther read nor write, nor even tell time by the clock’s face.”26 The use
of illiteracies here is telling. The muleteer, the Wassons’ other infor-
mants, even Pavlovina herself in her moment of forest rapture, de-
ploy a different style of literacy than that produced by the profes-
sional sciences. These divergent styles of literacy complicate the ety-
mological project; if the literacy of the muleteer—or the Russian
peasants who sense the onset of war in the wealth of mushrooms—
is not the literacy of standard representation, of reading or writing
or the measurement of time, then the capacity to listen to them re-
quires that the ethnomycological researcher develop new literacies.
Do the Russian peasants draw a connection of material or efficient
causality between mushrooms and war? Wasson’s recognition of the
surface “nonsense” of such a claim suggests not. What form of corre-
lation do they attach to these phenomena? What types of relations
are being adduced? In what logics and systems of knowledge would
such relations work? Or is, indeed, the nonsensical formal character
of these expressions their most important content? The practices of
ethnomycology must develop ways of listening to such nonsense.
Ethnomycology’s access to its object of study develops, then, ac-
cording to two related themes: the need to move between the spe-
cialist knowledges within the sciences, and the need to step outside
the specialist knowledges of science. Both practices, moreover,
require a methodological transformation.
It is also at the intersection of these themes that Wasson will lo-

cate psychedelic or entheogenic science. Before turning to that ques-
tion, however, Wasson’s interdisciplinary matrix requires further
exploration. In addition to elevating the practice of an amateur sci-
ence, his citation practice suggests the importance of specialists in
the knowledge network. Wasson carefully tempers the reproach of
the institutional sciences with admiration and engagement. To con-
tinue the previous quotation:
It seems strange that archaic peoples should still possess secrets of this kind
that our laboratories have not exhaustively analyzed. Indeed, Swiss and Eng-
lish workers have lately arrived, at last, at this exciting terrain for scientific
inquiry. From the fungus known as ergot Swiss pharmacologists have recently
isolated an alkaloid that causes massive psychic reactions in human beings,
including hallucinations that duplicate with astonishing fidelity the testimony
of the old Spanish writers.27
The devotion to folk knowledge, then, by no means indicates a re-

jection of science or academic specialty itself. If the first tenet of the
Wassons’ method privileges folk knowledge, the second retains use-
ful practices within the institutional sciences and specialties. Indeed,
the Wassons carefully cultivate relationships with all manner of spe-
cialists, and diligently include their contributions in their writing.
The story of their “discovery” of the entheogenic mushrooms of
Mexico clearly illustrates this point. After reviewing at length the
history of ethnomycological knowledge of entheogenic mushrooms
in Mexico—from the sixteenth-century Spanish friars who first doc-
umented the practice with contempt, to the twentieth-century
scholars who began to identify the species and practices before
World War II—the Wassons provide the following description, which
I will quote at length because it demonstrates the diligent naming
practice that serves to map the knowledge network:
At this point, in September, 1952, in almost the same mail, we received two
communications, one from Robert Graves in Majorca and the other from Hans
Mardesteig in Verona, alerting us to the peculiar place of mushrooms in the
Meso-American cultures. We had known nothing before then of the indige-
nous cultures of the region. Quickly we got in touch with Gordon Eckholm of
the American Museum of Natural History and Richard Evan Schultes of the
Botanical Museum at Harvard. Schultes told us to communicate with Blas
Pablo Reko, who passed us on to Eunice V. Pike of the Summer School of Lin-
guistics, and then died. Miss Pike, a student of Mazatec language, had lived in
27. Ibid.
228 Configurations
the Mazatec country off and on for many years, and she proved of invaluable
help in guiding our footsteps.28
We are seemingly quite a distance, at this point, from the “untu-

tored peasants” who people the network. The practice of naming
specialists and their contributions expands the knowledge network,
and enriches, rather than conceals, the field out of which ethnomy-
cological knowledge emerges. And the practice is spread across the
Wassons’ writing. In Mushrooms Russia and History, for example, the
Wassons give another nod to their friend Robert Graves, “novelist,
scholar, and poet, who supplied to us, among other brilliant sugges-
tions, the missing link that we had been seeking in order to round
out our conjectures concerning the death of Emperor Claudius, and
to render that conjecture not merely suggestive but persuasive.”29 In
his speech before the Mycological Society of America, Wasson notes
that “we drew heavily on our betters in the special fields that we
were exploring,” then launches into an extended encomium to
French mycologist Roger Heim, director of the Laboratorie de Cryp-
togamie, editor of the Revue de Mycologie, and an “indispensable and
beloved partner in our Middle American forays.”30 He goes on to
praise the work in chemistry of another current and future collabo-
rator, Albert Hofmann—work that the Wassons’ studies in Mexico
largely made possible—predicting that “thanks to the achievements
of our biological chemists, we may be on the brink of re-discovering
what was common knowledge to the ancient Greeks.”31 The devo-
tion to folk knowledge must meet up with the productive capacities
of technoscience; by letting these two domains resonate effectively,
the Wassons distinguish their work from the simple neo-primitivism
and reaction against technoscience so prevalent in the mid-twenti-
eth century.
The development of synthetic psilocybin and psilocin further il-
lustrates the extended knowledge network inscribed in the Wassons’
texts. The Wassons learned of ritual mushroom practices among the
Mazatec and Zapotec peoples through an itinerant series of corre-
spondences. Their first actual trip to Oaxaca came shortly thereafter,
in August 1953. The Wassons’ description replays the theoretical un-
derstanding of archaic knowledge, as it takes the reader through a sort
of travel time-warp. Each leg of the journey closer to the “primitive”
29. Ibid., p. 35.
30. Wasson, “Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico” (above, n. 12), pp. 140–142.
31. Ibid., p. 153.
culture is increasingly divorced from the technological world of their

home in New York City: from airplane, to train, to bus, to old auto-
mobile, and finally, by mule over the Sierra Mazateca.32 For two years
they made several contacts among the indigenous people and many
more journeys, until finally, in late June 1955, Gordon Wasson and
his friend Allen Richardson participate in a mushroom ceremony.
While on previous trips the local population had proved reticent,
Wasson’s Life article describes the crucial breakthrough in detail:
His name was Filemon. He had a friendly manner and I took a chance. Lean-
ing over his table, I asked him earnestly and in a low voice if I could speak to
him in confidence. Instantly curious, he encouraged me. “Will you,” I went
on, “help me learn the secrets of the divine mushroom?” and I used the Mix-
eteco name, ‘nti sheeto, correctly pronouncing it with the glottal stop and
tonal differentiations of the syllables. When Filemon recovered from his sur-
prise he said warmly that nothing could be easier.33
The passage is striking for several reasons. First, Wasson attends

to a hospitality and friendship constitutive of entry into the secret
community. A similar hospitality will extend to his interactions with
pseudonymous Eva Mendez, the curandera Maria Sabina who later
performs the ceremony. This practice of friendship within the knowl-
edge network will become important for distinguishing it from other
practices that seek to merely cycle indigenous knowledge into exist-
ing regimes of science. Second, Wasson carefully describes the correct
utterance of the secret word—a code for entrance into the Mazatec
“mystery cult.” Ironically enough, while Wasson exposes the secret in
one of the widest circulating venues of the time, neither its publica-
tion nor his pronunciation guide give any sense of how to actually
pronounce the word in order to produce the conspiratorial surprise,
a topic I will return to in the next section. Here it is enough to say
that the hospitality and secrecy Wasson describes seems to extend
far beyond a feeling of trust between experts that Steven Shapin sees
as founding validity claims in seventeenth-century epistemology
and now inundating the activities of institutional science.34 They
32. This trope of a movement back in time accompanying a spatial movement into
“primitive” areas is, of course, common in colonial travel literature. It also marks some
of William S. Burroughs descriptions of his movements in Peru in his hallucinogenic
exchange with Allen Ginsberg; see Burroughs, The Yage Letters (San Francisco: City
Lights Books, 1975).
33. R. Gordon Wasson, “Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” Life, May 13, 1957, 102.
34. Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century
England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Shapin’s insight on the function
230 Configurations
are, rather, affects forged in the moment of encounter, resting not

on the established familiarity of expertise, but on contingent com-
munication—the paradoxical trust of surprise.
The network grew past the local knowledges of the Mazatecs
when Wasson included Roger Heim in a trip to Mexico, for the pur-
pose, according to Hofmann, of “introducing the mushrooms to sci-
entific research.”35 Heim identified several species of mushrooms
and turned their chemical analysis over to pharmaceutical compa-
nies in the United States—among them Merck and Smith, Klein and
French—and in France, but they could not isolate the active psycho-
active chemicals. Heim then contacted the Swiss pharmaceutical
company Sandoz, where Hofmann had discovered LSD. Through
this circuitous route, Hofmann began work on identifying the active
agents. He managed to isolate psilocybin and psilocin as the halluci-
nogenic components of the teonanacatl mushroom through self-
experimentation with the mushroom specimens provided by Heim,
transforming the active ingredient into “a chemically pure state by
means of the newest separation methods.”36 Hofmann’s implication
is fairly clear on this point: the other pharmaceutical companies
failed because they would not turn to self-experimentation in order
to aid with the extraction procedure.37
The movement through the network then comes full circle. In
October 1962, Hofmann and his wife traveled to Huautla to present
Wasson’s original curandera, Maria Sabina, with synthetic psilocybin
pills. Hofmann describes the experience as an experiment, but it
took place in the traditional setting, and the curandera performed
the standard Mazatec ceremony while she and the group experi-
enced the effects of the psilocybin. When Sabina stated the next
morning that “the pills had the same power as the mushrooms,”
Hofmann took her declaration as a “confirmation from the most
of trust in modern scientific practice is fascinating. In moving past the networks of

institutionalized science, Wasson shows that trust need not be invested in an elite
group—either as a decorous society of aristocrats or a community of experts. As such,
Wasson’s work could add the notion of hospitality and friendship to the sedimented
conditions for trust in science.
35. Albert Hofmann, LSD: My Problem Child (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980), chap. 6
(available online at http://www.psychedlic-library.org/child.htm).
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid. Hofmann, like Heim, also accompanied Wasson to Mexico. Wasson was well
aware of Hofmann’s work even as it was ongoing. In his speech to the Mycological
Society of America, Wasson mentions both Hofmann’s isolation of psilocybin and psi-
locine and Hofmann’s identification of the active agents of oliliuqui, though the latter
discovery had occurred only weeks before his speech.
competent authority, that the synthetic psilocybin is identical with

the natural product.”38 Hallucinogenic researcher Jonathan Ott puts
it succinctly: “Maria Sabina’s historic test of psilocybin was a classic
science experiment, unparalleled in the long history of pharmacog-
nosy.”39 The synthesis of psilocybin illustrates the productive power
of the knowledge network as it draws in indigenous knowledge, sci-
entific specialization, and self-experiment, with the amateur serving
as mediator and rapporteur for a diverse array of disciplines and lit-
eracies.
The “openness” that the Wassons write into their texts, then,
models the open process through which psilocybin was both discov-
ered by Western science and synthesized for use. Throughout the
Wassons’ work, the knowledge they bring into the network through
their citation practice is treated with a sort of affection—not unlike
the affection Pavlovina showers on the patch of mushrooms in the
Catskills. In other words, there is an affective charge to the citation
practice that exceeds its informational value. Often, the excess of
citation itself marks this affective excess; the naming practice that
provides the entire story of the Wassons’ coming to hear of the Mex-
ican mushroom rites, quoted above, serves as an example. At other
times, this excess is marked by the presence of affectionate terms,
the presence of a friendship, a compliment, or by the insistence that
a contribution is crucial to the overall knowledge network. The de-
scription of Eunice Pike’s contribution on the Mazatec rites is exem-
plary: not only did the Wassons reprint her entire letter responding
to their inquiry in Mushrooms Russia and History, they also described
as “far superior to anything on teonanacatl given to us either by the
Spanish writers or recent enquirers.”40 And Pike—a Christian mis-
sionary familiar with the Mazatec language and customs—is ostensi-
bly a minor player in the entire heavily populated drama. It is no
mistake, then, that Wasson would label himself and Pavlovina “rap-
porteurs,” whose “whole work has been composed by others.” This
rhetorical effect is crucial to the project.
What is imprinted in the Wassons’ citation practice, to put it an-
other way, is a model both for group activity and creative engage-
ment. While I have been calling this grouping a “knowledge net-
work,” it might also be called a production network, since the con-
stitution of the group as such exceeds the knowledge it produces, at
least insofar as that knowledge can be actualized as knowledge
38. Ibid.
39. Ott, Pharmocotheon (above, n. 7), p. 275.
232 Configurations
within any given field. The concrete results of their affiliations are,
of course, important in their own right; the synthesis of psilocybin
and the global diffusion of entheogenic mushrooms are no small
matters, either scientifically or culturally. Yet, pragmatically, these
results are conditioned by the formation of the group body, and the
openness of that group body to the risk of the encounter. As the
“originary” scene of ethnomycology makes clear, that encounter
can be met neither with a blockage nor a solitary call. The content
provided by the network, in this sense, is dependent on the capacity
to act as rapporteur for it at any given point, or node. More than ci-
tation, then, the practice suggests a transformative subjectivity: no
longer the Wasson of “Come back to me!,” but the Wasson in Mex-
ico, now “bemushroomed,” listening to the disembodied voice of
the curandera, the voice that “hovers through the hut, coming now
from beyond your feet, now at your very ear, now distant, now actu-
ally underneath you, with strange ventriloquistic effect.”41 Subjec-
tive transformation, moreover, applies to groups themselves: Was-
son’s citation practice disrupts the lines of filiation between folk
wisdom and institutional science and allows communication across
these divergent lines; indeed, it must reconfigure these formations
in order to produce a responsive psychedelic science.
Such a reconfiguration, however, entails both political and ethical
concerns about Wasson’s method. The invasion of indigenous bodies
and knowledges by Western science is no new phenomenon. Genetic
material and traditional knowledges are leveraged all the time for the
extraction of and synthesis of products like psilocybin. The prob-
lems of such procedures intensify, of course, with the onset of cur-
rent global intellectual-property regimes, under which the contribu-
tions of indigenous people to a scientific knowledge-base mean little
if those communities cannot file a patent, or prove the illegality of a
patent, or, indeed, oppose outright the very practice of patenting
plants and other biological material. Indeed, Wasson’s arguments
for interdisciplinarity and collaborative research may seem quaint
today, when, as Alan Liu suggests, “the current hegemon is . . .
corporate interdisciplinarity.”42 The injunction to “think outside the
box,” posted so prominently in the open-floor-plan offices of con-
temporary capitalism, is nowhere more prevalent than in today’s
management and business literature. The same could be said of non-
specialist knowledges, as organizations are enjoined to embrace the

42. Alan Liu, Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 178.
exciting new models of crowd-sourcing and to leverage the un-

tainted vision of amateur “contributors.” Where the cross-functional
team and the wisdom of crowds explodes the old silos of the mod-
ernist organization (both in the sciences and elsewhere), Wasson’s
project seems far less the advance into thrilling new epistemological
experiments, and far more an early break in the now rapidly collaps-
ing disciplinary apparatus.
From this perspective, the Wassons could be seen as early exploit-
ers with a friendly and hospitable smile, and the pretensions to a
knowledge network little more than apologia for the relentless ex-
pansion of capitalist science into every aspect of social life. While
Wasson—if his practices of distribution (not to mention his work as
an investment banker at J. P. Morgan!) are any indication—was not
opposed to such notions of property, he would equally balk at reduc-
tion of the entheogenic encounter to a market mechanism. If the
science of entheogens requires for Wasson an open mode of encoun-
ter, it also requires a good deal of cunning, duplicity, and secrecy.
Wasson’s fascination with the relation between mystery cults and
hallucinogenic substances serves to tie the open exchanges of the
knowledge network to practices of secrecy. While such practices do
not directly oppose exploitation, they may constitute a modulation in
the regulation of the common and the proper. As Pamela Long’s ex-
cellent study of the role of secrecy in technical production makes
clear, current intellectual-property regimes operate through a his-
torically contingent set of techniques for secrecy and openness.43
Wasson’s mystical vision of secrecy for psychedelic science serves as
provocation to the current organization of secrecy; it re-inscribes
science within the tradition of the mystery cult.
The Secret and the Profane

“Just dwell for a moment on that description. How striking that the Mystery of
antiquity and our mushroom rite in Mexico are accompanied by veils of
reticence that, so far as we can tell, match each other point by point.”
R. Gordon Wasson44
“It is impossible to stress enough the unifying function of silence, which has been
seen by the great mystics as the ultimate form of communication. And
while their etymological relationship may be subject to some controversy,
43. Pamela O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowl-
edge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).
44. Wasson, “Speech” (above, n. 6); Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck, Road to Eleusis
(above, n. 13).
234 Configurations
one can point to a link between the mystery, the mystic, and the mute;
this link is one of initiation that permits the sharing of secrets.”
Michel Maffesoli 45
To address the regime of secrecy Wasson envisions for a psyche-

delic science, I turn to his obsession with the concept of the secret,
especially as it manifests itself both through the entheogenic experi-
ence and, in what seems like the corollary to this experience, through
his decades-long obsession with the Eleusinian mysteries. There is
little doubt that Wasson was interested in the concept of secrecy
before his entheogenic experiences in Mexico. The etymological
method of ethnomycology—and its reliance on “obscene and sca-
brous vocabularies that often escape the lexicographer”—was pre-
mised on the extraction of the “secret meaning” of words; his initial
correspondence with Robert Graves concerned the historical “se-
cret” of the Emperor Claudius’s death.46 The entire ethnomycologi-
cal enterprise, it might be said, ran like a deciphering engine long
before the stranger version of secrecy in the psychedelic experience
made itself plain. The secret character of the entheogenic rites was
preceded by decades of research that assumed “veils of reticence.” As
such, Wasson’s very desire to enter into the Mexican mushroom cer-
emony included the secret—and the secret to be cracked—as its mo-
tor. Yet the form of the secret that Wasson encountered in Mexico
serves as a second event; it works more like the invention of a new
notion of the secret, and a corresponding transformation of what
constitutes profanation. For despite cracking the secrecy of the
Mazatecs, Wasson discovered only another layer of secrecy—the in-
communicable character of the entheogenic experience itself.
Given Wasson’s well-publicized claims in the late-1950s that the
Mazatec mushroom rites resembled the Eleusinian mysteries of
Greek antiquity, his assertions to this effect during the Mycological
Society keynote address may not be particularly surprising. What is
surprising, however, is his compulsive repetition of the argument.
In The Road to Eleusis, a book co-written with LSD discoverer Albert
Hofmann and classicist Carl A. P. Ruck, Wasson reiterates the argu-
ment he presented to the American Mycological Society—even us-
ing many of the same paragraphs, word for word. The surprise comes
from its publication date: The Road to Eleusis appeared eighteen years
after his keynote address, in a culture completely transformed by its
45. Maffesoli, Time of the Tribes (above, n. 8), p. 91.

46. Wasson, “Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico” (above, n. 12), p. 141; Wasson and Was-
son, Mushrooms Russia and History (above, n. 15), pp. 360–362.
encounter with hallucinogenic substances. The interim is crucial;

between the keynote and the publication of The Road to Eleusis, psi-
locybin and psilocin fell under prohibition, first in the United States
in 1968, then through their scheduling as controlled substances un-
der the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act in
1970, and finally through the global extension of the prohibition,
in 1971, under the UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances.
Despite these legal prohibitions, however, the dissemination and
use of hallucinogenic mushrooms had exploded, and by the late
1970s, large quantities of psilocybin mushrooms were available on
the U.S. and global black markets. Both the prohibition and wide-
spread distribution of psilocybin mushrooms, moreover, serve as an
index for the cultural shifts that position the practices of ingesting
hallucinogenic mushrooms. Whereas in 1960, psilocybin consti-
tuted a legitimate space of exploration in the sciences, by 1978, the
substance had been firmly articulated to criminal and counter-cul-
tural practices. A massive body of political and cultural production
had circumscribed and marginalized its use, separating it from the
fields of study in ethnology, chemical and biological sciences, and,
more particularly, from any therapeutic role in psychology (in the
very definition of a Schedule I substance), and linking it instead to a
category of cultural danger—to the point of inducing moral and po-
litical panics. Wasson’s beloved mushrooms had, in other words, be-
come street drugs—“magic mushrooms.” Whereas in 1960, halluci-
nogenic substances in general were little known, by 1978, they vir-
tually stood in as cultural signs for the political turmoil and sup-
posed cultural degeneration of the late 1960s. Given the vast dispar-
ity in contexts, Wasson’s insistent repetition takes on a somewhat
startling—if not stubborn—appearance.
His insistence here can be read first in the context of a knowledge
network. While Wasson offers the beginnings of the detailed argu-
ments that will later be taken up by Hofmann and Ruck—that is to
say, the historical and chemical arguments—the most convinced,
and perhaps convincing, language of his early argument is associ-
ated with the direct intuition induced by the entheogenic experi-
ence. In 1956, just a year after his initial mushroom experience,
Wasson began arguing, primarily by analogy, that the mysteries at
Eleusis were actually hallucinogenic rites. As a correlate to the ana-
logical claim, he began describing the Mexican ceremony in terms
of the mysteries. In 1960, for example, he noted that he was “pro-
foundly grateful to my Indian friends for having initiated me into
the tremendous Mystery of the mushroom.” The language of the
ancient mysteries also covers the motive for the secret: the “Indians
236 Configurations
have kept the divine mushroom close to their hearts, sheltered from
desecration by white men, a precious secret; to them, performing
before strangers seems a profanation.”47 Wasson thus describes the
curious form of secrecy among the indigenous people of the Maza-
tec country, wherein everybody knows the secret though nobody
divulges it. The comparison to Eleusinian mysteries of this condi-
tion is not lost on Wasson: “In surviving texts there are numerous
references to the secret, but none is revealed. . . . Yet Mysteries such
as this one at Eleusis played a major role in Greek civilization, and
thousands must have possessed the key.”48 In addition to the obvi-
ous points of social and historical analogy that would be buttressed
by his co-author Ruck’s specialty in classical botany, Wasson, as early
as his 1960 speech, had the beginnings of the pharmacological argu-
ment that would be put forth by collaborator Hofmann. In the My-
cological Society speech, he had already made the connection be-
tween the d-lysergic acid amide isolated in ololiuqui (morning glory)
seeds used in Mexican rites and the same family of components
that, it would be claimed in 1978, appears in the ergot that makes
up the Eleusinian kykeon.49

48. In a curious footnote to The Human Condition, written at approximately the same
time, Hannah Arendt reflects on much the same problem, arguing that the Eleusinian
mysteries stand in a strange relation to the public and private realms as they were con-
ceived in Greek antiquity. The mysteries, Arendt speculates, “provided for a common
and quasi-public experience,” with the paradoxical caveat that while they were “com-
mon to all,” they nevertheless “needed to remain hidden, kept secret from the public
realm” (Arendt pp. 61ff., 63). Under discussion is the concept of the public and the
private and the specific function of the household as a locus for birth and death—those
things that are “hidden from human eyes and impenetrable to human knowledge” (pp.
62–63). This hidden-ness, for Arendt, is the necessary counterpart to the showing forth
in the public realm. Yet it is precisely the quasi-public nature of the mysteries that
erupts from the footnote to disrupt Arendt’s narrative; the mysteries take their place at
the pivot point of private physis and public nomos. The torchlight of their hidden pub-
lic rites flickers in the darkness between necessity and freedom, between the unspeak-
able and that which can only be spoken. But the quasi-public character of the mysteries
in antiquity should also throw into some doubt the telling of a fall into some degraded
public-ness, where the ordinary problems of biology invade political life. Another term
for the quasi-public-ness of the mysteries, then, might be one that functions only oxy-
moronically within the Arendtian discourse: biopolitics. See Hannah Arendt, The Hu-
man Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 61–63.
49. Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck, Road to Eleusis (above, n. 13), p. 20; Wasson, “Hal-
lucinogenic Fungi of Mexico” (above, n. 12), p. 155. Hofmann suggests that the fungal
species Claviceps purpurea, or some other variation of fungus, grew on the wild grass,
rye, or wheat in the Mediterranean region. Ergot is the sclerotium on the fungus. It has
chemical properties through its “alkaloidal components” (Wasson, Hofmann, and
However, despite these two dimensions of proof (cultural and

natural, as it were), the intuition that a hallucinogenic compound
stands at the heart of the Eleusinian ceremonies emerges as a result
of the entheogenic vision itself; the proofs seem to come afterward.
Wasson puts forth his most convinced—and least substantiated—
claim in his description of the vision state: “It is clear to me where
Plato found his Ideas; it was clear to his contemporaries too. Plato
had drunk of the potion in the Temple of Eleusis and had spent the
night seeing the great Vision.”50 In the Life article as well, the claim
is embedded in the description of the vision—and more, it is part of
the experience of the vision:
I felt that I was now seeing plain, whereas ordinary vision gives us an imper-
fect view; I was seeing the archetypes, the Platonic ideas, that underlie the
imperfect image of everyday life. The thought crossed my mind: could the
divine mushrooms be the secret that lay behind the ancient Mysteries?51
Put plainly, the intuition that the Mexican rites shared some fea-
tures with the Greek mysteries celebrated at Eleusis was the subject
Ruck, Road to Eleusis [above, n. 13], p. 30), specifically ergonovine. Hofmann suggests
that ergonovine served as the hallucinogenic ingredient of the kykeon. Ergonovine is
soluble in water; the poisonous ergot alkaloids ergotamine and ergotoxine are not. For
this reason, Hofmann speculates that the functionaries at Eleusis could have derived
the hallucinogenic compound without exposing themselves to ergot poisoning. As a
second solution, Hofmann suggests that ancient herbalists were able to extract the al-
kaloid from a different species of ergot (Claviceps papali) growing on “the grass Pas-
palum distichum which contains only alkaloids that are hallucinogenic and which could
have even been used directly in powder form” (ibid., p. 33). Finally, Hofmann suggests
that the alkaloid was extractable from ergot growing on a wild grass (Lolium temulen-
tum), which is “notorious prey to the Claviceps fungus.” The third solution presents
the same problem of the isolation of ergonovine from the more dangerous ergotamine
and ergotoxine. Wasson’s ability to make the connection so early, however, is truly
striking, since it appears that not even Hofmann himself had made the connection at
the time. Karl Kerenyi’s Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter contains an
appendix in which the author speculates on the ingredients of the kykeon, citing spe-
cifically a letter exchange with Albert Hofmann. Here, Hofmann suggests that alcohol
was sufficient to induce the visions associated with the mysteries, adding that “poley
oil (Oleum pulegii) might very well, added to the alcoholic content of the kykeon, have
produced hallucinations in persons whose sensibility was heightened by fasting.” See
Kerenyi, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter, trans. Ralph Mannheim
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 180.
50. In Road to Eleusis (above, n. 13), the quotation reads: “It is clear to me where Plato
found his Ideas; it was clear to those who were initiated among his contemporaries too.
Plato had drunk of the potion in the Temple of Eleusis and had spent the night seeing
the great Vision.”
51. Wasson, “Seeking the Magic Mushroom” (above, n. 33).
238 Configurations
of a trip report first and foremost; it is later supplemented by more

acceptable forms of scientific and historical evidence. This progres-
sion of the insight diminishes neither the process of putting that
knowledge together nor the careful argument that Wasson, Hof-
mann, and Ruck offer; it does, however, change the character of the
secret. It might be asked, at this point, what we learn when we learn
that the rites at the center of Greek religious life involved the use of
hallucinogenic compounds.52 Do we learn, after all, what it was the
Greeks experienced when they experienced the deiknymena (things
shown), the dromena (actions performed), and the legomena (things
said)?53 Or are we not, despite the revelation, more intractably in the
presence of an aporrhetoteros logos, a “story told under strict injunc-
tion of silence,” or the arrheta (the unspeakable)?54 Wasson follows
closely here in the longer tradition of the hallucinogenic experience
in Western thought: “Let me hasten to warn you,” he tells the gath-
ered mycologists in 1960, “that I am painfully aware of the inade-
quacy of my words, any words, to conjure up for you an image of
that state.”55 While he can “reveal” the secret of Eleusis, in other
words, the revelation can only approximate the secret, if the secret
is the entheogenic experience itself.
While Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck certainly argue that the se-
cret of Eleusis is the fact that hallucinogenic fungi were used to in-
duce the experience of the mysteries, this fact has little bearing on
the character of the actual experience. If the secret is rather the vi-
sion, the experience (as Wasson’s intuition suggests), then it is itself
dependent on the variables of set and setting—the contingent state
of the person ingesting (or encountering) the kykeon and the contin-
gent forces at work in the surroundings. Wasson clearly recognizes
these variables, even in his earlier work. His descriptions of the Mex-
ican rites are keyed into such factors, focusing on the place of the
rites, the particular lighting at different times during the ceremony,
the singing or chanting of the curandera, the production of a percus-
sive drumbeat. Furthermore, in his section of The Road to Eleusis
dedicated to the classicist/historical argument, Ruck suggests that
52. Kerenyi claims that “all Greek existence was bound up with the celebration of the
Mysteries at Eleusis” (Eleusis [above, n. 49], p. 10).
53. Ibid., p. 52.
54. Ibid., p. 138. See also Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 1987): “Is it not true that the mysteries were ‘unspeakable,’ ar-
rheta, not just in the sense of artificial secrecy utilized to arouse curiosity, but in the
sense that what was central and decisive was not accessible to verbalization?” (p. 69).
“we can rest assured that the hierophants, with generations of expe-
rience, knew all the secrets of set and setting,” and goes on to specu-
late about the arrangement of music, the release of various perfumes,
the timing of lights, and steps within the ceremony.56 The secret,
then, is a strange secret indeed, for it cannot be communicated as it
is—it can only be communicated as a secret. At its best, this sort of
profanation provides a group of valuable tactics for enduring the
experience, but it does not transmit the experience itself. If any-
thing, it heightens the difference between what can be experienced
and what can be transmitted. Far from annexing the hallucinogenic
substance for Western science, Wasson recognizes the difficulty sci-
ence has with such a problem:
These difficulties communicating have played their part in certain amusing
situations. Two psychiatrists who have taken the mushroom and known the
experience in its full dimensions have been criticized in professional circles as
being no longer “objective.” Thus it comes about that we are all divided into
two classes: those who have taken the mushroom and are disqualified by our
subjective experience, and those who have not taken the mushroom and are
disqualified by their total ignorance of the subject!57
We might return here to the process by which Hofmann isolated

psilocybin, and—for The Road to Eleusis—determined the hallucino-
genic activity of ergonovine. In both cases, as with LSD, Hofmann
tested the compound on himself; he combined the extraction ca-
pacities of traditional science with the capacity to enter into contact
with the molecule. Hofmann’s practice skirts between the two classes
described by Wasson (although, assuredly, not without practical con-
sequences), or it takes up both forms in different ratios, according to
different needs. In Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s terminology,
Hofmann practices both an iterative and an itinerant science, where
the first is characterized by reproducing (for example, the capacity to
reproduce the extraction of alkaloids according to fixed procedures),
while the second operates by following (in this case, following the
action of ergonovine, or exploring psilocybin “by legwork”).58 The
difference is important here, for it goes directly to the question of
which secret Wasson seeks to uncover. If the secret is the identifica-
tion of claviceps purpurea as the molecule “behind” the Eleusinian
56. Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck, Road to Eleusis (above, n. 13), p. 47.
57. Ibid., p. 152.
58. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
vol. 2, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp.
372–373.
240 Configurations
mysteries, then the first model would apply; in fact, Wasson’s argu-
ments by analogy seek to extract a consistency across the variable
practices of Mexican and Greek culture. One could then go further
and trace the movement of the molecule in the body, or identify
and thereby reproduce particular chemical relationships. If, on the
other hand, the secret Wasson seeks to disseminate is what he will
call the entheogenic experience itself, then the second group of
practices applies, since this secret can only be approached itiner-
antly, and the knowledge produced by approaching it is, as Deleuze
and Guattari would have it, “still dependent upon sensitive or sen-
sible evaluations that pose more problems than they solve.”59 The
first defines the secret as an actual set of identifiable and reproduc-
ible material phenomena; the second defines the secret as a contin-
gent virtualization of experience.
Wasson’s repetition of his argument in vastly different contexts
gives us the sense that he is working both angles. The question of
the mushroom’s divinity, posed before the gathered mycologists,
seems all the more radical given the itinerant framework, since it
calls for a transformation—or capacity for transformation—within
the science of mycology itself. At the same time, he is working to
build up an interest in the identification and traditional study of
psilocybin mushrooms. The repetition of the argument in 1978, of
course, finds much more fraught circumstances, because a “profana-
tion” of both secrets, and all the authority and force of Western rea-
son (and law!), had risen up to meet the diffusion of hallucinogens.
In the January–June 1979 issue of the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs,
Ruck and Wasson collaborated again, this time with Jeremy Big-
wood, Danny Staples, and Jonathan Ott to suggest that the very
journal in which they were published had been poorly named. The
authors propose the term entheogen to describe “states of shamanic
or ecstatic possession induced by the ingestion of mind-altering
drugs.”60 The argument plays out the concerns Wasson voiced about
nomenclature years earlier when he argued against the use of “intoxi-
cation,” noting that “we are all, willy-nilly, confined in the prison
walls of our everyday language.”61 The term entheogen manages to
avoid the “incomprehension and prejudice of the times,” to cast hal-
lucinogenic substances in a more rhetorically favorable light, no
doubt, but also to signal a dignified history of “prophetic seizures,
59. Ibid., p. 373.

60. Carl A. P. Ruck, Jeremy Bigwood, Danny Staples, Jonathan Ott, and R. Gordon Was-
son, “Hallucinogens,” Journal of Psychedelic Drugs 11:1/2 (1979): 146.
erotic passion and artistic creation as well as those religious rites in

which mystical states were experienced.”62 Arguing against the use
of terms like hallucinogen and psychedelic, the authors seek to pro-
vide a program or a set of guidelines for the itinerant study of these
substances and their effects.
In this context, The Road to Eleusis can be read not as a history
book, but as a recipe book. The question it asks is posed precisely to
the society where hallucinogenic substances circulate wildly, yet fall
under prohibition: How do you form a public mystery? The ques-
tion might be rephrased: How do you practice a collective science
that remains open to itinerant practices? The question turns back on
itself, since its answer must be a form of following the material of
collective bodies and of posing more problems than it solves. The
collaboration attempts to form a vocabulary for thinking about such
a public mystery, a thinking that includes seriousness—the serious,
even sacred character of the group encounter with the alien force.
Wasson, one suspects, is not fond of the recreational use of halluci-
nogenic mushrooms, except insofar as that use is taken seriously.
Like the term entheogen itself, The Road to Eleusis stakes out a zone
between mythos and logos, working to provide guidelines for operat-
ing in and enduring the flash—the flickering torchlight and ventril-
oquistic effects—that constitute that zone. The writing practice that
builds the knowledge network here enters into resonance with the
two forms of secrecy: the movement and connection of information
and its excess on the one side, and the itinerant practice of the mys-
tery, with its rich capacity for reproduction, its incommunicable
blockages, and its information scarcity on the other.
These relations may seem abstract enough in such terms. Wasson
might be read here, however, as providing a sort of compromise to
the problem of information flow. Questions concerning information
flow—Who controls it? How does one access it?—have, of course,
become all too familiar in recent years, playing themselves out in
fields as diverse as software, pharmaceuticals, music and cinema file-
sharing, and, importantly, the patenting of various plant species
used in indigenous practices. While the problem of information
flows in connected networks may seem familiar, Wasson’s terms for
the problem certainly do not, and that may be the point. Today,
these problems engendered by information flows are generally de-
bated within conceptual structures built by Enlightenment rational-
ity, jurisprudence, and market capitalism. They are problems of
62. Ruck et al., “Hallucinogens” (above, n. 60), p. 146.

242 Configurations
property, and problems of balancing property rights with the public

rights of access. Indeed, a massive literature has sprung from the
fertile soil in which digital information flows come into conflict
with intellectual-property laws. As Andrew Ross has recently argued,
however, such debates tend to be “legally-minded” and thus “re-
volve exclusively around the interests of claimants: creators, copy-
right holders, or the general public of users and consumers.”63 As
such, they focus on corporations seeking monopolistic control of in-
formation products on the one hand, and a vague class of consum-
ers seeking public access to information products on the other. Was-
son’s depiction of information flows seems mystical in comparison,
drawing as it does on archaic and non-Western traditions, but it may
be this very dissimilarity that serves to point up the strange effects
our own discourses of information flows have on our information
ecologies.
The problems of openness and secrecy, communication and mys-
tery, function across knowledge-making communities. There can be
little doubt that we are currently experiencing a crisis in the contingent
63. Andrew Ross, “Technology and Below-the-Line Labor in the Copyfight Over Intel-
lectual Property,” American Quarterly 58:3 (2006): 743–766. Ross provides a useful cor-
rective to both the euphoria and the hand-wringing over the emergence and subse-
quent “enclosure” of the digital information commons, arguing that the legalistic form
of such struggles have elided the effects that a networked information economy has on
labor. Many commentators have, of course, cast doubt on the very categories of “users
and consumers” that Ross deploys here, arguing that the distinction between con-
sumption and production is precisely what collapses in a networked information econ-
omy. But that collapse could be read to make Ross’s point: If what is at stake in intel-
lectual-property battles is the global restructuring of production and consumption,
why are the consequences for work qua labor so often banished in networked informa-
tion economy discourse in favor of rather vague promises of consumer-driven locations
for remixing, innovation, and participatory design?
Furthermore, where labor does seem central (if decentralized) and organized (if
through novel sociotechnical architectures), it is predictably limited to a privileged
class of technical workers. Since free and open-source software communities have been
the darling of numerous copyright activists and their primary model of communal and
novel labor organization in networked information economies, they come in for a
predictable drubbing in Ross’s account. Free and open-source software communities
might call into question romantic or industrial assumptions of singular authorship and
individual ownership (and the intellectual-property regime built on those assump-
tions), but for Ross, they operate as if narrowly held technical expertise will mitigate
any degradation of work. The “labor consciousness” found in free and open-source
software communities is thus like “the guild labor mentality of yore that sought secu-
rity in the protection of craft knowledge.” No doubt a similar charge could be leveled
at Wasson himself. While allowing that free and open-source software communities
and Wasson rely on an empirically limited technical knowledge, I’m suggesting that
they both provide an alternative model for social organization that can be generalized.
In this sense, their specific labor consciousness is not really at issue.
or historical configuration of these problems. Crises in the concepts

of secrecy go hand in hand with the diffusion of information on
global networks. Encryption technologies are deployed to hide
“dangerous” information from dangerous people, and are just as
quickly deplored for hiding dangerous people from informatization.
The emergence of purportedly free culture (and its attendant copy-
right and patent disputes) registers another slip in the contingent
configuration of the common and the proper, the digital commons
and intellectual property, and, like psychedelic sciences, it sees these
forces as intimately in league with the configuration of the amateur
and the professional, institutional boundaries and lines of noninsti-
tutional dispersion. That intellectual-property arguments have mi-
grated from the software field and the sciences in general into dispa-
rate domains of pharmaceuticals, music file-sharing, the use of digi-
tal images, and even student plagiarism demonstrates that these re-
configurations are widespread and historically significant. To argue
for either more information flow or more proprietary control, how-
ever, may be beside the point. The challenge before science and
other forms of sociality is to hack—that is, both endure and work
on—their reconfiguration already ongoing. It is certainly the case that
intellectual-property activism of some kind is a necessary feature of
such a hack, and advocates for broad public access to a scientific and
digital commons have done excellent work in addressing the more
dangerous expansions of enclosure. Wasson’s rhetoric, however,
seems to seek another kind of hack altogether: it works to build a
program for what he calls the entheogenic sciences, a program that
both opens lines of communications and develops new literacies be-
yond those constructed by institutions, while closing or warding off
the danger of both totalized knowledge and exploitation. It both
seeks and defends itself from immanence. The paradoxical figure of
the public mystery may be paradoxical only to the particular con-
figuration of secrecy and communication that underlies modern sci-
ence and its technological and economic partners. In gesturing to-
ward another set of practices, Wasson forces us to confront this par-
adox and provides us with a set of rhetorical resources to begin
hacking it.

Entheogens and The Public Mystery: The Rhetoric of R. Gordon Wasson

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Entheogens and the Public Mystery: The Rhetoric of R.

Configurations, Volume 16, Number 2, Spring 2008, pp. 215-243 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

Access Provided by Universiteit van Amsterdam at 02/07/11 11:23AM GMT

Mystery: The Rhetoric of

Configurations, 2008, 16:215–243 © 2009 by The Johns Hopkins

1. Botanical Museum Leaflets 19:6–18 (February–April 1961). Harvard’s Botanical Museum

Wassons orchestrated what could be called a successful publicity

websites like www.erowid.org, providing practical advice on dosage

3. MAPS Bulletin 14:1 (2004).

of its spiritual elements by attributing spiritual effects to material

4. Plato, Phaedrus, 229d–230a.

Notes from Underground: Wasson’s Mycelial Network

engagement that bubble up through the surface of the social, some-

thereby suggests an ethical practice—the practice of the node, or

Something has happened—an event. Wasson is forced to respond

to enter into another relationship. She is, in short, taken up by the

knowledge of cultural feelings toward and practical use of mushrooms

trope of interdisciplinary research of all stripes—block connectivity.

through the philological method. The Wassons operate according to

In this sense, the capacity to flow between disciplines derives

It is also at the intersection of these themes that Wasson will lo-

The devotion to folk knowledge, then, by no means indicates a re-

We are seemingly quite a distance, at this point, from the “untu-

culture is increasingly divorced from the technological world of their

The passage is striking for several reasons. First, Wasson attends

are, rather, affects forged in the moment of encounter, resting not

of trust in modern scientific practice is fascinating. In moving past the networks of

competent authority, that the synthetic psilocybin is identical with

41. Wasson, “Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico” (above, n. 12), p. 155.

exciting new models of crowd-sourcing and to leverage the un-

The Secret and the Profane

To address the regime of secrecy Wasson envisions for a psyche-

45. Maffesoli, Time of the Tribes (above, n. 8), p. 91.

encounter with hallucinogenic substances. The interim is crucial;

47. Wasson, “Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico” (above, n. 12), p. 140.

However, despite these two dimensions of proof (cultural and

of a trip report first and foremost; it is later supplemented by more

We might return here to the process by which Hofmann isolated

59. Ibid., p. 373.

erotic passion and artistic creation as well as those religious rites in

62. Ruck et al., “Hallucinogens” (above, n. 60), p. 146.

property, and problems of balancing property rights with the public

or historical configuration of these problems. Crises in the concepts

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