Magic Mushrooms, The Wild West and Ceremony

Everyone is doing ‘shrooms. The term “psychedelic wild west” has entered daily lingo. Various cities and states are legalizing them. Medical science sees promise in them and the pharmaceutical industry sees neon dollar signs. The blogosphere sparkles with promises of life radically altered, new connection with Spirit, banishment of old inner woe, and a great inside-the-eyelid-show. Finally, there’s a single cure for everything that bothers me.

So, people are micro dosing, and eating them in the basement or the woods with their friends, and clamoring for new certified psychedelic assisted therapists.

What is forgotten in the wild west is what indigenous people for thousands of years have known: plant medicines like mushrooms are living helping spirits. They aren’t a chemical compound. They aren’t a spiritual fast food menu item. Whenever there is a fervor, there is ego, greed and fear. These energies are antithetical to spiritual work. What nearly all the fervor over mushrooms has missed so far is how to work with them inside sacred ceremony, in prayerful community, guided by people who know how to do ceremony.

This is my simple reminder that mushrooms have been used primarily in ceremony for maybe 9,000 years. It’s not easy to find a competent ceremonialist because they stay mostly invisible. That invisibility helps to protect the work in many ways. A beautiful example of this is my teachers in Peru, who don't have a web site, work only with a few people, and who ask us not to reveal their names or location. 

I’ve never used drugs recreationally, and I’m not a therapist. Eight years ago, I started training with Peruvian vegeltalistas and other ayahuasceros steeped in indigenous traditions of plant medicines, travelling several times a year to study in various locations. Every one of my experiences with mind-altering plants has been in a ceremonial environment, so my perspective is limited.

Does one need to see the mushroom as a spirit, and the work as sacred? For some shamans, the answer is: if you aren’t ceremonially careful, the plant spirit will bring you harm. In this case, harm can mean a very uncomfortable experience – a bad trip. Or harm can mean falling into an ego fantasy of which you are unaware. Other shamans look at it more practically: extracting the chemical compound from the plant and skipping over the reverence and the ceremonial energies in the work mean that you are choosing to use only a fraction of the mushroom’s power. So, really, you’re wasting time and energy.

The Shamanic View of Mushrooms

Shamans take the mushroom seriously as a living healing spirit, not as a chemical, as entertainment, or as a bludgeon on the psyche. Taking it seriously as a spirit helper takes a sizeable (and not easy) leap out of the western mind’s naïve and consumerist foundation. A good example: In ceremony, you begin by thanking the plant spirit, and asking its permission (often days in advance) to work with it. You make prayers to the mushroom spirit to help you, teach you and heal you. In ceremony, you also call in the powers of the surrounding land to help. I’m not so sure that many in the psychedelic wild west do any of this.

There’s a lot of excitement about legalizing ‘shrooms. Therapists are eager. Users, patients, growers, and businesspeople are all eager. Psychedelic therapy training programs are popping up like mushrooms on a dewy Oaxaca cow pie.

However, in the polyamorous marriage of Big Pharma, Big Insurance, Big State License, and Big Academia, I don’t see the ceremonial approach to the medicine being part of the great new future. The legalized medicine will need to be delivered inside the white-coat, nice-couch-office frame of mind in order for insurance, academia and licensing agencies to say yes to the work. Unscientific, foreign, superstitious, unquantifiable, “primitive” ceremonial practices will not be part of any official training.

Big Mushroom is already branding the work as friendly and safe, as TOTALLY NOT the hippie 1960’s, and as the new panacea against anxiety and depression. 

But here is the thing: from the shaman’s point of view – and the mushroom’s – anxiety and depression may not be what needs to be healed in someone. The actual illness may very well be arrogance, which is a common spiritual parasite. Anxiety and depression are the symptoms of the arrogance parasite, which lies to people by telling them that they are all alone in a meaningless world, that they need to take total control, and that they are surrounded by stupid assholes. That’s a recipe for anxiety and depression to be sure. There are many kinds of invisible spiritual parasites recognized by shamans, and these may be what needs to be healed, not just their visible symptoms.

Ceremonial practices like prayers, drumming, singing, rattling, sacred tobacco smoke, the practitioner’s connection to the mushroom spirit and their own helping spirits – these are all essential parts of moving energies so that the mushroom spirit can dispel embedded spiritual parasites.

Grandfather Mushroom: A Praiseworthy Creature! 

I use the word creature because mushrooms are not plants. Plants eat light directly from heaven. But fungus, like us, eats things of the earth. And most of the fungus lives in darkness. You and I are, evolutionarily, more closely related to mushrooms than we are to plants.

What we call the mushroom is the fruit of the creature, its fingers reaching up from the dark belly of the great mother to taste the light and air. In truth, the creature you are working with is the mycelial web – a network of fibers that can run for feet, yards or miles under the soil. After it has gathered the wisdom of the underworld, the creature sends up its graceful fruits which burst open ecstatically, singing forth their spores with up to 25,000 times the force of gravity. This is also how the creature works inside human beings.

In the dark under-earth, the creature spreads itself out in a fungal net, reaching between and around the roots of plants. It holds space between the plants, and it also holds space between tiny soil particles so that air and water can flow in and around. This helps to create healthy soil. Spiritual people often speak of “holding space” for others – a loving and protective attitude. The creature holds space everywhere.

Researchers have found, in multiple studies, that psychedelics can increase connections between brain neurons. In theory, this may mean mushrooms help the brain to rewire itself, meaning, literally opening new doors and pathways of perceiving life.

Most magnificently, the fungal creature answers the prayers made by the plants. The plants pray for certain microscopic nutrients, and the fungal creature finds them and delivers them to the plant. The plants repay that gift by delivering sugars to the fungus to eat. Under your feet, wherever you step, there is an unending wooing going on between the masculine fungus and the feminine plants. You stroll atop an ancient love affair, a continuous courting and cavorting. This is one reason the Medicine so often fills people with a sense of huge Love. It’s not just a flood of serotonin.

Billions of years ago, the fungus was one of the very first forms of life along with bacteria. The fungus eats dead things, and, as it does, it creates ever-thicker soil filled with nutrients, where more life can grow. The fungi is called by some mycologists “the grand molecular disassemblers of nature; the soil magicians”. (Paul Stamets)

The medicine does this energetically in the body, too. It digests and composts old, festering, or dead energies, and creates new soil for new life. And because it’s so old, it is impossible for us to lie to it, as we do to ourselves and others. The mushroom has seen it all before, and it sees us more clearly than we see ourselves. When people have rough times with the Medicine, it’s likely because it has to work hard to clear out some old lie lodged in them, some lie that was implanted in them – like “I am not worthy” – a lie that has made many decisions for them in their lives without them even knowing.

The ceremonial environment is not analytical, not rational and not psychological. These are great human tools, but ceremony opens healing from a very different place, from a different mind. The ceremony also creates a bubble of energetic safety and support in which fear has less ability to intervene and twist the experience.

Geologists tell us that there have been several mass extinctions that wiped out 90% of life on earth, including the famous one where one (or two) asteroids hit the earth. They tell us we are in another extinction-cataclysm now, except this time we are, weirdly, both the asteroid and the dinosaurs. After each earlier apocalypse, the fungi inherited a nearly empty earth. Organisms that paired with fungi through these disasters tended to survive, others went extinct. So, maybe it’s a good time to get to know the fungi.

In summary, the Fungus is:

• In shamanic language: an underworld ally.
• The nervous system of the Great Mother.
• Like Hermes/Mercury, the magical communicator between the underworld, middle world and upper world.
• The earth’s natural internet.
• The deliverer of the medicine.
• The Ancient One, our primordial grandparent.
• The Spirit of dismemberment – the “Dark Mother,” the ambassador of the West on the Medicine Wheel – the one who comes to clear away what needs to go, and disassemble what has outlived its usefulness, in order to make room for new life, new wonder, and new dreams.
• The ever present “yet-to-be manifested” sea of creation under all visible things.
• The vast, intelligent network beneath our feet. (Paul Stamets)
• The great repairer of traumatized soil.
• The one who chews old rocks and spits them out as food for others.
• Like the Celtic Gods and Goddesses, the fungi moved into and under the green mounds and hills as the beings with internal stomachs “invaded” the land.
• The ones who form partnerships with many other life forms. They are the living embodiment of “all my relations” and “we are all connected.” The rescuer of life after disaster – the one who carries life through the next apocalypse.

Working with psilocybin

People have been using mushrooms in a sacred manner for at least 9,000 years (probably far longer than they’ve used ayahuasca.)

The vast majority of fear we may feel about this medicine has been implanted in us by the paranoia of the 1960’s from a culture that does absolutely nothing about alcohol, tobacco and guns, (revenue producers!) gleefully addicts people to prescription drugs of all kinds (revenue!) and does everything possible to keep people from having direct access to expanded states of connection with the divine (interferes with revenue extracted from sadness and envy!).

Set and Setting

If you’ve read anything about working with this medicine, you’ve come across the phrase “set and setting.” This is a clinical term that mostly refers to making sure people feel safe. When under the influence of medicine, fear can take a participant down a very rough road.

From a shamanic point of view, we can replace “set and setting” with “the ceremonial container.” This is a difficult idea to explain, so I’ll only touch on it. The shamanic view is that the medicine opens your energetic/psychic field, and that makes you more vulnerable to unhelpful energies who see you as food. So there needs to be a solid container to keep these energies outside the of the ceremony.

Shamans don’t see these unhelpful energies as psychological, but as parasitical energies – spirits – from the outside. They can cause a range of problems. It is important to set a protective field around each person, around the ceremonial circle, and around the entire space or building where the work is happening. It is often said that all shamanism involves singing. In the context of a medicine ceremony, shamans sing to solidify the container, to call in helping spirits that aid the work, to raise the vibration of the space, and they sing to the medicine to give it instructions.

It’s not easy to find a competent ceremonialist because they stay fairly invisible. They protect their work from random energies in the same way they hold the container for the ceremony. 

How to approach your ceremonial work

There is a mantra: “Set intentions; release expectations.” It’s important to set an intention – some kind of prayer for the healing or wisdom you want to come to you. It’s just as important to release all expectations that your intention will be met in any specific way that you understand rationally. You are not ordering from a menu, and you cannot complain to the manager when you don’t get what you ordered. The medicine will deliver on your truest need, and the secret is that, sometimes, you don’t even see that yourself. You are working with one of the oldest beings on earth. It has literally seen it all, and there is no way you can lie to it. It sees you from a larger perspective than you see yourself. This is why your intention must carry emotion. An intention devoid of emotion is an intellectualized cover over the truer intention – the one you are afraid to claim for yourself. The medicine will have to plow its way through that intellectual defense in order to get at your true intention, and that can be very uncomfortable. Remember that everything that happens in ceremony – beautiful to uncomfortable – is the medicine working with you, teaching, releasing, and re-organizing energies.

Some traditional names for this medicine:

• Teonanacatl (Nahua/ Mexico): “Flesh of the Gods”
• nti si tho (Mazate/ Mexico) “(Little) Ones Who Leap Forth”
• Other Spanish Names:
• Pequeño niño – “little child”
• Duendes (Spanish/”dwen-dayz”) and “Aluxes” (Mayan/’alushes’): mythical elf-like creatures that play pranks and steal from people at nighttime.
• Llas mujercitas (“the little women”)
• Las pequeñas mujeres los niños (“the little women children”)
• las pequeñas hermanas (“the little sisters”)
• niños santos (“holy children”)

A few resources:

"Everything you need to know…" https://thethirdwave.co/psychedelics/shrooms/

"About Shrooms": https://tripsafe.org/shrooms/

Psilocybin blunting effects of-SSRI’s and antidepressants: https://www.psychedelicpassage.com/psilocybin-blunting-effects-of-ssris-and-antidepressants

Magic Mushrooms Do The Opposite of Anti-Depressants, But That May Be Why They Work: https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-discovered-how-magic-mushrooms-alleviate-depression-antidepressants-psilocybin-amygdala

Webinar: hour long, boringly delivered but informative, from the University of Minnesota: https://mncamh.umn.edu/webinar/the-tripping-cure-psychedelic-assisted-therapies-past-present-and-future/

Which came first, plants or fungi?: http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=518

Mushrooms and anti-depressants: https://doubleblindmag.com/mushrooms/how-to-take-shrooms/how-psychedelics-contraindicate-with-ssris/

CAN YOU COMBINE PSYCHEDELICS AND ANTIDEPRESSANTS? A DIVE INTO POTENTIAL INTERACTIONS AND SAFETY: https://psychedelicspotlight.com/can-you-combine-psychedelics-and-antidepressants-a-dive-into-potential-interactions-and-safety/

THE EXPLOSION OF INTEREST IN MEDICINE PLANTS: WHAT WE NEED TO KNOW: https://thepowerpath.com/power-path-library/the-explosion-of-interest-in-medicine-plants-what-we-need-to-know/

Can You Take Psychedelics On Antidepressants? (From the Synthesis Institute:  https://www.synthesisretreat.com/psilocybin-and-ssri-snri-interactions