Psilocybin experiences described

In 1962, when I had my first psilocybin experience, I gave this visualization of Kennedy relatively little thought, as so many other impressions came my way. However, it was the only one of my visualizations that brought tears to my eyes, so I described it fully in the report I sent to Harvard. Nineteen months later, on November 23, 1963, the visualization came back to me as I mourned Kennedy s assassination. 

Some of the researchers who have experimented with synthesized mescaline, LSD, or psilocybin have remarked upon the similarity between drug-induced and spontaneous mystical experiences because of the frequency with which some of their subjects have used mystical and religious language to describe their experiences. These data interested the author in a careful examination and evaluation of such claims. An empirical study, designed to investigate in a systematic and scientific way the similarities and differences between experiences described by mystics and those facilitated by psychedelic drugs, was undertaken (Pahnke, 1966, 1967). First, a phenomeno-... 

Hofmann has been quoted about the Mexican tone coloring his first mushroom experience—when the Germanic doctor hovering over him appeared as an Aztec priest. In Hofmann s 1962 "psilocybin experiments, Mrs. Li Gelpke, an artist, also participated. Here she describes a drawing she made at that time ... 

Out of this work developed a third area of inquiry the resemblance of mystical experience induced by psilocybin to mystical states brought about by spontaneous rapture or by religious practice. This eventually became a "double-blind study, described by Leary as a "tested, controlled, scientifically up-to-date kosher experiment on the production of the objectively defined, bona-fide mystic experience as described by Christian visionaries and to be brought about by our ministrations. It was conducted by Walter Pahnke as part of his Ph.D. dissertation for the Harvard Divinity School. 

A new era in hunting mushrooms opened after publication of Leonard Enos A Key to the American Psilocybin Mushroom (1970). This small book described fifteen species in sixty pages, providing a water-color picture of each. Enos had had personal experience with only two of the species that he treated, and thus his renderings of the mushrooms appearances were inaccurate and sometimes fanciful. (In two cases, species known by two Latin binomials were drawn to look like different kinds of mushrooms.) He also provided a section on cultivation, which was overcomplicated and which no one seems to have used. Nonetheless, Enos book stimulated much American fieldwork that resulted in several reliable guides by the end of the decade. 

LSD and mescaline have a reputation for being spectacular hallucinatory drugs. In moderate to high doses, psilocybin and psilocybian mushrooms produce striking visual effects in most users who close their eyes even among people who are ordinarily not much as "visualizers. In contrast to most other psychedelics, psilocybian mushrooms have also impressed many users with auditory effects. Oss and Oeric describe the response when the experience is upbeat ... 

Also, the use of psilocybin as an adjuvant to psychotherapy, prisoner rehabilitation, and the experimental induction of religious experience is described in review chapters and experiential accounts of the early days of the Harvard project. So, the majority of the accounts in this book are of experiences that took place in the context of what I call neo-shamanic hybrid rituals, which I shall describe in a bit more detail. 

As early as 1909, Murrill described "Inocybe infida", a mushroom with "narcotic" effects from New York. In 1911, Ford named "Inocybe infelix" as a species that also caused strange effects, without inducing s miptoms of muscarine poisoning. These descriptions immediately bring to mind the psilocybin-producing fibreheads, even though visionary experiences are not expressly mentioned. 

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