Tripped by Norman Ohler

Author:Norman Ohler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

Part III

Narcotic

23

Mösch-Rümms

THREE THOUSAND MILES SOUTH OF NEW YORK AND A MILE above sea level lies the town of Huautla de Jiménez, where every year, at the beginning of the rainy season in early summer, mushrooms poke their light brown heads out of the earth. For generations they served as the only pharmaceutical in this place so long shut off from the outside world. They were used to treat all manner of ailments, whether it was broken bones, headaches, a bad flu, or memory loss in old age. Traditionally it wasn’t the patient who took the mushrooms, but the doctor, who reportedly would receive suggestions from the mushrooms on how to treat the ailment. In the sixteenth century the Spanish missionary and Dominican friar Bernardino de Sahagún had become the first person outside of Huautla de Jiménez to give an account of teonanacatl, the “god mushroom.” The Spanish colonial rulers didn’t investigate the phenomenon any further; they wrote it off as superstition and remained convinced of the superiority of their own methods of healing. Besides, they were there for gold and to root out the natives’ rites, not to study and preserve them.

For a long time the tradition had continued on in silence, at least as far as the outside world was concerned. The indigenous peoples of Mexico hadn’t advertised it for fear of further persecution. Only in 1922 did Blasius Paul Reko, an Austrian conducting ethnobotanical research in the southern state of Oaxaca, come upon the god mushroom, which was supposed to give clairvoyant capabilities to those who ate it and enable them, as he described it, “to locate stolen property” and “air secrets.” Thirty years later, Valentina and Gordon Wasson, a married couple living in New York who had devoted themselves to mycology and were working on an authoritative book on fungi, stumbled upon Reko’s writings. Valentina Wasson was a pediatrician, her husband a vice president at J.P. Morgan Bank. He managed to get in touch with Reko by letter, and shortly before the Austrian’s death he wrote back and in shaky handwriting tipped Gordon Wasson off to the mysterious happenings in the remote mountain region.

Having drummed up the necessary funding for an expedition, the Wassons, thanks to Gordon’s professional connections, were even able to make use of the Banco Nacional de México’s company plane, which took them as far as the Oaxacan state capital of Oaxaca de Juárez. After that the journey continued by donkey. In Huautla they gave the top official in town a watch, the children crayons, and went to see several healers, known as curanderos. To their disappointment, no one they spoke to would furnish them with a sufficient amount of the specimens they sought. Only in subsequent years, on his third visit to the mountain village, did Gordon Wasson meet a middle-aged woman of short stature named Maria Sabina who didn’t set store by the traditional rite, in which only the curandero ingested the mushroom. Sabina wasn’t known in the village as a healer, but she knew where to find the cowpats from which the little toadstools sprouted.

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