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My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two of our discussion of psychedelics with a special focus on psilocybin mushrooms. Um So, in the last episode, if you haven't heard that yet, you should probably go back and listen to that one first. That's where we lay the groundwork for a lot of the stuff we're talking about today. Where we ended up talking about a little bit about the history of psychedelics, about where we stand in that history, which will explore more over the next couple of episodes. We talked about a lot of the common features of the psychedelic experience and what those reported features have in common with, say, what William James described as the mystical experience or the religious experience. So we talked about like the ideas of the psychedelic experience being ineffable or hard to put into words, often having this quality of verticality or the noetic quality, seeming like it isn't just an experience, but that it's somehow imparts information do you, right? And then when we also just talked about in general terms like what is a drug? What what does this term drug mean? Why do we apply to some substances that have a physiological effect on us and not to others? And then what indeed is a psychedelic and uh, and again all those properties that we typically associate with the psychedelic experience, right. And one of the funny things is when I was growing up, I thought of drugs as one class of things that are all equally bad, um and you know, all equally scary. And of course this was you know, United States drug policy conditioning as it filtered through into the education system. Uh, and in a way you can kind of understand, like, you know, you want kids to be aware of the dangers of messing with addictive substances. You don't want kids trying out, uh you know, heroin or cocaine or even tobacco. Really you know, like yeah, I mean yeah, as a as a father, I totally get that. Yeah, but then all these other things get lumped in with that stuff, right, And yeah, I mean we could certainly a lot has been said, a lot has been written, and we could probably spend a whole time just dissecting the war on drugs and what what didn't work, um, and just sort of some of the problematic aspects of the messaging. Uh. Because I remember growing up and going to these like the dare rallies at school. Um, this is a like a a US educational outreach program um to keep kids off of drugs, and and there was to see it did feel like drugs were just the enemy, and then anything else you might be take like there was medication. Drugs certainly wasn't something that would a term that would be used to describe Thailand all or anything. Um. But but yeah, and in doing this, you end up like like just vilifying all these substances uh and in making and also perhaps making them more appealing in a certain sense, you know, because you're telling all these kids, know, this is dark, dangerous stuff. Don't get near the dark magicum of drugs. And and at the same time, it can lead to this false impression that drugs were a product of the nineteen sixties, or at least of the or the mid twentieth century, that we had like a time before drugs, and then suddenly here come uh, you know, here comes the psychedelic counterculture, Here comes the marijuana. Marijuana, of course came in earlier. Uh. The same can be said of cocaine uh and uh and opium and uh and so forth. But but still there's you could easily get this false idea in your head that these were products of modern society. There were new modern problems, and certainly there are versions of these substances that were modern and problems that they introduced were thoroughly modern. Um. You know, for for instance, you know, things like when you start talking about like crack cocaine or you start talking about heroin, um, you know, those are the more modern twists on on very old organisms, you know, going back to the poppy seed or the coca plant. Yeah, and even referring to the more psychedelic substances, not say like opium based alkaloids or something like that. But uh, you know, psilocybin and ellis E LSD was in a way kind of invented. It is a compound that was isolated from the urgad in nineteen thirty eight I think it was. And then first, you know, Albert Hofman figured out what it was in the nineteen forties. So that was kind of new, But psychedelics in general were not new. It's certainly been around. They've been used by humans for hundreds or thousands of years. Yeah, I mean we're talking about organisms. We're talking about species that evolved to thrive in our world. And um, you know, take psocybin for instance. Again, it's found in some two hundred different varieties of a two hundred different species of mushrooms, and um, exactly why they have these properties is still something that scientists or are looking into. But according to a two thousand eighteen study from Ohio State University, uh, the psychedelic properties of pilocybin condemning mushrooms it may have evolved as an appetite suppressant to deter insects that frequented the the animal dung from which the mushrooms grew, which which is interesting, Yeah, because that is that's not even a quality of the psychedelic experience that we even touched on in the previous episode. But there is an appetite suppressant that is taking place as well. So maybe a lot of the classic effects that we identify as psychedelic are merely by products of the of the compounds that the primary evolutionary purpose of which is an appetite suppressant. That that's just hypothesis, right, it's the hypothesis. Yeah, it's still still an open question. But but yeah, there's no such thing as LSD. Munchie's right. I mean there are funny enough that there are much weirder hypothesis, I mean, much weirder ones that a lot of the In the last episode, we talked about the people with the sort of mico centric worldview who come to see you know, like Terence McKenna and the people who come to see mushrooms. Is some in some way kind of secretly running the world, and some of these people, you know, they'll get into ideas of how, well, really the reason that psilocybin exists, you know, this compound has these effects on us, is that evolved as some kind of communication and mechanism where the mush you know, the fungus world is trying to break through to us because we're the like dominant moving species that controls energy and ecosystems, and it's trying to get through to us and open our minds to its priorities. It's it's interesting. Now, certainly we're not going to get into the question of whether psilocybin containing mushrooms are gods, or whether they're conscious or whether they're conscious. Well, actually, I think maybe Edward Ocne might have something to say about that, but he does, uh yeah, and we'll touch on that a little later. But even but I don't want to associate him too much with this um with with the you know, the sort of more extreme version of this. But in terms of just associating psilocymon and psychedelics with gods, there's nothing new about that, and we'll get into that as we go here. One of the connections that mckinnam makes in his stoned ape hypothesis is that since you have psilocybin growing out of the dung of verbivores, namely cattle, this would have been something they would have become obvious to people's that were rearing cattle in the ancient world, and then it would have traveled with them as they brought their cattle with them. And he makes a case I'm not sure exactly how strong it is for the various cattle gods of antiquity. Uh, you know the sort of you know, horned gods, the golden calf. Yeah, part of their association is with the psilocybin mushrooms that would have been almost like the milk of the animal. Like the animal produces meat, the animal produces milk. The animal produces this substance that allows us to engage in a mystic experience. That's an interesting potential ecological relationship. I mean, the same way that zoonotic diseases follow human civilization where they've got domesticated animals, right, because they're in close proximity to certain domesticated animals, the diseases that affect those animals have a greater likelihood of jumping over into you know, into the human strains. Right. Um, But you could say the same thing about things that are not diseases, but other follow on organisms, for example, psilocybin, mushrooms, right right, Yeah, Now, to be clear, I think, you know, as we're discussing the show before, I think it's always um too tempting to try and point to a single thing as being like the prime motivator in the creation of mythologies and the genesis of gods and so um. You know, I'm kind of I'm open to the idea that psilocybin could have played a role in the character of some of these gods. And we do see specific gods as we'll discuss that have clear iconography associated with psychedelic substances, but of course there are there's so many other processes going on in the generation of divine entities in the human mind. Well, one interesting question, at least interesting to me, is the question of why did we start taking these substances. Clearly, the use of psilocybin goes way back into history, and we'll talk sort of about the natural and cultural history of of psilocybin, especially in a in a bit, But like, why what benefit biologically would there have been to doing this? I mean, is it something that humans do just as a sort of like byproduct of the way their brains work, and there is no real biological benefit or is there a biological benefit that maybe we don't fully recognize. Is there an adaptive reason to take psychedelic drugs? Yeah, because a lot of times we think of these substances as being especially in the Western context, you know, purely recreational, purely even hedonistic. And that's not what we're seeing out of the especially the more recent studies and even the studies of the nineteen fifties and sixties. And it's also not what we see in traditional societies that use them. There was an attempt and these were used very seriously as a means of solving problems and uh, communing with the mystical world, etcetera. Yeah, that's exactly right, and and so you can I mean, one thing that automatically sticks out there for me is that if there is some kind of adaptive value to these things, it could have some kind of social reinforcement role. Right, you know, this is a common kind of thing. You say, what is the value of X cultural practice? Very often you could say, well, maybe it's strength and strengthen social bonds in some way. You know, helps groups work together better, um, helps them share information and bond better, so they're more effective as a hunting team or something like that. So that's a possibility, but we don't know that's the case. But another way of thinking about it is, could we better understand the uses of psychedelics and humans and the reasons for those uses by looking at the effects of psychedelics in other animals. Uh So, for one thing, there are some people in the world that actually gives psychedelic drugs to domestic animals for ritual and practical purposes. And there's one example I came across the I thought was a really interesting study. This is a study by Bradley Bennett and Rokyo Alarcon called Hunting and Hallucinogens the use of psychoactive and other plants to improve the hunting ability of dogs. So this is giveing psychedelic substances to animals with a purpose that's it's not research related, but also not um purely recreational like some of these videos you see of say, squirrels allegedly consuming psychedelic mushrooms. Right, yeah, So this would be something parallel to an adaptive value in a hunting scenario, and so this paper was in the Journal of ethno Pharmacology in two thousand fifteen. So the authors here looked at the use of psychoactive substances by two tribes in South America, the Shuar and the Quechua of Ecuador, who are reported to give hallucinogenic plants to their hunting dogs in order to improve their hunting ability. And the authors find that this practice is prevalent and they think it's likely adaptive. Now, what good would it do to give a hunting dog hallucinogen right, It seemed to me if you didn't think too deeply about it, that just seems counterproductive. Right, It's going to make the dog distracted, probably less effective, right. Yeah. The idea is that what it would would alter its perception of reality, but in a need of fine tune perception of reality in order to do it's hunting exactly. But the authors quote hypothesize that hallucinogenic plants alter perception in hunting dogs by diminishing extraneous signals and by enhancing sensory perception, most likely old faction, or the sense of smell that is directly involved in the detection and capture of game. Now, this is interesting because we always have to recognize that a dog is a far more uh smell based creature than than we can really almost more, it's more more smell based than we can imagine, Like, uh, you know, we're such a visual species and uh and certainly uh psychedelics are going to alter the sense of smell. And we discussed that briefly last time, Like you, smells may change, smells may seem strange, and imagine that in a creature for whom smell is this really rich means of sensing the external world? Yeah, exactly. I mean I think in the same way that the psychedelic experience is often ineffable, there's this quality to it that you can't describe once it's over and communicate to other people. I think probably the sense experience of other kinds of animals, animals like dogs, is probably ineffable and and un understandable from our point of view, Like there's no way for you to picture or put yourself into the level of chemo sensitivity of a dog. There, you know, their level of engagement with all of the chemical signals going on around them that we only get this tiny, blunt, faint kind of whiff of um and and so. Yeah, so that's obviously an important part of their hunting perception. But of course they have other senses to They've got hearing and smell and all that. So maybe what's going on again, we don't know this, This is just what the author's hypothesize, you know. In the last episode, we talked about how one of the common reported effects of taking psilocybin as a hallucinogen is the experience of heightened perceptions, like, you know, colors might seem more more vivid or brighter, or you might feel like you haven't a more sense of hearing. Um. It's hard for me to imagine that, like the you know, you actually have greater resolution in your eyeballs for sight, but there might be something going on in the brain where suddenly more power is devoted to noticing detail in what you see or something like that. Um, and so you can imagine maybe the same news true in these hunting dogs. Maybe, you know, brainpower gets sort of reorganized in a way where there's new levels of attention to detail and smell that would normally be dedicated to other senses or other distracting mental processes. But then again we don't know that's the case. That's just interesting possibility for what's going on here. If this is in fact adaptive, which the authors think it probably is. Uh, the author is also right, this is funny that quote. If this is true, plant substances might also enhance the ability of dogs to detect explosive drugs, human remains, and other targets for which they are valued. So so the drug dogs will now be given will Yeah, this is inter seeing a possible future in which let's say, explosive sniffing dogs will be micro dosing um or or perhaps macro dosing in rotor to find what they're looking for. Uh. We do want to stress that we are not encouraging anyone out there to uh take a psychedelic substance an attempt to carry out any particular tasks in their life. Um No. We're also not encouraging people to dose their pets or domestic animals with substances you might not know the effects of. I mean, that's just not advisable. But this, this does remind me, of course, micro dosing is this is what's supposed trend in like Silicon Valley and so forth, were take a little bit less a little bit of some sort of psychedelic in order to give you with what some supposed slide edge of whatever your coding job happens to be, etcetera. And uh, and I don't know. I haven't looked at the research on that to see if there is any research on that to say exactly how that holds up um, but it does. I don't know either. It does remind me of a recent Saturday Night Live sketch and which there was a there's a film reviewer who appears on Weekend Update who instead of micro dosing to go review films as macro dose. So he's taking like a colossal amount of psychedelics and then going and seeing just whatever the Hollywood films of the day happened to be and then having these just crazy um reviews of them. I recommend everybody check that out. I haven't seen that one. Now. I think something that's interesting about this hunting Dog study, though, is that it it kind of like roughly falls in line with some of the arguments the McKenna maide back in nine and Food of the Gods for psilocybin aiding humanities ancestors along three different levels. So but but one of the key areas is that he was pointing to the work of psycho pharmacologist Roland L. Fisher, uh, saying, quote, small amounts of psilocybin consumed with no awareness of its psychoactivity while in the general act of browsing for food, and perhaps later consumed consciously in part a noticeable increase in visual acuity, especially edge detection. As visual acuity is at a premium among hunter gatherers, the discovery of the equivalent of quote chemical binoculars could not fail to have an impact on the hunting and gathering success of those individuals who availed themselves of this advantage. That's interesting, yeah, yeah, um and uh. And he also argues that at higher doses, restlessness and sexual arousal would have played a role, and then finally, shamanistic ecstasy would have would have, of course been an important part and it clearly was an important part of the use of psychedelics early people. Now I'm not I'm not saying that this paper really backs up McKenna in any meaningful way here, And I'm also not sure if his interpretation of Fisher's work is completely fair or if he's leaning into his assumptions on this but you know, if if psilocybin makes a hunting dog slightly better at hunting or a hunter gatherers slightly better at their thing, then I think this is kind of interesting. I mean that the same case can can and is aid for natural substances that work as stimulants, which of course are widely used through human culture. And uh, you know, for every employee out there who's not micro dosing with psilocybin, everybody else is micro or macro dosing with caffeine, ultra dosing on or um. Goodness. I remember hearing tales of like the older newsrooms where a cigarette mate was a was a request where someone would be like working on a deadline and they're drinking coffee and they need somebody to actually like stick the cigarette in their mouth to give something and light it up for them so they can have the the nicotine rush to finish their job. Or even the cliche of the use of cocaine in business in Wall Street. Yeah, or and before that, the you know, I've heard tales of you know of labors, you know, being depending on cocaine back back in the day as being like a primary mean of just getting through the labor of the day, and of course in the armed forces of the twenty one centuries you see a lot of use of stimulants. Certainly we've talked about this in the show before the use of stimulants by the Nazis during the Second World War it was pretty extensive, especially in the Liftwaffe. And and today you still see variants, various stimulants that are designed for you some long flights in military context. All right, well, I think maybe we should take a break, and then when we come back, we will talk a little bit about animal self administration of hallucinogens. Today's episode is brought to you by Slack. Before there was podcast, there was radio. Before that, the stage and before that. You get the idea. Things evolve, technology changes, and we do too. So now we can listen to a show wherever, whenever. However, why should our work be any different? Why can't we work with more freedom, more flexibility, more choices. That's how Slack works. It's a digital headquarters that works how you work, and Slack is where the future works. Hi, I'm Hillary Clinton, and I'm excited to be back with a new season of you and Me both. You know, when we started this podcast, we were going through some tough times, and let's face it, we still are. But I am a firm believer. 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So before we get into the self administration of psychedelics by animals, it's just a quick reminder that animals in general are known to make use of various chemicals in their environment. It may be something more internal, like a poison dart frog acquiring its toxicity via the plants that it consumes, or it could be something like lemurs that take a centipede, crush it and spread the uh, the toxicity of the of of this species on their fur, presumably to keep insects away. So there are plenty of cases like that where it's either a more complex part of the creatures physiology or it is something that they are doing almost like tool, use of the toxins in their environment. Great example of this I remember from our Squirrels episodes was the ground squirrel. H I don't know. I think some western United States or western North American ground squirrel has a strategy for avoiding its rattlesnake predators, which is finding discarded rattlesnake skins after the snake sheds its skin, chewing that up, and rubbing it all over its body and the bodies of its young. Yeah that's brilliant. But so these are all, you know, self administrations of chemicals by animals. So would animals take psychedelic drugs given the opportunity do do they just seek these things out and consume them voluntarily. It's one thing if maybe an animal consumes a hallucinogen by accident, you know, because it's just there's a psychedelic compound in their environment and they happen to eat it while they're foraging, versus behaviors were really does seem like they're actively seeking it out and after they have the experience once tried to repeat it. Have you ever seen the movie The Bear? No, I haven't, so I forget the French director's name he directed the original, or the name of the rose Um. But but The Bear I remember as being a very fun film about this this bear, using lots of like real bears used in the film. But there's a sequence in which the bear eats a psychedelic mushroom and has a psychedelic experience and it's pretty wonderful of you. If you don't see the whole movie, I recommend everyone check out that sequence on like YouTube if it's still out there. Well, the bear would not be alone in the animal kingdom, it turns out. So there is a paper that I want to refer to here from the International Journal of Addictions. This is from nineteen seventy three, so a lot of thinking about drugs has changed since then, but this does document some like recorded animal behaviors that are pretty interesting. So this is called an Ethological Search for Self Administration of Hallucinogens by Ronald K. Siegel, And so it's been reported previously by Wasson and Nineteens sixty eight, who will learn a bit more about later in the episode, that reindeer often self administer hallucinogenic mushrooms known as Amanita muscaria or fly agaric. And they will find these mushrooms when they're available and they will eat them. So if you've never seen what these look like, they're worth looking up. They're kind of the classic like toadstool looking mushroom, you know, kind of the red and white spotted cap uh. And the reindeer are also known, interestingly, to try to ingest the urine of humans who have been consuming this same species of mushroom for psychedelic purposes. Wasson wrote in nineteen six quote, when human urine or mushrooms are in the vicinity, the half domesticated beasts become unmanageable. All reindeer folk and know of these two addictions. Reindeer like men, suffer or enjoy profound mental disturbances after eating the fly agaric. So Seagull writes that the normal diet of a reindeer is almost entirely composed of lichens, and so you know, lightlife in the tundra can be gastronomically boring sometimes, But they do also appear to have this strong instinct toward the consumption of hallucinogenic mushrooms and the human urine containing the active metabolites of the same mushroom. So, according to Siegel, the Chukchi people of the Eastern Arctic Russia region the Chukchi Peninsula sometimes take fly agaric intentionally, which leads to quote elation, sedation, colored visions, and hallucinations. And the reindeer who can acquire these compounds through raw mushrooms or human urine, quote, become just as drunk and have just as great a thirst. At night, they are noisy and keep running around the tints in the expectation of being given the long four fluid, And when some is spilled out in the snow, they start quarreling, tearing away from each other, the clumps of snow moistened with it. And that's another quote from Wasson one report quote stresses the passion of the reindeer for human urine is so intense that it is likely to make it dangerous to relieve oneself in the open when there are reindeer around. Uh. There's also some scant evidence that reindeer who ingest these compounds subsequently isolate themselves from the herd. But again the evidence here is not clear. Uh, and self isolating behavior could have other causes that this lines up with other observations that seagull makes. Yeah. Wson did a lot of work regarding fly agaric uh. And this was, you know, an extremely ancient shamanistic and toxicon that was used by the uh Tunguska tribes of ancient Siberia. And he even presented it as a potential candidate for soma somos, his mystical substance that was consumed in Vadic India. And uh and it's been interpreted, Uh, nobody's quite sure what exactly it was, but it's in it's been interpreted as having been opium, cannabis or got uh if fedra is a strong candidate. The often see discussed and in sometimes the cases made for psilocybin as well. Uh, and it may have been different substances at different times too, that's always important to keep in mind. H McKenna of course makes an argument in his book for psilocybin and that it spends a lot of time. He spends a lot of time with that. But but some is certainly a fascinating substance to try and unravel because it was an important Indo European substances, again described in the Vedas. It was also seems to be the same thing as a homa, which was an important Prizoroastrian substance in Persia, and it was attributed with all sorts of mystical and curative properties. It was quote the pillar of the world and uh and some still make a case for psychedelic substances being in play here, while others are kind of strongly in the ephedra realm, so seeing it more as like a purely a stimulant. Yeah, that's interesting. And honestly, I really did not know much about flying ark before before looking at this, so oh yeah, there's u if I recall correctly. There are even people who make interesting commentary about Santa Claus and flying reindeer yes, I've read about this. Yeah, the myth of the flying reindeer comes from them eating these mushrooms or eating the urine of people who have eaten the mushrooms and loosening the bonds of Earth's gravity. So Segel actually looks at a number of other recorded patterns of self administration of psychoactive substances and animals. In another example he gives is the mongoose, which has been reported to seek out hallucinogenic toads and other prey containing potentially psychoactive compounds during hunting, even when other prey are available. To read this quote, some mongooses in the West Indies and the Hawaiian Islands apparently ingest Buffo Marina's toads, which I should add um are now known as the Rinella Marina toads, the cane toad, the scourge of Australia, which we've talked about in a recent episode about cannibalism or almost cannibalism, because apparently these toads, uh, you know, they they like to eat their own tadpoles and juveniles. But these toads quote contain in the hallucinogen boufattenine and to continue this phenomenon is something of a mystery since other toads as well as other natural prey are more abundant in these regions. While it is not known if there are psychoactive effects resulting from such ingestions, the mongoose goes out of its way to ingest a variety of psychoactive compounds and poisons, including the poison bulb of scorpions and the sting which he quotes another author, which it seems to consider a bond bush. That's interesting considering you know that the mongoose is invasive. It was introduced to Hawaii as well as you know, other other places such as the Bahamas, Cuba, Jamaica, etcetera. And then the cane toade as well. Right, yeah, the cane toade I think is originally native to South America, primarily um and And that's not it for all of the potential animal self administrations of psychedelic compounds that have been recorded by you know, people observing animal behavior. Just a few quick notes mentioned in a little article in the Parmaceutical Journal in two thousand ten by Andrew Haynes, which has a truly horrible title that I'm not going to read, and I'm gonna assume was assigned by like a web editor. It mentioned something about animal junkies. Yeah, well it was a different time, Okay, So a few examples mentioned here. Apparently that big horn sheep of the Canadian Rockies apparently seek out and consume psychoactive lichen quote in scraping it off the rock surface, they can wear their teeth down to the gums. Uh. And in the rainforests of South America, apparently jaguars are known to sometimes not on the roots and bark of the yaga plant, which is this is the plant that is from which the d m T has has derived. Yeah, it's the plant used in the making of ayahuascati, and the jaguars apparently tend to so after they gnaw on this plant, they have been recorded acting playful and kind of kitten ish uh. And some wild animals in Africa, including boars, porcupines, some primates like man drills, are known to dig up and eat the hallucinogenic roots of the a boga plant. I love that the idea of a jaguar consuming this and just kind of being it's almost like it's eating cat and up for something. It's just a little playful where when the jaguar is considered such a spiritual animal in the traditions of like Amazonian people, and it's like it's the kind of spirit that you would perhaps encounter while on an ahuasca journey. Well, this has even been hypothesize. This is certainly not known, but it's been speculated that maybe the consumption of ayahuasca as a sacred right came from observing the jaguar doing this, And so like the ideas that you know, the jaguar is this powerful spiritual beast, and that its behaviors might have been copied by humans, they have the center. This is something important we didn't mention in the first episode. We talked about humans gradually figuring out what they could eat and what they couldn't eat. But of course humans can also look to see what other animals are capable of eating, which is not always a definite sign that you should eat it. There are things that animals can eat in certain species can eat that we absolutely cannot. They might have different enzymes and stuff that we don't. But then again, if you see an animal completely avoiding a particular substance, you know, that might be a clear sign that you should avoid it as well, or perhaps that the magic of cooking is necessary in order to to harness it. And then if you see some sort of peculiar behavior taking place after an animal consumes something, well maybe more study is required. Now, just the fact that an animal will self administer a drug is clearly not evidence that that drug is a good thing or a healthy thing for that animal to consume. Right, I mean we've all seen our pets consume things, right that that, you know, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's making a wise choice, and it's an environment or I think about the their lab studies where you know, mice lab mice will have the option to self administer addictive drugs. You know, they can self administer morphine or whatever, and sometimes this is used in studies to figure out how to break addictions, like what kinds of aratunities when offered to mice, will be more attractive to mice than just trying to self administer more doses of morphine. Right, But then again, you know we're talking about like morphine uh in like a drip or something, right, which is not not something that would encounter in the natural world obviously, And and also any of the and to be. I just wanted to say I used morphine as a just an example there. I don't remember what exactly the compound was they study, but it's something like that, right. Well, it seems like a lot of those studies do use synthetic drug compounds. So it's not like say we put we put a mouse in, you know, a small ecosphere with some psychedelic mushrooms and just see to see just how much you would eat. You know, It isn't something like that. It tends to be like a drip of some sort of synthetic version, some artificial substance that's created from a naturally occurring uh substance. But yeah, So the question is like with these psychedelics, self administration of psychedelics by animals, why do they do it? Why do they seek hallucinogenic substances? It would seem in many cases to be maladaptive. Now, we do have the one hypothesis already that there are perhaps ways in which some psychedelic compounds could alter brain function in a way that heightened sensory perception. Maybe it helps in hunting by making you know, by giving you stronger attention to your old factory senses and makes you better at sniffing out prey. That's possibility, you know, it's also possible. I've seen some authors speculat that maybe they consume these substances out of some equivalent to the human experience of boredom. You know, they're they're seeking novel experiences, which does that is a drive. The general drive to seek novel experiences is something that has in some cases an evolutionary purpose. We've talked on the show before about neophilia, right, the idea of like animals that seek novel experiences or go toward unfamiliar objects may often more often put themselves at risk of danger, but they also set themselves up for bigger rewards. So if you're in a your a raccoon living in a city, and you approach an unfamiliar object in a parking lot, it could be full of milkshake, it could be full of fries, but it also could kill you, you you know, so it's sort of like a higher stakes way of playing the life game. You know, you get bigger risks, bigger rewards. Yeah. And of course another example, just a quick one to throw out, is a just the obvious consumption of of of overripe fruit which in which fermentation has taken place, and you essentially have naturally occurring alcohol, not the synthetic version of this that we have today. Uh, you know anytime you go to you know, pick up beer or wine or hard liquor what have you. But just the fermented fruit that animals do still do eat when they when they find it. Well, I don't know what are that some I mean those are still made by fermentation, right what you're talking about beer and wine? Beer and wine? Is there something going on there? I don't know about I thought it was still a fermentation, was the process by which the alcohol was generated. Yeah, but it's it's different than the fruit, like you know, it's it is, that's true. You're not eating the grape right, Like, Yeah, there's a basically we've taken the naturally occurring um fermentation process and these fruits and we have we have harnessed it, and we've we we've learned how to how to concentrate it. So like a bottle ever clear is a rather different scenario compared to just some you know, some fermented fruit that's so littered on the ground beneath the tree. Yeah, and alcohol is clearly a case where animals will often have often been observed self administering drug Now we don't usually think of alcohol as psychedelic, it's not really, but but like you know, elephants will seek out fermented fruits, some primates will. It's a common thing. Um Uh. There's another question, is I guess this is sort of similar to the thing about um seeking novel experiences as a as a certain instinct, especially and maybe mammal brains. I'm sure some probably some bird brains to write, you know, but what if there's some drive and maybe like some mammal brains and some bird brains that seeks altered states states of consciousness. Is a form of what's known in some of the literature is deep patterning. There's a tendency toward habit breaking that is made possible by some of these drugs, which I think we'll get into more of the research about that in the next episode. And that's a very important therapeutic use of it. Uh. I mean a lot of the early research on the use of psychedelics in a therapeutic setting was about say, breaking addictions. Um. And that's a form of habit breaking or deep patterning of of mental processes or mental behaviors. Uh, And I wonder if it's possible there is some kind of instinct for that in other animal minds, not just in human brains, a tendency to seek out chemicals that allow you to adapt to new ways of doing things. Could this actually be a drive that's selected for Again, that's speculative, but it's interesting to consider. But maybe we should get into the history of human use here of these substances. Yeah, consertainly, human use of psychedelics does go back to ancient and prehistoric times like that is that that is universally accepted? Uh, you know the key stuff substances mentioned previously. Think it can be found across the continents, and a humans travel, they continue to encounter new species as well. I mean they're parts of the world where there does seem to be more of a concentration of them, such as you know, Mezzo in South America. Uh, but you do find psychedelic substances all over the place. I mean, I think Michael Pollen in his book How to Change Your Mind, which we mentioned in the last episode and is one of our major sources here, which is fantastic. It is a wonderful book. Um, you know he argues. I'm not sure if he's correct, but he argues that basically pretty much every culture in the world has some kind of tradition of using compounds from natural plants and substances to alter consciousness, with pretty much the only exception in some Arctic people's because they didn't nothing like that grew around there, right. But but even then, I mean, we have the Siberian use of the uh, the fly agarics uh so so, and then the other side of that being like to what extent did they stick with it? To what did did they lose the substance, did the substance fall out a favor? Uh? That sort of thing, you know, some of that we saw with with some example. But uh, I was reading around about this, uh in the aforementioned sources. But also I picked up a book off and turned to on our other show, Invention, which is the seventy Grade Inventions of the Ancient World. It's a classic, Yes, it's really good. It's written by Brian M. Fagan, who is just a you know, an authority in ancient technology and ancient invention, and it provides just overviews of various uh, you know, cultural inventions, technological inventions, et cetera. And uh. One of the chapters he writes um with Richard Rudgley, who was an author of several books on the story of psychedelic substances and and other substances in human culture, and they point out that basically, without written reports to go on, you know, with truly ancient people, we we tend to have to look for three types of evidence for the consumption of drugs or some sort of psychedelic substance, right, because how do we know what they were taking? Right? So we have to look first of all for botanical remains associated with barrels, burials, or or agriculture. So, you know, a kid, do we find the botanical remains of say, cannabis, uh, inside of a tomb or you know, among the arch archaeological remains of an agricultural site. The next thing we look for is artifacts that contain residues. Uh, So is there a residue of, say, cannabis in this device? And then clearly if if the device itself looks like it was clearly used for the consumption of drugs, such as a pipe, which you know some of you might be saying, well, pipe could be used for tobacco. Well, bingo tobacco also a drug, so that counts. Uh. And then of course artistic motifs that depict mind altering plants or fun guy that is another big one, though I will say a complication there is that very often with the artistic motifs there's an argument about exactly what they represent. Like there are people who make the case that there are stone age cave paintings that indicate the consumption of psilocybin mushrooms, but I think that's not that's not clear. Not everybody agrees on what's being represented there, right, And you get into complex issues with symbolism too. I mean basically, you could you could have something that looks like a mushroom and an ancient work, and one side might say, well, that's a mushroom. The other side might say that is a phallus, and then others might say, well, this could be very much be both, And then what does that say that the phallus and then the mushroom are combined in the same artistic tradition, etcetera. But for instance, just to put you to drive home some of the periods of time we're talking about here, Um, we know that domesticated opium pops up in the sixth millennium b C in the Western Mediterranean based on Neolithic burial sites. And then a cannabis pipe cup dates back to the third millennium BC in Central Asia. And then we have peyote cactus imagery and what is now Mexico and Texas from three thousand to four thousand years ago. We also know that the Aztecs used multiple different psychoactive plants for shamanistic purposes, drawing on the long traditional usage of these substances by other peoples of Messo and South America. And then there are for instance, the statues of the Aztec god Zochupeli. They clearly feature the motif of psychoactive plants. Yeah, Zochipele is an interesting figure. I was gonna say something a bit about him later, but I guess maybe I'll mention it now. We're gonna talk a good bit about the use of psilocybin mushrooms in Mesoamerica. But psilocybin mushrooms are not the only psychoactive substances that were used by the meso Americans and their religion, such as the Aztecs. Plenty of other plants played a old as well. And this as to god zoch Peely, his name means something like the Prince of flowers, which is great. But he's been suggested by several scholars as sort of the embodiment of a number of sacred and theogenic plants known to the Aztecs, including you know, everything like morning glory and tobacco, and a number of flowers and trees that have some degree or another of psychoactive compounds in them. I'll throw in real quick just to summarize, though. Fagan and rudgedy Uh point out that the psychedelic substances are quote both deeply embedded in many cultures in prehistoric and ancient Eurasia and intimately bound up with their ceremonial and religious life, and that also likewise in the America's it was quote both prevalent and ancient. Yeah, I think that's clear, and that's an interesting thing, which you know, we were talking about the drug war mentality earlier. You know, one thing I remember when I was growing up was that there was a clear cultural antagonism between drug use on one hand and religious authority on the other hand. It seemed like one of the main things one of the main cultural messages I remember hearing from religious authorities in America, I guess which would primarily be you know, Christian authorities, was against the use of drugs, which is at a surface level kind of counterintuitive because on you know, the use of psychedelic substances goes so far back in religious history with you know, many of the religions of the world. And because we talked about in the last episode, a very common response to people taking psychoactive substances is not saying like, well, well, now I'm going to discard my religion and just throw myself fully into secular modernity and become an atheist or something. No, it tends more often to encourage people to think more spiritually, to be to be more believing in something beyond the material world. Yeah. Absolutely. Um. You know this also reminds me to that you know, growing up in the with the War of drugs mentality is that when you did learn about religions, modern religions that incorporate, uh, some drug it, it felt like shocking. Like the first time you heard about the Rastafari faith. Uh, you know, you were like, whoa, they smoke cannabis as part of their their faith. You know that that seems shocking. Or you hear about traditional um Native American groups that would utilize substances like say Pioty and and that would seem shocking, And of course it shouldn't because again, all these different traditional and ancient religions seem to have been rooted at least in part in these substances. Yeah, i'd say non drug based religions or the exception, not the rule historically. Um. But then again, I mean, I think at a deeper level of analysis, you can kind of see why there's been that conflict between say, you know, especially a culturally dominant religious authority and the use of psychedelic substances, even though they might incur it's general spiritual feelings and beliefs. I think in some cases, the religious condemnation of psychedelic use might be rooted in the antiheterodoxy sort of impulse, you know, meaning like you don't want people thinking they've received new information from God or the gods. You know, you don't want people thinking that like, wait, you know, the dogmas of my church aren't aren't all there is there, there's I'm getting new messages things are doing. Because then you can't control doctrine. Like a common feature I guess of of monotheistic religion today is to sort of have a set law and to say, okay, we you know, we we have received all of the revelations and the rules and the communications from the divine in the past, and now everything is locked down and there will be you know, the phone lines are cut. There is no further revelation, right if God is still speaking. That can be a dangerous thing to some people, especially in the people that are in a position of power. Yeah, but it also seems like the kind of thing that is more of a risk if your religion has drifted away from the sorts of experiences, you know, drug related or otherwise that enable that kind of experience, you know. So we'll get into an example of that, I think in a bit. But then again, even without you know, drugs at all, I mean, heresies are always an issue to some sort of established religion. Somebody is going to come along that has a new vision of how this faith should work, how it's going to work with a uh, with with society, with culture, with the individual, and that is always going to be dangerous to to somebody. Yeah, and I'd say maybe one other reason you can see the religious opposition to drug use is probably just something more rooted in what we were talking about at the beginning of episode of the episode, which is like a failure to make crucial distinctions between the the effects of these different compounds and how they play out in culture and in people's lives. Like, uh, I can understand why if you have a religion that's trying to encourage social orderliness, why it might be against say the consumption of alcohol. You know, like alcohol is it's just crime fuel? Alcohol is this like hugely this the substance which you know, despite it, I enjoy having a beer or cocktail or something. But you can understand why the temperance movement arose. You know, people were seeing like alcohols it's it's running rampant through the culture, and in some ways it still is. Yeah, it is a very destructive force. Another issue, of course, is you know we taught described pre we talked about previously the description of these substances as being boundary dissolving, and a lot of times boundaries are very important in an organized religion. The boundary between the the inn group in the outsider, the boundaries between particular casts or divisions within a particular religious group, and so yeah, to the people controlling the religion, the people, uh, you know in the upper echelhon of the religion boundary, dissolution could be dangerous. Yeah. I can absolutely see that in the same way that you might view alcohol in as crime fuel. Psychedelics are in some ways heterodoxy fuel or just general questioning and uh, dissolution of of established order fuel. Yeah. The way McKenna put it, An thens a lot of time talking about um cooperative societies and then the dominator societies, and his critique was that alcohol is like the the ideal drug of a dominator society, that those an't that and along with stimulants. Yeah. Well, I think we should take a quick break and when we come back, we can discuss a little more of the more recent history of psilocybin mushrooms, especially in Meso America. I'm Ev Rodsky, author of the New York Times bestseller fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space, activists on the gender division of labor, attorney and family mediator. And I'm doctor adding A. Rukar, a Harvard physician and medical correspondent with an expertise and the science of stress, resilience, mental health and burnout. We're so excited to share our podcast, Time Out, a production of I Heart Podcasts and Hello Sunshine, where uncovering why society makes it so hard for women to treat their time with the value it deserves. So take this time out with us. 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We're We're looking to meso America now, which again is a is a part of the world where you see so many different powerful psychedelic substances. Really, some of the most powerful naturally occurring psychedelic substances on Earth can be found in this part of the world. And of course this is also part of the world with a very uh complex and bloody history. Uh and uh and where we see this prime clashing of cultures as a Western colonialism enters the picture. Yeah, exactly right. So the my cologist Paul statements we were talking about how far back uh the use of psychedelic substances goes In his book Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World, Stamit's argues that the sacramental use of psychoactive mushrooms goes back at least seven thousand years, probably extends into Paleolithic times. We don't know exactly for sure, but one of the most well documented religious uses of psychedelic mushrooms is the apparently long running use in Mexico and Central America of a species of philosopy now believed to be a peloscopy Mexicana that was then known to the Aztec, says Teo Nana Coddle, which was historically translated as God's flesh. But I've also seen translated I think more recently and simply as the god mushroom. So there might be some blurring of the line there whether a word means flesh or mushroom. There might be some overlap there, but we don't know exactly how far back the use of solosities among the Meso Americans goes earlier. You mentioned you know the art motifs as one clue, and there are archaeological artifacts found in Central America, I think primarily in Guatemala, now known as the mushroom stones, and these are attributed to the Mayan civilization. They depict humans, animals, and gods as sort of hybrid mushroom beings with mushrooms stems and caps erupting up out of their bodies, kind of like the lowand Men's you know the lionman statuette from Europe showing the humanoid figure with the lion's head, showing early ideation about monsters and fantasy hybrids. Except this would be like the fungus minch. Wow, this is like in indemons and dragons. This would be the Miconis, which are the mushroom people of the under dark. Oh, what what's that movie you you were telling me about a long time ago? It was like Matangatang mushroom horror film about these humanoid mushrooms and this infection that turns people into mushrooms, shambling mushroom creatures. Oh yeah, they're they're also that's a central conceit of the setting of the video game The Last of Us, which court Aceps invades humans. Uh. But anyway, this is a slightly different thing because it's not showing like fungus erupting as a as a disease out of people, but more like they are these uh, these fungus beings that seem I don't know, they're generally depicted as kind of like serene and like this is a good thing. We don't know exactly what these ancient mushrooms don't signify, but many scholars have interpreted them as reflections of the religious significance of psychedelic mushrooms for the Mayan culture and so much of the world became aware of the existence and use of psychedelic mushrooms during the nineteen fifties due to the work of people like the biologist Richard E. Shaltis, who studied indigenous people's uses of psychoactive plants, especially in Mexico and in the Amazon Basin, and public widespread awareness of the uses of psychedelic mushrooms in southern Mexico, specifically to Nana Coddle Owes a lot to an article published in Life magazine in May nineteen fifty seven written by a then vice president of JP Morgan, the the investment bank and financial services company UH. This vice president of JP Morgan was named R. Gordon Wasson, who was also a mycologist. He and his wife were both very interested in mushrooms UH, and he happened to be a mushroom enthusiast. I think he was pushing a kind of personal theory that mushrooms were the genesis of all religions and spiritual beliefs. But this article from Life magazine in nineteen fifty seven was called the Discovery of Mushrooms that Caused Strange Visions, and then also with the title seeking the Magic Mushroom. I think one was the cover title and one was on the article. But I want to stress again that despite the magazine at it, there's word choice there of the discovery of mushrooms that caused Strange visions. Wasson did not in any way actually discover psilocybin mushrooms. They were known to the indigenous peoples of Mexico and Central America for hundreds or thousands of years. Uh, they just weren't widely known about in many other cultures in the twentieth century beyond that. Now, I think it is important to note too that people like Wasson and Schultz, Uh, these were a different breed of professional like so so much of the time, when when we think about the emergence of psychedelics, we think of unfairly we think of Timothy Leary and h or even you know, we think more like a nineties context, we think of Terence McKenna. People were more uh you know, embody ements of counterculture, and that is not what these individuals were about. In fact, I believe it was it was Wasson who really did not like what he saw in the counterculture. Uh, you know, he was kind of anti hippie. Oh I don't know, but I'm not surprised. Weren't you saying something about McKenna talking about Schulty? Oh yeah, yeah. He he pointed out that schulzys was was pretty much the complete opposite of someone like Timothy Leary. That he was, you know, he was a botanist and a scientist, and he was at Harvard at the same time, while Leary was approaching psychedelics from a social science perspective, but also with arguably far less dedication to the rigors of scientific investigation and with a strong inclination towards celebrities, celebrity and the trappings of guru. But Schultz was also highly influential on a whole range of people, including EO. Wilson, but also people like William Burrows. That's interesting again that the just the the impact of their work is essential when you consider like all strains of knowledge and interest in psychedelic substances. Well, so one question you might have is like if there were people's of especially like Southern Mexico and Mohaka, who were practicing the religious use of psilocybin mushrooms. Um this question of like why didn't more people outside of the region know about this? And I think there's a very good reason actually why some of the indigenous peoples of southern Mexico would keep these mushrooms and their uses a secret as a sort of underground parallel ritual to the Catholicism that took hold of the region beginning in the sixteenth century. And that reason was psychedelic mushrooms in their religious uses had been brutally persecuted hundreds of years before by the Christian conquistadors in what the ethnobotanist Jonathan Ott has called the Pharmocratic Inquisition UH. Basically, when the Spanish attacked and began to colonize Mexico and Central America under Cortes in the early sixteenth century, the Catholic missionaries among them became aware that some parts of Aztec religion relied on the consumption of fung guide that allowed the Aztecs to actually see and receive guidance from their gods, and so these ritual feasts of the too Nana coadle would sometimes be used for the purposes of divination where you try to like receive guidance from the gods, or for other purposes ritual healing. And the mushroom rights were witnessed and described by a Spanish Franciscan friar named Bernardino de Sahagun. This is a section of de Sahagoon's work that is also quoted in Pollen quote. These they ate before dawn with honey, and they also drank cocaw before dawn. The mushrooms they ate with honey, and when they began to get heated from them, they began to dance, and some sang and some wept. Some cared not to sing, but would sit down in their rooms and stayed there pensive like. And some saw in a vision that they were dying, and they wept, and others saw in a vision that some wild beast was eating them. Others saw in a vision that they were taking captives in war. Others saw in a vision that they were to commit adultery and that their heads were to be bashed in there for then, when the drunkenness of the mushrooms had passed, they spoke one with another about their visions that they had seen. Oh wow. I also love the di mention of the honey because I think they're sort of two ve news here. Like one is that, of course, uh, some many of these psychedelic substance, especially the mushrooms, are quite pungent in their taste, and there's something you know, you didn't need a mask it in somewhere or another. But also I've read how honey could have been used traditionally to preserve uh, psychedelic substances, particularly mushrooms, and that you and that even there's this idea that certain meat traditions arose out of that um you know, which, of course is the fermentation process with the honey to produce an alcoholic beverage. Yeah, that's interesting. I had had not heard that, But so you might expect what the Catholic reaction of this is. In fact, I bet something some of this reaction is coming through even in the way that Bernardino de Sagoon describes these experiences, because you notice he tends to emphasize what he thinks are at least like negative hallucinogenic experiences about war, and about death and and about being eaten by an animal. The Catholic missionaries viewed the Aztec consumption of this and other psychedelic plants as a form of depraved pagan idolatry that needed to be wiped from the face of the earth. It's basically the same anti psychedelic messaging that you saw in the sixties. Right, this is saying like the kids are taking this and they're having bad trips and forcing themselves through key holes. They're picking up the axe and going going after you know, the grandparents. Right, They're confusing a baby with a basketball and raising the basketball as their own and uh and creating a college fund for the basketball. Clearly this this has to be stopped. Yeah, so it's exactly right. So yeah, the the Catholic missionaries wrote that they believe the consumption of Tonana Coddle was away for the Aztecs to receive messages from the devil and from demons. And of course it must have seemed especially perverse to the to the missionary mindset that at the at the time, the Aztec priests would have been understood to be eating this thing called God's flesh, given the parallels to the Catholic right of holy communion, in which you would eat bread and drink wine representing the flesh and the blood of Jesus Christ. So the Catholic missionaries tried to put down the ceremonies of the selosities, and they encouraged the substitution of what Jonathan Ott referred to seemingly by contrast as the placebo sacraments of the Catholic Eucharist. But fortunately, despite the persecution by the Catholic colonizers, these mushroom rituals did continue in secret through to the modern day, especially in more remote and mountainous regions like in southern Mexico and Oahaka. Now, questions of how they use these substances were used as a fascinating subject unto itself and one where you know, I'm not gonna have time to fully examine. I mean, the whole books have been written describing this. Uh yeah, you know. It's basically the idea is that set and setting would again be of primary importance here. Yeah, we talked about that in the last episode. But the importance of the surroundings and the mindset going in right, and then some of the more fascinating examples that we see in the Amazon, you know, where ayahuasca is brewed from the the age vine, uh, etcetera. Uh. But you know, they also turned to other substances as well as what and they also turned to dream in the shamanistic practice, which I think is interesting as well. Like it's not like the these were the that these substances were the only tool that was utilized. They would also refer to dreams and then and in terms of the shamanistic use of the substances themselves, it's you might think that such practices would simply involve a shaman giving you a substance guiding you through the experience to help you with your problem. And this is true. This is what you would see. And you see this reflected in the Western uh some of the Western research that will be discussing later. You see it in some of the the you know, the counterculture and underground uses of it. But in the classic scenarios that the shaman was sometimes the one to ingest the substance alone and solve your problem for you, which seems kind of counterproductive or counterintuitive at first, right the idea that you would you would go to the shaman and the shaman would take a psychedelic in order to help you with your problem, and you wouldn't take anything, But this could well be the case in some of these situations. You know that the shaman would step outside of of their own self in order to tackle your problem head on and help you solve it. Yeah, exactly so. So to finish the story, in the nineteen fifties, this Jp Morgan Banker we mentioned right our Gordon Wasson. He traveled to Wahaka in Mexico and he met with an experienced siloscopy shaman known as a curandera or which meants like a healer named Maria Sabina who allowed him to participate in a psilocybin healing and divination ritual known as a vilada to the Mazo tech people, and Wasson wrote about this experience in that Life magazine article we mentioned in fifty seven, and subsequently scientific interest in the mushroom skyrocketed. People eventually sent samples of the fruiting bodies of the mushrooms to Albert Hoffman, the man who first isolated LSD twenty five from urght rye and discovered its effects the decade before, and Huffman and colleagues were able to isolate the psychoactive compounds in the mushroom, and of course Hoffman had to try some out himself, and for a while before the anti on our culture backlash and the drug war crackdown, psilocybin was researched by psychologists psychiatrists as a potential tool for understanding human cognition, expanding consciousness, and treating addiction and mental illness. But of course then came the dark days right beginning in the nineteen seventies, where the association of psilocybin with hippie culture and recreational drug use created this stigma around research. Legal barriers went up that made research more practically difficult, and a lot of mainstream research attention just turned away from psilocybin in particular, uh and psychedelics in general. And I guess that's where we'll have to stop for this time until we come back next time. Yeah, so the journey continues. The trip is not over. It will continue in episode three of of this journey. So in the meantime, if you want to check out more episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, check out past episodes that have dealt with psychedelics, uh, such as the Timothy Leary episode, the John C. Lily episodes, or some of these other episodes we've alluded to. You'll find them there. That's the other ship Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. And if you want to support the show, the best thing you can do is to tell your friends about us, and also rate and review us wherever you have the power to do so. So, I don't know how you listen to your podcasts. Maybe if you find them carved into a piece of wood, uh, you know, may you probably get them through some sort of service online or on your phone. Wherever it is UH leave us some stars leave a nice review. 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