Entheogenic drugs have been used by various groups for thousands of years. There are numerous historical reports as well as modern, contemporary reports of indigenous groups using entheogens, chemical substances used in a religious, shamanic, or spiritual context.
Early history One of the oldest known entheogens is peyote, which has been used for at least 5,700 years by Native Americans in Mexico.
20th century In 1912 Merck laboratories synthesized the drug 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), currently known as ecstasy, It was used to enhance psychotherapy beginning in the 1970s and became popular as a street drug in the 1980s. In 1928 Heinrich Klüver was the first to systematically study its psychological effects in a small book called Mescal: The 'Divine' Plant and Its Psychological Effects. The book stated that the drug could be used to research the unconscious mind. He coined the term "cobweb figure" in the 1920s to describe one of the four form constant geometric visual hallucinations experienced in the early stage of a mescaline trip: "Colored threads running together in a revolving center, the whole similar to a cobweb". The other three are the chessboard design, tunnel, and spiral. Klüver wrote that "many 'atypical' visions are upon close inspection nothing but variations of these form-constants." In 1953 Aldous Huxley published The Doors of Perception, in it elaborates on his psychedelic experience under the influence of mescaline in May 1953. Huxley recalls the insights he experienced, ranging from the "purely aesthetic" to "sacramental vision".
MK Ultra R. Gordon Wasson had a funded expedition in 1956 by the CIA's MK-Ultra subproject 58, as was revealed by documents obtained by John Marks under the Freedom of Information Act. The documents state that Wasson was an 'unwitting' participant in the project. The funding was provided under the cover name of the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research (credited by Wasson at the end of his subsequent Life piece about the expedition). On May 13, 1957, Life magazine published an article titled "Seeking the Magic Mushroom", which introduced psychedelic mushrooms to a wide audience for the first time. Just a few days later a personal account by his wife about their research in Mexico was published in the magazine This Week., it was written by R. Gordon Wasson, ethnomycologist, and Vice President for Public Relations at J.P. Morgan & Co. about the use of psilocybin mushrooms in religious rites of the indigenous Mazatec people of Mexico. In 1957 Gastón Guzmán Huerta, a Mexican mycologist and anthropologist, was invited by the University of Mexico to assist Rolf Singer, who would arrive to Mexico in 1958 to study the hallucinogenic mushroom genus Psilocybe. While they were in the Huautla de Jiménez region, in their last day of the expeditions, they met R. Gordon Wasson. Guzman became an authority on the genus Psilocybe. In 1958, the French mycologist Roger Heim brought psilocybin tablets to Mazatec curandera María Sabina, that was the first velada using the active principle of the mushrooms rather than the raw mushrooms themselves took place. In 1962, R. Gordon Wasson and Albert Hofmann went to Mexico to visit her. They also brought a bottle of psilocybin pills. Sandoz was marketing them under the brand name Indocybin—"indo" for both Indian and indole (the nucleus of their chemical structures) and "cybin" for the main molecular constituent, psilocybin. Hofmann gave his synthesized entheogen to the curandera. "Of course, Wasson recalled, Albert Hofmann is so conservative he always gives too little a dose, and it didn't have any effect." Hofmann had a different interpretation: "activation of the pills, which must dissolve in the stomach, takes place after 30 to 45 minutes. In contrast, the mushrooms when chewed, work faster as the drug is absorbed immediately". To settle her doubts about the pills, more were distributed. María, her daughter, and the shaman, Don Aurelio, ingested up to 30 mg each, a moderately high dose by current standards but not perhaps by the more experienced practitioners. At dawn, their Mazatec interpreter reported that María Sabina felt there was little difference between the pills and the mushrooms. She thanked Hofmann for the bottle of pills, saying that she would now be able to serve people even when no mushrooms were available.
Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert studied and researched the effects of LSD and hallucinogenic mushrooms in the United States and Mexico.
Harvard psilocybin project The Harvard Psilocybin Project was a series of experiments in psychology conducted by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. The founding board of the project consisted of Leary, Aldous Huxley, David McClelland (Leary's and Alpert's superior at Harvard University), Frank Barron, Ralph Metzner, and two graduate students who were working on a project with mescaline. In 1960, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert ordered psilocybin from Swiss-based company Sandoz with the intent to test if different administration modes lead to different experiences. To a greater extent, they believed that psilocybin could be the solution for the emotional problems of the Western man.
Zihuatanejo Project
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