The Past, Present and Future of Psychedelic Tourism in Oaxaca (Part 1)
Exploring the Birthplace of the Psychedelic Renaissance
Hey Folks,
It’s almost Easter!
How’s everyone’s Lent going?
I’ll admit, I was planning to quit using my laptop for Lent and I didn’t succeed. I have been succeeding at being completely straight-edge since Ash Wednesday, though, so I’m not going to beat myself up.
Anyway, some of you may remember that I published a series of articles last year about a motorcycle trip that I took into the mountains of Oaxaca in search of a mushroom shaman.
It was a pretty awesome adventure and the resulting story was novella-length. I’m tempted to publish it as a book, and maybe I will one day.
Due to the time of year, a theme of the trip ended up being Easter. This felt appropriate, given the likely pre-Christian roots of the Easter egg hunt.
Don’t know what I’m talking about? I’ll give you a hint - the tradition probably derives from mushroom hunting. Rabbits don’t lay eggs, but both eggs and rabbits are universal symbols of fertility. Also, magic mushrooms are believed to have been used in pagan fertility rites. Just saying.
Anyway, I will be reposting the chapters of Psychedelic Tourism in Oaxaca in the coming days. I hope that it serves to get folks thinking about the true meaning of Easter, which many modern people seem to have forgotten all about.
I hope that I succeed in getting people to think about what Easter means to them. There are myriad possible interpretations.
Nietzche called Christianity “an encyclopedia of pagan cults”, and this is evident in the tradition of Easter, the holiest days of the year for Christians.
The modern holiday of Easter combines elements of many different cultural traditions, including Judaism, Zoroastrianism, astrotheology, and pagan fertility cults.
In recent years, I have been thinking a lot about the relation between culture, politics, spirituality, and religion, and I have had a lot to say on the subject.
For now, all I’ll say is this - Easter is a tradition that has stood the test of time. It has been celebrated for many centuries, and it connects us with traditions that are older still.
There are many layers of meaning to the Easter story, but it is ultimately about the triumph of good over evil.
Given that the world is clearly now ruled by insanely evil people, I would humbly ask the reader to consider whether celebrating such a victory might actually be a good thing.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this story.
Happy Easter!
for the wild,
Crow Qu’appelle
PSYCHEDELIC TOURISM IN OAXACA (PART 1)
by Crow Qu’appelle
What you are about to read is the first instalment of a series of articles about a motorcycle adventure I am currently on in the mountains of Oaxaca. If you didnt know, Oaxaca is a large state in the Southwest of Mexico, which is famous for its magnificent beaches, artesanial mezcal, and fierce tradition of revolutionary political activism.
For those of us who are counterculturally minded, it is famous for another reason. You see, Oaxaca was where the psychedelic renaissance began. Let me explain.
On May 13th, 1957, Life Magazine published an article by an amateur ethnomycologist by the name of R. Gordon Wasson, in which the writer spilled the beans about the existence of a potent hallucinogenic mushroom with the power to cause intense visions and produce states of religious ecstasy akin to those described by Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade and William James.
The article focused on a saintly Mazatec shaman by the name of Maria Sabina. Although it is difficult to imagine a single magazine article having such a profound cultural impact now, Wassons article propelled Maria Sabina to the status of countercultural icon.
Many adventurous hippies set out on their own self-styled pilgrimmages, lured by the promise of spontaneous enlightenment, or something like that. For better and for worse, the age of psychedelic tourism had begun.
It is truly remarkable that an illiterate peasant woman from a remote village in the mountains of Oaxaca could attain such stardom, but students of psychedelic history will not be surprised.
One cannot study psychedelics very deeply without marvelling at the myriad synchronicities and unlikely coincidences which seem to cluster around certain moments in time. It is almost as if the entheogens had a will of their own, and appear to human beings at certain times of their choosing.
These apparitions often come with an energetic signature that Terence McKenna termed ¨the cosmic giggle¨, a sense that some unseen force is having a laugh at us pathetically eager enlightenment seekers.
Personally, I owe a profound debt of gratitude to Maria Sabina, because magic mushrooms came to the world through her, and the sacrament has been a great boon in my own life. That said, I am not without my misgivings about psychedelic tourism.
I know that the road to hell with paved with good intentions, and that Maria Sabina ultimately regretted having shared the sacrament with European seekers, lamenting that:
From the moment the foreigners arrived to search for God, the saint children (the magic mushrooms) lost their purity. They lost their force, the foreigners spoiled them. From now on, they wont be any good.
Now, if you are one of the millions of people who have had positive experiences with magic mushrooms, this may strike you as a bit of an overstatement. I, for one, can testify to the good that magic mushrooms have done in my own life, and I know that many of my friends feel the same. To understand why Maria Sabina would speak so harshly, one must understand the havoc that the first generation of psychedelic tourists left in their wake.
Basically, their appearance had disastrous consequences for both Maria Sabina and her hometown of Huautla de Jimenez. Because magic mushrooms were considered a drug, Maria Sabina was seen by some as a drug dealer. I would venture to guess that some suspected her of witchcraft as well. Belief in witchcraft in still ubiquitous in Mexico in 2023, and I imagine that it would have been much more so a half century ago.
In any case, it seems that some members of Maria Sabinas own community blamed her for the unwanted attention caused by her visitors, and the result for her and her family was extreme strife. According to Wikipedia:
As the community was besieged by Westerners wanting to experience the mushroom-induced hallucinations, Sabina attracted attention from the Mexican police who believed her to be a drug dealer. The unwanted attention completely altered the social dynamics of the Mazatec community and threatened to terminate the Mazatec custom. The community blamed Sabina; consequently she was ostracized, her house was burned down, her son was murdered, and she was briefly jailed.
Then, between the years of 1967 and 1977, Mexican authorities closed the Mazatec highlands to tourists, essentially putting an end to the first wave of psychedelic tourism in Oaxaca.
While Wasson profited handsomely from sales of his books, Maria Sabina suffered from malnutrition in her later years before dying in poverty in 1985. She went to her grave regretting the fact that she had ever shared the sacrament of her people with the strange, overzealous gringos who came to her in search of God.
The cultural appropriation never ended, by the way. As psychedelic historian Thomas Hatsis recently pointed out, the legacy of Maria Sabina continues to be whitewashed by neo-hippies to this day.
So, knowing this history, why did I decide to go in search of a mushroom ceremony in the mountains of Oaxaca?
Well, to be honest, I need to do so healing. I recently broke up with my girlfriend after finding out she was cheating on me, but my emotional problems go way beyond that.
The truth is that I’ve been super fucking pissed at the world since the beginning of the whole COVID nightmare, and its gotten to the point where my anger has turned into hatred. Now, really, I’m not a hateful person by nature, and I don’t think that hatred is an emotion that leads to anything good. So I wanted to let go of the negative emotions Ive been carrying, and a mushroom ceremony seemed like a good way to go about it.
Personally, I believe in the healing power of magic mushrooms, and I was already in Oaxaca. If I was going to explore mushroom shamanism at some point, what better time than now?
Another reason I went was because I was encouraged by my friend to go. Lately, I have been pestering my friends and family to support my journalism career, and finally one of my friends agreed to send me on an assignment. He wanted it to be something that wasn’t purely political.
Why, you ask? Well, to be a successful journalist, one needs to write about subjects that people want to hear about it. And a lot more people are interested in psychedelics than in my highly esoteric political views.
So I made a pitch for a piece about ¨The Past, Present and Future of Psychedelic Tourism in Oaxaca¨ and he sent me an advance on the same day.
I gotta say, it feels pretty good to be getting paid to do reporting. Im a professional journalist now. And my first assignment was to ride up into the mountains on a motorcycle to take part in a mushroom ceremony. Next time I complain about my life, will someone please do me a favour and slap me in the face?
Now, all that said, I want to do this in the right way. I hate all this sensationalistic Vice garbage where narcissistic hipsters go do exotic drugs in exotic locales and misrepresent every aspect of what they’re reporting on. If you know anything about drugs, most Vice videos are just straight up embarrassing.
My interest is in healing, both my own and other peoples. Sacred ceremonies are not meant for entertainment, but exist to help individuals overcome sickness so that they contribute to the society that they are a part of. Maria Sabina herself was quite explicit on this point, stating that the problem with the hippies was that they were in search of God, and not seeking to heal themselves of illness.
If one is to take her words into consideration, I think that one should seek ceremony not just to get high, but in order to heal from illness.
Hopefully, I set out on my journey with the right attitude. I mean, I had a nervous breakdown about a month ago, and Ive been drinking and drugging a lot since I moved to Mexico. I’m heartbroken, bitter, angry, and hateful. That ought to count as soul sickness, should it not? If I was just trying to get high, I would have stayed in Puerto and partied on the beach.
Anyway, long story short, I decided to buy a cheap motorcycle, head up into the mountains, and write about whatever I experienced as faithfully as possible.
I bought a 150 cc Vento for $14500 pesos, which ended up being a bit under $1200 CAD, but when I tried to buy licence plates, the office wanted $5000 pesos. That was more than I was willing to pay, so I decided to take my chances without papers.
One great thing about Mexico is that there are way less rules, and many of the laws that are on the books are not enforced. It definitely makes travelling by motorcycle easier, as you don’t need insurance. Licence plates, ownership papers and helmets are technically required, I think, but you can get away without them most of the time.
(If someone reading this is planning a motorcycle trip in Mexico, its best to ask other motorcyclists about what you can get away with in a given area, and to bring a couple of crisp $500 peso notes just in case you need to pay a bribe or two.)
The next morning was Friday, March 7th. I got up early and got my stuff ready. I hugged my friends goodbye and told them I would probably be back on Sunday. My plan was to head up the mountain, do a mushroom ceremony, and head back to the beach. I had a free place to stay in Puerto and I wanted to make the most of it.
I headed East along the coast and was pleased to find that my new bike did have a decent amount of power. My last bike was considerably bigger but this new one had the advantage of being aircooled. After all the problems I had with the fucking cooling system on my last bike, I was happy to sacrifice some power in name of practicality. Really, if I want to tour the world by motorcycle, I need to acquire some more mechanical skills, and an aircooled bike is the natural place to start if you're as mechanically challenged as I am.
Because I had fucked up my last bike by riding it too hard up in the mountains, I decided to take it pretty easy this time around. I couldn’t tell how fast I was going, because the speedometer was broken, but it was pretty much as fast as I wanted to be going on the winding, steep Oaxaca highways. And I made sure to stop to let the engine cool down every hour or so, which is what youre supposed to do with aircooled engines when youre going uphill.
I drove past Mazunte, the famous hippie beach town paradise. I considered stopping, but it was already pretty hot and I wanted to get up into the mountain air before the heat started killing me. So I kept on straight, hugging the coast until it came time to turn up towards Pochutla.
I stopped in Pochutla to buy a laptop, then kept going. As I climbed higher and higher up the mountain the views became more and more majestic, and I felt that I was leaving one world and entering another. I was impressed by the changes in the vegetation. As I rose higher, the climate seemed to become lusher, and different types of trees came into view. Some were pines, but others I could not classify, and reminded me of trees Id seen in the jungle. For this reason, I was reminded both of Canada and Chiapas, and I had the strange sensation of entering into a world that felt at once unknown and familiar.
At a certain point, when I was drawing near to San Jose del Pacifico, traffic slowed to a crawl. This was surprising, since there had been no traffic to speak of all day. Since I was on a motorcycle, I was able to dart around traffic to the point of the line, where I could see a crowd marching up the highway. I asked a taxi driver if it was a protest or a parade, and he answered me that it was a procession "por Jesus Cristo" and that the crowd was heading up to the church. Makes sense, I thought. It is the Semana Santa, after all.
I decided to park my bike and go investigate. Maybe I could take some pictures. But by the time I had caught up with the crowd, they had already turned off the highway. I brought my bike up closer and parked by a giant mural which featured mushroom and included an inscription about what a blessing it was to be the home of the sacred mushrooms. It clearly wasn’t graffiti, and had probably been commissioned by the municipality. I was touched, and felt like I was being welcomed by the people of the town. All my adult life, I’ve dreamed of a psychedelic society, and now here I was in a place where the people knew about the magic of the fungi, and had known about it for centuries, if not millennia. Was this a dream come true? What would it be like to grow up in a place where people had never lost their connection to the spirit world? Or was I romanticizing these people, with whom I never even had a real conversation?
By the time I had caught up with the procession., an intense worship service was underway in the church. In fact, the church was so packed that I only made it as far as the doorway.
As soon as I arrived, I was awe struck by the scene. Although I’ll try to paint you a picture, I was most impressed by the energy itself, which is not something that I feel able to capture in words. I was standing in the doorway, but I could see the people kneeling on the floor, chanting and singing. There were some candles burning at the front of the church, and the smell of copal added to the multisensory hypnotic effect. I was immediately entranced. I remember thinking "Whatever they're worshipping, I want in."
As much as I wanted to enter and stay for the whole service, I decided against it. I hadn’t been invited, and I didn’t know if I should ask someones permission before entering. Generally, churches throughout Latin America are open to the public, including foreigners, but I didn’t want to make assumptions. If I was in ceremony, and someone uninvited showed up, I might not appreciate it. When it comes to matters of custom and taboo, I prefer to err on the side of caution. It is for this reason that I prefer to document my experiences in indigenous communities through writing, not photography. Strong taboos against taking photos of sacred ceremonies exist in many places to this day.
There was something so special about the energy in that church in that moment that I do wonder whether some of the participants might have partaken of their sacrament. Could these people be high on mushrooms while at a Good Friday church service? Well, probably not, but would that really be so farfetched?
If I had to guess, the local religion consists of ancient shamanic beliefs combined with Catholicism, as is common throughout Mexico. And in this specific area, magic mushrooms have been revered as divine beings for thousands of years. Would it be too much of a stretch to imagine that people would partake of the sacrament before attending one of the most important religious services of the year?
I don’t know, but what I do know is that there was something extremely special about the energy in that church.
I wonder, when an atheist is travelling and happens upon a religious festival in which people are worshipping the God they believe in, how do they feel? How do they make sense of what their senses are telling them? Do they feel like they’re missing out?
I mean, how could they not? If you witness someone who is fully emerged in the act of worship, how could you not be curious as to what such a state would feel like?
If you witness people engaged in collective worship, the obvious conclusion is that worship feels good. How does a person with no frame of reference understand such experiences?
In Spanish, the verb ¨to worship¨ would usually be tanslated as ¨adorar¨, a cognate of the English verb ¨to adore¨.
If you want to know what it feels like to worship, let me ask you this. Have you ever said the words ¨I adore you¨ to someone and really, truly meant it? If you answered yes, how did you feel in that moment?
If you take a second and think about it for long enough to summon forth a real memory of deep adoration, you will probably realize that the act tends to be accompanied by bliss, awe, and a deep appreciation for the mysterious web of life within which we embedded.
My point is that it feels good to adore, and I cant fault those early psychedelic explorers for wanting to experience something that their own culture denied them. If the police and the military caused problems for Maria Sabina because spiritual seekers wanted to attain enlightenment, is that their fault? Or was it the fault of the Mexican authorities?
Western Civilization has been consumed by a rapacious desire to consume and consume, and it is obvious to anyone with an inkling of spiritual awareness that this is a symptom of some kind of soul sickness.
Can magic mushrooms help cure us of this sickness?
I believe they can, but only if they are approached in the right way. And now that pharmaceutical companies are hard at work looking for their chance to make a greasy buck off the psychedelic renaissance, it is important that the new generation of psychedelic explorers learn the lessons of the last one.
I also wholeheartedly believe that entheogens have something of tremendous value to offer us, and that the psychedelic renaissance is one of the best hopes that we have to help us through the needed paradigm shift. These medicines have the power to help us awaken from the nightmare of history and come into balance with the Gaian mind again.
So much love and respect for you, brother Crow. So much love and respect. The plants and fungi with all their Godhead magic do just pop up all the time. I don’t presume to fully understand their wisdom but it is beyond powerful. Stupid gringos will fuck up just about anything. But the mushrooms keep going. They have their own deeper wisdom. I believe that we are on a mushroom planet. Fungi and their symbiotic networks of microbes are what is actually “going on” on this planet. Everything else, including ALL of humanity, is essentially a sideshow (and, importantly, also “on the menu” for the fungi and microbes.) Some of us are supposed to find and eat these things. This is our way of being the Godhead experiencing itself and our part of understanding and engaging - playing with and in - the vast field of manifestation magic.