Skipping a vignette or two, just a couple of Beats, we continue our journey into the poetry of psychedelics, and delve into the world of the mushroom (Part #1 is here).
VI
When Georgian poetry emerged in Britain during the years prior to the Great War, it ‘engaged and manifested a central modern problem: how to express and assert value for the inner life and the life of the senses in a world experienced as impersonal and dehumanized, lacking palpable warmth and vitality.’1 One of its finest exponents, a poet whose life stretched from Queen Victoria to Margaret Thatcher, transcending the anthologies through which Georgian poetry coalesced, was Robert Graves. A mythologist and classicist, Graves would also have occasion to trip in 1960.
Our five senses, Graves thought, have been dulled by our reliance on reason; our minds narrowed in comparison to ancient forbears and children alike. Our spirit, ‘has lost touch with the ideas of mystery, grace and love that originally informed it: intellect and habit starve our imagination.’ How should one awaken these senses? After surveying the ancient, widespread literature of the sensual wonders of paradise gardens, Graves suggests ‘a common drug causes the paradisal visions and provides the remarkable mental illumination described as “perfect wisdom”, and one such key to the poet’s paradise had recently been uncovered, he added; the Psilocybe mushroom.2
Indeed, it was Graves himself who in 1952 brought the ancient sacred use of the mushroom in Mexico to the attention of amateur mycologists Robert Gordon Wasson and his wife Valentina when he sent them a journal article. As a result, the Wassons rediscovered the existence of an ongoing ritual use of psilocybin-containing mushrooms in Oaxaca in the mid-1950s. Through widely-read magazine articles, the voluminous Mushroom, Russia and History (1957), and crucially here an LP, The Mushroom Ceremony of the Mazatec Indians of Mexico, they alerted the Western world to a local tradition long-forgotten among the habitués of a globally-minded postwar world.
At the centre of this emergent whirl of communication was a Mazatec wise women, curandera, shaman, and poet; María Sabina. It was she with whom the Wassons sat and who guided them through their first experience of what she variously called the little saints or children, the little-one-who-springs-forth, or the saint children. Maria’s disembodied voice was also recorded; old words with new wings. For the time, a mushroom media sensation par excellence. Thanks to chemist Albert Hofmann isolating psilocybin, the means—along with the poetry—disseminated quickly, and typically the drug-experimenting Beat poets were among the earliest to take the plunge.
‘The mushroom high isn’t like any other’ wrote poet Michael McClure. Every psychedelic lifts you into a timeless, huge Olympian universe, but each uniquely laden path leads to a different continent therein. ‘People are the main thing with the mushroom.’ Strange, grotesque and glorious people are paraded just for you in ‘one of the most elevated comic dramas ever seen’. You laugh and weep. Noting that a trip lasts six hours and that one doesn’t eat, he orders a sandwich while high, and ‘It looked like it was going to eat us’. Contorted bodies and faces drove those trippers onwards that day, and they rode a car up and down the hills, finally coming to rest in a sanctuary.
McClure stood in the stone hallway of a Swedenborgian church in California faced by two doors; one leading to an English garden, the other to a room of worship. He was moved to write a poem. With an altar before him, tiny white flowers laying behind in delicate vases, stained glass windows in half-darkness with dreamy vistas around, he was moved to sing into the Olympian world: ‘GROOOHOOOOE GROOOOOOOR SHARAKTAR / GRAHR GROOOOOOR GREEER / SHROOOOOOOLOWVEEEEEEEEEE.’ Throwing his head back, arms upraised, he bowed. A ‘here, now, eternal, beauteous peace and reality.’3 A paradise perhaps, as the Georgian suggested.
Graves himself took some psilocybin on 31 January 1960, during which the recording of María Sabina’s chanting was played. He entered a ‘Garden of Delights’. It was, he wrote, a ‘perfect schizophrenia’. His body lay reclined in a chair while another ‘I’ entered a tunnel. Perhaps, he mused, one similar to that which led Gilgamesh to his Babylonian paradise. He thereupon entered a ‘domed Treasury’ and found himself surrounded by colourful, glistening treasures. He saw naked Caryatids too, before arriving in daylight: ‘Around me lay a mountain-top Eden, with its jewel-bright trees, its flowers and its pellucid streams.’ He felt the bliss of innocence, but yet knew of good and evil.
When the tape-recording of María Sabina played, he fell ‘under her spell’, and the song-notes began weaving the reality of his experience. ‘Towards the end came a thick breathless, cheerful song of creation and growth. The notes fell to earth but rose once more in green shoots which soared swiftly up, putting branches, leaves, flowers—until it dominated the sky like the beanstalk in the fairy tale.’ The poet became the poet’s effect—no longer the speller but the spelled.
Sabina began her recorded chant, translated here twice, from Mazatec to Spanish, and from Spanish to English: ‘I am a woman who shouts, says / I am a woman who whistles, says / I am a woman who thunders, says / I am a woman who plays music, says / I am a spirit woman, says’. Of light, of saints, of Jesus Christ, and of books, of judges, of flowers, the sacred and profane transcend their opposition in Sabina’s realm of poetic chants. Graves did not understand Mazatec, however tone and note carried him into the poet’s paradise.4 The mushroom spoke to him, as anthropologist Henry Munn later understood it.
According to Munn, co-translator of Sabina with Nati Estrada, ‘The shamans who eat them [mushrooms], their function is to speak, they are the speakers who chant and speak the truth, they are the oral poets of their people, the doctors of the word, they who tell what is wrong and how to remedy it, the seers and oracles, the ones possessed by the voice.’5 Mazatec shamans conceive of poesis in its more original sense as an action. As such, words are medicine and heal through meaning and context. They are connecting speaking vessels for the mushroom; we their listeners.
Graves’ afterwards reflected that his experience was ‘wholly good’. While his mind was in some sense illuminated, he also felt all his senses had undertaken a ‘re-education’. What’s more, it confirmed his belief in the ‘poetic trance: a world where words come to life and combine, under the poet’s supra-conscious guidance, into inevitable and true rhythmic statements.’ Given this, it is perhaps surprising that Graves never wrote a mushroom poem. However, the two states, he believed, differed on an important point; namely, that the mushroom produced a passive trance in him.
‘Tlalocan, for all its sensory marvels, contains no palace of words presided over by the Living Muse, and no small white-washed cell (furnished with only a table, a chair, pen, ink and paper) to which a poet may retire and actively write poems in her honour—rather than bask sensuously under her spell.’6 Poet Henri Michaux similarly wrote of psilocybin, it ‘eliminates the adventurous spirit, it cuts off the future, it eliminates the feline disposition to face up immediately to everything that may occur unexpectantly. It eliminates the hunter in man, the go-getter in man, the cat in man. It demobilizes.’7
The two poets engaged with psilocybin as seekers, or even perhaps unwittingly as patients looking for some potential re-enchantment—bridging inner lives with worldly sensuality. Graves in particular was provided precisely this experience. As such, they were both passively entranced. In contrast, for María Sabina, the curandera, the central problem of Georgian poetry was no problem at all. The oral tradition is continually worked, developed and shaped by the world; her communications were poesis in action—vital, sensual, healing—a living medium connecting the world. Her poetry prevented such problems.
The little saints spoke through Sabina, healed her community, until, of course, they didn’t—and that is a story for our next vignette…
Robert Dickins is the author of Cobweb of Trips: A literary history of psychedelics - out next week (5.7.2024) and available to order now.
Underhill, Hugh (1992) The Problem of Consciousness in Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 22
Graves, Robert (1961) ‘The Poet’s Paradise’ in Oxford Addresses on Poetry. London: Cassell. 111–129
McClure, Michael (1963) ‘The Mushroom’ in Meat Science Essays. San Francisco: City Light Books. 15–22
Rothenberg, Jerome [ed] (2003) María Sabina: Selections. Berkeley, University of California Press. 83–100
Munn, Henry (1973) ‘The Mushrooms of Language’ in Harner, MJ Hallucinogens and Shamanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 86–122
Graves 1961, 129
Michaux, H (1964) Light Through Darkness: Explorations Among Drugs. London: Bodley Head. 39
Excellent piece. Were you able to find a recording of Maria Sabina's chants?