Into the West
Into the West
Directions #4: The Mushroom Road to Zipolite
A while back, a lifetime perhaps, I was rambling around looking at the different directions, North, East, South, and I stopped before reaching the West. Finally, here's the last installment of that series, though mushrooms definitely wanted to tell a story too, as you'll see! I've also released an audio version on this week's podcast (being completed next week with the South, audios of the East and North articles have already been released). Do note if you’re reading this on e-mail, you can see all my previous pieces by clicking through to the website. Please do let me know any ideas for future pieces, or thoughts on past ones. This piece is obviously informed rather a lot by my recent experiences in Mexico, and you can catch up on those starting here.
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The last sunset of 2023 was an interesting moment for me. I sat with a herbal tea, high above Capulalpam in Mexico’s Sierra Norte, and felt myself joining all the people I love most, who had already entered the final night of the year, because I was further west than any of them. Being in the west meant I had marked the hours of the day we’ve decided on, noting when 2024 was starting; it had already begun in South Africa when I was still walking in the light of the day.
There’s something special about a sunset. It’s generally something everyone’s awake for, even those lazybones who miss the sunrises; so it’s much more about arrival, a point of maturity in the day, a moment for letting go and goodbyes, but also for breathing out. Sitting in a cave above Hout Bay on the west Atlantic coast of Cape Town, watching the sun’s final rays over the mountain, was an indulgent moment on numerous occasions when I was a young man. Sundowners are a thing all over southern Africa: standing on a stoep with a drink, watching the end of the day, the reds and the oranges. Listening to the birds beginning their calls to their mates, “come home darling!” Yet the sun is probably setting in the direction I’ve often felt most ambivalence about, knowing the geopolitics of our time.
As a child, there was something sweet in the west. Holidays down to Devon and Cornwall or across to craggy Wales would have given me a little of this experience, with the rocky shorelines looking out at sunsets. I think my experience is tied up to a couple of things on the British Isles: firstly, that old Viking quest to keep going west, which Tolkien would pick up on again too, part of the old mythology, Irish saints like Brendan heading out into the great Atlantic towards who knows what. Before coming to Mexico, the furthest west I’d been was a few nights out in the old Viking port of Dublin after getting off the ferry! Where I played some fantastic gigs, and had a real craic, but also drank too much Guinness (I was in my early twenties). The relentless quest to the west though, is about chasing the sun, encouraging as much life as possible before the sun sets. Secondly, the old energy of the west was the wild one; in the British Isles, the west is where the Celts headed, getting away from the Roman invaders or the mainstream; it’s where the hills are, and hill people worldwide have always been the people escaping from the centralising centrifuge of the cities. But on TV and in the movies, heading for the wildness of the west was not so much to preserve older pagan values, as much as people getting away from the old values of the east, forging a new path, creating a new mythology. Till ‘we’ got to California. West Coast jazz: the ultimate sound that says, we made it, so Take Five. I love that style, but it does reflect an all-too-satisfied feeling of west coast types in LA or Mumbai or... the Atlantic seaboard of Cape Town, of course, where I’ve now and then had the chance to dip and face the ocean, or look through big windows at sunsets.
There in far western California, after the gold and cinematic rushes and on the verge of the silicon rush, Castaneda and co were building a new mythology once more, to recreate the shamanic energy of the Americas, to bring something a bit more balanced, more reverent perhaps, though still rather focused on individual power, as the dream of the west had been for a while. I mentioned the ‘cultural mycelium networks’ before and it’s worth looking at how this new mythology emerged, in the West, by looking a little more directly at fungi, I think. Mushrooms like the damp; in the Cape and in the British Isles that means you find them more in the west, where the rain is brought in from the Atlantic. We teach in the Waldorf School about mushrooms when we begin Plant Study with grade 5s, and mushrooms pop up in the first lesson, cutely emerging from the warmth and the damp and the dark like a newborn. Of course for Steiner, being called the baby of the plant kingdom is rather a statement of respect. Babies arrived most recently from the spiritual realm and are most strongly, openly connected to it and most powerfully ready to take on what they're absorbing in the material realm. Likewise mushrooms are much, much more than the little surface moments we see, deeply threaded into unseen forces, in their case below the surface of the soil. Fungi have, according to Steiner, not given us permission already to eat them. Best to ask before we do, then.
You don't have to be intimately familiar with them to understand mushroom thought, though spending a little time watching them emerge might help. Mushrooms are not concerned with individual recognition, or precise forms of truth, because while it looks like they're something ephemeral and solid on the surface, the real work connections are happening elsewhere, sustaining the forest's shifting forms. This vegetable consciousness is quite a challenge to modern human notions of separateness; a little slippery, playful, impossible to pin down. It's not that mushrooms have no heart, but that heart is not easily located by the unwary. Rather like the trickster-clown-shaman archetype. And so sometimes they make us wonder where our own ideas have come from, because perhaps it's not just that Tierra Madre is some imagined principle, but that She and her multiple (and often fungal) aspects are dreaming us up - imagining us. And we're part of the mushroom world ourselves, floating fleetingly on the surface, our task to disappear down animal burrows and excitedly find truths that then crumble in our hands, spores waiting to be discovered so they can be freed to move on to the next level in their-our game. Of course, there are other ways to explain the synchronicities that life brings us: Jung’s broad-level collective unconscious, or the guidance of the ancestors. But I rather like the idea of mushrooms, curious magicians of the west (though that’s also the direction of Hollywood’s wicked witch, if she’s not actually a stern but essential old crone, telling us we’re not yet ready for the race). Sylvia Plath portrayed them as impossibly strange: maybe so, but they’re also us.
I'm not sure what your abiding thoughts would be about Mexico, or how the country comes alive in your mind, if you have yet to visit the place. For me, Carlos Castañeda has a lot to answer for. In my thirties I worked quite a lot by myself with exercises from his Tensegrity program, laid out in Magical Passes, one of his later books and perhaps the most practical. I'm not quite sure how it came to be on our shelf, and the only other person I've encountered who owns it and worked with it is a friend who is also a sangoma. Encountering books themselves are often significant moments in the shamanic journey (which from my perspective we're all on, if we stop taking ourselves so seriously). Perhaps the fungus-consciousness told me that. Anyway, his Tensegrity exercises are a great combination of energy-type movement work similar to Tai Chi, and a magical awareness of the ‘voluminous egg’ talked about by many shamans and spiritual leaders; the energy body that surrounds us. I found them grounding and uplifting. Later I experienced, through my mentor, a desert initiation exercise from another shamanic figure connected to Castañeda and northern Mexico, Victor Sanchez, which was a really powerful and liberating experience. Ya’acov Darling Khan, one of the founders of Movement Medicine, worked with him particularly on matters relating to fire and the masculine: which that image of Don Juan in the western desert also represents.
Castañeda talked a lot about the shamanic practice of recovering energy through recapitulation, a technique I’ve also explored with strong results: looking back over the end of the day or the end of the period of life. So much of what he offered was extremely valuable. Yet the end of his life and the intensity with which the cult surrounded him suggests to me that he was another iteration of a type I’ve met fairly often in the world of spiritual seekers and pyschic explorers: the charismatic genius with a dark side. Perhaps it’s an outgrowth from that western quest for individual freedom above all else. It seems there have been a lot of powerful men in the last decades, with ground-breaking ideas and practices, but also a wayward ego-informed approach at times that wraps people up too easily. It’s definitely a masculine shadow magician type that we men need to be conscious of and bring into the light rather more, as we work into the next iterations of conscious evolution. Cancer ate Castañeda in the end, though what happened to his four closest women friends remains somewhat mysterious: one died in the western desert, the others are still missing. Castañeda wanted to join Don Juan in some alternate reality: maybe they all made it. Some would claim that Pakal of Palenque made it too, even though he left his bones behind.
In Villahermosa I saw ancient Olmec sculptures of sacred mushrooms that would suggest there’s been entheogens behind American creativity pretty much forever. Perhaps Carlos Castañeda's story is the most mushroom-flavoured of all in recent decades in its quality of slippery truth (although it is clearly seasoned with other vegetable intelligences). An artist, emerging out of Peru with all his creativity, moving into that modern living-history-story realm of anthropology, a discipline whose daring yet incomplete tales litter/decorate Mexico's museums. Monographs with so much fieldwork, possibly, that long-passed professors granted him that golden ticket, a PhD, though the field notes have long since disappeared, perhaps into the alternate worlds he believed in. All based on what certain other writers and artists now claim is an individual who never existed, Don Juan the Yaqui-Yuma shaman. But of course, if we have a bigger mushroom-style sense of who beings are, Don Juan did exist, as did the other shamanic individuals he mentions, even if Castañeda's mind was only called into bringing him to us by something in the collective tuned-in ether of the California/Mexico borderlands. Castañeda talked in his famous books of psychedelic experiences after taking a kind of datura, known in South Africa as malpitte, growing in the western desert north and south of the border, and he represents a profound aspect of the porous realm of consciousness of the 1950s and 1960s that established our modern age and is no doubt also working unseen, mycelium-like, in bringing in the coming times. Later Castañeda was more famously initiated into using peyote. The strange thing for me, looking at the modern world of mind-altering substances, is that so many synthesized chemical substances are on the black markets, dreamt up in Western labs. Yet the Americas already have such a variety of substances in nature, different portals, whose holistic usage takes more understanding of organic ceremony than a quick pop-cap fix. Again the contrast between the instant gratification west, teenagers still chasing the sun, and the true knowledge west, taking the time to prepare and understand the plant, or the fungus, or the frog, accepting that the day must end but that it will come again.
I’ve written elsewhere about flying sutras linked to eastern meditation practices. Castañeda and Don Juan claimed to be able to fly with the aid of psychedelics. Fritjof Capra, like so many in Castañeda’s decade, experimented both with eastern meditation and western psychedelics before writing The Tao of Physics. Yet there’s somehow something inherently earthy in the New World spiritual tradition; even if the Vedic tradition allows for the imbibing of ‘soma’, in the west, “taking drugs” has always been part of the path. And this Western approach is, of course, the one I’ve been most bombarded with all my life, along with the rest of Western ‘materialistic’ culture through different media, which was one reason it took me until my fifties to actually want to visit the Americas enough to get there. Castañeda's books had a big creative impact on the myth world of those of us growing up in the late 70s and 80s whether we knew it or not... in particular as the Star Wars galaxy erupted into Hollywood studios and then the big screen, George Lucas acknowledging his debts to Castañeda at the time. At the end of the last millennium, without, I think, knowing this, one oddball friend of mine, highly intelligent but on the verge of veering off into a very different reality, insisted to me that everything in the Star Wars world was real, it just happened slightly differently and was altered so that whoever Lucas was channelling could get their message across to us. Which just sounds like another iteration of how Castañeda always spoke of his adventures.
At one point as a child Don Juan was forced with his family down to the south of Mexico. And so it has been speculated that it was not the Yaqui or the Yuma from whom he first encountered plant medicines, but the Mazatec people of the northern Oaxaca mountains, who invited him into sacred ceremonies that would have involved psychedelic mushrooms. When we were hiking close by before new year, though, and enquired of our guide about hallucinogens in the culture, he said the local mountain mushrooms were all medicinal or edible, and you'd need to go far to the south to obtain ceremonial hallucinogenic ones. Britannica Online (which is of course the fount of all wisdom when it comes to orally transmitted shamanic practice) tells me that the Mazatec use a psychedelic mint leaf in ceremony instead; that definitely sounds like a nice culinary Oaxacan alternative to vomit-inducing Ayahuasca or nauseating psilocybin. But someone is being slippery with the truth; I would expect nothing less. It was definitely a shamanic mushroom ceremony in this area that was experienced by the Wassons, two amateur mycologists, who then quietly spoke about it to a little magazine called Life back in 1957, and the healer in charge – Maria Sabina – found herself ostracised for having suddenly brought the hippy movement in to trash the local culture over the next ten years. Things have recovered enough that her town is an officially-sanctioned pueblo magico these days, and she’s remembered as a folk hero, but perhaps not enough for our guide to mention it to us.
The secrecy, and red herrings, and false leads that Castañeda represents are obviously part of the traditional ways of the shaman, the world over. Credo Mutwa spent his life being challenged by those in the southern African traditions who felt he shouldn’t have told things to the world. Yet he was also part of recognising the need for the knowledge to come out now: that it can no longer be held onto in the old way, even if stories still need to be spun. Much destruction came with that initial over-sharing: the West piled in (or the North, perhaps; or both) and places that had been secret sanctuaries for energy and spirit for generations were suddenly discovered and desecrated by the drugged-up. I can only see this as part of the journey: only now are the seekers becoming readier for ceremony that also respects; only now are we growing up, like the true direction of the West calls for, as we realise the sunset is turning inevitably into night, and we have to let go of the ego and the quest for individual indulgence. It’s in the west, I feel, that we find our reckoning. And the shamans find their ways to reach and interact with the growing global culture, even if it’s through that most dead technology of the west – silicon, a chemical whose structure mimics carbon, but contains no organic life. The spiritual reasons for why we have a Valley named for this material, in the far west, are interesting to speculate over. I personally am convinced there’s a way back to source, that needs us now to connect with the descendants, ahead of us in the west; to connect with the technology that is giving us new structures and frameworks for source to build its mycelium networks. I dream of new organic computers whose answers are always more than binary duality.
Today the most famous place for Mexican psilocybin is San José del Pacífico, far to the south of Oaxaca, where hippies first came to take mushrooms during a spectacular eclipse in 1970, best seen from that zone high in the mountains. And it seemed my fellow traveller Matthew (who I hiked with at new year) had ended up with me in Capulalpam because of us sharing the fact that, in spite of being urged to go do mushrooms in San José by friends back home, we just weren't feeling it. In fact of course we were very close to where Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna and the rest had come, then spread the vibes and the research to change the world. And only then had the new ‘wild west’ to get away from it all become the Pacific Oaxacan coast (which I had avoided till now).
Nonetheless, several days later I found myself on the road to Zipolite. One good reason to stop in San José, even without the desire to partake of magic mushrooms, is that the 7-hour switchback-filled journey south from Oaxaca to the coast is quite the most nausea-inducing ride of itself anyway. The bus stopped just once, at one of the many plastic-signed generic puestos; only the Pacific Ocean could settle my stomach. There were many magical views en route, though I didn't feel I was missing out, after my days in the Sierra Norte. The western end of the beach (of course) was the hippiest hangout. I could walk straight down to the sand in my sarong from my room, and leave it while I plunged into the sea with the sunset. Freedom: what the west has always claimed to be, but what the sunset and the ocean waves call for is freedom with awareness.