Missing Witches - October 07, 2018


Missing Witches - Maria Sabina： ＂I Am The Woman Who Shepherds The Immense＂

Topics
Maria Sabina Velada psychedelic research & effects
Missing Witches： Witches Found - Self Care with Beisha Missing Witches： Witches Found - Spirit With Annie

Episode Stats


Length

40 minutes

Words per minute

143.79

Word count

5,879

Sentence count

269

Harmful content

Misogyny

13

sentences flagged

Toxicity

15

sentences flagged

Hate speech

29

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
00:00:00.320 Warning. The podcast you are about to hear contains coarse language and tells stories of witches.
00:00:07.000 Email us at missingwitches at gmail dot com if you want to be heard. And blessed be.
00:00:13.860 We want to make a big tent out of the word witch. 0.97
00:00:19.660 We want to include healers, shamans, artists, creators, all kinds of strong women.
00:00:26.540 As Zippecideroi Chakravarti says, every woman is a witch, and all are hunted.
00:00:35.180 Our story today is about a woman who didn't want to be identified with witchcraft, 0.96
00:00:40.260 although the word did get slung at her, so maybe telling her story in this context is a dick move.
00:00:47.680 But we just feel like her story deserves more telling,
00:00:51.360 and her art and connection to the earth called out to us for more study and the power of her
00:00:58.060 poetry merit being included in the big tent of magic so as usual amy and i'll try to welcome
00:01:05.620 this witch we've been missing thoughtfully in order to learn something cast a little light 0.99
00:01:11.060 and just not fuck it up too much you aren't being a proper woman therefore you must be a witch 1.00
00:01:16.200 You must be a witch. 0.99
00:01:21.040 This particular story ties the Beatles, Walt Disney, and the CIA's secret MKL true mind control experiments to a small elderly woman who, purified and late at night, high in the mountains in Oaxaca province, would become one with God and heal with words. 0.73
00:01:41.860 a woman who Mexican poet
00:01:44.680 Homero Aridichis called
00:01:46.700 the greatest visionary poet
00:01:48.680 in 20th century Latin America
00:01:50.720 I take little one who springs forth 0.99
00:01:54.800 and I see God
00:01:55.740 I see him sprout from the earth
00:01:58.960 he grows and grows
00:02:01.420 big as a tree
00:02:02.660 as a mountain
00:02:03.740 his face is placid, beautiful
00:02:06.520 serene as in the temples
00:02:08.140 at other times God is not like a man
00:02:11.400 He is the book, a book that is born from the earth, a sacred book whose birth makes the world
00:02:18.560 shake. It is the book of God that speaks to me in order for me to speak. It counsels me.
00:02:25.420 It teaches me. It tells me what I have to say to men, to the sick, to life. The book appears
00:02:33.000 and I learn new words. These are the words and this is the story of Maria Sabina, the contemporary
00:02:41.300 Mazatec Curandera, who allowed Westerners to participate in the healing vigil known as the
00:02:46.840 Velada, had her story told on the cover of Time magazine, and saw her tiny, isolated community
00:02:53.740 transformed into a transcendental hippie mecca or madhouse that shaped the world.
00:03:01.660 Maria Sabina isn't missing in the same way as some other witches. Her image is printed on
00:03:08.280 t-shirts and sold at head shops. Her impact on a psychedelic history of the modern world is famous
00:03:14.180 in some circles. She gave the world magic mushrooms, so hundreds of thousands of tech
00:03:20.440 bros micro-dosing in glass towers in Manhattan, steampunk music lovers in the desert, middle-aging
00:03:27.740 parents on vacations in the woods, artists looking for other vision, and over-prescribed
00:03:33.500 depressives looking for a better way all have her to thank, though they may not know her name.
00:03:40.980 They may not know or remember that a 60s subculture beat a path of thousands of hippie
00:03:46.820 seekers to her door once the news broke about a magic that opened minds and brought you face to 0.98
00:03:52.380 face with God. Maria Sabina was a Mazatec indigenous woman born in 1894. The Mazatec
00:04:00.840 traced their origins back thousands of years. By the 1300s, they were a free, independent people
00:04:06.720 with two empires, one in the highlands, or the east, and another in the lowlands. These kingdoms
00:04:13.560 were invaded by the Mexica, the Aztec emperor, and then the Spanish colonizers arrived in Mazatec
00:04:20.140 territory in 1520. The colonizers try to suppress and eliminate the indigenous ritual and religion.
00:04:28.220 They build churches and work on conversion, but they also document the fact of ritual hallucinogens and their healing powers.
00:04:37.640 And a couple hundred years later, this is how the West finds Maria Sabina.
00:04:43.200 In 1954, gigantic development projects begin in the area.
00:04:49.200 Hydroelectric dams are built, large tracts of the jungle are cut down.
00:04:53.580 Its private banks, supporting the monoculture of sugarcane and the development of pasture for cattle.
00:05:00.080 With the construction of the dam, the lowland Mazatec lost the equivalent of 50% of their usable land.
00:05:06.640 About 22,000 Mazatec who inhabited the basin were relocated some 250 kilometers away from their traditional lands.
00:05:14.900 The mountain Mazatec communities didn't immediately get access to the new services provided by the dam, the banks, the roads.
00:05:22.580 Their isolation also gave them a temporary reprieve.
00:05:25.800 That is until two independent researchers, fascinated by mushrooms, made their way to her door.
00:05:34.660 The Wassons are weird characters.
00:05:37.380 Gordon Wasson tells a story a couple different times in his books of having become fascinated by mushrooms
00:05:42.740 and starting down a personal research project tunnel that would end up lasting decades
00:05:47.280 because one day he was out walking in the woods in New York with his lovely Russian bride
00:05:52.380 when she exclaimed with glee and ran off to start gathering mushrooms in the woods.
00:05:57.440 He thought this was a macabre idea that would probably make them all sick,
00:06:01.900 but instead the mushrooms were delicious, and he started to pay attention.
00:06:06.200 She explained,
00:06:07.100 The cultures outside of North America have valued the mushroom differently.
00:06:10.760 Over time, Wasson and his wife traced out these opposing attitudes into two extremes
00:06:15.860 and reasoned that while some cultures retained a fondness and love of mushrooms
00:06:20.460 and others a death and rot-related fear,
00:06:24.360 both may have come from the same lost history.
00:06:27.480 They realized the mushroom in ancient history could have been deeply sacred.
00:06:32.320 That profound feeling drives extreme, if opposite, reactions today.
00:06:38.380 I mean, the same logic could be applied to certain attitudes towards women,
00:06:42.780 if you think about it. 0.98
00:06:43.860 The impulse to shame and control and call her sinner and slut and witch versus the nearly as 0.99
00:06:50.820 crazed impulse to throw her on a mother virgin pedestal could point to a time when she was 0.99
00:06:56.240 tremendously powerful and profoundly sacred. Just saying. Motivated by this idea, Wasson and his
00:07:05.160 wife trace scattered references to sacred mushrooms all over the world and eventually
00:07:09.820 they find Maria Sabina. She is not actually the first to allow them to join a ritual,
00:07:15.480 but she makes the greatest impact because Wasson's experience with horror is the one
00:07:19.640 he ends up writing for Time magazine. There is some conspiracy theory and some true secret
00:07:27.000 governmental fuckery at this part of the story because the Wassons went to Hautla in Oaxaca 0.85
00:07:32.400 that time on a small grant, which on the surface appeared to be a totally regular research grant, 0.82
00:07:38.200 but which we now know since the publication of the Project Artichoke MKUltra documents
00:07:43.440 was actually directly funded as part of the CIA's widespread investigation
00:07:48.380 into the possibilities of mind control as a weapon.
00:07:52.400 If by chance you haven't gone down the Wikipedia hole of reading about the secret CIA program MKUltra
00:07:59.700 that involved a crazy range of torture, including electrical and chemical experiments on veterans, 0.60
00:08:06.460 the mentally ill, the homeless, even right here in Montreal, I recommend it. Maybe don't do it high.
00:08:15.000 The Wassens wrote several beautiful books, and they coined the term entheogens, a class of
00:08:21.320 psychoactive substances that induce spiritual experience. They wrote about entheogens as the
00:08:27.280 origin of human religion. This is a lot of loving effort to go to if your real goal is to disguise
00:08:33.880 mind control research, so they probably weren't all in on the MKUltra stuff. But the fact that
00:08:40.260 Gordon Wasson's day job was VP of PR for Corporate Industrial Financier J.P. Morgan has got to raise
00:08:47.780 your eyebrows. They promised Maria Sabina not to reveal her identity or location, but somehow
00:08:54.360 promises were broken. And not long after the essay appeared in Time magazine, with Wasson on the
00:09:00.420 cover. Avant-garde icons of the counterculture start rolling up to her door. There are stories
00:09:07.420 of young hippies taking 17 hours on the bus through the mountains to arrive in Haudla,
00:09:12.340 only to find the Beatles' private plane parked in the town center. Others tell of swimming by a
00:09:18.500 waterfall after a trip to find Walt Disney's signature carved on a rock face. The Rolling
00:09:25.300 Stones go off the radar for a bit and reappear with a hallucinogenic art film called Performance
00:09:30.400 performance. The 1970 Rolling Stone magazine review called it a heavy trip, stunning in the
00:09:36.920 sense of a body blow, and if Woodstock presented one sort of reality, performance presents another
00:09:42.040 sort, a dark yin to Woodstock's yang, a slow love-death dance liberally spiced with magic
00:09:49.520 mushrooms. Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Pete Townsend of The Who, according to the stories, they all
00:09:56.980 were there, and they brought legions of hippie followers behind them. With so many moneyed
00:10:03.060 tourists arriving, it becomes clear there's money to be made, and various residents start 0.54
00:10:08.400 selling white people a ride on the sacred psilocybin. A ritual that required a gifted 0.51
00:10:14.980 guide and poet and seer, a blessed representative of God's children on this side, was dumbly,
00:10:22.240 greedily and sort of understandably ripped from its context and the kids just used it to get high
00:10:28.840 what kills me is that maria sabina saw it all coming the mushrooms which she referred to as
00:10:36.400 the holy children showed her the white men and then the waves that would follow if she shared
00:10:41.700 their power and that the mushrooms power would diminish from this dilution but they showed her 0.73
00:10:46.960 she must do it anyway. Maybe there are reasons beyond reasons. There's a lot of heartbreak in
00:10:54.740 this story. Maria Sabina married twice, both times to violent and abusive men who cheated on her.
00:11:02.320 But there's ferocious strength as well, and a constant force of creation.
00:11:08.380 Hoge Augustin recounts her husband found out that she was eating mushrooms to cure some of her old
00:11:13.540 friends and beat her in front of them. Perhaps Maria cast a spell on him or perhaps his karma
00:11:19.320 suddenly caught up with him. Either way that very night strange noises were heard in the street and
00:11:24.240 the next morning he was found dead. In a documentary you can watch on YouTube. We'll link it in our
00:11:31.280 notes along with every article we reference always. She says she bore 12 children and five died.
00:11:40.100 elsewhere she says she saw her son's murder coming before it came and she had to live and
00:11:46.380 relive it the strength required to endure this to me unbearable mix of power and powerlessness
00:11:53.800 is beyond awesome so often maria sabina gets described as humble and then tragic and i get
00:12:02.980 that but it also feels like pretty typical colonizer capitalist language for indigenous
00:12:07.680 people, especially women. It doesn't do much justice or wrap its head around the real complexity
00:12:13.920 and intentionality and other knowledge and power of that person's experience.
00:12:20.820 And Maria Sabina had some deep knowledge. She spent decades of nights on her mountaintop using
00:12:28.580 the power of her language to commune with the infinite. Wasson and others describe multiple
00:12:35.260 occasions where in the course of a vereda, she, riding the lines of sight provided by her discourse
00:12:41.520 with the holy children, provided information about future developments in distant places
00:12:46.520 that all proved true. I picture this experience as being like space travel in the new Star Trek.
00:12:54.460 Non-Trekkies, bear with me for like two quick seconds. In the new Star Trek show Discovery, 0.99
00:13:00.480 a beautiful gay genius scientist named Paul Stamets discovers, with the help of the ostracized 0.85
00:13:07.300 black half-Vulcan martial arts heroine named Michael Burnham, that they can ride a mycelium 0.95
00:13:13.600 network that flows through space and time. These spores of the network are the veins of the galaxy.
00:13:21.140 They discover that at a quantum level there is no line between biology and physics, and the spores
00:13:26.980 are the progenitors of panspermia, the building blocks of energy. Panspermia is the non-fictional
00:13:34.400 theory that life on earth originated from microorganisms or chemical precursors of life
00:13:40.260 present in outer space. In the TV show, Paul and Michael realize that an animal is being tortured
00:13:47.540 to make the spore drive work, and so Paul chooses to plug himself in instead. He's filled with the
00:13:54.720 spores and drives the ship through space-time. It's painful and spectacular, and when I picture
00:14:01.760 what those years of Maria Sabina's life were like, I kind of picture this. The spores connecting her
00:14:07.560 to the greatest web, vision beyond my comprehension, the woman who shepherds the immense.
00:14:15.780 She first glimpsed the sacred life as a kid. They were just hungry, eating the sacred mushrooms on
00:14:21.140 a mountainside, and she saw what they showed her about her life in the years to come.
00:14:26.840 But her life as curandera really only begins after her husbands have died. Her daughters stay with
00:14:33.420 her, and they braid her hair, and they sing her songs with her at night when she grows tired.
00:14:40.160 Celibate, as the holy children require, she listens to the messages from across the planet
00:14:45.180 through the earth and air. Like every artist, she is awed and lit up by the poetry that comes to her
00:14:52.840 and she's generous with her gift. Her community can rely on her. She is the gifted guide and she
00:14:59.660 will sing all night long with her daughters and they will surround you with their voices
00:15:04.260 until you see a way for healing, either through darkness or light. When outsiders come, she welcomes
00:15:12.220 them as well. But the tide of public opinion turns against her. Not all the seekers are
00:15:18.300 scrupulous or respectful, and as more and more come, they draw too much attention, attention of 0.95
00:15:24.540 the wrong kind, to beautiful, isolated jautla. The Mexican army can't ignore the drug trade
00:15:31.320 happening in the mountains. They harass, lurk, trouble the community. At a breaking point, 1.00
00:15:36.220 about a thousand people are rounded up and arrested and Maria Sabina's small adobe home
00:15:43.080 is burnt to the ground. Most accounts suggest that this was the act of frustrated villagers
00:15:48.980 but it could have been the Mexican army trying to shut off the source or even imaginably a frustrated
00:15:54.480 MKUltra assignment because their investigation into mushrooms for social control didn't work
00:15:59.920 out so well, did it? Though the hordes of hippies were messy and troublesome, you could at least say
00:16:07.100 on some level their minds were opening. Once the idea was lit in the young frustrated imagination
00:16:13.600 that there could be more to life than the two-car garage, simple patriotism and consumption,
00:16:18.840 happy obedience, there was no putting that particular Pandora back in her box.
00:16:24.740 according to Wasson Maria Sabina famously mourned that before you nobody took the children simply
00:16:31.980 to find God they were always taken to cure the sick from the moment foreigners arrived the holy 0.83
00:16:37.400 children lost their purity they lost their force they ruined them henceforth they will no longer 1.00
00:16:43.440 work there is no remedy for it in women and knowledge in Mesoamerica the author puts a twist
00:16:53.100 on this particular, popular, heartbreaking end to the story of Maria Sabina, the great poet,
00:16:59.400 the great healer of the Mestaca people, suggesting that her language always contained multiple
00:17:04.860 realities. She is a multiplier of possibilities, a trickster, and if she told you the magic was
00:17:13.300 gone, maybe that was because she wanted you to believe it.
00:17:18.100 herberito yepez is my favorite writer about maria sabina so far a poet who sees her as the same
00:17:27.220 and who sees poetry as the new making of oneself poetry as the practical not just verbal or
00:17:34.500 utopian invention of wholeness slash otherness poet as technicians of the sacred self
00:17:44.060 the construction poesis of oneself. Elsewhere he writes Maria Sabina was a wise one not because
00:17:54.560 she ate mushrooms and got into trips but because she dominated a dynamic dictionary of meanings. 0.99
00:18:00.980 She reproduced those meanings in the ceremonies. She rewrote that dynamic dictionary throughout
00:18:06.840 her life. She was trying to revolutionize the praxis. That's why she even allowed foreigners 0.93
00:18:14.060 to participate. She was trying to go beyond. She wanted to open the book. 0.92
00:18:21.680 She wanted to open the book. This poet sees her in an iconic line with Lilith and Malinche
00:18:28.900 and all black virgins. I'm going to quote such a chunk from him because I love him.
00:18:36.840 The historic Malinche was given to Cortez as tribute by the Indian leaders in Tabasco,
00:18:41.960 along with 20 other women, gold and poultry.
00:18:45.500 She later served him as mistress and translator during the conquest.
00:18:49.320 He refers to her as this tongue that I always have with me. 0.95
00:18:54.600 The great shadow that Malinche has cast on the Mexican psyche secretly reappeared
00:18:59.080 when Maria Sabina was, quote, discovered by life and Gordon Wasson.
00:19:04.240 Like Malinche, Sabrina, in an act of cultural infidelity, had betrayed the secret knowledge 1.00
00:19:11.540 of Mexican culture to foreigners. If Malinche is perceived as having been seduced by Cortez, 0.62
00:19:18.480 Maria Sabina is sometimes seen as having been seduced by Wasson.
00:19:24.100 Malinche and Sabina both become crying women, night-chanting women, and both were tongue women,
00:19:31.240 interpreters of language women who with their power over words guided men on their crucial 0.97
00:19:37.340 journeys one to the conquest of Mexico the other to the conquest of self both were translator 0.92
00:19:45.100 women of the book of language both Sabina and Malinche were women poets women with power over
00:19:52.300 language language can have a world making power it can reproduce power structures tell us who we 0.98
00:20:00.440 are, limit what we imagine we can be, or make us see new things. I honestly totally believe this.
00:20:08.620 As one example of the system creative power of language, I often think about the difference
00:20:13.400 between American and Canadian healthcare systems, and more fundamentally about what belief in a
00:20:18.740 right to health communicates and engenders in people. Believing in each other, in our right
00:20:25.840 to care, changes us. Canada, despite its own nightmarish history of colonialism and ongoing
00:20:33.380 racism, has come a long way, and has a long way to go, in expanding the power of this magical idea.
00:20:40.820 The colonel expanded rapidly. Within 10 years of Tommy Douglas, the greatest Canadian,
00:20:46.600 bringing free health care to his province of Saskatchewan, it had spread to the entire country.
00:20:52.860 Although let's be real and careful,
00:20:55.380 the Canadian healthcare system hasn't kept pace with Indigenous self-government
00:20:59.040 and has perpetuated health inequality for Indigenous Canadians.
00:21:03.880 There's more to be done.
00:21:06.300 And we can be guided by the evidence we've already seen
00:21:09.480 of the tremendous world-changing power in ideas and words.
00:21:13.740 In the idea of a right to health and healthcare.
00:21:18.840 The power in seeing each other.
00:21:22.140 and power in what we choose to obscure, the power of the word care.
00:21:29.400 As Yepez points out, when the Zapatistas declared war in Chiapas on January 1st, 1994,
00:21:36.260 the day that the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect,
00:21:39.820 it was charged that they were a group of foreigners from Europe and Central America
00:21:45.380 who wore masks to hide their true identity.
00:21:48.420 Another version of that accusation remains popular.
00:21:50.980 In the midst of the drama of the Zapatista entry into Mexico City in March 2001, television
00:21:57.400 crews didn't emphasize the hundreds of thousands of people in the streets cheering the rebels,
00:22:03.120 nor the speeches of Subcomandante Marcos.
00:22:06.740 The big news was the omnipresence of a group of foreigners protecting the Zapatista leaders, 0.74
00:22:13.280 Italians who were known as monos blancos, white monkeys.
00:22:16.760 It seems to be a rule of Mexican mainstream culture that whenever the Indian world presents itself to the public's attention, it is accused, as both Maria Sabina and the Zapatistas were, of serving hidden foreign interests.
00:22:30.720 Behind this automatic assumption, of course, is the idea that Indians can't think for themselves. 0.56
00:22:35.980 Somebody must be behind them, giving them bad ideas.
00:22:38.600 It is a somewhat pessimistic and premature commonplace about Maria Sabina that she was
00:22:45.140 to blame for the demise of esoteric shamanism in Mexico. She is declared the last shaman,
00:22:52.400 the one who brought the whole tradition of revelation down by revealing its secrets.
00:22:58.580 Yepez goes on. Why was Maria Sabina so painfully punished? Because of some of the peculiarities 1.00
00:23:05.900 and ghosts of Mexican cultural history, but also because she appeared to call into question the 0.81
00:23:11.180 deep premises of mestizo society. In an era of increasing literacy, she neither knew how to read
00:23:18.960 nor spoke Spanish nor cared, and she nonetheless considered herself and was considered by her peers
00:23:26.640 the wisest of all. She stood in contrast to the process of modernization that preoccupied the
00:23:34.460 nation. Still more dangerous, she led an extraordinary life but had a very common death.
00:23:41.060 Book woman, Jesus woman, light woman, died as malnutrition woman, anemia woman, bleeding woman.
00:23:49.740 Her social misery was public evidence of the failure of the Mexican state to maintain even
00:23:55.000 the most basic conditions for the preservation of physical and spiritual life. At the end of
00:24:00.160 the 20th century, according to the Mexican government's estimates, 74% of Mexico's 100
00:24:05.640 million people lived in moderate or extreme poverty. Like too many Mexicans, she was blamed
00:24:12.760 wrongly because she was poor, a woman, and an Indian because of who she was and what she
00:24:19.900 represented. But to an increasing number of Mexicans, half a century after her discovery,
00:24:26.520 She is Maria Sabina, great power woman, spirit woman, doctor woman, psychedelic woman, comics
00:24:37.500 woman, feminist woman, clock woman, whose time is just beginning.
00:24:44.520 That was another big fat Ebrito Yepes quote because I can't help it.
00:24:49.640 I spent a long time looking for an historian or seerist of Maria Sabina that I could really
00:24:55.040 love who could explain and explode all the heavy layered histories around her and obscuring her
00:25:01.800 and it seems appropriate that when I finally found who I'd been looking for he is a poet
00:25:07.100 a boundary slipping theorist from the border town of Tijuana who has cast light with his writing on
00:25:14.880 gay Mexican voices and fought to give true poet credit to Maria Sabina so indulge me a little bit
00:25:23.240 more. He writes, Sabina represents a critique on those who believe, like Octavio Paz and most 0.90
00:25:32.020 mainstream poets, that poetry is a voice that comes from nowhere, an ahistoric otherness.
00:25:41.160 She challenges those who find the idea of having just a single identity possible,
00:25:46.120 those who try to produce a voice without a context sabina's is also a critique on those
00:25:53.320 who believe there can be radical experimentation without healing poets who don't go to the roots
00:25:59.820 of society to cure ignorance sickness injustice and poverty sabina was without a doubt a poet
00:26:08.480 She was not only a poet, but more importantly, poetry's wholeness.
00:26:14.460 Her activity's goal was totality.
00:26:18.100 She reached for the impossible, searching for a book beyond the book,
00:26:24.000 having a new poetic body,
00:26:26.740 breaking the differences between writing, reading, chanting, talking, dancing, and silence.
00:26:34.500 Removing pain from others.
00:26:36.640 fighting for the survival of a great culture, investigating sounds, meanings, and languages,
00:26:44.780 increasing wisdom, teaching, being radically self-critical, recognizing when one fails, when one is dying.
00:26:57.580 Contemporary research into the possible uses of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic
00:27:02.900 mushrooms have focused in part on its ability when coupled with careful therapy to ease the
00:27:08.540 terror and depression that come when one is dying. At clinical trials at multiple universities
00:27:16.120 including NYU, cancer patients receiving just a single dose of psilocybin experienced immediate
00:27:22.300 and dramatic reductions in anxiety and depression, improvements that were sustained at least six
00:27:28.540 months. This info is from a great article in a 2015 New Yorker issue on the history and
00:27:34.800 contemporary research into therapeutic uses of God's children called trip treatment. I'm going
00:27:41.480 to quote a bunch of bits but just go read the whole thing. The author Michael Pollan points
00:27:46.140 out that between 1953 and 1973 psychedelics were tested on alcoholics, people struggling with
00:27:52.400 obsessive compulsive disorder, depressives, autistic children, schizophrenics, terminal
00:27:57.640 cancer patients and convicts, as well as on perfectly healthy artists and scientists to
00:28:02.200 study creativity, and divinity students to study spirituality. The clinical trials currently
00:28:08.760 happening at NYU are part of a renaissance of psychedelic research 40 years after the Nixon
00:28:13.420 administration effectively shut down most psychedelic research. Stanislav Grof, a Czech-born
00:28:19.780 psychiatrist who used LSD extensively in his practice in the 60s, believes that psychedelics
00:28:25.820 loosed the Dionysian element on America, posing a threat to the country's Puritan values that was
00:28:32.280 bound to be repulsed. He thinks the same thing could happen again. Roland Griffiths, a psychopharmacologist
00:28:39.200 at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, points out that ours is not the first culture to
00:28:44.560 feel threatened by psychedelics. The reason Gordon Wasson had to rediscover magic mushrooms in Mexico
00:28:50.400 was that the Spanish had suppressed them so thoroughly,
00:28:54.300 deeming them dangerous instruments of paganism.
00:28:58.100 There is such a sense of authority that comes out of the primary mystical experience
00:29:02.520 that it can be threatening to existing hierarchical structures.
00:29:08.700 Maria Sabina protected and shepherded these dangerous, 0.96
00:29:12.380 Dionysian, pagan instruments which threaten hierarchy 1.00
00:29:16.000 into the hands of multitudes of seekers. 1.00
00:29:18.740 she may have lost control of it but she also let it loose so wide it seems unlikely it'll ever be
00:29:24.880 lost again but what is it that mushrooms actually do and is it the same thing that yapez thinks
00:29:31.400 poetry can do breaking boundaries and healing how can a temporary shift in how our brain functions
00:29:38.060 or perceives threaten hierarchies in society and is this what a witch does with her spells
00:29:44.380 Her own inherited and improvised poetry, healing herself to heal the world.
00:29:52.220 More from this New Yorker article.
00:29:55.980 When, in 2010, researcher Carhart Harris first began studying the brains of volunteers on psychedelics,
00:30:04.100 neuroscientists assumed that the drug somehow excited brain activity.
00:30:08.060 But when Carhart Harris looked at the results of the first set of fMRI scans,
00:30:12.560 he discovered that the drug appeared to substantially reduce brain activity in one
00:30:17.520 particular region, the default mode network. The network comprises a critical and centrally
00:30:24.220 situated hub of brain activity that links parts of the cerebral cortex to deeper,
00:30:29.140 older structures in the brain. Carhart-Harris describes the default mode network variously
00:30:35.700 as the brain's orchestra conductor or corporate executive or capital city. It's charged with
00:30:44.420 managing and holding the entire system together. It is thought to be the physical counterpart of
00:30:50.520 the autobiographical self or the ego. He discovered that blood flow and electrical activity in the
00:30:57.200 default mode network dropped off under the influence of psychedelics, a finding that may
00:31:01.440 help to explain the loss of the sense of self that volunteers report. The biggest drop-offs
00:31:07.720 in default mode network activity correlate with volunteers' reports of ego dissolution.
00:31:14.240 It appears that with the ego temporarily out of commission, the boundaries between self
00:31:18.580 and world, subject and object, all dissolve. These are hallmarks of the mystical experience.
00:31:28.980 carhartt harris found evidence in scans of brain waves that when the default mode network shuts
00:31:35.440 down other brain regions are let off the leash mental contents hidden from view or suppressed
00:31:42.220 during normal waking consciousness come out to play emotions memories wishes and fears
00:31:48.260 regions that don't ordinarily communicate directly with one another strike up conversations
00:31:53.620 Neuroscientists sometimes call this crosstalk, often with bizarre results.
00:32:01.480 When administered under supportive conditions, psilocybin occasioned experiences similar to spontaneously occurring mystical experiences.
00:32:11.080 Participants ranked these experiences as among the most meaningful in their lives,
00:32:16.040 comparable to the birth of a child or the death of a parent.
00:32:19.340 More than a year after their psilocybin sessions, volunteers who had the most complete mystical experiences showed significant increases in their openness, one of the five domains that psychologists look at in assessing personality traits.
00:32:35.200 Openness, which encompasses aesthetic appreciation, imagination, and tolerance of others' viewpoints, is apparently a good predictor of creativity.
00:32:45.120 so our brains have a tiny orchestra conductor in them making sense of the world giving it order
00:32:52.420 and when in overdrive it becomes a tiny tyrant tied to depression and anxiety
00:32:57.640 certain experiences can calm it allowing us to experience the world more like we did before it
00:33:03.960 developed little kids are without it and they constantly create the world and make their own
00:33:08.920 bizarre rules in it personally i went through a period of petting strangers hair when i was about
00:33:14.660 four. I remember my mom looking at me and slow-mo mouthing, why? And that memory, like a lot of
00:33:24.520 others from my childhood, feels heightened and hallucinatory and kind of high. Not that I really
00:33:32.060 know what a mushroom drip feels like. The extent of it for me was one glorious, brilliantly cold
00:33:37.460 day up at the lake house with a beautiful witch artist friend who had weaned herself off
00:33:42.580 antidepressants and was microdosing mushrooms instead. So we joined her. Not enough to trip,
00:33:48.580 mind you, just enough to paint and toboggan and play music and laugh all day like kids.
00:33:53.720 The closest I came to feeling anything like what I've read described was after a crazy carpet run,
00:33:58.560 heart beating hard in the white, cold, diamond sun, wind brilliant in the trees and the world,
00:34:04.160 feeling spectacular. Prior to this, I have had some judgments and fears about psychedelics.
00:34:12.580 I have been in my life at times a kind of judgmental person although that's not a trade I value
00:34:19.780 the first time I got drunk I cried and told my friends I was a hippopotamus for having given 0.99
00:34:25.740 them shit about drinking beers I meant hypocrite the reality was I didn't have an actual issue 0.99
00:34:34.300 with them drinking besides being afraid of losing them of them going to a place I wasn't ready to go 1.00
00:34:39.580 or a place I was afraid of, of them going anywhere without me, to be honest.
00:34:44.260 I've got my abandonment stuff just like anyone.
00:34:48.040 I think this is partially related to how I've felt about psychedelics.
00:34:52.420 I was medicated from chronic pain during the decade
00:34:55.240 when my social circles were adventuring with mushrooms and LSD.
00:34:59.160 Maybe those things could have helped me, actually.
00:35:00.920 My pain grew as I clenched with fear around an injury.
00:35:05.180 And I can imagine now how an expansive trip led by a healing guide
00:35:09.200 could have lifted me, lifted my spine out of that trap earlier and saved me some tears, some time.
00:35:18.120 But those drugs were for other people. They were a place I shouldn't go.
00:35:23.020 I sat in judgment and in fear of most things.
00:35:26.860 Some fear was reasonable. We knew people lost on unguided trips.
00:35:32.400 Young men for whom acid pulled a schizophrenic trigger and caught them in a trap that was never unsprung.
00:35:39.200 There are some very known dangers to messing with this stuff unguided.
00:35:45.160 Maria Sabina would ask you to be as honest as you could about what needed healing,
00:35:50.120 and then she would stay with you and sing and dance
00:35:53.020 and treat you with her identity-changing poetry all night until it passed.
00:35:59.560 In current clinical trials, a therapist is with you through the entire experience,
00:36:04.400 helping you find your way through what are often described as visions of birth and then of death
00:36:10.040 and then back with a new belief that death is not an end. My co-producer Amy's experience was
00:36:18.280 different. She wrote, LSD was the first drug I ever took. I'd love to say this was some grand
00:36:25.340 planned spiritual quest, but the fact is I took whatever someone handed me first.
00:36:30.260 I, of course, discovered psychedelia before I discovered psychedelics,
00:36:34.320 but was enthralled by the music, art, and fashion of the mid-late 60s to the point of obsession.
00:36:40.060 I knew by age 10 that I wanted to open the doors of perception, whatever that might mean.
00:36:45.320 Expand your mind. Sign me up.
00:36:47.940 So let me tell you, on one hit of acid, you might feel strange.
00:36:52.380 Giggle. Your reality may start to shift.
00:36:55.620 But on four hits, you might discover the secret of the universe.
00:36:59.640 At 15 years old, all pupils and grins, our girlfriend and I discovered that the secret
00:37:05.420 of the universe is as follows. Everything is a circle. Now this is vague and probably not
00:37:11.280 helpful, but I stand by it even today. She continues, I don't recall the first time I
00:37:18.280 ate mushrooms. This is probably because where I come from, psilocybin wasn't a sacred magical
00:37:23.800 tool for healing. It was a party drug, eaten by the fistful in an attempt to, for lack of a better
00:37:30.120 term, trip balls. That said, I was always kind of the mystic in the group, and on these nights where
00:37:37.500 the holy children were consumed, I could be found dancing alone in a dark bathroom, or wandering
00:37:43.040 off in search of nature, adventure, train tracks, or stillness. I honestly don't advise that you use
00:37:49.860 drugs. Just take it from me and the lessons I've learned on my long, strange trips. Everything you
00:37:57.200 sense is filtered through your perception, and you can change your perspective without drugs.
00:38:02.800 When you change your mind, you change your reality. That's witchcraft, and that is sacred.
00:38:11.480 As Maria Sabina said, and Amy and I agree, the drugs will only take you so far. Whether you
00:38:18.400 are considering tapping into the highs of psilocybin or yoga or wine or mountaintops or
00:38:25.200 therapy or poetry or weed or power or even witchcraft. May I suggest again, these drugs
00:38:33.240 will only take you so far. To really open the doors of perception, I think we need to do more
00:38:40.040 than just get high and repeat existing patterns. To escape the violence we're doing to the world
00:38:45.820 and to each other, we need a language that enshrines our collective right to health,
00:38:51.580 that makes our identities multiple and twisted to each other, and understands health and self-love
00:38:58.580 on a scale so big we might need that mycelium drive to glimpse the expanse of it. For this
00:39:05.380 great big view, let's take Maria Sabina, her bravery and vision and poetry, as our patron saint
00:39:13.200 and black virgin guide. Because I can swim in the immense. Because I can swim in all forms.
00:39:22.060 Because I am the launch woman. Because I am the sacred opossum. Because I am the Lord opossum.
00:39:30.320 I am the woman book that is beneath the water says. I am the woman of the populous town says.
00:39:37.600 I am the shepherdess who is beneath the water, says
00:39:41.420 I am the woman who shepherds the immense, says
00:39:45.900 I am a shepherdess and I come with my shepherd, says
00:39:51.180 Because everything has its origin
00:39:54.100 And I come going from place to place from the origin
00:39:59.480 Because everything has its origin
00:40:03.660 and I come going from place to place from the origin. 0.99
00:40:12.700 You must be a witch. 0.53
00:40:14.520 Thanks for listening to the Missing Witches podcast. 0.76
00:40:17.060 If you want to know more about Maria Sabina,
00:40:19.240 check out our show notes at missingwitches.com
00:40:21.840 and be sure to come back for Witches Found.
00:40:25.060 This week I'm speaking to medicine woman Annie Lamarot 0.99
00:40:29.060 about the tools that she uses, other than drugs,
00:40:32.700 to connect with the spirit.
00:40:34.980 So that's Missing Witches Sundays,
00:40:36.740 Witches Found Wednesdays.
00:40:38.180 Please like, share, subscribe.
00:40:40.980 Follow us on social media at Missing Witches.
00:40:43.940 And if you have stories about your own witchcraft
00:40:46.920 or your families or witches that you've discovered,
00:40:50.760 please email us.
00:40:52.420 And blessed be.