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Genocide...

alcoholic intoxication was the root of most evils. Harold Driver, author of INDIANS OF NORTH AMERICA, says that among the Aztecs "Public drunkenness on the part of students, nobles, or priests was punished with death. A commoner would receive only a beating for the first offense, but would be killed if found drunk a second time." 

Imagine, then, the cultural strife that took place between the Spanish missionaries, who regarded wine as the blood of Christ, and the holy men of the Aztecs, who regarded fourteen species of three genera of m u s h r o o m s - - P S I L O C Y B E , STROPHARIA, and CONOCYBE -- as sacred. TEONANACATL--"God's flesh." Moreover, the Aztec shamans knew the use of both N. RUSTICA and N. TABACUM, called respectively in Nahuatl PICIETL and QUAUHYETL. And they knew about the best natural source of lysergic acid amides--the morning glory seeds they called OLOLIUQUI (RIVEA CORYMBOSA or IPOMOEA SIDAEFOLIA).

According to Francisco Hernández in 1570, the morning glory seeds were the means by which Aztec "priests communed with their gods...to receive a message from them, eating the seeds to induce a delirium when a thousand visions and satanic hallucinations appeared to them" The word "satanic" is the key to the psychedelic genocide which followed; for the Spanish explorers and missionaries were quick to notice similarities between certain rituals and and hence thought that the Aztecs were quite literally practitioners of black magic, heretical Satan-worshippers.

In addition, the Aztecs used Jimson weed (DATURA) and other SOLANCACEAE-- exactly as the witches of Europe did, for both religious and medicinal purposes, and the lowly Jimson weed was regarded as holy. Driver says "There were special officials who took DATURA, along with peyote, to discover cures for illness, lost or stolen property, and the cause of chronic illness due to witchcraft. Sometimes the patient was given the drug instead. DATURA was also one of the ingredients in an ointment made of venomous insects, burned to ashes and tobacco. The priests who were annointed with this salve were said to have lost all fear and to have become bold and cruel enough. to kill their sacrificial victims."

Perhaps the least-known aspect of Aztec psychedelic religion nowadays is their ancient use of chocolate as an aphrodisiac. A Mayan Indian girl, Dona Marina, captured by Cortez on his way into Mexico, knew Aztec and acted as interpreter for the Spaniards at the court of Montezuma. It was she who first, in 1519, told Cortez about the "food of the gods," CACAO, the bitter brew made from the chocolate tree and its seeds. The Aztecs called it CHOCOLATL, and the half-senile voluptuary Montezuma drank the choking brew before visiting his concubines. His courtiers explained that it not only excited their ardor but made them more potent -- they got high from it. Before Cortez ordered Montezuma murdered (1520), he had the old prince plant 200 CACAO trees which were to be sent later to the King of Spain, at that time a boy about 12 years old.

In about 1550 some Spanish nuns at the Mexican cloister of Chiapas mixed vanilla and sugar with the bitter chocolate drink, thereby making it palatable. (No one has explained what the nuns were doing messing around with the infamous aphrodisiac of Montezuma.) From that time on it became the rage among the European nobility, especially among ladies in church. Thus chocolate, like tobacco, was accepted only after its psychoactive properties had been so weakened that it was turned into a merely fashionable pleasant drink.

It was peyote, however, which provided the prototypical case of psychedelic genocide. This best-known of the Indian psychedelics was used by the Aztecs (from whence the name was taken -- PEYOTL) and the Huichols. It was first described by the Spanish historian Sahagun in 1560; Sahagun was the friar who first crudely described the use of TEONANACATL mushrooms as well. The chronicles of the Conquistadores are, as Schultes notes, "full of fanatic and vituperative condemnation of peyote as a diabolic root. Missionaries combated its use in native religions as a sacred element and compared the eating of the cactus with cannibalism" (Cannibalism was, incidentally, one of the first things Columbus accused the tobacco Indians of the Caribbeans of.)

Precisely BECAUSE peyote (LOPHOPHORA WILLIAMSII) was a major sacrament among the Indians of central Mexico, it was outlawed in 1620 by the missionaries of the Spanish Inquisition. It was the religious uses of the plant which most offended the friar prohibitionists, as may be seen in the wording of the law itself: "We, the Inquisitors against heretical perversity and apostasy, by virtue of apostolic authority declare, inasmuch as the herb or root called peyote has been introduced into these provinces for the purposes of detecting thefts, of divining other happenings and of foretelling future events, it is an act of superstition, condemned--as opposed to the purity and integrity of our Holy Catholic faith. The fantasies suggest intervention of the Devil, the real authority of this vice."

For a century on either side of that date, the Spaniards destroyed as many Aztec religious documents and records as they could find, and mercilessly slaughtered anyone found guilty of practicing the old religion by consuming these drugs. Because of this vicious suppression, the use of peyote, mushrooms, morning glories, and the other Aztec religious drugs died out. This was the most direct and most typical form of psychedelic genocide.

However, as readers of Carlos Castaneda's The Teachings of Don Juan know, the traditions were kept secretly alive by the Indians of Mexico most remote from the Spanish masters. Don Juan, a Yaqui from Sonora, tried to explain and demonstrate the uses of peyote, Jimson weed, and the mushrooms to the anthropology student. Earlier, in 1952, R. Gordon Wasson and his wife had learned the uses of the mushrooms from the Indians of Huautla, Mazatlan, the Sierra Costera, and the Masahua country; their research burst upon the world in 1957 with the publication of Mushrooms, Russia, and History. And in August 1960, in Cuernavaca, Dr. Timothy Leary consumed seven magic mushrooms given him by the anthropologist Gerhart Braun, who had gotten them from old Juana, the Indian CURANDERA. Tim ate the mushrooms and was impressed. The psychedelic revolution was on!

In August, 1963, Tim claimed that his ingestion of the mushrooms was "above all and without question the deepest religious experience of my life." He tried to found a church, the League for Spiritual Discovery, using psychedelics as the chief sacraments. Consequently, the modem Inquisition (Federal and State governments) has found him guilty of the heinous crime of possession of a little weed and has sentenced him to twenty years in prison. Psychedelic genocide, of exactly the kind practiced for centuries against nonwhites in Amerika, is now being practiced against hundreds of thousands of whites.

3. WHY THE NATIVE AMERICAN CHURCH SURVIVED

When the Catholic Conquistadores wiped out the Aztecs, they wiped out the Aztec religion. They did this by forcing the Indians to accept Christianity or be killed. As the Spaniards moved north to California, they suppressed psychedelics wherever they found them, and gave the red people firewater instead. A few Indians practiced the old ways, and secretly handed them down to their young -- including the primary rule of Aztec religion, adopted now by the Native Amerikan Church, that no liquor is allowed and alcohol-drinkers will not be accepted as members of the true psychedelic religion.

As time went on, however, many of the young people who had been forced to accept Christian ways for survival, mixed the Christian customs they learned with rituals from the older psychedelic ceremonies. The Christian trinity. and other Christian spirits such as the devil and angels, are accepted in full by the Native Amerikan Church. Often these are equated with comparable Indian spirits. The ethics of Christianity, such as the Golden Rule, and even nominally including the Protestant Ethic ("Members should work steadily and reliably at their jobs to earn a good living") were adopted entire. The essential rituals of eating peyote, and the ritual tools such as eagle-bone whistles, cedar incense, bird-feather fans, gourd rattles, water drums, and bundles of sage, are primarily Indian. But, as Driver says, the NAC is a "blend of about equal portions of Christian and Indian elements and patterns."

That is to say, only by accepting Christianity as half of its essence did the peyote Church survive. Had it retained its full Indianness it would never have been accepted.

Some tribes understood that the peyote religion was primarily accepted by the white man because it was a way of killing off Indian beliefs and customs, or at least watering them down. Read Frank Waters' most brilliant novel THE MAN WHO KILLED THE DEER, for a discussion of this fact among the Pueblos. There is another factor here. The peyote ceremonies had a most difficult time taking root among Indians who were used to a settled existence, with highly complex, conservative, and organized religions not based on peyote. For the white man to say that these Indians should or could accept peyote as their religion was yet another form of cultural genocide. Similarly, tribes who used Jimson weed primarily did not readily accept peyote--it was an imposition on their religion to hold that peyote was okay, but Jimson weed was not. Finally, the nomad Plains tribes, such as the Dakota, who eventually accepted peyote, did so only because their tobacco religion was bastardized beyond belief by the encroachments of white culture, and because the 1890 Ghost Dance messiah religion which grew up to replace tobacco was brutally wiped out at the massacre of Wounded Knee.

In 1937, when the government was moving to outlaw "narcotics" such as marijuana, the Feds tried to outlaw peyote. Some Indians, and, more importantly, some white liberal Anthros (including Franz Boas, A.L. Kroeber, and Weston La Barre) went to Washington to testify that the Native Amerikan Church was, in La Barre's terms, "a bona fide faith entitled to full Constitutional guarantee of religious freedom, whether we share its native theology or not." The supercilious and arrogant white anthros were quite willing to present this snide commentary on "native theology" to legislators AS LONG AS INDIANS WERE INVOLVED. However, this defense was, in their terms, not applicable to whites or non-Indians who took peyote, even though the whites vowed that their experience was deeply religious, because, again in La Barre's words, all non-Indian peyote lovers including Havelock Ellis and Aldous Huxley "seemed to me ethnologically spurious, meretricious and foolish poseurs." That is, Indians in the NAC are religious peyote-eaters, but whites are not religious peyote-eaters because they're not in the NAC. The argument is merely a circular definition and an excuse for (a) forcing Indians to join the NAC if they want to eat peyote for religious purposes, regardless of whether they believe in the Christian parts of the NAC, and (b) excluding white or non-Indian people from partaking of the peyote psychedelic religion. This definition is absurd, circular, self-serving, and an excuse for psychedelic genocide.

4. OTHER INDIAN PSYCHEDELICS, SACRAMENTS, AND STIMULANTS

The best way to avoid psychedelic genocide in times of insane repression such as ours, is to maintain the secrecy surrounding certain psychedelics, just as the Indians did earlier. I am therefore of mixed feelings about giving out this information. On the other hand, it is our right to take these drugs, most of them are legal, and hopefully by the time their use becomes widespread, we will be sufficiently powerful in Amerika to assure that they are not outlawed. Besides, the government cannot stop use of these drugs even if they do get around to prohibiting them. 

SWEET FLAG (ACORUS CALAMUS). - This little plant, also known as rat root, flag root, calamus, and sweet calomel may be found almost anywhere in marshy, freshwater soils. Look it up in an herbal or an encyclopedia for a picture-- it looks somewhat like cat-tail. In the 19th century it was widely used in folk medicine to cure stomach ache and as a tonic; its aromatic root is the principal ingredient in many well-known "bitters." It was used by the ancient Greeks as an eye-lotion, and by the ancient Chinese, who called it CH'ANG P'U, to stimulate appetite, alleviate fatigue, and as a medication for inflammation of the gastric membrane and for colic.

Osmond and Hoffer report in The Hallucinogens that rat root is collected in northern Canada by the Cree. "Rat root users seemed to be healthier and were not subject to alcoholism. The Indians used rat root (a) as an anti fatigue medicine (they chewed about 1 inch of the dried root which had a diameter equal to a pencil); (b) as an analgesic for relieving toothache, headache, etc; (c) for relief of asthma; (d) for oral hygiene , and (e) to relieve hangover."

Moreover, one of their informants walked 12 miles out in the north woods to fight a forest fire, and felt exhausted; he chewed and swallowed 2 inches of the root; "within 10 minutes the fatigue vanished and on the return march he seemed to be walking one foot above the ground and felt wonderful. The effect was very unlike amphetamine."

Finally, "the informant and his wife, a trained psychiatric nurse, were both sophisticated subjects with hallucinogens. They had taken LSD several times in well-controlled experiments at one of our research laboratories. They had both taken Í0 inches of rat root 5 times and both agreed it produced an experience very similar to LSD."

Asarone and B-asarone, the active chemicals in sweet flag, were found by Dandiya and Menon (1965) to antagonize the action of mescaline on rats, indicating that it is a true psychedelic. Asarone also protected rats against d-amphetamine more effectively than chlorpromazine did-speed freeks and researchers take note. Whitman wrote a small book of poems, CALAMUS, using the plant as his chief metaphor for a universal psychedelic -mystical experience. What did he Know? 

COHOBA (PIPTADENA PEREGRINA)-Ramon Pane, who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage, described COHOBA (an Arawakan word for snuffed tobacco) as it was used by the Tainos of Haiti: "This powder they draw up through the nose and it intoxicates them to such an at when they are under its influence, they know not what they do." Safford (1916) quoted Las Casas: "The ends of these two canes (a bifurcated snuff-pipe) inserted into the windows of the nostrils and the base of the flute into the powder on the plate, they would draw in their breath and, snuffing up, would receive through the nostrils as much of the powder as they wished to take, which, when taken would go at once to the brain almost as though they had drunk strong wine..."

Cohoba is made by grinding the seeds of PIPTADENS PEREGRINA, & tree commonly found in Haiti, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Peru, Argentina, and Brazil. The Otomaco tribesmen of Colombia and Venezuela mix it with quicklime before snuffing. Schultes warns that it may cause convulsions, for several BUFOTENINE, the toad-sweat drug of the witches, and DMT (N,N,-DIMETHYLTRYPTAMINE). Thus it appears that the exterminated Arawakans and other Indian tribes had discovered a natural source of DMT long before Columbus arrived. It was used, Schultes jays, "to induce bravery before a battle, to give hunters keener sight and as an agent for prophesying, clairvoyance and divination." Seeds may perhaps be obtained from any tropical seed company.

MESCAL BEAN (SOPHORA SECUNDIFLORA)-Not to be confused with mescal (Agave) or mescaline from peyote, the Mescal Bean grows commonly in western Texas and 

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southern New Mexico as well as in Mexico. At least a dozen southwest tribes organized cult-groups involving the eating of the bean. It contains a toxic alkaloid called sophorine, which, according to Driver, "resembles nicotine in its physiological action." lts use, while hardly as extensive as that of peyote, has made its way clear up into the Plains tribes. Score from the Arikara, Caddo, or any of the west-Texas tribes, or go pick, pulverize, and gobble it yourself. Make up your own ritual-most of the Indians did. Take very small doses, however--it can poison you severely.

VINHO DE JURUMENA and RAPE DOS INDIOS--both from Brazil. The beverage called vinho de Jurumena, used by Pancaru Indians in Pernambuco, Brazil, is prepared from the seeds of MIMOSA HOSTILIS and again seems to contain DMT. Rape dos Indios, taken as snuff by the Indians of the Brazilian Amazon, is reportedly made from the fruit of a giant forest tree, OLMEDIOPEREBEA SCLEROPHYLLA'

YAGE, YAKEE, AND HOJA DE LA PASTORA--For a description of BANISTERIOPSIS CAAPI, called ayahuesca, yaje, or caapi by the Indians of the western Amazon in Colombia, read Burroughs' and Ginsberg's THE YAGE LETTERS (New Directions). lts use among sorcerers as a telepathy drug has extended to Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. But it sounds like a death trip... YAKEE or Parica, used by Venezuelan Indians as snuff, on the other hand. sounds like a minor psychedelic. Schultes reports getting a headache only, but says the witch-doctors see visions in color. Osmond notes that it is dried, pulverized, and mixed with ashes from the stems of a wild cacao species, so perhaps Montezuma's chocolatl aphrodisiac had Yakee in it. Yakee is prepared from two trees of the genus Virola of the Myristicaceae family, the family of the nutmeg tree, Myristica Fragrans. Researchers in my own commune tell me that eating a whole nutmeg makes them high for a couple days and increases sexual potency. It's probably easier to get whole nutmegs at the grocery store to gnaw on than to mess around with Yakee: besides, Schultes reports that a witch-doctor once died from snuffing Parica.

Hoja de la Pastora, recently discovered by Wasson in use in northeastern Oaxaca, Mexico, is from a species SALVIA DIVINORUM of the Mint family. The Aztecs Indians grind up the leaves, make an infusion of strained leaves, and drink it. Wasson thinks it may be the PIPILTZINTZINTLI of the Aztecs, though Schultes says "there seem to have been no very early reports of SALVIA DIVINORUM in magico-religious rites." The leaves, presumably available from any herbal supply house that stocks Mexican mints, may be chewed directly. The effects are "similar" to those of the psilocybin mushrooms, but come on quicker, are "less sweeping," and of shorter duration . Several other mint-family plants in Mexico have been reported to be psychedelic, but research has not been done on them as yet.

Virtually any herbalist can supply these items, and they are legal. If your dealer hasn't been able to come through with any DMT or psilocybin recently, you might write to any of several herbalist supply houses and see if they can turn you on.

COCA LEAVES (ERYTHROXYLON COCA)--Finally, I would like to mention the ancient Peruvian, Bolivian, Colombian, and Argentinian Indian practice of chewing coca leaves, though strictly speaking it is not a psychedelic. Dried coca leaves have been found in Peruvian mummy bundles over 2000 years old, and it was the divine plant of the Incas. The leaves are toasted with small bits of lime, and chewed or packed between the gums and the teeth and allowed to dissolve. Millions of Indians keep their cheeks full of coca for most of their waking hours to relieve fatigue and provide alertness. It is not addictive, and Schultes confesses that "for the greater part of eight of my twelve years in exploration of the northwest Amazon, I used coca daily and found no desire for it when, back in the capital city, I had no supply." Unlike the cocaine made from it, coca even in daily use seems to have no debilitative effects and seems to be as safe as, or perhaps safer than, chromosome-damaging coffee. If we had not so stupidly classified cocaine as a narcotic, and its users as dope-fiends, in our patterns of drug-genocide this century, we might have found ordinary coca leaves a valuable minor stimulant in our drug-bedevilled society. As Taylor once said, "Even today, it has the touch of the miraculous."

5. THE REAL PSYCHEDELIC WAR.

This, then, is the historical pattern of psychedelic genocide. Either the drug itself has been weakened beyond recognition, and its use thereby changed from psychedelic/sacramental to merely sociable effect, as happened with tobacco and chocolate; or the drug has been banned directly and all users, whether they use the drug for social or sacramental purposes, have been slaughtered. The one exception, namely the Native Amerikan Church, is in reality not an exception at all, but rather a different form of psychedelic genocide which requires that all peyote users belong to a specific, half-Christian, half-Indian ritual institution. The alternative, historically, to psychedelic genocide has been simply to go underground, forming secret orally-transmitted cultures of psychedelic freeks, thereby keeping the drugs from being banned because the authorities aren't very much aware that they are being used.

This was, for a while, a viable alternative for us; but in the global village of instant sensationalism, this secret -society alternative has proven not to work. This was the essence of the "Hippie" , movement in 1966, 1967, and even 1968, and there are still plenty of idiot hippies around who think that they can sit around, smoke dope, drop acid, and jive about "the psychedelic revolution" without actually doing anything about it. Such people-and sad to say, some of our finest leaders including Leary are among them--made the essential mistake of thinking that as long as they were "nice," and cultured, and posed no "physical threat" to the established ownership government cliques, the government would leave them alone.

The basic mistake was ignoring this pattern of psychedelic genocide, which has been used for centuries to slaughter, imprison, and and enslave the Amerikan Indians and which has been used for decades to abuse nonwhites who smoked marijuana. The basic "hippie" mistake, repeated as recently as this summer at the banned Powder Ridge rock festival in Connecticut was TO CONTRIBUTE TO THIS VERY PATTERN OF PSYCHEDELIC GENOCIDE by not recognizing that the pattern would be applied to young whites as well as to nonwhites. The heart of the mistake is not believing that there is, indeed, a WAR GOING ON.

Does it have to be spelled out, for every pot-head or psychedelic hippie in the country, that this war applies to him or her personally? Already some 250,000 people, mostly young, are in prisons because of marijuana, LSD, or other psychedelics. Must the police break down the doors of every doper in the country before he or she believes that the government is actively pursuing a war to exterminate dopers that has been going on since November 5, 1492?

Unless every hippie understands the nature of this war, all people who prefer psychedelics to alcohol or narcotics are doomed. The Psychedelic Revolution is a fraud, for most psychedelic users don't understand that there is a real, physical war going on, and have never really attempted to make a Revolution in anything the vaguest "cultural" -- that is, ineffective -terms. Granted, psychedelic culture, with its love of freedom is proto-revolutionary, especially in rejecting the moneymad Speed culture of bourgeois Amerika. But unless every hippie becomes a Yippie, willing literally to fight and to die for that psychedelic culture, it is doomed, and there will be no hippies left except for a few backwoods shamans, just as happened with the Aztecs and their progeny the peyote Indians.

If we are going to win the Psychedelic Revolution, we must make and win a real revolution. Instead of bullshitting about acid in the water supply, which is impossible anyway because chlorine kills acid, how about going through supermarkets with a hypodermic needle and injecting acid into cake mixes? How about growing N. rustica and glories everywhere? How about miniature dart-guns or dart-blowers whose darts are tipped with DMT?

How about some of the so-called psychedelic revolutionaries in rural communes getting hip to training militiae in the use of rifles, shotguns, handguns, and bombs? How about urban communists undergoing strenuous physical (calisthenic) training in preparation for real war? How about manufacturing smoke bombs that emit real clouds of Cannabis? How about renting a helicopter, or skyjacking one, and dropping hundreds of rifles and pistols into state prison yards when the prisoners are out for a stroll, after smuggling in messages so the prisoners know what to expect?

Or, for those who think that "civil disobedience'" is a better route to social change, how about every pot-smoker in Amerika being very open about smoking, all the time? How about clogging the courts SO MUCH that they literally can't put us all away? How about smoking pot in every church in Amerikkka, openly, every Sunday? What would happen if every freek in New York City, San Francisco, and every other city walked into a police station on October 1st, 1970, smoking a joint? Instead of pointless "demonstrations" at colleges, what if every head in the country tripped on September 15,1970, and announced it to the world by walking into class or getting on the bus stark naked?

The 'hippie" psychedelic revolutionaries also make another mistake: they underestimate their, and our, power. There are now as many pot-smokers, between 25 and 30 million, as there are blacks in this country. Together with young chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Indians, the black and white pot-smoking youth of this country are a majority of the youth. The adult owners of the world are not going to hand it to us on a silver, marijuana-leaf-inlaid platter. If we don't TAKE IT ourselves, it will be everlastingly too late. They will continue to do as they have done for centuries, that is, pick off as many of us as they can. They're not going to stop the War, or their pattern of psychedelic genocide. If we don't stop it for them, by real instead of bullshit revolution, we might as well call it psychedelic suicide-for we are simply allowing them to kill us as they please.

It's our world. If we don't take it, we are lost, and the planet will probably be lost with us.