Wade Davis is one of the world's foremost experts in psychedelic plants of the Americas. He is Explorer in Residence at the National Geographic Society, and author of Light at the Edge of the World, a collection of photographs documenting his twenty-five years of explorations in Canada, the Andes, the Amazon, Haiti, Kenya, and Tibet.

Adams: I know that psychotropic plants are of great importance to the Amerindians and to the indigenous peoples of Siberia. They also have been of interest to many people in the United States. Who were the people in American culture that explored the affects of these plants, and what did they learn from their experiences with these hallucinogens?

Davis: One of the most fascinating times in the history of psychotropic plants occurred in the 'thirties, 'forties, and even the 'fifties, before these substances were widely known to the public (and before they were made illegal by the government). During these times, a curious cadre of individuals from all disciplines investigated psychotropic substances.

Everybody wanted to understand the curious mushrooms of Mexico. Aldous Huxley wrote of them and was fascinated by them, although he never saw them in context or ingested them himself.

Gordon Wasson, the banker, went to Mexico with his Russian wife in 1956, searching for people who worshiped mushrooms. He had read about this in an article by Richard Evans Schultes.[1] Wasson became the first outsider ever to ingest the mushroom in a sacred context. Both Wasson and his wife were serious scholars. He wrote about his experience for Life magazine in an article with the snappy title Seeking the Magic Mushroom. Timothy Leary saw the article and immediately made a beeline to Cuernavaca.

I think it's interesting that all these people approached the study of these plants in a very sincere and scholarly way. At the same time, they were just dazzled at the inherent wonder of what plants can do.

Adams: Did any of these people have extraordinary revelations that had a transformative effect on society as a result of taking mushrooms and other hallucinogenic plants?

Davis: The effects of these substances are so transformative, so ethereal, so wondrous that they really lay the person prostrate before the Gates of Awe. The experience can be either frightening or illuminating, depending on the receptivity and openness of the person taking them.

Within the ritual context of indigenous cultures, mind-altering substances are thought of not as drugs but as sacred medicines. They are keys to transforming consciousness and bringing greater awareness about the nature of existence.

I think that in a strange way, in the American cultural context, hallucinogens were seen as commodities, and so were quickly categorized as drugs. They were marketed in a corporate manner, and people were not always taking them in very positive ways.

On the other hand, the years since people started taking hallucinogens have seen unparalleled social changes in this culture. If you think of attitudes about civil rights, the environment, homosexuality, opportunities for women — there has been an absolute paradigm shift. You can expand that to the way people talk about their emotions and feelings. We aspire to connectedness, whereas the notion of connectedness didn't even exist before.

In trying to figure out what in the last forty years could have precipitated this amazing shift, we can point to many things: the assassination of the Kennedys; the perspective of earth from space, which transformed our notion of the environment; Vietnam, which changed our ideas about nation states. But there's no doubt in my mind that a critical ingredient in this paradigm shift was that millions of people took psychotropic substances in a positive way and were transformed by them.

Adams: You write that you have tried all of the psychotropic plants and mixtures. How has your experience with these hallucinogens shifted your own way of thinking?

Davis: I'm very happy to say that the way I see the reality, the connections I make in my research, the lyricism that comes into the prose I aspire to write, all come out of a total eclectic engagement with the world that I would not have had without these experiences.

The central perception of anthropology is that the world we live in doesn't exist in an absolute sense, but is a model of reality. But the real revelation in anthropology is that other cultures represent other possibilities for life itself. They are unique facets of the human imagination.

Collectively, all the cultures in the world make up the repertoire of humanities ability to cope with the challenges that face us. Anthropology teaches us that there really can be different realities, socially constructed, based on unique traditions.

I think that this truth was a message I could intuit and understand far more readily because I had literally been through so many realities myself. In that sense, I think society has benefited from the fact that people did this experimentation.

Adams: In his article Shared Wisdom: The Modern Mystical Movement, the anthropologist Hank Wesselman discusses the shift in thinking that is taking place in this country. He writes about a study that Paul Ray did showing that more than five million Americans may fall into this modern mystical movement. That's twenty-five percent of the adult population.

Davis: Yes, I think there's a profound change. We called it the New Age movement for a long time, but the New Age movement has its problems. Its credo is, "If I believe it, it's true." So New Age thought can be profoundly anti-intellectual and lacks the kind of discipline that gives an edge to the spirit and the intellect.

But this movement brings with it the overall quest for different ways of being and different motions of the spirit. It brings consciousness of the body. It brings the whole notion of consciousness — of trying to live to the best that one can, consciously.

It's not that people needed to take these substances to acquire these kinds of ideas or intuitions, but the use of these substances facilitated a transformation of individuals that led to this kind of awareness.

That said, I don't advocate the use of these substances. People have to ask the question for themselves whether it's appropriate or not.

Adams: It's interesting that you believe that the paradigm shift taking place nowadays is related to the experiences people had with hallucinogens from the 'thirties to the 'sixties. Do you think that hallucinogens also created paradigm shifts in ancient cultures? As a teenager, I remember reading The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross by the biblical scholar John Allegro. He connects the rise of Christianity to the fertility cults of the ancient Near East and the ingestion of sacred mushrooms.

Davis: During the psychedelic movement, people said that all kinds of social phenomena had their basis in some supposed substance. My old friend Terence McKenna was kind of a legend, not just for his amazing presentations and wonderful spirit but because of some of his wild schemes. He said that religion itself was born through the ingestion of a mushroom. Most people probably think that's ridiculous. I think Terence sometimes put forth these ideas because he was a kind of "provocateur" of the mystic.

But I don't think substances like mushrooms gave birth to religion. I think religious aspirations have always been there. Religion is born of mystery and the awareness that we all die. It is the desire to understand what that passage is all about — that inexorable separation from life as we know it. How we deal with that determines our cultural and spiritual worldview. Some people address that through meditation, prayer, or trance, and some do it through the use of substances.

The book The Secret Life of Plants (see The Secret Life of Plants elsewhere in this issue), made a big deal about plants' responding to music. Tim Plowman used to say to me, "Why would a plant care about Mozart. And even if it did, why should that impress us? They can eat light, isn't that enough?"

The reality that we know in science to be true is so much more wondrous than any of these crazy schemes that we can invent.

Adams: Are any psychotropic plants on the verge of extinction? Are we going to lose the wisdom and knowledge of the shamans regarding the nature and value of hallucinogenic plants?

Davis: We know of about a hundred and twenty hallucinogenic plants (and one from the animal kingdom). I don't think we need to fear the extinction of the species themselves, but there is a real possibility of losing the knowledge of both the metaphysical and spiritual context in which these plants were traditionally used. The cultures themselves face annihilation, acculturation, assimilation. . . Certainly the knowledge that has been lost in the Amazon, for example, was incredibly sophisticated.

Adams: What is the best way to preserve the shaman's wisdom about plants?

Davis: You can't photograph it. You can't film it. Words generally fail, but you can make the attempt, so I write about it. By writing about it, I think you can help to keep that spirit alive.

Adams: Are any of these hallucinogenic plants potentially harmful to the body and mind?

Davis: In all pharmacology, there is a gap between a drug's effective dosage and its lethal dosage. Something like aspirin actually has a surprisingly narrow window of safety: In other words, if you take two, it'll help a headache, but if you take a bottle, it will kill you. The curious thing about hallucinogens is that they are incredibly non-toxic in a pharmacological sense. Something like LSD has an incredibly wide gap. The amount of LSD you would need to take in order to have a mind-altering experience is trivial compared to the amount that would damage you.

So these substances are not pharmacologically toxic. But their psychological power and spiritual potential is obviously enormous. In that sense, I think that once they became commodities they were not necessarily used in a conscious manner, and that's when people began to have difficulties.

I've always maintained that one of the most curious things that our generation has done is to expunge from the record the fact that thousands, if not millions, of us took these substances.

There's no such thing as a bad or good drug. There are good and bad ways of using drugs. People who have studied the use of psychoactive substances always stress the importance of the mental and spiritual set that you bring to the experience, and of the setting — the literal environment in which the experience occurs.

Adams: Ayahausca is one of the most well-known hallucinogenic mixtures. What kinds of experiences do people have from ayahuasca — can the experience be both extraordinary and terrifying?

Davis: Your question reflects another kind of hangover from the 'sixties, this notion of good trips and bad trips. If you took one of these substances and had a negative experience, you were on a bad trip. The truth is, among many indigenous peoples, having a pleasant experience was not the idea.

When you take ayahuasca, you "face down the jaguar" and enter into hell and the darkest reaches of the imagination. You have to go to the placenta of ordinary awareness and test yourself in the most horrific ways. Then you emerge transformed and empowered — "a man," if you will.

As Tim [Timothy O'Leary] told me, William Burroughs made the mistake of thinking that ayahuasca was the ultimate high: another kick. He absolutely freaked out when he took it. Ayahuasca is many things, but pleasant is not one of them.

Like most ritual hallucinogens, ayahuasca is a sacred medicine and a vital component of the shaman's repertoire, enabling him to communicate across great distances in the forest to diagnose illness, ward off evil, prophesize the future. But for the peoples of the Northwest Amazon, it is far more. Ayahuasca is the visionary medium through which human beings orient themselves in the cosmos. Under the cloak of the visions, the user of ayahuasca encounters the gods, the primordial beings, and the first humans, even as he or she embraces, for good and for bad, the wild creatures of the forest and the powers of the night. Lifted out of his body, the shaman enters a distant realm, soaring like a bird to beyond the Milky Way or descending the sacred rivers in supernatural canoes manned by demons to reach distant lands where lost or stolen souls can be found and mystical deeds of spiritual rescue may be accomplished. —Wade Davis, from Plants of the Gods

Adams: I know that ayahuasca is made by a kind of shamanic alchemy. What plants are used in this mixture?

Davis: The fundamental ingredient is the vine — liana. The psychoactive ingredients in the vine are the beta-carbolines harmine and harmaline. This can be taken in conjunction with a shrub in the coffee family, Psychotria viridis, and with Diplopterys cabrerana, a forest liana closely related to yagé. Both of these plants contain tryptamines, which are powerful psychoactive compounds that must be smoked or injected. They cannot be taken orally because they are denatured by an inhibiting enzyme in the human gut that causes them to have no effect.

When ayahuasca is smoked or snuffed, it creates a rapid and intense intoxication of short duration, along with astonishing visual imagery. You get a powerful synergistic effect: a biochemical version of the whole as being greater than its parts.

Adams: I understand that there are tens of thousands of plants in the Amazon, and that the components of ayahuasca are morphologically unrelated and powerless taken alone. How did the Indians discover the ingredients for this magical blend?

Davis: We call it "trial and error," which is a meaningless euphemism. The Indians say that the plants told them what to do.

In the 'forties, Schultes reported that there were societies in the northwest Amazon where there were as many as seventeen different varieties of ayahuasca — all of which were referable to one main species. He asked how they were distinguished. The answer? You take the plants on the night of a full moon, when each species sings to you in a different key.

It's an amazing system of taxonomy.

Adams: That's stunning. Do you believe that?

Davis: I absolutely believe that.

Adams: Why do some cultures develop an extraordinary understanding of hallucinogens, while other cultures pay no attention to the psychotropic plants that grow all around them?

Davis: The key thing is the desire to change consciousness. Spirit possession, through one technique or another, is so ubiquitous in the ethnographic record that it seems to be a basic part of the human appetite. It satisfies an innate urge.

Every culture has some means to elevate the spirit, and different cultures will satisfy this appetite with varying means. In the Americas, the way of doing this has been a return to the plants. In Africa, it's spirit possession. In Southeast Asia, it's meditation or other practices of that nature.

The Haitian voodooists used to say that white people went to church to speak about God; Indians ate their magic plants and spoke to God; and the Haitians danced in the temple and became God.

I find spirit possession and the voodoo faith so powerful — it reinforces my notion that cultures really are different realities.

Adams: What have we learned from hallucinogenic plants?

Davis: One of the greatest things we learn from plants is that the world in which we live is just one facet of existence. There are worlds beyond this one. That sounds glib, but it's important. We're drifting towards some kind of blandly amorphous world culture. The world is becoming a far less rich place in which to live.

For instance, six thousand languages were spoken when I was born, and fully half of them are effectively dead already. That is an an apocalyptic scenario. Language isn't just a volume of vocabulary and a set of grammatical rules. It's a flash of the human spirit. It's the vehicle to reach the soul of a culture. Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an ecosystem of spiritual and social possibilities. Literally, right now, we are losing half of this human legacy.

But once you experience San Pedro cactus,[2] ayahuasca, or peyote in ritual contexts, you see in a most visceral sense that there are other worlds, and that these other worlds have their own with consciousness, awareness, and perception.

Whatever the psychedelic experience actually means, I think it gives us perspective.

Wade Davis is an anthropologist, botanical explorer, and best-selling author who received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany from Harvard University. Mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum, he spent more than three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among 15 indigenous groups in eight Latin American nations while making some 6,000 botanical collections. Davis's work later took him to Haiti to investigate folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies, an assignment that led to his writing Passage of Darkness (1988) and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986), an international best-seller that appeared in ten languages and was later released by Universal Studios as a motion picture. He is author of five other books, including Shadows in the Sun (1998) and One River (1996). Davis's television credits include Earthguide, a 13-part television series on the environment, which he hosted and co-wrote. He also wrote for the documentaries Spirit of the Mask, Cry of the Forgotten People, and Forests Forever. This interview was conducted on July 1, 2002

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