What ANCIENT CULTURES Have To Teach Us About PLANT MEDICINE & Psychedelics | Wade Davis

Good and evil marched side by side. Our job is to put our shoulder into the right side of history, knowing full well that the arc of history ultimately does bend towards the righteous.

What first got you interested in this whole exploration of indigenous cultures and ancient wisdom and plant medicines and the foundation of your work in life? Because back when you went to Harvard in the 60s, right, late 60s, 70s, this stuff wasn't like part of modern culture. This was really wacky stuff.

Yeah, I mean, I think like many of my generation, we grew up in a world that was problematic to us, the way women were treated, people of color were treated, gay people, an endless war in Vietnam. And I think many of us who ended up in anthropology were looking for a world that was more authentic, that radiated with some kind of vibrancy. I think we all shared Baudrillard's malady, which was, from home. I personally saw it escape from a kind of a blandly amorphous generic world into what I hope to find is a polychromatic world of diversity. I think my first impulse, curious, we're all products of our upbringing, and I was by chance raised in Quebec at a time when the French and English didn't speak to each other, and at the age of five, my mom would send me down to a little corner store, and I lived in an Anglophone suburb that was plunked like a carbuncle on the back of an old Franco- Francophone village that went back to the 17th century. And there was literally a boulevard, Cartier Boulevard, that divided the two neighborhoods. And at that time, literally, French did not speak to English and vice versa. And I would go down to this corner store to get milk for the family or whatever. And I'd sit on the edge of that boulevard and think as a five-year-old, wow, across this street there's another religion, another language, another way of being. And I was haunted by the fact that I wasn't supposed to cross that street, not by my family who were very generous, but by the society at large. And in the sense, Mark, I've been crossing that street ever since. Now, your first question that you started talking about is really interesting because the ubiquity of the Western paradigm, its overall authority and power shouldn't suggest to us that it's the norm. Viewed through the anthropological or the ethnographic lens, it's very much the anomaly. And what I mean by that is we liberated the individual from the collective that was a sociological equivalent of splitting the atom. But that also cast the individual adrift without the comfort of community. You know, at the same time as we tried sincerely to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of absolute faith, the gesture that birthed the enlightenment and the scientific medicine that gave us allopathic medicine and the genius of science, when we did that, we swept away all notions of myth, metaphor, mysticism and magic. When Descartes said that all that exists is mind and matter, with a single phrase, he de-animated the world, to the point where Saul Bellow would say, Science has made a house cleaning of belief, and the world- oh, wow, that's a big one.

Science has made a house cleaning of belief.

And the world was deemed to be inanimate. The world was deemed to be just a stage set upon which the human drama alone unfolded. And that is very different than the way most cultures around the world view their relationship with the natural world. Theirs is not an extractive model, but rather a reciprocal model, some basic iteration of a fundamental and obvious notion that the earth owes its bounty to humans, but humans in turn owe their fidelity to the earth. Now, these metaphors are important because they determine how we live. If you were raised, for example, in New York to believe that a mountain was a pile of rock ready to be mined, you're going to have a different relationship relationship to that mountain than a godchild of mine in the mountains of Peru raised to believe that that mountain is an Apu deity that will direct their destiny. I was raised in the forests of British Columbia under the assumption they existed to be cut. That was a fundamental ideology of scientific forestry that I not only learned in school, but I personally practiced as a logger in the woods of my country.

You're a logger.

Oh, I was a big time logger. Yeah. Yeah, I spent a year in one of the toughest logging camps in British Columbia because I wanted to know what it was all about. But anyway, but the point is that-.

Was that an anthropological study or was it a job?

It was a little bit of both. You know, I mean, I really hated what industrial logging represented, but I didn't want anyone to be able to say I didn't know what I was talking about. And I also learned in that year, just as an aside, that, you know, the men and women fighting off hunger with a chainsaw weren't my enemy. I kind of came to believe that in resource conflicts, they're never enemies, just solutions. So, you know, and that gave me a really tremendous authority when it came to time to really fight for the forest in the 1980s and 1990s. This is a complete aside and an amusing story. I was once on a live television interview with a man with a formidable reputation called Jack Monroe, who was the head of the IWA, the Woodworkers Union. He was probably the most powerful man in British Columbia. this mountain of a man. And he was furious that the producers had put this little whippersnapper green tree hugger on a live debate format interview with him unannounced. And he was dripping sweat of indignation. And so just went, before we went to air, I leaned over and I said, excuse me, Mr. Monroe, I just wanted to have this chance to tell you that I'm really grateful because your union put me through university. And he looked at me and said, what are you talking about? I almost saw your union putting me through university. Where'd you log? Dean and Bay. What was the local? I named the local. What was the TFL? I named the tree farm license. And then we went to Air and I said exactly what I was going to say about the corruption in the woods, all of which was true and all of which he knew but couldn't say. And before that live interview was over, Mr. Monroe had his arm around my 27 year old shoulder and was saying, you, know, I don't talk as good as this kid because I didn't get to go to college. But I'm telling you, this is the kind of young man my union makes. for the problems of British Columbia. And I turned the whole thing, you know, it's like killing people with kindness in a way. But the point is, you know, I always do believe that, you know, one must know before one judges. So that's why I took that chance to actually lied about my credentials and signed on as a forestry engineer so I could really get to the heart of the reactor. Yeah. But, you know, back to what I was saying though, you know, My attitude towards the forest at that time would have been very different than the Qua'qwaqwaq who believed that the forest is the abode of the Hukuk and the Kirkegi Beak of Heaven and the cannibal spirits that we embraced during the Hamat's initiation. Again, the interesting thing is not who's right and who's wrong, it's how the belief system mediates the interaction between the culture and the natural landmark or habitat with profoundly different consequences for the ecological.

Footprint of a people. And so for example- well, you're saying basically we've separated the individual from the collective. You separate yourself from humans from nature.

That's sociological, but we've also separated ourselves from nature, and nature is but an inert resource to be extracted, manipulated, consumed. And that's very different than the way most human beings think about the natural world. I mean, if you go to the Northwest Amazon, the most profound cultural intuition of the Barasana and the Makuna, peoples of the anaconda who believe they came up the Milk River from the east in the belly of the sacred serpent, are people who incidentally, cognitively do not distinguish the color blue from the color green because the canopy of the heavens is equated to the canopy of the rainforest. They believe that plants and animals are just people in another dimension of reality. The role of the shaman is not a priestly role or a medicinal role. It's much more analogous to a diplomat who must maintain a constant dialogue with the spirit realm with the skills of a nuclear engineer who periodically has to go to the heart of the reactor to reprogram the world. That's the shaman.

Wow. You programmed the world.

And you can find these sorts of beliefs all around the world. The sun priests of the Otawaco and the Kogi, the direct descendants of the ancient Tairona civilization, who today live in the isolated volcanic massif of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta that soars to 20,000 feet above the Caribbean coastal plain. They are still ruled 500 years after Columbus by a ritual priesthood. They still believe that their prayers literally maintain the cosmic balance of the world. The training for the priesthood involves 18 years of initiation in a shadowy world of darkness, where they're taught the values of the society, which include the absolute proposition that their prayers and rituals maintain the balance of life. And at the end of that initiation, the acolyte is taken on a journey to the heart of the world. So he has never seen a sunrise, never seen her rise and he's taken out of the sacred temple and he's taken on a journey from the hut to the ice, from the ice to the sea, from the sea back to the sacred temple. And during that whole journey, the priest who has trained him for 18 years is saying, you see, it's like I've told you all these years, the world is really this beautiful. And those beliefs are still held, still practiced. I was with the Mamos two weeks ago. in Colombia.

In Colombia.

Yeah, and they're still there peering down on the beaches where Columbus' men landed on the third voyage, two hours by air from Miami Beach, and ancient priesthood still praying every day for our collective well-being and survival. And you can find these beliefs all around the world. I mean, if we slip, for example, into the deserts of Australia, you know, it's a really I think, powerful example historically. When the British first arrived in Australia, they saw people that looked weird, had a simple material technology. But what really offended the British in the late 18th century was that the Aboriginal civilization, all 10,000 clan territories spread like a blanket across the most parsimonious of all continents, had no interest in progress in changing their lot. And because progress and optimism changed through time was the very ethos of Europe at the time. the British in their inimitable way concluded that the Aboriginals weren't people and they began to shoot them. As recently as 19- They weren't people. In 1902 in Parliament in Melbourne, Australia, it was debated as to whether or not Aboriginal people were human or not. As recently as the 1950s, ranchers had quotas as how many abos could be shot with impunity who trespassed upon the land. In the 1960s, a school book used in schools across Australia A treasury of fauna of Australia included the Aboriginal people as amongst the interesting forms of wildlife.

They were considered fauna?

And what was missing was appreciation by the British of the subtlety of the devotional philosophy, which is the dreaming. And the purpose of life in Australia was the antithesis of progress. It was stasis. You were simply expected to do the ritual gestures deemed to be necessary along the songlines, which are the trajectories walked at the dawn of time by the ancestral beings as they sang the world into existence, as that song line comes through your clan territory, you do the ritual gestures deemed necessary to keep the world exactly as it was at the time. It would be like all of science in the West had gone into pruning the shrubs in the Garden of Eden to keep it just as it was. And the interesting thing about that, of course, is if we had followed that philosophical and devotional trajectory, we wouldn't have put a man on the moon. but we wouldn't be talking about climate change.

We wouldn't be sitting here with cameras and microphones and everything else. I mean, it's such a mixed world because in some ways, progress has helped so many of us rise out of poverty and ignorance. But the thing is, everybody thinks it's.

Either or, like a pre-industrial past or this sort of world we find ourselves living in. The issue isn't the traditional versus the modern. It's the rights of free people to choose components of their lives. And the goal isn't to freeze anybody in time. People always talk about preserving culture. preserve jam, not culture. Culture is always changing. People are always dancing with new possibilities for life. The real question is how do we find a way, Mark, that all peoples of the world, whatever their cultural background, can benefit from the very best of modernity, if you will, but critically without that engagement demanding a death of who they are as a people. And the reason for that is very simple. Culture is not trivial. It's not decorative. It's not the songs we sing, the costumes we put on. Ultimately, Culture is a body of moral and ethical values that we wrap around every individual human to keep at bay the barbaric heart that history teaches us, sadly, lies within all of us. It's culture that allows us to make sense out of sensation, to find order and meaning in the universe, to do what Lincoln asked us to do, seek the better angels of our nature. And if you want to know what happens when the constraints of culture are lost, you just have to look at the points of kind of chaos.

We're seeing that, right? We're seeing the degradation of of human discourse interaction. And, you know, it sort of reminds me of that saying that good and evil lurk in the heart of all men. And I think, you know, what you're saying is these cultural structures, these meanings that were created around their life created a set of ways for them to actually not get co-opted by the things that we are now.

We have this thing in Christianity that a kind of a lingering hope that one day good will vanquish evil, you know, that fallen archangel, the devil, will be vanquished by the Christ ain't gonna happen. And you know, when you ask the obvious question, if God's all powerful, why does he allow evil in the universe? Well, if you ask that question in medieval Europe, you're a bird at the stake for heresy. Yeah. But when Lord Christian was asked that same question by a disciple, if God's all powerful, why does he tolerate evil in the universe? Lord Christian said, to thicken the plot.

To thicken that plot.

Because good and evil march side by side. And our job is to put our shoulder into the right side of history. knowing full well that as Martin Luther King said, the arc of history ultimately does bend towards the righteous, towards the good. One can only hope that's true. Yeah.

I mean, you've got the chance to see these indigenous cultures, to live among them, to learn their ways. And I think that the question I have is how does that inform what we need to be doing now? Because it seems so disconnected from most people's reality and we're so so kind of confused about meaning now.

You know, I think when I wrote a book called the Wayfinders, which an editor put a kind of a snappy title, why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World, I kind of had to answer that question.

Yeah, exactly. Why does ancient wisdom matter?

So it was with two words, climate change, not to suggest that we go back to a pre-industrial past, but rather to suggest the very existence of all these multiple ways of thinking, multiple ways of being, different ways of imagining yourself as a culture in spiritual, ecological, social space, the very existence of all these alternatives puts a lie to those of us in our own culture who say that we cannot change, as we all know, we must change the fundamental way in which we interact with the planet. And I think we're very impatient with the pace of change. but it's rather extraordinary. You'll remember, Mark, Christmas Eve 1968 when Apollo went around the dark side of the moon and we saw for the first time in human history not a sunrise or moonrise, but the Earth's self-ascendant. Well, that changed everything, like a great wave of illumination. If you remember, Mark, when we were kids, just getting people to stop throwing garbage out of a car window was a great victory. No one spoke about the biosphere or biodiversity. Now those terms are part of the language schoolchildren. In my lifetime, women have gone from the kitchen to the boardroom, people of color from the woodshed to the White House, gay people from the closet to the altar. I mean, the world is capable of extraordinary, not just technical changes, but also cultural changes. And I think that is our great hope. And so we are moving in the direction we need to go.

But I think also there's an ascendancy of darkness now, as well as sort of a rise of consciousness. You've got fundamentalism, nihilism, autocracy.

But what generation has ever been born into a world free of troubles? I mean, your parents had to deal with two world wars, the Holocaust and the Great Depression. You and I were born into a decade marked by assassinations, haunted by the prospect of nuclear war with riots in the cities and a distant war in Vietnam. I think the The point is that this is kind of the nature of life. I think the Buddhists have that really down where they don't speak of good and evil. It doesn't really exist in the Dharma. All life is suffering. That doesn't mean that all life is negation. It's just that the negative, or more politely put, happens. The cause of suffering is ignorance. The Buddha didn't mean stupidity. He meant the tendency of human beings to cling to the cruel illusion of our own centrality in the stream of divine existence. revelation that ignorance can be overcome. And then, of course, the fourth noble truth being the delineation of the contemplative practice that actually can and will empirically create a transformation of the human heart. So I think that's one of the reasons that you and I and so many in our generation are drawn to the Buddhist dharma, because in a way it exists outside of religious ideology. It's a way of being, a way of thinking, a way of living that that makes sense to us.

Yeah, it's kind of a way of freeing our minds from the prisons of our own illusions and or misperceptions of reality that cause us to suffer.

I mean, one of the things that I, you know, people, I mean, I'm almost 70 and I still have the kind of enthusiasm, even idealism that I had when I was in my 20s, not in a naive sense, but the reason I'm able to do that is I never expect to win. you know, I don't, and I think I've adopted that kind of sense of the pilgrim, you know, the pilgrim is not going to a destination, but aiming for a state of mind. And by the same token, if you act in life with no certainty that you're no expectation of, say, winning, whether it's winning an environmental battle, winning an election, winning whatever it is, you just, you know, it's the act that counts, you know, and if you win some, you lose some, and then you move on to the next one. And I think bitterness comes to those who indulge disappointment and allow that to kind of morph into something much more corrosive.

So, in all your travels Wade around the world and these indigenous cultures, what are the lessons that you've sort of found are the most salient for us today? Because I read Sapiens and it was sort of a bit of a wake up for me and I don't know what you think of this, but In that book, he kind of talked about how humans throughout history actually have been pretty destructive, that we have this sort of idealized view of ancient cultures, but maybe it's not so much like that. Like in Australia, when humans first showed up, they basically destroyed all the large mammals, they had all that sort of destructive thing.

The fascinating thing about culture is that we all face the same adaptive imperatives. We all have to give birth to children, find ways to couple that are consistent, deal with the agony of growing old and the inexorable separation of death and the mystery that death implies. And given that, I just find it inherently fascinating how many cultural expressions have developed over the course of human evolution. And I find in that diversity great strength, you know, and great wonder and great poetry. You know, you know, the, the, the, nobody indulges the myth of the ecological native or, or the idea that indigenous people are somehow inherently benign. I mean, this is, this is, that this is something that no one in anthropology would would be thinking about, you know? I mean, the glory is to just, you know, pay attention. I mean, one of the things that sparked my work at the National Geographic was, you know, a kind of a disturbing statistic that I first started to speak about a great deal in the 1990s, and that was the fact that there was a complete consensus amongst linguists that half the languages of the world weren't being spoken to children. And a language, of course, is not just vocabulary and grammar, it's kind of a flash to the human spirit. language is the way the essence of culture comes into the world. I wrote once that every language was an old-growth forest of the mind or a watershed of thought.

Old-growth forest of the mind. Wow, that's a beautiful idea.

Ecosystem of social and spiritual possibilities. And to lose half those languages is to lose, by definition, half of humanity's knowledge. And that I found to be shocking because no biologist would dare suggest that 50% of all forms of life morbid or on the brink of extinction, yet that the most apocalyptic scenario in the realm of biological diversity scarcely approaches what we know to be the most optimistic scenario in the realm of cultural diversity. So the question became, what do you do about it? If you identify an area of high species endemism, you can create a protected area, but you can't make a rainforest park of the mind. You can't free this culture like some kind of zoological specimen. So when I was given the mission at the Geographic to change the way the world viewed and valued culture in a decade, which was my mandate, we thought hard about that and we settled really on storytelling because polics are never persuasive, politicians follow, they never lead, but storytellers can change the world. And so we set out into what I was calling the ethnosphere, or the sort of social web of life around the planet, to find stories that wouldn't be just further examples of ethnographers celebrating the exoticism of the other, but rather really going to this sort of fundamental fact, which is in fact the, in addition to the vision of the earth from space, which we spoke about a moment ago, that's going to be spoken 10,000 years from now, and that vision has already infected the world in the best sense of the word. The other great discovery of our lifetime that we've spoken 10,000 years from now has yet to take hold, but it will in the lifetime of our children. It's even more important. Nothing that has happened from science has done more to liberate ourselves from the petty hatreds and tyrannies that have haunted us since the dawn of awareness. It also came about at the end of a long journey, but not in the space into the very fiber of our beings. In our lifetimes, science has proven the philosophers to be correct. We are all one interconnected whole as a species. Is that the vision that the genetic endowment of humanity is a continuum? Biologically, race is an utter fiction. We are all cut from the same genetic cloth. We're all children of Africa, including those of us who walked out of the ancient continent 65,000 years ago and embarked on this incredible journey over 40,000 years, 2,500 generations that carried the human spirit to every corner of the world. But here's the important point. If we accept what science has proven to be true, that we are all cut from the same genetic cloth, it means by definition every culture shares the same genius, the same mental acuity, the same raw human potential. And critically, whether that genius is placed into technological wizardry, which has been the great achievement of the West, or by contrast, placed into the task of unraveling the mystic threads of memory inherent in a myth, a priority of the Australian Aborigines, for example, is just a matter of cultural adaptation and choice. There is no hierarchy in the realm of culture. The old Victorian idea that we went from the savage to the barbarian to the civilized to the strand of London, that European society sat at the apex of the pyramid, going down to the so-called primitives of the world, has been absolutely debunked by modern science. It's shown to be an artifact of the 19th century, no more relevant to our lives today than the notion that clergymen had then that the Earth was just 6,000 years old. In this stunning affirmation of the human spirit, we have seen to be what we are. And what this means is that the other peoples of the world aren't failed attempts at being modern. They're not failed attempts to be you. Every culture is unique answer to a fundamental question, what does it mean to be human and alive? And when the peoples of the world answer that question, they do so in 7,000 different voices, 7,000 voices of humanity. And what this fundamentally means is that every culture has something to say, each deserves to be heard, just as none has monopoly on the roots of the divine. Well, that's an amazing shift in thinking if we actually embrace that. And so to encourage people to begin to think in those terms, we set out in the ethnosphere on a series of journeys where we went to societies that we could show that. I mean, we sailed with the Polynesian voyaging society, for example, using the ancient wayfinding techniques that allowed the Polynesian ancestors to settle the biggest Pacific Ocean on the Earth. I mean, these are sailors who can sense distant atolls beyond the visible horizon just by by watching the waves across the hull of the vessel. That's incredible. They can distinguish six or seven sea swells, distinguishing those caused by local weather disturbance in the darkness as they move through the hull of the vessel, distinguishing those caused from local weather, from the deep currents that pulsate across the ocean that can be followed like a terrestrial explorer would follow a river to the sea. And the amazing thing about that wayfinding technology was all based on dead reckoning. Dead reckoning means you only know where you are by remembering how you got there. So in a civilization that lacked the written word, it meant the wayfinder on the back of the vessel, never sleeping for three and four weeks, would have to remember every sign of the sun, the moon, the stars, the wind, the salinity in the sea, the flotsam on the surface of the sea, the not just remembering the data, but the order of its acquisition, because if that stream of knowledge broke, the voyage could end in disaster. They couldn't take notes on their iPhone.

They could not take notes on their iPhone.

Or, you know, we went, I mean, you're a Buddhist. We went to make a film called the Buddhist Science of the Mind. And, you know, every film, I kind of came up with a one line to try to distill the essence of it. I mean, Polynesia, the line was, if you took all of the genius that allowed us to put a man on the moon, and applied it to an understanding of the ocean, what you would get is Polynesia. Or in Tibet, we made a film with Matthieu Ricard, which we called the Buddhist Science of the Mind. And I remember when we interviewed and saw, met, spent time with a woman who had been a lifelong retreatant for 45 years, the sun hadn't fallen on her face until the door opened when we visited her. and by our terms of reference, she should have been mad. She had devoted 45 years to the recitation of a single mantra. And yet the woman's face who greeted us radiated loving compassion. And Matthieu said to me, what was.

She doing hiding in her 40s?

She wasn't hiding. She was a satsanga ani. She had gone deliberately into lifelong retreat 45 years ago. And what Matthieu said to me, this is proof of the efficacy of the science of the mind that is Tibetan Buddhism, the serenity achieved by the practitioner. And she was a Bodhisattva and a Lama.

I mean, it's almost as if we've sort of focused on the outer world, and a lot of these cultures are focused on the inner world, and the exploration of that.

And they've been in Buddhism. And advanced in technology of the mind as we have been in the technology of the world. Well, that's why Matthieu always uses the term science of the mind, because what is science but the empirical pursuit of the truth? What is the Buddhist Dharma, but 2,500 years of direct empirical observation as the nature of mind. that night, a llama said to me something really wonderful. He said, you know, we in Tibet don't believe you went to the moon, but you did. You may not believe that we achieve enlightenment in one lifetime, but we do.

Yeah, powerful. So, you know, what are some of those stories that matter now for us to help us emerge from the sort of loss of meaning and loss of connection and loss of relationship to nature? I mean, we're all sort of so disconnected.

Well, I think, you know, there's so much talk, Mark, about the psychedelic revitalization. And as someone who not only did I inhale, I liked it. In fact, I always say that it's interesting when we talk about these social transformations of our lifetimes, the one ingredient that's always expunged from the record is the fact that millions of us lay prostrate before the gates of awe having taken a psychedelic. I wouldn't write the way I write. I wouldn't think the way I think. I wouldn't treat women the way I treat women. I wouldn't treat gay people or people of color the way I treat them or interact with them. I certainly wouldn't see the natural world as I do, and I wouldn't understand the nuances of cultural relativism and the real gifts of anthropology as I do.

Had I not taken psychedelics, you know? And this is way before they were now, like, in Vogue. This is, you know.

Oh, no, I mean, 50 years ago. Yeah, 50 years ago. And, you know, when I first went to see Schulte's in 1974, I, I knocked on his door. He was, you know, the great Amazonian Explorer, you know, mentor of Andy Weil and Tim Plowman, who were like my big brothers at the time. And I just knocked on his door and I said, I've saved up money in a logging camp. I want to go to South America like you didn't collect plants. And at the time, people didn't even know where the Amazon was. Right. And rather than asking me for my credentials, he just said, well, son, when do you want go. And two weeks later, I was on my way. But before leaving, I remember he had one critical piece of advice. First of all, he said, Don't bother with leather boots because all the snakes bite at the neck. And then he said, At the neck. And he said, Don't come back without trying ayahuasca. So this was back in 1974. So of course, I tried ayahuasca amongst other things. But my point is that much as I revere the role that psychedelic have played it in the social transformations of our lifetime. And I probably come down on the side of Ram Dass as opposed to Tim Leary or George Harrison with Ram Dass, get the message, hang up. I mean, I'm sort of in the school that, I'm not sure how much psychedelics can teach us if you use them again and again and again. I'm not sure how much more there is to be learned. I tended to be somebody...

They open the door you can see.

You walk through, you know. But that's just a matter of personal orientation and choice. I don't have any judgment on that. But I think that some of the expectations are a little inflated. I mean, I think that psilocybin can be very useful for end of life care, not to eliminate the fear of death, but to make it perhaps manageable or understandable or whatever. I think that ecstasy can be terrific in couples therapy. and post-traumatic stress and everything. But I think the most important of all these plants and the most important role they can play is in the most important healing journey of all, which is our relationship with the natural world. And certainly, you cannot take San Pedro cactus, the cactus of the four winds, a plant that's been used by human society since it sparked the first civilization in the Andes, Chavin at 25 before the Christian era. You cannot take that mescaline containing denison of the northern Andes without having a more visceral, almost sensual connection to the natural world. So I think in that way psychedelics continued to be very, very powerful and potent medicines.

Not just for trauma, not just for healing.

I mean, they create a template upon which anything can happen. I mean, this is one of the, I think Andy Weil said there's no no such thing as good and bad drugs, there's good and bad ways of using drugs. And I think he also said, you know, these psychedelics just create a template upon which cultural forces and beliefs can go to work, you know. And of course, all the early pioneers spoke in those terms, set and setting, you know, the set you bring, the experience, the setting in which you take the substance. But I'm definitely of the school that believes that these are true medicines.

Yeah, yeah. No, I've definitely had a similar experience to you. shaped as a young man, my view of my relationship to myself, to the natural world, to the human culture that I lived in. And it really, you know, once you see it, you can't unsee it.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think it's, it's sort of like, you know, I, I didn't take a course in biology till third year of university. And then I, you know, I found Schultes and I found the Amazon, and I, yeah, I often look back and think how lucky I was that I found that because, I mean, you know, it's kind of astonishing. You would never think that you could go through a university and graduate if you didn't know the difference between a photograph and a painting. And yet we graduate students all the time who don't know the formula of photosynthesis, right? The fundamental formula of life. I mean, I don't think you should be able to run for political office if you don't know that formula. I mean, the very fact that carbon dioxide and water sparked by photons of light gives gives us carbohydrates, our food and oxygen, our air. I mean, this is biblical verse, if you will.

It is. I mean, we are so intertwined and we think we're so separate. And if all the plants died on the planet, we'd be dead pretty quick.

When I was at Harvard, the night that I actually figured out the Krebs cycle and photosynthesis and all the pathways, I just went berserk. I was like so ecstatic. I actually was rushing from student to student and kind of screaming at them in the library, Do you know how this work? And I actually got escorted out by security.

I think the only student ever kicked.

Out of a library at Harvard for pure kind of intellectual ecstasy. It's amazing.

You know, I think it reminds me of what Einstein said. He said, I'm not interested in the spectrum of this or that element. I'm interested in the thoughts of God. The rest are details. And what you're talking about when you talk about photosynthesis and the Krebs cycle, how our mitochondria create energy from oxygen and food, There ain't one intertwined cycle.

Well, you know, it's so funny because, like, you know, Suzanne Simard is wonderful. She's at UBC. And I remember when she first presented her work on mycelium, it was at a very obscure little gathering and no one seemed in the audience to grok how significant it was. But I went right up to her and I said, Suzanne, you're going to change the world. And she has.

Around mycelium.

Mycelium in general, not psilocybin.

No, no, just her work in understanding the underlying network of the plant.

So we're understanding how plants work in very sophisticated ways. But I only say that because back in the 70s when we didn't know some of these things, a book came out called the Secret Life of Plants that made a big deal about plants responding to Mozart and everything.

Yeah, I mean they have 20 different senses. They have more senses than we do.

Well, at the time, Tim Plowman, who was a great musician, great poet, and certainly a great botanist, he hated that book. book. I just hated it. And he used to say, why would a plant give a shit about Mozart? And even if it did, why should that impress us? They can eat light. Isn't that enough?

They can eat light. Yeah, that's true. That's amazing. They transmute light into energy.

In other words, yeah. I mean, you know, I think biology is just so extraordinary and it's, you know, certainly I think how close I came to not studying it. I find it haunting.

And ethnobotany was your PhD thesis?

Well, ethnobotany is more of a description than an academic discipline. It's looking at the world through the lens of plants and particularly how people use plants and how plants are important to people. Basically what happened to me, these things are so accidental, I mean how life unfolds. It's true.

I call it nostrum God, not necessarily accidental.

Coincidence, well, I was, you know, people say, how did you end up going to Harvard? And, well, the truth is, I used to fight forest fires during Vietnam and our fire camps. I was 15, and our fire camps were full of draft dodgers. And we were these obedient Canadian lads. And one of these, these, these American draft dodgers would tell our bosses to piss off. It was irresistibly charismatic. And one of them had the Life Magazine with the Harvard student strike of 1969 on the COVID and I thought, well, that's got to be the college you go to become cool like these Americans. So I applied, not really even knowing anything about it. I got in, and my parents didn't have the money to go to Boston from Vancouver, you know. So I got to Boston, and I realize I'm at Logan Airport with a big trunk. I don't know where Harvard is. And I saw this character with a Harvard t-shirt on, and I thought, well, he's got to know where it is.

He didn't know either.

That was before GPS and Google Maps. I took my trunk through the subway, got to Harvard Square. It was crazy. And then I realized my mother had made a mistake and the dorms weren't open for a week. So I had no money and I dragged my trunk until I hit a church, knocked on the door and a pastor opened it up and he kindly welcomed me and I fell in love with America. But he was also a war resistor and his basement was full of kids about to flee to Canada. So I got completely radicalized. I was living in the underground railroad. I was totally radicalized. I spent my first year at Harvard making trouble, including the last university-wide student strike. And then the day to declare your major was the next day, and I hadn't given it a thought. And I just by chance walked through the Peabody Museum of Ethnology for the first time. I came out into the light of spring, saw an acquaintance, and I said, Stuart, what are you going to major in? And he said, anthropology. And I said, what's that? And he said, well, you read about Indians and like Forrest Gump. I said, that'll do. And that's how I signed on as a student And then after two years of just reading about Indians and books, my roommate and I wanted to live with native people. And we were in a cafe in Harvard Square. It's a true story. And there was a National Geographic map on the wall right beside us. And David looked at the map, looked at me, looked at the map, looked at me and he pointed to the High Arctic. Well, I had to go somewhere and I watched my left arm lift and it hit the northwest Amazon of Colombia. Had it landed in Italy, I might have become a Renaissance scholar. But instead, having decided to go to the Amazon just on a whim, him, there was only one man to see, Richard Evans Schultes, a legendary botanical explorer who had sparked the psychedelic era with his discovery of the so-called magic mushrooms in Mexico in 1938.

1938. Wow, so that had really been unknown to Western society before that?

Yeah, it was Schultes, I mean that's another great story. I mean Schultes was a young pre-med student from East Boston, and his family didn't have the money to attend the dorms at Harvard. And he took the course that had been taught for over 100 years at Harvard, Plants and Human Affairs.

Actually, I took that at Cornell, it was Plants and Humans. It was my favorite class.

But in this class, they used to get drunk all through prohibition because the professor disliked the government. But when it came to the plants that were then known as a fantastic.

America.

They had to do a term paper or a book report. So Schultes races to the back of the hall to get the thinnest book possible. He's got so much other homework and puts it in his satchel and goes back to East Boston. And that night botanical history was made because that book turned out to be the only monograph available in the English language that described the stunning pharmacological effects of peyote, Henry Kluver. And Schultes read throughout the night of these visions of orb-like brilliance. And he went to his professor the next day said, I have to know this plant. And that was the beginning of Schultes' quest. And that summer, he goes out to Oklahoma territory and four to five nights a week, takes peyote and he comes back to Boston, a new man. And then he sets off on this mystery of Tewa and Oaxaca and Oaxaca.

And that's a story right out of Indiana Jones.

So he didn't know there was psilocybin in Mexico. He went to Mexico. No, what happened is he was studying peyote. And at the time, there was a prominent anthropologist at Smithsonian called Safford who said that this legendary Teonanacatl, which in Nahuatl means the flesh of the gods, it was reported as a drug by the early Spanish chroniclers. But no one knew what the botanical source was.

Early Spanish chroniclers actually sort of experienced.

The... Well, we don't know if they experienced it, but they chronicled almost everything. They were very good observers, very good scientists. and they reported Tewah Nacatl as a sacred plant, right? And obviously the church was drawn to anything like that in order to destroy it, right? And Safford had maintained that Tewah Nacatl was in fact peyote, and Schultes didn't believe it, but he had no evidence until he was in the National Herbarium, found a plant specimen which had a note attached to it by an obscure German engineer called B.P. Reko, addressed to the former director of the National Herbarium, a man called Dr. Rose, and the note said, Dear Dr. Rose, I understand your man Safford says Teuwenacatl is peyote. It's not. He's an idiot. It's a mushroom. I've seen it, yours sincerely. And so Schultes, having just jumped off a Greyhound bus from Tulsa, leapt on another one from Mexico City and hooked up with Reko, who turned out to be an ardent and this is 1938 and together they move into the mountains of Oaxaca to Wautla, to the Mazatec community and begin the search for Tewa Nacatl. Meanwhile there was another team led by Bernard Bevan who was British Secret Service also looking for it. So in this kind of scenario right out of Indiana Jones you had these two sides looking for the origin of this ancient Aztec hallucinogen and Shamans of the forest was the first to collect specimens.

It seems like these cultures all around the world have used these plants.

No, actually what's fascinating is that they don't use all these plants. What's really interesting is that of the 120 or more hallucinogens identified from nature, 95% of them are from the New World, not because the forests of Ecuador, West Africa or Southeast Asia are depopulated, but people there had other roots to the divine. For example, in Equatorial West Africa, the manipulation of plant poisons, including using them in judicial tribunals as punishment, is one of the most ubiquitous traits of material culture, but with the exception of iboga, ibogaine, or the containing plant in the ApoSonace family, there are not many hallucinogens in Africa or in Southeast Asia. Most are found in the Americas because in the Americas, that's the vehicle to the divine. I mean, it's like the Haitians used to say to me in Haiti, you white people, church and speak about God and go to, I mean, I'm sorry, you white people go to church and speak about God. Indians eat their magic plants and speak to God. We dance in the temple and become God. God. The root of these plants is, the use of these plants is firmly rooted in culture. So in fact, that anomaly is really marked. Siberia and the New World are basically where you find the vast majority of the hallucinogens.

Well, it seems that somehow the cultures have used these in a way that helped them actually stay connected to the world, to make meaning out of life, to do things which sort of seem to be really foreign to most Westerners. And what really struck me, I mean, and as a doctor who focuses on the role of food and plant compounds that regulate our biology for health, you know, the medicine in plants is very diverse. And what you're talking about are these just sort of compounds that somehow we've been able to use to open our mindset to change the way we think, to see our relationship to the world differently, to feel our place in nature. And, and, and I always wonder, how, how did that kind of get discovered? Or how to actually, more importantly, how, how do we sort of make sense of the fact that these molecules work in our brains on these receptors that change the way we feel and think and see? Because, you know, is it just an accident? Did we co-evolve with these things? Do we need them to wake up? Are they part of the things we need to actually Thrive, like we need broccoli or we need...

I mean, humans are kind of innately curious. We're all natural philosophers. And I mean, one of the things that I find so fascinating is the question of how were these plants discovered, particularly in something like ayahuasca, which is, of course, not a plant as much as a preparation. And so if you think of ayahuasca, it's a combination of the leaves of the nondescript shrub in the coffee family, psychotria viridis, which is chock full of these powerful tryptamines, 5-methoxy-dimethyltryptamine, dimethyltryptamine. And, these tryptamines are orally inactive, right? Because they're denatured by an enzyme found in the human stomach called monoamine oxidase. That's why tryptamines traditionally are snuffed or smoked or injected, I suppose. And, if you think ethnographically, the Yanomami, for example, blowing up their nose is the powder they call Ebene, the semen of the sun, they call it, derived from the blood red resin of several species in the genus Virola. Those powders are chock full of tryptamines, but they blow them up their nose specifically because tryptamines are orally inactive. And they're very powerful. I think it was Dennis McKenna who said, you know, having that stuff blown up your or maybe it was Terrence who said it, or maybe I said it, I can't even remember. But anyways, like being shot out of a rifle barrel lined with Baroque paintings and landing on a sea of electricity. I mean, it just creates a total-- in fact, I did argue with Schultes that you couldn't really classify iboga as hallucinogenic because by the time you're under the influence, there's no one home anymore.

To experience hallucinations, right?

But the ego-- the ego, but the interesting thing is that the the only way for these tryptamines to be taken orally is if they're taken in conjunction with some other compound that, denature, is the MAO in the human gut, which of course the beta-carbolines found in the Woody Leana, Banisteriopsis caapi, are MAO inhibitors of precisely the sort necessary to potentiate the tryptamines. Well, the really interesting question is not just how that combines to create this powerful psychoactive substance, But where did that knowledge come from? In a floor of 80,000 species of vascular plants, because how did the indigenous people learn to combine these morphologically distinct denizens of the rainforest to create this biochemical version of the whole being created in the sum of the parts? That's ayahuasca. Ayahuasca, or yage for the north. And of course, the only scientific explanation is trial and error, which statistically is quickly exposed as being a meaningless euphemism. It's gonna kill you before you figure it out. Well, it's not gonna kill you. It's just that, you know, I mean, 80,000 species, I mean, you're going one by one. No. And if you ask the indigenous people, as Schultes did in 1941 when he was with the Siona-Sequoya, and he documented 17 folk varieties of the woody liana, all of which were referable to his Harvard-trained taxonomic eye as being the same species. And when he asked them about the nature of their classification, They kind of looked at him as if he was a fool because any real botanist knew that you took each one of the 17 on the night of a full moon and each of the 17 sang to you in a different key. Well, that's not going to get you a PhD at Harvard and Plant Systematics, but it's a lot more interested in counting flower parts. But it also speaks about a different way of knowing, you know, a different way of knowing. You know, when I was doing the work in Haiti, this was a really important thing for me to try to understand. I was sent to Haiti to find the drugs used to make zombies. Well, no drug can make a social phenomena. We did believe that a drug could bring on a state of apparent death so profound that it could fool a physician, in which case that drug could have some medical potential. possibly. But when it came time to really understanding what a zombie was, it was a cultural phenomenon. And you had to distinguish the reaction, for example, hypothetically, to a dose of tetradotoxin, this very powerful neurotoxin that brings on peripheral paralysis, dramatically low metabolic rates, consciousness is retained until the moment of death and so on. And one of the things that allowed me to sort of take the zombie thing from the phantasmagoric to the plausible was the identification in Haiti in the folk preparations that were known as the zombies cucumber, not the zombies, the poudre zombie, rather. Zombies cucumber was the antidote. The consistent ingredient was a marine fish in this order of fish, the Tetrodotoxin, which does have Tetrodotoxin. So, they blowfish and it's the Fugu toxin. It's a Fugu, the same as Fugu. And because there was this huge literature because of the use of the fish in Japanese cuisine and also people dying in survival conditions and so on. We knew exactly what the tetrodotoxin did to someone. And in Japan, there were actually cases, many cases of people nailed into their coffins by mistake. And in Hokkaido, you're actually laid by your grave to make sure you're really dead.

Because if you don't prepare the blowfish properly in a restaurant or at home, you could end up- well, no, that's.

A bit of a Calvinist interpretation of what's going on in Japan. If it was simply a matter of these specially licensed chefs eliminating all of the toxin, why would anyone bother? There's lots of fish in the seas of Japan that you don't have to go through that effort to eat.

I've had blowfish. You can feel it on your tongue.

Well, but the real role of those specially trained chefs is not to eliminate the toxin, it's to reduce the amount of toxins so the connoisseurs still enjoys a pleasant after effects of a mild intoxication, which can be euphoria, flushing sensations up and down the body. And it's really one of the substances that kind of walks the line between food and drug. But the point is that a victim of tetrodotoxication in Japan, nailed in their coffin, if they're lucky enough to survive, they say, oh, that was really terrible. I ate the fish. It was badly prepared, I'm glad to be alive, end of story. But someone raised within the world view of the Haitian zombie knows what a zombie is, why a zombie is created. And when he or she suffers that same condition, it becomes a template for all these belief systems to go to work. So you really had to understand the psychology of what a zombie was and the sociology of what it implies. to realize how it was in fact a fate deemed by the people to be worse than death.

Yeah. Well, you know, I sort of loop back this zombie story is very interesting. I read the book Serpent in the Rainbow. It's a great read for people who want to understand how this all works. But you mentioned about the infinite variety of plants in the rainforest and how these ancient shamans were able to figure how to combine the plants to activate the ingredients and make them absorbable and actually create the visions and the transformations that people experience with ayahuasca. And, I was down in Peru and sort of on the border of Bolivia and we were in the Amazon jungle on the beach and it was way up some tributary, no electricity, nothing. And, there was an ayahuasca shaman who was named Panduro. who's now died. But I asked him, how did he figure out that these plants could go together? It's not trial and error, there was something else. He says, well, the plants told us. Plants spoke to us. And so my question too is, are human beings capable of this kind of communication with nature? And is it really a true story or is he just sort of...

It's very difficult to know what is... I mean, it's obviously at one level, it's a metaphor because plants literally don't speak. We know that. On the other hand, if we go back to this fundamental revelation that all human beings share the same genius, imagine if every scientist you've ever heard of in the West had spent their entire lifetime, all of them, trying to understand Central Park. The plants, the birds, the soils, the relationships, all of that human genius. had come together just for that purpose. I think we know Central Park pretty well, don't you?

Yeah, you bet, yeah.

Well, these people of the forest are exactly that. They're true natural philosophers, you know, who are using all of our human genius to understand a world upon which their lives depend. So they have that same adaptive imperative that we do.

And.

Once you can truly understand that and accept that, then in a way it doesn't come as that much of a surprise that with all of the human genius that they share together with the kind of the perspicacity of their attention to the world around them, that you would have these kinds of observations, experimentation, you know, deductions and results, you know. And I think also so informed by some of these experiences that take them outside of the rational in a sense, in the best sense of the word. The psychedelic experience, I think, is its own teacher to societies. And a lot of what's going on.

Is- you- think we need to just basically dose everybody up at least once or twice on the planet to solve our global crisis?

There's an awful lot of people I've encountered that I would not want to see dosed up in the. No, but I mean, you know, I mean, part of what, what's, part of what, you know, anthropology tries to do, at least in the classic form of anthropology, as I try to practice it, is to try to make sense out of sensation. You know, what is it the bodhisattva are really are really thinking, what is it that motivates them? And in that case, they're very clear notions of a world that was in chaos and that was, an order was given to it by the culture heroes who created kind of a world of reason and form and decency and honor, and that people have the obligation to maintain that. And so they For example, in the case of the Barasana, their longhouses are an absolute model of the universe, right? Every single feature of the longhouse- these are Northwest- Northwest American.

And these are- Amazon.

Yeah, and these longhouses are almost the size of half the size of a football field.

Wow.

And the whole community lives within it. And dangling from the heart of the maloca is a woven basket in which all the ritual paraphernalia is. That's the living heart of community. And the people, the dead are buried beneath the river, beneath the Maloca, so that the living literally walk over the bodies of the ancestors with every footstep of every life. The top, the ridgepole is seen as the arc of the Milky Way. Every single element of the Maloca has its symbolic resonance in terms of the spatial distribution of families, men's area, women's area, But critically over the whole universe is a universal maloka, also anchored by the sacred sites. And when the men and women, the men rather take ayahuasca in four and five day ceremonies, they literally become the ancestors, not the image of the ancestors, they become the ancestors, and they move to all the sacred sites, a lighting upon them. they regenerate the world. And they even at that point will recite the 1,600 or more toponyms of all points that we know to exist going down the Amazon 2,000 miles to the mouth, remembering the primordial journey of the ancestors. And these were the great civilizations that Aurelianus saw when he first went down the Amazon. So if we just, you know, I mean part of what motivates me. Yeah. It's just a pure Poetics of it all. You know, you can say, why do you do this? I mean, I've, you know, you know, why do I do what I do? Well, because I get to stand at, at the tip of, you know, Cape Crawford in the, in, on the solstice, you know, with, with the light of dusk 24 hours a day and watch 17 million marine mammals come, come across the mouth of animal inlet, even as I'm with the Inuit as we go to hunting, you know, or being with, I don't know, the. The wayfinders, you know, in the open ocean, sailing north of Molokai, you know, on the Hokule'a, you know, recreating the path of the ancestors or, you know, the months that I've spent in the Amazon, you know, or. Or in the Andes, you know, or. Or with the. The mummies. I mean, the mummies now call me the mum walks he. and I've been 48 years now. 48 years, I mean, I don't even feel like I know what 48 years means, but I was just down in Colombia. I mean, this is how the magic of it, man. It's like, so I've known this Mamo Camilo for one of the Sun Priests for a long, long time. He's an extraordinary, incredible individual. And in all the years I've known him, and it's four generations of that family, known. He's never spoken to me in his language, in Spanish, always in his language.

Did you speak that language?

No. But that's the formality of the Mammo, right? So he will be translated to me into Spanish. And then this last visit only three weeks ago, I was at Katar Sama, one of the sacred sites, and I got up in the hut in my hammock about five in the morning. I was just going to go bathe in the ocean. And I just noticed Momo Camilo and three other Arawakos and another Mamo sitting in a little circle, five o'clock in the morning chewing coca, right?

Yeah.

And I thought, you know, I'm just gonna go and have some a morning with them. So I go over there and I sat and it began Mambiando, which is chewing coca, which is their sacred plant. They, they use more high. than any other human society. Each man chews about a pound of leaves a day.

A pound of leaf a day, wow.

And they chew from morning till midnight. And it's completely benign. Anyway, and I just started, you know, and they were talking in Ika, their language, and something broke through because I just was sitting there and after about an hour and a half on I just entered the conversation in Spanish. I don't speak Hikke, but where I entered was exactly where they were in their language. And they didn't say anything, but it made some big imprint on Mama Camino because later that evening, for the first time, and I've known, like I've been working with him 48 years, he comes into the little hut and just lies in the hammock beside me and starts blabbering away in Spanish, unveiling his entire life, you know? So, you know, to me, these are the points of wonder that allow you to, I mean, it clearly has inspired you.

How do we take all the- I'll.

Tell you a story. Like once I was in, I went, after 9/11, I want to tell a story of Islam. So I went to Timbuktu and I wanted to look at, remind people in the West that the knowledge of the ancient Greeks only survived to inspire the Renaissance because it was held in the repository of the great Islamic scholars in places like Timbuktu. Timbuktu. And you can hold in your hand in Timbuktu ancient manuscripts embossed in gold in the 10th and 11th century of geometry and mathematics and cosmology and botany and chemistry, et cetera. And then I went a thousand miles north of Timbuktu to an ancient salt mine called Taoudeni where the salt of that mine wasn't like a condiment, it was sacred and traded at one point ounce for ounce with with the gold of Equatorial West Africa. And on the way back from the mine, two things happened. At the mine we met an old man. He wasn't old, he was younger than me, but his body was broken and he'd been caught in debt peonage, having lent some money to save the life of his child, and he could never escape that debt. So he was staying out in the this mine, a medieval kind of place.

Yeah.

Even in the middle of the summer when the sun's so hot they say it can melt the sand, which I think is just a poetic expression. But at any rate, it turned out his debt was less than the cost of a dinner in New York for two. So I gave him the money. And then I never figured out whether he was telling me the truth or because a sandstorm swept through the mine and it just enveloped him in a sort of a of yellow smoke. And I just, the last thing I heard from his was blessing Allah as this sort of swirling sand was all around us. And then we headed south back to Timbuktu and we came upon a caravan of salt traders that had got hit by a rainstorm of all things. And the salt gets wet, then it breaks, loses value. So they were stuck in the desert 250 miles from the nearest well. and they were down to a liter of water. And as we came upon them, one of them was walking away with his camel to try to dig 25 miles away a spot they thought they might find some water. And what do they do with their last liter of water? They instantly kindled a twig fire and brewed ST, honoring the Bedouin adage that you will always kill the goat that keeps your children alive with its milk. milk to feed a wandering stranger who comes in out of the night because you never know when you may be that stranger, cold, hungry, in need of shelter. And as I watched this kid called Muhammad pour me that first cup of tea, I thought, these are the moments that allow us all to hope.

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