Source: Whole Earth Review, Summer 1992 n75 p38(6). Title: Xochipilli: a context for ecstasy. (psychoactive drugs and religious or artistic experience) Author: Laura Fraser Abstract: Artist LordNose! has put together a booklet containing basic information on psychedelic drugs and plants. The inspirations for his effort included the disinformation circulating on MDMA (ecstasy) and the Aztec god Xochipilli, and the Indians' use of psychedelics for religious ceremonies. Subjects: Psychotropic drugs - Usage MDMA (Drug) - Social aspects Aztecs - Religion Magazine Collection: 64L5253 Electronic Collection: A12244924 RN: A12244924 Full Text COPYRIGHT Point Foundation 1992 A FEW YEARS AGO, BACK WHEN "designer drugs" were still too new to be illegal, an artist who calls himself LordNose! went to a party. The people there were (or considered themselves to be) the current cognoscenti of techno-consciousness: computer hackers, psychologists, writers. LordNose! found himself caught up in a conversation with a couple of journalists talking about the latest hot topic, new psychedelics, which he knew by their more intimate names, "Adam," "Eve," "Escaline." The first journalist, holding a drink, told LordNose! that "Ecstasy" (that's MDMA or "Adam") causes a loss of spinal fluid. The second, with a cigarette, reported that MDMA causes Parkinson's disease. Absolutely: He'd heard it on the news. The context for ecstasy -- the body of knowledge, belief, story, art, and ritual that supports the occasional practice of getting out of one's mind and out into the rest of the universe -- is strangely central to many of the problems we are facing in the global technologolopolis. Something's happening on the planet, and those of us who have the most to do with making it happen know the least about it. Those of us in cities have very few sensors left to perceive the natural world, and few dues to ways of feeling any personal relationship to even small pieces of the living planet. The developed world since the industrial revolution has been the first civilization (that it knows of) out of the countless civilizations that have come and gone, that has had to deal with technology as well as human behavior and the natural world. In the process of creating a marvelously godlike machinery, a civilization has arisen where ecstasy has no sanctioned context. A few other civilizations, almost all of them extinct, did have such contexts. These other civilizations left messages for us, carved in stone. LordNose! came to us with a story of ethnobotanical adventure, ancient spiritual traditions, and digital art -- an irresistible combination -- but he's an image artist, not a writer, so we teamed him up with Laura Fraser to tell the story of his quest. Fraser is a freelance San Francisco writer; LordNose! is a wandering minstrel and digital historian of ecstatic states. --Howard Rheingold LordNose! understood that MDMA, an empathogen-entactogen, was a substance that promotes the communication of feelings both with others and within oneself. It did have a few unpleasant side effects, and wasn't to be taken lightly. You had to do a little research to know you should avoid taking MDMA with unknown combinations of drugs, particularly certain antidepressants called monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs). This combination may cause dangerous elevation of body temperature and blood pressure. If you are taking an antidepressant and are unsure as to whether it is an MAOI, stop and find out before exploring. But otherwise, to his knowledge, MDMA's side effects were mainly limited to some mild jaw-clenching and an embarrassing tendency to call up ex-lovers and casual acquaintances to tell them how much you love them. The jaw-clenching part, at least, could be alleviated by taking a little calcium and magnesium before the MDMA and plenty of fluids during the session to prevent dehydration. But where did the journalists -- folks who were supposed to be in the know, with reliable "expert" sources -- come up with these apocryphal tales? As it turned out, the spinal-fluid story came from a study of MDMA by Dr. George Ricaurte at Stanford to determine if there were any residual effects of the MDMA. In fact, no effects were found, and the only spinal fluid lost was what the researchers took out of the subjects' bodies themselves. The Parkinson's Disease rumor came in the aftermath of a bad batch of a synthetic opiate that contained the neurotoxin MPTP, which people were shooting on the street as a heroin substitute, and which did, sadly, cause a few individuals to get the disease. The media were indiscriminately calling both MPTP and MDMA "designer drugs," despite the fact that they come from entirely different chemical (and spiritual) universes. There was a bad batch of information out there. As far as the media and even a few intelligent partygoers were concerned, one "designer drug" was the same as another. Most of the information circulating in magazines was erroneous, emphasizing either the simple hedonistic aspects of particular substances or warning of the ominous consequences of their use. (This year's undocumented newspaper accounts of numerous deaths due to MDMA in England are the latest rash of unexamined rumors about MDMA.) Much of the scientific literature on the traditional psychedelics and the newer compounds, such as MDMA, that are more appropriately classified as empathogens-entactogens, was hidden in relatively obscure journals, and often tainted with the usual government-approved biases that tend to distort reality. Recent pronouncements by scientists such as Dr. Stephen Peroutka at Stanford University School of Medicine that MDMA may have damaging effects on the human brain also go unchallenged. "The more (MDMA) you take, the more negative it becomes," he claims, without distinguishing reduced benefits from negative effects. As for damaging nerve cells, as Peroutka suggests, pharmacologist and chemist Dr. Alexander T. Shulgin says MDMA probably doesn't have that effect. "The most damning statement is that there is some damage to axons, bitty projections that are associated with neurons, but which seem to eventually repair." The scientific disinformation that was widely reported supported the government's ban on psychedelic drugs based on their abuse potential, not their neurotoxicity. All this misinformation, thought LordNose!, needed to be countered with a healthy dose of something better. So he and a few scientists set out to create a benchmark of reliable information that they hoped would spread like wildfire. They synthesized the available information on psychedelics, bringing together experiential observations and suggestions with hardheaded scientific research. "We've avoided telling people, `take this, and that will happen,' "says LordNose!. "We're not advocating illegal drug use. We just want to give some factual grounding to the population that uses drugs and to counter some of the poisonous propaganda out there." It proved challenging, however, to present that information in a concise, user-friendly form. Much of it is difficult to explain, simply because we have so few words to describe experiences outside our consensus reality. In order to describe the effects of psychedelics, it's necessary to put them into some kind of cultural context we can read: Are these compounds used for healing? Exploration? Divination? Recreation? But in the midst of a just-say-no social outlook, there is no widespread context other than abuse, no concept of appropriate "set and setting." As Shulgin put it in his new book, PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story (WER #72, p. 22), "This society has made self-exploration against the law." To communicate about psychedelics, then, it became necessary to communicate something of a culture that put these substances in a different light, that viewed their use as sacred and healing. LordNose! found such a symbol of that culture, a communication of its spirit, when he was paging through The Wondrous Mushroom: Mycolatry in Mesoarnerica (McGraw-Hill, 1980), by the late ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson, a Morgan Bank vice-president. Inside was a photo of the awesome statue of the Aztec deity Xochipilli, "Prince of Flowers." Wasson himself was intrigued with the statue, which sits in the Museo Nacional de Antropologia in Mexico City, because no other culture he knew of dedicated a divinity to flowers. But he was also suspicious of those flowers: "Do the `flowers' of which Xochipilli is Prince mean flowers?" he wondered. The deity, he noted, isn't looking earthward, toward any flowers, but ecstatically upward, toward his heaven or visions or sky. Nor is the deity showing his plain face to the sky; it is covered with a mask, which, Wasson surmised, indicates that the god is not seeing with ordinary eyes, but with the nonordinary eyes of the soul. He is in ecstasy, "in a far-off world." Wasson took a closer look at the flowers, which hadn't yet been fully identified by modern botanists. The first thing that caught his attention were what seemed to be mushrooms (naturally, since he was an amateur mycologist). These were eventually identified as Psilocybe aztecorum, or the renowned psilocybin mushrooms that grow only on the sacred volcano Popocatepetl in southern Mexico, near where Xochipilli was unearthed. Carved on Xochipilli's stone body are moths feasting on the mushrooms -- not ordinarily moth food. However, these moths seem to represent departed spirits feasting on "the food of the gods," as Wasson put it, "to whose world the mushrooms transport for a brief spell the people of this sad workaday world." Wasson enlisted the help of Harvard ethnobotanist Dr. Richard Evans Schultes [author of Plants of the Gods -- EWEC, p. 220] to identify the other botanical species represented on Xochipilli's stone body. One is Turbina corymbosa, a morning glory endowed with lysergic acid derivatives. Another is Heimia salicifolia, or "sinicuichi" of the Mexican highlands, a mild auditory hallucinogen. Xochipllli, Wasson concluded, is a god undergoing an intense, spiritual, ecstatic experience. "The artist who carved Xochipilli was giving us reality transfigured, was giving us what the Indian would feel that he was living through, was giving us Rapture petrified." Mesoamerican nobility, said Wasson, considered these entheogenic "flowers" sacred; sacred enough to devote one of their finest works of art to this deity. LordNose! and a friend went down to Mexico City to see Xochipilli for themselves and to photograph him for their project. They had walked through the anthropology museum for about an hour, gradually becoming more attuned with the people, masks and deities around them, when they reached the Mixtec room where Xochipilli and the famous Aztec calendar stone reside. At that point they were flying higher than eagles, says LordNose!- earlier they had prepared by ingesting a modern entheogen. LordNose! approached Xochipilli and offered him a little tobacco in homage. Suddenly, he says, "everything became alive." Spirits paraded by in a passing show of civilizations -- streams of ancient and otherworldly beings electrifying the air. LordNose! was alternately drawn to Xochipilli, sitting in quiet and stately rapture, and to a statue of Coatlicue, the earth goddess, with her wondrous and terrifying death's head and skirt of living, squirming serpents. He was awestruck by the spirits, in a state of knowing and wonder, lightening his consciousness, when another tour group walked through. "On your left," intoned the tour guide, "is a diablo." The tourists glanced at the stone statue. "We don't really know what it means." "XOCHIPILLI is the depiction of a being undergoing a psychedelic experience," says LordNose!. "It's a knowing that was absolutely reinforced by my being in an altered state with him. He was imbued with a spirit, a spirit manifest. I knew full well that these were not just artistic treasures, but spiritual treasures." While awaiting permission to photograph Xochipilli, LordNose! and his friend went out to wander amongst the buildings and murals of Mexico City's Zocalo district. In the patio of a huge building, the Secretariat of Public Education, they came upon frescoes of Mexico's history, painted by Diego Rivera between 1923 and 1927. Tucked away in the stairwell leading to the second floor was a jungle scene depicting Xochipilli, perched on top of a giant mushroom cap, surrounded by four naked Indian maidens ! Delighted at finding Rivera's Xochipilli, they were astonished to see him with the mushroom. "Diego Rivera must have understood the significance of the statue, and chose, like the Aztecs, to emphasize that meaning in his art as well," says LordNose!. "Great artists do not choose their subjects arbitrarily." That came as something of a surprise. Wasson is widely credited as being the first gringo to discover "magic" mushrooms, aided by the shaman Maria Sabina in 1955, and to describe the psychedelic meaning of Xochipilli. However, Rivera must have known about "magic" mushrooms in the 1920s. Dr. BIas Pablo Reko, an Austrian anthropologist working in Mexico, wrote about hallucinogenic mushrooms in the 1920s, but was widely discredited. Reko and Rivera traveled in the same circles, though, and it seems highly unlikely that Rivera didn't taste the "flesh of the gods." More striking to LordNose! than his discovery was the idea of how the psychedelic vision might have infused Rivera's work. It may help explain, he says, the magical spatial feeling of Rivera's work, where a vast array of elements are harmoniously composed. As an artist, he says, he has seen how psychedelics can define magical spaces, confronting the mind with a multitude of views simultaneously. So too can they help open an "inner eye" that expands an artist's vision. For LordNose!, both the ancient Xochipilli and Rivera's interpretation of him were inspirations. He and his friend returned across the border to create a Xochipilli of their own, as a vehicle through which to present information about psychedelics. They decided to re-create Xochipilli in a modern image, via computer. They wanted to use the latest technology to depict this ancient deity, giving Xochipilli an electronic feel, reinterpreting him in a completely new artistic medium and a transfigured reality. They decided to display Xochipilli on a poster, together with concise, up-to-date scientific information on a dozen compounds, each represented by a "3-D" rendering of its structure. These energy-minimized molecular models were created by Drs. David Nichols and Robert Pfaff, medicinal chemists at Purdue University. They are "flowers" created by computer, not carved in stone. In that way, they integrate the ancient meaning of Xochipilli into a modern context. Everything about their Xochipilli was created from new material. They started by scanning LordNose!'s 8"x10" black-and-white photo of Xochipilli into a Silicon Graphics Personal Iris, then filtered the image through a sequence of visual filters, manipulating the incoming data so that the picture elements were transformed into new, odd-sized shapes instead of uniform dots. "We pushed the machine to create something we couldn't do any other way," says LordNose!. "We wanted to create something unique. We didn't want to give the computer a simple command and use predigested material." The imagery was exported to a Macintosh, so as to take advantage of all available software. Using PhotoShop, Xochipilli was extracted from his museum setting and placed onto a nightsky background. Accurate placement of the imagery was not possible on the small-screen Macintosh, due to the large poster size (24"x36") -- so they did everything in pieces. For increased text legibility, they modified an existing typeface and set the type using PageMaker. All this electronic data was then combined on a Scitex workstation by ReproMedia of San Francisco, generating color-separated film ready for the lithographer. The process, which probably would have taken a month using "traditional" mechanical methods, took more like ten months because of the advanced technology and learning involved. It was a way of creating original art, in homage to a deity, using new tools. The resuit, as LordNose! says, is itself "something nonordinary." Accompanying the poster will be a 16-page booklet, "A Guide to the Psychedelics," which contains background information that wouldn't fit on a 24"x 36" poster format. It includes descriptions of what psychedelics do for the mind, soul, and body politic; sections on psychedelics, taxonomy, set and setting, routes of administration, side effects, urine testing, nutritional support; and other topics. Also included are bibliographies of popular and scientific resources for some of what we've learned about psychedelics since Aztec times. The "Xochi Speaks" poster and "A Guide to the Psychedelics" are available for $25 postpaid (Californians please add local tax), or $30 foreign,from LordNose!, P.O. Box 170473, San Francisco, CA 94117-0473. For a preview, see our back cover. Psychoactive Taxonomy from the Xochipilli Speaks poster MDMA Name: 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine. Class: Phenethylamine / Empathogen-Entactogen. Dosage: 100-150 mg / oral. Duration: 30-60 minutes to onset; 2-3 hour plateau; 6 hours to baseline. Effects: Ego softening; neurotically based fear dissolution; feelings of emotionally based love and empathy. No visual effects. Lucidity retained, in-depth communication facilitated. Present moment awareness heightened. Side effects: Appetite loss; stimulation; mild jaw-clenching; mild to moderate post-session fatigue. Occasional nystagmus (lateral eye wiggle). Initial restlessness, nervousness, nausea, shivering or tremor. CAUTION: May induce inappropriate and unintended emotional-bond imprinting. Note: Reversible nerve cell toxicity has been reported in laboratory animals at a dose equivalent to human consumption of 175 mg or more. Contraindications: Concurrent use of stimulants or MAO inhibitors (see Warning). Heart ailments, glaucoma, hypertension, aneurism or "stroke" history, hepatic or renal disorders, diabetes or hypoglycemia. Context: Light and warm environment; with a loved one or a few close friends, but sometimes with many others in celebration, KETAMI N E Name: 2-(2-Chlorophenyl)-2(methylamino)-cyclohexanone. Class: Miscellaneous / Entheogen (?). Dosage: 80-120 mg / insufflated ("snorted"). Orally inactive. Duration: 2-5 minutes to onset; 30-45 minute plateau; 2-3 hours to baseline. Effects: Refocusing of consciousness to normally unconscious realms. Serene detachment from emotionally charged personal content. Sense of benignly objective omniscience. Out-of-body experience. Side effects: Physical inertia, semiconsciousness, post-session grogginess, occasional nausea and vomiting. Contraindications: High blood pressure, "stroke" history, glaucoma. Context: Because this experience induces unconsciousness or semiconsciousness, a partner is required to stand by for any physical needs of the subject. Likewise, fasting for several hours and voiding the bowels and bladder before dosing are highly recommended. A bed or deep reclining chair in a quiet room offers the best place to be. Sessions conducted in the early evening allow a post-session sleep to replace any residual grogginess. Ingestion of the liquid solution of this drug is best accomplished by administering half in each nostril while hanging the head upside down, off the edge of a bed. Alternatively, evaporating the solution allows for insufflation of the resulting crystalline powder. DMT Name: N,N-Dimethyltryptamine. Class: Indole (Tryptamine) / Entheogen. Dosage: 25-50 mg / smoked; 50-100 mg / oral. Duration: (Smoked) 15-30 seconds to onset; 15-30 minute plateau; 4560 minutes to baseline. (Oral) 30-60 minutes to onset; 3-4 hour plateau; 6 hours to baseline. Effects: Initial overwhelming rush of colorful kaleidoscopic imagery with substantial ego loss. Auditory tones. Spectacular visions. Calm and centered psychedelic afterglow. Side effects: Strong indole ("burnt plastic") aftertaste when smoked. Possible loss of balance; headache; fear or panic. Contraindications: Latent psychoses, borderline schizophrenia; obsessive ego attachment. Context: Dark and quiet environment while sitting down with option to lie back (e.g., floor, edge of bed, isolation tank); attendant helpful to handle smoking ritual, others superfluous. -- End -- |