This ceremony fits fairly well into the "shamanic" category as defined by Mircea Eliade and others. It incorporates sleep deprivation as well as the ingestion of mushrooms for all participants (indeed, the mushrooms' seritonergic effects would tend to keep participants awake!), and dancing, clapping, drumming, and chanting by those who officiate as well.
The particular rituals described here are drawn from reports of practices in the Americas during this century. In particular, I have drawn on the practices of the shamaness Maria Sabina, who introduced the ethnomycologists Gordon and Valentina Pavlovna Wasson to her religious ceremonies. Her conduct and her ideas have been well-documented both by the Wassons in various books and articles, and in her autobiography as presented by Alvaro Estrada. (I will therefore refer to the officiant as "the priestess", though males can play this role as well, or two people may work together.) Where additional information was available, I have also drawn on others' practices to present as generalized a representation as possible.
In the early 1930's, prior to Maria's rise to prominence, Robert J. Weitlaner, witnessed, but it is not recorded he participated in, the Mazatec mushroom ceremony just northeast of Oaxaca. On July 16, 1938, his daughter Irmgard, with an anthropologist who eventually became her husband, Jean Bassett Johnson, together with two others, Bernard Bevan and Louise Lacaud, attended a mushroom rite in Huautla. Johnson later gave a full account of the event and were the first white persons "recorded" to attend such a ceremony (although it is said they did not participate in the ceremony or ingest the mushrooms).
Throughout the intervening years numerous reports have surfaced, although none offically recorded, of other white men having actually participating in the ceremony. Of those, there is only one of any note, that being a mysterious halluciogenic bio-searcher and mushroom hunter from the Taos, Santa Fe, New Mexico area. He is said to have had several species named after him and known as well, to have been married to a very powerful curandera Shaman himself.
(see)
Veladas might be called to serve a number of ritual purposes, including healing and the need to communicate with those far away. (When the Wassons attended theirs, they requested news of their son, whom they had left behind at school. Maria Sabina reported that he was at home, and missing his parents; after they returned, they discovered that he had indeed been home at that time, and in some emotional distress over his personal life!)
Veladas are generally conducted in the home, and generally at night. In Maria Sabina's time and place, the typical home was one-roomed, with pallets on the floor, upon which the participants might lie down. The entire family and perhaps friends would be present; children too young to participate would fall asleep to the sound of the chanting. A priestess might conduct a velada with an infant in her rebozo, held tight against the mother.
Several different species of mushroom can be used in the velada. All are psilocybin-bearing, and indeed Maria Sabina is documented as having been satisfied with the use of laboratory-synthesized psilocybin in one of her rituals. Mushrooms were typically taken in pairs, or threes, or perhaps fives -- a few pairs for a sick person or another participant; as many as thirty pairs for the officiating priestess herself. The entire fruitbody is consumed, as it was pulled up from the ground, "dirt and all" -- as Maria Sabina said, "if a piece is thrown away from carelessness, the children [ed. note: "children", along with "saint children" and "little things", are commonly used nicknames for the mushrooms] ask when they are working: "Where are my feet? Why didn't you eat me all up?" And they order: "Look for the rest of my body and take me." The words of the children should be obeyed."
Regardless of their kind, the mushrooms are always blessed before they are consumed. If one is Catholic (as Maria Sabina and many of the people for whom she practiced were), one might do this before images of the saints. Candles are lit and flowers are brought -- "all kinds of flowers may be used, as long as they have scent and color". The mushrooms are held in the hand and blessed with incense, perhaps copal smoke; the priest or priestess will speak to the mushrooms and pray Maria Sabina offers an example: "I will take your blood. I will take your heart. Because my conscience is pure, it is clean like yours. Give me truth. May Saint Peter and Saint Paul protect me." Then the mushrooms are eaten, and the candles are blown out, so that the darkness may provide a background for the visions.
During the course of the vigil, all may see visions. The priestess may chant, feeling that the mushrooms speak through her; she may also drum or dance. (Maria Sabina reports once destroying the walls of a hut with the force of her dancing!) If she is seeking news from far away, her spirit is said to go forth to visit; if the ritual is for healing, her visions should tell her what to do. The priestess may massage the sick person, rubbing where it hurts; she may rub "San Pedro" (described as "ground tobacco mised with lime and garlic", a protector against evil spirits) on the sufferer's body, or place a little in their mouth; she may vomit on the sufferer's behalf, to remove the malevolence from their systems. She may see visions of the sufferer's spirit, and understand the relationship between their spirit and their illness, and also what to do to intervene. Maria Sabina describes herself as curing with the sacred Language, being helped by the saints and the "saint children", and her cures as coming from God.
After the ritual, all participants, including the priestess, generally sleep peacefully until morning. For a very sick person, several vigils might be needed for them to get well. A priestess may receive gifts in payment for the healings she has done, but only in token amounts: Maria Sabina reports accepting a pack of cigarettes, a little aguardiente, a few pesos, but says:
"A Wise One like me should not charge for her services....The one who charges is a liar. The wise one is born to cure, not to do business with her knowledge."
(see)
The Guru usually gives the disciple a
Mantra and a puja (prayer accompanied by a ritual) to practise daily. The healer recites some Mantras, performs Divination, or some pujas on behalf of the patient, who has nothing to do but to believe in them. Both guru and healer have learned their art by assisting and watching their teachers for years, and often give their treatment free of charge. Typically healers think that if they accept money from their patients, they will also have to take their bad Karma. Because of this belief, it is not rare for the healers who take money to stop practising after some years. They interpret some personal or family problems in which they got involved as a consequence of their breach of the rule of not charging for their services. (see)
In a similar vein, regarding the venerated Indian saint and holy man the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi, it THE MEETING: An Untold Story of Sri Ramana the following is presented:
During the last years of Ramana's life, from well before the mid-1940s through to his demise in 1950, he was heavily impacted with an array of non-cancer related health issues. He had severe rheumatism over his entire body. His legs were crippled and his back and shoulders were racked with pain (hence his hobbling around with a cane).
However, it was as least two years AFTER Robert Adams arrival at the ashram in 1946 (i.e., December, 1948 in some reports, early 1949 in others) that for the first time a precursor to cancer, a small nodule that had appeared below his left elbow, was noticed (Ramana's legs were not involved). In February of that year the nodule was removed medically, and for the most part, without further concern by the medical staff in attendance. Within a month it returned, only larger and more painful. Doctors diagnosed the nodule as a malignant sarcoma (cancer of soft tissues). In March doctors from Madras came and operated a second time. The wound did not heal properly and the tumor soon grew to even a larger size in a higher location. Amputation of the arm was suggested but as a jnani's limbs should not be removed the amputation was denied. The arm became heavier and more inflamed each day. In August a third operation was done followed by radium treatment. After a few months of apparent improvement, the tumour reappeared climbing up higher in the arm to be nearer the shoulder. A fourth and last operation was performed in December. After this the doctors gave up hope.
It has been said that the reason for the Maharshi's frailty was the fact that he was alleviating the Karma of his devotees. There was evidence that he truly bore their burdens. There were many incidents recorded where his devotees’ suffering disappeared when he took over their pain.
The purpose of the velada, and the role of the mushrooms in it, is to unite the priestess with their sacred power, and to use her wisdom to bring that power to bear as it is needed. The identification between practitioner and power, and the mushrooms as both source and conduit of that power, is complete: "If I say I am the little woman of the Book, that means that a Little-One-Who-Springs-Forth is a woman, and that she is the little woman of the Book. In that way, during the vigil, I turn into a mushroom -- little woman -- of the book.... If I am on the aquatic shore, I say: I am a woman who is standing in the sand...Because wisdom comes from the place where the sand is born."
As an extra added insight, Carlos Castaneda, the author that contributed to the widened knowledge of the use of hallucinogenics in rituals similar to the velada ceremony and wrote that he became a sorcerer's apprentice under the auspices of a Yaqui Indian shaman he called Don Juan Matus is reported to have a connection to Maria Sabina. Anthropologist Jay Courtney Fikes in his book Carlos Castaneda, Academic Opportunism and the Psychedelic Sixties (1993) even goes as far to suggests that rather than being one individual, the chance exists that Don Juan was actually a composite of two or possibly even three authentic Indian shamans, of which one was Maria Sabina with another being, although not mentioned by Fikes in his book but by others, the venerated Cahuilla Shaman, Salvador Lopez.
It should be mentioned as well, as people often confuse the issue, that the hallucinogenics used in the rituals as described in Castaneda's first two books was extracted from a plant called Sacred Datura, not mushrooms OR peyote as many people think. See CASTANEDA: Datura or Peyote?
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IN MEMORIAM: (3 April 2000)
Terence McKenna
