The following is excerpted from Ayahuasca Analogues by Jonathan Ott, Natural Products Co., Kennwick, WA USA, 1994.

EPILOGUE: A PANACÆA FOR PANGÆA

Exactly two hundred years ago, on 10 October 1793, a 35-year-old London engraver offered for sale productions of ten of his own "illuminated" works: "of equal magnitude and consequence with the productions of any age" including, for the price of 7 shillings 6 pence, a remarkable "prophetic Book" with 14 illustrations entitled The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. If anything, William Blake was guilty of understatement, for this wide-ranging satire of politics, religion and philosophy is nothing less than one of the greatest poems ever penned, in English or any other language. Appalled by the spiritual materialism of his contemporaries, and haunted by the spectre of the Industrial revolution then casting its long shadow over England, Blake's poetic words are as meaningful and actual today as two centuries ago:

All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors: 1. That Man has two real existing principles: Viz: a Body & a Soul. 2. That Energy, call'd Evil, is alone from the Body; & that Reason, call'd Good, is alone from the Soul. 3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies. But the following Contraries to these are True: 1. Man has no Body distinct from his soul; for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age. 2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. 3. Energy is Eternal Delight.

Blake spoke directly from the logos, casting in English words and engraved designs what he saw... nothing seen with his "mortal and perishing" eye, but "organized and minutely articulated" visions perceived by his "imaginative and immortal organs" and "in stronger and better light than his perishing eye" could see. Blake saw that there was no conflict between Flesh and Spirit, Body and Soul; that it was a question rather of a dynamic interplay between matter and energy; that the materialistic perception of solid bodies was but a crude distortion of the all-encompassing reality as filtered through the five senses, "the chief inlets of the Soul" in a materialistic age. Recall that to Blake the five senses closed humankind to the "immense world of delight" that is "ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way" [Blake 1946]. Again, Blake:

But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do by... melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid. If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.

Blake was anticipating by more than a century the physics of relatively and quantum mechanics. Physicists, applying their "imaginative and immortal organs" to their visions from radio telescopes, electron microscopes and particle accelerators, have come to see scientifically that "Energy is the only life", and that our everyday perception of the universe as matter is a sort of hallucination operative only at a very gross and superficial level of perception. Solely by a counterintuitive process of "melting apparent surfaces away" can the scientist or the mystic discover "the infinite which was hid." In the psychopharmacology of the entheogens, we have the means to reconcile the unseen, mystical worlds of the physicists and poets. For the entheogens constitute, as Albert Hofmann asserted, something like "cracks in the infinite realm of matter," and operate "at the borderline where mind and matter merge" [Hofmann 1980,1989]. They are to philosophy and pharmacology what the radioactive isotopes are to physics - cracks in the materialistic edifice of reality, where matter spontaneously transforms, or profoundly alters consciousness.

Planet Earth, Our Lady Gæa, is suffering mightily the consequences of our materialistic world-view, especially the Judæo-Christian tendency to see humankind as a special creation, apart from all other Gæan life-forms, and as enjoined, moreover, to subdue and dominate other creatures. This horrendous duality is a modern superstition, for there is overwhelming scientific and experiential evidence which assures us that we are but one strand in the warp and weft of life; biochemically kindred to every other Gæan life-form and descended from the same primordial ancestors. This treacherous superstition, for placing of humankind above and beyond Nature has led to the objectification of our planet and all her Gæan creatures. Instead of revering our planetary mother, from whose cavernous, salty womb we have miraculously leapt forth, we see only property... things to be bought and sold. Rather than marvel at the eternally ephemeral, living miracle that is each and every one of our feathered, furry, leafy, spiny or scaly brethren, we see only dinner, resources that can be exploited. And exploit them we do, so ruthlessly that the extinction of plant and animal species, nay, of entire habitats, is an everyday occurrence, and by the time it dawns on us that we, too, are on the endangered species list, it may be a trifle too late!

That is where ayahuasca comes into the picture, as a healing balm for the lesions of materialism... as a prospective panacæa for our great sweet mother Pangæa. For the essence of the entheogenic experience is ecstasy, in the original sense of the word ek-stasis - the "withdrawal of the soul from the body." It is an ineffable, spiritual, non-materialistic state of being in which the universe is experienced more as energy than as matter. It is Blake's Eternal Delight, the archetypal religious experience, the heart and soul of shamanism, the pinnacle of human achievement in the archaic, preliterate world. It is to see, as did Blake, that "every thing that lives is Holy," us included, and especially Our Lady Gæa, this living, breathing, growing and evolving biosphere... to realize that every place is a sacred place, for the universe itself is divine, it is our creator. We are Gæan creatures every one, woven of the clay of this watery blue planet (seasoned with a bit of start dust), but the Earthen atoms that continually flow and plait themselves through our bones and blood and sinew are animated into this ecstatic dance of life by thermonuclear stellar energy.

Shamanic ecstasy is the real 'Old Time Religion,' of which modern churches are but pallid evocations. Our forebears discovered in many times and places that in the ecstatic, entheogenic experience, suffering humankind could reconcile the cultivated braininess, which isolated each individual human being from all other creatures and even from other human beings, with the wild and feral, beastly magnificent bodies that we also are. Blake said it beautifully, that this Energy of life, this Eternal Delight is from the Body... this Body which might be seen as an elaborate energy-processing machine working to maintain consciousness in a biocomputer... or perchance the Body and the biocomputer alike are just elaborate mechanisms for perpetuating the replication of some invisible, diaphanous strands of nucleic acids! This mysterium tremendum, this unio mystica, this eternally delightful experience of the universe as energy, is a sine qua non of religion, it is what religion is for! There is no need for faith, it is the ecstatic experience itself that it gives one faith in the intrinsic unity and integrity of the universe, in ourselves as integral parts of the whole; that reveals to us the sublime majesty of our universe, and the fluctuant, scintillant, alchemical miracle that is quotidian consciousness [Ott, in preparation].

We must come down from the Judæo-Christian pedestal and revel in our kinship with our fellow plant and animal creatures... we must repudiate religions which defend against religious experiences, wearily celebrating communion with a placebo sacrament, which requires faith and gives none! We must foster the Entheogenic Reformation, restoring the very heart and soul, yea, the core mystery to exsanguinated, purely theoretical religions which have lost touch with spirituality; hence all meaning and relevance. We must reject what Blake called "pale religious letchery" that heals not the gaping wound between Body and Soul, but would tear them asunder!

Entheogens like ayahuasca may be just the right medicine for hypermaterialistic humankind on the threshold of a new millennium which will determine whether our species continues to grow and prosper, or destroys itself in a massive biological Holocaust unlike anything the planet has experienced in the last 65 million years. Most of us really don't believe in the gods any more; few among us have much faith in our governments, nor in science and technology... but we do believe in the magic of drugs! We believe that shots can cure 'most anything... we don't want to be told that smoking, drinking alcohol, lack of exercise and poor diet may lead to coronary disease, we want a "magic bullet" that will make it go away instantly. We count on drugs to heal our ills, assuage our pain, to immobilize the violent, to wake us up, to put us to sleep, to make us sociable, to entertain us, to relax us, to make us smarter, to make us stronger athletes... drugs we believe in, O yes! It is a supreme irony that a material substance, a drug, could be the effective medicine against materialism:

Perhaps with all our modern knowledge we do not need the divine mushrooms any more. Or do we need them more than ever? Some are shocked that the key even to religion might be reduced to a mere drug. On the other hand, the drug is as mysterious as it ever was: "like the wind it cometh we know not whence, nor why."

I venture to answer R. Gordon Wasson's rhetorical question: precisely because of our modern knowledge, we need the divine entheogens more than ever. Far from taking the mystery out of religion, the restoration of genuine entheogenic sacraments puts the Mystery back into religion, obviating the necessity of faith in sophistical doctrines. The Entheogenic Reformation is our best hope for healing Our Lady Gæa, while fostering a genuine religious revival for a new millennium. That revival is under way in the vast tent of this watery blue planet... Gi' me that Old Time Religion!