The Antibody Suppressed

In McKenna’s image, a sick body produces antibodies to heal itself. The record shows something stranger: the body politic turning on them.

It has happened for as long as there are records. In 415 BCE, Athens condemned the general Alcibiades for performing the Mysteries of Eleusis in a private house, outside the institution that owned them, and ordered every priest and priestess to curse his name. In 1620, the Inquisition in Mexico forbade peyote as the Devil’s work. In 1970, the United States placed psilocybin in Schedule I, the category for drugs with “no currently accepted medical use,” and for a generation the research stopped.

The view this site holds is that the suppression is not an accident. These plants dissolve the ego, and a people who routinely practised these rituals would not be easy to control. The experience puts you back into alignment with the real reality, and teaches that you have no better guide than your own instinct. McKenna made a version of the same argument, above.

The official reasons were sacrilege, heresy, danger and disorder, and they can’t settle the question, because a sincere reason and a cover story look the same from outside. What the record does show is that the government of the prohibition era secretly gave LSD to people who didn’t know it, ran covert operations against the antiwar movement and other dissenters, and destroyed its own files when it suited it. The absence of a confession is not evidence of innocence. The motive is argued, not documented; the suppression is documented beyond argument.

The full history, graded claim by claim, is the Mycelium thread The Sacred Mushroom. The door has begun to reopen, in courts, in cities and in clinical trials, though the federal schedule hasn’t moved. Whether the body politic is ready to stop attacking what might heal it is the open question.