And so we went there, in 1958. In books and articles 
we have described time and time again our later adven- 
tures, and some of you, surely, are familiar with them. 
So far as we know, we were the first outsiders to eat the 
mushrooms, the first to be invited to partake in the agapé 
of the sacred mushroom.* I propose here this evening a 
new approach, and will give you the distinctive traits of 
this cult of a divine mushroom, which we have found a 
revelation, in the true meaning of that abused word, but 
which for the Indians is an every-day feature, albeit a 
Holy Mystery, of their lives. 
Here let me say a word parenthetically about the na- 
ture of the psychic disturbance that the eating of the 
mushroom causes. This disturbance is wholly different 
from the effects of alcohol, as different as night from day. 
We are entering upon a discussion where the vocabulary 
of the English language, of any European language, is 
seriously deficient. There are no apt words in them to 
characterize your state when you are, shall we say, “be- 
mushroomed.’ For hundreds, even thousands, of years 
we have thought about these things in terms of alcohol, 
and we now have to break the bonds imposed on us by 
the alcoholic association. We are all, willy nilly, confined 
within the prison walls of our every-day vocabulary. 
With skill in our choice of words we may stretch accepted 
meanings to cover slightly new feelings and thoughts, 
but when astate of mind is utterly distinct, wholly novel, 
then all our old words fail. How do you tell a man born 
blind what seeing is like? In the present case, this is es- 
pecially true because superficially the bemushroomed 
man shows a few of the objective symptoms of one in- 
intoxicated, drunk. Now virtually all the words describ- 
ing the state of drunkenness, from ‘intoxicated’ (which, 
as you know, means ‘poisoned’) through the scores of 
* This was on the night of June 29-30, 1955. 
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