less discuss the beliefs that go with the mushrooms and 
perform for you. Do not think that it is a question of 
money: 70 hicimos esto por dinero, ‘We did not this for 
money,’ said Guadalupe, after we had spent the night 
with her family and the cwrandera Maria Sabina. Per- 
haps you will learn the names of a number of renowned 
curanderos, and your emissaries will even promise to de- 
liver them to you, but then you wait and wait and they 
never come. You will brush past them in the market- 
place, and they will know you, but you will not know 
them. The judge in the town-hall may be the very man 
you are seeking; and you may pass the time of day with 
him, yet never learn that he is your curandero. 
After all, would you have it any different? What 
priest of the Catholic Church will perform Mass to satisfy 
an unbeliever’s curiosity / The curandero who today, for 
a big fee, will perform the mushroom rite for any stranger 
isa prostitute and a faker, and his insincere performance 
has the validity of a rite put on by an unfrocked priest. 
In the modern world religion is often an etiolated thing, 
a social activity with mild ethical rules. Religion in primi- 
tive society was an awesome reality, ‘terrible’ in the 
original meaning of that abused word, pervading all life 
and culminating in ceremonies that were forbidden to 
the profane. This is what the mushroom ceremony is in 
the remote parts of Mexico. 
We often think of the mysteries of antiquity as a mani- 
festation of primitive religion. Let me now draw your 
attention to certain parallels between our Mexican rite 
and the Mystery performed at Eleusis. The timing seems 
significant. Inthe Mazatec country the preferred season 
for ‘consulting the mushroom’ is during the rains, when 
the mushrooms grow, from June through August. The 
Eleusinian Mystery was celebrated in September or early 
October, the season of the mushrooms in the Mediter- 
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