Salon Wanderlust | High on Huautla

[Salon Wanderlust: Travel with a passion]

T A B L E_T A L K
You've won the lottery, quit your job and updated your passport. Where are you headed? Fantasize in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y
Why I hate B&Bs
By Julie Garagliano
On the depravities of teddy bears, claw-foot bathtubs, breakfast quiches and shared bonhomie
(10/02/98)
A desert affair
By Tehila Lieberman
An eerie and magical encounter in the Sinai
(10/01/98)
Iowa heartland
By Jennifer New
The joys and dilemmas of being a traveler from Iowa
(09/30/98)
An Italian romance: Chapter Two
By Laura Fraser
The first time, he had helped heal her heartbreak. Could their second fling be as good as the first?
(09/29/98)
Running with the Hadza
By Eric Seyfarth
Tanzania's Stone Age tribe represents a living link to our earliest ancestors
(09/27/98)

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High on Huautla
BY DEREK PECK | First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain. We have been driving upward all day and have just penetrated a thick white layer of clouds, sealing off the rest of the world below, when suddenly the words from the 1968 Donovan song make sense to me. At first there was a mountain, and now there is just Huautla, a Mazatec Indian village on steep lush slopes, dampened by mist and rain, and isolated not just by distance, but by natural powers of concealment.
Given what I know of the strange and magical history of the place, it seems perfectly right to me, and as we continue into the town itself, I am filled with a sense of occult expectation. But when we get off the bus, my Australian travel companion Carlos and I are greeted only by a jovial Indian man in his mid-30s, wearing dirty pants and scruffy leather sandals and smiling optimistically, who offers to lead us to a room. Eduardo, as he introduces himself, brings out our good humor more than our mystical awe. But then, as we're trudging up inclined alleyways and steep, winding dirt trails, he suddenly turns and asks, "So you are here to eat the sacred hongos?"
I tell him we haven't decided yet, and he nods understandingly, then adds: "Anyway, I will bring you to a shaman."
Eduardo leads us inside a small compound of houses. There is an old woman who he says is the shaman, or currandera. Two of her teenage grandchildren greet us and immediately start pattering about mushrooms and a nice place to sleep -- a package deal for a good price. It seems a number of Mazatec families have gotten into the business of hosting pseudo-veladas, as the mushroom-taking ceremonies are known, in order to make a few extra bucks off the occasional gringo seeker before he can locate a real shaman. Politely, we look at the room, then say we'd prefer to be in the center of town. Though he has missed the chance to make a commission, Eduardo is gracious enough to walk us to a hotel. Along the way I ask him if he ever takes mushrooms himself. He says, "Yes, but only when I'm sick. So I can go to the other side and heal myself."
Carlos and I look at each other quizzically. Such a strange idea: tripping when you're sick. In our culture you trip when you're well, to feel even better. The idea of taking hallucinogenic mushrooms when you've got a high fever makes us laugh, though it is precisely this approach that put Huautla on the map.
That history began in the mid-1950s, when Huautla was still about as remote as a place can be. Located high in Mexico's Sierra Madre del Sur, about 250 miles southeast of Mexico City, it took 10 hours just to make the 38-mile journey from the bottom of the mountain to the top. Nevertheless, two Westerners made their way to the village. They were R. Gordon Wasson and Allan Richardson. Wasson was vice president of J. P. Morgan Co., the huge banking firm, and Richardson was a New York fashion photographer. The two men wanted to know more about Mazatec spiritual and curative practices, which were said to center on ingesting sacred, vision-producing mushrooms, called teonanacatl ("flesh of the gods") by the Indians. Succeeding in their quest, Wasson and Richardson participated in an all-night ceremony led by María Sabina, the local currandera who subsequently became a cult figure; they were the first outsiders ever to experience the sacred teonanacatl.
Subsequently Wasson returned with his wife and the Swiss chemist Dr. Albert Hoffman, the inventor of LSD, to record a sacred velada. Hoffman had isolated the active alkaloids in the mushrooms, psilocybin and psilobin, and wanted to see how synthetic capsules would stack up against the mushrooms. After the ceremony, Sabina declared that they contained the same spirit. Wasson also published an account of his experiences in Life magazine in 1957. Today, that article is considered by many as the catalyst that kicked off the Psychedelic Revolution, giving Huautla a key -- if unwitting -- influence on 1960s and '70s pop culture.
In the years that followed, Sabina received a long procession of the era's most important rock 'n' roll musicians, writers, poets and counterculture personalities, including Donovan, Bob Dylan, Timothy Leary, the Rolling Stones, Peter Townshend and, most famously, the Beatles. John, Paul, George and Ringo are said to have arrived by helicopter in 1968 as part of Ringo's birthday celebration. They took part in a sacred night ceremony with Sabina, at her home in El Fortin, at the top of the mountain just outside of town. Legend has it that during the velada Sabina warned John that she saw a vision of a gun pointed at him.
By 1969, hundreds of hippies had swarmed into the small mountain village, crowding the square and open spaces with makeshift encampments. Locals who remember say that the hippies often behaved badly, tripping freely in public -- disrespecting the age-old ritual of the teonanacatl -- not only on mushrooms but on LSD, and also defecating and fornicating with apparently no reserve.
It didn't take long for the Mazatecan and Mexican authorities to grow weary of what they saw as a grotesque display of American youth immorality, and by the early '70s the military had driven the hippies out and set up checkpoints at the foot of the mountain, thus ending the Magical Mushroom Tour.
Today, Huautla is mostly unknown to the travelers who visit Mexico's southern state of Oaxaca. In recent years the town has prospered and grown substantially through coffee cultivation, yet it is still picturesque, with winding streets and crooked networks of stairs that connect it vertically, and breath-stopping views of lushly foliated hills and mist-shrouded mountaintops.
On our first night in town, Carlos and I step out to the corner comedor for dinner and end up watching Game Four of the NBA Championships -- remote as Huautla is, satellite receivers still point skyward from numerous tin rooftops. Later, as we return to our hotel across the town square-cum-outdoor basketball court -- the same town square that once housed throngs of hippies -- we're challenged to a game of one-on-two by a young Mazatec who thinks he's "Michael Yordan." The court is dark, except for some light that shifts in from a nearby building and a generous moon. And although we are much taller and change every few points so we can catch our breath in this altitude, the kid's jumps defy gravity and he apparently has infrared vision, too; he beats us handily, 10-2, and sends us home sucking air.
The next day we get up early and hike to El Fortin. It's a long hike that mostly follows the course of a winding road past the outskirts of town and myriad scenes of rural Mexican life. There are dirty children playing alongside the dusty road; men butchering a freshly slaughtered steer; women carrying heavy loads on their heads, or sitting in front of their shacklike houses with a basket of mangoes to sell and their breasts given out to hungry mouths.
The higher we walk, the more spectacular -- almost aerial -- views we get of Huautla, seemingly floating in mist, and the deep ravine that drops off to its side. On the last stretch to El Fortin, we cut through a coffee grove and follow a crooked dirt trail to the top. There we meet with Filogonio Garcia, the grandson of María Sabina and current practitioner of the family tradition. In fact, according to local belief, he's the direct inheritor of her formidable mystical gifts.
When he enters the hut where Carlos and I are waiting, I'm immediately held by his dark, lucent stare. Although he's in his 50s, he doesn't look a day over 35, with shiny coffee-brown skin and black, short-cropped hair. He takes a seat facing us and smiles.
First I tell him that I've come to learn about the sacred mushrooms and his grandmother, and he kindly allows me to peruse his own archive, which contains old books and photographs. In one book I glimpse the quote: "The sacred mushroom ceremony brings about a direct confrontation with the sacred world that obliges us to reevaluate all our concepts of the universe and of man." Hmm. This is definitely not just for fun.
Later, after answering more of my questions, Filogonio says: "But if you want to know the mushrooms, you have to eat the mushrooms."
I look to Carlos, who gives a slight, affirmative nod. So I ask Filogonio if a ceremony is possible. For a price, of course, it is. (Charging for a ceremony is one way in which the tradition has changed due to contact with outsiders.) Then he tells us we should abstain from smoking, drinking and sex, and come to see him again the following night, just before midnight, with reverence in our hearts.
N E X T+P A G E | And they ate the mushrooms with honey ...


	T A B L E_T A L K You've won the lottery, quit your job and updated your passport. Where are you headed? Fantasize in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Why I hate B&Bs By Julie Garagliano On the depravities of teddy bears, claw-foot bathtubs, breakfast quiches and shared bonhomie (10/02/98) A desert affair By Tehila Lieberman An eerie and magical encounter in the Sinai (10/01/98) Iowa heartland By Jennifer New The joys and dilemmas of being a traveler from Iowa (09/30/98) An Italian romance: Chapter Two By Laura Fraser The first time, he had helped heal her heartbreak. Could their second fling be as good as the first? (09/29/98) Running with the Hadza By Eric Seyfarth Tanzania's Stone Age tribe represents a living link to our earliest ancestors (09/27/98) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.		BY DEREK PECK \| First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain. We have been driving upward all day and have just penetrated a thick white layer of clouds, sealing off the rest of the world below, when suddenly the words from the 1968 Donovan song make sense to me. At first there was a mountain, and now there is just Huautla, a Mazatec Indian village on steep lush slopes, dampened by mist and rain, and isolated not just by distance, but by natural powers of concealment. Given what I know of the strange and magical history of the place, it seems perfectly right to me, and as we continue into the town itself, I am filled with a sense of occult expectation. But when we get off the bus, my Australian travel companion Carlos and I are greeted only by a jovial Indian man in his mid-30s, wearing dirty pants and scruffy leather sandals and smiling optimistically, who offers to lead us to a room. Eduardo, as he introduces himself, brings out our good humor more than our mystical awe. But then, as we're trudging up inclined alleyways and steep, winding dirt trails, he suddenly turns and asks, "So you are here to eat the sacred hongos?" I tell him we haven't decided yet, and he nods understandingly, then adds: "Anyway, I will bring you to a shaman." Eduardo leads us inside a small compound of houses. There is an old woman who he says is the shaman, or currandera. Two of her teenage grandchildren greet us and immediately start pattering about mushrooms and a nice place to sleep -- a package deal for a good price. It seems a number of Mazatec families have gotten into the business of hosting pseudo-veladas, as the mushroom-taking ceremonies are known, in order to make a few extra bucks off the occasional gringo seeker before he can locate a real shaman. Politely, we look at the room, then say we'd prefer to be in the center of town. Though he has missed the chance to make a commission, Eduardo is gracious enough to walk us to a hotel. Along the way I ask him if he ever takes mushrooms himself. He says, "Yes, but only when I'm sick. So I can go to the other side and heal myself." Carlos and I look at each other quizzically. Such a strange idea: tripping when you're sick. In our culture you trip when you're well, to feel even better. The idea of taking hallucinogenic mushrooms when you've got a high fever makes us laugh, though it is precisely this approach that put Huautla on the map. That history began in the mid-1950s, when Huautla was still about as remote as a place can be. Located high in Mexico's Sierra Madre del Sur, about 250 miles southeast of Mexico City, it took 10 hours just to make the 38-mile journey from the bottom of the mountain to the top. Nevertheless, two Westerners made their way to the village. They were R. Gordon Wasson and Allan Richardson. Wasson was vice president of J. P. Morgan Co., the huge banking firm, and Richardson was a New York fashion photographer. The two men wanted to know more about Mazatec spiritual and curative practices, which were said to center on ingesting sacred, vision-producing mushrooms, called teonanacatl ("flesh of the gods") by the Indians. Succeeding in their quest, Wasson and Richardson participated in an all-night ceremony led by María Sabina, the local currandera who subsequently became a cult figure; they were the first outsiders ever to experience the sacred teonanacatl. Subsequently Wasson returned with his wife and the Swiss chemist Dr. Albert Hoffman, the inventor of LSD, to record a sacred velada. Hoffman had isolated the active alkaloids in the mushrooms, psilocybin and psilobin, and wanted to see how synthetic capsules would stack up against the mushrooms. After the ceremony, Sabina declared that they contained the same spirit. Wasson also published an account of his experiences in Life magazine in 1957. Today, that article is considered by many as the catalyst that kicked off the Psychedelic Revolution, giving Huautla a key -- if unwitting -- influence on 1960s and '70s pop culture. In the years that followed, Sabina received a long procession of the era's most important rock 'n' roll musicians, writers, poets and counterculture personalities, including Donovan, Bob Dylan, Timothy Leary, the Rolling Stones, Peter Townshend and, most famously, the Beatles. John, Paul, George and Ringo are said to have arrived by helicopter in 1968 as part of Ringo's birthday celebration. They took part in a sacred night ceremony with Sabina, at her home in El Fortin, at the top of the mountain just outside of town. Legend has it that during the velada Sabina warned John that she saw a vision of a gun pointed at him. By 1969, hundreds of hippies had swarmed into the small mountain village, crowding the square and open spaces with makeshift encampments. Locals who remember say that the hippies often behaved badly, tripping freely in public -- disrespecting the age-old ritual of the teonanacatl -- not only on mushrooms but on LSD, and also defecating and fornicating with apparently no reserve. It didn't take long for the Mazatecan and Mexican authorities to grow weary of what they saw as a grotesque display of American youth immorality, and by the early '70s the military had driven the hippies out and set up checkpoints at the foot of the mountain, thus ending the Magical Mushroom Tour. Today, Huautla is mostly unknown to the travelers who visit Mexico's southern state of Oaxaca. In recent years the town has prospered and grown substantially through coffee cultivation, yet it is still picturesque, with winding streets and crooked networks of stairs that connect it vertically, and breath-stopping views of lushly foliated hills and mist-shrouded mountaintops. On our first night in town, Carlos and I step out to the corner comedor for dinner and end up watching Game Four of the NBA Championships -- remote as Huautla is, satellite receivers still point skyward from numerous tin rooftops. Later, as we return to our hotel across the town square-cum-outdoor basketball court -- the same town square that once housed throngs of hippies -- we're challenged to a game of one-on-two by a young Mazatec who thinks he's "Michael Yordan." The court is dark, except for some light that shifts in from a nearby building and a generous moon. And although we are much taller and change every few points so we can catch our breath in this altitude, the kid's jumps defy gravity and he apparently has infrared vision, too; he beats us handily, 10-2, and sends us home sucking air. The next day we get up early and hike to El Fortin. It's a long hike that mostly follows the course of a winding road past the outskirts of town and myriad scenes of rural Mexican life. There are dirty children playing alongside the dusty road; men butchering a freshly slaughtered steer; women carrying heavy loads on their heads, or sitting in front of their shacklike houses with a basket of mangoes to sell and their breasts given out to hungry mouths. The higher we walk, the more spectacular -- almost aerial -- views we get of Huautla, seemingly floating in mist, and the deep ravine that drops off to its side. On the last stretch to El Fortin, we cut through a coffee grove and follow a crooked dirt trail to the top. There we meet with Filogonio Garcia, the grandson of María Sabina and current practitioner of the family tradition. In fact, according to local belief, he's the direct inheritor of her formidable mystical gifts. When he enters the hut where Carlos and I are waiting, I'm immediately held by his dark, lucent stare. Although he's in his 50s, he doesn't look a day over 35, with shiny coffee-brown skin and black, short-cropped hair. He takes a seat facing us and smiles. First I tell him that I've come to learn about the sacred mushrooms and his grandmother, and he kindly allows me to peruse his own archive, which contains old books and photographs. In one book I glimpse the quote: "The sacred mushroom ceremony brings about a direct confrontation with the sacred world that obliges us to reevaluate all our concepts of the universe and of man." Hmm. This is definitely not just for fun. Later, after answering more of my questions, Filogonio says: "But if you want to know the mushrooms, you have to eat the mushrooms." I look to Carlos, who gives a slight, affirmative nod. So I ask Filogonio if a ceremony is possible. For a price, of course, it is. (Charging for a ceremony is one way in which the tradition has changed due to contact with outsiders.) Then he tells us we should abstain from smoking, drinking and sex, and come to see him again the following night, just before midnight, with reverence in our hearts. N E X T+P A G E \| And they ate the mushrooms with honey ...