RICHARD EVANS SCHULTES

"THE BOOKS OF REVELATIONS"

EDITED BY JOHN W. ALLEN
JOHN W. ALLEN'S
"MODERN FIELD RESEARCH ON TEONANÁCATL 1915-1940."
Excerpts from “Mushroom Pioneers” by John W. Allen, 2009 http://www.erowid.org edition. Chapter One and Two, Page 15-32).
(This chapter is copyright by John W. Allen and Erowid).


CHAPTER ONE

"MODERN FIELD RESEARCH ON TEONANÁCATL 1915-1940"

Part Three

Figure 2. Richard Evans Schultes, A Kiowa Indian Shaman and Weston LaBarre.
Photo: Courtesy of Richard Evans Schultes.




CHAPTER TWO
Part Four
Figure 3. Palacio's, an assistant to Rolf Singer; Dr. Rolf Singer, University of Chicago and Director of the Field Museum of Natural History; Ethnomycologist, R. Gordon Wasson.
Photos: Courtesy of Richard Evans Schultes.

Richard Evans Schultes
After attending the East Boston public-school system, Schultes received a scholarship to Harvard. While there, Schultes obtained a job as a file clerk at the Harvard Botanical Museum, where, 25 years hence, he would be the Director (Kahn, 1992).

In 1936, Schultes was just another premedical undergraduate student at Harvard University and one of his classes was Biology 104. While attending a course on "Plants and Human Affairs", Schultes was assigned to read a book by Heinrich Klüver entitled "Mescal: The Divine Plant and its Psychological Effects." Unbeknownst to Schultes, this assignment was destined to change the course of his entire life.

Previously unaware of peyote, Schultes soon began to develop a burning desire to experience mescaline firsthand. Schultes met with his professor, Oake Ames, and soon found himself with funding (most of which came directly from the pocket of his mentor Ames). Eventually Schultes met Weston LaBarre, a young student from Duke University in North Carolina who also shared an interest in peyote (LaBarre went on to become an anthropology professor and the author of The Peyote Cult, the definitive book on the peyote religion and The Ghost Dance: The Origins of Religion).

Together, Schultes and LaBarre traveled to Oklahoma where both participated in a Native American Church peyote-ceremony with the Kiowa Indians. There Schultes consumed the sacred cactus on which he then wrote his senior honors thesis.

Schultes soon decided that economic botany was the study he would pursue, so he completed his graduate work on the medicinal plants of Oaxaca, México. Schultes interest in Oaxacan plants came from having read some of the selected writings of the 16th and 17th century Spanish friars and historians who mentioned the existence of innumerable medicinal plants, some of a psychoactive nature, including the morning-glory seeds known as ololiuhqui.Not only did Schultes help rediscover the modern use of the ololiuhqui seeds among the Mazatec Indians, but along with Blas Pablo Reko also collected specimens of the purgative sacred mushrooms known as teonanácatl---of which Safford had only just denied the existence (Schultes, Pers. Comm. 1989).

As noted previously, the first mushrooms collected by Schultes and Reko fit the botanical description of Panaeolus campanulatus var. sprinctrinus. In his 1939 and 1940 papers on the identification of the visionary Nahua mushroom, Schultes alleged that the mushrooms mentioned by the Spanish chroniclers probably belonged to the genus Panaeolus. It was important for these scientists to collect and identify the species they believed were the Aztec teonanácatl, yet they couldn't find anyone to perform for them a shamanic mushroom ceremony such as they suspected continued being held in secret. According to Schultes (1969), "so few mushrooms were gathered, because of the unusually dry season, that it was not possible for me to ingest them experimentally; all were needed as voucher herbarium specimens."

Another mushroom Schultes collected among the Sierra Mazateca was known by the Mazatec Indians as kee-sho. This mushroom at the time was incorrectly identified by Rolf Singer as Stropharia cubensis Earle. Schultes later collected specimens of Stropharia cubensis from dung after heavy rainfalls.

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