Introduction
When the Spaniards entered Mexico in the early sixteenth century, they found the natives using a family of strange new drugs, unlike any they had known before. The Aztecs had given one of them the name Teonanácatl (“The Flesh of the God”) in honor of its miraculous properties, which enabled one to see visions, to foretell the future, and to obtain supernatural revelation. Farther north, the Conquistadors discovered a cult surrounding a mysterious, turnip-shaped cactus, almost indistinguishable from the stones of the desert, which enabled its users to behold the secrets of the universe. Duly noting the properties of these drugs, the Spaniards succeeded in stamping out their use. Through the centuries, they remained all but forgotten, until in the last century settlers in the American Southwest observed that the cult of the peyote cactus still survived among certain Indians, although in an altered form.
As they became converted to Christianity, these tribes adapted their worship of the magic plant to its celebration as a Sacrament; in its new form, the cult spread as far north as Canada and is today incorporated as the Native American Church of the United States.
Men of letters learned of peyote after the middle of the nineteenth century. Its properties were explored by cultured Europeans, such as Havelock Ellis and Alexandre Rouhier, who discovered for themselves the marvelous visions which the drug produced. The German pharmacologist A. Heffter finally isolated an active chemical from the plant, which was called mescaline.
I · The Buried World
Memory, Consciousness, and Primal Experience
We are told that, in those moments immediately preceding death, the world of our earliest infancy frequently opens up to us. We are also assured that senile reason passes readily into a state of second childhood, wherein the light of rationality is obscured by the resurrected past, experienced as fully as if the intervening years had rolled away. Normal adults occasionally dream of long-forgotten events, which have otherwise passed into oblivion. These facts, together with Freud’s rediscovery of the unconscious mind, suggest that within each of us the past slumbers on, occasionally reasserting itself in the fragments of a sudden recollection, the perception of some haunting perfume, or the unexplained appearance of an ancient face in our dreams. Most striking, however, is the fact that it is this earliest layer of the human memory that persists to the moment of death, even after the adult memory and its powers of reason are gone. Knowledge recently gained disappears, while that mysterious world of the long forgotten is reawakened, showing that our earliest experiences indeed have a vitality that rational intelligence does not possess.
The strange discovery in recent years of certain drugs that can open up this buried world at will seems to me to be worthy of our best romances, wherein men have ever dreamed of piercing the veil of memory in search of the ultimate secrets of Being. I can scarcely describe the excitement that possessed me when I first held in my hand a tiny vial of whitish powder, extracted from the sacred cactus, which the ancestors of the Aztecs worshipped millennia ago, when men believed in the Mysteries of Existence, now laid open to the dead knife of scientific analysis. Before me, in a heap of delicate needles, lay the divine power, which the ancient Indians identified with life itself — a supernatural and invisible force pervading the visible world, referred to by anthropologists as mana. Modern Indians say that God has sent His Holy Spirit in the form of the peyote plant, and he who eats thereof may take into himself this Power; he will see visions, obtain hidden knowledge, and be led to the Truth that evades his grasp. Even stranger claims have been made for the sacred mushroom, Teonanácatl, which can extend man’s vision to the future, to the past, or to remote occurrences of the present. Today, a third such chemical has emerged from the synthetic laboratory, derived artificially from the ergot fungus. All three substances have one thing in common: the power to penetrate that deepest layer of the human mind, that mysterious realm which lies beyond the veil of ordinary perception.
Excerpt © 2026 Eugene Seaich Estate and Eric Hendrickson.