Plants of the Gods: S8E6 Richard Evans Schultes' Legacy — Where Science Meets the Sacred

Well, you know, I think Schultes, um, um, [sighs] was a catalyst of dreams.

Um, he was such an open-minded individual, despite his sort of formidable, uh, conservative veneer.

Um, and I- I- I think such were the nature of his own experiences that just to walk in his shadow was to aspire to greatness.

I mean, here was a man who, um, you know, uh, attended Harvard, uh, the first of his family to go to university, but so poor he couldn't stay in the dorms, and he takes a job filing cards at, uh, in the, the library at Botanical Museum.

And surrounded by these folios and these monographs, he falls away into trance, and he takes the course that, uh, had been taught at Harvard longer than any other.

At that time, it was called Biology 16.

And the professor, Oakes Ames, was, um, a real libertarian.

And so throughout Prohibition, he expressed his contempt for the federal government by insisting that the students brew and drink copious amounts of alcohol-

[chuckles]

... at laboratory experiment.

And when it came time to these plants called the fantastica, which, uh, we now know as the entheogens or the hallucinogens, even the old professor had his limits, so they had to do a book report.

And Schultes raced to the back of the room to get the thinnest possible book to read, put it in his satchel, went home to his yellow tenement in East Boston, and that night, uh, botanical history was made because the book that he had selected by chance was Henrik Kluver's, um, monograph on peyote and mescaline, the only book available in the English language on that subject.

And throughout the night, he read of these visions of orb-like brilliance, and he became enchanted.

And he went back to Ames and said, "I have to know this plant." And so Ames pointed him to the literature and the Tarahumara and the Huichol.

And then the summer of, I guess it was 1936, yeah, I think '36, he and Weston La Barre, an anthropology student from Yale, headed out to Oklahoma Territory to study the Native American Church and the use of the peyote cult.

And, um, for four and sometimes five nights of this young man's life, um, he took peyote, and to say... needless to say, he came back a transformed individual.

And then he stumbled upon, while he did his undergraduate thesis on peyote, he stumbled upon the solution to one of the great enigmas of ethnobotany, and that was the identity of these two unknown Aztec sacred plants, teonanácatl and ololiuqui.

And, and there was a note from a obscure German engineer saying that teonanácatl was, in fact, a mushroom and that he had seen it used.

Schultes, um, made a beeline for Mexico City, and with Raco went up to the small Mazatec town of Huautla and became the first to actually collect botanical specimens proving that teonanácatl was indeed, um, a, a mushroom.

And the following year, he identified ololiuqui as being a, a morning glory.

And these were...

this was a sort of a seminal event that sparked the psychedelic era because Schultes then peeled away to the northwest Amazon, and the thread of that mystery is only taken up by Gordon Wasson in the early '50s, who had sent, had been sent by the poet Robert Graves, who was living on Majorca, a copy of Schultes' obscure 1940 paper on teonanácatl in American Anthropologist.

And that led Wasson to contact Schultes soon after he came back from Colombia in 1953.

It was Schultes that then directed Wasson to Huautla, um, and the Mazatec, including Maria Sabina, and Wasson became the first who, who outsider to actually ingest the mushrooms in ritual context.

He wrote it up for Life Magazine.