The Spirit of Two Pairs

by Albert Hofmann, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

A pill of the kind I carried into the Sierra Mazateca in the autumn of 1962 held five milligrams of psilocybin. It was white, it had no taste, and it had been made in Basel from starting materials that had never been near a mushroom. In a laboratory that is all that needs to be said about it. The compound is 4-phosphoryloxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine; it is identical in every atom with the principle I had crystallised four years earlier from the little brown Psilocybe mexicana, and a chemist who asks whether the synthetic substance "is" the natural one has not understood what a molecule is.

I had not travelled to Mexico to ask that question, all the same. It was asked of me, on the night of Thursday the eleventh of October, in the village of Huautla de Jiménez, by a woman who could neither read nor write and who had eaten the sacred mushrooms since she was a girl. Her name was María Sabina. I would like to set down what happened, because I have come to think it was the most exact test that psilocybin was ever given, and it was not I who designed it.

The mushrooms that made everything Mexican

Some years before, when the mushrooms had first come to us in Basel, I had to find out whether the dried specimens were active at all. Roger Heim in Paris had succeeded in cultivating them, and there was no animal whose behaviour would tell us what a Mazatec curandera meant when she said the mushroom spoke. So I ate thirty-two of them, which together weighed 2.4 grams. By the reports from Mexico, that was an average dose.

Within half an hour the room had changed. Everything took on a Mexican character: the colours, the forms, the ornament of whatever my eyes rested on, whether they were open or closed. When the physician supervising the experiment leaned over me to take my blood pressure, he became an Aztec priest, and I should not have been surprised if he had drawn a knife of obsidian. I knew perfectly well that he was a colleague and that I was lying on a couch in Basel. Knowing it did not help.

I record this because it was my first lesson in something I did not yet have a name for. I had read about Mexico and looked at pictures of Mexico; the mushroom had been picked in Mexico and had come to me with the whole story of Mexico around it. In the experience, all of that was given back to me. The substance did not put Aztec priests into my head. It found what I had brought and showed it to me with an intensity I had never given it myself. The mushroom was a sender, if you like, but what it sent went into a receiver already tuned, and what came out was what the receiver already held.

From that material we isolated two substances, which I named psilocybin and psilocin, and in the spring of 1958 we published them. By the autumn we had their structures and a synthesis. From then on the mushrooms were no longer needed. The active principle could be made in any quantity, dosed to the milligram, pressed into pills.

The mushrooms, one might say, had been made redundant. I did not quite believe it.

The leaves of the Shepherdess

In 1962 Gordon Wasson asked me to go with him into the mountains of Oaxaca. He was a banker by profession and a scholar of mushrooms by passion, and it was he who, seven years before, with a photographer friend, had been among the first outsiders admitted to a Mazatec mushroom ceremony, a velada, in María Sabina's house. His article about it in Life had made the mushrooms famous and had brought them to me. The purpose of the new journey was a different plant: the leaves the Mazatecs call hojas de la Pastora, the leaves of the Shepherdess, which they used when mushrooms were scarce. My wife Anita came with us, and Irmgard Weitlaner Johnson, who knew the region and its people better than any of us.

We travelled for days on mule tracks. At San José Tenango a curandera, Consuelo García, admitted us after dark to her solitary hut, crushed the fresh leaves, strained the juice through a sieve, held it in the smoke of copal, and gave it out by pairs. Anita and Gordon saw things; I was given none that night. Outside there was a thunderstorm. We brought leaves and juice back with us, and the botanists later found the plant to be a sage no one had described, which they named Salvia divinorum.

I will say plainly that as a chemist I failed with it. The juice I had preserved in alcohol was inactive by the time I tested it on myself in Basel, and the leaves would not give up their secret to me. Whatever the Shepherdess keeps in her leaves, it is unstable, and it did not survive the journey to a laboratory half the world away from where it grew. Other men found it many years later. I mention the failure because it belongs to the story. Not every principle waits patiently to be carried home.

The veranda of Doña Herlinda

At the end of the journey we came to Huautla, and Gordon took us to see María Sabina.

She had paid for her hospitality to him. Some people in the village regarded what she had done, admitting foreigners to the velada and allowing it to be photographed and written about, as a betrayal of the sacred, and her house had been burned. We found her in a new one, full of children and hens and pigs. She was small, grave, and entirely without self-consciousness. Through our interpreter, Doña Herlinda, Gordon asked whether she would hold a ceremony for us. It was the wrong season for mushrooms; there were none to be had. I had brought my pills.

This was the moment I had come to Mexico for without knowing it. I had the mushroom's principle in a bottle. I had tested it on myself and on volunteers, and every measurement said that it was the same thing. But a measurement is taken with instruments I chose myself, and it answers the questions I know how to ask. Here was a person who had known the mushroom for half a century not as a substance but as a presence, who called the mushrooms the holy children and listened to what they said, and who would know, better than any instrument, whether something was missing.

Through Doña Herlinda I explained that one pill contained the spirit of two pairs of mushrooms. This was a translation of five milligrams into the currency of the ceremony, where the mushrooms are always eaten by pairs. It was true. María Sabina agreed to try.

The ceremony took place in Doña Herlinda's house. María Sabina came with a large company: her two daughters, Apolonia, herself a curandera, and Aurora; a niece; and an old curandero, Don Aurelio, a massive man with one eye. The door was locked. We lay on bast mats in the dark. Copal was burned. María Sabina distributed the pills herself, as she would have distributed mushrooms: two pairs each, that is twenty milligrams, to herself, to Don Aurelio and to Apolonia; one pair to Aurora and to Gordon; a single pill each to Anita and Irmgard. For myself I took the juice of five pairs of fresh leaves of the Shepherdess, which a child had prepared, because I wanted to know that plant as well. It left me for some time in a state of great sensitivity and intense experience, but without visions. I was, that night, mostly a witness.

Forty minutes

About forty minutes passed, and nothing happened.

Then María Sabina said that the pills did not have the spirit of the mushrooms.

It was not a comfortable moment. It was the whole question put in a single sentence by the only judge whose verdict mattered to me, and the verdict was: no. Everything I believed about the identity of the molecule was on one side, and on the other side a woman in the dark who could not have known what a molecule was and who knew exactly what she was waiting for.

But I had a chemist's explanation, and Gordon and I both understood it. A fresh mushroom is chewed for a long time, and the principle begins to enter the body through the mucous membranes of the mouth. A pill must first dissolve in the stomach. Its effect comes later. Nothing was missing from the pills; they were slow.

We did not explain this. There was no way to explain gastric absorption on a mat in the dark in Huautla, and it would have been discourteous to try. We gave out more pills: another pair each to the two curanderas and to the curandero, which brought each of them to thirty milligrams.

Within a quarter of an hour the ceremony was fully alive. María Sabina sang and prayed, and the daughters and Don Aurelio answered her. Apolonia and Aurora gave out long, yearning, blissful moans, in which the religious and the sensual were not separated as we separate them. At a certain point María Sabina asked Gordon what his question was, for one brings a question to a velada as one brings a question to a physician. His daughter was in hospital, expecting a child, and he had had no news of her. María Sabina told him that mother and child were well. He found afterwards that they were.

Anita, who had taken only a single pill, lay in the dark and saw extraordinarily distinct patterns of lines, strange and very precise, which she could not place.

At dawn, when we were leaving, María Sabina said through Doña Herlinda that the pills had the same power as the mushrooms, that there was no difference.

I gave her a small bottle of pills. She told Doña Herlinda, with real joy, that now she would be able to give consultations even in the months when no mushrooms grew.

What she tested

I have thought about that night for longer than I have thought about almost anything except one afternoon in 1943, and I can now say what was tested and what was not.

The molecule was tested, and it passed. The most competent judge in the world, applying the only standard that counted, found that nothing of the mushroom's power was missing from a white pill made in Basel. That was a triumph for chemistry, and I do not hide that I was proud of it. It confirmed what I had held since my first experiment with LSD: the active principle does not carry some vague natural virtue that the synthetic copy lacks. The key is the key, whoever cuts it.

But look at what else was in the room. A locked door. Darkness. Copal. A woman who had sung to these mushrooms for fifty years, and who knew the way in and, more important, the way out. Her daughters answering her. A question brought to the ceremony and an answer received. Every person there, except perhaps myself, knew what the night was for. The pills went into a container that had been built over centuries, if not longer, and the container received them as it would have received the mushrooms, because the container does not care which way the key was cut.

María Sabina's verdict was no difference. She was right. The difference was never in the pills. It lay in everything the pills went into.

When I think of the vial of pills in her hands at dawn, I am glad she had it. It was the right substance in the right hands, as right as anything I ever made has been. When I think of what followed in Huautla in the years after, I am less glad. Our publications, Gordon's and mine, drew the searchers: young people from America and Europe who came up the mountain wanting the experience without the ceremony, and who brought with them the police, the traffic, the souvenir-sellers and all the rest. Huautla lost what it had been. María Sabina herself said, near the end of her life, that from the moment the foreigners came, the holy children lost their purity. I believe her. She was a better judge of that than I am, as she had been a better judge of my pills.

People have asked me whether I regret what came of LSD. My answer has always been that I regret the conditions into which it was released, not the substance. Huautla was the same lesson on a smaller scale. The molecule that María Sabina received as a sacrament was, in the hands of a tourist in a rented room, the same molecule. The same thirty milligrams. It entered another receiver and was given no container. What came out of it was not a consultation. I did not make that difference, and chemistry cannot close it.

The patterns

I said that Anita saw lines that night and could not place them. She placed them later, in the colonial churches near Puebla. There, in the ornament carved and painted by Indian craftsmen, she found them: the same distinct, strange patterns she had seen in the dark in Huautla.

I have never had a better answer to the question of whether we discovered anything with these substances or only recovered it. I was fifty-six that autumn. I had been a child in the forest above Baden, and I had found that forest path again one April day in 1943 with a substance I had synthesised myself; and I would later come to believe, with Gordon and Carl Ruck, that the initiates of Eleusis had walked the same path for two thousand years. The Indians of those mountains had never lost it. They had only hidden it, first from the Spanish priests and then from us. And it may be that the craftsmen who carved those churches had set its patterns in stone under the very eyes of the priests, where anyone could see them and hardly anyone did.

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Albert Hofmann, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quārtum Kalendās Octōbrēs (28 September 2026), ab Albertō Hofmannō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

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