McKenna
But before we leave it, I have to tell a wonderful story about the telescope which relates to what we’ve been talking about. The telescope seems to be a good metaphor for psychedelics. When Galileo discovered the telescope, he was not immediately slapped down by the church. It took a few months for them to even sort out what the issue was here. And then, of course, eventually he had to recant. But in the year preceding his trial, Galileo was, of course—before the invention of the telescope—well known in influential circles in Rome as an inventor and natural scientist. So in his apartment, on the rooftop, he set up his telescope and would hold small garden parties for influential Roman citizens—among them great cardinals and princes of the church, who were involved in deciding the issue of whether or not he was dabbling in heretical material.
So one evening he had Cardinal Roncalli of the Holy Office—which is the keepers of the doctrine of the faith—and had him to dinner, and said, “Excellency, would you care to look through my telescope?” And the Cardinal allowed as how he would like to look through the telescope. And so Galileo pointed it at the full moon, which was rising over the city, and the Cardinal peered into the telescope. And Galileo said, “And so, Excellency, as you see, there appear to be oceans and range of mountains on our sister world.” And the Cardinal looked for a long time and said, “Yes, but, signore, surely we can agree among ourselves that this is only a hallucination!”
Well, it turns out they couldn’t agree among themselves that it was a hallucination. And I don’t think that we can agree with our establishment that what we perceive is only a hallucination. It is, and yet it isn’t. It is a true hallucination.
I remember once, in the Amazon, a very bizarre incident. I was lying with a fever in a hut, and stomach—some horrible thing had happened to me. Anyway, I was in a terrible state, and I heard these children singing outside in Spanish. And the song that they were singing, as I slowly and painfully translated it, I could hardly believe my ears. The song was: “Behold, behold, the final illusion. At last, at last, the final illusion.” And this is, I think, from the point of view of historical society, what we are looking at. We are looking at the final illusion. The body of Eros, expelled from Greece, burned at Eleusis, driven out of the European mind by busy and pesky celibates, denied, repressed, cut apart, lay in wait in the mountains of the new world for the European civilization that would eventually conquer the new world. And, as it burned and pillaged and raped its way deeper into the interior of the new continents that it proposed to put under European sway, at last, at last, in 1953, Gordon Wasson glimpsed the final illusion.
We have found! We—you remember I said yesterday that the archetype of Western society is the prodigal son: the wanderer who leaves his birthright, who leaves the comfort of the village and the bride who was planned for him, and goes out, and does something tremendous and ambiguous and unimaginable, and returns with the gift difficult to obtain, returns with the healing plant, the magic word, the jeweled crown, and lays it at the feet of the mother so long-parted from, and by that act creates a historical closure.
You’ll recall at the beginning of this weekend I talked about the hexagram that had been thrown for the fate of our planet: work on what has been spoiled through the line, work on what has been spoiled by the father. And what has been spoiled by the father is the feminine—and the planet as the exterior manifestation of the feminine—leading to the change, which is the cauldron: the alchemical vessel, the theater and laboratory of the witch’s magic, the potion that transforms. And in the act of transforming nature through cooking, in the act of transforming human nature through the cooking of the historical process, we have made ourselves unrecognizable to our ancestors, even as we shall be unrecognizable to our children. But, ladies and gentlemen, this soufflé is done. This pie is cooked. It’s time to take it out of the oven, give the oven a rest, and spread the board.
You know, with the passing of the patriarchy, I recall that wonderful line in Finnegan’s Wake where Joyce says, “Grampupus has fallen down, but grinny sprids the boord, sunny-side up with care. If you want to be Phoenixed, come and be parked. Because up n’ent, prospector, you’re going to sprout all your worth and woof your wings!” And so that’s what I invite you to do: to woof your wings! Woof, woof!