Table Of Content“Combining the breadth of a scholar, the savvy of an underground journalist, and
the open spirit of a radical empiricist, Graham St John has written the definitive
cultural history of the weirdest molecule on the planet (and in your body).
Mystery School in Hyperspace tells amazing tales, sheds light on the shadows,
and brilliantly referees the ongoing psychoactive rumble between the sacred and
profane.”
—Erik Davis, author of TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age
of Information
“Graham St John’s tour de force through the tapestry of alchemists, hippies, DJs,
scientists, shamans, mystics, and seekers of the mystery that DMT reveals is an
exhilarating ride and a thoroughly researched achievement. St John successfully
builds up a historical profile of both dimethyltryptamine and the quest to
understand it, piercing the mystery to bring back translinguistic trip reports that
illuminate the central gnosis of our time. As the latest generation of psychonauts
explores the invisible landscape of Terra Incognita, Mystery School in
Hyperspace could very well be the map that we have all been looking for.”
—Rak Razam, director of Aya: Awakenings
“Boldly going where no one had gone before, Graham St John takes his readers
on a properly hallucinatory yet extremely well documented tour through the
history of DMT. Analyzing six decades of radical countercultural
experimentation and exploration at the limits of human consciousness and
beyond, this is a significant contribution to the emerging study of entheogenic
religion”
—Wouter J. Hanegraaff, University of Amsterdam
“Wrap your mind around the most ubiquitous and profound psychedelic on the
planet, DMT! A multidimensional journey that provides a smorgasbord of
information, and will give seasoned psychonauts, dogmatic academics, culture
aficionados, and frankly any curious mind, plenty to chew on.”
—Mitch Schultz, founder of MYTHAPHI and director of DMT: The Spirit
Molecule
MYSTERY SCHOOL IN HYPERSPACE
A CULTURAL HISTORY OF
DMT
GRAHAM ST JOHN
Berkeley, California
Copyright © 2015 by Graham St John. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review,
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without written permission of the publisher. For
information contact Evolver Editions c/o North Atlantic Books.
Published by Evolver Editions, an imprint of North Atlantic Books Berkeley, California 94712
Cover art by Beau Deeley Cover design by Daniel Tesser Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural
History of DMT is sponsored and published by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences (dba
North Atlantic Books), an educational nonprofit based in Berkeley, California, that collaborates with
partners to develop cross-cultural perspectives, nurture holistic views of art, science, the humanities, and
healing, and seed personal and global transformation by publishing work on the relationship of body, spirit,
and nature.
DISCLAIMER: The following information is intended for general information purposes only. The publisher
does not advocate illegal activities but does believe in the right of individuals to have free access to
information and ideas. Any application of the material set forth in the following pages is at the reader’s
discretion and is his or her sole responsibility.
North Atlantic Books’ publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, visit our
website at www.northatlanticbooks.com or call 800-733-3000.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data St John, Graham, 1968—
Mystery school in hyperspace : a cultural history of DMT / Graham St John.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-58394-732-6 (paperback) — ISBN 978-1-58394-733-3 (e-book) 1. Hallucinogenic drugs. 2.
Dimethyltryptamine. 3. Fourth dimension (Parapsychology). 4. Hallucinogenic drugs and religious
experience. 5. Shamanism. I. Title.
BF209.H34S72 2015
204.2—dc23
2015012875
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A provocation of midwives encouraged this book into the world. Daniel
Pinchbeck initially forwarded the idea to North Atlantic Books in 2012, where
Doug Reil gave it a chance and with unswerving professionalism and a
dedication to excellence, Louis Swaim later oversaw the editorial production,
Adrienne Armstrong the copyediting, and Candace Hyatt, the index. Dennis
McKenna kindly wrote the foreword and provided valuable feedback. Jon Hanna
offered a thoroughgoing forensic assessment of Chapter Three along with
various other leads and connections. Rick Watson was most accommodating
with details and commentary concerning his material used in the book. Many
others responded kindly and with many crucial details to my relentless inquiries,
helping with the inclusion of original and interview material: Julian Palmer, Rick
Strassman, Ralph Metzner, Mitch Schultz, Nen, Carey Thompson, Ray Thorpe,
Gwyllm Llwydd, David Luke, Neil Pike, Raja Ram, Nik Sequenci, Youth,
Simon Ghahary, Olli and Miki Wisdom, Des Tramacchi, Rak Razam, Ed
Sanders, Tim Scully, Keeper Trout, Jonathan Taylor, Orryelle Defenestrate-
Bascule, Milosz, Floyd Davis, Dennis Tapper (Hux Flux), Robin Graat, and
Peter Hale. Many others remain nameless and blameless.
There are many artists whose marvelous artwork and photographs are
reproduced in the book. I won’t name them here, as they are in the List of
Illustrations. A few artists warrant mention: Beau Deeley, whose Divine
Moments of Truth graces the book’s cover and who contributed another work to
the project; Adam Scott Miller, whose piece Condewsinc was used on the first
draft cover; and Cyb, whose epic oeuvre could fill a book (and who donated
several works to the project).
Research and writing for the book was undertaken over a few years, with
many friends contributing in unique ways to the project: nanobrain, Julian, Paris,
Jules, Eric, Yoyo, Jay, Sean and Mish, Damo, Pascal and Lydia, Kathleen,
Wolfgang, Mattias, Ian, Kurt, Rak, Alex, Chiara, Gen, Gwyllm, Michael, Ted,
Geert and Linda, and Csaba.
Most thanks go to the inspirational freakloriate himself, Terence McKenna;
and not least of all, the Spice Queen.
I should point out that, while I received assistance from those mentioned
above, I assume full responsibility for all content, including any errors, in this
book.
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Foreword by Dennis J. McKenna
Prologue
1. DMT: An Enigma Wrapped in a Mystery
2. Nightmare Hallucinogen?
3. Transcendental Trigger: The Keys to the Cosmic Hard Drive
4. La Chorrera: Jungle Alchemy and the Consciousness (R)evolution
5. Room 531: The Pineal Enigma
6. Entheogenic Culture and the Research Underground
7. Remixticism: Media Shamans and the Entheonic Milieu
8. Divine Moments of Truth
9. The Hyper Space Age
10. Breaking Through: Heroic Doses and Little Deaths
11. Virtual Threshold: Visionary Art and the Liminal Aesthetics of DMT
12. Entity Mosaic: Creatures from the Trypt
13. The Many-Sided Mystery of DMT
Endnotes
References
Discography
Filmography
Index
About the Author
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Cover: Divine Moments of Truth, by Beau Deeley (2009), www.beaudeeley.net.
Figure 1. Dreamcatcher, by Android Jones, www.androidjones.com.
Figure 2. Burroughs. Oil painting on canvas, by Jay Lincoln (2005).
Figure 3. Felinus Holographicus, by Cyb (2012).
Figure 4. Neal Cassady at Millbrook (1964). Allen Ginsberg LLC, 2015.
Figure 5. Jack Kerouac on a Visit to Manhattan (1964). Allen Ginsberg LLC,
2015.
Figure 6. Dennis and Terence McKenna. The Brotherhood of the Screaming
Abyss (1971). Photo: Dennis McKenna.
Figure 7. Terence McKenna. Photo by Kathleen Harrison (1976).
Figure 8. Bushfire of Life, by Shiptu Shaboo (2013).
Figure 9. Curandera. Oil on canvas, by Martina Hoffmann (2012). 48”×42”/
122×107 cm.
Figure 10. Divine Messenger of Truth, by Randal Roberts.
Figure 11. Contact, by Cyb (2014).
Figure 12. Hidoodlydo Neighbor, by Art Van D’lay (2014).
Figure 13. Vishvarupa, by Luke Brown (2015).
Figure 14. Condewsync: Transpiration of the Bose-Einstein Condensate. Oil
paint, chalk pastel, pencil on 24”×18” bristol on board, by Adam Scott
Miller (2012).
Figure 15. Transfiguration. Oil on canvas with mixed-media frame, by Alex
Grey (1993).
Figure 16. Beyond the Gate Keepers, by Gwyllm Llwydd (2013).
Figure 17. Soul Food from the Inner Sun. Digital artwork, by Jayarama Bryan
(2014).
Figure 18. DiMethyl Temple at Burning Man 2005. Photo by Jesse Cohn.
Figure 19. Diosa Madre Tierra. Oil painting, by Carey Thompson (2002),
www.galactivation.com.
Figure 20. Dance Temple, Boom Festival, 2012. Photo by Jakob Kolar,
www.jakobkolar.com.
Figure 21. Psychonautica vol. 1 cover design, by Mister Strange.
Figure 22. Forward Escape, by Android Jones (2014), www.androidjones.com.
Figure 23. Metamorph, by Cyb (2014).
Figure 24. Intentionality: Dimensions of Manifestation, by Beau Deeley (2014),
www.beaudeeley.net.
Figure 25. Melek Taus and the Path of Venus, by Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule.
Oils, peacock-egg-tempera, gold and copper leaf, peacock feathers,
snakeskin (2015), www.crossroads.wild.net.au/esoterotica.html.
Figure 26. Four Legged Myrtle, in Contemplation of That Which Is Not Yet
Revealed, by Art Van D’lay (2013).
Figure 27. Panspermia, by Stuart Griggs (2014).
Figure 28. Languages, by Marianna Stelmach (2011).
FOREWORD
by Dennis J. McKenna
DMT (N,N-dimethyltryptamine) is, structurally, the least complex of the
naturally occurring psychedelics, and yet it is the most enigmatic. In biology, it
derives from tryptophan, one of the twenty amino acids that are coded by DNA
as structural elements of proteins. Tryptophan is found universally in living
systems, from the simplest bacteria to the most complex lifeforms. DMT
originates from tryptophan via two utterly trivial enzymatic steps, the cleavage
of the carboxylic acid group to yield tryptamine, and the addition of two methyl
groups to the side-chain nitrogen. The enzymes that catalyze these reactions
serve multiple functions in basic cellular metabolism, and thus, like tryptophan
itself, are also universal components in living systems. Since tryptophan, the
precursor to DMT, is present in every living thing, the implication is that DMT
itself very likely occurs—albeit usually at vanishingly small levels—in every
living organism on the planet. Nature, in other words, is drenched in DMT. Is
this simply an accident of biochemistry or is it an indication of something more
profound, an inherent “intelligence” that is built into nature? DMT invites us to
look just a little more closely at the most fundamental levels of biological
organization to perceive there a mystery, present since the origins of life and yet
unsuspected until the vicissitudes of evolution granted a certain group of
primates the neural complexity to apprehend its pharmacology, and the tools to
isolate it, and the capacity for astonishment at the transcendent vistas it
illuminates.
DMT was synthesized in the 1930s but was not recognized as a natural
compound until 1946; and its psychedelic properties were not recognized until
1956, following the heroic self-experiments of Hungarian psychiatrist Stephen
Szára. Of course, plant-based preparations containing DMT and other
tryptamines as the active constituents were at the center of New World shamanic
traditions for millennia before Western science turned its gaze in their direction.
Unambiguous archaeological evidence, in the form of carved snuff trays and
snuffing tubes, confirms that DMT-containing snuffs prepared from
Anadenanthera species were in use in the pre-Incan Tiwanaku culture possibly
as early as 1000 BCE. Snuff trays have also been recovered from the most
ancient megalithic site of the New World, the five-thousand-year-old ancient
city of Caral-Supe (also known as the Norte Chico civilization) of north-central
coastal Peru. It is likely that the shamanic technologies utilizing Anadenanthera
in these ancient civilizations predated the construction of these megalithic
structures by centuries, if not millennia.
DMT can be viewed as a kind of molecular virus, permeating nature since
earliest times, quietly awaiting discovery by neurologically complex, curious,
tool-using, language-using primates. The human species has been learning from
DMT ever since this coevolutionary partnership was forged. We have barely
scratched the surface of what it has to teach us.
Graham St John’s landmark work, Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural
History of DMT, should more properly be termed a “modern cultural history,”
because it focuses on the twentieth-century events that followed its discovery by
science. The prehistoric and indigenous use of DMT in New World shamanism
is a prequel to the story narrated here, which begins in the mid-twentieth century
following its isolation in several plant species and Szára’s self-experiments
demonstrating its psychedelic properties. Although the decades discussed in this
work encompass a relatively short time frame compared to the centuries of its
indigenous usage, the story is nevertheless both rich, and dense. What St John’s
narrative makes clear is that DMT has a modern cultural history, a realization
that comes as a bit of a surprise to those accustomed to thinking of it in the
context of its ethnopharmacologic history. DMT came to the attention of science
in the mid-1950s, in an era before “psychedelics” as a class had become vilified
and marginalized, but also at a time when the newly minted discovery from
Sandoz Laboratories, LSD-25, was creating most of the excitement and
garnering all of the attention. By 1956, the year of Szára’s self-experiments, the
curious and fascinating properties of LSD had been known for some thirteen
years, ever since Albert Hofmann’s wild bicycle ride through the streets of Basel
on April 19, 1943. Hofmann’s discovery sparked great interest in the psychiatric
and neuroscientific communities (such as they were at the time), especially when
its structural resemblance to the recently discovered neurotransmitter, serotonin,
was noted, and because its unique psychological effects appeared to be partly
mediated by effects on serotonin. Speculation was rife that an endogenous
metabolite resembling LSD might play some role in the etiology of mental
illness, and the search for a possible “endogenous psychotogen” became a bit of
a Holy Grail quest for the emerging science of biological psychiatry. Stephen
Szára, at the time head of the Biochemistry program at Lipótmezõ, Budapest,
was one of those questing scientists. Stymied by Sandoz’s denial of his request
for clinical samples of LSD (probably because he was working behind the Iron
Curtain), Szára turned his attention to DMT, stimulated by recent reports of its
isolation from samples of cohoba, a psychoactive snuff powder prepared from
the seeds of Anadenanthera peregrina by the Taino Indians. With the help of his
colleague, chemist Miomir Mészáros, Szára cooked up 20 g of DMT and after
some animal experiments and a false start in which he discovered the oral
inactivity of DMT, he injected 75 mg and thereby became what St John has
termed “the Neil Armstrong of DMT.” Thus began the scientific and cultural
odyssey of DMT in modern times.
It is an odyssey that continues to unfold in the decades following.
Unsurprisingly, William Burroughs was among the first of his countercultural
generation to explore its properties, and pronounced it a “nightmare
hallucinogen.” Such a sinister compound could not and did not escape the
attention of the CIA’s MKUltra program in “mind control,” sited in the VA
Hospital in Menlo Park, California, and the nearby Stanford Research Institute.
Some four years after Burroughs’s experiments with a DMT-enriched extract
that he called “Prestonia” triggered his nightmare trips, Terence McKenna’s
ontological reference frame was thoroughly shattered by his first encounter with
DMT in his apartment in Berkeley in 1965; according to the apocryphal myth,
the source of this material was boosted by an unknown “mole” at the SRI from a
putative “fifty gallon drum” of military-grade DMT; more likely it found its way
to Terence through the aegis of his high school friend, one William Patrick
Watson, who was working on a summer organic chemistry project at the
Stanford School of Medicine. In his unpublished account of the events leading
up to Terence’s encounter with DMT, Watson speculates that, rather than
fencing government research chemicals as he thought, he (Watson) was an
unwitting participant in a “controlled release program” in which these chemicals
were selectively disseminated into civilian populations while maintaining
plausible deniability for the agencies conducting this covert program.
Whatever the ultimate source of the catalytic chemical that Terence
bioassayed on that rainy night in Berkeley, there is no denying that it changed
him, and everything, forever. Unlike Burroughs, who found a nightmare in
DMT, Terence discovered the “Secret that cannot be told,” and it was in quest of
an understanding of this Secret that led us, as brothers, to undertake our journey
to La Chorrera in Amazonian Colombia in 1971 and there to execute the now-
famous “experiment at La Chorrera.” For the next three decades, until his death
in April 2000, Terence’s life and career, as well as my own in part, unfolded in
the light of the discoveries and revelations we stumbled upon together in the
mist-shrouded pastures of that remote Colombian mission. I remained out of the
public eye, by choice and inclination, focusing on my scientific endeavors;
Terence, however, by choice and perhaps compelled by destiny, became the
public spokesman for DMT and mushrooms. Our collaborations in developing
and publishing the simple techniques for growing psilocybin mushrooms from
spores collected at La Chorrera opened the visionary portals to the wider world.
The methods for growing mushrooms, and eventually simple techniques for
extracting DMT-rich fractions from numerous plant sources, have been
developed and improved over the years by a new and younger generation of
aspiring psychonauts, so that now the “tryptamine dimension”1—for that’s really
what it is—is accessible to anyone with the courage and motivation to visit its
exotic shores. And yet it remains a Secret, and a Mystery; as fascinating and
puzzling to twenty-first-century humans as it was to the first curious primate
who ever munched mushrooms and closed their eyes in wonder.
As a species, and as a society, we are not done with DMT, or perhaps it is
more accurate to say that DMT is not done with us. It continues to teach, and we
continue to learn from it. DMT has spawned entire movements of visionary art
and mind-altering music. New psychedelic communities, committed to ritual and
spiritual explorations, have coalesced around it. Some are even proposing to
initiate formal diplomatic relations with the hyperdimensional entities they have
encountered “beyond the chrysanthemum.” Experimental ethnopharmacologists
have developed new formulations of DMT-rich extracts generically known as
“changa” that have made it more accessible, less “alien,” and certainly more
widespread. Building on the pioneering work of neuroscientists such as Szára,
Julius Axelrod, and psychiatrist Rick Strassman, we now know that DMT is
endogenous in the body and brain, that it is indeed a “spirit molecule” whose
functions, while still poorly understood, must be profound, that must, in fact, lie
at the heart of what it means to be conscious beings in a universe of life and
mind and intelligence.
The cultural, historical, and evolutionary story of DMT is still being written.
Graham St John’s engaging and well-researched chronicle casts its gaze back on
the recent past much as a traveler crossing a pass might pause to look back on a
road hard traveled, and provides an important and much-needed narrative of the
events that have transpired since science’s discovery of the Spirit Molecule. The
future of this ongoing relationship, as futures usually are, is a bit murkier but it is
likely that we will be seeking to understand the Secret for some time to come.
