Aegypt

Took 15 gms of my Psilocybe cubensis powder at 7pm last night on an empty stomach. The effects were evident after only 15 minutes. No sense of time after 7.30pm and generally oblivious to what was happening elsewhere in the house.

Initially, the dominant imagery was that of clowns, a carnival atmosphere, gaiety, everything very light-hearted. (Echoes of that wonderful essay called `The Mushrooms of Language' by Henry Munn). Then suddenly there was a transition and the whole trip become totally awash with mythic Egyptian imagery; especially that of birds - the falcon and vultures - and the presence of artefactual images of the gods Isis and Horus. All overwhelmingly intense and baroque.

Mythic Egypt became totally real, as if it exists eternally in another dimension of being. Strong images of the Nile and papyrus growing from its waters. V (my wife) came in at one stage and starting making love to me. All very exotic, erotic and far-out. She played the part of the High Priestess of Isis superbly, eventually leaving me and telling me that I should now be alone. Her reassuring presence in the house was vitally important during the whole trip. When we were making love she had a bird's face, with pointed ears, soft, dewy bird-like eyes with whispy, upturned eyebrows and eye lashes. She was like some beautiful, avian, extra-terrestrial visitor to Planet Earth. (Perhaps there was a visitor and it temporarily incarnated itself in her body.)

Nine years ago the pivotal LSD trip that I took one night in a snow-blown graveyard in Zurich, Switzerland, featured the mythic presence of Wotan/Attis, sacrificed on a tree. It was a darker, gloomier, more Gothic sort of trip than this one. (I suppose hardly surprising considering where I was tripping.) This mushroom trip was sunnier, more care-free, and lacked the overwhelming emphasis on death and putrefaction that was a feature of the Zurich one. This time birth was the central issue. Major insights on the trip were that Xmas was terribly important, the 25th of December sitting solid as a rock, unshakeable. The great mystery glimpsed was that of the birth of a wondrous child. (Jesus/Horus?).

I felt on the trip that it was very important that we should go and see L and her child in hospital. (A sort of parallel with the visitors to Mary and Jesus two millenia ago.) I realised what a great sadness it was for B not to be able to have children. In the early hours of the morning I started verbalising this to V - using the metaphor that barren women had a bottomless well of tears within them.

 Images of the mushrooms I am busy growing, and the small green leaves of my sinsemilla bush, were intertwined throughout all the Egyptian imagery. Things got pretty far out at times, at one stage I believed that I could mentally draw V back into the room whenever I chose to do so. I tried, and low and behold it happened! Heaviest of all was the experience of time compressing and accelerating, and that I was rocketing forward towards the Ultimate Truth, but uncertain as to whether I was ready to witness it. Time was at times like a roll of film being wound up, until there was no longer any time as such, just a solid circular object floating in a sea of infinite, eternal space.

At times I felt like calling to V for a tranquilliser to bring me down, but fortuntely I resisted the impulse. At times I was so far, far out that there did not seem to be any possibility of my ever coming back down again. Some heavy fears during the trip about the possibility of not being able to return to normal after this overwhelming experience.

A welter of Egyptian hieroglyphics permeated the trip - baroque, multitudinous, detailed - a total orgy of Egypt. And always, always, everywhere the falcon head of Horus. An image that came to mind quite a few times was that of the eagle picking up the shaman in his talons (the one appearing in the Joan Halifax book on shamanism).

The whole trip was far longer than I had anticipated, the main part lasting all of seven hours (7.30pm - 1.30am) and another five hours of being pretty high, making it a 12 hour trip in all. In fact it is now 9.30 am and I'm still pretty buzzy. No doubt the epic dose was responsible for the long duration of the experience.

Had some acute diarrhoea during the later part of night but this didn't phase me as I felt that this was all a very necessary part of the trip - images of the rich, brown fertile soil washed down by the Nile!

Quite a poignant moment when the cock next door started crowing before sunrise. It was no longer just a banal, irritating domestic fowl, but something extremely exotic and other-worldly. Interesting how so much of my imagery on my LSD death-trip nine years ago was of writhing, fanged snakes, now this time it was the bird image that dominated. Certainly preferable!

My experience was not the UFO one that McKenna raps about on his tapes, but it was in its own way even more bizarre than anything I could have imagined. The big question now is what do I DO with this event? Meditate on it I suppose, try to bring my life in line with the truths that it offered. I really have had a powerful shamanic initiation for which I am very glad and grateful. Thank goodness that my long and frustrating efforts at mushroom growing have finally been justified. How appropriate too that my first successful flush of mushrooms should have come at Xmas time. Los Ninos - Children of the Gods.

I think it will be some time before I make another venture out into these spaces. It's really wonderful to have survived back to reality. Sometimes the trip was just altogether too much, everything literally dripping in the essential spirit of mythic Egypt. Mostly all too luxuriant and overwhelming.

I feel as if I have reprogrammed myself in some way, as if my mind is the soft clay into which all these Egyptian images have been imbedded. So what do I do with this new programming? Idea of all these images being a sort of circuitry that actually transcends the individual meanings that hieroglyphic experts give to them. The idea that there is a Living Mystery lying at the heart of Egyptian mythology that is the most important thing on earth. Perhaps the key lies in the notion of hieroglyphics representing a sort of solid state circuitry - ie the images must be intuitively grasped in their entirety, not broken down and analysed as a form of language.

These last few hours of writing are perhaps the most important part of the whole trip - integrating everything that happened before I finally go to sleep. (Though there's little chance of that at the moment!) It's now close on 16 hours since I took the mushrooms and I'm still very sensitised. Thank God I don't have to do anything demanding today. I feel it would be very difficult to cope with any serious stress at the moment.