Rolf Singer
<p class="MsoNormal" >Since the passage is known to be of Duran’s own hand, Wasson can’t claim it’s a forgery. So when he claims that “many men drunk and senseless killing themselves is repeated by white men unacquainted with the hallucinogenic mushrooms,” this is actually what is known as a <i>circumstantial ad hominem</i> attack. Wasson’s tactic is arguing that because these men were white (Wasson was also white), their whiteness prevented them from properly seeing the natives eating mushrooms and, using suggestibility, influencing victims to commit sacrifice and suicide. None of this fits into the “spiritual” imagery Wasson is trying to force on his readers. It’s an absurd argument, and then he speculates about their use of alcohol to further his unfounded attack. Above I stated that anthropologists and ethnographers need to also be careful of their own prejudices against the Spaniards and using loaded language against them, but Wasson was, after all, the Vice President of propaganda for J.P. Morgan Bank and the head of the CIA’s MKULTRA Subproject 58 program. He has to promote this stuff to the youth. Wasson continues further down the page:
Such passages in the chronicles of the Aztecs astonish us: the number of human sacrifices that are set forth in detail, the way in which they are keyed to the religious calendar, the variety of methods used in taking the lives of the victims many of them cruel taxing belief and, perhaps strangest of all, the presence at their deaths, on the invitation of the victorious Aztec king, of their kin and friends. All these elements leave us in a quandary. A well-known mycologist has expressed his view- that the victims, to prepare them for sacrifice, were fed massive doses of mushrooms:
It now becomes comprehensible how the sacrificial feasts of ancient Mexico were unable to provoke any defense from the thousands of chosen human victims that were sacrificed in a cruel and bloody manner: they won the full cooperation of the victims, according the all appearances after massive orgies of mushrooms.
There is no support for this conclusion in either Duran’s Cronica X nor in the testimony of Sahagun’s Nahuatl informants nor anywhere else. This mycologist was giving circulation in a scientific journal to his own idle fancies. He did not know his sources, readily available though they were to him.
~ Gordon Wasson citing a “well known mycologist”</p>
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Il deviant comprehensible maintenant comment tes fetes sacrificielles de l’ancien Mexique ont pu ne susciter aucune defense des milliers de victims humaines choisies qu’on y sacrifiait de maniere cruelle et sanglante: elles obtenaient la pleine cooperation des victimes, selon toute apparence apres des orgies massives de champignons.</p>
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Bulletin [?] Suisse de Mycologie, June 1958]</p>
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Bulletin Suisse de mycologie, june 1958</p>
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<a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Bulletin_Suisse_de_mycologie.html?id=uoxKAAAAYAAJ">https://books.google.com/books/about/Bulletin_Suisse_de_mycologie.html?id=uoxKAAAAYAAJ</a></p>
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<a href="http://eol.org/pages/191579/literature">http://eol.org/pages/191579/literature</a></p>
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Singer, R. 1958. Pilze, die Zerebralmyzetismen verursachen. Bulletin Suisse de Mycologie. Vol. 36. 8189</p>
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<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolf_Singer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolf_Singer</a></p>
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Very possibly Rolf Singer wrote it. </p>