Bertram Wolfe

<p class="MsoNormal" >On September 26, 1970, Wasson published an article in the New York Times wherein he’s supposedly distraught and expresses remorse regarding the then recent reports of “hippies, psychopaths and adventurers and pseudo-research workers” descending on Huautla de Jimenez in Oaxaca, Mexico:

Huautla, when I first knew it as a humble out-of-the-way Indian village, has become a true mecca for hippies, psychopaths, adventurers, pseudo-research workers, the miscellaneous crew of our society’s drop-outs. The old ways are dead and I fear that my responsibility is heavy, mine and Maria Sabina’s. […]

As for me, what have I done? I made a cultural discovery of importance. Should I have suppressed it? It has led to further discoveries the reach of which remains to be seen. Should these further discoveries have remained stultified by my unwillingness to reveal the secret of the Indians’ hallucinogens?

Yet what I have done gives me nightmares: I have unleashed on lovely Huautla a torrent of commercial exploitation of the vilest kind. Now the mushrooms are exposed for sale everywhere—in every market-place, in every village doorway. Everyone offers his services as a “priest” of the rite, even the politicos. […] The whole of the countryside is agog with the furtive movements of hippies, the comings and goings of the “federalistas,” the Dogberries with their blundering efforts to root them out.<a id="ednref1" href="#edn1" name="_ednref1" title="">[i]</a>

~ R. Gordon Wasson

Here’s a very startling conversation between Wasson and Bertram Wolfe that I found in the Bertram Wolfe papers at The Hoover Institute at Stanford, which puts Wasson’s <i>New York Times</i> article in a whole new light:

October 8, 1970:

Dear Mr. Wasson:

I was greatly interested in your article in the New York Times on “The Sacred Mushroom.” […] I marked your note of sadness near the end and wish to tell you that you have nothing to reproach yourself for. Knowledge will out. If one man doesn’t spread it another will. The hippies, peddlers, and Dogberries will in, for nature abhors a vacuum. You may have hastened it a little by publishing in Life, rather than in a magazine of anthropologists, but the process was inevitable […]<a id="ednref2" href="#edn2" name="_ednref2" title="">[ii]</a>

~ Bertram Wolfe

October 13, 1970:

Dear Mr. Wolfe: [...] Do you remember your last letter to me? I was asking you where Tolstoy had said the printing press was a mighty engine for disseminating ignorance. <u>This Mazatec affair is a case in point</u>.<a id="ednref3" href="#edn3" name="_ednref3" title="">[iii]</a> [emphasis – mine]

~ R. Gordon Wasson</p>

<p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a id="edn1" href="#ednref1" name="_edn1" title="">[i]</a> Gordon Wasson. "Drugs: The Sacred Mushroom." <i>The New York Times</i>, 26 Sept 1970, p. 29.</p>

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<p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a id="edn2" href="#ednref2" name="_edn2" title="">[ii]</a> Hoover Institute, Stanford University. Bertram D. Wolfe papers. Box: 15, Folder: 72</p>

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Bertram Wolfe

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