Divine Voyeurs: Salvia on YouTube
This article originally appeared in Journeybook: Travels on the Frontiers of Consciousness, a recently released anthology of altered states, essays, history and manifesto for psychedelic culture in the 21st century. It covers the modern usage of sacramental plants and offers insights into traditional and contemporary shamanism, as well as analysis of the current state of global psychedelic culture and its place in a sustainable future.
Phil's sitting on a bed in a crashpad somewhere in the UK about to smoke Salvia Divinorum, an ancient Mazatec hallucinogenic herb. He's a gangly lad in his 20s with shoulder-length dark hair, dressed in blue jeans and a dark t-shirt. As his friend hands him the bong he bites his lip in anticipation of this strange new drug he's about to be filmed taking, which will later be posted on YouTube and broadcast to the world.
The background music is "Over The Line" by The Crystal Method from the Tweekend album, a chilled favourite of the salvia set. Phil's friend lights the bong -- it's a 5x dose, not a massive hit but a decent sized pinch. Smoke curls up the chamber. Phil coughs, quickly holds his nose to stop any smoke escaping, then leans back against the wall as the effects start to come on. Within seconds he's in another world. A smile breaks across his face and he keeps reaching forward like he's grasping for something interdimensionally, trying to cut and open a door in the air with his hands.
"Ah, now I get it," he says, his speech slurred and his body motor control impaired. He begins fidgeting around on the bed, gesticulating erratically. "Whooaww, whooaahhh" he says, over and over, waving his arms above his head like he's at a rock concert. It'd be tragic if it wasn't so funny.
And Phil's not alone: middle class white stoners in the suburbs; boys in the hood; party crews in Beverly Hills; drug geeks in their bedrooms. A new wave of psychedelic trippers are smoking salvia and posting their experiences on YouTube in a social networking phenomenon that's flustering parents and lawmakers around the world, and exposing the ritual of drug taking as never before. Now even the sacred is commercial, just another content package for a hungry world.
Author D.M. Turner states in his book, Salvinorin -- The Psychedelic Essence of Salvia Divinorum that the plant's effects may include: "Uncontrollable laughter, past memories, such as revisiting places from childhood, sensations of motion, or being pulled or twisted by forces; visions of membranes, films and various two-dimensional surfaces; merging with or becoming objects and overlapping realities, such as the perception of being in several locations at once." Is there any wonder bored kids across the Western world are turning to it in droves?
This isn't the first time users have broadcast their attempts to break open their head and explore higher consciousness. There were the Romantic poets -- Byron, Shelley, Keats et al, whose indulgences in laudanum made for some florid 19th century poetry. Thomas de Quincey similarly bared his altered state in Confessions of an English Opium Eater. And the 20th century was synonymous with writers and the drugs they explored: Leary and Kesey (LSD); Burroughs and Irving Welsh (heroin); Hunter S. Thomson (speed, mescaline and whatever he could get his hands on), to name just a few. But this time it's different -- now the internet allows the masses to share video footage of their trips with a global public -- so you don't have to read about it, you can see it, virtually in real-time.
Stevo looks a little like the guy from Harry Potter, caught in the headlights of a UFO. "How do you feel bro?" his friend asks, giggling at his utterly bewildered state. Salvia divinorum, also known as "Diviner's Sage," has been called "the most powerful hallucinogenic known to mankind" by enthusiasts on the net. How do you think he feels on salvia with a camera phone in his face? Stevo's confused, disorientated, and he needs help. He's been thrust into a completely alien headspace and all his friend here can do is assault him with his camera phone, laughing his ass off.
"Where... what's going to happen?" Stevo asks, like a small child.
"Its just a drug, it's that salvia shit we just picked up. C'mon bro. It's going to go away... Let me try this shit out bro... Is it sick or what?"
Totally sick, bro. Because in the post-Jackass, reality-TV generation nothing is sacred. Not the person's individual trip, nor the drug they use to trip on. The crushing irony is that salvia divinorum used to be one of the most sacred of plant allies to the Mazatec Indians of Mexico, who preserved its secret from the invading Spanish conquistadors for hundreds of years. It was whispered in secret tones and kept to the inner shamanic circles until the early-20th century. The Mazatecs still use it to see shamanic visions for divination and to heal, but by the late-1990s salvia had become available on the internet in increasingly concentrated extracts up to 40 times as strong as the natural strength leaf itself -- and that's where the party started.
Salvia users on YouTube brag about the concentration and potency of the plant, saying these are extremely super-powerful psychoactives that can catapult you out of your body or melt you into the furniture, becoming the very molecules of the things around you. One YouTube salvia poster called "hut141" remembers the first time he tripped out on salvia: "It was 20x extract. It was like reality became a landscape of some new kind of 3D. Time and space were both warped. Half of my entity was infinitely empty and the other infinitely full," he wrote in the YouTube comments section.
The journey of the soul can now be bookmarked, but as the YouTube phenomenon spreads it's also gaining mainstream attention - and begrudging respect. Last year even the prestigious UK magazine New Scientist published a scientific account of a researcher's salvia trip: "...The salvia took me on a consciousness-expanding journey unlike any other I have ever experienced. My body felt disconnected from ‘me' and objects and people appeared cartoonish, surreal and marvellous," reported Vince Gaia. Which is a polite way of saying, "you trip HARD AS FUCK for like 5 minutes", as a salvia video from PartyNetwork.tv states. And amazingly it's legal -- for now.
It's a typical frat party scenario somewhere in middle America -- it looks like an amateur porn video in the making, except the blonde girl on the couch is going down on an alien psychedelic from some Mexican plant. "It doesn't matter the size hit you get, you gotta hold it in all the way," a guy says to her as the blonde's salvia virginity is shattered forever.
"Are you fucking serious???" she laughs uncontrollably. But is she talking about the effects of the drug or her friends trying to make her move like a lab rat across vast dimensional spaces while being filmed on drugs? "I love that..." she says, coming down. "Oh my God, did it fuck me up... Let's do it again!"
Even the trippers can't believe how this one slipped through the cultural firewall. "How is this legal, I don't understand it?" the guy in the PartyNetwork.tv clip says. Yet the wildfire popularity of salvia -- and the adverse publicity from the YouTube salvia videos have seen it banned on a local level in over a dozen US states, with the predictable backlash raising the moral majority into a legislative frenzy.
In April 2008 Kenneth Rau, a 46-year-old bottling plant worker with an interest in herbalism, altered states, religion and spirituality, was arrested for possession of a few ounces of salvia that he had bought off eBay. Unbeknownst to Mr Lau, his home state of North Dakota had criminalised salvia back in August 2007, riding on a legislative shockwave in the wake of the YouTube videos. Zealous prosecutors dubbed his stash as possession with intent to sell, despite the fact the amount was the minimum quantity available from eBay and only cost US $32 -- hardly a lucrative resell market. Worse still, Google pulled up ads for salvia on the website of a local TV station that reported on Lau's arrest, as if to testify to the easy availability of the mint.
Australia banned salvia in 2002 but it's still legal to varying degrees in the UK, Canada, parts of Europe and elsewhere in the world. This is because despite its powerful psychedelic effects, salvia's chemical properties are significantly different under analogue drug acts from that of other psychoactive drugs like LSD -- and the plant, part of the mint family, can also be cultivated horticulturally. But despite long use in its indigenous setting, and an understanding that salvia is non-toxic and not addictive, conservative commentators have responded by calling the plant a "dangerous threat to society."
In a June, 2007 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, however, salvia-expert Daniel Siebert, who led a team that helped identify the plant's psychoactive mechanism and popularised the drug in the West, admitted: "Those videos are certainly not going to help the situation. They make salvia look like some horrible drug that makes people nuts and dangerous [...] The sad thing is it creates this public image where people don't realize there are sensible ways to use something like this."
And that's the real problem, not that people are using plant entheogens to connect to altered states, nor this new spin of uploading their trips to the net. The real issue is that the West lacks the guidance of indigenous elders to show how to use these plant tools correctly. And while the potential for responsible use is there -- it doesn't make great video. Because no matter how much content it hosts, even YouTube can't capture the Divine.
Image by oceandesetoiles, courtesy of Creative Commons license.
- 5-14-09
- Rak Razam's blog
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Simple
If it's sacred and people in the online entheogenic community don't want it banned they can do something about it by boycotting online vendors selling it, and hassling them to stop.
But of course most of the forums are funded by online vendors, so shucks.
None of this stuff should ever be sold out of shops, online or not.
From Cool to Chill
I was visiting the Grand Canyon years ago ... a car pulled up ... out jumped 5-6 Japenses men ... they all, very quickly, lined up for pictures ... click click click .. back in car ... to the next vista ... out again ... only long enough to click.
As if the communicating of their trip/experience was of more value than what that time and space moment could actually afford.
I could just stand there for 20 minutes ... just looking ... taking so much in ...
On fire with desire ... or able to keep it cool brother ... able to chill ???
Show the world ... or know the world
... the trip existing unto onesself only .... ultimately
Entheogens the very "way" to know ones self beyond the showing of onesself
Show the world....or know the world
Surprise
Kathleen Harrison
Fast Food Psychedelics . . .For some.
I'm not down with the posting of Salvia trips on youtube. Or mushroom trips, or acid trips.
The value in the plant is not in what your friend does or says when he's on it, or even what he does or says afterwards. The value of the plant is found in the moment, for the experiencer, and that moment is a sacred learning opportunity.
These kids funneling their minds into Salvinorin wormholes have no idea the potential this plant has. It's hard to catch anything when "I'm tripping soooo fucking hard, bro!"
I do admire the idea that shops stop selling it altogether, although, were it not for that I never would have tried it myself and found such a wonderful plant ally. Same goes to acid, shrooms, DMT, etc. If these things weren't available in the way they were I wouldn't have bothered.
The fact that Salvia has become the drug phenomenon it has is no surprise really. America's youth are spiritually devoid and with such a short, intense trip, Salvia provides a way for them to unconsciously satiate the human desire for connection with a source seemingly outside of themselves - which is exactly what Salvia brings to many people, a connection.
Take a few rides on Salvia and go back to your consumerist lifestyle unscathed by the nagging demands of the still, quiet voice that beckons all to discover ever deeper levels of "reality". Just a few short tokes and I have the perfect Fat American counterbalance to the depraved materialism that effuses itself into our cultural mind, and asks that any seeking outside of the conditioned order be done quickly and with few scratch marks to show for it.
Nothing near the Soma of Huxley's Brave New World, for those who might have otherwise found themselves on a "spiritual" path though, such back-water attitudes towards Salvia experiences certainly distract the user from gaining anything tangible that will stay with them long after the trip is gone. For those of us in the know, it is a deep understanding that the most important aspects of the psychedelic experiences occur well after the trip is done. We have here the equivalent of psychedelic fast-food, and somewhere Chogyam Trungpa is laughing.
where?
I do admire the idea that shops stop selling it altogether, although, were it not for that I never would have tried it myself and found such a wonderful plant ally. Same goes to acid, shrooms, DMT, etc. If these things weren't available in the way they were I wouldn't have bothered.
you bought acid and DMT from a shop? where? :)
There's a difference between shops selling openly to anyone as if it was candy, and underground distributors who know what they sell and who to sell it to.
I suppose what I meant was
oh, man! indeed, it would be
Salvia's Elves
from “Salvia’s Elves”
…As the effect was coming on I could feel male spirits pushing and pulling my ego one way and then the other, incrementally prying it open, till suddenly – WHOA - I was in its world and no longer in “mine.” The Sage transported me from time to the eternity of plant-consciousness, of the spirit world. The spirit world knew everything I knew. I was watching it watching me watching it. It perceived me from more angels than I normally can perceive myself. I perceived its perceptions of me. I felt too exposed. I panicked.
I asserted my ego, telling the plant, “I don’t want this. I don’t want this. I don’t want this…” I was OK in a few minutes.
In the midst of it I became aware of the masculine personage of Jesus Christ at the periphery. (He has a rarely experienced feminine aspect, being Sophia, a personage of his wisdom. Perhaps she is rare because we are fools.)
Everywhere Christ was not in my vision, there were elves. It was an ocean of elves, male elves, some more aggressive than others, these seeming to taunt me and tease me, to play with my naked psyche. There was almost something sinister about them, but it seems likely they were reflecting something sinister about me – some dark cyst-like pocket containing my wounded male self, waiting for consciousness to lance it…
Growing Up, Outer-Directed
It seems to me that tripping, by its very nature, is a private, subjective affair. One can communicate only bits and pieces of the experience.
Putting oneself in full trip mode on YT is not going to enlighten or even educate anyone.
In fact, as other posters have mentioned, it will probably draw the wrong kind of attention to a sacred plant and a sacred experience.
Thank you for this interesting (and kind of heart-breaking) article.
www.flickr.com/photos/21366765@N03
Minty
Of course, I'm not a fan of these kinds of videos or lack of respectful engagement.
However, it's worth considering the characteristics of Mint. Wherevever it's planted, it takes over, it is, essentially, invasive - it grows in places you might rather not have it grow. But grow it does.
Salvia Videos
The Silent Witch
Unfortunately now, the silent witch is having her 15 minutes, as the star of teenage youtube videos. But what must an inexperienced and occluded mind make of such an experience, amongst all this harsh decay and biospheric separation. No wonder many of them never do it again; she can bite and grind thee to quantum. Perhaps she is storming conciousness, leading a new wave of vegetal revolution, reclaiming territory in the noosphere?
SAGEWISE AND OTHERWISE
Skin erupts crystalline, frozen flesh made teeth
space block fractures, fault-lines grinding light
void dragging, pulling turgid tipping labyrinths
a focal remnant; the axis of rotational notation.
I saw them, they saw me; in infinite moment
howling by through long fractal night,
until clambered giggled gasp crosses event horizon
shedding wonderous tears, at first breath of æon.
http://decontaminated-continuum.blogspot.com
Yet another example of
Yet another example of people who have no respect or desire to learn taking the opportunity to do so away from others -- from both ends of the wick.
Some understand that to treat these substances lightly is to simultaneously endanger both oneself and the rights of others to partake in them.
Others apparently believe it to be nothing more than a game, and chance to 'get fucked up'.
Seriously...how many deaths need be connected with this substance before those who don't understand it begin to see it as a significant threat to their own children/families/lives/etc, rather than some holy spiritual experience offering personal growth?
You can call it what you like, but anyone who sees something consistently ruin lives is going to begin to have a dim view of that 'something'.
Even if it is not the something's fault, but the cause of irresponsible application.
So use responsibly. This is a sacred experience and a chance to learn and transform -- treat is as such, and speak of it as such...that way, people who aren't interested in these things will stay the hell away from it, and not ruin it for everyone.
"You must *be* the change you wish to see in the world." Mahatma Gandhi
I agree. This sort of
I agree. This sort of disrespectful foolishness can only lead to even greater misunderstandings of psychedelics in the wider culture. It's sad to watch. Sadder still is that, as Sancho implied, many are drawn to psychedelics by a yearning for a more meaningful existence; that the desire to "get trashed" has at its roots a valid acknowledgment that "something is missing," but the response to that is ignorant nihilism.
So, more power to those who approach psychedelics with reverence and caution. Keep sharing what you know.
Everything happens for a Reason
"post-jackass" stays
I think the supreme contribution of this article to the counterculture is the coining of the term "post-Jackass"!
I've lived without TV for the last 15 years (in a hole in the ground) so i don't actually know what Jackass is , but i can imagine. . .
Need Cutting, will share.
Wasson's opinion on lighthearted mushroom use
Victor Hazel
I'm reminded of Gordon Wasson's views on psilocybin tourism, quoted in the Bros Mckenna's Food of the Gods: I have often taken the sacred mushrooms, but never for a "kick" or for "recreation." Knowing as I did from the outset the lofty regard in which they are held by those who believe in them, I would not, could not, so profane them. Following my article in Life a mob of thrill-mongers seeking the "magic mushroom" descended on Huautla de Jimenez – hippies, self-styled psychiatrists, oddballs, even tour leaders with their docile flocks, many accompanied by their molls .... Countless thousands elsewhere have taken the mushrooms (or the synthetic pills containing their active agent) and the chatter of some of them fills the nether reaches of one segment of our "free press." I deplore this activity of the riffraff of our population but what else could we have done?"
wasson was
It's making the papers
Read an article in the Oakland Tribune today about this. F***in' great--now the DEA and Congress are starting to take notice. If it becomes illegal (or "elicit" as the story miswrote)will it gain an 'underground' aura? Is salvia the next LSD, except without the CIA mind-control experiment backdrop? Is this the Spirit's way of circumventing our fears of knowledge of other realities? The Silent Witch is cleverer than us...
Though the article mainly presented it as a possible 'drug menace to society',it did try to be non-sensationalist. They did quote an un-named head-shop owner in Berkeley who said:
"We point out this is a very serious thing. It has a very strong effect for about 10 minutes. You can actually have an out-of-body experience. It's not euphoric. It's not something where it's necessarily a pleasant experience, where people want to do more of it because it's fun....You have a very serious understanding that there are parallel realities and things are somewhat relative. It basically exposes elements of consciousness, like stretching your mind."
A pharmacist, John Mendelson, from the Research Institute at California Pacific Medical Center, said:
"College kids and friends have done it. Half of them, maybe two-thirds, have a really bad time, very disturbing imagery, lots of fear, lots of anxiety. This drug appears best done in silence and in darkness and with a sober companion."
Which is exactly what the literature I've seen in head-shops says about it--it's best done as an aid to meditation; it should be done with a sober person around; it should not be taken lightly. So anyone who gets it from legal sources and treats it stupidly has no legitimate excuse, at least. For what that's worth...
Perhaps the plant spirit itself has it's own safeguards against fools who disrespect it? Maybe it's just a passing fad among dumb kids who are unconsciously starving for some real experience but don't know how else to find it? Looks to me like our culture is in for an intersting 'trip'.
I can't tell you how many
I can't tell you how many people I saw 20+ years ago at Dead shows that were fucked up on LSD and not USING it as a spiritual tool. Some of us prefer using these tools/drugs to push ourselves further into new ideas, others just want to get fucked up and forget their lives.
Really, if youtube existed for my friends 20+ years ago in those situations, it'd be the same. my friends DID have photographs and the odd person did have a home videocam. we DID sit around laughing at photos of so-and-so with X'd-out eyes or even parking lot videos from Dead shows.
Youtube might have made that process cheaper and easier for these kids, but it's the same. just ignore them.
Y'know
It's probably best not to take the spiritual/existential high horse on this one, and remember that these things aren't going to change. I agree that if we could have recorded this on the internet 20 years ago, a lot of people would. Children (regardless of the age bracket we think a Child would fall into) will behave like children.
Unfortunately, in this instance, in this world perspective, this American perspective (in air quotes), it is a combination of semi serious to very serious problems: the worst of them being that there are many, many people, most often misinformed, bored, and immature minds, who feel like they have something to prove.
Think of the number of rapes that occur during armed conflicts in foreign countries. Would these people ever have thought of raping someone in their own country, community, whatever? Probably not. Probably. But stick them in a situation in which they think that their enemy is below them, subhuman, et cetera, where they're sexually deprived,risk of dying, and they're probably going to consider it.
Similar situation. A cohort group of bored people get together, they have these preconceived ideas of how to have fun (pot, drink, coke, sex, what have you) and they find a novelty alternative to spice it up. I found myself in a situation much like this, I had know idea of the potential that alpha salvinorin had. I just jumped in there, but I, being a jerk, commanded enough of the room to conform to my eccentricities that I could enjoy it without people gawking at me. It wasn't until the 3rd time I had attempted it that I REALLY gained something from it, while some people there began smoking habitually. A constant fucking novelty.
It blows my mind. But how can we teach people? Another unfortunate fact is that this system of belief, which I call the "thinking for yourself" complex, scares a lot of people. It isn't that people are stupid, they're misinformed, they're fed lies, many have old beliefs fearing altered-states, and so on.
What I can't tolerate about this particular instance is the scale at which this base behavior is glorified, and that some substance (that a small fraction of psychedelic thinkers use) has been caught in the middle. Another enemy.
What people fail to see is that if the symbol of the cross was suddenly under scrutiny because of potential abuse and misuse then there would be a lot more thinking happening. It's all about minority.
A word of caution
Aaron Mitchell
Author of 'Death of an Ordinary Life'
Yes!!
You are the first person to mention the fact of bad intentioned spirits...here or on any of the other numerous websites I have visited seeking information.
I have only tried SD once and I experienced the pulling forces trying to take me down...down...down...like a thousand fingers pulling every inch of my body...even inside my mouth...I couldn't relax and go with it. My 'self' fought it and all I could think was 'I don't want this...make it stop!' I was afraid I may never come back to myself. Like being paralyzed from an accident, I would never have 'control' over my body again. After the initial gust, during the glide and the glow I felt scary, hungry spirits circling all around me and was terrified. Having a non-shamanic sitter to safeguard me made absolutely no difference in regard to helping my experience...all it did was help me from hurting myself by burning the house down or some such...it did not help in any way in regard to successfully dealing with the experience.
I am a certified clairvoyant through BPI (Berkeley Psychic Institute) and divine through Tarot. In my younger days I also experiemented many times with LSD. I thought I was prepared, but my Ego was ripped apart into a thousand pieces. I would never want to do this again without an experienced Shaman to guide me. It was the most terrifying experience of my entire life, and I smoked one hit of the most 'mild' version available.
Puzzling
Education is the Keyword
just look this