Vegetalismo
Sermonette for St. Marks, New Years 1998 

We are now living in the third generation since the ceremonial re-emergence of hallucinogenic plants in global culture.  Some believe that these plants are conscious entities or spirits and they themselves have chosen to appear again after so long a time away.  The most recent dramatic re-entries have been staged by ayahuasca  (or yagé), a powerful S. American vine used in shamanic healing and visionquests, salvia  divinorum, the diviner's sage, a mysterious shadowy herb from Mexico, and harmal  or "Syrian rue," a sacred plant from the Middle East.  (These three are still legal, more or less.) Santo Daime and União vegetal (for which was coined the slogan vegetalismo), two ayahuasca religions from Brazil are spreading to Europe and N. America.  Psilocybin mushrooms have now reappeared nearly everywhere around the world, except Arctic and Antarctic, and new species are still being discovered. Have they always been there? Mexican seer Maria Sabina told Gordon Wasson in the later 1950s that the mushrooms had decided to reveal themselves to the wide world beyond the pines and clouds.  Plant consciousness manifests itself ambiguously at a point of crisis in the relation  between the machine and the human—a collective vegetal Trickster-as-Messiah con, a slow green epiphany—entheogenesis, "birth of the god within" by eating the god itself—an effective sacrament, or else an agent of Gaia's ancient chaos, sprouting like glowing mold from the cracks in the computer of the Universal Mall.  Do the plants have an agenda? After an amnesia lasting maybe 2,000 years, we now know again the identity of Soma, the divine drug of the Rig Veda.

 Is this just another bit of blah blah for the Worldwide Web or is it an end-time miracle?  According to William Blake, the world came to an end yesterday or so I calculated from some of his prophecies.  If I am reading this aloud, we still have a chance at the social movement of "a green thought in a green shade." Viva  vegitalismo and happy New Year.