- [Steve Paulson] Hey, it's Steve. And this is Luminous, a podcast series about psychedelics from To The Best Of Our Knowledge. One of my goals for this podcast is to bring you conversations with people who've been really important figures in the psychedelic movement but are not exactly front and center in current debates about psychedelics. Katherine MacLean is one of those people with a Ph.D. in psychology. She was hired by Roland Griffiths to work on some of the early clinical studies at Johns Hopkins. And 50 years ago, that was the epicenter of psychedelic research. This was Katherine's dream job. She became a gifted psychedelic guide, which was no doubt helped by her own rather extensive experience with psychoactive substances. But dream jobs have a way of turning sour. Catherine quit her job at Hopkins after just a few years. Exactly. Why is a fascinating story, which she tells in her psychedelic memoir, "Midnight Water." She writes about some really wild and challenging psychedelic experiences, which we get into later in this conversation. You had like a mushroom ceremony with your father's body in the room there. It was mind blowing reading this experience.
- [Katherine MacLean] I know. And the thing that people need to remember is that the book is true. And what I wanted to share with the world was that psychedelic people are really practicing at the very edge of anyone else's comfort zone.
- [Steve Paulson] We also talk about one of Katherine's personal heroes, Maria Sabina, the Mexican curandera who guided Gordon Wasson in his famous mushroom ceremony. It's one of the most iconic stories in psychedelic history. Wasson, who was a banker at J.P. Morgan, later wrote about his experience for Life magazine in 1957. And that article helped launch the modern psychedelic movement. But it also led to all kinds of troubling questions about the unintended consequences of Western psychonauts. going into indigenous cultures, they don't really understand. And for Katherine, the story we really need to hear is Maria Sabina's. So my conversation with Katherine MacLean is really in two parts. The first, why she considers Maria Sabina a pivotal figure in psychedelic history. And then we take a deep dive into Katherine's own quite remarkable psychedelic journey. Hope you enjoy the conversation.
- [Steve Paulson] So you've talked about Maria Sabina as being kind of a personal touchstone for you. Why? Why is she so important to you?
- [Katherine MacLean] Well, if you look back in history, there aren't many women who stand out as historical figures, especially in science, and especially not many indigenous women. It wasn't until after I left my job at Johns Hopkins that I realized that Maria Sabina was a bit of a patron saint of mushrooms and potentially part of my own lineage. Yeah, I think if I could pick anybody in psilocybin, she would be it. You know, she had the direct ticket to whatever this mystery is that we still don't understand.
- [Steve Paulson] So she talked about the mushrooms speaking through her.
- [Katherine MacLean] She did.
- [Steve Paulson] What do you think she meant?
- [Katherine MacLean] If you go back and look at how she described it, she described receiving a visionary holy book. She called it the Book of Knowledge or the Book of Wisdom. And she believed that these divine beings, saints had given it to her. She memorized the whole thing in one night, she says. And that that was what allowed her to sing and determine what could heal someone. And so, interestingly, I think some people experience mushroom visions visually and other people experience these words or sounds. I've experienced both. But strikingly, there was an experience I had once where I heard actual words like prayers, poetry coming from the mushroom. And then when I looked it up later, it was actual scripture. So I kind of wonder, like, maybe she wasn't being metaphorical. Maybe she experienced scripture coming from a divine source that she just interpreted as she needed to.
- [Steve Paulson] So Maria Sabina figures very prominently in the lore of psychedelics. Famously, Gordon Wasson and his wife Valentina found Maria Sabina in this little tiny village in southern Mexico. And we sort of have heard the story from the Gordon Wasson perspective, and it's been told many times it's sort of this foundational story and sort of how psychedelics came to attention, public attention in the Americas. Certainly we tend not to hear so much, not only about Maria Sabina, but about Valentina Gordon's wife. What pieces of the story do we not tend to hear about?
- [Katherine MacLean] Well, certainly Valentina is almost unknown, except to very committed Psychonauts an enthusiast like me. But I was living in a small town in Connecticut when a woman handed me an envelope that was dated to 1957. And I was shocked to see that Valentina Wasson had written the first Western account of psilocybin mushrooms, not Gordon Wasson. She beat him by a couple of months. And I said, my gosh, what else is missing from this story? The interesting thing about Maria Sabina is that she grew up very poor. She describes being hungry almost her entire childhood. And she and her sister started eating the magic mushrooms out of hunger. And she knew they were safe because she had seen her relatives eating them and using them to heal people. So the healing gift skipped over her father. But her great grandfather, her grandfather, she had a great aunt. She had many family members who had the gift.
- [Steve Paulson] And with the gift being what?
- [Katherine MacLean] My understanding is that the gift was the ability to receive the mushroom wisdom and speak, communicate, connect with the mushrooms in a way that this divine source would tell her what was wrong with someone. She also described somatically healing herself and her sister. So just like a, you know, a masseuse or an acupuncture therapist or these other kind of categories, you can go to a doctor and they say, this is what's wrong with you. Try this medicine. But then there's a different way of healing.
- [Steve Paulson] There are a lot of ethical questions about sort of the encounter between the Wassons and Maria Sabina. And one is that they seem to have lied to her about sort of keeping everything secret. So what do you know about that?
- [Katherine MacLean] I knew about the lie that happened afterwards. So they had promised to keep her anonymous. They published her name as Eva Mendez originally, but they also published her face in one of the biggest magazines at the time that, you know, every American would see.
- [Steve Paulson] This is Life Magazine.
- [Katherine MacLean] Life Magazine. And then shortly thereafter revealed her real name and where she could be found. So that was I knew about that part, but I didn't know that they had lied to her to get the mushrooms in the first place. So they went down there and they spoke to an official in the town and they said, Who's the best mushroom healer here? We're kind of you know, we're searching for this mushroom. I'm sure Gordon said something like, My wife is an enthusiast. We're just, you know, we're just curious. And the government official was the one who went to seek out Maria Sabina because she was the best. And it was a special holy day where you're not supposed to turn anyone away if they seek your healing. Think about it. The mayor of your town, you're a poor woman. You're a single woman. You're taking care of all your kids and your mother, your aging mother. So she says, okay, I guess I'll do this this one time. So there was a whole kind of ruse going on around what would it take a true expert to agree to do this? If the knowledge is hidden and they don't want to share it? So there was kind of a lot of strategy that was used to convince a true you know, she was an expert to reveal her secrets.
- [Steve Paulson] Gordon Wasson publishes a story in Life magazine. It's a huge phenomenon, and many people see this. It really kind of launched the the modern psychedelic movement in the US. And the story sort of we kind of hear it from the Wasson perspective. There's a whole aftermath for what happened to Maurice Urbina. After that, can you go through some of that?
- [Katherine MacLean] Yeah. So again, I think it's always a little bit difficult to figure out the timeline as far as I can tell. There was a period of time where things were still kind of on good terms between Maria Sabina and Gordon Wasson, and in some ways maybe they had a friendship, maybe they had an understanding. My best sense of it is that Maria Sabina understood that it was partly fate or destiny that kind of brought her into this world. And at the same time, her life was kind of ruined. You know, tons of people flooded the village. A lot of the villagers hated the presence of these hippies and these, you know, spiritual elites and all these people and like, what are they doing here? What do they want from us?
- [Steve Paulson] Were they all coming to see her because they wanted to have their mushroom experience with her?
- [Katherine MacLean] For the most part. And what she described is that before Gordon came, we would use the mushrooms, you know, for true healing. You know, if someone was really desperate and there was something that even the doctors couldn't figure out, the kind of the lower tier healers couldn't figure out, you go to a wise person, which was Maria Sabina and others, and she said, after all, the white people came down. She said they were just seeking God. They just wanted this fast track experience and it was no longer about, you know, kind of humbling yourself, asking for help and really submitting to the process. You know, it was kind of this ego trip.
- [Steve Paulson] And didn't she say that once the these white hippies came down, that that portal to God had closed?
- [Katherine MacLean] So she said a couple of things. One is she said that that portal closed. It would no longer work the same way it had worked. And I also know that healers like Maria Sabina have said, we only tell you white people 10% of what's actually happening because we don't want you to know the 90%. So who knows why she said those things? You know, maybe she realized the cat's out of the bag, but they don't even know what they're doing yet. So we better just. It doesn't work anymore. Go away. You know, let us kind of go back to our practice.
- [Steve Paulson] You said that her life was was kind of ruined after this encounter. What happened?
- [Katherine MacLean] So there were a number of kind of suspicious crimes. I believe one of her sons committed suicide or was killed. There was another incident of their home catching fire. Again, whether it was vandalism or an accident. But there's just kind of a lot of violent disruptions. And then toward the end of her life, it was really just her and her daughter. And she died of something that could have been healed, you know, a sickness that could have been healed by modern medicine. She died the way she kind of grew up, you know, hungry, poor, very humble, except for the fact that, you know, her her face was recognized all over the world now.
- [Steve Paulson] And it's striking that she had become the object of all these pilgrimages. I mean, people wanted to have these experiences with her, but she remained poor to the end of her life. She did not get rich out of this.
- [Katherine MacLean] No, absolutely not. And if you ask even practicing healers now, they can't accept money. They might accept like a token gift or a barter or an exchange like a family may give them the best that they have. And that's seen as a way that the person who wishes to be healed is kind of humbling themselves to the experience. But no, she didn't get paid for these experiences that people were getting. I've heard some folks on social media say that they figured out how much she was paid by Gordon Wasson based on today's standards, and it was 10 or $11. So for $10, we got psilocybin, which represents hundreds, if not thousands of years of trial and error and practice and people being born with the talent and passing it along. And so I think we have to remember that Maria Sabina was the end of a lineage that went back beyond the Spanish arriving in the new world. Who knows how long. And so what she was teaching us, even if it was 10%, represents real wisdom that I mean, we're just still figuring this out.
- [Steve Paulson] Yeah. When you think back on the story of Maria Sabina, I mean, is this a tragic story too.
- [Katherine MacLean] I think it is a tragic story. It's it's difficult for me because on the one hand, I feel connected to this woman and I wouldn't even know she had existed if not for all of these levels of deception and theft or, you know, these are kind of extreme words. But if not for all of the things that contributed to her giving the mushrooms to this one person, I wouldn't have benefited. I wouldn't have been able to study psilocybin. I wouldn't have benefited from mushrooms. I mean, maybe I would have found them another way. And so I kind of hold it in both hands. You know, it's like most of what I have received as a white American is a result of lots of criminal and violent activity before I was born. So I think it's more a matter of just accepting that we can't go back and change the past. But we can say her name, we can honor her. And, you know, maybe the companies now can give back to the people who are still practicing.
- [Steve Paulson] You're listening to Luminous, our podcast about psychedelics from to the best of our knowledge. My guest is Katherine McClain. And we're now going to take a sharp turn in this conversation and talk about her own psychedelic memoir, Midnight Water. And I might add, we recorded this interview in a library in Vermont close to where Katherine lives.
- [Steve Paulson]So we're now in southern Vermont, central Vermont, not that far from where you went to college in Dartmouth. Am I right that your first psychedelic experiences were at Dartmouth?
- [Katherine MacLean] I would say the first significant ones. And I know that there's debate about this, but for me, the times that I had experiences with MDMA, Ecstasy at the time were truly psychedelic in that I felt it kind of like a spiritual bubble. Luckily at Dartmouth, it's such a tiny town. It was not just my body, it wasn't just my friends or the party. It was the whole town. You know, the whole town took on a kind of spiritual or sacred sparkly quality, and it almost felt like a magical alternate reality.
- [Steve Paulson] And you did this in the cemetery at Dartmouth?
- [Katherine MacLean]There's actually a cemetery on campus. You're probably not supposed to go there at night. But, you know, I mean, Dartmouth is it's in the middle of the woods. There's nothing to do. You either go to frat parties or you study or you kind of wander. And the graveyard was actually right next to the campus. So it was very easy if you were kind of walking from one place to another to kind of just meander into this beautiful old wooded glen.
- [Steve Paulson] I have to tell you that I've wandered all through that cemetery. It's beautiful. We're sort of going down that big ravine, so.
- [Katherine MacLean] Yeah, So you understand it's not like this big open thing with tombstones. It's like this wooded secret place. Yeah, it's really special.
- [Steve Paulson] You write about how by the age of 19, you knew that psychedelics were going to play an important part in your life. Why?
- [Katherine MacLean] Up until I would say 18 or 19, I felt that I was living to achieve a conclusion or like a dream that my family and my culture and everything I knew about the world expected me to do. Like I could be the best I could be valedictorian. I could be the fastest track athlete, I could be number one and all of these things. And when I had these MDMA experiences and later mushroom experiences, it felt like suddenly it wasn't about achievement. And then it felt like consciousness suddenly got tuned to a different frequency, like, Hey, we've trained you up, you're now at the top of your game, you've excelled, and now we're going to show you what's really going on. And, you know, I'm 19, 20, so it felt very much like I'm special. I've been chosen like this is about me and what I'm being shown. And I think, you know, it's a fun thing to experience as a young person that, you know, how many times other than in science fiction or fantasy, do you experience the hero or the heroine suddenly learning, like, now here's your mission. You know, we've we haven't told you yet, but this is what the world is really about. That's how it felt.
- [Steve Paulson] I mean, obviously, you became a psychedelic researcher years later. Was that kind of your goal from early on?
- [Katherine MacLean] Early on I told my dissertation thesis advisor, my undergrad advisor at Dartmouth, that I wanted to hook people up to EEG in the jungle while they were on ayahuasca for I don't know how I came up with that particular plan. It wasn't so much about mushrooms and it wasn't even about that lineage. I mean, that was really happening. It's happening now. But it was also the same time as when Bob Jessie approached Roland Griffiths and Bill Richards at Hopkins about starting the psilocybin studies up again. So I happened to have a very broad understanding of how we're all connected. So I don't think the ideas I was having at that time were siloed. I think they were coming from some larger zeitgeist that, you know, most people weren't tuned into yet.
- [Steve Paulson] You went ahead and you got a Ph.D. in psychology and neuroscience and you got a job at Johns Hopkins. Tell me about that.
- [Katherine MacLean] Sure. Well, again, it was a result of, I think, connections between people more than anything and good timing. Roland Griffith's first psilocybin paper came out in 2006, which was shortly before we started this big meditation study that was the focus of my PhD. And the mentor that I had at UC Davis went on a meditation retreat with Roland shortly after that and put in a good word for me, knew I was obsessed with psychedelics. And Roland said later that the only reason he responded to my email was because of that personal connection, because he had so many people writing to him because they wanted to study drugs. But because I had the meditation background, he was like, All right, this lady's for real. And I thought I would just get to kind of meet a little like a hero of mine. Like, Hey, you brought this research back. And he said, Do you want a job? And I had to do this whole big interview with all of these drug researchers. And I was like, I don't know this world at all. Can I just come study psilocybin? And, you know, I got through the gantlet, let's say, and wound up at Hopkins.
- [Steve Paulson] So this was at least at the time, this was your dream job, right?
- [Katherine MacLean] It was my dream job. I think I had kind of made it into a bit of a fantasy in my mind what it would be like once I got to Johns Hopkins and the colleagues. The fact that I got to study psilocybin, all of that was truly a fantasy come true. But the research building itself was from the 1950s. It had been saved from demolition. It was kind of on the outskirts of the city. The psychiatry department wanted nothing to do with us, so it was different than I had imagined.
- [Steve Paulson] And to put this in perspective, so the years that you were there were, what, 2000?
- [Katherine MacLean] I arrived in 2009 and I was there until 2013.
- [Steve Paulson] And so this was early days in psychedelic research?
- [Katherine MacLean] Yeah. I wanted to fact check this a couple of times. And I'm not saying this to shoot my own horn, but I think I was one of the only if not the only woman to have a faculty job at a medical school. Only about psychedelics. Because for the time I was there, I wasn't studying anything else. I only had a grant to study psilocybin.
- [Steve Paulson] And what did you actually do when you were there?
- [Katherine MacLean] Well, the not fun part was that I was writing grants to get government funding. I was writing papers. I was running statistical analyzes, looking at spreadsheets all the time, reading tons of old research on creativity and trying to kind of promote this new idea that psilocybin could make people more imaginative, creative problem solvers. But then, luckily, I arrived again at the right time when a new study was starting the Spiritual Practices Study, where we wanted to see if regular people could be inspired to commit to a meditation practice if they had a mystical experience. And it was funded by a private foundation. And Bill Richards, the clinical director, and Mary Camano, had been the head guides up until that point. And now we needed more people in the room. And so I remember Roland asking Bill if someone without a license or any clinical training could be a guide. And Bill said it's not so much that she has a license, it's that she has the gift. And I've really reflected on that since then. And I don't think he meant it as like, she's special. It's just that to do this kind of work requires something more than training. It requires some special thing. And a lot of people probably have it and don't know it.
- [Steve Paulson] What do you think that special thing is?
- [Katherine MacLean] Well, to begin with, you have to really like sitting still for a long period of time and not speaking. So I guess monks have it, meditators have it. People who like, I guess, going to church and praying probably have it. But, you know, these sessions are eight hours long. You're not chatting with the person like on MDMA. Most people are silent for two thirds of the day. And if they're interacting, I mean, you don't want to sidetrack them with your jibber jabber. So I think the second piece is that and this is very hard to pinpoint, it's hard to teach except through observation and apprenticeship. But there is a kind of intuition you develop where you can be in the psychedelic space with the person without interfering, without guiding them in a certain, you know, on a certain path where you kind of know where they're at. And you have to be able to do that sober, at least in the scientific model that we're working with now. Not in the Maria Sabina model, but now we had to learn how to be in that space with people sober.
- [Steve Paulson] Well, and to put this in perspective for you personally, I mean, you have had a fair number of your own psychedelic experiences.
- [Katherine MacLean] Well, right. I mean, it's not true that I arrived without training. I had a different kind of training. And I think what Roland observed and Bill early on was that, okay, if stuff goes down, if there's a crisis, if someone's having a bad trip, if someone is getting paranoid or anxious, she knows what to do. And that's the kind of thing you learn when you're in college. Taking drugs with people is like, how to prevent a bad trip? What do you do if your friend gets really claustrophobic or anxious and. Well, I mean easier when you're on a college campus, you just go for a walk. You can't do that in a small room at Hopkins.
- [Steve Paulson] This is a really important point because, I mean, you've you are a pretty experienced psychic, not yourself. And I don't know how experienced you were back then, but you'd had some difficult trips, right?
- [Katherine MacLean] Yeah. And I would say that the trips started getting actually a lot more difficult once I left Dartmouth. There was something about Dartmouth. Maybe it was my age. I wasn't that stressed out. I had a lot of free time. I describe in my book going to California for grad school and trying to use mushrooms the way I had before. And they just the trips got spooky and kind of paranoid, and I had a lot of anxiety. I started having this feeling like I was dying or going to die, and I didn't know what that was about, you know, No one told me these medicines are death medicines in a good way. You know, they prepare you to let go of everything, you know. Well, I didn't know that. It just felt scary and creepy. And then it happens. Things got even, you know, a little bit more twisted for me, even when I was sober.
- [Steve Paulson] In what way?
- [Katherine MacLean] I felt that the more that I guided the spiritual practice of study, the more I entered into psychedelic consciousness just in my everyday life. I can't pinpoint the moment that that started, but by the time it was noticeable, there was no kind of going back. And I think in psychiatric parlance, you know, I had a psychotic episode that lasted 7 or 8 months, but one that, you know, I could go to work, I could write papers. I could still you know, I could still function.
- [Steve Paulson] Well, what do you mean? You had a psychotic episode that lasted 7 or 8 months? I mean, what was going on then?
- [Katherine MacLean] I mean, it's still a mystery to me. But one day I sat down at the edge of a waterfall and I asked, Where am I? Which is a meditative prompt. And everything around me, including myself, exploded into nothing.
- [Steve Paulson] Was this on mushrooms?
- [Katherine MacLean] No. Sober. But then after that, I felt like I was on LSD. Every day I woke up, I would look in the mirror and my face would be distorted and twisting. And, you know, I had the visual hallucinations that they describe, you know, your psychotomimetic model. I had a lot of paranoia, anxiety. Those are kind of the bad trip parts. And this was all sober, mind you. The good trip parts were that I would look at someone across the bus aisle and feel like, we're the same. Like we're both God. Like, you know, now I say that. But at the time, you know, as a Hopkins researcher, you are not supposed to be experiencing this on the bus to work.
- [Steve Paulson] Yeah. So how do you explain all of this? What was going on there?
- [Katherine MacLean] Well, I think that for better or for worse, I was getting really good at going into that space of consciousness that I needed to be in to guide people safely through. And it started to feel like I was in the room with someone could feel the amount of psilocybin that was in their bloodstream. I was no longer a very good research scientist because I wasn't blinded anymore. I mean, sure, I could be fooled, but I started to feel empathically, but also cinematically what my participants were going through. And I remember at some point in late 2012, I think, was when I said to Roland, like, I don't know if I can do this as a scientist anymore because this is changing me. And to do it the way I'm feeling it is not science. It's something else. Then in late 2012, shortly after, probably after this conversation with Roland, I came back from a meditation retreat, feeling the most clearheaded I felt since early that year. And two days later, I found out my sister had. Probably end stage cancer and was in the hospital where she had been treated a few years earlier and she died within six weeks.
- [Steve Paulson] And this was breast cancer. I mean, she was in her 20s, right?
- [Katherine MacLean] Yeah. It was breast cancer that had spread to her ovaries, her bones. I'm now seeing the kind of the simile here that I experienced, this explosion by the waterfall and the cancer was about to explode throughout her whole body. But, you know, I think it's a stretch for a lot of people to understand how does someone have a presentiment about a family member who's going to die? But if I look at that whole trajectory, it makes sense that that whole year was preparing me for her death. I don't know how to explain that as a scientist, but when I was with her in the hospital, suddenly that whole prior year made sense because how was I going to navigate death with her if I didn't understand? Fear, losing reality, losing sensation, not knowing what's real. I mean, these are the these are the gateways of death.
- [Steve Paulson] Well, you're pretty upfront in your book about how you think and understanding not just a psychedelics, but of reality. The scientific model just can't explain everything and can't explain a lot. And you say get ready to enter the supernatural here. Talk about that. Weird. Where do you go with that? I mean, where how does that figure into this whole story and your understanding of psychedelic experience?
- [Katherine MacLean] Well, I think that let's just put it this way. I think a lot of businessmen and doctors are in for a ride when they suddenly realize what they're involved with. And I don't say that to scare people. I just say it as a warning. You know, I think I'm pretty sure Maria Sabina herself chuckled. She's like, Good luck, Gordon. You know, you've got the ticket now get ready for the ride. I couldn't have been prepared, and I don't think anyone can fully be prepared, nor can we predict who's going to make that crossing. So the way I kind of imagine it is consensus. Reality is it's functional to a point. And there are kind of these thresholds that most people don't notice. And then suddenly you might find yourself at the doorway, you know, through meditation or through prayer, childbirth, maybe at the bedside of someone who's dying. Psychedelics, for sure. And unfortunately, you can't get to the doorway and not get pushed through sometimes. And I think for me, guiding at Hopkins pushed me through. And then I had to figure it out on the other side. The nice thing about meditation is you have a teacher, you have a community, you kind of prepare yourself for the threshold and then you, you know, whatever that is, willpower, you choose to kind of continue.
- [Steve Paulson] You have a line in your book where you say, Well, psychedelics and the supernatural can be super fun as long as you're in charge. But there's often comes a point where you're no longer in charge and get ready. I mean, watch out.
- [Katherine MacLean]Right. What I would say that this is just like super scary for someone listening. What I would say is that the first several years were hard and then they started getting easier and easier and easier. And now if I'm confronted with something unexpected in my life, the amount of clinging is almost like nothing. So the thresholds get easier to pass through after that. So you can decide, I think before you start, is this the kind of life I want to live? But what I can say is once you're through it and have integrated it, I think life is just delicious. Like, it just opens up a totally new layer of reality that most Westerners never get to participate in.
- [Steve Paulson] So I want to sort of go into this question of the supernatural. Maybe we would call it the paranormal. Can you give me 1 or 2 stories from your own life where you just you've just it it doesn't make sense unless you acknowledge there's some bigger reality out there.
- [Katherine MacLean] Well, there are a lot that I share in my book. Let me see if there are some that make sense without a context. Well, early on, I would say probably right at the point where I realized I had to kind of give up who I was and had to accept that I was becoming something else. When I was in the hospital with my sister most of that time was it felt like being on a meditation retreat. You know, she's she's in pain. It's uncomfortable. We're kind of making decisions. It's very quiet. Not much talking. You're in a small room like, okay, this is familiar. I recognize this. And then one night sober, everything took on the quality of psilocybin as if I had just been injected with DMT or something. It was that immediate. And my sister became this Hindu god. I didn't really know much about him at the time, but he had a particular look, a feel. Everything about it was like, This is not my sister, this is something else. And even stranger that God that telepathically communicated with me to explain how he was himself and also my sister and how she was dying. But it was it was fine, you know, because death isn't really an end.
- [Steve Paulson] Who was the Hindu god?
- [Katherine MacLean]This was Ganesh. So I learned later that this is a revered God in the Hindu traditions. He is the product of a huge trauma. His dad was upset that he was birthed without his participation. So Shiva came back and found out that Parvati had created a baby on her own and he cut off his head in a rage. And Parvati basically said, like, you better fix this. So he finds an elephant. His warriors cut off the elephant's head. So the violence continues and then the elephant's head gets put on the on the boy's head. And some Christian people who are listening and even just many of us know the Christian story of Jesus. You end up with a human who is also a god, and this person or God can intervene and become like a messenger between the heavenly and earthly realms. So Ganesh is like a major dude, and I didn't know anything about him. I kind of knew there was like an elephant god, but I didn't know what he was. It turns out he shows up around death spaces because he is skilled at removing obstacles. And so for my sister, there was a real obstacle around the permanence of her body that she wasn't ready to give it up. And suddenly it's like, Here comes Ganesh. And he's like, This is what's happening. Of course, I never asked my sister what she felt in that moment because she died within 24 hours. But I have to imagine that she was feeling that transition, like, Hey, you're not your body. Like something else is happening here. Like, get with the program, you know?
- [Steve Paulson] So what do you think happened?
- [Katherine MacLean] Well, Ganesh has continued to show up in many forms, so whatever that form is. That name. That identity seems to be an energy that helps me make decisions, especially in places of pain and fear. So until I figure out what that is, I will report back. But so far it's still a mystery. And everything I've done to discard Ganesh or say like, I'm done. Thank you very much for your help. He just keeps coming back. So, you know, I've he's like a family member now, so I don't what I don't think and what I don't want people to misunderstand is that I don't I felt extremely lucid, calm in my body and not, quote, insane at that moment. I didn't feel like I was hallucinating. It felt as real as you're sitting across the table from me. And I think that that's where a lot of us trained in science and materialism are really challenged. Like, what do you mean you weren't hallucinating? It's like, I don't know. I don't know what to tell you.
- [Steve Paulson] I'm talking with Katherine MacLean, author of the psychedelic memoir Midnight Water. You're listening to Luminous, our podcast about the science and philosophy of psychedelics from to the best of our knowledge.
- [Steve Paulson] So to pick up your professional story, you left Johns Hopkins your one time dream job. And just because, well, I mean, your sister just died. Janis showed up and showed up. It was just too much at that time. You didn't. You needed to change.
- [Katherine MacLean] What it felt like is when I went back to work, it felt like I had just experienced this extremely sacred thing. I didn't know if it was possible to keep experiencing that, but it felt like that was more important to understand than any job, any career, any life path. I was married at the time, and I'm sure some people say, all right, I'm out of here. You know, I'm going to become a monk. I'm going to dedicate myself to this practice and figure out what this is. I tried that. I went to Nepal. And what happened in Nepal was death found me again. A young man drowned on the trip.
- [Steve Paulson] And you watched that happen, right?
- [Katherine MacLean] I was right there when it happened. And in a way, what happened with my sister, I could compartmentalize. This is cancer. This is why she got it. This is how people die in the West. To see someone drown for what I considered to be no reason. You know, a total accident seemed just harsh and cruel. And so when I came back from Nepal is when I decided not to go back to Hopkins. I think that there was still a part of me that thought, okay, maybe all I need is a year off and then I can come back. You know, people tell you grief lasts, I don't know, few months, year. I didn't know it could last ten years. But the second death and the death in Nepal is what really kind of woke me up. I said, it's not just avoid cancer. It's not just live a healthy life. It's not just get less stressed. You could die today. You could die ten minutes from now. Like, how do you want to be living? And I hate to say it, but the life that I was living in Baltimore at Hopkins was not how I wanted to be living. If I got hit by a bus on the way to work.
- [Steve Paulson] Did you seek out psychedelic experiences, mushrooms, MDMA, to deal with these traumas?
- [Katherine MacLean] Yeah. I have to say, there are many disclaimers in my book and they're serious disclaimers. So I describe things that could have been life or death levels of risk. And I guess what strikes me now, looking back, is I'm happy I survived those challenges. And some of them I maybe would have told my past self like, hey, like take it easy there. Or like you don't really need to try all of those drugs in that year. Just stick to, you know, a couple that are more tried and true.
- [Steve Paulson] But you're talking about just because you took big doses.
- [Katherine MacLean] I took big doses sometimes. I was gifted experiences by very experienced people who said, hey, I'm going to give you this this medicine. I'm not even going to tell you a chemical. It is. But just trust me again, it's hard to remember because now I have little kids. I have a whole life. Like, I wouldn't just say yes to something like that, but at the time, nothing mattered that much. Everything had kind of been taken from me and I feel like I was kind of a blank slate. So if someone said, Hey, I'm an expert in this, try this, I'd have a big transcendent experience and then two days later feel like I want to kill myself. And that's the conversation I don't hear people having in the psychedelic community so much is that people can be so desperate for healing that they will try anything, even if it's a bad idea.
- [Steve Paulson] We should talk about the little bit. I mean, you've watched this whole field, this whole psychedelic movement take shape. I mean, you were in kind of on the ground floor in a way, and there's obviously a huge amount of hype going on right now. There's probably MDMA and psilocybin are going to get FDA approval for particular therapeutic uses pretty soon and certain states are decriminalizing psilocybin. What do you see as risks? What are you worried about?
- [Katherine MacLean] Well, let's see. I think there are different categories of risk for the different drugs. So with MDMA, I'm less worried that people will have severe bad trips. Very intense out there. Psychedelic experiences that they can't make sense of. You know, MDMA is a kind of drug that makes sense to a lot of people. It helps them feel safe. They can remember their memories more clearly. They can talk to their therapist more clearly. They want to repair family relationships, work on their own self-care. This is like an extension of therapy, Which isn't to say it's always easy, but I think it's more accessible. People will say, that's a little bit different than I'm used to, but not so much. With MDMA, the risks are more about who's in the room, you know, your therapist, how are they trained? Are they accountable to a community? Have they harmed anyone in the past? Have they broken boundaries?
- [Steve Paulson] You're talking about sexual abuse. I mean, the therapist.
- [Katherine MacLean] Abuse, financial abuse, even emotional abuse, like getting someone kind of hooked on the experience, like, Oh you're never going to be okay on your own. But I can, you know, this medicine and me, I can help you. So MDMA, because of how it makes people feel, I think it's more susceptible to that kind of manipulation. So that kind of setting aside, with psilocybin, what concerns me is that people will have the kind of experience they had at Hopkins, you know, like a full blown mystical experience, and then they're in a psychiatrist's office or they're in an ICU. And then who do they talk to? Not the doctor who just said, hey, psilocybin is legal now, you know, try this. They're going to want to talk to the chaplain or the priest. Maybe they can talk to their family about it because they're suddenly like, I saw Ganesh instead of Jesus. What does that mean? Am I Christian anymore? I mean, these are really existential questions that come up. And despite any criticisms now, I think that what we did at Hopkins was actually ethical because we prepared people for the spiritual experience, knowing that all these other things could happen, but at least they knew it was okay if they had the spiritual part and if they didn't. Okay, that's great too. But when you don't tell people it's a spiritual experience and they have one, they can end up feeling psychotic or crazy or just like they're betraying their culture or their family.
- [Steve Paulson] So you're saying there's there are risks as these psychedelics are medicalized based? I mean, they're sort of incorporated into the health care system. They will become part of psychiatric treatments, presumably. Maybe that's too narrow a lens of how to interpret these experiences.
- [Katherine MacLean] I mean, what I would love to see is I would love to see more home based and kind of residential based psilocybin experiences where you go to a place that's dedicated to this kind of experience. You stay there for maybe a week, you have preparation, you have the experience, you have integration. You get hooked up with a whole community of people who've gone through it before. Maybe there are regular support groups. Ideally, there are these kind of centers all over the place. You can within a couple of hours get to one. Then it becomes less about the authority figure in the room when you're having the experience and much more about the the kind of fabric around the experience before and after. I've accepted that for some people they will only be able to have this experience with a doctor in a doctor's clinic. But I think for a lot of people, they can do it at home. They can do it in one of these kind of residential places. It's not so much about treating someone. It's about giving them a great experience.
- [Steve Paulson] There's one piece of your personal story that I want to pick up. And I mean, we haven't talked about a huge theme of your book, which is your very complicated relationship with your father. Which went on for years. You were close to him, but it was really difficult. You ended up spending time with him at the very end of his life. He died and his body was brought back to his house. And you were in the room and you took mushrooms with his dead body there. It was mind blowing. And yet this experience, I know.
- [Katherine MacLean] Again, for better or for worse, when people get to the end of their book, they'll be like, this lady is actually insane. And the thing that people need to remember is that the book is true. I did not elaborate or make up anything. And what I wanted to share with the world was that psychedelic people are really practicing at the very edge of anyone else's comfort zone. This is not like a little treatment that's going to get legalized by FDA and everyone's going to feel better. This is like, you know, a vigil with your family member's body to get okay with something that happened when you were a kid so that you're not, you know, haunted by it. Well, after they've died, you know, with my dad, what I think happened in that final 24 hours with him and I even accompanied his body to be cremated. What happened in those couple of days was like decades worth of grief. But instead of coming out in the form of sadness, pain, illness, like it did with my sister, it was just like this high intensity burning through of all this karmic shit that I believe. And I don't know what people think. I believe it released him from that too. Because if you think about your life, I mean, you know, we're all kind of playing roles, and we are to one person, the hero, another person, the villain, someone else. We're just nothing. We fail people. We hurt people. We bring joy. But when we die, we let go of all of that. And I think our, like our narrow view of how things work means that the person's legacy is only the good things they left. But it's like, well, what about the person? What do they need to how do they want to be remembered? So I've had family members upset. This is not how your dad would want to be remembered. Why did you have to put everything out there? But my feeling is that he's liberated from that role that he played. And I guess only I and he know what transpired in those last few days, but it feels real and I wish it for other people. You know, don't be tormented by some experience that happened a long time ago. Certainly, don't be angry at someone after they died. There's no point.
- [Steve Paulson] Can you explain or can you describe what happened? I mean, you you had like a mushroom ceremony with your father's body in the room there. What happened then?
- [Katherine MacLean] So I was very lucky because I was away during the hours that he physically died. And I thought that I had missed my chance. But I then quickly realized that once a person dies, all the hospice nurses leave, all the professionals leave. I mean, it's really just you in the body. And usually then a funeral director comes and the body goes. I attribute this to my dad's wisdom was like, Katherine wants her night to do this vigil. It's not going to happen with the nurse in the room and people coming and going and marking down medicines and, you know, waking him up or whatever needed to be done. So it was also a very special day for other reasons that people will discover in the book. But I felt like he, in a spirit of a gift, that he gave this gift in the way that he departed. And we had not talked about this, but I felt like he knew that there was this closure that was required and a closure that he and I were incapable of giving to each other with him in his body. Now, I mean, the other kind of joke is that his body was there. I experienced my dad to be fully present. You know, again, it challenges people's beliefs about what happens to a person when they die. But distinctly, I did not feel that he had left. He was still there. So when people say, you did a vigil with your dad's body, you know, it was with him. He was very clearly there. And I also describe in the book how his his favorite dog, his best friend, came in the room and was the assistant guide in a way, you know, another witness to this whole process? And, you know, who knows who Teddy was there for? Was it for my dad? Was it for me? For both of us? Maybe Teddy's the guru, you know, he's just like, Man, I have been trying to teach these humans forever just how to love each other. Let the things go. Forgive, you know, dogs, they're, ou know, natural Buddhas.
- [Steve Paulson] Yeah.
- [Katherine MacLean] The morning that I woke up after this vigil, I felt that whatever I was holding against my dad or whatever had been not communicated or misunderstood was truly let go. And then after that, it was just okay. Now it's his body and we're going to help his body go to. But we're you know, this is done this whatever this contract or agreement or relationship that came together in a certain way for nearly 40 years now, it's it's gone again. Yeah. I don't know. It was one of the it was the one of the most amazing things I've done in my life. I, I congratulate my past self for having the courage to do it. You know, I look back at it like, wow.
- [Steve Paulson] It's an amazing story. And I mean, really just the great book. So thank you.
- [Katherine MacLean] Thank you.
- [Steve Paulson] That's Katherine MacLean, a former psychedelic guide at Johns Hopkins and author of the memoir "Midnight Water." You'll find more interviews on the science and philosophy of psychedelics on our website at ttbook.org/luminous. And I hope you're subscribing to the podcast feed where you will meet a lot of fascinating people, including Gul Dolan, the neuroscientist who has given MDMA to octopuses, and Eric Davis talking about the history of LSD in the psychedelic underground. And if you'd like to hear more about the Maria Sabina Gordon Wasson encounter, you'll find the full story on our luminous podcast. To the best of our knowledge, is produced in Madison, Wisconsin. Joe Hardtke is our technical director. Sarah Hopefl did the sound designed for this episode? And Angela Bautista is our digital producer. I'm Steve Paulson. Thanks for listening. PRX.
