[00:00:02]: [Intros]

[00:00:16]: Viktor Wynd is a writer, artist, and the proprietor of the eponymous Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art and Unnatural History in London. He regularly leads expeditions to Papua New Guinea, the Congo and beyond, taking small groups with him via his boutique travel agency, Gone with the Wynd.

He is the author of Viktor Wynd’s Cabinet of Wonders and the Unnatural History Museum, both published by Presto.

Viktor, welcome to the Brainforest Café.

And there you are.

[00:00:56] Viktor Wynd: Very nice to be here. Thank you very much.

[00:00:59] Dennis McKenna: Very good. I’m delighted that we have connected. We’ve done this once before, so tell me a bit. I believe last time that we talked, I was doing a podcast for you for the Last Tuesday Society, which is your.

Your organization. Right.

[00:01:21] Viktor Wynd: Yeah. I mean, it sort of. It’s mine in as much as I set it up and I’m nominally running it, but I’m more and more letting other people come and do things under its umbrellas. I don’t know what it is, but it’s a thing.

[00:01:37] Dennis McKenna: Right, right. So I think at some point after we did our symposium in the UK in 2022, my friend Bruce Damer visited you and made a presentation. Do you recall that?

[00:01:55] Viktor Wynd: No, because. I’m sorry, because we’ve got Maya who curates the sort of psychedelic talks.

[00:02:04] Dennis McKenna: Right.

Well, I don’t know if it was a presentation, but I thought he went there and visited.

[00:02:12] Viktor Wynd: We.

[00:02:12] Dennis McKenna: I just.

[00:02:13] Viktor Wynd: People do talks in the museum and I. I live three hours away, so I’m. And I’m also. I tend to hide.

[00:02:21] Dennis McKenna: Okay, okay. So maybe you didn’t see that. Yeah.

He would be someone you could invite onto your show. He’s very interesting fellow, as you are, and I think you’d have a lot of things to say, you know, so. And. And lately, in part, we’re having this conversation because you very kindly sent me this book which doesn’t show up well in the virtual world. There we go.

You have to hold it just right.

And it’s very interesting, but there we go.

Of course, the print is reversed. And then this one you sent me some time ago. I haven’t even had a chance to look through it all carefully, but it’s a beautiful book and it’s very odd, which is what I would expect, given the author.

And this is also an amazing book and these are both unique books. So tell me what’s on your mind. Tell me what you have been doing now that Dark Fairy Tales is published. And how is that going? What. What led you to.

[00:03:41] Viktor Wynd: I’ve always told fairy tales and I’d never written them down. And I was worried about writing them down because I thought maybe it would sort of imprison them in a way. But it was very good because. I don’t know, I’ve never.

Why do some of us do some things? I never understand why everyone doesn’t do everything that I do, because I enthusiastic about it. But I just.

I’ve been telling these stories and I’ve been telling them for well over 20 years. And then I started writing that. I’m trying to work out what they were. And when I wrote the book, I thought that fairy tales were a bit like viruses in as much as my GCSE biology. Understanding of the virus is not quite a living thing, but you breathe in lives inside you and then you sort of sneeze it out and it. It comes out.

Maybe a virus isn’t supposed to have that much agency, but it can come out the same way or it can mutate. And that’s what I thought stories were. But I now think the fairy tales are their own sort of living thing and they’re the way that the otherworld communicates with us.

Storytellers are really mediums.

They can. And just like, you know, like mediums, sometimes the spirit comes to a medium and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s just you’ve got to be ready to faint when the spirit isn’t there.

[00:05:09] Dennis McKenna: Right, right. And so the stories are a way to connect with that world.

And in the case of the dark fairy tales, a fairly dark world as well.

[00:05:22] Viktor Wynd: Well, I think it is a nasty world, isn’t it? And that’s just the way the world sort of grumbles. And then in a way that people used to explain, you know, nowadays we live in terror at the pedophile next door or the rapist down the alley. And we try and think of these people who think that you find it very difficult to explain why these people who live amongst us can do these terrible things that we can’t do.

Fairy tales has a very simple explanation. They could do these things because they’re not human, Right?

[00:05:55] Dennis McKenna: Right, exactly.

Maybe that’s the explanation. Well, that’s one way to look at it. Certainly fairy tales are. You know, Jung was very interested in fairy tales as effectively a portal into the collective unconscious.

And you’ve been collecting these tales for many years, is that right?

[00:06:19] Viktor Wynd: Yes, I mean, I’ve always collected.

I mean, I’ve always listened to stories and I’ve always remembered them and told them again.

[00:06:31] Dennis McKenna: And wherever I go, I’ve written that down. So you don’t have to keep telling them, but you never tell them the same way.

I thought the last part of your book where you talked about the art of storytelling was very interesting. I mean, it was basically an instruction.

You know how to do that, and you’re a master of this. It would be very hard for many people to spit out tales like this. You have to have some idea.

[00:07:01] Viktor Wynd: I think you. I don’t. I don’t think it’s difficult.

One of the things I’m sort of angry. I’m always angry about things, always campaigning against things.

We turn into a society where once people finish school, they stop producing things and they just consume things. You know, when they’re at school, they’re happy to write stories, paint, they’re happy to play football, play tennis, be in theater, whatever. And when they leave school and they think their job is to sit on the sofa and watch other people do things, and I. I think that’s wrong. I think every. Everybody should be out there.

They’re participating it. That’s like in my last book, the Unnatural History Museum, there’s a chapter where I argue that artists are just preserved children.

All children do what artists do. It’s just that artists carry on.

It’s like you listen to someone like Julian Schnabel who says, well, I’ve been painting since I was a child. It’s like all children paint. It’s just that lots of them stop.

[00:08:05] Dennis McKenna: Well, I think one thing that seemed. That’s interesting about what you do is you’re very much about engaging with the real world. I feel that these days, the Internet and now particularly AI is another threat to this where basically we’re encouraged to lock ourselves in this artificial world where we’re staring at screens constantly and then AI it’s as though AI is very seductive. And I’m quite terrified of it because I think it’s an invitation to outsource our spirit, outsource our creativity and ability to think and to experience wonder. And all of the things that make us human, we’re actually porting those over to AI so that we don’t have to do this difficult work. And I think that’s a very dangerous thing. What are your thoughts about AI?

[00:09:05] Viktor Wynd: I think about it very much, but I feel that when know, Guttenberg introduced the printing press, people had all the same.

The same reaction. And I’m sure when the first person started writing things down, everyone was horrified and said, you shouldn’t write it down. It’s going to harm your. Your memory. So my. My limited experience with using. Using AI is it makes really good posters.

[00:09:33] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, well that’s, that’s interesting. I think AI is qualitatively different to my mind because the printing press, writing all of these things, there’s still an entity in there, yourself that’s projecting your thoughts and yourself onto the page or into the medium. AI is sort of like you succumb to the temptation to give it all over to AI, let it do it for you. You know, write the term paper, write the proposal. All of these things that you know, would normally require, you know, effort of thought.

[00:10:16] Viktor Wynd: There always has been and there always will be a lump and proletariat and they’re always going to do what they’re going to do and if they’re happy for AI to do it.

I mean I do think like my daughters, I’ve got two 11 year old daughters and they keep being, they’re getting this homework where they’ve got to design posters for history or geography or stuff like that. And it’s like, well you could design it, but look, we can ask ChatGPT, it’ll make a really great poster straight away, save time. But yeah, I don’t know.

[00:10:51] Dennis McKenna: Well, like any technology, it can be used beneficially or not, harmfully or not.

[00:10:59] Viktor Wynd: You’ve been in a minority and always have been in a minority and always will be. And I think that the same people who use CHAT GDP to write an essay were the people who were paying other people to write them for them.

[00:11:16] Dennis McKenna: I suppose, yeah, I suppose. But you’ve always been, at least from what I know of you, you’ve been a very hands on kind of person.

I mean, I can see that by the background in your library that you cherish and value books, actual objects made from dead trees.

That is a treasure. Unfortunately, books seem to be, they’re almost becoming obsolete in a certain way. I mean I don’t have anywhere the amount of books that you have in your library that I can see right here, but the books I have, it’s like I wonder what am I going to do when I pass on.

I don’t have anyone to give them to.

[00:12:09] Viktor Wynd: No one sold books anymore.

That is true, but I know, I mean, I just feel that I always, I’m always, I don’t, it’s not, I don’t think AI is going to change anything that I do dramatically. It’s, it’s certainly making my life easier for what I’ve seen of it. Yeah, that’s all. I mean, I’m sure it will change the world in a way. That if I was a graphic designer or somebody who. It was going to overturn their world. But it’s not going to overturn, I don’t think.

Yeah, I’d rather think about flowers.

[00:12:45] Dennis McKenna: Well, it remains to be seen what’s going to happen. I mean, it’s definitely a complex issue. I mean, not least of all is the environmental impact of AI. You know, data centers and all that are actually a threat to, you know, along with all these other threats that threaten our ecosystem. AI is a serious one and the pursuit of profits. I mean, I am hopeful that all of this excitement and investment and so on in AI is actually a bubble and there’s discussion of that. And I hope that it does collapse at some point and people begin to take back their own, you know, creativity and all that. But it’s here. It’s one of these things that’s not going away. We have to learn to live with it.

But I didn’t really want to talk to you about AI, particularly what this conversation is about.

[00:13:57] Viktor Wynd: Not my field of expertise. I went to a Iquitos last year and I was reading this book by an ethnobotanist who was talking about youth. I want to think it’s. She was called Elsa Maxwell. Does that ring a bell?

It’s big, but it’s a woman. And she went out collecting plants all through the Amazon.

[00:14:16] Dennis McKenna: Oh, yeah, Nicole Maxwell.

[00:14:20] Viktor Wynd: Yes. Yeah.

[00:14:21] Dennis McKenna: Yes.

[00:14:22] Viktor Wynd: Sounded like an amazing person who just went out there and did it without thinking about it.

[00:14:28] Dennis McKenna: That’s right. Nicole Maxwell was a good friend when I knew her.

Actually, when I was doing my graduate work in Peru in 1981, she was living in Pucallpa. She was living actually at the Summer Institute of Linguistics complex. That’s a missionary group.

But they had a settlement outside Yarina Kocha, outside Pucalpa. And Nicole was living there and we became good friends.

She was another very eccentric person.

She claimed that. Well, I think she died in her mid-90s. Eventually she had to go back to Florida. She was in a nursing home for a while. But she lived well into her 90s. And when I was doing my graduate work, eventually she moved up to a ketos and had a little apartment at a place at a home of a gentleman named Gunter Schapper, who was one of the original.

He was involved in the mercantile trade in Iquitos. So I got lots of time to hang out with Nicole. And she was an amazing person, a real sort of a dowager empress figure. And she claimed that the reason she lived so long was because.

She claimed that the reason that she had kept her health all this time was that she smoked a pack of gawaz every day and drank a quart of kachasa, which is the fermented hard liquor from sugar cane that you could get seriously wasted on.

And she without fail consumed that. And it didn’t appear to set her back too much. And yeah, it was very interesting. She was another person, sort of like yourself, who really broke the mold. And she made some interesting discoveries.

I mean, she was another person who knew what she wanted to do and she went for it. And she was interested in, in these herbal medicines, in the Amazonian medicines, but particularly for women and for women’s issues like inducing labor and that sort of thing. And because she was a woman, she could go to these tribes and they would talk to her and they would share their information.

[00:17:10] Viktor Wynd: How do you think that, how did they find these, these plants? Because I was reading the Cosmic Serpent and he was saying that there was no way that.

The way we’re educated is to think, oh well, they just tried every plant and eventually they found a plant that worked.

But then if there’s 10,000 different plants, you can’t try every single plant and some of them are going to kill you. And then the Cosmic Serpent, he says if you ask the people, the people tell you, but the plants told you which ones.

[00:17:42] Dennis McKenna: Well, they do say that.

That comes up all the time. For example, with ayahuasca, this is a common trope.

Out of all these thousands of plants, how did they figure out how to combine just these two, the banisteriopsis vine and the Psychotria leaf which contains the dmt? How do they figure out this combination?

You know, out of all the possible plants they could have tried?

And yeah, the shamans will tell you the plants told us, you know. Yeah, but there’s a lot that goes into that. I mean that’s almost, that’s what they tell the gringos, right? Basically just to, just to shut them up, just to get them off their back, actually. What, it’s more complicated than that. The people have living in this environment, they’re much more sensitive to essentially what you might call the chemical environment. I mean, the ecology of a place like the Amazon is basically regulated and held together by chemical messengers which are this vast array, diverse array of chemical secondary compounds.

That’s what these medicinal compounds are because we’ve co evolved with these plants and so they just happen to fit into the receptors in our brain and when they do, they do interesting things.

So it’s not entirely trial and error. It’s careful observation.

Looking there is this, as I’m sure you’re aware, there’s this idea of the doctrine of signatures that some plants resemble.

If the leaves are shaped like a heart, it’s good for your heart, that kind of thing.

There is something to this actually, but it’s also based on sensory evaluation, organoleptic properties, taste, for example. Trivial example. Many. I mean the active principles of many plants are alkaloids, right? Particularly the CNS active principles. Alkaloids are bitter as a class. So if you munch on a plant and it’s bitter, you can think, oh, alkaloid, oh, maybe this is psychoactive, maybe I could brew it up.

There’s been work on this, but it seems that the formulations for ayahuasca probably grew out of a beer making culture. There was an area in the Vauques region of Colombia where chicho was produced, was made that was one of the main recreational sort of fermented beverages.

But then they also had the hallucinogenic snuffs and they had the vine and which used by itself is an MAO inhibitor, it’s not particularly psychoactive by itself, but they had the vine and they had the other DMT containing admixture plants.

And they were experimentalists, as many shamans are, they try things out. And so in this very much like craft brewers, in a certain way they’ll grab whatever’s on the shelf and they’ll throw it into the fermentation vat and they’ll see what turns up.

In that case, they’re not necessarily looking for psychoactivity, they’re looking for taste and that sort of thing. But they will stumble on these combinations. And I think that’s how ayahuasca was discovered.

And there’s been a lot of work on that, particularly by anthropologist named Manuel Torres, who’s looked into this and he actually reported on this in the ESPD55 conference that we did. Or actually I guess it was ESPD50 in 2017, but. But it’s not a complete mystery. It’s not like, oh, you know, the curaderos could tap into the telepathic vibes from the plant. It doesn’t work that way.

Plants do have a language and the language is chemistry.

And through chemistry they modulate their interactions with everything in the environment, including humans, but bacteria and other animals, fungi and things that might want to munch on them. All of this is chemically mediated through plants.

Creative chemistry here.

So.

It’s an interesting thing to speculate, but it’s not so simple as the plants told them. Yes, the plants told them, but. But they were, in a way, they were sensitive to the.

Come from this chemical environment.

So tell me you not to change the subject here, except. I’m going to change the subject.

Speaking of exotic places, have you ever been to the Amazon?

[00:23:25] Viktor Wynd: Well, I went last year because I’ve never been to the Amazon and I thought that was a great prime.

So last year I went to Aquitos and went to a couple of lodges and looked at dolphins and sloths and parrots and monkeys and frogs. Had a really good guide for frogs.

[00:23:44] Dennis McKenna: Right.

[00:23:45] Viktor Wynd: I’m very keen on frogs.

[00:23:47] Dennis McKenna: Yes. Yes. Well, Ketos is a great place in some ways. It’s a great place in some ways. I wouldn’t pay my best friend to go there, you know, but it’s a chaotic place, but certainly it’s the epicenter for a couple of nights, this plant knowledge.

Yeah, yeah.

And was that the first time you were in the Amazon?

[00:24:11] Viktor Wynd: Yep, first time.

[00:24:13] Dennis McKenna: Because you’ve been to all of these other exotic places that. Because I’ve never been to them, they seem particularly exotic.

Such as Papua New Guinea. You actually, your travel agency brings people to.

[00:24:29] Viktor Wynd: For reasons that I’m always struggling with myself to understand, I’m obsessed with Papua New Guinea and it’s where I feel at home.

So I’m about to go there again.

It’ll be the third time in 12 months that I’ve been in new.

I’m going for a month in January. I’ve just got back and I was there last January.

[00:24:52] Dennis McKenna: What is the magnetic attraction to you of Papua New Guinea?

[00:24:58] Viktor Wynd: Well, it’s the whole island of New Guinea. The Papua New Guinea I do prefer is more interesting, but it’s.

Yeah, it started as a child going to the Museum of Mankind in London and seeing the amazing things from them.

And then, like the first time I went to New York, I went into the, you know, the Michael Rockefeller wing and saw those amazing Asmat.

[00:25:21] Dennis McKenna: Right.

One there.

[00:25:23] Viktor Wynd: There’s a big pole just behind me that I brought back a couple years ago.

[00:25:27] Dennis McKenna: Yes.

[00:25:29] Viktor Wynd: And then the old anthropological museum in Paris. And for some reason those. The sort of. The carvings of the cultural artifacts there, you know, they sing to me in a strong way.

Papua New Guinea, I think there’s a million things, so it’s hard to know where to start.

I think it’s the only sort of large country where the indigenous. Indigenous population is in control, inasmuch as anyone’s in control.

It has been.

They are mainly Christians, so there’s not but they’re only a few generations away from a life that’s totally sort of unchanged.

And it’s also a place where people live with spirits every day. They live with the.

They live with the idea the world is alive, that they’re not gods walking on it, who own it.

[00:26:30] Dennis McKenna: There are very few places like that left in the world.

[00:26:36] Viktor Wynd: I wonder, you know, I do, because you start thinking about it, I think we. It’s, you know, most of Africa, that’s how people live.

Most of Asia, you go to Indonesia, I mean. But the thing is, of course, the Indonesians have chopped it all down and India and stuff. They feel that the world is alive. But the good thing about Papua New Guinea is it’s enormous and there’s not an awful lot of people. So you can sit in a plane and you can fly, you know, for several hours and not see. All you see is virgin rainforest.

And then when you get there, when you can go to a village in the. Which is many days journey from civilization in the bush and that has electricity, has nothing made out of metal there at all, apart from maybe the olive machete, where it’s still a total subsistence life.

And there’ll be somebody there who speaks perfect English because they will have had, they will have left when they were a child. They’ll have gone to Port Moresby, they’ll have had a job in the government, and then they’ll have said, right, I want to go back to my village.

And Because English is one of the two only because there’s over 800 languages there and the only common language, two languages that everybody, if you want to communicate with people or not in your village, you speak to, which is a pidgin English that you, I mean, it’s, it’s not understandable, or you speak English and there’s always somebody you could talk to. And then you have us. You can. And they’re very friendly and they want, they’re very friendly. They like, they like visitors. They want to talk to them. Their experience of white people is primarily positive.

And whereas wherever else you go in the, in the world you go into, you know. Well, I mean, I travel a lot in, in like in West Papua, in the Indonesian half. And you can’t talk to the locals there because even if they were to speak. I don’t speak Indonesian, but even if you. I did speak Indonesian, they wouldn’t speak Indonesian.

You can have a, like an immediate connection. I can sit in a, in a spirit house on the, on the Seik at sort of 10 o’.

[00:28:46] Dennis McKenna: Clock.

[00:28:46] Viktor Wynd: At night. And the person that can tell me, talk to me about the stories directly, not mediated through an interpreter who often, you know, who often doesn’t speak very good English anyway. Themselves.

[00:29:00] Dennis McKenna: Right, right, right.

[00:29:02] Viktor Wynd: It’s the same. And I mean, I. I’ve been spending quite a lot of time in Benin because I was interested in voodoo and I speak French, and they’re very open, and you can communicate with them, and you can go to the ceremonies and you can talk to the priests, and you can sort of access the culture in a way that you can’t. If you don’t.

Don’t have people who speak the same language.

[00:29:28] Dennis McKenna: Right. Well, I don’t know.

[00:29:30] Viktor Wynd: I would say the last time. The last time I’d took ayahuasca, the whole experience was me having a conversation about why I needed to travel all the time.

[00:29:47] Dennis McKenna: And why is that?

[00:29:49] Viktor Wynd: Well, I think ayahuasca was arguing that I didn’t.

That I did too much, that you traveled.

[00:29:57] Dennis McKenna: It was, say, you shouldn’t travel so much.

[00:30:00] Viktor Wynd: Well, so it was a bit like schizophrenic and not really focused. And it should be more focused.

And I mean, last year was stupid. Last year I started last year.

We had Christmas with the family in Bali, which was really lovely. And from Bali, I flew to the Solomon Islands. From Solomon Islands, I flew to Papua New Guinea.

Then I had a few days in Manila. Then I came back to England, and we went to Vienna for half term because it’s nice to take the children there.

Then I went off to the Congo for three weeks in the summer.

That’s this year. Went off to the Congo for three weeks, went to France and Spain for the summer. And I’ve just been in New Guinea again, and I’m about to go to New Guinea, which it’s a little much when you’ve got other things going on.

[00:30:52] Dennis McKenna: These places are exotic to me. I’ve never been there.

Most of my travels have been in South America.

And I think of these places, like New Guinea, as particularly challenging. I mean, much more so than the Amazon in a certain sense that it’s difficult to get around. And it’s, you know, it’s just a.

Not a comfortable environment.

Although the Amazon is anything but comfortable. But

[00:31:24] Viktor Wynd: you can’t really backpack in New Guinea. I mean, some people do. There are places you can go, but the place is. That’s why I started traveling, because the places where I want to go to, I can’t afford to go to them on my own because you need boats, you need cooks, you need porters.

You need security and it costs the same for one person as for six people.

[00:31:48] Dennis McKenna: So a visit to New Guinea is actually just to go there as an expedition. You have to have all of this support structure.

[00:31:57] Viktor Wynd: It depends where you want to go. But generally, yes, there’s a few figures you can do. But also it’s interesting to see the, the cultural, you know, the cultural ceremonies that they do. And if you don’t turn off on the day where one’s happening and there’s two or three hundred people can be involved in it, it’s expensive to arrange it.

[00:32:23] Dennis McKenna: Your travel agency, Gone with the Wynd, you take people regularly to these places, which is what I imagine that supports your own expenses and so forth. When you travel, do you have.

[00:32:40] Viktor Wynd: Yeah, What I’m finding is that half of them make money and the other half lose money. So.

And it’s never.

You can’t, it’s hard to predict because you can’t really budget for things because you don’t know, you know, but you’ve got an idea. But so see, like in Papua New Guinea, it’s much more expensive than traveling in, like in England or America. But if you rent a car and a driver and that is easily $500 a day, if it breaks down, you’ve still got to pay for that one, but you’ve got to get another one for your, for the group because the group can’t sit or sit around.

[00:33:22] Dennis McKenna: Right, right.

[00:33:24] Viktor Wynd: And they don’t have the idea that they don’t have the concept of contracts either.

So you can ask them how much something’s going to be and at the end of the day it can be a different price and it’s not their fault. You can’t necessarily argue with them and often you can’t argue with them anyway because you haven’t got the choice.

But it’s not malicious, it’s just that they thought, oh, I should charge these people more money. Or actually they’ve turned up at the village and everybody’s asking for something. So everybody has to be to be given something and quite often find at the end of the trip that actually the guide hasn’t got any money because he’s spent it all, he’s given it all away for everything. Yeah, So I sort of tried to budge. I was, you know, always budget in a very, very generous tips for everybody because you don’t know who’s. Where it’s going.

[00:34:22] Dennis McKenna: Right. Well, you have to do this.

But your travel agency, your expeditions that you host may not make money, but they do get you there.

[00:34:37] Viktor Wynd: And that’s the purpose, is for me to be able to go there, which I wouldn’t be able to do otherwise.

[00:34:44] Dennis McKenna: Right, right.

So I wanted to ask you, in the Amazon, they’re very deeply immersed in the plants and the medicinal plants and so on. Do you find a similar focus on plant medicines or vast knowledge of plants in Papua New Guinea in these areas?

Certainly they must have medicinal plants and probably psychoactive psychedelic plants as well, but little information about them.

[00:35:18] Viktor Wynd: It is interesting that there’s no recorded psychedelics in New Guinea, but that can be because no one’s been to look for them there.

[00:35:33] Dennis McKenna: I think that must be it.

[00:35:36] Viktor Wynd: And also, I mean, the problem. Well, the big problem, I think, in Papua New Guinea is a lot of the missionaries who went there just threw away all of the local culture and knowledge and just said, that’s all devil worship. And in places like, I mean, like the Amazon had hundreds at some place, the missionaries were active there for hundreds of years, and they sort of had time to evolved together. Whereas Papua New Guinea was sort of thrown straight from the Stone age into the 20th century.

And sort of, in many places, just went in with a bulldozer.

[00:36:19] Dennis McKenna: And the first thing to go is the knowledge of the plant medicines usually associated with some ritual context and so on.

Have you ever heard of. There’s a very interesting fungus. You’ve heard of the Mushroom Madness practice in New Guinea, have you?

[00:36:42] Viktor Wynd: What’s the Mushroom madness?

[00:36:44] Dennis McKenna: The mushroom madness. Well, it’s this practice where these people eat a kind of mushroom which they call nanda, I think.

And they do it seasonally, they do it every year, and then they go nuts. I mean, it’s like for a week or so, everybody is like, crazy.

And they blame it on the mushrooms, and they say the mushrooms are the cause of this. But people have examined.

It’s not clear exactly what species they use.

It’s not clear. This is about pharmacology. This is more about a cultural practice associated with them. Eating the mushroom gives people the.

The leave to kind of step outside the usual cultural boundaries of propriety and so forth. Eating.

There’s no chemistry behind it. Until recently, there’s just been a report of a species of mushroom that is used in New Guinea and also in China that is known to science, but it’s not.

The active ingredient is not known. But in China, it’s called xiao renren, which means the little person. Person.

It produces a very peculiar response where you see little people crawling all over everything. They come out and the Chinese, you go to the. You go to the stalls in Yunnan where mushrooms are sold. And the Chinese will talk about it, and they’re very amused by it. And there’s no spiritual tradition.

It’s nothing. It’s just like it’s a thing.

But they’ve just recently identified what this mushroom is, and it’s the same one that’s used in New Guinea.

[00:38:47] Viktor Wynd: I want some.

[00:38:49] Dennis McKenna: I want some, too. I’m working on that. I’m working on that. I’ll send you the link. I’ll send you the link.

[00:38:56] Viktor Wynd: Where in New Guinea?

Because the thing about New Guinea is you’ve got over 1400 different people, and they each have their own complete culture.

[00:39:06] Dennis McKenna: I don’t have my fingertips on the details right now, but I will definitely send you the article.

The person that made this discovery is a mycologist at the Utah Museum of Natural History in the States, and he presented at ESPD55 in 2022.

But he hadn’t made this discovery yet. He speculated on what the species might be and what’s going on, but he had no hard data.

Now he’s cracked the case, and it’s going to go. It’s. It’s going to emerge in some very interesting way because I’m. I’m chemically oriented. I’m interested in natural products.

Whatever the active ingredient of these mushrooms is, it’s not psilocybin, you know, it’s something different, and they don’t know what. So it’s. So this is another example of, you know, there’s still plenty to be discovered.

You know, the ethnopharmacopoeia is not explored by any means.

So. Yeah, I’ll keep you posted.

I’ve contacted him. I know him from the previous symposium, and I’m going to try and get a podcast going with him in the next few weeks because this is actually kind of a big deal, this discovery for people that are concerned with this. You know, everybody else, though, they’re too busy watching Netflix to bother, you know, but it’s. For ethnopharmacologists, it’s a big deal.

[00:40:50] Viktor Wynd: I mean, I think one of the. Actually going back to one of the problems, I think in Papua New Guinea is that the people who we could speak to, who speak English, are tend to be Christians, and they’re not that interested in that side of things. And if there are people who are practicing these. These have these traditional practices, they’re probably not.

They. They’re used to hiding it from the missionaries.

[00:41:18] Dennis McKenna: Right.

[00:41:18] Viktor Wynd: And they’re not talking.

[00:41:20] Dennis McKenna: Right. And the interpreters are not going to want to talk about that because they are Christian and this whole thing is like sorcery, black magic and so forth in there.

[00:41:32] Viktor Wynd: One of the most amazing things was on the Sepik River. I happened to be there when there was an initiation ceremony going for the crocodile men. This is when they had their backs.

Boys had their backs completely slashed up and they’re scarified to give them like crocodile skin.

And it’s a several month long ceremony. And they build a special building called the crocodile’s nest where the boys go into. And as they go in there, they have the shit beaten out of them. And then their backs are cut up with razors. And then they’re kept in there for three or four months learning how to become men. Whilst also the cuts are infected and they manage the infection so that at the end they’ve got their backs looked like crocodile skin. And we were there for the start of that ceremony and a very, very powerful spiritual experience. I mean you could feel the spirits were there and the spirits were amongst us doing whatever that they were being summoned to do. But that was.

That’s something we walked in on,

[00:42:52] Dennis McKenna: not part of. I mean it’s very hard to grok. It’s so far outside our ordinary experience. So they do this. They scarify their backs and then they stay in isolation until the.

[00:43:07] Viktor Wynd: Stay in the.

With the elders who teach them all the things they need to learn. I mean, I felt night. We were up all night and there were hundreds of people there and they were calling all their crocodile and they were dancing and they were singing and they were doing the ceremonies or whatever and they were summoning all the crocodile spirits. And there was a time that night when I stood there when I felt a crocodile came inside me. And I could feel it stretching out inside me and looking.

And it must have. At some point I felt that it realized it had come into the wrong person and it left.

[00:43:45] Dennis McKenna: I see.

That’s really interesting. That’s similar to.

You say you have been to the Congo as well and there are similar practices.

Have you ever connected with the Bwiti culture in Gabon that uses iboga?

[00:44:06] Viktor Wynd: No.

I’d like to. It’s very.

It’s not easy any of that part of the world. I mean Gabon is.

I’ve been trying to go to Gabon. Gabon, you can’s very expensive. But I’m not quite sure how to do it.

But what surprised me was that I was in the Congo.

Been Congo twice in the last sort of 18 months. But been down near the border with Gabon and they don’t know what I’m talking about when I ask about the Wicci ceremonies. It’s just total, you get a total blank. And yet, yeah, oracle, it should be there.

[00:44:46] Dennis McKenna: Of course, the problem also with all of these sort of spiritual practices, especially related to psychedelic plants, you see this with ayahuasca. You see it to a certain extent with iboga and these things.

Now they’re like a tourist industry, unfortunately. And then in some ways that is contaminating the tradition because it’s changing the traditions because any tourist with the money can get on a plane and go to these places.

That has to be disruptive in a certain way to the usual practices.

And like anyone else, the traditional healers will cater to the market.

And so we’ve seen this sort of corruption of the ayahuasca use in South America. I mean, it’s really gone pretty far away from the way it used to be, even 20 or 30 years ago.

And I don’t say this is good or bad. I mean, I am one of those tourists, I guess in a certain way I’ve been there many times, I’ve contributed to the corruption. But on the other hand, also I’m interested in acknowledging and educating about the practice.

And I’ve had, you know, I’ve sort of changed my perspective on the ethics of drug tourism and that sort of thing. It’s better not to do it in a certain way. But then again, it’s a reality. It’s a fact of globalization.

[00:46:31] Viktor Wynd: When I was in, I mean, I was there to look at wildlife, but it did not seem attractive what was being offered there. So I had, had. No, no. I mean, I’m sure if you, you, you need to know what you’re doing and where you’re going. And it certainly was quite ugly in a key to. You could see the people who are coming to Fryhawasa and you could see the people selling it. And it, it didn’t seem that that was anything of, of interest.

[00:46:54] Dennis McKenna: Right. Well, if, yeah, you, if you were there, if you were interested in it, you could certainly connect with it, you know, but there are many other things to see around there and just the wildlife and the biodiversity.

I have a long, many years relationship with the curator of the herbarium at UNAP in Iquitos. And we have done different expeditions together and are collaborating on different projects and somebody like that is very interesting because he is a scientist, he’s a botanist. So he has one foot in science and another foot in the traditional practices. So he’s a really valuable source of knowledge. About these things. And there may be people in the places that you’ve traveled to that are similarly. Maybe they’re academically affiliated or in some respects they bridge that.

[00:47:59] Viktor Wynd: Papua Guinea doesn’t really have much in the way of the functioning educational system.

And I mean the schools aren’t equipped, the universities aren’t really equipped.

There’s very little of that going on. And like where I’ve just been in the Congo, the government doesn’t want their, doesn’t want the people to be educated because they’d be a threat to them.

[00:48:25] Dennis McKenna: Right.

[00:48:25] Viktor Wynd: Where I get the scene. And they like Peru, you know, may, may or may not be ideal, but compared to somewhere like Papua New Guinea or, or the Congo, Peru is a enormously developed state in society that, you know, some like, if you’re, if you’re a bright kid, you can find, you get your way to university and whatever else, which is not really an option.

[00:48:51] Dennis McKenna: Right. Yes. Right. Well, that’s interesting. I wanted to ask you about also your museum here, reflected in this wonderful book, the Cabinet of Wonders.

You’ve been accumulating just an incredible collection of artifacts from all over the world.

And this book is amazing.

And just again, my virtual background is not cooperating here. When I want to show someone a book.

Ah, yes, you’ve got it. Okay. You could show him.

Is this book available? Is it in print? Can it be?

[00:49:41] Viktor Wynd: This one is not in print anymore and it really.

It was quite a big print runner, but so you, you could, it’s certainly. There are. You could buy a second hand, but it’s, it’s, it’s probably like, you know, it’s about £100, like a couple of hundred US Canadian dollars.

[00:49:58] Dennis McKenna: Right.

[00:49:59] Viktor Wynd: Whereas this one is. Which I have not seen and that one has. This is more like that. The Cabinet of Wonders is more about the sort of collecting a psychological condition.

It’s more about the object.

[00:50:21] Dennis McKenna: And are all these the same publisher?

[00:50:24] Viktor Wynd: They’re all prestel, yeah.

[00:50:26] Dennis McKenna: Okay, so we’ll put links to all these books on the podcast page so that people can order them and look at them.

I mean, this is basically. You’ve curated the contents of these. You are what some people might call a hoarder.

No, no, I mean hoarding is a pathology and that’s not this. You’re a curator

[00:50:57] Viktor Wynd: in that first book, Cabinet of Wonders. That’s really an argument that collecting is a psychological condition.

But hoarding is. There isn’t any, you know, there isn’t any order in the madness of a hoarder. Whereas there’s an order in my madness. My. The things I collect, they’re tools. They have a purpose.

Well, you see, a collage. So I always say, like, the objects and things, they’re my tubes of paint. And that the museum is one picture that I’ve made out of all these things.

[00:51:29] Dennis McKenna: Perhaps the best. A better term is you’re a collector.

Hoarder is a term associated with a pathology.

That’s not you. You are actually a collector and a curator of some of the world’s most curious objects. And that’s really.

[00:51:50] Viktor Wynd: Hoarders tend to collect things, don’t they, that don’t have any value or interest to anyone else.

[00:51:56] Dennis McKenna: There’s no systematic sort of.

[00:52:00] Viktor Wynd: We’re splitting hairs, but.

[00:52:04] Dennis McKenna: Right.

I mean, a hoarder is.

That’s not what you are. I would say you’re a very eclectic collector of oddities, and there’s no lack of oddities. And you have a great many of them in this book.

I am excited to see if I can find your other one, which is probably out of print now, too. But we’ll put the links to these publications on our website and people can. There will be many.

[00:52:37] Viktor Wynd: This one is still imprinted.

[00:52:39] Dennis McKenna: And what is the title?

[00:52:41] Viktor Wynd: That’s the Unnatural History Museum.

[00:52:43] Dennis McKenna: Oh, the Unnatural History Museum. Okay.

Which is where you are right now? You’re in the museum?

[00:52:51] Viktor Wynd: No, I’m at home.

[00:52:52] Dennis McKenna: Oh, you’re not. This is your home?

[00:52:55] Viktor Wynd: Yeah, this is my studio.

This is the library in my studio.

[00:53:02] Dennis McKenna: I hope that next time I come to the UK, I’m going to. Which will probably be in 2027.

I’ll make a point to come visit. I would love to see in person this collection that you’ve created.

[00:53:19] Viktor Wynd: I mean, you’re welcome to come visit down here if you have the time. We’re like three hours away from London,

[00:53:25] Dennis McKenna: but I’ll make a point to do it. I’ll build that into the schedule because I intended to in 2022 and then it didn’t happen.

But this time, now that we’ve been in touch and now that I’ve had a chance to appreciate what’s in the books, I think it’s time I paid the visit and we could hang out over a nice glass of claret or whatever and have.

[00:53:54] Viktor Wynd: You can have an evening drinking kava kava.

[00:53:57] Dennis McKenna: We could drink kava, yeah. Do you like to drink kava?

[00:54:01] Viktor Wynd: I drank it in the Solomon Islands in January. I found it very enjoyable and I’ve got some here.

The problem is, where I live, everyone has to drive to get home. And I haven’t got any interest in people coming around to spend an evening drinking kava because then they won’t be able to drive home.

[00:54:18] Dennis McKenna: Well, yes, I enjoy kava very much. I spent time in Hawaii. I’ve not been to Vanuatu and all that. But kava is part of the tradition and I rather like it. It’s definitely an acquired taste, but I like the effects. It’s very nice. It’s like a mild alcoholic intoxication without the belligerence. And you know, it’s, as they say, a social lubricant. So kava is a good medicine for sure.

Well, we’re just over an hour. Is there anything we should have said that we didn’t say yet?

[00:54:59] Viktor Wynd: I don’t know. I mean, anyone wants to come with me, they’re very welcome to join me on one of my expeditions. You should come if you’ve never been to Papua New Guinea.

[00:55:08] Dennis McKenna: I’ve never been to Papua New Guinea. I’m probably too old for that kind of travel. I’m, you know, I’ll be 75 in about a week.

[00:55:18] Viktor Wynd: I mean, I just took an 83 year old Vietnam veteran to the ASMAT in West Papua.

[00:55:27] Dennis McKenna: Oh yeah. Well, I might think about it. I might think about it. As long as you can guarantee that I’ll come home alive, I might consider it.

[00:55:38] Viktor Wynd: But there are trips that I do that involve, it depends where we go. That like some of them involve quite a lot of trekking and the conditions are really hard and you kind of need to be young and fit. But some blades like the asthma and the sepic, it’s, it’s all by boat. So you, and you can’t do it. You can’t really do anything other than sit in a boat and walk around villages.

So those, those places seem normally quite easy. And I think I’m going to go to New island in 20, 237 and New island is, is, is very relaxed.

[00:56:13] Dennis McKenna: Well, yeah. So your, your next, next expedition is planned for 2027 or not?

[00:56:20] Viktor Wynd: Well, I, I go to the highlands in January.

[00:56:24] Dennis McKenna: This January?

[00:56:26] Viktor Wynd: Yeah.

[00:56:26] Dennis McKenna: Okay. And then, and, and you go there roughly a few times a year?

[00:56:31] Viktor Wynd: Well, I have been, I think I’ve got a, as I say, we had this conversation with Ayahuasca.

I think I’m going to try. I tried to limit it to once a year.

[00:56:41] Dennis McKenna: Okay. Okay.

Well, I won’t say no.

If I go with you, it’ll probably be my last trip to Asia. There haven’t been that many, but not tempting. Definitely tempting.

[00:56:59] Viktor Wynd: Isn’t in Asia anyway, so it won’t even be that.

[00:57:04] Dennis McKenna: Yes, that’s right. That’s right.

Well, thank you so much for taking time to tell me about your life and your adventures. This has been a very interesting conversation and we look forward to sharing it with our listeners. And I’ll send you the links and everything relevant in the next few days. So thanks so much. Appreciate it.

[00:57:30] Viktor Wynd: No, great, great pleasure. Let’s. Let’s try and hope to.

[00:57:35] Dennis McKenna: Well, if you come in, if you come to Vancouver, you’re certainly welcome to come out to Abbotsford. We’re a little town.

Not so little, but much less chaotic than Vancouver. But we would love to host you and there are some interesting folks here that I’m sure would like to meet you.

So you’re welcome to come stay when you come out here if you can spare the time. We’d love to see you here.

[00:58:05] Viktor Wynd: That would be fun. I will let you know.

[00:58:07] Dennis McKenna: We’ll do a salon, we’ll do some kind of presentation, and we’ll have fun.

[00:58:13] Viktor Wynd: Yeah, that’d be good.

[00:58:15] Dennis McKenna: All right, thanks so much.

[00:58:18] Viktor Wynd: All right, Great pleasure.

[00:58:19] Dennis McKenna: I will call you win. Thank you so much for this. This has been very interesting conversation and must be late for you there. So pour yourself another glass of wine and

[00:58:35] Viktor Wynd: in the evening, Madeira.

[00:58:39] Dennis McKenna: Ah, looks good. Where is that from?

[00:58:42] Viktor Wynd: Duke of Cumberland. Madeira.

[00:58:44] Dennis McKenna: Oh, yeah. Okay. Duke of Cumberland.

I’ll keep an eye out for it.

I don’t have anything to toast you with, but I will virtually toast you and look forward to our conversation. Okay.

[00:59:03] Viktor Wynd: All right. Night, night.

[00:59:05] Dennis McKenna: Good night. Good luck. We’ll be talking. Thank you.