We do not enter the Underworld unaccompanied.
Nor can we follow Olson there without facing what shadows him: his appropriation of Indigenous symbols, roles, and names.
In a talk given at Gratwick Highlands in Pavilion, NY on November 16, 1963 — a gathering still warm from psychedelic ritual — Olson recalls the way the psilocybin entered him:
“The moment the peanuts affected me, I started talking longhouse talk. And created, because I was the responsible person… I was the tone, I created the tone for the evening. And it was absolutely a pure ceremonial set.”
(Muthologos, p. 39)
He saw himself, he says, as a “peace sachem,” a chief presiding over a longhouse rite.
This is Olson in redface.
It is not a metaphor. It is an act of ceremonial appropriation, grounded in an unexamined fantasy of indigeneity — an image drawn from settler desire, not communal responsibility.
And yet — and yet — Olson’s own account troubles easy dismissal. He is not mocking the role. He is not play-acting without affect. He is inhabiting something. Something passed to him through psilocybin’s mycelial brain, some fragment of buried myth, misread and re-embodied.
Still: this does not absolve him. It implicates him more deeply.
What does it mean when a white poet, freshly under the influence of a sacred plant, begins to identify not only with Indigenous ceremonial forms — but with authority? With chieftainship? With “tone”?
Heriberto Yépez, in The Empire of Neomemory, names this clearly. Olson’s act, he writes, is not just cultural appropriation but colonial fantasy: the poet as settler-shaman, one who claims access to a buried mythic layer while ignoring the living realities of the peoples whose cosmologies he mines.
It is not accidental that Olson claimed the role of curandero during Arthur Koestler’s ill-fated trip — a session that ended, absurdly, with Olson towering over the frightened writer, toy gun in hand. The irony is almost mythic: the self-appointed guide becomes, in Koestler’s eyes, a threat. The poet becomes a monster.
And still, Olson doesn’t retreat. He continues to correspond with Leary and his circle. He continues to reflect on the mushroom as a truth-pill, a love feast. He continues to write from the trance.
This section of our series is not meant to cancel Olson, nor to excuse him. Rather, we bring it here to name the conflicted terrain of settler psychedelia — the space where poetic vision overlaps with colonial fantasy. The space where mushrooms are consumed without regard for the lineages that protected and passed them on.
Consider: the mushrooms that reached Olson passed through María Sabina and her Mazatec kin. Through Mexican curanderas and cross-border crossings. Through networks of theft and transmission. Through bodies and rituals severed from their epistemologies.
Olson himself lived in Mexico for a time — months in Lerma, letters to Creeley that would later form the Mayan Letters. He encountered the ruins. He listened to the stones. He spoke of postmodernity as a return to the archaic. And in doing so, he gathered a cosmology — but not the responsibilities that came with it.
We can still read Olson. Still admire the breath and the ambition. Still learn from the Typhon he names. But we do so now from a different position — from within a Library that holds multiplicity and accountability together.
Let this post, then, serve as an act of reckoning and reorientation.
Let it be known: the psychedelic road is not immune to conquest. But in walking it with care, we may come to unlearn the fantasies we’ve inherited — and instead learn to listen.
Trance-Scripts 