The nature of the mind has fascinated humankind from the beginning of time—how it works, how substances engage it, and how we use it to make sense of the world. These ideas have followed retired United Nations worker and sociologist Carlos Zaccagnini de Ory for most of his life, ever since his epilepsy diagnosis as a teen. After penning two memoirs about his itinerant life, Between Chance and Destiny: Reflections on Uprootedness Consciousness and Defiance and En el laberinto del destierro: Geopolítica, Historia, Religión y Cultura,his third book blends scholarship, personal narrative, and history into what he calls an autoethnography. Epilepsy - Entheogens - Consciousness paints a broad-stroke global history of how entwined entheogenic (psychoactive) substances, the study of consciousness, and epileptic conditions like his really are.
“All this has been kind of brewing in my head for decades. I decided that in order to actually make believable what I was saying,” he says, “I had to…articulate the experiences I have had. With age, a lot of my personal experiences came together; it was the realization that these three fields of study can be connected, linked in many ways, and this has not been [described].”
Zaccagnini articulates his braided thesis in over 400 pages, spinning anecdotes from his life into webs supported with hundreds of global sources. Per Kirkus Reviews, the book’s greatest strengths lie in how the “writing remains eloquent throughout, alternating between scientific reporting and novelistic personal anecdotes” as a “thoroughly researched treatise.” But at the heart of the research remains what is lived and felt:
Following my retirement from UNHCR, and despite no longer experiencing epileptic seizures, I was determined to pursue my epilepsy-related experiments with entheogenic substances. As with my earlier use of psilocybin in the late 1970s, my aim remained essentially the same. I was to look back and search for the deep-seated unconscious cues that might reveal the causes of my past epileptic seizures beyond the obvious diagnosis of physical brain damage and/or electrical overdrive theories related to the neuronal synchronous firing….The personal insights gained from 5MeO-DMT—which I shared briefly in Part I—resulted from the conscious awareness of deep-seated “images remembered” laden with valuable meaning and healing potential. Most importantly, the realisation that both psychogenic and physical factors may have been at work in the outbreak of my grand-mal convulsive condition appeared to support the much-discussed notion that mind and body are intricately woven together into one indissoluble entity.
Zaccagnini was born in Madrid, Spain, in 1949, but his father’s work in the United Nations meant he’d never have one home. His nomadic life began as a child, living across borders in Jordan, Pakistan, and Switzerland before the age of 18. It was in Pakistan, as a young teenager, that Zaccagnini was diagnosed with epilepsy after suffering grand-mal seizures. In a way this was the book’s impetus; his perception of the world shifted, and he was put on intense medications like phenobarbital to manage his symptoms. He suffered with adverse effects from his medications for years without alternatives until his university studies brought him to England, where the influences of the Summer of Love were in full effect.
“The times I was living in as a teenager and [at] university, the 1960s, brought me to a counterculture which was thriving,” he says. “I was shaped by my illness, and with my family [bringing] me into contact with other cultures, other religions, other ways of living…LSD had been created shortly before, and cannabis was being brought from the East and Latin America. When I tried these substances, they were, for the most part, unknown. But I realized they were good for me.”
Counterculture suited Zaccagnini. After graduating from the University of London with a degree in comparative religion, he backpacked across South America, settling in the Peruvian Amazon and living what he calls a “primitive” life. He married and raised two daughters, all the while continuing his personal research into entheogens like mescaline and toad venom, and procuring cannabis to alleviate his seizures. But at 42, Zaccagnini had to acknowledge that a nine-to-five job was necessary. He joined the United Nations Refugee High Commissioner for Refugees in the early 1990s, where he worked for 20 years in conflict zones across the world. Though he kept it secret, he tells Kirkus he opted to work in countries with access to cannabis, including Rwanda, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. Unwittingly, he began to live the connections laid out in his book, experimenting with entheogens, expanding his mind, and engaging with some of the oldest cultures in the world and how they coped with physical and psychological distress.
“My destiny has been to take on an individual research path; I have not in my life taken entheogens for fun. During my working years with the UN, it was not possible to discuss [them], so I kept [my use] to myself. But…the basic element in all that is experience. You can’t know about the substances unless you experience [them] yourself.”
Just as the timing for his exposure to psychedelic substances aligned perfectly, so did the publication of his book in 2022, a time marked by a culmination of activism, research, and shifting attitudes in regard to entheogens and their place in society. Zaccagnini began writing the book in 2020, a year defined by changing attitudes toward substances like cannabis and psychedelics and how they impact both our physical and mental health. The American cannabis industry was declared an essential business, and many sought psychedelic experiences to make sense of the Covid-19 pandemic while in quarantine. Epidiolex, a cannabis oil–based drug, is now an FDA-approved medication for epilepsy; ketamine, psilocybin, and MDMA hold enormous clinical promise in treating conditions like addiction, PTSD, and depression. Which means more people are using them, more scientists are studying them, and more conversations are being had. The future for these three branches to grow into a single tree looks very bright, for now.
“Looking over your shoulder—that’s been the story of my life until recently. Things are getting easier, and I can only celebrate that. Society generally is becoming more receptive, [and] it is seeping through that science is not always right. Epilepsy treatment tries to tell you that you have a short [circuit]…electrically in your brain,” he says. “And many neurologists are acknowledging that their previous research trying to correlate experience, genetic or otherwise, with brain circuits is absolutely nonsense.”
Zaccagnini lives in Guatemala now, but he remains migratory. Though he says that entheogens haven’t entered the popular imagination there like they have in the United States and Europe, accessing the cannabis he needs has never been easier, either in his community or by frequenting one of Madrid’s many cannabis speakeasies when he visits his daughter.
His decade of retirement means he can dedicate his time fully to penning his books and stay up to date on the discourse surrounding epilepsy and psychedelics. Already there are new ideas to consider, and Zaccagnini has toyed with translating the book into his native Spanish. But all of that can wait. Right now, he’s working to get the book out there to those who need it, from the most seasoned psychonauts to the secretly curious. As the years have taught him, there’s no way to fully know anything without living it, and there isn’t always a quantifiable conclusion.
“Objectivity, as such,” he says, “is quite an illusion.”
Amelia Williams is a freelance writer in Brooklyn.