by Greg Marley
According to recent genetic analysis and the work of Rod Tulloss, the yellow A. muscaria of eastern North America has been renamed A. muscaria var. gues-sowii in recognition of the genetic differentiation from the European variety formosa. At this time, most published field guides list the old name. West of the Mississippi River, the Amanita muscaria takes on the appearance of the red-capped form originally described from Europe and Asia, but is a different subspecies, A. muscaria var. flavivolvata. This variety is common from Alaska to Central Mexico and the highlands of Guatemala, while the original A. muscaria var. muscaria is known from Europe, Asia, and only far northwestern Alaska.23
ECOLOGY, HABITAT, AND OCCURRENCE
The fly agaric grows in symbiotic association with the roots of a number of tree species. It is commonly found fruiting around trees in lawns and parks as well as deep in the forest. Its association with trees is based on a lasting symbiotic mycorrhizal relationship between tree and fungus. The fly mushroom forms relationships with tree groups including spruce, pine, birch, and aspen. A dedicated mushroom hunter should be on the lookout for patches of A. muscaria fruiting because it often fruits in the same location and same time as the highly desirable and edible Boletus edulis. The statuesque fly mushroom is visible from a distance and worth stopping to appreciate for the eye-candy appeal alone, but while you are gawking, keep on the lookout for the less obvious porcini.
The combination of good rainfall and the cool weather in midsummer and autumn brings on the fruiting of the fly mushroom in the eastern and central United States. In Maine that means we see these brightly colored fungi anytime from August through early November. In a particularly wet year, the fly agaric also is seen occasionally in early summer though care must be taken to not confuse it with other yellowish amanitas. The typical rainfall and weather patterns on the West Coast trigger fruiting of the fly agaric in California, Oregon, and Washington from fall through the winter.
Active Components
Amanita muscaria in all of its forms and varieties along with a few related species including A. pantherina, the panther cap, contain ibotenic acid and muscimol, two closely related compounds responsible for the psychoactive response when this mushroom is ingested. The psychoactive compounds are in the flesh of the mushroom and concentrated in the skin and the associated underlying flesh of the cap. When ingested, both compounds are able to cross the blood–brain barrier and act on neurotransmitter receptors in the brain. Once bound to these brain serotonin receptors, muscimol tends to remain bound for longer periods than other neurotransmitters, thus accounting for its prolonged effects. There is some evidence that ibotenic acid is excitatory and muscimol is depressive, though in the process of cooking or drying the mushrooms, ibotenic acid is easily and quickly decarboxylated into the more active muscimol. This conversion also occurs in the digestive tract.2425
The mushroom toxin muscarine was first discovered in the fly agaric and was long held responsible for the effects of the mushroom when eaten. It has since been established that the concentration of muscarine is too small to cause significant effects. It has been suggested by some that small concentrations of muscarine might be responsible for the reported twitching and spasmodic movements that occur with some people who have eaten these mushrooms. Benjamin reports this with the caveat that real evidence is lacking to support the claim.26 It is still possible to find recently published reports concerning the fly agaric and panther cap that attribute the toxicity to musca-rine alone.
The extensive and conflicting history of these mushrooms will ensure that new information and theories regarding historic claims and attributions will keep mycologists and anthropologists busy for generations to come. For many, the beauty of these mushrooms alone is enough reason to stop and admire their presence in the world.
13
PSILOCYBIN
Gateway to the Soul or Just a Good High?
I n 1957, Life magazine published an article by the noted amateur mycologist R. Gordon Wasson that introduced hallucinogens to the popular culture and gave us the term “magic” as a way to describe mushrooms. In “Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” Wasson described his experience in a village in southern Mexico, where, accompanied by his friend Allan Richardson, he actively took part in a traditional ceremony that spanned the night and involved eating hallucinogenic psilocybin mushrooms under the guidance of a local curandera, or healer, Maria Sabina, identified in the article under the pseudonym Eva Mendez. Wasson, one of the first Anglo-Saxons to take part in such a ceremony, experienced the visions and mind expansion these magic mushrooms induce. “I saw river estuaries, pellucid water flowing through an endless expanse of reeds down to a measureless sea, all by the pastel light of a horizontal sun.” He reported seeing a female figure dressed in native costume and was struck by the inability to connect with that world he saw. “There I was, poised in space, a disembodied eye, invisible, incorporeal, seeing but not seen.”1
For Wasson, an international banker and vice president of JP Morgan, it was part of a thirty-year quest with his partner and wife, Valentina Pavlovna Wasson, to explore the connections between people and mushrooms in diverse cultures around the world. The Wassons had first traveled to Mexico in the mid-1950s after hearing reports of indigenous peoples in the Oaxaca region practicing rituals with hallucinogenic mushrooms. They hoped and expected to find the people using Amanita muscaria, the fly agaric, in these ceremonies, which would further support their working hypothesis that Amanita muscaria was the Soma, the divine plant-god referred to in Vedic tradition. Though fly agaric was found growing in the mountainous region in nearby Oaxaca, people repeatedly denied using it. Later, the Wassons’ continued exploration revealed that they were asking the wrong question: The people did use mushrooms, but the ones they used belonged to a group of species in the genus Psilocybe and related genera. This revelation led, after a period of investigation, to their nocturnal ceremony with Maria Sabina and the exposure of psilocybin mushrooms to the larger world. Valentina Pavlovna Wasson and her daughter participated in their own mushroom ritual five days after her husband’s, and she wrote of her own experience. She died in 1958, and Gordon Wasson continued their life’s work on his own.
History
Psilocybin mushrooms were being used by Mayans and Aztecs in ceremonies and sacrificial offerings long before the Spanish explorers first landed in the New World early in the sixteenth century. Following their arrival, a small number of Spanish priests and officials wrote accounts of these ceremonies, detailing their observations about the use of mushrooms in both ceremonial and religious contexts.
In the mid-1500s, a Franciscan friar named Bernardino de Sahagun described the use of magic mushrooms in several passages of his famous historical work, Historia General de tas Cosas de Nueva Espana. He observed natives eating the mushrooms with honey, partaking of nothing else but chocolate through the night, and recounted some people’s visions of good fortune and long peaceful lives and other people’s visions of violent death. “All such things they saw. . . . And when [the effects of] the mushroom ceased, they conversed with one another, spoke of what they had seen in the vision.”2
Around the same time, a Dominican friar named Diego Duran also noted the use of mushrooms as inebriants during the festivities of the Aztec emperor Moctezuma II’s ascension to the throne in 1502. And in a report on religious use from the seventeenth century, Don Jacinto de la Serna wrote of a fellow priest who gave the mushrooms out to festival participants “in the manner of a Communion so that they all went out of their heads, a shame it was to see. In Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, these mushrooms were described as teonancatl, which can be translated as ‘sacred mushroom.’”3
The Aztecs’ use of the name teonanacatl, which is translated as “God’s flesh,” reflects the belief that the hallucinogenic mushrooms were part deity, God’s flesh, or a gift from the gods. This theme endures in several cultures where mushrooms are used ceremonially, including the northern European use of Amanita
muscaria. The European Christian priests and missionaries witnessing these rites and celebrations reacted strongly to what they saw as the pagan nature of the ceremonies and condemned the practice as idolatry. As the Spaniards tightened their control on the native peoples of Mexico and Central America, the practice of their religion, the sacrifices, and the ceremonial use of mushrooms disappeared or were forced deep underground.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was widely believed that there was no remaining ceremonial use of mushrooms in the Americas. In 1915, the American botanist W. E. Safford reported, in a talk to the Botanical Society of Washington and in a journal article, his belief that magic mushrooms weren’t being and never had been used in the Americas and that early reports to the contrary were mistaken and should have been attributed to the use of the hallucinogenic peyote cactus.4 A Mexican physician who openly disagreed with Safford later found evidence of mushroom use in isolated mountain villages in southern Mexico. In 1938, anthropologists and botanists from the United States (with the help of local informants and experts, I imagine) “found” the mushrooms and observed a nocturnal ceremony in which the mushrooms were used.5 Although World War II interrupted further exploration, this early rediscovery of the indigenous use of hallucinogenic mushrooms paved the way for the Wassons’ work in Mexico in the 1950s. Interestingly, although the sixteenth-century Spanish Catholics considered the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms to be a pagan ritual, when Wasson participated in the ceremony, the curandera Maria Sabina included many Christian images and symbols. Likewise, several local villagers spoke about their ongoing belief in the Godhood of the local mushrooms and the marriage of indigenous beliefs and Christianity. “To eat the mushrooms, you must be clean: they are the blood of our Lord the Eternal Father.”6
Throughout the 1950s, scientists in the United States and in Europe began to look more closely at a number of plants and fungi purported to contain psychoactive compounds and to study the chemistry of psychedelics as well as their potential for use in medicine. Roger Heim, a noted mycologist of the time and a friend of Gordon Wasson, accompanied Wasson on some of his explorations into Mexico and Central America in the mid-1950s. Heim collected, described, and named a number of the mushroom species used by indigenous people in Mesoamerica and was soon able to cultivate the hallucinogenic Psilocybe mexicana in his laboratory. In 1957, Heim approached the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann with a request to identify the active components in the magic mushrooms that he and Wasson had collected in Mexico the previous year. Hofmann, who is best known today as the man who discovered and synthesized LSD in 1938, was working for the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz, had read of Wasson’s work in Mexico, and was already interested in magic mushrooms before ever being approached. He readily accepted the challenge. Hofmann isolated and named the active components—psilocybin and psilocin—from specimens of Psilocybin mexicana that Heim had cultivated. Hofmann quickly determined a method to synthesize psilocybin, and Sandoz marketed and sold it in pure form for research studies into its potential clinical use and later for sale to psychiatrists and other clinicians around the world.
In the early 1950s, average Americans were busy putting the deprivations of the Great Depression and the horrors of World War II behind them and were working hard to build a homogeneous and conventional society. The possibilities of psychic exploration and spiritual expansion were seen as foreign and threatening. To the seekers for whom the bland conformity of the 1950s and early 1960s felt stifling, however, the possibilities possessed a powerful allure.
The Life magazine article and the subsequent identification and synthesis of psilocybin and psilocin as the active agents came at a time when psychiatrists were beginning to use lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) as a therapeutic tool. Hofmann had been working for a number of years studying and synthesizing some of the chemical compounds made by the fungus ergot (Claviceps purpurea). Several important medicines came from that research, including a very powerful medication called Methergine to staunch postpartum hemorrhaging that is still commonly used today.
Hofmann initially synthesized and isolated what we now call LSD in 1938 and it was referred to as LSD-25, one in a series of lysergic acid diethylamides that was initially thought by the company Sandoz to show little promise. At the time, Hofmann hoped that the lysergic acid derivatives would be heart stimulants like the chemically similar digitalis. No one had any idea that it was a powerful psychoactive compound. On a hunch, Hofmann returned to work on LSD-25 in 1943 and on April 16 of that year, he accidently absorbed a small dose through his skin and experienced a mild “weird state of consciousness.” Three days later he conducted the first planned experiment on himself by ingesting 250 micromilligrams of LSD and became famous for having the first LSD hallucinogenic experience. This was also the first bad trip on LSD. Hofmann later described the experience as horrifying, believing that his body was possessed by a demon. In a speech that he delivered to the World Consciousness Conference in 1996, Hoffman described the difference between LSD and psilocybin by comparing the potency of LSD to an atom bomb and psilocybin to conventional strength weapons.7
From the 1950s through the 1960s, scores of studies and clinical trials were conducted using different hallucinogens to address such diverse areas as physical and mental illness. They included modeling psychosis through the exploration of induced hallucinatory experience as treatments for depression and anxiety disorders, and some promising applications for chronic alcoholism. During the mid-1960s, a small number of researchers also sought to use hallucinogens as a means to facilitate mystical experience, recognizing the commonly experienced perception of the breakdown of the ego boundaries between self and the universe described by many who had taken various hallucinogens.
Walter Pahnke, a physician and doctoral student at Harvard’s School of Divinity, conducted what has become known as the Good Friday Experiment in 1962.8 Seeking to examine the claim that the effect of taking a psychedelic drug can resemble a mystical experience, he conducted a double-blind experiment using purified psilocybin with twenty volunteer divinity students. He chose to use psilocybin due to the much milder and controlled experience it imparts compared with the significantly more potent LSD. The students were all of similar Protestant, middle class backgrounds, and none had previous experience using hallucinogens. A deliberate and conscious effort was made to prepare the subjects for the experience by careful screening, interviews, and psychological tests. Pahnke encouraged positive group dynamics through group interaction and matching the subjects into small compatible pods. The preparations were planned in an effort to reduce fear, build positive expectations, and encourage trust and confidence. The setting, which was carefully chosen for the experiment, was a small private chapel in the basement of a large church.
Ninety minutes after they took their capsules, the volunteers listened to a 150-minute Good Friday service of music, readings, prayers, and meditation broadcast from the church upstairs. Half of the subjects were given 30 mg of synthetic psilocybin and half 200 mg of nicotinic acid, which was used as a control because it causes increased agitation and a small “rush” without any hallucinogenic effects. In a departure from good research protocols (perhaps influenced by Pahnke’s doctoral advisor, Timothy Leary), the five supervising group leaders also were given 15 mg of psilocybin.9 Following the session, the subjects were asked to write about their experiences and complete an extensive questionnaire, and were interviewed about their responses. Follow-up interviews were held over the next six months.
The results of the Good Friday Experiment showed a significant difference between how the experimental and the control groups self-reported about their sense of internal and external unity, transcendence of time and place, objectivity and reality, and the presence of positive changes in attitude and behavior toward self, others, and life. The test subjects who were given psilocybin reported a greater sense of oneness with the universe, a lessening of the barriers between self and others, and an increased sen
se of peace. Pahnke didn’t conduct any long-term follow-ups though he may have intended to; unfortunately, he died in 1971, the victim of a scuba diving accident in Maine.
In the mid-1980s, Rick Doblin, who later worked with Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government as a drug policy researcher, began a long process to locate and interview the original test subjects in Pahnke’s study and succeeded in locating and interviewing seventeen of the twenty original volunteers. Panke’s original notes and uncoded subject list were lost and Doblin had to conduct an extensive investigation to find most of them. Doblin met with the subjects between 1986 and 1989 and gathered data using interviews and the same written questionnaire that Pahnke used in the 1962 study. He found a significant correlation between the results of Pahnke’s six-month follow-up and his own long-term interviews. As with the six-month follow-up, the interviews more than two decades later revealed that the people who were given psilocybin felt strongly that the experience increased their sense of internal and external unity, transcendence of space and time, the perceived ineffability and transience of the universe, and a general sense of the sacredness of the experience. In addition, they reported persistent positive changes in their attitudes and behavior over the long term. Many reported that the experience helped them resolve career decisions, deepened their relationship to Christ, and heightened their sense of joy and beauty.10 According to Doblin, these results support Pahnke’s hypothesis that when people who are religiously inclined take psilocybin in a controlled setting, the experience can induce a deepening of their faith, just as cross-cultural mystical literature suggests. “All seven psilocybin subjects participating in the long-term follow-up, but none of the controls, still considered their original experience to have had genuinely mystical elements and to have made a uniquely valuable contribution to their spiritual lives. The positive changes had persisted over time and had deepened in some cases,” according to Doblin. In contrast, many of the control volunteers had very little memory or strong impression of the experience when they were interviewed twenty-five years later.
