Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom

by Alex Letcher

  I shall return to the thorny issue of prohibition in Chapter Fourteen, but for now, our introductions over, it is time to begin telling the story of the magic mushroom and how it came to have its foot wedged firm­ly in the door of Western culture. We need to go back to the beginning, to look at the archaeological remains from the earliest of human cul­tures, to see whether civilisation really began, as so many say, in the psychedelic swirl of a bemushroomed age.

  The Archaeology of Ecstasy

  And did those feet in ancient times Dance upon England's mountains green?

  And were the holy Spores of God On England's pleasant pastures seen?

  Stephen Hancock, 'Jerusalem (Glade remix)*'

  Imagine the scene. A Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer bends down and picks a variety of mushroom she has never encountered before. She is struck at once by its delicate pointy capf its distinctive and memorable shape; and yet, there is something else about it that draws her attention, for it seems almost as if the mushroom is calling to her. Nevertheless, mindful of the risks, she nibbles it gingerly; but then, finding its taste not altogether unpleasant, she swallows it and eats more. Thirty min­utes later; when the colours begin and the world starts to ripple around heri she finds herself propelled into the numinous world of the ances­tors and spirits who tumble towards her out of the sky and whisper songs of love and longing in her ear: 'We have been waiting for you/ they sing. Overwhelmed, she falls to the ground in ecstasy. Hours later; when it is all over; the colours and spirits long gone, she returns to her camp with a glint in her eye, and a bundle of the sacred mushrooms cupped in her hand. 'Look what I've found/ she says ...

  Speak to any serious-minded mushroom aficionado, and this is the kind of picture of the distant past that he or she will conjure up, telling you that it would have been 'natural' or 'obvious' for prehistoric cultures to have used magic mushrooms. Our ancestors, living in much closer contact with the natural world, would have had their senses more keenly honed to the powers of plants than we do. Shamanistically inclined, they would have unquestionably welcomed and celebrated the discovery of this key to the door of the otherworld. This belief resurfaces time and again in different guises, and we will meet it many times.

  Of course, this kind of argument should immediately alert the criti­cal enquirer, for whenever anything is deemed 'natural' and 'obvious' it almost always turns out, on closer inspection, to be culturally spe­cific, localised and historically contingent in other words, not at all natural or obvious. The belief actually rests upon an implicit philo­sophical assumption: that there is some universal or essential psychedelic experience that transcends history and culture, so that anyone eating a magic mushroom will have a similar, usual spiritually inflected, experience irrespective of who, when and where they are. It will be ecstatic, boundless, oceanic, noetic, cosmic, 'far out', or any of the other superlatives that are usually applied in such circumstances. It will be wholly benign, pleasurable and desirable. Thus, goes the argu­ment, any culture that stumbles upon a new hallucinogenic plant will embrace it with open arms.

  Historians and archaeologists are now all too aware of how our views of the past are tempered by the attitudes and dispositions of the present, and how these views may say more about us than ever they can about the people who came before us. The belief in the ancientness of psychedelia is no exception for it turns out, somewhat paradoxical­ly, to have rather recent origins: to be a product of the Utopian senti­ments that accompanied the psychedelic revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. In the early days of the cultural movement that would eventu­ally bequeath us the magic mushroom, academics and intellectuals happily and legitimately took drugs such as LSD and mescaline, and then marvelled that they had discovered an ancient and secret path to the kingdom of heaven.

  One of the first to do so was Aldous Huxley, who famously took mescaline in the spring of 1953, Wfote up his experiences in The Doors of Perception. There, alongside poetic descriptions of his spiritual ecstasies, he suggested that all 'the vegetable sedatives and narcotics, all the euphorics that grow on trees, the hallucinogens that ripen in berries or can be squeezed from roots all, without exception, have been known and systematically used by human beings since time immemorial'. The reason, he said, was simple: the longing to tran­scend the drudgeries and privations of life 'is and always has been one of the principal appetites of the soul'.2 Other intellectuals and aca­demics, caught up in the excitement of those early days, concurred but placed that ancient appetite not in the soul but in some essentialised 'human nature', or in the genes, and argued that it is a drive that, like

  its better known sexual counterpart, we repress at our peril.3

  When psychedelia went mainstream during the mid 1960s, and the drugs were hurriedly made illegal, these arguments were eagerly reit­erated by hippies determined to make the case against prohibition. Even today the popular writer Paul Devereux argues that human his­tory is one 'long trip' from which modern Western culture with its 'war on drugs' represents an anomalous aberration.4 In the case of magic mushrooms, therefore, enthusiasts imagine an unbroken tradi­tion of use stretching back to the Palaeolithic, which includes the hunter-gatherer shamans, the Neolithic builders of Stonehenge and Avebury, the ancient Greeks at Eleusis, the Iron Age Druids and medieval witches, and which was only severed by Christianity and the machinations of the industrial revolution.5

  While it is true that archaeologists are coming to terms with the fact that psychoactive drugs have played a part in human culture perhaps for millennia, one of the major themes running through this book is that this essentialist view of the psychedelic experience is problematic. I argue instead that drug experiences, whatever essential elements they may or may not contain, are always culturally bound, culturally medi­ated.6 Different people, let alone different cultures, have quite clearly approached the same drug differently, and the common thread linking disparate cultures in their relationship with drugs is more correctly an attitude of ambivalence. A rigorous history of the magic mushroom must therefore be built upon the evidence, and not upon a philosoph­ical assumption, however ardently we may wish it to be true. In later chapters I shall look at the evidence for mushrooming traditions in Mexico and Siberia, but for now let us start by sifting through the material remains left by earlier, prehistoric European cultures to see whether any of them really had acquired the taste for magic mush­rooms.

  For any particular culture to have centralised the use of a psychoactive plant, three conditions must obtain: the plant must be available in suf­ficient quantities to meet demand, either growing in a plentiful enough supply or obtainable by trade; the culture must know that the plant in question, when ingested, is responsible for causing the subsequent alterations of consciousness; and finally, most importantly of all, there must exist a cultural context in which those alterations can be mean­ingfully apprehended, and psychologically and socially integrated. The experience, in other words, has to be one worth repeating, its desirable effects outweighing any negative consequences. Not one of these prerequisites is ever guaranteed.

  To illustrate the first point, let us consider the ecology of the Liberty Cap, Psilocybe semilanceata. You will recall that this mushroom favours acid upland pastures and grows in the kinds of conditions where the only viable form of agriculture is sheepor cattle-farming. However, for much of its prehistory Britain was covered not in pasture but in dense primary forest,7 so the mushroom here would have been uncommon or rare. It could only have been with the introduction of agriculture and the gradual clearance of the forests from the Neolithic onwards, from around 5000 bce, that pastures of sufficient size would have been established to make psilocybin mushroom use in Britain plausible. It would be quite wrong of us to assume that just because a magic mushroom is abundant now it has been so throughout all of human history and prehistory.

  The second point, that cultures must spot the causal connection between eating a plant and the unusual effects this produces, seems so obvious as hardly to nee
d stating. In our scientific age it is easy to for­get that pre-modern cultures have attributed all manner of phenome­na to various agencies, not all of which proved to have substance. Take the example of ergot poisoning. At various points during the Middle Ages, and even as late as 1953 in France and Belgium, European society was periodically afflicted by a terrible plague that struck down whole regions at a time. The affected would be beset by trembling of the limbs, formication the feeling that they were cov­ered in crawling ants sweats and fevers, together with terrifying visions and hallucinations. In extreme cases, victims would go perma­nently insane, or would develop a fatal gangrene in their extremities. This scourge was seen as a God-given punishment and named St Anthony's fire, after the saint who was said to be able to appease the Almighty and cure this terrible affliction."

  We now know that it was caused, if not directly by the hand of God, then by the ergot fungus, Claviceps purpurea, which grows parasitically upon grasses, especially species of rye. This fungus forms a hard, lumpy, rind-covered structure called a sclerotium (another fungal strategy for riding out adverse conditions), which sticks out from the grass head like a blackened ear of corn. Ergot sclerotia contain a potent array of psychoactive and toxic alkaloids, from which the infamous drug of the 1960s, LSD, may be derived and which, when accidentally milled into flour, cause gangrene and hallucinations. Remarkably, though ergot's vasoconstricting effects have long been known and employed in folk medicine as an abortifacient or to bring pregnancies to term, its role in causing St Anthony's fire went undis­covered until the modern period. It seems that medieval herbalists were quite unable to spot the causal connection.

  The opposite is in fact true, in that pre-modern cultures often wrongly attribute a range of virtues to plants and potions that we now know to be inert most aphrodisiacs providing the obvious disap­pointing example. But during the 1960s it was reported that the Kuma people from the Wahgi Valley of the West Highland region of New Guinea used a hallucinogenic mushroom to go into collective states of trance. The news caused a substantial amount of excitation in the West, for it was hoped that this would prove to be the first example of indigenous mushroom use outside Mexico and Siberia.9 Under the influence of this mushroom, called nonda by the tribespeople, the men would dress up in ritual gear, grow tense and excitable, and run amok through their village. The women, meanwhile, would become relaxed and giggly, boast about their sexual exploits, dance provocatively and flirt indecorously with men. Both sexes acquired double vision, became shivery, and occasionally lost the power to speak. Some of the afflicted claimed to be able to see spirits and bush demons.

  However, in spite of several mycological expeditions to the region in which nonda specimens were successfully collected and identified (it turns out that nonda actually comprises several different species belonging to the genus Boletus), no trace of any hallucinogenic com­pound has ever been found within them.10 This curious omission rather explains why the mushrooms only became 'active' at certain times of the year and could otherwise be eaten with impunity, and why lying in running water apparently 'cured' the afflicted. Though it has been suggested that tobacco, which is hallucinogenic in strong doses, might have been responsible," it seems more likely that the nonda trance was an example of an event known in anthropology as a 'rite of rebellion'/1 Like the carnivalesque antics of Mardi Gras, or the medieval 'feast of fools', these effervescent social dramas which invert, parody and ridicule the norms and rules of the status quo act as safety valves and release pent-up societal tensions. None of them require the intercession of a drug, but merely an excuse though of course intoxicants may be consumed. In this instance the symptoms of intoxication were quite spuriously attributed to a mushroom by the Kuma, illustrating that knowledge of the causality between a drug and its action can never be assumed, however obvious that connection may appear to us.

  Finally, and most importantly, for a psychoactive plant to become legitimated or even institutionalised there must also exist a culturally agreed context into which the strange experiences it elicits can easily be slotted, and thus made meaningful and comprehended. But in many cultures, both current and historical, that context has been wholly lacking, and locally occurring psychoactive drugs have been known but shunned as either worthless or poisonous.

  For example, it is commonly recognised that indigenous cultures in the Americas, most notably Central and South America, have long employed a whole range of psychoactive plants for ritual and recre­ation. The proportion of available psychoactive plants actually used in the Old World is substantially lower.'5 The reason for this discrepancy seems not to be a paucity of botanical knowledge but a cultural aver­sion towards the plants and their pharmacological effects.

  In the Amazon rainforest there is one psychoactive brew, known as ayahuasca or yage, that is used almost ubiquitously by tribes across the region and forms a potent cornerstone of indigenous spirituality. Nevertheless, and in spite of peer pressure, some tribes in ayahuasca regions regard it as so tainted with negative associations, with sorcery, warfare and strife, that they will have nothing to do with it.'4 '

  Similarly, it has been known since the 1920s that throughout the southern Pacific Ocean there are, rather bizarrely, several species of hallucinogenic fish, two of which are the Hawaiian manini fish, Acantburus triostegus sandvicensis, and the South African brass bream, Kyphosus vaigiensis.,J The unknown active ingredients seem most concentrated in the fishes' heads and brains. In Honolulu in 1927 about thirty Japanese workers from the mayor's office were struck down with strange hallucinations and a feeling of pressure upon the chest after eating a meal of one such species. But we have yet to see the emergence of a psychedelic fish craze.

  Closer to home, there are several naturally occurring plant psy­choactives in Britain's flora, such as henbane (Hyoscyamus niger) and mugwort (Artemesia vulgaris), but they have been largely ignored, or actively shunned, by modern psychedelic enthusiasts. Admittedly, the threshold between an active dose and a toxic dose of henbane (which contains the deliriant drug scopolamine and was used by Dr Crippen to murder his wife) is worryingly narrow. Nor are its effects supposed to be altogether pleasant: I have heard it described by more than one brave experimenter as 'the Hieronymus Bosch trip'. On the other hand, mugwort, which contains a drug called thujone, might be regarded as a little tame in comparison to modern synthetics, but this simply reinforces the point. Some drugs are seen as simply not worth the bother.

  With regard to magic mushrooms, the fly-agaric is found growing across great swathes of the temperate forest regions of the world but, barring the occasional outbreak, has only been consistently used as an intoxicant in two relatively small regions of Siberia. The fly-agaric was consumed in Japan, but only as a food, with an elaborate set of cook­ing techniques employed to rid the mushroom of its psychoactive ingredients.'6 Magic, presumably psilocybin, mushrooms have been known about in China since at least the Chin Dynasty (265-420 ce), when they were written about by Chang Hua in his Po-wu chih, or Record of the Investigation of Things.17 But for Chang Hua, and the later compilers of herbals that came after him, the mushrooms that 'made you laugh unceasingly' were poisons, to be avoided or, if acci­dentally eaten, to be treated with herbal remedies.

  In Europe, as we shall see, psilocybin mushrooms have been known about since at least as long ago as the fifteenth century, with some writers even likening their effects to those of opium, but no one seems to have eaten them intentionally until the twentieth. And, at the risk of getting a little ahead of ourselves, contemporary statistics from Holland show that although the numbers of people who have ever taken magic mushrooms is steadily increasing, most only take them once or twice in their lifetime. If the desire to alter consciousness through drugs is a primal urge, as insistent as the drive to have sex, then we seem to have it very much under control.

  With these points in mind, we can now turn to the archaeological record to see what evidence there is for prehistoric mushroom use. Immediately, we stumbl
e upon two problems. The first is that mush­rooms differ from almost all other naturally occurring psychoactives in that they do not have to be prepared in any way before they are con­sumed. They do not have to be roasted, fermented, pounded, boiled or infused (though they may be cooked or made into tea for payability's sake). They do not have to be chewed in quids for hours at a time, injected, smoked, snuffed, rubbed on the skin in salves, taken by enema, or consumed by any of the other pleasant, and not so pleasant, methods by which we have learnt to introduce drugs into the body. They can simply be picked and eaten, and consequently there is noth­ing in the way of paraphernalia that might have been left in the archaeological record to indicate their use.

  The second is that mushrooms themselves, perhaps even more so than plants, do not preserve well. Archaeological ages are defined on the basis of the skeletal remains of prehistoric cultures, upon their hard-wearing and long-lasting artefacts of bone, ceramics, metal and stone. We talk of the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, but quite what wonders might have belonged to any 'Wood Age' we shall never know, for they will have long rotted away. Even more than wood which does occasionally get preserved if dropped in acid bogs mushrooms are delicate, evanescent and highly putrescible, often rotting away within a few hours of appearance. Nor is drying a guar­antee of protection from the ravages of their hungry, saprophytic, fun­gal brethren. It should come as no surprise, therefore, to learn that fungi of all kinds appear extremely rarely in the archaeological record.