by Alex Letcher
For example, writers and artists have struggled since the time of the Romantics to represent their natural or drug-induced hallucinations, and so the idea that anyone could reduce these to six abstracted forms seems arbitrary, subjective and unduly optimistic. And while altered states of consciousness may generate entoptic forms, not every entoptic form unambiguously indicates an altered state. There are all manner of reasons why people could have been moved to leave patterns and marks upon rocks and stones. Inspired by nature, they might have wanted to draw ripples or waves. Primitive tools might have limited artistic expression to curves and zigzags. Like doodlers everywhere, prehistoric artists might simply have found the patterns pleasing. Or they might have been bored. And even if our ancestors did make use of mushrooms or other psychoactives, there is no reason why they should have wanted to record their entoptic hallucinations. After all, the more intrepid mushroom enthusiasts today regard their 'entoptic' visuals as trivial compared to the deeper 'iconic' visions obtained on High doses. Academic opinion is at best divided over the model, at worst against it, so once again this particular line of inference reaches a dead end.
There is one final approach that we need to discuss, for if magic mushrooms were used in ancient times, they would have to have been used religiously (they are inherently spiritual, remember). It stands to reason, therefore, that the place to look for traces is in the relics of any ancient shamanic-inflected European religions. And the three that spring most obviously to mind, to mushroom enthusiasts at least, arc Druidry, witchcraft and the ancient Greek rites of Eleusis.
For nearly two thousand years spanning ancient Greek and Roman rule, mystery rites in honour of the goddesses Demeter and Persephone were performed annually at Eleusis, near Athens, at the temple marking the place where Hades was supposed to have abducted Persephone into the underworld.51 The September celebrations were open to all Greek speakers, excepting murderers, for the price of about a month's wages, and were attended by many thousands of people, from the lowly to the great and the good. Plato, the thinker with whom Western philosophy begins (and some say ends), is thought to have been an initiate. Celebrants walked a processional route from Athens, performing ritual ablutions along the way. They spent a night dancing in preparation and then they imbibed a potion from a sacred cup, the kykeon, before entering the secret telesterion initiation hall where a great mystery was revealed. Contemporary writers speak about the experience in hushed tones of reverential awe but, because disclosure of exactly what happened inside the temple at Eleusis was punishable by death, the climax of the ceremony has remained largely mysterious to this day. As classical writers seem, without exception, to have had a profoundly moving, ecstatic or mystical experience at Eleusis, modern enthusiasts have argued that the potion must have been psychoactive. And that, of course, means it could have contained magic mushrooms.
The poet and author Robert Graves who, as we shall see, was no stranger to mushrooms himself, was the first to suggest that plant hallucinogens might have induced the reported mystical raptures.55 He proposed, on the basis of his idiosyncratic interpretation of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and other Greek myths, that the potion given to all celebrants had originally contained the fly-agaric, replaced at a later stage by a more efficacious psilocybin mushroom. Hi* American friend Robert Gordon Wasson who played the lead role in the modern discovery of the magic mushroom favoured ergot as tht
likely psychoactive agent, for its psychoactive alkaloids could have been separated from the toxic ones by soaking the sclerotia in water.54 Others have suggested a mixture of ergot and mushrooms, or just plain old cubensis, as the responsible agents.55
Sadly, in the absence of any material residues or documentary evidence that would tell us exactly what was in the cup, all these theories must remain speculative. And while Plato could certainly have entered the realm of eternal forms after drinking mushroom tea from the kykeon, the history of religion is also replete with examples of mass epiphanies induced by nothing more exotic than enthusiastic fervour (contemporary charismatic Christianity being a case in point, vehemently opposed as it is to drugs of all kinds). The Eleusinian potion may have been alcoholic or, acting as placebo, may have contained nothing inebriating or psychoactive at all: the lengthy preparations and the great sense of anticipation and expectation could have been sufficient to have generated the feelings of religious awe that were so widely reported. The tendency to imagine drugs at the centre of a variety of ancient religions says rather more about «s, and our inability to countenance religious ecstasy without the use of psychoactives, than it does about the religions concerned.56 With so little to go on, the belief that mushrooms were consumed at Eleusis is highly tendentious, and even if it were truly the case, the Greek participants, ignorant of what was in the potion, would surely have had no idea that it was mushrooms they were taking.
The same is not supposed to be true of the shadowy Druids who, it is widely believed, knowingly consumed mushrooms as part of their pagan rites at Stonehenge. Again, it was Robert Graves who started the ball rolling. He argued, in one of his lengthy ruminations about the Greek myths, that the Druids formed part of a pan-European mushroom cult, and that they had remained on good terms with the ancient Greeks by supplying them with bundles of fly-agarics wrapped in straw, presumably for consumption at Eleusis.57 Graves's intellectual status ensured that the idea gained a certain currency. Others followed by examining not the Greek myths but the early Irish and Welsh vernacular literature (including the Welsh Mabinogion and the Irish Tain), which are replete with references to Druids and their magical doings. Academics and enthusiasts alike have wondered whether these tales contain thinly veiled references to psychoactive potions and preparations and their consciousness-altering effects.58 After all, isn't it natural and obvious that Celtic Europe's very own shaman-priests would have supped on the local hallucinogenic fungi?
Well, once again, alarm bells should ring, for what we actually know about the original Iron Age Druids could almost be written on the back of a postcard. They, being illiterate, left us no records of their own beliefs and practices, while the archaeological record presents us with a tantalisingly incomplete picture of Iron Age religious life/9 We can be certain that the link with Stonehenge is spurious, an antiquarian conceit from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for Stonehenge was already two thousand years old by the time of the Druids. That we know of the existence of Druids at all is because Greek and Roman classical authors chose to write about them, and it is from these second-hand accounts that the stereotypical picture of the Druids comes: the white-robed bearded philosophers, meeting in groves, harvesting mistletoe with golden sickles, and performing both animal and human sacrifices. But the extent to which the descriptive and fantastical or rhetorical elements of these accounts can be distinguished remains debatable: most of these authors had never been to Britain or Gaul, let alone encountered a Druid.60 In any case, none mention the use of psychoactive mushrooms. Nor do any of the stories from the Celtic vernacular literature, which were written so long after the formal end of paganism, and by people so far removed from it, that they can tell us nothing meaningful about the Druids they purport to describe.6'
If the figure of the Druid has been made to work hard by Western commentators, then that of the witch has been doubly made to do so. In particular, the episode of the medieval and early modern witchhunts has particularly exercised, if it has not been exorcised from, the Western scholarly and popular imaginations. As the remonstrationsof surly Goth teenagers everywhere will surely attest, the witches were not malevolent devil worshippers but pagans, herbalists, healers and midwives who almost certainly knew about the properties of magi*-' mushrooms that they slipped into their 'flying ointments'.6* A threat to patriarchy, nine million of them, mainly women, were persecuted by 3 vindictive Christianity and burnt at the stake.
This is the myth as it is popularly believed, but the real story, as evcx; is a little more complicated. F
or one thing, the figure of nine million deaths is vastly overstated, and was more realistically in the region of forty thousand (though still a far from trivial number).65 For another, those accused as witches were most emphatically Christian, not pagan, and were, in the main, outsiders, loners and scapegoats who upset the communities in which they lived, or who took the blame for the petty hardships, travails and mishaps of ordinary life. The potent idea of witches as pagans seems to have been invented in the years between the two world wars, but was brought to widespread attention in 19 21 by the British anthropologist Margaret Murray (1862-1963) in her influential book The Witch Cult in Western Europe. Here, and in subsequent volumes, she argued that the witches had not been devil-worshippers, as accused, but were actually members of an ancient pagan religion, existing secretly in rural backwaters since prehistory, that worshipped a a horned god and practised magic.
Although her thesis has now been demolished (the way she interpreted witch-confessions and her habit of gathering data partially and selectively are rightly regarded as unsound64), her ideas gripped the popular imagination. In particular, she inspired a retired colonial civil servant, Gerald Gardner (1884-1964), to set about 'reviving' (that is, creating) her witchcraft religion: currently, Wicca is the largest and most popular of the modern Pagan religions in Britain and America, followed only by revived Druidry. Wiccans are gradually accepting the scholarly revisions to their historical identity that theirs is actually a recent, invented spirituality and none the worse for that but one belief about early modern witchcraft remains firmly in place, par. ticularly amongst psychedelic enthusiasts: that of the witches' flying ointment/5
According to contemporary accounts and recorded confessions, those accused of witchcraft would often admit to using devilish ointments with which they would smear themselves before attending their sabbats. These greasy pastes enabled them to fly or even to turn themselves into animals. The idea that these ointments were not magical but mind-altering was mooted at the time of the trials. Rationalist sceptics, refusing to countenance the idea of magic and witchcraft, advanced the hypothesis that the ointments were deliriants that merely induced the impression of flying, of turning into animals, of consorting with the devil and so on/" The idea made little impact but remained in circulation, so that ointments were depicted in eighteenthcentury engravings67 and were discussed in this light by nineteenthcentury anthropologists.68 Margaret Murray gave the idea serious consideration, and in an appendix to The Witch Cult her colleague A. J. Clark concluded that some of the reported ingredients, hemlock, aconite and belladonna, might have induced a feeling of vertigo or flying when introduced via the skin.69 The idea was picked up by twentieth-century psychiatrists keen to disprove the ascendant Freudian theory that the persecutions were triggered by mass hysteria caused by repressed material surfacing from the collective psyche.70
It was during the 1970s, however, that the idea received its most fertile reception, when it was restated by the anthropologist Michael Harner in his widely read book Hallucinogens and Shamanism."The idea of witches as adept users of hallucinogens appealed not only to the burgeoning sixties and seventies psychedelic counterculture, impatient to find historical antecedents that would legitimate their own practices, but also to feminists looking for empowering historical role models/1 Harner's unfounded suggestion (apparently borrowed from the writer Michael Harrison73) that the witches had absorbed the poisonous ingredients of the ointment through the sensitive lining of the vagina, applied using broom-handles as dildos, allowed the witches to be reinvented as ecstatic proto-feminist separatists, sexually empowered yet independent of men. Later suggestions that the witch-hunts were an ergotism-induced mania74 did little to dent the now popular belief that witches were adept users of psychoactive unguents, employing the poisonous tropane-containing plants belladonna (Atropa belladonna), henbane (Hyoscyamus niger) and mandrake (Mandragora officinarum) as their three principal agents. From there, it was not so great a leap to add magic mushrooms into this potent mixture of sex and drugs.
It must be remembered that Michael Harner was an anthropologist, not a historian, but as such he argued passionately that we could only truly understand indigenous cultures and their world views if we actually partook of their psychoactive plants and brews, rather than watching from the sidelines. He took his own advice to heart, famously 'going native' while studying the Shuar Indians of Ecuador, and abandoning anthropology to undergo a gruelling shamanic training involving the repeated use of the psychoactive ayahuasca brew and of juice extracted from the datura plant.76 Now datura belongs to the same family as belladonna, henbane and mandrake, the Solanaceae or potato family, and contains the same active ingredients as its three European cousins, namely the tropane alkaloids hyoscyamine, atropine and scopolamine. Its use in the New World is typically associated with witchcraft and sorcery, and it produces bizarre and often troubling hallucinations.77 Harner, then, reached his conclusion about the European witches less upon the historical evidence than upon the basis of his own experiences with datura. He knew, first hand, that the tropanes were more than powerful enough to convince users that they had flown or, say, had intercourse with the devil, for his own experiences had been sufficiently terrifying and outlandish.
The fact that there was no pagan witch-cult would rather seem to pour cold water on the whole notion of the ointments, no matter how powerfully psychoactive datura and its European cousins are. Even so, scholars have accepted that occasional and localised use of tropanecontaining preparations amongst the accused cannot be entirely ruled out/' On the other hand, the fact that the 'ointments' conveniently explained how it was that tens, sometimes hundreds, of accused witches were able to gather for their sabbats without anyone noticing, makes the story just a little too convenient. It seems most likely that it was a 'plot device' inserted to make the accusations seem more credible." The idea of the ointments was already in circulation at the time of the trials, for in Apuleius' second-century ribald fable and protonovel The Golden Ass, the sorceress Pamphil smears herself with a paste before turning into an owl. The hero of the story, Lucius attempts to copy her but finds himself turned into an ass, with all the comical results you might expect. The book was read by Boccaccio, Shakespeare and Milton amongst others, and the fact that even today Pamphil's transformation is often taken as a literal description of a hallucinogenic experience80 suggests that it could easily have been read as such by the witch-hunters. The origins of the ointments seem almost certainly to have been literary.
It seems that everywhere we look in the dim and distant past, those slippery and evanescent magic mushrooms simply evade our grasp. There are none to be found in the archaeological record, nor are inferences from other psychoactive plant remains easy to make. Supposed images of mushrooms are, in the absence of contextual information, quite possibly something else entirely, while purported hallucinogenically inspired rock art may be nothing of the sort. Not one single line of evidence unequivocally points to their having been used by Druids, herbalists, Stone Age architects or prehistoric shamans. Of course, absence of evidence cannot be taken as evidence of absence, and it does seem inconceivable, given the huge amounts of time in question, that someone, somewhere, in European prehistory did not intentionally reach out to pluck a psilocybin mushroom from the soil. The problem is that, if they did, they left not a single piece of evidence of having done so. The best we can do is to say that we really do nor know, one way or the other, whether the ancients worshipped the holy spores of God. Though anyone is free to make that assertion, they should remember that they are doing so on the basis of wishful thinking and not established fact. But the time has come to leave behind the thorny question of archaeology and prehistoric ecstasy to ask what traces of magic mushrooms there are in the historical record. The answer is nothing if not surprising.
Much Disordered
.
The Mushroom is much eaten by the Gentry ... but as it may delight
one, so it may be Poison to another.
Randle Holme, The Academy of Armory (1688)
Few mushrooms are good to be eaten and most of them do suffocate and strangle the eater. Therefore, I give my advice unto those that love such strange and new fangled meates to beware of licking honey amongst thorns lest the sweetness of the one do countervail the sharpness and pricking of the other.
Gerard, The Her ball (1597)'
It is a little-known fact that the common Mexican magic mushroom species have all appeared on postage stamps in the African Republic of Benin; also, a type of 'felt' pill-box hat favoured in Romania is actually made from the flesh of a bracket fungus, Ganoderma applanatum; and in Zambia tortoises are believed to have a passion for mushrooms, hence the expression 'the guest of the tortoise has mushrooms for supper' (which is roughly equivalent to our 'when in Rome ...')/ That we know this sort of trivia and that it is available in sufficient quantities for compilers of modern miscellanies to earn a healthy living is due to the fact that all of it was, at some point, written down. The result is that, with the move into history, we have a much clearer picture of magic mushroom use in Europe than ever we can hope to obtain from the archaeological record. And the picture that emerges is quite surprising, for while people appear to have been eating hallucinogenic mushrooms for as long as there have been records, until the twentieth century they always did so accidentally and unintentionally.
