Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom

by Alex Letcher

  Thus, when Wasson met her in 1955 was, within the loc* indigenous community, a renowned 'curandera de primera, ot '1 highest quality, una Senora sin mancha, a woman without stain Wasson was immediately struck by her. 'She had presence,' he w and was 'a woman of rare moral and spiritual power, dedicated inr vocation, an artist in her mastery of the techniques of her offc*

  Arriving in Huautla, Wasson won the confidence of a town official, (jyetano Garcia, who arranged the meeting with Sabina, and again Wasson used the well-being of his son as a pretext to partake in a velaJj. According to Wasson, Garcia and the Americans picked a boxful of the mushrooms that were growing from a rubbish tip at the bottom of the valley and presented them to a delighted and grateful Sabina, who immediately agreed to hold a ceremony that night, 29 June.JO According to Sabina's autobiography, however, she only condescend­ed in deference to Garcia, and the implication is that this was against her better judgement. Nevertheless, she held not just one ceremony but two, the second on 2 July, with Wasson consuming the mush­rooms on both occasions, Richardson only the once.

  Shortly after eating six pairs of the grubby, acrid mushrooms," Wasson felt as if his soul had been scooped out of his body.5' Visions of geometric patterns gave way to 'architectural structures, with colonnades and architraves, patios of regal splendour, the stone-work all in brilliant colours, gold and onyx and ebony, all most harmo­niously and ingeniously contrived, in richest magnificence extending beyond the reach of sight . . He felt himself a 'disembodied eye' floating above strange, new landscapes, and then, somehow, a witness to the Platonic realm of forms. For a moment he felt as though he understood the true, awful meaning of the word 'ecstasy', and then:

  it seemed as though the visions themselves were about to be tran­scended, and dark gates reaching upward beyond sight were about to part, and we were to find ourselves in the presence of the Ultimate. We seemed to be flying at the dark gates as a swallow at a dazzling lighthouse, and the gates were to part and admit us. But they did not open and with a thud we fell back, gasping. We felt disappointed, but also frightened and half-relieved, that we had not entered into the presence of the ineffable, whence it seemed to us at the time, we might not have returned, for we had sensed that a willing extinction in the divine radiance had been awaiting us."

  While the influence of earlier drug writers upon Wasson's prose is apparent, he stands independently alongside figures such as Thomas de Quincey and Aldous Huxley in being able to convey vividly the full enormity of his drug-induced ecstasies: his accounts have rightly become classic pieces of 'trip-lit'. But what makes them interesting is

  not so much their stylistic pedigree as the fact that they show Wasson had, and anticipated having, a religious or mystical experience. He had, in other words, already abandoned the classical framework in favour of the psychedelic discourse, and went to Mexico quite con­vinced that the mushroom's effects were benign and desirable pcf. haps the first Westerner to believe as much. Clearly, he had come a long way since the events of his honeymoon.

  Like Huxley's, Wasson's writing became extremely influential. He 512 privately published copies of Mushrooms, Russia and Histor) were priced well beyond the reach of all but private collectors and uni­versity libraries, but he popularised his discoveries in a piece for the middle-brow magazine Life, published on 13 May 1957.H This famous article was eye-catchingly captioned 'Seeking the Magic Mushroom: A New York banker goes to Mexico's mountains to par­ticipate in the age-old rituals of Indians who chew strange growths that produce visions'. Here, for the first time, a positive way of under­standing the psychoactive properties of fungi was broadcast to the Western world, captured in the snappy and memorable phrase 'the Magic Mushroom'. The article was read by millions.

  Wasson, meanwhile, made many more return visits to Mexico to assess the extent of mushroom usage, and occasionally to consume mushrooms himself. He met Sabina several more times, and made two separate recordings of her veladas, one of which was released for pub­lic consumption (Mushroom Ceremony of the Mazatec Indians 0/ Mexico, New York: Folkways Records); the other, for an academic audience, came with an accompanying book in which the entire evening was linguistically and musically transcribed, and meticulously cross-referenced and annotated.55 Produced off his own bat, and tak­ing sixteen years, this last was a labour of love, and remained the work of which Wasson was most proud.

  Wasson enlisted in his endeavours the help of (amongst others) two notable scientists, Roger Heim (1900-1979) and Albert Hofmann (1906-). Roger Heim, Professor of Mycology and director of the pres­tigious Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, set about rhe task of identifying and describing the mushroom species employed: several species, primarily of the genus Psilocybe (but also Stropha and Conocybe), were used according to seasonal availabilitySufficient samples of the mushrooms were cultivated back in the oratory for Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist responsible for1

  discovery of LSD, to isolate the psychoactive alkaloids: in 1958, while working for the Basle-based Sandoz pharmaceutical company, he successfully synthesised psilocybin and psilocin, which he named after the mushrooms' Latin epithet.57

  The team made further discoveries regarding the psychoactive plants employed by the curanderos outside of the mushroom season. Wasson collected samples of what the Aztecs had called Ololiuhqui, and these were identified as seeds of the Morning Glory, Turbina (Rivea) corymbosa: Hofmann swiftly isolated their LSD-like active compounds.5" Wasson and Hofmann discovered the Mexican Hierba de la Pastora or Hierba de la Virgen ('herb of the shepherdess' or 'herb of the Virgin') to be a variety of mint, Salvia divinorum" (like magic mushrooms the bizarrely hallucinogenic Salvia has found its way into contemporary Western drug markets). Heim, meanwhile, turned his attention away from Mexico to the psychoactive fungi in Europe, about which much more will be said later.

  Within a very short space of time, then, the team made significant ethnobotanical advances inside and outside Mexico, while Wasson himself went on to promote his influential ideas about Soma, Eleusis and the religious nature of the mushroom experience. Consequently, for mushroom enthusiasts, Wasson has come to be seen as an intel­lectual giant who bestrides the history of the magic mushroom, bring­ing necessary scholarly gravitas to an otherwise flaky subject. He is nghtly remembered for his Mexican discoveries, but twenty years after his death many of his ideas have yet to be subjected to any kind of formal scrutiny. It is time to examine them to see what truth, if any, lies within.

  Wasson

  What pre-historic religion or tabu is finding expression when the English governess, with a facial spasm and shudder; grinds a delectable mushroom under her heel and warns away her charge?

  Gordon Wasson

  It is in the nature of an hypothesis, when once a man has conceived it, that it assimilates every thing to itself, as proper nourishment; and, from the first moment of your begetting it, it generally grows the stronger by every thing you see, hear, read, or understand.

  Lawrence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759-67)

  In the early 1950s, when Gordon Wasson first went to Mexico, travel to and from the Mazatec hinterlands was a considerable undertaking. Roads into Oaxaca were rudimentary or non-existent and were frequently blocked by muddy landslides and rockfalls. Though it was possible to travel some of the way by light aircraft, the only airstrips were those that had been cut precipitously into the sides of mountains, which made landing a bumpy and perilous process. From then on the only way forward was by foot, or on the back of a mule. If the weath­er turned bad you could be stranded in one place for weeks, forced to subsist on a local diet of eggs, cornbread and beans. And, reliant as you were upon the goodwill of the indigenous inhabitants for guid­ance, mules, food and lodgings, the chances of being caught in the crossfire of internecine feuds, or even of being ambushed by bandits, were worryingly high. None of this seems remotely to have bothered Gordon Wasson.

  Starting in 1953, Wasson embarked on his ten successive annua trips to Mexico with an
enthusiasm that was not always shared by other expedition members. Albert Hofmann, for example, seems to have found the idea of straying off the well-beaten tourist trail a cautf of some considerable anxiety, as a series of apprehensive letters to Wasson attest.' The monotony of trekking through Mexico led photo?

  rapher Allan Richardson to bow out after only a handful of voyages.4 gut Wasson was indefatigable and positively thrived on the privations ind hardships of voyaging to the remote, pre-modern parts of this extraordinary country. ^

  Of course, Wasson was possessed of an assured self-confidence that only great wealth and high status of the kind that comes from being vice-president of a major US bank can bring. He feared no obstacles tor, as he would admit many times, he was used to getting what he wanted. But his temerity, his love of travel and even his slightly obses­sive interest in all things mushroomic do not really explain what moti­vated him to keep going on these gruelling journeys: something more than just the quest to find the magic mushroom was driving him on. Indeed, he repeatedly made the trip to Mexico because he was looking for evidence, evidence that would prove a revolutionary new theory he had been developing ever since his passion for ethnomycology had first been aroused. If true, he knew that it would both overturn estab­lished thought about the history and origins of religion and ensure for ever his reputation as a scholar.

  Gordon Wasson was convinced that the human religious impulse itself had been awakened by a Palaeolithic magic mushroom cult. The great pillars of Western civilisation, our religious traditions, owed their origins to a time when our distant ancestors freely ate from the original tree of knowledge, the divine magic mushroom. And though long extinct, traces and legacies of the original cult could still be detected in certain attitudes and dispositions that obtained today.

  But what really spurred Wasson on was the hope that the cult had not died out entirely. What if, hidden away in the remote mountains of the Sierra Mazateca, it had clung on in some half-remembered form, of which the indigenous mushroom ceremonies were, in fact, the very last vestige? As he followed the mule trails ever deeper into the moun­tains, and as he left the modern world further and further behind, Wasson became ever more convinced that the answer was positive, and that his hoped-for religion lived on. The hardships of travel were nothing compared with the magnitude of this thrilling possibility. And ®en he made the biggest and most exhilarating find of all: Maria ^bina, the last living priestess of the ancient mushroom cult.

  To find the origins of Gordon Wasson's radical theory we need to look not for some hitherto unappreciated archaeological discovery turned up in the course of his researches, but at his horrified reaction to wild mushrooms of the Catskills, way back on his honeymoon. The force with which he was repelled, and with which Valentina was attracted, suggested to the couple that there must be an underlying reason or original cause for their respective revulsion and delight. They began to amass references to mushrooms from folklore, mythol­ogy, art history, etymology and philology, and noticed patterns within them, such as the paucity of names for mushrooms in the English lan­guage compared to the Russian. They coined the terms mycophilic, or mushroom-loving, and mycophobic, or mushroom-hating, and sepa­rated the nations of the world accordingly, placing Russia, for exam­ple, in the former category, and Britain in the latter.5 Soon they had divided up the countries of Europe according to this strange dialecti­cal axis.

  As the couple perused their unorthodox map, a troubling idea kept surfacing. What if the two reactions, mycophilia and mycophobia, were residual and half-forgotten cultural memories of some ancient strictures or taboos placed upon the eating of mushrooms? Surely only something as powerful as a religious prohibition would have been awe-imposing enough to have endured for so long down the ages, in which case could not the axis be the last surviving cultural trace of an ancient mushroom-worshipping religion? Surprising as the notion seemed, the more the couple looked and the more Wasson continued his researches after Valentina's death the more the evidence kept on accruing. Wasson's Mexican discoveries seemed to put the matter beyond doubt.

  He came to imagine the following scenario. Our Palaeolithic European ancestors had consumed magic mushrooms most proba­bly the fly-agaric, but perhaps later psilocybin mushrooms in an original and archaic form of shamanism. As this loose spirituality gradually became institutionalised, mushroom consumption w restricted to, and jealously guarded by, a powerful priesthood tlw placed a terrible taboo upon its profane usage. The cult spread glota ly, but eventually gave way to what would become the non-mush rooming world religions. Nevertheless, the taboo lingered m vestigial fashion so that fear of, or fascination with, the magic mu-s room lastingly determined people's attitudes to mushrooms in genera The magic mushroom, wrote Wasson, 'must have been hedged abowith all the sanctions that attend sacred things in primitive societies... it must have been instilled with mana, an object of awe, of terror, of adoration'.6 No wonder he recoiled from the Catskill mushrooms so violently.

  At first sight Wasson's extraordinary thesis seems incredible, more like something from the novels of H. Rider Haggard than a serious academic proposition. But what made Wasson's conclusions plausible was that he modelled his theoretical and methodological approach explicitly upon the foundational works of anthropology, and conse­quently a diverse range of distinguished academics were persuaded that Wasson was absolutely correct.

  The theoretical paradigm that steered Wasson's hand, and that, ever the autodidact, he had soaked up through his reading, is now termed 'cultural evolution'.7 As a systematising intellectual framework, it reached its peak in the early years of the twentieth century, and was espoused by the first anthropologists, such as Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917) and Sir James Frazer (1854-1941). It emerged out of a tempestuous intellectual climate in which debates raged about Darwinian (and other) ideas of evolution, about Freudian psychoana­lytic theories of the unconscious, and about the beliefs and practices of the 'primitive' peoples encountered through colonial expansion.

  Ideas of evolution and progress suffused the nineteenth century quite independently of Darwin's intellectual breakthrough in naming natural selection as the mechanism of biological diversity and change. Thinkers as various as the pioneering French sociologist Auguste Comte (1798-1857) and the British writer Herbert Spencer (18201903) proposed that it was not just plants and animals that evolved, but human societies as well. Comte, for example, thought that there was a natural progression by which societies moved from a theologi­cal, to a metaphysical, to a scientific stage; Spencer that evolution pushed societies into ever more complex forms of organisation. The colonial encounter with 'savages' living beyond the edge of the civilised world seemed confirmation of this view, the logic of which was that Western civilisation represented the pinnacle of the evolu­tionary process, the goal to which all other cultures naturally aspired. Primitive cultures were just those caught in stasis, in the evolutionary backwaters as it were, away from the driving current that had swept the West onwards to civilisation and 'supremacy'. As an idea, cultural evolution gave intellectual justification for the imposition of Western 'civilising' values upon colonised cultures as a means of accelerating their 'arrested development'. But it also presupposed a singularity from which all the cultures of the world had diverged, and so justified the search for origins: the academic discipline of anthropology was founded on precisely this basis the search for the 'origins of man' through the study of the primitive 'other'.

  That search was brought closer to home by the ideas of another rev­olutionary nineteenth-century thinker; Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), whose radical psychological theories sent ripples through polite society. According to Freud, within the Pandora's box of the unconscious lodged terrible scatological and oedipal desires which, when repressed, led inevitably to neurosis or psychosis. The realisation that the primi­tive could be found not just 'out there', but also 'in here', raised trou­bling anxieties. What if, beneath the veneer of Western civilisation, and malingering unconscious
ly like repressed Freudian desires, were to be found atavistic traces of our own evolutionary lineage, our own savage past? If primitive societies were living fossils from an earlier stage of human evolution, what vestigial myths and rituals might remain caught in our language, customs, folklore and religion?

  Edward Tylor named this idea the 'doctrine of survivals' in his mon­umental Primitive Cultures of 1871, and by the beginning of the twen­tieth century the hunt for survivals in the hinterlands of our own culture had begun in earnest. Interest was suddenly expressed in rural populations and their traditional rites and folk customs, previously dismissed as examples of rustic, uncultured backwardness (as they are so often today). So while Cecil Sharpe (1859-1924) wandered through summer meadows collecting and preserving folk songs in his bowdlerising aspic/ other metropolitan folklorists and anthropolo­gists lifted the stones on morris dancing and mummers' plays, in the hope of uncovering the remains of fertility rites from our own pagan past.9 Margaret Murray scrutinised the early modern witch-confes­sions for traces of her imagined 'Old Religion', while James Frazer col­lated twelve volumes of data published in three ever-expanding editions as The Golden Bough in support of his notion that all reli­gions, including Christianity, were actually expressions of a universal motif, that of the dying and resurrected vegetation god. As someone vehemently opposed to religion, his hope was that he would propel the West into Comte's scientific stage of development, banishing irra­tionality once and for all.