Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom

by Alex Letcher

  Returning to Wasson, what are we to make of this extraordinary man, his work and ideas? If his academic reputation in later life is anything to go by, we should think of him highly, for he was honoured with sev­eral accolades and awards. In i960 he was elected an honorary research fellow of the Harvard Botanical Museum, a position that he proudly occupied until his death in 1986. A Harvard graduate himself, he felt this particular reward was the ultimate vindication of his life's work. Then in 1983 he was awarded Yale University's prestigious Addison Emery Verrill Medal for having made an outstanding contri­bution to the study of natural history. Ten years earlier, and for identi­cal reasons, he was elected a fellow of the Linnaean Society of London. By all accounts, it appeared that his gruelling field trips and years of research had paid off, and that his groundbreaking ideas had gained acceptance within academia.

  Twenty years after his death, his scholarly reputation, at least with­in certain circles, is still high. Those who knew him eagerly report the details of their acquaintance, and stress his qualities as a scholar and a gentleman. He was, they say, a generous host and a tireless correspon­dent,57 a raconteur possessed of a rich and witty sense of humour, a bibliophile, an unremitting grammarian, and a diligent and meticulous worker/" According to his protege Jonathan Ott, he was 'a brilliant thinker, a superb writer, a patient teacher, a kind and decent man, a loyal friend'. Anthropologist Joan Halifax called him 'a twentieth-century Darwin', while Ott concluded that 'the world will not soon see his equal'." Amongst mushroom enthusiasts, Wasson is seen as a founding father, not only of psychedelia but also of a particular, rigor­ous approach to the study of this most colourful of subjects.

  That Wasson possessed some admirable personal qualities seems beyond question, but today, viewed from a sufficient distance, these claims and acclamations read as just a little excessive some might $a overblown for his ideas have yet to shake the world in quite the sam way as Darwin's. This is by no means to detract from his ethnobotan ical discoveries in Mexico, which were genuinely groundbreaking. B taking the brave, perhaps foolhardy step of eating the mushroo himself, he was able to bear personal witness to their powerful hall cinogenic effects, and thus to put the matter of the identity of te nanacatl beyond all doubt. His status as a writer of 'trip-lit' similarly beyond question. But his extraordinary ideas about the ori gins of religion, and the way he went about trying to prove them, no seem very hard to countenance.

  The key to understanding Wasson lies, I think, in the fact that how­ever much he wanted to be taken seriously by scholars, however muc he longed to be one of them, he always was, and always relished bein the outsider. On the one hand, he expressed what could be term 'scholar-envy'. Always self-deprecating about his own scholarly abili ties, he greatly enjoyed erudition and the company of intellectuals, an was delighted when they condescended his view to assist hi research. 'What guardian angel had me in his keeping,' he wrot somewhat ingratiatingly, 'when ... I ascended the steps of Roger Heim's laboratory in Paris to meet him for the first time, a stranger, an American, an ignoramus in the intricate, the vast, the exacting disci­pline that was his! At once he made me feel at home .. .,AO On the other hand, he felt that his discoveries could only have been made by some­one unblinkered by the disciplinary boundaries and specialisations of academe. Though he possessed the means and the influence to have opted for an academic training late in life, and indeed persuaded oth­ers of a similar age to do so, he preferred to remain an amateur.

  Free from the pressure to publish and so justify ever more stretched research budgets, he was never obliged to adhere to the usual checks and balances that operate upon scholars. That is, he only ever pub­lished a smattering of peer-reviewed articles and never in the main­stream anthropological literature that would have been the obvious home for his ideas preferring instead to disseminate his theories through his lavish, expensive and privately published books. This back-door approach means that it is hard to assess the extent to which his radical ideas were really accepted within the academy.

  For example, his ancient mushrooming thesis received short shrift when presented to E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1902-1973) and the other members of the Anthropology Department at Oxford University,61 but, dismissing it as the fringe theory of an amateur, none of the Oxford anthropologists saw the need to publish a rebuttal. The schol­ars who admired his work, and felt compelled publicly to say so, were usually those still wedded to the armchair scholarship of the comparI aove method, such as anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-) and scholar of religion Huston Smith (1919-). (To be fair to Wasson, the comparative method lingered much longer in American scholarship, especially in comparative religion and the work of Mircea Eliade I (1907-1986).) A more revealing measure of Wasson's academic achievements than all the awards, medals, and accolades heaped upon him in later life is perhaps the fact that he was consistently refused research funding from grant-awarding bodies.61 His honorary fellow­ship at the Harvard Botanical Museum came without stipend and was self-funded.

  This anomalous approach to intellectual endeavours begins to make I sense when we consider that for most of his life Wasson was one of America's leading financiers. In many ways this served him well. His considerable wealth meant that he could afford both the time and the expense of travelling the world in pursuit of his hobbies and interests. A mover and shaker used to making the hard sell, he had the charis­ma, the self-belief and the sheer chutzpah necessary to pursue his research and to assemble the most prestigious team available to him. If he came across an aspect of knowledge beyond his own expertise or understanding, he would have no hesitation in writing to the recog­nised world expert on the subject no matter how lofty their academ­ic reputation where others might have settled for a more junior colleague: this is how he began his collaboration with Heim. As vicepresident of J. P. Morgan & Co., he had no difficulty in obtaining the permits required for travel through the unstable hinterlands of Mexico, nor in procuring the use of the Banco Nacional de Mexico's private plane. Wealth, status and charisma allowed him to conduct and publish his research with ease.

  The flip side to this businessman-like approach, however, was that he went about his research rather as if he were conducting a major financial deal. He treated knowledge as a commodity, something that could be bought, sold or treated as an investment quite literally offering money for information with all the concomitant effects on Sabina and others that that was to have. He invested considerable

  effort in networking, entertaining and pressing palms, so as to build up alliances with supporters and potential supporters for example with Dick Schultes, Roger Heim and Albert Hofmann. (At the same time, he was a little too quick to dismiss detractors like EvansPritchard out of hand as inherently mycophobic.) And in this vein he rather used his books as 'sweeteners' to persuade recipients of the mer­its of his arguments. A substantial number of copies of all his books were given away to scholars and prospective reviewers, but these rare and extremely valuable gifts were double-edged for they made gain­saying their forceful author that much harder. Wasson's persuasiveness stemmed less from the clarity or originality of his thinking than from force of personality and his sheer belief in the product being sold. He was a brilliant salesman.

  The books were, of course, a shrewd way of sidestepping the tire­some process of peer review, and to a non-academic audience it is the books, as rare and beautiful objects, that have afforded him credibili­ty. Like medieval alchemical grimoires, they came wrapped in an aura of authenticity, and that, in popular terms, was sufficient to grant Wasson's ideas widespread acceptance.

  How we judge Wasson, then, ultimately depends on whether or not we choose to regard him as a scholar. If we do, and judge him accord­ing to the standards by which he so dearly wanted to be measured, I think we must now come down on him rather harshly. He was guided by an intellectual tradition cultural evolution that was thirty years out of date. His subsequently formed ideas concerning the origins of religion and the division of peo
ples into mycophobes and mycophiles are unfeasible, and should be rejected. His ethnography, though detailed in places, was poorly conducted, sketchy overall, and misrep­resented the practices he observed. More worryingly, it had a hugely detrimental effect upon the people he studied. And he surrounded himself with alliances of yes-men rather than submitting his ideas to peer review. Even by the standards of the time, this is a poor record.

  If we see him for what he was, however a Wall Street banker who developed a passionate interest in hallucinogenic fungi then I think we can absolve him from some of these criticisms, see his genuine achievements in a more favourable light, and draw attention to his positive qualities: his charm, his manners, his skills as a writer and raconteur, and so on. Though intelligent, he was never an academic, and consequently he was insulated from the process of self-criticism and self-reflection that the discipline of anthropology underwent from the 1960s onwards, and which might have alerted him more strongly ro the ethical dimensions of his research. There is no reason why a banker should be expected to have behaved any differently.

  Gordon Wasson was, then, a literate, well-educated and somewhat eccentric hobbyist who, driven by a personal obsession, made remark­able discoveries and then cleverly broadcast them to the world. He wanted to be remembered as the man who, under his own steam, dis­covered that the true origins of religion lay in a prehistoric mushroom cult. His claim was misplaced, but what he actually succeeded in doing was all the more extraordinary. Thanks to Wasson, people began looking for and eating psilocybin mushrooms in just about every country of the world, armed for the first time with a favourable way of understanding their effects. He may have failed in his attempt to prove the existence of an ancient mushrooming cult, but in doing so he gave the world a modern one. For this amateur, this upright banker, this conservative member of the establishment, it was a truly remark­able achievement.

  PART TWO: AMANITA

  Amanita! You no eat her! Else you'll end up, On the slab!

  Boris and his Bolshy Balalaika, Toadstool Soup'

  The Fly-Agaric

  Oh you little gold-stiped fly-agaric, chao-chao-chao,

  Such tidings you brought me, chao-chao-chao,

  Little patterned-stiped fly-agaric, chao-chao-chao,

  Many messages, many words you have, chao-chao-chao.

  Khanty Song from western Siberia1

  Dear children, Be not deceived By the red toadstools!

  Kobayashi Issa, Japanese haiku (1763-1827)1

  It is impossible to go on with the story of the magic mushroom with­out pausing, rewinding somewhat, and considering the cultural histo­ry of another altogether different fungus. Psilocybin mushrooms tend to be brown and nondescript and often require an expert eye to dis­tinguish them, but they have a distant and unruly cousin, which is by contrast lurid and eye-catching, and positively demands attention: the notorious fly-agaric, Amanita muscaria. With its milk-white gills and stem, and its wart-covered scarlet cap which can grow to the size of a small plate the fly-agaric is striking, alluring, strangely beautiful, and yet everything about it seems to scream 'danger'!

  No wonder, then, that it has become the iconic, archetypal mushroom, everywhere representing all of its kind and the peculiar qualities with which we imbue them. It adorns the covers of field guides, a guarantee of sales. It appears in children's books, cartoons, and illustrated fairy tales, a shorthand signifier of otherworldliness, enchantment and the uncan­ny. It is found on good-luck cards, Christmas tree baubles, and kitsch 'collectable' china.' And because of its sheer presence, not to mention its genuinely bizarre psychoactive properties, this mushroom has exercised the Western imagination for at least three hundred years in such a way that its story is inseparably intertwined with that of its visually drab, but 'n other ways more interesting, psilocybin-containing relatives.

  Found almost ubiquitously around the world growing in symbiotiJ association with birch, pine and fir, and often culturally associate® with flies, the mushroom has acquired many names. In Germany,! Italy, Spain and Russia it is respectively Fliegenpilz, moscario, hongok mosquero and mukhomor, the 'fly-mushroom'. In France it is atnanitm tue-mouche, the 'fly-killer'. Most delightfully, in Japan it is beni-tenpM take, the 'long-nosed goblin mushroom'.4 With a few notable excepJ tions, it has been widely shunned as the worst kind of toadstool. Bu J while its close relatives the Death Cap, Amanita phalloides, and the? Destroying Angel, Amanita virosa, are both deadly poisonous andl responsible for the majority of mushroom-induced fatalities, the belicfl that the fly-agaric is similarly injurious turns out to be misplaced (in its] long history, only a few deaths have been attributed to it, and in most! cases the victims were already in poor health'). Certainly it can causejj vomiting, headaches and even unconsciousness when eaten, and isi dangerous if taken in excess, but it is, as we shall see, a potent psy­choactive in its own right, a fact that has merely added to the air of mystery surrounding it.

  Teasing apart fact and fiction in the cultural history of this mush-J room is, however, made especially difficult because myths cling to it in} greater profusion than the white spots that adorn its crown. Indeed,l the ever more implausible stories concocted about the mushroom have become almost a literary genre in their own right. One of the most tenacious in a long line of academic hypotheses and urban myths isj that Jesus was an amanita-eater, breaking fly-agaric toadstools rather than the more usually accepted bread and wine at the Last Supper.' But it is also widely believed that the shamans of Siberia embarked on their spirit-journeys buoyed up by the mushroom; that they drank each other's urine not to mention that of their mushroom-loving reindeer to prolong the mushroom's effects; that the myth of Father Christmas (with his red-and-white coat and flying reindeer) is nothing less than a folk memory of fly-agaric shamanism; that Viking warriors entered their frenzied berserker battle trance with the help ot the mushroom; that the mushroom, crushed in milk, provides an effective fly-killer (which explains its ubiquitous association with flies); that the mysterious Soma, praised throughout the ecstatic hymns of the Ri£ Veda, was the fly-agaric; and last, that secretive and jealously guarded fly-agaric cults lie at the origins of most of the world religions. Such the body of extraordinary folklore that has built up around the fly agaric: what truth, if any, resides within these stories? And if the answer is none or very little, what is it about the mushroom that has caused such fevered speculation?

  Although its supposed insecticidal properties were recorded by Albertus Magnus in the thirteenth century and repeated three hundred years later by Clusius, the cultural history of the fly-agaric properly begins in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It was [hen that travellers' tales about the peculiar habits of the so-called primitive peoples living to the east of the ever-expanding Russian empire, in Siberia, began to filter into polite Western society. These rales were shocking, and hence grippingly enticing, for they revealed that lying just over the edge of the civilised Western world were peo­ple quite other in their lifestyle, habits, demeanour and religion. As disturbing as the revelation that some Siberian tribes appeared to shun washing entirely was the discovery that others delighted in eating a (ish stew so gamey that its ingredients had to be not just well matured but half-rotted (the fish were buried in pits and allowed to decompose for several weeks before being cooked).7 But two stories in particular had a more significant impact upon Western culture: the first con­cerned that mysterious class of people known as shamans; the second, the Siberians' habit of intoxicating themselves with a mushroom believed throughout Europe to be deadly poisonous.

  According to the early travelogues, the many animistic Siberian tribes all supported a few privileged persons, called shamans, who acted as intermediaries between the world of humans and the world of spirits. These strange, otherworldly figures were called upon to heal the sick, to prognosticate the future or divine the whereabouts of lost or stolen property, and to interpret dreams and omens. And this they did in the most dramatic fashion. Donning ela
borate costumes of tat­ters and feathers, they would dance themselves into a trance-like stu­por with the aid of the monotonous beat of an enormous drum. Then they would fall to the ground insensible, foaming at the mouth, occa­sionally muttering strange calls and cries, which they said were the utterances of spirits. In this condition shamans were thought to under­take a flight to the spirit-world, to demand assistance from the spirits 11 prognostication were required, or their appeasement should they be causing human illness or misfortune. For the audiences, spellbound by ^sc lengthy fire-lit performances and the spirit-battles they depicted, the climax came when the shamans, demonstrating the extent of their supernatural powers, would plunge blades through their bodies, or reach into boiling water, all without apparent harm."

  For the earliest Western travellers reaching Siberia in the sixteenth century, the shamans were clearly involved in diabolical or heathen practices, which were roundly condemned. But as Enlightenment thinking took hold in the eighteenth, and with it the reification of rea­son and rationalism, later travellers were more concerned with demonstrating that shamans were fraudulent manipulators of creduli­ty, conjurors possessing nothing more than a knack for ventriloquism and stage magic, charlatans whose mumbo-jumbo contained no cura­tive powers whatsoever. Nonetheless, even though shamans were fequently held up as exotic exhibits from the far side of the world, atavistic curiosities to be ridiculed along with their credulous audi ences, something about them resonated with Western sensibilities.

  Shamanism enthused and titillated the newly emerging and socially mobile middle classes, to the extent that the average literate person would have been unlikely not to have heard of their strange doings. Shamans were the talk of the coffee shops and salons; they inspired trends in fashion and formed the subject of operas; and they became a legitimate topic for essayists, writers and thinkers of the calibre of Voltaire and Kant. Physicians and philosophers alike wondered about the authenticity of the shaman's trance, and whether there might not be something of philosophical or physiological value contained with­in it. Everyone but everyone held an opinion about the shamans of Siberia.9