Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom

by Alex Letcher

  Not all scholars, however, have been so enthused. A rather persua­sive objection to the fly-agaric thesis was raised by two Indian schol­ars, Santosh Kumar Dash and Sachidananda Padhy.'5 Interested in the prescription and proscription of plants throughout Indian history, these ethnobotanists scrutinised a manuscript known as the Book of Manu, the Manusmruti, or the Manava-Dharmasastra. In this book of laws attributed to Manu, the 'first man', and believed to record the rules and norms that obtained throughout the first millennium bce they uncovered some ardent prohibitions against both the eating of mushrooms and the drinking of urine. A 'twice-born' person (some­one belonging to the upper two castes) who eats a mushroom falls down a caste, while anyone touching or drinking urine is expected to perform 4an arduous penance'.16 Wasson knew about the Book of Manu but rather glossed over it in a later chapter of SOMA, conclud'ng that its verses probably didn't apply to the Soma plant. On what basis he reached this supposition is unclear. He may well have been correct, for the Book of Manu is of uncertain provenance and could have been written as late as 100-300 ce, long after the Vedic religion had given way to Hinduism.'7 But then again, these prohibitions could easily have been a legacy from Vedic times, in which case the fly-agar­ic theory would be seriously weakened. Certainly, they presented a serious obstacle for Wasson's supporters to overcome.

  The most trenchant critic of the fly-agaric thesis, however, was the Cambridge Vedic scholar John Brough, who condemned it shortly after its publication. At what was a surprisingly genial dinner at Wasson's home in Connecticut, Brough handed over an advance copy of his clause-by-clause rebuttal of the American's elaborate exegesis. The details of his critique (later printed by the School of Oriental and African Studies in London'8) are lengthy, complicated and dry, but a few will serve to illustrate the magnitude of his objections. He pointed out, for example, that many of Wasson's arguments, not least the sup­posed existence of Soma in two forms, were overly sensitive to the vagaries of translation; other equally valid or more faithful renditions of the Rig Veda simply eroded many of Wasson's certainties. Only one hymn in the entire corpus appears to describe the effects of Soma hymn 10.119, cited at the head of this chapter and the artifice of its structure, Brough thought, precluded its having been written under Soma's influence. A dramatic monologue of this kind could easily have been written by someone with no personal experience of Soma, and without this hymn there is little else in the text that points to Soma being hallucinogenic. 'Exalted language is expected in liturgical utter­ances,' he wrote, 'and we can hardly suppose that all of these were drug-induced. The point need not be laboured.'" Furthermore, he wondered why a mushroom had to have been put through such an elaborate process of crushing, mixing and filtering, when the priests could simply have eaten it, or chewed its dried remains. And finally, and most damning of all, he pointed out that nowhere does the text state that priests actually drank the flowing Soma urine.

  Obviously bruised by the encounter, Wasson picked himself up and delivered his own, somewhat bombastic counterblast; but in spite ot harnessing all his considerable rhetorical skills, his rather puffed-up Rejoinder to Professor Brough added little in the way of new evidence that might have overcome the Cambridge man's objections.10 One of the major disagreements between the two centred on the question ot whether fly-agaric consumption in Siberia had any relevance to the identity of a plant used in northern India, some thousands of miles away. Brough maintained that the sheer geographical distance between the two regions separated as they are by China and the Himalayas meant that the one had absolutely no bearing upon the other. The identity of Soma could only be determined on the strength of the internal evidence of the Vedic texts and any local archaeological evidence that emerged."

  Wasson disagreed profoundly. Implicit in all his work was the belief which we encountered in Chapter Two that hallucinogenically inspired gnosis always transcends linguistic and cultural boundaries and is therefore universal. So if Siberian shamans found ecstasy on fly­agaric mushrooms, then the Vedic priests would have done so as well; and if Siberians learnt to recycle the mushroom's active ingredients, and prolong or deepen the intoxication by drinking one another's urine, then so would the Aryan invaders. For Wasson, Siberia formed the template about which the Soma practices could be reconstituted because fly-agaric gnosis was always and everywhere the same. But wedded as he was to the modernist approach of the comparative method, he failed to recognise that religious experience, whether obtained by eating mushrooms or granted by divine grace, is necessar­ily constrained by culture, and so historically contingent and particu­lar. There is absolutely no reason why a fly-agaric cult should look the same in India as in Siberia, or anywhere else for that matter. Brough was right: the situation in Siberia was interesting, but could have no cultural relevance to Soma whatsoever.

  In any case, the evidence from Siberia that Wasson did bring to bear on the Soma question was altogether too partisan, and too rose-tint­ed. He exaggerated the extent to which the fly-agaric was used within shamanism, and underplayed the extent to which it was used recreationally (thus contributing to the popular confusion that Siberian shamans always used the fly-agaric). He dismissed any account that claimed that the mushroom produced violent, aggressive or stultified behaviour, for this would have weakened his argument (hence also his eagerness to demolish the berserker theory). But it is hard to imagine why the Vedic priests would have written such ecstatic poems about a mushroom that rendered one so insensible, and distorted perception to such a degree, when the majority of Siberian shamans had the dis­cernment to avoid it altogether.

  The supposed link between Siberia and Soma mattered so much to Wasson because it formed a crucial piece of evidence in support of his grand theory that the origins of all religions lay in a prehistoric mushroom cult. He felt that his case in Mexico was watertight. Clearly, the use of teonanacatl by the Aztecs and the presence of the prehistoric mushroom stones pointed to a long tradition of psilocybin mushroom use in Mesoamerica; it was not so great a leap of faith to imagine this as ubiquitous throughout Central America. In the Old World, however, the evidence for a mushroom cult was not as forth­coming less charitably put, it was pretty well absent and Wasson admitted that he had been unable to find 'an umbilical cord linking the Mexican and Siberian cults'." But he knew that this situation would be dramatically overturned if his identification of Soma proved correct.

  If, as the orthodoxy of the time maintained, the European Aryans had invaded the subcontinent down from the Caucasus mountains, bringing their Soma religion with them, the use of the fly-agaric, far from being restricted to Siberia, had actually originated within, and been widespread across, Eurasia. Furthermore, if Weston La Barre's thesis that psychedelic shamanism had had its genesis in Eurasia, and had been introduced into the Americas with the eastward migrations that took place at the end of the last ice age, was correct, then Wasson's European mushroom cult acquired a global significance. Spirituality everywhere, from European paganism and the major world religions to First Nation spiritualities in the Americas, could be said to have begun when the religious impulse was triggered in some prehistoric ancestors, munching their way through the magic fairy-tale mushroom. Soma, then, slotted perfectly into this picture, forming the missing piece of the jigsaw that Wasson had been looking for to link the Old and New Worlds.

  Let us imagine, just for a moment, that the fly-agaric cult had been carried, as Wasson supposed, from Europe to India, across to Siberia, from there over the Bering Straits to Alaska, and finally down into the Americas. We would surely expect to find evidence for this extraordi­nary religion scattered along the way, especially in North America. But this is not the case. Evidence for the supposed fly-agaric cult is notable only by its absence, the mushroom having been by and large shunned by Siberian and American indigenes alike, and even by the curanderos of psilocybin mushroom-loving Mexico.

  There was a flurry of excitement in the late 1970s when Wasson announced that he had, in fact, found evide
nce of a Native American 'shaman' who used the scarlet mushroom. In 1978, at the third of a series of conferences on psychoactive drugs, organised by Jonathan Ort and others, Wasson introduced a charismatic Ojibway herbalist (and university-trained ethnobotanist) named Keewaydinoquay 'Kee' Resclid/' Leading a solitary existence on a remote island in Lake Michigan (at least during the summer months) Kee claimed to have been initiated into a shamanistic tradition of using fly-agaric known as the miskwedo, the 'red-topped mushroom dependent on trees' which she consumed four or five times a year. To a rapt audience, she retold the 'Legend of Miskwedo explaining how the mushroom had come to be used by the Ojibway people, and how they discovered that its sacred properties could be passed on through urine.

  No wonder Wasson was excited, for this, if true, would be just the sort of evidence he needed to link Siberia with North America: he opti­mistically predicted that other cases of indigenous fly-agaric shaman­ism would soon come to light. As ever, though, he read far too much into a single uncorroborated piece of evidence. Kee herself admitted that many of the Ojibway were vehemently opposed to the use of the fly-agaric, and that her original teacher forbade her to experiment with it. Other versions of the miskwedo story told by the Ojibway dif­fer substantially from Kee's, to the extent that they amount to prohi­bitions against eating all mushrooms!14

  Further doubt must be cast upon Kee's evidence because of the lit­tle-known fact that she and Wasson were lovers. Theirs was a compli­cated and stormy relationship, and it is not inconceivable that Kee embellished or changed her story to fit with Wasson's expectations as a means of prolonging his less than enthusiastic affections.15 At best, her testimony demonstrates the existence of a localised fly-agaricbased spirituality, quite possibly of recent origin; at worst, it may have been fabricated. Without further corroborative evidence, the extent of this uncertain fly-agaric use in indigenous North America must be regarded as occasional, sporadic and localised.

  As for the foundation stone of Wasson's grand argument, the sup­position that the Aryans brought the fly-agaric cult with them, schol­ars have been unable to agree on exactly who they were or exactly where in Europe they were supposed to have originated. Indeed, the notion that Vedic culture was the product of an Aryan invasion has recently been thrown into question. The lack of any archaeological evidence that would suggest a violent confrontation had taken place with the massive and sophisticated Indus Valley civilisation has led most Indologists to the conclusion that the Aryan immigration must have been an entirely peaceful one, or simply a gradual process of cul­tural, not tribal, diffusion. Other Indian scholars have even ques­tioned the idea of a cultural influx, arguing that the Aryans were the people of the Indus Valley civilisation. They have, quite correctly, pointed out that the invasion theory, first mooted in the nineteenth century by white Europeans whose countries were bent on imperial expansion, was both a product of and supportive of the Western imperialist agenda."

  To be fair, much of this is recent scholarship that has occurred since Wasson's death. Nevertheless, he failed to spot the rather glaring cir­cularity in his own argument. 'How astonishing,' he wrote, 'that we can draw parallels with [the use of Soma and] the fly-agaric cult in Siberia.'17 But having used Siberia to argue his case for the identity of Soma, he then suggested that the Soma cult had, in fact, spread from India to Siberia. In this light, it is Wasson's tortuous connections that appear astonishing.

  Like the other great proponents of the comparative method in anthropology (Edward Tylor and James Frazer) and the study of reli­gions (Max Miiller and Mircea Eliade), Wasson was an armchair scholar. He based his theory not upon the messy and often conflicting evidence garnered in the field, but upon the evidence of linguistics and texts gathered at one remove, in the library. The picture he generated from afar of a supposed, ancient, ur-religion was altogether too sim­plistic, too static, too monolithic. He underestimated the speed with which religion and culture change, adapt and evolve, and their sheer complexity and particularity. Like his illustrious forebears, he was too eager to shoehorn the data to fit his ready-formed thesis, when other more parsimonious, but less exotic, explanations would have sufficed The idea, then, of a fly-agaric-based gnostic religion spreading ever eastwards is too problematic to be accepted. As for Soma, until Brough's objections are met the status of the fly-agaric theory must remain highly questionable. There exists no shortage of plausible alternative candidate plants, for if Wasson had thought to end the Soma guessing game, to stop the merry-go-round once and for all, he was very much mistaken. The debate stimulated by his radical fly­agaric thesis simply spun it round with an extra impetus, and before long a queue of eager pundits were ready to line up with their own theories.

  Brough had questioned why the poetically enriched text of the Rig Veda would contain botanical information about the identification of the Soma plant, when it was essentially a collection of hymns: after all, the Christian liturgy does not contain botanical descriptions of the vine. In 1989 two scholars, David Flattery and Martin Schwartz, pub­lished their Haoma and Harmaline, in which they agreed that the text of the Rig Veda was so vague on botanical details as to be taxonomically worthless.

  Instead, they turned their attention to Iran, which had also been invaded by the Aryans, and to the ancient Iranian text known as the Avesta, which is linguistically related to the Rig Veda. Less contami­nated by poesy than its Indian counterpart, the Avesta more clearly pointed to another candidate for Soma, or haoma (pronounced 'horma') as it was known in Iran: the Syrian rue, Perganum harmala.1* Irs active ingredient is harmaline, which also turns out to be an impor­tant chemical ingredient of the psychoactive brew drunk throughout the Amazon basin, known as ayahuasca. Harmaline is a mono-amine oxidase (MAO) inhibitor, which means that it switches off the enzymes in the stomach that ordinarily block the absorption of harm­ful plant alkaloids. In other words, the mixing of harmaline into the ayahuasca brew is what allows the other principal ingredient, the more potent hallucinogen DMT, to be absorbed orally. Harmaline is, however, a psychoactive in its own right and, argued Flattery and Schwartz, could have prompted the rapturous adulation of the Avesta and the Rig Veda.

  Then, in 1992, the classicist Mott Greene published a book which, while agreeing with Flattery and Schwartz that the descriptions of the Soma plant in the Rig Veda were so distorted by poetic fancy and hyperbole as to be botanically unusable, rejected their haoma thesis/9 Greene saw the preparation of Soma, being practical and instruction­al, as free from exaggeration, and he used this to pinpoint Soma's identity. According to the Rig Veda, Soma was crushed between stones, mixed with milk and filtered through wool. For Greene, this elaborate process would only be necessary if the species concerned required special preparation if, for example, it were poisonous and this led him to the conclusion that Soma could only have been the ergot fungus, Claviceps purpurea. The preparation process was, he argued, the essential means by which the psychoactive ingredients, dis­solved into the fat of the milk, were separated off from the insoluble toxic alkaloids within ergot.50 It was the means, in other words, by which ergot could be safely consumed.

  Conversely, mushroom enthusiast and champion of plant psychedelics Terence McKenna thought that Soma could only have been a psilocybin mushroom, most probably the dung-loving Psilocybe cubensis.yt McKenna centralised neither the description nor the preparation but the experience of Soma, as described within the pages of the Rig Veda. His own disappointing personal experiments with fly-agaric had failed to produce the ecstasies promised by the Rig Veda, whereas psilocybin mushrooms had repeatedly fulfilled all his expectations in this regard. He bolstered his argument with some of Wasson's throwaway remarks, in which the latter had wondered whether mushrooms other than the fly-agaric might have been used by the lower castes in India.51 Both men were convinced that psilocybin mushrooms would be discovered in India (as, indeed, they have been), and that their presence there could explain the sanctity of cattle with­in Hinduism: by providing the dung upon w
hich sacred mushrooms could grow, cows had become sacred by association.

  These, then, are just a few of the dazzling array of suggestions that have been put forward by scholars and amateurs alike, their popular­ity rising and falling with the horses of the Soma carousel. But the wheels of this ever-spinning ride turn upon two assumptions: that Soma has to have been hallucinogenic, and that the Rig Veda can be read, quite literally, as a recipe book.

  It must be remembered that Soma could have carried great symbol­ic force without actually having been hallucinogenic. As we have seen with the Greek rites of Eleusis, this orientalist assumption, made from afar, may say more about us than about the supposed practices of the ancients; about the fact that we cannot countenance religious epiphany without the use of psychoactives.53 The following passage, written by an unknown Chinese poet, should serve as a salutary reminder that ecstasies need not be hallucinogenically inspired:

  The first cup moistens my lips and throat, the second breaks my loneliness, the third cup searches my barren entrails but to findtherein some five thousand volumes of old ideographs. The fourth cup raises a slight perspiration all the wrong of life passes away through my pores. At the fifth cup I am purified, the sixth cup calls me to the realm of the immortals. The seventh cup ah, but I could take no more ... Where is Elysium?54

  The drug in question here is none other than that innocuous staple of daily life, tea. So while the text of the Rig Veda may very well be the psychedelic cookbook we dearly want it to be, it could equally well be so couched in the idioms and metaphors of the time and culture in which it was written not to mention poetic hyperbole that a mate­rialist and literalist reading is both inappropriate and wrong. There are no sure grounds upon which to decide the correct reading.