Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom

by Alex Letcher

  Bradley derived her image of the past from talking to practitioners of modern, revived Paganism in America and the UK,7" so what is por­trayed in the novel is not the pagan past but rather a reasonably accu­rate record of how hippies and festival-goers, circa 1980, envisioned that past. Magic mushrooms appear in the book because she arrived in England to do her research just at the moment when the mushroom craze was at its peak. Without spotting that Bradley was holding up a mirror to their own beliefs, festival-goers read her book and accepted it as gospel.

  Within the space of about twenty years, then, the magic mushroom went from obscurity to being an underground delicacy and then the drug of choice for a vocal, countercultural festival movement. By the 1980s, the Liberty Cap had become an iconic and conspicuous badge of alteriry. Though it continued to be passed around in pubs as a cheap Friday-night high, it was more obviously conjoined with hippy, trav­eller identity, along with dreadlocks, piercings, outsized rainbow jumpers and army boots. Its distinctive goblin-capped shape appeared on festival flyers, T-shirts, postcards, album sleeves and the sides of buses. Defiantly, it proclaimed that those who knew and used the mushroom were an elect pagan few, pitted against the rising tide of consumerism and, like the mushrooms themselves, living on the mar­gins. Its moment of fame did not last long, however^ for during the late 1980s it was quickly eclipsed by a new, synthetic drug that ultimately caused far more excitement and moral outrage.

  That drug was Ecstasy, or MDMA, millions of doses of which would soon be consumed every weekend across the globe. Ecstasy brought with it a whole new invigorating youth culture 'Rave' or 'dance' culture with its own forms of music and dancing, fashions and slang. Hardly any aspect of mainstream culture was left untouched by the Ecstasy revolution, and mushrooms were sidelined as a minority drug for dyed-in-the-wool hippies. It is all the more sur­prising, then, that it was on the back of Rave that the magic mush­room's most cogent advocate arrived. A geeky American armed with an idiosyncratic nasal drawl, a suitcase full of bizarre theories, and a Blarney-kissed ability to hold audiences spellbound, he did more than anyone since Gordon Wasson to pave the way for the current mush­room boom. His name was Terence McKenna.

  The Elf-Clowns of Hyperspace

  I assume that psychedelics somehow change our channel from the evolutionarily important channel giving traffic, weather, and stock market reports to the one playing classical music of an alien civilisation.

  If the truth can he told so as to be understood, it will be believed.

  Terence McKenna'

  In the summer of 1989, when I was not quite nineteen, I went to the Treworgey Tree Fayre, a one-off hippy music festival in Cornwall. The first such festival to be held in the south-west for a number of years, it was eagerly anticipated as a commercial and hence legal event that would nevertheless maintain the unique atmosphere of its free prede­cessors. And so it did. Bands cranked out the expected festival melange of space-rock, punk, dub-reggae and folk from wonky and improvised stages. The usual array of drugs were on sale hash, Acid, Speed, and Special Brew with stalls openly offering chillums and 'hot knives', and grungy entrepreneurs happy to deliver hash fudge to your tent door, morning, noon and night. The ever-present collection of battered trucks and buses were parked up in a potato field along with a smat­tering of horse-drawn wagons for authenticity's sake. And, as usual, the organisation was chaotic, the toilets were execrable, the police stood by helplessly, and outraged local council officials bristled wit! indignation and writs over the festival's many petty infractions.

  Within a day, the fences had been torn down, the festival declared free, and the landowner was nowhere to be seen, havinc absconded until the resulting furore abated. All in all it was an ate*: lutely typical festival of the 1980s, and it lived up admirably to every­body's expectations.

  What made the festival unusual, however, was the unexpected appearance of a sound system. It was set up unofficially on the bat a lorry, from which DJs, not bands, pumped out a seamless mix unfamiliarly repetitive dance music, and in front of which a hand people moved jerkily and self-consciously. The arrival and incursion of Acid House into the festival scene was not, as I recall, met with much enthusiasm. The staunch hippies amongst us thought House too much the product of the metropolitan south-east, of affluent yuppies, of Wtr. not 2CV, drivers. 'It'll never catch on,' we said dismissively, 'it's too synthetic, too repetitive, too cool.' We could not have been more wrong.

  Within three years, House music, in all its derivative genres and forms, had become the music of the underground, with most festivals transformed into raves, and DJs eclipsing bands in popularity. Dodging the police to dance illicitly in a field all night became the way to spend the English summer, and a whole new cross-section of people from the cities and suburbs found their way into the festival scene, reviving it, but also transforming it in the process. The epitome of this crossover took place in 1992 when thirty thousand people, travellers and clubbers alike, turned up for the Castlemorton Free Festival which erupted near Malvern, much to the consternation of the then Conservative government who brought in the somewhat draconian Criminal Justice Act (1994) to outlaw free festivals, raves and what they stuffily called 'repetitive beats'.

  If Rave brought together fashion-conscious urban clubbers and metrophobic be-dreadlocked travellers, then the catalyst for this unlikely alliance was a new drug: Ecstasy.3 From its invention in 1912 as an appetite suppressant, MDMA, or 3,4-methylenedioxy-Nmethylamphetamine to give it its full name, went largely ignored until the 1960s when its empathic and euphoric properties were noticed by the maverick Californian chemist Alexander Shulgin. Shulgin who has made the discovery of new synthetic psychoactives his life's work popularised MDMA as a tool for psychotherapy, but the drug eventually found its way onto the streets and into the clubs of Chicago and Detroit, where it collided explosively with a new style of music.

  Acid House, as it came to be known, reached London clubs, by way of Ibiza, in the late 1980s, triggering a second summer of love. The underground writer Fraser Clark, clearly taken by the euphoria those early days, enthusiastically declared it 'a fuckin' movement that's bringing together ... the best in new age, the best in psychedel­ic and the best in green ecology. It's an evolutionary rollercoaster that* going to go on growing through the '90s and into a new age rollercoaster it may have been, for it left virtually no corner of popu­lar culture untouched, but a new age ... well, probably not.

  Nevertheless, what the Ecstasy revolution succeeded in doing was to make drug-taking a much more mainstream pursuit. Of course, there was still a small vanguard of psychedelic enthusiasts, or 'psychonauts' as they now called themselves, diligently experimenting with new and obscure designer drugs that were appearing in the marketplace (most­ly from the Shulgin stable') and, at the other extreme, there was a vig­orous anti-drugs campaign given urgency by occasional Ecstasyrelated deaths. But for most people in the middle and as Noel Gallagher famously observed taking drugs became like having a cup of tea. By the mid 1990s, millions of doses of Ecstasy were being con­sumed every weekend, with the result that interest in psychedelics of all kinds was significantly revived.

  Ecstasy and Rave culture, then, paved the way for the second, cur­rent magic mushroom boom with its loved-up social attitudes. It also created a platform for one of the most original psychedelic thinkers to have emerged since Gordon Wasson. For Terence McKenna, mush­rooms were not just a 'drug' but a portal to a shamanic realm where gnomic spirits strained to impart information of quite possibly earthshattering importance. He built his career by spreading the news that the elf-clowns of hyperspace were really out there, just a few mush­rooms away.

  Of all the psychedelic thinkers, writers, gurus, conspiracy theorists and proselytisers to have emerged, then, Terence McKenna (1946-. 2000) was perhaps the most idiosyncratic. Possessed of an unusually acute mind, a sparkling wit, and that rarest of qualities for an American, self-irony, his message was genuinely different. Moreover he was a brillian
t speaker with the power to transfix audiences with his free-flow improvised 'raps', as he called them, delivered in a char­acteristic nasal drawl that was the envy of every media-hungry scien­tist the world over.

  He was born in 1946 into a Catholic family in a small town in Western Colorado. An archetypally geeky child, with thick bifocal spectacles and a passion for geology and science fiction, he was some­thing of a loner who discovered an enduring love of nature while hunt­ing for fossils and collecting butterflies. Bookish and intellectually precocious, he had by the age of fourteen rejected Christianity in favour of Sartre, Camus and Nietzsche. Had events turned out differ­ently, he would almost certainly have become an academic, perhaps a philosopher, but most probably a geologist.

  It was his terrible eyesight that led him to read Aldous Huxley's book about the Bates method for correcting vision, The Art of Seeing, Won over by the author's writing style, he worked through the rest of Huxley's novels and essays, eventually alighting upon The Doors of Perception. Coincidentally, at exactly this time a minor moral panic erupted about a new drug craze: psychedelic Morning Glory seeds.1 McKenna immediately procured himself a packet from the local hard­ware store, ground them up, swallowed them with a glass of water and had his first psychedelic epiphany.

  He found that his natural affinity for studying things rocks, fossils, insects and beetles was enhanced a hundredfold, and he delighted in the fact that a multitude of faces smiled out at him from the weave or his mother's favourite curtains. Even more remarkably, on closing hi^ eyes he was suddenly immersed in extraordinary visions that welled up and flooded across his mind's eye. Amongst other vistas, he sa^ 'ruined cities covered with creeping jewelled lichen . . . inhabited b) shining-eyed creatures'.7 Through a set of happy coincidences, he had stumbled upon the mystery that would preoccupy him for the rest oi his life. .

  He left home at sixteen to go to San Francisco and the Experiment* University, arriving in plenty of time for the summer of love: he was there when Leary addressed the crowd at the Human Be-in in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park in 1967. Presented with the classic six­ties choice between political or spiritual agitation, he chose Leary and the latter. Discovering both cannabis and LSD, and the ability to con­sume them in what he would later call 'heroic doses', he began his psychedelic career in earnest. Eventually tiring of Acid, which he found 'abrasively psychoanalytical',* he tried smoking DMT, a supply of which had just been 'liberated' from the US Army. It would be his second great epiphany.

  In terms of sheer intensity, DMT is in a league of its own. N,Ndimethyltryptamine, to name it properly, is the most powerful hallu­cinogen so far discovered. Paradoxically, the drug occurs naturally in the brain; its ordinary presence there is little understood but, like psilocybin, it is structurally similar to serotonin. It forms the active ingredient of dozens of the psychoactive snuffs and potions employed throughout the Amazon. On its own, it is not orally active, for it is destroyed by enzymes in the stomach, but the synthetically produced extract can be smoked through a glass pipe. Taken thus, its effects, which are characterised by overwhelmingly intense three-dimensional hallucinations, come on rapidly within the space of a minute or so and diminish almost as quickly. The entire trip is over in about ten or fif­teen minutes. This was how McKenna took it in early 1966, but not even his hundred and fifty Acid trips could have prepared him for what happened.

  With eyes closed, he saw what he later termed 'the chrysanthemum', a revolving yellow-orange floral mandala of light, texture and form, towards which he was hurtled at great speed. Then, with a sound that he described as like the tearing of a plastic membrane, he felt himself puncturing through to another world entirely. He appeared to be in a domed circus-like space, lit from the side and apparently filled with bouncing, babbling creatures.

  I had the impression of bursting into a space inhabited by merry elfin, self-transforming machine creatures. Dozens of these friend­ly fractal entities, looking like self-dribbling Faberge eggs on the rebound, had surrounded me and tried to teach me the lost lan­guage of true poetry. They seemed to be babbling in a visible and five-dimensional form of Ecstatic Nostratic, to judge from the emotional impact of this gnomish prattle. Mirror-surfaced tum-

  bling rivers of melted meaning flowed gurgling around me . .

  Under the influence of DMT, language was transmuted from a

  thing heard to a thing seen.9

  The elf-clowns of hyperspace were calling to him, and their message was this: copy us and do what we do, transform your language and sing out in solid, resonant, ectoplasmic, semantic stuff!

  Pulled back almost as quickly as he had arrived, he re-entered the humdrum world unscathed, except that his otherworldly crash coursc in syntax and poetry had left him dumbstruck. Most of his subsequent work, his unorthodox application of science and philosophy, can be said to be an attempt to make sense of this mind-boggling encounter. Throughout his life, he took DMT about a further thirty times, until he was, in his own words, no longer able to summon the raw courage, but on every occasion he found the elves were waiting for him.

  In the early 1970s he began a short-lived attempt at smuggling cannabis, which ended abruptly when a consignment shipped from Jerusalem to Aspen fell into the hands of customs officials. He entered a three-year period of self-imposed exile, sojourning in India, Nepal and Indonesia, ostensibly collecting butterflies and studying Buddhism, but actually using the time to take psychedelics and to pon­der the mystery of those confounded machine elves. It was while still something of a fugitive that he made the trip to Colombia, which was to prove the final turning point of his life: for it was here that he alight­ed upon both the magic mushroom, and the rest of his outlandish ideas.'0

  He travelled south with a small party that included his brother Dennis, four years his junior, but just as bright and equally as fasci­nated by psychedelics, DMT and shamanism. Dennis, the quieter 0: the two, later went on to become a prominent neuropharmacologist in his own right, conducting much of the known research into the neu­rological effects of the Amazonian, DMT-containing, ayahuasca brew. But at the time, neither of the brothers, though well educated, had an^ formal scientific training. They wanted to pursue the hunch baked from a mix of science fiction, natural history, alchemy and magic, an^ fired in a cannabis-fuelled crucible that perhaps, in some mysterious way, the tryptamines worked their peculiar and idiomatic effects b) temporarily bonding with DNA. They went to the Amazon in ^ hope of shedding light on this rather unorthodox hypothesis, fof 1 they found cultures where the use of psychedelics had been institu­tionalised, who knew what insights they could gain from those indige­nous technicians of the soul? In particular, they hoped to find people willing to share the secrets of a DMT preparation called oo-koo-he, rumoured to produce encounters with diminutive spirits: perhaps these last were the very same DMT creatures the brothers had already confronted? So it was that in the early months of 1971 they arrived in the remote jungle outpost of La Chorrera, already struck by the pre­sentiment that something of great moment was to happen.

  In fact they never found the fabled oo-koo-he, nor the diminutive spirits, which remained the secret of the taciturn locals. What they dis­covered instead was a bountiful supply of magic mushrooms, Psilocybe (then, Stropharia) cubensis, sprouting from the cowpats spread abundantly across the pastures, unnoticed and ignored by the indigenes. Upon eating his first mushroom, Terence knew that he had found the drug he had been looking for: less abrasive than Acid and as profound as DMT, but not quite so hard on one's ontology."

  Nightly ingestion of mushrooms, together with much joint-smoking, led to some fevered speculation by the brothers McKenna. They concocted a bizarre hypothesis: perhaps, while under the influence of psilocybin, if it were augmented by a secondary tryptamine, harmaline, it might be possible permanently to bond psilocybin into one's neural DNA, and so effect an enduring expansion of consciousness. By singing at the exact resonant frequency of the relevant molecules, they hoped to set up a standin
g wave that would somehow slip the psilocy­bin into the DNA, rather as we might plug in an additional piece of software to augment an existing computer program.

  With an idea sounding more like science fiction than science fact, the brothers were nevertheless on a slightly manic creative roll, and conducted their 'experiment' on 4 March. They ate mushrooms, drank a harmaline-containing brew (which they made from the bark of the vine Banisteriopsis caapi), and sang at the exact frequency of the strange buzzing noise that subsequently rang through their ears.

  Something odd definitely happened. Dennis was catapulted into a ',ngering state of expanded consciousness in which, amongst other anomalies, he could telepathically communicate with anyone in the world. Terence lost all need to sleep, was buzzed by a flying saucer, a"d was led to pursue startling notions about the nature of time by an alien presence, the mushroom spirit, which spoke to him and egged him on to make yet further arcane discoveries. For the McKennas, this was all concrete proof that their experiment had worked. By most other reckonings the brothers had gone temporarily mad.

  This preternatural state of excitement, whether graciously raptur­ous or dangerously psychotic, did not last more than a few months, but the brothers then poured their energies into a book that attempt­ed to rationalise their discoveries and experiences The Invisible Landscape, first published in 1975. 'Dense. Technical. Fascinating. Infuriating. Marvellously weird' is how the writer Jay Stevens described it.'4 Like some alchemical text and by Dennis McKenna's own confession, a mix of science, pseudo-science, and pure hokum the book covers an extraordinary wealth of subjects. The details of their experiment are outlined, Terence's fractal theory of time present­ed, along with its mathematical 'proof, and the nature of shamanism explored. Most significantly, the book defends the brothers' experi­ences against the cultural charge of schizophrenia: they had not gone mad in La Chorrera, they had simply entered into shamanistic domains of noesis and experience, for which Western culture lacks the necessary explanatory frameworks. Thereafter, convinced that some­thing of great ontological importance had indeed occurred in Colombia, Terence became a passionate consumer of magic mush­rooms, taking them as often, and in as high doses, as he felt was con­stitutionally prudent, which worked out at about twice a month in colossal doses of five dried grams.