Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom

by Alex Letcher

  It was only later when pressured by the need to support a family he eventually married artist, ethnobotanist and fellow psychedelic explorer Kat Harrison, with whom he had two children that he dis­covered his innate ability for communicating his passions and ideas through public speaking. As he put it, in the poetic and purple prose that was to be his hallmark: 'I realized that my innate Irish ability to rave had been turbo-charged by years of psilocybin mushroom use... I had apparently evolved into a sort of mouthpiece for the incarnate Logos. I could talk to small groups of people with what appeared to be electrifying effect about.. . peculiarly transcendental matters.'

  He wrote a further three books, and co-authored one more with hi> brother, but it is in the realm of the spoken word that his true talent shone. During the late 1980s he became a regular fixture of the American psychedelic circuit, speaking at camps and conferences, seminars and soirees. There are legions of cassettes, CDs and MP551 available to the McKenna fan, officially recorded or simply bootlegged from the stalls, that capture the brilliance of his long, improvised and entertaining bardic raps about mushrooms, DMT, the elf-clowns of hyperspace and the nature of time.14 Blarney-kissed (or, less romanti­cally, fortified by the odd spliff or two), he could speak for hours at a time, and his inspired rhetoric, way with words and pithy sound bites cried out to be sampled. Catchphrases were digitally picked up by DJs and musicians looking for choice morsels to spice up their dance tracks and to inject them with the requisite amount of psychedelic credibility. McKenna's unmistakably nasal, sing-song voice became de rigueur, cropping up regularly in Rave anthems, and so his unortho­dox message, along with his celebrity, was broadcast far and wide.15

  The most famous was surely 'Re-evolution', released in 1993 by the British psychedelic dance band The Shamen, who began life as a cred­ible rock act before their transmutation into tacky chart-toppers and subsequent demise into obscurity. This seven-minute mix of sinister swirling analogue synth loops features an extended McKenna rap on rhe nature of the apocalypse, and begins with the ominous, if plati­tudinous, words 'if the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed'.16 Released at the height of the band's success, and with McKenna in full rhetorical flow, it was this record that did more than any other to propel the man and his ideas into popular consciousness.

  Tragically, McKenna's life was cut short at the relatively young age of fifty-four by the intercession of a massive brain tumour, a diagnosis that he realised would give his detractors powerful ammunition. While he knew of no evidence to link mushrooms or DMT to cancer, he worried, rightly, that people would inevitably arrive at that conclu­sion. His brother Dennis remains keen to point out that the illness, a particularly rare form of tumour, could have been caused by all man­ner of factors, not least Terence's lifelong affliction with migraines.'7 Whatever the cause, the Western world was suddenly and surely deprived of one of its most charismatic eccentrics.

  I was lucky enough to meet McKenna in February 1993 during one of his occasional visits to London. By luck rather than judge­ment, I managed to get myself invited to The Secret McKenna Workshop', a talk held, appropriately enough, in a squatted vegetar­ian cafe called Fungus Mungus on Battersea Park Road. The cafe, now defunct, was a deliberate flashback to the 1960s, complete with swirling paint, retro furniture and nylon curtains to assail the senses.

  The event was organised by Fraser Clark, self-styled 'zippie', editor of the almost insufferably upbeat magazine Encyclopaedia Psychedelica International, and founder of the legendary clubs Megatripolis and The Parallel Youniversity, at which McKenna spoke to rapturous audiences.

  My diary records that the invited audience (as the flyer said, 'by rec­ommendation only!') comprised the great and the good from London's revived psychedelic scene: a founder of the International Times; an ex-hash-smuggler; several Acid House DJs; a German baron; a lord (who had hot-footed it over from a debate in the Upper House); and several alternative therapists and practitioners. With his protruding eyes and bushy beard, McKenna looked for all the world like a char­acter from Gilbert Shelton's comic strip The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. But he spoke eloquently for an hour or more, never losing his train of thought once as he bamboozled us with his outlandish trip tales and Byzantine theories about the extraterrestrial origins of the magic mushroom. 'Far out,' I wrote afterwards, somewhat self-con­sciously. 'McKenna just blew my mind.'

  I freely admit that in my early twenties I was a fan, won over; if not entirely by his ideas, then by the man who very quickly became a fig­urehead for psychedelic enthusiasts across the world. But what are we to make of those ideas now? Do they merit serious consideration, or should they be consigned to the lunatic fringe where they can be safe­ly ignored as the ravings of a brilliant mind hopelessly unhinged by drugs?

  Unlike Gordon Wasson, McKenna did not suffer from scholar-envy and knew that he was an intellectual, well read as he was in philoso­phy and literature (for example, one of his great regrets was that he never had enough time to get to grips with Heidegger'"). Unlikely as it sounds, he regarded himself as wedded to science, rationalism and a sceptical outlook. 'I think the proper way to contact the Other,1 he once said, 'is with hard-headed rationalism exercised under weird con­ditions."9 He regularly lambasted the New Age movement for its rejec­tion of rationalism, and ridiculed the American UFO-hunting community as 'a magnet for screwballs.'10

  He was, however, self-aware enough to know that his own idea* were, at best, off the edge, and would in all likelihood be similarly cat­egorised as the worst the New Age had to offer. Candidly, he wrote: 1 am in the absurd position of being either an unsung Newton or com­pletely nuts. There is very little room to manoeuvre between these two positions.'1' His hope was that by setting his ideas in the concrete lan­guage of the Western intellectual tradition, within the interstices of sci­ence and philosophy, he might at least get a fair hearing. As detractor Will Self put it: 'Certainly Terence McKenna is a silly ass. But his heart is so clearly in the right place, and so much of what he says is a fresh synthesis of a collection of sixties ideas ... that his book|s]... deserve some careful attention.'" It would be churlish not to grant McKenna that much.

  There is an immediate problem when trying to distil McKenna's core message. His preferred mode of delivery the improvised rap though rarely waffling, and only occasionally repetitive, necessarily lacks the concision of the written word. His prodigious recorded out­put means that there are literally hundreds of hours of material to compare and contrast, and given that such a vast range of subjects interested him, and fell under his musings, it is hard to know exactly where to start. He was as likely to talk about the psychedelic experi­ence as he was about prehistoric religion, crop circles, the mechanisms of evolution, and the reasons for the fall of the Trebizond empire often in the same breath. He did at least set out his principal ideas in his written works, and so, with a little sifting, it is possible to arrange them into three broad categories: speculation about the nature of the psychedelic experience and arguments for the merits of psilocybin and DMT; speculation about the role of psilocybin mushrooms in human evolution; and speculation about the metaphysics of space, time, cos­mology and eschatology.

  Firstly then, drugs. The interesting thing about McKenna is that while he was a staunch advocate for the magic mushroom (above all other drugs), he was not a psychedelic proselytiser in the same way as Leary. He never demanded that everyone 'turn on', because he thought psychedelic shamanism, as he labelled it, was a calling. 'If you like watching your world shredded before your eyes and made into non­sense, if that makes you feel liberated and secure, then you can sign up for that carnival/ he once jokily advised. 'If that alarms you then you can stick to the tried and true.'13 He only really preached to the con­verted, working to raise the status of the magic mushroom from Acid's poor relation to the workaday choice for the would-be shaman.

  Before McKenna, and taking LSD as their cultural model, aficiona­dos consumed mushrooms for Dionysian
ends: to heighten their appreciation of art, music, nature, dancing and sex; to find religious epiphanies in some Learyesque setting; or to proclaim their alterity at free festivals. But for McKenna, the point of taking mushrooms was solely and simply a shamanic quest for visions. His prescription was five dried grams (of Psilocybe cubensis, or an equivalent dose of another species), taken alone on an empty stomach, in silent darkness, with eyes closed. No music, no art, no sex. With the mushroom taken in such a manner, and at such high doses, he suggested two things would happen. First, the swirling phantasmagoria of ever-changing coloured lights, repeated figures and juddering visuals ordinarily seen behind closed eyelids would condense and deepen into more profound visions. That is, as at the climax of 2001: A Space Odyssey, one would be propelled into other realities, into strange, alien landscapes, futur­istic scenarios or ancient cities; or perhaps through a process of death and rebirth so real that it left one drenched in sweat, gasping for air and overwrought with ecstasy. Second, clear as day and in broad English, one could expect the mushroom to speak.

  In his account of the trip to La Chorrera, True Hallucinations (1993), McKenna included a passage, written many years earlier; which he claimed had been dictated to him directly by 'the mushroom' and copied down verbatim. In an extraordinary speech, the mush­room claimed to be of extraterrestrial origin, its spores drifting through space and colonising new planets. The mushroom which you see,' it said, 'is the part of my body given over to sex thrills and sun­bathing . . . |The] occurrence of psilocybin and psilocin in the biosynthetic pathways of my living body,' it went on, 'opens for me and my symbiots the vision screens to many worlds,' and it enabled fasterthan-light communication with all other mycelial bodies across the cosmos.M

  McKenna was as surprised by this as anyone, but hedged on the rather important issue of the provenance of this voice. Sometimes hi seemed convinced that it really was the mushroom speaking. At oth­ers, he thought it came from some hidden aspect of his mind, or from the mind of nature, or from Gaia, or from an alien civilisation. He was not obfuscating, he simply did not know, and besides, provenan^ mattered less than the message itself.

  Strange as it seems, there is some clinical evidence that a statistical ly significant number of people do 'hear' voices under the influence 0 high doses of psilocybin.15 The parsimonious and culturally sanctions view is that the drug interferes with cognitive processing in some unknown fashion, giving the aural 'illusion' of a discarnate voice. But that is not how it feels, said McKenna. It feels as if one is in the pres­ence of some autonomous, external, overbearing, alien entity with which it is possible to have an I/Thou relationship. This was the voice that spoke to him and egged him on to continue his theorising. This was the Logos that he claimed lay behind his improvised raps.

  For McKenna, then, what made the tryptamines (and mushrooms and DMT in particular16) superior to all other drugs was not only the depth of the visions they occasioned, but also the overwhelming force with which they brought about this encounter with the Other.17 Even to think of them as drugs was wrong. They were rather independent agentic souls, plant-allies or spirit-teachers, with whom a symbiotic relationship would yield ecstasy and gnosis. The shamanic world view, in other words, was right all along.

  This concern with the 'natural' leads to the second area of specula­tion that preoccupied him: the possible role of mushrooms in human history and evolution. These ideas are spelled out in his Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge, published in 1992. The book dotted with his usual stories about the mind-bog­gling nature of DMT and mushrooms is a curious, disjointed and ultimately disappointing mix of well-researched twentieth-century drug history (including a passionate argument against prohibition) and a 'conspiracy-theory'-type invention of a presumed psilocybin mushrooming tradition stretching back to the Palaeolithic. Its princi­pal argument is that human evolution was accelerated by our ances­tors' use of magic mushrooms.

  When human hominid ancestors left the forests for the plains of Africa, argued McKenna, they encountered and experimented with new and unusual foods, which included the psilocybe mushrooms growing abundantly in cattle dung. At low doses the mushrooms, which have been shown to sharpen visual acuity, conferred an evolu­tionary advantage by improving hunting ability. At medium doses, he continued, the mushroom's supposed aphrodisiac qualities conferred an evolutionary advantage by upping the reproductive success of those who ate them. But, most dramatically, at high doses the encounter with the Logos occasioned by the fungi stimulated our ancestors' latent ability to speak, and so drove forward the evolution of lan­guage. For McKenna, the magic mushroom, eaten by our ancestors in the dim and distant past, brought out in us the best and noblest qual­ities that we now possess: they are what made us human.

  He went on to suggest that early prehistoric religions in Africa, the Mediterranean and the Middle East continued to use the mushroom, and lived in a goddess-worshipping, matriarchal, 'partnership' society, such as that supposed by some archaeologists to have existed in Minoan Crete: an Eden where war and conflict were unknown, and where we lived in a harmonious ecological relationship with the earth. A climatic change led to a gradual warming and drying of the prevailing weather, with the result that mushrooms became scarce. Patriarchal, mead-quaffing, 'dominator' cultures invaded from the north, and with that we fell from Eden into the clutches of linear time, history and ultimately the ecological mess of the modern industrial world. McKenna therefore called for an 'archaic revival' whereby the reintroduction of a magic-mushroom-based shamanism would erode the 'calcareous tumour of ego'** and restore society once more to a partnership paradise.

  By now it should be clear, from our consideration of Wasson's sup­posed prehistoric mushroom cult and the various mushroom conspir­acy theories, that there is scant evidence for any of this speculative prehistory. McKenna was no archaeologist and, like the conspiracy theorists, he took scraps of evidence, denuded them of their context, and shoehorned them into his preferred justificatory narrative, with little thought for alternative interpretations. His twist on the Wasson theory was to substitute psilocybin mushrooms for the fly-agaric, and to imagine their use in ancient matriarchal religions the latter having been proposed by American feminists during the gender-riven years ot the 1970s. Thus, he borrowed the terms 'partnership' and 'dominator' societies from the writer Riane Eisler, and the idea of a Mediterranean matriarchy overturned by male-dominated Indo-European marauders from Lithuanian archaeologist Maria Gimbutas.

  Putting to one side the likelihood of this feminist-inflected view ot the past (it remains contentious within both feminist thought and archaeology19), McKenna's thesis here rests on the notion that psychedelics produce societal harmony. By dissolving boundaries, he claimed, they make us less ego-centred, less selfish and more empathetically in touch with the needs of the other denizens of the natural world. In his rather disparaging review of Food of the Gods, the writ­er Will Self (no stranger to drugs himself) considered this a curious form of Marxist dialectical materialism: the type of drugs you take determines the type of society you get: mushrooms good, alcohol bad.

  The problem with McKenna's materialism is that indigenous societies with institutionalised psychedelic drug use are very often far from har­monious. Amazonian tribes take ayahuasca as often to curse as to cure,51 mushrooms failed to prevent the petty Mazatec vendettas, and even McKenna noted ruefully that, for all his bemushroomed revelations, he had been unable to save his marriage.31 As we saw when considering Timothy Leary, the idea of a psychedelic golden age, and of psychedelics as a panacea or magic pill, must remain a gloriously beguiling chimera; but without it, McKenna's thesis starts to look very shaky.

  As for his notion about mushrooms propelling human development by conferring evolutionary advantages and instilling in us our most elevated qualities, this is the same category of reasoning as is employed by evolutionary psychologists. This popular school of thought, very much on the ascendant, argues that selective p
ressures acting upon human ancestors in some imagined African past deter­mine the way we behave today. Countless scenarios are conjured up to 'explain' why people commit adultery, or why homosexuality exists, or why men are supposedly better at parking cars and women at multi-tasking, and so on and so forth.

  The difficulty is that, however plausible they seem, these are untestable hypotheses, which places them in the realm of storytelling, not science. In McKenna's case, it rather stretches credulity to believe that a bemushroomed hunter could actually pick up a spear, let alone walk or hunt. One could equally well imagine a scenario in which mushroom use was selected against, the bemushroomed being so inca­pacitated by fits of the giggles as to provide easy pickings for preda­tors. Yes, mushrooms might have been used by our ancestors, with unexpectedly beneficial effects on our development, but then again, they might very well not have been. At present, there is absolutely no way of knowing.

  The final, and most important, area of McKenna's thought concerns metaphysics, the nature of time, and the end of the universe. McKenna -who you will recall was, as a child, fascinated by geology and science fiction was in adult life profoundly interested in cosmology and the evolving complexity of the universe. Considering this, he thought increases in the universe's structural complexity had occurred sudden­ly and dramatically at discrete, identifiable intervals: the formation of hydrogen atoms from the initial plasma of the Big Bang; the conden­sation of stars; the creation of the other elements in stellar furnaces; the formation of planets; the emergence of DNA and complex life forms; the evolution of consciousness; the evolution of language, then culture and technology. Borrowing terminology from the process phi­losophy of the British mathematician Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), he called these events 'ingressions of novelty', or 'reve­latory intervals'." After each event, the universe existed in a more complex state of organisation than it had before; and each new level enabled the next, unexpected level to emerge.