Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom

by Alex Letcher

  Ease of acquisition, visibility and changed social attitudes go some way towards explaining the recent boom, but not really why people on both sides of the Atlantic took to the mushroom so enthusiastical|yin the 1970s, when mushrooms still had to be actively sought out. dd and psychedelia provided the favourable context here, while the latest advances in fungal taxonomy and pharmacology swept away any residual fears that these mushrooms might be poisonous. Mushrooms also arrived at a time when interest in, appreciation of and concern for the environment were all increasing significantly. This was the decade of Greenpeace, the Whole Earth Catalogue, The Good life and self-sufficiency. Mushrooms came to be cast as a 'natural', 'organic1 and hence better, healthier and more authentic alternative to synthetic LSD a perception that remains in place today and accounts for at least some of their popularity.

  But it is here, in this last point, that a revealing contradiction becomes apparent. On the one hand, by overturning the historically predominant poisoning discourse, science delivered up the magic mushroom to the West. Advances in microscopy, mycology, chemistry, pharmacology and myco-culture led directly to its recognition, rein­vention and rise. On the other, the very people who took to the mush­room most ardently in the 1970s, and whose interest ensured its eventual popularity, were those who were challenging or even reject­ing science's claims to epistemological exclusivity, or who saw sci­ence's destructive power as revealed by weapons of mass destruction and ecological degradation as something in dire need of restraint.

  Rather like the impact of matter and antimatter in a particle accel­erator, science and anti-science have collided throughout the history of the magic mushroom. Just as the ricochets and trajectories of sub­atomic particles reveal something of how the physical universe is con­structed, so, I think, do the reverberations caused by the magic mushroom expose something fundamental about our cultural uni­verse, about the attitudes and sensibilities that shape our time. That we in the West, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, have found •He mushroom's litany of peculiar effects desirable is, I would suggest, symptomatic of a broader underlying craving for meaning more specifically, for enchantment that sits somewhat awkwardly within °"r supposedly rationalist, scientific and technological culture.

  •n his essay 'Science as a Vocation', written during the First World ^ the pioneering German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) °°ted that The fate of our times is characterised by rationalisation and mtellectualisation and, above all, by the "disenchantment of the world V By this he meanr that there was no longer any need to inv mysterious forces to explain the phenomena of the world because4 can, in principle, master all things by calculation'/ The rising scienti ic tide had steadily scoured away belief in fairies, demons, spirii djinns, God even, and with it any notion that our place in the worl was ordained or had meaning. Though Weber died some twenty-odd years before its advent, the nuclear bomb threw this process into grim relief, revealing in dramatic form the godlike power of science and, by contrast, the impotence and obsolescence of other explanatory frame­works.

  If Weber seems implicitly to have accepted the supremacy of science, then he nevertheless gave people dispensation to make the 'intellectu­al sacrifice' and retreat back into the welcoming arms of religion should the 'fate of the times' prove unendurable. In doing so, he showed more forbearance than later theorists, particularly those of the 1960s, who thought the tide of science and secularisation both desir­able and unstoppable. Such a conclusion now appears hasty, for cul­ture seems to be increasingly parenthesised by two irreconcilable, absolutist positions: fundamentalist religion on the one hand, and fun­damentalist science on the other.

  The former is evidenced by the rise of the Christian Right in America and of militant Islamism elsewhere, the latter by the presence of vocal champions for science, such as writer and evolutionary biolo­gist Richard Dawkins. A militant atheist, Dawkins regards religion as an abrogation of rational thought, an intellectual sacrifice too far. The cold message of Darwinian natural selection, he admits, is that human existence, and indeed the fact of life, is meaningless, the product of random molecular collisions and selective pressures acting over vast timescales. Nevertheless, comfort may be found in knowing how light splits into the colours of the rainbow, how stars form, how the fig tree reproduces or how the mammalian eye evolved; that is, in sciences unbridled capacity to explain. For Dawkins, science reveals the world to be so full of wonder that there simply is no need to invent mythical forces, deities or beings."

  Weber thought the 'tension between the value-spheres of "science and the sphere of the "holy" . . . unbridgeable',7 but in truth people have managed to adopt an array of 'softer' positions between tinextreme poles of religious and scientific fundamentalism. Even so. there remains a significant residuum for whom processes of disen

  chantment have left an unaccountable feeling of loss. Possessed of romantic longings, and an appetite for mystery that science can never fulfil its raison d'etre is to banish mystery, after all they are, never­theless, unable to return to traditional religion. Caught between sci­ence on the one hand and religion on the other, they are continually forced to find re-enchantment elsewhere.

  The prevailing cultural discourses, however, do not make this easy. Anyone who, say, stands up and proclaims the existence of hives of self-transforming machine elves in a parallel dimension to ours is like­ly to meet with a cynical and derisive response. Culture can only tol­erate elves and faerie denizens if they are bound firmly into film, the pages of fiction children's, sci-fi, fantasy or the knowing conceit of magic realism or the symbolic language of the unconscious, where the ridiculous possibility of their actual physical existence need never be raised. As Graves noted, the dirty synthetic world has asserted itself as the sole factual truth.

  And yet, there is a palpable thirst for these oases of enchantment. Children's literature and fantasy fiction, for example, have never been so eagerly lapped up by adults. Witness the huge popularity of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter romps and Peter Jackson's epic screen version of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. According to some critics, we are all 'kidults' now, stuck in a permanent 'middle youth'. Think also of the burgeoning smorgasbord of alternative spiritualities New Age, Pagan and neo-Shamanic elective and eclectic assemblages that sit somewhere outside science and traditional religion, and yet proclaim a special place for us in the greater scheme of things. For all his tolerance of religion, Weber could not bear the New Age precursors of his time: he took a sideswipe at those who 'play at decorating a sort of domestic chapel with small sacred images from all over the world, or . . . produce [religious] sur­rogates through all sorts of psychic experiences to which they ascribe the dignity of mystical holiness'.8 Still lambasted by the mainstream, these alternatives are, nonetheless, genuine attempts to answer the dilemma of our times.

  And this is where mushrooms fit in. For whether they sweep back the veil to reveal the world as it really is, as enthusiasts maintain, or push one dangerously close to the edge of madness, as society ripostes, they indisputably occasion experiences that nowadays only happen in movies or stories, and with an immediacy that makes them seem, to all

  intents, real. One small cup of mushroom tea can assuage the most ardent craving for enchantment.

  Take the following example, recounted to me by a woman who was. at the time of the story, living in Glastonbury. This small town in rural Somerset is famous not only for its eponymous music and arts festival (actually held in the neighbouring village of Pilton) but also for its Arthurian associations, its hippies, Pagans and New Agers, and its mammiform Tor topped with a ruined church tower. It is the ancient, mystical Isle of Avalon, and as such remains an island refuge of enchantment in all its guises. Hopeful of gaining an insight into the Buddhist concept of 'the void' or 'emptiness', this plucky explorer went out alone and ate forty-five fresh Liberty Caps. Sitting on the lower slopes of the Tor, Chalice Hill to be exact, she watched as the stars
dutifully winked out one by one. At just the moment when noth­ingness, horror and panic threatened to overwhelm her, she saw a lozenge shape glowing reassuringly in the grass at her feet. Looking up, she saw that it was, in fact, a scale, one of thousands on the back of a gigantic beast that looped away and over the Tor. To her surprise she realised that the Tor really was, as some myths say, a sleeping dragon. The enchantment continued for some time, during which two moons rose into a flashing purple sky, and a small piece of woodland became magically transformed into a forest, through which she stum­bled, lost and pook-ledden, for what seemed like hours. It was, she said, one of the most terrifying, and yet beautiful, experiences of her life.

  Though the mushroom trip is never an easy ride as capable of inducing horror as delight enthusiasts are adamant that it contains a message: the world is not as sterile as science maintains, meaning resides within all things, and the essential quality of the universe, its quiddity, is one of enchantment. Or as Daniel Pinchbeck puts it: The nature of reality is spiritual, not physical. Everything we see around us is animated by sentient essences, dainty sub-Planck-length flimmersot cosmic wit.'9 For those in need, the magic mushroom seems to answer existential angst like the key to a lock. No wonder it has proved so enticing.

  In the summer of 2005, to round off my research for this book, I went to America specifically to attend the Telluride Mushroom Festival. This mycological celebration takes place every summer in, as the name suggests, the small ski town of Telluride, high up in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, and has done so now for twenty-five years. On the surface it is very much like any other gathering of amateur mycologists. Every day there are forays, a chance to wander off into the forests and collect mushroom specimens, with an expert on hand to help with identification. The day's pickings are diligently wrapped in wax paper and carried back to the town centre, where they are for­mally identified, labelled and laid out in a marquee for all to see. Some of the top American mycologists lecture on all aspects of fungal tax­onomy and ecology, or conduct workshops on cultivation: the latest hot technique is apparently growing mushrooms on newspaper and straw. There are cookery classes, and a trophy awarded to the local restaurant that crafts the best wild mushroom dish. And, to cap it all, there is a procession through the town, where festival-goers put on fancy dress as their favourite mushroom usually, but not exclusively, the fly-agaric and wave cheerily at the somewhat bemused locals.

  But look a little closer, and you will find that the festival is not quite what it seems. Though Telluride is a smart ski resort, its eco-caf, 0rganic supermarket and anti-war graffiti betray the fact that it is also 3 hit of a hippy town, and back in the early 1980s the hippies rather successfully infiltrated and subverted the mushroom festival. Now, not everyone who attends the workshops intends to grow gourmet or edi­ble fungi; not everyone who studies identification wants to know how to pick wood blewitts and morels.

  Uniquely amongst American mycological gatherings, Telluride blows love across puffballs, chanterelles and shaggy manes Death Caps, even, and fly-agarics but, most importantly of all, across Liberty Caps, cubensis and all the other psilocybe species. Telluride celebrates mushroom-kind in all its diversity, and in its understated way has become one stop on a much larger and thriving psychedelic circuit. It is certainly the place to network and discover what's hip and happening in the mushroom underworld. But while the lectures and workshops are all fascinating and well-attended, it is clear that, since the death of Terence McKenna in 2000, the psychedelic movement has had no obvious figurehead: the magic mushroom currently lacks a cogent and vocal champion.

  There is, of course, no shortage of contenders, with a new genera­tion of enthusiasts ready to take on the McKenna mantle. Daniel Pinchbeck the journalist who began writing about shamanism, but ended up deciding he wanted to be one is perhaps the brightest star, but Jeremy Narby the latest anthropologist to have taken ayahuasca and made a sudden departure from epistemological orthodoxy is also in the ascendant.10 Erik Davies adds a Californian perspective, with his intellectually more rigorous consideration of psychedelics, technology and magic." The Wassonian torch is being carried forward in Italy by Giorgio Samorini, and in Germany by Christian Ratsch both prodigious writers while in Britain, Simon Powell has become a cogent proselytiser for mushrooms as our ecological redeemers.

  During my visit to Telluride, however, the star performer was undoubtedly ethnobotanist and illustrator Kat Harrison, who has, until recently, been weighed down with the burden of being k Terence McKenna's ex-wife'. She is, however, a brilliant speaker and thinker in her own right, and is beginning to be recognised as such. At relluride she brought a refreshing womanly perspective to what has been hith­erto a male-dominated field, and in a gentle way laid out the case for the rightness of indigenous, animistic approaches to the use ot psychedelics in general, and mushrooms in particular.

  Whoever it is that eventually assumes the throne (I rather suspect that Harrison does not want it), they can be certain that they will

  joining an illustrious line of poets, scholars, artists, travellers and dreamers romantics, one and all whose dalliances with the mush­room have, if nothing else, injected a bit of sparkle into a loveless, syn­thetic world. The magic mushroom has been with us in the West for just fifty years, but in that time it has caused upheavals far greater than its diminutive size should rightfully allow. As long as there is a yearn­ing for magic and enchantment, its place in culture seems assured, no matter what prohibitions are introduced. Who knows what fabulous theories it will inspire next? At the very least we shall, I think, be blowing love on puffballs for some time to come.

  Appendix

  Chemical structures of some psychedelic compounds contained within magic mushrooms, and their close relatives.

  The mushrooms most commonly consumed are those which have psilocybin and psilocin as their principle active ingredients. These indole alkaloids are structurally similar to the most famous psychedel­ic drug, LSD; all three are similar to the endogenous brain neurotrans­mitter, serotonin, whose action they mimic. The fly-agaric, on the other hand, contains the psychoactive compounds ibotenic acid and musci­mol, which act on another part of the brain entirely. See chapter 2.

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