Sacred Mushroom of Visions

by Ralph Metzner

  Psilocybes have propelled themselves to the front lines of the evolutionary race precisely because of their psilocybin content. The production of psilocybin has proven to be a competitive evolutionary advantage. Psilocybin mushrooms carry with them a message from nature about the health of the planet. At a time of planetary crisis brought on by human abuse, the Earth calls out through these mushrooms—sacraments that lead directly to a deeper ecological consciousness and motivate people to take action.

  Throughout the world at least thirty thousand mushroom species have been documented. About a hundred are known or suspected active species and varieties. By active, I mean they produce psilocybin, psilocin, baeocystin, or nor-baeocystin. The species producing psilocybin analogues are concentrated in the species Psilocybe, which has more than eighty species. A few psilocybin mushrooms belong to other genera, including Panaeolus, Pluteus, Gymnopilus, Conocybe, and Inocybe. Although the vast majority of the species in these genera are not active, more than half the species in the genus Psilocybe are psilocybin-producing.

  Psilocybin mushrooms from the genera Psilocybe and Panaeolus are fairly safe to identify, in that there are no known poisonous species in these two genera. There are, however, several nasty species in the genera Conocybe and Inocybe that could be damaging or lethal. Because of the danger of misidentification, I recommend that you avoid the genera Conocybe and Inocybe until you become sufficiently skilled at identification.

  I spent hundreds of hours hunting in woods and fields before finding my first Psilocybe. I did run across many small brown mushrooms and hoped they might contain psilocybin but subsequently learned that the ones I had collected were poisonous! Today I am grateful that my eagerness in finding these mushrooms was tempered by a prevailing concern for self-preservation. Knowing that many people are not as cautious as I has convinced me that a good guide is urgently needed.

  In the Pacific Northwest, at least four thousand mushroom species have been identified, with more than a dozen of these containing psilocybin. About three-quarters as many have been reported in Europe thus far. Mexico is the richest in psilocybin mycoflora. In fact, I have yet to find a single temperate or tropical habitat with high annual rainfall that lacks psilocybin mushrooms. But without some form of guidance, the random discovery of a psilocybin mushroom is, frankly, remote. In any region of the world, psilocybin mushrooms are greatly outnumbered by toxic mushrooms.

  In some parts of the world, psilocybin mushrooms have not been reported at all. But just because they have not been reported does not mean they do not exist. Perhaps the indigenous population is simply unaware of them. Or, perhaps those who are knowledgeable are reluctant to discuss the subject.

  RELATIVE POTENCY OF PSILOCYBIN MUSHROOM SPECIES

  The following analyses are derived from research conducted over the past twenty years. Considerable variation in the content of psilocybin and psilocin had been found within each species. For the purpose here and with but one exception, I am listing the maximum concentrations detected in twelve Psilocybe species. [For more complete information, please consult the references in Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World—eds.] Other indole alkaloids have been found in these mushrooms besides psilocybin and psilocin. Baeocystin, nor-baeocystin and/or aeruginacine are closely related to psilocin and may be active (Gartz 1992). In general, these related indoles are present in lesser concentrations than psilocybin and psilocin. The actual potency of the mushrooms you collect is likely to be less rather than more potent than the table indicates.

  Reprinted with permission from Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World by Paul Stamets, pp. 16–20; 38–39. Copyright © 1996, Ten Speed Press, Berkeley, Calif., www.tenspeed.com.

  The percentage figures are always based on dry weight. For instance, a one-gram mushroom containing 1% psilocybin would have .01 grams or 10 mg psilocybin. The threshold dose, the amount where pharmacological effects can first be noticed, is 2–4 mg. Stronger but still moderate effects, which Jonathan Ott (1993) describes as “entheogenic,” are inspired above 6 mg for psilocin or 10 mg for psilocybin. Since psilocybin is degraded into psilocin during digestion, one is feeling the effects only of psilocin, a dephosphorylated form of psilocybin.

  Readers should note that within any one species there can be a ten-fold or more range in psilocybin and psilocin production from one collection to the next!

  Paul Stamets has been studying mushrooms for over twenty years and has discovered and coauthored four new psilocybin species. He runs a mail-order business, Fungi Perfecti (www.fungi.com), which grows and distributes gourmet and medicinal (no psilocybin) species. Paul Stamets also conducts workshops on mushroom cultivation and is the author of the definitive guide Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms.

  3

  THE “WONDROUS MUSHROOM” LEGACY OF R. GORDON WASSON

  THOMAS RIEDLINGER

  Many events helped transform the American cultural landscape during the 1950s, but perhaps none more profoundly than a little-noticed event that transpired on June 29, 1955. In Huautla de Jiménez, a village in south central Mexico, a middle-aged white man from New York City found himself taking possession of an ancient mystical secret that a tribe of local Indians, the Mazatecs, had guarded for thousands of years. Though some would later say he stole this secret, others believe that he acted as an agent or courier charged with transmitting a gift from the Indian culture to ours: a gift of sacred medicine for Western seekers.

  The medicine—the gift—was a variety of psychoactive mushrooms that the Indians in ancient times called teonanácatl. The man from New York, a Wall Street banker by the name of R. Gordon Wasson, had come to Mexico to confirm his belief that the legend of teonanácatl was no fabricated myth. Other researchers had found a few years earlier that Mazatecs ate psychoactive mushrooms in their sacred healing ceremonies, which were always held at night behind closed doors in private homes. Wasson intended to prove that ingesting these mushrooms could trigger spectacular visions and spiritual insights, something no “white outsider” before him and his traveling companion, a professional New York photographer named Allan Richardson, had ever before, until that night, been invited to experience firsthand.

  The success of Wasson’s enterprise itself remained a secret for the next two years. Then, in a widely-read article published in LIFE magazine on May 13, 1957, he introduced Western society to teonanácatl with these captivating words:

  On the night of June 29–30, 1955, in a Mexican Indian village so remote from the world that most of the people speak no Spanish, my friend Allan Richardson and I shared with a family of Indian friends a celebration of “holy communion” where “divine” mushrooms were first adored and then consumed. The Indians mingled Christian and pre-Christian elements in their religious practices in a way disconcerting for Christians but natural for them. The rite was led by two women, mother and daughter, both of them curanderas, or shamans . . . The mushrooms were of a species with hallucinogenic powers; that is, they cause the eater to see visions. We chewed and swallowed these acrid mushrooms, saw visions, and emerged from the experience awestruck. We had come from afar to attend a mushroom rite but had expected nothing so staggering as the virtuosity of the performing curanderas and the astonishing effects of the mushrooms.

  “For the first time,” Wasson added, “the word ecstasy took on real meaning. For the first time it did not mean someone else’s state of mind.”

  That many others in the West had a similar, unfulfilled longing for ecstasy soon become evident. Suddenly, sacred mushrooms could be found growing everywhere, it seemed, and thousands of spiritual seekers rushed forth to consume them. Not everyone who did so was prepared for a mushroom epiphany; many failed to anticipate what Wasson really meant by “awestruck.” Most, however, weathered the experience just fine. The mushrooms fortified their souls, they said, by helping them perceive a basic truth about existence: God and nature are not separate; the universe around us is suffused with the divine; it is an animistic world that we live in, as mo
st pagans have historically (and no doubt prehistorically) professed.

  If Western mushroom eaters found the revelation shocking, it was mainly because they’d been raised in a christianized culture that preaches the view that God cannot, by definition, be part of nature, because nature is what God created; everything in nature is God’s creation and, as such, can’t be its own creator. That makes sense from a limited, earthbound perspective; less so when one’s soul, “untrammeled and free, is sent soaring by mushrooms to bask in the dazzling light of God’s revealed presence.” That’s how Wasson described his own mushroom experience, adding that “the mushroom holds the key to a mystical union with God, whereas only rare souls can attain similar ecstasy and divine communion by intensive contemplation” of the Eucharist in mainstream Christian services (Wasson 1957).

  Not surprisingly, therefore, many sacred mushroom-eaters in the West have been converted by the evidence of personal experience to switch their allegiance from Christian to pagan religious beliefs, often with a corresponding anti-Christian bias. It is frequently assumed from Wasson’s writings that he likewise renounced Christianity. The following brief account of Wasson’s mushroom quest will show that he remained, in fact, a Christian—though a Christian with a difference. What he learned from his Mazatec hosts and their wondrous mushrooms helped him become what I propose to call a Gaian Christian.

  Robert Gordon Wasson was born in Great Falls, Montana, in 1898 and moved with his family several years later to Newark, New Jersey. His mother, Mary, and his father, Edmund, a somewhat free-thinking Episcopalian priest, both impressed upon Wasson a respect for rigorous scholarship. His father had written and published a book called Religion and Drink (1914) that refuted prohibitionists with passages from the Bible. At home, Edmund drilled his sons in “higher criticism” of the Bible, requiring that they read it through entirely three times and analyze everything in it from different perspectives. Consequently, Wasson came away with a far deeper understanding of the Bible’s flaws and virtues than most Christians. Many years later, when Wasson was in his sixties and had eaten sacred mushrooms several times, he still openly admired what he called the Bible’s “wealth of illuminating episodes both fictional and veridical.”

  After serving in the U.S. Army during World War I as a radio operator based in France, Wasson moved to New York and completed a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Columbia University. On a subsequent visit to London, he met a Russian pediatrician, Valentina Pavlovna Guercken, who, in 1926, became his wife. Two years later, after having worked first as a college English teacher at Columbia and then as a business journalist, Wasson started his career as an investment banker at the Guaranty Company of New York. In 1934 he transferred to J. P. Morgan and Company on Wall Street, where he remained until his retirement in 1963.

  Wasson’s involvement with mushrooms began on his honeymoon, in late summer 1927. He and his wife, Tina, had taken a cabin in the Catskill Mountains. While out for a walk one day, Tina shouted with joy upon noticing some mushrooms in the forest. As she gathered them for dinner, Wasson begged her to stop. Like many people of English extraction, Wasson regarded all mushrooms as probably poisonous. Tina, on the other hand, loved mushrooms with a passion that is typical of people raised in Russia. “That evening she ate them, alone,” recalled Wasson. “I thought to wake up the next morning a widower.” Later he wrote that the episode impressed them both so deeply that “from then on, as circumstances permitted, we gathered all the information that we could about the attitude of various peoples toward mushrooms: what kinds they know, their names for them, the etymology of those names, the folklore and legends in which mushrooms figure, references to them in proverbs and literature and mythology” (Wasson 1959). In doing so, the Wassons launched a field of research they called ethnomycology—the study of cultural uses of mushrooms.

  Their serious work in this field began with a chapter for a book they were writing on Russian cuisine. By the time it was published in 1957, the chapter had become the entire book, a two-volume treatise called Mushrooms, Russia and History. The Wassons developed their theory that mushrooms played a role in the religious rites of ancient Europeans. That would help explain, they said, why some Europeans today, such as Russians and Czechs, are mycophilic, regarding mushrooms with open delight, while others, such as the English, are mycophobic, regarding mushrooms with distrust and even horror. In their view, both reactions are degraded forms of what had been experienced in ancient times as epiphanic awe.

  But what kind of mushrooms could generate such an experience? The only psychoactivity then attributed to mushrooms was delirium, a side effect of poisoning. The earliest historical accounts of the Mexican psychoactive mushroom’s existence were recorded in the early 1500s by Catholic friars who accompanied Spanish soldiers into Mexico during the Conquest. According to the friars, local Indians were found consuming mushrooms they called teonanácatl that reportedly caused visions. The meaning of this Aztec word has never been conclusively determined, but most likely it translates to “wondrous mushroom.” The friars, however, construed it to mean “god’s flesh” or “divine flesh.” Its use in Indian ceremonies seemed to them a kind of profane parody of Catholic Holy Communion. As Wasson later wrote:

  One can imagine the many trembling confabulations of the friars as they would whisper together on how to meet this Satanic enemy. The teonanácatl struck at the heart of the Christian religion. I need hardly remind my readers of the parallel, the designation of the elements of our Eucharist: “Take, eat, this is my Body . . . ” and again, “Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son . . . and to drink His blood . . . ” But the truth was even worse. The orthodox Christian must accept on faith the miracle of the conversion of the bread and wine into God’s flesh and blood: that is what is meant by the Doctrine of Transubstantiation. By contrast the sacred mushroom of the Aztecs carries its own conviction: every communicant will testify to the miracle that he has experienced (Wasson 1980).

  The Spaniards, appalled, made an effort to suppress the mushroom ceremony and believed that they had succeeded. So completely did the practice disappear from light of day that over time Western scholars concluded that the friars had made a mistake: that teonanácatl never had been mind-altering mushrooms, which were doubted to exist, but instead were dried peyote cactus buttons.

  Meanwhile, mushroom ceremonies continued in secret for hundreds of years in remote mountain villages scattered throughout central and south Mexico. Over time, Christian concepts were mixed in with the pagan ones. The mushrooms themselves, for example, came to be viewed as a manifestation of Jesus that sprang from the ground where his blood fell at the time he was tortured and crucified. Since the mushroom veladas were secret, this conflation does not reflect a strategic concession by the Indians to please the authorities. Rather, it was spontaneous and sincere syncretism, such as marked the original spread of Christianity through pagan Europe.

  In 1936, a Mexican ethnobotanist named Blas Pablo Reko rebelled against the prevailing scientific view that teonanácatl was peyote. He began to consult with indigenous peoples in the mountains of Oaxaca in south central Mexico about the possible existence of mind-altering mushrooms. They confirmed for him not only their existence, but also that the mushrooms still were used in secret. In 1938, Reko was joined in his field research by a young ethnobotany student from Harvard named Richard Evans Schultes, who secured and identified samples of mind-altering mushrooms in the Mazatec village of Huautla de Jiménez. One year later, a Mexico City anthropologist named Jean Bassett Johnson and his wife, Irmgard Weitlaner, became the first white outsiders to attend a mushroom velada, though their hosts did not offer them mushrooms; they participated only as observers. Also that year, Schultes (1939) published a paper identifying teonanácatl as a specific mushroom. The onset of World War II ensured that this was overlooked for more than a decade.

  That is where things stood when Tina Wasson, in the early 1950s, told her friend,
the poet Robert Graves, about their research for Mushrooms, Russia and History. Graves called her attention to Schultes’ paper on teonanácatl, which was referenced in an article he’d recently read in a pharmaceutical company’s newsletter. The Wassons then contacted Schultes, who by then was a faculty member at Harvard, and Schultes referred them to his contacts in Huautla.

  Thus it was that Wasson, beginning in 1953, made the first of ten annual visits to the Oaxaca region, sometimes accompanied by Tina and their teenage daughter, Masha. In 1953 they sat in on a mushroom velada but were not invited to participate by eating mushrooms. The male shaman who presided said the mushrooms had the power to take those who ingest them “ahí donde Dios está”—there where God is. Wasson noted at the time that the mushrooms are treated with reverence by the Indians, so he always made it a point to do likewise. “After all,” he wrote, “it was a bold thing we were doing, strangers probing the innermost secrets of this remote people. How would a Christian priest receive a pagan’s request for samples of the Host?” (Wasson and Wasson 1957).