The Holy Mushroom

by Jan Irvin

  ~ Carl Ruck

  Allegro was never fired from the University of Manchester. In 1970 he resigned of his own accord before The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross went to print. He’d had enough of academia and wanted to write freelance (Irvin et al, 2006, pg. 183). His own professor, Professor T. Fish, said he was sorry to see him go (Brown, 2006).

  Wasson’s statement to Forte: “I had his address, and wrote him a letter after he had gone out there, and said, ‘I should like to correspond with you, if you will correspond.’ I never heard from him” is misleading. Wasson’s actual words, written in the September 14 missive, discussed above, state: “I think we can correspond with each other on friendly terms, like opposing counsel after hammering each other all day in court who meet for a drink together in a bar before going home.” As has already been repeated, two days later Wasson wrote his September 16 missive to the TLS, publicly attacking Allegro before he could respond.

  The spoken language of the Isle of Man is English, not Manx. Allegro moved to the Isle of Man partly to avoid the high taxes on authors in the UK, since he was no longer working for the University.

  Allegro never had a mental breakdown. He went on to publish six more books—five of which (The End of a Road, 1970; The Chosen People, 1971; Lost Gods, 1977; The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth, 1979; and Physician, Heal Thyself…, 1985) furthered the research he presented in SMC. Allegro’s first book The Dead Sea Scrolls, went through several editions, including one published just four years before Wasson’s letter to Hamilton (see Allegro, 1956/1981).

  Wasson published Soma in 1968, which was obviously before Allegro published SMC in May 1970. He is thus confused regarding the publication date of his own book.

  Below is a revealing excerpt from Fungus Redivivus by Ruck in which he copies Wasson’s errors but also reveals several more Wasson inconsistencies:

  Allegro was reportedly paid £30,000 for the first serialized rights of his book in an English tabloid, The News of the World, and was accused of unseemly profiteering.39

  39 Robert Forte, “A Conversation with R. Gordon Wasson (1898-1986)”: 13-30, in ReVision: The Journal of Consciousness and Change, vol. 10 nº 4 (1988). Wasson mentioned this unseemly profit to both Ott and Ruck in personal communication and also accepted the criticism of Allegro’s linguistic analysis, although his own languages were only Spanish and English. He was eager to accept the rejection of Allegro on the basis of the fact that Allegro had wrongly identified the toxins in Amanita muscaria, although that didn’t trouble him about Puharich, and that he accepted the Plaincourault fresco as a mushroom.

  Besides the obvious errors regarding the serialization being printed in The News of the World (though stated correctly as Sunday Mirror in footnote 37, above) and the unsupported statements on Allegro’s payment, from Ruck’s excerpt and footnote 39 we discover that Wasson rejected Allegro’s research because “of Allegro’s linguistic analysis, although his own languages were only Spanish and English”. Next we see Wasson accuse Allegro of “unseemly profiteering,” although Wasson had profited exceedingly well from his LIFE magazine publication of Maria Sabina and the Mazatec Indians, for which he destroyed their culture and paid them nothing. I have not attempted to verify what others claim Wasson was paid, but Letcher states that he was paid $6000 in 1957 money. The US Federal Reserve compares that figure to over $44,000 by 2007 standards. Letcher had this to say regarding Wasson’s profiteering (Shroom, 2007):

  It is clear that his [Wasson’s] motivations became more complex, and more muddied, once he had actually eaten the mushrooms in 1955. Thereafter, his banker’s instincts seem to have taken over so that he came home with every intention of profiting from his discoveries. In a shrewd move, he had already acquired the rights to all of Allan Richardson’s photos, in exchange for funding the photographer’s travel and subsistence costs. But within months of returning he had a meeting with top executives of the Merck Sharp & Dohme pharmaceutical company to discuss rights to the mushrooms’ potential active ingredients. […] it was Albert Hofmann’s team at Sandoz in Basle who eventually isolated psilocybin and psilocin, but nevertheless, when Sandoz put its patented brand Indocybin on the market, Wasson appears to have been rewarded for his part in its discovery with a directorship of one of its American subsidiaries.

  He made several other attempts to profit from his story by offering it to various magazines […] but after a chance meeting he opted for Life instead. Knowing that it would serve as a convenient and timely advertisement for Mushrooms, Russia and History, Wasson urged the editors to bring the article out in the May edition of 1957 […] The editors acceded to his demands – and advertised the mushroom edition of Life extensively on television – with the effect that his book, published a few months later in a limited edition of 512 copies and retailing at $125 [over $917 in 2007], doubled in price [over $1830 in 2007] before all the copies were sold. The article itself netted Wasson the extraordinary sum of $6,000…

  ~ Andy Letcher

  It also appears that Wasson gave out 100 copies of his book to friends and colleagues, which would leave 412 copies for him to sell. In 1957 money that equals $51,500 or the equivalent of a minimum of $378,000 today.

  Next, Wasson further dismissed Allegro because “Allegro had wrongly identified the toxins in Amanita muscaria,” although with so many confusing and differing reports by Wasson and his associates, as was shown above, it’s easy to understand how Allegro made these errors. Ruck then mentions yet another Wasson inconsistency: “although that didn’t trouble him about Puharich.” Wasson further rejected Allegro because “he accepted the Plaincourault fresco as a mushroom”. Regarding the Plaincourault fresco, Ruck states in Fungus Redivivus:

  Although Wasson himself apparently dismissed the fresco, he did so with reluctance and included it as a plate for his readers’ consideration in his 1968 Soma: The Divine Mushroom of Immortality, in which he advanced the theory that the ancient sacred plant-god of the Sanskrit RgVeda was originally this same fascinating and empowering mushroom.

  As already shown, there is no real evidence post 1953 of even the slightest reluctance on Wasson’s part to dismiss the Plaincourault fresco, or Allegro. His attacks on Allegro in the TLS, the Hamilton letter, and Forte interview are evidence of that. And as I just quoted from Ruck above, Wasson rejected Allegro because “he accepted the Plaincourault fresco as a mushroom,” that is, without reluctance. The only place that I could find any real sign of reluctance from Wasson was in his December 21, 1953, letter to Ramsbottom—“rightly or wrongly”. He does not show any clear signs of reluctance after that letter.

  Ruck suggests in Fungus Redivivus (and I likely agree) that it is from this letter that Allegro noticed Wasson’s reluctance to draw the conclusion that the Plaincourault fresco was a mushroom, and from there made his move toward investigating drug use within Judeo-Christianity:

  [Allegro] had drawn the conclusion that Wasson was still reluctant to make, although mentioned in his Soma.

  I should remind the reader that Allegro went public with the idea that Christianity was based on a drug cult in October 1967 (Anderson, 1967), before the publication of Wasson’s Soma in 1968. Therefore, for the purposes of chronology, Ruck’s mention of Soma is unimportant. As stated, Wasson’s statements in the TLS missives (above), written after the publication of Soma, are enough to completely dismiss any argument for later reluctance. But Ruck references pages 178–180, 214–215, 220–222, so let us take a look in Soma to see what Wasson had to say on the matter:

  Pg. 179–180: The mycologist would have done well to consult art historians. Here is an extract from a letter that Erwin Panofsky wrote me in 1952: [He quotes Panofsky] Professor Panofsky gave the expression to what I have found is the unanimous view of those competent in Romanesque art. For more than half a century the mycologists have refrained from consulting the art world on a matter relating to art. Art historians of course do not read books about mushrooms. Here is a good example of the failure of
communications between disciplines.

  The misinterpretation both of the Plaincourault fresco and of berserk-raging must be traced to the recent dissemination in Europe of reports of the Siberian use of the fly-agaric. I think the commentators have made an error in timing: the span of the past is longer than they have allowed for, and the events that they seek to confirm took place before recorded history began.

  There is no sign of reluctance there, so let’s check the next source:

  Pg. 214–215: Repeatedly we hear of the Food of Life, the Water of Life, the Lake of Milk that lies, ready to be tapped, near the roots of the Tree of Life. There where the Tree grows is the Navel of the Earth, the Axis of the World, the Cosmic Tree, the Pillar of the World. The imagery is rich in synonyms and doublets. […]

  It is the consensus of all who have written on the matter that the Siberians could not have fathered the myths and practices that they have made their own. Or, to put the thought more accurately, the very idea of such a possibility seems not to have been entertained by them.

  On the contrary I now suggest that the source and focus of diffusion of all these myths and tales and figures of speech – all this poetic imagery – were the birch forests of Eurasia. The peoples who emigrated from the forest belt to the southern latitudes took with them vivid memories of the herb and the imagery. The renown of the Herb of Immortality and the Tree of Life spread also by word of mouth far and wide, and in the South where the birch and the fly-agaric were little more than cherished tales generations and a thousand miles removed from the source of inspiration, the concepts were still stirring the imaginations of poets, story-tellers, and sages.

  In pages 214–215 we still find no clear hint toward any reluctance. We only find further musings on Wasson’s 1000BCE era theory, which continue from pages 179–180.

  Pg. 220–222: […] did the Mithraic beliefs and rites come down from the forest of what we now call Siberia? Let us look again at what is known of the Orphic mysteries, and reconsider the archetype of our own Holy Agape. On what element did the original devotees commune, long before the Christian era? Certainly the overt vocabulary relating to the birch and the fly-agaric carried great prestige over millennia throughout the south and east of Asia: the Tree of Life, the Pillar of the World, the Cosmic Tree, the Axis of the World, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil – all these were variations stemming back to the birch and the fly-agaric of the northern forests. The Herb (or Plant) of Life, the Herb of Immortality, the fruit of the Tree of Life, the Divine Mushroom of Immortality – these are alternatives ultimately representing the fly-agaric, no matter how far removed the poet or sage or king might be from the real thing. In remote China we have seen the devotees of the Manichaean sect as late as the 12th century eating ‘red mushrooms’ in such quantity as to arouse the indignation of a pillar of the Chinese Establishment: is not this an echo of Siberian shamanism, not having passed direct from Siberia to China, but tortuously, through successive Middle Eastern religions, until we reach the last of Mani’s followers, far from his Iranian home? […]

  In the opening chapters of Genesis we are faced with the conflation, clumsily executed, of two recensions of the fable of the Garden of Eden. The Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil are both planted in the center of Paradise. They figure as two trees but they stem back to the same archetype. They are two names of one tree. The Fruit of the Tree is the fly-agaric harboured by the birch. The Serpent is the very same creature that we saw in Siberia swelling in the roots of the Tree.

  Of arresting interest is the attitude of the redactors of Genesis toward the Fruit of the Tree. Yahweh deliberately leads Adam and Eve into temptation by placing in front of them, in the very middle of the Garden, the Tree with its Fruit. But Yahweh was not satisfied” he takes special pains to explain to his creatures that theirs will be the gift of knowledge it, against his express wishes, they eat of it. The penalty for eating it (and for thereby commanding wisdom or education) is ‘surely death’. He knew the beings he had created, with their questing intelligence. There could be no doubt about the issue.

  […] It is clear that among community leaders the hallucinogens were already arousing passionate feelings: when the story was composed the authentic fly-agaric (or an alternative hallucinogen) must have been present, for the fable would not possess the sharp edge, the virulence, that it does if surrogates and placebos were already come into general use. The presence of the serpent is a happy necessity, for throughout Eurasia the serpent is intimately associated with the fungal nomenclature of the mushroom world, or with particular species of mushrooms, though in nature as it happens they have nothing to do with each other. […]

  If these perceptions are right, then the mycologists were right also, in a transcendental sense of which neither they nor the artist had an inkling, when they saw a serpent offering a mushroom to Eve in the Fresco of Plaincourault. […]

  This is yet another continuance of Wasson’s 1000BCE theory, continued from the other pages above. This last excerpt is interesting because Wasson further drives home the point of his theory by asking: “On what element did the original devotees commune, long before the Christian era?” Notice the added caveat “long before the Christian era”. It appears that Wasson plugged this in as an intentional afterthought and diversion from Christianity. He then goes on: “If these perceptions are right, then the mycologists were right also, in a transcendental sense of which neither they nor the artist had an inkling”. Why does he complicate the matter by calling it “transcendental”? He says clearly: “The Fruit of the Tree is the fly-agaric.” But he denies that the Plaincourault fresco depicts this same tree. Once again, Wasson places his theory firmly in pre-Christian history, even though the evidence was painted in a late thirteenth-century church. We find no signs of his so-called reluctance. We only see signs of Wasson’s typical contradictory and contrived 1000BCE position served up for his own self interest—instead of being honest and admitting he was wrong, which I’ll discuss further.

  For good measure I decided to check one last source not cited by these other articles: Ethnobotany: The Evolution of a Discipline, pg. 388.

  Through the centuries we have heard references to the Tree of Life, the World Tree, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and perhaps other names, always pointing to a tree that is revered as holy, the focus of the religious feeling of the people thereabouts. The tree is never concealed, but it is a pity that seldom has the genus or species of tree been noted. I now make bold to suggest that it is always the mycorrhizal host of Amanita muscaria. The “fruit” of that tree is subject to taboo, spoken about only one-to-one, most frequently in the evening by candlelight; it is never mentioned in the marketplace or in mixed company. We must assemble all references to this tree and prepare a map showing where it has been worshipped and by whom. Does the religion of that tree still survive?

  ~ Gordon Wasson

  This reference was published posthumously in 1995. We can see that even to the very end of his life, holding tight to the Genesis theory, Wasson still refused to admit that he was wrong about Allegro. He never printed a retraction nor suggested the re-examination of Christianity and Allegro’s work. He instead appears to act more out of jealousy or resentment toward Allegro for doing what he never had the guts to do – investigate Judeo-Christianity. As if wool had been pulled over his eyes for nearly two decades, he states: “I now make bold to suggest […] host of Amanita muscaria” and then asks: “Does the religion of that tree still survive?”

  I propose that Christianity is the surviving religion of that tree.

  Michael Hoffman and I (Hoffman et al, 2006), showed that Wasson’s statement in Persephone’s Quest, “I was wrong,” with regards to mushrooms in the Bible is vague and non-specific. Beyond the Genesis story, no statement exists giving any clear indication as to what extent Wasson further believed mushrooms existed in the Bible.

  Ruck said Wasson was in the process of changing his mind. But
changing his mind about what? After thirty-three years, between December 21, 1953, and the publication of Persephone’s Quest, 1986, there is no change of position. Exactly how long should we expect to wait for someone to change their mind?

  As previously discussed, if we analyze Wasson’s statements to the TLS from September 16, 1970 we see that Wasson clearly separated his stance from Allegro’s by stating that mushroom usage in Judeo-Christianity was known only up to 1000BCE, a very safe position (however inaccurate the date), which limited the use of mushrooms to the Genesis story of Adam and Eve. But, in fact, he never changed his position, as we see from his words in Persephone’s Quest:

  “I once said that there was no mushroom in the Bible. I was wrong. It plays a major hidden role (that is, hidden from us until now) in the best-known episode of the Old Testament, tale of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden.”

  ~ Gordon Wasson

  Wasson’s circuitous admission “I once said that there was no mushroom in the Bible. I was wrong” serves only to mislead the reader into believing that he actually changed his stance, which he clearly hadn’t, at least not during 1953 to 1986. By removing Wasson’s two misleading statements in the above paragraph: “I once said that there was no mushroom in the Bible. I was wrong,” and “that is, hidden from us until now,” his true position regarding Amanita being limited to the Genesis story is revealed—completely intact: