by Alex Letcher
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Prologue
PART ONE: AGARICUS
The Mushroom People
Science and Magic
The Archaeology of Ecstasy
Much Disordered
Feasts and Revelations
Wasson
PART TWO: AMANITA
The Fly-Agaric
Soma
Chemistry and Conspiracy
PART THREE: PSILOCYBE
Academic Exercise
High Priests
Ripples and Waves
Underground, Overground
The Elf-Clowns of Hyperspace
Muck and Brass
Epilogue: Love on a Puffball
Appendix
Toadstool soup! Toadstool soup!
Drink it singly or in a group.
Boris and his Bolshy Balalaika, Toadstool Soup
Acknowledgements
Though writing a book is by necessity a solitary affair, I have been given invaluable amounts of help and support along the way. Tony Lyons of Sheffield University first awakened my interest in mycology through the brilliance of his lectures. Graham Harvey and Ronald Hutton have been, in their own individual ways, inspirational role models. Matthew Watkins patiently explained the mathematical problems with Terence McKenna's timewave theory, one starry solstice night at Avebury. David McCandless agreed to let me to accompany him on what turned out to be an invaluable research trip to Holland. Edward Pope, uniquely amongst sixties survivors, is not only able to remember what happened back in the day but is also willing to talk about it long may the spirit of '67 live on, old friend. Dave Todd alerted me to and purloined for me a hard-to-come-by copy of Work is a Four Letter Word, a film I would otherwise never have heard of. Alison Gill generously provided photos of her extraordinary art, and, even more generously, cycled round London delivering them for me by hand. Shawn Arthur and Stephanie Martin took me under their wing and treated me with wonderful hospitality during a research trip to Boston. And periodically my Welsh friends you know who you are provided me with a very necessary sense of perspective.
Many other people stepped on board to offer their assistance, whether steering my research in vital and exciting new directions, sharing their own personal experiences, providing photos, or offering tea and general encouragement. They are, in no particular order: Mike Jay, Mark Pilkington, Laura Rivel, Richard Rudgley, Toni Melechi, Michael Carmichael, Chas Clifton, Jenny Blain, Steven Harris, Peter Edge, Theo Sloot, Rumi Mohideen, Jackie Singer, Jocasta Crofts, Groovy Su, Peter Mantle, Katie Sterrett, Hafiz, Robin Williamson, George Firsoff, Anthony Henman, Hans van den Huerk at Conscious Dreams, Ananda Schouten at De Sjamaan, Runic John, Celtic Chris, Chris Spiral, Josh Ponte, Jane Griffiths, Vanessa Ryall, Amy Whitehead, the Camden Mushroom Company, Adrian Arbib, George Monbiot,Jim and Deborah, Jason Salzman and the other organisers of Telluride Mushroom Festival, Manuel Torres, Paul Stamets, Dawn Roberts, Anthony Goodman, Richard Allen at Delerium records, The Catweazle Club, Boris and His Bolshy Balalaika, the Magic Mushroom Band, Circulus and the Ooga Bonga Tribe.
I have always found librarians to be polite, forbearing and helpful, no matter how obscure or annoying the request made, but special thanks in this regard must go to the staff at the Radcliffe Science Library and the Bodleian Library Upper Reading Room in Oxford; the Guildhall Library and the Drugscope Library in London; and the Harvard Botanical Libraries in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Lisa Decesare, in particular deserves a medal for the tireless manner in which she handled my hectic seven day trawl through the vast Robert Gordon Wasson archive, and for providing me with photos at very short notice, just prior to Thanksgiving.
Kate Mohideen, Lydia Feodoroff and Daniel Wolverston generously translated some very dry articles for me, whilst Timea Szell, Robert Wallis, Kat Harrison and Stephen Hancock all made exacting and helpful comments on early chapter drafts. With their shrewd observations, insightful comments and polite cajoling, my editors at Faber, Julian Loose and Henry Volans, made the task of transforming my original manuscript into a publishable book a stimulating and enjoyable one. Thanks are also due to the rest of the Faber team.
It is no exaggeration to say that this book could not have been written without the assistance of Clare Brant who has acted, from the start, as my unofficial agent. She made initial introductions with Faber, read and commented upon the entire manuscript, and generally encouraged me with food and fine conversation during the last, most difficult, period of writing. I can only hope to repay the favour some day.
Henrietta Leyser has, over the years, supported me in so many ways that it is hard to know where to start or which, in particular, to mention. Perhaps most significantly, aside from commenting on early chapter drafts, she provided me with somewhere to live, rent free (again!), during the first year that I was working on the book.
But it is to her daughter my partner Matilda, that most thanks are due. As my biggest fan and harshest critic she embodies all the qualities of Muse, provoking me to strive for greater things even as, unswervingly, she homes in on my textual blunders and grammatical inconsistencies. It is to her, with love, that I dedicate this work.
Prologue
One evening in the late summer of 1916, an upright American surgeon from New England began to feel unwell.' Dr Beaman Douglass and his wife were on their way to play bridge with their neighbours when they were both overcome with preternatural waves of giddiness. Earlier they had eaten a meal of what they thought were innocuous wild mushrooms, fried in butter and served on toast, which were, by all accounts, delicious: 'We smack our lips even now over the savoury dish,' wrote Douglass a year after the event. But what neither he, nor his wife, nor the unfortunate maid who shared their meal knew was that they had in fact eaten several cupfuls of hallucinogenic fungi. They were, in other words, tripping.
By his own confession Douglass was 'not a botanist', but he was a careful amateur mycologist, competent at mushroom identification and possessed of a passion for edible wild fungi. 'For me,' he declared, 'hunting mushrooms is a pastime, eating them an adventure.' So it was with some considerable delight that he recognised a mass of mushrooms sprouting in a neighbour's cucumber bed as Panaeolus retirugis.
[1] The definitive guidebook, Charles Mcllvaine's One Thousand American Fungi, assured him that these were both edible and good, and Douglass had not the slightest reason to suspect otherwise.
Having cooked up the mushrooms, Douglass and his wife 'ate about one half cupful of the caps and two pieces of toast saturated with the liquor'. But a little over an hour later, when the couple had just joined their neighbours, the first peculiar symptoms came on. Mrs Douglass was the most strongly affected. Her vision was distorted, she was unable to concentrate (Douglass noted, somewhat peevishly, that she played cards badly that night), and she became increasingly dizzy. 'There was some cerebral stimulation too a tendency to be jolly, hilarious she laughed and talked inordinately and foolishly.' Later, however, she became depressed, could not see properly, and found it hard to breathe. Her pupils, Douglass noted, were unnaturally dilated.As a medical man, Douglass was obviously concerned for his wife's safety, but he knew enough about mycology to be reassured that their lives were not in any immediate danger for they had not eaten any of the deadly species. Nevertheless, as he too started to be taken by the effects of the mushrooms, he began to doubt his judgement. 'I . . . thought it was time to do something for her before things might become so bad that I could not help her ... I literally staggered back to my cottage, two hundred yards away, secured my tablets and syringe and struggled back over the
road to my wife.' Eventually, with the help of his friends who read the medicine labels, prepared the syringe, and steadied his hand as he gave the injection Douglass was able to administer atropine, morphine and an arsenal of emetics to his now ailing wife.
All the time he fought off his own equally lurid symptoms, for he was dizzy and light-headed and his thoughts reeled around with a volition quite of their own. The mind was stimulated truly, but the grade and result were below normal. Thoughts flew through my brain, but they were of secondary quality. The attention was easily distracted and disturbed . . . Objects near seemed far away, sounds were diminished, muscular weakness supervened and an uncomfortable feeling of anxiety appeared.' Then he had the strongest and most improper desire 'to be noisy, to laugh and joke', and worse, his own 'trivial and foolish remarks met with warm personal appreciation It was a most unbecoming, embarrassing and disquieting experience.
In the clear light of day, when the mushrooms' effects had mercifully receded, a relieved Douglass concluded that the adventure had possessed absolutely no merits, was intellectually worthless, and was not in any sense worth repeating. He wrote it up and published it in the journal of the mycological society to which he belonged: a cautionary tale, designed to 'restrain the hazardous' and prevent others from making similar foolish mistakes. Never once did it occur to him that anyone might actually want to seek out the mushrooms deliberately. But just forty years later that is exactly what they started to do, and the consequences were nothing if not extraordinary. Dr Douglass would have been astonished.
PART ONE: AGARICUS
Know your mushrooms,
Else they'll rush you,
Stomach pump, in hospital!
Boris and his Bolshy Balalaika, Toadstool Soup'
The Mushroom People
We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.
Sylvia Plath, 'Mushrooms'
Magic mushrooms are becoming hard to avoid. Once they were the preserve of the psychedelic underground of hippies, freaks and travellers the dedicated few who may still be seen in Britain and America every autumn searching diligently for the little goblin-capped mushroom, the Liberty Cap, Psilocybe semilanceata. Now, however, an underground army of net-head hobbyists grows more exotic species and strains away from the public eye, in jars and terrariums secreted in basement cupboards. Young Western travellers to Indonesia, Thailand and Bali, lured by the pull of the paradisiacal full-moon beach party, buy mushroom omelettes or cola-mushroom shakes from the surreptitious locals, illicit fuel for their all-night dancing. In Holland, where liberal attitudes to such matters prevail, magic mushrooms have become big business. 'Paddos', as they are called, can be sold quite openly from market stalls, in 'head shops' and in specialist 'smart shops1, and inundations of tourists flock to Amsterdam to sample these unusual wares.
For a few short years, until the legal loophole was forcibly slammed shut in July 2005, mushrooms could be bought in Britain too, provided they were fresh and unprepared. Almost overnight, it seems, they erupted onto the marketplace to become the fashionable illicit drug of choice for young and old alike. For example, at 2004's Stonehenge summer solstice gathering that great barometer of alternative tastes, lifestyles and ideas the principal psychoactive being peddled was not cannabis, LSD or Ecstasy, as recent trends might lead us to expect, but cultivated Mexican mushrooms. That year's Glastonbury festival now an established mainstream cultural event, in spite of the countercultural hype saw one wholesaler alone shifting an excessive 70 kg of fresh mushrooms, a turnover that factors out at somewhere in the region of 3,500 individual trips. You could buy DIY kits with which to grow your own or, if that was too demanding, you could find flyers advertising websites from which to order mushrooms direct, delivered to your doorstep by return of post.
The surge in mushroom consumption has not been restricted to festival-goers, hippies, clubbers, artists, musicians and the other usual bohemian suspects. I have heard of businessmen, academics, geneticists, photographers, architects, doctors, farmers, council workers and journalists who all make regular mushroom excursions. To reflect this trend, the Oxford English Dictionary, that great bastion of language and meaning, has been forced to add 'shroomer' to its ever-expanding lexicon.' From Scandinavia to Spain, from the Americas to Australia, from Ireland to Indonesia, shrooms are gathered and eaten with apparent relish, and with a total disregard for their prohibited status. Mushrooming is, well, mushrooming and, it seems, pretty much everywhere.
From a historical point of view, interesting questions remain over how this curious state of affairs came to be, questions that this book attempts to answer: have people always consumed mushrooms, but secretly and away from the public gaze, or is this a modern phenomenon, and if so, why? Ask these questions of mushroom enthusiasts and many at least those who are aware that mushrooms have a history at all will tell you that psychoactive fungi have been used since ancient times.1 With great certainty they will detail how mushrooms were used in prehistoric religious ceremonies, inspiring the building of the stone circles of Avebury and Stonehenge and the Aztec pyramids at Teotihuacan. They will tell you how Plato, amongst others, drank mushroom tea at the ancient Greek rites of Eleusis; how mushrooms were eaten by the shadowy Celts and their Druidic priests, by the Vikings to access their jingoistic rages, and then later by the medieval witches in their secretive moonlit sabbats. They will happily explain that folk memories of Siberian mushroom-shamanism gave us the figure of Father Christmas, who is, in fact, a magic mushroom in disguise. They will blame a blinkered, patriarchal and nature-hating Christianity, or perhaps the scientific machinations of the industrial revolution, for the severance of this unbroken tradition and the wilful oppression of this throwback to the stoned age. And they will claim that by reviving mushroom use they are reinstating an ancient shamanic heritage, a heritage that is their natural birthright.
This book differs from all others that have come before by breaking with this received orthodoxy, for the real and as yet untold history of the magic mushroom is at once less fanciful and far more interesting. The history of the magic mushroom is much more than a good old tripper's tale. It is intertwined with and inseparable from the social, cultural, scientific and technological changes that have occurred since the industrial revolution, the forces that have wrought the modern Western world. Because of this entanglement, the story of the magic mushroom says something rather revealing about ourselves, about the ideas, hopes, fears, aspirations and desires that shape our time: not least about our yearning for enchantment in a barren scientific world stripped of magic and meaning. That we in the West have found value in those remarkable mushroom experiences, where almost all others before us have regarded them as worthless, means that in a very real sense we could claim to be living in the Mushroom Age. We are the Mushroom People. The story of the magic mushroom therefore provides us with a window, albeit from a quite unexpected viewpoint, upon the modern condition itself.
Mushrooms may not yet have inherited the earth, as Sylvia Plath ominously predicted, but what little fossil evidence there is suggests that fungi per se have inhabited it for at least 400 million years, since the Devonian period.J It has been estimated that there may be as many as 1.5 million species of fungi currently in the world, of which only about 100,000 have been identified and formally described, with most of the new species being discovered in the tropics.4 Though people often label them as plants (from a writer's point of view, it remains occasionally convenient to do so), the fungi actually constitute a distinct biological kingdom, for they contain no chlorophyll and do not reproduce with flowers. But of the four major fungal phyla, in which may be found the rusts, smuts, yeasts, moulds and mildews, only the socalled Basidiomycetes produce what we commonly think of as mushrooms and toadstools. There may be as many as 140,000 of these mushroom-producing species in the world, of which we may know only as few as 10 per cent.
Cont
rary to popular belief, mushrooms or carpophores, to give them their scientific name do not only grow at night: we just tend to notice the ones that appeared while we were sleeping. Nor is there any scientific division between mushrooms and toadstools, though following the Greeks we commonly think of the former as being the edible species, the latter the poisonous. Nor, indeed, is the mushroom the entirety of the organism, for it is merely the reproductive structure, or fruiting body, concerned with the Darwinian task of propagating genes into the next generation. The main body actually consists of a network of microscopic threads, or hyphae, which grow and branch through the species' preferred substrate, forming what is called a mycelium. Mycelia can grow to a vast size. One of the largest has been found in America, a single root fungus, Artnillaria bulbosa. This specimen occupies an area of about fifteen hectares, weighs in the region of 10,000 kg, and is probably about fifteen hundred years old.5
Mushrooms and toadstools exist solely to produce spores, which they do by the million. Released and sometimes fired forcibly into the air, these microscopic 'seeds' are blown away by the slightest breeze until, if lucky, they land on a suitable substrate where, when conditions are right, they will germinate. A single hyphal thread hatches out of the spore and expands outwards, rather like the long modelling balloons used by stage conjurors, but inflated by water pressure, not air. The hypha grows, splits and branches this way and that, sensing its way to where pockets of nutriment can be found and absorbed through its semipermeable wall. At this stage the fungus is monokaryotic, that is, it contains only one nucleus and one complete set of chromosomes, and though viable for a short time, will die if it does not 'mate'. Unlike the dioecious higher organisms, fungi have many hundreds of different mating types sexes if you will, though the analogy is not precise to choose from. When two compatible types meet, they fuse together in such a way that each hyphal cell then contains two distinct nuclei, two complete sets of chromosomes, which coexist together harmoniously until environmental cues trigger true sexual reproduction.