Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom

by Alex Letcher

  In the temperate zones fungal reproduction is usually spurred by the onset of winter frost being the greatest enemy of an organism con­sisting mostly of water but elsewhere shortage of nutrients may be the trigger. When environmental cues indicate a period of stress, the ever-expanding hyphae suddenly grow together into tight balls, called pinheads. Then, from these, and occasionally rising with such force that they can dislodge stones and paving slabs, mushrooms grow up and out, an architectural triumph to rival the finest humans can offer. Indeed, the structure of the mushroom works on exactly the same principles as the fan-vaulting of our Gothic cathedrals, though unlike the fungi we lack this remarkable ability to expand our bodies to an equivalently majestic size.

  It is only here, within the cells of the mushroom itself, that true sex­ual reproduction occurs. The two nuclei fuse, meiosis takes place, and spores are formed, which then drop away from the mushroom's gills or pores rather like confetti from a Manhattan skyscraper, caught by the breeze and blown far and wide. There the analogy ends, for con­fetti quickly rots (decomposed by fungi, of course), but with their tough coats spores can lie dormant for years, weathering the harshest of conditions. For such a fragile organism, spores are an eminently sensible way of ensuring that those selfish fungal genes are passed on.

  The majority of fungi, whether mushroom-producing or not, are saprophytic, that is they are nature's recyclers, feeding off dead plant and animal cells. However, some are symbiotic, bonding with algae to form lichens, or together with plant roots to form complex under­ground networks called mycorrhizae, a 'wood-wide web'6 without which both plant and fungus would struggle to survive. Others are parasitic (think of ringworm and athlete's foot) or pathogenic, while some are even carnivorous: remarkably, certain species twist their hyphae into spring-loaded snares, which snap shut when an unfortu­nate, and equally microscopic, nematode worm wriggles through. Like something out of a horror movie, the unfortunate entrapped creature is then slowly digested as the hyphae penetrate and suck out the contents of its nutrient-rich body.

  Until very recently, with the advent of microscopy, all this sex and bloodshed was concealed from the human eye. Only the superficial, macroscopic mushrooms caught our attention; indeed, they are hard to miss for they come in all sizes, all shapes, all colours, all tastes and all smells. Some glow in the dark, while others are cast up in beguiling and enchanted-looking fairy rings. Some stain purple or yellow or blue when cut or bruised; others drip with a milky lac­tation, or dissolve away rapidly into a black slime that can double as ink. Some contain chemicals that can be used to dye cloth a vivid purple or red, while others emit hydrogen cyanide gas in quantities sufficient to be smelled.7 One, the accurately named stinkhorn or Phallus impudicus, is preternaturally priapic. It springs up from the earth with its bell-end covered in a green, fetid, spore-ridden slime that reeks of rotting meat, and is carried hungrily away by flies. (It is said that Charles Darwin's prudish granddaughter would collect and secretly bum these rude protuberances lest they corrupt passing children.8)

  Unsurprisingly, then, mushrooms of all kinds have proved an enduring source of inspiration for writers, poets, artists and musi­cians alike throughout Western history. Whether it is their sudden appearance, their ephemerality, their association with rot and decay, gastronomic pleasure and indigestive pain, their grotesque shapes, or just their sheer otherness, mushrooms and toadstools have always stirred and troubled our imaginations. Strange and uncertain, dark and disquieting, ruled by apparently supernatural forces, mushrooms seem to us living repositories of all that is weird, enchanted, other­worldly and uncanny. They have produced in us desire and loathing in equal measure.

  For Shelley, in The Sensitive Plant (1820), the mushroom's stalk was like a murderer's stake / Where rags of loose flesh yet tremble on high, / Infecting the winds that wander by. Both Charles Dickens in Dombey and Son (1847-8) and Edgar Allan Poe in The Fall of the House of *Jsher (1840) employed mushrooms figuratively as the obvious outward symbols of human decline and decay. It is common to find wild mushroom patches brutally trampled and kicked, as if their offensive presence will somehow drag us into ruin. Their cold, bloated fleshiness is, if not a genuine danger, then still an unwelcome reminder of mortality and death. Plath's 'foot in the door' is troubling indeed.

  Different artists and writers have responded more to the mush­room's otherworldly qualities. In music, the contemporary Czech composer Vaclav Halek quite literally takes his inspiration from mush­rooms, for he apparently hears eldritch orchestral music playing whenever he gazes upon one.9 Every species produces its own unique melody, which he dutifully transcribes and incorporates into his own compositions. Though this is almost certainly caused by a bizarre medical condition called synaesthesia (more commonly a symptom of eating magic mushrooms), in which colours are sensed as sounds, J numbers as shapes, sounds as smells and so on, mushrooms seem so

  strange to us that it is easy to believe Halek's claim that they really do sing out in otherworldly tones.

  The Belgian sculptor Carsten Holler specialises in making accurate models of mushrooms. In one installation (Upside Down Mushroom Room, 2000) giant, human-sized fly-agarics appear to be growing downwards from the ceiling: a dizzying inversion guaranteed to make the hardest of heads spin. The British artist Alison Gill placed humansized papier-mache Liberty Caps into London's Jerwood Gallery (Amplifier, 1997), an installation that afforded the mushrooms a ghost-like presence. Her series of magic mushroom photos, Fungal Kingdom Emanations (1997) created using a special technique known as Kirlian photography seem to capture the very nature of these peculiar mushrooms, for they appear surrounded by a coruscat­ing, electric-blue aura.

  Both Jules Verne and H. G. Wells imagined forests of giant mush­rooms growing at the centre of the earth and on the moon respective­ly, as if no other plant could capture the strangeness of these imagined places. Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill (1906) was accidentally sum­moned in a fairy ring. Shakespeare took a similarly enchanted view of mushroom-kind, placing 'demy-puppets ... whose pastime is to make midnight mushrumps' into the magical universe of The Tempest. In fact, as he did so often, he was breaking with tradition here, for it was more usual in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to hurl the word 'mushroom' as an insult.10 The actual mushroom's impudent and unexpected arrival, its equally rapid decay, its lack of a substantial root and its inherent love of ordure made it the perfect derogatory metaphor for lambasting the emerging mercantile middle classes. Thus, John Taylor (1580-1653) wrote the following in his Most Horrible Satyre of 1639:

  Consider this thou new made Mushroom man, Thy Life's a Blast, a Bubble, and a Span; And thou with all thy Gorgeous trappings gay, Art but a Mouldring lumpe of guilded Clay.

  More recently, with all things scatological forming the cornerstone of British humour, the children's author Raymond Briggs saw fit to name his perennially favourite flatulent bogeyman Fungus. Rather like his namesakes, this Fungus lives in a shadowy, dank underworld, thriving on the things that fill us with disgust mould, slugs, slime and pus and only appearing in our world, somewhat grudgingly, to give substance to our nightmares. But for Briggs's comical antihero, being a bogeyman is a profession, his job to tap on windows, wake babies with a prod and leap out from behind gravestones to terrorise human passers-by. Quite why this is his lot remains for him a source of exis­tential angst. That he turns out to be a surprisingly sensitive creature is just one of the many clever inversions that have ensured his contin­ued popularity amongst children and adults alike."

  Mushrooms, then, seem to us imbued either with an intrinsic earthy, grotesque and gnomic humour, or with all the beauty, glamour, danger and charm of a faerie enchantment. How apposite it is, therefore, to find that certain species are hallucinogenic, and that when eaten they produce in us both hilarity and the most profound and otherworldly alterations of consciousness. The fact of the magic mushroom simply accords with all our expectations.

  Science and Magic

&
nbsp; Every drug has its own character, its unique claims to fame.

  Sadie Plant

  There are, according to current estimates, 209 species of hallucinogenic mushroom, of which most fall into two broad groups/ The first con­tains the fly-agaric, Amanita muscaria, and its close relative the panther cap, Amanita pantherina. The former is the red-and-white-spotted mushroom so familiar to us from childhood, where it appears ubiqui­tously in storybook illustrations as the preferred seating of gnomes;

  the latter is its less well-known brownand-white-spotted cousin. Both fungi are closely related to the deadliest of species, the Destroying Angel, Amanita virosa, and the Death Cap, Amanita phalloides (which, as their names sug­gest, are responsible for the majority of fatalities worldwide).

  The fly-agaric is not deadly, how­ever, but contains a fuzzy cocktail of different chemical alkaloids, including ibotenic acid (a-amino-3-hydroxy-5isoxazoleacetic acid) and muscimol (5(aminomethyl)-3-hydroxyisoxazole), which produce an unsteady set of symptoms: nausea, dizziness, a flushed countenance, twitchiness, increased stamina, euphoria, deep coma-like sleep, hallucinatory dreams and, occa­sionally, nothing but a headache the next day.

  Not surprisingly given this litany, both species have been largely shunned apart from, that is, in two areas of Siberia where there is a long tradi­tion of using fly-agaric as an intoxicant. Nevertheless, this mushroom has generated a spectacular array of myths and legends about its sup­posed role in the origins of shamanism and religion so many myths, in fact, that three chapters in the middle section of this book are devot­ed to exploring and unpicking them. Curiously, the fly-agaric seems to be the one mushroom that most people assiduously avoid, and yet it is the one concerning which people will happily countenance all manner of moonshine. Something about its colourful and memorable form makes the mere thought of it a potent catalyst for the human imagi­nation, but just like its genuine, capricious, psychoactive effects, these tall tales need to be approached with a good deal of caution.

  The second group comprises those fungi, most commonly within the genus Psilocybe, that contain the active alkaloid ingredients psilocybin (4-phosphoryloxy-N, N-dimethyltryptamine) and psilocin (4hydroxy-N, N-dimethyltryptamine): these are the ones that we typically mean by the term 'magic mushrooms' and that constitute the main subject of this book.3 There are currently 186 known psilocybin species the figure is rising all the time of which 76 occur in Mexico alone/ To pick a mushroom at random in Mexico is to stand a very good chance of picking a hallucinogenic one, which is probably why it is the one part of the world where there is a genuinely old tradition of psilocybin mushroom usage. There are far too many psilocybin mush­rooms to describe them all here, but of the plethora growing world­wide two deserve special mention.

  The first is the Liberty Cap, or Psilocybe semilanceata (naked head, half-lance shaped). In Britain this delicate little mushroom appears in the autumn months, growing in great abundance in 'troops'. It is found in pastures across the British Isles, but especially in acid upland pastures, the wet, chilly sheep fields of Wales, the Pennines, Devon and Cornwall, and Scotland. Somewhat parochially, we think of it as 'our' magic mushroom, but in fact it grows in many temperate regions across the world. It is found across western Europe, from Scandinavia in the north to the Spanish Picos mountains in the south; from Ireland in the west to the Czech Republic and Russia in the east. Moreover, it grows across great swathes of the American Pacific Northwest, and also in New Zealand and Tasmania. Contrary to popular wisdom, it is not coprophilic, that is it is not a dung-lover, but actually grows saprophytically upon the dead root cells of certain grasses.5 Despite its small size the cap is only about a centimetre across it is home not to I gnomes but to species of mycophagous sciarid flies, the grubs of which are familiar to anyone who has ever picked and dried the mushrooms.

  Though originally lumped together with other small, nondescript I fungi as Agaricus glutinosus (in the eighteenth century Agaricus was a I catch-all generic name for mushrooms), the species was finally identiI fied, and acquired its Latin epithet, when it was described by the great i pioneer of fungal taxonomy, the Swedish mycologist Elias Magnus I Fries (1794-1878). Since then it has acquired many common names, I especially since it revealed itself to be a hallucinogenic species during I the 1970s: mushrooms, shrooms, mushies, psillys, pixie caps, Welsh I friends, Welsh tea. It is most commonly known as the Liberty Cap I because of the distinctive shape of its cap, which resembles the Phrygian bonnets worn by the French revolutionaries when they 1 stormed the Bastille. It seems to have acquired this name in Britain during the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, perhaps in response to palpable anxieties surrounding the very real possibility of a Napoleonic invasion: the sudden overnight appearance of troops of Liberty Caps might very well have been taken as an unwelcome por| tent of a similar incursion by the French. These days, and somewhat I tellingly, it is the mushroom's resemblance to the archetypal goblin's | cap that particularly arrests attention. This iconic shape made it a | potent countercultural badge during the 1980s and 1990s, when it appeared on T-shirts, postcards and album covers. As luck would have it, this one species that grows so abundantly in the world happens also to contain a high and predictable concentra­tion of psilocybin: about i per cent. It contains trivial amounts of psilocin, but significant amounts (0.36 per cent) of another psychoac­tive alkaloid, baeocystin (4-phosphoryloxy-N-methyltryptamine).6 Were these concentrations not so stable, dosage would be impossible to gauge (as is the case with certain other psychoactive species) and the mushroom would probably not have been adopted as a psychoactive drug. As it is, any twenty mushrooms picked in different parts of the world will have, on average, the same concentration of active ingredi­ents, and therefore the same pharmacological effect.

  The second notable psilocybin mushroom is Psilocybe cubensis. It was first collected by the American mycologist Franklin Sumner Earle (1856-1929) in 1904 in Cuba, hence its species epithet (although he originally placed it in the genus Stropharia). It is much larger than its diminu­tive cousin, its distinctive goldenbrown flying-saucer-shaped cap reaching sizes of up to eight cen­timetres across. It most definitely is coprophilic, and sprouts from the dung of bovines, or from well-manured ground, through­out the semi-tropical regions of the world. It is found in the south-east United States especially Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi; in Mexico, Cuba and the northernmost countries of South America; in Australia, notably Queensland; and in India and South East Asia, especially Vietnam and Thailand. The introduction of cattle-farming (usually through Western imperialist expansion) has undoubtedly done much to increase the frequency of occurrence of cubensis around the world. Whether cattle-farming actually spread the mushroom to new countries, or simply provided the already occurring species with a brand-new ecological habitat to colonise, is unknown. But what makes this species so important is that it has proved the easiest to cultivate: most of the magic mushrooms bought and sold, or grown in home terrariums, are cubensis.

  Cultivated specimens of Psilocybe cubensis. © Cordelia Molloy/SPL

  Though different strains of cubensis exist, and cultivated mush­rooms are marketed as such for example 'Thai', 'Colombian', 'Ecuadorian' and so on the commercial varieties are more often than not identical. Every mycelium produces several 'flushes' of mush­rooms, which can be made to look different by varying the watering regime, or the time when they are harvested: selling these as different strains is simply a marketing trick to meet consumer expectations shaped by the cannabis trade of variety and choice.

  Psilocybe cubensis is known by a variety of names. In Mexico, where it is sometimes viewed suspiciously because of its coprophilic habit, it is known as San Isidro Labrador after the patron saint of ploughing. In Mazatec it is 'di-xi-tjo-le-rra-ja', the 'divine mushroom of manure'. In Thailand it is imaginatively titled 'hed keequai', 'the mushroom that appears after the water buffalo defecates'. In Holland it is the gigglehead; in America and Australia it is the Golden Top or , Golden Ca
p, or simply cubensis.7

  On a per weight basis, cubensis is less potent than the Liberty Cap, with an average psilocybin content of around 0.63 per cent, psilocin 0.6 per cent and baeocystin 0.025 per cent." These percentages can vary quite substantially, however, and in cultivated specimens psilocy| bin content has been found to be highest in mushrooms picked during the fourth flush.9 A street dose of cubensis is typically in the region of fifteen to thirty grams of fresh mushrooms, though experienced users may double this. With Liberty Caps, psychoactive effects begin to be felt with ten to fifteen mushrooms, but an average dose is in the region of twenty to forty mushrooms. One hears stories of much higher, pos­sibly heroic, doses being taken in the hundreds but this happens more rarely. Mushrooms of all kinds may be eaten fresh, cooked into omelettes, made into a tea (along with warming spices such as ginger to offset the typical stomach aches and gripes that accompany con­sumption), or dried or preserved in honey for later use. Fresh cubensis mushrooms have a pleasant peppery taste, whereas Liberty Caps have a greasy, rancid aftertaste (and, if dried, the texture of boot leather), which makes stomaching them a difficult task indeed.