Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom

by Alex Letcher

  A common answer to the first was that mushrooms were sponta­neously produced by thunder, where lightning struck the ground. The great Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder (23-79 ce) thought, rather, that they were produced from mud and the acrid juices of moist earth, especially that found beneath acorn-bearing trees.15 Then again, the writer Nicander (fl. 197-130 bce) thought mushrooms 'the evil ferment of the earth', warmed by the heat rising from its core.46

  Regarding the more pressing second question, classical writers were well aware that while some fungi were gastronomic delights, others were disagreeable to the digestion, or worse, poisonous. Euripides and Hippocrates both recorded instances of mushroom fatalities, while the Roman Emperor Claudius was famously murdered by his wife, Agrippina, to ensure the succession of her son Nero. She prepared for him a dish of his favourite mushrooms laced with the Death Cap, Amanita phalloides: he died slowly and horribly. But writers were wide of the mark when attempting to distinguish the edible from the noxious.

  Pliny rather alarmingly thought that poisonous mushrooms were livid in colour and edible ones red (several poisonous species are in fact red). Nicander thought that fungi growing on oak and olive trees were poisonous, those on fig-trees safe.17 Dioscorides (40-90 ce) a Greek-born physician, botanist, pharmacologist, and surgeon to Nero's army, who described about five hundred plants and their heal­ing properties in his De Materia Medica (On Medical Matters) thought mushrooms edible unless they grew over rusty iron or near serpents' dens.*8

  The great herbals of the medieval and early modern periods, the tomes and compendiums of herbal remedies and lore produced by Gerard, Clusius, Culpeper and others, took much of their knowledge directly from these classical authorities, especially Dioscorides, and so retained their confusion about fungi. Albertus Magnus in the thir­teenth century and Gerard in the seventeenth thought fungi 'earthie excrescences',19 while others thought mushrooms a product of decom­position, not its cause.50 Later, in the eighteenth century, thinkers gave their imaginations free rein and variously attributed mushrooms to the

  fermentation of oil and nitrous salt, the coagulation of snails' slime trails, or vegetable crystallisation whatever that may have been." Even the great Swedish botanist Linnaeus (1707-1778) who over­turned the kind of unwieldy plant classification used by John Ray with his revolutionary binomial system was persuaded by another natu­ralist, Otto von Munchausen, that fungi were created as dwellings by insects. He quite overlooked the observation of Pier Antonio Micheli (1679-1737)5 published in 1729, that fungi did in fact reproduce by a kind of 'seed'.'*

  It is hard for us to imagine anyone taking the classical beliefs seri­ously, but because of the lasting Western obsession with all things to do with the ancient world, their influence endured way beyond their time. In particular, Dioscorides' binary division of Fungi esculenti (edible) from Fungi pernicosi (poisonous) became the template by which all fungi were categorised and led to the misguided search for generic rules rather than specific identifying features to distinguish the two. Thus, as late as the nineteenth century, and even in the early years of the twentieth, rules such as poisonous mushrooms 'will blacken silver or turn onions brown', or 'can easily be peeled', or 'do not grow in meadows, open fields and roadsides', were published in august journals like The Times and The LancetThese rules, abso­lutely spurious but adhering impeccably to classical reasoning, made mushroom-eating a game of Russian roulette and caused more acci­dents than they prevented.

  Indeed, so entrenched was the classical paradigm that it was not until the nineteenth century that botanists began to see what had been staring them in the face since the invention of the microscope some two hundred years previously: that fungi were indeed living species, reproducing sexually by means of spores, and that variations in microscopic features enabled species, poisonous or otherwise, to be distinguished. Nevertheless, Dioscorides' binary division remained stub­bornly instilled in Western consciousness as the single, overriding framework for understanding all unusual mushroom-induced symp­toms. It ensured that when magic mushrooms were accidentally con­sumed, as the various accounts suggest, their psychoactive effects were regarded as at best meaningless and at worst life-threatening or injuri­ous to sanity. 'It is certain that some [mushroom] species have an intoxicating quality,' wrote the eighteenth-century Swiss botanist Albrecht von Haller (1708-1777), 'followed often by deliriums, trem­blings, watchings, faintings, apoplexies, cold sweats, and death itself.'54 It would take the psychedelic revolution of the twentieth cen­tury finally to overturn this pervasive framework.

  Its tenacity is perplexing, however. As the Age of Enlightenment gave way to the Age of Empire, Western society became exposed to and made use of, a series of ever more exotic psychoactives, used pri­marily in medicine but also, to a certain extent, recreationally. It is no exaggeration to say that the cogs of the industrial revolution were oiled with opium, which was available over the counter at pharmacies in a variety of potions, powders and quack remedies, and which was prescribed for almost every minor ailment of body, mind and spirit. Its dreamy, visionary pleasures and nightmarish pains, were well known by the end of the eighteenth century and could easily have provided an alternative framework for understanding mushrooms. In fact the con­nection was spotted as early as 1744 by the naturalist and Fellow of the Royal Society William Watson (1715-1787). Watson was engaged in an intellectual spat with the aforementioned Roger Pickering about the origins of mushroom poisons, for he disagreed vehemently with Pickering's belief that burrowing insects were what turned esculent mushrooms noxious. But in an aside about the early European treatis­es on fungi, he noted that in 'most of these authors we find instances of mischievous effects from the pernicious kinds; which property some of them have equal to Opium, Aconite, or Henbane . . .'." He could not have made the link more explicitly.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) wrote his supposedly opiuminspired visionary masterpiece 'Kubla Khan' in or around 1799? ^ year that Dr Brande was called to attend the young Edward who was giggling hysterically in the kitchen.36 Coleridge's struggles with opium addiction were well known, those of Thomas de Quincey (1785*" 1859), the English opium eater, even more so, and other famous writ­ers were afflicted too: Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888), author of the children's classic Little Women (1868-9), was one such. Meanwhile, the chemist Humphry Davy found spiritual enlightenment in an oiled silk bag of nitrous oxide, the French psychiatrist Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours dined on candies of hashish, the American psychia­trist Weir Mitchell chewed buttons of the peyote cactus, and later. Sigmund Freud considered the pathways of the unconscious while injecting himself with the occasional syringe of cocaine.37 In other words, there were all manner of narcotic perspectives in which the

  mischievous effects of mushrooms could have been reframed, but not one made the slightest impact: mushrooms were poisonous, and that was that. The question is, why?

  Some twentieth-century scholars have, as we shall see, argued that this amounts to evidence of a lingering primal taboo against the eating of hallucinogenic mushrooms, but we need not invoke such a tenuous solution. For although mushroom-induced fatalities were rare, they were always reported sensationally and in gruesome detail. Thus, the alarming story of two soldiers and their cat who went mad and then died in agony after a mushroom repast was related in the Gentleman's Magazine in 1757.-K Nearly a hundred years later, stories about a sol­dier in Bruges whose convulsions were so appalling that he broke his back before expiring,'9 and of an old man whose body was so black and swollen that his face was no longer recognisable, appeared in The Times/0 In other words, the mental connection between unusual mushroom-induced symptoms and the possibility of a horrible death was constantly reinforced, and would have been uppermost in peo­ple's minds if and when any unexpected post-prandial symptoms materialised. The mycologist Charles Badham (1806-57) complained about a general climate of hysteria in this regard:

  Persons have fancied themselves poisoned when they were not; in
digestion produced by mushrooms is looked upon with fear and suspicion, and if a medical man be called in, the stomach-pump used, and relief obtained, nothing will persuade either patient or practitioner that this has not been a case of poisoning. 'You have saved my life,' says one. 'I think you will not be persuaded to eat any more mushrooms for some time,' says the other: and so they part, each under the impression that he knows more about mush­rooms than anyone else can tell him.4'

  Added to this was the problem that mushrooms were often all regarded as being essentially the same. The man J.S., for example, believed that he had been picking mushrooms, not a particular mush­room.41 Bemushroomed 'patients' typically had little idea of what exactly they had been eating, while the medical and botanical experts called in to assist them were rarely any the wiser. As the exasperated naturalist William Hay complained, the general fear of poisoning arose therefore from the singular popular incapacity for individualizing fungus species. They are all confounded together in the mind, and are not regard­ed separately, each kind by and for itself, as are other plants. An ordinary Englishman's only idea of gathering wild Fungi is to make a heterogeneous collection of everything fungoid that comes in his way. Put into practice this will obviously result in mistakes . . . Then the doctors will blame, not the stupidity or carelessness of the gatherer, but the mushrooms indiscriminately.43

  It was only when mycologists recognised that fungi were of distinct species, and learnt to demarcate the deadly ones, that this alarmingly inaccurate framework was abandoned.

  Charles Badham was one who lamented this woeful state of affairs, and he complained about the 'apparently clashing testimonies of authors respecting the same species, who not infrequently describe, under a common name, a fungus which some of them assert to be esculent, some doubtful, and others altogether poisonous in its quali­ties'.44 Badham's concerns were shared, and it was during the nine­teenth century that fungal taxonomy was finally systematised and placed on an equal footing with that of plants, firstly by the Swede Elias Magnus Fries, who was the first to separate species on the basis of spore colour, and later by the German Paul Kummer (1834-1912), who revised Fries's work on the gilled fungi. Between them, they final­ly extracted Psilocybe semilanceata from the heterogeneous tribe Agaricus glutinosus, as part of a continual process of ever closer retic­ulation by which the number of recognised species doubled between i860 and 1890.45

  It inevitably took time for this new way of looking at and thinking about mushrooms to disseminate beyond the borders of academe. However, the Victorian vogue for natural history ensured its eventual transmission, for this was the era of the amateur naturalist club, a trend that began in the 1830s and peaked some thirty years later. The most influential was surely the Woolhope Naturalists' Field Club in Hereford, of which most of the pioneering British mycologists were members. It began organising 'fungus forays' in 1868, excursions on which members would stroll genteelly through the autumn country­side, basket in one hand, mushrooming knife in the other, collecting and identifying whatever fungi could be found along the way. Then, fc>r the benefit of interested locals, the day's trophies would be displayed in the nearest village hall and discussed over a well-earned cup of tea.46

  By the turn of the century therefore, as a result of the work of this and similar clubs in publicising the new advances in taxonomy, the modern understanding of mushrooms as distinct species began to fil­ter through to the popular consciousness. The old folk wisdom about how to distinguish 'mushrooms' from 'toadstools' gradually gave way to positive identification of species, or more commonly, to an avoid­ance of wild mushrooms altogether. It is not hard to see why these upright Victorian gentleman mycologists would have found the idea of eating magic mushrooms abhorrent. One of these early mycologists and a member of the Woolhope Club deserves special mention, how­ever; for of all of them he came closest to starting a Victorian magic mushroom craze.

  Mordecai Cubitt Cooke is generally remembered, if at all, as an early science writer, author of tomes such as Rust, Smut, Mildew and Mould (1865) and the more popular Plain and Easy Account of the British hngi (186z), and editor of the improbably named magazine Science Gossip. However, he began his writing career with an exuberant and incautious treatise on drugs, The Seven Sisters of Sleep (i860), written while he was in his mid thirties.47 Not only was this a defence of Cooke's tobacco consumption (he was a lifelong smoker), but it also argued for the moral equivalence, and therefore legitimacy, of the world's regional drug preferences.

  He built the book upon the conceit that the Queen of Sleep, in order to fend off the political ambitions of her seven jealous sisters, gave to each a narcotic drug capable of producing exotic visions and thereby having power over man's waking hours. Each sister then took control of one part of the world 'Morphina' taking Tartary and Mongolia, for example, and 'Amanita' (fly-agaric) Siberia. In other words, Cooke was arguing, in the racial discourse of the time, that each of the human groups naturally utilised the local narcotic to which it was drawn as a result of geography and innate physical constitution: an idea he almost certainly plagiarised from James Johnston's earlier best-seller The Chemistry of Common Life (1855). If Johnston's tone was disapprov­ing, Cooke's was, as one reviewer put it, 'joyous and thoroughly irre­sponsible',4'4 and he was clearly targeting what he saw as the hypocritical mores of the emerging bourgeois classes of people like Johnston, in fact. 'Philanthropists at crowded assemblies,' complained Cooke, 'denounce, in no measured terms, "the iniquities of the opium trade", and then go home to their pipe or cigar, thinking them per­fectly legitimate.'49 No wonder the book has come to be seen as an early 'drug classic'.

  Of the seven plants described (tobacco, opium, hashish, betel, coca, belladonna and fly-agaric), Cooke devoted the most space to his own beloved tobacco. Even though he almost certainly encountered the effects of opium addiction first hand while working as a teenage apprentice apothecary, he wrote approvingly of the drug's effects and remained a lifelong fan of De Quincey.50 Of most interest here is Cooke's description of the fly-agaric: not only did he popularise the myths surrounding the mushroom's use in Siberia, but he also retold the story of Mr Glen's encounter with the bemushroomed man stag­gering through the streets of Knightsbridge. No fool, he realised that this must have been caused by a mushroom similar in its intoxicating properties to fly-agaric, for he wrote that 'if future generations do not deem it desirable to indulge in a narcotic of this kind for the purposes of producing pleasurable sensations, or to smother the carking cares of life, yet they may learn more than we do at present know of the peculiar characteristics which distinguish this [mushroom] from all the others of the "Seven Sisters of Sleep'"/1 The implication was plain: future generations would indeed find local intoxicating mushrooms desirable, and Cooke knew exactly why.

  Even though Cooke, a brilliant naturalist, knew all about the Liberty Cap and how to identify it, and seemed, here, to be interpret­ing its effects favourably, it is extremely unlikely that he consumed the mushroom himself. For one thing, the logic of his argument was that he, an Englishman, was not racially constituted to use mushrooms: that ability belonged only to the Siberians. For another, his career was, apart from this one book, distinguished by diligence, probity, and sobriety. Born of humble origins, Cooke had to work hard all his life as a botanist and science writer, a precarious occupation that necessi­tated the continual search for paid work.51 In spite of his great achieve­ments in the field, his origins prevented him from entering the ranks of the gentlemanly classes who were busy establishing and institutional­ising the discipline of mycology. Unlike, say, his contemporary the Reverend M. J. Berkeley (1803-1889), Cooke always remained an outsider. Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, he distanced himself from 'his earlier irresponsible work, born of a youthful naivety, as his career

  developed.

  By the time Cooke published one of his last works, Edible and Poisonous Mushrooms, in 1894, he had overturned his earlier opin­ions completely. In this classic work of Vic
torian philanthropy a good deed performed for the greater public good, published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) he warned peo­ple to avoid Liberty Caps, and rather stuffily cautioned against overindulgence in all its manifestations: 'punishment will follow inor­dinate indulgence in any of the good things of this life, and those who disregard reason, and are intemperate in eating fungi, must expect to suffer from repletion and indigestion'.55 The one person, then, who might have triggered a Victorian magic mushroom craze by instilling a 'narcotic' discourse into the public consciousness, turned instead to his career, and to temperance and moderation, and so left the popular fear of mushroom-poisoning firmly in place.

  Clearly, then, localised and episodic incidents of accidental magic mushroom consumption have been happening since records began. Without any kind of framework within which to interpret the experi­ences favourably, however, the victims, who believed themselves to have been poisoned, would have been most unlikely to repeat them. (As every enthusiast knows, the experience of taking magic mush­rooms can be harrowing enough, even without the belief that one is dying.) The classical approach of lumping all mushrooms together meant that they would have had only a very confused idea of what rype of mushroom to pick, even if they had wanted to. Intentional consumption therefore seems extremely unlikely.

  The increasing incidence of 'poisoning' episodes throughout the nineteenth century did not represent a Victorian mushroom craze, but was simply a product of the better record-keeping of the emerging institutions of medicine and science. Of course, we have no first-hand accounts from the victims, who were mostly illiterate, but only from the physicians who treated them, so it is impossible to prove that mushrooms were never knowingly consumed. Inadvertent consump­tion, however, seems more likely, with mushrooms eaten either by chil­dren who did not know any better or by families in such abject poverty that they were reduced to gathering whatever wild food they could find in order to put breakfast on the table.