by Alex Letcher
This, then, was the situation that prevailed at the end of the nineteenth century. The Liberty Cap was known to be poisonous, and was advertised as such in popular guides to fungi, but was nonetheless eaten occasionally. But then, perplexingly, its listing as a poisonous species began to disappear from the guidebooks until by the 1940s it was wholly absent. For example, the respected mycologist John Ramsbottom (1885-1974) listed it as 'suspicious' in 1923, but omitted it from both his Poisonous Fungi of 1945 anc^ his widely read Mushrooms and Toadstools of 1953.54 Worthington Smith regarded it as poisonous in 1891 but similarly omitted it from his guide to poisonous fungi of 1910," as did Mordecai Cooke from his Plain and Easy Account of British Fungi of 1904.56 It is as if a collective amnesia fell upon the founding fathers of British mycology, with the result that the mischievous Liberty Cap was quite forgotten.
Most probably this was because of the dramatic decrease in incj. dents of mushroom poisoning in the early twentieth century: if no one was being admitted to hospital having eaten Liberty Caps, there was a less pressing need to alert the public to their dangers. It seems that a gradual erosion of confidence in old wives' tales and folk wisdom, together with an ever-present fear of poisoning, led to a consensus that the only sensible thing to do was to avoid eating wild mushrooms altogether: people no longer trusted fungi, nor anyone selling them at market. The Lancet, reporting the introduction of official mushroom inspectors in France in 1934, suggested that in Britain 'consumption of mushrooms would go up by leaps and bounds if the public felt sure that toadstools were never offered in their place'.57 Perhaps this amnesia is also attributable to the hiatus of two world wars, in which some of the brightest minds of each generation lost their lives. Nevertheless, and even though advances in taxonomy and biochemistry had shown that the Liberty Cap need not be listed amongst the deadly species," it stands out as a rather inexplicable episode of sloppy scholarship in the history of modern mycology.
Without this lacuna, the story of the eventual rediscovery of the Liberty Cap might well have taken an entirely different course, or might not have happened at all. For when British hippies started looking for indigenous magic mushrooms in the early 1970s, they found that none of the authoritative field guides such as The Collins Field Guide to Mushrooms and Toadstools listed any psilocybe species as poisonous.59 The way was clear for them to start picking.
Here, then, for the first time in its history, the Liberty Cap's effects were seen in an entirely different frame from the one that had dominated for at least seven hundred years: it was no longer 'poisonous' but 'hallucinogenic', which meant that its effects were, for the first time, seen as desirable. This radical shift in cognition and understanding was triggered by a series of events that, unbeknown to the British medics and mycologists, had been unfolding for some five hundred years far away across the Atlantic.
Feasts and Revelations
He who eats many, many things sees. Bernardino de Sahagun, Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva Espana
Nothing that the mushrooms show should be feared.
Maria Sabina, The Life'
In July 1914, as Europe was sliding ineluctably into war, an upheaval of a very different kind was taking place in Oxford County, Maine. A man known to us only as Mr W. went mushroom-picking in the morning and 'gathered a good mess of the mushrooms (Panaeolus papilionaceusY which he prepared for his lunch/ He shared the harvest with his niece by marriage, a Mrs Y., and between them they ate about a pound of the mushrooms fried in butter. His nephew, Mr Y., declined to partake and was able to witness the dramatic events that followed unaffected. Writing up the incident a week later, Mr W. described how he was rapidly overcome with peculiar symptoms after finishing the meal: he became drowsy and felt his thought processes to be rather more impaired than was usual following a large lunch. Then, getting up to cross the room, he had the distinct impression that time had slowed down and that it was taking him far longer than was reasonable to reach the door. Having finally crossed the room, he discovered that Mrs Y. was similarly affected, and from then on their symptoms grew rapidly more intense.
They stepped outside and both were immediately struck by the brightness of colours. For Mr W., a 'field of redtop grass seemed to be in horizontal stripes of bright red and green, and a peculiar green haze spread itself over all the landscape'. Mrs Y. yelped with surprise on finding that her fingers had become delicately undulating snakes. The pair became clumsy, and even though it was hard for them to stand, let alone walk, they were overcome with the childlike urge to run and leap about. 'We became very hilarious,' wrote Mr W., 'with an irresistible impulse to laugh and joke immoderately, and almost hysterically at times. The laughing could be controlled only with great diffi. culty; at the same time we were indulging extravagantly in joking and what seemed to us funny or witty remarks.' The poor sober and bemused Mr Y. noted dryly that some of the jokes were more successful than others.
Things took a slightly darker turn when the party returned indoors. Mr W. noticed that 'the irregular figures on the wall-paper seemed to have creepy and crawling motions, contracting and expanding continually, though not changing their forms; finally they began to project from the wall and grew out toward me from it with uncanny motions.' He was struck by a bouquet of roses arranged on the table: 'the room seemed to become filled with roses of various colours and of all sizes, in great bunches, wreaths and chains, and with regular banks of them, all around me, but mixed with some green foliage, as in the real bouquets'. This rather beautiful vision lasted only a short time before Mr W. was overwhelmed with 'a decided rush of blood to [the] head' and a dizzying barrage of hideous human faces that leered at him from all sides: 'The faces appeared in all sorts of bright and even intense colours so intense that I could only liken them to flames of fire, in red, purple, green and yellow colours, like fireworks . . . They were all grimacing rapidly and horribly and undergoing contortions, all the time growing more and more hideous.' Looking down at his hands, he saw that they had become 'small, emaciated, shrunken and bony, like those of a mummy'. It was at this point that Mr W. decided to call for a doctor.
However, by the time the doctor arrived the worst of the symptoms had passed, and so, unlike his British counterparts, this physician felt unable to administer any palliative or useful treatment. Before the day was out the bemushroomed pair had further fits of the giggles, and at one point the peculiar sensation that their bodies were elongating: I grew far up, like Jack's bean-stalk,' wrote Mr W., and then 'collapsed back to my natural height'. Mrs Y. said that her 'hands and arms seemed to grow unnaturally long'. Mr W. also had the distinct impression that he had become clairvoyant and could read the thoughts of those around him, but shortly afterwards the effects of the intoxication began to wear off until by six o'clock in the evening they both felt quite normal again.
There remains a degree of uncertainty over exactly which species Mr W. and Mrs Y. had been eating, for modern studies have found Panaeolus papilionaceus to be only capriciously psychoactive
Nevertheless, this litany of symptoms seems wholly in keeping with those of psilocybin. The fact that the episode was written up by Yale biologist Addison Emery Verrill (1839-1926), and published in the major journal Science, suggests that mushroom 'poisoning' of this kind was as uncommon in the US, and therefore as noteworthy, as equivalent incidents had been in Britain. In fact, the first half of the twentieth century saw a few sporadic cases of accidental poisonings recorded in the US (and also in Japan and Australia)/ It was the account of Mr Glen's bemushroomed stagger through the streets of Knightsbridge in the London Medical and Physical Journal of 1816, and William Salisbury's subsequent identification of the offending species, that first alerted American botanists to the unusual qualities of certain mushrooms, especially those of the genus Panaeolus.* The earliest American guidebook, One Thousand American Fungi, published earlier in 1900, corroborated that Panaeolus papilionaceus had indeed been observed to cause intoxication, if
only capriciously.
Full acknowledgement must be given to the author of this pioneering guidebook, the courageous Captain Charles Mcllvaine (18401909), who 011 finding that very little was known about the edibility of American fungi determined to resolve the matter by eating each and every one himself. He clearly must have avoided the deadly varieties, for he lived long enough to catalogue the edibility of over a thousand species. His persistence was surely stoical at times, for he wrote (with, one detects, a certain degree of understatement) that 'while often wishing I had not undertaken the work because of the unpleasant results from personally testing fungi which proved to be poisonous, my reward has been generous in the discovery of many delicacies among more than seven hundred edible varieties I have found'/ A thorough man, he tested Panaeolus papilionaceus on himself, but found that thirty mushrooms produced no unusual effects whatsoever. He nevertheless concluded that the species was probably best avoided.
As for Mr W., though he knew his mushrooms, he obviously had no reason to suspect Panaeolus papilionaceus to be anything other than edible and delicious. But what is so striking about his account is that, even though he was forced to call a doctor when the visions became oppressive, at no time did he consider himself poisoned. Indeed, as the effects of the mushrooms came on he immediately recognised that they were similar to those attributed to other drugs, for he was familiar with Thomas de Quincey's writings on opium, Fitz Hugh Ludlow's on hashish and Weir Mitchell's on peyote.7 His account is therefore somewhat groundbreaking. It stands as the first intimation that the old framework of dividing edible 'mushrooms' from poisonous 'toadstools', which had been in place for nigh on two millennia, was about to be overturned. Within the space of forty years a third category would be added 'hallucinogenic mushrooms' and, within this new. revolutionary, psychedelic discourse, the effects of these mushrooms like those of other visionary plants, would be seen as wholly desirable.
Notwithstanding the importance of this break with the past, there is nothing to indicate that Mr W. ate the mushrooms purposefully for their visionary effects: like all the unlucky characters in the previous chapter, he entered into the trip quite unwittingly. Neither did he attempt to repeat the experience for, though he was a vigorous middleaged botanist with a specialist interest in fungi, he was 'strictly temperate in his habits'." However, just forty years later another middle-aged, temperate American gentleman with a keen amateur interest in fungi did go actively seeking psychoactive mushrooms, with the express intention of experiencing their effects first hand. His search took him many thousands of miles to the south, to the remote mountain regions of Mexico, where the situation regarding the knowledge and understanding of psilocybin mushrooms could not have been more different from that which had prevailed for so long in the West. How and why he did so, and what happened subsequently, form the central subject of this and the following chapter, for his arrival in Mexico had dramatic consequences that led directly to the unstoppable rise of the magic mushroom.
Perhaps uniquely in the world, there exists in the region we now call Mexico a genuine history of intentional psilocybin mushroom consumption that extends back at least five hundred years to the time of the Spanish conquest, but may go back much further. The Wests encounter with this wholly other way of being began when Hernan Cortes (1485-1547) landed on the Mexican coast, near present-day Vera Cruz, on Good Friday 1519. Enflamed by rumours of riches and gold whispered to him by his translator and lover, Malinche (1505?-! 5 29?) the slave woman presented to him as a tribute by the coastal indigenes the low-born Spaniard advanced inland with the intention of wresting whatever territory and gold he could from this 'new world'. With just 550 men, some horses and dogs, and a single cannon, Cortes led a charmed offensive against the ruling Aztec civilisation, which, remarkably, fell to him a mere two years later.
The Spanish invaders and settlers were shocked and fascinated in equal measure by the world they encountered, marvelling at its architecture, writing and laws and at the same time recoiling from its religious and cultural practices. While it was the Aztecs' predilection for human sacrifice the relentless offering of still-beating human hearts, thousands at a time, to voracious gods that was chiefly castigated, their application of a range of psychoactive plants and fungi in a variety of religious, secular, and prophylactic contexts9 caused the horrified Spanish no less offence. In this particular encounter the West quite literally demonised the other, attributing the alleged curative and divinatory powers of these plants to the work of demons or the Devil. They duly began the process of imposing Christian, 'civilising' values upon the pagans. Nevertheless, it is thanks to the endeavours of the sixteenth-century Spanish chroniclers, fascinated enough by what they encountered to make written records, that we have a picture of indigenous mushroom usage, however distorted it may be by the religious, imperialist and primitivist ideology through which the Spanish viewed this alien world.
Several sixteenth-century accounts describe the use of mushrooms at the highest social levels.'0 The Dominican friar Diego Duran (d 1588) wrote a detailed treatise, the Historia de las lndias de la Nueua Espana, based in large part upon an indigenous written source, now lost. From this source, Duran relates the story of how at the coronation of the Aztec sovereign Tizoc in 1481 inebriating mushrooms were provided for the guests. 'And all the lords and grandees of the provinces rose and, to solemnise further the festivities, they all ate of some woodland mushrooms, which they say make you lose your senses, and thus they sallied forth all primed for the dance.'" It is hard to imagine today's royals sharing out magic mushrooms at their nuptials but, according to Duran, Aztec royalty rarely consumed anything else, and especially not alcoholic drinks. They preferred 'the woodland mushrooms which they ate raw, with which ... they would rejoice and grow merry and become somewhat tipsy'.,x The evident delight with which the Aztecs took mushrooms to accentuate the pleasure of dancing seems thoroughly modern.
Moctezuma II (1466-1520), the last and ill-fated Aztec ruler defeated by Cortes, employed a coterie of old priests whose job it was to consume mushrooms for divinatory purposes, especially to prognose cate the outcome of battles. Anyone predicting defeat was, however, hastily executed perhaps a clue to why the Aztec ruler was so swiftly conquered. Moctezuma also appeased his traditional enemies with an annual mushroom feast, the 'Feast of Revelations', a custom that may have originated at his own coronation in 1502. Spies from the rival Tlascalan tribe were captured, pardoned, and magnanimously regaled with mushrooms. This gift may have been double-edged for, if Duran is to be believed, 'they all lost their senses and ended up in a state worse than if they had drunk much wine; so drunk and senseless were they that many of them took their own lives, and by dint of those mushrooms, they saw visions and the future was revealed unto them, the Devil speaking to them in that drunken state'.1'
Another more hard-line Franciscan friar, Toribio de Benavente (d. 1569), otherwise known as Motolinfa, wrote a treatise on indigenous religious customs his Ritos Antiguos, Sacrificios e Idolatrias de los Indios de la Nueva Espana in which he described the Aztecs eating bitter-tasting mushrooms sweetened with honey. Less sympathetic than Duran, he claimed that the mushrooms merely sharpened the Aztecs' already savage cruelty.'4 After eating the mushrooms the locals 'would see a thousand visions and especially snakes; and as they completely lost their senses, it would seem to them that their legs and body were full of worms eating them alive, and thus half raving they would go forth from their houses, wanting someone to kill them.' Motolinfa's disapproving tone is perhaps attributable to his religious sensibilities, which were affronted by the unfortunate resonances of these practices with the Christian communion. The mushrooms were known in the local Nahuatl language as teunamacatlth, which meant 'God's flesh', and which to Motolinfa would have seemed blasphemous.
But of all the accounts, the most comprehensive, and relatively speaking the most sympathetic, was that compiled by the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagun (1499-1
590), who spent some sixty years studying the indigenous populations. In his voluminous work the Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva Espana (the so-called Florentine Codex), he presented a summation of his many conversations with locals, written in the predominant native language, Nahuatl, with a parallel Spanish translation. He recorded the use not only of mushrooms but of other psychoactive plants such as peyote, tobacco and Morning Glory seeds. His informants called the mushrooms teonanacatl the name by which mushrooms subsequently became famous in North America a variant of Motoliiua's teunamacatlth translated likewise as 'God's flesh'. The mushrooms, he said, were to be found growing in grassland, in fields, moors and waste places, and had a round cap and a thin stem. They were so bitter as to hurt the throat, and only two or three were eaten at one sitting. They caused palpitations of the heart, excited lust, and induced laughter and terror in equal measure. At 'the hour of blowing conches and flutes', chocolate would be drunk and mushrooms eaten, with honey taken to ease the bitterness. After dancing and weeping, bemushroomed participants would have visions in which they might see their destiny, or even the manner of their death, before falling into a stupor. Later, they would sit around discussing the meaning of what they had seen (again, a thoroughly familiar scene to the modern mushroom enthusiast).