Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom

by Alex Letcher

  Clearly, then, at the time of the Spanish invasion, psychoactive mushrooms were being consumed in a variety of religious, secular, recreational and even diplomatic contexts within the dominant Mesoamerican Aztec civilisation. There exists material evidence, how­ever, to suggest that the practice may be very much older. Several Mesoamerican codices, the indigenous texts written in symbolic pic­ture language, portray mushrooms.'5 For example, the Codex Vindobonensis (the Vienna Codex), a Mixtec work depicting the mythological origins of the world, shows several gods and goddesses, including the feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl, clutching or earing mushrooms. Another Mixtec codex, the Lienzo de Zacatepec No. j. shows a man with mushrooms in his hair, while the Magliabechiano Codex shows a man who seems to be eating mushrooms while a 'supernatural' figure stands behind him, possibly Mictlantecuhtli, the Lord of the Underworld.16 All are, in the light of the chronicles, at least suggestive of mushroom use that predates the conquest.

  Furthermore, throughout Central America, about three hundred stone and pottery 'mushroom' effigies have been uncovered.'7 Although originating mainly in the highlands of Guatemala, a few have been found in the southernmost Mexican states. These sculptures are about a foot high and free-standing, are mushroom-shaped with a thin stem and a domed cap, and often depict a carved human, animal or super­natural figure squatting at the base. The pottery figures are much sim­pler, so that for a long time they were considered to be simply vessels. The earliest figures date from the pre-classic period, that is the second millennium bce; the latest, and simplest, from the late classic 600-90°

  cE Quite what they were for is uncertain: they have been variously and plausibly interpreted as phallic symbols, boundary markers, seats even, or as being connected in some way to the Mesoamerican 'ball-game' (a sort of gladiatorial football) beloved of the Aztecs and the civilisations that preceded them.'8 Nevertheless, given the historical evidence, and the discovery of other metal and pottery figurines from the region depicting elated-looking humans with mushrooms, it is extremely like­ly that these figures were connected with mushroom consumption, albeit in some unspecified and unknowable way. This would suggest that the practice extended back not just hundreds of years, to the time of the Spanish invasion, but thousands of years to the pre-classic peri­od. The contexts in which mushrooms were consumed prior to the Aztecs remain mysterious, however.

  Moving forward in time to the period of Spanish rule, the historical and material evidence all but disappears. The Spanish chronicles clus­ter together in the sixteenth century, with only one further account from the seventeenth. Here, the bullish cleric Jacinto de la Serna con­trived to eradicate the persistent 'idolatrous' practices of the indigenes by writing a guidebook on how to minister to them correctly, his Manual de Ministros de Indios para el Conocimiento de sus Idolatrias y Extirpation de Ellas. In a section devoted to local 'witchcraft', that is medical practices and midwifery, he describes how an Indian by the name of Juan Chichiton ('little dog'), a 'great maestro of supersti­tions', performed a mushroom ceremony in Serna's own village. On investigating the matter, Serna discovered that the mushrooms were customarily picked by the locals after a night of 'prayer and supersti­tious entreaties', were gathered once the dawn breezes had subsided and, whether eaten or drunk, intoxicated the locals, deprived them of their senses and made them 'believe a thousand foolish things'.19

  Chichiton's crime, it seems, had been to celebrate a saint's day with this solemn mushroom vigil 'after the manner of Communion', so that all present 'went out of their heads'. Having incurred the priest's wrath, Chichiton went on the run and evaded all Serna's attempts to have him captured and censured. But as the 'little dog' melted away mto the Mexican foothills, so too did the knowledge of the mush­rooms which, whether concealed from or simply unnoticed by the

  Western gaze, was to remain unrecorded for another four hundred years.

  It therefore remains unclear how or indeed whether mushroom­ing practices continued in an unbroken fashion to modern times. Nevertheless, the discovery in the early and mid twentieth century that indigenous Mexicans were still using mushrooms in ways not so dif. ferent from Chichiton's all-night syncretic religious observances was to have a much more dramatic impact on Western culture. This time the West was primed to accept a radically different way of thinking about psychoactive mushrooms and their strange effects.

  The Western rediscovery of Mexican mushrooming practices began, ironically, with a vigorous scholarly denial that they had ever existed." A year after Mr W.'s unexpected mushroom visions, the respected American botanist William Safford (1859-1926), oblivious of such shenanigans so close to home, published a paper on the identity of the supposed teonanacatl of the Aztecs in which he stated emphatically that Sahagun and his native informants had been wrong/1 They had mistakenly confused dried plant fragments for a fungus, and teo­nanacatl, revealed Safford, had been none other than the infamous peyote cactus (Lophophora williamsii). After reviewing the records of the early Spanish chroniclers, and the fruitless results of his own field enquiries, Safford reported that 'three centuries of investigation [had] failed to reveal an endemic fungus used as an intoxicant in Mexico?' He bolstered his argument by claiming that peyote 'resembles a dried mushroom so remarkably that at first glance it will even deceive a trained mycologist'/3 He was wrong on both counts.

  Regarding the latter, the ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes (1915-2001) drew attention to how extremely unlikely it would be for anyone to confuse peyote with mushrooms, so different are they in appearance.14 As for the former, Safford's failure to find any psychoac­tive fungi in Mexico was because, having misread Sahagun, he had been looking in the wrong place. A cursory consideration of the hydrophilic nature of fungi might have alerted Safford to the implausibility of finding mushrooms growing in the arid north of Mexico, but he remained implacable. Given that the rest of his work on Mexican botany was first class, his findings became widely accepted in scientific circles.15

  Nevertheless, it is the finality with which he delivered his conclu­sions that prompted others, better placed in the field, to challeng* them. An Austrian physician and amateur botanist who had settledlI*

  Oaxaca, Bias Pablo Reko (d. 1953), was the first to challenge Safford, in an article published in the journal El Mexico Antiguo in 1919.16 He repeated his assertions in a letter to the United States National Herbarium in 1923, writing that teonanacatl 'is actually as Sahagun states, a fungus which grows on dung-heaps and which is still used under the same old name by the Indians of the Sierra Juarez in Oaxaca in their religious feasts'.27 His cousin, Victor A. Reko, took up the cause, but the cousins' objections did little to dent scholarly opinion, persuaded as it was by the eminent Safford's assertion.

  In 1936, however, Robert J. Weitlaner (1883-1968), a linguist liv­ing in Mexico City and an expert on Indian culture, set out to conduct field research amongst the Mazatec Indians in a small, remote and oth­erwise insignificant town in Oaxaca. The town's name was Huautla de Jimenez, unheard of beyond its immediate hinterland but later to become famous as the epicentre of a global magic mushroom craze. There, Weitlaner discovered through a good friend and local merchant that mushrooms were indeed used in curative divinatory rites/8 He managed to procure a sample of the mushrooms, which he had arranged to be sent to Reko, who forwarded them to the Botanical Museum at Harvard, but by this stage the fragments were too badly decomposed for formal identification.

  Reko's determination to prove Safford wrong eventually paid off, however, for in 1938 he was joined by the brilliant young Harvard ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes. Together, and in spite of their acute political differences (Reko was a Nazi sympathiser), they col­lected samples from which Schultes was able to make the first formal identification: Panaeolus campanulatus L. var. sphinctrinus (Fries) Bresodola.1' Nearly twenty years later it transpired that although Schultes had identified the samples correctly, Pan. campanulatus was neither psychoactive nor was it used in indigenous ceremonies, a mis­ta
ke that arose perhaps either from misdirection by his informants in the field, or as a result of the labels becoming muddled at the Harvard herbarium/0

  However, in the same year that Reko and Schultes were collecting in Huautla, a party of linguists and anthropologists, led by Jean Bassett Johnson (1916-1944)" and inspired by Weitlaner, became the first Westerners to witness an indigenous mushroom curing ceremony." The curandero (healer),' wrote Johnson, 'while under the influence of the hallucinogenic mushroom, divined the patient's illness; and it was

  the mushroom that gave instructions on how the sick person should be cured.'" The mounting evidence was incontrovertible and Safford's peyote hypothesis was finally abandoned. And there the matter mighr have ended an obscure academic debate, of little concern to the wider world, that had finally been resolved had it not come to the attention of one man, the temperate, middle-aged American gentle­man previously mentioned.

  Robert Gordon Wasson (1898-1986) or Gordon, as he preferred to be known was born on 22 September 1898 in Great Falls, Montana, the son of an Episcopalian minister/4 After seeing active service in the First World War, he graduated from Harvard with a bachelor's degree in literature and began his career as a journalist, eventually working in the financial news department of the Herald Tribune. He moved across into banking, at first with Guaranty Company of New York, and then with J. P. Morgan & Co., where he was vice-president from 1943 until his retirement twenty years later. On paper there could not have been a more unlikely person than this upright and hard-nosed Wall Street banker to investigate and popularise the hallucinogenic mushrooms of Mexico, but remarkably, over the years, he had devel­oped a passionate and consuming interest in all things to do with the role of mushrooms and fungi in human cultures. Once he heard that the mythological teonanacat! of the Aztecs was not only a mushroom but that it was still in use, it was inevitable that he would make the journey to Mexico to investigate the matter for himself.

  This absorbing interest in the cultural history of mushrooms was stimulated by a widely re-told incident from his honeymoon." He mar­ried Valentina Pavlovna Guercken (1901-1958), a Russian emigre training to be a paediatrician, in 1926. The newlyweds took their hon­eymoon in the Catskill Mountains, famous for the beauty of their forests in autumn, and while strolling through the woodlands they spotted some wild mushrooms. His horror and revulsion were matched in intensity by his bride's evident delight, for she ran about gathering as many mushrooms as she could stuff into the makeshift carrier of her knotted skirt. Convinced that the pickings were toadstools, he would not touch the meal she prepared, and expressed alarm that he would wake up a widower. He did not, and in the clear light of day the couple wondered what could possibly lie behind their extreme opposite reac­tions: clearly there was a major difference between Russian an

  American attitudes towards mushrooms. Their curiosity aroused, they then embarked on what was to become a lifelong quest to investigate and understand the varied cultural relationships between humans and

  fungi.

  It must be said that while this hoary old story has become some­thing of a foundational myth for modern mushroom enthusiasts,'6 it was repeated by Wasson ad infinitum and grew ever taller in the telling. Its growing resemblance to a Hollywood movie script made Wasson's own daughter, Masha, question whether it had any sub­stance at all, but eventually she conceded that the incident had gen­uinely occurred, however embroidered the story had become over the years.-7 This is itself telling for, as we shall see, Wasson had a knack of overworking dry empirical facts in the interests of a good story.

  Whatever the details, it is clear that the Wassons began shortly thereafter to accumulate a vast amount of evidence, from philology, etymology, ethnography, folklore and fairy tale, to explain the prove­nance of their different reactions to all things fungal. They eventually presented their findings in a massive, privately published, two-volume opus, Mushrooms, Russia and History (1957),3H a work that had itself mushroomed from its original conception as a Russian cookbook. After Valentina died in 1958, Wasson continued their investigations alone, going on to publish a large number of papers and a further five lavish books before he too died in 1986. Amongst other ideas, he claimed to have solved the mystery of the identity of the Soma plant mentioned throughout the Rig Veda that it was the fly-agaric mush­room, Amanita muscaria and to have established that the potion at the heart of the Eleusinian mysteries contained an infusion of the ergot fungus, Claviceps purpurea. These ideas came later, however, built upon the discoveries made in Mexico for which he is principally remembered, and which, inserted hurriedly into Mushrooms, Russia and History just prior to its publication, transformed this otherwise laborious text into a classic of its genre.

  In 1952 Wasson received two letters, arriving virtually in the same post, that alerted him to the existence of the Mesoamerican mush­room stones, and to the fact that teonanacatl had been a mushroom.'9 Immediately, he wrote to Reko expressing his interest in the matter: Reko, by then an old man, forwarded his letter to a Eunice Pike, a mis­sionary resident in Huautla. Pike, exasperated by her inability to sway the locals from their heathen practices,40 was able to confirm that

  mushrooms were indeed used in curing rituals. She added incredu­lously that the Mazatecs believed the mushroom to have a 'personali­ty', which spoke through the curanderos, the healers, divining the cause and cure of illnesses and revealing the location of lost or stolen property. This was exactly what Wasson wanted to hear and, wasting no time, he began to organise an expedition. In the late summer of 1953 (the rainy, mushroom season), accompanied by his wife and daughter, he made what was to be the first of ten successive trips to Mexico on the trail of the psychoactive mushrooms.

  Reko had died in the interim, but the Wassons were accompanied on this first trip by Weitlaner, who provided invaluable local knowl­edge and acted as translator. Together, they made their way initially by car over the appalling roads and then with donkeys over narrow and vertiginous mountain passes to the town of Huautla. Late in the day, after much fruitless searching during which the taciturn Mazatec locals proved more than a little reticent on the subject of mushrooms, they discovered to their surprise that their local guide, the one-eyed Aurelio Carreras, was himself a curandero. After a little persuasion he agreed to hold a velada, Wasson's term for the indigenous all-night mushroom vigils, to determine the health and well-being of Wasson's son, Peter. Though only Aurelio consumed mushrooms, Wasson was at last able to witness, and make detailed records of, an authentic cer­emony. He politely humoured Aurelio when the results of the mushroom-assisted divination revealed Peter to be not in Boston, as believed, but in New York, and in a state of some emotional turmoil. On returning home, however, Wasson found things to be exactly as predicted: the enterprising Peter had made use of his father's absence to hold a party in their New York apartment, and was indeed in a state of adolescent turmoil, having been spurned by his girlfriend. Aurelio, Wasson noted, had scored a 'palpable hit'.

  The American's second trip to Mexico, in 1954 this time to the mountainous Mijeria region of north-east Oaxaca generated further ethnographic data on the indigenous use of mushrooms, but is not noteworthy here. His third trip, in 1955, with society photographer Allan Richardson (they were only joined later by Valentina and Masha), proved far more momentous. Returning to Huautla, he had his now infamous meeting with the curandera Maria Sabina (1894-1985): not only was she a locally respected and charismatic healer but, most importantly of all, she agreed to let both Wasson and Richardson cat the 'sacred' mushrooms. Thus, they became the first Westerners ever intentionally to do so.

  Maria Sabina, a Mazatec Indian, was born in Huautla on 17 March 1894,41 ^e year that Mordecai Cooke was fulminating against irre­sponsible parents for letting their unattended children pick and eat the 'poisonous' Liberty Caps. Very different strictures operated in Huautla, however, for in her autobiography Sabina recorded how she intentionally ate her first mushrooms while still a child of about six or seven.44
She grew up in a culture in which, although it was not openly talked about, it was a given that the highest class of curanderos, the 'Wise Men' and 'Wise Women', derived their healing powers from the 4sacred' mushrooms. According to curanderos, mushrooms granted access to, or were literally seen as, spirits with whom the healers could forge beneficial relationships. If a curandero proved worthy, the saint children, as Sabina called them, would impart information, or speak through the healer in improvised, poetic chants that were believed to

  have healing power.4' As a child, Sabina watched a healing ceremony in which her uncle was cured by the bemushroomed utterances of such a Wise Man, so when she stumbled across the same mushroorr/ growing wild in the woods she knew that, were she to eat them, too would 'sing beautifully'.44

  She ate her mushrooms sitting on the mountainside, supposed^ tending her family's goats. Very soon she felt propelled into another world full of temples and golden palaces. The mushroom spirits were waiting for her there, appearing as clownlike dwarfs and 'children with trumpets, children that sang and danced, children tender like the flesh of flowers. And the mushrooms talked, and I talked to the mush­rooms ... And the teo-nanacatl answered ... saying ... that when we needed something, we should go to them and they would give it/* Discovering that the mushrooms made her feel content, 'like a new hope in life', and secondarily that they assuaged her almost permanenr hunger, she ate them many times with her sister. The two of them were often found sprawled or kneeling in the woods. Their parents, know­ing that upsetting children in this state could cause permanent ill effects, carried them home gently. Sabina's grandmother believed the girl was destined to become a great curandera.

  According to an interview she gave for the Italian magazine L'Europeo,4* Sabina conducted her first healing ceremony when she was only eight years old. But famously she found her vocation when her sister, Ana Maria, became seriously ill some years later. Moved bj sisterly affection, Sabina ate more mushrooms, and went deeper into the mushroomic world than ever she had before. A duende, or mush­room spirit, appeared to her and presented her with a stark quesnon. 'But what do you wish to become, you, Maria Sabina?' She replied 'A saint' an answer that granted her access to a great book which, though she could not read, filled her with the knowledge of how : cure. 'When I came to myself ... I looked for the herbs that the Book had indicated to me, and I did exactly what I had learned from d* Book. And also Ana Maria got well.'47