Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom

by Alex Letcher

  Then, in 1955, after his two bemushroomed epiphanies with Sabina, he was joined in Huautla by Valentina and his daughter Masha, but the party became marooned after a fortnight of torrennai rain prevented their plane from landing. Bored and with little to do. the idea of eating some mushrooms seemed to them a way to brighten their spirits. 'We were damp, chilled through and miserable,' recalled Valentina. 'A few hallucinations, we decided, would be a great help."1 Wasson justified this particular transgression of local custom on the basis that he was conducting a 'scientific' investigation.

  Returning to New York with a collection of dried mushrooms and bags of excitement, Wasson did what so many others would later J after their first psychedelic epiphany: he 'turned on' his friends. In ! Manhattan pied-a-terre, he held a series of rather solemn veladas of own, in which he invited guests to achieve a state of grace, before hang­ing out pills made from dried mushrooms, supplied by Sandoz. k trippers were presented with a son et lumire show of Richardson*

  photos and Wasson's sound recordings of Sabina in full bemushroomed flow. Robert Graves and the proprietor of Life, Henry Luce, were just two of the luminaries turned on in this way. Though Wasson felt that he was recreating the special atmosphere of the velada, these soirees were something else entirely: cod Mazatec ceremonies, with Wasson assuming a priestly role.

  Most surprisingly, when US federal prohibition made obtaining and using mushrooms a criminal offence during the 1970s, Wasson was happy to emulate the hippies he so despised by surreptitiously import­ing psilocybin into America for his own use. He managed to persuade Albert Hofmann to risk his job by posting at least two consignments of psilocybin pills, wrapped in foil to avoid detection, from the Sandoz factory in Switzerland to a care-of address in California.57 Wasson may have been a pillar of society, but in this regard he seems to have considered himself above the law.

  To add to this, it now appears that the picture of Mazatec religion he presented within the pages of Life and in his other writings was slight, superficial and in many ways inaccurate; and this misleading picture contributed significantly to the flow of people travelling to Huautla. His exploits provide us with a model of how not to go about ethnographic fieldwork: he made lightning visits of only a few weeks at a time, rather than the months and years deemed necessary to build the essential trust and 'rapport' with another culture; he never learnt the Mazatec language, was always reliant on translators, and corre­spondingly overlooked or missed many of the subtleties of the Mazatec world view.3* His single-minded focus upon the mushrooms meant that he failed, for example, to tease out the complex relation­ships between the famously taciturn Mazatec and their healing plants, many of which have no psychoactive properties but are nonetheless considered powerful healing agents in their own right." It was as if, presented with a beautiful and many-tiered cake, Wasson had eyes °nly for the cherry on the top. But, most problematic of all, he was so obsessed with the issue of the mushrooms and with fitting them into bis ancient survival thesis that he completely misunderstood the true ^ture of what Sabina was doing in her mushroom veladas. He failed t0 spot that it wasn't a cherry at all.

  J^ria Sabina was born just a few years before Wasson, and although ncr hfe and circumstances could not have been more different, the two

  shared one thing in common: they were both, in their own wave charismatic. Many of the pilgrims who came to her after Wasson agreed that she possessed that mysterious quality, which in less secular times would have been labelled holiness. Alvaro Estrada, the Mazaier who assisted her in writing her autobiography, said that she had J look 'charged with mystery and light'; Joan Halifax that 'a ligkr seemed to emanate from the eyes of this woman, a quality that imparts to those who are with her a sense of the divine awakened'.40 1 That Wasson was captivated by her seems understandable, given these qualities. What is less understandable is why he dismissed the other curanderos he encountered as second rate, practitioners of a; degenerate tradition: their standing was as high as Sabina's within their respective communities. For example, Sabina recognised the oneeyed Aurelio Carreras as a healer of distinction, and in Huautla he was considered a 'wise one', while amongst the Zapotecs Aristeo Marias was regarded so highly that he sat on a committee of curandero elders. But for Wasson, both were inferior to Sabina; Matias's bemushroomd utterances were, by comparison, 'feeble'.4'

  It is possible that Wasson's perspective was skewed by his having seen only Sabina through bemushroomed eyes. After taking mush­rooms with her, he wrote that she was 'Religion Incarnate. She was the hierophant, the thaumaturge, the psychopompos in whom the trou­bles and aspirations of countless generations of the family of mankind had found, were still finding, their relief.'41 There may have been gen­der issues at play here as well, for this was the 1950s after all and Wasson was, by all accounts, a man of his time. But I think it most compelling that Wasson alighted upon Sabina as 'the archetypa shaman' because she neatly fitted his preconceptions about what J priestess of his old religion should look like. On finding Sabina, to heart must have skipped a beat, for in her he saw the missing link for which he had been looking.

  What is striking now is the extent to which he constructed hi* ancient mushroom cult in Christian terms. Though he always consid­ered himself deeply religious, Wasson was, until his latter years, rather non-committal Christian.4' But he had been brought up 1 Episcopalian by his father, a minister, and had read the Bible twice: the age of eleven. Something of this remained, for he seems to h^ pictured his ancient mushroom cult as a form of proto-Chri*n; mysticism, with mushrooms foreshadowing the sacrament of bro

  and wine and elevating the communicant to a direct encounter with God.44

  Whereas the veladas of the other curanderos were cluttered with pagan symbolism and practices such as a complicated divination system using husks of maize Sabina employed very little parapher­nalia, preferring the mushrooms to 'sing through her' in a form of improvised poetic glossolalia, a song of songs. Devout, suffering, compassionate, generous, humble, a loving and devoted mother, a mysnc, a woman without stain: she was a most Mary-like figure, and as such she slotted so very easily into Wasson's High Church expectanons. Through his writings, and with the help of Richardson's literal­ly iconic photos cropped and reprinted in grainy black and white, the better to show Sabina supplicating to heaven and illuminated from above Wasson beatified her. Then, through the Life article, he presented her to the world as the last living saint of his ancient mush­rooming religion.

  Maria Sabina hosting a velada for Gordon Wasson in uautla, 1956This is one of Allan Richardson's iconic pictures which inadver­tently contributed to Sabina's unsought celebrity. Courtesy R. Gordon Wasson Archive, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  'he only problem with all of this was that the veladas were not reli­gious ceremonies. That is, though each was framed within a unique and adaptive blend of Catholic and pagan ritual actions prayers t0 Christian saints and Mazatec spirits, for example they were not pcr. formed as an act of worship, or to induce mystical experiences of Goi they were performed for the serious and pragmatic purposes of heal­ing. Sabina was clear on the matter: 'the vigils weren't done for the simple desire to find God, but were done with the sole purpose of cur­ing the sicknesses that our people suffer from'.45 To find God, Sabinalike all good Catholics went to Mass.

  The solemnity and seriousness with which veladas were conductcd (and which Wasson misinterpreted as being purely devotional) were due to the fact that, as the mainstay of Mazatec medicine, they were literally matters of life and death. In the Mazatec world view, sickness

  which, given poor diets and sanitation, occurred with debilitating regularity was believed to be caused by the loss of one's soul through a sudden fright, or through magical interference by malevolent spirits and human sorcerers. When Sabina took mushrooms, what she called the saint children, or mushroom spirits, would appear and inform her whether or not the patient could be cured. Through visions, these benevolent mushroom spirits would show
her the cause of the illness

  where and why, for example, the person's soul had been lost and she would then be able to heal the patient through the power of her singing. 'Language makes the dying return to life,' she said. 'The sick recover their health when they hear the words taught by the saint chil­dren. There is no mortal who can teach this Language.'4* But the spir­its might equally tell her that the patient was beyond help and would necessarily die, no matter how intensely she sang. A trip to the curan­dera was always a sobering experience.

  The anthropological heresy that Wasson committed, therefore, was that he forced these complex indigenous healing practices to fit in with his own preconceptions rather than attempt the more difficult task of trying to understand them on their own terms. He went to Mexico with his vision of the ancient mushrooming cult fully formed, and pro­jected the priestly role onto Sabina Carreras and Marias, fitting less well, were simply dismissed then returned home triumphantly with her as his trophy, the final proof of the thesis that would ensure hi^ place in the academic firmament. And it just so happened that thi> image of a mushrooming religion, so much a product of its tinuproved absolutely enticing to a generation of young Americans hung^

  for spiritual satisfaction.

  •

  What are we to conclude from this episode? Whatever his intellecrual aspirations, Wasson's claims to have respected local custom, to have behaved differently from the hippies, and to have acted out of some inviolable desire for enlightenment certainly ring a little hollow. He went to Mexico more as a prospector digging for gold than a philosopher looking for knowledge and truth, and ever had his eye upon how the name of Gordon Wasson would be remembered. It was this vainglorious streak that prompted him to publish his findings in Life, a middle-brow magazine with a massive global readership, with barely a thought for how the article might affect anyone but himself.

  Of course, had he written an academic monograph or published his findings in a peer-reviewed academic journal, the news about the strange Mexican mushrooms would almost certainly have filtered out, and people would still have made the pilgrimage. But far fewer would have gone, and their impact would have been diluted as they would not all have headed for Huautla and Sabina. It is because of this deci­sion, motivated primarily out of self-interest, and the inaccurate way he singled out Sabina as somehow more saintly and more special than any of the other curanderos, that Wasson must, I think, take a sub­stantial proportion of the blame for what subsequently happened. His pride led directly to Sabina's downfall.

  That said, there is one more myth surrounding this historical episode that needs to be tackled, and that is the idea of Mexico as some prim­itive, prelapsarian paradise violated and desecrated by the civilised invaders. It is a powerful and coercive myth, etched into our very notion of the 'New World', and almost all writers about Wasson, and visitors to Huautla, have reiterated it: Huautla is now a dirty, com­mercial, corrupt town, where before it was an idyllic Eden.

  Without wishing to deny the impact that mushroom tourism had upon the indigenous population, I want to challenge this myth. For one thing, it absolves each successive wave of visitors of the need to address their own impact on the indigenous population. 'The damage k done,' they say, 'the fall has already happened, so I can do as I please.' For another, while the mountains of Oaxaca are undoubtedly beautiful and picturesque, the myth misrepresents life before Wasson: 11 was never Edenic nor paradisiacal.

  At the time of Wasson's arrival, most of the indigenous population eked out a living from subsistence farming or by selling a little coffee.

  Sabina recalled being almost permanently hungry during her child, hood, and Mazatec society was marked by petty blood feuds, vendet­tas, and alcohol-related problems (one of Sabina's sons was stabbed to death during a drunken brawl), not to mention a widespread belief in malicious sorcery.

  Nor was it an unchanged, traditional way of life insulated from Mexico's struggles to become an independent nation. One of Sabina's three husbands, for example, was a guerrilla who fought in the Carracista and Zapatista insurrections.47 This oppressed rural Indian underclass existed on the margins of a modern metropolitan industnal nation, which, during the 1960s and 1970s, developed its own urban counterculture, La Onda, modelled upon the American hippy movement. Many of the hippies who went to Huautla were rather Mexican jipitecas, and as culturally removed from Mazatec society as their American counterparts.4" The Mexican authorities, troubled by the effects of mushroom tourism, intervened in 1967 by gaoling or deporting the mushroom seekers, and criminalising the use of mush­rooms a few years later.49 In this complex scenario, then, the impact of internal sociopolitical factors upon the indigenes was as important as the arrival of American and European outsiders.

  And, of course, the myth of the desecrated paradise has the subtle but coercive effect of casting the indigenes as helpless and passive primitives, able only to respond to the intrusion of foreigners: it strips them of agency, in other words. It is rare for Western writers to ques­tion Maria Sabina's role in the Wasson affair, bur in Mexico some commentators have portrayed her as a modern-day Malinche, the slave woman who betrayed the Aztecs for her love of Cortes.50 Was the Wasson affair really some ghastly replay of this foundational episode in Mexican history? While there is a little merit in this reading, and while Sabina most definitely had a hand in what happened, I think it too harsh.

  Certainly Sabina did what no other curandero had done, and allowed Western outsiders to share the mushrooms; and, in spite of her denials, she was happy to charge for her services. At any time she could have refused, but anyone in such dire circumstances would ha^ found this sudden unexpected source of income hard to turn do*r Besides, she did not know all the facts and could have had no con prehension of the likely consequences of her decision. By agreeing1 service Wasson, she was unwittingly brought into contact with th^

  great Western malaise, celebrity, and as someone insulated from modernity she lacked the wherewithal to deal with it. Had she known, she would undoubtedly have remained tight-lipped as so many of the other curanderos did. In later life, she lamented that the power of the mushrooms had been corrupted and was dwindling away, but I rather suspect that this was an expression of the guilt she felt at what she had done.

  Unfortunately, gauging exactly what Sabina felt and thought is extremely difficult, for if there are precious few women's voices in the history of the magic mushroom, then Sabina's is the most marginalised of all. It is true that we have her autobiography, recently republished, but she was illiterate and in none of the 'writings' attributed to her are we looking at her unedited words. The well-known interview that appeared in the Italian magazine LEuropeosl during the 1970s was originally conducted in Mazatec, and translated first into Spanish and thence into Italian: a veritable chain of Chinese whispers. As for her autobiography, this was compiled by Alvaro Estrada, a Mazatec resi­dent of Huautla, from a set of interviews conducted over the course of a year between 1975 Young and under-confident, Estrada

  sent his transcripts to Wasson for comment. Wasson passed them on to his friend, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz (1914-1998) who, while expressing admiration for the work, suggested that Estrada edit it to make it sound more 'primitive' and more 'in keeping' with Sabina's personality. We can only guess at the corrections that Wasson pro­posed. Whatever they were, Estrada dutifully complied, and so what we possess is an edited representation of Sabina's words, tailored to Westernised primitivist expectations. Estrada could therefore provide a great service to scholarship by publishing the transcripts of his inter­views verbatim, and it is regrettable that the recent academic reprint of The Life did not seize the opportunity to do so.

  In truth, Maria Sabina has always been misrepresented by Western observers. For Eunice Pike, the missionary in Huautla who advised Wasson before his first trip to Mexico, her bemushroomed utterances were the work of the devil.51 Wasson inverted this reading to make her a saint. For legions of mushroom enthusiasts across the world,
she has become the quintessential psychedelic shaman a term she never used -while in certain academic circles she is honoured as an ethno-poet of some distinction. She has inspired feminist poetry the American Ann Waidman freely reworked Sabina's transcribed utterances into her poem 'Fast Speaking Woman'" and even a modernist opera, per­formed at the Carnegie Hall."

  In Mexico the comparison with Malinche may be popular amongst intellectuals, but others see her as more heroic. She has been the sub­ject of documentaries, had comic strips written about her, rock bands and theme pubs named after her. Her image has been used, somewhat bizarrely, in a campaign against drugs, and even more bizarrely, given her three marriages, she has been reinvented as a lesbian icon." She seems set fair to make the journey from icon to brand, and so if the knowing interplay of signs and surfaces continues to define the post­modern world, we can be certain that with the passing of time the real Maria Sabina will slip ever further from our grasp.

  Depressing as this is, there is at least one cause for comfort. Hidden in the mountains, away from Huautla and the hippy tourist trail, and pretty well closed to outsiders, the indigenous healing practices, of which the mushroom ceremonies were only ever one part, still go on.56 For example, a Mazatec taxi driver in Mexico City told a friend of mine how a visit to a mushroom curandero had cured him of a chron­ic stomach complaint that repeated trips to the hospital had done little to alleviate. How long these traditional practices will survive the relentI less pressures of the modern world remains to be seen, but for the moment we can be grateful that Wasson's prediction of an immanent decline was, like so many of his pronouncements, an exaggeration.