Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom

by Alex Letcher

  As the century progressed, a shift of emphasis occurred in which the shaman ceased to be considered as the embodiment of irrationality and came to be seen as a privileged individual whose creative trance gave him a unique vantage point from which to view the world. Contemporaneously, the emerging Romantic movement produced its own inflated idea of the 'artist', with creativity viewed as something mysterious, God-given, and beyond the reach of ordinary men. Artists were outsiders, set apart by their unique, inherent sensibility or genius, suffering for their art but only so that they could affect, transform and momentarily elevate audiences to their own level through the bril­liance of their vision and the creative force that flowed through them. Writers, poets, composers and painters, in other words, had become the shamans of the civilised West.10

  While shamans were being elevated as Rousseauesque noble-savages, the ordinary Siberian tribespeople were being denigrated as backward and barbaric primitives, in part because of the second influential theme that was emerging from the Siberian travelogues. In 1736 a book by the Swedish colonel Philip von Strahlenberg (1713-1755), his Historico-Geographical Description of the North and Eastern Parts of Europe and Asia, was translated into and published in English. It described his ill-fated reconnaissance expedition, in which he had been taken captive and held as a prisoner of war for twelve years. During this time he frequently observed members of the Koryak tribe in the far north-east of Siberia getting 'drunk' upon an unspecified mush­room known only as mukhomor in Russian.

  Though this was interesting a curiosity, in fact it was not partic­ularly shocking. Von Strahlenberg, however, went on to say that as the highly prized mushrooms were in short supply, the poor could no always afford to purchase them from the Russian and other tradcn who attempted to meet this local demand. Instead, members of the lower social strata would loiter outside the dwellings of the rich when­ever a mushroom feast was taking place, waiting for the momenq when the guests would come out to relieve themselves. Collecting thd urine in wooden bowls, they would then drink it down 'greedily, as having still some Virtue of the mushroom in it, and by this way thev [would] also get Drunk'."

  It was this simple act, this unusual and, to polite Western sensibili­ties, revolting, dissolute and transgressive act of drinking another's urine, that ensured that, as the myth of the fly-agaric trickled into thej West, it very rapidly made a splash. Its scatological content ensured! that it intoxicated the Western popular and literary imagination. As we shall see, just like the fly-agaric's active ingredients, the myth of the mushroom has been endlessly recycled and filtered from one source to another through a chain of retellings. But whereas the Siberians found that mushroom-tainted waters eventually diminished in strength, diluted with every micturition, the reservoir of mushroom myths that their habits generated seems only to have gained in potency with the passage of time.

  Von Strahlenberg's account was immediately seized upon and brought to popular attention by the struggling writer, satirist and friend of Dr Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith (1730-1774), best known for his 1766 novel The Vicar of Wakefield. In his earlier Citizen of the World (1762), Goldsmith used the conceit of an educated Chinese man writing letters home to satirise contemporary London society and the follies and absurdities of the British class system. Telling the tale of the urine-drinkers as if his Chinese hero, Lien Chi Altangi, had wit­nessed it first hand (but referencing von Strahlenberg in a footnote), Goldsmith imagined what would happen were the custom to be intro­duced in London. He surmised that 'we might have many a toad-eater in England ready to drink from a wooden bowl on these occasions and to praise the flavour of his lordship's liquor'." He viciously imag­ined a willing chain of condescension and deference, flattery and obse­quiousness, with a lord eagerly drinking from a priest, a knight from a lord, and a 'simple squire drinking it double distilled from the loins of knighthood!' It was, for Goldsmith, a delightfully carnivalesque image that refused to be banished 'For my part I shall never for the future hear a great man's flatterers haranguing in his praise, that I shall not fancy I behold the wooden bowl..

  The Citizen was read widely and it remained in print until the early years of the twentieth century. The view of Siberia that Goldsmith pre­sented was further augmented by more travelogues emerging from the region. The mukhomor mushroom was positively identified as the fly­agaric, the urine-drinking was confirmed and the antics of the intoxi­cated described. In his Description of Kamchatka Land, published in Russia in 1755, and translated into English, German and French thereafter, the botanist Stephan Krasheninnikov wrote how he had seen dried fly-agaric mushrooms consumed at feasts, rolled and swal­lowed whole, or drunk with an infusion of berries. The signs of intox­ication were announced by the twitching of limbs and the urge to run and jump and dance, followed by the onset of stupor, sleep and strange hallucinatory dreams.

  Russian officers, it seems, had tried the local delicacy with wild and debauched results. One officer believed himself to have been com­manded by the spirits of the mushroom to perform an act of bravado by strangling himself. He had to be restrained. Another, perceiving a vision of hell, fell to his knees and publicly confessed all his sins, an act he no doubt regretted for he thereafter became the butt of ridicule. We do not know what he confessed, only that he indelicately revealed things that ought to have stayed secret, but his sins were probably sex­ual in nature. And one final officer was accustomed to consuming fly­agaric before a long march, for he found that it prevented fatigue. However, overdoing things one day and having 'indulged to the point of delirium',14 he apparently crushed his own testicles and died.

  The extent to which these alarming scare-stories were literally true remains moot, for it seems that the Kamchatka locals managed to avoid such debauched excesses of behaviour. They must be contrasted with the account by the Polish Brigadier Joseph Kopec, who in 1797 claimed to have eaten the mushrooms himself. Travelling through Kamchatka, he fell ill with a fever and was received by the inhabitants of a small settlement. Ailing in a yurt, Kopec was persuaded to eat some fly-agaric by the local missionary, who assured him that it would restore his health. This he did, and falling into a deep sleep he experi­enced vivid dreams 'of the most attractive gardens where only pleasure and beauty seemed to rule. Flowers of different colours and shapes and odours appeared before my eyes; a group of the most beautiful women dressed in white going to and fro seemed to be occupied with the hospitality of this earthly paradise."5 Waking from this blissful slumber to discover that the pleasure gardens were illusory proved traumatic for Kopec, so much so that he eagerly doubled his dose the following evening. This time he was presented with long-forgotten images from his childhood and, more worryingly, disturbing precognitive visions of the future which, he later claimed, came to pass exactly as foreseen.

  As we shall see, the mushroom's effects more typically lie midway between the poles of pleasure and pain marked out by these two explorers, Kopec and Krasheninnikov, but nevertheless, to an uncriti­cal Western readership, their stories doubtless added to the belief that fly-agaric intoxication was the exotic, yet abominable, practice of bar­baric peoples from realms lying off the edge of the map. However, another of the mushroom's genuinely psychoactive effects was to exert a particular influence on the Western literary imagination of the nine­teenth century, and ultimately upon the perception and uptake of psilocybin mushrooms in the twentieth.

  One of the common consciousness-altering effects of the fly-agaric observed by Krasheninnikov was that users found their perception of scale to be radically altered, a phenomenon now termed macropsia. 4Some might deem a crack to be as wide as a door,' he wrote, 'and a tub of water as deep as the sea."' This peculiar feature was confirmed by Georg von Langsdorf in his Remarks Concerning the properties of the Kamchadal Fly-Agaric, published in Russia 1809. The nerves are highly stimulated,' he recorded, 'and in this state the slightest effort of will produces very powerful effects. Consequently if one wants to step over a small stick or a straw, he steps and jum
ps as though the obsta­cles were tree trunks."7 It was this absurd image of a man so out of his wits, so lost to irrationality, that he could no longer see that a straw was just a straw that seems particularly to have caught the attention of Western writers.

  At first the story was only to be found in the pages of the early European mycological literature, a curiosity to flesh out the dry botan­ical descriptions and always to be accompanied by stern admonitions against the temptation to experiment. It became widely read, howev­er, when an English translation was quoted at length in John Lindley s Vegetable Kingdom of 1853, and it turned up again in James

  Johnston's popular science exposition The Chemistry of Common Life of was a'most certainly there that a young Mordecai Cubitt

  Cooke encountered it, for he delighted in the knowledge of the Siberian predilection, realising that it was not so very different a habit from the consumption of alcohol, tobacco and opium at home. The moral disdain with which it was usually treated was, he felt, more than a little hypocritical.

  Cooke devoted a chapter of his Seven Sisters of Sleep to the fly-agar­ic in Siberia, relating its recorded effects in unusually positive terms.

  At first it generally produces cheerfulness, afterwards giddiness and drunkenness, ending occasionally in entire loss of conscious­ness. The natural inclinations of the individual become stimulat­ed. The dancer executes a pas d'extravagance, the musical indulge in a song, the chatterer divulges all his secrets, the oratorical delivers himself of a philippic, and the mimic indulges in carica­ture. Erroneous impressions of size and distance are common occurrences ... a straw lying in the road becomes a formidable object, to overcome which a leap is taken sufficient to clear a bar­rel of ale, or the prostrate trunk of a British Oak.19

  He repeated this description, word for word but with a little less enthusiasm, in his Plain and Easy Account of the British Fungi of 1862. This charmingly written guide and early example of popular sci­ence writing consisted of hard scientific data and botanical descrip­tion, overlaid with a genial mix of coloured plates, folk tales and anecdote. Unlike other guides published at the time, it was designed for a mass audience and was well-received and widely read: it proba­bly did more than any other book to circulate the fly-agaric story. But later on in his career, when the young and incautious drugs-relativist had given way to the upright and serious mycologist, Cooke per­formed an about-face, warning that the 'effects which follow on par­taking of this fungus have been recorded somewhat in detail, and resemble intoxication, but with dangerous symptoms which result in death'.10

  With stories about the perception-altering effects of the fly-agaric circulating freely through Victorian society, it is perhaps unsurprising that they stimulated another more famous Victorian academic and writer for whom optical illusions, paradoxes, and other inversions of logic and proportion provided endless sources of literary inspiration:

  the Reverend Charles Dodgson, better known by his nom de plume Lewis Carroll.11 One of the key moments and an essential plot device in his children's classic Alice's Adventures in Wonderland occurs when Alice meets a hookah-smoking caterpillar lying recumbent on a large mushroom. One side, the caterpillar lugubriously tells Alice, will make her grow taller; the other, smaller. By judiciously balancing her diet, Alice is able to control her height and so manoeuvre her way through the bizarre juxtapositions of proportion that bedevil Wonderland.

  Since the 1960s, Alice has been read by members of the psychedelic underground as a knowing pharmacological odyssey, replete with hid­den and not-so-hidden drug references and, not least, hinting that the author had a taste for magic mushrooms. The most celebrated instance of this must be that hymn to LSD, the song White Rabbit by San Francisco band Jefferson Airplane, a song that played no small part in broadcasting to the world the news about mushrooms. Here, backed by a classic sixties West Coast psychedelic guitar sound, the banshee-like Grace Slick extols the virtues of the psychedelic experi­ence in a thinly disguised code, and in ever more hysterical tones. 'You've just had some kind of mushroom, and you're mind is moving low ... Go ask Alice, I think she'll know.' But while this particular reading of Alice remains fashionable in psychedelic circles, it now seems highly unlikely to be true.

  That there is no record of him using mushrooms or other drugs him­self suggests that Carroll took only literary, and not literal, inspiration from the Siberian mushrooming antics. Indeed, there would have been little incentive for him to hide any such habits secretively between the lines of a children's fairy tale. An array of psychoactive drugs, includ­ing opium, were freely available in Victorian society, purchasable over the counter at most pharmacists. Consuming these for prophylactic or pleasurable ends carried nothing like the stigma nor the legal penalties that it does today: Conan Doyle, for example, saw no reason not to make Sherlock Holmes an occasional user of cocaine." We do know from his records that Carroll was, while never a valetudinarian, not ot particularly robust health. He was an insomniac, took homeopathic remedies for persistent migraines, suffered the occasional epileptic fit, was opposed to smoking tobacco and drank only in moderation. With the best will in the world, he makes an improbable pioneer of Bohemi­an drug-taking.

  The literary impact of the fly-agaric mushroom, however, continued to grow apace, inspiring other works of fiction that have now been largely forgotten. In 1866 Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), better known for his popular fairy tale The Water Babies and for his lov­ingly detailed prose descriptions of the north Devon coast in Westward Ho/, published Hereward the Wake, Last of the English. Here, alongside the heroic tales of derring-do replete with the romantic dalliances and dabblings in sorcery so typical of the Victorian adventure story Kingsley includes an episode of unwitting fly-agaric intoxication.

  Hereward's love interest, the beautiful Torfrida, longs to know both her hero's name and the secret of what lies under his ample beard (a tattoo of a cross, it transpires, marked on his chin in the 'English style'). As luck would have it, her nurse, who had been abducted by pirates years before, hails from Lapland and, like all her kind, is well versed in the secrets of magic. She presses the juice from some 'scarlet toadstools' and slips it into the beer drunk by Hereward's men. They grow 'merry-mad' and with their tongues loosened they reveal to her the required information. Consequently, Hereward returns to find his men 'chattering like monkeys', and terrified by the prospect of step­ping over a gutter in the road, which they think to be a vast and terri­ble gulf. No amount of physical persuasion by Hereward will convince them otherwise, and one by one they fall asleep by the roadside. In the morning all conclude they were bewitched foi; Kingsley informs us, 'they knew not and happily the lower orders, both in England and on the Continent, do not yet know the potent virtues of that strange fungus, with which the Lapps and Samoieds have, it is said, practised wonders for centuries past'/4 He makes very clear, in other words, the literary origins of this episode.

  More extraordinary still must be the short story by H. G. Wells (1866-1946), The Purple Pileus, published towards the end of the nineteenth century in 1897. I* concerns the hapless and henpecked Mr Coombes, who is so fed up with being bullied and humiliated by his wife that he decides to commit suicide by eating poisonous mush­rooms. Far from killing him, however, his feast of purple, yellow, and red-and-white mushrooms has quite the opposite effect, invigorating and empowering him in a wholly life-transforming manner. The ecstatically intoxicated Coombes returns to his wife, who is so shocked and impressed by the change in her husband that she meekly defers to his authority, remaining respectful and obedient even whei the effects of the mushrooms have faded away. |

  By the end of the nineteenth century the putative power of the fl agaric to inspire writers and artists seems to have taken on a life of its own, quite independently of the more comprehensive Russian and German ethnographies emerging from Siberia. The general anc widespread Victorian obsession with all things to do with fairies ha< given rise to a series of fairy paintings most notably by the artists No
el Paton, John Anster Fitzgerald, Richard Doyle and the troubled Richard Dadd, who spent much of his life incarcerated in Bedlam asy* lum. Mushrooms appeared in many of these paintings, not only to suggest the diminutive size of the fairies who pranced and frolicked amongst them, but to act as signifiers for the eldritch netherworld that fairies were supposed to inhabit. Thus, in Fitzgerald's Fairies' Banquet of 1859, a group of fairies dine around a mushroom table, while in a Doyle watercolour, painted between 1870 and 1880, we see Wood Elves Playing Leapfrog over Red Toadstools. On the Victorian stage, fairies appeared in everything from pantomimes to Shakespeare, and in the Princess Theatre's 1856 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, to the delight and wonder of the audience, Puck rose up from the stage atop a mechanical mushroom.15

  Not one of these examples of mushroom Victoriana was actually inspired by a first-hand experience with the fly-agaric: as Kingsley had noted, people had yet to acquire the taste. In the case of Fitzgerald, his otherworldly paintings can most definitely be attributed to an imagi­nation bolstered by that true Victorian staple, opium. By the turn of the century, the Victorian love of fairies had dwindled, and they, along with the mushrooms with which they had become inexorably linked, were banished to the domain of the nursery. The fly-agaric made its way into children's books, children's Christmas and good-luck cards (especially in Germany, the Baltic countries, and Eastern Europe), and other ephemera and knick-knacks. Cartoon fly-agarics littered the for­est floor in Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in 1937 and performed a memorable 'Danse Chinois' in the Nutcracker Suite of Disney's Fantasia. From there they entered the sickly sweet fair)' gardens and enchanted forests imagined by Enid Blyton, and became forever conjoined with that embodiment of suburban kitsch, the gar­den gnome.