Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom

by Alex Letcher

  It is not far-fetched to suppose that humans discovered the pleasures and pains of the mushroom after copying their animals and then, watching how the effects of the fly-agaric passed from human to deer, progressed to urine-drinking themselves. It is, however, a modern urban myth that shamans or anyone else drank reindeer urine: an intoxicated deer would be slaughtered and eaten, by which means the effects would be passed on.46

  This leads us to another of the great fly-agaric stories, the idea that the modern-day figure of Father Christmas, or Santa Claus, is an attenuated folk memory of Siberian fly-agaric shamanism. Here, Santa's red-and-white costume represents the parti-coloured mush­room, and his flight from the north on a reindeer-driven sleigh recalls the shamanic spirit-journey. That shamans would enter yurts via the smoke-hole in the ceiling explains why Santa drops into houses down the chimney, and also why he comes bearing gifts, a symbolic memory of presents from the spirit-world.

  This rather delightful story has gained a particular currency amongst contemporary members of the psychedelic counterculture in exactly the same way that Alice did for the sixties generation for whom the idea of a drug-taking shaman lying behind the innocent Christmas figure so loved by adults and children alike has obvious appeal. It has also gained strength by being pitted against another, less palatable version in which Santa acquired his red-and-white coat courtesy of an advert in the 1930s by the Coca-Cola Company, who were keen to promote their sugary brew by clothing Santa in the dis­tinctive colours of the brand. Which, if either, is true?

  The history of Father Christmas is complex, and at times obscure. The personification of Christmas began in the early seventeenth centu­ry, when the part of Sir, Lord, or Father Christmas was written into English plays, usually as a comic and carnivalesque figure. Santa Claus, on the other hand, has his origins in the medieval St Nicholas, the patron saint of children. He was brought to the United States by the Dutch, who performed the custom of leaving presents, supposedly from the saint, in the shoes and stockings of children on the eve of his feast day. New Amsterdam was eventually captured by the English, who renamed it New York, and Santa Claus and the customs sur­rounding him were forgotten. However, Santa was revived in the early nineteenth century by writers such as Washington Irving (1783-1859) and, most importantly, Clement Clark Moore (1779-1863) in his hugely popular poem of 1822, 4A Visit from St Nicholas'. It was Moore, with his vivid imagination, who pretty well single-handedly created the modern image of Santa: a fur-clad magic spirit, flying in his reindeer-driven sleigh, and delivering presents to well-behaved children via the chimney. The newly revived Santa had acquired his distinctive red-and-white garb by the end of the nineteenth century, well before Coca-Cola started to employ him in their advertising: that particular suggestion can be discounted. From there, the image crossed the

  Atlantic and became easily fused with the English Father Christmas.

  The notion that 'Santa' was a shaman, however, has a comparatively recent origin. It was first proposed by Robert Graves in one of his typically throwaway remarks about the supposed history of hallu­cinogenic fungi/7 The idea was picked up by the American writer Jonathan Ott presumably via Gordon Wasson, with whom both men were friends who mentioned it in his popular book about the nar­cotic plants of North America in 1976.48 From there, it was seized upon by the young academic Rogan Taylor, who brought it to much wider attention with a colourful article published in the British Sunday Times, in 1980.49 The story was repeated as fact in the weekly science journal New Scientist six years later.50

  Recently, however, the historian Ronald Hutton has poured cold water on the idea, pointing out its inadequacies.51 For one thing, Siberian shamans did not travel by sleigh and their various cosmolo­gies never included reindeer spirits. For another, they never wore redand-white clothes, nor did they physically climb out of the smoke-holes of their yurts while in trance, for their spirit-journeys to upperworlds took place entirely in an otherworldly dimension. Hutton reiterated the fact that fly-agaric use was intermittent amongst shamans, and that Americans only began to be aware of Siberian shamanism towards the end of the nineteenth century, long after Moore's poem was composed. Charming and appealing as the fly­agaric Santa story is, it is unlikely to be true, and we can say with great certainty that, in writing his poem, Moore was drawing not upon any shamanistic folk memory, but upon his particular talent for creative writing.

  The story of the shaman, then, the man with a foot in two worlds, is one that has so captivated our armchair-bound imaginations that we in the West have spread it around the globe. Whenever and wherever we have encountered something which, on the surface, appears remotely similar, we have named it shamanism, so often, in fact, that many in the West believe that shamanism is some primal human urge that will always push its way to the surface as the ur-religion, provid­ed the primitive conditions are right. These are the stories that we tell about others which say more about ourselves.

  When anthropologists, botanists, missionaries and explorers began pushing their way into Central and South America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, what struck them most about the spiritual practices they encountered (and labelled 'shamanism') was that they Were almost always accompanied by the use of powerful plant hallu­cinogens: the idea that shamans everywhere always used drugs became one more thread embroidered into the story. No wonder, then, that when we reflected upon Siberia in the light of these discoveries, we interpreted the data to fit our expectations, to fit the very image of the shaman that we had created.51

  Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Western scholars came gradually to the mistaken conclusion that, whether a vital com­ponent or a late degeneration of a previously drug-free tradition, the mushroom belonged solely to the domain of the shaman.51 One work in particular did more than all the others to fix this idea in the popu­lar imagination, a book by none other than Robert Gordon Wasson. Although the main focus of his research was always the nature and extent of mushroom use in Mesoamerica, in the mid 1960s he turned his attention to the Old World, and to the fly-agaric. The book he sub­sequently had published in 1968, SOMA: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, proved to be, arguably, the most influential of his oeuvre, for it opened a completely new chapter in the mushroom's cultural his­tory.

  Wasson proposed that the mysterious plant Soma, praised through­out the verses of the ancient Indian text known as the Rig Veda, had in fact been the fly-agaric, and his 'revelation' that there had been a mushroom cult practised by Indo-Europeans, as well as by Siberian shamans, sent shockwaves through academia. The date of its publica­tion, 1968, is significant too, for it was received with open arms by the psychedelic counterculture that was both reaching the zenith of its popularity and eager to find historical self-justification in foundation­al narratives: Wasson's thesis proved just the thing.

  Soma

  Like impetuous winds, the drinks have lifted me up. Have I not drunk Soma?

  In my vastness, I surpassed the sky and this vast earth. Have I not drunk Soma?

  I am huge, huge! flying to the cloud. Have I not drunk Soma?

  Rig Veda, 10.119, verses 2, 8 and 12'

  Amongst the foundational Indian Hindu texts (such as the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and the Ramayatia) are four bodies of sacrificial hymns known as the Vedas, of which the Rig Veda is the oldest, composed somewhere between 1500 and 1200 bce. The prove­nance of this earliest text remains a matter of considerable academic debate. The orthodoxy in the late 1960s, the time when Gordon Wasson was writing about the matter, held that it had been composed not by the indigenous Indus Valley civilisation of the subcontinent but by Aryan invaders from the north. Originating somewhere in Europe, perhaps the Caucasus mountains, the Aryans were thought to have been marauding nomadic warriors who rampaged their way down through the treacherous passes of the Hindu Kush, and into the Indus Valley. There they seized control, subduing and violently imposing their patriarchal religious and cultural values upon the local populace. T
he Rig Veda, consisting of 1,028 sacrificial hymns, was thought therefore to be a record of Aryan religious belief and practice, albeit one that contained traces of the displaced Indian religion, acquired through syncretic absorption.

  If its origins are obscure, then the text of the Rig Veda is even more so, for it raises as many questions as it answers. It is an extraordinary work, with moments of poetic brilliance that still have the power to illuminate and electrify; and yet it is replete with idioms and metaphors that elude modern comprehension. Many deities are hon­oured throughout notably the thunderbolt-wielding Indra, and the fire god Agni but one in particular, seemingly at once a god, a plant and an intoxicating drink, is singled out by the ecstatic and rhapsodic nature of the hymns in his honour: the god Soma. In one hymn the author beseeches Soma to inflame him 'like a fire kindled by friction'; . . make us see far,' he implores, 'make us richer, better. For when I am intoxicated with you, Soma, I think myself rich.' Elsewhere the poet cries out, 'We have drunk the Soma; we have become immortal; we have gone to the light; we have found the gods.'1

  Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Western Indologists tussled with the identity of the god-plant that had given rise to such poetic raptures. A body of texts later than the Rig Veda, the Brahmanas, composed around 800 bce, gave descriptions of plants that could, if necessary, be substituted for Soma in times of need. Eliminating these substitutes, scholars were able to advance a number of other possible plant candidates for Soma based upon the evidence of descriptive passages within the Rig Veda. Soma was, for example, apparently crushed between stones, mixed with milk and fil­tered through wool, making a materialist reading of the text as a sort of recipe book plausible enough. Candidates included various species of climbing plants in the genera Ephedra, Periploca and Sarcostemnui, some of which are mild stimulants; the more psychoactive Perganum harmala, or Syrian rue; a fermented alcoholic drink of hops, butter and barley; Cannabis sativa, taken in the form of a yoghurt drink, bhang; and, unlikely as it seems, the rather innocuous rhubarb, Rheum palmatumForty-three candidates were advanced in the nine­teenth century alone, a figure that rose to over a hundred during the twentieth.4 No consensus was ever reached, and the matter was deemed insoluble.

  Quite what inspired Gordon Wasson to wade Into this exegetical quagmire is unclear, but it may have been a conversation with Aldous Huxley that prompted him. The brilliant Huxley had become a found­ing father of psychedelia through his literary investigations into the effects of mescaline, The Doors of Perception, published in 1954* year before Wasson's momentous encounter with Sabina. Huxley, fas­cinated by mysticism in all its guises, was wholly familiar with the Rig Veda. In his most famous novel, the distopian Brave New World (1932), he borrowed the name 'Soma' for the 'perfect drug', which kept his genetically engineered populace happy, placid and in a state oi willing political acquiescence.

  On learning about Soma, Wasson, like Huxley, immediately sus­pected that it must have been a hallucinogen of some sort, and so he set about deploying his research talents to determine exactly which one: if it turned out to be a mushroom, so much the better. Originally entertaining several different candidates,' he eventually broke with aca­demic orthodoxy by concluding that Soma had not only been a mush­room, but was none other than the fabled fly-agaric. He announced his revolutionary thesis in 1968 with the publication of another of his lav­ish books, SOMA: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, made more widely available than any of his previous works through the produc­tion of a trade paperback three years later.

  Displaying all of Wasson's hallmarks panoramic breadth, radical ideas, sweeping arguments and an infectious rhetorical style SOMA makes for a giddy read. The first part of the book is devoted to his fly­agaric thesis, and the second to an essay by the scholar of Sanskrit, Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, on the history of the Soma question. Another part reprints in translation every reference to the fly-agaric in the Siberian ethnographies, travelogues, collections of folk tales and other secondary sources that Wasson could find (a veritable goldmine for later English-speaking scholars). The remainder details Wasson's speculations about the use of the parti-coloured mushroom in European, Siberian and Chinese history and prehistory, explores his own experiences after consuming it, and debunks some of the myths surrounding it. Take, for example, the popular belief that the leg­endary Viking warriors or berserkers, renowned throughout the medieval Norse sagas, entered their battle-frenzies by eating fly-agar­ic. Wasson convincingly demonstrates that this was the imaginative invention of nineteenth-century Swedish scholars: there is no mention of fly-agaric in the sagas, nor any evidence that the Vikings or berserk­ers required anything more potent than alcohol to access their belli­cose rages.

  The book's central concern, however, remained the question of Soma's identity, and Wasson employed all of his writerly skills to draw the reader steadily to the conclusion that Soma could only have been that most eye-catching of mushrooms, the fly-agaric. He began his argument by suggesting that certain lines and passages from the Rig Veda were actually poetic descriptions of the mushroom, and illus­trated his point with some rather dramatic photos taken by Allan Richardson. For example, a picture of a heavily spotted mushroom is captured with the line 'With his thousand knobs he conquers mighty renown': the mushroom does indeed appear to be resplendently cov­ered with a thousand knobs. Wasson continued by arguing that no one

  gifted enough to have composed the verses of the Rig Veda would have wasted such an emphatic metaphor as 'the mainstay of the heav­ens' upon a mere climbing weed like Ephedra or Sarcostemma. Only a plant as glorious as the fly-agaric merited this kind of praise, as further photos purported to illustrate. Nor could an alcoholic drink have given rise to such magnificent poetry. '[The] difference in tone between the bibulous verse of the West and the holy rapture of the Soma hymns,' he wrote disparagingly, 'will suffice for those of any literary discrimination or psychological insight.'"

  If Wasson's argument had rested upon second-guessing the motiva­tion of the Vedic poets, which is notoriously opaque, it would doubt­less have made little intellectual impact. Indeed, the discovery that he encouraged photographer Allan Richardson to 'tinker' with the pho­tos to make them more persuasive suggests that he was less than con­fident about the strength of this opening argument himself. For example, two plates in SOMA are supposedly illustrative of the line: 'By day he appears hart. By night, silvery white' (hart meaning red).' The same cluster of fly-agarics are shown by day and by night, the lat­ter indeed glowing with a preternatural silvery light. In fact Richardson simply took the same colour photo, reprinted it in black and white, and applied a special darkroom technique that made the mushrooms appear to glow in accordance with the text. All the other photos were similarly cropped and treated so that they would empha­sise the chosen qualities."

  These exegetical interpretations, and all this photographic jiggerypokery, however, were merely the hors d'oeuvres to the main course of Wasson's thesis for, he argued, the Rig Veda offered more meaty clues to the identity of Soma. Throughout the text there is no mention of roots, stems or seeds, all of which point to Soma being a mushroom. Soma is repeatedly said to have come from the mountains, which fits with the notion that the invading Aryans brought the fly-agaric cult with them and that they had to import the mushroom from outside the Indus Valley (where it does not grow). Scarcity would also explain why later substitutes had to be found. The text states that the Soma sacrifice took place over a matter of hours, with Soma crushed to pro­duce a tawny-coloured liquid. This, said Wasson, ruled out an alco­holic beverage, which would take much longer to ferment; and he produced photographic evidence showing that, when pressed, fly" agaric does indeed express a tawny liquid.

  The centrepiece of his argument, however, was the fact that Soma was described as existing in two forms, one of which appeared to be human urine. A cryptic verse in the Rig Veda states that The swollen men piss the flowing Soma'.9 This was drawn to Wasson's attention in 1963 by O'F
laherty,10 his translator, and whereas she was nonplussed by the verse, Wasson immediately spotted a connection with the habits of the indigenous Siberians. Soma had to have been the fly-agaric, for no other known drug had ever been recycled in this manner."

  This radical idea gained immediate academic support in influential quarters, and not just from within Wasson's inner circle of collabora­tors: Roger Heim, Richard Evans Schultes and Albert Hofmann. The imposing French founder of structural anthropology, Claude LeviStrauss, was won over, as was the great Cambridge Sinologist Joseph Needham, who followed Wasson by suggesting that knowledge of Soma had spread overland into China, to be employed by the ancient and medieval Taoists in their eternal quest for immortality.11 The American anthropologist Weston La Barre, whose own ideas resonat­ed with Wasson's, wrote enthusiastically about the latter's methods and conclusions.La Barre believed that Siberian shamanism was the original ur-religion, which had crossed into the Americas with the migrations over the frozen Bering Straits during the last ice age. The widespread use of psychoactive plants in the Americas could easily be explained, he argued, for it had originated in Siberia with the shamanic predilection for fly-agaric.'4