Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom

by Alex Letcher

  Soma could have been hallucinogenic, or a stimulant of the mind, or inert but imbued with symbolic force. It could have been a single plant, or a combination of different plants that varied through time according to availability. It could have been extremely rare, a plant as yet unknown to Western science, or even driven to extinction through the voracious appetites of the Vedic priests. Then again, it could have been a metaphor for something else entirely. In the absence of decisive archaeological or textual evidence, there is no way of evaluating the relative merits of the various possibilities to determine which, if any, is the right answer. The plethora of plausible candidates merely demon­strates the elasticity of interpretation that a text like the Rig Veda affords, or indeed demands, and should alert prospective scholars to the improbability of their putting the matter beyond doubt. Like a magic mirror, the Rig Veda has allowed people to see, within its opaque signs and poetic metaphors, whatever it was that they set out to find. The hard truth is that, while the search for Soma is diverting, exciting even, it is ultimately futile.

  Outside academia, such abstruse debates have done little to shake Wasson's fly-agaric thesis from its position of near-universal accep­tance by mushroom enthusiasts and other psychedelic subcultures around the globe. It is difficult now, nearly forty years later, to appre­ciate quite what an impact Wasson's radical thesis had when first it appeared.55 The timing was everything. SOMA was published at the height of psychedelia, a year after the summer of love, and just as the wave of inevitable moral backlash was starting to break. LSD, the name if not the drug itself, was on everyone's lips, and by this stage many people not just hippies, but scientists, academics, intellectuals, musicians, artists and other assorted members of the great and the good had made the illicit journey into the psychedelic otherworld and returned with shining eyes. The British and American govern­ments, meanwhile, were doing everything they could to stamp out what they feared would be a cataclysmic pandemic of people turning on, tuning in and then dropping out. All this amounted to fertile soil for an idea that proclaimed that European culture and civilisation were actually rooted in psychedelia, steeped in the juice of a red-andwhite mushroom familiar to everyone from the accoutrements of childhood. Wasson's idea caught the Zeitgeist perfectly. Forty years later, it is now so widely and dearly held that Soma was the fly-agaric that only a major paradigm shift will unseat it from popular belief.

  Interestingly, then, Wasson's interpretation of the Rig Veda had the unintentional effect of transforming it into a holy, foundational text for the psychedelic movement. Ironically, the baby-boom generation, who took psychedelics with such glee in the 1960s, and who were so disparaging of received wisdom that they questioned and cast aside scientific and religious orthodoxy alike, still felt the need to base their beliefs and practices upon holy writ. Distance of space and time ren­dered the Rig Veda quite amenable to the purpose: it was elastic enough for a psychedelic reading to be plausible, and not so far removed as to be unintelligible or irrelevant. Wasson's speculations, however, triggered a spate of other, less cautious minds to wonder whether holy scriptures closer to home might contain veiled references to this supposed magic mushroom cult. Could it be, they wondered, that Judaism and Christianity were actually founded upon the psychedelic fairy-tale mushroom? Crazy and far-fetched as these conspiracy-laden theories might sound, one of them was to scandalise the Anglican Church.

  Chemistry and Conspiracy

  If the great religious systems of India had their beginnings in the cups of the Soma priests, it no longer seemed unreasonable to assume that their Hebrew counterparts and contemporaries may have been doing the same thing.

  Clark Heinrich

  It seems when you start to look, there is mushroom imagery everywhere . ..

  James Arthur

  At any moment in history, at any particular time, certain ideas or guid­ing principles can be said to be hastening culture along its way, steer­ing it in a particular direction. We talk of the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, of surfing the cultural wave. While many are content to swim with the tide, a few taste other possibilities in the water, sensing alter­native destinations. We remember and praise the free-swimmers who have changed the way we view ourselves and the world by tugging us in wholly new directions. But history is unforgiving, and forgets or takes little notice of the small minority who, peering into the eddies and pools of culture, sense that all is not as it seems, that there are stronger and more sinister forces at work within its murky depths. These are the conspiracy theorists, the amateur (and occasionally scholarly) sleuths who reach startling conclusions about the way the world actually 'is' on the basis of hitherto unappreciated connections.

  The second half of the twentieth century was a plentiful time for conspiracy theories, with the publication of a seemingly endless series of unashamedly popular books on the theme of 'unexplained myster­ies'. Speculations about Atlantis, yetis, UFOs, Stonehenge, ley lines, the pyramids and secret Bible codes rubbed shoulders with mildly paranoid conspiracy theories about freemasonry, the Illuminati and °ther imagined secret rulers of the world. Erich von Daniken's best­seller The Chariots of the Gods epitomised this in the 1960s (humanirV had been visited by ancient astronauts), just as Dan Brown's Publishing phenomenon The Da Vinci Code does today (Jesus actual­ly married Mary Magdalene, their children secretly control the world, and Leonardo da Vinci knew about it). But retrospectively, Wasson s book SOMA can be seen as a foundational text in what was to become a sub-genre of this literary phenomenon: works that purported to reveal how the world's religions were actually founded upon secret fly­agaric cults.

  SOMA was undoubtedly, for all its defects, the most scholarly and serious-minded of these, but it was not quite the first. It was preceded by an extraordinary text that drew at least some of its inspiration from Wasson's earlier discoveries in Mexico: Andrija Puharich's The Sacred Mushroom: Key to the Door of Eternity, published in the late 1950s. Puharich (1918-1995) was born in the US, the son of poor Yugoslav immigrants, but trained as a physician, graduating from Northwestern University Medical School in 1947. He chose, however, to devote most of his life not to medicine but to his first love, parapsychology. In The Sacred Mushroom he related the story of how, while researching extra-sensory perception (ESP), he met the talented Dutch sculptor Harry Stone, who was also a medium. Stone possessed the ability to enter deep trances in which he channelled the spirit of an ancient Egyptian priest, Ra Ho Tep, who had lived around 4,500 years ago. Enthused in this manner, Stone acquired an ability to speak in the ancient Egyptian tongue and, even more remarkably, to write in hiero­glyphs. And when his utterances were professionally translated, Puharich found that they described the ancient Egyptian ritual use of the fly-agaric.

  Invigorated by this discovery, and the feeling that greater powers were at work, Puharich found himself rather mysteriously drawn to where the mushrooms, previously unrecorded in Maine, were growing in the local woods. When a specimen was picked and offered to Stone in one of his characteristic trances, the medium proceeded to make rit­ual gestures with the mushroom before ceremonially rubbing it upon his head and tongue. In the ensuing chaos, with the bemushroomed Stone drunkenly reeling about the room, Puharich managed to test Stone's psychic ability for ESP, and found, to his delight, that it was significantly improved.

  The Sacred Mushroom was widely read on both sides ot the Atlantic, especially during the 1970s, and many were convinced by Puharich's assertion that the ancient Egyptians had used fly-agaric mushrooms. However, in order to believe this remarkable story, the reader had to make several staggering leaps of faith: that the mush­room would have been available in Egypt, a famously arid region where the mushroom's host-tree species are absent; that a priest by the name of Ra Ho Tep had really existed; that communication from beyond the grave and ESP were possible; that the mushroom really could awaken psychic abilities; and that Stone was not making the whole thing up.

  There are, perhaps needless to say, some rather gla
ring anomalies in Puharich's account. For one thing, in the above scenario, Stone never actually consumed the mushroom but merely rubbed it briefly on his tongue. This would not have allowed significant quantities of the mushroom's active ingredients to enter his bloodstream (the Siberians knew that the mushroom had at least to be chewed), and the fact that the effects came on almost immediately suggests that his reeling intox­ication was, if not pretence, then certainly psychosomatic.

  For another, Puharich claimed to have undertaken a bioassay of the fly-agaric to determine its active ingredients, but of the three he 'dis­covered' muscarine, atropine and bufotenine only the first is actu­ally present in the mushroom, and in such small amounts as to play an insignificant role in its psychopharmacology. As Jonathan Ott has noted, Puharich was either an inept chemist or a fraud. Most proba­bly he fabricated the analysis and drew his conclusions from the incomplete scientific knowledge of the mushroom at the time.' Puharich also claimed to have cultivated the mushroom, a feat that has yet to be achieved owing to the fact that the fungus only grows in a symbiotic or mycorrhizal relationship with certain trees, usually birch, pine and fir.

  To be fair, Puharich's interest in telepathy did not mark him out as particularly exceptional for the time. Cold War anxieties led to a flur­ry of parapsychological research in the late 1950s, with both the US Army and the Westinghouse Electric company seriously pursuing the military potential of ESP.4 Even Aldous Huxley and Gordon Wasson were moved to participate in Puharich's experiments (though Wasson eventually gave them short shrift).5 But his methods were, even by the standards of the day, flaky. (According to his second wife, he devel­oped a penchant for hosting mushroom bacchanals during the 1960s where couples might ostentatiously and volubly make love to the accompaniment of operatic arias sung by appreciative onlookers jus­tifying them as legitimate scientific research.6) The episode with Stone

  shows that Puharich was as willing to let himself be deceived as he was to deceive his readership in his quest to 'prove' the existence of ESP.

  Puharich's The Sacred Mushroom and Wasson's SOMA were followed by a plethora of academic, and less-than-academic, fly-agaric conspir­acy theories, all of which shared two defining features. First, they assumed that anything resembling, however remotely, a mushroom in art, mythology, literature or material remains that is, anything round, domed or umbrella-shaped, coloured red and white, or for that matter simply unusual enough to have caught their attention must indeed have been a mushroom and, moreover, 'evidence' of a secret fly-agaric cult. Second, they concluded that absence of any corrobora­tive evidence plant names or botanical description, accounts of accompanying rituals, modes of preparation, pharmacological effects simply indicated how sacred, and how secret, the mushroom must have been. In the topsy-turvy world of the conspiracy theorist, absence almost always indicates presence, and a negative is frequently a posi­tive.

  For example, Carl Ruck, a classicist at Boston University, was so fired up after reading Wasson that he embarked on a quest to uncover hitherto unappreciated references to the fly-agaric in ancient Greek lit­erature. Thus, he 'found' the fly-agaric in Euripides' play The Bacchae (the intoxicated revels of the god Dionysus' devotees supposedly fol­lowed fly-agaric feasting); the story of Jason and the Argonauts (the Golden Fleece was actually a mushroom, no less); and the trials of Hercules (as also were those suspicious 'apples' of the Hesperides).'

  The writer Scott Hajicek-Dobberstein attempted to do the same for Buddhism, principally through his radical interpretation of a collec­tion of Buddhist hagiographies, The Stories of the Eighty-Four Siddhas, which were translated from Sanskrit to Tibetan some time in the late eleventh or early twelfth century. In one story, the siddha (roughly, 'saint') Karnaripa is forbidden by his teacher to eat any tasty or delicious alms, and is commanded to accept only as much food as he can place on the point of a needle. The cunning Karnaripa manages to bypass this austerity by balancing a large pancake, laden with sweetmeats, on his pin, much to the annoyance of his teacher. By now the supposed resemblance of this feast to the shape of the fly-agaric, proposed in all seriousness by Hajicek-Dobberstein, should come as no surprise.

  But the most influential of all these conspiracies was surely the bestselling The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, written by the British scholar John Allegro (1923-1988) and published in 1970. This sensa­tional book rocked both the British intelligentsia and the Church of England, and triggered a moral outcry within the press by alleging that Christianity was a sham, nothing less than the remains of a fertility cult centred on the consumption of the real sacrament, the fly-agaric.

  Allegro contended that ancient humanity, beholden to the awesome powers of nature, had been obsessed with the notion of fertility, both of humans in terms of reproductive success, and of the land in terms of generating successful harvests. Observing how the rain appeared to impregnate the ground, primitive humans everywhere had conceived a sky god known sometimes as Zeus or Jupiter or Baal or Jehovah whose holy ejaculations (the rain) maintained the fecundity of the earth goddess, as revealed by the growth of plants. Some plants, how­ever, were thought to contain more of this holy essence, for when eaten they elevated Man to the level of God, and so enabled him to shape his own destiny. The fly-agaric was one such plant, and had been used throughout the Middle East in biblical times; but the knowl­edge Vvas jealously guarded, lest the secret fall into profane hands.

  When Jerusalem was sacked by the Romans in 70 ce, Allegro's nar­rative continues, this cult was hurriedly forced to conceal its practices, which it did by coding them into a set of stories about a figure called Jesus: initiates would understand them metaphorically, but profane outsiders would wrongly take them as literal descriptions of the man, and his teachings and life. Tragically for the true believers, the actual meaning of the New Testament became lost and the stories were every­where taken at face value. The entire edifice of the Christian religion was a terrible mistake, the original atavistic fertility cult it stood for forgotten and buried like some mausoleum in the desert sands. That is, until Allegro uncovered it.

  Allegro reached this conclusion on the basis of philology, the study of language in its historical and comparative aspects. He argued that ancient Sumerian had formed a linguistic bridge between the IndoEuropean and Semitic language groups. To decode the Hebrew Bible, one simply had to find the cognate Sumerian word and translate it, and if one took the trouble to do so, one would find that the Bible was replete with references to the fly-agaric mushroom. Take 'J°iin the Baptist', for example. The name John, according to Allegro, comes from the Sumerian GAN-NU, meaning a red dye; while Baptist is from TAB BA-R/LI, meaning mushroom: the fly-agaric. Jesus' supposedly miraculous birth recalled the mysterious and sudden appearance of mushrooms, while his name came from the Sumerian SUM: 'the semen that saves'. 'Christ-crucified' actually meant 'semen-anointed, erect mushroom'.

  Had this been proposed by anyone else, it would doubtless have been swiftly discarded as moonshine. But Allegro was a scholar, a lec­turer in Old Testament Studies at Manchester University, a fact that gave the book authority in the eyes of the general reading public, unversed as its members were in the finer details of philology. The Church simply could not afford to stand by and ignore this unexpect­ed threat to its integrity. Prior to publication, the book was brought to nationwide attention through its serialisation in the tabloid Sund
  A group of outraged clergymen made an attempt to stop the book reaching publication, with an appeal to the Director of Public Prosecutions.10 They failed, but the publisher, Hodder & Stoughton, was forced to issue a humiliating public statement apologising for the offence caused by the book, adding that they were shortly to publish a scholarly rebuttal written by the Reverend John King (a shrewd move this: it both absolved them
of responsibility, and allowed them to cash in on the scandal twice over). There were even mutterings that Allegro might be tried under Britain's creaking blasphemy laws, but nothing came of this."

  Almost as soon as it hit the bookshops, the backlash began. Critics in all the broadsheet newspapers berated it with scathing reviews. The Dean of Christ Church College, Oxford, Dr Henry Chadwick, wrote in the Daily Telegraph that Allegro's book 'reads like a Semitic philolo­gist's erotic nightmare after consuming a highly indigestible meal ot hallucinogenic fungi', before branding it 'a luxuriant farrago of non­sense'.,x His opinion was not untypical. A group of scholars from Oxbridge and London University, led by the Emeritus Professor of Semitic Philology at Oxford, Sir Godfrey Driver, wrote to The Times to inform the editor that Allegro's book contained nothing of scholarly value, and was 'an essay in fantasy rather than philology'.'5

  |ohn King's patient and lengthy rebuttal of the book eventually appeared, and while his belief in the literal truth of the orthodox Christian message may now jar with some contemporary sensibilities, bis painstaking and elegant demolition of Allegro's edifice remains essential reading for anyone still convinced of the role of the fly-agariC mushroom in world religions. He pointed out that the Sumerian link between the Indo-European and Semitic language groups, the founda­tion of Allegro's thesis, was far from proven, and that many of the supposed Sumerian root words were Allegro's own hypothetical fabri­cations. He noted that the fly-agaric and its host-tree species are entirely absent from the flora of the Middle East. And he pointed out the absurdity of the notion that such a revolutionary idea could have been kept hidden so effectively for so long: if so, it would make it the best-kept secret in the world. 'If a man under the influence of, or out of devotion to, the fly-agaric could dream up what we call the gospels,' he wrote despairingly, 'then we need more men under the influence of the fungus."4