Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom

by Alex Letcher

  First he tested the mushroom himself by eating dried portions of it in small doses, repeated at regular intervals throughout the day. Having found its toxicity to be negligible, and the inebriating effects rather pleasant, he offered the mushroom to a series of healthy volun­teers, most of whom, it must be said, were young and pretty women. While the single male experimental subject experienced nothing at all, even after consuming massive doses, the women responded much more favourably. In almost all cases they became flushed, agitated, twitchy and talkative. Experiencing the usual macropsia, they rushed about maniacally, expressing delight at their feelings of euphoria and melancholy; indecorous flirtation and the incautious babbling of secrets preceded a deep slumber. The following day, some expressed guilt at their immodest behaviour, but most thought the experience pleasurable and worth repeating. The handsome Grassi was, unsur­prisingly, delighted with the results, and arranged to have the mush­room sold at the local apothecary so that all could avail themselves of its pleasures. To what extent the local townsfolk took up his seductive offer has yet to be discovered.

  Grassi's medical endorsement of fly-agaric intoxication marks him as exceptional. More typically, episodes of amanita insobriety, where they have occurred, have emerged following serendipitous discovery and have been met with medical disapproval. Take the following, from the case notes of two Scottish doctors, C. H. W. Home and J. A. W. McCluskie of Glasgow's Western Infirmary, who were taken aback in the autumn of 1962 when two 'professional salmon poachers', one of whom was distressingly confused, reeled into the waiting room: the afflicted man apparently saw everyone's skin peeling off. It transpired that the chancers had been habitual fly-agaric users for about two years, but that they had overindulged that night by drinking an infu­sion of twenty mushrooms soaked in beer: a considerable dose. The doctors seem to have found the whole episode a cause for levity, and having safely applied the usual emetics, wrote the episode up in a wry ^icle for the Scottish Medical Journal>

  The two poachers, who made an excellent recovery, were appar­ently evasive when asked whether others shared their predilection. (Theirs must be set against the admittedly anecdotal story recounted to me by Edward Pope, who spent the tail end of the 1960s living in Scotland with members of The Incredible String Band. There he was informed by a local shepherd that the fly-agaric, thought poisonous by the locals, was known as the gozinta: 'the mushroom gozinta you, and you gozinta the ground'!) The poachers did claim that in certain London bars it was possible to buy a mixture of vodka and amanita juice, called a 'Catherine', after Catherine the Great of Russia who was supposed to have been partial to the brew. Certainly, Catherine the Great's loathing of indigenous shamanistic practices makes this last claim implausible,43 although the Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas claimed that fly-agaric vodka was widely used in her home­land in the years leading up to the First World War, and had even been used to drug prison officers during several daring escapes.44 But as no other sources have come to light to corroborate the poachers' story, we cannot say whether there really ever was a fly-agaric craze in the British capital. *

  By the end of the 1960s, when both psychedelia and London were in full swing, speculation about the use of the fly-agaric in the past was rife, with one writer for the infamous underground paper the International Times claiming that the ancient Druids had used the mushroom in their initiatory potions.45 But it was the brouhaha over Allegro's book that prompted a few to try the mushroom themselves. A review in Friends magazine, by Colin Moorcraft, gave instructions for its preparation46 Moorcraft recommended drying, powdering and mixing several mushrooms to obviate the problem of variable potency while a man called Lynn Darnton, who was to play a key part in the rediscovery of the Liberty Cap, wrote up what were pre­sumably his own personal experiences for the more controversial Oz magazine. Under the influence of the mushroom, Darnton, having first overcome his nausea with a concoction of aromatic oils, heard 'a sin­gle, pure, flute-like note played inside [his] head', then 'choirs ot angels and deities singing from the tops of hills' before he plunged headlong into the now familiar deep sleep. In his dreams, he was taker, deep into the earth, where he witnessed 'a Grand Meeting of Gnomes who communicated with him telepathically.47 The poet Heathcote Williams later famous for his elegiac poen-

  Whale Nation wrote eulogising the mushroom, but the overblown language of the time makes it difficult to determine whether he meant his lines to be taken literally, or as a thinly veiled reference to LSD:

  Take it, eat it,

  Cut away the fronds and smoke it, And with your third eye Contact Lens Turn into a Planisphere.48

  Certainly when Mick Jagger administered fly-agaric to James Fox in Nicholas Roeg's 1970 cult film Performance, this would have been read as a code for Acid, at least by those in the know/9

  While experimentation with fly-agaric remained rare in Britain, the preserve of a few plucky inner explorers, the biggest fly-agaric craze outside pre-Soviet Siberia occurred in the Pacific Northwest area of America. During the 1970s, the mushroom, along with its more potent cousin the Panther Cap, Amanita pantherina, began to be used by hippies inspired after reading Puharich, Allegro and, principally, Wasson.50 The medic Andrew Weil, commenting at the time, noted that there seemed to be two groups: those preferring psilocybe mush­rooms and those preferring fly-agaric (both of which grow abundant­ly in the region). Each group was broadly ignorant of the other, the former deriving their mycological knowledge from academic training, the latter possessing a more folksy general knowledge about edible fungi. Steven Pollock went to Alaska on an amanita quest in the early 1970s. He not only found that the mushrooms were being regularly used by young enthusiasts, but was able to find an abundant supply growing in the woods around Anchorage. His first experiment pro­duced what he called a pseudo-delirium, interspersed with moments of nausea and euphoria; his second, with dried mushrooms, gave him a more pleasant feeling of intoxication. Jonathan Ott, however, reflect­ing back on this period, thought the amanita users a minority, even though fly-agarics were being traded on the black market.5'

  The fly-agaric is still championed by a few enthusiasts on both sides of the Atlantic. Take Runic John, for example, a stalwart of the British festival scene, and a practitioner of a form of reconstructed AngloSaxon neo-shamanism. He makes his living running a stall selling a cornucopia of exotic, yet legal, psychedelic plants from around the world. Pots containing strange roots and dried leaves jostle with c'ixirs, potions, snuffs and smoking mixtures and, of course, with pre serving jars filled with specially dried fly-agarics, available in pill form for the weak of stomach. John told me that he found the amanica experience positive and powerful, especially in low doses, useful for providing extra stamina to complete his lengthy tramps across the Lancashire hills. Once he even met a fly-agaric spirit in the form of a woman, who taught him how to make a shamanic headdress; but he confessed that he made most of his living selling cultivated psilocybin mushrooms (that is, while they were still legal).

  In the Pacific Northwest, Hawk and Venus, the so-called Red Angels or Soma Shamans, have dedicated their lives to the use of the fly-agaric.5X Taking Wasson's identification of Soma at face value, they regard the Rig Veda as an instruction manual for the use of the mush­room. They have eaten it every day for nigh on twenty-seven years, to their spiritual betterment, they maintain. Through books, videos and websites, they promote the mushroom, teach the 'correct' spiritual preparation required fasting and other austerities and warn against the ever-present dangers of overdose. That they have been able to use the mushroom safely for so long seems beyond question, but the reve­lations they attribute to the mushroom which they say has not only revealed to Hawk the exact time and manner of his death, but also the moment when the inevitably approaching day of Armageddon will come may prove not to be its greatest selling point.

  We have already encountered Clark Heinrich, who has attempted to resurrect and elaborate upon Allegro's theory, in part by attempting to promote
the mushroom. His experiences with it are, perhaps, abso­lutely typical, and quite explain why it is treated with such ambiva­lence. He records that, during the 1970s, he determined with a friend to rake the mushroom every day for thirty-one days (with not a little inconvenience to their respective partners). Saving the biggest mush­room till last, they enhanced the trip by recycling their own urine, which seems to have been the catalyst for what followed. Heinrich found himself ascending through ever-increasing levels of bliss, each more magnificent than the last, until he achieved union with the clear white light, the source, the Godhead. Understandably excited, he attempted to repeat this experience a few days later, but this time the experience was hellish. Losing all sense of time, space and identity, he struggled to remember who he was. Coming to, and remembering his name (at last!), he saw grotesque rope-like columns stretching upwards to the sky which turned out to be threads on the handkerchief upon which he was slumped and promptly vomited. The whole cycle, loss of identity, coming to, and being sick, was repeated again and again for what seemed like an eternity, until the effects eventually wore off."

  And even Keewaydinoquay, the fly-agaric shaman, had this to say after one particularly bad bout with her beloved miskwedo: 'Sunday I wanted to die and thought I might, Monday I knew I was going to die and was glad of it, Tuesday I became aware that I hadn't died but had flunked some tests I'd taken somewhere, Wednesday I was still nause­ated but I didn't want to die, and Thursday I was glad I hadn't. By Sunday again I was really smarting and wondering how I could have been such a damn fool.'54

  For every fly-agaric enthusiast, then, there are twenty, or perhaps fifty or more, who read these accounts and politely decline, preferring the more trustworthy psilocybin experience. Amanita-eaters suffer the curse of Cassandra: their panegyrics, their promises of the ecstasies to

  be found within the red-and-white-spotted mushroom, may very well be true, but they inevitably fall upon deaf ears. No one ever quite believes them.

  Before leaving the fly-agaric behind to continue with the story of the rise of the psilocybin magic mushroom, I want to end this section by returning to the question of why a mushroom that most people go to assiduous lengths to avoid has become the focus of so many myths and conspiracy theories. Why, in other words, has style triumphed over substance?

  It is not too problematic to see why some people find conspiracyhunting per se so appealing and all-consuming. The conviction that you have, say, unmasked the 'secret truth' behind Christianity is para­doxically, and in spite of its implicit paranoia, empowering. In a bizarre way, one feels elevated from the ranks of mediocrity for having uncovered the liberating truth. It turns one into a movie hero, a sleuth, an outsider able to spot the hidden connections that those in epistemological authority refuse to entertain.

  But this in itself is not enough to explain why the fly-agaric has attracted so much attention. Rather than look for the explanation in any inherent biochemical qualities the mushroom possesses, as the conspiracy theorists usually do, I prefer to seek it in the way that the mushroom's extraordinary form has engaged the human imagination. It is surely here that the mushroom has worked its most powerful effects. The one psychoactive property for which it is justly famous is the way it alters perception of scale, rendering straws into tree-trunks and cracks into chasms. Yet merely bringing the mushroom to mind seems catalyst enough to magnify our thoughts and ideas, to distort and stretch them way beyond the elastic limits of evidence and reason.

  Nothing in the natural world looks quite like the fly-agaric. There are other red mushrooms, red-leaved plants, red insects, red frogs, mammals and birds with flashes and dashes of red, but nothing else (at least on dry land) is red with white spots. The fact that these spots aren't markings at all, but the broken remains of the volva, the egg­like sac from which the mushroom bursts forth, does not diminish the point that the mushroom's coloured form is so rare, and so simple, as already to strike us as alien, unusual or peculiar. Anyone, even a child with no knowledge of natural history, could identify one they are that distinguishable.

  Furthermore, red is a colour that excites us. Culturally, it is the colour of anger, lust, passion, energy and heat, while naturally it is the colour of blood. In the animal kingdom, it is a universal sign of poison and danger, a common language reached after millennia of convergent evolution that warns potential predators to stay clear.

  This alone would have ensured that the daringly coloured mush­room stirred our imaginations, but there is a second reason, which is ro do with the way that we habitually categorise the natural world. It is ironic that as our knowledge of the physical, chemical, biological and ecological workings of the environment has massively increased, so our actual contact with it has fallen away almost to nothing. Most of us spend our lives cocooned in human-created worlds, cities and suburbs where the other species with which we would ordinarily cohabit cannot prosper, or from which they are actively removed. We have become quite divorced from the rhythms and other inhabitants of the natural world. As we have made the transition from agricultur­ists to industrialists to consumerists, we have retained a body of folk­lore, legend and urban myth about certain plants, certain animals: the powerful, colourful and distinctive species that linger in the imagina­tion as easy markers or symbols for the human qualities we admire, and project. We speak of being as brave as a lion, as wise as an owl, as cunning as a fox, as noble as an eagle. Most of us have never come face to face with these or any other animals or plants of the wilderness (excepting the urban fox, of course), and yet they intrude into our unconscious lives in ways that the more indistinct, forgotten, species say, wheatears, shrews and sulphur tufts do not.

  Apart from any of its psychoactive properties, then, the power of the fly-agaric to enchant and bewitch begins with its striking and memorable colour and form. The discovery that the fly-agaric is psy­choactive merely confirmed what we knew already: that it is danger­ous, powerful, mysterious and odd. As the one mushroom we all recognise, it has become the representative of all of its kind. From the safe distance that urban living affords, we have endowed the fly-agar­ic, the archetypal mushroom, with all the peculiar qualities that the fungi in general have come to represent for us. Like them, it seems to invite speculation and wonder in equal measure.

  Only one final myth about the fly-agaric has yet to be mentioned, and that is the myth that gave it its name: the idea that, crushed in its flesh attracts and kills flies. Repeated tests have shown that a few insects are killed, while most, like their human observers, are merely stupefied by the mushroom and go on to make a full recovery." In the topsy-turvy world of the fly-agaric, a world where nothing is quite what it seems, even its foundational myth proves to be a halftruth. Truly, this mushroom is the greatest of dissemblers.

  PART THREE: PSILOCYBE

  Psilocybe! Makes you high-be! Psilocybe makes you fly!

  Boris and his Bolshy Balalaika, Toadstool Soup'

  Academic Exercise

  Experiment I (10mg Psilocybin on 6 April, 10.20) 10.50 'strong! Dizziness, can no longer concentrate .. / 10:55 'excited; intensity of colours: everything pink to red .. 11:05 The world concentrates itself there on the centre of the table. Colours very intense.'

  Rudolf Gelpke'

  The implications of Gordon Wasson's Mexican discoveries Maria Sabina, the magic mushrooms, the myco-gnostic revelations to be had south of the border took time to be felt by the wider culture in America and beyond. But they were immediately seized upon by a number of scientists who were not only keen to find answers to the many questions thrown up by Wasson's researches legitimate aca­demic questions about chemistry, biology, anthropology and psychol­ogy but were also impatient to try the mushrooms themselves.

  From the perspective of our time in which prohibition reigns, the 'war on drugs' lumbers on, and any open academic self-experimentation with psychedelics would amount to career suicide this does seem rather strange. However, the political situation was very differ­ent in the la
te 1950s. Although cannabis, heroin and cocaine were all illegal throughout the Western world, what we would call the hallu­cinogenic or psychedelic drugs were not. The latter; including LSD and mescaline (the active chemical ingredient of the Central American peyote cactus), were being eagerly employed on both sides of the Atlantic in the rapidly expanding discipline of psychology.

  In an almost Utopian spirit, it was hoped that these psychedelics would usher in a new era of understanding of the mind as important a tool for psychology as the telescope and microscope had been for astronomy and biology. They would strip bare and magnify the con­tents of the unconscious; they would allow psychiatrists to find the chemical basis of mental illness; and, at the very least, they would allow scientists to empathise with the world of the schizophrenic by enabling them temporarily to inhabit it themselves. The discovery of psilocybin mushrooms provided yet another window into this myste­rious domain of the mind, and the way was clear for scientists of any discipline to step through this particular looking glass themselves.

  Perhaps the most cogent advocate for the prescribed use of psychedelics at this time was a young English psychiatrist working in Canada, Humphrey Osmond (1917-2004). It was Osmond who, one spring morning in 1953, administered mescaline to Aldous Huxley in the experiment that formed the basis of The Doors of Perception; and indeed it was Osmond who, in a poetic sparring match with Huxley, coined the term 'psychedelic', meaning 'mind-manifesting'.1