Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom

by Alex Letcher

  For Osmond, convinced by the structural similarities between mescaline and adrenaline that there must be a naturally occurring chemical trigger for schizophrenia, his elusive 'M-factor', the principal role of the psychedelic drugs was to provide a model or experimental psychosis.5 But he also believed passionately that psychiatrists should experience psychedelics first hand, and many times, or else how could they ever begin to empathise with their patients? 'These [psychedelic] states deserve thought and pondering,' he argued, 'because until we understand them, no account of the mind can be accurate' adding that 'the mind can not be explored by proxy'. Gently and without sen­sation, he went further, arguing that psychedelics had intrinsic reli­gious or philosophical value, and might be used profitably by people with no immediate interest in mental illness. 'For myself, my experi­ences with these substances have been the most strange, most awe­some, and among the most beautiful things in a varied and fortunate life,' he wrote. 'These are not escapes from but enlargements, burgeonings, of reality.

  Although some of the psychedelics Osmond was using were compar­atively new, his attitudes were not, for the history of psychology is replete with scientists exploring their own minds through the con­sciousness-altering effects of drugs. Perhaps the earliest was the French psychiatrist Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours (1804-1884), who ate lumps of hashish in the hope of finding a preventative for mental illness (needless to say, his ideas about the merits of cannabis are now quite unfashionable).5 The London physician Francis Anstie (1833-1 874) seems to have been able to categorise the action of various drugs in his Stimulants and Narcotics of 1864 because he had tested many of them on himself. The American philosopher and pioneer psychologist of reli­gion WiJliam James (1842-1910) felt able to comment on the nature of mysticism after he experienced the classic numinous feelings of awe under the influence of laughing gas (nitrous oxide). Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was partial to the odd syringe of cocaine, while countless psychiatrists most famously Weir Mitchell (1829-1914) in America, Heinrich Kluver (1897-1979) in Germany and Havelock Ellis (18591939) in Britain experimented with peyote.

  Scientific endeavour is one thing, but public and political opinion is quite another, and it does not necessarily follow that these personal scientific preferences reflected the popular mores of the time. Nevertheless, that a respected scientist like Osmond could publish his pro-psychedelic opinions in a peer-reviewed American scientific jour­nal without fear of censure or castigation says much about the climate into which Gordon Wasson announced his discoveries. Not surpris­ingly then, given the general air of excitement that prevailed in the late 1950s as to what psychedelics might reveal about the mind, Wasson's team of chemists, mycologists and anthropologists had few reserva­tions about trying the mushrooms themselves.

  For one, at least, self-experimentation was simply a matter of logic and expediency. The Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann was approached by Roger Heim in the late 1950s with a request to identify the active chemical ingredients of the newly identified Mexican mushrooms. Heim, you will recall, was Professor of Mycology at the prestigious Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, and had accompanied Wasson to Mexico in 1956 in order to classify and describe the hallu­cinogenic mushroom species. Attempts made by his own laboratory at the Museum, and by various American pharmaceutical companies (Merck; Smith, Kline & French), had failed in the task, so Heim approached Albert Hofmann as the leading authority in the field of plant alkaloids: Hofmann, after all, had discovered LSD some four­teen years earlier.

  By this stage, LSD was already showing signs of becoming, as Hofmann would later christen it, his 'problem child', and he found that his co-workers at the Basle-based pharmaceutical giant, Sandoz, were reluctant to take on the commission lest they became tarnished by association, to the detriment of their careers/ He therefore led the investigation into the secrets of teonanacatl himself, but immediately bit a problem, which was that none of the chemical extracts isolated had unequivocal effects upon the animals that new compounds were usually tested upon. Without clear, emphatic reactions, how was he to tell which alkaloid was the right one?

  Thinking the problem through logically, he began to question whether the dried mushrooms provided by Heim who was the first person ever to have cultured them in the lab were still active: perhaps the drying process rendered them impotent? There was only one way to find out, and that was for a human volunteer to eat some. Thus it was that one afternoon in July 1957, after having carefully assessed the risks, Albert Hofmann consumed thirty-two dried mushrooms of Psilocybe mexicana in a clinical setting under the supervision of a physi­cian, to see whether they had any effect. He was not disappointed.

  Of course, Hofmann was quite used to self-experimentation, having famously taken the first ever LSD trip. He had isolated lysergic acid diethylamide-25, to give it its full name, in 1938 while looking for analeptic drugs that might alleviate migraine, deriving it from the cocktail of alkaloids that make up the ergot fungus (the sclerotia of which, as we have seen, have been used in folk medicine for centuries for their vasoconstricting effects). Initial tests proved disappointing, however, and LSD-25 was quietly shelved, but acting on an intuitive hunch, and the feeling that he had overlooked something of impor­tance, Hofmann went back to re-examine it in the spring of 1943.

  It was while handling the material that he began to feel rather unwell and was forced to go home, overcome by a not altogether unpleasant dazed and drunken feeling. Lying in bed, he noticed that his imagination seemed preternaturally stimulated. Cleverly surmising that the cause of this malaise was chemical not biological, and that some microscopic trace of LSD must have entered his bloodstream, perhaps via the skin, Hofmann returned to the lab three days later on 19 April to test whether this was indeed the case. He deliberately took what he considered would be a microscopic dose, 0.25 mg dissolved in a little water. What he could not have known in advance was that LSD is many thousands of times more potent than any of the other hallu­cinogens, and that, by the standards of the later psychedelic sixties, he had taken a massive dose (today, a standard dose on the street is between 0.06 mg and 0.08 mg). Rather tellingly, his laboratory notes break off abruptly, for he was suddenly plunged into an overwhelming maelstrom of colours and hallucinations. Accompanied by a con­cerned colleague, he made what must be the most famous bicycle ride in history, weaving his way home as the road, and his Swiss sense of ordered reality, undulated before him.

  Sandoz were, understandably, more than a little perplexed at what to make of Hofmann's quite literally mind-blowing discovery but, sensing a marketing opportunity, they conducted the necessary toxici­ty tests, and put the drug on the market anyway, exactly as Osmond would later stipulate: for the purposes of inducing model psychoses, and for enabling the researcher to enter, and so empathetically under­stand, the world of the schizophrenic. From there, it was readily taken up by researchers on both sides of the Atlantic.7

  By the time he ingested the dried Mexican mushrooms, then, Albert Hofmann was a seasoned psychedelic traveller having made several personally illuminating LSD voyages. Nevertheless, like many of the psychedelic experiences he diligently recorded, which are charac­terised by dark and sinister undertones, it was not altogether pleasant. Things began to appear unsettling and strange to him, so he asked to be driven home to more familiar surroundings, but he found that the streets had been 'demonically transformed'.8 Arriving home at last, he lay on a couch and closed his eyes, whereupon he saw visions of land­scapes and strange, exotic, architecture. Opening his eyes again, he was quite taken aback when his room became suddenly encrusted with Mexican designs and motifs, and the doctor, leaning over him to check his pulse, was transformed into a rather menacing Aztec priest. 1 would not have been astonished,' Hofmann later wrote, 'if he had drawn an obsidian knife.' By the time the experience peaked, the 'rush of interior pictures' in his mind's eye had become so intense that he felt as if he had been possessed by a demon, and feared he 'would be torn into this whirlpool of
form and colour and would dissolve'.9 Luckily for science he did not, and he returned both unharmed and certain that nothing was at fault with the dried specimens.

  From then on, animal experiments were abandoned as quite inef­fectual, and all extracts were tested on a now increasingly willing field of human volunteers drawn from Sandoz's employees.10 In this way Hofmann's team swiftly isolated the active ingredients, the chemicals psilocybin and psilocin, which he named after the mushrooms, and Sandoz hurriedly placed their branded Indocybin on the market as one more in their stable of mind-altering drugs for use in psychological research.

  As for Roger Heim, his interest in the hallucinogenic mushrooms was first and foremost mycological, and it was intellectual curiosity that prompted him to accede to Wasson's request that he come to Mexico in 1956 to make the first systematic identification of the mushroom species used by the curanderos. The discovery of previously unrecord­ed species always brings justified rewards for the taxonomist, but for Heim these were doubled when he realised that it was a nondescript and hitherto overlooked genus, Psilocybe, that contained most of the hallucinogenic species.

  However, his interest was not quite as professional as it might seem. As luck would have it, this expert mycologist, chosen by Gordon Wasson because of his glittering academic credentials, had dabbled with the fly-agaric as a young man way back in 1913. Whether this had been an accident, the upshot of youthful exuberance, or pan of a calculated experiment remains unclear, but years later, reflecting on his own experiences, he wrote that 'consumed fresh and in small quanti­ties, [the fly-agaric] can produce an agreeable sensation which limits itself to a feeling of contemplative well-being'." In Mexico, therefore, he had no qualms about taking part in a Sabina-led velada, and then, having brought fungal samples home and cultivated them in the lab, undertaking a series of self-experiments (the results of which he even­tually published in the prestigious Annals of the French Academy of Sciences).

  Heim's meticulous writing style and his mastery of classical French prose, for which he was justly recognised, have the unfortunate effect of rendering his mushroom trips somewhat dull, especially when com­pared to Wasson's purple rhapsodising. No detail is trivial or insignif­icant enough to go unreported. Thus, we know that when on 14 Aprii 1957 Heim consumed thirty-two fresh specimens of Psilocybe mexicana the same dose as Hofmann he was forced to fight off a cold feeling with a hot-water bottle. And that when, on 18 May i95^> he took five fresh mushrooms of Stropharia [Psilocybej cubensis, they tasted strongly of radish.,x

  In none of his experiments did he allow himself to become over­whelmed by sensation, as Wasson and Hofmann had, for he strove to record and analyse what was happening to him in real time, as the experience unfolded, and as accurately as possible. He struggled to find the exact letters and words (his handwriting becoming strange!) bunched up, like the teeth of a saw) to describe the ever-changing

  'fairy spectacle' of visions fleeting across his mind's eye, the exact hue of the coloured lights that danced about his study, the precise manner in which ordinary things had become portentous and meaningful. In spite of his analytic approach, however, and anticipating one of the effects that would eventually make the magic mushroom so popular, this dry and serious man found that he always got the giggles, and that he would laugh and joke hysterically until the tears rolled down his face.

  One by one, members of Heim's and Hofmann's research teams in France and Switzerland made their own voyages of discovery into the strange realm of the mushroom, recording every visual mote, every perceptual nuance and every physical sensation as diligently and as faithfully as their superiors. Mushrooms were eaten fresh or dried, in low or high doses, in the clinic or at home, during the day or at night, supervised or alone: every combination was attempted, every differ­ence noted.'5 A certain naivety pervades the records of these early explorers, who were new to the terrain and uncertain of what features might later prove significant or, even, quite what it was they were looking for. One is reminded of the pioneering mountain climbers, hurling themselves up the unsealed Alps with nothing more substan­tial than tweed jackets, stout boots and rucksacks-full of enthusiasm to serve in place of expertise and technical know-how. In both cases, mishaps were prevented only by luck, not judgement.

  Take, for instance, Heim's laboratory assistant, Roger Cailleux, who seems to have been unusually sensitive to the effects of the mush­rooms. Even on barely active doses he saw visions of oriental-style writing and great threshing tapestries upon which strange motionless people had been embroidered in exotic tableaux. Intrepidly, he took a large dose of Psilocybe semperviva mushrooms very early one September morning in 1958. In the darkness before dawn, he watched as swathes of colours drifted across his room, arranging themselves into a cone of light standing freely before him and engraved with abstract designs. Closing his eyes, he felt as though he was witnessing the processes of evolution itself, forms twisting and writhing and ^getting ever more forms.

  However, the perceived presence of what he called 'silent and invis•ble people' began to unsettle and irritate him, and thereafter the trip took a downturn. He felt as if his personality was disintegrating, and

  that he was no longer inhabiting his body (which was permanently shivery and cold), and became terrified that he might stop breathing. Only the coming of dawn, and the beautiful sight of the tree in his gar­den with its unusually intense greenery, kept him clinging onto his sense of self. Eventually, and to his great relief, the effects of the mush­rooms began to wear off. Never experiencing Heim's 'happy clarity of spirit and exceptional well-being', Cailleux was left with an unsettling aftertaste, like the remembered presence of a bad dream, that lingered through the day and beyond.M

  Others, intellectuals and artists not immediately within the Hofmann-Heim scientific circle, volunteered to try this new mush­room-derived drug and to reflect their experiences through the more considered lens of their literary prose: most famously, the Swiss Islamic scholar Rudolf Gelpke (1928-1972), and the French artist and writer Henri Michaux (1899-1984). But though their experiences were often profound and occasionally overwhelming, and though they were often beautifully rendered 4the orchestra of the immense mag­nified inner life is now prodigious' thundered Michaux it became clear, to the scientists at least, that the addition of yet more varied accounts of scintillating colours, indescribable visions and numinous feelings were doing little to further scientific understanding. A more controlled and clinical approach was called for, one in which the occluding variables of setting and personality could be factored out and the true effects of psilocybin upon the mind could be determined. In other words, scientists on the continent stopped experimenting on themselves and began the more usual empirical process of testing the new drug upon others.

  Much of the early, unsung research into the pharmacology of psilocy­bin was conducted by the psychiatrist Professor Jean Delay (1907-1987) and his team at the Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris." In addition to performing tests on rabbits and mice, Delay administered psilocybin to healthy volunteers and, less ethically perhaps (but by no means unusually for the time), to patients sectioned in asylums, afflict­ed with a variety of mental illnesses. He investigated psilocybin s effects upon the body and mind, and defined no fewer than thirty-one

  'psychic' effects. The most commonly experienced were, for example, attention difficulties, euphoria (and/or disphoria) and extra version, but the list also included auditory hallucinations and the delightfully named 'bizarrerie de l'ambiance' (peculiar moods or atmospheres).16 The recovery of buried memories, at least with some patients, offered Delay the hope that psilocybin might prove useful in psychotherapy: at least one woman with an eating disorder achieved a partial cure under this regime.17

  But perhaps the most interesting research conducted in Paris throughout the 1960s by and large unreported was that investigat­ing the effects of psilocybin upon creativity. The question as to whether drugs unleashed or provoked artistic inventiveness was not new,
for artists, poets and musicians had been experimenting with drugs since at least the early days of Romanticism. But for every Theophile Gautier (1811-1872) the French novelist who claimed, in 1843, that hashish induced in him an irresistible urge to write'8 there has been a Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), whose creative powers were quite clearly stymied by drugs (in this case his opium addic­tion).19 For the prodigiously talented writer Aldous Huxley, who at times experimented with mescaline, mushrooms and LSD, there was no easy relationship between psychedelics and creativity. Quizzed on the matter, he replied that a drug like LSD can only help the creative process indirectly. 'I don't think one can sit down and say, "I want to write a magnificent poem, and so I'm going to take lysergic acid." I don't think it's by any means certain that you would get the result you wanted you might get almost any result.'10

  In the 1940s, the London psychiatrists Walter Maclay and Erich Guttman, who were interested in understanding the hallucinations of their mentally ill patients, gave mescaline to artists and asked them to paint what they saw. Believing mescaline to create a 'model psychosis', the researchers hoped to find what in German is called the Stilwandel, a sudden or radical change in drawing or painting style that some­times accompanies the onset of mental illness: at the time, different pathologies were thought to produce different stylistic changes, the one symptomatic of the other. Maclay and Guttman's results were dis­appointing, in that they found no discernible 'mescaline style', but what the drug did do was give artists the confidence to explore more fully the stylistic innovations with which they were already experi­menting.1' In that sense, creativity was definitely enhanced.

  I he Parisian psilocybin experiments were a more sustained attempt to investigate the matter, and at their simplest they involved scientists giving psilocybin to artists and then observing what happened to their painting style both during and after the session. But the rationale of the experiments was particularly French, for it was shaped by a school of thought that dominated continental thinking throughout the sec­ond half of the twentieth century, namely structuralism.