Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom

by Alex Letcher

  Magic mushrooms, like mescaline, played a supporting role in this movie, vital to the direction and development of the plot, but lurking in the wings and only taking centre stage in the events that came after­wards. Had Wasson never made his magic mushroom discoveries and broadcast them to the world, had Humphrey Osmond never given Aldous Huxley mescaline that spring morning in Los Angeles, LSD would still have found its way into popular culture as surely as any acid eats its way through matter and metal. The plot wheels were set

  in motion as soon as Albert Hofmann mounted his bicycle way back in 1943, were propelled forward when Sandoz put LSD on the market, and were unstoppable once the drug was taken up by research psy­chologists across the Western world. The rather elastic boundaries of their experiments ensured that Acid would never stay bottled up in the clinic, for its psychoactive effects were simply too dramatic and too profound to remain secret for long.

  But the exact manner in which the story unfolded was determined by these early luminaries, Wasson and Huxley, and their favoured drugs. For had one man in particular not found out about Wasson's mushrooms and been persuaded to try them himself, the movie would have been quite different. Married with kids, a model tenured aca­demic at Harvard, and a brilliant clinical psychologist who had revo­lutionised the field of personality testing, Dr Timothy Leary made an unlikely candidate for the position of Acid guru. Nevertheless, within the space of five years that is exactly what he had become, a role that turned him into a pariah and a jailbird, made his name a byword for degeneracy, and led to him being branded by one federal judge 'the most dangerous man in America'.1

  The story of Acid, with its rainbow trajectory and its highs and lows, has been told so many times that the pivotal moments and key char­acters have become etched into the popular imagination.' To list a few, in America: San Francisco and the Haight-Ashbury, with its love-ins and be-ins; Ken Kesey, The Merry Pranksters, and their 'Acid Tests'; The Grateful Dead; the preposterously named underground Acid chemist Augustus Owsley Stanley III; the gay, naked, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg; the highs of Monterey and Woodstock, and the correspond­ing lows of Altamont; and, more bleakly still, the psychotic killer Charles Manson. In Britain: London with its 'happenings' and the 'Fourteen Hour Technicolor Dream'; the Notting Hill squat scene; clubs like UFO and Middle Earth and their resident band, Pink Floyd; the maudlin psychiatrist R. D. Laing; underground rags and mags like Oz and International Times; the hippy trail to India; Sergeant Pepper; the Rolling Stones in Hyde Park, and Brian Jones, dead, in a swim­ming pool. But of all these, Leary stands out as perhaps the most icon­ic, thanks to the carefully crafted image he presented of himself as the kaftan-wearing academic with flowers in his hair, urging middle America to 'turn on, tune in, and drop out'.

  The story, as commonly told, of how Leary went from respected academic to Acid priest, began in August i960 when he ate magic mushrooms in a rented villa in the Mexican resort town of Cuernavaca. He first heard about mushrooms from his friend and col­league Frank Barron who naturally had read Wasson's Life articlebut, initially sceptical, Leary had to be convinced that this was some­thing worth trying. Judicious inquiries by another colleague, anthro­pologist Gerhart Braun, led him to Seriora Juana, an elderly Mexican woman who willingly parted with a bundle of freshly picked mush­rooms for just a few pesos. But whereas Wasson had tramped through the hinterlands in search of a primitive encounter with Sabina and her holy mushroom veladas, Leary, rather tellingly, took his mushrooms by the pool, with cold beers and dry martinis close at hand. He was joined by an indolent circle of academics and their bikini-clad wives who were moved to try anything to while away the long, hot sum­mer days. The playboy environment did not make the experience any less profound, however, for Leary oscillated between having intense sensual encounters with the women folk, and the feeling that he was being dragged backwards through his own evolutionary history: he regressed until he was no more than a single amoebic cell. 'It was the classic visionary voyage and I came back a changed man,' he later wrote. 'You are never the same after you've had that one flash glimpse down the cellular time tunnel. You are never the same after you've had the veil drawn.'4

  Later, he wrote that until that moment he had been 4 a middle-aged man involved in the middle-aged process of dying'.5 He returned to Harvard both reinvigorated and determined to abandon all his previ­ous research in favour of further explorations into the 'strange deep realms' that the mushrooms opened up. He quickly learned, following a judicious meeting with Aldous Huxley, that the mushrooms' chemi­cal ingredients were readily available from Sandoz thus solving problems of supply and so he initiated what must surely rank as one of the most unusual episodes in American intellectual history: the Harvard Psilocybin Project.

  Still at this point a rationalist, atheistic psychologist, Leary's princi­pal concern in initiating the project was to see how people might be beneficially changed through psychedelic experiences: personality assessment was, after all, his speciality. But in what was to prove a cru­cial decision, Leary rejected the clinical, quantitative approach that of statistically comparing personality traits before and after the expe­rience in favour of one that was subjective and qualitative. 'Our experiments would not follow the medical model of giving drugs to others and then observing only external results,' he proclaimed/ Instead, he assembled an ever-expanding team of willing volunteers academics, poets, artists, musicians, graduate students, friends of friends and, breaking all the academic rules, took psilocybin with them in a 'supportive environment'.7 This typically meant a relaxed home setting where volunteers could listen to music, browse through books on art, or make love even. Subjects were asked to record their experiences in whatever way they felt appropriate, be that in a paint­ing, a poem, or an annotated report. In other words, Leary moved in exactly the opposite direction to the Parisian researchers, who had abandoned subjective accounts as too woolly, too imprecise, too vague on crucial details.

  Over the years that the Psilocybin Project ran its chaotic course from i960 to 1963, during which time some two hundred doses were administered the project began to look less like a scientific experi­ment and more like a psychedelic tea party, or worse, like a religious cult with Leary its ebullient leader. For, quite surprisingly in this ratio­nalistic academic environment, increasing numbers of subjects were returning from their 'mushroom' trips with reports of religious, spiri­tual or mystical experiences. Take infamous Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, for example, who, halfway through his first psilocybin session, descended naked from his bedroom, declaring that he was the Messiah. He intended to walk the streets of Cambridge instructing people to stop hating one another. Careful redirection persuaded him against this somewhat inadvisable course of action." Other equally starry-eyed explorers gathered in Leary's cramped office, muttering about the other world, cosmic consciousness, and the need to have taken psilocybin personally in order to 'understand'.

  The project became cliquey, with furtive nods and winks dividing those that 'had' from those that 'hadn't'. Unsurprisingly, faculty divi­sions started to open up over Leary's steadfast refusal to rein in the project and play by the accepted academic rules. In the end, he attract­ed too much unwelcome press attention and ruffled too many feathers, particularly over the issue of giving psilocybin to graduate students, and after some wrangling the project was forcibly closed down. Harvard, worried by the stain on its reputation, gave Leary his march­ing orders, and in the very same year, almost as if to erase all trace of his ever being there, his controversial office on Divinity Avenue was removed to make way for a new and larger psychology building, in which psychedelic research would have no place.9

  Leary was to prove irrepressible, however, for he positively revelled

  in his outlaw status. During the latter days of the Psilocybin Project, he had finally taken LSD, a drug that, though at first he was reluctant to try, proved even more astonishing in its effects than psilocybin. 'I became initiated into an ancient company of illumined seers
,' he later wrote of his first Acid trip, i had taken the God-step."° His colleagues feared for his sanity, but after a day or so he returned to normal or so it seemed and thereafter he became perhaps the world's greatest proselytiser for the drug: everyone should take it, he said, everyone should turn on.

  Together with Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner, two other Harvard colleagues fired during the psilocybin furore, he founded IFIF, the International Foundation for Internal Freedom, and then the Castalian Foundation, both with the aim of promoting cultural revo­lution and spiritual enlightenment through mass consumption of LSD. The trio authored The Psychedelic Experience, a tripper's manual loosely based on the Tibetan Buddhist text The Book of the Dead, and designed to steer Acid initiates towards a peak ecstatic experience (it was this book that inspired John Lennon to write Tomorrow Never Knows', referred to above).

  Sponsored by wealthy patrons from the Hitchcock dynasty, and with his growing and well-to-do entourage, Leary moved into Millbrook, a rambling mansion set in a four-thousand-acre estate in upstate New York. It became the prototypical hippy commune, cen­tred, of course, around the taking of LSD. He published two autobi­ographies, gave an infamous interview for Playboy in which he claimed women could expect to have a thousand orgasms on an aver­age Acid trip and appeared on radio and TV extolling the chemical's benefits. His notoriety at a peak, he stood as a candidate for Governor of California against the ultimately victorious Ronald Reagan: Leary the academic had made the transition to Leary the prophet or, as he was punningly dubbed, Leary the 'High Priest'.11

  But by the mid 1960s, the backlash was in full swing. Not everyone found heaven on LSD: some found hell, and a small proportion lost their minds completely. The politicians and media latched onto these horror stories and stirred up a moral panic about 4the drug that made you mad'. In truth, they were more concerned about increasing num­bers of people who had taken LSD and lost not their minds but their motivation to work: many, especially good middle-class kids, were ^king Leary's advice and dropping out. As Acid's most outspoken advocate, Leary made an obvious target. Prior to the California elec­tions, he was arrested for possessing cannabis, and by the end of the decade he was in jail. Possession of LSD was made a federal offence in America in 1966, and overnight many hundreds of research projects across the States were shut down. Thereafter, research into the effects of psychedelics became impossible and unthinkable, a situation that only now, forty years later, is beginning to change.

  Leary's adventures did not end there, however. He escaped prison, and lived a fugitive lifestyle in Tangiers and Switzerland during the 1970s, before eventually returning to America to serve out his time. During this period, his influence waned steadily, only reviving slightly when he found a new following amongst the Rave generation of the 1980s and 1990s. He died in 1996, and at his bequest his ashes were fired into space: in death he orbits the earth, just as, one presumes, he did so often in life. He managed the last laugh in the end.

  This, then, is the story as it is usually told: the likely plotline of any Timothy Leary: The Movie biopic waiting to be made. But, while none of the facts are in question, it is very much the story as Leary wanted it remembered, an uncritical narrative that reinforces his view of psychedelics as inherently benevolent revolutionary agents. If Leary is to be believed, all the events that later befell him were ineluctably set in motion the moment he took those mushrooms by the pool in Cuernavaca.

  It is interesting, though, to compare Leary's reading with that of the researchers working contemporaneously in Paris, who never high­lighted the supposedly revolutionary aspects of psychedelics in quite the same way. Indeed, they stuck rigidly to empirical research methods and the scientifically sanctioned way of doing things that Leary even­tually rejected as passe. For whereas Leary thought psychedelics would produce a sudden and irreparable transformation in society, the Parisians made no greater claim than that psilocybin might produce a shift in painting style.

  That the same drugs could be considered so differently by two teams working in different countries rather suggests that their con­trasting ideas were the products of their time and place, and not, as Leary maintained, of some inherent or essential quality of the psychedelic experience. To unpick the Leary myth a little, then, we need to examine the ideas that informed his thinking, and that were seemingly confirmed by his psychedelic experiences. In fact he

  expressed these ideas very clearly in the six syllables of his famous motto: turn on, tune in, drop out'. Catchphrase, mantra and adver­tising slogan, all rolled into one, it was also a statement of scientific

  belief.

  The psychological school of thought to which Leary remained wedded all his life, and which indeed dominated psychological thinking in post-war America, was called behaviourism. As we have seen, the Parisians adhered to a Freudian-influenced structuralist model that prioritised the role of unconscious elements and forces in determining personality. Behaviourism, on the other hand, regarded external, envi­ronmental factors as the principal factor influencing character and behaviour. Behaviourism's most ardent advocate was Frederic Skinner (i904-1990), inventor of the 'Skinner Box' in which rats or pigeons could be 'conditioned' to behave in predictable ways by a regime of punishments and rewards. Skinner's belief in behaviourism was so extreme that once, when asked about the significance of a student's mushroom trip, he replied that manipulation of the correct environ­mental stimuli would produce identical effects, and that mushrooms, in themselves, were irrelevant.'1

  Most behaviourists would not go as far as that. For Leary, behaviourism meant simply that we come into the world as blank can­vases, and that the way in which our personalities subsequently devel­op is determined primarily by our physical and social environment. Just as geese 'imprint' the first moving object they see as 'mother' whether that object is indeed mother goose, human researcher, or even, as has been recorded, a passing car so, Leary thought, we are all conditioned to respond in certain ways because of the various imprints hard-wired into our brains at key moments in our development.'3 From then on, we are compelled into acting out socially sanc­tioned 'games' another idea popular in America in the 1950s and 1960s such as husband, father, breadwinner, housewife, mother, hostess and so on. Society was, in other words, one giant, human-sized Skinner Box.

  What psychedelics do, Leary maintained, is allow us momentarily to see these games for what they are, meaningless socially sanctioned interactions that imprison us and prevent us from fulfilling our own unlimited potential: psychedelics let us think outside the box. At the same time, they soften the soldering of our neural wiring and give us the power to re-imprint ourselves in the manner of our choosing, before we return to normal consciousness. The Timothy Leary game now existed only as a memory/ he wrote of his first Acid trip. 'I was liberated. Free to do anything I chose ... Go back down and wander through the planet as anyone I chose to be. Pick a role. Select a cos­tume."4 With psychedelics, then, he felt that he had found the holy grail of psychology: an agent that would deliver permanent and demonstrable personality change.

  This is why Leary rejected what he called the 'psychology game* of tests and measurements. What mattered to him was whether someone had had that transcendent moment, whether they had stood outside of their conditioning to glimpse the essential nature of selfhood. He came to believe this was something that could never be measured, but could only be recognised by a look or a glint in the eye, by a turn of phrase, a lightness of step. Very early on he started using the language of 'turn­ing on' have you turned on? have you been there? are you experi­enced? for if enough people turned on and saw the petty trivialities of society's games, then these restricting institutions would crumble and a new harmonious psychedelic era would be ushered in. It was to be nothing less than a bloodless revolution. No wonder that he refused to play the Harvard game, for he had bigger issues on his mind.

  By contrast, in France, the psychoanalytic tradition meant therapy was regarded less as a sudden transform
ation and more as an ongoing and continually unfolding process. Through therapy, psychedelic or otherwise, the various repressed elements of the unconscious would slowly and steadfastly rise up from the depths to be integrated into the psyche: but there was always more work to be done. Furthermore, as the traditional modes of resistance were still very much alive, there was little incentive to use alternative means of raising consciousness. The Left was still a vital force in politics, the barricades were never very far away, and students were still able to rock the government, as they did in May 1968. And, of course, the French intellectual tradi­tion, with its roots going back to the pre-Revolution Enlightenment philosophes, had too much faith invested in the academic project for it to be so easily abandoned. If it was a game, then it was a good game, and one that was a vital part of the national character and of civilised life.

  Political dissent and the struggle for Civil Rights were, of course, crucially important in sixties America too, but many in the counter­culture abandoned politics in favour of Leary's spiritual revolution. Even if the Left had 'full control of society', said Leary, 'they would still be involved in an anthill social system unless they opened them­selves up first'.15

  The idea, then, of the 'Acid flash' as causing an instant and irre­versible personality change was a particularly American one. The CIA hoped fervently that LSD would turn people into compliant zombies, while politicians worried that it already had. Leary insisted that we were compliant zombies already, and that Acid would set us free, while on the West Coast, Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters made the flash a trial by fire with their provocative challenge: 'Have you passed the Acid Test?'