Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom

by Alex Letcher

  Awakening the next day feeling surprisingly relaxed and refreshed after his ordeal, Harner went to see another shaman blind, but reputedly powerful to discuss what he had seen. Harner was shocked to find that the shaman was not only familiar with the black whalecreatures, but also warned that they were not to be trusted because they were inveterate liars! Harner felt that, through ayahuasca, he had indeed entered into the cosmological universe of the shaman. The shaman was certainly impressed, and straightaway suggested that Harner might himself become a great shaman. The anthropologist needed no further encouragement to go native, and at once set about the arduous training.

  On his return to the States, then, he finally left academia to set up

  his Foundation for Shamanic Studies, and to write several books on shamanism for a popular audience. He began teaching what he called 'core-shamanism', a set of techniques that he abstracted from the many different 'shamanisms' of the world. In truth, this is a rather stripped-down shamanism compared to the one he had encountered in the Amazon. But if it is a shamanism-lite, a shamanism denuded of the drugs and sorcery, the terror and magic, then it is arguably one that is perfectly tailored to Western needs and expectations."

  It was another book, however, published a few years earlier, that really kept the idea of plant hallucinogens and magic mushrooms uppermost in the public imagination. It told the supposedly true story of a young, rationalist anthropology student having his ontological foundations shaken by a hallucinogen-wielding, trickster-like Mexican shaman. Espousing exactly the kind of tales that a generation of Acid-heads wanted to hear, it very quickly became a bestseller. It was called The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, and its author was Carlos Castaneda.

  According to the story, which continued through many sequels, Castaneda met the shaman Don Juan Matus during the early 1960s while researching the indigenous use of peyote for his anthropology Masters at UCLA. Don Juan proved reticent, obfuscating even, on the matter until Castaneda agreed to become his pupil. Thereafter; Castaneda entered an alien world of witches and sorcery, of crows that could talk, lizards that could prognosticate, and spirits that would kill you in an instant if you transgressed their complex and bewildering strictures. Castaneda played the ignorant fool to Don Juan's wise old man, always asking silly questions, never fully understanding what was happening. Don Juan berated, cajoled and generally bamboozled 'little Carlos' in varyingly successful attempts to get him to step out ol his shackled, rational, way of thinking so as to 'see' the world in an entirely new way and to become 'a man of knowledge'. Of course it was possible to be in two places at once, to assume the form of an ani­mal, or to step off a cliff and fly. Castaneda was expected to do all these things and more.

  Understandably, Castaneda found much of this challenging to his belief system, and so Don Juan employed a variety of hallucinogen^ plants in a desperate attempt to shake him loose of his logical, emp*r ical world view. Castaneda chewed peyote buttons, took Jimson Wee

  (datura) and half-smoked, half-ingested a crumbly magic mushroom mixture, which Don Juan called 'humito', or his 'little smoke'.

  The experiences Castaneda went through were usually terrifying, occasionally beautiful, but always remarkable. The first time he used humito, for example, his body became so insubstantial that he fell backwards through the wall he was leaning upon. Another time he came face to face with a gigantic and hideous beast, which Don Juan had warned him was 'guardian' to the other world. It turned out to be nothing more than a hallucinogenically magnified gnat.

  In many ways Castaneda's experiences were similar to Michael Harner's: both had entered a radically unfamiliar shamanic world through the use of powerful plant hallucinogens. Both were anthro­pologists who were impressed enough with what they discovered to have abandoned their careers and gone native. And both chose to write about their experiences in popular and accessible books. The only difference was that while Harner had actually undergone the training he described, Castaneda had not. In fact, it now seems likely that Castaneda made up the entire adventure in the library at UCLA.

  Close reading of the text by various scholars has shown it to be replete with factual errors, inconsistancies and narrative blunders.'* For example, Don Juan, supposedly an illiterate Indian, possesses a remarkably Westernised vocabulary, especially when compared with, say, Sabina. Similarly, despite Castaneda's allegedly impeccable notekeeping, certain events described across the first three books happen in an inconsistent order. Gordon Wasson, though initially excited by the book, became increasingly frustrated at Castaneda's inability and unwillingness to produce a mushroom specimen for formal identifica­tion. Smoking mushrooms was unheard of it produces mixed results at best'1 and if true would certainly have merited further investiga­tion. Castaneda's failure to deliver led Wasson to become suspicious,H and rightly so, for scholars now believe that Castaneda concocted the 'little smoke' after reading Mushrooms, Russia and History. Wasson concluded that The Teachings were 'science fiction badly written'.'5

  The whole thing Don Juan, his teachings and Castaneda's terrify­ing initiation was an elaborate fantasy. That it was so widely coun­tenanced says much about the spirit of the times. It was, at its core, a version of the 'magical apprenticeship' story, as relevant to people then as Harry Potter is today, for it appealed to the same longing for enchantment. What raised it above the ranks of Tolkienesque fantasy fiction was the supposed use of hallucinogenic plants which, in the eyes of the Acid generation, gave the whole thing believabiiity. For, whether readers had actually taken Acid or not, they knew that the psychedelic experience was supposed to unsettle one's faith in the Newtonian, Cartesian universe. Thus, it was entirely credible that we in the West had seriously underestimated how weird reality is, that Castaneda could just conceivably have jumped off a high cliff and landed unharmed, or fallen asleep in one place and dreamt himself awake in another. If Harner, who had had the real training, was taken in by Castaneda's masterful storytelling, it is not surprising that so many others were as well.'6 But when a glut of would-be shamans journeyed south to find their own Don Juan in the Sonora deserts, they were met by bemused disdain, for the locals had never heard of such a person nor of his preposterous doings.

  In very different ways, both Harner and Castaneda rejected aca­demic life to pursue their own ideas of shamanism. But another group of their contemporaries, likewise turned on to psychedelics but look­ing for legitimate ways to pursue their hallucinogenic interests, chose to take the 'Great White Shamans' Schultes, Hofmann, and Wasson as their role-models. Though not all of these young psychedelicists had had formal academic training, they all strove to emulate the intel­lectual and publishing successes of their illustrious forbears. They were Andrew Weil, Jeremy Bigwood, Paul Stamets, Jonathan Ott and Stephen Pollock.

  The luxuriantly bearded Andrew Weil is now known as America's most vocal advocate of complementary medicine and 'natural' heal­ing, but he began his career promoting other more psychoactive plants and substances. It was while he was studying medicine at Harvard that he encountered both LSD and the Economic Botany course run by Schultes at the Botanical Museum. Engaged and trans­formed by both, he thereafter became one of the leading writers and thinkers of the psychedelic underground. His articles appeared in the long-running American dope-mag High Times, and his first book. The Natural Mind an impassioned defence of the judicious use of natural (that is, plant-based) psychedelics published in 1972, was a best-seller.

  Jeremy Bigwood is now a journalist, but during the 1970s and early 1980s he worked as a research chemist at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. He conducted important research into the biosynthesis of psilocybin by magic mushrooms, and also into perfect­ing methods of cultivation.17

  Paul Stamets is now America's leading expert on mushroom cultiva­tion, and devotes his energies to growing gourmet and medicinal mush­rooms, and developing ways to use fungi in ecological restoration. He did not go to university, spending his formative years wo
rking as a log­ger, but as a self-taught mycologist he brought out his reliable magic mushroom guide, Psilocybe Mushrooms and Their Allies, in 1976.

  Jonathan Ott began life as a chemist, but transferred across to Ethnobotany when he realised that there was a way to combine his love of chemistry with psychedelics. It was while he was a research fel­low in Mexico City that he met Schultes, who introduced him to Wasson. The two got on well, and thereafter Ott became something of a protege of Wasson's.'8 Ott subsequently wrote a number of exposi­tory reference books about the history, chemistry, pharmacology, biol­ogy, availability and preparation of old and novel plant hallucinogens, marked by his trademark laconic, and occasionally pedantic, style. His continuing opposition to America's drug laws has made him a hero of the psychedelic underground, which he still regularly addresses at con­ferences, seminars and other similar events.

  But of all these thrusting young psychedelicists, however, the late Stephen Hayden Pollock (1948-1981) was probably the most colour­ful. A physician at the University of Texas Health Centre in San Antonio, Pollock devoted much of his energy to identifying new psilo­cybin species, and tracing the spread of what he called 'psilocybian consciousness' throughout the world.19 He worked on refining cultiva­tion techniques, and even found and developed a new species, Psilocybe tampanensis, which is one of the commercial varieties culti­vated today. At one time he was alleged to have possessed the world's largest collection of hallucinogenic mushrooms. He sailed close to the wind, however, and his liberal attitude towards selling prescriptions to drug addicts is probably what led to his early and tragic demise. He was found murdered in his home in 1981, most probably for crossing powerful drug barons. At the time of his murder he was under inves­tigation by at least five different government agencies, and had he not been killed, it is likely that his mushrooming interests would have landed him in serious trouble.10

  All of these young men, in their own ways, made significant contri­butions to the study of psilocybin mushrooms, but more importantly from a historical point of view, they all wrote enthusiastic academicstyle books and papers detailing the dissemination of shrooming throughout America as it occurred. It is largely thanks to them that we know how it happened.11 Of course, the subtext of these works was thinly disguised and would have been very apparent to their intended readership. By including taxonomic, chemical and pharmacological information about the mushrooms, they hoped to spread the word.

  At times, the academic veneer of these papers seems very thin indeed: Pollock's justification of a mushroom-inspired skinny-dip in a secluded lake in Colombia as a 'psychomycological investigation' pushes the limits of scholarly inquiry. 'It became a major decision whether to sit in the sun or the shade,' he wrote of this particular trip. The phantasmagoria of color flashes superimposed on a panorama of solar diffraction produced by clouds blowing over the mighty Amazon was awesomely beautiful.'" Quite so, but hardly the great scholarly insight it is dressed up to be.

  Though, as you might expect, there was often intense competition and rivalry amongst the members of this psychedelic 'brat pack', they came together to organise the First International Conference on Hallucinogenic Mushrooms, held in Maytown, Washington, in 1976. Unlike the previous conferences and lecture series already described, this was explicitly aimed at magic mushroom enthusiasts, and was designed to disseminate accurate information about mushroom identi­fication. The mycological establishment had rather buried its head in the sand over the burgeoning recreational use of magic mushrooms in America during the 1970s. Indeed, some had even stated publicly that it would be better for people to die from mistakenly eating poisonous mushrooms than it would be for experts to produce a reliable guide to the hallucinogenic varieties!15 Consequently, in the absence of any proper works, a rash of poorly researched guidebooks were circulat­ing, gleaned from the literature rather than from knowledgeable field experience, and offering potentially dangerous and inaccurate advice. Two such were Enos's A Key to the American Psilocybin Mushroom (1970), and Ghouled's Field Guide to the Psilocybin Mushroom Species Common to North America (1972). The conference was intended to transform this worrisome situation. Speakers included Wasson, of course, and the Mexican mycologist Gaston Guzman, who taught people the key techniques of mushroom identification.

  The conference was a great success in spite of the fact that rumour

  of an impending drugs bust led some of the organisers to flee prema­turely: embarrassingly for them, the bust never happened. A second, larger conference was organised for the following year. Held in Port Warden, Washington, it brought together Schultes, Hofmann and Wasson, along with other up-and-coming writers and researchers of the psychedelic movement: Andrew Weil, Scott Chilton, Jeremy Bigwood and Carl Ruck. The proceedings were eventually published in 1978 as Teonanacatl: Hallucinogenic Mushrooms of North America, edited by Ott and Bigwood. The book quite naturally includ­ed detailed descriptions of the region's known psychoactive species, along with accounts of Wasson's rediscovery of the mushrooms and how the knowledge had subsequently been disseminated. A chapter by Bigwood explained the ins and outs of home cultivation. The book sold well, but is now so rare, and so coveted for the information it contains, that in the British Library at least the cover must be dis­guised lest anyone attempt to steal it.

  Once again, the success of this conference led to a third in 1978, this time in San Francisco, on the broader subject of hallucinogenic drugs and attended by the usual suspects.14 The net result of all these papers, books and conferences was that accurate information about identifi­cation, preparation and even cultivation of magic mushrooms was freely available and continually circulating throughout the public domain, where it was put to extremely good use by hippies and other psychedelic enthusiasts.

  The earliest record of illicit magic mushroom use in North America is from Canada in 1965. A handful of college students were arrested in Vancouver and found to be in possession of Liberty Caps. The records do not tell us who they were, how they made their fortuitous discov­ery, or whether they had the opportunity to sample the mushrooms/5 but in all likelihood one or all of the students had made the pilgrimage to Mexico and discovered the properties of Liberty Caps on their return.

  From these early ripples, the first proper waves of psilocybian con­sciousness began washing up in the beach State of Florida. In 1972., students discovered that Psilocybe cubensis grows abundantly there in the summer months, as it does throughout the Gulf States/6 Anecdotal reports at the time suggested that fraternity parties were being livened UP with mushroom omelettes and tea, with perhaps hundreds of peopie tripping at a time. Two years later, the use of cubensis was being reported from Mississippi, which was being hailed as the 'mushroom capital' of the States.17

  It was another region, though, that could have more legitimately laid claim to this title, for the Pacific Northwest proved to be abso­lutely replete with psilocybin-containing species. In 1973, a young hack, Timothy Egan, wrote a satirical piece for the University of Washington Daily detailing the new craze for magic mushroom-pick­ing. Rising before dawn, and braving inclement weather, irate farmers and truculent cattle, Egan accompanied the eager pickers hunting the plentiful Liberty Caps. 'After a while some of the magic mushroom harvesters stopped picking,' he observed. 'They wandered around, stared at the sky, rolled on the wet grass floor and laughed, some of them hysterically, at cloud formations . . . Apparently they'd been sampling their harvest.'18

  People may already have been sampling the mushrooms for a few years before Egan swelled their ranks, however. The popular author Tom Robbins claimed to have first tried mushrooms in the 1960s, and subsequently wove them into his debut novel, Another Roadside Attraction, published in 1971.19 This hallucinogenic, erotically charged tale centres around the activities of a bohemian, pantheistic couple who accidentally find themselves in possession of the preserved body of Christ. The gypsy-like heroine, Amanda, forages for mush­rooms in the Skagit Valley and, when not entering trances herself, vis­
its a mushroom-eating guru on Bow-Wow mountain. It is even hinted that she uses the fly-agaric, but in truth magic mushrooms play a small part in this cleverly crafted critique of contemporary Christian mores. Even so, Egan reported that Robbins was considered the 'godfather ot the mushroom cult', and had inadvertently inspired many of the pick­ers he met that year.

  That said, mushrooming remained very much an underground activity during the first half of the 1970s. For example, having heard rumours that Liberty Caps were being used in Oregon, Andrew Weil took upon himself the arduous task of reporting whether this indeed the case, setting out in the autumn of 1973. But he only suc­ceeded in obtaining a bag of dodgy chopped-up mushrooms tor tlu princely sum of $15, and these later turned out to be tinned he mushrooms laced with both LSD and another compound, the veten nary anaesthetic PCP. ^ff^

  He returned again in 1975, but this time the visit was successful. Together with some local friends, he collected large numbers of Liberty Caps from a farmer's field. The locals had apparently learned about the mushrooms from mycology students at Oregon State University at Corvallis, although one or two seem to have made the discovery serendipitously. Anecdotal accounts, recorded at the time, stating that people had been using the mushrooms for twenty years or so, were almost certainly untrue. Of Weil's companions, 'Susan' had developed something of a taste for the mushrooms, and would often consume two or three each morning so as to put her in the 'right' state of mind to face the day; 'Greg', meanwhile, usually ate them less fre­quently, in doses of twenty or so, but occasionally as many as a hun­dred at a time.

  The year 1975 proved particularly abundant for Liberty Caps, so much so that collectors gathered sufficient numbers to market them. They were found to be on sale in Eugene for the then exorbitant price of $75 to $100 per pound, wet weight.50 Local farmers, like their fel­lows everywhere, were typically hostile to this seasonal inundation of mushroom hunters in their fields, and some complained vociferously to the press.-' Sensing a marketing opportunity, however, others start­ed charging for access, with prices ranging from $1 to $25 for a day's picking. One enterprising farmer issued pickers with official blue buckets to show that they had registered.3*