by Alex Letcher
Of the many psilocybin-containing mushrooms discovered in the Pacific Northwest, the next most important species after the Liberty Cap was the newly identified Psilocybe stuntzii.3} It was found growing in the landscaped gardens of the campus of the University of Washington, on imported bark mulch. In 1973, unknown but intrepid students noticed that, when bruised, the mushroom turned blue, a sign that can indicate the presence of psilocybin (but is most certainly not a reliable indicator of edibility). Luckily for them, the mushroom turned out to be both non-poisonous (though it is extremely similar to
the deadly poisonous Galerina autumnalis), and replete with psilocybin.
Almost immediately thereafter, a mushroom craze spread through the University and on to other colleges in the region (such as the Evergreen State University in Olympia). An article in a student newspaper warning against the practice merely accelerated its spread.34 The mushroom acquired the name Washington Blue Veil and was usually eaten in doses of about twenty or so. Steven Pollock reported that immediately after Ott's first conference in 1976, a bumper crop of Blue Veils was found growing on the playing fields of Turnwater High School. 'Hundreds of students and other magic mushroom fanciers, neophytes and veterans alike, picked and sampled to their hearts' content, apparently with neither significant mishaps nor coercive administrative intervention.'" In fact this craze caused considerable indignation amongst the police and school authorities. The High School Principal, Gordon Prehm, found the whole situation 'disgusting'.36
Psilocybin and psilocin had been classified as controlled substances under Federal Law in 1970. The Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act (Public Law 91-513) made the unauthorised possession, sale or use of a psilocybin mushroom a crime punishable by fine or imprisonment.37 But the fact that all these activities were illegal did little to halt their spread. Arrests were few and far between, and were more often for trespassing than for possession of a prohibited substance.38 'On weekends,' Prehm complained, 'the lawn is covered with mushroom freaks.'39
A combination of word of mouth, academic dissemination and press scare stories meant that the magic mushroom finally 'tipped' in America in 1976. The Oregonian newspaper called the autumn months of that year 'mushroom madness timeV° Paul Stamets recalls that hunting for magic mushrooms approached the status of a 'national sport'. He estimated that on any particular autumnal day there were probably thousands of people out collecting. 'The wave of interest soon became an invasion,' he later wrote, 'a pandemic and a cause celbre for an entire generation.'4'
And apparently, while the growing use of wood chips in garden landscaping contributed to the natural spread of psilocybin mushrooms through suburbia, members of the mushrooming underground did what they could to help the process with 'guerrilla inoculations1. Spawning blocks wood chips imbued with mycelium changed hands and were freely shared, most notably at Grateful Dead gigs and thereafter psilocybin mushrooms started appearing in parks, zoos, arboretums and nurseries across the Northwest. It was, Stamets writes, one 'continually unfolding, exponential wave of mycelial mass'.4i
The spreading waves of mushroom consciousness were not confined to North America. Magic mushrooms were found and used, typically for the first time, in Jamaica, Hawaii, Guatemala, Venezuela, Argentina and Peru.45 Andrew Weil continued his investigations by popping in to an idyllic American hippy commune in Colombia, known as 'La MieP or 'Honey', where he was entertained with hongos Colombianos. A few years later, in the mid 1970s, Pollock made a similar trip and found that mushroom use there was rife.'*4
It was more orthodox waves, however, that carried psilocybian consciousness beyond the Americas, for it seems that it was a surfer who took the knowledge from Hawaii to Australia. The initial discovery of hallucinogenic mushrooms in Hawaii may have something to do with the maverick researcher Andrija Puharich. Puharich, you will recall, had investigated the supposed psychic-enhancing properties of the flyagaric, and written up his results in his popular book The Sacred Mushroom. Perhaps hoping to emulate Wasson, he travelled to Hawaii in 1961 to try to 'uncover' evidence for an ancient mushroom cult there. The Honolulu Star-Bulletin reported that he had yet to find the conclusive proof he needed to support his theory (unsurprisingly, given that there was none to be found),45 but it is possible that the publicity surrounding his visit spurred someone to identify the five or so hallucinogenic species now known to grow in the islands/6
However the news reached Hawaii, the unknown surfer carried it to Australia in 1969, where he or she recognised the distinctive form of Psilocybe cubensis sprouting plentifully from cowpats. That summer proved to be a bumper year for the mushroom in Queensland, which resulted in a craze amongst the young, and a corresponding moral panic amongst the older generation. Psilocybe mushrooms were made illegal in Queensland in 1971. Again, such legislation, and alarming newspaper headlines 'Children at a suburban school are getting high on mushrooms' did little to halt the spread.47 Underground supply lines opened up to meet the demand in the cities, so that in Hobart in i972.> sales of LSD dropped away almost to nothing because of the abundant availability of mushrooms. The habit amongst surfers was apparently to consume these Golden Tops or Golden Caps in 'smoothies', before heading out to sea to ride the waves.48
Several other psilocybin mushrooms were found in Australia, the most important of which were the extremely potent Copelandia cyanescens, known as 'blue meanies' (a reference to the fact that they stain blue when bruised, to their strength, and to the villains of The Beatles' cartoon adventure, Yellow Submarine). Just a handful of these mushrooms produces an intensely strong trip, and in 1971 a seventeen-year-old girl from Adelaide called for medical assistance after having eaten two or three. She was apparently convinced that she had been turned into a banana, and feared that at any moment someone might try to peel her. That she called for assistance is proof that the poor unfortunate was having a horrible time, but the banana storv sounds so like the kinds of fabricated LSD scare stories circulated during the 1960s that it is almost certainly an embellishment.
It took longer for indigenous magic mushrooms to be discovered in New Zealand. The phenomenon was thought to be entirely an Australian one, and until the early 1980s the only mushrooms consumed in New Zealand were those posted across the Tasman Sea. Once again, it was surfers who recognised blue meanies and another species, Psilocybe tasmaniana, this time growing in the sand dunes at Khomenii beach in New Plymouth. An unknown British botanist apparently found Liberty Caps growing on the Otago peninsula near the city of Dunedin on the South Island, and very soon the knowledge spread by word of mouth. From 1982 onwards lurid headlines appeared in the press, but these were accompanied by few prosecutions.49
It is tempting to suppose that surfers took the knowledge with them up the coast of South East Asia but, satisfying as this would be, there is no evidence for it. What is clear is that by the early 1980s psilocybin mushrooms were being used in Bali, Indonesia, Samoa, the Philippines and Thailand.50 In Samoa, an 'unknown foreigner' introduced the locals to the properties of Copelandia cyanescens, which was previously known as the Ghost Hat and avoided.5' Thereafter the mushroom became popular amongst the younger indigenous population. More often than not, however, mushroom use in South East Asia was restricted to remote, coastal tourist areas.
Though illegal in all of these countries, it was, until very recently, possible to see mushrooms (usually Psilocybe cubensis) openly advertised for the benefit of young European travellers in search of paradisiacal psychedelic full-moon parties. In Thailand there was even rudimentary cultivation of mushrooms, with dung collected and watered until the mushrooms sprouted obligingly. They were sold cooked in omelettes, or blended up with coca-cola in what one can only imagine to be a particularly foul brew.5X Clearly the black market in magic mushrooms formed an important part of the local economy
bur the use of the past tense is necessary because it is unclear how far this has been affected by the 2004 tsunami.
Underground, Overground
They looked like a couple of dry seeds, but they were the tiny mushrooms that grow so rarely near Avalon .. . this was a gift more precious than gold.
Marion Bradley, The Mists of Avalon
The key to the door of fairyland is now within anyone's reach ...
George Andrews
Of all the sights, spectacles and commotions that beset the visitor to the modern city of London, one image is guaranteed to arrest attention. The Tube map, the schematic plan of the London Underground railway system designed by Harry Beck in 1931, was created to enable travellers to navigate their way across the capital with a minimum of inconvenience. Such is the success of this 'design classic' that hardly a journey is undertaken without at least a quick perusal of its reassuring lines. But it possesses more than elegant functionality. Its bold colours mark out the tunnels that, spreading like a mycelium beneath the urban expanse, keep the city in constant motion, keep it alive. Like some alchemical glyph, it has acquired its own presence, its own aura, for it has come to represent not just the layout but the many-hued, living spirit of London itself.
As with any abstraction, its seductive simplicity belies a more complex reality. For instance, during the years stretching roughly from 1965 to 1972, London was home to another underground entirely. Though never mapped out in any formal sense, this subterranean movement had its own cartography, its own mycelium of connections, junctions and nodes that briefly intersected with the capital's more familiar superstructure. This underground had clubs and venues, galleries and theatres, squats and crash-pads. It had clothes shops, bookshops, cafes and dope dens. It had advice centres, alternative clinics, schools and even a university. It had its own sacred and significant sites. Within these spaces, politicos and journalists hammered out opinions in eagerly devoured papers and magazines, or harangue people on the streets. Artists, dancers and musicians chipped away at the boundaries of taste and form, while mystics, priests and visionaries watched the movement of planets through Acid-widened eyes, or traced out mythical ley lines across the English landscape.
For those few short years this young, radical, disparate, mostly white and male-dominated movement was united by the Utopian belief that the establishment was in its death throes. The old way of doing things, choked and stifled as it was by class, propriety, hypocrisy and the other vestiges of empire, was at an end. A new psychedelic Albion was about to rise from the ashes of this political, cultural, sexual and spiritual revolution. Or so they thought. But if the promised Blakean new dawn never quite emerged from all this foment, dissent and hubris, then something else rather more unexpected did.
As far as it is possible to tell, the first ever intentional psilocybin mushroom trip in Britain took place in or around 1970.5 Appropriately, it was recorded in Oz, the magazine that, along with the fortnightly newspaper the International Times (or /T), was the most vocal champion of the radical political values and psychedelic aesthetics of the day.4 As we shall see, it is not entirely clear how the momentous discovery was made, but what is striking is that it took someone such a long time. Just as in America, Acid was being used illicitly from the early 1960s onwards, and with it came news of the mushrooms, the shamans of Siberia and the pilgrimage to Mexico. All the pieces of the puzzle were in place, in other words, and by rights, the Liberty Cap should have been discovered a decade earlier than it was.
In March 1961, for example, Arthur Koestler published his essay Return Trip to Nirvana', detailing his psilocybin experience with Timothy Leary. Though hardly a ringing endorsement of psychedelia Koestler lambasted Leary's 'pressure cooker mysticism'5 it nevertheless appeared in the Sunday Telegraph and brought the concept of mushrooms to a wide readership.
It was followed a month later by a prime-time BBC television documentary, Eye on Research, devoted entirely to the subject of The Sacred Mushrooms'.6 Presented by Raymond Baxter, this precursor to the long-running science series Tomorrow's World contained interviews with Gordon Wasson about his discovery and consumption of the Mexican mushrooms, and with Albert Hofmann about the successful isolation of psilocybin. Slides and recordings of Maria Sabina were juxtaposed with footage of volunteers undergoing psychedelic therapy at Worcester's Powick Hospital, under the guidance of psychiatrist Ronald Sandison.7 The tone of the documentary was, in keeping with the times, stuffy. The Mazatecs were portrayed as primitive drug addicts, while the scientists appeared as white-coated and angelic, using purified psilocybin to cure 'previously hopeless mental cases'.1 Perhaps this explains why a striking picture of a Mexican mushroom, Psilocybe mexicana the species most similar in appearance to the Liberty Cap sprouting from a Petri dish seems not to have inspired anyone to consider the psychedelic possibilities of our own mycoflora. Though the image was reprinted in the British TV guide Radio Times, and delivered straight into the homes of Middle England, no one seems to have grasped its significance.
As the decade wore on, however; news about Sabina and the Huautlan mushroom pilgrimage not to mention the Mexican government's attempts to stamp it out filtered steadily into the British media. The Times reported the expulsion of hippies by the Mexican authorities in September 196-7,9 while earlier that year the International Times enthusiastically described the existence of Mexican mushrooms. This piece, written by Bradley Martin as part of a regular column detailing the latest groovy ways to 'get high', announced that psilocybin and psilocin were 'two beautiful hallucinogens found in the Mexican Sacred Mushroom'. Martin added that 'they grow in this country too any number of the genus Psilocybe will do'.10 But as he also recommended smoking banana skins (that great sixties myth) and stuffing toad skins 'up your arse', it was not altogether clear whether he meant his advice to be taken seriously: in any case, it all sounded a bit too much like hearsay.
One reason why psilocybin mushrooms were overlooked in Britain for so long was that popular belief still equated the 'magic mushroom' with the fly-agaric, a mushroom that, as we have seen, was not eaten with any degree of enthusiasm. Take the late playwright Jeremy Sandford, for example. Sandford (1934-2003) rose to fame on the back of his shocking TV drama Cathy Come Home (1966), which, in one of those defining sixties moments, raised the plight of the homeless to the top of the political agenda. Less well known is Sandford's travelogue detailing his meanderings through Mexico, In Search of the Magic Mushroom (1972)," in which he swore that the fly-agaric was the only equivalent British hallucinogen. He seems not to have tried it, though, and if Sandford, a true psychedelic initiate, was unaware of the Liberty Cap, then that suggests that most other people were as well.
Sandford was not the first playwright to have taken an interest in the plot possibilities afforded by magic mushrooms, however. Another dramatist had put them on the London stage eight years earlier, but once again clothed them in red and white. Henry Livings (192.9-1998) was a British working-class playwright famous for his farces and gritty social commentaries. His eh? debuted at the Aldwych Theatre in 1964, and was performed by the newly formed Royal Shakespeare Company no less, under the direction of Peter Hall.11 The plot revolved around the inauspicious meeting of company boss Mr Price (played by that oleaginous stalwart of British theatre Donald Sinden) and countercultural dandy Valentine Brose (played by the ever-menacing David Warner). In the play, Brose pretends to be looking for work, when in fact he is searching for somewhere to grow his mushrooms. Price's dank factory turns out to offer the perfect conditions. The cli
max of the play comes when the whole cast accidentally eat Brose's crop of mushrooms and the factory is destroyed in the ensuing chaos: a somewhat clumsy metaphor for the dismantling of capitalism.
Four years later the play was made into a film, Work is a Four Letter Word (1968), again directed by Peter Hall and a strong contender for the title of 'worst film ever made'. It is now hard to come by,11 but one of its few highlights occurs when a young Cilia Black Liverpudlian pop singer at the time, later doyenne of Saturday evening light entertainment, and now national treasure clutches a mushroom and with delirious eyes declares that 'God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.'
Livings had clearly never taken mushrooms himself, but had a wellformed idea of the sorts of pronouncements that the psychedelically befuddled were supposed to make. While he was hazy on the details ot exactly which mushrooms Brose used they are described in the script as mauve and prepared by cooking in milk he almost certainly had the fly-agaric in mind. In the film version, Brose's interest had most definitely turned to Mexican mushrooms, for we first see him seated in front of a poster with Teonanacatl written across it in large letters, but nowhere is the idea of a British mushroom countenanced.
The tenacity with which the improbable fly-agaric hogged the psychedelic limelight is explicable given its lurid cultural history, but is still surprising when one considers that scientists had found Libert) Caps to be hallucinogenic as early as 1963. Flushed with success from their Mexican discoveries, Roger Heim and Albert Hofmann (togeth