Illegal since 1970, psilocybin mushrooms were at the time chiefly of interest to the counterculture, as a gentler, more natural alternative to LSD, but very little was known about their habitat, distribution, life cycle, or potency. It was believed that psychedelic mushrooms were native to southern Mexico, where R. Gordon Wasson had “discovered” them in 1955. By the 1970s, most of the psilocybin in circulation in America was being imported from Latin America or grown domestically from spores of Latin American species, mainly cubensis.
The Evergreen group chalked up several notable accomplishments: they identified and published three new psilocybin species, perfected methods for growing them indoors, and developed techniques for measuring levels of psilocin and psilocybin in mushrooms. But perhaps the group’s most important contribution was to shift the focus of attention among people who cared about Psilocybes from southern Mexico to the Pacific Northwest. Stamets and his colleagues were finding new species of psilocybin mushrooms all around them and publishing their findings. “You could almost feel the earth’s axis tilting to this corner of the world.” Anywhere you went in the Pacific Northwest, Stamets recalls, you could see people tracing peculiar patterns through farm fields and lawns, bent over in what he calls “the psilocybin stoop.”
During this period, the Pacific Northwest emerged as a new center of gravity in American psychedelic culture, with the Evergreen State College serving as its de facto intellectual hub and R&D facility. Beginning in 1976, Stamets and his Evergreen colleagues organized a series of now-legendary mushroom conferences, bringing together the leading lights of both the credentialed and the amateur wings of the psychedelic world, and during my first evening at his house Stamets dug out some VHS tapes of the last of these conferences, held in 1999. The footage had been shot by Les Blank, but as often happened with coverage of such psychedelic gatherings, no one could ever quite get it together to edit the raw footage, so raw it remains.
“Conference” might not do justice to what now appeared on Stamets’s television. We watched as several of the attendees—I spotted Dr. Andrew Weil, best known for his books on holistic medicine; the psychedelic chemist Sasha Shulgin and his wife, Ann; and the New York Botanical Garden mycologist Gary Lincoff—arrived to great fanfare in a psychedelically painted school bus piloted by Ken Kesey. (The bus was called Farther, the successor to Further, the original Merry Prankster bus, evidently no longer roadworthy.) The proceedings looked more like a Dionysian revel than a conference, yet there were some serious talks. Jonathan Ott delivered a brilliant lecture on the history of “entheogens”—a term he helped coin. He traced their use all the way back to the Eleusinian mysteries of the Greeks, through the “pharmocratic inquisition,” when the Spanish conquest suppressed the Mesoamerican mushroom cults, and forward to the “entheogenic reformation” that has been under way since R. Gordon Wasson’s discovery that those cults had survived in Mexico. Along the way, Ott made an offhand reference to the “placebo sacraments” of the Catholic Eucharist.
Then came footage of a big costume ball with lingering close-ups of a giant punch bowl that had been spiked with dozens of different kinds of psychedelic mushrooms. Stamets pointed out several prominent mycologists and ethnobotanists among the revelers; many of them dressed as specific kinds of fungus—Amanita muscaria, button mushrooms, and so on. Stamets himself appeared dressed as a bear.
When one is screening raw footage of people in costume tripping on mushrooms and dancing sloppily to a reggae band, a little goes a long way, so after a few minutes we flicked off the TV. I asked Stamets about earlier iterations of the conference, some of which seemed to have a slightly more interesting ratio of intellectual substance to Dionysian revelry. In 1977, for instance, Stamets had the opportunity to play host to two of his heroes: Albert Hofmann and R. Gordon Wasson, whose 1957 article in Life magazine describing the first psilocybin journey ever taken by a Westerner—his own—helped launch the psychedelic revolution in America.
Stamets mentioned that he collected original copies of that issue of Life, which occasionally show up on eBay and at flea markets, and on my way upstairs to bed that night we stopped in his office so I could have a look at it. The issue was dated May 13, 1957, and Bert Lahr was on the cover, mugging for the camera in a morning suit and a bowler hat. But the most prominent cover line was devoted to Wasson’s notorious article: “The Discovery of Mushrooms That Cause Strange Visions.” Stamets said I could have a copy, and I took it to bed.
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FROM THE VANTAGE OF TODAY, it is hard to believe that psilocybin was introduced to the West by a vice president of J. P. Morgan in the pages of a mass-circulation magazine owned by Henry Luce; two more establishment characters it would be difficult to dream up. But in 1957, psychedelic drugs had not yet acquired any of the cultural and political stigmas that, a decade later, would weigh on our attitudes toward them. At the time, LSD was not well known outside the small community of medical professionals who regarded it as a potential miracle drug for psychiatric illness and alcohol addiction.
As it happened, the Time-Life founder and editor in chief, Henry Luce, along with his wife, Clare Boothe Luce, had personal knowledge of psychedelic drugs, and they shared the enthusiasm of the medical and cultural elites who had embraced them in the 1950s. In 1964, Luce told a gathering of his staff that he and his wife had been taking LSD “under doctor’s supervision”; Clare Boothe Luce recalled that during her first trip in the 1950s she saw the world “through the eyes of a happy and gifted child.” Before 1965, when a moral panic erupted over LSD, Time-Life publications were enthusiastic boosters of psychedelics, and Luce took a personal interest in directing his magazine’s coverage of them.
So when R. Gordon Wasson approached Life magazine with his story, he could not have knocked on a more receptive door. Life gave him a generous contract that, in addition to the princely sum of eighty-five hundred dollars, granted him final approval on the editing of his article, as well as the wording of headlines and captions. It specified that Wasson’s account include a “description of your own sensations and fantasies under the influence of the mushroom.”
As I paged through the issue in bed that evening, the world of 1957 seemed like a faraway planet, even though I lived on it, albeit as a two-year-old. My parents subscribed to Life, so the issue probably sat in the big pile in our den for a stretch of my childhood. Life magazine was a mass medium in 1957, with a circulation of 5.7 million.
“Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” in which “a New York banker goes to Mexico’s mountains to participate in the age-old rituals of Indians who chew strange growths that produce visions,” opened on a spread with a full-page color photograph of a Mazatec woman turning a mushroom over a smoky fire and goes on for no fewer than fifteen pages. The headline is the first known reference to “magic mushrooms,” a phrase that, it turns out, was coined not by a stoned hippie but by a Time-Life headline writer.
“We chewed and swallowed these acrid mushrooms, saw visions, and emerged from the experience awestruck,” Wasson tells us, somewhat breathlessly, in the first paragraph. “We had come from afar to attend a mushroom rite but had expected nothing so staggering as the virtuosity of the performing curanderas [healers] and the astonishing effects of the mushrooms. [The photographer] and I were the first white men in recorded history to eat the divine mushrooms, which for centuries had been a secret of certain Indian peoples living far from the great world in southern Mexico.”
Wasson then proceeds to tell the improbable tale of how someone like him, “a banker by occupation,” would end up eating magic mushrooms in the dirt-floored basement of a thatch-roofed, adobe-walled home in a Oaxacan town so remote it could only be reached by means of an eleven-hour trek through the mountains by mule.
The story begins in 1927, during Wasson’s honeymoon in the Catskills. During an afternoon stroll in the autumn woods, his bride, a Russian physician named Valentina, spotte
d a patch of wild mushrooms, before which “she knelt in poses of adoration.” Wasson knew nothing of “those putrid, treacherous excrescences” and was alarmed when Valentina proposed to cook them for dinner. He refused to partake. “Not long married,” Wasson wrote, “I thought to wake up the next morning a widower.”
The couple became curious as to how two cultures could hold such diametrically opposed attitudes toward mushrooms. They soon embarked on a research project to understand the origins of both “mycophobia” and “mycophilia,” terms that the Wassons introduced. They concluded that each Indo-European people is by cultural inheritance either mycophobic (for example, the Anglo-Saxons, Celts, and Scandinavians) or mycophilic (the Russians, Catalans, and Slavs) and proposed an explanation for the powerful feelings in both camps: “Was it not probable that, long ago, long before the beginnings of written history, our ancestors had worshipped a divine mushroom? This would explain the aura of the supernatural in which all fungi seem to be bathed.”* The logical next question presented itself to the Wassons—“What kind of mushroom was once worshipped, and why?”—and with that question in hand they embarked on a thirty-year quest to find the divine mushroom. They hoped to obtain evidence for the audacious theory that Wasson had developed and that would occupy him until his death: that the religious impulse in humankind had been first kindled by the visions inspired by a psychoactive mushroom.
As a prominent financier, R. Gordon Wasson had the resources and the connections to enlist all manner of experts and scholars in his quest. One of these was the poet Robert Graves, who shared the Wassons’ interest in the role of mushrooms in history and in the common origins of the world’s myths and religions. In 1952, Graves sent Wasson a clipping from a pharmaceutical journal that made reference to a psychoactive mushroom used by sixteenth-century Mesoamerican Indians. The article was based on research done in Central America by Richard Evans Schultes, a Harvard ethnobotanist who studied the uses of psychoactive plants and fungi by indigenous cultures. Schultes was a revered professor whom students recall shooting blowguns in class and keeping a basket of peyote buttons outside his Harvard office; he trained a generation of American ethnobotanists, including Wade Davis, Mark Plotkin, Michael Balick, Tim Plowman, and Andrew Weil. Along with Wasson, Schultes is one of a handful of figures whose role in bringing psychedelics to the West has gone underappreciated; indeed, some of the first seeds of that movement have quite literally sat in the Harvard herbarium since the 1930s, more than a quarter century before Timothy Leary set foot on the campus. For it was Schultes who first identified teonanácatl—the sacred mushroom of the Aztecs and their descendants—as well as ololiuqui, the seeds of the morning glory, which the Aztecs also consumed sacramentally and which contain an alkaloid closely related to LSD.
Up to this point, the Wassons had been looking toward Asia for their divine mushroom; Schultes reoriented their quest, pointing them toward the Americas, where there were scattered reports, from missionaries and anthropologists, suggesting that an ancient mushroom cult might yet survive in the remote mountain villages of southern Mexico.
In 1953, Wasson made the first of ten trips to Mexico and Central America, several of them to the village of Huautla de Jiménez, deep in the mountains of Oaxaca, where one of his informants—a missionary—had told him healers were using mushrooms. At first the locals were tight-lipped. Some told Wasson they had never heard of the mushrooms, or that they were no longer used, or that the practice survived only in some other, distant village.
Their reticence was not surprising. The sacramental use of psychoactive mushrooms had been kept secret from Westerners for four hundred years, since shortly after the Spanish conquest, when it was driven underground. The best account we have of the practice is that of the Spanish missionary priest Bernardino de Sahagún, who in the sixteenth century described the use of mushrooms in an Aztec religious observance:
These they ate before dawn with honey, and they also drank cacao before dawn. The mushrooms they ate with honey when they began to get heated from them, they began to dance, and some sang, and some wept . . . Some cared not to sing, but would sit down in their rooms, and stayed there pensive-like. And some saw in a vision that they were dying, and they wept, and others saw in a vision that some wild beast was eating them, others saw in a vision that they were taking captives in war . . . others saw in a vision that they were to commit adultery and that their heads were to be bashed in therefor . . . Then when the drunkenness of the mushrooms had passed, they spoke one with another about the visions that they had seen.
The Spanish sought to crush the mushroom cults, viewing them, rightly, as a mortal threat to the authority of the church. One of the first priests Cortés brought to Mexico to Christianize the Aztecs declared that the mushrooms were the flesh of “the devil that they worshipped, and . . . with this bitter food they received their cruel god in communion.” Indians were interrogated and tortured into confessing the practice, and mushroom stones—many of them foot-tall chiseled basalt sculptures of the sacred fungi, presumably used in religious ceremonies—were smashed. The Inquisition would bring dozens of charges against Native Americans for crimes involving both peyote and psilocybin, in what amounted to an early battle in the war on drugs—or, to be more precise, the war on certain plants and fungi. In 1620, the Roman Catholic Church declared that the use of plants for divination was “an act of superstition condemned as opposed to the purity and integrity of our Holy Catholic Faith.”
It’s not hard to see why the church would have reacted so violently to the sacramental use of mushrooms. The Nahuatl word for the mushrooms—flesh of the gods—must have sounded to Spanish ears like a direct challenge to the Christian Sacrament, which of course was also understood to be the flesh of the gods, or rather of the one God. Yet the mushroom sacrament enjoyed an undeniable advantage over the Christian version. It took an act of faith to believe that eating the bread and wine of the Eucharist gave the worshipper access to the divine, an access that had to be mediated by a priest and the church liturgy. Compare that with the Aztec sacrament, a psychoactive mushroom that granted anyone who ate it direct, unmediated access to the divine—to visions of another world, a realm of the gods. So who had the more powerful sacrament? As a Mazatec Indian told Wasson, the mushrooms “carry you there where god is.”
The Roman Catholic Church might have been the first institution to fully recognize the threat to its authority posed by a psychedelic plant, but it certainly wouldn’t be the last.
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ON THE NIGHT OF JUNE 29–30, 1955, R. Gordon Wasson experienced the sacred mushrooms firsthand. On his third trip to Huautla, he had persuaded María Sabina, a sixty-one-year-old Mazatec and a respected curandera in the village, to let him and his photographer not only observe but take part in a ceremony in which no outsider had ever participated. The velada, as the ceremony was called, took place after dark in the basement of the home of a local official Wasson had enlisted in his cause, before a simple altar “adorned with Christian images.” To protect her identity, Wasson called Sabina “Eva Mendez,” discerning “a spirituality in her expression that struck us at once.” After cleaning the mushrooms and passing them through the purifying smoke of incense, Sabina handed Wasson a cup containing six pairs of mushrooms; she called them “the little children.” They tasted awful: “acrid with a rancid odor that repeated itself.” Even so, “I could not have been happier: this was the culmination of six years of pursuit.”
The visions that now arrived “were in vivid color, always harmonious. They began with art motifs, angular such as might decorate carpets or textiles or wallpaper . . . Then they evolved into palaces with courts, arcades, gardens—resplendent palaces all laid over with semiprecious stone. Then I saw a mythological beast drawing a regal chariot.” And so forth.
Wasson’s original field notebooks are in the botanical library at Harvard. In a neat but somewhat idiosyncratic han
d, he kept meticulous track of the time that night, from arrival (8:15) to ingestion (10:40) to the snuffing out of the last candle (10:45).
After that, the handwriting disintegrates. Some sentences now appear upside down, and Wasson’s descriptions of what he felt and saw gradually break into fragments:
Nausea as vision distorted. Touching wall—made the world of visions seem to crumble. Light from above door and below—moon. Table took new forms—creatures, great processional vehicle, architectural patterns of radiant color. Nausea. No photos once the [illegible] seized us.
Architectural
Eyes out of focus—the candles we saw them double.
Oriental splendor—Alhambra—chariot
Table transformed
Contrast vision and reality—I touch wall.
“The visions were not blurred or uncertain,” he writes. Indeed, “they seemed more real to me than anything I had ever seen with my own eyes.” At this point, the reader begins to feel the literary hand of Aldous Huxley exerting a certain pressure on both Wasson’s prose and his perceptions: “I felt that I was now seeing plain, whereas ordinary vision gives us an imperfect view.” Wasson’s own doors of perception had been flung wide open: “I was seeing the archetypes, the Platonic ideas, that underlie the imperfect images of everyday life.” To read Wasson is to feel as if you were witnessing the still-fresh and malleable conventions of the psychedelic narrative gradually solidifying before your eyes. Whether Aldous Huxley invented these tropes, or was merely their stenographer, is hard to say, but they would inform the genre, as well as the experience, from here on. “For the first time the word ecstasy took on real meaning,” Wasson recalls. “For the first time it did not mean someone else’s state of mind.”