On the 10th of June 1957 the international edition of Life magazine carried a groundbreaking article that was to profoundly alter the West's attitude towards the wilder side of the natural world. For here was the first ever personal account written by a European describing the extraordinary psychological effects induced by a mushroom deified and ritually worshipped by native Mexicans. Consumption of the sacred Mexican mushroom allowed one to contact the Gods, experience profound visions, and gain mystical knowledge. Or at least these were the most extravagant of the native Mexican beliefs about the mushroom being reported by anthropologists during the first half of the 20th century.
In pre-Columbian times the mysterious mushroom had been known by the Aztecs as 'God's flesh' testifying to it's divine potency. Such veneration ensured the mushroom a cult status amongst native Mexicans despite the violent cultural upheavals wrought by the Spanish Conquest in the 16th century. Thus, although the once mighty Aztec culture was eventually destroyed, the sacred mushroom continued to be used in and around Mexico throughout the Spanish occupation. Yet despite the legendary effects of this peculiar species of fungus, it remained right up until the middle of the 20th century for an outside investigator to finally acquire and eat of the mushroom and hence verify the native's somewhat fantastic claims.
Transmitted solely by word of mouth since the time of the Spanish Conquest, detailed knowledge of the revered mushroom had lain principally in the hands of jealously guarding shamans or native healers who were loath to disclose their botanical secrets to outsiders. For they feared, perhaps justifiably, that the sacred mushroom's supernatural power would be diminished or be used profanely should the untrustworthy white man gain full admittance into it's living mystery. Therefore the 1957 Life article in which the secret of the mushroom was openly exposed, dramatically symbolised the West's bypassing of this long-standing cultural security system. The sacred mushroom had now been forcibly plucked from it's localised shamanic niche and thence presented to the Western world in the form of mass-circulated print with colour photographs and specimen drawings to boot.
Despite its exposure to the prying eyes of the West, the status of the Mexican mushroom remained as lofty and as tantalisingly ethereal as ever, more so even since the Western psyche was just as stunned and awed by it's transcendental visionary effects as were the indigenous Mexicans. In the following decades a psychedelic mushroom cloud of fascination would slowly expand and loom beyond Mexico, eventually extending it's magical influence as far away as Europe and North America.... but at this initial stage in it's sudden growth, the strange mushroom remained a purely Mexican phenomenon.
On the front cover, Life's simple headline read The Discovery of Mushrooms that cause Strange Visions, a rather unusual claim from such a traditionally conservative magazine. The article was included as part of Life magazine's series of Great Adventures, and was written by Robert Gordon Wasson, vice-president of a Wall Street banking firm who, with the aid of his wife, had spent some 30 years of part-time study creating a new scientific discipline - ethnomycology - the study of the cultural and historical use of fungi.
Although such a science is clearly specialised and seemingly remote from the affairs of modern culture, it was only due to their dedicated ethnomycological investigations that the Wassons learned of sacred Mexican mushrooms, sought to find them, experienced them first-hand, and thence gave psilocybin (the as yet unnamed active constituent of the mushroom, pronounced either 'silla-sigh-bin' or 'sigh-le-sigh-bin') to the West. Once discovered, ethnomycological science suddenly acquired a distinctly mystical edge allowing it to breach the domains of religion and psychology. It also provided a new impetus to mankind's enduring quest to access transcendental knowledge and there can be no doubt that Wasson's discovery and vivid description of the effects of the psilocybin were crucial in generating the subsequent cultural wave of psychedelic experimentation that soon followed in the 60's. Moreover, as we shall eventually see, the mushroom also reveals itself as the key to unveiling the secrets of consciousness and the hidden riches of Nature. Theophany, mind, and reality; these three most profound of topics are all met in some way through use of the psilocybin mushroom. But, before we jump into the deep end who, pray, was this Wasson fellow, this financier-cum-adventurer, and how had he come to penetrate the Earth's secret psychedelic dimension? Who was he to bring news of sacred fungi into the Western world?
In effect, Wasson's Life article was timed to coincide with the release of his magnum opus 2-volume book Mushrooms, Russia, and History, co-written with his wife Valentina. It is this work which fully reveals the extent of Wasson's long-standing interest in the cultural use of fungi and how he finally came to be at the door of perception marked 'psilocybin'.
With only 512 handcrafted copies luxuriously bound and printed, Mushrooms, Russia, and History stands as a rare piece of art. Indeed, by the late 70's its value had reached some $2500 making it the most valuable book in existence at that time whose author was still alive. It is a highly polished book, written in a lively style that reflects the love of ethnomycology borne by the Wasson's. It represents the distilled wisdom drawn from their extensive studies into the role that various species of mushroom played in different cultures and culminates in their discovery of the sacred mushroom ceremonies still being conducted in Mexico, a discovery important enough to warrant the further account in the more accessible pages of Life magazine.
The event that originally launched the Wassons on their mushroom crusade was simple, almost trivial, yet it was enough to provoke them into a three-decade-long bout of invaluable research. The Wassons married in 1927 and one day during their honeymoon decided to take a casual stroll in the Catskill mountains of New York. At some stage Valentina, who was Russian by birth, had stopped to pick some wild mushrooms, delighting in such a fortuitous find. Her husband on the other hand, being true to his Anglo-Saxon heritage, was appalled at his wife's avid interest in lethal fungal abominations, especially since she planned to cook and eat them later. After all, were not all fungal growths poisonous toadstools to be avoided like the plague? With growing dismay, Robert Wasson imagined himself waking up the next morning with a corpse instead of a wife.
This pronounced and deep-rooted difference in attitude between the two of them over the culinary virtues of fungi led them to suspect a cultural rift, that there were mycophobic peoples (sensible mushroom haters like the Anglo-Saxons) and mycophilic peoples (reckless mushroom aficionados like the Russians). Furthermore, the Wassons reasoned that there must be some historical reason for these diametrically opposed traditions, due not to something like food availability but rather to cultural and psychological factors. Thus began the Wasson's academic quest to explore this seemingly minor cultural anomaly. From the start both figured that religion somehow played a causal role.
Their intuition proved correct. Research soon unearthed the Siberian cultural history of the Amanita muscaria or fly agaric mushroom, that extraordinary bright red and white-spotted autumnal fungus found throughout the Northern hemisphere and often charmingly depicted in the illustrations adorning the pages of children's books. Indeed, it has been suggested that Lewis Carrol was influenced by knowledge of the Siberian use of the fly agaric and used the information to great effect in his Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in which, you might recall, Alice nibbles on a mushroom which subsequently alters her size.
As we shall see, compared to the psilocybin mushroom, the fly agaric's psychoactivity rates a poor second though it is potentially entheogenic due to the presence of an alkaloid named muscimole. Despite muscimole's entheogenic inferiority to psilocybin, the cultural role and use of the fly agaric mushroom amongst Siberian shamans is beyond dispute and the Wassons uncovered a wealth of literature testifying to this fact. The historical data concerning the shamanic use of the fly agaric mushroom proved to be a link to primitive religion just as the Wassons had originally foreseen, and it soon became clear to them that psychoactive fungi were no small feature of cultural history.
Since the time of Tsar Peter the Great (1672-1725), the Kamchitka Peninsula, the most Eastern part of Russian Siberia, had been visited by travellers, political exiles, explorers, fur traders, and anthropologists. All were to bear witness to the nomadic reindeer herders who ritually ingested fly agaric mushrooms (their only intoxicant) in order to obtain contact with the spiritual dimension. The word 'shaman' itself derives from the Siberian Tungus 'saman' which means diviner, magician, doctor, creator of ecstasy, the mediator between the human world and the supernatural.
The Siberian fly agaric user would sun-dry the mushrooms and later ingest them either alone or mixed with milk or water. If taken alone, the mushroom would first be moistened in the mouths of women who would produce a kind of pellet for the men to swallow.
The effects of consuming this mushroom included convulsions, delirium, visual hallucinations, perceptual distortions of size, feelings of superhuman strength, and a perceived contact with a numinous dimension, this last effect being the most important for the practising shaman whose predominant function is to access the spiritual realm in order to attain supra-mundane knowledge for the good health of his or her tribe.
The most bizarre aspect of this shamanic tradition however, was the habit of.... (readers of a frail disposition should skip the next few sentences).... urine-drinking. Somehow, the Siberians discovered that the active ingredient of the mushroom, muscimole, passed through the body without being metabolised so that by drinking fly agaric-spiked urine one could prolong intoxication. Possibly the Siberians learned of this odd fact by observing reindeer who not only reputedly eat the fly agaric themselves with much gusto, but also have an equal passion for human urine, so much so that the Siberians reindeer herders considered it dangerous to pee out in the open!
The rather disturbing and unpalatable practice of drinking psychoactive urine attained great significance in Wasson's later work in the 60's since urine-drinking is mentioned in the Rig Veda, the ancient religious scripture of India. Written in Sanskrit and derived from the oral traditions of the Indo-Europeans who migrated down into the Indus Valley some three and a half thousand years ago, the Rig Veda eventually went on to influence the development of Hinduism.
Of the 1000 holy hymns in the Rig Veda, over 100 are dedicated solely to the divine plant Soma and it's spectacular psychological effects. Because urine-drinking is clearly alluded to in these hymns deifying Soma and from analysing its poetic description, Wasson came to the conclusion that the fly agaric mushroom was the sacred Soma worshipped by the ancient Indo-Europeans. Indeed, in some parts of India, followers of the Vedic tradition still perform a religious ceremony in which Soma is ingested only they now utilise an inactive surrogate species of plant. Wasson's identification of Soma was, at the time he made the claim, one of only a handful of serious attempts to explore and name the legendary Soma plant, and his identification has generally come to be accepted by Vedic scholars to this day.
The shamanic use of fly agaric mushrooms by primitive Siberians seemed to date far back into history as there were various legends that spoke of its mythical origins. For instance, a Koryak legend tells of a hero named Big Raven who was able to attain immense strength by eating spirits given to him by the god Vahiyinin - the god of existence. By spitting upon the earth, Vahiyinin caused the necessary spirits to grow, these being fly agaric mushrooms with their ability to provide supernatural strength and wisdom.
The Wassons theorised that it was this archaic shamanic practice of fly agaric ingestion, so well reflected in legend and mythology, that had eventually lead to the mycophobic pre-Christian taboos against eating mushrooms which were still evidently shared by most of the peoples living around the shores of the North Sea. In other words, since the mushroom was used mainly by shamans in a ritual context, cultural injunctions and taboos would conceivably have begun to evolve in order to stop others wantonly utilising it's strange power. Or, it is just as likely that through migrations and invasions misinformation spread regarding the true nature of the mushroom's effects. Through such typical cultural mechanisms as these, the psychoactive fly agaric mushroom gradually came to attain a mythical status, guaranteeing it cultural immortality as it progressed as the stuff of legend from generation to generation.
As it's shamanic use diffused out from Russia, whilst some peoples gradually came to eschew the mushroom, others embraced it's effects. Not only did the Aryan people who migrated down into the Indus Valley 3500 years ago bring with them their religious cult of Soma, later still, some 1000 years BC., we find artistic representations of mushrooms on Swedish, Norwegian and Danish Bronze Age objects. On bronze artefacts like razors have been found mushroom motifs (generally stylised cross-sectional views of a mushroom) which depict the mushroom in a way that suggests that it was an object of worship. Since the fly agaric mushroom abounds in Scandinavia, these motifs are thought to represent a similar fly agaric-worshipping cult to those of Siberia.
Apart from Siberian folklore many European folktales also testify to the enigma of the fly agaric mushroom, providing an echo of the distant cultural interconnections of the past. Yugoslav peasants take the mushroom's supernatural origin back to the time of pre-Christian Nature gods. The legend relates that Votan, chief of all the gods and a potent magician and healer, was riding his magical horse through the countryside when suddenly demons appeared and started chasing him. As he fled, his horse galloped so fast that flecks of bloodied foam flew from its mouth. Wherever this bloody foam fell, fly agarics sprang up.
Hungarians call the fly agaric 'boland gamba' or the 'mad mushroom'. Austrians and Germans used to speak of the 'fool's mushroom' and were wont to paraphrase British comedian Tony Hancock's "have you gone raving mad?" with "have you eaten crazy mushrooms?"
The Wassons also analysed the vast array of words used to describe mushrooms in different cultures and the latent metaphors that such words conveyed; words like 'toadstool' for instance which links the toad to the mushroom, the toad being a creature much maligned in myth and folklore. The Wassons also conjectured that the 'fly' in fly agaric was not due to its supposed insecticidal effect but because the fly used to be associated with demonic power (Beelzebub is 'Lord of the Flies'), and was thus fearfully associated with the mysterious mushroom.
In short, the Wassons uncovered a vast cultural diffusion of homogeneous mushroom lore indicative of a common origin, the psychoactive fly agaric mushroom most likely being the instigator. Wasson later summed up his views in the following way:
"Death will come if the layman presumes to eat this forbidden fruit, the Fruit of Knowledge, the Divine Mushroom of Immortality that the .....poets of the Rig Veda celebrated. The fear of this 'death' has lived on as an emotional residue long after the shaman and his religion have faded from memory, and here is the explanation for the mycophobia that has prevailed throughout Northern Europe, in the Germanic and Celtic worlds."
At this point the Wassons might well have ended their mycological investigations, an interesting enough climax since they had left the fungal world and ventured into the domain of primitive religion. The plot however, was going to thicken as the fly agaric became overshadowed by the far more powerful figure of the psilocybin mushroom, a mushroom whose living mystery Gordon Wasson would eventually confront within the inner sanctums of his soul.
In 1952 an acquaintance of the Wassons, the noted poet and historical writer Robert Graves, wrote a crucial letter informing them of a supposed secret mushroom cult still in existence in Mexico. Graves included in his letter a clipping from a Canadian pharmaceutical journal which discussed finds made by Richard Evans Schultes years earlier. It transpired that Schultes, one of the world's leading ethnobotanists attached to Harvard had, in 1938, identified a species of Panaeoleus mushroom as being the sacred sacrament allegedly employed by Mexican Indians. At that time, only this one entheogenic species had been identified by Schultes and although a few European people had observed a native Mexican mushroom ceremony, no outsiders had been permitted to partake of the mushroom itself. This is significant, for without actually personally experiencing the psilocybin mushroom, one can only guess at it's effects and therefore the early anthropological observations passed by without much interest.
Once the Wassons learned of these beckoning facts, armed as they were with an already detailed knowledge of fly agaric mushroom history, it was only natural for them to heed Graves' investigational indications and focus their attention upon Mexico. If mushroom ceremonies were still being practised there then it would be testimony to the shamanic use of fungi not limited to the pages of history.
Through associates, the Wassons were soon in avid correspondence with one Eunice Pike, an American linguistic student and bible translator (which is short for missionary) who had been living amongst Mazatec Indians in Huautla, Mexico for over 15 years. Having become familiar with the native customs and beliefs about certain sacred mushrooms, she was only too willing to share her knowledge with the Wassons.
Miss Pike informed them by letter that one Indian boy had referred to the mushroom as a gift from Jesus, no less than the blood of Christ. The Indians also said that it helped 'good people', killing 'bad people' or making them crazy. Furthermore, the Indians were sure that Jesus spoke to them whilst in the 'bemushroomed' state. Everyone whom Pike asked agreed that they were seeing into Heaven itself through the mushroom.
As well as highlighting the on-going integration of the Christian faith into native Indian culture, the Indians' claims indicated that the mushroom was highly powerful in its psychological effect, able to induce a radical alteration of consciousness still relatively new to Western science. It was also clear that the normal procedure was for a 'wiseman' or shaman to eat the mushroom on behalf of another usually in order to heal, this being the classic social function of the shaman found in most of the world's native cultures.
Miss Pike ended her initial informative and tantalising letter by wishing that the natives would consult the bible instead of resorting to consumption of the strange mushroom, a remark natural enough to anyone concerned with preaching the bible and unfamiliar with the psychological territory accessed through psilocybin. But still, is it not odd that someone so obviously religiously inclined, as this woman was, should not have detected something of spiritual importance in the Indians' claims? If so many of them readily attested to the virtues of the sacred mushroom why did she not try them for herself? After all, she mentions no harmful effects apart from the dangers of possessing a 'bad heart'.
What is the nature of this fear which would prevent a single open-minded experiment with such fungi? How can one claim to be fully religious and not take the testimonies of shamans seriously? This was an anomaly which was to continually crop up in the relations between the Western psyche and the mushroom. Psilocybin would come to generate absolute awe or absolute rejection in those who confronted it, which is evidence that something significant is at work in the actual experience. If there was nothing of real interest to be gained from such visionary substances, if the experiences were purely limited personal fantasies, then there would be no stimulational force with which to generate enduring fascination. However, as I will show, many have claimed that psilocybin does offer some great knowledge about our existence, that it can yield soulful insights about reality. This is why the psilocybin mushroom experience has remained such an abstruse phenomenon and why opinions are so divided.
Sensing in the letter of Miss Pike's that there was indeed some great revelational discovery to be made, the Wassons decided to travel as soon as possible to Huautla, and in 1953 they did so. There could be no mistaking the aroma of the ethnomycological Holy Grail as they neared its living presence. As an aside, they also realised that to judge from Miss Pike's description, the mushroom being used by these Indians was not the Panaeoleus species previously identified by Schultes, and this was a further reason for scholarly investigation.
By August 1953 the Wassons had managed to enlist the help of a Mexican curandero or shaman and this was an achievement in itself since the Indians were reluctant to discuss the mushroom with European outsiders. Under the pretence of wanting supernaturally inspired news of their son, the Wassons were permitted to take part in a mushroom rite in which the shaman would ingest sacred mushrooms in order to gain the requested information. Unfortunately the shaman was the only person allowed to consume the fungi and the Wassons were forced to remain uninitiated.
The shaman, under the effects of psilocybin, made 3 specific predictions concerning Wasson's son which, at the time, he (Wasson) politely humoured as he had no real inkling into psilocybin's latent ability to produce feats of clairvoyance. His interest was, after all, still predominately academic and any kind of supernatural utterances were to be taken with a large pinch of salt. As it later transpired, all 3 of the shaman's predictions were borne out and Gordon Wasson was at a loss to explain this. Was it coincidence? Or was it a genuine case of the paranormal? Whatever it was, the mysterious mushrooms demanded closer scrutiny for they seemed to promise much more of interest. Wasson was being drawn ever nearer, as his lifelong adventure drew to an epic climax.
A fully detailed witness account of the above mushroom ceremony was to be the culminating chapter of Mushrooms, Russia, and History, though just as the book was going to press in June of 1955 a new breakthrough was made. In fact, it was the ultimate breakthrough and became the highlight of Gordon Wasson's scholarly career. It also generated another chapter in the book and the seminal piece for Life magazine. The middle-aged New York banker-turned-ethnomycologist became the first white man on record to deliberately consume sacred Mexican mushrooms and thus taste the entheogenic glory of natural psilocybin. He had sought and finally accessed one of the most remarkable experiences to be had upon this Earth, and thanks to his lifelong persistent efforts our enduring quest to uncover the true nature of reality and the true bounds of conscious experience became suddenly enhanced as psilocybin made it's extraordinary psychedelic presence felt. Indeed, for our purposes, it is rather apt that our man Wasson be provided with such an informative and illuminating meal at this time - almost an Earthly calling-card in fact - as only a few months earlier Nature had consumed the great Einstein. At least it was apt in a relative kind of way for anyone deeply interested in the subtle-yet-never-malicious force of such a wily killer/creator as Nature...
In telling of his experiences in Life magazine, Wasson comes across as a kind of Prometheus figure, bringing the world news of a hitherto secret gift of the Gods. Amongst dreamy 50's Technicolor photographs and numerous advertisements for miracle filter cigarettes and brands of alcohol, Wasson's article shines out like some otherworldly beacon signalling the awesome visionary power latent within the Mexican mushroom. We can only guess at the amazement that this article must have evoked in the psyche of a reader soaked in 1950's thinking and values. This was the decade of Cadillac's, rock'n roll, television, and electronic gadgetry, a decade in which the post-war generation could live happily upon the bountiful fruits of consumerism. Having recently conquered both Everest and the secret of the atom, Man seemed truly on the ascent. Unlimited atomic energy and unlimited material growth were on the cards. Nature had been tamed and set to work for our own ends.
Of course, what no-one realised at this time was the devastating effect upon the environment that such a material culture would wreak. As yet unconceived in holistic organismic terms, the natural environment was a place to take the kids at the weekend, not the grounds for concern let alone the grounds for a bizarre shamanic consummation. And, after all, weren't shamans just primitive witchdoctors who spouted all sorts of unsophisticated nonsense? It must therefore have been with some surprise that Life's readers found themselves being informed about visionary fungi, a facet of the environment still wild and untamed which spoke of a very different kind of reality to that of the American dream.
Deep in the south of Mexico in a small village in Oaxaca, Wasson recounts to the readers of Life how he had once more gained the confidence of a local shaman, a woman named Maria Sabina under whose guidance he was allowed to ingest sacred mushrooms. Judging from the photographs included in his account, the house where the ceremony took place was small and sparsely furnished, with various Christian icons on display. The paucity of modern furnishing however, was to belie the luxuriousness of the visionary experience that followed the ingestion of the mushrooms, the surroundings all but melting into insignificance.
At 10.30pm Wasson received six pairs of mushrooms from Maria Sabina as she commenced the auspicious rite. At long last he held the elusive mystery in his trembling hands. Tangible and open to physical analysis the fungi were no native myth or figment of the imagination. But what of their legendary effect? All theory and hearsay became vanquished as Wasson ate his destiny.
Like all good empiricists Wasson determined to remain objectively aloof and ward off any major psychological effects in order that he study more clearly the nature of the legendary shift in consciousness engendered by the mushroom. As noble as such efforts are however, they generally prove futile in the face of potent entheogens as one is forced to wholly succumb to the emergent global alteration in mentation.
As he lay in the dark confines of the hut, the power latent within the mushroom gradually introduced itself to Wasson's consciousness. Visions began to unfold before his eyes, visions so intense and so profound that they breached the ineffable realms of religious mysticism. They began as vividly coloured art motifs of an angular nature as found on textiles and carpets. Then the visions began to evolve into resplendent palaces and gardens laid over with precious stones. At one point, Wasson perceived a great mythological beast drawing a regal chariot. Still later it seemed as if his spirit had broken free from the constraints of his body and lay suspended in mid-air viewing vast mountains rising up to the Heavens. Wasson confessed that the sights were so sharp and clear as to be more real than anything that he had previously seen with his eyes, somewhat akin to archetypes and the Platonic realm of Ideas.
In Mushrooms, Russia, and History, Wasson's description of his visionary experiences is more explicit than in the Life piece. What had started out as a unique work of ethnomycology touching upon ancient Siberian shamanism, had now transformed itself into a personal testimony to the mystical shamanic experience. Coming from a man normally concerned with the world of finance, this is a truly remarkable turn of events, even the more so since he was not overtly religious. It was also the case that any of Wasson's residual mycophobia had now been utterly obliterated as the incontrovertible truth of psilocybin-induced shamanic ecstasy seized his soul. The sense of awe, the sense that he had been witness to an event of staggering cultural significance radiates these more detailed accounts, the book subsequently ending as a veritable religious treatise.
At one point during the mushroom ceremony Wasson thought it as if:
"...the visions themselves were about to be transcended and dark gates reaching upward beyond sight were about to part, and we were to find ourselves in the presence of the Ultimate. We seemed to be flying at the dark gates as a small swallow at a dazzling lighthouse, and the gates were to part and admit us. But they did not open, and with a thud we fell back gasping."
Although the visions lasted only a minute or so by watch, Wasson noted that he experienced them as having an aeonic duration as though he had passed out of the confines of normal time. He was also certain that the visions originated from either from the Unconscious or from an inherited source of racial memory, concepts borrowed from the work of Carl Jung with which Wasson was obviously familiar. He readily conceded that the intense visionary episodes arose within him, yet they did not recall anything previously seen with his own eyes. He wondered if maybe the mushroom visions were a subconscious transmutation of things read, seen, and imagined, so much transmuted that they appeared to be new and unfamiliar. Or, mused Wasson, did the mushroom allow one to penetrate some new realm of the psyche?
I assume here that Wasson was referring to something more than a personal Unconscious, and more like an organised field of intelligence or a transcendental sentience of some sort, interpreted by native shamans as a Great Spirit or God. Wasson failed to elaborate upon this matter, preferring to stick to more acceptable ideas and he ventured no further than Jungian territory in his enthusiastic speculation.
Wasson was also struck by the fact that the dazzling visionary material engendered by the mushroom must reside somewhere within the mind, in a kind of latent state until the mushroom's psychoactive constituents stirred them into activity. But how, he wondered, could it be that we could all be carrying around an inventory of such wonders deep within us, wonders that the mushroom could unleash so spectacularly? Perhaps, he suggested, some creative faculty of the brain was stimulated by the sacred mushroom and that this capacity for creative thought was somehow linked to the perception of the divine.
The visionary effects of the mushroom, so clearly related in some way to the experiences of religious mystics, also suggested to Wasson that such fungi might be connected in some significant way to the very origins of the religious impulse, an idea he first introduced in the Life piece and which he would constantly return to for the rest of his life. Wasson asks us if perhaps the idea of a deity arose after our primitive ancestors first consumed psychoactive mushrooms, surely a compelling scenario if we are pushed to explain the origins of religious mysticism in essentially physical terms. He was later to help coin the contemporary word entheogen to refer to these sorts of plants and fungi, a word which, although devised to mean 'becoming divine within', is more often considered to mean 'generating the divine within'.
Readers of the Life article were also informed as to what the Mexican Indians themselves had to say about the mushroom. The Indians claimed that they "carry you there where God is". Always the mushroom was referred to with awe and reverence. They were not some common drug like alcohol to be taken at the drop of a hat in order to drown one's sorrows or deaden oneself to reality. On the contrary, the Indian shamans used the fungus for oracular reasons in order to cure and prophesy. Wasson was intimately familiar with the Indian's sacred traditions and he was at pains to portray this cultural phenomenon to his readers in the respectful light it deserved. No Indian ate the mushroom frivolously for excitement, rather they spoke of their use as "muy delicado", that is, perilous.
A deeply inspired man, Wasson was not only the first Westerner to document the psilocybin experience, he was also the first to try and account for the mysterious effects in reasonable psychological terms, his tentative speculations all remaining valid today. It is remarkable to think that had he not had such a profoundly spiritual experience, or had his mind not been able to cope with the onslaught of a visionary dialogue, then the Mexican mushroom might well have remained a buried phenomenon to this day. Fortunately for us, this was not so and the entheogenic mystery is very much alive and 'unleashed', and, as will later become clear, is nearer to us than we might suppose.
Regarding Wasson's brave attempts to provide a reasonable explanation for his experiences, I will deal with what is currently known about 'the neuropsychological how' of psilocybin in later chapters. For now it is enough to recognise that the mushroom had proved itself to be the psychological analogue of physical fire, its dazzling effects able to brush and enliven the very soul of Homo sapiens.
To simply dismiss Wasson's visionary encounter as no more than the drug-induced fantasy of a middle-aged man is to miss the point completely. The significance of such a natural entheogenic experience for psychological science alone is enough to warrant our attention since psilocybin is clearly able to galvanise highly constructive systems of thought and emotion into action - that much can be said at the absolute least. Any substance able to evoke an organised flow of symbolic information seemingly issuing from somewhere outside of one's sense of self, or ego, has got to be worth studying, especially if the experience appears more real than real. And as far as the roots of the religious impulse and the actual experience of sacred transcendence is concerned, if we are truly interested in such things, if we are truly concerned with perceiving our existence in a way that is beyond the confines of a culturally-conditioned secular perspective, then we should surely have cause to consider the visionary mushroom experience. Whereas the most limited explanation for this psychological phenomenon, say in terms of creative imagination on an unprecedented scale, is still immensely important and fascinating, the more radical and speculative scenarios - which seem compelling when one has personally tasted such exhilarating forms of consciousness - offer an even greater and more brilliant conceptual view of reality.
It is here, in the personal impact of the psilocybin experience upon one's perceptions of reality, that the importance of Wasson's work resides, for he was able to verbalise his psychedelic encounters in a way that captured their compelling and alluring character. Wasson had evidently shown how sacred realms of experience were not to be found in churches or in the blessings of popes and priests, but could be accessed through the consumption of entheogenic fungi. Wasson had effectively lain such a natural option at the feet of the modern world.
At the end of his seminal account, Wasson discusses the accessibility of the mushroom-induced visionary realms to large numbers people whose psychological disposition was perhaps not in the same league as traditional visionaries like, for example, the poet William Blake. If Wasson was able to briefly become a visionary through eating a simple mushroom then no doubt others would want to follow suit. This inevitable social consequence of his tale was to become manifest in the next decade to a degree that he could never have anticipated, for his news of visionary fungi was instrumental in attracting the West's interest toward entheogens. As Blake had written, once the doors of perception were opened then the infinite beauty of reality could be perceived. Whether he had planned it or not, Wasson, like his contemporary Aldous Huxley, now had his foot firmly set between those perceptual doors.
As yet unnamed, its chemical structure still unknown, psilocybin thus began it's gradual infiltration of the modern technological world, flowing for the first time in and out of European human nervous systems, facilitating a spectacular kind of cerebral information processing in which the blazing divinity of Nature was potentially discernible. The world would never be the same again, as intellectuals, artists, and spiritual seekers with the aid of the psilocybin mushroom began scratching away at the restricted surface of normal everyday awareness. Such intrepid peering beyond the confines of routine perception seemed to reveal much, much more in the way of reality, allowing access to information of the most stimulating and enchanting kind, as if the mushroom was able to offer up all of Nature's best kept secrets.
However, despite the widespread interest generated by his Life piece, Wasson later chose, perhaps wisely, to distance himself from the 60's psychedelic hippy culture revolving as it was around synthetic LSD. Instead, he concerned himself with investigating the role of the fly agaric mushroom in ancient Indo-European Soma cults. He also went on to make invaluable contributions to our knowledge about the use of psilocybin mushrooms by the Aztec and Mayan civilisations of ancient Mesoamerica, and we shall now step briefly back in time in order to view these historical entheogenic traditions before bringing the history of psilocybin fully up to date.