HUMPHRY OSMOND--Humphry Osmond was Clinical Director of Saskatchewan Hospital in Canada in the mid 1950's where he and his colleagues had been conducting experiments using the psychedelics to treat alcoholism. Aldous Huxley as chance would have it read an essay by John Smythie and Humphry Osmond published in the Hibbert Journal in which they state, "One would have thought that anyone, concerned in devising systems of psychology based on the concept of the conscious mind, would have utilized such a prolific source of material as mescaline offers". Aldous Huxley wrote to them expressing an interest in mescaline and invited them to drop in if they should ever be in Los Angeles. The door to Humphry Osmond's and Aldous Huxley's friendship was opened when Humphry arrived in Los Angeles with a vial of mescaline to attend an American Psychiatric Association (APA) conference.

MYCOPHILE--One who loves and knows mushrooms more intimately referred to as shrooms.

MYCOPHOBE-One who fears and abhors mushrooms.

How amusing it has been to discover in mycophobia the willing, nay determined subservience of many Europeans to a simple tabu such as we like to associate with primitive peoples, a subservience to emotional responses that seem to stem back to the days when our ancestors found themselves face to face with the miraculous powers of the sacred mushroom! The secret lost, the tabu survives. Like the tribes our anthropologists study, we cling to our tabus and seek to justify them by rationalizing them. Few men want freedom, however they may talk. But then again perhaps man is free in his choice when he chooses to abide within the confines of his unreason.

--From Mushrooms, Russia, and History by Gordon and Valentina Wasson

FANE MEMBERSHIP-Membership in the Fane is open to all who agree with the three following principles:

1. That all mushrooms of the genus Psilocybe are sacraments and their ingestion is a religious practice and an aid to enlightenment.
2. Everyone has the right to expand consciousness and to stimulate aesthetic, visionary, and mystical experience by whatever means one considers desirable without interference from anyone, so long as such practice does not injure another person or their property.
3. We do not encourage the ingestion of the sacrament by those who are unprepared.

Contributions to aid the struggle to secure our religious freedoms are deeply appreciated. For the most recent newsletter send a $5.00 donation (for postage and handling) to:

The Fane
Box 8179
Victoria, B.C. V8W-3R8
CANADA

SOFT-HEARTED HANA--

I ate it and at once my eyes could see you
No sooner had I ooped it down
I felt so far off from the ground I stood on

My legs they seemed to me like high rise buildings
My head was high up in the sky
My skin the sun began to fry like bacon

And then somebody old appeared and asked had I come far
And hadn't they just seen me up on Haleakala
I kept on body surfing to pretend I hadn't heard
There was someone there beside me, swimming like Richard III
And I'm still smiling

I fell in love with my Soft-Hearted Hana
She entered right in through my heart
And now although we're miles apart
I still feel her

She lives beneath the crater in the meadow
She moves among the fruit and grain
You can meet her after heavy rain has fallen.

--George Harrison of The Beatles

MYSTICAL STATES-When asked about the resemblance of mystical states induced via the entheogens or psychedelics to the natural mystical state, Dr. W. T. Stace, Professor Emeritus at Princeton and author of Mysticism and Philosophy said, "It is not a matter of its being similar to mystical experience; it is mystical experience". A double blind experiment which became known as the Good Friday Experiment was designed and implemented by Walter N. Pahnke in 1962 to test Dr. Stace's statement. For the measures of religious experience Walter Pahnke used the seven core characteristics of mystical experience (plus two of his own) as listed by Dr. Stace:

1. unity
2. transcendence of time and space
3. deeply felt positive mood
4. sense of sacredness
5. objectivity and reality
6. paradoxicality
7. alleged ineffability.

COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS--Proposed as the next stage of evolution for mankind by the Canadian psychologist Richard Bucke in his book of the same name published in 1901. He himself had a deep encounter with cosmic consciousness while in a hansom cab on the way home from an evening of philosophical discussion with friends:

For an instant I thought of fire, an immense conflagration somewhere close in that great city, then next, I know the fire was within myself. Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe. Among other things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life.

ALDOUS HUXLEY (1894-1963)--On May 4, 1953, Humphry Osmond gave the writer, Aldous Huxley, a solution of mescaline. After ninety minutes, Aldous suddenly found himself experiencing "what Adam had seen on the morning of creation". He saw "eternity in a flower, infinity in four chair legs, and the Absolute in the folds of a pair of flannel trousers." This experience resulted in his classic essay titled Doors of Perception published in 1954 and led later to the publication of Heaven and Hell in 1956. Still later in a letter to Humphry Osmond, Aldous who was fatally ill with cancer recalled a mescaline experience in which he achieved "direct, total awareness, from the inside, so to say, of Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact,...I didn't think I should mind dying; for dying must be like this passage from the known (constituted by life-long habits of subject-object existence) to the unknown cosmic fact". As he lay dying Aldous asked his wife, Laura, to give him an injection of LSD after which she sat with him for the remainder of the afternoon and his life. He gazed at her with expressions of love and joy saying at one point, "Light and free, forward and up." She wrote, "Now is his way of dying to remain for us, and only for us, a relief and a consolation, or should others also benefit from it? Aren't we all nobly born and entitled to nobly dying?"

SAN ISIDRO, LABRADOR--San Isidro was a Spanish peasant renowned for his piety, humility, love for humankind, and love for animals. He was born in the year 1070 and died in 1130, and is the patron of all farmers. His spirit lives on in the sacred mushroom.

FANE CHARTER--Societies Act, Reg. no. 15308:

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE FANE OF THE PSILOCYBE MUSHROOM ASSOCIATION

1. The name of the association is the Fane of the Psilocybe Mushroom Association.

2. The purposes of the association are:

A. To promote the general welfare, both social and religious, of the community;

B. To encourage Enlightenment, which is the realization that life is a dream and the externality of relations an illusion;

C. To disseminate the idea that all mushrooms of the Genus Psilocybe are sacraments and that their ingestion is an aid to enlightenment and a religious practice;

D. To disseminate the principle that the ingestion of these sacraments by those who are unprepared is not encouraged;

E. To acquire, improve, or operate any real or personal property or interest or rights therein or appurtenant thereto for the above purposes or other lawful and related purposes;

F. To do all things necessary and appropriate for carrying out and exercising the foregoing purposes and powers.

3. The association shall be carried on without purpose of gain for its members and any other profits or other accretions to the association shall be used for promoting its objects.

4. In the event of winding up or dissolution of the association, funds and assets of the association remaining after the satisfaction of its debts and liabilities, shall be given or transferred to such organization or organizations concerned with the promoting of the same objects of this association, as may be determined by the Board of Directors of this association at the time of winding up or dissolution, and if effect cannot be given to the aforementioned provisions, then such funds shall be given or transferred to some other organizations, provided that such organizations referred to in this paragraph shall be a charitable organization, a charitable corporation, or a charitable trust recognized by the Department of National Revenue of Canada as being qualified as such under the provisions of the Income Tax Act of Canada from time to time in effect.

5. Clauses three and four of the Constitution are inalterable.

PSYCHEDELIC--Humphry Osmond and Aldous Huxley were unsatisfied with the terms psychotomimetic and hallucinogen current at that time (mid 1950's) for mescaline and LSD like substances. Aldous Huxley penned his suggestion, PHANEROTHYME, (to make the soul visible), in a letter to Humphry Osmond:

To make this trivial world sublime
Take half a gramme of phanerothyme.

Humphry countered with PSYCHEDELIC (mind revealing):

To fathom hell or soar angelic
Just take a pinch of psychedelic.

GOOD FRIDAY EXPERIMENT--

The most cogent single piece of evidence that psychedelic chemicals do, under certain circumstances, release profound religious experience, is the Good Friday Experiment. There are no experiments known to me in the history of the scientific study of religion better designed or clearer in their conclusions than this one, which is also a tribute to the value of these drugs as superlative means for the study of religious experience... After screening and preparation, in a double blind design, (which means that neither experimenter nor subjects knew who received the drug until the study was completed and ready for final conclusions) ten were given thirty milligrams of psilocybin and ten a placebo in indistinguishable pill form. All twenty then attended a two and one half hour Good Friday service in a private college chapel. Recorded spoken reports and written reports were collected after the service. The results indicated a sharp differentiation between the two groups. As criteria for mystical experience, Pahnke used Staces's seven characteristics of the "universal core" of mysticism with the addition of two other criteria, transiency of the experience and persistent positive changes in attitude and behavior. He then trained three judges, otherwise unconnected with the experiment to recognize evidence of the nine criteria. These judges were given the data collected from the subjects, with no indication as to which group they represented and asked to identify any evidence that the subjects were reporting mystical experience. Nine out of the ten of the experimental group reported unmistakable evidence of having experienced at least some of the mystical consciousness, most of them to a marked degree. Only one member of the control group--those who received the placebo--experienced mystical consciousness, and his experience was only minor....

From Chemical Ecstasy by Walter Houston Clark

ENTHEOGEN--"Producing God or the Divine within". Gordon Wasson and colleagues Jeremy Bigwood, Danny Staples, Jonathan Ott, and Carl Ruck suggested that the term entheogen was more appropriate than hallucinogen or psychedelic as applied to certain psychoactive plants in light of the important role played by these plants in religious rites. Jonathan Ott states, "It was of utmost importance to Gordon to have a term which would not prejudice the sacred mushrooms, for he always winced at the use of hallucinogenic or psychedelic to describe his beloved entheogens, and hated the use of the word drug in connection with them."

FOURTH WAY--

The fourth way is sometimes called the way of the sly man. The "SLY MAN" knows some secret which the Fakir, the monk, and the Yogi do not know. How the "SLY MAN" learned this secret, it is not known: perhaps he found it in some old books, perhaps he inherited it, perhaps he bought it, perhaps he stole it from someone: it makes no difference. The "SLY MAN" knows the secret and, with its help, outstrips the Fakir, the monk, and the Yogi.

Of the four, the Fakir acts in the crudest manner: he knows very little and understands very little. Let us suppose that by a whole month of physical exercise and intense torture he develops in himself a certain energy, a certain substance which produces certain changes in him. He does it absolutely blindly, with eyes shut, knowing neither aim, methods, nor results, simply in imitation of others.

The monk knows what he wants a little better: he is guided by religious feeling, by religious tradition, by a desire for achievement, for salvation. He trusts his teacher who tells him what to do , and he believes that his efforts and sacrifices are "pleasing to God": Let us suppose that a week of fasting, continual prayer, privations, and so on, enables him to attain what the Fakir develops in himself by a month of self torture.

The Yogi knows considerably more: he knows what he wants, he knows why he wants it, he knows how it can be acquired. He knows, for instance, that it is necessary for his purpose to produce a certain substance in himself. He knows that this substance can be produced in one day by a certain kind of mental exercise or concentration of consciousness; so he keeps his attention on these exercises for a whole day without allowing himself a single outside thought, and he obtains what he needs. In this way a Yogi spends on the same thing only one day compared with the month spent by the Fakir and a week spent by the monk.

But on the fourth way, knowledge is still more exact and perfect. A man who follows the fourth way knows quite definitely what substances he needs for his aims and he knows that these substances can be produced within the body by a month of physical suffering, by a week of emotional strain or by a day of mental exercises --and also that they can be introduced into the organism from without, if it is known how to do it; and so, instead of spending a whole day in exercises like the Yogi, a week in prayer like the monk, or a month of self torture like the Fakir, he simply prepares and swallows a little pill which contains all the substances he wants. And in this way, without loss of time, he obtains the required result.

--George Gurdjieff as quoted by Peter Ouspensky in In Search of the Miraculous

GORDON WASSON (1898-1986)--The Father of Ethnomycology. After graduating from Columbia University in 1920 and after a short stint at the London School of Economics, Gordon Wasson began his adult life as a journalist with the The New Haven Register and later moved on to The Herald Tribune in New York where he wrote a daily column for the financial news department. Gordon began his career as a banker in 1928 with the Guaranty Company of New York and later moved on to J.P. Morgan and Company in 1934 where he became Vice President handling foreign accounts in 1943. He retired from J.P. Morgan in 1963.

Gordon Wasson's article "Seeking the Magic Mushroom" in the May 13, 1957 issue of Life magazine which describes the "discovery" of the mushroom entheogen marked the beginning of the psychedelics movement. Wasson was a bit chagrined by the popularization of the sacred mushrooms since he felt they were not appreciated for the spiritual enlightenment they could bestow and criticized those whom he thought approached them too casually. As a result he was labeled by some as being "a snob and elitist" in regards to the use of entheogens. The criticism which disturbed him the most, however, came from some of his Indian contacts in Mexico who criticized him for violating a sacred trust by sharing their secret with all humankind and thus profaning the mushroom sacrament. Gordon Wasson found himself in the paradoxical position of being both popularizer and elitist.

After Valentina Pavlovna died in 1958, Gordon continued his mushroom studies publishing with Roger Heim Les Champignons Hallucinogenes du Mexique in 1958 which was followed in 1967 by Nouvelles Investigations Sur Les Champignons Hallucinogenes. In 1968 he published Soma:Divine Mushroom of Immortality in collaboration with Vedic scholar Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty. This was followed in 1974 by Maria Sabina and her Mazatec Mushroom Velada, in 1978 by The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries with Albert Hofmann, Carl Ruck, and Danny Staples, in 1980 by The Wondrous Mushroom: Mycolatry in Mesoamerica and just before his death he speculated on the origin of religion in Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion with Stella Kramisch, Jonathan Ott, and Carl Ruck .

THE ROAD TO ELEUSIS--An excerpt:

As man emerged from his brutish past, thousands of years ago, there was a stage in the evolution of his awareness when the discovery of a mushroom (or was it a higher plant?) with miraculous properties was a revelation to him, a veritable detonator to his soul, arousing in him sentiments and virtues that mankind has ever since regarded as the highest attributes of his kind. It made him see what this perishing mortal eye cannot see...What today is resolved into a mere drug... was for him a prodigious miracle, inspiring in him poetry and philosophy and religion. Perhaps with all our modern knowledge we do not need the divine mushrooms any more. Or do we need them more than ever?

POPULARIZER AND ELITIST--

His apparent contradictions were the outward indications of an enigmatic, complex, personality. He was both a respectable banker and, like it or not, a "founder" of the psychedelic movement; an elitist about sacred mushrooms but also, through his article in LIFE their popularizer; a level-headed scientist whose scholarly writings, while grounded in fact, yet inspire many readers to regard the sacred mushrooms with religious awe and reverence; the Father of Ethnomycology but also, to many, a kind of New Age patriarch.

--Thomas Riedlinger, The Sacred Mushroom Seeker: Essays for Gordon Wasson

Matthew, VII,6--King James version--

Give not that which is holy unto the dogs,
Neither cast ye your pearls before swine
Lest they trample them under their feet,
and turn again and rend you.

VALENTINA PAVLOVNA (nee GUERCKEN) WASSON--Pediatrician and Mother of Ethnomycology. The Wassons' masterwork Mushrooms, Russia, and History originally began its life under the pen of Valentina Pavlovna as a cookbook of mushroom recipes in the mid 1940's! However the book underwent many transformations expanding into the proposed Mushrooms, Russia, and History: An Introduction to Russia Through the Kitchen. As Gordon Wasson writes in an early manuscript:

The authors of this book started out with a modest purpose, --to assemble a comprehensive collection of Russian recipes adapted to the markets and tastes of the Western world. It became apparent that, detached from their background, these recipes lost much of their appeal. The authors undertook to supplement the recipes for the kitchen with a commentary for the drawing room. They invite the reader to enter Russia, so to speak, by the kitchen door, and while their commentary for the drawing room attempts no comprehensive picture of Russian life and manners, they have assembled information, directly or indirectly linked to Russian food, that they hope will prove enlightening and entertaining.

--Thomas Riedlinger, The Sacred Mushroom Seeker: Essays for Gordon Wasson

However the scope of the work continued to expand. In 1952, publication was delayed when Valentina Pavlovna and Gordon became interested in the role of mushrooms in Mesoamerica:

We had been pursuing our inquiries into the role of mushrooms in the cultural history of the Old World for many years. We had found indications in the etymology of the names of mushrooms and in folklore, as well as in contemporary attitudes toward "toadstools", that at one time mushrooms had played a part in our ancestors' religious beliefs. At this point, in September, 1952, in almost the same mail, we received two communications, one from Robert Graves in Majorca and the other from Hans Mardersteig in Verona, alerting us to the peculiar place of mushrooms in the Meso-American cultures. We had known nothing before then of the indigenous cultures of that region. Quickly we got in touch with Gordon Eckholm of the American Museum of Natural History and Richard Evans Schultes of the Botanical Museum of Harvard.

--The Garden Journal,January-February, 1958