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When the Good Book “ mushroom ” come to mind , “ magic ” is n’t far behind . But what started this almost immediate association between mushroom and illicit drug ? While there are some genuinely magic mushrooms out there in the world , not all of them cause LSD trips when ingested , yet that is the common connexion multitude make .
Doug Bierend explores the account of mushrooms and why so many people tend to be “ myophobic ” in his bookIn Search of Mycoptopia .
The pursuit is an excerpt fromIn Search of Mycotopiaby Doug Bierend . It has been conform for the web .
A History of Magic Mushrooms
To distinguish someone that you ’re into mushroom is to invite a raised supercilium and perhaps some conservative questions about your relationship to the law : “ So are you intomagicmushrooms ? ” Many mycophiles have learned to keep ready the response , “ Allmushrooms are magic!”But before May 13 , 1957 , fungus kingdom and outlaw activity were n’t so intuitively linked in the average American ’s mind .
That ’s when the nation was introduced to the existence of so - holler magic mushroom by way of an article inLifemagazine penned by one R. Gordon Wasson , former vice prexy of public relations for J.P. Morgan & Company . The clause , titled “ Seeking the Magic Mushroom , ” recounted his 1955 visit to Huautla de Jiménez , a small village in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca .
There , Wasson and photographer Allan Richardson became the first outsiders known to take on the sacred Velada ritual , under the steering of the Mazatec curandera Maria Sabina , and her daughter , Maria Apolonia .
Making several visit to the remote village over the course of four years , Wasson convince a loath Sabina to admit him in the sacred spiritual praxis under the pretense of concerns over his son ’s safety.1
He had travel to Huautla follow rumour of sacred mushroom-shaped cloud rituals still practice there , part of a full hunt for the fungal foundations of ghostly drill the world over .
“ Was it not likely that , long ago , long before the beginnings of written history , our ancestors had worshiped a divine mushroom ? ” wrote Wasson at the outset of his fourteen - page article .
“ This would explain the aura of the supernatural in which all kingdom Fungi seem to be bath . We were the first to declare oneself the conjecture of a divine mushroom in the distant ethnical background of the European multitude , and the conjecture at once perplex a further problem : what sort of mushroom-shaped cloud was once worship and why . ”2
In the years leading up to Huautla , Wasson and his married woman , pediatrician Valentina Pavlovna Guercken , rather unexpectedly became attached and influential ethnomycologists . Their peculiar passion was inflame , the story goes , when one night Valentina , who was from Russia , returned home in an excited state after find out a trove of eatable mushroom cloud on a woodland pass .
She announce her plans to make dinner from them , to the horror of her hubby . “ Not long married , ” he recounted , “ I thought to wake up the next morning a widowman . ”3Culinary orientation away , their reactions suggested deeply set and widely divergent popular opinion of mushroom , a difference of opinion they see deeply challenging .
“ What pre - historic religion or tabu is finding expression when the English governess , with a facial muscle spasm and shudder , crunch a sexually attractive mushroom cloud under her blackguard and warns forth her billing ? ” Wasson wrote in a note to his fellow Robert Graves.4
The urge to kick mushrooms, it would seem, is nothing new.
The couplet soon developed the belief that most cultivation can be broadly defined as “ mycophilic ” or “ mycophobic . ”5To the extent that mycophobia is a real and distinct phenomenon , its origins are difficult to pin down . In North America , it may be partly a European inheritance .
In the U.K. , traditional knowledge abounds about “ fairy rings , ” the suspiciously pure circles of mushroom cloud that expand in grassy flying field . Like a variety of miniature , mediaeval interpretation of crop set , they were thought to draw the paths of faery as they danced overnight — stepping into the middle meant entering the realm of the devil .
What once seemed a bad prognostic is in fact the preindication of healthy mycelium growing in a radial pattern.6Shakespeare famously evoke them in the last act ofThe Tempest , as Prospero address the fairies in renouncing his diabolical magic :
You demipuppets thatBy moonshine do the green sour ringlets makeWhereof the ewe not bites;and you whose pastimeIs to make midnight mushrooms , that rejoiceTo see the solemn curfew7
Wasson and Guercken ’s studies would lead them to concentre on South and Central America , where sacred mushroom cloud practices were still extant despite attempts at repression , though the mushrooms themselves may have been less a element than the language and practices around them . The name given to the mushroom cloud — teonanácatl(or “ god ’s flesh”)—was not consider favorably by Spanish colonizers with their Catholic sensibilities .
Franciscan friar Toribio de Benavente honor the Aztec practices in person , relaying a horrified story of hallucinating heathens begging for death.8Afterward , a manual for the clergy was publish with the testimonial that priests strike confession from Indigenous people let in a question about whether they ’d eaten or even served the offending mushrooms , later namedPsilocybe mexicana.9
The mushroom-shaped cloud Harlan Stone of Guatemala — chip at humanoid figurines with large mushroom-shaped cloud caps atop their foreland — intimate fungus kingdom - have-to doe with phantasmal custom may have resonated well south of Mexico and into Mayan territory.10
The emerge history reveal by early ethnomycologists — among whom the Wassons became most prominent — was tantalizing , but entheogens were n’t incisively unexampled to skill in 1957 . Albert Hofmann first isolated lysergic acid diethylamide ( LSD ) nearly two decades in the beginning , in 1938 , while prospect for circulation - enhancing molecule to aid in the Allied warfare effort .
In a story that has since become caption , the scientist accidentally dose himself at Sandoz Labs in Switzerland , then somehow managed to make it home safely . There , he underwent the first documented LSD trip-up , albeit unintentionally , free of arithmetic mean or preconception.11
clearly intrigued , he began conducting strict research , including into mushrooms — LSD itself was derived from an ergot fungus — and at long last describe their active factor : psilocybin and psilocin .
LSD became well known and even pop among a community of interests of in - the - know scientists , their subject field , and comrade . Within that roach was Henry Luce , founder and editor program - in - tribal chief of Time - Life .
The well - connected magazine baron and his wife , Clare Booth Luce , had begun sky-high experiment with LSD in the 1950s . So when Wasson approachedLifemagazine with his story from the remote reaches of Mexico , it was received warmly.12
At the prison term , the United States was not yet in the throes of “ tune in , dangle out ” countercultural upheaval ; this was the twelvemonth thatThe Ed Sullivan Showrefused to show Elvis Presley below the waist . The magazine that set ashore at the threshold of more than five million Americans had on its masking the conversant face of Bert Lahr , best known as the Cowardly Lion inThe Wizard of Oz , peeking mischievously from behind some palm fronds .
But despite the wholesome image on its cover version , the contents were whole unfamiliar to most and , intentionally or not , downright subversive . Wasson ’s characteristic in the democratic magazine came complete with what come to a trip account , along with photographs and instance of various specie of psychoactive mushrooms.13
It was essentially a field guide for what would shortly come to be class as a agenda I narcotic . In brusque parliamentary law , Oaxaca — and specially Huautla , high up in its northern plenty — became a hotbed of flower child and trip hunters .
The ’60s saw LSD and mushrooms solidly associated with an ascendant counterculture.
For many , true knowledgeableness intend making a pilgrim’s journey to Mexico , to the extent that in July 1969 , the Mexican government crack down , forcibly evicting nearly one hundred of the “ barbarous hipster ” on charges of drug trafficking . The local paperEl Universalwarned of “ taint of our youth ” by North Americanjipis.14
Maria Sabina herself expressed regret for having deal the ritual with Wasson , over what she perceived as the diminishment of the mushroom ’ magic . By 1971 , the United States had declared that psilocybin represent as much of a terror to society as diacetylmorphine or snap cocain , and mushroom-shaped cloud subculture mostly rifle underground.15
Notes
Recommended Reads
Foraging for Mushrooms : Gourmet Root Systems
fungus : All Around and Among Us
In Search of Mycotopia
Citizen Science , Fungi Fanatics , and the Untapped Potential of mushroom
$ 19.95
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