Simon Powell - The Psilocybin Solution

The shamanic use of fly agaric diffused out from Russia, and while some peoples gradually came to eschew the mushroom, others embraced its effects. Not only did the Aryan people who migrated down into the Indus Valley thirty-five hundred years ago bring with them their religious cult of Soma, later still, approximately 1000 B.C., we find artistic representations of mushrooms on Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish Bronze Age objects. On bronze artifacts like razors are mushroom motifs (generally stylized cross-sectional views of a mushroom) that depict the mushroom in a way that suggests that it was an object of worship. Because the fly agaric mushroom abounds in Scandinavia, these motifs are thought to represent a fly-agaric-worshipping cult similar to those of Siberia.

Apart from Siberian folklore, many European folktales testify to the enigma of the fly agaric mushroom, providing an echo of the distant cultural interconnections of the past. Stories arising from the region once known as Yugoslavia take the mushroom’s supernatural origin back to the time of pre-Christian Nature gods. A legend relates that Votan, chief of all the gods and a potent magician and healer, was riding his magical horse through the countryside when demons suddenly 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 once called the fly agaric boland gamba or the “mad mushroom.” Austrians and Germans used to speak of the “fool’s mushroom” and were wont to respond to peculiar behavior with the phrase “have you eaten crazy mushrooms?”

The Wassons also analyzed the vast array of words used to describe mushrooms in different cultures and the latent metaphors that these 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 a reference to its supposed insecticidal effect; rather, the common insect 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 mushroom lore indicative of a common origin. The psychoactive fly agaric mushroom seemed most likely to be the instigator. Wasson later summed up his views in the following way in his book Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality.

Death will come if the layman presumes to eat the 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. {1} 1 1. Wasson, Soma : Divine Mushroom of Immortality, 153.

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 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 that 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 its effects, and therefore the early anthropological observations passed by without much interest.

Once the Wassons learned of these intriguing facts, armed as they were with detailed knowledge of fly agaric mushroom history and lore, it was only natural for them to heed Graves’s investigational indications and focus their attention upon Mexico. If mushroom ceremonies were still being practiced, 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 (in other words, a missionary) who had been living among Mazatec Indians in Huautla, Mexico, for more than fifteen 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.

Pike informed the Wassons 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 while it helped “good people,” it killed “bad people” or made them crazy. Furthermore, the Indians were sure that Jesus spoke to them while in the “bemushroomed” state. Everyone whom Pike asked agreed that they were seeing into heaven itself through the mushroom.

As well as highlighting the ongoing 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 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.

Pike ended her informative and tantalizing 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 mushrooms, 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 that 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 that 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, this being indicative that something significant is at work in the actual experience. If there was nothing of real interest to be gained from 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 great knowledge about our existence, that it can yield soulful insights into the nature of reality. This is why the psilocybin mushroom experience has remained such an abstruse phenomenon and why opinions are so divided.