TAKING THE FUN OUT OF FUNGUS

A New History Of The Hallucinogenic Drug Aims To Debunk The Many Myths About
Magic Mushrooms

In August of 1830, surgeon D.O. Edwards was called to the waiting room
of Westminster Hospital in London. There he found Frederick Bickerton,
age 25, his 23-year-old wife, Anne, and their son, George, aged four,
all of whom appeared to be quite drunk.

Further examination revealed "that the inebriation proceeded from no
ordinary cause." Edwards wrote that the family were taken with the
"highest hilarity." Giggling hysterically, they strode around in
"continual motion, either dancing or throwing themselves in grotesque
attitudes."

The couple vehemently denied they were drunk and the doctor was
perplexed as to a diagnosis -- until he learned what the Bickertons
had for lunch.

It seems Frederick, a labourer, had been without work for some time.
In an attempt to bring in some money to buy food, the family had
picked mushrooms in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens to sell. Without
a single sale, they returned home and cooked their pickings into a
mushroom broth upon which they dined.

According to medical records, the symptoms came on fast. Frederick was
first "affected with giddiness; this gradually increased until a
dimness of sight supervened." He saw himself surrounded by flames and
"became confused to the eye. He occasionally felt a sentiment of
uncontrollable gladness, which prompted him to the muscular movement.
Yet he remained fully conscious that he was in a state of
preternatural excitement."

Frederick's stomach was then pumped and a diagnosis of mushroom
poisoning determined.

While the Bickertons actually seemed to have a fairly good trip, most
accidental magic mushroom ingestions were deemed highly unpleasant.
And so it's remarkable that for the past 40-odd years, hallucinogenic
fungi have been sought out for the very symptoms that once would have
had a person begging to have their stomach pumped.

"It's gone from poison to psychological panacea to psychedelic drug,"
explains Andy Letcher, who turned up the story of the Bickerton family while
researching his book Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom.

The Bickertons' story is not one usually repeated by magic mushroom
enthusiasts. Fans of hallucinogens prefer to cite prehistoric
religious ceremonies, or to tell you how Plato, the Vikings and
medieval witches all were regular shroomers. Or how author Lewis
Carroll's Alice in Wonderland is less fairy tale than underground code
for getting high. And they might even recount stories of Siberian
mushroom-shamanism. In short, some rather fanciful myth-making
surrounds the magic mushroom.

Letcher began to wonder about the validity of some of these trippy
tales when in 2001 a rash of magic mushroom merchants cropped up all
over Britain, taking advantage of a legal grey area that was made
decidedly black and white last year.

"And if you spoke to the hippies and asked them where all these
mushrooms were coming from, they would tell you people have been
taking them for a millennia," explains Letcher. "Or that the druids
took them and the witches took them and there's been this secret
underground tradition and that's what led to the present day."

Letcher knew from his academic training and study of religion there
were serious holes in these stories. The realization that no one had
properly sifted through fungi's urban myths was the impetus that led
to this extraordinarily detailed study.

Of all the urban myths surrounding psychedelic mushrooms, the one
Letcher most wanted to believe was the Santa Claus is a
magic-mushroom-in-disguise story.

Fathomable mainly for the fact the fly agaric brand of fungi, which is
said to produce a cocktail of hallucinogenic and physical side
effects, shares a red and white spotted exterior similar to that of
Father Christmas' cozy suit. Also, the story goes, Santa's annual
reindeer-powered flight is said to mirror the shamanic
spirit-journey.

"I thought that was a wonderful myth," says Letcher from his home in
Oxford, England. He explains that the notion that Santa is a shaman
was first proposed by the poet Robert Graves in the early '70s. Like
all prevailing shroom fables, Shroom Santa was likely helped along by
fungi fanciers looking to justify their counter-culture hobby.

In Shroom, Letcher restores Santa's image by noting historian Ronald
Hutton's observation that Siberian shamans don't travel by sleigh or
communicate with reindeer spirits, nor did they wear red and white
clothes.

Letcher also dismantles the Lewis-Carroll-as-psychedelic-guru
theory.

Participants of 1960s counterculture took inspiration from the scene
in Alice in Wonderland in which a hookah-smoking caterpillar lying on
a large mushroom tells Alice that eating one side of the mushroom will
make her grow taller and the other smaller.

Although Letcher admits Carroll's story is pretty surreal and he sees
the obvious connection to hallucinogens, he writes there is no record
of Carroll using mushrooms or any other drugs.

"Indeed, there would have been little incentive for him to hide any
such habits secretively between the lines of a children's fairy tale,"
he writes. "An array of psychoactive drugs, including opium, were
freely available in Victorian society." Carroll was also opposed to
tobacco smoking and only drank in moderation.

But Letcher's myth-busting doesn't mean he's a killjoy. He argues that
the real history is far more interesting.

"Take Mexico. It has a genuine history going back to the Conquest and
probably much earlier. The archaeology is indicative of that," he
says. "And the big question is why? What was different about Mexico?
It just so happens that Mexico is incredibly rich in psychedelic
plants. There is tobacco, morning glory, saliva divinorum, peyote and
mushrooms. And half of the world's psilocybe (the active ingredient in
the main group of hallucinogenic fungi) species grow in Mexico."

Shrooming was first embraced in North America in the 1960s, with the
first illicit use on record from a group of Vancouver college students
who were arrested and found in possession of Liberty Caps in 1965.
Mushroom use mushroomed in the 1970s, and Letcher says they are more
popular today than ever before.

In the book, the author never comes straight out and says he has taken
mushrooms, but his bio gives a few clues. In addition to his PhD in
religious studies, with an emphasis in paganism, Letcher is a musician
who has travelled around England and France playing with a number of
pagan-psychedelic bands.

"I'm a musician, I did the whole hippie thing," he says. "So, what do
you reckon?"

- - Shroom is published by Faber and Faber ($29).