SHROOM: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE MAGIC MUSHROOM BY ANDY LETCHER

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So That's Why Santa Claus Looks So Happy

When I first heard about magic mushrooms as a teenager in the late
1970s, the news that psychedelic drugs were sprouting freely across
the nation's playing fields and golf courses seemed like a plot device
from some science-fiction fantasy.

According to the lore that spread by word of mouth, at festivals and
in the photocopied and stapled sheets of the underground press, the
mind-altering properties of the Liberty Cap mushroom had been known
since time immemorial. They were referenced in the trippy spirals on
ancient megaliths, and had formed the core of the Druids' priestcraft.
After they had been driven underground by Christianity, their presence
continued to be signalled in coded forms, from the gnomic hints in
Alice in Wonderland and Victorian fairy lore to the figure of Santa
Claus, whose iconography was a folk-memory of the red-and-white
toadstool-eating shamans of Lapland. The counterculture of the 1960s
had amplified these subterranean rumbings in anthems like Jefferson
Airplane's White Rabbit, and now I had become the latest in a lineage
of mushroom initiates that stretched back to the dawn of humanity.

It's still quite a shock to realise not only that this entire lineage
is confabulated, but just how recently this took place.

There are enough records of accidental mushroom intoxications to make
it clear that Liberty Caps have indeed been popping their pixie-capped
heads up across Britain for centuries, but no evidence whatsoever for
an intentional magic mushroom trip before the 1970s.

Although scientists had found Liberty Caps to be hallucinogenic as
early as 1963, the hippie Sixties came and went without any of its
celebrants spotting the free drugs under their noses.

At the time that I was being sagely informed that the inhabitants of
our islands had been getting high on mushrooms for millennia, the
practice was almost certainly in its first few seasons.

In Shroom, Andy Letcher has cut through this dense tangle of
pseudohistory and urban legend with bracing scepticism, clearing the
space for an elegant and authoritative telling of the true story that
it conceals.

He establishes that there are only two parts of the world, Mexico and
Siberia, where there is clear evidence that mushroom's intoxicating
properties have been deliberately sought out and culturally
sanctioned. All the rest of the story, he proposes, dates from the
early 1950s. We, and not our prehistoric ancestors, are the true
"mushroom people". From full-moon parties in Thailand to stalls in
Camden Lock, neo-pagan festivals to internet spore-suppliers, there
are far more "shroomers" (the word is now in the OED) today than ever
before.

The inciting incident for both this modern culture and its modern
myths was an article in Life magazine in May 1957 by the international
banker Robert Gordon Wasson. It told how, in the mountains of Oaxaca,
Mexico, he had participated in a Mazatec Indian mushroom ceremony of
the type thought to have been eradicated by Spanish clerics centuries
ago. From Wasson's remarkable (if overspun) adventures flowed the
scientific discovery of the magic mushroom and the presence of its
hallucinogenic ingredient, psilocybin, in other related species around
the world, including Britain. Yet at the same time, Wasson's
enthusiastic but wayward amateur scholarship (egged on by the
mythomania of his friend Robert Graves) convinced him that he had
discovered the vestigial remains of a universal religious cult of the
mushroom, a hypothesis he elaborated in a series of lavish books, from
where it diffused into the emerging drug counterculture.

Letcher brings the same astute eye to his deconstruction of the modern
mushroom cult, analysing how its early evangelists, notably Timothy
Leary, persuaded a new generation to put a spiritual and life-changing
interpretation on an experience that had typically been viewed as a
toxic delirium.

A retrofitted pedigree of ancient wisdom clearly served this sales
pitch well but, Letcher argues, the mature and diverse culture that
has now established itself around the magic mushroom does its
credibility no favours by clinging to this litany of self-deception
and wishful thinking.

The profusion of mushroom enthusiasts today tells us less about
humanity's past than it does about our future, and the stubbornness of
our desire for adventures that re-enchant the world around us.