LET'S PUT THE FUN BACK INTO FUNGI

After reading Andy Letcher's Shroom, it's about time we learnt to
love our mushrooms, says Daniel Butler

Shroom by Andy Letcher 360pp, Faber, UKP 12.99

The sale of magic mushrooms was banned only last year, closing a
legal loophole. The fungi's active ingredients are ranked alongside
heroin, yet they were allowed to be sold openly.

For many the ban came not a moment too soon, for by 2004 one
Glastonbury trader was selling 70kg: the equivalent of 3,500 four-hour trips.

Andy Letcher, one-time psychedelic musician and former bypass
protester, charts the path to the ban in this intelligent and
well-researched book, which is full of surprises.

It begins with a brief scientific outline of the two main groups of
hallucinogenic fungi. The most popular are members of the Psylocybe
family which have been used by Mexican Indians for many centuries and
are represented in Britain by the liberty cap or "magic mushroom".
The others are best represented by fly agaric: the classic red and
white-spotted "toadstool" beloved by children's illustrators and
garden-gnome manufacturers. These are more powerful and again there
is a genuine history of their use (this time in Siberia).

These two undeniable historic links are often used by magic mushroom
aficionados to justify an ancient tradition of their use which is
heavily tinted with New Age mysticism: with great certainty they will
detail how mushrooms were used in prehistoric religious ceremonies,
inspiring the building of stone circles at Avebury and Stonehenge and
the Aztec pyramids at Teotihuacan. They will tell you how Plato,
among others, drank mushroom tea; how mushrooms were eaten by the
shadowy Celts and their Druidic priests, by the Vikings to access
their jingoistic rages, and then later by the medieval witches in
their secretive moonlight sabbats.

They will happily explain the figure of Father Christmas, who is in
fact a magic mushroom in disguise.

By reviving mushroom use they believe they are reinstating an ancient
shamanic heritage.

Given his psychedelic past, one might expect Letcher to side with
such views, but instead he shows that most claims are based on highly
questionable research.

For example, Terence and Kat McKenna publicised neolithic Algerian
rock paintings of a "mushroom shaman" in two books during the 1990s.
They did so without visiting the original, however, and used a
drawing of a photograph rather than the original.

Both McKennas were mushroom enthusiasts, and while they strove to
keep the image accurate, the mushrooms have been enhanced.

Others claim the giant magic mushrooms embossed on the gothic bronze
doors of Hildesheim Cathedral are evidence of a hidden pagan sect,
but Letcher argues that these make more sense as stylised fig trees.

He demolishes most of the flimsy evidence for an underground pagan
cult dating back millennia. The book's most convincing arguments come
as Letcher charts magic mushrooms' recent rise in popularity. This
began with pseudoscientific research in the 1950s by an American,
Gordon Wasson, whose interest in cultural attitudes to mushrooms
started when honeymooning with his wife, Valentina, a Russian emigree.

Wasson was horrified to watch his young bride eagerly collecting and
devouring edible fungi with relish, while his own upbringing made him
recoil in fear from such "toadstools".

This led to his anthropological interest in why some nations are
"mycophobic" (Anglo-Saxon cultures), while others (Slavic) prize them
highly. He heard that Mexican Indians used mushrooms in religious
ceremonies, so the Wassons went to Latin America in 1955 and a "wise
woman" introduced them to her hallucinogenic secrets.

Wasson had an "out-of-body" experience and wrote up an embroidered
account of the event for Life magazine in 1957.

Meanwhile, he harnessed the great Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann,
discoverer of LSD, to isolate the mushrooms' active ingredients. This
lent Wasson scientific credibility and soon "proto-drug-culture"
intellectuals such as Robert Graves and Timothy Leary were preaching
the wonders of magic mushrooms.

During the 60s, interest in mind-altering drugs became part of the
zeitgeist. Nevertheless, fungi were slow to catch on. Early hippies
generally preferred synthetic versions such as acid. In fact it
wasn't until consumption of fungi rocketed in the 90s that the
authorities became seriously alarmed.

If this meticulously researched and well written book has it has a
weakness, however, it is that Letcher skirts over what for me is the
lady in the attic.

Why did it take so long for these powerful, free and legal drugs to catch on?

The answer is that most Britons are terrified of mushrooms.

This is a tragedy, as we have around 10,000 native species and the
vast majority of the 1,000 non-microscopic species are harmless.

Only a handful are seriously poisonous, while many, such as porcini,
blewits and saffron milk caps, are both common and highly prized in
the kitchen.

Our Continental neighbours love them. Despite our perfect damp, mild
climate, as a nation not only do we not cash in, we positively shun them.

Perhaps it was to overcome this aversion that Letcher feels forced to
focus on psychedelia, but to my mind the mycophobia that fascinated
Wasson is the central issue.

To be fair, Shroom does cover possible answers. He points out that
until the advent of books, one needed a skilled teacher to
disseminate information: "Given the high price of getting the
decision wrong (a slow and painful death in the case of the death
cap, Amanita phaloides), blanket avoidance of all mushrooms is the
most sensible and reasonable option," he writes.

Modern reports of global fatalities back this. There are scores
annually in mushroom-loving nations such as Poland. Meanwhile
Britain's National Poisons Unit reports around two deaths per year
over the past century - virtually all of unattended toddlers chewing
on death caps.

Letcher may not directly cover the issue of edible mushrooms, but he
deals with the general failure to make use of hallucinogenic
mushrooms. He argues that we live in an age where literacy is
virtually universal, scepticism encouraged and facts established by
scientific experimentation. As a result it is easy to assume someone
would - sooner or later - stumble across the properties of every
mushroom and record it for posterity.

But our ancestors were generally illiterate, forbidden to question
authority and had no grasp of scientific methodology. Hence rather
than being naturally drawn to experiment with drug-rich mushrooms,
the reverse was true. The same argument applies to edible species.