DO YOU BELIEVE IN MAGIC?

My friends here in western Massachusetts usually don't let me down.
Kris, the truck-stop waitress, referred me to Michelle, a bartender
at the gentlemen's club down the road, who directed me to Kim, the
red-haired dancer with an ankh-tattoo armband, who referred me to an
ex-boyfriend's wife's girlfriend, another redhead, who met me outside
an American Legion hall in Chicopee (Nipmuck for "land of violent
pee") and informed me that magic mushrooms were "out of season," but
she could get me LSD instead. "Acid -- same deal as mushrooms," she
said. Besides, she wondered why a guy in his 60s wanted to experiment
with shrooms. The answer was obvious.

I had a review to write.

Even if read while sober, Andy Letcher's "Shrooms: A Cultural History
of the Magic Mushroom," is a near-transcendent experience. Well
written and thoughtfully researched, the book works on the limbic
system too: after reading it, one is tempted to hit the streets in
search of a religious-experience-in-a-fungus. Letcher has contributed
a delightful, journalistic addition to the genre known as trip lit.

While magic mushrooms are hallucinogens -- Chicopee wisdom aside --
their effects are different from those of LSD. Letcher describes acid
as having a "rainbow trajectory" lasting from 10 to 12 hours.

A shroom trip lasts from 4 to 5, and its primary active ingredient,
psilocybin, is about 100 times less potent than LSD.

In a shroom trip, Letcher explains, "colors seem brighter, more
saturated." At high doses, one's connection to reality may be
severed; "everything is suddenly tattooed with light, while unbidden
faces may peer out from the woodwork." It is more giggly than LSD;
mundane aspects of life can become comical.

One myconaut reported that the freckles on her arm "got up and danced
away." Some trips are hellish, complete with dragons and snakes.

The mushroom itself sometimes talks to you. One seller advised his
customers "not to operate any equipment more technically demanding
than a spoon."

Letcher, a Briton, holds doctorates in both ecology and religious
studies, and in the 1990s, when he was an eco-protester, lived in a
treehouse. (Or maybe he just hallucinated that his house was
levitating.) In 1993, he attended a lecture by Terence McKenna, the
"geeky American" who became the Johnny Appleseed of psilocybin.
Letcher wrote in his diary: "Far out. McKenna just blew my mind."
Fortunately, for this, his first book, Letcher's mind has remained unblown.

In "Shroom" he rewrites the history of magic mushrooms,
systematically destroying the myths festered by pioneers like
McKenna, R. Gordon Wasson, Robert Graves, Aldous Huxley and others,
while recognizing their heroic efforts in promoting mycomania.

There are an estimated 209 species of trippy mushrooms, which mainly
fall into two broad groups.

The psilocybes, containing psilocybin and psilocin, are the
friendlier magic mushrooms.

One of the most common is the Liberty Cap. Any 20 Liberty Caps
"picked in different parts of the world," Letcher writes, "will have,
on average, the same concentration of active ingredients, and
therefore the same pharmacological effect." Another psilocybe,
cubensis, is less potent than the Liberty Cap, but easier to grow and
more popular.

It was favored by McKenna.

The second type is the amanita.

The best known is the fly-agaric, Amanita muscaria, the
red-and-white-spotted mushroom familiar from storybooks, the favored
resting stool of gnomes.

The amanitas are more myth-ridden than the psilocybes, and their
psychic results more unpredictable. Letcher says the fly-agaric
contains a "fuzzy cocktail of different chemical alkaloids"; it can
produce increased stamina and euphoria but also nausea, dizziness and
twitchiness. "Compared to, say, the Liberty Cap," Letcher writes,
"the fly-agaric is like a chemical cocktail shaker into which a
blindfolded bartender has poured whatever ingredients come to hand --
vodka, juice or carpet cleaner."

Letcher seems most intent on upending the standard history of
shrooms. For the past half-century we have been told that prehistoric
cultures used magic mushrooms, that the true origins of religion lay
in an early mushroom cult, that Jesus ate not bread and wine but
fly-agaric at the Last Supper, that the magical Soma cited in the Rig
Veda was actually made from shrooms, that the mystical raptures
reported at the ancient Greek celebrations at Eleusis were really
shroom-fests. Same deal with the Druids at Stonehenge. I won't
elaborate here on the theory that witches used their broom handles to
apply mushroom goop topically.

Some very smart people -- Wasson, Graves, McKenna -- have promulgated
shroom myths, and Letcher meticulously runs every one of them to
earth. "There is not a single instance of a magic mushroom being
preserved in the archaeological record anywhere," he writes. "We
really do not know, one way or the other, whether the ancients
worshipped the holy spores of God," Letcher continues. "If they did,
they left not a single piece of evidence of having done so."

The myco-mythologists use the same goofy logic as today's
neo-Darwinists: if something could have happened, it did happen.
McKenna, for instance, who believed shrooms are the "portal to a
shamanic realm," said that when our hominid ancestors left the
African forests for the plains, they ate psilocybe mushrooms growing
in cattle dung. This sharpened their visual acuity and conferred an
evolutionary advantage. At medium doses, shrooms worked as an
aphrodisiac, and improved their reproductive success, and at high
doses these protohumans began to speak.

One assumes their first words were "Oh wow."

More interesting is Gordon Wasson, a vice president of J. P. Morgan &
Company, whose hobby and obsession was mushrooms.

In 1955 he traveled to Oaxaca, Mexico, where he met MarAa Sabina, a
Mazatec Indian, who introduced him to magic mushrooms and mysticism.

On his first shroom trip, he felt "as if his soul had been scooped
out of his body."

Wasson kick-started the psychedelic movement, according to Letcher,
when he wrote an article in 1957 for Life magazine entitled "Seeking
the Magic Mushroom." Westerners began tripping to Oaxaca and scarfing
up shrooms.

Letcher claims the Life article inspired Timothy Leary to experiment
with psychedelics. Even the Time/Life founder Henry Luce turned on
with Wasson. As Letcher puts it, Wasson "may have failed in his
attempt to prove the existence of an ancient mushrooming cult, but in
doing so he gave the world a modern one."

Does Letcher use shrooms himself?

He makes no comment, but he clearly resents the fact that magic
mushrooms, with a few exemptions, are now illegal throughout the Western world.

I would guess he shrooms a bit. I hope, though, he doesn't turn on in
his treehouse.

We need him in one piece to continue writing lovely books for us.

Meanwhile I keep searching for the "numinous feelings" and
"bizarrerie de l'ambiance" promised by shrooms.

I ran into reddish Kim at the truck stop, and registered my complaint
about the limitations of her Chicopee friend. I told her about the
poor Siberians in the 18th century who could not afford shrooms and
would loiter outside houses where mushrooms were being ingested.

When partygoers came outside to relieve themselves, the poor would
collect the urine in wooden bowls and drink it down. "Look," Kim
said, "I know a guy. ... "