Seeking the Magic Mushroom

Background

Wasson first became interested in mycology during his honeymoon in the Catskill Mountains in 1927. His new wife, Valentina Pavlovna Wasson, a native of Moscow, Russia, was identifying and collecting mushrooms in the forest, having been brought up with an appreciation for this practice. Wasson was disgusted. "Like all good Anglo-Saxons, I knew nothing about the fungal world and felt that the less I knew about those putrid, treacherous excrescences the better." The incident sparked Wasson's interest in mushrooms, leading to subsequent contributions to the field of ethnomycology.

In 1952, English poet Robert Graves sent the Wassons a letter containing a journal article quoting American ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes discussing the ritual use of mushrooms by Mesoamericans in the 16th century. The ritual was first observed in modern times in 1938 by American anthropologist Jean Basset Johnson in Huautla de Jiménez, in the Sierra Mazateca region of Oaxaca, Mexico. Beginning in 1953, Wasson repeatedly traveled to Mexico in search of the mushrooms. On a trip to the town of Huautla de Jiménez in June and July 1955, Wasson and New York society photographer Allan Richardson participated in a mushroom ritual with curandera Maria Sabina, where they became, in Wasson's words, "the first white men in recorded history to eat the divine mushrooms." When Wasson returned to the U.S., he sent some of the mushrooms to Dr. Andrija Puharich of the Round Table Foundation in Maine; Puharich analyzed them and identified muscarine, atropine, and bufotenin as the chemicals responsible for hallucinogenic effects, and also used them on himself and others. Among these was the sculptor Harry Stump, in the presence of Aldous Huxley, who paid Puharich a three-week visit in August 1955.

While having lunch at the Century Club in New York in 1956, a Time magazine editor expressed interest in their trip to Mexico and invited them to pitch a story about their experience.

Notes

References

• Allen, John W. 2002. Mushroom Pioneers. Psilly Publications. .
• Cloud, John. 2007. When the Elite Loved LSD. Time (April 23).
• Feinberg, Ben. 2009. “A Symbol Of Wisdom And Love? Counter-Cultural Tourism And The Multiple Faces Of María Sabina In Huautla, Oaxaca.” The Politics of Space and Imagery (2009): 93–114.
• Harvard University Herbaria. 2002. R. Gordon Wasson (1898-1986) Archives. Harvard University.
• Harvey, Graham. 2003. Shamanism: A Reader. Routledge. .
• Bone, Eugenia. 2011. Mycophilia: Revelations from the Weird World of Mushrooms. Rodale. .
• Lee, Martin A. Shlain, Bruce. 1992. Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond. Grove Press. .
• Karttunen, Frances E. 1994. Between Worlds: Interpreters, Guides, and Survivors. Rutgers University Press. .
• Letcher, Andy. 2008. Shroom: A Cultural history of the Magic Mushroom. HarperCollins. .
• Reiedlinger, Thomas J. 1990. The Sacred Mushroom Seeker: Essays for R. Gordon Wasson. Dioscorides Press. .
• Reuters. 1970. Hippies Flocking to Mexico for Mushroom 'Trips'. The New York Times (July 22).
• Ruck, Carl. 2010. Wasson and the Psychedelic Revolution. Brainwaving. Beckley Foundation.
• Singer, Rolf. 1958. Mycological Investigations on Teonanácatl, the Mexican Hallucinogenic Mushroom. Part I. The History of Teonanácatl, Field Work and Culture Work. Mycologia 50, no. 2 (March–April): 239–261.
• Stafford, Peter. 1993. Psychedelics Encyclopedia. Ronin Publishing. .
• Wasson, R. G. 1957. Seeking the magic mushroom. Life 49, no. 19 (May 13): 100–102, 109–120.
• Stevens, Jay. 1998. Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream. Grove Press. .
• Wasson, R. Gordon. 1970. Drugs: The Sacred Mushroom. The New York Times (Sept 26): 21.
• Wasson, Valentina Pavlovna. 1957. I Ate the Sacred Mushroom. This Week. (May 19): 8–10, 36.
• Wasson, Valentina Pavlovna and R. Gordon Wasson. 1957. Mushrooms, Russia and History. Vol II. New York: Pantheon Books.
• Weiner, Tim. 2002. Huautla Journal; The Place for Trips of the Mind-Bending Kind. The New York Times (May 8).

References

1. Stafford 1993, p. 233.
2. Stevens 1998, p. 77; Singer 1958.
3. Cloud 2007.
4. Harvard University Herbaria 2002; Cloud 2007; Karttunen 1994, p. 229.
5. Reuters 1970; Cloud 2007.
6. Wasson 1970, p. 29.
7. Letcher 2008, pp. 80-81.
8. Wasson 1957, p. 113.
9. Wasson et al. 1978, p. 4; Ruck 2010; Stafford 1993, pp. 225-233. Depictions of mushroom use can be seen in the [[Florentine Codex]] and the [[Codex Magliabechiano]]. Relevant papers on this topic by Schultes include: Schultes, R. E. 1939. The identification of Teonanácatl, a narcotic basidiomycete of the Aztecs. ''Botanical Museum Leaflets of Harvard'' 7 (3): 37-54. February 21; and Schultes, R. E. 1940. Teonanácatl: The narcotic mushroom of the Aztecs. ''American Anthropologist'' 42: 429-443.
10. Wasson & Wasson 1957, pp. 237-238.
11. Wasson 1957, pp. 100–102, 109–120; Ruck 2010; Cloud 2007; Erowid Character Vaults 2012; Stevens 1998, pp. 74-79.
12. Annie Jacobsen, ''Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis'' (New York: Little, Brown, 2017), p. 56.
13. Jacobsen, ''Phenomena'' (2017), pp. 56-59.
14. Riedlinger 1997, p. 199; Stevens 1998, p. 78.