I recently finished Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom by Andy Letcher, published by Faber and Faber. It’s a refreshingly earthbound account of Western human attitudes to our psychoactive fungal neighbours.
Starting with an overview of what is known about mushroom use in pre-history (unsurprisingly, very little, despite what some people will tell you), Andy steers us through written accounts from Ancient Greece to early modern Europe, as naturalists and thinkers attempted to get to grips with these strange lifeforms that are neither beast nor plant. My favourite early suggestions for their origins were that they grew from the slime trials of snails, or that they were homes for insects (this last from the splendidly-named Otto von Munchausen).
We trace separate paths of discovery for the psilocybe and amanita mushrooms which, while producing very different effects, seem often to have been confused, especially once modern day heads started to take an interest in them as free-range intoxicants.
The trip really gets started once we reach the 20th century, with insightful analysis of the key human channels for the mushroom mind in the modern world: Gordon Wasson, Robert Graves, Timothy Leary and Terrence Mckenna. With a steady hand, Andy carefully dissects their claims, assesses their influences and ultimately strips away about 5 decades of mythful-thinking about ancient mushroom cults, extra-dimensional communications and the coming fungal apocalypse.
Those of us who grew up with heads full of mushroom wonders may be in for a harsh comedown, but Andy’s sporetraits are always fair, even affectionate. Wasson and Graves may have been deeply misguided in their thinking about secretive mushroom religions, but it’s clear that without them this book might never have needed to be written. Perhaps the most surprising part of the story is how, given that the mushrooms have been at least as long as we have, it’s really only since the early 1970s that they got hold of England’s home-grown heads.
The story comes right up to date with the recent, all too-brief, flourishing of the shroom-mind on our high streets and the UK government’s reclassification of psilocybin-containers alongside heroin and cocaine as a menace to society. Of course this drought is nothing that a quick hop over the water onto the continent can’t remedy!
A timely, much-needed work, Shroom will surely intoxify trippers past, present and future. Liberty caps off then to Andy Letcher for steering such a wise path through this garden of earthy delights.
