Odd this day
13 May 1957
It is, today, the 68th anniversary of Life magazine running this marvellous cover, which, as well as featuring Bert ‘cowardly lion’ Lahr, trailed a story about a banker going to Mexico to eat magic mushrooms. That story was seen by a ten-year-old boy by the name of Terence McKenna, who — as a direct result — went on to become an ethnobotanist, make the same journey himself, and spend years eating mushrooms every day, eventually arriving at ‘stoned ape theory’: the idea that human consciousness comes from psilocybin.
Yes, that opening paragraph was a bit much, wasn’t it? And Bert Lahr was entirely incidental — but I felt I had to include him because the photo’s so much fun (and not entirely unlike something you might see while consuming shrooms). Anyway…
Let’s start in 1957 with R. Gordon Wasson, the author of the Life piece, and “a vice president of J.P. Morgan & Co”, who was clearly a conventional enough American to be a senior banker and to do that weird initial thing with his name, but who, nonetheless:
together with his wife, Valentina P. Wasson, M.D., a New York pediatrician, has spent the last four summers in remote mountains of Mexico. The Wassons have been on the trail of strange and hitherto unstudied mushrooms with vision-giving powers.
In June 1955, he and his friend, “New York society photographer” Allan Richardson spent a night in a remote Mexican village and
shared with a family of Indian friends a celebration of ‘holy communion’ where ‘divine’ mushrooms were first adored and then consumed … The mushrooms were of a species with hallucinogenic powers; that is, they cause the eater to see visions. We chewed and swallowed these acrid mushrooms, saw visions, and emerged from the experience awestruck … Richardson and I were the first white men in recorded history to eat the divine mushrooms, which for centuries have been a secret of certain Indian peoples living far from the great world in southern Mexico. No anthropologists had ever described the scene that we witnessed.
You can read the whole thing on the Internet Archive, including the splendid detail that Richardson’s
emotions were mixed. His wife Mary had consented to his coming only after she had drawn from him a promise not to let those nasty toadstools cross his lips. Now he faced a behaviour dilemma. He took the mushrooms, and I heard him mutter in anguish, “My God, what will Mary say!”
Wasson mentions how bad the mushrooms tasted — “acrid with a rancid odor that repeated itself” — but then the candle is blown out, they are enveloped in the night, starless and bible-black, and the visions begin…
They were in vivid color, always harmonious. They began with art motifs, angular such as might decorate carpets or textiles or wallpaper or the drawing board of an architect. Then they evolved into palaces with courts, arcades, gardens — resplendent palaces all laid over with semiprecious stones. Then I saw a mythological beast drawing a regal chariot. Later it was though the walls of our house had dissolved, and my spirit had flown forth, and I was suspended in mid-air viewing landscapes of mountains, with camel caravans advancing slowly across the slopes, the mountains rising tier above tier to the very heavens.
They repeated the process three days later, and
instead of mountains I saw river estuaries, pellucid water flowing through an endless expanse of reeds down to a measureless sea, all by the pastel light of a horizontal sun—
Yes, I cut him off. Frankly, it was getting a bit dull.
There I was, poised in space, a disembodied eye, invisible, incorporeal, seeing but not seen.
Oh, give over, Wasson. Wrecked people when you’re sober are usually pretty tedious, but Terence McKenna was 10 when he read this, and even if the account drags a tad, you don’t have to be a child to think that eating a mushroom that makes you see things sounds like fun. As Vice records, McKenna spent some time
trailing our mother as she did her housework, waving the magazine demanding to know more. But of course she had nothing to add.
That was how younger brother Dennis, then six, remembered it (in his 2012 book by the understated name of Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, a tale of “psychedelic experimentation, and the intertwining nature of science and myth”, which also, apparently, includes Dennis’ ideas about “merging mushroom and human DNA”).
It took another 14 years for them to actually ingest any psilocybin (which is probably for the best. I don’t want to come across as an old fuddy-duddy, but I do think 10 might be a bit young). In their 20s, the brothers journeyed into the Colombian Amazon and swallowed down some Psilocybe cubensis — known at the time as Stropharia cubensis, although Terence called it
the starborn magic mushroom.
…obviously. In a 1993 book, True Hallucinations, he said of the experience
I had never had psilocybin before and was amazed at the contrast with LSD, which seemed more abrasively psychoanalytic and personal. In contrast, the mushrooms seemed so full of merry elfin energy that casting off into a visionary trance was all the more enticing.
I have to say, that’s not far off how I remember mushrooms. Anyway, it certainly seems understandable that:
From the spring of 1975 onward I was not without a continual supply of Stropharia
…and ate five dried grams once every couple of weeks. He and his brother also brought spores back to California (well, obviously California) and cultivated the delightful little fungi themselves, publishing Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide, under the names O. T. Oss and O. N. Oeric in 1976.
By the sound of the Vice article about them, this seems to have been a pretty special book. The foreword talks about Jung’s idea of transference, and then informs the reader that by this process
The mushroom speaks, and our opinions rest upon what it tells eloquently of itself in the cool night of the mind.
Righto. It then goes into some detail about what the mushroom ‘said’:
I am old, older than thought in your species, which is itself fifty times older than your history. Though I have been on earth for ages I am from the stars. My home is no one planet, for many worlds scattered through the shining disc of the galaxy have conditions which allow my spores an opportunity for life. The mushroom which you see is the part of my body given to sex thrills and sun bathing, my true body is a fine network of fibers growing through the soil. These networks may cover acres and may have far more connections than the number in a human brain.
Fuck me, this guy was wasted. Still, the book sold 100,000 copies in its first few years, apparently, which must have kept him in intoxicants — and it seems likely that it was this altered state which led him to stoned ape theory. This is the idea that getting twatted is what gave us things like the ability to think in the abstract (to use concepts and make plans) and to have art, culture and all that malarkey.
Essentially, McKenna reckoned, early humans came into contact with cattle (and then domesticated them), and magic mushrooms grow on cowpats, so one thing led to another. As Wikipedia drily observes, this is
not based on scientific evidence
…but it is an immensely entertaining idea, so the lack of evidence is a great pity. And, on the subject of the online encyclopaedia, stoned ape theory used to have a splendid bit of disambiguation at the top.
Perhaps even better than that, stone tape theory is also unscientific nonsense: the notion that, for example, the bricks of haunted houses can contain and release information, and that’s what hauntings are. I mean…
Mind you, none of this is necessarily the most interesting thing about stoned ape theory. There are others, to put it mildly. Firstly, McKenna also wrote in True Hallucinations:
I think that it is possible that certain of these compounds could be ‘seeded genes’ injected into the planetary ecology eons ago by an automated space-probe arriving here from a civilization somewhere else in the galaxy.
…which, essentially, means that psilocybin came to us by the same mechanism as Scientology. Mind you, Wasson — who, after retiring from banking in 1963, seemed to devote the rest of his life to psychedelic fungi —
postulated that there had been a global, prehistoric mushroom cult [and] traveled the world in search of evidence of the “divine mushroom.” The god-like Soma of the Vedic texts? He and coauthor Wendy Doniger O’Flarety argued it was actually fungal in nature, and perhaps the last thing the Buddha consumed before his ascension to Nirvana.
Perhaps even better than that, though, because it seems to be true, is the news that Wasson’s early trips to Mexico may have been covertly funded (apparently without his knowledge) by the CIA’s MK-Ultra program
…apparently because of a 1949 memo in which one agent — inspired by the poisoned-mushroom-assassination of the Emperor Claudius by his wife in 54 BC — wrote:
Let’s get into the technology of assassinations. Figure out most effective ways to kill — like Empress Agrippina.
Basically, the world of mind-altering compounds is so endlessly weird, this edition of Odd this day could go on forever. But I think I need a lie down. Which, coincidentally, is what you’ll need if you now read this:
Yes, ‘mushrooms are from space and getting fucked up on them made us human’ may not be the weirdest theory connected to fungi.
You really are most welcome.
