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http://www.imaginaria.org/wasson/life.htm R Gordon Wasson's Life Magazine article
- From the many mushroom celebrations that I have now witnessed, nine in all, it is clear to me that at least in the Mixeteco country the congregation is indispensable to the rite. Since the congregation, in order to participate, must be brought up in the tradition, any white persons should be greatly outnumbered by the Indians. But this does not mean that the mushrooms lose their potency if not eaten communally. The potency of the visions are not dependent on the communal context of the rite .
- Research into the mushrooms : alien to the Anglo Saxon and Wasson's temperament at the outset: In the afternoon of the first day we went strolling along a lovely mountain path, through woods criss-crossed by the slanting rays of a descending sun. We were young, carefree and in love. Suddenly my bride abandoned my side. She had spied wild mushrooms in the forest, and racing over the carpet of dried leaves in the woods, she knelt in poses of adoration before first one cluster and then another of these growths. In ecstasy she called each kind of by an endearing Russian name. She caressed the toadstools, savored their earthy perfume. 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. We were married in London in 1926, she being Russian, born and brought up in Moscow. She had lately qualified as a physician at the University of London. I am from Great Falls, Montana of Anglo-Saxon origins. In the late summer of 1927, recently married, we spent our holiday in the Catskill Mountains in New York state. In the afternoon of the first day we went strolling along a lovely mountain path, through woods criss-crossed by the slanting rays of a descending sun. We were young, carefree and in love.
- To Wasson at the first a foreign topic to him but later through research and empirical experience, oh was he to learn their secrets.She insisted on gathering them, laughing at my protests, mocking my horror. She brought a skirtful back to the lodge. She cleaned and cooked them. That evening she ate them, alone. Not long married, I thought to wake up the next morning a widower. These dramatic circumstances, puzzling and painful for me, made a lasting impression on us both. From that day on we sought an explanation for this strange cultural cleavage separating us in a minor area of our lives. Our method was to gather all the information we could on the attitude toward wild mushrooms of the Indo-European and adjacent peoples.
- Folk legacy and not the knowledge of books they sought.These were novel inquiries without precedent and their findings presented to the world's scholars at large .
- The surprising pattern emerges of mycophobe or mycophile.The great Russians, we find, are mighty mycophiles, as are also the Catalans, who possess a mushroomic vocabulary of more than 200 names. The ancient Greeks, Celts and Scandinavians were mycophobes, as are the Anglo-Saxons.
- There was another phenomenon that arrested our attention: wild mushrooms from earliest times were steeped in what the anthropologists call mana, a supernatural aura. The very word "toadstool" may have meant originally the "demonic stool" and been the specific name of a European mushroom that causes hallucinations. In ancient Greece and Rome there was a belief that certain kinds of mushrooms were procreated by the lighting bolt
- Why is the lightning bolt myth so widespread over the earth? Why are those cleavages cross culturally spread whence and for what reason? Note their hazarding of a bold surmise.
- All of our evidence taken together led us many years ago to hazard a bold surmise: was it not probable that, long ago, long before the beginnings of written history, our ancestors had worshiped a divine mushroom? This would explain the aura of the supernatural in which all fungi seem to be bathed. We were the first to offer the conjecture of a divine mushroom in the remote cultural background of the European peoples, and the conjecture at once posed a further problem: what kind of mushroom was once worshiped and why? Our surmise turned out not to be farfetched. We learned that in Siberia there are six primitive peoples--so primitive that anthropologists regard them as precious museum pieces for cultural study--who use an hallucinogenic mushroom in their shamanistic rites. We found that the Dyaks of Borneo and the Mount Hagen natives of New Guinea also have recourse to similar mushrooms
- In China and Japan we came upon an ancient tradition of a divine mushroom of immortality, and in India, according to one school, the Buddha at his last supper ate a dish of mushrooms and was forthwith translated to nirvana. When Cortez conquered Mexico, his followers reported that the Aztecs were using certain mushrooms in their religious celebrations, serving them, as the early Spanish friars put it, in a demonic holy communion and calling them teonanacatl, "God's flesh." Note references here to the Aztecs and to the demonic holy communion of teonanacatl ,God's flesh. There is also an ancient tradition of the advent of the white God who appeared in the new world, the resurrected Christ(?) could it have been? The tradition by then would have been corrupted.(?) We think we have discovered it in certain frescoes in the Valley of Mexico that date back to about 400 A.D., and also in the "mushroom stones" carved by the highland Maya of Guatemala that go back in one or two instances to the earliest era of stone carvings, perhaps 1000 B.C.
- In man's evolutionary past, as he groped his way out from his lowly past, there must have come a moment in time when he discovered the secret of the hallucinatory mushrooms. Their effect on him, as I see it, could only have been profound, a detonator to new ideas. I can very well asee the sense to this or any enteogen being a catalyst of what internally lies within main in wait to "detonate new ideas, potentially there all the while.
- For the mushrooms revealed to him worlds beyond the horizons known to him, in space and time, even worlds on a different plane of being, a heaven and perhaps a hell. For the credulous primitive mind, the mushrooms must have reinforced mightily the idea of the miraculous. To catalyze entry into other worlds perhaps parallel but always on the edge of our own. Now we call them parallel universes and think in our inflated self esteem we have furthered our internal discoveries, latent all the while, and the time for their discovery was ripe for the coming.
- Many emotions are shared by men with the animal kingdom, but awe and reverence and the fear of God are peculiar to men. When we bear in mind the beatific sense of awe and ecstasy and caritas engendered by the divine mushrooms, one is emboldened to the point of asking whether they may not have planted in primitive man the very idea of god.I do not venture so far in this surmise but they have enabled man to bring to the surface these latent links, connections, to G-d and to parallel universes in a more clear and focused way.
- The following statement was a sort of catechism indeed as were the ceremonies with the sacred mushrooms themselves. is no accident, perhaps, that the first answer of the Spanish-speaking Indian, when I asked about the effect of the mushrooms, was often this: Le llevan ahí donde Dios está, "They carry you there where God is," an answer that we have received on several occasions, from Indians in different cultural areas, almost as though it were in a sort of catechism.
- At all times there have been rare souls--the mystics and certain poets--who have had access without the aid of drugs to the visionary world for which the mushrooms hold the key. William Blake possessed the secret: "He who does not imagine in... stronger and better light than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all." William Blake hits of the essence in attaining mystical experience, for those souls rare or not. If imagination is at dearth or lacking, then he or she needs the boost of the entogen extendly to jump start this retarded imaginative faculty, so seems the implication. BEATIFIC AWE
- Whence derived? Is metempsychosis or soul attachment involved. Another unknown.
- But I can testify that the mushrooms make those visions accessible to a much larger number. The visions that we saw must have come from within us, obviously. But they did not recall anything that we had seen with our own eyes. Somewhere within us there must lie a repository where these visions sleep until they are called forth. The repository does sleep and is awakened but what I have said.
- Are the visions a subconscious transmutation of things read and seen and imagined, so transmuted that when they are conjured forth from the depths we no longer recognize them? Or do the mushrooms stir greater depths still, depths that are truly the Unknown? These are questions for perusal and discussion certainly which are not well researched universally in the public domain in this suopossed progressive age.
- We have found five distinct cultural areas where the Indians invoke the mushrooms, but the usage varies widely in every area. What is needed is a perceptive approach by trained anthropologists in every area, cooperating with mushrooms specialists. Of these latter there are in the whole world relatively few: mushrooms are a neglected field in the natural sciences.
This perceptive approach as described leaves a gaping and black hole as to exposure in the public domain and as to research generally over the expanse of years. - In this field Professor Roger Heim is known the world over. He is not only a man with vast experience in the field of mushrooms: he is an outstanding scientist in other fields, a man steeped in the humanities, the head of the Muséum National D'Historie Naturelle in Paris. At an early stage of our inquiries he had lent us his counsel, and in 1956 our progress had been such as to justify him in accompanying us on another field trip. These few comments on Profeassor Heim "compels" me to research and find more insight into him and to the articles and work product produced.
- This time the immediate problem was to identify the hallucinogenic mushrooms and to command a steady supply of them for laboratory study. This is harder than a layman would think. Though the early Spanish writers wrote about the divine mushrooms four centuries ago, no anthropologist and no mycologist had been sufficiently interested to pursue the problem until our own generation. Laboratory study the necessary follow up was taken.The pursuit of the problem has still been sadly in adequate in our own time.
- Difficulties in pursuit of anthropological or other studies: Those who know these mushrooms are Indians belonging to tribes farthest removed from us culturally, locked in their mountains remote form highways, locked also behind the barrier of their languages. One must win their confidence and overcome their suspicion of white men. One must face the physical discomforts of life and dangers of disease in the Indian villages in the rainy season, when the mushrooms grow. Occasionally a white face is seen in those parts in the dry season, but when the rains come, those rare beings--missionaries, archaeologists, anthropologists, botanists, geologists--vanish.
- Other difficulties -efforts at subterfuge or deception?of the otther difficulties. Of the seven curanderos that by now I have seen take mushrooms, only two, Eva Mendez and her daughter, were dedicated votaries. Some hers were equivocal characters. Once we saw a curandero take only a token dose of mushroom, and there was another who ate and served to us a kind of mushroom that had no hallucinogenic properties at all. Had we seen only him, we should have come away thinking that the famed properties of the mushrooms were a delusion, a striking instance of autosuggestion. Do we discover here an effort at deception, or had the dried mushrooms through age lost their peculiar property? Or, much more interesting anthropologically, do some shamans deliberately substitute innocent species for the authentic kinds in a retreat from what is too sacred to be borne? Even when we have won the confidence of a skilled practitioner like Eva, the atmosphere must be right for a perfect performance and there must be an abundance of mushrooms. Sometimes even in the rainy season the mushrooms are scarce, as we have learned from costly experience.
- 7 kinds of hallucinogenic mushrooms: The only certain test is to eat the mushrooms. Professor Heim and we have thus established beyond challenge the claims of four species. The next best thing is to obtain multiple confirmation from informants unknown to each other, if possible from various cultural areas. This we have done with several additional kinds. We are now certain as to four species, reasonably sure about two other kinds, and inclined to accept the claims of a seventh, these seven belonging to three genera. The studies and techniques of delimiting the species of mushrooms that are hallucinogenic employ scientific methods even when studying topics of esoteric sorts and dimensions.
- Of these seven, at least six appear to be new to science. Perhaps in the end we shall discover more than seven kinds. The mushrooms are not used as therapeutic agents: they themselves do not effect cures. The Indians "consult" the mushrooms when distraught with grave problems. If someone is ill, the mushroom will say what led to the illness and whether the patient will live or die, and what should be done to hasten recovery. If the verdict of the mushroom is for death, the believing patient and his family resign themselves: he loses appetite and soon expires and even before his death they begin preparations for the wake. An interesting point as brought out is the consulting property of the mushrooms.The visions thus have purpose and efficacy and links the supersensitive worlds to our own . Every race and genre has its properties of consultations to secure those links . Note the use of the Urim and Thummim. Is the bolddened part of the quote prophetic or self fulfilling auto suggestion?
- The Indians believe that the mushrooms hold the key to what we call extrasensory perception. Little by little the properties of the mushrooms are beginning to emerge. The Indians who eat them do not become addicts: when the rainy season is over and the mushrooms disappear, there seems to be no physiological craving for them. Addiction is not present but the key to ESP is. Is it merely the heightening of already existent ESP powers?
- This time the immediate problem was to identify the hallucinogenic mushrooms and to command a steady supply of them for laboratory study. This is harder than a layman would think. Though the early Spanish writers wrote about the divine mushrooms four centuries ago, no anthropologist and no mycologist had been sufficiently interested to pursue the problem until our own generation.IDENTIFICATION AND SECURING A STEADY SUPPLY OF THEM ARE RECURRENT PROBLEMS. We are supposedly a wise generation and are just now beginning to discover their properties and historical niche.
- Each kind has its own hallucinogenic strength, and if enough of one species be not available, the Indians will mix the species, making a quick calculation of the right dosage. The curandero usually takes a large dose and everyone else learns to know what his own dose should be. The Indians can calculate the right dosages indicating a long and tenuous familiarity with the sacred plants almost considered to have an efficacy beyond which e of the West ascribe to plant life, but which ascribe as living beings ingested for the purposes of visions and prophecy.
- It seems that the dose does not increase with use. Some persons require more than others. An increase in the dose intensifies the experience but does not greatly prolong the effect. The mushrooms sharpen, if anything, the memory, while they utterly destroy the sense of time. On the night that we have described we lived through eons. When it seemed to us that a sequence of visions had lasted for years, our watches would tell us that only seconds had passed. The memory is sharpened and the sense of time is destroyed indicating the timeless world come to birth through this experience.
- We think the mushrooms have no cumulative effect on the human organism. Eva Mendez has been taking them for 35 years, and when they are plentiful she takes them night after night. The mushrooms present a chemical problem. What is the agent in them that releases the strange hallucinations? We are now reasonably sure that it differs form such familiar drugs as opium, coca, mescaline, hashish, etc, These elude at present chemical analysis of the releasing agent ,and that is a matter for pure science. more on that in the next point to be made.
- The problem is of great interest in the realm of pure science. Will it also prove of help in coping with psychic disturbances? My wife and I have traveled far and discovered much since that day 30 years ago in the Catskills when we first perceived the strangeness of wild mushrooms. But what we have already discovered only opens up new vistas for further study. Today we are about to embark on our fifth expedition to the Mexican Indian villages, again seeking to increase and refine our knowledge of the role played by mushrooms in the lives of these remote peoples. The opening of new vistas were familiar vistas in the mystery cult of the past translated into the pure science of the present.
- But Mexico is only the beginning. All the evidence relating to the primitive beginnings of our own European cultures must be reviewed to see whether the hallucinogenic mushroom played a part there, only to be overlooked by posterity. We are now only foraging as if in the dark and in the modern ignorance of a limited mkaterialism into those "primitive beginnings".
- LIFE here publishes Professor Heim's life-size water-color paintings of the seven kinds of hallucinogenic mushrooms so far discovered. Four of these are species new to science and two others are new varieties of a known species, Psilocybe caerulescens Murrill. At the present time no one knows what drug it is in these mushrooms that causes the eater to see visions, and until its properties are clearly defined the hallucinogenic mushrooms must be treated with extreme caution.
- Corrobation include the inerdisciplinary use of sources: Robert J. Waitlaner; to Carmen Cook de Leonard and her husband, Donald Leonard; to Eunice V. Pike, Walter Miller; Searle Hoogshagan, and Bill Upson of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (Middle America expertise); (Museums) also to Gordon Ekholm of the American Museum of Natural History, New York; and to Stephan F. de Borhegyi, director of the Stovall Museum of the University of Oklahoma; (Material assistance) the American Philosophical Society and the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, and also to the Banco Nacional de México for lending them its private plane and the services of the excellent pilot, Captain Carlos Borja; mycological guidance they are primarily indebted to Roger Heim, director of the Muséum National d'Historie Naturelle, Paris. general advice they are most deeply indebted to Roman Jakobson of Harvard University, Robert Graves of Majorca, Adriaan J. Barnouw of New York, Georg Morgenstierne of the University of Oslo, L. L. Hammerich of the University of Copenhagen, André Martinet of the Sorbone, and René Lafon of the Faculté des Lettres at Bordeaux
For two strange timeless nights in almost complete darkness, Wasson and Richardson sat in an underground room with the curandera, Eva Mendez. On the first, both partook of the sacred mushrooms, and both saw visions. On the second Richardson refrained; instead he set up flash equipment and, aiming his camera at sounds in the blackness, recorded on film parts of the ceremony. In a solemn musical chant, Eva Mendez began with an invocation to the mushroom in the name of Christ and the saints. She proclaimed her own good intentions and then, impatiently, entreated the spirits, "I'm a mouth looking for you, but you are not paying attention. Come." As the ritual proceeded Wasson lost himself in wondrous flights of fancy which moved him to say afterward, "For the first time the word ecstasy took on real meaning. For the first time it did not mean someone else's state of mind."
HOLDING a candle made of virgin beeswax before the smoldering embers of copal, an ancient native incense, Eva Mendez invokes the saints. Children were always in the room though they did not take active part in the ceremony.
AT THE CLIMAX of this session, at about 3:30 in the morning, Eva Mendez ministers to her ailing 17-year-old son. As he lies lost in the ecstasy of his visions evoked by the mushrooms, she asks divine help for him. The child at right, perhaps soothed by the rhythm of the chanting, is sleeping quietly through the ritual. About a dozen Indians remained in the 20 by 20 foot room throughout the night. A few of them sat up but most lay on reed mats.
CHANTING early in the night, Eva Mendez lists her qualifications: "Am I not good? I am a creator woman, a star woman, a moon woman, a cross woman, a woman of heaven. I am a cloud person, a dew-on-the-grass person."
MEDITATING silently, Eva Mendez sits before her mushroom bowl. Though she ate twice as many mushrooms as the rest, she stayed calm and dignified, often lyrical in her exhortations, sometimes impatient when spirits did not come.
From the many mushroom celebrations that I have now witnessed, nine in all, it is clear to me that at least in the Mixeteco country the congregation is indispensable to the rite. Since the congregation, in order to participate, must be brought up in the tradition, any white persons should be greatly outnumbered by the Indians. But this does not mean that the mushrooms lose their potency if not eaten communally. My wife and our daughter Masha, 18, joined us a day after the ceremony that I have described, and on July 5, in their sleeping bags, they ate the mushrooms while alone with us. They experienced the visions too. They saw the same brilliant colors; my wife saw a ball in the Palace of Versailles with figures in period costumes dancing to a Mozart minuet. Again, on Aug. 12, 1955, six weeks after I had gathered the mushrooms in Mexico, I ate them in a dried state in my bedroom in New York, and found that if anything they had gained in their hallucinogenic potency.
ON MORNING after eating mushrooms, Wasson and his wife review his notes, taken in the dark. Jars contain mushrooms later sent to Heim.
It was a walk in the woods, many years ago, that launched my wife and me on our quest of the mysterious mushroom. We were married in London in 1926, she being Russian, born and brought up in Moscow. She had lately qualified as a physician at the University of London. I am from Great Falls, Montana of Anglo-Saxon origins. In the late summer of 1927, recently married, we spent our holiday in the Catskill Mountains in New York state. In the afternoon of the first day we went strolling along a lovely mountain path, through woods criss-crossed by the slanting rays of a descending sun. We were young, carefree and in love. Suddenly my bride abandoned my side. She had spied wild mushrooms in the forest, and racing over the carpet of dried leaves in the woods, she knelt in poses of adoration before first one cluster and then another of these growths. In ecstasy she called each kind of by an endearing Russian name. She caressed the toadstools, savored their earthy perfume. 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. For her they were things of grace, infinitely inviting to the perceptive mind. She insisted on gathering them, laughing at my protests, mocking my horror. She brought a skirtful back to the lodge. She cleaned and cooked them. That evening she ate them, alone. Not long married, I thought to wake up the next morning a widower. These dramatic circumstances, puzzling and painful for me, made a lasting impression on us both. From that day on we sought an explanation for this strange cultural cleavage separating us in a minor area of our lives. Our method was to gather all the information we could on the attitude toward wild mushrooms of the Indo-European and adjacent peoples. We tried to determine the kinds of mushrooms that each people knows, the uses to which these kinds are put, the vernacular names for them. We dug into the etymology of those names, to arrive at the metaphors hidden in their roots. We looked for mushrooms in myths, legends, ballads, proverbs, in the writers who drew their inspiration from folklore, in the clichés of daily conversation, in slang and the telltale recesses of obscene vocabularies. We sought them in the pages of history, in art, in Holy Writ. We were not interested in what people learn about mushrooms from books, but what untutored country folk know from childhood., the folk legacy of the family circle. It turned out that we had happened on a novel field of inquiry.
As the years went on and our knowledge grew, we discovered a surprising pattern in our data: each Indo-European people is by cultural inheritance either "mycophobe" or "mycophile," that is, each people either rejects and is ignorant of the fungal world or knows it astonishingly well and loves it. Our voluminous and often amusing evidence in support of this thesis fills many sections of our new book, and it is there that we submit our case to the scholarly world. The great Russians, we find, are mighty mycophiles, as are also the Catalans, who possess a mushroomic vocabulary of more than 200 names. The ancient Greeks, Celts and Scandinavians were mycophobes, as are the Anglo-Saxons. There was another phenomenon that arrested our attention: wild mushrooms from earliest times were steeped in what the anthropologists call mana, a supernatural aura. The very word "toadstool" may have meant originally the "demonic stool" and been the specific name of a European mushroom that causes hallucinations. In ancient Greece and Rome there was a belief that certain kinds of mushrooms were procreated by the lighting bolt. We made the further discovery that this particular myth, for which no support exists in natural science, is still believed among many widely scattered peoples: the Arabs of the desert, the peoples of India, Persia and the Pamirs, the Tibetans and Chinese, the Filipinos and the Maoris of New Zeland, and even among the Zapotecs of Mexico... All of our evidence taken together led us many years ago to hazard a bold surmise: was it not probable that, long ago, long before the beginnings of written history, our ancestors had worshiped a divine mushroom? This would explain the aura of the supernatural in which all fungi seem to be bathed. We were the first to offer the conjecture of a divine mushroom in the remote cultural background of the European peoples, and the conjecture at once posed a further problem: what kind of mushroom was once worshiped and why? Our surmise turned out not to be farfetched. We learned that in Siberia there are six primitive peoples--so primitive that anthropologists regard them as precious museum pieces for cultural study--who use an hallucinogenic mushroom in their shamanistic rites. We found that the Dyaks of Borneo and the Mount Hagen natives of New Guinea also have recourse to similar mushrooms. In China and Japan we came upon an ancient tradition of a divine mushroom of immortality, and in India, according to one school, the Buddha at his last supper ate a dish of mushrooms and was forthwith translated to nirvana. When Cortez conquered Mexico, his followers reported that the Aztecs were using certain mushrooms in their religious celebrations, serving them, as the early Spanish friars put it, in a demonic holy communion and calling them teonanacatl, "God's flesh." But no one at that time made a point of studying this practice in detail, and until now anthropologists have paid little attention to it. We with our interest in mushrooms seized on the Mexican opportunity, and for years have devoted the few leisure hours of our busy lives to the quest of the divine mushroom in Middle America. We think we have discovered it in certain frescoes in the Valley of Mexico that date back to about 400 A.D., and also in the "mushroom stones" carved by the highland Maya of Guatemala that go back in one or two instances to the earliest era of stone carvings, perhaps 1000 B.C.
MEXICAN drawing of 16th Century shows three mushrooms, a man eating them and a god behind him, who is speaking through the mushroom.
MUSROOM stone" form the highlands of Guatemala dates back to 300-600 A.D.
HOLDING a candle made of virgin beeswax before the smoldering embers of copal, an ancient native incense, Eva Mendez invokes the saints. Children were always in the room though they did not take active part in the ceremony.
AT THE CLIMAX of this session, at about 3:30 in the morning, Eva Mendez ministers to her ailing 17-year-old son. As he lies lost in the ecstasy of his visions evoked by the mushrooms, she asks divine help for him. The child at right, perhaps soothed by the rhythm of the chanting, is sleeping quietly through the ritual. About a dozen Indians remained in the 20 by 20 foot room throughout the night. A few of them sat up but most lay on reed mats.
CHANTING early in the night, Eva Mendez lists her qualifications: "Am I not good? I am a creator woman, a star woman, a moon woman, a cross woman, a woman of heaven. I am a cloud person, a dew-on-the-grass person."
MEDITATING silently, Eva Mendez sits before her mushroom bowl. Though she ate twice as many mushrooms as the rest, she stayed calm and dignified, often lyrical in her exhortations, sometimes impatient when spirits did not come.
From the many mushroom celebrations that I have now witnessed, nine in all, it is clear to me that at least in the Mixeteco country the congregation is indispensable to the rite. Since the congregation, in order to participate, must be brought up in the tradition, any white persons should be greatly outnumbered by the Indians. But this does not mean that the mushrooms lose their potency if not eaten communally. My wife and our daughter Masha, 18, joined us a day after the ceremony that I have described, and on July 5, in their sleeping bags, they ate the mushrooms while alone with us. They experienced the visions too. They saw the same brilliant colors; my wife saw a ball in the Palace of Versailles with figures in period costumes dancing to a Mozart minuet. Again, on Aug. 12, 1955, six weeks after I had gathered the mushrooms in Mexico, I ate them in a dried state in my bedroom in New York, and found that if anything they had gained in their hallucinogenic potency.
ON MORNING after eating mushrooms, Wasson and his wife review his notes, taken in the dark. Jars contain mushrooms later sent to Heim.
It was a walk in the woods, many years ago, that launched my wife and me on our quest of the mysterious mushroom. We were married in London in 1926, she being Russian, born and brought up in Moscow. She had lately qualified as a physician at the University of London. I am from Great Falls, Montana of Anglo-Saxon origins. In the late summer of 1927, recently married, we spent our holiday in the Catskill Mountains in New York state. In the afternoon of the first day we went strolling along a lovely mountain path, through woods criss-crossed by the slanting rays of a descending sun. We were young, carefree and in love. Suddenly my bride abandoned my side. She had spied wild mushrooms in the forest, and racing over the carpet of dried leaves in the woods, she knelt in poses of adoration before first one cluster and then another of these growths. In ecstasy she called each kind of by an endearing Russian name. She caressed the toadstools, savored their earthy perfume. 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. For her they were things of grace, infinitely inviting to the perceptive mind. She insisted on gathering them, laughing at my protests, mocking my horror. She brought a skirtful back to the lodge. She cleaned and cooked them. That evening she ate them, alone. Not long married, I thought to wake up the next morning a widower. These dramatic circumstances, puzzling and painful for me, made a lasting impression on us both. From that day on we sought an explanation for this strange cultural cleavage separating us in a minor area of our lives. Our method was to gather all the information we could on the attitude toward wild mushrooms of the Indo-European and adjacent peoples. We tried to determine the kinds of mushrooms that each people knows, the uses to which these kinds are put, the vernacular names for them. We dug into the etymology of those names, to arrive at the metaphors hidden in their roots. We looked for mushrooms in myths, legends, ballads, proverbs, in the writers who drew their inspiration from folklore, in the clichés of daily conversation, in slang and the telltale recesses of obscene vocabularies. We sought them in the pages of history, in art, in Holy Writ. We were not interested in what people learn about mushrooms from books, but what untutored country folk know from childhood., the folk legacy of the family circle. It turned out that we had happened on a novel field of inquiry.
As the years went on and our knowledge grew, we discovered a surprising pattern in our data: each Indo-European people is by cultural inheritance either "mycophobe" or "mycophile," that is, each people either rejects and is ignorant of the fungal world or knows it astonishingly well and loves it. Our voluminous and often amusing evidence in support of this thesis fills many sections of our new book, and it is there that we submit our case to the scholarly world. The great Russians, we find, are mighty mycophiles, as are also the Catalans, who possess a mushroomic vocabulary of more than 200 names. The ancient Greeks, Celts and Scandinavians were mycophobes, as are the Anglo-Saxons. There was another phenomenon that arrested our attention: wild mushrooms from earliest times were steeped in what the anthropologists call mana, a supernatural aura. The very word "toadstool" may have meant originally the "demonic stool" and been the specific name of a European mushroom that causes hallucinations. In ancient Greece and Rome there was a belief that certain kinds of mushrooms were procreated by the lighting bolt. We made the further discovery that this particular myth, for which no support exists in natural science, is still believed among many widely scattered peoples: the Arabs of the desert, the peoples of India, Persia and the Pamirs, the Tibetans and Chinese, the Filipinos and the Maoris of New Zeland, and even among the Zapotecs of Mexico... All of our evidence taken together led us many years ago to hazard a bold surmise: was it not probable that, long ago, long before the beginnings of written history, our ancestors had worshiped a divine mushroom? This would explain the aura of the supernatural in which all fungi seem to be bathed. We were the first to offer the conjecture of a divine mushroom in the remote cultural background of the European peoples, and the conjecture at once posed a further problem: what kind of mushroom was once worshiped and why? Our surmise turned out not to be farfetched. We learned that in Siberia there are six primitive peoples--so primitive that anthropologists regard them as precious museum pieces for cultural study--who use an hallucinogenic mushroom in their shamanistic rites. We found that the Dyaks of Borneo and the Mount Hagen natives of New Guinea also have recourse to similar mushrooms. In China and Japan we came upon an ancient tradition of a divine mushroom of immortality, and in India, according to one school, the Buddha at his last supper ate a dish of mushrooms and was forthwith translated to nirvana. When Cortez conquered Mexico, his followers reported that the Aztecs were using certain mushrooms in their religious celebrations, serving them, as the early Spanish friars put it, in a demonic holy communion and calling them teonanacatl, "God's flesh." But no one at that time made a point of studying this practice in detail, and until now anthropologists have paid little attention to it. We with our interest in mushrooms seized on the Mexican opportunity, and for years have devoted the few leisure hours of our busy lives to the quest of the divine mushroom in Middle America. We think we have discovered it in certain frescoes in the Valley of Mexico that date back to about 400 A.D., and also in the "mushroom stones" carved by the highland Maya of Guatemala that go back in one or two instances to the earliest era of stone carvings, perhaps 1000 B.C.
MEXICAN drawing of 16th Century shows three mushrooms, a man eating them and a god behind him, who is speaking through the mushroom.
MUSROOM stone" form the highlands of Guatemala dates back to 300-600 A.D.
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For a day following our mushroom adventure Allan and I did little but discuss our experience. We had attended a shamanistic rite with singing and dancing among our Mixeteco friends which no anthropologist has ever before described in the New World, a performance with striking parallels in the shamanistic practices of some of the archaic Palaeo-Siberian peoples. But may not the meaning of what we had witnessed go beyond this? The hallucinogenic mushrooms are a natural product presumably accessible to men in many parts of the world, including Europe and Asia. In man's evolutionary past, as he groped his way out from his lowly past, there must have come a moment in time when he discovered the secret of the hallucinatory mushrooms. Their effect on him, as I see it, could only have been profound, a detonator to new ideas. For the mushrooms revealed to him worlds beyond the horizons known to him, in space and time, even worlds on a different plane of being, a heaven and perhaps a hell. For the credulous primitive mind, the mushrooms must have reinforced mightily the idea of the miraculous. Many emotions are shared by men with the animal kingdom, but awe and reverence and the fear of God are peculiar to men. When we bear in mind the beatific sense of awe and ecstasy and caritas engendered by the divine mushrooms, one is emboldened to the point of asking whether they may not have planted in primitive man the very idea of god. It is no accident, perhaps, that the first answer of the Spanish-speaking Indian, when I asked about the effect of the mushrooms, was often this: Le llevan ahí donde Dios está, "They carry you there where God is," an answer that we have received on several occasions, from Indians in different cultural areas, almost as though it were in a sort of catechism. At all times there have been rare souls--the mystics and certain poets--who have had access without the aid of drugs to the visionary world for which the mushrooms hold the key. William Blake possessed the secret: "He who does not imagine in... stronger and better light than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all." But I can testify that the mushrooms make those visions accessible to a much larger number. The visions that we saw must have come from within us, obviously. But they did not recall anything that we had seen with our own eyes. Somewhere within us there must lie a repository where these visions sleep until they are called forth. Are the visions a subconscious transmutation of things read and seen and imagined, so transmuted that when they are conjured forth from the depths we no longer recognize them? Or do the mushrooms stir greater depths still, depths that are truly the Unknown?
IN each of our successive trips to the Indian peoples of southern Mexico, we have enlarged our knowledge of the use of the divine mushrooms, and as our knowledge has increased, new and exciting questions keep arising. We have found five distinct cultural areas where the Indians invoke the mushrooms, but the usage varies widely in every area. What is needed is a perceptive approach by trained anthropologists in every area, cooperating with mushrooms specialists. Of these latter there are in the whole world relatively few: mushrooms are a neglected field in the natural sciences. In this field Professor Roger Heim is known the world over. He is not only a man with vast experience in the field of mushrooms: he is an outstanding scientist in other fields, a man steeped in the humanities, the head of the Muséum National D'Historie Naturelle in Paris. At an early stage of our inquiries he had lent us his counsel, and in 1956 our progress had been such as to justify him in accompanying us on another field trip. There came with us also a chemist, Professor James A. Moore of the University of Delaware; an anthropologist, Guy Stresser-Péan of the Sorbonne; and once again our loyal friend Allan Richardson as photographer.
GROWING in Paris, cultures brought back form Mexico by Heim produce mushrooms in his laboratory. These are Psilocybe mexicana Heim.
This time the immediate problem was to identify the hallucinogenic mushrooms and to command a steady supply of them for laboratory study. This is harder than a layman would think. Though the early Spanish writers wrote about the divine mushrooms four centuries ago, no anthropologist and no mycologist had been sufficiently interested to pursue the problem until our own generation. Those who know these mushrooms are Indians belonging to tribes farthest removed from us culturally, locked in their mountains remote form highways, locked also behind the barrier of their languages. One must win their confidence and overcome their suspicion of white men. One must face the physical discomforts of life and dangers of disease in the Indian villages in the rainy season, when the mushrooms grow. Occasionally a white face is seen in those parts in the dry season, but when the rains come, those rare beings--missionaries, archaeologists, anthropologists, botanists, geologists--vanish. There are other difficulties. Of the seven curanderos that by now I have seen take mushrooms, only two, Eva Mendez and her daughter, were dedicated votaries. Some of the others were equivocal characters. Once we saw a curandero take only a token dose of mushroom, and there was another who ate and served to us a kind of mushroom that had no hallucinogenic properties at all. Had we seen only him, we should have come away thinking that the famed properties of the mushrooms were a delusion, a striking instance of autosuggestion. Do we discover here an effort at deception, or had the dried mushrooms through age lost their peculiar property? Or, much more interesting anthropologically, do some shamans deliberately substitute innocent species for the authentic kinds in a retreat from what is too sacred to be borne? Even when we have won the confidence of a skilled practitioner like Eva, the atmosphere must be right for a perfect performance and there must be an abundance of mushrooms. Sometimes even in the rainy season the mushrooms are scarce, as we have learned from costly experience.
For a day following our mushroom adventure Allan and I did little but discuss our experience. We had attended a shamanistic rite with singing and dancing among our Mixeteco friends which no anthropologist has ever before described in the New World, a performance with striking parallels in the shamanistic practices of some of the archaic Palaeo-Siberian peoples. But may not the meaning of what we had witnessed go beyond this? The hallucinogenic mushrooms are a natural product presumably accessible to men in many parts of the world, including Europe and Asia. In man's evolutionary past, as he groped his way out from his lowly past, there must have come a moment in time when he discovered the secret of the hallucinatory mushrooms. Their effect on him, as I see it, could only have been profound, a detonator to new ideas. For the mushrooms revealed to him worlds beyond the horizons known to him, in space and time, even worlds on a different plane of being, a heaven and perhaps a hell. For the credulous primitive mind, the mushrooms must have reinforced mightily the idea of the miraculous. Many emotions are shared by men with the animal kingdom, but awe and reverence and the fear of God are peculiar to men. When we bear in mind the beatific sense of awe and ecstasy and caritas engendered by the divine mushrooms, one is emboldened to the point of asking whether they may not have planted in primitive man the very idea of god. It is no accident, perhaps, that the first answer of the Spanish-speaking Indian, when I asked about the effect of the mushrooms, was often this: Le llevan ahí donde Dios está, "They carry you there where God is," an answer that we have received on several occasions, from Indians in different cultural areas, almost as though it were in a sort of catechism. At all times there have been rare souls--the mystics and certain poets--who have had access without the aid of drugs to the visionary world for which the mushrooms hold the key. William Blake possessed the secret: "He who does not imagine in... stronger and better light than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all." But I can testify that the mushrooms make those visions accessible to a much larger number. The visions that we saw must have come from within us, obviously. But they did not recall anything that we had seen with our own eyes. Somewhere within us there must lie a repository where these visions sleep until they are called forth. Are the visions a subconscious transmutation of things read and seen and imagined, so transmuted that when they are conjured forth from the depths we no longer recognize them? Or do the mushrooms stir greater depths still, depths that are truly the Unknown?
IN each of our successive trips to the Indian peoples of southern Mexico, we have enlarged our knowledge of the use of the divine mushrooms, and as our knowledge has increased, new and exciting questions keep arising. We have found five distinct cultural areas where the Indians invoke the mushrooms, but the usage varies widely in every area. What is needed is a perceptive approach by trained anthropologists in every area, cooperating with mushrooms specialists. Of these latter there are in the whole world relatively few: mushrooms are a neglected field in the natural sciences. In this field Professor Roger Heim is known the world over. He is not only a man with vast experience in the field of mushrooms: he is an outstanding scientist in other fields, a man steeped in the humanities, the head of the Muséum National D'Historie Naturelle in Paris. At an early stage of our inquiries he had lent us his counsel, and in 1956 our progress had been such as to justify him in accompanying us on another field trip. There came with us also a chemist, Professor James A. Moore of the University of Delaware; an anthropologist, Guy Stresser-Péan of the Sorbonne; and once again our loyal friend Allan Richardson as photographer.
GROWING in Paris, cultures brought back form Mexico by Heim produce mushrooms in his laboratory. These are Psilocybe mexicana Heim.
This time the immediate problem was to identify the hallucinogenic mushrooms and to command a steady supply of them for laboratory study. This is harder than a layman would think. Though the early Spanish writers wrote about the divine mushrooms four centuries ago, no anthropologist and no mycologist had been sufficiently interested to pursue the problem until our own generation. Those who know these mushrooms are Indians belonging to tribes farthest removed from us culturally, locked in their mountains remote form highways, locked also behind the barrier of their languages. One must win their confidence and overcome their suspicion of white men. One must face the physical discomforts of life and dangers of disease in the Indian villages in the rainy season, when the mushrooms grow. Occasionally a white face is seen in those parts in the dry season, but when the rains come, those rare beings--missionaries, archaeologists, anthropologists, botanists, geologists--vanish. There are other difficulties. Of the seven curanderos that by now I have seen take mushrooms, only two, Eva Mendez and her daughter, were dedicated votaries. Some of the others were equivocal characters. Once we saw a curandero take only a token dose of mushroom, and there was another who ate and served to us a kind of mushroom that had no hallucinogenic properties at all. Had we seen only him, we should have come away thinking that the famed properties of the mushrooms were a delusion, a striking instance of autosuggestion. Do we discover here an effort at deception, or had the dried mushrooms through age lost their peculiar property? Or, much more interesting anthropologically, do some shamans deliberately substitute innocent species for the authentic kinds in a retreat from what is too sacred to be borne? Even when we have won the confidence of a skilled practitioner like Eva, the atmosphere must be right for a perfect performance and there must be an abundance of mushrooms. Sometimes even in the rainy season the mushrooms are scarce, as we have learned from costly experience.
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WE now know that there are seven kinds of hallucinogenic mushrooms in use in Mexico. But not all the Indians know them even in the villages where they are worshiped, and either in good faith or to make the visitor happy, the curanderos sometimes deliver the wrong mushrooms. The only certain test is to eat the mushrooms. Professor Heim and we have thus established beyond challenge the claims of four species. The next best thing is to obtain multiple confirmation from informants unknown to each other, if possible from various cultural areas. This we have done with several additional kinds. We are now certain as to four species, reasonably sure about two other kinds, and inclined to accept the claims of a seventh, these seven belonging to three genera. Of these seven, at least six appear to be new to science. Perhaps in the end we shall discover more than seven kinds. The mushrooms are not used as therapeutic agents: they themselves do not effect cures. The Indians "consult" the mushrooms when distraught with grave problems. If someone is ill, the mushroom will say what led to the illness and whether the patient will live or die, and what should be done to hasten recovery. If the verdict of the mushroom is for death, the believing patient and his family resign themselves: he loses appetite and soon expires and even before his death they begin preparations for the wake. Or one may consult the mushroom about the stolen donkey and learn where it will be found and who took it. Or if a beloved son has gone out into the world--perhaps to the United States--the mushroom is a kind of a postal service: it will report whether he still lives or is dead, whether he is in jail, married, in trouble or prosperous. The Indians believe that the mushrooms hold the key to what we call extrasensory perception. Little by little the properties of the mushrooms are beginning to emerge. The Indians who eat them do not become addicts: when the rainy season is over and the mushrooms disappear, there seems to be no physiological craving for them. Each kind has its own hallucinogenic strength, and if enough of one species be not available, the Indians will mix the species, making a quick calculation of the right dosage. The curandero usually takes a large dose and everyone else learns to know what his own dose should be. It seems that the dose does not increase with use. Some persons require more than others. An increase in the dose intensifies the experience but does not greatly prolong the effect. The mushrooms sharpen, if anything, the memory, while they utterly destroy the sense of time. On the night that we have described we lived through eons. When it seemed to us that a sequence of visions had lasted for years, our watches would tell us that only seconds had passed. The pupils of our eyes were dilated, the pulse of ran slow. We think the mushrooms have no cumulative effect on the human organism. Eva Mendez has been taking them for 35 years, and when they are plentiful she takes them night after night. The mushrooms present a chemical problem. What is the agent in them that releases the strange hallucinations? We are now reasonably sure that it differs form such familiar drugs as opium, coca, mescaline, hashish, etc. But the chemist has a long road to go before he will isolate it, arrive at its molecular structure and synthesize it. The problem is of great interest in the realm of pure science. Will it also prove of help in coping with psychic disturbances? My wife and I have traveled far and discovered much since that day 30 years ago in the Catskills when we first perceived the strangeness of wild mushrooms. But what we have already discovered only opens up new vistas for further study. Today we are about to embark on our fifth expedition to the Mexican Indian villages, again seeking to increase and refine our knowledge of the role played by mushrooms in the lives of these remote peoples. But Mexico is only the beginning. All the evidence relating to the primitive beginnings of our own European cultures must be reviewed to see whether the hallucinogenic mushroom played a part there, only to be overlooked by posterity.
Rare vision-giving fungi shown for first time
On his latest expedition to seek out and study the hallucinogenic mushrooms, Wasson was accompained by Professor Roger Heim, an old friend, one of the world's leading mycologists and head of France's Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle. Wasson had sent Heim specimens form three of his previous trips. Now Heim was able to study the mushrooms in the field, eat them with the Indians and work out techniques for growing some of them in the laboratory. LIFE here publishes Professor Heim's life-size water-color paintings of the seven kinds of hallucinogenic mushrooms so far discovered. Four of these are species new to science and two others are new varieties of a known species, Psilocybe caerulescens Murrill. At the present time no one knows what drug it is in these mushrooms that causes the eater to see visions, and until its properties are clearly defined the hallucinogenic mushrooms must be treated with extreme caution. Among the Indians, their use is hedged about with restrictions of many kinds. Unlike ordinary edible mushrooms, these are never sold in the market place, and no Indian dares to eat them frivolously, for excitement. The Indians themselves speak of their use as muy delicado, that is, perilous.
WITH professor Heim, Wasson (right) searches a mountainside near the village for specimens of the sacred mushrooms. They found two species here.
CALLED "Children of the Waters" by Aztecs, Psilocybe Aztecorum Heim grows in grass on volcano Popocatepetl.
GROWING on certain kinds of dead tree trunks, Conocybe Siligineoides Hiem was collected by Wasson in 1955.
FIRST DISCOVERED in Cuba in June 1904, Stropharia cubensis Erale grows on cow dung in pastures.
CROWN of Thorns," Psilocybe Zapotecorum Heim grows in marshy ground. It was first found in 1955.
LANDSLIDE" mushroom, Psilocybe caerulescens Murrill, var. Mazatecorum Heim, grows on sugar cane residue.
MUSHROOM of Superior Reason," Psilocybe caerulescens Murrill var. nigripes Heim, grows near Juquila.
MOST PRIZED by Indians and most widespread of these fungi, Psilocybe mexicana Heim grows in pastures.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For help in Middle America the author and Mrs. Wasson are indebted in Mexico chiefly to Robert J. Waitlaner; to Carmen Cook de Leonard and her husband, Donald Leonard; to Eunice V. Pike, Walter Miller; Searle Hoogshagan, and Bill Upson of the Summer Institute of Linguistics; also to Gordon Ekholm of the American Museum of Natural History, New York; and to Stephan F. de Borhegyi, director of the Stovall Museum of the University of Oklahoma. They are grateful for material aid granted to them by the American Philosophical Society and the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, and also to the Banco Nacional de México for lending them its private plane and the services of the excellent pilot, Captain Carlos Borja. For mycological guidance they are primarily indebted to Roger Heim, director of the Muséum National d'Historie Naturelle, Paris. For general advice they are most deeply indebted to Roman Jakobson of Harvard University, Robert Graves of Majorca, Adriaan J. Barnouw of New York, Georg Morgenstierne of the University of Oslo, L. L. Hammerich of the University of Copenhagen, André Martinet of the Sorbone, and René Lafon of the Faculté des Lettres at Bordeaux. In the article the names of places and persons have been altered to preserve their privacy.
WE now know that there are seven kinds of hallucinogenic mushrooms in use in Mexico. But not all the Indians know them even in the villages where they are worshiped, and either in good faith or to make the visitor happy, the curanderos sometimes deliver the wrong mushrooms. The only certain test is to eat the mushrooms. Professor Heim and we have thus established beyond challenge the claims of four species. The next best thing is to obtain multiple confirmation from informants unknown to each other, if possible from various cultural areas. This we have done with several additional kinds. We are now certain as to four species, reasonably sure about two other kinds, and inclined to accept the claims of a seventh, these seven belonging to three genera. Of these seven, at least six appear to be new to science. Perhaps in the end we shall discover more than seven kinds. The mushrooms are not used as therapeutic agents: they themselves do not effect cures. The Indians "consult" the mushrooms when distraught with grave problems. If someone is ill, the mushroom will say what led to the illness and whether the patient will live or die, and what should be done to hasten recovery. If the verdict of the mushroom is for death, the believing patient and his family resign themselves: he loses appetite and soon expires and even before his death they begin preparations for the wake. Or one may consult the mushroom about the stolen donkey and learn where it will be found and who took it. Or if a beloved son has gone out into the world--perhaps to the United States--the mushroom is a kind of a postal service: it will report whether he still lives or is dead, whether he is in jail, married, in trouble or prosperous. The Indians believe that the mushrooms hold the key to what we call extrasensory perception. Little by little the properties of the mushrooms are beginning to emerge. The Indians who eat them do not become addicts: when the rainy season is over and the mushrooms disappear, there seems to be no physiological craving for them. Each kind has its own hallucinogenic strength, and if enough of one species be not available, the Indians will mix the species, making a quick calculation of the right dosage. The curandero usually takes a large dose and everyone else learns to know what his own dose should be. It seems that the dose does not increase with use. Some persons require more than others. An increase in the dose intensifies the experience but does not greatly prolong the effect. The mushrooms sharpen, if anything, the memory, while they utterly destroy the sense of time. On the night that we have described we lived through eons. When it seemed to us that a sequence of visions had lasted for years, our watches would tell us that only seconds had passed. The pupils of our eyes were dilated, the pulse of ran slow. We think the mushrooms have no cumulative effect on the human organism. Eva Mendez has been taking them for 35 years, and when they are plentiful she takes them night after night. The mushrooms present a chemical problem. What is the agent in them that releases the strange hallucinations? We are now reasonably sure that it differs form such familiar drugs as opium, coca, mescaline, hashish, etc. But the chemist has a long road to go before he will isolate it, arrive at its molecular structure and synthesize it. The problem is of great interest in the realm of pure science. Will it also prove of help in coping with psychic disturbances? My wife and I have traveled far and discovered much since that day 30 years ago in the Catskills when we first perceived the strangeness of wild mushrooms. But what we have already discovered only opens up new vistas for further study. Today we are about to embark on our fifth expedition to the Mexican Indian villages, again seeking to increase and refine our knowledge of the role played by mushrooms in the lives of these remote peoples. But Mexico is only the beginning. All the evidence relating to the primitive beginnings of our own European cultures must be reviewed to see whether the hallucinogenic mushroom played a part there, only to be overlooked by posterity.
Rare vision-giving fungi shown for first time
On his latest expedition to seek out and study the hallucinogenic mushrooms, Wasson was accompained by Professor Roger Heim, an old friend, one of the world's leading mycologists and head of France's Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle. Wasson had sent Heim specimens form three of his previous trips. Now Heim was able to study the mushrooms in the field, eat them with the Indians and work out techniques for growing some of them in the laboratory. LIFE here publishes Professor Heim's life-size water-color paintings of the seven kinds of hallucinogenic mushrooms so far discovered. Four of these are species new to science and two others are new varieties of a known species, Psilocybe caerulescens Murrill. At the present time no one knows what drug it is in these mushrooms that causes the eater to see visions, and until its properties are clearly defined the hallucinogenic mushrooms must be treated with extreme caution. Among the Indians, their use is hedged about with restrictions of many kinds. Unlike ordinary edible mushrooms, these are never sold in the market place, and no Indian dares to eat them frivolously, for excitement. The Indians themselves speak of their use as muy delicado, that is, perilous.
WITH professor Heim, Wasson (right) searches a mountainside near the village for specimens of the sacred mushrooms. They found two species here.
CALLED "Children of the Waters" by Aztecs, Psilocybe Aztecorum Heim grows in grass on volcano Popocatepetl.
GROWING on certain kinds of dead tree trunks, Conocybe Siligineoides Hiem was collected by Wasson in 1955.
FIRST DISCOVERED in Cuba in June 1904, Stropharia cubensis Erale grows on cow dung in pastures.
CROWN of Thorns," Psilocybe Zapotecorum Heim grows in marshy ground. It was first found in 1955.
LANDSLIDE" mushroom, Psilocybe caerulescens Murrill, var. Mazatecorum Heim, grows on sugar cane residue.
MUSHROOM of Superior Reason," Psilocybe caerulescens Murrill var. nigripes Heim, grows near Juquila.
MOST PRIZED by Indians and most widespread of these fungi, Psilocybe mexicana Heim grows in pastures.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For help in Middle America the author and Mrs. Wasson are indebted in Mexico chiefly to Robert J. Waitlaner; to Carmen Cook de Leonard and her husband, Donald Leonard; to Eunice V. Pike, Walter Miller; Searle Hoogshagan, and Bill Upson of the Summer Institute of Linguistics; also to Gordon Ekholm of the American Museum of Natural History, New York; and to Stephan F. de Borhegyi, director of the Stovall Museum of the University of Oklahoma. They are grateful for material aid granted to them by the American Philosophical Society and the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, and also to the Banco Nacional de México for lending them its private plane and the services of the excellent pilot, Captain Carlos Borja. For mycological guidance they are primarily indebted to Roger Heim, director of the Muséum National d'Historie Naturelle, Paris. For general advice they are most deeply indebted to Roman Jakobson of Harvard University, Robert Graves of Majorca, Adriaan J. Barnouw of New York, Georg Morgenstierne of the University of Oslo, L. L. Hammerich of the University of Copenhagen, André Martinet of the Sorbone, and René Lafon of the Faculté des Lettres at Bordeaux. In the article the names of places and persons have been altered to preserve their privacy.
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