Taking the mush out of mushrooms: Forthcoming Letcher lecture

Attempting to unravel some of the mycelial-like myths and mysteries that pop up in the mush surrounding the magic mushroom, Dr Andy Letcher will be deconstructing the cultural history constructed around fungal cultures this month at the Ecology, Cosmos and Consciousness lecture series. See you all down the rabbit hole on Tuesday, 24^th November at the October Gallery for a reinvigorating mycophilic gathering in true salon style.

Making Sense of Magic Mushrooms

Dr Andy Letcher

October Gallery, 24 Old Gloucester Street, London, WC1N 3AL

(Tel: 44 (0)20 7831 1618). – email: rentals AT octobergallery.co.uk

RSVP so that we can anticipate numbers – Please book in advance by credit card to guarantee a place or pay on the door.

Entry £7 /£5 Concessions, Arrive 6pm for a 6:30pm Start - Wine available

For those who have encountered magic mushrooms, the psilocybin experience is like an ancient codex whose glyphs are at once baffling and clear. To make sense of it, each person must perform an act of translation or interpretation by which the strange is rendered familiar. But how should this be done? In the post-war period alone an original psychological framework has given way to that of mysticism, itself replaced in turn by the language of shamanism.

In this talk, Andy Letcher will encourage us to move away from the mushroom experience itself – the usual province of trip-lit –, to a consideration of how it has been interpreted throughout history. For, contrary to received wisdom, very few cultures have decoded the mushroom as we do. Along the way he will ask whether magic mushrooms bring genuine transcendence, or if the experiences they occasion forever bound by culture.

Andy Letcher is a freelance writer, academic lecturer and folk musician living in Oxford, UK. He lectures at Oxford Brookes University and Bath Spa University on subjects as diverse as neo-Paganism, shamanism, and theory in the Study of Religion. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom and Mad Thoughts on Mushrooms: Discourse and Power in the Study of Psychedelic Consciousness, published in the journal Anthropology of Consciousness. Known for his iconoclastic style, and with doctorates in both Ecology and the Study of Religion, he challenges us to question received wisdom about psychedelics and psychedelic history. A prolific song-writer, tunesmith and exponent of English Bagpipes, he fronts psych-folk band, Telling the Bees.

Can psilocybin really cause psi? - Part 2: Wasson in Mexico

In relation to “The Sacred Mushroom” film in the last post, the Wassons’ classic and rare book “Mushrooms, Russia and History” has been made available online by the New Alexandria Archive (Vol1 & Vol2). The original two-volume book, published by Pantheon Books in 1957, was limited to 512 copies and was never reprinted, although some university libraries (such as the Bodlian, Oxford) hold copies. This digital edition was scanned from the original and hand corrected by Igor Dolgov, Zachary Jones, and Greg Golden, with thanks to a generous contributor.

Among the intriguing sections on Russian mycophilia and other beautifully illustrated fungal curiosities, this classic text notoriously describes Gordon and Valentina Wasson’s search and discovery of a sacred mushroom cult in Mexico - following a tip off from the English poet and pagan icon Robert Graves. The book describes how the Mexican shaman most often associated with Wasson and the discovery of the psychedelic Psilocybe cubensis cult, Maria Sabina, was actually encountered on R.G. Wasson’s second trip to Huautla, Oaxaca, when he was accompanied by his photographer, Alan Richardson (who had an apparently true prophetic vision when they ate the mushrooms for the first time – see previous post).

However, on his first trip in 1953 Wasson observed a divinatory mushroom ceremony being held by Don Aurulio in which this ‘bemushroomed’ indigenous shaman, to his surprise, told him two things about his son back home that even Wasson could not have known, which later turned out to be true. So even from the very first discovery of psychedelic psilocybin and psilocin-containing mushrooms in the West we have reports of paranormal phenomena (clairvoyance and /or precognition in this case), echoing the ostensibly paranormal experience (out-of-body) of Dr Albert Hofmann when he discovered/invented LSD ten years earlier (read more about this) – though I suppose this is just coincidence?

(Thanks to Thomas Roberts for the link)

Can psilocybin really cause psi? - Part 1: Puharich in Mexico

Take a look at this classic, late 1950s film footage of the hunt for clairvoyance-inducing mushrooms in the (then) remote wilds of Mexico. Remaining out of the public domain until recently when it surfaced on YouTube in 3 parts, this vintage half-hour show was aired in the US on January 4, 1961 as one of the 96 episodes of the One Step Beyond series.

This episode, “The Sacred Mushroom”, takes its name from a 1959 book by the rogue parapsychologist and US defence intelligence asset, Dr. Andrija Puharich, who conducted research into the use of Amanita muscaria mushrooms for inducing paranormal abilities in the laboratory. The film shows rare footage of Puharich accompanying the director John Newland, an Hawaiian kahuna and some academics, on a journey to the inaccessible regions of rural Oaxaca in search of the magic mushroom-using curanderos - discovered a few years earlier in 1953 by the amateur mycologist Gordon Wasson and his wife Valentina.

Puharich had met up with Gordon Wasson in 1955 and arranged for them to conduct a long distance clairvoyance/telepathy experiment between the curanderos on (Psilocybe cubensis) mushrooms in Mexico and the ‘senders’ in Puharich’s lab in the United States. The experiment never happened because Wasson and his photographer, Alan Richardson, ended up taking the mushrooms themselves, becoming the first Westerners to do so, and Richardson had a prophetic vision that apparently came true shortly after - so a different parapsychology experiment occurred.

Not having experimented with Psilocybe cubensis mushrooms himself, Puharich joined Newland in a trip to Mexico for the film sometime between 1959 and 1960, and the footage shows the mushroom shaman apparently revealing paranormal information about the medical history of one of the academics present, Dr Barbara Brown. It appears from her comments at the end of the show that Dr. Brown was certainly convinced by the experience. Amazingly, all the research team also take the mushrooms themselves (apart from Brown) and another Psilocybe shaman tells them where to find a stolen donkey, which looks rather more spurious, particularly due to Puharich’s obvious rigidity in front of the camera (check out his appalling cue card reading at the beginning of the show). In any event this fascinating film is courageous and unique, and no show since has attempted to do anything similar. I'll be giving a public talk on this at Goldsmiths Univeristy, London, on November 18th, 2008.

David Luke (with thanks to Strange Attractor for the link)

The director and host of the series, John Newland, remarked in a 1999 interview with television historian John Muir, “That was our most popular episode. It was a spooky trip. We landed in a tiny airstrip in Mexico near a mission. From there, it was a donkey trip of four days to reach the village. It was a dangerous journey, but we got phenomenal footage.”

When sponsor Alcoa (Aluminium Corporation of America) got antsy about airing the episode (even though psychedelic mushrooms were not illegal at the time) Newland suggested that he should visit a laboratory to take the mushrooms himself and prove that they were not only safe, but might enhance psychic abilities, which was what the show was trying to prove (from realityportal.info).