Flashes of insight about the magic mushroom in "Shroom"

"Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom"

by Andy Letcher

HarperCollins, 360 pp., $25.95

Notice: Positive drug test not required.

"Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom" is not trip lit, where only the experienced need apply. If you've had a vision or two of God with your brain pulsating on psilocybin from a mushroom you ate, that might heighten your interest.

But mystical, frightening or mind-mushing drug experiences aren't necessary for relishing Andy Letcher's engrossing story of hallucinogenic mushrooms and the cultural history that has built up around them.

It's difficult to say which of Letcher's credentials was the most valuable in producing a coherent study of the recreational use of the psychoactive mushroom, its history and its literature. His doctorate in ecology? The Ph.D. in religious studies? His time living in a tree house as an eco-protester? The tours with psychedelic festival bands?

Maybe all of the above led to this pleasing combination of scholarship, humor and history.

Much of Letcher's examination of the magic mushroom and its use sweeps away the history that many mushroom enthusiasts hold to be true — that since prehistoric times psychoactive fungi have played a seminal role in many cultures and religions. Letcher finds the archaeological evidence for this premise weak, and sees such theories as mostly the result of modern users' imagination, self-justification and enthrallment with their own experiences.

Letcher's contention is that Western mushroom use dates only from the 1950s and has no certain prehistoric or even historical foundation. The book examines how Western cultural attitudes changed from the early 1900s, when such mushrooms were considered "poisonous," to today, when many users consider their effects desirable and seek them out despite legal prohibitions. Letcher claims that "the number of people actually using psychedelics in the 1960s was a fraction of those doing so today," without saying how he arrives at this conclusion.

Letcher pays particular attention to two men: Robert Gordon Wasson (1898-1986) and Timothy Leary (1920-1996).

Wasson was the son of an Episcopal minister, born in Great Falls, Mont., a financial journalist turned Wall Street banker. But he was taken with the idea that the religious impulse in humans could be traced to Paleolithic mushroom cults that might still be active. When he heard about the use of psychoactive mushroom in native ceremonies in Mexico, he saw that as proof of a cult continued from pre-Columbian cultures.

His trips to Mexico were reported in a 1957 Life magazine article read by millions and headlined "Seeking the Magic Mushroom." Soon after, the rush for Mexico's mushrooms was on.

One visitor was Leary, who took his first mushroom trip in 1960. Recalled now as the Pied Piper of LSD, a convict and jail escapee, it's hard to remember that he started down the psychedelic path as a respected clinical psychologist and a tenured Harvard faculty member, married with children. An expert in personality assessment, Leary sought to show that psychedelics could "deliver permanent and demonstrable personality change." The change would be good, and if enough people experienced it, society would be changed for the better. Or so he thought.

Letcher uses heavy artillery to demolish the theories of both men, using ordnance from philosophy, anthropology, psychology and several other fields.

Wasson and Leary made no great scientific discoveries, Letcher believes. Instead, they brought psychoactive mushrooms to the attention of a public ready to rebel against a culture dominated by rationalism, commercialism and organized religion.

As psychedelic drugs became popular in the 1960s, the Pacific Northwest played a role, according to Letcher, who says the area had a legitimate claim to being the "mushroom capital of the States."

Letcher quotes a quizzical "young hack" who wrote in the University of Washington Daily in 1973 about a mushroom hunt that ended with many of the searchers rolling in the wet grass, laughing hysterically. "Apparently they'd been sampling their harvest," reported Timothy Egan, now a Seattle-based New York Times writer and recent winner of the National Book Award.

More involved in the Pacific Northwest mushroom cult were author Tom Robbins; health guru Andrew Weil, who made mushroom-gathering trips to Oregon in the 1970s; and Robert McPherson, an Olympic Peninsula blues musician who developed a highly efficient mushroom-growing technique that led to his arrest in 2003. He received six months house detention and three years probation.

In the end, Letcher offers a theory on why the magic mushroom continues to attract users. Letcher argues that even though science seems to have a rational explanation for everything, there is still a human need to be enchanted, to be carried off to mystical places that can't be explained, that are truly magical.