The Psilocybin Solution

imagined himself waking up the next morning with a corpse instead of a wife.

This pronounced and deep-rooted difference in attitude between the two of them over the culinary virtues of fungi led them to suspect a cultural rift, that there were mycophobic peoples (sensible mushroom haters like the Anglo-Saxons) and mycophilic peoples (reckless mushroom aficionados like the Russians). Furthermore, the Wassons reasoned that there must be a historical reason for these diametrically opposed traditions, due not to something like food availability, but rather to cultural and psychological factors. Thus began the Wassons’ academic quest to explore this strange cultural anomaly. From the start both figured that religion somehow played a causal role.

Their intuition proved correct. Research soon unearthed the Siberian cultural history of the Amanita muscaria mushroom, also known as fly agaric, that extraordinary bright red and white-spotted autumnal fungus found throughout the Northern Hemisphere and often charmingly depicted in the illustrations adorning the pages of children’s books. Indeed, it has been suggested that Lewis Carroll was influenced by knowledge of the Siberian use of the fly agaric and used the information to great effect in his book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in which, you might recall, Alice nibbles on a mushroom that subsequently alters her size.

As we shall see, compared with the psilocybin mushroom, the fly agaric’s psychoactivity rates a poor second, though it is potentially entheogenic due to the presence of an alkaloid named muscimol. Despite muscimol’s entheogenic inferiority to psilocybin, the cultural role and use of the fly agaric mushroom among Siberian shamans is beyond dispute, and the Wassons uncovered a wealth of literature testifying to this fact. The fly agaric mushroom proved to be a link to primitive religion just as the Wassons had originally foreseen, and it soon became clear to them that psychoactive fungi were no small feature of cultural history.

Echoes of a Shamanic Beat

Since the time of Tsar Peter the Great (1672–1725), the Kamchatka Peninsula, the easternmost part of Russian Siberia, was visited by travelers, political exiles, explorers, fur traders, and anthropologists. All were to bear witness to the nomadic reindeer herders who ritually ingested fly agaric mushrooms (their only intoxicant) in order to obtain contact with the spiritual dimension. The word shaman itself derives from the Siberian Tungus saman, which means “diviner,” “magician,” “doctor,” “creator of ecstasy,” “the mediator between the human world and the supernatural world.”

The Siberian fly agaric user would sun-dry the mushrooms and later ingest them either alone or mixed with milk or water. If taken alone, the mushroom would first be moistened in the mouths of women, who would produce a kind of pellet for the shaman to swallow.

The effects of consuming this mushroom included convulsions, delirium, visual hallucinations, perceptual distortions of size, feelings of superhuman strength, and a perceived contact with a numinous dimension, this last effect being the most important for the practicing shaman, whose predominant function was to access the spiritual realm to attain supramundane knowledge for the good health of his or her tribe.

The most bizarre aspect of this shamanic tradition, however, was the habit of urine drinking. Somehow, the Siberians discovered that the active ingredient of the mushroom passed through the body without being metabolized and that drinking fly-agaric-spiked urine could prolong intoxication. Possibly the Siberians learned of this odd fact by observing reindeer, which not only reputedly eat the fly agaric themselves with much gusto, but also have an equal passion for human urine, so much so that Siberian reindeer herders considered it dangerous to pee out in the open!

The rather disturbing and unpalatable practice of drinking psychoactive urine attained great significance in Wasson’s later work in the 1960s, as urine drinking is mentioned in the Rig-Veda, the ancient religious scripture of India. Written in Sanskrit and derived from the oral traditions of the Indo-Europeans who migrated down into the Indus Valley some three and a half thousand years ago, the Rig-Veda eventually went on to influence the development of Hinduism.

Of the one thousand holy hymns in the Rig-Veda, more than one hundred are dedicated solely to the divine plant Soma and its spectacular psychological effects. Because urine drinking is clearly alluded to in these hymns deifying Soma, Wasson came to the conclusion that the fly agaric mushroom was the sacred Soma worshipped by the ancient Indo-Europeans. Indeed, in parts of India, followers of the Vedic tradition still perform a religious ceremony in which Soma is ingested, only they now utilize an inactive surrogate species of plant. Wasson’s identification of Soma was, at the time he made the claim, one of only a handful of serious attempts to explore and name the legendary Soma plant. To this day his identification is considered plausible by many Vedic scholars.

Mushroom Lore

The shamanic use of fly agaric mushrooms by primitive Siberians seemed to date far back in history, as various legends spoke of its mythical origins. For instance, a Koryak legend tells of a hero named Big Raven who was able to attain immense strength by eating spirits given to him by the god Vahiyinin—the god of existence. By spitting upon the earth, Vahiyinin caused the necessary spirits to grow, these being fly agaric mushrooms with their ability to provide supernatural strength and wisdom.

The Wassons theorized that it was this archaic shamanic practice of fly agaric ingestion, so well reflected in legend and mythology, that eventually led to the mycophobic pre-Christian taboos against eating mushrooms, which were still evidently shared by most of the peoples living around the shores of the North Sea. In other words, because the fly agaric mushroom was used mainly by shamans in a ritual context, cultural injunctions and taboos would conceivably have evolved to stop others wantonly utilizing its strange power. Or, it is just as likely that through migrations and invasions, misinformation spread regarding the true nature of the mushroom’s effects. Through such typical cultural mechanisms as these, the psychoactive fly agaric mushroom gradually came to attain a mythical status, guaranteeing it cultural immortality as it progressed as the stuff of legend from generation to generation.

The shamanic use of fly agaric diffused out from Russia, and while some peoples gradually came to eschew the mushroom, others embraced its effects. Not only did the Aryan people who migrated down into the Indus Valley thirty-five hundred years ago bring with them their religious cult of Soma, later still, approximately 1000 B.C., we find artistic representations of mushrooms on Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish Bronze Age objects. On bronze artifacts like razors are mushroom motifs (generally stylized cross-sectional views of a mushroom) that depict the mushroom in a way that suggests that it was an object of worship. Because the fly agaric mushroom abounds in Scandinavia, these motifs are thought to represent a fly-agaric-worshipping cult similar to those of Siberia.

Apart from Siberian folklore, many European folktales testify to the enigma of the fly agaric mushroom, providing an echo of the distant cultural interconnections of the past. Stories arising from the region once known as Yugoslavia take the mushroom’s supernatural origin back to the time of pre-Christian Nature gods. A legend relates that Votan, chief of all the gods and a potent magician and healer, was riding his magical horse through the countryside when demons suddenly appeared and started chasing him. As he fled, his horse galloped so fast that flecks of bloodied foam flew from its mouth. Wherever this bloody foam fell, fly agarics sprang up.

Hungarians once called the fly agaric boland gamba or the “mad mushroom.” Austrians and Germans used to speak of the “fool’s mushroom” and were wont to respond to peculiar behavior with the phrase “have you eaten crazy mushrooms?”

The Wassons also analyzed the vast array of words used to describe mushrooms in different cultures and the latent metaphors that these words conveyed; words like toadstool, for instance, which links the toad to the mushroom, the toad being a creature much maligned in myth and folklore. The Wassons also conjectured that the fly in fly agaric was not a reference to its supposed insecticidal effect; rather, the common insect used to be associated with demonic power