History, 225-248

From Antiquity until June 29, 1955, 226 The Wassons Mobilize Others, 233 Sandoz Synthesizes Analogues and Distributes Psilocybin to Researchers, 237 The Harvard Psilocybin Research Project, 239 Use of Psilocybian Mushrooms Increases, 244

Botany, 248-262

Field Identification, Bluing Reaction, Spore Prints and Preparation, 248 Stropharia (Psilocybe) cubensis (San Isidro), 250 Psilocybin semilanceata (Liberty Caps), 253 Panaeolus subbalteatus (benanosis), 256 Psilocybe cyanescens (Wavy Caps, BlueHalos), 257 Psilocybe baeocystis, 258 Pilocybe stuntzii, 260

Chemistry, 262-264

Psilocybin and Psilocin, 264

Related Psychoactive Derivatives, 264

Physical Effects, 265-266

Mental Effects, 266-279

Leo Hollister's Observations, 267

R. Gordon Wassons Observations, 268

Dosage Considerations, 271

Gentleness, 273

Auditory Effects, 275

The Great Oracle, 275

Andrew Weil's Observations, 277

Forms and Preparations, 279

CHAPTER FOUR

Psilocybian Mushrooms

"Will you help me learn the secrets of the divine mushroom?"

—R. Gordon Wasson

HISTORY

The fourth major category of Psychedelics includes well over two dozen mushroom species at present. The number has risen recently and is expected to expand substantially in the near future as more mushroom species are analyzed.

Psilocybin and psilocin molecules are the primary psychedelic agents in the psychoactive mushrooms known so far, but four related molecules may in some way contribute to the mental effects. The term "psilocybian mushrooms" has been proposed to include all of the dozens of species containing psilocybin; it will be used in that sense here. Quite distinct isoxazolic molecules are present in the Amanita muscaria (Fly Agaric) and Amanita pantherina (Panther Caps) mushroom species, which are said by some people to create psychedelic states.

Although the histories of psilocybian and of Amanita mushrooms are entwined, the categories are quite different chemically, pharmacologically and in associated shamanic practices. The Amanita species will therefore be discussed in Chapter Nine of this book.

Of well over a half million plant species classified so tar, about a fifth fall into the rather mysterious grouping of fungi. Many botanists consider these to be outside the usual concepts of "plant" or "animal." That some of these mushrooms are capable of causing impressive and often enlightening mental effects in humans is not, however, in doubt.

Fungi are distinguished from ordinary plants in two important ways. First, they lack—with a few exceptions—the green pigment chlorophyll that enables plants to make use of light in the production of organic substances. Second, they employ microscopic spores rather than seeds for reproduction. This chapter is concerned only with the rapidly growing, fleshy Basidiomycetes, the fungi popularly known as mushrooms or toadstools. The gilled "fruiting bodies" or carpophores of a mushroom are the sexual, "flowering" aspect; the larger part of the plant usually lives underground.

Scores of psilocybian mushrooms are of special interest nowadays, thanks mainly to the investigations of one couple: R. Gordon Wasson and Valentina Pavlovna Wasson. These two individuals were essential to the discovery that the largest natural production of Psychedelics occurs in mushrooms. This revelation—quite as serendipitous as Hofmann's discovery of

225

226 Psilocybian Mushrooms

LSD—came about in 1955. Their discovery (more accurately "rediscovery") is worth recounting because ii greatly influenced subsequent developments.

From Antiquity until June 29, 1955

For millenia, psilocybian mushrooms were used by native Americans, living mainly in Central America but also as far south as Chile. These original mushroom users left few records, bur they did establish a tradition of psychedelic mushroom use.

What we know of the Indian rites came from "gringos," and most of the relevant mushrooms go by botanical nomenclature that ends with the name of a non-native investigator. With only fragmentary evidence relating to earlier generations of mushroom worshippers, we must focus on fairly recent data.

The first important clues appear in six tee nth-century manuscripts written by Spaniards. The Friar Bernardino de Sahagun, who spent most of his adult life in Mexico, and Dr. Francisco Hernandez, the personal physician to the King of Spain, both clearly described "mushrooms" used as psycho-active agents in tribal rites in post-Conquest Mexico, An educated Indian named Tezozomoc wrote in 1598 about the ingest ion of "inebriating mushrooms" by celebrants at the coronation of Montezuma II.

In addition to these verbal accounts, drawings from Catholicized artists entitled "Teonanacatl"—meaning "wondrous," "awesome" or "divine" mushroom—also survive from the sixteenth century. One portrays a bird-like "devil" (a Spanish interpretation) dancing on top of a mushroom. Another depicts "the devil" encouraging an Indian to eat mushrooms.

A Na'huatl Indian dictionary prepared in 1571 distinguished a "mushroom of divine inebriation" from other "nanacatls," and another published in 1885 included the names for several inebriating mushrooms. In a translation of the latter, Teonanacatl is described as a "species of little mushrooms of bad taste, intoxicating, hallucinogenic."

Tales of "Inebriating Mushrooms" 227

Aside from these and other Spanish references, no effort seems to have been expended trying to identity teonanacatl until the twentieth century. A revival of interest, strangely enough, began as a scholar's squabble shortly after an authoritative misidentification in 1915.

After a search for teonanacatl in specimens of Mexican mushrooms, a prestigious American botanist, Dr. William E. Safford, concluded that there simply were none. He felt that the Spanish chroniclers must have confused them with dried peyote. In a talk entitled "Identification of teonanacatl of the Aztecs with the narcotic cactus Lophophora williamsii and an account of its ceremonial use in ancient and modern times," Safford—who was known for lengthy titles—declared that the dried mescal button resembled "a dried mushroom so remarkably that, at first glance, it will even deceive a mycologist"! He hypothesized that the Indians may have deliberately misled the Spanish in order to protect their use of peyote.

The few scholars who heard Safford or later read his handsomely-published report were mainly hearing about psychoactive mushrooms for the first time, only to be told that the mushrooms never existed. But there was one important dissenter—Dr. Plasius Paul (Bias Pablo) Reko, an Austrian physician who had engaged in extensive botanical collecting as a hobby while living in Mexico. Reko had become convinced that teonanacatl referred to mushrooms, not Safford's hypothesized peyote.

In 1919, Reko published a book entitled El Mexico Antigtto (The Old Mexico) in which he proclaimed his belief that people were still using mushrooms in Mexico for "effectos narcoticos." He wrote in 1923 to Dr. J.N. Rose of the Smithsonian Institution:

I see in your description of Lophophora, that Dr. Safford believes this plant to be the teonanacatl of Sahagun, which is surely wrong. It is actually, as Sahagun states, a fungus which grows on dung-heaps and which is still used under the same old name by the Indians of the Sierra Judrez in Oaxaca in their religious feasts.

Five years later, the journalist/novelist Victor A. Reko, a cousin of Bias Pablo Reko, wrote the first published objection to Safford's thesis. In an imaginative, popular book written in 1936—Magische Gifte: Rausch- und Betaubungsmittel der Neuen Welt (Magical Poisons: Intoxicants and Narcotics of the New World}—he declared that Safford's identification "must be contradicted":

The nanacates are poisonous mushrooms which have nothing to do with peyote. It is known from olden times that their use induces intoxication, states of ecstasy and mental aberrations, but, notwithstanding the dangers attendant upon their use, people everywhere they grow have taken advantage of their intoxicating properties up to the present time. Victor Reko gave the names "Amanita mexicana" and "A. muscaria variant mexicana" for the mushrooms described in his book. This embellishment of his cousin's views was significant in again attracting attention to a mushroom as teonanacatl.

228 Psilocybin Mushrooms

Although Dr. Reko was considered by many to be "only an amateur," and indeed one given to fantastic ideas, he continued steadfastly to argue that there were Mexican tribes still using mushrooms for their shamanic ceremonies. In 1936, more than two decades after Safford "closed the case," Dr. Reko heard from Robert J. Weitlaner, an Austrian-born engineer who had given up that profession to study Indian ways. He told Reko that the Otomi Indians of Puebla (just northeast of Oaxaca) and of nearby regions were using mushrooms as inebriants and gave samples to Dr. Reko of what he said were the psychoactive mushrooms.

Dr. Reko, in rum, forwarded these samples to Dr. Carl Gustaf Santesson in Stockholm for chemical analysis and to the Farlow Herbarium at Harvard University for botanical examination. Reko's mailing arrived at Harvard in such rotted condition that the mushrooms were identified only as to genus (Panaeolus)—and perhaps incorrectly so.

The Harvard recipient was the young ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, who had been a medical student until he happened upon Heinrich Kluver's first monography on "mescal visions." As Schultes later wrote to Klu'ver, reading that essay altered his life's course. Schultes changed his doctoral thesis to peyote use on the Kiowa reservation in Oklahoma and thereby began on a lifelong "interest in mind-changing plants of the New World.

The appearance of Dr. Reko's mushrooms "out of the blue" encouraged Schultes to suggest that these—or something similar—may have been the mushrooms referred to in the Spanish chronicles as teonanacatl. 'Soon he and a Yale anthropology student, Weston La Barre, began summarizing the available evidence against Safford's arguments. In the Harvard Botanical Museum Leaflets of April and November 1937, Schulces disputed Safford's conclusion and uged that attention be redirected to identification of the mushrooms.

The next year Schultes began studies with Dr. Reko in northeastern Oaxaca among the Mazatec Indians. Soon the two heard reports about the existence of mushroom rites in and near the Oaxacan town of Huautla de Jime'nez. They collected specimens of Panaeolus sphinctrinus, which was alleged to be the mushroom chiefly used in the rites. They also collected specimens of Stropharia (or Psilocybe) cubensis, a mushroom of lesser importance according to the native Mazatecs. These specimens remained in the herbarium at Harvard.

Soon after, Robert Weitlaner's daughter Irmgard and her husband J.B Johnson, along with others, attended a midnight mushroom ceremony—or velada—in which the shaman alone was said to have ingested teonanacatl-This ceremony was written up by Johnson for a Swedish journal, and soon forgotten.

All of these investigations ended with World War II. Dr. Reko went on to other pursuits, and Schultes was sent off to the Amazon to search out

Etiology of Discovery 229

rubber sources. Santesson died shortly after completing his chemical analysis, and Johnson was killed in a minefield in North Africa.

We turn to the Wassons, whose contributions were prompted by an apparently minor incident in the fall of 1927.

R. Gordon Wasson is the American son of an Episcopalian minister who had written Religion and Drink, a book that examined biblical references to trie drinking of alcohol by religious figures. He took the tact of a fundamentalist, which he was not, and implied that it would be quite unchristian to be critical of alcohol. The royalties of this book enabled the younger Wasson to study in Spain. He worked as an English teacher and then for a decade as a financial reporter for the Herald- Tribune. In 1926, he married a Muscovite pediatrician, Valentina Pavlovna.

A year later, the two were walking in the Catskill Mountains when Valentina Pavlovna dashed off the path to gather wild mushrooms. R. Gordon's initial reaction was one of disgust and fear that she might poison herself. He wouldn't even touch these "delicacies." Each of them was surprised to discover that the other had such intense, opposite feelings on the subject. The incident triggered a lifelong search of cultures manifesting either a great loathing of mushrooms or else a proclivity to treasure them. Soon they were dividing peoples into "mycophiles" ("mushroom lovers") and "mycophobes" ("mushroom fearers"). Their devotion to this eventually fed them on a worldwide search for references and practices involving mushrooms—in museums, proverbs, myths, legends, folk tales, epics, history, poetry, novels, records made by explorers, and so on.

230 Psilocybian Mushrooms

Twenty-five years later trie poet Robert Graves and simultaneously an Italian printer of fine books, Giovanni Mardersteig of Verona, wrote to the Wassons about the search. They called attention to the Spanish chroniclers who had touched on teonanacatl and referred the Wassons to the "mushroom stones" then being discovered in quantity in the Guatemalan highlands, in El Salvador and in southeastern Mexico. Mardersteig even sent along a sketch that he made at the Rietberg Museum in Zurich. A few months later, Eunice V. Pike, a Protestant missionary to the Mazatecs, informed the Wassons that the local word for mushrooms meant "the dear little ones that leap forth. This correspondence led the Wassons to the leaflets by Schultes, written some fifteen years earlier.

R, Gordon Wasson is not sure whether he or his wife was the first to put into words a hypothesis they came to agree on sometime in the 1940s— that as far back as 6,000 years ago, there were cultures that worshipped mushrooms. The discovery of the twenty or so mushroom stones seemed to be confirming evidence that the mushroom was the symbol of a religion, like the cross promulgated by Christians, the crescent moon by Moslems arm

The Wassons Search for "Sacred Mushrooms" 231

the Star of David by Jews. Although anthropologists and other experts referred to these artifacts as "mushroom stones," they seem to have thought of the term as merely descriptive, regarding these stone carvings as mainly phallic.

Schultes' papers, which pinpointed the town of Huautla de Jime'nez in Oaxaca, gave the Wassons their most important clue about where to look for remaining mushroom cults. They contacted Schultes, who told them about Weitlaner, the Rekos and the mushroom velada witnessed by Weitlaner's daughter. He even arranged for a guide who had lived with the Indians of Oaxaca.

Thus began the Wassons' eight expeditions into the mountains of central Mexico. In their fifties, they undertook these trips in the spirit of pilgrimage.

Over three summer vacations, the Wassons searched the Oaxacan highlands for someone who could tell them about the sacred mushrooms. They spoke to all the herb venders they could find and collected many different species of mushrooms previously unknown to scientists. In retrospect, it may seem amazing how long it took to find the objects of their search. The problem was that while they did find psychedelic mushrooms (none of which were tried), they found no one who would perform the ceremony or talk about the use of mushrooms. There was no way to tell if they were psychoactive unless tried, and who were they to trust?

In the tiny village of Huautla de Jime'nez, where he had traveled ahead of his wife, Wasson came upon the answer when he spoke briefly to Cayetano

•«•«"' Psilocybin Mushrooms

Garcia Mendoza, a thirty-five-year-old official presiding at the town hall The date was the 29th of June 1955. Feeling that he wouldn't have the chance to talk for very long, Wasson asked rather quickly, almost as if in an aside "Will you help me learn the secrets of the divine mushroom?" Uttering the proper glottal stop at the beginning, Wasson used the term 'nti si tho for the object of his search. The first syllable shows reverence and endearment, the second expresses "that which springs forth." To his utter surprise, the answer this time was: "Nothing could be easier."

Mendoza was as good as his word Later that afternoon he took Wasson to his house where they gathered some of the mushrooms. By evening Mendoza had spoken to the famous curandera Maria Sabina, telling her without further explanation that she should serve Wasson, who then went with New York fashion photographer friend Allan Richardson to a mushroom ceremony.

The CIA Becomes Interested 233

Richardson had promised his wife that if such an eventuality arose, he wouldn't try any mushrooms. At about 10:30 that evening, both he and Wasson were offered a dozen each of the large, acrid species known as Psilo-cybe caerulescens (or "Landslide" mushrooms). Over the next hour they Consumed them.

"Allan and I were determined to resist any effects they might have," Wasson wrote later, "to observe better the events of the night." However, he soon began to notice harmonious colors and then geometric patterns that emerged in the dark. Then came "visions" of palaces and gardens. He later compared his experience to what the Greeks meant when they created the word ekstasis—a flight of the soul from the body. The experience continued until the very early morning. Wasson and Richardson thus became the first whites in recorded history to partake of the Mexican divine mushrooms. Wasson described this velada, or night ceremony, most fully in The Wondrous Mushroom: Mycolatry in Mesoamerica.

Three days after he ingested the sacred mushrooms, Wasson tried the experience a second time. A few days later, Valentina and their thirteen-year-old daughter Masha tried it. Six months later, back in New York, Wasson ingested dried specimens and found the effects even more fantastic.

The Wassons Mobilize Others

Meanwhile, the CIA had initiated a search for the so-called "stupid bush" and other botanicals that might derange the human mind. The CIA became especially interested in a shrub called piule, whose seeds, they were told, had long been used as inebriants in Mexican religious ceremonies. In

early 1953, a scientist from "Project ARTICHOKE" went to Mexico in search of this plant. Before he left Mexico with bags of plant material, including ten pounds of piule, he heard wondrous stories about special mushrooms used in

connection with religious festivals.

His collected samples went immediately to chemical labs. CIA scientists were excited by his findings and soon came upon the Spanish records relating to teonanacatl. Morse Allen, head of the ARTICHOKE program, was particularly fascinated by indications that mushrooms could be used "to produce confessions or to locate stolen objects or to predict the future." Putting high priority on finding the mushrooms, Allen even traveled to the best mushroom-growing area of Pennsylvania to secure potential growers if they should be found.

Shortly after Maria Sabina's 1955 velada, a botanist informant for the CIA in Mexico City sent along a description of R. Gordon Wasson's discovery. The report was brief, mainly indicating that the banker had envisioned "a multitude of architectural forms" after he had ingested the mushrooms. That was enough for the CIA to be interested in the Wassons.

The Wassons' next expedition took place during the summer of 1956, timed for the rainy season in Oaxaca so they could gather mushrooms. They

234 Psilocybian Mushrooms

were accompanied this time by the French mycologist Roger Heim, Director of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and an acclaimed expert on tropical mushroom species. His role was to supervise the collecting of these fungi and to determine their taxonomy. Another Frenchman, a botanist colleague from the Sorbonne, also (raveled to Oaxaca. Finally, to round out this interdisciplinary team, there was Dr. James Moore, ostensibly a chemist from the University of Delaware.

Moore was much more than a mere organic chemist at a university. He has recently been identified as an expert at synthesizing psychoactive and chemical weapons for the CIA on short notice; he was known as the CIA's "short-ordercook." During the winter of 1955-56, he invited himself along when the Wassons indicated their intention to return to Mexico. As an enticement, he offered a J2.000 grant from one of the Agency's cover organizations, the Geschickter Foundation. The CIA man did not enjoy the journey or the mushroom ceremony:

I had a terrible cold, we damned near starved to death, and I itched all over. There was all this chanting in the dialect. Then they passed the mushrooms around, and we chewed them up. 1 did feel the hallucinogenic effect, although "disoriented" would be a better word to describe my reaction.

After the collecting of specimens was completed, Moore returned to Delaware with a bag of the sacred mushrooms for analysis, hoping to isolate and then synthesize the active principle in large quantities for the CIA Sidney Gottlieb wrote soon after mat if Moore were successful, it was "quite possible" that the potentiating molecules "might remain an Agency secret" (not published in the scientific literature, unlike most academic discoveries).

While Moore worked on the problem of extraction and synthesis, Heim and his Parisian colleagues succeeded in the difficult task of cultivating the species from specimens and spore prints collected in Mexico. Heim wrote to Sandoz asking if its research team would assist in analyzing the mushrooms that had been grown. His colleagues had been unable to extract the active ingredients. Heim thought Sandoz, successful with LSD-25, might be in the best position to undertake such work. Albert Hofmann accepted Heim's offer with enthusiasm, having already read about the Wassons' discovery in a newspaper article.

Heim sent Sandoz 100 grams of dried Psilocybe mexicana that he had grown in cultures. The research team there first tested this on dogs, trying to establish what would be a reliable dose. The results were uncertain and almost depleted the mushroom supply. Hofmann ingested 2.4 grams himself to see if cultivation had ruined its psychoactivity.

While the dosage was moderate by Indian standards, the effects led Hofmann to conclude that humans provide a more sensitive testing of mind-affecting substances than animals. Using about a third of Hofmann s dose, his team members then made many tests of various fractionated extracts and soon isolated 4-OPO^3-DMT and 4-OH-DMT as psychoactive constituents.

Hofmann Isolates and Synthesizes Psilocybin 235

Hofmann, as it turned out, was probably the scientist best equipped to analyze the psychedelic agents, in that there is considerable chemical similarity between these substances and LSD (both contain the same kind of nucleus with a substitution at the fourth position in me indole ring). "Probably in no other laboratory in the world," wrote Hofmann later, "would there have been 4-hydroxy indole for comparison purposes." He and his colleagues

236 Psilocybin Mushrooms

found by extracting the alkaloids in the mushroom material and degrading them what the pschoactive principles looked like chemically; then they were able to use a route for synthesis somewhat like that for making LSD. Before long, they had published their methods for extraction and for synthesis in a Swiss chemical journal, where Hofmann gave the generic name for the two activating molecules as "psilocybin" and "psilocin" (derived from the Psilo-cybe genus to which Pi. mexicana belongs).

The rapid achievement of Hermann's team was to end the CIA's dream of having its own clandestine reserve. Though Moore had the mushrooms first, he failed largely because he would not ingest the mushrooms back in the U.S. He had no way of telling whether his mushrooms were still active; even if he extracted the constituents in several solutions, he had no way of telling which solvent contained the active ingredients. There was no reason for him to test for indole tryptamines. Before long, Moore gave up his efforts and wrote Sandoz requesting a supply.

The first extensive accounts of the Wassons' discovery appeared in May 1957. They published a monumental two-volume work on their investigations, Mushrooms, Russia and History, and a shorter, more accessible report of seventeen pages in Life magazine. Only 512 copies of their magnum opus were issued (going for $125 then, and now selling at more than S2,<XX) a copy), but the Life article was seen by millions.

The third in a "Great Adventures" series, their article was titled "Seeking the Magic Mushrooms: a New York banker goes to Mexico's mountains to participate in the age-old ritual of Indians who chew strange growths for visions." The term "magic mushrooms" was invented by a Life editor; Wasson did not like it and still has reservations. John Marks characterized the tone of the presentation as giving these newly-revealed mushrooms "glowing but dignified respect." Coming soon after Huxley's writings about his ingestion of mescaline sulfate, the article caused quite a stir, introducing millions to the mysteries of Psychedelics.

Among those most interested in the Life magazine article was Dr. Rolf Singer, a mycologist who carried its illustrations of the sacred mushrooms with him on a two-week trip to Mexico. He was accompanied by two Mexican graduate students in mycology, one being Dr. Gaston Guzma'n, who was in the employ of Parke-Davis and who is at the time of this writing producing a monograph on the whole Psilocybe genus. This group followed the Wasson/ Heim trail, eventually meeting up with R. Gordon Wasson in the remote mountains of Oaxaca. The Singer group was successful in its mushroom collecting. Upon returning to the U.S., Singer hurriedly published a paper and was thus able to establish scientific priority in the identification of mushrooms that the Heim team had been collecting for years. This haste divided the communities of mycologists and ethnobotanists, creating a rift that is deep even now, more than a quarter of a century later.

For all that, the Wassons were still the primary investigators of psilo-cybian mushrooms. They mobilized an impressive array of interested parties

Excitement in Experimental Psychiatry 237

and resources for further study, involving institutions from the Bollingen Foundation to the Bank of Mexico. They recruited linguists, chemists, botanists and other specialists in Mexico, the U.S.,Japan and the Urals—anywhere they found evidence of mushrooms being used as "entheogens."

By the time of Valentina Pavlovna's death from cancer at the end of 1958, most of the teonanacatl story had been uncovered. Commenting later on their search, Wasson said that even if they had been on the wrong track, theirs "must have been a singular false hypothesis to have produced the results that it has."

Sandoz Synthesizes Analogues and Distributes Psilocybin to Researchers

The patents on psilocybin and psilocin belonged to Sandoz Pharmaceuticals. After extraction, identification and synthesis of these naturally occurring molecules, Hofmann and his co-workers synthesized a series of analogues, or related compounds. These were essentially the same molecules except that: (1) the phosphoryl or hydroxy group at the top of the indole ring was moved around toother ring positions, and (2) different numbers of methyl groups (CH3) and other carbon chains were added to the side chains and to the nitrogen on the indole ring to see how these changes would affect psychoactivity. These new compounds were tested on animals. The question of safety was significant in this case because these synthetic substances, unlike the mushrooms, were being tried for the first time.

Only two of these synthetic compounds were tested in controlled trials in humans, and they were eventually used in "psycholytic therapy" in several clinics in Europe. CY-19 (4-phosphoryloxy-N, N-diethyltryptamine) and CZ-74 (4-hydroxy-N, N-diethyltryptamine) are the diethyl analogues of psilocybin and psilocin; they produce experiences similar to their counterparts but are slightly less active by weight, and their effects last only about three and a half hours—compared with about twice that for psilocybin and three times that for LSD. They are considered particularly appropriate for psychotherapy using Psychedelics as an adjunct, because they are less tiring, more manageable for the experiencer and therapist and easier to schedule.

Psilocybin, meanwhile, was sent to interested researchers at cost, becoming another psychedelic agent backed by a pharmaceutical house— after Cannabis tinctures, then mescaline, then harmaline and harmine, then LSD-25. Results from psilocybin studies began appearing in 1958, when the conclusions from six research projects were published. By 1962, Wasson was listing 362 items of relevant literature in a bibliography about psilocybin and the mushrooms containing this compound. The excitement in experimental psychiatry was intense. It was long before this psychedelic became available to any but a few in the small but expanding drug subculture.

On the 1962 expedition organized by R. Gordon Wasson to see Maria Sabina, Hofmann came along and brought a bottle of psilocybin pills. Sandoz was marketing them under the brand name "Indocybin"—"indo" for both

Leary Swallows Seven Mushrooms 239

"Indian" and "indole" (the nucleus of their chemical structures) and "cybin" for the main molecular constituent, "psilocybin." ("Psilo" in Greek means "bald," "cybe" means "head.")

Hofmann gave his synthesized teonanacatl to the curandera who divulged the Indians' secret. "Of course," Wasson recalls of the encounter, "Albert Hofmann is so conservative he always gives too little a dose, and it didn't have any effect." Hofmann had a different interpretation: activation of "the pills, which must dissolve in the stomach before they can be absorbed, takes place only after 30 to 45 minutes, in contrast to the mushrooms which, when chewed, work faster because part of the drug is absorbed immediately by the mucosa in the mouth."

In order to settle her doubts about the pills, more were distributed, bringing the total for Maria Sabina, her daughter, and the shaman Don Aurelio up to 30 mg., a moderately high dose by current standards but not perhaps by the Indians'. At dawn, their Mazatec interpreter reported that Maria Sabina felt there was little difference between the pills and the mushrooms. She thanked Hofmann for the bottle of pills, "saying that she would now be able to serve people even when no mushrooms were available."

The Harvard Psilocybin Mushroom Project

Surprisingly little of the psilocybin experimentation involved human use. The best known investigations in this area were conducted by Dr. Timothy Leary and his associates at Harvard University—in the same building used by William James when he studied religious mysticism, "laughing gas" (N2O), and the nature of altered consciousness.

Leary, who was Irish and Catholic in extraction and whose father was Eisenhower's dentist, had been rebellious and was expelled from West Point, but later he was well-received as a psychologist, speaker and author of two works, widely recognized among psychologists, a textbook and a psychological examination still employed for categorizing personality types. In I960, while Leary was working as research director at the Kaiser Hospital in Oakland, he was offerred a lectureship at Harvard for the fall.

In the summer of I960, while on vacation in Cuernavaca near Mexico City, he ate seven small mushrooms beside the pool of his rented villa. Leary soon felt himself

being swept over the edge of a sensory Niagra into a maelstrom of transcendental visions and hallucinations. The next five hours could be described in many extravagant metaphors, but it was above all and without question the deepest religious experience of my life.

Leary vowed "to dedicate the rest of my life as a psychologist to the systematic exploration of this new instrument." That fall he returned to Harvard and interested many graduate students and others in researching psilocybin.

2^° Psilocybian Mushrooms

Aldous Huxley was in Cambridge at the time, as a visiting lecturer at M.I.T.; he was brought in as an advisor. On the day John Kennedy was elected to the Presidency, Huxley and Humphry Osmond visited Leary. Afterwards, they both agreed that Harvard would be a perfect place to conduct a study of psilocybin, but they felt that Leary "might be a bit too square," in Osmond's words. This evaluation has since caused Osmond to wonder considerably about his and others' efforts to generalize personality assessment.

By late I960, Leary had contacted Sandoz for psilocybin to be used for "creativity studies" and had established an eight-member board to oversee the Harvard Psilocybin Research Project. The board included Huxley, psychiatrist John Spiegel (who went on to become president of the American Psychiatric Association), David McClelland (Leary's superior), Frank Barron (an associate who has since written much about creativity), Ralph Metzner (later a close Leary colleague}, Leary, and two graduate students who had already started a project with mescaline.

Harvard Experimentation with Psilocybin 241

During the winter term of 1961, another Harvard faculty member, Richard Alpert, became an important companion. Leary and Alpert were co-lecturers in a course on "game theory" called Existential Transactional Behavior Change. Alpert was asked by the chairman of the social relations department (McClelland) to keep an eye on Leary and this "mushroom project."

During early March 1961, however, Alpert himself took synthesized psilocybin—which Leary and others made a point of referring to as "the mushrooms" or "the mushroom pills." Within a few hours, he had an exper-

ience that was to turn his life around. He began by closing his eyes and relaxing. Here's a description of that first trip beginning his transformation that

appeared in a New Age magazine of the mid-1970s:

... in the living room of Leary's house in suburban Boston, Alpert saw a figure in academic robes standing a few feet away and recognized himself in his role as Harvard professor. The figure kept changing to other aspects of his identity —musician, pilot, lover, bon vivant—that had somehow dissociated themselves from his body. And then to his horror he watched his body itself disappear as he looked down on it—first his forelegs, then all his limbs, then his torso—and he knew for the first time that there was "a place where 'I' existed independent of social and physical identity ... beyond Life and Death." About five in the morning he walked the few blocks to his parent's house in adriving snowstorm and began shoveling the driveway, laughing aloud with joy ....

Three psilocybin projects were set up in line with Leary and Alpert's specialty, the psychology of "game-playing." In early 1961, after initial psilocybin investigations, the Leary group began working in nearby Concord with convicts in the Massachusetts Correctional Institution, a maximum-security prison for young offenders. It was hoped that psilocybin could help prisoners "see through" the self-defeating "cops-and-robbers game" and become less destructive citizens. Leary got along well with the Irish warden, and soon six prisoners volunteered for the study.

The six volunteers grew in number to thirty-five over the next two years. Each underwent two psilocybin experiences during six weeks of biweekly meetings. Although the subjects were not very well educated, they were able to detach themselves from their everyday roles and "confront themselves," recognizing constructive alternatives to their formerly violent and self-destructive behavior patterns. The question was what would happen to these prisoners upon release. Would the insights gained from two fairly heavy doses of psilocybin help them to lead useful and rewarding lives? Or would they soon be headed back to prison? Dr. Stanley Krippner, who also was given psilocybin at Harvard and who has since worked in the fields of "dream studies" and parapsychology, summed up the results:

Records at Concord State Prison suggested that 64 percent of the 32 subjects would return to prison within six months after parole. However, after six months, 25 percent of those on parole had returned, six for technical parole

242 Psilocybin Mushroom^

violations and two for new offenses. These results are all the more dramatic when the correctional literature is surveyed; few short-term projects with prisoners have been effective to even a minor decree. In addition, the personality test scores indicated a measurable positive change when pre-psilocybin and post-psilocybin results were compared

Although this psilocybin experiment included a lot of "tender, loving care" and no control subjects, it established a sound basis for hope, The results warrant at least one controlled study.

In a second area of experimentation, Leary and his associates gave the "mushroom pills" to about 400 graduate students, psychologists, religious figures, mathematicians, chemists, writers, artists, musicians and other creative individuals to study their reactions. Extensive records were kept but to date only a few of these accounts have been published.

One recording of a Huxley trip mentions only that he was given 10 mg. of psilocybin and that he "sat in contemplative calm throughout; occasionally produced relevant epigrams; reported the experience as an edifying philosophic experience." Alan Watts' description of the psilocybin experience as "profoundly healing and illuminating" for him appears as chapter nine in Ralph Metzner's The Ecstatic Adventure; Stanley Krippner's account is in Bernard Aaronson and Humphry Osmond's Psychedelics. In Creativity and Psychological Health, Frank Barren devotes a chapter to excerpts from the records made by artists and musicians given psilocybin.

The December 1963 issue of the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases summarized the findings on the first 129 men and 48 women tested: 70 percent considered the experience either pleasant or ecstatic. 88 percent felt they had learned something from it or had some important insights, 62 percent believed the experience to have changed their life for the better, and 90 percent expressed a desire to try the drug again.

Out of this work developed a third area of inquiry; the resemblance of mystical experience induced by psilocybin to mystical states brought about by spontaneous rapture or by religious practice. This eventually became a "double-blind" study, described by Leary as a "tested, controlled, scientifically up-to-date kosher experiment on the production of the objectively defined, bona-fide mystic experience as described by Christian visionaries and to be brought about by our ministrations." It was conducted by Walter Pahnke as pan of his Ph.D. dissertation for the Harvard Divinity School.

His thesis focused on nine traits listed by Dr. W.T. Stace. Professor Emeritus at Princeton. These characteristics, Stace felt, were the fundamentals of mystical experience—"universal and not restricted to any particular religion or culture".

In a Boston University chapel on Good Friday 1962, twenty Christian theology students took part in Pahnke's experiment after having been exhaustively tested and screened. Ten were given 30 mg. of psilocybin. The others (as nearly as possible, a similar group) received 200 mg, of nicotine

244 Psilocybin Mushrooms

acid and a small amount of benzedrine to stimulate the initial physical sensations of a psychedelic. Neither the subjects nor their guides knew at first which drugs had been given to whom.

The experiment soon came to be known as "The Miracle of Marsh Chapel." In the following six months, extensive data were collected. These included tape recordings, group discussions, follow-up interviews and a 147-item questionnaire used to quantify these characteristics of mystical phenomena:

1) An experience of unity

2) An experience of time less ness and spacelessness,

3) A sense of having encountered ultimate reality

4) A feeling of blessedness and peace,

5) A sense of the holy and the divine

6) An experience of paradoxically

7) A sense of ineffability

8) Transiency, and

9) Persisting positive changes in attitude and/or behavior

The reaction level in each of Dr. Stace's nine categories was found to be significantly higher for the psilocybin group than for the controls. Nine out of the ten who ingested psilocybin reported having religious experiences that they considered authentic, while only one from the control group claimed to have had even minimal spiritual cognition. More important in terms of genuine mystical experience, there was a lasting effect upon behavior and attitudes. Pahnke summarized these results:

After an admittedly short follow-up period of only six months, life-enhancing and life-enrich ing effects, similar to some of those claimed by mystics, were shown by the higher scores of the experimental subjects when compared 10 the controls. In addition, after four hours of follow-up interviews with each subject, the experimenter was left with the impression that the experience had made a profound impact (especially in terms of religious feeling and thinking) on the lives of eight out of ten of the subjects who had been given psilocybin .... The direction of change was toward more integrated, self-actualized attitudes and behavior in life.

Subsequent requests by Pahnke for psilocybin and government approval to repeat his study were denied.

Use of Psilocybian Mushrooms Increases

Expensive and complicated to make, synthetic psilocybin was available to only a small number of those in the "drug subculture" and some with academic connections during the 1960s. As for the organic product, it was widely believed then that sacred mushrooms grew only in Mexico. Most who experienced them traveled to Huautla de Jimenez. The Turn-On Book and The Psychedelic Guide to the Preparation of the Eucharist described methods for growing Psilocybe cubensis on agar or grains, but these techniques were not very effective, did not produce many mushrooms, and went largely untried.

Resemblance to Mystical Experience 245

Additional species of mushrooms containing psilocybin and psilocin were discovered, and biosymthetic studies utilizing Psilocybe cubensis were initiated in many university laboratories. Still, only a few people having access to the mycological literature knew that Psilocybe semilanceata, which Heim and Hofmann had analyzed as being quite potent, grew extensively along the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Mycologists as a group were un-interested in publicizing psychoactivity. The main clues appeared in French, in Heim and Wasson's Les Champignons Hallucinogenes du Mexique (1959) and Nouvelles Investigations fur les Champignons Hallucinogenes (l967).

After the climax of anti-LSD propaganda in the late 1960s, interest in organic or "natural" Psychedelics greatly increased. The appeal was fueled by Leary's High Priest, which devoted attention to mushrooms and psilocybin, and by the books of Carlos Castaneda. The first of these, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yacqui Way of Knowledge, caught the popular imagination as many readers became fascinated with Don Juan's "smoking mixture" (alleg-ndly a combination of mushrooms, Datura and other substances sealed in a gourd for more than a year).

In order to meet the new demand for "magic mushrooms," many dealers simply renamed their LSD, PCP or other compounds, some even claiming that their "psilocybin" had been cut with "organic rose hips," Apparently to make it sound even more "natural." By the early 1970s, un-scrupulous dealers were adulterating Agaricus bisporus—the common, edible, commercial mushroom, which is now called A. brunnescens—with LSD or PCP or both. This practice continued for several years. PharmChem, after analyzing hundreds of suspect mushroom samples, reported that it had found only two genuine specimens over a three year period. Bruce Radcliff of PharmChem dubbed the others Pseudopsilocybe hofmannii. A new era in hunting mushrooms opened after publication of Leonard Enos' A Key to the American Psilocybin Mushroom (1970). This small book described fifteen species in sixty pages, providing a water-color picture of each. Enos had had personal experience with only two of the species that he treated, and thus his renderings of the mushrooms' appearances were inaccurate and sometimes fanciful. (In two cases, species known by two Latin binomials were drawn to look like different kinds of mushrooms.) He also provided a section on cultivation, which was overcomplicated and which no one seems to have used. Nonetheless, Enos' book stimulated much American fieldwork that resulted in several reliable guides by the end of the decade.

Starting in 1974, a group of a dozen people in the San Francisco Bay area began experimenting with various techniques for growing psilocybian mushrooms, hoping to find a simple procedure for cultivation that would work for the users themselves. They had already grown several Banistenopsts species and the San Pedro cactus in a search for a natural psychedelic that

246 Psilocybin Mushrooms

offered a high yield and could be grown indoors. They concluded thai mushrooms presented the best opportunity.

In 1976, writing under the names O.T. Oss and O.N. Oeric, this group published the results of their mushroom experimentation in Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide. This book described in clear English accompanied by photographs a fairly simple and effective technique for home cultivation of the potent Stropharia (Psilocybe) cubensis species that required no controlled materials. Simultaneously, spore prints became available through counterculture magazines, notably High Times.

The important differences in the Oss and Oeric method had to do with instructions for maintaining sterile conditions and with "casing." In 197| J.P. San Antonio published a new laboratory procedure for producing Agancus brunnescens in small amounts for scientific study: he showed that covering the mycelium, or vegetative stage, of this common mushroom with about half an inch of slightly alkaline soil could greatly increase the yield by causing it to "fruit" repeatedly (in "flushes" appearing periodically). Although it is unclear who deserves the credit for this breakthrough, the San Antonio technique was modified so that it worked with Stropharia cubensis grown on rye and other grains.

Oss and Oeric hoped that users cultivating these mushrooms in their homes would be independent of the illicit market, which at the time was producing and selling many spurious products. Further, they hoped that this

Cultivation Techniques 247

-technique would become a permanent part of the subculture, immune from Surveillance and anti-drug crusades. To a certain extent, these ends have been met. However, the authors did not realize that there would be as many large growers as have emerged.

Their technique was still so complicated that only a small percentage of users have even tried it. A large pressure-cooker is needed, and many

248 Psilocybian Mushrooms

couldn't get the hang of the spore-growing and sterilization requirements for inoculation of the rye jars. Since a capital investment of only about S200 enables one to produce large volumes, sorne people have taken on the procedure as a full-time job, producing thousands of jars of these mushrooms This cottage industry has disappointed some in the Oss and Oeric group because it again has resulted in a kind of centralized capitalism.

In the half-decade since publication of the Oss and Oeric book, several others have issued procedures for psilocybian cultivation. Many mushroom-growing kits have been presented to the public. There have even been "dung dealers" offering high-priced compost for sale.

Over this period, many interested parties have become knowledgeable about mushroom growing, with a few people doing much additional experimentation Among other current developments, we are seeing a fair amount of cultivation of other psilocybian species such as of Psilocybe cyanescens (which is large and full of psilocybin, but so far has been a poor "fruiter"). Also, procedures are becoming steadily simpler with time and practice.

BOTANY

Mushrooms containing psilocybin and/or psilocin belong to a broad botanical order, the Agaricales (gill-bearing fungi), and are found mainly in the Psilocybe, Stropbana, and Panaeolus genera. Well over two dozen species of psilocybian mushrooms are now known, each exhibiting distinct ranges in size, shape, habitat and potency. Potency goes from virtually nothing to approximately 15 mg./gm. of the dry weight. The average is perhaps 3.0 mg./dry gm., amounting to about 0.03 percent of the fresh mushrooms. Mushrooms are generally 90 percent water.

The species that are presently considered most important will be discussed in terms of their unique qualities. First, some comments relevant to them all.

Field Identification, Bluing Reaction, Spore Prints and Preparation

When the Wassons asked their Indian guide about the source of mushrooms, he replied, "The little mushroom comes of itself, no one knows whence, like the wind that comes we know not whence nor why." Actually, psilocybian mushrooms begin as microscopic spores that grow on the tip of cells near the mushrooms gills, called basidia. After maturing, they are dispersed by the wind.

Out of perhaps a million such spores, only a few grow after reaching an appropriate habitat. They develop threadlike into hyphae, thin cells that mass together and spread underground to become the mycelium, which corresponds to the leaves and roots of a green plant. When this structure "fruits," the sexual part of the organism appears above ground as a mushroom.

As the mushroom expands through the absorption of water by osmotic action, a protective veil develops under the gills. Eventually the cap breaks

life Cycle and "Bluing" 249

j|he veil through an evaporation process caused by the sun, and the veil and stem are covered with spores, usually a dark purple-brown. Millions of spores rain down and then are carried by the rain and wind to where they will germinate and again produce mycelia, thus completing another cycle. Anyone interested in collecting or growing psilocybian mushrooms should, of course, acquire a field guide by a competent author, such as Paul Scanners' Psilocybe Mushrooms & Their Allies. Additional valuable illustra-tions, photographs and descriptions can be found in Ott and Bigwood's contribution to Teonanacatl, Gary Menser's Hallucinogenic and Poisonous Mushroom field Guide, and Richard and Karen Haard's Poisonous & Hallucinogenic Mushrooms.

When collecting, it's a good idea to grasp and twist only the stem (not the cap). All species should be separated in wax paper or paper bags (not baggies—mushrooms must breathe or they rapidly spoil), and care should be taken to see that they aren't crushed.

Notes made about the mushrooms' habitat often give valuable clues to identification of psilocybian mushrooms, as does a "spore print." This can be made by placing one specimen's cap on a sheet of white paper and, if possible, another on black paper. These mushroom caps should then be covered by a glass and left alone for several hours, until it becomes clear whether or not they are dark purple-brown. The remainder of the collection should be refrigerated (but not frozen) as soon as possible, because mushrooms deteriorate fairly rapidly in heat. They can be preserved in the veg-etable bin of a refrigerator well over a week.

Some psilocybian mushrooms reveal a striking blue color characteristic in fresh specimens; this can aid in identification along with other traits, such as spore color and size, appearance of the gills, etc. When these mushrooms are scratched or bruised by handling, they stain blue or, if the surface color is yellowish, greenish blue. Some of these mushrooms exhibit this stain naturally, perhaps because of the heat of the sun or the pressure of raindrops. There has been much mention of this test in the psychedelic literature, but it is by no means reliable. Some mushrooms "blue" only after the first "flush" of the fruiting bodies (growth of the fruiting bodies recurs, usually at one-week intervals). Some authors have concluded that this "bluing" occurs only in mushrooms containing both psilocin and psilocybin.

Bigwood and Michael Beug, after analyzing many collections of fifteen psilocybian species, concluded that bluing per se does not indicate the presence of psilocin. A few species containing only psilocybin exhibited a slight bluing reaction on the stems but would not blue when handled. The species containing both the 4-phosophorylated psilocybin and the 4-hydroxylated psilocin analogues, however, bruised a darker blue and often showed this characteristic even when untouched. It is unclear which tryptamine in the psilocybian mushrooms is responsible for the bluing, but pure psilocybin or psilocin when placed in pure water and left at room temperature discolors the water to a bluish-brown.

. . Psilocybian Mushrooms

Harvested psilocybian mushrooms can be eaten fresh, or they can be dried, sealed and stored. The best procedure is to dry the mushrooms in a freeze-drier without heat. For most users, this is impossible, so a lamp or oven can do, as long as there is ventilation and the temperature does not exceed 90° F. in a dry atmosphere. (If you use an oven, leave the door cracked open.) A space heater can also be used. Whatever the means, the drying takes at least twenty to twenty-four hours and leaves the mushrooms in a brittle stare.

The mushrooms should then be weighed, placed in a scalable container and frozen. No mushrooms should be frozen fresh, because they will disintegrate when thawed.

To produce a homogenous mixture from which known doses can be accurately weighed, grind the mushrooms in a blender or coffee mill. The resulting powder should be stored frozen at the lowest temperature possible in an airtight container filled to the top. The result doesn't look like mushrooms and probably cannot be identified by species even by a mycologist. It is quite easy to measure out doses for ingestion.

Freezing is most critical for those mushrooms known to contain psilocin, such as Psilocybe cyanescens or Stropharta cubensis, because they have a short shelf life at room temperature. For ingestion, such powders can be capped, blended into a "smoothie," or drunk with chocolate. A chocolate drink prepared with honey, spices and water (there was no milk in pre-Conquest America aside from corn whey) has long been associated with mushroom rituals and is quite pleasant served before a velada.

Stropharia (Psilocybe) cubensis (San hidro)

This mushroom was originally collected in Cuba in 1904. It is the easiest of all mushrooms to grow—even easier than the commercial ones. Currently, it is probably the best psilocybian mushroom for most users and is certainly the most readily available. Its psychoactivity varies, however, and degenerates over time, especially when there is delay in moving the product from the grower to user. Some dealers have been known to open up bags of these mushrooms so they will gain more weight from ambient humidity, which breaks down the psilocybin and psilocin even further.

This species was collected by Schultes during his 1939 trip to Oaxaca and deposited at the Farlow Herbarium at Harvard University. After the Second World War, the mycologist Rolf Singer worked there identifying mushrooms; in an attempt to reorganize the taxonomy of the genus Stro-pbaria, he came upon Schultes' specimens. In 1951, he placed Strophana cubensis Earle in the Psilocybe genus, basing this identification on microscopic characteristics, particularly of the spore. He neglected to tell Schultes and didn't follow this work up, but the mushroom is now often referred to as Psilocybe cubensis (Earle) Singer.

252 Psilocybin Mushrooms

Some mycologists have disputed Singer's identification, arguing that the macroscopic features place this mushroom in the genus Stropharia. At the time of this writing, both designations are found in the literature—Stropharia in ethnopharmacological and some European mycological sources Psilocybe mainly in the American, Mexican and botanical sources.

This mushroom is tropical and subtropical and appears in cowfields during rainy seasons or other times of high humidity. In the U.S., it is distributed mainly along the southeastern seaboard, but it can be found inland as far north as Tennessee.

It grows naturally in connection with cattle—particularly hot-weather-loving Brahmas—and especially in dung a few days old. It may be because of this that the Indians consider it inferior, only using it as a last resort. More likely, it has lower status because it wasn't indigenous to Mexico—it arrived with Spanish importation of Brahma cattle from the Philippine Islands— and thus doesn't have ancient associations in their shamanistic rites. In Mexico, the Mazatecs call this species "di-shi-tho-le-rra-ja" (sacred mushroom of cow dung), but its other names are Spanish (such as "San Isidro Labrador," St. Isidore the Plowman). The anthropologist Peter Furst has promoted the notion that it may have grown in deer dung, but attempts to grow it in that medium haven't succeeded. In cultivating it, dung isn't essential; it fruits very potently on rye and other grains. Rye-cultured specimens appear less robust than those in the field or those grown on compost, but in terms of psychoactivity they are about a third stronger on the average.

In the fields, this mushroom tends to come up singly or in small groups. Growth is rapid. In pastures, it often grows from the size of a pinhead to a full mushroom in little more than a day. It becomes rather large, generally attaining a height of 15-30 cm. (6-12"). It often appears whitish overall, sometimes with a steaking of "comic strip blue." The mushroomoften blues without any apparent bruising, perhaps because of intense heat. When it opens, the cap usually gets lighter on the outside while the center gets darker— but not necessarily so. It can be light brown or light reddish-gold, and often the prominent annulus, or collar, is covered with spores.

Early studies made of this species estimated the concentrations of psilocybin at about 0.2 percent (2.0 mg./gm.) of the dry weight, along with a fairly high amount of psilocin. But the analytical tools then in use necessitated heating and are now considered obsolete. Current state-of-the-art equipment —such as High-Performance Liquid Chromotography (HPLC)—shows that much of the "psilocin" observed was actually psilocybin that had been transformed into psilocin by the analytical process.

Recently, Bigwood and Beug detected psilocybin in concentrations as large as 13.3 mg./gm, (1.3 percent) and psilocin in concentrations of 1.0 mg./gm. in a batch of dried Stropharia cubensis mushrooms. In the same strain, however, they also found psilocybin as low as 3.2 mg./gm. and psilocin at 1.8 mg./gm.

A Pacific Northwest Favorite 25)

Moreover, they discovered that the same strain in the same container produced greatly varying amounts of psychoactive constituents in different "flushes" appearing about a week apart. For example, they recorded the following psilocybin content—in mg./gm. dry weight—for one sequence of five flushes: 8.3, 6.5, 13.3, 4.8 and 6.8. The potency of the third flush was twice that of the second and nearly three times that of the fourth.

The third flush did not show the highest psychoactive concentrations

in other instances. The only consistency found was that in the first flush

psilocin—and the psilocybin and psilocin analogues—were either barely present or entirely absent. Their strength then increased in subsequent

flushes.

Bigwood and Beug's conclusion in 1982 was this:

We found that the level of psilocybin and psilocin varies by a factor of four

among various cultures of Psilocybe cubensis grown under rigidly controlled

conditions, while specimens from outside sources ["street" samples] varied ten-fold. It is clear that entheogenic and recreational users of this species have no way to predict the amount of psilocybin and psilocin they are ingesting with a given dry weight of the mushroom. Thus, variations in the subjective experience come not only from effects of "set" and "setting," but also in very real measure from dosage differences.

Psilocybe semilanceata (Liberty Caps)

This is now the second most important psilocybian mushroom world-wide. Its popular name comes from its looking like caps worn during the French Revolution. Found in the northern temperate zone, it grows inland up to a thousand miles from the ocean—a rule covering its known habitat to date. It fruits in tall grasses and on cow fields mainly in the fall, only occasionally in the spring. (Unlike Ps. cubensis, it does not grow on dung itself.) This species is fairly small, about 10 cm. (4") tall at most.

Reports of the psychoactivity of Liberty Caps predate the Wessons' journeys to Mexico. In C McIlvaine's One Thousand American Fungi (1900), this species is described as a mushroom with strange effects that don't last long and are not toxic. The psychoactive ingredient, according to this classic text, can be removed by boiling the mushroom in water and then throwing away the water. In 1910, a professor at Yale and his wife took it a few times and had marvelous experiences and hilarity for a short while. At about this same time, reports circulated of its use in Norway, Maine by the artist community there.

Psilocybin was first detected in Ps. semilanceata by Heim and Hofmann in the early 1960s, but it was not used in Europe until at least a dozen years later. In the Pacific Northwest, use apparently began as early as 1965. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police confiscated some on the Vancouver campus of UBC at that time. Experimentation with this mushroom was only sporadic, however, until publication of Enos' 1970 book because very few people were

aware of the existence of psychedelic mushrooms in that area. Nowadays, thousands of people in the northwestern U.S., Scandinavia (especially Norway), the British Isles and most of western Europe collect this mushroom. Ps. femilanceata is quite potent by weight, containing as much as 12.8 mg. psilocybin/gm. and averaging around 11 mg./gm. in dried specimens.

256 Psilocybian Mushrooms

Unlike Ps. cubensis, which is highly variable in strength, this one is much more uniform with psychoactivity differing in samples by not much more than a factor of two. Three or four of these tiny mushrooms are often enough to energize the body and affect color perception and visual acuity. About twenty to thirty mushrooms constitute a strong dose, although some people have been known to take up to 100 at a time. It is recommended that users take no more than 2 or 3 dried grams the first few times.

Some people have observed that mushrooms containing both psilocybin and psilocin tend to lose their psychoactivity fairly rapidly, whereas those lacking psilocin tend to have a long shelf life. Liberty Caps have no psilocin, but they do contain psilocybin analogues. Specimens collected and analyzed in 1976 were reanalyzed after four years on a shelf without refrigeration. They were found to be almost as potent.

Most Liberty Caps do not blue, but some do so heavily. At this point, we don't know whether the latter are another species. Some mushrooms recently collected are quite similar in appearance to Ps. semilanceata and inhabit the same cow fields. These may be variants or other new species; of those that look like Liberty Caps and grow on pastures, none is poisonous. (A recently discovered psilocybian mushroom that is similar is known as Ps. linaformens and is common in Europe and Oregon, where it too is often called a "Liberty Cap.")

Panaeolus subbalteatus (benanosis)

This is the most prevalent of these psilocybian mushrooms, growing throughout the U.S. and found in various climates in many parts of the world. It grows singly or in clusters to a height of about 8 cm. (just over 3"), most commonly on composted dung, in both spring and fall. The tan cap develops a striking cinnamon-brown band around the bottom and flattens as it ages, with the central portion fading over time to a pale, warm buff color. Eventually it resembles a large floppy hat draped over a fairly thick, whitish stem that sometimes blues at its bottom. The spore prim has a blackish-purple color.

Andy Weil claims that Panaeolus subbalteatus doesn't produce as good a psychedelic trip as most other psilocybian mushrooms and that it can bring on a side effect of stomach aches. These assertions have not been confirmed by most other users and many people like it—especially in the spring, when few Liberty Caps are available. It springs up on compost, straw and manure piles and often can be seen clustered in one- or two-foot rings along roads, on lawns and in open areas. It can be cultivated but only on compost, and spores from it can be bought from High Times' advertisers through the mail.

Panaeolus subbalteatus has a long shelf life and contains no psilocin; the psychoactivity comes only from psilocybin and its analogues. The amounts are low to moderate for psilocybin, varying from a little over 1,5 mg./gm.up to 6.0 mg./gm. dry weight.

Two More Popular Species 257

Psilocybe cyanescens (Wavy Caps, Blue Halos)

This species is the most potent psilocybian mushroom known. Although not as big as Ps. cubensis, it is probably the second largest growing in the U.S., generally reaching 6-8 cm. in height (about 3"), This mushroom, like Pi. pelliculosa and the few others that follow, don't grow on dung but rather on hardwoods and wood chips.

Ps. cyanescens likes to inhabit landscaped yards containing ground bark and often dwells under Douglas fir or cedar and in mulched rhodeodendron beds. The large cap, which starts out chestnut brown and becomes more caramel-colored with age, is wavy, so they've been called Wavy Caps. Because of the blue line around the edge of the cap, they are also known as Blue Halos. Generally this species grows in clusters, although sometimes it comes up singly. When it fruits, it is prolific It is not unusual to hear of mushroom hunters gathering six to seven ounces dry weight at a time.

This mushroom contains psilocybin, psilocin and at least four analogues. It blues markedly when bruised and is less stable than Liberty Caps. It isn't

238 Psilocybian Mushrooms

cultivated very easily, but is potent. In Bigwood and Beug samples, "Psilocybin levels were found to range up to 16.8 mg./gm. dry weight, with the total psilocin plus psilocybin levels reaching 19-6 mg./grn. dry weight—nearly 2% of the dry weight," Being large and the most potent psilocybian species, it is quite popular and one of the most sought after mushrooms in the Pacific Northwest.

Psilocybe baeocystis

This is another strongly-bluing Pacific Northwest species. It can be found growing on ground bark, wood chips, peat moss and occasionally lawns and is common on campuses. This popular mushroom appears from fall through midsummer; as many as fifty are often clumped together. Generally it contains rather low levels of psilocybin and psilocin. Its potency, however, is highly variable.

Another with Highly Variable Potency 259

Bigwood and Beug assess it as averaging about 2.8 psilocybin/gm. and 1.4 mg. psilocin/gm. dry weight. But one collection they examined was found to contain 8.5 mg- psilocybin/gm. and 5.9 mg. psilocin/gm.—rivaling concentrations in the strongest psilocybian species. This variability makes it riskier to use than most others. "One could eat a lot of weak ones to get an experience," comments Jeremy Bigwood, "and then go to another patch and get maybe 200 mg. of psilcybin plus." Extra caution in dosage is strongly recommended.

The edge of the cap of this species generally undulates, resembling a bottle cap or lawn umbrella, and the stem is often characterized by twisting bends. An important identifying characteristic is a brown spot that appears in the center of the cap after it is dried. Psilocybe baeocystis is bound to become more familiar because of increasingly widespread use of its host materials in industrial parks, around homes, etc.

260 Psilocybian Mushrooms

Another psilocybian mushroom that also blues and has characteristics similar to Ps. haeocystts and Ps. cyanescens is Ps. cyanafiberlosa. It was originally collected between patches of the first two. This one has somewhat wavy caps like Ps. cyanescens, although they don't open up nearly so much, and the same chemical components as the others. It's normally weaker than Ps. baeocystis, often containing about 13 mg. of both psilocybin and psilocin/ gm. dry weight.

Psilocybe stuntzii

This is another psilocybian mushroom that readily springs up on commercially prepared wood chips. It is a fairly small, stout mushroom, which in many people's opinion should be included in the Stropharia genus since it has a prominent annulus. It can be found on grasses, bark mulch and mulched lawns in the fall and summer; under the grasses there is always a

Possible Confusion with a Poisonous Species 261

layer of wood bits. The cap is sticky and has stripes on the edges that become flat, scalloped edges when the mushroom is mature. This is very likely the weakest psilocybian mushroom in the Pacific Northwest. The Bigwood and Beug srudies show that its potency ranges from nothing to a high of 3.6 mg. psilocybin/gm, dry weight.

IMPORTANT NOTE: this species can easily be confused by the novice with the deadly species Galerina autumnalis, with which it sometimes dusters. The most potent psilocybian mushrooms grow on wood chips, and so anyone hunting for them should know how to identify the poisonous Galerina.

The two species in question can definitely be separated from one another by spore color: that of the Galerina species is rust-brown in contrast to that of the Psilocybe species, which is gray to lilac. Furthermore, their coloration is different, their "collars" look quite different, and the Galerina species presents lines radiating from the center of the cap. Only the psilocybian mushroom turns blue upon bruising. If there is any doubt as to identification, a mushroom that does not blue should be discarded as Galerina. (The toxic ingredient in Galerina autumnalis also appears in the common edible mushroom but in very small amounts.)

262 Psilocybin Mushrooms

In December 1981 on Whidby Island in Washington Stare, some teenagers searching for psilocybian mushrooms made a mistake in identification Two young men and a woman who ingested the mushrooms got sick the next day but were afraid to report their illness for fear of arrest by the authorities. They apparently waited yet another day before the symptoms got extremely bad, and then all three went to a hospital. The two young men survived, but the young woman died on Christmas Day.

Another fatality attributed to the search for psilocybian mushrooms occurred in I960, when two adults and four children ate a large number of what they assumed were Psilocybe baeocystis. A six-year-old boy in this group died. Some of the mushrooms from this patch, photographed for an article, were clearly not Ps. baeocystts but Pi. cyanescens. Because these two species sometimes grow together with Galerina autumnalis, it's not unlikely that the six people ingested all three. Their symptoms were similar to those of the woman on Whidby Island.

This short description of the main North American species illustrates how varied psilocybian mushrooms are. People intending to garner or cultivate them should consult experts, particularly when identification of any mushroom is in question. Even clear photographs may be only somewhat helpful. It should be kept in mind that mushrooms change appearance as they age and often have different coloration in different regions.

CHEMISTRY

The psychoactive compounds in psilocybian mushrooms are psilocybin, psilocin and their N-de and N-di-demethylated analogues. Workers at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals and elsewhere have synthesized many related compounds. But only two have been tested in humans (these were lab-coded "CZ-74" and "CY-19").

AH such compounds contain the white, crystalline "ring" structure of an "indole"—which chemists abbreviate as CnH7N and draw in this fashion:

They also contain "ethylamine" side chains of various lengths. Taken together, the indole and side chain constitute "tryptamines." Nearly all psychedelic tryptamines exhibit a rare substitution at the position marked by an asterisk in the drawing above.

The psilocybin and psilocin molecular grouping bears a close resemblance to chemicals appearing in the brain. One of the psilocybian analogues is, in fact, one of the closest known compounds to the neurotrans-mitter serotonin, differing only with respect to the rare substitution just mentioned: it is 4- rather than 5-hydroxytryptamine. Psilocin, interestingly, is the nearest relative to bufotenine, once thought a psychoactive compound,

264 Psilocybin Mushrooms

which was first discovered in the skin secretions of toads (Bufo vulgaris for which it was named) and later in plants, notably the tree known as Anada-nanthera peregrina from which cohoba snuff (see Chapter 6) is made.

Psilocybin and Psilocin

The major psychedelic agent in psilocybian mushrooms is psilocybin—the first indole derivative discovered to contain phosphorus. When ingested, the phosphorus radical is immediately "dephosphorylated" by an intestinal enzyme, alkaline phosphatase, into psilocin and phosphoric acid Animal experiments suggest that psilocybin and psilocin appear at similar chemical concentrations at about the same time in various organs. Thus, the phosphorus radical is generally considered "dead weight" in terms of psycho-activity.

An important difference between psilocybin and psilocin is their relative stability—psilocin is easily oxidized, deteriorating soon afterwards. Hence Sandoz chose to develop psilocybin, which doesn't require freezing to retain potency, rather than the easier-to-synthesize psilocin. Unfortunately, mushrooms containing just psilocybin and its analogues—Ps. semilanceata, Ps. pelliculosa and Ps. mexicana—are all tiny. By weight, psilocin is about 1.4 times as strong as psilocybin—a ratio corresponding to their molecular weights. (Compared by weight, LSD is about 200 times as powerful as psilocybin.)

Related Psycboactive Derivatives

Many users feel that psilocybin and psilocin in synthetic form produce a more lucid mental state than the mushrooms; they also seem to provide more physical energy. Mushrooms generally have longer effects and ate more sedating.

These differences are probably caused by the presence of the psilocybin and psilocin analogues, which appear in small amounts but may act as sedatives. These analogues have so far been tested only on animals.

Few Physiological Reactions 265

PHYSICAL EFFECTS

The amount of time required to produce somatic sensations from psilocybin, psilocin or psilocybian mushrooms varies with the mode of ingestion. If a high dose of mushrooms is chewed well and kept for some time in the mouth, effects may be perceived within seven to eight minutes. Psilocybin or psilocin placed under the tongue—or moderate amounts of the mushrooms retained for a while in the mouth—produces initial sensations within about fifteen to twenty minutes. If the mushrooms are immediately swallowed, however, only about half of the potentiating chemicals are absorbed by the stomach wall, and it then takes thirty to forty-five minutes (sometimes a full hour) before they cross the blood-brain barrier to prompt psychoactivity. When psilocybin and psilocin are injected intramuscularly, the effects are felt within five to six minutes.

Generally, the first signs that the effects are starting are involuntary yawning (usually without sleepiness) and a non-specific sense of restlessness or malaise. Some people experience nausea with mushrooms, most often after they use the bitter Ps. caerulescens, Ps. Aztecorum or similar acrid species, A few users feel a chill as the effects come on, weakness in the legs or slight stomach discomfort. Others feel drowsy and may want to curl up and go to sleep.

In most instances, yawning and a slight sensation of physical disorienta-tion or giddiness are the characteristic experiences during the short take-off stage, which usually lasts half an hour and is followed by feelings of lightness and physical harmony. A few users find that bodily discomfort persists much longer.

High-dose studies of rats suggest that psilocin taken orally is distributed throughout the body. Concentrations in tissues appear highest about half an hour after ingestion, decreasing rapidly over the next three to four hours. The adrenal glands of the test animals show the highest concentrations after the first hour; until then, the kidneys have more. The small intestine, skin, bone marrow, lungs, stomach and salivary glands also have significant concentrations—greater, in fact, than those in the brain.

As with LSD, psilocybin and psilocin prompt few obvious physiological reactions in most people: mainly, dilated pupils and, in some users, a sensa-tion of "dry mouth." A few studies have noted a slight rise in blood pressure, heart rate and temperature, but these reactions appear to result from apprehensions about the experience or from environmental factors.

Psilocin's primary physiologic effect upon the brain seems to be inhibition of the neurotransmitter serotonin, an effect resembling that brought about by LSD. This finding, together with a notable cross-tolerance exhibited between psilocin and LSD, suggests that both compounds act upon similar mechanisms—or possibly, as Hofmann puts it, on "mechanisms acting through a common final pathway."

266 Psilocybian Mushrooms

Substantial tolerance can be built up by repeated doses taken in close-sequence. In 1961, Dr. Leo Hollister gave psilocybin to a subject on a daily basis for twenty-one days, starting with 1.5 mg. and increasing it to 27 mg. On the twenty-second day, the subject showed hardly any reaction to 15 mg. After a rest of several weeks, however, the same dose produced the normal degree of psychoactivity.

In less extreme instances, psilocin tolerance tends to be less pronounced than is the case with LSD. Furthermore, cross-tolerance between these two compounds, when ingested alternately, is not as complete as tolerance developed after repeated ingestion of just one alone.

In the high-dose study of rats, all but 6 percent of the psilocybin was excreted within twenty-four hours. In humans, only 80 to 85 percent of psilocybin and its metabolites is excreted within eight hours, in the urine (about 65 percent), bile and feces (15 to 20 percent). Some 15 to 20 percent lingers on, stored in fatty tissues; significant quantities appear in urine up to a week later. A full 25 percent of the originally administered dose enters urine as psilocin.

Psilocybin, psilocin and psilocybian mushrooms show low toxicity. Doses up to 200 mg. of psilocybin/kg. of body weight have been given to mice intravenously without lethal effects. When dosage was increased to 250 mg./kg. of body weight, a few of the mice died. In terms of average human weight, this corresponds to about 17 or 18 gm. of psilocybin—more than 2,000 times the dosage recommended by Sandoz when it originally marketed this drug.

Extrapolation from animal studies to human use gives only a rough estimate of toxicity. It does seem safe to say that one would have to consume well over a kilogram of the most potent fresh Stropharia cubensis mushrooms—which vomiting would prevent—even to approach the lethal range. Jonathan Ott, an organizer of mushroom conferences and author of Hallucinogenic Plants of North America, said, "I know of no case where an adult has been made seriously ill by psilocybian mushrooms. Tens of thousands of intentional inebriations occur each year with psilocybian mushrooms in the Pacific Northwest alone, yet no conspicuous medical problems have emerged."

MENTAL EFFECTS

Psilocybian mushrooms, psilocybin and psilocin can produce profound, awesome effects upon the mind. In research reported over the first two decades of study, subjects given psilocybin and other drugs in blind experiments were generally unable to distinguish this substance from LSD or mescaline of comparable dosage until several hours had passed. Recognizing psilocybin at that point was possible because of the shorter duration of its psychedelic effects.

In terms of timing, psilocybin experience is characterized by the user's going "up" rapidly, nearly always achieving an enlargement in the

Results in "Blind Experiments" 267

scope of perception that persists for about two hours. Then a gradual decline is experienced over the next three to four hours, resulting in the restoration of ordinary consciousness. The quality of thoughts and feelings evoked during these two phases varies greatly, according to the user's mental set, surroundings and the dosage ingested

Leo Hollister's Observations

In 1961, Leo Hollister and his associates at the Palo Alto Veterans Hospital reported on blind experiments in which they gave psilocybin orally and by injection to a group of "psychologically sophisticated volunteers (graduate students, etc.)." They found that the threshold oral dose was about 60 mcg./kg. of body weight—about 4 gm. for an average-sized person— "from which minimal but definite changes were produced." (An appropriate measure for drugs like amphetamines or barbiturates is perhaps body weight; in contrast, drugs stimulating the central nervous system, such as psilocybin and other Psychedelics, probably vary in effect more directly in terms of brain weight.)

In their observation of psilocybin experiences, Hollister and his associates paid almost no attention to such factors as the menial set of individual subjects (despite their background in psychology) or setting, except to say that "the visual beauty of the colored images, especially when augmented by the stroboscopic light during the electroencephalogram, seemed to be a mystical experience to some." The account of mental effects, unfortunately, consists of about 130 words, collected below (from Chemical Psychoses, 1968):

Some alterations in mood, either euphoria or dysphoria

Concentration and attention are disturbed

Psychological functioning is impaired

Blurred vision, brighter colors, longer afterimages, sharp definition of objects, visual patterns (eyes closed) Increased acuity of hearing Dreamy state, loss of attention and concentration, slow thinking, feelings of unreality, depersonalization Incoordination, difficult and tremulous speech Colored patterns and shapes, generally pleasing, sometimes frightening, most often with eyes closed, occasionally superimposed upon objects in field of vision

Undulation or wavelike motion of viewed surfaces Euphoria, general stimulation, ruminative state Slowed passage of time Transient sexual feelings and synesthesias A few auditory hallucinations

Changes in the body image, the extremities appearing larger than normal An unusual ability to perceive the feelings and motivations of people in the environment Reports of great empathy

^vo Psilocybin Mushrooms

R. Gordon Watson's Observations

When Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond took up the matter of mental effects in their book The Hallucinogens, they remarked that "the major difference between the mushroom effect and pure psilocybin seems to be the dryness of the scientific accounts and the richness of the accounts of self-experimentation." Probably no finer example of "richness" exists than in the descriptions of R. Gordon Wasson.

In The Wondrous Mushroom, Wasson wrote about four psilocybian experiences, highlighting the contributions of mental set and setting. All four experiences involved the same mushroom—Psilocybe caendescens— taken in roughly the same dosage.

(Trip I) As to mental set, his expectations had been building for some years. While his father was interested in Religion and Drink, Wasson became steadily more interested in religion and mushrooms, studying their significance in various cultures for a quarter of a century before he acquired a sample of teonanacatl. Another two years passed before he actually tasted it, as he waited to find someone who could perform the mushroom ceremony.

On the verge of a much anticipated but unfamiliar experience, Wasson derived an important sense of .reassurance from his setting. He was in the company of Indians who were experienced users and who were taking the drug with.him. The velada was conducted by a sabia—a wise-woman, "one-who-knows." Wasson had a close friend along for a companion.

The ceremony consisted of chanting that continued all night long, except for brief intermissions every forty minutes or so. The sabia Maria Sabina danced for two hours in the dark. The ritual aspect, in the context of feeling both adventurous and safe, seems to have influenced the quality (or tone) of Wasson's experience.

Early on, he saw architectural visions like the biblical descriptions of the heavenly city:

The visions came in endless succession, each growing out of the preceding one. We had the sensation that the walls of our humble house had vanished. that our untrammeled souls were floating in the empyrean, stroked by divine breezes, possessed of a divine mobility that would transport us anywhere on the wings of a thought.

{Trip 2) That first experience was impressive—even "gala." Wasson and his associate Allan Richardson had many questions to clarify. Three days later, they asked if Maria Sabina would perform a second veiada. This time Richardson didn't ingest any mushrooms because he intended to take photographs. Wasson accepted five pairs of the "landslide" (derrumbe} mushrooms, rather than the six pairs he had previously taken. He says the effects were just as strong. (He felt nauseous the first time and twice had to leave the room; on this occasion, he didn't have that problem.) The setting was the same, but his mental set was quite different. Here is how Wasson described it:

Experiential Variations from the Same Mushroom 269

(It was raining in torrents all that night, so there was no moon.) But the Senora's behavior differed much from what we had seen the first time. Everything was reduced in scale. There was no dancing and virtually no percussive utterances. Only three or four other Indians were with us, and the Senora brought with her, not her daughter, but her son Aurelio, a youth in his late teens who seemed to us in some way ill or defective. He was now the object of her attention, not I. All night long her singing and her words were directed to this poor boy. Her performance was the dramatic expression of a mother's love for her child, an anguished threnody to mother love, and interpreted in this way it was profoundly moving. The tenderness in her voice as she sang and spoke, and in her gestures as she leaned over Aurelio to caress him, moved us profoundly.

(Trip 3) Three days later, Wasson's wife Valentina Pavlovna ingested five pairs and their thirteen-year-old daughter Masha took four pairs of the same mushrooms. They swallowed them during the afternoon in sleeping bags in a closed room. This was the first occasion, Wasson remarked,

on which white people were eating the mushrooms experimentally, without the setting of a native ceremony. They too saw visions, for hours on end, all pleasant, mostly of 3 nostalgic kind, VPW at one point thought she was looking down into the mouth of a vase, and there she saw and heard a stately dance, a minuet, as though in a regal court of the seventeenth century. The dancers were in miniature and the music was oh! so remote, but also so clearly heard. VPW smoked a cigarette; she exclaimed that never before had a cigarette smelled so good. It was beyond earthly experience. She drank water, and it was superior to Mumm's champagne—incomparably superior ....

(Trip 4) Six weeks later, Wasson tried the mushrooms again in New York Although dried, they apparently retained much of their potency, for he wondered subjectively "if indeed their power had not increased." Secure in his home and confident now about the mushrooms, Wasson found the setting was actually enhanced by a terrific storm ("Hurricane Connie"):

As I stood at the window and watched the gale tossing the trees and the water of the East River, with the rain driven in squalls before the wind, the whole scene was further quickened to life by the abnormal intensity of the colors that I saw. I had always thought that El Greco's apocalyptic skies over Toledo were a figment of the painter's imagination. But on this night I saw El Greco's skies, nothing dimmed, whirling over New York.

Four experiences, catalyzed by the same mushroom, yielded four considerably different results. Two years later, Wasson amalgamated these into his generalized description of the effects of psilocybian consumption:

The mushrooms take effect differently with different persons. For example, some seem to experience only a divine euphoria, which may translate itself into uncontrollable laughter. In my own case I experienced hallucinations -What I was seeing was more clearly seen than anything I had seen before. At last I was seeing with the eye of the soul, not through the coarse lenses of my natural eyes. Moreover, what 1 was seeing was impregnated with weighty

Contrasting Views about Dosage 271

meaning: I was awe-struck. My visions, which never repeated themselves, were of nothing seen in this world: no motor cars, no cities with skyscrapers, no jet engines. All my visions possessed a pristine quality: when I saw choir stalls in a Renaissance cathedral, they were not black with age and incense, but as though they had just come, fresh carved, from the hand of the Master. The palaces, gardens, seascapes, and mountains that I saw had that aspect of new-ness, of fresh beauty, that occasionally comes to all of us in a flash. I saw few persons, and then usually at a great distance, but once I saw a human figure . near at hand, a woman larger than normal, staring out over a twilight sea from her cabin on the shore. It is a curious sensation: with the speed of thought you are translated wherever you desire to be, and you are there, a disembodied eye, poised in space, seeing, not seen invisible, incorporeal,

Dosage Considerations

Along with mental set and setting, dosage is a major consideration in the quality of a psilocybian experience.

Albert Hofmann's view has been that the "medium oral dose" for psilocybin is 4-8 mg., which "elicits the same symptoms as the consumption of about 2 g of dried Psilocybe mexicana fungus." When Sandoz first distributed psilocybin, the pills contained 2 gm. each; it recommended four to five of these in conjunction with "psycholytic" psychotherapy.

After the "mushroom pills" arrived at Harvard, Leary's group quickly discovered that larger amounts produced more impressive results. Leary and another person took 20 mg., and a third person consumed 22 mg. In the first session of the Concord prison project, Leary took 14 mg., while the three volunteer convicts took 20 mg. each. By the time Michael Hollingshead arrived with his bottle of LSD, the Harvard group was using as many as three 20-mg. pills for each trip, Hollingshead therefore took three: "There was a certain amount of intensification of colors, but nothing compared to LSD. So then I took 100. And then, though it was a shorter time, it was very impressive."

On the subject of appropriate dosage, there is clearly some distance between Hollingshead and Hofmann.

Regarding native use of psilocybian mushrooms, R. Gordon Wasson reports that usually each adult Indian is given four, five, six or thirteen pairs. Thirteen pairs is common because thirteen is considered a lucky number. With the wide variations in both mushroom size and potency, such rough guidelines undoubtedly result in enormous differences in the amounts of psilocybin and psilocin consumed.

Questions as to the proper dose for a first trip are difficult to answer, and no answer will be attempted here. With individual variations in mental set and setting taken into account, any general recommendation is bound to be too high or too low in a significant number of cases. It is up to the initiate to decide whether he or she should seek a more than recreational experience the first time out.

272 Psilocybin Mushrooms

For experienced users, Rolf von Eckansberg illustrates a point about regulating the quality of the experience through dosage in "To Be Able to Say: Thou, Really to Love" (reprinted in The Ecstatic Adventure). Von Eckartsberg and his wife had taken three low-dose psilocybin pills. Soon he became aware that while she "was floating through space, giggling, squirming, fluttering like a butterfly," he felt incapable of any emotional reactions. "I found myself standing apart," he reported, "removed by worlds, only half real, half empty and half dead." He pulled himself out of this "peculiar lack of emotional underpinning" by taking "two more pills, one after the other, at about forty-minute intervals."

This additional propulsion soon resulted in "a wonderful openness, I am held in the grasp of a comprehensive clarity, lucidity, like very clear, warm, transparent glass." By the end of his report, von Eckartsberg declared "For the first time I feel like a complete human being, centered in myself, yet an open platform, nothing to hide, completely reconciled and in harmony, a true partner, a steady pole . . . ."

Dosages increased beyond a certain threshold can significantly alter psilocybian experiences, which range from heightened sensitivity to color and sound through feelings of "mental stillness" and acuity to enhanced rapport with others and mystical states. Amounts of psilocybin above 8 or 10 mg. can produce the same gamut of experience available with LSD- In psychotherapy, doses of 10 mg. psilocybin and over have been used to good effect in penetrating the defenses of compulsive-obsessive patients, in aiding "transference" and in reviving childhood memories for the purpose of dealing with early traumas.

If mental set and setting are sacramental, the results can be mystics!, as with Wasson's first mushroom experience. However, circumstances need not be exceptional to evoke impressive responses, as Timothy Leary first learned after eating seven small mushrooms beside a pool: "the discovery that the human brain possesses an infinity of potentialities and can operate at unexpected space-time dimensions left me feeling exhilarated, awed, and quite convinced that I had awakened from a long ontological sleep." When Leary met Richard Alpert at the airport in Mexico City shortly after, he greeted him, saying he had just been through six hours that taught him more than all his years studying psychology. "That was impressive to a fellow psychologist," Alpert says.

Walter Houston Clark gives another example of how psilocybin tan profoundly influence behavior, speaking about the Corncord prison project:

The convicts Leary had were some of the toughest convicts in the Massachusetts prisons in 1961 and 1962. They were armed robbers. They ruled the other convicts when the guards were out of sight. They had no compunctions about breaking somebody's arm, if chat was necessary to enforce their ideas. They volunteered for this and thought they were going to get control of the experiment.

Impressive Responses 273

Instead, these tough convicts all had profound religious experiences. One of the toughest of them told me about when he took psilocybin. He had a vision of Christ and he helped Christ carry his cross towards Calvary. Then he said that after the vision stopped, "1 looked out of the window and all my life came before my eyes, and I said, 'What a waste!' " Well, that was the turning point in thus person's experiences, He and other tough guys started an organization within the walls to continue with their own rehabilitation and the rehabilitation of others.

Gentleness

LSD and mescaline are generally thought to have more impact than psilocybin because of their longer duration; they are also perceived by many people as more coercive than psilocybin. The psilocybin experience seems to be warmer, not as forceful and less isolating. It tends to build connections between people, who are generally much more in communication than when they use LSD.

Although rare, some "hellish" experiences have resulted from psilocybin and mushroom use, mainly in the early studies, when these drugs were administered in inappropriate hospital settings by doctors unacquainted with their effects. A vivid account of one such trip appears in Ebin's The Drug Experience—a first-class example of how not to conduct such investi-gations.

Albert Hofmann provides two examples. The first occurred after swallowing thirty-two dried specimens of Psilocybe mexicana to see if Heim's cultivation from Mexican sources produced mushrooms that were still psychoactive; the second appears as "an experiment with psilocybin" in the spring of 1962 in his autobiography (pp. 162-168). Hofmann seems to be one of those people "exquisitely sensitive" to psychedelic effects; as with his first self-ingest ion of LSD, these trips came on overwhelmingly. The first experiment involved a medium dose by native standards (2.4 gm.):

Thirty minutes after taking the mushrooms the exterior world began to

undergo a strange transformation. Everything assumed a Mexican character.

As I was perfectly well aware that my knowledge of the Mexican origin of the

mushrooms would lead me to imagine only Mexican scenery, I tried deliber-

ately to look at my environment as I knew it normally. But all voluntary efforts

to look at things in (heir customary forms and colors proved ineffective.

Whether my eyes were closed or open I saw only Mexican motifs and colors.

When the doctor supervising the experiment bent over to check my blood

pressure, he was transformed into an Aztec priest and I would not have been

astonished if he had drawn an obsidian knife. In spite of the seriousness of the

situation it amused me to see how the Germanic face of my colleague had

acquired a purely Indian expression. At the peak of the intoxication, about 1 1/2

hours after ingestion of the mushrooms, the rush of interior pictures, mostly

abstract motifs rapidly changing in shape and color, reached such an alarming

degree that I feared that I would be torn into this whirlpool of form and color

and dissolve. After about six hours the dream came to an end. Subjectively, I

had no idea how long this condition had lasted. I felt my return to everyday reality to be a happy return from a strange, fantastic but quite really experienced world into an old and familiar home.

In Hermann's 1962 psilocybin experiment, undertaken with the novelist Ernst Junger, the pharmacologist Heribert Konzettand the Islamic scholar Rudolf Gelpke, each took 20 mg. of psilocybin. Hofmann summarized the experience as having "carried all four of us off, not into luminous heights, rather into deeper regions" and concluded: "It seems that the psilocybin inebriation is more darkly colored in the majority of cases than the inebriation produced by LSD."

At Harvard, in contrast, there were no bad trips on psilocybin. Michael Kahn, a psychologist who observed both the Harvard and Millbrook psilocybin scenes, gives an account of how the advent of LSD changed the setting, resulting in greater emphasis on solitary experience.

There were no "bad trips" in those days. We didn't know what a "bad trip" was. Hundreds of psilocybin trips—I never saw one. I didn't even have a word "bad trip" in my vocabulary. Those were benign, life-changing, growth experiences, because Tim's presence was so involving .... We were on a love trip; Timothy had us on a love trip and it was fantastic.

We just formed this incredible community. We saw each other every day, and we hung around together, and we planned sessions together, and we played together, and we exchanged lovers, and it was just fantastic ....

Then Michael came and introduced the LSD and some stuff happened that I really didn't like—1 guess I should say I really didn't understand. Not so much to Timothy as the rest of us. LSD is a very different drug, and we began going on solo trips which we hadn't been doing so much. People would take these wild doses of LSD and disappear, and you wouldn't see them again for two days—including myself. You know, you get together with the gang expecting one of those love sessions, and somebody would give you 400 kosher meg. of that stuff and you'd never see anybody again till two days later, and you'd all look around and there you'd been out in the Tibetan mountains. It was fun, and it was exciting, and it was scary. And the bad trips began— and the scary things. But then what happened that really disturbed me a lot was that we got quite cliquey—which had never happened before.

You see, things like this would happen: we would finish the psilocybin session and we would go out to the Dunkin' Donuts or the Star Market to get breakfast. And you never saw such a beautiful bunch of people in your lire as that as we were walking into those places. Everybody else who was waiting in line for the "Dunkin' Donuts" were our brothers and sisters. We would quick over to the end of the line, somebody would come in and we would keep going; to the end of the line and we would strike up conversations with these people We would have this far-out thing going with the Dunkin' Donuts on Sunday morning, you know.

LSD changed all that. We got snotty, we got put-downy, we got "in" and "out." We got looking at the people who hadn't had "the experience" as though they were inferior to us. We would go to parties and there would be "drug people" and "non-drug people," and we would be in little groups, and

Euphoria and Lucidity 275

we would tell "invokes," and we would be groupy, and we'd put down people who tried to get in with us.

Auditory Effects

LSD and mescaline have a reputation for being spectacular hallucinatory drugs. In moderate to high doses, psilocybin and psilocybian mushrooms produce striking visual effects in most users who close their eyes even among people who are ordinarily not much as "visualizers." In contrast to most other Psychedelics, psilocybian mushrooms have also impressed many users with auditory effects. Oss and Oeric describe the response when the experience is upbeat:

The state of mind induced by a full dose of mushrooms is one of euphoria and calm lucidity, with no loss of coherence or clarity of thought. The hallucin-

ations seen with the eyes closed are colorful, hard-edged, and highly articulated, and may range from abstract geometrical forms to visions of fantastic landscapes and architectural vistas. These hallucinations are most intense when the mushroom is taken in the setting preferred by the Mazatecans: inside at night in complete darkness. On the other hand, if one is in a natural setting and directs the focus of the senses outward to the environment, one discovers that one's senses seem keyed to their highest pitch of receptivity, and finds oneself hearing, smelling and seeing things with a clarity and sensitivity seldom, if ever, experienced before.

One of the most interesting papers published on mushrooms is Henry Munn's in Hallucinogens and Shamanism. Married to a niece of the shamans he writes about, Munn reports that the Indians hear the mushrooms say things and theorizes that psilocybin affects some verbalization and speech centers of the brain. Auditory hallucinations induced by these mushrooms occur both externally and internally (with "hearing," as we normally think of it, and with "inner voices"). Munn emphasizes the "ecstatic language" given voice through the shamans:

The phenomenon most distinctive of the mushroom's effect is the inspired capacity to speak. Those who eat them are men of language, illuminated with the spirit, who call themselves the ones who speak, those who say. The shaman, chanting in a melodic singsong, saying says at the end of each phrase of saying, is in communication with the origin of creation, the sources of the voice, and the fountains of the word.

Jean Basset Johnson, among the first whites to observe a mushroom ceremony, also observed that inspired speech during a curing session attributed to the mushroom, not the shaman. Oaxacan Indians today claim that God gave them these sacred mushrooms because they could not read and it was necessary for him to speak to them directly.

The Great Oracle

The earliest report of mushroom ingestion comes from Tezozcimoc, who commented on the celebrants at the coronation of Montezuma II seeing

276 Psilocybin Mushroom!

visions and hearing voices: "therefore they took these hallucinations as divine notices, revelations of the future, and augury of things to come." Indian users have traditionally employed the visualization and vocalization in psilocybian experiences for purposes of divination, prophecy, healing and worship,

Wasson describes these practices more specifically:

Perhaps there is illness in the family and the mushroom is consulted to learn whether the patient will live or die. If the verdict is for death, the family does nor wait but immediately prepares for the funeral, and the sick person loses the will to live and shortly afterward gives up the ghost. If the verdict is for life, the mushroom will tell what must be done if the patient is to recover Or, again, if a donkey has been lost or if some money has been stolen, the mushroom is consulted and gives the answers. Among these unlettered folk, speaking languages that are not written, there is often no news of an absent member of the family, perhaps one who has gone as a "wetback" to the United States. Here the mushroom, as a postal service, brings tidings of die absent one, whether he is alive and well, or sick or in jail, or prosperous or poor, or whether he is married and has children.

Wasson had special reason to be interested: during the first ceremony, Maria Sabina asked him what question he wanted answered. After fumbling about, he asked about his son in Cambridge. She had never heard of the place. Later that evening, she reported that his son wasn't in Cambridge but at home. He was in emotional turmoil over a girlfriend and was about to join the Army. Although Wasson knew nothing of this at the time, all turned out later to be true.

Stan Krippner, one of the subjects of the Harvard Psilocybin Project, gives another example:

.. I found myself gazing at 3 statue of Lincoln. The statue was entirely black, and the head was bowed. There was a gun at the base of the statue and someone murmured, "He was shot. The President was shot." A whisp of smoke rose into the air.

Lincoln's features slowly faded away, and those of Kennedy took their place. The setting was still Washington, D.C The gun was still at the base of the statue. A wisp of smoke seeped from the barrel and curled into the air. The voice repeated, "He was shot. The President was shot." My eyes opened, they were filled with tears ....

Of this, he wrote later:

In 1962, when I had my first psilocybin experience,!gave this visualization of Kennedy relatively little thought, as so many other impressions came my way. However, it was the only one of my visualizations that brought tears to my eyes, so I described it fully in the report 1 sent to Harvard. Nineteen months later, on November 23, 1963, the visualization came back to me as 1 mourned Kennedy's assassination.

Divination, Prophecy, Healing and Worship 277

Hofmann has been quoted about the Mexican tone coloring his first mushroom experience—when the Germanic doctor hovering over him appeared as an Aztec priest. In Hofmann's 1962 "psilocybin experiments," Mrs. LiGelpke, an artist, also participated. Here she describes adrawing she made at that time:

Nothing on this page is consciously fashioned. While I worked on it, the memory (of the experience under psilocybin) was again reality, and led me at every stroke. For that reason the picture is as many-layered as this memory,

and the figure at the lower right is really the captive of its dream___ When

books about Mexican an came into my hands three weeks later, I again found the motifs of my visions there with a sudden start.

Similar phenomena have been noted by Wasson, who has conjectured that ancient Mexican art may have been influenced by visionary images appearing during mushroom sessions.

Andrew Weil's Observations

In The Marriage of the Sun and Moon, Andy Weil declares that he's a "mycophile" and describes three trips he took using the San Isidro mushroom (Stropharia cubensis). These three experiences with the same mushroom stimulated greatly varying responses. They may serve as a conclusion for this discussion, because they emphasize again the significant influence of mental set and setting.

(Trip 1) In 1972, Weil arrived in Huautla de Jimenez, where he had the good fortune to be taken into the house of a curandera living in a nearby village. As a healer, she used modern medicines and also mushrooms, which die regarded as the gran remedio that cures all ills. She had already collected a bunch of San Isidro mushrooms that were obviously meant for Weil, as she said. Weil had only a twenty-four hour permit to stay in the area.

He noticed larvae and insects among the mushrooms. The curandera, however, passed the mushrooms through the smoke from a dried chile pod placed on glowing charcoal, and instantly the insects crawled out of the mushrooms and died on a newspaper placed below. Weil ate two of the largest mushrooms (three-inch caps), and as the curandera prayed, he ate twenty smaller ones.

Protected by the sacred ministrations of the curandera, he was soon feeling "extraordinarily content and well" and experienced sensations of lightness. He felt "fresh, alert, healthy and cleansed." The healer communicated "much of her own vitality, optimism and goodness of spirit, leaving me elated and more confident in my own abilities and powers."

Going outside later, he recalled Wasson's suggestion that the word "bemushroomed" would be a good term for this state. He observed a full eclipse of the moon and later went to sleep. "In the morning, I awoke refreshed, feeling better than I had in a long time, and went off for a day in Huautla of shopping and negotiating with the military authorities . . . ."

218 Psilocybin Mushrooms

(Trip 2) When Weil returned, the healer cold him that some mushrooms were left over and that he might as well finish them that night. "I really did not want to," writes Weil, "since I had just had a perfect mushroom experience, but instead of telling her that. 1 agreed." They repeated the service with incense and prayers beneath a picture of the patron saint Isidro, who was being showered with "psychedelic rays ... from some other dimension." This time, the experience took a different direction:

A heavy bank of fog and clouds closed in, the temperature dropped, and suddenly nearly everyone in the house was sick. There was much crying anil coughing from the bedroom, and I began feeling unwell, coo. A great sense of depression and isolation came over me. 1 could not gel to sleep. The mushrooms seemed to be working against me, not with me, and I felt far away from where 1 was supposed to be.

Toward dawn, Weil was still awake and concluding that mushrooms, like other Psychedelics, "must be used in a proper context." He comments on this lesson:

To take them just because they are available, when the time is not right, is a mistake. The negative experience of this second night did not in any way detract from the goodness of the first night. If anything, it made me more aware of the value of that experience and more eager to retain it and use it in my life I hoped that I would be able to be bemushroomed again, but I resolved to be patient until the right moment came.

(Trip 3) A short while later, outside Cali in Colombia, Weil ate Stro-pharia cubensis again. The mushroom seemed to be growing all over the place, although its use was not traditional there. Whites and others "have recently introduced Colombian Indians to the drug, the reverse of the usual order of things." The setting this time was "an idyllically beautiful field with clumps of woods, a clear river and enormous, gray, humpbacked Brahma cows lying peacefully in the bright green grass." The resulting trip led him to inquire further into setting:

We sat in the grass, about ten of us, and let the mushrooms transport us to a realm of calm good feeling in which we drank in the beauty of the setting. There were color visions, as I had experienced before with San Isidro in Mexico. In Mexico I had eaten the mushrooms late at night, in darkness and secrecy, in the very shadow of menacing police authority. Now it was broad daylight, in open country, with no one around but friendly fellow travelers. In Mexico I had felt like an early Christian pursuing the sacrament in a catacomb, wary of the approach of Roman legions; here everything was above ground and open. The Indians of the Sierra Mazateia say the mushroom should not be eaten in daytime, that they must be eaten at night. Yet here we were in full daylight having a wonderful time. In general, I prefer to take psychedelic substances in the daytime, when their stimulating energies are more in harmony with the rhythms of my body. I feel that way about mushrooms, too. Is it possible, I wondered, that the Indian habit of eating mushrooms at night is

"I Hoped I Would Be Able to be Bemushroomed Again" 279

not so traditional as it seems but dates back only to the arrival of the Spanish

and persecutions of native rites by the church?

Weil has since experimented with other psilocybian mushrooms; he eel that "the most interesting properties of mushrooms may not come to our attention if people use them casually and without thought."

FORMS AND PREPARATIONS

Illustrations of the psilocybian mushrooms in this book have so far been in the fresh state. When offered for sale, however, they generally have been already dried. Here is an example of Stropharia {Pilocybe) cubensis as it is ordinarily presented:

Dosage regarding mushrooms is complex—enough so that the reader is directed to the botany section of this chapter where rough guidelines are given for the most popular half dozen psychedelic species. Near the beginning of that section are also instructions for preparing uniform, stable doses—something that so far has not shown up much in the psychedelic subculture.