Home | Community | Message Board

World Seed Supply
This site includes paid links. Please support our sponsors.


Welcome to the Shroomery Message Board! You are experiencing a small sample of what the site has to offer. Please login or register to post messages and view our exclusive members-only content. You'll gain access to additional forums, file attachments, board customizations, encrypted private messages, and much more!

Shop: Bridgetown Botanicals CBD Concentrates   Left Coast Kratom Buy Kratom Extract   Mushroom-Hut Liquid Cultures   Amanita Muscaria Store Amanita Muscaria   North Spore North Spore Mushroom Grow Kits & Cultivation Supplies   PhytoExtractum Buy Bali Kratom Powder   Kraken Kratom Red Vein Kratom

Jump to first unread post Pages: 1
OfflinemotamanM
old hand
 User Gallery
Registered: 12/18/02
Posts: 6,047
Last seen: 12 days, 7 hours
Let's put the fun back into fungi
    #5678117 - 05/26/06 07:32 PM (17 years, 8 months ago)

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/scienceandnature/story/0,,1784096,00.html#article_continue

Let's put the fun back into fungi

After reading Andy Letcher's Shroom, it's about time we learnt to love our mushrooms, says Daniel Butler
Daniel Butler
Saturday May 27, 2006

Guardian


The sale of magic mushrooms was banned only last year, closing a legal loophole. The fungi's active ingredients are ranked alongside heroin, yet they were allowed to be sold openly. For many the ban came not a moment too soon, for by 2004 one Glastonbury trader was selling 70kg: the equivalent of 3,500 four-hour trips.

Andy Letcher, one-time psychedelic musician and former bypass protester, charts the path to the ban in this intelligent and well-researched book, which is full of surprises. It begins with a brief scientific outline of the two main groups of hallucinogenic fungi. The most popular are members of the Psylocybefamily which have been used by Mexican Indians for many centuries and are represented in Britain by the liberty cap or "magic mushroom". The others are best represented by fly agaric: the classic red and white-spotted "toadstool" beloved by children's illustrators and garden-gnome manufacturers. These are more powerful and again there is a genuine history of their use (this time in Siberia).

These two undeniable historic links are often used by magic mushroom aficionados to justify an ancient tradition of their use which is heavily tinted with New Age mysticism: with great certainty they will detail how mushrooms were used in prehistoric religious ceremonies, inspiring the building of stone circles at Avebury and Stonehenge and the Aztec pyramids at Teotihuacán. They will tell you how Plato, among others, drank mushroom tea; how mushrooms were eaten by the shadowy Celts and their Druidic priests, by the Vikings to access their jingoistic rages, and then later by the medieval witches in their secretive moonlight sabbats. They will happily explain the figure of Father Christmas, who is in fact a magic mushroom in disguise. By reviving mushroom use they believe they are reinstating an ancient shamanic heritage.

Given his psychedelic past, one might expect Letcher to side with such views, but instead he shows that most claims are based on highly questionable research. For example, Terence and Kat McKenna publicised neolithic Algerian rock paintings of a "mushroom shaman" in two books during the 1990s. They did so without visiting the original, however, and used a drawing of a photograph rather than the original. Both McKennas were mushroom enthusiasts, and while they strove to keep the image accurate, the mushrooms have been enhanced. Others claim the giant magic mushrooms embossed on the gothic bronze doors of Hildesheim Cathedral are evidence of a hidden pagan sect, but Letcher argues that these make more sense as stylised fig trees. He demolishes most of the flimsy evidence for an underground pagan cult dating back millennia. The book's most convincing arguments come as Letcher charts magic mushrooms' recent rise in popularity. This began with pseudoscientific research in the 1950s by an American, Gordon Wasson, whose interest in cultural attitudes to mushrooms started when honeymooning with his wife, Valentina, a Russian émigrée. Wasson was horrified to watch his young bride eagerly collecting and devouring edible fungi with relish, while his own upbringing made him recoil in fear from such "toadstools".

This led to his anthropological interest in why some nations are "mycophobic" (Anglo-Saxon cultures), while others (Slavic) prize them highly. He heard that Mexican Indians used mushrooms in religious ceremonies, so the Wassons went to Latin America in 1955 and a "wise woman"introduced them to her hallucinogenic secrets. Wasson had an "out-of-body" experience and wrote up an embroidered account of the event for Life magazine in 1957.

Meanwhile, he harnessed the great Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, discoverer of LSD, to isolate the mushrooms' active ingredients. This lent Wasson scientific credibility and soon "proto-drug-culture" intellectuals such as Robert Graves and Timothy Leary were preaching the wonders of magic mushrooms.

During the 60s, interest in mind-altering drugs became part of the zeitgeist. Nevertheless, fungi were slow to catch on. Early hippies generally preferred synthetic versions such as acid. In fact it wasn't until consumption of fungi rocketed in the 90s that the authorities became seriously alarmed.

If this meticulously researched and well written book has it has a weakness, however, it is that Letcher skirts over what for me is the lady in the attic. Why did it take so long for these powerful, free and legal drugs to catch on?

The answer is that most Britons are terrified of mushrooms. This is a tragedy, as we have around 10,000 native species and the vast majority of the 1,000 non-microscopic species are harmless. Only a handful are seriously poisonous, while many, such as porcini, blewits and saffron milk caps, are both common and highly prized in the kitchen. Our Continental neighbours love them. Despite our perfect damp, mild climate, as a nation not only do we not cash in, we positively shun them.

Perhaps it was to overcome this aversion that Letcher feels forced to focus on psychedelia, but to my mind the mycophobia that fascinated Wasson is the central issue. To be fair, Shroomdoes cover possible answers. He points out that until the advent of books, one needed a skilled teacher to disseminate information: "Given the high price of getting the decision wrong (a slow and painful death in the case of the death cap, Amanita phaloides), blanket avoidance of all mushrooms is the most sensible and reasonable option," he writes. Modern reports of global fatalities back this. There are scores annually in mushroom-loving nations such as Poland. Meanwhile Britain's National Poisons Unit reports around two deaths per year over the past century - virtually all of unattended toddlers chewing on death caps.

Letcher may not directly cover the issue of edible mushrooms, but he deals with the general failure to make use of hallucinogenic mushrooms. He argues that we live in an age where literacy is virtually universal, scepticism encouraged and facts established by scientific experimentation. As a result it is easy to assume someone would - sooner or later - stumble across the properties of every mushroom and record it for posterity. But our ancestors were generally illiterate, forbidden to question authority and had no grasp of scientific methodology. Hence rather than being naturally drawn to experiment with drug-rich mushrooms, the reverse was true. The same argument applies to edible species.

· Daniel Butler leads edible mushroom tours (www.fungiforays.co.uk) and talks on "Fungiphobia: A Very British Disease?" at the Hay festival (www.hayfestival.com).


--------------------
http://heffter.org


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Jump to top Pages: 1

Shop: Bridgetown Botanicals CBD Concentrates   Left Coast Kratom Buy Kratom Extract   Mushroom-Hut Liquid Cultures   Amanita Muscaria Store Amanita Muscaria   North Spore North Spore Mushroom Grow Kits & Cultivation Supplies   PhytoExtractum Buy Bali Kratom Powder   Kraken Kratom Red Vein Kratom


Similar ThreadsPosterViewsRepliesLast post
* A cultural history of the magic mushroom by Andy Letcher veggieM 1,108 0 06/04/06 12:50 PM
by veggie
* Cornell's mycology museum harbors good, bad and macabre fungi veggieM 1,467 0 12/09/04 09:48 AM
by veggie
* Inspectors pick out poisonous fungi AnnoA 924 0 11/07/04 10:30 AM
by Anno
* Interview with Andy Letcher, author of Shroom veggieM 514 0 02/18/10 11:39 PM
by veggie
* Putting the fun back in fungi motamanM 1,555 0 01/12/04 06:16 PM
by motaman
* Fun with Fungi motamanM 1,422 0 11/29/03 08:29 AM
by motaman
* At least the rain is good for something... record numbers of magic toadstools [UK] veggieM 1,116 2 09/09/08 04:06 PM
by Midnight Rider
* Native Truffles - The fun guys in fungi[AU] AnnoA 770 0 06/08/05 12:41 AM
by Anno

Extra information
You cannot start new topics / You cannot reply to topics
HTML is disabled / BBCode is enabled
Moderator: motaman, veggie, Alan Rockefeller, Mostly_Harmless
862 topic views. 0 members, 3 guests and 1 web crawlers are browsing this forum.
[ Show Images Only | Sort by Score | Print Topic ]
Search this thread:

Copyright 1997-2024 Mind Media. Some rights reserved.

Generated in 0.023 seconds spending 0.009 seconds on 13 queries.