This paper was first given as the Annual Lecture of the Mycological Society of America, Stillwater, Oklahoma, 1960, and later published in the Botanical Museum Leaflets, Harvard University, 1961, 19(7).
WHEN I RECEIVED in Mexico your President's invitation to speak
here today, I knew that your Committee had made an unorthodox
choice, for I am not a professional mycologist. As the appointed
hour approached my trepidation kept mounting, for I saw myself
an amateur about to be thrown to a pack of professionals. But
your President's gracious introductory remarks, however unmerited,
have put me at my ease and lead me to hope that we shall all enjoy
together a mushroom foray of a rather unusual nature.
Those of you who do not know the story will be interested in learning
how it came about that my wife, who was a pediatrician, and I,
who am a banker, took up the study of mushrooms. She was a Great
Russian and, like all of her fellow-countrymen, learned at her
mother's knee a solid body of empirical knowledge about the common
species and a love of them that are astonishing to us Americans.
Like us, the Russians are fond of nature—the forests and birds
and wild flowers. But their love of mushrooms is of a different
order, a visceral urge, a passion that passeth understanding.
The worthless kinds, the poisonous mushrooms—the Russians are
fond, in a way, even of them. They call these "worthless
ones" paganki, the "little pagans," and
my wife would make of them colorful centerpieces for the dining-room
table, against a background of moss and stones and wood picked
up in the woods. On the other hand, I, of Anglo-Saxon origin,
had known nothing of mushrooms. By inheritance, I ignored them
all; I rejected those repugnant fungal growths, expressions of
parasitism and decay. Before my marriage, I had not once fixed
my gaze on a mushroom; not once looked at a mushroom with a discriminating
eye. Indeed, each of us, she and I, regarded the other as abnormal,
or rather subnormal, in our contrasting responses to mushrooms.
A little thing, some of you will say, this difference in emotional
attitude toward wild mushrooms. Yet my wife and I did not think
so, and we devoted a part of our leisure hours for more than thirty
years to dissecting it, defining it, and tracing it to its origin.
Such discoveries as we have made, including the rediscovery of
the religious role of the hallucinogenic mushrooms of Mexico,
can be laid to our preoccupation with that cultural rift between
my wife and me, between our respective peoples, between the mycophilia
and mycophobia (words that we devised for the two attitudes) that
divide the Indo-European peoples into two camps. If this hypothesis
of ours be wrong, then it must have been a singular false hypothesis
to have produced the results that it has. But I think it is not
wrong. Thanks to the immense strides made in the study of the
human psyche in this century, we are now all aware that deep-seated
emotional attitudes acquired in early life are of profound importance.
I suggest that when such traits betoken the attitudes of whole
tribes or peoples, and when those traits have remained unaltered
throughout recorded history, and especially when they differ from
one people to another neighboring people, then you are face to
face with a phenomenon of profound cultural importance, whose
primal cause is to be discovered only in the well-springs of cultural
history.
Many have observed the difference in attitude toward mushrooms
of the European peoples. Some mycologists in the English-speaking
world have inveighed against this universal prejudice of our race,
hoping thereby to weaken its grip. What a vain hope! One does
not treat a constitutional disorder by applying a Band-Aid. We
ourselves have had no desire to change the Anglo-Saxon's attitude
toward mushrooms. We view this anthropological trait with amused
detachment, confident that it will long remain unchanged for future
students to examine at their leisure.
Our method of approach was to look everywhere for references to
mushrooms. We gathered the words for "mushroom" and
the various species in every accessible language. We studied their
etymologies. Sometimes we rejected the accepted derivations and
worked out new ones, as in the case of "mushroom" itself
and also of 'chanterelle." We were quick to discern the latent
metaphors in such words, metaphors that had lain dead in some
cases for thousands of years. We searched for the meaning of those
figures of speech. We sought for mushrooms in the proverbs of
Europe, in myths and mythology, in legends and fairy tales, in
epics and ballads, in historical episodes, in the obscene and
scabrous vocabularies that usually escape the lexicographer; in
the writings of poets and novelists. We were alert to the positive
or negative value that the mushroom vocabularies carried, their
mycophilic and mycophobic content. Mushrooms are widely
linked with the fly, the toad, the cock, and the thunderbolt;
and so we studied these to see what associations they conveyed
to our remote forebears. Wherever we traveled we tried to enter
into contact with untutored peasants and arrive at their knowledge
of the fungi—the kinds of mushrooms that they distinguished,
their names, the uses to which they put them, and their emotional
attitude toward them. We made trips to the Basque country, to
Lapland, to Friesland, to the Provence, to Japan. We scoured the
picture galleries and museums of the world for mushrooms and we
pored over books on archeology and anthropology.
I would not have you think that we ventured into all these learned
paths without guidance. We drew heavily on our betters in the
special fields that we were exploring. When we were delving into
questions of vocabulary, when we worked out an original etymology
for a mushroomic word, we were always within reach of a philologist
who had made of that tongue his province. And so in all branches
of knowledge. Sometimes it seems to me that our entire work has
been composed by others, with us merely serving as rapporteur.
Since we began to publish in 1956, persons in all walks of life
have come to us in increasing numbers to contribute information
and oft-times the contributions of even the lowliest informants
are of highest value, filling a lacuna in our argument. We were
amateurs unencumbered by academic inhibitions, and therefore we
felt free to range far and wide, disregarding the frontiers that
ordinarily segregate the learned disciplines. What we produced
was a pioneering work. We know, we have always known better than
the critics, the flaws in ours, but our main theme, which we adumbrated
rather diffidently in Mushrooms Russia and History in 1957,
seems to have stood up under criticism. If I live and retain my
vitality, you may see published over the coming years a series
of volumes, to be called perhaps Ethnomycological Papers, and,
at the end of the road there may be a new edition of our original
work, reshaped, simplified with new evidence added and the argument
strengthened.
It would give me pleasure to enumerate the names of those to whom
we are indebted, but how tedious the roll call would be for you
who are obliged to listen! There is one name, however, that in
this audience I must cite. For more than ten years, we have been
collaborating closely with Professor Roger Heim, Membre de l'Institut,
and on all matters mycological he has been our guide and teacher.
For these many years, he has been the director in Paris of the
Laboratoire de Cryptogamie and, even longer, editor of the Revue
de Mycologie. More recently, he has also borne the burden
of directing the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, that renowned
center for advanced teaching and research in the biological studies,
one of the glories of French culture. But these titles to academic
distinction, though themselves of the highest order, do not tell
you the story. Vast as is his learning and his experience in field
and laboratory, sound as is his judgment in the vexed problems
that you mycologists face every day, formidable as he is in polemic,
it is as a rare human being that I commend him to you. Patient
with the beginner, inspiring as a teacher, model of generosity
toward others, prodigious worker in field and laboratory, and
classical stylist in the French language, who could be more delightful
whether in his published writings, or as correspondent, or as
companion in the field? In the presence of Roger Heim, the time-worn
conflict between science and the humanities fades away. One senses
that the field of science for him is merely the New World that
civilized man, the exponent of the humanities, is exploring and
assimilating. What guardian angel had me in his keeping when,
after the Second World War, I ascended the steps of his laboratory
in Paris to meet him for the first time, a stranger, an American,
an ignoramus in the complex, the vast, the exacting discipline
that you and he share together? At once he made me feel at home
and it was not long before he was developing enthusiasm for our
ethnomycological inquiries. Later he became our indispensable
and beloved partner in our Middle American forays.
I do not recall which of us, my wife or I, first dared to put
into words, back in the '40's, the surmise that our own remote
ancestors, perhaps 4,000 years ago, worshipped a divine mushroom.
It seemed to us that this might explain the phenomenon of mycophilia
vs. mycophobia, for which we found an abundance of supporting
evidence in philology and folklore. Nor am I sure whether our
conjecture was before or after we had learned of the role of Amanita
muscaria in the religion of several remote tribes of Siberia.
Our bold surmise seems less bold now than it did then. I remember
distinctly how it came about that we embarked on our Middle American
explorations. In the fall of 1952 we learned that the 16th century
writers, describing the Indian cultures of Mexico, had recorded
that certain mushrooms played a divinatory role in the religion
of the natives. Simultaneously we learned that certain pre-Columbian
stone artifacts resembling mushrooms, most of them roughly a foot
high, had been turning up, usually in the highlands of Guatemala,
in increasing numbers. For want of a better name, the archeologists
called them "mushroom stones," but not one archeologist
had linked them with mushrooms or with the rites described by
the 16th century writers in neighboring Mexico. They were an enigma,
and "mushroom stone" was merely a term of convenience.
Some of these stone carvings carried an effigy on the stipe, either
a human face or an animal, and all of them were very like mushrooms.
Like the child in the Emperor's New Clothes, we spoke up, declaring
that the so-called "mushroom stones" really represented
mushrooms, and that they were the symbol of a religion, like the
Cross in the Christian religion, or the Star of Judea, or the
Crescent of the Moslems. If we are right—and little by little
the accumulating evidence seems to be in our favor—then this
Middle American cult of a divine mushroom, this cult of "God's
flesh" as the Indians in pre-Columbian times called it, can
be traced back to about B.C. 1500, in what we call the Early Pre-classic
period, the earliest period in which man was in sufficient command
of his technique to be able to carve stone. Thus we find a mushroom
in the center of the cult with perhaps the oldest continuous history
in the world. These oldest mushroom stones are technically and
stylistically among the finest that we have, evidence of a flourishing
rite at the time they were made. Earlier still, it is tempting
to imagine countless generations of wooden effigies, mushroomic
symbols of the cult, that have long since turned to dust. Is not
mycology, which someone has called the step-child of the sciences,
acquiring a wholly new and unexpected dimension? Religion has
always been at the core of man's highest faculties and cultural
achievements, and therefore I ask you now to contemplate our lowly
mushroom—what patents of ancient lineage and nobility are coming
its way!
It remained for us to find out what kinds of mushrooms had been
worshipped in Middle America, and why. Fortunately, we could build
on the experience of a few predecessors in the field: Blas Pablo
Reko, Robert J. Weitlaner, Jean Bassett Johnson, Richard Evans
Schultes, and Eunice V. Pike. They all reported that the cult
still existed in the Sierra Mazateca in Oaxaca. And so we went
there, in 1953. In books and articles we have described time and
time again our later adventures, and some of you, surely, are
familiar with them. So far as we know, we were the first outsiders
to eat the mushrooms, the first to be invited to partake in the
agape of the sacred mushroom. [This was on the night of June 29-30,
1955.] I propose here this evening a new approach, and will give
you the distinctive traits of this cult of a divine mushroom,
which we have found a revelation, in the true meaning of that
abused word, but which for the Indians is an every-day feature,
albeit a Holy Mystery, of their lives.
Here let me say a word parenthetically about the nature of the
psychic disturbance that the eating of the mushroom causes. This
disturbance is wholly different from the effects of alcohol, as
different as night from day. We are entering upon a discussion
where the vocabulary of the English language, of any European
language, is seriously deficient. There are no apt words in them
to characterize your state when you are, shall we say, "bemushroomed."
For hundreds, even thousands, of years we have thought about these
things in terms of alcohol, and we now have to break the bonds
imposed on us by the alcoholic association. We are all, willy
nilly, confined within the prison walls of our every-day vocabulary.
With skill in our choice of words we may stretch accepted meanings
to cover slightly new feelings and thoughts, but when a state
of mind is utterly distinct, wholly novel, then all our old words
fail. How do you tell a man born blind what seeing is like? In
the present case, this is especially true because superficially
the bemushroomed man shows a few of the objective symptoms of
one intoxicated, drunk. Now virtually all the words describing
the state of drunkenness, from "intoxicated" (which,
as you know, means "poisoned") through the scores of
current vulgarisms, are contemptuous, belittling, pejorative.
How curious it is that modern civilized man finds surcease from
care in a drug for which he seems to have no respect! If we use
by analogy the terms suitable for alcohol, we prejudice the mushroom,
and since there are few among us who have been bemushroomed, there
is danger that the experience will not be fairly judged. What
we need is a vocabulary to describe all the modalities of a Divine
Inebriant.
These difficulties in communicating have played their part in
\ certain amusing situations. Two psychiatrists who have taken
the mushroom and known the experience in its full dimensions have
been criticised in professional circles as being no longer "objective."
Thus it comes about that we are all divided into two classes:
those who have taken the mushroom and are disqualified by our
subjective experience, and those who have not taken the mushroom
and are disqualified by their total ignorance of the subject !
As for me, a simple layman, I am profoundly grateful to my Indian
friends for having initiated me into the tremendous Mystery of
the mushroom. In describing what happens, I shall be using familiar
phrases that may seem to give you some idea of the bemushroomed
state. Let me hasten to warn you that I am painfully aware of
the inadequacy of my words, any words, to conjure up for you an
image of that state.
I shall take you now to the monolingual villages in the uplands
of southern Mexico. Only a handful of the inhabitants have learned
Spanish. The men are appallingly given to the abuse of alcohol,
but in their minds the mushrooms are utterly different, not in
degree, but in kind. Of alcohol they speak with the same jocular
vulgarity that we do. But about mushrooms they prefer not to speak
at all, at least when they are in company and especially when
strangers, white strangers, are present. If you are wise, you
will talk about something, anything, else. Then, when evening
and darkness come and you are alone with a wise old man or woman
whose confidence you have won, by the light of a candle held in
the hand and talking in a whisper, you may bring up the subject.
Now you will learn how the mushrooms are gathered, perhaps before
sunrise, when the mountain side is caressed by the pre-dawn breeze,
at the time of the New Moon, in certain regions only by a virgin.
The mushrooms are wrapped in a leaf, perhaps a banana leaf, sheltered
thus from irreverent eyes, and in some villages they are taken
first to the church, where they remain for some time on the altar,
in a jicara or gourd bowl. They are never exposed in the
market-place but pass from hand to hand by prearrangement. I could
talk to you a long time about the words used to designate these
sacred mushrooms in the languages of the various peoples that
know them. The Aztecs before the Spaniards arrived called them
teo-nanácatl, God's flesh. I need hardly remind
you of a disquieting parallel, the designation of the Elements
in our Eucharist: "Take, eat, this is my Body....";
and again, "Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat
the flesh of thy dear son...." But there is one difference.
The orthodox Christian must accept by faith the miracle of the
conversion of the bread into God's flesh: that is what is meant
by the Doctrine of Transubstantiation. By contrast the mushroom
of the Aztecs carries its own conviction; every communicant will
testify to the miracle that he has experienced. In the language
of the Mazatecs, the sacred mushrooms are called 'nti1 si3tho3.
The first word, 'nti1, is a particle expressing reverence
and endearment. [The superscript digits indicate the pitch of
the syllable, 1 being the highest of four. The initial apostrophe
indicates a glottal stop.] The second element means "that
which springs forth." In 1953 our muleteer had traveled the
mountain trails all his life and knew Spanish, though he could
neither read nor write, nor even tell time by a clock's face.
We asked him why the mushrooms were called "that which springs
forth." His answer, breathtaking in its sincerity and feeling,
was filled with the poetry of religion, and I quote it word for
word as he gave it:
El honguillo viene por si mismo, no se sabe de donde,
como el viento que viene sin saber de d6nde ni porque.
The little mushroom comes of itself, no one knows whence,
like the wind that comes we know not whence nor why.
Eleusis is a shrine common to the whole earth, and of all the divine things that exist among men, it is both the most awesome and the most luminous, At what place in the world have more miraculous tidings been sung, where have the dromena called forth greater emotion, where has there been greater rivalry between seeing and hearing?
The Prophets describe what they saw in Vision as real and existing men, whom they saw with their imaginative and immortal organs, the Apostles the same-the clearer the organ the more distinct the object. A Spirit and a Vision are not, as the modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour, or a nothing: they are organized and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce. He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light than his perishing eye can see, does not imagine at all. [Italics mine. From The Writings of William Blake, ed. by Geoffrey Keynes, vol. III, p. 108]
2. Giambattista della Porta: Villa, 1592, Frankfort, p. 764. (back)
3. Holger Pedersen in an early paper contended that the basic fungal words of Europe were identical: Old High German swamb, Slavic gomba, Lithuanian gumbas, Latin fungus, Greek sp(h)óngos, sp(h)óngê, and Armenian sung, sunk. (Published in Polish: 'Przyczynki do gramatyki porównawczej jezyków slowianskich,' in Materyaly i Prace Komisyi Jesytowe; Akademii Umieietnosci w Krakozvie, Cracow, 1(1): 167-176.) Since then some philologists have declined to accept this thesis as more than a possibility, especially as to the Slavic term, but Professor Roman Jakobson in a recent personal communication to me says: 'The etymology of Holger Pedersen, the great Danish specialist in the comparative study of Indo-European languages, seems to me and to many other linguists, e.g., the distinguished Czech etymologist V. Machek, as the only convincing attempt to interpret the fungal name of the European languages. Not one single serious argument has been brought against Pedersen's "attractive" explanation, as Berneker defines it, and not one single defensible hypothesis has been brought to replace this one.' (back)
4. The Chemistry of Natural Products, paper read by Dr. Hofmann, Aug. 18, 1960, in the I.U.P.A.C. Symposium, Melbourne. (back)
5. The best summary of the ololiuqui literature and problem is Richard Evans Schultes' A Contribution to Our Knowledge of Rivea corymbosa, the Narcotic Ololiuqui of the Aztecs, Botanical Museum, Harvard University, 1941. Also see Humphrey Osmond's Ololiuqui: The Ancient Aztec Narcotic, Journal of Mental Science, July 1955, 101(424): 526-537. Dr. Osmond reports on the effects of the seeds on himself. (back)
6. Ipomoea violacea Linnaeus Pl. Sp. (1953) 161. Convolvulus indicsus Miller Gard. Dict. (1768) No. 5. Ipomoea tricolor Cavanilles Icon. Pl. Rar. 3 (1794) 5. Convolvulus violaceus Sprengel Syst. 1 (1825) 399. Convolznalus venustus Sprengel Syst. 1 (1825) 399. Ipomoea rubrocoerulea Hooker Bot. Mag. (1834) t. 3297. Pharbitis violacea (L.) Bojer Hort. Maurit. (1837) 227. Tereietra violacea (L.) Rafinesque Fl. Tellur. 4 (1839) 124. Ipomoca Hookeri G. Don Gen. Syst. 4 (1838) 274. Pharbitis rubrocoeruleus (Hook.) Planchon Fl. des Serres 9 (1854) 281. Convolvulus rubrocoeruleus (Hook.) D. Dietrich Syn. Pl. 1 (1839) 670. Ipomoea puncticulata 8entham Bot. Voy. Sulph. (1945) 136. (back)
7. Credit for the discovery of the ceremonial use of Ipomoea violacea seeds goes to Thomas MacDougall and Francisco Ortega ("Chico"), famous Zapotec guide and itinerant trader. They have not yet delimited the area of diffusion, but they have found badoh negro seeds in use in the following Zapotec towns and villages in the uplands of southern Oaxaca: San Bartolo Yautepec, San Carlos Yautepec and Santa Catarina Quieri, all in the district of Yautepec; Santa Cruz Ozolotepec and San Andres Lovene, District of Miahuatlan; and finally a settlement called Roalo, between Zaachila and Zimatlan, just south of the city of Oaxaca. In San Bartolo I. violacea is used to the exclusion of Rivea corymbosa, but in the other towns both are used. These data are based on personal correspondence and also Thomas MacDougall: Ipomoea tricolor: A Hallucinogenic Plant of the Zapotecs, in Boletín of the Centro de Investigaciones Antropol6gicas de Mexico, No. 6, March 1, 1960. Reports from Juquila, to the west of the Zapotec towns mentioned above, indicate that I. violacea seeds may also be used among the Chatino Indians. (back)
8. A. Hofmann with R. Brunner, H. Kokel, and A. Brack, Helv. Chem. Acta, 1957, 40:1358. (back)