The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 43 of 125
Seeking the magic mushroom
By the time I had read a couple of books and looked through some underground magazines, I realized that this was far from being the case. Both LSD and MDMA had been eclipsed by the plant hallucinogens, in particular by magic mushrooms and dimethyltryptamine. A large proportion of the books I looked at were focused on ayahuasca and South American shamanism. At first I thought that this could be traced back to Carlos Castaneda. The Teachings of Don Juan, first published in 1968, has, after The Doors of Perception, probably been the most widely read book on psychedelics ever written. But according to recent psychedelic literature, The Teachings of Don Juan wasn’t the pioneer in the field of plant hallucinogens I had imagined. In 1957, more than a decade before Castaneda, there had been a striking, not to say sensational, article in the mass-circulation Life magazine called “Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” and if there was any single text to which the new orientation in psychedelic studies could be traced, this was it. A true-life adventure story, the article recounted the journey of a wealthy New York banker, R. Gordon Wasson, and his wife, Valentina, deep into the mountains of Mexico in an attempt to track down rumors of an ecstatic mushroom cult of great antiquity that still survived there. Finally, led to the remote mountain town of Huautla da Jimenez in the state of Oaxaca, the couple were introduced to a local curandera, a diminutive, middle-aged Mazatec woman called Maria Sabina.