The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 44 of 125
Mushrooms and the origins of religion
Such speculations were to run through the two-volume Mushrooms, Russia and History, which the Wassons published on their return from Mexico. Their book, or so the story goes, had started life as a cookbook of mushroom recipes. As the couple researched their subject, however, they were struck by the vehemence of the taboo against eating wild mushrooms, the overwhelming majority of which are well known to be harmless, with the few poisonous ones being easily identifiable. This taboo extended over large geographical areas, and as the Wassons began to trace back cultural references to fungi, they found an association with the supernatural to be widespread in folklore. Etymologically, there were repeated links to the infernal. Why such a widespread yet manifestly irrational attitude? The Wassons put forward the hypothesis of a prehistoric religion stretching across most of Europe and northern Eurasia, one in which psychoactive mushrooms had played a sacramental role. The religion was suppressed by Christian missionaries (hence the demonization), but vestiges of it had survived until comparatively recently, most notably in Siberia. As eucharist, the Wassons proposed the most charismatic of all fungi, the Amanita muscaria, or fly agaric, the archetypal red-andwhite-capped mushroom, stock in trade of countless fairy tales. That, however, was only the first part of their hypothesis. Bolder still, the second was the suggestion that hallucinogenic mushrooms could have played a decisive role in human evolution. Eaten by prehistoric hunters and gatherers, magic mushrooms could have opened an entirely new dimension to primitive awareness. They could even, or so the Wassons suggested, have provided the initial impetus toward religion itself. Our divine mushrooms, along with the secondary vegetable hallucinogens, may have played a role in the origins of human culture. . . . Our divine mushrooms must have unlimbered the imagination of those first men who ate them, stirred their curiosity and speculative faculties. Our mushrooms could have sparked in them the very idea of God.2