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Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom | 
 enlarge | Author: Andy Letcher
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  12 reviews
Sales Rank: 210719
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.1 x 1.2
ISBN: 0060828293
Dewey Decimal Number: 900
EAN: 9780060828295
ASIN: 0060828293
Publication Date: March 1, 2008
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Product Description
Did mushroom tea kick-start ancient Greek philosophy?
Was Alice's Adventures in Wonderland a thinly veiled psychedelic mushroom odyssey?
Is Santa Claus really a magic mushroom in disguise? The world of the magic mushroom is a place where shamans and hippies rub shoulders with psychiatrists, poets, and international bankers. Since its rediscovery only fifty years ago, this hallucinogenic fungus, once shunned in the West as the most pernicious of poisons, has inspired a plethora of folktales and urban legends. In this timely and definitive study, Andy Letcher chronicles the history of the magic mushroom—from its use by the Aztecs of Central America and the tribes of Siberia through to the present day—stripping away the myths and taking a critical and humorous look at the drug's more recent manifestations. Informative, lively, and impeccably researched, Shroom is a unique and engaging exploration of this most extraordinary of psychedelics.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 7 more reviews...
Well researched, articulate, lacking depth August 2, 2008
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
First, let me comment that this obsession with the entheogen theory of religion reminds me of the story of the guy who is searching for his car keys under the street lamp, because there he can see clearly, even if he lost them someplace else. This obsession strikes me as almost on a par with attempts to prove the 'existence' of a Divine Reality. There are some aspects of history and human experience that are beyond the scope of absolute knowledge--and frankly irrelevant. As Huxley remarked, "I am on the side of the mystery." Leave it alone. Guard it. Don't rip it's cloak off!
Andy provides a cogent history of the emergence of 'magic' mushrooms into general public consciousness. It is thoroughly researched and fairly complete--as far as it goes. He does hold some rather strong opinions on certain topics, such as the situation that developed in Huautla de Jimenez post Wasson, for instance, and it is not entirely clear to me that he quite understands the particular aptitudes of Maria Sabina, but no matter. These waters have been poisoned for decades by the well intentioned pavers of the Road to Hell--which has led, of course to the current state of almost universal prohibition. Ah well, forbidden fruit are meant to be tasted. I do agree with Brian Akers, below, that he includes occasional red herrings and jousts against his own straw men constructs. He goes too far on more than one occasion.
Because of his age cohort, he missed out on direct contact during the earlier chapters in the unfolding saga of psychedelia, and that is unfortunate, because some very dramatic, radical and profound instances of spiritual transformation occurred among some of the participants in the early waves. Without an understanding of the depth of these spiritual transformations--the actual significance of psychedelics as a socio-cultural phenomena slips through the net. And to be sure, much that was special about that period of American history was transmitted from one individual to the next--sort of like the old lineage of Zen Buddhists. Or Alchemists, whose holy recipes concealed the truth of the matter from the uninitiated, thus protecting the mystery within layers of veiled abstraction.
The situation with the class of psychedelics, including psilocybe mushrooms, is actually quite simple. They are non-specific amplifiers of mental processes. The confusing and wide ranging spectrum of reported effects has more to do with the circumstances of the encounter than with the nature of the actual 'medicine' itself. The 'medicine' simply provides an extreme opportunity. But if the individual has no knowledge of how to take advantage of the unique opportunity, they tend to react with surprise and wonderment as they are blown by the wind, pounded by the surf, burnt to a crisp by the fire, and buried alive by the earth.
That is why culture, and knowledge, and artful skill, hold the key to leveraging any value from the experience--and that is why persons such as Maria Sabina, for instance are so instructive. It isn't simply that Maria used magic mushrooms all her life. It's that she developed as a person in a culture with spiritual traditions that were entertwined with ancient mythologies, Christianity, and mysticicm. This provided training for the role of Psychopomp. People talk about the Velada in the context of a healing ceremony without mentioning the fact that the context of Christianity itself is healing and liberation--the very manifestation of salvation.
The only author I have read who seems to grasp the rest of the story, the big picture, and understand the meta-message of psychedelics, is Stanislav Grof, the Chezch psychiatrist. And here is a message at least as old as the Acid Graduation itself--and actually as old as the Buddha. Psychedelic encounters may open ones eyes to the human predicament, and to the existence of the Divine Reality--but, beyond that, each of us is qualified by the Spirit to minister the new Covenant. That is an old fashioned way of saying that your spiritual predicament or the possibility of your spiritual evolution does not rest upon and is not dependent upon psychedelic experience. These tools are for waking you from your slumber. They are like a love letter sent straight to your heart from the Old Ones. It's up to you to get up out of bed and remember your mission and get on with it. The Pearl is waiting for you to reclaim it. You DO have an original nature, and there IS a treasure buried in the field.
 384 pages of an irrelevant argument July 22, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
The very idea that any substance initialized religion is absurd. I define religion as the ideas and/or organization that occurs as a result of fundamental questioning, like, "what is all this for? why are we here?" etc. Questions like those are the basis of any religious or spiritual effort and precede ingestion of psychadelic substances. Psychadelics then aid in altering perspective and function as self-investigative tools. I believe this book is a scholarly work for those interested not in the direct application of spiritual practices, but in historical theories.
 An Exercise in Character Assassination June 21, 2008
2 out of 7 found this review helpful
One star for the interesting tidbits of information not easily found elsewhere. Did his Oxford professors not teach Mr. Letcher the fallacy of the argumentum ad hominem? His personal attacks on Gordon Wasson and John Allegro bring this book down to the level of tabloid journalism.
First, he portrays Wasson as a con artist who became famous as a result of clever salesmanship rather than for "clarity or originality of his thinking." He criticizes Wasson for skewing his data to fit a preconceived idea, but this is exactly what Letcher does. Letcher's premise is that psychoactive substances played no part in Old World religious practices (funny that they should have played such an important role in the other hemisphere). He overlooks or discounts historical data which demonstrates such a link as being "plot devices" of ethnocentric researchers trapped in the mindset of the sixties. We have seen this approach many times before: old theories are about as useful as old pop songs and TV shows, it's time to move forward and take the opposite view. But Letcher once again commits the same error he accuses others of committing by using flawed and dated arguments. One example is his assertion that if Soma was a hallucinogenic mushroom, it would have been simply eaten. Why go through the elaborate process of crushing, mixing, and filtering it? Evidence suggests that Soma was used in a mixture of various psychoactive and non-psychoactive substances, and hallucinogenic mushrooms went through a similar mortar-and-pestle procedure in Central America.
He paints a picture of ancient people ignorant of the plants around them. When plants such as cannabis, poppy, and henbane show up in the archaeological record, he dismisses their possible psychoactive use in favor of such applications as food and medicine. But medicine is always closely linked to the removal of "harmful" spirits in religious practices worldwide (Letcher considers "shamanism" to be a dirty word in his semantic shell games). His view is that it's okay to acknowledge drug use in the rites of the heathen Native Americans, but to say the same thing might have happened in the Middle East is striking too close to our religious traditions. In the end, Letcher comes across as a bizarre "counterculture" version of Jerry Falwell complete with hippy hairdo and "acid folk group."
Letcher saves his most scathing criticism for John Allegro, who is described as a "troubled mind" from the Erich von Daniken school of academia. Citing John King's rebuttal to The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross is another blunder on Letcher's part. If "the fly-agaric and its host-tree species are entirely absent from the flora of the Middle East," then why did the Israeli postal service issue stamps with fly-agarics in 2002? Has he bothered to check his facts? Attacking the character of a person simply cheapens your argument, and playing fast and loose with the facts makes you no more of a scholar than von Daniken.
Terence McKenna is given better treatment by being portrayed as a misguided product of his time. Letcher crafts himself as an exemplar scholar in a world of conspiracists, but after discounting the time-wave theory, he strangely states, "the demolition of the time-wave does not preclude something interesting, unusual, or even of great magnitude from happening as predicted." Maybe Letcher thinks it will be the apocalypse. The bottom line is that he is more influenced by von Daniken than was Allegro, he is far less original than the "amateur" Wasson, and he is much more misguided than McKenna.
 Make room for the Shroom,the Fungus among us+ June 2, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
Well,at least read the book.This is not a 'pro-hippie' book.That's what i liked about reading it.It gives the detailed and complex history of the 'Mushroom'.And how it has been used,worshipped,and ritualised by the ancients and modern peoples of the world.A great deal of attention is paid to the life and work of Terrence McKenna.He became the 'High-Priest of Magic Mushrooms',during the Haight-Ashbury hallucinogenic rad-chic days. Terrence Mckenna was a disciple of Timothy Leary,the charismatic pied piper of the LSD movement.His writings are still read with interest,yet mostly with a sense of humor.McKenna's imagination shines in his various research projects.Perhaps brighter than his mundane data.It's clear that the technological 21st century has not stopped mankind's quest, for the ultimate shamanic connection, with the natural world and cosmos above.Mushrooms are believed by some to be a ideal portal to a larger universe of understanding.Everything about mushrooms is in this book.Literary,scientific and social-wise aspects, concerning the influence mushrooms,has had on the psyche.And this is not historically endemic to an isolated gens of people.This 'Shroom' book is must-reading for all true neo-pagan followers.The impact of the 'Magic Mushroom' on world cultures cannot be ignored by any novice layman or even refuted by the elitist scholars either.
A little dry, but excellent nonetheless April 21, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Shroom succeeds where other psychedelic books have failed by providing what the latter are generally lacking: impeccable research. Letcher obviously went into writing the book with the foremost goal of being factually accurate at the expense of appealing to the hippy crowd that might be expected to be the primary audience. The result is a thoroughly engrossing history of magic mushrooms (and agarics). As a fan of these perplexing fungi, I was glad to be able to get a thorough history of such an emotionally charged subject without all the b.s. Letcher spends a lot of time debunking a lot of new-age myths about their historical usage, focusing on Gordon Wasson's mythology the most. My only real complaint is the amount of time spent on Wasson, when perhaps he could have gone more in-depth on the pre-Columbian usage of mushrooms in the New World. Even those readers who are not psychedelically inclined would likely be drawn into the underground world of shrooms and their adherents. Highly recommended.
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