Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom

By Andy Letcher

Book Overview

Even if read while sober, Andy Lechter's Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom, is a near-transcendent experience. -New York Times Book Review

Since its rediscovery only fifty years ago, the magic mushroom: a 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060828293
• ISBN13: 9780060828295
• Release Date: February 2008
• Publisher: Ecco Press
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.8" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Science meets Religion

In a provocatively packaged work, Andy Letcher provides historical accounts of the use of magic mushrooms (psylocibe varieties as well as agaric), re-examines many of the outlandish ancient accounts of magic mushroom use made during the 60's, details the current usage of magic mushrooms among trippers and shamans alike, and even recounts such recent occurrences such as the arrest of "Professor Fanaticus" Robert McPherson. A transporting read that grounds itself in solid references at every step of the way. A must for anyone interested in the topic.

Make room for the Shroom,the Fungus among us+

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

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.

What a Trip

We have healing drugs and then we have drugs that are taken just for fun. We recognize that drugs have a legitimate function of providing fun by making some such drugs legal, but some drugs for fun are left illegal. Hallucinogenic mushrooms, for instance, are generally illegal, although this changes from time to time and from society to society. You'd expect that a history of "shrooms" written by a fellow who has played in various psychedelic bands (currently in his own "acid folk group") would come down strongly in favor of legal mushrooms, but Andy Letcher is no ordinary shroomer. He has a couple of doctorates, one in ecology and one in religious and cultural studies, for instance. His _Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom_ (Ecco) is not a manifesto, although Letcher does explain the possible advantages of the experiences mushrooms might offer if they were more legally accessible. More importantly, Letcher cuts the legs out from under the legends that have grown up about mushrooms, the ancientness of their use, and their connections with religion and power (a "fantastical history... dreamed up on the basis of wishful thinking and overworked evidence.") A sizeable book resulting from a great deal of research, _Shroom_ is the sort of one-subject history that takes in a lot of general history and presents it all with an accessible and witty style. I don't know if shrooms help produce _Shroom_, but if so, it might be good to have more of them. Mushrooms do, perhaps more than other recreational drugs, promote mystical experiences that are highly valued by practitioners. Advocates have insisted that mushroom experiences will lead users in a spiritual direction; Letcher disagrees, and also disagrees with the New Age stories of mushroom "history". A great deal of the fun of his book has to do with debunking of such stories, which come from many varied sources. Witches, druids, and even Santa Claus have been said to spring from mushroom use, or mushrooms were the magical Soma that is cited in the ancient Hindu text the Rig Veda. Perhaps Jesus was dining on not bread and wine with his disciples, but fly-agaric, and perhaps Christianity was an invented religion based on a fertility cult with one true sacrament, fly-agaric. Perhaps the ancient mushroom cult is the one ur-religion from which all others are based. It is fun to read about these wide-ranging ideas, and it is fun to read Letcher taking the air out of each one. "The history of the magic mushroom," he writes, "is at once less fanciful and far more interesting." In fact, the West has no real shroom tradition. Psilocybin mushrooms were known six hundred years ago, but they were treated as poisons. People in Europe and America did not start gobbling them for their psychedelic effects until the middle of the twentieth century, when the astonishing (and then legal) effects of LSD and mescaline were under scientific investigation. Some of the users mentioned here are

A Welcome Complement to Pinchbeck

Andy Letcher's Shroom is an excellent history of the magic mushroom (mostly A. muscaria, P. semilanceata, and P. cubensis). Most of what one finds in psychedelic literature is idiotic speculation - from Timothy Leary's fantasy that if only enough people would take LSD we'd have world peace to Terence McKenna's arbitrary math with which he claims some sort of apocalypse in 2012. Thankfully, Letcher's history is sober. His central thesis is that the mushroom is in fact a drug that has only recently become popular and that there is little or no evidence for the use of mushrooms for mystical experiences outside of the modern context. He discusses Siberian shamanism, Mexican healing practices, accidental poisonings in Europe, and the modern explosion of mushroom use from Wasson through Psilocybe Fanaticus. I have a few complaints, but these are not enough to reduce my rating of the book. First, his prose is awkward at times, and his diction can be irritating: the word "preternatural" seems to crop its head up in all sorts of strange contexts. Second, he misunderstands or simplifies certain concepts in post-structuralism, especially the idea of the ethnic "other." And finally, though Shroom is intended as a history, he should have spend more time on the cultural context and phenomenological experiences of magic mushroom use. He claims, for instance, that there was a shift from seeing the mushroom as poisonous to seeing it as mystical. There are some intriguing examples of the 19th Century perception of the mushroom as affecting the nervous system negatively, and this seems like a wonderful opportunity for Letcher to apply some of his cultural studies training to analyze the discourse surrounding the mushroom experience, but he ignores it completely. I would suggest this book as a companion to Pinchbeck's Breaking Open the Head. Pinchbeck's book is a New Journalism-style exploration of the current use of psychedelic drugs, and it complements Letcher's book because Letcher doesn't discuss the use and interpretation of the psilocybin experience by contemporary psychonauts. I would, however, caution readers away from Pinchbeck's newer book 2012; it's one more contribution to the inane speculation about psychedelics for which Letcher's book is an effective antidote.