See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/229974722

Mad Thoughts on Mushrooms: Discourse and Power in the

Study of Psychedelic Consciousness

Article  in  Anthropology of Consciousness · May 2008

DOI: 10.1525/ac.2007.18.2.74

CITATIONS READS

9 308

1 author:

Andy Letcher
Oxford Brookes University
11 PUBLICATIONS   324 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Andy Letcher on 09 June 2020.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

OC1802_05 11/21/07 12:12 PM Page 74

Mad Thoughts on Mushrooms:

Discourse and Power in the Study
of Psychedelic Consciousness1
andy letcher
Andy Letcher is a freelance writer,
researcher, and lecturer based
in Oxford, UK.
[email protected]

abstract
This paper addresses the question of what happens to consciousness under the
influence of psychedelic drugs—specifically of psilocybin, or “magic” mushrooms—
and performs a Foucauldian discourse analysis upon the answers that have been
variously proposed. Predominant societally legitimated answers (the pathological,
psychological, and prohibition discourses) are those that, in Foucault’s sense, are
imposed from the outside as “scientific classifications,” that is, they are based upon
observations of the effects of mushrooms on others. By contrast, a series of resistive
discourses (the recreational, psychedelic, entheogenic, and animistic discourses)
have been constructed in opposition, as a means of making sense of the subjective
experience of taking mushrooms. When critiqued, only the animistic discourse—
the belief that mushrooms occasion encounters with discarnate spirit entities, or
animaphany—transgresses a fundamental societal boundary. In the West, to
believe in the existence of spirits is to risk being labeled “mad,” and as such the
phenomenon of mushroom-induced animaphany goes largely ignored. It nevertheless
remains a phenomenon in need of further scholarly research.
keywords: magic mushrooms, consciousness, Foucault, animaphany

introduction
What happens to consciousness under the influence of a psychedelic drug?
Given the importance of psychoactives in both indigenous and modern cultures
(whether culturally legitimated or not), this is a question that anthropologists are

Anthropology of Consciousness, Vol. 18, Issue 2, pp. 74–97. ISSN1053-4202, © 2007 by the Ameri-
can Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permissions to
photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and
Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo/asp. DOI: 10.1525/ac.2007.18.2.74

74
OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 75

mad thoughts on mushrooms 75

increasingly being forced to confront. In the West, for example, the last thirty to
forty years have seen a huge growth in the intentional consumption of “magic
mushrooms.”2 A practice that was once confined to indigenous cultures in what
is now Mexico has spread to become a global phenomenon—typically in spite of
prohibition—thanks to the discovery that psilocybin-containing mushrooms
grow naturally in many parts of the world (Letcher 2006). Recent developments
in cultivation have enabled commercial production such that psilocybin mush-
rooms are now sold on the internet and, in Holland at least, where there exists a
loophole in the law, openly over the shop counter.3 For a brief while, before a
similar loophole was closed in 2005, mushrooms were on sale in Britain, too, and
could be bought from head-shops, barrow stalls, and even tourist boutiques in
London’s West End. That many people are choosing to adjust their conscious-
ness through the action of magic mushrooms makes it a timely moment to be
asking this question.
My concern here, however, is not with answering it per se, but rather with
exposing how the various answers that have been proposed are historically con-
tingent and inseparable from relationships of power and knowledge. My thinking
is influenced by the French philosopher, Michel Foucault (1926–1984), for, in a
Foucauldian sense, the differing ways in which psilocybin mushrooms have been
categorized constitute competing discourses, each of which make certain “truth-
claims” about the effects of mushrooms upon physiology, psychology, conscious-
ness, and so on, but in doing so disallow, marginalize, or even criminalize others.
In this paper, therefore, I wish to rehearse old and well-worn debates about
the ways in which mushrooms have been categorized and delineated (and hence
about how the question of mushrooms and consciousness has been answered),
but to do so through the fresh lens of Foucauldian discourse analysis. My argu-
ment is that the culturally dominant discourses about mushrooms (what I term
the “pathological,” “psychological,” and “prohibition” discourses) have arisen
from what Foucault called “scientific classification.” That is, they have been con-
structed on the basis of observations of how mushrooms appear symptomatically
to affect others. On the other hand, a series of resistive discourses (“recreational,”
“psychedelic,” “entheogenic,” and “animistic” discourses) have arisen out of the
needs of practitioners, people who actually consume mushrooms, to find more
faithful ways of representing their own subjective experiences. The discourse
that increasing numbers of practitioners claim most accurately achieves this,
however—the “animistic discourse” in which mushrooms are regarded as occa-
sioning the perception of discarnate intelligences or spirits—cannot be counte-
nanced or taken seriously within mainstream culture because it transgresses a
fundamental ontological, but discursive, boundary. In a post-enlightenment,
materialist culture, where a disbelief in spirits prevails (at least among the intel-
ligentsia), to believe in the agency of mushroom-revealed spirits is to risk being
thought mad.4
OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 76

76 anthropology of consciousness 18.2

foucault and discourse

The many theories of discourse and methodologies of discourse analysis that
now exist owe their origins to the French philosopher Michel Foucault. A dis-
course may be defined in simple terms as “a particular way of talking about and
understanding the world (or an aspect of the world)” (Phillips and Jörgensen
2002:1), but Foucault’s insight was to describe how relations of power are deter-
mined discursively through these differing representations. That is:

In a society such as ours, but basically in any society, there are manifold rela-
tions of power which permeate, characterize and constitute the social body,
and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated
nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and func-
tioning of a discourse. [Foucault 1980:93]

Of the functions of discourse that Foucault identified, two are relevant here: first,
that discourses serve to divide people into objectified subjects; and second, that
they establish boundaries around what can be done and said.
One way in which subjects are routinely divided is through “scientific clas-
sification” (Rabinow 1984:8). For example, when you or I go to see a med-
ical doctor, a power relationship is established—in which doctor and patient
are expected to fulfill certain roles—by means of an institutionalized medical
discourse, under which our bodies are subjected to the “medical gaze” and
divided (diagnosed) according to the symptoms they exhibit (Foucault 1973).
For Foucault, the act of looking “is to assemble information, which combined
with knowledge already possessed by the gazer, leads . . . to the subjection of
the subject. The gaze is thus the means by which medical authority is estab-
lished, as a contingent effect of the interrelationship between power and
knowledge” (Voase 2003). Subsequent “dividing practices,” such as those that
separate the “sane” from the “insane” for instance, consist of processes of
“social objectification and categorization, [in which] human beings are given
both a social and a personal identity [which are accompanied by] . . . the
practice of exclusion—usually in a spatial sense, but always in a social one”
(Rabinow 1984:8). Or, as Foucault put it bluntly, “It is in fact a simple matter
to show that since lunatics are precisely those persons who are useless to
industrial production, one is obliged to dispense with them” (Foucault
1980:100).
A pertinent example of these dividing practices may be found in the predom-
inant cultural discourse about “drugs” (the “prohibition discourse”). Typically
this term refers to two broad antithetical categories: to pharmaceuticals, pro-
duced by large, licensed, and hence legitimated, multinational companies, and
administered by trained members of the professional medical establishment for
OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 77

mad thoughts on mushrooms 77

prophylactic and analgesic purposes; and to a range of plants, plant extracts, and
chemicals, typically grown or produced illicitly and self-administered for the
purposes of pleasure, introspection, or escape, but consequently derided and
criminalized, usually on the grounds of public health. The range of substances
placed in this second category is so wide as to obscure any commonalities of
chemical action, psycho-physical effects, duration, toxicity, and addictive poten-
tial beyond their shared delineation as being socially undesirable because of
their potential for “abuse.” To self-administer any of these substances is to be
branded by mainstream society a “drug-abuser,” a discursive label that castigates
and marks one as a deviant member of society, someone who has forfeited the
normal rights of citizenship and become a justified target for the “war on drugs.”
Drug-users/abusers are socially excluded and, if caught and brought to justice,
may be spatially excluded in prisons and detention centers. The label carries
connotations of pollution and danger (on which see Douglas 1994; Hethering-
ton 2000), largely due to the constructed image of the heroin-injecting addict—
as a morally degenerate vector of disease or as “drug-crazed” criminal—about
which most anxieties about drugs are orientated (see Jay 2000; Davenport-Hines
2001).5 By contrast, the use of a drug such as aspirin for pain relief carries no
such stigmas, while the use of certain other addictive or habit forming sub-
stances, caffeine and alcohol for example, have been naturalized to such an
extent that it would be laughable even to consider them drugs.
This leads to the second function of discourses, which is that they act to
place boundaries upon what is it possible to say and do, that is, “within [any]
particular worldview, some forms of action become natural, others unthink-
able” (Phillips and Jörgensen 2002:6). Or, as Foucault put it, the effect of dis-
cursive practices is “to make it virtually impossible to think outside them. To
think outside them is, by definition, to be mad, to be beyond comprehension
and therefore reason” (cited in Voase 2003). Thus the assertion that mushrooms
and other psychoactive plants elicit encounters with conscious autonomous
spirits or intelligences cannot be countenanced within the dominant scientific-
rationalist-materialist-deterministic discourse and must therefore be ridiculed as
delusion (e.g., see Richard Dawkins’ critique of religious beliefs, Dawkins
1998). To draw attention to the boundaries of a discourse is therefore risky, for as
Richard Voase cautions, to undertake discourse analysis one must be “prepared
to ask fundamental questions which may lead [one] to be considered a little
mad” (Voase 2003).
Whereas competing discourses seek closure, and to fix truth and meaning
within their boundaries, Foucault argued that “It is not possible to gain access to
universal truth since it is impossible to talk from a position outside discourse;
there is no escape from representation. Because truth is unattainable, it is fruit-
less to ask whether something is true or false. Instead the focus should be on how
effects of truths are created in discourses” (Phillips and Jörgensen 2002:14).
OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 78

78 anthropology of consciousness 18.2

To adopt a Foucauldian analytical framework, then, is to acknowledge that

one’s own scholarly perspective is not “objective” but discursive; it necessitates
making one’s own positioning explicit. The question of mushrooms and con-
sciousness is one that has intrigued me for many years, and it is one that I
approach in three ways. First, as a scholar of religion specializing in contempo-
rary alternative spiritualities, I am interested in “myco-spirituality,” that is, the
ways that psilocybin mushroom consumption are being incorporated into and
accommodated by spiritual practices and worldviews (e.g. Letcher 2001, 2005,
2006). Second, before crossing the floor into the humanities, I was first an ecolo-
gist and evolutionary biologist, and so have retained interests in the biological
and ecological dimensions of the subject: how consciousness may have evolved,
plant-human relationships, the ecology of fungi, and so on. Third, and perhaps
most importantly, I have myself been a practitioner of myco-spirituality for the
last fifteen years or so, and am someone for whom the experience of taking
mushrooms has had a profound spiritual and ontological impact. I therefore
have a considerable personal interest in how this question about mushrooms and
consciousness is answered.
While until recently such an admission might have stripped me of all aca-
demic credibility, being a practitioner of a particular spirituality is no longer con-
sidered to be the obstacle to scholarship that it once was. Briefly, postmodern
critiques concur with Foucault that all observations are made from somewhere,
and that there is no privileged position outside discourse. It is proposed instead
that research progresses dialogically, with scholars reflexively situating them-
selves in relationship to the object of their research (see, for example,
McCutcheon 1999; Flood 1999; Wallis 2003; Blain et al. 2004). The notion of a
continual struggle between competing truth claims seems particularly appropri-
ate when considering the way we think about “drugs,” and this paper represents
my contribution to an ongoing dialogue. Nevertheless, given that discourse ana-
lysts tend to produce “research that contributes to the rectification of injustice
and inequality in society” (Phillips and Jörgensen 2002:77), it is fair to say that my
sympathies lie with those most marginalized by the varying discourses outlined
herein.

dominant discourses about mushrooms

With these theoretical points in mind, I wish to summarize three dominant
Western ways of thinking about psilocybin mushrooms—what I term the “patho-
logical,” “psychological,” and “prohibition” discourses—that have been imposed
as Foucauldian scientific classifications. These have not arisen solely in relation
to mushrooms but have emerged in relation to other psychoactive plants and
drugs with which mushrooms tend to be lumped: LSD, the Mexican plant
Salvia divinorum, the peyote cactus and its active chemical ingredient mescaline,
OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 79

mad thoughts on mushrooms 79

the Amazonian brew ayahuasca and DMT, the African root bark iboga and ibo-
gaine, plus a whole range of other plants and chemical analogues (see Schultes
and Hoffmann 1992; Shulgin and Shulgin 1991). From the outside all these sub-
stances appear to act similarly, but while producing superficially similar observable
symptoms, practitioners remark on qualitative differences in the subjective experi-
ences—in terms of overall “mood” or “ambience,” physical sensations, quality or
intensity of “visions,” and so on (see Shanon 2002; below)—occasioned by each.
It must be remembered that any way of grouping these and other substances,
however natural it appears to be, remains discursive, and each of the discourses
that follow group these substances slightly differently.

The Pathological Discourse

The earliest and most long-lasting delineation of mushrooms (and these other
related drugs) constitutes what I term the “pathological discourse” in which the
accidental or intentional introduction of psilocybin mushrooms into the body is
regarded as producing disease, either poisoning (literally intoxication), or tem-
porary or even permanent psychosis.
This discourse originated in Antiquity when all mushrooms were essentially
regarded as the same thing but consisting of edible (esculent) and pernicious
(poisonous) varieties. Strange perturbations or effects following the ingestion of
mushrooms were regarded as incidents of poisoning and not as “psychedelic” or
religious experiences, with recovery seen as constituting a lucky escape from a
gruesome demise (Letcher 2006). Thus, throughout the 18th and 19th centuries
episodes of (probable) psilocybin mushroom consumption were treated with
emetics, cathartics, the stomach pump, and occasionally leeches, as would any
other poison (Letcher 2006). In the early 20th century, the American pharma-
cologist William Ford fixed this poisoning discourse into the medical textbooks
by naming it, for although psilocybin was yet to be isolated and would not be so
for another thirty years, he distinguished a unique type of mushroom poisoning
on the basis of its symptoms, which he termed mycetismus cerebralis (Ford
1926).6
At about the same time, another variant of the pathological discourse rose to
prominence, under which mushrooms and other hallucinogens (most notably
mescaline) began to be seen as agents producing temporary psychosis. In 1924,
the Prussian pharmacologist Louis Lewin (Lewin 1924) made the first scientific
classification of “narcotic and stimulating drugs,” of which the phantastica were
substances producing hallucinations. Lewin posited that the visions and halluci-
nations of mystics, psychotics, and those under the influence of phantastica orig-
inated if not from the same primary cause then from a similar disruption of the
normal functioning of the brain, or from what he called an “excitation of the
nerves.” By positing a materialist neurological basis for hallucinations (drug-
induced or otherwise) he helped introduce what was later to become a psychiatric
OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 80

80 anthropology of consciousness 18.2

and neuroscientific discourse into Western medicine (Lewin 1924:91; see also
Melechi 1997; Sandison 1997).
This association between psychosis and “hallucinogens” became fixed in the
popular imagination largely during the late 1960s and early 1970s with the moral
panic over the use of LSD and anxieties towards what became known as “mind-
altering” or “mind-bending” drugs (Stevens 1989; Farber 2002). Thus during the
mid-1970s, when the discovery that there were indigenous psilocybin mush-
rooms growing in Britain became widely known, a similar, if smaller, panic
ensued, centered around the fear that mushrooms might trigger permanent psy-
chosis (e.g., Young et al. 1982).7
Although Lewin’s “phantastica” never caught on, the pathological discourse
produced various terms which did, and which reveal its implicit assumptions
about mushrooms and consciousness: namely, intoxicant (producing poisoning);
hallucinogen (producing hallucinations); psychotomimetic (mimicking psy-
chosis); and schizogen (generating schizophrenia, or a schizophrenia-like state).
All these assume a condition of physical and mental “normalcy” from which
mushrooms (and the other related psychoactives) cause deviations or aberrations
through their poisonous action. That is, by impairing, deranging, or interfering
with the normal functioning of the body and brain, mushrooms alter conscious-
ness to produce visions and hallucinations, which, while appearing to be real (a
state indistinguishable from psychosis), have no actual ontological substance.
The phenomenological mushroom experience itself is valueless, other than, per-
haps, in generating empathy with the permanently psychotic. Various psychia-
trists during the 1950s and 1960s encouraged their colleagues to try drugs like
mescaline and LSD in order to gain a temporary, first-hand understanding of
what psychosis is like (see Melichi 1997; Stevens 1989; Letcher 2006). Subjects
who alter their consciousness in this way are therefore regarded as recklessly
endangering their mental health and potentially adding another unnecessary
burden to already over-stretched health services (Young et al. 1982).

The Psychological Discourse

Here the generation of non-ordinary experiences by mushrooms is delineated as
having therapeutic value. I label this the “psychological” discourse in the ver-
nacular sense of the word, meaning not only things pertaining to the mind, to
the psyche, or to the self, but also encompassing popular understandings of
Freudian/Jungian psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Under this materialist dis-
course, therapists regard the experiences produced by psychoactive drugs as hav-
ing their provenance entirely in the mind or psyche of the “patient.” By causing
perturbations in the natural functioning of the nervous system, these substances
allow buried or repressed biographical memories to come to the surface and into
conscious attention—in actual or symbolic form—from whence they may be
safely integrated. To misappropriate Freud, psychoactives open up a motorway to
OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 81

mad thoughts on mushrooms 81

the unconscious and so, if used in careful and controlled settings, they can allow
patients to explore aspects of their “deeper” selves that usually remain obscured
or hidden, and perhaps even enable permanent therapeutic cures for psychoses
and neuroses. The key terms of this discourse are psychoactive (activating the
mind/psyche), psychotropic (moving towards the mind/psyche), and psychedelic
(mind manifesting—a term coined by Humphry Osmond, in correspondence
with Aldous Huxley, during the 1950s).
The origins of this discourse can be seen, for example, in the writings of
Thomas de Quincey, who found childhood memories intertwined with his
more exotic opium visions; in those of William James, who saw the potential of a
psychological explanation for religious or mystical experiences—including his
own under the influence of nitrous oxide—or in Baudelaire; and, of course, in
Freud. The discourse came to prominence, however, with the rise of LSD, the
psychoactive properties of which were accidentally discovered by the Swiss
chemist Albert Hofmann in 1943. An employee of the Swiss pharmaceutical
company, Sandoz, Hofmann was paid to develop new drugs, and following his
own inadvertent psychedelic experiences he saw the potential of LSD for use in
psychotherapy. During the 1940s he engaged in small-scale experiments to deter-
mine the drug’s potential marketability in this area, and LSD was originally sold
as a psychiatric tool (Melechi 1997:34). Various “schools” of “psychedelic ther-
apy” emerged during the 1950s and 1960s as LSD and pure psilocybin began to
be employed in psychotherapy for the treatment of neuroses, schizophrenia, and
even alcoholism and recidivism (Melechi 1997; Sandison 1997; Dobkin de Rios
and Janiger 2003; Letcher 2006). Under this discourse, then, the therapeutic set-
ting of the clinic and the guidance of a medical authority provided the legitimate
context in which these substances should be consumed.

The Prohibition Discourse

While the various schools of psychedelic therapy employed controlled environ-
ments for using psychedelics, the use of LSD in the 1960s and psilocybin mush-
rooms in the 1970s spread way beyond the clinic as a psychedelic counterculture
grew (see below). Eventually Western governments intervened to prohibit the
use of these substances (both in medical research and recreationally), ostensibly
in the interests of public health—psychedelics can undoubtedly trigger inci-
dents of psychotic breakdown in certain cases—but more realistically to quell
the moral panic that had erupted in the media over anxieties about the psyche-
delics and the counter-culture that they helped to spawn.
Briefly, the discourse originated in America and has been exported around
the world, the first American experiment with prohibition being with alcohol
during the period between the First and the Second World Wars. The histo-
rian Mike Jay traces the origins of prohibition to a particular blend of politics,
Christian morals, fears about the inheritance of degeneracy, and pressure from
OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 82

82 anthropology of consciousness 18.2

women’s temperance leagues that were extant in America at that time (Jay
2000). He also notes that as a policy it failed spectacularly. Consuming alcohol
acquired the frisson of the forbidden, and armed gangs emerged to control the
illegal production and supply of alcohol, mainly in the form of spirits, to meet
the increased demand for this illicit pleasure. The end of prohibition, how-
ever, did not signal its demise as a discourse. Anxieties over the use of opium
by Chinese and of marijuana by Mexican immigrants, among other factors,
led to the banning of these substances (Davenport-Hines 2001). Currently pro-
hibition is the dominant discourse pertaining to psychoactives, about which all
others, including the pathological and psychological discourses, must orientate
themselves.
Under the prohibition discourse, the effects of mushrooms and other
psychoactives—often erroneously termed “narcotics”8—are delineated as having
no value: the question of mushrooms and consciousness is only of interest in
terms of how mental and physical health, law and order, might be adversely
affected. We have already seen how the prohibition discourse operates by divid-
ing subjects according to the use or abuse of certain substances—it criminalizes
them—but as with alcohol prohibition, it has been equally unsuccessful in pre-
venting subjects from consuming illicit drugs (see statistics in Davenport-Hines
1991). It has merely created a sense of urgency among drug countercultures
eager to promote their own resistive discourses; for as Cultural Studies scholar
Sadie Plant notes:

any hint of some illicit deployment of the body and its pleasures was enough to
dispatch vast swathes of the population into a new category, and also a new
underground with its own signs and secret gestures, cryptic messages, dress
codes, glances, clubs, street corners, covert actions, whispered promises and
hidden deals. [Plant 1999:154]

It is to a discussion of these resistive discourses that I now turn.

resistive discourses about mushrooms

Just as a candle casts a shadow, so every discourse lays out the means of its own
opposition; the negative by which it may be cancelled out. The four “resistive
discourses” (the recreational, psychedelic, entheogenic, and animistic dis-
courses) all react wholly or partially against the frameworks created by the dom-
inant discourses. Whereas the latter are derived from scientific classification, the
observation of symptoms in others, these resistive discourses attempt to represent
the subjective mushroom experience. But given that there can be no unmediated
representation, they still operate as discourses, and in practice it can be hard to
distinguish between them (see below).
OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 83

mad thoughts on mushrooms 83

The Recreational Discourse

If mainstream society regards the recreational use of drugs for pleasure as
legally, morally and medically unacceptable, then it is easy to see how taking
drugs immediately becomes a mode of resistance in itself. Under the resistive
“recreational discourse,” illicit drugs are taken both for the pleasure that they
give to mind and body, and also for the pleasure that transgression brings (Plant
1999; Hetherington 2000). Here, the entrenched cultural presence of alcohol
and its sanctioned modes of consumption mark out the template by which
other drugs are framed and consumed recreationally. Ecstasy (MDMA),
amphetamine sulphate, cocaine, ketamine, and mushrooms, among others, are
all thought of like alcohol as “party” drugs,9 with the pub and the club seen as
the appropriate context for consumption (e.g., see the Guardian, November 29,
2003). An extreme expression of this discourse may be found in Irwin Welsh’s
novel, Trainspotting, in which the principle characters regard heroin addiction
as a lifestyle choice.

The Psychedelic Discourse

We have seen how the psychological discourse regards psychedelic experiences
as therapeutically useful when they occur in the context of the clinic. However,
the discourse also inadvertently gave legitimacy to another, less controlled, man-
ner of consuming psychedelic compounds. For if they reveal or make manifest
the hidden dimensions of the self, it is understandable that those for whom a
sense of identity rests upon the notion of self-exploration, upon a sense of alterity
derived from privileged introspection, might wish to make use of them: that is,
artists, poets, musicians, and other assorted bohemians. While Aldous Huxley
thought that psychedelics should be administered to intellectuals and the great
and the good, many of his contemporary psychiatrists and psychologists—drawing
upon Romantic constructions of the “artist” as creative genius, as outsider, and as
having privileged access to an intensified experience of life—felt that it was
artists who would benefit most from experiencing “consciousness-” or “mind-”
“expansion,” “ego-loss” and so on. Consequently they started supplying LSD and
psilocybin for use in settings other than just clinical ones (Stevens 1989; Dobkin
de Rios and Janiger 2003).
This leakage of psychoactives from the clinic onto the streets became a flood,
giving rise to the 1960s “psychedelic movement.” This movement resisted the
institutionalized administering of LSD by medical authorities, preferring the
more uncontrolled settings of “acid-tests” and “happenings” (Stevens 1989), and
developing its own styles, vernacular language, political and spiritual world-
views, and, most importantly, music (see Whiteley 1997). The meaning of “psy-
chedelic” therefore changed, and as it became a term of resistance it lost the
veneer of medical authority with which it was originally endowed. Currently, as
the hippy-psychedelic movement is regarded somewhat ambivalently, the term
OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 84

84 anthropology of consciousness 18.2

has come to have derogatory and recreational connotations, and is perhaps most
strongly identified with the genre of psychedelic music (Ott 1996b).
The psychological discourse also provided a systematizing logic for the quest
to find new “designer” psychedelics, for if drugs reveal the hidden dimensions of
the psyche, then it stands to reason that every new drug acts as a “key” to unlock
a different, and hitherto unexplored, part of the self (see Shulgin and Shulgin
1991:xvi). But because the term “psychedelic” remains contested, a new label has
emerged for individuals who use these substances as a means of personal growth.
Psychonauts (travelers through the psyche) regard mushrooms as just one in a
palette of psychoactives, useful for self-exploration.10 For example, the occultist
Julian Vayne advocates the magical use of a variety of different substances
(including mushrooms), but notes that his favorites are “LSD and, in second
place, MDMA” (Vayne 2001:12). For Vayne, the

obliteration of individual consciousness isn’t the goal [of taking psyche-

delics]—instead the aim is transformation, re-formulation and reintegration of
the Self. The Self is liberated by, through, and in the world. The occult use of
drugs . . . collapses the dividing lines of Self and Other through the process of
transgression. [Vayne 2001:7]

Thus, while psychonauts challenge both the pathological and prohibition

discourses, they appear to remain faithful to the psychological discourse.

The Entheogen Discourse

By contrast, the predominant resistive discourse privileges mushrooms and the
experiences they elicit by framing them in religious terms. It was precisely to dis-
tance their own practices from recreational and non-medical psychedelic mush-
room use that a group of academic and amateur scholars coined the term
“entheogen.”
Briefly, this neologism was invented in 1973 by the classicist Carl A. P. Ruck
during a special committee meeting convened by Robert Gordon Wasson to
devise a new label to replace the terms “hallucinogen” and “psychedelic”
(Ruck et al. 1979).11 Gordon Wasson (1898–1986) was a Wall Street banker and
amateur ethnobotanist who re-discovered the indigenous use of psilocybin
mushrooms in Mexico during the 1950s (see Letcher 2006; Wasson and Wasson
1957; Wasson 1986). In 1955, Wasson and his photographer, Allan Richardson,
were invited to consume mushrooms as part of a indigenous healing cere-
mony—termed a velada or vigil by Wasson—and thus became the first West-
erners on record to do so (Letcher 2006). Wasson had several profound
religious experiences while under the mushrooms’ influence, and believed that
he had stumbled across the relics of a prehistoric mushroom cult (for a critique
of Wasson’s ideas, see Letcher 2006). An eloquent rhetorician and publicist,
OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 85

mad thoughts on mushrooms 85

Wasson introduced into the West both the knowledge of the properties of psilo-
cybin mushrooms and a wholly new discourse for understanding their effects:
that they induce religious or mystical experiences. He therefore sought a term
that was neither pejorative nor disparaging, and that would capture what he
believed to be the sacramental quality of mushrooms and other chemically
related psychoactives. “Entheogen” is the term that Ruck proposed and that
Wasson’s committee agreed upon.
The term itself was inspired by the Greek etymology of the word “enthusi-
asm” (“to be inspired by a God”) and means “generating the experience of God
within,” “God generated within,” or “becoming God within” (Wasson 1986:30).
Taking mushrooms as the prototypical entheogen, the discourse claims that they
are not dangerous or illicit substances (the prohibition discourse), nor are they
agents of disease (the pathological discourse), but that they have an intrinsic or
sacramental value (see Baker 2005). They do not produce hallucinations, or dis-
tortions of reality, but affect consciousness so as to produce religious or ontologi-
cally significant experiences. The entheogen discourse challenges us to reclassify
mushrooms and people who use them, and to regard both seriously.
While the term has been rejected by some as being too unwieldy (e.g., see
Saunders et al. 2000), and others as too exclusionary (e.g., Weil 1988; see below),
it has come to be the dominant, and increasingly legitimated, term within popu-
lar discourse. There is currently a diverse and emerging array of entheogenic
spiritualities—from organized “churches” to individual practitioners—that stress
the religious significance of the plants and chemicals that they employ. There is
even a journal, The Entheogen Review (Forte 1997; Smith 2003). As a religious
studies scholar and practitioner of myco-spirituality, this discourse is of particular
interest to me. I wish therefore to examine and critique its operation in some
detail: how does it operate as a discourse to divide subjects and place boundaries
upon what it is possible to do or say?
The actual circumstances of its genesis make it clear that the term entheogen
was intended to separate and distinguish religious from recreational use. Gordon
Wasson wrote of the need for a term that was “unvulgarized by hippy abuse”
(Wasson 1980:xv), while his protégé Jonathan Ott complained that although
“there may today be more communicants with the ‘magic mushrooms’ than ever
before, it is a profane and puerile, largely hedonistic cult which has succeeded
its venerable ancestor [indigenous use in Mexico]” (Ott and Bigwood 1978:16).
Contemporary recreational use, argued Wasson, precluded a drug from being
considered an entheogen, even if, as is the case with cannabis and the opiates, it
has an established history of religious usage (Sherratt 1995; Wasson 1986:31).
Heroin remains the bête noir of this discourse, with all advocates from Wasson
onwards stressing that true entheogens are by definition non-addictive (indeed
advocates are typically as disparaging of “hedonists” and addicts as the most
ardent prohibitionist; see Jesse 1997). So the entheogen discourse seeks to elevate
OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 86

86 anthropology of consciousness 18.2

its preferred drugs by distinguishing them from those castigated by the prohibi-
tion discourse. We can see therefore that, like the recreational discourse above, it
works within the terms and parameters set by the prohibition discourse and does
not challenge them wholesale (as would, say, a call to legalize all drugs).
However, when considering how “entheogens” are to be recognized and dis-
tinguished from mere “drugs,” a contradiction becomes readily apparent. The
discourse claims that entheogens are inherently sacred, irrespective of the con-
text in which they are consumed, and yet, certain vision-producing substances
such as cannabis are refused as entheogens precisely because of their use in “pro-
fane” contexts (Baker 2005:185).
Furthermore, it seems to claim that there is a deterministic, one on one, rela-
tionship between consuming an entheogen and having a religious or theo-
phanous experience,12 and yet it is well known that the psychedelic experience is
mutable and far from being independent of context. In the 1960s, various writers
noted the importance of “set” (practitioners’ mindset, preparedness, and intent)
and “setting” (the physical environment in which the drugs were consumed) in
contouring a “trip.” Religious experiences are not guaranteed, and as Aldous
Huxley noted, chemicals do not necessarily cause religious experiences, they
occasion them (Smith 2003:xvii). Likewise, the scholar of religion, Chris Par-
tridge, argues that “whilst . . . psychedelic experiences are undoubtedly heavily
weighted towards panenhenism (“all-in-one-ism”, the experience of the unity of
everything), contexts, presuppositions, worldviews etc. all contribute to the final
shaping of an individual’s psychedelic experience” (Partridge 2003:119). The sup-
posed essentialized sacrality of the entheogens, and the supposedly deterministic
relationship between their action upon consciousness and religious experience,
start to appear problematic.
The entheogen discourse attempts to elevate the use of certain plants and
chemicals by stripping away and making irrelevant the mundane practices and
social contexts that surround their consumption. It claims these substances are
inherently sacred. However, it cannot succeed because it is the practices and
contexts of consumption that define mushrooms, say, as a recreational drug or
religious sacrament. An improved and strengthened definition of an
entheogenic substance would therefore be one in which practices are included,
such as the following proposed by the scholar of religion, Huston Smith: “mind-
altering substances that are approached seriously and reverently” (Smith
2003:xvi–xvii).
There is, however, a second problem that follows, for if a drug becomes an
entheogen on the basis of the practices which accompany its consumption, how
are we to recognize these as reverential or religious? In other words, does the dis-
course contain implicit assumptions about what constitutes religious (and,
hence, sanctioned) and recreational (illicit) usage? The answer, typically, is yes,
and these assumptions include discursive preconceptions about the ritual-like
OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 87

mad thoughts on mushrooms 87

nature of the “setting,” coupled with a “set” of reverence, seriousness, and per-
haps solemnity—rather Christian connotations of the term “religious” (see cri-
tique by Dobkin de Rios 1995). As I argue elsewhere, Gordon Wasson, the son of
an Episcopalian minister who had read the Bible twice before adolescence,
inadvertently constructed his idea of etheogenic religion in Christian terms: see
Letcher 2006. Consequently, the writer on psychedelics, Andrew Weil, made a
robust criticism of Wasson, calling him a “snob and an elitist,” saying, “Who is
he to judge whether others’ uses of psychedelics are not religious? A great many
people in this century have experienced the joy, terror, and mystery of existence
through these substances, and there may not be a clear boundary dividing recre-
ation from religion” (Weil 1988: 490; see also critique by Dobkin de Rios 1995).
Nevertheless, the entheogen discourse attempts to make such a distinction
and resist the prohibition discourse by claiming that the use of certain psy-
choactives, in certain carefully prescribed contexts, constitutes a legitimate reli-
gious usage. It attempts to resist the pathological discourse by defining
entheogens as substances that are not addictive, and by claiming that their
“proper use” entails safeguards that prevent injury to mental health (see Jesse
1997). Interestingly, however, it restates the psychological discourse in its defi-
nition of entheogens as producing the experience of God within. This is seem-
ingly based on the assumption that God, the numinous, the Other, are all
located within the self, within the psyche (Lucas 1995). The only way, it seems,
that drug-induced theophanies can be countenanced is if they are situated as
originating in the mind. The psychological discourse makes religious experi-
ence possible in a scientific age.
In practice, however, the term entheogen is employed in a rather different
manner than that which was intended by its authors, and is subject to an ongo-
ing negotiation and contestation. I would argue that a variety of substances are
consumed in a variety of different circumstances that are then legitimated, post
hoc, by labeling them “entheogens” and “entheogenic” respectively. In other
words, while its original meaning has become diluted, the term “entheogen” has
come to function as a serviceable and flexible resistive discourse.

The Animistic Discourse

As we have seen, the entheogenic discourse contains certain Christian assump-
tions about the nature of sacrament, religious practice, and religious experience,
but these do not necessarily match practitioners’ actual mushroom experiences.
Although mushrooms can most certainly elicit Christian-like theophanies and
generate the experience of God within (see, for example, Partridge 2003), I would
argue that many more practitioners talk and write of experiencing encounters
with intelligences, spirits, or what in academic discourse has been termed “other-
than-human-persons” (see Harvey 2005) without. That is, they experience not
theophany but animaphany. I want, therefore, to introduce one final resistive
OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 88

88 anthropology of consciousness 18.2

discourse about mushrooms13 which is disallowed by all the above, including the
entheogen discourse, because it transgresses a fundamental cultural boundary
about the ontology of non-ordinary experience, and therefore, in Foucauldian
terms, about what it is acceptable to say, do, and think. Here, mushrooms are not
regarded as altering, consciousness but as adjusting it. They do not alter percep-
tion, but adjust what it is possible to perceive, and therefore under the “animistic
discourse” the spirits and beings occasioned by mushrooms are not hallucinations
nor some aspect of the self, but genuine beneficent discarnate entities or intelli-
gences, with whom the practitioner attempts to forge relationships.
This discourse has definite historical origins, which can be found in the
hugely popular writings of Aldous Huxley as well as in indigenous thought. In
Huxley’s “doors of perception” model, the mind acts as a reducing valve, filtering
out swathes of perceptual information that are unnecessary for biological sur-
vival and that would ordinarily overwhelm us with sensation (Huxley 1994).
Drawing upon the terminology of Eastern mysticism and the philosophy of
Henri Bergson, Huxley thought that psychedelics stripped away or relaxed the
mind’s filtering mechanisms, allowing one to perceive a greater part of “Mind at
Large.” Rather like someone suddenly having access to the tuning dial of an oth-
erwise fixed radio, psychedelics allow us to retune to, and hence to perceive, a
different frequency or aspect of extant reality.
Many indigenous cultures have a tradition of using “sacred” psychoactive
plants for the purposes of healing (Schultes and Hofmann 1992). Healers and
curanderos within Mexican indigenous cultures have employed psilocybin
mushrooms in a tradition that extends in some form back to the time of the con-
quest and possibly much earlier. Indigenous knowledge maintains that the
mushrooms propel the healer into a realm of spirits; spirits who can be per-
suaded to impart information such as the provenance and prognoses of illnesses,
or the whereabouts of lost or stolen items. For instance, the most famous
Mexican healer, the curandera María Sabina, who held the ceremonies
attended by Gordon Wasson, maintained that she gained all her healing powers
from the mushroom spirits, which she referred to as “the little children” or “the
saint children” (Estrada 2003).
Despite these demonstrable historical and cultural origins, the animistic dis-
course, more than any of the others so far discussed, has emerged in response to
the actual mushroom experience itself. In saying this I realize that I risk under-
mining my entire argument, that the ways we think about mushrooms are dis-
cursive rather than being “true,” unmediated representations of some essential
mushroom experience. Without contradicting this, I wish to introduce the idea
that psychedelic experiences are weighted (Partridge 2003) or bounded (Shanon
2002).
Benny Shanon, in his comprehensive study of the phenomenology of
ayahuasca, argues that, however bizarre the experiences people have, they
OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 89

mad thoughts on mushrooms 89

remain bounded. That is, using the terminology of his psychological dis-
course,14 these experiences represent a distinct or natural cognitive domain. Cer-
tain moods, physical sensations, types of visions, and so on are always present
within the ayahuasca experience, even if the exact structural and substantive
details vary; and these moods, sensations, etc. differ between psychoactive com-
pounds. Another way of putting this is Chris Partridge’s notion that the psyche-
delic experience is weighted (although I would depart from Partridge by arguing
for a distinction between the gravitational pull of different psychedelic com-
pounds). For while scientific classification tends to lump the “hallucinogens” or
“psychedelics” together on the basis of their observed effects upon subjects—
they make subjects have visions—practitioners typically perceive qualitative and
bounded differences in the phenomenological experiences produced by each:
They are similar but not the same. A common distinction between mushrooms
and LSD made by practitioners is that “mushrooms are more ‘earthy’ than acid”
or that “mushrooms are ‘analogue’ and acid ‘digital.’”
I wish to argue, then, that the experiences occasioned by mushrooms are
weighted towards animaphany. The entheogen discourse is problematic because
it implies that the experience of God is not a tendency but a deterministic cer-
tainty. The idea of weighting circumvents this, for clearly not all mushroom con-
sumers encounter spirits. However, with repeated usage an iterative process may
be set in motion by which presuppositions and worldviews direct the type of
mushroom experience (within its boundaries), which then in turn affects those
presuppositions and worldviews. The repeated use of mushrooms can, and often
does, lead practitioners to experience encounters with “spirits.” Whether practi-
tioners delineate these as delusional, as some hitherto hidden aspect of the psy-
che, or as genuinely animate entities, remains a discursive choice.
Some examples are helpful here: One of my informants calls indigenous
British psilocybin mushrooms a “Babel Fish15 to the vegetable kingdom,”
because he claims they facilitate the perception of plants as being in some sense
conscious, aware, and inspirited. Another, after taking mushrooms in the recre-
ational setting of a pub, had a dream thereafter in which mushroom spirits
appeared to her and warned her in no uncertain terms against using them in
such a “profane” manner. Since then, she has changed her patterns of con-
sumption accordingly. Another—a skeptic and rationalist whose own psychoac-
tive use is shaped by a bohemian, as opposed to a religious, discourse—told me
that it didn’t seem to matter who took mushrooms or where they did so (a party, a
club, etc.), everyone gained the impression that they should be consuming
mushrooms outside in a natural environment. In other words, he was attributing
agency to the mushrooms who were somehow prescribing the manner of their
own consumption.
The most famous advocate of this discourse in recent times was the late
Terence McKenna (1946–2000), who rose to prominence on the back of “rave”
OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 90

90 anthropology of consciousness 18.2

or “acid house” culture during the 1990s (see Partridge 2003; Letcher 2006).
While he was most certainly aware of Huxley’s model and indigenous knowl-
edge, he, too, claimed to have arrived at this position from his many mushroom
experiences. In a series of books and charismatic talks, McKenna made the
claim, among others, that with high doses of mushrooms it is possible to “hear”
and engage in dialogue with a discarnate voice (or voices) belonging to the
mushroom spirit(s). For example, in his True Hallucinations (McKenna 1993),
McKenna published a fantastical passage arguing that the mushroom’s origins
were extraterrestrial; a passage that he maintained was actually dictated to him
by the mushroom spirit. “The mushroom speaks,” he wrote:
And our opinions rest upon what it tells eloquently of itself in the cool night of
the mind: “I am old, older than thought in your species, which is itself fifty
times older then your history. Though I have been on earth for ages, I am from
the stars. My home is no one planet, for many worlds scattered through the
shining disc of the galaxy have conditions which allow my spores an opportu-
nity for life.” [McKenna 1993:210]
According to McKenna, the mushrooms desire a symbiotic relationship with
humanity in which noesis is exchanged for ecological propagation. The “mush-
room [spirit] states its own position very clearly. It says, ‘I require the nervous sys-
tem of a mammal. Do you have one handy?’” (McKenna 1991:47).
The latest advocate of the animistic discourse, and pretender to the throne of
psychonaut-in-chief, is the journalist Daniel Pinchbeck, who relates in his
recent best-selling book, Breaking Open the Head (2002), how his self-confessed
skepticism was shattered by a series of drug-elicited encounters with other enti-
ties and “beings”: in other words, his worldview was altered by his psychedelic
experiences. “Every time I take mushrooms,” he writes, “I feel a cheerful nutty
but intuitive certainty that trees are watchers, plants are sentient beings, patiently
aware of their place in the ultimate scheme of things” (Pinchbeck 2002:293). On
one particular bemushroomed occasion he was surprised, and more than a little
horrified, to see:
A group of laughing green elves standing in a line . . . When I saw them, I
could hear their cheers faintly in my ears—“Hooray!” They seemed to be wel-
coming me, very happy and excited because I had seen them. What was
alarming about this apparition was that it was like a photographic projec-
tion: The elves were as clear to my inner vision as film images. How could
this happen? [Pinchbeck 2002:214–5]
Central to the animistic discourse, therefore, is the idea of relationship with
agentic spirits, either in the form of conscious plants and objects, such as
stones, which we might otherwise regard as inanimate; or in the form of dis-
carnate mushroom intelligences. Under the discourse, “myconauts” if you
OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 91

mad thoughts on mushrooms 91

will, explorers of the “realm of the mushrooms,” regard themselves as being

rather like diplomatic emissaries traveling and learning how to negotiate their
way around a more powerful foreign nation. If approached in the “correct”
way—either outside in the natural world, or with eyes closed in silent dark-
ness—the mushroom spirits will reveal themselves and impart helpful infor-
mation. Unlike the entheogen or recreational discourses, then, the animistic
discourse resists the dominant Western discourses on its own terms. It resists
the pathological discourse, because indigenous knowledge maintains that the
use of mushrooms makes people well, not ill. It resists the prohibition dis-
course by maintaining that the authority to consume psilocybin mushrooms
comes from mushroom spirits. But most importantly of all it resists the psycho-
logical discourse in its claim that the spirits occasioned by mushrooms are, as
they appear to be, real.
In Foucauldian terms, to think beyond the confines of a discourse is to be
thought a little mad, but to transgress the boundaries of normalcy set by the psy-
chological discourse is to be mad—one reason why indigenous beliefs have
been disallowed by colonial and post-colonial discourse. Perhaps this is also why
both McKenna and Pinchbeck hedged slightly on the issue of the provenance
of spirits and voices: to prevent their being labeled as insane. McKenna wrote
that the voices came from mushroom spirits, but then sometimes contradicted
himself by saying that they come from “the earth” or from some new, higher
dimension of self (McKenna 1991). Pinchbeck is led by his experiences to coun-
tenance “manifold phalanxes of sentient entities beyond the realm of the sensi-
ble” (Pinchbeck 2002:294), but can not quite bring himself to enter fully this
belief: “Of course, this could be a delightful form of drug-induced paranoia”
(2002:293). Such is the power of discourse that this animistic worldview is the
most marginal of all.

what happens to consciousness under

the action of magic mushrooms?
Across all these various discourses and their varying ways of approaching the
enigma of mushrooms and consciousness, the fundamental question is whether
the action of mushrooms (and other related compounds) actually introduces
anything novel into consciousness. There are, it seems to me, three possibilities.
The first possibility is that mushrooms simply impair the normal functioning of
the brain and introduce nothing of value (the conclusion reached by the patho-
logical and prohibition discourses). The second is that mushrooms work “to
accentuate or to suppress functions in [mind and] behavior which are already
present” (Partridge 2003:119); that is, that they rearrange the already existing con-
tents of the mind in unpredictable ways that may be meaningful or therapeutically
useful (the conclusion of the psychological and recreational discourses). The third
OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 92

92 anthropology of consciousness 18.2

possibility is that mushrooms genuinely impart innovatory concepts and expe-

riences, whether in the form of revelations and theophanies (the entheogenic
discourse) or animaphanies (the animistic discourse).
My point is that the way in which we answer the question depends upon the
particular discourse to which we subscribe, and, as Foucault’s perceptive
analysis of power and knowledge demonstrates, upon the discursive bound-
aries each therefore imposes. A materialist discourse prevails in our current
intellectual climate in which consciousness is seen as, and only as, an emer-
gent product of human neurophysiology (e.g., Dennett 1991). The mushroom
experiences of adherents to the animistic discourse are quite otherwise, sug-
gesting, for example, that plants may be conscious, or that consciousness may
exist in the form of discarnate entities. Such experiences can not be counte-
nanced within the current intellectual climate: they lie off the scale of “mad
thoughts.” These animaphanies may indeed prove to be delusory, or to be sim-
ply products of the mind. However, to ignore them on the basis of the threat
they pose to the prevailing psychological discourse is, at best, to cut off a poten-
tially fruitful avenue of consciousness research, and, at worst, to endorse a
short-sightedness, a human-centered narcissism in which consciousness can
only be recognized if it comes packaged in human form. The answer to the
question of mushrooms and consciousness may yet be advanced by those pre-
pared to think the unthinkable and to take the risk of being labeled as more
than a little mad.

notes
1. An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the “Exploring consciousness” con-
ference, Bath 2005. A draft appeared online without the author’s knowledge or con-
sent. The version printed here is the official, authorized version: it alone should be
cited.
2. By “magic mushrooms,” I am referring to diverse species found throughout the
world, typically of the genus Psilocybe, which are intentionally consumed for their
psychoactive properties. These are produced by the alkaloids psilocybin, psilocin,
and baeocystin; hence “psilocybin mushrooms” for short. See Guzman 1983;
Stamets 1996.
3. A similar loophole, which allowed the open sale of mushrooms in Britain, has now
been closed by the Drugs Act 2005. See Letcher 2006.
4. Throughout this paper, I use the term “mad” (somewhat rhetorically) in the same
colloquial sense as the American “crazy,” meaning foolish, eccentric, imbecilic, or
irrational. To be thought “mad” is not necessarily the same thing as to be medically
diagnosed as suffering from psychosis—though the term usually carries a certain
stigma because of its negative cultural connotations with mental illness.
5. This stands in contrast to the sanctioned use of heroin in hospitals, where it is
administered under the name of dia-morphine by medical authorities for the
OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 93

mad thoughts on mushrooms 93

purposes of pain relief. Sadie Plant, drawing on Foucault’s analysis of homosexual-

ity, argues that “not until the late nineteenth century did the addict emerge as a new
identity, an individuated outsider born at the same time as the homosexual, both of
them figments of a modern imagination that needed to define its own normality,
drawing the boundaries around the upright, productive and reproductive members
of twentieth-century society. Just as cocaine was removed to make Coca-Cola a new
kind of real thing, so the addict was removed from the social body to assure the non-
using population of its own free agency” (Plant 1999:154).
6. He described these symptoms as follows: “The patients show peculiar cerebral
symptoms four or five hours after the fungi are eaten. They are greatly exhilarated,
laugh immoderately, develop a staggering gait and show disturbances of vision. The
symptoms are transient, the patients being restored to health in twenty-four to forty-
eight hours, except for a peculiar sensation which they describe as a feeling ‘as if
they were walking on air’” (Ford 1926:309).
7. There is an additional semiotic factor in the case of mushrooms, which is that dur-
ing late Victorian romanticism, mushrooms became a shorthand way of depicting
the enchantment and otherworldliness of fairyland (see Jay 2000). Consequently,
the “magic mushroom” was, on arrival, immediately burdened with pre-existing
cultural connotations of irrationality and a willingness to enter into self-delusion,
of an infantile urge to escape into a never-never land, of being “off with the
fairies.”
8. Strictly speaking, “narcotic” means “producing sleep,” and should only be used to
refer to the opiates. See Lewin 1924.
9. If the transgressive aspect of the recreational discourse is a recent phenomenon, the
use of mushrooms for pleasure is not. The Spanish chronicler de Sahagún records
how the Aztec empire entertained diplomatic emissaries with mushrooms, and
Durán that on one occasion “all the lords and grandees of the provinces rose and, to
solemnise further the festivities, they all ate of some woodland mushrooms, which
they say make you lose your senses, and thus they sallied forth all primed for the
dance” (translated in Wasson 1980:200, emphasis added).
10. According to Jonathan Ott, “psychonaut” was coined by the German writer Ernst
Jünger in 1970. Ott 1996a.
11. Also present were Danny Staples, Jeremy Bigwood, and Jonathan Ott.
12. A theophany is a visible manifestation of God or a god.
13. Here, I restrict my discussion to psilocybin mushrooms only. The animistic dis-
course may apply equally to other psychoactives, such as DMT, ayahuasca, and ibo-
gaine, but these lie outside my realm of experience and the scope of this analysis.
14. Shanon writes “What is special about Ayahuasca is the extraordinary subjective
experiences this brew generates in the mind . . . As such, the study of Ayahuasca
belongs first and foremost to the domain of psychology, and more specifically, cog-
nitive psychology” (Shanon 2002:31).
15. In Douglas Adam’s science-fiction comedy, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,
the Babel Fish, when inserted into one’s ear, translates all languages.
OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 94

94 anthropology of consciousness 18.2

references
Baker, John R.
2005 Psychedelic Sacraments. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 37(2):179–187.
Blain, Jenny, Douglas Ezzy, and Graham Harvey, eds.
2004 Researching Paganisms. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira.
Davenport-Hines, Richard
2001 The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Social History of Drugs. London: Phoenix Press.
Dawkins, Richard
1998 Unweaving the Rainbow. London: Penguin.
Dennett, Daniel C.
1991 Consciousness Explained. London: Penguin.
Dobkin de Rios, Marlene
1995 A Response to Lucas’s “Entheology.” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs
27(3):297–8.
Dobkin de Rios, Marlene and Oscar Janiger
2003 LSD, Spirituality, and the Creative Process. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press.
Douglas, Mary
1994 Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo.
London: Routledge.
Estrada, Álvaro
2003 The Life. In María Sabina: Selections. Jerome Rothenberg, ed. Pp. 1–79.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Farber, David
2002 The Intoxicated State/Illegal Nation: Drugs in Sixties Counterculture. In
Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 60s and 70s. Peter Braunstein
Peter and Michael William Doyle, eds. Pp. 17–40. London: Routledge.
Flood, Gavin
1999 Beyond Phenomenology. London: Cassell.
Ford, William
1926 A new Classification of Mycetismus (Mushroom Poisoning). Journal of Phar-
macology and Experimental Therapeutics. XXIX:305–309.
Forte, Robert, ed.
1997 Entheogens and the Future of Religion. San Francisco: Council on Spiritual
Practices.
Foucault, Michel
1973 The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. London:
Tavistock.
Foucault, Michel
1980 Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. Colin
Gordon, ed. New York: Pantheon Books.
Guardian
2003 High Times in Magic Mushroom Business—And It’s Perfectly Legal.
Guardian, November 29, 3.
Guzmán, Gastón
1983 The Genus Psilocybe: A Systematic Revision of the Known Species Including the
History, Distribution and Chemistry of the Hallucinogenic Species. Vaduz: J. Cramer.
OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 95

mad thoughts on mushrooms 95

Harvey, Graham
2005 Animism: Respecting the Living World. London: Hurst and Company.
Hetherington, Kevin
2000 New Age Travellers: Vanloads of Uproarious Humanity. London: Cassell.
Huxley, Aldous
1994 The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell. London: Flamingo.
Jay, Mike
2000 Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century. Sawtry: Dedalus.
Jesse, Robert
1997 Testimony of the Council on Spiritual Practices. In Entheogens and the
Future of Religion. Robert Forte, ed. Pp. 7–16. San Francisco: Council on Spiritual
Practices.
Letcher, Andy
2001 The Scouring of the Shire: Fairies, Trolls and Pixies in Eco-Protest Culture.
Folklore 112:147–161.
2005 ‘There’s Bulldozers in the Fairy Garden’: Re-Enchantment Narratives within
British Eco-Paganism’. In Popular Spiritualities: The Politics of Contemporary
Enchantment. Lynne Hume and Kathleen McPhillips, eds. London: Ashgate.
2006 Shroom. A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom. London: Faber and
Faber Ltd.
Lewin, Louis
1924 Phantastica: Narcotic and Stimulating Drugs. Their Use and Abuse. London:
Keegan Paul.
Lucas, Aline Marianne
1995 Entheology. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 27(3):293–295.
McCutcheon, Russell T., ed.
1999 The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion: A Reader. London: Cassell.
McKenna, Terence
1991 The Archaic Revival. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco.
1993 True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author’s Extraordinary Adven-
tures in the Devil’s Paradise. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco.
Melechi, Antonio
1997 Drugs of Liberation: From Psychiatry to Psychedelia. In Psychedelia Britan-
nica. Antonio Melechi, ed. Pp. 20–52. London: Turnaround.
Ott, Jonathan
1996a Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic Drugs, Their Plant Sources and History.
Kennewick, WA: Natural Products Co.
1996b Entheogens II: On Entheology and Entheobotany. Journal of Psychoactive
Drugs 28(2): 205–209.
Ott, Jonathan and Jeremy Bigwood, eds.
1978 Teonanácatl: Hallucinogenic Mushrooms of North America. Seattle: Madrona
Publishers, Inc.
Partridge, Christopher
2003 Sacred Chemicals: Psychedelic Drugs and Mystical Experience. In Mysticisms
East and West: Studies in Mystical Experience. Christopher Partridge and Theodore
Gabriel, eds. Pp. 96–131. Carlisle: Paternoster Press.
OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 96

96 anthropology of consciousness 18.2

Phillips, Louise and Marianne W. Jörgensen

2002 Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method. London: Sage.
Pinchbeck, Daniel
2002 Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contempo-
rary Shamanism. New York: Broadway Books.
Plant, Sadie
1999 Writings on Drugs. London: Faber and Faber Ltd.
Rabinow, Paul, ed.
1984 The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought. London:
Penguin.
Ruck, Carl A.P., Jeremy Bigwood, Danny Staples, Jonathan Ott, and R. Gordon Wasson
1979 Entheogens. Journal of Psychedelic Drugs 11(1–2):145–6.
Sandison, Ronald
1997 LSD Therapy: A Retrospective. In Psychedelia Britannica. Antonio Melechi,
ed. Pp. 53–86. London: Turnaround.
Saunders Nicholas, Anja Sanders, and Michelle Pauli
2000 In Search of the Ultimate High. Spiritual Experience Through Psychoactives.
London: Rider.
Schultes, Richard Evans and Albert Hofmann
1992 Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing and Hallucinogenic Powers.
Rochester, VT: Healing Arts Press.
Shanon, Benny
2002 The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca
Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sherratt, Andrew
1995 Alcohol and its Alternatives: Symbol and Substance in Pre-Industrial Cultures.
In Consuming Habits. Drugs in History and Anthropology. Jordan Goodman, Paul
E. Lovejoy, and Andrew Sherratt, eds. Pp. 11–46. London: Routledge.
Shulgin, Alexander and Ann Shulgin
1991 Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley: Transform Press.
Smith, Huston
2003 Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic
Plants and Chemicals. Boulder, Colorado: Sentient Publications, LLC.
Stamets, Paul
1996 Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World: An Identification Guide. Berkeley: Ten
Speed Press.
Stevens, Jay
1989 Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream. London: Paladin.
Vayne, Julian
2001 Pharmakon: Drugs and the Imagination. Brighton: El Cheapo Books.
Voase, Richard
2003 Diagnosing Power Relationships: A Foucauldian Perspective on the Pho-
tographed subject. Paper given at the Tourism and Photography Conference,
Sheffield Hallam University, October.
OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 97

mad thoughts on mushrooms 97

Wallis, Robert J.
2003 Shamans/Neo-Shamans: Ecstasy, Alternative Archaeologies and Contemporary
Pagans. London: Routledge.
Wasson, R. Gordon
1980 The Wondrous Mushroom: Mycolatry in Mesoamerica. New York: McGraw-
Hill Book Company.
1986 Persephone’s Quest. In Persephone’s Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of
Religion. R. Gordon Wasson, Stella Kramrisch, Jonathan Ott and Carl A. P. Ruck,
eds. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Wasson, Valentina Pavlovna and R. Gordon Wasson
1957 Mushrooms, Russia and History. New York: Pantheon Books.
Weil, Andrew
1988 Review of Persephone’s Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion. Journal
of Psychoactive Drugs 20:489–490.
Whiteley, Sheila
1997 Altered Sounds. In Psychedelia Britannica. Antonio Melechi, ed. Pp. 120–142.
London: Turnaround.
Young, Richard E., Robert Milroy, Steven Hutchinson, and Colin M. Keeson
1982 The Rising Price of Mushrooms. The Lancet January 23:213–215.
OC1802_05 10/22/07 9:47 M Page 98

View publication stats