Stoned apes
13 May 1957
It’s the 69th anniversary of Life magazine printing a story about a banker going to Mexico to eat magic mushrooms. A ten-year-old Terence McKenna saw it, prompting him to become an ethnobotanist who came up with the theory that human consciousness comes from psilocybin. Obviously.
This ridiculous shaggy inkcap story begins with R Gordon Wasson, “a vice president of J.P. Morgan & Co”, who was clearly a conventional enough American to do that weird initial thing with his name, but who, nonetheless
spent ... summers in ... Mexico ... on the trail of strange and hitherto unstudied mushrooms with vision-giving powers.
In June 1955, he and his friend, “New York society photographer” Allan Richardson spent a night in a remote Mexican village and
shared with a family of Indian friends a celebration of ‘holy communion’ where ‘divine’ mushrooms where first adored and then consumed … We chewed and swallowed these acrid mushrooms, saw visions, and emerged from the experience awestruck ... Richardson and I were the first white men in recorded history to eat the divine mushrooms, which for centuries have been a secret of certain Indian peoples
It still amazes me that a 1950s American magazine printed this, but perhaps they got away with it because the men at least professed to have mixed feelings about this ~ahem~ science they were doing – especially Allan Richardson:
His emotions were mixed. His wife Mary had consented to his coming only after she had drawn from him a promise not to let those nasty toadstools cross his lips. Now he faced a behaviour dilemma. He took the mushrooms, and I heard him mutter in anguish, “My God, what will Mary say!” Then we ate our mushrooms, chewing them slowly, over the course of a half hour. They tasted bad--acrid with a rancid odor that repeated itself. Allan and I were determined to resist any effects they might have, to observe better the events of the night. But our resolve soon melted before the onslaught of the mushrooms.
Perhaps the ‘mushrooms tasted bad’ bit helped to make their impartiality clear. Anyway, they masticated and ingested, the candle was blown out, and then...
The visions had started. They reached a plateau of intensity deep in the night, and they continued at that level until about 4 o’clock. We felt slightly unsteady on our feet and in the beginning were nauseated. We lay down on the mat that had been spread for us, but no one had any wish to sleep except the children, to whom mushrooms are not served. We were never more wide awake, and the visions came whether our eyes were opened or closed. They emerged from the center of the field of vision, opening up as they came, now rushing, now slowly, at the pace that our will chose. They were in vivid color, always harmonious. They began with art motifs, angular such as might decorate carpets or textiles or wallpaper or the drawing board of an architect. Then they evolved into palaces with courts, arcades, gardens--resplendent palaces all laid over with semiprecious stones. Then I saw a mythological beast drawing a regal chariot. Later it was though the walls of our house had dissolved, and my spirit had flown forth, and I was suspended in mid-air viewing landscapes of mountains, with camel caravans advancing slowly across the slopes, the mountains rising tier above tier to the very heavens.
They repeated the process three days later (well, of course), and
instead of mountains I saw river estuaries, pellucid water flowing through an endless expanse of reeds down to a measureless sea, all by the pastel light of a horizontal sun–
Actually, it gets a bit dull after a while.
There I was, poised in space, a disembodied eye, invisible, incorporeal, seeing but not seen.
Oh, god: wrecked people when you’re sober – but Terence McKenna was 10, of course, and even if the account drags a little, eating a mushroom that makes you see things sounds like fun.
Vice says McKenna’s younger brother Dennis, then six, said Terence spent some time
trailing our mother as she did her housework, waving the magazine demanding to know more. But of course she had nothing to add.
That’s according to his understatedly titled 2012 book Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (a tale of “brotherhood, psychedelic experimentation, and the intertwining nature of science and myth”, which also, apparently, includes Dennis’ ideas about “merging mushroom and human DNA”. You may with to imagine me looking to camera at this point.)
They were in their 20s, some 14 years later, when they actually journeyed into the Colombian Amazon and swallowed any Psilocybe cubensis – which is probably for the best. I don’t want to come across as an old fuddy-duddy, but I think 10 might be a bit young. It was known at the time as Stropharia cubensis, but Terence McKenna called it “the starborn magic mushroom”, and in a 1993 book, True Hallucinations, said LSD
seemed more abrasively psychoanalytic and personal. In contrast, the mushrooms seemed so full of merry elfin energy.
From 1975 onwards, he was eating five dried grammes of mushrooms once a fortnight, and cultivating them with his brother (in California – well, obviously California). In 1976, they published Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide, under the names O.T. Oss and O.N. Oeric.
Apparently, the book informs the reader that:
The mushroom speaks, and our opinions rest upon what it tells eloquently of itself in the cool night of the mind.
Terence later wrote that he simply transcribed what the mushroom told him, which was:
I am old, older than thought in your species, which is itself fifty times older than 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 opportunity for life. The mushroom which you see is the part of my body given to sex thrills and sun bathing, my true body is a fine network of fibers growing through the soil. These networks may cover acres and may have far more connections than the number in a human brain.
Fuck me, this guy was wasted.
Anyway, the book sold 100,000 copies in its first few years, and his altered state led him to stoned ape theory – the idea that getting twatted is what gave us things like the ability to think in the abstract (concepts, plans etc) and that led to art, culture and all that malarkey (I paraphrase slightly). Essentially, McKenna reckoned, early humans came into contact with cattle (and then domesticated them), and magic mushrooms grow on cowpats, so one thing led to another. As Wikipedia drily observes, this is
not based on scientific evidence.
...but it is an immensely entertaining idea, so the lack of evidence is a great pity. And, on the subject of the online encyclopaedia, stoned ape theory used to have a splendid bit of disambiguation at the top.
Perhaps even better than that, stone tape theory – the notion that, for example, the bricks of haunted houses can contain and release information, and that’s what hauntings are – is also... not fully based on science as we know it, let’s say.
McKenna also wrote in True Hallucinations:
I think that it is possible that certain of these compounds could be ‘seeded genes’ injected into the planetary ecology eons ago by an automated space-probe arriving here from a civilization somewhere else in the galaxy.
Wasson retired from banking in 1963, and “traveled the world in search of evidence of the ‘divine mushroom’,” and suggested that
The god-like Soma of the Vedic texts ... was actually fungal in nature, and perhaps the last thing the Buddha consumed before his ascension to Nirvana.
Yep: fucking hammered, the pair of them. Perhaps even better than that, though, Wasson’s original trip to Mexico may have been covertly funded (apparently without his knowledge) by the CIA’s MK-Ultra program, which may itself have been inspired by a 1949 memo in which one agent – inspired by the poisoned-mushroom-assisted assassination of the Emperor Claudius by his wife in 54 BC – wrote:
Let’s get into the technology of assassinations. Figure out most effective ways to kill – like Empress Agrippina.
Basically, the world of mind-altering compounds is so endlessly weird, this edition of Odd this day could go on forever. But I think I need a lie down.