1976, Stamets and his Evergreen colleagues organized a series of now-
legendary mushroom conferences, bringing together the leading lights of
both the credentialed and the amateur wings of the psychedelic world,
and during my first evening at his house Stamets dug out some VHS
tapes of the last of these conferences, held in 1999. The footage had been
shot by Les Blank, but as often happened with coverage of such
psychedelic gatherings, no one could ever quite get it together to edit the
raw footage, so raw it remains.
“Conference” might not do justice to what now appeared on Stamets’s
television. We watched as several of the attendees—I spotted Dr. Andrew
Weil, best known for his books on holistic medicine; the psychedelic
chemist Sasha Shulgin and his wife, Ann; and the New York Botanical
Garden mycologist Gary Lincoff—arrived to great fanfare in a
psychedelically painted school bus piloted by Ken Kesey. (The bus was
called Farther, the successor to Further, the original Merry Prankster bus,
evidently no longer roadworthy.) The proceedings looked more like a
Dionysian revel than a conference, yet there were some serious talks.
Jonathan Ott delivered a brilliant lecture on the history of “entheogens”—
a term he helped coin. He traced their use all the way back to the
Eleusinian mysteries of the Greeks, through the “pharmocratic
inquisition,” when the Spanish conquest suppressed the Mesoamerican
mushroom cults, and forward to the “entheogenic reformation” that has
been under way since R. Gordon Wasson’s discovery that those cults had
survived in Mexico. Along the way, Ott made an offhand reference to the
“placebo sacraments” of the Catholic Eucharist.
Then came footage of a big costume ball with lingering close-ups of a
giant punch bowl that had been spiked with dozens of different kinds of
psychedelic mushrooms. Stamets pointed out several prominent
mycologists and ethnobotanists among the revelers; many of them
dressed as specific kinds of fungus—Amanita muscaria, button
mushrooms, and so on. Stamets himself appeared dressed as a bear.
When one is screening raw footage of people in costume tripping on
mushrooms and dancing sloppily to a reggae band, a little goes a long
way, so after a few minutes we flicked off the TV. I asked Stamets about
earlier iterations of the conference, some of which seemed to have a
slightly more interesting ratio of intellectual substance to Dionysian
revelry. In 1977, for instance, Stamets had the opportunity to play host to
frankie
(Frankie)
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