as a sacrament five hundred years earlier, but by 1955 many Mazatecs
had become devout Catholics, and they now used mushrooms not for
worship but for healing and divination—to locate missing people and
important items. Wasson knew this perfectly well, which is why he
employed the ruse he did to gain access to a ceremony: he told María
Sabina he was worried about his son back home and wanted information
about his whereabouts and well-being. (Spookily enough, he received
what he discovered on his return to New York to be accurate information
on both counts.) Wasson was distorting a complex indigenous practice in
order to fit a preconceived theory and conflating the historical
significance of that practice with its contemporary meaning. As Sabina
told an interviewer some years later, “Before Wasson nobody took the
mushrooms only to find God. They were always taken for the sick to get
well.” As one of Wasson’s harsher critics, the English writer Andy
Letcher, acidly put it, “To find God, Sabina—like all good Catholics—went
to Mass.”
• • •
WASSON’S ARTICLE IN LIFE was read by millions of people (including a
psychology professor on his way to Harvard named Timothy Leary).
Wasson’s story reached tens of millions more when he shared it on the
popular CBS news program Person to Person, and in the months to
follow several other magazines, including True: The Man’s Magazine, ran
first-person accounts of magic mushroom journeys (“The Vegetable That
Drives Men Mad”), journeys for which Wasson supplied the mushrooms.
(He had brought back a supply and would conduct ceremonies in his
Manhattan apartment.) An exhibition on magic mushrooms soon
followed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Shortly after the article in Life was published, Wasson arranged to
have some specimens of the Mexican mushrooms sent to Albert Hofmann
in Switzerland for analysis. In 1958, Hofmann isolated and named the
two psychoactive compounds, psilocybin and psilocin, and developed the
synthetic version of psilocybin used in the current research. Hofmann
also experimented with the mushrooms himself. “Thirty minutes after my
taking the mushrooms,” he wrote, “the exterior world began to undergo a