How to Change Your Mind

generous contract that, in addition to the princely sum of eighty-five
hundred dollars, granted him final approval on the editing of his article,
as well as the wording of headlines and captions. It specified that
Wasson’s account include a “description of your own sensations and
fantasies under the influence of the mushroom.”
As I paged through the issue in bed that evening, the world of 1957
seemed like a faraway planet, even though I lived on it, albeit as a two-
year-old. My parents subscribed to Life, so the issue probably sat in the
big pile in our den for a stretch of my childhood. Life magazine was a
mass medium in 1957, with a circulation of 5.7 million.
“Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” in which “a New York banker goes to
Mexico’s mountains to participate in the age-old rituals of Indians who
chew strange growths that produce visions,” opened on a spread with a
full-page color photograph of a Mazatec woman turning a mushroom
over a smoky fire and goes on for no fewer than fifteen pages. The
headline is the first known reference to “magic mushrooms,” a phrase
that, it turns out, was coined not by a stoned hippie but by a Time-Life
headline writer.
“We chewed and swallowed these acrid mushrooms, saw visions, and
emerged from the experience awestruck,” Wasson tells us, somewhat
breathlessly, in the first paragraph. “We had come from afar to attend a
mushroom rite but had expected nothing so staggering as the virtuosity of
the performing curanderas [healers] and the astonishing effects of the
mushrooms. [The photographer] and I were the first white men in
recorded history to eat the divine mushrooms, which for centuries had
been a secret of certain Indian peoples living far from the great world in
southern Mexico.”
Wasson then proceeds to tell the improbable tale of how someone like
him, “a banker by occupation,” would end up eating magic mushrooms in
the dirt-floored basement of a thatch-roofed, adobe-walled home in a
Oaxacan town so remote it could only be reached by means of an eleven-
hour trek through the mountains by mule.
The story begins in 1927, during Wasson’s honeymoon in the Catskills.
During an afternoon stroll in the autumn woods, his bride, a Russian
physician named Valentina, spotted a patch of wild mushrooms, before
which “she knelt in poses of adoration.” Wasson knew nothing of “those
putrid, treacherous excrescences” and was alarmed when Valentina