How to Change Your Mind

proposed to cook them for dinner. He refused to partake. “Not long
married,” Wasson wrote, “I thought to wake up the next morning a
widower.”
The couple became curious as to how two cultures could hold such
diametrically opposed attitudes toward mushrooms. They soon embarked
on a research project to understand the origins of both “mycophobia” and
“mycophilia,” terms that the Wassons introduced. They concluded that
each Indo-European people is by cultural inheritance either mycophobic
(for example, the Anglo-Saxons, Celts, and Scandinavians) or mycophilic
(the Russians, Catalans, and Slavs) and proposed an explanation for the
powerful feelings in both camps: “Was it not probable that, long ago, long
before the beginnings of written history, our ancestors had worshipped a
divine mushroom? This would explain the aura of the supernatural in
which all fungi seem to be bathed.”* The logical next question presented
itself to the Wassons—“What kind of mushroom was once worshipped,
and why?”—and with that question in hand they embarked on a thirty-
year quest to find the divine mushroom. They hoped to obtain evidence
for the audacious theory that Wasson had developed and that would
occupy him until his death: that the religious impulse in humankind had
been first kindled by the visions inspired by a psychoactive mushroom.
As a prominent financier, R. Gordon Wasson had the resources and
the connections to enlist all manner of experts and scholars in his quest.
One of these was the poet Robert Graves, who shared the Wassons’
interest in the role of mushrooms in history and in the common origins of
the world’s myths and religions. In 1952, Graves sent Wasson a clipping
from a pharmaceutical journal that made reference to a psychoactive
mushroom used by sixteenth-century Mesoamerican Indians. The article
was based on research done in Central America by Richard Evans
Schultes, a Harvard ethnobotanist who studied the uses of psychoactive
plants and fungi by indigenous cultures. Schultes was a revered professor
whom students recall shooting blowguns in class and keeping a basket of
peyote buttons outside his Harvard office; he trained a generation of
American ethnobotanists, including Wade Davis, Mark Plotkin, Michael
Balick, Tim Plowman, and Andrew Weil. Along with Wasson, Schultes is
one of a handful of figures whose role in bringing psychedelics to the
West has gone underappreciated; indeed, some of the first seeds of that
movement have quite literally sat in the Harvard herbarium since the