Psychedelic Mushrooms: Two Key Books for Understanding the New Wave

They emerged millions of years ago, in prehistory, and there are hundreds of thousands of species , of which only a small percentage are known today. It is believed that even before the appearance of Homo sapiens , hominids had visions, mystical experiences, pleasures, terrors, and revelations when consuming them. The most widespread living being on Earth is, in fact, the fungus Armillaria ostoyae , known generically as "honey fungus ," which has lived in the United States for eight thousand years. At the other extreme, unicellular fungi , primarily yeasts, thrive.

On a mushroom trip through the jungle at Palenque, a Mayan site in Mexico, engineer and cultural critic Naief Yehya, driven by his own experience, saw how the plants and nature around him were, in his own words, the living remnants of a pre-human civilization , “debris from a vanished universe from which we emerged and which enabled our existence.”

For Yehya, the disappearance of the human species will leave behind something equivalent: a living world of chemicals and plastics, a new “nature toxic to us but ideal for our successors.”

In his book Planet of the Mushrooms: A Cultural History of Psychedelic Mushrooms (Anagrama), Mexican Naief Yehya, of Syrian-Lebanese origin and based in New York, argues that it is a commonplace to think that after the supposed nuclear or climate apocalypse, when humanity is wiped off the surface of the planet, cockroaches will dominate the Earth and foul waters will rule the gray and pestilent oceans.

“Today, I believe that in this scenario , mushrooms will continue to exist, almost as if nothing had happened , transforming substances, cleansing the world of toxins, poisons, and radioactive materials that they will learn to process and eliminate. The function of mushrooms is to recycle waste both in the earth and in our minds . The imperturbable mycelia will multiply capriciously and continue to produce psilocybin and other psychotropic substances for the beings who come to take our place. It is difficult to question the certainty that this is the planet of mushrooms and we are merely visitors,” concludes the essayist, who traces a history of the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms and LSD from the Stone Age to Silicon Valley.

There's no place on the planet where they don't grow : mushrooms are omnipresent. In another recently published book, El viaje interior. Peyote, hongos, psiconautas (Fondo de Cultura Económica), Uruguayan Guillermo Giucci , a doctor in Latin American Literature, presents a wide historical and cultural spectrum: from Artaud's experience with peyote among the Tarahumara Indians to the encounters of Robert Wasson, banker and amateur mycologist, with the Mazatec shaman María Sabina and the rituals with "the holy children," and the journey to Mexico by the beatniks as a liberating rite for their artistic and political expressions, nuanced by other experiences such as those of Aldous Huxley, William S. Burroughs, Antonio Escohotado and Carlos Castaneda.

“Without underestimating or overestimating the entheogenic risks, limited by the analytical demands of cultural history, an academic discipline that finds it difficult to admit ecstatic states as a legitimate mode of knowledge, I intended to convey something of this feeling of adventure and transcendence in this book,” writes Giucci, who takes a position from the outset , vindicating the term “entheogen,” coined in the late 1970s to replace terms considered pejorative, such as “hallucinogenic” or “psychedelic.”

The American continent, in fact, is the place of origin of four-fifths of the known psychotropic plants , which are concentrated mainly in Mesoamerica and the western Amazon.

“Unlike hallucination, which is an objectless perception in which personal credulity is confused with reality, when taking visionary drugs, the subject discerns that he or she is experiencing a vision . This visionary characteristic suggests that, in the tribal and pre-industrial world, psychotropic plants were considered sacred and had a sapiential significance,” Giucci reflects.

And he expands: " The modern concept of drugs is a non-scientific one , established on the basis of moral or political evaluations that imply norms or prohibitions. Thus, it is important to pay attention to entheogenic practices as channels of communication with the sacred and the medicinal, to counteract the perception of rituals as a praxis of drug addiction, individualistic, profane, and psychedelic."

Both essays review a vast bibliography on the so-called "intelligence" of the mushroom ; they trace keys to the relationship between psychoactive substances, divinity, therapy, and academia; the legal and the forbidden; the biological, the philosophical, and the neurological aspects of the link between mushrooms and humans; there are stories about shamans, witches, and scientists; adventures of anthropologists, chemists, and artists in search of "magic"; Albert Hofmann as the father of synthesized psychedelia and the first LSD revolution; the various revelations of the mind, existential journeys, and notes on "psychedelic corporatization" and notions about virtual reality, augmented reality, and psychedelic reality; and, furthermore, the centrality of Mexico as a territory of spirituality and a path toward "sacred mushrooms" and "the entheogenic experience," differentiated from the use of so-called recreational drugs.

As narrated in the chapter "Cuernavaca, 1960," when Giucci reconstructs Timothy Leary's adventure in that city, located 80 kilometers south of Mexico City, capital of the state of Morelos. Leary was a promising psychology professor at one of the world's top universities when he had his first experience with hallucinogenic mushrooms in Cuernavaca, in August 1960.

Although he was about to turn 40, this was the first psychedelic experience of his life. He hadn't even tried marijuana, only alcohol. " No one could have imagined that just a few years later he would become the guru of the counterculture , the champion of the therapeutic and spiritual benefits of psychedelic drugs," says Giucci, citing in historical context the fact that in June 1960, the oral contraceptive pill had been formally approved in the United States, a catalyst for the social and sexual revolution alongside anti-war demonstrations, the return to community life, openness and tolerance toward racial diversity, and class-based social justice.

“We might assume that the unifying principle of the various consumers of these substances was freedom ,” reads Planet of the Mushrooms.

Meanwhile, for Naief Yehya, and far from that hippie and lysergic dream of the sixties and seventies, recent research in the field of psychedelic substances reveals a peculiar characteristic in the era called cyberdelia: it has distanced itself from the countercultural vision of the past and has acquired a pragmatic, individualistic and, in a certain way, right-wing hue .

“ The comeback of psychedelic substances also contains a libertarian element in the sense that it is used by the right, that is, as an expression of rebellion against the state but also the community, as a conservative ideology,” writes Yehya, giving some data to corroborate his hypothesis, such as the founding of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies or MAPS, by Rick Doblin, who led a movement to legalize treatments for veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress with psychoactive substances, and received funding from the extreme right.

In this regard , one of Donald Trump's main campaign donors, shareholder Rebekah Mercer, donated at least $1 million to MAPS . Several European pro-hallucination groups have also been linked to ultranationalist and alt-right forces.

The radical traditionalist journal TYR: Myth, Culture, Tradition , named after a Norse god of war, publishes translations by the Italian fascist mystic Julius Evola and the philosopher Alain de Benoist, alongside articles by the German ethnopharmacologist and drug guru Christian Rätsch and an interview with Timothy Leary’s colleague, the psychologist and writer Ralph Metzner, on shamanic traditions in early Europe. Two in-depth and contentious reads, without certainty or idealization , on mushroom culture.

Both The Planet of Mushrooms and The Inner Journey are two texts of cultural analysis, transmission of experiences and scientific dissemination , two essays that while they bring a thorough collection of research and interpretation on the world of fungi and its link with perception and mental functions, the development of culture, technology and religions, they are also dissociated from the times in which they are consumed, exploring prejudices and imaginaries, conflicting political discourses and even their scientific findings, since they can contribute to the success of treatments for mental disorders.

Since ancient times and the movement of fungi across all continents over great distances, and given the growing interest in the wonderful world of fungi in documentaries, fiction and recent literature, both books are a new opportunity for knowledge to account for their unusual journey, their apparent disappearance and their “rediscovery” , of the cultural explosion they caused in the second half of the 20th century and the impact on the present with changes in ideologies, in the era of artificial intelligence and “post-humanism”, of those beings that are neither bacteria nor plants nor animals but have their own kingdom, the fungi, one of the most unknown to science.

Planet of the Mushrooms , by Naief Yehya (Anagrama) and The Inner Journey , by Guillermo Giucci (FCE).