I’ll be upfront about something. When I was in my late teens I was curious about mind expansion. I think a lot of people are, though most won’t admit it. The mushrooms were part of that curiosity, though at the time it was more about the experience than understanding what I was actually dealing with. I know what I like, and I’ve always wanted to understand things from the inside out. That hasn’t changed.
What has changed is the science.
In the 1950s and 60s psilocybin, the active compound in magic mushrooms, was being studied seriously as a therapeutic tool. Researchers were calling it a miracle drug. It was showing genuine results with alcoholism, addiction, depression and anxiety. The research was serious, the scientists were serious, and the results were hard to ignore.
Then it got classified as a controlled substance and the whole thing went underground. Forced underground, which if you’ve been paying attention to this series is a very fungi thing to do. The research stopped. The conversation stopped. Decades of potential progress, gone.
Sound familiar? It should. It’s the same pattern as everything else in the fungi kingdom. Hidden, suppressed, misunderstood, dismissed. And then, when conditions are right, it fruits again overnight as if it was always there.
Because it was.
In the last decade the research has come back and it has come back seriously. Clinical trials at Johns Hopkins, Imperial College London, NYU. Psilocybin being studied for treatment resistant depression, PTSD, addiction, end of life anxiety in terminal cancer patients. The results coming out of these trials are, in some cases, remarkable. Patients reporting that a single guided experience changed how they related to their illness, to their fear of death, to their sense of self. One researcher described participants transcending their primary identification with their bodies and returning with a profound acceptance they hadn’t been able to find through years of conventional treatment.
Michael Pollan, whose book How to Change Your Mind I’d recommend without hesitation, writes about LSD, which was derived from ergot, a parasitic fungus that grows on rye, restoring a childlike immediacy to experience. A sense of wonder. Seeing everything as if for the first time. That’s not the language of a drug study. That’s the language of someone trying to describe something that doesn’t fit neatly into existing categories.
Some researchers have suggested we call these compounds entheogens, from the Greek meaning divine within. Others prefer psychedelic, also Greek, meaning mind manifesting. Either way the language people reach for when trying to describe what these fungi do to human consciousness keeps bumping up against the limits of ordinary words. Journey. Expansion. Oneness. Ego death. These aren’t the words of science. They’re the words of people trying to describe something science hasn’t fully caught up with yet.
What I find most interesting, and this is the bit that tied everything together for me when I was researching this properly, is that indigenous cultures across the world already knew all of this. African and South American shamans have been using mushrooms medicinally and ceremonially for thousands of years. The Aztecs called psilocybin mushrooms teonanacatl, the flesh of God. Archaeological evidence of sophisticated mushroom culture dates back to at least 500BC. This knowledge existed. It was suppressed, largely by the same institutions I mentioned in the Santa Claus post, and we are only now rediscovering what was never actually lost.
Paul Stamets observed that magic mushrooms tend to grow where humans have changed the landscape. Disturbed ground. Altered environments. He asks whether that might be a natural evolutionary response to destruction. Expand the consciousness of the destructor.
I’ve been thinking about that ever since I read it.
Now. Ffyngau doesn’t sell psilocybin mushrooms. Nobody legal does in this country. That’s not what this is about. But I think the story of psychedelic research belongs in any honest conversation about the fungi kingdom because it is part of the same story. The suppression of knowledge, the slow return of understanding, the ancient wisdom that was always there waiting to fruit.
Fungi don’t give up. They go underground and they wait.
Then one day you wake up and they’re everywhere.
May the spores be with you.