Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom [Paperback]

Undoubtedly the most well researched and exhaustive cultural history of magic mushrooms. The book also covers the main figures and events in the history of psychedelic drugs and the drug counter culture. Even the most hardcore mushroom enthusiast will learn something they didn't already know from this book, it goes way deeper than anything I've seen before on the subject and debunks many of the myths surrounding both Psilocybe and Amanita mushrooms (although the focus of the book is Psilocybe mushrooms).

At times the author may appear excessively cynical as he goes on a mission to debunk as many myths as possible, however it's refreshing to read the views of an anti-prohibitionist mushroom enthusiast, which he obviously is, who does not subscribe to the "entheogen theory of religion" cherished by many - whether you agree with him or not. The author is pretty scathing of Wasson, Leary and many of the other prominent figures of the psychedelic underground (having a soft spot for Terence McKenna but even he doesn't get out of this unscathed) so it will not please everybody in that respect, but essential reading for anyone interested in the history and culture surrounding psychoactive plants and fungi.

This is a pretty comprehensive history of our encounters with magic mushrooms. He's certainly done us a service by digging up many intersting early (and inadvertant) mushroom experiences and deals with one of the key questions (for me at least) about the lack of evidence for traditional ritual psilocybin use in this country (there probably wasn't any!) as well as taking a sympathetic but rigorous look at many other mushroom tales and myths. It's very readable and sets a benchmark for some time to come. Excellent trip, Andy!

Here is a curious and somewhat depressing thing: a cultural history of magic mushrooms with the rigidly anti-psychedelic (not to say anti-philosophic) bias of current reductionist thought. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but this is no dry academic tome: it's a publication that strives for hipness. Like a cop at a rave, Shroom wears all the right gear - the down-with-the-kids title, the hookah-smoking caterpillar on the cover, the frequent references to people "tripping" or being "bemushroomed" - yet can't quite conceal a sneer of distaste. Unusual ideas and perceptions are judged by the blokeish standards of what "normal" people think and feel. This might suffice for a tabloid editorial, but isn't much help if you want to learn anything new.

Andy Letcher is also sweepingly anti-historical. His basic idea is that psychedelics are a recent phenomenon in the West, any speculation about their use by druids or Athenian initiates being pure fantasy. Again, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with this. The problem is that Letcher has decided his thesis in advance, and either shoehorns the facts into it or disregards them altogether. Hence the mycologically exact images on a bronze Gothic door can't be mushrooms or evidence of a hidden cult because the design would never have got past the bishop (would he really have been familiar with the diminutive Liberty Cap?) and because "there was no cult" in any case. Ah, of course. The recent theory concerning the psychedelic nature of prehistoric cave painting, one that even the arch-sceptic John Gray supports in Straw Dogs, is dismissed on account of its being controversial - a stance that would have put paid to Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin.

In a typically glib aside, Letcher says that those early artists might simply "have been bored" (he doesn't suggest why people would risk their lives descending into inaccessible caves in order to sit and doodle). Letcher's attitude towards the past seems to be that, since we can't be sure, we shouldn't even speculate. Once again, fair enough. But to move from lack of certainty to certainty of lack, deriding all theories as not just imaginings but actually "wrong", is a peculiarly dishonest move. Even when it gets to our own era, Shroom struggles to find a good word for psychedelics or their proselytisers. Letcher is a master of the primly disapproving epithet, a rhetorical device that manages to slight people even as they are introduced. Thus the radical psychiatrist R D Laing is "maudlin", Allen Ginsberg is "infamous", and everyone else with the temerity to advance an unorthodox view is somehow "troubled" - as if dissent were synonymous with mental instability.

Ploughing through this outwardly cheery book, I felt as if I were reading a report by some grey Westminster functionary. Whereas Huxley saw that psychedelics simply dilate the reducing valve of consciousness - with all the joys and perils this entails - for Letcher they cause "erratic behaviour" that proves "problematic" to those in authority. He comes across as wholly in thrall to official procedures and opinions, seeming to view the slightest deviation from common sense as irresponsible and implicitly paranoid. And yet to rubbish ideas because they are "provocative", "bizarre" or "far-fetched", in this unmapped terrain above all, is merely to inoculate yourself against discoveries (conversely, the astrophysicist Niels Bohr used to criticise new cosmological theories for being "not crazy enough"). In the end, the book has the distinct stench of a put-up job, a tawdry philosophical whitewash - interesting how it came out shortly after mushrooms were made illegal in this country...