Cultural History Of Shrooms with Andy Letcher
Alisa Nappa
Today we sit down with Andy Letcher to dive into the ethnomycological history of humans and psychedelic mushrooms. Andy published the book "Shroom: a cultural history of the magic mushroom" in 2006 and we chat about common myths and stories that have been circulating around magic mushrooms, shedding light on their veracity.
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TRANSCRIPT
Unknown Speaker 0:12
Alex, welcome, welcome. You are listening to the mushroom revival podcast. This is your host, Alex Dorr, and we are absolutely obsessed with the wonderful, wacky, mysterious world of mushrooms and fungi. We bring on guests and experts from all around the globe to geek out with us and go down this mysterious rabbit hole to try to figure out what the heck is going on with these mysterious wonder, wonderful fungal friends of ours. And today, we have Andy Letcher to talk about his book about magic mushrooms and all things fun going on in the UK. So Andy, how you doing? Man, Yeah, I'm good. Thanks. It's a great pleasure to be here.
Unknown Speaker 0:51
That's always good. It's always good to be amongst fellow mushroom nerds, that's
Unknown Speaker 0:58
for sure. For people who don't know you your book, what you what you got going on? Who is Andy Letcher,
Unknown Speaker 1:07
okay, so I'm, I'm an academic. I'm a Senior Lecturer now at the University of Exeter, teaching on the UK's first postgraduate degree in Psychedelic Studies. It's a postgraduate certificate, but is going to become an MSc.
Unknown Speaker 1:25
So that's super exciting.
Unknown Speaker 1:28
I suppose. I'm a scholar of religion, really,
Unknown Speaker 1:32
but I kind of meander through various disciplines, including history, and you know, I've always had a personal interest in psychedelics since I discovered magic mushrooms when I went to university long, long time ago in the late 1980s
Unknown Speaker 1:48
and I suppose I'm the reason why I'm here is that, gosh, nearly 20 years ago, I wrote this book, shroom, A cultural history of the magic mushroom. And,
Unknown Speaker 2:02
yeah, I've, as I say, I'm fascinated by psychedelics and
Unknown Speaker 2:08
tracing all the developments that are happening, you know, in the psychedelic Renaissance. But my, my sort of personal interest has always been in the fungi, mushrooms. And there's something very compelling, mysterious, weird about the whole kingdom,
Unknown Speaker 2:27
but the fact that you can, you know, eat a few grams of of these mushrooms, and then extraordinary things start happening. I'll never get over that. I i still think it's one of the most extraordinary things.
Unknown Speaker 2:42
And your introduction in university was that sparked by your own
Unknown Speaker 2:49
introspective, entheogenic journey and experimentation? Was it more academic of uncovering books or papers on ethnomycology, ethnobiology?
Unknown Speaker 3:01
Did they both kind of happen simultaneously, one after the other? Or, yeah, what was kind of your origin story? Yeah, it's a great question.
Unknown Speaker 3:11
Well, I mean, I had a I had a very sort of idyllic English childhood, English countryside childhood, so I spent a lot of time playing, rivers and streams and woodlands and what have you.
Unknown Speaker 3:25
And looking back on it now, I would say I had numerous experiences, maybe nature, mystical type experiences as a child. So I've always been interested in
Unknown Speaker 3:38
the hutrey, as McKenna would say, Terence. McKenna would say the weird, the wonderful,
Unknown Speaker 3:43
and getting up to university was something of a kind of
Unknown Speaker 3:47
a moment of liberation for me, escaping from the constraints of school. And I discovered two things. I discovered psychedelics because I started hanging around with these hippies and nerdy wells. And I discovered that people also wrote about psychedelics. And in the university library there was a copy of Roger aims
Unknown Speaker 4:09
les champignon, Alisa NAND, please forgive my French pronunciation, and Robert Gordon wasn't Persephone his quest. And I, you know, the penny dropped. And I Oh, my God. People write about this stuff. I want to write a book about psychedelics. And it took a while, but, yeah, eventually I did so.
Unknown Speaker 4:33
So, yeah, it happened together and, and this was the, this was the late 1980s
Unknown Speaker 4:40
so, you know, you have to,
Unknown Speaker 4:43
I suspect you've probably got quite a young demographic listening to this. I don't know, but back in the 1980s there's no internet all all ages. Yeah, okay, so, so some of your listeners will remember a time before the internet, not just a time before social media, but a time before the internet, before emails and.
Unknown Speaker 5:01
Um, and so psychedelics were really very underground. You had to seek them out. You had to, you know, look for the people who were the likely, the likely kinds. And luckily, you know, in those days, is fairly obvious. They had long hair, dressed in bright colors.
Unknown Speaker 5:20
But yeah, it was very much more underground, and it did have this feeling of being part of some kind of secret. It's
Unknown Speaker 5:30
almost like a secret initiation into some kind of subculture.
Unknown Speaker 5:35
And, you know,
Unknown Speaker 5:38
it had its good parts, it had its bad parts and and I think that side of things has probably disappeared now with the psychedelic Renaissance, but for a young, 19 year old just up at university, it was desperately exciting and romantic.
Unknown Speaker 5:54
Yeah, and you know, even,
Unknown Speaker 5:58
like 10 years ago for me,
Unknown Speaker 6:01
there was the internet and but, yeah, it's been, it's been interesting to watch the psychedelic Renaissance evolve even in the last 10 years, five years, couple years, you know, when I, when I first started in it, studying the world of mushrooms, like there wasn't
Unknown Speaker 6:19
cultivation techniques widely available. Or, you know, there's like, PF tech and, you know, from a long, long time ago, and Reddit forums of people like, oh, I tried this weird thing. And here's how to jerry rig a glove box. And, you know, they're all kind of terrible techniques, to be honest. And then now it's like people are publicly making, you know, Instagram ads and like, Oh, here's your all in one psychedelic grow kit. And it's just, like, really easy for people nowadays, and it's, it's been interesting to watch the evolution. And then, you know, from your experience as well, I feel like it, it was really hard.
Unknown Speaker 7:00
And then each year that passes is just getting really easy to access that world and and replicate it and to cultivate, you know, mushrooms and all these different things just becoming really easy for people and less of a taboo thing. And more,
Unknown Speaker 7:18
yeah, I mean, the laws are changing, and I did have a question about,
Unknown Speaker 7:23
specifically, the the laws in the UK. I think it was like page one or two of your book. You're talking about how in 2000 I think it was five, how the laws changed in the UK, around mushrooms and up to 2000 I think it was five or four,
Unknown Speaker 7:43
there was, like, a legal loophole. And I would love to hear what that legal loophole was. I think it was like you could if it was fresh and not dry, then it was okay. But I know your book came out a year later, so I'm just curious, like, what, what was that legal loophole, and how did that change in the UK, yeah. So it was all down to a court case in 1976
Unknown Speaker 8:06
and this guy in reading this city down there, London, he got busted for the possession of cannabis.
Unknown Speaker 8:16
And while the police were searching his house, they found some dried mushrooms. And so they they thought, right, we'll prosecute you for this, because psilocybin was by then, illegal under the, I think it was the 1971 miss misuse of drugs act. But I'm doing this from memory.
Unknown Speaker 8:37
And when it came to court,
Unknown Speaker 8:39
his defense said that possession of a mushroom was not the same thing as possession of psilocybin.
Unknown Speaker 8:47
And you know, because what about, you know, a mycologist who just wants to go out and do a field foray and collect mushrooms? Are they going to be prosecuted for going out and and doing mycology. And so
Unknown Speaker 9:03
I think he was found guilty on the cannabis charge, but acquitted on the on the mushroom charge. And so this opened up this gray area in the law where it was the intention to prepare, or the act of preparation the mushrooms, to consume them for their psychedelic effects, that rendered them illegal. So you could, you could have them dried, or no, you could have them fresh, dried was often regarded as as as the first step in preparation.
Unknown Speaker 9:32
So for the most part, people were still getting busted and prosecuted, until the late 1990s with Tony Blair's government, Tony Blair wanted to appear kind of cool, cool Britannia, all that kind of 90s stuff. And for whatever reason, they decided, or they told the police, don't bother prosecuting people.
Unknown Speaker 9:56
Don't bother exploiting this.
Unknown Speaker 10:00
Poll, and it suddenly meant that cultivated mushrooms were on sale everywhere. And I mean everywhere. You know, every little town your corner shop had a little punnet of cubensis that people could buy. And then I think there was an election coming up, and the government got cold feet, and they suddenly thought, oh my god, you know, we're leaving an open goal for the
Unknown Speaker 10:23
for the right? So let's, let's close that one down so they,
Unknown Speaker 10:29
they made the possession of any part of a fungus containing psilocybin illegal, but that still means it's okay to possess spores,
Unknown Speaker 10:39
as I understand it. Spores don't contain any psilocybin or active ingredients, so again, it is as soon as you start cultivating them and allow them to germinate, then they become a Class A offense with some pretty stiff penalties. But it is my sense, and I don't, please don't quote me on this and don't use it as a legal defense, but it is my sense that these days the police are just too busy and and really, you know, they're not. They're not chasing down psychedelic users in the way that they once were.
Unknown Speaker 11:13
That may or may not be the case, but that's my feeling,
Unknown Speaker 11:18
right, right? Yeah. I mean, we're starting to see that in the US, different different states and cities, decriminalizing it or making it the police's last
Unknown Speaker 11:30
priority so they're not able to spend any funds on it. And, I mean, yeah, rightfully so. It's,
Unknown Speaker 11:40
I mean, there's like that one story, and I think Amsterdam where someone fell off a balcony, but, yeah, it's, you know, we know it's much safer than alcohol or any alternative substance. And that's one of those very
Unknown Speaker 11:57
it's one of those myths that is just so stubborn, the idea that psychedelics make you think you want to fly and make you want to jump out of a window. I would love to get statistics on the number of injuries through falling under the influence of alcohol. I'm sure they are staggering, right? Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 12:17
So I want to go into, you know, it's a good segue. And I want to kind of go into your
Unknown Speaker 12:25
your research on this book, but, but I know you have a whole section of your book about Amanita muscaria, and it's a very kind of controversial mushroom where it has a ton of folklore and stories, but, you know, it's not really well used by a lot of people. And it seems like the and we have these crazy, outlandish stories about Santa Claus and then Vikings being in, being another one, which kind of both have a root in,
Unknown Speaker 12:56
like levitation or flying and, yeah. So, so what's your take on those two stories, and do they hold up to any truth? Are they kind of nice stories, but they're, that's all they are. Kind of curious what you came up came across in your research, right? Yeah. So,
Unknown Speaker 13:16
I mean, what a beautiful mushroom, the fly Garrick and it, it's beguiling, and it's the one mushroom we all recognize, and, and we see it repeatedly illustrated in children's literature. So it's the one mushroom we all know. And, and when you see one, I mean, it's, it stops you in your tracks. It's, it's got a presence. And then on top of this is this fact that it is psychoactive.
Unknown Speaker 13:41
Technically, it's not a psychedelic. It works on different neurotransmitters to the classic psychedelics like psilocybin and acid DMT,
Unknown Speaker 13:53
and it contains a range of different alkaloids, as I'm sure many of your listeners will know, which means that its effects are very unpredictable, and it needs to be prepared in the right way to lessen the toxicity and or the unpleasant effects and to maximize the pleasant effects, all of which means that it's, I think, a minority of people who experiment with the fly Garrick.
Unknown Speaker 14:19
But I think, because it's such a striking mushroom,
Unknown Speaker 14:22
this opens it up to myth making. And
Unknown Speaker 14:28
during, well, really the from the 17th century onwards, explorers and as the Russian Empire advanced eastward, people started encountering two things. They started encountering shamanism in Siberia, and also the use of the flygaric mushroom, and the extent to which shamans were using flygaric is moot. I think it is generally over, over exaggerated, and there's certain amount of evidence that shamans look down on anyone.
Unknown Speaker 15:00
Who used the fly Garrick and thought that they weren't sufficiently powerful as shamans that they needed this sort of crutch.
Unknown Speaker 15:08
But anyway, the stories about the shamans and the stories about the fly Garrick started traveling back through Europe, and one story in particular grabbed people's attention, and that's the fact that some of the active ingredients are excreted through the kidneys, and you can get high by drinking the urine of someone who's intoxicated on the mushroom. And this, you know, this was both repellent and exciting and and so all these stories were circulating and circulating and circulating.
Unknown Speaker 15:38
So for example, sorry, this is turning into a very long winded answer, but I will get to I will get to
Unknown Speaker 15:46
Lewis and the Vikings.
Unknown Speaker 15:49
Lewis Carroll, who wrote Alice in Wonderland, was almost certainly inspired by the stories of the fly Garrick,
Unknown Speaker 15:56
changing people's perception of size, but it's almost certain that he had never consumed one himself. So that story, the story about the mushroom, the story about shamanism, the story about this exotic other world beyond the Ural Mountains, was what sort of captivated the Western imagination. So every every Christmas, this story gets recirculated,
Unknown Speaker 16:23
that Santa Claus is actually a fly Garrick mushroom. You know, he's got the red and white
Unknown Speaker 16:29
costume. He comes down the chimney with flying reindeer bringing gifts from the upper world.
Unknown Speaker 16:36
I would love it to be historically true, but I think there's scant evidence for it, and much stronger evidence against it, namely.
Unknown Speaker 16:48
Well, first of all, the idea was invented by the poet Robert Graves, first published in 1972
Unknown Speaker 16:55
and graves was not one to let facts get in the way of a good story. Who privileged poetic imagination over scholarly knowledge.
Unknown Speaker 17:05
So he's using that kind of poetic analogical thinking to come up with an idea that seems like it could be true, but there's no evidence that shamans dressed in red and white, nor that they, during their trances left their tent through the smoke hole in the chimney,
Unknown Speaker 17:26
nor that they thought of reindeer, spirits supplying reindeer and so on and so forth. And really, a lot of the those stories about Father Christmas, Santa Claus, they come from Clark Clements, Clark Clement Moore's very famous poem to us the night before Christmas and all through the house, you know, the one. And he just invented all this stuff, the flying reindeer.
Unknown Speaker 17:50
All the names of the reindeer, people forget that in that poem, Santa Claus is tiny. He's diminutive, as are the reindeer. So really, yeah, yeah, it's people overlook that.
Unknown Speaker 18:04
So it's a lovely story.
Unknown Speaker 18:08
Having said, it's not historically true, I see no reason why we can't reinvent Santa Claus
Unknown Speaker 18:14
as a fly Garret eating Shaman. I mean, that seems a thoroughly good story for our times, and one that is opposed to the great machinations of late modern, late modern capitalism. So I'm all for reinventing Santa Claus as long as people realize that there's there's no historical evidence. And I'm afraid the same is true for the Vikings, who this idea that they they fly mushrooms to go into their berserker trance that was invented by 19th Century Scholars on the basis of no evidence whatsoever.
Unknown Speaker 18:48
But I think what's interesting about the mushroom is that it it's the mushroom that nobody takes but everyone is adamant about the stories, and I've got a sort of research project going on the back burner where I'm actually just collecting stories from people who are using the mushroom now and trying to get a handle on what the experience means for them and how they interpret the experience, what the contexts are that they're consuming the mushroom, which I find much more Interesting than endlessly rehashing these these old stories
Unknown Speaker 19:22
so similar, you know,
Unknown Speaker 19:25
with this fascination of amended muscaria comes Gordon Wasson, and you know his idea that amid the muscaria is actually Soma in the rig Vedas. And what I always thought was weird, and it's been many years since I looked into this or studied this, but
Unknown Speaker 19:46
it seems and correct me, if I'm wrong, that
Unknown Speaker 19:50
we know that his first trip was was funded by the CIA and the MK Ultra time, and this was kind of an MK Ultra.
Unknown Speaker 20:00
Um, funded trip to study psilocybin and the effects on people, and came back, wrote that lifetime article, and was kind of a huge advocate for for philosophy mushrooms. And then kind of it seemed to me and like he kind of switched his narrative, and suddenly he was not a proponent of philosophy, and was like, Oh no, no, it's all aminuker, and that's, that's soma and and everyone kind of look away from philosophy. I'm just kind of curious what you know in your research of Gordon was in like, what, what your opinion on that narrative is? And,
Unknown Speaker 20:42
yeah, like, what, what you came across in your research?
Unknown Speaker 20:47
So, yes, I think it was 1968 the year I was born.
Unknown Speaker 20:52
Watson publishes his book on Soma, arguing that Soma was the flag, Eric. And
Unknown Speaker 21:00
for those who don't know,
Unknown Speaker 21:03
Soma is a sort of deity, slash plant, slash drug, slash drink, that's mentioned in the Rig Veda, this ancient Indian text, and it's completely unclear what Soma is. It seems that there are instructions for preparing Soma that it needs to be dried and crushed and
Unknown Speaker 21:24
steeped in milk and filtered through lamb's wool.
Unknown Speaker 21:28
But nobody really knows what it is or what it was
Unknown Speaker 21:32
and wasn't in his book. Super vague, yeah. I mean, it's poetry, right? And clearly it, yeah, yeah, clearly it meant something to the people who wrote it, who didn't feel the need to lay out, you know, a detailed recipe of what they were talking about.
Unknown Speaker 21:49
Yeah, I've read the passages, and it's almost impossible to decipher what it is, which is, you know, I think what spurred a lot of these theories, because it's yeah, it's like, we'll never know.
Unknown Speaker 22:03
It's that vague. We're quiet and and Watson's argument was based on inference. He said that the passages in the Rig Veda both describe the mushroom, and they describe the preparation of the mushroom and the effects of the mushroom. Well, that's in the eye of the beholder. That's an interpretation. There's no There's no clinching evidence. It's not like, you know, fossilized remains of fly agaric mushrooms were found or
Unknown Speaker 22:33
and, and, of course, there's been a minor, minor industry of people arguing the case for all manner of different candidates for Soma, including cannabis, opium. Terence McKenna argued psilocybin mushrooms because he thought flygaric was an underwhelming experience.
Unknown Speaker 22:51
Pergamon harmela, on and on it goes. I mean, my my own theory, is that whatever it was was driven to extinction by,
Unknown Speaker 23:01
you know, by people over harvesting. But I've got no evidence for that whatsoever. It's just a pet theory. It may have been some combination of plants. It may have been a metaphor.
Unknown Speaker 23:14
Who knows, right? But,
Unknown Speaker 23:17
but
Unknown Speaker 23:18
in regards to wassam, I mean, he's such a interesting character and a complex character. And I think he, he alludes a simple reading,
Unknown Speaker 23:31
you know, he,
Unknown Speaker 23:33
he always was, I think, a banker. And, you know, he saw the world through a banker's eyes, and he was about making money, and he saw opportunities to make money, and he took them. I mean, that that was in his DNA, right? But I think he also desperately wanted to be a scholar, and wanted to be remembered as a scholar, as someone who discovered something, he made a great discovery, and released it to the world. And he was, he was sort of bound up with some very old ideas. When I say old ideas, I mean 19th century ideas about religion,
Unknown Speaker 24:11
and that religion had to have had an origin, an origin point. There was some impulse that led humanity to be religious. And he thought it was, it was a mushroom cult. And he thought, when he went to woutler in the 1950s when he met Maria Sabina, that he'd found this last living Priestess of the long lost mushroom cult. You know, it's all very Indiana Jones, isn't it?
Unknown Speaker 24:38
And unfortunately, you know, by today's standards, his scholarship was, was not good enough. By by Edwardian and Victorian standards, it was perfectly adequate.
Unknown Speaker 24:49
But it doesn't, it doesn't pass muster now.
Unknown Speaker 24:54
And of course, the problem is that his research had profound effects on the people.
Unknown Speaker 25:00
He studied on Maria Sabina, whose life was absolutely turned upside down by that, what we would now regard as a colonial encounter, and an encounter based on a very asymmetrical power relationship of a very wealthy white traveler with the knowledge the power to write about this indigenous person she had no idea what she was letting herself in for and her life was was dramatically changed by that encounter, and I think probably not for the good, not for the better. So he's a he's a complicated character. Without him, absolutely the psychedelic 60s would have, probably would have happened, but it would have taken a very different course. He alerted so many people to magic mushrooms through that. That article.
Unknown Speaker 25:49
Tim Leary, Terence, McKenna, you know that the list goes on,
Unknown Speaker 25:55
and yet it comes at a cost. And I do like this idea that some people are circulating that
Unknown Speaker 26:02
every mushroom trip, whether it's
Unknown Speaker 26:06
five dried grams of cubensis that you've grown yourself, or Liberty caps that you've gone and gone and picked, or whatever it is, whether it's pure psilocybin in a in a clinical trial somewhere, all of those trips owe a debt to Maria Sabina, who paid high price and and I always think it's good to just remember that. And you know, if you're the kind of person who likes to say a prayer or offer something, then I think a nod to Maria Sabina is is well worth doing.
Unknown Speaker 26:39
And,
Unknown Speaker 26:42
you know, it's been, what, almost 10 years since, 20 years since you published your book. 2006
Unknown Speaker 26:51
Yeah, so Yeah, almost 20 years now. And I'm curious for for people who haven't read your book,
Unknown Speaker 27:01
and also maybe, maybe things in the past almost 20 years that you've come across about magic mushrooms, that you you think
Unknown Speaker 27:13
people should know, or you think are
Unknown Speaker 27:17
you know, just like we're talking about kind of these reoccurring narratives that or stories that are untrue, but are just circulated a bunch that you want to debunk, but, but if you could say, you know, like a few key takeaways for people that,
Unknown Speaker 27:35
whether they're completely new to magic mushrooms, or maybe have been, you know, studying them For for many years and just have these, these false stories in their brain. Yeah, what? What key takeaways would you impart with them? Well, I think I would. I would just preface that by saying, you know, I, I was and remain, a psychedelic enthusiast. And the reason for writing the book was not just to debunk myths. It was to try and
Unknown Speaker 28:03
at the time, every book I picked up repeated the same stories, almost like a mantra. You know, about Hoffman's bicycle ride, about Gordon Wasson, yada yada, yada yada. And as a scholar, I was trained to always go back to the sources and not just repeat things and, and I wanted to stand psychedelic history, or this particular bit of it, on the evidence and, and, and come clean if, if there wasn't evidence to support some of these claims.
Unknown Speaker 28:36
So that's the sort of preamble, one takeaway I would want to impart to people is just that there is a history.
Unknown Speaker 28:46
You're not the first people to take psychedelics. People have been taking psychedelics before you, and there's a lot to be learned by reading about history.
Unknown Speaker 28:56
So you know, one of the things that some people claim is that there is an ancient use of psilocybin mushroom consumption in Europe
Unknown Speaker 29:08
and and there is perhaps inferential evidence, but there is no categorical evidence that may yet turn up.
Unknown Speaker 29:18
But the problem is that mushrooms don't preserve well in the archeological record, and so if someone says that the wavy line on a passage grave in Neolithic Ireland
Unknown Speaker 29:29
was a psychedelic vision, that's an inference, and you've got no evidence for it.
Unknown Speaker 29:37
What else? Well, another interesting thing is that people have known about psychedelic mushrooms for two, 300 years in Europe, the first mushroom trip, recorded mushroom trip in Britain was 1799, but it was accidental, and the person who did it didn't know what was happening to them. They thought they'd been poisoned. So.
Unknown Speaker 30:00
Weird has happened after consuming a mushroom, it must have been a toad store,
Unknown Speaker 30:06
and so they didn't have a good time. Now, that's really interesting to me why we didn't see a romantic era psychedelic
Unknown Speaker 30:14
moment. Because they had opium. They had all nitrous oxide. They certainly had a language to describe non ordinary experiences, and yet the experiences that were engendered by mushrooms were not regarded as worthwhile or worth repeating. So that's interesting.
Unknown Speaker 30:35
I'm also, I'm super interested in Robert Graves. This
Unknown Speaker 30:42
this poet. He's known as a British poet,
Unknown Speaker 30:48
just because he was so instrumental in making the psychedelic 60s happen. He alerted Gordon Wasson to the presence of psychedelic mushrooms in Mexico.
Unknown Speaker 30:59
He alerted a British readership of the fact that there was psychedelic mushrooms growing here. And
Unknown Speaker 31:08
he had two psychedelic experiences himself,
Unknown Speaker 31:12
one with mushrooms, one with psilocybin, with Gordon Wasson and wrote about them in they're not very well known his drug writings because they're buried in a expensive and unread tome called his Oxford addresses on poetry, but it's a bit classic bit of trick literature.
Unknown Speaker 31:33
So I think, yeah, really it's, it's just alerting people to the fact that there is this interesting history.
Unknown Speaker 31:41
There were people doing experiments on artists in in Paris in the 1950s giving them mushrooms and seeing what they painted
Unknown Speaker 31:52
again. You know, all these, all this stuff has happened, and people can forget about it and think that nothing happened before 2006
Unknown Speaker 32:01
and then, of course, you know,
Unknown Speaker 32:04
I was part of a British psychedelic underground in the 80s and 90s, and it was a great time to be alive and very exciting and
Unknown Speaker 32:15
dangerous, and we did silly things that I wouldn't encourage anyone to do it's definitely not my kids,
Unknown Speaker 32:23
but we did them. We made all the mistakes
Unknown Speaker 32:28
and and I think I often say this, that psychedelics have become a serious business, serious because we're talking about using them to cure people of some very pernicious and horrible illnesses, and a serious business, because people are hoping to make a lot of money out of it. And there is this other playful, trickster, prankster reside to psychedelics that I think is a very important part of psychedelic culture.
Unknown Speaker 32:54
And so moving into this new world of
Unknown Speaker 33:00
I don't know what number of psychedelic Renaissance we're in now. It
Unknown Speaker 33:05
seems like we've been around the block quite a few times, and we're doing it again. And yeah, it just like you said, there's a lot of studies coming out. There's a lot of people who, just like Gordon Wasson, have that banker mentality of, like, how much money can I make from this? And yeah, there's there's people that have been in the psychedelic culture for a really long time. There's people that just started yesterday and starting a new micro dosing business today. And you know, all these different things going on, but it seems like with social media, with the internet, it's, it's really exploding very fast.
Unknown Speaker 33:44
So what's your opinion on the evolving psychedelic world
Unknown Speaker 33:49
around the world, and where do you hope it to go?
Unknown Speaker 33:56
Hmm, well, I suppose, I suppose my perspective is, is somewhat limited by the fact that I'm in the UK, and as far as we're concerned, we're about 20 years behind America in terms of drug reform.
Unknown Speaker 34:11
You know, we still have a lot of politicians standing up wanting drugs to be illegal and condemning drug use. So
Unknown Speaker 34:19
and I'm aware things are moving very fast.
Unknown Speaker 34:23
I mean, although in my book,
Unknown Speaker 34:28
I sort of, I'm quite critical of Terence McKenna's ideas, he was a huge influence on me as a young man, and I still enjoy listening to his his raps. And
Unknown Speaker 34:40
one idea that always really appealed to me was this idea of the archaic revival, that
Unknown Speaker 34:46
psychedelic use was somehow about reorienting our attention away from the human concerns to our relationship with the non human.
Unknown Speaker 34:58
And I'm not.
Unknown Speaker 35:00
If you use this language, but I would use the language of animism and and we have these extant cultures who are animistic cultures who use psychedelics. They're not pristine. They're their traditions of use change and have changed in response to Western incursions. But nonetheless, I think
Unknown Speaker 35:26
there is, there is something to be said about
Unknown Speaker 35:30
framing psychedelic use as something that can change the way we see the world at this time of ecological crisis.
Unknown Speaker 35:39
And
Unknown Speaker 35:41
yeah, yeah, I still, I'm still signed up to the archaic revival, this idea that perhaps there's something fundamental to being human that is some deep, soulful connection to the non human that we can find, again, through psychedelics and in all the all the sort of hype about
Unknown Speaker 36:02
clinical trials and yada yada, yada, yada yada, that's great, but I would love people to just step outside and
Unknown Speaker 36:12
don't look at a tree.
Unknown Speaker 36:15
Yeah, totally, no, I tell people all the time,
Unknown Speaker 36:20
you don't even need to ingest magic mushrooms. They're,
Unknown Speaker 36:25
they're a portal, but it's the same portal that you can take just walking in the woods or breathing, meditating,
Unknown Speaker 36:34
you know, it's the reason why experience setting meditators say, yeah, it takes you to the same place. You know, it's it's just that, that remembering of our synergy with with the universe, right? And,
Unknown Speaker 36:51
yeah, I agree. That's a really, really good point. And thank you for saying that.
Unknown Speaker 36:57
I wish we can go on forever. It sounds like there's a million portals that we can take. Unfortunately, I do have a meeting in two minutes, but
Unknown Speaker 37:07
people follow your work. It's been, yeah, it's been great, a lot of great conversation starters that I wish we could dive deeper and deeper into, but,
Unknown Speaker 37:17
but we're just teasing the audience to get your book and deeper into your work. But so where can people buy your book? Where can people follow you and what you're up to now, my book is available at all good booksellers. I think it's still in print.
Unknown Speaker 37:34
I I'm I have a dead blog that I haven't written anything for years. I am on Instagram as the Bosque man
Unknown Speaker 37:43
and and you can find me at Exeter University, as I say, where I teach on this
Unknown Speaker 37:50
PG search, psychedelics, mind medicine, culture, and that's going to become an MSc soon. So you can find me there.
Unknown Speaker 38:01
Well, thanks Andy and thank you for everyone for tuning in and shrooming in for another episode of the mushroom revival podcast. We could not do without you. If you learned something cool in this episode, please tell your friend, tell a family member, start the conversation. I think this is also a collective conscious revival as well, of having really cool conversations about what's going on in nature and how we can connect further to nature in different ways, ideally mushrooms, but it goes way beyond mushrooms. If
Unknown Speaker 38:33
you want to support the show, we don't have a direct way that you can financially support. We don't have a Patreon or anything like that, but we do have a mother brand, mushroom revival, and we have a whole line of organic, functional mushroom supplements, gummies, powders, tinctures, capsules. If you
Unknown Speaker 38:49
don't want to spend any money, that's totally fine. We have a giveaway going on so you can win a free mushroom goody bag. Once a month, we pick a winner, and if you do, we have a special coupon code just for listeners, and that code is pod treat.
Unknown Speaker 39:07
And yeah, we have a bunch of free resources on our website as well, a ton of blog posts, a ton of free ebooks that you can download, and all of our podcasts and show notes are in there as well. So and also my newest book, The Little Book of mushrooms,
Unknown Speaker 39:24
talks about 75 different fun little mushrooms, little cute coffee table book. And with that, thank you for tuning in much love and may the spores be with you. Applause.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
