Andy Letcher and the Strange Case of the Deconstructed Mushroom

" I'd say that's an infusion of much-needed common sense and restraint in a field bursting with ideologues who see mushrooms in every piece of art and hallucinations guiding every religious text."

In general, I tend to agree with you, although I perhaps don't see Wasson's arguments as being as weak as you and Andy do, and in fact one place where I think the book could have been improved is in his critique of Wasson. Many of his arguments seemed to verge on the ad hominim, and I would have liked to have seen his arguments a little more evidence (or lack thereof) based.

Somewhat ironically I think the strength of the emotional reaction he has elicited in the "mushroom community" actually adds a lot of credence to his work. I've actually seen messages on the Internet by relatively well-known researchers that basically say "we must unite to stamp him out and discredit him." If they're trying to maintain that their positions are reasoned and evidence-based, they're not doing a particularly good job.

I also find other ironies too. For example, aficionados of psychedelic plants really, really like to pride themselves on their open minds and immunity to cultural influence and tradition, yet they try really, really hard to legitimize their practice through the weight of cultural tradition! Andy does a really good job bringing this up, and even if the mushroom community takes exception to all of his historical arguments, I wish they would at least ponder this point in the present. Oh well, I guess none of us are as open-minded as we like to believe and pretend. Thus is the human condition...

Wait a minute, who is the revisionist here?

As I read "Shroom," Letcher was paying the mushrooms-in-history crowd the compliment of taking their arguments seriously, and in that vein asking that they put forth legitimate evidence for the claims that they make.

Given the range of claims made about psychoactive use ranging from the extremely unlikely (Wasson's Soma) to the completely ridiculous (the Christ-was-a-mushroom people), I'd say that's an infusion of much-needed common sense and restraint in a field bursting with ideologues who see mushrooms in every piece of art and hallucinations guiding every religious text.

And what about all the important people who didn't do mushrooms more than once or twice, or maybe never? And the wild shit they did???

To my mind, the biggest gap in scholarship to be found in Shroom is its treatment of psychedelic usage in early Christianity. Andy gives it no more than a few pages, spending most of the time beating the dead horse of John Allegro and taking shots at some of Clark Henrich’s flimsier speculations. For a powerful treatise on the subject of early Christian psychoactive usage, check out The Apples of Apollo by Carl Ruck, Blaise Staples, and Clark Heinrich. It’s the only arena of history about which I’m knowledgeable, so I can’t say much about Andy’s debunking of other historical mushroom myths. But he dropped the ball on the topic of a psychedelicized early Christianity, and it might be enough to unravel his entire “we are the first mushroom culture” argument.