Mushrooms, Food of the Gods

by ROBERT GRAVES

1

ONCE, as children, my sisters and I spent a summer holiday on our grandfather’s Bavarian estate. Our mother, who had been brought up there, used to send us into the forest most afternoons with some young German cousins. They taught us to recognize by sight and smell the many different sorts of edible mushrooms growing under the pines or in the forest clearings. Nobody seemed worried that one of us might get poisoned: we soon learned to know the Täubling, the Eierschwamm, the Pfifferling, the Steinpilz, and the rest, Our harvest would be cooked with delicious sauces for supper by fat Fannie, the cook. That must have been in 1906. Next year, spending the holidays as usual in North Wales, we came on several patches of Bavarian mushrooms growing abundantly near our house. Naturally we filled all available baskets and hats and hurried home. Mother, however, threw up her hands: “Throw them away at once, dear children! They are deadly poison!”

“But, Mother, they look and smell exactly the same as . . .”

“Throw them away, I tell you! No, bury them in the garden, il’s safer. The mushrooms here may look and smell like those at Laufzorn, but they are poisonous for all that. Here one can trust only the white field mushrooms.”

I have since wondered whether she really believed our Welsh Täublinge and Eierschwämme to be poisonous — which they certainly were not or whether she feared that Mrs. Nelson, the irreplaceable cook, would give notice if told to serve them for supper, as fat Fannie had done. But I am now pretty sure that Mother was not telling even a white lie; because only the other day a Russian mushroomlover assured me in all seriousness that some of the varieties he liked best at home were highly poisonous in Czechoslovakia. He turned out to be wholly mistaken; his information must have come from Sudeten Germans, who had not quite so catholic a taste for mushrooms as Czechs and Russians. In North Wales, I ought to add, we could pick all the white field mushrooms that grew around, without fear of competition, since the local villagers thought them just as poisonous as the rest.

People of British stock are usually content to dismiss mycophobia (fear of mushrooms) as a social phenomenon hardly worth discussing. “After all,”they say, “most mushrooms are poisonous, so why not play safe? You have plenty of other things to eat, surely, without grubbing under rotten tree stumps for nasty-looking fungi. Leave that to the Slavs. Life has always been pretty cheap behind the Iron Curtain.”

I first began thinking seriously about the subject in 1949, when Dr. Valentina Wasson, a New York physician, wrote to ask me my views on the circumstances of the Emperor Claudius’s death. She and her husband were writing a book on mushrooms which has recently been published under the title Mushrooms, Russia, and History, by Pantheon books in a lavishly printed and illustrated limited edition. ( The two volumes sell for $125 a set.) I did not

realize at the time that her husband, R. Gordon Wasson, was a leading Wall Street banker; which may have been us well—poets feel a natural suspicion of financiers, and I might not have taken the book seriously . At all events, the Wassons and I exchanged several letters, as a result of which we solved, to our satisfaction (and, we hope, also to that of historians), the problem of how Claudius was murdered by his wife Agrippina and Seneca the orator, her son Nero’s tutor.

The Wassons had proved that Agrippina, advised bv the eminent poisoner Loeusta, gave ( laudius a dish of his favorite edible mushroom, amanita caesarea, but — an ingenious trick — poisoned it with juice of the amanita phalloides, the only really lethal mushroom (except for two almost indistinguishable subvarieties) to be found in European woods. Its poison resists cooking, freezing, and desiccation; and, what is worse, the mushroom tastes very good indeed. Claudius sat down to his last meal at 2:30 P.M. on October 12, 54 A.D., the height of the mushroom season; by noon on the following day he was dead. Yet this amanite does not kill so quickly; he should have lingered on for two or three days. The fact was that Claudius, having drunk a great deal of wine, threw up the meal, a misadventure which alarmed Agrippina and Seneca; they had already made arrangements with the Praetorian Guard for the accession of Nero. Agrippina therefore called in Xenophon, the imperial physician, and forced him to coöperate. He administered a second poison — by enema, it is said: a poison calculated to produce the same symptoms of acute abdominal pains and diarrhea as an amanita phalloides would have done it accidentally introduced in the dish of edible amanita caesarea. “What was this poison?" the Wassons asked me.

We settled for a massive dose of colocynth, or wild gourd (2 Kings iv. 38-41), too bitter to administer orally but, as we know from the writings of Scribonius Largus, a medical contemporary, recently introduced as a fashionable laxative among the Roman aristocracy. We could be pretty sure of the amanita phalloides because Seneca, in a letter written ten years later to his friend Lucilius the Stoic, mentions its initial tastiness and the considerable delay (which varies from six to forty hours) before the poison takes effect. As for the colocynth, Seneca published a cruel satire on Claudius’s death and deification, entitled “Apocolocyntosis” — a word telescoping apotheosis with colocynthis, and capable of meaning either “turning into a gourd” or “carried off by colocynth poison.

The Wassons and I had fun solving that problem, but none of us realized at the time the importance of Nero’s heartless joke about murder. When one of his Greek guests at a banquet quoted the proverb “Mushrooms are the food of the gods,”he answered, “Yes, they caused my late stepfather’s deification.”

2

How Gordon Wasson relinquished his mycophobia is a charming idyl. It should be prefaced by a glance at a map of the two main mushroom-eating areas in Europe. The western embraces Provence, Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands. The eastern embraces the whole Slavonic area, with extensions into Bavaria, Austria, and Italy. All the rest of Europe fears mushrooms to a greater or lesser extent. One finds certain anomalies on the map, such as the early-ninetcenth-century conversion of the Swedes to mushroom-eating by their alien king. Marshal Bernadotte, a Gascon; or the eating of blewits, an azure-colored mushroom, by the English Midlanders—which seems traceable to a Bronze Age settlement by a migrant tribe from the Black Sea.

The Pilgrim Fathers carried their ancestral fear of mushrooms to the New World; and in 1927 Gordon Wasson, a native American, on his honeymoon in the Catskills with Valentina Pavlovna Wasson, a beautiful young Russian émigrée, had to take a momentous marital decision. He saw his bride go down on her knees with joyful cries of “Lisishki, lisishki!” before a colony of nasty toadstools, and fill her handkerchief with them! “Throw them away at once, they are deadly poison,” he pleaded. But a bride has her privileges, and that night, of course, he nobly ate the dish she prepared — consoled only by the thought that they would at least die together.

The momentousness of his decision was proved by their subsequent agreement to collaborate in a book on edible mushrooms. A busy banker and a busy physician living in New York are apt to see little of each other, once their children are safely away at boarding school; and this book would give them a common interest on weekends and during their rare holidays. They had originally planned a botanical and geographical study of edible mushrooms designed to persuade mycophobes of their foolishness in rejecting such wholesome, toothsome, and hearty food just because a few easily recognized varieties are toxic. And foolishness it surely is. Does anyone become a earpophobe (or fruit-fearer) merely because certain fruits such as the deadly nightshade berry or the manchineel apple happen to be poisonous;

The Wassons, however, thought it only fair to discuss famous cases of mushroom poisoning, including the Claudius affair and the affaire Girard of 1918. Girard, a Parisian poisoner who relied too closely on a mushroom textbook he had carefully studied, took out insurances on his friends’ lives and then invited them to dine. Some died a day or two later in agony, some suffered no ill effects. The fact was that Girard had accepted the author’s description of amanita phalloides, which was not sufficiently distinguished in his book from amanita citrina, a perfectly harmless mushroom. Evidence by the lucky survivors condemned Girard to he guillotine.

Any widespread disgust for wholesome food, such as horseflesh among all Indo-Europeans, implies that it was once taboo. What is tabooed becomes both very holy and very disgusting — as the Church has made the human sexual act — and in accounts of ancient European sieges the besieged always eat grass, cals, and leather jerkins before they slaughter and eat their horses. Yet this taboo on horseflesh was formerly relaxed once a year during October, and Jens Jensen’s Fall of the King describes an ecstatic horse feast celebrated in Denmark as late as 1520 A.D.

Another thing: every taboo originally had its relaxation. Either all classes are expected to break it in some particular circumstances, as when tribesmen hunt and sacrificially eat their totem animal or else it is perpctually binding on all except a royal or priestly elan. In Classical Greece, even the general ban on the eating of human flesh was relaxed on certain privileged occasions.

Important taboos are usually protected by precautions against their breach. In this spirit, the Pharisees argued about the Deuteronomic injunction “Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk!" — a warning against participation in an Orphic sacrifice: “To avoid this grave sin, Israelites should not eat any kid seethed in milk, for fear this may be its mother’s; nor any lamb either, for fear that a flayed kid may have been mistaken for a flayed lamb. In fact, they should never take meat and milk at the same meal.”This became orthodox Jewish doctrine.

The English aversion to frogs’ legs, a great delicacy across the Channel, seems due to ancestral awe of the toad, the frog’s cousin, an animal closely associated with the mushroom taboo and treated with the same unreasoning hate, though its sweat, when people frighten or ill-treat it, is indeed extremely poisonous. Thus the Wassons guessed that tin’ sanctity of a particular mushroom, eaten only by privileged people at rare love-feasts, must have caused the general ban on all mushrooms whatsoever. (In North Wales and Brittany, even the white field mushroom is not exempt.) This theory they strengthened by a study of mushroom nomenclature in mycophobic areas.

Now, nearly all mothers discourage their children from trying grown-up food or drink not meant for the nursery by making grimaces of disgust, and calling it ca-ca!—an appeal to the toilet taboo, one of the few that they understand though it may be harmless and even delicious. This principle, the Wassons guessed, had been applied to mushrooms in all mycophobic countries. The general Greek word for mushroom is myces, from which, of course, are derived the words “rftyeophobe,” “mycology,” and ultimately “mushroom.”It means “nasal mucus,” or snot. Particular mushrooms have far coarser names — the sort of words one finds scrawled on the walls of privies in the worst quarters of the larger cities. Yet one should not feel surprised that growths with so foul a reputation are also called “the food of the gods" and, according to popular belief in Greece and elsewhere, thought to have been spontaneously generated by the holy stroke of lightning. It is only, so to speak, Mother saying “Ca-ca! Don’t touch that, children!”

Taboos on particular trees, plants, and vegetables mean that they have some peculiar sacred virtue. Among pastoral tribes, for example, the oak and ash were worshiped because they are more easily struck by lightning than other trees; and lightning denotes the presence of the Sky-god, who sends rain to the pastures. Ivy was sacred to Dionysus apparently because the beer drunk by his devotees was laced with ivy juice, which gave it greater potency. The vine also became sacred to Dionysus when wine from Crete displaced beer. Yet none of these trees and plants was so holy that people shunned it in horror and disgust, as they do mushrooms. Mushrooms must surely possess some unique virtue: but what?

The Wassons hit on the answer, or rather two complementary answers. The first was that certain mushrooms, especially the shelf mushroom which grows on birch and other trees, were the earliest form of touchwood, or tinder, in Europe. This mushroom — fames fomentarius — has been found at prehistoric Danish settlements of 6000 B.c. in Maglemose, associated with flint and iron pyrites. It was also used to assist the wooden fire-drill. Fire-making, if we may judge from the myth of Prometheus, who stole the sacred fire from Heaven, seems originally to have been a privilege of priests.

The second and more important answer emerged when the Wassons’ study of toxic mushrooms led them to investigate the scarlet-capped fly amanite. which this is significant — mycophobes regard as the most poisonous mushroom of all, though no one is ever recorded to have died from eating it! Oddly enough, its earliest appearance in English literature is a charming one: Lewis Carroll’s account of how Alice ate the mushroom on which the Caterpillar sat smoking his hookah, and could thus become shorter or taller at will. ("Curiouser and curiouser,” said Alice.) This hallucination, produced by the fly amanite, was described in a textbook, M. C. Cooke’s Plain and Easy Account of British Fungi, published on October 4, 1862, just before Alice in Wonderland was put on paper. Other effects, no less curious, of fly amanite are a delirium during which the eaters “prophesy wildly, engage in feats of prodigious physical exertion, and enjoy illusions of miraculous mobility and metamorphosis.”It has been claimed by certain Scandinavian historians that the Vikings of the Sagas who went berserk and performed superheroic feats had doped themselves with fly amanite.

In this light, mycophobia became more intelligible. Are the hallucinations and frenzy which the fly amanite induces the reason why all mushrooms were tabooed in Greece, except for adepts of certain divine mysteries and what substantiation of this theory could be found, or what analogies in other parts of the world?

3

THE Wassons had already been sent proofs of their book by the Italian printers about four years ago, when something occurred that turned it from merely an interesting work into a wildly exciting one, I happened to send them a reference to a preColumbian mushroom cult in Mexico, reported by Spanish missionaries at the close of the sixteenth century; and a friend sent them from Switzerland a photograph of a Mexican god sitting under a mushroom. By a coincidence the two letters arrived almost simultaneously. Gordon Wasson took this as a sign — alert bankers obey their hunches, then check up on the facts — and the Wassons therefore took a short vacation among the Mazatecs in the high mountains of Oaxaca province, where the cult had originally been reported. They found it still active, though driven underground by the Catholic priesthood and disguised as Catholicism. The devotees used it mainly for oracular purposes, especially in diagnosing illnesses or detecting crime.

As an excuse, the Wassons asked Don Aurelio, an adept, whether the mushrooms could tell them what was going on at home during their absence, and attended an all-night séance in a darkened hut to hear the answer. Don Aurelio treated the mushrooms with the utmost reverence and, after an address to the Trinity and certain saints, began eating them in pairs, until he reached fourteen.

We were eight in all, with the two children around the corner making ten. The setting for us strangers had its unusual aspects. Throughout the long ceremony the only illumination inside the room came from tapers or an oil wick, and sometimes from a single taper, and for more than an hour we sat in complete darkness and silence. The air grew foul, for the bean-eating Indians are not an inhibited people. After 1 1 o’clock a terrifying rain storm with thunder and lightning broke on Huautla, and through the knot-holes and chinks of the flimsy board walls of our hut the lightning would suddenly reveal every detail of the room and the huddled figures in it. After the storm ended there was more excitement. A shot was fired in the night and Demetrio cried out: ”Un homicidio!“ — a murder! Then there was the running of naked feet in the path outside our house, a loud knocking at a door not far away, and three more shots, but not a single human voice. Throughout the storm and the shooting Aurelio proceeded deliberately with the ritual. . . .

Though we could not enter into the subjective associations that the ritual evokes in Mazatec believers. it was easy for us to perceive the mystery that bathes each successive step in the Ceremony. For us as mycophiles and ethno-mycologists it was a stirring event to see our Mazatec curandero reverently raise the mushrooms from the cloth, pair after pair, a mushroom in either hand held by the stipe: and then see him eat the pair, first one and then the other, beginning with the pileus and then the greater part of the stipe, masticating each mouthful of the fresh raw mushroom a long time and then swallowing it, and depositing the stub of the stipe carefully in a piece of paper on one side. . . .

At one o’clock in the morning Don Aurelio reached a state of prophetic ecstasy. He then told the Wassons a fantastic story of what their son was experiencing in New York; and when they reached Mexico City a cable proved it to be uncannily true. The Mazatecs do not know the fly amanite; they eat nine varieties of a small brown, long-stalked, scented mushroom not hitherto known to science.

On a second visit, Gordon Wasson attended a mushroom oracle among the Mije, some hundreds of miles away, and found much the same ritual being practiced. On a third visit to Oaxaca, he took a photographer, Allan Richardson, with him, and one Doña Maria Sabrina, who controlled a second oracle, allowed them to take flashlight photographs during a séance. What is more, they ate the mushrooms themselves, after a fast. Despite the rancid and bitter taste, the toxic effects were — they say — so wonderful that opium, mescalin, marijuana, and the rest must be poor things by comparison. Gordon Wasson wrote of these visions:

They seemed the very archetypes of beautiful form and color. We felt ourselves in the presence of the Ideas that Plato had talked about. In saying this let not the reader think that we are indulging in rhetoric, straining to command his attention by an extravagant figure of speech. For the world our visions were and must remain “hallucinations.” But for us they were not false or shadowy suggestions of real things, figments of an unhinged imagination. What we were saying was, we knew, the only reality, of which the counterparts of every day are mere imperfect adumbrations. At the time we ourselves were alive to the novelty of this our discovery, and astonished by it. Whatever their provenience, the blunt and startling fact is that our visions wore sensed more clearly, were superior in all their attributes, were more authoritative, for us who were experiencing them, than what passes for mundane reality. . . .

On Wasson’s fourth visit, Professor Heim, France’s leading botanist and a devoted mycologist, also attended the ritual. One puzzling discovery was that the elaborate visions of rich landscapes and splendid cities which Wasson, Richardson, and Heim experienced (and also Wasson’s wife and daughter, when he brought back some mushrooms to New York) contained no single modern incident — neither cars, trains, nor planes. Landscapes seen combined the oddness of Hieronymus Bosch with the wildness of El Greco. The architecture could not be placed as Moorish, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, or anything else, but was no less lavish with precious metal and precious stones than the visions of the Heavenly Kingdom enjoyed by Ezekiel and the author of the Apocalypse. Mushroom-eaters remain conscious throughout these experiences, and able to take notes if they please. The “mushroom stones of Guatemala, some of which date from before 1000 B.C., suggest that this cult was once active there too, though no memory of it survives. One of the stones shows a toad with a human face supporting the mushroom! Toads are associated with mushrooms in most European languages, as they also are in Japan, Ngeria, Central Africa, and Madagascar.

There remains to be solved the problem of the fly amanite’s sacred use in Europe. Mythological references to mushrooms are few, but important. The inhabitants of Corinth, seat of a fire cult, claimed to have been born from mushrooms; and according to tradition Perseus built Mycenae, the capital of the Peloponnese, because he found a mushroom growing on the site. The gods of Olympus had a special food, ambrosia, described as a porridge of honey, water, fruit, olive oil, cheese, and pearl barley; also a special drink, nectar, consisting of honey, water, and fruit. No mortal might partake of either, under pain of everlasting torture. Then there was a special beverage which the goddess Demeter drank during her search for Persephone, and which the adepts of the Eleusinian Mysteries were privileged to taste before their final breath-taking vision. This consisted of mint, water, and pounded pearl barley.

Now, what is so holy about ambrosia porridge or nectar? And how could the visions at the Mysteries, the memory of which haunted the adept all his life and prepared him for death, have been caused by mint-flavored barley water? “Well, I have tried writing down in Greek characters the ingredients of ambrosia, nectar, and Dcmetcrs cyceon, and niv impression is that the mythologists have presented us with a riddling answer to our questions. What did Olympian gods eat? The initials of the ingredients spell myceta — accusative of myces, a mushroom. What did they drink? The ingredients of nectar and cyceon spell out, respectively, myc and myca. Myca is the nominative of a secondary word for “mushroom.”

The very words “mystery and “mystic may well be named for the fly amnnite; and so may “myth,” meaning an authoritative or poetic utterance. Gordon Wasson, for one, is convinced that the first mystic concept of divinity comes from hallucinations provided by mushrooms, though Jews and Christians agree to repudiate any prophecy produced by toxic agents. He writes:

But behind the interweaving of these innumerable words and ideas, there lies the Mystery of the divine mushrooms. We have now learned that many species of these strange growths possess a power such as early man could only have regarded as miraculous. Indeed they may have given to him the very idea of the miraculous, and inspired many of the themes that come down to us in our heritage of folklore. Mushrooms were doubly associated with fire. They were used as primary tinder in that miracle of divine copulation, the generation of fire by the fire-drill, and the divine mushrooms were the offspring ol the union of the Lightning Holt with the Mother Earth. We have suggested that the divine mushroom played a vital part in shaking loose early man s imagination, in arousing his capacity for self-percept ion, for awe, wonder, and reverence. They certainly made it easier for him to entertain the idea of God. In Europe the secret of the mushrooms was lost long ago, imt it lingers on, fossilized and misunderstood, in our vocabulary, as when the Greeks spoke of mushrooms as the “gods’ food,” the Flemings of “devil’s bread, the demonic era pawl in of France, and demonic “toad’s stool” of the English, yes and the “fly" of the German Fliegenschwamm. Our legacy of mycopliobia; what is it but a simple tabu, the aftermath of the emotional hold of those mushrooms on our own ancestors? There were other hallucinogens in the vegetable world, but we think the mushrooms were primary.

Mystic visions can, of course, be induced by fasting, concentration, prayer, and a rejection of normal social life. Yet it seems that Gautama Buddha himself did not disdain the food of the gods:

In the Buddhist world there is another clue to explore. According to orthodox tradition, the Buddha died after a Last Supper with his disciples at which he reserved for himself a dish of tender boar’s flesh, sūkara-maddava. Some have seen not pig but mushrooms on that fateful plate. Sūkara is cognate with the Latin sus, English “swine : our readers will recall that suillus in Latin is also a fungal name. In Russia there is also a “swine-mushroom.”the svinukha. In the light of our discoveries, should not this problem of exegesis be re-examined? That the Buddha should have died as a sequel to eating bad pork seems a shocking discord in the rarefied spirituality of the Buddhist legend. What could be more fitting than for the Master to be translated to Nirvana by the divine mushroom?