part0018

So this was the picture of our family life at the end of the 1950s, pulled from memory like a faded snapshot from those innocent years. For me, it evokes the breathless moment of eerie calm that settles over the landscape before a summer thunderstorm; nothing is happening, yet the air is charged with anticipation. There was a foreboding intuition that the old order, the old certainties, would soon be swept away. Despite an apparent calm, social forces beyond anyone’s control were massing on the horizon, ready to rip the idyllic Norman Rockwell fantasy to shreds. Indeed, everything we thought we knew, everything we thought we were, would soon be transfigured by the winds of change.

Like most Americans, my brother and I had little sense of what forms this change would take. But the signs were there, discernible at least to a few astute observers. With respect to psychedelics and their impacts—both on us personally, and on the wider culture—there were only hints. Although the effects of LSD had been known since the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann accidentally exposed himself to the drug in 1943, five years after he’d discovered it at Sandoz, it remained a curiosity, the plaything of a few psychologists, writers, artists, and covert researchers at the CIA. In 1953, William Burroughs, the literary icon of the “beat” generation, had wandered the Putumayo region of the upper Amazon looking for ayahuasca; his correspondence with the poet Allen Ginsberg on the topic became a book, The Yage Letters , a decade later. That journey prefigured our own quixotic quest to the area in the early seventies. Though Burroughs was often out front when it came to drugs, ayahuasca was already old news by the time he went looking for it, at least to R. E. Schultes, the Harvard ethnobotanist who had been documenting the region’s plants and their pharmacological properties since 1941. Aldous Huxley’s classic 1954 essay on his experience with mescaline, The Doors of Perception , stirred interest and criticism, though largely at first among philosophers and theologians. Timothy Leary’s fateful encounter with magic mushrooms at a resort in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in August 1960, radically altered the direction of his life, but his name was not widely known until the scandal that led to his dismissal from Harvard in 1963.

In the McKenna household and surely many others, there was one outstanding exception to this blackout: R. Gordon Wasson’s report on his rediscovery of the long-suppressed tradition of shamanic mushroom use among the Mazatecs of Mexico, published in Life on May 13, 1957. With its millions of subscribers, Life was the epitome of the era’s glossy photo magazine—and the unlikely portal through which awareness of the magic mushrooms and the strange realms they rendered accessible filtered into mass consciousness. It was a rather stealthy debut; there was no pejorative spin to the story, no cautionary warnings about the dangers of drug abuse, the risk of insanity, leaping out of buildings, or chromosome damage. All that came later, and in any event was mostly aimed at psilocybin’s more potent, scarier cousin, LSD—itself the subject of a Life cover story in March 1966. No, the 1957 piece was presented as a gee-whiz travelogue in the best National Geographic style. The intrepid explorers were on a fearless quest to be “the first white men in recorded history to eat the divine mushrooms.” A New York banker turned ethnobotanist accompanied by a society-photographer friend, Wasson summed up their first ritual succinctly: “We chewed and swallowed these acrid mushrooms, saw visions, and emerged from the experience awestruck.” A day later, Wasson introduced his wife and daughter to the remarkable fungi, with the same results. Along with Allan Richardson’s photos, the article was accompanied by stunning watercolor paintings by the mycologist Roger Heim of the seven types of psychoactive mushrooms that were then known. (Today the count is close to 200.) Most readers probably overlooked the article, but the magazine’s wide circulation assured an audience amounting to hundreds of thousands.

Among those intrigued was Albert Hofmann, who soon afterward isolated the psychoactive molecule in the fungi—psilocybin. Directly or indirectly, Wasson’s account jettisoned Leary out of a mainstream academic career and into a new role of bringing psychedelics to the masses. Terence and I were influenced as well, though I must admit the article was of more interest to him than to me; I was only six. Terence was ten and curious about everything—and because he was curious, I was curious, without really knowing what the piece was about. I do remember him trailing our mother as she did her housework, waving the magazine, demanding to know more. But of course she had nothing to add. Terence’s curiosity would linger, even if at the time he had no intimation of how important psychedelics, and especially mushrooms, would become for us, in events still years away.