Shroom review
I’ve just finished reading Andy Letcher’s recent “cultural history of the magic mushroom”, Shroom. It’s a valuable book, despite some general (and quite deep) reservations I have about it if it’s taken as anything like a self-contained “definitive” survey. To a large extent it’s a timely, tactical piece, aiming to shake of some hoary countercultural and academic myths, and establish modern Western mushroom use on a more demonstrably justifiable basis than any of the questionable “foundational myths” of mushrooms in history and prehistory. It loses some very valuable perspective along the way… but more of that in my review.
Nice review! As much as I tried to not like it I did enjoy the book. It seemed to me to be the evil twin of Graham Hancock’s “Supernatural”. Graham also explored the David Lewis-Williams thing and came up with what I thought was a more comprehensive outline of what that was all about, why it makes sense, what the naysayer’s have to say and why they do not make sense. He points out that although the model Williams puts forward does involve altered states of consciousness, he’s not particularly interested in exploring how entheogens (might) fit into the equation.
The John Marco Allegro thing is quite messy. I cant figure out whether his work was just a backlash at the (Catholic) establishment for debunking what he had to say about the Dead Sea Scrolls or whether he really did have something to go on. Anyway, there’s a book called Astrotheology & Shamanism by Jan Irvine and Andrew Rutajit that explores this a bit more, introducing a whole bunch of stuff in support of Jesus being a symbol for an entheogenic mushroom.
Entries on all three of these books appear in my blog/ website if anyone’s interested.
eggy - 10th April 2007 @ 7:33
Thanks eggy. Evil twin of Supernatural - good image! I think both books do a job that needs doing, and in the dialectic between the positions they represent I hope the debate will move forward very healthily.
I don’t know much about Allegro, but I remember that the book really opened me up to what Hillman calls “the etymological fantasy”. You have to stand back at some point and realize that, in terms of verifiable knowledge, this sort of stuff is poetic fancy at best, bullshit at worst. But there’s a need - in me at least - for a certain amount of this associational, mythic exploration of the past. It needs to be reigned in and placed in perspective by reason, but not nailed down and left to die. I firmly believe it just comes and bites you on the arse if you attempt this.
I wondered why Andy left out Peter Lamborn Wilson’s Ploughing the Clouds: The Search for Irish Soma. Possibly because it didn’t really have much impact, and he was looking at “culture”. Maybe he thought it beneath criticism! Anyway, I thought Wilson’s argument, in the rallying of evidence, was over-dense and often questionable, but the theoretical basis was excellent. He made much of the concept of a “Soma-function” - basically something that genuinely transported you to a deep altered state, be it whatever kind of mushroom, another plant, or even a ritual practice. He makes his bottom line the fact that a Soma-function almost certainly existed, even if we’re stabbing in the dark as to its exact nature or identity. That frees you up to speculate without gravitating to dogma. I think this neatly gets round a lot of the narrow vision where people like Wasson try to pin things down to a definite plant - leaving Letcher to easily demolish such a fixed idea, and throw out the whole enquiry.
Lewis-Williams is careful to apply this sort of openness to his ideas, despite the impression given by Bahn & Helvenston’s bitter rebuttal titled Desperately Seeking Trance Plants. I think he’s right to insist that it needn’t have been a psychedelic plant involved; but again, it’s good that Hancock has gone out and done the research to leave the door to the mushroom theory as open as it should be.
Gyrus - 10th April 2007 @ 11:12