R. Gordon Wasson: The Banker Who Rediscovered Psychedelic Mushrooms and Launched a Revolution

Language: en

The Velada in Huautla de Jiménez

On the night of June 29, 1955, in a small Mazatec village in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico, a 57-year-old vice president of J.P. Morgan & Co. consumed a handful of small, bitter mushrooms given to him by a Mazatec curandera named María Sabina. What happened over the following hours changed the trajectory of Western civilization.

R. Gordon Wasson — banker, amateur mycologist, and one of the most unlikely revolutionaries in history — became the first known Westerner in recorded modern history to participate in a traditional Mesoamerican mushroom ceremony. He experienced visions of extraordinary beauty and coherence: geometric patterns, mythological scenes, encounters with presences that seemed more real than the physical world. He felt that he had been granted access to a dimension of reality that his entire education had taught him did not exist.

Two years later, on May 13, 1957, Life magazine — then the most widely read publication in America, with a circulation of over five million — published Wasson’s account under the title “Seeking the Magic Mushroom.” The article included photographs by the expedition’s photographer, Allan Richardson, and Wasson’s careful, lyrical description of the experience.

The article detonated. It introduced the concept of psychedelic mushrooms to the American public and, through Life’s global reach, to the world. It launched the psychedelic revolution — a cultural upheaval that would reshape Western society, science, spirituality, and law over the following decades. And it initiated a chain of consequences — many of them unintended and some of them devastating — that continues to unfold today.

The Man: Wasson’s Improbable Background

Robert Gordon Wasson (1898-1986) was not a scientist, not a hippie, not a counterculture figure. He was a deeply conservative man — an Episcopalian, a Republican, a Wall Street executive — who happened to become obsessed with mushrooms.

The obsession began on his honeymoon. In 1927, Wasson married Valentina Pavlovna, a Russian-born pediatrician. During a walk in the Catskill Mountains, Valentina spotted wild mushrooms and exclaimed with delight, rushing to gather them. Wasson, raised in the Anglo-American tradition of mycophobia (fear of mushrooms), recoiled in disgust.

This moment of cultural collision — one spouse’s delight, the other’s revulsion — became the seed of a lifelong investigation. The Wassons began cataloguing the attitudes toward mushrooms across cultures and discovered a remarkable pattern: some cultures (Russian, Eastern European, many indigenous) were deeply mushroom-loving (mycophilic), while others (Anglo-Saxon, Celtic) were deeply mushroom-fearing (mycophobic). This cultural divide could not be explained by rational assessment of mushroom toxicity. It had to have deeper roots.

The Wassons hypothesized that the mycophobic cultures had once been mycophilic — had once revered mushrooms as sacred — and that the fear was a residue of a taboo against a sacred substance. Sacred things that fall from their religious context become objects of fear. The mushroom, once a sacrament, became a terror.

This hypothesis led the Wassons into ethnomycology — the study of the cultural role of mushrooms — and eventually to Mesoamerica, where reports of mushroom use in indigenous ceremonies had been documented by Spanish colonizers in the sixteenth century.

The Sixteenth-Century Sources: What the Spanish Saw

The Spanish conquest of Mexico in the early sixteenth century brought European observers into contact with a mushroom tradition that stretched back millennia. The sources are unambiguous:

Bernardino de Sahagún, the Franciscan friar who compiled the most comprehensive account of Aztec culture (the Florentine Codex, c. 1545-1590), described mushrooms called teonanácatl — “flesh of the gods” — consumed in ceremonial contexts. He reported that those who ate them “saw visions, felt themselves to be in a state of elation, and sometimes experienced terrifying images.” He described how the Aztecs mixed the mushrooms with honey and consumed them at banquets and religious festivals.

Diego Durán, a Dominican friar, described mushroom ceremonies at the coronation of Aztec rulers, where the mushrooms were consumed alongside chocolate and other ritual foods.

Toribio de Benavente (Motolinía), another Franciscan, noted that the mushrooms produced intoxication, visions, and sometimes “a kind of madness which made them dance.”

Despite these clear reports, Western scholarship spent the next four centuries systematically ignoring or misinterpreting them. The prevailing assumption was that teonanácatl was a mislabeled reference to peyote (a cactus) or was a purely mythological invention. The idea that mushrooms could produce visionary experiences was simply not within the conceptual framework of Western science.

It took a Wall Street banker with a mushroom obsession to take the sixteenth-century sources seriously.

The Expeditions: Finding the Living Tradition

Wasson began his search for the living mushroom tradition in the late 1940s, working with his wife Valentina and consulting with botanists, anthropologists, and linguists. In 1952, he made contact with the Mazatec community of Huautla de Jiménez in the Sierra Mazateca of Oaxaca, Mexico — a remote mountain town accessible only by mule trail.

The Mazatec had maintained their mushroom tradition through five centuries of Spanish colonial and post-colonial rule, hiding it from outsiders with remarkable discipline. The mushrooms — known in Mazatec as nti-si-tho (“little one who springs forth”) — were consumed in all-night healing ceremonies called veladas, presided over by curanderos (healers) who used the mushrooms as a diagnostic and therapeutic tool.

Wasson’s initial visits were frustrating. The Mazatec were understandably reluctant to share their sacred practice with an outsider. It took three years of patient relationship-building before Wasson was invited to participate in a velada.

The invitation came from María Sabina, a Mazatec curandera who had been working with the mushrooms since childhood. On June 29, 1955, Sabina conducted a velada for Wasson and Richardson, giving them mushrooms (later identified as Psilocybe caerulescens and Psilocybe mexicana) and singing the sacred chants that guided the ceremony.

Wasson’s description of the experience, published in Life and later in his scholarly works, emphasized its religious character:

“We were never more awake, and the visions came whether our eyes were opened or closed… They were vivid in color, always harmonious… They began with art motifs, angular, such as might be found in iron or woodwork, then evolved into palaces with courts, arcades, gardens — resplendent palaces all laid over with semi-precious stones… Could the divine mushrooms be the secret that lay behind the ancient Mysteries?”

The Life Article and Its Impact

The May 13, 1957 Life article, “Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” was a cultural earthquake. It was the first mass-media account of psychedelic experience in the West, and it reached millions of readers simultaneously.

The article was carefully written. Wasson emphasized the religious context of the mushroom tradition, the dignity of the Mazatec ceremony, and the profound, non-recreational character of the experience. He did not present the mushrooms as drugs but as sacraments.

But Wasson could not control how his article was received. The article inspired a wave of visitors to Huautla de Jiménez — seekers, adventurers, hippies, and thrill-seekers — who descended on the tiny mountain town in search of the sacred mushrooms. Among the early visitors were Timothy Leary (who later said the Life article inspired his first psychedelic experience) and many others who would become central figures in the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s.

The consequences for Huautla de Jiménez and for María Sabina were devastating.

María Sabina: The Consequences of Exposure

María Sabina (1894-1985) was born in Huautla de Jiménez into a family of curanderos. She began working with the mushrooms at age seven, after consuming them to seek healing for a sick uncle. Over the following decades, she became one of the most respected healers in the Sierra Mazateca, conducting veladas for healing, divination, and spiritual guidance.

Sabina agreed to conduct a velada for Wasson because she believed he was genuinely seeking healing. She did not fully understand that his account would be published to millions. When the flood of outsiders began arriving in Huautla, she recognized what had happened and said: “From the moment the foreigners arrived to search for God, the saint children [the mushrooms] lost their purity. They lost their force; the foreigners spoiled them. From now on they won’t be any good. There’s no remedy for it.”

Sabina’s community blamed her for the invasion. Her house was burned down. She was arrested. She spent the last decades of her life in poverty, revered by outsiders as a mystic but reviled by many of her neighbors as the woman who had betrayed the sacred knowledge.

Her story is the central ethical cautionary tale of psychedelic history: the extraction of indigenous sacred knowledge by outsiders, the destruction of the context that gave it meaning, and the harm inflicted on the indigenous community by the exposure.

Albert Hofmann and the Chemical Identification

Wasson’s discovery attracted the attention of Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist at Sandoz Laboratories who had synthesized LSD in 1938 and discovered its psychoactive properties in 1943. In 1958, Hofmann received samples of Psilocybe mexicana mushrooms collected by Wasson and his team.

Hofmann isolated and identified the active compounds: psilocybin (4-phosphoryloxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine) and its dephosphorylated form, psilocin (4-hydroxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine). Both are tryptamines — members of the same molecular family that includes serotonin, melatonin, and DMT.

Hofmann synthesized psilocybin in the laboratory and confirmed its identity by self-experimentation (as was his custom). He then sent synthetic psilocybin to Wasson, who brought it to Huautla de Jiménez and administered it to María Sabina in a velada. Sabina confirmed that the synthetic compound produced the same experience as the natural mushrooms, saying: “The spirit of the mushrooms is in the pill.”

This was a landmark in psychopharmacology: the identification, isolation, and synthesis of the first psychedelic compound from a traditional sacramental plant. It established psilocybin as a defined chemical entity that could be studied in controlled settings — the foundation for all subsequent psilocybin research.

Wasson’s Scholarly Legacy

After the Life article, Wasson spent the remaining three decades of his life building the scholarly foundation for ethnomycology. His major works include:

“Mushrooms, Russia and History” (1957) — co-authored with Valentina Wasson, a massive two-volume work documenting the cultural role of mushrooms across civilizations. Only 512 copies were printed. It is now one of the most valuable books in mycological bibliography.

“Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality” (1968) — Wasson’s argument that the Soma of the Rigveda — the most sacred substance in the oldest Hindu scriptures — was Amanita muscaria (the fly agaric mushroom). This hypothesis, while controversial, was endorsed by Claude Lévi-Strauss and remains one of the most discussed theories in ethno-botanical scholarship.

“The Road to Eleusis” (1978) — co-authored with Albert Hofmann and Carl Ruck, proposing the ergot hypothesis for the Eleusinian Mysteries.

“The Wondrous Mushroom: Mycolatry in Mesoamerica” (1980) — a comprehensive study of the Mesoamerican mushroom tradition, drawing on archaeological, linguistic, and ethnographic evidence.

“Persephone’s Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion” (1986) — Wasson’s final work, written with several collaborators, proposing that psychedelic plants and fungi are the origin of human religious experience.

Wasson also coined (with Ruck and others) the term entheogen — “generating the divine within” — as an alternative to “psychedelic” (which had acquired countercultural connotations) and “hallucinogen” (which implies falsehood). The term entheogen emphasizes the religious and spiritual character of the experience and has become the preferred term in academic scholarship.

The Ethical Reckoning: What Wasson Got Wrong

Wasson’s contributions to knowledge are immense. He rediscovered a tradition that had been hidden for centuries, established a new academic field, and opened a line of inquiry that continues to transform our understanding of consciousness, religion, and the human mind.

But his legacy is also marked by ethical failures that must be honestly assessed:

The exposure of María Sabina. Wasson published her name and location, making her a target. Later editions of his work attempted to use pseudonyms, but the damage was done. The principle of protecting indigenous informants — now standard in ethnographic research — was not applied.

The decontextualization of the mushroom. Wasson described the mushroom experience in terms that made it accessible and attractive to a Western audience — lyrical, beautiful, spiritual. What he could not convey was the cultural, ceremonial, and relational context that gave the experience its meaning within Mazatec culture. The mushroom, extracted from its context, became a “drug” rather than a sacrament — a commodity rather than a relationship.

The colonial dynamic. A wealthy white American traveled to an impoverished indigenous community, extracted its most sacred knowledge, published it in the world’s most popular magazine, and suffered no consequences while the indigenous community was devastated. This is the colonial dynamic in its purest form, and no amount of scholarly good intention can erase it.

The failure of reciprocity. Wasson did not establish ongoing reciprocal relationships with the Mazatec community. He did not share the profits from his publications. He did not advocate for the protection of the mushroom tradition or the rights of indigenous practitioners. The extraction was one-directional.

These ethical failures do not invalidate Wasson’s scholarship. But they provide essential context for understanding the psychedelic renaissance: the knowledge that modern researchers are building on was extracted from indigenous communities at significant cost to those communities, and the ethical debt remains unpaid.

The Wider Significance: Mushrooms and the Origin of Religion

Wasson’s deepest contribution was not the Life article or the identification of psilocybin. It was the question he spent his life pursuing: Is the psychedelic experience the origin of human religious consciousness?

The evidence he assembled — from Mesoamerica, from the Rigveda, from the Eleusinian Mysteries, from the global distribution of mushroom-using cultures — points toward an affirmative answer. The earliest human religious expressions — cave paintings, shamanic practices, mythological narratives — are associated with cultures that had access to psychedelic plants and fungi. The phenomenology of psychedelic experience — encounters with non-human intelligences, perception of a reality more real than ordinary waking consciousness, death and rebirth, the dissolution of the boundary between self and world — precisely matches the phenomenology of mystical experience as described across all religious traditions.

This does not mean that all religion is “just” drug-induced hallucination. It means that psychedelic experience may be the original technology through which human consciousness first encountered the transpersonal dimension — the dimension that religion then attempts to map, describe, and institutionalize. The mushroom is not God. The mushroom is the doorway through which the first humans walked into a relationship with the sacred.

Wasson did not live to see the modern psychedelic renaissance. He died in 1986, during the deepest trough of the War on Drugs, when the research he had inspired had been almost entirely shut down. But the revival that began in the 1990s — with the work of Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins, Franz Vollenweider in Zürich, David Nutt and Robin Carhart-Harris at Imperial College London — is built directly on the foundation that Wasson laid.

The banker who ate the mushrooms opened a door that cannot be closed. The question is no longer whether psychedelic mushrooms are real — they are, demonstrably and measurably. The question is what we do with the knowledge they provide — and whether we can learn from the ethical failures of their rediscovery to build a more respectful, reciprocal, and responsible relationship with the sacred plants and the indigenous peoples who have stewarded them for millennia.