dropped mine to reproduce. I imagined what it felt like to live my whole life hidden by leaf debris. The mushroom-thought theory worked so well that I wondered why anyone would go searching in any other state of mind.
The day after the Flaming Lips show, my friend Jim and I took a trip to the Denver Natural History Museum, where we saw Aztec daggers used for cutting out human hearts. One knife had a mushroomshaped handle with a little frog crouched on its tip.
“Look at that crazy frog. It’s so weird. It’s, like, sitting on a mushroom,” I said.
And Jim said, “Cool.”
The conversation, which could’ve been educational and enlightening, was a dud. I felt like an ignoramus for not knowing what kind of mushroom the handle was fashioned after. The Aztecs were expert botanists; I was sure the mushroom on that ceremonial tool bore great shamanic significance. I was a poseur, a hippified stoner with a mushroom-amulet necklace (the swirly colored kind on hemp rope) who knew nothing about mushrooms except how to trip out on them. The only minor mushroom knowledge I had, beyond identifying three psychedelic species in the field, came from Sylvia Plath’s poem “Mushrooms,” which has a mysterious, sinister tone. It’s about a mushroom colony breeding beneath the ground’s surface. Plath’s mushrooms grow Overnight, very / Whitely, discreetly, / Very quietly . By the end of the poem, they’re powerful, almost evil, when they tell the reader: We shall by morning / Inherit the earth. / Our foot’s in the door.
On the airplane back to California, I decided if I was going to be into mushrooms, I had to start learning some hard-core scientific information. I purchased David Arora’s seminal All That the Rain Promises and More … a book known by every real mushroom connoisseur. The cover shows a bearded man in a tuxedo holding a cluster of oyster mushrooms and a trombone. Inside there’s a picture of a dog whose hair has been dyed with yellow “shroom mush.” Right after I got this book, a girlfriend of mine found some Witches’ Butter, a rubbery orange fungus that’s ruffled like lace and has the chewy texture of seaweed, growing on an oak log. We used the book to identify it. Now we both snap photos of any shelf fungus we locate and mail them to each other for our fungi photo albums.
Thus, my knowledge of the plant kingdom Thalophyta can be attributed to that trip to see Aztec daggers. For example, I know that the clumps I used to dig up are known as thallus, and the reason the guys told me to pull the mushrooms out by the stems or stipes was to preserve the hyphae and mycelium below, from which new mushrooms can bloom season after season. I also discovered that psychedelic mushrooms are most potent when in a mature stage of fructification and the caps, or pileus, are darkbrown and tender.
Clients often ask me what makes mushrooms psychedelic, so I’ve memorized the molecular structures of psilocybin and psilocin (the chemical that psilocybin breaks down into). Psilocin causes the psychedelic high; scientists think its chemical similarity to serotonin, a natural human neurotransmitter, is what makes psilocin cause hallucinations. Oddly enough, serotonin occurs naturally in the Panaeolus genus of mushrooms. Humans share molecules with mushrooms! Perhaps depressed people could eat Panaeolus instead of Prozac or Xanax.
Here’s a diagrammatic breakdown of the principal active constituents in entheogenic psilocybes. All mushrooms containing these chemicals will produce a blue stain when laid on paper.
Rereading Sylvia Plath’s poem now, I feel I should reinterpret her words correctly through a mycological lens. The “toes” and “noses” that “take hold on the loam” are the carpophores and basidiomycetes, or the fruits and the spores. Her “soft fists” that “insist on heaving the needles” describe gilled fungus in the button stage hidden behind their universal veils . In a new and exciting
The day after the Flaming Lips show, my friend Jim and I took a trip to the Denver Natural History Museum, where we saw Aztec daggers used for cutting out human hearts. One knife had a mushroomshaped handle with a little frog crouched on its tip.
“Look at that crazy frog. It’s so weird. It’s, like, sitting on a mushroom,” I said.
And Jim said, “Cool.”
The conversation, which could’ve been educational and enlightening, was a dud. I felt like an ignoramus for not knowing what kind of mushroom the handle was fashioned after. The Aztecs were expert botanists; I was sure the mushroom on that ceremonial tool bore great shamanic significance. I was a poseur, a hippified stoner with a mushroom-amulet necklace (the swirly colored kind on hemp rope) who knew nothing about mushrooms except how to trip out on them. The only minor mushroom knowledge I had, beyond identifying three psychedelic species in the field, came from Sylvia Plath’s poem “Mushrooms,” which has a mysterious, sinister tone. It’s about a mushroom colony breeding beneath the ground’s surface. Plath’s mushrooms grow Overnight, very / Whitely, discreetly, / Very quietly . By the end of the poem, they’re powerful, almost evil, when they tell the reader: We shall by morning / Inherit the earth. / Our foot’s in the door.
On the airplane back to California, I decided if I was going to be into mushrooms, I had to start learning some hard-core scientific information. I purchased David Arora’s seminal All That the Rain Promises and More … a book known by every real mushroom connoisseur. The cover shows a bearded man in a tuxedo holding a cluster of oyster mushrooms and a trombone. Inside there’s a picture of a dog whose hair has been dyed with yellow “shroom mush.” Right after I got this book, a girlfriend of mine found some Witches’ Butter, a rubbery orange fungus that’s ruffled like lace and has the chewy texture of seaweed, growing on an oak log. We used the book to identify it. Now we both snap photos of any shelf fungus we locate and mail them to each other for our fungi photo albums.
Thus, my knowledge of the plant kingdom Thalophyta can be attributed to that trip to see Aztec daggers. For example, I know that the clumps I used to dig up are known as thallus, and the reason the guys told me to pull the mushrooms out by the stems or stipes was to preserve the hyphae and mycelium below, from which new mushrooms can bloom season after season. I also discovered that psychedelic mushrooms are most potent when in a mature stage of fructification and the caps, or pileus, are darkbrown and tender.
Clients often ask me what makes mushrooms psychedelic, so I’ve memorized the molecular structures of psilocybin and psilocin (the chemical that psilocybin breaks down into). Psilocin causes the psychedelic high; scientists think its chemical similarity to serotonin, a natural human neurotransmitter, is what makes psilocin cause hallucinations. Oddly enough, serotonin occurs naturally in the Panaeolus genus of mushrooms. Humans share molecules with mushrooms! Perhaps depressed people could eat Panaeolus instead of Prozac or Xanax.
Here’s a diagrammatic breakdown of the principal active constituents in entheogenic psilocybes. All mushrooms containing these chemicals will produce a blue stain when laid on paper.
Rereading Sylvia Plath’s poem now, I feel I should reinterpret her words correctly through a mycological lens. The “toes” and “noses” that “take hold on the loam” are the carpophores and basidiomycetes, or the fruits and the spores. Her “soft fists” that “insist on heaving the needles” describe gilled fungus in the button stage hidden behind their universal veils . In a new and exciting
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