Seana Gavin, ‘Mindful Mushroom’, 2017. Courtesy of the artist.
In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice eats mushrooms which alter her physical state and grant her access to unexplored worlds. “She set to work nibbling at the mushroom […] till she was about a foot high: then she walked down the little passage: and then – she found herself at last in the beautiful garden, among the bright flower-beds and the cool fountains.”
Despite the novel’s association with hallucinogens (which largely emerged thanks to Sixties counterculture), Carroll, an Oxford academic whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, most likely never experimented with them, and certainly never planned for his 1865 masterpiece to become a psychedelic classic. During the Sixties and Seventies, this association verged on obsession, as musicians, writers and artists jumped on the bandwagon, notably San Francisco’s Jefferson Airplane whose 1967 track, White Rabbit, offered a retelling of Dodgson’s children’s book with a West Coast hippie twang. Consider the way, for instance, singer-songwriter Grace Slick’s lyrics transform Alice’s scenes into a full-on drug-addled mess. “When the men on the chessboard get up and tell you where to go,” she intones in her booming voice. “And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom, and your mind is moving low … Go ask Alice, I think she’ll know.”
Graham Little, ‘Untitled (Wood)’ 2019, courtesy of Alison Jacques Gallery, London.
Mushrooms quickly became an icon for experimental drug use. What would the psychedelic Sixties and Seventies have been without them? The Beatles’ 1967 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was the product of the band’s adventures in the world of hallucinogenic drugs (they were mostly dabbling with LSD but used mushrooms as well). Even after John Lennon finally quit LSD, he still viewed mushrooms as an essentially harmless, benign pleasure. “A little mushroom or peyote is not beyond my scope, you know, maybe twice a year or something,” he told Playboy’s David She in 1980.
Despite the now ubiquitous – and frankly, often very boring – tales of psychedelic excess committed by members of 20th century rock bands, humans have in fact consumed magic mushrooms for thousands of years. And rather take them simply for pleasure, they’ve often been used in religious ceremonies that harnessed the power of psilocybin (the psychedelic compound found in magic mushrooms) in the service of a spiritual goal. Magic mushrooms are claimed to be depicted in cave paintings from North Africa estimated to have been made circa 9,000 BCE. Elsewhere, the Aztecs of Central America, who considered these fungi to be gifts from the gods, are believed to have taken magic mushrooms during sacred rituals.
Broad City 404 “Mushrooms”, October 11, 2017. Art by Mike Perry Studio.
But it was a 1957 photo-essay for Life magazine that helped whet our modern-day appetite for recreational psychedelic drugs. In the article, investment banker Robert Gordon Wasson travelled to Mexico and met Maria Sabina, a renowned spiritual healer and shaman. Wasson subsequently became – by his own account – the first white man in recorded history to eat the divine mushrooms.
Where Wasson went, the luminaries of the burgeoning counterculture followed. In 1960, Timothy Leary, the American psychologist, counter-culture icon and advocate of the psychotherapeutic application of hallucinogens, travelled to Mexico to try magic mushrooms for himself as part of the Harvard Psilocybin Project. Following his trip, it wasn’t long before celebrities followed in his footsteps, with Lennon, Bob Dylan, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger also making trips to see Sabina. (Legend has it that Sabina, who died penniless in 1985, regretted her role in popularising magic mushrooms outside her community).
Alex Morrison, ‘Mushroom Motif’ (Black and Ochre), 2017, courtesy of the artist, care of L’inconnue Gallery, Montreal.
Although preserved magic mushrooms were made illegal in the UK following a 1978 court case (a judgement made by the House of Lords, who ironically also decided not to prescribe fresh psilocybin fungi, a ruling that was eventually overturned in 2005), their legacy has endured, largely thanks to culture. In season four, episode four of Broad City (2017), for example, Abbi and Ilana trip on mushrooms and ramble through an animated, psychedelic wonderland version of New York, bringing the duo closer together.
Not all depictions, however, are positive. Conversely, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2017 period thriller, Phantom Thread, mushrooms are used to nefarious ends. Alma Elson, played by Vicky Krieps, is a young, clumsy waitress recruited by Daniel Day-Lewis’ Reynolds Woodcock, a controlling and demanding fashion designer, to become his muse. She is tasked with making Woodcock a mushroom omelette in the morning, but – fearing her time as Woodcock’s muse is limited – she intentionally poisons him with toxic mushrooms. Mushrooms subsequently become a symbol of their twisted, symbiotic relationship: Alma poisons Woodcock multiple times, with his knowledge and implied consent, to show him how much he needs her.
Phantom Thread. 2017. Focus Features.
In light of their significance in art and society, an upcoming exhibition at London Somerset House will document our enduring fascination with magic mushrooms. Mushrooms: The Art, Design and Future of Fungi, opens on 31 January 2020, and will feature work from artists including Cy Twombly, Hannah Collins and children’s book author, Beatrix Potter. Visual artist Seana Gavin’s Mindful Mushroom (2017) will be exhibited, too. Depicting a collaged woman, arms splayed gracefully from a bulbous fungal body, her lips a disjointed kiss on a mushroom head, the image updates psychedelic Surrealism for the 21st century. In Mushroomscape (2017), another image from Gavin’s series, giant, flapping mushrooms loom large over rural houses and citadels. It’s an apt illustration of how taking magic mushrooms can block out everything else in your consciousness, distend reality, and sometimes linger in your memory for decades to come.
There’s evidence to show that those early spiritual healers were right: magic mushrooms can be a powerful panacea for a range of conditions, from anxiety to depression. A 2016 study by John Hopkins University study found that 80% of cancer patients experienced reduced anxiety and depression after consuming controlled doses of psilocybin. Another study, published in 2017 by researchers from Imperial College London, found psilocybin was effective in treating depression. And the effects can be long-lasting: five weeks after treatment ended, they noted, nine out of 19 patients said that their depression was significantly reduced.
Perhaps, then, mushrooms can heal and even unlock new ways of seeing the world. But as anyone who’s ever had a negative drug experience will attest, if you’re going to experiment, take care, get advice, do them in a safe environment with people you trust, and don’t, whatever you do, go chasing rabbits.
Left: Hamish Pearch, ‘Cochlea Brick Tuft’, courtesy of the artist. Right: Beatrix Potter, Hygrophorus puniceus, pencil and watercolour, 7.10.1894,.
This article originally appeared in SLEEK 64, out now.
Mushrooms: The Art, Design and Future of Fungi is at Somerset House from 31 Jan – 26 Apr 2020.