{"id":691,"date":"2006-07-26T02:24:00","date_gmt":"2006-07-26T02:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=691"},"modified":"2006-07-26T02:24:00","modified_gmt":"2006-07-26T02:24:00","slug":"a-cultural-history-of-magic-mushrooms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=691","title":{"rendered":"A Cultural History of Magic Mushrooms"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andy Letcher’s Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom<\/a>\"\"<\/em> is also on my to-buy list.\"'Shroom'<\/a><\/p>\n

Much stranger than the fictions it has inspired, the world of the magic mushroom is a place where shamans and hippies rub shoulders with psychiatrists, poets and international bankers.<\/p>\n

The magic mushroom was only rediscovered fifty years ago, but has accumulated all sorts of folktales and urban legends along the way. In this timely and definitive study, Andy Letcher<\/a> strips away the myths to get at the true story of how hallucinogenic mushrooms, once shunned in the West as the most pernicious of poisons, came to be the illicit drug of choice.<\/em><\/p>\n

It fits right in with this<\/a>. But is “the laboratory” the best place to be having mystical experiences. At least the famous 1962 Good Friday Experiment<\/a> used a chapel. “Set and setting,” remember?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Andy Letcher’s Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom is also on my to-buy list. Much stranger than the fictions it has inspired, the world of the magic mushroom is a place where shamans and hippies rub shoulders with psychiatrists, poets and international bankers. The magic mushroom was only rediscovered fifty years ago, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[8],"class_list":["post-691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-entheogens"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-b9","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":981,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=981","url_meta":{"origin":691,"position":0},"title":"Shroom the Book, Shrooms the Movie","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 7, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Still on the entheogenic theme ... Andy Letcher, author of Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom, lent his expertise to a horror film in this YouTube video: I liked his book, so I suppose that publicity for it is a Good Thing. Actually, Shrooms -- now on DVD\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"entheogens\"","block_context":{"text":"entheogens","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=entheogens"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=chascli-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0060828285","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7436,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=7436","url_meta":{"origin":691,"position":1},"title":"Bemushroomed in the Deep Woods","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 14, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"M. and I have been hitting the deep woods one day a week as part of the annual Mushroom Hunt. Yesterday was an odd one. Actually, the previous hunt, six days earlier, was even stranger. First, I had a full-blown hallucination of a nice Boletus edulis (king bolete, steinpilz, etc.)\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Colorado\"","block_context":{"text":"Colorado","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=colorado"},"img":{"alt_text":"mushroomjar.jpg","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/mushroomjar.jpg-300x261.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":508,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=508","url_meta":{"origin":691,"position":2},"title":"Love and fungusM. and I\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"September 11, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Love and fungusM. and I went mushrooming today in the Wets. The local news had carried the story of yet another lost mushroom hunter, so she kept reminding me that she had no sense of direction and it was my job to get us back to the Jeep.We found a\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1830,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1830","url_meta":{"origin":691,"position":3},"title":"Equinoctal Musings","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"September 27, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"According to the cosmic clock, I must have experienced the fall equinox about the time that I checked into the Trade Winds Motel in Valentine, Nebraska, last Wednesday evening. The next day I would be driving through miles of the Sandhills, the climax prairie ecosystem, homeward bound from the annual\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"festivals\"","block_context":{"text":"festivals","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=festivals"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":490,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=490","url_meta":{"origin":691,"position":4},"title":"Local Knowledge","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 17, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Three cheers for Vera Stucky Evenson, author of The Mushrooms of Colorado. Those white mushrooms were indeed Agaricus campestris. M. and I ate them on last night's pizza, and we're still here 24 hours later. (Yes, I made spore prints too.) The cat ate some too--he must have liked the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"deep ecology\"","block_context":{"text":"deep ecology","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=deep-ecology"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2564,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2564","url_meta":{"origin":691,"position":5},"title":"Occultism and Mushrooms","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 17, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Not necessarily psychotropic mushrooms. To learn more about them, read Andy Letcher's Shroom or the works of Paul Stamets, Dale Pendell, etc. These are metaphorical mushrooms\u2014or mushrooms as metaphor\u2014from an article by Wouter Hanegraaff on the German scholar of esotericism Will-Erich Peuckert (1895-1969): To me, [Peuckert's] book [Pansophie] breathed\u00a0 an\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"occultism\"","block_context":{"text":"occultism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=occultism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=691"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}