Mushrooms
History

The History of the use of Magic Mushroom throughout the ages of civilization has often been strongly argued by aficionados of mushrooms, as an important part to justify or legitimize their use in today's modern world. The idea that "if great cultures, religions and philosophies were founded on bemushroomed gnosticism, then contemporary use is very far from the self abusive, criminal or escapist act that mainstream society claims it to be. This climate means that taking mushrooms remains a distinctly countercultrual act which, for many, forms the kernel of an identity founded on a sense of alterity, or opposition to the mainstream.

Even today the popular writer Paul Devereux argues that human history is one 'long trip' from which modern Western culture with it's 'War on Drugs' represents an anomalous aberration. In the case of magic mushrooms, therefore, enthusiasts imagine an unbroken tradition of use stretching back to the Palaeolithic, which includes the hunter-gatherer shamans, the Neolithic builders of Stonehenge and Avebury, the ancient Greeks at Eleusis, the Iron Age Druids and medieval witches, and which was only severed by Christianity and the machinations of the industrial revolution.

However, an interesting point to bear in mind is that Habitat of the Magic Mushroom is critical to its existence. The Liberty Cap (Psilocybe semilanceata) favours acid upland pastures and grows in the kinds of condition where the only viable form of agriculture is sheep - or cattle farming. However, for much of its prehistory Britain was covered not in pasture but in dense primary forest, so the mushroom would have been uncommon and rare. It could only have been with the introduction of agriculture and the gradual clearance of the forests from the Neolithic onwards, from around 5000 BCE, that pastures of sufficient size would have been established to make psilocybin mushroom use in Britain plausible. It would be quite wrong of us to assume that just because a magic mushroom is abundant now it has been so throughout all of human history and prehistory. (Shroom - a Cultural History 2006).

Therefore for the broken lineage theory to work we need to consider other mushrooms and other parts of the world where magic mushrooms have existed since the dawn of time.

We also have to consider how such ancient civilizations of people would have interpreted the magic mushroom experience and view it from the perspective they would have had at the time. Would the effects of magic mushrooms be seen as desirable? It is with these questions in mind that we now look at the history of magic mushroom use throughout the world, which we've broken down into three time groups, Ancient History, Intermediate History, and Recent History.