This magic mushroom moment

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SHROOM: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE MAGIC MUSHROOM

By Andy Letcher

HarperCollins, $25.95, 360 pages

REVIEWED BY JACOB SULLUM

Not long ago, at a party in Amsterdam, I was about to swallow some psilocybin mushrooms when the host interceded. Dividing the pieces into two piles, he twirled a small metal ball hanging from a thin chain above each, dangled the same "dowsing" device over my hand, and after some contemplation pointed me to the pile that was right for me. He also predicted, using amazingly precise but unverifiable numbers, exactly how the mushrooms would affect me along several different personality dimensions. This ceremony, akin to an unsolicited palm, aura or astrological chart reading, did not enhance my mushroom experience.

If you, like me, prefer your shrooms without the New Age baggage, Andy Letcher's book is for you. In "Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom," Mr. Letcher, a British writer and musician with a doctorate in ecology and another in religious/cultural studies, is careful to separate the truth about his subject from a "fantastical history . . . dreamed up on the basis of wishful thinking and overworked evidence."

Without dismissing the potential for mushroom-assisted mystical experiences (a phenomenon explored in a government-funded study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University that made headlines last year), Mr. Letcher rejects the idea that psychoactive fungi inevitably lead people in a specific spiritual or ideological direction. At the same time, he scolds politicians for overreacting to a practice that poses minimal risks and brings much-needed "enchantment" to quotidian life.

Mr. Letcher emphasizes that the significance of mushrooming, like that of other drug experiences, is "culturally contingent." In the 1960s, Americans and Europeans began to seek an experience they had until then equated with poisoning, reinterpreting effects that were once treated as signs of insanity or imminent death as an opportunity to explore inner worlds and see the outer one in a new light. Mr. Letcher's witty, entertaining and surprising book tells the story of how this happened, chronicling the contributions of explorers, naturalists, mycologists, philosophers, authors, charlatans, rock musicians and psychedelic visionaries.

Some of the facts Mr. Letcher confirms are at least as strange as the legends he debunks. Siberians, for instance, really do have a history of consuming fly-agaric mushrooms not only directly but also "distilled via human kidneys." Mr. Letcher speculates that they discovered the psychoactive properties of the mushroom itself, and of the urine excreted by people who have eaten it, by observing the antics of reindeer. In the winter, the animals supplement their meager diet of lichen by lapping up human urine, presumably for its mineral content.