that pharmacology intends to provide the future with an ever-expanding repertoire of psychoactive chemicals. But I wonder whether what is needed are new drugs or the courage to shamanically apply the botanical hallucinogens already sanctioned by millenia of folk usage. Few of the productions of the laboratory will be found to be as somatically benign as psilocybin or to be so structurally analogous to those compounds naturally occurring in the human brain and responsible for “normal” consciousness.
Once one has actually grown the mushroom, it becomes obvious that the mushroom uses the same strategy whether it is enveloping a petri dish or a society. A tiny part breaks away from the main body, it becomes a new center of radiative growth that expands until it reaches a critical limit, then it too spawns break-away particles with a life of their own. By this process—normally involving spores, but in cultivation involving propagation of mycelial strains, and on another level involving the teaching of cultivation techniques by one person to another—the mushroom makes its way in the world.
This implies an analogy: That knowledge of how to cultivate is spreading through society in the same way that the mycelium spreads through rye in a jaror a bed of compost. There is an apocalyptic corollary: When the technique is ubiquitous in society, “fruiting” will occur, meaning the real power and import of humanity’s relationship to the mushroom will be suddenly revealed.
—Terence McKenna,
August 1985
ACE of SHROOMS.
The Mixtec representation of the psychedelic experience, from the Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus 1.
FOREWORD
by Terence McKenna
More than twenty-five years have passed since Albert Hofmann isolated and named the hallucinogen psilocybin. Hofmann’s psilocybin was extracted from various species of mushrooms whose occurrence and ritual use in the mountains of Oaxaca had been discovered by Gordon and Valentina Wasson in the summer of 1953. Of the many species which were in use in Oaxaca, subsequent laboratory tests revealed that only one species was easily grown and able to fruit under a variety of artificial conditions. That one species is Stropharia cubensis—the starborn magic mushroom. This book is a path to this mushroom; how to grow it and how to place it in your life like the shining light that it is. The sections which follow give precise, no-fail instructions for growing and preserving the magic mushroom. We have made these instructions as clear and direct as possible; what is described is only slightly more complicated than canning or making jelly. These instructions can be adapted to undertakings of any size from a few jars to thousands.
But before all these details there should come a chat about just what this is really all about. We imagine that if you are avidly reading this book it is probably because you have taken dried mushrooms or been exposed to fresh ones in Latin America, so we do not begin with readers unfamiliar with the joys of mushroom tripping. Our instructions are a combination of research into other people’s methods of cultivation and procedures which we developed, tested, and found useful ourselves. Nothing we recommend is untried by us. There may be other ways to carry on small-scale cultivation indoors but either they are variations on our method that are less direct or they are unknown to us. Cultivation of Stropharia outside on compost is possible in the U.S. if the local temperature is warm through the growing season. But compost cultivation is an art in itself and demands more space, more effort, and more public exposure than our indoor method. Getting involved in composting a ton of manure is not a necessary part of producing huge quantities of perfect magic mushrooms!
Our method is scientific but our opinions about Stropharia cubensis are not. Our opinions in this matter do not rest upon the opinions of others nor upon anything written in any book, instead they rest upon the experience of five dried grams of this psilocybin mushroom; at that level a peculiar phenomenon occurs. It is the emergence of an I-Thou relationship between the person taking the psilocybin and the mental state it evokes. Jung calls this “transference” and it was a necessary condition of early and primitive humanity’s relationship to its gods and demons. The mushroom speaks, and our opinions rest upon what it tells eloquently of itself in the cool night of the mind:
“I am old, older than thought in your species, which is itself fifty times older than your history. Though I have been on earth for ages I am from the stars. My home is no one planet, for many worlds scattered through the shining disc of the galaxy have conditions which allow my spores an opportunity for life. The mushroom which you see is the part of my body given to sex thrills and sun bathing, my true body is a fine network of fibers growing through the soil. These networks may cover acres and may have far more connections than the number in a human brain. My mycelial network is nearly immortal—only the sudden toxification of a planet or the explosion of its parent star can wipe me out. By means impossible to explain because of certain misconceptions in your model of reality all my mycelial networks in the galaxy are in hyperlight communication across space and time. The mycelial body is as fragile as a spider’s web but the collective hypermind and memory is a vast historical archive of the career of evolving intelligence on many worlds in our spiral star swarm. Space, you see, is a vast ocean to those hardy life forms that have the ability to reproduce from spores, for spores are covered with the hardest organic substance known. Across the aeons of time and space drift many spore-forming life-forms in suspended animation for millions of years until contact is made with a suitable environment. Few such species are minded, only myself and my recently evolved near relatives have achieved the hyper-communication mode and memory capacity that makes us leading members in the community of galactic intelligence. How the hyper-communication mode operates is a secret which will not be lightly given to humans. But the means should be obvious: it is the occurence of psilocybin and psilocin in the biosynthetic pathways of my living body that opens for me and my symbiots the vision screens to many worlds. You as an individual and Homo sapiens as a species are on the brink of the formation of a symbiotic relationship with my genetic material that will eventually carry humanity and earth into the galactic mainstream of the higher civilizations.
“Since it is not easy for you to recognize other varieties of intelligence around you, your most advanced theories of politics and society have advanced only as far as the notion of collectivism. But beyond the cohesion of the members of a species into a single social organism there lie richer and even more baroque evolutionary possibilities. Symbiosis is one of these. Symbiosis is a relation of mutual dependence and positive benefits for both of the species involved. Symbiotic relationships between myself and civilized forms of higher animals have been established many times and in many places throughout the long ages of my development. These relationships have been mutually useful; within my memory is the knowledge of hyperlight drive ships and how to build them. I will trade this knowledge for a free ticket to new worlds around suns younger and more stable than your own. To secure an eternal existence down the long river of cosmic time, I again and again offer this agreement to higher beings and thereby have spread throughout the galaxy over the long millenia. A mycelial network has no organs to move the world, no hands; but higher animals with manipulative abilities can become partners with the star knowledge within me and if they act in good faith, return both themselves and their humble mushroom teacher to the million worlds to which all citizens of our starswarm are heir.”
