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<a name="Toc205380667" id="Toc205380667"> </a><a name="Toc190707540" id="Toc190707540">The Wasson and Allegro missives</a>

<a name="Toc205380668" id="Toc205380668"> </a><a name="Toc190707541" id="Toc190707541">1) Wasson to TLS</a>, pub. 21 August 1970

Sir, I have just read John M. Allegro’s The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (reviewed in the TLS on May 28). I will refrain from passing on his philological evidence, which others have already treated thoroughly. But I will call your readers’ attention to a question of art history, that I have not seen mentioned in the various reviews that have come to my attention.

Facing page 74 of his book Mr Allegro exhibits a photograph of what he calls “a Christian fresco showing the Amanita muscaria as the tree of good and evil in the Garden of Eden”. His publishers have reproduced a mirror-image of this on each of the end-papers of the book and also on the jacket.

This fresco, an expression of French provincial Romanesque art, was first called to the attention of the learned world in the Bulletin of the Société Mycologique de France in 1911 (vol. xxvii, p. 31). It has been picked up frequently in mycological publications, especially in England. Mycologists speak only to each other and never to art historians. Had they done so, the story would have been different.

I drew attention to this error in our Mushrooms, Russia & History (1957) and at greater length in my SOMA Divine Mushroom of Immortality (1969). In this last book I quoted from a letter that Erwin Panofsky had written me in 1952:

The plant in this fresco has nothing whatever to do with mushrooms…and the similarity with Amanita muscaria is purely fortuitous. The Plaincourault fresco is only one example – and since the style is provincial, a particularly deceptive one – of a conventionalized tree type, prevalent in Romanesque and early Gothic art, which art historians actually refer to as a “mushroom tree”, or in German, Pilzbaum. It comes about by the gradual schematization of the impressionistically rendered Italian pine tree in Roman and early Christian painting, and there are hundreds of instances exemplifying this development – unknown of course to mycologists. … What the mycologists have overlooked is that the medieval artists hardly ever worked from nature but from classical prototypes which in the course of repeated copying became quite unrecognizable.

I checked with other art historians including Meyer Schapiro, and found that they were in agreement. I was struck by the celerity with which they all recognized the art motif.

One could expect mycologists, in their isolation, to make this blunder. Mr Allegro is not a mycologist but, if anything, a cultural historian. On page 229 of his book, in his notes, he shows himself familiar with my writings. Presumably he had read the footnote in which I dismissed the fresco on page 87 of Mushrooms, Russia & History and, more especially, Panofsky’s letter reproduced on page 179 of SOMA. He chooses to ignore the interpretation put on this fresco by the most eminent art historians.

R. GORDON WASSON

<a name="Toc205380670" id="Toc205380670"> </a><a name="Toc190707543" id="Toc190707543">2) Allegro to TLS</a>, written 31 August, pub. 11 September 1970

Sir, Is it too much to hope that persons who presume to comment critically on my book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, would read it thoroughly first? Mr Gordon Wasson’s (August 21) objections to the mycologists’ identification of the Plaincourault fresco’s tree of good and evil as the Amanita muscaria are quoted verbatim in n. 20 to chapter IX.

One other point: “others” have not, in fact, “treated thoroughly” my philological evidence for the identification of the mushroom cult and mythology in the ancient Near East. Adequately to assess the results of this major advance in language relationships, now presented for the first time in published form, will require much longer unemotional study by competent philologians than has yet been possible. Until this has been done, laymen would be well advised to ignore the kind of emotive criticism of my work so far expressed by clerical and other reviewers and read the whole book for themselves.

JOHN M. ALLEGRO

<a name="Toc205380672" id="Toc205380672"> </a><a name="Toc190707545" id="Toc190707545">3) Wasson's private letter to Allegro, 14 September 1970</a>

Dear Mr Allegro

At last I understand. From your letter in the TLS 11.9.70 I surmise what had baffled me. I had found your note IX 20 incomprehensible. In nothing that I had published had I used the words apparently attributed to me, and it wasn’t 100% clear whether you were attributing them to me or to Ramsbottom. I looked up ‘Ramsbottom op. cit. p. 48’ and I found nothing there. In the fall of 1953 as I passed through London I saw an ad of Collins announcing a new book on mushrooms by Ramsbottom. (The date was the day it was put on sale, October 26.) I bought it and hurried home. On December 21 I wrote a letter to Dr. Ramsbottom pointing out the misinterpretation of the Plaincourault fresco in his book on page 34. I now gather that he was properly impressed and added a footnote, not to be found in the original edition, on p. 48. He never replied to my letter (which is not unusual with him), and he neither sought nor had my permission to reproduce what was a private letter. The letter was not drafted for publication. I had forgotten its text, which I have now looked up for the first time since it was written, and find the words you quote in it. What we wished to say we said in Mushrooms, Russia & History (1957) and I added Panofsky’s letter in my SOMA. Does your copy of Mushrooms and Toadstools carry ‘1953’ on its title page? If so, it is misleading, because it was either a fresh print or a new edition published at the earliest in 1954.

Though we are utterly opposed to each other on the role played by the fly-agaric, we agree that it was important. I think we can correspond with each other on friendly terms, like opposing counsel after hammering each other all day in court who meet for a drink together in a bar before going home. I wish you would tell me one thing: when did the idea of the fly-agaric first come to you and from where?

Sincerely yours,

R. Gordon Wasson

<a name="Toc205380674" id="Toc205380674">4) Wasson to Arthur Crook</a>, Ed., TLS, 16 September 1970

I think Allegro must have got his idea of the fly-agaric from us, yet his book does not show any influence by us, apart from the fly-agaric.

~ R. Gordon Wasson

<a name="Toc190707549" id="Toc190707549"> </a><a name="Toc205380676" id="Toc205380676">5) Wasson to TLS</a>, written 16 September, pub. 25 September 1970

The Sacred Mushroom

Sir,-Mr. Allegro (September 11) chooses to avoid the point of my letter: the Plaincourault fresco does not picture the fly-agaric. He admits, even insists, that he had been forewarned, but none the less for guidance on a question of medieval iconography he has stuck to a naive misinterpretation made by a band of eager mycologists, and only because he thinks this would serve his thesis. Some would have preferred the judgment of specialists in Romanesque art.

Mr. Allegro’s uncritical choice of sources is again made manifest on page 123 of his book, where he takes up the chemistry of the fly-agaric. “Among the drugs so far isolated”, he says, “are Muscarine, Atropine, and Bufotenin.” He cites as his authority a book published in 1959 by a man, not a chemist, who was at the time exploring E.S.P. and talking with the dead, especially with an Egyptian priest belonging to the family of a 4th Dynasty Pharaoh. Muscarine is found consistently in the fly-agaric but in quantities so small that one would have to ingest upwards of six kilos to get a muscarine reaction, and moreover this would not be hallucinogenic. Atropine has been reported, but several careful studies in recent years have failed to find it in American and European specimens and its very presence is now considered doubtful. As for Bufotenin, there is none in the fly-agaric.

In the past ten years chemists have done much to clarify the intricate problems presented by the fly-agaric, notably the Bowden team in England, the Takemoto team of Sendai University, and most important the team headed by Professor Conrad Eugster in Zürich. Mr. Allegro seems ignorant to their writings. The active agents are ibotenic acid, muscimol, and muscazone, but the fascinating problem of the fly-agaric is not yet fully solved and there may be other agents yet to be discovered. A recapitulation of the work in this field will appear in the October issue of the Bulletin on Narcotics published in Geneva by the Division of Narcotic Drugs of the United Nations.

May I ask the hospitality of your columns to clarify the difference that separates Mr. Allegro and me? We both think the role of the fly-agaric was of major importance in Eurasian cultural history. In the 1920s my wife and I began to interest ourselves in the widely varying attitudes toward wild mushrooms of the European peoples. For more than two decades we gathered data – philological, folkloric, anthropological – on this theme, and these [caused] us, in the 1940s, to hazard a weak surmise: that a mushroom (we knew not which) had played a role in the religious life of our remote ancestors millennia ago, long before there was writing. Seeking light, we turned to the Asiatic cultures, and there we found two shrinking enclaves, in the remotest regions of the far north, where the shamans still made use of the fly-agaric as the hallucinogenic agent for communicating with the spirits of the dead. This seemed a gratifying confirmation of our surmise and we thought we had reached the end of our road. Our book, Mushrooms Russia & History, appeared in 1957.

In the 1960s I directed my attention to the Soma of the ancient Aryans, an hallucinogenic plant that saturates the Vedic hymns and that had never been identified. The descriptive terms of the poets, all of their varied tropes for the adored plant, tallied perfectly with the fly-agaric. No one had ever suggested a mushroom. The art and folklore of the Near and Middle East in the third and second millennium B.C. are saturated with a Marvellous Herb linked with a Tree of Life. They are, I contend, the fly-agaric and the tree with which it prefers to live in mycorrhizal relationship, the birch of the forest belt of Eurasia. Among the peoples of the Near and Middle East many hailed originally from the north and the brought down with them the tradition of the Tree and the Herb. The Semites absorbed the tradition at Mari and elsewhere. How much the peoples of the Near and Middle East knew of the plant, whether the memory of the potent herb was reinforced by supplies to esoteric circles coming from areas where the fly-agaric grows in quantity, I do not know.

I published my findings in 1969, without fanfare, in SOMA Divine Mushroom of Immortality. Warned by scholar-friends that my book might pass unnoticed as coming from without the fold of accredited scholars, I gave my theme a full-dress presentation aiming my book primarily at Vedic scholars, supplying the best illustrations well reproduced, printed on fine paper by Giovanni Mardersteig of Verona, in a fine binding – in short, dressed in apparel befitting the holy herb that was its subject. This unfortunately raised the cost. I arranged to have sent out as gifts, almost a third of the limited edition, chiefly to Indo-Iranian scholars [damaged text][?some] to anthropologists, and a few to [?others] The book was quickly sold [?We heard…] that a Bern bookseller [...?] is offering a f[ew c]opi[es …] in price. The … well received. You m… [?] commentary (April 30), drew attention to M. Lévi Strauss's remarkable article devoted to it in L'Homme. In reviews and private communications, many have accepted or lean to my identification. I am to lead off in a discussion of the subject at the forthcoming International Congress of Orientalists in Canberra.

My book brings the role of the fly-agaric in the Near and Middle East down to 1000 B.C. Mr. Allegro’s performance brings it down from 1000 B.C. to the time of Christ. He does not disclose where he got the idea of the fly-agaric. I know no Sumerian, but I do remark that in an area of pioneering scholarship he tosses around Sumerian roots with an agility and a self-assurance not customary among philologists. When he occasionally touches on subjects with which I am familiar, as the Plaincourault fresco and the chemistry of the fly-agaric, he is, well, unimpressive.

The peoples of the Near and Middle East about whom Mr. Allegro is writing were among the most gifted and sophisticated that mankind has produced, and they have left us incomparable monuments of their culture. That they should have centred their religious life on a drug with the horrifying properties he describes on pages 163-164 of his book is unthinkable. Now that we are on the brink of learning the secrets of the great hallucinogen of history, the fly-agaric, it would be a reflection on our own intelligence were we to get off on the wrong foot. Mr. Allegro in this passage exhibits the complete syndrome of the invincible Anglo-Saxon mycophobe.