WASSON, Valentina Pavlovna and R. Gordon WASSON. Mushrooms, Russia and History. New York: Pantheon Books. 1957.
4to. 2 vols. Original green-grey cloth with red and gilt lettering pieces to spines, in original glassine wrappers and grey cloth slipcase; pp. xxi, [1], 212, [4]; xii, [213]- 433, [3]; 82 plates, many in colour, with tissue guards, numerous text illustrations; slipcase a little marked, glassine wrappers with portions missing from spines, spines slightly sunned, otherwise very good indeed.
No. 94 of a limited edition of 512, inscribed to flyleaf by both authors. A breathtaking history of hallucinogenic mushroom use. Despite the title, Russia is only one pit-stop on this tour through the fungal traditions of Europe and South America as they look at varying cultural responses to mushrooms, positing the idea that the mycophilia of the Slavic people and the mycophobia of the Anglo-Saxons stem from different folkloric traditions.
R. Gordon Wasson was a Vice-President of J.P. Morgan, a banker whose greatest contribution was in the field of entheogenic fungi; his Russian wife Valentina was a paediatrician. It was she, a keen mushroom forager from childhood, who led her husband into mycology, at first casually but then with increasing scientific and ethnological rigour.They became seriously interested in edible mushrooms on their honeymoon in the Catskills in 1927 and were later the first Westerners to participate in a Mazatec mushroom ritual in Mexico, on a trip funded by the CIA. Their Mexico trip was made famous by a photo story in TIME in 1957 but the present work, their first full-length book, explores it in more detail. While the Wassons published several more books, its pioneering cultural thesis makes this their most significant.
R. Gordon Wasson had two species of psychoactive mushrooms named after him and provided the specimens used by Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, to identify the chemical structure of the active compounds psilocybin and psilocin. Timothy Leary's reading of the Wassons' early research into these mushrooms led to his experimentation with and promotion of LSD as a consciousness-expanding agent.
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