R. Gordon Wasson

R. Gordon Wasson was an American ethnomycologist and vice president at J.P. Morgan & Company bank, known for his pioneering research into the use of psychedelic mushrooms in shamanistic rituals. His work became central to the CIA's MKULTRA Subproject 58's quest for the teonanáctl (God's flesh) mushroom¹.

Wasson and his wife, Valentina, a pediatrician, had been investigating a mushroom cult in Mexico. He had traveled to Mexico twice and was planning a third expedition when he was contacted by Andrija Puharich and Alice Astor Bouverie. Wasson explained that the Mexicans believed the mushroom was a pathway to the supernatural and possessed divinatory powers, allowing human consciousness to separate from the physical body¹.

In August 1954, Wasson shared his information with Puharich, who then briefed his Army superiors on the teonanáctl mushroom. The CIA, however, chose to bypass Puharich and approached Wasson directly through their chemist, James Moore, who posed as a professor¹.

In June 1955, Wasson, accompanied by photographer Allan Richardson, arrived in Huautla de Jiménez, Oaxaca, and became the first white men in recorded history to eat the divine mushrooms. Wasson reported intense hallucinations but no divinatory powers. Upon his return, he sent a cache of mushrooms to Puharich for chemical analysis¹.

Wasson's work gained widespread public attention when he struck a publishing deal with Life magazine and authored a twelve-page account of his experience titled "Seeking the Magic Mushroom." While he omitted any mention of the CIA's involvement, he highlighted the mushroom's alleged ability to access and enhance ESP. The article caused a sensation, effectively undermining the CIA's desire to keep the drug a secret psychic weapon under military intelligence control, as pleasure seekers flocked to Mexico to consume God's flesh¹.

Mushrooms, Russia and History

Decades before the Mexican expeditions, Wasson and Valentina had become fascinated by how different societies treat mushrooms, finding whole nationalities (Russians, Catalans) to be mycophiles and others (Anglo-Saxons) mycophobes; their limited-edition Mushrooms, Russia and History (1957, $125 new) catalogued the legends and photographs of nearly every known species.²

The 1955 Velada and the 1956 Expedition

On June 29, 1955 Wasson and photographer Allan Richardson reached the town hall at Huautla de Jiménez and were led to María Sabina, a curandera Wasson called a señora sin mancha; that night the two men each ate twelve mushrooms, and Wasson recorded "a fission of the spirit, a split in the person." On the 1956 return trip, joined by James Moore and the French mycologist Roger Heim with a $2,000 contribution from the Geschickter Fund, Heim later grew the mushrooms from spore prints in Paris and sent samples to Albert Hofmann at Sandoz, who isolated the active compound and named it Psilocybin, beating the CIA to "God's flesh." Wasson's 1957 Life account ran 17 pages and lured waves of Americans to Mexico, among them a young Harvard psychologist named Timothy Leary, who ate his first mushrooms in 1959.²