http://www.gnosticmedia....ryMagicMushroomsProject

An intriguing project focusing on R. Gordon Wasson, who really helped kickstart the psychedelic revolution. Did he do it with the blessing of the powers that be? Can a counter-culture be counter-anything, if it is funded by the established order?

"Wasson’s family requires all researchers to tell them exactly what they’re going to write about Wasson before they’ve even seen the documents"

This brings to mind the access limits to the archives of certain high-profile political figures.

The project is in funding stage and accepting donations.

and now there is a summation in a podcast from the same website

http://www.gnosticmedia....oms-by-jan-irvin-144-2/

i highly recommend it (especially for the information junkies, b/c it's pretty damn dense)

jan irvin is a great guy

That was a very interesting podcast.

Wasson a CIA asset... Shulgin in the Bohemian Club. Dark undercurrents, no doubt. Taken together with Lee and Shlain's thesis in Acid Dreams, it's not unreasonable to wonder what agendas were operating behind the "psychedelic revolution" of the 1960s.

I think it's impossible to doubt Wasson's sincere interest in visionary mushrooms and ethnomycology. He spent a great deal of time over the course of many decades exploring the subject. Still, Irvin gives some substantial food for thought. Some of the connections seemed innocuous; if you're a big enough player in the world of finance, you're bound to know some important people with dubious reputations. Other parts seemed more ominous. It all seems soundly researched in any case.

On a slightly related tangent, there's a lot of inaccurate information about who rediscovered magic mushrooms. Wasson himself never tried to claim credit, but he's often given it simply because he was the one who really brought them into the public eye. Schultes claimed credit, being the first to publish an article identifying the Mexican mushrooms, but his article was largely plagiarism, drawing from the fieldwork of Blas Pablo Reko (who referred to him as "an ambitious young Harvard student ... turned literary pirate"). This led Ott to suggest that Reko deserves credit for the discovery, but that isn't right either. The credit truly belongs to Robert Weitlaner, a friend of Reko's. Weitlaner had some interest in anthropology and a passion for linguistic studies, which he pursued as a hobby. While doing linguistic fieldwork during a vacation in Oaxaca, it was Weitlaner who heard about the magicomedicinal use of psychoactive mushrooms and recognized them as being the Aztec teonanácatl; not having the spare time to do further fieldwork himself, he encouraged Reko to gather further information about the mushrooms.

i find attributing rediscovery of the psychedelic mushroom to be trivial and fruitless after a while b/c there were most likely many westerners before them, and before them (albeit probably undocumented)that "rediscovered" it back to when they were "common" knowledge. i hate having to use obtuse terms to hide my ignorance. thank god for people like jan irvin for doing the research so many of us are too lazy to do.

It has to be documented for it to count.

There was a time lapse between the last documented mention of mushroom usage among indigenous peoples by the Spaniards in which the mushrooms were not only forgotten in the mind of the West but academia went as far as to say that the mushrooms of Mesoamerican Indians never existed in the first place (W. E. Safford 1915) and that instead Franciscian Friars misidentified the specimens as the tops of Lophophora Williamsii. Robert Weitleiner sounded the horn in a way, being the first outsider on record to touch the mushrooms, but his samples were not in satisfactory condition for analysis (Weitlaner 1936). Reko's objections led him to search Oaxaca and in 1938, with Schultes, obtained botanical specimens of teonanacatl' which turned out to represent three species.

1915 - Safford publishes his theory and it gains popularity in academia.
1936 - Weitlaner sends unidentifiable samples to Farlow Herbarium
1938 - Reko & Schultes collect what turned out to be three species of teonanacatl'
1939 - Irmgard Weitlaner-Johnson and J. B. Johnson in Hautla become first outsiders to witness valeda.
1939 - Carl Stantesson receives samples from Reko and performs chemical extracts on frogs and mice.

World War II now interferes and research basically drops off here for another 16 years before Wasson and Richardson get the goods in Oaxaca. As to technical breeches between Reko/Weitlaner being the true "pioneer of rediscovery", you decide.