A Fungus Among Us

This week at the Medicine Club was a different week. We diverged away from the plant kingdom for a moment to delve into the world of fungus. I brought in one representative of a most interesting genus, the Psilocybe. This week we worked with Psilocybe azurescens

We will not be working with this medicine internally. Each person must walk that road on their own, I can not be a guide to that realm through this avenue. But I can point the way.

All of my initial information about this curious little mushroom comes from Paul Stamets book, Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World, a landmark achievement for fungophiles everywhere. If you want to locate these mushrooms, I suggest you start there. I, too, wrote a book, entitled Columbiana!, in which I shamelessly reveal many of my secrets from my 20's. You can buy this book from me for 23 dollars if you are so inclined, or I suppose you can go to the Common Ground coffee shop on Hawthorne and look at the house copy they have there.

The fact of the matter is, I had to put in some leg work to meet these emissaries of the natural world and so should you. If things of this nature come too easily, they are not appreciated enough.

But we can start with the basic habitat. The azurescens are beach dwellers. They were not discovered until 1979 and the first place they were found is at the mouth of the epic river that drains all of our rainfall, springs, rivulets, and rivers out to the sea. From the mouth of the what the natives called Chenewa, these mushrooms sing their song of the mycelium connection.

Mycelium is facinating stuff. It is the organism of the mushroom. The above ground portion that most of us are familiar with is the fruiting body of the underground decomposing organism that is the mycelium, a vast network of interwoven tendrills. Under a microscope, it does not look too different from the interconnected pathways of nerves in the body or synapses in the brain.

Mushrooms, in general, play a very important role in any given ecosystem that we find them in. They are decomposers, breaking down dead and rotting material and transforming it into rich soils and substrates for new life. Some of them have a very interesting relationship with trees, in which the mycelium grows in a protective sheath around the rootlets of trees. The rootlets and the mycelium exchange nutrients with one another, making each one stronger than they would be on their own. Some trees need this relationship in order to grow. This relationship is called a mychorhizal relationship.

Mychorhizal relationships have been proven to be an integral aspect of the health of old growth forests. Restoration artists and tree planers have found that encouraging the proper mychorhizal relationships with newly planted trees by introducing mycelium into the planting process helps the new trees survive and establish themselves.

Paul Stamets is not just a psychonaut. He and his organization, Fungi Perfecti of Olympia, have been doing outstanding work on discovering mycelium that can transmute toxins, breakdown oils, and be a great aid in environmental cleanups of the superfund order. Mushrooms may just yet save the world, if we open our minds up to their abilities.

Back to our guest, the azurescens. The genus Psilocybe contains hundreds of species that all have a varying amount of the compounds psilocybin and psilocin. The more these compounds are present, the more these mushrooms affect the humans who work with them. The azurescens have a high content of both, making them the strongest mushroom by weight on the planet.

The Psilocybe mushrooms cause a change in consciousness. Plain and simple. This can be very useful for healing a sick mind. Sadness, depression, confusion, stress and related disorders can be alleviated by a change in perspective. These mushrooms will certainly aid in achieving this. Many healing practitioners who work with these mushrooms claim that the mushrooms "speak" to them and in these conversations provide valuable insights and information regarding the patient or themselves.

This was the modus operendi of the Mazatec healer, Maria Sabina. Sabina was "discovered" by R. Gordon Wasson in 1957, who traveled to the Oaxaca highlands to study folk usage of mushrooms. He wrote an article that appeared in Life magazine. This article went on to spark a great curiosity in the western world, which initiated a flood of wayward pilgrims to Maria's highland village, all seeking a new way to converse with the numinous.

Par for the course with the West, the sacrament was abused and things were taken for granted. Maria ended her career disappointed with the pilgrims and their looking for a shortcut to G-d. By the end of her days she said the "little ones" no longer spoke to her.

You may have come to meet the magic mushrooms as a recreational thrill seeker. I know my initial curiosity was not with pure healing intentions. I wanted to get high. That all changed after my initial encounters. As I got older, I matured and came to a place of great reverence for the medicine of the Psilocybe. It is not a genus to be trifled with. This is big medicine and it needs to be respected.

Why am I writing about the mushrooms? They asked me to. In my life, the Psilocybe have been great teachers revealing the wonder of the world when I have forgotten, revealing the nature of my sadness when my mind is ill, and revealing secrets of ecology, connections in the web of relations that were not evident to me until I looked at them with a different perspective. They have humbled me when I thought myself too great and boosted me up when I thought too little of myself. With their aid I have seen the timeless nature of existence and learned to navigate the river of time that we experience as "passing" with a greater ease and grace.

I feel that as denizens of the PNW, we are gifted to live among so many different species of Psilocybe. You don't even need to go to the beach. You can find many of them growing right here in Portland. They are an important part of this ecosystem, simply because they are here. Good luck, happy hunting, give thanks, and have respect.

We will be returning to the plant kingdom with the next Medicine Club.

I wish to close with a translation of one of Maria Sabina's songs that was taught to her by the mushrooms.

Because I can swim in the immense
Because I can swim in all forms
Because I am the launch woman
Because I am the sacred opossum
Because I am the Lord opossum

I am the woman Book that is beneath the water, says
I am the woman of the populous town, says
I am the shepherdess who is beneath the water, says
I am the woman who shepherds the immense, says
I am a shepherdess and I come with my shepherd, says

Because everything has its origin
And I come going from place to place from the origin...