In addition to trippy illustrations juxtaposed with chemical diagrams and laboratory photos, the brothers provided detailed instructions for achieving the four major stages of growth: extracting spores (the fungal equivalent of seeds), cultivating a batch of mycelium (the vegetative part of a fungus), inoculating a sterile medium with the mycelium, and then simulating the conditions of a humid forest floor in order to produce mushrooms.įorty years later, the book is useful mostly as a window into Terence McKenna's imagination. Oeric, though in a fun twist, Terence wrote the forward under his real name. Authors Terence and Dennis McKenna published under the pseudonyms O.T. The first widely available American treatise on home growing was 1976's Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide. Today, psilocybin mushrooms are more popular and easier to cultivate than at any point in recent memory, thanks to the internet's ability to disperse knowledge in much the same way that Psilocybe mexicana spreads its spores.īut it wasn't always so. In the 1950s, the Mazatec shaman María Sabina led an American banker named Gordon Wasson and his wife in a mushroom ceremony, and the couple returned to the U.S. Psilocybin mushrooms continued to grow throughout Central America and to clandestinely fuel the trips of indigenous psychonauts. When Spanish Catholics subjugated the Mesoamericans, they eradicated a religion but not its chief sacrament.
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