The Secret History of Magic Mushrooms

By on April 21, 2012 in News 15

Magic MushroomVia Gnostic Media:

Why is Gordon Wasson important?

He’s considered the discoverer of the magic mushrooms, the man who launched the psychedelic movement, and is also considered the father of the field of ethnomycology.

I’ve discovered the following information – most of which has been verified with primary documentation. Some of the details may change as we flush them out completely:

1) Wasson served as a chairman to the Council on Foreign Relations (the CFR).
2) Wasson was a director of the Free Russia Fund, Inc. “has been founded to support the “morale” of “exiles from Soviet powers”: surely “morale” must be spelled out in terms of Russian values, not what our values might be if we were exiles.”
3) Wasson worked as a VP to JP Morgan Bank at 23 Wall St, a.k.a. “The Corner”.
4) Wasson was PR (propaganda) VP for JP Morgan, and helped to sell the current financial system created by his boss, JP Morgan, at Jekyll Island (see Secrets of the Federal Reserve by Eustace Mullins).
5) Wasson had close ties to Allen Dulles, head of the CIA. There is documentation publicly available that Wasson himself was CIA.

Read More: Gnostic Media

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  • Liam_McGonagle

    I don’t really have much of an axe to grind on this one, but a bit of skepticism may be in order, at least with regard to some of the details.  For example:

    “11) Primary documents reveal that Wasson was involved in helping to cover up JP Morgan’s involvement in the Civil War’s Hall Carbine Affair, and that Wasson directed the disinformation campaign. It appears that this act earned Wasson a position as VP of PR for JP Morgan Bank.”

    The Hall Carbine Affair happened in August 1861.  Thirty-seven (37) years before Wasson was even born.  I know Rick Santorum may disagree with me, but I think most folks would find it hard to believe that a pre-fetal American could hold that much influence with an organization that size of JP Morgan.

    I’ll admit that I got fatigued working my way through an enormous list of points that appeared to be of marginal validity or relevance, so there just might be a gem hidden somewhere in this article.  But I totally broke down when I saw that “Hall Carbine” thing.

    • Tim Cavanaugh

      Probably a reference to Wasson’s 1941 book The Hall Carbine Affair: A Study in Contemporary Folklore, which argued that “the alleged transaction, insofar as the case against Morgan is concerned, is legend, not history.” Revisionist history maybe (I don’t know anything about the Hall Carbine Affair), but not a coverup in the strict sense. 

    • PhiloSlacker

       Wasson seems more like a guy brought up on the (morally) dirty side of life, and discovered mushrooms more as a fortunate accident than as part of some kind of evil plan. 

      I am not sure what the directors of the video hope to do apart from smear Wasson with a conspiracy brush.  So the guy had horrid connections… what does that have to do with mushrooms?  Nothing.  You might as well claim Maria Sabina’s personal life was more relevant to mushrooms, but even that would be silly.

      So what does this video have to do with “the secret history” of mushrooms?  Again, nothing.  “Secret history of some guy who ate mushrooms” is more apt.

    • Calypso_1

      I believe this probably refers to his work “The Hall Carbine Affair – A Study In Contemporary Folklore”  where he rather successfully crafted the publics opinion and the historical record on the affair into one more favorable for JP Morgan.
      It’s never too late to change history : ) 

      EDIT NOTE: Just saw the comment below related to the same book.

  • http://buzzcoastin.posterous.com BuzzCoastin

    One of the many myths of the 60′ is that
    stoners, especially users of pot, shrooms and LSD, are always good guys;
    when in fact
    all sorts of people use all sorts of “drugs” that have all sorts of effects.

    A friend of mine has been a Dead Head for over 35 years;
    he started doing LSD and shrooms while attending the US Naval Academy and
    he did lots of acid while studying nuclear weapon systems.

    Today he is a successful, high-level corporate executive.
    He knows that there is a problem with “the system,”
    but he keeps on pluggin away for da Man anyway.
    He hasn’t made one attempt to break away from the system;
    he’s training his kids to join it.
    So much for Tim Leary’s theory.

    • Chromex

      Certainly anyone who has heard Learys’ Cooper Union address on the possibilities of growth through use of LSD knows that he never presented it as a guarantee , nor did he imply that such growth would come about through anything other than some amount of effort ( see e.g. Leary and Alpert on set and setting) . AS he acknowledged in 1964, when one takes LSD in an uncontrolled setting the possibility of “accidental reimprints” remains strong. The fact that one guy who is now part of “the system” took lsd neither validates nor invalidates the multifaceted , complex theorys of Leary. 
      Irvin is irritating because he embraces the “trivium” and then emphasizes, in this blurb at least,  ad hominum “guilt-by-association” , which is forbidden under strict logic. One of the first things you learn in logic class is that the argument of a slumlord against rent control is not addressed by revealing that he or she is a slumlord. Irvin did a good enough job or dissecting Wasoon’s errors in his book. he has not made a demonstration of how Wasoon’s associations have impacted his position. 

  • Kevin

    wow, been reading DisInfo for awhile but this may get me to look to other outlets… you guys just post without research?? nowhere do you say anything about how he was an author and he didn’t discover mushrooms they’ve been a tradition for thousands of years. he was the first to document the mushroom writing about his experience in mexico with shamans in Life Magazine… the article was called “Seeking the Magic Mushroom”…so calling him the discoverer of magic mushrooms is sooo ignorant… cmon guys!!

    • Liam_McGonagle

      Don’t you think Disinfo’s kind of a game in a sense?

      Most of it’s user contributed content, like this.  And a lot of it’s relatively straightforward expose or think pieces.  But on occassion someone will deliberately post some dubious content in order to challenge readers into smoking out the weaker arguments/deceptions.

      In a manner of speaking, Disinformation is like a crack pipe for your inner skeptic.

  • MoralDrift

    Yeah my thoughts are that as far as Mushrooms go, their use and their utility has been long known to mankind although modern man has only recently rediscovered them. If this guy is some kind of “illuminati” minion and the allegation is that his propagation of magic mushrooms is somehow nefarious….I just don’t see it being true. many of us know from direct experience the powerful utility of these natural tools. 

    On the other hand, also with direct experience, I dont hold LSD in the same regard and wouldnt recommend it to anybody

  • teachpeace

    An In depth perspective…. Enjoy.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xfe7g-3Xuk&feature=related

     

  • Tchoutoye

    Ever since Jan Irvin got in contact with the Allegro family, he has taken up the cause to restore Allegro’s reputation, a cause which was indeed overdue. The bulk of his book “The Holy Mushroom: Evidence of Mushrooms in Judeo-Christianity” concerns itself with defending Allegro in his spat with Wasson. It is a worthy contribution to the field of ethnomycology, as it does so (mostly) on academic grounds.

    Irvin doesn’t seem content with that however, and has started a campaign to ruin Wasson’s reputation with attacks which are increasingly ad hominem, and depend on guilt by association in an X-degrees-of-separation game.

    As a regular reader of Disinfo, I am certainly no fan of the CIA, CFR, JP Morgan, and other usual suspects in the NWO cabal, and it may help, in certain cases at least, to place Wasson’s mushroom research in the context of his political/business background. But it should also be possible to separate the two, and judge Wasson’s contribution to ethnomycology on its own merits, in order not to throw away the proverbial baby with the politically dirty bathwater.

  • Tchoutoye

    “He’s considered the discoverer of the magic mushrooms”

    That’s a rather lazy assessment, as magic mushrooms have been discovered by people across the globe for (tens of) thousands of years. Wasson’s role was to bring specimens of a psilocybe mushroom back from Mexico to the Western academic world, where they could chemically analysed in a lab, and furthermore to introduce the existence of psilocybe mushrooms to the mainstream by publicizing his personal experience of a Mexican mushroom ceremony in a popular magazine.

  • Yer Dad

    “He’s considered the discoverer of the magic mushrooms, the man who launched the psychedelic movement, and is also considered the father of the field of ethnomycology.”
    The first two are so off base as to be laughable. The third and last part of that sentence
    is at least questionable. So is the idea that the person who posted this content had some
    sort of deeper ‘Disinfo motive’

  • Camron Wiltshire

    How many people read through the entire list on GnosticMedia.com before they commented?  Which of those points evidence at least a tacit relationship between Mr. Wasson and with known purveyors of human suffering (CIA, FBI, CFR)  This is of course an appeal to raise funds to finish a book/documentary describing in more detail why this information is important and deserves to be chronicled.  I for one am intrigued and curious to know the potential occulted desires and connections of  those known for having brought the horrors of MK Ultra to the micro and macrocosm of human experience and their connections to the suppression of the Gnosis of those original martyrs of consciousness expansion and cognitive liberty, the suppressed Gnostic christians, Pagan mystery religions etc. 

    It’s not a “guilt by association” fallacy alone if the connections brought forward have literally decades of evidence denoting a decided antihuman agenda, where these various agencies with explicit intent have cultivated technology for spreading misery and exploitation to the masses.  Therefore to assume that Jan is being hypocritical somehow for wanting to analyze in depth, for better or worse what this man’s connections to the proliferation of psychedelics might really have been, is in reality a blessing as it adds important context for a more holistic awareness of what has been, and what could be as we become increasingly addicted as a populace to mind altering substances, whether they be drugs, mass culture or manipulated food and water.

    Coupled with the cover up of Allegro’s work, you may just find that there are those working for enslavement via pharmacology and those pushing liberation and those archetypes may have been typified in another intersecting realm (entheogens) as they had been previously regarding the cover up and delay of the real import of the dead sea scrolls and the suppression of the heretics/gnostics and how religions have served the power structure then and now.

    Just food for thought.  Jan has done great work demonstrating explicitly the methods of mind control via perverted logic, religious occultation, and their intersection now with pharmacology.   Given his track record he deserves support as well as the benefit of the doubt.  

    Kudos to Jan and all the psychonautic autodidacts working to unveil the puppet masters throughout time.  

    To Cognitive Liberty!

    • Calypso_1

      Probably very few read the entire article – as is so often the case.
       
      I’ve been amused at the dismissal in several comments of Wasson’s role in the modern discovery of psychedelics.
      Certainly tribal societies have known about them for millennia and perhaps their use has been hidden within other groups but 50 years ago this was not common knowledge. 
      I meet many young people today who, though they have experienced psychedelics, have no idea who Wasson, Hoffmann, Huxley or Leary are.   
      Perhaps only by moving beyond the memory of the first modern development of psychedelic exploration can we once again make an attempt at bringing our society into this vital stream of human heritage.
       
      Anyhow Camron, I think this is one of the better articles you have posted.  I’d much rather see this than Infowars  : )