A sweeping cultural history of our yearning for psychedelics to free us from both modern life and traditional religion.

In 1957, Life Magazine published an article called “Seeking the Magic Mushroom” about a Mexican healing ritual centered on an obscure psychedelic: Psilocybe mushrooms. Readers raced to experiment with the drug for their own spiritual, therapeutic, and recreational purposes until a psychedelic craze swept the nation. Today, though psilocybin has been transformed from a sacred fungus into a pharmaceutical product, many people still turn to the enigmatic mushroom to encounter profound spiritual experiences without the baggage of traditional religion.

In Still Seeking the Magic Mushroom, Hugh B. Urban examines the alluring promise of mysticism without religion. With psychedelics, one need not fast, flagellate, or even worship a god to encounter the transcendent; a carefully timed ingestion of psilocybin will suffice. But, Urban argues, stripping the trip from its religion came at a cost: the erasure of Indigenous culture and the eventual commercialization and scientification of the psychedelic underground. Urban shows that psychedelic mushrooms, far from the fringe or countercultural margins, have been central players in shaping American attitudes toward religion and science over the last century. He argues that our love affair with the intoxicating fungus reveals a deep frustration with a disenchanted world, desire for meaning beyond religion, yearning for nature amid ecological crisis, faith in science to save us, and the relentless power of capitalism to turn everything into commodities.

Hugh B. Urban is College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University. He is the author of numerous books including The Path of Desire: Living Tantra in Northeast India, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

List of Figures
Preface

Introduction: Mushrooms, Enchantment, and Mysticism Without Religion
1. Flesh of the Gods? Mushrooms in the History of Religions
2. Seeking the Magic Mushroom: R. Gordon Wasson and the Birth of a Global Mushroom Mysticism in the 1950s
3. High Priests: Walter Pahnke and the Mushroom Counterculture of the 1960s
4. Neo-Shamans: Terence McKenna and the Explosion of Mushroom Mysticism in the 1970s and 1980s
5. How Mushrooms Can Save the World: Paul Stamets and Myco-Evangelism in the 1980s and 1990s
6. Mushrooms, Mysticism, and Pharmaceuticals: Roland Griffiths and the Rebirth of Psilocybin Research
Conclusion: Mushrooms and the Arts of Living and Dying on a Damaged Planet

Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index