Wasson first became interested in mycology during his honeymoon in the
Catskill Mountains in 1927. His new wife, Valentina Pavlovna Wasson, a native of Moscow, Russia, was identifying and collecting mushrooms in the forest, having been brought up with an appreciation for this practice. Wasson was disgusted. "Like all good Anglo-Saxons, I knew nothing about the fungal world and felt that the less I knew about those putrid, treacherous excrescences the better." The incident sparked Wasson's interest in mushrooms, leading to subsequent contributions to the field of
ethnomycology. In 1952, English poet
Robert Graves sent the Wassons a letter containing a journal article quoting American ethnobotanist
Richard Evans Schultes discussing the ritual use of mushrooms by Mesoamericans in the 16th century. The ritual was first observed in modern times in 1938 by American anthropologist
Jean Basset Johnson in
Huautla de Jiménez, in the
Sierra Mazateca region of Oaxaca, Mexico. Beginning in 1953, Wasson repeatedly traveled to Mexico in search of the mushrooms. On a trip to the town of Huautla de Jiménez in June and July 1955, Wasson and New York society photographer Allan Richardson participated in a mushroom ritual with
curandera Maria Sabina, where they became, in Wasson's words, "the first white men in recorded history to eat the divine mushrooms." When Wasson returned to the U.S., he sent some of the mushrooms to Dr.
Andrija Puharich of the Round Table Foundation in Maine; Puharich analyzed them and identified muscarine, atropine, and bufotenin as the chemicals responsible for hallucinogenic effects, and also used them on himself and others. Among these was the sculptor Harry Stump, in the presence of
Aldous Huxley, who paid Puharich a three-week visit in August 1955. While having lunch at the
Century Club in New York in 1956, a
Time magazine editor expressed interest in their trip to Mexico and invited them to pitch a story about their experience. ==See also==