Some time ago I lived for a year in Stoneybatter, the pleasantly self-contained neighbourhood of brick terraces just north of the Liffey. My back garden, as I soon came to think of it, was the Phoenix Park – its seven hundred hectares began just a five-minute walk from my door. A couple of weeks after I moved in, I arranged with my friend Fran to go picking magic mushrooms in the park. It was mid-October, the height of the season.

Even if we hadn’t found any mushrooms, it would have been a well-spent evening. Phoenix Park is resplendent at that time of year, ablaze with golds, mauves, browns and greens under vast skies. I’d been going out there a lot since moving to the area, to wander in the open spaces and the cold invigorating air. Fran is in his forties and has been taking magic mushrooms since his teens. He has been coming to the park during picking season for several years now, after chancing upon a batch during a walk with a friend. I had only ever been out foraging for mushrooms a couple of times in my life, with moderate success – once at the Sugar Loaf, in County Wicklow, and later on the hills along Dublin’s southern coast. While I might be liable to confuse the ‘magic’, psilocybin-containing mushroom with similar but non-hallucinogenic varieties, Fran knows exactly what to pick. The target variety – Psilocybe semilanceata, commonly known as the liberty cap – is quite small, and smooth, with brownish-white stems; Fran advised me to look for ‘the little nipple on top’. We found about fifty liberty caps that evening, most of them near the trail of the herd of deer that roams through the park: magic mushrooms tend to grow in fields fertilised by the faeces of certain herbivores, such as deer, cattle and sheep.

We split the mushrooms evenly, and dried them out in our respective homes, pressed between sheets of newspaper. When they were dried, the mushrooms shrivelled into stringy, dark-brown, faintly sinister- looking versions of their handsome former selves. A week later, Fran and I made an infusion by boiling them up in a pot at my house. Some users of Irish magic mushrooms prefer to bake them into a cake, or spread them on a pizza. The mushrooms can also be eaten directly: for a nice hit, you roll about twenty of them into a ball and gobble it down. The only drawback to the direct method is the possibility of stomach cramps caused by bacteria that the boiling process kills off.

It was a Wednesday afternoon: Fran had got off work early for the occasion. We drank the mushroom tea, hung around the house till the effects began to be felt, and then wrapped up in scarves and beanie hats and walked out to the park. It was a mild trip and, for me, undercut with anxiety. We had not taken a strong enough dose to have full-on hallucinations, only an intensification of the visual field, with heightened colours and vivid, shifting surfaces, together with a quickening of the intellect, a capacity to reflect on memories, ideas and phenomena from novel perspectives. I later wondered if the anxiety the excursion brought out in me had been triggered by a few stray mushrooms of a malign variety we had inadvertently cooked up in our brew. Likelier, though, it was a manifestation of the latent anxiety I carry around with me at all times, a free-floating dread that seizes on to whatever object presents itself.

After a couple of hours, the anxiety passed. It was another beautiful, slow-burning autumn evening, another limitless sky. We came upon the herd of deer. As the sun set, we watched them retreat into a copse at the end of the elevated plains, the antlered males stationed around the perimeter as sentries, the does and fawns calmly blinking at us as they ambled among the foliage. By the time night had fallen, the only other people in the park were joggers, mostly in clusters, with flashlights fixed to their heads. Without having to make much of an effort, we picked another small batch of mushrooms as we wandered. One more heavy rainfall, said Fran, and the park would be full of them.

It rained the next day. The day after that, a Friday, while most of the city was at work, I set out alone on my bike with an empty salt-and-vinegar Pringles tube. I cycled past the Wellington Monument, that towering imperialistic monolith proclaiming battles won and enemies vanquished, with the listed names of faraway cities up each side – a phallic Ozymandias declaring the grandeur of a dissolved empire as children played and students strummed guitars around its base. Fran had told me that the metal used in the engravings that adorned the monument had been stripped from captured enemy cannons. I recorded in my notebook the vainglorious paean etched on one of the monument’s sides, presumably to the Duke of Wellington:

asia and europe, saved by thee, proclaim invincible in war thy deathless name, now round thy brow the civic oak we twine, that every earthly glory may be thine

I too had played at the foot of the monument as a child, with no understanding of its significance, nor its curious poignancy, its sense of having been left behind, an erratic, far from home.

I cycled up the hill, from where there are views over the quaint, tree-lined village of Chapelizod and the Liffey valley, the city, and the mountains in the distance. I passed the old arsenal, now a well-fortified concrete shell, from where the British used to keep watch over the city, poised to quell any insurrection and enforce the ominous motto emblazoned on the city’s coat of arms: An obedient populace is a happy populace. Then I was out on to the plains, with the looming white cross on the far side, erected in 1979 to commemorate the papal visit. More than a million people attended that visit, one of whom was a seven-year-old Fran, despite his parents being determinedly secular. The papal visit took place in late September, so it is likely that a great many magic mushrooms were trampled under the feet of the multitudes. A series of well-tended football pitches stretched along the length of this raised section of the park, ending with the copse where we had watched the deer, fringed by a road dropping into a valley.

I stayed out there for three or four hours, and picked about three hundred mushrooms. I didn’t really want the mushrooms for myself and thought I would give most or all of them away. It’s something about being in my thirties: the appeal of psychedelics has receded, and the unease I associate with drug usage in general has increased. Maybe it is natural, a self-preservative mechanism that kicks in at a certain age, or maybe I just have more to be apprehensive about. But even if I didn’t really want them, I thought it good that others have them. The magic mushroom is among a handful of psychotropic substances that I have, with certain qualifications, actively encouraged others to try, whose wonders it seems to me a shame to get through a human life without encountering. The psychedelic experience, I have long felt, is so astonishing, opens up such startling vistas of beauty and otherness, that to live and die without knowing it is comparable to never having encountered literature, or travelled to another continent, or attempted to communicate in a foreign language.

I first tried magic mushrooms in my early twenties. I can’t remember the precise occasion, nor much about the trip, but it must have been pretty good or I wouldn’t have taken to them so enthusiastically afterwards. Before trying mushrooms, I had felt towards psychedelic substances the same sort of curiosity that drew me to philosophy, art and literature, particularly those varieties that trafficked in the mysterious, the sublime, the fantastical and the shocking. At the root of my interest in both drugs and art was the longing for an encounter with otherness, a seeking-out of astonishment for its own sake. The craving for fascination that I slaked with the work of, say, Borges, or the more colourfully speculative branches of philosophy – the Presocratics, Nietzsche, the Hindu metaphysicians – also motivated me to investigate the mind-altering effects of plant hallucinogens, and drugs in general. The counterpoint to this hunger for the strange and the sublime was the profound boredom I felt for the world I had grown up in, the revulsion for what seemed to me a crushingly drab, incurious, cultureless environment.

Down the years, I have had many wildly enjoyable, sometimes awesome trips on magic mushrooms, and a few bad ones. Most of the latter have been largely my own fault: I took the mushrooms irresponsibly, wilfully so, in the wrong circumstances and frames of mind. Thelonious Monk had a line about how he would start his improvisations by striking the wrong chord: the music would flow as he tried to make his way back to the right one. For a while, I told myself that my attitude to taking magic mushrooms was in a similar vein, but really it had more to do with impatience and recklessness, and the results sometimes were terrifying, though they never lasted more than a few hours, and usually resolved in a plateau of insight, serenity and euphoria.

A decade before I foraged in the Phoenix Park, Ireland had gone through a period, lasting a couple of years and now legendary among aficionados, during which magic mushrooms from around the world were legally available for over-the-counter purchase. The most commonly propagated version of how this golden age came about is that a Trinity College law student discovered a loophole in Irish legislation: while it was illegal to process or prepare magic mushrooms, it was lawful to possess and sell them in their natural state. When knowledge of the loophole became general, around 2004, outlets across Ireland began selling mushrooms legally, importing potent varieties from Thailand, Mexico, Indonesia and elsewhere. The mushrooms were kept in refrigeration and could therefore be sold and consumed fresh, circumventing the law. My friends and I, enthusiastic about drugs in general (with some exceptions – I never really knew anyone who had taken heroin, for instance), greeted the new-found availability of these exotic mushrooms with an exploratory zeal. There was one summer when we bought and ate mushrooms pretty much every weekend, usually to ecstatic effect. As summer faded into autumn, we realised we needed to lay off them for a while: perhaps as a somatic braking mechanism against an accumulation of psilocybin in our systems, our trips became harrowing and unpleasant, despite our efforts to take the mushrooms in congenial moods and settings (often in the flat of one of our group, with music and musical instruments on hand).

Before that, there were some memorable occasions. There was the birthday of a friend of mine who lived in a shared house in Bayside along with my then girlfriend. It was a sunny evening; we had erected a marquee and spent the day drinking beer and having a laugh. As the sun set, five or six of us ate the Thai cubensis mushrooms we had bought from a head shop in Temple Bar. The effects lasted for hours, were blissful and intellectually stimulating, and inspired us to retreat into the garage, which my friend had converted into a music studio. There, we performed and recorded a chaotic, instrument-swapping, genuinely psychedelic sonic extravaganza that, when we listened to it soberly the following day, really was what it had seemed to be in the moment of creation: the weirdest music we had ever made, in youths devoted to making weird music. A friend mastered the live mix and we put out a few DIY copies under the band name Heads Will Roll.

That same summer, a ginger-haired friend we’d met in college invited us out to camp and surf with him on a deserted beach in his native Mayo. I had little interest in surfing but, like my friends, I reckoned that the raw Atlantic coast, with its dramatic skies, was an ideal venue for yet another mushroom trip. The first night was a disaster: my friends and I, city-dwellers all, had made no real preparations for a night in the screaming wind and cruel cold of a remote Mayo beach. We took some mushrooms (Psilocybe tampanensis, also known as philosophers’ stones or, to us, truffles) then sat there for hours, shivering in misery and darkness. The effects of the mushrooms conspired with our physical discomfort to provoke relentless, brutal introspection – a long dark night of grim self-confrontation. In the morning, though, we found we once more had a huge, golden stretch of beach, crashing sea, plunging dunes and revivifying sun all to ourselves. The others put on wetsuits and got ready to surf, while I decided to eat the remainder of the mushrooms and wander off alone.

I was gone maybe four hours. I followed the beach out to where there was no trace of anyone. I climbed dunes and walked along the crest of the sea. As I moved, the psilocybin flooded my system, nurtured by the warm sun, the stretching of my limbs, and the beauty and expansiveness of my surroundings. There are certain experiences that are impossible to describe satisfactorily, which you can only know by having them yourself. So I’ll keep it relatively brief: alone on the beach, which felt endless, I lay down in the warm sand, sheltered by a towering dune, and watched the sky. It would have been magnificent even without psilocybin; with it, the vastness of swirling, voluptuous clouds framed by bottomless blue became an immense mosaic, depicting a cosmic drama of copulation, birth, transformation and unlimited eroticism. All boundaries were erased – women, men, children and beasts fused in amorous plenitude, a shifting, simultaneous fulfilment of every carnal yearning and sensuous whim. I drank it all in, smiling helplessly at times, powerfully aroused yet deeply serene. As ever, there was a faint sadness to the experience: I knew, even as I was undergoing it, that I could never possibly express the richness of it to anyone else, neither through art nor conversation. Having no skill for painting and being a mediocre musician, the best I could hope for was a few inadequate sentences in a book such as this one. Some hours later, sated with wonder, bliss and insight, I got up and walked slowly back along the empty miles of the beach, to my friends, who were cooking sausages on the stove.

In October of 2005, a thirty-three-year-old businessman named Colm Hodkinson bought a carton of mushrooms for twenty-five euro from a shop on Capel Street. He ate three of the mushrooms at a party in a friend’s apartment the evening before Halloween. Having vomited and alarmed his friends by exhibiting signs of panic and confusion, he rushed to the top of the building and went over the edge, falling to his death. In the days following his funeral, Hodkinson’s family campaigned to have magic mushrooms criminalised. This led to a meeting with the then Tánaiste and Minister for Health and Children, Mary Harney. At the end of the meeting, Harney, moved to tears, promised the Hodkinsons that legislation criminalising magic mushrooms would be enacted without delay, and so it was. ‘It was a bit of an anticlimax when we heard the news,’ said Sean Hodkinson, Colm’s brother, after the new law had been put in place. ‘We were surprised that it happened so quickly. Mary Harney said it would happen within three weeks and it did. But there was no elation, just a kind of emptiness.’

Since 31 January 2006, it has been illegal to possess or sell magic mushrooms in Ireland, including the kind that grow wild in the country. I left Ireland in the spring of that year, and would not properly return for another seven years, during which time I made it my business to see as much of the world as possible. The next time I took magic mushrooms was in Thailand, in a wooden hut that served as a bar and cafe perched atop a hill in the centre of the paradisal island of Ko Pha-Ngan. I rode up there on a rented motorbike along with French and German friends. We bought the mushrooms at the bar – it wasn’t legal, but it was tolerated (payments had probably been made). We had fun, and mild hallucinations, but not the deep psychedelia and startling insights I had experienced on stronger doses. A year or so later, I was travelling and living in South America. There, I had several marvellous encounters with the hallucinogenic cactus San Pedro, which grows on the Altiplano of Bolivia and Peru. Later, first in Peru and then in Colombia, I had many even more intense experiences with the hybrid hallucinogen ayahuasca (or yagé), generally considered among the most potent psychoactive substances in the world. Ayahuasca is a central part of the cultural and religious life of some indigenous tribespeople of Amazonia. The friends with whom I gathered to drink ayahuasca every weekend at an artist’s house in the hills outside Bogotá were professors, writers, artists and scholars, mostly in middle age, who had been deeply involved with the experiential, scientific and philosophical study of yagé for many years. The ceremonies were always overseen by their friend Crispin, a young, softly spoken shaman (or taita, in his own dialect) from the Amazonian south. Crispin travelled up to the capital each weekend bearing several flasks of the foul-tasting concoction. His entire life revolved around ayahuasca. Throughout the imbibing ceremonies, during which fragrant woods were burned, smoke wafted and incantations uttered, Crispin referred to the yagé with the affectionate, diminutive form yagécito – as if the spirit that he believed animated the brew was his otherworldly little friend. Ayahuasca exerted such fascination on me that I made plans to return home and begin a PhD on the affinities between the atheistic mysticism of Georges Bataille, Nietzsche and other Western philosophers and the psychedelic shamanism of the Amazon basin.

It was in South America too that I first came upon the writings of the ethnobotanist Terence McKenna, a brilliant advocate of the consciousness-expanding effects of hallucinogenic plants. Even if the often jaw-dropping ideas suggested in books of McKenna’s like The Archaic Revival and Food of the Gods turned out not to be true, they could still be read with great pleasure, and to wildly stimulating effect, as an outré breed of speculative or science fiction. Throughout his work, McKenna puts forward the claim that it was plant hallucinogens, particularly psilocybin mushrooms, sprouting in various parts of the world and offering consciousness- enhancing evolutionary advantages which enabled the great leaps forward in human culture that, among other things, provided the ur-experience of religion.

McKenna sometimes deploys a sober, professorial voice while putting forward arguments that, if true, would hurl into disarray all that our orthodox philosophies hold to be the case. In an essay entitled ‘Mushrooms and Evolution’, he writes: ‘For tens of millennia human beings have been utilising hallucinogenic mushrooms to divine and induce shamanic ecstasy. I propose to show that the human–mushroom interaction is not a static symbiotic relationship, but rather a dynamic one through which at least one of the parties has been bootstrapped to higher and higher cultural levels.’ Here we glimpse one of the strange notions about magic mushrooms that find fuller expression elsewhere in McKenna’s work, namely that the mushrooms may constitute an intentional, conscious species – that they, in some sense, have an agenda.

McKenna insists that ‘the mushroom religion is actually the generic religion of human beings’, and that ‘all later adumbrations of religion stem from the cult of ritual ingestion of mushrooms to induce ecstasy’. Elsewhere he makes even more vehement claims for the ontological implications of the experiences offered by other plant hallucinogens, in particular ayahuasca and its psychoactive component, DMT (N,N-dimethyltryptamine). The numinous and profoundly weird experiences produced by these substances, in which one will frequently have a compelling sense of coming into contact with entities, landscapes and intelligences external to the self, and even to broader human experience, are religio mainlined – not prayers, art, texts and rituals gesturing towards the ineffable, the transcendent Other, but the thing itself. The shamanic imbibing ceremonies of the ayahuasceros of the Amazonian region offer immediate access to a ‘hyperdimensional’ and ‘hyperspatial’ zone that McKenna claims is teeming with non-human entities. Perhaps it is futile to voice McKenna’s more outlandish claims to those who have never experienced the effects of the plant hallucinogens at high doses (‘heroic doses’, in McKenna’s exhortative phrase), but to those who do have first-hand experience of the deeply alien, sometimes shocking vistas they open up, his ideas may not seem so far-fetched.

The next time I ingested magic mushrooms was a number of years later, in San Francisco, where I lived for a few months. My then girlfriend, not a drug user, had been given a bag of mushrooms by a friend. There were enough for two or three people to enjoy a strong trip, but I persuaded myself otherwise and consumed the entirety of the contents one thickly overcast early afternoon. I then left our apartment to wander around Haight-Ashbury, one-time mecca of the hippy dream and now a sordid, dismal zone of wrecked aspiration. Soon realising that I had consumed a formidable dosage, I retreated to the top of Buena Vista Park, a steep, forested hill from where one can see the bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, the skyscrapers of downtown San Francisco, Ocean Beach and the Pacific. As fog swarmed in to engulf the hill, I plunged into dread. All of my semi-repressed anxieties – the full awareness of the catastrophe I was then living – rose to the surface. Growing desperate, I felt the only hope I had was to adopt a meditative posture and marshal all my psychic and emotional resources in order not to become swallowed up in the black hole of my own terror. The hallucinations were so strong that, at the height of it, it made little difference whether my eyes were open or closed. As I gradually grew calmer and gained a hold on my fears, intense but more benign emotions flooded me. I had a vision of twenty-first-century America as a wasteland of broken, defeated people, a sorrowing mass of human wreckage and unanswered prayers – I knew then that I could not live there permanently, a possibility I had been strongly considering. By the time I finally came down from the hill, it felt like a very long time had passed. In reality, it was about six hours. The trip was distressing, yet not one I regretted having. The next morning I began writing a short story that delved deep into sorrow and trauma and emerged, I thought, with some glinting shard of truth.

In the Phoenix Park, the sun was setting as I continued filling my Pringles container with liberty caps. As I stooped by the white paint markings of a soccer pitch, a man who was walking his dog along the pathway greeted me and enquired if I was picking magic mushrooms. I said I was and we began to chat. He was in late middle age, with grey hair, and was amiable and respectable. He told me that he and his friends had picked and consumed magic mushrooms for years in their youth. They used to go out to the Curragh, he said, and fill up cornflakes boxes with enough mushrooms to last the entire year, until it was time to go picking again. ‘We’d just sit there, in one of the lads’ places, and laugh all night,’ he said. He tentatively warned me about being seen picking mushrooms by the police. ‘To them it’s probably the same as if you had a box full of LSD,’ he said, but admitted he wasn’t entirely sure of what the law stated. He was thoughtful for a moment, watching his dog as it scampered by a goalpost. ‘It’s a bit silly, when you think of it,’ he said. ‘People were picking these things long before there were Guards. The mushrooms were growing here before there was any legislation at all. Can something be illegal that grows in the ground?’

He said he had picked up a few of the mushrooms earlier, noticing that they did indeed look like the hallucinogenic variety, but a friend had warned him that these were a ‘mimicking’ kind, not the real thing. He was wary about picking the wrong ones because of a bad trip he’d once had, at the twilight of his psychedelic youth, when one or two ‘bad shrooms’ must have gone into the mushroom cake he and his friends had baked. ‘I totally freaked out. Took me about two weeks to get back to normal.’ He wished me well and hoped I had a good time.

I remember telling a friend, when I was twenty or so, that I took drugs so that one day I wouldn’t have to take drugs. The idea was that, by gaining access to the weirder potentialities of consciousness, my basic stance towards existence would be altered: shorn of the tedium and banality that oppressed me in those years, I hoped I could come to experience consciousness itself, and the bare fact of being in the world, as ineffable, awesome, impregnably mysterious. The funny thing is that this really did happen. The occasional mushroom excursion aside, I rarely bother with drugs any more. The drugs I took in my youth – along with the art, literature and philosophy I imbibed with equal enthusiasm – helped to reconfigure the lineaments of my consciousness so that, nowadays, the mere fact of being here at all, the fact that something exists, consistently astonishes me. I don’t mean to suggest that one needs drugs, or even art or philosophy, to connect with the mystery of being, the supreme unlikeliness of finding oneself alive in an unaccountable universe. I mean only that I spent part of my youth oppressed by a boredom I now consider to have been a delusion, born of the depressive belief that the world around me was mundane, paltry, comprehensible. Bitterly at odds with my surroundings, I needed certain jolts to get me back in touch with my own capacity for wonder, which I now happily find to be a self-replenishing source.

A week after I had spent my Friday in the Phoenix Park, my girlfriend Alice was visiting from France, and my friend Sam came up from Wexford for the night. It was Halloween – the old pagan feast of Samhain, as Sam reminded me. The three of us had dinner at my place, in candlelight, with the fireplace blazing and music from Spotify streaming through the speakers. After dinner, I boiled up a brew. The anxieties I had attached to the mushrooms a week earlier had dissolved. The mood was ideal; I knew we would have a lovely time. Neither Alice nor Sam had ever taken magic mushrooms before, so I kept it mild. There was no anxiety, no unwelcome intensity, only joy, laughter and keen, open conversation. Later we wrapped up warm and walked to the Cobblestone pub, where a cluster of traditional musicians were playing in a corner, and some of the clientele were dressed as pirates, ghouls and zombies. Before going to bed that night, I swallowed the mushrooms I had boiled earlier, so that whatever residual psilocybin remained in them would animate my sleep. And so it did: I slept deeply, with strange, otherworldly dreams. I wandered through ancient hallways, encountering gods and sculpted sages who were immeasurably older than me, and who regarded me with solemn, unfathomable gazes before looking away towards unseen horizons, bearing intentions I would never understand.
 
Image © natureluvr01
 

‘Mushroom’ is an extract from Rob Doyle’s Threshold, out with Bloomsbury.