The Sacred Mushrooms of Mexico...and me.

One of the great things about writing books for a living is that over the years you encounter very interesting fellow authors who are also writing books, and whose paths intersect with yours. Such is the case of Brian P. Akers, a professor at Pasco Hernando Community College who, approximately a year-and-a-half ago, I guess, contacted me about my One Step Beyond research. In particular, he wanted to know about one episode of the series that I covered in my 2001 book, An Analytical Guide to TV's One Step Beyond.

You see, way back in 1961, One Step Beyond (also known as Alcoa Presents) aired one of its weirdest and most notorious installments. Although every other half-hour episode of this paranormal anthology is "fictionalized," this particular episode, "The Sacred Mushroom," was not. Instead, it was a legitimate documentary, a black-and-white travelogue of host John Newland and his camera crew heading down to a remote village in Mexico...for the purpose of sampling mushrooms and determining if they could endow the "user" with psychic powers. Even better, after the trip to Mexico, host Newland returned to America and a lab in Palo Alto, where he personally sampled the hallucinogenic "sacred mushrooms" and admitting feeling some...strange sensations.

Here's an excerpt from my interview with the late John Newland, covering "The Sacred Mushroom. (You can read the rest here.)

MUIR: That portion of the episode involved Dr. Barbara Brown (a neuro-pharmacologist), David Grey (A Hawaiian spiritual leader), Dr. Jeffrey Smith (a philosophy professor from Stanford) and Dr. Andrija Puharch sampling a mushroom called "X," given to them by a local with doctor called a brujo. The peyote was supposed to enhance psychic abilities, and it was pretty damn unusual to see people getting high on TV in 1961, wasn't it?

NEWLAND: Alcoa told us that the show was so bizarre, that we don't dare put it on the air.

MUIR: So how did you salvage the episode?

NEWLAND: Well, Puharich asked me to take the mushroom, and I was game, so we took a camera crew and drove to Palo Alto and Puharich's laboratory. Once there, I had three cameras rolling the whole time, and I told the cameramen to just keep shooting until we ran out of film. We decided to shoot and shoot and shoot and see what happened.

MUIR: Did you feel anything strange when you sampled the mushroom?

NEWLAND: I felt light-headed...and a sense of well being...the stuff was distilled. It was very powerful, but not poisonous, so I didn't have any trepidations.

MUIR: Were there after-effects?"

NEWLAND: I had flashbacks and hallucinatory moments for about a month...

This is quite the radical TV episode, as you can guess from my description and Mr. Newland's comments.. To see a major TV personality getting high on the air...well, it's an amazing thing. "The Sacred Mushroom" isn't just bizarre, isn't just odd...it's TV history. Anyway, Brian contacted me over a year ago to see if I had that particularly odd episode of One Step Beyond in my possession. I did, and gladly presented him a copy for his viewing pleasure and research. I'm happy to learn it proved useful in his research and even happier to see that his book The Sacred Mushrooms of Mexico has just been released by the University Press of America.

Here's the skinny, from the back of the book:

This work presents significant new readings in ethnomycology, a discipline that examines the role of fungi in human affairs. The greatest cultural and historical impact of mushrooms has resulted from psychoactive compounds found in certain species, and native interpretations of their mental effects in humans, as revealed through intensive multidisciplinary studies coordinated by the late R. Gordon Wasson, the father of ethnomycology.

Wasson's research in the 1950s led to the elucidation of mushroom cultism in Mexico, a phenomenon dismissed as unfounded rumor by "experts" only a few decades earlier. Discoveries made by Wasson and his collaborators intersect a staggering number of disciplines, so much so that individual fields have had difficulty assimilating them. The Sacred Mushrooms of Mexico presents six texts concerning the mushrooms. Five of them are translations of relevant scholarly sources in Spanish previously unavailable in English. The sixth is a transcript of "The Sacred Mushroom," a celebrated episode of the classic television series One Step Beyond. This television program my have been the only show in broadcast history in which the host ingested hallucinogenic mushrooms and endured their effects on camera for the viewing pleasure of the home audience.

About Brian Akers: He has written a number of ethnomycology and fungal systematics published in scientific journals. He is a member of the Mycological Society of America and the North American Mycological Association.

I'll say this: Life is full of odd twists and turns. I never imagined when I wrote a reference guide to One Step Beyond, that I would one day see my work (and my name...) quoted in a book about hallucinogenic mushrooms. But I'm absolutely delighted about it. Congrats, Brian!