R. Gordon Wasson

R. Gordon Wasson was an American banker and amateur scholar who founded the field of ethnomycology—the study of the cultural role of mushrooms. In 1955 he participated in a nighttime velada led by the Mazatec curandera Maria Sabina in Oaxaca, becoming one of the first Westerners to take part in a traditional psilocybin mushroom ceremony.

His 1957 Life magazine article, “Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” introduced millions of readers to sacred mushrooms and effectively launched Western interest in psychedelic plants. He later argued, controversially, that the Vedic soma was a psychoactive mushroom and that entheogens lay at the root of religion itself.

Wasson’s place in the mind-power lineage is as the bridge between indigenous plant-based shamanism and the modern Western consciousness movement. By presenting the mushroom ceremony as a genuine sacrament rather than superstition, he helped establish the now-foundational idea that altered states are a universal religious technology and that plant medicines open authentic spiritual realities.

This framing fed directly into the psychedelic and entheogenic spirituality that followed—though his publicity also exposed Maria Sabina and her community to harm, a consequence later critics emphasize.