Meanwhile, during her spare time, Valentina began collecting material on mushrooms in myth and literature. The cultural opposition caused them to begin a lifelong search for the origins of those opposing viewpoints.īy 1928, Wasson had left journalism for banking, working as an investment banker for Morgan Guaranty Trust. Wasson’s wife had grown up gathering mushrooms for the table he had been taught they were poisonous. Not the kind of auspicious beginning one might expect from a man who would become the world’s foremost authority on hallucinogenic mushrooms. She was overcome with joy at seeing the same kinds of mushrooms in the United States that she had seen in Russia.” That night she added the mushrooms to everything she cooked he refused to eat, sure that all wild fungi were deadly poisonous and that he would be a widower in the morning. Suddenly my bride spied wild mushrooms in the forest, and racing over the carpet of dried leaves in the woods, she knelt in poses of adoration before first one cluster and then another of these growths. As he put it: “In the afternoon of the first day in the Catskills, we went strolling…. Some months later, while on a delayed honeymoon, Gordon Wasson first came in contact with wild mushrooms. There she began a pediatric practice which flourished he wrote on economics for the New York Herald Tribune.
In 1926, after Pavlovna had completed her studies, they married and moved to New York.
It was while in London that he met and fell in love with Valentina Pavlovna, a Russian emigré studying to become a doctor. He spent his early years in Newark, New Jersey, attended Columbia School of Journalism, taught there for a short time afterward, then moved to England to study at the London School of Economics.
Gordon Wasson was born in Great Falls, Montana, in 1898, the son of a minister. To others, he was an extraordinary scholar, an able amateur botanist and anthropologist, a meticulous student of early man’s religion and an ardent traveler. Gordon Wasson is clearly the man who pulled the trigger and fired the first round in the psychedelic revolution. In honor of Wasson’s birthday on September 22, we’re bringing you the October, 1987 High Times cover story below. From a 1980s issue of High Times comes Peter Gorman’s tribute to the late godfather of the psychedelic revolution, R.
0 kommentar(er)
