A strange “new” mushroom seems to make everyone see the same kind of hallucinations. Is that even possible?
Psychedelic mushrooms are moving rapidly from shamans’ pouches into official medicine. New studies on Psilocybe mushrooms, for example, are being published almost every week, and many of them report promising results in the treatment of a wide range of conditions.
But in addition to their medical effects, psychedelic mushrooms also have another side: their psychedelic effects themselves. These effects challenge our ideas about the nature of human consciousness and, ultimately, about the nature of the world as a whole.
Recently there has been a great deal of writing about a “new” psychedelic mushroom, Lanmaoa asiatica. In any case, it belongs to the boletes. It grows at least in Yunnan, China, as well as in the Philippines and Papua New Guinea, although its range is probably much wider. Related species have been found in recent years in various parts of the world, including northern latitudes.
It is said to be a very good edible mushroom, but it has one strange property: almost everyone who eats it insufficiently cooked experiences similar hallucinations. They see little people. These figures are roughly human-shaped, a couple of centimeters tall, and usually appear in groups. In some cases, there may even be hundreds of them.
In Philippine folklore, these beings, known there as anisit, are believed to live underground, or in old trees, caves, or termite mounds.
A new unknown psychedelic
In China, these mushrooms are mentioned in some texts as early as about 1,700 years ago, but they were properly described scientifically only a little more than a decade ago. Still, they were known in scientific circles already in the 1960s. Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist best known for discovering LSD, tried to isolate their active compound, but he did not succeed.
Hofmann failed because he was looking for traditional alkaloid-based psychedelics. But Lanmaoa asiatica does not contain psilocybin or any other known indoles. Its entire genome has now been mapped, and we know that it completely lacks the genes and biosynthetic pathways needed to produce psilocybin. Biologically, then, it is not related to the traditional “magic mushrooms.”
Nor has the mushroom been found to contain ibotenic acid or muscimol, the compounds that cause the delirious states associated with the fly agaric, Amanita muscaria. Since all known psychedelics have been ruled out, the mushroom apparently contains a psychoactive compound completely unknown to science. Hofmann did not know to look for such a compound, and his analytical methods could not have identified it.
Traditional psychedelics act mainly through the brain’s serotonin receptors, and the visions they produce depend on the individual mind and its state. Lanmaoa asiatica, however, seems to make almost everyone see the same thing: those little human-like figures. That makes it scientifically exceptionally interesting.
What Is Reality Really Like?
Shamans might ask: what if those beings really do exist somewhere outside the physical world? How could any chemical force people to see exactly the same kind of hallucination?
Whatever the study of this mushroom eventually reveals, recent decades have also seen a growing willingness, even among some researchers, to ask a larger question: is consciousness really produced by the brain and therefore bound to the body, or might the brain instead be an instrument that transmits consciousness for the use of the physical body?
Or, to put it even more broadly: is the world only a physical phenomenon, or is physical reality perhaps part of something much larger, something whose true nature is not physical at all? In quantum physics, after all, reality takes its shape only when it is observed. What that actually means has been debated for more than a hundred years.
After a long and rather purely materialistic period, there are once again serious scientists who are willing to discuss, in all seriousness, the possibility that the universe may ultimately be consciousness — as Eastern religions and philosophies have suggested for thousands of years.
In that case, physical reality would be only one expression of cosmic consciousness, and not necessarily even a central one. Human consciousness would be a fragment of it, a point through which the cosmos looks at itself.
If that is so, it would not be surprising if there were many more realities and forms of being than we, as physical creatures, are normally not able to perceive. According to shamanism, such realities do exist, and they are inhabited by beings quite foreign to us.
One way or another, the “elf mushroom” is real. And once researchers find its active molecule and its target in the human brain, it may well open up a new way of understanding how human consciousness is formed.
