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It’s been said—by Terence McKenna, Paul Stamets, and others in the psychedelic scene who you can trust to play fast and loose with history—that the before the beer purity laws of the 1500s, people brewed beer with various mindbending and toxic ingredients, including magic mushrooms.

They also say that the church played a big role in creating the laws that stamped out the practice. I don’t know what their sources are for this, so I don’t really believe it about the mushrooms. But given that the printing press was still pretty new and for elites only, I can imagine how a possibly-widespread practice died out largely without comment in the historical record.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinheitsgebot#Purpose

I've often wondered about why psilocybin-bearing mushrooms are so widely distributed but had such localized cultural impacts. I don't have a good answer to that one and am still thinking it through.

I will note though that terms like "magic mushroom" can be confusing in that they lump together Amanita mascaria with psilocybin mushrooms. The effects are totally different on a pharmacological level. I don't see any reason to posit a direct link between cultures using amanita and those using psilocybin. That said, there are some interesting clues about shamanistic practices being shared across Central Asia and indigenous cultures of the Americas, especially if the Dené-Yeniseian hypothesis is true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dené–Yeniseian_languages

A fun book that touches, speculatively, on the legacy of Central Asian shamanism as a common thread even in medieval and early modern Europe is Carlo Ginzburg's The Night Battles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Battles

There are many psilocybin-containing species in the old world. P. semilanceata is a very common one for example, it grows all over the place in Europe.

Why there isn't more of a tradition in Europe in recent history I have no idea, but there is archaeological evidence pointing towards at least some use in Europe in prehistoric times.

Your paper compares psychedelic drugs with tobacco. While yes, tobacco is addictive, it's hardly in any way comparable to peyote or psilocybin mushrooms. The reason psychedelic drugs from the new world didn't catch on was the same reason they weren't eaten back home in the first place: Cultural reasons and political suppression. The church was opposed to it. These European cultures were quite repressive when you look at it from the lens of many native American cultures. Not a conductive environment for smooth trips, anyone who has experience with psychedelics will know this. The Mexican and Peruvian Inquisition were a thing. They burned most Maya texts and killed many of the native people. They tried to eradicate the cultures. It was a genocide, and experimenting with psychedelic drugs for spiritual enlightenment wasn't very useful at the time for the same reason it wasn't very popular among people in Nazi Germany. Smoking is different. If anything it takes the edge off while you're out looting and raping. Had they promoted psilocybin and mescaline usage, many of the conquistadors would have soon questioned their life choices and why they were being such massive dicks. They would have laid down their weapons.

>Had they promoted psilocybin and mescaline usage, many of the conquistadors would have soon questioned their life choices and why they were being such massive dicks. They would have laid down their weapons.

Is there any evidence for psychedelics making people nicer?

Sure, if you want research papers claiming so, there are plenty. This one finds a negative correlation with partner violence: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29807492

This one claims psychedelic drug users are more egalitarian and less likely to hold authoritarian views than non users: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02791072.2017.13...

It's social science though, of course it's easy to find papers making all sorts of claim. And it also very much depends on our definition of "nice", which is a completely subjective term. My intention wasn't to claim that psychedelics make people nice anyway. Rather at high enough doses they make people reflect deeply about themselves, the universe and everything. And they look at it from a different perspective than they usually do, because the drug changes how we perceive everything.

The following is my personal view now: I think the majority of people are good and they don't want to intentionally cause great harm. However depending on their upbringing and experiences, they can easily arrive at situations where they do evil things, sometimes because they don't know any better and sometimes because they were lead to believe it's ok, or even the right thing to do. When mass psychology and peer pressure is involved it gets even more complicated, and someone might come to find actions acceptable they otherwise never would. A psychedelic user gets ripped out of this whole dynamic. They view things from an outsider's perspective, if you will. I certainly do not mean to say it makes people nicer in the long term. But, to put it this way, I have a hard time imagining soldiers on LSD running concentration camps, or peyote users burning a whole continent's irretrievable cultural heritage. That's just not the kind of thing people tend to feel like doing during or even after trips. And I want to stress I don't think it's something most people would ever feel like doing if they weren't brainwashed into aggression and hatred, or arrived at such a point through a chain of unfortunate events. Racism, nationalism, religious indoctrination, violent behavior, etc... these are all learned ideas and they can be unlearned. There isn't even a need to take drugs, but psychedelic drugs can be a way to get there.

Datura metel as a common thread between India and N American entheogens is also interesting.

Not to neglect the book Bread of Dreams by Camporesi, which might shed some light on the ergotic hypothesis mentioned elsewhere. It’s at least entertaining.

> Finns protected the Sami from Christian missionaries, because they valued their shamanic powers.

Do you have a citation for that? I would expect the Finnish establishment to have been wary about christianization of the Saami because the missionary Laestadius, in evangelizing the Saami, also inspired them to rise up and assert their rights. There are also some instances in history of colonial powers not converting certain economically-useful populations (the Saami provided furs, hides and meat) because they didn’t want to risk disrupting that people’s traditional economy.

I don't have a reference to hand, i'm afraid - i read it somewhere in the last year, but i can't remember where. It could very well be nonsense.

> The mushrooms you might pick or buy in Europe today are, AFAIK, those European varieties, not imported American ones.

As I understand it, pick, yes, buy, no.

Cultivated mushrooms are normally P. cubensis, while "truffles" are grown from sclerotia-forming species such as P. mexicana and P. tampanensis. Cubensis is quite widespread but in warmer, wetter climates than Europe has to offer. I bet you can guess where mexicana and tampanensis come from!

P. semilanceata, the liberty cap, grows throughout Europe, but isn't a great candidate for indoor cultivation, for various reasons.

> The Sami famously use fly agaric in rituals (concentrating it in human or reindeer urine). Apparently, so do other Siberian peoples.

It has been (only half) joked that the reason for this is fermenting alcohol, which requires warmth, is a little difficult at those latitudes..... Hence the society adopted a different drug.