Gordon Wasson: The Amateur Who Changed Everything

“Wasson was a banker and an amateur mycologist. He changed Western civilization's understanding of its own origins.”

R. Gordon Wasson was a vice president at J.P. Morgan who spent his spare time studying mushrooms. He traveled to Mexico to participate in a Mazatec mushroom ceremony and wrote about it for Life magazine in 1957, reaching three and a half million readers.

He was not a trained anthropologist, ethnobotanist, or classicist. He was a banker who had read everything and was willing to go everywhere.

The Road to Eleusis (1978) is the product of Wasson's peculiar position: an amateur with the resources and access of a professional, able to bring together people, Hofmann the chemist, Ruck the classicist, who would not otherwise have collaborated. The book is possible only because of Wasson's particular combination of amateur enthusiasm and professional network.

The criticism of Wasson has always been that his enthusiasm outran his evidence, that he was too ready to find confirmation of his theories. This criticism is partly fair. The Road to Eleusis is stronger for Hofmann's pharmacological rigor and Ruck's philological exactness.

But the hypothesis would not exist without Wasson. The question would not have been asked. Amateurs with big questions and the means to pursue them are a feature of intellectual history, not a bug.

Sources

• Wikipedia, R. Gordon Wasson
• Wasson, Life Magazine (1957)