Psychedelics have lost their cool. Blame Gwyneth Paltrow | John Semley

On a June evening in 1955, an investment banker and amateur mycologist named Robert Gordon Wasson found himself in an adobe house high in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico, encountering the divine. That night, Wasson, his wife, the photographer Allan Richardson and about 20 local indigenous people took part in a Mazatec ritual involving psilocybe mexicana, a species of hallucinogenic mushroom. As Wasson in Seeking the Magic Mushroom, his 1957 Lifemagazine photoessay: “We chewed and swallowed these acrid mushrooms, saw visions, and emerged from the experience awestruck.”