Articles
JAN 2025
This article was written for Funga by Cordelia Fleming
In 1860, British Botanist and Mycologist, Mordecai Cubitt Cooke wrote about narcotic plants and the mind-altering effects of the fly agaric mushroom. ‘The Seven Sisters of Sleep’ was a ground-breaking and radical write up of the use and fascination with the seven most popular psychoactive plants of the Victorian era: Tobacco, Opium, Cannabis, Betel Nut, Coca, Datura and the Fly Agaric mushroom. Cooke’s book explores the effects of these psychoactive plants and fungi, delving into their powers to alter states of consciousness and exposed the Victorian curiosity about the boundaries between the real and the fantastical. In it he describes the Fly Agaric mushroom producing ‘cheerfulness, afterward giddiness’ and that ‘the natural inclinations of the individual become stimulated. The dancer executes a pas d’extravagance, the musical indulges in a song, the chatterer divulges in all his secrets, the oratorical delivers himself a philippic and the mimic indulges in caricature’. The book also documents the first ever recorded experience of a hallucinogenic mushroom experience in London’s Green Park in October 1799. This offers us a fascinating glimpse into the intersection of science, culture and consciousness during 19th century Victorian England.
Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
A man identified only as ‘J.S.’ was gathering small field mushrooms from the park on autumn mornings and cooking them up into a breakfast broth for his wife and young family. But this morning turned out rather differently. An hour after they had finished eating, J.S. experienced ‘black spots and odd flashes of colour’, he then became disorientated, and had difficulty in standing and moving. The family were found wandering about in a confused state. By pure coincidence, a doctor named Everard Brande happened to be passing, and he interacted, treated and observed the family. The scene that he discovered was so bizarre and unfamiliar that he wrote it up at length and published it in ‘The Medical and Physical Journal’, in 1800, making the first mention of hallucinogenic ‘deleterious’ mushrooms in European medical literature.
J.S. gathered early in the morning of the third of October [1799], in the Green Park [in London], what he supposed to be small mushrooms; these he stewed with the common additions in a tinned iron saucepan. The whole did not exceed a tea saucerful, which he and four of his children ate the first thing, about eight o’clock in the morning, as they frequently had done without any bad consequence; they afterwards took their usual breakfast of tea, which was finished about nine, when Edward, one of the children (eight years old), who had eaten a large proportion of the mushrooms, as they thought them, was attacked with fits of immoderate laughter, nor could the threats of his father or mother restrain him. To this succeeded vertigo, and a great degree of stupor, from which he was roused by being called or shaken, but immediately relapsed. The pupils of his eyes were, at times, dilated to nearly the circumference of the cornea, and scarcely contracted at the approach of a strong light; his breathing was quick, his pulse very variable, at times imperceptible, at others too frequent and small to be counted; latterly, very languid; his feet were cold, livid, and contracted; he sometimes pressed his hands on different parts of his abdomen, as if in pain, but when roused and interrogated as to it, he answered indifferently, yes, or no, as he did to every other question, evidently without any relation to what was asked. … By four o’clock every violent symptom had left him, drowsiness and occasional giddiness only remaining.
The species in question was later identified as the Liberty Cap.
Liberty Cap Mushroom
Cooke’s chapter on mushrooms, like the rest of Seven Sisters, was a compilation of tales of plant rituals and anecdotes, some of which has been said to have directly inspired Lewis Carol, the infamous author of ‘Alice in Wonderland’. His interest in botanicals and plant medicines was spurred by his own health issues, a lifelong insomniac and a sufferer of migraines he was a frequent reader of botanical literature and experimented frequently with homoeopathic remedies. The scholar Michael Carmichael in a paper called “Wonderland Revisited”, first highlighted that a few days before he began writing the story, Carroll made his only ever visit to Oxford’s Bodleian library, where a copy of The Seven Sisters of Sleep had been displayed. Carmichael states that Carol would have been drawn to the book not only out of curiosity to cure his health ailments and insomnia, but that he also, interestingly, had seven sisters himself.
Published in 1865, just 5 years later, the scenes and depictions in Alice in Wonderland could hardly be better known. It has been widely suggested that Carol drew inspiration from his own experiences, as well as from Cooke’s hallucinogenic accounts of absurdity, distortion, stupor and altered perceptions of time and size for Alice’s world-wide known mushroom nibbling adventures in wonderland. Together these threads form a rich network of connections that continues to inspire readers, researchers and psychonauts alike.
The original Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice: “Who are YOU?”
Alice replied, “I–I hardly know. At least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”
“What do you mean by that?” said the Caterpillar “Explain yourself!”
“I can’t understand it myself. Being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing!”
“It isn’t” said the Caterpillar.
“Well, perhaps you haven’t found it so yet” said Alice; “but when you have to turn into a chrysalis, then after that into a butterfly, I should think you’ll understand how odd it feels, won’t you?”
“Not a bit,” said the Caterpillar.
“Well, perhaps your feelings may be different,” said Alice; “all I know is, it would feel very odd to ME.”