Robert Gordon Wasson was born on September 22, 1898 in Great Falls, Montana. He was raised in Newark, New Jersey. His family made it a priority for him to become intellectually diverse, engaging him in museum visits and traveling frequently. As a young adult, he spent time traveling Europe at the being of WWI and eventually served as a private in 1917. Following the war, he briefly taught Spanish and then enrolled in the Columbia School of Journalism. Wasson also studied at the London School of Economics after receiving the first Pulitzer Traveling Scholarship. After finishing his formal education, he returned to Columbia University to teach English from 1921 to 1922. Robert was rapidly becoming a prominent journalist and editorial writer. He worked for the New Haven Register, The Current Opinion magazine in New York, the New York Herald Tribune, and the Guaranty Company. In 1934 he became a banker and shortly joined the JP Morgan Company, specializing in banking public relations. He served as vice-president of that company from 1943 to 1963 when he retired.
He was married to a Russian-born pediatrician Valentina Pavlona Guercken in 1926. While on their honeymoon in 1927 in the Catskill Mountains in New York, they began their studies of “ethnomycology." This interest arose due to their discovery of mushrooms similar to those found in Valentina's native Russia. They created the term “ethnomycology” to cover their field of studies, exploring all aspects of mushrooms, specifically investigating various cultures uses of and attitudes toward them. They theorized that mycophilia or mycophobia, terms which they created, had significant impacts on cultures and religions. They incorporated their work into other fields including history, linguistics, comparative religion, mythology, art, and archaeology. Robert and Valentina undertook a field-study expedition to Mexico in 1953, where they studied the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms in curing rituals and specific ceremonies. They became the first outsiders to participate in the Mazatec Indians sacred mushroom rituals in 1955. In 1957 they published their first book, Mushrooms, Russia, and History. Wasson published an article in Life Magazine on May 13, 1957 which covered the Mexican mushroom sessions entitled Seeking the Magic Mushroom. Upon retiring in 1963, Wasson began field work in the Far East to study the Indian soma plant. Between May 1963 and February 1966 he traveled to New Zealand, New Guinea, Japan, India, Korea, Iran, Afghanistan, Thailand, and Nepal. His work was published in 1969 in Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality. Wasson used the term “enthegen” to replace negative terms like “hallucinogenic” or “psychedelic” or “drug." While his work was generally accepted as scientific research, it was met with some controversy.
Wasson's ethnomycological studies have made valuable contributions to anthropology, as well as other disciplines. Wasson's role as an amateur scholar, as well as a generalist, led him to have no institutional affiliations. He also financed his own research which enabled him to devote decades to his studies and produce quality, unbiased research. Some specialists, however, remain unwilling to endorse all his conclusions due to his lack of in-depth linguistic or theological knowledge. Robert Gordon Wasson died December 23, 1986, in Binghamton, New York.
References:
"R. Gordon Wasson” Harvard University Herbaria 2002 http://www.huh.harvard.edu/libraries/wasson/BIOG.html
Lonergran, David. International Dictionary of Anthropologists. New York and London: Garland Publishing-1991
Written by Jason Mattick, 2003
Edited By Lindsey Alston, 2007