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Brian Blomerth’s Mycelium Wassonii

posted by Emily Gosling September 22, 2021

Since it’s nearly picking season, what better time to explore the stunning new tome from modern day psychedelia-whizz Brian Blomerth and his celebration of mushrooms?

If you know Blomerth’s work, it won’t come as a huge surprise that these are very much magical mushrooms. Back in 2019, he released the beautiful book Bicycle Day, which provided a “Technicolor retelling of the discovery of LSD,” as publisher Anthology Editions puts it. This was his most ambitious work to date, combining history and Blomerth’s signature bold, “comix” stylings in its historical account of the events of April 19, 1943, when Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann ingested an experimental dose of the then-new compound lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and effectively embarked on the world’s first acid trip.

Brooklyn-based Blomerth works as an illustrator, cartoonist and musician, and has published zines and comics – including a weekly spot in Vice – such as Xak’s Wax, iPhone 64: A User’s Guide and Hypermaze through the likes of Anthology Editions, Tan & Loose, and his own Pupsintrouble Press. His firm entrenchment in the worlds of underground music and comics is apparent not only in his portfolio of album cover designs, but in his deliciously idiosyncratic aesthetic and searing wit.

His new publication, Mycelium Wassonii (pronounced Wa-son-eye, apparently), is a follow-up of sorts to Bicycle Day in its marriage of weird new visual worlds, anthropomorphisation and historical accuracy. With a foreword by leading mycologist Paul Stamets, the book tells the story of scientist couple R. Gordon and Valentina Wasson, who are hailed as pioneering and popularising the use of psychedelic mushrooms in the US. The pair’s love of shrooms was born on their honeymoon in upstate New York. thanks to Valentina’s Russian background, she “held a wealth of knowledge and an appreciation for fungi not understood by Americans at the time, who associated mushrooms with the morbid,” according to Anthology Editions. Together, they set about documenting and recording the various cultural uses and traditions linked to psilocybin and amanita mushrooms.

Surprise surprise, only Gordon eventually got the credit for the work. Blomerth’s breathtakingly beautiful work looks to redress that, however, correcting the history books by showing that their work was very much a double-act effort. Acting as a visual dual biography, Blomerth traces the duo’s journey – literal, physical, academic and psychedelic – from Russian folk wisdom to mid century Manhattan, via the indigenous traditions of the Mexican Mazatec people to the mysteries of ancient Rome.

As Anthology Editions surmises, the story takes in a lot more than just mushrooms, providing an “illustrated, globetrotting vision of science and mysticism with appearances by J.P. Morgan, Robert Graves, Life Magazine, and the CIA.”

It’s a story of adversity, re-written histories, single-minded passion and bittersweet triumphs of sorts, which the title nods to in its homage to Gordon and Roger Heim’s 1963 journal-published piece Les champignons hallucinogènes du Mexique (Hallucinogenic Mushrooms of Mexico). The article proposed the name for a new species that had been discovered, “Psilocybe wassonii,” so named in honour of the Wassons’ work. Just weeks before the piece made it into the world, however, another name for the species had been published, ultimately usurping Roger Heim and the Wassons’ years-long dedication to and research of Mexican mushrooms. Finally, they’re getting their due.