The Hidden World: Survival of Pagan Shamanic Themes in ... (ISBN 1594601445)

Entertaining, but are mushrooms really the key to *everything*?:
This book was passed on to me by a friend who knows I have interest in the now largely-ignored issue of survivals in folklore and in religious studies (my doctoral work was in this area). The premise is interesting enough: that folkloric materials contain remnants of shamanic ritual. Given the work done on figures such as the Hungarian táltos, there is ample reason to accept this general premise. Unfortunately, Ruck's book is not about the survival of shamanic traces in fairytales. Rather (as anyone familiar with Ruck's writing, which I was not before reading this book, would have known), it's all about the 'shrooms dude. No occurrence of a red and white color scheme is too small, no bumpy surface too insignificant, no apparent change in mental state too trivial to be proof that lurking just beneath the surface of these tales is a cult of Amanita muscaria (fly agaric) eaters that seem to transcend time and space to be wherever Ruck needs them. If Ruck is right, then he has the key to understanding the whole of human history from (I'm not joking) the lotophagi of the Odyssey to Super Mario Brothers. Of course, when a claim is too much to be believed (such as his statement that it is well known that Through The Looking Glass is a text about mushrooms) there are footnotes to other writings by Ruck or his coauthors to back it up. It's self-referential scholarship at its best! Everything is meticulously documented, but nothing seems to escape the gravitational pull of Ruck's Big Idea. And just when you think that there can't be a more outrageous claim about the role of mushrooms in human society, another one comes along that tops the last one. Ultimately, I'm afraid, the issue isn't one of scholarship, but rather one of religion. Even Ruck's preferred term for psychedelics, "entheogens" (that which brings the god within), is an attempt to invest these things with not even quasi-religious authority. (While one could argue that entheogen is a more respectful and less loaded term than psychedelic with its associations with 60s drug counter-culture, Ruck seems to want the reader to take the theos component of entheogen literally.) Alas, Ruck's hypothesis cannot be falsified by the evidence, so it also cannot be tested or verified (a point he basically concedes at various points when he says that those looking for "proof" will miss the point). If you believe that the shrooms were everywhere, it all makes sense. If you're a bit skeptical, it's one wild ride of conjecture and outrageous speculation. While it is possible that Ruck is right and mushrooms (the consumption of which he basically equates with shamanism) were everywhere from Alice in Wonderland to the Christian Eucharist to Hindu enlightenment, I don't have the eye of faith needed to see it and I certainly don't see it as being so basic and fundamental and pervasive as Ruck and his colleagues do. I'd give this one star for the scholarship, but for sheer entertainment value it's got two stars. If you like Graham Hancock or Erik von Däniken as spinners of great yarns, Ruck is up there with them (although nothing here is quite so, umm, exciting as Hancock's tales of spending the night among the pyramids and finding out some things he just can't tell the readers yet...) There is credible scholarship out there about survivals and about shamanism, but this isn't it. I'm sure that Ruck would object that I've just bought into the whole mindset that suppresses the truth, but all this points to the fact that for Ruck et al. the mushrooms are an article of faith, something that is there before and after all proof or lack thereof.