n this episode, we descend from the orderly temples of organized religion into the wild, fungal undergrowth of human consciousness, where the sacred is not a matter of faith but of direct, chemical encounter with the divine. We explore how R. Gordon Wasson—the J.P. Morgan banker turned ethnomycologist, the Swiss-American outsider who married a Russian mycophile, the unlikely pioneer of a field that barely had a name—seized the anthropological inheritance of his time and dragged it into the muddy, mushroom-strewn reality of preindustrial ritual, declaring that the engine of religion is not the abstract perfection of doctrine but the dynamic interplay of plant, brain, and culture.

In a world that still craves direct spiritual experience, still fears the wild things that grow in the earth, and still debates the relationship between consciousn ...