the forests and birds and wild flowers. But their love of 
mushrooms is of a different order, a visceral urge, a pas- 
sion that passeth understanding. The worthless kinds, 
the poisonous mushrooms—the Russians are fond, in a 
way, even of them. They call these ‘worthless ones’ 
paganki, the ‘little pagans,’ and my wife would make 
of them colorful center-pieces for the dining-room table, 
against a background of moss and stones and wood picked 
up in the woods. On the other hand, I, of Anglo-Saxon 
origin, had known nothing of mushrooms. By inherit- 
ance, I ignored them all; I rejected those repugnant 
fungal growths, expressions of parasitism and decay. Be- 
fore my marriage, I had not once fixed my gaze on a 
mushroom; not once looked at a mushroom with a dis- 
criminating eye. Indeed, each of us, she and I, regarded 
the other as abnormal, or rather subnormal, in our con- 
trasting responses to mushrooms. 
A little thing, some of you will say, this difference in 
emotional attitude toward wild mushrooms. Yet my wife 
and I did not think so, and we devoted a part of our lei- 
sure hours for more than thirty years to dissecting it, de- 
fining it, and tracing it to its origin. Such discoveries as 
we have made, including the rediscovery of the religious 
role of the hallucinogenic mushrooms of Mexico, can be 
laid to our preoccupation with that cultural rift between 
my wife and me, between our respective peoples, between 
the mycophilia and mycophobia (words that we devised 
for the two attitudes) that divide the Indo-European 
peoples into two camps. If this hypothesis of ours be 
wrong, then it must have been a singular false hypothe- 
sis to have produced the results that it has. But I think 
it is not wrong. Thanks to the immense strides made in 
the study of the human psyche in this century, we are 
now all aware that deep-seated emotional attitudes ac- 
quired in early life are of profound importance. I suggest 
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