Richard Evans Schultes (1915–2001)
American botanist, widely called the father of modern ethnobotany, and — quietly, from behind a lab bench at Harvard rather than a lecture hall of hippies — the man who trained or influenced nearly everyone else on this site’s roster. Wasson’s fieldwork, Terence McKenna’s whole career direction, Wade Davis’s writing, even Albert Hofmann’s later popular collaboration all run back through him.
Born January 12, 1915, in East Boston to a plumber’s family, Schultes won a full scholarship to Harvard in 1933 planning to study medicine. A single undergraduate course changed that: “Plants and Human Affairs,” taught by the orchidologist Oakes Ames, director of Harvard’s Botanical Museum, alongside his own reading of Heinrich Klüver’s Mescal: The ‘Divine’ Plant and Its Psychological Effects. Under Ames’s mentorship he earned his B.A. (1937), M.A. (1938), and Ph.D. in botany (1941) without ever really leaving the department — and without ever leaving the subject that first pulled him in, either. His undergraduate thesis studied the ritual use of peyote among the Kiowa of Oklahoma; his doctoral fieldwork took him to Oaxaca, Mexico, where he identified two Mexican hallucinogenic plants scientifically for the first time: teonanácatl, the Psilocybe mushrooms this entire site is named for, and ololiuqui, a psychoactive morning glory. That was more than a decade before Wasson’s velada with María Sabina made the same mushrooms famous.
Into the Amazon
From 1942, working first as a field agent for the wartime Rubber Development Corporation and later on Guggenheim Foundation support, Schultes spent years living among Amazonian indigenous communities, learning the Witoto and Makuna languages and enduring malaria, beriberi, hunger, and at least one near-drowning along the way. The scientific yield of that fieldwork was staggering: more than 30,000 herbarium specimens, some 300 species new to Western science, the identification of the plant sources of curare (the dart poison now used, in refined form, as a surgical muscle relaxant), and status as the first outside scholar to study ayahuasca academically, identifying Psychotria viridis and Diplopterys cabrerana as the DMT-containing plants combined with the vine itself.
Harvard, and a legendary course
Schultes became curator of Harvard’s Oakes Ames Orchid Herbarium in 1953, curator of Economic Botany in 1958, and a full professor in 1970, teaching until his retirement in 1985. His undergraduate economic botany course became something close to campus legend — Schultes lecturing in a white lab coat, drilling students on Latin plant nomenclature, screening films of indigenous plant rituals, and staging blowgun demonstrations — a rigorous, old-fashioned scientific education wrapped around genuinely wild subject matter. Among his most distinguished students were Wade Davis, who carried Schultes’s methods into his own influential writing on ethnobotany, and Timothy Plowman.
His major books, especially Hallucinogenic Plants (1976) and Plants of the Gods: Origins of Hallucinogenic Use (1979) — co-written, notably, with Albert Hofmann — brought his scholarship to a much wider audience than academic botany usually reaches; Plants of the Gods has never gone out of print.
An unlikely counterculture influence
Schultes’s actual relationship to the 1960s psychedelic movement his research helped fuel was more complicated, and considerably funnier, than his influence on it might suggest. He personally kept his distance from the era’s enthusiasts and had little patience for imprecision: when William Burroughs described vivid ayahuasca visions to him, Schultes reportedly replied, “That’s funny, Bill, all I saw was colors.” He was openly critical of Timothy Leary’s shaky botanical knowledge, right down to Leary’s misspelled Latin plant names. Yet his rigorous, unglamorous fieldwork shaped an entire generation of writers and researchers regardless — Aldous Huxley, Allen Ginsberg, Andrew Weil, E.O. Wilson, and, most directly for the history this site tells, both Terence and Dennis McKenna, whose own 1970s Amazon expedition followed trails Schultes had helped map decades earlier.
Conservation and legacy
Schultes was also among the first scientists to sound a public alarm about Amazon rainforest destruction and the decline of the indigenous communities whose knowledge his entire career depended on — a conservation voice well ahead of its time. He received the Linnean Society of London’s Gold Medal (1992, botany’s most prestigious prize), the World Wildlife Fund’s Gold Medal, and Colombia’s highest civilian honor, the Cruz de Boyacá (1986); two plant genera, Resiaand Schultesianthus, carry his name. He died April 10, 2001, in his native Boston, at 86. His Amazon years were dramatized, loosely, in the acclaimed 2015 Colombian film Embrace of the Serpent.
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