This conversation took place at Mr. Wasson's home in Danbury, Connecticut in October, 1985, fourteen months before Gordon passed away. Gordon Wasson was a Wall Street banker, a vice president of the J.P. Morgan Trust. Mycology was his pastime until he retired from banking in 1963, then, as he puts it, he "got down to real business." Over the next thirty years Wasson authored six books in the field of ethnomvcology and dozens of scholarly articles unveiling the origin and phenomenology of some of humanity's greatest religious mysteries. He became an honorary fellow of the Botanical Museum of Harvard University, and Yale awarded him their esteemed Veblen Prize. But the full significance of his research has yet to be appreciated by modem society. It would be illegal today in America to do what Gordon and his wife accomplished when they found the sacred mushroom and brought it back to the Western world. Robert Forte, AMRS, began his work with psychedelics as a student of Stanislav Grof and Frank Barron, cofounder of the Harvard Psilocybin Project. He obtained his master’s degree under Mircea Eliade and has collaborated with many of the leaders in the field of psychedelics, including R. Gordon Wasson, Timothy Leary, and Huston Smith. A former director of the Albert Hofmann Foundation, he teaches at the California Institute of Integral Studies.