Why magic truffles are called philosopher’s stones

Magic truffles are called philosopher’s stones because Steven Pollock, who found Psilocybe tampanensis in 1977, gave its sclerotia that nickname, and because the people who sold them kept it. He borrowed it from alchemy, where the philosopher’s stone was the substance that would turn lead into gold. Since then the name has drifted from one species to the whole product category.

The stone of the alchemists

In alchemy the philosopher’s stone was the goal of the “Great Work”: a substance that could transmute base metals such as lead or mercury into gold or silver. The Latin lapis philosophorum and the Arabic ḥajar al-falāsifa both use the plural, so the literal translation is “philosophers’ stone”, the stone of the philosophers. The Wikipedia article gives the main lines of its history, with references.

The earliest known written mention is in the work of Zosimos of Panopolis, around 300 AD. Arabic alchemists of the eighth century and later, Jabir ibn Hayyan foremost among them, described a dry red powder that would bring about the change. Their word for it, al-iksir, is the origin of the English word “elixir”. Medieval and early modern European alchemists inherited the idea and wrote about the stone in deliberately obscure language, under dozens of code names.

By the seventeenth century the phrase was common enough to serve as a figure of speech. The preface to the 1611 King James Bible remarks that “men talke much of the Philosophers stone, that it turneth copper into gold”. Alchemists still worked on it in earnest. In 2021 historians at the Science History Institute helped decipher a Latin cipher by the English alchemist Arthur Dee (1579 to 1651) that turned out to be a recipe for the stone.

Alchemical texts describe the stone in two forms, a white one for silver and a red one for gold. In solid form it was imagined as heavy, glassy and red to purple. A pale brown, knobbly fungal lump that bruises blue looks nothing like it. The connection was never about appearance.

Pollock’s nicknames

According to Hamilton Morris’s reconstruction in Harper’s Magazine, Pollock tasted the first sclerotia from his culture, found them “nutty and tart”, and phoned his companion on the collecting trip, Gary Lincoff, to say that what they had found in Tampa was “nothing less than the philosopher’s stone”. Morris lists the other names Pollock used: “the rock of ages, the cosmic camote, the superfantastic megagalactic camotillo, and several other things”.

The camote names had a serious source. In his 1979 patent application, titled “Camote plant”, Pollock wrote that the Mazatec people of north-eastern Oaxaca call the large sclerotia of the landslide mushroom Psilocybe caerulescens “camote” or “camote del hongo”, the sweet potato of the mushroom, and n’o tse in their own language. The patent itself uses only “camote”. The alchemical name, the one that stuck, came from his informal talk.

How the name travelled

In March 1979 Pollock and two partners began advertising their company, Hidden Creek, in the American magazine High Times. According to Morris it sold cultivation material by mail and within a year was the largest supplier of its kind. Pollock was shot dead in his San Antonio office on the night of 31 January 1981, and the business fell apart.

The name survived him. In November 2003, when fresh magic mushrooms could still be sold in Britain, The Guardian described a market stall on Portobello Road in London where a regular customer’s “fungus of choice is a gnarled truffle the colour and texture of congealed muesli known as the Philosopher’s Stone” (Mark Honigsbaum). That trade ended in 2005, when the United Kingdom placed all fungi containing psilocin in Class A.

When the Netherlands banned magic mushrooms in December 2008, sclerotia remained outside the ban, and Dutch smartshops moved to truffles. By 2012 a toxicology paper from the Istituto Superiore di Sanità in Rome could use the two terms as equals in its title: “Magic truffles or Philosopher’s stones: a legal way to sell psilocybin?”.

What the name means on a label today

Today “philosopher’s stones” works as a trade name for magic truffles in general, and only sometimes for P. tampanensis in particular. The shop behind this site is an example: at Avalon Magic Plants the English web addresses of the Tampanensis, Mexicana A and Atlantis truffles all contain “philosophers-stones”. The Atlantis product text even opens with “Atlantis magic truffles, also known as Philosopher’s Stones”. Mexicana and Atlantis are different species, P. mexicana and P. atlantis. Public health sources use the name in the same broad way: the Amsterdam addiction service Jellinek writes that sclerotia “are also called philosophers stones or truffles”.

Shops also give the name new meanings. Shop texts sometimes link the nickname to the wisdom and insight users report. Historically, Pollock used the phrase as one exuberant nickname among several, next to “the rock of ages”, for a find he considered precious.

For a buyer the practical point is simple. The words “philosopher’s stones” on a pack say nothing about the species or the strength. Read the species or strain name instead, and see the strength chapter for what is known about the differences. The fungus chapter covers the species that started it all.