In October 1799 a man in London picked small mushrooms from Green Park, cooked them into a breakfast broth, and his family soon suffered giddy waves of symptoms, with the youngest child laughing uncontrollably. The physician who treated them blamed an ordinary-looking agaric, and the naturalist James Sowerby identified the culprit as liberty caps, Psilocybe semilanceata, the small mushroom that grows on British grasslands in autumn. The psychoactive compound was not isolated until 1958 and identified in this species in 1963. Victorian fairy stories later tied mushrooms to fairyland, which fed speculation about hidden psychedelic knowledge.

Hampi is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Karnataka, India, with more than 1,600 surviving remains spread over 4,100 hectares. It was the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire from 1336 to 1565. Travellers from Persia and Portugal described it as a prosperous, wealthy and grand city with temples, markets and farms along the Tungabhadra River. By 1500 it was estimated to be the world's second-largest city after Beijing, and probably India's richest at the time. In 1565 a coalition of Muslim sultanates defeated the Vijayanagara Empire, its capital was conquered and destroyed, and the city was left in ruins. Hampi remains a religious centre, with the active Virupaksha Temple at its heart.