“There’s a world past ours, a world that’s distant, close by and invisible. And there may be the place God lives, the place the useless stay, the spirits and the saints, a world the place all the things has already occurred and all the things is understood. That world talks. It has a language of its personal. I report what it says. The sacred mushroom takes me by the hand and brings me to the world the place all the things is understood. It’s they, the sacred mushrooms, that talk in a manner I can perceive. I ask them they usually reply me. Once I return from the journey that I’ve taken with them, I inform what they’ve instructed me and what they’ve proven me.”
Thus does the well-known Mazatec shaman, Maria Sabina, reverently describe the godgiven powers of the intoxicating mushrooms that she makes use of in her ceremony that has come down from ages previous.
Few vegetation of the gods have ever been held in higher reverence than the sacred mushrooms of Mexico. So hallowed had been these fungi that the Aztecs known as them Teonanacatl (“divine flesh”) and used them solely in essentially the most holy of their ceremonies. Though, as fungi, mushrooms don’t blossom, the Atztecs referred to them as “flowers,” and the Indians who nonetheless use them in spiritual rituals have endearing phrases for them, resembling “little flower.” When the Spaniards conquered Mexico, they had been aghast to search out the natives worshipping their deities with the assistance of inebriating vegetation: Peyotl, Ololiuqui, Teonanacatl. The mushrooms had been particularly offensive to the European ecclesiastical authorities, they usually got down to eradicate their use in spiritual practices.
“They possessed one other methodology of intoxication, which sharpened their cruelty; for in the event that they used sure small toadstools… they might see a thousand visions and particularly snakes… They known as these mushrooms of their language teunamacatlth, which implies ‘God’s flesh,’ or ‘of the Satan,’ whom they worshipped, and on this clever with that bitter victual by their merciless God had been they houseled.”
In 1656, a information for missionaries argued in opposition to Indian idolatries, together with mushroom ingestion, and really useful their extirpation. Not solely do stories condemn Teonanacatl, however precise illustrations denounce it. One depicts the satan attractive an Indian to eat the fungus; one other has the satan performing a dance upon a mushroom.
“However earlier than explaining this [idolatry],” one of many clerics stated, “I want to clarify the character of the stated mushrooms [which] had been small and yellowish, and to gather them the monks and outdated males, appointed as ministers for these impostures, went to the hills and remained nearly the entire evening in sermonizing and in superstitious praying. At daybreak, when a sure little breeze which they know begins to blow, they might collect them, attributing to them diety. When they’re eaten or drunk, they intoxicate, depriving those that partake of them of their senses and making them consider a thousand absurdities.”
Dr. Francisco Hernandez, private doctor to the king of Spain, wrote that three sorts of narcotic mushrooms had been worshipped. After describing a deadly species, he acknowledged that “others, when eaten, trigger not loss of life however insanity that now and again is lasting, of which the symptom is a form of uncontrolled laughter. Often known as teyhuintli, these are deep yellow, acrid, and of a not displeasing freshness. There are others once more which, with out inducing laughter, deliver earlier than the eyes all types of issues, resembling wars and the likeness of demons.
“But others are there not much less desired by princes for his or her fiestas and banquets, of nice value. With night-long vigils are they sought, superior and terrifying. This sort is tawny and considerably acrid.”
For 4 centuries nothing was identified of the mushroom cult, and it was even doubted that mushrooms had been used hallucinogenically in ceremony. The Church fathers had completed such a profitable job (by persecution) of driving the cult into hiding, that no anthropologist or botanist had ever uncovered the spiritual use of those mushrooms.
In 1916 an American botanist lastly proposed a “answer” to the identification of Teonanacatl, concluding that Teonanacatl and the Peyote had been the identical drug. Motivated by mistrust of the chroniclers and Indians, he intimated that the natives, to guard Peyote, had been indicating mushrooms to the authorities. He argued that the dried, brownish, disk-like crown of Peyote resembles a dried mushroom—so remarkably that it’s going to even deceive a mycologist. It was not till the Thirties that an understanding of the function of hallucinogenic mushrooms in Mexico and a data of their botanical identification and chemical composition began to turn out to be out there. Within the late Thirties the primary of the various species of sacred Mexican mushrooms had been collected and related to a contemporary mushroom ceremony. Subsequent fieldwork has resulted within the discovery of some two dozen species. An important belong to the genus Psilocybe, twelve of which have been reported, not together with Stropharia cubensis, typically thought-about a Psilocybe. An important species seem like Psilocybe mexicana and P hoogshagenii.
These varied mushrooms at the moment are identified to be employed in divinatory and spiritual rites among the many Mazatec, Chinantec, Chatino, Mije, Zapotee, and Mixtee of Oaxaca; the Nahua and attainable the Otomi of Puebla; and the Tarascana of Michoacan. The current middle of intensive use of the sacred mushrooms is among the many Mazatec.
Mushrooms range in abundance from yr to yr and at completely different seasons. There could also be years when a number of species are uncommon or absent—they range of their distribution and are usually not ubiquitous. Moreover, every shaman has his personal favourite mushrooms and will forego others. Maria Sabina, for instance, won’t use Stropharia cubensis. And sure mushrooms are used for particular functions. Which means that every ethnobotanical expedition could not look forward to finding the identical assortment of species employed at one time, even in the identical locality and by the identical folks.
The chance that extra species can be present in use is much from distant. Chemical research have indicated that psilocybin and, to a lesser extent, psilocine are current in lots of the species of the a number of genera related to the Mexican ceremony. In actual fact, these compounds have been remoted from many species of Psilocybe and different genera in broadly separated elements of the world, though the proof out there means that solely in Mexico are psilocybin-containing mushrooms at current utilized in native ceremonies.
The fashionable mushroom ceremony is an all-night seance which can embrace a curing ritual. Chants accompany the principle a part of the ceremony. The intoxication is characterised by fantastically coloured visions in kaleidoscopic motion, by auditory hallucinations, and, the partaker shedding himself in unearthly flights of fancy.
The mushrooms are collected within the forests on the time of the brand new moon by a virgin woman, then taken to a church to stay briefly on the altar. They’re by no means offered within the market. The Mazatec name the mushrooms Nti-xi-tjo, wherein ’Nti is a particle of reverence and endearment; the remainder of the identify means “that which springs forth.” A Mazatec defined this although, poetically: “The little mushroom comes of itself, nobody is aware of whence, just like the wind that comes we all know not whence nor why.”
The shaman chants for hours, with frequent clapping or percussive slaps on the thighs in rhythm with the mantra. Maria Sabina’s chanting, which has been recorded, studied, and translated, in nice half proclaims humbly her {qualifications} to treatment and to interpret divine energy by the mushrooms. Excerpts from her chant, all within the stunning tonal Mazatec language, give an thought of her many “{qualifications}.”
Lady who thunders am I,
girl who
sounds am I.
Spiderwoman am I,
hummingbird girl
am I….
Eagle girl am I, vital
eagle
girl am I.
Whirling girl of the
whirlwind am I,
girl of a
sacred, enchanted place am I,
Lady of the taking pictures stars
am I.
The primary non-Indian absolutely to witness the Mazatec ceremony wrote the next understanding ideas about this use of the mushrooms:
“Right here let me say a phrase concerning the nature of the psychic disturbance that the consuming of the mushroom causes. This disturbance is wholly completely different from the impact of alcohol, as completely different as evening from day. We’re coming into upon a dialogue wherein the vocabulary of the English language, of any European language, is significantly poor. There are not any apt phrases in it to characterize one’s state when one is, let’s assume, ‘bemushroomed.’ For a whole lot, even hundreds, of years, now we have considered this stuff when it comes to alcohol, and we now have to interrupt, the bounds imposed on us by our alcoholic obsessions. We’re all, willy-nilly, confined inside the jail partitions of our on a regular basis vocabulary. With ability in our alternative of phrases, we could stretch accepted meanings to cowl barely new emotions and ideas, however when a way of thinking is completely distinct, wholly novel, then all our outdated phrases fail. How do you inform a person who has been born blind what seeing is like? Within the current case that is an particularly apt analogy, as a result of superficially the bemushroomed man exhibits just a few of the target signs of 1 who’s intoxicated, drunk. Now nearly all of the phrases describing the state of drunkenness, from ‘intoxicated’ (which accurately means ‘poisoned’) by the scores of present vulgarisms, are contemptuous, belittling, pejorative. How curious it’s that fashionable civilized man finds surcease from care in a drug for which he appears to don’t have any respect! If we use by analogy the phrases appropriate for alcohol, we prejudice the mushroom, and since there are few amongst us who’ve been bemushroomed, there may be hazard that the expertise won’t be pretty judged. What we want is a vocabulary to explain all of the modalities of a divine inebriant….”
Upon receiving six pairs of mushrooms within the ceremony, this novice-participant ate them. He skilled the feeling of his soul being faraway from his physique and floating in house. He noticed “geometric patterns, angular, in richest colours, which grew into architectural constructions, the stonework in sensible colours, gold and onyx and ebony, extending past the attain of sight, in vistas measureless to man. The architectural visions appeared to be oriented, appeared to belong to the… structure described by the visionaries of the Bible.” Within the faint moonlight, “the bouquet on the desk assumed the scale and form of an imperial conveyance, a triumphant automobile, drawn by… creatures identified solely to mythology.”
Mushrooms have apparently been ceremonially employed in Mesoamerica for a lot of centuries. A number of early sources have instructed that Mayan languages in Guatemala had mushrooms named for the underworld. Miniature mushroom stones, 2200 years of age, have been present in archaeological websites close to Guatemala Metropolis, and it has been postulated that stone mushroom effigies buried with a Mayan dignitary instructed a reference to the 9 Lords of the Xibalba, described within the sacred ebook Popol Vuh. Truly, greater than 200 mushroom stone effigies have been found, the oldest courting from the primary millennium B.C. Though the bulk are Guatemalan, some have been unearthed in El Salvador and Honduras and others as far north as Vera Cruz and Guerrero in Mexico. It’s now clear that no matter using these “mushroom stones,” they point out the good antiquity of a classy sacred use of hallucinogenic mushrooms.
An outstanding statue of Xochipilli, Aztec Prince of Flowers, from the early sixteenth century, was just lately found on the slopes of Mt. Popocatepetl. His face is in ecstasy, as if seeing visions in an intoxication; his head is barely tilted, as if listening to voices. His physique is engraved with stylized flowers which have been recognized as sacred, most of them inebriating vegetation. The pedestal on which he sits is adorned with a design representing cross-sections of the caps of Psilocybe aztecorum, an hallucinogenic mushroom identified solely from this volcano. Thus Xochipilli undoubtedly represents not merely the Prince of Flowers, however extra particularly the Prince of Inebriating Flowers, together with the mushrooms which, in Nahuatl poetry, had been known as “flowers” and “flowers that intoxicate.”
Have psilocybin-containing mushrooms ever been employed as magico-religious hallucinogens within the New World? The reply might be sure.
A species of Psilocybe and probably additionally Stropharia are used at this time close to the traditional Maya ceremonial middle of Palenque, and hallucinogenic mushrooms have been reported in use alongside the border between Chiapas in Mexico and Guatemala. Whether or not these fashionable mushroom practices within the Maya area symbolize vestiges of former use or have been just lately launched from Oaxaca isn’t but attainable to say.
However, proof is now accumulating to point {that a} mushroom cult flourished in prehistoric occasions—from 100 B.C. to about A.D. 300-400 in northwestern Mexico: in Colima, Jalisco, and Nayarit. Funerary effigies, with two “horns” protruding from the pinnacle, are believed to symbolize female and male “deities” or monks related to mushrooms. Traditions amongst up to date Huichol Indians in Jalisco additionally recommend the previous spiritual use of those fungi “in historical occasions.”
What about South America, the place these psychoactive mushrooms abound? There isn’t any proof of such use at this time, however indications of their obvious former employment are many. The Yurimagua Indians of the Peruvian Amazon had been reported within the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to be ingesting a potently inebriating beverage made out of a “tree fungus.” The Jesuit report acknowledged that the Indians “combine mushrooms that develop on fallen timber with a form of reddish movie that’s discovered normally connected to rotting trunks. This movie could be very sizzling to the style. No one that drinks this brew’ fails to fall below its results after three draughts of it, since it’s so sturdy, or extra accurately, so poisonous.” It has been instructed that the tree mushroom may need been the psychoactive Psilocybe yungensis, which happens on this area.
In Colombia, many anthropomorphic gold pectorals with two dome-like ornaments on the pinnacle have been discovered. They’re within the so-called Carien model, and nearly all of them have been unearthed within the Sinú space of northwestern Colombia and within the Calima area on the Pacific coast. For lack of a greater time period, they’ve been known as “telephone-bell gods,” for the reason that hole semi-spherical ornaments resemble the bells of old style telephones. It has been instructed that they symbolize mushroom effigies. The invention of comparable artifacts in Panama and Costa Rica and one in Yucatan may be interpreted to recommend a prehistoric continuum of a sacred mushroom cult from Mexico to South America.
Additional to the south in South America, there may be archaeological proof that will recommend the spiritual significance of mushrooms. Moche effigy stirrup vessels from Peru, for instance, have mushroom-like caphalic ornaments.
Whereas the archaeological proof is convincing, the just about full lack of reference in colonial literature to such use of mushrooms, and the absence of any identified fashionable hallucinogenic use of mushrooms amongst aboriginal teams of South America, provides trigger for warning within the interpretation of what in any other case would possibly simply be interpreted as historical mushroom effigies from south of Panama. If, nevertheless, it turns into evident that the assorted archaeological artifacts from South America talked about above do symbolize hallucinogenic mushrooms, then the world for his or her significance in America can be vastly amplified.
Reprinted from Vegetation of the Gods: Origins of Hallucinogenic Use, Up to date by Alfred van der Marck Editions, New York, 1987. © 1979 by McGraw-Hill E-book Firm (UK) Restricted, Maidenhead, England.
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