The Psilocybin Solution

unremitting persecution. The Aztec religion succumbed to just such a fate.

The Catholic Constabulary Take Note

The Aztecs’ use of psilocybin is clearly revealed in many of the records made by Spanish chroniclers at the time of the conquest, who diligently recorded their own observations and translated Aztec historical documents as well. For instance, during the coronation of Montezuma the second in 1502, we learn that teonanacatl was consumed during the celebrations. Many war captives were slaughtered to honor the new king, their hearts torn out and offered to the gods. After the grisly sacrifices, the celebrants were bathed in blood and then given raw psilocybin mushrooms to eat.

Perhaps it was this kind of terrible juxtaposition that helped the finger of heresy point toward the mushroom. After all, a mass bloody sacrifice followed by some strange ritual fungal inebriation is a hellish concept to the West, yet it was bound with the Aztecs’ desire to supplicate their pantheon of gods. Blood spilled in the name of religion whether through war or sacrifice is, unfortunately, a kind of pious tradition that highlights the immense power of the religious impulse over the human mind and soul. The gods of the Aztecs were deemed real, and they had to be worshipped and placated.

At any rate, the Aztecs utilized psilocybin in their religious rituals and engaged in various other rites that would have appeared horrendously alien to the invading Spanish, who were unlikely to react in the manner of refined social anthropologists. The excessive sacrifices together with the ingestion of psychoactive mushrooms must have sorely confused the Spanish invaders. To be sure, while they were at once amazed at the glorious wealth and regality of the Aztec cities that they encountered, they were less enthusiastic about the underlying psychological forces that had led to the physical magnificence set in stone.

Further accounts from the occupying Spanish clergy reveal the Aztecs’ use of psilocybin. The following testimonies—which paint a sometimes vivid picture of Aztec tradition—are detailed in Wasson’s The Wondrous Mushroom. For example, Diego Duran, a sixteenth-century Dominican friar translating a document in Nahuatl (the language spoken by the Aztecs), writes of the coronation of Tizoc in 1481:

And all the lords and grandees of the provinces rose and, to solemnize further the festivities, they all ate of some woodland mushrooms, which they say make you lose your senses, and thus they sallied forth all primed for the dance.^{4}

On the aforementioned coronation of Montezuma, Duran tells us:

The sacrifice finished and the steps of the temple and patio bathed in human blood, they all went to eat raw mushrooms; on which food they all went out of their minds, worse than if they had drunk much wine; so drunk and senseless were they that many killed themselves by their own hand, and, with the force of those mushrooms, they would see visions and have revelations of the future, the Devil speaking to them in that drunken state.^{5}

Because of his own personal experiences with psilocybin, and in light of historical research that clearly showed the Aztecs’ reverence for teonanacatl, our mushroom expert Wasson came to the conclusion that Duran had imposed his own views on the matter in order to further demonize the mushroom practice. Which is to say that to identify the Devil at the heart of the psilocybin experience was an interpretation peculiar to the psyche of this sixteenth-century friar. With his particular theological training he would have had no choice but to sniff the sulphurous traces of the Devil in the Aztecs’ unusual entheogenic rites. Duran’s perception of psilocybin-inspired suicides within the Nahuatl texts is therefore more likely to be the result of bias and exaggerated translation than actual fact. Today’s tabloid press would doubtless be impressed by Duran’s sensational rhetoric.

Another friar, the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagun, also left us an account of native mushroom use. In the Florentine Codex he writes of a merchant’s celebration.

At the very first, mushrooms had been served. They ate them at a time when, they said, the shell trumpets were blown. They ate no more food; they only drank chocolate during the night. And they ate the mushrooms with honey. When the mushrooms took effect on them, then they danced, then they wept. But some while still in command of their senses entered and sat there by the house on their seats; they danced no more, but only sat there nodding.^{6}

On the face of it, this would seem to be a less prejudiced portrayal of psilocybin use, though in the following report, also by Sahagun, he soon slides into the familiar tabloidlike sensationalist mode while describing mushroom use.

It is called teonanacatl. It grows on the plains, in the grass. The head is small and round, the stem long and slender. It is bitter and burns; it burns the throat. It makes one besotted; it deranges one, troubles one…. He who eats many of them sees many things which make him afraid, or make him laugh. He flees, hangs himself, hurls himself from a cliff, cries out, takes fright.^{7}

Such scare stories are echoed by the rumors that surrounded LSD use in the 1960s. People were supposedly hurling themselves from high-rise apartments and foolishly attempting to stop highway traffic by the power of thought alone. In actuality, of all the millions of doses of LSD taken in the 1960s, there were only a handful of deaths through misadventure resulting from LSD’s effects. It appears that any psychedelic substance with a powerful mystique seems to instill fear in those who are unfamiliar with its effects and who are easily threatened by the unknown. Moreover, fear often precedes persecution and the spreading of inaccurate information, which is why it is so important to have an unconditional flow of informed, hysteria-free knowledge regarding the psychological action of visionary plants and fungi. One hopes, then, that we live in more enlightened times. The fact remains, however, that the Aztec use of psychoactive agents, which included the use of other entheogens like the morning glory plant (whose seeds contain LSD-related compounds), proved to be so abhorrent to the Spanish that they sought to drive all such practices to extinction.

That they were successful in forcibly burying the mushroom is made clear by the academic events in the early part of the last century, as it was erroneously believed that there never were any psychoactive mushrooms to be found in Mexico in the first place. It was assumed by scholars that a mistake had been made by the obviously dim-witted Spanish historians, and that dried peyote cactus buttons (containing the entheogenic alkaloid mescaline) were the legendary teonanacatl. This botanical conjecture, or blunder as it was, went completely unchallenged by the academic fraternity when it was presented in 1915, and it remained unchallenged until a species of psychoactive mushroom still being used in Huautla was identified in 1938.

Perhaps, then, we should conclude that mycophobia is not merely a cultural phenomenon, but a remorseless genetic trait. This is an idea that Wasson would certainly have appreciated, as he was to come across much in the way of scholarly disregard for psilocybin’s religious role within ancient Mesoamerican culture. It is only since Wasson’s work has come to be acknowledged that historians have begun to realize that psychedelic agents like the Mexican mushroom have the power to move people, that their tremendous psychological impact was significant in shaping the belief systems of those cultures that used them. The point that Wasson was continually at pains to make was that one should be wary of underestimating the cultural and historical role of entheogenic flora, although, of course, he came to this conclusion by way of his own personal psychedelic experiences. Alas, such personal insights are not shared by most other Mesoamerican scholars.

Illuminating Flowers