Ethnomycology

Ethnomycology concerns the relationships between fungi and human cultures, and for this genus that literature is large, old and written almost entirely by people outside the communities it describes. This section documents that literature as a record: who wrote something down, when, in which publication, and on what basis. It does not present cultural practices, community histories or attributed statements as findings of this reference, and nothing on this page is a claim about what any community does or believes now.

The design intent for this section is that authorship and sourcing should be highly visible and that multiple contributors and contextual notes should be supported. That structure exists. It is not yet filled: no contributor from any of the communities named below has been commissioned, and no external adviser has been appointed. Until that changes, this reference can describe a published literature but cannot speak for anyone in it, and does not try to.

Readers arriving here for an account of ceremonial practice will not find one, and that absence is deliberate rather than an unfinished section.

Bradshaw and colleagues record that Psilocybe mushrooms had been used across Mesoamerica for centuries, particularly in spiritual ceremonies, that in many of these Indigenous cultures their use was considered sacramental or devoted to healing practices, and that with the arrival of European colonialism these cultures in most cases experienced religious persecution for that use. The scientific literature on this subject is therefore late, and it enters a situation already shaped by that persecution.

Ramírez-Cruz and colleagues write that species of Psilocybe "have been embraced by some cultures that consider them to be divine mushrooms", that their traditional use was "rediscovered in Mexico in the 1950s among the Mazatecs of Oaxaca", and that Chatinos, Chinantecs, Mixes, Nahuas and Zapotecs are likewise recorded in the literature as having used them for ceremonial purposes.

The word "rediscovered" is quoted rather than adopted. It describes an event in the scientific literature, not in the communities concerned, where nothing had been lost. It is worth noticing because it shows the record positioning its own authors as the discoverers of something that was being practised continuously, and that framing runs through much of the 20th-century writing on the genus.

Several names in the genus commemorate the peoples among whom the fungi were recorded. Psilocybe zapotecorum, of the Zapotecs, rests on the Heim and Wasson collection J-125 of 3 August 1956. Psilocybe aztecorum was published by Heim in 1957 and remains an accepted name; Guzmán records apipiltzin as a name used for it near Popocatépetl. Heim published Psilocybe caerulescens var. mazatecorum in the same year, and Psilocybe mexicana in 1957 as well.

A binomial outlasts the paragraph that explains it. It is governed by the Code, it survives every later revision of the text around it, and it is reproduced in every database record, sitemap entry and citation that follows, including on this site. Decisions taken in the 1950s about whom a fungus should be named after are therefore still being restated daily, by systems that carry the name without any of its context.

The record also shows what happens when the taxonomy moves. The name Psilocybe caerulescens var. mazatecorum is still a legitimate name, but its current-name field now resolves to Psilocybe caerulescens, so the commemorative epithet persists in the nomenclatural record without denoting an accepted taxon. The name remains; the thing it was attached to has been absorbed.

The term most often attached to these fungi in the literature is teonanácatl, a Nahuatl word recorded by Sahagún in the 16th century, which Guzmán glosses from teo, divine or sacred, and nanácatl, mushroom. After the 1950s it became the standard term in the bibliography for sacred mushrooms generally.

Guzmán states plainly that he could not find that word in use among any present-day ethnic group in Mexico. He reports instead recording a variant, teotlaquilnanácatl, at Necaxa in the state of Puebla in 1959, and proposes teotlacuilnanácatl as the correct form, from tlacuil, to paint, giving a sense he renders as the sacred mushroom that paints or describes through coloured figures. He also records apipiltzin as the name used for Psilocybe aztecorum near Popocatépetl.

These are reports about words in publications, and they are presented here as such. Guzmán’s own account makes the collection conditions explicit: the names were given reluctantly, in exchanges shaped by the fact that the use of these mushrooms had been prohibited by the Church, and he offers that prohibition as the reason a term may not have been passed on to earlier chroniclers at all. A vocabulary assembled under those conditions is evidence about the literature before it is evidence about a language.

A substantial part of the ethnomycological writing on this genus concerns depictions rather than specimens: figures in Mesoamerican codices, the Mayan carvings known as mushroom stones from Guatemala and El Salvador, post-palaeolithic rock paintings at Tassili in the Sahara, and a prehistoric painted wall in the province of Cuenca in Spain. Guzmán assigns species to several of them, proposing Psilocybe zapotecorum or P. caerulescens for a figure in the Magliabechiano Codex, P. muliercula or P. zapotecorum for the Matrícula de Huexotzinco, P. mairei for the Tassili paintings and P. hispanica for the Spanish wall.

The paper states its reasoning, and the reasoning is what matters here. For the codex figure, P. zapotecorum is preferred because it "is more common in Mexico". For Tassili, the habitat that P. mairei occupies in Algeria and Morocco is compared with reconstructed prehistoric vegetation, and Guzmán writes that this "supports the hypothesis that P. mairei was growing in the Tassili region, and is the species represented on the murals"; he describes the attribution as a supposition he had been making in lectures since the 1990s. For the Matrícula figure he states the interpretation is his own, based on which species are common in that state today.

This reference does not adopt these identifications, and the Psilocybe hispanica account carries no reference to the Spanish wall. Each runs from an image to a species by way of present-day distribution, without material or a sequence, and a species record here requires one or the other. The claims are recorded as published hypotheses, which is what their author calls them, and declining to adopt them is not a judgement on the scholarship that produced them.

The literature summarised above was written in Spanish, English, French and German, largely by outsiders to the communities concerned, and much of it in terminology no longer in use. Where older wording is quoted on this page it is quoted as wording and marked as such, not adopted. Correcting it silently would hide the thing this section exists to show.

The gap that matters is not a missing paragraph. No contributor from any community named here has been commissioned, so this section describes a published literature rather than a living practice, and it should not be read as a summary of either. Filling it is a commissioning decision for the editor, not a research task, and it is recorded as outstanding rather than presented as complete.

This reference publishes no preparation, dose or effects information anywhere, including here.