History of the Spiritual use of Mushrooms
Since at least 5,000 B.C., people have used “spiritual mushrooms” in their religious rituals. The San Peoples of Tassili in southeast Algeria left behind cave paintings illustrating dancing, masked medicine men with mushrooms in their hands. It’s believed the mushrooms were of the consciousness-altering variety.
The area of Tassili is today an arid and desolate mountainous region of the Sahara desert but in the day of the cave painters, it had a habitable savannah-like climate with cattle, crocodiles and other large animals. Cultural ties of the San Peoples are evidenced across the Sahara region from Chad to Egypt, and perhaps in extension all the way to Greece.
Because ancient Greeks, too, may have used mushrooms in their spiritual practices. The “Eleusinian Mysteries,” continuous for an astounding two millennia, was the most important spiritual initiation ceremony in ancient Europe. Scholars believe it involved use of consciousness-altering mushrooms. With participants such as Plato and Aristotle, spiritual mushrooms may be an important part of the legacy of western civilization.
Further north and a thousand years later, the Vikings used Fly agaric (Amanita muscaria) to overcome fear before going into battle. In pre-battle spiritual ceremonies, they ate mushrooms and danced through the woods with wild abandon.
Granted, most of us would not consider this form of warrior spirituality in any way “admirable.” But it was part of the Viking religious practices, whatever our opinion of them may be. Meanwhile, to the east, Siberian shamans also used Fly agaric as a spiritual tool to communicate with their deities.
R. Gordon Wasson even claimed in a controversial book titled Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality that Fly agaric was the very substance referred to in ancient Vedic literature as the mysterious soma, a plant or mushroom extract used in ancient Hindu rituals and believed to bestow immortality of the soul and other divine qualities to the consumer.
(Please note: Fly agaric is poisonous. It can also be easily confused with other more deadly species. Consumption is strongly discouraged.)
On the other side of the ocean from Europe, the Mixtec culture likewise employed mind-altering mushrooms in their spiritual ceremonies, as recorded in the Mixtec Codex (13th-15th century). Their Gods were frequently engraved with mushrooms in hand.
In spite of the fact that the Mixtec people of central Mexico self-professed to use spiritual mushrooms in their religious ceremonies, western scholars still questioned it in a characteristically condescending fashion.
An American botanist named William Safford was convinced that peyote buttons were confused for mushrooms, while other scholars maintained that the Mixtec tribe truly did use consciousness-altering mushrooms in their spiritual practices.
Raging on until the early 1930′s, this debate finally got settled when amateur anthropologist Robert Weitlaner got invited to view a Mixtec religious ritual including the mind-expanding mushrooms.
In 1953, amateur mycologist R. Gordon Wasson and his wife Valentina Povlovna became the first westerners to actually participate in a Velada (mushroom ceremony), led by shaman Don Aurelio. Wasson publicized his experience in Life Magazine in 1957, which became the start of the popular awareness of spiritual mushrooms in the west.
25 species of the Psilocybe genus are known to contain the consciousness-altering chemical compounds psilocybin (stable) and psilocin (unstable). The species used by the Mixtec culture are believed to have been Psilocybin caerulescens and Psilocybin mexicana. The more common and sometimes cultivated species Psilocybin cubensis did not exist in America before the arrival of Europeans.
Spiritual mushrooms have been illegal in most of the world since the 1970′s because of their potential misuse as recreational drugs. Only in The Netherlands were fresh Psilocybe allowed to be sold until less than a year ago.
However, that came to an abrupt halt when a 17-year-old girl jumped off a bridge in Amsterdam after consuming Psilocybe mushrooms. In response, the Dutch parliament banned all sale of “magic mushrooms” effective December 1, 2008. So from Tassili to Amsterdam, the use of consciousness-altering mushrooms is now officially history.
