In 1957, American banker R. Gordon Wasson published a report titled "Seeking the Magic Mushroom" in Life magazine that forever changed the Western world's relationship with psilocybin mushrooms. It was the first time a non-indigenous person publicly documented the Mazatec velada ceremony with Psilocybe spp. — guided by the healer María Sabina in Huautla de Jiménez, Oaxaca. The report reached millions of readers and triggered an avalanche of interest that continues to this day. It also, unintentionally, attracted tourism that deeply disturbed the community of Huautla and María Sabina's own life.
That episode encapsulates the central problem of ethnomycology: the encounter between indigenous mushroom knowledge and the Western world has rarely been symmetrical or respectful. But the discipline itself — when practiced with rigor and humility — reveals something extraordinary: that mushrooms have played a much more significant role in human history than the dominant narrative recognizes.
The term that started it all
Ethnomycology as a formal field was born with Wasson himself, who coined the term in 1956. Before becoming a mushroom researcher, Wasson was vice president of J.P. Morgan bank and an enthusiastic amateur of European mushrooms, fascinated by the radical cultural difference between "mycophobic" peoples (who fear mushrooms, like much of the Anglo-Saxon world) and "mycophilic" peoples (who celebrate them, like Russians, Poles, Mexicans, and Italians). This cultural difference led him to ask: why do such different cultures have such distinct relationships with the same kingdom?
The answer, which Wasson explored for the rest of his life, is that the relationship with mushrooms reflects something fundamental about each culture's worldview — its relationship with nature, with the sacred, with altered states of consciousness, and with death.
Mushrooms in Mesoamerica: much more than teonanácatl
The narrative about mushrooms in Mexico tends to be reduced to psilocybin mushrooms — the teonanácatl ("flesh of the gods" in Nahuatl) and Mazatec ceremonies. But the use of mushrooms in Mesoamerica was much broader and more commonplace.
- Aztec codices and colonial chronicles record specific names for dozens of species — not just psychoactive ones. Sahagún's Florentine Codex (16th century) documents edible mushrooms with their Nahuatl names, culinary properties, and market values in the Tlatelolco tianguis.
- Huitlacoche (Ustilago maydis) — the corn smut fungus — was a common food in the Mexica diet and is now considered a culinary delicacy. The Spanish considered it a corn pest; indigenous cultures had cultivated and consumed it for centuries.
- The work of researchers like Dr. Gastón Guzmán from INECOL and Dr. Roberto Garibay-Orijel from UNAM documents that current Zapotec, Mazatec, Totonac, and Nahua communities regularly use more than 50 different species of mushrooms for food, medicinal, or ritual purposes — knowledge transmitted orally for generations.
The "mushroom stones" of Guatemala
Between 1000 BCE and 900 CE, the cultures of Soconusco (the Pacific coast of Guatemala and Chiapas) produced thousands of stone sculptures in the shape of mushrooms with a human or animal figure at the base. More than 200 of these "mushroom stones" have been found — most in ritual or funerary contexts. Wasson and archaeologist Stephan de Borhegyi proposed that they represented the cult of the mushroom as a sacred entity. The hypothesis is still debated, but the sculptures are unequivocal evidence that the mushroom had extraordinary cultural significance in these cultures.
Mushrooms in Europe: from witchcraft to cheese
In medieval Europe, wild mushrooms had an ambivalent relationship with the dominant culture. The Church associated them with the devil and witchcraft — they grew at night, in dark places, without visible seeds, sometimes hallucinogenic. The fairy ring — the circle of mushrooms that appears in meadows — was considered in Celtic and Germanic folklore to be the portal through which fairies and spirits came out to dance at night.
At the same time, the peasant cultures of Eastern Europe — Polish, Russian, Czech — had deep mycophilic traditions. Autumn mushroom foraging was a collective ritual of enormous social importance. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov repeatedly mention mushroom gathering as a central activity of Russian rural life.
The Vedic Soma: a mushroom?
One of the most controversial hypotheses in ethnomycology is that proposed by Wasson in his book Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality (1968): that Soma — the sacred drink described in the Rig Veda (1500-1200 BCE) as the elixir of the gods — was actually a preparation of Amanita muscaria, the red mushroom with white spots from fairy tales. The evidence Wasson gathered is suggestive but not conclusive. The hypothesis continues to be debated, but it has generated decades of research into the role of entheogens in ancient religions.
Ethnomycology today: documenting before it disappears
Contemporary ethnomycological research has an increasing urgency: traditional knowledge about mushrooms is disappearing faster than it can be documented. Rural-to-urban migration, climate change (which alters the distribution and season of wild mushrooms), the aging of communities that hold this knowledge, and the replacement of herbal medicine with conventional pharmacology are accelerating the loss of a heritage of knowledge accumulated over millennia.
The work of groups like the Mycology Laboratory of the UNAM Institute of Biology, the Micológica 360° collective, and international networks of indigenous researchers is trying to systematically document what remains — before the last bearer of that knowledge disappears without having transmitted it.
At Simbiosis, we believe that ethnomycology is not ancient history. It is a living, urgent, and profoundly relevant field for understanding what mushrooms mean in human life — beyond their biocompounds and clinical applications.
→ The Fungi Kingdom: biology, history, and Mexico
→ Educational resources on mycology
→ The Mycelium Blog — more articles
References: Wasson R.G. (1957). Seeking the Magic Mushroom. Life Magazine. Guzmán G. (1983). The Genus Psilocybe. Garibay-Orijel R, Caballero J, Estrada-Torres A, Cifuentes J. (2007). Understanding cultural significance, the edible mushrooms case. Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, 3:4. doi.org/10.1186/1746-4269-3-4