Mexican sacred mushroom

The news of the Mexican sacred mushrooms burst upon the world in the spring of 1957 with the publication of our book. Mushrooms, Russia History, and our articles in the popular magazines. (1 ... 

Psilocybe mexicana (Teonanacatl, Mexican sacred mushroom), Psilocybe spp. (magic mushrooms)... 

To her credit it can be said that she had thereby opened the door to the exploration of the Mexican mushroom cult in its present form, and to the scientific, botanical, and chemical investigation of the sacred mushrooms. Valuable active substances, psilocybin and psilocin, resulted. Without this assistance, the ancient knowledge and experience that was concealed in these secret practices would possibly, even probably, have disappeared without a trace, without having borne fruit, in the advancement of Western civilization. 

They obtained the teonanactl plant from Mexicans whose trust they had won over enough to allow them to participate in a sacred mushroom ceremony. Roger Herr identified the teonanactl mushroom as Psilocybe Mexicana, and he asked Hofmann to do the biochemical analysis. Unable to establish a bioassay for the extracts he made from the mushrooms, Hofmann took the psilocin and psilocybin extracts himself and reported vivid subjective experiences that were similar to those of LSD. LSD, psilocin, and psilocybin were all similar to serotonin in their molecular structure. 

The intriguing story of how Robert Gordon Wasson, a professional banker, partner and vice-president of the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company of New York, found himself ingesting the sacred mushroom on a remote Mexican mountain top, is worth repeating in his own words ... 

Over the intervening centuries, the native people concealed their use of their sacred mushrooms from outsiders. Thus the sacred mushrooms remained a secret until the Wassons celebrated velada with Dona Marfa Sabina in 1955. In the High Sierra region of the southern Mexican, indigenous Mazateca curanderos still use the sacred mushrooms today... 

Hofmann, A. 1980. The Mexican relatives of LSD—The sacred mushroom Teonanacatl. LSD My Problem Child, trans. Jonathan Ott, 101-44. New York McGraw-Hill. 

Three brassinosteroids have been used to speed up the life cycle of fungi in vitro. These are brassinolide, 24-epibrassinolide, and 22S,23S-homobrassinolide all of which increased mycelial growth by a factor of 2-3 and induced earlier sporocarp formation in Psilocybe cubensis and Gymnopilus purpuratus (20). P. cubensis forms part of the group known as the sacred mushrooms employed satisfactorily in religious ceremonies by Mexican Indians. One of the biologic y active compounds contained in Psilocybe is psilocybin which has been isolated, synthesized and used in the study of schizophrenia (19). The effects with 22S,23S-... 

Diethylamid) in the Mexican morning glory species or the Aztec ololouqui, and psilocin (Fig. 12.1) in the sacred but hallucinogenic mushroom teonanacatl (Psilocybe aztecorum) used by Maria Sabina, the famous Mexican chaman, are now exploited in recreational use. Other examples of recreational drugs are also documented.90 92... 

Mushrooms are the most important natural psychedelics of southern Mexico, used in ceremonies so sacred that Indians carefully concealed them from Europeans until the present century. It wasn t until the 1950s that descriptions of Mexican mushrooms came to the attention of the world. Soon after, botanists began to identify the mushrooms in use, and chemists found that their psychoactive properties came from psilocybin, an indole hallucinogen similar to LSD but with a shorter duration of action four to six hours. 

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