Sacred mushroom

Ruck, Carl A. 2006. Sacred Mushrooms of the Goddess Secrets of Eleusis. Berkeley Ronin. 

RiedUnger, T.J. (1990). The Sacred Mushroom Seeker. Portland Dioscorides Press. Rudgley, R. (1993). The Alchemy of Culture. London British Museum Press. 

Ride Through the Sierra Mazateca in Search ofthe Magic Plant Maria Pastora in The Sacred Mushroom Seeker, Thomas J. Riedlinger, editor,Dioscorides Press. 

Sacred Mushroom Seeker Essays forR. Gordon Wasson. Edited by T.J. RIEDLINGER, pp 115-127. Portland. OR. 

At least twenty-five of our early sources, many of them among our most important, speak of teonanacatl, God s flesh the sacred mushrooms of Middle America. Bernardino de Sahagun refers to them repeatedly and at some length. He gives in Nahuatl the text of his native informants. Of the Nahuatl poems preserved for us, one mentions them, and probably others refer to them metaphorically. 

At the time we knew nothing, absolutely nothing, about the cultures of Middle America. What awaited us in Mexico turned out to exceed our most sanguine anticipations, in the intellectual adventure of discovering for ourselves the rich Indian cultures of Middle America and in our rediscovery of the rite of the 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 ... 

On the slopes of Popacatepetl the sacred mushrooms are still taken with colorines. It is vital that the hilum be in the red field if it is in the black patch, it is the toxic seed of Abrus precatorius L., also called coloring (sic) and much used for beads by the Veracruzanos. 

And here we revert to the miraculous plant that we think is the Salvia divinorum, called (as we believe) in Nahuatl pipiltzintzintli, in the records of the Inquisition dating from 1700. This is obviously related to the name for the sacred mushrooms used by Marina Rosas. Dr. Aguirre Beltran translates it as the most noble Prince and relates it to Piltzintli, the young god of the tender corn. In the accounts of the visions that the Indians see after they consume the sacred food— whether seeds or mushrooms or plant— there frequently figure hombrecitos, little men, mujercitas, little women, duendes, supernatural dwarfs. ... 

Top) Young girl grinding sacred mushrooms (P. mexicana Heim) in juxtlahuaca, Oaxaca, inMixteca). 1960. 

Identification of the Teonanacatl, or Sacred Mushroom of the Aztecs, with the narcotic cactus, Lophophora, and an account of its ceremonial use in ancient and modern times, an address delivered May 4, 1915, before the Botanical Society of Washington. Published as an An Aztec Narcotic (Lophophora Williamsii) in Journal of Heredity, Vol. 6, July 1915. return... 

Participation in this ceremony was the climax of our expedition. It brought confirmation that the hojas de la Pastora were used by the Indians for the same purpose and in the same ceremonial milieu as teonanacatl, the sacred mushrooms. Now we also had authentic plant material, not only sufficient for botanical identification, but also for the planned chemical analysis. The inebriated state that Gordon Wasson and my wife had experienced with the hojas had been shallow and only of short duration, yet it had exhibited a distinctly hallucinogenic character. 

How should we judge the conduct of Maria Sabina, the fact that she allowed strangers, white people, access to the secret ceremony, and let them try the sacred mushroom ... 

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. 

RIEDLINGER T.J. (Ed.), 1990, The Sacred Mushroom Seeker. Essays for R. Gordon Wasson, Dioscorides, Portland, OR. 

My advice is, first, get some good books on the subject -- you can t expect to get this kind of information off the internet or in High Times, for example. You need to read Pharmacotheon by Ott, or Valdez and Diaz s excellent Journal of Enthnopharmacology article ( 7, 1983 pps 287-310) --go to your local university library and photocopy it. Another good book is Riedlinger s (ed.) The Sacred Mushroom Seeker, which contains a very good essay on Salvia divinorum by Albert Hofmann (recommended ). 

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 ... 

Andrija Puharich, M.D., "The Sacred Mushroom and the Question of its Role in Human Culture." Unpublished research memorandum, 1962. 

Sixteenth-century Central American Indians, according to the naturalist Francisco Hernandez, called them Teomnacatl, possibly translated as God s flesh or, simply, sacred mushroom. Albert Hofmann, the scientist credited with the inadvertent discovery of LSD when investigating its effects, is also credited with isolating the active ingredient of this mushroom in 1958. He claimed to have ingested 32 dried mushrooms, probably 10 times the usual dose taken today, to determine their... 

John Allegro, a leading Dead Sea Scroll scholar and author of The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, a daring volume of speculation about the origins of religion. 

Sabina, Maria, 88 Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, 88 safrole, 86... 

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