Sahagun, Bernardino

Sahagun, Bernardino, Historia General delas Cosas de Nueva Espana, Book III, Chap. 3 ... 

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. 

The writings of Fray Bernardino Sahagun (1499-1590), a Spanish missionary who lived with and studied the Indians of Mexico, provide the earliest documented information about peyote. He writes that the Chichimecas and the Toltec Indians probably used peyote as early as 300 B.C. 

Among the Spanish friars in sixteenth-century Mexico, the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagun devoted himself to recording extensive descriptions and testimonies on the culture, history, and religion of the native peoples. The testimonies, recorded in Nahuatl and Spanish paraphrase, were preserved in numerous handwritten volumes known as the Florentine Codex. Wasson suggested that because Sahagun came from a family of Jewish converts in Spain, he perhaps had more instinctive sympathy for the conquered natives. In any event, his attitude, though pejorative, also had a certain kind of detachment and objectivity. 

Sahagiin, Bernardino de. 1956 [Sixteenth century]. The Florentine Codex. Sahagun s Spanish text and the Florentine Codex text translated by Angel Maria Garibay K. Porrua, Mexico. 

Peyote has been used in tribal ceremonies by indigenous cultures in North America since 1000 bc. In the year 1560, Spanish priest Bernardino de Sahagun wrote about the use of peyote and hallucinogenic mushrooms by the Aztecs. The first proper botanical description of peyote was made by Hernandez, the naturalist of Philip II of Spain, in 1638. Dried peyote buttons were processed and distributed by Parke Davis and Company in 1887. By 1930, over a dozen states in the United States had outlawed the possession of peyote and in 1967 peyote was banned nationwide by the federal government. 

In 1560, Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagun first wrote about this plant (Estrada Lugo 1991 Sahagdn 1950 Sahagun 1982) ... 

---