To: X Y Zebra who wrote (7881 ) 6/29/2000 1:14:00 AM From: X Y Zebra Respond to
One early Spanish chronicler, quoted in an essay by Henry Munn, wrote: "?They pay a sorcerer who eats them [the mushrooms] and tells them what they have taught him. He does so by means of a rhythmic chant in full voice?" (Harner 88). Motolina, another historian, described a religious feast held by Montezuma at which mushrooms were eaten; the accompanying visions were believed to include divine advice about the future. In fact, the three kinds of mushrooms employed by the Aztecs seem to have played such an important role in their life that Indians groups owing dues to the Aztec emperor often paid with them the inebriating mushrooms (Dobkin De Rios 1976, 37). Spanish missionaries saw that the mushrooms, called "teonanacatl" or "flesh of the Gods," were for the Aztecs what the Eucharist is for Christians and that they receive their God(s) in communion through it. The clerics wanted to stamp out these practices, for they viewed them as atrocious pagan customs and were outraged at the belief that one could communicate with the spirit world through plants with sacred powers. Despite their efforts, it is clear that the rituals survived, for accounts of 17th century Spanish clerics deplore the use mushrooms and other hallucinogenic plants in pagan rites and "idolatries" (Furst 1972, 9). The cults survived, but only in a clandestine way. Missionaries drove the practices underground for nearly four centuries, until reports of their use in the Oaxaca valley began to surface in the 1920s and 30s. The first attempt to actually classify the Aztec?s mysterious "teonanacatl" was made in 1915 by the American botanist William E. Safford. He proposed a "solution" to the elusive identification of teonanacatl: since no such mushroom had been found yet, he concluded that chroniclers and authorities must have mistaken the dried, brownish, disk-like crown of Lophophora williamsii, that is, peyote (used today by American and Mexican Indians alike) for some form of mushroom. Although his classification was initially accepted, objections soon began to surface among anthropologists and ethnobotanists such as Blas Pablo Reko and Weston La Barre (Schultes 1939, 48). Further support against Safford?s hypothesis came in 1936, when Reko and a fellow Austrian researcher, R.J. Weitlaner, rediscovered the remains of the ancient cult, extant among the Mazatecs of northeast Oaxaca. Richard Evan Schultes then began his ethnobotanical investigations among the Mazatec with Reko in the summer of 1938. Subsequent identifications of teonanacatl as Paneolus Campanulatus L. var. sphinctrinus or as one of the Psilocybe species were proposed by Schultes (1939 38) and Singer (240), respectively. Later in 1938, anthropologist Jean Basset Johnson conducted his work on the witchcraft practices of brujos (witches, male or female) in Huautla de Jim‚nez and in 1953 ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson and his wife, Valentina Pavlovna, took the first of several trips to Huautla and several of other villages in Oaxaca to study the use of mushrooms among the Mazatec, Mixtec and other peoples living there. In 1955, they attended their first velada and became the first "outsiders" ever to eat the sacred mushrooms. (Furst 1972, 190) Three years later, in 1958, Wasson and several colleagues made the first actual recording of a mushroom velada, conducted by the shaman Mar¡a Sabina, and published it several years later, in 1974 in the comprehensive work, Mar¡a Sabina and Her Mazatec Mushroom Velada. To date, field work has established the use of mushrooms by at least nine tribes of modern Mexico in divinatory, curing and other religious ceremonies (Furst 1972, 10). columbia.edu
