Revised May 1, 2002 and August 29, 2007
Copyright 1998-2007 by John W. Allen
| Today, in Mexico, only a handful of remote mountain
area tribes still preserve and utilize the customs and rituals of what
once must have been a splendid and powerful system of worship and empirical
magic. So complete was the neglect and ignorance in this western world
of the botanical aspects of the Aztec and Mexican religions, that in 1915,
William E. Safford, a reputable and distinguished American Botanist, who
was an expert on the subject of many native American psychotropic plants,
believed that the mushrooms and their ceremonies recorded in the codices
were non-existent. Safford claimed that the Indians of Mesoamerica had
never used any mushrooms prior to the conquest or after. Disregarding
the noted valid testimony of the Spanish historians, and of his peers,
Safford paid little attention to the well documented evidence written
by the historians and clergy which described the rituals (mushrooms) and
their effects upon those who consumed them. Obviously Safford was anti-drug orientated in his beliefs and so once again the mushroom endemic lay hidden from the world until the middle of the late 1930's when it was once again brought to the attention of the scientific community. In the early 1900's, Austrian born Blas Pablo Reko, an ethnobotanist, received several reports that certain groups of Indians living in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, were consuming mushrooms and holding secret ceremonies involving ancient rites. These rites were performed only for the purpose of healing and divination. Reko published his findings in a book entitled El México Antiquo. Subsequently, Reko discussed these events with his colleagues. However, they paid little attention to his mushroom ramblings and showed no interest in following up on his information regarding the suspected use of inebriating mushrooms by the Indians of Mesoamerica. In 1936, a Mexican engineer, Roberto J. Weitlaner collected several mushroom specimens and forwarded them to Reko. Reko in turn sent the specimens to Harvard University for botanical identification. However, the specimens spoiled before they arrived, thus further delaying their existence to the scientific community. Later that same year, Weitlaner, became the first white man in modern times to observe an actual sacred mushroom ceremony. Two years later in 1938, his daughter Irmagard, her fiance Jean Basset Johnson and two friends became the first westerners to witness an actual mushroom ceremony. The velada was held in a home in the tiny mountain village of Huautla de Jimenez. The actual discovery of the first mushroom specimens of teonanácatl occurred when a young Harvard botanist, Richard Evans Schultes, made a trip to Huautla de Jimenez and along with Blas Pablo Reko (Schultes, Pers. Comm. 1989) collected several specimens of mushrooms which were suspected as being the mushrooms used in magico-religious ceremonies. So it would appear that the Indians, in their defiance and defense were able to hide their use of the mushrooms until the late 1930's when their use began to reemerge into the western hemisphere. Schultes (1939, 1940) presented the scientific community with numerous references describing the use of inebriating mushrooms by the Aztec priests and their followers. Schultes, in his 1939 and 1940 papers, reported that several codices mentioned the existence of the sacred mushrooms, thereby providing a reading audience with information about the mushrooms. Thus Schultes eventually paved the way, so to speak, for the Wassons' and others to follow in his footsteps when he published his findings to the world (Schultes 1939, 1940). The actual rediscovery of the Sacred Mushrooms and their ceremonies can be read in Volume I, II and VII of the Ethnomycological Journals Sacred Mushrooms Studies (Allen, 1997a, 1997b, 2000). |
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