Cap:
(1)2-5(6) cm broad. Obtusely conic becoming campanulate
with age. Edges of margins are decorated with tooth-like-geared remnants
of a partial veil, and sometimes with an obtused umbo. Color is brownish
to reddish-brown and sometimes looking black and fading to a tawny color
in age., somewhat hygrophanous but not always. Suface is smooth becoming
pitted and cracked in age. Gills:Adnexed and seceding from the stem, close to subdistant
and moderately broad with 1-2 tiers of intermediate gills. Color is
grayish at first, becoming mottled with age. Stem:60-40 mm long by 1.5-3.5 (5) mm thick. Equal, tubular,
fibrous and slightly striate towards the apex. Overall color of the
stem is brownish under a grayish pruinose surface and to a reddish brown
in drying. Spores:15-18 x 10-12 microns. Ovoid to lemon-shaped. Sporeprint: Black in deposit. Habitat:Scattered to gregarious in the manure of four-legged
ruminants (cattle, gaur, water buffalo and horse. In manured composts
at riding stables and racetracks. Distribution:Cosmopolitan throughout North America and temperate
zones of the world. Season:Most common in the autumn months in the USA and spring
and fall in most regions of the world and/or during and after rainy
seasons. Dosage:This species is not psychoactive. Comment:Ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes had collected this
species in Oaxaca in the middle and/or late 1930s. He originally described
it as a species used by the Mazatecs in divinitory ceremonies and rituals;
noting that it was a sacred mushroom of Mexico. Schultes' notes on specimens
stored on a single herbarium sheet confused Dr. Rolf Singer when he
incvestigated this species in 1958. It seems that Dr. Schultes had identified
one of his collections as Panaeolus campanulatus var. sphinctrinus,
a possible divinatory mushroom. However, Singer then wrote that "the
genus of Panaeolus was not used by the Mazatec Indians of the
Huautla region either for magico-religious ceremonies or as a sacrament
in shamanic healings." Additionally, Singer and Smith in their monograph
in Mycologia volume 50, wrote, "we must insist, that the phenomena which
belonged in the class of cerebral mycetism in the terminology of Ford
(1923), and not fully identified (Panaeolus campanulatus var.
sprinctrinus) but Schultes, in his 1939 and 1940 papers, noted
that the effects of Panaeolus sphinctrinus were comparable with
the hallucinatory-euphoric and lasting effects which have been described
in literature as belonging to and coming from certain mushrooms of the
genus Psilocybe. Aside from that we feel for certain that Panaeolus
campanulatus var. sprinctrinus is not now and never has been
used as a drug catalyst for divinatory purposes or religious ceremonies
by present day Indians in Mesoamerica", nor was it used as a sacrament
by their pre-Colombian ancestors. |