Hello and welcome to the new Mushroom John's "Tales of the Shrooms, a newly rewritten Psilocybian Mushroom Identification Guide. In this section you will find several pages on how to identify and preserve psilocybian mushrooms for microscopic identification. Also considered are short chapters on their history.


I first began photographing psilocybian mushrooms back in the early 1970's.
Farther below the mushroom guide I present over 60 different magic mushrooms. They are arranged alphabetically by Genus and species. I have also placed on each species page a brief description with some comments about each mushroom which I identify. I have also place in each section of the gallery, many photos of each individual species to show their various stages during their growth and development. Some species present lawn varieties, Woodchip and mulch varieties, dung varieties and bluing in individual species

Since 2000, more than 190 mushrooms species have been identified as containing psilocine and psilocybine, I have only listed species which I am familar with or species which I have photographs of. Later I will add sketches for many more species. Now the list has risen to more than well over 200 species containing these tryptamine alkaloids of psilocybine and/or psilocine.

Finally, I would like to note that there are four species described here in this guide which are not psychoactive, but I have placed them here because they are the most common mushrooms collected and mistaken for those which are psychoactive or which were, over the past century, previously misidentified as psychoactive by numerous authors in their scholarly field guides.
They are Panaeolina foenisecii (which macroscopically resembles Panaeolus subbalteatus); Panaeolus antillarum (often mistaken and collected as species of Copelandia, Panaeolus sphinctrinus (often collected and eaten with no noticible mind-altering effects) and the common dung fungus known as Psilocybe coprophila.


I also have placed on page 4 of the guide text, a pictorial of some of the deadly posisonous look-a-like species such as Galerina marginana, Galerina venenata, Galerina autumnalis and the confusing deadly species Conocybe filaris and I have placed them along side of images of Psilocybe cyanescens and Psilocybe stuntzii for comparison. These images are in the Posionous Mushroom page here in this guide. Last I have also included a few images of Chlorophyllum molybditis also known as Morgan's Lepiota or 'Green Gills', a mushroom species somehow mistaken for Psilocybe cubensis

INDEX TO GUIDE
Introduction
Teonanacatl: Food of the Gods
Mushroom Chemistry
Poisonous Mushrooms
Symptoms and Effects
Treatment for Psilocybian Intoxication
How to Identify Psilocybian Mushrooms
A Trip to the Field
Methods of Preparation, Dosage and Preservation.
Some Final Words of Caution
Suggested Readings

See below: One Happy Shroomer


"The Lunatic is on the Grass"
Pink Floyd: Brain Damage
A MacDonalds Lawn in Tumwater, Washington.
Image by Jochen Gartz, 1990.