15 Dec 2023
Mazatec Sacred Mushrooms vs. Western Psilocybin: Diverging Views
Mazatec Sacred Mushrooms vs. Western Psilocybin:Opposing Perspectives
Citlali Rodríguez Venegas, Ph.D.1
MAPS Bulletin: Volume XXXIII Number 3 • 2023
Mushrooms are some of the most mysterious beings that inhabit this planet. People tend to regard them with fear, hope, fascination, and disgust. They have become trendy because of the health and wellness they can offer us. Nonetheless, in the 1950s, they were highly stigmatized, primarily with fear and danger–not throughout the globe, but in cultures that have shaped the modern world, like America.
The mushrooms’ studies of the Wasson marriage began with an intriguing quest born in the cultural difference between Gordon Wasson (American) and Valentina Pavlovna (Russian): why some cultures have a strong link with mushrooms and others don’t, some like them, others reject them. Their book History, Russia and Mushrooms, a fantastic contribution to the mycology field that settled the first stones of ethnomycology, shows different cultural perspectives of mushrooms. The couple’s 30-year research peak was the famous encounter between Gordon Wasson and María Sabina, the wise indigenous Mazatec woman who gave a face to Mircea Eliade’s shamanism concept in America.
For the Mazatec people in the north highlands of Oaxaca, mushrooms are precious forest fruits that allow some of the tastiest dishes in the rainy season. Tjain is the Mazatec common word that refers to them. However, some kinds are appreciated because of their visionary and knowledge power. Mazatecs referred to them with sweetness, tender, and respect: so-called ndi tsojmi (little precious things), ndi xi tjo (the little ones that sprout), ndi naxo (little precious flower) or njíle Kristo (Christ’s blood). These mushrooms are the bridge, a synapsis between the son’dele nima santo (spirit world) and the world of the tangible, of the embodiment. The ndi xi tjo are xkon, as to say sacred, dangerous, powerful, pure, and delicate. In the Western world, they are commonly known as psychoactive mushrooms, loaded with a special and nowadays very precious component, psilocybin. From the mazatec’s point of view, they are extraordinary, powerful beings with sen majao (spirit), consciousness, and will.
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We are more than 60 years apart from the year when the Western world became aware of the existence of these unique beings. Re-discovered by scientific research during 1930’s, the sacred mushroom became known worldwide at the end of the 1950s through the publications of Wasson’s magazines’ articles: Valentina Pavlovna’s “I ate the magic mushroom” in This Week and Gordon Wasson’s “Seeking the magic mushroom” in Life (May 1957); both popular prints with massive distribution. After decades of oblivion and freezing research in the scientific realm because “psychedelics never went away–they just went underground,”2 we are experiencing a renewed interest in psilocybin mushrooms, popularly known as a psychedelic renaissance, within the realms of the therapeutic and mental health interests through psychonauts’ experimentation to microdosing to boost creativity and maintain or improve productivity. Psychoactive mushrooms and psilocybin for the mainstream are products needed to become the extraordinary humans that capitalist machinery carves on us: To be young, healthy, wealthy, beautiful, and successful. In this perspective, this form of relation is charged with egocentric interests and blind disassociated consumption that maintain the modern illusion that everything is okay; there is no humanity nor climate crisis, so we can continue devouring everything at our grasp, affecting the planet with impunity.3
Wassons’ mushrooms research was characterized by their close relationship with specialists in each knowledge field, from mycology to history to linguistics. They received help from researchers at the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) worldwide, like the missionary and linguist, Eunice Pike, who settled in Huautla de Jiménez (Mazatec capital of the highlands) in the 1930s. Pike gave Gordon Wasson one of the Mazatec’s names of the sacred mushrooms. Those Mazatec words were the powerful key that opened the gates of the Mazatec people’s sacred and hidden spiritual world. The Wassons were very close and worked with scientific authorities like the botanist Roger Heim, director of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, who specialized in mushrooms. He accompanied Gordon on different expeditions to the Mazatec highlands. In 1958, they published an exhaustive study of the hallucinogenic mushrooms of Mexico.4 Another crucial scientific figure was chemist Albert Hoffmann, famous for synthesizing LSD, a component found in a mushroom but a parasitic type. He worked with Sandoz, a Swiss pharmaceutical enterprise; in their laboratory, he succeeded in synthesizing psilocybin, so Sandoz became the first to commercialize psilocybin.
In 1959, pharmaceutic enterprises and scientists in important centers of research in France, the United States, and Swiss, as well as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), became part of an extractivist and colonial network that plundered mushrooms and other medicinal plants in Mazatec territory. The central mobiles were business and war weapons, the first founded in its potential benefit for the health industry and the second for military use. Several promising scientific trials were made during the psychedelic decade of 1960, demonstrating its virtues and usefulness, until its prohibition came through the Nixon administration (1971). The prohibitory regulation was a political strategy against the threatening waking consciousness of the youth. Psychoactive mushrooms, plants, and substances became the backbone of the contracultural movements that stood against Vietnam’s war, against the American way of life, and in favor of environmental care, sexual liberation, and human connection without divisions of race, religion, or so. The governments wiped out a legion of free people living out of the system and held discredited campaigns against all psychoactive substances; mushrooms once again were stigmatized.
It is important to acknowledge that disclosing sacred mushrooms brought major consequences to the Mazatec people and their territory. The spiritual domain was desecrated, not just because of the commercialization, but from the Mazatec point of view for exposing a xkon entity–sacred, dangerous, powerful, pure, and delicate–that belonged to the realm of the secret, the mystery, and the hidden. The openness had terrible consequences; the sen majao (spirit) of the mushrooms was corrupted, and nothing had been the same again; its serious damage deteriorated the strength of the ndi xi tjo, so to say, its language, its wisdom.5 For the chjota én nima (Mazatecs), the sacred mushrooms embody god, a powerful divine force that allows entrance to the son’dele nima santo (spirit world). It grants extraordinary powers that only a chjota chjine, a wise person, can deal with.
Nowadays, there is a tendency to prioritize psychoactive mushrooms’ medicinal properties because the pharmaceutical and health industry runs the show. But sacred mushrooms have shaped the Mazatec way of existence. They had been their primary source of knowledge since ancient times. Sacred mushrooms had been nuclear to their cosmology, cultural, political, and social knowledge as their ontology. Furthermore, they are mediums, as in their environment; mycorrhizal networks are the highways of nutrients. Without the fungal web beneath the earth, the woods would not exist. For Mazatecs, ndi xi tjo allows a direct connection to the spirit world; the strength of its sen majao (spirit) concedes to the one that eats it, a spiritual journey to other dimensions.
The difference between Mazatec sacred mushrooms and western psilocybin is not a minor issue; they address opposing forms of life, revealing a conflict between ways of existing on this planet.
Although Gordon Wasson’s approach to the ndi santo (little saints) was initially motivated by the drive to know more deeply about the mushroom’s world, the increasing attention over these beings brought a critical dimension: profit. Gordon Wasson was a director of JP Morgan; he was an international businessman; he, of course, could not be left behind. He would be ahead, riding the wave. The Western worldview is founded on a capitalist logic, like massive extraction, massive production, and human exceptionalism. We tend to relate and perceive nature as a material, not a living organism. Earth is something, not somebody. On the opposite Mazatec worldview, coincident with other indigenous worldviews, everything is alive; it is a subject, a conscious entity to relate with; humans are not at the center nor the top of the rest of the species. Nothing in nature belongs to the Mazatec people; it belongs to the Earth Lords, mothers, fathers, and grandmothers of the sond’ele (world). Everything in nature, animated and unanimated, has a spirit. Nonetheless, it is important to address that in the modern world, there are other ways of living rooted in biocentrism that embrace multispecies perspectives and engage meaningfully with nonhuman life that boosted in the 1970s.6 On the other hand, after decades of racist acculturation politics in Mexico, there are Mazatecs that had assumed the Mexican way of life, impregnated with Western modernity that scorns the Indigenous way of life.
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The historical knowledge of mushrooms held by indigenous sciences of the life is antique, thousands of years old; psilocybin knowledge is contemporary, less than a century, and encompasses the extractivist and utilitarian modern science practices that separate the substances from its body, abstract nature into a pill, and divide mushroom from psilocybin. The difference between Mazatec sacred mushrooms and western pharmaceutical psilocybin is not a minor issue; they address opposing forms of life, revealing a conflict between ways of existing on this planet.7 We all know by now that modern and dominant way of life prevails by oppressing others; the Western world does not allow any threatening form of existence that challenges its main constitutive elements, even though there are. This ontological difference between the Western and Mazatec world should confront us with the modern world crisis caused by the political, cultural, and economic capitalism that governs the globe. Psilocybin embodies commodity consumption and the immediacy of comfort where money is the primary good, a substance resource gained by hard modern science. Ndi xi tjo are powerful conscious entities that God gave to the Mazatec people so they would know how to live with respect towards their environment, God’s way. There is a struggle; new consequences and considerations are on the psychedelic game board: social justice, damage repair, folklorization, cultural appropriation, and exploitation. But also, there are alliance possibilities, existential modern shifting and shared perspectives with current countercultural groups and communities that had chosen to relate and live otherwise with nature. What would be the outcome of these paths?
Footnotes
[1] Born in Mexico City, she has dedicated over a decade of research to the Mazatec’s culture, contemporary history, and ontology, especially to the Mazatec capital of the highlands, the cosmopolitan Huautla de Jiménez (Oaxaca). She has a Ph. D. in Mesoamerican Studies from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a published book addressing the Mazatec’s perspective of sacred mushrooms (2017). Since 2019, she has collaborated with Mazatec’s projects regarding art, oral memory, and history.
[i] Krenak, A., (2020). A vida não é útil. Companhia das Letras.
[2] Steinhardt, J. (2018). Psychedelic Naturalism and Interspecies Alliance: Views from the Emerging Do-It-Yourself Mycology Movement. Plant Medicines, Healing and Psychedelic Science. Springer International Publishing, p. 171.
[3] Krenak, A., (2020). A vida não é útil. Companhia das Letras.
[4] Heim, R. & Wasson R. G. (1958). Les champignons hallucinogènes du Mexique, Études ethnologiques, taxonomiques, biologiques, physiologiques et Chimiques. Archives du Muséum National D’Histoire Naturelle, 7ème série.
[5] Estrada, A. (1981). María Sabina. Her life and chants, Ross-Erickson Inc. Publishers, New Wilderness Poetics Volume I.
[6] Steinhardt, J. (2018). ibid.
[7] Valdés, F., (2022). Seres del inframundo y exploración neocolonial: diferencia ontológica en terriotrios subterráneos de los pueblso mazatecos de Oaxaca. Conflictos entre mundos. Negación de la alteridad, diferencia radical, ontlogía política. El Colegio de la Frontera Sur.
References
Estrada, A. (1981). María Sabina. Her life and chants, Ross-Erickson Inc. Publishers, New Wilderness Poetics Volume I.
Heim, R. & Wasson R. G. (1958). Les champignons hallucinogènes du Mexique, Études ethnologiques, taxonomiques, biologiques, physiologiques et Chimiques. Archives du Muséum National D’Histoire Naturelle, 7ème série.
Krenak, A., (2020). A vida não é útil. Companhia das Letras.
Ladha A. (2021, May 20). How the Psychedelic Community Can (Actually) Create a Better World. https://doubleblindmag.com/psychedelic-community-create-a-better-world/
Ladha A. & Suša R. (2022, December 1). Why the “Psychedelic Renaissance” is just Colonialism by Another Name. https://doubleblindmag.com/colonialism-by-another-name/
Rodríguez, C. (2017). Mazatecos, niños santos y güeros en Huautla de Jiménez, Oaxaca. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
___________. (2022). Relacionalidad mediadora, alteridad y niños santos en la conformación de la ciudad mazateca de Huautal de Jiménez (Oaxaca). Tesis de doctorado en Estudios Mesoamericanos, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
Steinhardt, J. (2018). Psychedelic Naturalism and Interspecies Alliance: Views from the Emerging Do-It-Yourself Mycology Movement. Plant Medicines, Healing and Psychedelic Science. Springer International Publishing, 167- 184.
Valdés, F., (2022). Seres del inframundo y exploración neocolonial: diferencia ontológica en terriotrios subterráneos de los pueblos mazatecos de Oaxaca. Conflictos entre mundos. Negación de la alteridad, diferencia radical, ontlogía política. El Colegio de la Frontera Sur, 47 – 113.
Will, M. (2021, July 13). The Nice Married Couple Who Inspired People to ’Shroom. https://daily.jstor.org/the-nice-married-couple-who-inspired-people-to-shroom/
Citlali Rodríguez Venegas
Citlali Rodríguez Venegas has a Ph.D. in Mesoamerican Studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), is a cultural advisor, and project creator. For over a decade, from the anthropological perspective, she researched the Mazatec Highlands in the north of Oaxaca (Mexico), an indigenous territory characterized by their shamanic wisdom regarding psilocybin mushrooms. Author of the book Mazatecos, niños santos y güeros en Huautla de Jiménez, Oaxaca (2017), since 2019, Citlali has been working on Mazatec community-based projects focusing on history, oral memory, culture, and art. She likes to foster respectful, reciprocal, and informed relationships between outsiders interested in the Mazatec culture and people in the community. In the academic field, she has reviewed several articles in scientific journals and supervised undergraduate theses at the Anthropological Studies Center (CEA) and the Political and Social Sciences Faculty (FCPyS) at UNAM
