The world has woken up to the visionary potential of psilocybin mushrooms and their traditional use in various cultures, but what about other ‘magic mushrooms’?

Beyond psilocybin, there are numerous species of psychoactive fungi with well-documented uses historically among various indigenous populations around the globe. The iconic psychoactive red and white specked Amanita Muscaria has a widely documented connection to mystical traditions in various cultures, ‘Jian Shou Qing’ Bolete mushrooms are prized by locals and rumored to cause encounters with ‘Little People’ in China’s Yunnan Province, Conocybe mushrooms referred to as ‘Mushroom of Knowledge’ are purportedly employed by diviners in West Africa’s Ivory Coast, and even Reishi mushrooms are used by meditators to achieve deeper states of zen -

Do these not also qualify as ‘Magic Mushrooms’?

A Psychoactive Boletus mushroom in China

The western world’s first brush with ‘magic mushrooms’ came in 1957.

Two years prior, R. Gordon Wasson arrived to the remote mountain hamlet of Huautla de Jimenez in the Sierra Mazatec mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico in search of a mysterious and enchanting visionary mushroom ritual that was rumored to exist intact there.

The investment banker, who once served as the Vice President of JP Morgan, was entering a second chapter of his career as an ethnomycologist after his wife Valentina Wasson piqued his curiosity about the fungal kingdom. His primary reason for historical notoriety is ironically not related to any of the financial investments he made, but rather peculiarly as the individual who introduced psilocybin mushrooms to the west.

Wasson is remembered for blowing the cover on the Mazatec mushroom ritual in Huautla de Jimenez with an unauthorized Life Magazine article titled “Seeking The Magic Mushroom” on the mushroom ‘velada’ he experienced with Maria Sabina that was published in 1957. The veil of secrecy around the mushroom ritual was not without good reason; for over 400 years, colonizers and agents of the crown had been violently suppressing the practice.

Wasson swindled his way into an invitation to experience a ceremony under the pretense that a member of his family was missing, and Maria Sabina graciously offered to facilitate a mushroom ritual for him I the hopes that it would offer some assistance in locating the missing person. He undertook several trips to Huautla with a crew of ‘researchers’ funded by the CIA and documented the mushroom rituals in great detail, eventually publishing the fateful article that served as a call to action for the countless seekers to make a mass pilgrimage to the tiny town that was totally unprepared for such an influx of outsiders hungry for their secrets.

The impact of Wasson’s indiscretion and subsequent sharing of the secrets of the mushroom ritual he experienced in Huautla on the global stage via a scintillating and ultimately self-serving article in Life Magazine had devastating consequences on the town as it became a magnet for western spiritual seekers at the height of the hippie movement.

In some ways Maria Sabina has become to mushrooms what Bob Marley is to cannabis; a global ambassador who has been caricaturized and emblazoned onto t-shirts, coffee mugs and tapestries depicting her as the face of the sacred mushroom.

Wasson and Maria Sabina’s lives took two entirely separate tracks after their first fateful encounter in 1955; Wasson imprinted upon history as an Indiana Jones type adventurer who enjoyed a second act as a famed ethnomycologist who according to his obituary “illuminated the sanctity of psychotropic mushrooms…among the native peoples of Mexico and Guatemala, both ancient and modern”, while Sabina was condemned to a life of servitude sharing the sacred mushrooms and accompanying ritual with foreigners who overran the town, leading to her alienation from the community and the eventual torching of her family home out of jealousy and anger over the fate she was accused of bringing to the community and it’s ancestral traditions.

A Catholic Church with Magic Mushrooms Painted On It in Huautla de Jimenez

The legacy of R. Gordon Wasson is largely tied to his fateful encounter in Huautla de Jimenez, but did you know he traveled the world extensively searching for other surviving ethnomycological traditions?

In The Encyclopedia of Mushrooms published in 1979, Wasson extols that “There exist certain species of wild mushrooms that contain a potent & mysterious drug, which if you eat them cause you to see visions.From earliest times they have been worshipped by peoples from Mexico to Borneo to Siberia”.

While the psilocybin mushroom rituals of Mexico and the historical use of Amanita muscaria mushrooms in Siberian shamanic practices are well-documented, the matter of fact inclusion of Borneo as a cradle of indigenous psychoactive mushroom use alongside these other two widely recognized locations aroused my curiosity; throughout years of research on the subject, I’ve never come across a reference to visionary mushroom use by tribal societies in Borneo.

Even today, many researchers cite Mexico as the only region with evidence of a Pre-Columbian mushroom ritual; but perhaps our modern, westernized understanding of psychoactive mushrooms limits our ability to understand the ubiquity of visionary mushroom use globally. Beyond Psilocybin and Amanita mushrooms, there are a wealth of other potentially ‘entheogenic’ fungi that facilitate altered states and visionary encounters scattered across the globe in great number.

An example of this is with the Jian Shou Qing (见手青) Bolete mushroom that’s widely known in China’s Yunnan Province. Though not a prototypical ‘entheogenic mushroom’ as is generally recognized in the west, consuming this mushroom is known to facilitate encounters with “Xiao ren ren” or ‘little people’. The mushroom only recently largely gained recognition in the west after the incredible story of U.S. Secretary of The Treasury Janet Yellen eating these ‘magic mushrooms’ on her summer 2023 voyage to China.

“I was not aware that these mushrooms had hallucinogenic properties. I learned that later” says Yellen, though state sources claim she didn’t experience any of the purported psychoactive effects from her rendezvous with the mushrooms. It’s not unusual for a state guest in China to be served mushroom dishes, as virtually every meal in China is accompanied by some preparation and combination of the hundreds of culinary mushrooms that are revered in the culture.

The proliferation of ‘magic mushroom’ use in indigenous cultures across the globe continues to emerge via a

In the West African country of Ivory Coast, an academic account from 1995 documents traditional healers using ‘magic mushrooms’ in their work:

“One of these is tamu, the “mushroom of knowledge", growing in lagoonal areas, in compact groups, on rises in the ground, identified by Soubrillard as a species of Conocybe (Bolbitiaceae fam.). Souleymane takes the author to the place where these mushrooms grow, pick a sufficient number of these and then both men return to the village (presumably, Souleymane native village). A short time before going to bed, the healer offers Soubrillard a forkful of these cooked mushrooms (however, he affirms that they can be eaten either raw or cooked) and then - an uncommon fact in the traditional use of hallucinogenic mushrooms - he leaves him alone.”

There are many other examples of various mushrooms being charged with mystical & supernatural connotations throughout history & around the world - so just how widespread is the practice of ritualistic visionary mushroom consumption globally in antiquity?

And now that we have ample evidence that these traditions exist - how many other varieties of other ‘magic mushrooms’ are there, and how many cultures across time have known about and intentionally sought out these magic mushroom experiences?

Given the evolution of the citizen mycology movement in tandem with the accelerating forces of globalization connecting previously disparate and elusive indigenous cultures and their vast repertoire intellectual property, it seems likely that more evidence of variegated ‘magic mushroom’ knowledge will continue to emerge from the underbrush of antiquity.

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