![María Sabina and her daughter during a mushroom ritual ](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/2026-07/PsylocibeOsiris.Image3_.jpg?itok=5LIxcO0I) 

 



 

#   Psilocybe Mushroom Rituals 

 





July 09, 2026

 

 

 [ Osiris Sinuhé González Romero ](https://sites.exeter.ac.uk/psychedelics/osiris-sinuhe-gonzalez-romero/) 

Sacred mushrooms containing psilocybin and psilocin have been used for sacramental, therapeutic, divinatory, and artistic purposes by Indigenous peoples in Mesoamerica for centuries. *Psilocybe* is the genus name for those mushrooms containing psilocin and psilocybin.\[[1](#notes)\] The word “psychedelic” is a novel combination of Greek words meaning “mind-manifesting” or “mind-revealing”. These substances enhance human mental faculties such as visionary consciousness and imagination. Psychedelic substances—those substances which “manifest the mind/soul”—are classified as psychoactive, meaning that they alter or affect the mind/soul.\[[2](#notes)\] In academic research, the term entheogen, which literally means “substances that bring forth the divine within,” widely refers to sacred plants whose use has psychoactive aspects, especially *Psilocybe* mushrooms.\[[3](#notes)\] To better understand *Psilocybe* mushrooms’ therapeutic potential and these mushrooms as entheogens, including their cultural uses, psychological transformations associated with them, and their effects when ingested, it is essential to consider their different uses across history—sacramental, therapeutic, and divinatory—and to recognize the Indigenous knowledges about these mushrooms that have developed and been maintained since ancient times.

*Psilocybe* mushrooms cause transformations in users’ mood and behavior. These transformations push human thinking beyond individual and ordinary boundaries. In this way, they are transcendent because they facilitate communication with more-than-human beings, sometimes to learn the origin of a disease and also to make possible the power of “universal contemplation.” This entry highlights common cultural features shared by three Mesoamerican cultures under the umbrella of the “Healing of the Thunderbolt” symbolic complex. This symbolic complex runs through different cultures, but it also runs across different *Psilocybe* species: *Psilocybe aztecorum* for Nahuas,\[[4](#notes)\] *Psilocybe caerulescens* for Mazatecs,\[[5](#notes)\] and *Psilocybe zapotecorum* for Zapotecs.\[[6](#notes)\] There are more species used by these groups and by other Indigenous people in Mesoamerica, but I will focus only on these three mushrooms and these three cultures.

This study, by design, presents primary sources along with the research of Indigenous scholars, which is best practice for all topics concerning Indigenous peoples and cultures. The work of Western researchers on *Psilocybe* mushrooms, such as by Robert Gordon Wasson, is well known by general audiences, but Indigenous perspectives provide a broad yet nuanced overview regarding their worldview and ontology.\[[7](#notes)\] Wasson was particularly informed by María Sabina, a true expert in her own right.

Indigenous knowledge about *Psilocybe* and their uses challenges and reframes current hegemonic cultural paradigms. Acknowledging and drawing upon Indigenous perspectives, the 2023 United Nations World Drug Report now shapes international policies in exciting new directions.\[[8](#notes)\] It is only possible today for the celebrated and therapeutically promising psilocybin clinical trials to be undertaken because Indigenous peoples have for centuries and even millennia cultivated and maintained knowledge about the mushrooms and their uses. Studying psychedelic fungi requires accounting for cultural features related to the sacred landscape, for mushrooms are fundamentally considered sacred forces or ways to communicate with divine entities and to enter relationships with them. In particular, there is a personhood process that considers them more-than-human persons and agents, referring to them as “Little Men,” “Holy Children,” and “Dwarfs.”

Indigenous perspectives on *Psilocybe* have generally not been included in the works of Western researchers, and this, along with medical-industrial psychedelics research that ignores Indigenous knowledge, creates gaps in knowledge and reifies epistemic injustices. Ancestral wisdom must be acknowledged, and contemporary contributions by Indigenous researchers must be explicitly recognized. Indigenous perspectives remain hidden from mainstream and scientific narratives, but this need not continue. This essay is a model for research informed primarily by Indigenous knowledge, and it explicitly draws upon the research of Indigenous scholars like the works of Luis Reyes García, a Nahua historian;\[[9](#notes)\] Álvaro Estrada, a Mazatec journalist;\[[10](#notes)\] and several Zapotec scholars such as Minerva Méndoza Pérez,\[[11](#notes)\] Juan Carlos Sánchez-Antonio,\[[12](#notes)\] and Julieta Amaya Pérez.\[[13](#notes)\] In this entry, the titles for ritual specialist healers, *Psilocybe* mushrooms, and deities are presented in Indigenous languages.

Mesoamerican Indigenous cultures—including the Nahua, Mazatec, and Zapotec—deploy *Psilocybe* mushrooms in a range of sacred, therapeutic, and divinatory rituals.\[[14](#notes)\] A central feature of *Psilocybe* use is significant transformations in mood, sensations, behavior, and consciousness. These transformative experiences are part of the healing processes facilitated by the ritual use of *Psilocybe*, but these experiences are also a way to acquire wisdom about healing rituals, including diagnoses and treatments. These transformative experiences, however, are about more than healing, for they establish relationships with nonphysical, more-than-human sacred beings.

The relationship between humans and *Psilocybe* mushrooms has a long tradition among Indigenous peoples of Central America. Some *Psilocybe* mushroom rituals are initiations into the role of a healer that involve ongoing communication with more-than-human beings, which, in turn, leads to experiences of “universal contemplation.” In healing and other rituals, “wise doctors” transcend their ordinary states and transcend their relationships with human worlds; they enter new relationships and a new relational ontology with more-than-human sacred beings that they encounter during psychedelic rituals.

Indigenous traditions have different conceptions of transcendence than Western ones, including different beliefs about the afterlife and the sacred landscape. These frameworks extend the concept of the person in time and space to enable communication with more-than-human agents like ancestors. *Psilocybe* rituals and their participants engage modified or expanded states of consciousness, terms preferred to so-called altered states of consciousness. Cultural notions of universal contemplation are an example and pattern of transcendence, but universal contemplation experiences do not happen every day. These are moments transcending ordinary views through the power of sacred mushrooms, but they are also experiences that facilitate entering new relationships. Mountains, rivers, lagoons, fire, and the Earth are considered persons with which it is possible to establish communication through ritual and ceremonial language. In consequence, universal contemplation implies an interaction with these communal subjects. Focusing on *Psilocybe* initiation rituals reveals rich relational dynamics that transcend everyday relationships in the physical world.

 *Psilocybe* mushrooms present potential for four major transformations that expand possibilities for individuals and social groups: (1) individuals who are healed, (2) healers who are initiated, (3) community health services, and (4) mental health therapy, including therapy on a global scale. First, individuals are healed through rituals that feature experiences of transformation from illness to wellness via *Psilocybe* mushrooms. Second, “wise doctors” experience a process of transformation to become chosen by deities to receive the gift and duty of healing. The term wise doctors—*tlamatque*, in Nahuatl language; *chotaj-chinej*, in Mazatec language, *menjak*, in Zapotec language—are sometimes translated as “shamans” in English, though this term is not originally found in Mesoamerican Indigenous languages. Wise doctors are initiated into healing, transcending their profane condition in which they are helpless victims of illness. In the Nahua (Aztec) culture, healers are chosen by Tlaloc, the God of Rain and Thunderbolts. In the Mazatec worldview, they are chosen by other sacred forces, including elders and spirits of Nature (*chikones*). In Zapotec culture, they are chosen through dreams. Wise doctors in all three cultures are chosen during *Psilocybe* mushroom healing rituals. Third, Indigenous communities lack health services, and *Psilocybe* mushrooms address that lack by transforming members of the community into agents who can address and fulfill what communities need. Fourth, transformations occur at national and global levels because *Psilocybe* mushrooms have shown therapeutic properties to address mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) within industrialized societies. After the COVID-19 pandemic, in the face of economic uncertainty and due to the paradoxical lack of access to healthcare services in the industrialized West, especially in the United States, psilocybin therapy presents hope during fraught times of mental distress.

Initiated healers enter relationships with sacred fungi, with deities, and with more-than-human entities, especially creatures associated with lightning and rain. In the ceremonial language of Nahua and Zapotec cultures, these relationships are exemplified by the symbolic complex known as “Healing of the Thunderbolt” and by various expressions about “Rain Masters,” relationships with the mushrooms, initiation, and the interplay between the spiritual and natural worlds.\[[15](#notes)\] The sound of natural thunderbolts becomes a sort of “Thunderbolt Language” exchanged between atmospheric entities and those in the midst of *Psilocybe* ritual experiences. Lightning bolts themselves are related to the sacred mushrooms. It is said that some of the most powerful *Psilocybe* mushrooms grow in places struck by lightning.\[[16](#notes)\] Among Nahuas, people who survive a lightning strike often acquire the power to heal; that is, they become initiates, some even become wise doctors. Among Zapotecs, the expression “Rain Masters” refers to personifications of the sacred mushrooms who become masterful sources and agents of wisdom. They grant knowledge, whether that is knowledge to heal an illness, to get advice regarding a problem, or another potent teaching needed to address a situation. Their knowledge and wisdom are why they are called masters. The Healing of the Thunderbolt symbolic complex and the Rain Masters will be explored in greater detail below.

While this Nahua pattern is instructive, each culture has specific cultural traits worth explaining. We must strive to avoid essentialisms and hasty generalizations, such as asserting or assuming a pan-Indigenous perspective that hides differences in such patterns. Drawing on the work of Indigenous researchers who interviewed important practitioners associated with *Psilocybe* mushrooms, this comparative entry aims to reach a general and reliable overview across Nahua, Mazatec, and Zapotec cultures.\[[17](#notes)\] Writing in Nahuatl and Spanish, the Nahua historian Luis Reyes García records and presents interviews and writes about an anonymous, seventy-year-old, daughter of a midwife.\[[18](#notes)\] Writer and journalist Álvaro Estrada documents the wisdom and rituals of the famous sacred mushroom-figure María Sabina,\[[19](#notes)\] adding extensive nuance and correcting the limitations of Robert Gordon Wasson’s sensationalist study of her.\[[20](#notes)\] Healing *Psilocybe* rituals are still performed in Mesoamerica, although it is endangered knowledge. The focus on rituals recorded over the last fifty years is not due to these rituals being recent but because of the paucity of earlier documents.

 ![Map of Mexico showing Oaxaca and location of Foundation of the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc. (FAMSI).](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/2026-07/PsylocibeOsiris.Image1_.jpg)

 

Oaxaca is in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Map of Mesoamerica, undated, Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc. (FAMSI).It is important to study Mesoamerican Indigenous traditions when considering psychedelics because “Mexico represents without a doubt the world’s richest area in diversity and use of hallucinogens in aboriginal societies.”\[[21](#notes)\] The region represents ten percent of the world’s total biodiversity. México contains the most significant areas of psychoactive biodiversity worldwide, and Mexico is home to *Psilocybe* species in the highest geographic concentration. According to the *Index Fungorum*, fifty-five varieties of *Psilocybe* grow in Mexico. In the Oaxaca region alone, twenty-seven *Psilocybe* species grow. Indigenous knowledge and archeological evidence regarding *Psilocybe* mushrooms can be traced back three thousand years to the Mayan people in Kaminaljuyú, Guatemala, but these Mayans may not have been alone using *Psilocybe*. Historical and archaeological evidence demonstrates ritual and therapeutic uses of *Psilocybe* mushrooms and other sacred plants among several cultures whose roots stretch back to ancient Mesoamerican traditions. That said, diverse cultural uses of *Psilocybe* mushrooms are documented in at least eleven Indigenous Mesoamerican peoples.

Indigenous language terms for *Psilocybe* mushrooms demonstrate their significance as entheogens in these cultures, not just their taxonomy but their cultural features. As previously mentioned, the term entheogen means substances that bring forth the divine within. The class of entheogens among Indigenous cultures includes sacred plants and fungi, but this class also connects to symbolic or sacred forces from the Mesoamerican tradition and the Catholic worldview. Sixteenth-century written records depict Nahua ceremonial use of sacred mushrooms. *Psilocybe* are called *teonanacatl* in Nahua language, translated as the “Flesh of the Gods.” Luis Reyes García documents narratives, compiled within contemporary communities, that contain Indigenous terminology for the mushrooms and their uses in oral traditions. The Mazatec culture is widely known due to María Sabina, and Indigenous scholars like Álvaro Estrada nuance Wasson’s sensational accounts of her. *Psilocybe* mushrooms receive the Mazatec name *ndi-xijto*,meaning “Little Ones Who Sprout,” reflecting, as I will explain, their role in therapeutic rituals and rites of passage.\[[22](#notes)\] Finally, among the Zapotecs, the sacred mushroom is called *badao zoo*, meaning “Holy Mushroom.”\[[23](#notes)\] Despite being one of the most ancient Mesoamerican cultures and being of great vitality in the present, Zapotec cultural use of entheogens is much less known than entheogen use among the Nahua and Mazatec.



 

 

 

###  Nahuas, Healing Rituals, and the “Flesh of the Gods” 

Historically, Nahua people use *Psilocybe* mushrooms as entheogens during diagnostic processes to discern the origins or causes of disease, but there are other methods, like divination using corn kernels. Some divination processes are accompanied by entheogens, and some are not. Mexican historian Alfredo López-Austin explains: “The knowledge of the origin \[of disease\] was not always easy, and among the means recorded in the Nahua communities is the journey made by the healer, utilizing a drug, to celestial and subterranean regions, to indicate the precise cause of the ailment.”\[[24](#notes)\] Several diseases are thought to have a divine character and to be sent by or associated with sacred beings. Nahua *Psilocybe* mushroom ceremonies confer insights for practical purposes like alleviating an illness, but these insights also remove imbalances between human beings and Nature and restore balance between human beings and sacred beings.

 ![Illustration from a pre-Columbian Mesoamerican codex depicting several elaborately dressed deities in ceremonial scenes, arranged in five panels with colorful red, gold, black, and blue figures.](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/2026-07/PsylocibeOsiris.Image2_.jpg)

 

The Little Men. “Tlaloques, Inhabitants of Tlalocan.” *Codex Borgia*, Plate 27, pre-Hispanic (before 1521), Vatican Library, Rome.These entheogens establish communication between the *ticitl* (physician) and sacred entities. In contemporary Nahua communities, the name *tlakatsin*, meaning “Honorable Little Men,” is given to *Psilocybe* mushrooms, demonstrating that these mushrooms are sacred beings.\[[25](#notes)\] When encountered, the Honorable Little Men are like children, and communication with them is possible. The means and scope of the word entheogen are fully appreciated here, for the mushrooms are a vehicle establishing communication with sacred beings who “manifest within” those people who consume the *Psilocybe*.

A rich mythology and relational system is found in what I am calling the Healing of the Thunderbolt symbolic complex, a hard-kernel across the cultures in this entry: *Psilocybe* mushrooms—specifically, *Psilocybe aztecorum*—allow communication with sacred entities, especially the *tlaloques*, servants of the deity Tlaloc, God of Rain, whose name’s etymology is “the one who is made of earth.”\[[26](#notes)\] *Tlaloques* are depicted in codices (pictorial manuscripts) and mentioned in oral histories by terms like “Honorable Little Men,” “Children,” or “Dwarfs,” which are general descriptions of these entities that overlap, indeed, with the names of *Psilocybe*. These entities oversee the rains, the rains that are beneficial for crops and the storms that flood and destroy crops.

*Tlaloques* are held in great respect in sources like *The Codex Borgia*, a divinatory pre-Colonial manuscript from the Mixteca-Puebla region that is used to forecast the destiny of a newborn child, among other mantic practices.\[[27](#notes)\] The top parts of the codex’s plates 27 and 28 in Image 2 depict cloudy or sunny skies. At the center of these plates, see, for example, plate 27 below, is a depiction of five *tlaloques*, each one with the Tlaloc mask bearing serpent fangs, each wears the costume of a different Nahua deity. Each *tlaloque* is depicted on a *milpa*, a maize crop. In their one hand, each one holds a vessel that contains and causes rain. In their other hand, each one holds a snake, resembling lightning or *xiuhcoatl*, which means a turquoise serpent or a fire serpent. At the bottom of the plates, crops and dates corresponding to the divinatory calendar are depicted.\[[28](#notes)\]

Mesoamerican studies scholars argue that the *Codex Borgia* contains a clear depiction of the *tlaloques* who are encountered through psilocybin mushrooms and healing rituals. Ethnography and oral history presented originally in Nahuatl and Spanish languages in 1970, translated into English in 2007 by the historian Luis Reyes García, who is Nahua himself, demonstrate that cultural features of *Psilocybe* use in contemporary Nahua communities are contiguous with historical sources like the *Codex Borgia*. Within the Nahua worldview, Tlalocan is an afterlife residence for those who died as a consequence of diseases related with the rain deity: gout, hydropsy, boils, sores, or death by drowning or lightning strikes. Tlalocan is a subterranean afterlife place with an abundance of water and plants, a place of joy, abundance and singing; the *Florentine Codex* contains a description of this place.\[[29](#notes)\]

Modified states of consciousness are a mode of communication facilitated through *Psilocybe* mushrooms. These states are not mere hallucinations. They confer mundane knowledge and healing knowledge that are revealed and developed through communication. Developing this communication requires not just consuming the fungi but extensive preparation and cultivating capacities for ritual communication. This communication requires silence. *Tlamatque* healers and patients consult the *Psilocybe* mushrooms to determine the cause of illnesses, making mushrooms a crucial component in the healing ritual. A seventy-year-old woman, unnamed by Reyes Garcia, the daughter of an empirical midwife, meaning that she did not have an institutional acknowledgement in midwifery, describes the *tlakatsitsin* Little Men, their connection to *Psilocybe* mushrooms, and what can be learned from communicating with them.

> 1\. The ancient fathers and mothers had a custom whenever they would lose something, or even if they just wanted to know something whether it be where their spouses are, or to know who has bewitched them, or whether they would heal or if their sickness would last long. They would take mushrooms that they called *tlakatsitsin* (*hombrecitos*, little men), and these would answer, and tell them whatever they wanted to know.\[[30](#notes)\]

Mushrooms have cultural significance beyond illnesses and their treatment, including divination to secure advice regarding ordinary troubles and difficulties. The mushrooms solve problems.

In these rituals, prayers aim to acquire answers from the mushrooms but those answers may not be easily given. The healing ritual may be a dialogue, but it is also a struggle between the healer and sometimes ambivalent sacred entities. The sacred entities of the underworld, or guardians of Nature, are not always willing to return the “soul-shadow or spirit,” whose loss is the cause of illness.\[[31](#notes)\] Sacred entities may request offerings from the patient, healer, or relatives, who would all make offerings in different ways, but successful return of the spirit is not guaranteed. It is a struggle, and it is a negotiation, and it requires preparation and appropriate ritual protocols. Patients’ relatives sometimes participate in this preparatory process to support the sick person. But silence is important, as Reyes Garcia explains:

> 5\. And when they are going to be taken it is (or may be) necessary that nobody makes any noise; the dogs are going to be tied up faraway. And the cock that they know is going to crow will be put somewhere else faraway; nobody will make noise, nobody will shout.
> 
> 6\. Whoever takes them first says a prayer, requesting that “the medicine” (i.e., the mushrooms) may answer, holding the mushrooms in the smoke of incense (*sahumo a los hongos*). Then he lies down and proceeds to eat them one by one. It is said they would eat twenty, and those with a high tolerance would eat thirty.
> 
> 7\. And a woman will care for whoever is taking them, no one else will be there. It is said that if someone makes a noise or shouts, then he who ate the mushrooms goes crazy. Therefore, if he who ate them is brought to his feet, then he grabs whoever is tending him, he again lies down but doesn’t make a sound, he only grabs her.\[[32](#notes)\]

The patient prays in request for an answer before ingesting mushrooms and then increases the *Psilocybe* dose before lying down. This is a solitary ritual, only the patient and the *tlamatque* healer participate, both ingesting *Psilocybe*; the healer does not talk or make any noise. Silence is essential to avoid damage to the patient, for noise could anger the mushrooms and associated spirits, causing them to worsen the illness and the patient’s suffering. *Psilocybe* mushrooms, in fact, have psychodysleptic properties, meaning that they cause sound synesthesia or “sonorous hallucinations.”\[[33](#notes)\] Hearing the language of mushrooms could be a powerful experience that in fact requires complete focus in silence.\[[34](#notes)\]

The silence in these rituals and around these rituals could be considered the result of colonial legacies. These rituals were indeed carried out clandestinely for centuries to avoid oppression by Inquisitional authorities. Until the beginning of twentieth century, scholars like W. E. Safford believed that *Psilocybe* mushroom rituals were a fiction due to the lack of inquisitorial trial records about such rites and practices.\[[35](#notes)\] But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Participants’ silence, the remote rural locations for these practices, and the small number of participants all led to effectively avoiding the gaze of strangers, including representatives of the Holy Inquisition. Perhaps the silence was instituted to avoid notice by authorities. More likely, though, the importance of silence indicates the importance of the inner focus for the *tlamatque* healer and the patient, and the silence is not a mere reaction to the influences of outside authorities. Emphasizing silence is a cultural feature that contrasts with other Mesoamerican healing traditions. In Nahua communities, music and songs are essential during rituals, but there it is in silence that the Little Men speak.

> 9\. And the person who takes them well and sincerely begins to see many little men like children. He begins to talk with them, and these little men tell him everything because Tlalocan is where they are from; so it is the earth that answers because we are standing on it, hence it knows everything. The earth is watching us and it answers.
> 
> 11\. These little men tell him everything he wants to know, if something is lost they will tell who took it, if your spouse goes somewhere, they will tell you where, if someone is annoyed with you, if they talk behind your back, if they dishonor you, you will know everything about it.\[[36](#notes)\]

Reyes Garcia’s description is consistent with historical sources, like Book IX of the *Florentine Codex*, that depict *Psilocybe* mushrooms as sources of knowledge, i.e., mushrooms and beings are consulted to find things out. The mushrooms come from Tlalocan, a well-known and documented place in historical sources, iconography, and mythology.\[[37](#notes)\] Experiences with mushrooms are related to wisdom; they are sources of knowledge not a series of hallucinations. The ritual use of mushrooms, furthermore, facilitates communication with ancestors and sacred entities.

Reyes García highlights the Nahua cultural feature that the Earth is a living being “that is seeing us” and “that is hearing us.”\[[38](#notes)\] Foundational to Indigenous worldviews, the Earth provides abundant hunting and harvest, and it is therefore worshipped. The Earth is the Mother of all living beings, and the Earth gives humans the knowledge of medicines, revealed in dreams. While the Earth may only give medicines to certain individuals, any person can bring on a state of ecstasy by ingesting, in the academic jargon of Reyes Garcia’s time, “narcotic mushrooms” that are used to consult the subterranean inhabitants of Tlalocan. This includes what could be called medical consultation about specific illnesses. These inhabitants of Tlalocan who come to aid the “narcotized”—those under the influence of *Psilocybe* mushrooms—are children who died without baptism and who become *xocoyomeh*, meaning “beams of light” or “rays.”

The children transformed into rays are blue in color, and they live with the Father and Mother in the mythical Tlalocan whose entrances are natural caves; Father and Mother, here, refer to the Mesoamerican archetype of sacred duality.\[[39](#notes)\] Beings who are rays are present in the other Mesoamerican traditions addressed below. These *xocoyomeh*, the transformed deceased children as rays, come to the “narcotized” to support the healing of illnesses associated with them, including illnesses related to the rains such as gout and the consequences of being struck by lightning. The lightning strike itself can be an initiation because only the so-called “chosen ones” who survive the stroke of lightning are called to become healers. The mushrooms have the following characteristics and activities in relation to illnesses and treatments:

> 13\. If you are sick, they will tell you how to get better and who will cure you. Along with curing they will also give you a massage.
> 
> 14\. If something inside of you hurts, then with their little hands they will massage you. You feel as though “they settled your stomach.” Your stomach and innards will make noise while they are extracting the sickness from you.
> 
> 15\. And if not, you will see that they will open up your stomach. They will pass over you repeatedly, extracting the sickness from you.
> 
> 16\. Women used to take them very often, but not anymore, now they are afraid to.\[[40](#notes)\]

*Psilocybe* mushrooms are active in the healing process; they are agents. Mushrooms diagnose and tell patients how to get relief, but they also participate through massage and extraction of the illness, following healing modalities practiced throughout Mesoamerica, the Caribbean, and the Andes. As seen in the passage above, the extraction of sickness focuses on the stomach and guts. This healing process occurs with the support of the *tlamatque* wise doctor. Due to clairvoyance developed during the entheogenic experience, it is possible for the *tlamatque* to foresee some causes and facts of a patient’s illness.

The work of the ritual is not limited to the patient and healer. Usually, the patient and the *tlamatque* eat the mushrooms together. The common practice is that the ritual specialist—*paini*, *ticitl,* *tepahtiani, tlamatque, teciuhtlazque* are Nahuatl names for the “shamans”—leads the healing ceremony, but the support of the relatives is very important within the healing ritual.\[[41](#notes)\] In some Nahua communities near the Popocatepetl volcano, the *tlamatque* notify patients’ relatives when the mushrooms have been taken. In this way, there are relationships between not just the healer and the patient and the mushrooms but of a wider community.



 

###  Mazatecs, Universal Contemplation, and “The little ones who sprout” 

Shifting from the Nahua (Aztecs) to the Mazatecs, experiences derived from *Psilocybe* healing rituals called *veladas* or vigils are a source of knowledge and are linked to transformations in sensory perception, modification of consciousness, and changes in ways of perceiving, understanding, interpreting, and reinterpreting the world. *Psilocybe* mushrooms are known as the “Holy Children” or the “Little Ones who Sprout.” I will present a range of Mazatec sources, but the main focus in this selection is the famous twentieth-century Mazatec healer María Sabina and her focus on “universal contemplation.” For those Mazatec healers known as *chotaj-chinej,* meaning wise doctors or wise ones, these sensory transformations, which are modified states of consciousness, are evident when an individual receives the “gift of healing” from deities, and these transformations are initiations. This transformative call to be a wise doctor is manifested through dreams, omens, and experiences ingesting *Psilocybe caerulescens*. *Chotaj-chinej*s draw upon knowledge and language attained through mushroom rituals.

Ancient Mesoamerican traditions revered the reading of powerful sacred books to gain special knowledge; accessing the capacity to gain wisdom in Mazatec language is referred to by the phrase “being granted the Book.” According to María Sabina, the Book is not the Bible, it is the Book of Wisdom, or the Book of Language that is gifted by the powerful non-humans called Principal Ones. Interacting with these sacred beings is mediated by *Psilocybe*. The mushrooms are called “Saint Children,” condensing Indigenous and Catholic concepts. María Sabina describes gaining wisdom through *Psilocybe* mushrooms in the following manner:

> I had attained perfection. I was no longer a simple apprentice. For that, as a prize, as a nomination, the Book had been granted me. When one takes the *saint children,* one can see the Principal Ones. Otherwise not. And it’s because the mushrooms are saints; they give wisdom. Wisdom is Language. Language is in the Book. The Book is granted by the Principal Ones. The Principal Ones appear through the great power of the *children.* I learned the wisdom of the Book. Afterward, in my later visions, the Book no longer appeared because I already had its contents in my memory.\[[42](#notes)\]

Attaining wisdom is a process in Mazatec culture. The prospective healer must be an apprentice to another healer and, then, must advance to become a wise one with the help of the Principal Ones. These more-than-human beings who facilitate that gaining of wisdom are ancestors and the guardians of sacred places.\[[43](#notes)\] The *chotaj-chinej* wise doctor, may receive the healing gift in dreams, through illness, or by a mushroom ceremony, but all these entail a process guided by the Principal Ones. *Psilocybe* mushrooms allow a person to see and interact with the Principal Ones. Otherwise, it is not possible to communicate with them. Sacred mushrooms are the key to accessing these important entities.

Mushrooms are sacred because they bestow wisdom, not just because they are linked to a deity or sacred entity. Wisdom is expressed through Language, not just any language but the Language of the Book.\[[44](#notes)\] The Book and its Language are granted by the Principal Ones, who only appear by the power of the Children who are the *Psilocybe* mushrooms. The wisdom attained is not ephemeral. Due to the intensity of the experience, that wisdom is engraved in memory and consciousness. Through dreams or through entheogenic experiences, the *chotaj-chinej* penetrates the most profound realm of knowledge and can see the world from within.\[[45](#notes)\]

*Psilocybe* mushrooms, and psychedelics generally, are known to cause profound transformations in mood and behavior. These transformations can alter worldviews or push thinking beyond individual boundaries and biases. Communicating with more-than-human beings and understanding these experiences to be a source of knowledge—for example, to know the origin of a disease or other divination questions—suggests a truly transcendental consciousness and transcendental experiences beyond mundane limitations. Such transcendence is not completely otherworldly, however, and should not be considered so, because it arises in the physical world.

*Psilocybe* mushrooms generate experiences that transcend individual limits and have transpersonal or even universal scope: a “cultural trait” known in other religious, spiritual, and intellectual traditions as a “vision of universal correspondence” or a “cosmic consciousness.” María Sabina enunciates such transcendent experiences under the name of “power of universal contemplation”:

> The Curers (healers) don’t know that the visions the *children* show reveal the origin of the malady. The Curers don’t know how to use them. The Sorcerers don’t either. The Sorcerers are afraid of Wise Ones like me because they know that I can discover if they have caused an enchantment, if they have surreptitiously robbed the spirit of a child, of a man, or of a woman. The mushrooms give me the power of **universal contemplation**. I can see from the origin. I can arrive where the world is born. \[[46](#notes)\]

Accessing this vision of universal contemplation distinguishes the sage from the sorcerer or witch, for universal contemplation has a moral and positive relational capacity, whereas sorcerers and witches are trained to cause harm and illness. The *chotaj-chinej* is a sage who only works toward positive results. This vision and power of universal contemplation is an experience of unity between human beings and the world; the physical and the spiritual world are not separate in Indigenous worldviews. That experience enables the *chotaj-chinej* to approach the origin and birth of the world. Universal contemplation is a way to transcendence, a way to overcome particular and ordinary visions within a broader scope to achieve an understanding of the origin of the world.

Cosmogony is palpable and linked to Mesoamerican sacred narratives about the world’s origin, like the Legend of the Suns.\[[47](#notes)\] Each Mesoamerican culture has its own cosmogony and sacred narratives that highlight some overlaps but important differences among Indigenous traditions when they are compared.\[[48](#notes)\] The origin of the world is one of the core philosophical concerns for Indigenous worldviews, but origins are also a concern for Western science and religion; inquiry into cosmogony should not be considered a special concern limited to Indigenous thinking. The distinction between sorcerers, curers/healers, and wise ones reveals the moral components of psychedelic experiences and sacred wisdom. A *chotaj-chinej* does not use the power of universal contemplation to cause harm or evil in the way that a sorcerer deploys knowledge gained through *Psilocybe* rituals.\[[49](#notes)\] The commitment to universal contemplation is an ethical principle and an ethical commitment.

Knowledge is relational for the Mazatecs. When a person suffers due to an illness or has a concern, problem, unique question, or the person endures any situation that generates discomfort, then that person can consume sacred mushrooms—known as *ndi xijto*, meaning “little ones that sprout”—to find knowledge that will provide relief.\[[50](#notes)\] But the insights gained from the mushrooms are not considered the result of an entheogenic experience or thought to be from the psychedelic mushrooms themselves. Knowledge arises from interactions with beings, namely from interacting with those *ndi xijto*. These interactions require relationships, and relationships require those in relation to be persons; they must be entities and agents to enter relationships. The personhood of invisible beings associated with mushrooms is a shared cultural feature in Mesoamerican traditions, recall the Nahua “little men” (*tlakatsin*) similar to the Mayan “dwarfs” (*chaneques*). Scholars and psychedelic enthusiasts must recognize that these cultures are linked by their common Mesoamerican context. Recognizing these connections does not entail hasty generalizations or essentialist claims.

   ![María Sabina and her daughter during a mushroom ritual ](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/2026-07/PsylocibeOsiris.Image3_.jpg?itok=XuHircDN) 

 

María Sabina and her daughter during a mushroom ritual or *velada*. Image by Allan Richardson, 1957, Tina and Robert Gordon Wasson Collection, Harvard University.In several testimonies, María Sabina considers wisdom (*chjine*) in remarkable ways. *Chjine* is the word for wisdom in Mazatec, and a wise one is *chotaj chjine*; adding further nuance, *chotaj* could be translated as person; all of this nuances regarding the term *chotaj-chinej*, and the details of Indigenous language are essential for understanding Indigenous cultures and epistemologies. Wisdom, Sabina notes, arises from consuming *Psilocybe* and from relationships emerging through *Psilocybe* rituals called *veladas* that are sacred healing rituals performed by *chotaj-chinej* for specific purposes. She explains that “Wisdom is Language. Language is in the Book. The Book of Wisdom is granted by the Principal Ones.”\[[51](#notes)\] This figure of the Book acquires importance that may at first seem unexpected because María Sabina was illiterate in Spanish, or it may initially appear to be influenced by Catholicism. Mazatec culture has an ancient conception of powerful books containing wisdom, so the notion of a sacred book or a book of wisdom is not a result of syncretism or a borrowing from the colonial encounter. Sabina sets out analogies between God and the natural world and asserts that God is like a book, but the Book, here, is not the Bible. In spite of the fact that María Sabina chooses Jesus Christ during her initiatory process, she does not assert that the Book, which contains Language and that is Wisdom, is the Christian Bible.

Estrada records Sabina’s visionary encounters with God as an entity who resembles a human form but is not limited to having a human form, and he records her encounters with God as the Book. The following passage reveals the ways that Sabina and the Mazatecs considered God to be embedded in Nature, but God is also wisdom and the Book, and these are also embedded in Nature:

> I take *Little One Who Springs Forth* and I see God. I see him sprout from the earth. He grows and grows, big as a tree, as a mountain. His face is placid, beautiful, and serene as in the temples. At other times, God is not like a man: he is the Book. A Book that is born from the earth, a sacred Book whose birth makes the world shake. It is the Book of God that speaks to me in order for me to speak. It counsels me, it teaches me, it tells me what I have to say to men, to the sick, to life. The Book appears and I learn new words.\[[52](#notes)\]

It is possible to recognize connections to the Catholic tradition’s idea of God, but for Sabina, God is closely linked to Nature, and this differs from Christian dogma. She affirms that God grows like a tree. He grows like a mountain. Nature is sacred—this is especially true for the cult to the sacred mountains. Indeed, mountains are closely related to rain, water, and mushrooms, and this constellation is instructive for interpreting dynamics found about *Psilocybe* throughout and across Mesoamerican cultures.

The location of Huautla de Jiménez, where Maria Sabina lived, is situated in the highlands of Oaxaca; the mountains are a significant feature of the physical and spiritual landscape. The mountains are the source of healing wisdom. The Book is born from the Earth, and it makes the world tremble. The Book teaches new words and teaches what the wise doctor should say to the sick and say to people for whom they consult, but all of that emerges from the sacred landscape. There is a process to gaining and making use of knowledge for healing rituals, and this process of knowledge is an inherent part of Sabina’s explanations of psychedelic experience. Sabina states, “It tells me what I have to say to men.” The experience with psychedelic mushrooms is a search for knowledge.

The *chotaj-chinej* is an intermediary medium in *Psilocybe* rituals, transmitting the messages of the Book, which are accessed through psychedelic visions, to the patients or the people accompanying patients. The Book sets out the ritual language and procedures for healing:

> On the Principal Ones’ table a book appeared. An open book that went on growing until it was the size of a person. In its pages there were letters. It was a white book, so white it was resplendent.
> 
> One of the Principal Ones spoke to me and said: “María Sabina, this is the Book of Wisdom. It is the Book of Language. Everything that is written in it is for you. The Book is yours, take it so that you can work.” I exclaimed with emotion: “That is for me. I receive it.” The Principal Ones disappeared and left me alone in front of the immense Book. I knew that it was the Book of Wisdom.” \[[53](#notes)\]

Sabina explains that “The Book is granted by the Principal Ones,” her auxiliary spirits. In ancient Mesoamerican traditions, these auxiliary spirits—guardians of mountains, springs, and caves—are referred to as persons. The Principal Ones are also the elders of the community and the spirits of deceased *chotaj-chinej* who make up a lineage of ancestors.

Maria Sabina describes a dynamic image in which the Book grows into a person. “An open book that went on growing until it was the size of a person,” and this image shows the Book has personhood. It is a resplendent book. It is not just any book but the Book of Wisdom—it is the face of God. It is a gift bestowed upon ritual specialists by the ancient Principal Ones so that healers can work to heal people. The Book is the Book of Language and not a physical printed book from the library, not like some schoolbook.

The Book and the Language only appear during the entheogenic experience. The Language is linked to Wisdom. It is not ordinary language but a sacred and ceremonial language that comes during the mushroom rituals. Every ceremony and every patient are different; therefore, the prayers and ritual language are not always the same and must align with each context. Ritual struggles and negotiations occur in the Language realm, the space or dimension that allows interactions between humans and more-than-humans. The personhood of the Book can be understood as an instrument for the *chotaj-chinej*’s work. Wise doctors interpret and act as mediums for the Language, but it is the language of the mushrooms, and it does not belong to the *chotaj-chinej*. The Book contains wisdom, but it is also a powerful implement for healing.

The most transformative process in *Psilocybe* mushroom ceremonies is when the ritual specialist is initiated as a *chotaj-chinej* and receives the faculty or “the gift” of healing. Receiving the gift of healing can be signified in dreams or can be experienced in *Psilocybe* visions. It can also be indicated when a lightning bolt strikes a person and the person survives: a sign that this person is chosen by sacred powers to be a wise doctor. Ritual specialists who gain the gift of healing transcend their profane condition. They become sacred persons with different duties in relation to different deities who are related to different illnesses. The deities are part of the sacred landscape, and they are the agents who allow wise doctors to interpret the mushroom ceremonies.

In this process of transformation, healers, according to Maria Sabina, may choose what kind of *chotaj-chinej* they will become, which includes choosing the main deities with whom they enter relationships. For instance, a wise doctor will choose if he or she will be guided by the Lords of the Mountains or by Jesus Christ, and this is a free choice made by the prospective healer. The *chotaj-chinej*, the Holy Children mushrooms, and the Principal Ones who appear in the visions of the initiates are dynamically related.

> The *children* turn into the Principal Ones. The Principal Ones appear as well in the visions of the initiates. On their sacred table, they put clocks, papers, books, communion wafers, stars, dew, or eagles . . . .
> 
> The Principal Ones ask the initiates: “What type of Wise One do you want to be? Do you want the Lords of the Mountains, the masters of the places, to guide you, or do you want God the Christ to guide you?” Then the initiate chooses and tells the Principal Ones what he prefers. \[[54](#notes)\]

Sabina’s testimony explicitly mentions the prospective *chotaj-chinej*’s freedom of choice when deciding which deity and force will guide his or her practice. This choice accounts for what could be seen as religious or spiritual syncretism, but it is, in fact, a personal choice; the choice does not imply that religious traditions have been collapsed into one another, or any aspect has been replaced. Lords of the Mountains and Masters of Places (*chikones*) are parts of the ancient Mesoamerican tradition, and Christ comes from the Western tradition. Once the choice has been made, the wise doctor receives the Language appropriate for the force that guides his or her future practices. According to the wise doctor’s choice, the spiritual allies, whether they be the Lords of the Mountains or Jesus Christ, then guide and teach the Language through the mushroom healing rituals. This choice between Lords of Mountains and Jesus Christ could be atypical, and it is not common to find initiands making the stark choices described by Sabina.



 

###  Zapotecs and the Hard-Nucleus of the Healing of the Thunderbolt Complex 

Zapotec religion has ancient roots. Archeological data provide evidence of early settlements at least since 300–500 BCE in Monte Albán, Southern Oaxaca. The main deities for the Zapotec are Corn (*Pitao Cozabi*) and Rain (*Pitao Cocijo*). The Zapotec developed a pictographic writing system and a calendar related to the agricultural cycle, following a hard-nucleus Mesoamerican pattern that exhibits an ordered cluster of traits common to Mesoamerican cultures, especially around deities and the natural world. Despite these significant features, Zapotecs are less well known than the Nahuas and Mazatecs. There are sixty-five variants of the Zapotec language, making it important to avoid generalizations for such diverse peoples.\[[55](#notes)\]

   ![Stone statue of Urn of Rain God Cocijo](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/2026-07/PsylocibeOsiris.Image4_.png?itok=r7YHulTH) 

 

Pitao Cocijo, Zapotec god of Rain and Thunderbolt. “Urn of Rain God Cocijo,” 500-700 CE, Denver Art Museum Collection Arts of the Ancient Americas.  Like the Nahua and Mazatecs, Zapotecs used *Psilocybe* mushrooms—such as the *Psilocybe zapotecorum*, whose species name draws upon an etic name for their culture—in healing rituals to engage modified states of consciousness that grant access to “other worlds” where information about causes and remedies for illnesses can be obtained. Regarding the Healing of the Thunderbolt symbolic complex, wise doctors (*menjak*) work with forces like water or the power of lightning (*Pitao Cocijo*), especially when they deploy the powers of primordial waters. *Menjak*s specialize in knowing and interpreting dreams and patients’ destinies.\[[56](#notes)\]

In Zapotec medicine, as in other therapeutic systems, the vernacular language is a container of social symbols; each of the three traditions in this entry deploy skillful uses of language around natural symbols. Scholars and psychedelic enthusiasts cannot accurately understand Zapotec ritual systems that make use of *Psilocybe* mushrooms without attending to the nuance of language and Indigenous vocabulary. The Zapotec language and the symbols encoded in the language reveal nuances about healing ritual practices. In their rituals, Zapotec healers focus on the language of patients to understand their patients’ situations and painful symptoms, thereby establishing a diagnosis and treatment. This emphasis on dialogue is a hallmark of Zapotec healing rites.

For Zapotecs, there is a cultural context—or a “set and setting” in psychedelic parlance—that makes possible the construction of meaning around illness and healing. A Zapotec patient gives oral form to his experiences, verbalizing his illness to the healer. Patients’ narratives are guiding threads for the healer to detect the functioning or malfunctioning of the body and to diagnose “diseases of the spirit,” which might not present to the healer as physical symptoms.\[[57](#notes)\] Usually diseases of the body are treated with herbs and remedies, and the diseases of the spirit are treated with rituals, ceremonial language, and special considerations. “Causes and remedies” of diseases are sought through the intervention of the spiritual world, but that intervention can only occur through the mediation of language expressed between the wise doctor (*menjak*) and patient. *Menjak*s can only do their work through interacting with and being in relationships with sacred forces including rain, lightning, and thunderbolts. Wise doctors interact with these forces through interactions with deities presiding over them.

The symbolic complex between rain, lightning, and mushrooms—what I am calling the Healing of the Thunderbolt complex—is associated with fertility deities, especially associated with ancient Mesoamerican god Pitao Cocijo, the god who owns the lightning. This complex is also associated with El Rayo, whose name means “Thunderbolt.” Pitao Cocijo is the God of Rain and Thunderbolts. Pitao Cocijo is a deity associated with the rain and thunderbolts and also connected to *Psilocybe* mushrooms that are, once again, associated with natural occurrences of rain, lightning, and lightning strikes. In the sculpture featured in Image 4, he is depicted as a seated male figure. Pitao Cocijo’s mask is the feature that identifies him. His headdress displays a glyph with an S-shape, which refers to water, and at the top of his headdress is found the feathers of a precious bird. He wears a necklace and earmuffs and a snake-shaped nose ring.

Aristeo Macías, a Zapotec “wise doctor” (*menjak*), explained the offerings to the ray or lightning deity to anthropologists Robert J. Weitlaner and Robert Gordon Wasson, who are deemed Western pioneers regarding psychedelic mushrooms. Offerings to El Rayo are a thanksgiving given to three beings or entities: (1) the Earth, interpreted after the Spanish Conquest as God the Father; (2) *Mdi'ndo' pse biul* or the Great Ray in Charge of Taking Care of the Mushroom; and (3) *Mdi'ndo'blo ren biul* or Great Ray Who Gave Blood to the Mushroom.\[[58](#notes)\]

Aristeo Macías was originally from the community of Chilapa, Loxicha, and he was very knowledgeable about the ritual use of *Psilocybe* mushrooms and *piule*, the psychoactive seed of the vine known as *quiebra plato*. Macías and other *menjak*s inherit from their ancestors the belief that it is possible to communicate with gods and sacred entities through sacred mushrooms.\[[59](#notes)\] According to Macías, the mushroom is born where lightning has struck, and, in another element of cultural accretion, the blood of Christ is thought to be deposited at that same spot. Cultural dynamics around *Psilocybe* mushrooms demonstrate spiritual synergy between Catholic and Zapotec paradigms. One name for the mushrooms is “Corona Cristo,” meaning “Crown of Christ,” and this term connects the blood of Christ, shed by the thorns of his crown during crucifixion to lightning and to the mushrooms. When the preeminent *Psilocybe* mycologist Gastón Guzmán met Macías, he showed Guzmán a place where lightning struck and how the sacred mushrooms grew there, especially those called “Crown of Thorns”—these were *Psilocybe zapotecorum*.

Likely perpetuating undocumented ancient lore, Mesoamerican associations between mushrooms, rain, and thunderbolt are exemplified by Zapotec lore about what they call “lightning houses” and rain deities. The testimony of Zapotec ritual specialist Francisco Sánchez was recorded in San Miguel Suchixtepec, Oaxaca, during April 2012. Sanchez’s testimony documents that *Psilocybe* mushrooms are called “Rain Masters,” demonstrating the mushrooms’ association with natural lightning and the deity who is lightning, reckoning the mushrooms among the many natural phenomena that Zapotecs consider to be alive.\[[60](#notes)\] The mushrooms are considered “masters” due to their power to provide insights to humans about medical, spiritual, divinatory needs. Their master status is also due to their moral and teaching qualities and their consultation to solve problems.

   ![Photo of Macias, seated with blanket over knees with bowl of mushrooms](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/2026-07/Psylocibe.OsirisPicture5.png?itok=4l7wvPa1) 

 

Macías with a bowl of mushrooms, San Agustin Loxicha, July 22, 1955, Tina and Robert Gordon Wasson Archive, Harvard University.*Menjak*s are wise doctors, and their Indigenous language name according to Wasson means “the ones who know.” *Menjak*s often begin their learning path through requests for rain and harvest made by ingesting *Psilocybe* mushrooms, and they learn through experiences commonly called the “drunkenness of the mushrooms.” A main cultural feature here is elaborate symbolism concerning the phenomenon of lightning that is considered a sacred entity linked to water, both rain and sea, and to the animals living in rivers. Francisco Sánchez explains,

> When I was on the teachers’ binge, they took me in their little house. They took me far away. I went to visit the most integral, the best, the most studious, the chief teachers. But just as they took me, they came to leave me. That place was beautiful; it was a nice place. They took me above the cloud. So that's how he rebelled, that's how it was.\[[61](#notes)\]

This testimony highlights the knowledge attached to sacred mushrooms. They are conceived as teachers but also as moral beings through their personhood. The house of the masters is above the clouds, linking them to the rain and lighting, and this “place was beautiful, it was a nice place.” Alongside lightning, Zapotecs consider many natural features and bodies to be alive: earthquakes, fire, wind, clouds, hail, hills, mountains, caves, flowing blood, flowing rivers, the Sun, the Moon, and light.

Zapotecs petition the lightning deity at sacred sites called lightning houses found in sacred mountains, and the lightning houses represent access to those mountains. The lightning houses are usually caves, thresholds between sacred and profane worlds. Zapotecs petition the lightning houses for rain, for a good harvest, and to avert storms and hail that can damage the crops. In towns such as San Marcial Ozolotepec, San Miguel Suchixtepec, and Buenavista Loxicha, residents continue to preserve invocation rituals to Thunderbolt (El Rayo), and they visit lightning houses to make petitions.\[[62](#notes)\] In the Southern Zapotec worldview, different entities, such as the Children of the Ray/Lightning, are propitiated and associated with Lightning. All these entities act as Lightning’s helpers in rain and agriculture. Sacred narratives shared by Indigenous peoples in Mexico refer to the Sons of the Lightning as those responsible for “watering the rain” on Earth, similar to Nahua reference to the *tlaloques*. On most occasions, Zapotecs speak of three minor rays. The lighting houses are considered full of vegetation like *milpa*, beans, pumpkins, and chili. In the lightning houses also found are deer and large clay pots. The Children who live in the lightning houses keep wand implements that they use to cause rain. These wands are kept in wooden trunks or in large clay pots containing different types of rain. When some Children of the Lighting break a clay pot, a thunderbolt sounds in the world. Zapotec lightning houses may resemble the Tlalocan of the Nahua people, but the Zapotecs’ tradition is ancient and is not derived from the Nahua.

 Zapotec ritual specialists like *menjak*s are guides and counselors who work in tandem with the *Psilocybe* mushrooms in healing rituals. They listen to patients in order to make a diagnosis based on the patient’s ailments, like an allopathic doctor would do, and they also listen to know how to guide or to advise the patient in the face of family problems, work problems, or whatever other difficulties arise. Most of the time the *menjak* and patient take the mushrooms together—unless, for instance, the wise doctor is very old. The *Psilocybe* mushrooms help the person who consumes them to understand how to behave.\[[63](#notes)\] The mushrooms’ role is to “make people reason” (*hacer razonar a las personas*), but reason is not an absolute truth; it is not always right. Instead, the mushrooms work to convince people they can “live well” with their fellow humans, with animals, and with supernatural entities. They will live well through their good thinking, their good speech, their good acting, and even their good walking. Good walking functions as a metaphor for ethical living.



 

###  Patterns of Similarities and Differences 

The Healing of the Thunderbolt symbolic complex highlights the importance of rain and water deities associated with fertility and their associations with the growth of *Psilocybe* mushrooms and also highlights the nuanced roles of lightning in Nahua, Mazatec, and Zapotec cultures. This symbolic complex runs through different cultures, but it also runs through different *Psilocybe* species including *Psilocybe aztecorum* for Nahuas, *Psilocybe caerulescens* for Mazatecs, and *Psilocybe zapotecorum* for Zapotecs. It is essential to understand that this symbolic complex is a source of knowledge learned through ritualized *Psilocybe* mushroom consumption. This is valued knowledge, not a series of hallucinations—such reductionism fails to appreciate Indigenous epistemologies. While most scholarship and considerations of *Psilocybe* rituals in Mesoamerica focus on healing and therapeutic uses, divination and worshipful sacrament—also sources of knowledge—are equally important functions.\[[64](#notes)\]

In Mesoamerican cultures, more-than-human agents are embedded in a vast matrix of ritual, symbolism, and epistemology. The natural sounds of thunderbolts are associated with ritual language, including the sounds of prayers and chants offered to a range of deities during the rain petitions or during healing ceremonies. Additionally, the serpent resembles lightning and has been considered Lightning’s “*nagual*” or totemic animal. The Rain Masters exhibit the wisdom and knowledge acquired through *Psilocybe* healing rituals. That wisdom and knowledge is used for divination, to know the cause of an illness, and to address mundane problems like finding a missing person or stolen item or gaining insights into some particular trouble or concern. Lightning is a deity in each of the three Mesoamerican traditions, but it is also a living being, a being who is a person with whom it is possible to establish communication through ritual or sacred language; *Psilocybe* rituals are sacraments to Lightning.

Mazatec and Zapotec cultures share a conception of the Book encountered through *Psilocybe* rituals, and the Book further highlights these cultures’ epistemology of sacred knowledge. This sacred Book—a Book of Wisdom and a Book of Language—is not the Bible, even though a number of Catholic saints and the Virgin have been associated with the Book due to spiritual synergy as a result of an array of social and historical features. The entheogenic experience accesses the Book of Language, demonstrating that the *Psilocybe* mushroom ritual experiences are themselves Indigenous wisdom.

Nahua, Mazatec, and Zapotec cultures display significant differences related to entheogenic or psychedelic experiences. Their narratives or myths regarding the origins of the world display different networks of sacred interactions with the transcendent. The cultures’ original narratives differ regarding the origin of the world and the origin of human beings. Healing rituals have different patterns embedded in their specific cultural contexts, metaphysical entities and sacred landscapes, and they are displaying different construction of meanings for the entheogenic/psychedelic experience.

Mesoamerican studies have identified shared cultural features about deities, and this is known as the hard-nucleus of culture, but the types of sacred entities differ in each culture. Elements in this hard-nucleus include a range of deities and revered natural elements. In Nahua culture, the *tlaloque*, those servants of Tlaloc, are clearly identified even in Pre-colonial codices such as the *Codex Borgia*. Contemporary Zapotecs propitiate the Three Sons of the Great Ray in Lightning in a range of rituals and cultural complexes. The Mazatec culture reveres the Lords of the Mountains or “guardians” (*chikones*) of sacred places as mountains, caves, and rivers. When addressing non-expert audiences, it is common to label all these sacred entities with the ambiguous term of “dwarfs,” making careful comparative study essential to avoid hasty generalizations and to show the internal logic or set of relations within each culture or worldview. Ambiguous attributions, like referring to many deities across these cultures as “dwarfs,” may point to the hard-nucleus of cultures, but the richness of these cultures requires significant engagement with Indigenous languages, ritual and cultural elements, and epistemologies.



 

###  Impact 

In the last two decades, psilocybin and psilocin have taken a predominant role in the so-called psychedelic renaissance—characterized by a resurgence of scientific research into psychedelic substances due to the recognition of their therapeutic potential for conditions related to mental health. These therapeutic potentials have generated clinical studies, changes in legislation, new designs of public policies, construction of a more favorable public opinion of psychedelics, and a growing medical psychedelics industry. There are many clinical trials running, and there is massive hype for psychedelics to satisfy spiritual needs or to treat mental illness like depression and anxiety, but none of this would be possible without Indigenous peoples from Central America who have kept and cultivated knowledge of sacred fungi and techniques for their use. The lack of recognition of Indigenous knowledge remains a pressing problem.

This entry presents cultural uses of *Psilocybe* and highlights the diversity of perspectives among Indigenous peoples. Such cultural lore is too often reduced to monolithic depictions that fail to accurately represent Indigenous peoples or their diverse cultural uses of and perspectives on *Psilocybe* mushroom. Recognizing different and diverse Indigenous cultural uses in their own specific contexts using Indigenous vocabulary displaces and remedies hasty generalizations and essentialist arguments that have erased Indigenous specificity. The Oregon Psilocybin Advisory Board Rapid Evidence Review and Recommendations argues that “the authors acknowledge the limitations of the Western research model and how it might inequitably stratify evidence (i.e., evidence inequity). This rapid review excludes meaningful experiences, knowledge, and wisdom from Indigenous peoples and other communities and institutions not represented in the scientific literature.” The illegality of psychedelics and the lack of recognition of Indigenous knowledge and representation of research produced by Indigenous scholars has caused grave epistemic injustices that prevail in mainstream psychedelic studies.

Studies engaging Indigenous knowledge should draw upon the work of Indigenous scholars, as I have attempted to model in this entry. The research presented in this entry aims to partially fill this gap in knowledge and to overcome evidence inequity by setting out educational resources on Indigenous knowledge and *Psilocybe* mushroom healing rituals among the Nahua, Mazatec, and Zapotec cultures. Testimonies provided in this entry are a small sample of healing rituals associated with three different species of *Psilocybe* mushrooms—*Psilocybe aztecorum*, *Psilocybe caerulescens*, and *Psilocybe zapotecorum*—used by Indigenous people for centuries even millennia. Indigenous wisdom and these ancient healing rituals should be considered part of the World’s Cultural Heritage, including the sacramental, therapeutic, artistic, and divinatory functions of *Psilocybe* mushrooms among ancient Mesoamerican traditions. Indigenous uses of *Psilocybe* persist to this day, and experts in this wisdom ought to be reverently consulted in addition to modern scientific research. The next era of research ought to be informed and even shaped by Indigenous perspectives representing the vast scope of uses and knowledges about *Psilocybe* mushrooms. In Zapotec terms, this would be a form of “good walking.”



 

##  Notes 

\[1\] Richard Evans Schultes, et al., *Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing and Hallucinogenic Powers* (Healing Arts Press, 1992), 156.

\[2\] Humphry Osmond, “A Review of the Clinical Effects of Psychotomimetics Agents,” *Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences* 66 (1957): 418–434, 429.

\[3\] Carl A. P. Ruck, et al., “Entheogens,” *Journal of Psychedelic Drugs* 11, no. 1–2 (1979): 145–46.

\[4\] Gastón Guzmán, “Variation, Distribution, Ethnomycological Data and Relationships of *Psilocybe aztecorum*, a Mexican Hallucinogenic Mushroom,” *Mycologia* 70, no. 2 (1978): 385–86.

\[5\] Roger Heim and Robert Gordon Wasson, *Les champignons hallucinogènes du Mexique: études ethnologiques, taxinomiques, biologiques, physiologiques et chimiques* (Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, 1958), 54.

\[6\] Mara Ximena Haro-Luna, et al., “Current Use of Holy Mushrooms of the Genus *Psilocybe* in a Zapotec Community in Oaxaca, Mexico,” *IMA Fungus* 16 (2025).

\[7\] Robert Gordon Wasson, *The Wondrous Mushroom: Mycolatry in Mesoamerica* (McGraw-Hill Books, 1980).

\[8\] United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, *World Drug Report 2023*. “Recent Developments Involving Psychedelics” (Vienna: UNODC, 2023), 27

\[9\] Luis Reyes García, “An Account Concerning the Hallucinogenic Mushrooms,” in *The Sacred Mushrooms of Mexico*, ed. Brian P. Akers (University Press of America, 2007), 25–28.

\[10\] Álvaro Estrada, *Maria Sabina, Her Life and Chants* (Ross-Erikson, 1981).

\[11\] Minerva Mendoza Pérez, *Loxicha, un tesoro de la cultura zapoteca* (Oaxaca, 2008).

\[12\] Juan Carlos Sánchez-Antonio, “La psicología/medicina del alma y el cuerpo en los zapotecos: una aproximación desde la filología de la lengua,” in *Una aproximación a la psicología egipcia, nahua y zapoteca. Un estudio histórico y lingüístico*, eds. Manlio Barbosa Cano and Juan Carlos Sánchez-Antonio (Libertad Bajo Palabra, 2023), 95–140.

\[13\] Haro-Luna, et al., “Current Use of Holy Mushrooms.”

\[14\] Gastón Guzmán, “Hallucinogenic Mushrooms in Mexico: An Overview,” *Economic Botany* 62, no. 3 (2008): 404–412.

\[15\] Osiris González Romero and Carmen Macuil, “Healing of the Thunderbolt in Nahua Entheogenic Medicine,” in *Brill Handbook of Entheogenic Healing*, ed. M. Winkelman (Brill, 2025), 98–121.

\[16\] Valentina P. Wasson and Robert G. Wasson, *Mushrooms, Russia and History* (Pantheon Books, 1957), 315–317.

\[17\] Indigenous researchers provide access to sources that make my analysis possible. Luis Reyes and Alvaro Estrada made Spanish translations of their own work, and, nowadays, their work is available in English translation. The sources for the Nahua and Mazatec cultures were compiled by researchers in those languages. For the Zapotecs, the works of the philosopher Juan Carlos Sánchez-Antonio are valuable. I drew upon several anthropology reports written in Spanish. Damian González Pérez, “Llover en la Sierra. Cosmovisión y ritualidad en torno al rayo y la lluvia entre los zapotecos del Sur de Oaxaca” (PhD diss., Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2014); Carla López Aponte, “Los hongos sagrados y el sistema terapéutico zapoteco en la Sierra Sur de Oaxaca” (MA thesis, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 2022).

\[18\] Reyes García, “An Account Concerning the Hallucinogenic Mushrooms,” 25–28.

\[19\] María Sabina was monolingual in Mazatec, and Estrada had to conduct interviews in that language. He kept the recordings, and he stated he required help in the translation, because, although he was a Mazatec speaker, the language of María Sabina seemed very old and antiquated for him. Perhaps her language belonged to a variant he did not know, for Mazatec language has at least sixteen variants. Álvaro Estrada, *María Sabina*, *Her Life and Chants*, 24–25.

\[20\] Robert Gordon Wasson, “Seeking the magic mushroom,” *Life*, May 13, 1957: 100–120.

\[21\] Richard Evans Schultes, et al., *Plants of the Gods*, 26.

\[22\] Heim and Wasson, *Les champignons hallucinogènes du Mexique*, 54.

\[23\] Blas Pablo Reko, *Mitobotánica Zapoteca* (Private Edition, Tacubaya-México, 1945), 44.

\[24\] Alfredo López-Austin, *Textos de Medicina Náhuatl* (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México-Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, 1975), 40.

\[25\] Reyes García, “An Account Concerning the Hallucinogenic Mushrooms,” 25–28.

\[26\] Thelma D. Sullivan, “Tlaloc: A New Etymological Interpretation of the God’s Name and What It Reveals of His Essence and Nature,” in *Atti del XL Congresso internazionale degli americanisti Roma-Genova*, Vol. 2, ed. Ernesta Cerullia (Tilgher, 1972), 213.

\[27\] Gisele Díaz, et al., *The Codex Borgia: A Full-Color Restoration of the Ancient Mexican Manuscript* (Dover Publications, 1993).

\[28\] Each date refers to a period of thirteen days or “trecena,” the measure of time for the divinatory calendar. The Mesoamerican calendar did not have weeks like Western calendars. Rather, it organized time in periods of thirteen days. For example, at the right bottom of plate 27 (see Figure 2), it is possible to see the date, one alligator and one reed. At left to the bottom, the dates are one vulture and one rabbit. Date details are signified by a numeral, usually expressed by a dot, and a symbol for the day, usually an animal or a plant.

\[29\] Bernardino de Sahagún, *Florentine Codex*: *General History of the Things of New Spain*, Book III, trans. Charles E. Dibble and Arthur Anderson (The School of American Research and the University of Utah, Press 2012), 47.

\[30\] Reyes García, “An Account Concerning the Hallucinogenic Mushrooms,” 27.

\[31\] Soul and spirit are foreign concepts for the Nahua. The loss of shadow is a common feature for the three cultures in this study. The loss of the *tonalli* in Nahuatl culture is the loss of a vital force related to light. Justyna Olko and Julia Madajczak argue that word *teyolia* could be a neologism coined during sixteenth century by Catholic friars to explain this idea. See Olko and Madajczak, “An Animating Principle in Confrontation with Christianity? De(Re)Constructing the Nahua ‘Soul,’” *Ancient Mesoamerica* 30, no. 1 (2019): 75–88.

\[32\] Reyes García, “An Account Concerning the Hallucinogenic Mushrooms,” 27.

\[33\] Abraham Cáceres, “In Xochitl, in Cuicatl: Hallucinogens and Music in Mesoamerican Amerindian Thought,” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1984), 79–110.

\[34\] Henry Munn, “The Mushrooms of Language,” in *Hallucinogens and Shamanism*, ed. M. Harner (Oxford University Press, 1973), 86–122.

\[35\]William E. Safford, “An Aztec Narcotic (*Lophophora williamsi*),” *The Journal of Heredity* 6, no. 7 (1915): 291–311, 310.

\[36\] Reyes García, “An Account Concerning the Hallucinogenic Mushrooms,” 28.

\[37\] Alfredo López Austin, *Tamoanchan, Tlalocan: Places of Mist* (University Press of Colorado, 1997).

\[38\] Reyes García, “An Account Concerning the Hallucinogenic Mushrooms,” 26.

\[39\] Reyes García, “An Account Concerning the Hallucinogenic Mushrooms,” 26.

\[40\] Reyes García, “An Account Concerning the Hallucinogenic Mushrooms,” 28.

\[41\] González-Romero and Macuil, “Healing of the Thunderbolt,” 98–121.

\[42\] Estrada, *María Sabina, Her Life and Chants*, 47–48.

\[43\] María Sabina described herself as a wise woman and not a healer, not a sorcerer, not a wizard or a witch. All these terms and translations are a result of a stigmatization or misunderstanding. In Mazatec language, the word *chotaj* refers to wisdom, also in Nahuatl culture the word *tlamatque* could be translated as “the wise.” The verb *mati* means, at the same time, to known and to feel.

\[44\] Munn, “The Mushrooms of Language,” 86–122.

\[45\] Iván Juárez García, *Elementos de filosofía mazateca* (BA thesis, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, 2022), 33.

\[46\] Estrada, *María Sabina*, *Her Life and Chants*, 56, bolded emphasis in original.

\[47\] Space limitations prevent an explanation of this rich cosmology and cosmogony. See John Bierhorst, *History and Mythology of the Aztecs: The Codex Chimalpopoca* (The University of Arizona Press, 1992).

\[48\] Each sacred narrative or myth in each Mesoamerican Indigenous tradition has its own characters, names, and sacred entities. In Nahua cosmogony, for instance, five Worlds or Suns existed before the creation of the current World/Sun (The Sun of Movement). The Sun of Water, the Sun of Fire, the Sun of Wind, the Sun of Earth have specific names, cultural features, and symbolism for the Nahuas; these are not shared by the Mazatecs or Zapotecs.

\[49\] Wise ones and sages can be synonyms, but the English term “healer” must be used with caution. The Spanish word *curandero*, often translated as “healer,” has been stigmatized as a non-serious charlatan or fake doctor. The English translation “healer” could be more like the term *sanador*, a very rare word in Spanish. This is yet another instance demonstrating the importance of using Indigenous terminology to accurately represent Indigenous cultures and epistemologies.

\[50\] Heim and Wasson, *Les champignons hallucinogènes du Mexique*, 54.

\[51\] Estrada, *María Sabina*, *Her Life and Chants*, 47–48.

\[52\] Estrada, *María Sabina,* *Her Life and Chants*, 56.

\[53\] Estrada, *María Sabina,* *Her Life and Chants*, 47.

\[54\] Estrada, *María Sabina*, *Her Life and Chants*, 94.

\[55\] Haro-Luna, et al., “Current Use of Holy Mushrooms.”

\[56\] Sánchez-Antonio, “La psicología/medicina del alma y el cuerpo en los zapotecos,” 117.

\[57\] Aponte, “Los hongos sagrados,” 89.

\[58\] Aponte, “Los hongos sagrados,” 105.

\[59\] Minerva Mendoza Pérez, *Loxicha, un tesoro de la cultura zapoteca*, 154.

\[60\] Damian González Pérez, “Llover en la Sierra. Cosmovisión y ritualidad en torno al rayo y la lluvia entre los zapotecos del Sur de Oaxaca,” 207.

\[61\] Damian González Pérez, “Llover en la Sierra. Cosmovisión y ritualidad en torno al rayo y la lluvia entre los zapotecos del Sur de Oaxaca,” 207.

\[62\]Damian González Pérez, “Llover en la Sierra. Cosmovisión y ritualidad en torno al rayo y la lluvia entre los zapotecos del Sur de Oaxaca,” 157.

\[63\] Aponte, “Los hongos sagrados,” 118.

\[64\] Nowadays, it is common in Mesoamerica to perform divinatory rituals with maize kernels, in some cases with *Psilocybe* mushrooms or other entheogens, but the *Psilocybe* is not compulsory.



 

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Author Biography

### Osiris González Romero 

 

Osiris González Romero is a Research Fellow at “Glo-Phi: Philosophizing in a Global World Center for Advanced Studies”, Hildesheim University, Germany. He is a former Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, and also at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, Department of History. He earned his PhD in the Heritage of Indigenous Peoples from Leiden University. His research focuses on Indigenous Philosophies, Philosophy, Mesoamerican and Latin American Studies, Psychedelic Studies and Aesthetics.



 



      ![Osiris Gonzalez-Romero looking into the camera](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-07/Osiris-Gonzalez-Romero-2x3-1.jpg?h=b580d326&itok=9uFU1F-h) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

 



 

 See also:- [ Archive of Mystical Experiences ](/topic-tags/archive-mystical-experiences)
- [ psychedelics ](/topic-tags/psychedelics)