An archive, not an advertisement

What this is

Across Mesoamerica, Siberia, southern Africa, and the disputed shadows of prehistory, certain mushrooms have been treated as healers, diviners, ancestors, gods, and dangerous intelligences. This project gathers those traditions into a single archive — part ethnographic record, part illustrated field journal, part world map — and holds every claim to a visible standard of evidence.

It is not a drug website. MushroomTribes sells no mushrooms, recommends no dosages, and gives no instructions for illegal use. The traditions here are living cultural systems — and where this work ever helps support a community's own ceremonies or livelihood, it does so with that community, on its terms and to its benefit.

MushroomTribes is a nonprofit documentation project of The Community Garden Foundation. It runs on donations rather than the sale of any mushroom product; if the archive is useful to you, you can help sustain it on the support page.

Evidence standards

Every major factual claim is tied to a source, and every entry carries one of six evidence labels — from a documented living tradition to a speculative claim repeated in popular culture. The full system is set out in Evidence standards & methodology.

Cultural ethics

These traditions belong to living peoples. The project is built around a set of standing rules:

• Never reveal restricted ceremonial knowledge merely because it can be found online.
• Never publish exact locations of endangered mushrooms, sacred gathering areas, graves, caves, or private ceremonial spaces without permission.
• Never describe a living culture as primitive, untouched, frozen in time, or disappearing merely to create drama.
• Never call every ritual specialist a “shaman.” Use the community’s own title wherever possible.
• Distinguish culture, ethnicity, language, nation, village, religion, and civilisation — they are not synonyms.
• Never claim that one person represents an entire people.
• Never exploit a community’s ceremony for outside profit; any commercial partnership must be led by the community, with its consent and to its benefit.

Where the two pull against each other, cultural respect outranks completeness. Some things that can be found online will not be republished here.

Preservation and documentary work

The archive gathers and tells the great myth of the mushroom — recording the cultures, stories, and mysteries of humanity's encounter with the sacred fungus, and preserving knowledge that is often endangered. Sources and context run throughout, but the aim is to make these stories vivid and unforgettable.

How corrections work

Scholarship moves and we make mistakes. Each page carries an editorial record with a corrections history and a last-reviewed date. If you find an error, a mistranslation, a mischaracterisation, or a source we have misread, write to corrections@mushroomtribes.com. Substantive corrections are logged visibly on the page rather than quietly overwritten.

Contributing

We welcome contributions from Indigenous scholars, community members, ethnographers, mycologists, historians, and archivists — new sources, first-hand knowledge (only what is appropriate to share publicly), translations, images with clear licensing, and citations. Contributors are credited on the pages they improve. To propose a contribution, write to contribute@mushroomtribes.com.

Community amendments & removal

Communities and their representatives have standing here that outside readers do not. If a community, its recognised representatives, or a knowledge-holder asks us to correct, restrict, or remove sensitive or sacred material — including material that is technically public but should not be circulated — we will engage with that request seriously and, in the case of genuinely restricted knowledge, act on it. Requests can be sent to amendments@mushroomtribes.com. This is not a legal formality; it is part of how the archive is meant to work.