The archive
Cultures
Traditions that have treated certain mushrooms as healers, diviners, ancestors, or dangerous intelligences — each tagged with an evidence label for how well the connection is documented, from living practice to disputed theory.
Basotho · Basotho
Southern Africa was long treated as a blank space on the psychedelic map. New research on the Basotho suggests that blankness was a failure of attention: healers identify a native psilocybin mushroom and use it — for initiation, healing, protection, and the sharpening of dreams.
Principal mushroom — Psilocybe maluti
Maya
The ancient Maya mushroom story is powerful, but not simple. Carved mushroom stones from Guatemala have led some scholars to propose a sacred mushroom complex; others read the same objects as potters' moulds. No observed ceremony survives to settle it.
Mazatec · Ha shuta enima
In the cloud forests of northern Oaxaca, Mazatec healers address certain mushrooms not as drugs but as holy children — persons who can diagnose illness and speak through ritual song. It is the best-documented living mushroom tradition in the world.
Principal mushroom — Psilocybe caerulescens
Nahua · Nahua
Behind the Nahuatl word teonanácatl lies an archive of ritual practice that never entirely died — from the mushrooms of the Florentine Codex to a living medicine of thunder, rain, and healing.
Principal mushroom — Psilocybe caerulescens
Tassili n'Ajjer
On a Saharan plateau in Algeria, some of the world's oldest rock art includes figures read by a few researchers as mushroom-holding shamans. The forms are ambiguous, and nothing connects them to a known practice.
Vedic (Indo-Iranian) · Ārya
The Rigveda praises Soma — a plant pressed for a radiant juice and drunk by priests and gods. Which plant it was, the hymns never say. One famous theory makes it the fly agaric; the identification is far from settled.
Principal mushroom — Amanita muscaria
Zapotec · Binnizá / Bene Xon
No longer a historical rumour: a 2025 study documented living Zapotec ritual use of Psilocybe zapotecorum for healing and divination — the holy mushrooms called Ni'to be'ya.
Principal mushroom — Psilocybe zapotecorum
Chatino
Southern neighbours of the Zapotec, the Chatino appear in the ethnomycological record as one of the Mexican peoples with sacred mushroom use — though the detailed fieldwork behind that record is thin.
Principal mushroom — Psilocybe mexicana
Chinantec
A quieter record from Oaxaca: ethnography describes hallucinogenic mushrooms used for diagnosis — finding the cause of an affliction — among highland Chinantec healers.
Principal mushroom — Psilocybe hoogshagenii
Koryak · Chavchuven & Nymylan
In the Russian Far East, classic ethnography records the fly agaric — wapaq — as a ritual and social intoxicant. It is a genuine Old-World mushroom tradition, and a chemically distinct one that must not be folded into the psilocybin story.
Principal mushroom — Amanita muscaria
Mixe (Ayöök) · Ayöök
In the rugged mountains of eastern Oaxaca, the Mixe held onto a religious world of their own well into the twentieth century. Frank Lipp's ethnography records hallucinogenic mushrooms among their instruments of divination and healing.
Principal mushroom — Psilocybe mexicana
Mixtec (Ñuu Savi) · Ñuu Savi — ‘People of the Rain’
One of the oldest surviving pictorial records of ritual mushroom use in Mesoamerica sits in a Ñuu Savi codex — a scene of maize, pulque, and mushrooms before the first dawn. It is codical evidence, not an observed ceremony.
Norse (Berserkers) · Norrœnir menn
A popular theory holds that the battle-fury of the Norse berserkers came from eating fly agaric. No saga says so — the idea is an 18th-century guess that has been repeated ever since.
Principal mushroom — Amanita muscaria