Mesoamerica · Culture
Totonac
Tachiwīn
The Pyramid of the Niches at El Tajín — the great Totonac city whose name means 'thunder'. — Photo via Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0 · Source
The Gulf highlands
The Totonac of northern Veracruz and the Puebla sierra — long associated with the great Classic city of El Tajín — are one of the eastern Mexican peoples in whom ceremonial mushroom use is recorded. Their humid highlands carry the same Psilocybe the Mazatec know further south.
The city of the thunder god
The Totonac are heirs to one of Mesoamerica’s great ceremonial cities — El Tajín, whose very name means thunder or lightning in the Totonac tongue, a place of pyramids, ballcourts, and the sky-turning rite of the Voladores, flyers who spiral down from a pole to call the rain. It is a religious world soaked in weather, mountain, and the numinous — exactly the kind of world in which a rain-forest mushroom becomes a way of speaking with the powers. The sacred fungi belong to that older cosmology, not to a modern curiosity.
In the record
As with several of Mexico’s smaller-documented cases, the anchor is Gastón Guzmán’s enumeration of the Indigenous peoples with recorded ceremonial mushroom practice, in which the Totonac appear.1 The detail is quiet rather than absent — a genuine thread in the Mesoamerican fabric, waiting for the fieldwork that would let it speak in full.
Read alongside
The Totonac are set out with their sister peoples in Mexico’s other mushroom peoples.
Footnotes
-
Guzmán, Hallucinogenic Mushrooms in Mexico: An Overview (2008); Schultes, Teonanácatl (1940). ↩
The record
Historical record
- Classic era
An old ceremonial world
The Totonac built El Tajín and sustained a rich ritual life in the Gulf lowlands and adjacent highlands.
Archaeology - 20th c.
Recorded mushroom use
Modern surveys of Mexican mushroom practice count the Totonac among the peoples with documented ceremonial use.
Contemporary ethnography
Evidence
The support for this entry, separated by kind. Different kinds of evidence carry different weight.
- Contemporary ethnography
- Guzmán (2008) lists the Totonac among Mexican peoples with recorded ceremonial mushroom use.
- Botanical / mycological
- Psilocybe mexicana and related species occur in the humid highlands of Totonacapan.
What remains uncertain
- The specific Totonac ethnography of mushroom use is sparse and easily overstated.
Sources & editorial record
Sources & further reading
Gastón Guzmán (2008). Hallucinogenic Mushrooms in Mexico: An Overview. Economic Botany 62(3).
Species-level overview; identifies P. caerulescens (Nahua teotlaquilnanácatl) among ceremonially used mushrooms and counts Indigenous peoples with recorded use.
Richard Evans Schultes (1940). Teonanácatl: The Narcotic Mushroom of the Aztecs. American Anthropologist / Botanical Museum Leaflets, Harvard.
The paper that reconnected the colonial word teonanácatl to living Oaxacan mushroom use, drawing on Schultes’ 1938–39 fieldwork among Mazatec, Chinantec, and Zapotec communities.
Editorial record
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