Teonanácatl: ‘flesh of the gods’?

A word, not a species

Almost every account of Mesoamerican mushrooms begins with a single Nahuatl word: teonanácatl. It is worth slowing down on it, because how the word is handled is a good test of whether a source is careful or careless.

The term combines teotl — god, sacred, divine — with nanácatl, mushroom. It appears in colonial sources, most importantly the Florentine Codex, the sixteenth-century encyclopedia compiled by Bernardino de Sahagún with Nahua collaborators, where mushrooms intoxicate banquet guests and bring visions.¹ What the word does not do is name a botanical species. It names a kind of thing — sacred mushrooms — the way “communion wine” names a role, not a grape.

”Flesh of the gods” — a translation, not a fact

The famous rendering “flesh of the gods” is elegant and old, and it may well be right. But it is a translation choice, not a settled fact. Nahuatl compounds can be read more than one way, and other glosses — “sacred mushroom,” “marvellous mushroom,” “divine mushroom” — are all defensible. The phrase is best read as an interpretation rather than the mushroom’s proven literal name.

From word to genus

When Richard Evans Schultes reconnected the colonial teonanácatl to living Oaxacan practice in 1938–39,² and Gastón Guzmán later mapped the many Psilocybe species involved,³ a single word opened into a whole field. One Indigenous term can hold many species, many peoples, and many purposes; flatten it into “the Aztec magic mushroom” and most of the truth is already gone.