The archive

Mushroom species

Each species page links to the cultures that use it, and covers habitat, chemistry, ritual role, and what stays uncertain. A cultural and historical reference — not a cultivation or consumption guide.

Chemistry

Evidence

A fly agaric, Amanita muscaria, with a brilliant red cap flecked with white, growing in leaf litter.

Muscimol / ibotenic

Amanita muscaria

Fly agaric · fly amanita

The fly agaric — a genuinely toxic, muscimol-bearing mushroom (not a psilocybin species) at the centre of documented Siberian ritual use and a long train of disputed theories, from Soma to berserkers to Christmas.

A brown-capped Amanita pantherina studded with white warts, with a ringed white stem.

Muscimol / ibotenic

Amanita pantherina

Panther Cap · panther amanita

The panther cap — fly agaric's browner, more dangerous cousin. It carries the same muscimol chemistry at higher and more erratic doses, and is a genuinely toxic mushroom that poisons people every year. A muscimol species, not a psilocybin one.

A bolete from the highlands of Papua New Guinea, collected in the Wahgi Valley.

Boletus manicus

nonda (a name applied broadly to several boletes)

The vivid bolete at the centre of the New Guinea 'mushroom madness' — identified by Roger Heim among the Kuma of the Wahgi Valley, and famous precisely because the psychoactivity attributed to it was never confirmed.

A dense cluster of large tawny-orange Gymnopilus junonius mushrooms at the base of a tree.

Gymnopilus junonius

Laughing Gym · spectacular rustgill

The 'Laughing Gym' — a large, bitter, wood-rotting orange mushroom whose psilocybin-bearing forms are linked to one of the oldest written mushroom stories on earth: Japan's waraitake, the laughing mushroom of a thousand-year-old tale.

A Lanmaoa asiatica bolete — a pored, gill-less mushroom whose cut flesh bruises blue.

Lanmaoa asiatica

Little-people bolete · 見手青 jiàn shǒu qīng (blue-bruising bolete, Yunnan)

A blue-bruising Asian bolete — no gills, no psilocybin, no muscimol — reported to bring vivid visions of tiny people. Communities in Yunnan, Papua New Guinea, and the northern Philippines describe the same effect independently, and no one yet knows what compound causes it.

Slender grey-tan Panaeolus cyanescens mushrooms with thin caps, bruising blue.

Panaeolus cyanescens

Blue Meanies · Copelandia cyanescens (former name)

'Blue Meanies' — a small, intensely potent, pantropical dung mushroom in a different genus from Psilocybe, once placed in Copelandia, and among the strongest psilocybin species anywhere.

Psilocybe aztecorum mushrooms photographed against a black background, caps bruising blue.

Psilocybe aztecorum

apipiltzin (local Nahuatl)

A high-altitude mushroom of central Mexico's great volcanoes, recorded among contemporary Nahua under the name apipiltzin.

Psilocybe azurescens with caramel, umbonate caps and blue-bruised stems, on woody coastal debris.

Psilocybe azurescens

Flying Saucer · Azzies

'Flying Saucers' — among the most potent psilocybin mushrooms known, described from the Oregon coast by Paul Stamets and Jochen Gartz, growing on driftwood and dune-grass roots at the edge of the Pacific.

A brown Psilocybe caerulescens mushroom, the landslide mushroom, on bare disturbed earth.

Psilocybe caerulescens

Derrumbe · landslide mushroom

The 'landslide mushroom' of highland Mexico — the derrumbe — central to Mazatec veladas and identified with the Nahua name teotlaquilnanácatl.

Golden-brown Psilocybe cubensis mushrooms growing from dung in grassland.

Psilocybe cubensis

San Isidro · Golden Teacher (a cultivated strain name)

The most widely known psilocybin mushroom on earth — a dung-loving, pantropical species that travelled the world with cattle, became the mainstay of cultivation, and enters some Mexican ceremonies as the hongo de San Isidro.

A cluster of caramel-coloured Psilocybe cyanescens with wavy cap margins, bruising blue.

Psilocybe cyanescens

Wavy Caps — a potent, wood-loving psilocybe that has made a home in the woodchip and mulch of parks and gardens, spreading through the landscaped edges of cities across Europe and North America.

Psilocybe hispanica

A small, dung-loving psilocybin mushroom of the high Pyrenees — and the species proposed as the one painted, six thousand years ago, on a Spanish rock wall.

A small brown Psilocybe hoogshagenii mushroom with a small nipple-like projection at the cap apex.

Psilocybe hoogshagenii

Little bird of the divine · pajarito (locally, with other species)

A small Oaxacan mushroom recorded in ethnography as a diagnostic tool among Chinantec — and neighbouring — healers.

Psilocybe maluti

koae-ea-lekhoaba (Sesotho)

A native southern African psilocybin mushroom, formally described in 2024, reported in Basotho traditional use as koae-ea-lekhoaba — the strongest published African case to date.

Slender tawny Psilocybe mexicana mushrooms with conic caps, growing in grass.

Psilocybe mexicana

Pajarito · teonanácatl (applied broadly)

The small Oaxacan mushroom from which psilocybin was first isolated, and one of the species addressed as niños santos in Mazatec ceremony.

Psilocybe muliercula

las mujercitas ('the little women')

The 'little women' of the Toluca highlands — a Mexican ritual mushroom that Roger Heim named for R. Gordon Wasson, and whose very name has never been fully settled.

Psilocybe natalensis

Natal (a cultivation name)

A southern African psilocybe described from KwaZulu-Natal — one of the region's few named psilocybin species, and a marker of how recently, and how thinly, the continent's mushroom record is being written.

A slender Psilocybe semilanceata with a sharply conical, nippled cap on a tall thin stem.

Psilocybe semilanceata

Liberty Cap · witch's hat

The Liberty Cap — the small, sharply pointed grassland mushroom that is the most common and potent wild psilocybe of Europe, and the centre of the modern European mushroom story rather than an ancient one.

Two small tan Psilocybe tampanensis mushrooms with convex caps.

Psilocybe tampanensis

Philosopher's Stone · magic truffle (of the sclerotia)

The 'Philosopher's Stone' — a rare Florida psilocybe famous less for its mushroom than for its sclerotia: the hardened underground masses, sold legally in the Netherlands as 'magic truffles', that exploit a gap between mushroom and fungus in the law.

A cluster of robust brown Psilocybe zapotecorum mushrooms staining blue-black where handled.

Psilocybe zapotecorum

Hongo Santo · Hongo Borracho

A robust Oaxacan species documented in 2025 as the 'holy mushroom' of a Zapotec community — Ni'to be'ya — used for healing and divination before the altar of San Miguel Arcángel.