Researcher
Henry Munn
Writer and ethnographer of Mazatec chant · 1937–2015
Author of 'The Mushrooms of Language,' the essay that reframed Mazatec chant not as background to the velada but as its working technology — the means by which the mushroom speaks.
The mushrooms of language
Henry Munn’s 1973 essay “The Mushrooms of Language” made an argument that has shaped how the velada is understood ever since: that the chanting is not decoration but the working core of the rite.1 In the Mazatec ceremony, he wrote, the mushroom does not merely produce visions; it produces speech. The healer becomes a mouth through which illness is named, truth is spoken, and cure is sought. Language is the medicine.
Position
Munn was connected to the Sierra Mazateca through marriage into a Mazatec family, which gave his writing an unusual closeness to the tradition. Like the other outsiders who wrote about it, he was describing a practice that belonged to others — but his instinct was to treat Mazatec verbal art as serious thought rather than exotica.
Footnotes
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Henry Munn, “The Mushrooms of Language,” in Hallucinogens and Shamanism (1973). ↩
Sources & further reading
Henry Munn (1973). The Mushrooms of Language. in M. Harner (ed.), Hallucinogens and Shamanism, Oxford University Press.
Classic argument that Mazatec chant is the working technology of the velada — the mushroom "speaks" through ritual language.
Editorial record
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