1. Name

Mesoamerican cultures (at least 11 of them) have used Psilocybe—a genus of mushrooms, some of which contain the psychoactive chemicals psilocybin and psilocin—for ritual, divination, and therapeutic or healing purposes. Psilocybe use, growth, and cultivation are widespread throughout Mesoamerica, and there are regional variants for all Indigenous Psilocybe names. This entry focuses on Nahua/Aztec rather than surveying Mesoamerican Psilocybe use due to the wealth of evidence regarding Nahua/Aztec cultural uses of Psilocybe.

In the Nahuatl language spoken by Nahua/Aztec people, one name for the Psilocybe mushroom is “teonanacatl,” which can be translated as “the flesh of the gods”—formed from compounding the word “teotl,” meaning “God/gods” or “sacred,” and “nanacatl,” meaning “mushrooms or flesh.”[1] Another possible translation for the name “teonanacatl” is “holy/sacred mushroom.” The term “teonanacatl” is a generic Nahuatl-language name covering a range of mushroom species that includes Psilocybe aztecorum (Image 3), Psilocybe mexicana, and Psilocybe caerulenscens, and more.[2] Another Nahuatl-language name for Psilocybe mushrooms is “apipiltzin,” meaning the “water children.”[3] While “apipiltzin” is a general term, these mushrooms are also personhoods, meaning that they have subjectivity and agency beyond being physical mushrooms.

2. Introduction and Artwork

Across Mesoamerican cultures, teonanacatl mushrooms are symbolically linked to deities of death and the Underworld. Image 1 from the Codex Magliabechiano—a sixteenth-century Nahua/Aztec pictographic manuscript—depicts an encounter between a person eating teonanacatl mushrooms and the Lord of Death, Mictlantecuhtli. Those who consume teonanacatl are entranced and become ritual specialists who are intermediaries between the human realm and sacred entities, communicating with ancestors, gods, and nature spirits.

In the painting, a seated man consumes two teonanacatl mushrooms. Behind him, another figure, a god, touches his head. The seated man is in a trance or will soon enter a trance. Trance states in Aztec culture are initiated by ingesting teonanacatl mushrooms such as Psilocybe aztecorum (Image 3) and Psilocybe mexicana. “The three jade green mushrooms in front of the celebrant undoubtedly were painted in this colour to indicate their great value.” [4] Three mushrooms is the dose described in the sixteenth-century Florentine Codex, a Spanish ethnography composed in Spanish and Nahuatl languages by a Franciscan friar and a group of Nahua elders, scholars, and artists.

According to Mercedes de la Garza, scholar of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures, “A representation of the Magliabechiano Codex illustrates precisely the custom of only eating two or three mushrooms and on the visions produced. We see a native seated in front of three mushrooms, with another in the right hand and ingesting one more. Behind him, placing a hand on his head, is Mictlantecuhtli, the deity of death, expressing the experiences and images of death that those who ingested the teonanacatl used to have.” [5] Mictlantecuhtli, found behind the mushroom-eating man who looks to the left, is the ruler of Mictlan, the Place of the Dead—not necessarily the Underworld but closely related to the Underworld in funeral rituals. “The second illustration from the Magliabechiano Codex offers three elements: mushrooms, a man eating them, and a ‘supernatural’ effigy behind him. The reader will notice that the man holds a mushroom in each hand; that is, they have a pair of them.” [6] The man consuming the mushroom, however, could have a third mushroom in his mouth, agreeing with the three-mushroom dosage in colonial sources.

3. Geography and Context

Researchers indicate that “Mexico represents without a doubt the world’s richest area in diversity and use of hallucinogens in aboriginal societies.” [7] As a region, Mexico contains 10 percent of the world’s total biodiversity and accounts for the most significant psychoactive biodiversity and the number of Psilocybe species. (Image 2) Several Indigenous Mesoamerican cultures have used varieties of Psilocybe mushrooms. [8]

Psilocybe aztecorum (Image 3) and Psilocybe mexicana grow in volcanic regions of Central Mexico, especially surrounding the Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl volcanoes, “known only from the high mountains of Central Mexico: Río Frío, Nexpayantla (in the Popocatepetl), and Nevado de Toluca, in the State of Mexico, Paso de Cortés (between Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl), in the State of Puebla, and La Malinche, in the State of Tlaxcala.” [9] The most significant number of Psilocybe mushroom species in the world, around 27, are grown in the state and region of Oaxaca, Mexico, and there are probably more species there that have not yet been documented and registered.

4. Primary Sources and Evidence

Because mushrooms are 80 percent water, it is almost impossible to find and analyze material remains of teonanacatl. Evidence derived from sculptures, ritual paraphernalia, and historical sources suggests an ancient cult of teonanacatl.

Afterlife concerns were a central cultural feature in Nahua religion. Image 1 from the sixteenth-century Nahua/Aztec religious text Codex Magliabechi depicts a figure consuming teonanacatl mushrooms accompanied by Mictlantecuhtli, the Lord of Death. Death deities in Nahua culture are associated with sacred narratives about human origins and human fate. Compiled in the sixteenth century by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún with the significant support of Nahua scholars and artists, the Florentine Codex presents a large number of references to teonanacatl. “It is called teonanacatl. It grows on the plains, in the grass. The head is small and round; the stem is long and slender. It is bitter and burns; it burns the throat. It makes one besotted; it deranges one, troubles one. It is a remedy for fever, for gout. Only two [or] three can be eaten. It saddens, depresses, troubles one; it makes one flee, frightens, makes one hide. . . He who eats many of them sees many things.” [11] While a negative colonial tone predominates, this quote describes teonanacatl and a range of its medicinal and visionary effects.

Completed in 1577 at the Imperial Colegio de la Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco, which today is Mexico City, the Florentine Codex includes a ceremony performed by Nahua traders to give thanks for a successful expedition. This teonanacatl ritual has communitarian aspects, and the description reveals the significance not just of the visions but of talking about the visions. “At the very first, mushrooms had been served. They ate them at the time when, they said, the shell trumpets were blown. They ate no more food; they only drank chocolate during the night. And they ate mushrooms with honey. When the mushrooms took effect on them, then they danced, then they wept. But some, while still in command of their senses entered and [sat] there by the house on their seats; they danced no more, but only sat there nodding.”[12] This testimony highlights hedonistic uses of psychoactive mushrooms, especially among Nahua/Aztec elites; the communal and joyful consumption of entheogens is widely unacknowledged and understudied in scholarship, even in psychedelic studies.

5. Interpretation

Colonial, anthropological, and Indigenous sources document that some consumers of teonanacatl become ritual specialists. Through their trance experiences, they are intermediaries between inhabitants of the human realm and sacred entities: ancestors, gods, nature spirits, and, especially, rain deities. [13] The Nahua/Aztec link between teonanacatl psychoactive mushrooms and death deities is shared with the Mayans.

Teonanacatl are embedded in Maya and Nahua territories and cultures. Historical sources demonstrate that teonanacatl mushrooms are related to the rainy season, and these cultures link sacred mushrooms with rains and thunderbolts, symbolically reflecting the natural growth of physical mushrooms during the rainy season of July and August. Nahuas relate teonanacatl to deities of fertility, water, and thunderbolts. The most potent teonanacatl are thought to grow from soil at locations where lightning has struck. Teonanacatl mushrooms are not merely a drug or a substance that can be isolated from the territory; they are beings/entities with which it is possible to establish communication through ritual language.

Mushrooms are sacred beings themselves, and they enable communication with the wide range of these cultures’ deities and ancestors; furthermore, teonanacatl mushrooms are connected to the afterlife, concerns about the afterlife, and Underworld sacred beings, including the Lord of Death. [14] Mayans connect sacred mushrooms to the underworld death-beings known as Nine Lords of Xibalba [15]. Nahua culture associates the teonanacatl with Mictlantecuhtli, the Lord of Death. The image of the Lord of Death was not always frightening to ritual specialists; during healing rituals and divination, Mictlantecuhtli can be benevolent and can refer generally to the ancestors.

6. Implications

In the last two decades, psilocybin and psilocin have taken a predominant role in psychedelic science and medicine because of their therapeutic potential to treat conditions related to depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, palliative care, and addiction treatment. These therapeutic potentials have generated dozens of clinical studies, changes in legislation in some countries, the new design of public policies, the construction of a more favorable public opinion, and the creation of a growing industry around Psilocybe mushrooms and their chemical components.

All this has caused paradigm shifts and a dizzying series of social and cultural transformations. These transformations seem novel at first glance, but the relationship between humans and Psilocybe mushrooms has a long tradition among the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, especially among the Nahua/Aztecs. To better understand Psilocybe’s therapeutic potential and the cultural transformations associated with it, it is essential to know the history and contexts of its different uses.

References

[1] Schultes, Richard Evans, Albert Hofmann, and Christian Rätsch. Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing and Hallucinogenic Powers. (Healing Arts Press, 1992), 156.

[2] Stresser-Pean, Guy. El sol dios y Cristo: La cristianización de los indios de México vista desde la sierra de Puebla. (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2011), 357-359.

[3] Guzmán, Gastón. “Variation, Distribution, Ethnomycological Data and Relationships of Psilocybe aztecorum, a Mexican Hallucinogenic Mushroom.” Mycologia 70, no. 2 (1978): 392.

[4] Schultes, Richard Evans, Albert Hofmann, and Christian Rätsch. Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing and Hallucinogenic Powers. (Healing Arts Press, 1992), 162.

[5] De la Garza, Mercedes. Sueño y extásis en el mundo náhuatl y maya. (Fondo de Cultura Económica-Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2012), 79.

[6] Wasson, Robert Gordon. The Wondrous Mushroom: Mycolatry in Mesoamerica. (McGraw-Hill Books, 1980), 113-114.

[7] Schultes, Richard Evans, Albert Hofmann, and Christian Rätsch. Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing and Hallucinogenic Powers. (Healing Arts Press, 1992), 26.

[8] Guzmán, Gastón. “Hallucinogenic Mushrooms in Mexico: An Overview.” Economic Botany 62, no. 3 (2008): 405.

[9] Guzmán, Gastón. “Variation, Distribution, Ethnomycological Data and Relationships of Psilocybe aztecorum, a Mexican Hallucinogenic Mushroom.” Mycologia 70, no. 2 (1978): 388.

[10] Guzmán, Gastón. “Hallucinogenic Mushrooms in Mexico: An Overview.” Economic Botany 62, no. 3 (2008): 405.

[11] Sahagún, Bernardino de. Florentine Codex (General History of the Things of New Spain). Book XI. Translated by Charles E. Dibble and Arthur Anderson. (The School of American Research and the University of Utah, [1963] 1975), 130.

[12] Sahagún, Bernardino de. Florentine Codex (General History of the Things of New Spain). Book IX, Chapter VIII. Translated by Charles E. Dibble and Arthur Anderson. (The School of American Research and the University of Utah, [1959] 1976), 39.

[13] González-Romero, Osiris, and Carmen Macuil. “Healing of the Thunderbolt in Nahua Entheogenic Medicine.” In Brill Handbook of Entheogenic Healing, edited by Michael Winkelman (Brill, 2025), 98-99.

[14] Wasson, Robert Gordon. The Wondrous Mushroom: Mycolatry in Mesoamerica. (McGraw-Hill Books, 1980), 113-114; De la Garza, Mercedes. Sueño y extásis en el mundo náhuatl y maya. (Fondo de Cultura Económica-Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2012), 79.

[15] De la Garza, Mercedes. Sueño y extásis en el mundo náhuatl y maya. (Fondo de Cultura Económica-Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2012), 182-183.

Image 1. Teonanacatl use depicted in the sixteenth-century Codex Magliabechiano f.90.r.