The popular story of magic mushrooms in the West tends to start in 1957, with a banker and a magazine. But that is the story of when the West noticed, not the story of the thing itself, and treating the noticing as the beginning is a small act of erasure. The mushrooms were sacred in Mesoamerica for centuries, probably far longer, before any outsider wrote a word about them. The peoples of central Mexico had a name for them, teonanacatl, which is usually translated as something like flesh of the gods, and they used them in religious contexts long before the Spanish arrived. And then the Spanish did arrive, and one of the things the conquest set out to do was to wipe this practice off the face of the earth.
This article is about that older and longer history, the pre-conquest sacred use of the mushrooms and the colonial effort to suppress it, because you cannot understand the modern story without it. It is a history we know about partly through a strange irony, that some of our best early written evidence comes from the very missionaries who were trying to stamp the practice out. It is also a history of survival, of a tradition driven underground that endured in secret for centuries until it surfaced again in the twentieth century. Verify the historical specifics against scholarly sources before publishing, since this period is reconstructed from limited and complicated evidence.
A sacred practice older than the records
Start with what the name itself tells you, because it is not subtle. Teonanacatl, flesh of the gods, is not the name you give a recreational intoxicant or a casual folk remedy. It is the name you give something holy, something through which the divine is encountered, and that single word carries more about the mushrooms' place in Mesoamerican life than pages of description could. These were not, in their original context, drugs in the modern sense. They were sacraments, understood as a means of contact with the sacred, used within religious and ceremonial frameworks by peoples for whom the boundary between the natural and the divine ran very differently than it does for us.
The use was woven into the religious life of central Mexican peoples in the centuries before the Spanish conquest, including the Aztecs, or Mexica, whose empire the Spanish would topple. The mushrooms appear in the historical record as part of ceremonies and rituals, consumed in sacred contexts, sometimes at important occasions and gatherings, as a way of communing with the gods, seeking visions, divining, and accessing knowledge believed to come from beyond the ordinary world. This was an established religious practice embedded in a sophisticated civilization, not a marginal curiosity, and the reverence implied by the name extended into how the mushrooms were used, with seriousness and ceremony rather than idle indulgence.
How far back the practice reaches is genuinely hard to know, and honesty requires admitting the uncertainty. The written records that describe it come from the period of the conquest and after, since the pre-conquest peoples did not leave the kind of documentary record that would let us trace the practice with precision into the deep past. There is intriguing but contested evidence that has been read as pointing to sacred mushroom use stretching back much further, certain carved stone objects from the region, sometimes called mushroom stones, that some scholars interpret as evidence of an ancient mushroom cult, though their meaning is debated and uncertain. What can be said with confidence is that by the time the Spanish arrived, sacred mushroom use was an established part of central Mexican religious life, and that it very likely had roots reaching back well before the records that describe it, into a past we can only glimpse.
One documented occasion gives a vivid sense of how the mushrooms figured in Mexica life, and it is worth recounting because it punctures any notion that this was a marginal practice. According to colonial-era accounts, sacred mushrooms were served at major feasts and gatherings of the elite, including, by some sources, a great celebration tied to the coronation of a ruler, where guests consumed the mushrooms and experienced visions, some joyful and some terrifying, weeping or seeing portents according to what the experience brought them. Whether every detail of such accounts is reliable is a fair question, since they come filtered through colonial observers, but the basic picture they paint, of the mushrooms present at the highest occasions of the society and taken seriously as a source of vision and meaning, fits the reverence the name teonanacatl implies. This was not a fringe indulgence but something that reached into the ceremonial heart of the civilization.
It also helps to set the mushrooms in their wider context, because they were not the only sacred psychoactive plant the Mesoamericans knew and used. The region had a rich pharmacopeia of plants understood as having spiritual power, used by trained specialists within religious frameworks for healing, divination, and contact with the sacred. The mushrooms sat within that broader tradition of plant knowledge, one element in a sophisticated and long-developed understanding of the psychoactive flora of the region and its ceremonial uses. That breadth matters, because it shows the mushroom practice was not an isolated oddity but part of a whole worldview in which certain plants and fungi were doors to the divine, a worldview the conquest would set out to demolish in its entirety, not just in the matter of the mushrooms alone.
The missionary who wrote it down
Here is the irony at the heart of how we know what we know. Much of the best early written evidence for Aztec mushroom use comes from a Spanish Franciscan friar named Bernardino de Sahagún, who arrived in Mexico in the early years after the conquest and spent decades documenting the culture, religion, and daily life of the Indigenous peoples. Sahagún was a missionary, part of the very enterprise of converting the Indigenous population to Christianity and supplanting their old religion, and yet he produced one of the most detailed records of that old religion that survives, an encyclopedic work assembled with the help of Indigenous informants and scribes.
That work, generally known as the Florentine Codex, is an extraordinary document, a sweeping account of Aztec civilization compiled in the sixteenth century, written in both the Nahuatl language and Spanish, covering religion, customs, natural history, and much else. Within it, Sahagún recorded descriptions of the sacred mushrooms and their use, including accounts of how they were consumed at gatherings and the effects they produced, the visions and the altered states. So a Spanish friar, working to extend the reach of the Church, became one of the primary sources for our knowledge of exactly the Indigenous religious practice the Church wanted gone. It is a deep irony, and not a comfortable one.
Pull quote: A friar sent to erase the old religion wrote down so much about it that he became our best record of the very practice his Church was trying to destroy.
The irony deepens when you consider Sahagún's likely purpose. Missionaries documented Indigenous religious practices in part precisely so that they could recognize and root them out, the better to identify the survivals of the old beliefs hiding beneath a surface of nominal Christian conversion. Knowing what the old practices looked like was a tool for suppressing them, for spotting when a supposedly converted population was secretly continuing its former rites. So the very thoroughness of the record was, in part, in service of the erasure, an intelligence-gathering exercise aimed at the destruction of what it so carefully described. That the same documents now serve, centuries later, as a precious source for understanding and even reviving appreciation of the tradition is a turn the friars could not have foreseen and would not have welcomed.
The conquest as a war on the old religion
The Spanish conquest of Mexico was not only a military and political event but a religious one, and the suppression of the mushrooms has to be understood inside that larger campaign. The conquerors and the missionaries who followed them set out, with real determination, to destroy the Indigenous religion and replace it with Christianity. This was not incidental to the conquest but central to how its agents understood their mission, the saving of souls through the eradication of what they saw as idolatry and devil worship. The whole apparatus of Indigenous religious life, the temples, the priesthood, the rituals, the sacred objects, the calendar, became targets for destruction or forced replacement.
The sacred mushrooms, as a means of contact with the old gods, fell squarely within the scope of this campaign. To the Spanish religious authorities, teonanacatl was not a fascinating ethnobotanical curiosity but a tool of idolatry and demonic communion, a way the Indigenous people continued to consort with what the Church regarded as devils. The visions the mushrooms produced, which the Indigenous understood as contact with the divine, the missionaries interpreted as deception by the devil, and the use of the mushrooms as straightforwardly diabolical. From that standpoint, suppressing them was not cultural vandalism but spiritual rescue, the removal of a dangerous instrument of damnation, which is exactly the framing that let the suppression proceed with a clear conscience.
The instrument of that suppression, in part, was the Inquisition, the institution charged with policing religious orthodoxy, which extended its reach into the colonies. Practices associated with the old religion, including the use of sacred mushrooms and other Indigenous psychoactive plants, became matters for religious authorities to investigate and punish, treated as idolatry and superstition to be stamped out. The pressure of this religious policing, the danger of being caught in a forbidden practice, pushed the open, ceremonial use of the mushrooms into hiding. What had been a public part of religious life became something that had to be concealed, practiced quietly, away from the eyes of authorities who would treat it as a punishable offense against the true faith.
It is worth dwelling on the particular tragedy of how the visions were reframed, because it captures the collision of worldviews at the center of the whole conquest. To the Indigenous user, the mushroom vision was a genuine encounter with the sacred, a means of receiving knowledge and guidance from the divine, an experience of the highest value. To the Spanish missionary watching the same practice, that vision was the work of the devil, a demonic deception luring souls to damnation, and the very intensity and reality of the experience for the Indigenous person was, in the missionary's eyes, proof of how dangerous it was. So the two sides looked at the identical phenomenon and saw opposite things, sacred truth and diabolical lie, and there was no bridging that gap. The missionary's certainty that he was rescuing souls from the devil is exactly what licensed the suppression, and it is a sobering example of how a sincere conviction of righteousness can drive the destruction of something precious. The people doing the erasing did not, for the most part, think of themselves as cultural vandals. They thought of themselves as saviors, which made them all the more thorough.
There was also a practical and political dimension to the religious campaign that should not be lost. Destroying a people's religion is among the most effective ways to break their capacity to resist, since religion bound together the social order, the authority of leaders, the meaning of the calendar, the legitimacy of the whole way of life. By attacking the Indigenous religion, including its sacred plants and the specialists who wielded them, the conquerors were not only pursuing souls but dismantling the cultural infrastructure that might have sustained organized resistance to colonial rule. The suppression of teonanacatl, then, was a thread in a much larger fabric of conquest, one piece of a comprehensive effort to remake a civilization in the conquerors' image, which is part of why it was pursued with such persistence over so long a time.
Driven underground, but not out
Here is the part of the story that matters most, the part that turns it from a simple tragedy of erasure into something more stubborn and more human. The suppression did not fully succeed. Despite the determination of the conquerors and the missionaries, despite the Inquisition and the long centuries of colonial and then national pressure, the sacred mushroom tradition did not die. It went underground. It survived, in remote communities, away from the centers of colonial power, carried quietly through generations by people who kept the practice alive in secret rather than surrender it.
This survival is a genuine testament to cultural resilience, and it should be named as such rather than passed over. For roughly four centuries, from the conquest until the twentieth century, the sacred mushroom practice persisted in the shadows, maintained by Indigenous peoples in places like the Mazatec region of Oaxaca, far from the reach of the authorities who would have suppressed it. The tradition adapted, sometimes blending with the imposed Christianity in syncretic forms, the old practice surviving partly by wearing some of the clothing of the new religion, so that a healing ceremony might invoke Christian saints alongside the older understanding. But the core survived, the use of the sacred mushrooms for healing, divination, and contact with the sacred, carried forward in secret across an astonishing span of time.
The syncretism deserves a closer look, because it was not simply a disguise but a genuine and creative adaptation that is part of why the tradition endured. Faced with a Christianity imposed by force, the keepers of the old practice found ways to fold the new religion's figures and language into the existing framework, so that the sacred mushrooms might be approached with prayers to Christian saints, the Virgin, or God, even as the underlying purpose and understanding remained continuous with the pre-conquest tradition. To an inquisitor, a ceremony dressed in Christian language might pass as harmless folk piety. To the practitioner, the Christian elements layered onto rather than replaced the older meaning. This blending was a survival strategy, a way of hiding in plain sight, but it was also, over centuries, a real fusion that produced something genuinely new, a tradition that was neither purely pre-conquest nor truly Christian but a living synthesis shaped by the very pressure that had tried to destroy it. The healers who guided the twentieth-century ceremonies were inheritors of that long adaptation, not of some pristine unchanged antiquity, and recognizing that is part of taking the tradition seriously as a living thing rather than a museum piece.
The remoteness mattered as much as the cleverness. The practice survived best in places the colonial and later national authorities found hardest to reach and least bothered to police, the mountainous regions far from the centers of power where Indigenous communities retained more of their autonomy and their language and their old ways. Geography, in other words, was an ally of survival, the rough terrain of southern Mexico providing a kind of shelter that the open valleys near the capital did not. That is part of why it was in such a region, the Mazatec mountains, that the tradition was still alive and recognizable enough in the twentieth century for an outsider to encounter it more or less intact, after four hundred years in which the practice had been driven from the public life of the conquered heartland but never fully extinguished in the harder-to-reach corners of the land.
It was this surviving tradition that Wasson encountered in the 1950s, and that framing changes the meaning of his famous discovery considerably. He did not discover the mushrooms, and he did not discover their use. He stumbled, as an outsider, onto the living remnant of a sacred practice that had endured for centuries of suppression precisely by staying hidden, and then he published its location to the world. Seen against this longer history, the harm that followed his exposure takes on an added dimension. The tradition had survived four hundred years of colonial pressure by remaining concealed, and the thing that finally cracked it open to disruptive outside attention was not the conquest or the Inquisition but a magazine article, a reminder that exposure can do what centuries of force could not.
What the longer history changes
Recovering this older history does real work, and it is worth being explicit about what it changes in how we understand the whole subject. First and most simply, it corrects the timeline. The popular Western story that treats the 1950s as the beginning erases centuries, probably millennia, of Indigenous sacred use, and reframes a profound and ancient religious tradition as a mid-century curiosity discovered by a banker. Restoring the longer history puts the practice back in its true proportions, as something old, serious, and sacred that long predated and existed entirely independently of the Western attention that would later claim to have found it.
Second, it reframes the moral weight of the modern story. When you understand that the mushrooms were the center of a sacred tradition suppressed for centuries by colonial violence and only barely surviving in hiding, the later acts of extraction, the sampling, the naming, the commercialization, the flood of seekers, look different and weightier. They become not the discovery of a neutral natural resource but the latest chapter in a long history of outside forces taking, suppressing, or appropriating something that belonged, in every meaningful sense, to the Indigenous peoples who had kept it sacred and alive against enormous odds. The conquest tried to destroy the tradition by force. The modern world, in a gentler-seeming but still damaging way, has often treated it as a resource to be extracted and a curiosity to be consumed, and the through-line connecting those two is the consistent failure to treat the originating peoples as the rightful owners and authorities of their own sacred knowledge.
Third, it should shape how the present is approached, which is the part that reaches into the work being done now. As psychedelics move into mainstream research and commercialization, the long history of teonanacatl is a standing reminder that this is not an empty resource awaiting Western development but the sacred heritage of living peoples with their own claims, their own knowledge, and their own stake in what happens next. A field that forgets the centuries of Indigenous use and suppression, and treats the mushrooms as though their story begins in a laboratory or a clinic, repeats in a new key the same erasure the conquest began. Remembering teonanacatl is, among other things, an argument for humility, for acknowledgment, and for finding ways to ensure that the peoples who kept this knowledge alive are not, once again, the ones who bear the costs while others take the benefits.
Why this history matters
The history of teonanacatl matters because it is the true foundation under everything else, the part the popular story leaves out and the part that gives the rest its real meaning. Long before the magazine article, the laboratory, and the clinical trial, the mushrooms were the flesh of the gods, the center of a sacred tradition in a sophisticated civilization, used with reverence as a means of touching the divine. That is where the story actually begins, and beginning it anywhere later is a distortion that happens to flatter the West by making it the discoverer of something it merely noticed late.
It matters, too, as a story of attempted erasure and stubborn survival, which is its own kind of inspiration without being sentimental about it. A conquering power set out, with real force and real conviction, to wipe a sacred practice from existence, and it failed, because the people who held that practice refused to let it die and carried it through four centuries of hiding into the modern day. That endurance is the reason there was anything for Wasson to find, the reason there is a living tradition behind the molecule in the clinical trial, and it deserves to be honored as an achievement of the Indigenous peoples who accomplished it rather than absorbed quietly into a story about Western discovery. The honest way to hold the history of teonanacatl is as the long and rightful center of the whole subject, an ancient sacred tradition that survived a campaign to destroy it, and a standing reminder that the mushrooms now drawing so much modern attention were holy to living peoples for centuries before the modern world deigned to find them interesting.