Sacred Mushrooms Through the Ages: A History That Was Almost Erased

The story most people know goes something like this: in the 1960s, Timothy Leary discovered psychedelics, everyone got high, Nixon got angry, and the government banned everything. Then, around 2006, some brave researchers at Johns Hopkins brought it all back.

That story is wrong in almost every way that matters. It centers the wrong people, skips the most important chapters, and conveniently erases the fact that human beings have been using psychoactive mushrooms for somewhere between seven and nine thousand years, and that the cultures who carried that knowledge were systematically ignored, exploited, and damaged in the process.

The real history is longer, darker, and more interesting. Let me try to tell it honestly.

The Oldest Evidence

In the Tassili n'Ajjer plateau of southeastern Algeria, there are cave paintings dating to roughly 7,000–9,000 BCE. Among the images of animals and hunters, there's one figure that has generated decades of academic debate: a humanoid form with mushroom-shaped objects sprouting from its body and hands, sometimes called the "mushroom shaman" or the "bee-faced man."

Ethnobotanist Giorgio Samorini and later Terence McKenna pointed to this figure as evidence that humans were using psychoactive mushrooms in North Africa thousands of years before recorded history. The identification is contested; some archaeologists argue the shapes could represent plants, ritual objects, or artistic abstractions that have nothing to do with fungi. The rock art is ambiguous by nature, and projecting modern psychedelic culture backward onto Neolithic images is a real methodological risk.

But the broader point stands even without Tassili: humans have been seeking altered states of consciousness for as long as we've been human. Every culture on every continent has developed technologies for this, fermentation, plant medicines, breathwork, fasting, drumming, dance. The idea that consciousness alteration is a modern invention, or a uniquely Western one, or a product of the 1960s counterculture, is historically illiterate.

Mesoamerica: Flesh of the Gods

The most extensive documented history of ceremonial mushroom use comes from Mesoamerica, and it's not ambiguous at all.

The Aztecs called psilocybin mushrooms teonanácatl, literally "flesh of the gods" or "divine mushroom." Spanish colonial accounts from the 16th century, particularly those of Bernardino de Sahagún, describe elaborate ceremonies in which mushrooms were consumed for divination, healing, and communion with the divine. Sahagún's Florentine Codex, written in the 1570s, describes participants eating mushrooms with honey, then experiencing visions, weeping, and states of ecstasy or terror.

The archaeological record goes much deeper. Mushroom stones, carved stone figures depicting mushroom forms, often combined with human or animal features, have been found throughout Guatemala and southern Mexico, dating as far back as 1000 BCE. More than 200 of these have been recovered. Whatever they represent, they indicate that mushrooms held significant cultural and spiritual weight in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica for at least three thousand years.

The Spanish colonizers, predictably, tried to stamp it out. Mushroom ceremonies were declared idolatry and suppressed under the Inquisition. The practices didn't disappear; they went underground, preserved in remote indigenous communities, particularly among the Mazatec people of Oaxaca, Mexico. They survived for four hundred years in secret.

And then a banker from New York showed up.

The Wasson Problem

R. Gordon Wasson was a vice president at J.P. Morgan and an amateur mycologist. In 1955, he traveled to the village of Huautla de Jiménez in Oaxaca, where he participated in a velada, a mushroom healing ceremony, led by a Mazatec curandera named María Sabina. He became, by his own account, the first known outsider to participate in such a ceremony.

Two years later, Wasson published an article in Life magazine titled "Seeking the Magic Mushroom." It was a sensation. The article introduced psilocybin mushrooms to mainstream Western culture and triggered a wave of interest that would eventually bring tourists, hippies, researchers, and opportunists flooding into Huautla de Jiménez.

The consequences for María Sabina and her community were devastating. The influx of outsiders disrupted the village. The sacred ceremonies were commodified and trivialized. Sabina herself was ostracized by her community, who blamed her for revealing the mushrooms to foreigners. Her house was burned down. She spent her final years in poverty, saying that the mushrooms had lost their power because they had been profaned.

This is the part of the history that psychedelic enthusiasts often skip. The Western "discovery" of psilocybin mushrooms came at a direct cost to the people who had been stewarding that knowledge for centuries. Wasson didn't intend to cause harm; by most accounts he had genuine respect for the Mazatec tradition. But intent doesn't undo impact.

The Laboratory

While Wasson was publishing in Life, the chemistry was moving forward independently. Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who had accidentally discovered LSD in 1943, received samples of Psilocybe mexicana from Wasson and, in 1958, successfully isolated and synthesized psilocybin and psilocin. For the first time, the active compounds could be produced in a laboratory, measured in precise doses, and administered in controlled settings.

This opened the door to clinical research. Between 1960 and 1970, hundreds of studies were published on psychedelics. The work was wide-ranging: psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy for alcoholism, depression, anxiety in terminal cancer patients, and the study of consciousness itself. Some of it was rigorous. Some of it was sloppy. Some of it was ethically horrifying; the CIA's MK-Ultra program being the most notorious example.

And then there was Leary. Timothy Leary, a psychology lecturer at Harvard, launched the Harvard Psilocybin Project in 1960 with Richard Alpert (later Ram Dass). The project began as legitimate research and ended as spectacle. Leary's increasingly public advocacy for psychedelic use, his confrontational style, and his famous exhortation to "turn on, tune in, drop out" made him a counterculture icon and a political liability. He was fired from Harvard in 1963. Nixon would later call him "the most dangerous man in America."

Whether Leary helped or hurt the cause of psychedelic science is still debated, and I'm genuinely not sure there's a clean answer. His advocacy brought awareness. It also brought backlash. And the backlash was nuclear.

The Shutdown

The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 classified psilocybin, LSD, mescaline, and DMT as Schedule I substances, defined as having high potential for abuse, no currently accepted medical use, and no accepted safety for use under medical supervision.

Every part of that classification was wrong, and it was wrong on purpose.

The scheduling wasn't driven by science. It was driven by politics. The Nixon administration explicitly targeted psychedelics as part of a broader campaign to criminalize and marginalize the counterculture and the anti-war movement. John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic policy advisor, said it plainly in a 1994 interview: "We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities."

Psychedelics got swept into this political operation. The Schedule I designation didn't just make possession a crime; it made research effectively impossible. To study a Schedule I substance, you needed DEA approval, an FDA investigational new drug application, institutional review board clearance, and a willingness to build your career on a topic that would make you professionally radioactive.

Almost nobody was willing. For thirty years, from roughly 1970 to 2000, psychedelic research in the United States essentially stopped. Three decades of potential scientific progress, erased by political calculation.

The Long Silence and the Return

The renaissance, when it came, was quiet.

In the 1990s, a small number of researchers began the painstaking process of navigating the regulatory obstacles. Rick Doblin, who had founded the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in 1986, spent years building relationships with the FDA and DEA. Franz Vollenweider in Zurich published careful neuroimaging studies of psilocybin in the late 1990s. The groundwork was being laid by people with enormous patience and a long-term vision.

The breakthrough came in 2006, when Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins published "Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance" in Psychopharmacology. It was the first rigorously designed, placebo-controlled study of psilocybin in healthy volunteers in nearly four decades. The results were remarkable: over 60% of participants rated the experience as among the most meaningful of their lives, and the effects persisted at 14-month follow-up.

The Griffiths study didn't just produce data. It produced credibility. Here was Johns Hopkins, one of the most prestigious medical institutions in the world, publishing in a peer-reviewed journal that psilocybin could produce profound, lasting, positive psychological changes. The door cracked open.

What followed was an accelerating cascade. Imperial College London launched its own psilocybin research program under David Nutt and Robin Carhart-Harris. NYU began studying psilocybin for end-of-life anxiety. MAPS advanced MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD through Phase 3 clinical trials. The FDA granted breakthrough therapy designation to psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression in 2018 and to MDMA for PTSD in 2017.

The New Landscape

The legal and regulatory landscape is now shifting faster than most people in the field expected. Oregon became the first state to legalize regulated psilocybin services through Measure 109 in 2020, with the first licensed service centers opening in 2023. Colorado followed with Proposition 122, which decriminalized psilocybin and created a framework for regulated therapeutic use. Cities across the country, Denver, Oakland, Santa Cruz, Seattle, Ann Arbor, Washington D.C., have decriminalized or deprioritized enforcement of psychedelic possession.

Australia became the first country to reschedule psilocybin and MDMA for therapeutic use in 2023. Canada has granted exemptions for psilocybin-assisted therapy in palliative care. The global momentum is real, and it's not slowing down.

But there's a tension at the center of this momentum, and I think it's one that deserves more honest attention than it usually gets.

The Appropriation Question

The modern psychedelic renaissance is, in large part, a story of Western science "discovering" what indigenous cultures have known and practiced for millennia. The knowledge that psilocybin mushrooms can produce profound healing experiences isn't new. It's ancient. And the people who preserved that knowledge, often at great personal cost, through centuries of colonial suppression, have received very little of the credit, recognition, or financial benefit from the current boom.

The psychedelic industry is now projected to be worth billions. Pharmaceutical companies are patenting synthetic psilocybin formulations. Retreat centers charge thousands of dollars for guided mushroom experiences. Venture capital flows into psychedelic startups. And the Mazatec communities who kept this knowledge alive through four hundred years of colonial repression are still, by and large, poor and marginalized.

This is not a comfortable thing to sit with, and I don't think there are easy answers. The clinical research is genuinely important; it's producing treatments for depression, PTSD, addiction, and end-of-life distress that could help millions of people. I don't think the response is to stop the research or shut down the clinical programs. But I do think the response includes acknowledging the debt, centering indigenous voices in conversations about psychedelic policy, and building reciprocity into the economic structures that are being created.

Organizations like the Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative and the Chacruna Institute are doing important work in this space, advocating for indigenous rights and pushing back against the extractive dynamics of the psychedelic industry. Whether the industry listens remains to be seen.

What the History Teaches

If there's one thing I take from this long, tangled history, it's this: every era gets the relationship with psychedelics it deserves.

Indigenous cultures embedded these substances in frameworks of community, ceremony, and reciprocity. They treated them as sacred. And the practices endured for thousands of years.

The 1960s West approached them with a combination of genuine curiosity and spectacular recklessness. The result was extraordinary creativity and devastating political backlash.

The current moment is approaching them through the lens of clinical science and commercial opportunity. Whether that produces lasting benefit or just another cycle of enthusiasm and prohibition depends on whether we learn from the previous chapters.

The mushrooms have been here longer than any of our institutions. They'll be here after we're gone. The question is whether we can be smarter this time about how we relate to them, and to the people who understood them long before we did.