Psilocybe cubensis

All multicellular forms of life, including plants, animals and fungi, evolved from eukaryotic cells. A more accurate title for the website would identify this key psychoactive fungus as a thallophyte and the flowering vascular plants as angiosperms. At any rate, plants and fungi live in symbiosis, by means of mycorrhizal associations that facilitate the secretion and transportation of chemicals. 

As Ralph Metzner has written about the highly-repressive practices during the colonization of the Americas by Spain, “the suppression of the visionary mushroom cult by the Spanish clergy was effective and complete.” This is certainly in keeping with the ongoing inquisitorial spirit perpetuated by hypocritical contemporary anti-drug laws that severely limit research on fungi and plants that have many undeniable benefits for healing, especially in the field of psychiatry, at a time when, worldwide, as a result of the pandemic, we are facing the most serious mental health crisis since World War II.

But the ritual use of mushrooms for healing persisted secretly for centuries in remote parts of Mexico, as Alvaro Estrada writes in María Sabina: Her Life and Chants:

In June 1955, the U.S. mycologist R. Gordon Wasson was granted permission by Mazatec healer María Sabina who lived in Huautla de Jiménez, Mexico to attend and to document one of her ceremonies in which she chanted and healed the sick after ingesting the divine mushrooms. He published articles with dramatic photographs about his profound experiences in Life and Life en Español.

Three years later, he recorded one of María Sabina’s veladas (nocturnal vigils) in its entirety. The publicity resulted in a destructive onslaught of foreign “seekers of God”. María Sabina later told an interviewer: “From the moment the foreigners arrived, the saint children lost their purity. They lost their force; the foreigners spoiled them. From now on, they won’t be any good. There’s no remedy for it.” In a retrospective essay from 1976, Wasson laments being “held responsible for the end of a religious practice in Mesoamerica that goes back far, for millennia.” “I fear,” he continues, “she spoke the truth, exemplifying her wisdom. A practice carried on in secret for centuries has now been aerated and aeration spells the end.”

In How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, Michael Pollan describes taking some potent Psilocybe azurescens mushrooms that he found in the Pacific Northwest with the guidance of Paul Stamets, a leading expert on psilocybin species: “Dusk now approaching, the air traffic in the garden had built to a riotous crescendo: the pollinators making their last rounds of the day, the plants still signifying to them with their flowers: me, me, me! 

In one way I knew this scene well—the garden coming briefly back to life after the heat of a summer day has relented—but never had I felt so integral to it. I was no longer the alienated human observer, gazing at the garden from a distance, whether literal or figural, but rather felt part and parcel of all that was transpiring here.”

Stamets himself places these same ideas into a global environmental context: “Psilocybin mushrooms carry with them a message from nature about the health of the planet. At a time of planetary crisis brought on by human abuse, the Earth calls out through these mushrooms—sacraments that lead directly to a deeper ecological consciousness and motivate people to take action.”

Paul Stamets is collaborating with Giuliana Furci, the Founder and CEO of the Fungi Foundation on an important project called Historias y Memorias Mazatecas, which seeks to preserve the cultural heritage of the Mazatec people. Thus far, over the last two years, work has focused successfully on conserving and restoring historical artifacts and textiles as well as videos and photographs of leading Mazatec healers, including María Sabina. A secure, climate-controlled space has been constructed to protect the contents of the archive which was built over a lifetime by Renato García Dorantes. The collection is now curated by his son, Inti García Flores, a Mazatec historian and secondary school teacher in San Mateo Yoloxochitlán. Future plans, for which fundraising efforts are well underway, include the construction of a museum (and cultural center) so that these materials and this new space can benefit the Mazatec community. More information about the Historias y Memorias Mazatecas ethnomycological project and how to support it can be found here. 

The Fungi Foundation has been instrumental in promoting what it calls the FFF Initiative, which, according to the website, “elevates fungi’s conservation status by advocating for their inclusion in international laws and policies, promoting the term Funga alongside Flora and Fauna.” It also seeks to ally its work with the global Rights of Nature movement. To this end, the Fungi Foundation emphasizes Indigenous cosmovisions and ancestral relationships to Nature and understands Indigenous people as stewards of the genetics as well as the knowledge associated with medicinal plants and fungi. In an interview with Dennis McKenna on the Brainforest Café podcast series, Furci discusses how giving legal beinghood to mushrooms can accelerate habitat protection in that mushrooms are specific to their host symbionts. She reminds listeners that, unlike plants and animals, fungi cannot be removed from a particular habitat. This fascinating and inspiring conversation can be heard here.
A team of researchers headed by Sara de la Salle from the Department of Psychiatry at Montréal’s McGill University and Hannes Kettner from the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London published an article in Scientific Reports in 2024 analyzing the results of the pioneering work being done in Canada with regard to the use of psilocybin to treat anxiodepressive symptoms in patients with life-threatening illnesses. Legal pathways to obtaining access to “magic mushrooms” on the grounds of compassion began in 2020 and has reached perhaps 100 Canadian patients.  The researchers “conducted a prospective longitudinal survey which focused on Canadians who were granted Section 56 exemptions for legal psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy.” Data gathered from the small number of participants accepted for this formal evaluation suggest “significant improvements in anxiety and depression symptoms, pain, fear of COVID-19, quality of life and spiritual well-being” among most patients.