Psilocybin Mushroom Ceremonies

Sixteenth-century records of teonanácatl

A review by the Mexican mycologist Gastón Guzmán reports that the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún, writing between 1569 and 1582, described mushrooms used in special ceremonies by Nahua people and called them teonanácatl, rendered in that review as 'flesh of the gods' and in an earlier one as 'divine mushroom'. He states that the Spaniards suppressed ceremonial mushroom use and that references to sacred mushrooms then dropped out of the literature.

An American botanist proposed in 1915 that teonanácatl was peyote rather than a mushroom, and Guzmán reports that its identity as a mushroom was confirmed in the late 1930s through the ethnobotanist Richard Schultes, who acted on information from the physician Blas Pablo Reko about Mazatec ritual use in Huautla de Jiménez, Oaxaca. Guzmán proposes, as a hypothesis, that the mushroom Sahagún cited was Psilocybe caerulescens.

Archaeological claims and their limits

A neurology review states that Olmec, Zapotec, Maya and Aztec societies used hallucinogenic mushrooms and that mushroom stones dating from 3000 BC have been found in ritual contexts in Mesoamerica. Other scholarship is more cautious. Guzmán notes that Wasson and Wasson presented Maya mushroom stones in 1957 as evidence of ritual use of hallucinogenic mushrooms, while he discussed their resemblance to an edible Boletus group and a possible role as markers for good crops. He reports that other researchers read some figures of falling men as depicting hallucinogenic effects.

Guzmán calls pottery from the Nevado de Colima foothills, showing figures around a tall mushroom, vestigial evidence that suggests ceremonial use. These objects admit different readings, and the sources reviewed do not establish a continuous line from them to present-day ceremonies.

Outside attention in the twentieth century

According to Guzmán, the American anthropologist Jean Bassett Johnson visited Huautla de Jiménez in 1939 and observed a nocturnal mushroom ceremony without eating the mushrooms. The banker and amateur mycologist R. Gordon Wasson and his wife Valentina Pavlovna Wasson reached Huautla in 1953 and met the Mazatec curer María Sabina. Wasson returned in 1955 and took part in a ceremony under her guidance.

In 1956 Wasson brought the French mycologist Roger Heim to Huautla. Specimens cultured from Huautla reached the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, whose team isolated psilocybin in 1958. Wasson's article 'Seeking the Magic Mushroom' appeared in Life magazine in May 1957, and Feinberg describes a resulting fungus rush of foreign visitors to Huautla.

Names used by Nahua and Mazatec communities

Teonanácatl is the Nahuatl term recorded by Sahagún. Guzmán gives two renderings, 'flesh of the gods' in 2008 and 'divine mushroom' in 2001, so the exact gloss varies between sources. Among Mazatec people, Feinberg reports that the ritual is called a velada, meaning 'stay awake', that it takes place indoors at night, and that the ritual specialists are called chjota chine, 'people of knowledge'. Mushrooms are often referred to as 'child saints'. Spanish speakers use curandero for the specialist, and Feinberg notes that the term chamán is increasingly used.

Scientific, clinical and retreat vocabulary

In clinical research, psilocybin-assisted therapy means supervised dosing with preparation and psychological support, as in the trial by Davis and colleagues, which is a different intervention from a community ceremony. Kettner and colleagues use 'psychedelic ceremonies and retreats' for guided collective settings led by facilitators.

Mazatec veladas

Feinberg describes the Mazatec velada as an indoor, nighttime ritual in which a chjota chine provides mushrooms to clients, usually members of an extended family group. Language is central: the curer uses a charged, figurative form of speech, ending each line with tso, 'says', to convey words attributed to the child saints. The curer seeks the cause of the patient's illness, which may involve a lost soul or an intrusive substance.

Across the Mexican traditions he reviews, Guzmán reports that ceremonies are held at night, under the guidance of a shaman or an experienced older person, usually in the guide's home before a Catholic altar. Ceremonies mix native and Catholic elements, with prayers in Spanish, indigenous languages or both.

Other peoples and regions

Guzmán lists Nahua communities in the states of Mexico, Morelos and Puebla, Matlazinca communities in the state of Mexico, Totonac communities in Veracruz, and Mazatec, Mixe, Zapotec and Chatino communities in Oaxaca as groups that have used mushrooms ceremonially. He reports that traditional ceremonial use survives today only at elevations of about 1,500 meters and above, and attributes this to colonial persecution that left the practice among groups in remote mountain areas.

Contemporary ceremonial and retreat settings

Feinberg reports that some Mazatec curers now serve a foreign clientele and that some have adopted a customer-service approach, adapting the ceremony to visitors' preferences. Garcia de Teresa describes families that host tourists acting as intermediaries between visitors and the people who pick mushrooms.

Outside Mexico, a survey of 886 attendees of psychedelic ceremonies and retreats found that the planned substance was psilocybin mushrooms or truffles for about 80 percent and ayahuasca for about 15 percent. The sources reviewed do not describe a standard format for such retreats or any training standard for facilitators.

Uses described within Mazatec practice

Feinberg reports that most Mazatec people today say mushrooms should be taken to address a particular health problem. These may be conditions understood as psychological, such as susto, attributed to a sudden fright that makes the soul leave the body, or postpartum depression, as well as conditions that outsiders consider physical, such as an injury or back pain. He adds that rituals once addressed community-wide concerns such as drought, and that Mazatec practice allows much experimentation. These are descriptions by practitioners and community members, and the sources reviewed do not test them.

Uses sought in contemporary settings

Feinberg reports that visitors to Huautla usually describe their experiences as very positive and tend to stress a self-oriented search for meaning, in contrast with the emphasis on collective, social aspects of Mazatec healing. In the retreat survey by Kettner and colleagues, the primary outcomes were change in psychological wellbeing and social connectedness. Neither source tests whether ceremonies cause such outcomes.

Ceremonial settings

No controlled trial of a traditional Mazatec or other Indigenous mushroom ceremony was found in the searches run for this entry. The only quantitative data on guided ceremonial settings in the sources reviewed are observational: in a web-based survey of 886 retreat participants recruited through online forums, felt togetherness during the ceremony correlated with increases in wellbeing (r = 0.22) and social connectedness (r = 0.25). With no control group and self-reported outcomes, the survey cannot show that retreats cause these changes.

Clinical trials of psilocybin with psychological support

Clinical trials test a different intervention: a measured psilocybin dose in a clinic with preparation and psychological support. An open-label study gave 12 people with treatment-resistant depression two doses 7 days apart with no control group, and depression scores fell at 1 week and 3 months. Griffiths and colleagues randomized 51 people with life-threatening cancer in a double-blind crossover of very low versus high dose, and about 80 percent still showed clinically significant decreases in depressed mood and anxiety at 6 months.

Davis and colleagues randomized 27 adults with major depressive disorder to immediate or waiting-list psilocybin therapy, and among 24 completers ratings were lower at weeks 1 and 4 after treatment than in the waiting group. Carhart-Harris and colleagues compared two 25 mg doses with escitalopram in 59 people over 6 weeks, and the primary outcome did not differ significantly. In 233 people with treatment-resistant depression, Goodwin and colleagues found that at 3 weeks 25 mg lowered scores more than 1 mg, 10 mg did not, and sustained response at 12 weeks was not generally supported.

Blinding and expectancy

A 2025 meta-analysis by Hieronymus and colleagues of 17 trials found that control groups in four psilocybin trials (373 participants) improved less than control groups in antidepressant or esketamine trials. The authors raise concerns about functional unblinding and positive expectations and suggest that psilocybin's efficacy might be overestimated. A waiting-list design is not blinded, and none of these trials tests ceremonial use.

Wasson, María Sabina and the arrival of outsiders

Feinberg reports that after Wasson's Life article foreigners descended on Huautla, first avant-garde intellectuals and then thousands of countercultural visitors. He cites a statement by María Sabina, recorded by Álvaro Estrada in 1981, attributing a decline in the mushrooms' power to the arrival of foreigners, but argues that many changes in Mazatec curing respond to other causes and should not be seen only as foreign contamination. Garcia de Teresa notes that Wasson paid Sabina 50 pesos for a ceremony in 1955, which complicates accounts in which payment began only with mass tourism.

Sandoval-Cervantes writes that María Sabina has become a commercial icon whose image appears on merchandise, and that local residents often claim kinship with her to validate mushroom services offered to visitors.

Commercialization, extraction and calls for Indigenous guidance

Garcia de Teresa reports that Wasson set up local procurement networks and collected 80 kilograms of mushrooms in 1957 for pharmaceutical laboratories, and that the later tourist trade distributed benefits unevenly, with intermediaries in tourist-hosting families gaining more than pickers. Critics, including the Mazatec journalist Álvaro Estrada, argued that the trade profaned the mushroom spirit.

An Indigenous-led group of practitioners, scholars and others reports concerns about cultural appropriation, exclusion from research and practice, and patenting of traditional medicines in the Western psychedelic field. It proposes eight principles: reverence, respect, responsibility, relevance, regulation, reparation, restoration and reconciliation. Feinberg found that only one of 58 abstracts in two clinical tracks of a 2017 psychedelic science conference placed psychedelic experience in a particular cultural setting.

Psychological distress and psychosis

A safety review by Johnson, Richards and Griffiths identifies overwhelming distress during drug action, a so-called bad trip, as the most likely risk of hallucinogens, which could lead to dangerous behavior such as leaving the study site. Less common are prolonged psychoses. Its safeguards include excluding volunteers with a personal or family history of psychotic disorders.

In an online survey of 1,993 people describing their worst experience after psilocybin mushrooms, 11 percent put themselves or others at risk and 2.7 percent received medical help. Among those whose experience was over a year earlier, 7.6 percent sought treatment for enduring psychological symptoms, three cases appeared associated with onset of enduring psychotic symptoms and three with attempted suicide, while 84 percent endorsed benefit. Risk rose with dose, duration and difficulty and with absence of physical comfort and social support. Respondents were self-selected.

Physical effects and adverse-event reporting

A meta-analysis of 30 studies of psychedelic psychotherapy, covering several substances rather than psilocybin alone, found nine serious adverse events across more than 1,000 administrations and an increased risk of elevated heart rate and blood pressure and of nausea. In the 233-person trial by Goodwin and colleagues, adverse events occurred in 77 percent and suicidal ideation, behavior or self-injury occurred in all dose groups.

A systematic review of 24 psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy trials rated side-effect reporting quality as high in six, moderate in four, low in nine and very low in five, and all nine randomized trials were at high risk of bias for side-effect outcomes. A cardiovascular review reports relative cardiovascular safety in healthy volunteers but a lack of data in people with cardiovascular disease.

Suitability and care boundaries

The Davis trial excluded people with histories of psychotic disorder, serious suicide attempt or hospitalization and people using antidepressant medications, so those groups are not represented in its findings. The sources reviewed do not cover interactions with medications, pregnancy or standardized screening in ceremonial settings. Findings from screened, prepared and supported laboratory participants do not transfer automatically to unsupervised use. A ceremony or retreat is not a substitute for necessary medical or mental health care, and this information is educational and not individualized advice.