Much of our understanding of Mesoamerican religion has been pieced together from Spanish chronicles and prehispanic and Colonial period manuscripts called codices. Unfortunately, for our understanding of the role of mushrooms in this religion, the Spanish missionaries who reported these mushroom rituals were repulsed by what they perceived to be similarities to holy Christian communion.As a result, they made no attempt to record the rituals in detail and banished all forms of mushroom use.
Spanish chroniclers recorded that the Aztecs, at the time of the Spanish Conquest, revered three different kinds of narcotic mushrooms. This reference led me to a Wasson pamphlet in which he wrote that he had found this information in a guide for missionaries written before 1577 by Dr. Francisco Hernandez, physician to the king of Spain (Wasson, 1962: 36; see also Furst, 1990 ed., 9)
One of the Spanish chroniclers named Jacinto de la Serna, 1892 (The Manuscript of Serna) described the use of sacred mushrooms for divination: “These mushrooms were small and yellowish (Psilocybin mushrooms) and to collect them the priest and all men appointed as ministers went to the hills and remained almost the whole night in sermonizing and praying” (Quest for the Sacred Mushroom, Stephan F. de Borhegyi 1957).
Mushrooms were so closely associated with death and underworld jaguar transformation and Venus resurrection that I conclude that they must have been believed to be the vehicle through which both occurred. They are also so closely associated with ritual decapitation, that their ingestion may have been considered essential to the ritual itself, whether in real life or symbolically in the underworld.
Ethno-mycologist Robert Gordon Wasson believed that the origin of ritual decapitation lay in the mushroom ritual itself.In a letter to my father, Mesoamerican archaeologist Stephan de Borhegyi he writes:
“The cap of the mushroom in Mije (or Mixe) is called kobahk, the same word for head. In Kiche and Kakchiquel it is doubtless the same, and kolom ocox is not “mushroom heads”, but mushroom caps, or in scientific terminology, the pileus of the mushroom. The Mije in their mushroom cult always sever the stem or stipe (in Mije tek is “leg”) from the cap, and the cap alone is eaten. Great insistence is laid on this separation of cap from stem. This is in accordance with the offering of “mushroom head” in the Annals and the Popol Vuh.The writers had in mind the removal of the stems”.
“The top of the cap is yellow and the rest is the color of coffee, with the gills of a color between yellow and coffee. They call this mushroom, pitpa “thread-like”, the smallest, perhaps 2 horizontal fingers high, with a cap small for the height, growing everywhere in clean earth, often along the mountain trails with many in a single place. In Mije the cap of the mushroom is called the “head” “kobahk in the dialect of Mazatlan. When the “heads are consumed, they are not chewed, but swallowed fast one after the other,in pairs.” ( June 7, 1954, MPM archives)
