Huautla de Jiménez, a village deep in the mountains of Oaxaca, became a crucial meeting place between Mazatec mushroom practice and Western interest in psychedelic experience. R. Gordon Wasson’s visits brought the village into international view, but the encounter also exposed a persistent divide: the local practice served healing and divination, while Wasson recast it through his search for the origins of religious experience.

Setting and Wasson’s Search

Wasson’s interest in a divine mushroom initially pointed toward Asia. Botanist Richard Evans Schultes redirected the search to the Americas, where missionary and anthropological accounts suggested that mushroom ceremonies might persist in remote villages in southern Mexico. In 1953, Wasson began the first of ten trips to Mexico and Central America; several took him to Huautla, after a missionary informant told him that healers there used mushrooms.

The welcome was cautious. Some residents denied knowing about the mushrooms, said the practice had ended, or directed Wasson toward another village. That reticence reflected a long history of secrecy rather than simple absence: sacramental mushroom use had been driven underground after the Spanish conquest, and Western inquiry arrived in a place where disclosure carried historical weight.

Suppression and Religious Conflict

The history Wasson encountered extended beyond Huautla. Sixteenth-century accounts by the missionary Bernardino de Sahagún describe mushrooms used in an Aztec religious observance, with participants reporting visions and discussing them after their effects passed. Spanish authorities treated such practices as a challenge to Christian authority. Indigenous people were interrogated about mushroom use, sacred mushroom stones were destroyed, and the Inquisition pursued cases involving peyote and psilocybin. In 1620, the Roman Catholic Church formally condemned the use of plants for divination.

The conflict was also one of competing claims to access the sacred. The Nahuatl name for the mushrooms, Flesh of the gods, echoed Christian sacramental language, but the two practices organized religious access differently: the Eucharist depended on church ritual and priestly mediation, whereas mushrooms could give the person who consumed them a direct visionary experience. This broader history helps explain why mushroom use remained guarded, while also cautioning against treating every later ceremony as an unchanged survival of an ancient rite.

Ceremony and the Meaning of the Practice

Wasson entered a mushroom ceremony in Huautla in 1955 with a theory already in mind: he believed psychoactive fungi might have helped give rise to religious experience itself. To gain access, he told María Sabina that he was worried about his son and wanted to learn where he was and whether he was well. On returning to New York, Wasson believed that information he had received during the ceremony proved accurate.

But Wasson’s interpretation did not match the practice’s contemporary meaning for many Mazatecs. By 1955, many had become devout Catholics, and mushrooms were used not simply to worship or find God, but to heal the sick and to divine the whereabouts of missing people and important objects. Wasson knew of these purposes, yet presented the ceremony through the framework of sacramental communion and a universal search for divinity. His account therefore made Huautla legible to Western readers partly by narrowing a complex local practice to fit his prior hypothesis.

Reputation and Legacy

Wasson’s writing and public appearances brought the mushroom ceremonies to a mass audience, making Huautla a reference point in the expanding Western story of psychedelic mushrooms. That visibility carried an interpretive cost: the village’s healing and divinatory traditions could be overshadowed by the outsider’s claim that the mushrooms offered a path to God. The contrast between Wasson’s religious reading and the uses he knew Mazatecs made is central to Huautla’s significance in the book—not merely as a remote setting for a famous discovery, but as the place where an influential account of psychedelic revelation met a living practice with its own purposes and meanings.