Mexico enters the account as more than a destination in the search for psychoactive mushrooms: it is the setting of Indigenous practices that survived colonial suppression, and of a consequential encounter between those practices and Western attempts to explain them. The remote mountain villages of the south, especially Huautla de Jiménez in Oaxaca, become the focus of R. Gordon Wasson’s search. Yet the book also stresses that finding a surviving ceremony did not mean that an outsider had thereby understood its meaning.

Southern Mexico as a Field of Inquiry

Before turning toward Mexico, the Wassons had looked to Asia for the divine mushroom. Richard Evans Schultes redirected their search toward the Americas, where scattered reports from missionaries and anthropologists suggested that an ancient mushroom tradition might still be practiced in remote southern villages. Mexico thus became a place to investigate a possibility: whether accounts of sacred mushroom use described only a vanished past or a practice that remained alive.

In 1953, Wasson began the first of ten trips to Mexico and Central America. Several took him to Huautla de Jiménez, deep in the mountains of Oaxaca, where a missionary informant had said that healers used mushrooms. The setting mattered to the investigation not as scenery but as a meeting point between distant reports and living knowledge. At first, local people were guarded. Some denied knowing about the mushrooms; others said the practice had ended or survived only elsewhere. Their caution had a history: the sacramental use of psychoactive mushrooms had been concealed from Westerners for centuries after the Spanish conquest drove it underground.

The book places this local reticence against a much longer record of suppression. A sixteenth-century account by the missionary priest Bernardino de Sahagún describes mushrooms used in an Aztec religious observance, with participants experiencing varied visions and later speaking about them together. The account records an earlier religious context; it does not, by itself, establish that later Mazatec practice was unchanged or identical. That distinction becomes important when Wasson’s theory and the contemporary purposes of the ceremonies diverge.

Suppression and Religious Authority

The Spanish colonial campaign against mushroom practices was not merely a dispute over unfamiliar customs. The book describes the Roman Catholic Church as recognizing the ceremonies as a challenge to its authority. Missionaries condemned the mushrooms through Christian categories, while Indigenous people were questioned and tortured into disclosing their practices. Mushroom stones—some tall basalt sculptures carved in the form of sacred fungi and presumably used in ceremonies—were also destroyed. The Inquisition brought charges involving both peyote and psilocybin, placing the campaign within an early conflict over the use of plants and fungi as well as over religious authority.

In 1620, the Church formally condemned the use of plants for divination as contrary to Catholic faith. The account’s broader point is that religious practice was shaped by force as well as belief: a tradition could persist privately while becoming difficult for outsiders to observe. The Nahuatl designation for the mushrooms, rendered as flesh of the gods, sharpened the conflict. To Spanish authorities, the language could sound like a rival account of sacrament. The book contrasts the institutional mediation of Christian worship with the mushroom ceremony’s direct experience of visions, but it does not treat that contrast as a neutral comparison between interchangeable rites. It reveals why the ceremony could appear threatening to an institution seeking religious control.

Wasson, María Sabina, and the Meaning of Ceremony

Wasson arrived in Mexico with an existing hypothesis: that psychoactive fungi had played a profound part in the origins of religious experience. His encounter with María Sabina and the ceremony he attended seemed to support that idea. But the book qualifies the apparent confirmation. Wasson was prepared to interpret what happened in terms of his theory, and he shaped his access to the ceremony by telling María Sabina that he was worried about his son in New York and wanted to know about his welfare and whereabouts. After returning, he believed he had received accurate information about both.

That account of the encounter sits beside a crucial difference in interpretation. Wasson presented María Sabina as a religious figure and the ceremony as a kind of communion. The book notes that by 1955 many Mazatecs were devout Catholics, and that mushrooms were then used not primarily for worship but for healing and divination, including efforts to find missing people and important belongings. María Sabina later emphasized that people had taken the mushrooms to help the sick recover, not simply to seek God. Her account makes the ceremony’s local purposes visible and resists reducing a complex practice to the role it played in Wasson’s theory.

Mexico is therefore not just the origin point of a discovery story. It is where the difference between an outsider’s religious interpretation and practitioners’ accounts of healing and divination becomes explicit. The book recognizes that the mushrooms had a sacramental history while warning against treating that history as a complete description of their contemporary use. Wasson’s experience could be meaningful to him without settling what the ceremony meant to María Sabina or her community.

Circulation and Continuing Significance

The account of Wasson’s Mexican experience traveled far beyond the place where it occurred. His article in Life was read by millions; his appearance on the CBS program Person to Person carried the story to a much larger audience. Other magazines published first-person accounts of mushroom journeys using mushrooms Wasson had brought back, and an exhibition followed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The contrast is striking: a practice long kept from Western attention became a widely circulated subject, while the meanings attached to it were increasingly framed by the visitor who publicized it.

The book links that circulation to the persistence of institutional unease about practices that offer forms of religious or therapeutic experience outside established authority. It also cautions against confusing publicity with understanding. The historical record from Mexico, Wasson’s account, and María Sabina’s explanation do not collapse into one uncontested meaning. Together, they make the country central to the book’s exploration of how knowledge about mushrooms travels, who gets to interpret them, and how Indigenous healing traditions can be recast when they enter Western debates about religion and medicine.