Richard Evans Schultes

Richard Evans Schultes was a Harvard ethnobotanist whose work on psychoactive plants and fungi connected Indigenous knowledge in the Americas with the emerging Western study of psychedelics. By identifying teonanácatl, the sacred mushroom of the Aztecs and their descendants, and documenting ololiuqui, he helped redirect R. Gordon Wasson’s search for a divine mushroom and supplied botanical knowledge that preceded Timothy Leary’s arrival at Harvard by more than a quarter century.

Identity and Botanical Scholarship

Schultes studied how Indigenous cultures used psychoactive plants and fungi, and the book presents him as a revered professor as well as a field researcher. Students remembered a classroom presence that included shooting blowguns during lectures and keeping a basket of peyote buttons outside his Harvard office. These details mark a striking contrast: his work concerned substances embedded in Indigenous practices, while his academic position brought that knowledge into a university setting.

His research identified teonanácatl as the sacred mushroom of the Aztecs and their descendants. He also identified ololiuqui, morning-glory seeds that the Aztecs consumed sacramentally and that contain an alkaloid closely related to LSD. The two findings placed fungi and plants within a history of Indigenous ritual use that Western accounts had often overlooked.

The Clue That Redirected Wasson

In 1952, the poet Robert Graves sent R. Gordon Wasson a clipping from a pharmaceutical journal referring to a psychoactive mushroom used by sixteenth-century Mesoamerican peoples. The article drew on Schultes’s research in Central America. Until then, the Wassons had been looking toward Asia for the divine mushroom they hoped to find; the report turned their attention toward the Americas.

Schultes’s work thus shaped the direction of a thirty-year quest without making him its central traveler. His findings pointed Wasson toward scattered missionary and anthropological reports that an ancient mushroom practice might have survived in remote mountain villages of southern Mexico. Wasson began traveling to Mexico and Central America in 1953, including to Huautla de Jiménez in Oaxaca, where he sought information about healers who used mushrooms. The practice’s long concealment from Westerners formed part of the context for this search: after the Spanish conquest, sacramental mushroom use had been driven underground.

Teacher and Research Lineage

Schultes’s influence extended through his students. He trained a generation of American ethnobotanists, including Wade Davis, Mark Plotkin, Michael Balick, Tim Plowman, and Andrew Weil. The book places this teaching legacy alongside his research as part of his contribution to the arrival of psychedelics in the West: knowledge preserved in scholarship and in the Harvard herbarium was already present decades before the better-known public and campus history associated with Timothy Leary.

This chronology complicates the familiar account that begins with the 1960s. Schultes’s work had documented psychoactive plants and fungi, their Indigenous uses, and their historical significance well before that decade. His role was not the same as that of later psychedelic advocates or researchers; the evidence instead emphasizes his botanical identification, ethnographic research, and training of scholars.

Historical Significance

Schultes appears as a crucial intermediary between Indigenous knowledge, academic ethnobotany, and Wasson’s search. His research supplied a concrete lead that shifted the search from Asia to southern Mexico, where reports of surviving mushroom practices could be pursued. The narrative also frames his importance as underrecognized: he was one of a small number of figures whose work helped bring psychedelics to Western attention, while its roots in the Harvard herbarium extended back to the 1930s.

That significance does not make the later interpretations of mushroom use interchangeable with the practices Schultes studied. The book distinguishes the botanical evidence and historical reports from Wasson’s subsequent effort to interpret the mushroom as the origin of religious experience. Schultes’s documented contribution is more specific: he identified important psychoactive species, studied their use in Indigenous cultures, and made research that had been distant from the Western psychedelic story a decisive guide to its next chapter.