Spanish colonial suppression of psychoactive mushroom ceremonies

Spanish colonial suppression of psychoactive mushroom ceremonies was an effort to break a religious practice that offered its participants a route to divine experience beyond the authority of the Church. In the centuries after the conquest, the ceremonies were driven underground; their later history would be shaped both by that suppression and by outsiders’ tendency to recast Indigenous healing and divination as a universal search for God.

A sacrament beyond Church authority

The practice was not readily visible to Western observers. For roughly four centuries after the Spanish conquest, sacramental mushroom use was kept secret. A rare early account came from the sixteenth-century missionary Bernardino de Sahagún, who described people taking mushrooms before dawn and responding in different ways: some sang or danced, others wept or sat in silence, and some experienced visions of danger, death, or conflict. Afterward, they spoke with one another about what they had seen. The account preserves a range of responses, not a single uniform ceremony or interpretation.

Spanish authorities regarded the ceremonies as a challenge to Christian religious authority. A priest brought to Mexico by Cortés condemned the mushrooms as belonging to the devil and treated their use in communion as a rival sacred practice. The dispute was not merely over an unfamiliar substance. The Nahuatl name for the mushrooms described them as the flesh of the gods, language that could sound to Christian authorities like a competing claim about how people encountered the divine. Christian communion depended on faith and Church liturgy; mushroom use, by contrast, was understood to give its participants direct access to visions of another world. The conflict therefore concerned who could mediate sacred experience, and whether the Church could claim that role exclusively.

Suppression and its record

The campaign against the ceremonies used both religious condemnation and coercive enforcement. Indigenous people were interrogated and tortured into confessing their participation. Mushroom stones—basalt sculptures of sacred fungi, some about a foot tall and apparently used in ceremonies—were smashed. These actions attacked more than the continued use of mushrooms: they also targeted objects and knowledge through which the practice could be remembered and transmitted.

The Spanish Inquisition brought dozens of charges against Native Americans involving peyote and psilocybin. In 1620, the Roman Catholic Church formally declared the use of plants for divination contrary to the faith. The book presents this history as an early battle in what might be called a war on drugs, while making the sharper distinction that it was a war on particular plants and fungi. That framing places religious suppression and later disputes over psychoactive substances in the same broad history without making them identical events.

The consequences included concealment. The ceremonies’ secrecy for centuries helps explain why accounts were scattered and why Western visitors could encounter reluctance, denial, or claims that the practice had disappeared. When R. Gordon Wasson began traveling in Mexico and Central America in 1953, local people in Huautla de Jiménez were initially guarded about mushroom use. That reticence belonged to a history in which disclosure could carry religious and personal risk; it should not be mistaken for evidence that the practice had simply vanished.

Survival, healing, and outsider interpretation

Suppression did not freeze the ceremonies in one historical form. By the time Wasson encountered them in 1955, many Mazatecs had become devout Catholics, and mushroom use served purposes that included healing and divination—such as seeking information about missing people or lost items. Wasson knew that contemporary context. To gain access to a ceremony, he told María Sabina that he was worried about his son and wanted to know about his whereabouts and well-being.

Wasson nevertheless interpreted the encounter through a theory he had brought with him: that psychoactive fungi lay at the roots of religious experience. He presented María Sabina as a religious figure and the ceremony as a form of holy communion, emphasizing its possible historical sacramental meaning while conflating that past with its contemporary use. María Sabina later explained that, before Wasson, people took the mushrooms to help the sick recover, not simply to find God. Her account exposes a second kind of displacement: after colonial suppression pushed the practice out of public view, a Western account could make it legible again by translating it into a universal religious story, at the cost of flattening local purposes.

Historical significance

The ceremonies survived, but the historical record is marked by unequal power: colonial authorities condemned and attacked the practice, while later outsiders acquired influence over how it was described to a broad audience. The book’s account keeps those histories distinct. Church suppression arose from a perceived threat to religious authority; Wasson’s interpretation arose from his prior theory and his interest in the ceremony’s religious meaning. They were not the same action, but both demonstrate how outside frameworks could overshadow Indigenous accounts.

The episode also complicates any simple story of a lost, unchanged sacrament waiting to be rediscovered. The earlier account attributed to Sahagún, the centuries of secrecy, and the Mazatec healing and divinatory uses known to Wasson belong to different moments and contexts. Their connection is real, but it does not erase change. The suppression’s lasting significance lies both in the coercive effort to silence a religious practice and in the difficulty of recovering its meanings without substituting the observer’s theology for the purposes of its practitioners.