The Salvia divinorum Research and Information Center - Shroomery

The Mushrooms of Language
The Mushrooms of Language
by Henry Munn
(This site is created and maintained by Daniel Siebert)
The Mazatec Indians, who have a long tradition of using the mushrooms, inhabit a range of
mountains called the Sierra Mazateca in the northeastern corner of the Mexican state of
Oaxaca. The shamans in this essay are all natives of the town of Huautla de Jimenez.
Properly speaking they are Huautecans; but since the language they speak has been called
Mazatec and they have been referred to in the previous anthropological literature as
Mazatecs, I have retained that name, though strictly speaking, Mazatecs are the inhabitants
of the village of Mazatlan in the same mountains.
(1) HENRY MUNN has investigated the use of hallucinogenic plants among the Conibo
Indians of eastern Peru and the Mazatec Indians of the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico.
Although not a professional anthropologist, he has resided for extended periods of time
among the Mazatecs and is married to the niece of the shaman and shamaness referred to in
this essay.
from: HALLUCINOGENS AND SHAMANISM,
edited by Michael J. Harner. © 1973 by Oxford University Press.
The Mazatec Indians eat the mushrooms only at night in absolute darkness. It is their belief that if you eat
them in the daylight you will go mad. The depths of the night are recognized as the time most conducive
to visionary insights into the obscurities, the mysteries, the perplexities of existence. Usually several
members of a family eat the mushrooms together: it is not uncommon for a father, mother, children,
uncles, and aunts to all participate in these transformations of the mind that elevate consciousness onto a
higher plan. The kinship relation is thus the basis of the transcendental subjectivity that Husserl said is
intersubjectivity. The mushrooms themselves are eaten in pairs, a couple representing man and woman
that symbolizes the dual principle of procreation and creation. Then they sit together in their inner light,
dream and realize and converse with each other, presences seated there together, their bodies
immaterialized by the blackness, voices from without their communality.
In a general sense, for everyone present the purpose of the session is a therapeutic catharsis. The
chemicals of transformation of revelation that open the circuits of light, vision, and communication, called
by us mind-manifesting, were known to the American Indians as medicines: the means given to men to
know and to heal, to see and to say the truth. Among the Mazatecs, many, one time or another during their
lives, have eaten the mushrooms, whether to cure themselves of an ailment or to resolve a problem; but it
is not everyone who has a predilection for such extreme and arduous experiences of the creative
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