mushrooms had passed, they spoke one with another about
the visions that they had seen.The Spanish sought to crush the mushroom cults, viewing them,
rightly, as a mortal threat to the authority of the church. One of the first
priests Cortés brought to Mexico to Christianize the Aztecs declared that
the mushrooms were the flesh of “the devil that they worshipped, and . . .
with this bitter food they received their cruel god in communion.” Indians
were interrogated and tortured into confessing the practice, and
mushroom stones—many of them foot-tall chiseled basalt sculptures of
the sacred fungi, presumably used in religious ceremonies—were
smashed. The Inquisition would bring dozens of charges against Native
Americans for crimes involving both peyote and psilocybin, in what
amounted to an early battle in the war on drugs—or, to be more precise,
the war on certain plants and fungi. In 1620, the Roman Catholic Church
declared that the use of plants for divination was “an act of superstition
condemned as opposed to the purity and integrity of our Holy Catholic
Faith.”
It’s not hard to see why the church would have reacted so violently to
the sacramental use of mushrooms. The Nahuatl word for the
mushrooms—flesh of the gods—must have sounded to Spanish ears like a
direct challenge to the Christian Sacrament, which of course was also
understood to be the flesh of the gods, or rather of the one God. Yet the
mushroom sacrament enjoyed an undeniable advantage over the
Christian version. It took an act of faith to believe that eating the bread
and wine of the Eucharist gave the worshipper access to the divine, an
access that had to be mediated by a priest and the church liturgy.
Compare that with the Aztec sacrament, a psychoactive mushroom that
granted anyone who ate it direct, unmediated access to the divine—to
visions of another world, a realm of the gods. So who had the more
powerful sacrament? As a Mazatec Indian told Wasson, the mushrooms
“carry you there where god is.”
The Roman Catholic Church might have been the first institution to
fully recognize the threat to its authority posed by a psychedelic plant, but
it certainly wouldn’t be the last.