Research & Culture7 min read

A Short, Trippy History of Magic Mushrooms

Humans and mushrooms go back a very long way. The story of psilocybin runs through Indigenous ceremony, colonial suppression, a magazine article that changed pop culture, a Swiss chemistry lab, Harvard, the counterculture, decades of prohibition and, now, a research revival in hospitals and universities. Here is the long, strange trip, told as accurately as we can.

Ancient roots in Mesoamerica

Psilocybin mushrooms grow on several continents, but the clearest historical record of their ceremonial use comes from Mesoamerica, the region that covers much of present-day Mexico and Central America. The Aztecs knew a sacred mushroom as teonanácatl, a Nahuatl word often translated as "flesh of the gods" or "divine mushroom." The Spanish friar Bernardino de Sahagún documented Aztec mushroom rituals in the sixteenth century.

Archaeologists have also found so-called mushroom stones in Guatemala and nearby regions: small carved stone figures shaped like mushrooms, some with faces or animal forms. Many scholars read them as evidence of ceremonial mushroom use in Maya cultures going back well over a thousand years, although their exact meaning is still debated.

What we know for sure is that, for Mazatec and other Indigenous communities in what is now Oaxaca, mushrooms were used for healing and divination, often at night, in a ceremony led by an experienced healer. That context, with its preparation, intention and guide, looks a lot like what modern researchers call set and setting.

Suppression after the conquest

After the Spanish conquest, Catholic missionaries campaigned against Aztec religious traditions, including the use of sacred mushrooms. The practice did not disappear. It went quiet, survived in remote communities and was passed down in secret for centuries.

1955: a banker, a healer and a magazine

The modern Western chapter begins with R. Gordon Wasson, a vice president at the investment bank J.P. Morgan who had a passion for the study of mushrooms in culture. His wife, Valentina Pavlovna Wasson, was a paediatrician and his research partner. In 1955 Wasson took part in an overnight mushroom ceremony, called a velada, in the Mazatec town of Huautla de Jiménez. It was led by the curandera María Sabina.

In May 1957, Life magazine published Wasson's account under the title "Seeking the Magic Mushroom." Days later Valentina published her own first-person story in This Week magazine. Millions of readers in North America and Europe learned for the first time that these mushrooms existed.

The consequences for Huautla were serious. Waves of outsiders arrived looking for mushrooms. María Sabina faced police attention, was ostracized by parts of her community, and her house was burned. She later expressed regret about sharing the ceremony with outsiders, and she died in poverty in 1985. Any honest history of magic mushrooms has to hold both truths: the curiosity that opened Western eyes, and the real harm it caused to the people who had kept this knowledge alive.

1958: Albert Hofmann names the molecules

Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist at Sandoz who had discovered LSD's effects in 1943, received mushroom samples from the Mexican expeditions. In 1958 he isolated the two key compounds from Psilocybe mexicana and named them psilocybin and psilocin. He also worked out how to make them synthetically, and Sandoz later supplied psilocybin to researchers under the name Indocybin.

This mattered for science. Once psilocybin could be measured and dosed precisely, researchers could study it the same way they studied any other drug.

The 1960s: Harvard and the counterculture

In 1960 psychologist Timothy Leary started the Harvard Psilocybin Project with colleague Richard Alpert, who later became known as Ram Dass. Their studies, including experiments with prisoners and a famous Good Friday service experiment led by a graduate student, Walter Pahnke, generated fascinating results and a lot of controversy about methods. Leary and Alpert left Harvard in 1963, and Leary became a public face of the psychedelic movement.

Leary is also credited with popularizing the phrase "set and setting," the idea that your mindset and environment shape a psychedelic experience as much as the substance does. Historian Ido Hartogsohn has traced how the idea grew out of earlier research in the 1950s, including therapists who noticed that the room, the music and the relationship with the guide changed outcomes. Our set and setting guide puts it into practice.

The 1970s: prohibition and the home grower

As psychedelics became tangled up in the politics of the era, governments moved to restrict them. Psilocybin was placed in the most restrictive category of the 1971 United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances, and many countries passed matching laws. In Canada, psilocybin and psilocin are controlled under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. Most research ground to a halt for decades.

Ironically, this was also when mushrooms became easier to get. In the 1970s, books on growing Psilocybe cubensis indoors were published, and home cultivation spread. One was written by Terence McKenna and his brother Dennis under pseudonyms. Around the same time, mycologist Paul Stamets began his long career documenting mushroom species, later publishing the reference book Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World in 1996.

Terence McKenna and the heroic dose

No figure shaped modern mushroom culture quite like Terence McKenna (1946 to 2000). In 1971 he and his brother travelled to La Chorrera in the Colombian Amazon, an expedition he later recounted in his 1993 book True Hallucinations. In his 1992 book Food of the Gods he proposed the "stoned ape" hypothesis, a speculative idea that psilocybin mushrooms played a role in human evolution. Most scientists consider it unsupported, but it remains a famous piece of psychedelic lore.

McKenna is best known for championing the "heroic dose." Wikipedia summarizes his recommended practice as "five dried grams, taken alone, on an empty stomach, in silent darkness, and with eyes closed." He was a gifted storyteller who encouraged people to take the experience seriously rather than casually. That is worth remembering. Five grams of dried cubensis is a very strong dose, well beyond what most people need, and it is not a starting point. See our dose size guide for context.

The research revival

From the late 1990s, a handful of researchers began to revisit psilocybin with modern safety standards. A landmark 2006 study at Johns Hopkins, led by Roland Griffiths, gave psilocybin to carefully screened volunteers in a comfortable living-room style setting with trained guides. Two months later, participants rated the experience as having substantial personal meaning and spiritual significance. A 2011 follow-up by the same group compared doses and found that higher doses were more likely to produce mystical-type experiences, but also more likely to bring moments of extreme fear, which underlines why setting and support matter.

Since then, universities and hospitals around the world, including in Canada, have run trials looking at psilocybin alongside psychotherapy for conditions such as depression and end-of-life distress. Results are still being studied, and psilocybin is not an approved treatment for any condition in Canada. Health Canada has allowed limited access in specific cases, which our post on psilocybin in Canada explains.

Michael Pollan brings it to the mainstream

In 2018 journalist Michael Pollan published How to Change Your Mind, a mix of history, science and his own carefully planned trips with experienced guides. It became a bestseller and later a Netflix documentary series in 2022. Pollan helped many people see psilocybin as a subject for serious curiosity rather than just a party drug, while also talking openly about risks. In a 2022 interview with Time, he said that if he were writing the book again he would pay more attention to the risk of a bad trip: "People do have terrifying, excruciating experiences."

Canada's own psychedelic chapter

Canada has its own place in this story. In the 1950s, psychiatrists Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer ran pioneering psychedelic research in Saskatchewan, mostly with LSD, including work on alcoholism. Osmond is credited with coining the word "psychedelic," meaning mind-manifesting, in 1957. Their attention to the patient's surroundings and preparation fed into the ideas that later became known as set and setting. Saskatchewan was, for a time, one of the most active centres of psychedelic research in the world.

What history teaches us

A few lessons repeat through the whole story:

Context matters. From the Mazatec velada to the Hopkins living room, the most valued experiences happen with preparation, intention and a trusted guide.
Respect the source. Much of what Westerners know about mushrooms came from Indigenous communities that paid a price for sharing it.
Hype cycles come and go. Mushrooms have been called a miracle and a menace. The truth sits in the careful middle.
Dose is personal. McKenna's five grams and Hofmann's measured milligrams are both part of the story, and neither is a rule for you.

If you are new, start with our What Are Magic Mushrooms? guide and our safety guide. Mushrooms are for adults 19 and older, psilocybin remains a controlled substance in Canada, and it can interact with medications like lithium and some antidepressants.

Sources

This guide is general information, not medical or legal advice. If you have health questions, talk to a health professional.