Indigenous Peoples, Ceremonies, and the Medicinal Use of Psilocybin

Long before psilocybin entered modern laboratories, clinical trials, and discussions about psychedelic-assisted therapy, psychoactive mushrooms already held a place in the ceremonial and healing traditions of several Indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica.

It is important not to speak about “Indigenous use” as if it were one universal practice. Indigenous cultures are highly diverse, and the historical use of psilocybin-containing mushrooms is particularly well documented among communities in what is now Mexico, including Mazatec, Zapotec, Mixtec and Nahua/Mexica traditions. Different communities developed their own languages, meanings, rituals, and relationships with these mushrooms.

Psilocybin mushrooms in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica

Ethnohistorical and archaeological research indicates that psychoactive mushrooms were used in Mesoamerica for religious ceremonies, divination, and healing. Spanish colonial accounts documented a mushroom known as teonanácatl, commonly translated as “divine flesh” or “flesh of the gods,” among Nahua-speaking peoples. These accounts described altered states of consciousness associated with ceremonial mushroom use.

The Florentine Codex, compiled in the sixteenth century by Bernardino de Sahagún with extensive Indigenous Nahua knowledge, is among the earliest written sources describing these practices. Modern scholarship also points to mushroom imagery and ritual evidence from earlier Mesoamerican cultures, although archaeological objects need to be interpreted carefully rather than treating every mushroom-shaped artifact as proof of psychedelic use.

Spanish colonization and Christian religious persecution strongly disrupted many pre-Christian Indigenous ceremonies. Some mushroom traditions became less visible or were practiced privately for generations. Research on communities in southern Mexico suggests that colonial suppression contributed to the decline or concealment of sacred mushroom practices in some areas.

The Mazatec velada: more than simply taking mushrooms

One of the best-documented living traditions is found among the Mazatec people of Oaxaca, Mexico. In Mazatec practice, sacred mushroom ceremonies have often been described as veladas, nighttime healing ceremonies involving prayer, chanting, conversation, symbolic interpretation, and the guidance of a knowledgeable healer or curandera/o.

María Sabina, a Mazatec curandera from Huautla de Jiménez, became internationally known in the twentieth century. Archival and ethnographic records of her veladas show that mushrooms were embedded within a much larger cultural and spiritual framework rather than treated as recreational intoxicants.

Within these traditions, illness and healing could include physical, psychological, relational, spiritual, and communal dimensions. The ceremony therefore was not simply mushroom → altered state → healing. It included the healer, the person's condition and intention, ritual structure, language, music or prayer, community knowledge, place, and cultural meaning.

Modern psychedelic science uses different terminology, but researchers increasingly recognize that psychological state and environment—often described as set and setting—can influence psychedelic experiences and outcomes. This does not mean modern clinical protocols are the same as Indigenous ceremony. They are not. It does show that context is not an incidental detail.

María Sabina and the arrival of Western attention

Western public awareness of Mazatec mushroom ceremonies increased dramatically after R. Gordon Wasson visited Huautla de Jiménez and participated in a velada led by María Sabina. His 1957 Life magazine article introduced the practice to a huge international audience. Around the same period, Albert Hofmann and colleagues isolated and synthesized psilocybin and psilocin, helping move these compounds into Western pharmacological research.

This history also has a painful side. Publicity drew outsiders to Huautla, contributed to commercialization and disruption of local traditions, and placed significant pressure on María Sabina and her community. Later scientific and commercial development largely benefited institutions outside the Indigenous communities that had preserved this knowledge.

For that reason, the modern history of psychedelics cannot responsibly be told only as a story of Western discovery. The scientific isolation of psilocybin was new. The human relationship with psilocybin-containing mushrooms was not.

Why generalization is a problem

Contemporary ethnomycological work in Oaxaca continues to document local knowledge and ceremonial or medicinal relationships with Psilocybe mushrooms. At the same time, researchers emphasize that communities such as the Zapotec are culturally and linguistically diverse. Practices from one community should not automatically be presented as representative of all Indigenous peoples or even all communities within the same broader cultural group.

Researchers and Indigenous knowledge holders have also raised concerns about psychedelic tourism and the commercialization of sacred traditions. These pressures can transform practices rooted in community, spirituality, healing, and local ecological knowledge into experiences marketed primarily to outsiders.

Was this psychedelic-assisted therapy?

Not in the modern clinical sense. Traditional Indigenous healing systems should not be renamed retroactively as Western psychotherapy. Their understandings of health, illness, community, spirit, nature, and healing may be very different from contemporary psychiatry and psychology.

There are, however, meaningful parallels worth studying carefully. Traditional practices may emphasize preparation, trusted guidance, ritual structure, a protected environment, relationship, meaning-making, and the processing of difficult experiences. Contemporary psychedelic research likewise places substantial importance on screening, preparation, supervision, and integration. The similarity should encourage respect and curiosity—not the claim that modern clinics have simply reproduced Indigenous medicine.

What modern psychedelic science can learn—and what it should not take

Indigenous-led scholarship has raised an important ethical challenge for the modern psychedelic field. Indigenous knowledge has influenced psychedelic science while Indigenous communities have often had little power over how their traditions are represented, commercialized, patented, or used.

Respectful collaboration requires more than acknowledgement. It includes Indigenous leadership, cultural and intellectual sovereignty, appropriate benefit-sharing, reciprocal relationships, and free, prior, and informed consent when Indigenous knowledge or practices are involved.

Respecting Indigenous knowledge does not mean copying ceremonies, clothing, chants, titles, symbols, or rituals and inserting them into Western therapy. It means acknowledging where knowledge came from, avoiding false claims of lineage, listening to Indigenous scholars and knowledge holders, and understanding that traditional medicine cannot be completely separated from the communities and worldviews that created it.

A more complete view of healing

One of the most valuable lessons from this history is that psychedelics were not traditionally understood as isolated chemical interventions. The mushroom existed inside a relationship—with the healer, family and community, nature and place, ritual and meaning, and in many traditions, the sacred.

Modern psychiatry approaches psilocybin through neuroscience, pharmacology, clinical trials, diagnostic criteria, and measurable outcomes. Those tools are essential for determining safety and efficacy. History also reminds us that human beings have approached altered states through systems of meaning, community, spirituality, and responsibility for centuries.

A respectful future for psychedelic medicine should neither romanticize Indigenous traditions nor appropriate or dismiss them. Modern science and Indigenous knowledge are different systems, but Indigenous peoples preserved sophisticated relationships with psychoactive medicines long before the current psychedelic renaissance began.

Educational note: This article discusses history, culture, and emerging mental-health research. It is not an instruction or encouragement to use psilocybin or participate in unsupervised psychedelic ceremonies.