Quoting ethno-mycologist Robert Gordon Wasson...
"It
{the magic mushroom} permits you to see, more clearly than our
perishing mortal eye can see, vistas beyond the horizons of this
life, to travel backwards and forward in time, to enter other
planes of existence even as the Indians say, to know God".
By Carl de Borhegyi
Above is a close up image from a page in the Madrid Codex, one of the few surviving pre-Hispanic texts which escaped the Spanish holocaust. The codex is the longest of the Maya books, some 56 pages painted on both sides, dating back sometime around the fourteenth or fifteenth century, and now is safely stored in the Museo de America in Madrid. The scene above depicts what I believe is a mushroom ritual prior to self sacrifice, which was an important part of Maya worship. The individual above is painted blue, denoting sacrifice (Sharer,1984:484), and he has what appears to be a disembodied eye in the shape of a mushroom. Note also that a head varient glyph of Chac appears at the top left of the page in which Chac's eye is shaped like a capital T representing the word ik. The character in the scene painted blue is surrounded by a ring of what look like tiny mushroom caps. These tiny mushrooms may denote a sacred portal of deification via Chac's axe and underworld decapitation. In this scene the blue individual is likely a willing victim of self sacrifice (suicide), because the artist depicts him unbound with his arms crossed in front of his body and not bound behind him (Baudez and Mathews, 1979). He also wears elite ear ornamentation. If he were a captive, slave or prisoner, he would have been stripped of these elite items. Its possible that the use of the color blue to denote sacrifice comes from the fact that the stem or stipe of the psilocybin mushroom turns blue when picked or bruised. That characteristic blue color is, in fact, the best and safest way to identify a psilocybin mushroom. ( Guzman, 2009:261)
Much of our understanding of Mesoamerican religion has been pieced together from Spanish chronicles and prehispanic and Colonial period manuscripts called codices. Unfortunately, for our understanding of the role of mushrooms in this religion, the Spanish missionaries who reported these mushroom rituals were repulsed by what they perceived to be similarities to holy Christian communion. As a result, they made no attempt to record the rituals in detail and banished all forms of mushroom use.
After the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs in 1521 the Catholic Church ordered the burning of all native manuscripts. Called codices, these pictorial documents contained much valuable information pertaining to native history, mythology, and ritual related to a pantheon of supernatural gods. Unhappily, due to Spanish intolerance of indigenous religious beliefs, only eighteen pre-Conquest books attributed to the people of Highland Mexico have survived to the present day.
Spanish chronicler Jacinto de la Serna, in 1650 pointed out that the Aztec calendar was called the "count of planets", and writes that the people of Mexico "adored and made more sacrifices to the sun and Venus than any other celestial or terrestrial creatures", and that it was believed that twins were associated with the sun and Venus, ("The Manuscript of Serna" 1892). Serna (1892) also described the use of sacred mushrooms for divination: "These mushrooms were small and yellowish and to collect them the priest and all men appointed as ministers went to the hills and remained almost the whole night in sermonizing and praying" (from "Quest for the Sacred Mushroom", Stephan F. de Borhegyi 1957).
While many anthropologists and archaeologists have accepted the idea that mushrooms and other hallucinogens were used in ancient Mesoamerica, their use was, in most cases, dismissed as relatively incidental and devoid of deeper significance in the development of Mesoamerican religious ideas and mythology. With a few exceptions, notably the research and writings of ethno-archaeologist Peter Furst, further inquiry into the subject on the part of archaeologists came to a virtual halt. Fortunately, a few mycologists, most notably Bernard Lowy and Gaston Guzmán, (2002:4; 2009) continued through the years to make important contributions to the scientific literature. To this day. the subject remains relatively little known and generally missing from the literature on Mesoamerican archaeology, art history, and iconography.
"Maya codices has revealed that the Maya and their contemporaries knew and utilized psychotropic mushrooms in the course of their magico-religious ceremonial observances" (Lowy:1981) .
The page on the left in the Madrid Codex depicts a probable ruler on a throne being offered what appears to be an Amanita muscaria mushroom. The ruler on the throne most likely represents in metaphor, the Sun God prior to his self sacrifice in the Underworld.
Spanish chronicler Fray Diego Duran ...
“The Indians made sacrifices in the mountains, and under shaded trees, in the caves and caverns of the dark and gloomy earth. They burned incense, killed their sons and daughters and sacrificed them and offered them as victims to their gods; they sacrificed children, ate human flesh, killed prisoners and captives of war....One thing in all this history: no mention is made of their drinking wine of any type, or of drunkenness. Only wild mushrooms are spoken of and they were eaten raw.”
...“All the ceremonies and rites, building temples and altars and placing idols in them, fasting, going nude and sleeping…. on the floor, climbing mountains, to preach the law there, kissing the earth, eating it with one's fingers and blowing trumpets and conch shells and flutes on the great feast days-- all these emulated the ways of the holy man, Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl”. (Duran, 1971: 59).
...“It was common to sacrifice men on feast days as it is for us to kill lambs or cattle in the slaughterhouses.... I am not exaggerating; there were days in which two thousand, three thousand or eight thousand men were sacrificed...Their flesh was eaten and a banquet was prepared with it after the hearts had been offered to the devil.... to make the feasts more solemn all ate wild mushrooms which make a man lose his senses... the people became excited, filled with pleasure, and lost their senses to some extent."
Duran called these mushroom ceremonies "Feast of the Revelations". He also tells us that wild mushrooms were eaten at the ceremony commemorating the accession of the Aztec King Moctezuma in 1502. After Moctezuma took his Divine Seat, captives were brought before him and sacrificed in his honor. He and his attendants then ate a stew made from their flesh. (Duran, 1964: 225).
“And all the Lords and grandees of the province rose and, to solemnize further the festivities, they all ate of some woodland mushrooms, which they say make you lose your senses, and thus they sallied forth all primed for the dance”.…
“When the sacrifice was finished and the steps and courtyard were bathed with human blood, everyone went to eat raw mushrooms”.
“With this food they went out of their minds and were in worse state than if they had drunk a great quantity of wine. They became so inebriated and witless that many of them took their lives in their hands. With the strength of these mushrooms they saw visions and had revelations about the future, since the devil spoke to them in their madness”.
While I may be the first to call attention to this encoded mushroom imagery in the Madrid Codex, these images can be viewed and studied with ease on such internet sites as Justin Kerr's Maya Vase Data Base and F.A.M.S.I. ( Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc).
For more read (Hidden In Plain Sight) "Breaking the Mushroom Code" by Carl de Borhegyi at http://www.mushroomstone.com/
