How Schultes Found the Mushrooms

“Schultes identified the sacred mushrooms of Mexico in 1938. He sent specimens to Hofmann's laboratory. Hofmann isolated psilocybin. The collaboration made Plants of the Gods possible.”

When Gordon Wasson published his Life magazine article about the Mazatec mushroom ceremony in 1957, he was not the first Westerner to have identified the sacred mushrooms. That was Schultes, who had traveled to Oaxaca in 1938, nearly twenty years earlier, and had identified the mushrooms used in Mazatec ceremony, collected specimens, and sent them for analysis.

The 1938 identification was not widely publicized, partly because Schultes was at the time a graduate student without the institutional platform that would later give his findings wider reach.

When Wasson's 1957 article created widespread interest, Schultes had the relevant botanical documentation already in his archives. He facilitated the exchange that led to Hofmann receiving specimens and isolating psilocybin and psilocin in 1958.

The collaboration between Schultes and Hofmann that produced Plants of the Gods twenty years later was the culmination of a two-decade relationship that had started with mushroom specimens from Oaxaca. The field knowledge and the laboratory analysis had been in dialogue since 1938, the book was the record of that dialogue.

Sources

• Schultes & Hofmann, Plants of the Gods (1979)
• Wikipedia, Richard Evans Schultes