the laboratory. Dr. Albert Hofmann (discoverer of LSD-25, a substance kindred 
to the active principles found in the hallucinogenic mushrooms) isolated the two 
active agents, psilocybin and psilocin, and with his colleagues defined their mole- 
cular structure and succeeded in synthesizing them. Dr. A. Cerletti with his 
colleagues studied their pharmacological and physiological properties. Professor 
Jean Delay, the eminent French psychiatrist, was the first to head up a team to 
experiment clinically with psilocybin and psilocin at the Hépital Ste. Anne in 
Paris. 
All of this activity culminated in the appearance of a book, Les Champignons 
Hallucinogénes du Mexique, large in format and richly illustrated, in the writing 
and editing of which Professor Heim was the prime mover. I contributed the 
historical and anthropological chapters, and Professor Heim did me the honor 
of joining my name to his as co-author on the title page; the Sandoz and Delay 
teams also made their several contributions. My wife and collaborator died at the 
end of 1958, and, when the book appeared a few weeks later, it was dedicated to 
her memory. 
It is appropriate, even inevitable, that, because of their number and broad 
scope and the quality of Professor Heim’s contributions, his publications and ours 
be listed together in the first section of our bibliography. The second section, 
divided into three parts, deals with THE PAST: a) Primary Sources, b) Later 
References, and c) Archeological. Under a) Primary Sources we give the citations for 
all references to the sacred mushrooms known to us in the early Mexican writings. 
As time goes on, more will certainly be uncovered. A promising area to explore 
lies in the body of surviving Nahuatl literature, largely in manuscript and mostly 
unread; Nahuatl is the language spoken by the Aztecs and many other peoples 
of Middle America at the time of the Conquest. Our b) Later References includes 
such citations as we have found in writers who are posterior to the Primary 
Sources (the last of these being Bishop Lanciego in 1726) and down to and includ- 
ing William E. Safford in 1915. During these two centuries the record shows no 
first-hand contact by white men with the sacred mushrooms, no field trips, no 
curiosity about them. The sacred mushrooms of Mexico had never arrested the 
attention of the great outside world. Now they were known only to a few 
scholars poring over dusty tomes and records, who occasionally would mention 
them perfunctorily in their own obscure publications. Then finally Safford 
appeared on the scene and delivered, as he thought, the coup de grace by declaring 
in an elaborate paper read before a distinguished society in Washington (later 
published with photographs and footnotes in a learned journal) that the vision- 
producing mushrooms had never existed. They had been, it would seem, an 
hallucination of the Spanish padres. The entries under c) Archeological are con- 
tributed by Dr. Stephan F. de Borhegyi, Director of the Milwaukee Public 
Museum, who for more than ten years has studied the “mushroom stones” of 
Middle America, those artifacts long considered enigmatic that we interpret as 
[ 26 | 
