judge by their words) at first rejected them with horror 
and loathing as an abomination, and in the ensuing cen- 
turies simply ignored them. 
Such was this neglect that in 1915 William E. Safford, 
a North American economic botanist of established repu- 
tation, found it possible to read a major paper before a 
learned society, afterwards published in a respectable 
learned journal, denying that there had ever been sacred 
mushrooms in Mexico.”” Virtually no one challenged 
him. In a world indifferent to such matters, torn by 
warfare, his arguments won by default. Only a single 
thin voice was raised in persistent protest, the voice of 
Dr. Blas Pablo Reko, a Mexican citizen born in Austria 
of Slavic family background, a tireless and enthusiastic 
field worker but one given to fanciful theories and so not 
taken seriously.'' He kept insisting not only that the 
mushrooms had existed but that the cult survived in 
places off the beaten track in Oaxaca. 
Twenty years went by until, one day in 1986, Ing. 
Roberto J. Weitlaner got his hands on some of the sacred 
mushrooms in Huautla de Jiménez. He sent them to 
Reko, who forwarded them to Harvard, where they ar- 
rived in such a state that they could not be identified. 
On the record Ing. Weitlaner was the first white man in 
mocern times to have seen the teonanacat/. '‘'wo years 
later, on July 16, 1938, his daughter Irmgard, with the 
young anthropologist who was destined to become her 
husband, Jean Bassett Johnson, together with two 
others, Bernard Bevan and Louise Lacaud, attended a 
mushroom rite in Huautla, in the home of José Dorantes. 
Johnson later gave a full account of the event.” So far 
as the sources go, they were the first white persons to 
attend such a ceremony. 
One month later, in mid- August, the Harvard botanist 
Richard Evans Schultes, also in Huautla, received from 
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