native informants specimens of three species that they 
said were of the sacred class. He took them back to Cam- 
bridge. His field notes describe with unmistakable pre- 
cision the species that was to be defined in 1956 by Roger 
Heim as Psilocybe caerulescens Murr. var. mazatecorum 
Heim.” Dr. David Linder, Harvard mycologist, con- 
firmed another as Panaecolus campanulatus L. var. sphinc- 
trinus (Fr.) Bresad. Some time later the third species 
was identified at Harvard by Dr. Rolf Singer as Stro- 
pharia cubensis Earle, but he did not disclose his dis- 
covery, not even to Schultes, until many years later when 
it was too late to serve a purpose. 
Then the Second World War supervened. Johnson 
was killed in North Africa in 1942. Reko died in 1953. 
Schultes’ activities were diverted to other geographical 
regions. The outside world had been on the brink of dis- 
covering the Mexican mushrooms, but the war blanketed 
everything and the mushrooms slipped back into the well 
of the forgotten. 
Meanwhile the matter was being approached from an 
altogether different angle in New York, by the Wassons, 
husband and wife, who had spent more than two decades 
gathering data on the role of mushrooms in primitive 
societies in Kurasia. This theme in anthropology, which 
we called ethnomycology, had never before been explored 
in the West. Eurasia embraced so many cultures and so 
much history and literature that we had resolved early 
in our inquiries to stop with Eurasia and leave Africa 
and the Americas to others. Our Eurasian studies had 
led us to formulate a bold surmise: viz., that mushrooms 
had played a religious role in the lives of our remote an- 
cestors, a role far more important than the world had 
supposed. We were still preoccupied with this idea when 
in September 1952, suddenly, we learned that a mush- 
room cult had been reported in 16th Century Mexico. 
[ 168 | 
