A third consideration of the “telephone bell gods” as mush- 
room effigies was offered in 1974 by Professor Peter T. Furst. 
Referring to Emmerich, he reported: 
“Andre Emmerich developed the interesting theory that the 
pairs of telephone bell-like, semi-spherical, hollow-stemmed 
ornaments surmounting the head dress of a certain class of con- 
ventionalized anthropomorphic gold pectorals in the Darién 
style from Colombia (“telephone gods”) are in fact mushrooms. 
Emmerich demonstrated convincingly that over time these orna- 
ments gradually changed position as the effigies themselves 
became more and more stylized. On early, more realistic pieces, 
the mushroom form is unmistakable, the semi-spherical caps 
being separated from the head dress by stems or stipes attached 
to the top of the head. Subsequently, the stipes became shorter 
and the caps were slightly inclined forward. Eventually, the 
stipes, though still present beneath the cap, disappeared alto- 
gether from view and the two caps faced forward like a pair of 
female breasts. By this time the human characters had also been 
stylized to the point of abstraction” (Furst, 1974, 1976). 
Hf. 
Our own studies of the many gold pectorals in the Museo del 
Oro and our familiarity with the complexities of magico- 
religious, shamanic or ceremonial use of hallucinogenic plants, 
together with consideration of the natural range of psilocybine- 
containing genera of mushrooms in the New World, lead us to 
the belief that this identification of the dome-shaped head dress 
ornaments is indeed correct and that, further, they strongly sug- 
gest the religious use in prehispanic Colombia of intoxicating 
mushrooms. This interpretation of the gold pectorals has already 
twice been supported (Schultes and Hofmann, 1979, 1980). 
No other explanation of the possible significance of these 
domes has ever, so far as we know, been advanced. Significance 
they most certainly must have had. We are left, then, with the 
inescapable conclusion that they cannot represent anything else 
than mushroms. 
In a number of the pectorals, the domes are elevated on a 
stipe. Furthermore, a few of the domes have a mammiform tip 
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