CAMBRIDGE, MaAssacuuseTrs, NoveMBER 30, 1973 
BOTANICAL MUSEUM LEAFLETS 
HARVARD UNIVERSITY 
THE ROLE OF ‘FLOWERS’ 
IN NAHUATL CULTURE: A SUGGESTED 
INTERPRETATION 
BY 
R. Gorpon Wasson 
In the course of editing the text of a midnight mush- 
room velada (‘vigil’) sung by Maria Sabina, the Mazatec 
curandera or shaman, | have had occasion to concentrate 
my attention on the famous statue of Nochipilli, in the 
Museo Nacional de Antropologia in Mexico City, with 
results that | would now submit to students of the Meso- 
american cultures. 
NXochinandcatl. All students of the history of Nahuatl 
culture are familiar by now with the word teonanacatl, 
‘god's flesh’, the name used for the hallucinogenic mush- 
rooms by Fray Bernardino de Sahagtin and Fray Toribio 
de Benavente called Motolinia. But we may be justified 
in asking ourselves why this term is not to be found in 
Fray Alonso de Molina’s great lexicon of the Nahuatl 
language published in 1571. He gives us another word, 
vochinandcatl, “lower mushroom’, from wochit/, ‘flower’. 
We find wochinanacatl in a place name that survives 
to this day, Nochinanacatlan, a municipio of Tlaola, dis- 
trict of Huachinango, State of Puebla. Does the word 
occur anywhere else in Nahuatl] texts’ Was it one of 
perhaps several alternative expressions for the psycho- 
tropic mushrooms, one that Alonso Molina may have 
[ 305 | 
Vor. 23, No. 
