The same conspicuous emblem, obviously a plant mo- 
tif, is repeated on the four sides of the base and many 
have referred to it as a ‘flower’. But what flower and 
why’ From the beginning I thought that the five con- 
vex devices with inturned margins arranged in a circle 
were mushrooms. They are the caps in profile. A sixth 
is hidden by the carving of a mythic butterfly. But the 
eaps of mushrooms offer us a wide variety of shapes, in 
the wide variety of species and in the different stages of 
the life cycle of each species. Even among the hallucino- 
genic kinds—species of Psilocybe, Stropharia, and Cono- 
cybe—there is much diversity. The slopes of Popo- 
catapetl are the land of Tlalocan, the paradise of the 
Nahua, and here the statue was unearthed, in the heart 
of the sacred mushroom country. It was precisely in 
this vicinity that Professor Roger Heim discovered with 
the help of Nahuatl-speaking Indians Ps:/ocybe aztecorum 
Heim, a species then new to science, described and illus- 
trated later in Les Champignons Hallucinogenes du Meai- 
que, Plate NV, with the description on pp. 154-158. 
I draw attention to his figures 15 and 16 of specimens 
found in their natural habitat and showing the pileus at 
the moment when it begins to break forth into maturity. 
Slightly stylized, the mushrooms in stone catch admira- 
bly the precise convex shape of the actual pileus or cap 
of the living plant. The inturned margins (/a marge. . . 
incurvee, as Professor Heim says) are one of the specific 
characteristics distinguishing this species of Psilocybe. 
The left-hand Figure 1a reproduces what we find on the 
statue and 1b the illustration in Les Champignons Hal- 
lacinogenes: 
’ By Roger Heim and R. G. Wasson, published in 1958 by the 
Muséum National d’ Histoire Naturelle in Paris. 
[ 311 |] 
