angel had me in his keeping when, after the Second 
World War, I ascended the steps of his laboratory in 
Paris to meet him for the first time, astranger, an Ameri- 
can, an ignoramus in the complex, the vast, the exacting 
discipline that you and he share together? At once he 
made me feel at home and it was not long before he was 
developing enthusiasm for our ethnomycological in- 
quiries. Later he became our indispensable and beloved 
partner in our Middle American forays. 
I do not recall which of us, my wife or I, first dared to 
put into words, back in the °40’s, the surmise that our 
own remote ancestors, perhaps 4,000 years ago, wor- 
shipped a divine mushroom. It seemed to us that this 
might explain the phenomenon of mycophilia vs. myco- 
phobia, for which we found an abundance of supporting 
evidence in philology and folklore. Nor am I sure 
whether our conjecture was before or after we had learned 
of the role of Amanita muscaria in the religion of several 
remote tribes of Siberia. Our bold surmise seems less 
bold now than it did then. | remember distinctly how it 
came about that we embarked on our Middle American 
explorations. In the fall of 1952 we learned that the 16th 
century writers, describing the Indian cultures of Mexico, 
had recorded that certain mushrooms played a divinatory 
role in the religion of the natives. Simultaneously we 
learned that certain pre-Columbian stone artifacts re- 
sembling mushrooms, most of them roughly a foot high, 
had been turning up, usually in the highlands of Guate- 
mala, in increasing numbers. For want of a better name, 
the archeologists called them ‘mushroom stones,’ but not 
one archeologist had linked them with mushrooms or 
with the rites described by the 16th century writers in 
neighboring Mexico. ‘They were an enigma, and ‘mush- 
room stone’ was merely a term of convenience. Some of 
these stone carvings carried an effigy on the stipe, either 
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