What teonanacatl meant: the Aztec mushroom word, the friars who wrote it down and the peyote detour

Teonanácatl is the best-known name for the sacred mushrooms of central Mexico, and one of the least understood. The word comes to us only through Spanish-era books, and the translation most people repeat, “flesh of the gods”, was written by a Franciscan friar who thought the mushrooms were the devil’s communion (Motolinía, 1914 edition). This guide reads those books directly and follows the word through a 20th-century argument over whether it meant mushrooms at all.

What does teonanacatl mean?

The word has two parts. Nanacatl is the ordinary Nahuatl word for mushroom: Sahagún’s Spanish text glosses edible field mushrooms as “setas (hongos ó nanacatl)” (Sahagún, Book XI, chapter 7). Teo comes from teotl, usually rendered god or sacred. Richard Evans Schultes, writing in 1939, listed nanacatl as “mushroom” and teonanacatl as “sacred mushroom”, and the Mexican mycologist Gastón Guzmán gave the same breakdown in 2012: teo for divine or sacred, nanácatl for mushroom (Guzmán, 2012).

Nahuatl builds many mushroom names this way. Lothar Knauth points out that Alonso de Molina’s Spanish–Nahuatl vocabulary of 1571 gives five different terms for a “mushroom which makes drunk”, among them xochinanacatl and tequinti nanacatl (Knauth, 1962). The physician Francisco Hernández, sent to New Spain by Philip II in 1570, sorted mushrooms into white, red and yellow kinds eaten as food and set the intoxicating ones apart as teyhuinti, meaning “intoxicating”, according to the botanist William Safford, who quoted him (Safford, 1915).

So the plain reading is “sacred mushroom” or “god mushroom”. The Sandoz chemist Albert Hofmann offered both options side by side in 1971: the word “could be translated as ‘sacred mushroom’ or ‘God’s flesh’” (Hofmann, 1971). Our guide to psilocybin’s word origins lists the main English renderings; this article traces where each one came from.

Where does “flesh of the gods” come from?

It comes from Toribio de Benavente, called Motolinía, one of the first Franciscans in Mexico. In his history of the Indigenous peoples of New Spain he describes “another kind of drunkenness” from small bitter mushrooms eaten with honey, bringing “a thousand visions, especially of snakes”. Then he glosses the name: “Teonanacatl, que quiere decir carne de Dios, del demonio que ellos adoraban”, that is, flesh of God, of the demon they worshipped. He ends by saying that with this bitter food their cruel god gave them communion (Motolinía, Tratado I, chapter 2).

That gloss is an interpretation shaped by Christian theology. Nacatl, without the doubled syllable, does mean flesh or meat in Nahuatl: Schultes quotes the 19th-century lexicographer Rémi Siméon giving nacatl as “chair, viande”, with a question mark over whether nanacatl derives from it (Schultes, 1939). A friar looking for a demonic parody of the Eucharist could hear “flesh” in the word. Schultes cites La Barre as calling Motolinía’s etymology wrong.

The gloss also changed in copying. The version of Motolinía printed in Kingsborough’s collection, as Schultes quotes it, spells the word “teunamacatlth” and translates it “bread of the gods” (Schultes, 1939). By 1915 Safford was quoting H. H. Bancroft’s Native Races for teonanacatl as “flesh of God” (Safford, 1915). Schultes noted that the belief it meant “bread of the gods” or “flesh of the gods” was widespread.

The flesh reading did not fade once mushrooms were back in view. In a 1960 lecture published in 1961, R. Gordon Wasson said the Aztecs called the mushrooms “teo-nanácatl, God’s flesh”, and drew an open parallel with the bread and wine of the Christian Eucharist (Wasson, 1961). Knauth quoted the historian Manuel Orozco y Berra, writing in the 1870s, for a double gloss: “divine flesh, divine mushroom”. Our reading is cautious: “sacred mushroom” follows the word’s parts, while “flesh of the gods” follows a friar’s commentary.

What do the 16th-century sources record?

Only a few colonial writers describe the mushrooms, and they don’t all use the same word. The table lists what we read in digitised editions and what we know only second-hand. Every one of these texts was written after the conquest by, or for, a church that was trying to stamp the practice out, and Knauth argued that the Spanish accounts were written for wide publication, “if not for propaganda” (Knauth, 1962).

Sahagún and the Florentine Codex

Bernardino de Sahagún’s great survey of Nahua life survives most fully in the Florentine Codex, a manuscript in Nahuatl and Spanish that the Getty now presents online in its twelve books, with Book 9 on merchants and Book 11 on the natural world (Digital Florentine Codex). We read the Spanish text in the 1829–30 Bustamante edition. In Book 11 Sahagún describes little mushrooms called teonanacatl that grow under the grass in fields and wasteland. They taste bad, hurt the throat and intoxicate; they are medicinal against fevers and gout; and “los que los comen ven visiones”, those who eat them see visions (Sahagún, Book XI, chapter 7).

Elsewhere Sahagún uses only nanacatl. In Book 10 he credits the Chichimeca, peoples of the north, with first discovering both the root called peiotl and “los que llaman nanacatl”, harmful mushrooms that intoxicate like wine; they danced and sang through the night, and the next day wept and said they washed their eyes and faces with their tears (Sahagún, Book X, chapter 29). The same book lists “malos hongos” among things that unsettle a man’s judgment. That separate naming of peiotl and nanacatl would matter in 1939.

The fullest account is in Nahuatl. Knauth translated Sahagún’s Nahuatl description of a merchants’ feast: mushrooms were eaten first, with cocoa; some guests danced and wept, others sat against the wall with their heads hanging and saw themselves dying in war, eaten by wild beasts, growing rich or being punished. Afterwards the guests compared what they had seen and teased one another about it (Knauth, 1962). Our history of magic mushrooms quotes the Spanish version of this feast; Knauth judged this Nahuatl text closer to modern descriptions of the effects than any of the Spanish chronicles.

Durán, and the word that isn’t there

The Dominican Diego Durán describes mushrooms at three coronation feasts but calls them only “hongos monteses”, wild mushrooms. At one feast the lords “comieron todos de unos hongos monteses, que dicen que hacen perder el sentido”. In his account of Ahuitzotl’s coronation he remarks that his source never mentions wine at these feasts, only wild mushrooms eaten raw, and he says so as a reader: “dice la ystoria”, the history says (Durán, chapters 40 and 42). That phrase is a reminder that Durán was working from an older account, not watching.

His best-known passage is about Moctezuma II’s coronation. After the sacrifices, he writes, everyone went to eat raw mushrooms, saw visions and had revelations of the future, which he credits to the devil; some, he claims, killed themselves. He adds that one of Moctezuma’s yearly feasts, when everyone ate mushrooms, was called the feast of revelations (Durán, chapter 54). The claims of suicide sit in a text hostile to the practice, and Knauth saw this kind of emphasis on “horrible visions and excessive acts” as the church’s viewpoint at work (Knauth, 1962).

Was teonanacatl really peyote? Safford’s 1915 argument

For about two decades, many scholars thought the mushroom reports were a mistake. On 4 May 1915 William E. Safford of the US Department of Agriculture read a paper to the Botanical Society of Washington, published that July in the Journal of Heredity, arguing that teonanacatl was the dried crown of the peyote cactus, Lophophora williamsii (Safford, 1915; Crossref record).

His case had two legs. First, absence: “Three centuries of investigation have failed to reveal an endemic fungus used as an intoxicant in Mexico.” Second, appearance: the cut and dried top of the cactus, he wrote, “resembles a dried mushroom so remarkably that at first glance it will even deceive a trained mycologist”. He proposed that the Aztecs, seeing only dried buttons traded from the north, called them teonanacatl and called the whole root peyotl, and he went on to say that the mescal buttons used by Kiowa and other peoples in Oklahoma were “identical with the teonanacatl of the ancient Mexicans” (Safford, 1915).

He also declared the word dead: “The name teonanacatl is now obsolete.” Yet he quoted, without accepting it, Siméon’s Nahuatl dictionary defining teonanacatl as a small mushroom that tastes bad, intoxicates and causes hallucinations (Safford, 1915). The dictionary and the friars were telling him “mushroom”; his herbarium search found no Mexican fungus with those effects, and he chose the herbarium.

How Reko and Schultes answered him

Blas Pablo Reko, who by Schultes’s account had collected plants and studied Indigenous life in Mexico for more than a quarter of a century, never accepted the peyote theory. Schultes quotes Reko’s 1919 definition of nanacatl as various mushrooms, “especialmente un hongo negro que crece sobre estiércol”, and a 1923 letter to the US National Herbarium saying Safford was “surely wrong” and that the mushroom was still used under the old name in Oaxaca’s Sierra Juárez (Schultes, 1939). We have not read Reko’s own publications; both quotations come through Schultes.

Schultes, writing from Harvard’s Botanical Museum, settled the question with specimens. On 27 July 1938, at Huautla de Jiménez in the Mazatec country of Oaxaca, he and Reko collected mushrooms in use as a divinatory intoxicant, and he identified them as Panaeolus campanulatus var. sphinctrinus. His paper of 21 February 1939 announced the identification of teonanacatl as a narcotic basidiomycete, and a fuller paper appeared in American Anthropologist in 1940 (Schultes, 1940).

His rebuttal of Safford went back to the sources. A dried peyote crown, he wrote, carries dense tufts of silky hairs on top and shows its vascular tissue below, so it was “improbable” that anyone was fooled by a colour match. And Sahagún, he pointed out, named “the root which they call peiotl” and nanacatl, “harmful mushrooms”, as distinct things in the same passage, and described each separately elsewhere (Schultes, 1939). He also quoted La Barre’s verdict that Safford had made “somewhat casual use of his evidence”.

Schultes’s species identification did not last as the main answer. When Wasson brought the French mycologist Roger Heim to Mexico in 1956, Heim found that most of the sacred mushrooms belonged to the genus Psilocybe, according to Hofmann’s 1971 account (Hofmann, 1971). Those collections led to psilocybin; see how Hofmann isolated it and the early naming of Psilocybe mexicana. What Schultes established, and what held, was that teonanacatl had been a mushroom.

Teonanacatl as a modern name

After 1939 the word moved from the friars’ books into science. Rolf Singer’s 1958 papers in Mycologia were titled “Mycological Investigations on Teonanácatl, the Mexican Hallucinogenic Mushroom”, the second, with Alexander H. Smith, a monograph on a section of Psilocybe (Singer, 1958; Singer and Smith, 1958). A 1959 German medical paper was “Teonanacatl und Psilocybin” (Cerletti, 1959), and in 1979 Mycologia noticed a book titled “Teonanacatl: Hallucinogenic Mushrooms of North America”, whose record names Jonathan Ott and Jeremy Bigwood (Mycologia, 1979).

Guzmán, a mycologist at Mexico’s Instituto de Ecología in Xalapa, found that striking. He wrote that the word “is not used at the present among any ethnic group in Mexico”, and that writers from Schultes and the Wassons onward used it as a catch-all for every sacred species (Guzmán, 2012). In Necaxa, Puebla, in 1959, Nahuatl speakers who were reluctant to discuss the mushrooms finally gave him “teotlaquilnanácatl”. He proposed reading it as teotlacuilnanácatl, “the sacred or divine mushroom that paints”, and suggested Sahagún may have heard only part of a longer word, or been kept from it. He framed both ideas as suppositions.

The peoples who still use the mushrooms have their own names. Wasson recorded the Mazatec name as ’nti’ si tho (we leave out his tone marks), a reverential particle plus a word meaning “that which springs forth” (Wasson, 1961). The healer María Sabina’s role in that story, and the harm that followed the publicity, are in our profile of María Sabina and our account of Wasson’s 1957 Life article. Calling every sacred mushroom teonanácatl is a convenience for outsiders, built on one Nahuatl word that colonial writers happened to record.

In Canada, the name makes no legal difference. Schedule III of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act lists psilocin and psilocybin at items 11 and 12 (Justice Laws), and Health Canada says the production, sale and possession of magic mushrooms are illegal and that no therapeutic psilocybin product is approved (Health Canada). Our guide to whether magic mushrooms are legal in Canada has the detail.

What we could not check

• The Nahuatl column of the Florentine Codex for Book 11. The Getty’s site opened, but we could not retrieve that entry, so our Sahagún quotations come from the Spanish text.
• Reko’s 1919 article and his 1923 letter, the Kingsborough edition of Motolinía, Siméon’s dictionary and Hernández’s Latin text. We cite them only as Safford, Schultes or Knauth quote them.
• Schultes’s 1940 paper, Singer’s 1958 papers, Cerletti’s 1959 paper and the 1979 book notice. We read their bibliographic records, not their contents.
• Whether any Nahuatl-speaking community uses teonanácatl today. Guzmán reported in 2012 that he never found it in use; we have no newer survey.
• A Nahuatl specialist’s ruling on the “flesh” reading. We report how the sources we read translate the word and do not settle it ourselves.

Shroomverse sells mushroom products. This article is general information about the history of a word and the documents it appears in. It is not medical, legal or purchasing advice, it does not encourage anyone to use drugs, and it does not recommend or link any product.