Bernardino de Sahagún was a Franciscan friar in 16th-century New Spain who worked with Nahua elders, writers and artists on a vast survey of Aztec life. It survives most fully in the Florentine Codex, a Nahuatl and Spanish manuscript in twelve books that the Getty presents online (Digital Florentine Codex).
His text is a main source for Mesoamerican mushroom use. In Book XI he describes small mushrooms called teonanacatl that grow under field grass, taste bad and make those who eat them “see visions” (Sahagún, vol. 3). In Book IX he describes a merchants’ feast where “little black mushrooms” called nanacatl were eaten with honey before dawn and guests talked over their visions afterwards (Sahagún, vol. 2). In 1939 Richard Evans Schultes used Sahagún’s separate naming of peyote and mushrooms to rebut the claim that teonanácatl was peyote (Schultes, 1939).
His work should be read critically. The friars served a church that was suppressing the cultures they recorded, and colonial authorities banned the mushrooms as idolatrous (Spiers et al., 2024).
Sources
- Sahagún, Historia general, vol. 3 (Book XI)
- Sahagún, Historia general, vol. 2 (Book IX)
- Digital Florentine Codex (Getty)
- Spiers et al., 2024
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