Richard Evans Schultes (1915–2001) was a Harvard ethnobotanist whose research centred on hallucinogenic plants of the Americas (Sheldrake, 2020). In February 1939 he published “The identification of teonanacatl, a narcotic basidiomycete of the Aztecs” (Schultes, 1939), followed by a fuller paper in 1940 (Schultes, 1940).
The 1939 paper answered the botanist William Safford, who had argued in 1915 that teonanácatl was really dried peyote (Safford, 1915). Schultes pointed out that the colonial friar Sahagún named peyote and mushrooms as separate things, and he worked with Mazatec specimens from Oaxaca; he translated teonanacatl as “sacred mushroom” (Schultes, 1939). He had crossed paths in Huautla with the team that first witnessed a Mazatec ceremony in 1938 (Spiers et al., 2024).
His later work on Amazonian plants, including the ayahuasca vine, is covered in the site’s DMT and ayahuasca guides. The mycologist Gastón Guzmán notes that, after Schultes and the Wassons, scholars used “teonanácatl” as a catch-all for every sacred species (Guzmán, 2012).
Sources
- Schultes, 1939, Botanical Museum Leaflets
- Schultes, 1940, American Anthropologist
- Safford, 1915, Journal of Heredity
- Spiers et al., 2024
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