9781422282489

CHAPTER ONE

WHAT ARE HALLUCINOGENS? At the turn of the 20th century, archaeologists discovered the ancient “mushroom stones” of Guatemala. Carved by hand around 1000 BCE, they show individuals with strange, umbrella-like canopies on tops of their heads. These strange stones were found not only in Guatemala, but all across Mesoamerica, a region that now covers central Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and northern Costa Rica. At first, many assumed the stones were somehow associated with male fertility. Some scientists, however, disagreed. In their opinion, these stones represented “magic mushrooms” that cause people to hallucinate when consumed. Inside the mushrooms was a chemical compound called psilocybin that caused people to see things that weren’t there. The ancient Americans worshipped the mushrooms as gods and the intricately carved stones were symbols of that belief. Scientists suspected mushroom cults that flourished in the Americas long before Europeans arrived in 1492 used

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