Picture a Psychedelic Experience
Most people picture the same thing.
One person. Eyeshades. Headphones. A quiet room. Deeply internal and completely alone.
That image comes from clinical research, and it makes sense in a lab.
But it has almost nothing to do with how people actually used these mushrooms for thousands of years.
The old accounts all describe something else. Something that sounds a lot more like a party.
In 1502, Moctezuma II was crowned in Tenochtitlan.
Four days of feasting led up to it. And the accounts are very specific about the menu.
Mushrooms came first, before any food.
Guests ate them with honey. Then drank chocolate through the night.
This was not a private ritual behind a closed door. It was the centerpiece of the biggest public event in the empire.
The best line in the whole historical record is also the shortest.
One sixteenth-century account describes what happened once the mushrooms kicked in: then they danced, then they wept.
Not sat quietly. Not turned inward.
Danced. Together. Then cried. Also together.
Other accounts mention guests who stayed composed, sitting at the edge of the room, just nodding along.
Which is a scene anyone who has been to a good party will recognise instantly.
The Aztec language gives this away better than any description.
The word for mushroom was nanacatl. The sacred ones were teonanácatl, meaning god’s flesh.
But the useful word is the verb.
Monanacahuia. To mushroom oneself.
You do not invent a verb for something rare and solitary. You invent one for something people do often, and usually together.
This was not just an Aztec thing.
The Mazatec ceremonies in Mexico, which carried on into the twentieth century, follow nearly the same shape.
At night. In a group. Everyone in their best clothes.
Chocolate first, exactly as the Aztecs did. Singing until dawn.
Different culture. Different century. Same basic idea.
People gathered, after dark, dressed up, sharing something.
We invented almost none of this.
The Spanish banned it.
Ceremonial use was outlawed after the conquest, and the tradition went underground for four hundred years.
By the time Western science came back around in the twentieth century, there was no living practice left to learn from. Just a research question.
So the setup got rebuilt from scratch, and it got built for a laboratory.
Eyeshades, headphones, one person, controlled conditions. Perfect for clean data.
It just was not the original. It was a reconstruction, designed by people measuring things rather than celebrating them.
There is something fitting about this landing in late October.
Halloween is one of the last nights where adults still do the old thing properly. Everyone dresses up. Everyone gathers after dark. The usual rules loosen for a few hours.
People dance. Occasionally they cry. And for one night they feel like part of something bigger than their own week.
That is a direct descendant of what Moctezuma’s guests were doing in 1502.
None of this is an argument against the quiet solo version. That has produced remarkable results.
But it was never the only version. And for most of history, it was not even the usual one.
These mushrooms spent thousands of years at the centre of gatherings. Shared, at night, with music, among people who dressed for the occasion.
They have always been social. We are the ones who made them solitary.
And since the 31st lands on a Saturday this year, every unforgettable night has something that tips it over.
More on that shortly.
Water Your Mind 💚
Mushie Media of the Week:
"Teonanácatl: The Narcotic Mushroom of the Aztecs"
by: Richard Evans Schultes, Harvard University
