Long before prohibition, 

mushrooms held a sacred place in many civilizations around the globe.

From cave art in Southern Africa and Algeria, ancient rock statues and temples in Mesoamerica - fungi were honored as portals to the divine. They were not considered as drugs — but as sacraments. 

The Aztecs called them “Flesh of the Gods” (Teonanácatl). 

Mushrooms were eaten in ceremony to receive guidance and bridge the realms between human and spirit.

This legacy carried into the 20th century, in the mountains of Oaxaca, where a humble healer named María Sabina quietly preserved the sacred tradition. For generations, her people had turned to the mushrooms for healing— until western outsiders arrived, 

seeking the magic for themselves.

What followed was a wave of spiritual tourism that disrupted the community and brought unwanted attention to a tradition that was meant to be sacred and protected.

When stripped from its cultural roots and ceremonial context, the profound role of the mushroom and its wisdom was appropriated and what ultimately followed was widespread stigma and criminalization in the western world, due to a lack of understanding and knowledge that indigenous communities had cultivated over millennia.