About the project
An archive of the sacred mushroom
MushroomTribes documents humanity’s ritual, spiritual, and medicinal relationships with psychoactive mushrooms — what is known, what survives, and what remains a mystery. Built to be cited, and honest about its limits.
What this is
Across Mesoamerica, Siberia, southern Africa, and the disputed edges of prehistory, certain mushrooms have been treated as healers, diviners, ancestors, and gods. This project gathers those traditions into one archive — part ethnographic record, part illustrated field journal, part world map — and holds every claim to a visible standard of evidence. The aim is to make these stories vivid and lasting, and to keep what is documented clearly apart from what is merely repeated.
It records culture and history — not dosages, cultivation, or where to find or buy anything. MushroomTribes is a nonprofit project of The Community Garden Foundation, funded by donations rather than the sale of any product. If the archive is useful to you, you can help sustain it on the support page.
How we weigh evidence
Every major claim is tied to a source, and every entry carries one of six labels — from a living tradition observed today to a story the psychedelic world tells about itself. The full system is in Evidence & methodology.
Cultural ethics
These traditions belong to living peoples, and the archive is built to honour that. A few principles hold throughout:
- We use each community’s own words and titles — and never let one person stand in for a whole people.
- Restricted or sacred knowledge, and the exact locations of sacred sites, stay off the page — even when they can be found elsewhere.
- Where cultural respect and completeness pull against each other, respect wins.
- Any revenue this work earns from a tradition flows back to the community that holds it, on its terms.
Corrections, contributions & requests
This is a living document — meant to be corrected, and to grow.
- Found an error — a mistranslation, a misreading, a source we got wrong? corrections@mushroomtribes.com. Substantive fixes are logged on the page, never quietly overwritten.
- Have something to add — sources, first-hand knowledge appropriate to share, translations, or properly-licensed images? contribute@mushroomtribes.com. Contributors are credited on the pages they improve.
- Hold this knowledge yourself — a community member or knowledge-holder who wants something corrected, restricted, or removed, including material that is public but should not circulate? amendments@mushroomtribes.com. You have standing here that outside readers don’t, and we act on it.