Matlatzinca

A central Mexican tradition

West of the Valley of Mexico, in the highlands around the Nevado de Toluca, the Matlatzinca are one of several central Mexican peoples whose ceremonial mushroom use is documented — if lightly — in the mycological and ethnographic record. They belong to the same broad Mesoamerican world as the Nahua, in which the teonanácatl had a recognised sacred role.

Under the Nevado

The Matlatzinca live in the shadow of the Nevado de Toluca — Xinantécatl, the “naked man” — a snow-capped volcano whose summit crater holds two sacred lakes, the Sun and the Moon, where offerings have been carried since long before the Spanish. It is one of the great weather-making mountains of central Mexico, a place where rain and the ancestors are petitioned. The blue-staining Psilocybe of its pine meadows — P. mexicana, P. aztecorum — grow within sight of that summit, and belong to the same conversation with the mountain.

In the record

The clearest modern documentation comes from Gastón Guzmán, whose overview of hallucinogenic mushrooms in Mexico enumerates the Indigenous peoples with recorded ceremonial use and places the Matlatzinca among them.¹

Read alongside

This is a thinly documented case: real, but without the deep ethnographic literature that surrounds the Mazatec. It is set out more fully, with its sister peoples, in the field note Mexico’s other mushroom peoples.