Mesoamerica · Culture
Tlapanec (Me'phaa)
Me'phaa
La Montaña of Guerrero — the steep, cloud-wrapped homeland of the Me'phaa. — Photo via Wikimedia Commons · Creative Commons — see source · Source
The Montaña of Guerrero
In the steep, isolated Montaña of Guerrero, the Me’phaa — long known by the outside name Tlapanec — are among the southern Mexican peoples with recorded ceremonial mushroom use. The same species that anchor the Oaxacan veladas, including Psilocybe hoogshagenii, grow through these mountains.
Rain, jaguar, and the Montaña
The Me’phaa hold one of the most intact ritual calendars in Guerrero — a world of rain-petitioning at sacred springs and caves, of offerings to the powers of the mountain, and of specialists who read maize kernels and dream to divine. In the steep, cloud-wrapped Montaña, where the jaguar of the storm still moves through the ceremonial imagination, the sacred mushroom belongs to that same weather-soaked cosmology — a means of asking the mountain what it knows.
In the record
As with the other lesser-documented Mexican peoples, the anchor is Gastón Guzmán’s enumeration of Indigenous groups with recorded ceremonial mushroom practice, which includes the Tlapanec.1 A quiet thread — real, and still largely kept within the community that carries it.
Read alongside
The Me’phaa are set out with their sister peoples in Mexico’s other mushroom peoples.
Footnotes
-
Guzmán, Hallucinogenic Mushrooms in Mexico: An Overview (2008); Schultes, Teonanácatl (1940). ↩
The record
Historical record
- Historic
A Guerrero tradition
The Me'phaa of the Guerrero highlands sustained ceremonial and curing practices within the wider Mesoamerican world.
Colonial text - 20th c.
Recorded mushroom use
Mycological surveys of Mexican ceremonial mushroom use record the Tlapanec among the peoples involved.
Contemporary ethnography
Evidence
The support for this entry, separated by kind. Different kinds of evidence carry different weight.
- Contemporary ethnography
- Guzmán (2008) lists the Tlapanec (Me'phaa) among Mexican peoples with recorded ceremonial mushroom use.
- Botanical / mycological
- Psilocybe hoogshagenii and P. mexicana occur across the mountains of Guerrero and Oaxaca.
What remains uncertain
- The specific Me'phaa ethnography of mushroom use is sparse; the archive avoids overstating it.
Sources & editorial record
Sources & further reading
Gastón Guzmán (2008). Hallucinogenic Mushrooms in Mexico: An Overview. Economic Botany 62(3).
Species-level overview; identifies P. caerulescens (Nahua teotlaquilnanácatl) among ceremonially used mushrooms and counts Indigenous peoples with recorded use.
Richard Evans Schultes (1940). Teonanácatl: The Narcotic Mushroom of the Aztecs. American Anthropologist / Botanical Museum Leaflets, Harvard.
The paper that reconnected the colonial word teonanácatl to living Oaxacan mushroom use, drawing on Schultes’ 1938–39 fieldwork among Mazatec, Chinantec, and Zapotec communities.
Editorial record
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