Dispatches from the archive
Field Notes
New research, forgotten archives, and the strange, unfolding stories of the sacred mushroom — the discoveries, the mysteries, and the legends behind them.
Searching for Soma
The Rigveda opens with a hymn not to a king or a god but to a substance — Soma, a plant pressed for a golden juice that granted visions of the divine, then vanished from history. I spent a season crossing India, from the stone mushrooms of Kerala to the tantric temples of Odisha, chasing the old theory that Soma was a psychedelic mushroom. This is what I found — and what I didn't.
Dakota Wint
Mexico's other mushroom peoples
The Mazatec are famous, but the ethnomycological record counts sacred mushroom use among at least a dozen Indigenous Mexican peoples. A short guide to who they are — and why some have full pages here while others get only a line.
MushroomTribes editorial
The Mushroom That Speaks
Across peoples with nothing in common — peoples who never met — the same uncanny thing is reported: those who eat these mushrooms are not only shown visions but spoken to. Something addresses them, names the illness, answers the unasked question, teaches. This is the experience at the centre of every mushroom tradition, and the question the whole archive turns around: why does the same encounter keep arriving?
MushroomTribes editorial
Teonanácatl: ‘flesh of the gods’?
The word behind the whole Mesoamerican story — what teonanácatl named, and why its famous translation is a scholarly choice rather than a settled fact.
MushroomTribes editorial
How the Mushroom Becomes Myth
Across every culture that has met it, the sacred mushroom does the same astonishing thing — it makes myth. A look at the recurring stories the fungus keeps generating, and why they refuse to die.
MushroomTribes editorial
Newly documented: a psilocybin mushroom in the Maloti
A 2024 species description and a 2026 preprint have put southern Africa onto the map of documented ritual mushroom use. Here is what is actually new — and why we label it 'newly documented,' not 'newly discovered.'
MushroomTribes editorial