Psilocybe muliercula

Identification, in outline

A blue-bruising Psilocybe of cold, high Mexican forest, robust for its group, with a brown convex-to-umbonate cap and a fibrous stem, fruiting in the pine and alder woods of the Toluca highlands. As with all its relatives, the account here is descriptive; it carries no gathering guidance, and small Psilocybe are genuinely hazardous to identify.

A tangle of two names

Few mushrooms wear their history so plainly in their Latin. In 1957 the French mycologist Roger Heim described a sacred species from the highlands above the Valley of Toluca and called it Psilocybe wassonii, honouring R. Gordon Wasson. A year later Rolf Singer and Alexander H. Smith, working from the same fungus, published it as Psilocybe muliercula — “the little woman.” Because the two names describe one mushroom, taxonomy has argued ever since over which has priority; both remain in use, and the reader will meet the species under either. The archive files it here under muliercula while noting that wassonii means the same thing.

”Las mujercitas” and the Toluca highlands

Heim and Wasson documented these mushrooms in a healing ceremony in the highlands of the State of México — Matlatzinca and Nahua country, under the snow of the Nevado de Toluca. There they were called las mujercitas, “the little women,” and gathered for a nocturnal velada of the kind more famously kept among the Mazatec. The name is a reminder that the sacred-mushroom complex of central Mexico reached well beyond Oaxaca’s famous corner.

Active compounds

Psilocybin and psilocin, the tryptamines common to the genus.

Toxicity and safety

Not amatoxic, but subject to the real dangers of misidentification — several toxic genera produce similar fruitbodies — and to the medical and legal risks of unsupervised use. Psilocybin and hallucinogenic mushrooms are controlled under Mexican federal law.