The ritual use of neurotropic mushrooms by pre-Hispanic indigenous cultures of Colombia has attracted increasing scholarly attention in recent years.Ethnohistorical and archaeological interpretations have proposed the ceremonial use of psychoactive fungi among several indigenous groups, including the Muisca, Tayrona, Quimbaya, Zen, and related cultures.Parallel to this historical inquiry,...
The Tayrona were an indigenous tribe that lived in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and its surroundings on the actual north territory of Colombia. The purpose of the present paper is to suggest the possibility of mushroom use in sacred rituals for spiritual purposes by the Tayrona in pre-hispanic Colombia, this obviously involving a mycological knowledge that would have included uses of fungi...
In their article “Ancient gold pectorals from Colombia: Mushroom effigies?” Richard Evans Schultes and Alec Bright gave enough reasons to assure the reader that some goldsmithing pieces exposed mostly in the Museo del Oro located in Bogotá, Colombia that are part of the objects named “Darien Pectorals”, are representations of mushrooms. This is evidence of a mushroom cult that was practiced by...