Psilocybin

Although they have not been found in the plants from which psychoactive snuffs are made, the 4-hydroxy derivatives of N,N-dimethyltryptamine are among the more potent naturally occurring hallucinogens. The story of the rediscovery of the "magic mushroom" cult of Mexico by a New York businessman turned ethnologist and his wife has been well-chronicled, not only by them2° but by the press and by every writer who treats the subject of hallucinogenic drugs. It is an interesting episode and bears up well under retelling.
Spanish historians21,28 who wrote about peyote and ololiuqui also described the "sacred mushroom," teonanacatl. The intoxicating mushrooms were eaten by the Indians at feasts and religious ceremonies, and by special classes of folk, such as witch doctors and soothsayers. Imbibers were subsequently endowed with clairvoyance and divine powers. Descriptions of the response to ingestion of selected types of mushrooms are entirely analogous to those written about peyote ingestion.

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The use of mushrooms in Mexico and Central America for social and religious purposes had apparently disappeared except for a few isolated Indian tribes in remote mountainous districts of Mexico. Stimulated by reports that mushrooms were still being eaten for purposes of magic in southern Mexico, the Wassons26 made several trips into these regions in search of the culture and the mushrooms. In 1955, Gordon Wasson actively participated in an Indian mushroom ceremony in Huautla de Jimenez, Oaxaca. On a subsequent expedition in 1956, the Wassons were accompanied by Roger Heim, a botanist, who identified and classified the mushrooms. They were of the family Strophariaceae and mostly of the genus Psilocybe. Heim collected spores, and upon his return to Paris artificially cultivated the mushrooms in the laboratory. One variety Psilocybe mexicana Heim, grew especially well under these conditions and was later subjected to chemical analyses by A. Hofmann, the discoverer, of LSD, and his associates 29'30 The original extracts were tested in animals using pupillary and piloerection criteria to evaluate the activity. The results were equivocal, and there was some doubt as to whether the mush rooms, cultivated and dried in Paris, were still active. Hof-maim, settled the question personally by ingesting thirty-two dried specimen of Psilocybe mexicana weighing 2.4 grams. He described the results as follows.

Thirty minutes after taking the mushrooms the exterior world began to undergo a strange transformation. Everything assumed a Mexican character. As I was perfectly well aware that my knowledge of the Mexican origin of the mushrooms would lead me to imagine only Mexican scenery, I tried deliberately to look on my environment as I knew it normally. But all voluntary efforts to look at things in their customary forms and colors proved ineffective. Whether my eyes were closed or open I saw only Mexican motifs and colors. When the doctor supervising the experiment bent over me to check my blood pressure, he was transformed into an Aztec priest and I would not have been astonished if he had drawn an obsidian knife. In spite of the seriousness of the situation it amused me to see how the Germanic face of my colleague had acquired a purely Indian expression. At the peak of the intoxication, about 11/2 hours after ingestion of the mushrooms, the rush of interior pictures, mostly abstract motifs rapidly changing in shape and color, reached such an alarming degree that I feared that I would be born into this whirlpool of form and color and would dissolve. After about six hours the dream came to an end. Subjectively, I had no idea how long this condition had lasted. I felt my return to everyday reality to be a happy return from a strange, fantastic but quite really experienced world into an old and familiar home.
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Thus having established that the mushrooms were active, Hofmann et a/.23 proceeded to extract the active ingredients from the dried material and to purify and crystallize them. The main active component, 4-phosphoryloxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine, was named psilocybin, and an accompanying compound, present in much smaller amounts, was called psilocin. The latter was later found to be 4-hydroxyl-N,Ndimethyltryptamine, a hydrolysis product of psilocybin.