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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
SAN ISIDRO de LABRADOR
In Mexico, throughout the early to mid-1960s, ‘San Isidro de Labrador’ was the most common
name used by local ‘mestizos,’ when offering magic mushrooms to the hippie vagabond types
who had invaded their country by the thousands in search of the famed magic mushrooms of
Mexico.
A ‘mestizo’ was a traditional term that originated in Spain and Europe; however, by the mid-16th
century in colonial Spanish America, ‘mestizo’ was used in a derogatory manner to demean a
person of combined European and Native American descent. During the period when the
Spanish Empire controlled the American colonies and Mesoamerica, the term became used to
denote a racial category in the ‘casta’ system (a system based on the accepted knowledge that the
character and quality of people varied according largely to their birth, color, race and origin of
ethnic types). Those who were referred to as belonging to the ‘casta’ were usually considered to
be inferior and the church would treat them differently and they were often cast as people of low
birth.
Fig. 21. 1. Psilocybe cubensis in pasture
In Mexico, local Indians who perform mushroom Velada’s for tourists are fake shaman and
curanderas and are often referred to as ‘mestizos.’ especially in villages located in and around the
Mexican States of Oaxaca, Chiapas and Veracruz. And in Palenque they use the epithet, ‘San
Isidro de Labrador’ when referring to Psilocybe cubensis and Psilocybe subcubensis. The epithet
refers to the ‘patron saint of agriculture.’ Sometimes it is also referred to as, ‘San Isidro’ (patron
saint of the fields). In Central America, local children and mestizos also collect and sell
Psilocybe cubensis to inquiring foreign tourists by referring to the species as, ‘suntiama.”
In Oaxaca, the Mazatec Indians refer to the species as di-xi-tjo-le-rra-Ja (divine mushroom of
manure or sacred mushroom of cow dung). However, most shamans and healers (including the
late María Sabina) do not use this species in sacred healing and curing ceremonies due to its
association with the manure of four-legged ruminants. In fact many healers consider the specie
as ‘unclean.’ However, there are many mestizo charlatans who will perform ceremonies for a
price to tourists who are searching for their souls or to have communion with their God.
Fig. 21. 2. Psilocybe cubensis. Fruiting in decomposed manure.
The indigenous peoples of Mexico and Mesoamerica, who are of mixed Spanish and Mazatec
descent, usually refer to the sacred mushrooms as ‘nanacates,’ ‘hongos,’ and ’duendes’ (the
spirits). Those are only a few of the common mestizo epithets that are also used by foreign
tourists who trek through jungle ruins at Palenque seeking to experience the magic visions of the
Divine Mushrooms.
Fig. 21. 3. Bluing in Psilocybe cubensis.
Many of these intrepid travelers of the ‘subconscious mind’ also traveled to Mexico with the
intent of experiencing the mushrooms and some came seeking God. Most of them referred to
Psilocybe cubensis as cubes, shrooms, gold caps, golden tops, purple rings, golden teachers;
epithets also used in Florida and Texas.
However ludible users in both Florida and Texas also have referred to Psilocybe cubensis as
‘blue meanies,’ an epithet usually used to describe the bluing reaction that occurs in various
species in the genera, Copelandia. The major microscopic characteristic feature that separates
Psilocybe cubensis from that of Psilocybe subcubensis is that the spores for the latter are slightly
smaller than those of the former.
Since the early 1960s became an important pivotal point in the historical documentation of
humankind’s use of entheogenic plants, it eventually became of subject of interest to the
academic community at Harvard and other Northeastern Universities as students and scholars
soon became aware that several known drug plants had been used traditionally for more than five
thousand years in pagan-like ritual ceremonial activities. And now there were the mushrooms.
Some of these Harvard scholars then began to wonder exactly how these mushrooms might be
used as a new adjacent to psychotherapy with a possibility that they might have valid medical
applications as therapeutic agents for the use in treating a wide-variety of psychiatric disorders.
Those learned scholars and their undergraduate students soon began to share their common
interest of the mushrooms with one another by speaking openly about the mushrooms that altered
ones perception of normal consciousness.
It was because of the writings of Richard Evans Schultes, R. Gordon and Valentina Wasson,
Albert Hofmann, Andrew Weil, Sir Robert Graves, Timothy Francis Leary, Richard Alpert
(Baba Ram Dass), Nat Finkelstein and Rolf Singer, that the world soon became aware of the
mushrooms of Mexico and of the curandero, María Sabina.
María Sabina was the famed Mazatec curandero who shared with the Wasson’s and his many
scholarly colleagues, her secrets of the mushrooms. Sharing her knowledge had opened the door
to notoriety for her when she provided her services as a sabio (wise one) for R. Gordon Wasson
and his photographer Alan Richardson. She became the first sabio to perform a ritual-like
mushroom ‘velada’ (a Mazatec all-night healing vigil) on June 30th, 1955 to Westerners; and
later claimed to have known in advance that the foreigners were coming to seek out her services.
It was a secret ceremony that the Mazatec people had kept hidden from the outside world for
more than 400 years. After the knowledge of the mushrooms had become public, thousands of
young long-haired adults soon began a long and sometimes dangerous pilgrimage into the
jungles of Mexico seeking out the whereabouts of those sacred mushrooms.
Because Harvard University allowed research that included the use of psychedelic drugs
(mescaline and DMT) as an adjacent to psychotherapy while studying its possible use in the
treatment of schizophrenia and other mental disorders, those controlled studies soon became
public knowledge after Timothy Leary shared his experience after consuming seven small
specimens of Psilocybe caerulescens in 1960 while on a vacation in a small village in Mexico.
I suppose that if anyone wanted to go out and find their own mushrooms, others might actually
inquire as to how these intrepid first time voyagers knew exactly where to go in Mexico to find
those magic mushrooms they so diligently sought.
Fig. 22. 4. An unpublished cover photo of Timothy Leary (circa 1994). Photo: Ron Piper.
At the time, the only public source of knowledge regarding the existence of the sacred
mushrooms came about thanks to the efforts of Life magazine’s owners and editors, Henry and
Claire Booth Luce.
Both Luce and his wife were advocates of marijuana and they were not afraid to voice their
opinions in their publications. After they allowed the publication of the Wasson article on the
use of mushrooms in a sacred healing and curing ceremony performed by a Mazatec curandero
in Oaxaca, Mexico, the Luce’s began to publish editorials and articles on marijuana, LSD,
peyote, mescaline and other drugs. This apparently irritated the likes of anti-narcotic drug
crusader Harry J. Anslinger and his cohort, J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI
In 1957, Life magazine published an epic adventure by R. Gordon Wasson and his
photographer, Alan Richardson about their 1955 expedition to a small village hamlet, Huautla de
Jimenéz in the montane region of the high Sierra Mazateca mountain range in the Mexican State
of Oaxaca.
It was because of this article published locally in North America and in most of Europe, a month
later after an International Issue of Life was released that made aware to the world, a fantastic
true adventure story about the existence of certain mushrooms that were used ritualistically in
Mesoamerica; mushrooms that were reportedly used in sacred healing and curing ceremonies.
In such a setting as that performed by the wise one, it allowed ones senses to attain an altered
state of consciousness and through the curandero that person could be healed of a sickness; or the
mushrooms would allow the curandero to find lost or stolen objects for those who came seeking
her help. Even Timothy Leary had also heard about the mushrooms from that Life magazine
article as well as from his friends Frank Baron and Gerhardt Braun. Remember that they were
there with Timothy Leary during his first voyage into the realm of the world of the divine
mushrooms that Leary had earlier experience in Cuernavaca in the summer of 1960..
Psilocybe cubensis and Psilocybe subcubensis
Cap: The cap of these two common species of Psilocybe range in size from (15-) 25-70 (-85)
mm in diameter. The shape of the cap ranges from a cone-like conic shape to convex, becoming
campanulate to gradually expanding to plain in with aging. The color of the cap varies from a
copper tone in the center to a light golden brown in age. It is also hygrophanous in drying to a
straw-yellow color with remnants of a veil present and bluing in the edge of the cap when
injured.
Fig. 21. 5. Psilocybe cubensis fruiting in tiny powdered chunks of manured.
Gills: Adnate to adnexed to seceding. At first the gills are a light tan chocolate color, changing to
a dark gray and becoming a deep violet gray to dark purplish brown in age. Sometimes the gills
appear to be mottled with whitish edges.
Stem: The stem ranges in length and size from (40-) 70-120 (-170) X (4-) 8-13 (-16) mm. It is
also very equal and hollow and the color of the stem appears to be of a whitish to a creamy white
or yellow brown shade when faded, easily staining blue where damaged. Sometimes it may be
fibrillose below the annulus.
Spores: The spores of Psilocybe cubensis range in size from (12-) x 7-8.8 µ while the spores of
Psilocybe subcubensis range in size from (9.9-) x 6.6-7.1 µ.
Spore Print: The color of the print ranges from a light chocolate hue to a dark purple-brown
with age.
Fig. 21. 6. SEM of Psilocybe cubensis. Photo: Prakitsin Sihanonth and John W. Allen.
Habitat: Psilocybe cubensis is a species that fruits gregarious, rarely solitary or scattered and is
quite common on the manure of most four-legged ruminants (buffalo, cow, gaur, elephant, and
rhinos) as well in the dung of many other similar large mammals. It is rarely found fruiting on
horse manure, although this species fruits well at home on horse manure and compost. Also this
species at times may also occur in rich soil in pastures and meadows, along roadsides in manure
heaps and sometimes in powdered manure fertilizers. This species has also been found in forest
areas next to pasturelands where cattle wander into wooded areas leaving manure heaps along
cattle trails leading into the surrounding forest areas.
Distribution: The distribution of Psilocybe cubensis is very common in subtropical regions, yet
is unknown in the tropics. In the United States, this species is known to occur in the south and
southeastern region from Texas to Florida and north from Florida to Georgia and South Carolina.
Common in the subtropics it also occurs in Cuba, Mexico, Guatemala, South America, Viet-
Nam, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, India, Fiji, Philippine Islands and Australia.
Psilocybe cubensis and Psilocybe subcubensis have both, in recent times, been reported from
British Honduras. On the other hand, Psilocybe subcubensis is both a pantropical and subtropical
species. It has been identified as occurring in Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras, El
Salvador, Venezuela, Australia, India, Nepal, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and on several
Islands in the Philippines.
Season: Fruiting in summer these two species also appear in different seasons around the globe
depending on climatic weather conditions in areas where warmer climates occur out of season
after both heavy and light rainfalls begin to disappear.
In 1979, I arrived in Arlington, a suburb of Jacksonville, Florida. I had been to over 20 farms in
the area and only four farms gave me permission to collect specimens on their properties. One
such farm was the Dinsmore Dairy Farm outside of Jacksonville.
In recent years, Dr. Gaston Guzman of the Instituto de Ecologia in Xalapa, Veracruz has been
considering to combine both species into a single species with the common Latin name of
Psilocybe cubensis. As noted above, both species are macroscopically similar and
indistinguishable from one another with only the spore size separating the two species.
In order to be able to collect in Florida, I was fortunate to have a Lebanese Primitive Baptist
Church Minister take me and my son to this field for hunting mushrooms. At the time, the
minister was very nice to me and my children. He wanted us to join his church. Á church that
allowed no musical instruments (piano, tambourine, etc.), for their choir and hymns portion of
their Sunday Services because those instruments did not exist when Jesus roamed the Middle-
East.
The minister was not aware that the mushrooms I was looking for were of a psilocybian nature.
He assumed I was picking edible mushrooms for sale at the local weekend market. For two
months I went two to three times a week to this farm and no Psilocybe cubensis were to be found
on that property. Finally, towards the middle of April, I hit the jackpot. The weather was warmer
and the shrooms popped up. So, it seems that even in Florida, there are different seasons and
again, that always depends on the rain, no matter how hot, some fields will still produce
mushrooms.
By mid-June, thanks to no rain and 94 degree weather, no mushrooms appeared in manure at the
Dinsmore Dairy Farm because now it was too hot for them to fruit. I know that in Southeast
Asia the weather can be up to 100 to 115 degrees and I still find massive shrooms because of the
spring to fall monsoon rains that occur from late May through October.
And around the first week of July of 1979, I met two shroomers from the west coast of Florida
and Miami who claimed that they had harvested both Psilocybe cubensis and Copelandia species
during and after a June rainfall found in several pastures in those regions of the State.
Around the same period in July, I also met some shroomers from Georgia who informed me that
they had, two weeks earlier, collected Psilocybe cubensis near Augusta when I could not find
any in Jacksonville. So, as I speak of this species, it will grow in different areas at different
times, but once they began to appear in one area, then they are usually found fruiting in many
other places as well.
Dosage: One or two large mushrooms that weigh approximately one fresh ounce or 10 to 40
mushrooms weighing in at one fresh ounce would be considered an average dose. When in their
dried stage, a single dried 1 gram is sometimes considered as an average dose for the majority of
those individuals who choose this species for an entheogenic experience. The most common dose
for this species is three to five grams dried.
Three to five dried grams are considered a clinical dosage and are the equivalent to 15-30
milligrams of psilocybine and/or psilocine. That amount would be the equivalent of a Mazatec
Indian dosage used in their healing and curing ceremonies. Although Psilocybe cubensis is not
considered a good mushroom amongst Mesoamerican curanderos because of their association
with manure, they are more or less used by local mestizos when catering to tourist influence in
their perspective villages.
Such use is common as well as in remote regions of Oaxaca, Veracruz, Chiapas and other States
in Mexico. Since the mid to late 1960s, Palenque has been known as a place to experience the
magic of the mushrooms and when foreigners often arrive; they come seeking said mushrooms;
hoping to communicate with their God. In Mesoamerica, no Indians had ever used the
mushrooms to find God or to search beyond their consciousness for divine communication.
They were only used as I previously noted, only for healing and curing and to find lost or stolen
objects.
Comment: Psilocybe cubensis was first identified from Cuba in 1906 and named Stropharia
cubensis. In 1958, Drs. Rolf Singer and Alexander H. Smith provided two name for the species
from Cuba as, Psilocybe cubensis var. cyanescens and then as Psilocybe cubensis var.
caerulescens.
Eventually with the publication of Rolf Singer’s, The Agaricales (Mushrooms) in Modern
Taxonomy, Dr. Singer finally emended the species as Psilocybe cubensis. I only mention this
because sometimes a species might be found throughout the world by several people at the same
time and they all give it a different name or place it into different genera’s.
Psilocybe cubensis is known world-wide and is the primary mushroom grown clandestinely
indoors for ludible purposes. (See chapter on mushroom cultivation).
In villages in and around the ancient ruins of Palenque, some shamans and healers employ
Psilocybe cubensis ceremoniously. There it is referred to locally as the ‘San Isidro’ mushroom
(named after the patron saint of agriculture). Because of its association with manure, many local
shamanic healers (including the late María Sabina) did not and still do not use that species and
most consider it to be inferior.
However, this species was most likely introduced into the America’s by the Spanish who brought
the first cattle to the New World. It is somewhat doubtful that it was here before the conquest
regardless of the fact that Psilocybe cubensis has been found in the manure of most four-legged
ruminants. There are more species of the sacred fungi in Mexico and Central America than in
most countries around the world and the majority of species in Mexico grow in habitats other
than the manure of the cattle and horses in their land.
Because of the widespread popularity in that this species is clandestinely cultivated worldwide in
basement cellars and attics; this just happens to be the one species most sought after by tourists
who trek through the High Sierra Mazateca into Oaxaca, eventually traveling into the Mexican
State of Chiapas in search of these fungi. And once they reach Palenque it is the locals who sell
this species to the long-haired foreigners for a few pesos.
Figure 21.7. Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico.