Magic Mushrooms A Brief History

"There is a world beyond ours, a world that is far away, nearby, and invisible. And there is where God lives, where the dead live, the spirits and the saints, a world where everything has already happened and everything is known. That world talks. It has a language of its own. I report what it says. The sacred mushroom takes me by the hand and brings me to the world where everything is known. It is they, the sacred mushrooms, that speak in a way I can understand. I ask them and they answer me. When I return from the trip that I have taken with them, I tell what they have told me and what they have shown me."

Maria Sabina (1888-1985)

Maria Sabina is the famous Mazatec shaman of southern Mexico. She notably influenced the counter cultural revolution in America and abroad during the 1960s with her magico religious ceremonies being the point of much scientific and popular interest. R. Gordon Wasson, American ethnobotanist, visited her in the late 1950s and coined the term "bemushroomed" for the ineffable experience of the psilocybe. "There are no apt words in it to characterize one's state when one is, shall we say, 'bemushroomed'. For hundreds, even thousands, of years, we have thought about these things in terms of alcohol, and we now have to break the bounds imposed on us by our alcoholic obsession. We are all, willy-nilly, confined within the prison walls of our everyday vocabulary...Now virtually all the words describing the state of drunkenness, from 'intoxicated' thought the scores of current vulgarisms, are contemptuous, belittling, pejorative...What we need is a vocabulary to describe all the modalities of a divine inebriant..." He later took spores for study and some of which were sent to Europe and cultivated where the famous chemist Albert Hoffman isolated the active constituents.

(Quotations taken from Plants of The Gods)

Spring has sprung

From the depths of a long cold winter here in the southeast spring has finally arrived. So many projects in the works and not enough hours in the day. We were rewarded by our biggest Moso bamboo shoots this year and they are towering above us. Our Indian Runner ducks (only two females) have given us so many eggs we were inspired to incubate them and eagerly await the hatch expected around May 3rd. Last year our plum trees bloomed through some freezing temps and days that never made it out of the low 40s, so no pollinators. But this year the bee's were out in force and have made copious amounts of fruit, although making it to ripeness is another story. The kiwi vines will begin blooming in a week or so, last years bloom yielded more fruit than we could deal with, a little unripe seeing as they didn't mature before frost was expected. The gardens are coming along with okra emerging, beans, squash, bitter melon, all kinds of peppers and fresh herbs.

We will be working on new designs for our etsy shop www.mocahete.etsy.com and preparing to open a new shop on etsy sometime later this month under the name lunalindastudio.

So, so much going on!