STAT+: The quest for psychedelics in the Amazon would push a Harvard botanist to his limits
Decades ago, Harvard botanist Richard Evans Schultes braved malaria and worse to study Indigenous medicine. Now, scientists want to finish what he started.
The Aztecs called it teonanácatl, or “flesh of the Gods.”
Some who ate the intoxicating mushroom “saw themselves dying in a vision and wept,” according to an account by a 16th-century Franciscan friar. “Others saw themselves being eaten by a wild beast; others imagined that they were capturing prisoners in battle, that they were rich . . .”
Tantalizing references to the fungus could be found in the few pre-Colombian documents to escape the fires of the Spanish Inquisition, and were scattered across accounts of the New World written by the first European missionaries and explorers to visit it.
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