The quest for psychedelics in the Amazon would push a Harvard botanist to his limits

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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