The Tayrona and Fungi: Possible connections around a mushroom, fleur-de-Lis, and a bat cult in a pre-Hispanic indigenous tribe in Colombia

The Tayrona, an indigenous tribe that lived in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in pre-Hispanic Colombia, likely used mushrooms in sacred rituals for spiritual purposes, implying a sophisticated mycological knowledge that included nutritional, medicinal, and psychoactive uses. The paper suggests that psilocybin-producing mushrooms were employed by the Tayrona, and that present-day indigenous inhabitants of the region continue such practices. Recent medical research proposes psilocybin as a treatment for anorexia, depression, anxiety, and addictions. The document connects these modern applications to Tayrona culture, suggesting they understood brain functions and mushroom effects.

Study at a glance

Abstract

The Tayrona were an indigenous tribe that lived in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and its surroundings on the actual north territory of Colombia. The purpose of the present paper is to suggest the possibility of mushroom use in sacred rituals for spiritual purposes by the Tayrona in pre-hispanic Colombia, this obviously involving a mycological knowledge that would have included uses of fungi as nutritional edibles and medicinal sources. The uses of psilocybin producing mushrooms in the past and in present indigenous inhabitants in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia is of the most ethnomycological importance and should be studied with rigor and discipline. Psilocybin in recent times has been proposed in medicine as a new way to threat anorexia, depression, anxiety, addictions, among other illnesses that affect human beings in modern times with positive results. There is a part in this document dedicated to psilocybin as a panacea of the future relating all these applications and uses to the Tayrona indigenous culture from pre-Hispanic Colombia and suggesting they had a knowledge of the brain functions and the effects of the mushrooms.