by Carl de Borhegyi

Above is a Late Classic  (600-900 C.E.) Maya Vase K7289 painting from the Justin Kerr Data Base, that depicts a ruler or priest involved in a mushroom ritual of underworld jaguar transformation. The ruler is depicted holding a ceremonial bar from which emerges the divine vision serpent (bearded dragon) known to scholars as the Och Chan.  A deity wearing the ears of a deer and blowing upon a conch shell emerges from the jaws of the vision serpent. The ruler or priest wears a mushroom inspired ceremonial cloak and the headdress of the underworld jaguar. 

 Quoting ethno-archaeologist Peter T. Furst:

"It is tempting to suggest that the Olmecs might have been instrumental in the spread  of mushroom cults throughout Mesoamerica, as they seem to have been of other significant aspects of early Mexican civilization......" It is in fact a common phenomenon of South American shamanism  (reflected also in Mesoamerica) that shamans are closely identified with the jaguar, to the point where the jaguar is almost nowhere regarded as simply an animal, albeit an especially powerful one, but as supernatural, frequently as the avatar of living or deceased shamans, containing their souls and doing good or evil in accordance with the disposition of their human form" (Furst 1976, pp. 48, 79)."

 While I may be the first to call attention to this encoded mushroom imagery, these images can be viewed and studied with ease on such internet sites as Justin Kerr's Maya Vase Data Base and F.A.M.S.I. ( Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc).

 

by Carl de Borhegyi

Above is a Late Classic Maya Vase K1185, (600-900 C.E.) photographed in roll out form by Justin Kerr, is from the Nakbe Region in Guatemala. The Maya scribe portrayed holds a paint stylus in one hand and shell pot in the other, has an elongated head, reminiscent of the Maya Maize God. As a headdress he wears what appears to be an abstract bearded feathered serpent with bifurcated tongue. A closer look however, reveals that the scribe also has a mushroom encoded into his headdress. This encoded mushroom may be an esoteric reference to an elite school of calendar priests who were skilled in prophecy and divination.

Maya centers were ruled by a priestly caste whose duties seem to have been obsessively concerned with astronomical observations and mathematical calculations. Maya calendar priests were typically known throughout Middle America as the "enlightened ones." The Aztecs attributed this divine enlightenment to a single god named Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent, who was the legendary leader of the Toltec empire. In the 16th century Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagun recorded in his Florentine Codex, a multi-volume compilation of priceless Mexica ethnographic information, that the Toltecs were, above all: "thinkers for they originated the year count, the day count; they established the way in which the night, the day, would work; which sign was good, favorable; and which was evil, the day sign of wild beasts. All their discoveries formed the book for interpreting dreams."

While I may be the first to call attention to this encoded mushroom imagery, these images can be viewed and studied with ease on such internet sites as Justin Kerr's Maya Vase Data Base and F.A.M.S.I. ( Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc).

by  Carl de Borhegyi

 Above is a close up of a Late Classic (600-900 C.E.) Maya vase painting K5857, that depicts the hunting of the sacred deer. It is well known that many psychotropic mushrooms, such as the Psilocybe and Panaeolus genera mushroom, grow in the dung of certain quadrupeds. If you look closely "hidden in plain sight," I believe there are tiny mushrooms encoded above the deer's antlers. Mushrooms found growing in the dung of deer were easy to find, and safe to consume. They were also very easy to cultivate for the purpose of trade.

While I may be the first to call attention to this encoded mushroom imagery, these images can be viewed and studied with ease on such internet sites as Justin Kerr's Maya Vase Data Base and F.A.M.S.I. ( Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc).

According to ethno-archaeologist Peter Furst....

"The discovery, by early migrants into Mexico, of a functional deer-mushroom relationship could, conceivably, have served to reinforce whatever ancient Asian traditions might then still have remained alive concerning the deer as source of supernatural power, and especially the visionary gifts of shamans."

According to Peter Furst, among the tribes of Siberia the deer is the spirit animal that carries the shaman in his ecstatic state, to the realm of the sky deities. The Siberian shamans costume is typically adorned with deer symbolism, and the shaman's headdress is frequently adorned with antlers, without which he cannot properly shamanize, for it is the deers antlers that embody the concept of supernatural power and eternal renewal (Furst 1976, p. 170).

"It happens that not only Siberian shamans but their reindeer as well were involved with the sacred mushrooms. Several early writers on Siberian customs reported that reindeer shared with man a passion for the inebriating mushroom, and further, that at times the animals urgently sought out human urine, a peculiarity that greatly facilitated the work of the herders in rounding them up—and that might just possibly have assisted their reindeer-hunting ancestors in early efforts at domestication:

. . these animals (reindeer) have frequently eaten that mushroom, which they like very much. Whereupon they have behaved like drunken animals, and then have fallen into a deep slumber. When the Koryak encounter an intoxicated reindeer, they tie his legs until the mushroom has lost its strength and effect. Then they kill the reindeer. If they kill the animal while it is drunk or asleep and eat of its flesh, then everybody who has tasted it becomes intoxicated as if he had eaten the actual fly agaric. (Georg Wilhelm Steller, 1774, in Wasson, 1968: 239-240)