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

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.