The History of Psilocybin Mushrooms: From Tradition to Modern Wellness

People who microdose psilocybin mushrooms tend to talk about a subtle shift rather than anything dramatic — a steadier mood, a bit more patience, a mind that feels a little quieter and clearer. A review of survey and early clinical research looks at how people who take very small, sub-perceptual amounts describe their experience, including their mood and attention.

That’s the quiet core of a conversation that has gone genuinely mainstream in Canada: not tripping, not escaping, just an ordinary Tuesday that feels a bit easier to get through.

But the story is much older than the conversation. This article follows psilocybin from Mazatec ceremony in the mountains of Oaxaca to a Swiss laboratory, through a Harvard controversy and decades of prohibition, to the research of today.

Along the way it sorts out how ergot, LSD and other old fungus stories connect to psilocybin, and which ones don’t. It ends with what an ordinary microdosing day actually looks and feels like, and where the law stands in Canada. It isn’t a how-to guide and it isn’t medical advice — it’s a plain look at a practice that has moved from the margins into a lot of kitchen-table conversations.

A long history of ceremonial use

Psilocybin mushrooms aren’t a new discovery, and they certainly didn’t begin as a wellness trend. Indigenous peoples in Mesoamerica have worked with psilocybin mushrooms for a very long time — in some traditions, for as far back as anyone can record. The Mazatec people of Oaxaca, among others, have used them in ceremonial settings guided by trained healers, with songs, ritual structure, and a clear understanding of the mushrooms as something sacred rather than recreational.

The earliest written descriptions come from the people who wanted the practice gone. In the sixteenth century, Spanish friars recorded mushroom ceremonies among the Aztecs. The best known is Bernardino de Sahagún, whose Florentine Codex describes mushrooms eaten at feasts and the visions that followed. The Nahuatl name for them was teonanácatl. The Church treated the ceremonies as idolatry, and colonial suppression pushed them out of public view for roughly four hundred years. In the Sierra Mazateca they never actually stopped.

Older clues are harder to read. Carved “mushroom stones” from Guatemala and southern Mexico, and images in a few pre-Columbian manuscripts, are often linked to mushroom ritual, but what they meant is still debated. Our piece on what’s actually documented versus what got romanticized goes through that evidence, and why claims that “every ancient culture used psilocybin” don’t hold up.

These weren’t casual experiments. Ceremonial use was — and in living traditions, still is — embedded in a whole framework: preparation, intention, community, and integration afterwards. The mushroom wasn’t consumed to make an ordinary day slightly better; it was taken seriously, approached with respect, and handled by people who had spent years learning the tradition. Anyone curious about microdosing today is, in a real sense, downstream of that history, whether they think about it or not.

That history matters for a couple of reasons.

First, it’s a reminder that Western science arrived late to something other cultures had mapped out long before. Second, it’s a useful frame: the people who know these mushrooms best have never treated them as trivial. Scholarly work on the ritual and religious uses of Psilocybe mushrooms in Mesoamerica makes clear that intention and setting were always part of the practice — an idea modern researchers have quietly borrowed and renamed “set and setting.”

Other mushroom histories

Not every old mushroom tradition is a psilocybin tradition. China, for example, has one of the longest written records of people using mushrooms. The Shennong Bencaojing, compiled around the first or second century AD, is one of the oldest Chinese texts on medicinal substances. It listed 365 entries in three classes, and lingzhi (the mushroom now sold as reishi) sat in the upper class.

Over the following centuries, lingzhi became a familiar symbol of longevity and good fortune in Chinese art. It is a rich history, but it is a separate one. Lingzhi isn’t psychoactive and contains no psilocybin. It’s worth keeping the two apart, especially now that “functional” mushrooms and psilocybin often end up in the same conversation.

From a Mazatec village to a Swiss laboratory

The modern chapter starts in the town of Huautla de Jiménez. In 1955, the New York banker and amateur mycologist R. Gordon Wasson took part in an all-night mushroom ceremony, a velada, led by the Mazatec healer María Sabina. In May 1957, Life magazine ran his account under the title “Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” and millions of readers learned about a practice the Mazatec had protected for generations.

The history of psilocybin turns on that article. Within a few years, seekers, journalists and tourists were arriving in Huautla, and the consequences for María Sabina and her community were serious. Her story is told in full in our article on María Sabina and the velada.

The science followed quickly. The French mycologist Roger Heim identified the mushroom species, grew some in France, and sent samples to Albert Hofmann at Sandoz in Basel.

Hofmann was a natural choice for the job. He had spent years at Sandoz working on ergot (Claviceps purpurea), a fungus that grows on rye and other grains. In medieval Europe, bread made from contaminated rye had caused outbreaks of ergotism, known then as “holy fire” or St. Anthony’s Fire. From lysergic acid, the core of the ergot compounds, Hofmann first made LSD on 16 November 1938. He set it aside.

On 16 April 1943 he came back to it and accidentally absorbed a trace, which is how its effects were discovered. Three days later he took a deliberate dose and rode his bicycle home, and that ride is now remembered as “Bicycle Day.” Ergot contains no psilocybin, and LSD and psilocybin are different molecules. The two stories simply share a chemist. Our psilocybin vs LSD comparison covers how they differ.

In 1958, Hofmann’s team isolated the active compound in Heim’s mushrooms and named it psilocybin. Within the year they had worked out its structure and made it in the laboratory, and the related compound psilocin was identified alongside it. Sandoz then supplied pure psilocybin to researchers and clinicians under the name Indocybin.

It’s worth pausing on that sequence. Every synthetic psilocybin capsule used in a study today traces back, chemically and historically, to mushrooms that came out of a Mazatec ceremony. The Mazatec were not credited or compensated for it, and that is part of the history too.

Wasson and Hofmann’s paths crossed again two decades later. For centuries, initiates at Eleusis near Athens drank a ritual barley drink called the kykeon, and its recipe was kept secret. In 1978 the two men and the classicist Carl Ruck proposed that it contained ergot alkaloids. They made the case in The Road to Eleusis. The idea has never been settled, and other scholars favour different explanations. It is also not evidence of psilocybin mushrooms in ancient Greece. Our article on the Eleusinian Mysteries walks through the competing theories.

The 1960s: Harvard and the backlash

In 1960 a Harvard psychologist named Timothy Leary ate psilocybin mushrooms in Cuernavaca, Mexico. When he returned, he and his colleague Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass) started what became the Harvard Psilocybin Project. Early on, the work looked like research: questionnaires, attention to the setting, and an interest in how expectations shaped the experience.

The best-known study from that circle took place on Good Friday 1962. Walter Pahnke, a graduate student working under Leary, gave psilocybin or a placebo to divinity students during a service at Boston University’s Marsh Chapel. The Marsh Chapel Experiment asked whether the participants would describe what happened as a religious experience. Most of those who received psilocybin said they did.

The project’s discipline didn’t last. The line between studying psilocybin and promoting it blurred, and the university grew uneasy. In 1963 Harvard dismissed Alpert, after finding he had given psilocybin to an undergraduate, and ended Leary’s appointment as well. Leary went on to become the public face of psychedelics, and his slogan “turn on, tune in, drop out” tied psilocybin and LSD to the counterculture in the public mind. By the mid-1960s, Sandoz had stopped producing both.

Prohibition and the long pause

The legal response came within a few years. In 1970 the United States passed the law that created its modern drug schedules, and psilocybin was placed in Schedule I alongside LSD, as the history of the compound records. In 1971 the United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances put psilocybin and psilocin in its most restrictive schedule, and signatory countries followed. Canada added psilocybin to the Food and Drugs Act in 1974.

For roughly the next three decades, formal research on psilocybin almost stopped. The mushrooms didn’t go anywhere. People kept finding, growing and using them, and the Mazatec ceremonies carried on. What disappeared was careful study. Questions that were being asked in the early 1960s simply went unasked for a generation.

The modern research turn

For decades, psilocybin sat in the same cultural bucket as a lot of other restricted substances: legally complicated, scientifically neglected, and mostly discussed in whispers. That has changed. Over the past several years, researchers at reputable institutions have returned to psilocybin with fresh eyes, and what they’ve found has been interesting enough to reopen questions many people assumed were settled.

A turning point came in 2006, when a Johns Hopkins team led by Roland Griffiths published one of the first carefully controlled psilocybin studies in decades. They gave psilocybin to healthy volunteers in a calm, supervised setting, much as Pahnke had tried to do in 1962. Many of the volunteers rated the session among the most personally meaningful experiences of their lives.

Since then, Johns Hopkins and Imperial College London have opened dedicated psychedelic research centres, and studies are running in many countries. Regulators have started to move too. In 2023 Australia began allowing specially authorised psychiatrists to prescribe psilocybin for one narrowly defined use, under strict conditions.

A good deal of the early attention went to full-dose studies — supervised sessions with larger amounts, looking at experiences that were anything but subtle. But as that work matured, a parallel thread emerged: what happens at the other end of the scale? What about amounts so small they don’t produce a noticeable “trip” at all?

That question led to survey research and early trials on microdosing. Much of that work, including the review mentioned above, looks at how people describe their days on very small amounts.

Researchers are careful with their language, as they should be. Placebo effects are hard to rule out, and what people report about themselves isn’t the same thing as a confirmed clinical outcome. Researchers are still studying what people report.

The honest picture is this: microdosing research is still young, the enthusiasm is currently ahead of the evidence, and the evidence that does exist is early and far from conclusive. None of that has stopped a great many ordinary people — parents, students, retirees, folks with demanding jobs — from trying it and quietly deciding it suits them. For a balanced read, it’s worth holding both truths at once: the science is early, and many people share their experiences online and in surveys.

The ordinary-day microdose

So what does microdosing actually look like in practice? Frankly, it’s less dramatic than most people imagine. There’s no swirling colour, no giddiness, no afternoon spent on a couch watching the ceiling. A microdose is, by design, sub-perceptual — small enough that you can go to work, drive the kids to hockey, cook dinner, and generally live your life without anything obviously “happening.”

What some people describe instead is quieter: feeling a little more engaged with the work in front of them, or a bit less snagged by small irritations.

Some people say their thinking feels more fluid — that words come a touch easier, or that a stubborn problem loosens up. Others say they mostly notice the absence of something: the afternoon slump, the low-grade dread, the mental static that usually comes with a Monday. The effect is often described less as “I took something” and more as “today just went better than usual,” which is part of why people who microdose tend to keep quiet about it — there isn’t much of a story to tell.

Because the doses are so small, most people don’t take them every day. Common practice involves spacing doses out over the course of a week, giving the body and mind days off in between. If you want a grounded explanation of how people typically structure a routine — the schedules people use, the reasoning behind them, and what the experience generally feels like — Kind Stranger’s dosing guide covers it in plain, sensible language without hype.

It’s also worth being honest about the other side of the ledger. Some people try microdosing and feel nothing at all. Some feel a little off — slightly restless, or a touch foggy on dose days.

Because psilocybin affects everyone differently, a routine that suits one person may not suit another, and many folks find it takes some experimentation (with timing and breaks, not heroic amounts) to learn what works for them. Practically speaking, most experienced folks recommend starting small, keeping notes, and staying patient.

If you’re curious how this looks as a product rather than a pile of dried mushrooms, there are now prepared options designed specifically for microdosing routines. Brighten by Kind Stranger is one example — a product built around small, consistent amounts intended to fit into a normal week. Kind Stranger’s shop covers their full range if you’d rather browse what’s available before forming an opinion.

Whether any of that is right for you is, of course, a personal decision — and, as we’ll get to next, a legal question too.

Where the law stands in Canada

In Canada, psilocybin remains a controlled substance, and it’s important to be direct about that: unauthorized production, sale, and possession are illegal. Since the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act replaced the older drug laws in 1996, psilocybin and psilocin have been listed in its Schedule III. Health Canada’s page on magic mushrooms lays out the current legal situation in full, and it notes that there are no approved therapeutic products containing psilocybin in Canada or anywhere else.

There are narrow legal pathways, and they’re fairly recent. In August 2020 the federal Health Minister began granting a small number of individual exemptions under section 56 of the Act, starting with people in palliative care. In December 2020, exemptions followed for 16 health care professionals.

In January 2022 Health Canada amended the Food and Drug Regulations so that doctors, though not individuals, can request psilocybin for a specific patient through the Special Access Program. Clinical trials are the route Health Canada itself calls most appropriate, and its magic mushrooms page explains both of these routes. For most Canadians, the law as written doesn’t currently accommodate microdosing, whatever one thinks of that state of affairs.

More on the history and culture of psilocybin

These articles look at the older stories, the people and the ideas that have grown up around psilocybin mushrooms.

From the shop

Or browse all dried mushrooms →

For the science behind the compound, including what the body does with it and how a microdose differs from a full dose, start with What Is Psilocybin?

Frequently asked questions

Who discovered psilocybin?

Nobody “discovered” the mushrooms: Indigenous peoples in Mesoamerica, including the Mazatec, had used them in ceremony for centuries. The compound itself was isolated and named in 1958 by Albert Hofmann’s team at Sandoz, working from mushrooms that traced back to María Sabina’s community in Oaxaca.

Is psilocybin related to LSD?

By history more than by origin: the same chemist, Albert Hofmann, made LSD from ergot compounds and later isolated psilocybin from mushrooms. They are different molecules, and our psilocybin vs LSD comparison goes into the details.

Will a microdose make me feel high?

No — that’s the whole point. A microdose is small enough to stay below the threshold of perception for most people. You shouldn’t see visuals, feel intoxicated, or notice your senses change. People who microdose often describe the experience as subtle. If you noticeably feel “something,” you’ve likely taken more than a typical microdose.

Is microdosing legal in Canada?

Not for most people, no. Psilocybin is a Schedule III controlled substance, and the narrow legal routes that do exist are covered in the Canada section above.

Can microdosing replace my antidepressant or other medication?

That’s a question for your prescriber, full stop. Nobody should stop or change a prescribed medication on their own, and nothing in this article suggests otherwise. Some people do explore microdosing alongside existing treatment after talking with their doctor; others find the conversation clarifies that it isn’t the right fit for them at the moment. Either way, the prescribing physician needs to be in the loop.

What does the research actually say?

Early days. Most microdosing research so far is surveys and small early trials, it is still ongoing, and the research section above explains why it is far from conclusive.

Is microdosing safe?

Psilocybin affects people differently, and research on regular small doses is still early. It isn’t for everyone. People with a personal or family history of psychosis are typically advised to avoid psilocybin altogether, and anyone with a health condition or a medication list should talk to a healthcare professional first.

That matters especially for anyone taking lithium, an MAOI, or an SSRI or other antidepressant, because psilocybin can interact with these medications. Common-sense precautions — not driving on a day you’re still learning your own response, keeping a simple journal of how you feel — go a long way. None of this is a substitute for professional care.

How do I know what a microdose is?

The short answer is “a very small fraction of a full dose, spaced out across the week.” The longer answer depends on the product and your own sensitivity, which is why guides exist. Kind Stranger’s dosing page is a sensible place to start if you want the practical details laid out clearly, without guesswork or hype.

What if I try it and feel nothing?

That happens, and it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve done anything wrong. Responses vary from person to person, and some people genuinely don’t notice much of anything. Others find their routine needs adjusting — a different schedule, a bit of patience, more consistent notes. If it isn’t doing anything for you after a fair trial, it’s perfectly reasonable to shrug and move on. Plenty of people say microdosing suits them; it isn’t a moral failing if it doesn’t suit you.