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Hallucinogenic species of the Psilocybe genus have a history of use among the native peoples of Mesoamerica for religious communion, divination, and healing, from pre-Columbian times to the present day. Mushroom stones and motifs have been found in Guatemala. A statuette dating from ca. 200 CE. and depicting a mushroom strongly resembling Psilocybe mexicana was found in a west Mexican shaft and chamber tomb in the state of Colima. A Psilocybe species was known to the Aztecs as teōnanācatl (literally "divine mushroom" in Náhuatl) and were reportedly served at the coronation of the Aztec ruler Moctezuma II in 1502. Aztecs and Mazatecs referred to psilocybin mushrooms as 'genius mushrooms', 'divinatory mushrooms', and 'wondrous mushroom's. Bernardino de Sahagún reported ritualistic use of teonanácatl by the Aztecs, when he traveled to Central America after the expedition of Hernán Cortés.

However, after the Spanish conquest, Catholic missionaries campaigned against the cultural tradition of the Aztecs, dismissing the Aztecs as idolaters, and the use of hallucinogenic plants and mushrooms, like other pre-Christian traditions, were quickly suppressed. The Spanish believed the mushroom allowed the Aztecs and others to communicate with devils. In converting people to Catholicism, the Spanish pushed for a switch from teonanácatl to the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist. In spite of this though, in some remote areas the use of teonanácatl has remained. to the present day.

The first mention of hallucinogenic mushrooms in European medicinal literature appeared in the London Medical and Physical Journal in 1799: a man had served Psilocybe semilanceata mushrooms that he had picked for breakfast in London's Green Park to his family. The doctor who treated them, Augustus Everard Brande, reported that the father and his four children experienced typical symptoms associated with ingestion, including pupil dilation, spontaneous laughter and delirium, and later described how the youngest child "was attacked with fits of immoderate laughter, nor could the threats of his father or mother refrain him."

But IOTL, it took until 1955 for Valentina and R. Gordon Wasson to become the first known Caucasians to actively participate in an indigenous mushroom ceremony, and to publicize their discovery. The popularization of entheogens by the Wassons, Leary, authors Terence McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson, and others led to an explosion in the use of psilocybin mushrooms throughout the world; by the early 1970s, many psilocybin mushroom species were described from temperate North America, Europe, and Asia and were widely collected. Books describing methods of cultivating Psilocybe cubensis in large quantities were also published. And the availability of psilocybin mushrooms from wild and cultivated sources has made it among the most widely used of the psychedelic drugs.

So then, what if, instead of remaining a Native American religious/cultural custom that the rest of the world only caught onto with the birth of the Hippie counter-culture movement, the use of psilocybin mushrooms, aka 'Magic Mushrooms', had found its way over to the Old World ( brought back from Mexico by Spanish merchants in the 1500s- or, alternatively, rediscovered independently of Native American custom, at any location with a native species of psilocybin mushroom, at any time in the last 2000 years), and had caught on in a similar manner to the introduction of tobacco? How lucrative could the cultivation of, and trade in, magic mushrooms potentially have been?
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