Psilocybes, cultivation manual

Shortly after the rediscovery of entheogenic mushrooms in Mexico by R.G. Wasson, who on the evening of June 29, 1955 was initiated into a fungal soiree by the Mazatec sage Maria Sabina, the cultivation of magic mushrooms began to be tested in a laboratory. This step was taken by Roger Heim, mycologist, humanist and director of the Museum of Natural History in Paris, who had accompanied the Wassons on one of their expeditions to Mexico to provide advice on the identification of new species of entheogenic fungi, unknown until then by western botany.

Roger Heim not only carried out the cultivation of psilocybes out of curiosity or botanical interest, but this harvest served to provide Albert Hofmann, the eminent Swiss chemist and discoverer of LSD, with the basic material that would lead him to isolate the two active principles of the holy children: psilocybin and psilocin .

Years later, after the misleading announcement by the North American authorities that the consumption of LSD-25 produced teratogenic effects, many North American psychedelics began the search for 'natural' alternatives to the chemical entheodelic compounds. At that time an indoor mushroom cultivation manual by Oss and Oeric emerged, a psychonautical and metaphysical manifesto that would become famous, containing detailed information on the cultivation of psilocybes using pressure cookers for the sterilization process, agar, grain substrates and petri dishes for mycelium development and mushroom fruiting. Although the techniques presented in this book were not available to everyone, it did serve to make possible a first step in the decentralized cultivation of entheogenic mushrooms in the West - thus overcoming their scarcity in nature, as well as the distance to spontaneously growing mushrooms in the wild.

In the 1990s, another cultivation technique came onto the scene: the Psilocybe Fanaticuscultivation method (also known as PF Tek) . This time, it was a method within the reach of a wider public, as it was a simpler procedure that required very little culture material, and which largely avoided the risks of contamination by simplifying the steps in the cultivation process.

In this cultivation manual the authors echo all these methods, and complete them with a comprehensive and worthy exposition of the techniques for indoor and outdoor cultivation of psilocybes, visionary mushrooms that have been sacred to many cultures, both shamanic and religious, since time immemorial.