What Chocohongos Reveal About the Return of Ritual

A quick search for “chocohongos” — a portmanteau of “chocolate” and the Spanish word for mushrooms, hongos —  yields a flood of results. The first is a newscast from Azteca Noticias, posted to YouTube two years ago, echoing a common sentiment: to be weary. The Mexican news station, based out of Ciudad de México, opens its segment with an unassuming chocolate bar displayed in a cartoon gift bag. “Chocohongos,” explains Jorge Julio González Olvera — the interviewee who later goes on to advocate for regulation — are psychedelic mushrooms prepared in chocolate. 

Though often vilified by mainstream culture, largely due to the lack of regulation, mushrooms and cacao have had a long, historical affair in México. It makes sense, considering the country is home to approximately 371 edible wild mushrooms, 53 psychoactive mushrooms, and 38,000 tons of cacao produced annually in Chiapas, Tabasco, and Guerrero. The pairing feels almost inevitable. 

“There are things that remain from generation to generation because it’s a cultural teaching,” writes Luciana Helguera, a chocolatier from Guadalajara’s specialty chocolate shop and café, La Broma de Teo. Helguera likes to refer to psilocybin-containing mushrooms as “medicinal mushrooms” due to their potent benefits for mental, emotional, and spiritual health. She says the combination of chocolate and mushrooms has also become an oral tradition. “Once positive results are shared, an oral and medicinal tradition is created,” she says. “It builds a type of empirical data.”

The Florentine Codex — completed in 1577 by Friar Bernardino de Sahagún and a group of “Nahua elders, authors, and artists” — documents Mexicans’ use of mushrooms. In the book, the mushrooms — called nanácatl in Nahuatl, the Indigenous language of the Nahua people — are described as being akin to wine, noting the ability to get “drunk” off of them. It’s worth noting that the Nahua are an Indigenous ethnolinguistic group united by their use of the Nahuatl language. They encompass other groups, such as the Mexicas, who were later known as the “Aztecs” and resided in Tenochtitlan, what’s now Ciudad México. 

In Mexica culture, which is extensively documented thanks to the Florentine Codex, mushrooms were associated with Xochipilli, the prince of flowers, as noted by David Cox for the BBC. He was the god of summer, flowers, playfulness, music, creativity, and maíz, or corn. Cox writes that Indigenous groups, such as the Mexicas, regarded psilocybin mushrooms as spirit medicine and as an important part of their social fabric and cultural practice. Aztec peoples, on the other hand, would often take mushrooms communally in ceremony with music to elicit a trance-like state through heart-beat-esque drumming cadence. They would journey through the night together, often weeping by morning, saying their tears were a way of cleansing their faces.

The use of mushrooms is thought to date much further than the 16th century, however.

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