Scatalogic Rites of All Nations / A dissertation upon the employment of excrementitious remedial agents in religion, therapeutics, divination, witchcraft, love-philters, etc., in all parts of the globe

by John Gregory Bourke

MUSHROOMS AND TOADSTOOLS WORSHIPPED BY AMERICAN INDIANS.

Dorman is authority for the statement that mushrooms were worshipped by the Indians of the Antilles, and toadstools by those in Virginia,[22] but for what toxic or therapeutic qualities, real or supposed, he does not say. The toxic properties of fungi would seem to have been known to the Algonkins:—

“Paused to rest beneath a pine tree,

From whose branches trail the mosses,

And whose trunk was coated over

With the Dead Man’s Moccasin Leather,

With the fungus white and yellow.”

“Hiawatha,” Henry W. Longfellow, canto ix.