The list of quotations is not yet complete. Tezozomoc, also an author of repute, relates that at the coronation of Montezuma the Mexicans gave wild mushrooms to the strangers to eat; that the strangers became drunk, and thereupon began to dance.[20] All of which is a terse description of a drunken orgy induced by poisonous mushrooms, but not represented with the disgusting sequences which would have served to establish a connection with urine dances.
Diego Duran also gives the particulars of the coronation of this Montezuma (the second of the name and the one on the throne at the date of the arrival of Cortés). He says that, after the usual human sacrifices had been offered up in the temples, all went to eat raw mushrooms, which caused them to lose their senses and affected them more than if they had drunk much wine. So utterly beside themselves were they that many of them killed themselves with their own hands, and by the potency of those mushrooms they saw visions and had revelations of the future, the devil speaking to them in their drunkenness.[21] Duran, of course, is not describing what he saw. Doubtless, in that case, his narrative would have been more animated and, possibly, more to our purpose.
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.”