ESSAY text by DANIEL PINCHBECK artwork by TREY ABDELLA and JORGE YÁZPIK mexico’s psychedelic renaissance No country has a richer psychedelic legacy than Mexico. It’s in Mexico that the modern world discovered psilocybin, the magic mushroom traditionally used in ceremonies by the Maya and the Mazatecs. Here we also found peyote, the sacred cactus of the Huichol people and the Tarahumara; Salvia divinorum, a square-stemmed plant from the mint family that only survives as a cultigen; and bufotenine, a form of DMT secreted from the glands of a toad in the Sonoran Desert. Mexico also bequeathed to us the mysterious legacy of Carlos Castaneda, the anthropologist, sorcerer, and trickster whose enormously successful books on his apprenticeship to the Yaqui “man of knowledge” Don Juan made indigenous shamanism and entheogenic exploration wildly popular across the world. In 2002, I published my first book, Breaking Open the Head, on psychedelic shamanism. This…