The book
Occasioned
The Deep History of Minds and Mushrooms
by M.B. Healy
Psilocybin existed for millions of years before there was a mind to alter. This is the history of what happened when the two finally met, and of what the people who kept that knowledge alive were owed, and never paid.
20 chapters · ~73,000 words · First edition 2026
The argument
Not accident. Not corruption. Occasion.
The title comes from the sentence that reopened the field. In 2006 Roland Griffiths and colleagues at Johns Hopkins reported that psilocybin “can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance.”
To occasion is gentler than to cause. It implies conditions being met and an invitation extended. The book argues that the meeting between human minds and these molecules is best understood that way: a meeting that was always going to happen, given the grasslands, the dung, the herbivores and the hungry, opportunistic primate walking among them.
What follows from that is the interesting part: what the encounter has meant across a million years, what the neuroscience can and cannot explain, what the modern trials show once the press releases are set aside, and what is still owed to the people who carried the practice through four centuries of suppression.
Five movements
How the argument is built
Deep Time
Psilocybin existed long before anything had a mind to be altered. The molecule, the dung-fed grasslands, and the foraging primates who were always going to meet it.
The Long Encounter
Out of Africa and into the painted caves. Kykeon, Soma, and the plants that came to depend on us as much as we came to depend on them.
The Lock and the Key
Why these molecules work at all: the serotonin question, the default mode network, entropy and order, and what neuroplasticity actually explains.
The Modern Occasion
The forbidden forty years, the Griffiths experiments that reopened the field, what the trials genuinely show, and in the same breath the darkness in the light.
What We Owe
The great severing, Maria Sabina's regret, and the debt the psychedelic renaissance has never settled with the people it borrowed from.
Why it's on this site
It makes our case better than we do.
Peyote.com refuses to list peyote ceremonies, on the grounds that a sacrament held by particular communities should not be opened to a wider market simply because demand exists.
Chapter 18 is the case study for that argument. Maria Sabina admitted an American banker to a Mazatec velada in 1955. His account ran in Life magazine in 1957. Within a decade her village was overrun, her house was burned, her son was killed, and she died illiterate and penniless in 1985, “famous against her will,” as the book puts it.
Every argument for opening indigenous practice to a global market was made before, and answered. Reading what the answer cost is the fastest way to understand why this site draws the line where it does.
Get the book
Occasioned
The Deep History of Minds and Mushrooms. 20 chapters, from the deep-time origins of the molecule to the debt the psychedelic renaissance has never settled.
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Prefer to start with the site? Substance profiles, the research library and the retreat directory cover much of the same ground.