European use of psilocybin is undocumented…

[European use of psilocybin is undocumented, neither have we inherited much folk knowledge. Use of psilocybin for recreational/entheogenic purposes appears to have developed only from the 1960s onwards. As much as some people may have wanted to use it to discover God, they didn’t want to die to do it. We can’t assume that Europeans had a folk tradition of hallucinogenic mushroom use that was since suppressed. Even in the 1799 and later reports, physicians didn’t know how to treat psilocybin mushroom intoxication, and essentially just watched it run its – fortunately benign – course. Other mushrooms killed people in nasty ways, so we can understand people were pretty much willing to do without mushrooms in their diet.]


‘Although dozens of species of psychedelic mushrooms are found in Europe, there is little documented usage of these species in Old World history. The few existing historical accounts about psilocybin mushrooms typically lack sufficient information to allow species identification, and usually refer to the nature of their effects. For example, Flemish botanist Carolus Clusius (1526–1609) described the bolond gomba (crazy mushroom), used in rural Hungary to prepare love potions. English botanist John Parkinson included details about a “foolish mushroom” in his 1640 herbal Theatricum Botanicum. The first reliably documented report of intoxication with Psilocybe semilanceata—Europe’s most common and widespread psychedelic mushroom—involved a British family in 1799, who prepared a meal with mushrooms they had picked in London’s Green Park’

Pasted from <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybin#Early>