Mycology

Mycology is the scientific study of fungi, their classification, biology and chemistry, establishing what species a fungus used in a traditional or entheogenic practice actually is rather than relying on a traditional or common name alone. The Italian botanist Pier Antonio Micheli published Nova Plantarum Genera in 1729, describing roughly nine hundred fungi and lichens largely for the first time and demonstrating, through careful microscopic observation, that fungi produce their own reproductive spores rather than arising spontaneously from decay as had long been assumed, a finding widely credited with founding mycology as a science distinct from general botany.

A plant or fungus used in ritual, a sacred mushroom, an incense resin, a ceremonial preparation, is often known to a tradition only by a local or symbolic name that does not map cleanly onto a single modern species, and mycology's classification, built on Micheli's spore based method, is what settles the actual biological identity. The atlas relies on the discipline wherever a tradition's entheogenic or ritual fungus needs to be identified precisely, distinguishing documented species identity and chemistry from the symbolic name a practice uses for it.