The Myth That Built Modern Bufo

This Week’s Sunday Insider: Modern Bufo culture wasn't built on ancient tradition…it was built on a myth that almost nobody bothered to fact-check.

Atoms & quarks danced around me in perfect rhythm, forgotten moments from my childhood ran across my consciousness, loved ones I’ve lost appeared happy & peaceful. My body was engulfed in waves of cosmic love. The sheer terror I had felt just seconds before was replaced by overwhelming feelings of love, bliss & gratitude for the human experience.

There are experiences so profound that the limits of language will never do them justice.

I can describe the euphoria MDMA catalyzes, the feeling of the earth breathing on a hero dose of Psilocybin, or the perfect sacred geometry of Changa…but I could never fully convey the power of a Bufo experience.

I’ve sat with the God Molecule 4 times, and each experience left me completely blown away. I felt like a child of God, in complete awe of a realm otherwise inaccessible. It remains the single most powerful Psychedelic experience I’ve ever had.

Like many people who work with the toad, I went into the experience knowing very little about it. When we’re uneducated about a subject, we’re porous to the ideas shared by people we view as authorities—the facilitator, the shaman or the retreat leader. I was no different. I eagerly accepted the story that Bufo was an ancestral medicine used by Indigenous communities for thousands of years. It sounded plausible, so I never questioned it.

But as an innately curious person, which is what drove me to try Bufo in the first place, I eventually started researching its history. Almost everything I had been told about the medicine turned out to be wrong.

Once I started spending time around Bufo facilitators, I noticed they all seemed to tell the same story. It was presented with remarkable confidence.

Bufo was described as an ancient medicine. Indigenous communities had supposedly worked with it for centuries, maybe longer. Modern facilitators were simply continuing a lineage that stretched back through history.

It sounded plausible…even beautiful. The problem was that almost nobody could tell me where this history actually came from. Ask for evidence & the conversation drifted toward vague references to “ancestral wisdom” or “oral tradition.” Everyone seemed to know the story.

Very few people seemed interested in how we knew it was true.