The Aztec ethnobotanical tradition shows the society’s emphasis on infrastructure, war, and recreation. Because of the limited area that peyotl grows within, the Aztec had to develop a reliable infrastructure to transport these plants from the Rio Grande region throughout their empire and to societies to the South and East of themselves where their use has been reliably recorded. The Aztec use of peyotl to prepare soldiers for war and provide protection shows the emphasis of war within Aztec society. The Aztecs’ use of peyotl and teonanácatl recreationally as well as ritually shows the interrelation of recreation and ritual. In addition to recreational use, the rituals themselves were largely celebratory. Before asking for wisdom or protection, Aztecs would dance, laugh, and enjoy the intoxicated state. This paper will attempt to use specific ethnobotanical 1 and ethnomycological 2 descriptions of plants used within the three most well-known pre-Latin American societies to compare their worldviews. This paper will compare the Aztec (also known as Triple Alliance or Nahuatl), the Maya, and the Inca, including the proto-Incan Chavín society and the groups conquered during the Incan Empire’s reign, providing an equal focus on the botany, anthropology, and pharmacology 3 of these plants. Because many of these plants are entheogenic 4 and sacred within pre-Latin American pagan religions, much of the archaeological and ethnographical information of these plants’ rituals have been destroyed by the Spanish Conquest or distorted by Spanish missionaries. This paper will use primary sources whenever possible and will seek to neglect normative 5 language used within these sources. In addition to these complications, many of these plants and their active compounds are federally controlled in the United States. Because of this, information is sometimes hard to find, and not much research has been conducted into the pharmacology of some of these substances. The legal status of each plant and active compound is summarised in table 1.