Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers

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Now there are two species of coca. As I said, there’s 200 species in the genus Erythroxylum. But there’s two species that are chewed as what we know as coca leaves or coca powder. And this work was originally done by Tim Plowman, who was a student of Schultes, who spent about 10 years in South America, trying to figure out the coca story.

Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucin…

Another group of plants that should be mentioned for the sake of completeness are the opioids closely related to the narcotics. If the book, Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers, is deficient in one area, it is in the brief description of narcotics and cocaine. This could be related to the fact that narcotics produce euphoria but are generally not hallucinogenic. In fact, morphine, a well-known narcotic drug produced from the opium poppy plant, is named after the Greek god of sleep, Morpheus, because of its hypnotic qualities — in the same fashion as the scientific name of the opium poppy plant itself, Papaver somniferum.

Now chicle is a resin of the sapodilla tree, which also produces a very tasty indigenous edible fruit. It is best known to the Western world. It has had a major impact on our history in a very unique and interesting way. Chicle, as I said, was native to Central America. It was long chewed by indigenous peoples there, and the commercialization of chicle in chewing gum got its start with General Santa Anna, the Mexican hero of the Alamo.

Plants of the gods by Richard Evans Schultes | Open Library Plants of the gods by Richard Evans Schultes | Open Library

If you want to truly begin to understand shamanic cultures and shamanic healing, and the plant of the gods, and the fungi of the gods, and the magic frogs of the gods, you need to experience the ceremony as the shaman as the indigenous people see it. Now as an ethnobotanist, I’ve been through probably 80 or 90 ayahuasca ceremonies. Always in a ritual context, always led by a shaman, because these are plants of power and knowledge and danger as well.There is this interplay of beer and wine… few people realize that wine is not just [beneficial] because it’s wine, but certainly in the ancient world, it was [also] the number one antibiotic and also it was used as a menstrum– a word not common in everyday parlance, but meaning something useful for dissolving these compounds. There’s an episode in the “Plants of the Gods” podcat called “Hexing Herbs,” which focuses on these tropane alkaloids-rich plants like henbane that were used for mind-altering purposes, religious [purposes], witches’ Sabbaths and all sorts of other interesting stuff. But before I go into detail about the ethnobotany and neuropharmacology discussed in Plants of the Gods and the implications for neuropsychiatry,[ 5, 7] I want to satisfy the SNI reader’s curiosity: Why bring the controversial Carlos Castaneda and his books into neuropharmacology? I preemptively reply with another question: Is there any other cultural term that, for some individuals, has changed so dramatically as the literary reference to the persona of “Don Juan”?

Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic

Porewit, god of the woods, who protected lost voyagers and punished those who mistreated the forest Dr. Mark Plotkin: Huston Smith, who was the greatest historian and analyst I think of religions in the 20th century, said, and I quote, “if we take the world’s enduring religions at their best, we discovered the distilled wisdom of the human race.” And so much of your work, Brian, in the “Immortality Key” is distilling what is at the root of Western religions, and maybe world religions, so perhaps you can share with our listeners a bit about the Eleusinian mysteries, and the role in the development of where we stand today? So when we talk about plants of the gods or fungi of the gods, we’re not just talking about compounds which may be useful for treating mental or emotional ailments. We’re talking about compounds which have revolutionized Western medicine and Western culture, as discussed in the episode on ergot. These compounds may have played a vital role in the beginnings of Western religions in addition to many of the aboriginal ones as well. A Smithsonian scientist named William Safford said that, “No, there were no hallucinogenic mushrooms. It was just peyote. It was the Indians trying to mislead the missionaries.” But Schultes was a better botanist than Safford, and he knew there would be no peyote, which thrives in desert-like conditions. There would be no pipe peyote in the tropical forest of Oaxaca and Southern Mexico, and he set out to prove Safford wrong. The “Immortality Key” unfolds in a similar way. What appears to be a straightforward investigation into the origins of Christianity becomes a detective story, searching for an explanation into the famed Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece, as well as the righting of an academic wrong, a coming of age story, a Roots-like search for the author’s cultural origins, all told within the framework of a personal Odyssey, and I say Odyssey with a capital O!Clinicians are equally enthused about the possibilities of experimenting with these therapies to treat ailments as diverse as anorexia, early stage Alzheimer’s, insomnia, and even PTSD, one of the most terrible afflictions of our troops. The late Stanislav Grof, a pioneer in the field of psychotherapy, I love this quote, was fond of saying that “Psychedelics are to psychology the same way that telescopes are to astronomy, and microscopes are to the study of bacteria.”

“Plants of the Gods” and their hallucinogenic powers in

He said that you went to Eleusis not to not to learn something like doctrine, dogma, the way we think of religion today, you went there to experience something, you went there to suffer pathos, you went there to actually experience something. This shows up in early Christianity too. Only in recent years, as some of the technology came on the archaeobotany I write about in the book, the archaeochemistry is now really, really [able to] prove that, well, there’s actual organic data to test this hypothesis one way or the other. And so some pretty interesting data came to light shows that this is a discipline worth visiting. And I think, in coordination with some of the clinical work at places like Johns Hopkins and NYU and now it’s all over the place at Harvard, and Yale, and UCLA, even in Texas! I think that that the culture changed a lot in the past 5-10 years with respect to psychedelics. And so fortunately, Carl, who’s now 87 is experiencing yet another rebirth. And this is the proposition of the Mysteries that belong to the pagan world to whether it’s the mysteries of Eleusis that we talked about or the mysteries of Dionysus, which I think have far more in common with early Christianity, and we can talk about that later. But this notion of encountering the divine within [personal] experience, so how did Aristotle define this this notion of the Eleusinian vision? Astłik had been worshipped as the Armenian deity of fertility and love, later the skylight had been considered her personification These are not plants or compounds to be trifled with. And let me tell you about my worst ayahuasca experience of all. I was in the middle of a ceremony with a Komsa shaman, actually an Ingano shaman from Colombia, and I soon was able to realize that this was going to be a very, very, very bad trip. And I then found myself vomiting purple phosphorescent scorpions. So anyone who thinks that this is going to be a fun ride, anyone who thinks this is always going to be a world of wonder and magic, and lots of fun, is underestimating what these types of journeys can consist of.Aristaeus, god of shepherds, cheesemaking, beekeeping, honey, honey-mead, olive growing, oil milling, medicinal herbs, hunting, and the Etesian winds Well, I did plenty of nitrous oxide in college, and I still don’t understand Hegel! So William James definitely had the jump on me☺