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

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I recommend Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Power with the following caveat: The book was published 20 years ago, and during that time many advances have been made in the area of neuropharmacology.[ 1] The tome still makes good reading for enthusiasts, as well as a secondary reference source for neuropsychiatrists, neurologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and neuropharmacology medical researchers.

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

His second trip to South America was to recreate Bolivar’s famous trek from Caracas to Bogota overland. He was accompanied by a fellow who wanted to learn how to be a South American explorer. His name was Hiram Bingham. Bingham later went on to discover Machu Picchu and became much more famous than Alexander Hamilton Rice ever was. But I don’t think he ever would have got there if he hadn’t been trained in the field by Rice himself.You can see the results on a young, beardless me here. During the long research period while I was setting up various aspects of the filming, this book became my Bible. I actually read quite a few works on hallucinogenics and legal highs, but most were either obscurely medical or uncritically new-agey – this one is the perfect balance, giving excellent ethnographic details of the different peoples or tribes that have used the substances concerned, with comments on mythology or folklorish import where relevant, but also providing details on the chemistry at work and the neurological effects produced (where known). Now, among the prodigious consumers, a person may consume over a pound of the powder daily, which is why every night in the maloca you hear thud, thud, thud, which is the creation of the ipadu powder to be used the next day. And I might add that the Yucunas were Schultes’ most favorite tribe. He referred to them as the most valiant and reliable of all the peoples he worked with. And I think a lot of ipadu went into that judgment. They represent complex and fascinating aspects of the story. In fact, we’ve been able to document over 100 different plants from 40 different families, added to the ayahuasca brew. Most of these that I said are flowering plants, although one is a gymnosperm, a conifer, essentially. Another is a fern. There’s also records of snake fangs, snake poison, frogs being added. It is a rich field for further research. Before the advent of Carlos Castaneda in the 1960s, “Don Juan” was indelibly associated with the amorous, fictitious and devilish libertine brought to life by the 17 th century Spanish dramatist, Tirso de Molina. Don Juan has continued to occupy a central place in Spanish literature, been immortalized in the play Don Juan Tenorio by Jose Zorrilla, and celebrated in all of Western literature in the poetry of Lord Byron. But for many American baby boomers of the 1960s, “Don Juan” conjures up images of Castaneda’s Don Juan Matus, the Yaqui sorcerer from the Sonora desert.

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

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! Amanor, "The bearer of new fruits" (the god of the new year, Navasard). May or may not have been the same god as Vanatur. And which is all the more reason why you need a guide. And when I finished with the most horrible night of my life, going through this terrible, terrible ceremony, I asked the shaman who was a friend and teacher why he has subjected me to this. And he said, “As a conservationist, as a friend of the indigenous peoples, you confronted many challenges.” He said, “By experiencing your death in a ritual fashion, you will never fear death and travail ever again. I have prepared you for the path of the warrior. And these are the depths of the emotions and the challenges, mental and spiritual, which all of us who have an interest in trying, taking, consuming the plants of the gods must be ready to face.” Dionysus, god of wine, vegetation, pleasure, madness, and festivity. The Roman equivalent is Bacchus. [4]

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The original authors are the grand-daddies of hallucinogenic research: Richard Evans Schultes more or less invented the field of ethnobotany single-handed, while Albert Hofmann was the main discoverer of LSD and the first to identify (and synthesise) psilocybin. Their original work came out in 1979; this gorgeous 1998 version has been brought up to date by the German ‘ethnopharmacologist’ Christian Rätsch. It's so good-looking it's practically a coffee-table book. As a library, NLM provides access to scientific literature. Inclusion in an NLM database does not imply endorsement of, or agreement with, In the ’70s or ’80s, it was the first ethnobotanical congress in Latin America. It was held in Mexico, and much of the tenor of the discussion was how the Mexicans and other Latinos resented the fact that all of these gringos were coming down there and doing all these studies, and that the Latinos should study their own plants and their own indigenous peoples. I had to smile when the proceedings were published and here’s the dedication: Para Richard Schultes, quien abrió el camino (For Richard Schultes, who blazed the trail). So Schultes was beloved by the undergraduate students, by the graduate students, by many, if not most, if not all of his Latin colleagues. But I think most important of all is how he was regarded by the indigenous peoples themselves.