Brian Muraresku: You have to think about ancient wine. Without being heretical, or speculative about it, ancient wine was very, very different from the wine we drink today. In fact, a common word used in ancient Greek, the language that was used to draft the Gospels, the language that was used by St. Paul, the greatest missionary Christianity ever knew, when he was preaching and converting to this Hellenic univer 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.

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Secondly, Schultes’ legacy is that nature is the ultimate medicine chest. There are medicines to be learned from nature which can heal our ills. Even ills which physicians cannot cure can sometimes be treated and sometimes be cured by indigenous shamans. Whether it’s with peyote, whether it’s with mushrooms, whether it’s with ayahuasca, or whether it’s just by chanting, to the shaman, the hallucinogen, the entheogen, is a vegetal or fungal or biological scalpel which allows him or her to analyze, to diagnose, to treat, and sometimes to cure the human mind in ways that our own physicians cannot. Xochiquetzal, goddess of fertility, beauty, female sexual power, protection of young mothers, of pregnancy, childbirth, vegetation, flowers, and the crafts of women The present-day Tarahumara Indians of Mexico mix Datura plants ( Toloache) with maize to make a ceremonial drink. Furthermore, they believe that Toloache is possessed by a malevolent spirit, just as Don Juan, the Yaqui teacher, also believed. 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. Perhaps some of the lessons learned from the increasingly widespread legalization of marijuana in many countries might help us one day pursue a similar positive path with coca in its native form. In the meantime, the traditional use of coca by its traditional users should be celebrated and protected. The bottom line here is the coca used in its traditional cultural setting is a plant of the gods, which only benefits humanity.Bia, personification of the Bia River and god of the wilderness and wild animals in the Akan religion

Plants of the Gods | Book by Richard Evans Schultes, Albert Plants of the Gods | Book by Richard Evans Schultes, Albert

And let me just give you another example. Castaneda’s books were so popular in their day that American director, film producer, and screenwriter Oliver Stone named his movie production company, Ixtlan Productions (2007), after Castaneda’s third book, Journey to Ixtlan. So why not mix a little literature with ethnobotany and neuropharmacology?

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Now, Schultes was famous for saying and for writing he never felt anything from ayahuasca. A couple of flashes of color. If you read The Yage [Letters], which I’m not a great fan of but it has a huge following — this is William Burroughs’ account — Schultes says to Burroughs, who was a Harvard classmate, “Sorry, Bill. I just saw some flashes of color. No big deal.” Ethnobotanists always worried how this father of ethnobotany, this so-called scientific discoverer of ayahuasca, never felt the effects. 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 The Aztecs called these mushrooms Teonanácatl (“divine flesh”), and as we have mentioned, the Mayans also ingested them, although peyote may have been the most commonly used hallucinogen in both civilizations, as well as by most other Mesoamerican cultures.

“Plants of the Gods” and their hallucinogenic powers in

Schultes began his career in 1933 as a poor kid in East Boston. Got a scholarship to attend Harvard and because he was a scholarship student, he had to do a work-study job. At the time, he was interested in medicine. Remember, at that point in time, medicine and botany were very much intricately intertwined, so he went to look for a work-study job at the Botanical Museum which stands today on Oxford Street, just north of Harvard Yard, and looks the exact same as the day that Schultes showed up on the doorstep looking for a job. Previously, we mentioned D. innoxia in the context of the teachings of Don Juan. Datura plants grow in the tropical and subtropical regions of both hemispheres. In Mexico, the plants, referred to as Toloache, are considered one of the main plants of the gods and used extensively for their psychoactive effects. It was consumed by both the Mayans and the Aztecs in ancient times. The eminent Maya scholar Eric Thompson wrote in The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization[ 12] that the chilans (Mayan priests specializing in divination) may have used peyote and Datura mixed with tobacco and lime to induce hallucinatory visions and assist them in divination. More recent archeological and anthropological scholarship have confirmed that bloody Mayan rituals also utilized hallucinatory plants.[ 10] The behavioral side effects and toxic manifestations that may be associated with transient or permanent neurological deficits or psychiatric conditions place them in the realm of neuropsychiatry, when affected individuals present to the emergency room or are referred for medical consultation. Ott, Jonathan. Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic Drugs, Their Plant Sources and History. Natural Products, 1996.Nhang, was a river-dwelling serpent-monster with shape shifting powers, often connected to the more conventional Armenian dragons. The word "Nhang" is sometimes used as a generic term for a sea-monster in ancient Armenian literature. So, Brian, what are your thoughts about the Eucharist that you mention in your book about how this may actually have been a mind-altering experience at the [dawn of Christianity]? This is an excellent go to resource on the use of psychotropic compounds by pre-industrial societies. The exact mechanism of how THC acts to alter mood and cognition and other psychogenic effects is not known, but it is known that the drug induces its most powerful effects by binding to its own cannabinoid receptors in the brain and that additional psychotropic effects may take place by the indirect release of dopamine.[ 13] As a library, NLM provides access to scientific literature. Inclusion in an NLM database does not imply endorsement of, or agreement with,