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

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Before becoming a full-time author and internationally renowned lecturer, Rätsch worked as professor of anthropology at the University of Bremen and served as consultant advisor for many German museums. Because of his extensive collection of shells, fossils, artifacts, and entheopharmacological items, he had numerous museum expositions on these topics. Two plants in Don Juan’s armamentarium were considered “allies”: Psilocybe mexicana, a mushroom that was dried and smoked in a pipe and referred to as humito (“little smoke”) by Don Juan; and Jimsonweed or devil’s weed, a powerful psychoactive plant in the Nightshade family. The species utilized, Datura innoxia, was chewed and ingested or rubbed as an ointment to certain body parts. Both the smoked mushroom ( humito) and the flowering plant Datura, also referred to as devil’s trumpet and Moonflower, helped the ritualistic consumer in his journey to attain a state of non-ordinary reality and wield supernatural powers.

PLANTS OF THE GODS | Gegea Oana-Mihaela - Academia.edu (PDF) PLANTS OF THE GODS | Gegea Oana-Mihaela - Academia.edu

Brugmansia suaveolens mixed with Banisteriopsis Caapi, Psychotria viridis, Calliandra angustifolia (5-MeO-DMT), P. Alba, Tovomita aff. Stylosa, Couroupita guianensis, and Zygia longifolia for curing Lumbago Christian Rätsch, Ph.D. (1957 – 2022), was a world-renowned anthropologist and ethnopharmacologist who specialized in the shamanic uses of plants for spiritual as well as medicinal purposes. He studied Mesoamerican languages and cultures and anthropology at the University of Hamburg and spent, altogether, three years of fieldwork among the Lacandone Indians in Chiapas, Mexico, being the only European fluent in their language. He then received a fellowship from the German academic service for foreign research, the Deutsche Akademische Auslandsdienst (DAAD), to realize his doctoral thesis on healing spells and incantations of the Lacandone-Maya at the University of Hamburg, Germany. 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.

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. 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” and their hallucinogenic Book Review “Plants of the Gods” and their hallucinogenic

This is an excellent go to resource on the use of psychotropic compounds by pre-industrial societies.Also another spectacular find was the Lady of Cao, C A O, which is a similar story. And in terms of Moche pottery, it is a depiction of many aspects of daily life, many of which involved coca chewing. When you see the heads of the Moche people in the Larco Herrera Museum in Lima, many of them have a big quid of cocoa stuffed under their left cheek. The other thing that’s famous about their pottery is it’s incredibly pornographic. They depict all sorts of extraordinary sexual acts, and Professor Schultes remarked on this by saying, “If they’d spent as much time performing these acts as they did portraying them in pottery, perhaps they wouldn’t have died out.” Carefully researched, beautifully written, and abundantly illustrated, this book reminds us that the use of hallucinogenic plants has been a fundamental part of the human experience for millennia." Michael R. Aldrich 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.