Origin No single point of origin can be given. Ott's survey treats the ritual use of psychoactive plants as having arisen separately in the Americas, in Africa, in Siberia and in Oceania, in each case out of the plants that region actually had, rather than spreading from one hearth.
Plant medicine is the ritual use of psychoactive plants and fungi as a means of contact with the sacred, as distinct from their use as pharmacy and from recreation. The practitioner takes the plant inside a structure of preparation, diet, song, fasting and supervision, and the tradition holds that the plant itself is a teacher or a person rather than a substance, which is why the word medicine is preferred to drug by nearly everyone who does it. It is among the oldest documented religious techniques and among the most geographically scattered, appearing independently in Amazonia, Mesoamerica, the Andes, Siberia, Gabon and the Pacific. The name entheogen, meaning that which generates the divine within, was coined in 1979 by a group of scholars who wanted a term that described the religious use without the clinical or criminal freight of hallucinogen and psychedelic.
Facts
Status
Status TodayLiving tradition, practised today 3 Practice Status DetailLiving tradition, practised today. Fernandez's ethnography of Bwiti in Gabon documents one such practice as an ongoing religious life rather than a survival. 3 Regulatory StatusContested in law. In Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficente Uniao do Vegetal the Supreme Court of the United States held that the government had not carried its burden under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of justifying a ban on the church's sacramental tea. 4 Origins
Origin PeriodNo single point of origin can be given. Ott's survey treats the ritual use of psychoactive plants as having arisen separately in the Americas, in Africa, in Siberia and in Oceania, in each case out of the plants that region actually had, rather than spreading from one hearth. 1 Place of OriginSeveral regions independently rather than one. The best documented living complexes are Amazonian, Mesoamerican, West and Central African, and Siberian. 1 Position Profile
Key TextLuna's Vegetalismo, a study of the mestizo plant healers of the Peruvian Amazon, in which the plants are described as teachers with their own diets and songs rather than as pharmacological agents. 2 Learn More
What the Practice Involves, Described Rather Than Taught
The practices grouped under this heading share a shape without sharing an origin. A person is prepared for days or weeks before anything is taken, usually by a restricted diet and by abstention from sex and from salt; the plant is then taken under the direction of a specialist who has served a long apprenticeship, in a setting the specialist controls; and the specialist works throughout with sound, most often sung, which is treated as the instrument that steers the experience rather than as accompaniment to it. Afterwards the person is received back by a community that has an account of what happened and a place to put it.
Every part of that sequence matters to the people who do it, and the part most often dropped when the practice travels is the last. A session without the community that interprets it is a different thing from the practice as its holders describe it, whatever plant is involved.
These are living traditions with living authorities, and several of them are closed. Bwiti initiation in Gabon, Huichol pilgrimage in Mexico and the ceremonies of the Native American Church are held by specific peoples who decide who may take part. This atlas records what such practices are and where they are held, because that is public knowledge that their holders have themselves put into the record. It does not set out how to conduct one, and it does not treat the plants as available techniques. The distinction is not squeamishness: the traditions themselves make it, and the training they require is the part that cannot be summarised.
Several Separate Inventions Under One Recent Name
Plant medicine is a recent English phrase and it groups traditions that have no historical relationship to each other. Amazonian ayahuasca practice, Mesoamerican peyote and mushroom ceremony, the West and Central African use of iboga, and the Siberian complexes around Amanita muscaria arose separately, out of the plants each region actually had, and answer to different cosmologies. Reading them as one worldwide practice with local variants gets the history backwards.
The convergence people notice is real but it is a convergence of problem rather than of descent. Any tradition that gives a powerful psychoactive plant a religious role has to solve the same handful of difficulties: who is allowed to administer it, how the person is prepared, how the experience is steered while it is happening, and how what was seen is brought back into ordinary life. Preparation regimes, a trained specialist, controlled sound and a receiving community are the recurring answers, and they recur because the problem recurs.
The label also carries a therapeutic implication its subjects mostly do not. Very few of these traditions describe what they do as medicine in the sense a clinic would recognise. The Amazonian vegetalista speaks of plants as teachers with names and diets; Bwiti describes an encounter with the ancestors. Those are not clumsy statements of a pharmacological claim, and translating them into one loses the content. The atlas keeps the phrase because readers search for it, and records underneath it what each tradition says in its own terms.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Founded ethnomycology as a field through his fieldwork with the Mazatec curandera Maria Sabina and later comparative research into entheogens and ancient religion.
Plants and Materia Used
Ergot, Plants This edge names a proposed practice category rather than a contested claim in its own right. Ergot's own contested-use fact already carries the Wasson, Hofmann and Ruck 1978 Eleusinian kykeon hypothesis and its standing as influential but not generally accepted, in full.
Sources
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