Angel's Trumpet

Angel's trumpet, the genus Brugmansia, is a small Andean tree with long pendulous trumpet flowers, and it is the New World counterpart of the Old World nightshades this atlas already holds in datura, henbane and belladonna.

Its alkaloids are tropanes, principally scopolamine and atropine, and they are the reason it belongs in a different category from every other plant this atlas describes. Tropanes are delirients, not visionaries. They produce disorientation, extreme dry mouth, blurred vision, a racing heart, and, characteristically, hallucinations that are not recognised as hallucinations: a person under scopolamine will converse with people who are not present and will not afterwards remember. Amnesia is typical and the therapeutic margin is narrow enough that accidental deaths occur.

Traditions that use it are correspondingly cautious. In Andean and Amazonian practice it is a specialist's plant, used for hard cases of diagnosis, for divination when other means have failed, and in some places given to children in initiation under close control. It is sometimes added in small quantity to ayahuasca, a practice regarded as advanced and risky. The Chibcha of Colombia are recorded using related preparations in funerary contexts.

Where other plants in this atlas are described by their traditions as teachers, this one is generally described as something closer to a force to be handled.

Brugmansia is now an ornamental grown in gardens worldwide, and it is, as a wild plant, gone.

Every known species is considered extinct in the wild. All surviving forms are cultivated, propagated by cuttings, and many are hybrids or long-selected cultivars maintained by human hands. The likely explanation is that its seed dispersers were large mammals of the South American megafauna that disappeared, leaving the plant dependent on the people who had already been growing it. Like kava and salvia, it is a plant that exists because a tradition kept it.

That produces an odd modern situation. A plant that Andean specialists treat as dangerous enough to reserve for the most difficult work is sold in garden centres in temperate countries as a fragrant patio shrub, and poisonings among people who were unaware of what they had, or who sought it deliberately after reading that it was psychoactive, are a recurring feature of the medical literature. Reports of scopolamine being used criminally to incapacitate people, most associated with Colombia, are frequently exaggerated in popular accounts but not baseless.

The atlas records the plant because its ritual use is genuine and documented, and records the caution because every tradition that uses it does. Of everything this atlas describes, it is the one where the gap between traditional handling and casual availability is widest.