Salvia Divinorum

Salvia divinorum is a large leaved mint of the cloud forest of the Sierra Mazateca in Oaxaca, and among Mazatec healers it is known as ska Maria Pastora, the leaf of Mary the Shepherdess.

It is used for divination and for diagnosis. The leaves are rolled into a quid and chewed slowly, or crushed and strained into water to be drunk, and the practice is conducted in darkness and quiet by a healer, most often when the psilocybe mushrooms are out of season and a question still needs answering. Valdes, Diaz and Paul recorded the identification, preparation and use in fieldwork published in 1983, which remains the primary account.

The Marian association is a genuine syncretism rather than a missionary gloss laid over an indifferent plant. The leaf is addressed as the Virgin, prayers to her are part of its use, and the healers who use it are Catholic. What has happened here is the same thing that happened to San Pedro and to the mushrooms: a practice continued under Christian names, and the names became part of the practice rather than a disguise for it.

Its position in Mazatec practice is subordinate. It is not the principal plant, it is used for a narrower range of purposes, and the accounts describe it as weaker and more limited than the mushrooms rather than as an equivalent alternative.

Salvia divinorum is chemically unlike every other plant this atlas describes, and that has made it scientifically important out of proportion to its traditional role.

Its active compound, salvinorin A, is a diterpene, not an alkaloid. It contains no nitrogen, which is unusual to the point of being unique among strongly active plant psychoactives, and it acts as an agonist at the kappa opioid receptor rather than at the serotonin receptors that mescaline, psilocybin and dimethyltryptamine work through. It is also active in microgram quantities, making it one of the most potent naturally occurring psychoactive compounds known. None of that was predictable from the plant, and its discovery opened a line of pharmacological research on a receptor system that had few useful tools.

Two puzzles remain. The plant, like kava, appears to have no confirmed wild population, sets seed very poorly and is propagated by cuttings, which suggests long cultivation and raises the same question about how long the Mazatec have had it. And the traditional route matters: salvinorin A is largely inactivated in the gut, so the quid held in the mouth for absorption through the mucous membrane is not an arbitrary method but the one that works, a piece of practical knowledge arrived at without any of the chemistry.

Its legal status is inconsistent worldwide, and it was widely restricted in the 2000s after it circulated as a smoked concentrate that bears little relation to the Mazatec practice.