Plant Medicine (Entheogenic Practice)

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.

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.