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

Richard Evans Schultes was the ethnobotanist who personally made most of the Amazonian plant identifications this book documents, and Albert Hofmann was the chemist who first isolated the ergot alkaloids central to its pharmacological material, so the book's authority rests on the authors' own direct, documented fieldwork and laboratory discoveries rather than on the publisher's standing. This is a revised edition of the original 1979 volume, incorporating findings from the intervening years, a real revision history this record states. Use it for established facts about species identification, geographic distribution and ritual context of psychoactive plants across the traditions it covers; it is a survey across many cultures, so a claim needing deep ritual detail on one specific tradition's use of a plant may need a source focused on that tradition alone.