Visionary Plants and Fungi in Ritual Around the World

Peyote is the sacrament of the Native American Church, whose all night meeting is held around a crescent altar and fire with water drum, gourd rattle and staff. The Huichol of the Sierra Madre have a separate tradition, a pilgrimage to the desert of Wirikuta to hunt the cactus.

The seeds of a Mexican morning glory were taken in darkness and seclusion to answer a specific question, usually about theft, illness or a lost object. Francisco Hernandez and the friars recorded the practice, and Albert Hofmann identified the seeds' ergoline alkaloids in 1960.

The Nahua called these mushrooms teonanacatl, the flesh of the gods. Spanish friars tried to suppress their use in the sixteenth century, yet it survived in the night vigils of the Sierra Mazateca, where a curandera sings almost continuously and uses the mushrooms to diagnose the cause of an illness.

Mazatec curanderos know this mint as the leaf of Mary the Shepherdess and use it for divination, most often when the mushrooms are out of season. Its active compound is a diterpene rather than an alkaloid, and the plant appears to exist only in cultivation.

San Pedro is the oldest attested ritual plant of South America, shown held by a fanged figure in the stone relief of Chavin de Huantar from roughly the first millennium BC. On the north Peruvian coast a curandero works through the night at a mesa to remove harm sent by another person.

The Peruvian torch cactus grows faster than San Pedro and is used in the same continuous Andean tradition of divination and healing, with curanderos using it to remove harm believed sent by another person.

Yopo is a snuff of toasted seeds blown into the nostrils through a paired tube, so it is usually shared between two people. Snuff trays, tubes and spatulas survive in dry burials, showing that the practice reaches back thousands of years.

The ayahuasca vine supplies the beta carboline alkaloids that make a companion plant active, and across Amazonia it is treated as a teacher rather than a drug. The brew is taken at night in ceremony with icaros sung throughout, and it is the sacrament of two Brazilian churches.

Chacruna, the usual admixture leaf of the ayahuasca brew, carries the dimethyltryptamine behind the visions but is inert when swallowed alone. In the vegetalismo of the Peruvian river towns the vine is the teacher and chacruna is the light it gives.

Syrian rue seeds carry the same beta carbolines as the ayahuasca vine, yet in Iran, Anatolia and Central Asia they are burned as esfand to guard against the evil eye. It has been proposed as the haoma of the Avesta, one hypothesis among several.

The fly agaric is eaten by Koryak, Chukchi and other Siberian shamans. Its active compound passes through the body largely unchanged, so the urine of the eater was itself drunk, and the effect is a heavy intoxication rather than visions.

Ergot is a grain fungus known mainly for poisoning, as medieval ergotism or Saint Anthony's fire. It has been proposed as the key to the Eleusinian kykeon and as the cause of the Salem accusations, though most historians reject the second proposal.

In Bwiti, the initiatory religion of the Fang, Mitsogo and Apindji of Gabon, iboga root bark is taken chiefly once, in a very large dose over several days. The initiate is understood to cross to the land of the dead, meet the ancestors and be shown the origin of things.

Kava is a calming drink, not a visionary one. In Fiji, Tonga, Samoa and Vanuatu the order in which the cup passes states rank, and the drink opens chiefly councils, confirms installations and seals agreements.