256 - A Drug Enhancer Called Chocolate

Program Notes

[From Wikipedia] Jonathan Ott has written eight books, co-wrote five, and contributed to four others, and published many articles in the field of entheogens. He has collaborated with other researchers like Christian Rätsch, Jochen Gartz, and the late ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson. He translated Albert Hofmann’s 1979 book LSD: My Problem Child (LSD: Mein Sorgekind), and On Aztec Botanical Names by Blas Pablo Reko, into English. His articles have appeared in many publications, including The Entheogen Review, The Entheogen Law Reporter, the Journal of Cognitive Liberties, the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs (AKA the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs), the MAPS Bulletin, Head, High Times, Curare, Eleusis, Integration, Lloydia, The Sacred Mushroom Seeker, and several Harvard Botanical Museum pamphlets. He is a co-editor of Eleusis: Journal of Psychoactive Plants & Compounds, along with Giorgio Samorini.

A sampling of books by Jonathan Ott

Pharmacophilia, or, The Natural Paradises

Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic Drugs, Their Plant Sources and History<

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0300052669/192-0254306-7572131

Persephone’s Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion

By R. Gordon Wasson, Stella Kramrisch, Dr. Carl Ruck, Jonathan Ott

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/1888755024/192-0254306-7572131

Shamanic Snuffs or Enthogenic Errhines

By Jonathan Ott

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0961423455/192-0254306-7572131

Ayahuasca Analogues Pangean Entheogens

By Jonathan Ott

Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

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And can you believe it? I finally made it back to podcast land. It’s been a long, I guess,

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eight or ten weeks since we were last together, but after having to move to a new and somewhat

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smaller place, followed by my computer crashing, which resulted in the loss of quite a bit of

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unbacked up material. Well, I made it

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through that all right, but then the power switch on my Volcano burned out, and a couple of days

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later my Iolite gave up on me and just wouldn’t spark up anymore. So after I had a minor meltdown,

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I finally got back up to speed and had this program all ready to record a week ago. But

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when I plugged in my beautiful and very expensive Rode Podcaster microphone,

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I discovered that there was no longer a driver for it to work with Windows 7,

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and their tech support wouldn’t help, and so it’s now a very expensive paperweight.

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And so I had to wait for my new mic to arrive, which it just did today.

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So it is from those depths that the good wishes and support

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of a whole lot of our fellow salonners floated me back up,

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and all is well once again.

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In fact, without the donations of the 27 salonners

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who bought a copy of my pay-what-you-can novel,

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The Genesis Generation,

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and the donations to the salon by a whole bunch of people.

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Well, without all that help, I wouldn’t be here yet today,

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because it was through their kind donations that I’ve been able to buy a new microphone

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and a new computer to replace that rickety house of cards that I had been using.

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So here’s a great big thank you to those 27 wonderful souls who bought a copy of my book,

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and to the following salonners

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who made donations to the salon to keep us going.

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And I should point out that some of these donations, I’ve taken part of all these donations

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and passed them on to several other causes that are going on right now.

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I know the Shulgens need money, Jonathan Ott needs some money, and John Hanna has a real

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urgent plea out to help a friend

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of his. So I’ve taken the liberty of passing some of those donation amounts on to some of the other

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causes. So thank you all, one and all. And these donors to the salon are Howard F. And Howard,

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I’m sorry to say this thank you is so tardy, but the post office lost your letter for a while, and by the time I received it, my enforced hiatus was already underway.

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So a very late thank you goes out to you.

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Also, donations have been sent in during the past eight weeks by Rob P., Stuart P., Mark C., Matthew L thank you for that sizable donation.

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It really helped.

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And in particular, I want to thank John J.,

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whose extremely generous donation pushed the total over the top two weeks ago

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and allowed me to order this fast new computer,

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which has finally brought a smile back to my face.

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So thank you all ever so much,

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and I’m sure the other people we’ve passed some of these donations on to, thank you as well.

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You all have been very instrumental in seeing that this circus of interesting ideas will continue meandering along these merry trails for quite some time to come.

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Now, I was going to play a new Terrence McKenna talk for my first podcast after the break,

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but unfortunately I hadn’t backed up any of the McKenna tapes that I’d digitized

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or the talks that our fellow salonners have sent me.

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So rather than spend another couple weeks

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getting that set up again,

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I was lucky to find a couple of DVDs

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of Jonathan Ott’s talks that John Hanna sent me

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after his 2004 MindStates conference in Oaxaca, Mexico.

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Now when I first watched these videos,

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I planned on stripping the audio out for a couple of podcasts,

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but then due to my inattention to detail,

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they kind of got buried under the other projects

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that I haven’t gotten to either.

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But since Terrence and Jonathan were such good friends,

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I thought that it would be appropriate

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to play one of Jonathan’s talks today.

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The two recordings that John sent me

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were of Jonathan’s talks about. The two recordings that John sent me were of Jonathan’s

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talks about mescaline and chocolate, and right now I’m going to play what I like to call the

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chocolate talk. As you’ll hear, he was using a slide projector, but not seeing the slides doesn’t

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seem to diminish this talk too much. And by the way, the DVD didn’t show the slides either. It was

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just a headshot of Jonathan. Now when I come back after this talk, I DVD didn’t show the slides either. It was just a head shot of Jonathan.

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Now, when I come back after this talk,

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I’ll tell you about the first time I experienced Jonathan in person.

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But first, through the good graces of John Hanna,

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who produced this conference, and thank you very much, John,

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we’ll now join Jonathan Ott on a bright 2004 September day in Oaxaca, Mexico,

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and learn about the many different ways that cacao has been used by shamans and revelers throughout the centuries.

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Most of you probably know that cacao came to the old world

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or the rest of the world through Mesoamerica,

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even though the plant is of South American origin.

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Oddly enough, it’s thought to have been a cross between two wild species of cacao in the Amazon basin,

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something like 10 or 15,000 years ago, and it’s believed to be an anthropogenic cross.

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That is a hybrid made intentionally by human beings.

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But interestingly enough, that being the case, the first documented cultivation was in Mesoamerica,

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in the area where we are now, which is most of Mexico and part of Central America.

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And it goes back something like 4,000 years here, and there are pretty good evidence that cultivation goes back.

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The species that we’re dealing with is Theodroma

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cacao, and it’s from the family

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Sterculiaceae.

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There are a number

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of commercial cacaos, but it’s strictly

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a New World genus.

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Although there are examples

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of Sterculiaceae from the Old World

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and other genera,

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and now, of course, it’s grown in other areas.

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The interesting contrast also between South America and Mesoamerica

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is that until the Spaniards came, until the 16th century,

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in South America it was never cultivated for the seeds.

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It was already in semi-cultivation there at that time.

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for the seeds. It was already in semi-cultivation there at that time.

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But there it was only cultivated for the white pulp around the seeds inside the fruits,

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which I’ll show in just a moment.

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And these are used for making beverages, especially in Brazil.

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It’s very common in street-side juice stands and so forth, the beverage of,, which is made from the sweet whitish pulp of theobroma grandiflora,

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and perhaps of other species.

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And also here, that is done in the areas where cacao is grown.

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But it’s not a very big cultivation area in Mexico now.

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This slide shows the town of Cacahuatán,

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which is in Chiapas, not far from the Guatemala border.

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And in fact now, as I said, although the Spaniards introduced cacao to the old world from Mesoamerica,

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it’s not a leading cultivator of cacao at the moment.

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It’s basically only found in the states of Chiapas and Tabasco, which are adjoining and both also adjacent to Oaxaca,

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and perhaps spilling over a little bit into Oaxaca

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and also all through Central America.

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But the major cultivation now is in the old world,

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especially in Africa.

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It’s also grown in Asia.

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But it’s the Gold Coast and the Ivory Coast of Africa,

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where you see the maximum cultivation of cacao.

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It’s very much a minor iodine in Mexico.

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Now, in the next slide I show a sectioned fruit,

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so you can see the purplish fresh seeds

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and this white pulp that I’m talking about.

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And so in the preparation of cacao commercially,

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as I said, in South America, it was grown for this pulp.

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And so it’s simply separated and put into water.

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And it makes a very refreshing juice.

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And if you go to Brazil, you can get this cupuaçu, which is theobroma grandiflora pulp drink on the street.

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I’ve not seen it in Mexico, but it probably does exist.

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And in both areas also, this can be fermented to make an

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inebriating beverage, and so

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this also happens.

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But in fact, during the processing of

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cacao for the seeds, which was strictly

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a Mesoamerican practice,

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and again, the cultivation goes back farther

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here than it does in the home of the plant

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in South America,

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the whole mass is scooped

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out from the fruits and piled up in heaps.

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And then that fermentation is allowed to proceed just in a kind of a heap,

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piled up in a special space reserved for this.

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And that helps to separate the seeds.

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After a few days of this fermentation, it helps to separate the seeds from the pulp,

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which is very mucilaginous.

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And it also is said by enzymatic reactions to enhance the alkaloidal content of the seed,

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which I will talk about a bit later. Next slide, please. And so you can see the cacao

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beans here after processing, and some of them are going around and you’re already munching on them.

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But in any case, the seeds are cleaned out, the fresh seeds from this fermenting mass.

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Then they’re generally sun-dried and roasted at a fairly low temperature.

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And for making, and that’s what you see here, and they have a husk on the outside, which

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you’re probably picking off of the ones that you are munching on.

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And so for making fine chocolates,

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that husk is separated off from the inner part, which is called the nib.

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And then this is, again, after roasting.

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And then it’s crushed and usually on stone rollers.

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And what comes out of that looks like molten chocolate,

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and it is called chocolate liquor.

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And that chocolate liquor, like if you go to the market here,

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there are stands that just sell that.

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You can take even a big five-gallon tub and get it filled up,

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and it comes out of the machine.

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They usually mix it with granular sugar and cinnamon

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because it’s prepared that way here in Mexico to use

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as a beverage with milk or water. But you can get it just straight also, and then of

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course it will harden into a block like very hard dark chocolate, and it’s quite bitter.

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And so for making chocolate candies, that is the basis of chocolate bars and chocolate candy is the chocolate

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liquor or chocolate mass is another name for it and generally speaking with

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commercial chocolates well I should backtrack for a second in the late 19th

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century a Dutchman named CJ from how to develop a process whereby with a large

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press hydraulic press,

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he was able to express some of the fat, much of the fat, I should say,

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from this cacao liquor or cacao bean meal

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to render the product drier and more soluble in milk or water

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because the fat inhibited the solubility

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and made it difficult to froth it up into a beverage.

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On the other hand, the same Van Houten,

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sometime after that, also developed what is today

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called the Dutch process for making soluble cocoa,

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which is a cacao powder.

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And in this case, the fat is pressed out with this hydraulic press,

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and then the resulting material is treated with alkaline salts, basic salts,

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and it results in enhanced mineral content and also better solubility.

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Now, this device is called a batidor, and the whisk is called a molinillo, or little milk.

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And this is how it was traditionally solubilized here, although they didn’t have milk.

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It was in water.

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And the cacao seed, or bean itself, as well as this beverage, was called cacao,

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which means water or cacao, or a potion of cacao.

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Cacao is water, but it also is often used to indicate that it’s a potion.

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And this ingenious device, the modinillo,

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which is rubbed between the palms to impart a brisk rotary motion,

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reciprocating rotary motion to the head,

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it’s often carved in points and has removable rings,

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is a very good device for frothing

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and mixing things that aren’t very soluble.

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And this is a genuine, fairly old one.

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I have some even older.

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Could I have the next slide, please?

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And this is the origin of that implement, the Morninillo.

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This is a small palm called Camidoria tepejilote,

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and the common name is tepejilote. And this is very

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common. I have lots of them on my property. I have for a while a female donkey, and she

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really loved this plant, and ate it, and liked lots of them. So this is the bottom of the

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stem. It’s a very small palm. It’s in the Aracaceae, by the way, the group to which the betel nut palm belongs.

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And then they take it out with the roots and cut the roots down and just leave this part.

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And so this is the natural implement. And the other ones in the previous slide were

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like manufactured artifacts for doing the same thing. But again, this is a whisk. It

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works very well. So that’s the Tepe Hidalte. Next slide, please.

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And you can see, I haven’t gone to the market,

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but this was in 1982 or 3 that I took this photograph.

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This is in the marketplace here in Oaxaca.

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And this is a beverage made that way.

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And she has one of those whisks sticking out of it.

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And this is called Tejate, which is a local version of a cacao potion. And

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it’s a ground cacao with water, sweetened. And then it’s whipped up into a froth. And

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you can see it’s quite a foamy froth on top of it. Remember when I showed some of the

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codices, you would see this froth, but in that case it was brown to indicate cacao.

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But this particular potion, tecapit, contains a unique ingredient

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that also enables this frothing to be so dramatic.

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It’s very mucilaginous, and it also helps to make a whipped cream effect.

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It’s a flower.

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I could have the next slide called Quararibea funibus.

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Sorry, Quararibea funibus.

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And that’s in the Bombacaceae

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or the K-pop family,

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like Seba,

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that is the K-pop group.

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And I’ll say more about those.

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But first, this is, again,

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from the Codex Borja,

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Mixtec, 15th century,

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from this area, north of here.

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And this is a ceremonial codex.

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And this is the goddess Xochiquetzal, which is the female counterpart of Xochipilli.

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She’s the princess of flowers, also associated with inebriance, with springtime, with dance, with music, with all the good things.

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with springtime, with dance, with music, all the good things.

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And so she’s sitting in a house or on the side of a house.

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And it’s clearly sitting in one of these cacao potions,

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because you can see it from the brown froth.

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And again, you can see that she has this ornamentation,

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a flower on a headdress.

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She’s the princess of flowers, Xochiquetzal.

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Quetzal is the name of a very beautiful, colorful bird,

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which is mostly extinct in this area.

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And this potion, again, is flavored with flowers.

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And that’s why they depict it with the flowers sticking off.

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And it may be a compound thing with the flower

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on the one hand and the mushroom on the other,

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because you can see the mushroom on the other, because you

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can see the little round dot symbol, which perhaps

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represents mushroom content.

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And it’s often on the jar or the cup as well.

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Could I have the next one, please?

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And when these potions are made this way, they are called,

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remember I said with the

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agave potion, this was

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one of the vehicles, one of three vehicles

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for administering and inebriating

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other medicinal plants.

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This other two vehicles being the

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cacao potion and finally

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tobacco reeds. And I won’t talk

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about tobacco so much at the moment.

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But

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in the case of the agave potion, straight,

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it’s called,, or now we say,,

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but when it contained these visionary agents,

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it was called,, or the flowery or florid

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or it’s also,, or the wondrous or divine.

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The same is the case with cacao.

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When it contains these visionary elements,

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it’s called or the florid cacao.

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So we have the florid

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and the florid cacao.

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A combination, as I said the other day,

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seemingly mixed with the agave potion,

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which has this stick, which I believe represents acacia arnjusticum, the root of which was

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added to the still called palo de pulque. Next, please. And again, I showed both of

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these the other day, but I just wanted to show again the contrast between the agave

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potion, which she has in hand, and the pulque stick that she’s putting in it, and then another one to rub it in.

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The loveliest show, the two elements.

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And then on the side, by comparison, is the cacao potion.

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And here is a kind of offering.

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This is also the not-all codex, also Mixtec from the 15th century.

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Next slide, please. So apropos of these additives, the Tejate potion

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that I showed in the second from Oaxaca City Market,

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this contains particularly this flower.

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And someone here has some that can be shown around,

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which is the flower of Corare de Afunibus

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in the Bapakase, the Kehok family.

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And that man, of course, is Richard Evans Schultes.

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And I had the good fortune when I was researching my Chanka book,

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everything must have been lined up right in the ceremonial calendar,

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just by chance.

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I coincided here in Oaxaca with our first in Mexico City,

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and we came to Oaxaca together with both Richard Evans Schultes

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and Albert Hoffman.

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And so we came on a brief field trip

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to look into this Guaridea Funeris,

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because Schultes had written a paper on it in 1958

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in the Harvard Botanical Museum leaflets.

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And it also interested a man named Frederick Rosengarten

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from the New York Botanical Garden, who then

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became a consultant for the McCormick Spice Company,

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and he also wrote a very good paper in that same journal about this potion, Tecate, and about Portoribé of Funeris.

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There was a little bit of a – could I have the next slide?

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Because I think that shows slightly more of a close-up view.

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The leaves are quite big, and they generally hang down like this.

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You can see this, by the way, at you want, because there are two villages here in the

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valley where this is grown for economic purposes.

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One is El Tule, the village where the big famous tree is, which is kind of a cypress

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tree.

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And the other one is nearby San Andres Guayapa.

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And many of the families there just live off of this culture.

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They have one, it’s a very big lawn with a tree with very hard wood.

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And the batidor and molinillo that I showed you before was made out of this wood,

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quarry bale wood.

00:20:36 ►

And the trees get so big that one of them will cover an entire house and garden plot.

00:20:41 ►

And many of the families there basically live from just one of these trees because the dried flowers are worth as much as processed

00:20:48 ►

macadamia nuts and so they simply dry them and sell them but it’s only an item

00:20:53 ►

here in the market here in fact it’s it’s very strange because it was once a

00:20:57 ►

common rainforest tree here and well not so strange here in Mexico but because we

00:21:02 ►

don’t have any rainforest this is one of the consequences.

00:21:05 ►

This tree has been lost.

00:21:06 ►

And here in the valley, it’s not part of its natural range.

00:21:09 ►

But it was evidently taken here and cultivated here

00:21:12 ►

and has survived here as a kind of refuge.

00:21:15 ►

I’ve never seen it in the wild in Mexico,

00:21:17 ►

although it’s still fairly common in Guatemala.

00:21:20 ►

It’s called funerous, oddly enough,

00:21:23 ►

because the type specimen came from a graveyard where it was also planted near the Oaxaca Pueblo border.

00:21:30 ►

I don’t remember the name of the town.

00:21:33 ►

Could I have the next slide, please?

00:21:35 ►

And when Rosengarten became interested in it, just to show the post, again, this is the frothing result with the stick and everything of adding this flower dried and ground up.

00:21:46 ►

Now, the McCormick company

00:21:47 ►

became interested in it because it is a unique

00:21:49 ►

spice and it’s a very persistent aroma

00:21:51 ►

although the aroma does change

00:21:53 ►

with drying. It changes distinctly

00:21:55 ►

but it still remains a very

00:21:58 ►

unique spice and everyone’s always interested

00:22:00 ►

in any new and unusual

00:22:01 ►

spice, of course. But the McCormick

00:22:04 ►

company found from a survey

00:22:05 ►

that there just wasn’t enough of it here.

00:22:07 ►

There was, perhaps, in Guatemala,

00:22:09 ►

and that cultivation would take too long.

00:22:11 ►

And for various reasons, they dropped the project.

00:22:13 ►

So it never became commercialized,

00:22:15 ►

and it’s still a possibility.

00:22:17 ►

I’ve always had in mind, and for a while,

00:22:20 ►

Dennis McKenna was working for Aveda in Minneapolis.

00:22:26 ►

He hired me as a consultant on what they called the Aztec Chocolate Project,

00:22:31 ►

but he couldn’t sell it to the bean counters of the company.

00:22:34 ►

He said, this is a soap company, not a chocolate company,

00:22:37 ►

so we don’t want a part of it.

00:22:38 ►

But the idea was, here Mexico gave chocolate to the world,

00:22:43 ►

but they’re generally known for pretty lousy chocolates in modern times.

00:22:48 ►

And what is called Mexican style here is with cinnamon, and cinnamon of course is Asiatic, it was brought by the Spaniards.

00:22:56 ►

And so the idea was to make a true Mexican style chocolate using some of the original seasonings that were added to it. Besides this one, I don’t have photos of, but it’s another tree

00:23:05 ►

that’s in the Ananasiae, like Guadalajara, like many fruits in the tropics.

00:23:13 ►

And this is a Simbopetalum penduliflorum, and it has a very almost woody, dry, when dried,

00:23:26 ►

dried, when dried, flour pod, which is also a unique spice.

00:23:32 ►

In fact, it smells and tastes very much like black pepper, fresh black pepper, reasonably ground, but it is not pecan.

00:23:33 ►

It doesn’t have any biting, so it would also be a potentially valuable spice.

00:23:38 ►

And the idea was to use some of these things and make a modern chocolate, and I may still

00:23:43 ►

do that at some point.

00:23:45 ►

I also, some years ago, got correspondence from an English couple,

00:23:50 ►

and they have a company that makes very good chocolates

00:23:53 ►

called Green and Blacks Organic Chocolates.

00:23:57 ►

And they said that they had been in part inspired by my cacao book,

00:24:03 ►

The Ruminations of Non-Vegarian chocolate from 1985 to start this company.

00:24:10 ►

One of the things they have is a chocolate they call Mayan Gold, although oddly enough

00:24:15 ►

the cover art is not Mayan, it’s from Teotihuacan. But it’s from their own organic-grown cacao

00:24:22 ►

from Belize, and it’s almost unique for someone else that has a chocolate like this now,

00:24:27 ►

and then it’s really pure.

00:24:29 ►

It doesn’t have added cacao butter.

00:24:31 ►

It’s just a high-fat strain of cacao that’s grown organically,

00:24:34 ►

and so they just sweeten that and flavor that,

00:24:38 ►

and they use all spikes as a flavoring of that.

00:24:40 ►

I don’t know if it’s made in Guatemala, but not here.

00:24:42 ►

That’s also another oddball item. I think it’s also aged out, but that, and maybe in Guatemala, but not here, that’s also another oddball item.

00:24:45 ►

I think it’s also.

00:24:48 ►

And I’ll read you a quote from Sahagún,

00:24:51 ►

which expresses this while we have

00:24:52 ►

the slide team taking care of it.

00:24:55 ►

This is what Sahagún said about cacao.

00:24:59 ►

Again, this was in the mid to late 16th century.

00:25:06 ►

Cacao.

00:25:11 ►

This cacao, when much is drunk, when much is consumed,

00:25:14 ►

especially that which is green, which is tender,

00:25:17 ►

makes one drunk, takes effect on one,

00:25:22 ►

makes one dizzy, confuses one, makes one sick, deranges one.

00:25:25 ►

When an ordinary amount is drunk, it ladens one, refreshes one, consoles one,, deranges one. When an ordinary man is drunk, it lavends one, refreshes one, consoles one,

00:25:28 ►

invigorates one.

00:25:30 ►

Thus it is said, I take cacao, I wet my lips,

00:25:33 ►

I refresh myself.

00:25:36 ►

And Saigun had also referred to the flower kakawasolchiko,

00:25:42 ►

which we now know to be Porare de afundres, as being inebriating

00:25:47 ►

in and of itself. He said it takes effect on just like the mushrooms. And so this caused

00:25:52 ►

some confusion. People thought, well, maybe fresh green cacao is inebriating. And this

00:25:58 ►

has been put to the test by Tim Knapp, a Nahuatl scholar from the National University of Mexico City, with no particular, not even

00:26:09 ►

a very stimulating effect, came from taking

00:26:11 ►

large amounts of the unroasted seeds.

00:26:15 ►

It was thought that it would be the flowers because

00:26:17 ►

of this cacahuasolchi, but the flowers

00:26:20 ►

have also been tested, flowers with theobroma cacao.

00:26:24 ►

And this also didn’t give any particularly good inebriating result.

00:26:28 ►

And we now know furthermore that Kakavasolchitl means porarybea funeris.

00:26:35 ►

It refers to the tree.

00:26:36 ►

And the flower of that tree is called Poyomatli.

00:26:40 ►

And Poyomatli, according to Sakwoon, Poyomatli may refer to another flower.

00:26:45 ►

There’s a little bit of confusion about that, but there’s at least one thing that says Poyomatli is the flower of Kakawasochi, or Kwaribay Funeris.

00:26:55 ►

And I mention this because Poyomatli is an unknown floral inebriant from this area.

00:27:01 ►

And so it could be this flower, although I have taken fairly large amounts of it

00:27:06 ►

without getting any particular effect,

00:27:09 ►

the Guarari Bay of Funimers.

00:27:11 ►

And if you make a tea of it,

00:27:12 ►

it kind of thickens it up to a sort of gruel

00:27:14 ►

that has to be spooned down.

00:27:16 ►

But also the Nawa cacao portion,

00:27:22 ►

the cacao well, was also spooned down.

00:27:24 ►

It was thick, or it was more like a pudding.

00:27:27 ►

And so it doesn’t seem to be the case.

00:27:29 ►

Other candidates for Toyomari are the flower that I just mentioned.

00:27:33 ►

It’s another cacao additive, Simbo-Petalum penduliflorum in the Ananasii.

00:27:39 ►

And that’s called Teo-Nakasli, which means the sacred ear flower.

00:27:43 ►

It looks a little bit like an ear, or sochimocoste.

00:27:47 ►

So the names also suggest that it’s negrity,

00:27:49 ►

but that hasn’t yet been put to the test.

00:27:53 ►

And another possibility that’s been suggested

00:27:55 ►

is magnolia flower, a particular magnolia

00:27:59 ►

dealbata from Mesoamerica.

00:28:01 ►

And there is one report from the Northeast

00:28:04 ►

of indigenous use of a snuff by the Rappahannock Indians made from Mesoamerica. And there is this one report from the northeast of indigenous use of a snuff

00:28:05 ►

by the Rappahannock Indians made from

00:28:07 ►

the magnolia blossom.

00:28:10 ►

That’s also another possible psychoactive.

00:28:12 ►

And I mention these because there are still

00:28:14 ►

things to be resolved in this

00:28:15 ►

pharmacognosy, but still work to be done.

00:28:18 ►

But we also know

00:28:19 ►

that they inserted

00:28:21 ►

many other very inebriating

00:28:24 ►

visionary and theogenic type substances into this cacao that they inserted many other very inebriating, visionary,

00:28:28 ►

and theogenic-type substances into this cacao potion.

00:28:32 ►

And it may well be that Sahagun was not given the full information by his informants when he said this cacao, when much is taken, makes one dizzy, confuses one, makes one drunk.

00:28:38 ►

And particularly there’s a good amount of evidence that the psilocybin mushrooms were added to these cacao potions.

00:28:47 ►

This one in particular is psilocybe cerevescens. I showed another slide of it the other day,

00:28:52 ►

which is the de rhumbe mushroom, and this was the first one that Maria Sabina gave to Gordon Walser.

00:29:00 ►

Actually, he collected it and then she was the officiate. And so the mushrooms is probably not so widely known.

00:29:08 ►

They weren’t generally eaten here.

00:29:10 ►

They were crushed and the juice was drunk.

00:29:12 ►

And this is a fairly common phenomenon.

00:29:17 ►

The poetry, for example, speaks often of the liquor of the inebriating mushrooms.

00:29:21 ►

And it’s not liquor in the sense of alcohol.

00:29:23 ►

It’s just they would be crushed on a taffeta. And it’s not liquor in the sense of alcohol. They would be crushed on a matate.

00:29:25 ►

And this has been observed in modern times,

00:29:27 ►

although it’s also been observed simply to chew down the mushrooms.

00:29:30 ►

In the same way that salvia divinorum can be prepared,

00:29:33 ►

crushed on a matate.

00:29:34 ►

And the ololuki, the morning glory seeds,

00:29:37 ►

are also done the same way,

00:29:38 ►

but crushed on a matate and then made into an aqueous infusion.

00:29:42 ►

And could I have the next slide, please?

00:29:44 ►

And so one of the liquors of the de-rated mushrooms

00:29:48 ►

was Xochicacao or a visionary cacao potion, which

00:29:52 ►

happened to contain this one or another of these mushrooms.

00:29:56 ►

This is Salaspe Mexicana, which is one of the more common ones.

00:30:00 ►

And it’s a small, in the same subgrouping as Liberty Count,

00:30:05 ►

Salaspe Semionciata.

00:30:07 ►

It doesn’t particularly blue like coerulescens,

00:30:09 ►

as the name suggests.

00:30:11 ►

Could I have the next one, please?

00:30:13 ►

And this is Salaspe sapotecora, which

00:30:15 ►

is very similar to coerulescens.

00:30:18 ►

In fact, it’s called de rumbes del agua.

00:30:20 ►

It grows out of water.

00:30:23 ►

They call them de rumbes because where there’s a landslide,

00:30:26 ►

these mushrooms grow in a disturbed earth.

00:30:28 ►

And then when an animal walks across and leaves hoof prints that fill up with water,

00:30:33 ►

this fruits out of the water.

00:30:35 ►

In culture, it’s only, to my knowledge, in fruited and flooded cultures,

00:30:39 ►

it likes the water.

00:30:40 ►

And actually, that’s a very interesting aspect of it.

00:30:45 ►

So mushrooms could certainly explain the citation of Sahagún,

00:30:50 ►

because we know that they added the mushrooms to it.

00:30:53 ►

And when Borden Ross was introduced to Maria Serena on the night of 29-30 June 1955,

00:31:02 ►

which is subsequently reported on Life magazine,

00:31:05 ►

she served him a cacao potion beforehand.

00:31:07 ►

He remembered this association,

00:31:09 ►

so it was a sign to him of authenticity and tradition.

00:31:14 ►

Could I have the next slide, please?

00:31:17 ►

Also, as is in the case, remember,

00:31:20 ►

these are additives that I also mentioned for the agave potion,

00:31:25 ►

and some of them are also put into the tobacco reeds, the three different vehicles.

00:31:30 ►

Mushrooms were smoked in these tobacco reeds,

00:31:32 ►

but that was very likely Amanita muscaria, as I mentioned the other day,

00:31:36 ►

which is very active that way.

00:31:39 ►

And this is Datura’s dromonium again.

00:31:41 ►

They did add Datura’s as well to…

00:31:44 ►

I have the next slide please

00:31:45 ►

they did add different parts

00:31:48 ►

of datura to their cacao

00:31:50 ►

potion, usually under the name

00:31:51 ►

Tlapapa, but also

00:31:53 ►

Mishibu, which is another species

00:31:55 ►

Ceratoprava, and also

00:31:58 ►

I don’t have a slide of it, but the genus

00:32:00 ►

Salandra, or the gold cup

00:32:01 ►

which is a climbing vine

00:32:04 ►

it’s like a cross between a datura

00:32:06 ►

and a brucmancia,

00:32:07 ►

with big, golden, widely

00:32:09 ►

open flowers. This is

00:32:12 ►

still used by the Huichol, who call it

00:32:14 ►

K’ie, and they have two

00:32:16 ►

traditions of visionary shamanism.

00:32:18 ►

One that’s centered on hikuri, which

00:32:20 ►

is peyote, and the

00:32:22 ►

other one is centered on

00:32:23 ►

K’ie, which is salandra, which is cilantro, but under the name

00:32:28 ►

tecomasoci, which is the cup

00:32:31 ►

flower, because tecomate is cup, like the

00:32:35 ►

toch tecomate is the rabbit vessel for making the agave.

00:32:40 ►

So the cilantro is another solanaceous additive,

00:32:43 ►

and these, of course, the psilocybin

00:32:46 ►

mushrooms would have added psilocin

00:32:47 ►

and psilocybin to the brew, and these would have added

00:32:50 ►

visionary

00:32:51 ►

tropane alkaloids, so it’s

00:32:53 ►

a scopolamine type.

00:32:55 ►

Next,

00:32:56 ►

and this is also

00:32:59 ►

an important

00:33:01 ►

pre-Columbian visionary plant

00:33:03 ►

that is unknown as to its active principle.

00:33:06 ►

This is in the Campositi,

00:33:07 ►

and this is in the genus Tegidus,

00:33:09 ►

which is commonly called a marigold.

00:33:12 ►

And this is Tegidus lucidum.

00:33:14 ►

In Nahuatl, it’s called yaozi,

00:33:16 ►

and this was an important visionary substance

00:33:19 ►

that was also put into the tobacco reeds.

00:33:22 ►

It was not, to my knowledge, or it’s not recorded,

00:33:24 ►

it was added to the agave potion,

00:33:26 ►

but it was definitely added also to this cacao potion

00:33:29 ►

to make these cloward cacaos or such a cacao one.

00:33:34 ►

And we don’t know the active principle,

00:33:36 ►

but it is psychoactive.

00:33:40 ►

You can buy this in herb markets,

00:33:43 ►

and at least by smoking it, it is psychoactive.

00:33:47 ►

And it wasn’t known to have been smoked as long in time, so.

00:33:50 ►

In the markets today, they don’t call it yaote, they call it pericone.

00:33:54 ►

But that comes from the botanical name hypericone, from some kind of early botanical confusion.

00:34:02 ►

Pericone means iberis means hypericum.

00:34:10 ►

And the next slide shows Tegidus erectum,

00:34:13 ►

which is in the same genus.

00:34:16 ►

And this is a very famous ethnomedicine here and also ritual flower,

00:34:18 ►

which is called Sempoalasolchicum.

00:34:20 ►

Can somebody put up the next?

00:34:23 ►

This is called Sempoalasolchicum, or in modern Spanish, Sempa Sucil.

00:34:27 ►

And this is the Flor de Muerto.

00:34:28 ►

This is the flower for the Day of the Dead.

00:34:31 ►

And it’s especially found in cemeteries.

00:34:33 ►

And it’s very important on the altar table where you have the Dia de los Influentes,

00:34:38 ►

the Day of the Defuntones.

00:34:41 ►

And oddly enough, this has no reputation in modern times for psychoactivity

00:34:47 ►

but it is also

00:34:48 ►

psychoactive

00:34:49 ►

I haven’t verified this myself

00:34:52 ►

but I know that to this day

00:34:54 ►

the Aminke which are also in Oaxaca

00:34:56 ►

down in the northern part of the Isthmus

00:34:58 ►

who are

00:35:00 ►

known to be like the Weechel

00:35:02 ►

one of the less Christianized

00:35:04 ►

and less acculturated indigenous

00:35:06 ►

groups surviving here,

00:35:08 ►

still use both of these.

00:35:09 ►

And they make infusion of the flowers.

00:35:12 ►

And so there again, it’s the flower,

00:35:13 ►

which is the visionary element, and is added

00:35:15 ►

into these potions. But

00:35:17 ►

this would also have been added to

00:35:19 ►

cacao. And this

00:35:21 ►

is Semper Assortito.

00:35:24 ►

Now, could I have the next

00:35:26 ►

one, please? And again, we don’t

00:35:28 ►

know the active principles of these. It’s in

00:35:29 ►

the sunflower family,

00:35:32 ►

Compaciti.

00:35:34 ►

And there are other tagetas, by the

00:35:36 ►

way, that are used anthelmodecimally

00:35:37 ►

with suggestive psychoactivity in other areas.

00:35:40 ►

So here’s another

00:35:40 ►

subject for bioassay

00:35:44 ►

research in natural products chemistry.

00:35:47 ►

This, again, is that Bolivian caliandra.

00:35:50 ►

But caliandra, under the name chilo-solchilo, which means hair flower or filamentous flower,

00:35:58 ►

was also used in the cacao potion and was also added to the tobacco reeds and as well to the agave potions.

00:36:06 ►

In this case, you see this one in all three of the vehicles.

00:36:08 ►

We don’t know either what the active principle would have been in particular.

00:36:12 ►

At least a couple of different species would have been used here.

00:36:15 ►

Caliandra, this is in the Laguna Nosi, and here is aditives in the psychotropic substances.

00:36:21 ►

They are also, as I mentioned, added to ayahuasca potions in

00:36:27 ►

South America by the Shuar, who are also called the Hibos. They use probably two different

00:36:34 ►

species, Sameki and Shinviata, of which we now know to be caliandras. And I was told

00:36:41 ►

once by a very capable Shuar shaman that it was used in exchange with a leaf that provided a similar effect,

00:36:50 ►

which is called Diploteris caverana in the Montpeghiaceae, which is a DMT-containing leaf from the same family as ayahuasca.

00:36:59 ►

It used to be called Banisteriopsis rhodesbiana.

00:37:09 ►

and so it would make sense because the Liguminosa contains a lot of DMT sources that this might be a DMT source for this potion or some active triptych.

00:37:13 ►

And so, Caliandra we also have to add to the list.

00:37:16 ►

Could I have the next slide please?

00:37:20 ►

And this is of course Piper Oratum or it’s known as acuyo mostly in Mexico today.

00:37:27 ►

Probably been served as food either in a green salsa or some kind of dish.

00:37:34 ►

It’s a very commonly used seasoning.

00:37:37 ►

But this is in the piperaceae. This is a true pepper.

00:37:41 ►

Like the black pepper is piper nigrum, and the kava pepper is Piper rufisticum,

00:37:45 ►

and the betel pepper is Piper betel, which is chewed with the palms nut betel, a record cabbage.

00:37:54 ►

But it’s not so widely known that this is also a shamanic plant and a potentially visionary plant,

00:38:01 ►

a very good source of saphyl and isosaphyl, but mostly saphyl.

00:38:07 ►

And a friend of mine has bioassayed that

00:38:10 ►

in a significant dose,

00:38:12 ►

and it is very much of a trip.

00:38:13 ►

It’s very much of a psychoactive.

00:38:16 ►

And it can also be used as a precursor

00:38:18 ►

for making NDA-type compounds.

00:38:22 ►

But this is called mecasochitl

00:38:24 ►

in Nahuatl, which means the cord flower. And

00:38:30 ►

again, these things, it’s prominent here, but these things are called flowers in this

00:38:34 ►

context because that means they’re a visionary substance. And it’s the leaf that’s used.

00:38:41 ►

And this has a story in long association with shamanism.

00:38:45 ►

There are other pipers, like in South America,

00:38:48 ►

that are used as snuffs and substitutes for tobacco or as additives to tobacco.

00:38:52 ►

They’re also used in dart poisons, also used as fish bait.

00:38:57 ►

In fact, in Panama, there’s even an intriguing report where they would bait crabs,

00:39:03 ►

and then once they caught the fish,

00:39:05 ►

they would fatten them up in a holding pond

00:39:07 ►

and feed them on this.

00:39:08 ►

And they got a pre-seasoned fish fillet

00:39:11 ►

because it would absorb enough of the sacral.

00:39:13 ►

Whereas here, they normally wrap the fish in this leaf

00:39:16 ►

and bake it.

00:39:18 ►

And sometimes tamale is done that way.

00:39:21 ►

So this is very likely would have been due

00:39:23 ►

to the sacral content, why it was put

00:39:25 ►

into the Sochi cacao.

00:39:27 ►

Can I have a mention, please?

00:39:30 ►

And I put this in because

00:39:32 ►

now I want to talk a little bit about

00:39:33 ►

some correspondences with South American

00:39:36 ►

shamanism.

00:39:38 ►

There is also

00:39:39 ►

an additive to cacao that hasn’t

00:39:42 ►

been yet documented in Mexico,

00:39:44 ►

properly speaking, but in Central America, which is a Virola species, and that is Virola guatemalensis.

00:39:51 ►

And it probably at one time at least grew in Mexico, but it is definitely added to these cacao potions.

00:39:57 ►

And by the way, the Cuarari Bay flower also is added in cacao potions in Central America.

00:40:03 ►

And in South America, Cuararibe is also associated with cacao.

00:40:07 ►

And so I’ll say a little bit more about that later.

00:40:10 ►

And so this Virola guanamolensis is very interesting

00:40:15 ►

because on the one hand you have Virola surinamensis

00:40:19 ►

as an additive to different penisteriopsis or ayahuasca-type potions,

00:40:24 ►

especially in Peru.

00:40:25 ►

But the Virola species, the barks,

00:40:29 ►

and all I have is the bark of it in the back there.

00:40:32 ►

I don’t have any other photo of it in that.

00:40:36 ►

Virola bark.

00:40:37 ►

That’s androleaf.

00:40:40 ►

And this is tryptamine.

00:40:42 ►

That’s actually PMT on parsley,

00:40:44 ►

and those are standard 100-milligram tryptamine joints for biomass.

00:40:50 ►

That’s a good dose, by the way, 100 milligrams on parsley.

00:40:55 ►

And so the Ferrola, though, is a very potent source,

00:40:58 ►

not of DMT but of 5-methoxy-DMT,

00:41:01 ►

which is much more potent and, for me, more pleasant, more enjoyable, and about five times the potency.

00:41:10 ►

So it may be. I’ve always been looking for triptamine, short-acting triptamines in Mesoamerica,

00:41:15 ►

because one of the odd things is that the Nawa speakers were great experts on this.

00:41:21 ►

About a dozen different categories of chemical, pharmacological

00:41:25 ►

categories of visionary substances that we know to be used in world shamanism, speaking

00:41:29 ►

in terms of chemical, pharmacological categories.

00:41:32 ►

Representatives of about seven or eight of them are here just in this one culture, more

00:41:36 ►

than half.

00:41:38 ►

But a strong distinction between Mesoamerica and South America is the importance of the

00:41:43 ►

short-acting tryptamine in South America. And by the way, it’s 5-methoxy-DMT-Dufotin, not DMT. That’s

00:41:49 ►

not important in any snuff or other plant that we know about. More 5-methoxy and Dufotin.

00:41:57 ►

Dufotin is 5-hydroxy-DMT, and 5-methoxy is O-methyl-Dufotin, or 5-methoxy-DMT. DMT and 5-methoxy is omethyl-bevoting or 5-methoxy

00:42:06 ►

DMT. DMT occurs

00:42:08 ►

with many

00:42:10 ►

like in virola and also in

00:42:12 ►

amaranthic, generally really low amounts.

00:42:14 ►

It’s less potent, so it’s not really a

00:42:16 ►

significant factor, but everyone’s most

00:42:18 ►

fixated on DMT.

00:42:19 ►

So the fact that this virola thing

00:42:22 ►

crosses over into the cacao

00:42:24 ►

in Mesoamerica

00:42:25 ►

is intriguing, and it may represent an introduction of the short-acting tryptamine to this potion.

00:42:32 ►

5-with-Oxy-DMT is quite active orally without any monoamine oxidase inhibitors.

00:42:38 ►

It just takes a slightly higher dose, but at 30 milligrams and above, it’s active by itself.

00:42:41 ►

but it’s 30 milligrams and above.

00:42:43 ►

It’s active by itself.

00:42:47 ►

And interestingly enough, this Virola guatemalensis that’s put as an additive to the cacao potion

00:42:50 ►

is called cacao volador.

00:42:53 ►

There’s a lot of linguistic crossover

00:42:55 ►

between these different shamanic plants.

00:42:58 ►

Those that are major vehicles of inebriation,

00:43:02 ►

those that are additives to those,

00:43:03 ►

and those that are ashes, burned and make ashes,

00:43:06 ►

they’re all the same shamanic plants that figure,

00:43:10 ►

because ashes figure in many of these preparations,

00:43:12 ►

especially the snouts.

00:43:14 ►

And they all turn out to be shamanic plants,

00:43:16 ►

and there was a lot of linguistic crossover.

00:43:18 ►

So as I say, this virola, which bird rollers

00:43:21 ►

are usually called generically kumalas in South America,

00:43:24 ►

which is a Kichwa word, a big forest piece.

00:43:27 ►

And it’s the inner bark or exudate of the inner bark

00:43:30 ►

that is then processed down to make a snuff,

00:43:35 ►

which is just a blood-red, red exudate that comes from heating this bark,

00:43:39 ►

which is scraped up and dried and powdered.

00:43:42 ►

It’s also used as dark poison.

00:43:44 ►

And in some areas, some cultures of the Y camp

00:43:47 ►

or the so-called Yanomamo-type groups,

00:43:50 ►

there’s no distinction between snuff and dart poison.

00:43:53 ►

They just don’t make the snuff.

00:43:55 ►

They literally scrape their dart points,

00:43:58 ►

which are slitters of bamboo,

00:44:00 ►

in this exudate on the standing tree

00:44:02 ►

after pulling the bark down.

00:44:04 ►

And then they smoke it and they coat it over and over again.

00:44:06 ►

And each of these darts can contain as much as 10 milligrams of 5-methoxy-DMT,

00:44:11 ►

which is a very good dose snuffed and a very good dose inhaling the vapor

00:44:18 ►

and sublingually, cutaneously probably also.

00:44:23 ►

In the next slide, I show the way the Waikai used this.

00:44:28 ►

And they used a serpatana, which is what we call a blowgun.

00:44:33 ►

And these are also shamanic.

00:44:37 ►

The hunting blowgun is generally bat-sized or larger,

00:44:43 ►

but these are also made out of virolas,

00:44:45 ►

out of that family,

00:44:47 ►

Maristicaceae, some other shamanic plant.

00:44:50 ►

And it’s called a taboca, this device.

00:44:54 ►

And that’s where the name, it’s a snuff tube, really.

00:44:56 ►

And that’s where the name for tobacco comes from,

00:44:59 ►

by linguistic confusion.

00:45:01 ►

And they’re generally, as I said,

00:45:03 ►

made out of one of these shamanic trees, a pyrola or an erianthro species.

00:45:08 ►

And so in this case, among the waka, they’re used to

00:45:12 ►

blast the snuff into each other’s nostrils, just much.

00:45:16 ►

Two hands full, one at a time.

00:45:19 ►

And this is not shamanic. They do it just for pure entertainment

00:45:23 ►

every day when they have it.

00:45:26 ►

And the shamans also use it.

00:45:27 ►

But what we’re seeing here is not shamanic.

00:45:29 ►

They do this, and then when they come out of the stupor,

00:45:31 ►

they like to do wrestling matches and state-of-the-art warfare.

00:45:34 ►

And this is what the men do for entertainment.

00:45:37 ►

Could I have the next slide, please?

00:45:40 ►

And to talk a little bit about some of these South American connections, again with the Varroa, that Varroa guatemalensis that is added to cacao is called Cacao Volador.

00:45:54 ►

But on the other hand, you have a couple of South American cacao species that are called Varroa, they’re called Kumala.

00:46:03 ►

And so as I say, there’s all this linguistic crossover

00:46:05 ►

between these.

00:46:06 ►

In particular, this one, which I just have a flower,

00:46:08 ►

this is Herania brevigliata, which

00:46:11 ►

is a wild cacao-type species in the Sturco Leaceae.

00:46:15 ►

And this is an important one because the schwar, the heba,

00:46:19 ►

also add this to Benistriaceae’s brew, which they, of course,

00:46:23 ►

don’t call ayahuasca.

00:46:24 ►

They call it an atene, or an atena. have this to Banisteriopsis brew, which they of course don’t call ayahuasca, they call

00:46:25 ►

it an Aptam or an Aptama. And so you find the cacao species also entering into the South

00:46:34 ►

American Banisteriopsis complex. Not only that, but the role of preparations, you have

00:46:43 ►

two different kinds. You have the snuff,

00:46:47 ►

and one example of that is the first one.

00:46:49 ►

By the way, Schultes was the one who quote-unquote discovered this virula snuff,

00:46:52 ►

and only in the 1950s.

00:46:54 ►

We can find no documentation of this

00:46:57 ►

in the colonial records

00:46:59 ►

except for possibly as a short-acting dart poison,

00:47:02 ►

because now we know that it is a dart poison.

00:47:04 ►

And from Columbia in Brazil, there are two reports from the 16th century

00:47:08 ►

of an inebriating non-fatal dart poison that just knocked people out for a little while,

00:47:14 ►

and then they got out with no after effect a little bit later.

00:47:18 ►

And so I think that was probably this Virola paste, but we’re not sure.

00:47:25 ►

And in one of the areas, that Virola inebriate is called Kamalampi,

00:47:31 ►

and that could be Kumala Ampi.

00:47:36 ►

Ampi is Kudari, dark poison, and Kumala is Virola.

00:47:40 ►

So it’s kind of another mysterious inebriate, this Kumala Ampi,

00:47:44 ►

but it very likely is this

00:47:46 ►

Virola resin.

00:47:47 ►

But in the Tucana area in southern Colombia, where Schultes found this Virola resin snuff,

00:47:58 ►

it was called Yaki or Yato, and it consisted of 50% of this dried red exudate.

00:48:04 ►

It’s really blood red.

00:48:05 ►

And 50% ashes, and it was the ashes of cacao.

00:48:10 ►

In that case, it was not herania,

00:48:12 ►

but it was Theogroma subincanum, the bark, the ash of the bark,

00:48:17 ►

50-50.

00:48:18 ►

And then some of these groups, especially in that area,

00:48:24 ►

but not related to Tucano, with one exception,

00:48:28 ►

like the Bora and Muinane, Witotoan, which is another linguistic group, they also make,

00:48:35 ►

or apparently did make, a Virola inebriant.

00:48:38 ►

And this is also another ethnobotanical mystery, because this likewise was discovered by Schultes

00:48:42 ►

and only in the 1970s.

00:48:49 ►

And in this case, they made little pellets of this resin, and the pellets were always coated in ash, and one of the most important ash sources for that was the husk of cacao

00:48:55 ►

fruits, and also the bark of this species, to make these little pellets.

00:49:02 ►

And they were said in the literature to be for oral ingestion,

00:49:06 ►

but Dennis McKenna later bioassayed these and didn’t find that to be the case.

00:49:12 ►

Didn’t find them to be active and very toxic to him.

00:49:16 ►

He analyzed them also, and even ones that contained significant amounts of 5-methoxy-DMT,

00:49:21 ►

but not as much as I found to be the sublingual, sorry, the oral threshold.

00:49:26 ►

I think they were made for sublingual ingestion, these particular pellets,

00:49:31 ►

and they coated them in the cacao ash just to make them easy to handle

00:49:35 ►

and not sticky.

00:49:36 ►

These resins are also used in ethnomedicine, like rubbed on the gums,

00:49:41 ►

to cure problems there.

00:49:43 ►

Now, there’s another example of cacao

00:49:45 ►

used in association with the Nibiruans

00:49:48 ►

among the Kuna of Panama, which is also not

00:49:51 ►

so acculturated a group.

00:49:53 ►

And in this case, they would get together

00:49:55 ►

and were using tobacco as a primary major shamanic Nibiru.

00:49:59 ►

And they would get together in a pretty well-closed hut

00:50:03 ►

and put gums of tobacco on open fires and burn it.

00:50:07 ►

Or alternatively, they would use this tube method

00:50:11 ►

and blow the smoke around each other.

00:50:12 ►

Because these tubes also are sometimes packed with tobacco,

00:50:16 ►

and then a coal is put in them.

00:50:17 ►

The coal end is put in the mouth,

00:50:19 ►

and some of the schwarze is through them.

00:50:21 ►

The smoke is blown into or onto a person

00:50:24 ►

for various curative purposes and also for re-agitation.

00:50:27 ►

So while they’re blowing each other to bits

00:50:29 ►

with this tobacco smoke, they have braziers around.

00:50:32 ►

And then they put dry cacao beans and also

00:50:36 ►

dried chile onto these braziers.

00:50:38 ►

And that’s really hairy.

00:50:40 ►

And so they’re having the smoke from the chile, or capsicum,

00:50:44 ►

which contains an alloy called capsaicin

00:50:46 ►

in the air

00:50:48 ►

while they’re doing this tobacco ingestion

00:50:50 ►

which goes on sometimes for days

00:50:51 ►

one time in the Mazatec country

00:50:53 ►

in 1975

00:50:55 ►

I had this mushroom session

00:50:57 ►

with kind of not a real shame

00:50:59 ►

maybe the son of one who was given to catering

00:51:02 ►

to the tourist trade

00:51:03 ►

and

00:51:04 ►

one of the things he did really made my hair stand on end.

00:51:09 ►

Normally the mushrooms might be sensed with copal,

00:51:15 ►

some kind of a resinous incense, on braziers.

00:51:19 ►

But this guy did it with pure dried chile seco, dried cacao palms.

00:51:23 ►

And so he broke them up and stuffed them on

00:51:25 ►

and not only did he sense the mushrooms,

00:51:27 ►

but he hyperventilated the smoke for about a minute.

00:51:30 ►

Like this.

00:51:31 ►

And I was choking on the floor with my head.

00:51:34 ►

It was like I’m opening five bottles

00:51:36 ►

of puning nitric acid and ammonium hydroxide

00:51:41 ►

and hydrochloric acid.

00:51:42 ►

I really couldn’t breathe it.

00:51:44 ►

But this guy was hyperventilating.

00:51:46 ►

Those chelae is also a real, a shamanic ingredient.

00:51:50 ►

And so that’s another example involving cacao.

00:51:54 ►

And so also with the tobacco snuffs,

00:51:57 ►

there are many examples of different species

00:52:00 ►

using the ash from, let’s see, the ash

00:52:04 ►

from the husks of Theobroma subancanum to mix with tobaccos.

00:52:08 ►

The snuffs usually have a basic consistency, chemically basic, and they mix ash with them.

00:52:15 ►

Theobroma bicolor is also used, and then there’s even a modern mestizo report from Guyana of some blacks. They’re like caboclos. They would call them in Brazil.

00:52:28 ►

Guianese that make a tobacco snuff

00:52:30 ►

from ordinary cigarettes.

00:52:31 ►

They just take it apart

00:52:33 ►

and they stick the free tobacco in their palms.

00:52:37 ►

And then they use the wood,

00:52:38 ►

the ash from burning wood of a sterculia

00:52:40 ►

of some tree in this cacao family.

00:52:43 ►

And then they do this

00:52:44 ►

and they kind of squeeze out the liquid,

00:52:46 ►

and they snuff that.

00:52:48 ►

So again, this cacao connection passes over into a more modern form.

00:52:54 ►

Then you have the case of the Barola pellets,

00:52:57 ►

these mysterious pellets.

00:52:59 ►

And it’s mysterious because we’ve never seen the shamanic use of them.

00:53:03 ►

Schultes learned this from these Bora and Matoto people

00:53:06 ►

that were living in another area from their ancestral area,

00:53:09 ►

and they said that their fathers and grandfathers did this,

00:53:12 ►

and they knew which trees, no, they knew how to make it,

00:53:16 ►

but they didn’t know precisely which species were used for it.

00:53:19 ►

They’d lost the tradition.

00:53:20 ►

So Schultes had them make it from every myristicaceous tree,

00:53:23 ►

for all is another general gentlemen that they could find

00:53:26 ►

and then analyze them for tryptamines.

00:53:28 ►

But I think they were sublingual pellets,

00:53:30 ►

or they were made to stick in the nose,

00:53:31 ►

because snuffs can also be solids, or liquids, powders,

00:53:35 ►

solids, or vapors.

00:53:36 ►

There are four different classes of snuffs.

00:53:39 ►

We also have the ethereal rinds, which are vapors.

00:53:42 ►

But there’s at least tobacco pellet snuff

00:53:44 ►

that’s known from Brazil,

00:53:46 ►

where they make these tobacco pellets

00:53:47 ►

and stuff it in the nose.

00:53:49 ►

Okay, so in this, there’s also tobacco paste,

00:53:52 ►

which is called ambirat or ambir.

00:53:55 ►

Ambirat is called by the Huitoto in this same area.

00:54:00 ►

They make these for all pastes.

00:54:03 ►

And it crosses all the way over Colombia

00:54:05 ►

to the northernmost part to a linguistically unrelated group

00:54:08 ►

of the Covey, or the most famous ones.

00:54:11 ►

And they also make this tobacco paste

00:54:13 ►

and have a similar mythology, which

00:54:15 ►

is just fascinated around it.

00:54:17 ►

But they call it by almost the same name.

00:54:20 ►

They just call it ambide, or ambidear, the two names.

00:54:23 ►

And the retodo also call it hiera.

00:54:26 ►

Well, this also has ashes from, in this case,

00:54:29 ►

that very plant, Herania revigilata.

00:54:34 ►

And then they will sometimes carry the ambide,

00:54:37 ►

this tobacco paste, which is rubbed on the gums,

00:54:39 ►

just like the Barola resin, in a cacao gourd.

00:54:43 ►

Can I have the next slide, please?

00:54:44 ►

I guess I’m moving to move on quickly.

00:54:47 ►

I’ll just mention, apropos, the tobacco paste and ayahuasca-type brews also.

00:54:54 ►

It’s little known that banisteriopsis is added to snuts and also added to tobacco paste.

00:54:59 ►

I think this is much older than the potions that everyone’s so familiar with.

00:55:05 ►

And the name ayahuasca is clearly colonial, too, clearly post-Columbian.

00:55:13 ►

And I think that’s a recent phenomenon, maybe just a few hundred years old,

00:55:18 ►

of making these composite potions that Luis Eduardo Luna has studied so much.

00:55:24 ►

But the Banisteriopsis goes way back in Colombia,

00:55:27 ►

and it’s added just to tobacco and also to these snuff plants of different types.

00:55:34 ►

And this has been found among various groups.

00:55:37 ►

Okay, I just put this here to make the relationship that these cacao potions are rather like.

00:55:48 ►

The Benistriosis potion that we know not just,

00:55:54 ►

I’ve enumerated a dozen or so of presumptive or known visionary kinds that are added to the cacao potions,

00:55:56 ►

but just a cursory reading of it, Nandas and Sagun,

00:55:58 ►

we’ll find many, many others.

00:56:01 ►

And so you can see it as a vehicle, an ethnomedicinal vehicle,

00:56:05 ►

for administration of many kinds of medicines, not just psychotropic ones, and

00:56:08 ►

that’s the same thing that what we call ayahuasca is. Many of the ayahuasca

00:56:12 ►

herbs are not visionary and they’re designed to cure specific diseases. We

00:56:16 ►

know about a hundred different plants that are added to those. Could I have the next

00:56:22 ►

slide please? I’m going to read a little thing in the end,

00:56:26 ►

if you’ll permit me.

00:56:27 ►

It summarizes all these connections.

00:56:29 ►

It took me a couple of months and about an ounce and a half

00:56:33 ►

of cocaine to get this thing involved.

00:56:35 ►

It’s really complicated.

00:56:36 ►

And the best thing I can do, and I’ll just

00:56:38 ►

confuse it if I try to make all these conclusions,

00:56:42 ►

but I just wanted to say, apropos the pharmacology

00:56:44 ►

of cacao,

00:56:46 ►

it principally

00:56:47 ►

contains xanthine albinoids.

00:56:51 ►

And here you see the

00:56:52 ►

three principal xanthines, caffeine, which is

00:56:54 ►

trimethylxanthine,

00:56:56 ►

and theophylline and theobromine

00:56:58 ►

are dimethylxanthines

00:57:00 ►

that are positional isomers of each other.

00:57:02 ►

The next slide, please.

00:57:04 ►

Theobromine is really the major component.

00:57:06 ►

Caffeine is comparatively minor.

00:57:08 ►

It’s maybe as much as 10 to 1 difference

00:57:10 ►

or 5 to 1 in different cacao products.

00:57:14 ►

Theobromine has less of a central stimulating effect

00:57:16 ►

and more of a cardiac stimulatory effect.

00:57:22 ►

And can I have the last slide, please?

00:57:23 ►

What is the name of that cacao and please? What is the name of that book?

00:57:25 ►

Cacao and Chocolate?

00:57:26 ►

What is the verbiage underneath that?

00:57:28 ►

It is on the bibliography.

00:57:30 ►

I put about 50 copies of a brief bibliography back there.

00:57:33 ►

It’s by a man named Knapp from the 30s.

00:57:35 ►

It’s a very good book about the, it’s called The Cacao

00:57:38 ►

and Chocolate, The Cocoa and Chocolate, Their History

00:57:43 ►

from Plantation to Consumer by Knapp. OK. Could I have the last slide, please? cocoa and chocolate, they’re history from plantation to consumer, but yeah.

00:57:48 ►

Okay, could I have the last slide, please?

00:57:52 ►

And I just put this to show that cacao is a love drug,

00:57:57 ►

and it was, of course, said to be an aphrodisiacal potion that Moctezuma used when he went to visit his harem.

00:58:00 ►

He took especially cacao.

00:58:02 ►

We don’t know what seasonings it had in,

00:58:06 ►

but, of course, it is very much associated, even among us,

00:58:08 ►

as being a love drug.

00:58:10 ►

Theobromine has been shown to be a very potent

00:58:12 ►

aphrodisiac, and hormones at least.

00:58:14 ►

It hasn’t been extensively tested

00:58:16 ►

in human beings.

00:58:19 ►

And of course,

00:58:19 ►

since I wrote the book, and I have to

00:58:22 ►

update this part of it, we now know

00:58:24 ►

also that we have this particular problem neurotransmitter,

00:58:29 ►

arachidonyl ethanol amide, or anandamide,

00:58:34 ►

which is the ligand for the THC, for a receptor in the brain to which THC binds from cannabis.

00:58:41 ►

That also occurs in cacao, probably in sub-psychoactive amounts, but

00:58:45 ►

inanimate itself, to my knowledge, has not been bio-assayed for psychoactivity in human

00:58:51 ►

beings. And that’s another desideratum of this area. It’s also, there’s talk of phenethylamine

00:58:58 ►

in cacao, although that’s ambiguous evidence. There apparently is not as much of it as has been said,

00:59:06 ►

but there’s probably been some work since I wrote this book,

00:59:10 ►

and I haven’t looked at that.

00:59:11 ►

But it is presumed by many people to be a potent source of phenethylamine,

00:59:15 ►

which has some mood-altering effects.

00:59:19 ►

And I’ll just mention briefly, before reading this,

00:59:21 ►

that I was told here that it’s also now known to have monoamine oxidase inhibiting effects but I haven’t actually

00:59:27 ►

seen that particular work. So this is from, I’ll conclude with this, this is from my

00:59:33 ►

snuff book which is called Shamanic Snuffs or Entheogenic Rhymes. It’s kind of a

00:59:37 ►

limited edition jam made. And actually this was published in John Hannah’s Entheogenic

00:59:43 ►

Review but it summarizes the last of a series of vignettes that I wrote to try And actually, this was published in John Hanna’s Entheogen Review.

00:59:49 ►

But it summarizes the last of a series of vignettes that I wrote to try and make some provocative suggestions about Shamanism

00:59:52 ►

and also to show all these connections.

00:59:54 ►

It’s called Cacao Volador, from Amazonia to Asplan.

00:59:59 ►

We have seen that two species of Virola and one of Erianthra, or late genus,

01:00:04 ►

might be called Cacaos in South America.

01:00:07 ►

And it comes as no surprise that seeds of Virola walamalensis, or cacao volador, are used for flavoring chocolate potations in Central America.

01:00:17 ►

I’ll skip over because that’s about the origin of the plant.

01:00:21 ►

I wish to note some South American linguistic crossovers involving cacaos.

01:00:25 ►

Paque many books, including my own.

01:00:29 ►

Cacao appears not to be of Mayan Mesoamerican derivation, the word cacao,

01:00:34 ►

inasmuch as the root is found in Tupi-Wanani languages for Theobroma cacao and Theobroma speciosa,

01:00:41 ►

along with the roots for other cacao terms, such as cupui for tea

01:00:46 ►

southern Canaan, cupuasu for tea grandiflora.

01:00:50 ►

The Mesoamerican name for theobroma bicolor, pataste, or cacahuat patlachlea nava, exists

01:00:57 ►

through Central America all the way to Ecuador as patasi in the Rio Nando, although in this

01:01:03 ►

latter case it is less clear in which direction this Fani migrated.

01:01:07 ►

Inasmuch as tea cacao is of South American origin

01:01:10 ►

and in memorial association with humankind there,

01:01:13 ►

logic dictates the Mesoamericans derived their words

01:01:16 ►

cacauanawa from Tupi-Guarani and not conversely.

01:01:21 ►

We’ve seen intimate relationships between cacaos

01:01:23 ►

as snuff, tobacco, and coca ash sources

01:01:27 ►

and that both Varroa and Eschweibera, another important ash source species, are called cacaos.

01:01:36 ►

Significantly, two species of Malpicaceae, the family of Banisteriopsis, are called Lana cacao, cacao liana in the Caribbean.

01:01:47 ►

Two Banisteriopsis species are also named Wilka behuco, Wilka liana,

01:01:53 ►

which associates them with another snuff plant.

01:01:56 ►

And theobromine, sorry, Wilka, well, a Colombian peptidinia is known as chocolatillo.

01:02:02 ►

Peptidinia is the presumptive genus of this

01:02:05 ►

bufotinine snuff. Some of them are Peptidinians.

01:02:09 ►

So one of those

01:02:09 ►

is called Little Chocolate.

01:02:11 ►

And theobromine, in fact, occurs in

01:02:13 ►

Peptidinia leptostachia.

01:02:16 ►

Cuararibea cacao

01:02:17 ►

and Cuararibea cordata

01:02:20 ►

bombicaceae

01:02:21 ►

bear names relating to cacao in

01:02:23 ►

Colombia and Brazil, such as Cacao Semarron

01:02:27 ►

and Cupuaçu. This is significant since Ho’oponopono is called Cacauasolchipu or cacao flower

01:02:34 ►

in Mesoamerica. Its aromatic flowers still used as additives to chocolate in Oaxaca.

01:02:40 ►

I’ve noted the importance of Lupuna Bambakesia, both as tobacco and ayahuasca plants in Amazonia.

01:02:47 ►

In Mesoamerica, poraribea funeris flowers seasoned both tobacco reeds for smoking and orally ingested cacao potions,

01:02:55 ►

and the Central American species, poraribea fildii, madre de cacao, known as maja and mayan, is also still used as spice in chocolate.

01:03:07 ►

Furthermore, lupuna blanca, ceiba pentandra, very important in South American shamanism

01:03:14 ►

and hunting technology, portico and nanowattle, was likewise added to cacao wattle in Mesoamerica

01:03:22 ►

and probably also to ayahuasca in Peru.

01:03:33 ►

Lufuno Blanco was also used in a potion called Chocoya when something derived over chocolate,

01:03:36 ►

this country of Hernandez, the Chocoya was

01:03:40 ►

with cacao.

01:03:43 ►

An obscure Shipibo additive to Nishioni, or ayahuasca in Peru,

01:03:48 ►

ispingo, or ispingu, or espingo, is probably

01:03:52 ►

the seeds of a species of coraribea,

01:03:55 ►

used like vilca seeds as Peruvian additives to chicha,

01:03:59 ►

called hiale.

01:04:00 ►

Again, we’re relating it to the agave potion here.

01:04:04 ►

Chicha is another fermented drink,

01:04:08 ►

which contains many visionary additives.

01:04:11 ►

Corare de Apuntumayensis is a cofano curare plant,

01:04:15 ►

fruit of Bombacaceus patanoa,

01:04:17 ►

Ixio toxica, a tucun fish poison,

01:04:20 ►

which is commonly called cupuasu rana,

01:04:23 ►

false cupuasu,

01:04:24 ►

cupuasu being this cacao name

01:04:26 ►

for graniflorum in Brazil. I’ve noted that in Mesoamerica, cacao bottle or cacao potions

01:04:36 ►

constituted a sort of ayahuasca analog. Like ayahuasca, cacao bottle was an all-purpose

01:04:41 ►

pharmaceutical vehicle for administration of many medicinal plants,

01:04:46 ►

both curative specifics and shamanic inebriants.

01:04:50 ►

Besides seeds of pocho, ceiba pantandra, flowers of the related acute quarary veifunigris,

01:04:55 ►

and seeds of byrola guatemalensis,

01:04:58 ►

Mesoamerican cacauvras at times contained psilocybin mushrooms, teonanacata,

01:05:07 ►

at times contained psilocybin mushrooms, flowers of Solandra, or Datura, Tejidas flowers,

01:05:12 ►

and piper leaves, all visionary agents, as well as some promovable

01:05:18 ►

in theatres, including flowers of a caliandra species called Shilosochidu, Symbopetalum penyeliflorum, Theonocostli, and Magnolia

01:05:27 ►

di Alveda, Enlosochidu. The epigram introducing this chapter indicates that many such flowers

01:05:34 ►

were also additives to Acaia, the tobacco reeds, or Aribea, Piper, Symbopetalum, Tegidus,

01:05:43 ►

and some species of visionary mushrooms.

01:05:45 ►

But Mesoamericans had still another class

01:05:48 ►

of ayahuasca analog,

01:05:49 ►

alcoholic chichas, known as

01:05:51 ►

Balche and Mayan and Otli

01:05:53 ►

and Noam, or Pulque.

01:05:55 ►

In both cases, many visionary additives

01:05:57 ►

were involved, but it is significant that the

01:05:59 ►

primary and definitive additive in each

01:06:01 ►

was leguminous.

01:06:03 ►

The Mayan meath gland, or medicated mead,

01:06:06 ►

is named for the Balche tree,

01:06:08 ►

Monchocarpus violaceus,

01:06:09 ►

whose bark was fermented with water

01:06:11 ►

and stingless bee honey.

01:06:13 ►

By the same token, Mesoamerican fermented oakley

01:06:16 ►

from sweet saps of agave

01:06:17 ►

with oak-padley roots,

01:06:20 ►

or the oakley drug from the leguminous tree

01:06:22 ►

Acacia angustissima,

01:06:24 ►

and also the roots of Caliandra anomala,

01:06:28 ►

still called Palo de Pulque or Pulque tree, in Zapotec.

01:06:33 ►

And this was the first Mesoamerican entheogen to be prescribed by the Spaniards

01:06:37 ►

by royal decree in 1529, 42 years before the Holy Office of the Inquisition was constituted,

01:06:44 ►

and 91 years before the more famous peyotro and kindred entheogens were decreed hereditary.

01:06:50 ►

Balche in the Mayan area and Okli Okpatli in Highland Mesoamerica

01:06:55 ►

were clearly the most common everyday working class entheogens at the time of conquest.

01:07:01 ►

We found that in South America, species of acacia were involved in the Gerdaima complex,

01:07:06 ►

while species of longocarpus may be fish poisons and gudaria adducts. Not only did cacao and

01:07:13 ►

live shamanic plants spread by trade to Mesoamerica in pre-contact times, but we described strong

01:07:20 ►

parallels between Mesoamerican and South American ethnopharmacognosy. In both cases, leguminosy

01:07:26 ►

and sterculiasy cacao are central elements. Tobacco is intimately intercalated, and the

01:07:34 ►

bombicaceae, especially porarybea species, are inextricably related to cacaos. Lirola

01:07:41 ►

is an additive both to ayahuasca and cacao potions besides being itself a major

01:07:45 ►

snuff plant, and we see common additives in other families, including boraginaceae, comprocete,

01:07:51 ►

piperaceae, and solanaceae.

01:07:53 ►

Andean San Pedro cactus has its pharmacognostical equivalent in the Mesoamerican peyote cactus,

01:08:00 ►

both inseparably interrelated with tobacco, like ayahuasca and cacao wattle potions,

01:08:07 ►

the last taken during feasts, accompanied by smoking acai and tobacco reeds, potions

01:08:12 ►

and reeds containing many of the same entheogenic admixtures, mostly having direct parallels

01:08:18 ►

in South American snuffs, ipa du coca, and tobacco adagics, in each of which cacaos are

01:08:24 ►

key.

01:08:24 ►

hipa-dukoka, and tobacco adiabats, in each of which cacaos are key.

01:08:30 ►

Not only are we faced with the pan-South American complex of shamanic inebriation, but this includes also Mesoamerica and its prodigious pharmacognosical purview,

01:08:35 ►

with roots dating back at least three millennia.

01:08:38 ►

Moreover, this shamanic pharmacognosy extends northward, via tobacco, peido, and ubatura,

01:08:44 ►

far into North America, where earliest

01:08:46 ►

human uses of the first two likely

01:08:48 ►

took place, whereas Amanita

01:08:49 ►

Muscaria, primal entheogen of

01:08:52 ►

Beringian groups who first migrated

01:08:54 ►

into Neogia decades of millennia

01:08:56 ►

ago, plates and interweaves

01:08:58 ►

the whole, with far more

01:09:00 ►

archaic roots than Siberia.

01:09:03 ►

Thank you.

01:09:04 ►

I’ll take questions.

01:09:07 ►

Yes, please.

01:09:08 ►

I was wondering, all the

01:09:10 ►

things that I’ve read from South America

01:09:11 ►

to Central America and to the Mexican

01:09:14 ►

area is that they always fermented some

01:09:16 ►

type of corn, hot pepper,

01:09:18 ►

and one of these flowers to make

01:09:20 ►

a beverage from cacao.

01:09:22 ►

And in doing that

01:09:23 ►

in our residents in the States it’s

01:09:26 ►

actually got a very extreme psychoactive response in the system.

01:09:32 ►

With corn chicha, maize chicha. For example in the north that’s pretty common.

01:09:37 ►

That’s a very restrictive practice in Mesoamerica that is more north central

01:09:42 ►

Mexico. Chicha de maiz is much more common in South America,

01:09:46 ►

especially in the northern part.

01:09:48 ►

But this is generally with chewed or malted maize kernels.

01:09:54 ►

And this is generically called chicha.

01:09:56 ►

Of course, it also has many additives, and it’s very similar.

01:09:59 ►

But, for example, where it is used in Mesoamerica,

01:10:02 ►

it’s called tzatzuino, and it’s mainly by groups like the Tarahumara or the Huichol.

01:10:08 ►

And they also make agave potions, and they use similar additives, one of which is peyote.

01:10:14 ►

But I don’t know about chile as an additive to that.

01:10:17 ►

You said they use chile as well.

01:10:19 ►

Right, exactly, aji.

01:10:21 ►

It’s very strong.

01:10:23 ►

And the frothier it gets, the stronger it is.

01:10:26 ►

I consider aji or chile to be a shamanic inebriate,

01:10:30 ►

especially after seeing that hair-raising thing in the Mazatec zone

01:10:33 ►

with the burning chile pots.

01:10:37 ►

But that’s an archaic thing because it’s known in other areas,

01:10:41 ►

burning chile on open brazierszers in tobacco also yes I was

01:10:47 ►

wondering if you could comment on the presence of tyramine in fermented dried

01:10:52 ►

cacao but not in fresh cacao fresh fruit and its relationship to problems with

01:10:58 ►

ayahuasca or ayahuasca analogs in the sense that tyramine can interfere with the,

01:11:08 ►

I believe it’s beta-carbolines in the typical ayahuasca group.

01:11:14 ►

Yeah, well, tyramine, I don’t have any ready, recent data at hand on tyramine and cacao,

01:11:15 ►

though I know it occurs.

01:11:20 ►

But on the other hand, I don’t think it’s a,

01:11:25 ►

there’s been a lot of polemic about this serotonin effect and so forth.

01:11:30 ►

And I have maintained, and I think history has borne me out from the very start,

01:11:33 ►

that there is such a fundamental difference between the short-acting,

01:11:41 ►

comparatively weak, monoamine oxidase inhibitors that are used in these potions, which are beta-carbides, like harming, especially, and secondarily

01:11:45 ►

harming, and the ones that are used in medicine.

01:11:49 ►

The effect is so fleeting in this case, and much less potent.

01:11:52 ►

I don’t think that this is a problem at all, to have any dietary restrictions.

01:11:57 ►

And the dietary restrictions that are associated with ayahuasca in South America are no different

01:12:02 ►

from what you would find with mushrooms here or peyote there or tobacco there.

01:12:06 ►

It’s for spiritual reasons.

01:12:07 ►

I don’t think tyramine is a problem in the case of beta-carbons,

01:12:11 ►

but certainly if people are taking non-amine oxidase inhibitors under prescription,

01:12:18 ►

some of which are irreversible inhibitors like isocarboxazide, one would want to be careful.

01:12:25 ►

like isocarboxazoid, one would want to be careful.

01:12:28 ►

And they do recommend not to use chocolate products or anything theopropanol or xanthine-containing.

01:12:32 ►

Yes.

01:12:33 ►

Hello, this is working good.

01:12:35 ►

Jonathan, I have a two-part question.

01:12:37 ►

One was what year did you go to Oaxaca

01:12:40 ►

with Dick Schultes and Albert Hoffman

01:12:42 ►

to study para- in the same-

01:12:46 ►

82 or 83, about.

01:12:47 ►

82 or 83.

01:12:48 ►

Yeah.

01:12:49 ►

And the second part is, what is the nature

01:12:51 ►

of the psychoactive activity of Pagetti’s lucida

01:12:54 ►

and Pagetti’s erecta?

01:12:57 ►

It’s like, it’s one of the classic marijuana

01:13:00 ►

substitutes.

01:13:01 ►

You fire up a joint and you get a buzz.

01:13:04 ►

But it’s nothing dramatic.

01:13:06 ►

Yeah, I would say, in a way, kind of cannabis-like.

01:13:09 ►

It’s not salivated and normal, that’s for sure,

01:13:11 ►

or tryptamine-like.

01:13:13 ►

It’s more of a relaxing effect.

01:13:15 ►

But it is definitely, it’s kind of like smoking Artemisia leaf.

01:13:20 ►

If you smoke fujian-rich plants, and it’s very aromatic.

01:13:24 ►

It may be some aromatic substance.

01:13:26 ►

But even the dry leaves are aromatic.

01:13:28 ►

It has a very strong anise-like smell.

01:13:32 ►

And so it could be some aromatic compound.

01:13:36 ►

And there is a thesis from the 1960s, I think,

01:13:40 ►

where they did a bioassay of snuffing it, which was unusual.

01:13:43 ►

They chopped up the leaf and so forth, because they did

01:13:45 ►

notice the psychoactive

01:13:47 ►

references to it.

01:13:51 ►

And for some reason, they decided to snuff it.

01:13:54 ►

In the case of…

01:13:56 ►

These are known as snuffs, and snuffing is

01:13:57 ►

not dry snuffing, not widely

01:13:59 ►

known in Mesoamerica, just tobacco, and that’s

01:14:02 ►

hardly only mentioned once

01:14:03 ►

for medicinal purposes.

01:14:06 ►

But there is one report of Itzáhuacu, which is Artemisia leaf, that would have been Artemisia mexicana,

01:14:13 ►

or it’s also called Estafiate or Ajenco, which means wormwood, that that was powered up and thrown in the face of sacrificial victims. Supposedly they would become insensitized or whatever,

01:14:27 ►

which sounds a little bit like a snuff blown in,

01:14:30 ►

but that’s the closest we can come to it.

01:14:32 ►

But that wasn’t the Tzatzitas.

01:14:34 ►

So these guys tried a basic snuff,

01:14:36 ►

and they said it irritated like hell

01:14:38 ►

and was a great sternutatory or sneezing powder,

01:14:42 ►

nisblu,

01:14:43 ►

but on the other hand, they didn’t find it to be especially psychotic.

01:14:47 ►

But he did say that a couple of his students did a lot of it

01:14:51 ►

or something like that.

01:14:52 ►

He made some comment like they did or something,

01:14:54 ►

and they seemed to become fond of it.

01:14:57 ►

So I haven’t tried it except by smoking.

01:15:00 ►

And I haven’t tried the Sempau Solji at all.

01:15:04 ►

Yes?

01:15:03 ►

And I haven’t tried the Sempab Solji at all.

01:15:04 ►

Yes?

01:15:09 ►

Would you think there’s not really been a problem with people who are taking antidepressants and taking ayahuasca?

01:15:14 ►

A lot of people are demanding it.

01:15:15 ►

You mean if they’re taking monoamine oxidase?

01:15:17 ►

No, like that’s their time.

01:15:19 ►

No, I don’t really think that’s going to be a major problem.

01:15:26 ►

But on the other hand, there are a couple of reports that people that take some of those,

01:15:33 ►

I don’t know if it’s going to be reported for Prozac,

01:15:35 ►

but certainly for medicinal non-amine oxidase inhibitors,

01:15:38 ►

that they become completely insensitized to psilocybin and LSD,

01:15:43 ►

or they have to take ten times more to get the same

01:15:46 ►

effect. Remember the

01:15:48 ►

ayahuasca effect. This is something that’s caused

01:15:50 ►

a lot of confusion and it still hasn’t been

01:15:52 ►

dispelled. And I maintained

01:15:54 ►

this from the very beginning and was criticized

01:15:56 ►

at first by some of my colleagues

01:15:58 ►

like Jace Caldwell and Dennis McKenna

01:16:00 ►

but they themselves adduced the results

01:16:02 ►

that supported this view

01:16:03 ►

that the ayahuasca effect is strictly peripheral.

01:16:08 ►

It’s not in the brain.

01:16:09 ►

And it’s only to get it absorbed into the bloodstream

01:16:13 ►

and prevent the deamination of the compounds in the gut.

01:16:18 ►

And in the brain, its effect is negative.

01:16:21 ►

It’s not an enhancing effect.

01:16:22 ►

It’s an anti-DMT effect.

01:16:26 ►

Beta-caroline, for example, is a

01:16:28 ►

thallium-like compound.

01:16:30 ►

Indeed, there’s a receptor that’s called

01:16:32 ►

the GABA-A receptor.

01:16:34 ►

And one of the subunits of that is

01:16:36 ►

called the benzodiazepine receptor

01:16:38 ►

where the compounds like diazepam,

01:16:40 ►

desmethyl diazepam, all of these

01:16:42 ►

benzodiazepines bind.

01:16:44 ►

No one has yet found the anxiolytic or anxiety-releasing

01:16:48 ►

or dissolving ligand of that receptor,

01:16:51 ►

but two compounds are known to be anxiogenic ligands of that receptor,

01:16:56 ►

and one of them is a beta-carboline.

01:16:57 ►

We know that that’s also a beta-carboline site.

01:17:01 ►

And if you take, as I have, very large amounts of beta carbolines, it’s very

01:17:06 ►

much like valium. And if I take valium,

01:17:08 ►

I knock out even a good dose

01:17:10 ►

of LSD. And

01:17:12 ►

so,

01:17:12 ►

there are several reasons you could conjecture.

01:17:16 ►

But the MAO, in any case, in the brain,

01:17:17 ►

is not in the synapses where you have

01:17:20 ►

this receptor site interaction. It’s

01:17:22 ►

inside the nerve cells for processing

01:17:24 ►

cellular compounds

01:17:27 ►

that are outside the vesicles, inside the cells.

01:17:30 ►

That’s where the MAO is, not in the synapse.

01:17:32 ►

And so if you introduce another indole, like a beta-carbine,

01:17:35 ►

and that gets high enough levels in the brain to where it might be in the synapses,

01:17:40 ►

that’s going to compete against the tryptamines for access to these receptor sites.

01:17:44 ►

And it’s also going to activate this the tryptamines for access to these receptor sites,

01:17:52 ►

and it’s also going to activate this GABA-A receptor, which is a depolarization receptor. It causes a flood of chloride ions, which depolarizes the membrane

01:17:56 ►

and turns down its sensitivity by two orders of magnitude or something.

01:18:01 ►

And so the general effect is that what you want is you want to take only

01:18:05 ►

enough of the beta-carboline and at the same

01:18:08 ►

time as the tryptamine to enhance the

01:18:09 ►

uptake. In the case of mushrooms,

01:18:11 ►

for example,

01:18:13 ►

some people will take an extract

01:18:15 ►

of rich and beta-carbolines

01:18:18 ►

like peganum seed with the

01:18:19 ►

mushrooms and claim that it

01:18:21 ►

enhances the effect. And what you’re getting

01:18:23 ►

there is more absorption, again, in the stomach.

01:18:26 ►

So you don’t want to be able to feel this in the head

01:18:29 ►

because that means there’s this inhibitor up there

01:18:31 ►

that’s going to inhibit the DMT or the thiamethoxin or whatever.

01:18:36 ►

And so I went from the ayahuasca analogs.

01:18:39 ►

In this snuff book, there’s a different technology described

01:18:42 ►

because the beta-carbines are also,

01:18:44 ►

the huascavines areines also use these snuffs,

01:18:47 ►

and I think that’s the primordial use.

01:18:49 ►

In that case, you do get enhanced

01:18:51 ►

when you get double the potency,

01:18:53 ►

and you need about more than 10 times less of a dose.

01:18:58 ►

And the dose is so small

01:19:00 ►

to enhance the tryptamines in the nose

01:19:01 ►

that you can’t feel it in your brain.

01:19:03 ►

It doesn’t build up brain levels there and compete.

01:19:06 ►

And so where, for example,

01:19:08 ►

10 milligrams of 5-methoxy-DMT snuffed

01:19:11 ►

is very active by itself.

01:19:13 ►

If you take 5 milligrams with 5 milligrams of harming

01:19:16 ►

or harmaline, it’s the same effect

01:19:18 ►

that you get with 10 milligrams approximately.

01:19:20 ►

And this has been verified in other people.

01:19:23 ►

So there’s still a lot of confusion about this MAO inhibiting thing and again I don’t know about that in relation to cacao. It wouldn’t be surprising. that have these high blood levels, often from taking them every day in psychiatry, just becoming sensitized.

01:19:46 ►

No one’s reported enhanced effects with these things,

01:19:48 ►

but often very attenuated.

01:19:51 ►

Yes, any other?

01:19:52 ►

Yeah, back there.

01:19:54 ►

Have you ever tried smoking beta carbolines

01:19:56 ►

to pre-gose before taking tryptamines?

01:20:00 ►

No.

01:20:01 ►

No.

01:20:02 ►

I don’t even model things that are like shamanic practices. I don’t know of any practice that would be like that. And so I haven’t.

01:20:11 ►

Okay. I mean, it sounds like based on the explanation you’re giving that it would inhibit the effect. Is that correct? I mean, my understanding that you’re… A tryptamine-like effect, I would think, yes.

01:20:27 ►

But we don’t even know if the beta-carbolines survive intact, that kind of process.

01:20:33 ►

The vaporization, they may even be altered into some other compound.

01:20:37 ►

Yeah.

01:20:37 ►

It’s hard to say.

01:20:39 ►

Okay. Well, I know experientially, I know people who’ve done that.

01:20:47 ►

Smoking, for instance, ground-up Syrian Roo before smoking DMT,

01:20:51 ►

it seems to stretch out the DMT a little bit more.

01:20:54 ►

I mean, this is…

01:20:55 ►

I know I’ve heard this kind of thing from many people,

01:20:57 ►

but no one’s ever given me any kind of hard enough data

01:21:00 ►

to have even minimal control.

01:21:02 ►

So it’s not a tricky thing to do this in a way that you get

01:21:06 ►

some useful information. There is

01:21:08 ►

very useful information to be got, and I

01:21:10 ►

don’t mean to deprecate

01:21:11 ►

this kind of research. I think it’s a very valuable

01:21:14 ►

and there’s an important place for

01:21:16 ►

it, and it’s indispensable in this particular

01:21:18 ►

field of visionary compounds.

01:21:20 ►

But in both my

01:21:21 ►

Iowa’s Book and Snuff Book, which are kind of like

01:21:24 ►

two parts of the same study,

01:21:26 ►

I talk quite a bit about how to make this methodology rigorous so that you get information.

01:21:33 ►

You want to only use threshold-level doses because that’s a threshold level for a particular thing,

01:21:38 ►

which is rare in me, like visual effects.

01:21:42 ►

And so that is repeatable.

01:21:43 ►

That I can recognize again the next time. Whereas if I

01:21:45 ►

take double that, how do I know that is that twice that or two and a half times that? It’s very vague.

01:21:51 ►

But that’s kind of a repeatable thing. So if I establish that 10 milligrams is that visual

01:21:56 ►

threshold, and then I get that with 5 milligrams with this booster, that’s something that is more

01:22:02 ►

or less reliable. Whereas if I took 20 and that worked and I wasn’t looking for the

01:22:08 ►

threshold, I first looked for the threshold, something

01:22:10 ►

that’s a repeatable

01:22:11 ►

assignment,

01:22:14 ►

is what I’m saying.

01:22:16 ►

Yeah, yeah.

01:22:17 ►

Maybe we can talk to the FDA about setting up

01:22:20 ►

some controlled studies.

01:22:22 ►

Yeah, well,

01:22:23 ►

I have published three parts,

01:22:26 ►

and there’s the fourth part that’s coming,

01:22:29 ►

of essentially bioassay pharmacology

01:22:31 ►

in the journal Psychoactive Drugs,

01:22:33 ►

which is like a hippie drug abuseology journal.

01:22:36 ►

It is a medical journal, and it is indexed,

01:22:38 ►

indexed medicus, and so forth.

01:22:40 ►

But the first one was called Pharmawaska,

01:22:43 ►

and it was modeling with pure tryptamines

01:22:44 ►

and pure beta-carblines, what I call the Ayahuasca effect.

01:22:49 ►

Then the second one was with bufotinib, 5-hydroxy-DMG, which I isolated from antigenanthro and compared bioacid and antigenanthro snuff.

01:22:58 ►

And then the pure compounds with and without tryptamines by different routes, including intranasal, sublingual, oral, oral with MAO

01:23:05 ►

inhibitors, and intrarectal, and pulmonary, because N and anthrax also smoke. And then

01:23:12 ►

I did the same thing. That second paper was called Pharma-Neopro, and then the Pharma-Pena

01:23:16 ►

ones with 5-methoxy-DMT. And the fourth part is on nicotine, and I still have yet to complete the nicotine bioassays with beta carbolines,

01:23:27 ►

but that’s sublingual nicotine. And I didn’t get any trouble from them on publishing this.

01:23:32 ►

In fact, the strangest thing happened when I sent them the Pharma Nyoko paper. It was

01:23:37 ►

like a hot potato. They didn’t answer me for a long time. They didn’t say anything

01:23:41 ►

about the Pharma Waska paper, but a couple of years went by, and that was when they were debating that stupid methamphetamine bill that originally had an anti-press provision that didn’t make any distinction between commercial and scientific press.

01:23:54 ►

So, oddly enough, this never happened to me before.

01:23:56 ►

I got two reviews back, and one of them was like three pages in very detail, and it wasn’t critical at all. It really said this is, and it was

01:24:06 ►

from some straight pharmacologists, that this is important information and it’s had a good

01:24:10 ►

methodology. But they wanted me to add things to it. They usually want you to take stuff

01:24:14 ►

out. And this is the first time they’d ever asked me to add like 20% more text to the

01:24:19 ►

paper. But they wanted me to justify the ethics of self-experimentation in human beings

01:24:25 ►

and compare and contrast it with animal research.

01:24:29 ►

And so I did that, and I think they wanted to cover their ass

01:24:31 ►

and also establish some kind of a framework for this.

01:24:34 ►

So I would say that’s enough.

01:24:37 ►

That establishes it well enough.

01:24:39 ►

So then I sent them another one, which was me and BiggerHotPotato,

01:24:42 ►

and they accepted this with some foundation but that’s on withdrawal viruses where I have a methodology for

01:24:52 ►

completely eliminating physical tolerance and withdrawal syndrome from

01:24:56 ►

opiates which I take all the time anyway and so nobody says the Quincy is

01:25:02 ►

published withdrawal of our assets and so there are two case reports where I withdraw from lengthy opioid habits,

01:25:10 ►

which were always oral with known doses so that I have a track record for it

01:25:15 ►

and give the withdrawal results of that.

01:25:19 ►

And it’s the first symptom-free withdrawal that’s ever been reported.

01:25:22 ►

So that’s going to soon be published in the JVD, too.

01:25:24 ►

So that’s also pushing it even farther.

01:25:27 ►

And so I think it’s very important.

01:25:31 ►

And for some time I wrote a column in Spain

01:25:33 ►

called The Catholic Psychonautics,

01:25:36 ►

Catholic in the sense of universal.

01:25:39 ►

And it was basically about that,

01:25:41 ►

really showing the importance, not just historically,

01:25:46 ►

but conceptually, of human self-experiments.

01:25:47 ►

But ethics dictate that the researcher himself do this.

01:25:52 ►

As Sasha’s also, in the end, also pointed out,

01:25:54 ►

in a very clear and unambiguous and excellent fashion.

01:25:59 ►

OK, one other question?

01:26:01 ►

Yeah.

01:26:02 ►

The aroma sub in Canaan is something you mentioned.

01:26:04 ►

The spelling of that, and then

01:26:06 ►

another question is, you hear about

01:26:08 ►

these wild tobaccos, nicotine

01:26:09 ►

or rustica, for example, having

01:26:11 ►

MAO inhibitors. What is the MAO inhibitor

01:26:14 ►

chemical?

01:26:16 ►

It’s nicotine, but it’s MAO-B.

01:26:19 ►

But it’s a very

01:26:19 ►

significant MAO-B inhibitor.

01:26:22 ►

And

01:26:22 ►

Banisteriopsis bark, incidentally,

01:26:26 ►

this is the first

01:26:27 ►

report that we have

01:26:30 ►

of that being smoked

01:26:31 ►

in South America. But Schultes

01:26:34 ►

reported that the same

01:26:36 ►

boron and wetoto that have this

01:26:37 ►

two-generation gap between

01:26:40 ►

their grandfathers, who knew all this stuff,

01:26:41 ►

and they just kind of remembered or vague on the details.

01:26:44 ►

They said that they made splits out of heliconia flowers,

01:26:48 ►

which is with Musaceae, like banana-famous ornamental flowers.

01:26:53 ►

The heliconia leaf, they made a split with tobacco and Banisteriopsis bark,

01:27:00 ►

or would smoke the bark by itself, and some leaf.

01:27:03 ►

And by the way, that’s another interesting thing about Ben’s three ounces,

01:27:07 ►

is the leaf, the names refer to the leaf.

01:27:10 ►

The etymologies that have been proposed for things like kata, ki, yake.

01:27:15 ►

Yake is specifically the name of the leaf in many languages.

01:27:18 ►

And it’s very clear that the leaves, we only have one analysis,

01:27:24 ►

but the leaves are much, much more rich

01:27:26 ►

in alkaloids than the stem bar

01:27:28 ►

for the stem is.

01:27:30 ►

And there are only a couple of reports of people

01:27:32 ►

putting leaves symbolically into the brews,

01:27:34 ►

but at some time the leaves were the important

01:27:36 ►

part of the venstreoxysm.

01:27:38 ►

It’s gravitated to the stems.

01:27:41 ►

It’s maybe

01:27:42 ►

because of the male-female dichotomy.

01:27:44 ►

The leaf additive is the female, the stem is the male-female dichotomy. Believe that it was the female

01:27:45 ►

and the stem was the male, but that’s the case.

01:27:50 ►

And then the spelling for the other…

01:27:51 ►

Oh, sorry. Sub-S-U-B-I-N-C-A-N-U-M. Theobroma subincanum. It’s important to manage one.

01:27:58 ►

Yeah.

01:27:58 ►

Just a quick question. Have you tried cacao before where you’ve taken it, the purple fresh pods out of the white,

01:28:06 ►

blended it up in a blender, and just consumed that rich purple drink?

01:28:10 ►

No.

01:28:11 ►

No.

01:28:11 ►

I would suggest it at some point.

01:28:13 ►

I mean, I’ve suggested it to many people, but it’s very interesting because it’s very psychedelic.

01:28:18 ►

Really?

01:28:18 ►

It makes you extremely sensitive.

01:28:20 ►

What do you mean that it’s very psychedelic?

01:28:22 ►

It’s very psychedelic in the fact that it sort of puts you in a place where you feel like…

01:28:29 ►

It’s almost like pre-LSD, where you start to feel like you’re being embodied.

01:28:34 ►

But it’s not going to replace LSD.

01:28:36 ►

I’m not saying that.

01:28:38 ►

That’s always the question. But wait a second, how much?

01:28:42 ►

About two cups.

01:28:44 ►

Two cups, that’s a significant amount.

01:28:46 ►

But that’s interesting because of this report.

01:28:48 ►

But it doesn’t happen once it’s fermented.

01:28:50 ►

It’s completely gone and so is all the purple color.

01:28:52 ►

Yes. Well, it’s a brownish purple afterwards.

01:28:55 ►

Yeah, I understand what you mean.

01:28:57 ►

Yeah, but we used to do it in Costa Rica all the time.

01:28:59 ►

And aqua aqua is very psychedelic to eat the seed and fruit.

01:29:03 ►

But by saying very psychedelic, you mean it’s comparable to mushrooms and peyote and…

01:29:07 ►

No, it’s free.

01:29:07 ►

Because…

01:29:08 ►

Free.

01:29:09 ►

It makes you very light.

01:29:10 ►

Free.

01:29:11 ►

And so it suggests that or gives that kind of…

01:29:13 ►

No, it’s definitely psychedelic.

01:29:15 ►

You get…

01:29:16 ►

It would be driving me wild.

01:29:16 ►

You get colored patterns or…

01:29:18 ►

Absolutely.

01:29:19 ►

You get strange colored patterns.

01:29:21 ►

I’m not being stubborn.

01:29:22 ►

I just want to, you know, clear up.

01:29:23 ►

No, or swinging light sticks, there’s many trails.

01:29:26 ►

If there’s any sounds or sensitivity, you can always…

01:29:29 ►

Okay, well I’ll definitely try that.

01:29:31 ►

Let’s go to the teacup in a while.

01:29:33 ►

There you go.

01:29:34 ►

It also very strongly enhances the mushroom experience.

01:29:37 ►

If you eat the cacao like that, it’s more…

01:29:40 ►

Like, you can eat it like this, which is traditional in ceremonies,

01:29:42 ►

to continue eating the fresh cacao, eating dry cacao throughout the ceremony.

01:29:46 ►

If you eat the fresh cacao, it’s probably five times stronger.

01:29:49 ►

You get a real strong hit on it.

01:29:51 ►

Yeah, and again, one of the major things about putting mushrooms in the cacao potion also is the fact that they’re crushed and made into juice.

01:29:59 ►

Like Maria Sabina was observed to take the whole mushrooms, but she would chew them for a half an hour.

01:30:06 ►

I mean, just keep chewing like this.

01:30:08 ►

For example, when people present in hospital with mushroom poisoning,

01:30:13 ►

they often evacuate the stomach and so forth,

01:30:15 ►

and you can see whole mushrooms or, you know, just the pieces,

01:30:19 ►

virtually big pieces.

01:30:20 ►

They don’t digest well.

01:30:22 ►

And so you want to blend them

01:30:26 ►

in a blender or crust them

01:30:28 ►

on the top until you get the juice out

01:30:29 ►

or really chew them well, which is very, very

01:30:32 ►

hard. Something like slothly syrolesic

01:30:34 ►

which really this is a gag reflex

01:30:36 ►

and it’s harder

01:30:38 ►

to get down even than peyote, although

01:30:40 ►

it’s not bitter. This also

01:30:42 ►

is going to greatly increase

01:30:44 ►

the bioavailability as would, I suppose, the monoamine

01:30:47 ►

oxidase inhibiting effect, because it’s also going to be a substrate for MAO.

01:30:53 ►

Okay, well, thanks for your attention.

01:31:00 ►

You’re listening to

01:31:02 ►

The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:31:09 ►

I guess the first thing I should say is that if you’re a chemist or botanist,

01:31:14 ►

whether professional or amateur,

01:31:16 ►

and you skipped over this talk because you weren’t interested in chocolate,

01:31:20 ►

well then you may want to go back and listen to it

01:31:22 ►

because there are some very interesting things

01:31:24 ►

about little-known psychoactive plants that he pointed out.

01:31:28 ►

And if you did hear the entire talk, well, then you know what I mean.

01:31:31 ►

Of course, unless you’re the most experienced note-taker I’ve ever encountered,

01:31:36 ►

your head is probably buzzing with all of the information that Jonathan just now passed along.

01:31:41 ►

Well, he actually passed that along in 2004, but at least it’s more widely available now.

01:31:47 ►

I can still very clearly remember the first time I heard Jonathan lecture in public.

01:31:52 ►

It was at the Entheobotany Conference in Palenque in January of 1999, and he was the first speaker

01:31:59 ►

on the schedule that year. His talk was titled, Pharmacophilia or the Natural Paradises? And the talk was held

01:32:07 ►

in the conference room at the top of a long, hard climb up above the Chan Ka Hotel where we were all

01:32:13 ►

staying. And it began right on time at two in the afternoon, and the room was filled when Jonathan

01:32:19 ►

walked in. He climbed up on the little table in front of the room and began speaking, and there he sat like a Buddha for almost three hours while he spoke without notes, completely blowing us all away.

01:32:31 ►

I’ve met a lot of highly intelligent people in my day, but for sure Jonathan is right at the top of that list.

01:32:46 ►

The truth is that he spoke so fast and threw out so many names of psychedelic plants that I’d never heard of before,

01:32:51 ►

and in such rapid succession that I didn’t even try to write down any of them.

01:32:56 ►

But I did come away with the knowledge that there are thousands of ways to experience natural highs,

01:33:00 ►

and that never again would I worry about finding a good source for my medicine,

01:33:06 ►

because Mother Nature has seen fit to stock this planet with more entheogens than any one person will ever be able to sample in just one lifetime.

01:33:09 ►

Although I would be willing to bet that no one in history has made a better attempt at it than Jonathan Ott.

01:33:15 ►

And I do hope that you paid close attention to one of his answers in the Q&A session

01:33:20 ►

when he was asked about a certain poly drug combination.

01:33:24 ►

He said that he’d never tried

01:33:25 ►

it because he only focuses on investigating plant combinations that already have a long history of

01:33:31 ►

shamanic usage. So if you also happen to be a psychedelic explorer, I hope you take that to

01:33:37 ►

heart. For laymen like me, I must admit that most of this highly detailed information isn’t something that I can use, let alone remember.

01:33:46 ►

However, should you ever have an opportunity to walk through a forest or even in a city park with Jonathan or Christian Rasch,

01:33:55 ►

you will be amazed to discover that in almost every habitable place on the planet you can find a wide range of psychoactive plants,

01:34:03 ►

many of which have been used by shaman

01:34:05 ►

for quite a long time. It’s very reassuring, even if you don’t plan on taking advantage of that

01:34:10 ►

information. However, I did capture a couple of short non-plant quotes from Jonathan’s talk in

01:34:17 ►

Palenque that year, and I’ll read them to you now. There’s only three of them, three sentences actually. First one is, when you take

01:34:26 ►

drugs, you are setting up hardwired circuits in the network of the brain. Now, you might want to

01:34:33 ►

think about that for a minute, because I know it makes me wonder if ritual users of psychedelics

01:34:38 ►

may have permanently hardwired their brains, or if those circuits will be lost if they aren’t used

01:34:44 ►

regularly.

01:34:50 ►

And by that I don’t mean regular use of the medicine that set up the circuit, but rather the regular thinking about what you learn during the experience.

01:34:54 ►

Here’s another one of his quotes.

01:34:57 ►

It’s not the number of brain cells, but the number and complexity of the neural connections

01:35:02 ►

that determine intelligence.

01:35:04 ►

number and complexity of the neuroconnections that determine intelligence. The brain’s substrate is plastic, and taking drugs actually changes the number of connectivity

01:35:10 ►

types.

01:35:12 ►

Then, during a discussion of the possibility of an artificial intelligence waking up in

01:35:17 ►

the internet, Jonathan said,

01:35:20 ►

Since electronic processing speed greatly exceeds synaptic processing speed, then perhaps it’s only the psychedelic people who will be able to deal with the AI.

01:35:30 ►

And with that interesting thought, I think I’ll leave it for now.

01:35:34 ►

That is, after a couple of announcements.

01:35:38 ►

First of all, we’re going to begin a little experiment here in the salon.

01:35:42 ►

Our working title is called Global Trialog, and it’s a new interactive question-and-answer podcast format Thank you. and so forth, creating a trial log of sorts. And our first volunteer to test this format,

01:36:06 ►

also the volunteer who came up with the

01:36:08 ►

idea, is regular

01:36:09 ►

salonner Bruce Dahmer.

01:36:11 ►

So if you send in your questions via

01:36:13 ►

email, Facebook, thegrowreport.com

01:36:16 ►

forums, text, or

01:36:17 ►

record it in audio and send it to us,

01:36:20 ►

well, Bruce will do his best to

01:36:21 ►

address it, and then if we

01:36:23 ►

select it for good listenability, I’ll include your question and the answer in an upcoming salon.

01:36:30 ►

Now, my next announcement has to do with the Internet Archive, and I’m pleased to announce that Spirit Plants Radio has become the first new contributor to the Psychedelia Collection at the Internet Archive.

01:36:41 ►

at the Internet Archive.

01:36:46 ►

And I’ve also added a link to their site from our Notes from the Psychedelic Salon blog,

01:36:50 ►

which you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.

01:36:57 ►

Or you can get to Spirit Plants Radio directly by entering radio.spiritplants.org.

01:37:03 ►

That’s radio.spiritplants, all one word,.org, and put that in your browser’s address box. So if you have objects of a psychedelic nature, audio, video, documents, photos, or artwork,

01:37:11 ►

you can contribute this to a large and ongoing collection, which, by the way, contains all

01:37:17 ►

the podcasts from the salon, along with a huge collection of raw materials, all of which

01:37:22 ►

are under Creative Commons licenses.

01:37:24 ►

huge collection of raw materials, all of which are under Creative Commons licenses.

01:37:30 ►

So, if you get a chance, you might want to check out the Psychedelia collection by entering the search term Psychedelia, that’s P-S-Y-C-H-E-D-E-L-I-A, psychedelia, at archive.org, or by clicking

01:37:41 ►

the link on the Psychedelic Salon notes page.

01:37:43 ►

or by clicking the link on the Psychedelic Salon notes page.

01:37:50 ►

Also, I want to remind you that April 3rd is the annual Terrence Day celebrations,

01:37:53 ►

where we honor the life and work of the Bard McKenna,

01:37:56 ►

who left the planet on that day in the year 2000.

01:38:00 ►

This year we have the potential of having a truly interactive celebration,

01:38:04 ►

thanks to the hard work of fellow salonner and dope driver Scooby Snacks, and his wonderful live Planet London radio show, Thank you. For example, two weekends ago, the Dope Fiend and I had our first Skype conversation,

01:38:31 ►

and it was on the air with Scooby Snacks, as did Dope Fiend and Isle Light Night a couple days ago.

01:38:36 ►

Now, this show is in its infancy right now, but I’ve got a feeling that it’s going to catch on.

01:38:45 ►

And for the next few weeks, at least, we’ll be meeting at www.justin.tv slash Planet London Radio, all one word.

01:38:49 ►

Now, I probably won’t be able to tune in for the full five hours every Sunday,

01:38:54 ►

but for sure I’ll be calling again each week when I can.

01:38:57 ►

So join Scooby Snacks, the Dope Fiend, myself,

01:39:01 ►

and others whose names you’ll recognize from our various podcasts.

01:39:02 ►

Snacks, The Dope Fiend, myself, and others whose names you’ll recognize from our

01:39:03 ►

various podcasts.

01:39:05 ►

It’s really a good way for those of us who

01:39:08 ►

don’t have a lot of fellow tribe members nearby

01:39:10 ►

to exchange ideas and

01:39:12 ►

stay connected. So,

01:39:14 ►

don’t forget, Sunday night in London,

01:39:16 ►

Sunday morning in California, and all

01:39:17 ►

points in between. We’ll be

01:39:20 ►

looking for you to join us in

01:39:21 ►

cyberdelic space. And

01:39:23 ►

that’s 7 to midnight London time,

01:39:26 ►

noon to 4 California time,

01:39:29 ►

and all points in between.

01:39:31 ►

You can figure out your own local time from that, I’m sure.

01:39:34 ►

Well, this podcast has gone on a lot longer

01:39:37 ►

than I like to have them go,

01:39:39 ►

but it’s been so long that I’ve been away,

01:39:41 ►

I just couldn’t stop talking.

01:39:43 ►

I’ve really missed being with you.

01:39:45 ►

But before I go, I do want to mention that during the nine or ten weeks of my forced hiatus,

01:39:51 ►

as we all know, the world has turned upside down for many of our fellow slaughters.

01:39:56 ►

I know we have a lot of listeners in New Zealand,

01:39:59 ►

and they’re working through some significant difficulties recovering from recent earthquakes.

01:40:04 ►

And then there’s been all that flooding in neighboring Australia that has also displaced so many people.

01:40:10 ►

And, of course, we’re all anxiously watching the revolution spread in the Middle East,

01:40:16 ►

where we also have many fellow salonners.

01:40:19 ►

I haven’t checked recently, but as of a year ago,

01:40:22 ►

there were regular downloads of these podcasts from every country in the Middle East that’s currently undergoing a lot of change.

01:40:29 ►

So, no matter where you go, you aren’t far from someone who thinks like you do.

01:40:33 ►

And I hope we can all keep that in mind as these historic events continue to unfold.

01:40:39 ►

Because we’re all in this together, you know.

01:40:42 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from

01:40:45 ►

Cyberdelic Space. Be well my friends and I’ll see you soon. I’m an alien

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

256 - A Drug Enhancer Called Chocolate

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Program Notes

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