Program Notes
Guest speaker: Jonathan Ott
This is a talk that Jonathan Ott gave in September 2004 at the Mind States Conference in Oaxaca, Mexico.
From the program for Mind States 2004:
Jonathan Ott will give a talk titled “From Octli/Pulque and Xochioctli to Mezcal and Vino de Mezcal Tequila”.
The ethnopharmacognosy of inebriating pre-Columbian potions based on octli or pulque, wine of various species of Agave, with special reference to numerous inebriating additives; traditional foods and beverages made from mezcal Agaves; and colonial development of distilled mezcal from fermented, cooked mezcal Agaves. Finally, more recent development of Vino de Mezcal Tequila or Tequila, a regional type of mezcal brandy, from cooked hearts of Agave tequillense or blue agave.
Mescal: A New Artificial Paradise by Dr. Havelock Ellis
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon,
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along with today’s virtual hosts in the form of some fellow salonners who either made a direct donation
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to help out with the expenses here in the salon, or who paid for a copy of my Pay What You Can novel,
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The Genesis Generation. And those generous souls are Simon P., Jack C., and Carl K., better known as Buck, I believe.
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So Simon, Jack, and Buck, hey, thank you ever so much for keeping the wheels turning here
00:00:54 ►
in the salon.
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Also, as you may already know, Dennis McKenna’s Kickstarter project exceeded its goal and raised the astounding amount of $85,750 from
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873 backers. And I skimmed through the list of names of donors and was happy to see the names
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of so many of our fellow salonners there. So on behalf of Dennis, I want to thank all of you for
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contributing to this important project. Now it’s Dennis’s turn to
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hunker down and write the book that we’re all waiting for. And while that’s a tall order,
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I have no doubt of what Dennis is up to the challenge. Now, if you’re thinking that, hey,
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it’s only been a couple of days since the last podcast came out of the salon, well, you’d be
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correct. But as my dear sainted mother would say, there’s a method to my madness.
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You see, this Friday, June 10th, will be the 6th anniversary of my podcast from the salon.
00:01:53 ►
And to celebrate, I plan on playing something new from Terrence McKenna, if I can find it.
00:01:58 ►
But since I’ve got five cassette tapes on my desk right now, and the labels are all in several different handwritings,
00:02:04 ►
tapes on my desk right now, and the labels are all in several different handwritings.
00:02:09 ►
I think there probably is going to be something there, even though the labels are a bit smudged and hard to read.
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I can’t quite tell what’s on them, but hopefully we’re going to hear something new from at
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least one of those.
00:02:16 ►
But before I begin listening to them and digitizing them, I want to do this podcast of the second
00:02:22 ►
Jonathan Ott talk from the 2004 MindStates Conference in Oaxaca, Mexico.
00:02:28 ►
As you may remember, I guess it was about three months ago I played the other Jonathan Ott Talk from that conference
00:02:33 ►
that the conference producer, my good friend John Hanna, sent to me.
00:02:38 ►
And, hey, a big thank you goes out to both you, John, and to Jonathan for providing this information for us.
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out to both you, John, and to Jonathan for providing this information for us.
00:02:50 ►
Now, the talk I’m about to play had a handwritten label on the DVD that I stripped the sound from, and the label read, Ot on Mescal, which I took to mean that he was speaking about
00:02:56 ►
Mescal, and not that he was under the influence of that substance at the time he spoke, which
00:03:01 ►
he obviously wasn’t.
00:03:03 ►
And so this is for those Jonathan Ott fans
00:03:06 ►
who have been reminding me via email and Facebook
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and comments on our Notes from the Psychedelic Salon blog
00:03:12 ►
that they are quite anxious to hear more from Jonathan.
00:03:16 ►
And now if you remember that the earlier talk that he gave and I played,
00:03:21 ►
the one about chocolate,
00:03:22 ►
you will recall that his talks are aimed at the biologists among us.
00:03:26 ►
And if that doesn’t include you, which it doesn’t include me,
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but I’m sure that you’ll still be happy about today’s program
00:03:33 ►
because it’s our wonderful biologists,
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those wonderful people among us who keep coming up with ever more plants
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that are of interest or worth exploring, whatever you want to say.
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For me, even though I don’t follow the biology all that well, I really do enjoy listening to Jonathan, mainly from the
00:03:52 ►
perspective of reminding myself that our so-called psychedelic renaissance is merely the rediscovery
00:03:58 ►
of human practices that extend back for countless years. So now let’s join Jonathan Ott and some hardy adventurers
00:04:06 ►
on a fine 2004 September day in Oaxaca, Mexico, and learn something about the many ways that
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indigenous people have been getting high for thousands of years.
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And I’m going to talk today just about inebriating potions made from agave.
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And you may be familiar, probably, experientially, although this is not supposed to be an experiential conference.
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They do have tequila and mezcal in the bar.
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But also there’s agave wine, which is called Oatly in Nahuatl, or Pulque, which is a post-conquest name.
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And no, it is not a cactus.
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It’s the family Agavesiae, which is a much smaller family, only a few genera.
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And it’s specifically from the genus Agave.
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Agave has about 166 species, of which 125 are native to Mexico. It’s strictly a New World genus agave. Agave has about 166 species, of which 125 are native to Mexico. It’s strictly
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a New World genus. And in pre-contact times, the extension went as far north as Alberta,
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Canada, and as far south as northern Colombia and Venezuela. Very soon after the conquest,
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the agaves were taken to Peru and farther down
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in the Andes and also to the Old World. You will find many populations of them in the
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Old World. For example, in the Kathmandu Valley in Nepal, there are a lot of them. But this
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is all post-conquest or post-contact. But interestingly enough, here in Mexico, they’re
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called magueyas or maguey is the typical word that’s used. This is agave marginata,
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or sometimes called
00:05:48 ►
agave americana, variety
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marginata.
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And oddly enough, maguey
00:05:54 ►
is not a Mexican word.
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It’s a Taino word, which comes from the
00:05:57 ►
island of La Española, or Hispaniola,
00:06:00 ►
and the greater Antilles,
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Las Antillas
00:06:04 ►
Mayores. And so we only know them here by the word and the greater Antilles, Nassau and Pia’s majorities.
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And so we only
00:06:08 ►
know them here by the word Magé,
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but the word in Nahuatl,
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in the language,
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the principal language of Highland Mesoamerica,
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is Metl, M-E-T-L.
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Metl.
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And could I have the next slide?
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I can’t control it here, I guess.
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So this is aave margarita.
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This is not exactly its native habitat.
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And the agaves do flower, as you will soon see,
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but they also produce shoots off of the base,
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which are called ejedos in Spanish, or buds.
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And this is an example.
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This is agave salmiana.
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Could I have the next one, please?
00:06:47 ►
Oh, it seems to mix up the first few.
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But this is Agave salmiana again,
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and you can see this shoot is called guillote,
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and that’s starting to flower,
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and they are sometimes called in English century plants,
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ostensibly because they would only follow once in a century but in
00:07:05 ►
fact they flower in about 10 or 11 12 years and so as a crop it’s a cycle of
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about that 12 or 13 years and that’s that same one in full flower and so it
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does produce seeds.
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They’re very attractive to bees, a lot of nectar for making honey from them as well.
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But in terms of farming, they’re grown from seed but also from those igueros.
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And so although it takes about a good decade to develop a crop from these agaves,
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the first thing you can sell are the igueros.
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And so you get the buds off of the sign,
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and those are also sold,
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because it’s rather like growing an orchard crop.
00:07:51 ►
It takes a long time to cash in.
00:07:53 ►
Could I have the next slide, please?
00:07:56 ►
And that’s another commercial agave,
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Mapisaga, Agave Mapisaga.
00:08:04 ►
So it is a succulent. It’s not, per se mapisaga. Agave mapisaga. So it is a succulent.
00:08:05 ►
It’s not, per se, a cactus.
00:08:10 ►
But it’s a very juicy succulent.
00:08:15 ►
Could I have the next slide, please?
00:08:17 ►
And I want to talk a little bit about the history of this first.
00:08:19 ►
And then I’m going to mention inebriating potions that you’re probably not aware of,
00:08:24 ►
which are based on what is called
00:08:25 ►
ohtli, which is wine
00:08:27 ►
of agave.
00:08:29 ►
And this is…
00:08:31 ►
I’ll describe
00:08:33 ►
the manufacture now
00:08:35 ►
of the
00:08:36 ►
ohtli, or the wine.
00:08:39 ►
And this is known in modern day Mexico as
00:08:41 ►
pulque. And it’s
00:08:43 ►
very much of a degenerated tradition, but there are still
00:08:45 ►
pulquerias in the cities and in the
00:08:48 ►
small villages. But at one time
00:08:50 ►
it peaked really around 1900,
00:08:52 ►
the early decades
00:08:54 ►
of this century. But it was a very
00:08:56 ►
important beverage. And then
00:08:57 ►
beer brewing basically competed
00:09:00 ►
against it. It can’t be bottled.
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It spoils readily.
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And it’s thought that the name pulque, in fact, comes from the Nahuatl term opli poliuki, which means rotten agave
00:09:13 ►
wine when it’s spoiled, when it’s gone too far. And so there were attempts even to make
00:09:18 ►
synthetic pulque, make a product that could be bottled, but it just was not able to compete
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with beer, and so it has been largely replaced.
00:09:26 ►
So you have many examples of this in the codices of this orgy,
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and especially of some variants that I will discuss in a minute.
00:09:36 ►
But to tell you about the manufacture of it, it’s really rather interesting.
00:09:42 ►
When you saw the slide of the
00:09:45 ►
big flowering stalk coming up,
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which happens around
00:09:49 ►
usually not sooner than about seven years,
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but normally around nine, ten,
00:09:54 ►
eleven years. So that
00:09:56 ►
is the first step, is when
00:09:58 ►
they can see the bud
00:10:00 ►
starting, this flowering bud
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that’s going to lead to this stalk and eventually
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to the seams of flowers,
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that is cut off, and it’s
00:10:08 ►
in a process that’s called capasson,
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which means castration.
00:10:12 ►
And so basically the plant
00:10:14 ►
is castrated, and then
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it’s left to scar over
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for, in fact, the better part of the year.
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And then
00:10:22 ►
the next step is called picasson,
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which is with a sharp pointed implement.
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And so then after this has scarred over and healed, then it is punctured or perforated.
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Many holes are made in it and then it’s left again for approximately a week. And then the
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next stage is what is called a raspa which means to scrape and in the raspa
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a cavity is made in the center of this plant sometimes some of the leaves have to be cut
00:10:54 ►
off around this and then other leaves are bent over to protect it once this process is underway
00:10:59 ►
and so in the raspa one makes a cavity which is like a jug-sized thing. It could be a dozen foot or so, about 25 centimeters in diameter,
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and about twice that or not quite twice that in depth.
00:11:13 ►
And so it’s a hollow that’s made in the center about this size.
00:11:17 ►
And then the rest of the process is called flachicada,
00:11:22 ►
or flachicero as a person that does this.
00:11:24 ►
And so this is using a long gourd.
00:11:26 ►
I’m sorry I don’t have pictures of this.
00:11:28 ►
But it’s using a long, hollow gourd of the species Vaginaria vulgaris.
00:11:33 ►
It’s a large pipette for suction, to suck the sap out of the middle of this cavity.
00:11:41 ►
And that’s called flaccicada, or a plachicero, is one who sucks this out.
00:11:45 ►
And this is done
00:11:47 ►
when it’s in full production
00:11:49 ►
for a period of
00:11:50 ►
the better part of a year,
00:11:53 ►
many months in any case,
00:11:55 ►
and often two or three times a day.
00:11:58 ►
And interestingly
00:12:00 ►
enough, a large
00:12:01 ►
pulque agave,
00:12:03 ►
or oakly agave like the
00:12:05 ►
one that I showed in flower,
00:12:07 ►
the Salmiana. And there are about
00:12:09 ►
a dozen, nine species
00:12:11 ►
that are used for making these agave
00:12:13 ►
wines. And they are distinguished,
00:12:15 ►
I will say in a moment, from the Mestal
00:12:17 ►
agaves. And the
00:12:19 ►
processing is different.
00:12:21 ►
But I will describe that also in detail.
00:12:24 ►
And so one of these large plants, and they get, of course, you’ve seen them, I’m sure,
00:12:29 ►
much taller than a human being and quite large, and they’re used for fencing, in fact, and
00:12:34 ►
they make a very impermeable fence.
00:12:37 ►
One of these will yield over its production lifetime, over this period of months in which
00:12:42 ►
it is pipetted out two or three times a day, about a thousand
00:12:46 ►
liters of sap
00:12:48 ►
which is called nekutli
00:12:50 ►
in Nahuatl, which also
00:12:52 ►
means nectar, it’s a kind of nectar
00:12:54 ►
or in Spanish it’s called aguamien
00:12:56 ►
and so
00:12:59 ►
this nectar-like substance
00:13:02 ►
or honey water is sucked out with these
00:13:04 ►
big pipettes.
00:13:06 ►
And then traditionally in a place where pulque or oakley was made,
00:13:12 ►
that’s called a tinacana, the winery.
00:13:16 ►
It’s a kind of wine.
00:13:18 ►
And so originally it was done in bullskins, which were called dordos.
00:13:24 ►
But they made a kind of a wooden tub,
00:13:26 ►
which these uncured skins were stretched over.
00:13:29 ►
And then the aguamiel is brought in fresh.
00:13:32 ►
It has to be kept fresh.
00:13:33 ►
And every day, usually on muleback or on donkey,
00:13:37 ►
and poured into these skins.
00:13:39 ►
And then they will make what’s called madre de pulque o sinascle,
00:13:44 ►
a starter batch,
00:13:46 ►
of the specially pure and much cleaner conditions.
00:13:49 ►
They will always maintain a starter culture.
00:13:51 ►
And so that is added to the fresh aguamien or the fresh necutli.
00:13:57 ►
And fermentation takes place.
00:14:01 ►
Most people think of fermentation, because we’re from the north,
00:14:04 ►
as being a phenomenon
00:14:05 ►
of yeasts or saccharomyces, like the famous brewer’s yeast, saccharomyces herbicii. But
00:14:12 ►
in fact, in the tropics, and this is true all over the world, alcoholic fermentation
00:14:17 ►
does involve yeast, but only on a very low level. There are, some yeast can be cultured from the ferments for things like pulque or
00:14:26 ►
oakley, but it’s mostly bacteria that produce the alcoholic fermentation in tropical climates,
00:14:35 ►
especially of the genus Thermobacterium. Thermobacterium mobile is especially important in the case of these agave wines.
00:14:46 ►
And so the fermentation, then these torres, these tubs, but this has also been in barrels
00:14:53 ►
and cast, like a moonshine installation, wooden, open wooden tubs, hob tub type of things.
00:15:01 ►
This happens in this area called the Tinacal, and a large one of these would produce
00:15:08 ►
something like 1,500 liters a day of fully fermented agave wine, or oxtree, or pulque.
00:15:18 ►
So the fermentation takes place over several days, about 36 hours is the mean, and as I say, it has to then be taken
00:15:25 ►
fresh to the
00:15:27 ►
pulquerias, which is what they’re
00:15:29 ►
always called in
00:15:31 ►
Mesoamerica and Mexico,
00:15:34 ►
which are the taverns
00:15:35 ►
where it was consumed. And there’s a
00:15:37 ►
very extensive,
00:15:39 ►
actually I haven’t made the conference,
00:15:41 ►
but I made a small bibliography
00:15:43 ►
for both my lectures on Xerox and Vansadal.
00:15:47 ►
But there are some books that
00:15:48 ►
document this extremely well,
00:15:50 ►
but unfortunately they’re in Spanish,
00:15:52 ►
showing pictures of the
00:15:54 ►
consumption and the manufacturer
00:15:56 ►
and so forth that have been
00:15:58 ►
dug out of historical archives.
00:16:00 ►
So, and the
00:16:02 ►
final beverage is approximately
00:16:04 ►
4-7% alcohol.
00:16:05 ►
So it’s like a weak wine or like a beer in terms of alcoholic content.
00:16:11 ►
It sours readily.
00:16:13 ►
And it’s also very nutritious.
00:16:15 ►
And it was a very important item in the diet of people from highland Mesoamerica.
00:16:20 ►
And now I’m going to talk a little bit about that.
00:16:22 ►
But it contains all the essential amino acids.
00:16:28 ►
And also it’s very rich in vitamins.
00:16:37 ►
Many people think of brewing grains into beers or winemaking from fruit juices or grapes as being strictly a ludic phenomenon, something involving an ebriation.
00:16:42 ►
But we have to remember, in the process of malting grains
00:16:46 ►
and then a fermentation process to make beers,
00:16:50 ►
or a simple fermentation of sugar-rich plant extract,
00:16:54 ►
this is also of extreme nutritional importance
00:16:57 ►
because the process enhances the nutritional value of the original fruit
00:17:00 ►
in terms of protein, especially of amino acids
00:17:03 ►
that are of the eight or ten essential amino acids
00:17:08 ►
particularly ones that are not
00:17:10 ►
so common in
00:17:11 ►
plant form and so
00:17:13 ►
it is a very important nutritional
00:17:15 ►
phenomenon. It isn’t like wasting grain
00:17:18 ►
or wasting fruit
00:17:19 ►
so that people can get drunk.
00:17:21 ►
You don’t lose, you gain in nutritional
00:17:23 ►
value by this process
00:17:25 ►
because of the bodies of the organisms
00:17:27 ►
that convert some of the sugar into the protein
00:17:30 ►
for their own cellular machinery,
00:17:32 ►
and those end up in the brew.
00:17:36 ►
And so now I’ll talk a little bit about this culture
00:17:39 ►
and the cultural context of this agave wine.
00:17:42 ►
Now, the highland Mesoamericans,
00:17:45 ►
everyone uses the term
00:17:47 ►
outside of
00:17:48 ►
Mexico, the Aztecs, and thinks
00:17:51 ►
of it in terms of the Aztec culture.
00:17:54 ►
The Aztecs were a flash in the pan.
00:17:56 ►
They came late on the
00:17:57 ►
historical stage
00:17:58 ►
in terms of being a dominant
00:18:01 ►
culture. They were always
00:18:03 ►
the barbarians,
00:18:06 ►
rather like the Goths,
00:18:09 ►
not like the Romans or the Greeks.
00:18:14 ►
In terms of, it’s a fairly good analogy.
00:18:17 ►
When they came around,
00:18:18 ►
everyone said, who are these barbarians?
00:18:20 ►
The language was not theirs.
00:18:22 ►
The calendar was not theirs.
00:18:24 ►
The art styles were not theirs.
00:18:26 ►
In fact, they’re not known to have really invented anything except for
00:18:27 ►
better methods of killing.
00:18:30 ►
They were kind of like the
00:18:31 ►
evil empire of the United States
00:18:33 ►
of their day.
00:18:36 ►
Very good at weaponry
00:18:37 ►
and at fighting tactics
00:18:39 ►
and at appropriating
00:18:42 ►
things from other cultures.
00:18:44 ►
And so
00:18:44 ►
the stock is called Chichimeca.
00:18:48 ►
And there is an extensive pre-Columbian history,
00:18:52 ►
history that does not start with the conquest in the year 1521.
00:18:58 ►
It’s when these so-called Aztecs, who were really Mexicas,
00:19:02 ►
from which the name Mexico comes from, Mexica, M-E-X-I-C-A, and then Mexicas are people.
00:19:10 ►
Chichimeca, in fact, means those who suck from the maguey,
00:19:14 ►
or those who suck from the agave.
00:19:17 ►
Chichi is to suck.
00:19:19 ►
Chichi is to suck in Nahuatl,
00:19:21 ►
and still in modern-day Spanish in Mexico only,
00:19:24 ►
chichi means breast. And it comes from this Nahuatl, and still in modern day Spanish and Mexico only, chichi means breast.
00:19:26 ►
And it comes from this Nahuatl word.
00:19:29 ►
So chichi, mento, mento is agave.
00:19:33 ►
So chichimeca means those who suck from the agave.
00:19:37 ►
And an agave that produces enough of this hidromien,
00:19:44 ►
or this arroi mien
00:19:45 ►
this reactor
00:19:47 ►
for making the wine
00:19:49 ►
is called chichi mint
00:19:51 ►
it’s called a sucking agave
00:19:53 ►
and we have to remember
00:19:56 ►
that this was the entire
00:19:57 ►
fountain of life for these people
00:19:59 ►
it was the basis of not only
00:20:01 ►
their alimentation
00:20:02 ►
because they ate this they also made their drinks from it,
00:20:07 ►
in an area where there often is no water, much less pure water.
00:20:11 ►
And that’s another point about fermented beverages.
00:20:14 ►
It’s a way of purifying water, where you don’t have good supplies of water.
00:20:19 ►
They also use it to make their housing and their clothing.
00:20:23 ►
Implements of warfare, ceremonial implements as well.
00:20:28 ►
And so it’s literally, the plant is like the fountain of youth.
00:20:31 ►
It’s like a fountain.
00:20:32 ►
As I say, one of these, in these very arid areas,
00:20:35 ►
and they don’t, even in modern agriculture,
00:20:37 ►
they do not need particular attention.
00:20:39 ►
They can be grown economically without any agrochemicals
00:20:42 ►
or irrigation in the right area.
00:20:46 ►
And so the fact that a plant like this out in a very arid area where these people were
00:20:52 ►
known as also can produce 1,000 liters of a sweet, nutritious water is a fantastic thing.
00:21:00 ►
That indicates it was literally the fountain of their sustenance.
00:21:06 ►
thing. That indicates it was literally the fountain of their sustenance. And so you would have the record that goes back about 400 years fairly reliably before the conquest of pre-Columbian
00:21:13 ►
history, which has been documented. And this was documented largely by the work of just
00:21:17 ►
one man, Bernardino de Sagun, who was a Franciscan friar who lived for 61 years in Mexico and died in 1590, came in 1529,
00:21:26 ►
only eight years after the Mexicas were subdued by the conquistadores under Hernan Cortes.
00:21:33 ►
And Sakun single-handedly documented this. He was the world’s second anthropologist,
00:21:38 ►
and he assembled elderly, monolingual, Nahuatl-speaking sages, and
00:21:45 ►
he himself trained
00:21:47 ►
in a university that they made for
00:21:49 ►
Indians, which was called
00:21:51 ►
the Colegio
00:21:53 ►
de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco,
00:21:55 ►
and had
00:21:57 ►
trained them in Latin and in Spanish,
00:21:59 ►
and also in theology. And so he
00:22:01 ►
had these scribes that were
00:22:02 ►
basically tri-lingual. They knew Latin, they knew
00:22:06 ►
Nahuatl, and they knew Spanish.
00:22:08 ►
Take down the words in a
00:22:09 ►
transliterated version of Nahuatl, and this
00:22:11 ►
survives in an immense work of
00:22:13 ►
many hundreds of pages called
00:22:16 ►
the Florentine Codex.
00:22:18 ►
It’s only been translated into English.
00:22:20 ►
It’s never been translated completely into
00:22:21 ►
Spanish. And at the same time
00:22:24 ►
he made a parallel book,
00:22:25 ►
which is called The General History of the Things of New Spain,
00:22:28 ►
Historia de la Catedral de las Cosas de Nueva España.
00:22:31 ►
And this is thought to be a parallel text, but it really isn’t.
00:22:35 ►
It covers much of the same material, but not all of the same material,
00:22:39 ►
and it’s somewhat altered because Sahagún later himself had problems with the Inquisition,
00:22:44 ►
and he had to somewhat censor
00:22:46 ►
self-censors work
00:22:47 ►
so this written record
00:22:50 ►
goes back for a long time and it tells
00:22:51 ►
the story of the Chichimecas
00:22:53 ►
who went on a long migration
00:22:55 ►
it’s very much like the Old Testament
00:22:57 ►
in fact
00:22:58 ►
and this story, the Mexicas
00:23:01 ►
play the role of the Israelites
00:23:03 ►
this wandering tribe looking for a garden in a desert
00:23:08 ►
and looking for a promised land
00:23:11 ►
and obeying blindly the dictates of their god,
00:23:13 ►
which often tells them to go annihilate this person
00:23:16 ►
or that people and so forth.
00:23:19 ►
It’s a very similar story.
00:23:22 ►
But supposedly there were seven tribes
00:23:24 ►
of these wandering Chichimecas,
00:23:26 ►
and they came out of a cave in the north, which was called Chico Mosto,
00:23:31 ►
which means seven caverns.
00:23:33 ►
And so each tribe had its own little hall in this cave.
00:23:37 ►
And they came out into the crepusculum in the early parts of the world of the fifth sun,
00:23:42 ►
according to the calendar, which is much, much older than this culture and doesn’t derive from this culture. It came from the Gulf of Mexico
00:23:49 ►
well before the Mayans. It’s not a Mayan calendar either. It’s thought to have originated with
00:23:55 ►
the people that we now call the Olmec and lived in Veracruz and Tabasco. What is now
00:24:00 ►
Veracruz and Tabasco? And so they came out into the light of day in this calendar of the fifth sun
00:24:06 ►
and began this long migration
00:24:09 ►
over many centuries
00:24:10 ►
and then the Mexicas
00:24:13 ►
it’s known by many people
00:24:15 ►
that the Spaniards burned codices
00:24:17 ►
what we have here is a piece of the codex
00:24:20 ►
this is from the Borafia
00:24:22 ►
mixtec from here
00:24:24 ►
from this state not far from this
00:24:27 ►
valley where these were made. This is pre-Columbian. And the Spaniards, as is known to many people,
00:24:35 ►
especially Bishop Diego de Landa in Yucatan in the latter part of the 16th century, but
00:24:40 ►
also Bishop Juan de Sumárraga in the highland culture of
00:24:45 ►
Mesoamerica, the Nahua speakers,
00:24:48 ►
burned these codices. They assembled
00:24:49 ►
all the ones they could find and burned them.
00:24:52 ►
And so much of this history
00:24:53 ►
was destroyed. This
00:24:55 ►
codex that I’m showing you in the present
00:24:57 ►
slide is actually a ceremonial one,
00:24:59 ►
but some of them are historical.
00:25:01 ►
And they are not
00:25:02 ►
hieroglyphs. They are comic books in a way. They’re like
00:25:07 ►
illustrated stories. And they are decipherable and the history is known of the few that survived.
00:25:14 ►
There are only about 20 that have survived this congregation. But it isn’t so much known
00:25:20 ►
that the Aztecs or the Mexicas also burned them when they gained hegemony in 1524
00:25:26 ►
over the
00:25:28 ►
other valley, sorry
00:25:30 ►
1424, over the other valley
00:25:32 ►
peoples. They only had about a little less than
00:25:34 ►
100 years of imperial
00:25:35 ►
rule in the valley of Mexico.
00:25:38 ►
They assembled all the codices
00:25:40 ►
they could find and burned them and then
00:25:42 ►
rewrote history to their own
00:25:43 ►
grandest. As I said, it’s very much like the Old Testament story.
00:25:48 ►
And so that’s why we know so much about Meshikas and so on,
00:25:53 ►
because they tried to destroy everything, but they weren’t able to.
00:25:55 ►
And so this shows some of the ways that they depicted this agave wine in these codices.
00:26:03 ►
So this is the Codex Borchia.
00:26:01 ►
depicted this agave wine in these codes. So this is the
00:26:03 ►
Codex Borchia.
00:26:06 ►
This vessel is called
00:26:07 ►
the Tochtecona, which means
00:26:09 ►
the jar of the rabbit.
00:26:12 ►
And the
00:26:14 ►
white foam that’s spilling over is
00:26:15 ►
the octli. That’s the agave
00:26:17 ►
wine. When you see these vessels
00:26:19 ►
filled with foamy drinks,
00:26:21 ►
the foam is brown, it’s cacao
00:26:23 ►
or cacao. If it’s white, it’s
00:26:26 ►
oakley or pulque. And the rabbit jar, the tosticoma, is generally round-bottomed, and
00:26:35 ►
it sits on a coiled core. Sometimes it’s made as a snake. Here you see it perforated with
00:26:41 ►
a lance, and that’s a paper sign on it on the front, it’s sticking out of the foam
00:26:45 ►
and that’s a deer
00:26:47 ►
this is a deer pulchra, there is what’s called
00:26:50 ►
Masa Blu Orpi, or deer orpi
00:26:52 ►
but I just want to draw
00:26:54 ►
your attention in this one to the flowers
00:26:55 ►
in the hands of the deer
00:26:58 ►
and also the flowers sticking off
00:27:00 ►
from the foam
00:27:00 ►
these are flowers, and so
00:27:03 ►
what this tells us,
00:27:05 ►
this one on the left-hand side,
00:27:08 ►
this is a generic potion of what would be
00:27:10 ►
called Sochi Ocli, or
00:27:11 ►
Te Ocli. Sochi Ocli
00:27:14 ►
means florid ocli, or florid
00:27:16 ►
agave wine.
00:27:17 ►
But what it means is that it’s visionary.
00:27:20 ►
It has an additive that causes
00:27:22 ►
visions, because the flower signals
00:27:24 ►
vision, according to the brilliant theory
00:27:26 ►
of Gordon Watson where he deciphers
00:27:28 ►
Xochipilli
00:27:30 ►
a Nahuatl
00:27:32 ►
cultural icon
00:27:34 ►
which is the lord of the flowers
00:27:36 ►
and for example
00:27:38 ►
in one of Sahagún’s colleagues Molina
00:27:40 ►
made a dictionary of Nahuatl
00:27:42 ►
in Spanish in the mid
00:27:44 ►
16th century,
00:27:45 ►
and he gives words like Xochimilco, which means flower mushroom.
00:27:50 ►
But that actually means visionary mushroom, because the definition is an inebriating mushroom.
00:27:56 ►
And so in the poetry, which we also have about 250 pre-Columbian poems that survive,
00:28:01 ►
and I’ll say a little bit more about that later.
00:28:03 ►
And the other portion on the right is kind of an odd one, because you see both brown
00:28:08 ►
foam and white foam, but I think it’s made to indicate a mixture of the two.
00:28:13 ►
And the ball that’s sitting on the top is a ball of rubber, because they sometimes add
00:28:18 ►
resin from the rubber trees to these potions, and the things sticking out of the top of
00:28:22 ►
that are feathers.
00:28:25 ►
And you can see it’s
00:28:26 ►
really clever. He’s obviously tasting it
00:28:28 ►
and giving the high sign.
00:28:30 ►
Yeah, it’s ready.
00:28:31 ►
As I say, it’s not difficult
00:28:34 ►
to read these things, especially
00:28:36 ►
when they’re full of these potions.
00:28:38 ►
Could I have the next slide, please?
00:28:40 ►
This is also from the Borcia,
00:28:42 ►
which again is a ceremonial. It’s not telling
00:28:44 ►
history. It’s telling the ceremonial story of the raid.
00:28:49 ►
And so again you can see the tochtekoma, and sometimes it has like a face on it, and it’s overflowing with this foamy, you don’t have to whip this to a froth, the cacao is done that way, and I’ll talk about that in my cacao lecture, but this froths by itself. And you can see this is
00:29:06 ►
loaded up with flowers, and it’s also got
00:29:08 ►
mushrooms in it, because you can see the little
00:29:10 ►
dots on the top.
00:29:13 ►
One of the variants of this,
00:29:15 ►
as I say, these
00:29:16 ►
cured bouquets
00:29:18 ►
or oakleys were called sociocle
00:29:20 ►
or teocle. Sociocle
00:29:22 ►
means visionary oakley, teocle
00:29:24 ►
means divine or wondrous okli,
00:29:26 ►
like teonanakab is wondrous mushroom.
00:29:29 ►
Teokli is wondrous okli or puike wine.
00:29:33 ►
And the dot symbol indicates very likely mushrooms.
00:29:37 ►
In some contexts, it could be the olive yuki seed,
00:29:40 ►
which means the little round thing.
00:29:42 ►
But in this case, it is clearly a mushroom
00:29:45 ►
because you also have the surviving word in poetry,
00:29:48 ►
which means mushroom wine.
00:29:54 ►
And so it’s also a very beautiful representation.
00:29:57 ►
This guy is really falling under the effect of this potion.
00:30:01 ►
Could I have the next one, please?
00:30:03 ►
Again, this is mixed techodex borchia. Within I have the next one, please? Again, this is mixed-text codex Borcia within 50 years of the Congress.
00:30:08 ►
These were either painted on deerskin or on bark paper
00:30:12 ►
made from a fig tree, a ficus, which is called
00:30:15 ►
amatil. And just to show you how
00:30:19 ►
common these are, this is part of the calendrical representations
00:30:23 ►
in this codex of Borcia.
00:30:26 ►
And this is the god
00:30:27 ►
Xochipilli.
00:30:30 ►
And so
00:30:30 ►
Xochipilli, in fact,
00:30:33 ►
his name is
00:30:34 ►
his original date is
00:30:37 ►
which means five
00:30:39 ►
flower.
00:30:40 ►
And so he’s
00:30:43 ►
the sign of five is really important.
00:30:46 ►
And this potion is also called Maquil Oqli, or Five Oqli,
00:30:51 ►
or, if you will, the quintessence of Oqli,
00:30:54 ►
because it was just as in Arabic culture,
00:30:57 ►
the fifth distillation of the fifth essence was the pure substance or the most divine thing.
00:31:03 ►
They called this special visionary god in wine
00:31:06 ►
Maquil Opre, or the quintessential Opre.
00:31:09 ►
It’s really remarkable that it’s also the number five.
00:31:12 ►
But in Mesoamerica, it’s the sacred number
00:31:15 ►
because those are the cardinal directions.
00:31:16 ►
You have the four ordinary cardinal directions,
00:31:19 ►
but here you also have the axis,
00:31:21 ►
which is the axis mundi, which is the world tree,
00:31:23 ►
which is the place where the observer sits.
00:31:26 ►
It’s the center of the universe
00:31:27 ►
for every person. That’s the
00:31:29 ►
fifth direction. And that
00:31:31 ►
axis is called Omeyokan,
00:31:33 ►
which means the place of duality.
00:31:35 ►
And there are two
00:31:36 ►
deities associated with that,
00:31:39 ►
Ome Tekuti, Ome Sihwakun,
00:31:41 ►
the two man and two woman.
00:31:44 ►
And so it’s both male and female.
00:31:46 ►
It’s not binary.
00:31:49 ►
It’s dual.
00:31:50 ►
It’s duality.
00:31:50 ►
It’s the place of duality.
00:31:52 ►
That’s the fifth direction.
00:31:54 ►
So the hand over the mouth,
00:31:56 ►
that shows five.
00:31:58 ►
That shows that his sign is five.
00:32:00 ►
And this is very common.
00:32:01 ►
And the deities,
00:32:01 ►
which are associated with inebriation,
00:32:03 ►
have this five thing.
00:32:05 ►
And they often have this on the face.
00:32:07 ►
These are all things you can read easily in these codices.
00:32:10 ►
But you can see again, as a decorative element, you see here, that’s the rat, Tochtek.
00:32:19 ►
And as I said, the jar, the vessel is called the tochtekonamthal, the rabbit vessel.
00:32:27 ►
And so there you have another one,
00:32:28 ►
clearly with this agave
00:32:30 ►
wine. It has rubber, it has a feather
00:32:32 ►
sticking out of the tongue. But I want to draw
00:32:34 ►
your attention to these sticks.
00:32:36 ►
Again, he’s five flowers.
00:32:39 ►
Manquil Xochitl,
00:32:41 ►
or Xochipilli,
00:32:42 ►
the prince of flowers.
00:32:43 ►
Now, the rabbit, the reason all these glyphs are around here
00:32:47 ►
is it’s indicating the different calendar signs
00:32:49 ►
that are associated with Xochipilli.
00:32:51 ►
But the rabbit is really important here, and I’ll tell you why.
00:32:54 ►
In the migration of the Chichimeca people,
00:32:57 ►
the rabbit taught them how to make this agave wine.
00:33:00 ►
This is one of the…
00:33:02 ►
Very often we know that inebriation is natural
00:33:04 ►
because it’s
00:33:05 ►
embedded in the animal kingdom. It’s not
00:33:07 ►
a human phenomenon at all.
00:33:10 ►
And in many cases the
00:33:11 ►
lore is that we learned about this from
00:33:13 ►
observing other animals like
00:33:15 ►
baboons and porcupines
00:33:16 ►
with iboga in Africa like
00:33:19 ►
deer and caribou with Amanita
00:33:21 ►
muscaria in the north, like llamas
00:33:23 ►
with coccolis and andes.
00:33:25 ►
But here it’s the rabbit that taught them how to make this potion.
00:33:30 ►
And so during this migration, there was a woman named Mayabal,
00:33:34 ►
who then subsequently became deified, and a man named Patecatl.
00:33:40 ►
And this woman observed that the rabbits would go up to the base of the agave
00:33:44 ►
and they would gnaw out a little cavity and then they would just leave it
00:33:48 ►
and it would fill up with this sweet sap which would ferment in situ right inside this cavity.
00:33:54 ►
In production they’d take it out three times a day before it could ferment
00:33:57 ►
and then the rabbit would come back two or three days later to become drunk
00:34:02 ►
by licking up this fermented agave wine.
00:34:05 ►
And so the rabbit is the one that taught them how to make it.
00:34:08 ►
And so the sign to rabbit, which is omentochli,
00:34:11 ►
is what’s most associated with inebriation, with shaming, and also with this potion.
00:34:16 ►
So you often see the rabbit associated with it.
00:34:21 ►
Okay, could I have the next one?
00:34:22 ►
I do remember the sticks sticking out of the jar here.
00:34:28 ►
Okay, now here we again have the tochtekomah, the rabbit jar.
00:34:34 ►
And this is, the deity here is, do you have a question or are you sewing?
00:34:39 ►
The deity here is dasoteo, which is she who eats filth.
00:34:41 ►
is Dasoteo,
00:34:44 ►
which is she who eats filth.
00:34:46 ►
The Nahuatl speakers,
00:34:47 ►
the Chichimecos,
00:34:50 ►
always deified a certain element that took away the garbage.
00:34:52 ►
The sopidote, or the buite,
00:34:54 ►
which means the buzzard or the vulture,
00:34:56 ►
was a very sacred animal.
00:34:58 ►
And there was a goddess named Dasoteo,
00:35:00 ►
her,
00:35:02 ►
that was she who eats filth,
00:35:03 ►
and often her mouth is always black, if not in this
00:35:06 ►
particular case, it’s often black. And she has this thing on her nose, which is the half
00:35:12 ►
moon, and that’s called yakamesli, which means half moon. And that’s the sign of deities
00:35:20 ►
that are associated with the moon and with this beverage, because the rabbit is in the
00:35:24 ►
moon, there’s no man in the moon
00:35:26 ►
here. It’s the rabbit in the moon,
00:35:28 ►
and the lunar imagery is associated
00:35:30 ►
with an ebriation, and the rabbit of an
00:35:32 ►
ebriation actually lives in the moon.
00:35:34 ►
And so the people
00:35:36 ►
that represent him have this half-moon
00:35:38 ►
nose piece, which could be made
00:35:40 ►
of various materials. But notice
00:35:42 ►
how she’s, this is my own
00:35:43 ►
interpretation, and no one else’s,
00:35:45 ►
and it hasn’t been published,
00:35:47 ►
no one else has hit on it.
00:35:48 ►
But notice how she’s holding
00:35:50 ►
two bundles of sticks
00:35:51 ►
and you always see these sticks
00:35:53 ►
in relationship with this potion.
00:35:55 ►
One of them is sticking out
00:35:56 ►
of the potion.
00:35:58 ►
And notice this yellow thing
00:36:00 ►
with a cleft in it on top.
00:36:02 ►
This is by agreement
00:36:03 ►
of experts in this subject.
00:36:06 ►
This thing.
00:36:07 ►
That is cacao.
00:36:09 ►
And you have white foam here. So again,
00:36:11 ►
you have the mixture of cacao and
00:36:13 ►
this potion. So it’s evidenced,
00:36:15 ►
although this is not written down, but we don’t
00:36:17 ►
see it in the codices, that the
00:36:19 ►
two were sometimes mixed.
00:36:21 ►
But the stick is an additive to this
00:36:23 ►
potion, and it’s a psychoactive one.
00:36:26 ►
Can I have the next one, please?
00:36:27 ►
This again is from Oswald Taylor.
00:36:29 ►
That was also from the Codex Borgia,
00:36:31 ►
all of those that I previously showed. This is
00:36:33 ►
now from the Codex Nubal, but it’s
00:36:35 ►
also from the same area, from the same time.
00:36:39 ►
But this one is historical.
00:36:41 ►
And this is towards the end of it.
00:36:44 ►
They’re read from back to front, like Hebrew.
00:36:48 ►
And in Bustrophedon, which means like an ox plows a field,
00:36:52 ►
up and down, up and down, like this, from page to next.
00:36:56 ►
And this is toward the end of it.
00:36:58 ►
So I want to call your attention to a few of them.
00:37:00 ►
This is a funeral scene.
00:37:02 ►
That’s a funeral pyre in the front and a dead person that’s
00:37:06 ►
wrapped up. In some areas
00:37:08 ►
here they did burn the dead. This was not
00:37:10 ►
a special kind of thing.
00:37:11 ►
It was really barbarous to do. The Inquisition
00:37:14 ►
burned people alive.
00:37:26 ►
Those elements.
00:37:30 ►
So here we have, in the center there,
00:37:31 ►
between the two people,
00:37:34 ►
that is cacao, and that’s cacao with mushroom.
00:37:39 ►
Brown foam and the dot.
00:37:40 ►
And it’s a different kind of jar because it has feet on it.
00:37:42 ►
And the rabbit thing is always unlike that.
00:37:46 ►
But what we have here are cups of the
00:37:48 ►
potion, which are just a half a gourd.
00:37:51 ►
And so, the sticks.
00:37:53 ►
This, again,
00:37:54 ►
is my interpretation very clearly to me.
00:37:55 ►
This is showing as clearly as possible
00:37:58 ►
the aditum below to rub it in.
00:38:00 ►
You see the stick. It’s always curved.
00:38:03 ►
Generally, it has
00:38:04 ►
a green, which is the sign
00:38:05 ►
of value, jade, or
00:38:07 ►
a bluish green on one
00:38:09 ►
extremity, but in most cases, that’s
00:38:12 ►
what it is. In this case, it is not.
00:38:14 ►
And they’re showing the foaming
00:38:16 ►
cup of the potion there with the stick
00:38:17 ►
on top to show this contains the stick.
00:38:19 ►
And she’s putting the stick into it.
00:38:22 ►
And some people idiotically have said,
00:38:24 ►
oh no, this is the frothing stick
00:38:25 ►
that’s rough between,
00:38:28 ►
and I’ll talk about this with cacao,
00:38:29 ►
but as I said, this does not need frothing.
00:38:32 ►
Point one, point two, you have to have two hands to use it,
00:38:35 ►
and point three, if it’s curved like that,
00:38:37 ►
it will cavitate and it will spill the thing all over the place.
00:38:40 ►
It has to be a straight stick.
00:38:42 ►
So, what is this?
00:38:46 ►
Next one, please.
00:38:50 ►
Or maybe go back to that one,
00:38:52 ►
and I’ll just say a few words about that stick
00:38:54 ►
before I just mention this one.
00:38:57 ►
Could we go back to the…
00:39:01 ►
Yeah, okay.
00:39:02 ►
That is okpatli,
00:39:03 ►
which means the drug of Okli,
00:39:06 ►
or the medicine of Okli.
00:39:09 ►
And
00:39:09 ►
patli is medicine or drug.
00:39:12 ►
And so it is the pulque
00:39:14 ►
drug. And in fact, today,
00:39:16 ►
it is still called palo de pulque,
00:39:18 ►
the pulque tree,
00:39:20 ►
or the pulque stick, literally speaking.
00:39:22 ►
Palo de pulque is the pulque tree.
00:39:25 ►
And that’s acacia on Vistissima.
00:39:28 ►
Okay, now we can show the next one.
00:39:30 ►
And that is called
00:39:31 ►
Othapopli.
00:39:33 ►
Okay, this is the 100-pager note, and if you want
00:39:35 ►
to take back a souvenir,
00:39:37 ►
it’s better than anything you can get in the souvenir
00:39:39 ►
shop at the museum or here in the hotel,
00:39:42 ►
because this is a totally
00:39:43 ►
visionary piece
00:39:45 ►
and it has an interesting political history
00:39:47 ►
but I don’t have time to go into that.
00:39:50 ►
Sochi Bele
00:39:51 ►
that I mentioned before, this lord
00:39:53 ►
of the entheogens,
00:39:55 ►
Netsawakoyoku.
00:39:58 ►
Netsawakoyoku.
00:39:59 ►
Here.
00:40:00 ►
And I said that
00:40:03 ►
the Mashikas or the so-called Aztecs
00:40:06 ►
burned the codices but Netzahualcoyotl
00:40:08 ►
wouldn’t let them burn the ones in Texcoco
00:40:11 ►
he was not an Aztec or a Mexica
00:40:13 ►
but he was a representative
00:40:15 ►
of the central cultural tradition
00:40:17 ►
of these people
00:40:18 ►
what is called the ancient wisdom of the Toltecs
00:40:21 ►
some have called him a Neo-Toltec
00:40:23 ►
or a Neo-Quetzalcoatl
00:40:24 ►
Quetzalcoatl was a Toltecs. Some have called him a Neo-Toltec or a Neo-Quetzalcoatl. Quetzalcoatl was a Toltec
00:40:26 ►
king.
00:40:29 ►
And Nezahualcóyotl
00:40:30 ►
was contemporary
00:40:32 ►
with this time when the Aztecs
00:40:33 ►
or Mexicas gained control of the valley.
00:40:37 ►
But anyway,
00:40:38 ►
his people were the
00:40:40 ►
Aconuas from what we call
00:40:42 ►
Texcoco now to the east
00:40:44 ►
of the Valley of Mexico.
00:40:46 ►
And he had a library
00:40:48 ►
and an art school and a
00:40:50 ►
major artistic training center
00:40:52 ►
and these people were, they lived
00:40:54 ►
rather like monks. They had very simple
00:40:56 ►
ornamentation. They didn’t run
00:40:58 ►
into ostentation.
00:41:00 ►
And that’s why Coyoca was a great poet.
00:41:02 ►
You’ll need a magnifying glass.
00:41:05 ►
There’s even a poem about him in theaters here.
00:41:08 ►
There are about 200 poems that survived,
00:41:11 ►
250 pre-Columbian poems,
00:41:13 ►
and 30 or so were written by him.
00:41:15 ►
He died in 1472.
00:41:18 ►
And it’s really an interesting piece.
00:41:20 ►
And next to the bust of him in the portrait,
00:41:23 ►
that’s him from one of Sahagun’s manuscripts.
00:41:26 ►
His name means the lion-strong
00:41:28 ►
famished coyote.
00:41:30 ►
Ako nizli,
00:41:32 ►
that’s a coyote. And it shows
00:41:34 ►
the coyote head behind him,
00:41:36 ►
sitting on a throne. And then you have
00:41:37 ►
Xochipilli, and you also have the
00:41:39 ►
glyph in the watermark,
00:41:42 ►
which is very faint,
00:41:43 ►
you can see it on the bill. It’s also small there.
00:41:47 ►
For the culture of Texcoco, which is an agave with that jar on top of it.
00:41:52 ►
That’s the symbol for people.
00:41:54 ►
Okay, the next one.
00:41:55 ►
I think it doesn’t move along.
00:41:56 ►
I get stuck on this reclining history part.
00:41:59 ►
Okay, so this is acacia angustissima.
00:42:02 ►
That’s the stick that they put in.
00:42:04 ►
Can I have the next one, please? And it’s very common in the United States. So this is acacia agustissima. That’s the stick they put in to have an exome tree.
00:42:06 ►
And it’s very common in the United States.
00:42:09 ►
It grows from Central America up pretty far north and west of the Mississippi.
00:42:15 ►
And they put, in fact, the root.
00:42:18 ►
And this was long before the Inquisition was established officially in Mexico,
00:42:22 ►
the Inquisition was established officially in Mexico almost 100 years, 91 years,
00:42:26 ►
before it prohibited peyote and mushrooms
00:42:28 ►
and other things like it.
00:42:30 ►
This was prohibited because this was the common
00:42:32 ►
everyday working-class inebriant and visionary substance.
00:42:37 ►
My theory is that it’s a visionary legume.
00:42:41 ►
It’s in the leguminosae.
00:42:42 ►
There are six species of acacia
00:42:44 ►
known to contain
00:42:45 ►
dimethyltryptamine. I haven’t been able
00:42:48 ►
to complete my analysis of this because
00:42:50 ►
I moved and I still
00:42:52 ►
have my lab set up and I’m just now
00:42:54 ►
getting the tree started again on my new ranch.
00:42:56 ►
Next, please.
00:42:59 ►
And so
00:43:00 ►
this is the polluted
00:43:02 ►
drug. And so they put this stick
00:43:04 ►
into the, and I believe in the codices,
00:43:07 ►
that’s the stick that’s being represented.
00:43:10 ►
Now, some people say it’s for aiding in fermentation as an inoculum.
00:43:15 ►
But they had a separate inoculum.
00:43:16 ►
I think it’s more likely that it’s a secondary compound in this.
00:43:19 ►
And this is pretty much obsolete today.
00:43:23 ►
Next.
00:43:25 ►
But there were many other additives,
00:43:26 ►
psychoactive to this,
00:43:28 ►
that are a little better documented.
00:43:30 ►
Caliandra, in the same family,
00:43:32 ►
it was mostly Caliandra grandiflora
00:43:35 ►
and Caliandra aloxa
00:43:36 ►
that were added to the oakly wine here.
00:43:40 ►
This is one from the Mungos de la Paz in Bolivia,
00:43:44 ►
and I really don’t know the species.
00:43:46 ►
But caliandra, we don’t yet know it to contain tryptamines,
00:43:50 ►
but there are caliandras that the shuar, or the so-called hebo, add to ayahuasca, for example,
00:43:55 ►
in preference to the Diplateras carborana, which is a strong DMT plant.
00:44:00 ►
And there are a number of citations of psychoactive use of Kali Andes.
00:44:05 ►
So that’s likely another legume additive that’s psychoactive.
00:44:08 ►
Next, please.
00:44:11 ►
And this is Datura.
00:44:12 ►
This is Datura’s Trimonium, which was in fact introduced after the Congress.
00:44:16 ►
But there were many Daturas used as inebriants in Mesoamerica,
00:44:20 ►
and that was an additive to these potions.
00:44:22 ►
And there are two that Saigun especially mentions
00:44:25 ►
in Hernández also that are a little bit mysterious.
00:44:28 ►
One is called Tochtetepon
00:44:30 ►
and the other Itlanesillo,
00:44:32 ►
which means something like the rabbit’s foot,
00:44:34 ►
like the lucky rabbit’s foot you can carry in your pocket.
00:44:37 ►
Next, please, it just shows the capsule.
00:44:39 ►
This is Thorn Apple or the tourist ammonia.
00:44:41 ►
But they were called by various names,
00:44:44 ►
Tlapa, Toloa, or Toloatzin.
00:44:47 ►
Toloache is common today,
00:44:49 ►
and they’re much associated with love magic.
00:44:51 ►
Mishito, there are various species.
00:44:53 ►
But this rabbit’s foot strange additive,
00:44:56 ►
which was especially mentioned
00:44:58 ►
by various chroniclers in the 16th century,
00:45:01 ►
was very likely the root of Turo.
00:45:03 ►
Next, please.
00:45:05 ►
And this is a Phaedra of Rihanna.
00:45:07 ►
This is also from South America.
00:45:08 ►
This is, in fact, in the Atacama Desert.
00:45:11 ►
But Phaedras were also added to it.
00:45:14 ►
Broom plants under the name Tepopote,
00:45:18 ►
or Tepopote, they call it today.
00:45:20 ►
Popote still means straw,
00:45:23 ►
like a feathered straw.
00:45:27 ►
So that was another additive, probably a feathering-containing plant.
00:45:31 ►
Next, please.
00:45:33 ►
And then, of course, you have peyote.
00:45:35 ►
And even to this day, peyote is still added to these kinds of beverages in the north
00:45:39 ►
by the Tarahumara and the Huitol, although they generally make a corn beer,
00:45:44 ►
which is called
00:45:45 ►
Tesquino. That also
00:45:47 ►
applies to Oakleys.
00:45:50 ►
They also make cactus wines
00:45:51 ►
as well, from cactus fruits. There are many
00:45:53 ►
of those. And so
00:45:56 ►
it’s known that
00:45:57 ►
Peco, which was an important
00:45:59 ►
advocate, these photos are actually from Texas,
00:46:01 ►
from what’s called the Peote Gardens,
00:46:03 ►
very near the Rio Bravo or the Rio Grande in Texas.
00:46:07 ►
Next please.
00:46:08 ►
I have a few shots of them.
00:46:10 ►
This shows it in flower.
00:46:12 ►
This again is called peyote.
00:46:14 ►
Some people say peyote, but it really is accented peyote.
00:46:18 ►
The cyclone spelled it P-E-I-O-T-E-L, which would be pronounced peyote.
00:46:23 ►
This is actually a rare double, well not so rare,
00:46:26 ►
double flower.
00:46:27 ►
I’ll show the flower open in a minute.
00:46:29 ►
Next, please.
00:46:31 ►
And interestingly enough, these things in the wild
00:46:33 ►
will do what’s called cresting.
00:46:36 ►
They get this
00:46:37 ►
tumorous growth that’s
00:46:39 ►
a little bit, almost all cacti
00:46:41 ►
do this, but peyote also. It’s a small
00:46:43 ►
spineless cactus.
00:46:45 ►
And it’s very common in Mexico, not at all common in the U.S.,
00:46:48 ►
and it only grows in one state in the U.S. naturally,
00:46:51 ►
and only in four or five counties.
00:46:54 ►
Next, please.
00:46:56 ►
And that shows an example of the well-developed princeton.
00:46:59 ►
And this is in a shrine garden for peyote,
00:47:04 ►
or a legal peyote vendor and collector from Texas.
00:47:07 ►
Next. And just to give you an idea, this is a three-month-old seedling. Very slow growing.
00:47:14 ►
Next. A three-year-old plant. And that’s what’s in the diameter of a finger tip. Next. And that’s the flowering plant.
00:47:26 ►
This agave is
00:47:27 ►
somniana.
00:47:30 ►
That one
00:47:30 ►
is not the same one that I heard
00:47:33 ►
and see that it’s still not that big. Okay, next please.
00:47:37 ►
And then
00:47:37 ►
also I mentioned there was this nanaka
00:47:39 ►
oakley or the
00:47:40 ►
mushroom oakley. It’s
00:47:42 ►
improbable that Amanita muscaria was used in that,
00:47:46 ►
but it’s possible. This was called
00:47:48 ►
Sante Comana Naka,
00:47:49 ►
which means the skull mushroom.
00:47:52 ►
But it is used as an inebriant
00:47:54 ►
to this day in Mesoamerica, but it’s
00:47:56 ►
mainly known to be smoked with tobacco.
00:47:58 ►
There were three basic vehicles
00:48:00 ►
for administering inebriating
00:48:02 ►
plants, two of which are the
00:48:04 ►
subjects of my lecture here,
00:48:05 ►
the agave potion, the cacao,
00:48:08 ►
and the other one was tobacco regions of Phragmites Reed II,
00:48:12 ►
which contains several tryptamines also,
00:48:15 ►
that plant, 5-hydroxy-DMT and DMT.
00:48:20 ►
And that was stuffed with tobacco and what are called flowers,
00:48:23 ►
or in theaters, that was one vehicle. And in that case, it was definitely Omnium Muscari that was stuffed with tobacco and what are called flowers, or in theaters, that was one vehicle.
00:48:26 ►
And in that case, it was definitely Omnium Muscari that was smoked.
00:48:29 ►
And then in cacao, the next one, it would be more likely in the Nanaca Ocli, or the agave wine with mushrooms.
00:48:38 ►
It would be a mushroom very much like this.
00:48:40 ►
This is Solospe surlescens, which is one of the big, potent, real Mexican
00:48:45 ►
species, although oddly enough it was first
00:48:47 ►
collected in Montgomery County,
00:48:50 ►
Alabama. It’s never been found outside
00:48:51 ►
of Mexico and South America
00:48:53 ►
since then, but it’s very common here in
00:48:55 ►
Oaxaca, and it also grows where I live.
00:48:58 ►
And this is what’s called the
00:48:59 ►
derrumbe mushroom, and
00:49:01 ►
Mazatec translates as the landslide
00:49:03 ►
mushroom, and it’s called derrundes
00:49:05 ►
on the street.
00:49:07 ►
Next, please.
00:49:10 ►
And also, the
00:49:11 ►
morning-water seeds were added to this
00:49:14 ►
agave wine.
00:49:16 ►
And that, of course, everyone knows
00:49:18 ►
by the name Oloryuki, but actually
00:49:20 ►
the plant in Nauru is
00:49:21 ►
guaxiwito, which means the snake plant,
00:49:24 ►
or guaxiwito, which means the green plant, or guapu xoxoqui, which means the green snake.
00:49:27 ►
Ololiuque is the name of the seed.
00:49:30 ►
And the seeds are little round things, it means, just as they are.
00:49:37 ►
So this was also added, and is still to this day.
00:49:39 ►
This was mentioned by Schultes first in Mipra, which is not far from here.
00:49:43 ►
Next.
00:49:42 ►
as mentioned by Schultes first in Nipa,
00:49:43 ►
which is not far from here.
00:49:44 ►
Next.
00:49:48 ►
And this is from one of Schultes’ books,
00:49:49 ►
but it just shows that it was,
00:49:52 ►
this was the most important pre-Columbian in Nibiru, and at least what most
00:49:54 ►
attracted the Spanish attention.
00:49:57 ►
Both Hernandez above
00:49:58 ►
and Sahagun below
00:50:00 ►
represented this plan.
00:50:03 ►
And it’s her binding
00:50:04 ►
for both Hernandez, Sahagun, that’s the little round, represented this plant. It’s turbine-informed both. And down there
00:50:06 ►
is a boom. That’s the little round
00:50:08 ►
thing. And that’s the species
00:50:10 ►
I’ll show next.
00:50:13 ►
And this contains lysergic acid
00:50:14 ►
alkaloids of the lysergic
00:50:16 ►
acid amide, simple amide type.
00:50:19 ►
And above you see
00:50:20 ►
the little round things. And below
00:50:22 ►
is the little black things.
00:50:24 ►
Next slide.
00:50:27 ►
And through this, this is a pre-Columbian type of apiary,
00:50:32 ►
because in the Mayan area, this morning glory seed was used in the form of honey
00:50:36 ►
to make another ritual beverage, which is called balche.
00:50:41 ►
But that is, in Narwhal, would be called ayokli.
00:50:44 ►
They had okli, which is agave wine.
00:50:46 ►
Ayokli is made from honey
00:50:47 ►
or from some other nectar-type substance.
00:50:50 ►
But for the Mayans, they didn’t
00:50:52 ►
have these agaves in abundance
00:50:54 ►
in their environment,
00:50:56 ►
and they made their
00:50:58 ►
Ayokli in the form of Balche
00:50:59 ►
from honey.
00:51:02 ►
And these are stigmas beehives
00:51:04 ►
in an A-frame type of apiary.
00:51:07 ►
And then they put these around
00:51:09 ►
where the morning glories abounded
00:51:10 ►
and cultivated the morning glories around them
00:51:12 ►
and actually sequestered the lysodic acid
00:51:15 ►
alphaboys in the nectar
00:51:16 ►
and then made their wine from this.
00:51:17 ►
But this also had a psychoactive leguminous additive,
00:51:21 ►
which is mongocarpus violaceus root bark,
00:51:24 ►
exactly like the
00:51:25 ►
acacia that’s added to the oakleaf.
00:51:28 ►
And so they put this psychoactive
00:51:29 ►
root bark from the Longocarpus,
00:51:31 ►
which is in the same family as the oakpopley
00:51:34 ►
or the acacia.
00:51:35 ►
Next, and I think I only have two more.
00:51:38 ►
This shows the hives up close.
00:51:39 ►
They’re little sections about this long of hollow
00:51:41 ►
logs with about several
00:51:43 ►
hundred individual bees. They’re stingless bees
00:51:46 ►
which are called
00:51:47 ►
kolam kham in Mayan.
00:51:50 ►
The Mayans call that morning
00:51:52 ►
war a shtab in tun.
00:51:54 ►
You can still even buy a
00:51:56 ►
distilled liqueur with
00:51:57 ►
anise flavoring star anise
00:52:00 ►
in Yucatan
00:52:02 ►
in Valladolid.
00:52:03 ►
Sorry, Merida in Valladolid, Yucatan,
00:52:06 ►
and it’s called Staventun,
00:52:07 ►
so this name and this inebriating potion survived,
00:52:10 ►
and I forgot to put that slide in here,
00:52:12 ►
but I’ll try and show it with a cow.
00:52:15 ►
Next.
00:52:17 ►
And last, I think,
00:52:18 ►
and this is the Ipomea violacea,
00:52:20 ►
which is the little brown things.
00:52:22 ►
Okay, okay.
00:52:24 ►
Now, everyone knows about tequila.
00:52:27 ►
Tequila is actually a special kind of mezcal.
00:52:31 ►
In fact, it’s just as champagne is a special kind of cava,
00:52:35 ►
like cava is cave-bottled fermented foaming wine
00:52:40 ►
from southern France or Catalonia,
00:52:43 ►
and champagne is denomination Controle. It’s just
00:52:46 ►
a regional brand name for this kind of wine. And that’s the same with tequila. Ten minutes?
00:52:54 ►
Okay. Yeah, I’ll give you another time. Okay, and so tequila is a Denomination Controle
00:52:59 ►
for Mezcal. And so Mezcal is a different kind of agave and I didn’t bring,
00:53:05 ►
I don’t have photographs of those.
00:53:07 ►
But instead of doing this process of castrating
00:53:10 ►
the flowering part of the plant
00:53:11 ►
and then making a cavity
00:53:14 ►
and pipetting out
00:53:15 ►
this very sweet
00:53:17 ►
juice that comes flowing out of this fountain
00:53:20 ►
of the plant. In this case
00:53:22 ►
when it starts giving signs
00:53:23 ►
of flowering, it’s cut down.
00:53:25 ►
They cut the root off, and then they
00:53:27 ►
cut down all the leaves
00:53:30 ►
of blades, and it makes up what’s called a
00:53:31 ►
pina, or a pineapple.
00:53:34 ►
And these things weigh about
00:53:35 ►
80-100 pounds,
00:53:37 ►
with the typical mescaligades.
00:53:40 ►
And then that
00:53:41 ►
is taken to what’s
00:53:44 ►
called a palenque.
00:53:45 ►
Palenque means like a ring, like a circus ring, or palenque is where you have cockfights or whatever.
00:53:51 ►
It’s like a corral ring.
00:53:53 ►
And traditionally speaking, it’s then baked underground in a kind of a stone oven,
00:53:59 ►
like making a sort of a temazcal, which is a sweat bath or kind of an earth oven. So a
00:54:06 ►
fairly large pit, a few meters in diameter
00:54:08 ►
and about a meter deep
00:54:10 ►
is dug and filled with stones
00:54:12 ►
and an immense fire is
00:54:14 ►
made in this and it really heats
00:54:16 ►
up these stones, which are then
00:54:17 ►
evenly spread around.
00:54:19 ►
And then these piñas, about
00:54:21 ►
a quarter
00:54:24 ►
to a half ton at a time,
00:54:28 ►
these big things which may then be cut into quarters or something,
00:54:31 ►
make slightly smaller pieces, are stuck on these hot rocks.
00:54:35 ►
And then agave hay and agave leaves or blades are piled on top of this
00:54:40 ►
and then earthen finely for insulation.
00:54:43 ►
And so it’s a baked oven.
00:54:44 ►
And so this is a baked oven.
00:54:45 ►
And so this is called baking mezcal.
00:54:48 ►
And the word mezcal comes from mezcal metal,
00:54:52 ►
which is agave atropine.
00:54:56 ►
No, that’s teal metal.
00:54:58 ►
Mezcalic metal is agave hard.
00:55:00 ►
And that’s one of these particular mezcal agaves.
00:55:03 ►
And so mezcal metal means the agave that’s used for this mezcal.
00:55:07 ►
And it’s bread.
00:55:08 ►
It’s like baking bread, basically.
00:55:10 ►
Sweet bread.
00:55:11 ►
And so this was probably an important foodstuff before it was an important inebriant and soon became both.
00:55:20 ►
But this is a very extensive area.
00:55:22 ►
It’s not just the family of Agavesiae,
00:55:26 ►
but you also have the Nolinaceae family,
00:55:29 ►
which is especially the genus Dazolirium,
00:55:31 ►
especially the species Durangensis.
00:55:34 ►
Dazolirium, Durangensis, and the Nolinaceae.
00:55:37 ►
There are 19 species of Nolinaceae, all Mexican,
00:55:40 ►
and that’s like a little tiny agave.
00:55:42 ►
And these are also used for making this baked sweet bread in the same way, and also’s like a little tiny agave. And these are also used for making this
00:55:46 ►
baked sweet bread in the same
00:55:48 ►
way, and also for making a beverage
00:55:49 ►
which is called sotol.
00:55:52 ►
But that’s only one species.
00:55:54 ►
It’s basically an agave thing.
00:55:55 ►
And this goes from the southwestern United States
00:55:58 ►
all the way down to Central America.
00:56:00 ►
This tradition.
00:56:02 ►
But it’s not,
00:56:03 ►
it’s mostly along the Pacific coast in the south.
00:56:08 ►
And so these piñas are cooked like a few days.
00:56:13 ►
It could be as much as five, but it’s at least one day
00:56:16 ►
in these underground distilling ovens.
00:56:19 ►
And then they’re cut off and milled.
00:56:20 ►
And the typical mill is like a round circular
00:56:26 ►
ring with a pivot in the center
00:56:28 ►
with a sidebar to which a couple
00:56:30 ►
of animals can be attached to push the thing
00:56:32 ►
around. And then that sidebar is threaded
00:56:34 ►
through a big circular milling stone,
00:56:36 ►
a big wheel, like this.
00:56:39 ►
And so
00:56:40 ►
and then the animals
00:56:42 ►
turn around and crush these cooked
00:56:44 ►
penis after they’re taken out of the stone oven.
00:56:48 ►
And then the fibers are separated from the juice.
00:56:52 ►
And then that is then fermented to make this wine, an agave wine, somewhat similar.
00:57:00 ►
It’s a similar process in that you use starter cultures as well.
00:57:05 ►
And it’s basically like making oakley or like making pulque.
00:57:09 ►
But in this case, although there is some evidence that the wine is still drunk,
00:57:15 ►
almost exclusively where this winemaking process occurred,
00:57:19 ►
it became transformed into a distillate, into a brandy, into a brandy of agave wine. And the earliest, the distillation technology
00:57:28 ►
was not known here in the pre-Columbian times. And the history
00:57:32 ►
of distillation is now pretty well worked out. It only goes back in Europe
00:57:36 ►
about the year 1100. And it’s the earliest example is about
00:57:39 ►
1550 in Mesoamerica. But early on they started
00:57:43 ►
distilling it with very simple stills.
00:57:45 ►
At first, bungholts and other stuff,
00:57:48 ►
these were indigenous because one of them
00:57:50 ►
was probably the earliest form,
00:57:53 ►
which was from Mongolia and North Korea,
00:57:56 ►
of like a pot with a pan of water on the top
00:57:59 ►
and a kind of a rim so that you could
00:58:00 ►
drip off the distillate on the sides
00:58:03 ►
or to a secondary top below.
00:58:06 ►
These were found among the wheat
00:58:07 ►
but now we know pretty clearly
00:58:09 ►
that this was not a pre-Columbian technology.
00:58:11 ►
It was introduced afterwards. It was mostly
00:58:13 ►
the moonshine type stills made out of
00:58:15 ►
copper.
00:58:17 ►
And so
00:58:19 ►
the mezcal is then
00:58:21 ►
single distilled and
00:58:23 ►
bottled. And I had planned to pass them out to the people in the tribe,
00:58:27 ►
but unfortunately the bottle cracked.
00:58:29 ►
They sell them in really nice uncooked clay crocks.
00:58:33 ►
But tequila then is a specific kind of mezcal.
00:58:37 ►
Originally it was called vino de mezcal tequila
00:58:40 ►
when it was first commercialized.
00:58:43 ►
But in this case, it’s one particular mezcal,
00:58:46 ►
agave especially, which is called
00:58:47 ►
agave tequimana, or
00:58:49 ►
maguey azul, or
00:58:51 ►
mezcal azul. It’s the blue
00:58:53 ►
mezcal agave.
00:58:56 ►
And this is only grown
00:58:57 ►
around Jalisco.
00:58:59 ►
Actually, Guanajuato, Zacatecas,
00:59:02 ►
Chocan,
00:59:04 ►
Jalisco,
00:59:07 ►
these are, and Durango, all the way, theseajuato, Zacatecas, Chocan, Jalisco, and Durango,
00:59:14 ►
all the other states or Jalisco, that’s the legal tequila-producing region.
00:59:17 ►
But it’s based on growing this particular one. The manufacture originally was the same, as I just described, for mezcal.
00:59:23 ►
But in present times, it’s done in a much more of a
00:59:25 ►
factory type basis. And so
00:59:27 ►
you have the same cutting of the piñas
00:59:29 ►
and so forth. And then
00:59:31 ►
these are
00:59:33 ►
cooked in a steam autoclave, a big
00:59:35 ►
cylinder, like a huge
00:59:37 ►
steam autoclave, not in a baked oven.
00:59:40 ►
And then they’re milled on a
00:59:41 ►
type of a conveyor belt roller
00:59:43 ►
mill. But then the rest of the production is similar,
00:59:47 ►
except that tequila is always double distilled.
00:59:50 ►
Mezcal is usually only single distilled and filtered.
00:59:54 ►
And so the difference that you get is with a non,
00:59:58 ►
apart from the fact that you have a different source agave,
01:00:02 ►
and to be legally tequila,
01:00:04 ►
it has to have at least 51% of agave. And to be legally tequila, it has to have at least
01:00:06 ►
51% of
01:00:07 ►
agave sugar.
01:00:10 ►
Other sugars can be added.
01:00:12 ►
So if you want the real thing, it has to say
01:00:14 ►
100% agave on
01:00:15 ►
the label. And even
01:00:17 ►
then, it won’t be, not today
01:00:19 ►
because of shortages, it won’t be 100%
01:00:22 ►
blue agave because they add other agave
01:00:24 ►
sugars as well.
01:00:26 ►
By the way, when you cook these mezcals
01:00:28 ►
and squeeze the juice out,
01:00:29 ►
it’s about 45% glucose that comes out.
01:00:33 ►
So it’s a process of baking
01:00:34 ►
to convert starches into sugars.
01:00:38 ►
And it’s double distilled.
01:00:40 ►
So the real differences between mezcal and tequila are those.
01:00:46 ►
It’s a different agave source plant in the case of tequila.
01:00:50 ►
You don’t get the smoky flavor. The agave or the mezcal still tastes smoky
01:00:54 ►
because they’re still cooked in this traditional way, whereas the modern tequilas are not.
01:00:58 ►
It’s in a steam autoclave.
01:01:00 ►
It’s double distilled in the case of tequila so you get generally higher alcohol levels
01:01:05 ►
although it’s usually diluted then
01:01:07 ►
and so the tequila
01:01:09 ►
and that’s basically the difference
01:01:11 ►
only difference
01:01:12 ►
and so the tequila as it’s produced
01:01:14 ►
after the second distillation
01:01:15 ►
comes out approximately 55% alcohol
01:01:19 ►
and for export it’s shipped as 55% alcohol
01:01:23 ►
and then it’s diluted with the skilled water,
01:01:25 ►
usually to about 38%, which is 76% crude.
01:01:29 ►
It’s become an export industry.
01:01:32 ►
Now of the blue agave, there are about 200 million plants grown total.
01:01:37 ►
Only for a few years in the 70s was Tamaulipas,
01:01:40 ►
which is a completely different area,
01:01:42 ►
through some legal maneuvering, authorized as a tequila-growing area.
01:01:46 ►
But the plant didn’t prosper there.
01:01:48 ►
And so, although even Salsa and Grego,
01:01:51 ►
which were the biggest, oldest producers,
01:01:53 ►
had to go set up in Tamaulipas,
01:01:55 ►
by the time the 90s were there,
01:01:57 ►
the Tamaulipas thing was over.
01:01:58 ►
And so now it’s just, as I said,
01:02:00 ►
Jalisco and those four states around it
01:02:02 ►
where you have this tequila-producing area,
01:02:06 ►
about 50% of the production is exported,
01:02:09 ►
and of that, more than 90% goes to the United States.
01:02:12 ►
So once again, the U.S. really hogs up this particular inebriant.
01:02:16 ►
The U.S. consumes 90% of the tequila,
01:02:20 ►
70% of the world’s cocaine crop,
01:02:23 ►
50% of the opiates used
01:02:26 ►
in medicine are consumed in the United States,
01:02:28 ►
and fully 34%
01:02:30 ►
of the entire output of the world’s
01:02:31 ►
pharmaceutical industry is consumed in the United States.
01:02:34 ►
So, in closing, I’ll just
01:02:36 ►
joke, and people talk about a
01:02:37 ►
drug-free America, well, if it gets any
01:02:39 ►
freer, we’re all going to be dying of an overdose.
01:02:42 ►
So, thank you.
01:02:43 ►
Thank you.
01:02:56 ►
Well, I have plenty of prompting, so… Yes, questions, please.
01:02:58 ►
I can give… Yes.
01:03:00 ►
John, I know you just mentioned this in the beginning,
01:03:02 ►
but could you clarify again the difference between
01:03:04 ►
a bad day and a gay? Yes. John, I know you mentioned this in the beginning, where now is Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
01:03:28 ►
That is the language from there.
01:03:30 ►
And there were 2 million people living on that large island
01:03:33 ►
at the time of the Colón, Columbus.
01:03:37 ►
By 1600, not a single one of that language was completely destroyed.
01:03:41 ►
But oddly enough, that word survives in modern tongue
01:03:45 ►
to hear, and there are a number of other common words that are from Taino that have spread
01:03:50 ►
out all over the world, like canoe, barbecue. There are three or four, but Mage is a Taino
01:03:56 ►
word.
01:03:59 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one
01:04:03 ►
thought at a time.
01:04:11 ►
You know, as I was listening to Jonathan talk just now,
01:04:17 ►
it dawned on me that of all the speakers I heard at the Entheobotany conferences in Palenque,
01:04:22 ►
that Jonathan and Sasha Shulgin were the two that I had the hardest time following,
01:04:25 ►
and yet were the only two whose talks I never missed.
01:04:29 ►
I can’t really describe what it was like when they were on a roll, but it was truly amazing when one or the other of them,
01:04:33 ►
sitting in on each other’s talks,
01:04:35 ►
would begin discussing some point in great detail
01:04:38 ►
from both the perspective of botany and of chemistry.
01:04:42 ►
Now maybe I’m just easily impressed,
01:04:44 ►
but those moments are some of the most memorable scenes
01:04:47 ►
of my days at the Planca conferences.
01:04:50 ►
Of course, for all I understood about what they were saying,
01:04:53 ►
they may as well have been talking in Latin.
01:04:55 ►
However, I can assure you that there are a good many
01:04:58 ►
of our fellow salonners who are most likely already planning
01:05:02 ►
on ways to follow up on the information we just heard.
01:05:05 ►
And who knows, their continuing investigations into these plants
01:05:09 ►
may be the subject of a future podcast one day,
01:05:13 ►
featuring some of the new experts who are filling in the ranks
01:05:15 ►
of the academic psychedelic community every day.
01:05:19 ►
And now, as much as I’d like to continue visiting with you today,
01:05:23 ►
I’ve got to get busy working on my six-year anniversary podcast,
01:05:27 ►
along with another little project that I’ll be mentioning in that program,
01:05:31 ►
which, if all goes well, will be posted before the end of the day this coming Friday, June 10th.
01:05:36 ►
So, that’s going to do it for now, which means that I’ll close today’s podcast once again
01:05:41 ►
by reminding you that this and most of the podcasts from the psychedelic salon
01:05:45 ►
are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects under the creative commons
01:05:50 ►
attribution non-commercial share like 3.0 license and if you have any questions about that just
01:05:55 ►
click the creative commons link at the bottom of the psychedelic salon web page which you can get
01:06:00 ►
to via psychedelicsalon.us and if you’re interested in the philosophy behind the Psychedelic
01:06:06 ►
Salon, you can hear something about it in my novel, The Genesis Generation, which is available
01:06:12 ►
as a pay-what-you-can audiobook that you can download at genesisgeneration.us. And for now,
01:06:18 ►
this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well my friends.