RV 8.48 and 9.113 on soma, immortality, and light
Two selected Rigvedic hymns to Soma: RV 8.48, the famous hymn of drinking soma and becoming immortal, and RV 9.113, a Soma Pavamana hymn asking to be placed in deathless worlds of light, delight, and fulfilled desire.
Ritual architecture, psychoactive plants, sound, and authority in the Early Horizon Andes
A concise archaeological site entry on Chavin de Huantar as a ceremonial center where architecture, controlled movement, sound, San Pedro imagery, and direct evidence for vilca and Nicotiana snuff formed part of institutionalized ritual practice.
The Homeric Hymn to Demeter (7th-6th century BCE) is the founding myth of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Disguised as an old woman, Demeter drinks kykeon (barley meal, water, and mint) and later teaches the Eleusinians the 'awful mysteries.'
Clement of Alexandria's chapter from his Exhortation to the Greeks (c. 195 CE), exposing Greek mystery religions including the Eleusinian rites. He quotes the complete verbal formula recited over the kykeon and recounts the myth of Demeter and Baubo.
A high-Andean ritual bundle with direct chemical evidence for multiple psychoactive plants
A rock shelter in southwestern Bolivia where archaeologists found direct chemical evidence for ancient use of coca, harmine-bearing plants, DMT-bearing plants, and possibly psilocin.
Motolinía's account of Aztec mushroom intoxication from Historia de los indios de la Nueva España. He describes small bitter mushrooms producing visions of serpents and worms, names them Teonanácatl ("flesh of God"), and compares the rite to other Aztec communal meals.
A sixteenth-century Portuguese-Goan discussion of bangue, or bhang, describing cannabis preparations in South Asia, their relation to opium, and accounts of intoxication, appetite, laughter, sleep, and imaginative travel.
Sahagún’s Book 11 on herbs that intoxicate
Spanish entries from Book 11 of the Florentine Codex, the encyclopedia of Nahua life compiled by Bernardino de Sahagún and Nahua scholars at Tlatelolco around 1577. They describe ololiuhqui, peyotl, tlapatl, mixitl, and teonanácatl, plants and mushrooms that cause intoxication or visions, with an English translation made for the archive.
Mushrooms, coronations, and the feast of revelations
Three passages from Diego Durán's Historia describing raw mountain mushrooms in Mexica royal ceremonial life: a coronation feast, Durán's note that mushrooms rather than wine appear as the chronicle's intoxicant, and Motecuhzoma's feast of revelations.
Chapter 14 of Francisco Ximénez's 1615 Spanish redaction of Hernández's natural history, describing ololiuhqui. Ximénez gives the plant's Nahuatl name cohuaxihuitl ('serpent herb'), its medicinal uses, and records that priests ate it to commune with the devil and see a thousand phantasms.
An edict of the Mexican tribunal of the Holy Office, issued in Mexico City on 19 June 1620 over the signature of Licenciado Pedro Nabarre de Isla, prohibiting the use of peyote to discover thefts and divine hidden or future events. The inquisitors deny the plant any natural power to produce visions, attribute them to the devil, threaten users with excommunication and proceedings as suspects in the faith, and pardon use before the edict's publication. The Spanish text is hosted as printed by Irving A. Leonard (1896–1996) in American Anthropologist in 1942, with a new English translation.
Colonial anti-idolatry texts on divination, healing, and visionary plants
A set of Spanish colonial anti-idolatry excerpts describing ololiuhqui and peyote as oracular substances used in healing, theft investigation, divination, and diagnosis of sorcery. The source preserves rare early descriptions of visionary plant practice while also showing how clerical authorities criminalized and demonized Indigenous ritual knowledge.
The entry "Koræiki" from the anonymous 1736 London translation of Das Nord- und Ostliche Theil von Europa und Asia (Stockholm, 1730) by Philip Johan von Strahlenberg (1676–1747), a Swedish officer captured at Poltava who spent over a decade as a prisoner in Siberia. Strahlenberg reports that Russian traders exchanged the mushroom Muchumor for Koryak furs, that wealthy Koryaks boiled it and drank the liquor at feasts, and that the poor drank the urine of intoxicated guests to share the effect. The full entry is hosted from pp. 396–97 of the 1736 printing.
Krasheninnikov's 1764 English translation describes fly-agaric (Amanita muscaria) intoxication in Kamchatka: its effects, use by the Koryak, and the practice of drinking an intoxicated person's urine to prolong inebriation. He covers dose-dependent effects and behavioral consequences including murderous impulses.
Franz Xaver Veigl, a German Jesuit who worked in the mission province of Maynas in the upper Amazon until the Jesuits were expelled in 1768, describes healers and visionary drinks there. He writes that people who drank "hayac huasca" saw "absolutely enormous visions" and seemed to travel far away, and, like other missionaries of his time, he treats this as dealings with the devil. English translation of Latin passages from his account of Maynas.