1500–1800

Between 1500 and 1800, European powers and the societies they encountered built — sometimes collaboratively, often violently — the first global pharmacopoeia. The earliest substantial European-language descriptions of substances that would later become central to the psychedelic story belong to this era: Sahagún's Mexica informants on teonanácatl and peyotl in the Florentine Codex; José de Acosta's Historia Natural; the Inquisition's prosecutions of curanderos in seventeenth-century Mexico; East India Company officers reporting on bhang, kava, and betel.

These sources rarely use vocabulary we would recognize today. "Intoxication," "witchcraft," "frenzy," "the Devil's herb," and "melancholy" are pressed into service to describe what may have been, in their original contexts, sacramental experiences. By the eighteenth century the apparatus of Linnaean botany begins to absorb this knowledge, smoothing earlier wonder and horror into the language of natural history. The era ends with Humphry Davy at the Pneumatic Institution and the threshold of the modern laboratory.

This is a placeholder summary. A full description will be added later.