Pre-500 CE

Direct evidence for psychedelic use in the deep past is thin, and the lack of evidence is itself one of the defining features of the era. A handful of well-documented archaeological cases — cannabis residue in Pazyryk burials, opium poppy capsules in Neolithic Mediterranean tombs — sit alongside a much larger body of speculative interpretation. Rock panels at Tassili n'Ajjer in the Algerian Sahara, sometimes read as depicting mushroom-using shamans, are far more ambiguous than the popular literature suggests. The San Pedro iconography at Chavín de Huántar in the Andes is on firmer ground but still tells us little about the ritual context.

The textual record is similarly uncertain. The Rigveda's hymns to soma describe a divine intoxicant whose botanical identity has been argued over for two centuries, with proposed candidates ranging from Amanita muscaria to ephedra to harmal. The Eleusinian Mysteries involved the drinking of kykeon under strict secrecy; Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck proposed in 1978 that it was an ergot preparation, but there is no direct evidence for this, and the hypothesis remains contested. What we can say more confidently is that Greek and Roman writers — Theophrastus, Pliny, Dioscorides — catalogued opium, mandrake, henbane, and hemp with practical sobriety, and that by 500 CE the visionary remains, mostly, off the page.

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