Monday, May 5, 2008

When and how was Ayahuasca discovered by the world outside the Amazon?

By Dennis McKenna (Terence's Brother, check out the book True Hallucinations!)

The earliest Europeans to mention Ayahuasca were Jesuits travelling in the Amazon. One of the earliest such reports of this “diabolical potion,” written in 1737, describes it as: “an intoxicating potion ingested for divinatory and other purposes and called ayahuasca, which deprives one of his senses and, at times, of his life.”

Several early explorers of northwestern South America also referred to ayahuasca, yage and caapi. They all cited a forest liana but offered little detail.

Read on here at ayahuasca.com

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Have you heard about 'the coccaine mummies'?

There's many mummies from ancient Egypt, supposedly before people on this side of the pond got to the Americas side (excluding that land bridge theory that covers Eskimo's), who have been found to have (upon evcavation) coccaine on them, as well as other plants only found in the Americas.

Curiously, (I think this was mentioned in Plants of the Gods by Schultes and Hoffman also) if you take the places with the highest occurance of psychedelic plants and entheogen use tribally, you get the East coast & inland areas of Southern America, and the West coast & inland of Africa - which happen to fit together as coastlines if you line the two continents up (except for the Gulf of Mexico).

There's all these interesting little connections; what happens for example if it's considered that there was a disaster that made the crater that's the Mexican Gulf, Atlantis did used to be - in the Atlantic, Antartica did appear on quite recent maps but outlined as it is under the ice, and all those fossils and other evidence that people and dinosaurs co-existed are true, and there is evidence that the Romans were the the Americas. There's a coherent picture that starts to emerge, involving misestimates of timescales of when various things happened*.

It Just So Happens that all these various topics that all point to similar conclusions all happen to be the ones you're "not supposed" to take seriously. (Otherwise you might start thinking of big lizards and people co-existing for example. And we all know there's no such thing as dragons. And everyone's evolved from one type of primate, even people with none of those genes. And there's a gunstore in Dallas that sells rifles with barrels that take two different calibrations of bullets. Oh, did they leave that one in too? But it still wasn't enough to stop the madness was it.)

"Not supposed" being emergent primarily from an academic form that insists such things as the Greeks definitely weren't inheritors of ancient Egyptian knowledge.

*Readers of Ralph Ellis, and other authors, might recognise a similar occurance, where evidences were altered to obscure who Moses and Akenaten really were, and what Pharoahs were contemporary with what times.