Notes on the Present Status of Ololiuhqui and the Other Hallucinogens of Mexico

Abstract

Picietl, peyotl, teonanacatl, and ololiuhqui these were the four great divinatory plants of Mexico at the time of the Conquest. We give the names in Nahuatl, the lingua franca of that time, spoken as a mother tongue by the Aztecs and many other peoples. By 'divinatory' we mean plants that served in Middle American cultures as keys to knowledge withheld from men in their normal minds, the keys to Extra-sensory Perception, the Mediators (as the Indians believed) between men and their gods. These plants were hallucinogens, psychotropic agents, psychotomimetics, if we must use the noncewords of contemporary science. Among the remote monolingual peoples of Mexico these plants continue to this day playing their divine role. Whenever the Indian family is troubled by a grave problem, it is likely to turn to one or the other of these plants and consult it according to the usage prevailing in the region. There were other drugs, certainly, that be-