Blanka Amezkua It is a real gift to have found the Microcosms website that contains such valuable information with beautiful images that as a visual artist enrich me and offer me a singular and intense range to perceive the plant world. It is a truly unique approach. Since the appearance of Covid-19 in our lives,…
Giovanni Aloi The history of science and western art are intimately entwined—a keen determination to visually assess similarities and differences pervades both. This approach has nurtured a deep archival tendency—a wish to order, catalog, and hierarchize that over the past five centuries has constructed a limited conception of what we call nature. What we see…
Brigitte Adriaensen Microcosms: A Homage to Sacred Plants of the Americas is a wonderful tool for my course on the Culture and History of Psychoactive Substances in Latin America, which I teach at Radboud University in the Netherlands. What I find most attractive about the website is the protagonism of the plants, and the exhibition…
Cestrum parqui Cestrum parqui, commonly known as palqui, is a flowering bush native to central Chile whose fetid leaves have been used medicinally by the Mapuche for the treatment of wounds, rashes, allergies, inflammations and fevers. Mössbach mentions the Chilean saying: “Wherever the devil has planted a nettle, God has planted a palqui.” In a…
Bursera fagaroides According to a team of Mexican scientists led by Mayra Antúnez-Mojica, Bursera fagaroides has proven antitumor activity. In their overview published in 2021, they affirm: “In general, lignans from B. fagaroides exhibited potent anti-cancer activity, although antitumor, anti-bacterial, anti-protozoal, anti-inflammatory, and anti-viral properties have also been described.” The researchers also mention that the resin from…
Alicia anisopetala As Glenn H. Shepard, Jr. has written, “though a fair amount is now known about how psychoactive plants and compounds produce their peculiar effects on the human mind, it is still largely a mystery as to why certain plants produce such compounds.” In other words, why do some 100 plants from among perhaps half a million different…
Latua pubiflora Olivos Herreros calls Latúe, perhaps the rarest of all psychoactive plants, “the classic hallucinogen of Mapuche ethnology.” One researcher translated the name of the plant as “Land of the Dead”, perhaps in reference to the isolated region on the mountainous coast of southern Chile (from Valdivia to Chiloé), which is its sole habitat…
Drimys andina One of the last plants we were able to image, Drimys andina (with thanks to Sacred Succulents in California), enabled us to extend the geographical representation of sacred plants in our project much further south into the immense forests that are the Mapuche ancestral lands on both sides of the cordillera of the…
Leonotis nepetifolia Leonotis nepetifolia, although originally from Africa, where its common name is Klipp Dagga, has been naturalized and can be found throughout the Caribbean and the Americas as well as the Indian subcontinent, where there are more than a dozen common names corresponding to the linguistic diversity of this region, including Lion’s Ear. Sometimes…
Ullucus tuberosus (aborigineus) The Peruvian historian María Rostworowski de Diez Canseco explains and recounts a mythic narrative related to Andean food plants, including, of course, the potato, which was domesticated in Peru 7000 years ago: “The feminine and divine element represents the fruitful and prolific mother; not in vain was the earth called Pachamama (mother…
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