Anadenanthera spp.
Constantino Manuel Torres and David B. Repke, authors of Anadenanthera: Visionary Plant of Ancient South America, the most comprehensive study of this plant maintain: “The genus Anadenanthera was, together with tobacco, one of the most widely used shamanic inebriants.
It is primarily South American in distribution and includes two species with two varieties each.
The earliest evidence for the use of psychoactive plants in South America is provided by remains of seeds and pods recovered from archaeological sites four millennia old.
Seeds are roasted, pulverized, and inhaled through the nose, or smoked in pipes or as cigars.”
They also point out that “the earliest descriptions of the use of visionary plants in the Americas refer to smoking of tobacco and inhalation of powdered seeds of Anadenanthera peregrina by the Taínos of the Greater Antilles […]
The first description of snuffing practices in the Americas was written by Christopher Columbus from observations made during his second voyage (1493-1496).
During his brief period of residence on the island of Hispaniola, Columbus observed that the natives engaged in a religious ceremony in which the snuffing of a psychoactive powder was an integral part.”
Hundreds of thousands of examples of rock art possibly produced by the Carijona people have been identified at the archaeological site of Chiribiquete (located in the departments of Caquetá and Guaviare in Colombia). The oldest drawings could be up to 20,000 years old. The paintings in the rock shelters include depictions of sacred plants, among them the psychoactive acacia Anadenanthera peregrina known as yopo. According to Colombian archaeologist and anthropologist Carlos Castaño-Uribe, author of the indispensable study Chiribiquete: la maloka cósmica de los hombres jaguar: “In the sacred iconography, the yopo seed is represented with a spiky stem and a bifurcation for the beginning of germination. As the seedling grows, it forms a central branch (tridigit). In many representations the image is synthesized with a fully horizontal germination and ascending leafy ramifications, which are associated with dances with the Center of the World Pole, a key aspect of the dance rituals observed in Chiribiquete.”
The images from the confocal microscope that we have included in the website are of Anadenanthera colubrina, which is from South America. The incontrovertible archaeological evidence in the form of actual seeds that Torres and Repke mention is from sites in northern Chile and Argentina, as well as Bolivia, near Lake Titicaca. There are also extraordinarily artistic snuffing trays and other paraphernalia associated with the ingestion of the toasted and crushed seeds that contain high amounts of bufotenine.
I met Manolo Torres in 1983 when we both had Fulbright grants to work on projects in Chile. I was doing the research necessary to edit and translate a bilingual anthology of contemporary Chilean poetry ten years after the military coup. I had the rare privilege of seeing Manolo as he worked through his hypotheses and fascinating questions, still unresolved at that time, when he invited me to visit him in San Pedro de Atacama, one of the driest and most beautiful places on earth. Ancient mummies, snuff trays and, at night, more stars than I had ever seen! The Milky Way is a white river there!
The very closely-related species Anadenanthera peregrina, called cohoba by the Taínos in the Caribbean, was documented by a friar, Ramón Pané, who was commissioned by Columbus to study the ceremonies and antiquities of the Indigenous people who inhabited the islands. Pané, beginning in 1494, worked a full four years on his ethnographic research, which included specific references to this all-important psychoactive powder made from the seeds of A. peregrina. The Inquisition produced the violent banning of this sacred plant and the rituals associated with it that were considered a threatening source of Indigenous social coherence and unwanted competition with Christianity. This tragedy also marks the beginning of Europe’s ecological devastation of the Americas. And, of course, the regional human toll with regard to the subsequent extermination of the Amerindian population of the Greater Antilles could not be greater.
Palaeoethnobotanic evidence discovered by a team of researchers led by Matthew E. Biwer during excavations at a site in Quilcapampa strongly suggests that the Wari culture during the Middle Horizon (AD 600-1000) produced a psychoactive fermented drink by combining Schinus molle drupes and Anadenanthera colubrina (vilca) seeds. According to this article published in the journal Antiquity: “Vilca-infused molle chicha enabled a more inclusive psychotropic experience in Wari society. For perhaps the first time in the Andes, the consumption of vilca therefore moved beyond those spiritual leaders who communed with the supernatural realm.” The public, ritualized partaking of this brew is an example of the ancient use of hallucinogens in Peru to coordinate collective action and create social cohesion.
In the extraordinarily insightful and comprehensive study “Contemporary Uses of Vilca (Anadenanthera colubrina var cebil): A Major Ritual Plant in the Andes,” Verónica S. Lema, an anthropologist from the National University of Córdoba in Argentina, highlights “the enduring ritual value” of A. colubrina from a pre-Hispanic past to the contemporary south Andean world. Vilca or cebil, says Lema, is used for magical-religious, medical and veterinary purposes, as well as for construction, fuel, fodder, dyeing, and artifact-making. In keeping with Andean conceptions of illness, Lema describes how vilca seeds are believed to “act as protective amulets, playing a dual role: shielding the body to prevent the displacement of its spirit and embodying a continuous, rotation movement, [which] compels incoming negativity to reverse its trajectory and to return to its point of origin.” Lema provides detailed information about the multiple ways that A. colubrina is used not only for protection and to bring good luck, but also as a purge, cleanser, medicine, and ritual drink, as well as an ingredient in ritual bundles for ceremonial altars (mesas). Lema undertook this fieldwork between 2017-2019 by doing interviews with people selling medicinal products at numerous traditional markets in Peru, Bolivia and northwest Argentina.
A group of scientists, primarily from Brazil’s Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso and led by Merline Delices, published an overview of A. colubrina that demonstrates how recent pharmacological studies corroborate popular therapeutic uses of extracts of this plant to heal wounds and as an anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, antidiarrheal, antifungal and antitumoral. The scientists warn that unregulated use of bark and seeds from this plant for medicines and for recreational psychedelic experiences may result in its extinction.
