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Hierochloe odorata
Hierochloe odorata The Sweetgrass in the image for the Microcosms website was growing in a North Country backyard in upstate New York. Its name in Mohawk (Kanien’keha) is Óhonte Wenserákon. In an entry in The Canadian Encyclopedia, this plant with its distinctive red color at the base of its long fragrant leaves used for making…
Salvia apiana
Salvia apiana A website for the Department of Biology at the University of San Diego contains the following information about Salvia apiana, a well-known and popular smudging plant: “White sage is an important and sacred plant for Native Americans. This plant provides both food and medicine for the Kumeyaay. The seeds of the white sage…
Latua pubiflora
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…
Nicotiana rustica
Nicotiana rustica Johannes Wilbert’s impossibly comprehensive study of tobacco has stood the test of decades: “Tobacco in traditional South American societies […] is shown to have played a culture-building role. Functioning as an actualizing principle between the telluric and the cosmic, it has served to validate the normative behavior and to affirm cultural institutions.” Wilbert…
Salvia divinorum
Salvia divinorum The most comprehensive overview of Salvia divinorum, a member of the mint family, was published in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology in 2013 by a team of researchers headed by Ivan Casselman. Their article “concentrates on the investigation of Salvia divinorum over the last 50 years including ethnobotany, ethnopharmacology, taxonomy, systematics, genetics, chemistry and…
Lophophora williamsii
Lophophora williamsii Wade Davis hopes that we always keep in mind a fundamental truth regarding this cactus: “In fact, we now know, based on recent archeological discoveries, that the native people of Mexico have eaten peyote for seven thousand years.” About what they characterize as a “divine cactus” used by the Huichol (Wixárica) of Mexico,…
