Heimia spp.
Even though there are dozens of names for Heimia salicifolia that cut across national borders from Mexico to Brazil as well as linguistic boundaries that indicate traditional medicinal plant knowledge among a diverse array of Indigenous groups, there is no known pre-Hispanic ritual use of this plant. Heimia is widely used as a folk medicine (often together with other plants) for ethnogynecological purposes such as infertility, ovarian inflammations and uterine ailments.
The earliest report of Heimia, also known as Sinicuiche, as a psychoactive plant is from Juan B. Calderón’s thesis “Estudio sobre el arbusto llamado sinicuiche” at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in 1886. The study is only 27 pages long and was done as a requirement for the author to receive his university degree in medicine as a pharmacist. Calderón hoped to substantiate reports of optical effects such as yellow vision and acoustical phenomena after ingesting infusions made from the leaves of Sinicuiche. The young student’s 19th-century scientific curiosity based on his direct experience with varying, precise amounts of self-administered plant-preparations bears a resemblance to the work of contemporary psychonauts that is available online in the Erowid Experience Vaults, where one can read dozens of earnest “trip reports” for Heimia salicifolia conducted over more than two decades. Although Calderón was unable to feel the psychoactive properties of Sinicuiche himself, he does seem to have been successful, as Christian Rätsch puts it, in producing “a morphogenetic field that still exerts itself and continues to develop today.” The Erowid experiences range from severe physical discomfort (“This is poison. Do not take it!” to a sublime, euphoric state, albeit of short duration (“Everything was bathed in a soft, wondrous sunshine […] A truly entheogenic experience if there ever was one!”. Victor A. Reko, in medical journals of the 1920s and 30s, refers to “a magical drink causing oblivion,” though it is unclear what, exactly, forms the basis of this conclusion. Professional academic researchers Marvin H. Malone and Ana Rother in their phytochemical and pharmacologic review of Heimia published in 1994 also conducted self-experimentation and could find no evidence of the plant’s alleged psychoactive properties. Likewise, the best that Jonathan Ott could do in Pharmacotheon based on his own personal experience is put Heimia on a list of “Doubtful Entheogens.” One might ask: is it only a certain variety of the plant that produces visionary qualities, the freshness of the leaves, the quantity consumed, the method of preparing an infusion that might require fermentation? Intuition takes one back to Calderón in the late 1800s and the likelihood that there was some cause for his initial research on Sinicuiche, also known as “Sun Opener”. Even so, there is also the ongoing issue of the inconsistent reproducibility of the entheogenic experience proffered by this enigmatic plant that seems to have become a repository for wishful human thinking.
