He wants an old drug…

An article in Wednsday’s Jornada, (“Etnias nayaritas se oponen a que las farmacéuticas comercialicen el peoyte”) reported on the indigenous communities in Nayarit which express objections to so far vague suggestions of commercializing peyote along with other hallucionagenic fungi for pharmeceuticals. While there has been research for years, and some clinical studies suggesting the value of these fungi in treating illnesses like depression, the proposal, by Green Party Senator Alejandra Lagunes (who claims her depression was cured with ayahuasca — which grows in Amazonia, not Mexico) was printed in the Gazeta Oficial back in October 2023. Not that anything has come of it so far.

The objections are not, as one might have expected, on the disruptions to indigenous communities following the “discovery” of possible pharmaceutical value to “magic mushroom” back in the 1950s, when Gordon Watson wrote about Maria Sabina for Life magazine. While Sabina claimed the invasion of the gringos. As Sabina later sadly said:

These young people, blonde and dark-skinned, didn’t respect our customs. Never, as far as I remember, were the saint children eaten with such a lack of respect. For me it is not fun to do vigils. Whoever does it simply to feel the effects can go crazy and stay that way temporarily. Our ancestors always took the saint children at a vigil presided over by a Wise One.

Although, in a way, that is what the wix{arika, naayerij, o’dam and mexikan communities are arguing. To them, peyote has religious and cultural significance, and not a medication, not in the physical sense (unless, perhaps, in the sense that the pope referred to Christian sacraments as “medicine for the soul”). Not to mention the ecological damage (and several of these cultures see the land itself as sacred) caused by outsiders “harvesting” cacti and other desert flora for “medicinal use”.

As it is, some of the fungi and plants once held sacred, or having theraputic uses, have disappeared for one reason or another. Among them, the “Narcotic Rose” … the subject of a rather lyrical article by historian Ernesto Serna, in today’s Milenio. My translation:

In ancient Mexico, something similar to a musician’s jam sessions featured both flowers and songs. The magicians of the word, almost all of noble birth, met at the most elegant brothel in Tenochtitlan — euphemistically called cuicalli (“song houses”) — where they began the session by invoking the muses, singing their poems, and chatting up the good-time dancing girls. Until the spirit moved them to a more carnal release, though the libertines among them probably had their dessert before the soup. No poet declaimed without music. The vibrations of the teponaztli, the percussions of the huéhuetl, the whistle of the flutes, the ululation of the sea snail and the ringing of the tetzícatl (a type of cymbal) marked the meter of the poems, different for each lyrical genre. The music played an important function, “bringing the gods down to earth,” according to the historian Guilhem Olivier. Dance was also essential, and a poet had to dance with grace.

Father Angel María Garibay, a distinguished compiler and translator of Nahuatl poetry, maintained, against all evidence, that in that orgiastic atmosphere the poets did not get drunk. He undoubtedly sought to exonerate them from any fall into perdition, attributing to them an Apollonian serenity incompatible with the induced euphoria, but the very songs that Garibay translated refute his pious conjecture. The “celestial parrots” may have been cautious about ingesting pulque, but not because they were paragons of sobriety: they drank in moderation so as not to cross paths with other substances, since we know that they resorted to artificial paradises to ignite their imagination. They ate, for example, chocolate sprinkled with poyomatli, a rose fungus that apparently drew sumptuous metaphors from their souls. The anonymous author of an elegy in honor of Nezahualcóyotl put fervent praise of that forgotten drug in the poet king’s mouth: “There are flowery songs: let it be said/ I drink flowers that intoxicate,/ the flowers that make you dizzy have arrived, come and you will be glorified/. The drum is already beating: let it be the dance: my heart is dyed with beautiful narcotic flowers.”

Less potent than magic mushrooms, poyomatli mixed with tobacco or dissolved in chocolate was a “controlled substance”, in that it permitted the user some control over their hallucinations, to “put the words on their feet,”according to Miguel León Portilla. Some evidence suggests that the rose fungus had aphrodisiac powers. In a beautiful erotic song by Tlatecatzin, a 14th century poet, carnal pleasure and lyrical impulse seem like two sides of the same coin. After greeting a “sweet, tasty woman, a beautiful flower of toasted corn,” who invites pleasure, Tlatecatzin exclaims “The blossoming cocoa already has foam/ the tobacco flower was distributed. /If my heart liked it/ my life would be intoxicated.”

The praise of flowers in Nahuatl poetry is such a cliché that it can annoy a modern reader. For example, the eagle warriors were a “flower of shields”, the battlefields were watered with “blood flowers” and the poems themselves were attempts to create “unfading flowers, perfecting the task of the gods”. The rose is the poetic flower par excellence, and apparently the ancient Mexicans esteemed it as much as the Europeans. The consumption of poyomatli suggests that roses mixed with foaming cocoa also beautified the gardens of thought. The rose with fungus is a sick rose, but the Mexica sensed, before Baudelaire, the charm locked in the flowers of evil.

As far as I know, poyomatli disappeared along with the pre-Hispanic civilization, since no one consumes it today, unlike peyote or the extensive variety of hallucinogenic mushrooms found throughout Mexico. Did the cultivation techniques introduced by the Spanish eradicate the rose fungus? Did the insecticides kill it off? Is there no way to resurrect it in a laboratory? What has come down to us is combining chocolate with psychotropic substances. There is a black market for chocomushrooms and some eternal teenagers have taken to chocomilk with marijuna, in search of the youth they lost or wasted. It is difficult to imagine the bohemian evenings of pre-Hispanic poets without a nostalgic sigh. The extinction of an artificial paradise may be beneficial in terms of public health, but along with it dies a source of intuitions and dreams that may never return.