Divinity Atlas
Ethnobotany Still Owes This Atlas Four Plant Origins
Ethnobotany, the study of how human societies use plants, is named by this atlas as the discipline four open questions still wait on, one plant to a question: a shared word from the Vedas and the Avesta, a jungle vine from the Amazon, a mint from Oaxaca, and a water lily from the Nile.
Two Where the Plant Itself Is the Question
Soma is at once a plant, the juice pressed from it, and a god in the Rigveda, addressed across the whole of its ninth book as it is strained through wool into wooden vats, and the drink is described as producing exhilaration and clarity, what the gods themselves drink. What the plant actually was is unknown: ephedra, a mushroom and Syrian rue have all been proposed and none is established. The ritual use lapsed and the name transferred to the moon, and the Iranian haoma of the Avesta is, the atlas records, the same word and the same rite. The blue lotus, Nymphaea caerulea, is a water lily of the Nile and not a lotus at all, a confusion of names inherited from Greek writers and never corrected. It is the most frequently depicted plant in Egyptian art, held to the nose at banquets, offered to the dead, and used as an emblem of the sun rising from the water. Whether it was psychoactive is genuinely open: the iconographic case that it functioned as more than a perfume is substantial, the pharmacological case is weak, and the compounds proposed have not been shown to act at the doses available from a flower.
Two Where the Plant Is Known and the History Is the Question
Salvia divinorum is a mint of the cloud forest of the Sierra Mazateca in Oaxaca, known there as ska Maria Pastora, the leaf of Mary the Shepherdess, used by Mazatec curanderos for divination and healing, most often when the psilocybe mushrooms are out of season. It has no confirmed wild population and sets seed poorly, so it appears to be a human inheritance rather than a found one, and how long the Mazatec have used it and where the plant itself came from is what remains open. The ayahuasca vine, Banisteriopsis caapi, is a woody liana of the western Amazon that supplies the beta carboline alkaloids that make an orally inactive companion plant active, which is why the tradition treats the pairing, rather than the vine alone, as the discovery; how that specific combination was first arrived at is the open question the atlas records.