Angel's trumpet, the genus Brugmansia, is a small Andean tree with long pendulous trumpet flowers, and it is the New World counterpart of the Old World nightshades this atlas already holds in datura, henbane and belladonna.
Its alkaloids are tropanes, principally scopolamine and atropine, and they are the reason it belongs in a different category from every other plant this atlas describes. Tropanes are delirients, not visionaries. They produce disorientation, extreme dry mouth, blurred vision, a racing heart, and, characteristically, hallucinations that are not recognised as hallucinations: a person under scopolamine will converse with people who are not present and will not afterwards remember. Amnesia is typical and the therapeutic margin is narrow enough that accidental deaths occur.
Traditions that use it are correspondingly cautious. In Andean and Amazonian practice it is a specialist's plant, used for hard cases of diagnosis, for divination when other means have failed, and in some places given to children in initiation under close control. It is sometimes added in small quantity to ayahuasca, a practice regarded as advanced and risky. The Chibcha of Colombia are recorded using related preparations in funerary contexts.
Where other plants in this atlas are described by their traditions as teachers, this one is generally described as something closer to a force to be handled.