Certain morning glories carry a further, weightier history: the seeds of some American species contain ergot-related alkaloids and were used by the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican peoples as ololiuqui, a sacred divinatory and visionary preparation taken under priestly control, its use recorded by early Spanish chroniclers who condemned it. This belongs to a specific ritual tradition and is described here from the outside; the seeds are genuinely toxic, and this is history and not any encouragement to use them. The morning glory thus carries two meanings drawn from two real properties, the gentle emblem of the day's brief beauty from its dawn-to-noon flower, and the grave sacred-visionary role of certain species from the chemistry of their seeds.
The active compounds identified in these seeds, chiefly ergine and related ergot alkaloids, were studied and chemically characterised in the 1960s by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, already known for his earlier discovery of LSD, whose research confirmed that the Aztec ololiuqui tradition rested on a real and potent, though chemically distinct, class of psychoactive compounds rather than on suggestion alone, a case where twentieth-century pharmacology took a colonial-era missionary condemnation and found, examined coolly, a genuine chemistry behind it.