Ololiuqui

Ololiuqui is the Nahuatl name for the seeds of Turbina corymbosa, a white flowered morning glory of Mexico, and for their use in divination.

The practice is narrow and specific, and the colonial descriptions agree on it. A person with a question, ordinarily about a theft, a missing object, an absent relative or the cause of an illness, would consult a specialist, or take the seeds themselves; the seeds were ground and drunk; and the taker was placed in darkness and seclusion, sometimes with someone sitting by to listen, because the answer was expected to be spoken. This is divination in the strict sense, an instrument for getting information, not a ceremony of worship or a rite of passage.

The Spanish record is unusually good because it was hostile. The physician Francisco Hernandez described the plant and its effects in the sixteenth century, and the ecclesiastical authorities documented ololiuqui use extensively in the course of trying to extirpate it, producing manuals for identifying and punishing it. The Inquisition's interest generated the archive.

Related seeds of Ipomoea species, called tlitliltzin, were used in the same way, and both continued in use in Oaxaca and elsewhere into the twentieth century, where Zapotec and other communities were recorded still using them.

Ololiuqui is the clearest case in this atlas of a colonial account of a plant's effects being vindicated by chemistry, and it is worth setting out because the usual pattern is the opposite.

For most of the intervening period the Spanish descriptions were treated with suspicion. Nineteenth and early twentieth century commentators doubted that a morning glory seed could produce anything, suspected the friars of exaggerating in order to justify suppression, and in some cases proposed that ololiuqui was really datura misidentified. The seeds were tested and found inactive by researchers who, as it turned out, tested them wrongly or in insufficient quantity.

In 1960 Albert Hofmann identified the active constituents as ergoline alkaloids, principally ergine, closely related to the lysergic acid compounds he had worked on in ergot. The finding was surprising on its own terms, since these alkaloids were known from fungi and their presence in a flowering plant was unexpected, and it is now understood to involve a fungal endophyte living in the seed. The sixteenth century reports turned out to be accurate.

Two lessons follow. Colonial records of indigenous practice are hostile witnesses but are not therefore false, and they are frequently the only record there is. And an absence of demonstrated activity is not evidence of absence, a point directly relevant to the blue lotus, where the chemistry is currently unpersuasive and the iconography is not.