Ipomoea violacea : from PHARMAKO/GNOSIS by Dale Pendell

An Excerpt from Dale Pendell's Book

Dale Pendell

Common names: Tlitliltzin. Heavenly Blue. Pearly Gates. Morning glory.

Ololiuhqui, sometimes applied to morning glory, is the Nahuatl word for the seeds of Turbina corymbosa (Rivea corymbosa), a closely related plant.

Part Used:
The seeds

Chemistry:
Lysergic acid amide ("LSA"). By chemical extension, if the two protons clinging to the nitrogen atom are replaced by ethyl groups, we have d-lysergic acid diethylamide ("LSD"). LSD has not yet been found in a plant.

[structural formulae for LSA and LSD appear here]

Besides ergine (d-lysergic acid amide), ololiuhqui and other psychoactive morning glories contain isolysergic acid amide and half a dozen other closely related compounds of various toxicities, including ergometrine (ergonovine), a powerful uterotonic.

Ergine, or LSA, is about one-twentieth the potency of LSD.

Effects:
Albert Hofmann claimed, after self-experiment, that LSA was a narcotic-sedative as much as a hallucinogen.

moving and flowing--
dream/waking
blur.
Or are we dreaming
always?

Colors. Plants, ready to talk. Me, just as I am. Act of faith.

The Ally:
Much esteemed by a few aficionados. Most find LSD both more reliable and more pleasant. The plant freaks smile to themselves and gently shake their heads.

Not the same. Not the same.

The indigenous people of Oaxaca use various species of Ipomoea, as well as ololiuhqui, for divination and curing, exactly as had the Aztecs five hundred years before them. Gordon Wasson wrote that ololiuhqui and tlitliltzin are more widely used today in Mesoamerica than teonanacatl, the sacred mushroom.

Many mesoamerican Indians believe that the tlitliltzin speaks so clearly and plainly that the services of a shaman are unnecessary. Unlike the mushrooms, the seeds are usually given to one person at a time.

The Plant:
Ololiuhqui, "the round ones," in Nahuatl. Sometimes coaxihuitl, or coatl-xoxouhqui:
Snake plant, the green snake plant.

The Ally:
Some claim it to be profound.

Effects:
10:15 pm.
Drank a cold water infusion of Heavenly Blue. Not bad tasting. Herbal and wild, but not bitter.

The Plant:
Xtabentum: "precious stone cord," Mayan.
Tlitliltzin: "the sacred black ones,"
Mazatec: na-so-le-na: "flower-her-mother."
Mayans call morning glory xtontikin, "dry penis."

Effects:
10:40 pm.
Took a shower and a bath. Soaking in the tub felt good. Closed my eyes. A weird and penetrating sound wormed into my thoughts. Opened my eyes: it was the faucet, leaking. First alert.

Standing, bending, towelling off brings some slight nausea. Some anxiety.
But I was even more anxious before I started. Mainly I just want to lie down. If I had a uterus, would I be cramping? Maybe. Tightness in the gut.

Closing eyes, thoughts/mental events are loud, amplified. Try to keep my eyes slightly open, follow my breathing.

The Plant:
In 1629, Hernando Ruiz de Alarcon described the use of ololiuhqui in his Treatse on the Heathen Superstitions. Alarcon had been brought to the attention of the Inquisition because he was torturing and conducting his own autos-da-fé, matters of Inquisitional jurisdiction. The investigation that followed found that his error had been made out of ignorance rather than malice, and his zeal was recognized and rewarded with an eccesiastical judgeship in the Holy Office.

The religious character of the War on Drugs has been obfuscated as much as possible. Only when the speciousness of the arguments of public health and crime are refuted by logic, science, and sociological research do the warriors sometimes reveal their true beliefs and prejudice: i.e. that the use of entheogenic plants is a threat to civilization itself, by which they mean their religious hegemony. Willfully exploring self and consciousness with the aid of plants is considered worse than mere criminality, it is seen as heresy and blasphemy, as an attack on the Holy values of the true church of Western rationalistic materialism.

And it is punished accordingly. Twenty-year-olds in their tie-dyeds, arrested at Grateful Dead shows for possessing LSD, are often given longer prison terms than embezzlers or killers.

Almost all of them [the Indians] hold that the ololiuhqui is a divine
thing . . . And with the same veneration they drink the said seed,
shutting themselves in those places like one who was in the
sanctasanctorum, with many other superstitions. And the veneration with
which these barbarous people revere the seed is so excessive that part
of their devotions include washing and sweeping even those places where
the bushes are found which produce them, which are some heavy vines,
even though they are in the wilderness and thickets.

--Hernando Ruiz de Alarcon, 1629

The War on Drugs was launched by the European invaders shortly after their arrival in the New World. Possession of the sacred seeds was made a crime, and Alarcon, like other ecclesiastical authorities, began a campaign of uprooting and burning the vines wherever he could find them, along with those who loved them. The Holy Inquisition itself was formally inaugurated in 1571, set up to ferret out lapsed maranos, sephardic Jews who had feigned conversion to Christianity, in addition to exterminating heresy among the Indians. The Inquisition specifically ordered the prosecution of divination by hallucinogenic plants.

Since preaching has not sufficed, rigorous punishment is needed,
because, being--as they are--children of terror, it may be that
punishment may accomplish what reason has not been sufficient to,
since the Apostle said, compelle intrare. ["Compel them to
come in." Luke 14:23.]

--Hernando Ruiz de Alarcon

A war of sacraments.

Wine was the blood of Christ, but the Aztecs had their own sacred plants:
teonanacatl, "God's flesh," the sacred mushroom, and teotlacualli, "food of God," an unguent prepared with ololiuhqui.

The sorcerers persuade the people with such ease that they find it
unnecessary to use menaces or torture or threaten them with the wheel
of blades of Saint Catherine or the gridiron of Saint Lawrence.

--Fray Diego Duran

Alarcon complained that in spite of severe punishments, the Indians seemed to be more concerned with maintaining the good will of the ololiuhqui than with escaping the fury of the Inquisition.

aco nechtlahueliz: let it not be that he become angry.

Effects:
10:50 pm.

Drifting.
Phantoms. Truths. Insights. Connections. Poems.
River of dreaming.

"There aren't any good things in those values."

Values/thoughts. Dharmas. All are ill. Dukkha. The Way of Makyo is the Path of Ill. Up to your armpits in samsara.

Go further.

11:00.
Ring? Or ring in the mind? Which telephone? Either way it wakes me up.
Thoughts, jokes, all flowing down the river and over the falls.
Who is guest and who is host? We dine together. The guests pay their way
by talking and telling stories. But the banquet is interrupted.

(a pebble striking bamboo . . .)

Who knocks? Serres's parasite. Alcibiades banging at the door.
The gods come to visit.

The Poison:
Don't take It unless you want to know everything simultaneously,
hell & heaven, terror & ecstasy --

When I tell you to try it it is afterwards in a room with solid
furniture, remember that.

--Alden Van Buskirk, "Lami in Oakland"

Matters of State and Liberty:
Alarcon's program was the extirpation of heresy, sycretism, and the works of the Devil. He feared divination, and he feared the resemblances of Mesoamerican religion to his own. He feared the easy way that the Indians could assimilate Catholicism without denying the older gods of their own land. He feared the little carved animals and figures, the "idols." He found them hidden in piles of rocks at passes and crossroads. He found them hidden in churches where the people would place their offerings of copal. He even found one that had been built into the base of a large cross (after the cross had been struck by lightning). And he found them in the specially woven baskets that hid the ololiuhqui.

The special baskets contained ritual objects along with the seeds: a small carving, a piece of incense, pieces of embroidery, "little girls' dresses, and things of this nature." An ololiuhqui basket was passed on to the owner's descendents. Sometimes the basket was placed inside of a larger, carved wooden box.

Alarcon's advice for catching the heretics:
1. Arrest the delinquent outside of the village, so that he cannot take precautions or warn others.
2. Place guards at his house and place his nearest relatives under guard.
3. Don't trust the local authorities as "usually there is no one who is faithful."
4. The judge should seize the evidence in person, as the delinquent Indian will often swallow the idol if
it comes into his reach "even though he is already convicted and knows that if he swallows it he will
surely die."
5. In searching a house be diligent, examining even old and dirty pots.

. . . while it did not actually show up in the house, she had an old,
dirty pot covered with a potsherd in the courtyard of the house. The
black pot was full up to the brim with ololiuhqui, and in the middle
of it, in the depth of the pot, wrapped in a rag, was the little idol,
which was a little black frog of stone.

--Hernando Ruiz de Alarcon

As Moses said,

I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.

The Ally:
Tlitliltzin is above all a plant of divination. Divination was its principal use by the Aztecs, as it is in Mesoamerica still today. Alarcon reported, with some indignation, that some of the Aztec doctors "practice ololiuhqui drinking as a profession."

Whether it is the doctor or another person in his place . . . he
closes himself up alone in a room, which usually is his oratory, where
no one is to enter throughout all the time that the consultation lasts,
which is for as long as the consultant is out of his mind, for then
they believe the ololiuhqui or peyote is revealing to them that which
they want to know.

--Hernando Ruiz de Alarcon

Alarcon distinguishes between the false results of divination, "just a representation of the imagination caused by the conversation," and the true results, which are revealed by the Devil.

Despite Mathias having been selected by the eleven as Judas's successor by the casting of lots, the Church inveighed against divination of any form. Fortuna had been mostly disassembled by Chance-- but the Devil, the one who could speak truth, was a far deadlier foe.

The Devil usually mixes something of our holy religion in those
apparitions of his so that he whitewashes his malice and lends a
color of goodness to such a great evil.

--Hernando Ruiz de Alarcon

Effects:
11:15.
I'm fairly comfortable. Don't want to get up. Some belching. Dog sleeping upside down with all his feet splayed out into the air: from me? Fluidity begins. Formerly distinct partitions between categories, perceptions, and thoughts blur, visually.

Ripple in a clear lake: grass and sedges rippled beneath.

In the mountains at a lake, wave patterns on the transparent surface of the water. Sunrise. Birds darting over the lake like bats, feeding. Blue.

Grasses on the bottom of the lake and his mind fell through.

Out across the lake the breeze breaks up the glassy surface into alternating patches of smooth and rippled water, like pages, the rippled areas like an ancient script.

Cursive runes. Stelae.
An oasis on the Silk Road. Takla Makan.

The letters and words of an eidetic alphabet. The script of knowledge.

WE WILL SHOW YOU HOW TO READ OUR LANGUAGE. YOU MAY ASK US ANY QUESTION.

The world as poison. This world. Of all possible and parallel and coexisting universes, this particular one: the one in which stones are heavy and thoughts light. "The world is a drug." Not a metaphor but a tautology.

"What are the poisons?"

WE ARE THE POISONS.

All dharmas are poisons. Stone in the mind, goose in a bottle.

"What is seeming and what is real?"

WE WHO SHOW YOU THE REAL ARE SEEMING.

The light on the water supported his weight. In the middle of the
lake he thrust his hand into the water.

Curings are performed at night, and quiet is important. Sometimes the doctor speaks into the patient's ear, reminding him of his questions. To an outside observer it may appear that the person is talking to himself.

Sometimes the ally speaks in visions rather than in voices. If the visions are hellish, it is said to be because a taboo has been broken. The remedy is to eat chilies and salt and to go to sleep.

Effects:
11:30.
(hey, he still hasn't moved up off of the bed)
(yeah, what's he doing down there?)

The words are sinking. The clock is running down.
(Yes. That means you are dying.
The time alloted to works is not infinite.)
Words sinking.
(some may rise up, have their own life,
live for awhile in the free air like butterflies . . .

live for a season.)

I have arrived at square minus one.

From here we could go anywhere.
A voice would lead me.
(a voice whispering into my ear...)

The Poison:
turn out lights, lie alone in dark room &
start imagining anything, start with any image & let it send out
another. Don't drink or take any depressants. Luck.
--Alden Van Buskirk, "Lami in Oakland"

Effects:
all a dream we dreamed
one afternoon long ago
--Robert Hunter, Phil Lesh

Karma is the link from one thought to the next. Ahhh, endlessly arising.
Dharmas and phantoms, Mara and Buddha. The uninvited guest is the ring.
The knock. Door bursting open. Alarm clock. The medicine.

The Poison:
I am ready to come back to you. I've lived my life a
million times over in a few hours, seen everything, known too
much, & now I'm burnt out, want only love & peaceful madness
of America seen & shared with your eyes.
--Alden Van Buskirk, "Lami in Oakland"

Matters of State and Liberty:
It is worth noting that Aztec religion and society were both hierarchical. That the Aztec nobility evidently had no trouble integrating the use of entheogenic plants into that hierarchy should give pause to those who believe that if only more people today would use hallucinogenic drugs, our society would perforce become kinder, gentler, and more egalitarian.

The Plant:
Considering the easy availability of psychoactive morning glory seed, the ease of growing them, and their tolerance of many climate zones, it is remarkable that more plant people do not make use of this ancient and time-tested plant. It says something about the availability of LSA's better known diethyl cousin.

The Plant:
I. violacea: quiebraplato, "plate breaker."
Mixe: piH pu'ucte.sh, "broken plate flower."
Ma-sung-pahk: Mixe, morning glory, "bones of the children."
La'aja shnash: Zapotec, "seeds of the virgin."

Gordon Wasson and Jonathan Ott note that the contemporary Mexican term for morning glory seeds, semillas de la virgen, probably does not refer to the Virgin Mary, but to the virgin who ground the seeds.

Effects:
1:00 AM: Music. Grateful Dead in a long jam with Branford Marsalis. All the instruments distinct and separated.

2:00 AM: Gut still hard. Tired. Mind still very active, but I will sleep and let the dream be dreaming.

The dreams of the children.
The little ones who come to tell you.
The plant children, our children,
who grind the medicine.