The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 50 of 125
Taught by the plants themselves
Indeed, the far-reaching question Schultes’s fieldwork raises is how the local tribes could possibly have worked it out. Trial and error, in a jungle containing some eighty thousand different species of plant, hardly seems credible. The case of curare, the paralyzing arrow poison (the chemistry of which Schultes also cracked) is even more enigmatic. In The Cosmic Serpent, Jeremy Narby writes: There are forty types of curares in the Amazon, made from seventy plant species. The kind used in modern medicine comes from the Western Amazon. To produce it, it is necessary to combine several plants and boil them for seventy-two hours, while avoiding the fragrant but mortal vapors emitted by the broth. The final product is a paste that is inactive unless injected under the skin. If swallowed it has no effect. It is difficult to see how anybody could have stumbled on this recipe by chance experimentation.5 So how did these “primitive” tribes acquire such botanical and chemical knowledge? The Indians, Narby reports, all say either (a) that the gods told their ancestors how to do it at the dawn of time, or (b) that they were taught by the plants themselves, particularly when the plants were taken in conjunction with ayahuasca, which showcases the properties of any given plant. Such explanations have, needless to say, left most Western scientists speechless with indignation.