Ah, how we call in the plant medicines that 'reflect a new beauty, a new way to see the world'. If you've experimented with these world decimating and rebuilding plants, you'll know that they teach us to see the world anew. Sometimes in a good way, and sometimes in a terrifying one.

On Youtube you can watch people smoke salvia and trip out. It's a symptom of the modern age that mind altering substances be writ large across public spaces. There's something that makes me uncomfortable with this - like walking with muddy boots into a church or leaving trash in a forest. I wonder about the importance of ritual in using entheogenic plant medicines in particular, given what they give us in return, and what they may give us - something we perhaps hadn't asked for.

Chewed or smoked, Saliva Divinorum is a powerful entity that deserves respect.
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The Pharamkoepia series by Dale Pendall presents to us this 'poison path' - a path of plant medicines that can be dangerous as well as enlightening. The series is a fusion of enthnobotany, folklore, science and poetry, neuroscience, mythology and how it interacts with our psychoactive use of plants. These poison paths are more esotoric than the banal cackling of a teenager collapsed in laughter on a stairwell getting hits on social media. This is about creating magical links with earth spirits, communicating with ancestors for insight, entering trance states, considering life cycles through natural patterns, working with spirits and honouring plants as deities.

Salvia Divinorum is a poison path plant - some compare it to ayahuasca in that regard, although I know little about that. In this exploration of this 'poison', I refer to Pendall - he is a springboard from where all other musings come. Christened by Pendall's poetic reverie, I emerge wet with desire to know more, and thus I leap into the web where poets and artists and dabblers muse too on on this extraordinary plant and it's capabilities.

Beginning: Sound

I begin with a song - listen as you read.

salvia divinorum
i think
i once read
salvador dalí
dreamed of worlds
full of divine creatures
that fell from the sky like
comets falling from the heavens.
and in his dreams, these creatures
appeared to be different from others.
they reflected a new beauty, a new way
to see the world.
Andvari Sæglópur

Or perhaps, this song - too hectic for me, but perhaps not for you. Perspectives are the point, perhaps. Ironically, in Mexican salvia ceremonies, noise and sound disrupt the medicine. Darkness is the cloak under which the spirits are called. Perhaps silence is better, after all.

The bark of the elder makes whistles for children

To call to the deer as they rove over the snow;

‘I am born in the dark’, says the Green Man,

‘I am born in the dark’, says he.

William Anderson

A Memory: Dabblings

We knew when we smoked salvia divinorum that it might not work the first time - the effect, they say, is cumulative - or, perhaps she is getting to know you first. I felt nothing but disappointment and perhaps a kind of unworthiness that this plant goddess did not visit me. What had I done wrong? It is funny, how plants become mothers, sisters - human beings. Goddesses all.

She can be shy. Sometimes she has to get to know you for a while, before she will come out and say hello. But once she appears, are there any who are more direct? - Dale Pendall

But sometimes, she can affect you on the first visit. Whilst I felt nothing but a lungful of smoke, he felt, perhaps, the theta rhythmic birds's tongues that Pendall speaks of -

It's like cat paws, soft cat paws pressing, or like a bunch of bird tongues lapping the mind. Or like tiny fingers, the way ivy fingers reach out to climb a wall . . .

and this poem where Laura McCarthy writes that:

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But then, perhaps the plant would not visit me so tenderly. Sometimes, plants are not to be messed with. We did call her - or him - with respect and reverence. We'd read about her as much as we could and it was at a time in our lives where we were deep in forest and herb lore. The Green Man was everywhere - nature personified as a man, a pre-Christian nature spirit to be worshipped and revered. Like our pagan ancestors, we knew the importance of the natural world and it's cycles, our dependence upon it. When we invoked the spirit of salvia, we did so knowing we were dabbling in something similarly greater than ourselves. Thus, the ritual - the moon, the cleaned pipe, the dark night in a quiet room.

Like antlers, like veins in the brain, the birches

Mark patterns of mind on the red winter sky;

‘I am thought of all plants’, says the Green Man,

‘I am thought of all plants’, says he.

- William Anderson

Whilst for me, there was only silence, my man went elsewhere. There was a green hill, and a forest, and a door in the hillside. Had he smoked more, would he have knocked? Would there have been an answer?

Pendall writes of one ingester who was visited not by a goddess, but by a giant wearing a belt of human skulls who looked directly at him and wanted to know why he'd been summoned.

And did not want a trivial answer.

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The Path of Ritual - Walking with Reverence, & Caution

Thus, we must be cautious of smoking or ingesting entheogen without a kind of thoughtful awareness of the sacred. Entheogens are not party drugs and we must not treat them as such.

Plants can be oracles, seers - instead, sages - and one would do well to bow at their feet rather than seek a high for the sake of a high. The Mazatecs treat the plant with such sacred reverence:

Thirteen pair of leaves, the stems all facing the same direction, are rolled into a cigar and eaten. That is the traditional way, the way of the Keepers of the Plant, the Mazatecs. The leaves are used the same way mushrooms are used, with candles (which are later put out), prayers, and singing. The ceremony is performed at night, in a darkened room. The darker the better. And the quieter the better: both light and noise have a way of dissipating the experience. It is not uncommon for the Mazatecs to wash the leaves down with a swig of tequila. The tequila cleanses the palate and may aid in the final absorption.
It lights up the mouth like a rainbow,
it's like a pastel sunrise breaking in the east.
There are strict taboos to keep for several days after eating the sacred leaves, such as not having any sexual contacts. It is also important to be ritually mindful when collecting the leaves, and also in cleaning up after the ceremony.
Dale Pendall

They believe salvia is the Virgin Mary, and that to ingest it is to speak with her, St Peter and even Jesus. For this reason, it's also know as hierba de Maria - the herb of Mary. It's a therapy too - one asks a question, and the answer is a re-framing of life issues. Thus, the diviner's sage - it 'divines' answers, an oracle, a seer.

Are their truths in this ability? Apparently. Salvinorin A binds to kappa-opioid receptors in the brain which shuts down the claustrum, which gives us a subjective experience of sight, sound and touch. Thus, consciousness stops being regulated - the ego dissolves. It is a Huxleyesque doorway - we go through it and step outside the reality we know to explore consciousness.¹ Thus salvia divinorum becomes a meditative tool too, with the potential to shift negative thought patterns which seems ingrained and habitual. It is also said to retrieve childhood memories. Not something to mess without a guide, I suspect, or at least a conversation with the Green Man beforehand, or any of the other spirits you might be interacting with.

But still, we get curious.

We like to walk around sometimes, and to see new places.
We like some of those animal things, like mating.
Sometimes we get curious
to see what it is like to program computers.
Dale Pendall

According to a VICE article where the reporter spoke of warnings give at a psychedelics conference, it makes you ' you trip harder, and weirder, than pretty much anything else.' Thus unless you're ready for this kind of effect, you might be best advised to leave it alone.

Kathleen Chichester's son died from salvia divinorum, she believes. I worry that he messed with the giant with the belt of skulls, or worse. He wrote that "salvia makes me realize that humans have no reason to be on Earth. We are all just grains of sand on reality beach.". There were no traces of salvia found in his system, yet it's listed on his death certificate and Chichester fights for regulation.

I'm cautious about fear mongering.

Is there research?

Yes. But it lacks poetry for me. Pinned butterflies. And yet - they say, perhaps, it is key in understanding Alzheimer's, cocaine addiction, chronic pain. Perhaps not the dangerous substance that but a whole therapeutic pathway. Ah yes, science, discovering what folklore has known all along. Still. Addictive? Perhaps not. But you don't want to drive a car on it. And if you have mental health problems to begin with, perhaps you don't want to let the salvia light in.

The subjective experience of acute salvia divinorum inebriation
Controversial Hallucinogen The Intense Effects of Salvia

Final Adjectives: Describing the Indescribable

Pendall's poetic cluster of adjectives to describe Diviner's sage are like bird tongues on my mind. It makes me want to write plant medicine poetry.

seer's sage
truth sage
dream sage
ghost sage
lizard sage
mouse sage
soft-footed sage
cymbals sage
roller coaster sage
rocket sage
wake-up sage
it's-like-a-dance sage
silver fox sage
bare light bulb sage
waterfall sage
garden green sage
bitter bitter sage
compost sage
sweet smoke sage
riverbank sage
shade-leaf sage
crenate-leafed sage
come-to-me sage
get-the-willies sage
whispering sage
get well sage
get fooled sage
candle-in-a-wind sage
nobody knows it sage
checkerboard sage
paisley sage
amazing sage
calico ribbon sage
vortex sage
owl sage
shape-shifting sage
skin-walking sage
who-are-you? sage
something-is-moving sage
get serious sage
look-we-have-come-through sage
on your own sage
she's leaving home sage
metate sage

Perhaps I will, with one of the other plants in the Plant Medicine challenge this fortnight.

Will you?

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Find the challenge here - you can choose salvia too, or the two other herbs listed (valerian and thyme) or all three. Write poetry, history, medicinal or personal research - the whole idea is to look at natural medicine from all angles rather than being THE definitive authority. Have fun, engage with others, and win some steem!

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