Then I saw descend from the sky – from the moon – a giant circle which came down and encircled the earth, as a rainbow of three colors – blue, red, and white. I began playing the ngombi under the rainbow and I heard the applause of men. I returned. All the banzie thought I had gone too far and was dead.
Since then I have seen nothing in eboka. But each time I take it I hear the spirits who give the power to play the ngombi. I play what I hear from them. Only if I come into the chapel in a bad heart does eboka fail me.
1982. From: White Rabbit: A Psychedelic Reader,
eds, John Miller and Randall Koral, 1995
And the leaves of the trees were for the healing of the nations
Revelations
Dawn F. Rooney
Betel-Chewing Traditions in South-East Asia
FEW TRADITIONS IN South-East Asia have the antiquity and universal acceptance of betel-chewing. The custom is over 2,000 years old and has survived from ancient times into the twentieth century. Its use cuts across class, sex, or age. Its devotees include farmers, priests and kings; men, women, and children. The homeliness of the name belies its importance.
Three ingredients – an areca nut, a leaf of the betel pepper, and lime – are essential for betel-chewing; others may be added depending on availability and preference. The leaf is first daubed with lime paste and topped with thin slices of the nut, then it is folded or rolled into a bite-size quid. The interaction of the ingredients during chewing produces a red-coloured saliva. Most of the betel juice is spat out. The tell-tale residue looks like splotches of dried blood. Indeed, the resemblance is so close that some early European visitors thought many Asians had tuberculosis. The splotches of betel spittle are spaced consistently enough for use as measurements of time and distance in rural areas. A short time is ‘about a betel chew’ and the distance between two villages, for example, may be ‘about three chews’.
Besides being chewed, the betel quid and the individual ingredients are widely used for medicinal, magical and symbolical purposes. It is administered as a curative for a plethora of ills, including indigestion and worms. It is believed to facilitate contact with supernatural forces and is often used to exorcise spirits, particularly those associated with illness. In its symbolical role, it is present at nearly all religious ceremonies and festivals of the lunar calendar. Betel fosters relationships and thus serves as an avenue of communication between relatives, lovers, friends and strangers. It figures in male-female alliances and its potency in this area is especially telling. Because of its power in bonding relationships, betel is used symbolically to solidify acts of justice such as oaths of allegiance and the settlement of lawsuits. Betel is a surrogate for money in payment to midwives and surgeons for services rendered.
A key to the unconditional patronage of betel is its use on four levels – as a food and medicine, and for magical and symbolical purposes. As such, this single tradition is an integral part of the art, ceremonies and social intercourse of daily life.
Why do people chew betel? The multi-purpose benefits are described explicitly in Indian literature as early as the sixth century. ‘Betel stimulates passion, brings out the physical charm, conduces to good luck, lends aroma to the mouth, strengthens the body and dispels diseases arising from the phlegm. It also bestows many other benefits.’ According to a sixth-century Indian text, betel is one of the nine enjoyments of life – along with unguents, incense, women, garments, music, beds, food and flowers named in a Sanskrit verse of the twelfth century.
The main reason for chewing betel seems to lie in the social affability produced by sharing a quid with friends. This enjoyment can be seen on the faces of a group of elderly men squatting around a betel box, or heard in the laughter of women relaxing in a rice field with a betel basket. Offering a quid to someone is a mark of hospitality.
From: Artificial Paradises: A Drugs Reader, ed. Mike Jay, 1999
Stewart Lee Allen
Ethiopian Prayer
Me buna nagay nuuklen
Me buna iijolen haagudatu
hoormati haagudatu
waan haamtu nuum dow
bokai magr nuken.
– Garri/Oromo prayer
The coffee bean has long been a symbol of power in Harrar. The caste of growers, the Harash, not only bore the city’s name but were forbidden to go beyond its walls lest the art of cultivation be lost. The head of the emir’s bodyguard was allowed a small private garden as a sign of his rank. And of course, natives worshiped their coffeepots, as in the prayer above, which translates:
Coffeepot give us peace
coffeepot let children grow
let our wealth swell
please protect us from evils
give us rain and grass.
I think we all pray to the first cup of the day. It’s a silent prayer, sung while the mind is still foggy and blue. ‘O Magic Cup,’ it might go, ‘carry me above the traffic jam. Keep me civil in the subway. And forgive my employer, as you forgive me. Amen.’
But the prayer from the Garri/Oromo tribe is more serious, part of a ritual called bun-qalle that celebrates sex and death, and in which the coffee bean replaces the fatted ox in a sacrifice to the gods. Among the Garri the husking of the coffee fruit symbolizes the slaughter, with the priests biting the heads off the sacrificial creatures. After this, the beans are cooked in butter and chewed by the elders. Their spiritual power thus enhanced, they pronounce a blessing on the proceedings and smear the holy coffee-scented butter on the participants’ foreheads. The beans are then mixed with sweet milk, and everybody drinks the liquid while reciting the prayer.
If the whole affair seems vaguely familiar, it should. Who has gone to a business meeting where coffee is not offered? Its use as an intellectual lubricant, along with its ability to ‘swell our wealth,’ per the Garri prayer, has made having a pot ready for consumption an international business norm. Looked at this way, a modern business office is nothing more than a ‘tribe’ camped out about its own sacred pot, and the bun-qalle is nothing less than man’s first coffee klatch, archetype of the world’s most common social ritual.
Two things about the bun-qalle mark it as probably the earliest use of coffee as a mind-altering or magical drug. The first is that the beans are fried and then eaten, a practice clearly derived from the coffee balls chewed by Oromo warriors near Kefa. The Garri, who live a few hundred miles south of Harrar, are related to the Oromo and share their language. The second part of the ceremony, where the roasted beans are added to milk and imbibed, indicates it predates Islam (AD 600) because Islamic alchemists believed that mixing coffee and milk caused leprosy (a belief that lies at the root of the disdain many Europeans have for coffee with milk).
Further indication of the ceremony’s extreme antiquity is the fact that the Garri associate bun-qalle with the sky god Waaq. His name may sound uncouth to us, but the worship of this sky god is thought to be among the world’s first religions. Whether the eating of coffee beans was performed in the original Waaq ceremonies is beyond knowing. One can say, I think, that since the Garri were doubtless among the first to taste our favorite bean, and since primitive people who discover psychoactive drugs tend to worship them (a penchant today denigrated as mere substance abuse), it seems likely that consuming the beans was added to the Waaq ceremonies at a relatively early date.
In the Oromo culture of western Ethiopia, the coffee bean’s resemblance to a woman’s sexual organs has given birth to another bun-qalle ceremony with such heavy sexual significance that it is preceded by a night of abstinence, according to the work of anthropologist Lambert Bartel. Oromo elder Gammachu Magarsa told Bartel that ‘we compare this biting open of the coffee fruits with the first sexual intercourse on the wedding day, when the man has to force the girl to open her thighs in order to get access to her vagina.’
After the beans are husked, they are stirred in the butter with a stick called dannaba, the word for penis. Some people replace the stick with bundles of living gras
s because a dead piece of wood cannot ‘impart life’ or impregnate the beans. As the beans are stirred, another prayer is recited until finally the coffee fruits burst open from the heat, making the sound tass! This bursting of the fruit is likened to both childbirth and the last cry of the dying man. The person stirring the beans now recites: ‘Ashama, my coffee, burst open to bring peace there you opened your mouth please wish me peace keep far from me all evil tongues.’
In being eaten the coffee bean ‘dies,’ blessing new thought and life, a tradition the Oromo say goes back as far as anyone can remember. After the bean has spoken, the assembly moves on to the matter at hand, such as a circumcision, marriage, land dispute, or the undertaking of a dangerous journey.
One important point about the bun-qalle. The beans are simply added whole to the milk, not pulverized. True infusion, where crushed beans are added to a neutral liquid like water, thus completely releasing the bean’s power, is reserved for the darker acts such as laying a curse or, as in tonight’s ceremony, the exorcism of evil spirit.
The Devil’s Cup, 2000
Howard Marks
A Dope Strategy for the Third Millennium
AS THE WAR against drug users increases in intensity, with weed being ripped out of wardrobes and pills pulled out of pockets by pillocks and police, one needs to seriously and tenaciously seek alternative ways to get hammered during this current millennium. One obvious solution is to venture forth into the remote countryside and grow more weed. Plough the fields and scatter skunk seeds everywhere. But a far more pioneering and vastly overlooked defence against the anti-caning brigade is the sensible use of animal products as psychoactive sources. Most outbuildings can be easily converted into zoos and menageries of supplies for getting stoned.
The first animal to acquire is, of course, a reindeer, a far more interesting pet than either a dog or cat: reindeer are attracted to smoke, eat mushrooms, go into psychedelic trances; and their piss gets you off your tits. The Chukchi people of eastern Siberia are rarely found without a couple of bags of reindeer piss by their side. And no country has yet made piss illegal.
Another valuable potential psychoactive pet is the good old giraffe. The Humr tribe of Baggara, Arabs who live in Kordofan, Sudan, are normally strict abstainers. But they kill giraffes and boil up their livers and bone marrow to make a drink called umm nylokh. After drinking umm nylokh, one sees hallucinations of giraffes everywhere, stretching their necks longer to get at the leaves and making a mockery of Darwin.
Admittedly, giraffes and reindeer are a bit on the large side and need a lot of land and sky for exercise. So unless one wishes to make a business out of it, start small: get an insect house, and stock insects that can get you spannered or make you want to shag all night. Such an aphrodisiac is Spanish fly, which is made from beetle wings and ‘if anointed on the soles of the feet, testicles and perineum provokes and stirs up lust to a miracle in both sexes and invigorates the feeble instruments of generation’. It’s not really like that, but it does cause itching sensations in the genitals that are excellent fun to be scratched.
Ants, tarantulas, ground-up scarab beetles and various other insect potions are also documented as able to either get one out of it or keep one’s dick big and hard. So there’s plenty of opportunity for experiment, and it’s legal. Next to the insect house build an aviary, catch some South American birds called pitohui and eat them. You’ll see heavenly visions of birds of paradise. Next to the aviary, build a small reptile house and tropical pond. Inside the reptile house, put a load of king and other cobras. Get some of their venom, crystallise it, mix it with a skunk bud, put it in a pipe and smoke it. Hear the music of the snake charmers.
For the slightly more adventurous and wealthy, I would suggest converting all swimming pools into aquariums and stocking them with puffer fish (key ingredient of the very hardcore zombie drug), certain species of mullet (be careful of mental paralysis and delirium), tang (the nightmare fish) and yellow stingray (stoning aphrodisiac).
If skint, then simply rely on ponds full of newts, salamanders, frogs and toads. I, along with countless others, have licked toads and got absolutely legally wasted. Not just any old toad will do, of course. Ideally, it has to be the Sonoran Desert toad (aka the Colorado River toad: Bufo alvarius) which is found in Mexico and the southern United States. Pus is extracted, dried and smoked. It contains tryptamine 5-MeO-DMT, which is at least four times stronger than regular DMT and mimics the death and dream experiences. Devotees of its consumption call their cult the ‘Church of the Toad of Light’. So, fill the pond with these toads, and examine their shit for toadstools.
Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve
John Milton
Albert Most
The Psychedelic Toad
FRESH VENOM CAN easily be collected without harm to the toad. Use a flat glass plate or any other smooth, non-porous surface, at least twelve inches square. Hold the toad in front of the plate, which is fixed in a vertical position. In this manner, the venom can be collected on the glass plate, free of dirt, and liquid released when the toad is handled. When ready to begin, hold the toad firmly with one hand and, with the thumb and forefinger of the other hand, squeeze near the base of the gland until the venom squirts out of the pores and on to the glass plate. Use this method to systematically collect the venom from each of the toad’s granular glands: those on the forearm, those on the tibia and femur of the hind leg, and, of course, the parotoids on the neck. Each gland can be squeezed a second time for an additional yield of venom if the toad is allowed a one-hour rest period. After this the glands are empty and require four to six weeks for regeneration. The venom is viscous and milky-white in color when first squeezed from the glands. It begins to dry within minutes and acquires the color and texture of rubber cement. Scrape the venom from the glass plate, dry it thoroughly and store it in an airtight container. Smoke it.
Eros and the Pineal: The Layman’s Guide to Cerebral Solitaire, 1986
Sweet are the uses of adversity
Which like the toad, ugly and venomous
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head
William Shakespeare
Hunter S. Thompson
A Terrible Experience with Extremely Dangerous Drugs
‘AS YOUR ATTORNEY,’ he said, ‘I advise you not worry.’ He nodded toward the bathroom. ‘Take a hit out of that little brown bottle in my shaving kit.’
‘What is it?’
‘Adrenochrome,’ he said. ‘You won’t need much. Just a little tiny taste.’
I got the bottle and dipped the head of a paper match into it.
‘That’s about right,’ he said. ‘That stuff makes pure mescaline seem like ginger beer. You’ll go completely crazy if you take too much.’
I licked the end of the match. ‘Where’d you get this?’ I asked. ‘You can’t buy it.’
‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘It’s absolutely pure.’
I shook my head sadly. ‘Jesus! What kind of monster client have you picked up this time? There’s only one source for this stuff . . .’
He nodded.
‘The adrenalin glands from a living human body,’ I said. ‘It’s no good if you get it out of a corpse.’
‘I know,’ he replied. ‘But the guy didn’t have any cash. He’s one of these Satanism freaks. He offered me human blood – said it would make me higher than I’d ever been in my life,’ he laughed. ‘I thought he was kidding, so I told him I’d just as soon have an ounce or so of pure adrenochrome – or maybe just a fresh adrenalin gland to chew on.’
I could already feel the stuff working on me. The first wave felt like a combination of mescaline and methedrine. Maybe I should take a swim, I thought.
‘Yeah,’ my attorney was saying. ‘They nailed this guy for child molesting, but he swears he didn’t do it. “Why should I fuck with children?” he says. “They’re too small!”’ He shrugged. ‘Christ, what could I say? Even a goddamn werewolf is entitled to legal counsel . . . I
didn’t dare turn the creep down. He might have picked up a letter opener and gone after my pineal gland.’
‘Why not?’ I said. ‘He could probably get Melvin Belli for that.’ I nodded, barely able to talk now. My body felt like I’d just been wired into a 220-volt socket. ‘Shit, we should get us some of that stuff.’ I muttered finally. ‘Just eat a big handful and see what happens.’
‘Some of what?’
‘Extract of pineal.’
He stared at me. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘That’s a good idea. One whiff of that shit would turn you into something out of a goddamn medical encyclopedia! Man, your head would swell up like a watermelon, you’d probably gain about a hundred pounds in two hours . . . claws, bleeding warts, then you’d notice about six huge hairy tits swelling up on your back . . .’ He shook his head emphatically. ‘Man, I’ll try just about anything; but I’d never in hell touch a pineal gland.
‘Last Christmas somebody gave me a whole jimson weed, the root must have weighed two pounds; enough for a year but I ate the whole goddamn thing in about twenty minutes!’
I was leaning toward him, following his words intently.
The slightest hesitation made me want to grab him by the throat and force him to talk faster. ‘Right!’ I said eagerly. ‘Jimson weed! What happened?’
‘Luckily, I vomited most of it right back up,’ he said. ‘But even so, I went blind for three days. Christ I couldn’t even walk! My whole body turned to wax. I was such a mess that they had to haul me back to the ranch house in a wheelbarrow . . . they said I was trying to talk, but I sounded like a raccoon.’
‘Fantastic,’ I said. But I could barely hear him. I was so wired that my hands were clawing uncontrollably at the bedspread, jerking it right out from under me while he talked. My heels were dug into the mattress, with both knees locked . . . I could feel my eyeballs swelling, about to pop out of the sockets.