The sacred botany of healing

As progressive beings, we can try to benefit from the healing properties of psychedelic medicines, but we shall never forget – nor take for granted – the sacred knowledges behind them.

The physics of energy

Wherever you look in the world, humans are not its oldest inhabitants. The most ancient forms of life on Earth have always been plants, with some plant fossils dating back as far as 3.2 billion years.

The botanical kingdom has marvellously prepared a thriving environment in which humans and other living creatures can co-exist. There’s plenty we should be grateful for. Plants have a beautiful, synergistic relationship with the sun – they absorb solar rays and synthesise organic compounds, which then serve as a building material for both botanical and animal organisms.

This way, the solar energy is stored within the organic energy of the plants and the chemical equilibrium of life on Earth is sustained – through access to oxygen and diverse food chains.?

There’s no way one can imagine a global state of wellbeing without plants, and that is something that the Indigenous populations worldwide have consistently recognised for centuries.

For example, Ayurveda, one of the oldest medicine systems on the planet, believes that all things in the universe, both living and nonliving, are joined together on a subatomic level. So deep down in our bones, marrow and cells (all 37.2 trillion each one of us possesses), we all share the same energetic vibration. Just as Albert Einstein used to say: “Everything is energy, and that’s all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want, and you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way.

This is not philosophy. This is physics.

Interconnectedness of life

Dr Nicole Redvers, an assistant professor at the Department of Indigenous Health at the University of North Dakota, thinks that modern medical science has finally caught up to what traditional healing systems have known for centuries – that we’re all interconnected.

In her book, The Science of the Sacred: Bridging Global Indigenous Medicine Systems and Modern Scientific Principles, she investigates the bridge between evidence-based research and traditional healing modalities.?

“I’ve heard Aboriginal elders often proclaim that knowledge is nothing useful until you share it. They value sharing of the knowledge and being helpful to the community,”

Dr Redvers says poignantly. The collaborative spirit of pre-modern societies has guided their relationship with the world around them, and plant medicine power is one of the finest examples of this concept.

For Indigenous healers, it’s not the plant itself but the ritual and beliefs around it that render healing. “Many traditional cultures cannot separate their bodies and health from the environment around them, including the animals, the rocks, the plants, the stars and the winds.

In the light of traditional medicines, the most powerful thing you can do for yourself today is to engage in one of the activities that remind your body of the interconnectedness of all things,” Dr Redvers adds.

And that’s where hallucinogenic or consciousness-expanding medicines come into play.

Sacramental tools

While most hallucinogens are of plant origin, a few are derived from the animal kingdom (toads, frogs, fish), and some are synthetic (LSD). As Richard Evans Schultes explains in his cult book The Plants of the Gods, they’re complex chemical factories capable of inducing altered perceptions and hallucinations.?

While their full potential has not been yet understood, hallucinogens (also called psychedelics or?phantastica) are a fundamental pillar in most religious and spiritual rites of early civilisations. Non-Western cultures have used them as sacramental tools for thousands of years.

Some of the earliest mentions of psychedelics come from the Sanskrit religious texts that mention ‘Soma’, the active component which was possibly the hallucinogenic Amanita Muscaria (the Fly Agaric mushroom).

There are also ancient Greek myths of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which describe a drink made from the Paspali grass most likely infected with the Ergot fungus – the active component of which is a close relative of LSD.

It was consumed in a ceremony to worship Goddess Demeter, helping to communicate with her and the spirit of Earth.

Interestingly, Christianity has its own secret relationship to psychedelics.

Some scholars suggest that the apple eaten by Adam and Eve, which allowed them to open their eyes and see the world as it truly appeared, was the Stropharia Cubensis mushroom, still in abundance today at the base of trees in Palestine.?

While their spiritual role is rarely debated, the healing potential of psychedelics still puzzles the Western world that had institutionalised medicine and distorted the role of a doctor, commodifying it and detaching from the community.

Today, not many practitioners remember that the origin of the word?doctor?derives from the Latin?docere, which means 'to teach'. But how to teach if the time with your patient is scarce, and your toolbox is limited to prescribing drugs that treat symptoms, not causes of the disease???

Healing is not about pills

The biggest strength of Indigenous communities has been their ability to commune over important issues, together and in ritual.

For them, healing is an important social event – in villages and within tribes, it’s never been done alone and behind closed doors like in Western societies. Instead, it was the core area of social life, with the shaman as a leader of the ceremony, a mystical healing expert and a custodian of cultural traditions in one.

In her book, An Encyclopedia of Shamanism, Christina Pratt explains that traditionally, shamans had to master three specific functions.

First, they were to be responsible for entering altered states of consciousness. Then, they had to translate between the spirits and the physical world in a way that’s useful to the community while also meeting the community’s needs in ways other practitioners couldn’t.?

Pragmatic and mystical in equal terms, shamans were as adept at rebalancing the body and the mind as at teaching the community the difference between right and wrong.

Their healing methods were steeped in ritual, but modern science confirms that they were able to stimulate positive body responses – either through hypnotic susceptibility or placebo effects.

As Richard Evans Schultes explains: “Indigenous cultures usually have had no concept of physically or organically induced sickness or death: both result from interference from the spirit world. Thus, hallucinogens, which permit the native healer to communicate with the spirit world, often become greater medicines than pharmacology.”

During healing ceremonies, plant medicines were instrumental, but they were never served alone. To experience the therapeutic mechanisms of psychedelics, the members of the community had to enter altered states of consciousness, amplified by other cultural activities: fasting, chanting, drumming and dancing.?

Interestingly, this is another example of an overlap with

Modern neuroscience, which admits that psychoactive compounds like LSD and psilocybin influence the brain's neuroplasticity,

helping to shift emotional biases toward positive stimuli, increasing feelings of happiness, trust, and closeness to others and promoting prosocial behaviour.

Changing and reorganising thought patterns then allows finding new ways to process anxiety, depression or trauma.

In other words, in the traditional, pre-modern sense, healing was always deeply cerebral – it happened in the patient’s mind. Anthropologists admit that shamans couldn't fully understand all the cognitive and therapeutic mechanics of psychedelics.

But they knew their effects on people because of their deep respect towards the interconnectedness of all facets of life.?

If there’s one lesson the psychedelic medicines can help bring to our postmodern world, it’s that healing is never linear, rarely quick and shouldn't be done alone.

We need supportive communities – from doctors, spiritual leaders to empathetic families – to lift the heavy burden of mental health epidemics.

Whether done in the depths of the Amazon rainforest or the sterile rooms of New York practices, the treatments should never be rushed or devoid of the ritualistic aspect.

Psychedelics are not another pill to be popped but the journey the patient has to take, negotiating their relationship with themselves, their body and the whole world around them.

By Alex Reszelska