Sacred Plants and Their Miraculous or Healing Properties

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to study the 'sacred' plants’, diverse from those exclusively medicinal but with an unquestionable ethnobotanical value because, added to their healing properties, they develop mystical experiences and altered states of consciousness analogous to the ecstatic trance. _Psychoactive_ plants have played an important role in medicine, religion, _ritual_ life and recreation since ancient times and_ have been_ consumed by many cultures, cults and groups during religious rituals and ceremonies for centuries. Used in indigenous contexts and acting as divine intermediaries, they provide treatment for physical, psychological, spiritual and social symptoms, diagnosis and cure of diseases as well as supernatural experiences focused in religious rituals. First of all it will be interesting to analyze its perspectives on ritual, shamanism and ecstasy techniques, to reexamine the distinction between psychotropic, analgesic, stimulant and visionary substances, its distinguishing characteristics, the latest research on symbolic beliefs and the men's bodily reactions and effects produced by the ingestion. The altered states of consciousness (ASCs), induced by the badly called 'hallucinogenic' plants, include bodily sensations, intuitions, visions, dreams or cognitive impacts with perception of strange sounds that allow to get in touch with the deep psyche. People in this condition could activate emotionally arousing experiences that digging _deep_ to _unearth_ a well of _memories_, to face limitations, response to the basic emotion of fear, and even intensify physical pain to definitively cure it. Altered states of consciousness differ energetically on the dimensions of (a) arousal versus sedation, (b) pleasure versus pain, and (c) expansion versus contraction [1]. We will later provide some background on the different 'entheogenic' plants distinguishing their regional use and finally, by selecting two most ecologically representative species, mandrake and peyote, we will identify both basic characteristics and their long and very complex history. The similarities and differences between the mandrake, an ancestral toxic plant in force since ancient times, usually used in Western culture, and peyote, characteristic of the New World, will show us the strong biological effects produced by their powerful alkaloids in human organisms. The two have a long history of medicinal purposes, while peyote widely used both by drug abusers and by peoples of traditional cultures, stands out as a current psychedelic drug much sought after and consumed by Western intellectuals around 1960. It will be interesting to analyze their true characteristics and the symbolic beliefs that they aroused due to the strange effects that their ingestion produced.