Luminous Numinous

It’s that time of year again. All across temperate regions of the western United States–and in the central and southern regions of the most populous state, California, in particular–the Jimson Weed is in full bloom. Datura Inoxia. Angel Trumpet. Stinkweed. Thornapple. Hell’s Bells.

Yeah, yeah, I know: technically, Jimson weed, which gets its name from the Jamestown settlement, where early arrivers to America were poisoned by ingesting the plant, is actually Datura Stramonium. But the more famous Datura is Datura Inoxia, nacazcul, toloache, the sacred Datura of the Aztecs and the Datura of Don Juan lore made famous by the writings of Carlos Castenada (Go Bruins.)

Every year a handful of bored, adventurous, and foolhardy teenage boys will get sick or even die from overdosing on the poisonous alkaloids in Datura. And it seems like every year the editors of magazines such as High Times and Heads have to write another series of polemic articles admonishing us that there is absolutely no safe and effective way to get high off of this most infamous of psychoactive plants.

It’s true, no doubt, that the conventional way of using Datura (making tea from the seeds) is stupid at best and lunatic at worst. It’s also true that the method of using the plant described in the Castaneda texts (making a tea of the root bark) is ineffectual; it’s bullshit; it doesn’t work. But are we throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Is there a way to use Datura that is more effective than making a tea of the roots (which does NOTHING) and safer than ingesting the highly toxic seeds (which are either chewed or, again, made into a tea)? My personal experience says “yes!”

“Hunter S. Thompson used the stuff,” I (my id?) tell myself. “Yeah, but Thompson would have ingested chlorine bleach if he thought it would have gotten him high,” another part of me (my super-ego?) responds. I’m out in the field, harvesting various parts of the plant to ingest. All in all, I spent the better part of a year fooling around with Datura. I’ve ingested every conceivable part of the plant: the roots, the rootbark, the leaves, the seeds, the shells of the seedpods, and each and every part of the flowers. Usually, the most I got was a headache (from elevated blood pressure) and cottonmouth. But I did figure out a way to put the stuff to good use. Eventually.

Datura is a fickle plant. Castaneda got that part right. Allegedly, Don Juan taught that some plant allies have dependable, loyal “male” spirits, while other plant teachers are highly potent but highly capricious–even coquettish. These spirits are (you feminists are going to have a field day with this) described as “female.” Datura is the quintessential female plant teacher. To borrow phraseology from the famous Faces song, Don Juan more or less thinks that Datura will “come on strong and it aint too long before [she'll] make you feel a man. But love is blind and you soon will find you’re just a boy again.” This is why Don Juan warns against Datura: she gives you too much power too quickly and then rends it back from you when you least expect it.

Cocaine would be another hallmark example of a female ally. White as a vestal virgin–just like Datura– cocaine has a whorish side, to be sure. The white lady will fuck you over in the end, despite Clapton’s crooning contention that “She don’t lie, she don’t lie, she don’t lie.”*

So Datura is demonized even in the Castaneda books that are most responsible for their use. (It’s interesting to note that the mythic relationship between femininity, evil, and mind-altering plants goes all the way back to Genesis and the Garden of Eden.)*

But when I say Datura is fickle, I, for one, do not mean to describe her as evil. What I mean is that she displays herself in an array of ways to different people. And she changes chimerically throughout the season and even throughout the course of the day. Her fragrance, for instance, ranges from the ambrosially aromatic to the pungently putrid. I have joked to friends that Jimson weed can smell like “Jasmine Weed” (with a fragrance resembling freesias, gardenias, or honeysuckle) or “Jism weed” (I swear to god that on its worser days, the plant smells exactly like stale semen), depending on when you smell her blossoms. This is why the plant is sometimes called “Stinkweed.” And, while I am no expert in Latin, I would wager that the “Inoxia” in “Datura Inoxia” is related to the English word, “noxious.”

And then there is her appearance. Some find her beauty mesmerizing; others find it menacing. The plant is commonly referred to as “Angel Trumpet” on the one hand, owing to her beautiful, long tubular blossoms of bright white which dilate as the seasons (and hours of the day) become increasingly warmer.

But, on the other hand, the same plant is also known by more sinister names, such as “Devil’s Weed,” and “Hell’s Bells,” a name synechdochically applied to the whole plant because of the minatory appearance of the spiky seed pods which are vaguely reminiscent of Pinhead from the Hellraiser movies.

And indeed the plant’s twofold nature, invoking metaphors of heaven and hell, has at least as much to do with her neurological effects as it does with her aesthetic attributes. The plant provides a passport to either beatific or demonic astral realms depending on dose, set, and setting.

Personal experiences and interviews with psychonaut friends have led me to the conclusion that making a tea out of 50-300 seeds is suicidally stupid. DON’T DO IT. You may well have fucked-up visions of ghosts, goblins, and ghouls. But you are more likely to just have fucked-up vision. In particular, everything takes on a bright hazy halo, making it very difficult to navigate through the world. One close friend who drank a tincture made from about 200 seeds told me that he had trouble reading for a few weeks! Another well documented optical delusion stems from the fact that the alkaloids in the plant seem to affect the way the eye focuses light. Objects are shifted upward, downward, to the left, or to the right. When you go to reach for a glass of water, you are unable to grab it because it appears to be somewhere in space other than where it actually is. If you do drink the tea and are lucky enough to survive, you will find yourself itching and scratching your skin and running to the urinal every fifteen minutes as your overloaded kidneys struggle against failure to purge your body of the potent toxins.

The eye thing is important to take note of. While traditional psychedelics (the phenethylamines and tryptamines) affect the brain’s level of neurotransmitters like seratonin and dopamine, altering the way that sensory data is interpreted, deleriants like Salvia and Datura affect the body in less subtle ways. After smoking Salvia a dozen or so times, including a hellish experience with some home-grown, re-concentrated 60x (that may well have been more like 100x) and after having witnessed someone on Salvia go into some sort of epileptic seizure where her eyes rolled back into her head and her tongue shot out and spasmed about like an eel out of water, I think that Salvia directly effects the nerves. I would describe the effects of a fullblown Salvia experience as sort of like a migrainesque MSG-overdose multiplied by one million. I’m told that chewing Salvia, as the natives do, is the way to go. All I know is that smoking strong salvinorum-crystal-covored extracts is like a ticket to hell. It’s only purpose is to show you what hell is like. Or maybe it would serve as the world’s worst fraternity prank. Give it to someone and tell them it’s weed. After they’ve taken a bongload, they’ll end up running around the room like a chicken with its head cut off, or more aptly, a body with its soul cut off. This, again, would be the most fucked-up prank ever.

A deleriant, It seems clear that Datura, also, does not so much affect neurotransmitter chemistry (although it reportedly does increase acetylcholine levels) as it does the actual physical mechanism of the optic nerve. That Datura affects the eye is well known to medical doctors. Scopalomine, one of the principal alkaloids in Datura, is used by optomotrists–in those yellow eyedrops–to dilate the pupil. And belladonna, the plant from which all belladonna alkaloids get their names, gets its name in turn from the Italian words for pretty (bella) and lady (donna). Belladonna is named “pretty lady” because miniscule amounts of the plant were used in ancient times by Italian women to dilate their pupils–large pupils being considered beautiful. So while psychedelics are non-neuro-toxic, and seem subjectively to affect subtle aspects of the brain and to transform the “mind” and even “soul” or “Spirit,” deleriants like Datura are actually and most definitely fucking with your body! This is especially true if you make a tea of 50 or more seeds. DON’T DO IT. Anything could happen.

And, as mentioned before, if you make a tea of the root bark, you can expect the opposite to happen: that is, nothing at all will happen. Don’t do it.

And then there is the balm method. Supposedly the powerful belladonna alkaloids in plants like Mandrake and Deadly Nightshade and Datura can be made into lotions that are rubbed on the skin. If you are extremely brave, the most effective method of transport for the alkaloids is to rub the balm on your temples. Some scholars (I took a seminar at UCLA from this cool feminist professor from Cambridge called “The History of Science and Gender.” Awesome class.) think that witches may have used these alkaloids to “fly” by rubbing the balms on broomsticks and then rubbing the broomsticks on, or inserting them in, their vaginas. This, some have even claimed, is the secret to witches being able to–astrally at least–fly. My advice is to avoid balms and lotions altogether. I’ve heard too many horror stories. Don’t do it.

The middle path, as I see it, is smoking the flower, specifically its pistils. And to achieve maximal effects, you’ll want to harvest the pistils at the right time of the year. And note that different flowers on the same bush may ripen weeks apart.

I have no biochemistry to back this, but anecdotally, here is what I have discovered (and many of these discoveries are really those of my good friend and amateur shaman, Blake). You want to harvest the pistils from the inside of the flower when they are maximally covered in resin. There are several clues that a flower’s psitils are ready for harvesting. For one, flowers that smell like Jasmine–and not Jism!–are best.

Next, you’ll want to find a flower that has a faint purplish hue highlighting its more obvious whiteness. You’ll want to find a flower that is partly open. A blossom that has not yet opened is premature and one that is completely opened is over-ripe. Lastly, a flower that has insect holes on it has already been pillaged by bugs, but a blossom that has an insect or two on it or in it AS you harvest it, is likely perfect. The bugs seem to know just when the pollen is at an optimum.

If smoked, the pollen produces some rather interesting effects. The first and most noteworthy is that all Datura plants in your field of vision appear to glow. I am sure there are any number of positivist explanations for this, but I am more of a sheep than a goat and I can’t help but finding it odd that Datura plants in particular seem to be haloed in a luminous, silver silhouette when you are under the influence of the plant. Other plants and animals also seem to glow, particularly humans, but not as pronouncedly as Datura plants. Living things are much more visually distinguishable from non-living things than when looking with non-altered vision.

One EXTREMELY bizarre effect is that photographs of humans take on a very magical air. The people in posters and  pictures seem to glow, to have auras, and to stand out in a more 3-D way. Gazing meditation with puja tables replete with pictures of saints and swamis (Jim Morrison, Jimmi Hendrix) is significantly enhanced by smoking Datura. In fact, the effects are so compelling, that I began to wonder if my eye was responsible for them. I knew my ocular vision was altered, that much was certain,  but it seemed that my subjective way of seeing had been transformed, too.

The psychic affects are subtle, but profound. Natural beauty is enhanced, but man-made objects take on a preternatural ugliness. One friend remarked that he had never noticed all the power lines in a meadow near Santa Clarita, California before. Suddenly aware of their imposition, he said, giggling, that someone ought to cut them all down. That is one thing I noticed about Datura. It seemed to inspire anarchistic, eco-terrorist sentiments. While marijuana makes you want to hide from the great and terrible machine, Datura gives you the mischievous confidence to try to thwart it.

At this point, I need to come forth with my most whacked-out observation of all. Datura seems to thrive under and around man-made infrastructure. I never noticed it before I smoked Datura, but under its influence, I noticed that populations of the plant seemed to congregate under and around power lines, street lamps, transformers, and (to a lesser extent) in straight lines running parallel to roads and fences. Again, I am sure that there is a rational explanation for this. Perhaps high-energy electromagnetic fields prompt seeds lying dormant in the soil to sprout. But again, I am a bit of a believer and a mystic, and under the influence of the plant, I had the intuitive feeling that the plants were some sort of antibodies, macrophages, immunoglobulins shot up from the earth to absorb the bad juju of encroaching suburban sprawl. While my suppositions are so unscientific that Carl Sagan is squirming in his grave as I write this, the hypothesis that Datura grows in greater abundance near strong EMFs is eminently testable or what Karl Popper called, “falsifiable.” Look for yourself and you will see. A giant Datura bush under a street lamp. Four Datura plants at each inside corner of the base of a transformer or lined up, linear as a light beam, underneath a power cable or phone line.

Please remember that harvesting and ingesting Datura remains illegal in most places. And please remember that the alkaloids are highly poisonous. But if you’re Hell’s-bells-bent on trying the stuff (and you probably shouldn’t), I beseech you to experiment with small doses of smoked pollen rather than large doses of the seeds (including teas and tinctures thereof). Taking a birth as a human is a rare and blessed cosmic happening. Don’t throw your life away.

*A less sexist way of labeling the drugs on either side of the dualistic, dichotomous borderline demarcating “good” from “bad” is Terrence McKenna’s. Rather than calling the “good” drugs “male” and the “bad” ones “female,” the all-wise Terrence talks about drugs of liberation (the psychedelics) vs. drugs of enslavement. Enslaving drugs have a tendency to enslave at both the individual and societal levels and would include caffeine (from coffee beans and cola berries), alcohol and sugar (which are kissing cousins), tobacco, and, of course, cocaine. While I believe that the ephedra alkaloids are positive spirits, it is clear that crystal methamphetamine is a drug of enslavement–perhaps the worst to hit the streets since television. Psychedelics have the potential at least to be liberating on both the individual and societal levels. The Anti-war, civil rights, and women’s lib movements all were arguably propelled forward by the psychedelic revolution.