civilisations were able to form. In the New World, on the other hand, what turned out to be the most useful grain there was evolved from teosinte which, in the wild, was, morphologically speaking, far more distant from the domesticated form than was the case with the Old World grasses. Furthermore, as we now know, because of its high sugar content (as a tropical rather than a temperate plant), maize was first used for its psychoactive properties rather than as a foodstuff. On top of everything else, maize – even when it did become a foodstuff – found it harder to spread in the New World because of the north-south configuration of the landmass, which meant that mean temperatures, rainfall and sunlight varied far more than they did in Eurasia. For this reason, the development of maize surpluses was much harder – and slower – to build up. As noted, possibly only Cahokia followed an Old World trajectory at all closely. Thus the domestication trajectory of the most important New World grain was very different from its more numerous counterparts in the Old World.
The second crucial area where plants differed between the Old World and the New was in the realm of hallucinogens. The influence of these plants on history has perhaps not been appreciated before to this extent, but it is now clear that the distribution of psychoactive plants across the world is curiously anomalous. The figures, as we saw in chapter twelve, are that between 80 and 100 hallucinogenic species occur naturally in the New World, compared with not more than eight or ten in the Old World.
It is also now clear that hallucinogens played a large and vital role in the religious thought of the New World but especially so in Central and South America, where the most advanced civilisations evolved.
The role and effect of hallucinogens was essentially two-fold. First, they made the religious experience in the Americas much more vivid than in the Old World. Second, because of their psychoactive properties, as shown by the experiments of Claudio Naranjo, discussed in chapter twelve, hallucinogens fostered ideas of transformation , between humans and other forms of life, and of travel, or soul flight, between the middle world and the upper and lower realms of the cosmos. Combined with a society in which, because of the lack of wheeled transport, or riding, and the north-south configuration, people found it relatively difficult to travel far, the journeys to the upper and lower realms were all the more important. The sheer vividness, and the fearsome nature of some of the transformations experienced in trance, the overwhelming psychological intensity of altered states of consciousness induced by hallucinogens, would among other things have made New World religious experiences far more convincing and therefore more resistant to change than those in the Old World where, as we have seen and shall see again shortly, horse-riding and wheeled transport – carts and chariots – meant that different groups, with different beliefs, came into contact with each other far more.
This is not to say that there were no hallucinogens in the Old World, or that they were not important. As was discussed in chapter ten, opium, cannabis (hemp) and soma were all widely used ritual substances in various regions of Eurasia. For a variety of reasons, however, the more powerful psychoactive substances gave way relatively early on to milder alcoholic beverages, whether this was because domesticated mammals needed to be controlled (riding, driving, ploughing and milking in particular needed concentration), or because the pastoral lifestyle was less communal, meaning people came together not so much for intense shamanistic ceremonies, but for more social bonding reasons, where milder euphoriants were more suitable, or because they came together to face threats from outside, when again strong psychoactive substances would have been inappropriate, while alcohol was acceptable in
The second crucial area where plants differed between the Old World and the New was in the realm of hallucinogens. The influence of these plants on history has perhaps not been appreciated before to this extent, but it is now clear that the distribution of psychoactive plants across the world is curiously anomalous. The figures, as we saw in chapter twelve, are that between 80 and 100 hallucinogenic species occur naturally in the New World, compared with not more than eight or ten in the Old World.
It is also now clear that hallucinogens played a large and vital role in the religious thought of the New World but especially so in Central and South America, where the most advanced civilisations evolved.
The role and effect of hallucinogens was essentially two-fold. First, they made the religious experience in the Americas much more vivid than in the Old World. Second, because of their psychoactive properties, as shown by the experiments of Claudio Naranjo, discussed in chapter twelve, hallucinogens fostered ideas of transformation , between humans and other forms of life, and of travel, or soul flight, between the middle world and the upper and lower realms of the cosmos. Combined with a society in which, because of the lack of wheeled transport, or riding, and the north-south configuration, people found it relatively difficult to travel far, the journeys to the upper and lower realms were all the more important. The sheer vividness, and the fearsome nature of some of the transformations experienced in trance, the overwhelming psychological intensity of altered states of consciousness induced by hallucinogens, would among other things have made New World religious experiences far more convincing and therefore more resistant to change than those in the Old World where, as we have seen and shall see again shortly, horse-riding and wheeled transport – carts and chariots – meant that different groups, with different beliefs, came into contact with each other far more.
This is not to say that there were no hallucinogens in the Old World, or that they were not important. As was discussed in chapter ten, opium, cannabis (hemp) and soma were all widely used ritual substances in various regions of Eurasia. For a variety of reasons, however, the more powerful psychoactive substances gave way relatively early on to milder alcoholic beverages, whether this was because domesticated mammals needed to be controlled (riding, driving, ploughing and milking in particular needed concentration), or because the pastoral lifestyle was less communal, meaning people came together not so much for intense shamanistic ceremonies, but for more social bonding reasons, where milder euphoriants were more suitable, or because they came together to face threats from outside, when again strong psychoactive substances would have been inappropriate, while alcohol was acceptable in
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