Ants and grubs
In the human relationship with the drugs, animals are often involved. From the coffee to the amanita muscaria, from the tea to the iboga, numerous drugs have been discovered by the man observing the animals that intentionally inebriate themselves with those substances. This is in relationship with the important ethological discovery that also the animals can drug themselves.
However, the involvement of the animals in the relationship between man and drugs also concerns the case of the animal drugs, that is to say, those animals or parts of animals that are psycho – active when consumed by the man. The hallucinogenic properties of the glandular secretion of some toads are very well known and we badly know other cases of animal drugs, and it is probable that such a small number – in comparison to that of the vegetable drugs (over 1400 are listed in my ordinateur) – is due to our ignorance.
Various Indian tribes of the California use the hallucinogenic plant of the toloache (Datura wrightii) to contact the supernatural world and to acquire powers like swarms. During the winter period, when the toloache is not available, they uses another visionary source, that is considered more powerful than datura: red ants of the kind Pogonomyrmex, whose painful pinch is well known to the tribes..
Among the Chumashes of the southern California, if a youth desires to acquire an “allied spirit”, he doesn’t have to do anything else than to follow this procedure: he will be accompanied by a “doctor of the ants” – an old woman of the village specialized in this assignment – in a set apart place, to open sky. After three days of fast and induced vomits to purify the body, the visionary aspirant lays down on the back ground; sat nearby him, the old woman hands on his mouth a small dampened pellet of eagles’ feathers around which 4-5 alive ants have been grasped. The youth has to inhale the pellet with an only puff, in order not to stop it in the mouth, as it must be directly swallowed in the stomach. One after the other, the youth can actually assume up to 90 pellets, for a total of around 400 ants. These have to stay alive in the stomach; if they died, the young man would die too. As soon as the assumption is finished, the woman emphatically moves the body of the boy, she drums him to the stomach, she makes him roll on the ground, she strikes him to the sides, and in such way the ants start biting the inside wall of the stomach contemporarily injecting all their poison.
As result of this, the youth passes out and so painfully he finally meets the vision. Because the whole phase of swallowing the alive ants – who keep biting while they are going down in the oesophagus – is accompanied by a strong feeling of burning to the throat, which increases more and more, up to the moment of the loss of knowledge. If he has assumed the ants in the first morning, the youth takes back knowledge in the afternoon. At this point he drinks some warm water to induce the vomit and to allow the “return in house” of the sacred ants, kept alive for that whole time.
If some reader thinks that for the young lover of ants the things end here, he is wrong! Among the traditional cultures there are no alternatives for the transcendence, there is no space for the half measures in the streets of knowledge. Strong doses and long times are requested by the tribal visions, and the diffused concept is that more the visions are suffered, more they are deep and full of meanings.
Returning to the Californian visions with six legs, what has happened until here to the youth it is only the beginning of a series of “bellyfuls” of ants, 400 any time, for 2 or 3 times a day, for 3, 4 or more days, up to the moment in which the ingested ants find the street of the “return in house”, that is to say that they go up again along the oesophagus, and they escape from the mouth, without vomiting them. At this point the contact with the allied spirit that has chosen the youth conferring him its virtues is completed.
The active principles of these ants are not very well noted, but it has been calculated that the doses assumed by the “eaters” of ants are of few inferior to the lethal ones.
If this visionary technique can seem repugnant and dangerous, surer and savoury should appear that practised by the Malalis, a small tribe of the coast of Brazil. When a Malali doesn’t succeed to follow asleep because emotionally shaken by anything – and only in this case – he can use a grub that lives in the inside part of bamboos. Called by the native bichos de tacuara, this big grub, that reaches the length of 10 cm, has been identified as larva of a butterfly of the kind Myelobia. It is found only in the period of July-August, but the Malalis make the grubs desiccate and they jealously preserve them to consume them in the opportune moments. The head of the grub is considered poisonous and is removed, watching out for to preserve the intestinal pipe, that seems to be the part of the animal responsible of the psycho active characteristics.
Once ingested the grub, the native falls in a kind of ecstatic sleep, for one whole day and from which he wakes up again remembering to have been in marvellous places, rich of delicious fruits, splendid birds and animals of all the types, a sort of terrestrial heaven. The Malalis watch out not to exceed with these “meetings” with the grub, because they think that the frequent use is weakening.
Keeping talk about bugs, among the native Aymaras of the lake Titicaca, in Bolivia, the knowledge of a beetle that provokes hallucinations is so rooted, that is common among them the motto “someone has given him a beetle to drink” referring to a crazy person, in the same sense it is said in the Catalan region “estar tocat de bolet”, in Hungary “bolondgombát evett” (“he has eaten crazy mushrooms”), in Austria “er hat verrückte Schwammerln gegessen” (“he has eaten that mushrooms that provokes folly “) and in Slovenia “najeo if ljutih gljiva” (“he has eaten the insane mushroom in a big quantity”), that associate the psycho-active mushrooms with the states of mental confusion; all these sentences are testimony of ancient knowledge and ritual approaches connected to the beetle and mushrooms with visionary characteristics.
Decidedly more appetizing are the dream fishes and pez borracho, that is to say the various kinds of fishes that can represent a pleasant heaven or a scary hell for the fishermen, according to the quality (and to the interpretations) of the hallucinations induced by the consumption of their meat. Fishes “that make you dream” when eaten, are known along the coasts of South Africa, on the Hawaii islands, on the archipelagos of the Melanesia and Japan, along the coasts of Peru and in so many other places, but they still miss specific searches. It’s very probable that the intoxicating properties of these various fishes are due to the fact that these usually eat alga or of other toxic or psycho active fishes, and therefore they would act as bio-mediators among the true source of drugs and the man. After all, man in some cases intentionally has forced animals to feed themselves of drugs, and then he feeds himself with some meat of that animals, strengthening the hallucinogenic properties of the native drugs. We will talk again about it in the next number.
Edited by GEORGIO SAMORINI
Ethnic – botanic and ethnic mycothic. For over twenty years he has developed searches on the ritual and social use of the drugs, in ethnological and archaeological contexts. He has published different volumes and kept lectures in Europe, Africa, Latin America, India.
Published on Dolce Vita International 2
