by Peter Watson
The truth now appears to be that maize achieved an economic importance much, much later in South and Mesoamerica than previously thought (it was never economically important in the Caribbean, while the Amazon and Orinoco are too tropical for maize). In the Andes, potatoes and quinoa continued throughout as the mainstays of the diet.
This picture is moreover borne out by linguistics which show that the vocabularies for maize go back for more than 4,000 years and that Proto-Otomanguean speakers (in Mexico) were involved in the initial domestication of teosinte.22 However, of the four major linguistic families in Mesoamerica – the Uto-Aztecan, the Otomanguean, Mixe-Zoque and the Mayan – maize terms are unrelated, confirming there was no rapid spread. The Amuzgo (another Otomanguean language also spoken in Mexico) classify maize as a grass while Mayan-speakers separate out maize from other life forms, suggesting they added maize on to a pre-existing taxonomic framework.23 A similar process is evident among the Sioux, whose word for maize is a relatively late variant of other (presumably pre-existing) cultigens, suggesting it was a late arrival, tacked on to pre-existing taxonomies.
Among North American tribes of the south-west, maize was not in use until the first millennium AD but there is no evidence for a protolanguage maize term, and this is consistent with the theory that maize did not develop as a dietary staple among such groups before about AD 600. The latest evidence from the south-west is that, before maize arrived, the inhabitants were ‘protecting, encouraging and cultivating’ a large variety of grasses, with various forms of water management, and different races of maize were incorporated into their pre-existing systems. In other words, in North America there was no sudden ‘invasion’ of Mexican maize.24 Other evidence suggests that maize moved faster to the north of Mexico, where it developed, than to the east or south. Even so it took nearly two thousand years from its first appearance until it became the main element of the diet. In the Mississippi Valley, in Ohio and in Ontario, it was the same story: maize appeared around AD 500 but the tribes there were not reliant on the grain until around AD 1000–1200.
One place where maize does appear suddenly, and in great quantities, is at Cahokia, on the Mississippi (near what is now St Louis), at ~AD 750–850, together with the equally sudden predominance of limestone tempered pottery, and a high-maize diet apparently among those individuals who were sacrificed. This too reinforces the idea that maize had a ceremonial role, even in Cahokia. A similar change is seen in the body morphology of the Cahokians excavated there – tooth decay shows a marked increase, as well as orthopaedic disorders, notably of the joints. So it seems that maize did become a sudden staple at Cahokia after AD 750, when mound plazas appear. At the same time, it is worth noting that, as T.P. Myers, of the Nebraska State Museum, has pointed out, the corn at Cahokia and other sites of Mississippian culture, is a flint corn, Northern Flint (with an especially hard outer shell), ‘so distinct from its Mexican ancestors that it is almost a different species’. The difference this made, says Myers, was so marked that it ‘jumped from almost no dietary importance to half of the diet in a generation or two’. His point is underlined by the fact that maize had reached New Mexico – not so far from Cahokia – by 1000 BC, but the hunter-gatherers there did not become reliant on the maize crop until AD 600, possibly for climatic reasons.
The same change, from being minimally present between AD 600– 700, but becoming abundant during AD 750–850, occurred across many regions of eastern North America. ‘At the same time, settlement density increased with more houses occupying less space, leaving more land for cultivation.’25 Simultaneously, slab metates (large stones, with shallow concave grinding surfaces) decline rapidly in importance – these had probably been used for grinding chenopodium, knotweed and may-grass, on which the population had hitherto subsisted.
And so, in the New World, outside North America, we see three phases of maize: its use as beer, its slow adoption as a grain, and a much later use as a staple. Only in eastern North America is the Old World pattern paralleled, very rapidly, unlike anywhere else in the western hemisphere, and grain subsistence, and the surplus it provided, led fairly straightforwardly to urbanisation.*
BLOOD AND NUMBERS
What were these ceremonies where maize was such a feature? There was a widespread tradition that humans were created from maize, that blood and maize were equivalent. Prayers were recited for maize, many words were created to describe its parts, its development, its role in cuisine. There was a maize calendar – many scholars believe that the 260-day calendar unique to the Americas (see chapter twenty) is related to the growing season of the corn plant. The early civilisation of the Olmec had a maize deity-ruler and the Maya believed that the first eight human beings were formed of maize (after two previous unsuccessful creations of humans, from mud and from wood).26
There are many legends about the secret of maize, with precious corn seeds being hidden in sacred mountains. Among the Maya there was a tradition that maize originated in the ‘hearth of creation’, an equilateral triangle hanging from Orion’s belt in the constellation of that name, the triangle being formed by the stars known to them as Alnham, Saiph and Rigel.27 Other traditions say that maize came from the sun’s groin, or from a dwarf with golden hair. Maize plays a part in childbirth rituals, rain petitions, medical rituals, community renewals and funerary rites. Bloodied kernels of maize are sown in honour of newly named children.28 Maize is associated variously with the numbers 3, 7 and 8. The maize deity is represented on many Mayan glyphs.
Taking all this together, we can see that, in the Americas, the two most important food crops were very different in character from the cereals of Eurasia. The potato was specially adapted to the relatively extreme environment of the Andes mountains. This environment had its advantages but it meant that the potato, highly adapted as it was, was unable to spread, and those dependent on it could not spread either. Maize, although it is a grain, like wheat, barley and rice, was also a tropical plant, not a temperate one, and this helped to account for its high sugar content which meant that, in the very beginning, its primary use was to be chewed, for its sugar and the associated fermentation that gave it psychoactive properties.
This latter fact has also to be seen against the background of the much higher number of psychoactive plants to be found in Mesoand South America, which are the subject of the next chapter, and undoubtedly contributed to the use of maize in ceremonial contexts. All this meant that the role of maize in the New World was quite different from that of the cereals in the Old World. Aside from North America, at a very late date, there was no simple association between the domestication of maize, sedentism, the development of surplus, leading to the subsequent growth of civilisation. In other words, in the New World there was not the uniform spread of cereal farming as there was in Eurasia. Maize was valued in most locations, to begin with and for thousands of years, as the provider of an alcoholic drink, producing altered states of consciousness and conviviality, helping different hunter-gathering tribes maintain friendly relations with their neighbours/rivals in reciprocal gift-giving feasting ceremonies.
Valuing maize for its psychoactive properties seems to have slowed down appreciation of it as a foodstuff. No doubt this also had something to do with the relatively poor quality of rainforest soil, as discussed earlier, which took much longer to regain its fertility, and the absence of ploughs, which inhibited the innovation of broadcast sowing.
A final factor to be considered is that the protein value of maize is much increased when it is paired with beans (maize, beans and squash spread together in the New World, much as did wheat, barley and oats in the Old World). Maize, and beans, together with amaranth and sage, were very successful eventually but perhaps discovering the advantages of their combined use also took time.29
Among hunter-gatherers, the gift-giving ceremonies, with altered states of consciousness, would have maintained shamanistic forms of religion far longer than in the Old World. As in the Old World, however, alcohol
consumption – to begin with – was associated with elite status; but in small tribal bands, and with no domesticated mammals to deal with, without driving or riding, there would not have been the same pressures to dispense with the more powerful narcotics and hallucinogens that were much more available in the New World – and especially in South and Central America – than anywhere else.
• 12 •
THE PSYCHOACTIVE RAINFOREST AND THE ANOMALOUS DISTRIBUTION OF HALLUCINOGENS
Just as the Old World had far more domesticated mammals than the Americas, so the situation is reversed with regard to hallucinogens. In 1970 Weston La Barre published a significant paper in the journal, Economic Botany, entitled ‘Old and New World Narcotics: A Statistical Question and an Ethnological Reply’. In that paper La Barre attempted for the first time to account in terms of cultural history for the astonishing proliferation of sacred hallucinogens in Indian America. The ‘statistical question’ of his title referred to the ‘striking anomaly’ between the much greater number of psychoactive plants known to the original Americans, who had utilised between eighty and a hundred different species, as compared with the much smaller number – no more than eight or ten – used in the Old World. Since the Old World has a much greater landmass than the Americas, and its flora is as rich and as varied, if not more so, one would have expected there to be more hallucinogens in Eurasia. Added to which, humans have been around much longer in the Old World than in the New.
La Barre’s answer was that American Indian interest in hallucinogenic plants ‘is directly tied to survival in the New World of an essentially Paleo-Mesolithic Eurasiatic shamanism, which the early big game hunters carried with them out of northeastern Asia as the base religion of American Indians’. In other words, the first Americans were ‘culturally programmed’ to consciously explore and exploit their new environment in search of means ‘by which to attain the desired “ecstatic” state’.1 It was also La Barre’s thesis that ‘while profound socio-economic and religious transformations brought about the eradication of ecstatic shamanism and knowledge of intoxicating mushrooms and other plants over most of Eurasia, a very different set of historical and cultural circumstances favoured their survival and elaboration in the New World’.2
Peter Furst, in his book, Hallucinogens and Culture, argues that the basic foundations of the symbolic systems of American Indians ‘must have been present already in the ideational world of the original immigrants from northeastern Asia’. These foundations, he insisted, are shamanistic and they include numerous concepts recognisable even in the highly structured cosmology and ritual of hierarchic civilisations, for example, the Aztecs, where we find such phenomena as: the skeletal soul of humans and animals; the restitution of life from the bones; the belief that all phenomena in the environment are animate; the belief in soul flight; the belief in the separability of the soul from the body during life (e.g., by soul loss, by straying during sleep, or by rape or abduction, or else the soul’s deliberate projection, as by shamans in their ecstatic dreams); an initiatory ecstatic experience, especially of shamans, who must often begin their vocation by undergoing sickness; supernatural causes and cures for illness; the belief that there are different levels of the universe with their respective spirit rulers, and the requirement for feeding these on spirit food; the belief in human-animal transformation – indeed, says Furst, transformation rather than creation becomes the origin of all phenomena; the belief in animal spirit helpers for the shaman; supernatural masters and mistresses of animals and plants.
Furst concluded that with the concept of transformation being so prominent in these traditional systems, ‘it is easy to see why plants capable of radically altering consciousness would have come to stand at the very centre of ideology’.3
As La Barre’s original hypothesis had it, Asia and Europe formerly shared in the shamanistic world view but the Neolithic Revolution and subsequent economic and ideological developments brought about profound changes in religion ‘although ancient shamanistic traditions are here and there still visible even in the institutionalised churches’. In the New World, in marked contrast, the original practice of hunting and food gathering, and the shamanistic religious rituals that went with them, persisted much longer, even into the great civilisations that arose in Mesoamerica and the Andes.4
Just how old these practices are has been shown from radiocarbon studies which confirm that the hallucinogenic mescal bean, Sophora secundiflora, was already used by Palaeo-Indians towards the end of the late Pleistocene big-game hunting period, 11,000–10,000 years ago – ‘not long after the cessation of the last overland migration from Asia’. And it was still being used as part of the desert culture of the North American south-west at AD 1000.5
The remains of Sophora seeds, and associated paraphernalia and rock paintings, have been found by archaeologists in a dozen or more rock shelters in Texas and northern Mexico, as often as not grouped together with another narcotic, Ungnadia speciosa. The oldest were dated to 7265 BC and the latest at the time the site was abandoned.6 ‘At Fate Bell Shelter in the Amistad Reservoir area of Trans-Pecos Texas, a region rich in ancient shamanistic rock paintings, the narcotic seeds of Sophora and Ungnadia were found in every level, from 7000 BC to AD 1000, when the desert culture finally gave way to a new way of life based on maize agriculture.’ Even more important for a general understanding, studies at Bonfire Shelter, a well-known rock shelter site, near Langtry in south-west Texas, showed Sophora seeds present at its lowest occupational stratum, dated to 8440 to 8120 BC – that is, well into the big-game hunting era. More than that, the seeds were excavated alongside Folsom and other projectile points, together with the bones of the large extinct species of the Pleistocene bison, Bison antiquus.
Furst found it remarkable that a single hallucinogen, the Sophora bean, should have enjoyed ‘an uninterrupted reign’ of over 10,000 years as the focus of ecstatic-visionary shamanism. It was all the more extraordinary, he said, because, of all the many hallucinogens native to the New World, only the genus Datura (‘jimsonweed’) poses such a physiological risk as does Sophora. ‘Clearly, the individual, social and supernatural benefits ascribed to the drug must have outweighed its disadvantages.’7
Over enormous areas of North America many aboriginal peoples achieved much the same ends by non-chemical means, such as: fasting, thirsting, self-mutilation, exposure to the elements, sleeplessness, incessant dancing and other means of total exhaustion – bleeding themselves, plunging into ice-cold pools, laceration with thorns and animal teeth, and other painful ordeals, as well as a variety of less brutal ‘triggers’: different kinds of rhythmic activity, self-hypnosis, meditation, chanting, drumming and music. In one, holes were cut into men’s shoulders or arms and bison skulls hung from the bleeding fissures. In another technique, some shamans used mirrors of obsidian and other materials to induce a trance state (some Indian shamans in Mexico still do). A final widespread technique was the spirit-quest ordeal practised by certain Plains Indian tribes, such as the Oglala Sioux and the Mandan.8
Such ordeals were not uncommon in ancient Mexico either. Self-mutilation is portrayed in the art of several pre-Hispanic cultures such as the Maya. These include bloodletting rites that must have been incredibly painful – perforation of the penis, tongue and other organs with cactus thorns, stingray barbs and other sharp instruments (see chapter 21 for an extended discussion). In one, holes were cut in the shaman’s back and he was suspended with ropes passed through the folds of his skin. A well-known Maya carving, dated to ãd 780, from the ceremonial centre of Yaxchilán in the Usumacinta region of Chiapas, shows a kneeling woman in the act of drawing through her tongue a twisted cord, set with large sharp thorns. She is richly dressed and was clearly a member of the elite (see figure 13). Such rites are often discussed in Maya literature in terms of blood sacrifice – blood being the most precious gift mankind could offer to the gods in ancient Mesoamerican thought. ‘But in point of fact [it] must have constituted a violent sh
ock to the system, sufficient to bring about alterations in consciousness to the point of visions.’9
VINES OF THE SOUL
We have already (in chapter 10) explored the psychoactive substances used in the Old World. Of the more than eighty psychoactive substances known to have been employed in the New World, we have space here to mention only the ten most studied plants and even then very briefly.
The first is the hallucinogenic harmala alkaloids (harmine, harmaline, harmalol and harman), originally isolated from a substance we have already met, Peganum harmala, or Syrian rue. Syrian rue is one of at least eight plant families of the Old and New Worlds in which harmala alkaloids are now known to be present. The most numerous, and the most culturally interesting, again according to Peter Furst, is Banisteriopsis, ‘a malpighiaceous [liana-like, vine-like] tropical American genus that comprises no less [sic] than a hundred different species, of which at least two, B. Caapi and B. Inebrians . . . are the basis of the potent hallucinogenic ritual beverages of the Indians of Amazonia’.10 In Quechua, the language of the Incas, and many Peruvians today, the drink is known as ayahuasca, or ‘vine of the souls’. In the north-west Amazon, where it was widely used, it is known as yajé or yagé, a Tukanoan word spoken by, among others, the Desana of Colombia, a tribe intensively studied by Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff.
