CamsripGar, Massacuusretrrs, NoveMBER 22, 1963 
BOTANICAL MUSEUM LEAFLETS 
HARVARD UNIVERSITY 
NOTES ON THE PRESENT STATUS OF 
OLOLIUHQUI AND THE OTHER 
HALLUCINOGENS OF MEXICO 
BY 
R. Gorpon Wasson* 
Picietl, peyotl, teonanacatl, and ololiuhqui—these were 
the four great divinatory plants of Mexico at the time 
of the Conquest. We give the names in Nahuatl, the 
lingua franca of that time, spoken as a mother tongue 
by the Aztecs and many other peoples. By ‘divinatory’ 
we mean plants that served in Middle American cultures 
as keys to knowledge withheld from men in their normal 
minds, the keys to Extra-sensory Perception, the Media- 
tors (as the Indians believed) between men and their 
gods. These plants were hallucinogens, psychotropic 
agents, psychotomimetics, if we must use the nonce- 
words of contemporary science. 
Among the remote monolingual peoples of Mexico 
these plants continue to this day playing their divine 
role. Whenever the Indian family is troubled by a grave 
problem, it is likely to turn to one or the other of these 
plants and consult it according to the usage prevailing in 
the region. There were other drugs, certainly, that be- 
* Research Fellow, Botanical Museum of Harvard University. This 
paper was written in honor of Robert J. Weitlaner on the occasion of 
his 80th birthday and will be published in Spanish in the Homenaje 
edited under the auspices of a committee headed by Dr. Alfonso Caso 
in Mexico City. 
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