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derworld? Can this help us to identify 
the specific locale of the scenes in 
the murals: just which level of the 
multitiered Mesoamerican universe is 
being depicted here? If so, the mush- 
room motif, almost by itself, reveals 
the murals’ subject matter to be the 
underworld, fertile womb of the ma- 
ternal earth from whence originate 
moisture and fertility. 
Wasson concludes his exploration 
with an overview of the historical rec- 
ord, from the time of the conquis- 
tadors to the present. He also gives 
us the most thorough discussion to 
date of the famous “mushroom 
stones” of highland Guatemala and 
Mexico and their relationship to the 
ancient use of the sacred fungi as early 
as the mid-first millennium b.c., a 
functional connection most authorities 
now accept. He is, however, more im- 
pressed than I with published argu- 
ments for a connection between the 
mushroom effigies and the sacred ball 
game. These stone replicas may have 
played some role in the game — really 
a religious ritual — but I doubt that 
any were ever used to mold hollow 
rubber balls. In fact, all the descrip- 
tions of the game, and all the archeo- 
logical finds, demonstrate unequivo- 
cally that the rubber balls were solid, 
never hollow, and so heavy that the 
chroniclers speak of serious injuries 
if a player was hit in a sensitive part. 
But these are minor flaws in a work 
whose flights of intuition are generally 
informed by painstaking scholarship. 
Wasson’s advocacy of a recently 
coined term, “entheogen” (God within 
us), in place of the more popular, but 
value-laden, “hallucinogen,” because 
entheogen more nearly approximates 
“the rich cultural resonances evoked 
by the substances,” is nicely comple- 
mented by the title of Schultes’s and 
Hofmann’s Plants of the Gods. This 
is a truly encyclopedic examination 
of the psychoactive flora of the world, 
profusely illustrated on every page in 
black and white and with more than 
a hundred color plates. There are in- 
troductory chapters on the definition 
of plant hallucinogens and their place 
in the plant kingdom, phytochemical 
research to date on sacred intoxicating 
species, geographical and botanical 
distribution and use (with a very clear 
map), and a most useful 29-page il- 
lustrated plant lexicon covering no 
fewer than ninety-one species with 
known or presumed psychoactive 
properties. This is followed by specific 
discussions of fourteen major Old and 
international 
nature tours 
Galapagos Islands/ 
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Tanzania/Rwanda 
Gorilla Safari/Costa 
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