After-Orts #67

In ancient times, people all over the world grew or gathered sacred plants (and fungi) with the power to inspire visions or conduct them on journeys to other worlds . . . . The medieval apothecary garden cared little for aesthetics, focusing instead on species that healed and intoxicated and occasionally poisoned. Witches and sorcerers cultivated plants with the power to “cast spells” — in our vocabulary, “psychoactive” plants. Their potion recipes called for such things as datura, opium poppies, belladonna, hashish, fly-agaric mushrooms (Amanita muscaria), and the skins of toads (which can contain DMT, a powerful hallucinogen). These ingredients would be combined in a hempseed-oil-based “flying ointment” that the witches would then administer vaginally using a special dildo. This was the “broomstick” by which these women were said to travel.

     — Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire
Quoted here: https://www.themarginalian.org/2021/10/29/michael-pollan-witch-broomstick/

From the same source, why (maybe) NYC is “the Big Apple”
https://www.themarginalian.org/2021/05/02/nyc-big-apple/


Self-knowledge isn’t necessarily good news.
     — Lily Tomlin

Self knowledge is always bad news.
     — John Barth, Giles Goat-Boy