It’s 3,000 years ago. You’re 10,000 feet up in the Peruvian Andes. You’ve been invited into a sacred stone chamber. You step inside. A priest hands you a bone tube filled with roasted vilca beans, a prehistoric version of DMT, and a little wild tobacco to smooth it out.
You take a hit and go on a cosmic ride that will echo through the ages. Publishing their findings in the journal PNAS, this is what archaeologists theorize is the current world’s oldest known psychedelic ceremony.
Long before the Incas, the Chavín called the Andes home, where its cultural elite—and only its most elite members—transformed themselves into divine beings by smoking themselves straight out of this plane of existence.
For the first time, researchers have found direct chemical evidence, not just speculations. Twenty-three artifacts, mostly hollow bone tubes, were dug up from a sealed-off ritual chamber that’s been untouched since 500 BCE. In those tubes, researchers found traces of wild tobacco and vilca, a hallucinogenic cousin of DMT.
It’s not like whole villages were getting their brains recreationally ripped to shreds. According to anthropological archaeologist Daniel Contreras, these experiences were “tightly controlled rituals” that were conducted in restricted areas that were cut off from the rest of the community.
Only the upper echelons of Chavín society were allowed to partake, all in an effort to reinforce its strict social hierarchy. We can smoke a bean in a bone to touch God while you stand outside the door listening to moan and groan.
Archaeologists believe these rituals were more than spiritual, but acted as a kind of political theater, designed to awe and manipulate, allowing the trips to justify inequality. And who wouldn’t believe every word of some guy who says he directly spoke to a cosmic being after he hotboxed inside of a pitch-black sacred closet?
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