Plague of Strength

We left off in Part 1 with four PEDs considered to be sacred in Hinduism, datura, ephedra, betel, and cannabis, and I listed a few of the warrior cultures who were fond of cannabis, lest some of you still retain the skepticism I once had for this venerable plant. Simply the fact that Mike Tyson I realized that that list, which I mentioned was entirely incomplete, left out a couple of awesome examples I still might share. If you still think weed is for the sweet, the soft, or the estrogenic, think again- here are a couple other badass cultures of the past who loved weed as much or more than modern hyperviolent cultures like Americans:

• the Hashashin, Thuggees, and earlier related regional assassin tribes/syndicates like the Sagartians. Although the Hashashin and Thuggees are distinct groups of assassins from nearby regions, they’re rarely looked at as related because people are fucking idiots. The word “thug” comes from the Indian word “Thuggee”, who might have been the world’s first organized gang of professional assassins, though the word “assassin” comes from the name from the name of another local group of Persian stoners who loved murder in the name of Allah-the Hashashin, aka “the hash eaters.”
  • The Assassins were active between 1092 and 1275AD- a fictionalized biography contemporaneous to them claimed their first victim was Nizam al-Mulk in 1092, though they were founded two years earlier. If you were to imagine a band of psychotic fundamentalist ninjas fucked out of their minds on hash, you’d be imagining the Hashashin. I’d assume they consumed their cannabis the same way the Indians did- in balls of sort-of hash called charas (see above) which they would either smoke in a pipe called a chillum or eat.
  • The Thuggees were Indian worshipers of Kali, the destroyer of worlds and wife of the Supreme Being (Shiva), who was the patron of cannabis and datura and who is essentially an amalgam of all of the pre-Indo-European gods of ancient India. The earliest reference in historical records to the Thuggees states that 1000 Thuggees were captured an deported in Delhi in 1290, and these evil motherfuckers were still robbing and right up to the end of the 19th century. The Thuggees were most famous for strangling their victims to death with a garrote, which later became one of the favorite weapons for Sicilian organized crime after picking it up from the Indians. Exactly like their Persian forebears, the Thuggees carried a dagger strapped to their chest, which they often used when slaughtering foreign traders invaders, or anyone who seemed like they might not venerate Shiva. Not all Thuggees were alike, however, some killed their victims before robbing them while others let them live, believing only the Muslim bands of Thuggees would do something so shitty, while others killed their victims and their families because that’s what people who worship death gods do. There were also non-religious Thuggees, and those were unsurprisingly the most ethical- they would simply smoke datura alongside their victims and then poison them with a killer dose of it after their victim passed the fuck out. That’s right- there were areligious Indian assassins who literally smoked their victims to death before robbing them.

• the Celts and Picts. Like their contemporaries the Scythians (and likely derived therefrom), the Celts did a lot of drinking out of the skulls of their enemies, and were also reported by Roman sources to have drunk blood out of those skulls after bathing in it (Elliott 43). And you know they were blazing just as hard as the Scythians, because why wouldn’t they? We do have physical evidence of cannabis dating to the 5th century BC, and between the artistic similarities to the Scythians and their affinity for using human remains for place settings, I’ll go ahead and be the one to speculate that both practice were likely handed down through the centuries after the practices of the Yamnaya culture that tamed the horse and ended the societies of the early bronze age with a combination of the invention of cavalry-based warfare and the spread of smallpox that went with it.
• the Egyptians. They got a passing mention in the last installment and get another here, because their weed culture was intense and long. The above carving is over 2500 years old and venerates the goddess of wisdom, knowledge, and writing, Seshat. Egyptologists are unclear what her crown is, but it looks exactly like an indica leaf, and the Egyptians began heavily using cannabis in medicine at least as early as 1750BC, which is the oldest medical text that recommends the use of cannabis.

And now back to the story (after that four-hour reearch and wrsiting detour for an intro I probably could have skipped but am simply incapable of half-assing shit)…

The Bactrian civilization was in decline as the Macedonians arose as the dominant power in Europe (Alexander the Great’s empire ruled much of the world from 808BC to 168BC), and Bactria was the center of resistance against the Macedonians as they urged east. Though the Bactrian culture predated the predated conquest by the Persians it was considered one of the sixteen perfect Iranian lands by the Zoroastrians, and it acted as a multicultural melting pot for centuries, blending the cultures and trends of East and West as they washed back and forth with trade and warfare. After Bactria fell to Alexander in the 4th century BC it came under the rule of Alexander’s general Selucus, who began the short lived Selucid Empire of Persia (312-63BC), at which point cultural transfer between the Greco-Bactrian kingdom and the Greek city states reached a fever pitch, so even if they Greeks hadn’t already started using them, they would have imported PED use from the Bactrians anyway.

But they had been using PEDs, and they’d been using them for a long time, because the forebears of the Mycenaean and Macedonians were the Minoans, and as an island nation (based on Crete) they traded heavily with the Indians, Egyptians, and the Mesopotamians, all of whom venerated poppy, datura, and cannabis. As you might guess, the Minoans did too, and archaeologists have stated very conclusively that “the Archaic period in Greece, poppies, cannabis, and other plants such as henbane or datura were used for ritual and medicinal purposes” (Carod-Artal). And beyond that, the ancient Greeks were well known for using any means they could to gain an advantage on their opponents-

in ancient Greece, cheating was both expected and appreciated, provided the cheater didn’t get caught (Bowers).  

They and the Romans (and the gladiators in particular), ingested whatever they could to give them an edge, with a special focus on increasing both energy and testosterone (just as modern athletes do).

“Even in 700 BC there was an awareness that heightened testosterone would increase performance. With no syringes or hormones in injectable liquid form, it was left to the athletes to gorge on animal hearts and testicles in search of potency.

Aretaeus of Cappadocia, a 1st century ancient Greek physician, once opined on the purportedly salubrious effects of such ingestion:

“For it is the semen, when possessed of vitality, which makes us to be men, hot, well braced in limbs, well voiced, spirited, strong to think and act. … But if any man be continent in the emission of semen, he is bold, daring, and strong as wild beasts as is proved from such of the athlete as are continent. … Vital semen, then, contributes to health, strength, courage, and generation.”

Galen, another prominent ancient Greek physician, is said to have prescribed “the rear hooves of an Abyssinian ass, ground up, boiled in oil, and flavored with rose hips and rose petals” for a performance-enhancing tonic.

During the Olympic Games in the Third Century BC, athletes were trying to boost their performance using mushrooms. Philostratus reported that doctors were significantly helpful in athletes’ preparation for the games and cookers prepared bread with analgesic properties.

In the First Century AD, it was also reported that the Greek runners were drinking a herbal beverage to increase their strength and to be capable of competing in long duration events.

Athletes were also known to drink “magic” potions and eat exotic meats in the hopes of gaining an athletic edge on their competition. Dried figs, wine potions, herbal medications, strychnine and hallucinogens were also used” (Chrysopoulos).

And while Greeks, Indians, Mesopotamians, Bactrians, and Roman gladiators were getting faced on ephedra, cannabis, alcohol, and opium (Murray), various tribes in southeast North America had been tweaking like fuck off their favorite PWO- the black drink- and they seem to have been doing so since 8000BC or earlier. Derived from the berries of a holly bush known as Ilex vomitoria, members of the Cherokee nation and their neighbors chugged this shit on the daily, using it for everything from a recreational pick-me-up to a ceremonial drink… one that contained ten to twenty times the caffeine in a Bang, Reign, or Ghost energy drink.

And no, I didn’t misplace a comma- their energy drinks could contain up to 3-6 grams of caffeine and according to a modern researcher tastes “like the perfect combination of dark roast coffee and pu’erh tea” (Fornal).

Tribes located in other areas usually consumed the ephedra local to the area, which in the Southwest and Mexico had the additional benefit of being an excellent topical remedy for gonnorhrea and syphilis, which is why it was known as “whorehouse tea” in early Western America and Mexico (González-Juárez). Like the Eurasian ephedra strains, the ephedras found in the Americas aided in healing, overall health, respiration, and in providing additional energy (though the American ephedras are somewhat less potent in their ephedrine and pseudoephedrine concentrations), making the plant a super-PED irrespective of where it was being consumed.

Likewise, cocaine was being consumed in the Americas (and through suspected trade between the Greeks and Europe/Egypt, possibly in those regions as well) since at least 5000BC. By 3000BC use of the coca leaf was endemic throughout South America, and tobacco had been cultivated in Mexico since about 1500BC, both of which were found in nine Egyptian mummies that were dated from between 1070BC to 395CE. In case you’re unaware, both are stimulants historically prized for their value in war and sports (and if you’re skeptical of the latter you need only look at the former Eastern bloc lifters and their insane chainsmoking habits), and both of them have been in use by humans in an effort to kick more ass per minute every day for thousands of years.

Coca was so important in the Incan empire, which at one point composed 75% of the Pacific coast of South America, that distance was actually measured in coca.

If I hadn’t had friends who measured distance in Germany by how many beers they would need to consume to traverse a given distance, I doubt I’d really understand the true meaning of that last sentence. The word “cocada” in Quechua now refers to a little coconut cookie thing, but in the good old days it referred to the distance you could cover while chewing a wad of coca leaves (also called a cocada). Around the time of the first recorded coca use in Europe, Incan silver miners were consuming 500000 kilograms of coca leaves a year to do their backbreaking work, and in 1570 the Catholic Church decided to levy a 10% tax on coca rather than ban the drug. That tax helped pay for the massive expansion of the Catholic Church in the late Renaissance and helped drive the European obsession with cocaine in the 1800s and 1900s.

And circling back to the wider world, the selective use of ephedra, opium, and cannabis was widespread in throughout Eurasia from prehistory, but access to each varied in amount and type by the region in which a person lived. In Scandinavia and North America, psychadelics were in heavy use for thousands of years.

“American psychedelics included peyote cactus, San Pedro cactus, morning-glory, Datura, Salvia, Anadenanthera, Ayahuasca, and over 20 species of psychoactive mushrooms. It was a pre-Columbian Burning Man. Indigenous Americans also invented the nasal administration of tobacco and hallucinogens. They were the first to snort drugs a practice Europeans later borrowed.

This American psychedelic culture is ancient. Peyote buttons have been carbon-dated to 4,000 BC, while Mexican mushroom statues hint at Psilocybe use in 500 BC. A 1,000 year-old stash found in Bolivia contained cocaine, Anadenanthera and ayahuasca and must’ve been one hell of a trip. Inventing alcohol A huge step in the evolution of debauchery was the invention of agriculture, because farming made booze possible. It created a surplus of sugars and starches which, mashed and left to ferment, magically transformed into potent brews” (News18).

While we usually think of Norsemen as drunk on mead at all times, they didn’t just chug honey wine as a preworkout- they added mushrooms to the mix as well, both for ceremony and battle. These weren’t the psilocybe you’re stuffing down your neck at a concert, however- this was far more wild shit. They would either consume Amanita muscaria (fly agaric) or Amanita pantherina (panther cap), both of which contain the extremely interesting psychoactive ingredients muscimol, and would eat it before battle and enter the fray filled with bloodlust, fighting naked in the snow.

“Muscimol is a full GABA_A agonist.² As to be expected, the effects caused by muscimol are typical of GABA_A agonists and include euphoria, out-of-body experiences, and synesthesia with an onset of symptoms 20-120 minutes after ingestion. Muscimol also allegedly produces a sensation called micropsy, a perception that objects are actually smaller than they are. Simplistically put, micropsy makes the world appear smaller and far less threatening, giving the user a feeling of omnipotence, inflating self-confidence while fighting against what appears to be a weak and feeble foe. The user feels invincible, and their performance is nominally boosted in battle. It may be for this effect that the military use of drugs was tolerated or potentially even encouraged in the Vikings. This may well be one of the earliest examples of a performance-enhancing drug.

Paradoxically, muscimol can also produce macropsy, a perception that objects appear to be unnaturally large. These two are suggested to have influenced literature as well, from fairy tales of Gulliver’s interactions with Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians and Lewis Carroll’s shrinking and growing potions in the Alice stories.

Fly agaric and panther cap are not the only mushrooms or plants to cause psychedelic effects. Psilocybin mushrooms, also known as magic or psychedelic mushrooms, are well known for their effects associated with the substituted tryptamines psilocybin and psilocin. Tryptamines are also well established in traditional shamanic medicine.

So yes, there is sound physical, archaeological evidence and a logical scientific foundation based on the mechanism of action of muscimol to support the use of Amanita species of mushrooms by Vikings in conflicts. The Vikings are not the only group to have used these mushrooms. Wasson and Wasson report the presentation of a paper in 1918 at the Royal Scientific Society in Upsala that stated Swedish soldiers of the Värmland Regiment:

‘were seized by a raging madness, foaming at the mouth. On inquiry it was learned that the soldiers had eaten of the fly amanita, to whip up their courage to a fighting pitch.‘

Kamieński in his book Shooting Up: A History of Drugs in Warfare highlights a report from Sroka about a similar incident in 1945 where Soviet troops, possibly from Siberia, allegedly ingested mushrooms prior to the Battle of Székesfehérvár in Hungary”

In Africa, people also used alcohol and cannabis, alongside yohimbe, iboga, khat and kola in the regions to which they were indigenous (though in the modern era they are widely available. Yohimbe is the herb with which most of you are likely familiar as it is currently included in many fat burners and preworkouts, and it was used for its stimulant and aphrodesiac properties by the people of West Africa. Yohimbe bark is a grab bag of speedy goodness, bearing 55 alkaloids that do a variety of stuff in the name of getting your ass moving. The alkaloid with which we’re all familiar and with which the bark is often confused is yohimbine, a stimulant alkaloid also found in the unrelated South American tree quebrancho blanco, as well as in the iboja plant found in Gabon. That’s not the only gift that iboja gives, however- the main reason it’s consumed is for its psychedelic effects. It was actually the Pygmy people who discovered the plant, and they showed the people of Gabon that it would aid them in conquering their fears- a performance enhancing drug if I’ve ever heard of one, though its effects are in recovery rather than the performance itself.

In Ethiopia, khat was the driver of progress, though its effect on your teeth and jaw is like what would happen if you laced your chewing tobacco with radium and then chewed it compulsively. The health problems associated with khat are so numerous and stupid you’re far better off going with tobacco if you don’t really care that much about your health but want the less harmful option, or you could just shoot yourself and spare us your horribly disfigured but now-cancer-free-face one day. In West Africa, however, they have a rad alternative to coffee (which I’ll cover with caffeine, cocaine, and meth in the next part of the series) called the kola nut. You’ll recognize that word as being half of the inspiration for the name Coca-Cola, and in addition to providing flavor for the soda it provides a natural source of caffeine, and it’s one the people of West Africa have been consuming for centuries. “Throughout West Africa, every market, bus depot, and corner shop has small piles of kola nuts for sale. It’s a significant cash crop for poor rural farmers. Many people chew them daily for a dose of caffeine. Each nut contains more caffeine than two large cups of American coffee” (O’Keefe Osborn).

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