The Babylon rite

42

The Radisson Hotel, Lima, Peru

Deck the halls with boughs of holly…

Jessica Silverton sat in the lobby of her hotel. It was Christmas Day: the PA was playing endless carols on a loop. She’d rung her mother. She’d rung her brother. She’d told them very little of her predicament; she couldn’t bring herself to regurgitate all the misery. For a second she felt like asking about Dad — how did he really die? — but of course she didn’t: the fear of hearing the wrong truth was too great.

Now she was pounding her laptop, oblivious to the warbling voices of the festive muzak. Here. She scrolled up the page once more and read it for the third time this afternoon.

Ololiuqui. ‘ Turbina corymbosa (syn. Rivea corymbosa), also known as the Christmas vine, is a species of morning glory native throughout Latin America from Mexico in the north to Peru in the south and widely naturalized elsewhere.’

Tra la la la la la la la la…

‘It is a perennial climbing vine with white flowers, often with five petals, shaped as a star. It secretes copious amounts of nectar, and the honey the bees make from it is very clear and aromatic.’

Don we now our gay apparel…

‘ Turbina corymbosa is also known to natives of north and central Mexico by a Nahuatl name ololiuqui and by the south-eastern natives as xtabentun (in Mayan). Its seeds were perhaps the most common hallucinogenic drug used by the natives of pre-Columbian Mexico, and elsewhere in Mesoamerica.’

Tra la la la la la la la la…

‘In 1941, Richard Evans Schultes of Harvard University first identified ololiuqui as Turbina corymbosa and the chemical composition was first described on August 18 1960, in a paper by Dr Albert Hofmann. The seeds contain ergine (LSA), an ergoline alkaloid similar in structure to LSD. The psychedelic properties of Turbina corymbosa and comparison of the potency of different varieties were studied in the CIA’s MKULTRA Subproject 22 in 1956.’

Follow me in merry measure

Fa la la la la…

‘The plant is called coaxihuitl, “snake-plant”, in Nahuatl, and hiedra or bejuco in the Spanish language. The seeds, in Spanish, are sometimes called semilla de la Virgen (seeds of the Virgin Mary).’

While I tell of Yuletide treasure

Fa la la la la la la…

She’d had enough. Taken at face value, this sounded as if she had solved the problem in one go. And yet maybe she hadn’t. An hour ago she’d telephoned her old tutor, in Iquitos: Boris Valentine. He was, after all, an ethnobotanist, working in the Amazonian capital of ethnobotany: he had the expertise. And he had sent his reply by email, and it provided a very different perspective.

‘It’s a moot point, Jessica. The story is famous of course, how, after several weeks Schultes found Turbina corymbosa growing around the porch of a witch doctor’s house in Santo Domingo Latani, south Mexico. But in recent years, yes, some have questioned his identification: various other forms of morning glory (convolvulae) have been suggested as alternative candidates, or other plants entirely.

‘To my mind it is actually unlikely that ololiuqui was Turbina corymbosa: the descriptions of Aztec intoxication by ololiuqui do not match the effects of Turbina corymbosa. So it is quite possible that you are looking for a different plant. If your theory is correct, you could disprove the mighty Schultes! Find the real ulluchu and the real ololiuqui! That would be a remarkable achievement. Indeed I’d love to help you out. It’s likely this entheogen comes from the jungle out here: that’s where the ancient Peruvians sourced all their drugs. We have the best pizza these days, as well. Bx’

The holly and the ivy, / When they are both full grown / Of all the trees that are in the wood, / The holly bears the crown…

She sipped her iced coffee, and wrote some notes in her pad. The coffee was decaff; the caffeine of excitement inside her was quite sufficient. Jessica sensed she was in danger of running away with herself. So she slowed down and reviewed what they already knew for sure.

To start with, it was generally accepted that the Moche — like most pre-Columbian societies — took mind-altering drugs. They had found cocaine-taking implements in most Moche tombs: bird bones for tooting, elaborate snuff-boxes. The sacrificed children were probably given nectandra before they were killed: an analgesic and mild psychedelic derived from the laurel. So there was no doubt the Moche experimented with intoxicants.

Now there was tantalizing evidence of a different intoxicant, an underlying drug, the ur-drug; the secret drug, so sacred it could only be symbolized iconically, in the shape of its seeds.

Her thoughts halted at the obstruction, which was yet a way through. Like a car at a locked gate.

The seeds!

Of course. Why hadn’t she done this before?

Speedily, she Googled ‘morning glory seeds’. Then stared at the screen of images, her eyes quite wide.

The seeds of morning glory, in almost all species, looked like little drops of blood. Like ovals or commas. Just like the iconic blood drops, in all the Moche murals and pottery.

The holly bears a blossom, / As white as lily flower, / And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ, / To be our sweet Saviour…

Ulluchu was therefore, very possibly a kind of morning glory, like ololiuqui, but perhaps not the precise one identified by Schultes. It was likely to be a more powerful and maybe volatile drug, a drug that stimulated the sex drive and induced violent cruelty. It was probably given to prisoners before the sacrifice ritual. Which was why the men had erections in the murals of El Brujo.

Who else gave drugs to people before executions?

She found another web-page. ‘The Sacrificial Customs of the Aztecs’: ‘ Many Aztec sacrificial ceremonies were small, with the sacrifice of a single slave or captive to a minor god. Others were savagely spectacular, involving hundreds or even thousands of doomed and shuffling captives. Aztec history claims that Ahuitzotl (1468–1502), the ruler before Moctezuma II, sacrificed twenty thousand people after a battle in Oaxaca.

‘Whatever the size of the rite, the sacrificial ceremony was nearly always conducted with the same brutal ceremonies. Four priests held the victim on an altar at the top of a pyramid or temple while the presiding official made a cut below the rib cage with a blade of obsidian — a black volcanic stone — and pulled out the living heart. Commonly the victim was given a drug, before the ritual, which meant he went more willingly to the altar.’

The victims were given a drug.

Surely this was ulluchu. The drug that made you want to cut off your own hands and lips; the drug that made you accept being led up a pyramid to have your pumping heart torn out by Aztec priests. The drug of sex and violence, the drug that led people in a state of erotic and psychotic bliss to kill others or mutilate themselves, to drink their brother’s blood, to permit their own destruction.

Jessica’s fingers were trembling. Entheogenic and psychedelic drugs united all the cultures of pre-Columbian America. The Aztec and the Inca, the Maya and Mazatec, the Zapatec and the Mixtec, the Chan Chan and Zuni, and Hopi and Chimu, and Nazca and Navajo and beyond. The practice stretched far north: the Kiowa of Oklahoma took peyote cactus buttons; it reached west into the deserts, where the Tarahumara ate mescal; it reached deep into the jungle, where Amazonian tribes took ayahuasca; it reached unto the Olmec, who delighted in datura; it reached long into the Great Plains, where Apache imbibed nicotine, and down the Andes, where virtually all cultures sniffed and chewed cocaine. It reached into the Sonora wilderness, where ancient men licked the cane toad, and into the pampas, where Argentine tribes endured psychedelic enemas of liquidized snuff made from the ground seeds of Anadenanthera peregrina.

The Aztecs even gave hallucinogens to their jaguars.

The holly bears a berry

As red as any blood

And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ

To do poor sinners good

Jess sat back. She had her proof; or, at least, an excellent theory. Drug use was the unifying factor that underlay all pre-Colombian cultures from Patagonia to Canada, and therefore perhaps all their rituals and religions. And maybe their iconography, too: perhaps they all hallucinated in the same way, because of this unknown plant, explaining the similarity of pre-Columbian art from the Maya to the Aztec to the Inca and Muchika.

A universal proto-drug that eroticized sadism or masochism would also explain the terrible cruelty of all these religions and cultures: the obsession with sacrifice and blood letting, with blood drinking and decapitation.

The words of the carol were still spinning in her mind, though the PA had been switched off, long ago.

The holly bears a prickle

As sharp as any thorn

And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ

On Christmas Day in the morn.

So what happened to this precious and terrible drug? It must have gone north, from Peru to Mexico, and then gone to ground. But now, it seemed, ulluchu had re-emerged. Someone had found it, taken it, used it. Others were looking for it.

Jess felt a tiny frisson of exultation, but then her epiphany passed, and the fear returned. Who would be the most likely people to want such a powerful and dangerous drug? Who would be prepared to kill to get it? To murder indiscriminately?

They were all in much more danger than they had ever realized. She reached for her phone. This time she wasn’t going to be fobbed off with cached Facebook pages and unanswered emails.

Getting put through to the right person took an hour, and it probably cost her two hundred dollars. But she didn’t care.

Finally a warm but wary British voice answered her query. ‘Yes, I am Detective Chief Inspector Mark Ibsen. I’m in charge of the McLintock case. But who are you?’