Page 25:

Datura innoxia dust was blown into the eyes of the author to intentionally harm him.

Page 81: Mentions Brugmansia aka Angel’s Trumpets as a pant that can alter human
perception. P.84: The seedpods of the brugmansia have no prickly spines, but all of the
seedpods of the various datura do.

Page 83: Datura stramonium : For ying.

Symptoms: People call the stramonium the jimsonweed, which came from the name
Jamestown weed. Even though it now grows
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 all around the globe, it originated in what is now the northeast
part of the United States. As you
probably know, Jamestown was one of the rst British colonies in North America,
founded in the early 1600s. What you
don’t know is that by the late 1600s the aristocratic colonists
and their servants had formed an uprising against the British.
When the British soldiers came to Jamestown, they had little
food, and since they were enemies of the Indians, an Algon-
quian Indian witch cast a spell on them to eat the stramonium
as a salad. And so for many days the soldiers were out of their
minds, haplessly wandering around, playing jokes on each other,
and urinating and defecating on themselves.

Page 84: preparation

pick ve seedpods from the stramonium while telling
the plant that you honour it and mean no harm.
Carefully cut open one of the seedpods,
scrape the seeds into the mortar.
Fill a pot with a liquid that smelled like a fragrant form
of tesgumo (a brewed corn beverage).
Scrape the crushed stramonium seeds into the boiling liquid in the pot.
With a miniature homemade straw broomstick, stir the pot with the wooden end.
Florinda proceeded to dip the broom handle many times
into the pot and rub the liquid onto her most private of places.
When I had nished anointing my sexual organ, Florinda
silently gestured to me to put the broom in the re, and the
four of us joined hands as we watched it burn.
“One day you will no longer need the datura
or anything else in order to y, but right now the spirit of the
stramonium will help you to y and consciously dream. Dip the
broom into the pot and rub the liquid on yourself, and then let
it dry. When it dries, rub some more on, and let it dry. Do that
a total of ve times.”
I felt a rapid sleepiness engulf me. The next thing I remember is waking up
in the ocean.
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 Page: 118 ceratocaula, nexehuac, or, in Spanish,
torna loco (makes you crazy). With the spirit of the ceratocaula,
we will y to the place where we can capture and tame some
evil spirits.
This was the rst species of datura I had seen actually growing in water. Plus, unlike the
Datura inoxia, whose smell made me
want to vomit every time I touched one, the ceratocaula had
fragrant owers that were almost intoxicating by themselves.
These funnel-shaped owers upon
closer inspection were faintly pinkish-violet inside, and if you
looked at them kind of out of the corner of your eyes, the out¬
side radiated a bluish tone that felt rather eerie for some reason.
The ceratocaula seedpods were
completely smooth and resembled the shape and smoothness of
an egg.
With the stramonium we can open to its power by
allowing it to enter into the mystical power point of our body:
our genital region. But with the ceratocaula, we will allow it to
enter only on the outside of our body, through our skin and not
any of our mucous membranes.

I cut open the seedpods and crushed them with the

mortar and pestle. Florinda told us that she was going to make
a much stronger mixture this time because we would be admin¬
istering the spirit of the ceratocaula into our dreaming bodies
in a di erent way.
Marisol and I put the ground ceratocaula into the pot, and I
saw that Florinda had put less than half of the sacred corn beverage into the mix with it
this time.
In the case of both the ceratocaula and the spirits we are going
to meet, we don’t want to fully open ourselves to them. The cer¬
atocaula is the trickiest of all the daturas and will surely attempt
to trick or delude us if we are not careful and do not take the
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 appropriate measures to avoid her gaining complete control. Her fragrance, her beautiful
owers, and her egg-shaped pods are all disguises she wears to lure people, animals,
and even spirits into her games. That is why she is the best datura to use
in order to meet the lying, cheating, and malicious spirits of the
underworld.”

placing the pot between us, she instructed us to apply the gooey mixture as she
was doing. First we smeared some around both our ankles, then
on the inside of our wrists, then on the center of our chest, and
nally on the forehead. “Once you start to feel slightly drowsy,
then follow the same procedure again,” she instructed.

“The next phase will be the feeling of a strong wind rushing

over your whole body and soul. When you get to the point of
feeling that the wind is so strong that it s going to carry you
away and you cannot hang on much longer, quickly reapply
another coating of paste and then lean back and let the wind
take you.”
Put on the last coat of paste, then lie back down and relax. What¬
ever you do, be sure to concentrate on the cave of the dead. We
will meet there in Mictlan. You have been there before, so you
should be able to easily y there. DO NOT let your mind wander or who knows where
you’ll end up.”
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