Plants of the Gods: S5E6. Plants of the Gods in Ancient Persia: A Conversation with Dr. Shauheen Etminan

Well, when Schultes did his work and brought these hallucinogens to the fore, the few people in the Western world who were paying attention thought of hallucinogenic plants and fungi as something essentially peculiar to Native American societies.

You had peyote on the U.S.-Mexico border.

You had the mushrooms in southern Mexico.

You had ayahuasca in the northwest Amazon.

And then lo and behold, Benny Shannon, the Israeli ethnobotanist, found these alkaloids, some of these same alkaloids in the Sinai.

This is from Syrian Roux.

Then, in listening to a presentation at ESPD 50, five years before, there was an Australian ethnobotanist who talked about some of these compounds in acacia.

Well, the Ark of the Covenant was built from acacia wood.

So here's Benny Shannon finding Syrian rue and acacia in the Middle East.

And here you are moving not so far from there and finding similar compounds in ancient Persia.

So talk to my listeners, if you would, about what's the difference between harming and telepathine.

Because when the French chemists looked at some of these plants in the late 1900s, mid 1900s, They said, oh, a completely new alkaloid, which is we're calling telepathine.

Absolutely.

Yes, I think the primary compound from both Syrian rue and Banisteropsis copy, the bark of Yahe, is harmeen.

And harmeen, it's interesting, we call them like out of like harmala compounds, you know, which is related to Paganum harmala.

But on that side of the world, they call it banisterine, which comes from Banisteropsis copy.

But both of them, they are also like the harmin, which is the same compound.

Harmin, benestrin, and telepathin are kind of the same name for the same molecule.

And this is a fascinating molecule with so many properties, both physiological, neurophysiological, as well as neuropsychological.

And this is basically from fecundum harmalat.

This is the primary compound.

And then the second compound is harmaline, which again, the effect of harmaline is also being studied with our Chilean psychotherapist, Claudio Naranjo, when he also injected back in the day, basically the intravenous tetra, I think it was, sorry, it was, I guess, 10-methoxyharmonine into his patients, you know, basically, and the effect that he reported out of those clinical trials.

That was just fascinating as part of his work.

But back into the effect of beta-carbolines in general and our study from the clinical work that we have done, it seems that these compounds, haramine, harmaline, and in case of Banisterosus copy, which is more rich in tetrahydroharamine, which is another analog of the hormonal compounds, so haramine seems to create an effect that is somehow a relation between kind of like the part of hippocampus that creates memory and episodic memory, plus the kind of like a connection to something that is outside.

So that's why it's called telepathine because when you take, and this has been what I have been experiencing because we do like the pure compound, different dosages, there is no imagery like DMT effect, but there is vivid images of, let's say, scenes or places that you have never been to.