Editorial Statement

In Greek, pharmakon names the remedy and the poison at once — the same substance under two descriptions, its meaning settled only by dose, intention, and the hand that administers it. Standing close beside it is pharmakos, the one driven out to purify the city: cure by expulsion. Plato worried at the word in the Phaedrus; Derrida let it stay undecidable. It is the right name for these plants, because every one of them has been, somewhere and to someone, all of it at once — sacrament and controlled substance, ancestor-medicine and scapegoat, the thing that heals a village and the thing a state legislates against. This archive holds that ambivalence open, tracing the relationships, institutions and acts of preparation through which each aspect acquires its force.

Sacramental plants occupy points of convergence between art, religion, medicine, ecology, politics and the sciences of mind. Across different societies they have participated in divination and diagnosis, pilgrimage and initiation, healing and warfare, song and dance, painting and weaving, mythic narration and the transmission of ecological knowledge. They have been approached as ancestors, teachers, deities, allies, poisons, technologies and molecular resources. Their effects have entered images, ornaments, architectures, ritual objects, cosmologies and institutions. A single plant relation may differentiate into a healing practice, a body of songs, a visual grammar, a religious movement, a theory of consciousness, a controlled substance or a pharmaceutical formulation.

Pluripotence describes this capacity to generate divergent cultural, aesthetic, intellectual and political forms. These possibilities arise through relationships rather than residing as a complete programme inside the plant. Visionary forms may be painted, woven, carved or projected into digital space. Perceived intelligences may enter mythology, theology or ecological obligation. Physiological actions may become medicines, experimental instruments or objects of neuroscience. Circulation may produce pilgrimage routes, diasporic religions, countercultures, markets, prohibitions and claims to cognitive liberty. Pharmakon follows these differentiations across bodies, disciplines, images, institutions and worlds, revealing connections concealed by their later separation into specialist fields.

The possible role of psychoactive plants in human cultural evolution belongs within this inquiry. Proposals linking altered states to the emergence of symbolic thought, ritual, language and religion range from archaeologically grounded interpretation to expansive evolutionary speculation. Evidence acquires different weight at each scale: residues and botanical remains, ritual objects, iconography, oral histories, comparative ethnography, neuropsychology and theories of cognitive evolution. Together they open a serious historical question concerning the recurrent relationship between psychoactive plants, image-making, rhythmic performance, mythic thought and ceremonial organisation. Pharmakon keeps the degrees of evidence visible while allowing the larger evolutionary question to remain in view.

These plants have also occupied an unusual place in the development of science. They have served as medicines and experimental instruments through which researchers investigated perception, psychosis, cognition, neurochemistry, psychotherapy and the construction of reality. Alkaloid isolation translated culturally situated preparations into molecular objects; psychiatry and neuroscience translated visionary events into symptoms, scales, receptors and neural dynamics. Contemporary psychedelic medicine continues this movement through clinical protocols, standardised compounds and intellectual property. Scientific description becomes another transformation of the plant relation, carrying it into new languages, institutions and regimes of evidence.

There are two easy ways to lose sight of the sacrament and living tradition. One is to dissolve it into chemistry — to say that Banisteriopsis caapi is a β-carboline, that peyote is mescaline, that the vision is a matter of neurotransmitter reuptake inhibition and increased entropy. The other is to dissolve it into the ineffable — to insert every tradition into one universal post-modern consciousness, that everyone will see elves, and treat the differences as trivial.

This archive is built on two axes precisely so that neither can win. On one, the Plant: the species entry — on the other, the Cultural Complex. In both cases we transcend botany or cultural tradition and engage in the cosmology, history and art that gathers plants and humans into a relational living world of mutual arising — the powder, the ash, the tube, the breath, the ordeal, and the phenomenology.

The practices recorded here are living and diasporic. The record is dated where it can be dated, sourced where possible, and honest about the contemporary hedonic and psychonautic zeitgeist that the mystical literature usually omits: along with biopiracy and patent, prohibition, and questions of commercialisation and conservation in a global market.

Pharmakon is an old name for the discipline of keeping remedy and poison in one vessel — of working a raw and dangerous material toward knowledge and healing. Pharmakon is offered in that spirit: an atlas of sacramental plants and the worlds gathered around them, assembled with the patience of taxonomy, the depth of anthropology, the openness of inquiry and the seriousness of ritual. Its purpose lies in revealing the pluripotent connections through which plants have entered art, history, evolution, science and religion—allowing the reader to move between molecule and myth, organism and artwork, field and forest, laboratory and ceremony, while retaining the dynamic web of relations that gives each its meaning.

— Daniel Mirante, Editor

THE PROPRIETARY TURN

July 2026

On 16 July 2026, Eli Lilly, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, announced an agreement to acquire AtaiBeckley for approximately $2.8 billion upfront and up to $1 billion in clinical and regulatory milestone payments. At the centre of the transaction stands BPL-003: a proprietary, patent-protected intranasal formulation of mebufotenin benzoate, a synthetic salt of 5-MeO-DMT, entering Phase 3 development for treatment-resistant depression. The portfolio also contains VLS-01, a buccal DMT formulation in Phase 2 development. Lilly’s announcement >

The scale of the agreement defines a historical threshold. A tryptamine whose modern biographies extend through natural sources, chemical synthesis, psychonautic experimentation, contemporary ceremony and scientific research has become the lead asset in the largest pharmaceutical commitment yet made to a psychedelic developer. Its value becomes legible through form, delivery system, clinical indication, patent estate, trial data and prospective market.

The acquisition brings the relations of ritual authority into sharp focus. A naturally occurring tryptamine may remain prohibited in personal or ceremonial use while a patented formulation advances towards authorised medicine. Clinical development can produce evidence, standards and lawful access; patents, diagnostic eligibility, professional supervision and pricing determine the conditions of that access. Financial value accumulates around a proprietary configuration drawn from a wider field of Indigenous practice, underground experimentation, community knowledge and public science.

Alongside this proprietary route stands the Pangaean entheogenic route: the recognition that visionary compounds and their enabling chemistries recur across the living world. Their planetary distribution weakens every claim that access must pass through one region, corporation, clinic or authorised formulation. Distributed botanical knowledge creates the material basis for cognitive liberty and for forms of inquiry organised through communities, religions, independent research and personal practice.

That route deserves open political advocacy. Non-commercial adult cultivation, possession and preparation should cease to attract criminal penalties. Public policy should support honest drug education, chemical and botanical testing, experienced accompaniment, crisis response and long-term integration. Conservation, Indigenous attribution, reciprocal benefit and protection from exploitative facilitators belong within the same framework. Prohibition drives these capacities underground; legal pluralism allows them to become visible and accountable.

Corporate medicine may develop standardised treatments for people who seek clinical care. Its presence grants no exclusive jurisdiction over visionary consciousness. Medical, religious, communal and autonomous forms of access can coexist, each governed according to its actual risks and responsibilities.

Pharmakon follows the whole field from organism and ceremony to molecule and patent. Its purpose lies in preserving the pluripotent connections through which sacramental plants have entered art, history, evolution, science and religion, while affirming a Pangaean commons in which the living sources of altered consciousness remain available beyond proprietary custody.

— Daniel Mirante, Editor