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. Pharmakon does not want to try to resolve that ambivalence.

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 the culture plants that have shaped vision, assembled with the patience of taxonomy and the seriousness of ritual, so that a reader can move between the molecule and the myth, the field and the forest, and lose neither on the way, finding a deeper perspective in those dynamic webs of relationship.

— Daniel Mirante, Editor