Two Kinds of Knowledge: Schultes and Hofmann

“The collaboration between Schultes and Hofmann was the collaboration between field knowledge and laboratory analysis, between knowing which plants indigenous peoples used and knowing what the plants contained. Neither alone was sufficient.”

Richard Evans Schultes and Albert Hofmann were the ideal collaborators for Plants of the Gods because they represented complementary forms of knowledge that were, individually, incomplete.

Schultes's knowledge was ecological, ethnographic, and taxonomic. He knew which plants indigenous communities used, in which preparations, for what purposes, within what ceremonial contexts. He had watched curanderos prepare ayahuasca, attended peyote ceremonies, and collected specimens of the sacred mushrooms that Wasson's publications had brought to Western attention. What he lacked was the chemistry: he was a botanist, not a pharmacologist.

Hofmann's knowledge was chemical. He had synthesized LSD from ergot alkaloids, isolated psilocybin and psilocin from Schultes's mushroom specimens, and analyzed the chemistry of morning glory seeds. He understood how these compounds interacted with human physiology. What he lacked was the field context: the knowledge of how the plants were used, who used them, in what forms and quantities and ceremonial frameworks.

Plants of the Gods combined these two forms of knowledge in a way that neither could have produced independently. The botanical and ethnographic descriptions are Schultes's. The chemical structures and pharmacological notes are Hofmann's. The book argues, by its structure, that both are necessary for understanding what these plants are and why they matter.

This argument has institutional implications. The current psychedelic renaissance tends to separate the clinical and the cultural: researchers at Johns Hopkins study psilocybin in controlled trials; anthropologists study ayahuasca in indigenous contexts; they rarely read each other. Plants of the Gods was written by two people who talked to each other across the laboratory/field divide and produced something neither could have produced alone. The model is still the right one.

Sources

• Schultes & Hofmann, Plants of the Gods (1979)
• Wikipedia, Albert Hofmann
• Wikipedia, Richard Evans Schultes