Psychoactive Plants & Fungi: A Cultural Guide to 42 Botanicals That Expand The Mind

Humans have long turned to plants and fungi to change how they feel, think, work, socialize, and worship. Ethnobotanist and natural products chemist Liam Engel surveys 42 such items as part of the long history of plants associated with healing, ceremony, and altered states of consciousness. 

Each illustrated profile considers what makes a species psychoactive, where and how it has traditionally been used, and the rituals, beliefs, and economies that have developed around it. The selection ranges from coffee, tea, tobacco, nutmeg, and yerba mate to coca, kava, kratom, peyote, ayahuasca, fly agaric, salvia, poppy, and several psychoactive mushrooms. 

The result is less a guide to psychoactive substances than a history of our relationships with them. Engel is interested in both what these species do to the human body and the meanings people have assigned to those effects, including the ways traditional practices have been adapted, commercialized, prohibited, or revived. 

With 330 color illustrations, the book is designed as an accessible visual reference and not a field guide or manual for use. Engel’s background across ethnobotany, chemistry, and pharmacology allows him to approach psychoactive plants and fungi as biological organisms, chemical substances, and participants in human culture. 

Hardcover. Color illustrations and photographs throughout.