ABSTRACT
The chapter focuses on medical recipes containing psychoactive peyote and ololiuhqui seeds as used in New Spain during the 16th and 17th centuries. The recipes under scrutiny were used by Spanish clergymen for medical assistance, and likewise for cultural intermediation. The effects of peyote and ololiuhqui seeds were defined by analogy with the effects of wine and other distilled intoxicating beverages with one key difference: the New Spanish plants were explicitly connected with idolatry. Both plants were used in rituals and were likewise classified by the Europeans as intoxicating, hence hallucinogenic. The American nature increasingly drew the attention of the scientific community. The textualizations of the medical and superstitious practices assigned to peyote and ololiuhqui were scarce in the medical texts, but no less relevant for that. The physicians and surgeons who wrote these texts were acting as cultural mediators. They shed light on the medicinal properties of these plants by inevitably relying on analogies.
