Salvia Divinorum — Visions of La Maria

FEATURE | RONGOA / DRUGS

Written by Stu Paul (he/him) | Contributing Writer

Illustrated by Tashi Donnelly (she/her) | @tashi_rd | Feature Editor

Salvia divinorum — an inconspicuous and seemingly unremarkable little plant — contains one of the most powerful and unique psychoactive compounds that can be found in nature. 

This mysterious herb is known by many different names: the diviner’s sage, Mexican tripping weed, yerba de la pastora, but to the indigenous   shamans of southwestern Mexico, it is most commonly referred to as simply ‘La Maria’. 

With a long history of sacred ritual use by the Mazatec people of Mesoamerica, salvia divinorum was unknown to Western academics until 1939 — when American anthropologist Jean Basset Johnson recorded and documented its use and effects amongst the shamans of the Sierra Mazateca in Oaxaca, Mexico. Salvia is native to the region, where it is used by Mazatec priests in rituals performed for healing and divination purposes. Post-colonisation the herb was religiously associated with the Virgin Mary and is still referred to as ‘La Maria’ by the locals. 

The traditional method of ingestion is to chew a quantity of freshly cut leaves until it forms a ‘quid’ — a small lump of chewed plant material that one holds in the mouth for a particular length of time, absorbing the psychoactive compound ‘Salvinoran A’ through the mouth and gums. The effects are apparently quite pleasant and euphoric — usually performed in semi-darkness with accompanying drums and singing. The salvia ceremony is intended to induce a visionary state of altered consciousness during spiritual healing sessions. This ritual has a deep significance to the Mazatec people — with the salvia plant believed to be a literal incarnation of the Virgin Mary and referred to as she/her — La Maria; Lady Salvia. 

However, a strange and unfortunate phenomenon began to occur in the United States in the early to mid-2000s. As the popularity of the internet and video-sharing platforms such as YouTube skyrocketed, people began uploading footage of themselves smoking salvia out of bongs with blowtorch lighters — and the resulting chaotic madness that would ensue. Videos with titles like ‘Gardening on Salvia’ and ‘Driving on Salvia’  became extremely popular. This early form of viral video resulted in huge media stories and moral panic in Western countries where this dried, extracted form of high-strength salvia was available for purchase. 

These videos would depict salvia smokers burning and inhaling the leaves, and then the subsequent babbling and confusion that would follow; the joke being that the psychoactive effects of salvia are so strong that one is barely able to sit upright for 10 minutes — let alone attempt gardening or drive a car. One popular video featured a couple in their lounge, with the salvia session devolving into the smoker yelling and flailing his arms while his partner panics. The unfortunate salvia user drops the bong and hurls himself at an open window, crashing through the blinds and tumbling out of both the window and camera view. As these alarming salvia videos became widespread, at some point, the knowledge of the phenomenon got back to the Mazatec shamans in southwestern Mexico. The shamans were disgusted and appalled — not only were the Westerners extracting the substance at extremely high doses and selling it as a packaged psychedelic, they were also consuming it in a way that they believed was profoundly disrespectful to the plant itself — burning and smoking the dried leaves in a destructive act that the Mazatec viewed as essentially sacrilegious. 

It was this form of salvia divinorum that the writer experimented with circa 2006-2009. At this time, the Psychoactive Substances Act (2013) was not yet in place, and many different varieties of high-strength salvia extracts were available on the NZ market. It was cheap — and boy was it powerful. Many of the salvia extracts were 15x and 20x the strength of the natural leaf, with some brands having extract levels of up to 50x and 80x — a dizzying quantity of the compound that would send even the most experienced drug user into a wildly bizarre and often confused hallucinatory state. 

I experienced a handful of these unnerving trips while smoking salvia during my early teenage years. The first time would prove to be the strongest — an experience that transformed my visual field to a skipping, flickering film reel that seemed to be viewed from an impossibly far distance away. The coloured patterns on the carpet of my family home began moving, dancing, marching, in a manner reminiscent of the magically animated broomsticks from Disney’s ‘Fantasia’. I looked up at my friends during this time, and distinctly remember their laughing faces — “How is it? What does it feel like?” — but I could not answer them. There was no ‘I’ present, and the concept of speech was so alien to me in that state that it would take several strange minutes before my ability to speak would return. 

For a trip that only lasted a short duration of 5-10 minutes, smoking salvia was a shockingly powerful experience. I had several other trips on this bewildering drug — in different places and varying quantities — that were similar to this first experience but not quite as strong and jarring. The emotional effect after each trip was always the same: an odd feeling of balanced neutrality, reflecting on the experience as neither positive nor negative, just neutral. This would contrast with later drug trips on other psychedelics — the aftermath of these experiences always reliably glowing with positivity and supposed learning. 

Salvia would leave me with no answers — only more questions. Perhaps this was the point, as elaborated by the priests of the Mazatec. Lady Salvia was insulted by arrogant Westerners burning her precious leaves and consequently provided no luminous insight to any would-be salvia-smoking psychonaut. I suspect that the true secrets of salvia divinorum lie in the traditional indigenous method of chewing fresh leaves in semi-darkness. Maybe only then will La Maria reveal herself and the intricacies and spiritual mysteries of her plant to the user…