Long before 'Heavenly Blue' climbed garden fences, the seeds of two Mexican morning glories had a place in religious life. The round seeds called ololiuqui came from Turbina corymbosa. Black, angular seeds, known in Zapotec as badoh negro and possibly in Nahuatl as tlitliltzin, came from the plant now called Ipomoea tricolor, the wild ancestor of the garden cultivars. This page describes that history as historians and ethnobotanists recorded it. It is not a guide to anything.
Four plants of divination
The American banker and ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson, who studied these plants in southern Mexico, wrote in 1963 that picietl (a wild tobacco), peyotl (peyote), teonanacatl (the sacred mushrooms) and ololiuhqui were "the four great divinatory plants of Mexico at the time of the Conquest" (Wasson, 1963). By divinatory he meant plants that were believed to give access to knowledge hidden from the ordinary mind, consulted when a family faced a grave problem.
Ololiuhqui is the Nahuatl name of the seeds, not of the plant, and means "round things". The vine itself was called coaxihuitl, "snake plant", and in Spanish the seeds became known as semilla de la Virgen, seed of the Virgin. Linguists prefer the spelling ololiuhqui; ololiuqui is the more common form in English.
What the colonial writers recorded
Spanish priests in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries wrote about ololiuhqui often, mostly in order to stamp it out. Wasson singles out the treatise on surviving "heathen superstitions" by the priest Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón as the richest source. He describes these texts as a record of "two cultures in a duel to death": churchmen pursuing what they saw as idolatry with the help of the secular courts, and Indigenous communities protecting a practice they valued. In his judgement, "the Indians seem to have won out", since the seeds were still in use across Oaxaca in the 1950s and 1960s.
The records of the Inquisition contain cases too. Wasson mentions an enslaved African healer who spoke of ololiuhqui del moreno, which the Mexican anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán read as his way of saying "black ololiuhqui".
Identifying the plants
For decades there were disputes outside Mexico over which plant ololiuqui came from. The Harvard botanist Richard Evans Schultes settled the question in 1941 with a paper identifying it as Rivea corymbosa, now usually placed in Turbina (Wasson calls it "the definitive paper").
The second seed came to light later. In 1960 the naturalist Thomas MacDougall reported that in various parts of Oaxaca, especially the Zapotec area, another seed was used in exactly the same way as ololiuqui. This was badoh negro, "black badoh", the seed of the plant then called Ipomoea violacea and now I. tricolor (MacDougall, 1960, cited in Wasson, 1963). In Zapotec, ololiuqui itself was called badoh.
Tlitliltzin
The black seeds are long and angular, so they could hardly be called "round things". Wasson looked for their Nahuatl name and found a candidate in the Breve relación de los dioses y ritos de la gentilidad by the priest Pedro Ponce, which mentions ololiuhqui, peyote and tlitliltzin together as separate products. Tlitliltzin is built on the Nahuatl root for "black", with a reverential suffix. Wasson proposed that it was the classic Nahuatl name for the black morning glory seed. He presented this as a reasoned guess, and it has remained one: the word may occur only once in the surviving classic Nahuatl texts.
What Wasson and MacDougall found in Oaxaca
Their notes, published with a map, list seven Zapotec villages and a group of Chatino villages where the black seed was in use around 1960. In some villages only the black seed was used, in others both; the black seed was widely regarded as the stronger. In places it was called macho, male, and taken by men, while the ololiuqui seed was called hembra, female (Wasson, 1963).
Wasson also recorded a healer's account from San Bartolo Yautepec. The rite took place on a Friday night in complete silence. It was addressed to the Virgin, with Catholic prayers, and a ritually washed child of seven or eight attended the person who had come for help. Its purpose was to learn the cause of an illness, whether it came from malice or from something else. The account is a striking example of how pre-Conquest practice and Catholic devotion had merged by the twentieth century.
From Oaxaca to the laboratory
The samples that MacDougall and his colleagues collected in Oaxaca reached Albert Hofmann in Switzerland through Wasson. In 1960 Hofmann announced that both kinds of seed contained ergot alkaloids, with ergine as the main component (see what is in the seeds). Within a few years the garden cultivars of the same species, 'Heavenly Blue' among them, had caught the attention of American students and of the medical press, which is where the risks page picks up the story.
Read on
- What is in the seeds
- The plant and the cultivar
- Legal status, including Louisiana's law that names Ipomoea violacea