HECATE'S GARDEN

Love and strife, Empedocles said. An ivory cannine, or the peacock's tail: natural selection and sexual selection. Hecate's enchanted garden. She who birthed the vine, Trioditis:


the meeting of three roads.

Angel messengers, terpenes and alkaloids, serotonin receptors on platelets, like olfactory sensing on protozoa. Pheromones. Salts and oils.


Smell is the first of the senses.

Some messages get misdelivered, the names of the addressees spelt so similarly.


Come close. Stay away. I love you. Eat me and die.

And the primal atmosphere, likewise internalized. Nitric oxide in the synapse, enemy nerve gas co-opted, given a work perrmit in a Precambrian armistice and employed.

The nervous system is distributed, thousab=nds of receptor types, hundreds of thousands of mediating chemicals.


Love and strife. Angels terrible and sweet.

Some messages are like interoffice memos, acetylcholine between cells. Others are transmissions from the Foreign Office, tannins, meant for other species. Jasmonic acid. Some messages are false: disinformation created to confuse and subvert. Protease inhibitors. Some are love letters to other life forms, or imperialistic sabre-rattling, like a phylum-wide Monroe Doctrine.

Plants to animals, or interactions with the environment. Carbohydrates oxidizing. Secretions of GABA.


It's NOT all in your head.

The "brain" in that jar of formaldehyde is not all there - look closely and you will see that it has been severed.

The real brain extends to fingertips, to genital surfaces, across synapses, through capillaries, veins, neuroreceptors lining the gut, covering platelets, carried by messengers through skin pores. Or inhaled, or ingested, or excreted.

Winds and ocean currents are intersynaptic fluids.

This, your own brain, buzzing with state transitions, energy captured through electron transport chains in green chloroplasts, from photons radiated, ninety-three million miles away in a great star, itself interacting and resonating with cosmic fields and galaxies.

& that's just the brain,

laughs the Mind.

I prefer caapi to pure harmalas, but like using harmalas for potentiation.

Recently I did my first trial of pre-dosing with harmalas using ~100mg of vine extracted harmine/THH followed later by two cups of Aya.

Not surprisingly, the harmalas seemed to potentiate the brew without appearing to notably alter its character, with the possible exception of increasing drowsiness early on.

Brewing Ayahuasca can take a minute, so having an easy way to make it stronger without altering its basic makeup seems like a good way to go, in my experience.

Did you notice an influence on the ayahuasca purge if any?

Brewing Ayahuasca can take a minute, so having an easy way to make it stronger without altering its basic makeup seems like a good way to go, in my experience.

Extracting vine seems like a waste of vine, a precious scarce resource. Plus you're risking THH to harmaline conversion if you store it as freebase.

If you want to potentiate it, why not just drink more vine? Yes, it takes a while to brew, but you had already brewed it to extract from, so why not store the brew?

And if you like extracts, why not extract rue + do a zinc reduction?