In 1959 Gordon Wasson sent Albert Hofmann the seeds of ololiuhqui, the Aztec morning glory, and Hofmann found in them close relatives of LSD, compounds thought to be made only by fungi. His colleagues suspected contamination. Half a century later they were proved right, in a way nobody had imagined.
by Albert Hofmann, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
There is a vine sold in seed packets all over Europe for the sake of its flowers, which open sky-blue in the morning and have folded shut by the afternoon. Gardeners call it the morning glory; botanists of my generation called it Ipomoea violacea, and now more often Ipomoea tricolor. It climbs a fence in a single summer. Children like it because the flowers really do close, as if someone had told them the day was over. I had looked at it many times without a single chemical thought. A chemist does not expect a garden flower to be a relative.
In the summer of 1959 I began to learn that it was one.
The seeds came from Gordon Wasson, with a letter dated 6 August 1959. Wasson was by then an old friend of the laboratory. We had isolated psilocybin and psilocin from the sacred mushrooms of the Mazatec country, which he had made known to the world, and I think he had begun to regard me as the man to whom one sends a Mexican mystery in an envelope. This time there were two samples. The first was of light brown, roundish seeds collected in Huautla de Jiménez; the botanists identified the plant as Rivea corymbosa, which is now called Turbina corymbosa. The second was of black, angular seeds from San Bartolo Yautepec, in Zapotec country, and the plant was Ipomoea violacea. The Zapotecs call the first badoh and the second badoh negro. The Aztecs had called the seed of the first ololiuhqui, which means a round thing.
The name was not new to me. It sits in the old Spanish chronicles, where the friars and physicians of the sixteenth century wrote down, with disapproval and with care, what the Indians did. Bernardino de Sahagún described a plant called coatl xoxouhqui, the green snake, whose seeds, he wrote, stupefy and deprive one of reason. Francisco Hernández, physician to Philip II, reported that the priests who ate them saw thousands of fantastic images and demons. The colonial authorities understood very well that these seeds were a way to the old gods, and they punished those who used them. So the seeds went where the mushrooms had gone: out of sight, into the hands of healers in the mountains. Four hundred years later a young botanist from Harvard, Richard Evans Schultes, went looking for the plant and in 1941 published his identification of it as Rivea corymbosa. The Indians had never lost it. We had simply stopped reading the chronicles as if they meant what they said.
I gave the seeds to Hans Tscherter, with whom I had carried out the isolation from the mushrooms, and we began in the usual way: grind, defat, extract, separate, and follow the activity. What we found was plain. The active principles of ololiuhqui were lysergic acid amide, lysergic acid hydroxyethylamide, and a few alkaloids closely related to them. There was chanoclavine. The same alkaloids stood in the black seeds from San Bartolo. And the black badoh negro was nothing other than the morning glory of the seed packets.
I should say what this meant to a man who had spent his working life among the ergot alkaloids. Lysergic acid is the nucleus of the whole ergot family. When I made lysergic acid diethylamide in 1938, I made it by joining lysergic acid, which I had from ergot, to diethylamine, which I had from a bottle. Lysergic acid amide is the simplest member of the family: the same nucleus, with the plainest possible group where I had put the two ethyl groups. It is LSD's elder brother, so to speak. I knew that molecule. I knew where it came from: from Claviceps purpurea, a fungus living on rye. In a quarter of a century of work on ergot at Sandoz I had never met these compounds in anything but fungi.
And here they were in the seeds of a flowering plant, a vine in the bindweed family, as far from a parasitic fungus as a rose is from a mould.
It is hard now to convey how strange this was, because the strangeness depended on a rule that only specialists cared about. Every plant chemist of my time knew that a given class of substances belongs to a given class of organisms. Nature has habits. The morphine alkaloids come from the poppies; the ergot alkaloids come from the lower fungi, from Claviceps and a few of its relatives. On this experience a whole science, chemotaxonomy, was being built: tell me what a plant makes, and I will tell you where it stands in the family tree. The occurrence of ergot alkaloids in a higher plant contradicted that experience. It was, as I later wrote, an astonishing result, and at first it seemed to me scarcely believable.
I believed it because I had seen it. We published the isolation in Experientia in 1960, and in the same year I presented it in Sydney, at the congress on natural products of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. I remember the room less well than I remember the discussion. My colleagues received the talk with scepticism. It was suggested, politely, that the extracts might have been contaminated with traces of lysergic acid derivatives. And where would such traces come from? From my own laboratory, of course. The man who had made LSD had found LSD's relatives in a Mexican seed. It was a very reasonable suspicion. If I had been sitting in the audience, I would have held it myself.
I could only say what we had done, and that the seeds had come from Oaxaca and not from Basel. The answer, when it came, would not be mine.
Before I come to the answer I must say something about what the seeds do, because this is where the chemistry ends and the question I care about begins.
I took lysergic acid amide myself, pure, as a self-experiment. It is active, but only at a dose ten to twenty times greater than that of LSD, and its effect is not the same. It gave me a dreamlike condition, but one marked by mental emptiness and by a sense that things were unreal and without meaning. My hearing became very sensitive. My body grew heavy and tired, and in the end I slept. The psychiatrist H. Solms later examined the substance systematically and found much the same picture. I have seldom been so little rewarded by an experiment on myself. There was no forest path in it.
The seeds themselves had already been tried by others before our analysis. Humphry Osmond, the English psychiatrist who gave the word psychedelic to the language, took between sixty and a hundred seeds in 1955 and reported apathy and emptiness, with a heightened sensitivity of vision, followed by a state of relaxation. In 1958 V. J. Kinross-Wright gave the seeds to eight volunteers, at doses of up to one hundred and twenty-five seeds. They noticed nothing at all.
Now set beside these the Aztec priest in Hernández, with his thousands of images and demons, and the healers of Oaxaca who still grind the seeds to a flour and take them for divination. Four accounts of the same seeds and of what is in them: a Swiss chemist who was emptied and put to sleep; an English psychiatrist who felt apathy with bright eyes; eight volunteers who felt nothing; and a priesthood who consulted the gods with them for centuries.
I do not think these accounts contradict one another, and I do not think the seeds were bad in Basel and good in Oaxaca. Seeds vary; the amount of alkaloid in them varies with the plant, the season, and how they are stored; a seed swallowed whole may pass through a man untouched, where the same seed ground and soaked gives up what it holds. These are facts a chemist must state first. But when they are all stated, something remains. The molecule is a key. What it opens depends on the door, and on the house, and on who stands in the house waiting. A man who takes a seed in a clinic as a test of its effects is a different receiver from a sick woman who takes it at night because a healer has told her the seed will speak. I have said this about LSD for sixty years, and people have heard it as a mystical excuse. It is nothing of the kind. It is the most sober description I know of what a psychoactive substance is: a sender that only transmits into a receiver, and the receiver is a whole person in a whole place.
The Indians knew that the seeds are not a pharmaceutical. They are a guest you receive in a certain way, at a certain hour, with a certain question. The friars knew it too, which is why they feared them.
The answer to Sydney came slowly, and most of it came after my death.
By 1962 two workers, W. A. Taber and R. A. Heacock, were already examining where in the seed of Rivea corymbosa the alkaloids lay, and whether fungi were to be found there. It was the natural question. If only fungi make ergot alkaloids, then perhaps there is a fungus in the seed. For decades the matter was not settled, and most of us went on speaking of the alkaloids of the morning glory as the vine's own.
Then, in 2011, a group of botanists and mycologists described a new genus of fungi, which they named Periglandula. These are clavicipitaceous fungi, the same family as the ergot of rye. They live with the morning glories. In the species studied, their fine threads appear on the upper surface of the young leaves, close to small glands; they grow into the seed and pass from mother plant to daughter plant through the seed itself, generation after generation, so that the vine and the fungus are never parted. It is the fungus that makes the ergot alkaloids. One species of it, Periglandula turbinae, lives with Turbina corymbosa, the plant of the light brown seeds that Wasson sent me from Huautla. In 2021 an American group showed that the alkaloids are concentrated in a few lineages of the morning glory family, and that the vines with larger seeds carry more of them, perhaps because they have more to protect. In 2025, the partner of Ipomoea tricolor itself, the garden flower on the fence, was described as a species of its own.
So my Sydney colleagues were right, in a sense none of us could have imagined. The extracts were contaminated. They were contaminated by a fungus that had been riding in those seeds long before there was an Aztec priest to eat them, or a friar to forbid them, or a chemist in Basel to grind them up. And the rule of chemotaxonomy was not broken after all. The ergot alkaloids had stayed in their family. The family had simply moved into a flower and kept very quiet about it.
I find this one of the most beautiful things that has happened in my science, and I want to say why.
I began my life, if I may put it so, in a forest above Baden, as a small boy on a May morning, when the whole wood suddenly stood in a clear light and seemed to be speaking to me, as though it wanted to take me into its own being. I did not know then what had happened. I spent the rest of my life asking, and the chemistry was the form my asking took. What I found, again and again, was that the separations we make are useful and not final. Subject and object; the chemist and the thing he studies; the healthy mind and the altered one; the flowering plant and the fungus. Each of these distinctions serves us well at the bench. None of them is the last word on how things are.
The morning glory is not one organism. It is an arrangement between two, so old and so intimate that for fifty years the best chemists in the world, myself among them, took the pair for a single plant. The alkaloid that Tscherter and I held in a crystal in 1960 was the product of a partnership neither of us suspected. And the effect that alkaloid produces in a human being depends, once more, on a partnership: between the substance and the person who receives it, between the person and the place, between the place and the whole tradition that tells a man what the night is for.
The initiates at Eleusis, if Gordon, Carl Ruck and I were right, drank a preparation of the ergot of grain in the sanctuary of Demeter, and for nearly two thousand years the Greeks counted it among the holiest things in their religious life. The same family of fungi that grows on the grain grows in the Mexican vine. On two sides of the world, at least two peoples found that a fungus living with a plant could open the door, and both of them surrounded the door with preparation, silence, fasting, secrecy and awe. Our century, which found the molecule in a laboratory, was the first to hand it round without any of that. And then we grieved at what followed.
There is one more thing the seeds taught me, and it is a lesson in humility for a chemist. When I stood in Sydney and my colleagues doubted me, I was right about the seeds and they were right about the rule, and none of us was right about the world. The world was larger than both our positions. A presentiment had brought me back to LSD-25 in 1943, when every rational account said that the compound was finished. Something like that presentiment, I think, is what keeps a scientist looking at a result that ought not to be there, rather than explaining it away. The scientist who explains too quickly loses the guest.
If you grow the blue morning glory next summer, look at the young leaves early in the day, while the flowers are open. You will probably see nothing with the naked eye. But the guest is there, and by autumn it will be in the seed.
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Albert Hofmann, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem tertium Kalendās Octōbrēs (29 September 2026), ab Albertō Hofmannō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
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