Ancient Egyptians drank hallucinogenic cocktails in rituals

Nov. 15 () –

Advanced chemical analyzes have yielded the first physical evidence of hallucinogens in an Egyptian cup, which validates written records and myths about ancient Egyptian rituals and practices.

The teacher of the University of South Florida Davide Tanasi examined one of the few remaining Egyptian Bes cups in the world.

These cups, including the one donated to the Tampa Museum of Art in 1984, are decorated with the head of Bes, an ancient Egyptian god or guardian demon worshiped for protection, fertility, medicinal healing, and magical purification. Published in Scientific Reports, the study sheds light on an ancient Egyptian mystery: the secret of how Bes cups were used about 2,000 years ago.

“There is no research that has uncovered what we found in this study,” Tanasi said. in a statement. “For the first time, we were able to identify all the chemical signatures of the components of the liquid brew contained in the Tampa Museum of Art’s Bes cup, including plants used by the Egyptians, all of which have psychotropic and medicinal properties.”

The presence of Bes cups in different contexts over a long period of time made it extremely difficult to speculate about their contents or their role in ancient Egyptian culture.

“Egyptologists have long been speculating about what the cups with Bes’s head could have been used for and for what type of drink, such as holy water, milk, wine or beer,” said Branko van Oppen, curator of Greek and Roman art at the Tampa Museum of Art. “Experts did not know whether these cups were used in daily life, for religious purposes or in magical rituals.”

Various theories about the cups and vases were formulated from myths, but few of them were tested to reveal their exact ingredients until the truth was extracted layer by layer.

Tanasi, who developed this study as part of the Archeology of the Mediterranean Diet project promoted by the USF Institute for Advanced Studies of Culture and the Environment, collaborated with several USF researchers and partners in Italy at the University of Trieste and the University of Milan to carry out chemical and DNA analysis. Using a powdered sample obtained by scraping the inside walls of the vase, The team combined numerous analytical techniques for the first time to discover what the cup last contained.

The new tactic was successful and revealed that the vase had a cocktail of psychedelic drugs, bodily fluids and alcohol, a combination that Tanasi believes was used in a magical ritual recreating an Egyptian myth, probably for fertility. The concoction was flavored with honey, sesame seeds, pine nuts, licorice and grapes, which were commonly used to make the drink look like blood.

“This research teaches us about magical rituals in the Greco-Roman period in Egypt,” Van Oppen said. “Egyptologists believe that people visited the so-called Chambers of Bes in Saqqara when they wanted to confirm a successful pregnancy, since pregnancies in the ancient world were fraught with danger.

“Therefore, this combination of ingredients may have been used in a magical ritual that induced dreamlike visions in the context of this dangerous period of childbirth.”

“Religion is one of the most fascinating and perplexing aspects of ancient civilizations,” Tanasi said. “With this study, we have found scientific evidence that Egyptian myths have some kind of truth and it helps us shed light on the little-understood rituals that probably took place in the Chambers of Bes in Saqqara, near the Great Pyramids of Giza”.