Microcosms

A Homage to Sacred Plants of the Americas

We hope that the Microcosms website, entirely available in English, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, can be a valuable resource for Latin American Studies programs in that it cuts across traditional disciplines in innovative ways and encourages dialogue between the humanities and the sciences in general, including Anthropology, Art History, Biology, Chemistry, Economics, Environmental Studies, History, Philosophy, Political Science, and Religious Studies. Indeed, Microcosms touches on almost every aspect of the traditional way of compartmentalizing knowledge at a typical university, even Mathematics when one begins to calculate the enormous scope of the genocide that occurred during the first century of European colonial rule in Latin America.

In his indispensable, groundbreaking book Posthuman Plants: Rethinking the Vegetal through Culture, Art, and Poetry, John Charles Ryan discusses how “the maintenance of the world’s biocultural heritage should become a moral obligation” (52). The dozens of plants assembled in the Microcosms website are revered by Amerindian groups throughout the continent and, collectively, form an alternative cognitive map based on a deep ancestral knowledge of vegetal technologies. In this repository, the digital images of these sacred plants generated through confocal microscopy can be seen together in this innovative way and admired for the astonishing aesthetic nourishment they provide. Additionally, to do this work effectively, Ryan believes that the binary relationship between nature and culture needs to be decompartmentalized in order to “bring the sciences, arts and humanities into transdisciplinary dialogue” (52). He calls for interdisciplinarity: “Is an ecodigital practitioner an environmentalist, artist, poet, scientist, engineer, conservator, botanist, or all of the above?” (83).

For this reason, the Microcosms website should be considered a place for people and plants to be and to become together. It is a digital repository of plant-art, an archive of ancestral knowledge, a heritage-site that preserves the memory of precarious lives, both human and vegetal. We hope that this website becomes a platform for new aesthetic experiences through technology, a site of resistance to humanity’s predominant utilitarian attitude toward plants, a means of denouncing the abuses that are producing a mass extinction of plant species, and a call to urgent, empathic, morally-based activism as conservators, creators and informed citizens against the political and economic systems that are so irrevocably harmful to the environment.

Confocal microscopy, also known as confocal laser scanning microscopy, is a specialized optical imaging technique that provides contact-free, non-destructive measurements of three-dimensional objects. For the website (https://www.microcosmssacredplants.org/), which was designed and built by Eric Williams-Bergen, plants considered sacred by indigenous groups of the Americas were scanned at St. Lawrence University’s Microscopy and Imaging Center.

The procedure gathers information from a narrow depth of field, while simultaneously eliminating out-of-focus glare and creating optical sections through layers of biological samples. Images are built over time by gathering photons emitted from fluorescent chemical compounds naturally contained within the plants themselves, creating a vivid and precise colorimetric display.

To pay homage to sacred plants revered by indigenous groups throughout the Americas is a way of honoring the entire world in a time of environmental emergency. The website—at the juncture of art, technology, and science—magnifies life in ways that may alter how humans perceive other living entities from our shared and threatened biosphere in more egalitarian terms.

The plants reveal themselves as 21st-century extensions of biomorphic forms that were the genesis of abstract works by artists such as Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee one hundred years ago.

Some of the plants contain the most potent psychoactive agents on the planet and serve as intermediaries that have enabled native communities to communicate with their ancestors, wage war on the enemies of their land and their traditions, conceptualize entire cosmogonies, and maintain a nearly impossible ecological equilibrium.

Each stoma, each trichome, each patterned fragment of xylem and vascular tissue, as well as each grain of pollen in these vital portraits is not only a way into previously unseen vegetal realms, but also a potential way out of our collective crisis. The confocal images of the sacred plants in combination with the psychoactive properties many of these plants possess and have shared with humanity can be effective tools for truly critical perception, as well as for new phytocentric collective visions of eco-activism and militancy.

We understand “sacred” in an ample way, in the reverential and respectful sense that Amerindian groups define this term as a spiritual pact, and have included a wide (albeit still limited) range of nearly 50 plants from Maize to Peyote, from Amaranth to the plants used to prepare ayahuasca, from the Mapuche’s Foye to the Yanomami’s Yãkoana, and from an Incan ancestral potato Olluco to the San Pedro cactus. There is also an additional image of the obligatory fungus in this context Psilocybe cubensis known to indigenous Mesoamerica as Teonanácatl (flesh of the gods) to accompany all these plants. The texts that describe each individual species in the Plant Index clarify Amerindian medicinal and spiritual uses associated with them. More often than not, the revered plants that appear in this digital collection are psychoactive. Why? According to the great Harvard ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes and his co-author Albert Hofmann, the Swiss scientist who was the first to synthesize LSD: “Plants that alter the normal functions of the mind and body have always been considered by peoples of nonindustrial societies as sacred, and the hallucinogens have been plants of the gods par excellence […] It is in the New World that the number and cultural significance of hallucinogenic plants are overwhelming, dominating every phase of life among the aboriginal peoples” (7, 26).

Like the Hubble telescope that has produced so many iconic celestial images, the confocal microscope is a tool of perception that extends humanity’s narrow biological filters. And now, we’ve used our human eyes and technological vision to design the James Webb Space Telescope so that we are able to perceive the universe in colors and details that no human eye has ever seen. Perhaps this kind of seeing beyond parallels the neurological effects of these plants of power themselves as they have crossed blood-brain barriers and exercised their profound influences in ritual contexts, in some cases, for millennia.

This is transgressive art, an art of resistance. The art, finally, of surviving in a threatening world in which laws and repressive security forces with unchecked power continue to discriminate against plants, harassing, arresting and imprisoning the people who use them for spiritual and academic purposes. Tragically, the violent fear underlying and fueling the Spanish Inquisition of time past is still a grave threat in the twenty-first century around the world. As many have said, the War on Drugs is a War on Consciousness. The confocal images themselves demonstrate the correspondence that exists between the otherworldly this-worldliness of magnified sacred plants and the visionary experience that they produce in human consciousness.

Reading Michael Marder’s Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, we began to ask ourselves some questions: How can we give a new prominence to the vitality of plants? How is it possible for us to encounter plants and not take them for granted? Plants are so absolutely familiar, yet at the same time, so utterly foreign. We regard plants with what Marder calls an “instrumental attitude,” always wondering how we can put them to good material use. But if we were able to move beyond the impediments that we have erected between ourselves as humans and plants, could we somehow turn our utilitarian approach to vegetal lives (in their astonishing variety) into a way of perceiving them differently, “recreating the plant in imagination” (Marder 4-5)?

About the Author

Jill Pflugheber is a 1986 graduate of St. Lawrence University. Jill worked 17 years in biomedical research at places like Harvard, University of Kentucky, and University of Texas SW Medical Center, before returning to SLU as the microscopy instructor.

Works Cited

Marder, Michael. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. Columbia University Press, 2013.

Pflugheber, Jill and Steven White. Microcosms: A Homepage to Sacred Plants of the Americas, 2022, https://www.microcosmssacredplants.org

Ryan, John. Posthuman Plants: Rethinking the Vegetal through Culture, Art, and Poetry. Common Ground Research Networks, 2015.

Schultes, Richard, Albert Hofmann and Christian Rätsch. Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers. Healing Arts Press, 2001.

A Homage to Sacred Plants of the Americas

4W Women in Translation: Circles of Meaning

Rizoma: Latin American Laboratory of Art, Ecology, and Science

LACIS Review