Why ancient Peruvian leaders served this special drink at feasts
Here’s what you need to know about vilca.
First, it’s both the name of a psychedelic powder (more on that soon) and the tree from which the powder is made. Tall and thorny, the vilca tree (Anadenanthera colubrina) grows throughout South America, including Peru. Within its seeds is a powerful psychoactive ingredient: butofenin. And when those seeds are pulverized and powdered, they can be snorted or smoked, delivering what Dr. Justin Jennings, ROM Senior Curator of Latin American Archaeology, describes as a trip like ayahuasca.
Put differently, vilca gets you high—as in a mystical-out-of-body-experience high, which obliterates your ego and whisks you away on a profound psychedelic journey.
The second thing you need to know about vilca is that it has a long history in South America, especially Peru, where Jennings and other ROM researchers have been working for almost two decades. In fact, the earliest evidence of vilca goes back 4,000 years to a site in northern Argentina, where researchers found a pipe and vilca seeds.
During what’s known as the Formative Period (900–300 BCE), archaeologists like Jennings believe that vilca was probably restricted to priests, who used the psychedelic to enable a “personal journey into the spiritual world.” The evidence is in the architecture, such as a temple found at another archaeological site in Peru, where “sculpted heads projecting along the temple’s façade depict humans in the process of transforming into something non-human, replete with mucus flowing from their nostrils, which suggests the inhalation of hallucinogens.”
But in the Middle Horizon (600–1000 CE), as the Wari—a pre-Incan Andean civilization—expanded their empire, the use of vilca began to shift. In a paper published on January 11 in Antiquity, Jennings and his three colleagues—Matthew Biwer, Willy Yépez Álvarez, and Stefanie Bautista—claim to have found the “the first archaeobotanical evidence” of the addition of vilca to beer, facilitating what they believe to have been a collective psychedelic experience.
The evidence was excavated at Quilcapampa, a Wari colonial settlement on the coastal plain of Southern Peru—an archaeological goldmine.
“The Andes is a bit like Egypt, in the sense that everything preserves,” says Jennings. “You have every peanut husk, every shrimp casing, which is awesome.”
Left: The seeds of the vilca tree can be used to make a powerful hallucinogen. This seed was excavated in Quilcapampa, Peru. Photo by Matthew Biwer, © Royal Ontario Museum. Centre: Close-up of a face-necked jar. More than 800 years before the Inca, the Wari State expanded out of the central Peruvian Sierra around 600 AD and shaped interactions in the region for the next four hundred years. Wari ceramics like this Robles Moqo face-necked jar excavated at Quilcapampa can be found across much of Peru. Photo by Lisa Milosavljevic, © Royal Ontario Museum. Right: These fragments of face-necked jars from Quilcapampa were likely used to serve the vilca-laced beer consumed during feasts. After feasts, these vessels were sometimes intentionally broken with a blow to the chest. Photo by Luis Manuel González La Rosa and Justin Jennings, © Royal Ontario Museum.
But the more evidence there is, the more there is to sort through—a painstaking task that was left to Biwer. Hour after hour, staring into a microscope, Biwer classified millions of plant remains. Among all the soil and debris, he found 16 vilca seeds and an abundance of molle, which is used to make beer.
The proximity of the plants, as well as pottery found nearby, all seem to suggest that Wari leaders hosted intimate feasts during which they served vilca-laced beer to their subjects. Yet this discovery only begs a more interesting question: Why?
Without any written records, it’s impossible to know for sure, but Jennings and his team have a theory.
Feasting of all kinds—including the much larger, beer-soaked feasts of the later Incan empire—can facilitate a deeper relationship between leaders and their subjects, but vilca as typically consumed is too powerful a hallucinogen to experience a sense of togetherness. Combining it with beer mellowed and extended the trip, creating a collective psychedelic journey that might have occasioned a unique kind of intimacy.
“What they’re trying to do is expand the notion of family,” explains Jennings. “Beyond one’s uncle, one’s nephew, to create these clans that become sort of the loci for political action.”
Plus, he suspects it could also have been a display of power.
“This vilca is very hard to come by. It’s growing on the opposite side of the Andes. You have to have access to longer chains of exchange in order to get it.”
That special access—and the know-how to make it—may have raised the status of Wari leaders in their subjects’ eyes, helping to establish a new hierarchy in the nascent settlement.
Jennings says that the feasts also emphasized the contributions of ordinary citizens—including copious amounts of meat and beer. “Even though the Wari host might add the secret sauce, everyone was contributing,” he says. “You sense that they are trying to create community.”