Every Drug Used in Ancient Civilizations transcript

Today we're going over every major drug used in ancient civilizations. And I'm not talking about herbal tea and chamomile. I'm talking about the hard stuff. The substances that entire empires ran on, that religions were built around, and that may have literally shaped the course of Western philosophy. Turns out our ancestors were way more familiar with getting high than most history books would like you to believe. Let's get into it.

Number one, opium, the joy plant. It's roughly 3,400 BC in ancient Sumer, modern-day Iraq, and the Sumerians have discovered something wonderful. They've been cultivating a flower, the poppy, and they figured out that if you slice open the seed pod and collect the milky sap that oozes out, you get a substance that makes pain disappear and fills you with a warm, dreamy euphoria. They call it hul gil, the joy plant. And with that, humanity's longest and most complicated relationship with a drug begins.

The Sumerians didn't keep this discovery to themselves. They passed their knowledge of opium cultivation to the Assyrians, who passed it to the Babylonians, who passed it to the Egyptians. By 1300 BC, opium was being mass-produced in the poppy fields of Egypt and traded across the entire ancient world. And everybody loved it. Egyptian mothers would rub opium paste on their gums to stop their babies from crying, which, I mean, it definitely worked.

Egyptian doctors prescribed it for basically everything: headaches, surgery, insomnia, depression. They ground it into a paste, mixed it into drinks, and even shaped it into suppositories. The Ebers Papyrus, one of the oldest medical texts in existence, contains over 700 remedies, and opium shows up in a shocking number of them. When the Greeks got their hands on opium, they ran with it. Greek soldiers took it before battle to dull the fear of death.

Homer mentions it in the Odyssey. Helen of Troy drops a drug into wine that quieted all pain and strife and brought forgetfulness of every ill. Most scholars believe she was spiking the wine with opium. The Greek god of sleep, Hypnos, was depicted holding poppies. The god of dreams, Morpheus, whose name we literally get the word morphine from, was surrounded by them. And then there were the Romans. Roman emperors were straight-up addicts.

Marcus Aurelius, one of the most celebrated philosophers in human history, took opium daily. His personal physician, Galen, prescribed it to him, and Marcus spent his evenings writing some of the most profound philosophical texts ever produced while absolutely zonked on opiates. His Meditations, a book still assigned in university philosophy courses today, was written by a man who was probably high while writing it. Which, honestly, explains why some of it reads the way it does.

The really wild part is that for roughly 4,000 years, nobody considered opium a problem. There was no concept of addiction, no war on drugs, no moral panic. It was just medicine. Good medicine that made you feel incredible. It took until the 19th century for anyone to seriously start questioning whether maybe, just maybe, a substance that makes you feel like a god every time you take it might have some downsides. Number two, blue lotus, the party drug of the pharaohs.

It's around 1,500 BC in ancient Egypt, and the elite are throwing a party. But they're not drinking regular wine. They've taken the petals of a beautiful blue water lily, Nymphaea caerulea, commonly known as the blue lotus, and soaked them in wine for several hours. The result is a drink that acts as a sedative, an aphrodisiac, and a mild hallucinogen all at the same time. It's basically ancient Egypt's version of a cocktail that does everything.

Blue lotus was everywhere in Egyptian culture, and I mean everywhere. It's painted on tomb walls, carved into temple pillars, depicted in banquet scenes, shown being held up to people's noses at parties. When archaeologists opened the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922, they found dried blue lotus petals scattered across his body. This wasn't some obscure recreational drug. This was a central part of Egyptian social and religious life.

The effects of blue lotus are pretty interesting from a pharmacological standpoint. The flower contains two main psychoactive compounds, nuciferine and apomorphine. Nuciferine is a sedative that produces a calm, floating sensation. Apomorphine activates dopamine receptors, creating feelings of euphoria and heightened sensual awareness. Combined with alcohol in wine, the result is a warm, dreamy, mildly psychedelic state that the Egyptians associated with divine connection.

Egyptian priests used blue lotus as part of religious ceremonies, claiming it allowed them to communicate with the gods. And given what we now know about its psychoactive properties, they were probably having some genuinely interesting experiences. Temple rituals involving blue lotus wine were considered sacred, and depictions of the flower appear alongside Osiris and other gods of the afterlife. Cleopatra, according to some historical accounts, allegedly bathed in pools infused with blue lotus.

Whether that's actually true or just the kind of story that gets attached to someone like Cleopatra is hard to say. But it fits. The whole Egyptian upper class was soaking in this stuff. And here's the fun fact, blue lotus is still legal in most countries today. You can buy it online. You can brew it into tea. Nobody really regulates it because it's technically just a flower. The ancient Egyptians' favorite party drug is available on Amazon.

Welcome to the future. Number three, Soma, the mystery drug. Sometime around 1500 BC in ancient India, priests of the Vedic religion are performing their most sacred ritual. At the center of this ritual is a drink called Soma, pressed from a plant, filtered through sheep's wool, mixed with milk and honey, and consumed by the priests who then enter states of ecstatic divine communion. Soma is mentioned 114 times in the Rigveda, one of the oldest religious texts in human history.

An entire book of the Rigveda, the ninth mandala, is dedicated exclusively to Soma. Hymns describe it as granting immortality, divine visions, superhuman strength, and communion with the gods. One verse reads, "We have drunk Soma and become immortal. We have attained the light the gods discovered." This wasn't just a drug. This was the centerpiece of an entire religion. And here's the problem. Nobody knows what it was.

The identity of Soma is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in the history of religion and botany. The original plant went extinct or the knowledge of which plant to use was lost or the trade routes that supplied it dried up. Nobody's sure. By the time later Hindu texts were written, Soma had already become mythological rather than practical. The priests knew they were supposed to use Soma, but they no longer knew what Soma actually was.

This has not stopped people from guessing. In 1968, a banker and amateur mycologist named R. Gordon Wasson published a book arguing that Soma was Amanita muscaria, the red and white spotted mushroom that looks like something out of a Mario game. His theory was that the mushrooms psychoactive properties matched the Rigveda's descriptions of divine visions and feelings of invincibility. Other scholars have proposed ephedra, a stimulant plant that grows in the region and would explain the descriptions of superhuman energy.

Some suggest it was a combination of plants, maybe a psychedelic mixed with a stimulant that produced effects no single plant could replicate. Others have gone even more exotic suggesting Syrian rue, cannabis, or plants that no longer exist in their original form. The truth is, we may never know. The most important drug in ancient religious history, a substance that an entire civilization built their spiritual practice around, and its identity is a complete mystery.

Somewhere out there is a plant that made people feel like gods, and we lost it. Number four, henbane, the berserker drug. It's the 9th century AD somewhere in Scandinavia, and a band of Viking warriors is preparing for battle. But, these aren't regular warriors. These men have stripped naked, painted themselves, and are currently biting their own shields while howling like animals. Their eyes are dilated to the size of dinner plates.

Some of them are foaming at the mouth. They feel no pain. They feel no fear. They're about to charge into an enemy army like rabid wolves, and they cannot wait. These are the berserkers, the most feared warriors in the Viking world, and there's a growing theory that their legendary battle rage wasn't purely psychological. It was pharmacological. And the drug in question was henbane. Henbane, or Hyoscyamus niger, is a deliriant.

Unlike hallucinogens, which reality, deliriants replace reality entirely. Users experience full-blown hallucinations that they cannot distinguish from the real world. They feel invincible. They feel no pain. And in many cases, they become extremely aggressive. The plant contains tropane alkaloids, hyoscyamine and scopolamine, that in the right doses produce exactly the kind of behavior described in the sagas. Uncontrollable rage, immunity to pain, superhuman strength, or at least the absolute conviction that you have superhuman strength, which in a battle situation amounts to the same thing.

Some researchers have found henbane seeds in Viking graves and at settlement sites, suggesting it was widely available and commonly used. Norse shamans, called volvas and seidmadr, also used henbane in their rituals. They'd burn the seeds and inhale the smoke, or brew them into a drink, entering trance states where they believed they could travel between worlds. Celtic druids reportedly did the same. And here's where it gets really interesting.

One of the side effects of henbane is the sensation of flying. Users consistently report feeling like they've left the ground and are soaring through the air. Some scholars have linked this directly to medieval witch legends, the idea of witches flying on broomsticks. The theory goes that so-called witches were actually women who had been using henbane-based ointments applied to the skin or to mucous membranes using a staff or stick.

The flying sensation became the legend of witches on broomsticks. The broom was just the delivery mechanism. So, a single plant may be responsible for both the most terrifying warriors in medieval history and the most enduring image of witchcraft. Not bad for a weed that grows in ditches. Number five, ergot, the fungus that built philosophy and burned witches. And finally, we arrive at perhaps the most consequential drug in ancient history.

Not because it was the most powerful or the most popular, but because its influence may have shaped both the foundation of Western philosophy and one of the most infamous events in American history. This is ergot. Ergot is a fungus, Claviceps purpurea, that grows on grain, particularly rye. It produces dark, purplish-black growths called sclerotia that replace the grain kernels. If you eat contaminated bread or grain, the ergot alkaloids enter your bloodstream.

And what happens next depends entirely on how much you consume. In small doses, ergot produces mild euphoria, vivid hallucinations, and a sense of profound spiritual connection. In larger doses, it causes violent convulsions, terrifying hallucinations, a burning sensation in the limbs, gangrene, and death. The chemical reason for this range of effects is that ergot contains lysergic acid, the same compound that Albert Hofmann would later synthesize into LSD in 1938.

Ergot is, quite literally, natural acid. Now, here's where it gets fascinating. In ancient Greece, the most sacred religious ceremony for nearly 2,000 years was the Eleusinian Mysteries. Every year, thousands of people would travel to the town of Eleusis near Athens to participate in a secret initiation ritual that reportedly produced life-changing mystical experiences. Participants drank a beverage called kykeon, made from barley, water, and mint.

Barley is one of the grains most susceptible to ergot contamination. In 1978, scholars Albert Hofmann, yes, the same guy who invented LSD, along with R. Gordon Wasson and Carl Ruck, published a book arguing that Kykeon was deliberately spiked with ergot. The priests at Eleusis, they argued, had figured out how to extract the psychoactive compounds from ergot while filtering out the toxic ones, creating a controlled psychedelic experience for initiates.

The participant list for the Eleusinian Mysteries reads like a who's who of ancient philosophy. Plato participated. Socrates participated. Aristotle participated. Marcus Aurelius participated. All of them were sworn to absolute secrecy about what happened inside the ritual on pain of death. Whatever they experienced was so profound that it influenced their entire philosophical world view. And if the ergot theory is correct, it means that the foundational thinkers of Western civilization may have developed their ideas about the nature of reality, consciousness, and the divine while tripping on ancient LSD.

Now, fast forward about 2,000 years to 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts. A group of young girls begin having violent seizures, screaming about invisible tormentors, hallucinating demons, and contorting their bodies in ways that terrify the deeply religious Puritan community. The townspeople conclude that the girls have been bewitched. The Salem witch trials begin. 20 people are executed. In 1976, behavioral psychologist Linda Caporael published a paper arguing that the girls of Salem weren't bewitched at all.

They were suffering from ergot poisoning. The rye crop in Salem that year had been grown in a warm, damp environment, perfect conditions for ergot contamination. The symptoms described in trial records, convulsions, hallucinations, the sensation of being pricked by invisible pins, the feeling of ants crawling under the skin are a near perfect match for ergotism. Not everyone agrees with this theory, and there are valid counterarguments.

But the possibility remains that a single fungus growing on grain may have been responsible for both the philosophical enlightenment of ancient Greece's greatest minds and the execution of 20 innocent people in colonial Massachusetts. A fungus that inspired Plato and killed witches. You can't make this stuff up. So, there you have it. Five ancient drugs that shaped civilizations in ways we're still only beginning to understand.

Opium ran the ancient world for 4,000 years before anyone noticed it was a problem. Blue lotus was ancient Egypt's favorite party favor. Soma was so important they built a religion around it and then lost it. Henbane may have created the berserkers and the myth of flying witches. And ergot might have given us both Western philosophy and the Salem witch trials. And honestly, after researching all of this, the thing that surprised me most isn't that ancient people used drugs.

It's that they used this many drugs, this effectively, for this long. And we just kind of forgot about it. History class really left some stuff out.