Overload
Eating snails
Category: Food
Type
Involuntary and voluntary
Introduction and description
Perhaps one of the odder ways in which you can obtain a spiritual experience is by eating a creature – fish, animal, insect, reptile or amphibian - that has itself eaten some hallucinogenic substance such as a plant or perhaps more alarmingly eaten some delirium inducing - and therefore toxic- substance such as a herbicide, pesticide or parasite.
You normally do not know which of the two is the case and by far the greater likelihood these days is the latter – which means if anything happens you get hallucinations or out of body experiences via ‘near death experiences’.
Clearly if you are eating a snail, the effects can be completely unwanted and unexpected. The majority of snails sold by restaurants and packed in cans have been 'farmed', however, farming a snail is not quite as easy as farming a cow!
Snails seem remarkably resilient to herbicides and pesticides, but the toxins remain with them.
Background
There appears to be some evidence that snails were once farmed or collected for their ability to produce unusual experiences. But we have also to be careful here, as snails also have symbolic significance, so there may be a literal and figurative aspect to the records in ancient shamanic societies.
Paintings on Moche vessels of the Chimu of approximately 500 CE show ritual snail collectors with columnar cacti, most likely Trichocereus pachanoi or other Trichocereus cacti species. The collection of snails that have fed on psychoactive plants can be traced some way back into history. Christian Rasch in his Encyclopaedia of Psychedelic plants states that “Even snails that live on the cactus Trichocereus pachanoi are said to contain mescaline”. The San pedro cactus was also used in Peru and snails eaten there to obtain 'psychedelic effects'.
AN ALMOST IDENTICAL SET OF PRE-COLUMBIAN MOCHE JARS FROM PERU. These vessels date from AD100-. They measure approximately six and three fourths inches in height with six and one fourth inch diameters. Their basic slip color is a soft burnt orange with raised snail motifs surrounding the vessel in a slightly lighter shade of gold/brown. The upper neck of the vases have stylized avian motifs in a soft golden yellow. Note that the center of the jars have a cup-shaped bottom. The spouts on the sides are hollow.
I always knew that Brian in the Magic Roundabout knew a thing or two he wasn’t letting on about
How it works
It depends what the snail has eaten or is infested with; it could be the toxins, the drugs, the parasites, or the bacteria.