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ABSTRACT
The ‘Chu Silk Manuscript’, or ‘Zidanku Silk Manuscript 1ʹ, estimated to date back to 300 BCE, and considered to be the earliest known Chinese manuscript containing illustrations, features the depiction of plants on its four corners. Although there is an academic consensus in considering these plants as ‘mythical trees’, my study suggests that some of the plants depicted present puzzling similarities with Caesalpinia decapetala, or Yun-Shih, an hallucinogenic plant known for its recorded ‘shamanic power’ in the first known Chinese herbal 神農本草經 Pen-ts’ao Ching, which is estimated to have been compiled from oral sources around the beginning of our common era. Here I show that the geographic distribution of the plant, its shape and the recorded relation of its use to shamanism tend to reinforce the possibility of its presence on the Chu Silk Manuscript; therefore potentially helping to identify substances used as trance–facilitating drugs during shamanic rituals dating back to the Chu state era and before.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the Professor Roy Ascott for his support to my overall research. Thanks to my Father and Mother for transmitting to me a critical sense and a taste for research. Finally, I would like to express my thanks to Rebekah Tafel and the team at Arthur M. Sackler Foundation for helping me to access the copy of the CSM from the Arthur M. Sackler Foundation archives that I reproduce in this article; and my heartfelt gratitude and deep thanks to my friends and colleagues: Mr John Bardakos for his help to access and translate some Chinese written sources and Dr Diane C Derr for proof-reading the French to English translation of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.