Datura metel

Species of flowering plant

Datura metel is a shrub like annual (zone 5–7) or short lived, shrubby perennial (zone 8–10), commonly known in Europe as Indian thornapple, Hindu Datura, or metel and in the United States as devil's trumpet or angel's trumpet. Datura metel is naturalised in all the warmer countries of the world. It is found notably in India, where it is known by the ancient, Sanskrit derived, Hindi name dhatūra (धतूरा), from which the genus name Datura is derived. The plant is cultivated worldwide, both as an ornamental and for its medicinal properties, the latter being due to its tropane alkaloid content. Like its hardier and smaller flowered relative Datura stramonium, it is now of widespread occurrence, although showing a preference for warmer, humid climates.

The plant is an annual or short lived shrubby perennial herb. The roots are a branched tap root, and are not fleshy like roots found in perennial species such as Datura innoxia and Datura wrightii. The species can grow up to 6 feet (2 m) high. The stems are hollow, green or purple black, somewhat woody, and have a strong odour. It is slightly pubescent, with green to dark violet shoots and oval to broad oval leaves that are often dark violet as well. The leaves are simple, alternate, petiolate, and exhibit entire or deeply lobed margins. The pleasantly scented flowers are immensely varied, and can be single or double. Corolla colour can range from white to cream, yellow, red, and violet. The seed capsule is covered with numerous conical warts or short, sparse spines. The fruits break up irregularly at maturity by not dehiscing in four equal valves like those of other Datura species. Seeds are endospermous. D. metel was first described by Carl Linnaeus in 1753, but few botanically correct illustrations were made until after the New World was settled. The original home of the plant, although long conjectured to have been India, is now known to have been somewhere in the Americas, probably the Greater Antilles. that the plant was " native probably to the mountainous regions of Pakistan or Afghanistan westward "
While there now remains no doubt that the species originated in the New World, evidence is mounting that it was introduced to the Indian subcontinent whether by human agency or some chance natural event is not known at a date no later than the 4th century CE. This precedes the first arrival of European explorers in the Americas. A wild form of D. metel as a distinct species is unknown. The species, as currently described, is essentially a collection of ancient cultivars likely attributable to pre Columbian horticultural practices. (no longer an accepted species and now listed as a form of D. innoxia), the capsules of which are tuberculate like those of D. metel. Historically, single flowered forms of D. metel have frequently been confused with the widely naturalised D. innoxia from which it differs in its much less pubescent stems and foliage and shorter spined and less densely spined capsules. Accounts of the Thugs written by early 19th century colonial authors tend to evoke an orientalist fantasy of a bloodthirsty (quintessentially) Hindu cult offering human sacrifices to the goddess Kali, while modern scholars tend to perceive the reality of Thuggee to have been more a matter of criminal activity undertaken for gain by organised groups of disaffected and recently unemployed soldiers of both Hindu and Muslim faith. There were also occasional reports, from the earliest times, of gangs [i. e. criminal gangs active long before the advent of Thuggee] who poisoned their victims with Datura, which was commonly used by many Indian highway robbers to stupefy their victims. It seems to have been used [by the Thugs] only intermittently. One Thug described this technique of using the drug as the tool of "mere novices", implying that an experienced strangler should have no need of such an aid to murder. Schultes and Hofmann in 1979 in the second edition of The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens were confident in their assertion of an Asiatic origin and history of use in India stretching back to Vedic period for Datura metel. Considering its allegedly recent introduction to the Old World from the New, beginning in the sixteenth century, Datura metel has indeed been integrated with remarkable thoroughness into the religious and magical practices of Asia and Africa as an intoxicant and entheogen. Schultes and Hofmann later devote much of a chapter in their 1980 work Plants of the Gods on the use of Datura as a hallucinogen to Chinese, Indian and African practices involving the use of Datura metel as diverse as its employment in Taoist magic, in the worship of the Hindu deity Shiva and in the magical rites of the Eritrean Kunama people. They quote the oft repeated idea that the plant is to be equated with the herb Jouz mathal (= "metel nut"), described in the eleventh century writings of Persian polymath Avicenna (drawing in turn upon the work of Dioscorides), and thus has an Old World pedigree predating Columbus's arrival in the New. It is certainly the case that D. metel is not one of the species mentioned as being used in the ancient Datura cults of the southwestern U. S. A. and Mexico a result possibly of its lacking the large, tuberous roots of the desert adapted Datura species. A great deal of work undoubtedly still remains to be done on the unraveling of the early history and folklore of the plant and its wide dissemination in lands far from its place of origin.

German expert on hallucinogenic plants Christian Rätsch asserts an Asiatic origin for Datura metel. Rätsch bases his contention on the research of Hungarian scholar Dr. Bulcsu Siklós, an authority on Vajrayana, the wrathful deity Bhairava and other aspects of Buddhism at London's SOAS. Siklós claims that references to the use of the plant may be found in the Vajra mahabhairava tantra (= "diamond thunderbolt Tantra of the great and terrible one" (i. e. of the wrathful Shiva conceived of as a bodhisattva)), the Vamana Purana, the Garuda Purana, the Matsya Purana, the Amarakosha and the Kama Sutra of Vātsyāyana. The occurrence of a plant known as da dhu ra is investigated in the pre 11th century Vajra mahabhairava tantra, an Indian Buddhist tantric text existent in Tibetan translation. Internal evidence from the texts, and linguistic evidence, identifying da dhu ra as Datura metel is given despite current certainty of the New World origin of the genus Datura. The Vajra mahabhairava tantra deals with the rituals of the wrathful Buffalo headed deity Vajrabhairava (a manifestation of the Buddhist Bodhisattva Mañjuśrī). Notable amongst these many and varied rituals are a set of five, three from the 2nd chapter and two from the 4th. These all contain references to a plant known in the Tibetan text as da dhu ra. However, Symon and Haegi point out two pieces of evidence showing that the supposed naturally disjunct distribution of the genus Datura is unnatural. First, the genus supposedly has a wide distribution and yet shows diversification only in the Americas, and second, the Old World species represent not a taxonomic unit in themselves, suggestive of independent evolution after isolation in Asia, but a cross section of two sections of the genus Datura already present in the Americas: section stramonium (to which D. ferox belongs) and section dutra (to which belong D. metel and D. leichhardtii).