CHAPTER FOURTEEN: THE TOAD AS EARTH MOTHER: A PROBLEM IN SYMBOLISM AND PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY

There is in North and South America a widespread mythic complex that links the toad to the earth as animal manifestation of a dualistic Earth Mother Goddess, at once destroyer and giver of life. Sometimes the toad is the earth, and from her body sprouted the first food plants—maize in Mexico, bitter manioc in Amazonia. She is also benefactress of the first people or culture heroes, teacher of the skills of hunting and the magic arts, and her dismemberment accounts for the origins of agriculture.

The most dramatic variation on this common theme is Tlaltecuhtli, "Owner (Guardian) of the Earth," the Mother Goddess in her monstrous, devouring form in the complex cosmological scheme of the Aztecs of central Mexico, in whose art she is depicted sometimes as a real toad, more commonly as a clawed, anthropomorphic being in the characteristic upright squatting position in which women in the traditional world customarily give birth. Her joints are adorned with human skulls, her fanged mouth is the maw of the Netherworld through which the human dead and dying Sun pass into her transforming womb in a never-ending cycle of destruction and rebirth.

In a somewhat fragmentary origin myth set down in Spanish in the sixteenth century, after the destruction of the world by water, the gods Quetzalcóatl and Tezcatlipoca (the one the bird-serpent, the other the magician who transforms into the jaguar) see Tlaltecuhtli floating alone in the primordial seas as sole survivor of the universal deluge. Transforming themselves into snakes, they take hold of the amphibian goddess and split her in half, one part becoming the heavens, the other the earth—the valleys, mountains, lakes, rivers and other natural features being formed from different parts of her violated body. The wounded creature cries pitifully in the night, until the gods decree that she is to bring forth the useful plants to feed humanity, but that man in turn must guarantee her continued vitality by pledging his flesh and blood as her proper sustenance.

Toad as Mediator and Dualistic Mother
Tlaltecuhtli is of course not just toad. Rather, with her cavernous mouth and her delivery-like crouch, the toad is an archetypal form on which the characteristics of other life forms pertaining to different planes of existence (predators like the jaguar, for example) are often superimposed. She is thus an ideal image of the mediator, by which otherwise apparently disparate states are united—life and death, air and water, death and rebirth, and the like. The fact that the toad is at once impressively fertile and also cannabalistic, often feeding on smaller members of the same or related species, including her own offspring, almost certainly reinforced her role as metaphor for the earth as the Great Mother who is at once giver and taker of life, if it did not in fact inspire it in the first place.

In any event, there is clearly much more than only the "obvious" connection with rain to account for the importance of the toad-frog motif in the indigenous symbolic system, including its expression in the visual arts, where it appears both realistically and overlaid with mythic motifs. More than almost any other member of the animal kingdom, except perhaps butterflies, toads display a dramatic metamorphosis—from aquatic, gill-breathing, fishlike vegetarians into largely terrestrial, carnivorous quadrupeds, some of them equipped with powerful poisons capable of killing (i.e. transforming into another state of existence), with habitats ranging from the banks of streams and ponds to the crowns of the highest trees. Thus these creatures seem to embody some of the most fundamental principles of American Indian thought: transformation, rather than creation ex nihilo, to account for all phenomena in the natural and supernatural environment; dualism or complementary opposites; the cycle of death and regeneration.

Thus the gaping mouth of Tlaltecuhtli—the earth as the terrible devouring mother in her monstrous feline-toad form—becomes the proper symbol for the maw of the divine earth in the pictorial codices of ancient Mexico, swallowing the dead as she swallows the dying Sun—her own offspring—in a constant repetition of destruction and rebirth that will end only if humanity fails in its duty to feed her with its own flesh and blood. Actually Tlaltecuhtli is nothing else than the adaptation to complex Middle American civilization of an apparently very ancient concept—one we find to be fundamental even today in the origin myths of many peoples of the Amazon basin: the toad as dualistic, beneficent-devouring, transforming female shaman, owner of the earth and of fire, and originator of the magic arts as well as the useful arts of agriculture, of which she makes a gift to humanity through the agency of a culture hero, or more commonly, a pair of Hero Twins. These Twins are analogous to the Hero Twins of the Maya and other Middle and North American Indians.

Toad Mother and Culture Heroes

The following is a composite summary of the typical Toad Mother-Hero Twin myth whose distribution, in its essentials, extends from the Guianas in the east to the forested eastern slopes of the Andes in the west:

The twins are the offspring of a natural mother who is killed and eaten by the Jaguar People (paralleling the destruction of the first world era and its inhabitants by jaguars in Middle American cosmology). Toad Woman, or Toad Grandmother, who is also the supernatural Mother of the Jaguars, intervenes and rescues the pregnant uterus.* She keeps it near her life-giving maternal hearth until the embryonic twins grow to proper size and emerge. As befits culture heroes, they reach adulthood with miraculous speed, and are taught the skills of hunters and the arts of shamanism by their foster mother who, although agriculture has not yet been invented, feeds them baked cassava bread made from the flour of bitter manioc, the staple of root-crop agriculture in the tropical forest. Mystified, the Hero Twins, who have vowed to avenge their real mother's death, spy on their foster mother and discover that not only are the jaguars who killed their mother her children but she herself transforms into jaguar and squeezes cassava flour from her poison glands. They kill, dismember, and burn her in a part of the forest they have cleared for planting. From her ashes grow the first food plants, her milky poison transforming itself into the bitter, or poisonous, variety of manioc (Manihot utilisima).

The origin of manioc cultivation, which was already fully developed by 3000 B.C., is believed by some scholars to go back as far as 5000-7000 B.C. Bitter manioc, an exclusively New World member of the Euphorbiaceae that is much more nutritious than the sweet variety, in its untreated state contains a high concentration of hydrocyanic (prussic) acid. The Indians long ago learned to extract this poison in a complicated process by which the dangerous acid is either evaporated or, preferably, converted into sugars that serve to render other foods more palatable. Donald Lathrap (1970), one of the foremost students of tropical forest Indian culture, argues that the invention of these procedures must lie far back in prehistory, since archaeology has shown that bitter manioc was already the staple crop of flood-plain agriculture in northern South America in the second millennium B.C. Since the genetic modification of bitter manioc from its wild ancestor probably took millennia, the whole process of manioc cultivation, so basic to tropical forest Indian culture, could well have had at least its tentative experimental beginnings seven thousand and more years before the present. The agricultural component of South American toad mythology obviously postdates the origins of bitter-manioc cultivation, which are here linked to the poisonous white secretion flowing from Toad Grandmother's parotid glands; on the other hand, this aspect of the toad as animal avatar of the Earth Goddess could have been superimposed upon a much older mythic complex. Considering the wide distribution of the Earth Mother-as-toad mythology in South America and the striking similarity of this mythic theme to Mesoamerican and even North American traditions, the Amazonian myth may ultimately derive from very ancient Paleolithic roots that extend beyond the New World into Asia.

Psychotropic Properties of Toad Poison

Myth is one thing, practice another. True, bufotenine occurs coincidentally in the skin glands of Bufo marinus and other species; and the related alkaloid, 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine, which is mainly responsible for the hallucinogenic activity of Virola and Anadenanthera snuffs, has recently been isolated from the North American desert toad, Bufo alvarius (Erspamer et al., 1967; Daly and Witkop, 1971). But what actually is the evidence that the Indians themselves ever utilized such animal poisons for purposes that could be seen as magicoreligious?

Though widely scattered through the ethnographic literature, the evidence turns out to be surprisingly substantial, beginning with an early Colonial account by the English Dominican friar Thomas Gage, who reported in the mid-seventeenth century that the Pokoman Maya of Guatemala had the habit of not just adding tobacco to their fermented ritual drink but also poisonous toads to give it a special potency (Thompson, 1970)! This evidently ancient practice, which managed to survive into modern times, may explain the large quantity of skeletal remains of Bufo marinus which the Yale archaeologist Michael D. Coe found at the important Olmec ceremonial site of San Lorenzo, in Veracruz, Mexico, dating to 1250-900 B.C. (Coe, 1971). In view of the toad's high poison content and its sacred stature, Bufo would hardly have served the Olmecs as ordinary food. But as animal manifestation of the Earth Mother the toad could well have entered into magicoreligious inebriation—as much, perhaps, for symbolic as for pharmacological considerations.

Preparations of Bufo marinus poison apparently still play a role in the pharmacopoeias of some few indigenous curanderos (curers) in Veracruz, who claim that the secret techniques by which the venom is extracted and processed into pills and potions have been passed down to them through the generations from older masters, customarily their own fathers. It is said that the toad is never killed or harmed but only irritated gently to make it release its poison from the prominent parotid glands characteristic of the species. The poison is collected in small bowls and subjected to repeated treatment over fire to remove or reduce the harmful elements before being hardened. It is then rolled into pills for later use, love magic being one of the reported purposes. (T. Knab, personal communication)

Such surviving practices help to explain the purpose of small, toad-shaped effigy bowls that have been found in archaeological sites in Veracruz and adjacent parts of southeastern Mexico. On these the ancient ceramic artists customarily emphasized the parotid glands that contain the poison. The same emphasis marks a well-known monumental Aztec basalt sculpture of a toad (with the glyph of the Mother Goddess of Terrestrial Water Chalchiuhtlicue, Skirt of Jade, on her belly) in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.

Analogies in Asian Mythology

The use of Bufo poison as magical folk medicine in Mexico recalls Chinese Taoist and derivative Japanese traditions of the Gama sennin , a wise teacher and accomplished herbalist who lived alone in the mountains in the company of a giant toad. The toad, who in some versions is really the Gama sennin himself (Gama means "toad" in Japanese), taught him the magical and healing arts, including the making of pills that enabled him to transform at will into toad form. There are also Japanese and earlier Chinese traditions of toads capable of conjuring up the most exquisite visions, especially a vision that brought one face to face with the Taoist Islands of Paradise, in whose center stood a giant immortal pine amid the most beautiful flowers, trees, and animals that symbolized eternal life; among these is the fungus of immortality, the legendary Ling Chih, whose real ancestor may have been the fly-agaric of Eurasiatic shamanism. What is more, the dwellers of this blessed island stayed eternally young by drinking from the fountain of life at the foot of the enormous, never-decaying pine, which reminds one of similar references cited by Wasson in connection with Soma and the origins of the Tree of Life. (Volker, 1950:168-170)

Toad and Toadstool

Wasson (1968) also explored the whole problem of the toad's connection with Amanita muscaria in European folk usage. The English "toadstool" is a nonspecific term that now applies to all wild or inedible mushrooms, but Wasson showed that originally it referred to the fly-agaric, as in fact the rural French crapaudin, the toad's thing, still does. The ancient Finns also seem to have recognized a close affinity between Bufo and mushroom. In the Kalevala, the great national saga of Finland, the heroes are forever searching for the mysterious sampo, source of supernatural power. Just what sampo was has never been satisfactorily explained, but recently an anthropological linguist, Lyle Campbell (personal communication), discovered that in some BaltoFinnish dialects sampo stands for "mushroom" as well as "toad," raising the distinct possibility that the legendary sampo may be nothing else than the Finnish equivalent of Soma (see also Wasson, 1968:310-312). This possibility is all the more likely in that the fly-agaric is known to have been employed in Baltic shamanism as well.

Oddly enough, the toad-mushroom association, which in Europe seems to be very ancient, reappears in the New World in Preclassic highland Guatemala, where toads by themselves or toads with feline characters (the "earth monster" Tlaltecuhtli again), are depicted three-dimensionally on "mushroom stones" dating to the first millennium B.C. The most interesting of these is the already mentioned effigy with the mushroom emerging from the mouth of a toad with prominent poison glands that is unmistakably meant to be Bufo marinus. One would have to ignore some enormous gaps in space and time to suggest a direct connection with the Old World, but the coincidence is certainly striking.

Magical Uses of Frog and Toad Poison

Apart from the poison of Bufo marinus , which evidently does have what can be called hallucinogenic properties, the venoms of some other species of toads or frogs in South America have found uses that can only be described as magical, on occasion approximating the ecstatic state, even if from the point of view of pharmacology and toxicology their action belongs to a wholly different class. A good deal of the evidence then available from travelers, ethnologists, and other sources was brought together more than forty years ago by Wassén (1934), who came to the conclusion that the ubiquitous frog/toad motif in South American Indian mythology and art, including the great number of effigies of cast gold from pre-Hispanic Colombia and Panama, was inseparable from the practical use of frog venom for blowgun-dart poison (which in any event had a magical component), and from the widespread magicoreligious beliefs and practices involving the toxins of different species of these amphibians.

One of the most unusual of these—and one that certainly typifies transformation and the power of frogs to bring it about—is tapirage , a curious practice involving the use of frog or toad poison to cause a change in the natural plumage of parrots. As described in the Handbook of South American Indians (Steward, ed., 1963: Vol. 1, 265, 275, 424; Vol. 3, 102, 414; Vol. 6, 384, 397), in tapirage the feathers are plucked from a living bird and a small quantity of the extremely potent poison of Dendrobates tinctorius or some other venomous species is rubbed on the wound, which is then sealed with wax. When new feathers appear they do so in a color different from the original ones, yellow and red replacing green, for example. According to Gilmore (in Steward, ed., 1963: Vol. 6, 407-408), the poisonous secretion of the toad (Bufo marinus) is also used in this manner. Tapirage has been reported independently over the past two centuries from the Guianas, the Gran Chaco, Brazil, Venezuela, and Bolivia, but some zoologists have tended to doubt that the poison really plays any but a magical or symbolic role in the process. Instead they assume that a change in the diet of the captured birds is more likely to be responsible. Scores of Indian tribes from the Atlantic to the Andes believe otherwise.

On another level, as early as 1915 Walter E. Roth, colonial magistrate, medical officer and protector of the Indians in the Pomeroon District of British Guiana (now independent Guyana), reported in some detail on the magical use of the poisonous skin exudates and spawn of certain frogs. The Indians, he wrote, rubbed these poisons into cuts made in the skin, or else introduced them into the eyes, nose, mouth, and ears of men about to embark on a hunt. These curious practices received their charter in myths, clearly related to those of the Hero Twins, whose common theme is that a primordial hunter received his skill as gift from Toad or Frog Woman, who rubbed her venom into his sensory organs to heighten their acuity. After suffering drastic symptoms, including temporary loss of consciousness, the mythic First Hunter found himself imbued with miraculous skills in the pursuit of game. Likewise, Guyana Indian shamans employed toads and venomous frogs in ritual curing, rubbing the animals over the body of the patient or else introducing the poison directly into cuts.

In 1961, Drs. Gertrude Dole and Robert Carneiro (Carneiro, 1970) of the American Museum of Natural History observed somewhat the same rites among the Amahuaca Indians of the Peruvian Montana. The Amahuaca believe that the strongest hunting magic of all is for a man to inoculate himself with an extremely potent frog poison. This is scraped off the back of the frog with a small stick and rubbed into self-inflected burns on the arms or chest. Within a short time the hunter becomes violently ill, suffering uncontrollable vomiting, diarrhea, convulsions, and loss of consciousness. For some time thereafter he experiences hallucinations which are interpreted as supernatural encounters with the spirits of the forest. Since this phase is accompanied by the drinking of ayahuasca, it is not clear how much of the actual ecstatic experience can be ascribed to the frog poison and how much to Banisteriopsis. Of course, the radical purging of the system through the action of the poison would tend to heighten the effects of the ayahuasca. In any event the two aspects of the ritual are conceptually and functionally related.

Carneiro and Dole were unable to identify the frog involved, but it was probably a species related to the kokoi frogs (Phyllobates bicolor and Dendrobates tinctorius) of Colombia, whose secretions the Choco Indians use to poison their blowgun darts.

These spectacularly colored frogs and their poisons have been well-studied by toxicologists and herpetologists (Daly and Witkop, 1971; Daly and Myers, 1967). Some species were found to be astonishingly venomous—the secretion of one tree frog measuring less than an inch in length was judged sufficient to kill a thousand mice! In fact the venoms of certain species utilized by the Indians were found to constitute the most powerful natural toxins known to man, and several species have turned out to be so potent that they cannot even be handled safely without causing severe physical discomfort, including extreme irritation to the eyes, nose, and throat. While none of these poisons should be called "hallucinogenic," even in the sense in which this can be said of bufotenine, some of their constituents are known to affect the central nervous system, which may contribute to the supernatural effects ascribed to them by some Amazonian Indians. For that matter, however a particular Indian interprets the experience with toad or frog poison, whether taken internally or rubbed into a wound, it is scientifically inexact in the extreme to equate these animal poisons, including the venom of Bufo marinus, with the botanical hallucinogens: the massive assault on the system brought on by bufotenine-containing Bufo venom is of a very different order than the shift from one state of consciousness to another triggered by bufoteninecontaining snuff.

What should be stressed is that all these animal poisons, including that of Bufo marinus and its relatives, are extremely potent, and that for anyone outside the traditional world, with its great store of traditional knowledge, or outside strictly controlled scientific settings, to experiment on himself or herself with these dangerous substances would obviously be the height of folly.

*It is interesting that in central Europe, in particular, the toad is identified with the womb or uterus, and toad effigies of metal and other materials are placed in churches as votive offerings to help women to conceive or get them through a difficult pregnancy. These beliefs of course predate the introduction of Christianity.