MDElliottMD: Category taxonomy ship: create Category:Poeia

2026-05-22T00:37:46Z

Category taxonomy ship: create Category:Poeia

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In 1995 the American poet [[Dale Pendell]] published ''Pharmako/Poeia: Plant Powers, Poisons, and Herbcraft'', the first volume of what would become a trilogy on the plants that change the mind.<ref name="poeia">Pendell D. ''Pharmako/Poeia: Plant Powers, Poisons, and Herbcraft''. San Francisco: Mercury House; 1995.</ref> Pendell wrote as a poet and a working herbalist rather than as a pharmacologist, and the book braids botany, chemistry, ethnography, and verse into a single account of what he called the "ally" character of each plant. ''Poeia'' gathers the inebriants: the plants and preparations that loosen, slow, soften, and ground, the substances of intoxication and narcosis rather than of stimulation or of vision. Beer and aqua vitae open the volume; [[Opium|opium]], [[Cannabis|cannabis]], [[Kava|kava]], [[Salvia divinorum]], wormwood, and [[Nitrous oxide|nitrous oxide]] are among the plants and agents it treats at length.

On pharmacopedia.wiki the ''Pharmako'' trilogy is the primary literary source for plant medicines, and its three volumes form the primary structure of the plant panel. This category is the wiki's page for the first volume. It collects the plant medicines that Pendell placed among the inebriants, and it indexes the seven class-level categories he names within ''Poeia''.

== Poeia indexed ==

Pendell divides the inebriants of ''Poeia'' into seven classes. Each is a category page in its own right; the medicine pages are indexed under the classes.

* [[:Category:Inebriantia|Inebriantia]]: the inebriants proper, the substances of straightforward intoxication. Anchor agents include beer, aqua vitae, ether, and the fossil-fuel inhalants.
* [[:Category:Rhapsodica|Rhapsodica]]: the plants of a lighter, more lyrical alteration. Anchor plants include absinthe and wormwood, and Calea zacatechichi.
* [[:Category:Euphorica|Euphorica]]: the opioid-class agents, the plants and medicines of euphoric narcosis. Anchored by [[Opium|opium]], [[Heroin|heroin]], and the opioids that descend from them.
* [[:Category:Pacifica|Pacifica]]: the plants of calm and of social ease. Anchored by [[Kava|kava]].
* [[:Category:Existentia|Existentia]]: the plants of a dislocating, ground-shifting alteration. Anchored by [[Salvia divinorum]].
* [[:Category:Evaesthetica|Evaesthetica]]: the plants that alter perception and aesthetic sense without the full visionary character of the ''Gnosis'' plants. Anchored by [[Cannabis|cannabis]].
* [[:Category:Metaphysica|Metaphysica]]: the inhalants and agents of a more abstract, dissociative alteration. Anchor agents include [[Nitrous oxide|nitrous oxide]], Leonotis leonurus, and ivy.

== Notes on scope ==

This category collects the plant medicines that Dale Pendell gathered in the first volume of the ''Pharmako'' trilogy, the inebriants. It is one of three volume categories, alongside [[:Category:Dynamis|Dynamis]] and [[:Category:Gnosis|Gnosis]], that together make up the Pendell axis, the primary structure of the wiki's plant panel.

The Pendell axis is one organizing frame among several. A plant medicine indexed here carries one volume tag, Poeia, and one or more of the seven class tags above; it may also belong, under the wiki's multi-membership convention, to cross-cutting classes that the Pendell scheme does not name. The boundaries between the volumes are Pendell's own, and they are characterological rather than strictly pharmacological: ''Poeia'' is the volume of loosening and grounding, ''Dynamis'' the volume of quickening, ''Gnosis'' the volume of vision. Where a plant could be argued into more than one volume, the wiki follows Pendell's placement and notes the tension on the plant's own page.

== About these pages ==

Each plant medicine indexed under this volume has its own page, built on the wiki's standard plant-medicine structure: a history-first account that gives most of its length to where the plant came from and how people came to use it, followed by pharmacology, indications, adverse effects, and interactions. Verbatim passages from ''Pharmako/Poeia'' appear on the medicine pages through the wiki's PendellsCorner component, which carries Pendell's own words and nothing else.

This is one of the wiki's MedCategory overview pages. It carries the [[:Category:MedCategory|MedCategory]] marker tag. The category sits beneath [[:Category:Plants|Plants]], the plant origin root; the seven class categories sit directly beneath it.

== References ==

<references/>

[[Category:Plants]]
[[Category:MedCategory]]

Category:Poeia - Revision history

MDElliottMD: Category taxonomy ship: create Category:Poeia