Category:Poeia

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.^[1] 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, cannabis, kava, Salvia divinorum, wormwood, and 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.

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.

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

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 Dynamis and 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.

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 MedCategory marker tag. The category sits beneath Plants, the plant origin root; the seven class categories sit directly beneath it.