Reko, Bias Pablo

We have found no reference to the use of the leaves of Salvia divinorum in the 16th and 17th Century writers. We have found only two passages that may refer to them in modem writers. Dr. Bias Pablo Reko, a pioneer in Mexican ethnobotanical field work. 

Puharich in The Magic Mushroom as well as in his most recent book is unduly impressed with the occurrence of A. muscaria. Wherever the species of trees occur with which it lives in mycorrhizal relationship, it is common. It is one of the commonest of fungi in North America and Eurasia. Puharich quotes at length as an authority Victor Reko, a notorious forceur, not to be confused with his cousin. Bias Pablo Reko. 

The few scholars who heard Safford or later read his handsomely-published report were mainly hearing about psychoactive mushrooms for the first time, only to be told that the mushrooms never existed. But there was one important dissenter—Dr. Plasius Paul (Bias Pablo) Reko, an Austrian physician who had engaged in extensive botanical collecting as a hobby while living in Mexico. Reko had become convinced that teonandcatl referred to mushrooms, not Safford s hypothesized peyote. 

Five years later, the journalist/novelist Victor A Reko, a cousin of Bias Pablo Reko, wrote the first published objection to Safford s thesis. In an imaginative, popular book written in 1936—Magische Gifte Rausch- und Betaubungsmittel der Neuen Welt (Magical Poisons Intoxicants and Narcotics of the New World)—he declared that Safford s identification "must be contradicted ... 

Plasius Paul (Bias Pablo) Reko, 1876-1953—a physician from Austria who conducted extensive botanical investigations in Mexico and held that mushrooms were still used by natives for creation of visionary states. 

In 1897, Manuel Urbina identified ololiuhqui as the seed of Ipomoea sidaefolia (today known by the synonyms Rivea corymbosa and Turbina corymbosa-, Urbina 1897), an identification later accepted by B.P Reko (Reko 1919 Reko 192,9). Some incorrectly maintained that the Aztec snake plant was not a morning glory, but a species oiDatura, in the nightshade family, Solanaceae (Hartwich 1911 VA Reko 1936 Safford 1915). Finally in 1938, Bias Pablo Reko and Richard Evans Schultes collected the first good botanical voucher specimens of coaxihuitl and ololiuhqui, and definitively identified the plant as Turbina corymbosa (Schultes 1941). 

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