Few plants are more celebrated in Egyptian mythology than the blue lotus, a stunning water lily that stars in some of archaeology’s most significant discoveries. Researchers found its petals covering the body of King Tut when they opened his tomb in 1922, and its flowers often adorn ancient papyri scrolls. Scholars have long hypothesized that the lilies, when soaked in wine, release psychedelic properties used at hallucination-and-sex-fueled rituals dating back some 3,000 years.
Perhaps, then, it’s not surprising that a plant resembling the blue lotus is now marketed online as a soothing flower, one that can be smoked in a vape or infused in tea.
There’s just one problem, according to Liam McEvoy: The blue lotus used in ancient Egypt and the water lily advertised online are completely different plants.
McEvoy, a fourth-year UC Berkeley student majoring in anthropology and minoring in Egyptology, has spent much of his time on campus studying Nymphaea caerulea, the vaunted Egyptian blue lotus. He’s dived deep into the wild world of rare plant procurement on Reddit to look for the plant in the present and studied hieroglyphic translation to search for it in the past. In collaboration with the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics and with the help of chemists, he compared authentic plants now growing at the UC Botanical Garden with samples sold in online marketplaces like Etsy.