Eric A. Vasallo

500 YEARS AGO, THE INCA WERE GIVING CHILDREN DRUGS BEFORE SACRIFICING THEM TO THE GODS. NOW WE KNOW WHAT SOME OF THEM WERE TAKING. I came across a new study published November 3, 2026, in the journal Antiquity, and this one is pretty disturbing. Researchers examined the frozen remains of eight children and young women who were sacrificed by the Inca roughly 500 years ago, high in the Andes Mountains of Peru and Argentina. What they found in their hair and fingernails tells us something about the final months of their lives. These children were prepared for it. The Inca practiced a religious ceremony called capacocha, where children were chosen to serve as messengers between the living and the gods. Some were taken on long journeys through the mountains before being sacrificed at sacred sites, sometimes more than 6,000 metres above sea level. The new tests found evidence that all six children whose hair was examined had consumed coca leaves, the same plant from which cocaine is made. Some had also consumed alcohol, likely a fermented corn drink called chicha. Researchers found a chemical called harmine in the fingernails of a 14-year-old girl discovered on Mount Ampato in Peru. Harmine is found in plants used to make ayahuasca, a powerful drink that has been used in South American spiritual ceremonies for generations. Now, the researchers didn't find DMT, the chemical responsible for the strongest hallucinogenic effects of many ayahuasca brews. But they believe the plants may have been used to calm the children, reduce their fear, or prepare them for what the Inca believed was a journey to the gods. One eight-year-old girl discovered on Mount Chuscha had enough hair preserved for researchers to study roughly the last six months of her life. They found evidence of coca use over that period, but signs of alcohol only appeared in the final month before her death. An eight-year-old child, taken from her ordinary life, brought through the mountains, given substances that changed how she felt, and eventually sacrificed because the people around her believed she had been chosen for something sacred. We don't know what these children understood about their fate. We don't know whether they were terrified, accepting, or completely unaware of what was coming. What I find fascinating is how much we can now recover from people who died centuries ago. Their hair was still holding a record of what they consumed. Five hundred years later, we're reading it. The Inca believed these children could carry messages to the gods. We can't prove anything about that belief. But we can now see that preparing them for death involved far more than simply performing a religious ceremony. article in the comments below.

THE ANCIENTS BUILT TEMPLES WHERE PEOPLE WENT TO SLEEP SO THE GODS COULD SPEAK TO THEM. Thousands of years ago, people across Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece were deliberately putting themselves into altered states of consciousness, hoping to communicate with beings they believed were gods. They actually developed procedures for it. In ancient Greece, people travelled to healing temples dedicated to Asclepius. They underwent purification, made offerings, and entered special sleeping chambers where they waited for the god to appear. Some claimed he spoke to them. Others reported being physically treated during the dream. At Epidaurus, stone inscriptions dating to the fourth century BCE describe people arriving with serious illnesses, sleeping in the sanctuary, and reporting encounters with the god. One man claimed Asclepius removed an arrowhead from his chest during a dream. According to the inscription, he woke up holding it. Now, whether that actually happened is another question, right. Researchers have identified ancient cuneiform tablets containing what amounts to a twelve month instruction manual for producing specific dreams. I'm not kidding. The instructions changed depending on the month. They could tell someone what to eat, what clothing to wear, what oils to use, whether to have sex, what mood to maintain, and where to sleep. Some instructions even required the person to remain dirty, eat strong smelling food, and stay quiet. One Babylonian text tells the participant to sleep on a rooftop so the gods of the night will speak to him. These weren't people sitting around waiting for something supernatural to happen. They were deliberately changing their conditions before sleep in an attempt to produce an encounter. In Egypt, we even have ancient dream diaries associated with the Serapeum at Saqqara. People recorded what they experienced, sometimes with dates and details about the beings they believed they encountered. Now, I've worked with hypnosis for years, and there's something interesting here. The human mind can produce incredibly detailed experiences when we move away from ordinary waking awareness. People can hear voices, see figures, feel physical sensations, and receive information that seems to come from somewhere outside themselves. We also now know from sleep research that suggestions given around the point of falling asleep can influence what someone subsequently dreams about. So here's my question-like thought. Were these ancient temples using expectation and suggestion to produce religious experiences? Or had people discovered, through generations of trial and error, that certain conditions made unusual experiences more likely? The Babylonians were writing instructions for producing dreams and the Greeks built sleeping chambers specifically for divine encounters. The Egyptians recorded what people believed they experienced. Once again we have different cultures. Different gods. Similar basic practice. Prepare the mind. Enter sleep. Expect contact. They were literally doing this thousands of years before we had a modern understanding of how the brain produces conscious experience. They kept doing it for centuries; and why did it stop?