Harmal peganum, Arun palestinium, Botanicals, Cancer, Entheogenesis, Hallucinogens, Persian medicine

Harmal: The Genus Peganum

Review by Jacob Schor, ND, FABNO

Harmal: The Genus Peganum by Ephraim Lansky, Shifra Lansky, and Helena Paavilainen.

CRC Press, New York, London, Boca Raton.

2017; 241 pp; hardback ($155); eBook ($77.50).

Ephraim Lansky sent me his new book in the mail from Israel, but it’s taken me months to read it. Lansky is the medical doctor from the US who immigrated to Israel and first popularized pomegranate for breast cancer. His wife Shifra has probably still not forgiven me. She took offense at the way I described her husband in a 2006 issue of Naturopathy Digest:

At NCNM, every class had what I used to refer to as their “hippy”: the brilliant and perhaps eccentric student who, while the rest of us tried to look like doctors and adjusted to wearing ties and white coats, somehow got away with dreadlocks and a tie-dyed wardrobe. Every so often, you meet an intelligent mind more creative than you would ever hope to be, who sees the world in a way you never will. I bet Einstein fell into this category when he was a student. Whether we say the fellow “marched to the beat of a different drummer” or the guy took the “road less traveled,” Ephraim Lansky was probably not your typical medical student. I don’t know what Lansky looked like when he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Medical School in 1982, but he certainly looks a bit fringe now.¹

I countered her complaints by sending an old photo of him I downloaded online from a website that advocated the medical use of psychedelic drugs. I didn’t hear further from her, but Lansky and I have stayed in touch. He has gone on to earn both a PhD in pharmacognosy and an MBA. He has co-authored several scholarly books on medicinal herbs that include volumes on capers, figs and, of course, pomegranates.

The new book titled Harmal: The Genus Peganum is also rather scholarly, the sort of book that makes excellent bedtime reading if you are plagued by insomnia. It is volume 20, part of a series called Traditional Herbal Medicines for Modern Times that is being published by CRC Press. The back cover suggests that the book will be an invaluable addition to the personal libraries of professional pharmacognosists, botanists, physicians, psychologists and all persons interested in the interrelationship of consciousness, medicine, and coevolution.

It’s something of a boring book, targeting mostly PhD sorts who might take pleasure in obsessing about the minutiae of plant classification. That sentence may have put me back on Shifra’s blacklist. Particularly as she is listed as a co-author on the book cover along with Helena Paavilainen. Apparently the beautiful watercolor painting reproduced on the cover of someone riding a flying carpet was painted by their daughter Zipora Lansky.

Boring, yes, but keep in mind I tend to read murder mysteries that are plot driven. This book feels important to me in something of a serendipitous way. Serendipity is a word Lansky likes to use by the way.²

Three things happened in close chronological proximity that made me sit up and take notice. I had recently proofread a paper by Benton Bramwell, ND, that has subsequently been published in the Natural Medicine Journal (NMJ) on the herb Arum palaestinum.³ I had also written about vanillin both as a December 2018 blog in NMJ⁴ and as a full-length article for the Townsend Letter.⁵

Shortly after my vanillin blog was published in NMJ I heard from a fellow named Preston Douglas, a PhD pharmacist who told me that the company he worked for, Hyatt Science, had developed an herbal product that I would find interesting because it contained vanillin. However, it contained more than vanillin; there were two other ingredients, Harmal peganum and Arum palaestinum. That felt like more than coincidence.

I was already primed to pay attention to Palestinian herbs as my daughter Sophie Schor had acted as my personal tour guide of Israel and the West Bank a few months prior. We had toured the Natural History Museum of Palestine in Bethlehem and been guided through the desert by a man whose family had lived in a desert cave for generations. He had pointed out these and many other unfamiliar herbs to us.

I was thus not too surprised when I attended the annual conference of the Oncology Association of Naturopathic Physicians (ONCANP) mere weeks later where Paul Saunders, ND, who, by the way, also has an PhD in botany, focused his annual lecture on this very herbal combination. Dr. Saunders quoted a 2013 thesis written by a student in Nablus on these two herbs that suggested they were non-toxic but would trigger apoptosis in several cancer cell lines. A 2015 study reported that a combination of Arum palaestinium, vanillin, linoleic acid and beta-sitosterols eradicated prostate cancer cells while the individual ingredients had no effect.⁶ Other studies suggested that an extract of Arum acted against breast cancer, lymphoblastic leukemia, and prostate cancer.^7,8

I came home for the ONCANP conference and picked Lansky’s book back up. Harmal is the tricky herb in this mix. Harmal is a hallucinogen and has been used for this action in traditional Persian medicine. It’s the warp drive that gets flying carpets to lift off the ground.

In their 1989 book, Haoma and Harmaline, the linguistic scholars, David Flattery and Martin Schwartz, put forth a rather fascinating theory, that Harmal peganum is the same herb as Avestan haoma that is mentioned in the ancient Persian Zoroastrian texts and that “haoma” in turn is likely the “soma plant” mentioned in ancient Vedic texts; both plants are famously special plants employed in religious ceremonies, plants whose exact identities have been lost over time.⁹

There is one word in Lansky’s book that makes the entire book worth reading. The word is entheogenesis and we should note right now that harmal’s chief action is entheogenic.

The term entheogenic was invented in 1979 by a group of ethnobotanists and scholars of mythology as a way to describe the action of psychedelic drugs and differentiate certain uses that were not recreational. Entheos is a Greek term for ‘the God within’ and is the root for the term enthusiasm. Genesthe means to create as in generate or genesis. Thus, an entheogen is a substance that generates the experience of God, or divinity within oneself. Humankind has been using various plants to trigger entheogenic experiences long before there was such a thing as organized religion. Some have theorized that inebriation with entheogenic plants is what eventually gave rise to religion.

The seeming value of entheogenesis, of generating this internal experience, is that it may trigger some shift in perception and allow a physiologic shift that allows healing. At its least, the entheogenic experience may give the individual a perspective on their life journey imbuing it with meaning.

Lansky notes that a now popular entheogenic brew called ayahuasca, which is made from Baniteriopsis caapi, contains harmala alkaloids, similar to those found in Harmal peganum. In Zoroastrian rituals, haoma (which Lansky and others argue is Harmal) is often blended with several companion plants: in particular, Ephedra, Punica granatum (pomegranates) and Ruta graveolens.

I have either a sneaking suspicion, or better, a deep intuition that we are going to hear a lot more about these plants, in particular, Harmal peganum soon. This little book may become a classic you wish you had on your shelf.