page_title: Datura metel
section_title: Sacred to Shiva
hierarchical_section_title: Datura metel / Sacred to Shiva
caption_attribution_description: English: Shiva drinking the World-Poison
context_page_description: Datura metel is a shrub-like annual or short-lived, shrubby perennial, commonly known in Europe as Indian Thornapple, Hindu Datura, or Metel and in the U.S.A as Devil's Trumpet. Datura metel is naturalised in all the warmer countries of the world - notably in India, where it is known by the ancient, Sanskrit-derived, Hindi name धतूरा -from which the genus name Datura is derived, and in Tamil as ஊமத்தை. The plant is cultivated worldwide, both as an ornamental and for its medicinal properties, the latter being due to its tropane alkaloid content. Like its hardier and smaller-flowered relative Datura stramonium, it is now of widespread occurrence, although showing a preference for warmer climates and of more attractive appearance. Datura metel was first described by Carl Linnaeus in 1753, but few botanically correct illustrations were made until after the New World was settled. The original home of the plant is now known to have been somewhere in the Americas, probably the Greater Antilles. As late as 1992 it was still being claimed that the plant was "...native probably to the mountainous regions of Pakistan or Afghanistan westward..."
context_section_description: Shiva remains in divine intoxication. Hence, his association with dhatūra or thorn-apple...which has hallucinogenic properties. Dhatūra is called shiva-shekhara, the crown of Shiva. It is believed to have emerged from Shiva’s chest after he drank the deadly poison, halahal, produced during the churning of the cosmic ocean. Its leaves and fruit are offered to Shiva on special days.
  The above is a quotation from a contemporary article devoted to Hindu liturgical practice and provides a rationale for the presentation of plant parts (often seed capsules) of Datura metel to the deity Shiva, integrated (no later, on evidence currently available, than the second century C.E.) into a much older mythological framework dating back to Vedic times.
  The Vedic myth referenced is that of The Churning of the Ocean of Milk (Sanskrit Samudra manthan), in which two groups of gods, the Devas and the Asuras, churn the Cosmic Ocean of Milk (Sanskrit Kshira Sagara) to bring forth treasures. In the course of the churning, the terrible, choking poison Halahala emerges from the ocean before the treasures and threatens to overwhelm the cosmos.
  Only the god Shiva is strong enough to swallow the poison, thus neutralising it, and, even in so doing, still requires the help of his consort, the goddess Parvati, who squeezes his throat to trap the poison there. Such is the potency of the poison that, even though Shiva is able to transmute it to make it harmless, it turns his throat permanently blue, so that, ever afterward one of his epithets has been Neelakanta - "the blue-throated one".
caption: The deity Shiva drinks the cosmic poison churned from the Ocean of Milk. Note the swollen blue spot in the throat of the god caused by transmutation of the Datura-engendering poison Halahala.
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