Dr Rafael Guerra

speaker

150 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 6 Aug

Dr Rafael Guerra’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Dan Snow's History Hit · The Fall of the Ancient Maya · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

So you can choose somebody to release that blood for yourself.

But the blood is released from different parts of the body, it drops into a bowl.

And that bowl is lined with bark or cloth.

And then they add the sap from the copal tree and they burn it.

This ritual burning, they're meant to see something we call the vision serpent.

which is a mediator, a way of communing with the supernatural world.

Of course, we know that when you're doing this, you're likely taking some kind of psychoactive material.

And in Belize, there's no lack of that.

We have one specific animal called the cane toad, which is an alkaloid.

in two glands behind its eyes here.

And then ingest it in the right amount, you can get high from it.

Then there's a lot of plants, including the nightshades.

We have a big group of nightshades in the Maya area.

Yeah, the hallucinogen or the psychoactive material allows you to have that spiritual journey into the supernatural world.

And it's very common among many groups across the Americas, from North America to South America.

In North America, we see the use of peyote, one of the cacti in that area.

In this area we have a lot of different plants we can use and for the salt we see the use of the ayahuasca vine.

Oh, definitely.

And you think about the people who are being brought in as those human offerings as well.

So it's not just you coming with these gifts, but at some point in time, they're bringing physical humans that are being left behind.

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