Hey all,
I was reading about the Völva, an Old Norse occupation some women held wherein they practiced shamanism, prophecy and sorcery. That led to me reading about their burial sites, in which a number were found with hensbane seeds (which cause a sense of "flying" because of their hallucinogenic properties when thrown into a fire) and cannabis seeds.
Firstly, I'm surprised the Vikings had access to cannabis in the first place, and if anyone knows why they did, I am looking to be educated!
So my question, simply enough, is what other hallucinogenic substances did shamans use in the Viking Era? Although I've phrased it as a Viking-centric question, I'm not just talking about Norse shamans - if you know more about Byzantine sorcerers, or any sorcerers around in approximately 600 AD - 1100 AD, I'm interested in that too!
You might have some more luck with this question over in /r/anthropology or somewhere similar.
(There are a lot of theories and extrapolations about Saami people using fly agaric mushrooms, for example, but nothing really historical. And some folks have speculated that the gruit - the mixture of herbs used to flavor some kinds of ale and mead - might have contained henbane or psychoactive nightshades. I don't believe any recipes still exist, though, so not really "history.")
On this question specifically:
Firstly, I'm surprised the Vikings had access to cannabis in the first place, and if anyone knows why they did, I am looking to be educated!
Vikings traveled enormous distances. There's runic graffiti in the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul and on a lion statue in Venice, probably left by members of the Varangian Guard. Engravings on stones in Sweden remark on voyages to Greece and Italy.
Also, a good deal of what we know about Vikings and hallucinogens comes from a fellow other people here turned me on to, Ibn Fadlan, who was sent by the Caliph of Baghdad to the King of the Volga Bulghars, traveling in the company of the "Russiyah" who seem to be the Rus - who might have been people from Kiev, or people from Scandinavia, but definitely living something like Vikings. His funeral account starts on page 13 of this pdf, and involves sacrificing a slave girl after she's been giving something to drink that makes her deranged.
What all this demonstrates is that people we'd recognize as Vikings were part of the machinery that made the Byzantine Empire run, and had plenty of opportunities for contact with the Mediterranean and Near East.
The cannabis plant itself actually entered the historical record with the Scythians (see 74 and 75 here, in Herodotus), who were from an area a lot closer to where Ibn Fadlan was traveling than the places we now think of as being cannabis country.