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By combining organic chocolate with other Rainforest botanicals in its Chocamaca herbal balls, the Amazon Herb Company makes a daring thrust back to cacao’s wild origins in the Amazon headwaters. From its wild Amazon roots, cacao moved north to Central America, where Mayans began its cultivation in 1500 BC. With great genius, they developed a sophisticated fermentation process that turned the cacao bean into a versatile medicine and a revered ceremonial drink.
Like the Mayans, the Aztecs prepared many medicinal chocolate beverages. Cacao beans blended with ground maize and herbs alleviated fevers, breathlessness and faintness of heart; combined with ground-up hot pepper they relieved pain; and spiked with the ground vanilla bean they induced sleep. Chocolate herbal preparations helped emaciated patients gain weight; others tonified the nerves of feeble patients trapped in a mental stupor; and still others enlivened stagnant stomachs, stimulated exhausted kidneys and improved sluggish bowels. 
For Mayans and Aztecs, cacao’s origin was a divine one, given by the god Quetzacoatl. Like pulque, tobacco, sacred mushrooms, and coca, cacao was considered a sacred plant, in the charge of male deities: the Mixtec Seven Flower and the Aztec Lord of Flowers, Xochipilli, god of song, poetry and spring. It was the sacred beverage xocoatl, sweetened and flavored with cinnamon and vanilla and served in golden cups that Montezuma first served Cortés in 1519.
 High in the Andes, natives have chewed on coca leaves for millennia to relieve hunger, fatigue, pain, cold, chronic high-altitude sickness and possible death. Used in ritual ceremonies, coca enhances the natives’ relationship with what they term “the powers.” Cacao in its traditional culture was a bitter herb, a sacred rite and a social drink.
In our Western society, we turned chocolate into a substance rather than a plant sacred in the context of its culture. Seeing something as substance or a tool rather than a sacred gift to be celebrated in a ritual way reduces its spirit. Like tobacco, sacred mushrooms, sugar and coca, chocolate in Western society became an addictive, self-ended substance.
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