Aho Yagé: Some Medicine Traditions and Benefits of Ayahuasca or Yagé
by Ronald W. McNutt August 1, 2022
Plants that make up the Amazonian plant hallucinogen decoction, or brew, called by names including ayahuasca and yagé are a combination of a woody vine, Banisteriopsis caapi, (also called ayahuasca or yagé, and by other names such as natema, yajé, nepe, caapi, and kaji) and the leaves of chacruna, Psychotria viridis, or chagropanga, Diplopterys cabrerana, or other admixtures. It is a drink used as part of an indigenous practice from before European contact that usually combines plants together and boils them into a powerful, thick psychedelic drink with visionary and medicinal qualities.
The name ayahuasca is used in Peru, Ecuador, and parts of Colombia. It is called yagé (or yajé) in southern Colombia, and caapi in the Vaupes River region of Colombia and nearby Brazil. These are names for the vine as well as for the mixture that brings about the psychedelic and vision-producing state of consciousness known as the mareaceon. For convenience, this paper will use the most common name, ayahuasca, most frequently, and refer to yagé with respect to the Colombian traditions.
Traditional societies that used ayahuasca faced intense destructive forces from colonialism, and it became a hidden secret. Its use had barely survived in remote regions after the enslavement, massacres, and epidemics the indigenous people would suffer from contact with settlers, and their traditions were further eroded by acculturation by capitalism and missionary workers. Despite having to endure centuries of destruction and pressure, many resilient societies that have used ayahuasca have been spiritually nourished by its benefits.
The power and mystery of ayahuasca visions are recorded in many wonderful works of literature, including accounts from the medicine guardians as well as intrepid travelers and anthropologists. Acculturation and deforestation present great challenges to continuity of traditional practices, while the potent transformative spirit of the medicine and its beneficial health effects create greater and wider interest among diverse peoples. The medicine may be inviting an evolutionary process that fosters the mystery and incorporates fruitful growth, including ways that have not been tried but are true. As we who live in a very different place draw together and participate in the rituals from time immemorial, we incorporate core features such as staffs, rattles, fire, and the circle of participants, seeking renewal, purification, and a deeper soul connection.
The word ayahuasca can be interpreted as “vine of the soul” in Quechua language. It is the name used in Peru, Ecuador, and parts of Colombia. It is also called yagé (or yajé) in southern Colombia, and caapi in the Vaupes of Colombia and nearby Brazil. These are names for the vine as well as for the mixture and the state it opens up. It is the most important of the sacred plants in the western Amazon. The yagé vine grows quickly from cuttings reaching skyward in a single helix and it flowers in the rainforest canopy. While the older vines from the jungle are highly prized for their medicinal properties, the medicine men in Colombia, often called taitas or payés, have traditionally grown the vine in special gardens, with coca or other sacred or ceremonial plants, separate from the food plants like manioc, which traditionally have been tended by women in plots tended closer to the community maloca.
Ayahuasca’s effects include visual phenomena, colorful, bright, very symbolic imagery that holds deep meaning for the subject. People may observe their thoughts and emotions with much greater clarity. The experiences bring deep subconscious material, intense emotions, including fear and exaltation, memories, and vivid visions to light for the conscious mind to consider afterward. One’s cerebral cortex is not as active, and the lower brain that predominates under the influence of ayahuasca is more rooted in emotion and instinct and is less individualistic.
Ayahuasca brings an experience of depersonalization in which people are able to detach themselves from more defensive patterns of behavior. A person may experience mental distress as part of discovering the source of the distress and learning how to address its source. An experience with ayahuasca can facilitate realizations of strong personal truth whether it is terrifying, exhilarating, or subtle. These realizations are often accompanied by purging with vomiting or diarrhea which can be part of a cathartic relief that can be part of an experience that reveals solutions to one’s suffering or insights and lead to changes in behavior patterns that do not serve people well.
Ayahuasca is respected for its ability to help enhance soul connections and to alleviate physical and psychospiritual afflictions. It has been used for centuries by the Amazonian indigenous people to strengthen and refine perception, to ward off sickness and misfortune, and to develop a deeper understanding of one’s place in the world. Research is showing that one of ayahuasca’s components, harmine, helps alleviate physical afflictions. Traditional societies that used ayahuasca faced intense destructive forces from colonialism, and it became a hidden secret. Its use had barely survived in remote regions after the enslavement, massacres, and epidemics the indigenous people would suffer from contact with settlers, and their traditions were further eroded by acculturation by capitalism and missionary workers. Despite having to endure centuries of destruction and pressure, many resilient societies that have used ayahuasca have been spiritually nourished by its benefits.
This tradition of ceremonial and reverent use of this medicinal plant combination for transcendent visions goes back at least a thousand years, even before the time of the Incan empire. Scientists have recently shown that the chemical components of ayahuasca found in a cave in the Bolivian Andes 13,000 feet high were in use around 1000 years ago. They were part of a group of medicine plants that must have been highly valued because they had to have been carried far from lowland rainforests where they would grow to a burial site located high up in the mountains. In an article published in Science magazine in May 2019, a team of scientists revealed the results of a chemical analysis from this archeological find from 2008. Inside a leather pouch was another pouch made of three Andean fox snouts that contained dust and debris with harmine, dimethyltryptamine, along with cocaine and bufotenine. These are the essential ingredients of ayahuasca, ordinarily made with the plants, chacruna (Psychotria viridis) and ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi) which would grow in the areas of the upper Amazon but the presence of bufotenine indicates that the powder included yopo, seeds from a tree that grows in open grasslands of the Northern Amazon, Anadenanthera peregrina. The dust was accompanied by macerating tools and a snuffing tube, artifacts that supported the dating, and the likelihood that the the chemical components of ayahuasca were inhaled as a snuff mixture.
South American traditions from centuries past involve concurrent plant medicines and mixtures of ingredients to bring about trance and beneficial states of awareness. There have been “potions and brews analogous to ayahuasca” among people of the Amazon and in the Andes. Many indigenous societies in Amazonia maintain that spirits of ancestors, plants and animals, and other mystical beings, communicate with them in trance states brought about by yagé. Images in sculpture and other art mediums have the double figures of human and animal, an alter ego motif associated with shaman iconography.
Ancient petroglyphs graven on rocks around waterfalls and river rapid are revered places of power and sacred spaces to this day. They often show concentric rings or circles. Shamans or payés explain their meaning which involve the origins of the sacred medicine they call yagé. In his 1889 work A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, Alfred Russel Wallace described carvings in rock from many centuries ago.
Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff wrote that the Tukano believe that the Sun Father was measuring the center of the day where the constellations appear to rise and set vertically, and past generations commemorated the event by carvings on rocks. The Barasana people would stop their canoes at the impassable rapids to portage them. They view these spots as the places where supernatural beings lived before the first human beings on earth. They are also associated with the visions that the Indians see while having yagé sessions, and indicate places sacred to the Master of Animals. The petroglyphs found at these sacred places often show concentric rings or circles. Shamans or payés explain their meaning which involve the origins of their sacred medicine, yagé.
One fine example of a petroglyph shows a triangular face of the Sun Father over a payé manifesting energy. It is located near the equator in Colombia, where the Apaporis River joins the Rio Pira Paraná. The Rock of Nyi is adorned with some of the best-preserved petroglyphs in the entire Vaupés River area. Dr. Reichel-Dolmatoff wrote that the Tukano regard its location as the spot where the first people came from the Milky Way. According to Tukano legend, the first Tukanos came down from the Milky Way in a dug-out canoe, drawn by an anaconda, which carried a man, a woman, and three plants, yuca, coca, and yagé or ayahuasca. The spot corresponds to the center where a staff of sunlight made no shadow, and represented sexual contact between the father Sky and the mother Earth, because the celestial hexagon crystal from Orion’s Belt to the boulder at the spot where the equatorial line crosses a north-to-south flowing river.
Early Written Accounts of Ayahuasca Use
The earliest writings about the origins of the ceremonial use of ayahuasca are historical records of the Spanish Catholic Church, which were produced from a perspective that was hostile to practices of employing plant hallucinogens by a force of persecution and domination. Early explorers in South America found many Indian villages along the Amazon and other areas. In the 1600s and 1700s, Jesuits observed natives using ayahuasca in the Marañón River area. The Marañón runs northwest from a glacier high up in the Andes mountains through Peru along the eastern edge of the Andes. The Marañón turns east and flows into plains and meets the Ucayali River and together they form the Amazon River.
According to an article by Guerra in 1967, the Holy Inquisition of Mexico issued a proclamation in 1616 ordering the persecution and excommunication of those who, under the influence of, “herbs and roots with which they lose and confound their senses, and the illusions and fantastic representations they have, judge and proclaim afterwards as revelation, or true notice of things to come…” Having called for repression and death for those who claimed to experience revelations by using roots and herbs, the traditions practicing use of ayahuasca suffered and diminished because of contact with the European culture, and the persecution would be exacerbated further by colonialism and the forced labor of Indians by the British for rubber production. However, there was some interaction and contact generated by the Rubber Boom that did lead to spreading information about ayahuasca and its practice.
One of the earliest sources documenting ayahuasca use is from Father José Chantre y Herrera, compiled from historical documents of the Jesuit missionaries in the Marañón River area from the time between 1637 and 1767. He included a clear description of an ayahuasca ritual using a liana, or woody vine, with other plants. He described how there would be a night-long divination ceremony held in a house suited to hold many people, with benches placed for the men on one side, and open space for the women on the other. The leader would be in the middle seated on a hammock with a platform beside him, and, Herrera stated, places beside it “an infernal beverage that they call ayahuasca, which is singularly efficient in depriving one of one’s senses.” He continued, “They make the concoction of lianas or bitter herbs, which, after a great deal of boiling, becomes very thick. Since it is so strong as to derange a person even in small quantities, the dose is minimal, and fits into two small receptacles. The sorcerer, each time he drinks, consumes very small amounts, and knows very well how many times he can drink the potion without losing his sanity in order to carry out the ceremony with due solemnity and direct the chorus, since everyone responds to his invocation of the devil.”
In the 1700s, Jesuit writers wrote about a vine called ayahuasca in a pejorative fashion. Pablo Maroni, a Jesuit missionary present in the Marañón River area in 1738 to 1740, wrote that some of the indigenous people used the juice of a Brugmansia, while others would use a liana, or woody vine, called ayahuasca, for divination. He said that these drinks were “very effective to deprive one of the senses, and even of life” when used in “overloaded” doses. He added, “This they also sometimes use to cure themselves of habitual diseases, mainly of headaches. Drink, then, because he who wishes to divine conducts certain ceremonies, and being deprived of his senses lays face down, to avoid being suffocated by the power of the herb, he is thus many hours and sometimes even two and three days, until the inebriation takes its course. After this, he reflects on what the imagination represented, who alone and at times must remain in a delirious state, and this he takes as fact and prophesies as an oracle.”
In 1768 Franz Xaver Veigl described ayahuasca use as a bitter vine used for “mystification and bewitchment” and that it caused the users to lose their minds. The location of the rituals was not specified.
In the 1850s, Richard Spruce an English botanist, collected the ayahuasca vine and documented its use in the upper Amazon valley and observed it being used by the Tukano in the area of the Vaupés River, a tributary of the Rio Negro. He was an active botanical collector from 1855 to 1864 in the Brazilian Amazon, the upper Orinoco of Venezuela, and into the high Andes. He identified Banistreriopsis caapi and studied the rubber tree among his many accomplishments.
In November 1852, when Mr. Spruce was in his thirties, he drank ayahuasca at a Feast of Gifts among the Tukano on the Rio Uapés, a tributary of the Rio Negro, in Amazonas, northwestern Brazil near the Colombian border. He later saw it being used along the upper Orinoco in Llanos in Venezuela among the Guahibo, who would chew the dried stem as well as brew it to drink. In the Ecuadoran Andes, he also encountered use of the vine among the Zaparo on the Pastaza River, at the border of Ecuador and Peru, and it was this group that called it by the name ayahuasca. He suspected some admixtures added to its potency, though the vine on its own was esteemed as a medicine. He did not find the people along the Rio Negro in areas closer to civilization and more accessible to river traffic to be using the ayahuasca vine. Some ayahuasca vines that he collected from the Rio Negro area in 1853 were not analyzed until 1968, when they were located at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew after being considered lost. The century-old vines were almost as rich in the active beta-carboline alkaloids, primarily harmine, as recently collected vines, with 0.4 % compared to 0.5 % concentration in the fresh specimens.
Ayahuasca use also was reported in the Rio Napo area of Ecuador by another explorer in 1858. The Rio Napo runs southeast from the Andes into the Amazon and was a major trade route connecting a pass between Ecuador and the Amazon River, before the Spanish invasion.
Some ethnobotanists believe that ayahuasca usage spread from the Tukano tribal region near the Colombian Amazon and spread along the Vaupés River, a tributary of the Rio Negro, which flows into the Amazon. Usage of ayahuasca apparently spread with the trade routes where Quechua language was used during the first rubber boom from 1879 to 1912, a time of mass movement, especially in the area of Brazil. Quechua is an ancient language that was used by the Incan empire, throughout the Andes. The word ayahuasca is Quechua language for “vine of the soul”, “vine of the dead”, or “vine of the ancestors.”
Richard Evans Schultes, wrote that yagé arose before history into the well of the world, to help people learn of the soul and bring back transformative information for use in this world and make things beautiful. Bernd Brabec de Mori, a musicologist and cultural anthropologist, opined that ayahuasca came from the Tukano tribal region in what is now the south of the Colombian Amazon and was used in the Amazonian lowlands near the Napo River.
Gayle Highpine, a linguist believes that the vine was first used in the Napo River area and its use spread from there north and south along that river connecting a pass between the Andes in Ecuador and the Amazon River, a major trade route before the Spanish invasion. He believes that the admixture plants that contain dimethyltryptamine were added later, to produce the profound visionary experience, in the area around Iquitos, Peru. The Quechua language was used in that area and often appears in the language associated with ayahuasca ceremonies. Ayahuasca is a Quechua word meaning vine of the soul, or vine of the dead. The vines were growing in the Napo River area, possibly because they had been grown for use by the people of the region and spread during the times of the rubber boom of the late 1800s.
An article by Dr. Constantino Manuel Torres of Florida International University, in Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs (2017) advances a theory that ayahuasca originated from multiple sources and areas of the Amazon. Some indigenous traditions describe an origin myth of a union between the Sun Father and his daughter that gave birth to yagé. One tradition states that the origin of yagé was a gift from a place below the water, and other traditions state that it was brought by a giant snake or from the body of a shaman. Mestre Ireneu’s vision recorded in one of his hymns is of a silver canoe with a lady who came from the sky, imparting this gift, daime, meaning “to give me.”
The Tukano legend of the origins of ayahuasca is that the first Tucanos came down to earth from the Milky Way in a dug-out canoe drawn by an anaconda. It contained a man, a woman, and three plants: caapi or ayahuasca, coca, and yuca. Indigenous cultures such as the Tukano use psychedelics for sacramental and healing purposes, viewing the components of ayahuasca as having a divine origin. Their ceremonies observe reverent ritual formalities and there are taboos against improper use. These expectations and practices preserve a sacred and ceremonial structure and provide expert guidance that inspires courageous journeying and minimizes adverse reactions. These practices are derived from experience of the elders and payés with the medicine itself. Colombian traditions not uncommonly would employ types of the ayahuasca vine without admixtures and drink several rounds after soaking the macerated and pounded vine in water.
Dr. Reichel-Dolmatoff wrote that the Tukano myth about the vine is that it was a gift to the people brought by a child of the sun, which often represents God. He wrote that among peoples who practice medicinal and religious use of ayahuasca, the ceremonial use of it is central to their identity that it forms an intrinsic part of their culture: “The use to which these hallucinatory trances are put by the different Indian tribes varies from curing rituals to initiation ceremonies, and from the violent frenzy of warriors to ecstatic religious experiences. In all cases, it seems, yagé is thought to provide a means of being transported to another dimension of consciousness, which, in the daily life of the individual or of the group, acquires great importance. It would seem, then, that without exploring this dimension, a knowledge of aboriginal culture is impossible.”
Ayahuasca or Yagé Usage Has Persisted and Spread in the Amazon Region
Ayahuasca use has continued among Indian peoples of the Amazon area and Orinoco plains and its use has spread and flourished. In the areas of the Uaupés River, as it is called in Brazil, it has played a central role in religious festivals. Some cultural groups have restricted its use to shamans. Anthropologists have found that there were some Amazonian cultural groups that were unaware of ayahuasca although they were living close to other tribes that would employ ayahuasca or yagé as a central part of the spiritual life of their societies. Ayahuasca or yagé ceremonies also have continued in Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, and other parts of South America. South American traditions from centuries past involve concurrent plant medicines and mixtures of ingredients to bring about trance and beneficial visionary states of awareness. There have been “potions and brews analogous to ayahuasca” among people of the Amazon and in the Andes.
The taitas of the Putumayo-Coqueta region of Columbia have observed a traditional use of ayahuasca, although Colombian medicine traditions have seen acculturation over the years. There are very large preserves of rainforest that are dedicated to preserving the lives and culture of the indigenous stewards whose way of life preserves the rainforest over time. The use of yagé has expanded in Colombia and elsewhere since the 1990s.
The indigenous people who have employed ayahuasca believe that it frees a person’s dream spirit to allow one to explore supernatural realms, to bypass ordinary channels of awareness to get revelations from the spirit world. Some view this as a truer reality. Ayahuasca participants maintain that it opens communication with the supernatural world, to ancestors and spirits, and fostering an evolutionary process and strengthening of the spirit. It provides a means to keeping one open to the mystery of life. Many indigenous societies in Amazonia maintain that the spirits of ancestors, plants, and animals, and other mythological-type beings, communicate with them in trance states brought about by ayahuasca. Images in sculpture and other art mediums have the double figures of human and animal, an alter ego motif associated with shaman iconography.
In the northwest Amazon, medicine healers, often called payés, or taitas, have traditionally been prominent and esteemed community figures, holding great influence over various aspects of life. The payés have been renowned for their knowledge of plants. The work of the shaman or payé is a primordial calling that arises from before history. It provides a guiding image that sustains society that involves the journey into the well of the world to learn of the soul and bring back transformative information for use in this world. The payé leads a journey that involves a trial, being tested by an unfamiliar agency, a confrontation and passage through the psychedelic fire. The goal is to find oneself, one’s authentic being, and to obtain the courage and commitment to forming one’s personality in a beautiful way, to leave things in place that are beautiful, and to act in ways that are in harmony with the supernatural wisdom and order.
In Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, and other areas, healers have employed ayahuasca in ritual ceremonies to diagnose and ward off disease in keeping with folk beliefs that disease and misfortune arise from malevolent supernatural forces. The ayahuasca medicine has expanded its territorial range in the past fifty years. Mestizo populations in the Amazon basin have adapted ayahuasca traditions in diverse ways that have incorporated other traditions that appreciate its healing and spiritual virtues. These practices have helped protect and heal people from many cultures and backgrounds who have become demoralized and wounded from enduring stress and anxiety.
Icaros
Icaros are songs with spiritual power, sacred songs, ordinarily sung without instruments other than a leaf rattle called a shacapa. The term may come from the Quechua verb ikaray, which means to blow smoke for healing, or the Shipibo word ikarar, which means a shaman’s song. To sing or whistle an icaro over something or someone gives it power. In the traditions of the upper Amazon, songs are a healing element and critical part of spiritual connection. Shamans acquire visionary experiences and acquire spirit allies through the icaros. One can come from each plant used in a diet. The spirits teach them, but they also are exchanged, and people travel far and also listen to recordings from other shamans. An ayahuasquero may know as many as one hundred icaros.
Stephan Beyer, the author of Singing to the Plants — A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon, writes that icaros have a central place in the practices of Amazonian Indians and mestizo practitioners, people of mixed indigenous and Spanish descent. Dr. Beyer writes that while many icaros are passed on by teacher to student, sometimes the person will hear the icaro as an actual song, with words and melodies, from the plant spirits during an ayahuasca ceremony. Among the Arawete and the Yaminahua, chanting is the most important activity. Through the healer, the spirits of mountains, rivers, plants, and wild animals sing for the people. Singing helps guide the sacred plant medicine and lead people to vital information. Icaros number in the thousands and serve purposes such as obtaining and offering protection, calling upon spirits, animals, plants, and people, learning, and especially healing. The songs bring power to influence and invoke, and the meaning may become clear over time. They can help control another person’s visions in plant medicine ceremonies, and there is a potential for exerting domination or control.
“The Songs the Plants Taught Us,” released in 1991, is a wonderful collection of icaros that were recorded by Dr. Luis Eduardo Luna during his field work studying ayahuasca healing sessions in Peru’s Amazon region. Some artists merge newer influences into their icaros. Maestro Alonso del Rio, a master healer of ayahuasca plant medicine, learned traditional icaros and has originated his own songs as well. He has incorporated the use of a guitar in ceremonies and he calls this Medicine Music. Don Agustin Rivas Vasquez uses Peruvian instruments like panpipes, drums, maracas, and a harmonica. Tito LaRosa plays flute to back up Shipibo shamans Amelia Panduro, her son Milke Sinuiri, and Jose Campos, and the group dadaworlddata accompanies the icaros of don Flores Salazar, an Ashaninaka shaman, with jazz music in live performances and the film “Maestro Ayahuasquero.”
The Yagé Traditions of Colombia
In isolated areas of Colombia and Brazil, the Tukanoan people, under different group names, have preserved their original ayahuasca traditions, living lives close to the earth, farming cassava and hunting wild animals. Indigenous cultures such as the Tukano use psychedelics for sacramental and healing purposes, viewing the components of ayahuasca as having a divine origin. Their ceremonies observe reverent ritual formalities and there are taboos against improper use. These expectations and practices preserve a sacred and ceremonial structure and provide expert guidance that inspires courageous journeying and minimizes adverse reactions. These practices are derived from the experiences that the elders and payés have had with the medicine itself.
Franz Trupp wrote that the sun and moon are supernatural beings in traditional Tukanoan mythology. Mr. Trupp described how payés regard visions as the source of knowledge in his 1981 book Last Indians: South America’s Cultural Heritage. One source said, “We drink yagé, things begin to speak to us, and our souls are released from our bodies.” A common theme from yagé ceremonies is the fear of being vanquished upon entering another dimension. The medicine will affect people differently, but the dissolution of the ego and its resurrection and transformation are important themes. The ceremonies also serve as social rituals to enhance group identity and community cohesion and reaffirm cultural values and beliefs. The songs and rituals evoke different plant-spirits, and the shaman’s social function is important.
Colombian traditions not uncommonly would employ types of the ayahuasca vine without admixtures and drink several rounds after soaking the macerated and pounded vine in water. The vine grows quickly from cuttings reaching skyward in a single helix and it flowers in the rainforest canopy. While the older vines from the jungle are highly prized for their medicinal properties, the medicine men in Colombia, known as taitas or payés, have traditionally grown the vine in special gardens, with coca or other sacred or ceremonial plants, separate from the food plants like manioc, which traditionally have been tended by women in plots tended closer to the community maloca.
The Tukano People Studied by Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff:
The late anthropologist and archeologist, Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, is the author of the 1975 book, The Shaman and the Jaguar, A Study of Narcotic Drugs Among the Indians of Colombia, and many other writings about indigenous societies and traditions in Colombia. One group he studied, the Barasana of the Pira-Parana, are closely related to the Tukano. An Austrian who was educated in Paris and who became a Colombian citizen in 1942, Dr. Reichel-Dolmatoff was an authority on the native traditions throughout Colombia, including those surrounding yagé. He described his first session with yagé, which took place among the Barasana, in his 1975 book.
He was asked by his Indian friends if he wanted to join a ceremony and he had said yes. He had not heard anything further and a week later, men left with hammocks and fishing gear, apparently to invite others from neighboring malocas, and later canoes arrived with people who exchanged ceremonial greetings and the men placed their hammocks in the maloca and women prepared manioc. Dr. Reichel-Dolmatoff was present one day shortly after noon when a leader of the Barasana whom he called Bia said, “Let’s go gather yagé,” and they went with his brothers and a bush knife, crossed a creek and went up a forest hill and Bia gathered vines from different trees. The segments were the thickness of fingers, and Bia chewed pieces and identified subtle differences such as ridges on bark, brown color with spots, and knotty twisted segments, and called the names of each variety of Banisteriopsis caapi species.
Around 4:00 p.m., Bia mashed and pounded the vines for an hour as he quietly murmured invocations and chanted at times. The head man of the maloca, Muhipu, took down the yagé vessel from its place, wiped it out, and held a torch as he murmured and chanted, walking along the walls of the maloca. The vines were placed in a trough, but not boiled or mixed with leaves, with over two gallons of water. The people made paint from plants and applied it to their faces and bodies with roller stamps. Muhipu saw that the water turned cloudy and said, “It is starchy, it is good! We shall see many images!” The liquid was poured through a sieve into the pot, as the men put on rattles and painted loincloths. The headmen, including Behpo, the headman from the visitors, put on feather crowns. They lit a ceremonial resin torch that shown red light and the oldest headman held a stick rattle and called “Ho-ho.” The men brought out flutes, rattles, and whistles and began to practice, sipped cashiri beer, and Behpo blew a horn for the first dance.
The men danced with their right hands lightly placed on the shoulders of the men in front of them. The women mainly remained on the outer part of the maloca as the men occupied the center. After 8:00 p.m., Muhipo stirred the yagé and blessed it and offered the first cups, which the men drank followed by sips of cashiri. They played flutes and rattles and some laughed, then the men danced, followed by a dance with the women which was slow and solemn. One of the leaders chanted, “mamamamamama.” There were rounds of yage drinking at 9:30, followed by more dancing, at 10:15, followed by a quiet time when Muhipo chanted, then signaled for silence and the two leaders alternated chanting, and there was a long silence in almost complete darkness.
The ceremony was formal and solemn, and the participants engaged in little, if any, eye contact. The torch was rekindled and the men rose for another dance, with loud rattles, saying, “ho, ho-ho,” again in a circle with hands on the shoulders of the men ahead of them. Noise rose and fell, the men became drowsy, some quietly describing their visions. They would dance with precision, singing very carefully. Dr. Reichel-Dolmatoff wrote that “song and dance had become completely fused.” The fifth call for yagé took place after 11:00, followed by another dance with the women, more rapid this time, with panpipes playing. Some of the men had taken rapé snuff. At midnight, Muhipo served more yagé and by this time, the trance state had set in. Dr. Reichel-Dolmatoff was seeing shapes increase and decrease, after six cups, and he said that most participants, like himself, had diarrhea and vomiting. He heard groaning, murmuring, and some exclamations. He saw a flash and there was an opening, like a door, and he gazed into deep space with colored patterns, visions of architectural designs forming, undulating, like colored feathers. The visions were static and in motion, with ancient ornate patterns. The men danced while having visions. At 2:10 and 3:20 a.m., the seventh and eighth cups of yagé were served, and the men danced with their rattles resonating in the darkness of the maloca.
As dawn came, Muhipu received Bhepo’s feather crown, and others took theirs off. Bia packed the ornamental clothing in boxes, and the men gathered outside, yawning and stretching quietly. The yagé ceremony had been almost exactly 12 hours, from 6:20 p.m. to 6:20 a.m. Some men went to sleep in their hammocks. Few people ate anything. As Dr. Reichel-Dolmatoff drew some images, his friends told him, “You saw the Milky way! You were flying up with us to the
Milky Way!”
Dr. Reichel-Dolmatoff wrote about the Tukano myth that the yagé vine is a gift to the people brought by a child of the sun, which often represents God. He wrote about how the yagé ceremony among peoples who practice it is so central to their identity that it forms an intrinsic part of their culture: “The use to which these hallucinatory trances are put by the different Indian tribes varies from curing rituals to initiation ceremonies, and from the violent frenzy of warriors to ecstatic religious experiences. In all cases, it seems, yagé is thought to provide a means of being transported to another dimension of consciousness, which, in the daily life of the individual or of the group, acquires great importance. It would seem, then, that without exploring this dimension, a knowledge of aboriginal culture is impossible.”
Dr. Reichel-Dolmatoff wrote with loving attention about a wrote about one of the branches of the Tukano in the northwest Amazon in Columbia, the Desana, who were primarily hunters and fishers. Their Tukanoan relatives, the Pira-Tapayu, the Tukano proper, the Tuyuka, and the Eastern Tukanoans, relied more heavily on manioc, their staple. During the time when he stayed with the Desana, he observed them use yagé for religious rituals, medical practices, and in divination. In his field research living with a group of about 600 of them for over two years, Dr. Reichel-Dolmatoff learned their language and interacted with them in ways that revealed an understanding of their disciplined medicine practices and lifestyles in harmony with the rainforest. He learned that their lives were held in balance by their beliefs that directed them to observe strict behavior patterns that restricted hunting and controlled population. For example, during the middle phases of the moon, they would avoid hunting and sexual relations.
His works indicate that their payés, the Colombian term for shamans, are familiar with the other world occupied by sprits and beyond time that people may enter through grace and sacred plants with appropriate preparation and reverence. In a 1981 article published in his 1997 book, Rainforest Shamans, “Brain and Mind in Desana Shamanism,” he wrote that the worldview of the Desana is derived from their sacred rituals with yagé, which reveal “mythological scenes and iconographic images” that shed light on their origins, their lives, and the true spiritual nature of their surroundings.
The Desana observe taboos such as allowing hunting only after the animal’s corresponding star constellation has risen. Hunting was not a casual activity at all, but a reverent part of a sacred exchange in terms with the Master of Animals. The men would observe traditional purification observances for the hunt — abstinence, food restrictions, cleansing baths and emetics to obtain permission for hunting and avoid illness or misfortune in hunting. The Desana and other Tukano people have an origin story of a snake canoe descending from the Milky Way. The Sun Father designed a flat earth with a celestial vault and a place of bliss under the earth. The Sun Father placed spirit beings in charge of parts of creation.
On most ritual occasions, they consume hallucinogens in the presence of their shamans, who employ trance states to diagnose illness. The people openly discuss and interpret their visions. The occasions come after periods of sensory deprivation and are accompanied by music, colors, changing lights. There are masters of various kinds, spirit guardians whom they need to avoid offending. The spirit guardians provide the game animals they relied on so heavily in their lives strongly based on hunting and fishing. Their shamans create the conditions and are specialists in transformation and healing. They find the sources of illnesses, which can be caused by human personal enemies. There are also protectors and representatives of animals, supernatural beings headed by the Master of Animals, a dwarf-like spirit who oversees animals, may be a source of illness or affliction. They encourage people in ceremonies to hear, calling them to listen, to understand, to be stirred, and call out people who are not sitting attentively to visualize. Their understanding of being in proper balance is associated with health and sustenance. They act well to avoid misfortunes, illnesses, and afflictions, which can grow like germs. Imploring the Master for more game could open the door of the ghostly house and could also release evil spirits and doubles and cause difficulties.
Their shamans or payés, in addition to directing ceremonies and rituals of the life cycle, and healing diseases, would also restrict the terms of any hunting, and direct movements of households to more suitable and fertile land for their swidden agriculture. The payés helped heal illness by identifying variations in the light one emanated, possibly revealing the neglect of a restriction or breach of a social expectation. The yagé experience brought visions and trances that were at the core of their beliefs and were significant in various ways for their daily lives. Their visions offered religious experiences and dimensions that would reinforce their cultural values, shed meaning on their desires and conflicts, and provide the divine origins of their art forms.
The first stage of the yagé experience they described as pleasant reveries when they would have sensations and perceptions that would involve a tremor, rushing winds, and drowsiness. They would see flashes and streaks, sometimes like flowers or stars, flickering grids with zigzag or other line formations such as circles. They referred to sprigs, little flowers, or clusters, visual effects that included repetitive luminous patterns, predominantly in various shades of red, yellow, and blue. When he asked them to draw their visions, they would draw about 20 recurring styles that were similar to patterns from phosphenes, which occur in psychedelic or ordinary experiences. The Indians described associated of the various patterns with representations of sexual anatomy, kinship groups, and symbols like rainbows, the sun, the Milky Way, a rattle, plant growth, and mythical canoes. They would paint these bold, geometric images on the front of their long houses, their bark cloth aprons, and their masks. Their ceremonial yagé pots would have such patterns, typically with red, yellow, and white colors, and their stamping tubes for ceremonial body designs would provide similar patterns. He wrote that when he would ask about them, they would say, “This is what we see when we drink Banisteriopsis.”
His sources associated the second phase of yagé with difficult experiences, but which allowed them to have contact with spirit beings. They would observe larger colors, figures, images, beings, and mythical scenes that he said would be projections of stored material related to their society and expectations. Then, his sources stated, a third phase would unfold characterized by pleasant effects with perceived soft music, clouds of imagery, and blissful scenery. They maintained a set of practices that prevented depletion of resources by a system in which their purpose would be to maintain positive relations with their spirit helpers who protected the animals, fish, and plant life that supported them, in order to lead healthy lives and social harmony.
The other dimension, the other house to their understanding, is a place that harbors the ideal, where the abstract, the principle of moral authority and personality would reside. The other people who were their doubles would live there, along with the creatures of darkness. It is part of the origins of the world, with access to the Sun people, their first ancestors. It is the source of spiritual awareness, intuition, visions, and higher functions and, he discovered, also corresponds to the left hemisphere of the brain, as well as to the malocas where they would live. A maloca has a hexagonal crystal outside the end with the men’s door facing east that represents the Sun Father’s energy. The Sun Father had guided their ancestors in canoes like huge snakes, leading chiefs, shamans, dancers, warriors, and servants, in order of their status.
They would discuss their beliefs and he learned that they had sacred spirit abodes that they called houses in both the inner world and in the world around them. The rocky hills above the forest canopy that had caves and crevasses were hill houses that were like brains, and they avoided hunting in the hills beyond in order to maintain good relations with the Master of Game Animals.
He wrote that the Desana are sensitive to the energies of places and the importance of deprivations and diet, controlled breathing, accompanying music, and singing repetitively to activate the potential. The passage between is like a great current, or energy called boga. The goal is to harness boga energy and be evolved in the other world and break away, loosen, and bring back visions and messages opened by plant spirits to make changes and manifest in the right hemisphere, the physical world. One aspires to put into action and act according to the divine laws laid down by the Sun Father.
Mr. Reichel-Dolmatoff wrote that to drink yagé in the Tukano society is to return to the cosmic uterus and be reborn, to tear through the placenta of ordinary perception and enter realms where death can be known and one may trace life to the source of all existence. Their religion and worldview, reveled by their visions, views the fissure in the cosmos between this world and the other world to be present in hemispheres of the human brain and in the social and physical world. One’s memory must be refreshed so one will observe appropriate behaviors, and the shamans are their transmitters to help the people draw down, and recognize healing and restorative visions into their waking state, which can fertilize and restore gaps that harbor affliction and act according to socially agreed ideas.
The Siona:
The Siona Indians live in the Putumayo region of Colombia. They defended their territory in the 1600s and 1700s from the Spanish, and from epidemics, with the power and leadership of their payés. Dr. E. Jean Matteson Langdon, an anthropologist who taught in Brazil, has written about the Siona people of Colombia. The Siona enjoy discussing their experiences with yagé. They understand that yagé opens to a hidden reality of five realms, each of which has its own music, sounds, smells, and colors. Her work has been informed by the late Ricardo Yaiguaje (1900–1985), the son and the brother of payés from the area around the Putumayo River. He explained that when they drink yagé, they go to a hidden reality composed of five disks.
One may ascend to higher levels but there is danger from a domain below the earth, a bleak, dark, rotten, terrifying and somber reality with monotonous zinging sounds. Each disk has its own sounds, music, smells, and colors. Novices are prepared for travel, to leave their bodies and meet the tender people, the yagé people, to learn the designs of their realms and their songs. A master shaman is called “one who sees” and may lead and protect others. Initiation begins with testing and danger. One moves toward becoming “one who has left” by traversing dark and frightening visions when one must be strong. Then, visions become full of light and the yagé people reveal dynamic realities with moving patterns and scenery where everything is experienced at once.
Ricardo described the details of the High River running through the second heaven. His shaman chanted and played flute as he saw the yage people, some were non-indigenous caciques. He saw the High River fire canoe as the shaman sang about it and entered and rode it. They wore red macaw feather headdresses and there was music and dancing. They greeted him, asking, “what are you thinking as you come?” They told him: “we live in this place…This is how our place is.” As he went deeper into the fire canoe, he saw women with animal features, iridescent girls transformed to fragrant people and he was taken to the Bamboo River to a pretty town. People said “Ah, you have come, friend.” He said he came to visit, which they said was good, adding, “Drinking again, you will become fully transformed.”
But the next day, his yagé vision was overwhelmed with black winged creatures, and he did not succeed in the transformation journey. His brother-in-law, the payé, told him he should have asked for help when the vision entered the bleak place. The Siona teach that a master healer must bring people back from the bleak disk below the earth. Death and illness lurk there, and people may lose progress on the medicine path if they end up there.
Carlos Miguel Gomez Rincon, in his 2020 article, “The Spiritual Dimension of Yagé Shamanism in Colombia,” discussed lessons from his teacher, a taita named Luis Antonio Portilla. Taita Luis was born in southern Colombia from the Putumayo area and lives in Guarne, Antioquia in northern Colombia. He was from the Awa people, but he learned from the Siona people, including two taitas. Siona payés will be consulted for choices about where to cultivate sacred plants. They will appeal to the master of animals for permission before group members will hunt for animals, and the hunters will observe rituals before hunting, which traditionally involves using blowguns with curare-tipped darts. They employ plants to paralyze fish. A principal payé traditionally will have facial tattoos to indicate his respected position.
Mr. Rincon wrote that taitas started to visit city dwellers and that the city dwellers sought the ayahuasca experience, at a time when Colombia’s leaders endorsed multiculturalism and protection of indigenous people. He writes that young people from many walks of life and social and cultural backgrounds have been drawn to learn of the ritual use of yagé from the taitas. Taita Luis described a long learning process with the medicine, which he said is a divine gift, and one which requires a learning process with celibacy and strict diets, and frequent drinking of yajé, to earn the wisdom it imparts. Taita Luis said, “The more one drinks, the more one learns and sees.”
Practitioners must go to the heavens and hells it reveals, and face one’s fear, in order to heal. Taita Luis said, “Yagé is our book, our Bible. One can study it their whole life and die without having finished the first page.” There is a complex mystery that surrounds its use. He states, “The whole universe is within us. It is where one encounters oneself, knows the spiritual dimension, and learns to live, and where there is an inner connection between heaven and earth.” It is a gradual process of developing spiritual awareness and knowledge, growing and learning to see in the other reality. “This is the mirror of consciousness, the mirror of truth, the medicine of the spirit.”
Mr. Rincon wrote, “To become a taita one has to walk a very long path. First you have to heal your own spirit” Taita Luis told him. One’s prowess and authenticity are measured by the deeds and the acknowledgement of the community and through the oversight of elder taitas. The effects of one’s transformation are visible in the concentration and research, and the effectiveness of one’s work in the trance state. “Healing is a mystery so sacred that even the taita does not understand it. Through the healings I have performed, I have become aware that it is not the taita who heals. It is God who enters through the medicine to heal the sick.” Taita Luis continues, saying, “We are only the mediators. We pray internally for the healing of the patient.” It seems simple but it is amazing. Yagé provides knowledge from visions, for particular matters like hunting to all of reality. It provides visions of celestial realms of heaven. It is a source of newness and diversity, a source of continual spiritual transformation. The leaders of yagé bring new medicines to the people, even animals and musical instruments.
The experience and vision of yagé, Taita Luis, an elder of the Siona people, stated, imparts vision and understanding of self, reality, and the divine dimension. “Yage is an inner encounter with oneself. It is there that you know the spiritual dimension. There, it occurs [as] an inner connection between heaven and earth. It is there that you learn how to live and what life is.” He said that we are here living to know how to live, and then meet “the Father himself,” and “discover what lies inside us. When your consciousness awakens, it is as if you leave a dream,” he explained. Awakening brings faith, respect for the spiritual dimension. In 2018, he said, “When we heal the spirit, we heal everything else. Consequently, we decide not to wish evil on anyone, because otherwise we destroy ourselves without realizing it.”
Taita Luis, told Mr. Rincon the legend of the origin of yagé, how when the white people came, the indigenous people would kneel and pray to lakes and worship the sun because God gave messages through lakes and the sun, while white people did not understand this. The sun then called an angel to deliver the vine and leaves of chagropanga for yagé to a good-hearted cacique, or clan chief, so the indigenous people could use them to know good and evil. Taita Luis said that this angel told the cacique, “I am not the Father but a messenger. He sends you this beautiful gift with which you will know good and evil and will heal many grave illnesses.” Then the yagé vine and chagropanga grew and the cacique was filled with love and joy. The more he drank, the more he was able to see and learn. He noticed a storm, and planted thunder yagé. He saw golden while using some yagé and he named it gold yagé. He saw other images, and named heaven yagé, parrot yagé, fish yagé, pig yagé, and tiger yagé. He lived on and founded the wisdom. When he died, his body became like the white beads that his people use on bracelets to protect themselves from sorcery and evil forces. God made their relations better and brought healing and salvation through the sacred plants. They learned about good and evil and how to cure grave illnesses.
The Kamsá, or Kamentsá:
The Kamsá and Inga of the Valley of Sibundoy in Colombia have great shamans. The name Kamsá, or Kamentsá, means men from here. The name Inga means good friends. Dr. Andrew Weil wrote that the indigenous Inga and Kamsá, would travel from the Sibundoy Valley to get the yagé vine by crossing the mountains and descending into the hot country of the Amazon basin. He also wrote about the ways that yagé would activate the visual cortex and bring people to the realms of telepathy and clairvoyance. He described intensive training sessions and the careful three-day preparations of yagé and how the shaman would invoke the spirit of the forest to impart magic power to the potion, to illuminate the minds, expand foresight, increase knowledge and understanding of the jungle, and impart good fortune to the people who would drink it. He had read that yagé would allow people to communicate with people from far away, find lost objects, solve crimes, and have visions of spirits. He wrote that the people viewed the transcendent spirit world as being a real and present realm that they respected and were a part of, and how their visions unified the group, forming a bond in the sacred presence of a holy presence. In his book The Marriage of the Sun and Moon he wrote about unitary consciousness. He observed that the cultural validity and beneficial use of yagé was promoted by placing it in a sacramental context supervised by a shaman, and that the use of a hallucinogen in ritual use, employed with gratitude, would limit the potential for disruption and potentially traumatic mental health problems.
Colombian Explorations of Richard Evans Schultes:
Ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes collected over 26,000 plant specimens including about 300 of which had not been named by western science. He collected plants for study in Mexico, the northern Andes, and the western Amazon regions. He was fascinated by the folk medicine traditions and was concerned with the loss of nature’s herbal lore through the disintegration of the connections the native people had with their immediate ambient vegetation by “what we euphemistically call civilization.”
Dr. Richard Evans Schultes explored the Amazon rainforest in northwest Colombia beginning in 1941 with a grant to study the ingredients of curare, a muscle relaxant and paralytic substance helpful for surgery. He learned from shamans from the Kofan people, who would consume yage (ayahuasca) weekly, that they used over 70 plants for curare, carefully supervised and brewed by shamans for use on arrows in hunting.
Dr. Schultes first had yagé or ayahuasca under the guidance of a Kamentsá (or Kamsá) payé, Salvador Chindoy, of the Valley of Sibundoy. Salvador Chindoy was one of the most knowledgeable plant medicine people in the region and he was a great source for Dr. Schultes to learn of herbal remedies. He stated that he had been taught by the plants themselves over many years. Dr. Schultes was eager to acquire his vegetal knowledge that appeared to be in danger of disappearing. Dr. Schultes wrote that during this time, the Indians were free to roam forests and rivers, but he was alarmed at the erosion of the societies. He and his students collected a great amount of ethnobotanical information from the vast knowledge of the payés, who shared their knowledge and experience.
Salvador Chindoy shared his vast knowledge of plants that he learned from yage and barrachero, a rare hallucinogen now identified as Brugmansia aurea culebra. His apprentice, Pedro Juajiboy, recalled years later that during that first experience with yagé, Dr. Schultes sang and told stories all night in English, which none of the native people could understand. He would not claim to have any religious insights, and would profess to see only “squiggly lines,” and he remained a lifelong Episcopalian. He inspired many people with his contagious enthusiasm for the way of life of the indigenous people and his admiration for their vast knowledge of the rainforest and his love of plants and their healing alkaloids.
The Kofán people may have as many payés for their size as any indigenous community. The payés are almost without exception “gentlemen of the forest,” Dr. Schultes wrote. Many can employ soul travel or transform, when necessary, into jaguars and back into human form. They know the power to cast spells, employ cosmic forces, solve practical problems, diagnose illnesses and prescribe cures using their vast knowledge of plant medicines. The payés also know the myths of their traditions and are able to explain their meaning, which helps preserve the culture of their society. The payé often will have a boy or adolescent helper, and will impart stories of the sacred hallucinogen, pointing out and describing the types that are best to use, subtle differences which botanists are not able to understand.
Dr. Schultes remained in the western Amazon region when he was recruited for a twelve-year expedition for the Rubber Reserve Company to locate rubber plants to help the allied effort in World War II. He collected seeds and helped establish rubber stations as he located wild rubber trees. As he traveled a treacherous 1350-mile Apaporis River trip, he befriended Tucano language tribespeople, such as the Makuna and Kananari. He developed a deep respect for their ability to recognize and combine plants to “novel and powerful effects.” Dr. Schultes befriended shamans and elders from the Witotos, which led to the discovery of the yoco tree, used as a stimulant. In 1953, the project ended and Dr. Schultes became a biology professor at Harvard University and he took a position at the Harvard Orchid Herbarium. He became the director of the Harvard Botanical Museum.
With Albert Hofmann, Dr. Schultes helped discover how ayahuasca creates a potent effect by combining dimethyltryptamine with a mono amine oxidase inhibitor. They became friends and collaborated on books including Plants of the Gods (1979), which states in its introduction: “A few plants had inexplicable effects that transported the human mind to realms of ethereal wonder — in communication with the spirit world. It is little wonder that they have long played an important role in religious rites of early civilizations and are still venerated by people who remain part of ancient traditions.” His other works include The Golden Guide to Hallucinogenic Plants (1976) and he co-wrote Vine of the Soul: Medicine Men, their Plants and Rituals in the Colombian Amazonia (1992). Dr. Schultes realized that biological and cultural diversity are intimately connected. He helped preserve large sections of the Colombian Amazon region for indigenous people and their natural areas, and inspired others to do so, such as the Amazon Conservation Team and the Gaia Amazonas Foundation.
The Barasana:
Anthropologist Wade Davis ventured into the culture of the Barasana in the Vaupés River area of Colombia. In the 1996 book by Dr. Davis, One River, which describes Dr. Schultes’s 1942 journey studying medicinal use of plants among the Inga and Kamentsa communities, he describes their experiences in the 1970s among such diverse societies as the Kogi of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northern Colombia and the Waorani of eastern Ecuador. He traveled with the late ethnobotanist Tim Plowman for a detailed study about varieties of the coca bush, which has been an important plant since pre-Inca civilizations. The coca 1eaves are rich in vitamins and minerals. Dr. Davis conducted extensive anthropology studies in Colombia in 1974.
An elder whom Dr. Davis called Rafino’s father led a yagé ceremony that he attended. The men wore geometric skin designs from red and black plant dye, headdresses of parrot and macaw feathers, and guayucos, or loincloths. The ceremony took place after the men danced and a resin torch was lit in the long house. Flickering red light in the maloca adds to the mystery. Red plants and pigments are respected for their connection with the medicine. The elder spoke of a red sky with red rain beforehand, and there was solemn chanting and dancing, with rattles. The drink was not boiled, but the vine and the chagropanga or oco-yagé were steeped in water, and many rounds of the drink were consumed.
The edges of the world softened and Dr. Davis felt a resonance from beyond the sky, pulsating with energy, and then he became terrified as reality dissolved into another dimension. The sky opened and it was as though wind scattered everything and visions of snakes slithered into the earth and images of death and sorrow overwhelmed him. He seemed to be in another reality and that he would not return, when Rufino’s father was very focused in his chanting and the terror began to recede. He noticed green light and heard women laughing as the dawn came, and he remained awake for a long while before drifting off to sleep. He awoke feeling washed inside and out albeit with a headache.
Dr. Davis said that shamans speak of facing down the jaguar in their medicine journeys because they do that. He learned from the medicine man that yagé is like a river, a journey that takes one above the land and below the water to the most remote reaches of the earth where the animal masters live and lightning is waiting to be born.
In March 2019, Dr. Davis reflected on the popularity of yagé, as he spoke to 1400 people at the World Ayahuasca Conference in Girona, Spain, expressing great surprise that yagé had become so popular. Dr. Davis stated that at the time of European contact, as many as ten million people were living in the Amazon, in a thriving civilization. The culture suffered tremendous pressure and persecution from colonialism and disease. In isolated regions of the northwest Amazon territory of Colombia, the ancient traditions of that society had endured among the Tukanoan people, all the peoples of the Anaconda, the Barasana, Macuna, and the Tanimuka. At the time he studied their homelands in 1974, he recognized that something vital and important had happened there long ago and that it had been forgotten after the devastation of the rubber trade and the conversion efforts of missionaries.
Anthropologist Steven Hugh-Jones lived among the Barasana in the 1960s. He discovered that for the Barasana, every object is viewed at many levels and the symbolic level is one of present reality, and there is not a lot of separation between nature and culture. He had pessimistically anticipated the demise of the people when he was interviewed and he went with Dr. Davis in 2006 to the community of San Miguel that Dr. Davis had visited in the 1970s. Dr. Davis and Dr. Hugh-Jones found a deep spirit of reverence and a strong vitality in a vibrant community when they returned to San Miguel. Dr. Davis was pleased to find that the Barasana have a community thriving with a strong sense of traditional wisdom on land preserved in the Colombian rain forest. He paid tribute to their way of life, with a perspective of a living forest, living sacred sites, spiritual reverence, rich in meaning, with love for nature and a sense of being beyond time. They viewed the rivers, the trees, the mountains as being fully alive and filled with spirit. They promote a connection between neighboring tribes through marriage and deep spirituality and they draw wisdom and reverence from yage or ayahuasca. Dr. Davis reflected on the popularity of ayahuasca as a medicine in the keynote address:
“It’s interesting how this new generation of young people don’t use that kind of language to describe their experiences with ayahuasca. In Colombia, for example, ayahuasca is all the rage, consumed by all sorts people, students, young professionals, mystic seekers. And those of a certain generation describe their experiences in very positive terms, as if the substance was gently transcendent and benign. Revelatory intuitions and gentle sensations and intuitions that I associate much more with mescaline containing plants such San Pedro, the Cactus of the Four Winds.”
Dr. Davis wrote: “I once took ayahuasca with the Cofan, with a friend of mine Randy Borman, who was the chief at the time. In the wake of a traditional ceremony, men alone isolated in a hut built for the occasion in the forest, we had a spontaneous debriefing. I mentioned that the potion really could be terrifying. They all responded that this was the very point. As Randy noted, it’s not for the faint hearted.”
The Union de Medicos Indigenas Yageceros do la Amazonia Colombiana, known as UMIYAC, is the Union of Indigenous Yagé Healers of the Colombian Amazon. The organization states that yagé is “a gift from God with which we learn our wisdom, get to know all medicinal plants… and heal many illnesses.” A conference by ICEERS, the International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research, and Service, in May 2020 featured Miguel Evanjuanoy Chindoy, of the Inga people of the Colombian Putumayo, a member of UMIYAC. He said that we westerners have forgotten our identities, and that we can benefit from the sacred knowledge that transmits responsibility to preserve the natural world and cultures that preserve them. Our friends in the Amazon are the traditional stewards of sacred plant medicines that have upheld their culture, a spirit rooted in a shared life force, using sustainable practices like small farms. The Indigenous wisdom keepers have evolved with the plants that are awakening us to respect and join with the plant guardians, to share in their independent spirit and provide support and traditional medicines in reciprocity.
Dr. Schultes’s explorations in the Colombian Amazon were featured by Mark Plotkin, Brian Hettler, and Wade Davis in the keynote discussion in the 2017 Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs symposium that Dennis McKenna helped produce. Mark Plotkin, Ph.D., is an ethnobotanist who has broad experience with entheogenic plants and fungi and who is an activist for preserving biodiversity and natural areas in the Amazon. In his December 2020 lecture on ayahuasca, he reflects on the wonder of ayahuasca, how it combines two varieties, the vine, named caapi for the Tucanoan name from Brazil and Colombia, by Richard Spruce in 1851, and either chacruna, a plant of the coffee family that grows throughout the region, or Oco yagé, chagropanga, Diplopterys cabrerana, from the same family as the ayahuasca vine, which grows in a smaller region of the northwest amazon basin. Out of 40,000 species in the region, it is truly miraculous that these cultures of the Amazon combined the powers of the two complementary plants. Dr. Plotkin cautions that plant hallucinogens present dangers and can create terrifying experiences, so an experienced healer is necessary. One of his experiences in a plant medicine ritual with a shaman involved visions of his experience of death so that he would be prepared for the path of a warrior.
In his books, including Medicine Quest and his 2020 work, The Amazon: What Everyone Needs to Know, and in his Plants of the Gods podcast lectures, Dr. Plotkin describes a way of life that is hidden and often vanishing, and which is miraculous. In 1996, he co-founded the Amazon Conservation Team, which has established sustainability projects in Colombia, Suriname, and Brazil, and he has led the organization since it was formed. The Amazon Conservation Team is a field-based organization that works by invitation, working closely with indigenous cultures to help preserve headwaters and buffer areas near existing conservation preserves and to support and promote medicine traditions within indigenous groups. He states that while we now have the technology and analytical tools to decipher the mysteries of the past, the cultures with knowledge of these plants are disappearing. Better stewardship, he states, will help the world find better cures for diseases of the soul and of the body.
Some Indigenous Traditions from the Peruvian Region
The Sharinahua of eastern Peru:
The Sharinahua of eastern Peru are neighbors of the Cashinahua. Dr. Janet Siskind, a retired anthropologist, studied a small group of Sharinahua in Marcos, a community in eastern Peru near Brazil, along the upper Perus River, beginning in 1966. They were was a small group of Indians who were loosely associated and who had migrated to the area around the 1930s. It was an area that was populated by Indians in 1866 when an explorer traveled there, but had become unoccupied by the time the Sharanahua moved there. The previous occupants had been enslaved in the first Rubber Boom and their society was disrupted through the terrible devastation and exploitation that it entailed. In the 1940s and 1950s, great numbers of their people had died from viruses, malaria, and tuberculosis after some trade was beginning, exchanging skins and furs for clothing, metal pots, machetes, mosquito nets, and shotguns.
Dr. Siskind wrote that the Sharanahua grew sweet manioc, plantains, bananas, corn, and peanuts and hunted game and fished for food. The shamans would augment dietary and herbal remedies, and the people had antibiotics from the missionaries. Three of the 25 men in Marcos were shamans. The people would call in shamans for more severe and intense illnesses, when a person would refuse food, which the community described as the person “wanting to die.” The shamans would cure with songs about plants, animals, and objects. They feared their Culina neighbors because they believed that they would throw “dori” into the bodies of others to inflict harm. A shaman or a relative of the patient in need of healing would cook the ayahuasca and chacruna for the ceremony. The shaman and the men who would participate would drink it in the early evening. They all would chant and the shaman hopefully would have a vision from the sick person’s dream and in the shamanic state of consciousness devise a cure.
Dr. Siskind found that the Sharanahua shamans had songs that they would learn over the course of a one-year apprenticeship that involved intense training. These songs had the power to heal or to inflict harm. Her source was a shaman named Ndaishiwaka, a man who had recovered from a snake bite as a young person. With ayahuasca, he had terrifying visions of snakes, and he overcame his fear, and then he observed a strict diet, observed celibacy, and took on the boa constrictor’s spirit by practices such as eating one’s heart. He learned songs from two other shamans, Forako and Casha, and his visions under ayahuasca became more elaborate. He saw the “man of ayahuasca” and the spirits the medicine showed who would help the shamans with their activities.
The Sharanahua shamans would choose healing songs based upon imagery in the dreams of their patients and the symptoms their afflictions were causing. Their cultural stories and myths also would play a role in the healings. Animals who would change into humans, and people who would become animals would appear in visions to help effectuate a cure. Symbolic curing of afflictions through the shaman’s singing and visions could take a variety of forms. Among the accounts of healing Ndaishiwaka provided, he would describe scaring away a Culina, or an attacking capybara or peccary, or a large monkey who was causing an illness. He also would tell a patient to avoid a food, such as watermelon, based on a vision showing it to be the source of a problem. The Sharanahua had a fear of foreigners, and the Culina often would figure into illness, perhaps as a scapegoat based on the perception that they were malevolent. The shaman would then drink a small amount of ayahuasca when the patient began to recover and begin to eat.
The Cashinahua or Huni Kuin:
There are three main branches of the Huni Kuin, who have been known as the Cashinahua by outsiders, on both sides of the Brazilian-Peruvian border. The Huni Kuin groups living on the Peruvian side of the border are more isolated, as are the groups on the Purus River at the Brazilian side. Some of the Cashinahua made contact in the 1940s, seeking industrial products like axes and shotguns, and trading in lumber and rubber, but they retreated after being subjected to poor treatment. Some moved to small cities like Santa Rosa, Brazil and most remained isolated. In 1951, some German ethnographers visited eight Cashinahua villages varying in size from 20 to 120 people and tragically they had 75 % or more members die after contracting measles. The epidemic decimated these villages. Other Cashinahua continued living in the tropical forests from the foothills of the Andes of Peru to the western states of Acre and Southern Amazonas near rivers.
The Cashinahua of Peru are a group of about 500 people living in remote rainforest in southeast Peru along the Curanja River. The linguistics worker Kenneth Kensinger lived with a reclusive branch of the Cashinahua on the Curanja River in southeastern Peru in 1955. He wrote that there were around 300 members in the area where he stayed. He learned their language, which did not have a written form at the time. Mr. Kensinger studied the Cashinahua traditions of healing with ayahuasca, which they called nixi pae, and presented his results in the 1972 book Hallucinogens and Shamanism and at a 1968 symposium for the American Anthropological Association.
Their medicine included the Banisteriopsis caapi as well as the Psychotria viridis. Any initiated male member could participate in their ceremonies, which would take place not more than every other week. They were organized by general consensus. Every male knew how to prepare it although the same people would tend to go and cut one to two meters of vine and gather three to five branches of chacruna. They would boil and simmer it for about an hour. Some participate regularly and others would not, and they would do so communally. The sessions would take place after dark, around 8:00 p.m. to about 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. The host would place stools and logs for sitting. The men would come and dip out about a pint of the drink, sing or chant asking for it to show many things, and gulp it down. Later, they might drink another pint, as they said to “have a good trip” and hallucinate freely. He often would hear them say, “It is a fearsome thing, I was very much afraid.” He wrote that the participants would take ayahuasca to learn about people, places, and events. They said that “the dream spirit” leaves and perceives things, and they would share what they learned when it would anticipate events that they would plan for. He wrote that their shamans would use ayahuasca for treating illnesses that were not resolved with herbal or other remedies, and would use chanting, massage, herbal prescriptions, or a technique involving sucking out an invasive force.
The group is a reference point, a reassurance, during the ayahuasca experience. The men often would hold onto the person in front of them, but some experienced drinkers who were considered strong would not have physical contact with others. Chanting would rise and fall and he would hear shrieks of terror and the sounds of purging. The participants would see visions that would come and go in darkness, things like brightly colored snakes, jaguars, ocelots, spirits, trees, lakes, villages, both theirs and those of others, trading posts, and gardens. He described a vision from one of his sources, who saw a vision of transformation and fertility, which he saw as a premonition of good things to come. He told Mr. Kensinger, “I knew we would be well and have plenty to eat.” He said that after one session, six of the nine men with him told him they had seen that his grandfather died, and it turned out to be true. Some saw sights in Pucallpa, although they never had been there.
Mr. Kensinger returned nine years later to observe initiation rites, and found that the old rituals and ceremonies were being revived. He wrote that they strongly defend their traditional lifestyle and they also would sell their traditional crafts. The people who were there wanted to form a school for their youth, and the old men wanted their cultural lore recorded in books. Mr. Kensinger taught one of the Cashinahua, Mario Martin, to write in his own language.
The Peruvian Cashinahua were deep on the forest away from the rivers so they remained living in isolation and independence. There were between 2400 and 7500 people living in independent villages, about one-third of them in Peru and two-thirds in Brazil. They would cultivate plantains and manioc in swidden agriculture and hunt and fish. Some cultural differences developed between the Brazilian and the Peruvian Cashinahua.
The Purus River Huni Kuin in Brazil:
The anthropologist Elsje Maria Lagrou studied among the Cashinahua or Kaxinawa in northwestern Brazil. Dr. Lagrou wrote her dissertation on the Cashinahua, also known as the Huni Kuin, and she has published several articles about their culture. Dr. Lagrou wrote that they were called Cashinahua by outsiders, a reference to bats, or bat people. They called themselves the Huni Kuin, meaning real people, true humans, or people with known customs. The Huni Kuin say that they were called the “Bat People” because of an error in language interpretation from Portuguese informants when they had answered a question to state that they were hunting bats.
The Huni Kuin who stayed at the Brazilian side of the border suffered terrible exploitation from the rubber boom period, enduring slavery type conditions when they worked for rubber bosses. They had been enslaved and forbidden to practice their own culture. They had been through massacres by Brazilian rubber tappers and forced to migrate from their original domain due to pressures from the rubber boom beginning in the 1890s. Groups had separated in the early 1900s when there was a revolt against a rubber baron, and they left the Envira River area to relocate to the Perus River while others lived in the Jordao River area.
Dr. Lagrou states that many Huni Kuin groups in Brazil almost lost their language and culture, and recently have initiated the revival movement with intensive cultural exchange with urban ayahuasca movements. Dr. Lagrou works with the group on the Purus River. She records in her article, “Homesickness and the Cashinahua Self,” how the people in the village where she stayed accepted her in their cooperative and empathic community. Manuel Sampaio, a leader in a new village, said that many people were lost to disease from contact with white people, and the Cashinahua needed to grow and the nation became larger. They had stopped using poison and shamanizing to kill each other, and 16 children of the 18 born that year had survived.
The Purus River Huni Kuin would share a worldview that strongly connected emotions, belonging, and the identity and presentation of individuals. One of Dr. Lagrou’s Cashinahua sources, Antonio Pinheiro, told her that to be a proper human is to have feelings of belonging, the healthy desire to be present with those people who made and looked after you. A person’s sense of relatedness creates good responses in the body which manifests emotions. For example, emotions like jealousy make people lack energy, think too much, or withdraw socially, while happy people are satisfied, “fat,” and not worried. Good people are generous and express good and healthy thoughts and will offer food to their guests. Since women provide food in households and men do not give orders, hospitality reflects favorably on the entire household. Hospitality is a healthy practice that helps prevent illness. Their leader will encourage work in daily meetings, will be the one to go first in work and play, and will create enthusiasm without giving orders. He shares his goods and food and will not speak loudly.
Dr. Elsje Lagrou writes that the Huni Kuin women of the Purus River village she studies wanted her to return healthy and beautiful and “fat” from their village as a testimony to how well she was treated, because people tend to become scrawny if they are sad or socially isolated or fighting with their husbands. To be that way generates comments and social concern. Homesickness is a good sign, showing vitality and belonging. It can be healed through careful, deliberate remembering, like singing the songs of parents. Their word for nostalgia has the same meaning as thirst. They told her that a person who does not miss his or her relatives in the same way one craves water when thirsty is not a person but a yuxin, a rootless, kinless wandering spirit, or a nawa or stranger. Relations are transformative and embody the language of emotions. Dr. Lagrou describes this as the “interpersonal transmission of qualities through physical contact and ritual song.” When babies lose their umbilical cords, the people cover them with genipa in a song ceremony intended to make them invisible to the yuxin.
Dr. Lagrou wrote about two of their central myths in the Ayahuasca Reader, including the “vine of lightness” in which a group of their ancestors drank of a vine they cooked ceremonially, consecrating their piece of land when they drank it. They sent a man to inform a neighboring village, urging him to inform them quickly, for they were feeling the effects and about to rise toward heaven. He was distracted by his sexual desire, hoping to make love to a beautiful woman, and was lurking in the bushes as the people of his own village made loud noises with trumpets and voices, and drumming on canoes, and the other villagers came and ran toward the village. The man who had been hiding was startled by the noise, and came out and he went with them to the village that was already risen above their heads, and they cried to join them and go with them as they left the earth, but they were too late. This is one of the myths they would meditate on before drinking ayahuasca so it would guide their visions.
Dr. Lagrou writes that the origin myth showed how people formed by overcoming stinginess in the “Stingy Enemy,” who withheld knowledge of plants, fire, and goods. The people’s ancestors stole these and embodied animals’ names. The word for stinginess has a broad meaning and can include hypervigilant and controlling behavior. They contrast sweet and bitter behaviors, both of which arise from one’s liver. Sweetness is generous and social, but bitterness is needed to harden the body. Shamans are called Mukaya meaning the one with bitterness, meaning power, and his diet avoids meat, sweet food, salt and spices to acquire bitterness like the hero, Tene Kuin Dumeya, the proper one.
Dr. Legrou studied the wisdom of the villages of Cana Recelo and Moema. She wrote that the majority of the men would use ayahuasca, called nixi pae in their language, frequently, about twice per month. The liana, a long-stemmed woody vine, is associated with the snake which has colorful patterns like the bark and can shed its skin. Traditionally, they regard the body as being created and accumulating knowledge in the form of the soul, a process directed toward transformation into a body that knows. To be healthy, they told her, one must learn constantly and accumulate knowledge. It is a way of life dwelling in the spirit. The visionary world reveals a primordial time when beings acquired definitive shapes. The experience was considered so transformative, such a part of their identity, that it was described metaphorically as a symbolic death described as changing one’s clothes and changing one’s skin. In one of their ayahuasca songs they are encouraged to put on vine clothes or the clothes of a squirrel or peccary. Part of the process to become a shaman involved an ordeal alone in the forest.
The myth of the origin of nixi pae, their word for ayahuasca, is that an ancestor of the Huni Kuin named Yube discovers its secrets after being seduced by a snake woman from the underwater world. Yube brings it back to the ordinary world of his people but he does not survive the ordeal. Yube was a married man who went hunting had observed a tapir who threw fruits into a lake and an anaconda come out of the water and turned into a beautiful woman, who made love to the tapir. He became infatuated with the woman and went back and threw the fruit into the lake and the snake came out and turned into a woman but turned back into a snake when she saw him. She told him she wanted someone to marry and he lied and said he was single, and they went underwater to her village and he lived with the snake people. They took nixi pai and he wanted to join them, and she warned him he would be afraid and call out their names if he drank it. Yobe said that he wanted to drink, but when the visions came from nixi pai he cried “the snakes are trying to swallow me!” and the snake people were offended. They did not speak to him the next day, and he went to hunt in the forest and a fish told him the snakes were going to kill him and that his wife missed him, and he decided to return to his family after three years absence. He went with the fish who took him through the stream. His wife greeted him with manioc soup and boiled bananas.
Yube stayed hidden for a year from the anacondas and his wife had another child. The rains came and the rivers rose, and he slipped into a stream where he was attacked by his snake family and when he was rescued by his Huni Kuin relatives, his bones were broken and he was weakened. Wanting to know when he would die, he sent his people to find the vine and leaves of nixi pai. They brought many types of vines and leaves and he showed them the right ones. Yube brewed the nixi pai. He gave the men of the village a cup and he sang the songs he had learned from the snake people all night and the next days, and died at the end of the third night. His body was buried and four kinds of vines grew, each for the various kinds of visions — blue, red, light, and dark. The people brewed the vines and leaves, and a young boy who had listened remembered the songs to sing during their ceremony. The Cashinahua told Dr. Lagrou the types of vines revealed different parts of the thoughts and parts of Yube’s life.
Manuel Córdova-Rios:
Manuel Córdova-Rios, a healer and ayahuasquero, was born on November 22, 1887. He lived in Iquitos, Peru, practicing herbalism until he died in 1978 at the age of 91. Mr. Córdova-Rios was a healer from the vegetalista herbalist tradition of the upper Amazon. He had a seven-year apprenticeship with the chief, Xumu Nawa, of a group of Amahuaca Indians in Peru who called themselves the Huni Kuin, meaning the real people. The account of how he became an ayahuasquero was described in Wizard of the Upper Amazon which was published in 1972 and Rio Tigre and Beyond, both written by F. Bruce Lamb, a forester and explorer. Although some ethnobotanists have questioned the authenticity of details about his account of his abduction and seven-year apprenticeship, his knowledge of plants, his healing power, and his experience with making ayahuasca are universally respected.
He stated that he was working as a 15-year-old in a rubber tapper camp at a small tributary of the Rio Jurua near the border of Brazil in 1902 when he was abducted and forced on an arduous journey of many days through the jungle, where he was brought to the old but vigorous chief, Xumu Nawa. The chief groomed him to be his successor, teaching him in intensive private sessions, every eight days for a month, followed by a month off while he was secluded using ayahuascaa. The chief shared his knowledge in a secluded series of ayahuasca sessions, and the visions imparted telepathic powers and revealed minute details about the properties of plants and other secrets of the rainforest. He learned how to diagnose conditions and treat them with remedies from plants and even snails, through knowledge and intuition before becoming a full-time curandero in 1968. His familiarity with plants was part of a respect for nature that we see today in the Huni Kuin culture.
The chief imparted knowledge about how to hunt, about medicinal plants of the jungle, how to brew ayahuasca and use it, and about ways of leadership. Córdova-Rios learned how to diagnose conditions and treat them with remedies from plants and even snails, through knowledge and intuition before becoming a full-time curandero in 1968. His familiarity with plants was part of a respect for nature that we see today in this Indigenous culture.
A bird’s call opened up the story, when he and Bruce Lamb were working on a timber survey in the jungle. Don Manuel said, “You hear that panguara calling? It reminds me of a time in my youth over 50 years ago when I awaited nightfall in a forest caucho camp.” Don Manuel concluded that his abduction was part of his plan to obtain rifles for the tribe. The rubber boom caused a great deal of displacement and tribes would move and seek new territory. He had trade with rubber they harvested at Purus River, a tributary of the Amazon. Conflict from other tribes was a great danger, and he had an arrow shot at him, indicating he was in danger. He also had a vision on ayahuasca that foretold the death of his mother. He slipped away when he was on a trading mission and got a boat ride up the river. He returned to Iquitos by way of Manaus and had a reunion with his father.
Don Manuel’s initiation had included restrictive diets, herbal purges, baths, and massages and culminated in a series of ayahuasca sessions. They would eat carefully, like a diet of only fresh fruit, roast chicken, and boiled manioc (or yuca) for two days prior to, and on the day of the ceremony. He said that he had the “impression of being free of my body, capable of actions, sensations, and knowledge completely divorced from my physical being.” During his seven-year apprenticeship, the medicine helped him learn the language and the visions imparted telepathic powers and revealed minute details about the intricate interplay between humans, animals and plants. These sessions imparted the power and knowledge of the chief and the culture’s accumulated tradition. He received an ability to foretell events, locate objects from a distance, learn the properties of plants, and great skills for hunting. He learned how to diagnose conditions and treat them with remedies from plants and even snails, through knowledge and intuition.
After his return to Iquitos, Don Manuel worked again in the jungle finding rubber trees. He learned about making curare from the Tikuna Chief Izidoro, in exchange for Cordova’s knowledge about how to make ayahuasca. He had an allegiance with the black jaguar, and it would reappear in his visions, and he had conjured it up for Chief Izidoro when leading his visions in a ceremony. He worked on curare and rubber and timber explorations in Colombia, Brazil and Peru, and gathered pharmaceutical products from the forest before becoming a full-time curandero in 1968, and learned to diagnose and treat illnesses without ayahuasca, using his vast knowledge of medicinal plants and his psychic powers to diagnose maladies. He was held in high esteem for his power to heal people from all walks of life, and he turned down esteemed career opportunities to continue his services.
Don Manuel did not view ayahuasca as healing in and of itself, but it would provide knowledge of curing disease, a diagnosis, not only showing which organ system was out of adjustment, but also show him a cure from the resources of nature. “Ayahuasca, it tells you how, but by itself it cures nothing directly.” Don Manuel said, “All that I learned from ..{Xumu} — the insight I developed of the inner workings of the mind and the human psyche, as well as the knowledge of the natural medicinal plants of the forest and how to use them — all this has remained a part of me in the years that have passed since I left the Huni Kui.” He developed the capability to see problems in people’s inner anatomy and organs, and then the right medicinal plant would appear spontaneously for a healing regimen.
Don Manuel became able to diagnose illnesses and provide cures without using ayahuasca. He said that his goal in the healing process was to create a condition of harmony and stability that would allow the body to heal itself. He believed he had been in about 500 sessions with Chief Xumu and others, all of which involved icaros. A plant’s spirit, according to the ayahuasquero, responds to sounds especially the singing of icaros. The medicinal plant has its own properties but the curandero’s icaro of healing energy to the patient. When he spoke to Mr. Lamb about the preparation of his healing plant preparations, he acknowledged that he would sing as he prepared them. Córdova said, “What good do you think my remedies would be if I didn’t sing to them? The Indians who taught me their secrets believed that words carried by the breath of their shaman had a creative power all their own.”
Don Manuel and his wife had many children and grandchildren, but he lamented his lack of an apprentice. In nearby areas, the urban curanderos who would divine sorcerers behind affliction, he would look into the body of a patient and see the problem conditions. He stated, “I could never turn suffering people away when I had it in my power to help.” He did not approve of its use for sorcery and witchcraft, and stated it often would backfire, and he would not ask much for healing people. He said that he healed mostly for personal satisfaction, knowing that over-commercialization of healing powers could result in the healing powers losing their force. In nearby areas, the urban curanderos who would divine sorcerers behind affliction, he would look into the body of a patient and see the problem conditions. He stated, “I could never turn suffering people away when I had it in my power to help.”
Recently, a large group in Brazil has opened to outsiders and influences from the urban Mestizo ayahuasca culture. The Entheonation film, Novo Futuro, A Huni Kuin Renaissance, shows how there has been a rebirth of the cultural heritage of the people over the past 18 to 20 years. Their members number over 15,000 in the Brazilian Amazon bordering on Peru, living in many very remote areas. After surviving terrible ordeals of rubber raids and captivity, their culture has seen increased quality of life with a reconnection to nature and their traditional culture, a time when the creator is heard again. The film states that they are now thriving on 314,000 acres of rain forest. This has come with protection in a reserve with the Kulina people, the Alto Purus Indigenous Territory. The film took place during 2017 to 2019 in one village that had opened to non-indigenous people who wanted to live a simpler life close to nature. It features their Eskawata festival, which celebrates the songs of their culture. One of their leaders, Ninawa Pai da Mata, Father of the Forest, was interviewed and said they were living a time of rebirth, when they have rights, clean water, education, and health.
The Huni Kuin payé, or spiritual healer, describes in the film how his people use ayahuasca, or nixi pae, to provide visions for the future, for communication with spirits, and for other positive purposes such as healing, bringing peace to people’s hearts, and creating a culture of spirituality in harmony with nature. Ninawa Pai da Mata said that some healing has come from their reconnection with medicine over the years. He said nixi pae is a sacred medicine, which they use along with kambo and rapé. He states that they want to share their culture and wisdom and a message that there is a unity of all humanity. They would like to create alliances with the outside world and show their culture and traditions of knowledge of nature. A longer film is being created, called Eskawata Kayawai, and the film encourages support of the Huni Kuin through the Instituto Sociocultural Huni Kuin.
Ecuador and Some of its Ayahuasca Traditions
The Secoya of Ecuador and Peru:
The Secoya people are from northern Ecuador and parts of Peru. They are small in number and now facing acculturation stress. The Secoya have maintained a rich tradition with yagé going back hundreds of years. The ancient Secoyas were quite numerous. They observed plant medicine ceremonies in community, and would paint their faces with stripes, color their lips dark, and wear new clothes, necklaces, flowers, and feather crowns for the occasion. They would use decorated hammocks and would stay in the yagé house until dawn, when they would have breakfast and return to their homes.
A shaman and chief of a group of Secoya people from the Aguarico River in northern Ecuador, Fernando Payaguaje, provided an account of his life experience and advice to his grandson Alfredo, who helped publish his autobiography. It is recorded in the book The Yagé Drinker. He was an eminent healer and expert on the healing properties of Amazonian plants who lived until 1993. He said that when he was a young boy, his father told him, “You should be initiated in yagé so that someday you can be chief of your own people when I die.”
Because of his concern for his people and wishing to be able to cure the sick, don Fernando took this path. It was a major undertaking, requiring gaining knowledge by drinking yagé and serving as an apprentice from a young age. The shaman’s path required interest, bravery, and ability to withstand suffering in order to “graduate” and become a wise person, one with authority to give it to others and to instruct other healers. Some may be demoted from healer to ordinary drinker, or not acquire the level of knowledge to graduate. He wanted to be the best healer and become chief of his family. He said that to be wise and graduate, one needed to drink yagé at least fifteen times over a few months and to keep restrictions limiting foods and avoiding intimate relations as well as pregnant or menstruating women. He could eat certain fish, certain meat, and green peppers, but he needed to be careful and decline forbidden foods. He reached this position of responsibility, becoming a graduate, at a young age, which his people believed was good way to assure the quality of his visions.
When he was sixteen, don Fernando was an apprentice and he had a plot of yagé vines that he used, and he also had access to vines from one of his uncle’s fields. Don Fernando’s father was trained by a wise man from the Putumayo, and he passed onto others the wisdom of the medicine yagé. During his course of instruction, he had to address his own rage. He was cautioned by his father and his uncles, Sebastian and Saulerio, that he must only heal and not and use magic for harm. He usually drank from the vine by itself. He had visions of birds, light, and butterflies when he was a young man. He saw beautiful colors, heard beautiful sounds, and he passed through the sky-blue spirits. Later, he had visions of the huinahui, the good small spirit protectors from the other world.
He saw the angels and underwater animals, he felt hot and noticed his anger, and realized that his goal was to master his rage and not harm others. The celestial beings who were visible with yagé taught singing and how to make flutes of wing bones. They also helped him purify his mind so he would resist pride and violent impulses, and control rage. He said that he learned about devils, which can appear anywhere and only attack if a witch orders them to do so. He learned about the waters, the spirits, and the imposter spirits, and the many animals that inhabit the earth, where they live, and what they eat. His initiation ceremony was with another healer’s son. He was able to keep the medicine down, a good sign, and he fell asleep, waking up the following morning, and he saw a little house in the water when he went to a river.
In his visions he saw that a person dies in order to know everything. The body is reduced to ash and the spirit rises, ready to reach wisdom and in the end to reach God. The Shaman would help him spiritually go up a ladder to see the house of the sun, and the house of the rainbow, the place where one could defeat witchcraft. At the highest level, yagé continues to teach and brings access to visions and the power to heal. It opens up to another world, a happy kingdom of celestial beings. He said that he would see the truth of everything that exists.
The healers who attain the highest level may sing and prepare yagé, while others drink it in silence. Good drinkers will be able to see God — Nané, the God of the sky. Don Fernando noticed light when he graduated. When he was in the presence of Nané he was told, “You are going to be a great healer. You will have the power to heal. To do that, you should love people and do good, not evil.” Nané gave him salt stones the wash his mouth to help him cure illnesses. He was wearing resplendent clothes of white and in a shining house. He was sent home but was able to go back, and Nané told him he had graduated through bravery and to follow his laws. He said, “I only show myself to people of good conduct, giving them instructions so they can increase their wisdom.” He told him goodbye and said, “My son, now you too, are God.”
Don Fernando spoke about the Secoya yagé ceremonies. He said that he was concerned because young people were not learning from the medicine and people in his clan were not even cultivating the vine. He described the traditional ceremonies of his people. The yagé is boiled for at least a half a day so it will be thick, bitter and concentrated. Don Fernando said that it would be kept in a large pot and the participants would drink it in darkness when the only light would be from flames and coals in the hearth. The participants would dress up and some would pay the shaman and bring sick people to the yagé ceremony. A graduate of the training would sing, walking and standing. Don Fernando said that the time after the full moon before August is the best time for visions because the celestial spirits, the people of the sky, the true people who live short little men who resemble dolls, “are right above the trees,” moving over the face of the earth. Sometimes they would mix in peji bark or the bark of ujaji, as the culmination of the initiation, but Don Fernando said that that it made him lose his ability to see.
Don Fernando said that there are lesser gods who were left behind because they were bothering Nané, the God of the sky. Death does not exist above or below the earth. He said that there are lesser gods who were left behind because they were bothering Nané, the God of the sky. Death does not exist above or below the earth. Songs will come from the visions which are forms of prayer invoking the spirits who can lead them. The dead arrive, longing to go back, and the nuni pai take them to a great river where they can visit. Then they forget and remain with the celestial beings. They have boats and the river is immense. Tiny angels with resplendent white clothes and crowns accompanied him. There is a house of God and he had to cross over a large hole.
The Jívaro:
As a graduate student from 1956 to 1957, Michael Harner undertook archaeology fieldwork that led to contact with the Jívaro, or Shuar, people living in the Amazonian jungle in eastern Ecuador. The Jívaro are a very independent people who resisted the Spanish invasion. They were known in former times for warlike behavior to fend off potential invaders and would conduct raids, accumulating shrunken heads in the process. He wrote that his experiences among the Jívaro showed him that the availability of ayahuasca allowed virtually anyone to achieve the trance necessary to practice shamanism. Dr. Harner stated that ayahuasca is a sacred tool and that people should approach it with respect and use it in a sacred ritual context after careful training.
Dr. Harner was doing field research to study traditions of the Conibo, another remote group that used ayahuasca. When he sought to learn more about shamanism from the Conibo, they told him he would have to try ayahuasca before they could know what he would be able to learn. This first experience with ayahuasca in 1961 opened a portal to a spiritual reality for him.
After his initial experience with ayahuasca among the Conibo, he returned to the Jívaro in 1964 to learn about shamanism, and again in 1969 and 1973. In his 1973 book Hallucinogens and Shamanism, he included an article, “The Sound of Rushing Water,” that described his 1964 fieldwork among the Jívaro. Dr. Harner found Jívaro shamanism to be developed, dramatic, and exciting. They called ayahuasca natema. Because the Jívaro tend to be individualistic and have feuds, they would take ayahuasca individually for the purpose of coping supernaturally with enemies. Many members of the group were shamans, one in four males, and a few of the women as well. There were curing and bewitching shamans in that society who would employ ayahuasca in the context of curing and bewitching, finding and eliminating curses case by malevolent intent.
Among the Jívaro, an apprentice would acquire tsentsak, for attacking or for protection, from the phlegm of a master shaman as part of an initiation. This would be followed by several evening sessions with natema as the shaman would blow over the body of the novice to increase its power. A period of resting and celibacy, up to a year to be fully effective, is required as well. The novice chooses to become a curing or bewitching shaman, and the choice may be influenced by the master. The novice also swallows organisms like insects or worms to make the supernatural power, which appears as animals such as giant butterflies, monkeys, or jaguars who assist the shaman.
Dr. Harner was impressed with these two societies that had so many shamans who had the capacity to heal others, and he sought to train with indigenous teachers and he began his initiation into shamanism. In 1980, he published The Way of the Shaman: A Guide to Power and Healing. He describes an adventure beginning when he went to meet the Jívaro shaman Akachu and offered a Winchester shotgun, an improvement over the standard gift of a powder-charged weapon, in exchange for the power acquisition of tsentsak or magical darts used by a shaman. The process included hiking to a sacred waterfall and being exhausted and losing his way in the jungle, so that the grandfathers would take pity on him. The tsentsak are spirit helpers used by the Jivaro shamans along with the guardian spirit of the shaman to help shield attacks. He had brugmansia and had to attack a malevolent spirit, which took great courage, in order to obtain the power. The Jívaro would drink ayahuasca and also drink green tobacco water every few hours to see in the body for diagnosis, and then they would suck out magical darts in the dark. They summon the tsentsak with magical songs while under ayahuasca and the goals include retrieving a patient’s power animal from the Lowerworld. They are attracted in the ayahuasca trance with songs, and have a shrill music audible to the shaman.
His 1972 book, The Jívaro: People of the Sacred Waterfalls, was based on his doctoral dissertation. He wrote: “The Jívaro believe that the true determinants of life and death are normally invisible forces which can be seen and utilized only with the aid of hallucinogenic drugs. The normal waking life is explicitly viewed as ‘false’ or ‘a lie,’ and it is firmly believed that the truth about causality is to be found by entering the supernatural world or what the Jívaro view as the ‘real’ world, for they feel that the events which take place within it underlie and are the basis for many of the surface manifestations and mysteries of daily life.”
Dr. Harner began to pursue a career as an ethnologist and began a lifelong study of shamanism, which he compared to a spiritual immune system. He learned to connect with spirit helpers and set about finding other means to achieve a shamanic state of consciousness. He and his wife Sandra established a Center for Shamanic Studies in 1979 and a Foundation for Shamanic Studies in 1985. They collected an archive of media and artifacts that is the world’s largest library about shamanism and they worked to promote and share understanding and appreciation of the tradition of shamanism. They adopted a core shamanism practice that can be applied in a fairly uniform way, and he contrasted this with borrowing elements from particular societies, which he referred to as neoshamanism.
It is a method of shamanism to help connect shamanic practitioners as intermediaries to contact compassionate spirits, beings whose souls have transcended to a better place. The Harners taught that shamanism should be seen as a respected practice and tradition that can help western people from industrial nations to heal from a sense of alienation and fear based on separation from nature and other life. It can help people recover our lost appreciation of interconnectedness and revitalize our mutual understanding and connection to the natural world. Shamanism may provide direct access to the spiritual world through a doorway to another reality and help people call in another dimension of existence, promote spiritual revitalization, connect with the planet and nature, and know better how to live with compassion for oneself and for nature at the same time.
In a 1965 article in Psychedelic Review, (vol. 6, pp. 58–66), titled “Ayahuasca drinkers among the Chama Indians of northeast Peru,” Heinz Kusel wrote about his experience with ayahuasca in the late 1940s. At the time, he was a trader living among the Chama and he had had two unpleasant experiences drinking ayahuasca. His third journey was led by an indigenous ayahuasquero named Nolorbe. He saw organized images of complex, changing designs of dark brown and green after drinking the medicine. They felt precious and seemed particularly directed to him. He wrote about seeing naked dancers whose bodies shone and were filled with light and seemed to dance to the songs of Nolorbe. Their faces were hidden, and he longed to glimpse their beauty. One dancer’s face then came close to him, her eyes closed, but when they opened to his gaze it seemed to be an answer to a riddle and it brought him a level of satisfaction that he had never known before.
The Shipibo-Conibo:
The Shipibo-Conibo are an indigenous Amazonian culture originally separate but through intermarriage and communal ritual they became one group. They were not conquered by the Inca and resisted the Franciscan Catholic efforts to convert them beginning in the 1600s. The Shipibo-Conibo originally lived along the Ucayali River. There are as many as 35,000 individuals spread over a large area of Amazon jungle in Brazil, Ecuador, and Colombia, and many are living in Pucallpa and other parts of Peru. They are very mobile and the census data is unreliable. Estimates are that there may be about 20,000 Shipibo-Conibo in Peru, which is fewer than 10 % of the registered indigenous population in the country, although census data is unreliable. Pucallpa, a port city, grew quite large during the rubber boom, and it has attracted large numbers of people of European descent as well as Shipibo-Conibo from the jungle areas. This may have encouraged exchange of information and experience with ayahuasca. The Shipibo-Conibo sell many fine arts and crafts with the distinctive maze-like patterns in pottery and embroidery, which are similar to ayahuasca visions. Their traditions have upheld an authentic non-Eurocentric cultural context in a dynamic and vital way, and many visual artists from their tradition have inspired interest in ayahuasca throughout the world.
Ayahuasca in the past was used communally and now helps the community by helping people be healthy. It is a spiritual medicine that helps ordinary people by promoting mindfulness and clarity, cleansing, and protecting the body, and increasing agility and problem-solving ability. Healers in the Peruvian area are called vegetalistas because they have gained wisdom and healing ability from the plants and the visions they impart. They view plants added to ayahuasca as “plant teachers” that have spirits and intelligence. The shamans develop relationships with spirit beings known as the masters of animals. Vegetalistas follow a strict dieta and employ isolation and other demanding techniques to receive healing powers. This requires long periods of refraining from sex and eating bland foods, avoiding foods that are spicy, salty, high in fats, and foods high in tryamines, such as fermented foods, aged cheeses and fish, and some processed foods. The plant spirits reveal their knowledge and icaros as a reward for showing such discipline.
Michael Harner, as discussed in the above section, was a scholar and practitioner of shamanism. His edited book in 1973, called Hallucinogens and Shamanism, includes some of his own contributions. Dr. Harner wrote that in its traditional context, people consumed ayahuasca for a serious supernatural purpose. It allowed the participants to see through the world to a supernatural and actual reality. He wrote that the custodians of these ancient methods have knowledge that their ancestors acquired over hundreds of generations of acquired knowledge, learned painstakingly in situations of life and death to maintain health and strength, to cope with serious illness, and to deal with the threat and trauma of death.
Dr. Harner studied the Conibo Indians of the Río Ucayali of eastern Peru, a tributary of the Amazon, doing anthropology field work in 1960–61. He stated that the Conibo were a peaceful people. Dr. Harner believed that the Shipibo-Conibo used Chacruna, the Psychotria viridis, as did the Cashinahua of eastern Peru. Their languages were similar as well. The admixture we know as chacruna was called cawa by the Shipibo-Conibo and a small group of people called the Amahuaca around the Peruvian-Brazilian border.
His Conibo hosts offered him the opportunity to take ayahuasca, and told him it would be frightening. His first ayahuasca journey was in 1961, and it formed his initiation into shamanism. An elder boiled the vines and leaves of the cawa plant all afternoon. He had visions after drinking the medicine, and saw brilliant waterfalls, geometric patterns, dim figures, and creatures. Two boats approached him and merged and became a moving valley and he heard beautiful singing. Then he saw animal-human composite figures and his body felt like concrete and he felt as though he was being taken away and being offered esoteric knowledge reserved for those who were about to die. Reptilian beings approached him from space and told him they came to earth and created life forms and were part of the composition of life here. He wanted to understand his visions, and approached an elder shaman the following day, a renowned blind man who was very familiar with ayahuasca. He told the shaman about the giant dragon-like creatures who said they were the true masters of the world. The Conibo shaman said, “Oh, they’re always saying that, but they are only the masters of the outer darkness.” Dr. Harner was shocked that the shaman was familiar with the spirit world, and its apparent reality, because he had not disclosed that these beings had come from the outer darkness.
Dr. Harner states that the origin myth of the Conibo involved a dragon boat with singing spirits and the invitation to come for revelation. He learned about the journey into the Lowerworld and retrieving spirits from the Conibo. He wrote, “The Conibo Indians taught me to follow the roots of the giant catahua tree down to the ground to reach the Lowerworld.” In the shamanic state, he wrote, its roots were transformed for him and his Conibo friends into black serpents they would slide down to reach lands of forests, lakes, rivers, and strange bright cities illuminated, although the sessions were in the darkness of night.
Alonso del Rio is the author of The Four Altars: The Book of Liberation with interpretation by Gareth Morgan from the Spanish language book Los Cuatro Altares: El Libro de la Liberacion. Maestro Alonso del Rio, a master healer of ayahuasca plant medicine, stresses the importance of managing emotions and not using the power of the medicine to hurt anyone. He lived for thirteen years in the Amazon jungle studying under Don Benito Arevalo, an Onayo Shipibo medicine man, who passed away in 2005 at the age of 84. As a guardian of the power of the master plants, he says that before anyone ventures into these spaces, it is critical to establish one’s purpose for how one will use it. He says, “It is for this reason that we insist that those who have the call to share these master plants in ceremonies must be people whose lives are aligned towards virtue and love, not the search for power.” He learned traditional icaros and has originated his own songs as well, and uses the guitar in ceremonies. He calls this Medicine Music. He also has incorporated lessons from his study of comparative religion and ancestral spirituality.
Some Traditions from Brazil
Baniwa Jaguar Shamans:
The Baniwa are a northern Arawak people from the upper Rio Negro valley. The most revered Baniwa pajés are known as dreamers, wise seers who chant, like priests, and have healing abilities that help preserve the vitality of the entire community. Dr. Robin Wright, an anthropologist, wrote his 1981 Ph.D. dissertation at Stanford University on the history and religion of the Baniwa in the upper Rio Negro valley. Dr. Wright is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Florida and the director of the center for research in Indigenous Ethnology at the state university in Campinas in São Paulo, Brazil. He studied a group of people who dwell in northwest Brazil, southeast Colombia, and southwest Venezuela who number about 12,000 individuals. They are a northern Arawak people. He conducted research in Brazil at various times from 1976 to 2017, studying under Manuel “Mandu” da Silva, a Hohodene Baniwa pajé.
In his article, “A Joyful Place: Baniwa Shamans’ Songs and Historical Change,” Dr. Wright describes the encounter a shaman would have with a superior power, in visions accompanied by movements up and down or sideways. The entity asks, “You were looking for me?” and the reply, “Yes, I was looking for you.” The superior being then will say, “Ah, yes, that is good.”
The oral history of the Baniwa people shows a direct line of seer-savants who saved their clans from extinction when there were efforts in the mid-1800s by Brazilian authorities to pressure them into assimilation, they were exploited by merchants, and being and placed into forced labor. They rose up together to survive illnesses and pressure from outsiders. One of the famous pajé active during that time, Kamiko was a seer or one who knows; he drew power from spirits and ancestors using a mixture of ayahuasca and yopo, Anadenanthera peregrina, which contains dimethyltryptamine. The social disruption had led to an increase in sorcery practices. He stressed the elimination of sorcery and advocated having a harmonious society through healing. He visited indigenous and mestizo communities in Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela. Kamiko visited the highest God, Nhiaperikuli, who is in the house of the sun, which has a medicine box guarded by the harpy eagle. He was granted powers of prophesy after reaching the highest region. He began the ritual called Song of the Cross with dancing, when people would rid themselves of objects of sorcery. He survived ordeals sent by Venezuela that attempted to kill him in a submerged coffin.
Kamiko was the son of a Venezuelan Catholic folk saint of African descent named Father Arnaoud, who blended Christian beliefs with Baniwa spiritual traditions. Baniwa shamans were considered to be wise seers and dreamers who would combine healing and chanting, consuming high doses of parika and caapi in order to die symbolically in order to converse with deceased ancestors who serve as emissaries of the Creator. The joyful place is a hidden place, the highest realm, and the shamans would endeavor to use its powers to make the world better. They had spiritual sanctuaries to resist enemies and to see with, and use, their creative power to preserve their autonomy and resist the evils that endanger the world. They have relations with “other peoples,” ancient spirits and invisible entities. They must respect their spaces, in their understanding, as a way to avoid disease and affliction.
Kamiko’s spiritual grandson Uetsu was influenced by folk Catholicism traditions and communicated with the creator, obtaining power and resiliency and foresaw the overthrowal of Brazil’s government in the late 1920s. He combined songs and images, using spiritual power from the highest realm, where the creative powers of the universe dwell, to heal divisions in society. carried forth the Baniwa dreamer shaman traditions as he sang praises to God. Jaguar shamans of the Baniwa, according to Dr. Wright, would turn down positions of status and social distinction. The sought to bring about their vision of prosperity and faithfulness to their ancestral traditions, a time when there would be freedom from disease, relief from the debts owed to merchants, and abandonment of practices of sorcery. They brought cures and inspired hope and rejected the warrior ethos intrinsic to the jaguar shamans’ previous power struggles. The visions of their shamans revealed spirits at all levels of the cosmos, some with power over diseases and healing. Their songs created a sonic bridge to the higher realms.
Mestizo Ayahuasqueros in Peru
The traditions of the Shipibo-Conibo and other indigenous populations have inspired people of mixed Indian and western heritage, known as Mestizos, to adopt traditions employing ceremonial use of ayahuasca. Colombian anthropologist Luis Eduardo Luna authored or edited three of the most valuable books about ayahuasca medicine practices, including the rare 1984 book, Vegetalismo: Shamanism Among the Mestizo Population of the Peruvian Amazon. Dr. Luna writes that a relationship with plant spirits is expected of anyone who aspires to become an ayahuasquero. Ayahuasqueros learn through ecstatic states, trances, and dreams. They are revered for their healing powers and ability to commune with the gods, employing practices to help them master the trance state and come closer to nature and the spirits such as singing icaros, songs sung in ayahuasca ceremonies. They practice utilizing native plants and ritual songs to induce a trance-like state.
Dr. Luna writes that around Iquitos especially, an apprentice’s lineage of healers is very important, part of a transmission of esoteric knowledge with the ability to lead ceremonial practices. Ayahuasqueros learn through traditions by apprenticeship to a master teacher, and practices such as fasting, purging, dieting with plants, and periods of isolation and abstaining from sexual relations. Dr. Luna wrote: “One ayahuasca vision showed me how all levels of existence, including material and non-material levels as thoughts or feelings, have vibration, or sound underneath their surface manifestation. If one can reproduce the sound, vibration, or ‘song’ of that which you are working with, you can enter into it and change it around! The shaman does just this using themselves as an instrument to effect the joining.”
Dr. Luna wrote that his Mestizo teacher, don Emilio Andrade Gomez, advised him to take ayahuasca “to be strong and keep the mind clear.” He states that in the Mestizo ayahuasquero tradition, it is common to hear that it can cleanse and protect the body and ward off illness. Ayahuasca is a medicine that brings “advice” in forms of thoughts, images, symbols, even voices, which people experience as coming from the spirit of the plant. People may experience a scanning with tiny invisible hands or serpents to remove afflictions or an attraction of spirit allies that teach songs to call them to return and rely on them to help remove and repel the agencies of illness.
Dr. Marlene Dobkin de Rios was a medical anthropologist and a psychotherapist. She was one of the first anthropologists to report on social and historical research on the use of ayahuasca and San Pedro in South America. She conducted social research in Peru and Brazil about traditional uses of ayahuasca in Mestizo society, people of mixed indigenous and European culture. Dr. de Rios earned a Ph.D. in medical anthropology in 1972 from the University of California Riverside. Her thesis was based on research in 1968 and 1969 in Belen, an economically distressed area of Iquitos, and she wrote a book about it in 1972 called: Visionary Vine: Hallucinogenic Healing in the Peruvian Amazon.
Dr. de Rios found that with ayahuasca, people enter hyper-suggestible states that tend to shape their visions, and may help initiate people and instill values of traditional society. She found that ayahuasca used in a traditional setting was effective in helping cure diseases that were thought by participants to be magical in origin. She worked closely with an ayahuasca healer in Pucallpa, Peru, Don Hilde who was the father of her husband, Yando Rios. Dr. de Rios stated, about her own healing ceremony with ayahuasca, “I felt like a tap had opened with regard to my writing, and I became very productive.” It ignited her passion and curiosity.
The ceremonies she observed in Iquitos and Pucallpa would involve groups of five or so up to 25 meeting in clearing. The folk healers called themselves vegetalistas, meaning their healing powers came from the plants. They would require dietary restrictions such as avoiding salt, lard, and sweets for 24 hours before and after the ceremony, to please the guardian spirit, and sometimes sexual abstinence. The participants would Mestizo and indigenous people who had relocated from remote and rural areas in search of income, facing poverty, rapid social change and loss of familiar culture, and problems with hunger, unemployment, long periods of annual flooding, illness, prostitution and vandalism. The vegetalistas helped cure the stress-related illnesses and psychological problems of people by employing techniques and safeguards to culturally integrate the participants’ psychedelic experiences. She acknowledged that the ayahuasquero tradition had a dark side from brujera, or sorcery, that originated from the common belief in the Amazon that illness, injury, and bad luck are caused by other people who do evil out of envy, using curses, by hiring brujos to cast spells. The healers would interpret frightful visions for the participants, diagnose their troubles, and sing songs to provide healing and assurance often effecting a cure for diseases related to anxiety, repressed pain or sorrow, and alienation from neighbors.
Dr. de Rios was very critical of the ayahuasca tourism that existed in Peru in the early 2000s, and the less deliberate modern use of psychedelics that did not have socially constructive contexts for preparation and integration of experiences. She conducted fieldwork studying adolescents from 1999 to 2005 who had sacramental use of ayahuasca who participated in ceremonies of the União do Vegetal Church in Brazil, the ayahuasca church founded in the 1960s. The name means “Union of the Plants” in Portuguese, and it promotes a doctrine of light, peace and love with combined influence of animism, a belief in spirits without bodies, along with Christian practices and sources. She found that the adolescent members had lower levels of anxiety, body dysmorphism and attention problems, and also consumed less alcohol than their peers who were not members of the church.
During her many years as a professor of anthropology at California State Fullerton, Dr. de Rios wrote over forty articles and eight books, mainly about psychedelics and culture. She published an article on ancient Mayan use of psilocybin mushrooms and in 2003, she released a book with psychiatrist Oscar Janiger to describe his research on how artists and other creative people could benefit from psychedelics, called LSD, Spirituality, and the Creative Process. She also wrote an anthropological collaboration with Roger Rumrrill in 2008, A Hallucinogenic Tea, Laced with Controversy: Ayahuasca in the Amazon and the United States and her 2009 autobiography, The Hallucinogenic Journey of Dr. Marlene Dobkin de Rios. 45 Years with Shamans, Ayahuasqueros and Ethnobotanists.
She stressed the value of the psychedelic experience for prepared individuals, and she had great respect for the revelatory properties of this medicine in the way that the União do Vegetal and folk healers held space for people. She contrasted western civilization with its emphasis on individualism, its superficial values and erosion of institutions, and its instability in family structure. The healers would carefully select patients to eliminate those with severe psychotic disorders. Starting around 10:00, they would pass the cup and use portions of 7 mg. per kilogram of body weight. They would use larger doses for patients with apparent psychosomatic diseases that they suspected came from magical harm. Words would come from the Quecha language in songs, with whistling, and the healer would make contact with the individuals, blowing tobacco smoke and rustling a schacapa rattle of dried leaves, to help protect people from harm. The ceremony would often be called a purge, and the healers spoke of the benefit of purging, while encouraging people to hold it in their stomachs as long as possible. Sometimes, the healer would extract a harmful dart by sucking it out, to remove the influence of the malice. Her research showed that the participants lacked access to western medicine and would approach folk healers when unhealthy conditions did not heal. They might suspect someone had thrown earth from a cemetery over one’s threshold or put vulture droppings on a doorstep. If the people could endure the fear, the Mother Spirit of the vine would teach them her songs, which would help people overcome stress-related illness and build community cohesiveness.
Stephan Beyer is the author of the 2009 book Singing to the Plants, A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon. It is a very comprehensive and detailed book about the cultural context of ayahuasca. He wrote from his personal experiences after seven trips to the Amazon learning as an apprentice for two healing shamans, maestro ayahuasquero Roberto Acho Jurama, don Roberto, and his plant teacher, Maria Luisa Tuesta Flores, dona Maria. He found that the healer shamans are dwellers in the spiritual world of the Upper Amazon, melding traditional knowledge of the plant spirits; they are innovators and culturally syncretistic. His primary interest is the use of sacred plants in indigenous ceremonies. His interest in wilderness survival led him to the Upper Amazon ayahuasca tradition and he developed a deep respect for the spiritual component of this cultural tradition.
Dr. Beyer is an anthropologist who earned a Ph.D. in Buddhist studies in 1969. His primary interest is the use of sacred plants in indigenous ceremonies. He studied under San Pedro cactus healers in Peru and participated in peyote rituals with the Native American Church of North America. He practiced law for 25 years and obtained a Ph.D. in psychology. Dr. Beyer wrote that his work was intended to build on the work of anthropologist Luis Eduardo Luna, whose 1984 book, Vegetalismo: Shamanism Among the Mestizo Population of the Peruvian Amazon, is out of print. Mr. Luna estimated that there are 72 different indigenous groups reported to use ayahuasca. Dr. Beyer stated that ayahuasca catapulted into the modern world in 1993 with the book Ayahuasca Visions by the artist Pablo Amaringo and Luis Eduardo Luna. People became fascinated by the visionary art evoked by this mysterious medicine from the hidden world. It spurred widespread travel to the Amazon.
Dr. Beyer describes himself as a weak apprentice who was weak on mapacho lessons, he reveals a deep respect for the spiritual component of this cultural tradition, how practitioners were in right relations with non-human entities and with one another. Ayahyuasca is a hallucinogen, an emetic, a purgative, and a vermifuge, meaning it makes you vomit, evacuate your bowels, and clear out parasites. Dr. Beyer stresses that people of the Upper Amazon region, in Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, and Venezuela, greatly value these effects for getting rid of internal parasites and residue effects of eating game animals. He believes that the vine was discovered because of this effect. He explained that the medicine itself is called la purgq, meaning to vomit or be cleansed. Shamans will diet with scores of plants which will become allies, and the three principal ones are ayahyuasca or yage, with chacruna or chagropanga, toe or brugmansia, and mapacho, or tobacco. Ayahyuasca is used as a teaching plant to open the way to hundreds of other healing plants and to nurture the healing power of phlegm.
Dr. Beyer explains that the Upper Amazon has a rich and tragic culture with some features we do not want to emulate such as the prevailing witchcraft belief. Every harm is interpreted to arise from a malevolent source, typically a dart. Harm and calamity can come from a sorcerer or brujo’s dart, and shamans acquire darts and cultivate phlegm to insulate and store them within themselves. The darts are alive and need to go somewhere when sucked out, because they are hard to destroy. They can be projected into others or retained and stored for healing by a shaman. Shamans, curanderos, or folk healers usually stay in remote areas. They sing songs, call on spirits, suck out the darts, and learn from the medicine which plants to use for prescribed healing.
Dr. Beyer states that ayahuasca reveals the deep realities of the everyday world, creates psychic experience, and information for healing and shedding light on our place. Dr. Beyer says there are two stages of the experience, called mareacion, meaning to feel sick, dizzy, nauseous, drunk, or seasick. To be mareado is when one is hallucinating. There is apprehension at first, and nausea, which eases with practice. The first stage is a stage of visual forms, scenes, and then the medicine provides contact with the spirit world. Singing helps guide the medicine and lead people to vital information from the soul, which goes to dark and deep places where love and sorrow dwell, emotions that can lead to sickness and also to transformative experience.
The medicine practice unfolds in stages. Dona Maria would respond to Dr. Beyer’s questions, saying, “I will show you,” anticipating the lesson he would later receive. The shamans form a community with a network that allows shamans to visit other tribes to share knowledge. They have a goal to pass on their knowledge, but the recent generation is not eager to do the sacrifices and purifications to carry the work forward. One shaman told Dr. Beyer that he had not experienced deeper states and lessons initially, but that he was “probably learning but I didn’t understand.”
Dr. Beyer writes that ayahuasca teaches what is wrong or broken in life and what medicine to take for healing, “to see through the everyday, to see the world is meaningful and magical; it opens a door to wonder and surprise.” He views ayahuasca as a true hallucinogen, and states that, unlike the other major psychedelics, it does not evoke mystical experience so much as reveal the deep realities of the everyday world, with its spirits, but it also creates psychic experience. The spirits are helpers who bring information that is vital for healing as well as shedding light on our place. Dr. Beyer suggests we develop an understanding that recognizes three realms: the real, the unreal, and the imaginal, and move away from dichotomies. When clear visions appear, we should ask, “Will you be my teacher?”; “Why are you here?”; and “What are you trying to tell me?”
Few authentic shamans work with Gringos, and Dr. Beyer estimated only about fifteen of them would deal with westerners on a regular basis. The ayahuasqueros would endure much hardship to observe a dieta and self-sacrificial practices to become worthy of the medicine and its spiritual powers. In previous times, ordinarily only the ayahuasquero would drink the ayahuasca and not the subjects being healed, but the mestizo tradition broadened the use. It is important for people to have a shaman when using the medicine, and things can go wrong. Singing helps guide the medicine and lead people to vital information. The highest level of prestige is the banco, one who observes a forty-year diet and never leaves the place in the jungle, who has the greatest powers, to transform into animals and who has spirits residing and can summon spirits of the dead while in a trance. They have visual or auditory information about events remote in time or space. Teaching comes about intuitively, and the plants create telepathic powers.
Brazilian Ayahuasca Churches
Ayahuasca churches in Brazil have evolved from traditions of indigenous ayahuasqueros and sources that include inspiration from Christian and African and other folk traditions. They are syncretic, in having intertwined inspired experiences of their founders into new and evoling spiritual traditions. The founders of the two largest Brazilian ayahuasca religions had learned of ayahuasca when they had contact with indigenous people when they were rubber work. In the Brazilian Amazon, ayahuasca churches formed in the 1930s and 1940s. Raimundo Irineu Serra originated an ayahuasca religion with Christian influences called Santo Daime. Daniel Pereira de Matos formed the Barquinha ayahuasca religion which also has Christian orientation. Jose Gabriel de Costa formed the União do Vegetal religion in Brazil in the 1960s, which is a more independent ayahuasca religion and has branches in many countries, as does the Santo Daime ayahuasca church.
Mestre Irineu:
Raimundo Irineu Serra, Mestre Irineu, was born in 1892 and grew to be seven feet tall. He founded Santo Daime, an ayahuasca religion, in 1930 in Rio Branco. He had gone to the western part of Brazil from a poor area in northern Brazil in 1912 to work in rubber tapping, but that industry began to collapse. He was initiated into the mysteries of ayahuasca by indigenous shamans in the upper Amazon near the border with Bolivia. He had a series of visions and revelations that included a vision of the Divine Mother who identified herself as “the queen of the forest.” According to the Daime tradition, on a clear and beautiful night, Irineu took ayahuasca and, as he looked up at the moon, he saw a beautiful and wondrous lady. She asked him, “Who do you think I am?” Irineu was amazed as he looked at her and he replied: “My lady, you must be a Universal Goddess!”
The goddess gave Mestre Irineu guidance and told him to observe practices, which he undertook and she gave him the blessings of healing power and instruction on making ayahuasca with chacruna and the vine. The queen of the forest also taught him how to sing and asked for beautiful songs of devotion to be sung to her and he identified her as the Virgin Mary. She revealed to him that ayahuasca was the sacred blood of Jesus Christ giving light, love and strength, and he called it daime, a variation of “give me” in Portuguese, with the sense of asking for love and light.
Mestre Irineu was inspired to form the religion Santo Daime, which combined the medicine practice with African, Christian and folk traditions with teachings about reincarnation and karma and Christian theology. He was not able to read and write, and he was a Black man from a slave tradition. His healing ability and popularity allowed him to build a church and an agricultural community. His first adherents were migrants from the jungle who were displaced rubber tappers. When he first started holding ayahuasca ceremonies, he met opposition from authorities who misunderstood his practices, and thought it was witchcraft. Mestre Irineu served time in prison in the early 1940s. He moved around and settled his church in Rio Branco in Acre State near Peru. The church began to draw well-placed citizens and it exhibited self-discipline and devotion. Their goal was to model unconditional love of neighbor, show devotion to Jesus and the saints, and carefully protect the formula for the sacrament daime. The church has been very particular about preparing ayahuasca the traditional way, and psychotria viridis is referred to as Queen of the Forest.
The services offer hymns that came to Mestre Irineu — and his followers wrote them down. They open and close with Christian prayers there is an emphasis on preparation beforehand for appropriate dedication. There are 132 hymns to portray strength, harmony and love, which revealed the course of his spiritual path. The ceremonies are called trabalhos or “works” and are organized rituals of different kinds, some contemplative, called concentrations, sitting upright quietly. The “hymnals” or dance ceremonies, have worshippers sing and dance for up to twelve hours, as the hymns guide the journeys. Services are dedicated to healing and promote personal responsibility, a wholesome lifestyle, love of nature, humility, fraternity and purity of heart.
Mestre Ieineu referred to the work of the church, from the beginning with his vision, as “Juramidam,” or God and God’s soldiers. After Mestre Irineu died in 1971, different branches and communities formed. There is a leader or godfather and controllers, an altar or table with the cross and symbols, and all the practitioners wear white. The symbols in the altar include a six-point star, a double cross to symbolize the second coming of the Spirit. The church motto is harmony, love, truth and justice. The original community continues to function in the same place, led by Irineu Serra’s widow, Madrinha Peregrina Gomes Serra: the Luz Universal Christian Light Center — Alto Santo. Around 1980, Sebastiao Mota de Melo (Padrinho Sebastiao) formed a church and community, the Raimundo Irineu Serra Eclectic Center of Fluid Universal Light, centered on Santo Daime, in Ceu do Mapio, Amazonas State. This is the branch of Santo Daime that has the most practitioners, up to 10,000, and helped to spread this type of ayahuasca church to many places around the world.
In a 2009 interview, Dr. Stanley Krippner described his experience with ayahuasca rituals in Brazil with Santo Daime and other churches in a religious setting. He said the members of ayahuasca churches experience visions like dreams that are spiritually significant and provide meaning for their lives. The activity of the cerebral cortex and sense of self is suspended, which allows the more basic lower brain and visual cortex to be more active and allow for nonrational states that can bring about emotional surrender and spiritual reverence. Other benefits from the ayahuasca experience can include insights that help people learn to be more forgiving, less resentful, and less angry. He stated that best future for ayahuasca is to place its use in a spiritual framework, such as the long-established shamanic tradition or another spiritual context, where it can provide visions to affirm spiritual significance, a deeper context or code of ethics, and meaning for personal life. Otherwise, he concluded that it would be confusing and disorienting to take it in the absence of a grounded setting.
Mestre Gabriel:
Known as Mestre Gabriel, Jose Gabriel da Costa was the founder of Centro Espirita Beneficente União do Vegetal, the largest, most organized, and most recent of the three main ayahuasca churches in Brazil. União do Vegetal means “union of the plants” in Portuguese, and is a reference to the two plants they know as mariri, the vine, and chacrona, the leaf, which combine to give the medicine its powerful effect. Mestre Gabriel first had ayahuasca on April 1, 1959 at the Guarapari rubber camp, on the border between Brazil and Boliva. He had gone from Bahia in northeastern Brazil to the area of the Amazon in 1943 for wartime efforts to produce rubber. He had traveled between Porto Velho and rural rubber camps in the 1950s, and discovered the mestizo Peruvian ayahuasquero tradition that incorporated an exchange between Indian vegetalista healers and influences from other cultures. Mestre Gabriel founded the church on July 22, 1961, near Rondonia in the Amazonian state of Acre, Brazil, and moved it to Porto Velho in 1965, and is now centered at the capitol of Brasilia, with centers throughout the world. His purpose was “to heighten spiritual understanding and perception and bring practitioners closer to God.” He served without compensation, and earned income at various times working as a rubber worker, a bricklayer, and as a nurse.
In the 2012 biography The Messenger of God, Ruy Fabiano writes that Mestre Gabriel was looking for a way to help humanity and take evil away from human hearts. When he first drank ayahuasca, it was served without ritual and he recognized the need for one to recognize its spirit. He got up from his hammock and said, “Look, Chico, this is something from God, something serious. You don’t know how to work, you mix a lot. Whoever gives this tea is responsible for the people.” He found that it produces a state of consciousness that can amplify one’s perception and help people recognize their essentially spiritual nature and promote their moral and intellectual capacities. Sandra Goulart, who conducted fieldwork and studied União do Vegetal wrote that one tradition that it holds is that twelve masters of curiosity, who preserved the tradition of ayahuasca, recognized him as having authority and complete knowledge to complete the elements of this lost tradition, blessing his efforts to reestablish it.
The church celebrates with the sacrament of Hoasca Tea or Vegetal, with a goal to promote reverence for the medicine and its messages, and transparency among its members. Its practices involve simple dress, with green, a five-pointed star, seated ceremonies when everyone drinks at the same time, and last about four hours. Members will ordinarily drink medicine one or two times per month. Services and teachings are in Portuguese, and there is a is a council of mesters.
Mestre Gabriel’s experience evoked the ancient origins of Hoasca and renewed the ritual with spiritual revelations. He became dedicated to working exclusively with Vegetal. Drawing upon the spiritual foundations of his day, and his personal experience, he led a structured group in Porto Velho with ayahuasca worship. He incorporated names from Quechua language and aspects of healing with plants, including nine other healing plants that he used initially. He had been steeped in his mother’s lay leadership in Catholicism and the Umbanda tradition, of southeastern Brazil, an African-Brazilian religion that he had actively practiced before. He developed devotional songs and practices. His vision drew on deeper mysteries that he felt had been lost and rediscovered. He taught that it had been a known sacrament from the time of King Solomon and reappeared during the Incan civilization, and that he had been involved with the medicine in previous incarnations. União do Vegetal also drew on a Kardecist spritism tradition that held that spirits of the dead, and psychic and magnetic forces, would intervene in the events on earth, and had teachings about reincarnation. He was guided by an Indian sprit, Sultan of the Forest, with knowledge of the medicines and secrets of the jungle.
Mestre Gabriel sought to include the poor, the simple folk, and excluded people in the church. The church’s story is set forth in The History of Hoasca, which states that the Mariri vine and the Chacrona leaf encompass elements of the life of Christ. Mestre Gabriel is identified as the reincarnation of the first person ever to drink Vegetal on earth, and was a vassal of King Solomon, and remembered his mission, and was among the people who had been transformed to plants. He serves as a model of virtues such as generosity and devotion. The tea is regarded as providing spiritual healing, as opposed to physical healing. The church has a medical scientific department with health professionals. Its teachings do not accept the curandeirismo or folk healing traditions, and they believe those traditions had forgotten the original spiritual knowledge and proper context for taking Vegetal. Members will wear common clothing often with green and will typically drink Hoasca tea two times per month, and they all take it together at the signal of the mestre of their center. The church has many charitable activities such as literacy projects, clothing and book drives, sustainable agriculture projects, and a large preserve of 20,000 acres in Amazonas.
Because of good examples and careful preparation, screening, and integration, the União do Vegetal Ayahuasca church and Santo Daime and Barqhinho churches achieved legal protections in Brazil. In 1987, Brazil declared ayahuasca a legal substance when used within the context of religious practice, becoming the first country to allow psychedelic use by non-indigenous persons. In 2006, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous (8–0) decision, Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficente Uniao do Vegetal, 546 U.S. 418 (2006), which upheld the right of practitioners of a religious group that had a branch in New Mexico to use ayahuasca as a sacrament.
Benevolent Spirits in Shamanic Practices
Dr. Michael Harner wrote that shamanic practice is a transformation of consciousness that allows for contact with other worlds, seeing more deeply into reality, and experiencing a broader and greater range of knowledge than the fragment we inhabit. The indigenous medicine guardians are the cultural cornerstones of the sacred medicines, like ayahuasca, virola, and yopo, and leaders in how they are prepared and used. Shamans are familiar with the other world occupied by sprits and beyond time that people may enter through grace and sacred plants with appropriate preparation and reverence.
Dr. Harner found that the Cashinahua and Sharanahua would use ayahuasca in group settings and would share their insights or revelations that were related to the group. Dr. Reichel-Dolmatoff observed that the Tukano, whose usage of yage was observed as early as the 1850s by Richard Spruce, would use it in collective rituals. Similarly, the Secoyas, who preserved ancient traditions according to Fernando Payaguaje from northern Ecuador, would have ayahuasca in a special house together and wear ceremonial clothing and decorations. Manual Sampaio, a leader of a Cashinahua or Huni Kuin village, told Els Lagrou that many of his people had been lost to disease and that they stopped using shamanism against each other because they needed to survive and build their numbers.
The context for its use differs with the orientation and experience of the cultures that employ it. The gregarious Cashinahua and Sharanahua, a people who endured disruption and loss from epidemics and reside now in the upper reaches of the Río Purus, primarily in Peru, but also in Brazil, would use it in a group setting and share their revelations related to the interests of the community. The Cashinahua, like other people, would say that ayahuasca produced an unpleasant experience, but one necessary to obtain urgently desired revelations from the spirit world. Elements of sacrifice and self-discipline are important for becoming worthy to enter the challenging space and to find portals to the spirit world and be in the presence of the ayahuasca people and other benevolent spirits.
Shamans gain power often by inspiration and usually after an apprenticeship and a form of initiation. They practice medicine, using magical practices. Some groups believe that nature is occupied by spirits, some of which are benevolent, and some are harmful and cause affliction. Beings have a soul that gives life and many plants and animals have a “mother” or “master,” such as crops like manioc, corn, and game animals. The soul can have a seat in the heart, the chest, or in other parts of the body.
One technique is to remove objects that cause illness, such as a small stone, a leaf, an insect, or a substance that has affected someone when it was sent by another shaman through harmful spirits. They can use massage, suction, blowing, and fumigation to cure illness, and can recover one’s lost soul, often using spirits they have invited into them, which can help to overcome the evil influence.
Dr. Harner saw an anaconda become the crown of a shaman in an ayahuasca ceremony, and then the butterfly appeared and sang with its wings. Then, other animals appeared along with the sound of rushing water. He found that spirits are real and that he could relate to them. They are people whose souls have transcended to a better place. Shamans, as intermediaries, could contact the compassionate spirits in the Lowerworld, where they would appear in human and animal forms, and they could be invited back to come and be transferred as spirit helpers. They will heal on a soul level and help reveal the source of illness and affliction.
Dr. Ralph Metzner, in his 2015 book, Allies for Awakening, Guidelines for Productive and Safe Experiences with Entheogens, encouraged participation in the older nature-based traditions, and urged the value of psychedelics, which he describes as non-specific awareness amplifiers, for purposes of spiritual awakening, healing and increased understanding, and enhancement of creativity. The goal, he stated, is to bring back useful content from the expansive visions of reality. Dr. Metzner urged following an explorer type of shamanic practice that seeks to maximize the potential to expand harmoniously with nature as part of a community of equals. It entails an expansion of potential within oneself, finding flexibility to surpass limitations, to unfold one’s potential destiny within communities by seeking to harmonize among equals rather than to dominate. He states that there is a mutuality to this approach, which appears consistent with deep ecology and the Divine Feminine, cultivating the potential of creative expression in community with animals, plants, humans, and spirits. He states that a great danger to our world has formed from losing a sense of interwovenness and that humans have become parasitic, viewing life not as sacred but in a mechanistic fashion. Animism, instead, offers a sustaining understanding that the earth is alive, that beings are sacred, that everything is related.
During a 1988 program, “Shamanism: Before and Beyond History,” Dr. Metzner advocated for a practice of adventurer shamanism, which he believed to be an approach followed by ancient ancestors of modern Europeans. He explained how shamanism evolved as a survival skill of humanity that allows people to have contact with the inner world and receive and perceive the full context of reality from the outside. It helps with perception that is not the projection outward, and is less filtered by our outer expectations. Dr. Metzner cited as an example of adventurer shamanism a shamanic path from the Polynesian and Hawaiian traditions called the explorer or adventurer path. It is focused on creating harmony and fluidity, finding the tools and allies that help us attain knowledge that ordinarily is not available. This form involves approaching nature with loving understanding. It may incorporate certain core features from rituals used with plant medicines for centuries, as well as fruitful growth that incorporates elements from our own traditions. Dr. Metzner stated that the plants and nature open to ways that foster the evolutionary process, providing an incentive to learn more cooperation, and lead to interactive connectivity that will provide for community and natural healing, in contrast to our efforts to dominate nature, which are having catastrophic effects.
Dr. Metzner stated that the adventurer shamanism path is like the more common warrior path, because it calls for developing impeccability for awareness of malevolent forces and developing the tolerance and discipline to have visions. The adventurer also needs attention to detail and develops skills so that the fluid reality can be expanded, to co-create in a cooperative, symbiotic process. He said that the connection with the world of spirits involves connecting deeply with a morphic field that we can study for its forgotten lessons from the history of one’s own ancestors. He states that going back around 200,000 years ago, the human species in Europe was a hunter-gatherer and pastoralist existence, a tribal and peaceful society with a female deity that was life-giving and life-taking. It was not a patriarchy. Around 4000 B.C. to 3000 B.C., there were waves of invading warlike people and the warrior archetype became predominant in western society.
Dr. Metzner explained that the explorer path seeks to maximize the potential to expand harmoniously with nature as part of a community of equals. It entails an expansion of potential within oneself, finding flexibility to surpass limitations, to unfold one’s potential destiny within communities by seeking to harmonize among equals rather than to dominate. He states that there is a mutuality to this approach, which appears consistent with deep ecology and the Divine Feminine, cultivating the potential of creative expression in community with animals, plants, humans, and spirits. He states that a great danger to our world has formed from losing a sense of interwovenness and that humans have become parasitic, viewing life not as sacred but in a mechanistic fashion. Animism, instead, offers a sustaining understanding that the earth is alive, that beings are sacred, that everything is related.
Dr. Metzner discussed “neoshamanism,” which involves an individual’s right to practice on one’s own, being attentive to traditional endeavors, such as studying the world of plants and spirits and practicing self-transcending flight journeys. Dr. Metzner stated that this approach entails an archaic revival, taking lessons of past and present, and reviving forgotten connections of awareness. It requires cultivating relations with spirit guardians, the souls of animals, and being clear with one’s ancestors. Neoshamanism combines the traditional with new elements such as science and Eastern Religion and knowledge of the limits of existing political and social structures. Neoshamanism can include the inner journeys of urban shamanism.
An Overview of Scientific Research about the Health Effects of Ayahuasca
Ayahuasca is respected for its ability to help enhance soul connections and to alleviate physical and psychospiritual afflictions. It has been used for centuries by the Amazonian indigenous people to strengthen and refine perception, to ward off sickness and misfortune, and to develop a deeper understanding of one’s place in the world. Ayahuasca’s effects include visual phenomena, colorful, bright, very symbolic imagery that holds deep meaning for the subject. People may observe their thoughts and emotions with much greater clarity. Ayahuasca brings an experience of depersonalization in which people are able to detach themselves from more defensive patterns of behavior. A person may experience mental distress as part of discovering the source of the distress and learning how to address its source. An experience with ayahuasca can facilitate realizations of strong personal truth whether it is terrifying, exhilarating, or subtle. These realizations are often accompanied by purging which can be part of a cathartic relief that reveals solutions to one’s suffering or insights that lead to changes in behavior patterns that do not serve people well.
In Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, and other areas, healers have employed ayahuasca in ritual ceremonies to diagnose and cure disease in keeping with folk beliefs that disease and misfortune arise from malevolent supernatural forces. The medicine has expanded its territorial range in the past fifty years. Mestizo populations in the Amazon basin have adapted ayahuasca traditions in diverse ways that have incorporated other traditions that appreciate its healing and spiritual virtues. These practices have helped protect and heal people from many cultures and backgrounds who have become demoralized and wounded from enduring stress and anxiety.
The harmala alkaloids in the vine have a bitter taste and may cause nausea, and they create experiences with dimethyltryptamine, as well as boosting levels of serotonin, a hormone and neurotransmitter, which can help us feel warmth and love and a sense of belonging. The monoamineoxidase inhibiting effects of harmine and harmaline in the vine prevent serotonin and dimethyltryptamine (DMT), from being quickly metabolized by the body. Ordinarily, monoamineoxidase, an enzyme in the body, eliminates the natural or endogenous DMT and serotonin created by the body. Through the inhibiting effects of harmine and harmaline in the ayahuasca vine, also present in Syrian rue, both DMT and serotonin remain in the body during the experience.
Research is showing that one of ayahuasca’s principal components, harmine, helps alleviate physical afflictions. In the 2021 textbook, Handbook of Medical Hallucinogens, co-edited by Dr. Charles Grob and Dr. Jim Grigsby, contains a chapter about ayahuasca written by four Brazilian neuroscientists, titled “Biological and Psychological Mechanisms Underlying the Therapeutic Use of Ayahuasca.” The chapter demonstrates that ayahuasca is presenting a valuable tool for the study of the human condition and novel paradigms for healing. A key emphasis of recent scientific studies is the role of ayahuasca to help treat depression and anxiety. Dr. Grob is a psychiatrist and research scientist whose previous work includes editing and writing articles for the 2002 book Hallucinogens: A Reader and co-editing the 2005 book, Higher Wisdom: Eminent Elders Explore the Continuing Impact of Psychedelics. Dr. Grob is interested in the classic serotonergic psychedelics, LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and DMT, which are similar to the hormone and neurotransmitter serotonin. He is a founding board member of the Heffter Research Institute, which has funded research with psilocybin and ayahuasca. He states that ayahuasca is seeing a revival and overcoming an institutional bias in the field of psychology. At the same time, people are learning how to maximize its useful potential.
In the 1920s, late in his life, the eminent psychopharmacologist Louis Lewin isolated harmine from ayahuasca, which was the final accomplishment to conclude his career. At his encouragement, a neurologist, Kurt Beringer, conducted experiments with harmine and they showed that it helped people with Parkinson’s disease. In the last thirty years, there has been renewed scientific research into ayahuasca’s components and its power to heal the nervous system, regulate emotions, reduce anxiety, and ease depression.
The late Chilean psychiatrist and medical anthropologist, Dr. Claudio Naranjo, wrote in his 1974 book, The Healing Journey: Pioneering Approaches to Psychedelic Therapy, that with the assistance of the ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, he had traveled by canoe up the Amazon River to study ayahuasca with the South American Indians. He brought back samples of the beverage and published the first scientific description of the effects of its active alkaloids. His 2020 autobiography, My Psychedelic Explorations: The Healing Power and Transformational Potential of Psychoactive Substances, includes his reflections on the spiritual aspects of psychedelics and the healing transformations they bring about. He maintained that psychedelics like ayahuasca act as agents of deeper consciousness, and he shared optimal techniques for controlled induction of altered states using different visionary substances.
In his native Chile, Dr. Naranjo conducted clinical research, published in 1965, using 35 volunteers from Santiago, to compare the effects of mescaline with effects of harmaline, an alkaloid in ayahuasca, which is present in greater concentrations in the seeds of Syrian rue. Dr. Naranjo presented his research at the Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs conference in 1967. His presentation showed that harmaline creates electrical effects in the retina, which is unique among the psychedelics. Dr. Naranjo’s research into the effects of harmaline built upon prior research thirty years earlier indicating that it is hallucinogenic and twice as active as harmine. He stated that harmaline causes a sleeplike trance, withdrawal and lethargy, and has physical effects, such as numbness and nausea and sometimes dizziness, which would appear and disappear with different thoughts. The subjects showed little desire to communicate and passivity to movement. Most of the subjects would lie down for 4 to 8 hours. He was on a panel with Gordon Wasson and expressed an opinion that Soma was Syrian rue, since it grew in Asia and produces a yogic trance and withdrawal from the environment.
The harmaline was more visual in its effects than mescaline. Dr. Naranjo found that with eyes closed there would be a lot of imagery with long dreamlike sequences. The people had variable effects in a world of inner visions, feelings and thoughts with unusual depth, insight and inspiration. People reported having soul awareness, sometimes experiencing a separation of mind and body, and feelings of flight. There would be an alertness to mental processes and an activation of fantasy. Some subjects saw themselves as disembodied witnesses of themselves in a different time and place. Dr. Naranjo noted that some volunteers described landscapes and cities, masks, eyes, animals and human figures, dwarves, angels and giants. Fifteen of the thirty-five subjects had religious, fairy tale, or mythic images, some of which would transform to animals. Visions of transitions would depict the human drama of being and becoming, spirit and matter, freedom and necessity, and opposites could merge and reconcile, sometimes after experiencing death and destruction. Seven of the 35 subjects saw large cats, although none are present in Chile. Dr. Naranjo stated that these visions revealed “a fluid synthesis of aggression and grace and a full acceptance of the life-impulse beyond moral judgment. People would have images of being merged with the entire scene. Some of the subjects had pronounced improvement of neurotic symptoms. Dr. Naranjo argued that Soma, rather than Amanita muscaria, is more likely to be Peganum harmala, also called Syrian rue, which contains harmaline and harmala, like the ayahuasca vine. He mentioned that its seeds are sold in bazaars in India and that the plant grows even in Spain.
The Takiwasi Center in Tarapoto, in the San Martin province in the upper Amazon region of Peru, uses models for shamanic healing derived from indigenous medicine practices to treat addiction. It was established in 1992 by French and Peruvian physicians and healers to help address a severe problem of addiction to coca paste, a plentiful product that was creating problems at the time. It was established a nonprofit organization. Takiwasi means “The Singing House” in Quechua language. The center uses traditional means of healing and ancestral wisdom to help heal addiction.
In 1993, the Heffter Research Institute funded and began a multidisciplinary scientific study in Manaus, Brazil, involving Dennis McKenna, Charles Grob, and Jace Calloway. They conducted an in-depth study with other scientists, called The Hoasca Project, to study the effects of long-term members of União do Vegetal and their use of ayahuasca.
The Hoasca Project was conducted with long-term members the União do Vegetal ayahuasca church at a location in Manaus, Brazil. The scientific study included biomedical and psychopharmacological analyses. The scientists compared fifteen active long-term members of União do Vegetal who had participated for at least ten years in ayahuasca ceremonies having participated for at least ten years, compared with control persons who were similar in other ways but had not had exposure to ayahuasca or been involved in that type of church. Their research resulted in scientific papers in 1994 and 1996 that demonstrated convincingly that ayahuasca could be used safely in a supportive community.
The fifteen active long-term members of União do Vegetal members stated that their previous behavior had been improved, and that they had undergone a personal evolution that allowed them to leave behind troubled past behavior. They appeared to have been transformed from having major social problems to becoming pillars of the community. The União do Vegetal members stated in the screening process that about three-fourths had used alcohol, one-half had smoked cigarettes, one-third had committed at least one violent act, and one-fourth had used stimulants previously. All of them had discontinued that behavior. The fifteen União do Vegetal members exhibited improved behavior and explained that their affiliation instilled in them a “path of simplicity and humility.”
When compared to nonmembers, the ayahuasca users showed greater scores on social desirability and emotional maturity, they were less inhibited, more outgoing, more energetic, and had improved mood, and good short-term memory and concentration ability. The ayahuasca users also were more harm-avoidant, confident, relaxed, cheerful, and optimistic than the control subjects, and appeared to show better powers of concentration. The União do Vegetal members showed more reflective personalities, greater persistence, orderly, self-controlled, and frugal behavior compared with the control group. The ayahuasca users also scored higher on emotional maturity and social desirability scores and appeared to be less inhibited, more outgoing, and more energetic than the control group.
Dr. Jordi Riba, a pharmacologist at Barcelona’s Sant Pau hospital, led a study reported in 2002 that showed that ayahuasca increases introspection and removes attention from ordinary thoughts. Scientists showed that ayahuasca causes decreased EEG readings in all frequencies when it is active. In 2006, Dr. Riba published results from another study that showed that ingestion of ayahuasca increased cerebral blood flow in areas associated with attention, emotion, and interoception, which is awareness of what is going on in one’s own body. Their studies with MRI imaging showed that ayahuasca stimulated the visual cortex, and areas associated with memory, metacognition, and lucid dreaming.
The brain studies of the effects of ayahuasca show that it significantly decreases the activity of the default mode network, areas of the brain that manifest self-oriented mental activity and stream of thought associated with rumination and depressive thoughts. A four-year study in Barcelona authored by Jose Angel Morales indicates that ayahuasca acts on key areas of the association cortex, the part of the brain that activates thought, perception, emotional behavior, and it modifies the flow of information that can help regulate emotions and attention. It may help people develop new perspectives. It also seems to stimulate or awaken neural stem cells and cause the formation new neurons in the hippocampus which is associated with memory and learning.
Harmine has proven effective in treating parasites in the digestive system. It is able to cross membranes and enter cells because it is a small molecule, and binds easily with DNA cells. A 2012 study by Alomar and others showed it inhibited toxoplasma invasion. Preliminary research from an Argentinian study in 2016, led by V.M. Quintana, shows that harmine may provide antiviral properties. Harmine reacts at a cellular level to provide an to reduce the harmful effects of toxins and pathogens in the environment. Harmine also has antimicrobial effects, as does harmaline, which is present in much lower levels in ayahuasca. A study in 2011 in Japan, led by T. Yonezawa, showed that harmine promotes a signaling process that helps preserve bone strength. A 2016 by Y. Hu and H. Xie demonstrated that it can help protect and regenerate bone and cartilage by limiting and metabolizing osteoclasts, osteoblasts, and chondrocytes, and may be beneficial to prevent bone diminishing diseases.
Ayahuasca is used in the Amazon to treat cancer and studies show that harmine is able to eliminate tumor cells and bind strongly with DNA and interfere with the metabolism of pathological organisms and malignant cells. Several studies have shown that harmine damages the DNA of malignant cancer cells. A Chinese study showed harmine is effective to attack gastric tumors, and other research shows inhibits the growth of other forms of cancer. A 2011 study in India by T.P. Hamsa and G. Kuttan showed that harmine helps kill melanoma cells. While much of the research is preliminary, it shows great promise for use of ayahuasca to help alleviate symptoms caused by depression, anxiety, and addiction. There is also potential benefit for helping posttraumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorders, and help with autoimmune disease, neurological problems, and cancer. The research has led scientists to believe that ayahuasca increases the distribution of features of brain organization, leading to a greater variety of conscious experience than ordinary waking consciousness. Ayahuasca acts on key areas of the association cortex, which is responsible for thinking, attention, emotional behavior, and perception. Scientists believe that by modifying the flow of information, it may offer new perspectives by revealing emotions and attention. Studies indicate that ayahuasca leads to creative, divergent thinking, allowing unexpected connections to come to awareness, and flexible and creative insights and solutions to take hold. The therapeutic benefits are enhanced when used in supportive spiritual communities with reverence and mutual support.
A 2012 study led by F. Dos Santos indicated that it releases creative and divergent thoughts spontaneously, including unexpected connections and creative strategies. Another 2012 study led by E. Frecska showed that for up to two days after an ayahuasca session, it leads to visual creativity and increased mindfulness, with decreased judgmental processing and reduced reactivity. Ayahuasca has shown promise in helping relieve depression and promote mindfulness. In 2015, a study by Brazilian and Spanish scientists led by R.F. Sanches, and F. de Lima Osorio published in the Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology showed that a single dose of ayahuasca has antidepressant effects and helps relieve anxiety when compared to traditional antidepressants. They showed significantly reduced depression in people with depression for up to 21 days after an ayahuasca session compared to a sample of people given a placebo. The greatest reduction in depression took place at seven days afterward. Ayahuasca helped people to reduce anxiety and promote mindfulness at least two weeks after taking it.
The Journal of Psychopharmacology released a study by Nicole Leite Galvao-Coelho, a professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil that showed 28 patients with treatment-resistant depression had reduced levels of C-reactive protein for 48 hours after taking ayahuasca, compared with 42 control patients who were given a placebo. The protein is associated with inflammation, which is significant because treatment-resistant depression is associated with mild chronic systemic inflammation. The reduction of inflammation indicates that ayahuasca has the potential to reduce the mechanism associated with depression.
Research has shown that B-carbolines in ayahuasca show promise for treatment of neurological diseases. A Brazilian study released in 2016, headed by V. Dakic, showed that harmine increases human neural progenitor cells, which help produce more nerve cells. It also is capable of stimulating the release of the dopamine, a hormone associated with positive mood and resilience which can help ease depression. A recent four-year study in Madrid, headed by cell biologist Jose Angel Morales, showed that ayahuasca may generate new neurons. It is unusual under normal conditions for new neurons to form. The study showed that harmine helped mice with improved learning and memory, and showed formation of neural cells, astrocytes and oligodendrocytes in the hippocampus.
In the 2017 symposium, Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs, the ethnobotanist Dale Millard reviewed research of the healing effects of harmine, which is present in the ayahuasca vine as well as in Syrian rue, in greater concentrations than harmaline. Mr. Millard is affiliated with Dr. Luis Eduardo Luna at the Wasiwaska Research Center for the Study of Psychointegrator Plants, Visionary Art and Consciousness, and has studied plants used to treat tropical diseases and immune system disorders. He states that ayahuasca is used in the Amazon region for treating cancer, and that harmine has multiple anticancer properties. Mr. Millard writes that ayahuasca has a strong reputation in the Amazon for its ability to treat parasitic infections. He states that harmine not only helps prevent parasitic infections and interferes with metabolic processes of pathological organisms and cancerous cells, but also promotes the growth of healthy nerve cells, pancreatic cells, and bone and joint cells.
