Ayahuasca, Yage, Natema, Santo Daime
Ayahuasca.com is a multi-disciplinary project devoted to the Amazon Spirit Vine Ayahuasca (aya-soul/dead, wasca-vine/rope). Ayahuasca is used widely used throughout the Amazon for healing and spiritual exploration. Ayahuasca is a medicinal tea prepared principally from Banisteriopsis Caapi, a jungle vine, found in the tropical regions of South America. Banisteriopsis Caapi is often combined with other plants, most commonly Chacruna/Rainha (Queen); Psychotria Viridis.
Ayahuasca has a rich legacy of associated traditions, myths, therapies, rituals and aesthetics, spanning from the primordial roots of the indigenous tribes of South America, to diverse syncretic spiritual movements emerging across the planet.
Painting "Sky Spirits" by Pablo AmaringoNews
November 17th, 2009
Dear Friends
I invite you to join the newsletter of my site. From time to time I send some news about my writings and my activities, about the universe of ayahuasca and psychoactive substances in general, legislation on drugs, important cultural events and conferences etc. Usually I do not send too much messages, and they do [...]
November 17th, 2009
Don Pablo Amaringo, one of the most significant artists of our age, shaman of the highest order, and teacher to many, died November 16th.
The world of art has lost a truly original visionary – a seer in all senses of the word. I think we all join together in wishing him a safe passage to [...]
September 18th, 2009
The UDV, whom fought a long legal battle for the right to drink tea in as part of their spiritual practice want to build a temple and greenhouse which has attracted the beady eye of the news media, hungry for cheap controversy.
July 15th, 2009
It is often said the fact that drug treatment “works” proves there’s an underlying biological deficiency. But there is another explanation for how psychiatric drugs affect people with emotional problems.
June 13th, 2009
The Peruvian government has pushed through legislation that could allow extractive and large-scale farming companies to rapidly destroy their Amazon rainforest. Indigenous peoples have peacefully protested for two months demanding their lawful say in decrees that will contribute to the devastation of the Amazon’s ecology and peoples, and be disastrous for the global climate. But last weekend President Garcia responded: sending in special forces to suppress protests in violent clashes, and labelling the protesters as terrorists.
June 12th, 2009
Luien Chauvin, reporting for Time Magazine, says, “Peruvian President Alan Garcia is furious. His plans to open huge parts of the country’s Amazon jungle to foreign investors are crumbling … a casualty of violent protests by indigenous people in the northern jungle last weekend. … The violence was unleashed when police officers received word from Lima, the capital, to remove the protesters who were blocking a highway and the nearby pumping station on the northern pipeline.”
March 24th, 2009
On Wednesday a federal judge in Oregon ruled that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) allows followers of the Brazil-based Santo Daime sect to consume ayahuasca, a psychedelic tea ontaining the ordinarily illegal drug dimethyltryptamine (DMT), as part of their rituals. Guided by the Supreme Court’s unanimous 2006 ruling in “a very similar case” involving Uniao do Vegetal, another Brazilian religious group that also consumes ayahuasca, U.S. District Court Judge Owen Panner concluded that RFRA “requires that plaintiffs be allowed to import and drink Daime tea for their religious ceremonies, subject to reasonable restrictions.”
Latest Feature
The Ayahuasca Visions of Pablo Amaringo
November 18th, 2009 | Published in Visual Art
The late Pablo Amaringo trained as a curandero in the Amazon, healing himself and others from the age of ten, but gave this up in 1977 to become a full-time painter and art teacher at his Usko-Ayar school. Pablo left us this November 2009, and this interview is posted in homage to this great Artist and great Man.
More Features & Articles
The globalization of ayahuasca: Harm reduction or benefit maximization?
November 16th, 2009 | Published in Law, Syncretic Movements & Ayahuasca Religions
This paper explores some of the philosophical and policy implications of contemporary ayahuasca use. It addresses the issue of the social construction of ayahuasca as a medicine, a sacrament and a “plant teacher.” Issues of harm reduction with respect to ayahuasca use are explored, but so too is the corollary notion of “benefit maximization.”
Therapeutic caapi tea: a prototype – Material and Method
November 16th, 2009 | Published in Physiology, Medicine
More and more people are using or consider using ayahuasca tea as an alternative medicine for different therapeutic purposes: depression, Parkinson’s disease, ageing-related cognitive decline, etc.
Yet most of these actual or planned uses are relying on the rich pharmacodynamics of the caapi vine and don’t necessitate the preparation and use of a standard mix. Rather what is needed is a caapi tea specifically designed for these purposes.
Short Glossary of the Terms Used in the União do Vegetal
November 16th, 2009 | Published in União do Vegetal
In order to help the English-speaking public understand some key elements of UDV cosmology, rituals and social organization, the authors have compiled a short glossary of native hermeneutic terms and Spiritualist idioms that commonly circulate within this particular religious universe.
Older Features & Articles
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Psychointegration
Published in ScienceSteve Beyer
Anthropologist Michael Winkelman, at Arizona State University, says that shamanic practices — drumming, chanting, and the ingestion of sacred plants — create a special state of consciousness he calls transpersonal consciousness, and that these practices create this state of consciousness through the process of psychointegration — that is, by integrating a number of otherwise discrete modular brain functions. Anthropologist Homayun Sidky, at Miami University in Ohio, says that this theory, despite a surface plausibility, is without empirical justification. -
A New Book on Ayahuasca Shamanism
Published in CreativitySteve Beyer
In the Upper Amazon, mestizos are the Spanish-speaking descendants of Hispanic colonizers and the indigenous peoples of the jungle. Some mestizos have migrated to Amazon towns and cities, such as Iquitos and Pucallpa; most remain in small villages, their houses perched on stilts on the shores of the rivers that are their primary means of travel. Here in the jungle, they have retained features of the Hispanic tradition, including a folk Catholicism and traditional Hispanic medicine. And they have incorporated much of the religious tradition of the Amazon, especially its healing, sorcery, shamanism, and the use of potent plant hallucinogens, including ayahuasca. In my new book, Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon, I try to set forth, in accessible form, just what this tradition is about. -
Blending Traditions – Using Indigenous Medicinal Knowledge to Treat Drug Addiction
Published in Physiology, Medicine, Psychology, PsychiatryJacques Mabit, M.D.
Ancestral medical practices are based on a highly sophisticated practical knowledge and view the controlled induction of non-ordinary states of consciousness as potentially beneficial, even in the treatment of the modern phenomena of drug addiction. These ancestral practices stand in contrast to the clumsiness with which Western peoples induce altered states of consciousness. Drawing from his clinical experience in the High Peruvian Amazonian forest, the author describes the therapeutic benefits of the wise use of medicinal plants, including non-addictive psychoactive preparations, such as the well-known Ayahuasca tea. Within an institutional structure, a therapeutic system combining indigenous practices with contemporary psychotherapy yields highly encouraging results (positive in 2/3 of the patients). This invites us to reconsider conventional approaches to drug addiction and the role of the individual’s spiritual journey in recovery. -
Kambô, The Spirit of the Shaman
Published in Primordial Culture, Spirit & HealingMarcelo Bolshaw Gomes
“Kambô circulates in the heart. Our shaman said that when we take Kambô it makes the heart move accurately, so that things flow, bringing good things to the person. It is as if there was a cloud on the person, preventing the good things to come, then, when it takes the Kambô; it comes a ‘green light’ which opens its ways, making things easier.”
