Author: Steve Beyer

“Templo Sacrosanto” by Pablo Amaringo

Visionary Experiences

Published by Steve Beyer

Painting – “Templo Sacrosanto” by Pablo Amaringo

There are a number of human experiences — I am thinking of such things as hallucinations, lucid dreams, visions, out-of-body experiences — that are characterized by presentness, detail, externality, and three-dimensional explorable spacefulness. We can call these visionary experiences. Such visionary experiences appear to be a central and consistent component of shamanism generally — most prominently, for example, in the ayahuasca shamanism of the Upper Amazon

Jan Irvin Talks with Steve Beyer

Published by Steve Beyer

Steve Beyer is a researcher in ethnobotany, ethnomedicine, shamanism, and hallucinogenic plants and fungi. His interests center on the indigenous ceremonial use of the sacred plants — ayahuasca and other psychoactive and healing plants in the Amazon, peyote in ceremonies of the Native American Church, huachuma in Peruvian mesa rituals, and teonanácatl and other mushrooms and plants in Mesoamerican healing ceremonies — and on the legal status, uses, effects, and therapeutic potential of naturally occurring and synthesized hallucinogens, empathogens, and entheogens.He is the author of Singing to the plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon. Jan Irvin is an independent researcher, author, and lecturer. He is the author of several books, including The Holy Mushroom: Evidence of Mushrooms in Judeo-Christianity, and co-author of Astrotheology & Shamanism: Christianity’s Pagan Roots. He is the curator of the official website for John Marco Allegro, the controversial Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, and in 2009 he republished Allegro’s famous 1970 classic, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, in a fortieth anniversary edition. Jan is the editor of …

Howard Charing Talks with Steve Beyer

Published by Steve Beyer

This is an edited transcript of a series of conversations between Howard G. Charing, author of The Ayahuasca Visions of Pablo Amaringo, and Steve Beyer, author of Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon. These talks took place during the summer of 2010, at the kitchen table and on the front stoop of Steve’s house in Chicago. Some drinking and cigar smoking was involved. Howard: I read Singing to the Plants several times, and I found it not only an extremely well researched book but also inspirational; it came through to me as a true labor of love. I understand that you originally envisioned the book to address more of an academic, anthropological audience, which is the reason that you wanted it to be published by the University of New Mexico Press; but you have created much more than an academic work. When you talk about your teachers, doña María and don Roberto, your warmth, humanity, and respect for them shines through. You asked them to describe their history, …

Ayahuasca and Transformation

Published by Steve Beyer

Steve Beyer talks about ayahuasca and transformative experiences, in a clip from the film project From Neurons to Nirvana: Psychedelic Science in the 21st Century, produced and directed by Vancouver-based filmmaker, writer, and media artist Oliver Hockenhull.

Michael Winkelman

Psychointegration

Published by Steve Beyer

Steve 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 by Steve Beyer

Steve 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.

Ayahuasca and Mental Health Among the Shuar

Published by Steve Beyer

Steve Beyer
We have talked before about the Grob, McKenna, Callaway, et al., psychiatric study on the long-term effects of drinking ayahuasca in the ceremonies of the União do Vegetal church. I noted that the study had not clearly disentangled any bias that might have resulted from the fact that the ayahuasca drinkers — but not controls — had been preselected for their orderly churchgoing habits. Here is a study that may shed some light on that question.

By Colin Prahl

Some Thoughts on DMT Art

Published by Steve Beyer

Steve Beyer
A number of artists have attempted to render the striking visual experiences that occur after ingesting ayahuasca or DMT. In the Upper Amazon, there are both indigenous artists, whose traditional work consists largely of abstract patterns, such as those found on the now well-known pottery, clothing, and other household goods of the Shipibo; and visionary artists, mostly mestizo, whose work is characterized by detailed representations of spirits, trees, animals, objects, and participants in ayahuasca healing ceremonies. These latter works fall almost paradigmatically within what has now come to be called outsider art, sometimes naïve art, and sometimes visionary art — direct, intense, content-laden, narrative, enormously detailed, personal, idiosyncratic, two-dimensional, and brightly colored.

Deep ecology

Vomiting

Published by Steve Beyer

There is no doubt that ayahuasca makes you vomit. There is some consolation in the fact that the vomiting will ease with continued experience; shamans seldom vomit. There is more consolation in the fact that the vomiting is considered to be cleansing and healing.

Plants and Spirits

Published by Steve Beyer

By Steve Beyer
The plants, in addition to being real medicines, contain madres or genios, the beings who teach. A cure is not caused by the ingestion or topical application of an herbal medicine; rather it results from the benevolent intervention of the mother through the intermediation of the plant. Amazonian shamans sing to the plants, charge them, cure them, call the spirits that invest themselves in the healing process.

What Are Spirits?

Published by Steve Beyer

By Steve Beyer
Each species of teaching plant has what mestizo shamans call a madre, mother, or genio, genius, or espíritu, spirit. Informally, we generally translate all these terms simply as the spirit of the plant, as if the meaning of the term “spirit” was perfectly clear. So: what do we know about these spirits?

Ayahuasca in the Supreme Court

Published by Steve Beyer

By Steve Beyer
There has been a lot of confusion about the current legal status of ayahuasca in the United States since the Supreme Court decided the União do Vegetal case two years ago. This post attempts to shed some light on the subject in the context of earlier cases involving peyote, the Native American Church, and other claims of religious exemption from the Controlled Substances Act.