Steve Beyer has doctorates in religious studies and in psychology. He has been a university professor, lawyer, wilderness guide, and peacemaker. He has studied both wilderness survival and the indigenous cultures of North and South America. He has studied sacred plant medicine with traditional herbalists in North America and with ayahuasqueros in the Upper Amazon, where he received coronación by banco ayahuasquero don Roberto Acho Jurama. He has worked with ayahuasca and other sacred plants in the Amazon, peyote in ceremonies of the Native American Church, and huachuma in Peruvian mesa rituals. He has served as an editor of the Journal of Shamanic Practice, and is currently completing a book on shamanism, sorcery, and plant medicine in the Upper Amazon.
Articles by Steve Beyer:
Ayahuasca and Transformation
Posted by Steve Beyer • Category: Creativity, Experiences, Neurosciences, Visual ArtSteve 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.
Self-Control
Posted by Steve Beyer • Category: ShamanismSteve Beyer, author of Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon, talks about the differences — and similarities — between healers and sorcerers in the Upper Amazon.
Beta-Carbolines
Posted by Steve Beyer • Category: Botany, Experiences, Overviews, Pharmacology, BiochemistrySteve Beyer, author of Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon, questions the Western conventional wisdom that the sole function of the beta-carbolines in the ayahuasca drink is simply to allow DMT to become orally active, and explores the scientific and ethnographic literature for evidence of beta-carboline psychoactivity.
Psychointegration
Posted by Steve Beyer • Category: 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
Posted by Steve Beyer • Category: 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.
Ayahuasca and Mental Health Among the Shuar
Posted by Steve Beyer • Category: Science, Spirit & HealingSteve 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.
Some Thoughts on DMT Art
Posted by Steve Beyer • Category: CreativitySteve 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.
Ayahuasca: Peruvian National Cultural Heritage
Posted by Steve Beyer • Category: News, ShamanismThe Peruvian National Institute of Culture resolved that indigenous ayahuasca rituals — “one of the fundamental pillars of the identity of Amazonian peoples” — are part of the national cultural heritage of Peru, and are to be protected, in order to ensure their cultural continuity.
Vomiting
Posted by Steve Beyer • Category: Overviews, ShamanismBy Steve Beyer
Yes, ayahuasca makes you vomit. Is that a problem?
Ayahuasca in the Upper Amazon: A Very Basic Introduction
Posted by Steve Beyer • Category: Overviews, ShamanismBy Steve Beyer
This post answers the very basic questions you may have been afraid to ask about ayahuasca in the Upper Amazon — what it is, what is in it, what it does, how it is used, how it fits into the religious culture of the region, and how it tastes. If you are new to the subject of ayahuasca, this is a good place to start.
Plants and Spirits
Posted by Steve Beyer • Category: Shamanism, Spirit & HealingBy 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?
Posted by Steve Beyer • Category: Mythos, ShamanismBy 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
Posted by Steve Beyer • Category: Law, NewsBy 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.
Mermaids
Posted by Steve Beyer • Category: Mythos, ShamanismSteve Beyer
They travel on boas. Indeed, sometimes they turn into boas; if the woman sleeping next to you turns into a boa during the night, that is a good sign that you have been seduced by a mermaid.
