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 the forthcoming Entheogens & Consciousness: A Comprehensive Overview of the Psychedelic Sciences, a two-volume set of interviews done with about fifty of the world’s leading independent and academic researchers in psychedelic studies, from which this interview is drawn. The original audio interview is available on Jan’s popular Gnostic Media podcast site.

Jan Irvin: Steve, welcome to Gnostic Media’s podcast. How are you today?

Stephan Beyer: I’m just fine. I’m very happy to be here talking with you.

JI: And I’m very excited to have you on the show. I finished reading your new book, Singing to the Plants, last week. I would say that it definitely has raised the bar, as far as research into ayahuasca and South American shamanism. I would put it up there with Benny Shanon’s book, Antipodes of the Mind — I think you’ve done an equivalent job in bringing your data together and the thoroughness of your research.

SB: Well, thank you for your very kind words. I really appreciate that. I’m happy to talk about the book with you.

JI: Why don’t you start out by telling us a little bit about who is Stephan Beyer and your background?

SB: I’m a retired university professor. I’m a retired lawyer.

JI: Where did you used to teach?

SB: I taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I taught at Berkeley. I taught at Graduate Theological Union, back in the ‘70s.

JI: So it’s been a little while?

SB: Oh, it’s been a long time, yes. I’m also a retired wilderness guide. Right now I am a peacemaker and a community builder. And that’s really about it. It’s been a great ride.

JI: Would you define yourself as a practicing shaman?

SB: No. And I’ll tell you the reason for that. I have studied with people I consider to be real shamans. And when I look at the depth of their knowledge and experience, when I look at their ability to suck illness out of the bodies of suffering patients, when I see that they know intimately hundreds of plants and hundreds of sacred songs, I’m barely even a beginner on that path.

JI: Would you say that they’re sucking sickness out of a patient? Is that something real that you’ve seen actually work?

SB: It raises a whole bunch of questions. I’m still trying to sort through those questions myself. Can I tell you a story?

JI: Sure.

SB: Alright. Here’s a story. I was sitting with my teacher, my maestro ayahuasquero, don Roberto, late at night. A canoe pulls up at the landing down by the river near his hut. And two men come up the walk, one holding the other. They tell don Roberto that the sick person has terrible stomach pains. The guy carrying him is his cousin and he’s brought him to don Roberto. So don Roberto does his healing work — what I came to think of as his ten-minute healing. And he did all of the things that an Upper Amazonian shaman does. He blew tobacco smoke into the crown of the sick person’s head. He blew tobacco smoke where the pain was. He shook his leaf bundle rattle, his shacapa, and sang his icaros, his magical songs. And he sucked at the place where the pain was. And he spit the illness, the flemosidad, the darts, onto the ground. And all the time I’m sitting there thinking to myself: ‘Oh my god, what if this guy has acute appendicitis?’ So when don Roberto is finished with his healing, I ask permission from everybody to touch the person he has just been healing. And I check for all of the signs of appendicitis: fever, rebound tenderness, guarding, pain on the right side when pressing on the left — all of those things. And I say to myself, phew, no appendicitis. But that left me with an unanswered question, which is this: Here is don Roberto — my teacher, a man I respect and admire and love — and I have to ask myself: Do I or do I not believe that he is capable of healing acute appendicitis?

JI: Very interesting. Are you familiar with professor Tom Roberts?

SB: Oh yeah.

JI: And you’re familiar with his work on placebo ability, right?

SB: Yeah.

JI: So obviously you’ve considered that as a possibility as well — just placebo ability. Or do you think that it’s deeper than that?

SB: This is a difficult question. Let’s look at the course of most illnesses. Most sicknesses that people suffer are self-limiting. Many other diseases — such as arthritis or multiple sclerosis — are cyclical. They seem to be getting better and then they get worse and then they seem to be getting better. Lots of diseases seem to respond to placebo in most drug trials, as you know. Something like thirty percent of the placebo group get better. But I don’t know whether the placebo effect can heal acute appendicitis.

JI: What gives you the idea that he had acute appendicitis?

SB: Oh, I think he did not.

JI: OK.

SB: And surely whatever he had, it responded to what don Roberto did. My dilemma was a little different. My dilemma was: if he had appendicitis, did I think that don Roberto was in fact healing it? And if I didn’t think so, if I thought this guy was going to die, what should I do? So that raises the question: What is a shaman really doing? To what extent do we think that shamans cure in the same way we think that biomedical doctors cure? Or are they doing something else? Certainly when you talk to shamans, they will say that they are just as interested in healing physical disease as any biomedical specialist is. And I think we have to be very careful about how we use words — like curing and healing — to try to understand, in their own terms, exactly what it is that shamans do when they’re shamanizing. I think one of the advantages of really trying to understand shamanism is that it allows us to look at sickness and at the process of healing, as we experience it in our own culture, from a very different perspective. In the Upper Amazon, I think shamans see disease, see sickness, as having a profoundly social dimension that we don’t think about in biomedicine. We see patients as being discrete, monadic units, somehow isolated from their social setting. In the Upper Amazon, a shaman looks at sickness as indicating a failure of right relationship. Disease, sickness, is always the result of a broken trust, is always the result of envy, resentment, or malice on the part of another human being. And so, there is a social dimension —

JI: That’s such a hard concept for many people to grasp. They don’t understand that these indigenous people — and it’s not just in South America, but throughout the world — don’t believe that a germ comes and gets you sick. Traditionally they believe that sickness was caused by sorcery and things like that. And, as you’re familiar with, I had Neil Whitehead on my show last year. He was a pioneer in that area of research. So many people get this New Age concept of neo-shamanism that is so far removed from what shamanism is really about. To even try and explain it to people causes them to start making all sorts of bizarre ad hominem attacks and things like that instead of trying to realize that Terence McKenna’s definition of shamanism is not really all there is to shamanism.

SB: I agree with what you’re saying. There is, especially in the Upper Amazon, what I have called a tragic cosmovision, which is very different from the view of shamanism which you see in a lot of the popular media. For example, the relationship between hunter and prey in North American indigenous culture is often based on a gift model. In other words, indigenous people in North America frequently express their relationship to animals in the hunt as the animals giving themselves up as a gift to the humans who hunt and eat them, which requires in turn a gift from the people who hunt them — a song, a ritual, tobacco. And so, the hunt is perceived as a gift relationship. And many people take this as normative for indigenous culture generally. But in the Upper Amazon, human and animal relationships, the relationships between people, are not based on a gift model so much as they are based on a predator-prey model. And just as jaguars hunt people, people hunt wild pigs. And the relationships between people in causing disease, in hunting animals, in warfare, are all made part of this same tragic cosmovision. In many Upper Amazonian cultures it’s very clear you can’t cure one person of the disease without causing that disease to go to a different person. And it seems to me that this kind of tragic cosmovision, this sense of the innateness of human aggression and the necessity of tremendous self-control on the part of the shaman to keep from becoming an aggressor him- or herself is something that is very difficult for people in our culture to understand or accept. And that’s why work by people like Whitehead and Brown is so very important.

JI: What got you into studying psychedelics and Amazonian shamanism?

SB: I was interested in wilderness survival, of all things. And I was filled with machismo — you know, drop me naked in the desert and I’ll eat lizards and survive.

JI: Like these guys on Discovery Channel or whatever —

SB: Yes, exactly like that. And I had the benefit of many really good wilderness survival instructors. I first went down to the Amazon to study jungle survival. I had a lot of very interesting adventures doing that.

JI: But you were a professor before you did that, correct?

SB: I was a professor of Buddhist Studies and I did that for twelve years.

JI: I see clearly the direct relation.

SB: I went off after that to become a lawyer. And I was a litigator and a trial lawyer for twenty-five years. And then toward the end of that, I was becoming interested in wilderness survival.

JI: So what happened? You did some mushrooms or some ayahuasca, and something happened?

SB: It went the other way, actually.

That’s the usual trajectory, no question about it. But, as I studied wilderness survival, it became clearer and clearer to me that survival in the wilderness had a spiritual dimension — that if you look at the spirituality of indigenous peoples, it is almost universally based on the need to maintain right relationships, both with the group that you’re part of and with the spirits of the wilderness. They’re also part of your group. And the spirits of the cosmos are also part of your group. So, when I started thinking about that, I became very curious. I wanted to find out more about it. So it was at that point that I started drinking ayahuasca. I did — how many — seven four-day and four-night wilderness vision fasts in the desert — in Death Valley and the Gila Wilderness and in other areas of the Southwest. I participated in ceremonies of the Native American Church, and slowly became drawn into the ayahuasca shamanism of the Upper Amazon and just felt I needed to learn more and more about it. So there was no great revelation. It was a matter of just increasing curiosity, and then, as my curiosity began to be satisfied, my need to understand what was going on in some kind of cultural context. And that’s what led to the book.

JI: Would you like to define shamanism?

SB: Umm, no. People who are a lot smarter than I am have gotten into trouble trying to define shamanism. I’m not at all sure that there is one shamanism. I guess I prefer to talk about shamanisms. And it’s like a Wittgensteinian family resemblance more than anything else. This shamanism resembles that shamanism. That shamanism resembles a third shamanism. And by the time you get to the other end of that chain, the shamanism at the end has very little similarity with the shamanism you started with. Let me put it this way: when lawyers talk about property rights they often use the metaphor of a bundle of sticks. To own a piece of property means that you have the right to sell, lease, share, bequeath, donate, alter, repair, or destroy it. Owning different things, or owning the same thing under different circumstances, may alter the number or type of sticks included in the bundle. And the notion of owning a piece of property is defined by these sticks in a bundle. I like to think about shamanism the same way as a kind of bundle of sticks. One stick is that the shaman has a particularly close relationship with spirits that other people don’t have. Another stick is that shamans know things that other people don’t know. They know what caused a sickness, or they know where game animals are. They know where a lost soul has gone. Another one is that they are performers. Shamans practice, at least some of the time, in public where people can see what they’re doing. The shaman’s power may be encapsulated as a physical object inside the body And you can come up with a list of maybe a dozen of these sticks. And you can say that a shaman in this culture has these six sticks, and a shaman in another culture has these six sticks, of which three are the same as the first one. And you can come up with some kind of a way of thinking about shamans that doesn’t seek for some kind of essence that they all have in common. If I were asked to define shamanism, I would define it in terms of a bundle of sticks.

JI: What are shamanic darts?

SB: Let’s see. In the Upper Amazon, a shaman’s power is conceptualized as being kept inside the shaman’s body, usually in the form of some kind of slimy, sticky substance. And among the mestizo shamans, they use the common Spanish word flemavirot, for phlegm. And in this matrix, there are kept pathogenic projectiles, or the substance may itself be projected outside the body. Among the mestizo shamans, usually these are called virotes, darts. The word virote means a crossbow dart. And when the Spanish invaded, that term was used for the darts that the indigenous people of the Amazon used in their blowguns. Although these pathogenic projectiles are called darts, if you see them having drunk ayahuasca, they can be teeth, scorpions, spiders, the beaks of birds, razor blades. And the sorcerer causes sickness by projecting these darts into the body of the victim. This concept of disease being caused by some pathogenic projectile being inserted into the body of the patient is virtually universal in the Upper Amazon. Just as the cure for this is virtually universal: the healing shaman sucks the dart out. And that’s how the patient is healed.

JI: And we’ll get back to the concept of the phlegm in a moment. I want to come back to your discussion of shamans appearing to suck the disease out of someone. But first I wanted to talk about your research into Gordon Wasson and his interactions with María Sabina.

SB: Well, I wouldn’t even really call it research. It’s a story that has been well told before and I told it again to make a point, which is that people have mistakenly thought of shamans as something like spiritual gurus — as being like Zen monks, or Hindu ascetics, or people who dwell in the bright light and on the mountaintop of enlightenment. And shamans are really nothing like that. Shamans dwell in what James Hillman has called the valley of soul.

JI: I know somebody who has been living in Jimenez since the early 90s. They say that Wasson’s picture of María Sabina and the whole situation was highly distorted.

SB: I think that’s right. He saw her as this perfect spiritual person, the embodiment of spirituality. She was a shaman who lived her own messy life, who dealt with disease and resentment and envy and love affairs gone bad and farms that stopped producing crops and all of the mess of human life. And she healed people by vomiting for them. If the mushrooms didn’t make people vomit, then she would vomit for them and try to heal them that way. She was a person who lived our ordinary, human, messy life and was a healer in this context of, not the mountaintop, but the valley of soul. But Wasson idealized her and made her into this spiritual person. And as you know so well, María Sabina just didn’t understand any of this.

JI: You know that Wasson had actually met several other shamans and had seen them doing the mushroom ritual before he selected María Sabina to be the proper one to show, whom he then presented to the world in Time-Life Magazine. And I’m not sure if you were aware, but he was the head of PR, or public relations — which is spin — for J.P. Morgan Bank. In fact, he was the pioneer of banking spin. And so it’s not surprising that he would look for the most opportune way to spin his story, which just happened, unfortunately, to be María Sabina and the Mazatec.

SB: I’m sure you know that he probably, at least based on what I have read, was less than honest in explaining to any of these people he met, including María Sabina, why he wanted to take the mushrooms.

JI: Oh yeah. He made $40,000 off of the serialization rights of the article. I think he paid María Sabina like a pack of cigarettes and some little trivial items. He was a banker through and through. He certainly had ulterior motives. I’m actually working on another book. In 2008, I published a book called The Holy Mushroom, that revealed a lot of Wasson’s tactics against John Allegro, who is the author of The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. Since writing that book I have come across a lot of new and startling information that merits a whole other book.

SB: I hadn’t heard about the disparity in what he made and what he gave María Sabina. But as you know, that’s an old story. People, gringos, have been doing that to indigenous healers for an awfully long time, and I’m sure you know the story of this guy who tried to patent ayahuasca, leading to a very bitter fight. And that kind of thing has been going on for a very long time. Fortunately, things, I think, are getting better as people become more and more aware. But the exploitation of indigenous healers is a really old and very troubling story.

JI: Are shamans trusted or distrusted?

SB: Shamans are generally mistrusted. In the Upper Amazon — and in many, if not most, shamanic cultures — it’s generally accepted that the power to heal is also the power to harm – they are the same thing. This is especially clear, I think, in the Upper Amazon, where the sorcerer and the shaman use exactly the same means. They use the same plant spirits. They use the same protective plants and animals both to attack and to defend. The means of causing disease overlap with the means of extracting disease. The phlegm which contains the darts of the sorcerer is what the healing shaman uses to protect himself from the darts that have been projected into the patient. So the shaman in the Upper Amazon inhabits this area of ambiguous marginality. People don’t trust shamans. Shamans are killed. If a patient dies, people wonder: Was he really trying hard enough? Was this sorcery under the guise of healing? A French anthropologist, Jean-Pierre Chaumeil, did a study of Yagua shamans in eastern Peru. He tracked the death of shamans over a period of several years. Every shaman who had died did so in one of two ways. Either he had been killed, people said, by a sorcerer, or he had been killed by people who said he was a sorcerer. So, people need shamans, but they distrust them.

JI: They need them but they distrust them. Interesting paradox.

SB: In the Upper Amazon, they say the difference between a sorcerer and a shaman comes down to a matter of self-control.

JI: Well that leads me to my next question. Are shamans that are capable of healing also capable of killing? And what is the separation there?

SB: It’s not a bright line. For example, a shaman sucks pathogenic projectiles — darts, scorpions, snakes, razor blades, piranha teeth. When don Roberto heals, part of the performative aspect is that he makes it very clear that what he is sucking out of the patient is vile and disgusting — he gags, he chokes. It is clear from what he does that he is taking grave risks on behalf of his patient by ingesting into his own body these vile, foul substances that were projected into the body by a sorcerer.

JI: You don’t think it’s just a show though? You think there’s merit to this display?

SB: I have come to think that we make a mistake by simply dividing the world into two boxes. And in one box we put things that are real, and in the other box we put things that are fake. And I think that drinking ayahuasca — participating in the healing culture of the Upper Amazon — makes you question whether there is in fact a bright line difference between things that are real and things that are unreal. When you read accounts of shamans, when you talk to shamans, they will talk about physical things coming into their mouth that need to be spit out. But when the shaman sucks a dart from the body of a patient, what does the healing shaman do with that dart? Sometimes, in some traditions, that dart is put into a rock or thrown toward the sun over the horizon. But that’s a problem because it is still pathogenic. Somebody could stumble on it and become sick. Another possibility is for the shaman to take it into his own phlegm and add it to his store of darts that protect him from attack by sorcerers. A third possibility, which is probably the most common, is that the shaman takes that dart that he has sucked out and projects it back into the one who sent it. Is that healing or is that sorcery? Here’s another example. The darts that are in the shaman’s body are in some sense alive and autonomous. When you have darts in your chest, embedded in the phlegm that’s in your chest, those darts, in many traditions in the Upper Amazon, want to hurt people. They are eager for you to project them out of your body into the body of somebody else. They are in some sense alive and autonomous and you have to feed them tobacco juice. They tempt the shaman to use them in order to harm. And only the most self-controlled shaman can keep those darts under control and be a healer. And my teachers, don Roberto and doña María, prided themselves on following the path they called pura blancura, pure white. They only healed, they said. On the other hand, doña María once said to me, she said: You know, we are gentle people, but sometimes we show our claws. That’s typical doña María.

JI: One point that came to me via David Hillman’s work in The Chemical Muse, and it’s come up in other areas as well, is that practically all plants, depending on the dosage, have the ability to both heal and kill. Are you familiar with that idea?

SB: Oh yes. It goes back to Paracelsus, who said that the dose makes the poison.

JI: And things like hemlock were actually used as inebriants back then — you increase the dosage a little bit and suddenly the user dies. But at very minute doses, they were having a good old time with the stuff.

SB: In the Upper Amazon it goes even beyond dose. You can use the plants for selfish, vengeful purposes, or for protective and healing purposes. And the same plant can harm or heal, depending on the intention of the shaman, who calls the spirit of the plant using the song that the plant taught the shaman.

JI: What is the importance of the shaman’s diet, or dieta?

SB: I think it’s important. People spend a lot of time talking about ayahuasca. And there’s no reason why they shouldn’t. Ayahuasca is fascinating. But I think you have to remember that — especially among the mestizos — ayahuasca is embedded in a whole pharmacopoeia of healing plants. And part of the training of the shaman is to learn not only ayahuasca, but to learn all of the healing and protective plants that the shaman may use and prescribe to patients. And the way in which you learn the plants is by establishing a close, personal relationship with the plant, so that the plant will teach you how to use it, what song to sing to call it, what sicknesses you should prescribe it for. The way the shaman learns that is to go into the jungle and live in solitude over a period of time — maybe with periodic visits by the apprentice’s teacher — and to ingest the plant. Then, in a dream, in a spontaneous vision, in a vision when the apprentice is drinking ayahuasca, in all sorts of subtle ways, the knowledge appears. It may appear in the form of a plant spirit speaking to you. It may appear in the form of a song that you hear in a dream. It may appear in the form of knowledge that forms in your mind. The song may be something that you just spontaneously find yourself singing. But the idea is that the plant is not just a collocation of molecules that you use to treat a specific disease. The plant spirit is a person, an other-than-human person, who may appear in different forms under different circumstances. But the shaman or the apprentice has to form a deep personal bond with the plant, and does that by actually taking it into the body and letting it teach from within. This is learning with the body. So it’s very important that when you go into the jungle and you are learning the plants, you have to keep to a very strict regimen of solitude, of dietary restrictions, and of sexual abstinence. So that you’re in the jungle alone. No salt, no sugar, no sex — this last because the plant spirits can be very jealous. In this solitude, you let the plant teach you in the plant’s own time. And that’s pretty much la dieta. The details vary from teacher to teacher and from tradition to tradition. But that’s basically the idea.

JI: What is the importance of the icaros, or the shaman’s songs?

SB: The songs you learn in a number of different ways. The apprentice begins by learning the songs of his or her master, the maestro ayahuasquero. It’s the songs that allow the shaman to call the spirits of the plants, to call the protective spirits, to do all kinds of things: call the lightning, summon the souls of deceased shamans, protect against rain. There are a thousand uses for these icaros. Once you’ve started to learn the songs of your own master, then the songs come to you while you’re in solitude in the jungle. And you may dream the songs. You may hear them with your ears. Sometimes people will travel long distances to hear the songs of other shamans. A shaman is known in the Upper Amazon for the number and quality of these icaros, these magic songs. They are the basic tool of shamanizing in the Upper Amazon.

JI: Let’s get back to phlegm, or tsentsak I believe is another word that you used. In your book you discuss that this was given to you both through your corona and orally. What is its purpose? Have you noticed a real effect on you from it?

SB: Let me tell you a story. Back when I was doing vision fasts in the desert, I apprenticed to somebody who knew what he was doing, as opposed to me, and I helped put people up on the hill, helped people do their four-day and four-night vision fast. People would go into the desert. They’d have water, but there would be no food, no tent, no fire. We encouraged people not to have a fire unless it was part of a ceremony, and basically to spend these four days really focused on whatever issue in that person’s life had made them want to go out and do a vision fast. And many people went out there because of the stories they had heard and the legends that they had heard, looking for what I came to call the pink neon buffalo. They wanted a big vision — an epiphany, a revelation, a transformative experience. And some of them got it, and many did not. There was this one guy, who after four days of great discomfort in the desert, came back and was distraught. He cried. He had not had a vision. And so I started to talk with him. And I said, Well, tell me, the first day you were there, what did you see? And he said he had gone back into the Eureka Mountains and walked up this wash and found this cave where he stayed. Once there had been bats in the cave and he saw the guano on the floor. He saw a lizard squatting in the shade of a creosote bush. He had seen ravens circling in the sky. And it became clear to me, and eventually became clear to him, that in fact the spirits had been speaking to him the whole time, and he just really hadn’t been listening.

And I think that that’s true of a lot of spiritual events: drinking ayahuasca, getting the phlegm of your master, going out on a vision fast in the desert. People have been conditioned to expect the pink neon buffalo. But I think many things, especially the sacred plants, I think that often, they work very slowly and subtly. And there are no big transformative visions. There are no epiphanies. What happens is that things work very slowly over time. And after six months, or a year, you realize that you have changed and that the sacred plant — the peyote, the ayahuasca, the teonanácatl — has worked in you in ways that you didn’t even expect.

And I think that the same thing is true for getting the phlegm of my maestro ayahuasquero. Don Roberto was always pretty taciturn. It was often doña María who took me under her wing and explained things. Don Roberto said I had to nurture the phlegm that he gave me by smoking mapacho and by drinking ayahuasca — although he realized that doing that was very difficult in North America. Doña María said that now that I had the phlegm of my master, I had a corazon de acero, I had a heart of steel, and I no longer needed to fear any person because this phlegm would protect me. I took that with a grain of salt. Yet over time, I have discovered that I have changed in ways I never expected. I don’t know whether it was the ayahuasca. I don’t know whether it was the phlegm of my master. I don’t know whether it’s just getting older. I don’t know whether it was my family and my friends. But I am different from when I first started studying jungle survival. I’m not a healer in the sense that I’m a curandero: I don’t give plant medicines to people, I don’t suck darts out of people. But as a peacemaker, I have become a healer in a very different way than I would have expected. And my own arrogance and rage, that was part of my love of wilderness survival, has evaporated. And again, I don’t know why. I kind of suspect it has something to do with the phlegm that don Roberto gave me. I have a suspicion that it has something to do with the way that has worked on me and made me feel safe enough so that I don’t have to be angry any more. But I don’t know. And that’s the answer: I don’t know.

JI: What is the importance of mapacho, or tobacco, in South American shamanism?

SB: Mapacho is, in many ways, the most sacred plant in South America. As it is in North America.

JI: And probably the least discussed in that regard as well.

SB: Yes. Tobacco is the most important of the strong, sweet smells — like camphor and cologne — that are considered to be protective in the Upper Amazon. So tobacco smoke is protective. It keeps away the spirits of the dead. It helps protect you from darts that are projected at you. It nurtures your own phlegm and that protects you. In a healing ceremony, the shaman blows smoke into and over the body of the participants. Tobacco is one of the three primary hallucinogens that are used by mestizo shamans. The three primary hallucinogens are tobacco, ayahuasca and toé — which is a variety of species of the genus Brugmansia, the Angel’s Trumpet, a plant very rich in scopolamine, just as ayahuasca is very rich in dimethyltryptamine.

JI: Which is the Datura family, isn’t it?

SB: Yes. Sometimes it’s called tree datura. So it’s related to Jimson Weed and other scopalamine-rich plants. And tobacco is used as a hallucinogen. Now, we generally don’t think of tobacco as a hallucinogen. And I think there are two reasons for that. One is that the tobacco that people smoke in North America has very little nicotine in it.

JI: Which is Nicotiana tabacum, as opposed to Nicotiana rustica which is the more traditional type that’s found everywhere from San Diego all the way through South America.

SB: Yes, absolutely right. South American varieties may have eight times as much nicotine as the kind that’s cultivated for smoking in North America. The second reason is that most Americans smoke for mood stabilization. They smoke because the effect of the nicotine is to calm them down if they’re nervous or excited, or to elevate their mood if they’re feeling sad or depressed. And they stop smoking when that mood stabilization has been achieved. But if you drink a lot of tobacco — for example, you soak green tobacco leaves in water over a period of time and drink the juice — nicotine is a hallucinogen. I don’t recommend trying it without proper supervision because for nicotine, the effective dose for hallucinations is very, very close to the lethal dose. So I wouldn’t recommend it if you don’t have an expert to teach you how to do it. But nicotine is one of the three major hallucinogens in the Upper Amazon. Ayahuasca is a teacher. Tobacco is a protector. And toé, tree datura, Brugmansia, teaches you courage, protects you from sorcery in particular, gives you a closed body that resists the intrusion of pathogenic projectiles.

JI: And that’s one that I’ve never gone out of my way to try. And I can find Datura growing a hundred yards from here.

SB: Scopolamine, Datura, again is not something I would recommend people experimenting with, without a very experienced guide. There is no question that Datura or toé can make people do crazy, stupid, and self-destructive things. The visions that it produces can be terrifying, paranoid, and people can easily get out of control. So that’s another one I would not recommend without appropriate guidance.

JI: I appreciate that you’re not just saying: that’s not one I would recommend. You are saying: without proper guidance. And I appreciate the proper caveat there.

SB: One of the problems I have in communicating my understanding of the shamanism of the Upper Amazon is that there’s a lot of it that people find strange and disturbing. And from our point of view a lot of it is strange and disturbing. It has a tragic view of life. It has a view of human aggressiveness which is very different from the one we find, or we profess, in North America. It has concepts that are very foreign to people. And so I don’t want to be off-putting. On the one hand, I think it is a beautiful, and rich, and very profound tradition. I think people who go down there to drink ayahuasca ought to know something about its depth and its beauty and also something about what it really, really says as opposed to huggy-bunny concepts of what shamans are and what shamans do.

JI: Good analogy. Would you like to discuss Pablo Amaringo?

SB: Sure. I never had the honor of meeting him. I know people who have known him and speak with great respect, not only of his artistic ability and his devotion to his work and to his people and to the jungle environment, but also of his personal qualities. Clearly he has become emblematic. And his art has created an entire school of Amazonian ayahuasca-derived art. I think when he passed away a month or so ago, it was a great loss. And I think he will be missed.

JI: Talk about don Roberto, your maestro.

SB: Don Roberto is my maestro ayahuasquero. I don’t want to say he is very traditional, because Upper Amazonian shamanism is traditionally eclectic, but the kind of shamanism he does, I think, is noticeably similar to the kind of shamanic practice you find in many cultures in the Upper Amazon. He is an ayahuasquero, as opposed to a tabaquero or a toéro, and is a man for whom I have the greatest respect and admiration and love. The man is a true healer. He doesn’t talk much about his life. In the book I give a brief biography. I have watched him heal. I have watched his healing performance on many occasions. He is a man of his community. He is devoted to the people of his community. One of the things I like about how the book took shape is the fact that I was able to work, particularly, with two very different people. Doña María was this wonderful grandmotherly, fussy, generous, scolding, outspoken woman. Walking with her through the jungle was like walking with an encyclopedia. She knew every plant personally. She would walk through the jungle and say, here is this plant, you use it for this, and you prepare it in that way, and it’s used for these diseases. And this one is good for children, and that one is good for adults. I couldn’t keep up with her. And so she’d scold me and tell me I’d better pay attention because she was teaching me all these valuable things. She began, not as an ayahuasquera, but as an oracionista, as a prayer healer. From the time she was seven years old, she had had visions of angels and the Virgin Mary. And the Virgin Mary would teach her how to use the plants for healing. The angels would tell her when there was a sick child in a nearby village and she would go and use the plants the Virgin Mary had taught her to go heal sick children. She was doing this from the time she was seven years old. She had dreams and visions constantly. She didn’t become an ayahuasquera until much later. She began to study under don Roberto when she was, I forget the actual date, twenty-five maybe.

JI: She cured someone of something that came out of the woman’s vagina, didn’t she?

SB: I wasn’t myself a witness, but this was the story she told me. Apparently the woman’s husband had run off with another woman — this is a very common story among mestizos in the Upper Amazon. Her husband had abandoned her and run off with another woman. But this other woman still considered her to be a rival. So she or her husband had hired a sorcerer to do harm to her. And this took the form of an animal in her womb. Now when I first heard about this it struck me as odd. But from subsequent reading and research, it becomes clear that having an animal in your womb, as a result of human or animal malevolence, is not an uncommon condition among Amazonian mestizo women. Doña María used a sweat bath and put sorcery herbs in the sweat bath — emetic and other herbs in the sweat bath. The woman squatted over it and this animal in her womb was driven out with considerable force from the woman’s vagina, as doña María told the story. And she said that this flash of white, like rabbit fur, came out of her vagina like a rocket — whoosh, she said, like that. And the woman started bleeding. And they both started praying to the Virgin Mary. And the woman was healed. This pathogenic intrusion, in this case taking the form of an animal in her womb, had been driven out by the combination of the steam and the herbs and doña María’s prayers and icaros. And the woman was healed.

JI: Why an interest in snakes?

SB: Let me take a step back. People go down to the Amazon to drink ayahuasca. There are two things about many, perhaps most, of these people that troubled me, and were among the reasons I wanted to write the book. One is that people go down there with no commitment to understanding the struggles of the indigenous people from whom they are taking this medicine. They really do not have an idea of the culture that has produced this healing practice that they are trying to tap into. Now, I can hardly blame them because there has, until now, been no single, accessible source that would let them learn something about the healing culture that they’re trying to be part of. One of the reasons I wrote the book, in addition to trying to understand my own experiences, was to try to provide people who may be going down to the Amazon to try ayahuasca with an understanding of the cultural context, the conceptual, the metaphysical context, as well as the struggles of indigenous communities in the Upper Amazon, so that they can understand this and maybe get rid of some of their preconceptions and have a better understanding of the beauty and depth of this tradition.

The other reason is that many of the people who go down to the Amazon don’t like the jungle. They’re afraid of the jungle. They have heard stories about the jungle. Now, I love the jungle. And one of the things I wanted to do was to introduce them to what the jungle is really like. And so I have all of these sidebars in the book. People go down, and they go to a tourist lodge where they’re going to drink ayahuasca. And people put food on their table. They put fish. They put fruit in front of them. And these people who have gone down there to drink ayahuasca have no idea where this food came from — of the hunting and fishing skills that are necessary, of the highly astute and sophisticated forest management skills that produce the fruit that’s on their plate, that produce the plantains that they’re eating. So, a lot of these sidebars are intended just to give some of the information that I have learned about life in the jungle through my study of wilderness survival in indigenous cultures in the Amazon. How do they build a house? How do they hunt? How do they cook? Where does their food come from? How do they fish? What do they use? I had a section on snakes for two reasons. One, because people are scared of snakes. So it makes sense to have some kind of a clear, objective description of exactly what the risks of snakebite are. And the answer is, just like in North America, even where you’re in rattlesnake country, the risks of being bitten are relatively low if you just use your head. And the other reason was because there are indigenous and mestizo snakebite remedies, and I wanted to talk about those a little bit because it may be that they have immunomodulatory effects that might be of interest to people. So I talk a little bit in that section about the traditional snakebite remedies that are used in the Amazon.

JI: Let’s talk briefly about love potions.

SB: Doña María was an expert in love magic, in pusanguería. Pusangas are very widely used in the whole area. In the book, I find the word pusanga, or very similar words, in a wide range of indigenous languages in the Upper Amazon. There are folk pusangas, there are pusangas that are made of various kinds of plants. You can buy pusangas on the Internet. If there is a woman you particularly desire and she has been ignoring you, you can go on the Internet and buy pre-made pusangas. Doña María was famous for her pusangas. She tried very hard to make her use of love potions consistent with her vision, her practices, being the pure white path. She would not use love potions if she figured the effect would be to break up a marriage, for example. There’s an anthropologist named Marie Perruchon who studied the Shuar, and in fact married a Shuar and became an initiated Shuar shaman. It turns out that at one point in their courtship, she and her husband had both, without the other one knowing it, given each other love potions.

So there are folk love potions. There are professional love potions. Doña María makes a love potion that combines ten plants. It’s in a powdered form. If I just mix a little bit of it with, say, aguardiente or with some cologne, and apply it to my face, I, not only become irresistible to women but, doña María said, I would be successful in all of my lawsuits as a lawyer. I would, in effect, seduce juries with this pusanga. And I always wanted to try it and yet I resisted because I figured maybe it wasn’t quite fair to use a pusanga in order to win one of my cases.

JI: Oh, why not. Isn’t being a lawyer based on argumentation and rhetoric anyway, and using all of that?

SB: Well that’s true. There was something about it. You know, as they say, with great power comes great responsibility. So here I had this very powerful, doña María’s best pusanga, and, you know, I have never used it. I don’t know what would happen.

JI: What are some of the various names for South American-Peruvian shamanism?

SB: It’s interesting. One of the reasons I went into this in the book was because in indigenous North America, there has been great resistance among many North American Indians to the use of the term shaman for their healers, people that they often refer to as medicine men. There has been great cultural resistance to the use of the term shaman as being an imposition of a foreign term and concept by a dominant culture. Many defenders of indigenous culture in North America have been very outspoken, and often very bitter, about the attempt to consider their healers to be shamans — and especially the way the term shaman, as applied to North American indigenous healers, has been incorporated into the whole New Age movement.

JI: For sure on that one.

SB: It was interesting to me that in South America, many of the people I knew, including don Roberto and doña María, who had had contact with gringos and gringo tourists, were perfectly happy to be called chamanes, were perfectly happy to be considered shamans. It was of interest to me to see how these various terms that were used were distributed. And apparently there is no consistency to it.

JI: Alice Beck Kehoe, in her book Shamans and Religion, made the point that these other cultures aren’t really practicing the Siberian shamanism where we get the word shamanism from. But at the same time, I see it as a language issue. The English lexicon does not provide us enough terms. It’s like in Sanskrit or in Hindi, there is like ten different words for love and they all have specific meanings. Whereas we have the word love. We don’t really have any longer in our culture terms for these things. Unfortunately, in Alice Beck Kehoe’s book, she doesn’t provide us something that we should use. You can’t without providing a definition of shamanism in each and every instance. Or if you’re going to use curandero or ayahuasquero or brujo or all of these other various terms, you can’t use that word without specifically defining it because most people in our culture aren’t going to know what all of those words mean. The word shamanism is generic, which is why I know that you tip-toed around this issue at the beginning of the interview. It’s become such a generic word in our language that it really has no meaning, except to maybe the New Age crowd who completely misuse and misunderstand it.

SB: I think this is a problem which applies to a lot of terms that come from anthropology. Here’s an example: tattoo. People get tattoos in this country and nobody has challenged them by saying: Wow, you’re using the word wrong. Yet, technically, tatu is a Polynesian word and refers to very specific kinds of facial designs that have profound social meanings. And so, does it make sense to say: Well, no you can’t use the word tattoo because you’re borrowing it from indigenous Polynesian culture and you’re using it in an entirely different social context? And if you look at other anthropological terms that have been broadened from their original context — words like totem, words like taboo — they are words borrowed from very specific cultures. And yet, when people have studied other cultures they have seen practices and ideas that are more or less similar, just as my tattoos are more or less similar to Polynesian tattoos. It becomes a line-drawing exercise.

And I can understand why indigenous North American people do not like their culture being co-opted by New Age movements. And if they want to object to the use of the term shaman in that context, then fine. I can absolutely understand what they are trying to do. On the other hand, there are similarities between what a Siberian healer does and what a Korean healer does. The question then is, are those similarities enough that it becomes convenient to use the term shaman for both? And where do you draw the line? Is Siberian shamanism different from Inuit shamanism? So that we can’t use the word shaman for Inuits, but we can use it for some kinds of Siberians, but not others? That’s why I like my bundle of sticks approach.

JI: Right, and I think that Kehoe’s book actually raised more problems than solutions, unfortunately. And she had a lot of valid points but she doesn’t tell us any solutions to rectify the problem.

SB: In my personal opinion, it is a very ill-tempered book. One of the things that struck me about that book is that she said that the people I have worked with, that I have called shamans, aren’t shamans at all because they take drugs.

JI: And she tries to separate out many of the Siberian shamans, saying that they don’t use Amanita muscaria, when in fact there are many who do use it on a regular basis. But at the time, she didn’t find any that did. Even the BBC, last year, did a video on this tribe that are reindeer herders and their whole culture is based around the use of the mushrooms. But she would point to another culture and she would say, well, this culture thinks that those people over there who use the Amanita, they’re a degraded form. But it’s hard to say how much of that came from Russian-Soviet propaganda trying to get them all on vodka and alcohol and things like that and their own systematic method of destroying those ancient cultures’ heritage. And so that has to be studied and looked at as well.

SB: I think it’s an exercise in line-drawing and in cultural sensitivity. If people I am trying to understand don’t want me to use a particular word for their healing practitioner, then it seems to me only basic courtesy not to use that word. I don’t see any reason to get into a fuss over it. But I think it still makes sense to point out that there are healing practices in indigenous North American cultures that are very similar to healing practices you find in other cultures. For example, the sucking shaman is common to both South American shamanism, at least in the Upper Amazon as I’ve described it, and to indigenous cultures in North America. First nations in North America have had sucking shamans for as long as there have been written records of what their practices are. I don’t think it’s disrespectful to point that out.

JI: What does it mean for a shaman to live under water?

SB: In the Upper Amazon, there are common conceptions — by common I mean common to a number of cultures in the Upper Amazon — about people who live under water. There is a whole mythology built up about dolphins and about the yacuruna, the water people, and how they live in these beautiful cities under water, how they lie on hammocks made of boas and their seats are gigantic tortoises. Under the water, there are dolphins, there are yacuruna, the water people, there are mermaids, sirenas, which sometimes sort of overlap in their characteristics. But they are all sexually seductive. It is a common belief throughout the Upper Amazon, all the way to Brazil, that male dolphins desire to have sex with human women, that female dolphins are sexually voracious and provide a sexual experience for human males that is far beyond the capacity of any human woman to provide, and that the yacuruna, the water people, and the mermaids will seduce men and force them to live under the water. There is an entire underwater mythology that is very important, especially among the mestizos though also elsewhere — for example, the idea among the Shuar that the first shaman, named Tsunki, lives under the water with his entourage and cities of underwater people. It’s very important for shamans to be able to interact with all of these different kinds of underwater people, especially mermaids and yacuruna. Mermaids, for example, are possessors of powerful songs, icaros. A shaman may learn powerful songs from visiting with the mermaids. The yacuruna are held to be great and powerful healers, doctors. And so, many times shamans will learn healing from the underwater people. Because underwater people are sexually voracious, because they capture human beings for sexual and other purposes, it can be very important for a shaman to be able to command the mermaids and the water people to give up their human captives, or to be able to channel the voices of people being held captive under the water so that their relatives know that they are alive and well. There is also a group of shamans, most often I would say called sumi or sumiruna, who have the capacity to actually go visit these underwater kingdoms and dwell underwater at least part of the time. Again, there is a whole mythology built up — and I spend a chapter in the book talking about this mythology of underwater people and how important it is for shamans, as part of their practice, to have access to these underwater realms. And some are specialists in this area more than others.

JI: Can you give a rundown of a few, or some, of the various names used for ayahuasca in the different South American regions?

SB: If you can get hold of it, in Luis Eduardo Luna’s dissertation, there is a list of — I forget how many — forty-odd words for ayahuasca among different indigenous people. Ayahuasca is the term that is usually used in Peru. If you go up to Colombia, the term is usually yagé. Among the Shuar the term is natèm. But there are lots of different words for it. I think the best compendium of those terms is in Luis Eduardo Luna’s original book Vegetalismo: Shamanism among the Mestizo Population of the Peruvian Amazon, which was his dissertation at the University of Stockholm.

If you can get hold of that book, it is worth tracking down through used bookstores or wherever you have to go. Along with the work of Marlene Dobkin de Ríos, that is the pioneering work in this area.

JI: In your opinion, how was ayahuasca discovered?

SB: There has been a lot of discussion. As you know, there are ways of ingesting DMT — and more importantly, plants and plant substances that are rich in DMT — parenterally, that is, bypassing the gastrointestinal tract, usually, in the Orinoco and other areas in the Northern Upper Amazon, by snuff of one sort or another.

JI: Like epená.

SB: Yes, exactly, or like yopo. The problem with ingesting sacred plants that contain dymethyltryptamine orally, is that there is an enzyme in the gastrointestinal tract, MAO, which is designed to inactivate molecules exactly like the class of molecules that DMT belongs to. In the ayahuasca vine are a number of beta-carbolines that act as MAO inhibitors. So when you mix the ayahuasca vine with any of a number of plants that contain, among other things, DMT and drink them together, that allows the DMT to be orally active because the MAO inhibitor inhibits the MAO that inactivates the DMT.

JI: And not only that, but so many different analogues of ayahuasca. I think it’s fascinating. Some argue that it was probably a salad-like mixture or something like that. What do you think about that theory?

SB: I have heard a lot of theories. One theory is that indigenous people have some mystical connection to the plants.

JI: Do they talk to the plants or maybe they were taking some other plant, other hallucinogen, whether it be scopolamine or maybe mushrooms? Certainly a lot of mushrooms grow in the rainforest. Could it have been some other hallucinogen? I’ve had some pretty interesting experiences myself on rare occasions of having the feeling that I was talking to a plant. So I don’t totally dismiss the idea.

SB: And also the people themselves will say: Well, the plants told us. The plants are the ones who teach all their medicinal uses. One theory I came up with, that I give in a little sidebar in the book, is that I think that if you look at the way ayahuasca is used in the context of the Upper Amazon, often it’s used simply as a purgative and an emetic. And that people who take ayahuasca for a purge, la purga, in order to cleanse themselves physically, find the hallucination, the visionary effects to be side effects. Whereas in other uses, other occasions, other people, the purpose of drinking it is for the hallucinations, the visionary effect, and the purgative and emetic effects are the side effects. I think they came up with this because they were looking for a better emetic. Some Psychotria species by themselves may have an emetic effect. I think they were looking for plants to mix in that might have had some kind of an emetic effect themselves. They mixed them together in order to see if, in some way, they could modulate the emetic effects of the ayahuasca vine. They came up with this combination that had, as an effect, vivid, life-like, three-dimensional hallucinations. I have no idea when this happened. I believe the mestizos got the use of ayahuasca from the indigenous people of the Upper Amazon. Peter Gow, an anthropologist for whom I have tremendous respect, who has worked in that area, believes that in fact it went the other way, that it was mestizos who came up with it first and it passed from them into the indigenous people. It’s an opinion that I have to give some deference to. But I think whoever came up with it, and whenever they came up with it, one plausible explanation is that they were mixing plants together to see if they could make a better emetic, either more gentle or more powerful.

JI: I would think that the fact that there are so many different types of ayahuasca used throughout the Amazonian region would negate the idea that it came from the mestizo population into the indigenous. Isn’t it that these people, the indigenous people that have the connection to the jungle, that know and understand all of these plants and their uses and things like that to begin with?

SB: I think that’s right and it’s certainly the way mestizos view jungle Indians.

JI: Right. They don’t say: oh no, we gave our information to the jungle Indians. They say: no, we got our information from them. I don’t want to dwell on this, but I just don’t see a whole lot of basis in flipping that.

SB: I can say that Gow’s hypothesis has not been widely accepted, but I think it’s an alternative you have to consider, especially given that Gow is a very important investigator of this whole region and has done some important work.

JI: Fascinating. I haven’t studied him. I’ll have to look into that.

SB: Peter Gow.

JI: What does ayahuasca taste like and what are the immediate effects?

SB: It tastes more awful than you can imagine. It has been described as being like a toad in a blender. My favorite description.

JI: Personally, I think it’s a little bit worse than that. I could probably handle a toad in a blender all right.

SB: It is difficult to convey to people just how awful it is. It is hard to swallow. It sticks to your teeth.

JI: The tannins. The only thing worse than San Pedro cactus I think is ayahuasca.

SB: It’s worse than anything I can imagine. It has this hint of sweetness that makes you gag. It sticks to your teeth. It’s hard to keep down, but you have to keep it down for as long as you can. Every molecule in your body rebels against taking this stuff inside you. Especially if you’ve drunk it once and you say: Alright, I can handle this. And then after an hour or so, the shaman calls you up and gives you another cup full. And you want to say: No, no more! It really is terrible and it makes you really nauseous.

JI: Not always, but it can.

SB: You can get used to it. But even experienced people, even shamans, will vomit every once in a while.

JI: I’ve had it a few times where I didn’t get any nausea at all, and other times where in fact, one of the best experiences I had, I had one very short, small and, excuse the term, sweet vomit that just went real quick and I was done. I got up and I felt a hundred percent and within five or ten minutes I was feeling very well on many different levels.

SB: In the Upper Amazon, if you drink it and you don’t vomit, something’s wrong with you. Doña María had a special flower bath that she used for people who weren’t vomiting, to open them up and let this out. We gringos, we don’t like to vomit. We consider vomiting to be something shameful, that you go and hide in the bathroom when you throw up. Vomiting in the Upper Amazon is very natural. The Achuar have group vomiting every morning. When you sit in ceremony with mestizo or indigenous people, you hear them vomit, but it’s not a big deal.

JI: It’s not a negative thing. It’s like a cleansing, a purification. You’re getting out the negative stuff, the blockage, whatever. It’s like you’re freeing up your chakra points or something like that. I don’t know quite how to explain it but I know what they’re getting at. And it’s a bizarre feeling when you go through it.

SB: I make horrible, wretched, awful sounds when I vomit because it is so hard for me not to be embarrassed and ashamed. And yet, I think the first thing that the medicine tries to teach you is to give that up, to give up control, to take the plants into your body and let them do their work. And yet, it has always been hard for me. Maybe it has to do with upbringing and the ways people in my generation or in my sub-culture were taught about retention and how retention is good. It may very well be that other people don’t have that kind of experience. As I say in the book, vomiting has become kind of a literary trope among people who write about ayahuasca. Literary artists compete to come up with the most compelling description of how ayahuasca makes them vomit. I mean all the way from William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg to the present, people have been describing the vomiting of ayahuasca in compelling and poetic terms.

JI: Telepathine and telepathy with ayahuasca. Is that something that you’ve experienced at all?

SB: No. I haven’t. Ayahuasca is a teaching plant. In fact, in most traditions, and to a large extent, ayahuasca is not a healing plant at all. What it does is give you the information you need to find out what caused the sickness and, in many cases, what you need to do to get rid of it.

JI: Speaking of that real quick, I remember one time being on ayahuasca and I looked over at a friend and I could see that he was sick and suddenly I could see the problem and I just started telling him: Hey, you need to do this, this and that. And it was nothing I had ever recalled having an ability to do before, but suddenly I could just see all of this person’s ills and exactly what was going on.

SB: I think that that’s exactly right. Ayahuasca is primarily a teaching plant. It is an information-gathering spirit. People who drink ayahuasca, especially shamans, will go on long journeys and see things that are far away. They can detect where game is plentiful. They are shown by ayahuasca where lost objects may be found. If a relative has been gone for a long time, ayahuasca will show the shaman whether that relative is alive or dead, or healthy or not. Ayahuasca will let you see what happened to somebody in the past. If somebody was killed, a shaman can use ayahuasca and can see what the circumstances were. Ayahuasca is an information-giving plant. This includes, in some cases, seeing things that are far away, or distant in time. In that sense, I think that there is some truth in the meme that ayahuasca is telepathic.

JI: I’ve had extreme cases of telepathy with it on one or two, actually two, occasions that were with a couple of other friends, with several sitters in the room and several people witnessing what was going on; us also verbalizing the telepathic thoughts that were happening. But it started out while we were all in different rooms and suddenly we basically mind-locked, like the Vulcan mind meld or something. It was just a pure connection between me and the other partakers of the ayahuasca. None of the sitters were a part of that. Would you talk briefly about Alan Shoemaker?

SB: I devote several pages to Alan and his experience in the context of a discussion of the legality of ayahuasca. I compare his experience with the experience of the Brazilian new religious movements and their more church-like use of ayahuasca. I use Alan’s story just as a way of trying to show how the legal system works in this area and to compare the experience of one person, without a lot of resources, facing the same kind of drug enforcement system that was successfully challenged by, and is still being successfully challenged by, the Brazilian new religious movements. In some ways it’s a cautionary tale, especially because there is still a myth that plant material, chacruna, sameruca, chagraponga, the leaves of DMT-containing plants, are legal. I think that’s just wrong, and I think people can get in trouble because they believe that. The story of Alan is instructive in that regard too because what he was arrested for was chacruna leaves. He wound up having a nightmare experience before he was able to get out and get back to Peru, at the cost of still being a fugitive from American justice. I think it’s an important story for all kinds of reasons. I think Alan, fortunately, is back in Peru and with his family. I think that there is something to be learned from this story in a lot of ways.

JI: One thing that I found interesting in your work that I wanted to touch on here is that — unlike other entheogens: psilocybin, mescaline, LSD — why did you classify ayahuasca as a hallucinogen?

SB: Because I think it is. I think that the primary effect of ayahuasca is to show you things that have been there all along that you haven’t seen. It does this by showing you things, showing you people, showing you objects, that are three-dimensional, solid, present, interactive, and often coordinated with sounds in a space that is three-dimensional and explorable. I think that that is different in significant ways from the depth- or insight-producing effects of LSD or psilocybin.

JI: In your book you say these dimensions or whatever, they’re not other dimensions, there’s only one dimension and that ayahuasca and these substances just open us up and allow us to see that dimension. Is it possible that they’re not really hallucinogens, that these objects and things are just in this, hidden to us in our normal state?

SB: I think that’s absolutely right. As I am sitting in this room right now the walls are covered with tiles — there are a lot of tessellations in the ayahuasca world — brilliant, glowing tiles with minutely detailed fine designs. I just can’t quite see it. I once asked don Rómulo Magin if he could see the spirits all the time. Very experienced ayahuasquero. I asked him if he could see the spirits all the time and he said he can vaguely. But drinking ayahuasca, he told me, is like putting on glasses. I was really struck by that analogy. Right now, there is a window in my wall through which I can look and see a crystal staircase by a blue pool with an escalator going up and down carrying Peruvian schoolgirls in blue and white school uniforms. I just can’t see it right now. That doesn’t mean it’s not there.

JI: Discuss the issue with patents and indigenous shamanism.

SB: That gets kind of technical. I would refer people to the book for that. There’s a whole chapter on the attempt to patent ayahuasca.

JI: It’s such a fascinating story and just so disturbing at the same time. Right now you’ve got these companies, like Monsanto, just running around patenting every living thing they can get their hands on. I personally see it as one of the largest threats that humanity faces today.

SB: I don’t disagree. I think people are becoming more aware of the fact that companies, often foreign companies, come in and attempt to patent indigenous plants and techniques. The Peruvian government has been very active in opposing such patents. I think that’s good. I think that the idea of a law that allows you to patent living things is not a bad idea in itself. I think it’s certainly possible, for example, if I invented a microbe that could clean up oil spills, then I think that I should be encouraged to do so by being allowed to patent my creation. On the other hand, I should not be in a position where I can take a healing plant that’s been used for generations by an indigenous people and patent it so that I get the benefit of their wisdom and they don’t. I think that, again, the story of the ayahuasca patent is instructive as standing for a whole class of cases where I think people need to be more aware of this potential for misuse of what I think is generally a pretty good idea.

JI: What is the future of shamanism?

SB: In the Upper Amazon I think the future is bleak. I think a lot of people are interested in it. I think a lot of those people are interested in it just because they see it as a source of another psychoactive substance they can use, more or less, recreationally, or as a source of a psychoactive substance that they can use in their own personal quest for healing and transformation. I think that there is very little interest on the part of people who generally drink ayahuasca in the struggles and problems of the indigenous communities in the Upper Amazon. And I think that the one thing that is missing is apprentices. There are very few shamans in the Upper Amazon now who are training apprentices. Young people do not want to go through the sufferings, the deprivations, the self-control, the avoidance of sex for months at a time, that can be required in training to be a shaman. So while Amazonian shamanism has always been voraciously absorptive and very adaptive, I am just not sure that it’s going to last without the younger generation taking it up and actually practicing it. I hope I’m wrong.

JI: Well, hopefully books like yours that bring a more realistic approach to the situation — There’s such a movement in European and North American countries into shamanism and neo-shamanism and all of this stuff that hopefully that goes back down into South America and influences the people who are there to focus on what has always been right there for them to begin with and start to pick it up in a serious manner before they get themselves in a position that they can’t recover from.

SB: I hope you’re right. I am not hopeful, but I hope you’re right. I am just not sure the extent to which the interest of foreigners is going to have much influence on young people in the Upper Amazon, except, unfortunately, to the extent that they perceive these foreigners as being useful sources for dollars and may, in fact, have the opposite effect. It will lead people to pretend to be shamans, to learn a few icaros, to learn how to brew up some ayahuasca, and to put themselves forward as healers and shamans for ayahuasca tourists without actually going through the struggle and deprivation that becoming a shaman really requires. I hope I’m wrong.

JI: Have you gone through that deprivation yourself?

SB: Certainly not to the extent that I would ever consider calling myself a shaman.

JI: What is the single most important idea that you would like people to take away from this interview?

SB: The world is magical. The world is full of wonders. There are spirits everywhere. Ayahuasca, if it has any purpose at all, I think, ultimately is to open our eyes to the miraculous nature of the world around us — to teach us that everything in this world is meaningful in a very deep and important way, that we are surrounded by the plants that are singing to us all the time, and that if we can only open ourselves, we can see that the world is filled with wonders and magic and the spirits.

JI: Would you like to give out any website or contact information? And obviously, your book is titled Singing to the Plants. Do you have any other books?

SB: I have three other books.

JI: What are those books’ titles? And also give out any information you’d like to give out about yourself, etc…

SB: The website for the book is www.singingtotheplants.com. That website also has my blog that I have been keeping for several years where I talk about shamanism generally. I talk about the Upper Amazon. I talk about indigenous spirituality generally. The book is Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon. It’s published by the University of New Mexico Press. It’s available on the website. It’s available at amazon.com. It’s available at barnesandnoble.com. The website talks about my other books, which are: The Cult of Tara: Magic and Ritual in Tibet; The Buddhist Experience; and The Classical Tibetan Language, which is a grammar of classical Tibetan.

JI: Well, thank you Steve for coming on and for being a part of the show. And I thank you for your work. Your book is absolutely wonderful and I highly recommend everybody get out there and read it that has an interest in ayahuasca and this whole field, for that matter — whether it be just psychedelics or shamanism or whatever label they want to put it under. I think your book is extremely important for people to read. Thank you for coming on and for participating in the show.

SB: Well thank you for the conversation. I had a really good time. It was really interesting. I appreciate the invitation.

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, how they perceive their lives, as a personal mythology in which their stories are portrayed not as a continual flow but as consisting of events and turning points in their lives. You have lived and studied in Tibet, written books about Tibetan Buddhism, had a career as a partner in a major Chicago law firm, and finally worked with medicinal plants, shamanism, and a blog and book of the same title. So my question is: how would you mythologize your life?

Steve: Some people don’t mythologize their lives. Don Roberto didn’t, but doña Marie did see her life as a series of major episodes. I tend think that lives actually go in spirals — at least it seems that mine has. My interest in Buddhism, and in Tibetan Buddhism in particular, was an attempt to understand what it was like… I have a lot of trouble articulating this, because the vocabulary available to me has gathered so much baggage. I want to say that I’ve always been interested in altered states of consciousness.

Howard: That’s an important starting place.

Steve: But the term “altered states” seems to me to be wrong. And it has accumulated so much baggage that it’s very hard to use.

First of all, if you talk about altered states of consciousness, you’re immediately making the assumption that there are ordinary states of consciousness that are somehow in opposition to altered states. I have simply never seen this as an opposition. Let’s think about human experiences. You have the experience of doing mindfulness meditation, climbing a mountain, writing poetry, falling in love, giving birth to a child, or watching someone you love give birth to a child. Human life is so filled with important experiences that grouping them into just two classes, ordinary and altered, is artificial, and filled with built-in value judgments. For example, I can see what a life-changing experience it can be for people to witness the birth of their first child. Then to say that’s somehow an ordinary state of consciousness, as opposed to taking LSD, which for many years has been the paradigmatic altered state of consciousness, is, I think, artificial and misleading.

So, to rephrase what I started to say before, I have always been interested in the range of human experience, including those experiences that are less common in North America. That was one of the reasons I became interested in Buddhism and in Buddhist meditation in particular. At the time I wrote my first book, The Cult of Tara, in 1973, Tibetan meditation had not yet really been explored by Western scholars, and what I wrote about — how Tibetans actually performed meditation, what was going on internally when one performed ritual meditation in the Tibetan tradition — was pretty much new. So this was one of the first books to talk about what it was like to perform Tibetan ritual meditation and the ways in which meditation coordinated with ritual in the context of monastic practice.

And when I first started to think about Amazonian shamanism, that was the model that I was using. I wanted to understand how it worked, what it was like, what the cultural context was.

Howard: I think there’s an important point here; there are two ways to look at this. One way, for example, would be a traditional anthropological perspective — that is, you sit outside and you describe your observations. Then there is another method where you actually participate, so it does not become a scientific Western objective perspective, but rather a subjective experience. And when you write about these things, you’re writing about your personal altered experience.

Steve: I think there’s a trap there. If you follow that path, it’s very easy to come to the conclusion that you are more important than the people you’re writing about. If you approach it from this — let’s call it postmodern — perspective, it’s very easy for the investigator to think that the investigator’s thoughts, reactions, emotional involvements are all much more interesting than the people the investigator is trying to understand. The book is not about me; the book is about my teachers.

And, in particular, about doña María and don Roberto. I tried very hard to use my own very limited kinds of experiences to illuminate something about them and about the kind of shamanism that they practice. Erik Davis, the social historian and cultural critic, in his review of the book, said that I resisted the temptation to turn it into a memoir, which I thought was very astute. I take that as a compliment.

So there is kind of a narrow path you can walk, which I tried to walk, where you use your own experiences to illuminate the people and practices you’re trying to understand, without turning it into a book about yourself.

Howard: Your relationship with doña María and don Roberto does come through without a doubt, and their teachings are central to the book. You have been explicit regarding this. I just want to underscore — without implying that this book is anything resembling a memoir — that your relationship and personal dynamic with them are an essential component of the book. This certainly makes the book more engaging, richer, more textured. Although you resist this point, your role as narrator, their communicator and pupil, makes you part of it, and the vignettes — how at times they treated you as a confidant and other times admonished you like an errant pupil — in my view has really successfully augmented the academic text.

Steve: Well, I really appreciate that. That’s very kind of you.

There is a tendency — and I talk about this especially in relationship to María Sabina — to romanticize and to spiritualize shamans generally, and shamans in the Upper Amazon in particular. I think that does them a disservice. It takes away the depth of their humanity.

Howard: And their suffering, too. This is another important aspect of Singing to the Plants. You show that life in the Amazon is harsh, and in no way is it a soft and easy reality. The tragic death of doña María illustrates this. It is candid and direct, and no attempt has been to make the Amazon world romantic or “cosmic.” In my experience the shamans are not cosmic. They work to help everyday people in their suffering, their illnesses, and their protection. It is about the nitty-gritty of survival, and that’s one of the impressive aspects to your book.

Steve: Shamans are people who are engaged in dealing with envy, resentment, jealousy, disease, sickness, marital problems, business failures, interpersonal conflict. These are people whose job it is to deal with mess.

And they have their own sometimes messy lives. They have the dirty, difficult, and dangerous job of trying to make sick people better. And I think we do them a disservice when we spiritualize them, romanticize them, and try to turn them into some kind of religious icon. They deserve better than that.

Howard: I found your description of your first ayahuasca session and its effects to be something I can relate to. It was amusing and messy, very real. You are not saying “I had this transcendent experience.” You describe the reality of the whole thing: “I was sick as a dog.”

Steve: The unique healing culture of the Upper Amazon is centered on making sick people better; but their concept of what constitutes sickness is, I think, broader than in biomedicine. For example, an unfaithful spouse, a failing business, the patient’s own acts of selfishness and betrayal are all forms of sickness that need to be healed. And sickness in the Upper Amazon is always social. The only reason you get sick in the Upper Amazon is because there has been a breach of the social bond among people. The patient has behaved in a way that violates the norms of generosity, mutuality, and trust to such an extent that envy and resentment on the part of the other person results in this social disruption embedding itself in the body of the patient in the form of a dart. And this dart could be a monkey tooth, a parrot beak, a scorpion, a razor blade, a snake. It is a physical manifestation of a breach of confianza — a breach of the relationship of trust and mutuality that ought to inform all human relationships.

Howard: What you’ve been describing, and putting into a good perspective, is a self-regulating social anarchy system. There’s no form of institutional authority involved in regulating people’s behavior. It certainly for me puts the use and purpose of sorcery in another light. In the Western world, where anarchy is frowned upon, the authorities control our social behavior.

Steve: Right. Sorcery has been said to be a weapon of the weak. It is a way of enforcing social norms of generosity and mutuality. It is a way of subverting hierarchy. It is a way of making sure that people interact in ways that are socially acceptable.

Howard: Westerners treat sorcery or brujería dismissively as a superstitious belief: if you don’t believe in it, they say, it cannot harm you. This is a mistake. There are powers outside of the everyday human intellect which do have an effect, which can heal people and which can harm people. And I think it’s a weakness for a Westerner to go to the Amazon and believe that this kind of sorcery is just some kind of illusion.

Steve: But at the same time I have seen Westerners get caught up, for example, in the sorcery craziness in Iquitos. Part of mestizo culture is the assumption that life is a zero-sum game — that if I get something that you don’t have, I have in some sense deprived you of it. There are constant undercurrents of suspicion. If anything goes wrong, it’s not attributed just to bad luck, it’s attributed to the malevolence of another person. So, sorcery has both positive and negative aspects within mestizo culture. On the one hand, it is the enforcer of norms of generosity, a subverter of hierarchy, and at the same time it creates currents of gossip and speculation about who is using love magic on someone else’s wife, and who is using evil magic to make sure someone else’s business fails. This is constant conversation in Iquitos.

I have seen westerners get caught up in this. If they have a bad experience with ayahuasca, they say, “Oh, it must be brujería.” Or if they almost get hit by one of those motorcycle taxis, they say, “Oh, somebody’s out to get me.” So between these extremes, I think there somehow must be a way for foreigners to understand these cultural assumptions without themselves getting all caught up in paranoia about brujería.

I was once asked how I protected myself from sorcery, and I gave several answers. I said, first of all, that I have the phlegm of my master, which gives me a corazon de acero, a heart of steel, and protects me. The second is that I am, however remotely, an apprentice of my maestro ayahuasquero, so that my teacher is able to protect me and to take vengeance on my behalf. But my most important protection against sorcery is my insignificance. I think that if you are trying to navigate these currents in ribereño culture, you conform to the social norms that sorcery is intended to enforce. In other words, the lesson of sorcery is that you should strive to be in right relationship with everyone you can. You don’t pick fights, you act generously, and, if somebody offends you, you try to work it out. You don’t attack back. Basically, you behave the way a real human being is supposed to behave, and that’s your best protection against sorcery.

Howard: I go along with that. You don’t want to make enemies in the Amazon. I remember being told, “If someone sticks a knife in your back, take it out, and move on.” The message is clear not to get sucked into all this.

Steve: I think that’s what ayahuasca teaches, too. In the Amazon, as you know, you cannot separate out sorcery and healing. There is no bright line that separates them.

Howard: In my experience it is more of a faint boundary. Where does one begin and where does one end? For example, the use of pusangaría, love magic, which often raises an ethical dilemma for a Westerner.

Steve: The same practices are used for sorcery and healing. The same plants are used. The brujo plants are the very ones used for protection against sorcery. The spiny palms are used as offensive weapons by sorcerers, but they are used as protection by healers. And at the same time, the difference between a sorcerer and a healer has a conceptual basis — the difference between lack of control and self-control.

So, I think again what we see is a lot of ambivalence and a very tragic view of human life. Healing and harming, disease and health, life and death are all bound up together. There are no sharp lines between them. For example, in many indigenous cultures in the Upper Amazon, it is impossible for a shaman to heal one person without making another person sick, because the dart has to go somewhere. You can throw it away, but it’s still there where somebody can trip over it, get hurt by it. Most often the shaman will take the dart and project it back at the person who sends it. Is that healing or is that sorcery?

Howard: That’s the ambiguity of the whole thing.

Steve: Don Roberto told me that he never sent back a dart to the person who sent it. He would always simply put it into his phlegm and make it part of his own armamentarium, his own protection. But that’s unusual. The more common course is to send it back.

Howard: Eye for an eye… It can be very raw and harsh.

Steve: As you know, and as Pablo Amaringo has illustrated, this leads to great battles between shamans, and the line is not easy to draw — as in most human life whenever there is a conflict — and say that one person is perfectly right and one is perfectly wrong. Shamanic battles symbolize human conflict, just as the healing shaman takes onto himself a conflict between two people that has caused the sickness to occur.

Howard: Shamans have to be very careful about who they return the darts to, because they might make another enemy for themselves.

Steve: That’s exactly right. Being a shaman, sucking out a dart, is a dangerous thing to do, for all sorts of reasons. In fact, part of shamanic performance in the Upper Amazon is to dramatize the danger and difficulty of doing this. The darts are perceived as being putrid and nauseating and terrible. The shaman — don Roberto was great at this — spits them out on the ground and makes horrible noises, horrible gagging noises, to show that the dart that’s being sucked out is repulsive, and this dreadful thing has to go somewhere. You can throw it on the ground, but still someone may step on it and be hurt by it.

Howard: And the person being healed can see the disgusting or noxious thing removed. They are then engaged in what’s being performed as well. It’s the drama of the show — a performance, like an art. It’s also for the person that’s being healed. They can actually see it, and the healing becomes tangible.

Steve: Although doña María — this is so typical of her — said that sometimes when you suck it out, it’s very sweet, you have a great temptation to swallow it, and then it’s going to get you. So if you suck something out and it’s sweet, you have to be particularly careful to resist it and to spit it out.

Howard: Did doña María or don Roberto use plants such as camalonga or other roots in their mouths as an additional barrier to prevent them from swallowing the noxious virote?

Steve: What they told me was that this barrier was primarily the mariri, the phlegm that rises up in the throat and becomes like air to protect them from the dart going into their body, but instead gets stuck and dissolved into the mariri.

Howard: Right, then they master this power.

Steve: Yes, and then they can project it out. They can put it into their own phlegm for further protection, or they can use it for attack.

Howard: The use of tobacco; that is so interesting. I know you wrote a whole chapter about it. And it’s particularly important in situations of healing.

Steve: I talk about what I call the Big Three. There are three hallucinogens that are of primary importance in mestizo culture. There is ayahuasca; there is toé, or various species of Brugmansia; and there is mapacho, or tobacco. I should add that there has been so much emphasis on ayahuasca that people have lost sight of the fact that ayahuasca is embedded in a whole pharmacopeia of healing plants, each with a different function. The function of ayahuasca is to give you information. The function of toé is to harden your body and make you immune from sorcery. The function of tobacco is to protect you, because it is the paradigmatic strong sweet smell, and strong sweet smells are protective — that means tobacco, agua de florida cologne, camphor. And mapacho is used by tabaqueros and others as a hallucinogen. It’s hard for a North American to think of tobacco as being hallucinogenic.

Howard: Given the fact that tobacco…

Steve: The fact that, one: Our tobacco is very weak. And two: The reason that people smoke tobacco in North America is as a mood stabilizer. If you’re feeling down, tobacco helps you focus, it increases your attention. If you’re stressed, it can calm you down. So people smoke until they’ve ingested enough nicotine to achieve that effect.

Howard: And there’s very little nicotine in commercial cigarettes compared to mapacho, which has a high level.

Steve: That’s right. That’s why if you’re simply seeking mood stabilization, you don’t have to inhale mapacho, because the underside of the tongue is heavily vascularized, and you can ingest enough nicotine for mood stabilization from mapacho just by holding it in your mouth. But tobacco has all kinds of physiological effects in addition to being a hallucinogen. As you know, it’s smoked during the ceremony and has an effect of — how can I put this? Let me take a step back. Schizophrenics smoke a lot. One reason schizophrenics smoke a lot is because nicotine reduces the negative symptoms of schizophrenia. It helps you concentrate, it helps you focus, it keeps you from getting scattered, while it has no effect on the positive symptoms of schizophrenia, such as hallucinations. So tobacco, when used in conjunction with another hallucinogen such as toé or ayahuasca, helps focus, helps calm, without having any effect on the visions.

What’s interesting to me is, as far as I know — and I could be wrong about this, I’m still waiting for someone to come forward with an example — tobacco is one of the most sacred plants in North America, as well as in South America; yet I know of no indigenous people in North America that has used tobacco as a hallucinogen.

Howard: Let’s talk more about tobacco. This is s very interesting and important part of the Amazon world. It is not only the leaves; you talk about how the smoke is used, and the purpose of drinking tobacco in water as well.

Steve: Yes, a cold infusion of tobacco. Shuar drink tobacco the same way. You have to drink green tobacco to keep your tsentsak, your darts; you have to feed your darts with tobacco. Tobacco use is ubiquitous. It’s everywhere.

Howard: What did doña María or don Roberto say about tobacco? Did they discuss any sort of spiritual aspect to the tobacco or some kind of energy or force associated with it?

Steve: I was told by both that I needed to smoke mapacho every day to nurture my phlegm. But they understood that in North America it was hard to get mapacho and it was hard to drink ayahuasca.

Let me step back a minute. When shamans get together, what do they talk about? They do not, as far as I know, talk about great cosmic symbolic metaphysical ideas. They talk about practical things — how much you should charge your clients, how to deal with clients who don’t pay what they promise to pay, what kind of animal skin makes the best drumhead: “Have you heard about this plastic drumhead they use in North America? Have you tried that?” And what plant medicines to use: “I have a patient with this condition, I’ve used this plant and it doesn’t seem to work. Do you have any idea what other plants I might use?” Or in the Upper Amazon shamans will drink ayahuasca together in order to solve a problem or see if they can get some insight into a difficult social situation. They don’t talk metaphysics any more than biomedical doctors at a medical conference are going to talk about the philosophy of medicine. They’re not going to talk about how the AIDS virus symbolizes social disjunction. They’re going to talk about, “Gee, have you tried this new x-ray machine?”

So, as a general rule, I got very little philosophy from either doña María or don Roberto.

Howard: It was pragmatic?

Steve: Very pragmatic. And what was interesting about doña María was that, unlike most shamans, she had started out as an oracionista, a prayer healer. She had a close relationship especially with the Virgin Mary. Much more than don Roberto, she had incorporated folk Catholicism into her practice. Her arcana, her protective song at the beginning of an ayahuasca healing session, was the Ave Maria. She had, on her own, come up with a metaphysics that explained the relationship between the Virgin Mary in Heaven and the work that she was doing on Earth. She had developed a schematization that was satisfactory to her in making sure everything fit together.

Howard: You know, this is interesting. I’ve never seen a group of shamans get together and talk about their practice. They are very protective. Because when I asked them about this, about sharing their use of medicinal plants or an icaro with a fellow shaman, how they use it, and other things, the general response is that to reveal it would weaken the power for them.

Steve: On the other hand, shamans are part of a whole shamanic information network, reinforced in the Upper Amazon by an apprenticeship system that encourages apprentices to study with other shamans, especially shamans in another indigenous people. There is a tradition that mestizo shamans should go study with indigenous healers, because indigenous healers are masters of shamanism. Just as there are traditions of exogamous marriage among indigenous people in the Upper Amazon, where you are supposed to marry somebody from a village that speaks a different language, there is a tradition that the more foreign shamans you study with, the more powerful you become.

Howard: Absolutely. Artidoro, a mestizo shaman, offers a good example. What he said about the power of icaros was interesting: the ones in Spanish are deemed to have less power, the ones in Quechua have more power, but the ones in the indigenous languages, he says, have the most. He told me a great story of his quest to learn the chants from the Asháninca. The Asháninca are hard-line and war-like, and the men are naked. Artidoro had to be naked with them in order to be accepted. It is not as if you can simply say, “Can I come along with you?” They have to accept and trust an outsider.

So it’s a long process to do this, and though it may be tradition, it’s not something that every shaman, or every single ayahuasquero, can or will do. The apprenticeship takes a long period of time. And so, when Artidoro chants, he chants Asháninca icaros, and they’re so exquisite, they have, so to speak, a very different vibration. And this power and sublime nature of the icaros is something that many people do not appreciate.

Steve: There is a tradition that icaros you have brought from a long distance are more powerful than those you have learned locally. Now, doña María, once again, was contrary. She sang mostly in Spanish, she sang loud, and she said, “I don’t hide anything. I let everybody know exactly what I know.”

Howard: That’s different.

Steve: That’s doña María. She was a feisty lady. There is also a tradition that it is difficult for a shaman in one indigenous group to suck out darts that belong to a different indigenous group. So unless I have, say, Shuar darts myself, I can’t suck out Shuar darts from somebody else.

Now that has a couple of functions. One function is that it’s a good excuse if someone being healed happens to die, and the healer has a concern that he might be accused of sorcery, of having himself killed the patient. He can say, “You know, it was a Shuar dart. There was nothing I could do.” But more important, it means that there is dart trading. There is a market in darts; you go and you get darts from as many different people from as far away as you can.

There are some really interesting things about this shaman network. One is that one of the places where shamans from many different parts of Peru come together is in the Peruvian Army. Another is that Protestant missionaries give people rides in their airplanes to these big tent revival meetings. So people from a wide area all come together for the Protestant revival meetings, and that’s where shamans from different regions of the country get together and share information: “How do you do this where you come from?”

There are lots of reasons for a shaman to be part of a network of shamans. I might have a healing problem that I can’t solve. Maybe the brujo who has afflicted my patient is much more powerful than I am. It is important for me to have access to other shamans who are even more powerful than the brujo. People who might attack me need to know that I have powerful friends, and that if they succeed in killing me, at least I will have the satisfaction of knowing that my friends will take revenge on my behalf.

Howard: And that’s a good thought, isn’t it?

Steve: So, yes, there is this combination of secretiveness and trying to protect your proprietary knowledge, while at the same time there is a lot of sharing going on, not only among the mestizo shamans but among mestizo shamans and Shipibo, Huitoto, Asháninca shamans, all these other peoples.

We started out talking about the fact that most Upper Amazonian shamans are not philosophers of shamanism, and that when they get together — just as when biomedical doctors get together — they talk about practical things. Doña María was, in part, an exception, because her path to being an ayahuasquera began when she was very young and was a prayer healer. Pablo Amaringo is a good example of somebody with an intense curiosity and, because of the popularity of his paintings, with the opportunity to meet and interact with all kinds of people. He had a remarkably absorptive mind. He was unusual, I think, in the way that he became a philosopher of mestizo shamanism.

That’s one of the things that made him important, because he was doing something that other people were not doing. And I think in Pablo Amaringo we have somebody who was deeply immersed in his own tradition, but had both the capacity and the opportunity to be able to apply all kinds of other things to this tradition — to express a philosophy of shamanism and how it works, how it can be read cosmologically.

Howard: Absolutely. Pablo is an authority; he not only paints but describes the structure of subatomic particles and how matter is formed. He shows the influences of sound and vibrations, and ultimately he says that everything is just one, massive, eternal sound, one vibration. His mastery of communicating the underlying nature of existence is unique, his paintings inform where linguistics cannot.

Steve: He talks about the Hindu gods, samadhi meditation, the king of the Sakyas — that is, Buddha. He remembers everything he’s ever heard, and he works it into a philosophical system of Amazonian shamanism.

Howard: And beyond. Well beyond.

Steve: I am sometimes asked — because I wrote the book and not because I know anything — in effect to philosophize on behalf of my teachers. Somebody will come up with something, you know, sort of cosmic, and they ask me what I think about it. And I have to answer, “I don’t have a clue.” I would guess that certainly my teachers, and probably most Amazonian shamans, never thought about it at all.

Howard: It’s not in their world at all. It just falls outside their domain. Absolutely, practical matters, you know, “Is my boyfriend cheating on me?” “Why can’t I get a job?” “Why aren’t plants growing properly on my farm?” Practical, everyday matters of life.

Steve: That’s absolutely right. The mess of life.

Howard: One of the things that has come up in this type of discussion, it was about two years ago, at the conference in Iquitos, and the first few days the shamans were introducing themselves, describing what they do so the gringos could decide who they would like to drink ayahuasca with — a sort of “shaman market.”

I recall one shaman talking about how he heals, about his plant mixtures, resins, and so on. But basically, he was saying, “My work is proprietary. It works for me. I heal people.” He was saying this his healing comes from a personal relationship with the plants, with the medicine, and that is the source of his power. A couple of Westerners couldn’t appreciate this. They stood up and said, “Well, if your medicine is so powerful, why don’t you share it with everybody? Why don’t you give it to everybody?” The shaman was literally lost for words. In the West, medicine is pharmaceutical; there is no relationship between the doctor and the medicine. In the shamanic paradigm, healers undergo the discipline of la dieta, and they learn directly from the plants how to heal. So I can really understand that a shaman can say, “I can’t share this with anybody else because it wouldn’t work for anybody else.”

Steve: I think one of the things that we need to think about is whether, in fact, when we say heal or cure we’re talking about the same thing that an Amazonian shaman is talking about when he uses the words heal or cure.

Here is a story. I was with don Roberto in his hut when a boat pulls up by the bank of the river. Two men come up the bank, one helping the other. The man being helped is doubled over, and the man carrying him tells don Roberto that the man is his cousin who has terrible pains in his stomach. Can don Roberto do something about it? So don Roberto does what I came to think of as his ten-minute healing. He shakes his shacapa, his leaf-bundle rattle, all over the man’s body, especially in the area where it hurt. He blows tobacco smoke into the top of his head, all over his body, and onto the place where it is hurting. He sucks the place and spits stuff out and shakes the shacapa some more, and the man said he was feeling a little bit better.

And I was sitting there the whole time, thinking to myself, “My god. What if this guy has acute appendicitis?” So I ask permission from everybody if I can touch him, they say okay. There’s no fever, no rebound tenderness or guarding, no pain on the right side when pressing on the left, nothing special in the lower right quadrant — all the things you look for to see if someone has appendicitis. So I was very relieved, but that only postponed the real question: Here is don Roberto, my maestro ayahuasquero, a man I admire and respect and love. Do I or do I not believe that don Roberto can heal acute appendicitis? If I had acute appendicitis in the jungle, would I want to have don Roberto sucking at it, or would I want to be on a plane to the University of Chicago Hospital?

Howard: Yeah, but that is not a valid question or situation for an average guy in the Amazon. They don’t have that choice.

Steve: Absolutely right. But it raises, I think, in stark personal terms, the question of what is going on when healing is taking place in the Upper Amazon. There is question I ask people. Some Amazonian shamans are very humble, some are very bold. There’s one who says he can cure cancer, he can cure AIDS, he can cure obesity, and he’s got a whole list of things that he claims to cure. It strikes me that if he can do even a fraction of what he says — if he can cure breast cancer, for example — then there ought to be hundreds of doctors studying what he does to find out how it works and to see if it can be reproduced; he should be immensely wealthy and should be teaching in medical schools and hospitals all over the world. And yet this doesn’t happen.

Howard: I’m not sure that I would trust someone who made those claims. As you say, if those claims were proven, he would indeed be world renowned, a shaman to the stars and the wealthy.

Steve: Now, two things occurred to me. One is when Amazonian shamans who deal with a gringo clientele make claims like that about what they can heal, the claims always involve diseases that are socially salient in gringo culture. They always involve the diseases, such as AIDS and cancer, that gringos are most concerned about, that have almost mythic significance.

So I would ask that shaman, “Can you cure gingivitis?” And if he could cure gingivitis, that would mean that all of the old people in his village would have all their teeth. And if he can’t cure gingivitis — if, like everywhere else in the jungle, people have lost most of their teeth by the time they are in their forties — should I think he can cure cancer?

Howard: But we’re talking two completely different paradigms here, and the two just don’t work together. When a Westerner talks about AIDS or cancer, that is a disease from our perspective, but maybe that’s not what they regard as a disease. As you said before, they deal with the results of social imbalance, an illness caused by envidia, the envy of others, or susto, a fear caused by contact with a tunchi or ghost. There are many different factors involved; they can heal the imbalances within their own paradigm, many of which are caused by an external source. Shouldn’t we keep these different domains separate? When we talk about disease from a Western view, doesn’t that that confuse and in some respects contaminate the shamanic paradigm?

Steve: Well, let me respond. Anthropologists have made a distinction between healing and curing. The idea in this distinction is that you cure things like a duodenal ulcer. But when we talk about healing, we’re talking about the making better of a whole person, not only individually, but socially and spiritually. So that the distinction is drawn that if you cure cancer, then there are objective measures by which you can determine whether the cancer has gone away or not. But if you heal cancer, you’re talking about something different. Even if the cancer is not cured, perhaps the person has now accepted the cancer, or the person is able to live with a better quality of life without anxiety over impending death.

But I reject this distinction for a couple of reasons, particularly in the context of healing in the Upper Amazon. One is that if you speak to the shamans, they will claim that they can, and certainly claim that they want to, cure physical diseases. If you had a duodenal ulcer, they will say, “Yeah, we can cure this in exactly the Western sense. It will go away if you use our treatment.” I think that this distinction is a Western imposition, and it is political. Because when a biomedical doctor sets up shop in the jungle, he wants to make a political deal with the shaman, saying, in effect, “I’ll do the curing, you do the healing” — which is the doctor’s way of saying, “You’re not going to do anything at all.”

Howard: But this isn’t just about the individual shaman. We’re talking about plants, about medicinal plants that have healing properties. So traditions and taboos and must have some truth to them, some factual, pragmatic evidence that this healing works, even among people who have no formal education; otherwise they wouldn’t have been there for such a long time. There must be a body of evidence to support the belief that the plant can heal physical illnesses. There are certainly some plants that I would take if I had a physical illness, for example uña de gato, cat’s claw, which is also well known in the West.

Steve: One consideration is that most diseases are self-limited; they get better by themselves. Another consideration is that many even serious diseases are cyclical. Arthritis, for example, can go through a period of getting better, and then go through a period of getting worse. And so the question is: if we’re looking at whether shamans actually heal or cure, we have to separate out the effect of the plants from the effect of a disease being self-limiting or cyclical. We have to have some kind of a metric for deciding when something is healed and when it isn’t. And as far as I know, certainly in the Amazon and for just about every shamanic practice in the world, there has been no study that has done long-term follow-up. I think this is different from trying to understand from within the culture what kind of healing or curing is really going on.

Howard: In some respects we are touching on the allopathic versus holistic systems of healing. In the Amazon, an external influence or “energy” such as malaire —literally bad air — is regarded as a common source of illness. This condition would not be recognized in the allopathic model.

Steve: And malaire is associated with tunchis, the spirits of dead people.

Howard: That’s right, and according to Pablo there are certain plants that create malaire when they decompose. The closest approximation we have to malaire is the term “bad energy.”

Steve: One of my goals in the book generally has been to try to understand this healing system in the Upper Amazon on its own terms, and I have tried to step away from trying to explain it in my terms.

People use terms like energy; just about everybody who is involved in this work at some time or another has used the word energy. But I don’t know what Shipibo term, for example, would be properly translated as energy. Even if I were fluent in Shipibo, I don’t know how I would go about trying to explain the Western concept of energy to them. Even if I tried to explain energy to a mestizo shaman in Spanish, I don’t think I would be able to explain the whole complex of ideas that accompany our concept of energy, its relationship to concepts such as vibration in nineteenth century science, or its relationship to quantum physics. At the same time I am not sure that there is any word that I have heard mestizo shamans use regularly — except perhaps words like energía that they have borrowed from gringos — that I would feel comfortable translating as energy.

So, one of the questions that fascinated me was trying to understand this kind of healing shamanism on its own terms. Now, I say one of the things I was interested in. One of the other things, of course, was trying to understand my own experience and trying to come to grips with the things that I had experienced and seen and participated in, and to see how that related to my own life. But that was not something that I wanted to be in this book.

Howard: Yes, you make that very clear in the book. and it’s a very difficult thing to do, what you described. I know how great a challenge it is, because when I have spoken to a shaman, automatically I’m trying to understand — trying to put my own influences on it, to put it into my way of thinking.

So although a shaman is talking to me about his world, how he understands things, I have to do some kind of translation, some kind of processing to incorporate it. So it takes a lot of care to avoid getting your own personal perspective and comprehension tied up in this. It is a challenge to step outside your own subjective framework of ideas, and try to see it from the other’s perspective. That’s one thing I think you definitely achieved in that book.

Steve: Well, thank you. I was trying to understand what was going on, to take my teachers and place them in a social, cultural, and historical context, and to understand them on their own terms to the extent that I could.

Another reason for writing the book was that there are now a lot of people going down to the Amazon to drink ayahuasca, and they go down there in a state of ignorance. They know nothing about the culture. They may have heard a few things, and they may have heard about sorcery in one of the online ayahuasca discussion groups, but they know nothing about indigenous mestizo culture. They are divorced from the cultural and political struggles of the mestizo and indigenous communities. They are often afraid of the jungle, and will do just about anything to insulate themselves in concrete buildings, because they don’t understand the jungle and they have heard stories about how dangerous the jungle is.

My jungle survival instructor told me that you are safer in the jungle than you are in Lima, because there is virtually no animal in the jungle that will attack you without warning you first. Usually the animal will warn you because you are doing something stupid — you’re getting too close, say, to a wild sow’s piglets. The tourists go to a lodge and food is put in front of them; there are fruits and vegetables and fish and chicken, and they have no idea where this food came from. They have no idea how the people in the jungle fish, or of the kind of sophisticated forest management skills that mestizo and indigenous people use to make sure that they have plantains to eat. So, one of the reasons I wrote the book is to be a sort of guide, because I wanted people to have in their hands something about the culture, the background, so that they could, to some extent, be involved in the culture from which they are taking the medicine.

Howard: That is something which is needed, and is very informative.

Steve: A lot of people go down there for very self-centered reasons. “It’s about me. I am going down for my enlightenment. I am going down for my healing. I am going down there for my very own transformative transcendent experience. I am going down for my epiphany.” And they go down there without any sense of this rich, deep, profound culture that is giving them the medicine that they are taking for their own private purposes.

Howard: I’m not saying that these people are wrong in any way, but they are uninformed about the wider aspects of that world. Most of the literature and Internet material seems to be focused on the more cosmic, transformative, Western perspective on this.

Steve: I would hope that somebody would read this book and say, “Damn. This is really interesting.” These are creative people with a culture that is worth preserving, people who are engaged in long-term struggles for their own culture, for their own land.

Howard: Against the oil corporations and mining companies…

Steve: And are being assaulted from all sides.

Howard: The government, for sure.

Steve: I would hope my readers would say, “Maybe I should go down with an open heart, rather than with a set of motivations that all center on me.”

Howard: There certainly is a self-centered aspect to this. I’m occasionally asked, “How do I become a shaman, who can I apprentice with?” I respond by suggesting that they go there and initially check things out, get in the groove, make some connections with the shamans and so on, but of course that is not what they want to hear. You know, some do go, and if they last three or four weeks, then I’m impressed. But many give up earlier than that, discomfort with insect bites, or basically they couldn’t make friends with the jungle. It’s a very beautiful environment, a total change in the rhythm of life, just day and night.

Steve: Rhythms do change in the jungle. Your sleep patterns change in the jungle because, for people from the temperate latitudes, there’s no twilight. The sun just goes straight down: one minute it’s light and the next minute it’s dark. The darkness comes on very fast. Then you have twelve hours of darkness, which usually changes your sleeping habits — unless you resist the rhythm of the jungle by setting up bright lights to keep you up late.

And, to bring it back around to what we were discussing earlier, there’s a third reason I wrote the book. I wanted to get these ideas out there. Even in just the time since this book was published, there have been all kinds of really interesting discussions, especially online, where people say, “Oh, well, you say this. Here’s my experience.” And the experience is the same, or maybe different. People have corrected some errors I made in the book, which is terrific, and people have challenged some of the ideas I put forward. If we’re lucky, in five or ten years, this book will have been entirely superseded. Hopefully by then people will have read this book and said, “Oh, well, I disagree with Beyer here,” or, “I agree with Beyer, but I can add something here.” I wrote it because there was no book out there like it, where the information was all in one place, and people could add to it, debate it, and correct it.

Howard: You write about the wider popular culture, the unique foods, the drinks, where it all comes from, how it’s made, how it’s transported and so on. It was a pleasure to read, in those informative shaded boxes that feature in the book, about the local cumbia amazónica music that you hear blaring from many bars in Iquitos and Pucallpa.

Steve: Sidebars.

Howard: The sidebars really add the flavor and texture of Amazonian life, and even the dancing girls get a mention — it’s great.

Steve: That was really fun to write. I was very happy because it was the first time in my life I was able to use in a sentence the word callipygian, which is classical Greek for “having a beautiful butt.”

Howard: You do use some words I’ve never seen before. I had to look it up, and, yup, it means “well-shaped buttocks.” By the way, the callipygian dancing girls are called vedettes — just mentioning that to give some texture.

Steve: And not just cumbia amazónica but cumbia music generally is like the hip-hop music of Peru. It’s countercultural underground music. It’s the music of the people.

Too late to get it into the book, there was an art show in a gallery in Lima called Poder Verde, “Green Power,” which is one of the words that they use for the music, cumbia amazónica, but this was an art exhibition, mostly by local artists in Iquitos, the guys who paint murals on the sides of restaurants, who paint pictures of large-bosomed women on the walls of brothels. They had an exhibit of this colorful, exuberant art from the Amazon.

Howard: Have you seen the work of Christian Bendayan?

Steve: Yes! He was one of the people who organized the exhibit and exhibited in this gallery.

Howard: I regard Christian as kind of the founder of that sort of outsider folk art in Iquitos. His work is brilliant and vibrant.

Steve: It’s very powerful, it’s colorful. It’s filled with spirit and sensuality, and the elite in Lima and in Cusco couldn’t care less. They still see the jungle as an arena of exploitation. For example, there was a gastronomy fair in Lima, which featured famous chefs preparing the food of the Amazon. But they did not have the real food of the Amazon. They did not have boiled monkey.

Howard: Or suri, palm beetle grubs, for sure.

Steve: Or suri, absolutely right. What they had was exotic fruit from the jungle, which was made into Western-style desserts. There were, as far as I know, no actual Amazonians there, and the refrain was, “Oh, this grows wild in the jungle for our taking.” There was no understanding of the fact that mestizos and indigenous people are cultivators of the forest with a sophisticated understanding of forest succession, of the ways in which the chacras, even when they are no longer being harvested, provide shelter for animals that they can hunt. There was no mention of the sophisticated jungle management skills that produce these fruits, only the assumption that they are somehow magically there for us to take away.

Howard: The people from the jungle are looked down upon as unwashed and uneducated by the urban bourgeois class in Lima.

Steve: It is racial.

Howard: The natives are not even citizens. They are regarded as being just one step above animals. And the people of Iquitos in their turn look down and discriminate against the river people.

Steve: That’s right. And you hear people say that the wild Indians don’t wear clothes, they eat raw meat, they don’t have salt — and therefore they’re not really there. And so the jungle becomes an area open for exploitation.

Howard: The concept of Manifest Destiny is alive and kicking…

Steve: So people go down to the jungle, and they know nothing of this background. Like the elite in Lima and Cusco, fruits and vegetables appear magically on their plates, and they have no idea where this came from or how it fits into the culture of the Upper Amazon.

Howard: This is the conquistador culture. They just came there, and they just took what they wanted, without any regard for how it’s produced or how it’s made. And that mentality has filtered down through the social structure.

Steve: I talk about this in the book. There is a long, troubled history between mestizos and indigenous people, because, during the rubber boom, not only were mestizos used as itinerant rubber tappers, but they were also used as enforcers by the rubber barons to maintain the servitude of the indigenous people. And of course my belief, for whatever it’s worth, is that the mestizo ayahuasca shamanic tradition is just a hundred years old or so — not much older than that — because it’s a product of the rubber boom.

Mestizos lived by the rivers and used rivers for transportation and or commerce and offered them the opportunity to make a lot of money, supposedly, by chopping down rubber trees and tapping rubber. And they became itinerant rubber tappers, itinerant rubber workers who very quickly became enmeshed in the debt peonage system, because they had to buy their supplies from the company store.

But what it did was to bring these ribereños away from their beloved rivers and move them all east into the jungle, where they came in contact with indigenous people. When they became sick, there was nobody who could look for them because, as itinerant rubber tappers, nobody knew where they were. So they went to indigenous healers, and some of them then studied under the indigenous healers and became healers themselves. When the rubber boom ended, they moved back west and they brought this tradition with them.

Howard: Yes. I think that’s a very important point. For example, we can talk about the barco fantasma, the phantom ship, and how this became incorporated in their world. They were overawed by this invasion of nineteenth-century technology. Steam ships, with their coal burning furnaces producing huge volumes of smoke, making an enormous noise, not just a different noise but one they had never heard before. Up until that moment, the jungle had a whole different sound, and suddenly that had all changed. It’s hard to imagine the impact that the invasion of the rubber barons had on the native world, and how they had to come to terms with it all.

Steve: But look what they did. They incorporated it into their shamanic mythology, the same way they incorporated metaphors of electricity, electromagnetic waves, the way they incorporated flashlights, the way they now have incorporated laser beams and biomedicine. Perfect example: doña María drinking ayahuasca dressed in a long, white coat, like a doctor’s coat, and don Roberto wearing a hat with beads and feathers and Shipibo designs on it and a shirt with Shipibo designs — in effect, symbolizing were two different modes of eclecticism.

Some of the plant spirits who came to don Roberto and doña María would be dressed in hospital scrubs and wearing surgeon’s masks. When they left their bodies and went on journeys through the galaxy, they would visit great spiritual hospitals on other planets and watch the procedures. Remember that to the mestizos, the source of all shamanic wisdom is the indigenous people. It’s hard to think of a mestizo shaman who does not claim somewhere to have been taught by indigenous people.

For example, don Manuel Córdova Ríos, who was a mestizo shaman in Iquitos, told this story about how he had been kidnapped and taken to live with an indigenous people — in effect to where the wild things are. He claimed to have learned the native language through group telepathy sessions when they drank ayahuasca. Eventually he learned all their healing techniques, became their chief, and finally escaped. This is kind of an archetypal story — the civilized person who gets captured by the wild people, learns their language, and comes back and teaches their redemptive secrets to other civilized people. This is a myth that is not only current in the Upper Amazon among mestizos, but this myth is being reenacted by the gringos who go down to the jungle to drink ayahuasca. Here the civilized people go down into the jungle, meet the wise wild people who live there, learn their redemptive secrets, and come back carrying this redemptive wisdom to civilization.

Howard: Joseph Campbell, the myth of the hero.

Steve: That’s right. And this myth of bringing back the healing secrets of the jungle is not only circulated among mestizos, but is now being reenacted by gringos who are going down to the jungle.

Howard: Bring back the gold, bring back the treasure.

Steve: But of course, as you said, this is an ego-feeding kind of thing, because you can say to yourself, “Oh, I’m selected. I’m the gringo to whom these wild people chose to reveal their secrets. That must mean there’s something special about me.” And all of this is divorced from the reality of the jungle, and it’s divorced from the lives of the people and their shamans. It’s divorced from the culture from which these foreigners seek their healing.

Howard: It is important that this way of life be documented in detail, before it goes under the weight of romantic and divorced-from-reality bullshit.

Steve: I think that is another reason. I am very pessimistic about the survival of this tradition.

Howard: Me too.

Steve: I think this rich, deep, profound healing tradition is going to disappear, because there are no apprentices. On one of my podcast interviews we were talking about the loss of this tradition, and I was asked: What about the gringos who have become shamans? I thought that was a really good question, so I gave it a lot of thought, and I said: Well, first, there are very few. Second, they are concentrated in very few places, primarily around Iquitos. And third — and I’m happy to be corrected about this — I do not see these gringo shamans going into mestizo and indigenous communities in order to serve those people. The people they are serving are overwhelmingly gringos.

PART TWO TO FOLLOW

From Neurons to Nirvana is about the science of psychedelics — the quest to discover how psychoactive substances affect the neurological system and how those effects are related directly to how we understand the world around us; how they affect consciousness and what that means for our understanding of ourselves, our relationship with others, and our understanding of the world.

Hockenhull is working in partnership with executive producer Mark Achbar (The Corporation) and Betsy Carson, and with European co-producer Oval Filmemacher, Berlin. He has been developing and shooting this film over the last two years, filming extensively in Canada, the USA, and Europe.

You can help to make this film a reality. See how you can contribute here — and how you can get signed DVDs, exclusive downloads during production, music tracks, special imagistic loops for continuous ecstatic play on your monitor, an exclusive audio clip of Aldous Huxley recorded in the 1930s, and even co-production credit. Check it out.

Steve Beyer is the author of Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon. His website and blog is at www.singingtotheplants.com.

There is a theme woven through the shamanisms of the Upper Amazon — that human beings in general, and shamans in particular, have powerful urges to harm other humans. The difference between a healer and a sorcerer is that the former is able to bring these urges under control, while the latter either cannot or does not want to.

Thus, what distinguishes a healer from a sorcerer is self-control. This self-control must be exercised specifically in two areas — first, in keeping to la dieta, the restricted diet; and, second, in resisting the urge to use the magical darts acquired at initiation for frivolous or selfish purposes. Shamans who master their desires may use their powers to heal; those who give in to desire, by their lack of self-control, become sorcerers, followers of the easy path.

As simple as the restricted diet seems, it is hard to keep. Food without salt or sugar is bland and boring; I have tried to live on just fish and plantains, and, believe me, the craving for salt or sugar can become intense. Commenting on a similar diet among Achuar apprentice shamans, limited to plantains, boiled palm hearts, and small fish, anthropologist Philippe Descola calls it “dauntingly dull.” In order to be a shaman, one Napo Runa elder says, “one has to suffer much with all this fasting.” Thus, la dieta is a form of self-imposed discipline, which makes the apprentice or shaman worthy of the love of the plants.

Secoya shaman Fernando Payaguaje, speaking of the restricted diet kept when drinking yagé, says: “Some people drink yagé only to the point of reaching the power to practice witchcraft; with these crafts they can kill people. A much greater effort and consumption of yagé is required to reach the highest level, where one gains access to the visions and power of healing. To become a sorcerer is easy and fast.” As anthropologist Françoise Barbira Freedman puts it, shamans who master their emotions and aggressive desires use their powers to heal; apprentices who break the rules of their ascetic training become weak, and therefore become sorcerers.

Similarly, a significant part of the initiation process is for the new shaman to demonstrate the self-control which separates healers from sorcerers. Self-control is manifested in resisting the immediate urge to use newly acquired powers to cause harm. Among the Shuar, there is a general sentiment among the people that becoming a shaman — acquiring tsentsak, magic darts — creates an irresistible desire to do harm, that “the tsentsak make you do bad things.” Shuar shamans themselves dispute this. While the tsentsak indeed tempt one to harm, the desire can be resisted; those who “study with the aim to cure” become healers.

Shuar shaman Alejandro Tsakímp describes one of these temptations as the urge to try out the new darts on an animal — “a dog or a bird, anything that has blood.” Once one does that, once one “starts doing harm, killing animals, one cannot cure,” but becomes a maliciador, a sorcerer. Similarly, the Desana believe that sorcery is very dangerous, apt to rebound on its practitioner, and to be used only in narrowly defined circumstances — for revenge on a sorcerer who has killed a family member, for example. Thus it is the novice, the inexperienced, the untrained person who causes sickness — who lacks the self-control imposed by the shamanic initiation, who experiments with evil spells, who uses them carelessly and irresponsibly, just to see if they work.

This self-control is often expressed in terms of regurgitation and reingestion of shamanic power. Anong the Shuar, after a month of apprenticeship, a tsentsak comes out of the apprentice’s mouth. The apprentice must resist the temptation to use this dart to harm his enemies; in order to become a healing shaman, the apprentice must swallow what he himself has regurgitated. Among the Canelos Quichua, the master coughs up spirit helpers in the form of darts, which the apprentice swallows; here, too, the darts come out of the apprentice’s body and tempt him to use them against his enemies; again, the apprentice must avoid the temptation and reswallow the darts, for only in this way can he become a healer.

This self-control is sometimes also put in terms of turning down gifts from the spirits. The spirits of the plants may offer the apprentice great powers and gifts that can cause harm. If the apprentice is weak and accepts them, he will become a sorcerer. Such gifts might include phlegm which is red, or bones, or thorns, or razor blades. Only later will the spirits present the apprentice with other and greater gifts — the gifts of healing and of love magic.

Self-control is thus central. It is difficult to control lust and abstain from sorcery; even experienced shamans must work hard to maintain control over their powers, which are often conceptualized as having their own volitions.The pathogenic objects that are kept within the shaman’s body, often embedded in some phlegm- or saliva-like substance, are also in some sense autonomous, alive, spirits, sometimes with their own needs and desires, including a need for nourishment, often supplied by tobacco. If not fed properly, they can turn on their possessor, or seek their food elsewhere.

The magic darts kept within the chest of a Shuar shaman, for example, are living spirits, who can control the actions of a shaman who does not have sufficient self-control. The magic darts want to kill, and it requires hard work to keep them under control and use them for healing rather than attack. Similarly, the Parakanã of Eastern Amazonia believe that shamans possess pathogenic agents that cause sickness, called karowara. When animated by a shaman, karowara are tiny pointed objects; inside the victim’s body, they take the concrete form of monkey teeth, some species of beetle, stingray stings, and sharp-pointed bones. Karowara have no independent volition; but they have a compulsion to eat human flesh.

In this way, the pathogenic objects hidden within the shaman’s body enact the Amazonian belief in innate human aggressiveness. To be a healer is to keep this powerful force in check by great effort.

Steve Beyer is the author of Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon. His website and blog is at www.singingtotheplants.com.

Ayahuasca is made from the stem of the ayahuasca vine (Banisteriopsis caapi), almost always combined with the leaves of one or more of three compañeros, companion plants — the shrub chacruna (Psychotria viridis), the closely related shrub sameruca (Psychotria carthaginensis), or a vine variously called ocoyagé, chalipanga, chagraponga, and huambisa (Diplopterys cabrerana). It is in fact the companion plant that contains the potent hallucinogen dimethyltryptamine (DMT); but, while DMT is effective when administered parenterally, it is, when taken orally, inactivated by peripheral monoamine oxidase-A (MAO-A), an enzyme found in the lining of the stomach, whose function is precisely to oxidize molecules containing an NH2 amine group, like DMT.

The ayahuasca vine contains three primary harmala alkaloids — the β-carboline derivatives harmine, tetrahydroharmine (THH), and harmaline. Harmine is the primary constituent, followed first by THH and then by harmaline. These three harmala alkaloids are potent reversible inhibitors of MAO-A. Thus, combining the ingredients of the ayahuasca drink allows the DMT to produce its hallucinogenic effect when orally ingested — a unique solution which apparently developed only in the Upper Amazon. Indeed, the MAO-inhibiting β-carbolines in the ayahuasca vine may also potentiate the actions of psychoactive alkaloids other than DMT — for example, nicotine from mapacho (Nicotiana rustica), or the primary tropane alkaloids from toé (Brugmansia spp.).

The question is: Apart from inhibiting MAO, do these β-carbolines contribute to the nature or quality of the ayahuasca visionary experience?

The accepted wisdom answers no. A study of the ayahuasca drink used by the syncretic religious movement União de Vegetal in Brazil, for example, concluded that the harmala alkaloids “are essentially devoid of psychedelic activity” at doses found in the drink.

A number of experiments with harmine — the primary β-carboline in the ayahuasca vine — would seem to bear out this assessment. The chemist Alexander Shulgin has reviewed the self-experimentation literature and concluded that harmine has inconsistent effects, which have in common that not much either pleasant or interesting happens — pleasant relaxation and withdrawal in one case; dizziness, nausea, and ataxia in another. Researchers who have self-administered harmine have reported an increase in belligerence, fleeting sensations of lightness, transient subjective effects, mild sedation at low doses and unpleasant neurological effects at higher doses, and, indeed, no “notable psychoactive or somatic effect.” Some researchers have expressed doubts that harmine is psychoactive at all.

Jonathan Ott gives several accounts of his own experiences with ingesting infusions of the ayahuasca vine or other β-carboline-rich plants without DMT additive plants. During one shamanic ceremony, he drank an infusion of the ayahuasca vine mixed only with a small number of guayusa (Ilex guayusa) leaves, which contain caffeine but no tryptamines, which he intended to counteract the soporific effects of the drink. According to Ott, the caffeine content was insufficient for that purpose; he had to fight off sleep. He could see, he writes, why β-carboline-enriched infusions had been used traditionally as sedatives.

However, there are two reasons to question the common wisdom. The first is the work of Claudio Naranjo, who administered harmaline — not harmine — to 35 volunteers, by mouth and intravenously, under laboratory conditions. Harmaline, he reports, was “more of a pure hallucinogen” than other psychoactive substances, such as mescaline, because of the number of images reported and their realistic quality — what Naranjo calls their “remarkable vividness.” “In fact,” he writes, “some subjects felt that certain scenes they saw had really happened, and that they had been disembodied witnesses of them in a different time and place.” The volunteers often described landscapes and cities, masks, eyes, and what are elsewhere called elves — vividly realized animal and human figures, angels, demons, giants, dwarfs. If this study is credible, there are grounds to believe that, among the β-carbolines, at least harmaline, at sufficient doses, has independent hallucinogenic properties, phenomenologically not dissimilar to those of DMT.

Shulgin’s review of the self-experimental literature with regard to harmaline provides some confirmation of the reports of Naranjo’s volunteers. A 500-mg oral dose produced nausea and a complete collapse of motor coordination — “I could barely stagger to the bathroom,” one person reports — along with eyes-closed eidetic imagery, and “tracers and weird visual ripplings” with open eyes. It is even more interesting to look at the effects of Syrian rue (Peganum harmala), which contains pretty much equal quantities of harmine and harmaline, as opposed to the proportionally much smaller amount of harmaline in the ayahuasca vine. Oral ingestion of ground Syrian rue seeds caused intense eyes-closed hallucinations of “a wide variety of geometrical patterns in dark colors,” which evolved into more concrete images — “people’s faces, movies of all sorts playing at high speeds, and animal presences such as snakes.” Oral ingestion of a fivefold greater dose, as extract, caused “zebra-like stripes of light and dark” — visual effects which had “a physicality unlike those of any other entheogen I’d experienced.” In a second trial at the same dose, the participant saw “strange winged creatures” and traveled to “jungle-like places, full of imagery of vines, fountains, and animals.”

Now, the amount of harmaline in any sample of ayahuasca vine or drink is extremely variable; it is a matter of controversy whether any infusion of the ayahuasca vine contains enough harmaline to cause the effects reported above. Jonathon Ott, whose views deserve respectful attention, says that the amount of harmaline in a single 200-ml drink of ayahuasca would be insufficient to produce the effects reported by Naranjo.

Yet the accepted wisdom is challenged by ethnography as well. Among mestizo shamans, an ayahuasca drink made solely from the vine is sometimes ingested orally for hallucinogenic effects of a particular “dark” nature. In addition, ayahuasqueros, virtually universally, say that it is the ayahuasca vine that provides the fuerza, the power, and DMT-rich plants such as chacruna that provide the luz, the light, in the ayahuasca experience. In Colombia, the shamans say that the companion plant brilla la pinta, makes the visions brighter; among the Shuar, the companion plant is not considered to have any hallucinogenic effects, but rather is believed to make the visions clearer, and is in fact occasionally omitted. The great ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes reports that certain Colombian Indians smoke leaves of the ayahuasca vine; under certain circumstances, my teacher don Roberto Acho recommends the smoking of the bark.

Schultes himself, at Puerto Limón, drank an infusion derived solely from ayahuasca bark: the visions he experienced were blue and purple, he reports — slow undulating waves of color. Then a few days later he tried the mixture with chagraponga. The effect was electric — “reds and golds dazzling in diamonds that turned like dancers on the tips of distant highways.” As my teacher don Rómulo Magin told me, visions with the ayahuasca vine alone are dark and dim; the chacruna makes the vision come on like this: whoosh! he said, moving his closed hand rapidly towards my face, the fingers opening up as it approached. Luis Eduardo Luna, one of the leading investigators of Amazonian mestizo shamanism, reports that often a larger amount of the ayahuasca vine is added to the ayahuasca drink than is needed for MAO inhibition, precisely because of its ability to produce strong visual hallucinations.

There is also some reason to believe that THH may have some role in the hallucinogenic effects of the ayahuasca vine, either by itself or acting synergistically with other β-carboline compounds. Indeed, in 1957 Hochstein and Paradies had already conjectured — “astutely,” in the words of Jonathon Ott — that harmaline and THH might have “substantial psychotomimetic activity in their own right.” Strikingly, among members of the ayahuasca-using União de Vegetal church in Brazil, experienced users seem to prefer ayahuasca drinks where THH concentrations are high relative to harmine and harmaline. They explain that such drinks deliver more “force” to the experience. It is therefore surprising that so little research has been done on THH. Alexander Shulgin, in his search of the self-experimentation literature, found only a single and entirely unhelpful report. “More studies on tetrahydroharmine,” he says, “are absolutely imperative.”

Similarly, additive and — especially — synergistic studies of harmala alkaloids have not been performed. The ethnographic evidence strongly suggests that interactive effects are important and are yet to be investigated.

Steve Beyer is the author of Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon. His website and blog is at www.singingtotheplants.com.

The argument raises a number of interesting questions, and is worth following.

Michael Winkelman

Winkelman’s position consists of two intertwined elements, one descriptive and one historical. The descriptive part begins from the concept that the human brain is modular — that it is a large collection of small modules that have evolved to perform specific functions. These modules can be quite specialized. Modules have been proposed for such functions as distinguishing living from nonliving things, identifying faces, understanding motives, throwing accurately, attaching emotions to faces, and recognizing causal relationships. Tools such as Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging may even be able to locate these modules in particular areas in the brain.

Winkelman maintains that shamanic techniques for inducing transpersonal consciousness override this modularity through what he calls integrative brain processes. In this integrative mode of consciousness, he says, ordinarily separate modules can interact, so that the brain processes information through several modules at once, in a way that is different from other states of consciousness. Synesthesia — seeing sounds or smelling colors, for example — is such a cross-modular experience, as is the uniquely human capacity for metaphor, mimesis, and symbolism. Winkelman sees such capacities as central to the role of the shaman.

There is much to be said for this last observation. Jerome Rothenberg, poet and pioneer of ethnopoetics, calls the shaman the protopoet. Poet Gary Snyder says that the shaman gives song to dreams, “speaks for wild animals, the spirits of plants, the spirits of mountains, of watersheds. He or she sings for them. They sing through him.” For these poets, the shaman is the healer who sings — the creator of metaphor, the shaper of symbols.

Winkelman’s view has started a trend toward speaking of the sacred plants — such as the ayahuasca drink, the peyote cactus, the teonanácatl mushroom — as psychointegrator plants. Such plants “enhance integration of information by eliciting cognitive capacities based in presentational symbolism, metaphor, analogy, and mimesis … representing preconscious and prelinguistic structures of the brain.” The shaman’s individual psychodynamics, Winkelman says, expressed symbolically in the language of myths and spirits, are restructured “at levels below conceptual and operational thought.”

This is also where the historical element comes in. Premodern humans, Winkelman says, had highly modular brains. It was shamanism that was the foundation for the development of “synthetic symbolic awareness” in early humans. “The integrative potentials of shamanism,” he writes, “help explain the rapid rise of culture in modern Homo sapiens sapiens and the origin of shamanistic and religious features … from the cross-modal analogic and psychophysiological integration processes from different innate modules.”

Homayun Sidky

Sidky doesn’t buy it. His critique has two prongs, both directed against Winkelman’s historical thesis. First, Sidky questions the assumption that shamanism — at least in any form recognizably similar to contemporary indigenous practice — was in fact a paleolithic phenomenon. This point has merit. As I have written before, historical materials on shamanism date back only as far as the sixteenth century. By the time the first European travelers brought home descriptions of Siberian shamanism, it had already been influenced by centuries of contact with Buddhism, Islam, and Russian Orthodox Christianity. We have no direct evidence of what any sort of indigenous spiritual practice might have been like before that time.

Second, the question of what caused the sudden emergence of behaviorally modern humans about 40,000 years ago is a highly contentious one, and a wide variety of mechanisms have been proposed, including the introgression of Neanderthal alleles into the human genome. Sidky questions whether the hypothesized integrative mode of consciousness would have been advantageous in the sense Winkelman intends. Winkelman says that “altering consciousness provides a variety of adaptive advantages through development of a more objective perception of the external world.” Sidky quotes Charles Tart as saying that altered states of consciousness are, just like ordinary consciousness, “mixtures of pluses and minuses, insights and delusions, genuine creativity and misleading imagination.” What would be the benefit of such a state of consciousness to a paleolithic human?

More interesting to me than where these two thinkers differ is where they seem to agree. Both agree that there is something we can call a shamanic state of consciousness, although they disagree about what it is. Winkelman claims it is a state in which normally discrete brain modules interact. Sidky maintains that there is no empirical justification for hypothesizing the existence of such a state. Rather, he says, the state is clearly one of dissociation — a state in which “the ordinary meta-awareness that gives us our sense of personal identity and agency, and which operates atop the brain’s cognitive hierarchey, is temporarily overtaken.” Such a state is in fact a state of increased modularity, “when parallel brain modules disengage from each other or from ordinary meta-awareness and operate independently.”

My first reaction to all this is that we seem to be theorizing far ahead of a sufficient factual basis. If cognition does work in a modular fashion, there is still little agreement about what those modules are, how many there may be, and how they might interact. There are numerous modular models of the mind, but their modules often do not correspond; one review of the literature came up with a total of fifty different modules that had been proposed in different studies. If there is little agreement about the modularity of the contemporary human brain, it is hard to see how we can reasonably discuss the modularity of paleolithic humans.

And there are continuing conceptual difficulties. If there is a speech processing module, are there submodules for semantic coding, phonemic processing, pitch recognition? Is the semantic coding module for speech reception the same as one for speech production? How do all these modules and submodules interact? For these and other reasons, modular models are currently being challenged by alternative models that are increasingly holistic and nonlocalized.

But my concern is deeper. Shamans are not states of consciousness. Shamans are people who have messy personal lives, an ambiguous social role, and the risky job of making sick people better. In fact, as I wrote here and here, I am not at all sure that there is such a thing as a discrete, unitary, contextless, disembodied shamanic state of consciousness at all. Perhaps what we should be talking about instead are the experiences of shamans in their global, postcolonial, historical, and ineluctably idiosyncratic cultural settings.

In the same way, we cannot simply assume that sacred plants all function in the same way, or produce the same experience, especially under their ceremonial conditions of use. Indeed, I think it is pretty clear that the effects of the ayahuasca drink, the peyote cactus, and the teonanácatl mushroom are phenomenologically distinct. What happens to the shamanic state of consciousness then?

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.

The result is a uniquely eclectic shamanist culture that continues not only to fascinate outsiders with its brilliant visionary art but also to attract thousands of seekers each year with the promise of visionary experiences of their own.

In Singing to the Plants I try to set forth, in accessible form, just what this shamanism is about — what happens at an ayahuasca healing ceremony, how the apprentice shaman forms a spiritual relationship with the healing plant spirits, how sorcerers inflict the harm that the shaman heals, and the ways that plants are used in healing, love magic, and sorcery.

There is a website for the book and an accompanying blog at http://www.singingtotheplants.com/.

There are several reasons why I think a book on the mestizo shamanism of the Upper Amazon was worth writing at this time. Mestizo shamanism occupies an exceptional place among the shamanisms of the Upper Amazon, assimilating key features of indigenous shamanisms, and at the same time adapting and transforming them. There is today considerable interest in shamanism in general, and in Upper Amazonian shamanism in particular, especially its use of plant hallucinogens; yet there is currently no readily accessible text giving general consideration to the unique features of Amazonian shamanism and its relationship to shamanisms elsewhere in the world.

We now know much more about shamanism than when Mircea Eliade published his famous overview in 1951. There is now a wider range of excellent ethnographies, including many of Amazonian peoples; debates within the field have sharpened an awareness of many of the assumptions that underlay the fieldwork of many decades ago. Indeed, we now know, too, much more about ethnobotany, hallucinations, and the actions of such substances as dimethyltryptamine.

Moreover, ayahuasca shamanism has become part of global culture. The visionary ayahuasca paintings of Pablo César Amaringo are available to a world market in a sumptuous coffee-table book; international ayahuasca tourists exert a profound economic and cultural pull on previously isolated local practitioners; ayahuasca shamanism, once the terrain of anthropologists, is the subject of novels and spiritual memoirs. Ayahuasca shamans perform their healing rituals in Ontario and Wisconsin.

In Singing to the Plants I emphasize both the uniqueness of this highly eclectic and absorptive shamanism — plant spirits dressed in surgical scrubs, extraterrestrial doctors speaking computer language — and its deep roots in shamanist beliefs and practices, both healing and sorcery, common to the Upper Amazon. I have sought to understand this form of shamanism, its relationship to other shamanisms, and its survival in the new global economy, through anthropology, ethnobotany, cognitive psychology, legal history, and my own personal experiences studying wilderness survival and plant healing in the Amazon.

The twenty-question Self Report Questionnaire, or SRQ-20, is a screening tool for common mental disorders that investigates nonpsychotic symptoms — depression, anxiety, somatiform disorders — in the month prior to the interview. The questionnaire consists of four questions about physical symptoms and sixteen questions about emotional symptoms, all with yes-no answers — questions about such things as crying, tiredness, and inability to enjoy life. The test was validated in a Brazilian population, and thus is commonly used in South America to identify psychiatric symptoms in a primary care setting.

The higher the number of positive yes responses, the greater the likelihood of psychopathology. The validity study in Brazil reported that a score of more than eight positive responses is an adequate cut-off point to detect nonpsychotic mental disorders. The test was reported to have a sensitivity of 83 percent, a specificity of 80 percent, and both positive and negative predictive values of 82 pecent, which makes the SRQ-20 a pretty good little test.

Josep María Fericgla

Josep María Fericgla, director of the Institut de Prospectiva Antropológica in Barcelona, is an ethnopsychologist and cognitive anthropologist who has done fieldwork with Shuar shamans in Ecuador, and has written widely on shamanism and sacred plants, including a classic Shuar ethnography, Los jíbaros, cazadores de sueños. In his book Al trasluz de la ayahuasca: Antropología cognitiva, oniromancia y consciencias alternativas, he reports on his administration of the SRQ-20 to 113 Shuar, and analyzes the results according to the number of times each participant had drunk ayahuasca in the past.

The chart below should make the results clear. The stacked columns run from zero positive responses on the left to greater than sixteen positive responses on the right — that is, from left to right in order of increasing psychopathology.

The chart clearly shows that Shuar who drank less ayahuasca had higher psychopathology scores on the SRQ-20, and those who drank more ayahuasca had lower psychopathology scores. Put another way, the chart shows Shuar who drink more ayahuasca stacked at the left-hand low-pathology end of the chart, and those who drink less ayahuasca stacked at the right-hand high-pathology end. Of those participants who gave zero positive responses, 72 percent had drunk ayahuasca more than 21 times.

The study also revealed that there appears to be a generally high rate of psychopathology among the Shuar: more than 60 percent of the participants gave eight or more positive responses on the SRQ-20. Fericgla attributes this unusual level to the accelerated process of deculturation that the Shuar were undergoing — the destruction of their traditional way of life, the plundering of their environment by multinational petroleum and lumber companies, territorial conflicts with colonists, the loss of their spiritual values. Even so, the distribution of the high scores is interesting. Of those who gave eight or more positive responses, 72 percent were women, and 35 percent were men. Part of the explanation may be that Shuar women bear the brunt of deculturation more than the men. Another part may be that Shuar men drink ayahuasca at twice the rate of women.

Now, again, what we have here is simply an apparent association between increasing ayahuasca consumption and lower scores on the SRQ-20. The study cannot tell us if there is a causal connection, or, if there is, in which direction it runs. It may be, for example, not that drinking ayahuasca causes better mental health, but rather that people with greater mental health — for any of a variety of reasons — drink more ayahuasca; or even that some third factor — family or social status, for example — is causally related to both.

But the bottom line of this study remains that — consistent with the results of the União do Vegetal study and, indeed, of the long-term study of peyote use we discussed here — there is little evidence that the long-term use of either sacred plant in its ceremonial setting causes any psychological harm, and appears to be associated with mental health benefits.

Outside the Amazon, artists not born into or raised in indigenous or mestizo ayahuasca-using cultures, including such well-known visionary artists as Alex Grey, Robert Venosa, and Martina Hoffmann, have also rendered visual experiences attributed to the ingestion of ayahuasca or DMT. For want of a better term, I will call this body of work DMT art.

There are some remarkable convergences between DMT art and the abstract representations of the ayahuasca experience in indigenous Amazonian art. The indigenous work on the left, below, by Cashinahua artist Arlindo Daureano Estevão, represents the different worlds of the ayahuasca vision as houses with doors to be entered and paths linking the different contained spaces. This type of design is called nawan kene pua, or stranger’s design, since it is a map that keeps one from getting lost in the ayahuasca world. This abstract representation is strikingly reflected in the work on the right, below, entitled DMT, by photographer Peter Kosinski. It is difficult to say whether such convergences are due to acquaintance with indigenous art or to similarities in the visionary experience.

Arlindo Daureano Estevão, Nawan Kene Pua	Peter Kosinski, DMT

Similarly, on the left below is a traditional Shipibo woven cloth, whose design represents a sacred pattern derived from a cosmic anaconda whose skin embodies all possible designs. Shipibo shamans employ these patterns to reorder the bodies of persons who are sick. Certain diseases are thought to be caused by harmful, messy designs on the wsick body, which the shaman must magically unravel and replace with orderly designs. After drinking ayahuasca, the Shipibo shaman sees a luminous design in the air. When this design floats down and touches the shaman’s lips it becomes transformed into a song the shaman sings. Different elements of the song relate to different elements of the design; for example, the end of each verse is associated with the end-curl of a design motif. When the patient is cured, the design has become clear, neat, and complete. Again, this abstract representation is strikingly reflected in Vibrata Chromodoris’s Emergence, below on the right.

Anonymous, Shipibo Woven Cloth	Vibrata Chromodoris, Emergence

However, most DMT art is representational rather than abstract, and taps into the work of mestizo Amazon visionary artists. The first painting below is by mestizo artist Pablo Amaringo; the remaining pieces are DMT art by artists from outside the Amazon, all working with content recognizably similar to that of Amaringo, although not necessarily in the same naïve outsider style.

Pablo Amaringo, Ayahuasca and Chacruna (Detail)	Robert Venosa, Ayahuasca Dream (Detail)
Cyril Lanier, Ayahuasca Vision of the Blue Perfume	Michael Jacobs, Ayahuasca Dream

But even more striking, I think, are two motifs that appear with some frequency in DMT art but not in the indigenous or mestizo artistic traditions. The first of these I will call The Face — that is, a recognizably humanoid face with eyes, a nose, and a mouth, often filling the entire frame, and often constructed from smaller units, either geometric figures or dots. These figures are often described as a being, an entity, or a visitation. For example, Robert Essig says of his painting DMT Entity, below on the right, “This image was inspired from my first unnatural encounter with the spirit molecule. An Entity that seemed extremely real and intelligent appeared before me with terrific precision and speed. It dissipated as soon as I imposed my will upon it.”

Alex Grey, Ayahuasca Visitation	Robert Essig, DMT Entity

Indeed, The Face often appears in works that are not conceptually about The Face. In Luke Brown’s Pineal Feline, for example, below on the right, the titular face is that of a cat, at the bottom center of the painting; what then makes up The Face are floral arabesques and ornamentation of the cat’s face, almost entirely buried within — indeed, reduced almost to a decorative adornment of — The Face. Similarly, in Martina Hoffman’s La Chacruna, below on the left, The Face decomposes, upon closer inspection, into arabesques, including snakes and elephant heads, elaborated upon the relatively small face of the goddess, in the upper middle of the painting.

Martina Hoffmann, La Chacruna	Luke Brown, Pineal Feline

Sometimes The Face is deconstructed to simpler, rather than more complex, elements. At that point, we can begin to see the basic patterns from which complex Faces are constructed.

Dennis Konstantin, DMT Entity	Nisvan, Ayahuasca Vision (Detail)

What is interesting here is that underlying The Face is a relatively simple symmetric pattern, not unlike the abstract patterns of indigenous Amazonian ayahuasca art, but here cognitively assembled into a recognizable human face. Perhaps that is why Essig’s Face dissipated as soon as he imposed his will upon it; attempting to control the image distracted the perceiver from its imposed structural coherence.

Another recurring motif we can call the wingspread. This is a pattern very similar to the wings of a moth or dragonfly. Below, for example, is a more or less typical moth — actually, the tobacco hornworm moth (Maduca sexta):

Wingspread Moth

We can see this wingspread motif reproduced with increasing elaboration in the following pictures:

Strikingly, this wingspread pattern is often hidden rather than explicit, providing a formal structure rather than any content; look, for example, at the wingspread position of the hands in Alex Grey’s Light Weaver, especially in conjunction with, say, Robert Venosa’s Yagé Guide, above. The wingspread pattern underlies the purely formal similarity between Mariela de la Paz’s Ayahuaska at the Gates of San Pedro and Alejandre Segrégio’s Presente Divino. Indeed, sometimes this structure is so deeply embedded as to be difficult to discern, until the pattern suddenly emerges, as with the darker rock formation in Olga Spiegel’s Rendezvous.

The resolution explicitly differentiates the traditional use and sacred character of indigenous ayahuasca rituals from “decontextualized, consumerist, and commercial western uses.”

The resolution is based on a May 29, 2008, report originally submitted by Rosa Giove Nakazawa, a physician at the Takiwasi Center in Tarapoto, to the Regional Bureau for Economic Development, a local governmental entity in the departamento of San Martin. The Takiwasi Center is a medical facility investigating the treatment of addictions using traditional Amazonian medicine, including ayahuasca.

The Resolution states that ayahuasca is “a plant species with an extraordinary cultural history, by virtue of its psychotropic qualities and its use as a drink combined with the plant known as chacruna.” This plant, the Resolution says,

is known to the indigenous Amazonian world as a wise or teaching plant, which shows to initiates the very foundations of the world and its components. The effect of its consumption is to enter into the spiritual world and its secrets … The effects of ayahuasca, widely studied because of their complexity, differ from those usually produced by hallucinogens. Part of this difference consists in the ritual which accompanies its consumption, which leads to a variety of effects which are always within culturally defined limits, and with religious, therapeutic, and culturally affirmative intentions.

It is not clear to me what legal effect this resolution has, or what powers the National Institute of Culture has to enforce it, or whether this means that support is available for additional research and publication on ayahuasca rituals, or whether the resolution is intended to encourage or discourage ayahuasca tourism.

It is also not clear what impact — if any — the resolution might have on drug prosecutions in the United States; but, given the specific disclaimer language cited above, it might make it more difficult for North Americans to claim religious exemptions from US drug laws.

The complete text of the resolution is here.