Ayahuasca.com is a library and community collectively researching the botany, ethnography, mythology, arts, music, therapeutic mechanisms, and phenomenology of the Amazonian Spirit Vine.
Ayahuasca (pronounced ah-yah-WAH-ska) or Yagé (ya-HEY) are native Amazonian names for the jungle vine Banisteriopsis Caapi and the medicinal tea prepared from it and other plants. (Ayahuasca derives from the Quechua aya-spirit/dead, waska-vine/rope.) Ayahuasca is used throughout the Upper Amazon to enable access to the visionary or mythological world that provides revelation, blessing, healing, and ontological solace (Dobkin de Rios 1972, Grof 1994, Andritsky 1984).
Constituents
The Banisteriopsis caapi vine is a Malpighiaceous jungle liana found in the tropical regions of Peru, Bolivia, Panama, Brazil, the Orinoco of Venezuela and the Pacific Coast of Colombia/Ecuador. The vine is the common base ingredient of the Ayahuasca tea. B. caapi contains beta-carbolines that exhibit sedative, hypnotic, anti-depressant, monoamine oxidase inhibiting, and threshold visionary activity.
Ayahuasca brew is a synergistic potion. Although the Indians sometimes make Ayahuasca with Caapi vine only, a wide variety of admixture plants may be combined with the vine. See Plants used in Ayahuasca and analogue brews.
Most typically the vine is mixed with a tryptamine carrying plant. The foliage of Psychotria viridis (Chacruna) is the principal admixture of Ayahuasca potions employed throughout Peru and Brazil. In Columbia and Amazonian Ecuador, the plant Diplopterys cabrerana (Chaliponga) is often used instead.
These plants provide the “light” or the visionary qualities, but these tryptamine-containing plants are not orally active alone. The monoamine oxidase inhibiting action of the B. caapi vine makes it possible for the tryptamines to produce powerful visions. In turn, the admixture plants potentiate the Vine.
The combination of the Caapi vine with Chacruna or Chaliponga is sometimes known as a marriage of Power and Light. This marriage unlocks the full shamanic mareacion and its visionary mythological vistas.
This medicine has been used for millennia in order to enter the sacred supernatural world, to heal, divine, and worship.
Effects
The Ayahuasca potion is a multi-levelled medicine that works on both the soma and psyche. It is very difficult to try to say exactly ‘what’ Ayahuasca does or ‘how’, because it presents a profound mystery to the human psyche.
Since it is for no one person to say what Ayahuasca is and what it does, this forum exists as a means for explorers to exchange information and insight into this profound Medicine.
Antiquity
The use of Ayahuasca may well be primordial, its use extending back to the earliest aboriginal inhabitants of the Upper Amazon region. Abstract liminal patterns such as zigzags, serrated lines and geometric forms found on ancient relics and traditional textiles, pottery and body art of various tribes represent the perceptual threshold between everyday and transpersonal realms of consciousness. These relics, combined with an abundance of myths describing the origin of Ayahuasca as deeply intertwined cosmologically with the creation of the universe, earth, and tribal people, indicate a long history of human use.
Ayahuasca is a revered and respected sacred medicine, considered a spiritual and physiological panacea par excellence, because its medicine can instruct in healing, visionary insight, and the art of using plants for various purposes. Sometimes it is referred to simply as La Medicina – the Medicine.
For indigenous people such as the Napo Runa of Ecuador, Ayahuasca is “the mother of all medicines” and “the mother of all plants.” Other peoples regard Ayahuasca as a Grandfather or Grandmother. Ayahuasca, “the Vine with a soul,” is perceived as a communicating being who guides, teaches, and heals. Ayahuasca also acts as a mediator and translator between the human and plant worlds, and teaches humans how to communicate with plants and use them for various purposes.
Ayahuasca use began with the Ayahuasca vine alone, and in the indigenous world, the Ayahuasca vine is the defining component of Ayahuasca, and the admixtures are “helpers” and optional.
See Unraveling the Mystery of the Origin of Ayahuasca
Modern use
In modern times, many new Ayahuasca traditions have continued to grow like the spreading tendrils of the Vine. Ayahuasca seems to adapt itself to the needs and intents of those who use it the way the vine adapts its form to the shape of the tree on which it grows.
Mestizo Ayahuasca shamanism has its origin in the Amazonian Rubber Boom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In Ecuador and Colombia, rubber companies brutally enslaved local Indians to work for them. However, since the area around the headwaters of the Amazon (the Iquitos area of Peru) had been largely depopulated of Indians, mestizo rubber tappers were brought in to that area. Rubber tappers worked alone in the forest because rubber had to be harvested from wild, widely separated trees. When the mestizo rubber tappers fell ill, they had to turn to Indian curanderos. Some of them ended up apprenticing to the curanderos and learning the Ayahuasca practices. In other cases, mestizo rubber tappers were kidnapped by Indians and learned their practices while living with them.
As the mestizo cities of Iquitos and Pucallpa grew in the Peruvian Amazon, so did a mestizo Ayahuasca tradition that blended indigenous Ayahuasca practices with some Catholic worldview.
In Ecuador and Colombia, on the other hand, no mestizo shamanism developed as it did in Peru, because the rubber companies enslaved local Indians rather than bringing in mestizo workers. Ayahuasca remains almost exclusively the domain of indigenous people in those countries. But in Colombia, many of the taitas (a title given to indigenous curanderos in Colombia, from a Quechua word for “father”) have had to flee their jungle homelands over the past fifty years due to the civil war, and today in Colombia many indigenous curanderos live in cities and towns and offer Yage ceremonies to the whites and mestizos.
The next branch of new Ayahuasca tradition also came from rubber tappers who were initiated in Ayahuasca by the Indians — this time in Brazil. This is the movement of syncretic Ayahuasca religions.
The first such religion was the Santo Daime, a church that blends folk Catholicism, Afro-Brazilian spiritism, and indigenous Amazonian shamanism, founded in the 1930s by Afro-Brazilian rubber tapper Raimundo Irineu Serra. Santo Daime ceremonies are highly ritualized, and group unity in the ritual is of utmost importance. Santo Daime rituals can engage in a kind of group shamanism in which an entire group of people can perform healing collectively. The Santo Daime doctrine is not a codified set of beliefs; members learn the Doctrine by singing hymns under the influence of the sacrament and receiving direct private revelations from the “astral.”
In the 1960s, another rubber tapper, Jose Gabriel Costa (known as Mestre Gabriel) established another Ayahuasca church, the Uniao do Vegetal or UDV. The UDV is a path of esotericism similar in broad ways to mystery schools like Hermeticism and Rosicriucianism; it focuses on reincarnation and on the progress or ascension of the individual soul to higher and higher spiritual levels. In the hierarchical UDV, more advanced teachings are reserved for members who have attained higher levels of understanding. UDV ceremonies usually involve long periods of meditation in silence, or sometimes with recorded music, and listening to teachings from elders of the church while under the influence of the sacrament.
An important difference between UDV and Santo Daime is that the UDV is a single unified organization, while the Santo Daime is a movement with many diverse autonomous “currents” (but most Santo Daime churches outside of Brazil are affiliated with the CEFLURIS current).
Although both the Santo Daime and the UDV forbid proselytizing, both religions have spread from the jungle to cities in Brazil and have even become international, as people visiting from other countries have become involved with these religions and have founded centers in their own countries. The government of Brazil, after making several extensive studies of the matter, has recognized the legal right to religious use of Ayahuasca, but in many other countries these branches are forced to be clandestine. Another Brazilian Ayahuasca church, Barquinha (which considers itself a branch of Santo Daime, although its rituals are different) remains a small group confined to the Amazonian state of Acre where it was born.
There are also religious movements syncretizing Ayahuasca with Sufism (Fatimiya Sufi Order), Gnosticism (Gnostic Shamanism of Light), Sikhism, Wicca (Padeva). There a church that gives religious sanction to traditional shamanism in Peru (Soga del Alma). Individual practitioners of Buddhism blend Ayahuasca with their practice. New syncretic movements will undoubtedly continue to be born.
Another syncretic movement is between Ayahuasca shamanism and western psychotherapy. The most famous center for this is Takiwasi, a treatment center for drug addiction in Tarapoto, Peru, in which Ayahuasca shamans and western psychotherapists work together using Ayahuasca to help treat addicts of cocaine and other drugs.
Yet another Ayahuasca tradition, which began in the 1980s but became stronger in the late 1990s, is that of the western psychedelics tradition. Within this tradition, a custom started of using the word “ayahuasca” to mean any combination of MAOI and DMT, because the chemical action on the brain was what mattered. Their perspective was that Ayahuasca was simply an orally active form of DMT, the B. caapi vine was merely the potentiator of the DMT, and that any combination of plants, or even of pharmaceuticals and laboratory chemicals, that similarly resulted in orally active DMT was basically the same as Ayahuasca. Within the western psychedelic tradition, the term “ayahuasca” is often used to refer to a brew made of Peganum harmala and a DMT source, typically Mimosa hostilis.
Since some in the western psychedelic movement are serious spiritual seekers, within the western psychedelic movement has developed a tradition of using Ayahuasca primarily for mystical experiences, and for that purpose Ayahuasca and Mimosa/Rue can both serve — they can both be good catalysts for profound cosmic mystical experiences — as can many other Plant Teachers. But they are each distinct Teachers, each with its own distinct personality, each to be be respected for itself.
Yet another Ayahuasca syncretic movement is developing via what is known as “Ayahuasca tourism.” Individuals from industrialized countries are traveling to South America to drink Ayahuasca with Amazonian healers, and Amazonian healers are learning to adapt their healing traditions to the needs of patients from the western world. This is creating a new syncretism, because, just as mestizo curanderismo adapted to the issues of mestizo people, the needs, issues, and quests of people from industrialized countries are deeply different from kinds of problems and illnesses that Amazonian indigenous and mestizo curanderos have traditionally had to address. As a result, a new tradition is developing as some curanderos learn to adapt to the needs of foreigners; some curanderos are creating retreats specifically geared to foreigners (often in partnership with foreigners) and many of these have web sites.
The Ayahuasca tourism industry is centered in Iquitos, Peru, and to a lesser extent Pucallpa. Most of the curanderos who participate in it are mestizos; the only Indian group that has become significantly involved in Ayahuasca tourism is the Shipibos.
Traditional healers in the Amazon, both indigenous and mestizo, charge for their services; reciprocation is important in Amazonian and Andean culture, and in the Amazonian world one’s willingness to offer something of value communicates the seriousness of one’s intent to the spirits.
Needless to say, since foreigners represent money, there are increasing numbers of charlatans in these regions who represent themselves as trained shamans and offer Ayahuasca to tourists. These individuals can copy the outward forms of ceremonies they have witnessed, but in the Amazon a real shaman, or curandero, or vegetalista, or yachak, or paye, or paqo, has undergone highly disciplined training. People considering visiting these regions to drink Ayahuasca are encouraged to do research and educate themselves first.
Individuals who want less touristic, gringo-oriented settings, who want to share Ayahuasca in the context of real life of Amazonian people, may go to other regions, including Colombia (dangerous), Ecuador, or other parts of Peru. Indigenous as well as mestizo people are very open about sharing Ayahuasca (but payment is expected in return). By sharing Ayahuasca with foreigners, the Indians gain allies, because Ayahuasca drunk in the rainforest frequently converts the drinker into a passionate defender of the rainforest. (Indeed, Ayahuasca may have something to do with why the Amazon rainforest has become a passionate international cause in the past couple of decades.)
Sometimes Amazonian healers actually take on western apprentices and train them in their ancient practices. These western apprentices — who may remain in South America helping to run Ayahuasca retreats, or who may bring their healing practices back to their own countries — may be considered part of the broader “neo-shamanic” movement, a movement to adapt shamanism to the needs and problems of the industrialized world.
More and more practitioners of other healing arts have been going to South America to drink Ayahuasca with Amazonian curanderos, not to apprentice as a traditional ayahuasquero but rather to add dimensions of Ayahuasca shamanic healing to their primary modes of practice. Also, many westerners who do apprentice as ayahuasqueros blend their ayahuasquero training with other training they have had. These syncretic healing practices represent yet another level of Ayahuasca syncretism.
The Ayahuasca Forum aspires to create a spaciousness in which all these traditions, and individual seekers of all backgrounds, can communicate and exchange insights.
Safety precautions
Care should be taken with foods (e.g tyramine/protein containing foods) and drugs (e.g SSRI s) that have a contraindication for MAOI’s.
The beta-carbolines present in Banisteriopsis caapi, primarily harmine and tetrahydroharmine, inhibit the enzyme Monoamine Oxidase and reduces the metabolism of serotonin. Due to the MAO-inhibiting action of the vine, otherwise non-orally-active tryptamines such as N-N DMT and 5-MEO DMT from the admixture plants (Psychotria viridis or Diplopterys cabrerana) can reach receptor sites in the brain, unlocking the entheogenic mareacion.
This MAOI action also makes certain foods and pharmaceuticals hazardous that otherwise would not be.
Interaction with pharmaceuticals can be much more dangerous than food interactions. Even some OTC pharmaceuticals like antihistamines, decongrestants, ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, diet pills, and allergy medication can have potentially serious interaction with Ayahuasca. If you are taking pharmaceuticals, please inform yourself about the potential for MAOI interaction before taking Ayahuasca.
Lastly, there is a very rare and idiosyncratic reaction to caffeine and Ayahuasca in a very few individuals. Until you know you are not in this category, be careful combining Ayahuasca with caffeine.
Purification
There is another aspect to diet with Ayahuasca, the shamanic dieta. The dieta has many variations, because it is practiced in many cultures (practically all traditional Ayahuasca cultures have a form of dieta, which is remarkably similar across cultures that are otherwise very dissimilar), and because it has various purposes: being healed, learning how to heal others, and learning how to communicate with plants. A dieta can last any length of time from one day to years. In its essence it involves avoiding strongly flavored food and sexual stimulation. In a western setting, it would undoubtedly include fasting from television and mass media as well. For more threads on dieta
The Purge
“When it came, it was earthshaking! ALL the filth, negativity, malice, ill will, and unforgiveness of myself, was loosed from me. Image after image of all life’s unpleasantries, ill will, the dual part of my nature, that evil that is seamlessly woven into the very fabric of much of this world, and pollutes, and deviates us from our true soul/self, it was all gloriously expelled over the course of 20-30 long, glorious, vomit saturated minutes.”
The Purge may be strong or mild, may happen several times in one session or may not happen at all, but it is a central part of the Ayahuasca There are ways to reduce the purge, but if you can learn to accept it and flow with it can actually be very enjoyable. It is a release and purification. If you fight it, it will be more difficult and unpleasant. Give in to it and just go with it. Imagine all of the distractions, discomfort and pain you have within you being released with each purge. Let it flow as it is supposed to. Accept it as part of the experience.
After it is all through you will feel very good, very clean and pure.
The clearer ones system, the better able one is to receive and integrate spiritual energies the knowledge of Ayahuasca. The concept of subtle body phlegm is an important one in Amazonian shamanism. Vegetalistas say that Ayahuasca is needed for cleansing all the flemosidades (phlegm formations) that accumulate in the intestines. The flemosidades are believed to arise from environmental toxins, certain foods, trauma (susto, soul loss), and moral transgressions such as ill will, etc. Analogous to blockages of chi in the meridians, or prana in the nadis, flemosidades disrupt the smooth functioning of the body and mind. Clearing the flemosidades prepares the body to journey deeper into health and wisdom.
Legality
Ayahuasca with DMT is illegal or of ambiguous legality in many places in the world. In certain countries the active components of B. caapi are also illegal. For a discussion of the legal issues.
Cultivation
Growing these plants will be one of the most rewarding aspects of your experience. Growing the plants yourself helps you develop a relationship with the plants. Using an Ayahuasca brew with plants you grew deepens the experience; the plants will have gotten to know you and this will emerge as a very important aspect in your journeys with Ayahuasca.
Even growing them as companion plants can deepen your experience with the Ayahuasca brew.