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.

The very first Evolver Intensive was hosted by Jeremy Narby, and it set a serious precedent. Hundreds of people gathering together online, via webcams to discuss and explore Ayahuasca with some of the most well respected visionaries of our age.

Now it is time for another round, as there are endless avenues, paths and canopies to explore on the subject.

These sessions are intimate, interactive, exciting, engaging and, I dare say, uplifting. Ayahuasca.com is an enthusiastic sponsor of this event and we hope you will join us, along with Jeremy Narby, and guests Steve Beyer, Benny Shanon, Kenneth Tupper, Susana Bustos, and Martina Hoffmann to explore how Ayahuasca is transforming the lives of people around the world, challenging Western notions about healing, art, religion, and the intelligence of nature.

Registration for the course is $129

Not long ago, the vine of the soul, ayahuasca, was virtually unknown outside the Amazon region. Today it attracts the attention of legions of Western seekers drawn to the prospect of deep wisdom available through indigenous shamanic practices that involve the use of psychedelic plants. Ayahuasca is revered by ancient tribal societies as a potent teacher capable of healing the body, expanding the mind, and strengthening community.

• What can modern people can learn from indigenous cultures about the use of ayahuasca as part of a healing practice?
• What can be learned directly from the spirit vine — which can be a powerful and tricky teacher — and how can we incorporate these lessons into our daily lives?
• In what ways do indigenous people benefit from the Western interest in shamanism, and what new cultural bridges are being built through the spread of indigenous spiritual practices?

The renowned anthropologist Jeremy Narby has explored these questions for over two decades. In his much-admired books, including The Cosmic Serpent and Shamans Through Time, Jeremy has shared his wisdom and insights. Last winter, Jeremy hosted his first Evolver Intensives course, Awakening the Cosmic Serpent: Shamanism and Plant Teachers in this Transformative Time, which offered a rare opportunity to explore the nuances of plant medicine with some of the world’s leading visionary thinkers on the subject.

As participants in that course will attest, Jeremy is a remarkable teacher. If you missed that course, here is your chance to take part in a special online event, watching the live video stream and asking your questions directly to inspirational pioneers. If you were there, you won’t want to miss the continued exploration of topics charted in the first course, as Jeremy leads in-depth discussions with 5 exciting new guests: Steve Beyer, Benny Shanon, Kenneth Tupper, Susana Bustos, and Martina Hoffmann.

This course gives you the tools you need to integrate the shamanic knowledge offered by ayahuasca into your life, so you can fully embrace the change called for by this time of global transformation.

• Learn how plant teachers teach their own secrets, such as how to sing to them and how use them
• Explore how well shamans actually cure sickness
• Discuss the predatory and ambiguous nature of ayahuasca shamanism
• Learn the categories of visions that people have
• Discover whether drinkers of the brew gain access to specific factual information
• Review the influence of ayahuasca on contemporary visionary art
• Explore ayahuasca’s recent transnational expansion, and why it remained obscure for most Euroamericans until the last part of the 20th century?

This course takes place on 5 Sundays, between October 9 and November 6 and you can participate from your laptop anywhere in the world with a broadband connection. If you can watch a YouTube video, you can take part in this course.

Each seminar is devoted to one-on-one conversations between Jeremy and a featured guest, followed by a Q & A session in which you can take part. This will be a live, dynamic experience in which you become part of a community of students sharing real time with some of the most inspiring visionaries of our era.

Steve Beyer

Benny Shannon

Kenneth Tupper

Susana Bustos

Martina Hoffmann

ABOUT OUR HOST

Given the many research findings related to the use of ayahuasca, from finding no physical or psychological harm in chronic use (Callaway et al., 1999; Riba & Barbanoj, 2005), to its benefits in spiritual inquiry and psychological growth (Dobkin de Rios et al., 2005; Doering-Silveira et al., 2005; Grob et al., 1996; Hoffmann, Keppel-Hesselink, & da Silveira Barbosa 2001; Naranjo 1979; Shanon 2002; Trichter, 2006; Trichter et al., 2009), it is of no wonder that increased attention is being given to the brew by Western researchers and seekers alike. Despite these findings and extensive anecdotal reports of healing and transformation, there is concern about how this growing phenomenon could harm those Westerners who partake in the ayahuasca brew, unless guidelines are created to protect their physical, psychological and spiritual health.

The movement of ayahuasca rituals from an Amazonian cultural context to a Western one creates the potential for serious risks to participants as this movement gains popularity in the West. It is only within the Amazonian indigenous cultures and syncretic Brazilian churches in which power hierarchies and traditional family-community structure exist that the current models of ayahuasca ritual have thrived. Although there are many aspects of these rituals that would benefit Westerners, it is important to realize how differences in culture are likely to require an adaptation and evolution when applied to new settings.

In a detailed look into what is happening in “ayahuasca tourism,” Dobkin de Rios and Rumrrill (2008) pointed to the health of Western users who participate in an unregulated and economically challenged Amazon region where charlatans and malevolent practitioners use the hallucinogenic brew to take advantage of high paying Western ayahuasca tourists.

Although their work and similar findings contain important contributions to the literature, I take the position that a significant number of more subtle, yet equally harmful psychological risks are involved in integrating ayahuasca-based rituals into Western contexts, even if knowledgeable, trained and respected ceremony leaders are the ones sharing the brew. Ayahuasca rituals over the centuries have adapted to their indigenous cultural context to best serve those communities. With a rapidly growing diversity of people participating in these rituals, the slow refining process used to best suit the people and communities involved is not possible. With the import of the ayahuasca trade to North America, Europe and Australia, those participating in these ceremonies, even with well intentioned and trained ayahuasca ritual leaders, are at risk of harm.

Psychiatric and medical risks

Because of the increased consumption of ayahuasca in the West, there is a need to acknowledge the medical, psychiatric, and psychological, risks involved in mixing the psychoactive chemicals of the brew. Psychiatric risks include the risks of combining ayahuasca with prescription medications, particularly the SSRI anti-depressants (Callaway & Grob, 1998). In addition, individuals diagnosed with a mental health disorder or at high risk for one are taking a potent psychedelic and are putting themselves at risk for decompensation and the potential for mental and emotional stress. Experiences can bring up past traumas or can bring about new traumatic experiences that participants may not be able have the ego strength or emotional capabilities to work through without causing significant disturbances to themselves, their friends, and their families. Further research is needed in identifying the risks and benefits of different populations, including healthy populations, neurotic patients, and psychotic patients. This kind of experience is not for everyone, just as any psychospiritual practice may not be a good match for everyone. The hallucinogenic properties of the brew allow the ego’s defenses to lower, facilitating investigation into oneself; however, this scenario can induce a rush of fear and paranoia, and psychotic states can result. Therefore it is suggested that only healthy people would find the most value participating in an ayahuasca ceremony. Determining who can safely participate in these ayahuasca rituals will continually need to be re-addressed as further research is conducted.

Spiritual Risk

In a time of postmodern and New Age hodgepodge spirituality in which Westerners often reject their Judeo-Christian past, and end up picking and choosing from different religious and mystical traditions to create an idiosyncratic spirituality, it is of great importance that the implications of introducing such a powerful shamanic tool into the West are examined. Often spiritual seekers, in an effort to escape their own psychological challenges and traumas of their past, turn towards spirituality to find answers. Roberts (2001) explained that a “genuine encounter with the Ultimate does not guarantee a genuine spirituality. The experience may be authentic, but how authentic their spirituality wasdepends on what those who had the experience do with it” (p. xii). John Welwood (2000), in his examination of the Eastern religious movement into the West termed the phenomenon “spiritual bypass,” explored the idea that people often turn to and get absorbed into an unhealthy relationship with spirituality to avoid examining their psychological issues.

Welwood’s concern about spiritual bypass expresses the sentiment that we are only successful at finding psychological health if we truly unravel our unhealthy personality patterns and/or have a history of positive psychological development. Participating in an ayahuasca ceremony in and of itself creates a risk of falling into old patterns, newly masked. This idea flies in the face of many of those who blindly rush towards the potential spiritual and psychological benefits discussed earlier. As Welwood illuminated, much has been learned from the challenges of the movement of Eastern religions to the West that those seeking enlightenment in ashrams and on mountaintops may sometimes merely push their pain into the unconscious while donning a shiny new spiritual practice veneer. Immersing oneself in a community based on ayahuasca rituals can create many similar blind spots to self-growth and well-being.

Furthermore, one must acknowledge the possibility that spiritual seekers who pursue ayahuasca rituals may be looking for answers to some of their life’s challenges in the bottom of a glass of a hallucinogenic tea. While studies (MacRae, 1992; Sulla, 2005; Trichter, 2006; Villaescusa, 2002) have shown that profound insights are possible during ayahuasca ceremonies, there are no studies of Westerners to date that show that these insights can be integrated into the patient’s ongoing life in order to make the positive changes they are seeking. With no ongoing treatment or continuity of care, not only might patients find it difficult to integrate these insights into their life, but if the ceremony breaks down psychological defenses and results in opening up trauma that is left unresolved, these patients are at risk of developing new or exacerbating old psychological difficulties.

Through my clinical work, I have discovered that many Western participants in ayahuasca ceremonies seek out the weekend long spiritual retreats typical in the West, for similar reasons that Fotiou (2010) has found in shamanic tourism – for self transformation, healing, accessing the sacred, etc. They end up depending on the retreats for this type of environment and seek out ceremonies during which they may connect to the medicine, sometimes several dozen times per year. As discussed elsewhere in more detail (Trichter, 2009) and seen through my clinical work with patients, some of these individuals often find themselves coming back for more insights, connection with alleged spirits, and alleged spiritual healing in a compulsive way. This ceremony-craving behavior is the result of a co-dependence on the ayahuasca rituals and its components, which is a form of what could be called spiritual addiction. It is a way in which the person uses an external object as a soothing coping mechanism. This will likely fail repeatedly as the patient will become psychologically dependent on the ayahuasca to achieve these visions, feelings, and insights.

Despite the sense of connection that I previously reported in many ayahuasca ceremony participants (Trichter, 2006), I have observed in some patients in my clinical practice a sense of spiritual narcissism, a phenomenon similar to Welwood’s (2000) observations when eastern religions moved to the West. Individuals become so deeply involved in the spiritual path with the ceremonies that they become unaware of the impact of their spiritual pursuits. Through my clinical practice I have observed participants who do not have compassion for others who do not share the ideology of the community. Other people have pushed aside their life’s work and their loved ones in order to spend more time drinking ayahuasca in ceremony to connect with what they consider to be “the spirit world.”

Ethical and Legal Challenges

One of the greatest challenges of the movement of ayahuasca culture to the West is the movement of a tradition rooted in psychoactive substances and shamanic community leaders to ones with vastly different contemporary and historical cultural values. In a risk similar to the challenges of adopting Eastern guru-based practices in the West (Kornfield, 1993; Welwood, 2000), the ayahuasca ritual leader’s position of power in combination with the psychoactive brew can create many challenges. Ayahuasqueros are in the center of power, of psychoactive substances, and of wealthy and devoted participants who often see the brew as a means of connecting with the Divine. This often leads to participants who idealize the shamanic practitioner, sometimes falling in love and occasionally developing a sexual relationship with him or her.

The interpersonal dynamics and energy between the practitioner who is conducting an ayahuasca ritual and the participant can cause significant harm in the participant when not handled appropriately. Ayahuasca ceremony leaders often come from other Amazonian cultural traditions and are rarely trained in the knowledge of transference and countertransference issues — terms used in psychotherapy to describe the unconscious projections of energy between patient and therapist. This knowledge is necessary in order for ayahuasca ritual leaders to navigate these powerful energies within a culturally appropriate Western framework.

As discussed in more detail elsewhere (Trichter, 2009), it is not uncommon that well-established and seasoned ayahuasca ritual leaders demonstrate countertransference towards the participants in their circles. The ayahuasqueros may end up superimposing their own agenda on the client, claiming that the client needs to go through certain types of intense experiences, some of them sexual in nature. Some ritual leaders have been known to project erotic fantasies into their work with participants. Although often not consciously wielding their power over the participants in drug induced states, sexual relationships are quite common between healers and participants during rituals and sometimes continue on an ongoing basis.

Strong feelings of the ayahuasca ritual leader can emerge in other ways as well. Leaders can be supportive or punishing towards certain of the participants’ reactions to their action, the effects of the brew, or the ceremony in general. Ritual leaders may project their feelings of anger, disappointment, shame, or guilt onto participants if they do not act according to expectations. Clients can also idealize the leaders losing their original intention for participating in the rituals by focusing more attention and energy on the leader than on their own growth and development (Kornfield, 1993).

Regardless of the setting, ayahuasca leaders have been known to be attached to certain ideologies and dogmas that are entwined in their traditions. It is often in these cases that ceremony leaders with little understanding of how their own personal reactions can be psychologically harmful to the participants can do a great disservice to those they attempt to heal.

Within the Western framework of psychological healing, the therapist creates a safe container by examining his or her countertransference issues and keeping any idiosyncratic or impulsive feelings from entering the room or the group. A well-developed theory regarding how the ayahuasca ceremony leader relates to participants as part of the healing process would be useful in this exploration. Otherwise, without this relational agreement, negative results can occur, causing pain to the participant. For example, if the ceremony leader prefers hearing about one type of experience and not another, then the result becomes conditioned, and little, if any, growth can occur.

A final consideration involves the regulation of ayahuasca. In the countries of the Amazon (principally Brazil, Peru, and Ecuador), the use of ayahuasca, whether in the indigenous context or in the religious contexts described earlier, is legal. In the Western world, the situation is not clear. Although UDV’s right to use ayahuasca has been affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court, Dimethyltryptamine, in itself, remains a Schedule I substance in the United States, which makes it illegal for administration and consumption (Bullis, 2008).

Regardless of whether or not there is ambiguous legal status there are no standards (or protocol) of how ayahuasca ceremonies are to be safely and effectively conducted, nor any ethical guidelines for how ayahuasca ceremony leaders should work with their participants in any country. There are many disparate ceremony leaders from various cultural traditions, and different schools of thought, each with idiosyncratic variations on ceremonies that make standards and regulations of ayahuasca ceremonies and ceremony leaders’ conduct difficult, if not impossible, to maintain. Furthermore, because of the great variability within ayahuasca ceremonies and ceremony leaders right now, there is no current protocol on how ayahuasca ceremonies could be integrated as a beneficial part of psychotherapy, counseling, or spiritual development.

Conclusions

The growing evidence of the positive benefits of drinking ayahuasca has led to a surge in use from its original base in South America to ritual leaders traveling worldwide conducting ceremonies with the brew. However, these benefits do not come without serious risks involved. There are many precautions that should be taken on order to insure the protection of ayahuasca ritual participants as this indigenous shamanic tradition makes its way into the Western world. The following list is by no means exhaustive, as it is not meant to make recommendations beyond the author’s field of expertise.

Education

It is of increasing importance that the public needs to be educated about the traditional use of ayahuasca in both church and indigenous settings, so that they can be well-informed about making a decision whether or not to participate in these rituals. Too often participants blindly trust ayahuasca ritual leaders and place their medical and psychological well-being into the hands of strangers. The growing body of knowledge gathered by seasoned ayahuasca communities and academia needs to be utilized to educate naïve newcomers about the psychological and spiritual risks and benefits of working with ayahuasca. Creating a cross-cultural document about the medical risks involved in contraindicated medicines and foods and sharing the document with pertinent forums and centers could prevent unnecessary hospitalizations and deaths.

Additionally, by educating those interested in participating in ayahuasca rituals regarding the traditional uses of the brew, the cultures in which the rituals originated and the cosmology of the traditions, there would likely be an increase in seriousness, reverence, structure, and cohesive community support with contemporary rituals. Simultaneously, education of this sort would likely decrease the use of ayahuasca ritual as “spiritual recreation,” as well as the number of unskilled leaders who are not prepared to handle the challenges that manifest during ceremonies.

Psychotherapeutic Integration

By combining ayahuasca rituals with Western psychotherapeutic models, participation in these traditions could be brought towards a healthy Western psychospiritual healing practice. Takiwasi, a center that combines ayahuasca and other indigenous healing tools with psychotherapy, is one such model that has been treating patients suffering from severe drug addiction for the past 25 years in Tarapoto, Peru (Mabit, 2007). Through such integration, the psychological health of participants could be safeguarded so that during psychotherapy sessions they could explore potential spiritual bypass and investigate shame or guilt that may have come up in transference-countertransference issues within the ayahuasca ritual context. Standing alone, the ayahuasca ceremony has the potential of creating meaningful and significant mystical and spiritual states of being; however, combined with psychotherapy, specific qualities of such states can further promote the essential goals that have been proven to be effective in the Western psychotherapeutic modalities.

Another benefit of integrating psychotherapy and ayahuasca rituals is that it would allow licensed and experienced mental health professionals to help screen, prepare potential crisis intervention, and work with emerging traumas and post-ceremony integration. The work that can be done with an experienced licensed mental health professional begins with preparing the client with the potential of emotionally challenging material that may come up during the ceremonies. The clinician can also work with the client to prepare an intention as a focusing of the client’s psychospiritual needs at the time of the ceremony. Doing so may enable the client to guide the direction of the experience towards gaining insights into pertinent areas that are challenging the client’s presenting problem or development.

To achieve the greatest benefit from an ayahuasca ceremony, it would be valuable for the client to have participated in therapy for some time. One of the key benefits that could be found in integrating psychotherapy and an ayahuasca ritual would be that the previous therapeutic work could be brought into the ayahuasca ritual for further investigation, the experiences could be further explored, and the interpretation’s validity tested in the dream-like states of the ayahuasca experience.

The client could prepare for the ayahuasca ritual work by setting an intention to further explore themes that have come up during therapy and could examine any resistance recognized in the consultation room during the ceremony. The clients who might be working on several themes in their ongoing therapy could determine with appropriately trained clinicians which ones might be most effectively explored during an ayahuasca ritual.

During ayahuasca rituals it would be valuable to have a well-trained clinician available for participants who were overwhelmed, agitated, and/or unstable during the experience. It is possible for participants in ayahuasca ceremony to be in crisis due to fear and anxiety over the altered state of consciousness or the psychological material that comes up. One major psychological service that can be employed during these ceremonies is having people trained in crisis intervention available. Often in the Western context, ceremonies have “sitters” assisting participants who are confused or disoriented. Sitters could be trained in relaxation techniques, empathic listening, and simply being present to alleviate some of the stressors that occur during these crises.

Few sitters are trained in mental health procedures and many are inadequately able to assist the participants or work with the client to use the psychological material that is coming up for the client to their benefit. In the traditional ayahuasca context, the ritual leader, or ayahuasquero uses icaros (songs), native tobacco, and other shamanic tools to assist the struggling participant (Luna, 1986). However, this is part of a larger context of community support found in the traditional culture. Although these tools can and should be utilized in the ceremony, it is not unheard of that individuals sometime seek more Western-oriented tools to aid in the process during ceremony. A clinician trained in integrating spirituality and psychotherapy, is helpful to have on hand to help individuals work through their experience if needed in the moment.

Most contemporary psychotherapeutic frameworks state that a therapeutic relationship is necessary for the client to experience sincere relatedness to others and to develop a stronger sense of oneself. Therefore, the sense of interconnectedness that participants feel with this type of work could be supplemented with such psychotherapeutic techniques to create complementary benefits (Shanon 2002; Trichter, 2006). Although the sense of connection sometimes felt during experiences with ayahuasca can have healing benefits for participants, there is often no ongoing concrete relationship that is deliberately occurring during the group rituals. This causes questions of the sustainable impact of these feelings on contemporary Western psyche. By bringing the feelings of connection to a therapeutic relationship alongside participation in an ayahuasca ritual, they could be further explored and integrated.

The integration of ayahuasca ceremony into a framework of ongoing psychotherapy would create a greater sense of safety for the client when participating in an ayahuasca ritual. This would allow the participant to explore a situation that often brings up fear, feeling fully prepared. It would also allow the client to share his or her experiences with the therapist post-ceremony. Lastly, this rapport would create an opportunity for the therapist to make interpretations more freely while the ceremony experience is more temporally and affectively grounded within the client. After participating in the ceremony, the affective experiences and the insights that may have been obtained through the ayahuasca ritual could be interpreted, worked through, and integrated into the ongoing therapy.

In order to avoid the pitfalls of spiritual bypass, numbing distraction, and egocentric self involvement (Welwood, 2000), it is valuable for a trained clinician to work with the participants of the ayahuasca ceremony afterwards in order to help them use the material to interface with their intentions, spiritual growth, interpersonal connections, and psychological development. Welwood’s concern about spiritual bypass expresses sentiments similar to the psychotherapy model which states that we are only successful at finding health if we link affective expression and interpersonal connection with reality, not fantasy (Mitchell, 1993). When clients participate in an ayahuasca ceremony, psychotherapy creates an opportunity for the therapist and client to work through any of the breakthroughs that occurred during the ceremony to explore whether they are founded in fantasy or reality. As ayahuasca rituals are transferred into a Western culture that does not automatically support them, a means of integration is needed in order for clients to take the lessons from the ritual and incorporate them into their daily life. Because these rituals only happen sporadically in the West and the ritual leaders are often traveling between communities, there is often a feeling of longing for the next opportunity to connect with the experiences attached to earlier ayahuasca experiences. By exploring the insights, wisdom, and healing that have come out of ayahuasca ritual experiences regularly in psychotherapy, the feelings of connection, growth, strength, will, and purpose that are often reported can not only be integrated, but a tendency for dependence on the ayahuasca rituals for such states can be extinguished.

Ethical Guidelines

In addition to education and integration into Western psychotherapy, individuals would be protected from potential risks if ayahuasca ritual communities created ethical guidelines stating the proper use of the sacrament and conduct of participants and ceremony leaders. The educational movement and the collaboration with mental health professionals will only be possible through building communities and community networks to share knowledge and set standards of care during ayahuasca rituals. This is a departure from the rivalry that is commonplace between ayahuasqueros in the indigenous setting, where shamans speak badly of each other and are sometimes involved in combative sorcery (Dobkin de Rios & Rumrrill, 2008). The building of these collaborative relationships between Western communities and the ayahuasca ritual leaders with whom they work will allow proper dissemination of the educational materials, as well as medical and psychological screening standards.

Ayahuasca ritual leaders in the Western setting need to be held accountable for these outcomes because if they are not embedded in a community in which there is a continuum of feedback and accountability, they can take advantage of and abuse ritual participants and continue on to their next destination unchecked. In a similar vein to Dobkin de Rios and Rumrrill’s (2008) work, I am proposing that by setting up intra and intercommunity dialogue around ethics and monitoring the reputations of different ritual leaders the community can be protected from predators. Those ritual leaders who need to work on issues that come up with Westerners can receive the feedback they need in order to obtain further training or do personal work. Kornfield (1993) writes that Eastern religion teachers in the West had “to deal with the underlying roots of problems in themselves, whether old wounds, cultural and family history, isolation, addiction, or their own grandiosity. In some communities masters have ended up attending AA meetings or seeking counseling. In others, decision-making councils were formed to end the isolation of the teacher” (p. 264).

Setting up ethics for the communities and ayahuasca ritual leaders also would be beneficial so that the powerful temptations of power, sex, and money can be discussed transparently and leaders could be held accountable. Currently, there are no cross-cultural ethical standards by which ayahuasca ritual leaders must abide. They receive no coursework in ethics, nor are they required or advised to go through any type of personal psychotherapy, consultation, or supervision to examine any personal issues that may come up in the work they conduct.

Some groups have already begun to explore this idea such as the Montreal chapter of the Santo Daime (Ceu do Montreal Santo Daime Church of Canada, 2008) and the Indigenous Doctors Union Yageceros of the Colombian Amazon (Unión de Médicos Indigenas Yageceros de la Amazonia Colombiana, 1999). The UDV also has a 50 year tradition of monitoring the ethical conducts of their leaders (mestres) (Henman, 1986; Luís Fernando Tófoli, personal communication, February 6, 2011). More dialogue needs to be created not only within communities, but between communities so that those seeking guidance and healing from this plant medicine are adequately protected when entering such powerful and vulnerable states of consciousness.

Dobkin de Rios and Rumrrill (2008) make a strong case for the dangers involved in working with inexperienced or charlatan neo-shamans, those who have not studied the depths of the tradition and are solely seeking money, sex, and/or power. Although their investigation is extensive, there is an equally important need for the examination of well established and respected ayahuasqueros and other ayahuasca ritual leaders, whose practices and/or personal beliefs may be in conflict with participants from urban or international cultures, thus causing unintended harm to their patients. A well-developed theory regarding how the ayahuasca ceremony leader relates to participants as part of the healing process would be useful in the exploration of transference and counter-transference issues. If the participant knows that their emotions are accepted within the therapeutic relationship, the client can move from the fantasy that they have been holding onto – that affective expression yields pain and tension – to a realistic observation that connection with others through affective expression can exist.

In this global age it is no longer acceptable to claim naiveté or tradition when intentionally crossing cultural boundaries as a healer. Until we begin to look at all of these challenges in detail, the full range of potential benefits cannot be considered inside a vacuum. The community of those who participate in ayahuasca rituals must take it upon themselves to protect themselves as individuals and a community from potential harms so that they can explore the depth and beauty of the healing potential of the sacred brew.

References

Bullis, R.K. (2008). The “Vine of the Soul” vs. The Controlled Substances Act: Implications of the hoasca case. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 40, 193-199.

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The Author

Stephen Trichter is a licensed psychologist in private practice, a candidate at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California in San Francisco, and an adjunct professor at Alliant University. In addition to working with his patients and teaching future psychologists, he is currently interested in how meditative dream states can be effectively integrated into the analytic relationship.

A manuscript that links Conan Doyle, fellow novelist H Rider Haggard and a hallucinogenic plant from South America (WMS/Amer.148).

It’s a report from 1927 by Edward Morell Holmes, an English botanist, into the properties of Yagé, a South American drug, which – refering to a conversation initiated by Sir H. Rider Haggard, author of King Solomon’s Mines – “causes clairvoyant and telepathic effects”. The manuscript refers to a full account of the drug by A. Rouhier in Bulletin des Sciences Pharmacologiques, 1926, 33, 252-261 (which Holmes’ notes summarise) and also to South American knowledge of Yagé.

But the Conan Doyle connection comes with the most fascinating aspect of this manuscript. The notes talk of a tincture of the drug prepared by the leading pharmacist W.H. Martindale (1875?-1933) and Holmes’s attempts to pass it on to “some of our leading scientific Spiritualists to experiment with including Sir A. Conan Doyle, Professor (Sir) Oliver Lodge, and Sir (W.) F. Barrett”.

These beliefs of these men in the ability to contact the spirit world is well recorded: Conan Doyle took his belief strongly enough to publish a History of Spiritualism in 1926; Lodge, a key figure in the development of the wireless, was like Conan Doyle a member of the Society for Psychical Research, and Barrett was a physicist and the author of such works as The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism and On The Threshold Of A New World Of Thought.

But do we know if their interest in spiritualism was enough for these men to test out the “telepathic effects” of the tincture”? Did Holmes, indeed, ever contact them? So far, our research has drawn a blank…

It is a manuscript we feel in need of more attention. Given its hoped for attraction to men of letters from the early 20th century, we even wonder if the notes may even shed light on the interest in Yagé of the beat author William Burroughs in the 1950s, in light of possible explanations as to how Burroughs developed an interest in the drug.

Edward Morell Holmes

We wonder then, if Holmes’s notes featured here may add something to this debate: even if not, they shed an intriguing light on scientific and literary circles in the early part of the twentieth century, and suggest a topic that we feel would have piqued the interest – and possibly the taste buds – of Holmes’s namesake and Conan Doyle’s most famous literary creation.

Images:
- Text of Holmes’s Notes on Yagé
- Portrait of Edward Morell Holmes

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

These days are intense. No question. Depending on your perspective, things are moving with astonishing speed and clarity, or painfully slow, and saddening. We need to act fast. We need to shed our skins, and redesign. We need to do this together.

Come along with Starhawk, Van Jones, Vandana Shiva, Toby Hemenway, Ernest Callenbach, Carolyn Stayton and Mark Lakeman on four consecutive Wednesdays, from March 30 through April 20 at 9:00 p.m. EST, to dive deeply, intimately and comprehensively into How To Redesign The World: Lessons From The Fifth Sacred Thing.

Evolver Intensives are, well, intense.

Video calling and conferencing has become the norm, via Skype and so forth, but these sessions – these feel different. It’s quite an experience to gather together with a large and diverse group of people from around the planet, see each other, interact, chat, and sit comfortably with respected visionaries, luminaries and elders; sharing stories, experiences, wisdom, designs and energy openly, intimately, eloquently.

If you’ve participated in the previous session; Awakening The Cosmic Serpent, you know what I’m talking about; it’s a global campfire, and it’s warm and friendly.

Where Awakening the Cosmic Serpent explored worlds beyond, How To Redesign The World, takes things in another direction – down to earth, ground level, grassroots.

If you’re drawn towards peace, practical solutions, permaculture, transition towns, economics and ecology, community, regeneration, balance, and vision – then let’s go.

The course begins March 30 and runs four consecutive Wednesdays at 9:00 PM EST.

Registration is $110, and includes:

• Four 90-minute live video seminars with Starhawk and featured guests
• 30 minutes of question-and-answer time in each seminar
• Breakout sessions for student discussion following each seminar
• Participation in a private online community with other students
• Unlimited online access to videos of all seminars
• PDF articles about course topics from Starhawk and each of the guests

Gather your friends, family and neighbours together, share the cost and make it a weekly event!

Overview:

Without a clear vision of the future, how can we move forward? A vision crystallizes vague hope into concrete direction.

• What would it look like, feel like to live in harmony with nature? To live in a world that celebrates diversity, where art, joy, love and compassion take precedence over war and weapons? How would we grow our food, produce what we need, educate the young and care for the old?
• How can we turn this vision of the future into the mission that guides our lives today, so it can shape the world of tomorrow?
• What forward-looking efforts now exist to inform and nurture the growth of your vision?

In her utopian novel, The Fifth Sacred Thing, Starhawk offers a vision of a green, multicultural society based on reverence for the four sacred things, a vision that has inspired countless readers, and has changed lives. In the novel, northern California has survived ecological and social catastrophes to become a place where no one goes hungry or homeless, streams flow through former streets, gardens are everywhere, and the culture has the strength and fortitude to resist invasion without turning to violence.

As we head into times of great chaos and potential destruction, we need a vision of a positive future. In this course, Starhawk will train us in some of the basic tools of magic, “the art of changing consciousness at will”: meditation, visualization and grounding. We’ll then use those tools to generate our own vision.

For over three decades, Starhawk has been one of our most respected and influential visionaries, leading the revival of earth-based spirituality and Goddess religion. In her work as an eco and peace organizer, she has trained thousands of activists in the skills necessary for effecting real change consistent with their deepest held convictions. As a prize-winning author or co-author of 11 books, her voice has been instrumental in shaping the ecological consciousness many of us share today.

Join Starhawk as she takes part in intimate, in-depth discussions with five fellow pioneers who are helping to move us into the future we want to see: Van Jones, Vandana Shiva, Toby Hemenway, Ernest Callenbach, Mark Lakeman, and Carolyn Stayton. In her talks with these remarkable thinkers, writers and activists, she’ll explore some of the most inspiring efforts to create the diverse, sustainable, exuberant society depicted in The Fifth Sacred Thing. For the course, Starhawk will also suggest discussion topics, exercises and journaling for participants to develop their own clear visions and map the path for getting there. Participants will come away from this course with renewed inspiration and practical ideas for making the transition to a truly abundant, just and resilient world.

You will be part of this unique online event, watching the live video stream and asking your questions directly to these inspirational pioneers.

Starhawk For over three decades, Starhawk has been one of our most respected and influential visionaries, leading the revival of earth-based spirituality and Goddess religion. In her work as an eco and peace organizer, she has trained thousands of activists in the skills necessary for effecting real change consistent with their deepest held convictions. As a prize-winning author or co-author of 11 books, her voice has been instrumental in shaping the ecological consciousness many of us share today.

Vandana Shiva In her many roles as environmentalist, physicist, feminist and philosopher, Vandana has been a powerful voice of deep conviction, grounded in solid research. Her ability to combine intellectual study with grassroots activism in the fields of eco-feminism, bio-piracy and intellectual property rights has won her many international awards, including the Right Livelihood Award (the Alternative Nobel Prize), the Earth Day International Award, and the Global 500 Award.

In 1984, Vandana founded Navdanya, an organization which helps India’s small farmers to develop organic farming methods and ensure biodiversity. Following on the success of Navdanya, she started Bija Vidyapeeth in Dehradun, India, to popularize holistic living practices.

Van Jones Globally recognized, award-winning pioneer in human rights and the clean-energy economy, the co-founder of three successful non-profit organizations: the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Color of Change, and Green For All. Author of the definitive, best-selling book on green jobs, The Green-Collar Economy, Van served as the green jobs advisor in the Obama White House in 2009.

Carolyne Stayton Executive Director of Transition US, Carolyne, brings over thirty years of experience with nonprofit organizations and educational institutions to the growth of a grassroots network that aligns community activists around a shared vision and a unified mission. Carolyn will talk about the movement to organize in our towns and neighborhoods for a graceful transition to a society that uses less fossil fuel energy but has more time for relationships, connection and real abundance.

Mark Lakeman In the last decade he has directed or facilitated designs for more than 300 new community-generated public places in Portland, Oregon alone. Through his leadership in Communitecture, Inc., and its nonprofit affiliate, The City Repair Project, he has also been instrumental in the development of dozens of participatory design projects and organizations across the United States and Canada. Mark works with governmental leaders, community organizations, and educational institutions in many diverse communities.

Toby Hemenway Author of the classic introduction to permaculture, Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, which for the last seven years has been the best-selling permaculture book in the world.

Ernest Callenbach Author of the utopian novel Ecotopia, one of the inspirations for The Fifth Sacred Thing and an environmental classic that has sold almost a million copies.

Click here for further information and to register.

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It is a very, very wild era;  increasing numbers of people around the world are engaging shamanism and sacred plants—potent teachers capable of healing the body, expanding consciousness, and strengthening community.

However, these plants, plant teachers, shamanic practices and spirit worlds can be a difficult landscape to navigate. There is much to learn. It is not easy.

Join host Jeremy Narby for a groundbreaking series of live online lectures, and one-on-one discussions with four of the world’s leading experts on the shamanic use of plants:  Wade Davis, Kat Harrison, Stanislav Grof, and Luis Eduardo Luna.

The course is a unique, rare and exciting opportunity to learn from, and engage in discussion with these well respected elders.

For the course, Jeremy will give two lectures, and also conduct four one-to-one discussions with guests Stan Grof, Wade Davis, Kat Harrison, and Luis Eduardo Luna. All this takes place using a real-time, interactive video technology easily accessible to anyone with a laptop and a broadband connection. If you can see YouTube videos, you can take part in an Evolver Intensives seminar.

Ayahuasca.com is a enthusiastic supporter and sponsor of this event. We sincerely hope you will join us, in the midst of this wild, wild era, to discuss, listen, learn, explore, discover and dive deep with Jeremy and these magnificent plant people.

Register Now. The course begins on January 23 and runs on six consecutive Sundays at 3pm EST.

Early Bird discounts are available until January 10.

You can watch Jeremy Narby’s video introduction to the course by clicking here.

If you have any questions, concerns or comments please join the conversation here, in the forums.

What can modern people can learn from indigenous cultures about the use of psychoactive plants and the modification of consciousness?

What can be learned directly from these plants — which can be powerful and tricky teachers — and how can we incorporate these lessons into our daily lives?

In what ways do indigenous people benefit from the Western interest in shamanism, and what new cultural bridges are being built through the spread of indigenous spiritual practices?

Painting by Yvonne McGillivray

Abstract

In light of recent specific liberalizations in drug laws in some countries, this article investigates the potential of entheogens (i.e. psychoactive plants used as spiritual sacraments) as tools to facilitate existential intelligence. “Plant teachers” from the Americas such as ayahuasca, psilocybin mushrooms, peyote, and the Indo-Aryan soma of Eurasia are examples of both past- and presently-used entheogens. These have all been revered as spiritual or cognitive tools to provide a richer cosmological understanding of the world for both human individuals and cultures. I use Howard Gardner’s (1999a) revised multiple intelligence theory and his postulation of an “existential” intelligence as a theoretical lens through which to account for the cognitive possibilities of entheogens and explore potential ramifications for education.

Introduction

In this article I assess and further develop the possibility of an “existential” intelligence as postulated by Howard Gardner (1999a). Moreover, I entertain the possibility that some kinds of psychoactive substances—entheogens—have the potential to facilitate this kind of intelligence. This issue arises from the recent liberalization of drug laws in several Western industrialized countries to allow for the sacramental use of ayahuasca, a psychoactive tea brewed from plants indigenous to the Amazon. I challenge readers to step outside a long-standing dominant paradigm in modern Western culture that a priori regards “hallucinogenic” drug use as necessarily maleficent and devoid of any merit. I intend for my discussion to confront assumptions about drugs that have unjustly perpetuated the disparagement and prohibition of some kinds of psychoactive substance use. More broadly, I intend for it to challenge assumptions about intelligence that constrain contemporary educational thought.

“Entheogen” is a word coined by scholars proposing to replace the term “psychedelic” (Ruck, Bigwood, Staples, Ott, & Wasson, 1979), which was felt to overly connote psychological and clinical paradigms and to be too socio-culturally loaded from its 1960s roots to appropriately designate the revered plants and substances used in traditional rituals. I use both terms in this article: “entheogen” when referring to a substance used as a spiritual or sacramental tool, and “psychedelic” when referring to one used for any number of purposes during or following the so-called psychedelic era of the 1960s (recognizing that some contemporary non-indigenous uses may be entheogenic—the categories are by no means clearly discreet). What kinds of plants or chemicals fall into the category of entheogen is a matter of debate, as a large number of inebriants—from coca and marijuana to alcohol and opium—have been venerated as gifts from the gods (or God) in different cultures at different times. For the purposes of this article, however, I focus on the class of drugs that Lewin (1924/1997) termed “phantastica,” a name deriving from the Greek word for the faculty of imagination (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 1973). Later these substances became known as hallucinogens or psychedelics, a class whose members include lysergic acid derivatives, psilocybin, mescaline and dimethyltryptamine. With the exception of mescaline, these all share similar chemical structures; all, including mescaline, produce similar phenomenological effects; and, more importantly for the present discussion, all have a history of ritual use as psychospiritual medicines or, as I argue, cultural tools to facilitate cognition (Schultes & Hofmann, 1992).

The issue of entheogen use in modern Western culture becomes more significant in light of several legal precedents in countries such as Brazil, Holland, Spain and soon perhaps the United States and Canada. Ayahuasca, which I discuss in more detail in the following section on “plant teachers,” was legalized for religious use by non-indigenous people in Brazil in 1987i. One Brazilian group, the Santo Daime, was using its sacrament in ceremonies in the Netherlands when, in the autumn of 1999, authorities intervened and arrested its leaders. This was the first case of religious intolerance by a Dutch government in over three hundred years. A subsequent legal challenge, based on European Union religious freedom laws, saw them acquitted of all charges, setting a precedent for the rest of Europe (Adelaars, 2001). A similar case in Spain resulted in the Spanish government granting the right to use ayahuasca in that country. A recent court decision in the United States by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, September 4th, 2003, ruled in favour of religious freedom to use ayahuasca (Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, 2003). And in Canada, an application to Health Canada and the Department of Justice for exemption to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act is pending, which may permit the Santo Daime Church the religious use of their sacrament, known as Daime or Santo Daimeii (J.W. Rochester, personal communication, October 8th, 2003)

One of the questions raised by this trend of liberalization in otherwise prohibitionist regulatory regimes is what benefits substances such as ayahuasca have. The discussion that follows takes up this question with respect to contemporary psychological theories about intelligence and touches on potential ramifications for education. The next section examines the metaphor of “plant teachers,” which is not uncommon among cultures that have traditionally practiced the entheogenic use of plants. Following that, I use Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences (1983) as a theoretical framework with which to account for cognitive implications of entheogen use. Finally, I take up a discussion of possible relevance of existential intelligence and entheogens to education.

Plant Teachers

Before moving on to a broader discussion of intelligence(s), I will provide some background on ayahuasca and entheogens. Ayahuasca has been a revered “plant teacher” among dozens of South American indigenous peoples for centuries, if not longer (Luna, 1984; Schultes & Hofmann, 1992). The word ayahuasca is from the Quechua language of indigenous peoples of Ecuador and Peru, and translates as “vine of the soul” (Metzner, 1999). Typically, it refers to a tea made from a jungle liana, Banisteriopsis caapi, with admixtures of other plants, but most commonly the leaves of a plant from the coffee family, Psychotria viridis (McKenna, 1999). These two plants respectively contain harmala alkaloids and dimethyltryptamine, two substances that when ingested orally create a biochemical synergy capable of producing profound alterations in consciousness (Grob, et al., 1996; McKenna, Towers & Abbot, 1984). Among the indigenous peoples of the Amazon, ayahuasca is one of the most valuable medicinal and sacramental plants in their pharmacopoeias. Although shamans in different tribes use the tea for various purposes, and have varying recipes for it, the application of ayahuasca as an effective tool to attain understanding and wisdom is one of the most prevalent (Brown, 1986; Dobkin de Rios, 1984).

Notwithstanding the explosion of popular interest in psychoactive drugs during the 1960s, ayahuasca until quite recently managed to remain relatively obscure in Western cultureiii. However, the late 20th century saw the growth of religious movements among non-indigenous people in Brazil syncretizing the use of ayahuasca with Christian symbolism, African spiritualism, and native ritual. Two of the more widespread ayahuasca churches are the Santo Daime (Santo Daime, 2004) and the União do Vegetal (União do Vegetal, 2004). These organizations have in the past few decades gained legitimacy as valid, indeed valuable, spiritual practices providing social, psychological and spiritual benefits (Grob, 1999; Riba, et al., 2001).

Ayahuasca is not the only “plant teacher” in the pantheon of entheogenic tools. Other indigenous peoples of the Americas have used psilocybin mushrooms for millennia for spiritual and healing purposes (Dobkin de Rios, 1973; Wasson, 1980). Similarly, the peyote cactus has a long history of use by Mexican indigenous groups (Fikes, 1996; Myerhoff, 1974; Stewart, 1987), and is currently widely used in the United States by the Native American Church (LaBarre, 1989; Smith & Snake, 1996). And even in the early history of Western culture, the ancient Indo-Aryan texts of the Rig Veda sing the praises of the deified Soma (Pande, 1984). Although the taxonomic identity of Soma is lost, it seems to have been a plant or mushroom and had the power to reliably induce mystical experiences—an “entheogen” par excellence (Eliade, 1978; Wasson, 1968). The variety of entheogens extends far beyond the limited examples I have offered here. However, ayahuasca, psilocybin mushrooms, peyote and Soma are exemplars of plants which have been culturally esteemed for their psychological and spiritual impacts on both individuals and communities.

In this article I argue that the importance of entheogens lies in their role as tools, as mediators between mind and environment. Defining a psychoactive drug as a tool—perhaps a novel concept for some—invokes its capacity to effect a purposeful change on the mind/body. Commenting on Vygotsky’s notions of psychological tools, John-Steiner and Souberman (1978) note that “tool use has . . . important effects upon internal and functional relationships within the human brain” (p. 133). Although they were likely not thinking of drugs as tools, the significance of this observation becomes even more literal when the tools in question are plants or chemicals ingested with the intent of affecting consciousness through the manipulation of brain chemistry. Indeed, psychoactive plants or chemicals seem to defy the traditional bifurcation between physical and psychological tools, as they affect the mind/body (understood by modern psychologists to be identical).

It is important to consider the degree to which the potential of entheogens comes not only from their immediate neuropsychological effects, but also from the social practices—rituals—into which their use has traditionally been incorporated (Dobkin de Rios, 1996; Smith, 2000). The protective value that ritual provides for entheogen use is evident from its universal application in traditional practices (Weil, 1972/1986). Medical evidence suggests that there are minimal physiological risks associated with psychedelic drugs (Callaway, et al., 1999; Grinspoon & Bakalar, 1979/1998; Julien, 1998). Albert Hofmann (1980), the chemist who first accidentally synthesized and ingested LSD, contends that the psychological risks associated with psychedelics in modern Western culture are a function of their recreational use in unsafe circumstances. A ritual context, however, offers psychospiritual safeguards that make the potential of entheogenic “plant teachers” to enhance cognition an intriguing possibility.

Existential Intelligence

Howard Gardner (1983) developed a theory of multiple intelligences that originally postulated seven types of intelligence (iv). Since then, he has added a “naturalist” intelligence and entertained the possibility of a “spiritual” intelligence (1999a; 1999b). Not wanting to delve too far into territory fraught with theological pitfalls, Gardner (1999a) settled on looking at “existential” intelligence rather than “spiritual” intelligence (p. 123). Existential intelligence, as Gardner characterizes it, involves having a heightened capacity to appreciate and attend to the cosmological enigmas that define the human condition, an exceptional awareness of the metaphysical, ontological and epistemological mysteries that have been a perennial concern for people of all cultures (1999a).

In his original formulation of the theory, Gardner challenges (narrow) mainstream definitions of intelligence with a broader one that sees intelligence as “the ability to solve problems or to fashion products that are valued in at least one culture or community” (1999a, p. 113). He lays out eight criteria, or “signs,” that he argues should be used to identify an intelligence; however, he notes that these do not constitute necessary conditions for determining an intelligence, merely desiderata that a candidate intelligence should meet (1983, p. 62). He also admits that none of his original seven intelligences fulfilled all the criteria, although they all met a majority of the eight. For existential intelligence, Gardner himself identifies six which it seems to meet; I will look at each of these and discuss their merits in relation to entheogens.

One criterion applicable to existential intelligence is the identification of a neural substrate to which the intelligence may correlate. Gardner (1999a) notes that recent neuropsychological evidence supports the hypothesis that the brain’s temporal lobe plays a key role in producing mystical states of consciousness and spiritual awareness (p. 124-5; LaPlante, 1993; Newberg, D’Aquili & Rause, 2001). He also recognizes that “certain brain centres and neural transmitters are mobilized in [altered consciousness] states, whether they are induced by the ingestion of substances or by a control of the will” (Gardner, 1999a, p.125). Another possibility, which Gardner does not explore, is that endogenous dimethyltryptamine (DMT) in humans may play a significant role in the production of spontaneous or induced altered states of consciousness (Pert, 2001). DMT is a powerful entheogenic substance that exists naturally in the mammalian brain (Barker, Monti & Christian, 1981), as well as being a common constituent of ayahuasca and the Amazonian snuff, yopo (Ott, 1994). Furthermore, DMT is a close analogue of the neurotransmitter 5-hydroxytryptamine, or serotonin. It has been known for decades that the primary neuropharmacological action of psychedelics has been on serotonin systems, and serotonin is now understood to be correlated with healthy modes of consciousness.

One psychiatric researcher has recently hypothesized that endogenous DMT stimulates the pineal gland to create such spontaneous psychedelic states as near-death experiences (Strassman, 2001). Whether this is correct or not, the role of DMT in the brain is an area of empirical research that deserves much more attention, especially insofar as it may contribute to an evidential foundation for existential intelligence.

Another criterion for an intelligence is the existence of individuals of exceptional ability within the domain of that intelligence. Unfortunately, existential precocity is not something sufficiently valued in modern Western culture to the degree that savants in this domain are commonly celebrated today. Gardner (1999a) observes that within Tibetan Buddhism, the choosing of lamas may involve the detection of a predisposition to existential intellect (if it is not identifying the reincarnation of a previous lama, as Tibetan Buddhists themselves believe) (p. 124). Gardner also cites Czikszentmilhalyi’s consideration of the “early-emerging concerns for cosmic issues of the sort reported in the childhoods of future religious leaders like Gandhi and of several future physicists” (Gardner, 1999a, p. 124; Czikszentmilhalyi, 1996). Presumably, some individuals who are enjoined to enter a monastery or nunnery at a young age may be so directed due to an appreciable manifestation of existential awareness. Likewise, individuals from indigenous cultures who take up shamanic practice—who “have abilities beyond others to dream, to imagine, to enter states of trance” (Larsen, 1976, p. 9)—often do so because of a significant interest in cosmological concerns at a young age, which could be construed as a prodigious capacity in the domain of existential intelligencev (Eliade, 1964; Greeley, 1974; Halifax, 1979).

The third criterion for determining an intelligence that Gardner suggests is an identifiable set of core operational abilities that manifest that intelligence. Gardner finds this relatively unproblematic and articulates the core operations for existential intelligence as:

the capacity to locate oneself with respect to the farthest reaches of the cosmos—the infinite no less than the infinitesimal—and the related capacity to locate oneself with respect to the most existential aspects of the human condition: the significance of life, the meaning of death, the ultimate fate of the physical and psychological worlds, such profound experiences as love of another human being or total immersion in a work of art. (1999a, p. 123)

Gardner notes that as with other more readily accepted types of intelligence, there is no specific truth that one would attain with existential intelligence—for example, as musical intelligence does not have to manifest itself in any specific genre or category of music, neither does existential intelligence privilege any one philosophical system or spiritual doctrine. As Gardner (1999a) puts it, “there exists [with existential intelligence] a species potential—or capacity—to engage in transcendental concerns that can be aroused and deployed under certain circumstances” (p. 123). Reports on uses of psychedelics by Westerners in the 1950s and early 1960s—generated prior to their prohibition and, some might say, profanation—reveal a recurrent theme of spontaneous mystical experiences that are consistent with enhanced capacity of existential intelligence (Huxley, 1954/1971; Masters & Houston, 1966; Pahnke, 1970; Smith, 1964; Watts, 1958/1969).

Another criterion for admitting an intelligence is identifying a developmental history and a set of expert “end-state” performances for it. Pertaining to existential intelligence, Gardner notes that all cultures have devised spiritual or metaphysical systems to deal with the inherent human capacity for existential issues, and further that these respective systems invariably have steps or levels of sophistication separating the novice from the adept. He uses the example of Pope John XXIII’s description of his training to advance up the ecclesiastic hierarchy as a contemporary illustration of this point (1999a, p. 124). However, the instruction of the neophyte is a manifest part of almost all spiritual training and, again, the demanding process of imparting of shamanic wisdom—often including how to effectively and appropriately use entheogens—is an excellent example of this process in indigenous cultures (Eliade, 1964).

A fifth criterion Gardner suggests for an intelligence is determining its evolutionary history and evolutionary plausibility. The self-reflexive question of when and why existential intelligence first arose in the Homo genus is one of the perennial existential questions of humankind. That it is an exclusively human trait is almost axiomatic, although a small but increasing number of researchers are willing to admit the possibility of higher forms of cognition in non-human animals (Masson & McCarthy, 1995; Vonk, 2003). Gardner (1999a) argues that only by the Upper Paleolithic period did “human beings within a culture possess a brain capable of considering the cosmological issues central to existential intelligence” (p. 124) and that the development of a capacity for existential thinking may be linked to “a conscious sense of finite space and irreversible time, two promising loci for stimulating imaginative explorations of transcendental spheres” (p. 124). He also suggests that “thoughts about existential issues may well have evolved as responses to necessarily occurring pain, perhaps as a way of reducing pain or better equipping individuals to cope with it” (Gardner, 1999a, p. 125). As with determining the evolutionary origin of language, tracing a phylogenesis of existential intelligence is conjectural at best. Its role in the development of the species is equally difficult to assess, although Winkelman (2000) argues that consciousness and shamanic practices—and presumably existential intelligence as well—stem from psychobiological adaptations integrating older and more recently evolved structures in the triune hominid brain. McKenna (1992) goes even so far as to postulate that the ingestion of psychoactive substances such as entheogenic mushrooms may have helped stimulate cognitive developments such as existential and linguistic thinking in our proto-human ancestors. Some researchers in the 1950s and 1960s found enhanced creativity and problem-solving skills among subjects given LSD and other psychedelic drugs (Harman, McKim, Mogar, Fadiman & Stolaroff, 1966; Izumi, 1970; Krippner, 1985; Stafford & Golightly, 1967), skills which certainly would have been evolutionarily advantageous to our hominid ancestors. Such avenues of investigation are beginning to be broached again by both academic scholars and amateur psychonauts (Dobkin de Rios & Janiger, 2003; Spitzer, et al., 1996; MAPS Bulletin, 2000).

The final criterion Gardner mentions as applicable to existential intelligence is susceptibility to encoding in a symbol system. Here, again, Gardner concedes that there is abundant evidence in favour of accepting existential thinking as an intelligence. In his words, “many of the most important and most enduring sets of symbol systems (e.g., those featured in the Catholic liturgy) represent crystallizations of key ideas and experiences that have evolved within [cultural] institutions” (1999a, p. 123). Another salient example that illustrates this point is the mytho-symbolism ascribed to ayahuasca visions among the Tukano, an Amazonian indigenous people. Reichel-Dolmatoff (1975) made a detailed study of these visions by asking a variety of informants to draw representations with sticks in the dirt (p. 174). He compiled twenty common motifs, observing that most of them bear a striking resemblance to phosphene patterns (i.e. visual phenomena perceived in the absence of external stimuli or by applying light pressure to the eyeball) compiled by Max Knoll (Oster, 1970). The Tukano interpret these universal human neuropsychological phenomena as symbolically significant according to their traditional ayahuasca-steeped mythology, reflecting the codification of existential ideas within their culture.

Narby (1998) also examines the codification of symbols generated during ayahuasca experiences by tracing similarities between intertwining snake motifs in the visions of Amazonian shamans and the double-helix structure of deoxyribonucleic acid. He found remarkable similarities between representations of biological knowledge by indigenous shamans and those of modern geneticists. More recently, Narby (2002) has followed up on this work by bringing molecular biologists to the Amazon to participate in ayahuasca ceremonies with experiences shamans, an endeavour he suggests may provide useful cross-fertilization in divergent realms of human knowledge.

The two other criteria of an intelligence are support from experimental psychological tasks and support from psychometric findings. Gardner suggests that existential intelligence is more debatable within these domains, citing personality inventories that attempt to measure religiosity or spirituality; he notes, “it remains unclear just what is being probed by such instruments and whether self-report is a reliable index of existential intelligence” (1999a, p. 125). It seems transcendental states of consciousness and the cognition they engender do not lend themselves to quantification or easy replication in psychology laboratories. However, Strassman, Qualls, Uhlenhuth, & Kellner (1994) developed a psychometric instrument—the Hallucinogen Rating Scale—to measure human responses to intravenous administration of DMT, and it has since been reliably used for other psychedelic experiences (Riba, Rodriguez-Fornells, Strassman, & Barbanoj, 2001).

One historical area of empirical psychological research that did ostensibly stimulate a form of what might be considered existential intelligence was clinical investigations into psychedelics. Until such research became academically unfashionable and then politically impossible in the early 1970s, psychologists and clinical researchers actively explored experimentally-induced transcendent experiences using drugs in the interests of both pure science and applied medical treatments (Abramson, 1967; Cohen, 1964; Grinspoon & Bakalar, 1979/1998; Masters & Houston, 1966). One of the more famous of these was Pahnke’s (1970) so-called “Good Friday” experiment, which attempted to induce spiritual experiences with psilocybin within a randomized double-blind control methodology. His conclusion that mystical experiences were indeed reliably produced, despite methodological problems with the study design, was borne out by a critical long-term follow-up (Doblin, 1991), which raises intriguing questions about both entheogens and existential intelligence.

Studies such as Pahnke’s (1970), despite their promise, were prematurely terminated due to public pressure from a populace alarmed by burgeoning contemporary recreational drug use. Only about a decade ago did the United States government give researchers permission to renew (on a very small scale) investigations into psychedelics (Strassman 2001; Strassman & Qualls, 1994). Cognitive psychologists are also taking an interest in entheogens such as ayahuasca (Shanon, 2002). Regardless of whether support for existential intelligence can be established psychometrically or in experimental psychological tasks, Gardner’s theory expressly stipulates that not all eight criteria must be uniformly met in order for an intelligence to qualify. Nevertheless, Gardner claims to “find the phenomenon perplexing enough, and the distance from other intelligences great enough” (1999a, p. 127) to be reluctant “at present to add existential intelligence to the list . . . . At most [he is] willing, Fellini-style, to joke about ‘8½ intelligences’” (p. 127). I contend that research into entheogens and other means of altering consciousness will further support the case for treating existential intelligence as a valid cognitive domain.

Educational Implications?

By recapitulating and augmenting Gardner’s discussion of existential intelligence, I hope to have strengthened the case for its inclusion as a valid cognitive domain. However, doing so raises questions of what ramifications an acceptance of existential intelligence would have for contemporary Western educational theory and practice. How might we foster this hitherto neglected intelligence and allow it to be used in constructive ways? There is likely a range of educational practices that could be used to stimulate cognition in this domain, many of which could be readily implemented without much controversy.vi Yet I intentionally raise the prospect of using entheogens in this capacity—not with young children, but perhaps with older teens in the passage to adulthood—to challenge theorists, policy-makers and practitioners.vii

The potential of entheogens as tools for education in contemporary Western culture was identified by Aldous Huxley. Although better known as a novelist than as a philosopher of education, Huxley spent a considerable amount of time—particularly as he neared the end of his life—addressing the topic of education. Like much of his literature, Huxley’s observations and critiques of the socio-cultural forces at work in his time were cannily prescient; they bear as much, if not more, relevance in the 21st century as when they were written. Most remarkably, and relevant to my thesis, Huxley saw entheogens as possible educational tools:

Under the current dispensation the vast majority of individuals lose, in the course of education, all the openness to inspiration, all the capacity to be aware of other things than those enumerated in the Sears-Roebuck catalogue which constitutes the conventionally “real” world . . . . Is it too much to hope that a system of education may some day be devised, which shall give results, in terms of human development, commensurate with the time, money, energy and devotion expended? In such a system of education it may be that mescalin or some other chemical substance may play a part by making it possible for young people to “taste and see” what they have learned about at second hand . . . in the writings of the religious, or the works of poets, painters and musicians. (Letter to Dr. Humphrey Osmond, April 10th, 1953—in Horowitz & Palmer, 1999, p.30)

In a more literary expression of this notion, Huxley’s final novel Island (1962) portrays an ideal culture that has achieved a balance of scientific and spiritual thinking, and which also incorporates the ritualized use of entheogens for education. The representation of drug use that Huxley portrays in Island contrasts markedly with the more widely-known soma of his earlier novel, Brave New World (1932/1946): whereas soma was a pacifier that muted curiosity and served the interests of the controlling elite, the entheogenic “moksha medicine” of Island offered liminal experiences in young adults that stimulated profound reflection, self-actualization and, I submit, existential intelligence.

Huxley’s writings point to an implicit recognition of the capacity of entheogens to be used as educational “tools”. The concept of tool here refers not merely the physical devices fashioned to aid material production, but, following Vygotsky (1978), more broadly to those means of symbolic and/or cultural mediation between the mind and the world (Cole, 1996; Wertsch, 1991). Of course, deriving educational benefit from a tool requires much more than simply having and wielding it; one must also have an intrinsic respect for the object qua tool, a cultural system in which the tool is valued as such, and guides or teachers who are adept at using the tool to provide helpful direction. As Larsen (1976) remarks in discussing the phenomenon of would-be “shamans” in Western culture experimenting with mind-altering chemicals: “we have no symbolic vocabulary, no grounded mythological tradition to make our experiences comprehensible to us . . . no senior shamans to help ensure that our [shamanic experience of] dismemberment be followed by a rebirth” (p. 81). Given the recent history of these substances in modern Western culture, it is hardly surprising that they have been demonized (Hofmann, 1980). However, cultural practices that have traditionally used entheogens as therapeutic agents consistently incorporate protective safeguards—set, settingviii, established dosages, and mythocultural respect (Zinberg, 1984). The fear that inevitably arises in modern Western culture when addressing the issue of entheogens stems, I submit, not from any properties intrinsic to the substances themselves, but rather from a general misunderstanding of their power and capacity as tools. Just as a sharp knife can be used for good or ill, depending on whether it is in the hands of a skilled surgeon or a reckless youth, so too can entheogens be used or misused.

The use of entheogens such as ayahuasca is exemplary of the long and ongoing tradition in many cultures to employ psychoactives as tools that stimulate foundational types of understanding (Tupper, in press). That such substances are capable of stimulating profoundly transcendent experiences is evident from both the academic literature and anecdotal reports. Accounting fully for their action, however, requires going beyond the usual explanatory schemas: applying Gardner’s (1999a) multiple intelligence theory as a heuristic framework opens new ways of understanding entheogens and their potential benefits. At the same time, entheogens bolster the case for Gardner’s proposed addition of existential intelligence. This article attempts to present these concepts in such a way that the possibility of using entheogens as tools is taken seriously by those with an interest in new and transformative ideas in education.

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i The 1971 United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances allows for indigenous peoples to use traditional medicines and sacraments even if those substances are prohibited under international drug control treaties (United Nations, 1977, Article 32).

ii Santo Daime is the name of the sacrament as well as the religion.

iii Writers and drug aficionados William S. Burroughs and Allan Ginsberg (1963) published an account of their experiences seeking out and drinking ayahuasca in South America in the early 1960s, but their report was mostly negative and did not inspire many others to follow in their footsteps. As ethnobotanist Wade Davis remarks, “ayahuasca is many things, but pleasurable is not one of them” (2001).

iv The original seven types of intelligence Gardner (1983) proposed were: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal.

v Eliade (1964) identifies two primary ways of becoming a shaman: 1) hereditary transmission, or falling heir to the vocation in a family legacy passed down from generation to generation; and 2) spontaneous vocation, or being called to shamanism by the spirits. Prodigious existential intelligence may be manifest in either case.

vi Here I conceptually separate education and schooling; unfortunately, I don’t see the latter institution—the legacy of 19th-century homogenizing and democratizing socio-political programs (Cremin, 1961; Egan, 2002)—as inspiring much optimism for an embracing of existential intelligence.

vii Gotz (1970) argues that the practices of teachers might benefit from the mind-expanding potential of psychedelics.

viii “Set is a person’s expectations of what a drug will do to him [sic], considered in the context of his whole personality. Setting is the environment, both physical and social, in which a drug is taken” (Weil, 1972/1986). These factors influence all psychoactive drug experiences, but psychedelics or entheogens especially so.

The following interview with Donal Ruane was conducted in May 2006 by Gyrus, and was first published in Dreamflesh Journal Vol. 1.

Gyrus: What strikes you as unique about the experience of ayahuasca?

Donal: It’s a difficult question to answer, as I get more experienced. The reason being that my experience of ayahuasca varies according to who I drink it with, and the brew. It appears to me that how the brews are made, and the additives that are used, and the set and setting in which it is consumed, very much alter the experience.

Last year in Iquitos I had a session with an Indian shaman from the Witoto tribe—a very interesting tribe who have had an awful history of exploitation and abuse, by colonists and by missionaries, who have devastated their belief systems and their way of life. They feature heavily in Wade Davis’ book, One River. I didn’t know much about them until I met this shaman, Don Mariano. He’s from Columbia, along the Rio Negro I think, one of the tributaries of the Amazon. He’s sixty-four years old, and he first started training to be a shaman, dieting with ayahuasca, at eight years of age. So he’s been drinking for a long, long time.

His ayahuasca was very different from the other brews I’ve drunk. My experiences are mainly with two types of ayahuasca. Initially it was with the Church of the Santo Daime, and then later I started to drink with Peruvian shamans.

Now after drinking regularly with the Santo Daime for a few years I started to feel increasingly restricted. I felt the experience itself and the brew itself was controlled and there was pressure to conform to their particular model and ultimately to become a member. The church itself was founded by Raimundo Ireneu, a black rubber trapper, after a period spent drinking ayahuasca in the jungle where he received instructions to found the church from a female spirit who he associated with the Virgin Mary. Ironically enough, Ireneu himself was probably initiated into the use of ayahuasca by a Peruvian mestizo shaman. Of course, the Santo Daime only works within a certain spectrum of what is possible with ayahuasca. This is not necessarily such a bad idea; ayahuasca has the ability to manifest some pretty dangerous phenomena. Let’s say that of all the hallucinogens it is one of the more unpredictable.

Don’t get me wrong, I am enormously grateful to the church. However, as is often the case with such matters, a synchronicity nudged me in another direction. The day I bought the book Ayahuasca Visions I also met Pablo Amaringo for the first time, coincidentally, in a London art gallery where I had gone to meet a friend. Out of that initial meeting, my friendship with Pablo developed so much so, that I decided to visit him in his hometown, Pucallpa, four months later. During that first visit, while talking to Pablo, I realised there was a lot more to learn about ayahuasca than I could possibly learn in the context of the church. The ritual use of ayahuasca in the Upper Amazon region has developed over millennia into a sophisticated science, a plant alchemy with a remarkable mythology of its own.

Now there is a big difference between the Santo Daime brew and the traditional ayahuasca drunk by shamans in Peru—it’s a lot less visionary and isn’t as purging. You don’t enter the remarkable visionary realm, and you don’t get the ‘drunkenness’ which you normally associate with ayahuasca in Peru, which they call mareación—a Spanish word which translates as ‘sea-sickness’…

This is what William Burroughs talked about as “the motion-sickness of time travel”…

Yeah, he talked about it that way. It’s something that comes on usually within about two hours, but it can come on at different times. Usually you start feeling very nauseous, then your body heats up. I usually sweat and yawn profusely; it’s very uncomfortable and unpleasant. At this stage you become very disoriented, and you may vomit, sometimes in conjunction with diarrhoea. They can be separate, or you can get the two of them together. The mareación usually lasts about half an hour, three quarters of an hour, but again there’s no standard. Now you don’t tend to get this with the Santo Daime brew, and you don’t get the visions. Of course the Santo Daime is always drunk with the lights on, and traditionally ayahuasca is always drunk in the dark.

The other ayahuasca I have most experience with is what I call Pucallpa ayahuasca, which is like ‘moonshine’. That’s the standard ayahuasca recipe, which is made using the bark of the vine Banisteriopsis caapi and the leaves of the bush Psychotria viridis—alone. They do put additives in it, but that’s to do with particular shamans’ own likes and dislikes. Some of these additives are psychoactive, but other aren’t. For example, plants like coca have quite subtle effects compared to something like Brugmansia (which they call Toé), which is similar to Datura but in fact isn’t—although it contains the same tropane alkaloids. Some shamans use Brugmansia on its own, usually by smoking the leaves.

The ayahuasca of Don Mariano had Banisteriopsis caapi, Oco yagé (Banisteriopsis rusbyana), mapacho tobacco (Nicotina rustica), and two leaves of Toé. The Oco yagé would have been the substitute for Psychotria viridis. I only found out later that it contains 5-MeO-DMT, so it’s not very visionary. I got some slight hypnagogic visions, but not many. I originally thought that ayahuasca’s a “visionary” vine, so if you don’t get visions, you’re not getting proper ayahuasca. But while that one didn’t give many visions, it was an incredibly powerful teacher—probably one of the most powerful experiences I’ve had.

Each brew has its own personality. This one was very talkative, and it was very purgative too, due particularly to the tobacco additive, which made me really nauseous and gave me diarrhoea; I got both. And because of the Oco yagé, it lasts over six hours, rather than the average four hours.

They say that Toé and Oco yagé are “teacher” plants; the brews are less visionary, less about power and more about receiving teaching. That’s what I received: a very, very powerful teaching. I was literally talked to for four, five, six hours. Almost from the time it came on this telepathic dialogue started, which is one of the phenomena we get with ayahuasca. What it is, I’m not sure; there are many theories. The locals call these phenomena “spirits”. McKenna called it the Logos and connected it with Philip K. Dick’s creature of pure information that we find in his extraordinary novel Valis. I’ve been drinking and studying this for about seven years now, and I’m still trying to understand all these phenomena.

When I first came across Pablo’s paintings I had never before seen an artist capture the visionary realms in such a startlingly original way. I was captivated not only by the visions themselves but also by their paradoxical nature… so vividly alien, and yet so extraordinarily familiar and beautiful. I wondered, where are these dimensions located? Pablo explained to me that he had visited many such places, many universes when he drank ayahuasca. He said, “I have visited the Moon, I have visited Mars, I have visited Jupiter, yes, all the planets. There are many planets. I have visited all of them. There are many spirits in these places. There are sacred temples, places like islands with castles. In these castles some spirits are good but some are bad. They have human faces but their body is of a tiger or a snake or an eagle.” Pablo told me that shamans learn to immerse themselves in these domains and interact with the spirits like actors in a film. This only happens after dieting and drinking ayahuasca for a long time—so that you no longer see visions as if you are looking at television but are completely immersed in them.

How could this be so? How could so-called ‘primitive’ people and peasants have developed such a sophisticated methodology of interaction in these ‘virtual realities’? Jung speculated that “it may well be a prejudice to restrict the psyche to being inside the body. There may be a psyche outside the body, and one has to get out of oneself to get there.” He further speculated that this ‘psychic reality’, rather than being two separate worlds, one inside and one outside, was in fact two aspects of the same world: a microcosm and a macrocosm. This has very much been my own experience. For ayahuasqueros the difference between the purely mythological and what we would consider ‘real’ is indistinct.

In fact, the only way to really understand these ‘invisible’ realms is through metaphor: the secret language of the shaman. What we are talking about here is a way of seeing, a method of perceiving ‘reality’ differently. For the ayahuasquero the tobacco smoke from his pipe becomes a vine which becomes a rope which becomes a snake which becomes a ladder to climb into other worlds. The anthropologist Graham Townsley, while working with Yaminahua ayahuasqueros in the Peruvian Amazon, was told they called this “language-twisting-twisting”. For example, arkanna is a Quechua word meaning “to block” or “to guard”. It can be an icaro, a magical song, or an object like a crystal or an animal that the shaman puts inside you to protect you. Or it can be tobacco smoke blown over you to form a protective shirt or armour, like a bullet-proof vest. The relationship between the signifier and the signified is fluid. For a child, a chair can very easily become a flying saucer; a simple stick a golden sword that defends against evil knights. As one gets older this imaginative engagement with the mysterious potential of the universe is ‘unlearned’. The child is literally programmed not to see in this way from a certain age. Children who continue to see in this way, who refuse to give up their secret friends, are usually considered ‘deviant’ and treated as mentally ill. What we are talking about is really a technique for ‘seeing’ that we in the West have lost! A technique that enables one to view ‘reality’ as a constantly unfolding mystery… an interconnected domain of wonder, rather than the ‘objective’, fragmented view we usually perceive.

As a child growing up, I heard many stories of ‘seeing’ fairies among the old people in the west of Ireland. When I asked them where the fairies were now they always said the same thing: electricity and cars had driven them away. What really happened of course was that people stopped seeing fairies because of the paradigm shift overtaking the wider community at that particular time. The influx of new technology required a radical shift in the belief systems that had sustained that rural peasant community for thousands of years. Beliefs, which included a reciprocal relationship with nature spirits, were literally unsustainable in the ‘light’ of the electric bulb. The new magic had destroyed the old… and people gradually stopped seeing and believing in fairies. Which in my view is a great shame.

Another factor in this was the gradual encroachment by civilization on the wilderness; cars and electricity made the areas where these beliefs still existed more accessible, and he introduction of radio and television and the electric light literally lit up the darkness where these beliefs existed, ironically making them invisible once more. I love Patrick Harpur’s idea, which he expounds in his wonderful book Daimonic Reality, that the unconscious was formed during the Reformation. He speculates that the Anima Mundi, the World Soul, was withdrawn from outside and relocated within, as the collective unconscious, eventually to be rediscovered by 20th century depth psychology. In effect, the daimonic realm was forced underground into the unconscious regions of the mind at the beginning of the Age of Reason, when the mind became identified with reason.

I’ve had a lot of what I would call “archetypal experiences”, encounters with archetypal beings and phenomena. A lot has been written about this, but I don’t think there’s been as much work done on just steadily studying how and why archetypes manifest, what they are, and how our experiences of them vary over periods of time. What do these experiences actually mean?

Anyway, something else I find remarkable about ayahuasca is the purging aspect. One thing I noticed around Pucallpa is that they call all the plants La purga.

All the ingredients of ayahuasca?

No, all the different plants that shamans diet with, the teacher plants within this “science”. The science has various names. For instance, an old name that Pablo used was alquemica pallistica, which means “tree alchemy”. There’s also ciencia vegetal—a mestizo term meaning “plant science”—and ciencia de los palos, “science of trees”. A very old Quechua term is caspi yachai (“tree wisdom”).

What we’re talking about here is a form of alchemy. My theory is that this so-called “plant science” is in fact the ancient precursor of medieval alchemy. I think the Spanish named it this when they came over because they recognized what was going on.

In the same way that the Catholic communion must have been seen by the conquistadors to be “primitively” echoed in the mushroom cults of Mexico, where they called the mushrooms “God’s flesh”.

Exactly. And this science believes that a certain number of plants-some obviously psychoactive, some not-each have a “mother”, some sort of ancestor relation. They also use the terms father, or grandmother or grandfather in this sense. These are the owners of the plant, and these owners can be reached by going through a strict diet of purification and consuming the plant in isolation.

I’ve dieted with ayahuasca, but I’ve also done a eight-day diets with plants that are not psychoactive. For instance, the “jungle onion”, cebolla de selva (or cebolla de monte), is referred to as a purgative, and it did make me vomit the first time I drank it. Tobacco does the same thing. I think all the plants have a purgative effect.

But not necessarily to the point of inducing vomiting? Perhaps more just detoxifying?

Yeah, making you sweat or whatever. They flush things out of you. To me the whole point of the science is a purification of the body, in order to communicate directly with these plants and learn things from them. And this is done over periods of time. It requires isolation from people: no conversations, no looking at people, and no people looking at you. Sitting alone, eating a special diet: no salt, no sugar, no pork, no alcohol, no sex. In fact, traditionally you eat only boiled plantain with a small number of fish-interestingly enough, fish that only eat plants. There’s boca chica (a type of snapper), palometa (related to piranhas), and sardinas.

With some of the plants, particularly the trees, the diet is even more important because some of them are highly poisonous. It’s much more dangerous to not go with the diet with those than it is for, say, ayahuasca. It’s interesting that purifying the body allows you to ingest “poisons”…

So some things we consider inherently poisonous may just have bad reactions with things we habitually consume.

That’s what it seems to be. One of the people I got to know and interview was an old shaman called Don Fidel Mosombite—who incidentally first turned Terence McKenna onto ayahuasca in the mid-1970s. He has been a practising ayahuasquero for over fifty years, and has dieted with a lot of plants and trees. One of these was the catahua tree (Hura crepitans). He told me he dieted with this tree for three months. He had to drink the sap of this tree once and he was intoxicated for three days. He said he thought he was going to go insane! During this time he had an experience where he was suspended by a rope upside-down from a steel pole, rather like the hanged man in tarot. During this he was cut loose and started to fall, and if he hadn’t dieted well he would have been killed. Just before he hit the ground he suddenly transformed into the commander of a ship which was travelling underwater. This was the catahua ship. Then a voice gave him instructions on how to smoke the leaves of this tree in order to heal people.

We take the word ayahuasca and put it on our Western list of psychedelics. Do you think that creates a false impression of how it works, and that it should be seen as embedded with the entire ciencia vegetal, this whole belief system revolving around spirits and their various plants?

The whole molecular level of nature is connected with spirits in this science. The scientific categories we have broken things down into, they have personified.

Do the key constituents of ayahuasca—Banisteriopsis caapi, Psychotria viridis, etc.—do they have a special role in the “pantheon”?

Different shamans have different views. Graciela said that the jungle onion, and Ajo Sacha, which is jungle garlic, are much more important than ayahuasca. That they’re much more potent for healing. But what Pablo said to me is that ayahuasca is at the centre of the whole system. Usually you go from ayahuasca to the other plants—though this isn’t always so.

There’s different ways they heal, specific to the plant. Take plants like Sangre de drago [Dragon's blood, Croton lechleri], or Una de gato [Cat's claw, Uncaria tomentosa], which have particular effects. They’re medicinal herbs. Dragon’s blood is phenomenal for congealing cuts.

But there is also a lot of magic involved in this science. For example, it is believed that by blowing an icaro into a glass of water and getting the patient to drink, it will cure a wide range of illnesses.

Could you talk more about the effects of ayahuasca in relation to this system?

My experiences with it don’t fit the materialist view of how it works, which says that you take certain plants, mix them together in certain amounts and you get this effect. In terms of dosage, you can take more and not have a very strong experience, or take less and have a much stronger experience.

I feel there are realms made visible by ayahuasca that are to do with the plant itself; but there also appear to be realms that are all around in the jungle—and I don’t know what that’s all about. Because that doesn’t fit our paradigm. I’ve had experiences of ghosts, all sorts of different presences, little dwarves or whatever, that they connect with different plants, different phenomena out in the jungle. They seem to be things connected with place. I don’t have those experiences when I’m drinking here in London. Having all those trees around you, it seems to open up another level of the experience.

What is made visible here in your flat? Or is it a more interior experience?

It’s just a more interior experience. One of the things they say is that the further away from humans you are, the more pronounced the experience is. To get really in touch with spirits, you have to be way out in virgin jungle. I’ve never done that, but I’d love to. Certainly the city isn’t a very pleasant place to be when you’re opened up like that. It’s not that there aren’t all sorts of energies or spirits around in cities…

Maybe ayahuasca just isn’t the best way to approach them.

It comes from a particular place, and it’s connected with that ecology. And that seems to be the realm that it opens up.

Something I also wanted to mention about the varying effects of dosage is that shamans appear to be able to “take it out of you” after you’ve drunk it-by either blowing you with tobacco, or rubbing you with aguardiente, which is sugar cane rum, and camphor.

Like a magical thorazine?

Yeah, it doesn’t make sense. It’s been done to me, and it very obviously did happen. That was a time when I’d only taken half of what I’d done the night before, but it really was quite ferocious. They often sniff ayahuasca and see it as having an effect, y’know?

And you think this is beyond “set and setting”?

I think it is beyond that, I think there’s a magical element to it, and I don’t really know how it works. Maybe it is set and setting, maybe set and setting and intention are that powerful. Maybe intention is that powerful, and when you put it together with ayahuasca, it multiplies its power by a million, like putting a magnifying glass over it. You have the sun, and a piece of paper, and with the magnifying glass it bursts into flames. Maybe that’s what it does to the intention: it ignites it. But there certainly seems to be an aspect to it that I can’t understand, a magical element.

Could you back-track to the vomiting thing? You talked about it being called La Purga. In our culture, vomiting’s associated with eating disorders, being too drunk, basically a pathological thing—undignified.

From the first time I witnessed it, it did completely throw me. The diarrhoea as well. It was very casually dealt with. I also saw people doing that after smoking pipes of tobacco—vomiting and diarrhoea. But they also have a thing about spitting as well, which we have a taboo against.

The healing process is about purging the body. And they use plants that purge the body, that make you spit up phlegm, which make you vomit and have diarrhoea, and sweat. That’s four ways of getting toxins out of the body. That’s usually in conjunction with dieting, which means that you’re also reducing your intake of toxins.

So, similar to alchemy before the point when magic and science separated, what they’re practicing here is a quite sophisticated “nature science”, knowledge of plant properties and so on, but completely intermingled with what our culture would call “superstition”. For them it’s part of the same system.

The way I understand it is that it’s a metaphor anyway, and the goal that’s produced out of alchemy is spiritual enlightenment—personal mastery and immortality.

What form of immortality do they see it as?

All shamans believe they live on in spirit form after they die.

Reincarnation?

Ordinary mortals keep on returning to the material realms until they work everything out they have to. Shamans, on the other hand, depending on how advanced they are, because of the spiritual work they have done through the suffering of the dietas, believe they become pure spirit and live on eternally. Death is not the end, basically. There’s a lot to be said about the whole psychedelic experience being a preparation for death. And that resonates for me.

The whole idea of making gold out of shit, as it were, I can see happening in the dieting, in purifying the body, vomiting and diarrhoea, getting rid of the toxins and pollutants. But also all the psychological stuff as well. I was releasing angers and resentments, and releasing memories, phenomenal memories. This wasn’t when I was on ayahuasca, it was dieting the day after. Just sitting there and remembering kids I went to school with, all this sort of stuff. It was like my memory banks were completely opened for the first time. I suppose rather like what we are told will happen at the exact point of our death—confronting all our past deeds.

One of the more startling experiences I had was when two entities in a canoe confronted me. They were like aliens. I’d just travelled through this awesomely beautiful multi-coloured golden city, and they told me that the Spanish never found El Dorado—that this is it. That the extraordinary experiences that ayahuasca can make available to us if we follow the proscriptions of the diet were in some way a secret fount of knowledge and teaching, connected with immortality, that humans could make contact with—and have been making contact with it for thousands of years. That El Dorado was a metaphor that the Spanish mistook for a literal truth. There never was any golden city in the jungle. I suppose this is an ongoing problem humans have had interpreting mythology, including the Bible—taking it literally. Metaphor is, at its simplest, a way of interacting with the ‘other’, with the unknown.

What about the identity of the “spirit” of the plant, or plants? McKenna has his thing about “the Mushroom Voice”. Whether you see the psilocybin mushrooms as being seeded from space, as McKenna suggested, or having evolved on Earth, genetically it’s a distinct entity in nature. Ayahuasca, however, doesn’t exist without humans. The constituent plants exist of course, but we’re talking about an admixture that’s an artifact of human culture.

If there were no humans, I don’t think this realm could exist. Because the third ingredient along with the two plants is human consciousness. That realm is some sort of common ground—Jung would call it the collective unconscious. It’s also a realm where you can meet other shamans and mystics and so on, and where shamans have fights. And it carries over into dreams.

It seems that an awful lot of revelation comes through in dreams, during or after the diet. And that’s the most understandable, clear information coming through. Certainly the combination of the dieting, the plants you use, and the tobacco you smoke, enhances and incubates dreams in combination with isolation from the normal everyday familiar world of human interaction. Being deprived of status and normal social relations focuses the mind into the now. The initiate is ‘betwixt and between’, a liminal state where revelation can take place.

Many people may think that the key to this mestizo shamanism is the visionary experience of taking ayahuasca.

Sometimes the visionary experience is superfluous. Often the more interesting stuff can happen just after, or a period of time after you drink ayahuasca. I think it stays in the body; particularly if you keep on dieting, it’ll stay in the body longer than normal. After drinking for months in Peru, when I came back I’d say there was still ayahuasca operating in me for up to a year afterwards. I brought up an awful lot of things, negative things, and it appeared to teach me about my depression… which then, over time, transformed into something else. Something I could understand. Something I had control over. This happened after I came back from Peru. It was a very difficult period, for a few months, where it kept coming back. It appeared to be showing me how it worked: this is how it works, and you have control over it, you don’t have to be a victim of this.

Ayahuasca to me is a harsh teacher. It expects an awful lot of you, and if you don’t learn the lesson, it can push your face in it. There are many stories in the mythologies around Pucallpa of the bad sides of ayahuasca—as much as it can give you good things, it can give you bad things. It can make you lazy, lethargic, it can destroy your life. It can cause illnesses, if you go against it. It is believed that if you diet badly, it punishes you. Instead of doing good, it does harm to you.

If you mix different plants, it gets jealous. It is conceptualized as having all the characteristics of human beings by the shamans who use it, including anger and jealousy. There appears to be an almost sexual relationship going on between the shaman and the plants, and the spirits of the plants are very jealous; you’re not allowed to mix plants. For example, when I was dieting with this jungle onion, I wasn’t allowed to drink ayahuasca for three months afterwards. I couldn’t even smell it, Graciela said, because they get jealous when they get mixed up.

Many of Pablo’s experiences, being attacked by sorcerors, have happened in his dreams, when he wasn’t using ayahuasca at all. When you do drink ayahuasca, especially when you’re dieting, you tend to have very light sleep, very “lucid” sleep, where you’re almost awake.

You’ve said of Western anthropologists who have taken the plunge and partaken of ayahuasca ceremonies, that that’s all well and good, but that actually the literature misses some of the more important effects you only get after a prolonged initiatory experience. What have we missed?

Well, I haven’t experienced anything that I haven’t heard anyone else talk about; but in the main field of anthropology, it tends not to be talked about. In Jeremy Narby’s book Shamans Through Time, there’s an anthropologist called Edith Turner who talks about seeing these ghostly figures coming out of a person being healed, and I’ve seen phenomena like that.

What convinced you that this was something other than an hallucination? Not that it’s not “real”, but that there’s not much that people haven’t seen when taking strong psychedelics!

Because I wasn’t intoxicated enough at the time. These experiences happened before or after taking ayahuasca. I’ve seen enough hallucinations to know this wasn’t that. “Hallucination” is a very problematic word anyway.

I’ve seen smoky figures standing over sick people, presences around me while I’m drinking. These were there, with your eyes open. I’ve also seen figures sitting in the trees, watching while I’m doing ayahuasca, which are transparent, like the creature in Predator. Like silhouettes of crystal or glass.

The word “shade” comes to mind…

Yes, that’s an interesting word. On the borders, betwixt and between. That’s where I’m at. To me there’s many levels of hallucinations; I’ll have to start cataloguing it to figure it out. There’s the full-colour visions that you see on ayahuasca, very fast, with your eyes closed. There’s another level of figures you can see, like the snakes I saw here on the floor, which were so realistic I nearly tried stamping on them! On that level I’ve seen figures come to me and hand me things at the beginning of sessions. A few weeks ago, actually, a figure came to me and gave me a glass of beer; I don’t know what that was about because I don’t drink any more…

One of your ancestors!

One of my demons… When I had the very powerful mystical experience with Don Mariano, these Shipibo women came and put books on a table in front of me. They were communicating to me using sign languages. I’d call them “hypnagogic”, dream-like. The sort of phenomena I associate with mushrooms or acid.

Then there’s all the aural stuff, voices speaking to you, and your psyche dividing into parts. That could account for the spirit phenomena, but I’m not sure. You get a chance to see your fears and neuroses, your own operating system, but detached from it to observe how it works. How it creates your sense of self in the world, and how it creates the world you perceive and experience.

Jung described individuation as separating out the distinct parts of yourself…

That’s certainly what I’ve observed in my work with ayahuasca. There are many levels to working with it. There’s the idea of “plant teachers”, and the idea that it’s like university, with a hierarchy of levels of understanding, moving upwards all the time. I had a huge breakthrough experience last year in Peru and it became so different from my previous experiences. I had a lot more confidence with it, and I learned how to deal with a lot of my fears. I also know that’s not the end! I know that when you reach a certain level, you level off; then suddenly you go boom and you’re moving up again. That “jumping up” is quite a challenge, and can be quite traumatic, because it opens up a whole new realm.

You sense that these levels are governed by the experience itself, and only loosely tied to human traditions?

Yeah. If you keep on working with it, it brings you to different levels. That’s an alien idea for us: that plants could be enabling something like that, that they could teach us.

That they could do anything but just sit there! Could you talk about icaros a bit, the magical songs of the ayahuasqueros? Is that specific type of tradition unique to South American ayahuasca use, or do they have similar things in Central American mushroom use, in Siberian shamanism, or whatever?

I’m not as familiar with the other traditions. I know singing itself is definitely a part of all shamanic traditions. Being a shaman is often equated with the ability to sing, and without songs you are not a shaman. One of the things that I thought was interesting was if you compare Shipibo shamanism with mestizo shamanism. Mestizo shamanism is about 150 years old, and it was learned by people of mixed blood, people from Europe who left the cities to work as rubber trappers in the jungle around Pucallpa and Iquitos. They got ill and went to indigenous Indians and learned about ayahuasca. With mestizo shamanism, you mostly learn songs from your maestro. Some of them can be received, but a lot are handed through family members. Often the songs that are believed to be most powerful are those in different languages: Quechua, Campa, other Indian dialects. It’s the reverence for the Other. You find that again with gringo spirits that appear to mestizos; it’s something from outside your own culture that has power. But for the Shipibo there isn’t this tradition of handed-down songs. The songs they sing are always improvised on the night of the session.

Unlike most other shamanic traditions, they don’t really have “objects”. They have a pipe, and bottles of aguardiente, medicinal plants and stuff. They might have rattles, but these would usually be made from the leaves of the piníon tree. Their basic tools are blowing their pipe tobacco, maybe certain perfumes… and icaros.

When I was dieting I would get repeating nightmares, hag-ridden kind of experiences, very terrifying. After a period of time I would start singing songs when these came up. There’s a whole vocal aspect to these experiences for me. I was waking up and going [lets out a strained high-pitched sound]. At the time this seemed almost like trying to scream, or trying to articulate the terror I was going through-which often woke everyone in the village up! But over a period of time, those high-pitched sounds became the songs I had been learning while drinking ayahuasca. It wasn’t conscious, it would just come out, until someone woke me up.

The other way I received icaros is directly through the mareación, the ‘sea-sickness’ phase of taking ayahuasca. You get very dizzy, very hot, your body boils, you’re sweating, it’s very uncomfortable. You also start yawning and yawning, and the more you yawn the more tired you get—you feel like you’re falling asleep or going unconscious. Melodies came to me spontaneously, having that experience. I don’t know where they came from, I would just start singing.

Graciela Shuna

Later, Graciela taught me how to put words to them. They have particular phrases in Quechua, which are in all the songs, and which are almost interchangeable. They’re all about calling the doctors, calling the magic, giving power, asking for power from the plants, etc. A lot of the songs have the same sort of words and phrases, with different melodies; the same phrase is repeated over and over again. Those phrases are important, but it seems to me that they’re not as important as the melodies. Once you have the melody, you have power from it, because you have something you can use.

When I was dieting with the jungle onion, on the first night after drinking it, I had this incredibly vivid dream where this very powerful man came. There’s all these images of power they have; they talk about doctors, policemen, presidents, kings, queens, commanders in the army. Often I had dreams about powerful people. In this dream it was a kind of trickster, a very powerful, rich businessman. I didn’t trust him. He was doing a deal with me, and he was taking me somewhere in a car with three other older men. He was sending me into this building that was falling apart. All the floors were damaged by water, very weak in the middle. A beautiful old house, with beautiful designs on the walls. When I got to the top room I started falling through the floors… down, down, down. But it wasn’t frightening. There was a brass band playing a waltz, and I started singing along with it spontaneously. All around me, as I was going down faster and faster, were all these beautiful dancing designs, like ayahuasca visions, beautiful patterns… I was amazed.

Of course, I woke Graciela up; she was sleeping beside me, and I was singing my head off! “Donal! Donal!” [laughs] She interpreted the powerful man as being the father of the plant. He was coming to teach me something, a Shipibo icaro. And the beautiful designs I was seeing were the songs: the designs were the visual manifestation of the song.

What is the nature of the power of icaros?

It’s having a relationship with something that’s outside yourself, but also within yourself. By learning about that and engaging with that, you learn something, and you get power. You’re powerful by the fact that you’re relating in that sort of way.

Maybe related to the strength that a Jungian would see gained in integrating parts of the Self? Psychic integration.

Yes, exactly. When she started interpreting my dreams, I could see her pattern. Everything was interpreted in order to empower me. To show me that everything-all my experiences, all of my psychic life-was part of an interconnected landscape that I was now becoming familiar with and learning about. By engaging with that, and by being able to have a relationship with that landscape, that was giving me its own power.

There’s that paradox of relating to something outside you and inside you. And when we talk about “psychic integration”, the process is actually about separating things out, as figures, landscapes…

It is a funny one. It gets back to the idea of, “What the hell is an archetype?” They’re part of us, but they’re outside us as well. And everybody can engage with them, so they’re personal, but they’re also universal at the same time. It seems that there’s a space where they exist that’s both outside us and inside us.

There’s a fragmentation, but I presume for someone who’s insane, these parts wouldn’t be connected in any way. But when you’re in this altered state and you’re learning about it, it doesn’t feel like a part is going way over there and I’m “losing my mind”. What you’re doing is leaning about all these compartments of your consciousness. They’re like mirrors that are reflecting each other. You can observe consciousness itself at work, how it operates. You can see all these negative or problematic parts of yourself, and you can see how they work, and how they control. And you can also see how they don’t have to control you. It’s like Cubism or something, getting a chance to see it from loads of different perspectives. In that act of observing these parts of yourself, you get a chance to have power over them. It’s a slow process.

Obviously, once you have this understanding of what’s going on with yourself, you’re much more able to see what’s going on with other people, and help them.

It’s like the “theory of mind” in evolutionary thought, where self-awareness is seen to be at least partly initiated by the evolutionary pressure in proto-hominid apes to understand others. The pressure to act in a socially effective manner required having an understanding that something like your own self-experience is probably happening inside others. And thus, to understand, manipulate or empathize with others, you looked within, to make guesses about other people’s thoughts and motives, based on your own inner workings.

“Modular” theories of consciousness are also popular in evolutionary thinking now—seeing discreet types of intelligence, like social intelligence, technical intelligence and so on, as having evolved semi-independently. Obviously it’s different to the psychological “compartments” you were talking about, but interesting all the same.

You described the experience in concrete, spatial terms…

It does feel like the mind divides into these compartments. And one of those is an observer, watching the other parts. It’s separate from them. And that’s incredible. The fact that it’s separate. You see that they’re not integral parts of you—which is how you feel. You can feel your fears are you, but they’re not. They are, but they’re also outside you, and you can control them.

How did Graciela conceive of this, or is it just your experience? Was there part of her mythology that expressed that, and did she know what you were talking about when you related it?

No. I think it’s a Western thing. They have very different models. The whole issue is one of witchcraft and sorcery; it seems to me that they don’t have an explanation for negative experiences in altered states. Or, they do, but it’s an external one. All negative experiences in these states are rationalized as sorcery and psychic attack and so on. It’s not an aspect of yourself. Like paranoia, in the West would be seen as an internal thing projected out. Whereas they take it on as an external threat, and treat it in that way. But it works, what they do. It’s still a huge area that I expect to carry on trying to understand.

Another thing is the idea of voices that come to you. I don’t know what they are.

Disembodied voices?

It’s hard to say… It’s like what we were saying about the inner/outer division: for all intents and purposes, it’s ‘our’ own voice, talking to us. But it’s different. In one of the first experiences I had after drinking with Graciela, after she had gone to bed we had what appeared to be a telepathic conversation for an hour and a half while she was asleep in the next room. Among other things she told me that I could become a shaman. The next day she came and told me that I’d come and talked to her in her dreams, and that I’d thanked her for all she had done for me. A few weeks later during an ayahuasca session she said while in trance that the spirits had talked to her, and she confirmed the very things I’d been told that previous night by ‘her’. So she confirmed the conversation I had with her, about becoming a shaman.

I’ve had other conversations, and they’ve been quite extraordinary. If I’m rational, it can’t be spirits, because spirits don’t exist. Right? So it must be a part of myself. In some way, by dieting and drinking a lot of ayahuasca regularly, you break down your normal consciousness, and there’s a paradigm shift. And in that shift you gain access to a fount of information, the Logos, whatever you want to call it, and whole realms of beings. This feeds you information about all sorts of things. It can be predictive, it can tell you about healing people, all sorts of stuff.

What about songs being used to shape and guide the experience?

Yeah, and to take you to places. My experience of that is that the experience of drinking ayahuasca is too awful to contemplate without singing. The songs appear to be like roads, or some sort of guidance through what appears to be a chaotic experience. They’re guides through what can be an incredibly alien environment. That’s all I can say.

The beliefs around those songs are that particular plants teach you songs, and that that is a direct communication with the spirit of that plant. That plant is actually speaking to you through songs, and by having the song of that plant, that gives you the power of that plant to heal, and to protect yourself and so on. There’s loads of different types of songs: songs to take you to different places, songs to cure different illnesses, songs to modify the visions, songs to calm people down when the mareación is too much, songs to reduce the visions when they’re overwhelming and frightening, when you think they’re never going to stop… And then there’s the songs that are like “story songs”, which tell stories about the mythological experiences you can have: of going underwater and meeting mermaids, meeting the ghost ships, spirits of the jungle, etc. There’s songs with words, and songs that are just hummed, blown or whistled melodies.

Actually, icaro means “to blow”, and there a whole mythology of the breath of the shaman having power to heal. By smoking tobacco, you make the breath visible. That’s one of the reasons for smoking tobacco. The whole idea of blowing and sucking is found throughout South American: blowing for protection or to heal, or sucking out things like magical darts or whatever.

There’s a number of ways the tobacco works. They can blow out the smoke, and you can see it, the breath, the power, blowing over someone’s body. So that enhances the ritual, theatrical aspect. The other thing that comes out, which I find really interesting, is the “magic phlegm”. This is the phlegm that comes up from smoking tobacco.

A different view from our culture. We don’t call it the “magic phlegm”!

Very different. They call it the mariri, the magic phlegm, and only some shamans have it. It’s really weird how they get it. They get it through the diet, and it comes in the stomach, and then up, and it burns inside them… It’s difficult to understand. The shaman will bring it up, and he will suck the dart or whatever that’s causing the illness out of the person, with the phlegm in his mouth. That acts as a protection—so the arrow doesn’t go back into him, and cause harm to him. He holds it there, then he spits that phlegm out.

The other thing is that they use perfume. So they put a perfume in their mouth, suck something out of someone, and then tsssscccccchhhhh! they spit the perfume out. Again, the perfume protects. Or else they have the perfume and they blow it over someone as a fine mist, like blowing tobacco smoke.

The perfume stuff is fascinating to me. It’s also used to modify the visions. An apprentice shaman puts perfume on himself; so again there’s a whole sexual aspect of contact with spirits. You’re preparing yourself by putting on nice clean clothes and perfume before you drink. There’s also sniffing perfume when the mareación is coming on, to enhance the visions. There’s a whole olfactory realm, or spectrum, with ayahuasca, as well as the auditory aspect.

Do you hallucinate smells?

No, but you can modify the experience incredibly with smells. With the aguardiente, with camphor. There’s agua de florida (flower water), and Tabu, different commercial products that they use. I’m still learning about this, it’s such a big, big area. There’s been very little research on this. In talking to Pablo, it seems there’s less and less perfumeros around. There’s ayahuasqueros, tabaqueros, paleros (who are tree specialists), toéros (who work with Toé). And from what I can gather from Pablo, there’s very few perfumeros left. It’s a really sophisticated thing, the perfumes they make are really powerful. Shamans will go to a perfumero to get special perfumes to protect them from sorcery or to heal an illness. Like you might sing to create patterns around you for protection, he will do that with smell, with odours. Pretty wild stuff!

When using perfumes with ayahuasca, does the odour make a transition into visuals?

Yes, that’s one aspect. It also helps to calm you down, it can reduce anxiety. But yeah, you see the smells, absolutely.

On ayahuasca, you’re incredibly suggestible, so all these things are tools. By virtue of having an intention, you feel like you can make it happen. There’s certainly a kind of self-hypnosis; and by implication, you can hypnotize the person who you’re healing. And by doing that, by convincing them that you have this power and that you’re doing this, that by itself will enable them to heal themselves.

So it’s like Paul McKenna as well as Terence McKenna!

There’s all sorts of things going on there. I don’t like to use the term “placebo”, because people go, “Oh yes, placebo, I understand it.” It’s like “archetypes”-we don’t actually understand these things. We see placebo as kind of like you’re pretending, or you think it so it works… I think it’s a bit more complex than that.

What are you trying to achieve with the film?

I’ve always been a filmmaker. I went to art school, and got into making Super 8 films, and after that I worked with bands, then went on to do Exploding Cinema, trying to create a whole alternative culture around film making. Then I got involved in raves, VJaying, further away from film making.

Then I went through an awful crisis in my mid to late thirties. I was experimenting with all sorts of different substances, like a mad doctor, getting hits and misses, after not taking any for a long time. I started falling apart, and this very difficult crisis lasted on-and-off for a few years. During that I discovered ayahuasca, and I just started shooting film. I wasn’t even sure what I was doing. I was interested in shamanism, and always had been since reading Casteneda’s books as a teenager.

On one of my trips to Peru in 2001 I went with a camera to interview Pablo Amaringo, after talking to him before and realizing he knew an awful lot. But there was no real plan about what the film was going to be like. It evolved over a period of time. When I was working with a production company after coming back from Peru, I had all this footage, and I said I wanted to do something with it. The film came out of that process. I started to see that my story was actually part of the film, and that’s what I should be looking at.

Then I went out to Peru again with a cameraman, to get more footage, and to start documenting the experiences I was having much more comprehensively. I started thinking about how my story and experiences would be the best way for me to try and understand shamanism, the mythology and so on. Otherwise it was just “funny primitive people” doing weird shit out in the jungle, which we have no bridge to; I realized I was the bridge to this experience, and that this was a powerful way to try to understand this. Part of my healing has been to try and understand what these people are talking about.

So the film’s come about as a result of several different stories: their stories and folklore, the shamans over there; partly, my own story; and the stuff I brought to it from Ireland, folklore that I’d collected there, some of which seemed to resonate with the oral traditions around shamanism I was hearing around Pucallpa. All these elements gelled together as an idea, Stories on a Stick.

At the same time, with me the director in the film, I started thinking about the whole documentary form. It’s an interesting way of interacting with the documentary process, which is seen as being objective; in a way I was “going native”, crossing over a line. About a year after I started doing this, these mainstream films started appearing, like Supersize Me and American Splendor. You could see the whole idea of documentary breaking down, using reconstructions and so on like in Touching The Void. This gave me the confidence to really push the boundaries of what a documentary could be. I was really interested in playing with the form like this, and of course the film lent itself to this sort of experimentation because it was about psychedelic states, dreams, mythology, memory and the supernatural.

Putting yourself into the film, deconstructing and reconstructing your experiences… Did this relate to or grow out of the experience on ayahuasca, of having the different parts of your psyche laid out before you, with an observer part watching?

I hadn’t consciously thought of that, but now that you mention it I’d say there’s something interesting going on there. It’s quite a cubist film in that way, in that there are all these different perspectives—even down to the whole thing of working with special effects, trying to create these visual metaphors. There’s a mixture of the diary form, from my own diaries, written and video diaries; there’s my own memory, which is very elastic; and there’s the special effects, trying to reconstruct internal, subjective experiences and create visual metaphors. People have said you can’t reconstruct these things, and you can’t. But since humans started taking plants, going back to Palaeolithic caves, there’s been representations of the experience; whether it’s just dots pecked onto a cave wall, the entoptics, the swirls, whatever.

Maybe they knew they were falling short of representing the whole experience, but they still felt compelled to mark it.

All around the Amazon, the face painting, the weaving, the pottery, it’s all there, it’s everywhere, those designs are integrated into all aspects of their lives. They were creating metaphors, connecting everything. The stick of maize becomes the vertical shaft, which the shaman travels up and down to the upperworld and the underworld, which has a cross at its centre: the four directions, north, south, east and west, a map of human consciousness. It’s incredible how it all integrates, right down to how smoke becomes a snake, or a rope, or a vine, or a ladder. Things morph into other things. It integrates the world you live in. And that’s a powerful thing to do. Otherwise you’ve got a world that doesn’t make any sense, and that’s terrifying.

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.