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.

Preface:
This article is not to attack anyones practices and beliefs, but it tries to elucidate where in the West we have underplayed the role of the Ayahuasca vine and beta-carbolines within our Western notion of Ayahuasca, which has, since the early 1990’s wave of entheogenic literature, been very DMT-centric. Such an view has begun to lead onto the attitude that smoking DMT or Changa is ‘the evolution of Ayahuasca’ or ’smokable Ayahuasca’. In this we risk falling into cultural appropriation, since the indigenous use of Ayahuasca (B.caapi) is many thousands of years old.

“ayahuasca” or “ayawaska” (“Spirit vine” or “vine of the souls”: in Quechua, aya means “spirit” while huasca or waska means “vine”) in Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru, and to a lesser extent in Brazil. The spelling ayahuasca is the hispanicized version of the name; many Quechua or Aymara speakers would prefer the spelling ayawaska. The name is properly that of the plant B. caapi, one of the primary sources of beta-carbolines for the brew.
Wikipedia- Ayahuasca entry

Ayahuasca is the indigenous Amazonian name for the Banisteriopsis caapi vine, where it has been used for thousands upon thousands of years in healing, sorcery, and cleansing. The vine is used as a gatekeeper to the realm of a myriad of medicinal plants, such as Ajo Sacha and Tobacco, which are ‘dieted’ in close proximity to the Vine.

Ayahuasca lives within a unique complex of customs, traditions, knowledge and wisdom which are strong to this day, and continue to develop within syncretic communities and movements such as UDV, Barquinha and Santo Daime, as well as through the unique and individualistic exploration with the tea in the Western world.

Ayahuasca in Psychedelic Literature

Beginning with ethnographic exploration, beat-generation literature, and the psychedelic research of the 1960’s, Ayahuasca research entered the Western world. Since the mid-1980’s Ayahuasca was popularised in North America and Europe through the writings of Terrence McKenna and other ethnobotanical luminaries such as Jim DeKorne and Jonathon Ott. This wave of literature was important and paradigm-shifting, despite the Ayahuasca often being understood from a Westernised ethnocentric perspective. The literature of this time focusses on the botanical classification of entheogenic plants and the principle psychedelic compounds they contain. Westerners approached indigenous traditions as pilgrims and explorers, ‘discovering’ the ways and means to work with the powerful psychedelic properties of shamanistic medicines.

Two books stand out as seminal from this time. ‘Ayahuasca Analogues’ by J.Ott, and ‘Ayahyasca Visions’ by Pablo Amaringo and Luis Eduardo Luna. It was perhaps only with the publication of ‘Ayahuasca Visions’ by Pablo Amaringo and Luis Eduardo Luna that the rich levels of meaning, knowledge and tradition connected with the indigenous Ayahuasca universe became evident. This was because the Ayahuasca was spoken of from the perspective of an Ayahuasquero – someone who had immersed themselves for many years within the culture of Ayahuasca practices and the accrued, empirical knowledge of countless generations of people working with the Ayahuasca potion. The phenomenology and shamanistic practices of the plants takes precedence in this information. The bias of knowledge is in furthering the internal horizon with the aid and agency of plant spirits and other intelligences accessible through the ambassador of the Ayahuasca.

‘Ayahuasca Analogues’
or
Potions-with-their-own-names

‘Ayahuasca Analogues’, by Ott, revealed the exciting prospect of developing Ayahuasca-type synergystic potions from plants in boreal climates. The book is composed of potentially useful plants that are identified as containing either DMT, 5-Meo DMT, and beta-carbolines. Analogues are plants or chemicals used in place of the traditional constituents of the ayahuasca brew. In the perspective of this book, analogues can produce an ‘ayahuasca-effect’. Two of the most common are Peganum harmala and Mimosa hostilis, as replacements for the B. caapi vine, and DMT-containing admixture plants, respectively. It discusses the prospect of Ayahuasca-analogues preventing psychedelic prohibition, and ushering in a pan-Gaian entheogenic revival. Whilst the book is an incredible contribution to human knowledge, it does present certain axioms that, in light of further research, could be analysed further.

Through ‘analogues’, many have experienced profound healing and accessed visionary states not entirely unlike those produced by traditional ayahuasca brews, and most agree that modern analogue plants are extremely powerful and deserving of respect. However, analogue brews are not the same as Ayahuasca and deserve unique status. This is because experienced ayahuasca drinkers who have also had the opportunity to drink ayahuasca admixture brews, such as tea made from Syrian rue and Mimosa, generally conclude that the effects are different.

And infact, many ‘Ayahuasca analogues’ are plants with their own histories and traditions as shamanistic catylists. They have their own names. Calling unique plant potions ‘Ayahuasca analogues’ encourages a uncreative approach to the specific identies and properties of other medicine plants. Different plants, such as Jurema (Mimosa Hostilis), Haoma (Syrian Rue) and Golden Wattle (Acacia) have their own names and their own unique teachings, if one is working with the plant and not a highly refined isolate.

Ott, in his ‘Ayahuasca Analogues’ book describes a series of experiments where he works to lower the beta-carboline component of the tea to a point where it is simply enough to allow tryptamines to be orally active. So, using the bare minimum of Caapi, and focusing only on the visionary DMT effects as the “main event” can result in the impression that Caapi and Rue, or any MAOI are similar and interchangeable. This view of the spiritual and entheogenic unimportance of the beta-carbolines has been assumed by many who have followed:

“Through the hard and potentially dangerous work of back yard shamans and amature ethnobotanists, any plants have been discovered that have the alkaloids necessary to produce the ayahausca effect…. The ayahuasca effect is simply the inhibition of enzymes in the body that normally degrade ingested DMT, allowing the DMT to pass though the body altering consciousness without being destroyed by the body’s enzymes.”
- Chen Chow Dorge

But Ayahuasca is not ’simply’ a vehicle for DMT. This is over-simplified to the point of fallacy. The Ayahuasca vine itself could only be considered a simple ‘inhibitor of the enzymes’ if it were without its own experiential and bio-active dimension.

Ayahuasca is not an ‘effect’. It is the name of a plant, and the tea made from the plant. And its effects are unique. The indigenous Amazonian perspective is that Ayahuasca is the B.caapi vine, and the admixture plants are her “helpers.” It is no accident that the brew is called “Ayahuasca,” the name of the vine. Most of the common native names for the brew — Ayahuasca, Yage, Caapi, Natema, Caapi, Dapa, Mihi, Kahi, Pinde, Nixi, etc — are also names for the Vine, whereas there is no record of any group naming the brew for the tryptamine-containing admixtures. It took many decades for the importance of the admixture plants even to be recognized by ethnobotanists, because every indigenous group recorded as using Ayahuasca stressed the Vine, and not uncommonly use Vine alone, and admixtures vary widely while the Vine is the common denominator.

A DMT-centric view of Ayahuasca neglects the powerful influence of the beta-carbolines. The psychopharmacology of the beta-carbolines, in their specific and fluctuating levels within the vine, is poorly understood both pharmacologically and experientially in the West, and its role underappreciated by many psychonautic western researchers.

The Ayahuasca vine is not merely a facilitator for a DMT experience. It is a profound entheogenic plant teacher in its own right, and patterns any other plant taken with it according to its unique character. Although not considered ‘psychedelic’ to an conventional, LSD orientated Western standard, the vine is notheless capable of producing profound noetic experiences, visions, amplified dreams, anti-depressive effects, and both physical and spiritual cleansing. This is why in the Amazon it is often used by itself, or with many other plants. The vine is also known as a bearer of THH, which is a minimal MAOI, but generates receptor sites for serotonin thus producing a long lasting antidepressant effect. THH occurs in much greater concentration in B. caapi than in other plants bearing ß-carbolines, such as Peganum harmala (Syrian rue). THH may be (according to Dr Alexander Shulgin) completely absent from Syrian Rue. This is just one example how each plant has their own unique signature, chemically speaking. This doesn’t even cover the differences in spiritual character.

This dynamic aspect, the vine as an ambassador of the plant kingdom, is part of the very beauty of Ayahuasca traditions, which is corroded by a view of the vine as a mere delivery system for DMT.

The idea that a combination of plants results in a simple ‘ayahuasca effect’ depicts a vision of plants as simple repositories of alkaloids. The reality is each plant has its own unique biochemical signature, and this is what gives a plant its ‘character’ when consumed.

To briefly pay homage to the indigenous vision (the wisdom accured over millenia of first-hand phenomenological shamanistic experiences)… Plants are not simple repositories of chemicals. They are living dyanmic systems, organisms, which, when accessed from an entheogenic state of mind, reveal themselves as ‘plant-teachers’.

Banisteriopsis Caapi - Ayahuasca

Changa & Ayahuasca

To highlight the issue of cultural appropriation, recently, an interesting article has appeared on the internet penned by Chen Cho Dorge, claiming an ‘Evolution of Ayahuasca’. www.realitysandwich.com/changa_evolution_ayahuasca … discussing ‘changaya‘, a smoking mixture made from a DMT-rich alkaloid extract soaked into herbal carrier, sometimes including dried, potentised B-caapi leaf, the article rolls with the idea that the reader agree that this smoking mixture is Ayahuasca.

The article relays a definition of Ayahuasca which intentionally attempts to sever the word ‘Ayahuasca’ completely from the plant and its indigenous lineages, and asserts that the reader think of Ayahuasca as a DMT based ‘ayahuasca-effect’. It is a paradigm that is the logical outcome of a view of Ayahuasca where the role of the Ayahuasca vine is strongly overlooked. The early 1990’s wave of entheogenic literature was very DMT-centric. Such an view has begun to lead onto the attitude that smoking DMT or Changa is ‘the evolution of Ayahuasca’ or ’smokable Ayahuasca’.

In many peoples minds this is a form of cultural appropriation, because even though there is this push to call the smoke some sort of evolution of Ayahuasca, it removes the central role of the Ayahuasca vine as a medicinal tea and purgative, and makes the Ayahuasca vine – at the very most- a secondary ingredient.

“The sacred medicine that has historically provided incredible transformations in those who drink it has itself transformed. It has become Changa… Changa is quite possibly one of the most amazing innovations in the technology of the sacred in our lifetime.”
- Chen Chow Dorge

To claim any plant combination that enables DMT to become orally active is ‘Ayahuasca’, or more, that the DMT effect = ‘Ayahuasca effect’ = Ayahuasca itself, is trouble on grounds of cultural appropriation, because it ignores a living indigenous tradition, language, etymology, folklore, taxonomy. It is a conflation:

Conflation occurs when the identities of two or more individuals, concepts, or places, sharing some characteristics of one another, become confused until there seems to be only a single identity — the differences appear to become lost.[1] In logic, the practice of treating two distinct concepts as if they were one does often produce error or misunderstanding — but not always — as a fusion of distinct subjects tends to obscure analysis of relationships which are emphasized by contrasts.

A refined DMT alkaloid extract from acacia or mimosa (in the great majority of cases, extracted with non-lab grade petrochemicals), absorbed via the burning of a herbal carrier (which may or may not include caapi leaves), is a very different matter than imbibing an aqueous solution of the entire water soluble aspect of the plants. Such a smoking blend may be profound, entheogenic, and, if made cleanly enough and taken with intention and preperation, could be cleansing and healing.

But nobody in South America, the thousands of people working regularly with the tea as a sacrament, shamanistic tool or healing medicine, would recognise Changa as Ayahuasca. Changa is a tryptamine rich smoking mixture, where the actual Ayahuasca – the beta-carboline rich vine – may be slightly present or completely absent from Changa depending on the recipe.

Unless we want to inadvertantly decimate a living taxonomical, historical, and indigenous definition, it is useful to learn the individual names of entheogenic plants and not conflate them. With so little indigenous knowledge left in the world, we would do well to respect and preserve the diversity of knowledge, language and tradition.

To iterate, this is not a moral issue, of what is ‘better or worse’, ‘right or wrong’, its about taxonomy and language, and the accompanying paradigms around plant teachers.

Theres a difference in paradigm between an approach that looks at Ayahuasca as a DMT carrier, looks at the plants as delivery systems of a certain number of chemicals we know to be powerfully entheogenic, or looks at Ayahuasca through a systemic or ecological view, looks at the plants as being highly complex signals, highly complex communications, highly complex identities, where the powerful entheogenic substances like DMT and the beta-carbolines, are modulated, signatured and patterned by the total sum of all elements within the plant. Because a plant is made from hundreds if not thousands of different molecular patterns, all of which interact, all of which make up the plants own ‘true name’.

- Daniel Mirante, May 2010

Links

See also www.ayahuasca.com/ayahuasca-overviews/what-are-ayahuasca-analogues/

Eagle’s Wing

General Information about Ayahuasca

After being virtually ignored by Western civilization for centuries, there has been a huge surge of interest in Ayahuasca recently. There is a growing belief that it is a kind of ‘medicine for our times’, giving hope to people with ‘incurable’ diseases like cancer and HIV, drug addictions and inspiring answers to the big ecological problems of modern civilization.

Spirituality is at the centre of the Ayahuasca experience. Purification and cleansing of body, mind, and spirit in a shamanic ceremony can be the beginning of a process of profound personal and spiritual discovery and transformation. This process can continue indefinitely even if one never drinks Ayahuasca again. One thing is sure, and that is that every person gets a unique experience. We believe that by seriously looking at the way Ayahuasca is used we can improve our life experience and benefit more from this medicine.

Ayahuasca is the jungle medicine of the upper Amazon. It is made from the ayahuasca vine ( Banisteriopsis Caapi) and the leaf of the Chacruna plant (Psychotria Viridis). The two make a potent medicine, which takes one into the visionary world. The vine is an inhibitor, which contains harmala and harmaline among other alkaloids, and the leaf contains vision-inducing alkaloids. As with all natural medicines, it is a mixture of many alkaloids that makes their unique properties. For example, Peyote, the cactus used by the North Native Americans, is said to contain 32 active alkaloids, so when one of those alkaloids, mescaline (LSD) is synthesised in a laboratory, contrary to popular opinion, the result is not at all the same.

The oldest know object related to the use of ayahuasca is a ceremonial cup, hewn out of stone, with engraved ornamentation, which was found in the
Pastaza culture of the Ecuadorian Amazon from 500 B.C. to 50 A.D. It is deposited in the collection of the Ethnological Museum of the Central
University (Quito, Ecuador). This indicates that ayahuasca potions were known and used at least 2,500 years ago.

Ayahuasca is a name derived from two Quechua words: aya means spirit, ancestor, deceased person, and huasca means vine or rope, hence it is known as vine of the dead or vine of the soul. It is also known by many other local names including yaje, caapi, natema, pinde, daime, mihi, & dapa. It plays a central role in the spiritual, religious and cultural traditions of the Indigenous and Mestizo (mixed blood) peoples of the upper Amazon, Orinoco plains and the Pacific coast of Colombia and Ecuador.

The plants are collected from the rainforest in a sacred way and it is said that a shaman can find plentiful sources of the vine by listening for the ‘drumbeat’ that emanates from them. The mixture is prepared by cutting the vines to cookable lengths, scraping and cleaning them, pounding them into a pulp. Meanwhile the Chacruna leaves and picked and cleaned.

So what, perhaps, is the advantage of ayahuasca over other disciplines? In the words of Padrino Alex Polari de Alverga of the Santo Daime Community in Brazil, “Daime (ayahuasca) is basically a shortcut, it’s as if we had been travelling down the same highway as the rest of humanity, but then, in order to arrive at our destination more quickly we took a side road. When taking such a shortcut, however, we must be very careful and clear-minded. It is a shortcut that leads us to truth, but only if we follow in the footsteps of the Masters who have preceded us.”

Medicines like ayahuasca can help us along our path but we still have to do the work ourselves. My experience is that these kind of allies can help us open the doors of perception, but what we do when we get there is entirely our own challenge.

To understand ayahuasca in the local context, one cannot avoid taking a look at the ecological environment, such as the forest, cultural environment and indigenous cultures. This has structured the cultural content of ayahuasca.

There are many legends and myths about ayahuasca, one the more romantic is from the Shipibo people who live up the river in the heart of the jungle in the Peruvian Amazon.

This tale is centered around women, more so than men, as they look after the children and their health, whilst the men are out hunting and fishing. Men are more interested in plants that aid their inner spirits whilst hunting. Women are more interested in plants that will allow their children to grow.

There was one particular woman who was very interested in plants, who liked to pick the leaves of different plants. She would then crush the leaves into a pot and soak them in water over night. She would then take a bath every morning before sunrise (the way to find out about various plants and their effects is to bathe in them). She bathed in them every morning until she had a dream. In her dream a woman came and said, “why are you bathing every day?”

She answered, “I am doing this as I want you to teach me.” The other woman said, “You must seek out my uncle, his name is Kamarampi. I will show you where to find him”. The woman led the other woman to her uncle. The uncle showed her how to mix the leaves of the chacruna, which was a bush she had taken leaves from to bathe in. He showed her how to prepare the brew of Ayahuasca, he told her to go and tell the people the knowledge of how to use the brew. The Indigenous people past and present have taken Ayahuasca to enable them to focus on other dimensions. One example: – To enable them to be more successful on a hunting trip they would contact the Mother spirit of certain species, through the Ayahuasca. The hunt would be more successful.

One of the many mysteries surrounding Ayahuasca is how the vine became to be used with the Chacruna leaves as although they both come from the same soil but always grow apart otherwise the ayahuasca winds around the Chacruna and kills it. No one knows this but we get a clue from how the shamans interact with the plant. Javier Arevalo a shaman from the Peruvian Amazon told us “ in the old days his grandfather and uncles used to sit around after taking ayahuasca and he said that ayahuasca was originally taken alone and in the visions they saw that Chacruna was missing. Ayahuasca would say I am the doctor that gives the vision. His grandfather responded, how can we find this plant? The response in the vision was, you can find it by turning two corners. So they went around two corners and found a bush which attracted them which was Chacruna i.e. the ayahuasca showed them.

This is a fundamental principle, in the visions it is the spirit doctor of ayahuasca which tells them what is wrong with their patient, what medicine they need, or who has caused the illness or malaise.

The Icaros

Integral to the ceremony are the chants that the shaman sings. These are known as Icaros, and the chant will direct the nature of the ceremony or visionary experience for the group and for individuals as the shaman during the ceremony will chant specific Icaros for that person’s needs.

The words of the chants are symbolic stories telling of the ability of nature to heal itself. For example the crystalline waters from a stream wash the unwell person, while coloured flowers attract the hummingbirds whose delicate wings fan healing energies etc. You might see such things in your visions but the essence which cures you is perhaps more likely to be the understanding of what is happening in your life, allowing inner feelings to unblock so that bitterness and anger con change to ecstasy and love. To awaken from the ‘illusion of being alive’ is to experience life itself.

There are several different kinds of Icaros, at the beginning of the session. Their purpose is to provoke the mareacion or effects, and, in the words of Javier Arevalo, ‘to render the mind susceptible for visions to penetrate, then the curtains can open for the start of the theatre’.

Other Icaros call the spirit of Ayahuasca to open visions ‘as though exposing the optic nerve to light’. Alternatively, if the visions are too strong, the same spirit can be made to fly away in order to bring the person back to normality.

There are Icaros for calling the ‘doctors’, or plant spirits, for healing, while other Icaros call animal spirits, which protect and rid patients of spells.

Healing Icaros may be for specific conditions like manchare, which a child may suffer when it gets a fright. The spirit of a child is not so fixed in its body as that of an adult, therefore a small fall can easily cause it to fly. Manchare is a common reason for taking children to ayahuasca sessions.

Preparation for the Ayahuasca Experience

In the West there are lots of stories like ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ reminding us that plants have spirit power, Alice in Wonderland explored this world too. There is a large body of knowledge of power plants even if the form has been adapted to fairy tales and ‘domesticated’, not to under rate the richness of Grimms’ tales.

When a person drinks Ayahuasca, especially with a trusted shaman, there is a chance to learn and trust the plant. You discover that it works in its own way. It is a great moment getting to this point. Then there is the question of whether the plant trusts us, because it can be abused and used for getting the wrong kind of personal power. Without intention, vision, preparation, and a shaman, it is a drug not a healing medicine.

A major difficulty for Westerners is the diet and the living conditions in the rainforest. There is also the care clients need afterwards, as one is extremely vulnerable after drinking Ayahuasca. Also some of our attitudes need to change, for example some people find vomiting unpleasant.

In the Ayahuasca ceremony purgative cleansing of the physical body is an essential preparation for the new level of emerging consciousness. Vomiting and occasionally brief diarrhoea are common effects during the initial sessions.

The Shaman’s Diet

An integral element of this preparation is to undertake a diet intended to reduce excessive sugar, salt, oils, pork, fat, and spicy food in the body in
preparation to be in communion with the spirit of Ayahuasca. Reduction of these should commence as soon as one commits to the experience.

Pork in particular is considered to be impure and is studiously avoided by Ayahuasca practitioners. Complete abstinence from pork and lard for at least two weeks prior to the first ceremony is recommended to participants to reduce the impact of the purge. It is also recommended that this abstinence continue for at least two weeks after the final ceremony.

In the initiatory diet for those seeking personal cleansing and healing, chicken, fish, wild game meat, fruits, and vegetables may be eaten but with little if any salt, sugar, oils or spices. The cleansing effect and strength of the visionary experience can be greatly enriched by one’s commitment to these preparations.

Sexual abstinence also forms part of the diet and is a traditional requirement of Ayahuasca cleansing and healing. We recommend abstinence from sexual activity for a few days prior to the ceremony, and to continue a day or two after the last ceremony.

As all Amazonian shamans will tell you, and in the words of Dona Cotrina
“ Sex is bad. The ‘mother plant’ loves you and if you make love to another person, you are being unfaithful to her”. For this reason it is often said that Ayahuasca is jealous, and if you do not respect her, she makes you ill instead of healing you. You will also not be able to see any visions. The ill effects from not respecting the diet are called cutipa and range from a sense of trauma and stress to skin problems.

Menstrual cycle.

This is a complex issue in the Amazonian tradition. Basically women in their menstrual cycle are not permitted by Amazonian shamans and curanderos to be present in the preparation of the brew, drink Ayahuasca or attend the ceremonies. This is an ancient tradition rooted mainly in safety considerations rather than sexism, as female shamans in the Amazon also follow these prohibitions.

Some shamans say the presence of a woman in menstrual flow prevents them from “seeing” the causes of illness among those present in the ceremony, thus obstructing their ability to make diagnoses and facilitate healing.

Although Eagle’s Wing are unable to make any exception as this rule is observed by shamans in the Ayahuasca tradition, our experience is that shamans have a degree of flexibility and can perform a special chacapa session with participants to address this.

Medical Precautions

It is important to know that, in some cases, the consumption of Ayahuasca in combination with some groups of prescription & non-prescription medicines can bear health risks.

1. Prescription Medicines
If you are taking prescription medication (including antibiotics), are subject to high blood pressure, have a heart condition, or are under treatment for any health condition), please consult your GP.

1.1 Anti-depressants
Ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis Caapi) contains MAOI’s (monoamine oxidase inhibitors) generally in the form of harmine and harmaline therefore Medical consultation is essential if you are taking Prozac or other antidepressants affecting serotonin levels, i.e. serotonin selective re-uptake inhibitors (SSRI).

SSRI’s block the reuptake of serotonin in the brain and because MAOI’s inhibit breakdown of serotonin, the combination of MAOI’s and SSRI’s can lead to too high levels of serotonin in the brain. SSRI’s are much more common than MAOI’s which are found in some anti-depressants. Consult your GP about the use of temporary monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOI).

These medications generally require a period of six to eight weeks to completely clear the system and must be reduced gradually.

2. Non-Prescription Medicines
Non-prescription medications such as antihistamines, dietary aids, amphetamines and derivatives, and some natural herbal medicines, i.e. those
containing ephedrine, high levels of caffeine, or other stimulants, may also cause adverse reactions. We recommend that you discontinue all such medications, drugs, and herbs for at least one week prior to and following work with Ayahuasca.

3. Recreational Drugs
Avoid all recreational drugs, in particular MDMA (Ecstasy), cocaine, heroin. Also do not drink alcohol on the day of the ceremony.

4. Herbal Remedies
Use of herbal remedies for depression such as St John’s Wort (which also influence the serotonin levels) need to be discontinued as per 2 above.

Article Source: Preparation for the Ayahuasca Experience

]]> http://www.ayahuasca.com/ayahuasca-overviews/preparation-for-the-ayahuasca-experience/feed/ 15 http://www.ayahuasca.com/ayahuasca-overviews/on-the-origins-of-ayahuasca/ http://www.ayahuasca.com/ayahuasca-overviews/on-the-origins-of-ayahuasca/#comments Sun, 31 Aug 2008 12:40:21 +0000 Daniel Mirante http://www.ayahuasca.com/?p=68 Daniel Mirante How could such a complex synergistic potion be discovered amongst over 80,000 catalogued plant species of the Amazon forest? Studying Ayahuasca, modern minds have puzzled the origins of the discovery of the Great Medicine, since it is commonly said that being a synergistic potion, there is no effect when only one of the plants are consumed. ]]> How could such a complex synergistic potion be discovered amongst over 80,000 catalogued plant species of the Amazon forest? Studying Ayahuasca, modern minds have puzzled the origins of the discovery of the Great Medicine, since it is commonly said that being a synergistic potion, there is no effect when only one of the plants are consumed.

Most indigenous Amazonian populations say they learned how to combine Ayahuasca directly from the plants and plant spirits as received instruction. For many westerners such an assertion is completely beyond their familiar paradigm and experience.

Some modern researchers have therefore appealed to blind chance, ‘coincidence’. Natural selection. Trial and error. An explanation that the scientific mind finds credible, and yet there is something improbable and lazy about the idea, unless factors were at work which raised the odds of the magical medicines discovery…

PARALLEL USE AND CONVERGENCE THEORY

One often touted inaccuracy about Ayahuasca is that both plants have to be combined for psycho-activity. In fact, banisteriopsis caapi is a powerful shamanistic plant teacher in its own right. Many tribes drink the vine on its own.

The vine has been used as a kind of ‘divinator’ for other plant medicines for a long time because it allows the person injesting to get a kind of deep readout of the property of a plant taken in combination with vine.

The Rubiaceae family has many medicinal plants, and perhaps Chacruna may have already been taken medicinally. There are obviously many plants that the indigenous people consume as medicines that are not evidently psychoactive. And many of these plants also have a history of being used within the context of Yage (banisteriopsis caapi) based potions.

There is a medicinal employment of a plant closely related to Psychotria Viridis, called Psychotria Ipecacuanha – i-pe-kaa-guéne, which is said to mean ‘road-side sick-making plant.’ It is used as a treatment for “bloody flux” – dysentery. There is also a Psychotria called Psychotria Emetica – guess what that does.

There is another Psychotria, ‘Sampakatishi’, the leaf juice is squeezed into the eyes for a sharpening of the senses that aids in hunting, and also it is used as a treatment for migraine.

To summarise this idea : Psychotria Viridis was employed as a purgative and intestinal cleanser… the medicinal uses of P.Viridis and Caapi may have been occurring parallel, then at some point their paths crossed. (As for Diplopterys Cabrerana, another primary Ayahuasca plant, is a liana similar in appearance to Banisteriopsis Caapi. It is likely plants of similar taxonomic appearance were reasonably assumed to have similar properties.)

SLOW METABOLISERS OF MAOI/LOW MAO-A PHENOTYPE THEORY

Here is another theory. It occurs to me that physiologically westerners are greatly different from the early inhabitants of the rainforest – in height, fat, and probably even vary with the basic processes of digestion and metabolism, because they had such a very different way of life, a completely different diet.

Is it possible that the early inhabitants, since they did not have a fermented/aged protein-rich diet, had not evolved a powerful MAO-A response ? And that consumption of psychotria, perhaps originally as an amoebic dysentery cure, could have induced some kind of mild psycho-activity in such sensitive beings with very ‘acute’ awareness (which was needed as hunters, gatherers and warriors within such an environment). ?

It is known that westerners have trouble getting strong entheogenic effects from the tryptamine snuffs such as virola and cebil without using very powerful basification and large doses. Similarly the amount of morning glory seeds consumed in traditional sessions are of an order of magnitude less than what Westerners seem to require for any psycho-activity. Could it be that the early forest dwellers were more sensitive to tryptamines because of their way of life as well as lacking a powerful MAO to break down environmental tryptamines ?

…what we think of as very grass roots tribes descended from civilisations such as the Inca or Tirona – had common roots where such knowledge was already established. The true gold of El Dorado was no metal…

Whilst a discovery like Ayahuasca may have occured against astronomical odds in an isolated context, such knowledge may have spread quickly. Tribes connect with each other through trade, through marriage, through war. A lot of tribes that are described as isolated were actually fugitives from the conquests… what we think of as very grass roots tribes descended from civilisations such as the Inca or Tirona – had common roots where such knowledge was already established. The true gold of El Dorado was no metal…

JAGUAR THEORY

On an aesthetic level this is a cute theory : Humans learnt the use of the Vine from the Jaguar.

Jaguar’s chew the leaves of banisteriopsis caapi, the indians believe, to improve its sensitivity for hunting, and the indigenous people took it originally for the same reason. It seems from an evolutionary perspective all sacred medicines have selective advantages in their use, as anti-parasitic, immune-boosting, or increasing ones capacity to acquire more food.

RESONANT INFORMATION THEORY

And now to return to the indigenous assertion that the plants themselves, or spiritual being associated with the plants, revealed the Great Medicine.

It has to be pointed out that there are many variations of Ayahuasca origin myths, varying from tribe to tribe. They may point to an underlying truth, that of an ultimately spiritual ordinance, but the great variety of myth must necessarily lead us out of a singular literalistic view. Its a human tendency to generate narratives and imaginings when the truth is lost in primordial time.

However it is a modern human tendency to dismiss the exquisitely sensitive capacities of our being, to sense the qualities of plants, either in very small quantities, or even through smell or proximity.

In Forest of Visions: Ayahuasca, Amazonian Spirituality, and the Santo Daime Tradition, Stephen Larsen writes:

“I met with one of the jungle pharmacists, a woman who makes potent preparations from indigenous wild plants. In an amazing conversation hampered by my limited Portuguese, I learned how elemental spirits of the rain forest appeared to her, sometimes even before the physical plant was discovered, and helped her understand the pharmaceutical uses of their plant. “Yes, but do they really work?” I heard myself asking, half hating myself for the sceptic’s question. “Yes,” she said simply, “they work.” Here in the jungle, I realized, there is not much room for placebos or double-blind studies — or for remedies that don’t work! Life seems precarious and precious. Healers need to heal well.”

We see throughout the animal communities that monkeys, bears, hedgehogs, peccaries, and birds including eagles, avail themselves of the naturally occurring medicinal plants surrounding them. How do animals know what to munch on ? They have no written pharmacopoeia, or oral traditions. Acquired and learned behaviours are certainly possible, but this does not explain the broad instances of animals using medicinal plants of their bio-regions.

How does the jaguar know about Ayahuasca ? Perhaps they quite simply feel it. And if they can tune into these plants through deep intuition/instinct, then humans in can as well.

How do they know that a plant is good for them ? How does the jaguar know about Ayahuasca ? Perhaps they quite simply feel it. And if they simply feel it, if they tune into these plants through deep intuition/instinct, then humans in bio-centric cultures certainly can as well.

The question is how is such ‘intuition’ possible ?Westerners have inherited a concept of self or mind from a Cartesian framework, which (theoretically and often experientially) severs the mind from body, body and mind from its greater ecological milieu. Consciousness and matter, mind and body, subject and object, process and substance always go together, as a unity, a non-dual duality, which for the indigenous cultures of the world is a lived experience needing no special distinction.

We participate in nature’s process, and are participated within our selves by nature. Alfred North Whitehead’s world is filled with “organisms” from elementary particles to human beings and galaxies. An organism is a focus of unification, a holon (in Arthur Koestler’s language) in which other organisms are nested in various hyper-cycles that constitute and define it, support and maintain it.

Just as the body is a liquid-crystalline continuum which registers our experiences and allows us to then act upon our experiences, with spontaneous choice, Laszlo (1995,1996) has proposed that the universe is a quantum holographic memory-medium, one with the experiences of every being, which in turn feeds back on it. In this way, each being exists due to the influences of the quantum holographic sea of information. This is all another way of saying ‘as above, so below‘.

Dr Mae-Wan Ho :

“It is truly a creative universe in that the future is not pre-ordained but spontaneously and freely made by every being, from elementary particles to galaxies, from microbes to the giant redwood trees, all mutually entangled in a universal wave-function that never collapses, but like a constantly changing cosmic consciousness, maintains and informs the universal whole”

If the universe of all beings co-evolves in a mutually correlated fashion, then certainly Gaia may be understood as a super-organism within which communication and coherence (synchronic order) can be established in ecological relationships. Synergies, symbiosis, and human-plant partnerships become established, as the web of life evolves. There is a self-organising play at work, beyond natural-selection and blind coincidence.

Certainly, many people working with Ayahuasca rediscover sensitivity toward the realm of nature, as if the phantom self had come down from its ivory tower to finally touch the earth, the real. And what the real is, has levels of organisation beyond what we may previously have thought possible. In the collapse of the mundane, cerebro-tonic left-brain dogmas, a new, enchanting and mysterious aspect to the world is revealed, as Thomas Berry put it, “The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects”.

Further reading

Sachahambi

http://forums.ayahuasca.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=14399

(With thanks to Sachahambi for her balance in this area.)

Ayahuasca: An Ethnopharmacologic History
by Dennis J. McKenna, Ph.D.

IS THERE PURPOSE IN NATURE
Mae-Wan Ho

http://www.cts.cuni.cz/conf98/ho.htm

]]> http://www.ayahuasca.com/ayahuasca-overviews/on-the-origins-of-ayahuasca/feed/ 5 http://www.ayahuasca.com/ayahuasca-overviews/when-and-how-was-ayahuasca-discovered-by-the-world-outside-the-amazon/ http://www.ayahuasca.com/ayahuasca-overviews/when-and-how-was-ayahuasca-discovered-by-the-world-outside-the-amazon/#comments Sun, 04 May 2008 10:23:23 +0000 admin http://www.ayahuasca.com/?p=50 History of ethnobotanical research

The earliest Europeans to mention Ayahuasca were Jesuits travelling in the Amazon. One of the earliest such reports of this “diabolical potion,” written in 1737, describes it as: “an intoxicating potion ingested for divinatory and other purposes and called ayahuasca, which deprives one of his senses and, at times, of his life.”

Several early explorers of northwestern South America also referred to ayahuasca, yage and caapi. They all cited a forest liana but offered little detail.

The serious scientific study of ayahuasca began in the 1850s with the field investigations of the English botanist Richard Spruce, a one time British schoolteacher who was among the early explorers to make the perilous journey into the Amazon. Spruce almost died of dysentery and malaria but survived to become one of botany’s greatest collectors. In 1851, while exploring the upper Rio Negro of the Brazilian Amazon, he observed the use of yage among the Tukano Indians of the Rio Uapes in Brasil. He collected samples of Banisteriopsis and sent them home for chemical analysis. He came upon it twice in Peru in 1853. Seven years later, Spruce again encountered the same liana in use among the Guahibo Indians on the upper Orinoco of Colombia and Venezuela, and, later the same year, found it used the Záparo Indians in Peru near the Ecuador border. In his Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and Andes, he described its sources, its preparation and its effects upon himself.

Spruce suspected that additives were responsible for the psychoactivity of this beverage, although he noted that Banisteriopsis by itself was considered active. The samples he sent to England for chemical analysis were not located and assayed until more than a century later. They were still psychoactive when examined in 1966.

One of Spruce’s greatest contributions was his precise identification of the source of caapi as a new species of the Malpighiaceae. The species was described and called Banisteria Caapi. Subsequent botanical studies showed showed that it belonged to not to the genus Banisteria but to the allied genus Banisteriopsis. The correct name now is, accordingly, Banisteriopsis Caapi.

Although Spruce’s discovery predates any other published accounts, it was not published until 1873, when it was mentioned in a popular account of his Amazon explorations, and his notes were not published in full until 1908. Credit for the earliest published reports of Ayahuasca usage belongs to the Ecuadorian geographer Manuel Villavicencio, who in 1858 wrote of the use of Ayahuasca in sorcery and divination on the upper Rio Napo. The experience made him feel he was “flying” to most marvelous places. He reported that natives using this drink were able “to foresee and answer accurately in difficult cases, be it to reply opportunely to ambassadors from other tribes in a question of war; to decipher plans of the enemy through the medium of this magic drink and take proper steps for attack and defense; to ascertain, when a relative is sick, what sorcerer has put on the hex to carry out a friendly visit to other tribes to welcome foreign travelers or, at least to make sure of the love of their womenfolk.”

In the early twentieth century, it was learned that the use of Banisteriopsis vines for healing, initiatory and shamanic rites extended from Colombia to the Amazon of Peru and Bolivia and even to the rain-forested Pacific coastal region of Colombia and Ecuador.

Throughout the remainder of the 19th century, various ethnographers and explorers continued to report on their encounters of the use of an intoxicating beverage prepared by various indigenous Amazonian tribes, and purportedly prepared from the “roots” of various “shrubs” or “lianas.” They rarely collected specimens of the plants they observed. But the fact that diverse admixtures were being used was established.

In 1939 it was established that caapi, yagé, and ayahuasca were all different names for the same beverage, and that their source plant was identical: Banisteriopsis caapi or B. inebriens.

In 1905 an alkaloid named “telepathine” was obtained from unvouchered botanical material called “yajé” In 1923, an alkaloid was again isolated from unvouchered botanical materials and again named telepathine; another Colombian team isolated an alkaloid which they called yageine.

Between 1926 and 1928, several different scientists isolated an alkaloid from the B. caapi vine, which they variously named yageine, telepathine and banisterine. These were all shown to be the same alkaloid and to be identical with harmine, which had been isolated from (and named for) Peganum harmala in 1847. Samples of “banisterine” were used in a clinical study of 15 post-encephalitic Parkinson’s patients, with dramatic positive effects reported. This was the first time that a reversible MAO inhibitor had been review for the treatment of Parkinson’s Disease, though harmine’s activity as a reversible MAOI was not discovered until nearly 30 years later. This represents one of the few instances where a hallucinogenic drug has been clinically evaluated for the treatment of any disease.

From 1941 to 1953, Richard Evans Schultes explored the Amazon (especially the Colombian Amazon), researching the plant knowledge of Amazonian peoples. Schultes, later a professor at Harvard and author of many books, is regarded as the “father of modern ethnobotany.” He documented the use of over 2,000 medicinal plants in the Amazon, and dozens of species are named for him. He observed the use importance of Ayahuasca in indigenous cultures throughout the Upper Amazon. He recorded the fact that admixture plants varied widely, but observed the B. caapi vine or a close relative was the one constant in the brews.

In 1957 harmine, harmaline, and tetrahydroharmine were isolated from the B. Caapi vine. By 1965, the active alkaloids of Banisteriopsis caapi and related species were firmly established as harmine, tetrahydroharmine, and harmaline.

In the late 1960’s, the first detailed reports began to emerge of the use of admixtures as a frequent component of the brew. At least two of these admixtures, Diplopterys cabrerana (then called Banisteriopsis rusbyana) and Psychotria species, particularly P. viridis, were often added to the brew to “strengthen and extend” the visions.

A further surprise came when the alkaloid obtained from these species proved to be the potent short-acting (but orally inactive) hallucinogen N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT).

DMT had been known as synthetic since 1931, but its occurrence in nature and its hallucinogenic properties had only come to light in 1955, when it was established as the active ingredient in the hallucinogenic snuff Anadenanthera peregrina, used by Indians of the Caribbean and the Orinoco basin of South America. In 1957, the first reports were published of DMT’s profound, though short-lasting, hallucinogenic effect on humans, and of the fact that DMT was orally inactive.

In 1958, it was demonstrated that ß-carbolines were potent, reversible inhibitors of MAO, and it was suggested that Ayahuasca depended for its activity on a synergistic interaction between the MAO-inhibiting ß-carbolines in Banisteriopsis with the psychoactive but peripherally inactivated tryptamine. By the late 1960s, this was confirmed. Until then, the prevailing assumption had been that the psychoactivity of Ayahuasca was due primarily if not entirely to the ß-carbolines.

Schultes and his students Pinkley and der Marderosian published their initial findings on the DMT-containing admixture plants in 1968 and 1969, fueling speculation that DMT, orally activated by ß-carbolines, was responsible for much of the activity of the brew. This notion, although plausible, would not be scientifically confirmed for another decade.

In 1972, Rivier and Lindgren (1972) published one of the first interdisciplinary papers on ayahuasca, reporting on the alkaloid profiles of ayahuasca brews and source plants collected among the Shuar people of the upper Rio Purús in Peru. It discussed numerous admixture plants besides the Psychotria species and Diplopteris cabrerana, and for the first time provided evidence indicating that Ayahuasca admixture technology was complex, and that many species were on occasion used as admixtures.

In 1984, McKenna et al., published the results of their chemical, ethnobotanical, and pharmacological investigations which confirmed the theory that the active principle of Ayahuasca was DMT, rendered orally active by ß-carboline-mediated blockade of peripheral MAO. Experiments on rats showed that the brews were extremely potent MAO inhibitors even when diluted many orders of magnitude; in other words, the B. caapi content of typical brews in the Amazon was orders of magnitude stronger than what was necessary to potentiate the DMT.

In the 1980s, Luis Eduardo Luna began working among mestizo ayahuasqueros near the cities of Iquitos and Pucallpa in Peru. Luna was the first to articulate the importance of the strict diet followed by apprentice shamans, as well as the specific uses of some of the more unusual admixture plants . He was also the first to report on the concept of “plant teachers,” (plantas que enseñan), which is how many of the admixture plants are viewed by the mestizo ayahuasqueros.

Note: this article draws from a number of sources [citations] but primarily from “Ayahuasca: An Ethnopharmacologic History” by Dennis McKenna

© 1998 Dennis J. McKenna, Ph.D. For full citations, names of the scientists who made discoveries, more details, and publication information for their research, see that article, which may be found at http://leda.lycaeum.org/?ID=16806

]]> http://www.ayahuasca.com/ayahuasca-overviews/when-and-how-was-ayahuasca-discovered-by-the-world-outside-the-amazon/feed/ 1 http://www.ayahuasca.com/ayahuasca-overviews/what-are-ayahuasca-analogues/ http://www.ayahuasca.com/ayahuasca-overviews/what-are-ayahuasca-analogues/#comments Sun, 27 Apr 2008 13:04:15 +0000 admin http://www.ayahuasca.com/?p=48 Analogues are plants or chemicals used in place of the traditional constituents of the ayahuasca brew. Two of the most common are Peganum harmala and Mimosa hostilis, as replacements for the B. caapi vine, and DMT-containing admixture plants, respectively.

There has also been some experimentation with the use of pharmaceutical MAO-Is, most commonly Moclobemide, as well as extracted or synthesized DMT.

Is Syrian Rue + Mimosa (or another analogue) the same as Ayahuasca?

Experienced ayahuasca drinkers who have also had the opportunity to drink ayahuasca admixture brews, such as tea made from Syrian rue and Mimosa, generally conclude that the effects are substantially different. Most feel a strong connection to the ayahuasca vine, and understand this to be a fundamental, if not completely essential aspect of the ayahuasca experience and its healing properties.

Many have experienced profound healing and accessed visionary states not entirely unlike those produced by traditional ayahuasca brews, and most agree that modern analogue plants are extremely powerful and deserving of respect. However, analogue brews are not the same as ayahuasca and deserve unique status.

Aren’t B. Caapi and P. harmala alike chemically?

Many people think of the use of Banisteriopsis caapi and Peganum harmala as interchangeable. In truth they are both effective Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors (MAOI’s) but there is a definite difference both chemically and in the subjective experience.

P. harmala contains many alkaloids including but not limited to: VASICINONE, HARMALINE, HARMALOL, HARMAN, HARMINE, ISOPEGANINE, DEOXYVASICINONE. It contains mixed amounts of harmala alkaloids (mainly harmine and harmaline) from 2%-7% in the seed. The harmaline in P. harmala is a very efficient MAOI and is present in significant, but lesser amounts then harmine. Harmaline has been shown in large doses to be neurotoxic to animals by effecting the degeneration of Purkinje cells in the brain.

While doses of that magnitude are rarely taken, those that are concerned may look to Banisteriopsis caapi as a source of harmala alkaloids due to an almost negligent amount of harmaline present.

Banisteriopsis caapi has a slightly different chemistry with the same harmala alkaloids present but in different proportions. B. caapi contains between 0.2%-1.3% mixed harmala alkaloids. The major difference between P. harmala and B. caapi, is the levels of harmaline and tetrahydroharmine. In P. harmala, the levels of harmaline are much higher, (which may also explain it’s greater MAOI effectiveness) while levels of tetrahydroharmine are absent, or in lesser quantities then B. caapi. The higher levels of tetrahydroharmine in B. caapi may be responsible for the very different subjective effects, and maybe even it’s reported “telepathic” inducing qualities observed. When first isolated from B. caapi, the harmala alkaloids were named “telepathine”, until further research showed them to be chemically identical to the compounds in P. harmala. Although both plants contain very similar alkaloids and both serve as effective MAOI’s, it is important to point out that both chemically, and through subjective experiences using them, that they are different.

There are clear biochemical differences between the vine and rue.

Callaway, J.C., M.M. Airaksinen, Dennis J McKenna, Glacus S. Brito, Charles S.Grob (1994). Platelet serotonin uptake sites increased in drinkers of ayahusaca. Psychopharmacology 116: 385-387

This paper focusses on ‘Tetrahydroharmine’ (harman, 7-methoxy-1,2,3,4-tetrahydro; harmine, 1,2,3,4-tetrahydro; b-carboline, 7-methoxy-1-methyl-1,2,3,4-tetrahydro; 7-methoxy-1,2,3,4-tetrahydroharman; 1,2,3,4-tetrahydroharmine; 7-methoxy-1-methyl-1,2,3,4-tetrahydro-b-carboline; 7-meo-thh; leptaflorine). It discusses how THH generates receptor sites for serotonin thus producing a long lasting antidepressant effect. THH occurs in much greater concentration in B. caapi than in other plants bearing ß-carbolines, such as Peganum harmala (Syrian rue). THH may be (according to Dr Alexander Shulgin) completely absent from Syrian Rue.

Also there is the issue of Syrian Rue toxicity :

Dr Shulgin :
“There are two additional alkaloids that usually appear as gratuitous components in these latter samples (Syrian Rue), namely, Vasicine and Desoxyvasicine. I have no knowledge what these Syrian Rue quinazoline compounds might contribute, positively or negatively, to the Ayahuasca experience, but my gut feeling would be to avoid them until you know their pharmacological properties. The second question relates to yet another beta-carboline alkaloid, Harman. This is a structural analogue of Harmine that has been stripped of its methoxyl group…. it also interacts directly with DNA and is thus a possible mutagenic agent.” http://www.alchemind.org/shulgin/adsarchive/ayahuasca_maoi.htm

Harman is only present in trace amounts in banisteriopsis caapi. In Peruvian Ayahuasca brews assayed by Dennis McKenna, harmine represented 65% of the alkaloidal fraction, tetrahydroharmine 22%, DMT 8% and harmaline only 6%. A typical dose of the combined beta-carbolines Harmine, Harmaline, and Tetrahydroharmine, in an Ayahuasca brew, has been estimated by Mckenna to be 28mg harmine, 10mg tetrahydroharmine, and 2mg harmaline. Harmaline therefore only constitutes a small proportion of the total alkaloidal makeup of ayahuasca. Yet Harmaline is the primary beta-carboline component of Syrian rue.

Recommended: “The Scientific Investigation of Ayahuasca ; A review of past and current research” by D.Mckenna, J.C Callaway and Charles S Grob. Its in the first issue of The Heffter Review of Psychedelic Research volume 1 1998.

Another important matter to bring up in this section is the use of P. harmala as an abortificant/emmanagogue. (Emmanagogue is a substance that contracts or acts on the uterus, strong emmanagogues can easily induce abortions). The non-MAOI alkaloids are most likely responsible for this action. Boiled extractions of seeds are recommended over consuming whole seeds, to avoid ingesting some, but not all of the compounds in question.

“Although harmel has been described recently as an aphrodisiac, it is used traditionally by Bedouins as an emmanagogue and abortificant, as well as for “narcotic” purposes, properties documented in animal experiments.”
Ott, Pharmacotheon p 202

“Besides the beta-carboline alkaloids, epigeal parts of P. harmala contain quinazoline alkaloids such as visicine (peganine) and vasicinone, which have uterotonic effects possibly accounting for the use of P. harmala as an abortificant, and the related Tribulus terrestris is used as an emmanagogue in Thai ethnomedicine….. and the vasicine containing Adhatoda vasica is used in Thai ethnomedicine as an anti asthmatic and in Indian ethnomedicine as an abortificant.”
Ott, Pharmacotheon p 204

Are Caapi and Rue brews experientially similar?

People who focus on DMT as the main “point” of the Ayahuasca experience, and regard the MAOI merely as a potentiator for the DMT, tend not to notice any difference between Caapi and Rue.

One of the reasons for this is that, in a Rue-based brew, only the minimum amount of Rue is used necessary to potentiate the DMT. Increasing the Rue beyond the minimum necessary would serve little purpose beyond increasing the sense of sickness.

People who are used to taking this approach will often use the same approach with Caapi — use the minimum amount necessary to potentiate the tryptamines.

Using the bare minimum of Caapi, and focusing only on the visionary DMT effects as the “main event” can result in the impression that Caapi and Rue are similar and interchangeable (and Rue is much cheaper, so go for the bargain).

The difference, however, is that the amount of Caapi can be increased — without limit — and increasing the amount of Caapi can add a dimension of its own, a dimension of rich depth — it adds the whole Caapi dimension to the experience.

The indigenous Amazonian perspective is that Ayahuasca is the vine, and the admixture plants are her “helpers.” It is no accident that the brew is called “Ayahuasca,” the name of the vine. Most of the common native names for the brew — Ayahuasca, Yage, Caapi, Natema, Caapi, Dapa, Mihi, Kahi, Pinde, Nixi, etc — are also names for the Vine, whereas there is no record of any group naming the brew for the tryptamine-containing admixtures. It took many decades for the importance of the admixture plants even to be recognized by ethnobotanists, because every indigenous group recorded as using Ayahuasca stressed the Vine, and not uncommonly use Vine alone, and admixtures vary widely while the Vine is the common denominator.

The Santo Daime view is of a “marriage,” a Sacred Synergy, between Vine and Leaf, the Power and the Light. (The analogy between the tryptamine plants and Light with which to see what is happening is also made in indigenous cultures.

Vine alone can be visionary in high enough doses, but the visions are different from tryptamine visuals. Vine visions tend to be monochromatic, even shadowy, and they mean something, when they come. It is not eye-candy!

Visions of the type recorded in Pablo Amaringo’s paintings may be considered a marriage of Vine visions and Tryptamine visuals, both with both at high levels.

But one of the advantages of Caapi over Rue, for the home brewer, is that iyou have used the minimum possible amount of Rue or Caapi to potentiate the Leaf, but it turns out your Leaf is weak, then basically you have nothing — a dud brew or a weak brew. If, on the other hand, you have used a large amount of Caapi, and your Leaf is weak, the Caapi experience alone, with little or even no tryptamine visuals, can be profound and transforming.

And if your Leaf is strong, on the other hand, the Vine spirit can help guide and support you in the frightening depths of the realms. You are not alone.

The Vine is a being, a sentient Presence, who cares about you and accompanies you no matter where you go in the cave. She tends to present herself with a strong sense of gender — people describe feeling from the Vine not just a female or male presence, but a “strong” male or female presence. It may be that it is easier for humans, as a gendered species, to be able to relate to another being if it presents itself as gendered.

The primary use of Ayahuasca in Amazonian shamanism is for healing. The Vine is experienced by many people as a being or presence who can heal, who knows how to heal. Or as the Santo Daime says, the Vine is the Power in the marriage of Power and Light, and that Power is above all power to heal, at very deep levels.

Comments on Banisteriopsis Caapi (Ayahuasca Vine) vs Peganum Harmala (Syrian Rue):

For me, the experience of rue is somehow crystalline – like diamonds running through the veins. To my system, it feels cold and inorganic – as if the body would be shredded to bits if a muscle is moved. I won’t ingest rue – it feels like poison to my system. Perhaps one day I’ll grow it, but it’s not for this human’s consumption.

Caapi feels warm, organic and wise – friendly to (and knowing well) the human system. I love the taste of the tea (perhaps because I only reduce it by half, when brewing). For me, Caapi is Ayahuasca. I often use it without any admixture except blowing mapacho into it while brewing.

http://forums.ayahuasca.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=6886

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The first difference noticed was the level of intensity with which the trip kicks in. with 5meo or with a rue tea, I have always felt a very strong tryptamine rush; all of a sudden there’s a rip, a crash, and it has kicked in. after a time I became very scared of this, and was unable to handle it. With caapi, it comes on very slowly. As soon as I begin drinking, I begin feeling it, and an hour or so later I’m there. There is no harsh transition. Furthermore, I can feel the effects of the caapi; although I always felt that it was the rue communicating with me, not the mimosa, I never felt any effects from the rue itself other than nausea.

So the major differences, as I have experienced them-

Rue was female, caapi is male;

Rue is mostly only an maoi, while caapi has qualitative effects of its own;

Rue brings it on in a very intense fashion, while caapi is slower, smoother, perhaps more experienced/wiser;

Rue oscillates wildly between being really intense and not working at all, while caapi always works, but not in such an intense way;

With caapi, you aren’t restricted by the toxins found in rue and can use much larger amounts;

Taste- caapi is still very bitter, but it smells so nice and isn’t nearly as rough as rue.

With caapi I do always feel more aware, more “connected”. Rue just kind of opens up the floodgates, while caapi seems much wiser and more experienced; less erratic and more sure of what it is doing.

It also seems to have opened up a much deeper world, one with more facets than that of rue. Its obvious that there’s much more going on; not just a feeling that the universe is stranger than I’ve ever imagined, but how this directly affects me, particularly while dreaming. Its added a whole new twist; set and setting aren’t enough any more- there is much more to it than my own mindstate.

In the end, caapi is clearly “superior” to rue. Although it hasn’t shown me as much, it still seems much wiser, more steady and evenhanded.

http://forums.ayahuasca.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=6886

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People who focus on the Vine have experiences that are qualitatively different in some important ways from those who focus on the DMT plants.

In other words, let’s say there are three groups: a) people who take Caapi-based brews focusing first on Caapi, b) people who take Caapi-based brews focusing mainly on the DMT, c) people who take Rue-based brews focusing mainly on the DMT.

The experience of group B will resemble the experience of group C more than it will the experience of group A, in spite of the fact that group B is drinking the same brew as group a and a different brew from group C.

Groups B & C often have terrifying and traumatic experiences, especially with high DMT content. Group A experiences are not so traumatic because, when you have a relationship with the Vine, you are never alone. She accompanies you with her caring presence no matter how deep you go.

Also, group A tends to discover that there is no correlation between how deep an experience is and how visual it is — there is no correlation between how deeply you go into the cave and how bright your torch is. Sometimes people decide that they can have a deeper spiritual experience with a candle than with a floodlight. After all, they are accompanied by a wise Guide who will not let them fall.

But if you are alone in that strange cave, with a bright torch to see the incomprehensible, the experience can be very different. Even with a Caapi-based brew, if you are not attuned to the Caapi, it is like you are alone in there.

(Unless, of course, you have a shaman to guide you.)

To the Indians, Ayahuasca (the Vine) is the Mother of all Plants. She teaches humans how to communicate with plants. She led people to the admixtures and told them they were her helpers.

http://forums.ayahuasca.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=8003

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Rue is nice to have around for MAOI — it does seem to work as an anti-depressants agent on its own, does the trick for MAOI but, seems to me a shortcut for the real deal — the vine.

Just seems, IMO, rue/addmixture is more of a ’singular’ experience as opposed to an ongoing path that is followed, with a more detailed ‘how to’ manual to study along the way.

Also with no other mixtures rue alone is just plain icky ???

whereas the vine seems it can be taken in larger amounts with much more profound insights and less body load.

http://forums.ayahuasca.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=3948

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I’ve been using Rue exclusively lately, money being somewhat scarce these days. I’m beginning to find a different entity all together with rue than that of the vine. The vine seemed to have more enduring benefits, an amazing “I’m ALIVE” feeling, and the insights were much more understandable and tangible, something I could bring back.

The rue brings a strange alien vibe to the experience, and it has benefits as well, but the overall healthy holy afterglow I got from the vine it seems to lack.

http://forums.ayahuasca.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=3679

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The after effects between caapi and rue are quite different. The rue combination brings him from slightly down and dysphoric to neutral and dysphoric while the caapi combo takes him to happy and optimistic and at times, slightly euphoric.

http://forums.ayahuasca.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=4050

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rue + admix visuals tend to be bright light almost circus colors in the red/pinkish red, yellow and light blue tones. The overall journey tends to feel more “heady” with a tendency to a lot of thinking

caapi + admix visuals are more in the dark blood red, deep purples, dark greens, and dark gold color range with a more deeply lumious quality, while the overall journey seems to be much more embodied and grounded with stronger physical energetic, kundalini-ish component. Overall more blissful.

http://forums.ayahuasca.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=3948

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Visually the vine does seem to go for much more deeper darker organic colors and rue much more electric with vibrant reds, oranges and works on a higher frequency-faster spin, sometime leading to ‘bed spins’ as opposed to more of a immersed feel into self.

http://forums.ayahuasca.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=3948

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As for the rue, there are several reasons that it’s rather unpopular around here. first — rue is quite unpleasent in taste and smell, and is full of tannins and toxic chemicals that make it difficult to keep down (and that can be hazardous to your health!)

second is sort of a two part answer. First, ayahuasca is a vine, not just a tea — the b caapi vine itself is called ayahuasca. traditionally, you can’t have an ayahuasca brew without ayahuasca; the focus of the ceremony is on the vine itself, with the admixtures–sometimes ones that don’t contain any dmt–considered very important helper plants, but not ayahuasca itself.

of course, it’s silly to hang on to tradition for tradition’s sake. but aside from the traditional emphasis on the ayahuasca vine, ime it seems that rue and caapi are different teachers. they have fairly similar chemical signatures, yes, but not equivelant ones. The experiences engendered by each plant are different. ime, the vine just has more experience working with humans, and plays a greater role actually interacting and guiding the experience; the rue, on the other hand, just kinda says “here ya go!!” and leaves it at that. they are both useful, but in somewhat different ways. caapi gives one a more centered, controlled experience, while rue just kinda throws you into the stratosphere and says good luck.

i’d also highly recomend against chewing the seeds. you really don’t want to do that. (well, i’m not you, maybe you do want to do that . . . ) chewing the seeds will make it much more difficult to keep down than a rue tea, and they really don’t taste good!

also, using only rue with no admixture is a very different experience than caapi with no admixture–again, they are different teachers. eating some rue will not help you get to know the ayahuasca spirit. as i’ve said, in my experience at least, the rue tends not to take a very strong role in the ayahuasca experience; while caapi makes its presence known, rue tends to let the admixture shine through while staying in the background.

of course, this is all based on my own experience. everyone needs different things and experiences things differently, which is why i do think that rue can be a valuable ally. it isn’t the same as the vine, but that doesn’t make it useless or bad. to figure out what you need and want, you of course need to examine your own experience, which will take some time and some experiences to examine.

http://forums.ayahuasca.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=11337

]]> http://www.ayahuasca.com/ayahuasca-overviews/what-are-ayahuasca-analogues/feed/ 2 http://www.ayahuasca.com/ayahuasca-overviews/vomiting/ http://www.ayahuasca.com/ayahuasca-overviews/vomiting/#comments Sun, 30 Mar 2008 22:06:44 +0000 Steve Beyer http://www.ayahuasca.com/?p=36 By Steve Beyer Yes, ayahuasca makes you vomit. Is that a problem?]]> By Steve Beyer

There is no doubt that ayahuasca makes you vomit. There is some consolation in the fact that the vomiting will ease with continued experience; shamans seldom vomit. There is more consolation in the fact that the vomiting is considered to be cleansing and healing. But the vomiting is certainly distressing to a gringo, who has been taught that vomiting is wretched and humiliating. Indeed, ayahuasca vomiting has become something of a literary trope. Poet Allen Ginsberg has described the physical part of his ayahuasca experiences. “Stomach vomiting out the soul-vine,” he writes, “cadaver on the floor of a bamboo hut, body-meat crawling toward its fate.” William S. Burroughs writes: “I must have vomited six times. I was on all fours convulsed with spasms of nausea. I could hear retching and groaning as if I was some one else.” Novelist Alice Walker speaks of the effect of ayahuasca on her protagonist — horrible-tasting medicine, gut-wrenching nausea and diarrhea, “waves of nausea … like real waves, bending her double by their force.”

Anthropologist Michael Taussig, investigating the shamanism of the Colombian Putumayo, felt compelled to drink ayahuasca — he uses the Colombian term yagé — as part of his research. “Somewhere,” he writes, “you have to take the bit between your teeth and depict yagé nights in terms of your own experience.” And one gets the ineluctable impression that Taussig hated the experience of drinking ayahuasca, hated the corporeality of its effects, hated vomiting. He writes, “But perhaps more important is the stark fact that taking yagé is awful: the shaking, the vomiting, the nausea, the shitting, the tension.” It is, he says, “awful and unstoppable.” His description of the experience is filled with metaphors of slime and nausea. The sounds he heard “were like those of the forest at night: rasping, croaking frogs in their millions by gurgling streams and slimy, swampy ground,” “the sound of grinning stoic frogs squatting in moonlit mud.” He writes that the “collective empathizing of nausea” at the healing session “feels like ants biting one’s skin and one’s head, now spinning in wave after trembling wave.” He refers again and again to “the stream of vomit,” “the streaming nasal mucus,” “the whirling confusion of the prolonged nausea.”

But this is the reaction of a gringo. It is important to note that emetics and purgatives are widely used among the people of the Upper Amazon, who periodically induce vomiting in their children to rid them of the parasitic illnesses that are endemic in the region. Vomiting is often induced in children and adults using the latex of ojé, also called doctor ojé, which is widely ingested throughout the upper Amazon as a vermifuge; some shamans, such as don Agustin Rivas, use an ojé purge to begin la dieta. Vomiting may be induced in children by giving them piñisma, hen excrement, mixed with berbena, verbena, or ñucñopichana, sweet broom, along with other horrifying components, including pounded cockroaches and urine. I have no doubt that this is an effective emetic.

Communal vomiting is also found among indigenous Amazonian peoples. The Achuar drink a hot infusion of guayusa as a morning stimulant, much as we drink coffee, after which all of them, including the children, vomit together. Apparently the vomiting is not due any emetic effect of the drink, but is learned behavior. Here in the jungle, vomiting is easy, natural, expected; the strangled retching of a gringo comes from shame.

La purga misma te enseña, they say; vomiting itself teaches you. Giving yourself over to the plant, giving up control, letting go of shame — perhaps that is the first lesson you receive from el doctor.

Steve Beyer’s blog Singing to the Plants is at www.singingtotheplants.blogspot.com

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