Plants of Ayahuasca Shamanism
Art – Caapi Dreams by Donna Torres.
This is an introductory beginners guide to several plants significantly connected to Ayahuasca shamanism.
The ecological dimensions of the plant
Art – Caapi Dreams by Donna Torres.
This is an introductory beginners guide to several plants significantly connected to Ayahuasca shamanism.
An introduction and overview of Cat’s Claw, one of the most amazing and powerful plants on this planet.
For decades, researchers have puzzled over the mystery of the origin of Ayahuasca, especially the question of how the synergy was discovered between the the two components of the brew: the vine (Banisteriopsis caapi) with a monoamine oxidase inhibiting (MAOI) action and the leaf (Psychotria viridis or Diplopterys cabrerana), which requires that MAOI action to make their dimethyltryptamine (DMT) orally active.
Steve Beyer, author of Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon, questions the Western conventional wisdom that the sole function of the beta-carbolines in the ayahuasca drink is simply to allow DMT to become orally active, and explores the scientific and ethnographic literature for evidence of beta-carboline psychoactivity.
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.”
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.
A growing thread on propagation of Banisteriopsis caapi…