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On the Origins of Ayahuasca

Daniel Mirante — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 12:40:21 +0000

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

When and how was Ayahuasca discovered by the world outside the Amazon?

admin — Sun, 04 May 2008 10:23:23 +0000

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