Year: 2010

the Ayahuasca vine

Notes on the Western Paradigm of Ayahuasca

To claim any plant combination that enables DMT to become orally active is ‘Ayahuasca’, is to ignore a living indigenous tradition, language, etymology, folklore, taxonomy. And more… calling unique plant potions ‘Ayahuasca analogues’ encourages a lazy approach to the specific identies and properties of other medicine plants.

Peru: Hunt Oil Contract to Reignite Amazon Uprising?

Only the most controversial of President Alan García’s legislative decrees, which triggered the uprising, have been overturned. These decrees-promulgated under special powers granted to García by Peru’s congress in 2008 to ready the country for the new U.S. free trade agreement-would undo a generation of progress in protecting indigenous territorial rights in the rainforest, opening indigenous lands to oil drilling, logging, and other forms of resource extraction as never before.

On a personal note

I was asked about the Barquinha’s astrology. There isn’t any (I was told). Stars are a part of the creation. One can learn anything from anything. Some people can learn things by looking at stars. In the Barquinha they look at God. For a week I was preparing with prayers, candles, intensions… Daime work at the Barquinha of Dona Gabriel each day… Came the 27th, a Saturday before the Semana Santa and the entity Don Rafael was going to operate me. Finally I am going to heal the pain in my back which does not leave me alone ever since I had hernia of a disk two and a half years ago. It is normal that such treatments are done over 3 ceremonies (three 27th) but I had only one (two to come). I did not know I was supposed to bring something to lie on, and sitting was never as difficult as it was that night. I did not know what to expect… we were seven or eight people in a dark room, drinking …

Soul, Spirit and Right Relationship: A Conversation with Steve Beyer

Morgan Maher
Steve Beyer’s Singing to the Plants, writes Morgan Maher, is “a wild ride out and across the jungles of mestizo shamanism. The book, and its wonderful cast of characters, curanderos, animals, plants, spirits and stories presents honest, accurate, respectful, levelheaded and, at times, outrageously marvelous descriptions of the environments and climates of mestizo shamanism in the Upper Amazon.” Morgan interviews the author.