/Adventures-with-Ayahuasca

Dumbarton Oaks Plant Humanities 2021's "deep spiritual dive"

Since the late 1990s, the Amazonian psychoactive beverage ayahuasca has grown increasingly common throughout the world. Spurred by interest in Indigenous Amazonian groups, New Age spiritual practices, and the exoticizing travel writing, ayahuasca has attained the status of “The Drug of Choice for the Age of Kale,” according to a recent article in The New Yorker.1 Despite its global popularity, ayahuasca’s ingredients and components, ritual usage, and spiritual and medicinal effects remain highly dynamic and contested.

Ayahuasca: A plant or a brew?

Although many associate ayahuasca with a particular species of plant, it actually refers to a group of Indigenous psychoactive brews made by boiling a combination of species found in certain regions of Amazonia. The name ayahuasca is a compound word in the Quechua language: aya refers to “soul, ancestors, or dead persons” while wasca refers to “vine or rope.” Popular translations of the name allude to “vine of the soul,” while skeptics suggest “rope of death.”2 However, Ayahuasca is known by many names such as natema, hoasca, daime, yagé, or yajé among groups living in Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, and Brazil.

On a pharmacological level, ayahuasca harnesses the chemical effects caused by the mixture of plants that contain β-carboline type alkaloids (such as harmine and tetrahydroharmine) and Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) to produce a hallucinogenic state within the consumer.3 There are many traditions associated with the preparation and imbibing of the decoction due to its ubiquity amongst cultures throughout the Amazon basin and Andean highlands. Boiling and steeping together the vines of Banisteriopsis caapi (Malpighiaceae) and the leaves of Psychotria viridis (Rubiaceae) is most common.4 However, there are some recipes which do not contain any Psychotria viridis and opt for other plants which contain DMT such as Diplopterys cabrerana (Malpighiaceae).

Additionally, exact recipes are often closely guarded by Indigenous knowledge keepers known as ayahuasqueros or vegetalistas, and precise measurements of the ingredients are not always recorded. Beyond the variability of the recipes, naming the plant species used in ayahuasca decoctions is at times complicated by vernacular naming traditions. Different Indigenous groups classify plants according to different criteria (leaf shape/size/breadth/flowering vs. non-flowering, the effects of the plant on the human body, the color of the decoction made from the plant, as well as the guardian spirits associated with the plant).5 These unique classification systems at times identify the same plant species as several different species. These “different” species are used to create brews with varying strength and purpose.6

Ayahuasca in Practice

The use of Banisteriopsis caapi and Psychotria viridis dates back at least one thousand years. A preserved ritual bundle containing snuff paraphernalia, dried plant remains, pouches, and textiles was excavated at the Cueva del Chilena rock structure in the Sora Valley in Bolivia, associated with the ancient Tiwanaku state. Chemical analysis conducted on harmine and DMT residue indicates that Banisteriopsis caapi and Psychotria viridis were likely present in the bundle. It is not known how these materials were taken into the body (snuff plates and spatulas were discovered in the bundle so the plants were possibly inhaled directly) but it is possible that the two plants were combined together even then to create an early ayahuasca decoction.7

Consuming ayahuasca produces a roughly four hour long period of altered consciousness. During this time, practitioners experience otherworldly visuals and fluctuations in conceptions of reality and selfhood. Most Indigenous groups of the Amazon basin understand the world as a series of interlocking human and nonhuman persons, both visible and invisible.8 By entering the “ayahuasca world,” a liminal meeting place with more-than-human beings, Indigenous participants in the ritual are able to better visualize the forces at work around them.9 Such insight is used to treat physical ailments, address mental health concerns, and provide spiritual guidance. In these Amazonian communities, ayahuasca is central to religious, healing, and initiation ceremonies as a form of traditional medicine and psychiatry.10

Representing Ayahuasca with the Senses

While conducting his groundbreaking research on ayahuasca rituals amongst the mestizo population in the Peruvian Amazon, anthropologist Luis Eduardo Luna encountered the curandero Pablo Amaringo. Wanting to know more about Amaringo’s experiences with the brew, Luna provided him with paper and tempera paints and asked him to draw his visions. For Amaringo, the visual was a key component in ayahuasca’s efficacy. “The Spirits don’t talk,” he explains, “but express themselves through images.”11 Full of bright colors, elaborate patterns, and fantastical scenes, Amaringo’s paintings both attempt to reproduce the effects of ayahuasca and point to the knowledge and wisdom derived from the rituals. Furthermore, according to Amaringo, the brew transformed him into an artist by teaching him how to see and understand colors. In this example, Amaringo represents the corpus of Indigenous botanical knowledge and the ways practitioners might access that knowledge through ayahuasca, fasting, and chanting.

For the Shipibo people of modern day Peru, ayahuasca rituals likewise revolve around visualizing the unseen. According to Shipibo history, in ancient times, everything in the world -- water, plants, earth, humans, etc. -- was once covered with intricate patterns that expressed the fundamental nature of creation through design. As time passed, this ubiquitous patterning was lost. Through the transcendent hallucinations of ayahuasca, though, Shipibo artists could once again have access to sacred patterns. The Shipibo people are unique in that the majority of these artists and practitioners were female. By reproducing such patterns in pottery and textiles, these women practiced therapy and healing born out of the knowledge of the interconnectedness of the universe.12

More than just visual, though ayahuasca ceremonies are a multisensory journey for those experiencing the effects of the decoction. In addition to the ayahuasca itself, music is a vital component in several ayahuasca traditions. In Peru, whistled chants, icaros, accompany ayahuasca healing ceremonies carried out by ayahuasqueros or vegetalistas. The whistling is meant to invoke spiritual forces so that they may open doorways and help to complete tasks. Guardian spirits of the vine may also be invoked by the whistling to aid in the ceremony. The songs likely also help to orient those who have imbibed the decoction, providing some grounding effect while the participant is otherwise disoriented by the effects of the decoction.13

Ethnobotanical Encounters

The rich descriptions of ayahuasca ceremonies we know today have been written in the last four decades or so. Yet the few materials that document early encounters with the brew reveal the longstanding religious and intellectual barriers that prevented outsiders from understanding Indigenous knowledge and their worldview.

Jesuits overseeing missions in the Amazon in the eighteenth century were among the first Europeans to explicitly mention ayahuasca (or marari) as a substance for ritual and medicinal purposes. While their main goal was to Christianize peripheral regions, most Jesuits had secular concerns about the use of ayahuasca.14 Missionaries like Pablo Maroni found it difficult to prove whether spiritual leaders had a pact with the devil but were concerned about the divinatory purposes of ayahuasca. In their view, spiritual leaders (usually referred to as sorcerers) were only tricking and deceiving people in their community.15

In contrast, descriptions of individual plant species were devoid of demonic or ritual associations. In the late eighteenth century, the Spanish explorers and botanists Hipólito Ruíz and José Pavón led an expedition across present-day Perú, Ecuador, and Chile that covered parts of the Western Amazon. Among the new plant species and genera they described was Psychotria viridis.16 Even though these botanists sought to obtain knowledge from local herbalists and sorcerers, the hallucinogenic properties and use of P. viridis in ayahuasca brews were never reported and remained unknown to westerners until the twentieth century.17

Almost a century later, the Portuguese Manuel Rodrigues Pinto Rubens echoed the Jesuit views on ayahuasca when he wrote about the Ticuna in the Northern Amazon. He recognized the medical specialists of this community (called pagés) but also called them “impostors” who frightened the overly “superstitious indians” of the region.18 Pinto Rubens’ work stands out from previous missionary accounts because it has great ethnographic detail about indigenous rituals combined with botanical references to the plants used by the Ticuna. It also features several watercolors, including one of a pagé who apparently is using ayahuasca to understand their patient’s ailment and find a cure.19

While Pinto Ruben’s work is certainly ethnobotanical in character, the most celebrated figure in this discipline is Richard Spruce. This well-known Victorian Era botanist travelled for fifteen years across South America and documented extensively the Putumayo region of the Amazon. Spruce gave a binomial name to the most known ayahuasca vine in the region (Banisteria caapi)20 and included a whole section of notes in his posthumous book, Notes of a Botanist in the Andes and the Amazon (1908). Because of this, Spruce is considered to be the "pioneer" of ayahuasca studies in the modern scientific world.21

However, Spruce did not obtain all of the information through first hand interviews and observations. He also relied on scientific networks in the nascent Spanish American republics. Spruce cited and translated the work of Manuel Villavicencio, a Quiteño criollo scientist who had been recently appointed governor of the Oriental Provinces in Ecuador. Not surprisingly, Villavicencio dedicated a sizable portion of his book to this specific region and discussed strategies of incorporating the apparently isolated and wild tribes who lived there. To expand his scientific project he sought to tap into British imperial botanical networks and thus saw fit to share his work with Spruce.22 Even though Spruce recognized the ethnographic efforts of Villavicencio, he found his botanical description useless.23 Villavicencio did include other important ethnobotanical details such as the use of a “guayusa” brew (Ilex guayusa) to purge the ayahuasca drinker before the ceremony.24 Interestingly, he also described the diplomatic and warfare uses of the brew in the Záparo and Jívaro communities.25 These political uses are now rarely mentioned in ayahuasca literature thus leaving the magical and spiritual connotations of the brew as the most relevant ones.

Spruce’s work ultimately shaped twentieth century ethnobotanical interests. The famous ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes was inspired by Notes of a Botanist... and decidedly followed Spruce’s steps into the Amazon during the 1940s.26 Schultes lauded the naming of the ayahuasca vine as Spruce’s greatest “discovery” but regretted that the Victorian botanist wasn’t able to experience ayahuasca on his own.27 It was years after Schultes returned to Harvard and mentioned ayahuasca to a fellow undergraduate, famed novelist William Burroughs, that personal accounts and autoethnographies under the influence of ayahuasca would become popular beginning with Burroughs’ epistolary Colombian odyssey to experience the brew, The Yage Letters.28

Ayahuasca's Global Trip

Today, many in the West are most familiar with ayahuasca not through Indigenous knowledge systems and practices, but through its incorporation into New Age spiritualism. Following in the footsteps of Americans like Burroughs, by the late twentieth century westerners were flocking to Amazonia in search of an authentic experience with the brew. So profitable was this new fascination with the hallucinogen, that an entire industry of ayahuasca tourism began to flourish in the Amazon basin. As a result, ayahuasca rituals were westernized to focus on self-exploration and emotional healing under the leadership of new “gringo shamans” and exported in vast networks, particularly in the United States and Canada, but also through Europe, Africa, and Asia.29

Scholars have debated at length about the contemporary global usage of ayahuasca. On the one hand, ayahuasca tourism highlights the legacies of extractive colonialism as non-Indigenous peoples exploit Indigenous knowledge and belief systems and adapt them for their own benefit. In the case of ayahuasca, this often involves idealizing and stereotyping real Indigenous shamans living in the modern world. 30 On the other hand, ayahuasca has provided Indigenous people with an economic tool to engage with the wider globe, while at the same time ensuring the persistence of practices that were threatened by Christianizing colonialism. 31

In truth, ayahuasca rituals have always been dynamic and multiple, differing between ethnic groups in Amazonia and evolving over time. In Peru, for example, the mestizo population developed a set of practices called Vegetalismo, which was inflected by both Catholicism and traditional Indigenous knowledges. Vegetalistas consider the plants that form the ayahuasca brew to be “teachers” capable of imparting specialized knowledge to humans. Likewise, a Brazilian minister raised in an ethnically diverse rubber boom town founded the syncretic church of Santo Daime based on Catholicism, African animism, and Indigenous vegetalismo, which uses ayahuasca extensively in its rituals. Santo Daime itself spread globally, with churches in the United States, Canada, and Europe.

The question then becomes, who, if anyone, owns ayahuasca? In 1986, American Loren Miller tried to patent ayahuasca plant. Back in the late 1970s, this pharmacologist had developed a cultivar in Hawaii of Banisteriopsis caapi. He named his patented plants “Da Vine” and founded a company to study its potential benefits. 32 Miller’s actions are best described as biopiracy and were denounced by the Coordinating Body of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA) in 1994.

The “Da Vine” patent was eventually overturned, but not because the courts recognized the COICA’s claims to their own culture.33 Rather, a herbarium specimen from the Field Museum in Chicago demonstrated that Miller’s unique plant had in fact been cultivated on U.S. soil before he submitted his patent.34 In the end, this seemingly simple botanical artifact —a pressed and dried plant with a descriptive label attached to a cardboard— defined what ayahuasca meant in the United States.

Future Adventures with Ayahuasca

References

Footnotes

  1. Ariel Levy, “The Drug of Choice for the Age of Kale.” The New Yorker, September 4, 2016. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/12/the-ayahuasca-boom-in-the-u-s. ↩

  2. Luna, 2011. Frecska, Bokor, and Winkelman 2016 ↩

  3. Callaway et al.,1996 ↩

  4. McKenna, 2004 and Szára, 2007 in Frecska, Bokor, and Winkelman 2016, 2 ↩

  5. Center for Western Studies (Flagstaff Ariz), Journal of Ethnobiology., vol. v. 6-7 1986-87 (Flagstaff, Ariz. :Center for Western Studies, 1986): 235. ↩

  6. Ibid, 236. ↩

  7. Melanie J. Miller et al., “Chemical Evidence for the Use of Multiple Psychotropic Plants in a 1,000-Year-Old Ritual Bundle from South America,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 23 (June 4, 2019): 11210. ↩

  8. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4, no. 3 (1998): 469–88. ↩

  9. Luis Eduardo Luna, “Indigenous and mestizo use of ayahuasca: An overview,” in The Ethnopharmacology of Ayahuasca, ed. Rafael Guimarães dos Santos (Kerala: Transworld Research Network, 2011), 8. ↩

  10. Frecska, Bokor, and Winkelman 2016. ↩

  11. Quoted in Robert Sirko, “The Artist and the Shaman: Seen and Unseen Worlds,” in Inner Visions: Sacred Plants, Art and Spirituality (Valparaiso, IN: Brauer Museum of Art, 2015): 51. ↩

  12. Ibid, 69. Peter Roe, and Manuel Rengifo Barbaran. “Shipibo Ainbo Chomo - Infinity of Nations: Art and History in the Collections of the National Museum of the American Indian” Accessed July 28, 2021. https://americanindian.si.edu/exhibitions/infinityofnations/amazon/239608.html. ↩

  13. Rich Doyle, “Hyperbolic: Divining Ayahuasca,” Discourse 27, no. 1 (2005): 7. ↩

  14. Emilio García Cuervo, “De Herejes a Chamanes. Una Historia Fragmentada Sobre El Imaginario Occidental de La Medicina Indígena” (Tesis de Pregrado, Bogotá, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2019), 26. ↩

  15. García Cuervo, 27-3. ↩

  16. Hipólito Ruiz and José Pavón, Flora Peruviana, et Chilensis, Sive, Descriptiones et Icones Plantarum Peruvianarum, et Chilensium, Secundum Systema Linnaeanum Digestae, Cum Characteribus Plurium Generum Evulgatorum Reformatis, vol. 2 (Madrid: Typis Gabrielis de Sancha, 1799), 61. ↩

  17. Biblioteca Nacional de España, “La Expedición Botánica de Ruiz y Pavón al Virreinato del Perú, 1777-1788,” España en el mundo (Biblioteca Nacional de España, April 10, 2011). ↩

  18. Manuel Rodrigues Pinto Rubens, Costumbres de los indígenas que habitan en el Valle del Amazonas en el departamento de Loreto, Dumbarton Oaks Digitization Project. Pre-Columbian Studies. Rare books (1873), 6v. ↩

  19. I say apparently because the original author does not mention this but a later commentator did ↩

  20. The generic name Banisteria was later changed to Banisteriopsis in the twentieth century ↩

  21. Merlin Sheldrake, “The ‘Enigma’ of Richard Schultes, Amazonian Hallucinogenic Plants, and the Limits of Ethnobotany,” Social Studies of Science 50, no. 3 (June 1, 2020): 346. ↩

  22. Elisa Sevilla and Ana Sevilla, “Inserción y participación en las redes globales de producción de conocimiento: el caso del Ecuador del siglo XIX*,” Historia Crítica, April 19, 2017: 83-84. ↩

  23. “He could tell no more that it was a liana or a vine” in Richard Spruce, Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon & Andes, ed. Alfred Russel Wallace, vol. 2 (London,: Macmillan and co., limited, 1908), 424. ↩

  24. Manuel Villavicencio, Geografía de la República del Ecuador, Dumbarton Oaks Digitization Project. Pre-Columbian Studies. Rare books (New York: Imprenta de Robert Craighead, 1858), 373-374. ↩

  25. Villavicencio, Geografía, 372-373. ↩

  26. Diane M. Rielinger, “A Forest of Knowledge: Richard Evans Schultes and the Rise of Ethnobotany,” Biodiversity Heritage Library (blog), August 11, 2020; Sheldrake, “The ‘Engima’ of Richard Schultes”, 357 ↩

  27. Sheldrake, 360. Spruce actually translated Villavicencio’s personal account of ayahuasca consumption. ↩

  28. Sheldrake, 349. ↩

  29. Beatriz Caiuby Labate, Clancy Cavnar, and Françoise Barbira Freedman. “Notes on the Expansion and Reinvention of Ayahuasca Shamanism,” in Ayahuasca Shamanism in the Amazon and Beyond (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Beatriz Caiuby Labate ed. The World Ayahuasca Diaspora: Reinventions and Controversies (London ; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2017). ↩

  30. Evgenia Fotiou, “The Globalization of Ayahuasca Shamanism and the Erasure of Indigenous Shamanism.” Anthropology of Consciousness 27, no. 2 (September 1, 2016): 151–79. ↩

  31. Labate et. al., “Notes on the Expansion and Reinvention of Ayahuasca Shamanism.” Esther Jean Langdon, “The Revitalization of Yajé Shamanism among the Siona: Strategies of Survival in Historical Context.” Anthropology of Consciousness 27, no. 2 (September 1, 2016): 180–203. ↩

  32. Leanne M Fecteau, “The Ayahuasca Patent Revocation: Raising Questions About Current U.S. Patent Policy,” Boston College Third World Law Journal 21, no. 1 (January 2001): 84-85. ↩

  33. Antonio Jacanamijoy, “El acuerdo TRIPS y los Pueblos Indígenas” Octava Sesión de la Comisión Sobre el Desarrollo Sostenible Panel: Comercio y Pueblos Indígenas, New York, April 2000. ↩

  34. Field Museum of Natural History., “Field Museum Specimen Overturns U.S. Patent,” In the Field : The Bulletin of the Field Museum of Natural History., April 2000, 13. ↩