Psychotria varieties

Ayahuasca/Yagé—Banisteriopsis spp., Psychotria spp., and Diplopterys spp.

For the sake of clarity, we have decided to create a special grouping of sacred plants for Microcosms. Banisteriopsis spp., Diplopterys spp. and Psychotria spp. are the plants most widely used to create the sacred drink known either as ayahuasca or yagé, depending on the brew’s geographical origin. Our organizing principle here for this book comprised of many different species of sacred plants, however, is “B” for Banisteriopsis. To be clear, the two words “ayahuasca” and “yagé” are used to name a drink that is composed of more than one plant. But both words also designate the single vine B. caapi on its own.  Neil Logan, writing in “The Yagé Complex,” explains the importance of highlighting Banisteriopsis caapi as the common underlying element that joins all the multiple variations possible in the preparation of the sacred beverage: “Ultimately, the use of B. caapi combined with more than one hundred potential admixture plants, became common across the eastern Andes from Bolivia, north to Colombia, and Venezuela, following the Amazon and its tributaries eastward across much of north and central Brazil. “Caapi” or “Cabi” are two of the more common names for referring to related vines across most of northern South America.  B. caapi is considered by many groups of these regions to be a kind of driver of ecological ingenuity. It is the fundamental master medicinal plant teacher around which all other plants revolve.” 

Constantino Manuel Torres summarizes the synergy between these plants in his brilliant study “From Beer to Tobacco: A Probable Prehistory of Ayahuasca and Yagé”: “The Banisteriopsis vine contains several β-carboline alkaloids—harmine, harmaline, and tetrahydroharmine—which are potent inhibitors of the enzyme monoamine oxidase (MAO). Frequently, ayahuasca and yagé are combined with the leaves of Psychotria viridis or Diplopterys cabrerana. The leaves of these two species contain N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), which is not orally active. However, its combination with the MAO-inhibiting harmala alkaloids allow for its activity.” Therefore, although these species could very well be considered separately, they are more conveniently regarded together as a sacred synergetic mixture. 

We are pleased to offer in this section some additional botanical information that is rarely given the attention it deserves. In some brief comments on his photos of Diplopterys longialata (“Huambisa”), Alan Rockefeller maintains how important it is to keep in mind the overlooked or even occluded presence of this particular species as perhaps the most common plant additive in the ayahuasca brew always prepared with Banisteriopsis caapi. Often, he affirms, D. longialata is misidentified as Diplopterys cabrerana. Indeed, botanically, the two species of Diplopterys can easily be confused if they are not flowering. However, generally speaking, D. cabrerana, is almost always used to prepare yagé in Colombia. In northern Ecuador along the Colombian border, D. cabrerana and D. longialata are used with B. caapi interchangeably, and sometimes together.  D. longialata, known by its common name Huambisa, is used in ayahuasca preparations in southern Ecuador. Additionally, over the last fifty years, it has been introduced into Peru, becoming increasingly popular as a substitute for Psychotria viridis due to its similar entheogenic strength/quality and also because it is more resilient in terms of climate fluctuations such as cold, drought, and flooding. 

In Brazil, ayahuasca is also known as Daime, a sacrament used by members of the Santo Daime church, which has legal status and exists throughout the country. As always, the preparation includes the obligatory B. caapi (known also as jagube) and, in Brazil, the plant admixture Psychotria viridis (called “a Rainha”–“the Queen”–by the daimistas).  Life, of course, is complicated on account of biodiversity. So, a curious reader with some Brazilian Portuguese can read the doctoral dissertation by Ricardo Monteles about the different varieties of sacred plants used in the Santo Daime ceremonies. Also in Brazil, Regina Célia de Oliveira is undertaking serious scientific studies with other academic researchers on the numerous B. caapi ethno-varieties. Unfortunately, the names of these ethno-varieties in Brazil do not coincide with the plethora of Indigenous names for varieties of B. caapi (including wai yagé, tara yagé and tzinca) in combination with D. cabrerana (oco yagé) in the Northwest Amazon, which is the probable geographic origin of the synergistic plant knowledge that, over time, evolved in the following way: from B. caapi used on its own, to chewed B. caapi raw stems combined with the ground seeds of Anadenanthera peregrina (a source of bufotenine, 5-OH-DMT), to B. caapi stems boiled with the leaves of Diplopterys cabrerana (which may have begun as recently as less than 200 years ago, according to Torres). We are pleased to offer in this section of Microcosms, confocal images of some of these Amazonian legacy vines. Not all B. caapi is the same. Hardly! The great Richard Evans Schultes may have had difficulty distinguishing between these varieties of the sacred Amazonian vine, but this is not true for the Siekopai, Siona and Cofán with their sophisticated ethno-taxonomy. Jonathon Miller Weisberger has studied this phenomenon in Rainforest Medicine: Preserving Indigenous Science and Biodiversity in the Upper Amazon. 

Luis Eduardo Luna and I met at Palenque in 1996 for a gathering sponsored by the Botanical Preservation Corps and began the structural planning for what would become the nearly 500-page volume Ayahuasca Reader: Encounters with the Amazon’s Sacred Vine first published by Synergetic Press in 2000 with a revised second edition in 2016. From the onset, it was the highest priority for us as co-editors to emphasize what might be called an Indigenous research paradigm. Ayahuasca Reader, like Microcosms, is a tribute to the Amerindian receivers, keepers and perpetuators of particular vegetal lives that are gifts from the gods. For this reason, the first of five different sections in the anthology is called “Ayahuasca Myths and Testimonies” and collects plant narratives related to Banisteriopsis caapi, Diplopterys spp., and Psychotria spp. Sometimes, as in the case of Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, the stories reach us through old-school, now questionable, anthropological methodologies using anonymous informants to create paraphrased recreations. In other instances, the ethnographers provide more information, and, rightly so, furnish the names of Indigenous guardians of shamanic tales such as Ricardo Yaiguaje (Siona), Milton Maia and Maria Domingo (Cashinahua/Huni Kuin), Mengatue Baihua and Huepe Orengo Coba (Huaorani), Alberto Prohaño (Yagua), Hilario Peña (Inga) and, finally, Fernando Payaguaje (Secoya/Siekopai), the extraordinary bebedor de yagé (yagé drinker), whose extensive and invaluable first-person testimony was preserved in Payaguaje’s first language Pai-Coca by the very elderly healer’s grandchildren, then translated into Spanish. One hopes that these voices (recorded as interviews, transcribed, edited, translated and even translated yet again into a third language) are ethically and equitably collected. One deeply appreciates these words, even as one recognizes that there is always a complex process of mediation occurring that involves close family members fighting oblivion in the inexorable flow of time or a foreign anthropologist, perhaps a graduate student hoping to finish a dissertation or someone such as Bruce Albert, who collaborated with healer and activist Davi Kopenawa over decades to create the remarkable book The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. 

Despite these filters, nonetheless, the plants are able to make themselves known. An awareness of inevitable mediating processes also makes one personally cherish less mediated contact, in my case a long direct conversation with the highly-respected Onanya (Shipibo visionary doctor) Don Benito Arévalo in Pucallpa, Peru in June, 2000. It was a true privilege to talk with him about these healing plants and then watch or, rather, hear him labor through the entire night as he treated local patients (none of whom drank ayahuasca) for a wide variety of maladies. In this Shipibo context, it was the doctor, not the patient, who drank ayahuasca in order to diagnose and cure difficult and persistent illnesses. 

Pedro Favaron’s enormously insightful books Las visiones y los mundos: sendas visionarias de la Amazonía Occidental and La senda del corazón: sabiduría de los pueblos indígenas de Norteamérica (which takes place primarily in Canada and upstate New York in the St. Lawrence River Valley, where I live) are journeys into traditional Indigenous knowledge. Favaron (a Peruvian mestizo of Italian descent from Lima) is married to the accomplished Shipiba artist Chonon Bensho from Santa Clara de Yarinacocha, Peru, and, through her family, now also his, he is able to describe lineages of legendary healers (such as his wife’s grandfather Ranin Bima) and their relationship to plant medicine, ancestral narratives and songs by engaging in dialogue with other members of his family (especially his father-in-law Menin Bari and his uncle Kene Jisman) over the long periods of time that constitute lifetimes of shared responsibilities and accumulated knowledge. The visionary doctors of the Shipibo nation, according to Favaron, undergo arduous initiations that enable them to establish relations with the Ibo, or Dueños (in the double sense in English of both Owners and Masters) of the medicinal plants called rao in the Shipibo language. It is thanks to these plant-alliances created through ritual dieting that the traditional physician is able to use songs to cure in keeping with the healing powers of particular species. In “Netabaon Joi: the Shipibo-Konibo Cosmic Semiotics,” Favaron concludes that “the diverse beings of the cosmos are all interwoven in a single communicating loom.”

In general, Favaron has a very negative view of the explosive increase in the non-Indigenous globalized use of ayahuasca in recent decades. As he puts it, “the visionary medicine of the Western Amazon has become the new spiritual territory that the modern way of thinking wants to profane and commercialize.” He laments the confusion and the lack of respect that he perceives in relation to ayahuasca, and recognizes that “some Indigenous persons, with little preparation, call themselves maestros just to do business.” “The Shipibo doctors in the olden days,” continues Favaron, “did not have the custom of giving ayahuasca to their patients, but, rather, drank to connect themselves to spiritual worlds and cure the sick by singing songs and using other medicinal plants.” 

Alex K. Gearin, author of Global Ayahuasca: Wondrous Visions and Modern Worlds (2024), analyzes the burgeoning use of ayahuasca in several contexts, including non-Indigenous foreigners arriving en masse in the Peruvian Amazon for spiritual retreats with Shipibo healers, who are contracted to provide these services in businesses that are owned by foreign nationals. The guests, called pasajeros, or passengers, by their hosts, writes Guerin, “came to heal themselves, learn about their own spiritual interior, and transcend ‘modern’ problems with shamans seen to be relatively uncorrupted by the ills of civilization.” These centers, however, are based on what Gearin calls “a double dislocation”: “Indigenous healers are dislocated from the place, context, and moral order of their existing local shamanic practices, and ayahuasca tourists are dislocated from their homelands and ordinary cultural realities when embarking on pilgrimages to the Amazon rainforest.” Even so, ultimately, affirms Gearin, “Ayahuasca has attracted people from distant corners of the planet precisely because of its adaptive ontological capacities.” His study also documents ayahuasca use in Australia, (where Australian facilitators guide ayahuasca drinkers who “aim to heal distress and sickness by imbibing a natural antidote sometimes said to heal the trauma of society itself”) and, yes, believe it or not, in mainland China (where users tend to be young, wealthy Chinese entrepreneurs and corporate managers “searching for holistic wellness, self-cultivation and a competitive edge in capitalist environments”). During his research and interviews in China, what struck Gearin, who teaches in the Medical Ethics and Humanities Unit at the University of Hong Kong, was the “utilitarian ethos of ayahuasca” and “the sanitization of ayahuasca into a secular framework.” In China, writes Gearin, psychoactive plants have “become a visionary technology employed to advance business life.” Some insider will no doubt soon publish a book on the prevalence of ayahuasca use in the Hollywood film industry, the creation of Artificial Intelligence and venture capitalism in Silicon Valley. Welcome to the contemporary world of global ayahuasca!

The astonishing growth in worldwide interest in ayahuasca has become a recurring theme in the mainstream media and in prominent publications such as David Wallace-Wells’ bestselling The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2019), in which the author describes a burgeoning Wellness Movement, saying, “What has been called the “new New Age” arises from a similar intuition—that meditation, ayahuasca trips, crystals and Burning Man and microdosed LSD are all pathways to a world beckoning as purer, cleaner, more sustaining, and perhaps above all else, more whole. This purity arena is likely to expand, perhaps dramatically, as the climate continues to careen toward visible degradation…” 

Researchers such as Luis Eduardo Luna and Dennis J. McKenna, who have been writing for decades on this phenomenon that has been called an Archaic Revival, emphasize the transformative ecological perspectives that many people experience—and it’s not always pretty! Luna describes how ayahuasca can “increase fully-sensed body-and-mind awareness of the current perils of environmental destruction, nuclear disaster and social turmoil.” McKenna proposes ayahuasca as a teacher, an “ambassador from the community of species,” and, most importantly, “a catalytic influence in changing global environmental consciousness.” In this regard, ayahuasca might propitiate a visceral, indelible, impassioned understanding of the term “biophilia,” a love of life worth defending against its powerful enemies. 

Additionally, as Dale Millard points out, the healing properties of harmine in ayahuasca are of utmost consideration. Millard’s research overview demonstrates its “wide variety of therapeutic activity inducing antimicrobial, anti-diabetic, anticancer, antidepressant, antiparasitic, DNA-binding, osteogenic, chondrogenic, neuroprotective and other effects. Harmine is by far the most abundant constituent of the medicine ayahuasca. Its presence in pharmacologically active amounts may therefore provide a rationale for its contribution in ayahuasca’s wide application in traditional medicine and its general reputation for treating a broad range of diseases and ailments.” P. viridis is the species of Psychotria that is the preferred ayahuasca admixture plant, though there is evidence that the closely-related species Psychotria carthagenensis also is used, especially by the formidable Lamista shamans in Peru, according to University of Cambridge medical anthropologist Françoise Barbira Freedman in her study “Shamanic Plants and Gender in the Healing Forest.” Barbira Freedman affirms that “shamanic plant knowledge acquisition involves the understanding of the dynamic relations between the gendered species and the engineering of balance among them.” She goes on to explain that there are androgynous trees as well as some plants that are not gendered: “For instance, the various plants that are labelled ayahuasca (several varieties of Banisteriopsis and Brugmansia) are paired with plants that activate the visionary quality of the brews. These plants are generically called chacruna; the most commonly used species are two shrubs (Psychotria viridis and Psychotria carthagenensis) and a scandent vine (Diplopterys cabrerana).” It is interesting to note that, etymologically, the word chacruna is from the Quechua verb chakruy, which means to mix. In this important region of shamanic traditions, chacruna is not solely associated with P. viridis (as it is elsewhere) but has, instead, a generic use and refers to a range of ayahuasca admixture plants.  Despite certain controversies regarding the actual alkaloidal content of P. carthagenensis in the context of phytochemical lab testing (See Leal and Elisabetsky (1996) and McKenna, et al. (1998)), the ritual Amerindian use of this species of Psychotria is well documented.  For this reason, we include Psychotria carthagenensis among the sacred plants of Microcosms.

Banisteriopsis caapi

Psychotria varieties

Diplopterys varieties