Banisteriopsis caapi, Psychotria spp. and Diplopterys cabrerana (see also Yagé Complex below)

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 highlight 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., the plants most commonly combined to make a visionary drink for healing, divination and overall social cohesion among numerous Indigenous groups of the Amazon basin. Sometimes, as in the case of Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, the stories reach us from 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 then 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 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 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. Additionally, there is a spiritual nation called the Chaikonibo, says Favaron, who are the keepers of all ancestral wisdom and who maintain connections with some visionary doctors through the training and restrictions of diets with the appropriate plants undertaken by the Shipibo healers. And returning to the idea regarding the importance of familial bonds, Favaron maintains that “a legitimate doctor has spiritual Chaikonibo wives and, thanks to these marriages, is part of a spiritual family.”

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. And what about Elon Musk? Welcome to the contemporary world of global ayahuasca! 

Returning to the plants in this part of the Microcosms Plant Index, when B. caapi is prepared with D. cabrerana, the drink is known as yagé (also spelled yajé). When the crushed stems and trunks of B. caapi containing β-carbolines (an MAO Inhibitor) are boiled in water with the leaves of P. viridis, a source of Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), the resulting sacramental beverage is called ayahuasca, a composite Quechua word (aya/huasca) meaning Spirit Vine in reference to an interlinked “organic” community of beloved ancestors.  

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 are pleased to include Psychotria carthagenensis among the sacred plants of Microcosms.