Ayahuasca Reader: Encounters with the Amazon's Sacred Vine

Compilation © copyright 2016 by Luis Eduardo Luna and Steven F. White

Text and art © copyright by individual authors

Foreword © copyright 2016 by Ralph Metzner

Preface to the Second Edition © by Luis Eduardo Luna and Steven F. White

Introduction and Translations © by Luis Eduardo Luna and Steven F. White unless otherwise indicated

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo-copying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher, except for the quotation of brief passages in reviews.

Published by Synergetic Press

1 Bluebird Court, Santa Fe, NM 87508

24 Old Gloucester St. London, WC1N 3AL England

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Luna, Luis Eduardo, editor of compilation. | White, Steven F., 1955- editor of compilation.

Title: Ayahuasca reader : encounters with the Amazon’s sacred vine / edited by Luis Eduardo Luna, Steven F. White. Other titles: Encounters with the Amazon’s sacred vine

Description: Second edition. | Santa Fe : Synergetic Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015051096 (print) | LCCN 2016002877 (ebook) | ISBN 9780907791492 (hbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780907791591 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 9780907791607 (E-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Ayahuasca--Psychotropic effects. | Ayahuasca--Therapeutic use--Amazon River Region. | Ayahuasca--In literature. | Indians of South America--Drug use--Amazon River Region. | Hallucinogenic drugs and religious experience--South America--Amazon River Region. | Shamanism--Amazon River Region. | Indians of South America--Ethnobotany--Amazon River Region.

Classification: LCC BF209.A93 A95 2016 (print) | LCC BF209.A93 (ebook) | DDC

394.1/4--dc23

Cover and book design by Ann Lowe

Managing Editor: Linda Sperling, Associate Editor: Stephanie Joelle Smolarski

Cover art: Anderson Debernardi, Ayahuasca in Bloom

Printed by Bang Printing, USA

This book was printed on SFI Certified #60 Offset

Typeface: Adobe Jenson Pro

CONTENTS

FOREWORD by Ralph Metzner

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION Luis Eduardo Luna and Steven F. White

INTRODUCTION

I. AYAHUASCA MYTHS AND TESTIMONIES

YAJÉ: MYTH AND RITUAL

Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff

THE CREATION MYTH

Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff

A VISIT TO THE SECOND HEAVEN: A SIONA NARRATIVE OF THE YAGÉ EXPERIENCE

E. Jean Matteson Langdon

TWO AYAHUASCA MYTHS FROM THE CASHINAHUA OF NORTHWESTERN BRAZIL

Elsje Maria Lagrou

MYTHOLOGIES OF THE VINE

Oscar Calavia Sáez

A HUAORANI MYTH OF THE FIRST MIIYABU (AYAHUASCA VINE)

Jonathon S. Miller Weisberger

INITIATION EXPERIENCE

Jean-Pierre Chaumeil (as told by Alberto Prohaño)

LIGHT OF THIS WORLD

Don Hilario Peña

UNÁMARAI, FATHER OF YAJÉ

Hugo Niño

AT THE END YOU SEE GOD

Fernando Payaguaje

II. AYAHUASCA CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS

ON SOME REMARKABLE NARCOTICS OF THE AMAZON VALLEY AND ORINOCO

Richard Spruce

FIRST KNOWN PRINTED REFERENCE TO AYAHUASCA (1675)

José Chantre y Herrera

THE DRUG THAT MAKES MEN BRAVE

Gordon MacCreagh

DISCOVERING THE WAY

Michael Harner

A YAJÉ SESSION

Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff

YAGÉ NOSTALGIA

Scott S. Robinson

THE SPEARS OF TWILIGHT: LIFE AND DEATH IN THE AMAZON JUNGLE

Philippe Descola

ONE RIVER: EXPLORATIONS AND DISCOVERIES IN THE AMAZON RAIN FOREST

Wade Davis

BECOMING-JAGUAR

William Torres C.

THE JAGUAR WHO WOULD NOT SAY HER PRAYERS: CHANGING POLARITIES IN UPPER AMAZONIAN SHAMANISM

Françoise Barbira Freedman

MONTAGE

Michael Taussig

DESIGN THERAPY

Angelika Gebhart-Sayer

HEALING ICAROS IN PERUVIAN VEGETALISMO

Susana Bustos

TRACKING THE RIVER OF CHANGE: A MULTIDIMENSIONAL INTERPRETATION OF AYAHUASCA HEALING

The Heart: Hungarian Ethnobotanical and Ayahuasca Research Team.

Petra Bokor, Ede Frecska, Lajos Horvath, Attila Szabo

THROUGH THE VOID: A COGNITIVE TESTIMONY

Jan Kounen

TWENTY YEARS LATER

François Demange

SOME OBSERVATIONS ON THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE AYAHUASCA EXPERIENCE

Luis Eduardo Luna

AYAHUASCA AS ANTIDOTE

Jeremy Narby

III. NEW RELIGIONS:

SANTO DAIME, BARQUINHA, AND UNIÃO DO VEGETAL (UDV)

HYMNS

Received by Raimundo Irineu Serra

Received by Sebastião Mota de Melo

Received by Alfredo Gregório de Melo

Received by Daniel Pereira de Matos

Received by Francisca Campos do Nascimento

THE BOOK OF VISIONS: JOURNEY TO SANTO DAIME (excerpt)

Alex Polari de Alverga

AN UNUSUAL EXPERIENCE WITH HOASCA: A LESSON FROM THE TEACHER

Dennis J. McKenna

IV. WRITING AYAHUASCA

THE VORTEX (excerpt)

José Eustasio Rivera

THE YAGÉ LETTERS

Allen Ginsberg

MEN OF CHAZÚTA

F. Bruce Lamb

THE THREE HALVES OF INO MOXO (excerpt)

César Calvo

AYAHUASCA, OR WHAT THERE IS AT THE END

Mario Villafranca Saravia

RETURNING

Ib Michael

AERIAL WATERS

Néstor Perlongher

THE MOTHER OF THE VOICE IN THE EAR (excerpt)

Alfonso Domingo

RIO NAPO

Dale Pendell

FROM SWORN TO THE PLANTS

Steven F. White

AYAHUASCA IN MY ART AND PHILOSOPHY

Alex Grey

AYAHUASCA

Juan Carlos Galeano

THE WOMAN I COULD HAVE BEEN

Esthela Calderón

ICARO OF THE YACUMAMA

Ana Varela Tafur

RITE OF PASSAGE

Percy Vílchez Vela

AYAHUASCA GAVE ME A STORY

Graham Hancock

V. AYAHUASCA IN VISUAL EXPRESSION

LIST OF COLOR PLATES, AYAHUASCA IN VISUAL EXPRESSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY, SELECT DISCOGRAPHY AND FILMOGRAPHY

APPENDIX – SELECTED WORKS IN THEIR ORIGINAL LANGUAGE

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

FOREWORD

Ralph Metzner

AYAHUASCA has become a phenomenon of cultural transmigration—from being an obscure medicinal plant concoction with purgative virtues used by certain Amazonian tribal shamans, it has moved into urban population centers in Brazil, Colombia and Peru. In these countries, Ayahuasca has given rise to three distinct religious churches that use the tea in their ceremonies. Attracting the attention of physicians and psychologists, both local and global, who were intrigued by remarkable-seeming cures and the alleviation of psychosomatic symptoms and long standing issues with depression and anxiety, neo-shamanic hybrid rituals using ayahuasca have evolved and moved to urban centers in North America and Europe. This cultural transmigration has afforded a much needed source of additional income for adventurous ayahuasqueros who have found themselves in demand for guiding curious Westerners, not only into the ritual use of a promising new exotic medicine but also into the complex mythic cosmology of Amazonia.

Their experiences presented Westerners with a radical challenge to the accepted materialist medical model: ayahuasca healers with their concoctions do not counteract or eliminate disease-causing viruses and bacteria in their patients. Instead, healers and their patients together drink the purgative and hallucinatory brew and the healer then starts to sing icaros, healing songs learned in his or her shamanic apprenticeship. These songs invoke the spirits with whom the practitioner has developed a relationship or alliance and these spirits enter into the person’s body, or rather the body-mind-spirit-complex, and do the healing from inside. The concoction has a strong purgative component; the purging, which is typically associated by Westerners with being sick, is then experienced as the unexpected and rapid elimination of toxic feeling-thought-sensation complexes after which the person feels almost euphorically lighter and clearer.

The book, co-edited by my friend Luis Eduardo Luna, and my own edited collection of essays Sacred Vine of Spirits—Ayahuasca both first came out in 1999/2000—and since that time the public interest in ayahuasca has grown enormously and continues to expand. Both books have now just come out in new editions, joined by perhaps a dozen or more books describing detailed personal experiences of healing with ayahuasca. Several films have been made of ayahuasca ceremonies, containing testimonials by individuals who have been deeply moved by their experience of the healing virtues of the tea.

My book contains chapters on the botany, chemistry and pharmacology and accounts from around twenty individuals, mostly Westerners, of their unique experiences. This book edited by Steven F. White and Luis Eduardo Luna, a Colombian born anthropologist, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Vegetalismo: Shamanism among the Mestizo Population of the Peruvian Amazon, has a wide variety of contributions by more than sixty indigenous, mestizo and Euro-American writers. Especially intriguing to my mind are the previously untranslated descriptions of creation and origin myths of some of the indigenous cultures: of how the knowledge of the preparation and use of ayahuasca came down with people in a ship from the sky; how its purpose was to teach people how to adapt successfully to the rainforest environment; of how there is inevitably going to be fear in confronting the unknown dimensions of our existence; of how the brew can be and should be used for healing purposes, but sometimes is also used for gaining power over one’s enemies through sorcery. The latter is a point often not understood by naive Westerners under the grip of an idealized conception of so-called indigenous wisdom traditions.

Much has been made in some circles about sexually and financially exploitative behavior by some self-appointed shamans, both Euro-American and South American natives. Undoubtedly, abusive behaviors by corrupt practitioners and those more interested in wealth than health exist even in societies where the healing professions are more strictly regulated than they are in South American mestizo communities. In this as in other areas, superstitious over-reliance on a mystique of an alien healing practice is no substitute for informed common sense in evaluating or utilizing an unknown method.

Part II contains valuable excerpts from the writings of some of the earliest participant-observers of the shamanic cultures of the South American continent: ethnobotanists such as Richard Spruce in the nineteenth century and Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff in the twentieth; as well as from Michael Harner, the anthropologist who has perhaps done more than anyone to familiarize Western societies with shamanic journey practices as a scientifically valid way to expand and deepen our knowledge of the world. There are also the early accounts of ayahuasca or yage by intrepid Western poets and writers like Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, who boldly confronted the terror of becoming unhinged from the cognitive safety of their worldview. There are accounts from some, like Michael Taussig, who decry the loss of indigenous knowledge and harshly criticize the exploitative colonial regimes that have dominated the continent for 500 years, arguing that the use of ayahuasca has been a way for the indigenous tribes to protect their world from colonial depredations. Prolific filmmaker and explorer Wade Davis is represented in an extract from his book One River, a beautiful and moving multidimensional journey through the many cultures of the vast South American continent.

There are accounts of the founding myths and songs from the three religious communities that have grown up around the ceremonial use of ayahuasca in Brazil: the União de Vegetal, the Santo Daime and Barquinia. In these churches, the main purpose for the use of the tea is not for healing, but for building community cohesiveness and a sense of belonging. And there are accounts of visionary experiences by modern writers like the novelist César Calvo and poet Allen Ginsberg. Especially brilliant too is the account by ethnobotanist and biochemist Dennis McKenna, co-author with his brother Terence of the autobiographical Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss. In his account, Dennis uses his knowledge of plant biochemistry to give an experiential account of the molecular processes of photosynthesis presaging a stage in the evolution of humanity when the sciences of external matter will converge and cohere with the sciences of interior experience.

This book is a treasure trove of insights and discoveries—I encourage you to read it and be inspired by the depth and poetry of these visions.

Ralph Metzner, PhD

Author of The Unfolding Self, Green Psychology and editor of Sacred Vine of Spirits—Ayahuasca

Alex Grey, Ayahuasca Angel, 2002. Ink on paper, 9 x 11 in.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

GLOBAL INTEREST in ayahuasca has grown exponentially since the first edition of the Ayahuasca Reader fifteen years ago. This is a phenomenon with a double flux that has occurred simultaneously: some people from all over the world are traveling to Peru, Colombia, Ecuador or Brazil to experience ayahuasca in a variety of contexts, while others come in contact with the sacred plants due to practitioners (indigenous or not) who work with ayahuasca in lands that are very distant from the brew’s place of origin in the Amazon. The result is a burgeoning awareness of the extraordinary possibilities of ayahuasca in terms of therapy, personal and collective spiritual development, creativity, in addition to an appreciation of ayahuasca as an object of and tool for scientific enquiry. At the same time indigenous communities in the Amazon area and beyond are adopting ayahuasca as an important element in preserving and strengthening their native identities (cf. Rose 2010, Langdon & Rose 2014, Pantoja 2014), a phenomenon that may be analogous to what took place with peyote at the end of the nineteenth century in the revival of native spirituality among the North American indigenous cultures.

Historically, ayahuasca should be understood within a larger context of Amerindian land use and plant knowledge. The indigenous population of the Americas discovered and domesticated the properties of numerous plants (which are now an essential part of the world’s food heritage), such as potatoes, corn, manioc, beans, tomatoes, squash, pumpkin, quinoa and many others; three of the most widespread stimulants (tobacco, coca and chocolate); medicinal plants such as quinine and the muscle relaxants from the plants combined to make curare (Amazonian dart poisons), once used in open heart surgery; and, of course, rubber, which played such an important economic role (albeit with tragic social consequences for the native population of the Amazon) at the onset of the automobile revolution.

It is also of great importance to consider ayahuasca in the context of a longstanding and wide-ranging Amerindian interest in psychotropic plants and fungi: the use, for example, of peyote cactus (Lophophora williamsii) for more than three thousand years (Schultes & Hofmann 1979:132); San Pedro cactus and Trichocereus species used ritually between 2000 and 1500 BCE in Las Aldas, northern Peru (Fung 1972; Polia Meconi 1996), as well as in Chavín de Huantar (900-200 BC) and Nazca (100 BC-700); the ubiquity of Anadenanthera species (central to the Tiwanaku culture) in South America and the Antilles, where its use was documented in 1495 by the Catalonian friar Ramón Pané (McEwan 2001, Torres 1995, Torres & Rebke 2006, Pané 2008); in addition to the use of mushrooms, largely of the genus Psilocybe, in Guatemala, Mexico and Colombia (Wasson 1983, Schultes & Bright 1979, Reichel-Dolmatoff 2005). It should be noted that there is still no evidence of the use of ayahuasca prior to the seventeenth century, and its antiquity is convincingly put into question in the Peruvian Amazon (Bravec de Mori 2011). However, it is not far-fetched to suppose that knowledge of the properties of the ayahuasca vine Banisteriopsis caapi, wherever its point of dispersion may have occurred, either alone or as a potentiator of the effects of other plants, could be as old as the use of psychotropics in coastal, desert and mountain regions of the Americas. This is especially true when considering the interest among Amazonian populations in plants such as various species of the genus Virola and Anadenanthera peregrina. Banisteriopsis-based preparations may very well have been used for centuries or even millennia in Northwest Amazonia, perhaps along with tobacco and coca.¹

As in the rest of the Americas, the population of the Amazon experienced devastating demographical losses that are nearly impossible to imagine over a relatively short period of one hundred and fifty years after the European invasion. Until recently, this area was thought to be able to sustain only scant populations based on the assumption that protein sources were scarce.² We now know, however, that the pre-Columbian Amazon was the site of large populations and complex societies, as proved by the existence over large areas of rich anthropogenic Amazonian Dark Earths (ADE), not only in the valleys but also upland, revealing the remains of many satellite villages now visible as a result of large scale deforestation. The increasing loss of tree cover in the Southwest Amazon has led to the discovery of geoglyphs, gigantic earthworks, causeways and raised fields, (cf. McEwan, Barreto & Neves 2001; Mann 2008; Schaan, Ranzi & Pärssinen 2008). The use of Banisteriopsis caapi (and its additives) is thus a technology that emerges from a larger socio-cultural context that includes complex societies, large trade networks, optimal use of natural resources, and probably systematic experimentation with plants (and animals) exhibiting interesting pharmacological qualities: poisons, medicines, and plants that affect consciousness.

Any attempt to understand Amerindian cosmology, spirituality, and artistic manifestations must include a knowledge of shamanism in addition to the central importance given to the ritual use of psychotropic plants, including tobacco and coca, perhaps the oldest of all the psychoactive plants of the Americas, dating from at least 6000 BCE (Dillehay et al. 2010). The states of consciousness elicited by such plants surely would have contributed to animistic ideas among members of Amerindian societies by means of which intelligence is extended to plants, animals and the whole of nature, as well as to an understanding of the role of humans as guardians of the natural world. Shamanism (which has sparked increasing interest since the 1960s (Znamenski 2007), implies epistemological processes that in their most radical form include knowledge through identification or even cognitive transformation into the object of interest, a view that suddenly clarifies the significance of a great deal of pre-Columbian art with its many examples of jaguar and bird transformations (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1988, Stone 2011).

What will be the impact of the current growing interest in ayahuasca and other Amerindian plants? The discourses are remarkably homogeneous worldwide. As a result of their experiences with the sacred plants, many people claim to have derived personal insights or to have found relief from various afflictions. For those who are religiously- or spiritually-inclined, ayahuasca may provide access to states of consciousness associated with the numinous and foment a profound realization of the biosphere’s sacredness. Ayahuasca could thus be considered a propitiator of ecological literacy, a way of giving voice and agency to the nonhuman world, a means of protecting against the loss of floral and faunal story.³ These conceptions are certainly aligned with Amazonian ideas by which psychoactive plants facilitate contact with a spirit world that it is not dissociated from the natural environment. This is especially relevant today, given the ways that climate change and global environmental degradation affect all populations, though not necessarily in equal ways, as Rob Nixon has described in his remarkable book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Perhaps ayahuasca can facilitate a radical reappraisal of cultural attitudes towards nature. It is only through a deep, more egalitarian, less anthropocentric relationship with the natural world that religions, nations and political movements of the future will be able to sustain any real relevance. Ayahuasca may already be joining people into alliances that will work toward social change, especially with regard to governments and corporations that are destroying the habitats of the sacred plants themselves on a massive, hitherto unseen, scale. Perhaps the plants want us all to understand that the time of passive, pacific, solely self-centered contemplation is over. Above all, we believe that ayahuasca can help us understand the fundamental concept of biophilia, which means, of course, love of life. In the stunning new book Biophilia, Christopher Marley talks about how we as a species are burdened with a stewardship over this planet: To aid us in fulfilling that obligation, we have within us an appreciation, an empathy, and an affection for the life systems around us. Thankfully, it is a symbiotic relationship. The more we grow in understanding and appreciation of the natural world and the more we invest in it, the greater the peace, satisfaction and joy we receive from our association in return (Marley 2015, 6). In short, ayahuasca can help us avoid the view that human beings are the pinnacle of evolution (Gee 2013), overcome speciesism and reveal our place as simply a part of what Eduardo Kohn has called an ecology of selves (Kohn 2013).

It is clear that ayahuasca, as it has reached more people in a variety of contexts (religious, therapeutic, artistic, scientific), has been placed in various categories and assigned different roles. In many cases, ayahuasca is personalized: for some, she is a plant teacher, as in Peruvian vegetalismo, an archetype that situates intelligence beyond the human realm, and into the world of nature; for others, she is mother ayahuasca (interestingly, among the Tukano of the Vaupés, yajé is considered masculine), thereby giving her a benign and emotionally intimate role. Ayahuasca may also be considered a sacred medicine, a vehicle to an inner healer/higher self, or the means to experience ego dissolution and a symbolic death. It is also known as a cognitive enhancer, a tool for artistic, scientific or technical inspiration, or a means to experience beauty and social integration.⁴ Scientific research on ayahuasca and its active compounds seems especially promising in the study of human cognition, with the identification of brain structures and the underlying biological mechanisms involved in the experiences (McKenna & Riba 2015). Additionally, recent studies are demonstrating the potent immune-modulatory capacity of DMT and 5-methoxy-DMT (Frecska et al. 2013, Szabo et al. 2014), opening new avenues of research that may link physiological and cognitive processes.

Some traditional academics view contemporary ayahuasca narratives with a certain contempt, considering them to be a New Age construct and mystical mumbo-jumbo. However, this particular view from the outside is an easy one: these researchers observe the actors in their social and cultural circumstances and then establish categories to compartmentalize or dismiss them. The view from the inside is more challenging, since one is entering new territories, and the narratives are the only materials at hand. The texts and works of creative visual expression included here, all by individuals with firsthand encounters with ayahuasca, are highly relevant, and can be examined in many different ways. For this reason, this new edition of the Ayahuasca Reader should be considered a primary source of information regarding the boundless paths revealed by the sacred Amazonian vine.

NOTES

1. We include in this Reader only texts that refer to ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi + Psychotria viridis), yajé (Banisteriopsis caapi + Diplopterys cabrerana), and a few that refer exclusively to the caapi liana, without an additive. There is one exception: Jonathon Miller’s report on the Woarani, who use B. muricata, a closely related species with a far greater distribution. There are no texts here referring to ayahuasca analogues (Ott 1994, 1999), with plants other than the three plants mentioned. Many other admixtures plants have been reported, in some cases added with the purpose to study the properties of other plants (cf. Bristol 1965, Schultes 1972, Luna 1986, Ott 1995, Rätsch 1998, 2005).

2. Estimates of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas are a matter of debate, with figures that range from 50 to 112 million, and the deaths of approximately 90% of these people over a period of less than two centuries, amounting to perhaps one third of the world’s population (cf. Denevan 1976, Thornton 1997, Henige 1998, Stannard 1992).

3. There is a convergence of environmental awareness and interest in alternative approaches to body, mind and spirit. As stated by Barbira Freedman (2014:147) the shaman’s garden is now part of the architecture of ayahuasca shamanism in the Amazon. For urban dwellers, this is a good opportunity to learn about plants. See also Nabhan and St. Antoine (1993: 243), in which the authors sustain that there is no doubt that linguistic diversity and its associated reservoirs of folk scientific knowledge have become as endangered this century as has biological diversity itself.

4. A notable example is the Cuarto Encuentro Internacional de Culturas Andinas which took place August 2014 in Pasto, southern Colombia, a conference dedicated to a lasting peace and preceded by the presence of local and national authorities. The catalogue gave equal prominence to an academic program (with the participation of notable indigenous intellectuals) and a ceremonial program which included peyote, yopo (Anadenanthera peregrina), yajé and temazcal, the Aztec variant of the sweat lodge (cf. http://www.culturasandinas.com/programacion/).

A note from the publisher: Yagé (with a ‘g’) is the most common spelling in English, which we have used throughout. However, yajé, with a ‘j’, is an alternative spelling that we have left as is in previously published materials.

Map of the Upper Amazon, indicating indigenous groups, and many of the places and rivers that are mentioned in the Ayabuasca Reader. Map by Jeff Drew.

INTRODUCTION

WE BEGAN CONTEMPLATING the scope of this collection as the result of extended conversations at a 1996 conference sponsored by the Botanical Preservation Corps on Ethnobotany and Shamanism at the Mayan ruins of Palenque. Given our shared interest in anthropology, literature and the dynamics of ayahuasca, a sacred drink that has been used by at least seventy indigenous groups primarily in the Upper Amazon and Orinoco basins for divination, healing and other cosmogonic/shamanic purposes, it became clear to us that there was the potential for a very exciting project on which we could collaborate. The general objective of this anthology is to provide the reader with a panorama of texts from nearly a dozen languages that, collectively, treat the ayahuasca experience from what might be called an anthropoliterary perspective. These include indigenous mythic narratives and testimonies (from a number of ethnic groups who use the drink, including the Siona, Cashinahua, Huaorani, Desana, Witoto, Yagua, Inga and Secoya) as well as narratives related by western travelers, scientists and writers who have had contact with ayahuasca in different contexts. The anthology also contains ayahuasca-inspired lyrics of hymns received by members of Brazilian religious organizations that incorporate the drink in their ceremonies. In some cases, the material included has been published previously, often in difficult to find journals and books in a variety of languages. In other cases, the authors have produced their contributions expressly for this anthology.

In order to organize what eventually grew into an almost unwieldy amount of material, we divided the book into four sections, while recognizing that these categories overlap a great deal in terms of their content: I. Ayahuasca Myths and Testimonies; II. Ayahuasca Cultural Encounters; III. New Religions: Santo Daime, Barquinha and União do Vegetal (UDV); and IV. Writing Ayahuasca. This new edition includes a section of Color Plates representing Ayahuasca Art and Visual Creative Expression. We realize, of course, that there are inherent dangers in attempting to compartmentalize the (dis) ordering and all-embracing principle of ayahuasca itself in that it rejects such mutually-exclusive boundaries.

Ayahuasca (also known as yagé, natem, caapi, nishi, kamarampi and by dozens of other vernacular names) is merely one of many psychotropic decoctions derived by humans throughout the ages based on a profound knowledge of the plant world. As a means of defining with greater clarity the diverse roles of sacred plants in both ancient and contemporary societies, Michael Winkelman proposes the name psychointegrator plants. In summarizing some of the cross-cultural commonalities with regard to the use of these plants, Winkelman says that the induced experiences have effects upon personality in: entering into a personal relationship with a reality established in a mythical time; developing relationships with an animal spiritual realm which is the source of power and self identification; the dissolution or death of the ego and its resurrection and transformation; and social rituals to enhance social identity formation, group integration and cohesion, and to reaffirm cultural values and beliefs. He continues by saying that the ubiquitous simultaneous therapeutic, religious, spiritual and medicinal roles of these plants have implications for understanding the nature of human consciousness and the spiritual.¹ Consequently, efforts to understand the material presented in this anthology necessarily entail a broader than usual interdisciplinary perspective. In this spirit, we have attempted to bridge traditional disciplinary gaps in order to enrich and expand critical vocabularies and approaches to cultural studies. Even so, our whole is limited in scope and seeks to complement itself by means of a bibliography more extensive in disciplinary terms.

The first section opens with a series of mythopoetic narratives in which ayahuasca is a protagonist.² The ayahuasca plant has its otherworldly origin in mythic time: either it comes from the incestuous union of the Sun Father and his Daughter, or the secret knowledge from the subaquatic realm, or the cadaver of a shaman, or the tail of a giant serpent joining heaven and earth. These diverse indigenous groups all believe that the visionary vine is a vehicle which makes the primordial accessible to humanity. According to Stephen Crites, the narrative forms of sacred stories orient the life of people through time, their life-time, their individual and corporate experience.³

Anthropologists make a distinction between the emic (the declarations of natives) and the etic (the interpretations of the observer-analyst).⁴ For the first section of this anthology, we have preferred methodologies that either emphasize the emic or blur the distinctions between the emic and the etic. Gatherers and interpreters of mythic narratives included in the Ayahuasca Reader such as E. Jean Matteson Langdon, Elsje Maria Lagrou, and Jonathon S. Miller Weisberger⁵ mention the names of the indigenous storytellers whose words they transcribe and translate as a way of highlighting the emic perspective as well as the individual stamp on an evolving narrative’s latest flowering. The ever-changing new story is, as Stephen Crites puts it, superimposed on the image-stream of the original chronicle.⁶ One example of this phenomenon is the Desana myth (transcribed by Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff) of the Snake-Canoe descending from the Milky Way with the first inhabitants of the world, which is transformed into the High River Fire Canoe carrying yagé (ayahuasca) people and the white caciques in the narrative recorded by Langdon, the dragon/boat and singing spirits of Harner’s account of his first ayahuasca experience among the Conibo, and the silver canoe with a Lady in the bow coming down from the sky in the hymn received by Mestre Irineu. In the second and third of these narratives, the figures within the canoe invite the narrators to join them on a revelatory journey, an offer that is accepted. Crites sustains that the form of consciousness is narrative and that consciousness is molded by the sacred story to which it awakens.⁷ For Claudio Naranjo, the ayahuasca experience provides a unique opportunity to observe the mind engaged in mythopoetic activity, to interrogate it on its products, and even interact with archetypal productions in their nascent state.⁸ The act of concentrating on a particular myth under the effects of ayahuasca, according to Osmani/Lagrou, enables the individual to live in it and to understand its meaning. In Mythologies of the Vine, Oscar Calavia Sáez provides a fascinating analysis of how the archetypes of ayahuasca mythology, which he divides into aquatic and chthonic narratives, reflect a particular indigenous group’s relationship with its environment (riverine vs. high rainforest) and its ancestors.

Langdon’s contribution A Visit to the Second Heaven: A Siona Narrative of the Yagé Experience, opens with a fundamental Siona conception that also characterizes other indigenous groups of the Upper Amazon: the assumption that the universe is composed of two superimposed realities and that the other is eventually accessible by means of ayahuasca. The narrative describes a failure to know the domains or designs (toya) of the high river which, as Langdon points out, runs through the second heaven, the heavenly level above the earth that begins at the point where you can see no farther with the naked eye. The fear of being vanquished upon entering the dimensions of the mind is a recurring theme in the narratives throughout the Ayahuasca Reader. Langdon’s text also highlights the problematic issue of translation with regard to representation. Her more literal, line-by-line rendering of the narrative told by Ricardo Yaiguaje is an attempt not to take the teller’s language toward that of the reader, but to bring the reader closer to the teller’s words. Her refusal to retell or rewrite a narrative based on an anonymous informant then present it in a monolingual format (a technique related to the important, pioneering work of Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff among the Tukano Indians) is, perhaps, more ethical than that of Hugo Niño in that Langdon does not create the false impression that the indigenous text somehow mimics or conforms to western narrative techniques.⁹

Langdon’s analytical approach, which she has defined as symbolic anthropology,¹⁰ provides an interesting contrast to Hugo Niño’s Marxist methodology in Unámarai, Father of yagé, which evolved over a seven-year period beginning in 1967. According to the introduction to his collection Primitivos relatos contados otra vez: héroes y mitos amazónicos (Primitive Tales Retold: Amazonian Heroes and Myths), Niño initially believes that a mythology should be preserved just as he collected it so that it can serve him as a document to corroborate scientific principles. Later, he reconceives the ethnoliterary process as one of rewriting. He comes to the conclusion that it is important to take into account the magical qualities of the voice as it shapes myth and ritual poetry and feels that he cannot ignore the aesthetic and culturally creative purposes of this communication as well. In his introduction, Niño compares himself (presumptuously) to Homer in that he believes he is shaping an aesthetically pleasing written form from an oral tradition. For him, his retold myth is an unproblematic faithful restoration that is the product not of a flight of the imagination, but rather something that is based on his research, his experience and his observations in that part of America.

In many ways, the content of the first section illustrates the intradisciplinary debate with regard to what Janet M. Chernela calls the anthropological word, its purpose and its power.¹¹ According to Chernela, there are two basic positions:

The so-called scientific (or scientistic) extreme holds that objective assessment of an external reality is the realizable goal of anthropology, made possible through disinterested observation and methodological rigor. In contrast, the postmodern humanistic critique asserts that ethnography is a literary creation whose false scientism obfuscates underlying interest in both ethnographer and native. At its extreme, the interpretive-humanistic perspective holds to an epistemological relativism in which ethnography is a literature of observational fact no more authoritative than any other fictive work whose coherence and orderliness result from rhetorical devices. Proponents of this position claim to be modern, suggesting a paradigm shift in anthropology away from traditional ethnographic description and explanation and toward an interactive and interpretive ethnographic process in which goals of objectivity are unattainable and misapplied. Postmodernists also criticize the scientific approaches for neglecting the role played by anthropology in the service of hegemonic powers. These critics call for a thorough recognition and critique of colonial and neocolonial influences in shaping what anthropologists have misrepresented as isolated peoples without histories.¹²

While recognizing the problematic nature of the reproduction of the native voice by means of translations that are sometimes translations of translations (a situation that recalls the debate generated by I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala and testimonial literature¹³), we sought texts for the first section of this anthology that approximate the emic, such as the first person narratives of Ricardo Yaiguaje, Alberto Prohaño, Hilario Peña and Fernando Payaguaje that relate individual stories of lives, struggles, journeys to other realms and vast knowledge of botany, imperiled, of course, by ecological destruction and a lack of shamanic successors among today’s younger generations. In these four instances, the ethnographer is a listener, though no doubt shaping the autobiographical discourse to varying degrees through transcription, editing and translation.

Perhaps one of the most interesting characteristics of the narrative by Prohaño as told to French anthropologist Jean-Pierre Chaumeil is the emphasis on ritual itself and the actual songs used to invoke the different plant-spirits. The individual performance of the shaman facilitates a social function in connection with the mythic presences invoked through the act of singing. This text also exemplifies the role of ayahuasca as a milestone in the path of knowledge, following other sacred plants such as piripiri (Cyperaceous sp.) and tobacco and preceding others, such as Brugmansia sp.

What gives the Ayahuasca Reader a circular quality is a link between Ayahuasca Myths and Testimonies of Section I and the literary selections of Section IV, Writing Ayahuasca, based on the important relationships between psychointegrators and a creative therapeutic culture that joins language, music, art and performance.¹⁴ The idea of performance is a critical concept underlying Jerome Rothenberg’s work on primitive poetry in Technicians of the Sacred: Our ideas of poetry—including, significantly, our idea of the poet—began to look back consciously to the early & late shamans of those other worlds: not as a title to be seized but as a model for the shaping of meanings & intensities through language. As the reflection of our yearning to create a meaningful ritual life, a life lived at the level of poetry—that looking-back related to the emergence of a new poetry & art rooted in performance & in the oldest, most universal of human traditions.¹⁵ Shamanism, then, as a series of individual performances in a dynamic complex across space and time, is a simultaneous process of mediation and domestication.

If the shaman, by definition, is one who goes beyond, he (or she) is also one who crosses ethnic boundaries in consulting with shamans from other groups, generally providing the technology for adapting to an environment that, historically, is characterized not by isolation but by great intercultural penetration over long periods of time. This process also involves the shamanic appropriation of any and all power-metaphors, including received books, radios, magic matches, white pills, drugstores, contemporary weapons of war, and UFOs. Future shamans will no doubt be opening spiritual windows on the Internet. This is entirely in keeping with what Josep M. Fericgla has called the adaptogenic function of ayahuasca in terms of being something that one incorporates in order to modify oneself or one’s external reality.¹⁶

Fericgla also proposes that ayahuasca consumption induces a dialogic consciousness that facilitates auto-reflexion as an essential strategy in avoiding egocentrism (the starting point of radical ethnocentrism).¹⁷ Fericgla, in other words, envisions ayahuasca-solutions to interethnic conflict, ideas that may or may not be in keeping with shamanic practices in terms of embedding knowledge in the ayahuasca experience, seeking power over one’s enemies and preserving at all costs a particular, threatened ethnic identity, examples of which can be found in the testimonies of Alberto Prohaño and Fernando Payaguaje. With regard to ayahuasca as a human construct, Oscar Calavia Sáez distinguishes between a contemporary pacified New Age ayahuasca and an older, more bellicose, conception of the sacred drink: ayahuasca as an effective way of waging war and vanquishing one’s nemesis.

Janet M. Chernela sustains that western historians highlight the significance of the speaker as an individual, whose subjective meanings, intentions, perceptions, interests, goals, interpretations and representations must all be taken into account. She goes on to say, however, that while social historians rely on data derived from the written manuscripts of individuals, ethnographers transcribe audio recordings of naturally occurring speech in which individual contribution is often obscured.¹⁸ Focusing on the individual and speech as the locus of cultural change (as is the case in several instances in Ayahuasca Myths and Testimonies), new approaches to anthropology no longer treat indigenous people as atemporal members of a static culture outside the vicissitudes of history, but rather as producers of history.¹⁹ This anthology facilitates a kind of mythistoric understanding (in keeping with the ideas expressed by Dennis Tedlock in his introduction to the Popol Vuh). Ayahuasca is a means of transport into an ancestral state, a way of passing into myth itself as a protagonist, which is one way of understanding César Calvo’s The Three Halves of Ino Moxo (a fragment of which appears in Section IV). The natural world as invoked by Ino Moxo is a living memory of creation. Nevertheless, Calvo’s narrative world is not divorced from historical time: the tragedy of the rubber boom 1880–1914 and its disastrous effects on the Amazonian indigenous population periodically emerges from the consciousness of the literary protagonist indirectly allied with the author himself. The adaptive ability of the spirits reflects the changes in human history. This is especially true in the paintings by Peruvian Pablo Amaringo in which an eclectic array of spiritual beings from past and present joins forces in kinetic, visionary panoramas.²⁰

The second section, Ayahuasca Cultural Encounters, contains perspectives that are characterized by the absence of a so-called objective, etic distance in that the anthropologists, ethnobotanists and observers of indigenous cultural traditions (Richard Spruce, Gordon MacCreagh, Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, Scott S. Robinson, Michael Harner, Philippe Descola, Wade Davis, William Torres C., Françoise Barbira Freedman, Michael Taussig, Angelika Gebhart-Sayer, Susana Bustos, the team of Hungarian researchers known collectively as the HEART, Jan Kounen, François Demange, Luis Eduardo Luna and Jeremy Narby) all demonstrate varying degrees of interactive participation in and knowledge of ayahuasca rituals among indigenous and mestizo populations.

Ayahuasca Cultural Encounters opens with a classic piece—Spruce’s 1852 description of his botanical identification and ingestion of caapi among the Tukano Indians of the Vaupés. We have decided to include the little-known personal testimony in Gordon MacCreagh’s The Drug that Makes Men Brave (published in 1926) with the hope that the reader can temporarily set aside the author’s ethnocentric, even racist, discourse as a way of learning about a rarely-documented indigenous ceremony of the Jurupary man among the Tiquié people in which the ingestion of caapi figures prominently. The section continues with Reichel-Dolmatoff’s meticulously-documented account of his participation in a yajé ceremony among the Barasana Indians of the Pira-Paraná.²¹ In all three cases, the authors manifest a scientific urge to document not only the externalities of the decoction (plant identification, methods of preparation and ritual procedures), but also its internal function in the human mind. This approach set the standards that would be followed by botanists such as Richard Evans Schultes (as well as his disciples that include Wade Davis) and anthropologists working in the Amazon, some of whom are represented in this collection. Spruce and Reichel-Dolmatoff were truly remarkable scientists. Richard Evans Schultes has characterized Spruce’s work, undertaken from 1851–1855, as the most complete phytogeographic labor ever carried out in the Amazonia.²² Reichel-Dolmatoff, born in Austria in 1912,²³ was the founder of Colombian archeology and anthropology. He was certainly the first anthropologist to fully recognize and document in a human group the omnipresence of the states of consciousness produced by sacred South American plants. Using the categories by which western thought compartmentalizes cultural reality, Reichel-Dolmatoff analyzed the indigenous group’s mythopoeia, religion, ecological awareness, music, dance, visual arts and philosophy.

In terms of other contributors to this section, it is important to remember that Michael Harner’s well known discovery of the way of the shaman has its origin in his pioneering research among the Shuar and Conibo of Ecuador and Peru. The piece we have included describes his first ayahuasca experience with a compelling mixture of drama and humor. Scott Robinson’s contribution (written for this anthology) is a remembrance of journeys within journeys by means of ayahuasca-driven memories. Robinson personalizes ethnobotanical history by mentioning figures such as Richard Evans Schultes, Schultes’s protégées Homer Pinkley and Timothy Plowman, as well as Allen Ginsberg and Claudio Naranjo. Robinson also laments the devastating consequences of oil exploration on traditional cultures of the Ecuadorean Amazon. As he says at the end of his piece, I’m almost afraid to go back.

From Descola’s The Spears of Twilight: Life and Death in the Amazon Jungle, a companion to his impressive ethnographic study of the Achuar (a Jibaroan indigenous group of the Peruvian Amazon) La nature doméstique: symbolisme et praxis dans l’écologie des Achuar, we have included the author’s reflective description of his first experience with ayahuasca and how it relates to his theoretical knowledge of shamanism. We also have selected an excerpt from Wade Davis’s One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest that is a verbalization of the writer’s encounter with ayahuasca, treating the terror of dissolution into another dimension and the transformation of thought into vision.

The complexities of the critical model used perhaps too extensively by Torres in Becoming-Jaguar could have the unfortunate effect of alienating readers, who may perceive in it an unnecessary, even suffocating, application of the thoroughly foreign theories of Deleuze and Guattari. Donna J. Haraway, in When Species Meet, expresses her legitimate disappointment with the theoretical framework that D&G express in the Becoming-Animal section of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia: why, she asks, do the authors write with such scorn and a lack of respect and curiosity about the actual animals? For Torres, the jaguar deserves the utmost respect, but it remains a visionary animal, hunted, dismembered and turned into relics, then invoked by incantatory shamanic language in conjunction with the sacred plants. Nevertheless, for Torres, D&G raise fascinating questions about causality in which, according to Deleuze, desire directly charges the perception-system. Deleuze understands perception in this sense as internal and external and is especially attentive to space-time perceptions. What most interests Deleuze is how drugs concern above all, velocities, the modifications of velocity, the thresholds of perception, shapes and movements, micro-perceptions, the perception that becomes molecular, superhuman or subhuman times, etc.²⁴ This new landscape is a potential source of astonishing beauty for Deleuze and, no doubt, Torres. For this reason, we urge the reader to be patient with the experimental and hermetic qualities of Torres’s contribution to this reader. In addition to the theoretical complications, there are inter-linguistic and morphological difficulties in the creation of new shamanic chants in the article as well. For those readers familiar with Hispanic American poetry, it might seem as if it were the Chilean avant-garde poet Vicente Huidobro of Altazor fame who drank ayahuasca and parachuted into the Amazon of William Torres.

Françoise Barbira Freedman, in her contribution to this section, examines the female principles of Becoming-Jaguar in the context of the interacting polarities of Amazonian religious and ethnic diversity. She describes how indigenous and mestizo healing and symbolic systems coexist and how outsiders, like herself, might have very ambivalent reactions to shamanic power-appropriations from Catholicism.

Michael Taussig’s account of yagé nights, in Montage, is punctuated by the contemporary political violence of Colombia, in the context of which, shamanic curers and their assistants are hardly exempt from the government repression unleashed against an armed leftist opposition. Fundamental to Taussig’s approach is the concept of montage, which, in Taussig’s words, provokes sudden and infinite connections between dissimilars in an endless, or almost endless, process of connection-making and connection breaking. Taussig prefers to link the yagé experience with Antonin Artaud’s ideas regarding anarchy, disorder, chaos and the infinite perspective of conflicts that the French author proposes as part of his aesthetic of a Theater of Cruelty. Taussig rejects the idea of ritual linked to order as well as the Romantic concept of the Symbol which forms the basis, in his opinion, of the anthropological models defined by, among others, Victor Turner. For Taussig, the notion of the mystical trip, the ritual leader and the absorption of the individual in the tribe are all elements of an overly male, fascist fascination. Taussig believes that the shaman as Wild Man and Possessor of Magic is a colonial construct. He characterizes the shaman’s song as ordered disorder and continuous discontinuity. For him, truth is a shifting, multiple concept of coexisting opposites linked to a series of incomplete representations in the theatrical sense. He prefers to emphasize the social function of the cure.

As a kind of prelude to some of the issues raised in the final part of the anthology, we also have included in Section II an excerpt from The Geometric Designs of the Shipibo-Conibo in Ritual Context by Angelika Gebhart-Sayer. In this article, the author maintains that the visionary design art of this indigenous group from eastern Peru, while not a veritable writing system … may well have constituted a graphic device comprising symbolic, semantic units, in perhaps a mnemotechnical arrangement. Gebhard-Sayer goes on to say that the shamanic act of invisibly marking or writing on the skin of individuals by means of spiritual projection is part of an ongoing therapeutic treatment and that every person feels spiritually permeated and saturated with designs.²⁵ She refers to this process in the fragment we have included in this anthology as design therapy. It may be illuminating to consider this body art a proto-text, a pre-history of writing in what José Sánchez-Parga has defined as a process of progressive textual separations.²⁶ In other words, the history of writing can be understood as the gradual de-anatomization of the text as it is lifted from the body and shifted to textiles, stones, ceramics, monuments and other materially-objective surfaces.

Gebhard-Sayer´s account of healing designs produced by shamanic song and traced in the air by the hummingbird spirit Pino is a wonderful segue to the contribution by Susana Bustos Healing Icaros in Peruvian Vegetalismo, which opens with a description of working with legendary healer Don Solón Tello Lozano (1918-2010) in Iquitos, Peru. For Bustos, the singing of icaros in conjunction with ayahuasca is related to what she calls the unfolding of a perfectly syntonic journey, a type of unitive consciousness between healer, client and song. As Bustos concludes, the singing, then, becomes a healing art, an embodied practice.

The group of researchers from Hungary known collectively as the HEART (Hungarian Ethnobotanical and Ayahuasca Research Team) have contributed Tracking the River of Change: A Multidimensional Interpretation of Ayahuasca Healing to this new edition of the Ayahuasca Reader. Petra Bokor, Ede Frecska, Lajos Horvath, and Attila Szabo, each with their particular disciplinary perspectives and integrative thinking in Psychology, Psychiatry/Neuropharmacology, Philosophy and Biology present a "multilayered biopsychosociospiritual paradigm. Their work focuses on ayahuasca healing and the ability of the brew to induce long-term beneficial changes in the physical body through the mind by means of a psychosomatic frame of explanation."

Jan Kounen is the director of the wonderfully strange and powerful psychedelic western Blueberry (known as Renegade in the version marketed in English) (2004), in which the Peruvian shaman Guillermo Arévalo plays a role. In Through the Void: A Cognitive Testimony, Kounen gives a personal account of a healing experience with ayahuasca mixed with toé (Brugmansia) in Peru. He speaks of surrendering totally to the plants, which prompts the visions to open up like a titanic vortex of images. In order to describe this healing experience with traditional indigenous medicine, Kounen prefers to mix his words with his drawings, as if he were creating a storyboard for the preparation of a filmic approximation of his own wellbeing, grateful for the knowledge he has received and recognizing in his testimony that the mystery of existence is much larger than the idea that my culture had transmitted to me.

François Demange, who also goes by the name of Metsa, an increasingly well-known healer based in the U.S. after his extensive Peruvian training with traditional indigenous ayahuasqueros, reflects on the two decades that have passed since his first transformative experience drinking ayahuasca. He discusses how he has come to realize a truth of the existence of a spiritual world, of an expanded reality accessible to all, where, once we tap into it and understand it, we recognize we are all connected to all living things and that the sense of solitude and separation is an illusion.

Luis Eduardo Luna, in his new contribution Some Observations on the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience, has written a personal memoir mixed with philosophical and scientific reflections closely linked to the work of Benny Shanon in The Antipodes of the Mind and the research projects undertaken by Ede Frecska and his Hungarian colleagues. Here, Luna, as he characterizes it himself, deals almost exclusively with recurring visual motifs, adding at the end some observations about the possible relation between visions and dreams, as well as some reflections about the ontological aspects of the ayahuasca experience. Like Jeremy Narby, Luna warns about current concerns regarding abuses (primarily sexual and monetary) in ayahuasca retreat centers.

Jeremy Narby’s cautionary piece Ayahuasca as Antidote calls attention to how in the intercultural interface of ayahuasca tourism, misunderstandings abound and how female westerners who travel to the Amazon to consult male shamans need to be especially wary of sexual predation by ayahuasqueros. Ayahuasca can cure as the title of Narby’s article implies, but it is hardly unproblematic for westerners, especially those who hide things from themselves, or who have false or amplified visions of themselves. Ultimately, however, says Narby, ayahuasca acts as an antidote to the disenchantment of modernity.

We are pleased to be able to include in this expanded edition a substantial selection of visual creative expression in this new edition of the Ayahuasca Reader. Following the lead of Esther Pasztory, one of the world’s foremost experts on Pre-Columbian art and archeology and author of Thinking with Things: Toward a New Vision of Art, we prefer to consider these paintings (named here in alphabetical order in keeping with the last names of their creators) by Pablo Amaringo, Jeison Castillo, Anderson Debernardi, Demetri Efthyvoulos, Alex Grey, Allyson Grey, Rick Harlow, Martina Hoffmann, Marlene Lopes Mateus, Alex Sastoque, Donna Torres, Robert Venosa, Rember Yahuarcani, and Estanislao Yaiguaje as things having cognitive rather than purely visual value (Pasztory, 24). According to Pasztory, we make our things to match both our physical and mental needs, and because of that they resemble us: they are concretizations of our thoughts (22). Talking about art in this way, says the critic, with the recognition that things are necessary for cognitive activity helps to destroy the imaginary differences that are supposed to exist between peoples at various stages of evolution (24). We offer these visual tools of thought, then, in the spirit of juxtaposing and fomenting a dialogue between the work of a variety of contemporary creators from different geographical and social realities, some of whom are interested in representing and safeguarding their own indigenous cultures (e.g. Cashinahua, Witoto, Shipibo, and Siona) in innovative ways and others who encounter in their affinity with Amerindian shamanistic traditions a way to critique, maintains Pasztory, an industrial technological society, which is stripped away to reveal a more perfect archaic world (92). Naturally, there are many risks to this nostalgic, idealized conception of nature and ancient indigenous cultures as well as the contemporary artist-shaman relationship. In any case, by examining these works of creative expression as blueprints of thought, a great deal can be learned about how we, as humans, conceive of visionary states of consciousness.

In her discussion of the significance of the groundbreaking work Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman (1991), Emory University art historian Rebecca R. Stone reveals an important relationship between this book and her own research in The Jaguar Within: Shamanic Trance in Ancient Central and South American Art: "Amaringo’s personal and creative insights underscore that The Jaguar Within is at base not only an art historical but also a phenomenological study in which direct experience—both that of visionary consciousness and that of perceiving art—is primary evidence. Stone goes on to say that shamanism is an experiential religious complex in which an initiate is singled out by having experiences different from the ordinary and then learns to control non-ordinary realities through repeated journeys to the Other Side, each one adding another layer of sensory—but primarily visual—revelation. (Stone, 2). According to Luis Eduardo Luna, when I asked Pablo how he learned to paint, he said that during visions under the influence of ayahuasca he had been shown how to combine colors correctly" (Luna and Amaringo, 17). Furthermore, in terms of content, the sacred plants also allowed Amaringo to document a hitherto unpainted invisible landscape populated by the same entities that Amaringo vividly remembers invoking, consulting and fighting in a ritual context as an ayahuasquero.

About his vision Espíritus de los renacos (Spirits of the ficus trees, included here), with their system of roots that provide shelter to the diversity of spiritual inhabitants of an unrevealed landscape made visible by ayahuasca and, in this particular painting, graphically represented by