Ayahuasca Vine

Ayahuasca is not one plant. The brew is made by pounding the stem of the Banisteriopsis caapi liana and boiling it for many hours with the leaves of a second, usually chacruna. The vine contributes no visions at all. What it contributes is a group of beta carboline alkaloids that inhibit an enzyme in the human gut, and that inhibition is the only reason the dimethyltryptamine in the leaf survives being swallowed. Taken alone, the leaf does nothing whatever. Taken alone, the vine purges and sedates.

This is the fact that makes ayahuasca remarkable before any question of religion arises. Two unrelated plants, out of the tens of thousands in the Amazon, must be combined in the right way for either to have any effect, and nothing about the appearance, taste or individual action of either suggests the other. Explanations offered for how the combination was found range from very long systematic experiment to the answer the traditions themselves give, which is that the plants said so.

The brew is taken at night, in ceremony, under the direction of someone who has undergone a long apprenticeship built around la dieta, a restrictive regime of food, salt, sugar and sexual abstinence held for weeks or months while learning from one plant at a time. The singing is not accompaniment. The icaros are understood to shape and steer what happens, and a ceremony without them would be considered not a lighter version of the thing but a different and unsafe one.

Sources Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic PowersRichard Evans Schultes and Albert Hofmann with Vegetalismo: Shamanism among the Mestizo Population of the Peruvian AmazonLuis Eduardo Luna

Ayahuasca has travelled further and faster than any other sacred plant, and almost every stage of that journey is disputed by someone.

Its indigenous use is Amazonian and old, documented among Tukanoan peoples of the Vaupes, the Shipibo, the Ashaninka and dozens of others, each with its own name for it and its own ceremony. Alongside that, and not the same thing, is vegetalismo, the mestizo healing tradition of the Peruvian river towns studied by Luis Eduardo Luna, which is a genuine tradition in its own right but a younger and partly urban one. Writers regularly collapse the two, and the collapse usually flatters whoever is selling the ceremony.

In twentieth century Brazil the brew became the sacrament of new religions rather than an indigenous inheritance. Santo Daime and the Uniao do Vegetal are syncretic churches with Christian liturgy, hymnody and organisation, and they are the vehicle by which ayahuasca reached the rest of the world. The United States Supreme Court ruled unanimously in 2006 that the Uniao do Vegetal could import and drink it, applying the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which makes ceremonial ayahuasca one of very few entheogens with an explicit legal standing outside its region of origin.

What follows from all this is the live problem. A practice whose transmission depended on years of apprenticeship is now widely sold by the weekend to people who will not return, and the traditions that hold it have very little say in the matter.

Sources Vegetalismo: Shamanism among the Mestizo Population of the Peruvian AmazonLuis Eduardo Luna with Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficente Uniao do Vegetal, 546 U.S. 418Supreme Court of the United States