Review of the book “O Uso Ritual da Ayahuasca”
(“The Ritual Use of Ayahuasca”) by Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Wladimyr
Sena Araújo (Eds.)
By Antonio Bianchi
Translated to English by Jacqueline Knowles
Ayahuasca is one
of the last remaining great myths of alternative culture in Europe.
The word “ayahuasca” comes from Quechua meaning “aya”,
soul and “huasca”, liana (vine), and literally meaning the “liana of the souls”.
It is used by an ample number of indigenous tribes of the North –East Amazon
(Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and Brazil). It is used far less in other areas of
the great rain forest. Among these tribes its use is related to a spiritual
vision of the world.
Whether it is the prerogative
of specialists, the “curanderos,” a local version of what we call “shamans,”
or whether it is diffused throughout the whole tribe like in most traditional
groups, the essential objective of using ayahuasca is to put a person who
ingests it into contact with the world of spirits.
It is produced by the prolonged
decoction of the liana Banisteriopsis
caapi and by the leaf of a shrub, Psychotria viridis. The latter contains compositions of DMT, which
are orally inactive substances, destroyed by an enzyme in the gastrointestinal
duct. The liana contains a different substance, the B-carboline, which is
not hallucinogenic in itself but blocks the enzyme stopping DMT from activating,
allowing DMT to be absorbed and to exercise its hallucinogenic powers.
The result is a beverage containing
a safe and strong hallucinogenic effect, surely safer than many other types
of psychedelics (most common side effects are vomiting and sometimes diarrhea)
often inducing visions relating to spiritual aspects of the natural world.
In summary, it has some characteristics
that make it an ideal candidate to become an interesting means for rapidly
providing internal experiences to young Europeans, anxious to find alternative
dimensions other than material ones. In fact, this is what happened: many
Europeans have poured into the urban centres of the Peruvian Amazon (the touristically
most accessible ones) in search of magical and esoteric sensations, whilst
in Brazil an unrestricted amount of communities claiming to create new messianic
religions with the use of this beverage have been founded. As always, for
most people this is a fleeting experience, for others it is a brief infatuation,
whilst for some, for better or worse, a new purpose of life. These preliminary remarks
help us understand the importance of the text edited by Labate and Araújo.
Countless anthropological and
non-anthropological texts have been written on Ayahuasca. Some of them are
excellent. Not one of them, however, has attempted to provide an overall view of the use of Ayahuasca in
South America by paying special attention to aspects attracting the interest of Europeans. Others had tried to do so
but the results were rather disappointing (Metzner 1999; Luna and White 2000).
This is, to the contrary a meticulously compiled text by people who know their
job from a scientific point of view.
The results is 25 chapters:
7 chapters are about the indigenous use of Ayahuasca, 13 talk about the new
Brazilian religions and 5 chapters are dedicated to the pharma-toxicological
aspects of Ayahuasca. The best results are found in the sections dedicated
to the Brazilian religions, where it is evident that the authors had major
contacts. It is the phenomenon of
these new Brazilian religions, which
are based on ayahuasca, that provide the most detailed analyses that have
been offered (excluding some obscure Brazilian thesis and some books which are more worthy as New Age literature than as scientific
literature - Polari 1999)
In Brazil in the last ten years,
due to a rather limited indigenous use of ayahuasca, religious sects have
grown exponentially. Two in particular,
the Santo Daime and the União do Vegertal – are building churches and borrowing
symbols and escathologies deriving from the Christian doctrine and from modern
esoterism. The Santo Daime church has diffused throughout many European countries
(Italy and USA are two) where ceremonies based on the use of the sacred beverage
are periodically carried out.
It is unusual to note how the
Western world has (or perhaps has had to) create new religions to run a kind
of experience appearing too alien. These religions are surely (although there
is insufficient reference to this in the Brazilian text) very different from
the original traditional indigenous populations’ use of the beverage, revealing
how difficult it is to transfer religious practices and knowledge in such
different cultures.
Labate and Araújo have devoted
a chapter to the Alto Santo sect (where the Santo Daime religion was founded),
a chapter to the Barquinha (an obscure religion deriving from the remote region
of Acre in Brazil), three chapters to the União do Vegetal (especially diffused
in Brazil and the States) and 7 chapters to the Santo Daime. The official
calendar of the Santo Daime rituals is illustrated, as well as its rites and
therapeutic methods, the use of ayahuasca, and its activity in Europe (particularly
in Germany). A report (inexplicably found in the indigenous part of the book)
on the caboclo use of this beverage (a mixed Brazilian population in the Amazon)
is original in that it emphasizes a vast and undervalued phenomenon,
which is not known by the above mentioned religions.
In Brazil ayahuasca is always
associated with the religions of the Daime and União do Vegetal. In Europe
the result of this is the idea that these religions are the expression of
ayahuasca as used by the rural populations in eastern regions of the Brazilian
Amazon. A more detailed study on the use of Ayahuasca outside such religions
could probably be surprising to the two Brazilian sects that maintain an ambiguous
relationship with the cultural environment they were developed in. The collected
material in the text is on the whole vast and well constructed, and scholars
of religious dynamics will certainly find excellent arguments to develop.
Reports regarding the indigenous use of ayahuasca are probably weaker than
the others. Jacques Mabit is one of the authors, a French doctor who opened
a centre in Tarapoto, in Peru, originally dedicated, through the use of ayahuasca,
to the recovery of pasta basica
drug addiction, a drug obtained from coca-leaves. This center was later transformed into something
quite close to a spiritual touristic centre for Europeans.
A Colombian doctor German Zuluaga,
to the contrary, attempted to create an association of indigenous curanderos in Colombia and ended up creating a kind of panindigenistic ethic on
both the ritual use of Ayahuasca and the relationships between curanderos and the white participants or
the people from the city.
And finally Luis Eduardo Luna,
who having written one of the most lucid reports on mongrel curanderismo in the cities of the Amazon,
became a well known anthropologist (Luna 1986) and has recently given life to an organization
which guides Europeans into the Brazilian forest, where rituals are carried out in safe conditions.
Each in their own way honestly
describes personal experiences. On the whole however, the texts and analysis
are quite superficial and rather insignificant, revealing how difficult the
cultural interaction between the Western world and the Amazon is.
The world of indigenous shamanism is a distant world, a
vital one without doubt, which is easily misunderstood and in continuous rapid transformation. To decodify this world requires time and patience, meaning that it
remains a foreign land to those Europeans who cannot dedicate but a holiday
to it.
Perhaps the use of another title
rather than “Ayahuasca amongst the people of the forest” could have been sufficient
in this section. There are in fact two chapters that discuss the peoples of the forest, one written by
Jean Longdon and one splendid pearl by Barbara Keifenheim, the German
anthropologist with more than ten years of experience amongst the Cashinahua
in the Purus region. She has probably written one of the best recently
published reports on the perceptual effects of ayahuasca.
The Purus has always been a
region with poorly beaten-tracks; although
in Peru (and therefore in a Spanish speaking country), it is more easily accessible
from Brazil (if we can define days and days of boat journeys along the river
so) than Peru itself. Keifenhem accurately
describes the importance of the sonorous experience of ayahuasca and how through
kinaesthetic phenomena it enables you to structure a visionary experience
through which a sound is immediately turned into an immage. The German author
emphasizes how these songs are in fact insignificant and that they mainly
consist of evocative sounds. This distinguishes the indigenous world from
the mongrel world, where songs always carry a meaning. It connects to what
is previously indicated by another anthropologist that mostly worked in Shipibo
area (Gebhardt-Sayer 1987) and recently by Muller-Ebeling et.
al. (2002) in a publication on plants used by shamans in the Himalayan
areas, and lays the basis for important scientific hypotheses.
It is a past argument that visions
induced by Ayahuasca have an archetypal and trans cultural content (Harner
1973). This has also been confirmed by serious anthropologists who have drunk
the substance in ancient indigenous communities.
A possible ethnomusical analysis
of such sounds (not discussed by the German anthropologist) could emphasize
the capacity to determine sounds evoked within a determined cultural context
or even outside it, and once the level of consciousness has been altered by
the ingestion of ayahuasca determining visionary contents.
Recent studies on ayahuasca
have finally reached modern methodologies of neuro-psychophysical research
through which it is possible to analyse the effect on the brain of any kind
of stimulus in whatever state of consciousness (Riba et. al. 2002).
The German anthropologist’s
intuition therefore could reveal, if supported by other data, interesting
perspectives in inter disciplinary research finally enabling an objective
analysis of the visionary experience
to proceed (there is no better way
than that of a hallucinogenic substance
taken in a culturally different setting).
I recommend Labate’s and Araújo’s
text partly for this reason, not only to those interested in drugs coming
from remote areas of the world. It is a text whose content surpasses one’s
interest in Ayahuasca and offers starting points for many unique and limitless
developments. As for Portuguese: It would be good if one considered translating
it in to a more accessible language, like English or Spanish.
Bilbliography
Gebhardt-Sayer
A. Die Spitze des Bewusstseins. Untersuchungen zu Weltbild and Kunst der Shipibo-Conibo.
Klaus Renner, Munchen.
Harner MJ (1973). Common Themes
in South American Indian Yagè Experiences. In Harner MJ. Hallucinogens and
Shamanism,. Oxford Univ. Press, London.
Luna
LE (1986). Vegetalismo. Shamanism among the Mestizo Population of the Peruvian
Amazon. Almqvist & Wiksell, Stockholm.
Luna
LE and White SF (2000). Ayahuasca Reader. Encouter wuth the Sacred Amazon’s
Sacred Vine. Synergetic Press, Santa Fe
Metzner
R (1999). Ayahuasca. Hallucinogens, Consciousness and the Spirit of Nature. New York, Thunder
Mouth Press.
Muller-Ebeling
C, Ratsch C and Shahi SB (2002) . Shamanism and Tantra in the Himalayas. Thames
and Hudson, London.
Polari de Alverga A (1999). Forest of Visions. Ayahuasca, Amazonian Spirituality
and the Santo Daime tradition. Rochester, Inner Traditions.
Riba J, Rodriguez-Fornells and Barbanoj MJ (2002). Effects of ayahuasca
on sensory and sensorimotor gating in humans as measured by P50 suppression
and prepulse inhibition of the startle reflex, respectively. Psychopharmacology,
165: 18-28