Ayahuasca is a brew from the western Amazon, made from the ayahuasca vine and other plants, that produces powerful visions; it is one of several psychoactive plants that some shamanic cultures use as one way into the shamanic state. Plant spirit medicine is healing through relationship with the spirit of a plant, and in Therapeutic Shamanism working with the Plant People in this way, above all in journeys, is central, whilst taking psychoactive plants is not needed and is treated with caution.
What is ayahuasca?
A drink made by boiling the woody ayahuasca vine, Banisteriopsis caapi, usually together with the leaves of the chacruna shrub, Psychotria viridis. The leaves are rich in DMT, the hallucinogen that produces the visions; taken on its own the vine does not induce a psychedelic experience, but in the brew it allows the DMT to take effect. There are other recipes, using different plants.1
It is used in ceremony by many peoples of the Amazon basin. The physician Joseph Tafur, who trained for years under a Shipibo healer in the Peruvian Amazon, describes the Shipibo as a people of the Ucayali River basin who have kept much of their pre-Columbian culture, including their language and their tradition of plant medicine.2 The Shipibo are riverside farmers, fishers and hunters, not nomadic hunter-gatherers.
Did shamanic cultures commonly use psychoactive plants?
Some did, and how common it was is disputed. Shamanic cultures certainly had powerful ways of shocking people into a deep, right-brain, shamanic state: ceremonies that went on for days, prolonged fasting or dancing, hallucinogenic plants, vision quests and sweat lodges.3 The poisonous plants that many indigenous cultures know as Power Plants have especially deep and powerful medicine, and in non-fatal doses they often teach through hallucinogenic and out-of-body experiences. Poisonous plants grow the world over, and every shamanic culture would have known how to work with them; in Britain and Europe they include yew, hemlock, deadly nightshade, henbane and many mushrooms. When we turned our backs on shamanism, that knowledge of how to work with them safely was lost.4
The historian of religion Mircea Eliade saw the use of hallucinogens as a comparatively recent degeneration of a “pure” shamanism in which visions came spontaneously. The anthropologist Michael Harner, introducing the collection he edited, Hallucinogens and Shamanism (1973), called the use of hallucinogens to reach trance “evidently an ancient and widespread human practice”. The anthropologist Piers Vitebsky adds that even Eliade’s “pure” experiences were often reached through extreme fatigue, fasting or stress, which bring similar states.5 For the drum and the other ways in, see What role do drumming, movement and other methods play in journeying?
How does Therapeutic Shamanism see psychoactive plants?
As powerful spirits, to be respected, not as a route into shamanism for modern people. Plants such as tobacco and opium, like alcohol, have strong spirits. In the cultures that first used them they were never used recreationally, only for shamanic work and with great respect for their power. They are great teacher spirits. The trouble comes when someone already weakened by soul loss and Power-loss uses such a substance without any understanding of its power, and the spirit of the substance overwhelms them and takes them over. That does not make the substances bad; it means they need to be used wisely.6
For modern people there is a further difficulty. The powerful practices of shamanic cultures can work dramatically in the short term, but these days they do not always work, or not in the way they once did, because their effects are hard to carry back into ordinary, domesticated life. That is the subject of Do you need psychedelics or plant medicines to practise shamanism?, and it is not repeated here.
What Therapeutic Shamanism does instead is work with these Plants where they live in the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer. Journeys there can include meeting a poisonous Plant, being poisoned by it, dying and coming back, or experiencing its effects in non-lethal doses, with heightened senses, altered perceptions, distortions of time and out-of-body experiences, all within the journey itself. This is a safe way to begin piecing back together the knowledge that was lost.7 Rewilding Yourself has an exercise for experiencing a poison in this way. See What are transformation practices and shapeshifting?
What is plant spirit medicine?
Healing that works through the spirit of a plant, through a relationship with it, not through its chemistry. The phrase is best known from the book Plant Spirit Medicine by the American healer Eliot Cowan, first published in 1995. Cowan combined the Chinese Five Element tradition, learnt from the English acupuncturist J. R. Worsley, with what he learnt in an apprenticeship to a shaman of the Huichol (Wixárika) people of western Mexico, who are maize farmers. On his account, “There is only one active ingredient in plant medicines: friendship”: a plant spirit heals a patient as a favour to its friend, the healer.8
In Therapeutic Shamanism plant spirit medicine happens chiefly in journeys. Some Human Lower-World GuidesHuman Lower-World Guide. A face put on the human Oversoul: the Ancestors met through an individual form, genuinely other than us, chosen from pre-Fall hunter-gatherer humanity. Related to as a teacher, never a master. Read the full answer specialise in it, and can teach about it if asked.9 In a journey a Plant’s spirit may take on another appearance, a woman with skin of tree bark, a winged creature or a ball of energy, and direct or carry out a healing itself; or the journeyer may be told to shapeshift into the Plant, or be placed inside it, or bathe in an infusion of it, or have its energy flow into them.10 Plants are revered as teachers by shamans all over the world because they teach how healthy beings are deeply rooted, slow and content. See What are Plant People and what gifts do they bring?
There is one clear difference of approach between the two. Cowan’s healer works with the spirit of a particular plant, called on for a particular patient. Therapeutic Shamanism works with the Oversoul, the spirit of the whole species, such as Yew Tree or Oak. Both are set out here as they are; the difference is one of practice.
Are psychoactive plants safe?
Not for everyone. Tafur, writing as a family physician, says that for people with a history of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia or psychotic symptoms the use of shamanic plant medicine is not currently recommended, because they are particularly vulnerable to ayahuasca’s destabilising effects.11 Cowan, from a different direction, writes that “None of the sacred plant teachers are for everybody”: each grew with particular peoples and particular lands.12 There is a parallel caution in the books about journeying itself: anyone prone to psychotic episodes, severe dissociation or unmanaged manic depression should not journey for themselves. See Is shamanic work safe if I have a mental health condition?
