Ayahuasca Shamanism in the Amazon and Beyond
Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Clancy Cavnar offer an in-depth exploration of how Amerindian epistemology and ontology concerning indigenous shamanic rituals of the Amazon have spread to Western societies, and of how indigenous, mestizo, and cosmopolitan cultures have engaged with and transformed these forest traditions. The volume focuses on the use of ayahuasca, a psychoactive drink essential in many indigenous shamanic rituals of the Amazon. Ayahuasca use has spread far beyond its Amazonian origin, spurring a variety of legal and cultural responses in the countries to which it has spread. The essays in this volume look at how these responses have influenced ritual design and performance in traditional and non-traditional contexts, how displaced indigenous people and rubber tappers are engaged in the creative reinvention of rituals, and how these rituals help build ethnic alliances and cultural and political strategies for their marginalized position. Some essays explore important classic and contemporary issues in anthropology, including the relationship between the expansion of ecotourism and ethnic tourism and recent indigenous cultural revival and the emergence of new ethnic identities. The volume also examines trends in the commodification of indigenous cultures in post-colonial contexts, the combination of shamanism with a network of health and spiritually related services, and identity hybridization in global societies. The rich ethnographies and extensive analysis of these essays will allow deeper understanding of the role of ritual in mediating the encounter between indigenous traditions and modern societies.
Ayahuasca Shamanism in the Amazon and Beyond, door Beatriz Caiuby Labate & Clancy Cavnar (Editors), Oxford Ritual Studies reeks, Oxford University Press, 320 pagina’s.
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Carl Gustav Jung pioneered the transformative potential of the deep unconscious. Psychedelic substances provide direct and powerful access to this inner world. How, then, might Jungian psychology help us to better understand the nature of psychedelic experiences? And how might psychedelics assist the movement toward psychological transformation described by Jung?
Drawing on two years of ethnographic field research among the Navajos, this book explores a controversial Native American ritual and healthcare practice: ceremonial consumption of the psychedelic Peyote cactus in the context of an indigenous postcolonial healing movement called the Native American Church (NAC), which arose in the 19th century in response to the creation of the reservations system and increasing societal ills, including alcoholism. The movement is the locus of cultural conflict with a long history in North America, and stirs very strong and often opposed emotions and moral interpretations. Joseph Calabrese describes the Peyote Ceremony as it is used in family contexts and federally funded clinical programs for Native American patients. He uses an interdisciplinary methodology that he calls clinical ethnography: an approach to research that involves clinically informed and self-reflective immersion in local worlds of suffering, healing, and normality. Calabrese combined immersive fieldwork among NAC members in their communities with a year of clinical work at a Navajo-run treatment program for adolescents with severe substance abuse and associated mental health problems. There he had the unique opportunity to provide conventional therapeutic intervention alongside Native American therapists who were treating the very problems that the NAC often addresses through ritual. Calabrese argues that if people respond better to clinical interventions that are relevant to their society’s unique cultural adaptations and ideologies (as seems to be the case with the NAC), then preventing ethnic minorities from accessing traditional ritual forms of healing may actually constitute a human rights violation.
Entheogens, Society & Law takes a major step towards a comprehensive understanding of the human condition, elucidating how empathy, meaning and purpose emerge from three intersecting areas of human life: biology, consciousness and culture.
Mystic Chemist begins at the start of the twentieth century, in the Swiss town of Basel which is evolving from a popular health spa into a major industrial city. The story concludes more than a century later, after celebrating Albert Hofmann’s 100th birthday. It tells the unique story of a soon to be famous scientist, highlighting his academic journey, his research at Sandoz and then, as the discoverer of LSD, his meetings and interactions with illustrious writers, artists and thinkers, from all over the world, whose common interest is a fascination with the new wonder-drug. Luminaries like Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert appear on the scene and Hofmann begins a prolific correspondence with them and other interested parties. Sometimes he sends a sample, other times he hears of their “trips” on LSD or other psychedelic substances, like mescaline or psilocybin. From the beginning he takes a positive view towards efforts by physicians and psychotherapists to include LSD in new approaches to the treatment of illnesses. He sees the “psychedelic” potential of this “wonder drug” as beneficial to all. And he expresses his conviction that mystical experiences and trips to other worlds of consciousness are the best preparation for the very last journey he and every one of us well must eventually make. At the age of 102, Albert Hofmann dies at home. His vitality and open mindedness stay with him until his last breath. The life of Albert Hofmann, the Mystic Chemist, is a testimony to how one can reach a great age all the while remaining physically and mentally fit and spiritually aware. Mystic Chemist: The Life of Albert Hofmann and His Discovery of LSD tells the story of Albert Hofmann’s life and the parallel story of the wonder-drug, LSD. The book runs to 408 pages and contains over 500 color and black and white photographs, illustrations and drawings; some of them never published before. With a foreword by world renowned Czech psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, Mystic Chemist will be published in May 2013, and is available in hardcover and softcover editions.
Dr. Grof’s consciousness research over the last five decades has shown that the deepest roots of trauma often lie in experiences from birth or in events from human history that have not yet been resolved and are still active in the collective unconscious. This unresolved personal or collective history then expresses through an individual or group that has some connection to the earlier events. Traditional therapeutic approaches which focus only on events in the personal biography or tranquilizing medications do not access or heal these deeper wounds in the human psyche. From a more general perspective, Dr. Grof examines the broad problems of violence and greed in society and finds that the widespread fear and aggression between individuals and groups may also originate in large part from the unconscious acting-out of unresolved historical traumas from the collective unconscious. The message of Dr. Grof and this book is, however, a hopeful one: there are approaches to therapy which utilize a specific non-ordinary state of consciousness which enables individuals, with support, to access and heal these deeper levels of trauma from the personal and collective unconscious. He has named this state of consciousness Holotropic, a composite word which means “oriented toward wholeness” or “moving in the direction of wholeness” (from the Greek holos = whole and trepo, trepein = moving toward or in the direction of something). Dr. Grof describes various approaches to achieving this Holotropic state and using it for healing, with his focus on Holotropic Breathwork, which he developed with his partner Christina, and psychedelic therapy, which he pioneered in the 1950s and which is now experiencing a renaissance of clinical research for treatment of addictions and PTSD.
Are humans unwitting partners in evolution with psychedelic plants? Darwin’s Pharmacy weaves the evolutionary theory of sexual selection and the study of rhetoric together with the science and literature of psychedelic drugs. Long suppressed as components of the human tool kit, psychedelic plants can be usefully modelled as “eloquence adjuncts” that intensify a crucial component of sexual selection in humans: discourse. In doing so, they engage our awareness of the noosphere, defined by V.I. Vernadsky as the thinking stratum of the earth, the realm of consciousness feeding back onto the biosphere. Sharing intelligence, connecting with the noosphere and integrating individuality into its eco-systemic context offers powerful and promising ways to respond to ecosystems in crisis, and formed the backdrop of what Doyle dubs the “ecodelic” thought of the environmental movement. Yet current policies criminalize the use of plant-based psychedelics while simultaneously feeding a violent global black market for refined and chemically-derived drugs. In this tour de force of “first-person science,” Doyle takes his readers on a mind bending journey through the work of William Burroughs, Kary Mullis, Lynn Margulis, Timothy Leary, Norma Panduro, Albert Hoffman, Aldous Huxley, Dennis and Terrence McKenna, John Lilly and Phillip K. Dick. Readers who take the journey that is Darwin’s Pharmacy will experience extraordinary insights into evolutionary theory, the war on drugs, the internet, and the nature of human consciousness itself. Richard M. Doyle is professor of English and science, technology, and society at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of On Beyond Living and Wetwares.
Ethnopharmacology is a relatively new science that studies the cultural aspects of substances (plants, animals, minerals) and their biological characteristics and activities. While investigating and identifying compounds and the various uses they have in indigenous and non-indigenous groups, this science is also involved in studying the bio-activity of these materials. Ethnopharmacology is connected with other ethno-sciences, especially ethnobotany, which studies the uses of plants by human groups and their chemical and biological aspects. Plant development is part of nature but also part of the human culture, since man has been selecting plant materials from millennia for their qualities and characteristics. Humans use plants to eat, to hunt, to build houses, for killing, and from the rich variety of uses man had been given to plants, some kinds of uses involves the magical. Ayahuasca, a psychoactive Amazonian plant preparation, had been and still is used within the context of the sacred, the religious, the divinatory and the therapeutic. Ayahuasca is an excellent bio-active material to be investigated from an ethnopharmacological point of view, since its various uses, in the past and in the present, by many different human groups and for a high diversity of objectives, warrant an interdisciplinary approach. Although many human groups have been using different kinds of flora for reaching and connecting with the sacred, the hallucinogenic botany seems to occupy a very special place in some cultures. The high relevance of these substances is evident in many human groups. In the present book, several authors present to us some of the uses that ayahuasca had and still has in indigenous, mestizo and urban groups. Also, other chapters illustrate the various uses that ayahuasca have in modern science. This pan-Amazonian brew is used actually not only in Brazil, Colombia, Peru or Ecuador, where indigenous groups have been using this plant preparation for centuries, but in North America, Europe and Asia, where non-indigenous groups have been using this brew for many years now. It is an attempt of the present work to try to show the rich diversity that exists around ayahuasca. Because ethnopharmacology involves social aspects of bio-active compounds, the two first articles of the book are made considering the anthropological, cultural and social aspects of ayahuasca. In the first article, Luis Eduardo Luna shows how ayahuasca is used by indigenous and mestizo populations and in the second article Sandra Lucia Goulart discusses the context of the Brazilian ayahuasca religions. Luna and Goulart illustrate the diversity of concepts and ideas that these groups have regarding ayahuasca, discuss concepts and practices of healing and disease in these groups, and compare the ways in which ayahuasca is experienced and explained in these groups. The next articles are about pharmacological aspects of ayahuasca, to complement the social and cultural aspects. On the third article, José Carlos Bouso and Jordi Riba describe the pharmacological and neuropsychiatric aspects of this Amazonian brew. Their work is based in many years of clinical trials with acute ayahuasca administration to healthy volunteers and also on the investigations regarding the possible consequences of the long term consumption of this centenary potion. On the fourth article, Paulo César Ribeiro Barbosa illustrates a case report of a person that has taken ayahuasca for the first time. The possible therapeutic effects of ayahuasca are investigated in the context of the acute and post-acute effects of the brew. On the fifth article, Flávia de Lima Osório and collaborators explore the therapeutic potentials of one of the main ayahuasca alkaloids – harmine – for the treatment of depression, and they also discuss the curative potentials of the brew itself in this psychological disequilibrium. Still on the pharmacological perspective, but also involving psychiatry, the last two articles talk about the possible interactions of ayahuasca and cannabis in humans. One of the articles, which was wrote by me, is a theoretical overview of the eventual interactions – positive, neutral, or negative – that can potentially happen when humans take ayahuasca and cannabis together. The last article, wrote by me and Rick J. Strassman, shows a case report of a young man that had psychotic episodes related directly to the consumption of ayahuasca and cannabis. It is the main intention of the present book to make accurate and easy information regarding as many as possible aspects of ayahuasca accessible to the public. It is hoped that this little book will bring light to an issue that, in many cases, is still debated in obscurity.
The Shulgin Index is a comprehensive collection of the known psychedelic phenethylamines and related compounds. There are 126 main compounds with detailed physical properties, synthesis and analytical chemistry, biochemistry, pharmacological properties, and legal status. Fully referenced with over 2,000 citations. There are sub-tables of lesser-studied structural homologues and analogues, over 1300 total compounds covered. GCMS scans are included for 229 compounds. This book is an invaluable resource for researchers, physicians, chemists, and law enforcement.