Medical anthropology and psychedelics with Dr Luis Eduardo Luna

My unofficial Vital Study Zine #15 with observations from Vital Psychedelic Training and recent happenings in the space

Pablo Amargino, ‘Spiritual Heart Operation’ via Dr Luna’s True Amaringos gallery

Dr Luna is the eminent expert on indigenous psychedelic use worldwide.

He’s every bit the classy, cosmopolitan professor; armed an incorrigible streak required to pioneer psychedelic research.

The Guggenheim Fellow and member of the learned Linnean Society of London breaks up a thrilling, theatrical presentation with itemised lists of how Western psychedelic therapy can incorporate Amerindian tradition to considerable benefit. And Amazonian animism, Dr Ludo says, is a practical lifestyle for interacting with the natural world.

“In mythical times animals, plants, and humans were all shamans able to transform,” says Dr Luis Eduardo Luna during his Vital lecture, “this is why we believe that selfhood does not apply exclusively to ourselves, but to any entity that communicates through signs.”

Plants do communicate he points out, maybe in a more sophisticated way than us.Thus Spoke the Plant author Monica Gagliano has proven they generate delicate harmonies: “Maybe you can hear it, just being in the forest, without ideas,” urges Dr Ludo. “You can feel your child. You do not need words.”

Myself and Dr Luis Eduardo Luna at Philosophy of Psychedelics

But he didn’t get there purely by publishing papers. Or with soundbites like “The Anthropocene began in 1610, when carbon dioxide started rising because of all the forest growing over the farms of a massacred civilisation. Europe is just a peninsula of Asia.”

Instead, Dr Luna self-actualised through “direct experience” – manifesting, learning and transforming within our physical reality. 

“Is ayahuasca addictive? No! I have taken it a thousand times”

Born 1947 in Florencia, Colombia a city noted for its proximity to rainforest and tribal settlements, Lois Eduardo Luna was sent away to religious school to study philosophy as a boy with the hope of becoming a priest. He hot-footed to university in Madrid, Spain where he graduated in philosophy and literature. Returning home aged 21 he fell in with a Canadian traveller called Terrence McKenna (the very same). The two took yagé, a variant of ayahuasca prevalent in Colombia together for the first time.

“Her own body is a metaphor. She is a river, a serpent, an umbilical cord”

In 1980 Dr Luna met a Colombian vegetalista ‘plant teacher’ Emilio Gomes. The shaman told him, “Everything has spirit. Everything is intelligent,” and eventually took Luna in as an apprentice. The Journal of Ethnopharmacology published Dr Luna’s fieldwork paper The Healing Practices of a Peruvian Shaman in July 1984. The abstract (introduction) reads, ‘The basic ideas of his cosmovision are presented… attention is given to the concept of “doctor” or “plant teacher” applied to certain plants which are supposed to “teach medicine”, if the appropriate conditions of isolation and diet are observed… During the period of isolation the spirits of these plants teach the initiate certain melodies or “icaros” that he will later use when practising his shamanistic activities.’ The accompanying film Don Emilio and his Little Doctors is “probably the first ayahuasca documentary,” he says proudly but with signature charm. His first book Vegetalismo was published in 1986 and Luna was made an associate of the Botanical Museum of Harvard University.

“There is more healing in connection, outside in the forest among the trees”

Not soon after Luna came across a distinctive Peruvian artist named Pablo Amaringo, who painted beguiling scenes of plant medicine ceremonies and their accompanying visions. The pair took ayahuasca art to the world, with Luna arranging global exhibitions and persuading the Finnish government to open an art school where 300-plus mestizos, mixed heritage, children received tuition. Luna still acts as agent for authentic trade of Amaringo’s works. 

During the late 1980s the action switched to northern Europe, where Luna studied for a Phd in Helsinki and Stockholm, then took up a post lecturing at The Swedish School of Economics in Finland. Synchronicity abounded when he discovered a predecessor in the same role was theological firebrand Rafael Karsten, who wrote one of the first ever detailed accounts of Amazonian plant medicine ceremonies in 1935’s The Head Hunters of the Western Amazoas. 

Now Professor Luna, and a globe-trotting ayahuasca ambassador with several books under his belt, he was invited to visit Rustler’s Valley in South Africa, an Earthrise Trust alternative community. Also visiting, coincidentally, was permaculture pioneer Bill Mollison who informed him how miniature organic ecosystems can be created. Luna also met Dale Millard, an adventurous anthropologist who introduced Dr Luna to nearby African tribespeople who told him they too had plant teachers of their own. Dozens, in fact.

“Everything has spirit. Everything is intelligent”

Inspired yet again, Dr Ludo struggled through the woes of doing business to build Wasiwaska Research Centre. It’s a breathtaking psychedelic nature reserve and ceremonial paradise, on a tip of the agreeable archipelago of Florianópolis, Brazil. Most of your favourite international space heads are hanging out there: maybe tapping some of the many ayahuasca vines for some sap syrup, taking a perambulo around the exotic selection of rare psychoactive plants with far-out flowers, having some reflective time in the library with a cup of kava-kava, or simply watching the marmoset monkeys get high. 

“Therapy is narcissistic, ‘me’, going inside,” says Dr Luna, “There is more healing in connection, outside in the forest, among the trees. Depression is caused by not connecting.”

Check out Wasiwaska in Dr Luna’s presentation of its gardens at Exeter University where he’s a research fellow, his autobiographical and philosophical keynote speech Decolonising the Self at Exeter’s 2022 Philosophy of Psychedelics conference, and much more on the New Psychonaut YouTube lecture channel.

Here’s what’s in this week’s issue of your directly experienced Vital Student Zine:

Vegetable rights and peace

Approach

“If psychedelic therapy embraces animism it can do wonderful things” says star anthropologist Dr Luis Eduardo Luna

Pablo Amargino, ‘Vision of the Snakes’ via Dr Luna’s True Amaringos gallery

Mention an interest in animism and most folk’ll think you’re holding a seance.

It’s become a fancy term for the kind of ‘spiritualism’ where a Madame Xanadu type supposedly relays messages from beyond the grave… with wildly varying degrees of authenticity.

Trivia buffs might extend their apocryphal knowledge to animism being an early religion where pretty much everything – the sea, your spear, that sabre tooth tiger over there – had a spirit essence dwelling within it. They probably got it from anthropologist Sir Edward Tylor who wrote in 1866, ‘the theory which endows the phenomenon of nature with personal life might perhaps conveniently be called animism’ in an article with a title that’d come back to haunt him… Religion of the Savages.

“Animism is not a religion, or a philosophy”

Tylor did actually challenge convention at the time by pointing out that the tribes were no less intelligent per se: but their civilisation, such as it was, hopelessly backward.

You may be unsurprised to learn that most the above displays a grasp of animism that is loose at best.

“I’m not idolising Amerinidian cultures; there was human sacrifice,” said Dr Luna in the question and answer session after his keynote at this year’s Philosophy of Psychedelics conference, “huge festivities alongside people waiting to be burned.”

But swotting up on animism seems sensible, considering it’s the guiding ethos of the people who’ve been using psychedelic medicine for at least 4000 years longer than we have.

If western psychonauts can get to grips with animism, despite our “impoverished worldview” as Dr Luna puts it, the advantages to psychedelic therapy will be significant, he claims.

And we may be able to arrest the climate crisis. Plus even halt the dreaded Anthropocene. 

“Animism is not a religion, or a philosophy” says Dr Luis Eduardo Luna, who was born in the Amazon and first drank shamanic yagé with Terrence McKenna in 1971.

Dr Luna’s lecture climaxing Vital’s therapy-focussed training module was packed with guidance for modern-day western practitioners the anthropologist brewed up from the historic psychedelic rituals of South America and beyond.

“Once you re-connect with the world, you know are never alone”

The religion of many Amazonian tribes is… actually a syncretic christianity, and they combine animistic principles with catholic worship in their ceremonies. The translated lyric sheets of Maria Sabina’s LP contain artfully improvised prayer mixed up with references to her local ecosystem. Syncretic combinations of animism and christianity have been recorded since 1930 and are thriving today.

Animism is instead a practical path for successful interaction with your environment, “Entirely based on experience,” that urges a “non-conceptual relationship with the natural world. Once you re-connect with the world, you know are never alone,” whispers the man who brought Pablo Amaringo and ayahuasca art to the West.

Before you think this is all sounding a bit vague and maybe there’s a Zoom lecture coming up about it that you can check out, “it’s not based on a book, or a doctrine,” cautions the anthropology expert.

Vital lecturer Ashleigh Murphy-Beiner, who worked as a guide on Imperial College’s landmark PsiloDep 2 trials, has studied the effect of traditional ayahuasca use on mindfulness and cognitive flexibility. While presenting the results to the MIND Foundation in 2019 Ashleigh used meditation as an example of a skill that is better learned by practice – direct experience – than via spoken explanation.

Animistic tribes prize directly acquired knowledge so highly that they don’t have schools. Formal education nonetheless has existed for millennia. The tribespeople never stop learning, and they do have teachers. These are plants (and fungi). Guess which ones? A 4000 year-old fossilised San Pedro cactus, for example, was found in a dig near Lima, Peru. Ayahuasca the concoction is only around 250-300 years old, but its cousin Caapi much older.

You know exactly what those plants and fungi have to say about ‘reconnecting to the world’ don’t you? Plus how good they are at giving you advice (most of the time, after careful reflection)? 

Remember too that veteran psychedelic therapists stress the pretty much total importance of first hand experience, not only of the medicine itself but the guide process in particular. More on that over in this week’s Space Holding section.

Connecting to nature, community and self is apparently key to psychedelic therapy’s success. Luna says a ‘non-conceptual relationship to nature’ is intrinsic to animism too. The ‘lived experience’ of our relationship with the natural world is starkly apparent in the environmental crisis, no matter how many ‘theoretical’ arguments that it doesn’t exist there are. Me weeping over the David Attenborough film with the turtle wrapped in plastic bags while carrying on smearing the same carbon footprint is a ‘conceptual’ relationship with nature, not a real one.

Recently, some of us in the West who fancy ourselves as adventurous have been re-learning the importance of a (non-conceptual) relationship with nature with the help of the same plant and fungi teachers that have been used in the Amazon for 4000-plus years. In the past we’ve found a load of other useful stuff we found lying around the place. Like cotton, rubber or the majority of medicines we use and food that we eat. Which the inhabitants told us about after we beat the shit out of them.

“If you feel lonely go outside. Look at the grass growing between the paving stones in your street”

Hence the weary attitude heading from that direction. “Europe was simply a peninsula of Asia in 1492 when Columbus landed. Power in the region was centred on the Middle East,” mulls Dr Luna mischievously in his presentation to Vital students. He even rolls his eyes at western understanding that man is ‘disconnected’ from nature. In fact, according to Luna the situation’s far worse. “We are narcissists,” he says, “my gut is teeming with bacteria – of course I am connected. But we look only within ourselves. If we were to have silence: no radio, advertisements, vehicles… the answers will come.” 

Luna's animistic life hack for the western condition? “If you feel lonely, go outside, look at the grass growing between the paving stones in your street.” Doesn’t appeal much to your dopamine receptors? Unsurprisingly so perhaps, because as Luna explains “the most essential lesson is re-enchantment with the world,” an appreciation of the moment, also a favourite subject of our plans and fungi teachers. Less enamoured are, as Dr Luna puts it, “The people with the habit, the black one or the white one, it is difficult for them.” Sounds like it might be tough for anyone to get their heads around let alone psychic gatekeepers like the the clergy and clinicians. 

“Selfhood does not apply exclusively to humans. How arrogant an assumption”

Help explain please Andy Letcher, high-level druid and author of Shroom a definitive history and analysis of psilocybin-based fungi. “It’s about building a relationship with place,” Letcher told Graham Hancock’s son Luke on a podcast for funky Japanese set-up the Kakuichi Institute, “really listening to the world around you in the wider sense. Get close to any plant, meditate next to a tree, and you will feel it.”

Animism urges respect for the natural world, to the extent that man is a humble part of it alongside not only “the river and the jaguar,” but also “the bee people and the ant people,” as Dr Luna calls our six-legged friends during a keynote presentation about his Wasiwaska psychedelic nature reserve at Exeter University’s 2022 Philosophy of Psychedelics conference.

Indeed the beaches of nearby Cornwall, Dr Luna points out, are ‘animistic’ and would be ascribed a ‘spirit’ too, one that represents the combined effect of sea, wind, tide, pebbles, crabs, grasses… and humans.

Importantly, “Selfhood does not apply exclusively to humans, how arrogant an assumption,” advises Dr Luna. Instead according to animism we’re part of an ‘ecology of selves’ symbiotic to the environment.

It works both ways. “Any sentience is worthy of respect,” says Dr Luna and mankind has certainly done well out of stuff he’s found lying around over the centuries. In the Amazon especially, as it happens. The better we do by it the better it’ll do by us. In general, that is. One of the lessons of life’s direct experience is that some thing are simply bigger than us, and this can develop self-compassion to soothe more challenging emotions like loss.

“Animism is entirely based on experience”

Being a dickhead to another human on the beach in Cornwall would probably cause a ruckus, right? Applying animism to the beach scenario, being a dickhead to anything – anyone – up to and including the pebble people (maybe beyond) causes a degree of disharmony. And from disharmony, not singing in time, comes disenchantment, a lack of meaning, purpose, and belonging.

Through lived experience we learn, sometimes bitterly, that we’re not the only things that might cause disharmony, or spread it. It teaches us ways to hone our own vibration, to just the right pitch.

Usually. Because we are not as important as we think we are… another pet subject of the plant and fungi faculty. 

We don’t like to accept that we aren’t, though. And we’ve dreamed up ways to avoid any lived experiences that might remind us we’re not. I initially made a long ranty list of these to publish here, but let us all instead ponder our own myths of avoidance and denial. For inspiration, Luna quotes Davi Kopenawa, a shaman from the Yanomami region where gold mining has caused mercury levels in unborn babies to rise by nine times. “His is a sort-of ‘reverse anthropology’,” says Luna:

‘White people call us ignorant because we are other people than they are. But their thought is short and obscure. It does not succeed in spreading and rising because they prefer to ignore death. They constantly drink cachaca and beer, that overheats their chests and fills them with fumes. This is why their words become so bad and muddled. We do not want to hear them anymore.

They do not dream as far as we do. They sleep a lot, but only dream of themselves. Their thoughts remain blocked in their slumber, like tapirs or tortoises. This is why they are unable to understand our words.’

The Hybrid Model

Therapy

Dr Luis Eduardo Luna’s got a plan to mix shamanic ceremony with Western medicine

Lucile Haut, ‘Cyberwitches’

What can the Western model take – sorry, learn – from a tradition of psychedelic medicine that’s many millennia on from our own?

After all our boffins recently confirmed that the mystic elements of a psychedelic experience can be especially restorative, although that aspect of healthcare was dismissed as ‘miracle work’ centuries ago. Despite their shared basis of a healing process using psychoactive plants, what we understand as psychedelic therapy is still very different to a traditional shamanic ceremony.

That doesn’t stop regular guys like Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rogers crediting ayahuasca for the two seasons in a row he just won the American football team’s ‘most valuable player’ award, and telling sports reporters ‘The greatest gift I can give my teammates, in my opinion, is to be able to show up and to be someone who can model unconditional love to them’ in the pages of USA Today. Those unable to travel can give virtual reality shamanic ayahuasca a try.

Dr Luis Eduardo Luna is considered one of the foremost experts in the Amazonian shamanic custom. In his Vital lecture closing the course’s therapy-themed module, he rattled off a bluet-point list of what western therapy can do to make it as effective as its Amerindian inspiration. And as popular – given the choice it’s difficult to opt for a K-clinic treatment room on the high street over Dr Luna’s Wasiwaska retreat. Even halfway houses like luxury ayahuasca resort Rythmia or the growing number of on-trend local circles offer much more of that all-important mystical allure.

“I think the doctors would be happy, as they participate in this separation, this depression”

Dr Luna believes that group therapy over a period of days with eight to ten participants: “Intensive collective retreats are potentially more efficient and less expensive than individual treatments at medical institutions,” says Dr Luna demonstrating that he’s meeting the Western mindset halfway.

Moreover, in a group session over several days a patient’s “Sense of community is created too” says Dr Luna. He also suggests the presence of a medical doctor, “Nearby in case help is needed, but not as part of the ceremonial aspect.” 

From then on Dr Luna’s tips on how western psychedelic therapists can learn from the ancient ways diverge from our current model. His number one tip is for the therapist to trip too, like a traditional shaman does. “The therapist will go part of the route of taking the medicine him or herself, ready to give assistance if needed,” he says, “Only persons thoroughly familiar with modify the state of consciousness can understand and therefore assist persons on the going the experiences. Besides the therapist’s theoretical knowledge, he or she needs to have first hand experience in training with at least one or several sacred plants, fungi or other substances.”

Which may put the puma amongst the guinea pigs, so to speak. “Ideally a well-trained indigenous practitioner, or [facilitators] trained within indigenous communities would be present too.” You can read more about the controversial trend of ‘co-sitting’ over in this issue’s Space Holding section.

“Illnesses of civilisation are often related to a state of separation from the natural world”

Dr Luna also frowns on western use of isolated chemicals instead of the whole plant or fungus they’re derived from and we’ll go further into that in this issue’s Medical section. He’s also got some superb suggestions for your retreat centre’s design based on his experiences tending the exquisite gardens at his Wasiwaska Rereat Centre in Florencia, Brazil that I detail in this week’s Integration slot.

Here’s Dr Luna’s other suggestions specifically relevant to therapy. 

Echoing the styles of pioneering MDMA therapists Dr Ben Sessa and The Mithoefers, Dr Luna urges level communication between therapist and patient where possible. “There are no shared myths,” he says, “despite a complex socio-economic provenance.” The codified language used instead is psychology, “which the patient has little knowledge of” and is very unlikely to lead the conversation in. Read Dr Ben Sessa’s own tips for negotiating the transcendental with alcoholics at his Awakn clinic in Bristol in Vital Student Zine issue #14.  

Preparation for both therapists and patients should take the form of traditional dieta, “Minimising the use of salt, sugar or fat and consumption of alcohol. The food should be produced on site as much as possible so participants have direct access to the plants.” Also verboten, or kept to essential use only, is the use of personal electronic devices and social media.

“Pharmacology does not take into account social or ecological concerns”

Furthermore Western healers could benefit their own knowledge and reciprocate by establishing “Transnational networks involving conservation in educational ecological projects, involving whenever possible traditional societies, cross cultural recognition and integration of knowledge derived from indigenous sources.”

Instead of chugging beer at the bar and doom scrolling during downtime on retreat, patients can enjoy face to face interaction, educational lectures and plentiful nature worship, “spending time in silence with the forest or gardens encircling the body, feeling the presence of the nonhuman persons.”

Dr Luna expands: “Illnesses of civilisation are often related to a state of separation from the natural world. We would be learning about the habitat, disease tuition, cultivation, preparation, and cultural uses of sacred plants and fungi by traditional societies.” Our pharmacological model “Does not take into account social or ecological concerns,” he adds, instead putting emphasis on legal, economic, bureaucratic and moral factors, presented for the benefit of the patient when they are only really in place to protect and feed the managerial machine.

Shamanic healing views discomfort very differently, considering it part of a restitution cycle. Affliction is something we consider anathema to medical treatment, and life outside hospital too. But it is the body exhuming disease that causes the unpleasant symptoms of illness, not the malaise itself. The close monitoring western psychedelic therapy adheres to may consider ‘disturbing’ outbursts – somatic, verbal, or ‘humorous’ in either the amusing or purgatorial sense – to be unacceptable in a treatment situation. Clinical staff and patients without the knowledge of their importance may not feel able to embrace the process, and may even consider encouragement of it to be inappropriate and even abusive. 

A combined model of Western and Amerindian spiritual healing seems like a dream for now. Albeit a very worthwhile one that’s being mirrored to an extent in ‘underground’ ceremonies. Dr Luna though is optimistic for his vision being taken on board by the medical establishment: “I think the doctors would be more happy, as they participate in this separation, this depression.”

Vibing as one

Space

Research claims voyagers prefer guides to trip with them in the shamanic tradition

Pablo Amargino, ‘‘The Sublimity of the Suminura’ via Dr Luna’s True Amaringos gallery

Down at your local psychedelic clinic, your therapist is certainly not tripping with you like an Amazon shaman would.

‘Therapists should not take any mind-altering substances before or during therapy sessions,’ says a 2021 review of the nascent Western sector. While it’s certainly not new for indegenous people to voyage alongside each other, historically the ceremony leader alone takes the medicine while the community receives mystical healing.

In Dr Luis Eduardo Luna’s question and answer session following his Vital lecture on medical anthropology, one student who facilitates jungle ayahuasca ceremonies lamented this state of affairs in the West. “You drink when you assist,” she said, “There is no choice. And so much magic happens.”

Sober sitter or co-consumer? published May 2022 in Addiction Research and Theory concluded that heads out in the space did prefer their guide to be tripping too. Although maybe not as hard as they were. How much? One poster is quoted as recommending “around a quarter to one gramme of cubies [Cubensis mushrooms, the underground’s fungi of choice].” 

Why? The ‘benefits of improved communication and shared experience’ according to the report.

“The relationship is subject-to-subject, not object-to-object”

It went on, ’Psychedelic co-consumption was portrayed as an opportunity for bonding, connection and communication between co-consumers. This seemed related to a perceived mutual understanding of the ineffable that couldn’t be accessed without the influence of psychedelics.’ Given that a strong, open, trusting relationship between voyager and therapist is absolutely key according to modern-day experts wouldn’t a quarter gramme of Cubensis for the therapist contribute to the success of the therapy?

That’s not all. Normals hanging around bring the vibe right down.

‘Consuming psychedelics alongside sober people could increase anxiety,’ suggest researchers, ‘It was also suggested that sober carers could make psychedelic experiences more awkward. Other forum participants simply found being around sober people whilst experiencing the effects of psychedelics to be irritating.’

The Sober Sitter or Co-consumer? paper said recreational requirements for guides did align with many other elements of psychedelic therapy: including not directing the experience, first hand knowledge of the substance, unconditional acceptance of what comes up for the patient, and boundary-setting beforehand. The data also uncovered recommendations that a ‘sober sitter’ be used during difficult emotional times, when out and about… or taking 5-MEO DMT.

“Lived psychedelic experience represents knowing through identification, and transformation… the spirit of the jaguar”

How does the ceremony leader partaking – be they guide, therapist, sitter, shaman or space holder – contribute to a better experience? Dr Luna thinks it’s because “The relationship is subject to subject, not object to object.”

Being ‘on the same level’ is equivalent to a “relational epistemology” where there is “reciprocity” which in this case means a mutually endorsed understanding rather than overdue donations to the indigenous people.

By tripping together “magic happens” because therapist and patient are ‘being’ together rather than ‘doing therapy’. They share a bathtub of their own cosmic love, as opposed to nervously going through the motions set out in a top-down bureaucratic directive. “That is non-particpation, disenchantment,” says Dr Luna, “with objectivity, the world is not of my own making… I do not feel a sense of belonging to it. What I feel is a sickness of the soul.”

Relating instead to a sense of subject promotes agency and mindfulness. Here’s someone who knows about lived experience: ‘I am not a thing, a noun,’ wrote engineering genius Buckminster Fuller, ‘I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe. Life is regenerative, and conformity meaningless.’ I pinched this contribution from a Vital school chum, in case they are reading.

“You drink when you assist at the ceremony, and so much magic happens”

Dr Luna says this is part of the ‘lived experience’ of animism. “Ancestral language is 70% verbs compared to 30% in English,” he adds by way of illustration, “the lived psychedelic experience represents knowing through identification, and transformation… the spirit of the jaguar.” Not simply referring to ‘your dried pig skins’ as militant tribesmen call books. 

Sure, the preference for ‘co-consumer’ guides comes from the psychedelic underground rather than clinical patients. Yet as the report points out in its intro, ‘In a similar way that indigenous knowledge about psychedelics can be utilised to inform psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy,’ like the lecture from Dr Luna you’re reading about now, ‘we believe that Western people who use psychedelics outside of a clinical environment for healing purposes also have knowledge relevant to psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.’ Like Dr David Luke said in his Vital lecture on transpersonal psychology, the underground can teach the medical sector “everything.”

Soul reduction

Medical

‘Pharmahuasca’ pills are simply not the same as ingesting traditional brews fully in a ceremonial context

By OMA at Foundazione Prada, Milan. Yes, these are Fly Agarics.

The Vine of the Soul has been synthesised. Kind of.

Pharmacusca is a combination of DMT and beta-carboline stomach inhibitor harmine, which also boasts psychedelic properties. “There’s a huge body of evidence showing ayahuasca’s therapeutic potential,” says Imperial College’s Ashleigh Murphy-Beiner who’s been a cheerleader for ayahuasca research here in the UK. 

What’s used for most tests on ayahuasca, ‘The Vine of the Soul’ is ‘pharmahuasca’ a combination of DMT and harmaline, the brew’s two stand-out alkaloids, often taken as separate pills 10-20 minutes apart so the mono-inhibitors in harmine that stop the stomach from registering the fact there’s a bucket of DMT in there can take effect. Pharmahuasca’s long been gaining popularity with recreational users too.

“The vines are part of a magnificent cluster of beings”

“You just use the alkaloids and you say this is equivalent,” comments Dr Luis Eduardo Luna in his lecture closing Vital’s therapy-themed teaching module examining what Western practitioners can learn from traditional amazonian approaches, “It isn’t, neither chemically or synergistically. It is reduced down to a pill… an object.”

Pharmahuasca also dispenses with the aspects of ritual, myth and ceremony – and even the digestive pruging – that are obligatory in traditional use. 2021 resarch paper Examining changes in personality following shamanic ceremonial use of ayahuasca gently insisted, ‘Ceremonial practices may be informative about key elements of psychedelic-assisted experience that potentiate positive psychological changes’ and used authentic ceremony as its laboratory setting.

Traditional ayahuasca brews contain more than two dozen active ingredients, some of which are contained in the chunky bits floating around the ichorous concoction. “The vines run throughout the forest. They are in symbiotic relationships with other plants, insects, animals and microbes, part of a magnificent cluster of beings,” says Dr Luna who cultivates an ecosystem friendly to Columbian ayahuasca equivalent yagé at his Wasiwaska nature reserve in Florentina, Brazil that you can read more about in this issue’s Integration item. 

Preparations and admixtures for ayahuasca, yagé and another concoction capi differ between tribes and locations, so don’t accept any black-and-white categorisations from know it alls while debating psychedelics at one of your global north dinner parties. For example the Colombian Orinoco tribe consider ayahuasca to contain a ‘male’ spirit while it is generally thought of as ‘Mother Ayahuasca’ elsewhere and in the West.

“I believe in both approaches, science and animism. We could be epistemological polyglots”

The Colombian yagé Dr Luna first took alongside Terrence McKenna in 1971 uses the chaliponga plant as its DMT source instead of chacruna. While it may not be of relevance to Western researchers the preparation and ceremonial aspects of yagé are certainly different. Yagé’s effect is considered more contemplative and ayahuasca’s purgative, but that statement is also generalising to an inappropriate degree.

Forcing down all the ingredients ceremonially for the true effect is no piety, insists Dr Luna. Indeed traditionally ayahuasca and yagé are used to solve practical issues (for instance locating a missing cockerel, clearing out your guts) rather than ‘finding God’ as canonical maestro Maria Sabina put it. 

If Westerners can come to terms with an overlap of the spiritual and the material inherent in amazonian animistic and plant medicine culture, “We could truly be epistemological polyglots – studying the living and non-living world with the precision of scientific language, while simultaneously somehow perceiving the spirit, the anima of all that exists,” said Dr Luna in his keynote speech at Exeter University Philosophy of Psychedelics conference earlier this year, titled ‘Decolonising the Self’. “I believe in both approaches, science and animism, and that they are entirely compatible in the modern world,” he edicts.

Even the paper Examining changes in personality following shamanic ceremonial use of ayahuasca printed in March 2021’s Scientific Reports slipped into the academic conversation that ‘The present study shows preliminary support for the therapeutic benefit of the shaman, icaro, purgative elements, cognitive reappraisal, sacramental atmosphere, and communal/group context.’

44% of Amazon biomass is vine. Vines are plants that require other surfaces to support themselves. They climb up these, which are mostly ‘self-supporting’ trees, using strong arterial veins pumped with water so they love rainforest. While vines might creep around and not stand up straight without leaning on something else, they’re of considerable importance to the local ecosystem and tribespeople put them to good use as a versatile building and manufacturing material. Animals use them as transport, for avoiding predators in particular. Their abandoned biomass keeps the soil below host plants nutrient rich and vines provide food and medicinal sources aplenty: grapes, cucumbers, melons, and vanilla come from vines.

Dr Luna lists the importance of ingesting the whole plant/fungus, not an extraction, in his bullet-points for Western therapists. Ideally it would be grown on-site at one’s paradisiacal retreat like Dr Luna’s Wasiwaska, a psychedelic nature reserve. Ecological projects involving the local community bring economic benefits. in the Amazon itself for example, retreats investing in the community would bring serious good vibes back in return. I’d cite Jake’s in Jamaica as a great example, would-be psychedelic travel entrepreneurs. 

Ayahuasca’s shown considerable benefits to mindfulness (being ‘in the moment’) and cognitive flexibility (common sense) in tests for depression plus it’s also been a focus for studies into borderline personality and eating disorders. Leading crowdfunded research into trauma already testing DMT on rats is none other than… the esteemed Dr Robin ‘Hollywood’ Carhart-Harris, now ‘Founding Director of The Neuroscape Psychedelics Division and newly endowed Ralph Metzner Distinguished Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco’ (capitals all theirs). Hollywood says, ”DMT is a particularly intriguing psychedelic. The visual vividness and depth of immersion produced by high doses of the substance seems to be on a scale above what is reported with more widely studied psychedelics such as psilocybin or ‘magic mushrooms’.” Before you think ‘Isn’t that a bit of a Western science-y interpretation?’ that’s what Hollywood does – get these concepts over the line with the scientific establishment. We should thank him for that, I reckon. 

Even if he is using pharmauasca. For now – because the active chemical ingredients may only play one part in the healing power of Amazonian-style plant medicine traditions. And not be so powerrful without the… is magic too strong a word? ingredients that are impossible to replicate in laboratories and treatment rooms.

Botanic therapy

View fullsize

Integration

Wasiwaska in Brazil is Dr Luna’s psychedelic nature reserve

Hummingbird babies nesting on Dr Luis Eduardo Luna’s Wasiwaska nature reserve

Gardening just got even more quietly inspirational.

Among Dr Luis Eduardo Luna’s itemised tips for for the Western psychedelic therapy sector presented in his Vital lecture is: ‘Experience the medicines among beautiful, dedicated surroundings.’

Another recommendation is to grow the plants and fungi locally, plus grant patients access, “So they can spend time in the forest feeling the presence of non-human persons. There is healing from contact with the forest itself.” Specimens should be kept around at least, so “People have direct perception of them.”

Wasiwaska is Dr Luna’s psychedelic nature reserve, retreat and research centre on a far corner of Santa Caterina island, Brazil’s answer to Ibiza. Artist Alex Gray, Cosmic Serpent author Jeremy Narby, writers Graham Hancock and Sue Blackmore, plus DMT pioneer Dr Rick ‘The Strass’ Strassman are among the luminaries on Wasiwaska’s advisory board.

Dr Luna, who was born on Santa Caterina is not the only local ecologist; an initiative to reintroduce oysters to the ecosystem has proved stunningly successful. 

This El Jardin de la Ciencia (scientific garden) was founded in 1996 while Dr Luna was teaching at nearby San Catarina University. It boasts extensive ethnobotanical gardens, a psychedelic library, and study facilities plus guest rooms. It is the culmination of several other attempts that Dr Luna didn’t let phase him.

Distinctive brugmansia aurea flowers at Wasiwaska

Dr Luna showcased the garden in a speech titled The Wasiwaska Ethnobotanical Garden in Southern Brazil: A Chronicle at Exeter University (where he is an associate research fellow) for its Transdisciplinary Research Colloquium on Psychedelics in July.

The enclave is home to miles of ayahuasca vines, fifty-plus chacruna plants, capi, yagé, plus even more exotic DMT-containing plants like the distinctive brugmansia aurea, which flowers near constantly and produces “an intoxicating scent, that at night is overpowering. Its leaves vary in length like a key. A spider living inside the flowers changes colour accordingly; the bees are interacting with the spiders, getting some sort of effect. Perhaps it’s possible to make psychotropic honey.” 

Ayahuasca flowers at Wasiwaska

Dr Luna and Anna tap sap from the psychoactive vines and drink it as a syrup. DMT-containing Cohaba trees, which Christopher Columbus turned down and took tobacco home instead, are also in situ. Non-native plants like Polynesian kava-kava, Tabernaemontana catharinensis a South American plant with similar effects to iboga, and peyote – which has been grafted on to San Pedro so it grows much quicker – have been cautiously introduced. 

Permaculture innovations like clitora plants, which sport vibrant flowers and invigorate clay soil, support the ecosystem. Living alongside are the hummingbirds, bees and spiders one would expect in the wild. The garden is mostly curated by Dr Luna’s wife Anna, who recently introduced marmoset monkeys. These headed straight for the Cohoba trees that were part of their ecosystem, taking resin in morning and evening. The monkeys climbed other DMT-rich plants that weren’t part of their natural environment and did the same.

“My first teacher, Don Emilio,” about whom Dr Luna made probably the first ayahuasca documentary Don Emilio and his Little Doctors in 1984, “told me everything is full of life, of spirit,” he reminds us.

See what’s on at Wasiwaska via wasiwaska.org

Kool-Aid Corner #15

To finish: trippy clippings, merry pranks, and psychedelic student life

From ‘The Creatures with the Creator’ a tribute to Glauco Vilas Boas by Adrix

Graph of the Week

Group MDMA and LSD therapy trails are underway. Put the mix CDs in the middle with the leaflets

Group MDMA and LSD therapy outline from MAPS trials recently underway

My bookshelf weighs a ton

Notable new purchases for the occult library. Strictly second hand snap-ups only. This week: The AA Atlas of Secret Britain

Easily available from WoB

Developing a personal relationship with your indegenous cosmology? Looking to trip out the glovebox in that new state of the art camper van? Then bail out the barley sugars and give thanks to the Spirit of Sediment for this round-Britain guide to the wyrd and sort-of cute but macabre at the same time.

Divided into regional sections for easy referral. Disclaimer: even indegenous British sacred groves may have purgative properties. One New Psychonaut reporter walked around Avebury stone circles and took five lengthy visits to the bathroom upon returning to his nearby bed and breakfast. Scrumpy rituals meanwhile are being colonised.

Next issue: Vital’s Space Holding module is all about the direct experience…