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

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.”

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: