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What is Ayahuasca?

A brief overview bridging Indigenous and Western perspectives

Origins & Global Expansion

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Ayahuasca is a psychedelic brew that Indigenous peoples in the Global South have discovered, used, and safeguarded for generations for a variety of purposes including medicinal, spiritual, practical, artistic, and recreational.

In the last few decades, ayahuasca use has expanded rapidly worldwide. An estimated 4 million people across North America, South America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand have drunk ayahuasca at some point in their lives. In Brazil alone, more than 2.5 million servings are consumed each year, primarily within syncretic churches such as Santo Daime, Unãio do Vegetal, and Barquinia that use ayahuasca as a sacrament. In 2019, there were more than 230 ayahuasca retreat centers operating in South and Central America catering to international clientele. 

Underground ceremonies have proliferated in countries where ayahuasca is a controlled substance. Currently, only an estimated 10% of people drinking ayahuasca are thought to be Indigenous people with the ayahuasca vine in their cultural context.

How Is Ayahuasca Made?

Sample subtitle

Ayahuasca is made by pounding the stems of the ayahuasca vine (Banisteriopsis caapi) and boiling them for several hours with (usually) the leaves of the chacruna plant (Psychotria viridis) into a reduction. In some cases, other plants containing monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) are used instead of chacruna. The final preparation – known as ayahuasca – among its many names, including caapi, yajé, daime, vegetal, and oni – contains both the B caapi vine and chacruna plant. 

What Ayahuasca “Is”: A Deeper Dive

Beyond its physical components

Exploring what ayahuasca “is” beyond its physical components reveals a complex topic that can be viewed from multiple perspectives. 

The first perspective encompasses the original knowledges of ayahuasca that Indigenous peoples have stewarded for generations, which hold deep understandings of health, healing, and the interconnection of all life. These knowledges and associated practices are very much alive today in more than 160 ayahuasca-using communities in the Global South.

A second, newly-developing perspective comes from research undertaken by Western scientific communities examining ayahuasca’s potential as a mental health intervention. The effects of ayahuasca on depression, anxiety, substance use, suicide, and eating disorders are being investigated, with promising early results.

Both of these knowledge systems can be recognized in their own right – each with their own internally consistent logics and ways of knowing – without using one to validate the other. Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Native American botanist, author, and professor of environmental and forest biology highlights that each perspective brings something useful to the table: 

“I think of Indigenous knowledge and Western science both as powerful intellectual traditions, which grow from different worldviews, but can both illuminate the nature of the living world and how we might better care for it. They are distinctive, sovereign systems of knowledge which can complement one another” (in Aschaiek, 2021).

Below is a sampling of the knowledges held by these respective communities. Generally speaking, on the left, ayahuasca is multifaceted and multi-use, and on the right, it’s being studied for mental health applications. (Although concepts are grouped for clarity, Indigenous knowledges of ayahuasca are diverse and not a single, unified perspective.)

Indigenous Knowledges

Ayahuasca is:

  • A Quechua term meaning “vine of the dead” or “vine of the soul,” though it’s also called caapi, yajé, daime, vegetal, oni, and more, depending on the community.

  • A reduction of the ayahuasca vine (which has many varieties) and typically the leaves of the chacruna plant.

  • A portal, a delicate tool for reaching the spirit world

  • An entity

  • Spirits in a liquid form

  • A teacher

  • An ethnomedical practice

  • A plurality

Western Knowledges

Ayahuasca is:

  • A substance

  • A decoction of the ayahuasca vine (Banisteriopsis caapi) and typically the leaves of the chacruna plant (Psychotria viridis)

  • An hallucinogen

  • A pharmacotherapy, sometimes with adjunctive psychotherapy

What Is Ayahuasca Used For?

Indigenous Vs Western

Ayahuasca has served multiple purposes for Indigenous and Mestizo communities (use characterized by multiplicity) versus the proposed applications from a Western perspective (use focused specifically on mental health). 

Indigenous Knowledges

Ayahuasca has been or is used for:

  • Aiding hunting

  • Divination

  • Communicating across distances

  • A diagnostic tool for illnesses

  • Medicine (in the original practices, only the practitioner drinks the ayahuasca, not the patient)

  • Art

  • Sorcery and counter-sorcery

  • Recreation

Western Knowledges

Ayahuasca may have potential applications for:

  • Anxiety

  • Depression

  • Suicidality

  • Substance use disorders

  • Eating disorders

How Does Ayahuasca Work?

Indigenous Vs Western

Again, the perspectives are really different! The Indigenous views I’m most familiar with see the practitioner’s healing ability – enacted through their healing songs and relationships with plants – as an energetic bridge between the physical and spirit worlds. Western perspectives highlight complex biological variables, while also considering the importance of “set” (mindset of the person drinking the ayahuasca) and “setting” (the context in which it is consumed). 

Post-Tourism Indigenous Knowledges

How ayahuasca works is by:

  • Giving the ayahuasca practitioner the ability to communicate with the spirit world

  • Facilitating the practitioner’s ability to see and diagnose the causes of illness, misfortune, or concern in the patient

  • Acting as a guide, alongside the practitioner, through a healing process in which the patient is an active agent and the plant spirits are the doctors.

Effectiveness is attributed to the healer’s power, knowledge, and experience.

Western Knowledges

How ayahuasca works is by:

  • Permitting the psychoactive compound N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) in the chacruna leaves to pass through the digestive tract and reach the brain unmetabolized (this is achieved through the addition of the monoamine oxidase inhibitors [MAOIs] present in the ayahuasca vine)

  • Activating, via the DMT, serotonergic pathways in the brain through the 5HT-2A receptors 

  • Additionally activating serotonergic pathways with the beta-carbolines present in the ayahuasca vine

  • Disrupting the brain’s usual neural hierarchies by reducing higher order cognitive control and promoting the bottom-up flow of information

  • Facilitating somatic, introspective, and emotion-processing experiences as well as self- and spiritual connection and new insights and perspectives.

Effectiveness is attributed to the substance-as-ingested in people for whom ayahuasca is appropriate, in a safe and supportive setting.

Summary

This brief overview has highlighted two prevailing perspectives that may be complementary and contribute to an evolving understanding of ayahuasca. I believe it’s important to emphasize that Indigenous practitioners currently hold the deepest, most established understandings of ayahuasca while Western research is still in its early stages. 

Exploring the diverse personal accounts of ayahuasca journeys can also offer insights into what ayahuasca is, what people use it for, and how it works for each person. If you’d like to read about my personal experiences with ayahuasca, you can find more details [here].

Green Quote marks

When you regain a sense of your life as a journey of discovery,
you return to rhythm with yourself.

~ John O’Donohue

Top 9 Ayahuasca Tips for Optimizing your Ceremonies, ebook by Dr. Meris Williams

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