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Ayahuasca: Hallucinogens, Consciousness, and the Spirit of Nature
Ever since the "consciousness revolution" in the 1960s, dedicated spiritual seekers and scientific researchers from all continents have explored the world of psychoactive and hallucinogenic plants. In Ayahuasca, objective scientific information and the narratives of ayahuasca users -- shamans and others -- are presented together. Readers will also learn the pharmacology of this Amazonian plant.
- GenresNonfictionDrugs
294 pages, Paperback
First published April 28, 1999
About the author
Dennis J. McKenna
14 books184 followersDennis Jon McKenna is an American ethnopharmacologist, research pharmacognosist, lecturer and author. He who has studied plant hallucinogens for over forty years.
He earned his Master's degree in botany at the University of Hawaii, and his Doctorate in Botanical Sciences from the University of British Columbia.
Since that time, he has conducted extensive ethnobotanical fieldwork in the Peruvian, Colombian, and Brazilian Amazon.
He is the brother of well-known psychedelics proponent Terence McKenna.
He is a founding board member and the director of ethnopharmacology at the Heffter Research Institute, a non-profit organization concerned with the investigation of the potential therapeutic uses of psychedelic medicines.
He earned his Master's degree in botany at the University of Hawaii, and his Doctorate in Botanical Sciences from the University of British Columbia.
Since that time, he has conducted extensive ethnobotanical fieldwork in the Peruvian, Colombian, and Brazilian Amazon.
He is the brother of well-known psychedelics proponent Terence McKenna.
He is a founding board member and the director of ethnopharmacology at the Heffter Research Institute, a non-profit organization concerned with the investigation of the potential therapeutic uses of psychedelic medicines.
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March 1, 2024
Another book I got almost for free at a local flea market: Until the COVID lockdowns hit Denmark, I often raided flea markets and bookstore sales for interesting looking titles I wagered would be difficult to find otherwise. As a consequence, my tiny one-room apartment is now full of rare books I fear I would never get around to reading. The last couple years, however, I have changed this by going through my private library at as quick a pace as possible.
Last in line was this non-fiction book about scientific research into Ayahuasca, a beverage made by several indigenous peoples of South America from a mix of hallucinogenic plants native to the area for use as religious sacrament. On here, the authors are listed as Dennis McKenna (Terence's younger brother) and another clinical psychologist named Ralph Metzner. However, each of those authors just contributed with a few chapters. Instead the bulk of the page count is taken up by first-person accounts of Ayahuasca vision trips by people who have taken it. These experiencers have very different cultural backgrounds and religious beliefs, with their existing cultural programming shaping how their brains interpret the anomalous signals received during Ayahuasca rituals.
For example: A Buddhist has encounters with various Bodhisattvas; a Jew first meets angels and then his own ancestors at different points in human history; a Roman Catholic has visions of meeting Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene; New Agers encounter a garbled mixture of motifs and narrative tropes from seemingly unrelated religious traditions.
I do wonder how much Ayahuasca trips "open the doors of perception" and how much they just amplify the experiencer's existing metaphysical belief systems back to them. From this book it does look like there are some recurring themes in the experiences regardless of which cultural programming they get filtered through: The experiencer shedding their socially constructed artificial self in an extremely traumatic manner to re-connect with something deeper; what this "something deeper" then turns out to be varies - be it the Earth as a larger ecosystem, the spirits of their own ancestors, their own "higher self", some type of super-consciousness permeating the universe, and so on. Symbolism involving snakes and other reptiles appears again and again, notice that snakes habitually shed their own skin like the people taking the trips experience shedding their artificially constructed public personae and socially conditioned views of themselves. All of this strikes me as uncannily similar to the "reptilian aliens in human disguise" motif that first appeared in the stories of fantasy author Robert E. Howard who never intended them as anything else than fiction, then promoted as perfectly real by conspiracy theorists like David Icke, as well as the folklore surrounding wendigos and werewolves.
The really interesting parts of this book, at least in my estimation, are the later chapters. Where McKenna and Metzner summarise all the scientific research into the hallucinogenic plants involved, local religious traditions incorporating them (including several explicitly Christian) and neurobiological studies of exactly what happens to the brain during Ayahuasca trips. I was surprised to learn how poorly Western science grasped any of this until the 1960's, with the McKenna brothers bearing much of the responsibility for Western scholars of comparative religion even taking indigenous religions' use of hallucinogens as sacraments seriously at all... or for that matter botanists even knowing which plants contain which hallucinogens. These studies do provide hard evidence for unambiguous positive effects on the physical and mental health of people who take Ayahuasca within the context of the right ritualistic disciplines, as well as demonstrating the risks when done carelessly including documented cases of people dying from improper use, from these studies.
In some way, this book did exceed my expectations: I have for a long time viewed people who take hallucinogenic drugs to achieve spiritual enlightenment the same way I view athletes who use doping to improve their performance. (full disclaimer: I spent 2019-2022 living an ascetic lifestyle abstaining from any other intoxicants than caffeine) After reading Metzner and McKenna's summaries of their research, I have gotten a more nuanced understanding of the subject than I had before. That said, I still wish there was more information on scientific research surrounding use of Ayahuasca and fewer interviews with people describing their trip experiences - eventually I got the picture that the experiences almost always get filtered through culturally specific belief systems.
Last in line was this non-fiction book about scientific research into Ayahuasca, a beverage made by several indigenous peoples of South America from a mix of hallucinogenic plants native to the area for use as religious sacrament. On here, the authors are listed as Dennis McKenna (Terence's younger brother) and another clinical psychologist named Ralph Metzner. However, each of those authors just contributed with a few chapters. Instead the bulk of the page count is taken up by first-person accounts of Ayahuasca vision trips by people who have taken it. These experiencers have very different cultural backgrounds and religious beliefs, with their existing cultural programming shaping how their brains interpret the anomalous signals received during Ayahuasca rituals.
For example: A Buddhist has encounters with various Bodhisattvas; a Jew first meets angels and then his own ancestors at different points in human history; a Roman Catholic has visions of meeting Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene; New Agers encounter a garbled mixture of motifs and narrative tropes from seemingly unrelated religious traditions.
I do wonder how much Ayahuasca trips "open the doors of perception" and how much they just amplify the experiencer's existing metaphysical belief systems back to them. From this book it does look like there are some recurring themes in the experiences regardless of which cultural programming they get filtered through: The experiencer shedding their socially constructed artificial self in an extremely traumatic manner to re-connect with something deeper; what this "something deeper" then turns out to be varies - be it the Earth as a larger ecosystem, the spirits of their own ancestors, their own "higher self", some type of super-consciousness permeating the universe, and so on. Symbolism involving snakes and other reptiles appears again and again, notice that snakes habitually shed their own skin like the people taking the trips experience shedding their artificially constructed public personae and socially conditioned views of themselves. All of this strikes me as uncannily similar to the "reptilian aliens in human disguise" motif that first appeared in the stories of fantasy author Robert E. Howard who never intended them as anything else than fiction, then promoted as perfectly real by conspiracy theorists like David Icke, as well as the folklore surrounding wendigos and werewolves.
The really interesting parts of this book, at least in my estimation, are the later chapters. Where McKenna and Metzner summarise all the scientific research into the hallucinogenic plants involved, local religious traditions incorporating them (including several explicitly Christian) and neurobiological studies of exactly what happens to the brain during Ayahuasca trips. I was surprised to learn how poorly Western science grasped any of this until the 1960's, with the McKenna brothers bearing much of the responsibility for Western scholars of comparative religion even taking indigenous religions' use of hallucinogens as sacraments seriously at all... or for that matter botanists even knowing which plants contain which hallucinogens. These studies do provide hard evidence for unambiguous positive effects on the physical and mental health of people who take Ayahuasca within the context of the right ritualistic disciplines, as well as demonstrating the risks when done carelessly including documented cases of people dying from improper use, from these studies.
In some way, this book did exceed my expectations: I have for a long time viewed people who take hallucinogenic drugs to achieve spiritual enlightenment the same way I view athletes who use doping to improve their performance. (full disclaimer: I spent 2019-2022 living an ascetic lifestyle abstaining from any other intoxicants than caffeine) After reading Metzner and McKenna's summaries of their research, I have gotten a more nuanced understanding of the subject than I had before. That said, I still wish there was more information on scientific research surrounding use of Ayahuasca and fewer interviews with people describing their trip experiences - eventually I got the picture that the experiences almost always get filtered through culturally specific belief systems.
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