The foundational triad of mestizo shamanism in the Amazon is shacapar, rattling; chupar, sucking; and soplar, blowing tobacco smoke. Amazonian healers are classic sucking shamans. Sucking out a disease is risky, dramatic, frightening, unpredictable.

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Mestizo shamanism in the Upper Amazon is expanding and declining at the same time. It is expanding at the expense of other indigenous shamanisms, and it is declining in the face of biomedicine and the reluctance of the young to undergo the sufferings required to become a shaman.

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Richard Doyle is currently Associate Professor of Rhetoric in the Department of English at Penn State University. He received his PhD from the University of California–Berkeley in 1993, and is the author of two books of interdisciplinary scholarship on science and technology. Doyle has written a on his own ayahuasca experience. And he is now working on a new book on the history of archaic and contemporary ecstatic practices and their role in the biological and technological evolution of human beings.

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Susana Bustos is a graduate student in East-West Psychology at the California Inistitute of Integral Studies. In 2004, she began research in the Peruvian Amazonian Rainforest, working as a counselor at Takiwasi, a center for the research of traditional medicine and drug abuse rehabilitation using ayahuasca and other indigenous healing methods.

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Indigenous Amazonian peoples ingest tobacco in every conceivable way — smoked, as a snuff, chewed, licked, as a syrup applied to the gums, and in the form of an enema. Mestizo shamans consume tobacco as a cold-water infusion, in cigarettes, or in specially carved pipes; tobacco may also be added to the ayahuasca drink.

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There has been very little research on sexual relations between shamans and plant spirits. Certainly the spirits can be muy celosa, very jealous, about sexual relations between shamans and human persons. Relations with the spirits may imply both sexual abstinence with humans and sexual alliance with the spirits. There are reports of erotic ayahuasca visions; regular ayahuasca use apparently does nothing to abate — and, by report, may significantly enhance — sexual desire and performance.

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I am drinking ayahuasca. Suddenly I find myself standing in the entry hallway of a large house in the suburbs, facing the front door. The floor of the hallway is tiled, like many places in the ayahuasca world. There is a large staircase behind me, leading to the second floor; there are large ceramic pots on either side of the entrance way. I open the front door and look out at a typical suburban street — cars parked at the curb, traffic going by, a front lawn, trees along the curb. Standing at the door is a dark woman, perhaps in her forties, her raven hair piled on her head, thin and elegant, beautiful, dressed in a red shift with a black diamond pattern.

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Marko Rodriguez, at the Computer Science Department of the University of California at Santa Cruz, has come up with a really interesting idea to see whether the spirits seen after ingesting DMT — which would include drinking ayahuasca — are autonomous. persistent, intelligent entities or something else — perhaps, say, imaginal projections of the perceiver.

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There is no doubt that ayahuasca makes you vomit. There is some consolation in the fact that the vomiting will ease with continued experience; shamans seldom vomit. There is more consolation in the fact that the vomiting is considered to be cleansing and healing. But the vomiting is certainly distressing to a gringo, who has been taught that vomiting is wretched and humiliating.

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Ayahuasca — both the ayahuasca drink and ayahuasca shamanism — has been subject to the forces of globalization and modernity that have affected every other aspect of Amazonian life. The results of this encounter have been mixed, on both sides — on the one hand, new forms of literature and art, new religious movements, experiments in religious organization; on the other hand, oppression, exploitation, and the piracy of valuable traditional knowledge.

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