The New Yorker reports on Ayahuasca, providing an historical look at the emergence of this amazonian plant medicine into our western society...
Ayahuasca enthusiasts frequently use the language of technology, which may have entered the plant-medicine lexicon because so many people in Silicon Valley are devotees. “Indigenous prophesies point to an imminent polar reversal that will wipe our hard drives clean,” Daniel Pinchbeck wrote in his exploration of ayahuasca, technology, and Mayan millennialism, “2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl.” In an industry devoted to synthetic products, people are drawn to this natural drug, with its ancient lineage and ritualized use: traditionally, shamans purify the setting by smoking tobacco, playing ceremonial instruments, and chanting icaros—songs that they say come to them from the plants, the way Pentecostals are moved by the Holy Spirit to speak in tongues. “In Silicon Valley, where everyone suffers from neo-mania,” Ferriss continued, “having interactions with songs and rituals that have remained, in some cases, unchanged for hundreds or thousands of years is very appealing.”
Ayahuasca isn’t the only time-honored method of ritual self-mortification, of course; pilgrims seeking an encounter with the divine have a long history of fasting, hair shirts, and flagellation. But in the United States most ayahuasca users are seeking a post-religious kind of spiritualism—or, perhaps, pre-religious, a pagan worship of nature. The Scottish writer and ayahuasca devotee Graham Hancock told me that people from all over the world report similar encounters with the “spirit of the plant”: “She sometimes appears as a jungle cat, sometimes as a huge serpent.” Many speak about ayahuasca as though it were an actual female being: Grandmother.
Full article:
THE DRUG OF CHOICE FOR THE AGE OF KALE
Ayahuasca enthusiasts frequently use the language of technology, which may have entered the plant-medicine lexicon because so many people in Silicon Valley are devotees. “Indigenous prophesies point to an imminent polar reversal that will wipe our hard drives clean,” Daniel Pinchbeck wrote in his exploration of ayahuasca, technology, and Mayan millennialism, “2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl.” In an industry devoted to synthetic products, people are drawn to this natural drug, with its ancient lineage and ritualized use: traditionally, shamans purify the setting by smoking tobacco, playing ceremonial instruments, and chanting icaros—songs that they say come to them from the plants, the way Pentecostals are moved by the Holy Spirit to speak in tongues. “In Silicon Valley, where everyone suffers from neo-mania,” Ferriss continued, “having interactions with songs and rituals that have remained, in some cases, unchanged for hundreds or thousands of years is very appealing.”
Ayahuasca isn’t the only time-honored method of ritual self-mortification, of course; pilgrims seeking an encounter with the divine have a long history of fasting, hair shirts, and flagellation. But in the United States most ayahuasca users are seeking a post-religious kind of spiritualism—or, perhaps, pre-religious, a pagan worship of nature. The Scottish writer and ayahuasca devotee Graham Hancock told me that people from all over the world report similar encounters with the “spirit of the plant”: “She sometimes appears as a jungle cat, sometimes as a huge serpent.” Many speak about ayahuasca as though it were an actual female being: Grandmother.
Full article:
THE DRUG OF CHOICE FOR THE AGE OF KALE
