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In a large hut on the edge of the Peruvian Amazon, 12 strangers gathered to transcend the modern world and find psychedelic healing. The Shipibo healer Maestro Juan, wearing a T-shirt with an illustration by Gustave Doré of angels circling heaven, was smoking a thick wad of hand-rolled mapacho tobacco while passionately telling us about tiny, invisible people who protect powerful noya rao medicine plants growing deep in the rainforest. When the seeds of those miraculous plants fall into the river, fish quickly eat them and jump into the air, becoming colourful birds. ‘Ayahuasca is similar,’ Juan explained, adding: ‘It’s not as powerful as noya rao, so you can drink it. Ayahuasca brings you into a new dimension where you can transform.’ But, as I learned during the 26 sessions I participated in at the centre where Juan worked, known as Pachamama Temple, what counts as ‘transformation’ can look very different depending on where you come from in the world.

I’m an anthropologist, and I came to Peru in 2019 to study these complex differences. For the other international participants beside me – who had arrived from Europe, North America, Southeast Asia and New Zealand – the retreat was a means of turning inward to heal personal trauma, experience shamanic visions, and forge a deeper connection with the natural world. For Juan, and the other Shipibo guides, it could be something quite different. The psychoactive molecules are the same in most ayahuasca recipes. The typical concoction is a tea made by boiling two plants that can be found across the rainforest basin: a vine (Banisteriopsis caapi) and a leafy shrub (Psychotria viridis). And yet, the experiences those molecules inspire are refracted by diverse cultural approaches and perspectives.

During the next few ceremonies I attended at Pachamama Temple, all the healers and guests drank ayahuasca as usual. But Juan stopped singing healing icaros (special songs) to each guest. Instead, dressed in a full-length robe covered in rainbow-coloured geometric kené patterns, he sung different songs to deal with the psychic incursions of sorcerers. His singing was no longer confident and loud, but now took on a cadence that was distressed, quivering and weak. He breathed heavily between verses as if the air filling his chest was thick with affliction. Then, his voice would rise again with confidence, passion and beauty. Through the sessions, the emotional tone of the singing oscillated between pain and comfort.

Juan later explained to me that jealous rivals had been magically attacking the centre – a story corroborated by other healers at the retreat. These rival shamans were telepathically spying on the centre and had directed criminals to rob Juan several weeks earlier while he was transporting a reasonable sum of cash to the local bank. As he drove on the dusty roads between the retreat and the city, Juan was confronted at gunpoint and mugged.

In Western imaginaries, the concepts of sorcery and witchcraft evoke dark and sometimes racist views of Indigenous societies being backwards or ‘primitive’. In Amazonian worlds, however, they represent an important part of holistic theories of health, emotion and power. Sorcery often signals that a disturbance has occurred and that balance needs to be restored. Many Amazonian cultures hold tranquillity and harmony as core values of society, and ayahuasca has been used to help restore balance within, for example, a village, a family or the wider ecology. Healing, in this context, is relational. Distress is understood as something that moves between people and places, not simply within the self. Therefore, accusations of sorcery may surface where relations of power or reciprocity have broken down – including around issues of jealousy, money or political dispute.

The global expansion of ayahuasca is unravelling academic ideas about the brew’s universal effects

The international guests at Pachamama Temple typically did not believe in sorcery and often ignored any sign of it. Like many of those in the Global North who turn to psychedelics as a form of psychological treatment or therapy, the guests came to the Amazon to heal themselves, learn about their own spiritual interior and connect with nature to transcend ‘modern’ problems. This treatment took place in ceremonies led by shamans seen to be relatively uncorrupted by the ills of civilisation.

Brewing ayahuasca at Pachamama Temple in Peru, 2019. Photo by Dominik Janus

This difference in perspective demonstrates how ayahuasca can split into wildly different realities – a shapeshifting property I explore in my book Global Ayahuasca: Wondrous Visions and Modern Worlds (2024). The global expansion of ayahuasca is unravelling academic ideas about the brew’s universal effects, challenging decades of research by psychologists, scientists and anthropologists. Michael Harner, an anthropologist who lived in the Amazon during the late 1950s and early ’60s, identified purported ‘common denominators’ among Indigenous narratives of ayahuasca-drinking, such as visions of snakes, jaguars, spirits, distant places, the separation of the soul, and more. The author Peter Stafford, who wrote the Psychedelics Encyclopedia (1977), even went so far as to suggest the β-carbolines in the brew might represent a ‘pure element’ in a sort of ‘Periodical Table of Consciousness’, implying a transcultural, fundamental core to the visions.

In the 1980s and ’90s, the brew was brought to North America and Europe where it entered a burgeoning psychedelic age and became seen as a means of mind-expansion, personal empowerment and archaic revival. Even the word ‘psychedelic’ – from the Greek for ‘mind-revealing’ – privileges inner experience in ways foreign to many Indigenous understandings of the same substances. In Quechuan, the word ‘ayahuasca’ means ‘vine of souls’. For centuries or more, drinking this brew has connected Indigenous peoples in the Amazon with an invisible world, serving as a powerful teacher and ally. It has helped Indigenous groups strengthen their identities, and forge alliances with each other and with their ecological environments. It has assisted with healing, hunting, social welfare and more, representing a relational, embodied and ecological understanding of the world – one poorly captured by the English word ‘psychedelic’.

In the 2020s, we find ayahuasca used in wildly different settings to those where it first emerged in the ethnographic record. The European-based non-profit ICEERS (International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research, and Service) published a report in 2023 estimating that about 4 million people in the United States, Europe, Australia and New Zealand have consumed ayahuasca once in their lifetime. In smalltown Australia, I witnessed people purging traumas and reconnecting with nature, finding an ‘antidote’ to the disenchantment, malaise and alienation of their urban lives. In the Netherlands and elsewhere, ayahuasca drinkers embody a hybrid Christian cosmos that courses the body with the force of the brew. In Switzerland and other places, scientists are developing ‘pharmahuasca’ recipes that are administered through short-acting nasal sprays as part of the value-neutral idealism of biological psychiatry or psychotherapy. Still further, in China’s metropolitan shadows, I found entrepreneurs and executive managers secretly overcoming their blind spots with insights drawn from ayahuasca visions. Here, drinkers have visionary experiences that clarify business challenges, improve management skills or navigate complex workplace dynamics.

These glimpses show just how far ayahuasca has travelled from its rainforest origins. Across cultures and contexts, it keeps changing shape – absorbing new meanings and applications. But with so many ways of experiencing and understanding it, can anything truly universal still be said about the brew and what it reveals?

As ayahuasca circulated to places such as Australia, North America and Europe, it became associated with a movement toward ‘nature’ and away from cities. Descriptions of ancient and wise shamans living deep in the Amazon rainforest have tended to define who are the most legitimate and powerful healers. These Indigenous shamans are framed as holders of natural wisdom and ancient techniques of plant-spirit healing, which helps explain why international tourists, primarily from Western societies, keep coming to the Amazon rainforest in search of ‘authentic’ ayahuasca experiences.

However, Amazonians hold a more complex view of the brew. They have frequently equated psychedelic experiences with their understanding of the latest technologies of the city: ayahuasca is seen as a forest cinema or Indigenous TV, and drinking it gives access to futurist underwater cities filled with skyscrapers where shamans obtain powers and a vast array of tools like X-ray machines, large bright surgical lights, hypodermic needles, as well as jet fighters and flying saucers. For marvellous visual portrayals........

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