A man receives a cup of ayahuasca from a shaman in the Amazon jungle

This article is a preview from the Autumn 2019 edition of New Humanist

It’s late, past midnight, and guests are starting to arrive at a house in Butantã, an inner-city suburb of São Paulo, Brazil’s biggest metropolis. Some are carrying blankets, even though summer evenings in South America can be stifling well into the night. A humming air-conditioning vent rests above a row of mattresses. At the foot of each one is a small waste paper bin, lined with a plastic bag. Two female shamans greet the group in the living room. Soft chanting music begins to play, and one by one, guests drink their first dose of bitter, sludgy liquid – a potent brew of Amazonian plants.

“I didn’t want to be out in a forest for a weekend, in a place I don’t know,” says one young woman who has come to tonight’s ceremony from London. “Here, if I don’t like it, I can call an Uber.” She carries her yoga mat to her place, where around 70 others will surround her for the next eight hours. The bin, she explains, is for “purging”, or vomiting. She paid £50 (R$250) to be here tonight.

Ayahuasca is renowned for the often extraordinary visions it induces. The word means “the vine of the spirits” in the indigenous Quechua language. Ayahuasca is made from an Amazonian vine, Banisteriopsis caapi, and at least one other leaf-based plant; typically Psychotria viridis from the coffee family. Up to four doses are taken in a single session.

For centuries, remote groups from the Amazon rainforest have prized this concoction for its healing and spiritual purposes. It is a central part of traditional shamanistic practice. Although it is not globally recognised as such, many view ayahuasca as a medicine, a way to treat internal wounds and reconnect with nature. Over the past 25 years or so, the rituals around the tea drinking have gone mainstream, offering psychedelic enlightenment to thousands worldwide. They partake in private homes and suburban business parks, at health retreats and community centres.

More recently, ayahuasca has come under heightened scrutiny. A series of deaths – largely people attracted by the growing shaman-tourism industry – has sparked media outcry and called into question participants’ safety. The current political context in Brazil is also raising questions about how state regulators view the ancient rituals.

Brazil’s new president Jair Bolsonaro assumed office on 1 January. A retired army captain and career
politician, he was baptised live on television in 2016 by Pastor Everaldo, a prominent leader of the Pentecostal church of the Assembly of God (the second biggest evangelical church in Brazil). Evangelical leaders strongly backed Bolsonaro in the October elections – helping him secure a victory as the first truly right-wing president since the fall of the military dictatorship in 1985, when Brazil returned to democracy.

Bolsonaro has expressed extreme scepticism that indigenous communities would actually choose to live in one of the most unspoilt regions of the planet, saying they are being kept in “zoos”. In 2017 he said that tribes wanted “electricity, television, blonde girlfriends and internet”. He has been especially critical of the commitment by previous Brazilian governments to set aside in perpetuity vast areas of the forest for indigenous people, protecting them from the threats of mining and logging gangs.

Given the fundamental links between ayahuasca and its indigenous heritage, leaders are unsure whether the new government will make moves to suppress the substance, or whether his support for religion will lead to further support for this traditional practice.

With more and more people taking ayahuasca, Brazil has a new leader who is at once anti-indigenous and pro-religious tradition. It is a growing tourist attraction, at the same time as its legal status looks more uncertain than it has for decades. What is next for this substance and its proponents?

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Ayahuasca is widely used by indigenous communities in both Brazil and Peru. But it is also a fundamental part of the Santo Daime Church, founded in Brazil in the 1930s. Santo Daime was formally recognised by the Brazilian government as a religion in 1986, and at the same time, ayahuasca became explicitly legal for religious use. That means that in Brazil, members of such churches are legally allowed to use the substance, while its use outside religious ceremonies remains a grey area. Santo Daime is an amalgamation of different faiths. Its sermons feature elements of Catholicism, African rituals and indigenous traditions. Daime (“Holy Give Me” in Portuguese) is actually another name for ayahuasca – which forms the religion’s primary sacrament. Santo Daime is not the only ayahuasca church. There are three main churches: Santo Daime, Barquinha and União do Vegetal (UDV). They do not track members, but estimates suggest hundreds of thousands attend the Santo Daime church each week. Lua Cheia in São Paulo has a congregation of roughly 7,000. The UDV – the most recent ayahuasca religion to appear in Brazil – has roughly 19,000 members worldwide.

The ceremonies focus on meditation, healing and communal celebration. They are held in churches, which are generally round, thatched-roofed structures with a central altar. Hymns are sung and everyone is dressed in white, while tapestries and crystals often adorn the open space. The brown ayahuasca brew, or “sacrament”, is taken throughout. Some people who drink ayahuasca describe feeling at peace with themselves, God and the universe.

The focus of Santo Daime is fundamentally Christian. Drinking ayahuasca has the same significance for Santo Daime members as the Eucharist has for Catholics: they believe they are drinking in Jesus Christ. Ceremonies are held according to the official Santo Daime calendar, with “works”, or ceremonies, that take place roughly three times a month. These tend to run from sunset until dawn. The hallucinogenic tea is administered throughout, so that members can journey through their lives and revisit their mistakes with fresh understanding.

Attitudes towards women and gay rights across the different branches of the religion are broadly conservative. Much like Christian denominations such as the Seventh-day Adventist Church and the Southern Baptist Convention, the UDV does not permit gay people to assume positions of leadership within the organisation. Furthermore, women who take part in ceremonies are expected to present themselves as feminine – with long hair, and dresses or skirts. Men and women tend to be separated. This is ironic given that indigenous communities view ayahuasca as a sacred feminine plant.

LGBT people say they have experienced prejudice in different ways among church communities. In 2008, the then-leader of the UDV issued a controversial statement to their chapters that was leaked and published online. It read: “As we have faith in the incontestable existence of God, we can never agree with the practice of homosexuality as it goes against the natural origin of human existence; this is, the relationship between man and woman which gives origin to generation. We disagree with the marriage of persons of the same sex because we do not want and do not have the right to bring about the extinction of the human species which belongs only to God.”

To become a “counsellor” or “master” you, as a man, “have to be married to a woman,” a former congregant member revealed. Clancy Cavnar, a clinical psychologist who studied the use of ayahuasca among gay people and is herself a long-time member of the Santo Daime church, attributes some of this to homophobic attitudes found more generally in Brazil.

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Raimundo Irineu Serra, a descendent of African slaves, founded the Santo Daime church soon after his first encounter with ayahuasca in 1914. According to legend, “Master Irineu”, as he is now known, was by the Amazonian border of Brazil during an eight-day fast when he saw the moon coming towards him. An eagle was perched in the centre, and inside the moon was a female spiritual figure later identified as the Queen of the Forest and Our Lady of Conception (the Virgin Mary). This sparked a new religious movement, although it wasn’t until 1982 that the first formal Santo Daime church, Céu do Mar, opened.

Léo Artese, a Santo Daime church leader in Itapeceria da Serra, a town to the south-west of São Paulo, says it became a national movement in Brazil in the 1980s, with innumerable “affiliated churches” like his that were given government protection in perpetuity. Irineu’s doctrine of spiritual awakening through ayahuasca reached suburbia, later making its way abroad. Artese explains how there was an influx of foreign visitors to the Brazilian Amazon at the time, and in the early 1990s South American shamans “started travelling out to Europe and the US.”

Dozens of new affiliates to the churches have appeared in recent years, raising concerns about their legitimacy and practices. The legal ambiguity of ayahuasca is one of the fundamental issues that surrounds both the church and its respective religious and non-religious branches.

“New groups are quickly becoming part of the scenario,” says Brazilian anthropologist Dr Beatriz Labate. “They’re accepted as a branch of the original religion and religious use of ayahuasca is legal.” In 1987, Brazil’s federal drug agency concluded that “religious group members” could take ayahuasca. This is also the case in the United States. Ayahuasca is not recognised as a medicine and many modern-day “retreat”-type rituals, like the one in Butantã that you pay to attend, do not take place inside church ceremonies. They are therefore technically prohibited – and are completely unregulated.

The plant itself is also illegal to harvest. Oddly – but in keeping with countless other legal loopholes in
Brazil – it is not illegal to transport. This is creating problems for rural communities that produce the plant for ayahuasca rituals far away from its natural habitat, on a much bigger scale than before. These legal grey areas, Labate argues, are fuelling controversy around ayahuasca. Some of the so-called branches of the church should not be recognised as religions at all. And as more people become church members and more people partake in an essentially unregulated activity, greater scrutiny naturally follows.

In 2018 there were 13 known cases of sexual abuse reported in the city of São Paulo, at the Reino do Sol religious centre. This is just one of hundreds of practising centres across South America, suggesting that unreported figures are much higher.

There have also been some deaths of western backpackers, who are travelling in increasing numbers to take ayahuasca administered by shamans. The potent brew made headlines in the UK last year when a British coroner confirmed that 19-year-old Henry Miller from Bristol had died after taking a dose in a ceremony four years ago in the Colombian jungle. The coroner, who ruled Miller’s death accidental, urged the UK Foreign Office to provide a “standard message warning” to tourists who want to participate in ayahuasca ceremonies. In January 2015, an anonymous open letter reported “horrific and unsafe” experiences of 15 American women at a shamanic centre in Peru, where victims alleged various forms of groping and inappropriate behaviour by shamanic apprentices.

“Exact numbers are difficult to obtain as most cases never come to light, but the issue [of sexual abuse] is common knowledge within the ayahuasca community,” says Labate. In 2017, she set up the Chacruna Institute, an organisation dedicated to providing public education and cultural understanding about plant medicines. “We […] do not wish to dissuade women from drinking ayahuasca, but rather to raise their awareness about sexual harassment, and offer practical guidelines in the interest of keeping female participants in ayahuasca ceremonies and communities safe.”

Participants describe intense periods of weakness, feelings of being “immobilised”, both physically and mentally, as some of the side effects of DMT, the active powerful hallucinogen in ayahuasca.

Many within the community are naturally fearful of what revelations of sexual misconduct might do to the already contentious public view of Daime and ayahuasca. Despite its spiritual applications, it is a drug, and carries the same connotations of drug use. “Daime is so stigmatised and persecuted in Brazil,” a São Paulo congregant says, adding, “There are so many misunderstandings that we don’t need more problems.”

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Despite these alarming reports, scientific research into ayahuasca’s benefits is also ongoing. In 2018, a team of Brazilian scientists at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte conducted the first clinical trial of ayahuasca and found it could work to combat severe depression. The study is a key part of a growing body of evidence that psychedelic drugs such as LSD and mushrooms, when administered correctly, can have life-changing effects on difficult-to-treat psychiatric issues. In the state of São Paulo, psychiatrists are already using it to treat alcoholics.

One of the central ideas behind the organisation Chacruna is to promote a bridge between the ceremonial use of sacred plants and psychedelic science. Artese, the Santo Daime church leader, agrees that the biggest challenge for his church in 2019 “is to create a dialogue between science and academic research, over and above the spiritual dimension,” in order to make it more accessible to the general public, and help protect the legitimacy of the church community.

Church representatives are lobbying for government agencies to recognise ayahuasca as “immaterial cultural heritage” of Brazil. A request was made in 2008 to Brazil’s National Institute of Historical and Artistic Patrimony (IPHAN) but the designation remains unapproved.

This combination of scientific research, foreigners eager to participate and a new Brazilian president is drawing greater scrutiny as to how perceptions of ayahuasca will evolve: as a legitimate medicine, an element of religious ritual or a drug. The question remains whether the new government will repress or endorse ayahuasca.

Back at the house in Butantã, the ceremony closes and the group leaves one by one. Another 70 have already signed up for next weekend.