DMT and its effect on human consciousness have been explored in clinical trials by Dr. Nick Strassman using endogenous DMT in subjects in the 90s. Since then, conjecture has arisen on the physiology of how DMT acts on the brain.
Traditional plant medicines such as ayahuasca and lesser-known acacia tree show humans have been utilising the properties of DMT for thousands and thousands of years. What do these medicinal practices experiences tell us about the human brain and consciousness?
In this episode, I discuss with the author of the paper “Deep Ecology of Ayahuasca Discourse” Jef Baker, on his long-standing fascination with psychoactive plants. Jef is president of the Sydney chapter of The Australian Psychedelic Society and dives into the history, state of research and personal experiences with DMT practices.
To explore more about our guest, Jef Baker, check out these links:
Australian Psychedelic Society
Facebook: Entheogenic Anthropology
‘From Changa to Change – Self to Society’ by Jef Baker @ The Politics of Awe, APS-Sydney 2019
Here’s the full transcript for this episode:
Steven: [0:00:05] Hey Jef, thanks for joining me today.
Jef: [0:00:06] [inaudible]
Steven: [0:00:07] Yeah, good, man. I’ve been looking forward to talking about this. We met a few months back and we’ve been talking back and forth.
Jef: [0:00:14] Yeah, a couple of months.
Steven: [0:00:16] There’s really an interesting story about your training and how it’s kind of led you down to this path of exploring very fundamental things that really go back a long way in human history. I’m really looking forward to diving into that.
Jef: [0:00:33] Cool. I think it works both ways, as the plants led me to studying. The studying came from my sort of obsession with psychoactive plants that I developed at quite a young age.
Steven: [0:00:45] Absolutely. Tell us about your training. So you’ve got a PhD –
Jef: [0:00:50] No, I’ve got an Honors thesis in Cultural Studies and Communications. I was slated to do a PhD, but I put that on hold, which I’m quite glad I did because I was going to look at ways and techniques people use to integrate psychedelic experiences and how communities form through that. But for other life reasons, I chose to come to Sydney and work – kind of a crazy reason. [laughs]
But yes, it gave me time to sort of think of actually what I really, really like to study if I could. And I think, as we spoke, looking at the modern use of acacia and the emergence of that, and then tying it back to the ancient use of acacia, I think, is a very under-researched area. There’s so much to know about acacia that we don’t know yet, in almost every field – in taxonomy, in botany, and little on the anthropological side of things, it’s not greatly studied.
Steven: [0:02:04] That’s what really struck me about the stories. We’re kind of hearing a lot about the South American ceremonial use of ayahuasca and DMT. There’s a lot of discussion about that, but there is a huge story all around the world and acacia is central to it. And you go back into Egyptian literature, some of the most fundamental mythological stories –
Jef: [0:02:34] The tree of life. It’s the beginning of everything, and all these different cultures have a world tree at their core, which I think, points to the idea that they understood that we originally all came from plants, that plants were the first life form on the planet, and everything emerges out of that. Hence the world tree or tree of knowledge, the tree of life, as the origins of everything is quite a common tripe in different mythologies of different cultures.
Steven: [0:03:06] We were talking just before about the Egyptian acacia, it grows around the Nile, which is one of most–
Jef: [0:03:15] Hence its name ‘Nilotica’, I believe.
Steven: [0:03:17] Yeah. And the mythology kind of goes that one of the primary gods, Osiris, was born of an acacia nilotica. He was also referred to as the tree god. You keep finding this reference to acacia, and I started to think about the branching of how all this happens, beginning to think about how fundamental the acacia tree really is to the human story. The Egyptian culture goes back right to our roots of where the cradle of civilization started –
Jef: [0:03:56] Exactly, it’s quite prevalent in most Mesopotamian cultures, the use of acacia. Obviously, it’s a good food source, as a gum it’s very useful, the wood is extremely hard and really good to build with– there’s a lot of biblical references to building with acacia, but also building extremely sacred things like the Ark of the Covenant, and the Crown of Thorns even. There’s significance placed on it for a reason, I believe.
Steven: [0:04:31] Yeah, that was an acacia – was it a branch or was it…?
Jef: [0:04:35] The nilotica, I believe It’s a thorned acacia.
Steven: [0:04:39] Isn’t that amazing? There was a really practical side of this as well like the boat of Ra that they say was built in acacia.
Jef: [0:04:46] Yeah, built of half of acacia and half of palm wood.
Steven: [0:04:48] That’s right – palm wood and then it’s the back portion that’s –
Jef: [0:04:50] The back was acacia. Not sure exactly why they did half and a half there.
Steven: [0:04:56] There would be a purpose though, right?
Jef: [0:04:58] Yeah, absolutely. It’s functional or ritual.
Steven: [0:05:03] That’s right. And the gum is used in the blending and smoothing of fats, and they use it for candy making. So they just had this broad splattering of really treasured use of the plant. And across the Mesopotamia as well, the word, ‘Akakia’ is used by the Byzantine priests but that represents a cylindrical purple silk that contained dust, which was the metaphorical dust from which mankind was formed to symbolize a moral nature.
Jef: [0:05:37] There you go! Origins again.
Steven: [0:05:41] It’s interesting because it was really when I started talking to you that the story of the acacia began to come out. And your journey in this has got these deep roots in stories all around the world.
Jef: [0:05:58] Yeah it’s… [laughs]
Steven: [0:06:03] When did it first come on to your radar to start looking into the Acacia plant?
Jef: [0:06:13] Well, I guess I’ve got to go right back to my interest in psychoactive plants, which began quite young – 16, I’d just left school. I was sort of kicking around with the punks and all kinds in the mid/late 80s, and I’d just finished reading The Doors of Perception Aldous Huxley’s story of his mescaline journey. I picked it up for a couple of dollars in a bookstore just on the merit of the brave new world and sort of finished reading and was like, “I don’t really understand it…” [inaudible 04:46] quite what aspects were fact and what aspects were fiction.
And then synchronistically, a day or two later, was when I ran into this group and they were brewing up cactus and, “hey, let’s drink some cactus” a shits and giggles sort of thing. I was like, “okay, yeah, let’s do it”. But very quickly, it struck me – the significance of this state of mind – that this was nothing to joke around with. As much as I expected to enjoy this, there were some serious implications to this. And I was struck with the profound feeling of familiarity. Like, how do I remember this experience? I have no reference point in this life to having done this before, where is this familiarity coming from? And then it just lingered for hours.
And so that led me into exploring the different psychoactive substances floating around like the mushrooms that grow in New Zealand. But that weekend that I first drank the cactus, that same weekend, for the next four years, the cactus would just appear in my life randomly, which was really, really nice synchronicity and a good sign of the power of these plants – that they will weave meaning into your life, whether you’re aware of it or not, and they’ll make you aware of it.
So I experimented and explored for quite a few years, and then having family, and kids, and career, it sort of fell off from my radar for a little while. And then I went to university in [inaudible 0:08:26] and basically did a bit of psychology, did a bit of sociology, and then discovered cultural studies. And in doing philosophy, it suddenly hit me. Existentialism, and metaphysics and all the theoretical philosophy, just all related to my experience with psychedelics. It was all just so parallel. I felt, “wow, there’s room here to weave psychedelics into social sciences”. And that led me to graduating and then moving on to doing an Honors thesis.
Obviously, I was seeing ayahuasca in the media, everywhere, but I didn’t have any experience with ayahuasca, but I sort of really wanted to write something about it as a sort of strange attractor, to bring it into my life. And so I wrote about the way that ayahuasca was spoken about, that embodies a deep ecological philosophy. I kept seeing the way it was referenced to as a female plant entity, a plant spirit, and how people would have profound experiences of connection to nature, which really resonated with my experience on cactus, particularly.
But I wanted to be very careful not to speak for the experience because I hadn’t had it yet. And so that was a good way to like use online data of people’s experiences, to analyze the way it was discussed, have a discourse analysis. And, behold, that sort of led me to people and ayahuasca, people with access to ceremony and bang!
And around that same time, I was given some DMT. And I was told that it was obtusifolia and it actually came from the mountains behind where I was living at that time, up in the north coast. I sat with it for a couple of months, looking for a good safe spot to have it. I wanted to be really super prepared. And so eventually I found a nice spot down by the beach, and laid the DMT between some caapi leaf (ayahuasca vine leaf), and was really quickly catapulted into a completely other realm, as I’d read about, a breakthrough as they say.
But as soon as I entered this other space, this little thing came out to greet me. It had a little sort of fluffy white head about the size of your index finger and big green splayed sort of rabbit-like ears, and it was just, “yeah, you made it, you made it!!” this sort of congratulatory excitement. And perhaps that in part is your own self congratulating “oh you did it mate, you broke through DMT, well done!” but also, this was something else. This was an independent plant spirit, I quite recognized it as a plant at the time. I was like, “okay, that was weird”.
It was about six months later – at the time, I didn’t know what an acacia was or a gum tree, I really couldn’t identify the species – so I started looking into it a little bit, getting more familiar with it. I driving along the road and all this acacia was blowing in the wind, it all in flower. I was like, “that’s what I saw! That was the little fluffy white flower!” And the big green rubbery phyllodes/leaves (they’d be like ears in my vision), were the phyllodes of acacia obtusifolia. What I saw was an exact depiction of acacia obtusifolia, probably six months prior to my having any knowledge of what it looked like.
Steven: [0:12:19] Isn’t that amazing! So you were pushed down into this road of understanding the acacia tree. It was through psychoactive plants that you had an experience, but then you said that when you had the experience with mescaline, that it was a feeling that you’d been there before. It’s interesting to me because now, we’ve kind of been studying this for something like decades – like Strassman –
Jet: [0:12:50] Yeah, I’d say 100+ years. The discovery of mescaline goes back to the late 19th century/early 20th century. And it’s a quite often forgotten chapter of psychedelic history, this period – the turn of the century into the 20th century. And prior to the discovery of LSD, there was a really popular use of mescaline within the philosophical circuits and writers in Europe. Jean-Paul Sartre and that sort of people were having these kinds of experiences.
Steven: [0:13:26] It’s interesting like that. What I meant by that is that clinical studies are starting to kind of start to understand this stuff and to –
Jef: [0:13:34] Yeah, it’s becoming mainstream to a certain extent.
Steven: [0:13:36] Right. But the uses of these plants and its application into cultural, across many even kind of closed-circuit kind of communities, it goes back a long way, as you say. And to me, while we’re starting to move into this period where we’re using these kinds of substances for clinical research, all these kinds of things, PTSD, there are some—
Jef: [0:14:05] Yeah, there’s enormous potential. And it’s sad because we didn’t know these things prior to the prohibition of LSD and pretty much all psychoactive substances. There was over a thousand papers written on LSD, prior to its out outlawing. You’re looking at treating alcoholism, and depression, and anxiety. Obviously, depression and anxiety weren’t prevalent nearly to the extent they are now, perhaps they were but they weren’t identified as such. I think it’s pretty clear we have more depression and anxiety in our society now than perhaps we did in the 50s.
But, yeah, we knew the potential of these substances and Nixon, for whatever political reasons – vendetta, Leary, or whatever – he decided to outlaw it. And also, the CIA was studying these things, they knew the potential as well. But obviously, their agenda was to try and weaponize it somehow, a little bit too unpredictable for that, so I think they canned it (that’s not to say that the program closed, I believe it continued on). And they were looking at DMT as well, which was a pretty obscure substance in the 60s. There wasn’t a lot of people doing it. It wasn’t as socially transportable as LSD, or physically transportable in the sense that you couldn’t just take it anywhere like it were with LSD.
Steven: [0:15:35] It’s interesting that you say unpredictability, because that, in clinical trials just doesn’t go right. It’s a hard thing to study and make guidelines on, or make concrete findings in research sets. It’s a difficult area, but it really is happening now. The understanding of DMT, in particular, is starting to bubble up now and recently there was a study by Jimo Borjigin who has a PhD in molecular and integrative physiology on oscillated DMT is mammalian brains. And this is the first kind of –
Jef: [0:16:24] This is the proof everyone’s been looking for, that DMT is produced in the pineal gland.
Steven: [0:16:31] It’s getting there. It was kind of all hovering around, but then it kind of led to this idea that this is all around nature, it’s deep in our history. And acacia is a very, very old plant and a good percentage of them contain Dimethyltryptamine, so we’re starting to see this story really bubble up and that’s –
Jef: [0:16:54] As [inaudible 0:16:54] says, nature’s drenched in DMT. And from reading Andrew Gallimore’s work, it is one of these really old compounds. It’s sort of like a building block to a very, very early point in human evolution, alongside serotonin. And I think that’s interesting in that the compounds are so similar. And he sort of puts forth a way that serotonin has a lot to do with the way we construct our reality. We take in sensory information and build a coherent image in the world and build our reality.
And when you replace it with DMT, this complete other reality is formed in your brain, like a parallel reality that’s completely different to this one, but often feels like it’s been there all along – like you’ve stepped into this zone that has been existing and will continue to exist when you step out of it again. Quite often you hear people talk about DMT experiences where they suddenly are like they’ve stepped into a room and there’s some bizarre creatures working on something and they go, “hi, what are you doing here?” They either tell you to piss off, or they say, “come join us, we’re fixing this thing or whatever”, and then they leave again. And it’s like, you get the sense that they’ve just been doing this all along, and they’ll keep doing it and you just sort of stepped into their world and interrupted them.
Steven: [0:18:30] That’s interesting because physiologically, we can explain that now because serotonin derives from tryptophan in the pineal gland which converts to melatonin, which is the sleep hormone.
Jef: [0:18:44] Well, melatonin is definitely produced in the pineal gland and there’s sort of a pathway from melatonin to tryptophan to serotonin, and then perhaps, down the line to N-Dimethyltryptamine and 5-Methoxytryptamine. He’s sort of itching for this to be proven enemy. Perhaps it’s not the case. We know that DMT can be found in cerebral spinal fluid, it’s produced in the lungs, a lot of serotonin is produced in the gut, it’s not all happening in the brain.
The suggestion for endogenous DMT in the pineal glands has become a real sort of popular methinks to Strassman. He did write in The Spirit Molecule, that it was a speculative theory, that it wasn’t a hard fact. But it just took a life of its own, and absolutely just people grabbed and ran with it because it’s so appealing. Because the pineal gland has such esoteric meaning for many cultures, particularly through alchemical traditions and all the way back to Egypt. There’s even references to it in the Vatican. It’s this sort of very mysterious part of the brain, the only part of the brain that’s not broken or divided, it’s a unitary piece of the brain.
It is a very, very tiny organ. And if it was producing DMT, it would be in extremely small quantities. And even then we don’t really understand how that would work. There might be many different pathways between endogenous DMT and endogenous MAO inhibitors. Oxidase, which normally breaks down DMT, we don’t quite know how that would interact as well. Perhaps it potentiates the DMT or perhaps it destroys it.
Steven: [0:20:42] Yeah, it’s definitely a puzzle that is revealing itself quite slowly, but like you’re saying, Strassman in the 90s somewhat in some circles romanticized the idea.
Jef: [0:20:55] Definitely, yeah.
Steven: [0:20:58] But then you look at what we’re learning now and a lot of it, like you said, we’ve clinically recorded these experiences that people have and so when you kind of go back to the idea of serotonin and melatonin, we know dreams, for instance, the dominance of melatonin and the body will push –
Jef: [0:21:18] And darkroom meditations I think are a really good evidence for endogenous DMT, that when you deprive the human system of light, after about three days people start experiencing N-Dimethyltryptamine-like effects and visions. And then come five/six days, they start becoming more like 5-MeO-DMT – less colorful and playful and more just unitary and spacious. So, yeah, this is got to be –
Steven: [0:21:53] It’s a phenomenon that it feels like we’re on the road to understanding.
Jef: [0:21:57] Yeah, definitely.
Steven: [0:21:59] So let’s talk about the acacia, specifically, because I think this is really interesting. I think most people that have kind of been in this space have probably heard of Strassman and ayahuasca. The Acacia story is really different – people generally know maybe that acacia species contain certain forms of DMT. It’s one of the oldest plants on the planet, isn’t it?
Jef: [0:22:29] Yeah, I believe so. A very early form of flowering plant.
Steven: [0:22:34] And what percentage of acacias have DMT in the different types?
Jef: [0:22:39] It’s an enormous species. I think there’s about 10,000 species of acacia, under the Mimosoideae Fabaceae family. There is acacia and there is wattle, as well. The wattle obviously has the feathery-like leaves, whereas an acacia grows as initially, but then it pushes that leaf out with a phyllode, which, for all intents and purposes, is a leaf (to us, it looks like a life) but it’s actually part of the trunk/plant body. It’s just not technically a leaf, it’s a phyllode.
I think there’s probably hundreds of acacias that have some DMT in them. There would probably be, I’d say, half a dozen that are commonly used and are really viable for home-base extraction. Mimosa hostilis and Acacia confusa would be the two most commonly used sources of DMT. And both of those generally tend to use the root bark, which has the highest concentration of DMT. It could be up to 3% sometimes in mimosa, which is a massive amount.
In case of confusa, it can be at about 1.5-1.6 units, but a third of that is also NMT (N-Methyltryptamine), which doesn’t generally crystallize, it comes out as an oil. It’s another very under-researched compound but plays a huge part in the experience because most acacias have small amounts of NMT in them. It’s less visual, far more spatial and auditory as well. It gives a very, very different effect.
And obviously when you look at acacias that have a number of different profiles, different levels of DMT and NMT, and perhaps 5-MeO-NMT, you create an entourage effect – the plant creates an entourage effect. And I believe there’s probably even forms of DMT or tryptamines in acacias that we haven’t even discovered yet. And that could well be the case. But it’s probably, I’d say, a dozen species that are viable for an extraction.
The unfortunate thing about the popularity of acacia confusa and mimosa root bark is that people then believe that you need the root bark to extract from, or bark. And there’s no single acacia in Australia that requires bark to source DMT. Equal amounts of DMT can be gotten from the phyllodes (the leaves). And I can’t stress that enough because I’ve seen very sacred sites, or very rare acacias, people stripping the bark of living trees and leaving them to die, just for the DMT. That’s really sad because these are incredibly intelligent plants and very, very special, wise old trees. So just the phyllodes, just the leaves, for all intents and purposes.
Steven: [0:26:05] Interestingly too, we were talking before how they have natural defense mechanisms like when an animal would eat and they would release tannin which is actually poison. And they release like a gas into the air to warn the other plants.
Jef: [0:26:17] Like a pheromone, I think. They’re basically talking to each other saying, “hey, here’s this giraffe munching on one of us, quickly all release this tannin that will release this enzyme into the air that will tell the other acacias to release its tannin so the animals will stop eating us”. Yeah, plant intelligence.
Steven: [0:26:39] The nilotica obviously is the one that grows up and down the Nile, but there are species in Africa, across Asia, and many across Australia. Are there any other? Because it grows in hot climates, doesn’t it?
Jef: [0:26:53] There are some cold climate acacias as well. There’s acacias growing in Tasmania, Victoria, even micro endemic acacias in Victoria – they grow in one singular Alpine area. They seem to be extremely adaptable plants too. Some, you can take out of their micro endemic climate and they’ll grow prolifically in other areas, ones that are more subtropical and more adaptable. The ones from Alpine areas that are micro endemic, you can try and grow, and very few people succeed at getting them past about two years old. They seem to do something about that micro endemic climate that they really need – maybe something in the soil. We know that there’s a sort of rhizobal microbial interaction with acacias and the soil around it. It is a nitrogen exchange from what I remember.
Steven: [0:27:55] And have you come across much knowledge from indigenous Australia?
Jef: [0:28:01] This is a very contentious issue. Everyone says, “where is the evidence that the indigenous people of Australia used acacia for its DMT?” Well, very few indigenous societies live in ignorance of the potentials of all their plants and animal species. They know the various abilities and potentials and properties of every single plant. You don’t live that in tune with the natural world without really knowing. Even through trial and error, over tens of thousands of years, allows a culture to experiment and discover. When you look at the Dreamtime, when you look at indigenous door art, when you hear the [inaudible 0:28:57], it resonates with the acacia experience so deeply that you just know.
From an anthropological perspective, the colonization of Australia was just a genocide and through that, we dismantled knowledge. But even within those intact cultures, prior to colonization, knowledge of a psychoactive compound like DMT would have been kept very secret because of its power. You wouldn’t be transmitting that knowledge to everyone in the group and the tribe because it dilutes the power. It’s kept for initiation. The knowledge of how to work with those plants that contain DMT would have been learned over an entire lifetime. Whether that’s a shamanistic society that chooses someone or someone appears to be chosen for the shamanic path and is then initiated from a young age, or every member of the tribe is initiated at a certain age, say 14, via an acacia ritual to understand the Dreamtime stories that are told all the lives.
This is how a peyote ceremony works. It’s in the teenage years – they sit in a tipi and they drink the peyote, but that confirms to them the reality of the myths and legends they have been told, how the universe works, all the stories. It’s confirmation, like a Catholic confirmation. It’s proof and evidence that these things are real experientially, and not just stories we’ve been told as children. And so within the Australian indigenous culture, yes, this would have been kept very secret. It’d just be the wise old ones, the wise fellows that knew how to work with the plants and how to serve it to initiates.
And perhaps also from the distance and the geography of Australia, and the power dynamic of colonialism, we really didn’t make inroads into indigenous knowledge. I think, to our detriment, we ignored much of the knowledge of this land as somehow inferior due to this patriarchal nature of colonialism. But perhaps it’s a good thing that this knowledge is kept sacred. But then again, if it’s not transmitted through each generation, it disappears.
Steven: [0:31:44] Yeah, it’s certainly a theme across the globe that traditional cultures, like you say, they had like a shamanistic application of whether it’s DMT or other psychoactive plants – ayahuasca is obviously one of the better-known ones. It is a very, very deep and treasured ritual in the community and indigenous Australian culture is certainly known for its keeping knowledge and tradition sacred, but also its connection to the land.
Jef: [0:32:17] Yeah. It’s an oral tradition too. There’s power in an oral tradition or non-written tradition in that when you are given knowledge, the impetus to learn that and hold it, so that you can then pass it on, is so much more powerful because you’re not relying on written word and records, which can then lead to misinterpretation or reinterpretation, as we see with the Bible, and that sort of thing. It can lead to maybe laziness that you don’t need to remember as much. And then, again, a power dynamic comes in that only those that can read and write get to be guardians of the knowledge.
It’s not so much that it’s an oral tradition because it’s far more than that. It’s that, instead of writing, the land is the record. The stories are in the land, and the voices of the ancestors are in the land. It’s ideographic and pictographic. They can read the shapes of the stones and the river-ways, and they become mimetic markers/points of memory. So on initiation routes over many, many miles, they sit down next to a particular stone and be told a particular story, and they can revisit that with their children, and that stone becomes the memory trigger for that piece of knowledge. So it is very much the land that is holding the knowledge and the people who are born of the land. We’re all born of the land.
Steven: [0:34:04] The indigenous Australian culture is one of the oldest surviving cultures in the world. Obviously, we know the South American traditions on the ayahuasca, we now know the Egyptian and Mesopotamian use of acacia and DMT, what are your thoughts on potentially these kinds of traditions maybe originating or somehow beginning from indigenous Australian origins?
Jef: [0:34:33] It’s all sort of predicated on the ‘Out of Africa’ theory, but Shamanism is the oldest religion. Anthropology has acknowledged that for a long time, that pretty much every society has at its core, at one point in time, a type of Shamanism. It gets a bit problematic in that the term shamanism/the word ‘shaman’ is taken from ‘Sami’, the Finnish word for that role in society. The anthropology of the Western academy then applied that term to every other culture that had a similar dynamic.
So, to call Southern American ayahuasca traditions shamanism is a little bit [inaudible 01:35:20] in that they have their own words for that role – Curandero/Curandera, Ayahuasquero, or whatever it might be, whatever plant that person works with. Tobaquero, if he’s working with tobacco.
So if you look at the ‘Out of Africa’ theory, where, supposedly, human origin branches out, comes down to Australia, and it goes up to the north, and then eventually across the Bering Strait when there was a land bridge, and down into America. The general consensus of that is that the new world is the colony of the Americas who are the most recently inhabited, other than the Pacific Islands and smaller countries, but one of the more recently inhabited continents. But the Americas have such a proliferation of psychoactive plants, particularly in South America and up into Mexico; such a diverse range of different plants with different psychoactive properties.
Steven: [0:36:19] It goes to the different tribes of Brazil and Peru, and they all have their different applications. It’s quite detailed, isn’t it?
Jef: [0:36:26] Yeah, even the diversity in ayahuasca traditions. The West sort of became aware of ayahuasca through rubber plantations and the rubber booms in the late 19th century and early 20th century, it was sort of two waves. But when they cleared land, they cleared rainforests, they brought the Indians/natives to work in the fields, they brought Spanish settlers to work in the fields, and the Mestizo populations in between that, and different tribes coming from very different areas of the Amazon to work in these plantations, usually in slave labor, I imagine. It was quite brutal. The rubber industry and the exploitation of resources there was essentially slavery. But they discovered, through communicating with each other, that they all were using this vine in different ways.
Some from further north were using the chaliponga for their source of DMT, which, by all experiential accounts, its seeds contain 5-MeO-DMT. Their mythology is very much one of lies, and stabbings. Whereas for the southern Peru, chekruna is the DMT admixture to the vine, which is much more colorful and full of spirits.
Back to the point; there was all these different tribes using the ayahuasca vine in different ways. And then, when we get up through into the Western discovery of psychedelics and interest and people like Burroughs and Ginsberg going down to the Amazon, Burroughs going to the Amazon in the early 80s and some of these early pioneers in the 60s going, “oh, what is this ayahuasca?” and going down to the jungle and –
Steven: [0:38:24] It’s only that recent isn’t it that they –
Jef: [0:38:25] It’s very recent, yeah. And then as that gets written about, it gets into this public consciousness, the public psyche, and then more and more people start going and looking for it. And so by the 90s, you almost have this industry arising to cater for Westerners looking ayahuasca. And we’ve seen various waves since then, of it growing and growing and growing. Now, every other sort of American sitcom has some sort of sly reference to ayahuasca, “oh, I’m doing ayahuasca this weekend…” so it’s sort of become this new age thing.
And so that drives an industry that therefore caters to Westerners’ expectations, and so the brews change. Because we’re a very visual culture, we want visual stimulus, everyone wants the visions and so they stopped putting more and more DMT with the vine and they started putting other things like brugmansia atropines, which can be very, very misused. It’s traditionally associated more with the sorcery side of things, and that’s really common in the ayahuasca traditions as well. In their own non-Western application of ayahuasca, there is a lot of sorcery going on – different shamans looking to gain power over others. Ayahuasca is often used to foresee coming events, to foresee what another tribe is doing, perhaps if they’re about to attack, or to find lost objects even. If someone’s lost their goats, he drinks some ayahuasca and see, “alright, they are over there in that field…” and sure, there they are.
So yeah, you get even the brew changing. And, obviously, there were songs developed around that, and they get transmitted through each ceremony. So it builds its own sort of culture, its own hybrid culture. It’s an extremely hybrid phenomenon.
Steven: [0:40:27] It’s amazing to think that what we know about it now is very, very recent and a very limited view of…
Jef: [0:40:37] There’s, I think, some archaeological evidence that traces ayahuasca back about 4000 years.
Steven: [0:40:46] Was it Yopo?
Jef: [0:40:47] Yeah, there’s the Yopo snuff from anadenanthera peregrina through and cebil and some other plants that have a compound of 5-MeO-DMT and N,N-DMT and mixed with herbal alkaloids and administered as a snuff. So essentially, for all intents and purposes, pharmacologically, ayahuasca is administered as a snuff, which is also very, very common throughout the Americas, the use of snuffs, we wrap our tobacco in snuffs.
And even very recently, I think was about three months ago/six months ago maybe, there was a discovery of a shaman’s pouch and it was made out of fox snouts. This was I think in northern Yucatán. Interestingly enough, a pouch with snuffs is made it out of snouts of a fox. But yeah, they found traces of caapi vine, and traces of DMZT, and little snuff tools, and bones.
Steven: [0:41:56] It goes back thousands of years. What really interests me is how globally endemic it is – two cultures seemingly separated but using the same process.
Jef: [0:42:10] Ayahuasca is the jungle, it’s the Amazon. You really didn’t find it outside of the jungle until Western discovery of it and spread of it. [inaudible 0:42:24] pretty much growing everywhere. You find ayahuascas in almost every city, every continent in the West anyway. And that’s also partly catalyzed by the religions that formed out of the rubber boom – Santo Daime, União do Vegetal. They formed and had leaders who were like, let’s protect this practice, at least create a space where people can gather and drink the plants and worship.
But I think they also created these religions as a way of safe keeping their practices from colonialism, as did the peyote churches and even the mushroom rituals. They adopted Christian iconography so that if the Conquistadores would come in and say, “what are you doing?” They outlawed the peyote and the psychoactive plants because it was seen as demonic and devilish. But if they would have sort of asked, “what are you doing?” “oh, we are just doing a Christian ritual because, hey, here is all this Christian iconography”. But also the power of conversion into that religion, and the fear of death. That sort of protected these practices to some extent.
And you find that the ayahuasca religion is incredibly syncretic. They’ve got aspects of African Bantu and Vodun and Brazilian. Brazil is a very diversely religious place anyway. But you see it in inside these ayahuasca churches – the really incredibly unique symbols and practices and ways of interpreting the ayahuasca experience.
Steven: [0:44:12] It’s fascinating like we kind of move on to how we’re seeing this play out now in this modern day with researchers starting to understand DMT. But really, it does seem like we need to go back and really understand what these ancient cultures knew and practiced about this. The diversity I think is just so much, there’s so much to be learned there, like you say, like all the different flavors and practices that people put towards it. What would you like to see in terms of how this plays out in the next few years?
Jef: [0:44:45] Well, it is playing out in so many different ways. As you said, we’ve got this wave of clinical research and corporations moving into that space to sort of profit off. So like [inaudible 0:45:02] MDMA as a daily pill like say, Prozac, it’s usually a one-off or a couple of sessions with a therapist, and so it’s contained within that therapeutic environment, but there’s still actors moving into that space looking to make money because this is happening. And, particularly in America, we have freedom of religion that protects a lot of the Ayahuasca churches there. There’s so many different ways, as you said.
I think what I’d like to see is the rebirth of modern mystery schools, not necessarily under the structure of religion, but a very open, safe place where people can go and consume these plants as sacraments in a safe space, be looked after in ceremonial environments, but are left to their own interpretation. That there’s no dogma, there’s no particular way of interpreting or navigating, the experience is left to the individual, but obviously, would have some protection around it legally as a legitimate spiritual practice.
Steven: [0:46:27] That’s interesting in terms of how it interfaces into modern society, and the legalization of these things happening now. So integration of safe spaces would definitely be a way because obviously the one big concern with all this is the safe application, right?
Jef: [0:46:45] Yeah, and people will still take it recreationally on their own, just out of curiosity, and perhaps might not be as safe as they could be. But this is just education, it’s the only thing we can really counter it with. It’s like everything, it’s like high-risk sports or whatever. You can’t just be protecting people against every possible risk that exists in the world. You’re hit by a bus, you outlaw buses, you just teach people to cross the road properly.
Steven: [0:47:15] The amazing thing about acacia and DMT is that it is so prevalent across nature. So it does seem like there is some application we should understand and know, right?
Jef: [0:47:23] Yes. And if everyone’s approaching it with different reasons, different intentions, there’s no real right or wrong, other than the fundamentals of safety and respect. The thing is, you approach these plants without respect, recklessly or carelessly, and they’ll teach you a lesson, they’ll teach you some respect.
I hear people saying, “oh, there’s no such thing as a bad trip, it’s just an experience to learn from”. Well, if you get your sitting wrong, that’s a bad trip. You might learn not to have huge amounts of mushrooms in the middle of the city or set it in the middle of something where it is not particularly safe. Yeah, so there can be such a thing as a bad trip where you just haven’t got hold of the elements right. So that’s just education, it’s all we can do. Teach people.
Steven: [0:48:18] Exactly. Education and understanding. And hopefully we do have this good understanding, building and cultivating these safe spaces. Jef, it’s been a pleasure!
Jef: [0:48:31] Yeah! I don’t think we really even got into the acacia too much, did we?
Steven: [0:48:345] It’s such a story, but I think we definitely will be diving into that again.
Jef: [0:48:41] Because, as we were saying, with the ayahuasca culture, by comparison, acacia use is far older. It was often just seen as a substitute for DMT plants used in ayahuasca in the Amazon, but I think now we are recognizing acacia as a true power plant in its own right, not as just an admixture substitute for Amazonian DMT plants.
Steven: [0:49:06] Yeah, that story in particular, we’ll definitely have to come back and revisit that one.
Jef: [0:49:11] I think so, yeah.
Steven: [0:49:13] As you said, it’s a deep topic. So we can jump into that one.
Jef: [0:49:16] Absolutely. And I think the time is really right for acacia to come into its own right now.
Steven: [0:49:22] Absolutely.
Jef: [0:49:22] Awesome. Thanks, Steven.
Steven: [0:49:24] All right. Thanks, Jef.
