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| Ayahuasca Ritual
Jardin Botanico Shuar People and Places Ayahuasca ritual Jardin Botanico Shuar Luis Polyglot San Agustin |
While visiting the
Shuar Botanical and Medicinal gardens in the upper Amazon
basin of Ecuador near the town of Puyo, we were fortunate enough to document and
take part in an Ayahuasca ceremony which the Shuar people have been practicing
100's of years. Ayahuasca is a natural and powerful hallucinogen created from a
combination of 7 different plants found within the botanical gardens. It takes an
entire day to make the mixture, from picking the plants to cooking the components
over a period of several hours until it is finally strained into a drinkable brown liquid.
The ritual took place in the early evening in a large bamboo hut on the grounds. Felipe acted as our "moderator," first talking about what we might experience and how to combat the ill effects which typically follow ingestion of the liquid. Before partaking, we snorted a liquified tobacco up our noses and Felipe's wife Rosa sprayed a great smelling herbal concoction all over us which has the effect of easing one into the hallucination or "trip." The results varied by susceptibility and amount of the ayahuasca or Yage ingested.
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