This adventure in science and imagination, which the Medical Tribune said might herald “a Copernican revolution for the life sciences,” leads the reader through unexplored jungles and uncharted aspects of mind to the heart of knowledge. In a first-person narrative of scientific discovery that opens new perspectives on biology, anthropology, and the limits of rationalism, The Cosmic Serpent reveals how startlingly different the world around us appears when we open our minds to it.

When National Geographic Adventure published an article in 2006 about the powerful antidepressant effects of Ayahuasca, the piece received a phenomenal reader response. That article struck a chord with psychotherapist Rachel Harris, who had encountered many clients unresponsive to traditional therapy and antidepressant protocols. Used for more than 8,000 years in the Amazon rainforest, Ayahuasca is a powerful — and illegal — psychedelic that has distressing gastrointestinal side effects. Yet Harris found many willing to try it, so deep was their suffering. Harris here shares her original research (the largest study of Ayahuasca use in North America) into its effects on depression, anxiety, and PTSD, along with her own personal experiences. By detailing Ayahuasca’s risks and benefits, she aims to help those driven to investigate Ayahuasca to do so safely and to give their psychological caregivers a template for transformative caring and healing.

A new collection of never-before-published paintings by renowned artist Pablo Amaringo

• With written contributions by Graham Hancock, Jeremy Narby, Robert Venosa, Dennis McKenna, Stephan Beyer, and Jan Kounen

• Contains 47 color plates of Amaringo’s latest works, with detailed narratives of the rich Amazonian mythology underlying each painting

• Shares Amaringo’s personal stories behind the artistic visions

Recognized as one of the world’s great visionary artists, Pablo Amaringo was renowned for his intricate, colorful paintings inspired by his shamanic visions. A master communicator of the Ayahuasca experience — where snakes, jaguars, subterranean beings, celestial palaces, aliens, and spacecraft all converge — Amaringo’s art presents a doorway to the transcendent worlds of Ayahuasca intended for contemplation, meditation, and inspiration.

Illustrating the evolution of his intricate and colorful art, this book contains 47 full-color reproductions of Amaringo’s latest works with detailed explorations of the rich Amazonian mythology underlying each painting. Through their longstanding relationship with Amaringo, coauthors Charing and Cloudsley are able to share the personal stories behind his visions and experiences with Amazonian people and folklore, capturing Amaringo’s powerful ecological and spiritual message through his art and words. With contributions by Graham Hancock, Jeremy Narby, Robert Venosa, Dennis McKenna, Stephan Beyer, and Jan Kounen, this book brings the Ayahuasca experience to life as we travel on Amaringo’s visionary brush and palette.

In the Upper Amazon, mestizos are the Spanish-speaking descendants of Hispanic colonizers and the indigenous peoples of the jungle. Some mestizos have migrated to Amazon towns and cities, such as Iquitos and Pucallpa; most remain in small villages. They have retained features of a folk Catholicism and traditional Hispanic medicine, and have incorporated much of the religious tradition of the Amazon, especially its healing, sorcery, shamanism, and the use of potent plant hallucinogens, including Ayahuasca. The result is a uniquely eclectic shamanist culture that continues to fascinate outsiders with its brilliant visionary art. Ayahuasca shamanism is now part of global culture. Once the terrain of anthropologists, it is now the subject of novels and spiritual memoirs, while Ayahuasca shamans perform their healing rituals in Ontario and Wisconsin. “Singing to the Plants” sets forth just what this shamanism is about — what happens at an Ayahuasca healing ceremony, how the apprentice shaman forms a spiritual relationship with the healing plant spirits, how sorcerers inflict the harm that the shaman heals, and the ways that plants are used in healing, love magic, and sorcery.

An insider’s account of the journey to become an ayahuasquero, a shaman who heals with the visionary vine Ayahuasca

• Details the author’s training and life as a curandero using Ayahuasca medicine, San Pedro cactus, tobacco purges, psychedelic mushrooms, and other visionary plants

• Offers first-hand accounts of miraculous healing where Ayahuasca revealed the cause of the illness, including how the author healed his mother from liver cancer

• Shows how “Ayahuasca tourism” symbolizes the Western world’s reawakening need to connect with the universal life force

For more than 20 years American-born Alan Shoemaker has apprenticed and worked with shamans in Ecuador and Peru, learning the traditional methods of Ayahuasca preparation, the ceremonial rituals for its use, and how to commune with the healing spirit of this sacred plant as well as the spirit of the San Pedro cactus and other sacred plant allies. Now a recognized and practicing ayahuasquero, or Ayahuasca shaman, in Peru, he offers an insider’s account of the Ayahuasca tradition and of its use for expanding consciousness and achieving healing through access to other dimensions of being.

Shoemaker details his training and his own curandero practice using Ayahuasca medicine, tobacco purges, psychedelic mushrooms, and other visionary plants. He discusses the different traditions of his two foremost teachers and mentors, Don Juan in the Peruvian Amazon, an ayahuasquero, and Valentin in Ecuador, a San Pedro shaman. He reveals the indispensable role played by icaros, the healing songs of the plant shaman, and offers firsthand accounts of miraculous healing resulting from Ayahuasca’s ability to reveal the cause of an illness, including how he healed his mother from liver cancer.

The author also addresses the rising popularity of Northerners traveling to the Amazon to seek healing and mind expansion through Ayahuasca and shows how this fascination is triggered by humanity’s reawakening need to connect to the universal life force.

Western medicine has not been particularly successful at getting people relief from conditions like depression, chronic pain, migraine headaches, addiction, and PTSD. Dr. Tafur helps us to understand why.

I have watched people spend years in frustration and thousands of dollars consulting an army of specialists, without getting real relief from their problem. Because these and others are diseases deeply connected with the state of our emotional bodies. Too often, the Western medical approach fails to address the emotional dimension of illness. This is where traditional plant medicines, with their ability to alter consciousness and open channels of communication to our emotions, offer so much promise.

The stories shared here demonstrate the astonishing-mystical, colorful, metaphysical-effects of Ayahuasca and Traditional Amazonian Plant Medicine. Follow Dr. Tafur through the Amazon jungle as he develops a breakthrough understanding of how psychoactive plants interact with the complex network that connects our minds and hearts to our physical anatomy. What Dr. Tafur presents here is nothing short of a paradigm shift for modern medicine, where sacred plants, used properly in ceremony, take their place as important tools in the doctor’s medicine chest, offering the missing elements of emotional and spiritual healing that have eluded us for so long.

A journey into the deeper workings of indigenous healing in the Amazon

• Explores the three pillars of Amazonian shamanism: purging, psychoactive plants, and diet

• Shares the experiences of apprenticing with an Ashaninca master shaman

• Reveals the intimate relationship between shamans and plant spirits

The Jaguar that Roams the Mind is a journey into the vanishing world of Amazonian shamanism — an adventure of initiation and return — that explores the unique reality at the heart of the Amazonian healing system. Robert Tindall shares his journeys through the inner and outer landscape of the churches of Ayahuasca and with the Kaxinawa Indians in Brazil; his experiences at the pioneering center for the treatment of addiction, Takiwasi, in Peru; and his studies with an Ashaninca master shaman deep in the rainforest jungle.

Moving beyond the scientific approach to medicinal plants, which seeks to reduce them to their chemical constituents, Tindall illustrates the shamans’ intimate relationships with plant spirits. He explores the three pillars of Amazonian shamanism: purging (drawing disease out of the body), psychoactive plants (including the ritual use of Ayahuasca), and diet (communing with the innate intelligence of teacher plants). Through trials and revelations, the subtle inner logic of indigenous healing unfolds for him, including the “miraculous” healing of a woman suffering from a brain tumor. Culminating in a ceremony fraught with terror yet ultimately enlightening, Tindall’s journey reveals the crucial component missing from the metaphysics of the West: the understanding and appreciation of the sentience of nature itself.

An exploration of the chemical, biological, psychological, and experiential dimensions of Ayahuasca

• Details the scientific discovery of Ayahuasca’s sophisticated psychoactive delivery system in the brain and body and its potential applications in medicine and psychology

• Includes contributions from Dennis J. McKenna, Ph.D., J. C. Callaway, Ph.D., and Charles S. Grob, M.D., on the ethnopharmacology, psychology, phytochemistry, and neuropharmacology of Ayahuasca

• Provides 24 firsthand accounts of Ayahuasca experiences and resulting life changes

Widely recognized by anthropologists as the most powerful and widespread shamanic hallucinogen, Ayahuasca has been used by native Indian and mestizo shamans in Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador for healing and divination for thousands of years. Made from the Amazonian vine Banisteriopsis caapi and the DMT-laden leaf of Psychotria viridis, Ayahuasca is regarded as the embodiment of intelligent plant beings who can offer spiritual teachings and healing knowledge to those who respectfully engage with them. Many Western-trained physicians and psychologists now acknowledge that Ayahuasca allows access to spiritual dimensions of consciousness, otherworldly realms and beings, and visionary experiences indistinguishable from classic religious mysticism.

With contributions from leading psychoactive scholars Dennis J. McKenna, Ph.D., Charles S. Grob, M.D., and J. C. Calloway, Ph.D., on the ethnopharmacology, psychology, phytochemistry, and neuropharmacology of Ayahuasca, Ralph Metzner provides a comprehensive exploration of the chemical, biological, psychological, and experiential dimensions of this Amazonian hallucinogen. He includes more than 20 firsthand accounts from people who have participated in Ayahuasca rituals and experienced major life changes as a result. He details the scientific discovery of Ayahuasca’s sophisticated psychoactive delivery system in the brain and body as well as the deep psychological impact of this potent entheogen. He concludes with his own findings on Ayahuasca, including its applications in medicine and psychology, and compares the worldview revealed by Ayahuasca visions to that of modern cultures.

An authoritative treatise on the use, history, culture, and art of the sacred plant medicine Ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is the strongest shamanic plant medicine. Brewed from the combination of the Amazonian vine, Banisteriopsis caapi, and leaves from the plant, Psychotria viridis, Ayahuasca creates sweeping visual and mentally startling effects. For many of the indigenous cultures of the Amazonian basin, Ayahuasca is central to their culture, revealing to mankind its role in the universe and the true nature of reality. Used properly, Ayahuasca provides healing and integration with nature and community and stimulates the creative process. The authors are recognized experts in the field of ethnology, anthropology and pharmacology and demonstrate the use of Ayahuasca in shamanic rituals. They dive deep into shamanic visionary worlds, explore the plants and their souls, and share their authentic encounters with Amazonian cultures and their artistic works.

Wizard of the Upper Amazon is an extraordinary document of the life among a tribe of South American Indians at the beginning of the 20th century. For many readers, the most compelling sections of the book will be the descriptions of the use of Banisteriopsis caapi, the Ayahuasca of the Amazon forests. This powerful hallucinogen has long been credited with the ability to transport human beings to realms of experience where telepathy and clairvoyance are commonplace. Manual Córdova, the narrator of these adventures is a well-known as a healer in Peru.