Ayahuasca as Liquid Divinity: An Ontological Approach (Studies in Comparative Philosophy and Religion) 9781666906448, 9781666906455, 1666906441

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Ayahuasca as Liquid Divinity

STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION Series Editor: Douglas Allen, University of Maine This series explores important intersections within and between the disciplines of religious studies and philosophy. These original studies will emphasize, in particular, aspects of contemporary and classical Asian philosophy and its relationship to Western thought. We welcome a wide variety of manuscript submissions, especially works exhibiting highly focused research and theoretical innovation. Recent Titles in This Series Ayahuasca as Liquid Divinity: An Ontological Approach, by André van der Braak Gandhi’s Global Legacy: Moral Methods and Modern Challenges, edited by Veena R. Howard Confucian and Stoic Perspectives on Forgiveness, by Sean McAleer Justice and Harmony: Cross-Cultural Ideals in Conflict and Cooperation, by Joshua Mason Chinese-Western Comparative Metaphysics and Epistemology: A Topical Approach, by Mingjun Lu Confucian Ritual and Moral Education, by Colin J. Lewis Exile and Otherness: The Ethics of Shinran and Maimonides, by Ilana Maymind Gandhi’s Thought and Liberal Democracy, by Sanjay Lal Plantingian Religious Epistemology and World Religions: Prospects and Problems, by Erik Baldwin and Tyler Dalton McNabb Three Pillars of Skepticism in Classical India: Nāgārjuna, Jayarāśi, and Śrī Harṣa, by Ethan Mills Dharma and Halacha: Comparative Studies in Hindu-Jewish Philosophy and Religion, edited by Ithamar Theodor and Yudit Kornberg Greenberg Philosophy of the Ancient Maya: Lords of Time, by Alexus McLeod

Ayahuasca as Liquid Divinity An Ontological Approach André van der Braak

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Braak, Andre van der, author.   Title: Ayahuasca as liquid divinity : an ontological approach / André van     der Braak.   Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2023] | Series: Studies in     comparative philosophy and religion | Includes bibliographical     references and index.  Identifiers: LCCN 2023007947 (print) | LCCN 2023007948 (ebook) | ISBN     9781666906448 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666906455 (ebook)   Subjects: LCSH: Ayahuasca ceremony. | Latour, Bruno. | Metaphysics.  Classification: LCC BL65.D7 B695 2023  (print) | LCC BL65.D7  (ebook) | DDC     204/.2--dc23/eng20230415  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023007947 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023007948 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Preface vii Introduction

1

PART ONE: AYAHUASCA‌‌‌‌

25

Chapter 1: Making Sense of Ayahuasca in the West Chapter 2‌‌‌‌‌: Latour’s Experimental Metaphysics Chapter 3: Reimagining Ayahuasca



55



81

PART TWO: AYAHUASCA RELIGIOSITY



Chapter 4: Religiosity as Engaging with Beings of Religion Chapter 5: Santo Daime Religiosity as Theurgy Chapter 6: Facing Gaia Through Ayahuasca Conclusion



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125 153 187

205

Bibliography Index

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211

223

About the Author



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v

Preface

The Western religious landscape is transforming rapidly. The very meaning of being religious is shifting, for many, from being exclusively affiliated with one of the fixed and bounded entities called “world religions” to feeling at home with and using the resources of a wide array of religious traditions.1 The boundaries between religion, psychology, and art are becoming fuzzy. Being religious is for many no longer about having religious beliefs, following the religious law, or being baptized, but rather about committing to transformative practices of meaning-making. Since the Sixties, many in the West have embraced non-Western religious traditions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Daoism, and have committed themselves to the various religious practices that these traditions offer, such as meditation, yoga, tai chi, and qigong. Lately, this religious diversity is even more increasing due to the growing interest in shamanic traditions from the Amazon that use the psychoactive tea ayahuasca in a sacramental way, either as a sacrament or as a sacred medicine. Many people feel they have to try this magical tea from the Amazon. They come back with stories about life-transforming experiences, healed diseases, and deeply meaningful new insights. As a comparative philosopher of religion, I notice a shift in my students. When I teach my undergraduate course “Spirituality Today,” and I tell them about Zen and yoga in the West, they nod politely. However, when we start talking about ayahuasca religiosity in the West, they truly become alive. They all seem to know someone who has taken ayahuasca, or they are thinking to try it themselves one day. Some students do even have some personal experience with ayahuasca. However, they all are at a loss to understand it. This interest in ayahuasca has captured my interest as a researcher of new forms of religiosity in the West. During much of my life, I have been fascinated with the encounter between Western modernity and non-Western religiosity, both as a practitioner and a scholar. After having been raised as a Roman Catholic, I encountered the writings of the Indian freethinker Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) and became a dedicated Buddhist meditation vii

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practitioner in 1981. As a philosophy student in the Eighties, I wrote my thesis on Nietzsche and the Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna, while intensively practicing Vipassana meditation and doing ten-day intensive meditation retreats. However, after graduating in both philosophy and psychology in 1986, I felt that my academic projects were dead ends. I was focusing on the menu rather than eating the cake. In 1987 I met the American spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen, who claimed to be transmitting the living realization of enlightenment of his Indian Advaita Vedanta teacher H. W. L. Poonja (in the tradition of Ramana Maharshi). Here I felt I could taste the cake. I ended up spending eleven years in Cohen’s spiritual community, first in Boston, then in Marin County, and finally in Amsterdam. However, in 1998 I left his community with a bad case of spiritual indigestion, disillusioned by the many dysfunctional mechanisms which led to an increasingly authoritarian sectarian community.2 After leaving Cohen, I went back to academic research. As a comparative philosopher, I continued my research into building bridges between Western and Asian thinkers. Starting in 2000, I became a practitioner in the Buddhist Zen tradition and studied the writings of the Japanese Zen master Dōgen (1200–1253). This resulted in a Ph.D. thesis on Nietzsche and Buddhism in 2004, and a book on Nietzsche and Zen in 2011.3 In my Zen practice, my deepening appreciation of the Chinese female bodhisattva Guanyin (the embodiment of compassion) led to a renewed heart connection with the Virgin Mary of my Roman Catholic upbringing. I started praying the rosary again, in combination with my Zen shikan taza practice. In 2013, I received dharma transmission from my Zen teacher Ton Lathouwers, and I have been working as a Zen teacher since. Since 2013, I have led an academic research project on the increasingly popular phenomenon of multiple religious belonging and “fluid” religiosity. People combine elements of various religious traditions, unhindered by any compulsion to remain faithful to any particular tradition, or even to self-identify as “religious” at all. Such “spiritual but not religious” people defy all traditional conceptions of a “solid” religiosity that takes place in the context of one of the world religions. The emergence of such new types of religiosity outside traditional confessional frameworks continues to be endlessly fascinating for me. In my previous book, Reimagining Zen in a Secular Age, I have written about the history of the complex encounter of Asian Buddhist traditions with Western modernity over the past hundred and fifty years.4 Many of the same processes and trends that I described in this encounter also play a role in the transmission of ayahuasca religiosity from the Amazon to the West. However,

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other than the transmission of Buddhist religiosity, the transmission of ayahuasca religiosity is only just beginning. In this book, I want to apply what I have learned as a philosopher of religion about contemporary new forms of religiosity to ayahuasca religiosity. It is an experimental book that explores ontological questions that arise out of the religious use of ayahuasca. When writing this book, I gradually began to realize that it should not only contain philosophical explorations of speaking about what ayahuasca is and what it does. It should also reflect what ayahuasca is said to point to: the responsibility for helping to create new forms of thinking and being that will contribute to confronting the great problems of our time, such as climate change and diminishing biodiversity. As the Zen tradition is fond of saying, we should not focus on the finger (ayahuasca) that points to the moon but on the moon itself. In this book, I attempt to be a philosophical diplomat, bridging gaps between various approaches to ayahuasca (secular versus religious, Western versus indigenous, scholar versus practitioner), and looking for a new language to speak about ayahuasca as liquid divinity. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book couldn’t have been completed without the help of the many friends and colleagues who have encouraged me to persevere in this challenging effort. I thank the many ayahuasca practitioners who were willing to speak to me about their experiences. Also, Jan Willem Houthoff, Hans Gerding, Bill Barnard, Marc Blainey, Govert Derix, Helle Kaasik, Angela Roothaan, Willie van Alst, and Ivar Brinkman all read the manuscript and gave very helpful comments. Especially my discussions with Bill Barnard have helped very much to make this a better book. They have greatly stimulated me to think things through more thoroughly, and to find my own voice. Thanks to Alexia Worthington-Blount, one of my master students at the Vrije Universiteit, for her many questions about the manuscript that were very helpful to me. Alexia critically engaged with the manuscript in her M.A.‌‌‌‌‌ Thesis. The students of the Comparative Philosophy course at Amsterdam University College, as well as co-teacher Mariette Willemsen, read the Bruno Latour chapter of this manuscript and gave many helpful comments and suggestions for improving it. In September 2022, I was able to give two talks on this book, at the University of Tartu in Estonia and at the International Conference on Psychedelic Research in Haarlem, which helped me to find the right tonality for this book. Many thanks to the academic colleagues at the Dutch psychedelic research network Indegeest [In the Spirit] and the Dutch OPEN

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Foundation. But mostly my thanks go out to Muriel Boutreur, my partner and ally, for her constant support, encouragement, as well as critical questioning. We have spent countless hours discussing this whole project in all its aspects. This book wouldn’t have been born without her. NOTES 1. This phenomenon is called multiple religious belonging, spiritual but not religious, or religious flexibility or fluidity. I researched this phenomenon in a six-year research project at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. See André van der Braak and Manuela Kalsky, eds., “Multiple Religious Belonging, thematic issue,” Open Theology 3/1 (2017). 2. I documented my experiences in my spiritual memoir Enlightenment Blues: My Years with an American Guru (Rhinebeck, NY: Monkfish Publishing, 2003). 3. André van der Braak, Nietzsche and Zen: Self-overcoming Without a Self (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011). 4. André van der Braak, Reimagining Zen in a Secular Age: Charles Taylor and Zen Buddhism in the West (Leiden: Brill Publishing, 2020).

Introduction

Today, the West is increasingly witnessing the rise of a new set of contemplative practices that center around the use of ayahuasca. Such practices have originated in the various indigenous cultures from the Amazonian area in Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador.1 However, over the past decades a “world ayahuasca diaspora” is taking place in which ayahuasca is becoming increasingly well known worldwide.2 In addition to countless neo-shamans leading ayahuasca ceremonies in many countries, Brazilian ayahuasca religions such as Santo Daime and União do Vegetal (UDV) have spread out all over the world.3 Whereas backpackers in the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties of the past century traveled to India or Nepal in search of spiritual enlightenment, they now increasingly travel to the Amazon to seek illumination and wisdom through deep communion with nature. Is the mystical enlightenment of the East being superseded as an ideal by the deep ecological wisdom of the South?4 A true ayahuasca renaissance is taking place in the West, a shared result of both a growing ecological interest in Amazonian cultures and a psychedelic renaissance marked by an increase in the research into and use of psychedelic substances. The West is now flooded with neo-shamans who preach the gospel of ayahuasca, promising oneness with nature as the source of new wisdom that will save the earth. Sociologist Colin Campbell has argued that an “Easternization of the West” has been taking place since the Sixties: Western religiosity is increasingly influenced by what Max Weber described as the ideal type of Eastern religion: not a personal creator God, but an impersonal divine force; no fixed separation between the sacred and the secular, between immanence and transcendence.5 Perhaps today, we can also speculate about a “Southernization of the North.” These days, the global momentum seems to be shifting from the earlier thinking in terms of East-West dialogue (creating bridges between the Western philosophical tradition of being and the East Asian traditions of nonbeing or emptiness) to thinking in terms of a North-South dialogue (creating 1

2

Introduction

bridges between the philosophical traditions of developed, individualist, and technology-oriented‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌ Northern countries in Europe and the US and the indigenous traditions of more community-oriented cultures that exist on all continents, and that are most well known today through, for instance, classical Chinese spirituality, African communalism, and Latin American solidarity movements).6 The American anthropologist Sophia Rokhlin describes the encounter between Amazonian ayahuasca and Western modernity with the concept of the edge, derived from permaculture: The edge describes the place where two distinct ecosystems meet. These are places of tension and unfamiliarity, territories of confrontation, where different ecosystems overlap and merge. The edge is found where a grassland meets a forest, where oceans reach the shore, where wetlands mediate between river basins and fields. Edges are hot spots of biodiversity that invite innovation, intermingling, and new forms of cooperation from various species. Edge realms are thresholds of potential and fecundity.7

This book is about this “edge” as it is emerging due to the encounter of Amazonian ayahuasca with secular Western modernity. How can we philosophically inquire into the meeting of two such different ecosystems? This encounter also leads to a diversity of various forms of ayahuasca religiosity that invites ontological innovation and religious intermingling. It is also a threshold of potential and fecundity. AYAHUASCA Ayahuasca is a psychoactive (mind-altering) drink that is prepared with two plants from the Amazon region. The base is the vine of the Banisteriopsis caapi plant. This is supplemented with the leaves of the Psychotria viridis plant which contain the psychoactive substance DMT (dimethyltryptamine).8 DMT is broken down in the stomach and liver by so-called monoamine oxidase (MAO) enzymes. These enzymes function, as it were, as a safety brake that prevents DMT from transforming consciousness in such a way that daily human functioning is affected by it. While the leaves of the Psychotria viridis plant contain DMT, the Banisteriopsis caapi harmalines function as MAO inhibitors. They ensure that the DMT in ayahuasca is not broken down in the stomach and liver by the MAO enzymes. In this way, ayahuasca can be said to take the body off the brake. Since ayahuasca contains DMT, it is often framed as similar to psychedelic substances such as LSD, MDMA (the active ingredient in ecstasy), or

Introduction

3

psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms). However, ayahuasca is mainly used in a ceremonial context, whereas LSD, MDMA, and psilocybin have been well known in the West for their recreational use, either at parties or by oneself, to feel better or have an interesting experience. What is especially popular today is their medical-therapeutical use. These substances indeed have great potential as medicines that can help with disorders such as depression, addiction, PTSD, and so on. However, the use of ayahuasca is mostly not primarily aimed at having a good time or solving a particular medical condition. It may very well be that when people take ayahuasca, they don’t have a good time, because drinking ayahuasca can be very challenging and demanding. This is because ayahuasca contains not only the psychoactive substance DMT but also various bioactive harmines and harmalines. Therefore, whereas psychedelics are often used in a recreational mode, recreational use of ayahuasca is fairly rare because of its bioactive effects which include nausea, diarrhea, extreme fatigue, and dizziness. Drinking ayahuasca can be hard work. Whereas ayahuasca ceremonies may yield, in the right set and setting, beautiful experiences of mysticism and joy, they may also include periods of confrontation with great suffering, not only on a personal level but also that of others and even that of the entire planet. The psychoactive effects of ayahuasca include so-called “altered [or rather, “alternate”] states of consciousness.”9 However, as with psychedelics, the psychoactive effects of ayahuasca can vary widely. This is related to the theory of set and setting: both the experienced psychoactive effects and their interpretation are determined not only by the pharmacological properties of the substance, but to a large extent by individual variables (the set: expectations, previous experiences, beliefs and motivation) and contextual variables (the setting: both immediate factors, such as the location, atmosphere, or companionship, and wider factors such as cultural and social context and worldview).10 The ayahuasca experience can be very immersive and overwhelming. As Glenn Shepard notes: “The ayahuasca experience defies ordinary notions of causality, space, time, and logic. Indeed, in its intensity and fundamental strangeness, the ayahuasca experience can feel like the cognitive equivalent of the far side of a black hole, spewing out new space-time tunnels and parallel universes with utter disregard for the laws of cognition, if not physics itself.”11 It is perhaps this intensity of the ayahuasca experience, he adds, that calls for “the structuring powers of ritual, ideology, and social control to impose order, provide meaning, and even extract advantage from the boiling foam of ecstasy.”12 This is why ayahuasca is mostly consumed in a contemplative and ceremonial setting. Ayahuasca ceremonies usually take place in groups of between five and twenty-five people, sometimes in groups of more than a hundred people. Meetings usually take place in the evening and

4

Introduction

at night, and last between three and seven hours. The ayahuasca experience has several phases. Inner explorations can be accompanied by emotional pain, often accompanied by purging. The ceremony is often accompanied by music, although work is also done in silence. People often come out of an ayahuasca ceremony at a loss to describe what just happened. Ayahuasca gives us transformative experiences that we don’t know how to talk about. People say, “I don’t know what just happened. I am completely overwhelmed.” But it does change them in some way. However, it is not easy to talk about such experiences. I’m not even sure whether the term “spiritual experiences” does justice to it. People say such things as, “I did an ayahuasca ceremony and now I don’t know who I am anymore. And I don’t even know what’s real or not real anymore. I have to put it all in question. I used to be an atheist, but now I’m not so sure anymore.” All their convictions are shaken up. I call this “ontological shock.” All familiar philosophical oppositions—the sacred and the secular, transcendence and immanence, subject and object, and even the human and the nonhuman—tend to fall away. Things become more fluid and fuzzy. When we look into the meaning of ayahuasca experiences, we encounter fundamental questions: What are our assumptions about the nature of reality? Which kind of entities do we allow to exist? And what types of existence do we allow? What are the fundamental distinctions that we make between the natural and the supernatural, the subject and the object, and the human and the nonhuman? What is the nature of ayahuasca? Does it have agency? Can spirit plants communicate with humans? This book will address such questions. AYAHUASCA RELIGIOSITY Despite all the hype around ayahuasca, I read about very few people in the West that have adopted a committed ayahuasca contemplative practice as a way of life. This matches my experience as a Buddhist Zen teacher: in spite of the hype around mindfulness, there are few people that embrace Buddhist meditation practice as part of a committed Buddhist path. This book will distinguish between incidental users of ayahuasca and committed ayahuasca practitioners.13 Whereas ayahuasca users often approach it as a tool, ayahuasca practitioners see their engagement with ayahuasca as part of a contemplative practice. They are not focused on only ayahuasca experiences, but consecrate ayahuasca as a sacrament or sacred medicine in order to meet with it again and again, in order for transformative encounters to take place. This book is about such committed ayahuasca contemplative practice in the West: I have chosen to call it “ayahuasca religiosity.”

Introduction

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Such an ayahuasca religiosity first of all takes place within the various ayahuasca religions that have emerged, due to various political and historical factors, from the beginning of the twentieth century in Brazil.14 The most internationally known of these are Santo Daime, founded by Raimundo Irineu Serra (1890–1971, known as Master Irineu) in the Thirties, and the União do Vegetal (UDV), founded by Jose Gabriel da Costa (1922–1971, known as Master Gabriel) in 1961.15 Since the Eighties, both these religions have spread throughout Brazil and the world. However, next to these two ayahuasca religions, there is also a great variety in (neo)shamanic ceremonies that have traveled from Latin America to the West. Such ceremonies are usually led by Latin American indigenous shamans (also called curanderos [healers] or vegetalistas) or by Western disciples who (claim to) have been trained in these indigenous traditions. This book frames such ayahuasca ceremonies as “religious” as well. The term “religion” has become very contested among scholars of religion and has acquired many negative connotations from the public at large, including many participants in ayahuasca ceremonies. They often have a strong response to the term “religion,” which they reject as being about dogmatic belief in God or Allah. They may call themselves “spiritual but not religious.” When I ask these people during (neo)shamanic ayahuasca ceremonies whether they are doing something religious, they almost look at me in horror. Of course, what they are doing is not religious, they say. They may even add they are against religion. However, I feel that a properly contextualized use of this term is actually quite helpful and illuminating (more so than, for example, “spirituality” or “mysticism”). It is important how we frame engagement with ayahuasca. As philosophical hermeneutics emphasizes, words and labels do matter very much. A religious set and setting change the effect of ayahuasca in important ways. It allows for transformative encounters to take place. And when we describe the religious use of ayahuasca as being about spiritual experiences and spiritual transformation (which also includes healing) it is clear that this is what most ayahuasca practitioners are involved in. The term “religion” is sometimes said to come from the Latin religare, which means “to reconnect.” People that are religious want to reconnect, to the world, to others, to nature. This book will approach religion not as being about believing in something, but as being about participating in ritual practices that aim at cultivating connection with more-than-human powers. It considers ayahuasca ceremonies “religious” (rather than merely therapeutic) to the extent that they aim at cultivating relationships with such more-than-human powers. This is a long way from the old way of defining “religious” as having a set of creedal beliefs in the existence of “supernatural beings.”

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Introduction

AN ONTOLOGICAL APPROACH Whereas anthropologists and sociologists have amply described the social, historical, and cultural context of ayahuasca religiosity,16 particularly that of Santo Daime,17 there have been relatively few philosophical studies on ayahuasca religiosity.18 The discipline of philosophy of religion is gradually expanding beyond its Eurocentric focus on theistic questions (Does God exist? Is He omnipotent and omniscient?) to a broader interreligious and transreligious‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌ focus that also includes non-Western religions and nonaffiliated religiosity, and that is asking questions about transformative experiences and practices rather than merely about religious doctrine.19 This book argues that the ontological categories of Western modernity are too restrictive in the kind of entities that they allow to exist, and that the dialogue with indigenous spirit ontologies that is taking place in contemporary ayahuasca religiosity points to the need for a more liquid ontology that allows room for the existence of more-than-human entities, powers or energies that have traditionally been described as divine beings. My main argument will be that, in a religious set and setting, ayahuasca offers us noncognitive, embodied, and aesthetic access to such more-than-human powers that are reflected in various forms of visionary and mystical experience. Enactive and embodied ritual ayahuasca practices serve to activate the presence of such powers, learn to communicate with them, and learn to work with them for the greater good, out of solidarity with all sentient beings, both human and more-than-human. The ontological approach in this book is sympathetic to what has been called “the ontological turn,” as described by Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen for cultural anthropology, and by Jorge Ferrer and Jacob Sherman for religious studies.20 The ontological turn asks ontological questions without accepting any particular substantive ontology as an answer. It prefers to keep the ontological horizon open. It is not concerned with what the “really real” nature of the world is. We must not limit the horizon of our inquiry into ayahuasca by assuming in advance some kind of ultimate reality or essence. One of ayahuasca’s often-reported effects is ontological shock: it radically breaks through our ontological frameworks, over and over again. The traditional challenges in anthropology (such as those of ethnocentrism and orientalism) have been epistemological: is it possible to take off the socially, culturally, and politically tinted glassed through which we must necessarily see the world?21 Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski formulated the anthropological challenge as finding a way to “grasp the native’s point of view.”22 Applied to the study of ayahuasca religiosity, this would mean finding out the meaning-making processes of ayahuasca practitioners themselves.

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And recent studies of Santo Daime practitioners (daimistas), for example those of Dawson, Blainey, and Barnard, dedicate themselves to this task in a very commendable way, following a range of approaches.23 One of the great shifts of the thinkers of the ontological turn, however, is that they focus not on epistemological problems of meaning-making, but on ontological problems: The epistemological problem of how one sees things is turned into the ontological question of what there is to be seen in the first place. Accordingly, what ultimately tints the anthropologist’s glasses are not social, cultural, political or other presuppositions, but ontological ones, by which we mean basic commitments and assumptions about what things are, and what they could be. . . . The ontological turn is not so much a matter of “seeing differently,” in other words. It is above all a matter of seeing different things.24

The ontological turn, therefore, involves a basic reversal in the understanding of the problem of tinted glasses. It is not our Western presuppositions that prevent us from “grasping the native’s point of view” on the same reality that we both inhabit; it is our ontological assumption of this shared reality that is problematic. We don’t need a better or more inclusive grasp on reality; we need to allow ourselves to be grasped by realities that may escape our current ontologies, by keeping open the question of what ultimately exists. Rather than striving to grasp the native’s point of view, we should try to overcome what we already (think to) grasp about our research subject, in order to better be grasped by it.25 Similarly, my goal is not to enable readers to grasp ayahuasca, but to allow them to overcome what they already think they know about it, in order to better be grasped by ayahuasca. This book uses the “experimental metaphysics” of the French philosopher, sociologist, and anthropologist Bruno Latour (1947–2022) to find a new language to do justice to the inescapable liquidity of what occurs in ayahuasca religiosity.26 What happens is always co-determined and co-constructed by set and setting, by both the practices and beliefs of ayahuasca practitioners and the ritual context of the ceremony. My aim is to move from “how things are with ayahuasca” (a single absolute truth about what is “really real” about ayahuasca) to “how things could be with ayahuasca” (showing how ayahuasca could open up various ontological worlds and multiple possible modes of existence).27 Rather than this book being a project of advocating for religious ayahuasca traditions from the inside out, or advancing historical-empirical knowledge with regard to religious ayahuasca traditions from the outside in, I follow the American religion scholar Jeffrey Kripal in attempting to be one of these “scholars who imaginatively allow their own worldviews to be turned ‘inside-out’ by the traditions, even as they turn the traditions ‘insideout’ through critical theory and rational discourse.”28

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Introduction

This study will follow the ontological turn in its three interrelated methodological practices of self-reflexivity, conceptualization, and experimentation.29 Self-reflexivity refers to perpetually keeping the ontological horizon open, in order to leave room for generating new ways of thinking—or to reconsider previously discarded old ways of thinking. In this study, two of such discarded old ways of thinking will be picked up again: the imagination as a constructive faculty rather than mere fantasy and illusion, and theurgy as a way to think about working with more-than-human powers. As Holbraad and Pedersen note, “Conceptualization . . . is the trademark of the ontological turn just as, say, ‘explanation’ epitomizes positivist approaches and that of ‘interpretation’ typifies hermeneutic ones.”30 This study does not aim to merely explain the workings of ayahuasca (although it will discuss various possible explanations), or to merely interpret ayahuasca experiences (although it will discuss various interpretations). It aims to find new conceptual approaches to ayahuasca by opening up (or liquifying) established concepts such as “agency,” “spirit,” or “reality,” and explore new concepts such as “modes of existence,” “beings of religion,” “entanglement,” “participation,” “theurgy,” and “Gaia” that can be more cross-culturally inclusive and productive. Such concepts are hermeneutical tools rather than reflections of what the world is really like. The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur has distinguished between two modes of interpreting religion in religious studies: the hermeneutics of recollection (popular in theology and phenomenology of religion), which assumes that religious practitioners are in touch with something real, and the hermeneutics of suspicion (popular in social scientific approaches to religion), which favors reductionist naturalistic explanations of religion because it denies that there is a divine reality in religion.31 Philosopher of religion D. Z. Phillips has argued that the task of the philosopher of religion is not to be for or against religion, but to understand it. Both the hermeneutics of recollection and the hermeneutics of suspicion have certain methodological assumptions that stand in the way of an inquiry into religion. Phillips proposes a hermeneutics of contemplation that attempts to do conceptual justice to religious beliefs and practices without advocating personal acceptance of such beliefs and practices.32 This study aims to avoid both the hermeneutics of suspicion and recollection and stay within a hermeneutics of contemplation. OVERVIEW OF CHAPTERS The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 (chapters 1, 2, and 3) focuses on reimagining ayahuasca. Part 2 (chapters 4, 5, and 6) focuses on finding a new language for ayahuasca religiosity.

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From a perspective of philosophical hermeneutics, when we try to understand something, it is very important how we frame it. Chapter 1, Making Sense of Ayahuasca in the West, surveys how ayahuasca has been framed so far: as a hallucinogenic drug, a psychedelic substance; an entheogen that awakens the divine within; or, more recently, as an ecodelic plant teacher that brings about an awareness of the interconnectedness of humans and nonhumans.33 Such understandings are always embedded in wider discourses about ayahuasca. Several discourses have arisen that frame in different ways what ayahuasca is and what it does. These are always inevitably influenced by what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has called “the immanent frame”: the seemingly self-evident secular context that underlies Western worldviews. The immanent frame divides reality into a common natural, immanent order (the domain of scientific research) and an optional transcendent, supernatural order (the domain of those who choose to be religious believers).34 This is most obvious in the secular drug discourse on ayahuasca, often used by law enforcement agencies, which frames ayahuasca negatively as a harmful pharmacological substance that causes random hallucinations. More recently, medical discourses frame ayahuasca more positively as a cognitive tool. Religious framings of ayahuasca can be found in two influential discourses. The first is the discourse of psychedelic mysticism, which is well known from since the Sixties. According to this discourse, ayahuasca brings about a process of ego-loss (or even ego-death), an expansion of consciousness, and mystical experiences of oneness with ultimate reality.35 The discourse of entheogenic shamanism, which became popular in the Eighties, is used to talk about ayahuasca in a ceremonial context. This discourse often frames ayahuasca as a plant teacher, a sacrament, or a sacred medicine that offers visions, spiritual teachings, and encounters with spirits and visits to spirit worlds. It talks about encountering such spirits and engaging with them. It sees ayahuasca experiences not so much as mystical realizations of oneness with ultimate reality but as journeys to other realities.36 This is not a mystical language of expanding your consciousness and becoming one with reality, but a shamanic language about engaging with spirits and finding your way within the wider web of plants, animals, humans, and spirits. Both discourses agree that ayahuasca diminishes a particular sense of self that Charles Taylor calls “the buffered self.” This acts as a buffer between the inner and the outer world, defending the inner world against threats from this outer world. It functions as an enclosed inner space. That is the modern Western self-experience. Taylor argues that in the Middle Ages, people had a very different self-experience, a “porous” or transparent self. The whole world was full of spirits, and one always had to be careful to defend oneself

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against evil spirits. Somehow, ayahuasca’s ontological shock returns us to such a porous or liquid self, and the buffered self retreats.‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌ Chapter 2, Latour’s Experimental Metaphysics, introduces the methodological guide on our philosophical journey. Bruno Latour might have the dubious honor of being the most famous philosopher that people have never heard of. He is the most often cited philosopher of Europe, yet he remains fairly unknown to the general public. Latour became famous with his early studies on science and technology, in which he demonstrated that scientific facts are not simply discovered but are always constructed in the laboratory. In his 1993 book We Have Never Been Modern, he argues that Western modernity is not the inevitable destination of world history, but merely a brief interlude in Western history that started around the time of Descartes, and is now way past its expiration date.37 Latour criticizes what he calls “the Modern Constitution,” an implicit set of philosophical assumptions that divide reality into the separate domains of Nature and Culture, into external objects and internal subjects, into transcendence and immanence, and into the human and the nonhuman. Also, he claims that although we endorse this Constitution in our thinking, we don’t really live by it. Therefore, although we call ourselves “modern,” we are not, and have never been, modern. As an alternative to this Modern Constitution, Latour proposes to approach reality as an actor-network, in which both human and nonhuman actors act in mutual entanglement: his Actor-Network Theory.38 Due to these early studies, Latour acquired the reputation of being one of those postmodern French deconstruction‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌ thinkers that argue that everything is socially constructed. However, Latour stresses that although facts are always fabricated, the question is: are they constructed well or badly? Not all constructions are of the same quality. Some of them are more real. Latour has always argued that he is not only a constructivist but also a realist. In his later work, starting with An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, he has emphasized ontological issues.39 Through his ontological works, Latour has been one of the inspirators of the ontological turn. He sees himself as a philosophical diplomat, mediating the conversation between Western and non-Western ontologies. According to Latour, when Westerners think about ontology, they usually acknowledge only two kinds of existence: the objective outer world and the subjective inner world (some people might acknowledge a third kind of existence, that of God, but that is optional). For Latour, there are many more ways in which things can exist. He calls those ways “modes of existence.” In An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, he differentiates fifteen different ways in which things can exist. We have to think about existence in a more nuanced way. It might not be that, for example, spirits either exist or don’t exist. Maybe they only exist when they are being called. We need to be more

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creative in imagining how things may exist. We need a more expansive language. When you have a broader ontological view, you can see the matter in a more nuanced way. Latour argues that, although there seems to be an external world made up of stable objects, which is experienced by an inner subject, the world is more fruitfully approached as consisting of various types of actors that can exist in actor-networks in multiple modes. There are no stable subjects; our interiorities are continually being constituted by what Latour calls “beings of transformation.” These are like plugins that install themselves in us. They both constitute and transform human subjectivity. And not only are there no real subjects, but there also are no real permanent objects. In Latour’s actor-network, the world becomes an ongoing construction site where various types of actors continually interact. Latour rejects the Modern epistemology of representation, according to which we have minds that somehow mirror and reflect an outer world of objects, that yields various “representations” that populate our experiences. According to this model, ayahuasca would give us special “spiritual experiences” filled with representations of objects from higher, spiritual, worlds. Latour rejects the existence of such higher spiritual worlds. For him, knowledge is always co-constructed and participatory. The world is always “in the making,” a joint effort between the various actors within us and outside us. There is not only no ultimate foundation for reality, but there is also no ultimate foundation for “us.” But how to talk about such a world “in the making”? This is where Latour’s modes of existence come in. Each mode has its own preposition, its own way of being approached. Latour writes not only about “beings of transformation” that exist in their own ontological mode, but also about “beings of religion” that are capable of radically transforming us. Latour is not only a secular thinker but also a Roman Catholic who studied theology. Latour’s notion of beings of religion allows us to reimagine ayahuasca as a boundary being that can serve as a conduit and facilitator of transformative encounters with beings of transformation and religion. This chapter shows how Latour’s modes of existence can be diplomatically used to further dialogue between Western and indigenous ontologies.40 Armed with Latour’s diplomatic toolkit, Chapter 3, Reimagining Ayahuasca, explores the nature of ayahuasca in terms of what it is and what it does. This chapter will first combine various understandings of ayahuasca (as a cognitive tool, as a plant teacher, and as liquid divinity) into a new Latourian entangled discourse on what ayahuasca is. It will then discuss several possible answers to the question of what ayahuasca does: it produces visionary experiences, it shifts the boundaries between subject and object, it empowers the imagination, and it dissolves the ego in mystical-type experiences.

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Introduction

The next section critically re-evaluates some aspects of the discourses of psychedelic mysticism and entheogenic shamanism, such as the focus on inner spiritual experiences and the assumption of the existence of a pregiven ultimate reality. It will argue that we need to rethink the category of “subjective experience,” and may better speak of ayahuasca visions as co-created spiritual events that are always also influenced by what practitioners themselves bring to the table. However, such events also cannot be reduced to mere mental constructions. They can be constructed well or badly and be more or less real. Such co-created ayahuasca events do also open up ontological worlds in which different modes of existence become activated. As an illustration, this chapter will describe a Santo Daime ceremony in actor-network terms. A crucial aspect of Latour’s philosophy is that actor-networks are always constructed (either well or badly) and always need to be maintained to remain well constructed. Also, ayahuasca ceremonies, and the actor-networks that they can facilitate, are always constructed. The mutual entanglement of set, setting, and ayahuasca determines the transformational effect of ayahuasca ceremonies. To properly navigate such entanglements requires practice, much practice. This is why it is important to also focus on practices, rather than only on experiences. Although experiences play a substantial role in ayahuasca religiosity, committed contemplative ayahuasca practice is more than collecting extraordinary experiences. The point is the transformation of oneself and the world at large. Part 2 of this book, on ayahuasca religiosity (chapters 4, 5, and 6), will further focus on such practices. Chapter 4, Religiosity as Engaging with Beings of Religion, first asks to what extent and in what sense we can call ayahuasca practices “religious,” by addressing the larger question of what we mean by religion in general, and how to distinguish it from nonreligion. Latour argues that just as an idealized version of Science has been part of the Modern Constitution, an idealized version of Religion has been pitted against it. (Latour uses capitals to indicate that he refers to idealized constructs rather than lived realities.) Just like Science claims to discover true knowledge about the immanent natural world, Religion claims to offer a special, intuitive access to a transcendent supernatural world, a higher, independent “spiritual” realm. Whereas Science provides immanent truths, Religion is responsible for transcendent truth. Latour distinguishes between this idealized Religion and religion as it is actually practiced (or should be practiced) as one of the modes of existence. He argues that today, we have to look for the religious outside the domain of Religion. To restore the beings of religion to their rightful place, we have to renounce Religion. This chapter will follow Latour in his emphasis on religion as the mode of existence in which actor-networks are constructed that involve the presence

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of beings of religion. It follows scholars of religion Martin Riesebrodt and Christian Smith41 in studying religion as a set of interventionist practices aimed at cultivating relationships with more-than-human powers, rather than merely a collection of creedal beliefs in the existence of supernatural beings. Such interventionist practices are to be distinguished from discursive practices that focus on meaning-making, and behavioral practices that focus on the disciplining of religious practitioners.42 This chapter presents the American anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann’s description of such interventionist practices as “kindling the presence of invisible others,” involving the building and maintaining of a faith frame, the cultivation of the inner senses, and creating relationships with invisible others.‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌It argues that ayahuasca interventionist practices are of a quite specific type that the American historian of religions April DeConick calls “gnostic.”43 The threads of the previous chapters come together in Chapter 5, Santo Daime Religiosity as Theurgy. This chapter takes up a new language to talk about such interventionist ayahuasca practices. In non-Western contexts, such ritual practices have been described, for example, in the languages of shamanism and tantra. In the Western philosophical tradition, such languages have been lacking except for the now mostly forgotten language of “theurgy,” a term that was used in late antiquity (the late third century up to the seventh century) to describe the practice of rituals that are performed with the intention of invoking deities. Whereas the language of theology (theo-logos: god talk) served to talk about the gods and understand them, the language of theurgy (theo-ourgia: god work) served to work with the gods in transformative rituals in which not humans but the gods do the work. Although the term “theurgy” originated in the second century, it only entered the Western philosophical tradition through the work of the Syrian Neoplatonic philosopher and pagan priest Iamblichus (ca. 245–325), who wrote On the Mysteries (between 280 and 300) in response to critical questions about theurgic ritual of the Greek rationalist Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry (234–305), student and biographer of Plotinus (200–270).44 This chapter argues, using the work of Iamblichus as a lens, that Santo Daime practices are not merely about individually contemplating and experiencing the divine (theoria), but mainly about ritually, and collectively, enacting and embodying it (theurgy). After introducing Santo Daime, it describes the nature of such a theurgic religiosity as world-affirming rather than world-denying, and as embracing embodiment. After exploring the phenomena of ecstasy and divine possession, it understands Santo Daime religiosity in terms of the three phases of the theurgic path: catharsis, learning to communicate with beings of religion, and becoming a companion of such beings of religion.

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Iamblichus stands in a Platonic philosophical tradition that is participatory: rather than dividing reality into an external objective world and an inner subjective world, it assumes that what we experience as “reality” is the result of a continuous process of co-construction in which we are not passive observers, but active participants.45 Despite their historical and disciplinary differences, Iamblichus and Latour are both participatory thinkers. For them, religiosity is not an attempt to gain some kind of direct access to “the sacred,” seen as a separate and pregiven supernatural world. Instead, humans, nonhumans, and more-than-humans alike always already participate in the ongoing co-construction of the world. Chapter 6, Facing Gaia Through Ayahuasca, explores what being a companion of beings of religion could mean in our contemporary age with its great social challenges of climate change and diminishing biodiversity. It addresses the larger societal relevance of ayahuasca theurgy, seen as an instance of what religion scholar Bron Taylor has called “dark green religion.” ‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌This chapter argues that ayahuasca religiosity is not merely about having individual visionary or mystical experiences (although these are very important), but ultimately about engaging in communal transformative practices that fully immerse us in this co-construction, working as companions of beings of religion to practice solidarity with all sentient beings. This chapter will explore the American professor of English Richard Doyle’s ecodelic hypothesis that ayahuasca not only produces experiences of interconnection between humans and the biodiversity of our larger ecosystem, but also aims to transform us into the living embodiment of such interconnection.46 Doyle speculates that through religious ayahuasca practices, a plant-human co-evolution is taking place in which we are taught by plants to leave behind our anthropocentric focus and strengthen our awareness and embodiment of interconnected planetary networks of humans and nonhumans. This book’s Latourian entangled discourse is very much in line with Doyle’s ecodelic discourse. In recent years, Latour has written much about ecodelic topics such as the need for a new climate regime, and the ecodelic consequences of the COVID pandemic.47 This chapter connects Doyle’s ecodelic approach to ayahuasca with Latour’s plea for a new Gaian religiosity: his adoption of Lovelock’s notion of the earth as Gaia, a large, interconnected entity in which both human and nonhuman entities reside according to various modes of existence. Such an ecodelic awareness can help us to migrate from what Latour calls “the old climate regime,” based on a dualistic separation from Nature, to a new climate regime based on new human-nonhuman alliances with Gaia.48 This chapter argues that ecodelic ayahuasca religiosity could fruitfully be described in terms of such a Gaian earth religiosity.

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BRIDGING THE GAPS Today, legally sanctioned research on psychedelics has resumed after a near-standstill of thirty-five years. Authors such as William Richards and Michael Pollan have written bestsellers on this psychedelic renaissance.49 As part of this renaissance, there is also a growing academic interest in ayahuasca from a variety of academic disciplines. From a biomedical and pharmacological perspective, the psychoactive effects of ayahuasca are most interesting. Its effects have been studied by (neuro)psychologists, consciousness researchers, and pharmacologists. How does the use of ayahuasca change brain functioning? How does it change consciousness?50 From a clinical perspective, the healing possibilities of ayahuasca are most interesting. How can the use of ayahuasca (similar to other psychedelic substances such as MDMA, psilocybin, and LSD) play a productive role in the treatment of depression, addiction, PTSD, anorexia, and other illnesses? Such potential healing properties have been explored by psychotherapists and other clinicians.51 However, such contemporary psychedelics research is often focused on healing the personal psyche and exploring the neurological and biochemical pathways that psychedelics activate. Such research fits nicely within the materialistic worldview of the sciences. When it comes to the philosophical study of the religious practice of ayahuasca, however, I see at least three different gaps that need to be bridged: the gap between indigenous and Western ontologies, the gap between insiders and outsiders, and the gap between established conceptions of religion and a liquid approach to religion. (1) The Dutch postcolonial philosopher Angela Roothaan has discussed the clash between modern secular ontologies (in which humans stand apart from and over against nature) and shamanic indigenous spirit ontologies in which “all beings are a meaningful part of the web of energetic relations we call nature” and in which nonhuman nature is spirited or animated.52 Roothaan helpfully defines ontologies as follows: “Ontologies are nothing more or less than relatively stable relations to the world we live in, which are continuously negotiated in thinking and in practical activities of members of relatively stable groups we call peoples, communities, or cultures.”53 She notes that indigenous ontologies are often misperceived and misunderstood by Western observers: From a modernist point of view, shamanistic or spirit ontologies are considered to “believe” in the existence of a spirit world next to and interacting with the empirical world. From their own point of view, such a dualism doesn’t arise in the same way, as the distinction between a material and a spiritual realm is not made similarly. Instead we find in spirit ontologies varying combinations of distinctions between what is real/living/an agent and not real/dead/passive.54

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Roothaan also remarks that such spirit ontologies are often defined in time and place as “premodern” and/or “non-Western.” However, they do not only underlie premodern or non-Western worldviews, but also represent suppressed realities of our modern, supposedly “disenchanted” Western cultures.55 In spirit ontologies, trees, animals, humans, and spirits exist in “shared or overlapping ontological spheres, in which all are understood to interact, depend on and communicate with each other.”56 As the French anthropologist Philippe Descola has argued, the line between culture and nature, between what is of the human and what is not, is drawn in different ways in Western and indigenous philosophies.57 The Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and others have argued that most anthropological observers have written about indigenous beliefs as if they presume that such beliefs are wrong. He argues that “anthropologists must allow that ‘visions’ are not beliefs, nor consensual views, but rather worlds seen objectively; not world views, but worlds of vision.”58 As Luhrmann notes: “It seems likely that Western culture invites people to make a realness judgment categorically: real or not real. . . . Other cultures may be more likely to invite people to make that judgment on a continuum: more or less real.”59 These cross-pressures between the Western modern worldview and indigenous worldviews are related to Taylor’s immanent frame. First, there is a strong boundary between our commonly shared sense of an immanent natural order and an optional transcendent supernatural order that is only real for religious believers. Second, there is no objective meaning “out there” in the cosmos. All meaning-making takes place in the mind. Third, the self is commonly experienced as a bounded, buffered space that stands in opposition to the external world. These three assumptions are not shared by those with indigenous worldviews. For them, there is no such division between a natural and a supernatural order.60 The cosmos is a place of inherent meaning. And the self is a porous vehicle that can transport natural and/or divine forces. One of the aims of this book is to ease such cross-pressures through a diplomatic approach that attempts to come up with new narratives that can do justice to both parties.61 (2) There is an interpretation gap between insider and outsider perspectives. Ayahuasca practitioners tend to frame ayahuasca as an intelligent plant teacher that offers access to invisible beings, such as disembodied spirit guides that teach wisdom and compassion, and that induces visions that contain information about alternative realities. The outsider perspective, on the other hand, is disenchanted and tends to favor a naturalistic approach, in which ayahuasca is usually framed as a hallucinogenic or psychedelic substance that at worst produces hallucinations and at best serves as a cognitive tool. This interpretation gap, usually bracketed in academic research, is connected to a wider gap between science and religion: science is considered to

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produce “objective knowledge” through publicly validated empirical research into the natural order, whereas religious believers are seen as holding “subjective” and private beliefs in supernatural realities that cannot be validated. This gap between insider and outsider perspectives is always there in the study of religion, but perhaps especially so when it concerns ayahuasca religiosity with its overwhelming experiences that are difficult to communicate. The Dutch historian of religion Wouter Hanegraaff argues that with ayahuasca research, personal experience is not only recommended but absolutely required.62 Whereas most ayahuasca practitioners embrace ontological beliefs in other worlds, divine realms, and spiritual beings, most ayahuasca scholars (psychotherapists, neurobiologists, sociologists, historians, scholars of culture) admit that such ontological questions are beyond their pay grade. They profess a methodological agnosticism, merely describing ayahuasca beliefs, experiences and practices without making any claims as to their reality or truth. (3) There is a gap between our common-sense pre-understanding of what true religion is about (it should be about the sacred, separate from mere secular concerns) and lived ayahuasca religiosity in the West. The idea of liquid divinity, drinking God out of a bottle, is a scandal to both secular and religious sensibilities. To entertain the possibility that ayahuasca experiences and practices can have ontological and epistemological relevance goes against some deeply engrained assumptions within the immanent frame, even for those who are open to religion. Ayahuasca religiosity is suspect in both secular and religious circles. Seen from a rival religious discourse, the use of ayahuasca (and psychoactive substances in general) is fundamentally considered incompatible with “true” religious practice.63 The belief that the use of ayahuasca opens the doors to divinity (however conceived) is not only at odds with increasing secularization, but from a theological perspective is also often seen as incompatible with “true” religion. Spiritual reality cannot be reached through liquid divinity or any other material (chemical) means. Religious experiences are not available from a pill or drink on demand. In addition, from a theological perspective, God’s initiative for his grace is circumvented when religious experiences are enforced by chemical means. Such manipulation of spiritual reality evokes associations with magic, which is seen as a form of “untrue” religion. Therefore, ayahuasca visions cannot but be illusions (demonic or otherwise).64 In his discussion of such theological concerns, the British scholar of religion Christopher Partridge notes that all experiences of transcendence inevitably involve natural material processes.65 He cites the work of religion scholars Kroll and Bachrach, who, in their study of medieval mystical experiences, link ascetic religious practices such as fasting, self-flagellation, and sleep deprivation to hormone and immune system effects.66 If ascetic “techniques of transcendence” can create the conditions for religious experiences,

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Partridge asks rhetorically, why not psychedelic “techniques of transcendence”?67 He emphasizes that psychoactive substances do not directly bring about transcendent experiences; they are merely the key that opens the door to the mystical (or takes the brain off the brake). The second objection is that God’s initiative for his grace is circumvented by taking ayahuasca. First of all, as Hanegraaff rightly points out, this objection rests on a normative Protestant view of “true” religion as based on freely received grace, rather than “pagan” attempts to manipulate the divine.68 However, the theurgic interpretation of ayahuasca religiosity in this study also frames it as based on freely received grace. Beings of religion take the initiative, rather than the ayahuasca practitioner themselves. One of the aims of this book is to show that a theurgic interpretation of ayahuasca religiosity can be compatible with such religious discourses. LIQUID DIVINITY In the Santo Daime tradition, ayahuasca (or rather, Daime) is framed as “liquid divinity.”69 As a hymn received by Odemir Raulino da Silva puts it, “The divine being, transformed into a liquid, comes to awaken our spirit.”70 This refers first of all to the tea itself containing a divine being that has been transformed into liquid form and “lives in a bottle.”71 But it also captures the radical otherness of ayahuasca religiosity: rather than a clearly defined, univocal conception of God or the Divine, “liquid divinity” points to a more fluid conception of divinity and a liquid kind of religiosity. Therefore, the “liquid divinity” in the title of this book can be understood in three ways. First, ayahuasca itself is framed as liquid divinity. Second, what ayahuasca does is framed as offering access to liquid divinity: divinity not conceived as static supernatural beings that exist in their own higher spiritual world, but as a co-created actor-network that is continually maintained through contemplative ayahuasca practices. And third, it also refers to the liquid and free-floating character of ayahuasca religiosity. Ayahuasca crushes our ontological and epistemological boundaries. It cannot be contained by fixed conceptual doctrines. Engaging with ayahuasca forces us to be flexible and fluid. Ayahuasca liquifies (or liquidates) our ontologies. It not only brings us into a deeper contact with life, but also takes away the reassuring boundaries that we have set up to serve as a foundation of life. In this sense, ayahuasca’s liquid religiosity fits right into our current times of what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has called “liquid modernity.”72 It is a fluid religiosity that leads to ever-new conceptual maps of the ontological worlds that are opened up by ayahuasca.

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Over the past year, two books on Santo Daime have been published that I feel much affinity with G. William Barnard’s Liquid Light is a moving philosophical memoir of his twelve years as a committed daimista, using his philosophical expertise on William James and Henri Bergson to philosophically reflect on his phenomenological observations. Marc Blainey’s Christ Returns from the Jungle is an ethnographical study of Santo Daime practitioners in Europe that aims to find a balance between the self-understanding of daimistas and an academic redescription of what occurs in Santo Daime works. I see this book as complementary to these two books, building on their invaluable ethnographical and phenomenological groundwork. As the philosopher of religion Mikel Burley has argued, any philosophical study of religious phenomena needs to start with a thick description of these phenomena.73 I am grateful that such a thick description (both ethnographical and auto-ethnographical) is abundantly available in those two books. With this book, I hope to build a bridge between contemporary Western ayahuasca practitioners, academic scholars of religion, and interested spiritual seekers curious about the ayahuasca phenomenon—a bridge that will hopefully make it easier to make sense of ayahuasca. NOTES 1. Beatriz C. Labate and Edward MacRae, Ayahuasca, Ritual and Religion in Brazil (London: Routledge, 2010); Luis Eduardo Luna and Steven F. White, eds., Ayahuasca Reader: Encounters with the Amazon’s Sacred Vine (Santa Fe: Energetic Press, 2016); Ralph Metzner, ed., Sacred Vine of Spirits: Ayahuasca (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 2006 [1999]). 2. Beatriz C. Labate and Henrik Jungaberle, eds., The Internationalization of Ayahuasca (Zürich: LIT Verlag, 2011); Beatriz C. Labate, Clancy Cavnar, and Alex K. Gearin, eds., The World Ayahuasca Diaspora: Reinventions and Controversies (London: Routledge, 2017); Beatriz C. Labate, and Clancy Cavnar, eds., The Expanding World Ayahuasca Diaspora: Appropriation, Integration and Legislation (London: Routledge, 2018); Daniel Pinchbeck and Sophia Rokhlin, When Plants Dream: Ayahuasca, Amazonian Shamanism, and the Global Psychedelic Renaissance (London: Watkins, 2019). 3. Andrew Dawson, Santo Daime: A New World Religion (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 4. The opposition between the hippie backpackers from the Sixties looking for enlightenment and millennials looking for harmony with nature should not be exaggerated. There was already much ecological thinking in the Sixties. 5. Colin Campbell, The Easternization of the West: A Thematic Account of Cultural Change in the Modern Era (London: Routledge, 2007).

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6. It is not my intention to replace the binary opposition East-West with a new binary opposition South-North. Also, indigenous religiosity takes place both in the South and the North (e.g., the Yakut people in Siberia, the Sami people of Sapmi [formerly Lapland], and some Inuit people). 7. Pinchbeck and Rokhlin, When Plants Dream, xxiv. 8. Especially in a shamanic context, other plants are also often added to the mix, such as mimosa and jurema. See Helle Kaasik, Rita C. Z. Souza, Flávia S. Zandonadi, Luís Fernando Tófoli, and Alessandra Sussulini, “Chemical Composition of Traditional and Analog Ayahuasca,” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 53/1(2021): 65–75. For a more extensive discussion, see Helle Kaasik, “Sacred Medicine from the Forest: Chemical, Psychological and Spiritual Aspects of Ayahuasca,” Ph.D. dissertation (Tartu, Estonia: University of Tartu, 2022). 9. The term “alternate” was introduced by Pieter Craffert to avoid the use of “altered” states of consciousness, because it is impossible to give a cross-cultural definition of what is “normal” and what is “altered”: “What is ‘ordinary’ consciousness is not the same for all human beings, and on a cultural level, a distinction can be made between baseline (or normal) and alternate states of consciousness, and they will differ from culture to culture.” Pieter F. Craffert, The Life of a Galilean Shaman: Jesus of Nazareth in Anthropological-Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: James Clarke and Company, 2008), 23n22. 10. Norman Zinberg, Drug, Set and Setting: The Basis for Controlled Intoxicant Use (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1984); Ido Hartogsohn, American Trip: Set, Setting, and the Psychedelic Experience in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020). 11. Glenn H. Shepard, Jr., “Foreword‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌,” in The World Ayahuasca Diaspora, xvi. 12. Ibid., xvii. 13. The term “ayahuasca practitioners” is sometimes used to indicate those that serve ayahuasca in ceremonies. This book, however, will use the term to indicate all those who participate in ayahuasca ceremonies on a regular basis. 14. See Dawson, Santo Daime, for an overview of these factors. 15. A third Brazilian ayahuasca religion, A Barquinha, is much less well known outside Brazil. 16. Labate and Jungaberle, Internationalization of Ayahuasca; Beatriz C. Labate and Clancy Cavnar, eds., The Therapeutic Use of Ayahuasca (Heidelberg: Springer, 2014); Labate, Cavnar, and Gearin, World Ayahuasca Diaspora; Labate and Cavnar, Expanding World Ayahuasca Diaspora. 17. Titti Kristina Schmidt, “Morality as Practice: The Santo Daime, an Eco-Religious Movement in the Amazonian Rainforest” (Ph.D. diss., Uppsala University, 2007); Dawson, Santo Daime. 18. Ayahuasca tends to be underrepresented in recent studies on psychedelics and philosophy. See Chris Letheby and Jaipreet Mattu, “Philosophy and classic psychedelics: A review of some emerging themes,” Journal of Psychedelic Studies 5/3 (2021): 166–175; Chris Letheby, Philosophy of Psychedelics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Christine Hauskeller and Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes (eds.), Philosophy and Psychedelics: Frameworks for Exceptional Experience (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).

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21

19. See Kevin Schilbrack, Philosophy and the Study of Religions: A Manifesto (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014); Mikel Burley, A Radical Pluralist Philosophy of Religion‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌:Cross-Cultural, Multireligious, Interdisciplinary (London: Bloomsbury, 2020); Jim Kanaris, ed., Reconfigurations of Philosophy of Religion: A Possible Future (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2018). 20. Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen, The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Jorge N. Ferrer and Jacob H. Sherman (eds.), The Participatory Turn: Spirituality, Mysticism, Religious Studies (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007). 21. Holbraad and Pedersen, Ontological Turn, 5. 22. Bronislaw Malinowski, A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 21. 23. Dawson, Santo Daime; Marc Blainey, Christ Returns from the Jungle: Santo Daime Religion as Mystical Healing (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2021); G. William Barnard, Liquid Light: Ayahuasca Spirituality and the Santo Daime Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022). Whereas Dawson’s approach is etic, using Bourdieu’s sociological categories to make sense of meaningmaking processes in daimistas, Barnard’s auto-ethnographic investigation of his Santo Daime experiences is more emic. Blainey attempts to balance emic and etic approaches by interviewing European daimistas about their meaning-making process and reflecting on his empirical results through theological thinkers such as Kierkegaard and Kearney. 24. Holbraad and Pedersen, Ontological Turn, 5f. 25. Ibid., 7. 26. Erik Davis also uses Latour as a philosophical guide in his book High Weirdness, in which he charts the emergence of a new psychedelic worldview in the Seventies. Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019). 27. Holbraad and Pedersen, Ontological Turn, 29. My approach also fits with the aim of Mikel Burley’s radical pluralist philosophy of religion to present new religious forms of life to the reader as possible ways of being human, which he calls, borrowing from Wittgenstein, “loosening up one’s life” (Burley, A Radical Pluralist Approach, 191). 28. Jeffrey J. Kripal, Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 87. 29. Holbraad and Pedersen, Ontological Turn, 9–24. 30. Ibid., 16. 31. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970). 32. D. Z. Phillips, Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 33. Richard M. Doyle, Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noosphere (Seattle, WA: The University of Washington Press, 2011). 34. ‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). As its name already implies, the immanent frame is heavily tilted toward

22

Introduction

the immanent order as the only reality that is indubitably present for all. It is connected with disenchantment: the prevalent belief that no super-empirical entities or “magical” processes exist, and that meaning is not to be found in the cosmos but is constructed by the mind. It is also connected with the notion of the buffered self: our self-experience is that of a bounded, separate entity that is cordoned off from the external world. Therefore, the immanent frame is characterized by a double dualism: that of immanence and transcendence, and that of subject and object. 35. Christopher Partridge, High Culture: Drugs, Mysticism, and The Pursuit of Transcendence in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 225–287. 36. Ibid., 288–342. 37. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993 [1991]). 38. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 39. Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013 [2012]). Referenced from here on as AIME. 40. Latour’s modes of existence should not be seen as a pluralist ontology (many different things may exist) but as an ontological pluralism (many different ontologies may exist). 41. Martin Riesebrodt, The Promise of Salvation: A Theory of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Christian Smith, Religion: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It Matters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). 42. This means that I will not extensively describe discursive ayahuasca practices or ritual aspects of ayahuasca practices. Such descriptions can already be found elsewhere, e.g., Labate and MacRae, Ayahuasca, Ritual and Religion in Brazil; Labate and Jungaberle, The Internationalization of Ayahuasca; Dawson, Santo Daime; Labate, Cavnar, and Gearin, The World Ayahuasca Diaspora; Labate and Cavnar, The Expanding World Ayahuasca Diaspora; Blainey, Christ Returns from the Jungle; Barnard, Liquid Light. 43. April D. DeConick. The Gnostic New Age: How a Countercultural Spirituality Revolutionized Religion from Antiquity to Today (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). 44. Iamblichus, De Mysteriis [On the Mysteries], trans. with Introduction and Notes by Emma C. Clarke, John M. Dillon, and Jackson P. Hershbell (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003). 45. See Jacob H. Sherman, “A Genealogy of Participation,” in Ferrer and Sherman, Participatory Turn, 81–112, especially 82–86. 46. Doyle, Darwin’s Pharmacy, 26. 47. Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2017 [2015]); Bruno Latour, After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis, trans. Julie Rose (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2021 [2021]). 48. As discussed by Latour in Facing Gaia.

Introduction

23

49. William A. Richards, Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us about Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence (New York: Penguin, 2018). 50. For example, Benny Shanon, The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 51. For example, Rachel Harris, Listening to Ayahuasca: New Hope for Depression, Addiction, PTSD, and Anxiety (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2017). 52. Angela Roothaan, Indigenous, Modern and Postcolonial Relations to Nature: Negotiating the Environment (London: Routledge, 2019), viii. 53. Ibid., 16–17. 54. Ibid., x–xi. 55. See Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), for a deconstruction of this “myth of disenchantment.” 56. Roothaan, Indigenous, Modern and Postcolonial Relations to Nature, 17. 57. Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013 [2005]). 58. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Zeno and the Art of Anthropology: Of Lies, Beliefs, Paradoxes, and Other Truths,” Common Knowledge 17/1 (2011), 133. Eduardo Kohn and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro have attempted an ontological clarification of the possibility that forests think, and humans communicate with animals and spirits. Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-Structural Anthropology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014 [2009]). However, as secular anthropologists, they tend to neglect the importance of spirituality and religion, an oversight that this study aims to remedy by focusing on transformative contemplative practices. 59. Tanya M. Luhrmann, How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020). 60. Jeffrey Kripal suggests replacing the notion of the “supernatural” with the notion of the “super natural,” which implies that extraordinary experiences still take place within the realm of the natural, albeit a conceptually expanded realm. Such epistemologies would be in line with such shamanistic worldviews. Whitley Strieber and Jeffrey J. Kripal. The Super Natural: Why the Unexplained Is Real (New York: TarcherPerigee, 2016). 61. This gap is also related to the need for decolonizing ayahuasca studies. Although many ayahuasca researchers are quite sympathetic toward indigenous discourses and concerns, there is still much cultural appropriation toward indigenous cultures going on. References to indigenous beliefs and techniques are often free-floating and detached from their indigenous context. Such epistemic injustice is being exposed by researchers such as Labate, Dev, and Roothaan in a recommendable way. However, this study follows a different, diplomatic approach.

24

Introduction

62. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “Ayahuasca Groups and Networks in the Netherlands: A Challenge to the Study of Comparative Religion,” in Internationalization of Ayahuasca, 85–103. 63. Ibid., 88–92. 64. Ibid., 91. 65. Partridge, High Culture, 24. 66. Jerome Kroll and Bernard Bachrach, The Mystic Mind: The Psychology of Medieval Mystics and Ascetics (London: Routledge, 2006), 27. 67. Partridge, High Culture, 25. 68. Ibid.‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌ 69. Since Daime is used as a proper name within the Santo Daime, I will follow their custom to capitalize this term throughout the book. 70. Odemir Raulino da Silva, Ser Divino [Divine Being], n.d. 71. Hymn 24 of the Nova Jerusalem hinário of Padrinho Sebastião speaks of “I am bottled, I always live embottled.” Sebastião Mota de Melo, Estou Aqui [I Am Here], n.d. 72. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2000). 73. Burley, Radical Pluralist Philosophy of Religion, 60–65.

PART ONE

Ayahuasca‌‌‌‌

25

Chapter 1

Making Sense of Ayahuasca in the West

In recent years, much is being published about ayahuasca. Most of these stories are accounts of all kinds of extraordinary, transformative ayahuasca experiences. However, what it all means is seldom addressed in these spectacular stories. No one seems to know. It seems that we lack the philosophical tools for making sense of experiences that are so other. How do we make sense of ayahuasca philosophically? In this chapter, I will look at various approaches to making sense of ayahuasca in the West. Whereas indigenous cultures have the philosophical resources for making sense of ayahuasca, such resources are often lacking in contemporary Western philosophy, which is predominantly secular. This chapter starts with a discussion of how set and setting are crucial in co-determining what ayahuasca is and what it does. They determine how ayahuasca is framed (understood in terms of something else). The next section further explains the notion of framing ayahuasca, and explores Charles Taylor’s notion of the immanent frame, which, he argues, serves as the invisible philosophical background of much of Western modernity. This immanent frame also implicitly co-determines how we think and talk about ayahuasca in our secular age. It is the unseen context that shapes our discourses about psychedelics in general, and ayahuasca in particular. Such Western discourses manifest themselves as either secular or religious.1 This chapter first discusses two Western secular types of discourses on ayahuasca: a recreational “drug” discourse and a medical “medicine” discourse. Consequently, it discusses two Western religious types of discourses on ayahuasca: psychedelic mysticism and entheogenic shamanism.2 In the discussion we start with our explorations of the ontological implications of these discourses.

27

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SET AND SETTING The psychoactive effects of ayahuasca can vary widely. This is related to the theory of drug, set, and setting: both the experienced psychoactive effects and their interpretation are determined not only by the dose and pharmacological properties of the substance (the drug), but to a large extent by individual variables (set: expectations, previous experiences, beliefs, and motivation) and contextual variables (setting: location, atmosphere, company).3 The question of what ayahuasca is and what it does cannot be answered separately from set and setting. Ayahuasca seems to be, similar to what the Israeli Science and Technology Studies scholar Ido Hartogsohn has argued about LSD, “a psychopharmacological chameleon, one that changes its psychoactive pigmentation in relation to the cultural set and setting into which it is introduced.”4 Based on such a view on psychedelics as nonspecific amplifiers of human experience, set and setting have been described by Leary, Alpert, and Metzner as road maps in the third part of their manual The Psychedelic Experience.5 Settings for ayahuasca use can differ widely. The use of ayahuasca was discovered by indigenous tribes in the Amazon, and it has widely been used there in a traditional context. Among the indigenous peoples of Amazonia, there is an infinite variety of ritual ayahuasca practices. There can be huge stylistic differences in the performances of ceremonies. Each shaman develops his or her own style. Some follow strict rules, some follow no rules at all. Arno Adelaars describes, based on fieldwork undertaken in Europe, North America, and South America between 1995 and 2005, four types of ritual ayahuasca performance: (1) rituals of shamans from indigenous ethnic groups in Colombia; (2) ceremonies of vegetalistas in the vicinity of Iquitos, Peru; (3) Santo Daime and other ayahuasca religions; and (4) contemporary adaptations of ceremonies by Western ritual leaders.6 Adelaars describes a new form of ayahuasca ceremony: a wide variety of the do-it-yourself ritual, where the ritual leader orders the raw materials for ayahuasca or ayahuasca analogs via the internet, and prepares ayahuasca at home.7 Partly thanks to the increased information about ayahuasca on the internet and social media, there is an increasing number of “psychonauts” who order the ingredients of ayahuasca through the internet, brew ayahuasca themselves, and consume it in a non-traditional and nonritual context.8 Often a secular focus on the pharmacological and ethnobotanical properties of the plants predominates here, without much attention to set and setting.9 In addition, there is a strong proliferation of commercial providers of often expensive therapeutical sessions with ayahuasca. These sessions are much less regulated and ritualized than the religious practices of the Santo Daime and UDV churches and the (neo) shamanic ceremonies.10

Making Sense of Ayahuasca in the West

29

Often connected to these different settings are different motivations or sets from which ayahuasca is used. In the traditional shamanic context, ayahuasca was drunk for many purposes: recovering lost objects, promoting success in hunting, resolving disputes, or promoting health. Often, only the shaman would drink ayahuasca, make a journey to different realities, and come back with information for his client to solve daily problems such as lost objects or interpersonal conflicts. Such problem-solving would often be connected with consulting the spirits.11 Today, people drink ayahuasca for many reasons: curiosity about transgressive experiences, wanting to get high or tripping, for therapeutic reasons, or out of a search for meaning and a desire to connect with the sacred.12 The various settings and sets within which ayahuasca is used can overlap, and the distinction between religious and recreational use is not always clear-cut. The demanding and intense shamanic ceremonies and Santo Daime works discourage purely recreational use. Nevertheless, people may participate in these gatherings out of an initial recreational motivation. In practice, however, with repeated participation, this motivation often grows into a therapeutic or religious motivation. Therapeutic ayahuasca ceremonies are more approachable because there are less stringent behavioral requirements. Although there is, of course, a wide variety of sets, for the sake of clarification I would like to distinguish five ideal types of sets that correspond to various settings: 1.  A problem-solving set, in which ayahuasca is used to solve a variety of problems in order to function better in this world and improve one’s well-being. As mentioned above, in a traditional Amazonian setting, ayahuasca is often consumed for instrumental reasons: improving one’s luck and skill at hunting in the jungle; finding out whether one’s husband has been cheating; locating misplaced objects; finding a romantic partner.13 2.  An explorative set. People seek expanded states of consciousness in order to explore inner and outer worlds. Such “psychonauts” see themselves as explorers in the tradition of Stanley and Livingstone, charting formerly unknown territory.14 Terence and Dennis McKenna are good examples of this, as is Aldous Huxley’s famous self-experimentation with mescaline that was documented in his The Doors of Perception.15 In a contemporary science context, this can involve the use of ayahuasca in a scientific setting to study psychopharmacological effects, or effects on consciousness. Such an explorative set with regard to LSD was popular in the Fifties and early Sixties of the past century. 3.  A recreational set. People seek intense and pleasurable experiences. This type of set sometimes corresponds with a “(neo)shamanistic”

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setting, in which a Western self-appointed shaman presides over an informal gathering. Pinchbeck and Rokhlin describe how today, from London to Ibiza to Manhattan, a hip avant-garde ayahuasca counterculture is arising where DJs, cultural influencers, and artists, always on the lookout for “the next new thing,” take ayahuasca.16 4.  A medical-therapeutic set. This type of set includes wanting to cure medical or psychological problems out of a desire for healing, whether physical, psychological, emotional, or spiritual, often corresponding with a medical or therapeutical setting. Ayahuasca is being used for the healing of a wide variety of disorders, including depression, eating disorders, addiction, and PTSD.17 In this context it is often framed as a medicine. 5.  A religious or spiritual set that involves a desire to reconnect with the divine and with nature, to find ultimate meaning in life, and to go beyond the narrow and limiting sense of self as a personal ego. In this context, ayahuasca is part of a spiritual practice corresponding with a religious ritual setting. Ayahuasca is often framed as a sacrament or a sacred medicine here. Of course, these five types of sets are ideal types. In reality, people demonstrate a wide variety of motivations and intentions that often change over time, even from moment to moment. A religious use of ayahuasca does not exclude wanting to solve all kinds of problems or a curiosity about other inner and outer worlds. And an ayahuasca hipster would certainly also harbor a desire for psychological healing and a spiritual longing for the meaning of life. However, I feel this typology is helpful to bring some order to the complexity of the topic of the effect of ayahuasca. A recent “therapeutization” of the use of ayahuasca has led to an overlap between therapeutic and religious settings. This development fits within the broader cultural process of a therapeutization of religion in the West.18 Because recreational, therapeutic, and religious uses of ayahuasca are not always clearly distinguishable in practice, I will focus in this chapter on thinking and speaking about ayahuasca, which is often embedded in different and often mutually incompatible discourses. Set and setting co-determine how ayahuasca is framed—in terms of what it is understood‌‌‌‌‌‌‌. In his discussion of set and setting, Hartogsohn discusses so-called looping effects: the mere act of classifying and defining psychedelics leads to changes in their effects.19 How we frame ayahuasca is not a mere academic exercise. It shapes the types of experiences that can be had with ayahuasca, and the types of knowledge that working with ayahuasca can produce.

Making Sense of Ayahuasca in the West

31

THE IMMANENT FRAME In his hermeneutical writings, Heidegger has reversed our use of the terms “interpretation” and “understanding.” It is not that we first interpret things, and then our interpretations lead to our understanding of them. It is the other way around: we first understand things “in terms of” something else, as something else, and this creates the horizon within which our interpretations can take place.20 There is no way to straightforwardly describe, as if from a view from nowhere, what ayahuasca is and what it does. How we talk about ayahuasca, how we think about ayahuasca, how we pre-understand ayahuasca, co-determines what ayahuasca is and what it does. In this chapter, I will distinguish several such pre-understandings of ayahuasca that have arisen in the West based on certain ways of understanding ayahuasca in terms of something else. Pre-understandings of ayahuasca as a hallucinogenic substance (a substance that leads one to perceive things that are implicitly assumed to be not really there) tend to lead to biomedical and psychiatric interpretations that often pathologize its effects. Pre-understandings of ayahuasca as a psychedelic substance (a substance that brings the mind or Mind to the surface) lead to psychological and spiritual interpretations that interpret its effects more positively as a journey into self-exploration or expansion of consciousness. Pre-understandings of ayahuasca as a plant teacher can either give rise to mystical interpretations of ayahuasca experiences and practices as forms of gnostic spirituality, or to more ecodelic interpretations of ayahuasca experiences and practices as furthering interconnectivity with nature and the earth. Such pre-understandings are not only shaped by the set and setting of specific individuals (their traits and expectations or their immediate environment), but also by set and setting at the collective level: the wider sociocultural forces, conditions, and seemingly self-evident pre-understandings that implicitly shape our worldview. Hartogsohn helpfully differentiates between an immediate set (the specific goals that someone may formulate for an ayahuasca ceremony) and a long-term set (personality traits).21 Even though ayahuasca experiences in many respects defy interpretation, it is inevitable that we fall back on existing frameworks. This is why it is so important to not only focus on individual variables but also critically investigate the wider collective set and settings of Western modernity. From a cross-cultural hermeneutical point of view, when trying to make sense of ayahuasca, we have to be aware of our own Western philosophical horizons. We need to reflect on the larger historical processes that have led to the current reigning precognitive paradigms in the West that unconsciously shape our thinking. Charles Taylor has written about a collective shared

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Chapter 1

precognitive sensibility that he calls “the immanent frame”: the seemingly self-evident sense that for secular moderns, the natural world is all there is, although some religious believers choose to continue to believe in the gods, angels, and fairies of a supernatural realm. Standard secular narratives claim that humanity has matured and outgrown such childish religious superstitions, thanks to the development of science, and that religious believers are holding on to a belief in a transcendent supernatural world that is no longer viable. Taylor rejects such explanations as “subtraction stories”—they suggest that humans now finally arrive at the scientific truth of things as a result of gradually subtracting and weeding out the unscientific and superstitious myths that religions have traditionally provided. He provides an alternative story: humans have gradually invented a new imagining of the universe, of the human individual, and of the ultimate meaning of life (what he calls “fullness”).‌‌‌‌‌‌‌The immanent frame has now become self-evident to many because it informs secular discourses at universities and in the media. The immanent frame consists of the following elements: we imagine and experience ourselves as autonomous and clearly bounded Cartesian “buffered selves” that are separated from an inanimate “outside world” consisting of material objects devoid of meaning. We live in a self-existent and independent natural order ruled by the laws of nature. While it used to be commonly believed that this natural order is created by and depends on a higher, supernatural order (“God” or “the Sacred” or “the Numinous”), for many today it is a perfectly manageable option to live their lives entirely within this natural order and find fullness within it. Secular humanism has become a credible option. As the mechanistic philosopher Laplace famously answered when Napoleon asked him what the place of God was in his philosophical system, his system needed no such hypothesis. The God hypothesis is an interesting possibility today, but life goes on fine without it. The immanent frame is connected with the development of disenchantment in the two meanings of that term that Taylor distinguishes. First, it refers to decreasing belief in a supernatural order. Second, it means that meaning is no longer considered to be objectively located “out there” in the cosmos. It must be produced from the interior depths of our own minds and hearts. This is why enchanted religious narratives about the all-pervasive presence of the divine in the natural order are increasingly translated into psychological and therapeutic registers. For example, the Buddhist bodhisattvas become psychological archetypes. The Buddhist six ontological realms (human, animal, lower heavens, higher heavens, hells, lower hells) are becoming six psychological states of mind (or even “the six patterns of stress”).22 Taylor calls this process “excarnation”: rather than God incarnating (becoming flesh) in this world, he is being banished to a merely hypothetical transcendent supernatural world.23

Making Sense of Ayahuasca in the West

33

In the immanent frame, Taylor notes, fullness must be sought in the here and now, in ordinary human flourishing: well-being, prosperity, a happy family life, and good health. The notion of a fullness beyond ordinary human flourishing, which is part of most religious narratives (enlightenment, the eternal salvation of the soul, immortality, saving all sentient beings, deification), is at odds with the immanent frame.24 Three types of ontology have dominated in the immanent frame. First, reality is material in nature (materialism). In that case, the supernatural can be explained in terms of the natural. Mind can be explained in terms of the body. Consciousness can be explained in terms of the brain. Second, reality is spiritual in nature (idealism). In that case, the natural can be explained in terms of the supernatural. Cosmic consciousness is primary. Matter is an emanation of consciousness. The body is a vehicle for the mind, and the brain is a vehicle for consciousness. Third, reality has both a material and a spiritual domain (Cartesian dualism).25 In the Western philosophical tradition, idealism has had the upper hand. In our disenchanted, secular age, however, we live in a world where various materialist ontologies are the default option. Reality is considered to be composed of material objects, and consciousness and mind are somehow emergent epiphenomena dependent upon and the result of physical processes. Such ontologies are seldom made explicit. The immanent frame is, in Wittgenstein’s terms, a “picture,” a background to our thinking to which we can imagine no alternative.26 In the immanent frame, it is assumed that there is a mental world “in here” and a material world “out there,” and that there is only one way that our knowledge about that material world can reach this mental world: through the senses. Knowledge from an ayahuasca experience does not count as real knowledge since it is only “in the head” of the ayahuasca practitioner. It is a hallucination, imagined, and thus “imaginary.” There is an unbridgeable abyss between the mental world “in here” and everything else “out there.” It seems that the only things that can get in are those that travel along the tiny bridge of the senses and their technological aids. Within the immanent frame, ayahuasca experiences are interpreted in one of two ways, either in terms of immanence or in terms of transcendence. The “immanent” interpretation sees ayahuasca experiences as subjective hallucinations that are functions of brain processes, and that have no connection to a meaningful cosmos. The “transcendent” interpretation sees ayahuasca experiences as somehow referring to a transcendent realm beyond the natural world, the supernatural. In the immanent frame, we are all educated into the materialist view. However, it is remarkable that ayahuasca experiences can lead to conversions, not to this or that religion, but to a more open worldview in which ayahuasca experiences can have ontological significance. Such conversions are clearly visible in the book Listening to Ayahuasca by the

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American psychotherapist Rachel Harris.27 She conducted empirical research on the spiritual experiences that people report after drinking ayahuasca. In her study, a noetic awareness of a previously unknown spiritual dimension was one of the most frequently mentioned experiences resulting from ayahuasca ceremonies. Harris quotes various responses from her respondents: “There seems to be a much richer tapestry of spiritual dimensions for us to access, explore and learn from. I now believe that the universe is connected through consciousness, that we are all one and interconnected through a web of love and life. I used to not believe in anything.”28 “I changed from being an atheist to being a deeply spiritual person. I live with the sense of awe and knowledge of the great beyond, with feelings of humility and hope. I learned that reality is much larger and more complex than our ordinary state, that the Divine exists and is accessible to us all. This is a major shift in worldview.”29 “I appreciate Nature as Divine. The spiritual world is primary; the world of the rational senses is secondary.”30 “It’s made a believer out of me—there’s more to consciousness than waking and dreaming.”31 “[I feel] a reaffirmation that there is a definite spiritual presence in the universe and that there are many more dimensions than our conventional mainstream one.”32 “I believe I will continue to use the tea throughout my life to open myself up to nonsecular channels of wisdom and guidance.”33 Various ways of thinking and speaking solidify into discourses. The notion of a “discourse” has been explained well by the American philosopher and quantum physicist Karen Barad: Discourse is not what is said; it is that which constrains and enables what can be said. Discursive practices define what counts as meaningful statements. . . . Discursive practices are the local sociohistorical material conditions that enable and constrain disciplinary knowledge practices such as speaking, writing, thinking, calculating, measuring, filtering and concentrating. Discursive practices produce, rather than merely describe, the subjects and objects of knowledge practices.34

In Western modernity, two main types of discourses can be found when it comes to describing non-ordinary experiences, based on the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Biochemical and psychological Enlightenment-type discourses, strictly based on reason and reductionist empirical science, reject the ontological implications of such experiences and strictly treat them in a psychological way. From a medical or neuroscientific point of view, psychoactive substances cause hallucinations. From a more liberal, psychotherapeutic point of view, they can liberate previously repressed unconscious psychological material. In both discourses, whether such experiences are considered to

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35

be profoundly healing or not, we are not required to change our materialist worldview. Romantic-type discourses are based on intuition and holistic approaches to reality. They stress the ontological implications of psychedelic experiences. Those experiences are believed to reveal an ultimate spiritual reality that lies beyond ordinary reality. This is the reality that the mystics of all times and places have gained access to. Romantic countercultural discourses see psychedelics as a conduit to higher spiritual worlds. Hartogsohn has investigated the rise of various discourses with regard to psychedelics in general, and LSD in particular, out of the sociocultural ideas and questions that preoccupied American culture in the 1950s and 1960s.35 Similarly, in the following two sections, I will identify four discourses with regard to ayahuasca: two secular discourses (recreational and medical) and two religious discourses (psychedelic mysticism and entheogenic shamanism). SECULAR DISCOURSES Within closed versions of the immanent frame, ayahuasca is most often interpreted as a hallucinogenic substance that causes hallucinations. It is assumed that ayahuasca is taken for recreational purposes. In such contemporary recreational discourses about ayahuasca, the term “drugs” plays an important role. However, the Canadian drug regulation expert Kenneth Tupper distinguishes between three different meanings of the English word “drug.”36 In its oldest and broadest meaning, drug1, the term refers to any substance, other than food, that alters metabolic or other bodily functions. Later, that meaning narrowed to substances used in the prevention and treatment of disease. Today, drug1 is a synonym for a medicine, as in the English word “drugstore.” In this meaning, it does not matter whether the substance is psychoactive or not. In the second sense, drug2, the term refers to any psychoactive substance other than food, regardless of its medical effect or legal status. The semantic range of drug2 includes psychopharmaceuticals (antipsychotics, tranquilizers, antidepressants, sedatives), legal psychoactive stimulants (alcohol, caffeine, nicotine), and illegal psychoactive substances such as LSD, mescaline, cannabis, or DMT. In the third sense, drug3, the term refers to an illegal psychoactive plant or chemical substance that is subject to the strictest forms of control (usually criminalization) within international drug policy and the “war on drugs.” While drug1 is used in biomedical discourses, in the (public and political) recreational discourse, drug3 predominates. Tupper distinguishes the following elements within such a discourse: no distinction is made between different drugs, no matter how different their chemical composition; drugs cannot

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be used unproblematically or responsibly but are always “abused”; drug users are criminalized (they are drug abusers) or pathologized (they are addicts in need of medical help); production and distribution of psychoactive substances are prohibited—except in the regulated realm of pharmaceuticals (where, as Tupper notes, they magically transform from drugs into medicines).37 Within the recreational discourse, psychoactive substances are called “hallucinogens.” The verb “hallucinate” has a normative connotation: it means to be misled by things one believes one sees but which are not actually present. Hallucinations may be harmless, dangerous, or therapeutically useful, but they fundamentally rely on a misperception of reality (through whatever mechanism). Although there are also positive uses of the recreational discourse, it is often used negatively in the context of law enforcement. In the prosecution’s recreational drug discourse, ayahuasca is considered a drug3 in the context of the war on drugs. However, when considered from the generic meaning of the term “drug,” drug2, the war on drugs is primarily a war between drugs, namely between psychoactive substances that are criminalized and pathologized and psychoactive substances such as alcohol, tobacco, and psychopharmaceuticals that are socially accepted. Medical ayahuasca discourses focus on its therapeutic effects. Ayahuasca is framed as a medicine. This subsection discusses different variants of such medical discourses, first within psychiatry and clinical psychology, and then within neuroscience and cognitive psychology. It was within psychiatry that talk of psychoactive substances from within a medical discourse gained momentum in the 1950s.38 British psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond and American writer Aldous Huxley jointly sought an appropriate term for psychoactive substances such as LSD and mescaline, and arrived at the term “psychedelics,” a composite of the Greek terms psyche (mind or soul) and delos (manifesting). As a psychiatrist, Osmond interpreted the term “mind-manifesting” as the coming to light of repressed contents of the mind, and he saw potential in psychedelics for the treatment of mental illness.39 LSD was seen as a promising drug in psychiatry, to treat forms of schizophrenia and psychosis because of its supposed psychotomimetic effect (its ability to mimic psychosis).40 In the Sixties, much research on psychedelics was conducted from within such a medical discourse, but the prohibition of psychedelics made such research increasingly difficult and finally impossible.41 Since about fifteen years ago, however, as part of the broader psychedelic renaissance, much academic research has been undertaken again on the therapeutic effects of ayahuasca on conditions such as addiction, depression, and PTSD.42 Within medical discourses, interpretations of what ayahuasca does vary widely. Transpersonal psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, who conducted much

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research with LSD, argues that a psychoactive substance may act as a “powerful non-specific amplifier or catalyst of biochemical and neurophysiological processes in the brain.”43 Israeli cognitive psychologist Benny Shanon interprets ayahuasca experiences as manifestations of universal archetypes.44 Anthropologist Marlene Dobkin de Rios and psychiatrist Charles Grob, on the other hand, give the alternative interpretation that ayahuasca induces a hyper suggestible state.45 British neuroscientist Robin Carhart-Harris has attempted to identify the neurological correlates of the psychedelic experience via fMRI brain imaging techniques.46 Psilocybin reduces activity in the so-called default mode network—the brain network that connects the cerebral cortex to deeper and older structures in the brain, and which appears to play a role in the construction of the self. The decrease in activity in the default mode network is accompanied by the subjective experience of ego dissolution (a decrease in the subjective experience as a self) and absorption into a larger totality (one of the hallmarks of the mystical experience). Carhart-Harris speculates that the de-activation of the default mode network leads to more entropy (disorder) in the brain, as different brain networks can communicate more with each other.47 The attention to ego dissolution indicates that within neuroscience and cognitive psychology there is increasing attention to the spiritual experiences reported by ayahuasca users. Such experiences are taken seriously as a source of meaning. As cognitive psychologist Michiel van Elk argues, such experiences are no longer pathologized as disturbances in brain functioning resulting in hallucinations, as in reductionist psychiatry. The role of interpretation, learning effects, and cultural context (in other words, set and setting) is increasingly emphasized.48 This process of ego dissolution can be connected to Taylor’s notions of the buffered self and the porous self. The buffered self refers to our Cartesian self-perception as a circumscribed and separated self that is facing an external, outside world. Taylor contrasts this with the premodern self-perception as a porous self in constant interaction with the (natural and supernatural) environment, which is also widespread in non-Western cultures. The repeated experience of ego dissolution may contribute to replacing one’s self-perception as an enclosed self with that as a porous self. These first two types of discourses are both secular in that they remain skeptical with regard to the ontological significance of ayahuasca experiences. These may be called “mystical” but only in a phenomenological sense: they are profoundly meaningful for the person who experiences them, but they do not per se put that person in touch with larger ontological dimensions. Such secular researchers follow the approach of methodological agnosticism and leave the ontological question open. They follow a black box approach: as long as they can see a correlation between certain input (the

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consumption of ayahuasca) and certain output (observable therapeutic effects), they do not need to know how ayahuasca does what it does. If ayahuasca consumption has a therapeutic effect, it does not matter whether users themselves interpret their experiences ontologically or not. For example, Griffiths et al. report that the use of psilocybin can facilitate mystical experiences that may have beneficial therapeutic effects, regardless of their ontological status.49 RELIGIOUS DISCOURSES In his study High Culture, Christopher Partridge provides a historical overview of nonsecular discourses that have developed beyond the boundaries of established religions, within what he calls the occulture (counterculture) that has emerged in the West over the past two centuries.50 He describes psychedelics as “technologies of transcendence”51 that can lead to an overthrow of what sociologists Berger and Luckmann call “hegemonic plausibility structures,” our commonly shared understanding of reality that determines what we accept as plausible and what we do not.52 An ontological interpretation of psychedelic experiences is given in some discourses of psychedelic mysticism. They differ from medical discourses in the way that they interpret the meaning of Osmond and Huxley’s term psychedelics as “mind-manifesting.” For Osmond, it meant revealing previously invisible forms of mind in a psychological sense. The term “psychedelic” indicates here that these substances are a new scientific instrument for the investigation of consciousness: they can summon forms and aspects of consciousness that are unknown or not noticed under ordinary circumstances. For Huxley, however, it meant revealing Mind-at-Large, a larger cosmic reality that is obstructed by our usual forms of consciousness.53 Mind-at-Large is usually filtered out by the reducing valve of our waking consciousness. Psychedelics widen the reducing valve and allow more of Mind-at-Large in. According to such a filter model, the brain is a reducer rather than a producer of consciousness. Jeffrey Kripal explains this as follows: Mind exists independently of the brain, into and by which it is filtered, transmitted, reduced, particularized, and translated through all of the neurological, cognitive, linguistic, cultural, and social processes that we have identified in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. The filter thesis does not require that we deny any of these hard-won knowledges—only that we “flip” our interpretive perspective and see these processes as reductions rather than as complete productions of consciousness.54

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Kripal notes that the filter theory is resonant with Kant’s philosophy, according to which noumenal reality (the real) always comes to us already filtered by the a priori cognitive categories of space, time, and causality. For Kant, noumenal “unfiltered” reality can never be rationally known as such. The material world might be fiercely alive and cosmically conscious. Our world might be populated with innumerable strange creatures, powerful nonhuman Others, which are normally completely invisible to our perceptual systems. Huxley’s metaphor of a reducing valve imagines the relationship between a distributed consciousness (Mind-at-Large) and the altered brain as a quantitative one. It led to the popular notion of the expansion of existing consciousness, rather than a completely new mode of consciousness that is discontinuous with ordinary waking consciousness. As Kripal puts it: The mushroom or chemical does not cause the experience of God; it suppresses and messes with brain function to the extent that mystical forms of mind, which are always present, always “there,” can get into the brain and so manifest as a human experience. . . . [P]sychotropic substances do not cause Mind at Large; they allow us to become aware of it; they let it in.55

If the human brain functions as a “receiver” of the different channels of reality, could the channel suddenly switch to some previously unknown transhuman signal? Perhaps, Kripal speculates, our brain blocks out, or veils, a larger cosmic background. Perhaps we are being “dumbed down” and enshackled by our bodies. If we were in constant touch with the larger cosmic background, we wouldn’t be able to survive in this world. Albert Hoffman, who discovered LSD in 1937, uses the metaphor of tuning in to other wavelengths: If one continues with the conception of reality as a product of sender and receiver, then the entry of another reality under the influence of LSD may be explained by the fact that . . . the receiver is thereby tuned into another wavelength than that corresponding to normal, everyday reality. Since the endless variety and diversity of the universe correspond to infinitely many different wavelengths, depending on the adjustment of the receiver, many different realities, including the respective ego, can become conscious. These different realities, more correctly designated as different aspects of the reality, are not mutually exclusive but are complementary, and form together a portion of the all-encompassing, timeless, transcendental reality.56

The filter model has been very popular as a metaphor in philosophical approaches to psychedelic experiences, and extraordinary experiences in general. For example, William James held a “transmission” theory of mind. He argued that, although consciousness is a function of the brain, this does not

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mean it is a production of the brain. Function can also denote transmission, as when a prism refracts light that is not produced by the prism itself. Henri Bergson held a “radio reception theory of consciousness”: our sensory system has evolved to pick up and interact with only a small sliver of reality. Our “attunement” to the world is accurate enough to survive and adapt but does not accurately or completely reflect reality. Psychedelic mysticism goes back to the publication of Huxley’s The Doors of Perception in 1954 and a famous Life magazine article in 1957 that reported on the banker and mycologist Gordon Wasson’s experiences with psychoactive mushrooms with Mexican healer Maria Sabina.57 It was popularized by Timothy Leary in the Sixties, who made liberal use of Eastern religious ideas to describe the psychedelic experience,58 as part of a more general process of an Easternization of the West.59 As Partridge notes, discerning exactly how Leary understood the religious concepts he used is not easy. For Leary, “Oriental religion provided a culturally appropriate and therapeutically useful vocabulary for interpreting the psychedelic experience.”60 As one of his co-workers observed, Leary tended to call himself a Hindu, Buddhist, or Daoist as the situation required. He was more interested in generic Oriental wisdom than in specific ontological doctrines.61 Actually, Leary preferred psychological to ontological interpretations of the psychedelic experience. With Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert, Leary published The Psychedelic Experience, a detraditionalized reading of The Tibetan Book of the Dead through psychological game theory that turned it into a manual for the psychedelic trip.62 While The Tibetan Book of the Dead is about the bardos (ontological realms) to be crossed after death, Leary, Alpert, and Metzner applied its instructions to the death and rebirth of the ego that took place during a psychedelic trip. For Leary and his co-workers, psychedelics were technologies of gnosis that help in this transformation process by cleansing the doors of perception. Such gnostic technologies could liberate the self from its sociocultural conditioning and induce peak experiences. They could open a door to Buddhist truths or higher states of consciousness.63 Leary became a charismatic religious leader who knew, however, very little about religion and mysticism. In 1966, he started his own “religion” in order to legally protect the use of LSD, the League of Spiritual Discovery, which used LSD as its sacrament. However, Partridge argues that during the 1960s, psychedelic mysticism discourses increasingly degenerated into a cover for the uninhibited recreational use of psychoactive drugs: Much of what went on beyond the cloistered spaces of academia in the late 1950s and 1960s amounted to a valorization of recreational drug use in a culture shaped by a turn to the self. Unquestionably, many young people simply enjoyed taking drugs. Steve, a hippie interviewed in 1967, recalled that when he and his

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friends first took LSD, “we didn’t drop it to see God or overthrow the government. We did it because we liked it.”64

As a result, religious discourses of psychedelic mysticism gradually lost their credibility. The increasing recreational use of psychedelics, which was accompanied by various incidents, led in 1970 in the US to the proclamation of the Drug Act, supplemented in 1978 by the Psychotropic Substances Act, and to the war on drugs that is still going on internationally. Psychoactive substances have since been considered dangerous drugs.65 Because of the increased association of the term “psychedelics” with recreational use of psychoactive substances, in 1979 a group of ethnobotanists and mythology researchers proposed the term “entheogen” for the use of psychoactive substances in a ritualistic religious (especially shamanic) context.66 The researchers wanted to escape association with the “hippie abuse” of psychoactive substances.67 “Entheogen” is a contraction of the Greek terms en theos (“full of god, inspired, possessed”) and genesthai (“to become”), and can be translated as “to bring forth the god (or the divine) within” or “to become full of god.” An entheogen is not considered to evoke hallucinations but visions, which are not misperceptions but expanded perceptions that allow one to perceive things that cannot be perceived with everyday consciousness. The term is not without its critics. Partridge argues that the term is associated with a theologization of transcendent experiences. He considers “psychedelics” to be the more neutral term.68 Dobkin de Rios also argues that the term is too theological, and that it reveals an ethnocentric bias that disregards indigenous perspectives.69 Other critics argue that the term confirms the problematic separation between an internal subject and an external outside world. Christian Rätsch points out that the term was originally coined to refer to the cultural and ritual use of psychoactive substances, not per se to their religious use.70 However, most religion scholars today use “entheogen” for the use of psychoactive substances in a religious context. Beginning in the Eighties and Nineties, the discourse of entheogenic shamanism became popular, based in part on the work of popular authors such as Carlos Castaneda and Terence McKenna.71 The turn to the Orient in the Sixties gave way to a fascination with an imagined archaic past and its survivals within indigenous cultures. However, as Partridge notes, the lure of Romanticism remains strong.72 Spiritual seekers long for a primal, universal wisdom to which entheogens can provide access. Entheogenic shamanism goes back to the work of Huxley and Wasson. Huxley considered mescaline, the psychoactive substance in peyote, a sacrament, and even argued that the Catholic Church should replace alcohol as a sacrament with mescaline.

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Wasson considered psilocybin, the psychoactive substance in mushrooms, a sacrament.73 Not unlike the term “mysticism,” the term “shamanism” is a problematic and contested scholarly construct. It is understood within the entheogenic counterculture primarily through Mircea Eliade’s work. According to Eliade, the shaman specializes in trance, during which his soul is believed to leave his body through all kinds of “archaic techniques of ecstasy.”74 Based on Eliade’s views, McKenna constructed a discourse of entheogenic shamanism in which psychedelics could pave the way for an archaic revival of such techniques of ecstasy. Another view of Eliade, the existence of a global core shamanism, was elaborated by anthropologist and shaman Michael Harner.75 However, many religious scholars have critically deconstructed Eliade’s ideas.76 Entheogenic shamanism sees ayahuasca as a combination of sacred plants that (some say for centuries and around the world) functions in indigenous traditions as a sacrament in a ritual and liturgical context, much like peyote, psychoactive mushrooms (magic mushrooms), and cannabis.77 Ayahuasca experiences are interpreted as journeys into parallel realities. Reports of ayahuasca experiences describe some of the same territory as mystical experiences, but they also include aspects not usually mentioned in mystical experiences, such as entry into otherworldly realms and contact with spirit entities. People report opening up to what they refer to as nonhuman worlds, plant spirits, spirit doctors, personal ancestors, past life experiences, and sometimes entities from other dimensions or universes. Other than psychedelic mysticism, which assumes a vaguely monistic construction of reality based on Eastern nondualism, entheogenic shamanism distinguishes ordinary and non-ordinary reality based on indigenous shamanic discourses: Behind the material world, which is interpreted as the world of outer appearances alone, there exists for these peoples a reality hidden from normal view. The indigenous population of South America name this other reality the “true reality,” the “reality of souls,” the “invisible world.” One might conceive of it as a parallel universe. The “true reality” does not lie somewhere outside the forest, but is the primal ground of being, so to speak. . . . The world of expanded, extraordinary consciousness is a place outside of ordinary perception, beyond known regions, and lost to time; it is an invisible world, a place of dreams.78

Ayahuasca visions are seen as journeys into this other reality.79 An important concept related to such shamanic journeying is ecstasy. The term is based on the Greek term ekstasis and means “to transcend, to stand outside the self.”80 In the ecstatic entheogenic state of consciousness, the soul can step outside the body and travel to invisible parallel universes or astral dimensions of reality. Thus, humans can acquire a liberating experiential knowledge (gnosis) of

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their true divine nature. As Wouter Hanegraaff explains, in a gnostic-dualist variant of this discourse, humans are trapped in the global capitalist consumer society, a vast impersonal, demonic system of domination and control in which politicians and the media hypnotize the population into slavish submission to “the matrix,” a metaphor borrowed from the film series The Matrix. Entheogenic sacraments can break the spell and bring the truth to light—analogous to swallowing the red pill in The Matrix.81 Such gnosis is not an end in itself; it is mainly about its practical application, for example, for healing. According to Hanegraaff, the worldview of entheogenic shamanism can be called a cosmotheism: the divine is present in the visible, created world without coinciding with it.82 This is based on the spirit ontologies of traditional indigenous cultures: plants, animals, humans, and spirits are part of one interconnected web, and healing occurs through a renewed harmonious alignment within that web, where the spirits can be asked for help.83 It is therefore not the entheogenic experience that is central, but the ritual and liturgical practice. The therapeutic effects of ayahuasca are made possible by the shaman’s ability to contact the spiritual entities within the plants, which are considered teachers. Ayahuasca facilitates interaction with the spirits of plants and animals, and with other more-than-human forces. From a modern perspective, these forces are supernatural, but within shamanic discourse, they are part of the web of nature.84 The belief that ayahuasca is, in itself, an entity with agency and consciousness is held by many practitioners. What Leary was for psychedelic mysticism, Terence McKenna (1946– 2000) was for entheogenic shamanism. He promoted entheogens as a sacred technology that puts us in contact with other realities. They are, as McKenna puts it, “a transdimensional doorway which sly fairies have left slightly ajar for anyone to enter into.”85 Entheogens are also persons with which we have a symbiotic relationship that offers access to other entities and to the voice of an alien intelligence beyond the self. They are doorways to a larger intelligent environment.86 As Partridge notes, McKenna’s particular brand of entheogenic shamanism was highly idiosyncratic and very different from both psychedelic mysticism and indigenous discourses.87 In the end, Partridge concludes, McKenna was not particularly interested in indigenous cultures, only in their technologies of transcendence, similar to the way that Leary appropriated the Tibetan Book of the Dead for his own countercultural purposes.88 As the Santo Daime church has expanded beyond Brazil into the West, its eclectic ayahuasca discourse is spreading.89 Elements of entheogenic shamanism are combined with a diversity of other elements: alternative philosophies and non-mainstream “scientific worldviews” of the Esoteric Circle,90 Christianity (mainly folk Catholicism), Kardecist Spiritism, Umbanda, as

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well as references to elements and entities from the natural world (sun, moon, stars, earth, sky, sea). Andrew Dawson argues that although Santo Daime is often labeled as a shamanic religion, this is a reductionist and misleading characterization.91 There is an eclectic combination of different religious discourses and practices, including Western esotericism and New Age. He even argues that the actual religious practices and beliefs of contemporary (urbanized) Santo Daime churches have more in common with this new spirituality than with other Brazilian ayahuasca religions such as Barquinha and the União do Vegetal.92 DISCUSSION In this chapter, I have discussed four different types of ayahuasca discourses. In each of these discourses, different ontological assumptions are made about what ayahuasca is and what it does. In both recreational and medical discourses, it is equally assumed that ayahuasca is a pharmacological liquid substance. However, with regard to what it does, these discourses vary. According to the recreational understanding of ayahuasca, it causes hallucinations, which by definition cannot be true since they don’t have an ontological referent. According to the medical understanding of ayahuasca, however, it can reveal deeper layers of the mind. As such, it can serve as a therapeutical or cognitive tool, even if we do not understand the exact mechanism yet. In the psychedelic mysticism discourse, ayahuasca can even give rise to mystical experiences that do have an ontological referent (in a perennialist framework usually referred to as ultimate reality). Both hallucinogenic and psychedelic discourses are still firmly entrenched within the immanent frame (although psychedelic mysticism can be seen as a theological discourse that fits within an open version of the immanent frame that leaves room for transcendence). Anthropologist Silvia Mesturini Cappo has argued that the two secular discourses as well as psychedelic mysticism (which she calls “chemical” and “mystical” approaches) are still somewhat reductionistic: The mystical perspective saw a potential for spiritual development and alternative medical uses, and therefore reduced this practice to an individualist, interiorized, psychological space. The chemists’ perspective, and its way of reducing profoundly entangled substances to one powerful, and possibly dangerous, component, has opened the way to both legal issues related to the War on Drugs as well as to recreational use that has escaped from the ritual entanglement of community surveillance and of ayahuasqueros’ and ayahuasqueras’ expertise in preparation.93

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The entheogenic shamanism discourse views ayahuasca not as a pharmacological liquid substance but as liquid divinity, a plant teacher or sacrament with agency that does not produce hallucinations but bestows visions and gives access to invisible beings. In terms of what these invisible beings do, the interpretations range from problem-solving to healing to salvation. These days, the fact that ayahuasca functions as a sacrament in ritual and liturgical contexts is recognized as an important factor in its therapeutic effects. As medical discourses become less and less reductionist, and as religious discourses focus less and less on “the psychedelic experience” but on ayahuasca rituals as contemplative practices aimed at wholeness and connection, entangled discourses are beginning to emerge that focus, based on a holistic health approach, on the effects of ayahuasca on the health of people, society, and the earth as a whole.94 I will discuss such discourses further in chapter 3. We have seen how the discourse of psychedelic mysticism was obscured by the recreational use of psychedelics in the late Sixties, thus giving way to the discourse of entheogenic shamanism. However, as Partridge argues, the discourse of entheogenic shamanism has also been popularized and diluted in a similar way since the Nineties. Beginning in the Nineties, the Romantic imagination began to focus less on Eastern mysticism and more on an archaic past still present in indigenous cultures.95 From a perennialist perspective, there was still ancient wisdom to be found here that had been lost in secular modernity, and to which entheogens could give access again. Today, a romantic popularization of ayahuasca threatens to take place that views it as a panacea for all possible ills. Whereas from within medical discourses, psychedelic experiences open the door to the study of mystical experiences because they are mysticomimetic (they mimic mystical experiences), from within psychedelic mysticism, such experiences actually are mystical experiences.96 This fits within a psychologization of mysticism that took off around the beginning of the twentieth century. From a perennialist perspective, mystical experiences are universal, unmediated, and homogeneous. The importance of the linguistic and sociocultural context of the mystical experience is strongly relativized.97 Therefore, it does not matter whether it is attained through religious practice, asceticism, or psychoactive substances. This entails a democratization of mysticism, which was further enhanced by psychedelics. Now, mystical experiences are within reach for everyone, not only for religiously gifted individuals who are willing to put in years of ascetic practice. In a theological context, Thomas Roberts has argued that entheogens will lead to an “entheogen Reformation” that will make religious experiences accessible to all, similar to how Luther’s translation of the Bible into German made it available to all.98 According to some, ayahuasca is in danger of acquiring a status similar to that of LSD in the Sixties among Leary’s followers.99

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With regard to the ontological questions around ayahuasca, there is an interesting parallel with the early twentieth-century revolution of quantum mechanics. These findings were so incompatible with reigning philosophical frameworks that the Copenhagen interpretation of Bohr became standard: we don’t know what it means, but the equations work. We need a black box approach: work with the equations without any adequate epistemological or ontological frameworks. Philosophical speculation about what it all meant about our models of reality was discouraged. Since the Seventies, such philosophical speculation has become part of the discipline of physics again. Today, serious philosophical interpretations such as Carlo Rovelli’s relational approach are being discussed within physics.100 Also when it comes to ayahuasca, the black box approach is tempting. Simply work with ayahuasca and observe its effects, without speculating too much about what it all means. However, in this book, I do want to undertake such ontological explorations because I think that without them, reductive materialist ontologies and epistemologies become the unspoken default when it comes to discussing ayahuasca.101 To ayahuasca’s ontological shock, three responses are possible for the scholar who doesn't simply want to embrace a new ontology. One is to stay away from ontology as much as possible—the approach of methodological agnosticism which “does not deny the truth or assert the falsity of nonempirical beliefs; it merely acknowledges that the social sciences have no techniques or expertise with which they can judge or evaluate supernatural claims, although they will try to describe these and their consequences as accurately as possible.”102 Social scientists often follow this approach.103 A second response, popular since Kant influentially argued that we do not have access to things-in-themselves but only to how they appear to us, is to replace ontology (the study of what is) with phenomenology (the study of what appears). In such an approach, the object-oriented mode of inquiry into the structure of reality that ayahuasca might reveal is replaced by the subjectoriented mode of inquiry into the content and structure of ayahuasca experiences. A third approach (the one taken in this study) would be to investigate ontological questions about ayahuasca without committing to any specific ontology.104 It agrees with Latour, who sees the need for “ontological fattening therapy”: ‌‌‌‌‌‌‌allowing more ontological answers to co-exist without turning any one of them into a final answer, in order to diplomatically negotiate between various possible ontologies. This book is looking for a new language that does not take up a different position within the immanent frame but that has the potential to take us beyond the immanent frame altogether. In the next two chapters, it will look into the challenge of making sense of ayahuasca without falling back into some position within the immanent frame. More specifically, it wants

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to address four interrelated “cross-pressures in the immanent frame” that we need to find an answer to: 1.  The construction of meaning. According to the immanent frame, all meaning-making must always necessarily take place in the mind since there is no meaning embedded in the natural order. And even if there is a supernatural order, we do not have epistemological access to it. Therefore, meaning is always constructed, never discovered. What does this mean about the deep sense of meaning that is often connected with ayahuasca experiences? Is such meaning always manufactured and subjective? Or can there also be an objective, ontological referent to such experiences that makes them meaningful? Are ayahuasca experiences only hallucinations of the brain, or can they also be visions that perceive something that really exists? Can we find an epistemological justification for the deeply felt sense that such experiences are, well, true? Are such experiences real or constructed? In chapter 2 we will see that according to Latour’s philosophy, they are both. Ayahuasca experiences do indeed communicate meaning to the individual, although often indirectly through baroque or fantastic imagery. Unlike the popular view that mystical experiences give us direct access to reality, what I will argue is that ayahuasca gives us indirect access to reality, which is always co-determined by set and setting. 2.  The nature of the self. According to the immanent frame, we experience ourselves as buffered selves, separated from the outside world. We have access to both the inner world of our thoughts and feelings, and the outer world of matter. However, in the alternate states of consciousness of ecstatic ayahuasca experiences, this separation between subject and object falls away. We experience ourselves once more as the porous selves of our premodern past, without clear boundaries, vulnerable to invasion by all kinds of cosmic powers and energies. How to philosophically make sense of this? According to Charles Taylor, such a porous self may be still accessible to indigenous people, but is impossible for modern, secular Westerners to recover. In chapter 2, I will present Latour’s notion of “beings of transformation” that can offer a new language for such a porous self. 3.  The nature of divine beings. What kind of entities are allowed to exist, and in what way? Can we meaningfully speak about the existence of more-than-human beings (i.e., spirits)? Within the immanent frame, such spirits are banished to a separate, supernatural ontological realm. How can we think about divine beings in a different way? In chapter 2, I will present Latour’s notion of “beings of religion” to explore a new language for speaking about divine beings.

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4.  The nature of ayahuasca. As we have seen, in religious ayahuasca discourses, ayahuasca itself is considered to be a divine being (liquid divinity) that gives access to divinity. As an intelligent plant teacher, ayahuasca is assumed to have agency. However, in the immanent frame, agency is only conferred upon self-aware human beings. Plant teachers cannot have agency. However, as we will see in chapter 3, there are different ways to think about agency that don’t limit it to human beings alone. I want to stress once more that the immanent frame is not a particular worldview but our “felt sense” of how things are. It determines our plausibility structures, that which we consider likely to exist. Ayahuasca changes this “felt sense.” It doesn’t just make us take up a different position within the immanent frame (for example, become a believer in transcendence), but invites us to go beyond the immanent frame itself. This is what I want to explore in the remainder of this book. In the next chapter, we will start with Bruno Latour. He can help us to go beyond the immanent frame through his experimental metaphysics, in which he approaches the world as a collection of actor-networks. NOTES 1. This very distinction is highly problematic from an indigenous point of view. 2. I will pay less attention to indigenous shamanic discourses and UDV discourse since these are less widespread in the West. 3. Zinberg, Drug, Set and Setting. 4. Hartogsohn, American Trip, 7. 5. Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (New York: University Books, 1964). Of the four possible goals of psychedelic trips that they distinguish (self-enhancement, altruistic, hedonistic, and religious), their road map is oriented toward the religious one. 6. Arno Adelaars, Christian Rätsch, and Claudia Müller-Ebeling, Ayahuasca: Rituals, Potions, and Visionary Art from the Amazon (Studio City, CA: Divine Arts, 2006), 156–241. 7. Ibid., 231. 8. Jonathan Ott, “Psychonautic Uses of ‘Ayahuasca’ and its Analogues: Panacea or Outré Entertainment?” in Labate and Jungaberle, Internationalization of Ayahuasca, 105–122. 9. Matthew Conrad, “The Global Expansion of Ayahuasca Through the Internet,” in Labate and Cavnar, Expanding World Ayahuasca Diaspora, 95–114.

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10. Such commercial use is related to the problematic increase of ayahuasca tourism in Peru and Brazil, which will not be discussed in this book. 11. Westerners would call some of those purposes profane and others sacred; however, in indigenous worldviews, such a distinction between profane and sacred is not made in the same way. 12. Harris, Listening to Ayahuasca, 120. 13. Ibid. 14. Ott, “Psychonautic Uses of ‘Ayahuasca’ and its Analogues.” 15. Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (New York: Harper & Row, 1954). 16. Pinchbeck and Rokhlin, When Plants Dream. 17. Harris, Listening to Ayahuasca; Pollan, How to Change Your Mind. 18. Taylor, Secular Age. For this reason, the concept of “spirituality” is popular among ayahuasca users. This allows them to pursue religious goals in nonreligious (or even anti-religious) ways, similar to what many Americans described as “Spiritual But Not Religious.” See Linda Mercadante, Belief without Borders: Inside the Minds of the Spiritual But Not Religious (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 19. Hartogsohn, American Trip, 205. This is part of the coproduction theory that has come out of Science and Technology Studies: norms produce knowledge, and knowledge produces new norms. 20. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 188. 21. Hartogsohn, American Trip, 121. 22. Braak, Reimagining Zen, 125. 23. Taylor, Secular Age, 554. 24. Or at least with closed versions of it; Taylor notes that there are also open interpretations of the immanent frame that do leave room for a transcendent supernatural order (Taylor, Secular Age, 545). 25. A fourth option that postmodern anti-realist ontologies hold is that all reality is humanly constructed; there is no reality independent of the human. 26. Taylor, Secular Age, 549. 27. Harris, Listening to Ayahuasca. 28. Ibid., 65. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 65f. 31. Ibid., 66. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 67. 34. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 146f. 35. Hartogsohn distinguishes seven such discourses: psychotomimetic, military research, mental health, mysticomimetic, psychedelic creativity, technical and scientific innovation, and LSD as a catalyst for world peace. 36. Kenneth W. Tupper, “Psychoactive Substances and the English Language: Drugs, Discourses, and Public Policy,” Contemporary Drug Problems 39/3 (2012): 465–467.

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37. Ibid., 472. 38. The use of psychoactive substances in a medical and therapeutical context had earlier already been discussed by Jung, James, and others around 1900. 39. Partridge, High Culture, 4. 40. Pollan, How to Change Your Mind, 144–185. 41. Ibid., 185–220. 42. Ibid., 331–390; Harris, Listening to Ayahuasca, 31–63; Labate and Cavnar, Therapeutic Use of Ayahuasca; Labate and Cavnar, Expanding World Ayahuasca Diaspora. 43. Stanislav Grof, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research (New York: Viking Press, 1975), 32. 44. Shanon, Antipodes of the Mind. 45. Marlene Dobkin de Rios and Charles S. Grob, “Hallucinogens, suggestibility and adolescence in cross-cultural perspective,” Yearbook of Ethnomedicine and the Study of Consciousness 3 (1994): 123–132. 46. Pollan, How to Change Your Mind, 291–330; Robin L. Carhart-Harris, D. E. Erritzoe, T. M. Williams, et al., “The neural correlates of the psychedelic state as determined by fMRI studies with psilocybin,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of USA 109/6 (2012): 2138–2143. 47. Robin L. Carhart-Harris, Robert Leech, Peter J. Hellyer, et al., “The entropic brain: A theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, February 3, 2014, https:​//​doi​.org​ /10​.3389​/fnhum​.2014​.00020. See also Michiel van Elk, “Neuroscientific and psychological explanations for the therapeutic effects of psychedelics,” Tijdschrift voor Psychiatrie 62/8 (2020): 677–682. 48. Elk, “Neuroscientific and psychological explanations.” 49. R. R. Griffiths, W. A. Richards, U. McCann and R. Jesse, “Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance,” Psychopharmacology 187 (2006): 268–283. 50. Partridge, High Culture, 3. 51. Ibid., 9–29. 52. Ibid., 13. 53. Ibid., 201–212. 54. Kripal, Secret Body, 195. 55. Ibid., 216. 56. Quoted in Doyle, Darwin's Pharmacy, 184. 57. Partridge, High Culture, 295–305. 58. Ibid., 225–287; See also Morgan Shipley, Psychedelic Mysticism: Transforming Consciousness, Religious Experiences, and Voluntary Peasants in Postwar America (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2015); Karl Baier, “High Mysticism: On the Interplay between the Psychedelic Movement and Academic Study of Mysticism,” in Constructions of Mysticism as a Universal: Roots and Interactions across Borders, edited by Annette Wilke, Robert Stephanus, and Robert Suckro, 363–396 (Wiesbaden: Harrassovitz, 2021). 59. Campbell, Easternization of the West.

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60. Partridge, High Culture, 255. 61. The Australian transpersonal psychologist Gregg Lahood calls such indiscriminate mixing and matching “the hybridization of Eastern spirituality and entheogenic states.” Gregg Lahood, “Paradise Bound: A Perennial Tradition or an Unseen Process of Cosmological Hybridization?” Anthropology of Consciousness 19/2 (2008): 155–189. He argues that psychedelic states of consciousness were often interpreted through insights from various Eastern religious traditions (samadhi, satori, wu, dharmakaya, moksha, satchitananda). This led to the perennialist discourse of psychedelic mysticism: psychedelic experiences confirmed that ultimate reality, although it manifests itself in various culturally determined forms, is actually One. Lahood argues, however, that what was presented as confirmation of the perennial philosophy actually masked a process of cosmological hybridization where “cosmological designs are detraditionalized, reconfigured, and deployed as subversive devices” (Partridge, High Culture, 168). 62. Leary, Metzner, and Alpert, Psychedelic Experience. 63. Partridge, High Culture, 260f. 64. Ibid., 284. 65. Mark Haden, Brian Emerson, and Kenneth W. Tupper, “A Public-Health-Based Vision for the Management and Regulation of Psychedelics,” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 48/4 (2016): 245. There is still much debate on the political context that led to the war on drugs. 66. Carl A. P. Ruck, Jeremy Bigwood, Danny Staples, Jonathan Ott, and R. Gordon Wasson, “Entheogens,” Journal of Psychedelic Drugs 11 (1979): 145–146. 67. However, as Partridge notes, since the Nineties the term “entheogen” has been similarly incorporated into a “neo-hippie” discourse surrounding entheogenic shamanism (Partridge, High Culture, 6). 68. Partridge, High Culture, 4. 69. Marlene Dobkin de Rios, The Psychedelic Journey of Marlene Dobkin de Rios: 45 Years with Shamans, Ayahuasqueros, and Ethnobotanists (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 2009), 73. 70. Adelaars, Rätsch, and Müller-Ebeling, Ayahuasca, 15. 71. Partridge, High Culture, 288–341. 72. Ibid., 288. 73. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “Entheogenic Esotericism,” in Contemporary Esotericism, edited by Egil Asprem and Kennet Granholm, 392–409 (London: Routledge, 2014); Partridge, High Culture. 74. Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1964 [1951]). 75. Michael Harner, The Way of the Shaman (New York: Harper, 1980). 76. See, for example, Robert J. Wallis, Shamans/Neo-Shamans: Ecstasies, Alternative Archaeologies and Contemporary Pagans (London: Routledge, 2003). 77. This is connected with the notion of the long trip: the idea that psychoactive plants might have been used for centuries and around the world and might have stood at the foundation of religious traditions. The soma juice, described in the Vedas, and the kukeon, which was drunk in the mysteries of Eleusis (dedicated to the fertility

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goddess Demeter, her daughter Persephone, and the god Dionysus), might have been psychoactive (R. Gordon Wasson, Carl A. P. Ruck and Albert Hoffman, The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries [New York: Yovanovitch, 1978]). The sacred drink amrita, described in Tibetan Buddhist writings, might have been psychoactive (Michael Crowley, Secret Drugs of Buddhism: Psychedelic Sacraments and the Origins of the Vajrayana [Santa Fe: Synergetic Press, 2019]). The burning bramble that spoke to Moses may have been the Acacia tree, which in combination with the Peganum harmala bush is psychoactive (Benny Shanon, “Biblical Entheogens: A Speculative Hypothesis,” Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology and Culture 1/1 [2008]: 51–74). And in many Dionysian mystery religions, the wine that was drunk may have been spiked with mind-altering substances (Brian C. Muraresku, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2020]). However, there is still too little hard archaeological and historical evidence for such claims, according to scholars of religion. Hanegraaff, “Ayahuasca Groups and Networks in the Netherlands,” argues for solid historical research. 78. Adelaars, Rätsch, and Müller-Ebeling, Ayahuasca, 4f. 79. Among indigenous people, ayahuasca is sometimes described as “the television of the forest.” 80. Partridge, High Culture, 20. 81. Hanegraaff, “Entheogenic Esotericism,” 408. 82. Ibid., 406. 83. André van der Braak, “Spirit Ontologies en ‘wij modernen,’” Filosofie-tijdschrift 30/3 (2020): 34–39. 84. Ibid. 85. Partridge, High Culture, 323. 86. As McKenna put it: “The most extraordinary thing about the DMT experience is that you see entities. You encounter beings whom I’ve described as self-transforming machine elves. They are the denizens of this other dimension. They are trying to teach something” (Partridge, High Culture, 322). 87. For example, in a variation on Huxley’s Mind-at-Large, McKenna spoke about the Overmind, “a globally conscious, ecologically sensitive, balanced, human, caring kind of consciousness,” which amounted to a “much larger, much wiser organizing force that we all carry around inside ourselves.” McKenna ultimately defended a theology of revelation: the Overmind breaks through our presuppositions and cultural constraints and communicates directly to the mind. For McKenna, this is what UFO visitations are about. They are a revelation of alien gnosis from beyond. See Partridge, High Culture, 333f. 88. Partidge, High Culture, 324. 89. The history of Santo Daime will be presented in more detail in chapter 5. 90. The Esoteric Circle was an organization in São Paulo of which Irineu Serra was a member for several years. 91. Dawson, Santo Daime, 132f. 92. Ibid., 184. 93. Silvia Mesturini Cappo, “What Ayahuasca Wants: Notes for the Study and Preservation of an Entangled Ayahuasca.” In Expanding World Ayahuasca Diaspora, 167.

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94. See, for example, Jordan Sloshower, “Integrating Psychedelic Medicines and Psychiatry: Theory and Practice of a Model Clinic,” in Plant Medicines, Healing and Psychedelic Science: Cultural Perspectives, edited by Beatriz C. Labate and Clancy Clavnar, , 113–132 (Heidelberg: Springer, 2018). 95. Partridge, High Culture, 288. 96. Ibid., 193. 97. Ibid., 17–19. 98. Thomas B. Roberts, “The Entheogen Reformation,” Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 48 (2016): 26–33. 99. Bernd Brabec de Mori, “Tracing Hallucinations: Contributing to a Critical Ethnohistory of Ayahuasca Usage in the Peruvian Amazon,” in Labate and Cavnar, Internationalization of Ayahuasca, 27. 100. Carlo Rovelli, Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution (New York: Riverhead Books, 2021). 101. In The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge (New York: Bellevue, 2019), Kripal laments that the humanities have become culturally largely irrelevant because they are held hostage by reductive materialist ontologies and epistemologies, which prohibit the study of consciousness. As Kripal notes, we are between stories: “Modern science, and particularly quantum mechanics, has rendered every past public conception of the real, every past conventional religious worldview fundamentally inadequate. And yet the positivism of science has prevented us from offering any viable alternative or new story” (ibid., 103). Kripal proposes to reimagine the humanities as the study of consciousness encoded in culture: “We can only study consciousness indirectly—that is, as it is reflected and refracted in cultural artifacts in the humanities (literature, art, language, religious expression); or in social expressions in the social sciences (institutions, cultural practices, legal systems, voting patterns); or in brain-based neurological processes (cognition, perception, temporality) in psychology and neuroscience” (ibid., 45). 102. Eileen Barker, Revisionism and Diversification in New Religious Movements (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 11. 103. For example, Dawson, Santo Daime; Mesturini Cappo, “What Ayahuasca Wants”; Harris, Listing to Ayahuasca; Blainey, Christ Returns from the Jungle. 104. G. William Barnard has reminded me that, although it is a lovely intention to not adopt any specific ontology, we all bring tacit ontological assumptions about the nature of what is real to each moment of our experience. Claiming to have no ontological position may be allowing unexamined and unconscious cultural internalizations to superimpose themselves on our view.

Chapter 2‌‌‌‌‌

Latour’s Experimental Metaphysics

The French sociologist and anthropologist Bruno Latour (1947–2022) has become well known since the Eighties of the last century, initially for his critical contributions to the new field of Science and Technology Studies, in which he showed that scientific knowledge is never pure and immediate but always constructed and even manufactured.1 And in recent years he has been very influential with his studies on the climate crisis that look for new places where we can land after both the dystopia of the economy and the utopia of ecology have failed us. However, in the intermediate years, Latour has also sketched in his various works the contours of an experimental metaphysics in which he addresses fundamental ontological and epistemological questions. In 1972, Latour had what he calls his “Saint Paul on the way to Damascus” experience. Driving back home late at night, he suddenly saw with great clarity that the world cannot be reduced to some special reality that explains all the others. He put the car to the side of the road and repeated to himself: “Nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything may be allied to everything else.”2 Latour calls this “the principle of irreduction.” Out of this germ, his entire experimental metaphysics grew. The world can most productively be approached as an ongoing co-constructive network of interrelated human and nonhuman entities (Latour calls them actors).3 Latour’s metaphysics is experimental in that it refuses to make any axiomatic a priori decisions about the nature of the real. Latour refuses to ontologically preformat the world. He rejects existing modern preformats such as the oppositional terms nature-culture, nonhuman-human, and object-subject. For him, the world is an irreducible plurality of actors that can best be described through the metaphor of the network. The first part of this chapter will lay out Latour’s criticism of what he calls “the Modern Constitution” and explore the consequences of what his critique 55

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means for rethinking ontology and epistemology. Taking stock of these consequences, it will consider the question of whether ayahuasca experiences should be seen as real or constructed (the answer will be: both). The second part of this chapter will explore Latour’s proposed solution to the crisis in the Modern Constitution, which involves a new ontological protocol that allows multiple modes of existence. It presents some of these modes of existence that involve invisible beings of transformation and beings of religion, which give us new ways of seeing the self and seeing divine beings. I will argue that these modes of existence apply to indigenous religiosity in general, and ayahuasca religiosity in particular. The discussion will revisit the ontological explorations of chapter 1 and the need for a liquid ontology. DECONSTRUCTING THE MODERN CONSTITUTION Latour is most famous for his writings on science. In his early publications on the sociology of science, Laboratory Life and The Pasteurization of France, Latour shows that scientific facts are never simply data that are discovered but are always constructed in the laboratory.4 Scientific experiments mostly produce inconclusive data that need further processing (weeding out apparatus failure or shortcomings in the experimental method). Actual scientific work, rather than the ideals of Science, does not so much appear to be an unbiased search for truth and accuracy, but a process of construction. Latour’s early work culminates in We Have Never Been Modern, in which he fundamentally rethinks and re-evaluates the mental landscape of Western modernity.5 He argues that modern thought has been based on what he calls a Modern Constitution: fundamental ontological assumptions that divide reality into the realms of Nature and Culture, immanence and transcendence, subject and object, and the human and the nonhuman.6 It takes for granted that there is only one global Nature, but many different local cultures. Nature is one, but humans have different perspectives on it. Therefore, the Modern Constitution combines a pluralistic multiculturalism with a mononaturalism. There are universal natural phenomena such as mountains, rivers, or the planets that are studied by science, and there are locally diverse cultural phenomena (such as being in contact with spirits, ancestors, snakes, or jaguars) that are studied by anthropologists as “representations,” “symbols,” or “social constructions.” Latour, however, insists on the existence of many natures, of which only one can be studied by science.7 For Latour, it is arbitrary to carve up reality into Nature and Culture. Why not divide the world into celestial and terrestrial spheres, as scholars did in the sixteenth century? Why not divide the world into male and female (as some cultures do, like those found among the Navajo Indians)? Why not divide the

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world into yin and yang, as in the Chinese worldview? Why not divide the world into matter and anti-matter? For Latour, Nature and Culture are not two isolated zones. There are only networks of individual actors, none of them inherently natural or cultural.8 Latour not only has theoretical objections to such a Modern Constitution that separates Nature and Culture, but he also argues that the actual practices of the Moderns do not conform to this theoretical foundation. In our daily lived experience, we do not divide the world in the way that the Modern Constitution demands. The Moderns don’t really live by these theoretical assumptions. This is why we are not, and have never been, modern. Also, this Modern Constitution is way past its expiration date. Modernity is not the final destination of world history, but merely a brief parenthesis, a four-hundred-year interlude from Descartes to the twentieth century that was useful for a while but now proves itself completely inadequate to meet today’s global challenges.9 The next section will discuss how Latour specifically rejects various ontological divisions that follow from the primary Modern division of reality into Nature and Culture: between transcendence and immanence, between subject and object, and between the human and the nonhuman. RETHINKING ONTOLOGY In the Modern Constitution, ontology (the inquiry into the true nature of reality) has taken a back seat to epistemology (the inquiry into obtaining knowledge of reality). Since Kant, the question of the nature of reality itself has been bracketed, since for Kant, noumenal reality (things as they are in themselves) cannot be known rationally by humans. They can only have rational knowledge of phenomenal reality (things as they appear through the senses).10 Such a phenomenal reality is always constructed by human consciousness. Latour rejects such a fundamental division of reality into noumenal and phenomenal. For him, the question of ontology becomes primary once again. However, Latour rejects ontological answers that imply a single underlying “ultimate reality” that serves as the unifying foundation for the plurality of objects. The world is an infinite multiplicity without beginning or end. Rather than in a universe, we live in a pluriverse.11 Rather than as a collection of substantial essences, the world is seen as an ever-changing and “becoming” construction site.

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Transcendence and Immanence Latour wants to go beyond the distinction between transcendence and immanence. For him, there is no deeper, ultimate reality that is the source of reality as it appears. He rejects such vertical ontological transcendence which implies an ontological fundamental difference between the natural world of material objects and living beings and another higher, original, unconditioned supernatural realm. It might seem that, with the absence of a supernatural transcendent world,12 the immanent natural world is the only world left. Latour may seem to be a secular thinker. However, Latour also denies that there can be such a thing as an immanent world. There is no such thing as a strictly material natural order, nor are there purely passive material forces. It is not merely that the natural world is both immanent and transcendent; Latour wants to leave both of these notions behind. As the American theologian Adam Miller explains, Latour doesn’t do away with transcendence altogether but reimagines the notion and retrofits it for a different use in his experimental metaphysics. When we traverse actor-networks, there is always something “more,” something slightly out of reach that we can connect to by following the chains of reference of the network. There is a multitude of such horizontal “mini-transcendences” that are all within the same plane. Latour uses the metaphor of fermentation. Just as yeast ferments laterally in all directions, never led or commanded or directed from above, in Latour’s dynamic actor-network, objects are always brewing, always fomenting, always bubbling over. Unlike vertical transcendence, which has traditionally been associated with purity, such local mini-transcendences are not pure but always messy. They are not unconditioned but the result of translation, negotiation, and compromise.13 Subjects and Objects Not only the distinction between a “higher” transcendent and supernatural world and a “lower” immanent natural world needs to be left behind. For Latour, also the distinction between an outer material world of objects, which is perceived and interpreted from within our inner subjective world, needs to go. Latour deconstructs the very notions of “matter” and “the material world” as both an invention and a construction. Latour provides a very brief genealogy of matter. The notion of “matter” emerged in the seventeenth century, connected to Descartes’s invention of the res extensa, when people started to believe that the thought of matter described real things.14 This was connected to the notion of “substance,” an enduring support “underneath” things that would ensure their continuity.15

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Locke famously made a distinction between the primary qualities of objects that are independent of the observer and therefore reside in the objects themselves (solidity, motion, size, weight) versus their secondary qualities that produce an effect in the observer and are therefore also dependent upon subjective interpretation (color, taste, smell, sounds). As a result, Latour argues, the external world began to bifurcate. On the one hand an invisible essence of things, on the other hand the remaining features of objects that produce sensory experiences.16 Latour concludes that we can actually do without such a reductive imagining of matter, just as physicists have learned to do without the notion of the ether. For Latour, objects do not exist independently by themselves‌‌‌‌‌. They are always interconnected through their relations. Moreover, objects are also not passive and material, but they are actors with agency because their presence can influence a situation. The invention of material objects, Latour argues, has gone hand in hand with an invention of the immaterial subject, a “mind” that is an internal entity separate from the external material world. Therefore, Latour also reimagines the subject. It doesn’t exist autonomously but is always constituted by a multiplicity of forces.17 Just like objects, subjects are continually being constructed. Latour looks for the networks that are responsible for the construction of “subjects,” similar to the networks responsible for the construction of “objects.”18 Humans and Nonhumans For Latour, reality is populated with many kinds of entities that all exist in their own mode. One type of these entities, the human subject, is seen by the Modern Constitution as special and as fundamentally different from other nonhuman types of entities because it has consciousness and is able to form representations of reality. The gap between humans and mountains is seen as more fundamental than, for example, the gap between mountains and lightning. However, for Latour, everything has an equal right to existence, not only privileged human entities. Latour is critical of Kant’s Copernican Revolution that placed humans at the center of philosophy: “What was a mere distinction [between nature and humans] is sharpened into a total separation, a Copernican Revolution. Things-in-themselves become inaccessible while symmetrically, the transcendental subject becomes infinitely remote from the world.”19 Latour therefore recommends a Counter-Revolution and pleads for a parliament of things that are connected into a network of actors through the alliances that they form with each other. Humans and nonhumans, large and small, artifacts and organisms, all equally exist.

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According to the Modern Constitution, humans have become more and more emancipated from nature, thanks to the accomplishments of science and technology. However, in a time of climate change and ecological crisis, it becomes clear that there is an increasingly intimate entanglement between humans and nonhumans. This acknowledgment of the entanglement between humans and nonhumans is what distinguishes Latour’s philosophy from that of most other Western philosophers. As the American philosopher Graham Harman puts it, “Ignore all rhetoric about realism and idealism, and ask of any philosophy whether it places inanimate relations on the same footing as the relations between human and world. If not, then we are still amidst the Copernicans, full stop.”20 Latour’s demolishing of our modern ontological concepts, such as immanence and transcendence, substance, subject and object, and human and nonhuman, corresponds to the kind of ontological shock that can often be the result of drinking ayahuasca. Ayahuasca breaks down and restructures our mental structures, thereby completely changing our sense of what is real. Reality can seem to become groundless, bottomless, without anything to hold on to. Different ontological worlds can open up. Latour’s abstract philosophical considerations can become a living experience. RETHINKING EPISTEMOLOGY It will be of no surprise that Latour not only demolishes our cherished ontological ideas about reality, but also approaches epistemological questions about our access to reality in a very different way. He questions the assumption that we can somehow have direct access to reality, for example through scientific knowledge. According to his Actor-Network Theory, such access to reality is always indirect and the result of following the different connections in the network. Reimagining Representation If both the given external world of material objects and the internal subject of human consciousness are continually under construction, true knowledge cannot consist in an accurate passive reflection or representation of external reality by the human mind. The latter is what is claimed by correspondence theories of knowledge that take as their truth criteria the correspondence between the external world and our representations of that world. If my experience of seeing a table corresponds with the actual existence of such a material object in front of me, I have true knowledge of it (or at least justified knowledge).

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However, for Latour, this traditional notion of representation is incoherent since there are no original “presentations” of reality against which such representations can be checked. If reality is imagined as an ongoing active process of co-construction, ontology and epistemology become blended. To know reality means to co-construct it. We can no longer distinguish between the ontological status of things and our epistemological access to them, once we realize that there is no prior world out there and we reject, with the American philosopher Richard Rorty, “the myth of the given.”21 However, just as with transcendence, Latour does not merely deconstruct the notion of representation but reimagines it. Although the notion of representation, seen as a mirror-like true copy of external reality, is a fiction, the world is continually being represented in the process of co-creation. Latour speaks of the ongoing process of fragile and multiple representations and translations that constitute the world, without a stable, unified “nature” that can serve as their foundation. Therefore, Latour argues, there can be many legitimate ways of knowing reality (in the sense of participating in its co-construction). The correspondence theory of knowledge merely elevates one way of linking truth and reality—that of objective, scientific knowledge—to the status of true knowledge, while leaving to other modes of representation only the secondary role of “language games.”22 In such an approach, the scientific mode of representation serves to judge the quality of all the other modes. The scientific mode of representation is connected to the myth of direct access to reality, as if scientific knowledge can magically transport us to things as they truly are. However, in a network, Latour argues, access is always indirect, always mediated by the connections between the various nodes of the network. For example, it seems that our remote-control device offers us direct access to our television set. We click the on-button and the TV switches on. In reality, however, the remote-control device and the television set are both parts of an elaborate network involving a modem, Ethernet cable or wireless access device, power cables, and so on. Access to our television images is indirect, involving many chains of reference (elements of the network that refer to each other). When one of the elements in this chain breaks down, we find ourselves (often literally!) crawling on our hands and knees, checking the cable connections and power outlets, and restarting the modem. Similarly, on our laptops, it seems that we only have to double-click an icon in order to gain direct access to our software programs. Latour rejects such a “double-click” approach to epistemology. He argues that “objective” knowledge is manufactured by patiently constructing chains of reference, rather than by a leap of direct access to the world: “Chains of reference are not rope bridges strung between the mind on one side and reality on the other, but snakes . . . whose heads and tails grow further and further

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apart as their bodies grow longer and stouter.”23 Knowledge is constructed out of such material chains of reference, rather than somehow popping into the mind’s eye. Latour agrees with William James’s deambulatory theory of truth: rather than leaping from words to things, we find ourselves in practice facing a form of crawling from one link to another until we have achieved a solid and secure grasp by forming a chain of references.24 Since truth and knowledge are always inevitably constructed and manufactured, Latour urges us to abandon the optical metaphor (popular since Plato) of “directly seeing the truth.” This metaphor tempts us to see true knowledge as immediate (non-mediated). However, for Latour, mediations do not obscure access to things, but they are what makes contact and access to things possible in the first place. Knowing is always also know-how, in the sense of knowing your way around the chains of reference in a given network. Truth is not a given but a result of following the series of translations between the actors in the network.25 After deconstructing the correspondence theory of knowledge, Latour reimagines the notion of corresponding as “co-responding.” There is a continuous co-responding between the various movements that constitute the so-called “object” and the various movements that constitute the so-called “subject.”26 Latour points to the need to find a new language to describe such a choreography of co-responding, a language in which both “subject” and “object” are either absent or acquire a new meaning. Chapter 5 of this book explores the language of theurgy as such a new language. Real or Constructed? Visionary or mystical ayahuasca experiences have as one of their main qualities the unmistakable sense that they are true, and that they carry profound messages that contain deep truths about reality. They seem a prime example of precisely Plato’s optical metaphor of “directly seeing the truth” that Latour rejects. Latour’s deconstruction seems to take away any idea that ayahuasca experiences could be true. Like all experiences, they seemingly can be nothing other than mediated and constructed. However, things are more complicated. Latour has been misunderstood from all sides. On the one hand he has been condemned by anti-postmodernists as yet another soft French relativist who denies the reality of the external world. On the other hand, he has been criticized by postmodernists as being tainted by realism. However, as philosopher Graham Harman remarks, his position has a greater philosophical depth than either constructivism or realism. It might seem that in the ongoing debate between realists (those that assume the foundation of a material world) and non-realists (those that stress social constructions), Latour would side with the non-realists. However,

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Latour rejects this very distinction. For him, the world is both real and constructed. Today, being a realist usually means being a reductive materialist and believing in an external material world. However, for Latour, the real is not simply given but constituted by a multiplicity and complexity of dimensions that are simultaneously accessible in many different ways.27 Latour is a constructivist (but not a social constructivist) in the sense that reality is not given but always constructed. He is not against realism, but only against the wrong kinds of realism that deny this constructed quality of reality. Latour notes that the appeal to the notion of construction is usually a tool for critique. If something is proven to be constructed, this is usually taken as an indication that it is false and unreal. It usually implies that some previously assumed essence is now exposed. It has become impossible to say that something, for example, an ayahuasca experience, is well constructed and therefore true.28 This is because the notion of construction contains three different aspects that need to be taken into account. First, it is often not clear who or what is doing the constructing. For example, Latour says, when we say that Caesar constructed a bridge, we mean that he instructed his soldiers to do so. So, who constructed the bridge? When we say that ayahuasca works in a certain way, does ayahuasca do the work, or does it put our minds or brains to work? From a neuropsychological point of view, any experience is constructed by our brain. However, this doesn’t rule out ayahuasca as a constructor, just as in the example with Caesar. Second, the direction of the action is uncertain. When describing how an artwork is produced, does the artist construct the artwork, or does the artwork construct itself through the artist? Or is it a complex bidirectional process of co-construction? Who is the puppet and who is the puppeteer? The puppet sometimes makes the puppeteer do strange and unexpected things. Ayahuasca differs from other psychedelics in that it is often described as an agent that we have to work with. We have to meet it halfway, by remaining attentive and open, by praying, or by singing or dancing. Santo Daime ceremonies are called “works” (trabalhos) because it is indeed hard work to engage with ayahuasca. Third, there is always a value judgment involved whenever something is said to be constructed (although this is mostly ignored): is it constructed well or badly? Ayahuasca experiences also can be constructed well or badly, although it is difficult to specify the criteria for this. However, practitioners (or an elder or guardian) can often tell the difference between a genuine vision and a visionary experience that contains much fantasy and wishful thinking. It is not simply that anything that we can think up can exist. For Latour, experience, as well as the ongoing negotiations between the various actors involved, becomes the criteria for existence. The more something is connected and related, the more it becomes real. For example, although scientific

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facts are constructed, they do exist, and their existence becomes stronger when more actors are connected to them. Graham Harman notes that Latour’s realism differs from orthodox realism in three ways. First, it doesn’t accept any ultimate substance of reality on which everything else is built, whether it is Plato’s Ideas, Aristotle’s concrete individual things, Augustine’s and Spinoza’s God, Leibniz’s monads, or the indestructible atoms of atomism. There is also no underlying ultimate reality in the religious sense, whether conceived as God, Brahman, Buddha Nature, or Dao. Second, there is no inner sanctum of things in which their essence resides, and to which we can gain access through some kind of privileged religious experience. All actors are in principle publicly accessible. What you see is what you get. Latour’s realism is a realism of relations. A thing is entirely defined by its relations, by its effects and alliances rather than by an inner kernel of essence. Third, we are always in contact with reality—even though our access is indirect, through a chain of references and translations, rather than direct, through a one-to-one representation. As Harman puts it, “Reality does not play hide-and-seek behind a veil.”29 This would mean that visionary and mystical ayahuasca experiences do not give us a “peek behind the veil” in order to reveal “things as they really are.” They are both real and constructed. They do give us mediated access to other ontological worlds, but not through straightforward one-to-one representations. MODES OF EXISTENCE For Latour, the Cartesian way of thinking that has arisen in the modern West over the past four hundred years has served an important function, but it has now outlived its usefulness. It is time for new types of ontology and epistemology that are more fitting for our time. In 2012, Latour publishes An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, in which he attempts to construct another system of coordinates, new ways of thinking that are more appropriate and fitting for our current time. With this book, he returns to ontology. As part of the broader ontological turn in anthropology, asking ontological questions becomes important again to him. But for Latour, ontology is not the search for a univocal truth about being in general. It refers to a form of diplomacy that allows us to give to our different approaches to reality (science, religion, law, literature, politics, economics, and so on) each their proper weight and significance, rather than judging them all by the scientific approach to reality. Ontology is no longer a particular theory or understanding of Being; it refers to the ways in which something can be determined as a being. For example, witches may not exist in Europe, but they may indeed exist in the Amazon.30 This is not simply a form of relativism that accepts that whatever someone

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declares to exist does indeed exist (“to each their own”), but it is about a better understanding of how different things come to exist in different ways in different worlds. It calls attention to the set of operations that we must perform on our Western ontology in order to be able to understand why there are sorcerers in the Amazon but not in Europe (or why there might be divine beings during a religious ayahuasca ceremony but not in a secular context). It is not a question of accepting the existence of divine beings or not, but of better understanding how they could exist, and understanding how different worlds, in which different kinds of entities may exist, may be made possible by different forms of consciousness. In order to remedy the anemic understanding of reality of the Modern Constitution (acknowledging only two types of being, subjects and objects), Latour wants to add “a bit of ontological realism, counting on many beings, well-nourished, fattened up, plump-cheeked. To push this inquiry forward, we are going to have to go through ontological fattening therapies.”31 Such fattening therapies would mean allowing more ontological answers to co-exist (an ontological pluralism). The temptation is always to presuppose one ontological realm (Being) that has many linguistic representations or interpretations. However, for Latour, reality itself is an incommensurable plurality of competing representations or construction projects. Being itself is always in the making; there is no ready-made reality. Instead of a variety of culturally determined languages and representations of a single shared objective external material world, we need a variety of ontological domains, or “modes of existence.” Each mode of existence co-constructs reality in its own way and has its own types of being.32 Being-as-being and Being-as-other Latour contrasts two ontological approaches to being that he terms, in a Heideggerian way, “being-as-being” versus “being-as-other.”33 Being-as-being represents the approach of orthodox forms of realism. There is an objective reality out there, independent of our representations of it. Such an approach to being involves ontological transcendence. Reality is always somehow “beyond” our attempts to grasp it. The approach of being-as-other acknowledges the existence of beings that “do not head up or down to seat their experience in something more solid; they only move out in front of experience.”34 This involves Latour’s horizontal mini-transcendences: although we do not have direct access to such beings, we can have indirect access to them by following the links of reference in the network that they are a part of. Whereas being-as-being allows only one type of being, about which we can speak in different ways, being-as-other allows many types of being that can exist in different modes.35

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Latour holds that there are multiple modes of existence, each with its own mode of representation. Each mode of existence links truth and reality in its own way. It has its own forms of veridiction: the standards that are used to determine what is true and what is false. A court ruling can be legally true (our claim for damages is awarded), but emotionally feel false (we do not experience the satisfaction that we hoped for). A spiritual vision can be religiously true (we are profoundly moved by the grandeur of a majestic sunset), but scientifically false (the sun does not set; it is the earth that revolves around its axis). Each mode has its own precise mode of verification, its way of determining whether something is true or false.36 The various modes of existence, each with their own forms of veridiction, are like different maps that offer different types of access to various territories. It is exactly because the map does not resemble the territory that it can provide access to the territory. And different types of maps provide different types of access. Rather than having words that describe things in either a true or a false way, Latour proposes to give up both notions, “word” and “thing,” and only speak about modes of existence that are all real and are all capable of distinguishing between truth and falsehood in their own way.37 How to speak appropriately about such a plurality of types of beings? Latour wants to take to heart William James’s radical empiricism: nothing but experience, but nothing less than experience. Such an empiricism can become faithful to experience again. Understanding Modes of Existence As Charles Taylor has pointed out, one of the aspects of the disenchantment that characterizes the immanent frame is the notion that meaning always takes place in the mind. There is no meaning “out there” in the nonhuman external world, waiting to be discovered by us humans. There are no meaningful coincidences, no synchronicities. All meaning that we may seem to observe in the nonhuman external world is projected onto it by us.‌‌‌‌‌This is why, seen from within the immanent frame, ayahuasca experiences can never be meaningful in an ontological sense. However, for Latour, meaning doesn’t take place only in the mind. For him, “the world of meaning and the world of being are one and the same world.”38 To live is to interpret.39 For Latour, “interpreting” is not like imposing one’s will on passive material (such as a text)—it is active mutual negotiation. Latour stresses the impossibility of the representational mode of language, the dream of “straight talk”: speaking literally, straightforwardly, directly, about what is the case. Even though such straight talk is impossible and implausible, the ideal of straight talk has often been used to discredit other modes of speaking and make them look like “crooked talk.”40

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Latour’s ontological hermeneutics is connected with his multiple modes of existence. Understanding a certain mode of existence requires that we first define what William James called its “preposition,” the interpretive key in which its events are to be grasped.41 For example, the labeling of a book as a novel, inquiry, memoir, or essay gives us the interpretive key in which to read it. Understanding different modes of existence requires different interpretive keys. We have to discover the right category, speak in the right tonality. It requires speaking well, the art of rhetoric. Speaking in the wrong tonality constitutes a category mistake, similar to trying to make sense of a novel while approaching it as a work of nonfiction. To repeat our earlier example, within the legal mode of existence, we may score a victory in a lawsuit against someone we feel mistreated by. However, emotionally, this may not feel like a victory at all since our feeling of being mistreated is not alleviated. Latour aims to clarify such category mistakes with regard to the various modes of existence, which involves clarifying the assertions bearing on the truth or falsity of an experience within a particular mode of existence.42 We have to know how to speak of each mode in its own language and according to its own principle of veridiction.43 Beings of Transformation In chapter 1 we came across Charles Taylor’s notion of a “buffered self,” the modern Western self-experience as a bounded self that is independent of the outside world. Taylor opposes such a buffered self to a “porous self” that is permeable and vulnerable to influences from outside, and that is continually influenced and even constituted in part by those outside forces.‌‌‌‌‌ For Latour, the self is in actuality not buffered but porous. He argues that the psyche is always produced by actor-networks that he calls psychogenic networks. The very same people who insist on having an independent self, he says, in fact continually deal with forces that transcend them, oppress them, dominate them, and alienate them. They take pharmaceutics and take psychotropic drugs in order to tame such forces.44 And those same people make condescending fun of others who believe in sorcery, protect themselves with fetishes or amulets, or go to a shaman to interpret their dreams.45 They will say that those others still believe in invisible beings, whereas they themselves know that these are only projections and products of psychic activity. However, when they talk about their emotional life, they often talk in terms of being targeted by an emotion, being taken over by an uncontrollable force (“I don’t know what got into me”) or being in the grip of something. But when asked: By whom are you possessed? Who carries you away? Who traverses you? Who has begun to dwell in you?46 they fall silent. They don’t have a language to talk about such “owners” and “inhabitants,” whereas

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non-Western collectives47 have developed rituals, cosmologies, and philosophies to acknowledge and deal with such invisible beings (often understood as spirits or divinities). Such rituals help to “install” such beings, “seat” them, and turn them into helpful divinities.48 Latour describes such invisible beings as “beings of transformation.” They manifest in the constant change and transformation of our emotions and moods. Such beings of transformation can transform us at any time, turn us into monsters, or give us strength: “It is as if we were some fragile envelope constantly bombarded by an incessant rain of beings that bear psyches, each of which is capable of influencing us, moving us, messing us up, upsetting us, carrying us away, devouring us, or, on the contrary, making us do something we didn’t know we were capable of doing.”49 There seems to be no relationship between our sense of being an autonomous, buffered self and the endless number of entities that seem to be necessary to the constant fabrication of the self.50 Latour complains that the Moderns lack an adequate way to grasp such invisible beings. They insist that such beings actually originate in the human psyche. Western psychology tells us that we must look not outside, but inside, into the mind, even into the brain, to make sense of such beings. It is a matter of projection, not of encounters with actual beings. Latour comments that psychology plays a similar role among the Moderns as epistemology: whereas the latter exaggerates the outside world, the former overplays the inside world.51 How can we understand the language of such beings? How can we talk to them? Latour asks. First, he says, we have to pass through artificial ritual arrangements that allow us to compromise with these beings. We can install them, institute them, and turn them into helpful allies.52 In the West, the therapeutic arrangement is the only place where such invisible beings can be met and dealt with (even if only in practice, not in theory). Latour remarks that such beings have a demanding form of veridiction. One ill-chosen word or misunderstood gesture can radically change their effect: they no longer free us, but imprison us.53 There is a difference between a ritual that makes things better and one that makes them worse. This relates to the third feature of construction, the difference between well and badly made. When it comes to those therapeutic professionals that make it their business to speak to such beings of transformation, this is what differentiates the good from the bad psychoanalyst, or the good and the bad dosage of a medication.54 What are those beings of transformation? What is their mode of existence? They are more than mere “projections” of the mind onto neutral material objects. But they also don’t exist in the same way that stones and tables are real. Latour suggests that we have to find their proper interpretive key, their preposition, the proper tonality in which to hear claims about such beings. In

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his plural ontology, there are more than just two ontological templates, more than the two options of them being either material beings or figments of the imagination. We have to determine their exact weight of being. What is the manner of being that is proper to this mode? Latour answers that in their existence, such beings continually transform themselves and transform us. Without such beings, he argues, we would always and forever be the same: These beings undergo metamorphoses such that one can surely not attribute to them the mode that would make them persistent entities, on the same basis as tables and stones. We may choose to call them occult, but as one says of planets or asteroids that they are undergoing “occultation,” for these beings, too, appear and disappear. They are peculiar aliens in that one can say, from one second to the next, “I thought it was nothing, but then I turned around and there it was, terrifying”; or, conversely, “I thought it was something, but then I turned around, and there was nothing there after all.55

Latour remarks that the special effects of horror movies (you look, and the ghost is there; you look again and there is nothing to see) may be the best description of this mode of existence. Beings of transformation exist by continually transforming themselves and us. They nourish and energize us. The fundamental misunderstanding of the Moderns is to mistake the beings of transformation for our inner world, leading to the illusion of the buffered, autonomous self.56 However, what we call our “self” consists of a continuous dialogue between beings of transformation and other actors in the actor-network. Iconoclash: The Gap between Western and ‌‌‌‌‌ Indigenous Practices Latour’s beings of transformation are often understood as spirits in indigenous practices, a notion that has been rejected as superstition in the Modern West. Latour points to the gap between Western and indigenous collectives, to the abyss that exists between on the one hand the enormous work done by the collectives known as “traditional” to capture, situate, institute, and ritualize “invisible beings” and on the other the continual defense of the societies known as “modern” against these beings, so as to prevent them from securing their positions. Institution on one side, destitution on the other. . . . One set comprehends and encompasses invisible beings that are totally absent and totally incomprehensible among the others. On one side, these beings exist fully; on the other, not at all.57

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In the immanent frame that remains characteristic of Western collectives, spirits are relegated to the mind, even to the brain. We seem to be able to deny such invisible beings, except in therapeutic arrangements where they are allowed. And whereas in Western collectives, Latour’s beings of transformation have a merely therapeutic importance, in indigenous collectives, they can have cosmological relevance.58 Indigenous practices often involve rituals in which seemingly ordinary man-made objects, such as statues or amulets, become charged with the presence of invisible beings. From a Western, critical perspective, Latour argues, such objects with mythical powers have been rejected as fabricated, and therefore not real. They were called “idols” or “fetishes” by Western missionaries and scholars. Indigenous “believers” in such idols were criticized by Western missionaries for ascribing an independent reality to their man-made idols that were not real but made up.‌‌‌‌‌ In his book On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, Latour imagines the arrival of the Portuguese on the West Coast of Africa, asking the Gold Coast Blacks ‌‌‌‌‌about their idols: “Have you made these stone, clay and wood idols you honor with your own hands?” The answer was yes. “Are those stone, clay and wood idols true divinities?” The answer was yes again. The Portuguese objected: “You can’t say both that you’ve made your own idols and that they are true divinities; you have to choose: it’s either one or the other.” However, the Gold Coast Blacks‌‌‌‌‌persisted that they did make their own idols, and therefore these were indeed true divinities.59 Western debates about such indigenous practices have often centered around whether their invisible beings (spirits) were real or constructed. For Latour, it is obvious that they are both. It is Western critical thought that assumes that they must be one of the two. Latour describes a process that runs through modernity that he calls iconoclash: the battle between iconoclasts (those who want to overthrow idols) and idolators (those who are said to believe in idols and worship them). He argues that Western history is filled with those who overturned the idols: “destroying the Golden Calf, toppling the statues of the Roman emperors, chasing the moneylenders out of the Temple, burning the Byzantine icons, looting the Papist cathedrals, beheading the king, storming the Winter Palace, breaking the ‘ultimate taboos,’ sharpening the knives of critique, or finally, more sadly, taking the dust fallen from the ruins of postmodern deconstruction and further pulverizing it, one last time.”60 Latour points out that the battle between idolators and iconoclasts contains two misunderstandings. The first one has to do with the unavoidable nature of all images and mediation, and the impossible longing for immediacy. Iconoclasts want to destroy all mediation—but that is impossible. They are going to have to find other images, other mediations, other conduits.61 There

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is no way around mediation and making images. Therefore, “as soon as the Golden Calf has been overturned, someone has to build the Tabernacle with its sculpted cherubins. . . . Luther has paintings of the Crucifixion taken down, and Cranach is already painting the ‘mental image’ of the Crucifixion as it emerges from one of Luther’s sermons in the minds of believers,” and so on.62 Latour vividly portrays how this torments the Moderns: “If only we could get along without images, we could at last reach God, the True, the Good, the Beautiful!” they say out of one side of their mouths, while out of the other they sigh: “If only we had images, we could at last reach God, the True, the Good, the Beautiful!”63 The second misunderstanding has to do with what Latour calls “the belief in belief.” Iconoclasts accuse idolators of a crime that they are incapable of committing: truly believing in their idols. In the meeting of the European missionaries with the Latin American “pagans,” Latour notes that none of those “pagans” probably understood why the Catholic iconoclasts destroyed their idols and broke their fetishes, considering that those iconoclasts themselves wore medals of the Virgin and set up altars.64 And ironically, in the French Revolution, those Catholics didn’t understand either why their worship was ended by those who worshiped Reason themselves.65 In actuality, Latour notes, idolators do not have the sort of literal belief in their idols that the iconoclasts assume them to have. According to the iconoclasts, idolators don’t realize that the objects they worship have been made out of wood, clay, or stone by themselves.66 But, Latour notes, of course they know this very well. It is only the iconoclasts who believe that the idolators believe.67 Latour’s elucidation of both these misunderstandings (about the longing for immediacy and the inevitability of mediation, and about a “belief in belief” that misunderstands the nature of belief) can contribute to a better understanding of indigenous practices. Beings of Religion One of the striking aspects of An Inquiry into Modes of Existence is the overwhelming and positive role played by religion as a mode of existence, including its gods and angels. One reviewer even called it an “onto-theological work.”68 Apart from beings of transformation, Latour also distinguishes “beings of religion.” Whereas beings of transformation continually manufacture and constitute the self, beings of religion make us exist as a unified person.69 They resuscitate us and get us moving again. They are messengers that transport messages that don’t have any content but that transform us as a person.70 They convert and save those to whom they are speaking. The religious mode of existence does not carry information but transformation. It arouses persons anew.71

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Latour keeps intact the contrast between beings of transformation and beings of religion. There is a difference between caring for a person and saving that person. Beings of transformation address different layers of subjectivity than beings of religion. However, there is an overlap. Although cure is different from salvation, the same places, the same priests, the same rituals can serve both purposes, Latour notes. People often come to sanctuaries looking for both cure and salvation. What are the “specifications” of such beings of religion? Just like beings of transformation, they appear and disappear. However, they do so in a way that cannot be controlled by us. We can never be completely assured by their presence and know for certain that we have seen them. The initiative always comes from them, Latour notes. They invite us to live in another, totally different way. This is what conversion means.72 Religion is about interactions with such beings, produced by religion, that appear and disappear according to how they are addressed. For Latour, these are real and helpful beings whose existence depends on our ways of speaking.73 They are both objectively existing and simultaneously dependent on speech acts.74 For a better understanding of beings of religion, we may return to Latour’s notion of the actor-networks: reality is an ensemble of actors (both human and nonhuman) all in the process of acting upon one another. Beings of religion are one type of actor. Like all actors, they do not exist “in themselves” but only have a relational existence. They are a tiny operational element whose exact determination depends on their local operation in a religious network. They resemble elementary particles in a physics experiment that appear and disappear in different forms (particle or wave) according to the local operations of the experiment. In ayahuasca visionary experiences, such beings of religion also can indeed appear and disappear at a very rapid rate, depending on the set and setting‌‌‌‌‌. The fluid and fleeting nature of the beings of religion that one can encounter in ayahuasca experiences is exactly what makes them so hard to pin down. The consideration that “we” (whoever we are) can also help to make them appear (for example, by calling them or praying to them) would not make them any less real according to Latour. DISCUSSION This chapter has presented some philosophical innovations from Latour that might contribute in several ways to new conceptual approaches to ayahuasca religiosity. The early Latour’s Actor-Network Theory replaces metaphysical oppositions such as transcendence-immanence, subject-object, and human-nonhuman with a network approach. The world appears as an

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ensemble of actors all in the process of acting on one another, an ongoing construction site. Instead of a ready-made reality waiting to be discovered by us, being is always in the making. This can help us to find the ontological openness that is needed for speaking about ayahuasca religiosity. In Latour’s actor-networks, everything is connected via chains of reference to something else, all the way down. There is nothing behind the interplay of interdependent relations. The French philosopher Patrice Maniglier notes that Latour’s actor-network has been interpreted by some in a reductive way as a “flat ontology” that leaves no room for hierarchy or depth.75 This expression (which has come to be widely adopted) was coined by Manuel de Landa.76 Object-oriented philosophers such as Graham Harman have used Latour’s work to construct such a flat ontology.77 However, there are important differences between Harman’s object-oriented ontology and Latour’s experimental metaphysics. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence corrects such a reductive interpretation, expands on the theory of actor-network, and clarifies its status. It doesn’t reject ActorNetwork Theory but supplements and completes it.78 Latour remarks that if everything is reduced to a network, everything begins to look the same.79 Actor-Network Theory is not a general ontology. This is out of the question for Latour because of his principle of irreduction: “Nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything may be allied to everything else.”80 Different types of actor-networks are all there is, across all modes of existence. Latour’s experimental metaphysics in An Inquiry into Modes of Existence is part of the ontological turn: it is not metaphysics in the sense of pronouncing a new univocal truth about being in general. In his distinction between being-as-being (a single form of being) and being-as-other (multiple ways of being), Latour agrees with the scholars of the ontological turn (Viveiros de Castro, Descola, Kohn) who all stress that we don’t have mind (or culture or language) on one side, and being (or reality or the world) on the other, but various ways of being. Latour is not after finding an ontology that captures the world “as it really is” or an epistemology that assures us that we can gain indubitable knowledge of it. He sees himself as a diplomat who mediates between the different ontologies that are dominant in various collectives. However, as the Australian philosopher Terence Blake points out, Latour is not a relativist. He doesn’t extend ontological tolerance to every worldview; some are just plain wrong. For example, fundamentalist Christians or climate change denialists are mistaken; they get the world wrong.81 In particular, Latour aims to mediate between Western and indigenous collectives. For Latour, indigenous religious practices still manage to honor the various modes of existence, including the invisible beings of transformation that have been ignored in the

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West. He emphasizes that we need to be flexible about what kinds of being we acknowledge to exist, and in what form we allow them to exist. By comparing Western and indigenous ontological schemas, there is room for more types of being to show up, and in different ways. The point is not to come to some kind of relativism, but to use the different modes of existence as ontological templates. Such templates are not to be understood as a plurality of perspectives on the same reality, but as a multiplication of types of being in order to register more reality. Latour wants to come to a comparative anthropology that approaches Western and indigenous collectives on equal terms. Rather than imposing the Western singular ontology of being-as-being on indigenous collectives, there should be room for different types of indigenous ontologies. Latour explains how the focus of the Moderns on being-as-being, assuming a material world of objects and acknowledging only two ontological modes of existence (res cogitans and res extensa), has made a true dialogue with indigenous collectives impossible. In indigenous collectives (and also, incidentally, in premodern Western collectives), the inventions of the material world and the autonomous subject have not taken place. Those collectives have been getting along perfectly well without “the material world” and “the subject.” To repeat, Latour practices ontological diplomacy: his goal is not to arrive at any particular ontology, or to go beyond ontology altogether, but to open his audience up to multiple ontological possibilities (modes of existence). He acknowledges many possible ontologies and modes of existence without privileging any of these as the ultimate answer to the ontological question. There is no single conceptual framework, not even a pluralist one, that can account, once and for all, for everything that exists. Latour’s experimental metaphysics does not present a new pluralist ontology but an ontological pluralism that is used diplomatically for negotiating encounters between ontologies. A diplomat, says Maniglier, “tries to dissipate misunderstandings by forcing everyone to think of themselves differently.”82 The misunderstandings with regard to being have arisen because we have given science the monopoly on the truth of being: only what can be scientifically established truly exists. The rest is a matter of belief. However, things do not exist in one single way but in many different ways.83 The point is to learn to not confuse the different modes of existence. That would be a category error, such as expecting a legal decision to provide emotional closure or trying to establish the existence of invisible beings through scientific procedures. Latour’s modes of existence serve as an ontological protocol to clear up such ontological misunderstandings. It delineates the conditions under which ontological questions can be asked. As Holbraad and Pedersen stress, the point of the ontological turn is not to find new alternatives to what the world is like, but to allow the world

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to show us how things could be otherwise. In that sense, ontological questions are not about what is, but about what could be.84 In this chapter, we have seen how Latour considers the autonomous self to be an illusion. He brings to light how “we” are continually being constituted by invisible beings of transformation through continuous processes of encounter and negotiation. He describes the psychogenic networks that are engaged in the production and maintenance of psyches and subjectivities. We are usually engaged in the ontological repression of such psychogenic networks that produce our sense of self, in order to maintain the illusion of an autonomous self. We pay attention only to the “visible” products of such networks, and we forget the invisible infrastructures. Ayahuasca may lift this ontological repression and bring back to light those invisible infrastructures. We may start to notice the networks that produce our psyche, and the swarm of entities that are actually necessary for the fabrication and modification of our psyche. Some might interpret such entities as specific deities, whereas others may interpret them differently, for example, as alien beings. As Blake notes, invisible beings may be real—but perhaps not in the way that people who consciously believe in their existence may suppose.85 In this way, ayahuasca may function as a diplomat itself, bringing about the ontological openness that we need, as Roothaan argues, to listen to the “chorus of natural spiritual voices to be heard around us—voices that are still heard by those who practice shamanic ways to be in the world.”86 This involves shifting the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, between self and other, and between immanence and transcendence. The next chapter will suggest that ayahuasca can be framed not only as a tool, an ally, or a teacher, but also as a “boundary being” that shifts such boundaries, makes them fluid, and brings us in touch with the entangled character of reality that Latour attempts to describe in his experimental metaphysics. NOTES 1. For example, Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 2. Latour, Pasteurization of France, 163. 3. Latour also uses the more technical term “actants,” but in this book, I will stick to “actors.” 4. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1979); Latour, Pasteurization of France. 5. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern.

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6. Latour speaks about Nature, Culture, Science, and Religion with capital letters to remind the reader that he is talking about figures of speech, not actually existing domains of the world. 7. With this multinaturalism, Latour agrees with Viveiros de Castro. 8. It is not so much that Latour argues that Nature and Culture are always hopelessly intertwined. His claim is even stronger: the very dualism between Nature and Culture is itself groundless. Actors are hybrids composed of both “hard facts” and “social constructions.” They are hybrid through and through and not a mixture of two pure ingredients. 9. Whereas Latour rejects the modernist approach, he also rejects postmodernism since it implicitly accepts the Modern Constitution even while deconstructing it. And a return to premodernism is not possible due to the large-scale scientific experimentation that has fundamentally altered our view of the world that we live in. Latour calls himself “nonmodern.” 10. For Kant himself, it was possible to acquire moral knowledge about noumenal reality through our deepest moral intuitions. 11. Cf William James, A Pluralistic Universe (New York: Longmans Green, 1909). Although the preformatted global One does not exist, actors continually act upon each other because they are mutually co-conditioned. Therefore, locally constructed unities, which are temporary and open, can and do exist. 12. Kripal has suggested going beyond the natural-supernatural distinction by replacing the notion of the “supernatural” with that of the “super natural”: “The supernatural has functioned from the thirteenth century on as a clear marker for an act or event ‘from God’—that is, as a miracle that issued from outside the natural order. The super natural is, yes, well ‘above’ or ‘beyond’ (super) our present scientific or religious models but nevertheless remains very much a part of a single nature, now conceived in much more expansive and fantastic terms” (Kripal, The Flip, 24). See also Introduction note 60. 13. Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 43. Miller calls Latour’s actor-network “an industrial grade blender that emulsifies heaven and earth, the global and the local, the human and the nonhuman, into a single, messy, metaphysical pulp” (ibid., 42). 14.   AIME, 110.‌‌‌‌‌ 15. Ibid., 111. 16. Ibid., 115–116. 17. The notions of subject and object are not rejected entirely by Latour but reimagined as quasi-subjects and quasi-objects. As Latour notes, “the Subject/Object distinction is troublesome only if we take these two terms as distinct ontological regions” (ibid., 290)‌‌‌‌‌. 18. Such networks, Latour writes, “would allow us to empty out and dig down, to equip, illuminate, maintain, and move subjects around. The Moderns have big egos, it’s true, but if we listen carefully, we hear the regular humming of the exhaust pipes that maintain the void in their ever-so-precious interiority” (ibid., 189‌‌‌‌‌). 19. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 56.

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20. Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Melbourne: re.press, 2009), 67. 21. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). 22. AIME, 72. 23. Ibid., 81. 24. Ibid. 25. Latour follows William James when he says: “A sentence does not hold together because it is true, but because it holds together we say that it is ‘true’” (Latour, Pasteurization of France, 185). 26. AIME, 86. 27. Ibid., 120. 28. Ibid., 155. 29. Harman, Prince of Networks, 72. 30. The anthropologist Evans-Pritchard, who studied witchery in the Zande people in South Sudan, reported: “I once heard a Zande say about us: ‘Perhaps in their country people are not murdered by witches, but here they are.’” E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937), 540. 31. AIME, 177. 32. Ibid., 147. Latour distinguishes beings of law, beings of politics, fictional beings (Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot), religious beings (gods, angels, and bodhisattvas), economical beings (the global market), psychological beings (emotions, inspirations), and so on. 33. Ibid., 162. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 163. 36. Ibid., 53–54. 37. Ibid., 86. 38. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 129. 39. As Latour remarks, “Hermeneutics is not a privilege of humans but, so to speak, a property of the world itself” (Latour, Reassembling the Social, 245). 40. AIME, 128. 41. Ibid., 66. 42. Ibid., 18. 43. Ibid., 143. 44. Ibid., 186. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., 193. 47. Rather than thinking in terms of different cultures and a single nature, Latour thinks in terms of different natures-cultures that he calls “collectives.” 48. AIME, 195. 49. Ibid., 196. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., 185.

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52. Ibid., 195. 53. Ibid., 197. 54. Ibid., 198. 55. Ibid., 202. 56. Ibid., 204. 57. Ibid., 183. 58. This is why therapeutical and religious modes of existence are so interwoven in non-Western collectives. Whereas in the Western collective, the “therapeutic turn” often means that religion is reduced to therapy, in non-Western collectives therapy and healing often stretch out into cosmological and religious dimensions. 59. Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 2f. 60. AIME, 165. 61. Ibid., 167. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid., 168. 64. Ibid., 170. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., 171. 67. Ibid., 172. 68. Gunnar Skirbekk, “Bruno Latour’s anthropology of the moderns: A reply to Maniglier,” Radical Philosophy 189 (2015): 45–47. Skirbekk notes that An Inquiry into Modes of Existence was published with the motto si scires donum Dei (“if you knew God’s gift”), a Biblical reference (John 4:10). 69. AIME, 301. 70. Ibid., 303. 71. Ibid., 319. 72. Latour suggests using the term “divinities” to speak about beings of transformation, and “gods” to speak about beings of religion. With the former, one can conduct transactions; with the latter, no transaction is possible. However, to me, this distinction seems to be too much determined by Latour’s Christian background. 73. Bruno Latour, Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013 [2002]), 121. 74. Ibid., 142. 75. Patrice Maniglier, “A metaphysical turn? Bruno Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence,” Radical Philosophy 187 (2014): 37–44. 76. Manuel de Landa, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2002), 47. 77. Harman, Prince of Networks. 78. AIME, 353. 79. Ibid., 35. 80. Latour, Pasteurization of France, 163.

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81. Terence Blake, “On the Existence of Bruno Latour’s Modes,” https:​//​philpapers​ .org​/rec​/BLAOTE. 82. Maniglier, “Metaphysical turn.” 83. As Maniglier says, “‘To be’ does not mean the same thing for a Higgs boson as it does for the Argentinian peso, but both equally are, and the task of the metaphysician is to exhibit that equality and that diversity” (ibid.). 84. Holbraad and Pedersen, Ontological Turn, 68. 85. Blake, “On the Existence of Bruno Latour’s Modes.” 86. Roothaan, Indigenous, Modern and Postcolonial Relations to Nature, 4.‌‌‌‌‌

Chapter 3

Reimagining Ayahuasca

In chapter 1, we looked at various secular and religious ayahuasca discourses. Each of these discourses has a particular approach to what ayahuasca is and what it does. We have seen how such discourses have been deeply influenced by the broader discourses of Western modernity with their ontological and epistemological presuppositions. They tend to view ayahuasca as an ontological essence with certain fixed characteristics. Chapter 2 presented Bruno Latour’s criticism of the modernist assumption of a Great Divide between Nature and Culture, which includes a separation between an external objective world and inner subjective experience, a separation between a higher transcendent spiritual world and an immanent natural reality, and a separation between the human and the nonhuman. We have discussed the ontological consequences of Latour’s criticism of Western modernity: we can no longer think coherently of an objective reality “out there.” Latour has presented two new ideas that together form his experimental metaphysics: firstly, his Actor-Network Theory proposes to investigate the world, not as a static reality but as a dynamic configuration of ever-changing networks that are continually being co-constructed by various actors that receive their qualities in function of their interactions with other actors. Importantly, such actors can be either human or nonhuman, “subjective” or “objective.” What we call reality is an ongoing construction site. Secondly, Latour’s ontological template of various modes of existence differentiates between different kinds of actor-networks that consist of different types of entities that each exist in their own ontological mode. Apart from the seemingly constant beings of reproduction (objects such as tables and chairs that seem to make up objective reality), there are also beings of law, beings of fiction, beings of transformation that constitute our subjectivity, and, most important for our investigation into ayahuasca religiosity, beings of religion. Such different types of beings each exist in their own ontological register. They each need to be approached through their own “preposition” so that they can re-present themselves to our consciousness and in our language. The way 81

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they can be known is correlated to the way in which they exist. Epistemology and ontology are always intimately connected. This chapter explores how we can reimagine ayahuasca along the lines of Latour’s experimental metaphysics. The first section discusses the various framings of what ayahuasca is. Both materialist and psychedelic discourses frame ayahuasca as merely a chemical substance that functions as an instrument or tool, even when they differ widely in their views on what it is that ayahuasca can bring about. Shamanic discourses, on the other hand, that speak of “mother ayahuasca” involve interspecies communication and animistic forms of perception that involve intimate relations between the human and more-than-human. In religious discourses, ayahuasca is framed as liquid divinity. Silvia Mesturini Cappo frames engaging with ayahuasca as a way of life as much more than only taking a chemical or mystical commodity or relating to a singular agent. Ayahuasca can be fruitfully framed as an entangled plurality, a boundary being that shifts ontological boundaries. Next, we will start our investigation into what ayahuasca does. A first answer would be that it produces extraordinary experiences that are even difficult to classify: Are they visionary? Mystical? What is involved in such experiences? How are they commonly understood, and how can we redescribe them using Actor-Network Theory? What is the ontological status of such experiences? Do they take place only in the mind, or do they also offer access to other ontological worlds and entities? The next section will question several assumptions about such experiences: that they are individual experiences, that they take place “inside” of us, and that they give us knowledge of “things as they really are.” Since the first wave of psychedelics in the Sixties, such assumptions have been embedded in psychedelic discourses. However, such discourses may be further refined by speaking not of ayahuasca experiences, but of ayahuasca spiritual events. I will offer an actor-network description of a Santo Daime ceremony (applying our Latourian insights from chapter 2) as an illustration of such an approach. One of the characteristics of such spiritual events is that they are very much connected to the cultivation of set and setting through transformative practices. As a result of these explorations, the last section will argue that we need to shift our attention to transformative ayahuasca practices rather than remain fascinated with ayahuasca experiences, as transformative as these might be. WHAT AYAHUASCA IS Ayahuasca is framed in many different ways. Laura Dev has called attention to the ontological tensions around the nature of ayahuasca centering around the notion of plant agency. Based on her fieldwork during the 2016 AYA

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conference, Dev showed that ayahuasca was framed in the various research presentations as a drug, a creator, a mother, a sacrament, a teacher, or an experience.1 This section will first discuss three such framings: as a tool, as a plant teacher, and as liquid divinity. It will first argue that ayahuasca being a cognitive tool or a nonspecific amplifier does not mean that it doesn’t have agency. Then it will use Eduardo Kohn’s discussion of nonhuman personhood to argue that not only agency, but also personhood can be ascribed to ayahuasca. A Tool We have seen that, within medical discourses, ayahuasca is sometimes framed as a cognitive or therapeutic tool. Psychiatrist Stanislav Grof famously suggested that psychedelics function as a “powerful unspecific amplifier or catalyst of biochemical and neurophysiological processes in the brain.”2 Both materialist and psychedelic discourses frame ayahuasca as such a nonspecific amplifier of the psyche. In the materialist discourse, the amplification is random and in itself devoid of meaning, although it can be used for exploratory or therapeutic purposes. The amplification can also be purposeful in some way. Ayahuasca is, in this view, a kind of psychic microscope (or, as Marc Blainey suggests, a suiscope that allows for introspection3). In the psychedelic mysticism discourse, ayahuasca amplifies the psyche in the sense of an expansion of consciousness, which leaves more room for Mind-at-Large to enter. According to the filter theory of perception and knowledge, ayahuasca would inhibit the filters that normally keep Mind-at-Large out. In this view, ayahuasca would serve as a kind of enhancer to the radio receiver that consciousness is. Kenneth Tupper and Beatriz Labate have further explored the framing of ayahuasca as an epistemic technology or a cognitive tool.4 They suggest that such a framing may be diplomatically helpful for negotiating with modern scientific, legal, and political categories. They note that the “cognitive tool” metaphor for ayahuasca may be less provocative to modern scholars than the “plant teacher” concept with its animistic roots.5 Tupper and Labate draw an epistemic analogy between psychoactive cognitive tools and early modern mechanical instruments such as telescopes and microscopes. Huxley argued that psychedelics “may play a part [in education] by making it possible for young people to ‘taste and see’ what they have learned about at second hand, or directly but at a lower level of intensity in the writings of the religious, or the works of poets, painters and musicians.”6 Leary argued that “the metaphor that’s most accurate is the metaphor of the microscope, which brings into awareness cellular patterns that are invisible to the naked eye. In the same way, LSD brings into awareness the cellular conversations that are inaudible to the normal consciousness and for which

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we have no adequate symbolic language.”7 Alan Watts asserted that “there is no difference in principle between sharpening perception with an external instrument, such as a microscope, and sharpening it with an internal instrument, such as [psychedelic] drugs.”8 Tupper and Labate compare the negative reaction to psychedelics among power elites to historical examples of negative reactions to the introduction of potentially transformative cognitive tools. For example, in Plato’s Phaedrus, writing and literacy are already criticized as a technology that would make humans lazy in recall, ruin their memories, and provide only an appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.9 Also, the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was made possible by the development of new kinds of instruments or tools, including clocks, telescopes, and microscopes, which provided early modern natural philosophers with experiences which led them to question or reject traditional cosmologies and worldviews. Therefore, such new-fangled tools were considered dangerous.10 When ayahuasca is framed as a tool, can we ascribe agency to it? Leary and his collaborators write in The Psychedelic Experience: “Of course, the drug dose does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key—it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures. The nature of the experience depends almost entirely on set and setting.”11 This passage simultaneously denies agency to ayahuasca (“it does not produce the transcendent experience”) while ascribing another type of agency to it (as a chemical key, it opens the mind). Can a chemical key have agency? Usually, we associate agency with human intentionality or subjectivity. However, we have already seen in chapter 2 that for Latour, objects are not only passive and material, but can also be seen as actors that have agency, because their presence can influence a situation. In his book Facing Gaia, Latour relativizes the notion of agency by discussing three short excerpts: one from Tolstoy’s War and Peace, one from a newspaper story, and one from an article on neuroscience.12 The excerpt from War and Peace shows a situation in which general Kutuzov—although, as a human subject with agency, he should be in full control and able to achieve his intentions—is described as being without agency: he is made to act by objective forces that he cannot influence. The second excerpt is about the battle of hydraulic engineers with the river Mississippi, which is described as possessing strong agency. It needs to be tamed and controlled. The third excerpt describes corticotropin releasing factor (CRF) as an actor with agency. Latour’s point is that, although we assume it is easy to distinguish between the objects of the natural world that lack agency, and the subjects of the human world that possess agency, in practice this distinction is extremely difficult to make.

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According to Latour, when we divide the natural world from the human world we arbitrarily strip nonhuman actors of their agency, and endow human actors with a kind of autonomous agency that they do not possess: “Being a subject does not mean acting in an autonomous fashion in relation to an objective context; rather, it means sharing agency with other subjects that have also lost their autonomy.”13 The Neo-Kantian scheme of subjects and objects breaks down: “there is no longer enough object to oppose to humans, not enough subject to oppose to objects.”14 Latour argues that the Western distribution of agency between so-called human and nonhuman actors no longer works. Whereas human actors have been overanimated, nonhuman actors have been deanimated. Agency must be redistributed. As Latour remarks, animation is the essential phenomenon; it is deanimation that is the more superficial and auxiliary phenomenon: “One of the great enigmas of Western history is not that ‘there are still people naïve enough to believe in animism,’ but that many people still hold the rather naïve belief in a supposedly deanimated ‘material world.’”15 Seen from this perspective, it would be perfectly fitting to describe agency to ayahuasca. Even if it would only be seen as a chemical substance, it would be a nonhuman actor that greatly influences our experience, and greatly transforms us as a result. A Plant Teacher In discourses of entheogenic shamanism, ayahuasca is considered to be a sentient plant that serves as an ally and a teacher. Ayahuasca is seen as a person—sometimes a being with a feminine gender, “mother ayahuasca”—with agency and consciousness, as well as a particular mission and purpose as she extends her reach across the planet. Doyle refers to ayahuasca as “the plant intelligence that rather matter-of-factly runs the planet.”16 Human consciousness is just a way for plants to move plant and bacterial genes around; plants enlist humans in their service. The idea that a plant or combination of plants might possess agency and sentience of some kind falls outside the immanent frame in which consciousness is limited to the physical structure of the brain. The German botanist Ernst Jünger has called attention to the notion of plant agency or plant power: “Just as the plant forms sex organs in order to mate with the bees, it also weds human beings—and the contact gives us access to worlds we would never enter without it.”17 Plants can be seen as more-than-human powers, or at least as conductors of more-than-human powers.18 The two plants that make up the ayahuasca tea are experienced as communicating with humans. Therefore, a symmetrical relationship based on honor and respect is of the utmost importance. In Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, he speaks of peyote as being “a friend of immemorially long standing” for the Indians of Mexico and the

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American Southwest. For Maria Sabina, the Mexican healer that was visited by Gordon Wasson in the Fifties, the psilocybin mushrooms were “the little friends.” Also ayahuasca is often framed as a friend, ally and teacher. But can a plant really be a person? If we follow the line of reasoning of anthropologist Eduardo Kohn, yes. In his book How Forests Think, Kohn argues that all living beings, not just humans, think, and that all thoughts are alive.19 All living beings interpret and represent the world—in more than only a linguistic fashion. They manifest intentions and purposes. All biological processes are inherently full of sign-making, in which something stands for, or represents, something else, in relation to a “somebody” (a self).20 Kohn argues that humans, animals, and plants all have “selves.” Selves can even be distributed over bodies (e.g., an ant colony can act as a self), or they can be one of many selves within a body (e.g., individual cells in a body can act as a self). Selves are both the result of interpretation, and the cause of further interpretations. Kohn defines “thinking” as the ability to learn about the world from one’s experience of that world. In this sense, everything that has a self also thinks. Such thinking need not take place within the life of a single organism. Biological lineages also think, in that they can, over the generations, grow to learn by experience about the world around them. For Kohn, the forest can be seen as an ecology of selves, which includes not only humans, animals, and plants but also spirits. These different kinds of beings each represent and are represented by the other kinds of beings. They are intentional, communicating selves. It is possible to communicate with other nonhuman selves by learning to relate to them and enter into the logic of their representation, as the indigenous Runa of Ecuador’s Upper Amazon (the people that Kohn studied) demonstrated to him over and over again.21 His observations forced Kohn to rethink the notion of relationality.22 How can we become capable of relating to nonhuman agents and engaging in interspecies communication? Wittgenstein was famously pessimistic about this possibility: even if lions could talk, we could not understand them.23 And Thomas Nagel argued in his famous article “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” that, even though bats might have some kind of selfhood, humans can never know what it is like to be a bat because they are simply too different.24 Kohn rejects such notions of incommensurability. He argues that thinking and knowing are always mediated in some way. The self is a construction, a result of such mediations. There is no fundamental difference between the associations between the various thoughts that constitute a self, and the associations between different kinds of selves. We “know” ourselves in the same way as we “know” others: “We can only come to know ourselves and others through the medium of signs. It makes no difference whether that interpreting self is located in another kind of body or whether it is [our own self].”25 However, Kohn argues, such mediation is not making knowledge of

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selves (our own or others’) impossible. On the contrary, it is the basis for its possibility. Even though nonhuman selves are ontologically different from us because they represent and interpret the world differently, such different ways of representing are, to a certain extent, knowable to us.26 According to Kohn’s approach, ayahuasca could have agency because it is a person, it has a self, and it is looking to communicate with us.27 Becoming skillful in such interspecies communication requires extensive practice. It requires becoming familiar with nonhuman ways to represent the world, and nonhuman ways of being a person.28 Liquid Divinity Another framing of ayahuasca is that of liquid divinity: the tea hosts a divine being or divine beings. In the Santo Daime, ayahuasca (or rather: Daime) is considered a sacrament in which Christ is believed to be actually present after consecration. After the ritual preparation and consecration of Daime in a multiday feitio ceremony, its chemical appearance is still the same as ayahuasca, but its substance differs from it (just as in the Roman Catholic tradition, the communion wine after consecration is not chemically different from ordinary wine but is still substantially different from it). In the feitio ceremony, a transformational process takes place that results, it is believed, in the incarnation of a highly intelligent divine being in a liquid body. It is believed that this being incarnates in the Daime to provide comfort, healing, and spiritual evolution to those who connect with it. Santo Daime’s sacramental view of Daime bears similarities to how within the Catholic Church the communion wine is seen as a sacrament. In Holy Communion, communion with the body and blood of Christ takes place through bread and wine.29 According to the Catholic understanding of transubstantiation, Christ is actually present in the host and the mass wine after consecration30 (as opposed to the Protestant interpretation that Christ’s presence is to be understood symbolically).31 Also in shamanic circles, ayahuasca is seen as liquid divinity. It is considered a sacred medicine. As one ayahuasquero explains: “You are not drinking a plant that allows you to see spirits. You are drinking spirits in a liquid form. Ayahuasca is spirit, millions of spirits, turned into liquid for you to drink. When you drink those spirits you are actually choosing to host them into your body. . . . You are actually inviting people into your body and these guys are trees.”32 This is ayahuasca as liquid divinity: not only offering access to divinity but also made up of divinity itself. Ayahuasca might be a different form of sentience that knows and perceives in ways that we don’t understand yet. Such a sentience may enter and explore the world through the seemingly innocuous guise of the Banisteriopsis vine.

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In his book LSD and the Mind of the Universe, his report of seventy-three carefully set up LSD trips, philosopher of religion Christopher Bache reports a communion with a being of infinite intelligence: As this journey deepened, I found myself entering a spiraling love affair with this intelligence, a Being so vast I can only describe it using the vocabulary of the Divine even while the sessions themselves were repeatedly demonstrating how limited and childlike our historical conceptions of the Divine have been. . . . I do not know the limits of this Being and I hesitate to even call it a “Being” at all. As I have experienced it, it is the fabric of existence itself. I think of it as the generative intelligence of our universe, the Mind of the Cosmos—both transcendent source and manifest body of existence, beyond all categories of He or She yet infinitely more than any It.33

Jonathan Goldman says in relationship to Santo Daime ayahuasca practice: “The rituals of the Daime are not meant to be an ‘experience,’ but rather to provide a chance to interact intimately with a Divine Being of unimaginable intelligence, compassion, clarity, and spiritual power.”34 Such a relationship with a divine Being is exactly the point of a religious use of ayahuasca. An Entangled Plurality These three framings of ayahuasca (as a tool, a plant teacher, and liquid divinity) can each be interpreted in a Latourian way. Ayahuasca is a tool for constructing actor-networks that include beings of transformation and religion. However, ayahuasca is, as a plant teacher, also a being of transformation itself. And as liquid divinity, ayahuasca is also a being of religion itself. Ayahuasca is not one thing, but an entangled plurality. As Latour would say, to get to know what (or who) ayahuasca is, we have to follow the process of its construction. In the ritual of the feitio, the jagube and rainha are combined with water and fire, with the knowledge, experience, and relations of those who participate, and with the spirits present during the feitio. Ayahuasca is all of this, made liquid and drinkable. In the feitio, during the cooking process, the brew has to be sung to in order to add spirits to the brew.35 Anthropologist Silvia Mesturini Cappo reimagines ayahuasca as constituted by a set of relations. She describes and comprehends ayahuasca as “a complex relational space, constantly moving and adapting to evolving contexts.”36 She describes how her relational approach to ayahuasca arose from long-term immersion within groups of internationally connected ayahuasca practitioners, which involved a movement from the periphery to the center. Her hypothesis of an entangled ayahuasca aims to address ayahuasca as more

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than a substance, and even more than a singular entity capable of agency. She describes ayahuasca’s agency as “the culmination of a complex and cultivated set of entangled relations that go beyond human borders.”37 Entangled ayahuasca is “a relational space where the power of the plants, of the brew, of the spirits, and of the ayahuasquera, as well as the influence of colonial invasion, Western thought, foreigners’ needs, local resistance, and local collaboration with global issues become inextricable.”38 Ayahuasca’s workings are a constructed entanglement of the brew, the ritual expert, the setting, and the set of the participants, who are required to work with ayahuasca. It is hard to define where agency is located: “Yet, who does what? Who cures? The brew? The songs sung by the ayahuasquero? The participant, through their commitment and concentration? And where do the healing songs come from? From the plants, who intimate them to the ayahuasquera, or from the singing ayahuasquera who uses them to get the brew to work? So, who puts who to work?”39 Mesturini Cappo describes a shift in the expectations and agenda (the set) of the ayahuasca practitioners that she has met during her twelve years of fieldwork (2004 to 2016). She remarks that this shift could be due to an evolution in the agenda of Western practitioners toward ayahuasca rituality, or it could be a result of her own movement from the periphery of the ayahuasca movement to its center. She describes a Western traveling audience of ayahuasca seekers motivated by such spiritual questions as “Do spirits exist?” “Do we get to see them by drinking ayahuasca?” “Is there hope that life on Earth will be saved from global catastrophe?” “Can shamanism and plant medicine cure me and help me find the answers I have not been able to find elsewhere?” Mesturini Cappo notes that such a set that considers ayahuasca to be “the ultimate healing hope” makes it difficult to distinguish between “drug tourism” and a genuine search for healing and spiritual insight, between sincere experimentation and mere curiosity for something exotic.40 However, Mesturini Cappo argues that this search for authentic indigenous knowledge based on the opposition between “Western modernity” and “authentic indigenous traditions” is gradually giving way to a new discourse centered on the importance of interrelatedness, relationship, and entanglement.41 With experienced practitioners, it is about the commitment to contemplative practices around ayahuasca as a way of life, in order to be able to make a collective response to the global problems of our time (see chapter 6). Within this new set, practitioners relate to ayahuasca on one hand as a living being, a singular entity capable of agency, rather than as a substance or psychoactive brew. Ayahuasca is referred to as a “friend,” a “mother,” a “teacher,” who talks, teaches, and heals. However, the more one moves to the center of the ayahuasca movement, Mesturini Cappo argues, the more ayahuasca is also framed as a plurality. The brew is seen as populated by a

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plurality of spirits: “plants, trees, roots, and flower spirits, but also spirits of locations, rivers, mountains, lakes, spirits of animals, as well as spirits of dead ayahuasqueros or of generations of ancestors of a specific ayahuasca tradition, as in the Brazilian ayahuasca churches.”42 Mesturini Cappo describes two shifts in the framing of ayahuasca use. The first shift is from imbibing a psychoactive substance to entering a relational reality with a singular entity capable of agency, a radical Other. The second shift is from encountering a radical Other to engaging with ayahuasca as a way of life, where ayahuasca becomes a plurality, a complex space of entanglement: It is not only an active biochemical principle, a plant or a ritual setting, not only shamanic tourism, mass consumption or another intrusion of modernity in the heart of the Amazon, not only an alternative way to learn about the world, not only a remedy, not only a way to cultivate witchcraft in order to damage those who are thought of as damaging, not only the expertise of trained ayahuasqueros and ayahuasqueras of varied origins, not only what links individuals from all parts of the world into new forms of shared experiences, lives, and values, but all of these realities entangled together.43

The paradox is that ayahuasca is seen as both singular and plural, both a singular spirit and a doorway to other spirits. It acts as a guardian to those who travel with it. Training with plants means meeting them regularly, spending time with them, and getting to know them well. It is a relational training: “It means negotiating relational ethics and subtleties. It implies learning to meet with radical otherness; and yet, meeting these plants means recognizing them as people.”44 In such a relational training, one develops the capacity to relate to as many types of beings and modes of existence as possible. Rather than being seen as radical otherness, ayahuasca is seen as “kin.” As Mesturini Cappo puts it, this is actual “interspecies presence” in action and interaction. One presence wielding another presence into existence at the very point in which they touch each other, a point where they become responsible for each other’s histories of participation in world-making. Not the spirits of spiritism, living in their separate spiritual world, but entities whose presence stands for the coevolution of all of those who have participated and participate to their on going life as entanglement.45

Ayahuasca does not cause healing or bring insight all by itself. Its entangled nature means that it opens one up to a wider more-than-human network of representation—in the way that Kohn describes this, in which the tea, the hymns, the rhythm, the dancing, one’s own intention and the rest of the ceremonial setting all bring about a participatory enactment.

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In the next section, I will shift from the question of what ayahuasca is to the question of what it does. A first answer to this question would be: it gives us visionary and mystical experiences. WHAT AYAHUASCA DOES Imagine an ayahuasca practitioner who is struggling with intense and overwhelming emotions of anger, fear, and discouragement. With eyes closed, he tries to stay with what is happening without giving in to a strong temptation to pull away from it all. Suddenly, from the upper right corner, a dark reddish purple Buddha figure enters his field of vision, shining brightly in an overwhelming way. The figure grows larger and larger until it fills his entire field of vision. Somehow this visual experience goes together with a sense of benediction and comfort that feels enormously supportive to him. The whole experience lasts about five seconds. Afterwards, he can’t help but think about what happened. Has he been visited by a Buddha? Perhaps a Buddha in his sambhogakaya form (his astral appearance) as a well-known Mahayana Buddhist doctrine holds? Or did he construct a Buddha vision for himself, to help him in his struggle with his difficult emotions? Was he comforting himself? Or was it even more complicated? Producing Visionary Experiences When thinking about visionary ayahuasca experiences, we are beset by ontological questions (Do spirits exist? Does a more real world exist underneath or beyond this world?) and epistemological questions (Do we get to see spirits by drinking ayahuasca? Does ayahuasca put us in touch with a more real world?). Where do we now stand in relation to such questions? In this section I will review various theoretical approaches to ayahuasca experiences that deal with construction versus immediacy. In visionary ayahuasca experiences, is ultimate reality known in inconceivable ways—not bound to any conceptual system? Do we experience ultimate truths beyond thought? For G. William Barnard, such visionary experiences are “powerful glimpses into the more-ness that, above our heads, surrounds and interpenetrates our normal waking awareness.”46 As William James remarked, they demonstrate that our normal waking consciousness . . . is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. . . . No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question—for they are so discontinuous

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with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes . . . though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.47

We might argue that this more-ness becomes manifest during visionary ayahuasca experiences. In his philosophical analysis of such experiences, Barnard uses James’s distinction between knowledge-by-acquaintance and knowledge-about. Knowledge-by-acquaintance is immediate and direct knowledge of the simple “thatness” of something, often based on our sense experiences: the wetness of water, the sweetness of chocolate. Knowledgeabout is conceptual knowledge linked to the “whatness” of something. It analyzes, compares, contrasts, explains, and describes the qualities of an object: water is H2O and boils at one hundred degrees Celsius. Knowledge-about can be either conscious or preconscious (based on our internalized cultural and linguistic assumptions). According to Barnard, the knowledge-by-acquaintance aspect of ayahuasca-based visionary experiences manifests as the in-your-face quality of their thatness. In the case of the ayahuasca practitioner that saw the Buddha, the Buddha may have felt really there, just as real as the wetness of water. However, it could be that a long-term experience as a Buddhist practitioner caused him to see a Buddha, rather than Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary (as might have been expected from a Santo Daime practitioner) or snakes or jaguars (as a shamanic practitioner may experience). His previous experience may have helped him to make sense of the thatness of that Buddha, as Barnard puts it, “seamlessly interweaving a highly condensed, multilayered, linguistically structured network of meaning onto all of that detailed sensory-like information.”48 In this way, the luminous immediacy of an image is turned into a meaningful experience. Following Barnard, we may problematize these seemingly clear-cut categories: was the overwhelming shining quality of the Buddha really there, or was it a metaphorical interpretation of a quality of experience that couldn’t be grasped by the mind? Barnard suggests the following sequence of events: first, a “more-ness” appears, with immediate luminosity, within the consciousness of the ayahuasca practitioner, something that feels very much like it exists independently of him. However, this influx of more-ness is intimately fused with the practitioner’s knowledge-about. His cultural and psychological assumptions (set and setting) filter and shape that more-ness into forms that make sense to him. As Barnard puts it, in ayahuasca visionary experiences it seems that “real Light is shining through a psychologically and culturally constructed glass window.”49 Barnard goes on to hypothesize that “this felt sense of more-ness itself has a very deep, very real, ontological source—or better, a plurality of such

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sources, or even better, a plurality of sources that are all rooted, in different ways, in one Source—and all of this ontological fecundity can be found in the depths of our own consciousness, in what James calls the ‘mother sea’ of consciousness, a Consciousness that connects us all, under the surface of our conscious awareness.”50 Shifting Boundaries between Subjects and Objects Let’s look more closely into the precise relationship between this “more-ness” and our personal acts of interpretation of it. Barnard stresses that these two aspects continually interact. I agree and want to avoid the interpretation that there is first this objectively existing more-ness (the Light), which we consequently subjectively interpret according to our cultural and psychological assumptions (the glass window). Also, from a Latourian point of view, we cannot make a clear separation between this “more-ness” on the one hand, and “us” (whoever we are) on the other hand. Like Latour, quantum physicist and philosopher Karen Barad challenges theories of knowing and being that are based on an independently existing reality “out there” that is grasped and represented by our mental faculties of knowing.51 She wants to replace such representational accounts of being and knowing with a performative account that sees subjects and objects as mutually interdependent. For Barad, the term “reality” does not refer to a collection of objects “out there,” but to ongoing primary practices of representation out of which “subjects” and “objects” arise. Reality is an ongoing performance that produces subjects and objects.52 Although the boundaries between the external world (“objects”) and the human observer (“subjects”) are usually assumed to be transparent and stable, for Barad they actually are far from stable and far from clear. Even to say that they interact suggests too much stability. She coins the new term “intra-action” to emphasize that subject and object are not two different entities that precede their interaction. They emerge as two different entities through their intra-action.53 They are mutually constituted or, as Barad calls it, “entangled.” The term entanglement, which she borrows from quantum mechanics, does not simply mean being intertwined, as in the joining of separate entities. It means to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Subject and object are always entangled. Laura Dev suggests that ayahuasca might serve as a “boundary being” that shifts the boundaries between the subjective and the objective. In this way, it connects disparate communities and creates a bridge for dialogue and translation. It has meaning and makes meaning in multiple worlds. It might provide a new way to communicate with other-than-human beings.54 The boundary between the observer and the observed is not fixed but can shift according to

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cultural and psychological conditions. Our state of consciousness determines where this boundary lies. In an ordinary state of consciousness, where one might experience oneself as a clearly delineated ego that is separate from its surroundings, the boundary between oneself and what one perceives is clear. But in the many possible alternate states of consciousness, this boundary can shift. And since ayahuasca changes our state of consciousness, it also helps to bring about a shift in the boundary between observer and observed. We are no longer separate from what we observe. The purple Buddha is no longer simply an external object that we interact with. We both intra-act. We are both part of the ongoing performance, or co-construction, of reality that is usually invisible but is now brought to light through the workings of ayahuasca. Usually, we would take the purple Buddha as the primary ontological unit. We can then inquire into its ontological status. We can ask, is it an independent object with inherent qualities? Or is it a projection? What Barad is proposing is to take phenomena to be the primary ontological unit. The phenomenon of “seeing-purple-Buddha,” the result of a process of intra-action, comes first. Then, as soon as we observe or experience this phenomenon, boundaries start to appear. Experiencing something doesn’t mean passively registering an external reality; it produces the boundaries between what counts as “objects” and what counts as a “subject.” Now, an “I” comes into being that experiences “a purple Buddha.” However, both the “I” and the purple Buddha lack inherent existence. Such emptiness is brought to light by ayahuasca. As a boundary being, it shifts the boundaries between subject and object. It produces new boundaries that allow other entities to show up. What would it mean to “know” this purple Buddha? For Barad, knowing is not about trying to grasp an external world through ideas or concepts. It is not seeing from outside, or from above, “what is really happening,” but it means taking part in the process of intra-acting. Knowing something means taking part in the ongoing ontological performance of the world and contributing to how the world articulates itself.55 Not only with our intellect but also with our heart, our body, and our imagination. In this way, many different kinds of epistemological practices are possible, and they are not limited to human beings alone. Also nonhuman beings, such as plants, can contribute to how the world articulates itself. I may try to get to know ayahuasca, as ayahuasca is trying to get to know me. By opening up and loosening our established boundaries, ayahuasca may help to create the conditions where such nonhuman types of knowing may become more apparent. When our ayahuasca practitioner experienced the purple Buddha, he may also have felt the purple Buddha communicating with him, reassuring him, telling him not to give up. Through knowing, a part of the world makes itself intelligible to another part. Practices of knowing are related to practices of being. We know because we are part of the world in its ongoing intra-activity.

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This is why, for Barad, there is no boundary between epistemology and ontology. She coins the term “onto-epistemology” to refer to the study of practices of knowing in being. According to Barad’s proposed agential realism, the instruments that are being used in experiments (she calls them “apparatuses”) enact “agential cuts,” which produce determinate boundaries between entities such as subjects and objects. When people experience the presence of divine beings during ayahuasca ceremonies, it is the result of such agential cuts. Ayahuasca can be seen as an apparatus that enacts such agential cuts. It produces spirits as bounded entities. As with all apparatuses, ayahuasca can be seen as a boundary-making practice.56 It is an apparatus that helps to make the world intelligible. In traditional humanist accounts, intelligibility requires our human intellect. But in Barad’s posthumanist agential realist account, intelligibility is an ontological performance of the world—the world articulates itself. “Knowing” the world does not require human intellection but intra-acting. Empowering the Imagination Since beings such as the purple Buddha exist in different ways from ordinary objects, perceiving them in visions is of a different quality than ordinary perceptions. Such perception is “imaginal” (but not imaginary): one must use the imagination to be able to perceive in this way. The Sufi scholar Henry Corbin argues that the imagination can be a valid source of knowledge, which provides us with knowledge of what he calls “the imaginal”: a realm that is not reducible to immanence or transcendence. Corbin introduced the term “imaginal” in order to avoid confusing external visions with mere imaginative projections of the psyche (inner visions), and to assert the reality of a visionary world that is neither material nor intelligible but in-between. As Corbin explains: Our language of today, even philosophical, is so unfit to describe this world of the Imagination as a perfectly real world that a satisfactory term is lacking here. We must avoid all confusion with simple “fantasy”; “imaginable” too particularly indicates possibility. We need some such adjective as imaginal to qualify everything related to this intermediate universe (dimensions, figures, landscapes, and so on). Then we would have Imaginalia (as original, not as mere “effigies” of sensory things), just as we have Divinalia. And imaginal is no more to be confused with imaginary than original with Originary.57

Jeffrey Kripal explores the idea that the human faculty of the imagination can be seen as a two-way mirror that can either reflect images (when looking at it)

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or allow us to see images (when looking through it). The Romantics already claimed that “the imagination can become a ‘window’ of revealed truths from some other deeper part of the soul or world.”58 Kripal speculates that “a rare but real form of the imagination may be what the conscious form of evolution looks like.”59 He further elucidates this speculation as follows: In very special moments, the human imagination somehow becomes temporarily empowered or “zapped” and functions not as a simple spinner of phantasies (the imaginary) but as a very special organ of cognition and translation (the symbolic), as a kind of supersense that is perceiving some entirely different, probably nonhuman or superhuman order of reality but shaping that encounter into a virtual reality display in tune with the local culture: in short: a reflecting back and a seeing through at the same time.60

On one hand, if the imagination is seen as a mere projector of fantasy (if all it does is reflect back), then ayahuasca visions must be interpreted as simple reflections of the practitioner’s own psyche and culture (as reflections of set and setting). On the other hand, if the imagination is seen as merely a camera or recorder of what is (if it only allows us to see through it), then ayahuasca visions will be interpreted literally: what one sees is what is really there. However, as Kripal argues, in extraordinary experiences both sides may be in play at once. The nineteenth-century psychologist Myers ‌‌‌‌considered the imaginal as an evolved form of the imagination. In entomology, an imago is the final adult form of an insect’s metamorphosis. The mature imaginal stage follows the immature larval stage, as the proverbial butterfly follows the caterpillar. Kripal recounts how Myers distinguished two modes of the imaginal, the empirical and the symbolic. In the empirical imaginal, a vision corresponds closely to an event in the objective world, e.g., knowing that a loved one is in danger or has died. This is “clairvoyance.” Little or no interpretation of the vision is needed. The visionary knows instantly what the vision is about. In the symbolic imaginal, the vision is experienced as mediating some other reality. The content can be baroque or bizarre. The images and narratives are ciphers of something Other, which need interpretation.61 According to Latour’s thought, such a symbolically mediated form of knowledge represents an encounter with other modes of existence. Symbols allow indirect access to actor-networks that involve more-than-human actors. Such actors cannot be accessed literally and directly in language, but only symbolically and indirectly in strange images, open paradoxes, and bizarre narratives. Kripal notes that a symbol is different from a sign. Whereas a sign (e.g., a green traffic light) does not bear a real relationship to that of which it speaks,

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a symbol bears a relationship to that which it symbolizes, as well as that in which it appears and symbolizes (the human mind). A sign cannot be true and false at the same time, but a symbolic expression can be. It can also reference two things at the same time, Kripal argues: “The symbol communes, even if it never quite identifies or fuses the subject and object, the visionary and the vision. The symbol itself is a bridge over the abyss. It appears in between.”62 Perhaps visionary ayahuasca experiences can be paradoxically described as what early Victorian researchers called “veridical hallucinations” (with respect to precognitive dreams).63 They are functions of the human imagination, and therefore dreamlike or hallucinatory, and yet they may provide accurate information. As Kripal puts it: “We tend to think of the imagined as the imaginary, as fancy and schlock, but clearly something else is shining through these extreme cases, something, well, true.”64 Similar to what Kripal has described, Jess Byron Hollenback proposes that one of the effects of long-term contemplative practice may be an empowerment of the imagination, in which the imagination is turned into an organ of supranormal perception and knowledge.65 It then becomes capable of co-creating different spiritual landscapes, not as merely a kind of psychological projection, but in co-operation with larger ontological realities. In alternate states of consciousness, Hollenback argues, supernormal capacities are possible due to this process that he calls enthymesis: the empowerment of the mystic’s imagination, thoughts, emotions, and volition. Due to such empowerment, “these faculties not only objectify themselves so that they form the visionary landscape that the mystic perceives, but they also exhibit noetic possibilities, that is, they can sometimes function as supernormal channels of perception, locomotion, and communication.”66 Such empowerment can lead to the blurring of the boundaries between the subjective and objective domains of experience: “what an individual concocts in his or her imagination can sometimes become immediately experienced as an objective datum perceptible to others.”67 The boundaries between real and imaginary begin to dissolve. This can lead to spiritual landscapes such as the Astral, “an experiential realm created when one’s thoughts (and the thoughts of others alive and dead), innermost desires, and emotions immediately concretize and ‘objectify’ themselves.”68 Ayahuasca experiences could be a result of such an empowerment of the imagination. Partridge suggests interpreting visionary entheogenic experiences as an exercise in what Samuel Veissière has described as “Tulpamancy”: “Tulpas (a term borrowed from Tibetan Buddhism) are imaginary companions who are said to have achieved full sentience after being conjured through ‘thoughtform’ meditative practice.”69 And indeed, tantric Tibetan Buddhist practices are said to be able to produce such tulpas as materialized thought forms.

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The wide variety of ayahuasca mystical experiences, which suggests their contextuality, is also consistent with Hollenback’s phenomenon of enthymesis. Such an empowerment of the imagination can never create anything in a contextual vacuum. It is impossible for a vision to avoid being shaped by the presuppositions, desires, and anxieties that practitioners bring with them into the experience. The empowerment of the imagination is incredibly sensitive to context. Whenever it is operative, there can be no such thing as a pure, unmediated mystical experience. Therefore, he argues, it will be impossible for any individual’s mystical experience to be the same as any other person’s.70 Ayahuasca visions can lead to self-knowledge; however, improperly framed visions can become empty infatuations of one’s ego.71 Visions can convey lessons about how one can evolve spiritually, but the desire to encounter otherworldly beings can also become a source of distraction. This is why the content of visions is downplayed in the Santo Daime.72 How can such visions be distinguished from illusions? Barnard discusses the question of the truth and value of the experienced transmission of information through visionary or mystical experiences (whether entheogenically inspired or not) through three criteria offered by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience: immediate luminosity (the immediate force of the experience, “its raw voltage”), philosophical reasonableness (can it be placed within an articulate and rationally defensible system of beliefs?), and moral helpfulness (does it lead to positive consequences on the whole and over the long run?).73 PERENNIALIST, CONTEXTUALIST, AND PARTICIPATORY APPROACHES Some contemporary medical researchers of psychedelics attempt to make room for the non-therapeutic effects of ayahuasca by claiming that ayahuasca causes ego dissolution and mystical-type experiences.74 Some scholars, such as philosopher Chris Letheby and neuroscientist Robin Carhart-Harris, embed such an understanding into a broader naturalistic philosophy of psychedelics, cutting out all references to supernatural entities.75 They firmly remain within a physicalist or materialist ontology. Others, such as William Richards, remain closer to Huxley’s notion of an expansion of consciousness, related to the filter theory and a more idealist ontology.76 When discussing ayahuasca experiences, we need to take into account the complexity of the wider academic discussion of mystical experience in general. First, we have to acknowledge, as Hollenback has pointed out, that most classical studies of mysticism have ignored or devalued forms of indigenous mysticism due to ethnocentricity and a lack of comparative breadth.77

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In shamanic mysticism, visionary experiences often go hand in hand with supernormal capacities such as supernormal perception, mediumship, and spirit possession. Such capacities may include “the capacity to undertake ecstatic flights to visit spirits, accomplish work by mere wish, kill by mere wish, know the thoughts of others, locate game clairvoyantly, and locate lost objects supernormally.”78 Also, the “ex-static” character of shamanic mysticism has received insufficient attention. Hollenback distinguishes between ecstasy and the more technical term “ex-stasis”: In ex-stasis either a part or all of the subject’s consciousness-principle, usually conceptualized as the “soul” or “spirit,” separates from the physical body and it is this disembodied soul-substance or spirit-substance that is reputed to be the agency that performs deeds or perceives things that are otherwise impossible while one is in the ordinary waking state subject to the normal limitations of the physical body.79

The academic study of mystical experiences has been dominated by the perennialist and the contextualist approach. Classical perennialist approaches to mystical experience see it as the direct experience of a single, pregiven ultimate reality that is directly accessed by mystics of all times and places. Therefore, mystical experiences from mystics in different cultures and traditions are either identical, or they access different dimensions, perspectives, expressions or levels of this singular ultimate reality. While the doctrinal beliefs of the religious traditions may be incompatible, their esoteric core transcends doctrinal pluralism. It is this essential core that may be directly accessed by the mystics through an unmediated mystical experience. The perennialist view was strongly challenged by Steven Katz and other contextualist scholars, who argued that mystical experiences are mediated and shaped by set and setting: both the doctrinal beliefs and soteriological expectations of the mystics themselves (set) and the language and culture of the religious traditions of the mystics (setting).80 They argue that the relationship between mystical experiences and their interpretation is not a one-way street (the Light that comes in and is interpreted in varying ways) but a twoway street (experiences and their interpretations are mutually co-constructed). There are strong and weak versions of this thesis of mediation. The strong thesis argues that all mystical experiences are entirely mediated; they can be fully explained through set and setting. The weak thesis argues that mystical experiences are heavily mediated by set and setting, but that an encounter with actual ontological realities is not excluded as a factor. For contextualists, set and setting do not only influence the interpretation of mystical experiences but also their content. Mystics do not necessarily experience different dimensions or levels of one ultimate reality. The different religions may each

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have their own ultimate, as independent contemplative goals determined by their particular practices.81 According to transpersonal psychologist Jorge Ferrer, both perennialist and contextualist approaches remain caught in the dualism between reality on the one hand and human frameworks on the other hand.82 Perennialist scholars are caught in the myth of the given: they subscribe to the specific ontology of a pregiven spiritual reality. Contextual scholars remain silent about the ontological implications of mystical experiences. Both are caught in what Karl Popper has called “the myth of the framework,” which postulates a dualism between uninterpreted reality and our conceptual frameworks. ‌‌‌‌Although religious practitioners may be in touch with something real, their knowledge of this reality must always be shaped by, and screened through, their conceptual frameworks. Other ontological worlds may exist, but the only thing that we have access to is our situated phenomenal awareness of them.83 In such approaches to religion, divine beings are either reduced to discursive entities (not ontologically real but part of a language game), or they are bracketed as part of an inaccessible ultimate reality about which we must remain silent. This has led most scholars to a metaphysical agnosticism. Letting go of the idea of an uninterpreted and unknowable reality would allow being more directly in touch with the real again, not through critical rationality, but through our body and the imaginal. Ferrer presents a participatory approach that emphasizes contemplative practice rather than spiritual experience.84 He disagrees with the contextualists in that knowledge is not a representational process of passively reflecting external reality, but an embodied and enactive process that requires our active participation. He disagrees with the perennialists in that there is no pregiven world that is entirely independent of human cognition. Instead, the participatory approach assumes that there is an underlying creative spiritual power that is the generative source of all participatory events. Such an underlying spiritual power should not be seen as a pregiven Kantian-like “thing in itself.”85 It is not pregiven but “cocreatively unfolds in multiple ontological directions.”86 Such co-creation has three interrelated dimensions. On an intra-personal level, all human attributes (body, vital energy, heart, mind, and consciousness) collaborate equally in contemplative practices. On an interpersonal level, contemplative practice is not solitary but inherently relational: it takes place in a communal context through cooperative relationships among human beings growing as peers, being students and teachers to each other in different regards.87 On a transpersonal level, contemplative practices involve dynamic interactions with more-than-human powers. Multiple types of such interaction can potentially be equally liberating. Such a participatory pluralism means that not only can there be a multiplicity of spiritual paths, but also a multiplicity of spiritual liberations, worlds, and even ultimates.88

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Ferrer argues that a participatory approach can more fully account for entheogenic experiences than perennialist interpretations. As an example, he gives a participatory, rather than a perennialist, interpretation of the empirical findings of psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, who has conducted nearly fifty years of consciousness research that often involved entheogens.89 Although both a perennialist and a participatory interpretation are consistent with Grof’s empirical data, Ferrer argues that a participatory interpretation offers a more pluralistic account of entheogenic experiences and leads to more ontological openness.90 It is therefore more useful to the philosophical diplomacy that is one of the aims of this book. Ferrer’s participatory framework is not a new invention but has a long and honorable pedigree in the Western philosophical tradition. The first technical use of the term can be found in Plato, who employed participation (methexis) as a philosophical concept to explicate the relationship between individual forms and the Forms.91 In the Renaissance, the notion of “creative participation” was developed when theurgic Neoplatonism was discovered by Ficino and others, and this discourse continued through the Romantics into the present.92 Ferrer distinguishes three forms of participation: archaic, Romantic, and enactive.93 The archaic mode of participation was described by the French anthropologist Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939) as a “participation mystique”: a prelogical, mystical interconnectedness with others, nature, and things. In his posthumously published Notebooks, he recognized logical and participatory mentalities as two different cognitive styles that coexist to some extent in all human beings.94 The Romantic mode of participation stresses the participatory role of imagination and feeling, intuition, and inspiration. It also acknowledges multidimensional cognition.95 An enactive mode of participation differs from archaic and Romantic modes of participation in two respects: (1) Like them, it also avoids the subject-object divide, but not by mystical fusion but self-reflexively, preserving a highly differentiated but permeable individuality or participating self as the agent of religious knowing. Knowing is enactive. (2) It avoids the Romantic opposition between a deep structure versus various surface expressions of that structure. The participatory approach affirms the ontological value and creative impact of a plurality of spiritual worlds and realities. In order to approach such a multiplicity of worlds, Ferrer argues, it is necessary to bridge the natural/supernatural split, and embrace an open, extended naturalism. Ferrer’s participatory framework is similar to Latour’s thought. For both Latour and Ferrer, reality is an ongoing process of co-construction, and contemplative practices are a means of cultivating our conscious participation in this process. Both challenge the neo-Kantian separation between an external reality and our inner representations of it. Both recommend a pragmatic

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epistemology based on a radical empiricism. However, whereas Latour’s experimental metaphysics is nonfoundationalist (in line with his principle of irreduction), Ferrer’s “mystical” metaphysics assumes the existence of a mystery, or creative force of the cosmos and reality. This mystery serves for Ferrer as an ontological grounding for spiritual pluralism. In affirming such an underlying mystery, or creative spiritual power, as the generative source of all spiritual enactions unfolding in multiple ontological directions, Ferrer holds what he calls a “more relaxed” spiritual universalism.96 Latour might reject such a universalism. Whereas Ferrer holds a pluralistic ontology (many co-created ontological worlds arise out of the ontological ground of the mystery), Latour presents an ontological pluralism (many possible ontologies without one being the preferred one). FROM AYAHUASCA EXPERIENCES TO PARTICIPATORY EVENTS So far, we have focused on visionary and mystical experiences as a first answer to the question of what ayahuasca does. Such a phenomenological focus on visionary ayahuasca experiences is an example of the general turn, since Kant, from ontology to phenomenology that I described in chapter 1. Discourses about ayahuasca have focused on the ecstatic experiences that it yields. Such an experiential focus has been invaluable in breaking open the immanent frame that implicitly rules Western secular society (especially academic discourse) and has opened the door to the academic study of ayahuasca religiosity in an open-minded and expansive way. However, it also suffers from some ontological assumptions that limit its effectiveness in addressing the full range of ayahuasca religiosity. This section will criticize some of those ontological assumptions, following the analysis of Jorge Ferrer.97 Richard Tarnas notes that conceptual innovations will often retain certain unexamined assumptions from old structures, which weaken the power of the new perspective, but also make possible its broad acceptance.98 They are like the mortgage that is necessary to buy the new house, but that needs to be paid off later. A second conceptual intervention is needed later on, which will emancipate the original revolution from its unconscious limitations. For example, Copernicus embedded his revolutionary insight that, not the earth, but the sun is at the center of our solar system within old assumptions that the planets move with uniform circular motion. Because of these assumptions, his heliocentric theory was no more successful than the old geocentric model in describing the movements of the planets. Half a century later, Kepler dropped the assumption of uniform circular motion and discovered the elliptic orbits of the planets. He liberated the Copernican hypothesis from

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its unconscious assumptions and paid off the mortgage. Kepler did not argue against Copernicus, nor did he want to prove him wrong. He merely wanted to solve some problems with Copernicus’s system that would make it more effective. In a similar spirit, this section aims to “pay off the mortgage” of existing ayahuasca discourses by questioning two unexamined assumptions that made possible their broad acceptance: the focus on inner experience and the adoption of a perennialist framework. The first wave of psychedelics, in the Sixties, was an important factor (together with the rising interest in nondual Asian spiritual traditions and Western esotericism) in breaking free from the positivism and reductionism that dominated the field of academic psychology. The discourse of psychedelic mysticism made room for spirituality as an essential part of human health and healing. However, it was still largely a modern project (even, or especially, when it tried to go beyond modernity’s emphasis on the Cartesian ego). Although it tried to expand the boundaries of the Cartesian ego by seeing psychedelics as making room for an encounter with the sacred, it kept intact modern Cartesian assumptions about the distinction between private, individual intrasubjective experiences and an independent, universal spiritual reality. Experience of this spiritual reality was, like scientific truth, independent of human interpretation and projections. The centrality of the intense psychedelic experience led to this commitment to an inner empiricism.99 This move to inner empiricism had many advantages. Through such an inner empiricism it proved possible to free spirituality from its previously obligatory association with Christianity and engage freely with Western esotericist and Asian mystical practices (often removed from their cultural contexts, as we saw in chapter 1 in the example of Timothy Leary). It was now possible to be spiritual without having to also be Christian. At the same time, it was possible to be spiritual and be scientifically respectable as well. The notion of “spiritual experience” was a successor to the notion of “religious experience” that had already been presented by Schleiermacher in the early nineteenth century in order to shield religious doctrines from Enlightenment critique. Buddhism had presented itself to the West as a spiritual path aiming at the realization of a universal “pure experience” free from distortions.100 Similarly, neo-Hindu thinkers had presented Hinduism in experiential terms in order to make it comparable with the empiricism of Western science.101 In the Sixties, these developments were absorbed by the discourse of psychedelic mysticism. The problem was how to justify such spiritual experiences epistemologically. What were the criteria to establish their truth? As a response to this problem, psychedelic mysticism embraced the possibility of a pregiven, impersonal, universal truth, independent of all subjective and cultural interpretation, that could be empirically verified. This embrace was crucial for

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legitimizing the spiritual use of psychedelics: it was not just recreational but gave access to deeper truths about “things as they really are.” This was a big step beyond the immanent frame, according to which spirituality is epistemologically sterile: although it may be highly meaningful for individuals, it does not give them any real knowledge about themselves or the world. It may provide edifying subjective experiences, but without real cognitive value. Psychedelic mysticism showed that psychedelic experiences can tell us more about the world. They are epistemologically relevant. However, it carries the mortgage of experientialism and inner empiricism. The assumption of experientialism was that the most important effect of psychedelics is that they give us individual inner experiences. The assumption of inner empiricism was that these inner experiences give us access to truth. Both these assumptions were crucially important for the acceptance of psychedelic experiences among (a small part of) the academic community. However, the focus on individual inner experiences, as important as these are, leaves out important aspects of ayahuasca religiosity. Although the psychedelic revolution of the Sixties was initially inspired by the participatory ritual and collective use of natural psychoactive sacraments such as peyote and magic mushrooms, synthetic substances such as LSD and mescaline were increasingly consumed in individualized and recreational settings rather than collective and ritual settings.102 The focus was on individual psychedelic experiences that happen to an autonomous subject. Such experiences are seen as the result of a face-to-face between a “substance” and a “consumer,” rather than the result of a shared rituality. Mesturini Cappo argues that the frame of mystical experiences resulting from drinking ayahuasca seen as a psychoactive substance can contribute to a disentangling process that fails to relate to the actual networks that ayahuasca is a part of: Detailing personal experience, putting into words extraordinary visions or revelations that transform one’s comprehension of oneself, of others, and of the world, is certainly the main frame in which Westerners have managed to “relate” to such “substances” and to honor their “power.” The alliance of the chemical and the mystical perspectives seems to have formed an interpretative matrix that represents a kind of consensus of both detractors and defenders of the psychedelics wave.103

We have seen that ayahuasca, as a boundary being, shifts the boundaries between subjects and objects. What is subjective can become objective in the inner world. For example, practitioners can learn to disidentify themselves from the contents of their consciousness. There are only thoughts, feelings, sounds, images without the interpretation that I am seeing these images or hearing those sounds. What is subjective can also become objective in the

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outer world, in the sense of new ontological worlds opening up. And also vice versa: what was objective can become subjective, as when human consciousness can become identified with biological, social, cultural, planetary, and cosmic phenomena.104 Such ontological shifts are frequently reported during ayahuasca ceremonies. In contemplative traditions, spiritual experiences have always been an important but partial element of a larger path that includes communal life, ethical commitment, relationship with teachers, and the study of scriptures. We need a socially engaged spirituality that addresses the social, political and ecological problems of our times. As Ferrer argues‌‌‌‌, once spiritual experiences are segregated from ethical and traditional contexts, they tend to lose their sacred and transformative quality and become mere peak experiences.105 They become spiritual events that are understood in phenomenological terms, not as emerging from the participation in spiritual realities that exist beyond the realm of human experience.106 The focus on spiritual experiences can potentially lead to ego inflation and narcissism,107 which makes it more difficult to integrate them into everyday life.108 Spiritual traditions have emphasized that the goal of the spiritual life is not to have spiritual experiences, but to stabilize spiritual consciousness, live a spiritual life, and help transform the world. Spiritual experiences, as important as they may be, do not in themselves produce a spiritual life. Apart from its focus on spiritual experiences, psychedelic mysticism also embraces the notion of a universal and all-encompassing perennial philosophy that can be traced back to various branches of Neoplatonism. The term itself stems from the Renaissance. It was used in different senses throughout the history of philosophy, but the basic idea is that all spiritual traditions can be integrated harmoniously into a single Truth which underlies the apparent plurality of worldviews. This Truth stems from a single ultimate reality that can be known by the human mind under special circumstances. It can be found at the heart of all the world’s mystical traditions. Although the doctrinal beliefs of religious traditions can contradict each other, their esoteric or mystical dimension reveals an essential unity that can be reached through a direct, intuitive understanding of reality (gnosis) that is beyond individual and cultural projections (beyond set and setting). Religious traditions are different rivers reaching the same ocean, or different pathways leading to the peak of the same mountain. For Aldous Huxley (who wrote The Perennial Philosophy) and many others, the psychedelic experience made such gnosis possible.109 Ferrer argues that there are various problems with perennialism. From an ontological point of view, its most problematic aspect is that it tends to assume the existence of a pregiven ultimate reality that can be objectively known through spiritual practice. Also, the assumption of a common core

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to all spiritual traditions is an apriori philosophical premise rather than the conclusion of cross-cultural research or interreligious dialogue. Therefore, there is not even a real need anymore to study what the religious traditions say about themselves. Moreover, in spite of its appearance of ecumenism and tolerance (all religions are rivers toward the same ocean), perennialism is often quite hierarchical in that it privileges some religious traditions over others. Nondual Eastern traditions are often seen as somehow “higher” than shamanic traditions. Ferrer also notes that the things that are common among religious traditions are not necessarily the most important ones. He quotes the story of the woman who, observing her neighbor entering into an alternate state of consciousness for three consecutive days first with rum and water, then through fast breathing and water, and finally with nitrous oxide and water, concludes that the reason for his alternate state of consciousness was the ingestion of water. Another story is about an individual who enters a Parisian bakery and, observing the variety of croissants, baguettes, and coffeecakes displayed, insists that he wants to savor what is essential and common to all of them, that is, flour.110 The global ayahuasca expansion of the past two decades, dominated by the discourse of entheogenic shamanism, can be considered a kind of second wave to the psychedelic revolution of the Sixties.111 During the first wave of psychedelics, psychedelics were seen as being able to give us inner spiritual experiences (experientialism) of the sacred, seen as an independent ultimate reality (perennialism). Some of the problematic aspects of the discourse of psychedelic mysticism (such as the disentangling of spiritual experience from its ritual context) were corrected by the discourse of entheogenic shamanism, which stresses the importance of the ceremonial use of ayahuasca and other entheogens. Also, more and more often the sacred is not seen any longer as something “other” or “higher,” but as a fundamentally embodied dimension of personhood and reality itself. Ayahuasca practice is seen as being aimed towards becoming a complete human being that naturally and spontaneously participates in the deeper, sacred dimensions of life. However, as Partridge notes, the lure of perennialism remains strong.112 Many would still agree with religious scholar Huston Smith, who wrote that “the basic message of the entheogens [is] that there is another Reality that puts this one in the shade.”113 Ferrer has proposed understanding spiritual experiences in a new way that is not limited by objectivism (the assumption of a pregiven objective reality) and individualism (a focus on individual experience). Rather than speaking about intrasubjective experience, he speaks of participatory events.114 As we have seen, visionary ayahuasca experiences differ from ordinary experiences in that they dismantle the distinction between subject and object. As a boundary being, ayahuasca shifts and liquifies the boundaries between what is subjective and what is objective. Therefore, rather than speaking of ayahuasca

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experiences that take place within an individual, I follow Ferrer in his suggestion to speak of participatory ayahuasca events that involve encounters with liquid divinity. In such participatory ayahuasca events, the interpretation is not that ayahuasca expands our consciousness in order to give us access to higher worlds or realities (such as Huxley’s Mind-at-Large, for example), but that the encounter with liquid divinity can manifest itself in the individual as a visionary ayahuasca experience. In such an approach, the emergence of an ontological encounter, in which our consciousness participates, is primary; the spiritual experience is merely its result.115 Such participatory events not only occur within an individual, but also in a community.116 For example, in the Santo Daime, collective prayer, singing, and dancing lead to the buildup of a spiritual “current” between the daimistas (see chapter 5). A Santo Daime work is not only about personal transformation, but also, and perhaps in the first place, it is a communal performance, in which, step by step, a healing current is constructed that provides light and love for all participants involved. This leads to a multidimensional participation in reality that involves not only the rational mind but also the body, the heart, and the soul.117 To the extent that such participatory events lead to knowledge, it is participatory knowledge. Such knowledge, often indicated by the term “gnosis,” is not the knowing of something by someone. It is a knowing that occurs by virtue of being. It is enactive (it brings forth ontological worlds) rather than representational (the inner subjective representation of an independent objective reality). It is also transformative: it transforms self and world. And self-transformation is necessary for such participatory knowing to occur. Barnard gives a phenomenological description of such participatory events during Santo Daime works: During these higher-level mirações [visions], we can merge with Beings of Light and be granted a glimpse of the purity and profundity of their diamondlike, love-suffused vision of the cosmos. In this way, our vibratory rate can be radically upgraded via a streaming of divinity manifesting as rays of radiance itself. Or our physical/emotional ailments can be healed via the shimmering and yet exceedingly potent crystalline presence of compassionate spiritual “doctors.” Or . . . in these innately higher/purer realms, you can have the direct realization that you are no longer “you” . . . you know that “you,” in the higher “octave” of your being, are the Source of all of that visionary beauty—beauty that radiates from you and then pours back into you.118

Barnard makes the ontological point that such a vision no longer means simply seeing an inner scene, but unfolds “within the embracing, enveloping matrix of a preexistent, fully formed archetypal world, a world that is itself an

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upgraded outpouring of our own consciousness.”119 Such a world is not a different realm that is separate from ordinary life, but ultimately linked with it. It is “one of the countless creative matrices of this world.”120 Barnard argues that our ordinary world “is ceaselessly aligned with these higher realms of Being that interpenetrate and overlay this world.”121 Such an alignment is what occurs during Santo Daime works, he adds. And this is exactly the point of contemplative practice. High-level visions are not important as “mystical” experiences in and of themselves; via those visions, the Daime is “‘rewiring’ [one’s] capacity to increasingly manifest those highly refined frequencies of Being within this everyday world.”122 AN ACTOR-NETWORK DESCRIPTION OF A SANTO DAIME CEREMONY After the theoretical explorations of chapters 2 and 3, I want to synthesize our findings so far in a hypothetical description of an ayahuasca ceremony in terms of Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, which also takes his modes of existence into account. Such a description will focus on the construction of and attunement to various types of actor-networks that include actors from different modes of existence. In such a description, ayahuasca is only one of those actors, and its qualities and effects are closely dependent on its interactions with the many other actors that are present in ayahuasca ceremonies. In an ayahuasca ceremony, beings of transformation and religion become more tangibly present to the participants. In chapter 2, we saw that beings of transformation are the beings that constitute our interiority: they construct subjects. We usually experience them as emotions or moods, which we assume to well up from within our inner depths, according to our usual selfunderstanding. However, during an ayahuasca ceremony there is no “inside” anymore. The self becomes porous and liquid. During such a “liquification” of the usual subject-object structure, room is also created for the interaction with beings of religion. These are beings that only come into existence when called. Their modes of existence, and the actor-networks associated with them, become more available and accessible for being traversed and navigated through. The ayahuasca experience is often described as a journey into new realms and new ontological worlds. And indeed, new ontological modes of existence do open up—not as separate geographical locations that lie outside or “beyond” day-to-day reality, but as hitherto inaccessible actor-networks, the construction of which becomes possible not only because of the effects of ayahuasca as the sole causal factor, but as a result of the careful connection and entanglement of many different actors.

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There are many different types of ayahuasca ceremonies, and our hypothetical example will be based on a particular Santo Daime ceremony, the mediumistic mesa branca (white table) work.123 In this type of Santo Daime ceremony, the different types of actors include the leader of the work, the musicians, the puxadora (the daimista who initiates the singing and sets the tone), the players of a maraca (a rattle that is used as a musical instrument), the participants, their physical posture, and their ritual clothing. These actors engage in different activities, including reciting prayers, singing hymns, and maintaining a contemplative state of mind, that are performed in a ritual context that includes a room decorated with pictures of Santo Daime elders, Saint Michael, an altar with a Caravaca cross (a cross with two horizontal bars of unequal length), a statue of the Virgin Mary, flowers, and candles. Before the ceremony, the setting has been carefully constructed. The participants have changed into their farda, a ritual uniform involving blue pants, white shirt, blue tie, and a six-pointed star for the men, and a blue skirt and white shirt with blue emblem (containing a six-pointed star) for the women. The room has been transformed into a ritual space with about eighty neatly lined up chairs in a six-pointed star formation, around a six-pointed table with six chairs in the middle. A table at the side of the room, adorned with flowers and a Caravaca cross, functions as the altar from which the Daime is served. Seen from the altar, the men are sitting in the left half of the room, the women are in the right half. At the beginning of the ceremony, the set of the individual participants is carefully harmonized and attuned, so that a collective set is constructed. The ceremony is opened with a fixed liturgy: several communal prayers, concluded with “amen” and the sign of the cross. Now, a first connection has been established that allows for the construction of religious types of actor-networks. The first dose of the Daime is served in a ritual manner. Men and women line up at both sides of the altar while Santo Daime hymns are being sung. The Daime is not just a liquid substance but a sacrament that is entangled in various actor-networks. It has been ritually constructed during a feitio ceremony, in which the jagube was first harvested by hand by the men, then cleaned and beaten to pulp, then cooked several times in large pots of boiling water, after which the rainha leaves (that were first carefully cleaned one by one by the women) were added to it.124 When all are seated again, fifteen Oraçao hymns are sung together, during which the Daime is gradually releasing its force. A great force becomes tangible that liquifies the subjects and objects in the room. After the Oraçao, a prayer is recited, “The Consecration of the Space,” during which the Daime seems to open up fully.125 It releases its full power. Existing ego boundaries fall away, the sense of self diminishes, and a spiritual current starts to flow

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between the participants. There are some minutes of collective silent meditation. The room is buzzing with intensity. Then the commander announces that there will be a second serving of the Daime in order for the participants to be able to reach the higher spiritual level needed for doing this work. In actor-network terms: the participants need to interact with more Daime in order to be able to access, traverse, and further construct various higher-order actor-networks involving beings of religion. Traversing such actor-networks requires further breaking down the subject-object structure. After this second serving, the work shifts into higher gear. It takes an enormous discipline to continue to pay attention, be alert and aware, sit up straight, and not be blown away by the strong force that arises. Then the cura hymns are sung together. Led by the commander, the puxadora with her strong rhythmic maraca, the guitar and accordion players, and the collective singing voices of the participants, step by step different actor-networks are being constructed that include links to Latour’s beings of transformation and beings of religion. In shamanic parlance, such beings are commonly designated as “spirits.” However, these beings should not be understood as inhabitants of different “spirit worlds.” It is not that these beings come to visit the room by traveling from an earlier different location. They do not descend from a higher spiritual world “beyond this world” into this world. Rather, due to the entangled activity of the Daime, the singing, the music, and the intentional effort of all participants, it becomes possible for them to exist. Because of the new actor-networks being constructed, it becomes possible to interact with those beings that have a different mode of existence. It becomes possible to find the right prepositions to address them. This is why it becomes possible for them to manifest themselves. They become real and they become true, according to their own mode of verification. Such beings may become real and true to a different degree for the various participants of the ceremony. Some, who have been trained in this capacity, may be able to consciously work with such beings, interact with them, cooperate with them, help them, or allow themselves to be helped by them. Others may only vaguely experience the presence of such beings. They may feel that “some energy” has joined the atmosphere in the room, without being able to pin it down to specific entities. Others may feel profoundly uncomfortable or even ill because they are forcefully shaken out of their comfort zone. And it is also possible for some participants to experience nothing unusual at all. They do not interact with such beings of religion. Therefore, there is a wide range of personal experiences of the participants in the ceremony. However, the actor-networks that are constructed in the ceremony transcend such personal experience. In a sense they have nothing to do with any of the participants in particular. The participants merely serve as instruments in this process. They are links in the actor-networks under construction, but not particularly

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privileged links. They causally contribute to the construction work, each according to their own capacity and previous training. And the healing current that they help to construct also cleanses them personally. It heals whatever needs to be healed. But in a sense, this is an added bonus, almost a side effect. They are cleansed so they can become better instruments, which makes for a more powerful healing current, which leads in turn to more cleansing and healing. This is the positive feedback loop that is being created.126 After the cura hymns, the hymns of Saint Michael are sung. This initiates a new phase in the work. Now, a specific being of religion, Saint Michael, is being invited to become activated in the ceremony. The singing of the Saint Michael hymns increases the participants’ ability to interact with the Saint Michael entity or Saint Michael energy—again, dependent upon former training and individual capacity. It becomes possible for participants to embody this energy. Some begin to shake violently, whereas others start singing very energetically. The energy level in the room rises, sometimes to the level of pandemonium. When the Saint Michael hymns are completed, the energy in the room is very high, almost physically unbearable. Then the commander announces that now it is time to enter the last phase of the work: the singing of some hymns that will invite the beings of the forest.127 He invites those who want to drink a little bit more Daime in order to reach the level of openness required to be able to interact with these beings and fulfill their role as instruments in the creation of new actor-networks. Without their continued collective cooperation, those actor-networks will break down and it will not be possible to interact with the beings of the forest. The ceremony is concluded with several closing hymns and prayers. There are speeches of gratitude and appreciation, greeted with applause. Then the ceremony is formally closed through a communal liturgical recitation. Everyone gradually returns to the day-to-day modes of existence of the ordinary world. Such an actor-network description of a Santo Daime ceremony is much broader in its description of the entangled collective causalities in play than other discussions of psychedelics that tend to reduce such complex entanglement to the causal effects of a psychedelic substance on an individual consumer, or even the effect of a biochemical component of that substance on specific regions of the brain. Although such more reductionist descriptions can be useful from a scientific point of view, they tend to obscure the collective entanglement that is involved in the construction of new actor-networks that involve new modes of existence.

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DISCUSSION In this chapter, we first looked into the nature of ayahuasca. Ayahuasca can be framed in many ways, as a (cognitive) tool, as a plant teacher, and as liquid divinity. It is a boundary being that shifts existing boundaries, also conceptual boundaries. Part 2 of this book will make a clear choice. It will frame ayahuasca not as a psychoactive substance that has certain pharmacological effects on brain chemistry, not as a psychedelic tool for achieving alternate states of consciousness and mystical experiences of oneness, not as a healing medicine capable of curing PTSD, depression, addiction, and other afflictions—even though ayahuasca can be fruitfully imagined as all of these things. It will frame ayahuasca in a religious register, as liquid divinity, as a sacrament or sacred medicine that embodies an intelligence so vast that it has traditionally been approached through the language games around the divine. Whereas “liquid divinity” may be, from now on, our guiding hypothesis on what ayahuasca is (based on a religious framing of ayahuasca), the question of what ayahuasca does is still open. Our first answer in this chapter was that ayahuasca provides access to something “more” through visionary and mystical experiences. With Latour, we have argued that such experiences are both constructed and real, involving both of William James’s two forms of knowledge: knowledge-by-acquaintance (immediate and direct knowledge) and knowledge-about (conceptual interpretation). The relationship between these two forms of knowledge is far from clear because the boundaries between the external world and the human observer are not transparent and stable. Both Latour and Barad approach reality as an ongoing process of construction that even precedes the interaction between subjects and objects as clearly defined entities. Since ayahuasca lays bare such an ongoing process of construction, it can be seen as a boundary being that shifts boundaries between subjects and objects. One of the workings of ayahuasca may be that it empowers the imagination, in the way proposed by authors such as Kripal, Corbin, and Hollenback. After having explored ayahuasca visionary experiences, we also identified some subtle Cartesian ontological assumptions still inherent in some of the discourses around such experiences. The tendency to focus on inner experiences leaves out much of the participatory ritual and collective aspects of ayahuasca religiosity. It is also often connected with the perennialist notion of a single pregiven ultimate reality that can be known by the mind under certain circumstances through a core religious experience that is assumed to be at the heart of all religions. Such critical considerations have led us to doubt whether ayahuasca experiences are really experiences at all. Perhaps “events” is a more accurate

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designation. Ferrer proposes to understand spiritual experiences as participatory events, rather than only inner experiences. Ayahuasca visionary and mystical experiences, seen as participatory events, are not only profoundly meaningful in and of themselves, but also reveal themselves to be part of contemplative ritual practices that involve working with liquid divinity. And the individual nature of such events is in question: perhaps they rather require the end of the individual as a subject that has experiences of objects. This is why the question of what ayahuasca does could be met with a second answer: it invites us to engage in contemplative participatory practices. In many psychedelic discourses, the use of psychedelics as part of a long-term committed contemplative practice has generally been absent. Early influential accounts of psychedelic experience were often based on limited exposure. As Christopher Bache notes, although Leary and McKenna were liberal (even excessive) users of psychoactive substances, influential academic voices such as Huxley and Smith probably took such substances fewer than ten times in their lifetime. Huxley wrote The Doors of Perception after only one mescaline trip. And when Smith published Cleansing the Doors of Perception, he had taken LSD only half a dozen times.128 With regard to psychedelics, the Buddhist writer Alan Watts famously gave the advice, “When you get the message, hang up the phone.” And indeed, for many in the Sixties, their use of psychedelics was not part of a serious contemplative practice (although for many it served as an entry point into a committed longterm Buddhist contemplative practice).129 Building their use of psychedelics into a serious contemplative practice would have amounted not so much to hanging up the phone, but to staying on the line and continuing the conversation.130 As such contemplative practices are today springing up around the use of ayahuasca, there is a need for a new discourse that does not carry the weight of either the psychedelic Sixties or the countercultural appropriation of shamanism. One aspect of such a new discourse may be that it moves on from the focus on ayahuasca experiences. I would like to argue that the fascination with such extraordinary experiences, and the alternate states of consciousness that facilitate them, might be characteristic of more incidental users of ayahuasca, who tend to experience each ceremony as a collection of spectacular experiences. When the use of ayahuasca becomes embedded in a committed long-term contemplative practice, the focus may shift to whether or not transformation is taking place. Alternate states of consciousness become states that one learns to navigate. And extraordinary experiences become alternate experiences that we learn to make use of in pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, and transformation just as we might make use of dreams. They become part of an ayahuasca practice—meeting with it again and again in order to absorb

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its lessons, look in the mirror, and develop positive qualities such as firmness, love, reverence, and humility. The new academic field of contemplative studies aims to investigate such long-term contemplative practices, which are defined as “various approaches, disciplines and methods for developing attentiveness, awareness, compassion, concentration, presence, wisdom, and the like.”131 The American religion scholar Louis Komjathy lists twenty-four different types of contemplative practice, of which apophatic, attentional, communal, concentrative, devotional, ecstatic, kinesthetic, mediumistic, mystical, and quietist would seem to apply to ayahuasca practices.132 Komjathy defines contemplative experiences as “the type of experiences that occur within the parameters of contemplative practice, and/or are deemed significant by contemplatives and their associated communities.”133 Within the field of contemplative studies, some understand contemplative practice as a means for inducing or exploring contemplative experiences. Others see contemplative practices as primary. Such practices may often even involve ignoring contemplative experiences. Part 2 of this book will further explore such contemplative practices, which will be framed as religious practices. Chapter 4 will discuss in what sense ayahuasca practices are forms of ayahuasca religiosity, how they can be framed as forms of engaging with Latour’s invisible beings of religion, traditionally conceived of as the “gods,” and how they can be interpreted (along with other forms of New Age religiosity) as a “gnostic” type of being religious that goes all the way back to the Greek mystery religions. It will argue that the best way to understand such religiosity is through a liturgical approach (focusing on the practices themselves) rather than either an intellectualist (etic) approach (focusing on the worldviews underlying such practices) or an subjectivist (emic) approach (focusing on the experience of ayahuasca practitioners themselves). Chapter 5 will look at contemplative ayahuasca practices as engaging with beings of religion through the lens of the theurgic mystagogy of the Neoplatonic philosopher and priest Iamblichus. Theurgy (literally: god work) refers to a set of ritual practices that engage with the gods in order to heal and liberate the soul. Especially the religiosity of Santo Daime (that models itself self-consciously upon gnostic mystery religions) can be understood fruitfully within such a narrative. Chapter 6 will present a contemporary ecodelic narrative about ayahuasca religiosity as dark green religion, a new and rapidly expanding environmentalist type of nature religiosity that has been described by the American religion scholar Bron Taylor. Of primary importance in such dark green religiosity is the challenge of, in Latour’s terms, “facing Gaia” in times of climate change, diminishing biodiversity, and other environmental challenges.

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NOTES 1. Laura Dev, “Plant Knowledges: Indigenous Approaches and Interspecies Listening Toward Decolonizing Ayahuasca Research,” in Plant Medicines, Healing and Psychedelic Science, edited by Beatriz C. Labate and Clancy Cavnar, 185–204 (Berlin: Springer, 2018). 2. Grof, Realms of the Human Unconscious, 32. 3. Blainey, Christ Returns from the Jungle, 258–265. 4. See Kenneth W. Tupper and Beatriz C. Labate, “Ayahuasca, Psychedelic Studies and Health Sciences: The Politics of Knowledge and Inquiry into an Amazonian Plant Brew,” Current Drug Abuse Reviews 7 (2014): 71–80. 5. Ibid., 76. 6. M. Horowitz and C. Palmer, eds., Moksha: Aldous Huxley’s Classic Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience. (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 1999), 30. 7. Timothy Leary, The Politics of Ecstasy (Berkeley, CA: Ronin Publishing, 1998), 137. 8. Alan W. Watts, The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness (New York: Pantheon Books, 1962), 20. 9. Plato, Phaedrus. 10. Barbara M. Benedikt, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 11. Leary, Metzner, and Alpert, Psychedelic Experience, 11. 12. Latour, Facing Gaia, 50–54. 13. Ibid., 62. 14. Ibid., 62f. 15. Ibid., 70. 16. Doyle, Darwin’s Pharmacy, 252. 17. Ernst Jünger, “The Plant as Autonomous Power,” The Entheogen Review 9/1 (2000): 34–36. 18. See also the Ph.D. dissertation of Laura Dev: “Plants and Pathways: More-than-Human Worlds of Power, Knowledge and Healing,” University of California, Berkeley, 2020. 19. Kohn, How Forests Think, 71–100. 20. Kohn explores the idea that also nonhuman life forms represent the world, in forms that go beyond language. As Kohn argues, both human and nonhuman living creatures use signs as “canes” that represent parts of the world to them. We all live with and through signs (ibid., 9). Such signs are not necessarily symbolic, Kohn argues. For example, they can also be “iconic” (they share likenesses with the things they represent) or “indexical” (they are in some way correlated with the things they represent) (ibid., 8). Signs are not produced by the mind. Rather, the mind, or self, is itself a product of semiosis (the way that an organism uses signs) (ibid., 34). 21. Ibid., 81. 22. Ibid., 84. Kohn argues that existing attempts, such as Latour’s, to extend relational concepts beyond the human are still based on assumptions about how human

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symbolic representation works. They assume the special kinds of relational properties that we find in human language. Extending such a human, linguistic type of relationality to nonhuman actors is still keeping the dualism between human and nonhuman intact. It might even be a narcissistic way of projecting the human onto that which lies beyond it. 23. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Hoboken, NJ: WileyBlackwell, 2009 [1953]), part II, section 190. 24. Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 83/4 (1974): 435–450. 25. Kohn, How Forests Think, 87. 26. However, we must realize that nonhuman agency is of a different kind than human agency. Kohn disagrees with Latour here. He feels that Latour leaves concepts like agency and representation unexamined. In this way, human agency and representation become the standard for all agency and representation. For Kohn, agency has to do with intentionality, purposefulness, and selfhood. You need to have a self and be a person to have agency. Therefore, for Kohn, things do not have agency since they are not living beings. Kohn differentiates himself from indigenous animist worldviews, in which, for example, a stone also would have agency. His goal is not to illuminate a particular animistic worldview but to think beyond the human by making general claims about the world. Kohn is not asking ontological questions without providing an ontological answer, as we saw as characteristic of the ontological turn. He is looking for ontological answers. 27. See Jeremy Narby, Intelligence in Nature: An Inquiry into Knowledge (New York: TarcherPerigee, 2006). 28. Karen Barad reimagines the notion of agency to remove all associations with human subjectivity. Agency is not something that someone or something, whether human or nonhuman, has at all. Agency is the doing without a doer that takes place within the intra-activity of the world. It is an enactment. And for Barad, agency is always entangled. It is very difficult to determine who is doing what to what exactly (Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway). 29. In the Latin rite of the Catholic Church, at Communion, the consecrated host is handed out to the faithful. The drinking of the communion wine from the chalice is usually reserved for the priest (John Paul II. Redemptionis Sacramentum, March 25, 2004, chapter IV, section 94). In the Protestant liturgy, the faithful receive communion under two forms (bread and wine from the chalice). 30. A distinction is made here between what does change (the substance) and what does not change (the manifestation). Attempts by theologians to understand transubstantiation symbolically as transignification (change of meaning) or change of purpose (transfinalization) have always been rejected by Catholic authorities as heresies, most recently by Paul VI in the encyclical Mysterium Fidei of September 3, 1965: https:​//​www​.vatican​.va​/content​/paul​-vi​/en​/encyclicals​/documents​/hf​_p​-vi​_enc​ _03091965​_mysterium​.html. 31. For an overview of the extensive discussions between Catholics and Protestants regarding transubstantiation, see Robert A. Orsi, History and Presence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

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32. Quoted in Mesturini Cappo, “What Ayahuasca Wants,” 169. 33. Christopher Bache, LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 2019), 21f. 34. Jonathan Goldman, “Preface,” in Alex Polari de Alverga, Forest of Visions: Ayahuasca, Amazonian Spirituality, and the Santo Daime Tradition, edited and introduced by Stephen Larsen, translated by Rosana Workman, xxxi (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 1999). 35. Dawson recounts a Santo Daime story about a man who was bragging about the very strong Daime that he had made. Yet, the Daime had no psychoactive effect, due to his lack of humility. Andrew Dawson, “Making Matter Matter: The Santo Daime Ritual of Feitio,” in Making Spirits: Materiality and Transcendence in Contemporary Religions, edited by Diana Espirito Santo and Nico Tassi (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 229. 36. Mesturini Cappo, “What Ayahuasca Wants,” 157. 37. Ibid., 158. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 170f. 40. Ibid., 159. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 161. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid., 169. 45. Ibid., 171. 46. Barnard, Liquid Light, 217 47. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Longmans Green, 1902), 378f. 48. Barnard, Liquid Light, 68. 49. Ibid., 71. 50. Ibid., 71f. 51. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. 52. Ibid., 50–59. 53. Ibid., 178. 54. Dev, “Plant Knowledges,” 188. 55. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 149. 56. Ibid., 148. 57. Henry Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, trans. by Nancy Pearson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 294. 58. Strieber and Kripal, The Super Natural, 118. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid., 119. 61. Ibid., 120–129. In The Flip, Kripal further explains what symbolic knowledge is through the example of mathematics. Mathematical symbols are not what they signify, but they somehow participate in that which they signify: “Numbers are symbols that mean something other than what they appear to mean (squiggly lines on a page, screen, or chalkboard) but nevertheless participate in some fundamental way in that

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which they symbolize (the workings of the physical world) and in that in which they appear (the human mind)” (Kripal, The Flip, 136). 62. Kripal, The Flip, 145. 63. To bridge the hallucination-perception continuum between the imaginary and the real, Terence McKenna famously spoke of “true hallucinations” (Doyle, Darwin’s Pharmacy, 219). 64. Kripal, The Flip, 35. 65. Jess Byron Hollenback, Mysticism: Experience, Response, and Empowerment (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). 66. Ibid., vii. 67. Ibid., 158. 68. Ibid., 152–153. 69. Partridge, High Culture, 340. 70. Hollenback, Mysticism, 292. 71. Blainey, Christ Returns from the Jungle, 196. 72. Ibid. 73. Barnard, Liquid Light, 215. 74. For example, Griffith et al., “Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences.” 75. Letheby, Philosophy of Psychedelics; Carhart-Harris et al., “The entropic brain.” 76. Richards, Sacred Knowledge. 77. Hollenback, Mysticism, 3–4. 78. Ibid., 135–136. 79. Ibid., 137. 80. See, e.g., Stephen T. Katz, Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). 81. See, e.g., S. Mark Heim, Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1995). 82. Jorge N. Ferrer, Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002), 143. 83. Such a dualism of framework and reality has been criticized by the American analytic philosopher Donald Davidson:“On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 47 (1973): 5–20. 84. Ferrer, Revisioning Transpersonal Theory; Ferrer and Sherman, Participatory Turn; Jorge N. Ferrer, Participation and the Mystery: Transpersonal Essays in Psychology, Education, and Religion (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2017). 85. Ferrer, Participation and the Mystery, 17. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid., 13. 88. Ibid., 16f. Ferrer notes that participatory pluralism is in alignment with Viveiros de Castro’s critique of scientific mononaturalism, which he contrasts with Amerindian multinaturalism, according to which “different embodiments and cognitive apparatuses bring forth ontologically distinct worlds” (ibid., 62).

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89. Ferrer, Participation and the Mystery, 181–197. Grof argues that during the alternate states of consciousness induced by entheogens, subjects not only gain access to traditional spiritual experiences, symbolism, and ultimate principles, but also gain a deep understanding of them without previous exposure to them (Stanislav Grof, The Cosmic Game: Explorations of the Frontiers of Human Consciousness [Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998]). Also, Jungian archetypes can be directly experienced independent of cultural background and prior personal learning (ibid., 23–24). Grof’s approach is perennialist in three senses: it is esotericist (true spirituality needs to be sought in an esoteric core purportedly common to all religious traditions), perspectival (the diversity of spiritual ultimates is explained as different ways to experience the same supreme cosmic principle), and nondual (this esoteric core is both the ultimate ground of all that exists and essentially identical to the individual human soul) (Ferrer, Participation and the Mystery, 189f). However, Ferrer argues, Grof’s empirical results might just as well (and more productively) be interpreted in participatory terms. The participatory approach does not assume that any pregiven ultimate reality exists, but that different spiritual ultimates can be enacted (brought into being) through contemplative practice. Various mystical experiences can be seen as independently valid enactions of an undetermined mystery. Such an interpretation seems consistent with the rich diversity of psychedelic spiritual states in general, and ayahuasca states in particular. 90. Ibid., 196. 91. For example, an individual horse participates in the Form of Equinity (Horse as such). 92. Sherman, “Genealogy of Participation.” 93. I have compared the three forms of participation to Nietzsche’s three forms of Dionysus: André van der Braak, “Three Forms of Dionysus: Recreational, Medical and Religious Use of Ayahuasca,” Tijdschrift voor Psychiatrie 62/8 (2020): 721–725. 94. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, The Notebooks on Primitive Mentality, translated by Peter Rivière (New York: Harper & Row, 1975 [1949]). 95. However, many Romantic thinkers blended an openness to feeling and intuition with certain universalistic and objectivist assumptions of the Enlightenment. For example, Eliade developed a view of “the sacred” as a universal element embedded in the innermost structure of human consciousness (Jorge N. Ferrer and Jacob H. Sherman, “Introduction,” in The Participatory Turn, 37). 96. Ferrer, Participation and the Mystery, 17. 97. Ferrer, Revisioning Transpersonal Theory. 98. Richard Tarnas, “Foreword,” in Ferrer, Revisioning Transpersonal Theory, vii. 99. Tarnas notes that in a culture in which spirituality is located in the innermost depths of the individual, it makes sense that this project started in the discipline that studies human experience: psychology. Both Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were experimental psychologists. Also, the focus on experience was related to the highly “experientialist” climate of California in the late 1960s, and perhaps of the US in general, compared to Europe (Tarnas, “Foreword,” xviii). 100. Braak, Reimagining Zen.

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101. William Halbfass, “The Concept of Experience in the Encounter between India and the West,” in India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding, 403–418 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988). 102. See Shepard, “Foreword.” 103. Mesturini Cappo, “What Ayahuasca Wants,” 166. 104. Ferrer, Revisioning Transpersonal Theory, 31. 105. Ibid., 27. 106. Ibid., 28. 107. Ferrer, Revisioning Transpersonal Theory, 2. This is why in the Santo Daime, talking about one’s mirações is not encouraged. 108. Psychologist John Welwood has called attention to the phenomenon of “spiritual bypassing”: the misuse of spiritual experiences and practices to avoid developmental challenges, human relationships, and social engagement. The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa coined the term “spiritual materialism” for such ego-centered approaches to spirituality. It confines spirituality to the very domain where the ego believes itself sovereign: the realm of inner experiences. 109. Aldous Huxley, The  Perennial Philosophy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945). 110. Ferrer, Revisioning Transpersonal Theory, 92f. 111. Shepard, “Foreword,” xv–xix. 112. Partridge, High Mysticism, 288. 113. Huston Smith, Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals (Boulder: Sentient Publications, 2003 [2000]), 133. 114. Ferrer, Revisioning Transpersonal Theory, 115. 115. Ferrer remarks that this comes close to the ideas of the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, who interpreted “truth” as an event of self-disclosure of Being, an ontological “happening” of Being. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Continuum, 2004 [1960]). 116. Ferrer, Revisioning Transpersonal Theory, 116. 117. Ibid., 3. 118. Barnard, Liquid Light, 210f. 119. Ibid., 211. 120. Ibid. 121. Ibid. 122. Ibid., 213. Barnard also discusses another, arguably even higher, level of visions: the “formless” experiences that take place within profound moments of inner stillness. He refers to them as moments of “unspeakable grace” and earth-shattering realization that can be very overwhelming (ibid., 214). 123. See Barnard, Liquid Light, 235–241, for more background information about mesa branca works in general, and a fuller description of one particular mesa branca work. 124. See Dawson, “Making Matter Matter.” 125. See chapter 5 for a fuller explanation of the specifics of Santo Daime ritual practices.

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126. See chapter 5 for a more in-depth discussion of such cleansing. 127. Such hymns are part of the Umbanda lineage within Santo Daime. Umbanda is a syncretic Afro-Brazilian religion that blends traditional African religions with Roman Catholicism, Spiritism, and Indigenous American beliefs. See chapter 5. 128. Bache, LSD, 40. 129. See Douglas Osto, Altered States: Buddhism and Psychedelic Spirituality in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 130. Bache, LSD, 40. 131. Louis Komjathy, Introducing Contemplative Studies (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2018), 51. 132. Ibid., 58. 133. Ibid., 92f.

PART TWO

Ayahuasca Religiosity

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Religiosity as Engaging with Beings of Religion

This second part of the book will look at specifically religious framings of ayahuasca beliefs, experiences, and practices. It will be casting a wide net, all the way from Santo Daime (that explicitly self-identifies as a religion) to (neo)shamanic ayahuasca networks whose practitioners would mostly self-identify as nonreligious or even anti-religious since they view “religion” as a set of institutionally based rules and dogmas that go against the very open and improvisational nature of ayahuasca practice. The central argument of this chapter is that we can describe ayahuasca religiosity in a way that “involves the gods really present,” as religion scholar Robert Orsi puts it.1 According to Latour’s modes of existence, the invisible beings of religion that are traditionally called “gods” can be seen as real, but real in a different way than we are used to. They must be made real; they become more real through contemplative practice. They require our conscious and unconscious participation. In contemplative practice, set and setting are being changed and transformed in a way that allows beings of religion to come into existence. By putting ourselves in certain carefully orchestrated settings, our set is transformed. And it takes such a transformed set for beings of religion to become more real. This chapter will first discuss why ayahuasca practices can be framed as religious, rather than as therapeutic, existential, or medical. Then it will give an overview of Latour’s approach to religion, which it will connect to recent developments in the academic study of religion: a movement from the focus on beliefs to a focus on practices, and an ontological turn, in which a “rhetoric of absence” (taking for granted that the invisible beings that believers engage with of course do not exist) gives way to a “rhetoric of presence” that acknowledges the possibility for beings of religion to exist.2 I will adopt the German/American sociologist of religion Martin Riesebrodt’s definition of religion as a system of practices involving superhuman powers.3 His 125

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approach can be seen as in line with the participatory turn that Ferrer has argued for.4 The chapter will then discuss Tanya Luhrmann’s notion of “kindling the presence of invisible others.”5 Luhrmann agrees with the French anthropologist Philippe Descola that there may be more ontological approaches to invisible beings than our Western naturalist ontologies, which only allow such beings to be either “real” (e.g., existing in a separate supernatural realm) or “unreal” (figments of the imagination). She argues that the existence of such invisible beings may have to be kindled by contemplative practice, in the sense that their powers and capacities are being activated. Such kindling, Luhrmann argues, involves developing a faith frame for their existence, establishing contact with them, and developing a relationship with them.6 All three activities form an important aspect of ayahuasca religiosity. Finally, this chapter argues that ayahuasca religiosity is closer to what the historian of religion April DeConick calls “gnostic” religiosity, in which humans and gods relate to each other as equal partners, than to more traditional forms of religiosity, in which there is a wide gap between humans and gods. FRAMING AYAHUASCA PRACTICES AS RELIGIOUS When reflecting on the encounter between Amazonian-based ayahuasca practices and Western secular modernity, it may seem at first glance that the term “religion” is not the most appropriate one. Western ayahuasca practitioners often do not describe themselves as religious since that term is associated with dogmas, empty rituals, and stifling institutions. I am not claiming that extraordinary ayahuasca experiences are inherently religious. I agree with the American religion scholar Ann Taves that extraordinary experiences in general (what she calls “revelatory events”) are best approached as mere “building blocks” of religiosity. They are not yet religious, nor do they need to become religious. They must be construed or interpreted religiously to become so. Ayahuasca experiences can be interpreted as religious, especially in a Santo Daime context, but they do not need to be interpreted as such. Once they are interpreted as religious experiences, Taves argues, such religiosity might consequently be built up into religions (various religious forms and institutions), according to various social, political, cognitive, narrative, and textual processes,7 such as in the case of Santo Daime. In other words, whether ayahuasca practices are religious or not has to do with set and setting. In a religious mindset, the practitioner is expecting and preparing to commune with unseen beings. A religious ritual and liturgical context is aimed at facilitating such communion. In a secular setting (e.g., in a clinical context that does not contain religious symbols), an ayahuasca

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user is more likely to experience and interpret the effects of ayahuasca in psychological terms. For conceptual clarity, I distinguish between the related concepts of religion, religiosity and religions (or religious traditions).8 Religiosity refers to the individual’s religious experiences and practices—to be distinguished from religions or religious traditions: historically determined cultural ways of life that contain systems of religious practices but also transcend them because of political and historical contexts. For example, Santo Daime is an ayahuasca religion that also includes broader Brazilian and African beliefs and practices (e.g., apocalyptic notions or Umbanda practices of spirit possession) in which its ayahuasca religiosity is embedded. Being religious can be the same as being a follower of a religion (as in the Santo Daime), but it does not have to be. The British theologian and religion scholar Paul Hedges has observed that Western religiosity has so far often been studied with implicit assumptions that he summarizes as the World Religions Paradigm: religions are assumed to be bounded entities that stress belief in religious convictions rather than embodied practice, and that require exclusive belonging from their followers. In the sociology of religion, the religious landscape has often been approached through a religious market model, according to which established religions and new religious movements (such as ayahuasca movements) compete for market share. However, since the religious landscape has become so much more fluid, today some scholars also use the metaphor of the religious ecosystem, in which people make use of various religious resources without committing to specific religions. Hedges calls this “strategic religious participation in a shared religious landscape”: rather than being focused on religious denominations, people make use of ritual service providers (such as shamans or other ritual experts) that offer a toolbox of practices comprised of various elements from both established religions and forms of religiosity that are sometimes indicated as “folk religion.”9 This is how I see ayahuasca religiosity outside the Santo Daime (and even at the margins of the Santo Daime among less committed members). Following Latour, making sense of ayahuasca experiences and practices requires that we first define their preposition, the interpretative key in which they have to be grasped, and their forms of veridiction (i.e., what criteria can be used to determine their truth or falsehood). Chapter 1 distinguished three such prepositions: the recreational, the medical-therapeutic, and the religious. When we use the preposition “recreational,” ayahuasca experiences are viewed as being aimed at emotional, intellectual, or aesthetic pleasure. Veridiction is experiential: a mind-blowing experience is seen as true, whereas a “bad trip” or boring experience is seen as false. When we use the preposition “medical-therapeutic,” veridiction consists in the ceremony being

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helpful or not, leading to healing and integration or not. When we use the preposition “religious,” what is the proper form of veridiction? It all depends on what we mean by “religion.” Let us start with consulting our philosophical guide, Bruno Latour. LATOUR ON RELIGION Latour has written much about religion. Not many people know that he received his Ph.D. in 1975 in philosophical theology.10 After writing mostly about science at the beginning of his career, in 2002, he published a very personal essay, Jubiler (translated in 2013 as Rejoicing), about his struggle with his being unable to talk about his religious faith (he is a Roman Catholic) to his loved ones, and even to make sense of it for himself.11 His 2005 essay about science and religion, “Thou Shalt Not Freeze-Frame,” was published in 2010 in On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods.12 Just as Latour makes a distinction between Science (the idealized version of scientific practice that promises natural knowledge by discovering facts and natural laws via experiments) and science (the actual lived reality of scientific practice which is much messier, and does not discover but constructs new facts through the actor-networks that it builds), he differentiates between Religion (the idealized version of religion that promises spiritual knowledge through direct access to a spiritual, supernatural world for those who believe in it) and religion (the actual lived reality of religious practice that is about building actor-networks in its own mode of existence that include invisible beings of transformation and religion). According to Latour, Christian theology made a fatal mistake at the time of the Scientific Revolution. It succumbed to the temptation of jumping into a competition with science over ontological questions. It should have not answered the question “What do you say about invisible beings?”13 It should not have responded because beings of religion cannot be defined theologically. They must be re-enacted, re-engaged, rekindled, over and over again through contemplative practices. Their existence can only be experientially justified through theurgic rituals, not through theological or philosophical arguments. Otherwise, religion will start to justify itself against its skeptical competitors and claim that it too can offer a way to access invisible beings.14 At that point, religion becomes reduced to a belief in the existence of inaccessible, invisible beings. And the next step will have to be for religion to claim that there is something “beyond” Nature. Religion becomes a ladder to the supernatural world, a ladder without rungs or rails. And once religion focuses on the beyond, it misses the here and now of the present.15

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As Latour points out, the conflict between Science and Religion has never been about replacing Belief with Reason.16 Science and Religion were equally mistaken. Whereas Science was looking for the substance of the material universe, Religion was looking for God as a substance.17 However, as Latour says, “God” is not a substance that persists across time. It is a name that is given to what circulates within the actor-networks that involve beings of religion.18 Latour argues that, whereas Religion is generally considered to be a matter of belief in some kind of ontological transcendence (God, the divine, or ultimate reality), in actuality, belief has never had that much to do with religion: “In ancient times, when people talked about the gods, believers were no more numerous than non-believers. The presence of divinities was obvious in the air or the soil. They formed the common fabric of people’s lives, the primary material of all rituals, the indisputable reference point of all existence, the ordinary fodder of all conversation.”19 Similarly today, in indigenous cultures, the presence of spirits is part of the common fabric of people’s lives. Their existence is not something to be believed in. Latour argues that belief, in the sense of trust, is indispensable for living, thinking, and speaking. For example, when we say that we believe in the reality of global warming, we mean that we trust the findings of climate scientists. However, when we say that we believe in God (or Buddha Nature or the existence of an ultimate reality) we use the word in a different sense. The issue is not that God is invisible and global warming is not: “global warming is exactly as invisible to the naked eye, to the eye not equipped by the sciences, as this ‘God.’”20 The problem is rather, Latour argues, that belief in God “leads thinking astray into a virtual world, one to which we ‘could’ have access ‘if only’ we had the means available to chains of information but of which belief actually remains forever deprived.”21 Religious language, used in this way, “engenders the illusion of another world to which religious discourse, by some miraculous somersault, would provide exclusive access.”22 However, Latour argues, there is no higher “spiritual” world that comes on top of the “material” world. There are simply different types of actor-networks that are connected to the various modes of existence.23 Such a division between the material and the spiritual world, the natural and the supernatural realm, was invented by believers in the eighteenth century as part of the Modern Constitution.24 (It is also, as Charles Taylor argues, the essential foundation of the immanent frame that characterizes Western modernity.) Therefore, Latour argues that taking the notion of “believing in God” in the sense of being convinced of his existence is a category error. The question “Do you believe in God” is closer to the question “Do you love me?” than to the question “Do you believe in global warming?”25 For Latour, “belief is a

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caricature of religion exactly as knowledge is a caricature of science.”26 Just as scientific activity involves much more than only knowledge, religion is not about immediate belief but about mediated practice.27 Whereas the language of Religion is supposedly providing information and knowledge of a higher supernatural spiritual world (analogous to the way that Science provides information and knowledge of the natural world), Latour argues that the language of religion is actually not about information but about transformation: there is no information in matters of religion, no maintenance of constants, no transfers of relationships intact throughout the stream of transformations. And so, sadly, no knowledge of the kind the humblest map provides, no science, no reference, no access, no mastery, no control, nothing we can dominate by sight. . . . The connection between a religious text and the thing it talks about is not the same as the connection between a map and its territory. . . . Those texts, those words, do not provide access to anything whatsoever.28

Instead, Latour says, religious words are meant to change, alter, shake up. They are not meant to provide access to the far and distant (a higher spiritual world) but to get closer to the person they are addressing. Latour uses the language of lovers as an analogy. For example, when a woman asks her lover, “Do you love me?” it is not meant as a request for information. When her lover answers, “I told you so yesterday already,” he is missing the point of the question. His affirmative answer, “Yes I love you,” is a speech act that confirms their love. “No information is conveyed by the sentence and yet she, the woman who loves, feels transported, transformed, slightly shaken up, changed, rearranged, or not, or the opposite, alienated, flattened, forgotten, mothballed, humiliated.”29 Love talk is assessed “by the transformation it generates in the listener, as well as in the speaker. In-formation talk is one thing; trans-formation talk is another. When they are uttered, something happens.”30 Such sentences are not judged by their content but by their performative abilities: “Do they produce the thing they talk about, namely lovers?”31 In love talk, Latour argues, “attention is redirected not to the content of the message, but to the container itself, the person-making. One does not attempt to decrypt the sentence as if it transported a message, but as if it transformed the messengers themselves. Yet, it would be wrong to say that they have no truth value simply because they possess no informational content.”32 Similar to love talk, Latour argues, religious speech has little informational content, as we can see when we look at the messages of angels in the New Testament: “Angels do not convey messages; they change those they address. What they transfer is not an information content, but a new container. They

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don’t bring maps offering some hold to beings starved of knowledge—they transform their interlocutors.”33 Latour argues that there are different forms of speech (not just language but also nonverbal or bodily forms) “that are able to transfer persons, not information, either because they in part produce personhood, or because new states . . . are generated in the persons just addressed.”34 Love talk can transform both space and time. It can bring the lovers from being far away to being closer again. It can also overcome states of inertia and stuckness: suddenly, things start flowing again: “possibility arises; fate is overcome; you breathe; you feel enabled; you hope; you move.”35 The lovers are present to one another again. For Latour, although scientific and religious language are both aimed toward truth, they produce different kinds of truth in different ways. They both have different felicity conditions (as they say in the philosophy of language). The truth or falsehood of scientific and religious statements is determined in different ways, using different criteria. A scientific statement is true when it corresponds with a state of affairs, when what it refers to is empirically or logically confirmed. Religious words, on the other hand, are true (or generate truth) when they shake up and transform their receiver, when they transform someone distant into someone close; Latour calls this “conversion.” Love talk brings the lovers together. However, as we will see in chapter 6, today, “it’s not a matter anymore of merely forming a couple, a group, a family or a commune, but of gathering a new people together.”36 He wonders whether it is religious words that can bring people together: “So, there really exist such miraculous words, then, that produce those who say them at the same time as those who hear them, gathering them together into a newly convened people united by the same message finally made real?”37 For Latour, religion does not try to reach anything beyond.38 Rather, it “does everything to constantly redirect attention, by systematically breaking the will to go away, ignore, be different, blasé or bored.”39 It “attempts to break all habits of thought that direct our attention to the far away—to the absent, to the over-world—in order to bring attention back to the incarnate, to the renewed presence of what was previously misunderstood, distorted, and deadly.”40 It is about “dancing towards the present and the close: to redirect attention away from indifference and habituation, to prepare oneself to be seized again by this presence that breaks the usual, habituated passage of time.”41 This is a beautiful description of what contemplative ayahuasca practice is about. Whereas for incidental users, drinking ayahuasca is about traveling to mysterious other worlds that open up and being fascinated by wonderful mirações that unfold, committed practitioners focus on paying attention to the here and now, staying firm and present when the force of ayahuasca unfolds.

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The Santo Daime hymns incessantly warn to prestar bem atenção (pay close attention). FROM ABSENCE TO PRESENCE The opposition between Science and Religion has always been a part of the Modern Constitution. Enlightenment discourses on Religion focused on the question of whether and how it could be reconciled with Science, for example, by rationalizing it. Being religious was primarily viewed in terms of creedal belief. To be a religious believer, especially in the Protestant tradition, meant to be convinced of the truth of certain creedal propositions. Correspondingly, non-Western religious believers were initially conceptualized as believers in Buddha, Brahman, or the Dao. However, closer contact with Asian religions has led to the realization that their practitioners do not attach all that much importance to holding creedal beliefs (obviously they do hold religious beliefs, but these are not fundamental to their religious belonging).42 As a defensive reaction, Romantic discourses put Religion beyond the reach of rational criticism by assigning it a special place in the heart. Religion referred to a universal potential in humans. A Schleiermachian and Jamesian understanding of religion gained popularity: being religious is not so much about holding religious beliefs but is primarily a matter of seeking out and having religious experiences. Religion scholars focused on the core religious experience of the individual itself, defined variously as “the feeling of absolute dependence” (Friedrich Schleiermacher) or the subjective consciousness of the numinous (Rudolf Otto) or the sacred (Mircea Eliade) or one’s ultimate concern (Paul Tillich). The individual consciousness was primary, not external reality. Such an approach to Religion in terms of experience lends itself well to a pluralist understanding of religious diversity. Rather than competing and incompatible belief systems, religious traditions are different “fingers pointing to the moon”: conventional conceptual systems that were meant to make room for a “pure,” uncontaminated, ineffable experience of that which always must remain beyond words and concepts. Religions are different paths up the same mountain, or different rivers flowing into the same ocean. Whereas this experiential approach to religion continues to be very popular with some religious practitioners, the notion of a “pure” religious experience has been challenged as being very problematic in academic circles. Experience, perception, and language are inevitably bound up with each other, and arise in a context of socialization. It is highly doubtful whether there can be such a thing as a “pure,” unmediated experience. Therefore, within religious studies, in the Seventies, the approach to religion shifted from a focus on experience to a focus on meaning-making, as was especially

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apparent in the influential work of anthropologist Clifford Geertz.43 Of course, religious practitioners do have personal beliefs and experiences, but these were seen as secondary to the contextualized meaning-making practices that they were engaging in.44 This approach to religion shifts the focus of inquiry from the “private” inner representations, ideas, and experiences of the subject to the publicly accessible and verifiable linguistic and material processes that are behind meaning-making in the world. It abandons all efforts at investigating “private experiences,” especially suprasensible experiences of the real, the sacred, or the holy. The sacred no longer has an ontological meaning, but is approached through the textual, the linguistic, and the symbolic. This comes down to a linguistification of the sacred.45 Jeffrey Kripal notes that in the academic study of religion, religious experience is contextualized, quite correctly, as always “constructed” by local languages, ritual practices, and institutions. However, the danger of exclusively approaching religious experience as contextualized lies in losing sight of what makes religious experience religious. In the immanent frame, the so-called “supernatural” is taken off the table, in principle, as inappropriate to the academic project. Kripal notes: “And then we are told that there is nothing ‘religious’ about religion, which, of course, is perfectly true, since we have just taken all of the fantastic stuff off the table. Put a bit differently, our conclusions are really a function of our exclusions.”46 Religion scholar Robert Orsi has commented that religious studies generally operate from a rhetoric of ontological absence: although religious practitioners speak of the gods, pray to them, give thanks to them, and feel their presence, the gods are not really there. They are absent. His recommendation is to start studying religion from a rhetoric of presence: people pray to the gods because they are really there. They are afraid of the spirits because the spirits are really there.47 Ferrer and Sherman have described how such a shift is taking place in the field of religious studies.48 There has been much criticism, similar to that of Latour, of using only Western epistemologies to determine the validity of religious, and especially non-Western, truth claims that emerge from long-term contemplative practice. It is recognized that there is a multiplicity of valid ways of knowing that use not only critical rationality but also embodiment and the imagination. The rational buffered self is actually much more porous and in contact with outside forces. Pre- and translinguistic variables (somatic, imaginal, energetic, contemplative) are important in shaping religious experiences and meanings. Meaning-making and hermeneutics are inherently ontological: all interpretation takes place in a continual process of exchanges with the real. Truth is not static, but a relational, endlessly hermeneutical happening. We humans

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continuously participate in communicative acts and semiotic exchanges with all sentient beings. “Knowing” is not a matter of grasping some static reality but of being open to an ongoing ontological process of disclosure that always includes our own contributions. RELIGION AS PRACTICES INVOLVING SUPERHUMAN POWERS Several postcolonial and postmodern thinkers have criticized the notion of religion as an invention of Western modernity that should not be applied as a universal concept to premodern or non-Western societies. Birgit Meyer has used the example of “religion in Africa” to show how colonial factors play a role in applying the notion of “religion” to non-Western societies.49 Richard King has unmasked the construction of Hinduism and Buddhism as world religions as Western inventions that were based on the unquestioned assumption that religion was universal.50 Talal Asad argues that there can be no universal concept of religion but, at most, an archaeology of changing concepts of religion.51 Several thinkers have suggested to no longer use the term “religion.” Kevin Schilbrack has argued, however, that we should keep the term “religion” because it describes a social fact.52 And Paul Hedges has suggested to use “religion” as an “essentially contested concept,” similar to art, democracy, and so on.53 Martin Riesebrodt is among those who defend the continuing use of the term “religion.” He argues, from a historic-sociological point of view, that in all ages people have distinguished interaction with superhuman powers from other forms of action: “The distinction between religious and nonreligious is lacking neither in the premodern West nor in non-Western cultures, and the religious in the sense of institutions that are associated with superhuman powers has existed in all ages and cultures.”54 Riesebrodt argues that, although it is indeed true that the Western concept of religion as privatized and individualized cannot be applied universally, we need an expanded concept of religion that makes room for premodern and non-Western manifestations of it. And this concept of religion needs to focus on religious actions and practices, rather than on religious beliefs and experiences. Religious practitioners tend to be involved with the influence of superhuman powers in their everyday life.55 For Riesebrodt, this last aspect distinguishes religious from nonreligious actions: “Religious actions involve personal or impersonal superhuman powers and thus commonly require charismatically qualified specialists, while nonreligious actions do not.”56 According to this definition of religion, contemplative ayahuasca practices in

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a shamanic or Santo Daime setting are religious since they involve spirits and gods, and require qualified shamans or padrinhos and madrinhas. Riesebrodt defines religions as systems of practices that aim at gaining access to superhuman powers.57 Such access can be gained, for example, through symbolic actions (prayers, chants, or gestures), through manipulation (ritual acts or wearing amulets), through temporary interaction or fusion with superhuman powers (ecstasy), or through activating superhuman potential within oneself (meditative practices). All such practices are what he calls interventionist practices. They regulate access to superhuman powers. Such practices are always connected with discursive practices (theological views on what superhuman powers are and how they can be accessed), such as, for example, the ayahuasca discourse of liquid divinity. Such discursive practices help to determine the set of the practitioner. Interventionist practices are also connected to behavior-regulating practices (practices that prescribe bodily and social behavior in the religious community); these shape the setting. And whereas religious scholars often focus on discursive and behavior-regulating practices (religious worldviews and regulations), for Riesebrodt, interventionist practices (how the superhuman powers are accessed) are primary for the study of religiosity. For our inquiry into ayahuasca religiosity this would mean less focus on worldviews and theologies, and on the rules and regulations of behavioral ritual practices, and more focus on how interventionist ayahuasca practices help practitioners connect to superhuman powers. For Riesebrodt, there are three possible approaches to the study of religious practices: intellectual, subjectivist, and liturgical.58 The intellectual approach constructs complex religious ideas that explain the beliefs of religious practitioners. Such an approach privileges not only the cognitive side of religion and attributes a secondary role to practices, but it also privileges the etic perspective of the researcher at the expense of the emic side of the practitioner.59 The subjectivist approach asks religious practitioners what their experience is. Such an emic approach yields unsystematic, unstable, and incomplete answers. And, as Riesebrodt argues, “we understand a play or an opera not by interviewing the actors, singers, musicians, or spectators but by grasping the meaning of the action.”60 Such meaning is not based on religious worldviews or theologies (“belief”), or on what the practitioners report (“experience”), but on “liturgies”: the rules and scripts that guide humans’ interactions with superhuman powers—spoken words, symbolic actions, gestures, hymns.61 This is why Riesebrodt prefers the liturgical approach: the meaning of religion is not developed in theological discourse but in ritual performance. In the study of ayahuasca practices, we find all three approaches. As an example of the intellectual approach (which he combines with a liturgical approach), Andrew Dawson has done an admirable job of reconstructing the Santo Daime worldview and its evolution over time. However, he stresses the

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heterogeneity and eclecticism of Santo Daime beliefs. It is very difficult to define one Santo Daime worldview. The “doctrine” is not a systematic theology, but it is contained in the Santo Daime hymns as a living and evolving mechanism.62 Marc Blainey’s research combines the subjectivist approach with the liturgical approach. He did extensive fieldwork with European daimistas, asking them what their Santo Daime practices mean to them.63 Based on her fieldwork during the 2016 AYA conference, Laura Dev distinguishes between objectivist approaches (focusing on ayahuasca as a substance), subjectivist approaches (focusing on subjective ayahuasca experiences), and constructivist approaches (focusing on meaning-making as a result of social practices).64 Objective and subjective approaches focus either on the object (ayahuasca as a substance) or on the subject (the experience of the person taking ayahuasca). And although both these approaches are very useful and very necessary, a philosophical approach needs to go beyond the objective and the subjective approach, especially since ayahuasca itself dissolves the boundaries between the objective and the subjective. How are we to understand the notion of “superhuman powers” (or more-than-human powers, as I will call them)? Sociologist of religion Christian Smith connects Riesebrodt’s theory of religion with critical realism, which provides a conceptual distinction between the real, the actual and the empirical. The real is what exists, . . . even when parts of it are not expressed in actuality. The actual is what happens in the world, when entities that belong to the real activate their powers and capacities. The actual happens in time and space, whether any person experiences it or not (“If a tree falls in the forest . . . ”). The empirical consists of what humans experience or observe, either directly or indirectly.65

Smith notes that these distinctions can help us to understand that “certain entities can and do exist even if they are empirically not observable. Only when they activate their causal powers in ways that produce events in time and space do they become actual, and thus potentially observable.”66 As Smith notes, “The causal powers of other real entities may counteract or neutralize their causal powers, in which case their effects may not become actual, even though their real causal capacities are operating.”67 This distinction between the real, the actual, and the empirical allows for the understanding that more-than-human powers can exist, even if they are empirically not observable, and even if they do not actually exist all the time.68 The empirical (what can be perceived by the mind and the senses) is a subset of the actual (what is actually occurring at any given moment), which is a subset of the real (what ultimately exists, regardless of whether it is actually occurring at this moment or not). More-than-human powers are usually,

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for Westerners, not part of the empirical. However, that does not necessarily mean that they are not part of the actual. As Charles Taylor has observed, although our buffered selves are no longer able to directly experience divine beings, medieval people with their porous selves lived in a universe where such beings were an actual presence with very real effects. The same is true for contemporary indigenous people. For them, spirits are part of the empirical. In the ayahuasca experience, the buffered self falls away and the porous self reemerges. In this way, actually existing more-than-human powers can also become empirically existing.69 MORE-THAN-HUMAN POWERS AS BEINGS OF RELIGION Let us connect the notion of more-than-human powers with Latour’s notion of beings of religion. As we saw in chapter 2, Latour devotes a full chapter of An Inquiry into Modes of Existence to the mode of existence that is specific to religion. In this chapter, he attempts to find the right ontological tenor to speak about the beings, and their mode of existence, that are specific to religion. Such religion-bearing entities (beings of religion) are highly sensitive to how they are talked about. They change according to how they are addressed. They appear and disappear depending entirely on how they are said. They depend on ways of speaking. Such ways of speaking can be true or false: Either they transport the spirit from which they talk, and they can be said to be truthful, faithful, proven, experienced, self-verifiable, or they don’t reproduce, don’t perform, don’t transport what they talk from and immediately, without any inertia, they begin to lie, to fall apart, to stop having any reference, any ground. Either they elicit the spirit they utter and they are true, or they don’t and they are worse than false: they are simply irrelevant, parasitical.70

Beings of religion have been subjected to so many category mistakes that for the Moderns, religious matters have become incomprehensible both to believers and nonbelievers.71 They have lost their interpretive key for such religious matters. Latour attempts to rearticulate them in the right interpretive key. He attempts to make what religious beings have to say audible, in their own language, and in the right ontological tenor. For the task of ontological diplomacy such a re-articulation of religion is indispensable. For although non-Western collectives may not have Religion in the Modern sense (although due to the spread of Modernization and missionary activities they may increasingly have that too), they have developed great repertoires of interventional practices to deal with the religious mode of existence.

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According to Latour, beings of religion are responsible for a deeper layer of subjectification than beings of transformation: they have the “soul” as their target.72 Whereas beings of transformation are responsible for transformations that constitute the subject, beings of religion bring messages that transform the subject and make it into a unified person.73 According to Latour, beings of religion differ from beings of transformation in that they address us personally. Rituals that are connected with beings of transformation are therapeutic in their aim, Latour argues. Their goal is to exit from a crisis through an established procedure, leading either to a detachment from unwanted beings of transformation (an exorcism of bad spirits) or an alliance with positive beings of transformation (a possession by good spirits).74 A good deal of what can happen during ayahuasca ceremonies falls into this category. However, Latour distinguishes other kinds of rituals, for example, those that help to exit from love crises, that bring the persons involved back together. Such rituals include words of love that affirm the existence of the person to whom they are addressed.75 Such words are very special, he adds. They bear beings of religion that can renew those who receive them. Unlike beings of transformation, such beings do not fabricate or possess subjects, but they transform subjects into persons, and bring persons into proximity to each other. They resuscitate persons, arouse them anew, get them moving again. They are messengers that transport messages with no content but transformations of persons. Latour gives as an example the archangel Gabriel, who comes to visit Mary. By greeting her, he saves her and impregnates her.76 Latour notes that there is a constant risk of confusing beings of transformation and beings of religion. But he insists that they constitute two different modes of existence. Beings of transformation care for the subject through a cycle of mutual interaction and negotiation; beings of religion convert, save, and radically transform the subject by utterly overwhelming it. It is important to control the traffic among all these beings without confusing them. Latour admits that both cure and salvation can be offered by the same priests or the same rituals.77 However, beings of transformation and beings of religion are different types of invisible beings that target different layers of the subject, and that need to be addressed in different ways. How to identify the various beings of religion? What are their specifications? What is their type of veridiction (the criteria for determining their truth or falsehood)? Just as with other types of being, we can find the answers to such questions by following the threads of the actor-networks that involve such beings of religion.78 As Latour argues, this will do justice to the testimony of the saints and mystics.79 Following the threads of the actor-networks involving such beings, distinguishing between the different paths of angels,

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demons, and other spirits, is simply a responsible form of William James’s radical empiricism. The specifications of beings of religion do not include the persistence that characterizes the existence of, for example, tables or cats. They are susceptible to being turned on and off.80 They appear, but also disappear. Obviously, for many critics, this proves that they do not really exist. But for Latour, it is simply part of their characterization that their appearance and disappearance cannot be controlled. Unlike with beings of transformation, there can be no transaction or negotiation with beings of religion, and no guarantees of their appearance.81 Beings of religion have as their type of veridiction that they need to be addressed in the right manner, the right tone, the right tonality. There is always the risk of being mistaken, and of mistaking them for another, Latour says. One can never be sure that they have truly appeared, and that one truly understands what they want.82 Beings of religion need to be addressed, beseeched, engaged with, over and over again, just as the lover needs to hear again and again, “Yes, I love you.” It requires constant practice to maintain the actor-networks that involve them. KINDLING THE PRESENCE OF GODS AND SPIRITS Such maintenance of the actor-networks that involve beings of religion can be further explored using Tanya Luhrmann’s notion of “kindling the presence of invisible others.” Such a kindling process includes (1) building and maintaining a faith frame: a willingness to entertain the possibility of the existence of invisible others; (2) cultivating the inner senses: strengthening the faculty of the imagination, the capacity to become absorbed in what one imagines, blurring the boundaries between the inner and outer world, subject and object, human and nonhuman; entering a participatory mode of thought in which the buffered self gives way to the porous self; and (3) creating relationships with gods and spirits. According to Luhrmann, this is what religious practice is all about.83 The importance of a faith frame for contemplative practice is stressed within many religious traditions. For ayahuasca contemplative practice, a faith frame is even more indispensable. When ontological shock sets in, when your plausibility structures are being challenged by the appearance of all kinds of entities that cannot reasonably exist, what you need in order to navigate such wild and stormy waters is faith. Not necessarily faith in something or someone in particular, but what the Zen tradition calls “Great Faith”: the groundless faith that you will be safe, you will be taken care of no matter what happens. Such faith will allow you to surrender to the experience and

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let go, instead of tensing up with fear and panic, with the risk of spinning out of control. Building and maintaining a faith frame is hard work. It involves changing the way we think about what is real and adopting the type of liquid ontologies that we have discussed in this book. We need to be in the right frame of mind (we need to have the right set) for the gods and spirits to be present. As Latour has pointed out, the beings of religion need to be called properly and treated properly. Interacting with gods and spirits requires particular acts of paying attention in a certain way. Rituals remind us that gods and spirits matter.84 Through rituals, the gods can be experienced in the world. Rituals can be a form of contemplative technology. What does it mean to have a faith frame in the context of ayahuasca religiosity? Do Western ayahuasca practitioners truly believe in the gods and spirits that they encounter in their ayahuasca sessions? As mentioned before, Rachel Harris has found that many of them undergo a conversion toward an enchanted worldview.85 However, Richard Doyle warns that there is a difference between the trip reports of new and experienced psychonauts. New psychonauts tend to take their experience literally, whereas experienced psychonauts appreciate the metaphorical quality of their experience. In their description they will say that it was “as if” they encountered alien beings.86 We need to be more specific about what it means to “believe in” gods and spirits. In his essay “Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?” the French historian Paul Veyne argues for the existence of different “truth programs”: we believe in the existence of different types of entities in different ways. The Greeks did believe in their myths, but in a very different way than they believed in their ordinary world of time and space. As Veyne puts it, “A Greek put the gods ‘in heaven,’ but he would have been astounded to see them in the sky. He would have been no less astounded if someone, using time in its literal sense, told him that Hephaestus had just remarried or that Athena had aged a great deal lately.”87 As Latour would say, beings of transformation and religion need a different mode of veridiction. Set and setting play a big part in establishing a faith frame. Philippe Descola has pointed out that different collectives have different ontological protocols. They divide up nature and culture in different ways. In the West, natural things are “real” and cultural things are “constructed.” In indigenous collectives, things can be more or less real along a continuum. They recognize different ways of being real, different modes of existence. Such differences between collectives have to do with their dominant plausibility structures: the particular socially determined understandings of the world that determine whether something is likely to be real or not. As Partridge has argued, psychedelics change the plausibility structures of their users.88 Thinking with the

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faith frame involves deciding to enter into another mode of thinking about reality. It means changing the truth program. Kindling the presence of gods and spirits also requires what Luhrmann calls “cultivating the inner senses.” She notes that some people more easily experience unusual bodily or sensory events, such as visions, that are interpreted as spiritual presence events. This talent she calls “absorption,” and the training of this talent she calls “inner sense cultivation.” People have different capacities for absorption due to more developed “inner senses” as a result of the cultivation of the imagination and its empowerment.‌‌‌‌‌ On the one hand, ayahuasca may seem to level the playing field for undergoing spiritual experiences by also boosting such absorption in people with less talent. However, also in ayahuasca religiosity, inner sense cultivation is crucial. Contemplative ayahuasca practices, like contemplative practices more broadly, can be seen as spiritual technologies that help to cultivate the inner senses, especially the faculty of the imagination. They are means for developing ways of using the mind so that invisible others can be grasped. This involves learning to blur the boundary between the subjective and the objective. This is related to Lévy-Bruhl’s two different modes of thought: the rational and the participatory.89 In the rational mode of thought, the world is seen as disenchanted through the buffered self. In the participatory mode of thought (Lévy-Bruhl called it “mystical”), the world is seen as responsive and alive through the porous self. Practices of inner sense cultivation allow us to enter into participatory modes of thought. They can be explicit (such as Mahayana Buddhist visualization practices) or implicit (such as the astral journeys of the shaman). In practices of inner sense cultivation, the boundaries between the outer and the inner are blurred, allowing the faculty of imagination to develop. This facilitates entanglement and the empowerment of the imagination. In ayahuasca religiosity, practices of inner sense cultivation (such as prayer, the singing of hymns, dancing to hymns, or listening to the icaros of the shaman) are primary, rather than belief or experience. The inner sense cultivation that takes place in such practices leads to spiritual experiences, leading to a re-enchanted worldview, which causes such spiritual experiences to be interpreted religiously as spiritual presence events. Blainey’s ethnographic research into Santo Daime reveals the wide variety in worldviews and experiences in Santo Daime. What daimistas have most in common is not particular religious beliefs or particular types of spiritual experiences, but uniformity in ritual practice.90 Grasping invisible others not only takes place through optical means. The alternate states of consciousness that result from drinking ayahuasca are also managed through practices of rhythm, music, and rhetoric, not in order to retain control, but to allow for a practiced flexibility within ritual.

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Anthropologist Marlene Dobkin de Rios and ethnomusicologist Fred Katz have compared the function of music in ayahuasca practices to a “jungle gym” for consciousness. Ayahuasca provides a series of pathways and banisters through which the ayahuasca practitioners negotiate their way.91 Doyle argues that in Santo Daime works, the singing and dancing to hinários increases constraint and enables a new threshold of freedom: “The itinerative awareness enmeshed with music in the Santo Daime ritual literally does not have a moment for interpretation or choice in any usual (egocentric) sense, as it necessarily follows a dynamic flow and cannot comfortably take leave of it.”92 The rhythmic singing of and dancing to Santo Daime hinários can be seen as what Doyle calls a form of rhythmic entrainment, “the formation of regular, predictable patterns in time and/or space through interactions within or between systems that manifest potential symmetries.”93 An example is a group of jazz percussionists who agree on a complex musical progression. Such rhythmic entrainment, Doyle argues, can produce a more robust system that requires less energy to maintain. In contemplative practices, it is not sufficient to only believe in the existence of gods and spirits. If that were true, such practices could be merely a case of make-believe. No, one must learn to communicate with them in collaboration with other practitioners. Luhrmann describes how relationships with gods and spirits are created through spiritual presence events. Such events develop in specific patterns, she argues. There is no such thing as a core uniform mystical experience that is ineffable and is later “clothed” with theological beliefs. Based on her anthropological fieldwork, gods and spirits make themselves known in quite particular ways.94 Processes of attention and expectation (set and setting) play a large role. Creating relationships with gods and spirits takes place through a process of making them more real which she calls “kindling.” The concept of kindling first appeared in the medical literature in the Sixties. It refers to a process of sensitization in the brain. Over time, less stimulation is needed for the same effect to occur. For example, kindling is thought to play a role in major depression. Whereas a first episode of depression may be brought on by major life events such as the death of a parent or spouse, later episodes may be caused by relatively minor events. As Luhrmann explains, the person who first becomes depressed by losing his mother may later become depressed because the spring is wet.95 The concept has been used to describe the learning effects that are involved in the use of psychoactive substances.96 The body’s response to entheogenic stimulation involves learning. These learning effects are also social and cultural: certain patterns of experiences become more habituated for members of a social group. Spiritual kindling is about learning to pay attention in new ways. This not only changes what one notices, but also how one experiences

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what one notices. Paying attention differently can lead to perceiving things differently. Paying attention differently in a contemplative ayahuasca practice means being sensitized to possible communications from gods and spirits or the spirit of ayahuasca. It means learning to be in relationship with gods and spirits. As gods and spirits become more real through spiritual kindling, their communications are perceived more easily. Spiritual kindling not only leads to epistemological changes (becoming more sensitized to different ways of knowing the world), but also to ontological changes (the co-creation of different ontological worlds altogether). A GNOSTIC TYPE OF RELIGIOSITY If religiosity involves engaging with the gods, there can be different ways of doing so. Our relationships with the gods can be of different types. Even though two types of religiosity can look very similar, they can assume vastly different types of relationships with the gods. For example, in her book on ayahuasca, Rachel Harris cites Luhrmann’s research in order to comment on the seeming similarities between Pentecostal and ayahuasca religiosity.97 The relationship of ayahuasca practitioners with the spirit of ayahuasca is similar in many respects to the evangelical experience of direct communication with God or Jesus. The challenge of discernment (how to differentiate God’s voice from your own thoughts) is similar in both types of religiosities. Evangelicals report that God speaks to them in their dreams, very much like how people describe communicating with the spirit of ayahuasca in their dreams.98 However, Evangelicals and ayahuasca practitioners vary widely in the type of relationship that they have with the gods and spirits that they engage with. In her study of ancient religiosities, the American historian of religions April DeConick distinguishes between traditional types of religiosities and a “gnostic” type of religiosity.99 In traditional religiosity, the relationship to the gods is one of subservience. Gods and humans are vastly different in terms of both substance and power. DeConick argues that a new type of religiosity arose in the Mediterranean area when Greek religiosity came into contact with Siberian and Mongolian shamans who were specialists in other-world journeys. This led to the rise of Greek, Roman, and Egyptian mystery religions that offered shamanic soul journeys to the otherworld, where the initiate could meet with Persephone.100 It is in these mystery religions that this gnostic type of religiosity arose that was associated with five main characteristics that also apply to ayahuasca religiosity:

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1.  Gnosis: a direct experiential knowledge of divine intelligence through ecstatic states. This was a third kind of knowledge, next to sensory and rational knowledge. Such gnosis was utterly transforming, and restored practitioners to spiritual and psychological wholeness.101 Also in ayahuasca ceremonies, direct personal experiential and transformative knowledge is considered to be of central importance. Ayahuasca itself is considered to be the teacher, rather than an elite class of religious authorities or priests that mediate between the practitioner and the divine.102 2.  Ritual: Gnostic religiosity was focused on ritual, rather than being dependent upon revelations or holy texts. Ecstatic states were carefully choreographed in terms of ritual. Rituals and ceremonies were technologies of the transcendent to know such a divine intelligence through personal experience. Such rituals were built around ceremonies of induction or initiation. They were largely cathartic and psychologically therapeutic shamanic journeys of integration.103 Historically, the ritual use of entheogenic substances was often an important part of such practices. The Dionysian festivals took place around the ritual consumption of wine. The rituals of the Eleusinian Demeter mysteries centered around drinking a barley liquid named kukeon, an opium-like drink that produced strong visions.104 Also in ayahuasca religiosity, the ceremonial and ritual use of ayahuasca is central. As Jonathan Goldman notes, such rituals are not meant to be an “experience” but serve to facilitate an intimate connection with invisible divine beings: “The experience of those who participate in such direct communication is that they are not seeing visions, which implies a relationship to the experience similar to watching a movie. The experience of the miração is one of being taken by these beings, or, conversely, experiencing them actually entering the room itself where the ceremony is being conducted. The descriptions of these experiences are not unlike the descriptions of spiritual revelations and life-transforming visions reported by people throughout history.”105 3.  Holism: there is no unbridgeable gap between an utterly transcendent and omnipotent God and an inferior and helpless human being. The divine is embodied in each human, who is therefore potentially an equal partner of divine beings. In cooperation with such beings, the spirit can be transformed, leading to spiritual, physical, and psychological well-being. There is no fundamental distinction between the secular and the sacred, and no clear distinction between therapy and religion, healing and salvation. Therapeutic and physical healing takes place through realizing gnosis, with no strict distinction between therapeutic and religious effects. 4.  Transgression: due to their continuous transgression of religious boundaries, practitioners of gnostic religiosity had a strained relationship with

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traditional religions and their institutions. They operated at the margins in grassroots groups with charismatic leaders. They criticized traditional religiosity as “the opiate of the masses, the drug that keeps people satisfied to serve the gods and their kings as obedient slaves and vassals.”106 They also criticized traditional claims to religious authority in sacred texts or in the Church. True authority lay within the heart of each person. Also practitioners of ayahuasca religiosity see themselves as very different from traditional religious believers. Often, they do not even call themselves religious. Ayahuasca religiosity also often takes place at the margins of society due to the problematic legal status of ayahuasca in many countries. 5.  Eclecticism: practitioners of gnostic religiosity used whatever religious resources were at hand: “they relied on everything from Homer and Plato to magic and astrology to ancient brain science and fantastic cosmological speculations about multiworlds. . . . Their intellectual engagement was open-ended, their mentality that of a seeker.”107 As DeConick comments, they were embedded within the countercultural. Ayahuasca practitioners also often do not have one specific worldview, but feel free to mix and match many different elements from different epistemologies and ontologies.

DISCUSSION According to the participatory perspective presented in this chapter, ayahuasca practices do not primarily give us visionary experiences that present us with new truths about the world, but they serve as transformative performances that attune us to the world. We don’t see the same things in a different light, but we learn to see differently altogether. As we have seen before, ayahuasca is a purgative that negates our existing ontologies, in order to open up, in Latourian terms, different modes of access to more modes of existence— new orientations to the world that give us new ways to participate (cognitively, aesthetically, bodily) in its ongoing co-construction. Contemplative ayahuasca practices further cultivate our capacity for enacting the world, in dialogue with Latour’s beings of religion and transformation. Ayahuasca religiosity thus becomes a way of engaging with beings of religion through interventionist ritual practices. Luhrmann has explained such cultivation as a process of kindling. DeConick’s notion of a gnostic type of religiosity has proven useful to distinguish ayahuasca religiosity from other, more traditional types of religiosities that also kindle the presence of beings of religion.

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In this chapter, Latour has been our philosophical guide. He has broadened our outlook on ayahuasca religiosity: it is not about belief but about practice, and not about information but about transformation. However, there are also some limitations to Latour’s thoughts on religion. 1.  Latour focuses on religious language. That is understandable since, as he makes very clear, he only speaks from the perspective of his own Roman Catholic tradition, a tradition of the Book in which religious language is very important. However, in ayahuasca religiosity, language is not the most important aspect (even though Santo Daime hymns and the icaros of the ayahuasqueros do obviously make use of language). Interventionist practices are the most important aspect of ayahuasca religiosity, or in any case, they are what this book focuses on. Latour does not have that much to say about such interventionist practices. 2.  Latour stresses that religious language does not offer access to anything. It does not offer information but transformation. This is a valid argument when it is used against both religious believers who take religious statements as truth claims, and secular critics that reject religious statements because their truth claims are false. However, in ayahuasca religiosity the focus is not on such truth claims at all. It is on interventionist practices that build actor-networks in the religious mode of existence that engage beings of transformation and religion. In that sense, such practices do offer access to such beings. As Riesebrodt stresses, offering access to superhuman powers is precisely the point of such interventionist practices. They can open up new ontological worlds. Actor-networks in the religious mode of existence can engage beings of transformation and religion. Love talk, Latour’s model for religious language, offers access to the beings of transformation that enliven and sustain love relationships. However, such access is always indirect, mediated via actor-networks. The “double-click” myth of direct, unmediated access is an illusion. 3.  Latour’s insistence that there is no such thing as a higher world is meant to counter the Modern notion, conceived of in the eighteenth century, of a separate supernatural world. However, interventionist practices may very well give access to higher, more-than-human worlds, ontological n-dimensional realms. Such worlds can be called “higher” in the sense of being more complex, more subtle, or more refined. The actor-networks that interventionist practices construct can extend in all ontological directions and dimensions. Latour’s ontological fattening therapy does apply here. 4.  Latour stresses that religion offers no knowledge in the sense that science offers knowledge. He considers it a fatal mistake of theologians

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to try to compete with science for offering a special kind of knowledge of remote beings. However, ayahuasca religiosity does claim to offer knowledge, although knowledge of a special kind: gnosis. This is an embodied, participatory kind of knowledge that is experiential and liberating. Latour’s thought has led us to Riesebrodt’s emphasis on interventionist practices. However, about the nature of such interventionist practices, Latour doesn’t have that much to say. Therefore, we will temporarily change our philosophical guide in chapter 5, which will use the theurgy of Iamblichus as a lens to view Santo Daime religiosity. By approaching Santo Daime as engaging in theurgic practices, we can get closer to the nature of the transformation that takes place in interventionist ayahuasca practices. Rather than becoming one with the divine or doing the will of the divine, such theurgic practices aim at becoming “companions of the gods.” NOTES 1. Orsi, History and Presence. 2. The terms are from Robert Orsi. 3. Riesebrodt, Promise of Salvation, xii. 4. See Ferrer, Revisioning Transpersonal Theory. 5. Luhrmann, How God Becomes Real. 6. Ibid. 7. See Kripal, The Flip, 28. 8. I follow Riesebrodt, Promise of Salvation, 76. 9. Paul Hedges, “Multiple Religious Belonging After Religion: Theorising Strategic Religious Participation in a Shared Religious Landscape as a Chinese Model,” Open Theology 3/1 (2017): 48–72; Paul Hedges, “Strategic Religious Participation in a Shared Religious Landscape: A Model for Westerners?” in Theology Without Walls: The Transreligious Imperative, edited by Jerry L. Martin (London: Routledge, 2020),165–171. 10. Latour’s Ph.D. thesis was called “Exegesis and Ontology: An Analysis of the Texts of Resurrection.” 11. Latour, Rejoicing 12. Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. 13. AIME, 319. 14. Ibid., 319–320. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 321. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 315. 19. Latour, Rejoicing, 5.

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20. Ibid., 38. 21. Ibid., 30. 22. Ibid. 23. AIME, 299. 24. Latour, After Lockdown, 50. 25. Latour, Rejoicing, 40. 26. Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, 121. 27. Latour’s focus on mediated practices rather than on immediate beliefs gives his thought on religion an affinity with the “new materialism” in religious studies, as evident in the work of David Morgan and Birgit Meyer, who stress, following Latour, the mediated nature of religious practice and experience (David Morgan, The Thing About Religion: An Introduction to the Material Study of Religion [Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2021]; Birgit Meyer, Mediation and the Genesis of Presence: Towards a Material Approach to Religion [Inaugural lecture, Utrecht University, 2012]). 28. Latour, Rejoicing, 20. 29. Ibid., 26. Obviously, there is some informational content in the confirmation “Yes, I love you,” but Latour is intentionally heightening the contrast with scientific statements. 30. Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, 102. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Latour, Rejoicing, 32. 34. Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, 103. 35. Ibid. 36. Latour, Rejoicing, 160. 37. Ibid., 49 (emphasis original). 38. Since religion has nothing to do with gaining access to a higher spiritual world, Latour recommends avoiding using the word “spirituality,” or at least “to wean ourselves for a few years, a few decades, off the habit, too quickly acquired, that made us link religion and altitude. What if we stopped turning our eyes heavenward, sighing, every time someone uttered the word religion? Yes, we could go on a kind of retreat, take a sabbatical, have a jubilee, during which we’d ban anything spiritual, and wipe out the debt and deficits of translation. A sort of moratorium, of letting the land lie fallow, to unlearn these conditioned reflexes that pointlessly paralyse religious speech” (Latour, Rejoicing, 35). 39. Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, 110. 40. Ibid., 111. 41. Ibid., 122. 42. See Donald S. Lopez, “Belief,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, edited by Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 23–35. 43. See Stephen S. Bush, Visions of Religion: Experience, Meaning, and Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 44. The Romantic discourse, with its individualist orientation, continues today in the widespread notion of spirituality.

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45. Ferrer and Sherman, “Introduction,” 2–6. 46. Kripal, The Flip, 40 (emphasis original). Jorge Ferrer has similarly discussed how the linguistic turn within religious studies has tended to ignore that which religion is essentially about. See Ferrer and Sherman, “Introduction.” 47. Orsi, History and Presence, 16–48. Orsi explains how this clash between discourses of presence and absence goes back to theological debates in the sixteenth century between Catholics and Protestants about the ontological status of the Christian sacrament: was the body of Christ really present in the Host, or should it be conceived as a symbolic representation? 48. Ferrer and Sherman, “Introduction.” 49. Birgit Meyer, “What Is Religion in Africa? Relational Dynamics in an Entangled World,” Journal of Religion in Africa 50 (2020): 156–181. 50. Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Post-Colonial Theory, India and “The Mystic East” (London: Routledge, 2000). 51. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Disciplines and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 52. Schilbrack, Philosophy and the Study of Religions. 53. Hedges, “Multiple Religious Belonging after Religion.” 54. Riesebrodt, Promise of Salvation, 1. 55. Ibid., 45. 56. Ibid., 20. 57. Stephen Bush has similarly argued that religion should be understood in terms of social practices. Through a historical analysis, he shows that theories of religion that focus on either experience, meaning, or power alone are too limited in their view (Bush, Visions of Religion). 58. Riesebrodt, Promise of Salvation, 79–89. 59. Ibid., 80. 60. Ibid., 83. 61. Ibid., 84. 62. Dawson, Santo Daime. 63. Blainey, Christ Returns from the Jungle. 64. Dev identifies several ontological and epistemological assumptions underlying ayahuasca research practices that reinforce hierarchies of knowledge and animacy, and stresses the need for decolonizing ayahuasca research. Dev, “Plant Knowledges.” 65. Smith, Religion, 9n10 (emphasis original). 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. To equate what is real with what actually happens is to engage in what critical realists call the fallacy of actualism. 69. String theory has famously proposed the existence of eleven dimensions, but because seven of those are rolled up, we only experience four dimensions (three spatial dimensions plus time). Drinking ayahuasca may be one of those special circumstances that cause various aspects from the actual (such as spirits or other dimensions) to become empirical. 70. Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, 101.

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71. AIME, 297. 72. Ibid., 301. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid., 302. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid., 304. 77. Ibid. 78. Latour notes that, although theology at a first glance seems unable to offer any assistance here, a Christian theology of love is actually a form of the love talk that he uses as a model for the kind of religious talk that involves beings of religion. 79. AIME, 308. 80. Ibid., 309. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid., 310. 83. Luhrmann, How God Becomes Real. 84. As Pascal Boyer argues, “Beliefs are often an occasional and elusive consequence of ceremonies rather than their foundation.” Pascal Boyer, “Why ‘Belief’ Is Hard Work: Implications of Tanya Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3/3 (2013): 349–357. 85. Harris, Listening to Ayahuasca, 65ff. 86. Doyle, Darwin’s Pharmacy, 226. 87. Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination, trans. Paula Wissing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988 [1983]), 18. 88. Partridge, High Culture, 13–14. 89. Lévy-Bruhl, Notebooks. 90. Blainey, Christ Returns from the Jungle. 91. Marlene Dobkin de Rios, Hallucinogens: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1996), 208. 92. Doyle, Darwin’s Pharmacy, 25. 93. Ibid., 219f. 94. With regard to ayahuasca experiences, the Israeli cognitive psychologist Benny Shanon has attempted a categorical inventory of the archetypical contents of ayahuasca visions (Shanon, The Antipodes of the Mind). 95. Luhrmann, How God Becomes Real, 113. 96. Partridge, High Culture, 3f, further discusses such learning effects. 97. Harris, Listening to Ayahuasca, 86. 98. Ibid., 87. 99. DeConick, Gnostic New Age. DeConick stresses that “gnostic” should not be seen as referring to a particular historical tradition called Gnosticism, but to a particular way of being religious that spread widely during Hellenistic times, until it was repressed when Christianity became dominant. She goes to great lengths to redefine Gnosticism not as a particular religious tradition, but as a countercultural type of spirituality that transgresses boundaries set up by traditional religiosity. 100. Ibid., 42.

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101. Ibid., 11. 102. As Goldman puts it with regard to the Santo Daime: “The Daime is true to the original teaching of Jesus, who never sought to establish an elite class of priests to intercede between people and the Divine. Rather he taught that direct experience of God was the birthright of all humans” (Goldman, “Preface,” xxiv). 103. DeConick, Gnostic New Age, 11. 104. See Muraresku, Immortality Key, for a recent historical investigation. 105. Goldman, “Preface,” xxiii. 106. Ibid. 107. DeConick, Gnostic New Age, 12.

Chapter 5

Santo Daime Religiosity as Theurgy

The Santo Daime religion self-consciously models itself after the esoteric mystery schools of the early centuries CE. The ancient Greeks took part in such mystery schools that included elaborate rituals and often involved the consumption of enigmatic concoctions that facilitated transformative visionary experiences. During the final centuries of the Roman empire, such rituals using mind-altering substances were possibly practiced by both pagans and Christians.1 This chapter will describe Santo Daime religiosity through the lens of the theurgic spirituality that has been most fully described by the Syrian Neoplatonic philosopher and mystagogue Iamblichus.2 To be clear, I am not making the historical argument that contemporary Santo Daime religious practice is the same as, or even similar to, what Iamblichus wrote about. There is insufficient historical evidence to make such an argument. As a philosopher of religion, my aim is not historical but hermeneutical. I am merely claiming that Iamblichus’s work can productively be used as a soteriological frame to make sense of contemporary Santo Daime religiosity. After first introducing Santo Daime, this chapter will interpret its religiosity in terms of the theurgic religiosity of Iamblichus. Next, it will elaborate on Santo Daime practices. It will interpret these practices in terms of the three phases of the theurgic process: catharsis, receiving the transmissions of the gods, and becoming a companion of the gods. It will close with a brief discussion. SANTO DAIME Santo Daime was founded in the Thirties of the last century by Raimundo Irineu Serra (1890–1971), who became known as Master Irineu. It originated 153

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in a rural Amazonian rainforest religious buffer that contained Portuguese popular Catholicism, indigenous vegetalista traditions, and European esoteric traditions (especially through the São Paulo–based Esoteric Circle with which Master Irineu was associated). Master Irineu participated in a number of ayahuasca ceremonies and received a series of visions from a spiritual being he called “the Queen of the Forest.” She told him to go into the jungle alone for a week to fast, pray, and drink ayahuasca. When he did this, he was told he had a spiritual assignment. He was to establish a new spiritual path to be called the Santo (holy) Daime, which would focus on the direct experience of the divine forces that resided in the forest and on the astral plane. Access to these subtle realms would be facilitated by the drinking of ayahuasca, from now on to be called Daime (Portuguese for “give me”), as a sacrament. Around Master Irineu a community began to develop, mostly consisting of caboclos from the woods and poor villagers. Various rituals developed: the concentration ritual that includes long periods of silent contemplation; various healing rituals in which hymns are sung; the Holy Mass ritual to commemorate the departed; and dancing rituals that involve dancing to hinarios (collections of received hymns).3 These rituals were originally aimed at physical healing, prosperity, and harmonious family life. One of Master Irineu’s close disciples was Sebastião Mota de Melo (1920– 1990), who became known as Padrinho Sebastião. He was a local healer also involved with the spiritist tradition of Kardecism, the teachings of the French medium Allan Kardec (1804–1869). After the death of Master Irineu in 1971, Padrinho Sebastião started his own community that eventually created the settlement of Céu do Mapiá, a small village deep in the Amazon. This community was increasingly visited by Western backpackers who brought elements from the Sixties’ religious buffer that caused changes to Santo Daime beliefs and practices. Also, spiritist and Umbanda elements were incorporated into daimista ritual.4 Padrinho Sebastião started his own organization, Cefluris (later Iceflu), which led to a denominational diversification within Santo Daime. In the Eighties, Santo Daime communities in the Iceflu lineage of Padrinho Sebastião sprung up in the big cities in southeastern Brazil, and Santo Daime became a national movement. Most of the new urban daimistas were middle-class Brazilians rather than poor villagers from the rainforest. The context of Santo Daime ritual practices changed due to various New Age beliefs and values that were new elements in the Brazilian religious buffer, for example, a focus on personal rather than communal transformation, and an aversion to established religions. Since the death of Padrinho Sebastião in 1990, his son Padrinho Alfredo has taken charge of the movement. Padrinho Alfredo introduced a new ritual, the Saint Michael work, a practice of invocation that calls down the archangel Saint Michael. During the past three decades, the Santo Daime (mainly the

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Iceflu branch) has grown into a global movement, with centers in all large Brazilian cities, the US and Europe, and other parts of the world. Now there is a further change in the context of Santo Daime beliefs and practices. They are becoming even more eclectic, also including Buddhist and Hindu elements. Also, under the leadership of Padrinho Alfredo, reverence and respect for nature, which had been important in Santo Daime from the beginning, have become an even more explicit aspect of the Santo Daime doctrine. References to the natural world are frequent: the sun, the moon, the stars, the sea, the forest, the sky. Santo Daime sees itself as a contemporary mystery religion with a direct connection to early gnostic Christianity that uses Daime as a religious sacrament.5 As in such esoteric early Christian schools, there are stages of knowledge and stages of initiation that one passes through as part of the path toward salvation. However, these stages are not externally regulated. There are no specific programs or practices that are followed by daimistas, nor are there any ceremonies that mark any specific progress on the path. Every new threshold that one passes is characterized by a deepening of the relationship with the divine. That the Santo Daime considers itself to be directly connected to early Christianity becomes clear from the following myth that is recounted by Jonathan Goldman: Legend has it that when Jesus died, the Doctrine saw the distortions being made to Jesus’ teachings, and It knew the necessary darkness ahead for humanity. It left the world at large, entering the deep forest. There It secreted Itself in the jagube vine and the rainha leaf. It waited with Its guardians, the native peoples of the Amazon, for the day when humanity would be ready to reembrace It. When the time arrived It called Master Irineu, who had been part of the original mission of Jesus, to his new mission of replanting the Doctrine in greater humanity. Through the Holy Daime, It is calling to Itself, one by one, the many souls who are ready to rapidly awaken the seed that Jesus planted, the Christ Consciousness, in themselves. It calls us not only for ourselves, but also to accept responsibility for helping to secure the Doctrine on Earth in these delicate times.6

Santo Daime religious ceremonies are called trabalhos (works). Daimistas work together to develop and manifest positive qualities such as love, faith, truth, harmony, justice, and forgiveness.7 These works take place on specific dates according to the Christian calendar commemorating religious events. They involve ritual time rather than chronological time, and are sometimes imagined as re-enactments of spiritual battles between wholesome and unwholesome forces that take place both in the salon and in the hearts and minds of daimistas.8 Praying, the singing of hymns, and dancing are used to unify, motivate, and energize daimistas as they enter into long and arduous

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ceremonies.9 Such ceremonies are joyful but are also seen as tests (provas) that allow daimistas to cultivate wisdom, strength, joy and love.10 Obviously, such a framing of ayahuasca practices has great consequences for the set of daimistas: being active, persistent, alert, and focused are seen as qualities of great importance. Santo Daime works differ from (neo)shamanic types of ayahuasca ceremonies in two important respects. First, there is no central figure such as the shaman who leads the ceremony, manages the group energy, and guides individual participants through the ups and downs of their ayahuasca experience. And although there are leading roles in Santo Daime works (there is a commander who oversees the work, there are puxadoras who initiate the singing and set the tone, there are guardians who assist individual daimistas through difficult passages), they are considered collective works in which all are expected to contribute with equal effort, each according to their own capacity. Second, the “work” aspect of Santo Daime religiosity is sometimes controversial in (neo)shamanic ayahuasca groups that emphasize passively experiencing and surrendering to the effects of ayahuasca. The instruction for daimistas is not to simply surrender and let the Daime experience wash over them but to actively participate in the co-construction of the work, which involves conforming oneself to a strict discipline: how one sits, how one moves, how one sings. Everything in a work is aimed at becoming attuned to one another and reaching greater and greater levels of harmonious singing, dancing, and being. Through such collective efforts of all participants, it is believed that a beneficial healing current is created between daimistas. This is especially felt during the dancing works, when everyone moves in step, as one, and the boundaries of the individual personalities fall away. Although each daimista can and will go on their own journey, in which they may receive strong insights, revelations, and mirações, the general instruction is to not retreat into one’s own experience while under the force of Daime, but to remain present and available to what is occurring in the work, and to continue to make the effort to contribute to the group current by participating in the prayers, the singing, and the dancing. The creation and support of the communal healing current is the main purpose of a Santo Daime work—any personal healing that takes place can almost be considered as a side effect (although when individual boundaries fall away, the distinction between communal and individual healing becomes difficult to draw). The strict ritual discipline of Santo Daime works, and the importance of the willingness to engage in self-cultivation, can be challenging for many, who may rebel against having to follow seemingly arbitrary rules, and may feel that there is no room for creative self-expression. And indeed, individual self-expression is not the point of Santo Daime works. The whole point

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is to go beyond the individual personality, awaken the higher self (the eu superior), and contribute to a collective self-expression. Daimistas are like members of a symphony orchestra: they not only practice to play their own instrument (their own aparelho) with skill and sensitivity, but also learn to listen and tune in to the other players, develop their sense of timing, and go with the flow of the orchestra. In order to be able to do all this while under the strong influence of Daime, a crucial virtue needs to be developed called firmeza (firmness). This is the ability to not be swayed or distracted by the inner pandemonium that can arise when the Daime is in full force, and gently keep one’s attention on what is happening in the work. The challenge is to learn to do this without overly exerting one’s willpower (this will only increase the inner pandemonium). Firmeza does not mean resisting the Daime but, on the contrary, completely letting the Daime do its work without inner friction. Sometimes this can feel like being operated upon with light. And when under the knife of the surgeon, the best thing to do is to remain completely still and not interfere in any way. In this sense, the attitude of daimistas is very similar to those of participants in (neo)shamanic ceremonies. Although it may seem that Santo Daime works are about effort, while (neo)shamanic ceremonies are about letting go, the reality is more complex. Santo Daime works are a delicate mix of effort and non-effort. Even though the works (especially the dancing works that can last up to twelve hours or even longer) seem to require much willpower, they can only be completed when daimistas find their way to a kind of effortless effort. The kind of suffering that they sometimes go through can only be sustained by a big heart full of love. Effort and willpower will only take them so far. And vice versa, experienced practitioners of (neo)shamanic ceremonies will also develop the skill to navigate the ayahuasca experience by applying the same kind of effortless effort. In chapter 3 we encountered a description of a Santo Daime work. All Santo Daime works start and end with Christian prayers (usually three Our Fathers and Hail Marys). They all involve singing hymns of various elders such as Master Irineu, Padrinho Sebastião, Padrinho Alfredo, and others. Other elements depend on the type of work. There are sitting works and dancing works. The concentração (concentration) is a sitting work that contains at least one hour of silent contemplation while under the force of Daime. In cura (healing) sitting works, specific healing hymns are sung while strong Daime is served. In the bailado (dancing) works, a whole hinário (collection of hymns) of a particular elder is sung and danced to. In the Sao Miguel cura (healing work of Saint Michael), the energy of the archangel Saint Michael is specifically invoked to assist in healing. There are also more mediumistic types of works (such as the mesa branca described in chapter 3), often

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connected to Umbanda, in which spirit possession plays an important part. Also, in the monthly santa missa (holy mass), the dead are being remembered, and suffering spirits are being helped toward the light.11 In the feitio work, often lasting a week or longer, the Daime is prepared in a ritual way.12 The spiritual current that is believed to be evoked during Santo Daime works under the force of Daime allows for the collective co-creation of a subtle realm that is called the Astral. This is the mode of existence where beings of religion can be encountered. It is not a separate world, but a higher dimension of this world. From this higher-order Astral, it is possible to communicate with beings of religion and receive visions and guidance. In a certain way, this Astral is where Santo Daime works truly take place, which makes them very ineffable to outside observers. They cannot be explained or discursively understood but require immediate experience. Many Santo Daime hymns mention “the doctrine.” This is, however, not a collection of rules or beliefs but is considered to be a living matrix of consciousness that serves to embody the upcoming great transformation of consciousness. The doctrine, which is the organizing principle of the awakening of mankind, is seen as being in the possession of its own active intelligence. The religious path of the Santo Daime church can be seen as a contemplative practice in which learning to communicate with the Daime is central. Santo Daime works are not designed to achieve a special experience or psychedelic trip but serve to open the possibility of an intimate connection with what is considered a divine being of intelligence, compassion, clarity, and spiritual power.13 In the remainder of this chapter, Santo Daime practices will be explored through the lens of theurgy, a concept that was crucial in the work of Iamblichus, to whom we will turn in the next section. IAMBLICHUS AND THEURGY Iamblichus was born between 240 and 250 in Syria. He left Syria to study philosophy but eventually returned to Syria to found some kind of spiritual community in Apamea. He died in 325. He has become known for his discussions with Porphyry (ca. 234–305), the student of the great founder of Neoplatonism, Plotinus (200–270).14 Although both their Neoplatonic ontologies are based on emanation (all things arise from the One, and all things return to the One), and their religiosities aim at the attainment of liberating experiential knowledge (gnosis) within a Platonic framework, they differ in their soteriological views on how we can become liberated. Porphyry’s interpretation of Plato tends toward a dualism in which the world of the senses is a poor reflection of the transcendent world of Ideas, and according to which we

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should use our intelligence to withdraw from the material world and ascend to the Intelligible.15 For Iamblichus, however, the material world and the body are an integral part of his soteriology.16 As a scholar-practitioner (both a leader of a Neoplatonic philosophical school and a priest responsible for the performance of sacred ritual practices), Iamblichus preferred the term theourgia (god work) to the more common term theologia (god talk).17 Theology is merely logos, the human, all-toohuman activity, of speaking about the divine. Theurgy is a theion ergon, a “work of the gods” that refers not to human activity but to transformative ritual practices in which the gods do the work, rather than humans.18 It is different from both theology and ordinary ritual practices, just as interventionist practices are different from both discursive practices (that focus on meaning-making) and disciplinary behavioral practices (as we saw in chapter 4). Theurgy has been misunderstood by classical scholars who have uncritically followed Porphyry’s objections to it. Gregory Shaw has corrected many of these misunderstandings, which has resulted in promising new scholarship on Iamblichus.19 Iamblichus presents his thoughts on theurgy in On the Mysteries (ca. 280– 300), a response to a series of questions by Porphyry, who, as a rationalist Greek philosopher, was critical of the need for rituals, which he considered superstitious practices unworthy of a rational philosopher.20 In his response, Iamblichus explains such rituals as theurgic practices in order to distinguish them from merely human rituals and practices of sorcery. For Iamblichus, theurgy is divine activity communally shared. It is not something that may be grasped or experienced by an individual since “it is impossible to participate individually in the universal orders, but only in communion with the divine choir of those lifted up together, united in mind.”21 Similarly, in this chapter, I will approach Santo Daime ritual practices as divine activity communally shared, to be distinguished from primarily recreational or therapeutic uses of ayahuasca that focus on individual experience. I will present Santo Daime, through the lens of Iamblichus’s theurgy, as a world-affirming form of religiosity that assumes an ineffable, rather than a human, form of gnosis, and that stresses the role of the body and embodiment. World-affirmation versus World-denial An important soteriological distinction between various forms of religiosity is whether they see this world as a benign place of beauty and order, to be embraced through religious practice, or as a hostile place that needs to be escaped from through religious practice. This dimension can be philosophically clarified further by looking at the soteriological differences between

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Iamblichus and Porphyry, whose discussion took place at a crucial junction in the Hellenistic world. Religion scholar Jonathan Z. Smith has pointed to the distinction between what he calls “locative” and “utopian” soteriologies.22 Locative soteriologies center around an all-pervasive and beneficent order of the cosmos, the divine society of the gods. Religiosity is about re-attuning the soul to this divine order. In the shift to utopian soteriologies, the cosmos was transformed from a beneficent order into a system of repression and punishment handed out by cruel demons. “Utopian” means that there is no place in the cosmos that is good. Religiosity is no longer about deepening one’s affiliation to the cosmic order, but about escaping it. Most Gnostic and Christian thinkers of the third century subscribed to utopian soteriologies. Iamblichus, however, subscribed to a locative soteriology. He followed Plato’s description of the cosmos in the Timaeus, according to which all of the world is sacred and full of gods. The goal of theurgy is to reconnect humans with the activities of the gods, to become “companions of the gods.” For Iamblichus, salvation or awakening is not about the soul escaping materiality in order to ascend to the heavens, but about the soul embracing matter and multiplicity in order to fully participate in its perpetual co-creation. However, in order to be able to fully embrace the world, the soul must also be purified from its attachment to matter, so that it can be fully assimilated to the gods and become fit for their friendship.23 Although Porphyry and Iamblichus were both Neoplatonic philosophers, they interpreted Plato’s philosophy in different ways. Porphyry tended toward a utopian perspective, leading to a philosophy that was hostile to the material world of nature and aimed to escape it. Iamblichus’s theurgic Neoplatonism was locative. The cosmos was all-embracing and entirely good. Whereas each soul contained a divine spark, its task was not to escape the cosmos, but to use this spark to perform its own “god work” (theurgy): to participate in the continuous co-creation of the cosmos. As Shaw comments: “Instead of rising to the abstract and immaterial, theurgists like Iamblichus remain below: they find the gods in matter; they receive divinity in this lower world. Through them, the gods see through human eyes, feel with human hearts, and speak with a mortal voice.”24 This dimension ranging from world-affirming to world-denying can also be found in the various forms of contemporary ayahuasca religiosity. As already discussed in chapter 1, some ayahuasca practitioners, including daimistas, consider this world to be a prison, held in place by evil powers, and compare drinking ayahuasca to taking the red pill in the movie The Matrix: it will remove the veils in order to show what is really going on. My own interpretation of Santo Daime religiosity, on the other hand, is more world-affirming. Although some hymns warn about not getting caught up in the “illusion” of

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this world, in general the focus is on learning to live with joy and happiness in this world, together with others, and on building a new world together.25 Human versus Ineffable Gnosis What is the ontological status of the gods and how can we know them? Iamblichus addresses such fundamental ontological and epistemological matters with regard to the existence of the gods. Apparently, Porphyry had started his questioning of Iamblichus on a generous note, conceding that the gods do indeed exist. Porphyry was no atheist philosopher. However, Iamblichus disagrees with such an approach. The existence of the gods is not an ontological truth that can be established theoretically. We can know the gods through gnosis, an innate preconceptual knowing that is inherent in our nature and connected to the soul’s deepest striving toward the good.26 However, to even call such gnosis “knowledge” can be misleading, since knowledge is always separated from its object.27 But knowledge of the gods is participatory knowledge for Iamblichus, rather than Porphyry’s intellectual knowledge that uses conjecture or syllogistic reasoning. The gods cannot be known by opinion or deductive reasoning processes, but only by participating in their existence. Iamblichus continues: You seem to think that the same knowledge exists for divine things as for any other sort of thing, and that one may deduce some part of the answer from contraries, as is the habit in dialectical propositions. But there is no resemblance whatsoever! For knowledge of the Gods is completely different and is removed from all opposition; it does not subsist by our granting that it exists now or will exist, but from eternity it has uniformly co-existed in the soul.28

Divine things exist in different modes than other things. And even though we may feel alienated from the gods, or may not experience them, Iamblichus says that we remain enveloped by their divine presence.29 Such gnosis is not conceptual but a matter of eros, a deep desire that is prior to abstract thinking. It is through such a preconceptual desire that we can meet the gods and find direction in life. In actuality, it is not even the soul itself that knows the gods, but the god knowing itself. As Shaw puts it: “Theurgic noesis was, in fact, the act of a god knowing itself through the activity and the medium of the soul, not vice versa. Noesis, in fact, was not conceptual, and Iamblichus maintained that noetic contacts with the gods were more erotic than intellectual.”30 As Emma Clarke notes, Iamblichus uses the term “gnosis” in an unusual manner.31 It is the kind of knowledge that only comes with experience of divine revelation. Seeing is not only believing, but also knowing and

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understanding. Although both Porphyry and Iamblichus see gnosis as the way to salvation, they conceive of it in very different ways. Porphyry emphasizes a human kind of gnosis, the rational exercise of the human intellect. Iamblichus sees gnosis as arising from revelation through theurgic ritual. Such an ineffable gnosis is superior to human gnosis because it comes from the gods. It is, in human terms, not really gnosis at all. Whereas Santo Daime hymns emphasize the importance of studying and of gaining knowledge, they always refer to an Iamblichean gnosis that is revealed through mirações, not to Porphyry’s human gnosis that is attained through rational thought and discourse. As we have seen already, such ineffable gnosis cannot be approached through standard epistemological procedures. It is “removed from all oppositions” (subject and object, transcendent and immanent, human and more-than-human). Such a “knowledge of the gods” has already co-existed in the soul and can be triggered, or awakened, through contemplative Santo Daime practices. The clear sense of knowing that can arise during Santo Daime works is not representational but participatory, connected with eros. Doyle describes Santo Daime practice as “a pedagogical practice oriented toward divining and learning to love infinity.”32 As a practice of love, it is unavoidably participatory. It requires the tuning of our attention, and the development of “a capacity to navigate and joyfully endure the sheer difference of another, even, especially, a plant other.”33 Doyle adds that it also requires Shelley’s negative capability: the capacity to endure uncertainty, especially the uncertainty clustering around the possibility of being an “I.” Santo Daime practice is not only about opening the doors of perception, but also about opening the gates of the heart. The Daime communicates through love, the hinarios communicate through love—this is why one must learn how to love. And working with the Daime is often about opening one’s heart and learning to patiently transform into love the very strong emotions, old hurts, and desperate longings that arise in this process. Whereas Porphyry’s approach is that of a rational philosopher practicing ontology and epistemology as separate disciplines, Iamblichus embraces a religious approach using an onto-epistemology, like Latour. He warns Porphyry that his rationalistic approach will destroy theurgic religiosity because it assumes that divine beings are distant from the earth and cannot mingle with men. Then this world becomes a desert without gods.34 Placing the divine at a distance from the earth (in its own supernatural realm) is exactly what happens in the immanent frame, and what is contradicted by ayahuasca religiosity. Please note that Iamblichus does not criticize Porphyry for not believing in the gods, but for believing in them in the wrong way, as inhabitants of

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a separate ontological domain. This is illustrated by the different ways in which the term “supernatural” (hyperphusis) was used by Iamblichus and by utopian thinkers such as Porphyry. For Iamblichus, the supernatural was never removed from nature but was invisibly present in it as its principle. For later Christian thinkers, the supernatural came to refer to an independent realm different from the natural realm.35 Since the divine was placed in such a supernatural realm, this paved the way for the immanent frame with its distinction between the natural and supernatural order. Philosophy and ritual have become separated from each other. Religion has become something that involves belief in supernatural beings. For Iamblichus, however, the gods are not different from the unchanging patterns of nature.36 I want to argue that in our interpretation of Santo Daime religiosity, we can also regard the gods and the forces of nature as one and the same. For example, in the Santo Daime ritual of the feitio (the process of preparing Daime out of jagube and rainha) there are many material and practical processes that are needed to prepare such liquid divinity. Harvesting the divine, cleaning the divine, beating the divine to pulp, boiling the divine in water and fire: all this seems to be part of a mysterious alchemical process. The divine is not separate from nature but very much embodied in nature and materiality. The Daime contains the forces of nature, and it is also the key that unlocks the forces of nature. It gives access to larger, unseen, dimensions of reality. It opens up ontological worlds. And yet it is all very practical and down to earth. As Dawson notes, the material and the spiritual are fused and collapsed in the Santo Daime worldview. Ritual participation in the feitio is more about the transformation of matter than about its transcendence.37 Embodiment Due to its bioactive effects, drinking ayahuasca is by its very nature an embodied process. The body cannot be ignored. It can have very visceral reactions to ayahuasca, including nausea, diarrhea, shaking, or other forms of great discomfort. Religious transformation is also transformation of the body. Ayahuasca rituals are not about escaping the world but about embracing the body and multiplicity. They are performances that initiate us into the activity of beings of religion and awaken the philia between such beings and the soul. Under the force of ayahuasca, the affinity of ayahuasca practitioners with such beings allows them to enter their energeia.38 Whereas this process is mostly individual during (neo)shamanic ayahuasca rituals, Santo Daime works can be seen as collective performances in which daimistas are initiated into the activity of the beings of religion that are enacted through the entangled effect of praying, singing, dancing, and drinking Daime. Divine energies become available to the individual participants of the work in order

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for them to be transformed. Iamblichus believes that the unifying principle that transforms the soul in theurgy is the same principle that holds the cosmos together as its universal philia or eros.39 Ayahuasca can activate this principle of eros, both individually and communally. Iamblichus’s embrace of embodiment is very different from Porphyry, who, like his teacher Plotinus, had a negative view of the body and embodiment. For Plotinus, embodiment pollutes the soul, and the spiritual path consists of escaping from materiality and the body.40 According to Plotinus, the soul actually never really descends into the body. It remains in the heavens, above the flesh and the physical world.41 Therefore, his disciple Porphyry concludes that participating in religious rituals that are tied to nature’s powers makes no sense. It would only add to the confusion of the soul. Porphyry therefore advises the philosopher to forgo all ritual activities. Salvation means to escape from the cosmos, not to assimilate oneself to it. Only common people incapable of such a philosophical escape perform theurgic rites, Porphyry argues. Theurgy has its role as a preparation for the philosophical life but needs to be left behind. Iamblichus, however, sees no fundamental split between the body, the soul, the intellect, and the gods. The body is simply an integral part of a larger process.42 Therefore, anything from stones, plants, animals, humans, to spirits can be a potential medicine for the soul.43 Although the body can sometimes be experienced as an oppressive weight (such as in Plato’s Phaedo, where the body is seen as the prison of the soul), it also serves as the vehicle that rejoins us with the gods (as is emphasized in Plato’s Timaeus). Such a view of the body as an aparelho (a vehicle) is also stressed in the Santo Daime. Through the performance of theurgic ritual, embodied souls can enter divine energies. For Iamblichus, the soul requires an embodied mystagogy. The soul’s experience of the body is determined by its own internal condition. One’s perspective toward embodied life depends on one’s level of spiritual development. As Shaw remarks, “As the soul became increasingly purified by theurgy so that it received . . . visions, its experience of matter became less like that of the Phaedo and more like the cosmological matter of the Timaeus, transforming the entire world into an immense receptacle.”44 This is also the experience that can arise from ayahuasca visions: the world is not seen as a prison but as a glorious configuration of light.45 As Shaw explains, The pessimistic language of the Phaedo should be understood within the context of the soul’s entire incarnational itinerary. The perception of the body as a ‘prison’ would be an important and necessary step in the soul’s progress toward a complete incarnation. The negative imagery functioned as a catalyst to purge the soul of an identity anchored in the sensible world. . .  Its negative view of

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embodiment should be seen as a medicinal shock, intended to disturb the soul’s complacency and later to be ameliorated with a more complete understanding.46

Iamblichus stresses that theurgic practices aim at the invocation of the natural powers of the cosmos in order to restore contact with the divine cosmic order. Such practices respect the sanctity of the natural world and do not try, like Plotinus and Porphyry, to elevate the human mind beyond its natural limits—which is hubris for Iamblichus, and only separates us from the activity of the gods.47 Also in Santo Daime works, humility is the most important virtue to be cultivated over and over again. Ultimately, the beings of religion are doing the work, not the daimistas (although it can be very hard work to let the beings of religion do their work without interfering). Santo Daime trabalhos are not new, but a re-interpretation of existing traditional vegetalistic and mestizo practices that centered around the drinking of ayahuasca. Similarly, for Iamblichus, theurgy does not refer to new soteriological practices, but to a revaluation and re-interpretation of existing traditional cultic rituals.48 Iamblichus compares such practices with the Platonic philosophic paideia (the spiritual education of the soul). Whereas the paideia centers around the contemplation (theoria) of divine powers, the ritual practices of theurgy are aimed at their ritual embodiment and enactment. Human energies or activities (energeia) are united with the energeia of the gods. This helps the soul to tap its hidden divine power, and to participate directly in the creation and cultivation of the cosmos. Similarly, Santo Daime religiosity is not merely about contemplating mystical otherworldly realities, but about embodying and enacting such realities in order to bring more light into the world. Ineffability and the Need for a Theurgic Language Iamblichus stresses that theurgic rituals are ineffable. They cannot be explained or discursively understood but require immediate experience. Aristotle famously wrote about the mysteries of Eleusis that those who enter them do not learn anything but experience something by being put into a changed state of mind.49 (This brings to mind Latour’s emphasis that religious language is not about information but transformation.) Since this is incomprehensible to the mind, it can evoke feelings of fear. As the later Neoplatonic thinker Proclus (412–485) puts it: “Initiations bring about a sympathy of souls with the ritual actions in such a way that is incomprehensible to us yet divine, so that some of those initiated are stricken with fear, being filled with divine awe; others assimilate themselves to the holy symbols and, having left their own identity, become completely established in the gods and experience divine possession.”50

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Such a description applies very much to Santo Daime works. They can be terrifying. Depending on their personal capacities and characteristics (their set), daimistas can sometimes become overwhelmed with fear, whereas at other times they manage to “assimilate themselves to the holy symbols.” What is needed to manage such assimilation is the development of several positive qualities, mainly firmeza. Firmeza also has to do with being able to let go of thinking and of trying to understand. As Shaw remarks, for the theurgist, it is not what we know, it is not our thinking that unites us with the gods but our capacity to enter states of not-knowing receptivity: an almost impossible task for those who pride themselves on intellectual sophistication. Iamblichus’s critique of Porphyry’s intellectual approach makes it clear that theurgy was not something one could conceptually grasp; it was transmitted only in the experience of those who performed the rites and had, themselves, become vehicles of the gods.51 The soul cannot reconnect itself to the divine through intellectual understanding. There must be transmissions from the gods that are ineffable to the mind. As Iamblichus puts it: Intellectual understanding does not connect theurgists with the gods . . . rather, it is the perfect accomplishment of ineffable acts, religiously performed beyond all understanding, and it is the power of ineffable symbols understood by the gods alone, that effects theurgical union. . . . The symbols themselves, on their own, perform their work, and the ineffable power of the gods to whom these symbols belong, recognizes, by itself, its own images. It is not awakened to this by our thinking.52

It is not through only intellectually understanding the content of the Santo Daime hymns that transformation takes place. Such hymns are considered to be revealed from the Astral and contain their own power. They function as symbols that perform their own work in the soul and awaken divine energies. They call beings of transformation and religion. Such a transformation is often not on the conscious level but takes place “under the radar,” in a way that transcends discursive understanding. Because of this ineffability, there is a need for a new theurgic language. Theurgy is not a matter of philosophical contemplation of the divine but of its ritual embodiment. This is an epistemological necessity: merely theoretical knowledge works within a dualistic structure (is exoteric) so it can never engender a union with the divine. Therefore, there is a need for esoteric rituals rather than exoteric philosophy. Like religious language for Latour, theurgic language is different from philosophical language. It functions evocatively rather than descriptively. If the discursive meaning becomes central its evocative power will be lost.53

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Theurgic Practices Santo Daime practices (prayer, silent meditation, singing, dancing, invocation, and spirit incorporation and possession) can be interpreted as theurgic practices. They can cure disturbances in the soul, enhance the soul’s receptivity, and draw it into deeper resonance with the divine. They turn the soul’s attention back to the gods.54 For Iamblichus, theurgy is about embodying the gods through embracing and transforming our embodied souls. The obstacles to our divinization become the vehicles through which we become divine. Very little is known about the historical specifics of theurgic practices in the time of Iamblichus. They were not written down, and they were most often adapted to the specific needs of the situation or the individuals involved. Elements that are used in theurgic practices of cure include incantations, concoctions, melodies and rhythms, prayer, and a practice called “gathering the light.” Anything that receives the god and mediates its presence can function as a sacred receptacle, whether it is a stone, a plant, a smell, or a song.55 Material objects such as stones, plants, and animals could bear the “signatures” (sunthemata) of the gods.56 Such sunthemata can therefore also be present in concoctions such as ayahuasca. One of the features that characterize Santo Daime ceremonies is the crucial importance of communal prayer. Works are started and ended with praying three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys (followed at the end by a Salve Regina). Dancing works are started with praying the Christian Creed, followed by the rosary. Other important prayers are the Consecration of the Space, the Prayer of Caritas, and the Key of Harmony.57 According to Iamblichus, the impulse to pray derives from the divine image in the soul yearning for its original. The soul’s turn to prayer, in short, is the awakening of its divine sunthemata. Therefore, prayer is a divine rather than a human activity. Theurgic prayer lifts up the habits of our thought and bestows on us the habits of the gods.58 What occurs in prayer is not a human speaking to the gods, but the gods speaking to themselves through the human. The divine is joined with itself.59 In prayer, the gods reunite with themselves through the human. Prayer is a crucial theurgic practice, as it helps the soul to become both subtle and strong enough to be able to experience the efflux of divine light without distortion. Iamblichus distinguishes three stages of theurgic prayer that express an increasingly intensive communication with the gods. The first stage of “gathering together” establishes contact with and awareness of the gods. The second stage of “binding together” brings the soul into a common mind with the gods. The third state of “ineffable union” establishes all power in the gods and allows the soul to rest in the gods.60 Another important theurgic practice is the practice of invocations, or calling down, of the gods. Invocation is practiced in the Santo Daime in the

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works of Saint Michael, in which invocations of Saint Michael are being performed through prayers, hymns, and hand gestures. In fact, such practices do not call the gods down but activate the divine elements of the soul. Invocation makes our intelligence fit to participate in the gods; it elevates it to the gods.61 Invocations do not create the presence of the gods; the gods are always there, and the invocations crystallize their invisible presence in a form that the soul can behold. As Shaw emphasizes, such invocations are also, strictly speaking, performed by the gods themselves: The theurgist did bring the gods down into the world, but he did so at their command, and to fulfill their will. This clearly would distinguish theurgy from sorcery, for a theurgic incantation preserved the transcendence and ineffability of the gods while making the soul an embodiment or actualization of their will. Since the soul itself could never grasp or initiate theurgy, the incantation, strictly speaking, was accomplished by the god.62

ECSTASY AND DIVINE POSSESSION A returning theme in this book has been the ecstatic nature of ayahuasca experiences. The distinction between subject and object falls away, and a different space opens up. The ordinary, habitual form of consciousness gives way to alternate forms of consciousness in which the individual personality is partially or fully eclipsed (or “possessed”) by more-than-human powers. Gregory Shaw has written about the various strategies relating to ecstasy and possession in Iamblichean theurgy.63 Porphyry and Iamblichus have different views on ecstasy. Porphyry challenges Iamblichus for promoting ecstatic practices. Reminiscent of contemporary ayahuasca critics, he criticizes ecstatic experiences as either pathological (a psychological or chemical imbalance, the result of disturbances in the soul) or demonic (the result of negative demonic influences). Iamblichus, however, considers a state of ecstasy a necessary condition for making contact with the gods. Although ecstatic states can be (and indeed often are) delusional, the personality needs to be eclipsed in order for the gods to be able to descend. Therefore, while admitting that many forms of ecstasy can be dysfunctional and pathological, Iamblichus argues that higher forms of ecstasy lift the soul above nature and attach us to beings that transcend human understanding. However, he considers it crucial to be able to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy forms of ecstasy: “It is necessary to divide ecstasy into two species: some are turned toward the inferior [and some reach up to the superior]; some are filled with foolishness and delirium, but others impart goods more

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honorable than human wisdom.”64 Both types of ecstasy are ineffable, but for very different reasons: The former are separated from understanding because they are deprived of knowledge, but the latter are separated from understanding because they are attached to Beings that transcend all human understanding. The former are unstable, the latter unchangeable; the first are counter to nature (para phusin), the latter are beyond nature (hyper phusin)65; the former make the soul descend, the latter raise it up; and while the former entirely separate the soul from a share in the divine, the latter connect the soul with the divine.66

Iamblichus’s criterion for determining whether the ecstasy was divine or deranged was whether or not it had a beneficial and stabilizing effect on the soul. This distinction had already been made by Plato in the Phaedrus: “There are two kinds of madness (mania), one resulting from human illness, the other from a divine disruption of our codes of conduct.”67 Plato had already argued that divine mania came from the gods and was superior to human rational thinking. Porphyry assumes that rituals involving such alternate states of consciousness must only be meant to improve our human existence. For Iamblichus, however, the main purpose of theurgic practices inducing ecstatic states of mind is to unite the soul with the gods, something that human reason is unable to do. During Santo Daime ceremonies, such inferior and superior states of ecstasy are very common. It is very difficult to determine whether a state of ecstasy is inferior or superior. This is why the role of the guardian is very important. He or she holds the space for the person going through a difficult passage. Such ecstatic states of consciousness can manifest as divine possession in which the body is taken over by beings of transformation and religion. However, the topic of divine possession is a complicated one. How to ensure that positive rather than negative forms of divine possession occur? Iamblichus emphasizes that working with ecstatic states requires extensive training, especially learning to resist the impulse to want to direct the outcome of the ritual. Not humans, but the gods do the work in theurgic ritual: Divine possession is not a human action nor does its power rest in human attributes or actions, for these are otherwise receptively disposed, and the God uses them as instruments (organois). The God completes the entire work of divination by himself. . . . But whenever the soul takes the initiative or is moved during the rite or the body interrupts and disturbs the divine harmony, the divinations become turbulent and false and the divine possession is no longer true nor genuinely divine.68

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This is why, in Santo Daime works, cultivating firmeza is emphasized. Such firmness is often interpreted as a Herculean type of willpower that allows one to remain sitting or dancing and continue singing the hymns while under the strong influence of the full force of Daime. However, as Barnard explains, it actually refers to the capacity for remaining still and uninvolved in the middle of the storm and being able to refrain from taking the initiative and trying to steer one’s experience in a particular direction.69 For Iamblichus, true possession by a god is very different from any kind of human accomplishment. In a state of enthusiasm, the soul is lifted into the god and transformed into a vehicle or organ of the deity.70 However, this requires training. As Shaw explains: The specific skill required of the theurgist is the ability to enter a state of quiet receptivity . . . and to surrender every impulse that would pre-empt the god’s orchestration of the rite. As long as the soul attempts to direct or take the initiative, the divination reflects only the impulses of the soul, or worse: it attracts like-minded and impulsive spirits. Iamblichus insists that rituals of ecstatic possession require long training and perseverance, and those who neglect such preparations fail to accomplish anything.71

The Santo Daime provides exactly such long training. The structured nature of the ceremonies provides a safe and secure space for developing the capacity for entering such states of quiet receptivity. What is in the way is past emotional and spiritual wounds, traumas, and conditionings that attract lower spirits. When impulsive spirits are being attracted, the guardians are around to maintain a safe and harmonious space. Iamblichus speaks about different degrees of possession, from becoming wholly the property of the god to acting in common with him. It can range from a bare participation to a communion or even union with the god.72 He describes techniques of “light gathering” where the individual remains aware while its consciousness becomes filled with light and is moved by the will of the gods. He explains: This [light-gathering] occurs in two ways: either the gods are present in the soul or they shine an advance light from themselves into the soul. In each case, the divine presence and the illumination are both separate [from our control]. The attention and awareness of the soul follow what happens since the divine light does not touch them, but the imagination is divinely inspired for it is stirred into modes of imagination from the Gods, not from itself, and it is utterly changed from what is ordinarily human.73

Such light-gathering is a common experience in Santo Daime works. Daimistas often report experiencing a blindingly pure influx of light starting

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to pour in that feels exquisite and uncontaminated. Often, the body is straining to keep up with such an influx of pure light. They often add the insight that this light is always there, and that the Daime is merely making it available, giving them access to it (or giving the light access to them).74 Apart from unconscious possession, where the personality is taken over by different forces, there is also conscious possession, which is superior for Iamblichus. This occurs when a residual awareness follows the images that are inspired by the gods. Shaw describes such an awareness as “conscious but not active, it perceives but does not analyze or evaluate” and it “does not focus on specific objects or exert its will.”75 He summarizes it as follows: “This contact with the divine occurs only with an ecstatic exchange that transforms our imagination into an organ of the god while the soul—with empty mind—follows the visions and witnesses the divine reunions.”76 CATHARSIS: CLEANSING THE IMAGINATION Santo Daime ceremonies are called “works” for a reason. They can be very challenging and demanding, involving intense periods of catharsis. This can be bodily catharsis (for example, vomiting or diarrhea) or emotional catharsis (for example, intense crying). For Iamblichus, such forms of catharsis are the necessary first steps toward theurgic transformation. Shaw describes how theurgists followed the ancient pattern of all the mysteries: first practices of purification (catharsis), followed by esoteric transmission (paradosis), and culminating in a deifying vision (epopteia).77 First, catharsis is necessary to purify the soul and release it from its attachments to the material world. Second, the soul needs to make contact with the gods and receive transmissions from them (for example, in the form of visions) that help it to awaken to its true nature. Such transmissions are facilitated by the symbols and “signatures” (sunthemata) of the divine that are present in concoctions, objects, hymns, and melodies.78 Through these signatures, the soul is awakened to the presence of the divine that it already carries within itself.79 This transforms the soul’s somatic, emotional, and intellectual identity. Third, once its identity has been transformed, the soul can become a companion of the gods. In order for the ecstatic communion with the gods to be of the positive variety, it is necessary to purify the soul by means of practices of catharsis. Shaw notes that rationalistic perspectives on catharsis view it as the ascetic elimination of all passions tied to material life in order to become a virtually emotionless and cerebral bachelor like Plotinus. However, he argues, catharsis is not the elimination of passions, but the work of giving each its proper place, in order to be able to embrace all things from a deeper perspective. It

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is to see the emptiness and illusory nature of the world of abstractions that we take for reality.80 Without the dissolution of our personally constructed world, we lack the capacity to receive the gods.81 Practices of catharsis are meant to cleanse the faculty of the imagination. For Iamblichus, the imagination has a dual function: it not only creates sensory phenomena, but it can also function, under special circumstances, as a medium for the appearances of the gods.82 Shaw notes that these two kinds of imagination correspond to the distinction in archetypical psychology between the imagination (the fantasies of the ego) and the imaginal (the autonomous imagery rising from the unconscious). In chapter 3 we already saw how ayahuasca can empower the imagination. Just as there are two types of ecstasy (a human and a divine), there are two kinds of imagination, one reflecting physical sensations, the other reflecting divine light. Such divine imaginations can easily be confused with hallucinations. Because the soul is embodied and self-alienated, the imagination normally habitually attaches the divine light to material images. Therefore, the imagination must be cleansed. It is not possible to simply transcend these attachments through a practice of contemplation or theoria (as Porphyry and Plotinus claimed). They must be worked through in order to come to a living and embodied engagement with the gods. For Iamblichus, seeking spiritual transcendence without honoring and working through the attachments is an escapist fantasy.83 This would be, as Shaw puts it, a form of “spiritual bypassing.”84 In contemplative practice there is a real need for honestly facing into (the darker aspects of) oneself. As Shaw puts it, “to enter catharsis means that our next step is not forward but backward, not up but down; it means that we will lose understanding, not gain it. In catharsis we do not enter clarity and light, but darkness and confusion.”85 According to Shaw, the trauma of embodiment needs to be repaired first: “In its descent into a body, the soul is fundamentally torn in pieces and distributed into the material world. This psychic dismemberment requires rituals of recovery that answer to each kind of rupture and embodied agony that the soul undergoes. Theurgic rites contain these traumas and allow the soul to gradually recover its divine body.”86 First, the soul must engage the powers that keep it attached to the material world.87 Due to such attachments, the soul is not able to receive divine light in its purity but only in a distorted form. As a result, the gods are often received in pathological ways. As Shaw notes, this is where we must begin. We must “learn to accept and to honor the disturbing, dark, even terrifying daimonic images that form part of the soul’s itinerary to recover its wholeness. If properly endured, the agonizing image reveals its underlying principle and becomes part of the soul’s vessel to contain the god.”88 The encounter with such powers is

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necessary in order to “recover the divine proportions hidden in our corporeal pathologies.”89 However, such withdrawal from the body and separation from the material world are only the “lesser goals” of catharsis. Giving priority to such lesser goals would lead to a dualistic separation between body and soul that Iamblichus rejects. A purgative catharsis that removes the soul from somatic attachments needs to be embedded in a complete catharsis that follows purgation and withdrawal with a renewed empowerment of the soul and the imagination that allows it to engage with the world in a divine way.90 Ultimately, the goal of catharsis is not to escape from the body or nature, but to embrace both from a divine perspective.91 A deeper way to understand catharsis is that “it is what allows the soul to receive the god; it is also what allows the gods to become human.”92 It is an active cooperation with the gods. Blainey discusses the importance of catharsis in Santo Daime practices. In the Santo Daime view, the Holy Light is considered a purgative agent that purifies any parts of the self that are antithetical to divinity.93 Daime is liquid light: it induces direct experience of the Holy Light.94 Especially the cura ceremonies aim at cleansing blockages, purging egotistical fixations, which often manifest through vomiting and other heavy bodily discomforts.95 Difficult ceremonies with much physical and emotional suffering (conceptualized as peia) are given a positive spin as being part of a learning process that provides remedial insights into detrimental aspects of the personality.96 In many Santo Daime works, the cathartic element is very noticeably present. The experience can either be physical (feeling like being ripped apart or being operated upon) or emotional (unbearable suffering or negative feeling). COMMUNICATING WITH DIVINE BEINGS Even though catharsis is an important and necessary part of Santo Daime works, it is not primarily what these works are about. They are about learning to communicate with divine beings. In Latourian terms: learning how to construct and maintain actor-networks that involve beings of religion. Within the notably diverse symbolic universe of Santo Daime (often referred to as “the doctrine”), the relationships with such divine beings are not only understood in the context of the indigenous, vegetalista traditions that were familiar to Master Irineu, but also influenced by the esoteric worldviews from the São Paulo–based Esoteric Circle, with which Master Irineu was associated for some time. Padrinho Sebastião’s involvement with Allan Kardec’s tradition of spiritism led to the integration of spiritual entities such as Dr. José Bezerra de Menezes and Professor Antonio Jorge.97 During the 1980s, spirits of the Afro-Brazilian religion Umbanda were integrated into the Santo

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Daime doctrine. However, the Santo Daime symbolic universe is primarily populated with religious figures from Brazilian folk Catholicism, such as the Archangels Michael and Raphael, John the Baptist, Joseph, the Virgin Mary, the holy spirit, the eternal father, and Jesus Christ. Also included are natural entities and forces: the sun, moon, and stars, and the sea, forest, and sky,98 and various Afro-Brazilian spirits.99 A special figure is that of Juramidam, which is, among other meanings, a name given to the connection between all the members of the Santo Daime family and the divine.100 Iamblichus calls such communication with divine beings “receiving the transmissions of the gods.” As a result of catharsis, the soul becomes receptive. The effectiveness of theurgic practices depends on the soul’s receptivity. This is not only passivity, but a receptive capacity that is awakened and sustained by its awareness of its own nothingness compared to the gods.101 According to the Chaldean Oracles, an important source text for theurgic traditions, the ineffable can only be perceived with an empty mind: There exists a certain Intelligible which you must perceive with the flower of mind. But if you turn your mind to it and perceive it as a specific thing you will not perceive it. . . . You must not perceive that Intelligible with vehement effort but with the extended flame of an outstretched mind that measures all things except that Intelligible. I ask you to perceive this in a simple and direct way: bring back the sacred eye of your soul and extend an empty mind into that Intelligible to know it, for it exists outside the grasp of mind.102

Shaw notes that the strength of such an emptiness is proportional to the strength of eros, the longing in the soul to reconnect with its lost divinity. And the depth of the ecstatic exchange of identity is proportional to the empty receptivity of the soul: “By giving up its willfulness and propensity to know and by identifying with its poverty and emptiness, the Iamblichean soul reversed the alienating magnetism of its descent and offered the gods a receptacle vast enough to contain them.”103 The only contribution of the soul in this process, Iamblichus says, is the acute realization of its own deficiency. It is because we are far inferior to the gods that we must pray to them. Becoming aware of our own nothingness compared to the gods will make us turn to prayer.104 As Shaw adds, “To recover our divinity the most we can do is to recognize the depth of our longing for the divine and the utter hopelessness of all plans or designs to reach it.”105 The presence of the god is always in proportion to the purity of its receptacle. Light is received differently in clear or muddy water. Although the gods are everywhere, they cannot affect souls that lack an appropriate receptacle. This is why there is a need for prayer: it enlarges the soul’s receptacle for the gods.106

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Once the soul has been purified and made receptive, it is ready to be contacted by the gods and receive their transmissions. The goal of such transmissions is to awaken the soul to its divine spark (its higher self). Theurgic rituals transform the soul’s somatic, emotional, and intellectual identity through symbols (sumbola) and tokens (sunthemata), drawn from the natural world, that unite the soul with the divine.107 Such tokens can even be present in inanimate things such as pebbles, rods, pieces of wood, stones, corn, or wheat.108 Even things without intelligence can be vehicles of divine wisdom. This shows that communion with the gods does not take place through man’s mental efforts or power.109 When theurgic ritual activates the power of these symbols, their presence in the soul is awakened. The work of the soul is not to actively effect its own liberation, but to purify itself, to be firm, and to bear the ordeal when the gods start working through it. Any attempt to control the gods is the antithesis of theurgy. Of its own power, the soul cannot ascend to the gods. It can only participate in and be illumined by the gods.110 The symbols that are awakened in the soul do their own work without our thinking.111 Shaw says, “The embodied soul, as intermediary, was simply the conduit through which the divine will in nature joined the divine will in the soul, a conjunction that transcended discursive consciousness. . . . A divine name was the audible energeia of the god and when invoked the theurgist entered its power, joining the divine image in his soul to the divine itself.”112 For Iamblichus, transmissions from the gods can manifest as visions: “The presence of the Gods . . . causes a light to shine with intelligible harmony, and it reveals the incorporeal as corporeal to the eyes of the soul by means of the eyes of the body.”113 When the gods appear in a vision, even though they may have been invoked, it is not because the theurgist commands them to appear. Shaw says, “Called or not called, the gods were never absent: the theurgic art simply crystalized their invisible presence in a form corresponding to the receptive capacity of the soul. [The theurgist] clothed the epiphany in the subtle matter of imagination.”114 Proclus explains this further: The Gods themselves are incorporeal but since those who see them possess bodies, the visions which issue from the Gods to worthy recipients possess a certain quality from the gods who send them but also have something connatural with those who see them. This is why the Gods are seen yet not seen at all. In fact, those who see the Gods witness them in the luminous garments of their souls.115. . . Each God is formless even if he is seen with a form. For the form is not in him but comes from him because of the incapacity of the viewer to see the formless without a form; rather, according to his nature he sees by means of forms.116

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Visions are a result of a process that Iamblichus calls “gathering the light” (photos agoge). With divine light, the aethereal and luminous vehicle surrounding the soul is illumined, and from this, divine visions (phantasiai theiai) take possession of our imaginative faculty being moved by the will of the Gods.117 Such divine light cannot be received by the senses: “The Gods irradiate it to such a fine degree that the eyes of the body cannot receive it, and they undergo the same experience as fish when they are lifted up out of turbid and thick fluid into subtle and diaphanous air.”118 Iamblichus gives a diagnostic guide of divine appearances and lists twenty criteria that distinguish them.119 In addition to descriptive criteria, they can be distinguished by their effects on the soul. It is lifted above its passions, participates in divine love, and experiences great happiness.120 BECOMING A COMPANION OF THE GODS Learning to communicate with divine beings is not a goal in itself in the Santo Daime. Ultimately it is about being able to work together with those divine beings and assist them in their task of bringing more light into the world. Once one has acquired the capacity for constructing and maintaining actor-networks that include beings of religion, the task becomes to actually traverse and navigate such actor-networks. Also for Iamblichus, the ultimate goal of the theurgic path of transformation is to become a companion (sunopados) of the gods. This is different from what Plotinus envisages as the goal of the philosophical path. For Plotinus, becoming one with the divine is exclusive (the soul must strip itself from its attachments that come with embodiment). Awakening means lifting the soul above the cosmos, liberating it from the material realm. For Iamblichus, awakening is inclusive: the soul must embrace its embodied existence.121 It means fully participating in both divinity and materiality. The soul becomes a companion of the gods: “As the phantasia is gradually cleansed of the alienating compulsions of sensate imagery, it becomes fit to reflect the intelligible light of the gods, and it is in this body of light that theurgists enter the activities of the gods.”122 Such an entering into the activities of the gods also constitutes the completion of the process of catharsis. However, no matter how advanced a soul becomes in its spiritual development, it remains a soul. Iamblichus explicitly rejects the idea (held by Neoplatonists such as Numenius [second century] and Plotinus) that the soul achieves a mystical union with the divine. Becoming a companion of the gods is not becoming identical with them, but unifying one’s own will with the will of the gods. As Shaw puts it, “The soul’s conjunction with the divine was never an absolute identity of soul and god but a unification of the will

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and activity of the soul with the will and activity [of the divine].”123 Whereas Platonists claimed that liberated souls would merely contemplate [theoria] the divine hierarchy, according to ancient theurgists they would administer the cosmos together with the gods. And rather than merely accompanying the angels in their circular journey, they would create the cosmos together with them.124 The goal of the theurgic path is not passive contemplation, but active participation. Visions are not a goal in and of themselves, but a means to an end. Therefore, as Shaw comments, liberation of the soul “was not a beatific repose but an active embodiment and beneficent sharing of beatitude in cosmogenesis.”125 Such an active participation with the gods in their work was the highest achievement of the soul: “The highest condition for souls was not their enjoyment of divine status, but their bestowal of divine measurements in cosmogenesis.”126 Classicist John Dillon has compared this to the Buddhist bodhisattva ideal.‌‌‌‌ Such souls become bodhisattvas that work tirelessly with divine beings to save all sentient beings. In Santo Daime theurgy, such a companionship of the gods is of the highest importance, although not always recognized by participants in Santo Daime works. Many people come to the Santo Daime because they experience all kinds of crippling afflictions, emotional, physical, or spiritual. They come looking for personal healing. As a Santo Daime elder once remarked to me, many people encounter the Daime as cripples. Then the Daime works with them and heals them. However, once they can walk again, they walk out the door, proclaiming that their work is done. But actually, this is when the real work begins. For this elder, a true daimista would work with the Daime not merely for personal gain or well-being, but also in order to contribute to a better world, like a Mahayana Buddhist bodhisattva that practices with the aim of liberating all sentient beings. The phenomenon of practicing with ayahuasca for personal benefit has been related to the subjective turn in religion in the West. For many modern practitioners of religion, the focus has moved from finding meaning in the cosmos to creating meaning through the agency of the experiencing self. Partridge argues that the traditional indigenous use of ayahuasca is centrifugal (directed outward, toward others and the community). The Western therapeutic use of ayahuasca, however, is often centripetal (directed inward, toward the self). In line with the broader “subjective turn” in contemporary religion and spirituality, ayahuasca thus risks becoming an esoteric technology in the service of the ego, focused solely on psychological well-being and personal spiritual enlightenment.127 Dawson also describes a shift from an initial communal orientation toward social transformation within traditional indigenous Santo Daime communities to an individualistic orientation toward self-transformation and personal healing within contemporary urbanized

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Santo Daime.128 Such healing is increasingly framed as personal growth, rather than harmonizing with the larger web of plants, animals, humans, and spirits. A theurgic approach to ayahuasca religiosity, with its ritual orientation, might help to go beyond this subjective turn. DISCUSSION This chapter used the different philosophical approaches of Iamblichus and Porphyry to religious ritual to frame Santo Daime religiosity as working with the divine (Iamblichus’s theurgy) rather than as talking about the divine (Porphyry’s theology). It has characterized Santo Daime religiosity as more world-affirming than world-denying, as focusing on an ineffable rather than a human gnosis, and as an embodied form of religiosity. The ineffability of Santo Daime rituals calls for a theurgic, rather than a theological, language. Interpreting Santo Daime ritual practices as theurgic practices means stressing their communal nature (communicating both with other humans and with beings of religion). Such practices are beyond the self; they are ecstatic and invite divine possession. They involve processes of catharsis (a cleansing of the imagination) and learning to communicate with beings of religion, in order to become a companion of the gods and traverse and navigate the actor-networks that include beings of religion. Various points stand out in this chapter. First, the amount of training and practice that is required in order to be able to properly participate in Santo Daime works. Such works do not merely aim at producing mystical or visionary experiences; they are truly a form of “god work.” The point of visions is not the experience in itself, but to become more attuned to the gods in order to be able to do this god work. Second, such god work requires utter humility and the capacity to completely submit one’s personal will to the will of the gods: the gods always do the work. Third, the goal of this process is to become a companion of the gods, which means perfectly assisting the gods in their work. Fourth, in such theurgic rituals, language is no longer a distortion (masking and limiting things “as they truly are”) but becomes a creative force that can assist in empowering the imagination. Seen as theurgic rituals, it becomes clear that Santo Daime works are fundamentally participatory in their emphasis of the bodily enactment of the divine through singing and dancing. In a variation on the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty, who spoke about “singing the world,” we could say that Santo Daime works are about singing and dancing the divine world, the Astral, into being. The isolated and insulated autonomous buffered self changes into a porous self, an enminded body and embodied mind that are intertwined with others and the world. This focus on the body and embodiment in theurgic

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Santo Daime works can hopefully serve to counteract an excessive academic focus on the effect of ayahuasca on the brain. Wouter Hanegraaff has commented on the promising similarities between the religious ritual practices that Iamblichus describes in his work and the phenomenology of contemporary ayahuasca practices.129 I propose that theurgy provides us with a fruitful new language to make sense of interventionist ayahuasca practices, in which divine and more-than-human forces ultimately do the work, rather than the practitioner. Such practices train ayahuasca practitioners to become companions of these divine forces. They offer a new way to work with the gods, with the beings of religion that Latour talks about. On the other hand, viewing ayahuasca practice in terms of theurgy may contribute to rediscovering the existential depth of the long-ignored theurgic tradition, and re-engaging with entering the ecstatic communion with the gods that it describes. As Latour laments, in our Western religious traditions we have lost the capacity to work with beings of religion. There are no teachers and guides anymore, no mystagogues. One of the reasons why meditation and yoga have become so popular in the West might be that these practices do offer such ways of working with beings of religion. And now, new theurgic ayahuasca practices may also revitalize our Western religious traditions. The light may not only come from the East (ex oriente lux), but also from the forest. Finally, two more observations can be made. First, it was self-evident for Iamblichus to speak of the gods in a world that was obviously permeated with divine powers. The task of theurgists was to honor each divinity in a manner appropriate to its specific qualities. Yet, our secular culture has moved away from such a cosmocentric vision. In our secular and post-Darwinian age, the world has become disenchanted. Evolutionary biology, cosmology, and quantum physics are reshaping the religious imagination. We no longer speak of deification or becoming a companion of the gods, because we lack an adequate philosophical framework to do so. Second, for Iamblichus it was self-evident that eros, the unifying principle of the soul, was equal to the unifying principle of the universe. However, as we have seen in chapter 2, for a skeptical thinker like Latour such a unifying principle would have to be immanent to the world, rather than some metaphysical foundation. His principle of irreduction holds that “nothing may be reduced to anything else.” These two observations require that we find a new contemporary language to talk about Iamblichus’s theurgic insights. Also, our age has its own urgent social and environmental problems that require our solidarity. What would it mean today to be a companion of the gods? This is why chapter 6 explores the contemporary relevance of ayahuasca religiosity using a language that also includes scientific and evolutionary

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discourses rather than only religious discourses. How can we take theurgic practices, in which the divine takes up existence in rocks, status, and plant concoctions, seriously today? How can we take liquid divinity seriously today? This chapter will present Latour’s attempts to port religion to the post-Darwinian world of the twenty-first century and use his reflections on a religious response to the climate crisis to come to a contemporary language of theurgy that can describe not only Santo Daime, but also more shamanic-oriented forms of ayahuasca religiosity. NOTES 1. See Muraresku, Immortality Key. 2. Gregory Shaw’s work‌‌‌‌ on Iamblichus is an important resource for much of this chapter, especially his book Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014 [1995]). 3. Paulo Moreira and Edward MacRae, Eu venho de longe: Mestre Irineu e seus companheiros (Salvador: SciELO-EDUFBA, 2011), 142–174, 305–333. 4. Dawson, Santo Daime, 26–30. 5. Goldman, “Preface,” xxx. 6. Ibid., xxiv–xxv. 7. Ido Hartogsohn, “Set and Setting in the Santo Daime,” Frontiers in Pharmacology Volume 12, May 2021, https://doi.org/10.3389/fphar.2021.651037, provides a thorough, methodic, and rich under-the-hood description of the mechanics of such entheogenic initiation within Santo Daime. 8. Santo Daime language is filled with what Hartogsohn terms “astral militarism”: military references to battles, phalanges, enemies, soldiers, arms, swords, shields, and medals (Hartogsohn, “Set and Setting in Santo Daime,” 5). 9. Ibid., 6. 10. As Hartogsohn puts it: “Unlike many other sets and settings for psychedelic use, which recommend letting go and surrendering to the experience—daimistas commonly walk into the daime ritual galvanized and ready to partake in ‘spiritual warfare’” (ibid.). 11. I will not focus on such mediumistic works in this book, but for a very lively and detailed description, see Barnard, Liquid Light, chapter 8. For an overview of the controversy around such mediumistic works in the Santo Daime, see Blainey, Christ Returns from the Jungle, 85–89. 12. See Dawson, “Making Matter Matter.” 13. Goldman, “Preface,” xxxi. 14. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination: Altered States of Knowledge in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 101. Whereas standard accounts portray Iamblichus as a pupil of Porphyry, Hanegraaff argues that there is no actual evidence for this.

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15. This is the form of Neoplatonism that is most well known in the West because it informed Christian metaphysics and theology. 16. This embrace of the body and embodiment has led Shaw to interpret the theurgy of Iamblichus in terms of Asian forms of tantra as a kind of “Platonic Tantra.” Gregory Shaw, “Platonic Tantra,” Quaderni Di Studi Indo-Mediterranei X: Oikosophia: From Intelligence of the Heart to Ecophilosophy, edited by Daniela Boccassini ‌‌‌‌(2017): 269–284. 17. Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 7. Iamblichus exercised great influence over subsequent Neoplatonists such as Proclus (412–485) and Damascius (462–550), and his thought and practice thrived in the Arab world until the tenth century. Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) attempted to revive Iamblichean Neoplatonism in fifteenth-century Florence. 18. The term theourgia originated with second-century Platonists, but Iamblichus is the first to provide a philosophical justification for such ritual practices, explaining and defending them through Platonic categories. 19. For example, chapter 4 in Hanegraaff, Hermetic Spirituality. 20. Iamblichus, De Mysteriis. From here on cited as DM. References will be to the page and line numbers of the Greek text. 21. Quoted in Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, xx. 22. Jonathan Z. Smith, Map Is Not Territory (Leiden: Brill, 1978), 88–103. 23. Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 43. 24. Gregory Shaw, “Living Light: Divine Embodiment in Western Philosophy,” in Seeing with Different Eyes: Essays in Astrology and Divination, edited by Patrick Curry and Angela Voss (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 60. 25. For example, hymn no. 5 in the hinário Nova Dimensão that was received by Padrinho Alfredo. Alfredo Mota de Melo, Mundo Novo [New World], n.d. 26. DM 7,12. 27. DM 8,5. 28. DM 10,1–9‌‌‌‌. Quoted in Gregory Shaw, “Containing Ecstasy: The Strategies of Iamblichean Theurgy,” Dionysius XXI (2003), 64. 29. DM 8,8–9. 30. Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 137. 31. Emma C. Clarke, Iamblichus’ De Mysteriis: A Manifesto of the Miraculous (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001), 29. 32. Doyle, Darwin’s Pharmacy, 38f. 33. Ibid. 34. DM 28, 6–11. Quoted in Peter Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 101. 35. Shaw, “Containing Ecstasy,” 57n19. 36. “The Egyptians praised by Iamblichus worshiped the true gods of Platonism: the unchanging patterns of nature; they were a community perfectly integrated with the natural world” (Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 24). 37. Dawson, “Making Matter Matter,” 247. 38. Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 173. 39. Ibid., 140.

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40. Shaw, “Platonic Tantra,” 275. 41. Plotinus distinguishes between intelligible and sensible matter. Of these two, it is especially sensible matter (the natural world) that is the cause of the soul’s confusion. 42. Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 51. 43. The soul can be realigned to the manifesting energies of deities that are connected to these objects. Iamblichus agreed with Aristotle, who considered the soul as the actualization (entelecheia) of the body. 44. Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 56. 45. See Barnard, Liquid Light, 210–215, for some very eloquent descriptions of such visionary experiences. 46. Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 41. 47. There are strong parallels with Asian forms of tantra, for example, esoteric Buddhism (which was a strong influence on Zen). The distinction between theurgy and theology, between “doing God” and “talking God,” is similar to the distinction between tantra and sutra (doing Buddha and talking Buddha), that is used by esoteric schools of Buddhism to distinguish between esoteric and exoteric Buddhism. See Shaw, “Platonic Tantra.” 48. Iamblichus refers to Egyptian, Chaldean, and Assyrian mystery traditions as historical sources for such practices. 49. Cited in Marvin Meyer, The Ancient Mysteries: A Sourcebook (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 12. 50. Proclus, In Platonis rem publicam [Commentary on Plato’s Republic] II 108, 17–30. 51. Shaw, “Containing Ecstasy,” 58f. 52. DM 96,13–97,9. Quoted in Shaw, “Living Light,” 71. 53. Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 109. 54. Iamblichus distinguishes between cosmic gods that are material, and hypercosmic gods that are immaterial. Material gods are the celestial deities: the sun, moon, and the stars. The immaterial gods are the intelligible deities (Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 154). The soul can reach the immaterial level only by first passing through the material gods (ibid., 155). 55. Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 56. 56. DM 133,18. 57. Both the Key of Harmony and Consecration of the Space are from the São Paulo–based Esoteric Circle of the Communion of Thought, as well as the Prayer of Caritas, which was originally channeled in 1873 by the French medium Madam W. Krell. See Blainey, Christ Returns from the Jungle, 190–191, 264, 457n9, 464n19. 58. DM 239,5–6. 59. DM 47,9–11 and 49. 60. DM 238,1–5. 61. DM 42,9–17. Quoted in Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 199. 62. Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 210. 63. Shaw, Containing Ecstasy. 64. DM 158,11–159,6. Quoted in Shaw, “Containing Ecstasy,” 56.

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65. Shaw adds: “Hyperphusin is accurately translated as ‘supernatural,’ but the Iamblichean supernatural should not be confused with its later Christian expression. As a Pythagorean, Iamblichus’s hyperphusin was never removed from nature but was invisibly present in it as its principle. Indeed, material nature is rooted in the immaterial even as it unfolds its powers into temporal reality” (Shaw, “Containing Ecstasy,” 57n19).. 66. DM 158,11–159,6. Quoted in Shaw, “Containing Ecstasy,” 56. 67. Plato, Phaedrus 265a, 9–11. Quoted in ibid. 68. DM 115,3–15. Quoted in ibid., 59. 69. Barnard, Liquid Light, 80–84. 70. DM 109,13; 115,3–7; 157,8–15. 71. Shaw, “Containing Ecstasy,” 59. 72. DM 111,9–15. 73. DM 133,19–134,8. Quoted in Shaw, “Containing Ecstasy,” 62. 74. Blainey, Christ Returns from the Jungle, 185. 75. Shaw, “Containing Ecstasy,” 62. 76. Ibid., 63. 77. Shaw, “Living Light,” 66. 78. Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 124. 79. Latour’s beings of religion that have already installed themselves in the subject. 80. Shaw, “Living Light,” 66. 81. Ibid., 70. 82. Shaw, “Containing Ecstasy,” 70. Shaw quotes the Latin grammarian Priscian: “[Imagination] rouses up images from sense perception to opinion and extends images from Intellect down to opinion as it receives these images from wholes. And imagination (phantasia) is uniquely characterized by this two-fold assimilation: as both producing and receiving likenesses that are appropriate, either to intelligible powers or to materially generative powers, or to those in the middle, fitting the outside with the inside and establishing the images that descend from the Intellect upon the lives extending down around the body.” Priscian, On Theophrastus’ On Sense Perception, trans. by Pamela Huby (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 23, 16–23 (translation modified slightly by Shaw). 83. Shaw, “Containing Ecstasy,” 73. 84. Spiritual bypassing is the tendency to avoid developmental tasks by focusing on spirituality. 85. Shaw, “Living Light,” 66. 86. Shaw, “Containing Ecstasy,” 73. 87. The “bonds of generation” were personified by Iamblichus as the daimons, mediating entities that tied souls to their bodies: “It was their task to exteriorize specific aspects of the divine, and in disseminating the divine presence into matter daimons also led the attention of particular souls into a centrifugal and extroverted attitude. This was what bound them to their bodies and caused them to suffer” (Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 44f). 88. Shaw, “Containing Ecstasy,” 74. 89. Ibid, 75.

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90. Shaw, “Living Light,” 73. 91. Ibid. For Iamblichus, the most useful goals of catharsis were: “(1) withdrawal from foreign elements; (2) restoration of one’s own essence; (3) perfection; (4) fullness; (5) independence; (6) ascent to the creative cause; (7) conjunction of parts to wholes; and (8) contribution of power, life, and activity from the wholes to the parts.” Iamblichus, De anima, text, translation, and commentary by John F. Finamore and John M. Dillon (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 70.1–5 (translation by Shaw). 92. Shaw, “Living Light,” 72. 93. Blainey, Christ Returns from the Jungle, 185. 94. Ibid. 95. Ibid., 189. 96. Ibid., 14 97. Dawson, Santo Daime, 23. 98. Hartogsohn, “Set and Setting in the Santo Daime,” 5. 99. Ibid., 201. 100. Ibid. Juramidam is also understood by most daimistas to be Master Irineu’s “name in the Astral”; see Barnard, Liquid Light, 86. 101. DM 47,13–48,4. 102. Ruth Majercik, Chaldean Oracles. Text, Translation and Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 1989), frag. 1. Quoted in Shaw, “Containing Ecstasy,” 63. 103. Shaw, “Containing Ecstasy,” 69. 104. DM 47,13–48,4. 105. Shaw, “Containing Ecstasy,” 69. 106. DM 238,17–239. 107. See Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 162–166. 108. DM 141,14–142, 3. 109. DM 97,1–9. 110. DM 149,4–17. 111. DM 97,4–5. 112. Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 125. 113. DM 81,13–82, 2. Quoted in Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 246. 114. Shaw, “Containing Ecstasy,” 72. 115. Proclus, In Platonis rem publicam, II 39,5–11. Quoted in ibid. 116. Ibid., II 39,28–40,4. Quoted in ibid. 117. DM 132,9–133,9. 118. DM 86,5–14. Quoted in Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 251. 119. DM 71–90. 120. DM 87,14–18. 121. Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 275. 122. Shaw, “Containing Ecstasy,” 72. 123. Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 129. 124. Ibid., 130. 125. Ibid., 131. 126. Ibid., 133. 127. Partridge, High Culture, 335f.

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128. Dawson, Santo Daime, 93–111. 129. Hanegraaff, “Ayahuasca Groups and Networks in the Netherlands.” Hanegraaff has called for detailed comparative research, which is beyond the scope of this work.

Chapter 6

Facing Gaia Through Ayahuasca

Ayahuasca visionary experiences often involve nature and natural phenomena‌‌‌‌. This chapter is about such a deeper connection to nature and the earth that can be the result of ayahuasca practice. As the last stop on our philosophical journey, we will attempt to find a contemporary discourse that can clarify theurgic ayahuasca practices, a discourse that will focus on the reason for such practices, rather than on their ontological aspects. And after zooming in on Santo Daime in chapter 5, we will zoom out once again in this chapter, trying to address the entire field of ayahuasca religiosity. Chapter 5 used an Iamblichean theurgic narrative to make sense of Santo Daime religiosity, talking about working with beings of religion and becoming their companion. It became clear that the goal of such a theurgic path is not to escape or transcend the world, but to assist liquid divinity (however conceived) in the task of healing the cosmos. Today, such a task also seems increasingly urgent to many ayahuasca practitioners. We no longer live in the times of Iamblichus, but have entered the Anthropocene, an ecological mutation of unprecedented scale in which many unexpected connections between human activity and the natural world become apparent. The COVID pandemic is the most recent example of this, but global climate change and diminishing biodiversity form even greater challenges. In order to engage with such challenges, many ayahuasca practitioners today, especially those working within a (neo)shamanic context, do not talk about working with beings of religion but about strengthening their connection to the earth. Being a companion of beings of religion today means practicing solidarity with all sentient beings—including the earth itself, reconceived as the Greek goddess Gaia. This chapter will focus not on the personal transformation that contemplative ayahuasca practices can yield, but on the social, cultural, and political action that they can inspire. Such social action has to do with a sense of solidarity with all living beings, the result of an increased sensitivity to the pain of others. Such solidarity is not inherent in human nature or founded upon a 187

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transcendent moral order. It is always co-constructed. By extending our “we,” the beings that we feel related to and responsible for, our solidarity grows. And although many remain anthropocentric in only allowing other humans in the new “we,” Latour also includes nonhuman beings. He has argued for a “parliament of things” in which rivers, mountains, trees, and animals are also given a voice. This chapter will first present Richard Doyle’s ecodelic hypothesis: the use of ayahuasca produces experiences of interconnection between humans and the biodiversity of our larger ecosystem.1 According to the ecodelic narrative, the point of drinking ayahuasca in a ceremonial context is to contribute to facing and saving the earth, seen as Gaia. Ayahuasca can be seen as an ambassador of Gaia, and ayahuasca practices are not about having mystical experiences but about waking up to our interconnection with Gaia. Next, such ecodelic practices will be discussed as an instance of what religion scholar Bron Taylor has called “dark green religion.” The next section will describe (neo)shamanic ayahuasca religiosity as animist ecodelic practices. It will follow David Abram in arguing that shamanism is indeed about working with gods and spirits conceived, however, not as supernatural beings but as invisible, natural, more-than-human powers. Finally, this chapter attempts to adapt Iamblichus’s theurgic language to a contemporary context. It will use the metaphor of “porting.” To a computer programmer, porting a software program or application means modifying it for use on a different platform or with a different operating system. To port an application, one must rewrite the sections of code that are system-specific and then recompile the program on the new platform.2 To philosophically port Iamblichus’s theurgic language means to modify it for use outside the metaphysical platform of Neoplatonism. For this porting project, we will return to our philosophical diplomat Bruno Latour, who has struggled to come to a new religious language for our secular age. As we have seen, for Latour, religion is a matter of ritual practice rather than creedal belief. A new religious language should be theurgical rather than theological. This chapter will present Latour’s new Gaia-centered religiosity for what he calls “earthlings.” For Latour, such religiosity is about returning to the world over and over again, rather than attempting to transcend it. He has argued that the problems of climate change and diminishing biodiversity have deep religious roots, and that addressing them also requires a religious response: not only understanding, but also experiencing and even becoming our entanglement with Gaia.

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DOYLE’S ECODELIC INTERPRETATION Richard Doyle’s term “ecodelic,” rather than psychedelic or entheogenic, highlights an important effect of ayahuasca experiences: they reliably produce an “ecodelic insight,” which refers to “the sudden and absolute conviction that the psychonaut is involved in a densely interconnected ecosystem for which contemporary tactics of human identity are insufficient.”3 One’s usual sense of being a Cartesian buffered self that stands in opposition to the outside world gives way to a felt continuum between inside and outside (Taylor’s porous self). One feels interrelated with and mycelially connected to a nature-wide community. Ayahuasca makes conscious our ongoing participation in living global ecosystems. Such ecodelic insight involves “a sudden apprehension of immanence, a connectivity that exceeds the rhetorical capacities of an ego.”4 Doyle’s ecodelic hypothesis suggests that humans may be unwitting partners in evolution with psychedelic plants such as ayahuasca. In the ayahuasca counterculture, it is a commonly shared notion that “ayahuasca represents the intelligence of nature—an ancient, botanical sentience—reaching out from the Amazon jungle at this critical juncture to change human consciousness and behavior to avert our seemingly inevitable biospheric collapse.”5 For example, Dennis McKenna writes that during an ayahuasca ceremony in Brazil, he somehow understood that ayahuasca was the embodiment of the plant intelligence that embraced and covered the earth, that together the community of the plant species that existed on the earth provided the nurturing energy that made life on earth possible. He calls ayahuasca a plant ambassador to the human community.6 According to Doyle, ayahuasca seduces us to interact with it in order to teach us ecodelic practices that help us to creatively thrive in an ecosystemic rather than an egocentric context, to confront the environmental crisis, and to discover how to live in a reality that has itself become plural in the context of global ecosystems. Such practices extend our solidarity beyond a mere solidarity with other human beings. Also the plants, animals, mountains, rivers, yes, the entire earth, become part of the circle of our solidarity. Extending this circle is a matter of expanding our imagination. Doyle argues that, in order to be able to respond to global climatic change, we must evolve. We must recognize plants, and the earth itself, as “a world-governing body—the world’s body—whose weaponry is temperature change, rising ocean levels, and emergent and proliferating diseases.”7 We need to rearticulate human autonomy: we are interconnected with global ecosystems, capital and information flows, as well as the carbon cycle. In order to alter what we do, we must reimagine who we are. Our separateness from

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ecosystems is an illusion—we are membranes inseparable from a global ecology. It is not about understanding this interconnection, but about experiencing it, and even becoming it. We need to become persuaded on a cellular level. Doyle’s academic discipline is rhetoric, the practice of learning and teaching eloquence and persuasion. The rhetorical challenge is not to merely make people understand their interconnection with global ecosystems, but to make them experience it. We need practices to develop ecological consciousness8 that enables us to apprehend the immanence that is inherent in biological systems: they are massively interconnected with themselves in a web structure without subjects or objects (Latour’s actor-networks). Ritual ayahuasca practices, understood as ecodelic practices that help us to realize our interconnection with global ecosystems, can be seen as a contemporary form of theurgy that uses a naturalized discourse of attuning to natural forces rather than a religious language of engaging with gods and spirits. It may seem that therefore such theurgy is secular. However, I want to argue that it can be seen as religious, as long as we can find a new religious language to clarify such theurgy. We live in times that are very different from those of Iamblichus, in which Platonism was still a shared philosophical language that could serve as a foundation for the description of theurgic practice. Doyle argues that the learning that takes place in ayahuasca ceremonies has to do with one’s relationship to one’s experience. For him, visionary ayahuasca experiences are born out of “a connectivity that exceeds the rhetorical capacities of an ego and simultaneously summons transpersonal characters who, at the very least, function as rhetorical tactics for managing the strangeness of ecodelic experience.”9 Talk about meeting all kinds of entities, according to Doyle, is a strategy for managing the strangeness of a felt interconnectivity that exceeds our capacity for putting it into words. This may explain, he argues, why these entities take such diverse shapes in contemporary reports of ayahuasca experiences, from machine elves to aliens to UFOs. Encountering entities is a possible cognitive strategy for dealing with the overwhelming intensity of the ayahuasca experience that has to do more with set and setting than with any particular substantial ontology. For dealing with such an ontology, one needs a liquid ontology, an ontological openness that doesn’t deny that something of an ontological nature takes place, but that refuses to pin it down to a particular ontological interpretation. This is why for Doyle, the ability to navigate the strangeness of ayahuasca experiences hinges on being able to let go of the need to interpret one’s experience in particular ontological terms.10 Doyle argues that experienced ayahuasca practitioners “learn to manage the information of the experience without ascribing an ontology to it.”11 They learn to cultivate ontological openness. This learning effect is what Ronald Siegel noticed in his experiments with psychedelics:

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In the controlled set and setting of the experiments . . . the psychonauts held on to the experimental demands and kept up their detached reporting. The untrained subjects, however, frequently described themselves as having become part of the imagery. At such times they stopped using similes in their reports and asserted that the images were real.12

As Doyle explains, “The deployment of rhetorical devices (similes) useful to blurring but not disavowing the distinction between a hallucination and a perception becomes the very marker of a trained psychonaut.”13 By means of the deployment of similes (it was as if . . . ) they systematically resist a premature resolution of the fundamental kōan: is what I experience true or false?14 As Doyle notes, the very categories of true and false may be non-sequiturs in a world of information constantly subject to change. What is important is not the verification of one’s experience (Is it really true or real what I experience?), but about learning to navigate it, live through it, and allow a transformation to take place.15 In Latourian terms: a different mode of verification applies to ayahuasca experiences. It has to do with their transformative capacity. Learning to resist premature ontological interpretations of one’s experience requires developing the skill that Doyle calls “blanking the mind.” During an ayahuasca ceremony, there will be a multitude of entities competing for one’s attention. It is important to see them all as empty of inherent existence, as the Buddhist notion of emptiness expresses.16 Doyle recommends Buddhist contemplative practices in order to develop these skills. In the end, as Doyle says, it is not about ayahuasca visions being true or untrue, but about finding a way to navigate through them without moving on the inside.17 From an ecodelic perspective, ayahuasca practices do not require a belief in the existence or nonexistence of beings of religion. They only require a faith in the transformative quality of the practices. This is why Doyle would say that a commitment to the practice is most important. Rather than either believing or not believing in the existence of beings of religion, it is important to listen to their messages and allow these to transform us. DARK GREEN RELIGION Ecodelic ayahuasca practices can be considered part of what religion scholar Bron Taylor has called dark green religion.18 Taylor has argued that in North America, traditional religiosity has for many been replaced by spiritual practices that hold nature as sacred. Such groups include radical environmental activists, lifestyle-focused bioregionalists, New Agers involved in ecopsychology, and groups that hold scientific narratives as sacred. Taylor notes that

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Darwin’s theory of natural selection shattered traditional explanations of the fecundity and the diversity of the biosphere, and that religion has never been the same since. Traditional religious beliefs in nonmaterial divine beings have become less plausible. They are being replaced by new perceptions, both explicitly and implicitly religious.19 Although many contemporary environmentally oriented, spiritually motivated individuals and movements reject religious and supernatural worldviews, Taylor argues that they can be understood as religious. For him, the search for interconnection with what people most value, depend on, and consider sacred is what distinguishes religiosity from spirituality, which is often concerned with mere personal growth. Even though the people that Taylor writes about often self-describe as spiritual or even spiritual but not religious, he prefers to continue using the term “religion,” provided that one does not limit the definition of religion to “belief in supernatural beings.” He coined the new term “dark green religion” to describe those new forms of religiosity in which “nature is sacred, has intrinsic value, and is therefore due reverent care.”20 Taylor distinguishes such dark green religion from green religion, which merely holds that environmentally friendly behavior is a religious obligation.21 For example, Christians may feel that it is their religious duty to be shepherds of the earth because the Bible tells them so. For Taylor, dark green religion differs from such green religion in that it is “generally deep ecological, biocentric, or ecocentric, considering all species to be intrinsically valuable, that is, valuable apart from their usefulness to human beings.”22 This is based on a felt kinship with the rest of life, a critique of human superiority, and a metaphysics of interconnection and interdependence. Based on his empirical research, Taylor distinguishes four often overlapping forms of dark green religion: two based on animism and two based on what he calls Gaian Earth Religion (holistic and organicist worldviews).23 He defines animism as “perceptions that natural entities, forces, and nonhuman life-forms have one or more of the following: a soul or vital lifeforce or spirit, personhood (an affective life and personal intentions), and consciousness, often but not always including special intelligence or powers.”24 Such intelligences are sometimes, but not always, considered divine. The animistic perception is that “spiritual intelligences or lifeforces animate natural objects or living things,”25 and that it is possible, for example, through ritual practices, to communicate with these intelligences or lifeforces and develop beneficial relationships with them.26 Taylor distinguishes between spiritual animism, involving belief in immaterial spiritual intelligences, and a more agnostic or skeptical naturalistic animism that prefers to speak of life forms or natural forces. Forms of Gaian Earth Religiosity subscribe to the Gaia theory of the British scientist James Lovelock, which understands the biosphere (universe

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or cosmos) as a self-regulating organism, and that uses religious language and metaphors of the sacred to express the feeling of belonging and connection to this larger system.27 Lovelock chose the name “Gaia” for the fragile, complex system through which living phenomena modify the earth. Lovelock argues that it is important to recognize that we belong to and are dependent upon Gaia. His Gaia theory argues that the biosphere functions as a self-regulating entity that maintains the conditions necessary for the life forms that it contains.28 Whereas Gaian spirituality sees Gaia as part of a divine cosmos, Gaian naturalism is more skeptical of such ontological notions.29 Taylor concludes that dark green religion could be both a sensible post-Darwinian religion (one that is rationally defensible) and a sensory post-Darwinian religion (one that defends the possibility of new kinds of sensory perception).30 ANIMIST ECODELIC PRACTICES Doyle argues that our human perception is “wired” for recognizing ecodelic interconnection; it is highly tunable by ecodelic practices. The American ecophilosopher David Abram has described shamanic practice as connected to such ecodelic perception based on an ongoing, reciprocal relationship and communion with human and nonhuman entities. In his 1996 book, The Spell of the Sensuous, he draws on his experiences with indigenous shamanism to further describe such a form of perception in a more-than-human world.31 He stresses that we are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human. He argues that shamans are not the priests, but the ecologists of tribal societies. The role of the shaman is not to encounter “supernatural” entities,” but to engage the mysterious powers, beings, and forces of nature itself. Shamans mediate between the human community and the larger ecological field, the multiple nonhuman entities that constitute the local landscape, from plants and animals to winds and weather patterns. Abram argues that this ecological dimension of the shaman’s craft has often been overlooked by Christian missionaries and anthropologists due to the immanent frame assumption that the natural world is largely determinate and mechanical, and that more-than-human forces must therefore be of some other, nonphysical realm above nature, “supernatural.”32 The missionaries assumed a belief in supernatural, otherworldly powers among tribal persons, whom they saw as awestruck and entranced by nonhuman (but natural) forces. Abram argues: “The deeply mysterious powers and entities with whom the shaman enters into a rapport are ultimately the same forces—the same plants, animal, forests, and winds—that to literate, ‘civilized’ Europeans are just so much scenery, the pleasant backdrop of our more pressing human concerns.”33

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Humans, in an indigenous context, experience their own consciousness as simply one form of awareness among many other, alternate ones. By shifting out of one’s common state of consciousness, one is able to “make contact with the other organic forms of sensitivity and awareness with which human existence is entwined,” and “enter into a rapport with the multiple nonhuman sensibilities that animate the local landscape.”34 From a shamanic point of view, such alternate forms of consciousness open us up to the experience of existing in a world made up of multiple intelligences and allow us to send our awareness into other dimensions. Yet, Abram argues, these other dimensions are neither simply “supernatural,” nor are they realms entirely internal to the personal psyche of the practitioner. Rather, the sensuous world itself may be the dwelling place of the gods, of the numinous powers that can either sustain or extinguish human life. The shaman makes contact with such powers, not by sending his awareness out beyond the natural world or by journeying into his personal psyche, but by propelling his awareness laterally.35 Propelling our awareness laterally is indeed what ayahuasca does to our mode of consciousness. This is why both the terms psychedelic (suggesting that ayahuasca merely amplifies our inner experience) and entheogenic (suggesting that ayahuasca merely reveals the god within) fall short, and the term ecodelic is more suitable to capture this lateral expansion of our awareness that reveals more modes of existence, and more types of intelligence, to us. The experience of existing in a world made up of multiple intelligences is related to the notion of animism. The British religion scholar Graham Harvey has done much to rehabilitate this term. Whereas the older usage of the term “animism” was used to indicate a “belief in spirits” or “non-empirical beings,” the term is increasingly used today in a new way as a shorthand reference to human participation in a larger-than-human, multispecies community.36 Such a new related, embodied, and eco-activist animism is often more naturalist than metaphysical. Contemporary new animists are, as Harvey puts it, “people who recognize that the world is full of persons, only some of which are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others.”37 Harvey has described this new animism as located “in between” in the relating together of persons (often of different species‌‌‌‌), rather than “within,” in the possession of or by “spirits”: “Animism is more accurately understood as being concerned with learning how to be a good person in respectful relationships with other persons.”38 The various kinds of shamanic ayahuasca practices can be seen as a way of creating, discovering, and communicating worlds of meaning. Environmental philosophers Jim Cheney and Anthony Weston have coined the term “ceremonial worlds” for such worlds of meaning.39 They observe that “Euro-Americans tend to be concerned with ontology, correct descriptions

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of indigenous worlds. Many indigenous people, on the other hand, are concerned with the right relationships to those beings that populate their worlds, they are concerned with mindfulness, ‘respect.’”40 Their religiosity is not about the sacred as an object of knowledge or belief, but about sacramental practice, a matter of comportment that brings into being a ceremonial world. Sacramental practices create ceremonial songs of the world that have the potential to open up its hidden potential.‌‌‌‌41 Davi Kopenawa, a Brazilian Yanomami shaman, and Bruce Albert, a French anthropologist, elucidate a shamanic perspective on the activity of spirits by conveying a particular indigenous (Yanomami) spirit ontology.42 The spirits help humans to achieve knowledge, not by giving them information, but by showing them direction. Seen from a spirit ontology in which trees, animals, humans, and spirits form an interconnected web, different modes of transforming arise that are aimed at healing and seeing direction: “The aspect of healing has its eye on the harmony of the web. Indigenous knowledge in different forms claims that we get sick when the web is not as supportive as we would hope—when it is hostile, eating away at this fragile structure we call our own (body and psyche or soul).”43 Seeing direction is necessary, as Angela Roothaan explains, because the world of relations in which we live and move is too complex to oversee. The Western approach promises, in its claim to universality, the possibility to get a bird’s eye view of things. Shamanistic philosophies take such a promise to be utterly wrong. All knowledge is limited, by nature, and therefore we always need “direction.” Direction is not the same as a blue-print or a clear telos, it is no hoped-for eschaton. It is a relative thing, of which we ourselves, after receiving it, will have to find out how to put it into practice and change our life or our world to follow it.44

From such a perspective, the spirits can provide insights for healing and direction during experiences in which the consciousness of everyday experiences has been transcended. In such a way, the self can be transformed. TOWARD A NEW RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE Let us consult our philosophical guide Bruno Latour for a philosophical perspective on such animist ecodelic practices. Latour attempts to come to a new religious language for a post-Darwinian world that goes beyond the historical answers of Western theology: theism (a personal God created the world and can intervene in it in miraculous ways), deism (a personal God designed the laws of nature and created the universe but then refrained from interfering

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with it), and pantheism (divinity is identical with reality; everything constitutes a unity, and this unity is divine). Such a new language needs to take Darwin’s revolution into account. Prior to Darwin, explanations of evolution assumed the existence of an unknowable large-scale divine force of cosmic progress, hidden from view, operating behind the scenes, that directed the general purpose and direction of evolution. However, they couldn’t explain how this divine large-scale force related to the many palpable and testable small-scale forces that were found to direct adaptation and diversity at the local level. How did the one large-scale force and the many small-scale forces work together? How was the vast complex of local unities derived from some kind of divine original unity? This remained a paradox, until Darwin came up with a radical solution: there is no divine large-scale force driving evolution; the process of evolution can be entirely explained through upward extrapolation from the many small-scale forces, which Darwin called “natural selection.”45 The Darwinian revolution was that “what is given and available—here and now and in plain sight—is sufficient to account for its own organization.” As a result, the whole of the world’s historical and material complexity is no longer “a mute and static screen that hides from view the real arena of divine action” but “appears as dynamic and alive,” as “something intelligibly at work.”46 Similarly, Latour attempts to talk about the divine not as an all-powerful and omnipotent large-scale force at work behind the scenes, but as the many beings of religion that spring in and out of existence. Liquid divinity pervades and animates religious actor-networks. Latour’s post-Darwinian religiosity would not need a single divine large-scale force (God) to account for change and transformation. Rather, many natural small-scale forces (Latour’s beings of religion that are part of actor-networks) can account for the given world being dynamic and alive. Religious practice is not about achieving a mystical union with a pregiven divine reality, but about learning to work together with beings of religion, based on Latour’s principle of irreduction: “Nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything may be allied to everything else.”47 However, for Latour this is not a challenge to religion but an opportunity for true religiosity.48 For Latour, such true religiosity is not a matter of theology but of theurgy49: not about belief in God as a transcendent absolute withdrawn beyond human discourse, or in angels and bodhisattvas as invisible supernatural entities, but about practical engagement with liquid divinity that opens us up to the transformative effects of beings of religion.50 Such beings of religion are brought into being by theurgic practices of language, music, and rhythm. They can change according to how they are addressed; this is why ritual theurgic practices are so fragile.51 As we have seen before, beings of religion are both constructed and real. They depend on a sacramental language of words, music,

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and rhythm—and they also exist in their own mode of existence.52 Through the Moderns’ fights against idols and fetishes, they have deprived themselves of ‌‌‌‌ the possibility of making well.53 Practices that co-construct beings of religion cultivate Doyle’s ecodelic perception and Abram’s capacity to propel our awareness laterally, traversing different modes of existence within the actor-network. For Latour, religious ritual practices do not give us more information about beings of religion; they aim to transform the participants in the ritual. Such practices demand a liquid and flexible self. We need to be capable of letting ourselves be carried along and carried away by more-than-human powers that are capable at any moment of shattering us or installing themselves in us.54 In 2013, Latour held the Gifford Lectures on natural religion. In these lectures, he engages with the global climate crisis. He argues that present attempts to govern the climate through scientific and technological solutions, as if CO2 were just another case of pollution, are not very effective, and that we need a completely new approach, a new climatic regime. Latour attempts to provide the philosophical and religious foundations for such a new climatic regime.55 Such a new climatic regime must be religious, he argues, however, religion based on practices rather than based on a belief system. In addressing the current climate crisis, most people assume that we need to turn to science in order to find technological solutions to the problems that we face. For Latour, however, the response must be religious. The climate crisis is as much a local crisis as a global crisis, and whereas we may need scientific research to address the global crisis, we need religious practices to address the local crisis. We need to change our relationship with the earth. We need an ecological religiosity (or a religious ecology). For Latour, the word “religion” designates “that to which one clings, what one protects carefully, what one thus is careful not to neglect.”56 Therefore, there is no such thing as an irreligious collective: each collective has those things that it is careful not to neglect; if it is not divinities or deities, it could be Society or the Market that serves as their supreme authority, in whose name they gather. However, “there are collectives that neglect many elements that other collectives consider extremely important and that they need to care for constantly.”57 Therefore, “to be religious is first of all to become attentive to that to which others cling. It is thus, in part, to learn to behave as a diplomat.”58 Latour defines ontology as “the diplomatic care with which we collectively come to grips with what is and what should be assembled in the world.”59 We need a radically different relationship with the natural world. Galileo claimed that the earth was a planet like any other. One could treat all the planets, all the suns, all the galaxies, as so many billiard balls. Every place was literally the same as every other, except for its coordinates. It was a movement

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from a closed world to an infinite universe. In exact opposition to Galileo, Latour argues, Lovelock discovered that the earth is a planet like no other, the only one that is capable of supporting intelligent life. It is a return from the infinite universe to our closed world. It describes the earth as an actor with agency. Latour notes that this is exactly the opposite of the Copernican revolution, in which it was shown that the earth was merely a billiard ball turning endlessly in a vast universe. Now, the earth has again become “an active, local, limited, sensitive, fragile, trembling, and easily irritated envelope.”60 The challenge is to reconnect people to the world by making Gaia an instinctive belief.61 According to the ecodelic hypothesis, “making Gaia an instinctive belief” is exactly the kind of transformation that ayahuasca is aiming for. For ayahuasca practitioners, it may be exactly the regular engaging with ayahuasca that helps to make Gaia an instinctive belief, and to translate conscious ideas about Gaia into unconscious, embodied understanding. Latour’s Gaian religiosity goes beyond both traditional forms of religion and current forms of secularity. First, for Latour, religion as it has been imagined since the seventeenth century is deeply problematic. The Modern approach to Religion imagines it as either something that takes place “in the mind” without any relation to reality, or as something involving an invisible supernatural world. However, Latour disagrees with both. As he sees it, such an approach to Religion “has only two equally fatal exit strategies: one is to limit itself to the inner sanctum of the soul; the other to flee into the supernatural.”62 The first exit strategy turns religion into spirituality and takes away all ontology. The second exit strategy fixes ontology into one specific form. Second, Latour argues that our current society, even though it seems secularized, is actually still in the grip of Religion: “There is always a deity waiting in ambush that demands to be made commensurable with no other—its name matters little.”63 The secular Moderns are the direct heirs of monotheistic Christianity, in that they continue to connect supreme authority with truth. As we already saw in chapter 2, Modern iconoclasm rejects all religious believers, similar to how Christians rejected non-Christian believers: “From the true God fulminating against all idols, we have moved to the true Nature fulminating against all the false gods.”64 Latour shows that the Nature that orders the scientific view of the world bears a close resemblance to the God that orders the religious view of the world: truth is external, universal, and as indisputable as it is indestructible.65 For Latour, therefore, the fundamental opposition is no longer that between Religious believers and secular unbelievers. Today, the opposition is between both Religious believers and secular unbelievers on the one hand, and a new group of followers of Gaia that he calls “Terrestrials” on the other. Both Religious believers and secular unbelievers, Latour argues, are still caught up in the myth of a universal and monolithic Truth. Religious believers

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believe in their own and only true God. They are caught up in a particular substantial ontology. For secular unbelievers, their one and only true God is called Nature, and Science is its messenger. And although they claim they have stepped away from ontological questions because, since Kant, the only reality that we can know is the phenomenal one, they actually subscribe to a materialistic ontology in which the material world is the only one that truly exists. Latour’s Terrestrials, however, the people assembled under Gaia, do not subscribe to the substantial ontology of either Religion or Science. They have ontological flexibility and give supreme authority not to a global ordering principle of the world, but to local connection and composition, to relationality and fragility. They have taken the participatory turn. As Latour hopes, the people of Gaia might escape from the bifocal vision (the bifurcation of Nature and Culture) from which the people of Nature suffer so badly.66 It is these Terrestrials that ayahuasca practitioners belong to. They are not interested in being either a Religious believer or a secular unbeliever. Their contemplative practice centers around becoming more sensitive to local connection, relationality, and fragility. In that sense they can be seen as exponents of a new type of Gaian religiosity. In Latour’s Gaian religiosity, religion is not the work of escaping this world. It is the practice of returning to it, over and over again. It is what breaks our will to go away, our will to simply withdraw, and it brings us back to the ordinary world at our feet. Religion not only takes us to new ontological worlds, but it also brings us back again and again to the field of immanence and reveals the nearness of what is often too near to be seen. It keeps us from fleeing so that we can attend to the resistant availability of the given world.67 Ritual religious practices are “tools for practicing an immanence that calls us to gracefully attend to our relations in the here and now.”68 Our attention must be redirected to what is directly beneath our feet.69 Religious practice transforms us through the twisting of our ordinary certainties. It is not about taking refuge in distant other realities, but about conversion or metanoia, a fundamental change of heart. Religious experience is ineffable, not in the sense of being aimed at a transcendent unknowable world beyond reference, but in the sense that the experience of riding a bike is ineffable. Latour’s way of describing his new Gaian religiosity may contribute to finding a new language to describe ayahuasca religiosity as a contemporary form of theurgy. This is compatible with Doyle’s ecodelic interpretation, which stresses the experience and embodiment of our interconnection with global ecosystems as the most important transformative effect of ayahuasca practices. We learn to work together with all kinds of more-than-human forces, regardless of whether we interpret these as beings of religion or not. Described in this way, contemporary ayahuasca religiosity fits well within Bron Taylor’s larger movement of dark green religion. Taylor’s empirical

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research has identified both spiritual and naturalistic varieties of dark green religion. Whereas Santo Daime religiosity fits within the spiritual varieties, much (neo)shamanistic ayahuasca religiosity fits more within the naturalistic varieties as described by David Abram. The challenge has been to find an updated version of a theurgic understanding of such naturalistic ayahuasca religiosity. Latour’s attempts at a language to describe a new Gaian religiosity for Terrestrials, beyond Religious believers or skeptical unbelievers, might contribute to such an updated theurgic understanding. This chapter has updated Iamblichus’s participatory theurgic discourse in an attempt to explore the contemporary relevance of ayahuasca religiosity. It has ported this discourse from a premodern Neoplatonic platform to a contemporary post-Darwinian platform in order to make it more suitable for taking on the great challenges of our contemporary age: climate change, global warming, and diminishing biodiversity. We need a new Gaian religiosity for Terrestrials as a religious response to the climate crisis. I have suggested that ayahuasca practices may lead us to such a Gaian religiosity as part of the wider phenomenon of dark green religion, in which nature is seen as sacred and worthy of reverent care. Both (neo)shamanic forms of ayahuasca religiosity and Santo Daime can be seen as the cultivation of ecodelic perception that allows us to commune with more-than-human powers of nature, regardless of whether these are conceptualized as beings of religion by practitioners themselves. NOTES 1. Doyle, Darwin’s Pharmacy, 26. 2. Miller, Speculative Grace, 4. 3. Doyle, Darwin’s Pharmacy, 20. 4. Ibid. 5. Pinchbeck and Rokhlin, When Plants Dream, xvi. 6. Dennis McKenna, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss: My Life with Terence McKenna (Clearwater, MN: Polaris Publications, 2012). 7. Doyle, Darwin’s Pharmacy, 7. 8. See Christopher Uhl, Developing Ecological Consciousness: Path to a Sustainable World (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). 9. Doyle, Darwin’s Pharmacy, 20. 10. Ibid., 24. 11. Ibid., 226. 12. Ronald Siegel, Intoxication: The Universal Drive for Mind-Altering Substances (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 2005), 235. 13. Doyle, Darwin's Pharmacy, 226.

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14. When descriptions of ayahuasca experiences are approached from a representational model, they are assumed to have either a literal (realist) or a metaphorical (non-realist) meaning. However, as philosopher of religion Mikel Burley notes, for Wittgenstein there can also be figurative forms of language, languages used in a “secondary sense” that are neither straightforwardly translatable into nonfigurative terms nor nonsensical. They derive their meanings from their use in practice (Burley, Radical Pluralist Philosophy of Religion, 178). Descriptions of ayahuasca experiences can also be studied as such figurative but not metaphorical forms of language. 15. Doyle, Darwin’s Pharmacy, 230. 16. Richard M. Doyle, “Healing with Plant Intelligence: A Report from Ayahuasca,” Anthropology of Consciousness 23/1 (2012): 38f. 17. Doyle’s remark on inherent emptiness refers to Mahayana Buddhism, in which the celestial bodhisattvas and buddhas are said to be empty of inherent existence. See, e.g., Peter Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhism: Teachings, History and Practices, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 172. According to an influential Mahayana Buddhist notion, there are three different ontological classes of buddhas: (1) the “body of the manifest beings” (nirmānakāya); (2) “astral buddhas” that have a body of bliss encountered in visions (sambhogakāya); (3) the absolute buddha principle (dharmakāya) (ibid., 165–171). However, there are two main Mahayana Buddhist interpretations of emptiness. For the Madhyamika school, based on the thought of Nāgārjuna (ca. 150–250), emptiness is an ontological notion that denies any ultimate nature of reality. For the Mind Only school, emptiness is a phenomenological notion that describes the ultimate nature of reality as revealed in a nondual form of cognition beyond the illusory subject-object duality. Such nondual experiential reality is the ultimate truth. It cannot be directly described or accessed by dualistic thought and language. It can only be indirectly indicated, or experientially known in visionary or mystical experiences. For a wide-angle overview of such debates, see Douglas S. Duckworth, Tibetan Buddhist Philosophy of Mind and Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 18. Bron Taylor, Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 19. Ibid., x. 20. Ibid., 10. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 13. 23. Ibid., 15. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 35–40. Taylor notes that Lovelock is critical of green religion, such as the humanist concept of sustainable development and the Christian concept of human stewardship of the Earth: “We are no more qualified to be stewards or developers of the Earth than are goats to be gardeners” (James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: The Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity [New York: Basic Books, 2006], 137). However, “While Lovelock may not consider himself conventionally religious,

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he has nevertheless expressed many convictions that cohere with beliefs typically found among dark green religionists and that signal that he would welcome a new, science-based nature religion” (Taylor, Dark Green Religion, 36). 28. In calling it Gaia, Lovelock looks on the Earth “as if, metaphorically, it were alive at least in the sense that it regulates climate and composition of the Earth’s surface so as always to be fit for whatever forms of life inhabit it. . . . I am continuing to use the metaphor of ‘the living Earth’ for Gaia; but do not assume that I am thinking of the Earth as alive in a sentient way” (Lovelock, Revenge of Gaia, xiii, 16). 29. Taylor, Dark Green Religion, 16. 30. Ibid., 222. See also Bron Taylor, “Retrospective: Dark Green Religion—A Decade Later,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 14/4 (2020): 496–510. 31. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Vintage, 1996). 32. Ibid., 8. 33. Ibid., 9. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 10. 36. Graham Harvey, “Introduction,” in Handbook of Contemporary Animism, edited by Graham Harvey (London: Routledge, 2014). 37. Graham Harvey, Animism: Respecting the Living World (London: Hurst & Co., 2005), xi. 38. Ibid. 39. Jim Cheney and Anthony Weston, “Environmental Ethics as Etiquette: Toward an Ethics-Based Epistemology,” Environmental Ethics 21 (1999): 115–134. 40. Ibid., 122. 41. Ibid., 124. 42. Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2013 [2010]). 43. Roothaan, Indigenous, Modern and Postcolonial Relations to Nature, 146. 44. Ibid. 45. Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 23. 46. Miller, Speculative Grace, 2. 47. Latour, Pasteurization of France, 163. 48. “Theologians should not shun but on the contrary embrace the formidable chance provided by a thoroughly secularized spirit to say that there is no powerful, omniscient, omnipresent Creator God, no providence, that God does not exist . . . and to see in those common sense features of ordinary talk the expression, the power of religion which may start exactly as freshly as it once did.” Bruno Latour, “‘Thou Shalt Not Take the Lord’s Name in Vain’: Being a Sort of Sermon on the Hesitations in Religious Speech,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 39 (Spring 2001), 229. 49. Latour himself does not use the term “theurgy” in this context (although he is familiar with the term since he uses it three times in Rejoicing).

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50. The American theologian Adam Miller has fashioned an “object-oriented theology” out of Latour’s work on religion. In such a theology, God is not a traditional, omnipotent, impassible, wholly transcendental God who created the world out of nothing, and in whom one should believe (Miller, Speculative Grace). 51. Latour, Rejoicing, 120. 52. Ibid., 142. 53. Ibid., 145–146. 54. AIME, 196. 55. Latour, Facing Gaia. 56. Ibid., 152. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. Bruno Latour, “How Better to Register the Agency of Things,” in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Volume 34 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2016), 103. 60. Latour, Facing Gaia, 60. Latour remarks that Gaia has been misunderstood as a single organism, a giant thermostat, a New Age goddess, or even divine Providence. Latour, however, argues that the figure of Gaia offers an ideal way to disentangle our now-obsolete notion of Nature. 61. For this, Lovelock speculates that using religious metaphors may be unavoidable: “We have to use the crude tool of metaphor to translate conscious ideas into unconscious understanding” (Lovelock, Revenge of Gaia, 139). 62. Bruno Latour, “Will Non-Humans Be Saved? An Argument in Ecotheology,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (2009) 465. 63. Latour, Facing Gaia, 156. 64. Ibid., 157. 65. Ibid., 169. He notes that, whereas the scientific view of the world deanimates the agents that populate the world (they are part of a mechanical world), the religious view of the world overanimates them (they are part of a divine plan). 66. Ibid., 214. 67. Miller, Speculative Grace, xviii. 68. Ibid. 69. Many Santo Daime hymns emphasize “Estou Aqui” [I am here] to stress the importance of remaining anchored in the here and now, rather than floating off into some ethereal distance.

Conclusion

Part 1 of this book has attempted to show the limitations of the various popular, mostly implicit, ontological and epistemological approaches to ayahuasca in the West. I have used Latour’s philosophy to show that materialist views on ayahuasca as a psychoactive pharmacological substance that merely causes the brain to produce hallucinations are still caught up in the assumptions of the Modern Constitution that problematically separates transcendence from immanence, subject from object, and the human from the nonhuman. On the other hand, the popular view among ayahuasca practitioners that ayahuasca somehow, miraculously, offers direct and uncontaminated access to messages from the Beyond denies the very real contribution of set and setting to the co-construction of ayahuasca experiences. I have used Ferrer’s participatory approach to transpersonal psychology to show that, although ayahuasca experiences can provide a sense of being elevated to subtle realms of being and being initiated into profound mysteries, they are also always entangled. Ferrer conceives of the new ontological worlds that can be opened by the use of ayahuasca as co-created, rather than as a preexistent ultimate reality. Part 2 of this book has presented two narratives that describe ayahuasca religiosity as engaging with beings of religion. Chapter 5 offered an ontologically rich theurgic Iamblichean narrative, that frames ayahuasca religiosity as a way of working together with beings of religion in order to bring more light into the world and save all sentient beings (as the Buddhist bodhisattva vow puts it). Chapter 6 offered a dark green religion ecodelic narrative, which frames such a working together with gods and spirits as becoming receptive to and capable of resonating with the natural forces (plants, animals, humans, and spirits) that make up the web of life. The bodhisattva vow of saving all sentient beings can be translated into a vow to save Gaia as a member of Latour’s new Terrestrial tribe. In the introduction to this book, I mentioned three gaps that a philosophical approach to ayahuasca religiosity needs to address. The first gap is between indigenous “spirit ontologies,” which consider the existence of divine beings as part of the web of life, and the Western immanent frame in which such beings are banished to a separate supernatural realm. Throughout this book 205

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I have used Latour’s modes of existence as an ontological protocol to mediate between these widely divergent ontologies. Beings of religion can exist, but according to their own mode of existence. I have argued that an attitude of “ontological openness” is of the greatest importance in both set and setting. Since ayahuasca use originates in the Amazon, it is tempting to take up indigenous philosophies of ayahuasca, and many practitioners also do so. However, these indigenous philosophies are often disentangled from their indigenous context and overlaid with perennialist notions of all religions leading to the same ultimate truth. Similar to the Western engagement with Zen Buddhism, which led to the rise of a “Zen modernism” that reimagined Zen as a form of universal mysticism and a type of global spirituality, an “ayahuasca modernism” looms large in which ayahuasca religiosity is decontextualized and “spiritualized.” From a cross-cultural hermeneutical viewpoint, the Western philosophical horizon (and its inherent limitations) needs to be taken into account in order to come to new productive narratives. As we have seen in this book, the opposition between Western and indigenous is giving way to intercultural and interfaith networks around ayahuasca, also blurring the distinction between religious and therapeutic use of ayahuasca. In addition to understanding the limitations of the discourse of entheogenic shamanism, due to the Romantic idealization of the shaman and shamanism, there is now a greater understanding of the reductionist aspects of the discourse of psychedelic mysticism, in which the psychedelic experience was individualized, internalized, and psychologized by Huxley and others.1 We have seen that a long-term commitment to working with ayahuasca as a “way of life” makes ayahuasca a living international reality. Within this new set, based on a relationship to ayahuasca understood as a way of life, the opposition of Western and indigenous might hopefully become obsolete. Whether ayahuasca practitioners are indigenous or Western would be of no importance. The reference to “shamanism” might no longer seem useful, as there is no longer a need to oppose premodern and modern practice. As Mesturini Cappo cautiously suggests, Does this mean that there is an ayahuasca space where the Occidental and the Indigenous have actually managed, successfully and peacefully, to meet and to converge into a shared space with common signifiers and common practice? The quest for “contact with nature” seems to have mutated into the wish for a “connected becoming,” where the divide between the human, vegetal and animal realms becomes an actively experimented crossover space.2

The second gap is between insider and outsider perspectives, which give widely different answers to the question of what ayahuasca is and what it does. In this book, I have reviewed several views on what ayahuasca is

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(a cognitive tool, a plant teacher, liquid divinity), and have presented an entangled perspective in which, as a boundary being, ayahuasca can be all three of these. The question of what ayahuasca does has been answered in three interrelated ways that are increasingly less self-centered: first, it provides access to liquid divinity through visionary and mystical experiences; second, it transforms us through theurgic practices; and third, such ecodelic practices are not merely about personal transformation but also about collective meaning-making and transformation, which ultimately serve to cultivate solidarity with other human and nonhuman beings, and ultimately with Gaia itself. The movement here is from individual experience to transformative practice to collective solidarity. The third gap concerns different understandings of religion. This book has presented a practice-based theurgic understanding of religion, rather than a belief-oriented theological understanding. According to such a theurgic understanding, ayahuasca ritual practices may turn us into “companions of the gods,” or connect us to various forms of liquid divinity. According to traditional understandings of religion, religious practice puts us in contact with a pregiven, objectively existing, ultimate reality. I have argued that perennialist approaches to ayahuasca religiosity, which assume that ayahuasca brings us in touch with some ultimate Truth, still perpetuate such a traditional understanding of religion. More “gnostic” and theurgic understandings of religion, however, stress the participatory nature of ritual religious practice: it is always enactive, in the sense of bringing forth ontological worlds. Therefore, I have argued, a participatory approach to ayahuasca religiosity may be more fruitful than a perennialist one. The thinkers I have engaged with on this philosophical journey, Latour and Iamblichus, both share this participatory temperament. I wrote this book as a philosophical diplomat in the spirit of Latour, who mediates between Modern and indigenous perspectives, and between science and religion. My first diplomatic aim has been to mediate between religious and secular voices in the public debate around ayahuasca. On the one hand, Santo Daime has presented itself as a bona fide ayahuasca religion in the hope of gaining legalization under the legal umbrella of freedom of religion.3 On the other hand, there is a growing number of secular publications on ayahuasca that treat it in a purely psychological way, ignoring the ontological implications of ayahuasca experiences and practices. Some scholars even admit that they employ such discourses as a strategic Trojan Horse approach to introduce ayahuasca to the Western medical establishment. Through adapting to the requirements of the immanent frame (in effect, respecting the gods of the academic polis), they hope to present ayahuasca in such a way that its use (especially medical-therapeutical use) gains wider acceptance and may

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even eventually be legalized. I am not against such approaches, but I feel that they leave a lot out. My second aim as a philosophical diplomat has been to create more bridges between Santo Daime and shamanic forms of ayahuasca religiosity. I sincerely hope, with Mesturini Cappo, that a new shared international and multidisciplinary network around ayahuasca will form in which different movements and organizations (Santo Daime, UDV, and shamanic and therapeutic ayahuasca providers) will work together.4 Within such a network, the opposition would no longer be one between religious and nonreligious discourses, but between inclusive discourses that leave room for the multidimensionality and relational entanglement of ritual ayahuasca use, on the one hand, and exclusive discourses that focus on a single dimension of ayahuasca (from its biochemical composition to mystical ayahuasca experiences) on the other hand. In other words, respect for set and setting is key. The two interrelated, new narratives presented in chapters 5 and 6 can be a first step toward such inclusive discourses. This can help to identify, take seriously, and legitimize the religious use of ayahuasca in the context of a committed contemplative practice, next to recreational and medical-therapeutical uses. I hope that this book will contribute to ayahuasca being less misunderstood. Through writing it, I have seen my own ideas about religion become more liquid. It has led me into a profound and ongoing process of recognizing, understanding, and embodying a fundamental interconnectedness with human, nonhuman, and more-than-human beings. With this book, I hope to put ontological issues around ayahuasca back on the table. Ayahuasca as liquid divinity should no longer be the elephant in the room. This other side of the story also needs to be told. This book has been my personal attempt to tell my version of that different story. NOTES 1. Mesturini Cappo, “What Ayahuasca Wants,” 167. 2. Ibid., 160. 3. I have argued elsewhere that legalization strategies for ayahuasca might more fruitfully focus on the benefits of ayahuasca for public health; see André van der Braak, “Ayahuasca: Drug, Sacrament or Medicine?” NTKR 1 (2020): 47–71. 4. A good example is the International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research, and Service (ICEERS), which has also created an Ayahuasca Defense Fund for legal support (iceers​.org). Another example is Chacruna, an institute for psychedelic plant medicines started by the Brazilian anthropologist and activist Beatriz

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Labate (chacruna.net). However, there are still many old grudges between the various churches and organizations that stand in the way of a unified approach to such thorny issues as the legalization of ayahuasca.

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Index

Abram, David, 188, 193–94 actor-networks, 10–12, 22, 58, 72–73, 108–11, 128–29, 138–39, 146, 173, 176, 178, 196 agency, 44, 47–48, 59, 83–87, 89–90, 116n26, 116n28, 198 Alfredo, Padrinho, 154–55 animism, 192, 194 Astral, 97, 154, 158, 166, 178 ayahuasca: as a boundary being, 93–95; discourses on, 9, 27, 35–46, 102–3; as entangled plurality, 88–91; as liquid divinity, 18–19, 87–88; as a plant teacher, 85–87; as a tool, 83–85; practices, 12, 13, 131, 134–35, 139–42, 145, 177–79, 187–88, 190, 194, 198, 199; religiosity, 4, 14, 17–18, 114, 125–27, 160; research into, 8, 15–17, 72, 135– 36, 149n64, 206–8; visionary experiences, 3, 9, 11, 12, 47, 64, 91–98, 113, 191, 201n14 Bache, Christopher, 88, 113

Barad, Karen, 34, 93–95, 112, 116n28 Barnard, G. William, 7, 19, 21n23, 53n104, 92–93, 98, 107–8, 120nn122–123, 170, 180n11, 182n45 Bergson, Henri, 19, 40 beings of religion, 11, 12–13, 14, 71–72, 78n72, 110, 125, 129, 137–39, 145, 150n78, 158, 163, 165, 173, 176, 178, 179, 185, 189, 196–97, 197, 205–6 beings of transformation, 11, 67–71, 73, 74, 78n72, 108, 137–38, 146, 166 Blainey, Marc, 7, 19, 21n23, 83, 135, 141, 173, 180n11, 182n57 bodhisattva, viii, 177, 205 Buddha, 91–92, 94, 95, 182n47, 201n17 Buddhism, vii, viii, 97, 103, 182n47, 201n17, 206 buffered self, 9–10, 22n34, 32, 37, 47, 67, 68, 69, 133, 136, 137, 139, 141, 178, 189 catharsis, 171–73, 174, 176, 178, 184n91 Christ, 87, 149n47, 174; consciousness, 151n102, 155, 158 co-construction, 14, 61, 63, 94, 101, 145, 156, 205 223

224

Index

consciousness, 33, 34, 38, 43, 57, 59, 60, 82, 84, 85, 92, 93, 99, 100, 104, 105, 108, 119n95, 132, 192; academic study of, 53n101, 101, 119n89; alternate states of, 3, 20n9, 47, 65, 91–92, 94, 97, 106, 112, 113, 119n89, 141, 168, 169, 175, 194; Christ, 151n102, 155, 158; distributed, 39, 52n87, 93; expansion of, 9, 29, 31, 42, 50n61, 83, 98, 107; filter theory of, 38–40; transformation of, 2, 15, 158, 189 constructivist, 10, 62, 63, 136 contemplative practice, 1, 4, 12, 18, 23n58, 45, 89, 97, 100, 113–14, 125, 126, 128, 131, 133, 134, 139, 140, 141, 142, 145, 172, 185, 191, 199, 208; Santo Daime as, 158, 162 Corbin, Henri, 95, 112 Cult of the Factish Gods, 70, 128

embodiment, 13, 14, 118n88, 133, 163– 65, 166, 168, 172 entanglement, 10, 12, 44, 45, 60, 82, 88–90, 93, 109, 110, 111, 116n28, 141, 163, 188, 208 entheogenic shamanism, 9, 12, 41–45, 51n67, 85, 106, 206 epistemology, 6–7, 11, 47, 57, 60–62, 68, 73, 82, 91–93, 94, 95, 102, 149n64, 161–62, 166 Facing Gaia, 84, 114, 197–200, 203n60 feitio, 87, 88, 109, 117n35, 158, 163 Ferrer, Jorge N., 6, 100–7, 113, 118n88, 119n89, 120n115, 133, 148n46, 205 firmeza, 114, 157, 166, 170 Gaia, 14, 187, 188, 192–93, 198–99, 202n28, 203n60, 206, 207 gnosis, 40, 42–43, 105, 107, 143, 146, 158; human versus ineffable, 161–62, 178 Goldman, Jonathan, 88, 144, 151n102, 155 Grof, Stanislav, 36–37, 83, 101, 119n89

Daime, 18, 24n69, 87–88, 108, 109–11, 117n35, 151n102, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 162, 163, 171, 173, 177 daimistas, 7, 19, 21n23, 107, 135, 141, 154, 155, 156, 157, 160, 163, 165, 170, 180n10 Dawson, Andrew, 7, 21n23, 43–44, 117n35, 135, 163, 177 DeConick, April, 13, 126, 143–45, 150n99 diplomacy, ix, 10, 23n61, 46, 64, 73–75, 83, 101, 137, 195, 208 DMT, 2, 3, 35, 52n86 Doyle, Richard, 14, 85, 140, 141, 142, 162, 189–91

hallucinations, 9, 16, 33, 34, 35–36, 37, 41, 44, 47, 172, 189, 205; true, 97, 118n63 Hanegraaff, Wouter, 17, 18, 43, 178 Harris, Rachel, 34, 140, 143 Hartogsohn, Ido, 28, 30, 31, 35, 49n35, 180nn7–8,10 hermeneutics, 5, 8, 9, 31, 66, 77n39, 133, 153, 206 Holbraad, Martin and Morten Axel Pedersen, 6–8, 74 Huxley, Aldous, 29, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 83, 85–86, 105, 107, 113, 206

ecodelic, 9, 14, 31, 186, 189–95, 197, 198, 199, 207 ecstasy, 13, 42, 99, 135, 168–70

Iamblichus, 13–14, 114, 153, 158–83 iconoclasm, 69–71, 198 imaginal, 95–97, 100, 133, 172

Index

imagination, 8, 11, 95–98, 112, 133, 139–41, 170–6, 178, 183n82, 189 immanence, 1, 4, 10, 22n34, 33, 56, 57, 58, 75, 95, 189–90, 199 immanent frame, 9, 16, 17, 21–22n34, 27, 31–35, 44, 46–48, 49n24, 66, 69, 85, 102, 104, 129, 133, 162, 163, 191, 206, 208 indigenous, 27, 28, 41, 42, 45, 47, 48n1, 52n79, 73, 86, 89, 99, 136, 207; discourses, 23n61, 41; ontologies, 11, 15, 16, 43, 48n11, 73, 74, 116n26, 129, 140, 195, 206; practices, 69–71; religiosity, 20n6, 56; shamanism, 5, 42, 89, 188, 193–194, 207; traditions and Santo Daime, 154, 173; use of ayahuasca, 1, 5, 28–29, 42, 177 ineffability, 4, 132, 142, 158, 161–62, 165–66, 167, 168, 169, 174, 178, 199 An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, 10, 64, 71, 73, 78n68, 137 interspecies communication, 82, 86, 87, 90 Irineu, Master, 5, 153–54, 155, 157, 173 irreduction, principle of, 55, 73, 102, 179, 196 James, William, 19, 39, 49n38, 61, 66, 77n25, 91–92, 93, 98, 112, 132, 138 Latour, Bruno, 7, 10–12, 14, 46, 55–78, 81, 84, 85, 88, 101–2, 112, 116n26, 127, 128–31, 137–39, 140, 146–51, 179, 188, 195–203, 208 liquid divinity, ix, 11, 17, 18, 44, 47, 82, 87–88, 107, 112–13, 163, 196, 207 LSD, 2, 3, 15, 28, 29, 35, 36, 39, 40, 45, 49n35, 83–84, 88, 104, 113 knowledge-about, 92–93, 112

225

knowledge-by-acquaintance, 92–93, 112 Kohn, Eduardo, 23n58, 73, 86–87, 90, 115n20, 115n22, 116n26 Kripal, Jeffrey J., 7, 23n60, 38–39, 53n101, 76n12, 96–97, 112, 117–18n61, 133 Leary, Timothy, 28, 40, 43, 45, 83–84, 103, 113, 119n99 Luhrmann, Tanya, 16, 126, 139–43, 145 McKenna, Dennis, 29, 189 McKenna, Terence, 29, 41, 42, 43, 52n86, 52n87, 113, 118n63 mediumship, 99, 109, 157, 172, 180n11 mesa Branca, 109–11, 120n123, 157 Mind-at-Large, 38, 39, 83, 107 mirações, 107, 120n107, 131, 144, 156, 162. See also visionary experiences Modern Constitution, 10, 12, 55–57, 59, 65, 76n9, 129, 132, 205 modes of existence, 7, 10, 11, 12, 14, 22n40, 64–75, 78n58, 81, 90, 96, 108–11, 125, 129, 138, 140, 145, 194, 197, 206 more-ness, 91–93 more-than-human powers, 5, 6, 8, 13, 14, 43, 47, 82, 85, 90, 96, 100, 136– 39, 146, 168, 179, 188, 193, 197, 199 mysticism, 5, 41, 45, 98–102, 206 nature, 1, 5, 14, 15, 19n4, 30, 31, 32, 34, 43, 59, 61, 75n6, 75–76n8, 76n12, 101, 128, 155, 160, 163, 168, 169, 173, 175, 181n36, 182n65, 187, 189, 191–95, 198–99, 201–2n27, 203n60, 207; and culture, 10, 16, 55, 56–57, 77n47, 81, 140, 199 Neoplatonism, 13, 101, 105, 158–60, 165, 176, 180n15, 180–81n17, 188 objects, 10–11, 29, 32, 33, 46, 47, 55, 57, 58–59, 60, 62, 65, 68, 70, 71, 74,

226

Index

76n17, 81, 84, 85, 92, 93–95, 104, 109, 112, 113, 167, 171, 190, 192 onto-epistemology, 61, 95, 162 ontological: fattening therapy, 46, 65, 68, 146; openness, 72, 75, 101, 111, 190, 206; shock, 4, 6, 10, 18, 46, 60, 105, 139, 145; turn, 6–8, 10, 64, 73, 116n26 ontology, 7, 10, 11, 15, 22n40, 33, 38, 46, 49n25, 53n101, 53n104, 55, 57–60, 64, 68, 73–74, 82, 87, 98, 100, 102, 118n88, 126, 145, 158, 162, 190, 194, 197, 198, 199; Buddhist, 32, 40, 201n17; flat, 73; liquid, 6, 56, 139, 190; spirit, 6, 15–16, 23n58, 43, 195, 206 participatory: approach, 98–102, 119n89, 205, 207; ayahuasca events, 106–7, 112, 113, 145, 178; knowledge, 146, 161, 162; mode of thought, 101, 139, 141; thinkers, 14, 101, 207; Turn, 126, 199 Partridge, Christopher, 17–18, 38–45, 51n67, 97–98, 106, 140, 177 perennialism, 41, 44, 45, 50–51n61, 98–103, 105–6, 112, 119n89, 206, 207 person, 71, 86, 106, 116n26, 130, 131, 137, 138, 194; ayahuasca as a, 43, 85, 87 philosophy of religion, vii, ix, 6, 8, 19, 21n27, 153 Plato, 62, 84, 101, 145, 158, 160, 164, 165, 169 Plotinus, 13, 158, 164, 165, 171, 172, 176, 181n41 porous self, 9, 16, 37, 67, 133, 136, 141;

ayahuasca returns us to, 10, 47, 108, 137, 139, 178, 189 Porphyry, 13, 158–66, 168, 169, 172, 178, 180n14 possession, 67, 99, 127, 138, 157, 165, 168–71, 178, 194 preposition, 11, 66, 68, 81, 110, 127–28 psychedelic: mysticism, 9, 12, 38–41, 44, 45, 50–51n61, 103–6, 206; renaissance, 1, 15, 36; substances, 2, 9, 15, 31, 84, 111 psychedelics, 3, 15, 27, 28, 30, 35, 36, 38, 40, 41, 45, 82, 83, 84, 98, 103–6, 113, 140, 190–91 PTSD, 3, 15, 30, 36, 112 radical empiricism, 66, 102, 138 realism, 10, 60, 62–64, 65, 95, 136, 201n14 religion: beings of. See Beings of religion; as belief in supernatural beings, 163, 198, 207; dark green, 14, 114, 186, 191–93; in the West, vii, 1, 30, 40, 177; Latour on, 128–31, 202n48, 203n50; material approach to, 148n27; philosophy of. See philosophy of religion; as practices, 125–26, 134–37, 149n57, 188, 197, 207; study of, 5, 8, 15, 17, 125, 127, 132–37, 160, 207; versus science, 12, 16, 128–30, 132, 197–98, 208; versus spirituality, viii, 5, 148n38, 177, 192 religiosity, vii, viii, 1, 6, 14, 114, 126, 127, 135, 143, 186, 190, 193–98; ayahuasca, vii, 2, 4, 5, 6, 12, 17, 18, 72, 112, 140, 141, 143–46, 160–61, 177, 188, 191–200, 206–8;

Index

gnostic, 143–45, 150n99; liquid, viii, 18; Santo Daime, 153–58, 160–61, 163, 165, 170–71, 177, 178–79 religious studies, 6, 8, 132–33, 148n27, 148n46 representation, 11, 59, 60–62, 64, 65, 86, 90, 93, 102, 107, 115–16n22, 116n26, 133, 149n47 Riesebrodt, Martin, 13, 125, 134– 35, 136, 146 ritual: practices, 13, 28, 43, 68, 113, 126, 133–36, 141, 144, 190, 196, 197, 199, 207; theurgic, 13, 159, 162, 163, 164, 165, 167–68, 169, 175, 178–79, 196; use of ayahuasca, 41, 42, 44, 45, 87, 88, 90, 104, 109–11, 154–59, 163, 167, 178–79, 190, 207, 208 sacrament, vii, 4, 9, 30, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 83, 87, 109, 112, 116n29, 149n47, 154, 155 Santo Daime, 5, 6, 7, 13, 18, 19, 43–44, 87–88, 107, 108–11, 117n35, 127, 135, 141–42, 153–79, 208 Sebastião, Padrinho, 24n71, 154, 157 set and setting, 3, 5, 6, 7, 28–30, 31, 37, 47, 72, 82, 84, 92, 96, 99, 105, 125, 126, 140, 142, 190, 191, 205, 206, 208 shamanism, vii, 9, 13, 15, 20n8, 29, 41–42, 82, 87, 89, 99, 113, 143, 156, 157, 193–95, 207

227

spirits, 9, 10, 16, 29, 42, 43, 47, 69–71, 87–88, 89, 90, 95, 110, 129, 133, 136, 138, 139–43, 158, 170, 173– 74, 194, 195 spirituality, 49n18, 50n61, 103, 105, 119n89, 119n99, 148n38, 148n44, 192, 198, 206 St. Michael, 109–11, 154, 157, 168, 174 subjects, 10, 11, 34, 47, 58–59, 62, 65, 67–69, 74, 76n17, 76n18, 84, 85, 93–95, 104–5, 108, 112, 133, 138 supernatural, 5, 9, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 32, 33, 43, 47, 49n24, 58, 128, 130, 146, 162, 163, 182n65, 188, 193–94, 196, 198, 206; as super natural, 23n60, 76n12 Taylor, Bron, 14, 189–91, 201–2n27 Taylor, Charles, 9, 31–33, 37, 47, 66, 67, 129, 136 theology, 8, 11, 13, 17, 41, 45, 52n87, 71, 128, 135, 149n47, 150n78, 159, 178, 182n47, 195, 203n50 theurgy, 8, 13, 18, 101, 128, 153–79, 188, 190, 196, 199, 207 transcendence, 17–18, 33, 58, 65, 129, 196, 199 Tupper, Kenneth, 35–36, 83–84 visionary experiences, 6, 9, 11, 14, 16, 42, 62–64, 72, 91–93, 95–98, 99, 107–8, 113, 120n122, 140, 144, 154, 175–76, 177, 178, 190–91, 207 We Have Never Been Modern, 10, 56–57 Wittgenstein, 21n27, 86, 201n14 Zen, viii, 4, 139, 182n47, 206

About the Author

André van der Braak is professor of comparative philosophy of religion at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Among his many published books and articles are Nietzsche and Zen: Self-overcoming Without a Self (2011) and Reimagining Zen in a Secular Age: Charles Taylor and Zen Buddhism in the West (2020). From 2013 to 2019, he led a large international research project on multiple religious belonging. His current research interests focus on philosophical reflection on new fluid forms of religiosity, including ayahuasca religiosity.

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