Ayahuasca, homepage of the great amazonian medicine
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The War on Consciousness – Graham Hancock at TEDxWhitechapel
Ayahuasca, also commonly called yagé, is a psychedelic brew made out of Banisteriopsis caapi vine, often in combination with various other plants. It can be mixed with the leaves of Chacruna or Chacropanga, dimethyltryptamine (DMT)-containing plant species.
The brew, first described academically in the early 1950s by Harvard ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, who found it employed for divinatory and healing purposes by the native peoples of Amazonian Peru, is known by a number of different names.
It has been reported that some effects can be felt from consuming the caapi vine alone, but that DMT-containing plants (such as Psychotria) remain inactive when drunk as a brew without a source of monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI) such as B. caapi.
It is unclear how indigenous peoples discovered the hallucinogenic properties of the plants used in the ayahuasca brew. Many indigenous Amazonian people say they received the instructions directly from plants and plant spirits.
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