Lila

Steve uses his own compelling experience with meeting and knowing Mestizo Ayahuasca shamans to thread together a detailed understanding of the rituals and worldview of the Ayahuasquero, expressing his understanding of the deep aspects of his subject, such as the realms, entities and forces of the shamanic realms, with a refreshing phenomenological purity, humility, and respect for the mysteries.

The common motif across McGillivray’s vast body of work is the inter-relationship of humanity with the plant realm. The human form is frequently depicted as interpenetrated by root, rhizome, vine and leaf. These icon paintings of the deep ecological plant realm are the productions of a ‘vegetalista’, a plant-shaman.

Pablo Amaringo is one of the world’s greatest visionary artists, and is renowned for his highly complex, colourful and intricate paintings of his visions from drinking the Ayahuasca brew. Howard and Peter met with Pablo at the school which he founded (Usko-Ayar school of painting) in Pucullpa where he lives and paints, and interviewed Pablo about his life as a shaman and artist.

Outside the Amazon, artists not born into or raised in indigenous or mestizo ayahuasca-using cultures, including such well-known visionary artists as Alex Grey, Robert Venosa, and Martina Hoffmann, have rendered visual experiences attributed to the ingestion of ayahuasca or DMT. For want of a better term, I will call this body of work DMT art…

Jay Michaelson discusses his views of the Ayahuasca experience and its relationship to Kabbalah – “…journeys of the soul to other realm and in the sense of a transformation of the self. They yield information, prophecy, revelation, theophany.”

Benny Shanon, a professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, releases a paper outlining a hypothesis that entheogenic plants including ayahuasca analogues formed an integral part of the religious rites of Israelites in biblical times.

Benny Shanon, Ph.D.
AYAHUASCA IS FAMOUS for the visions it generates. Commonalities appear in the visions of individuals from different personal and cultural backgrounds. This essay explores these commonalities from a phenomenological viewpoint.

By Morgan Brent
Plant-inspired religions can be understood as acts of guidance by an elder community of species to a younger one, the human. They are concerned with successful co-creative relations within the community of nature and the organismic and spiritual growth that these bring about.