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Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon

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In this tome, Beyer has found the sweet spot between scholarly and popular writing, the otherworldly and the ordinary, participation and observation; the result is the single best book I have seen yet on ayahuasca.

In addition to a law degree, Beyer hold doctorates in psychology and religious studies, but his discovery of ayahuasca was more than intellectual. Arriving in the Amazon to practice wilderness survival, he soon realized that learning about the jungle meant learning about the spirit of its plants. So he apprenticed himself to two mestizo teachers named Don Roberto and Dona Maria. He studied ceremony, healing plants and the inevitable sorcery tactics with them and others for many years.

While Beyer's personal tale enlivens Singing to the Plants, he resisted the temptation to write a memoir. Instead, he allowed his experiences to round out, deepen, and authenticate what is a manifestly solid work of scholarship designed, happily, for the rest of us. Beyer's book offers broad discussions more than new data or highly focused arguments; despite some arcane and fascinating discussions of magic stones and sex with plant spirits, I suspect that ethnobotanists and anthropologists familiar with the Amazon will find relatively few surprises. But the ant hills of detail are not the point. Singing to the Plants is designed to inform a wider audience--and gently bust some myths--by presenting this almost literally kaleidoscopic phenomenon through a number of distinct lenses: anthropology, ethnobotany, pharmacology, psychology, international law, cultural politics, and magic both crafty and occult.

I knew I was gonna love this book when, after presenting illuminating and occasionally disturbing tales about his own teachers, Beyer frames the shaman's work through an understanding of performance. Like stage magicians (or western doctors), shamans are, on one level, performers with an audience, and aspects of their performance are deeply linked with everything from the sleight of hand of conjurers to costume. Beyer's breakdown of shamanic performance is thorough and fascinating, with chapters on "Phlegm and Darts," "Sucking and Blowing," and "Harm." I was particularly wowed with his discussion of shamanic sounds and songs, and especially the haunting, nasal whine of icaros. In addition to presenting research on how these sacred songs are passed on and improvised, he emphasizes the abstract effects produced when lyrics break down into alien tongues or pure sounds like whistles, hacks, and hums, whose "correct resonance and vibration [are] more important" than meaning.

Beyer roots shamanic performance and the ayahuasca ceremony in the body. As initiates know, the aya ritual can be an intensely physical experience--a woozy, vibrating, literally gut-wrenching dance of coughing, spitting, burping, and, of course, puking. (Beyer spends a lot of time with phlegm, for example, an aspect of shamanic performance that is not always emphasized north of the border.) This carnal and even carnivalesque dimension reminds us that ayahuasca is not a mystic or transcendentalist affair, and resists the highly internalized or even disembodied approaches that many American seekers bring to it, with their background in meditation or other more internalized psychedelics. Along these lines, Beyer makes the provocative argument--which is growing on me the more I think about it--that DMT (the most active ingredient in ayahausca) deserves to be classed as a "hallucinogen" distinct from "entheogens" like LSD and mescaline, which peel away the layers of the self to reveal the god within (the literal meaning of entheogen). In contrast, according to Beyer, DMT unveils a visionary world out there, one that is not only believable but seemingly inhabited.

While Beyer uses plenty of concepts and lingo drawn from anthropology and psychology, he does not offer these views in a spirit of reductionism. After all, Beyer has been learning the ropes for years, and has spent far too much time wrestling with wizardry to try to dissipate its dialectic of healing and harming with the word-spells of academe. Beyer's critical discussions only help illuminate the central mystery with greater intensity. So while he offers up useful maps of the phenomenology of visionary states, when it comes to talking about the spirits themselves, Beyer just calls `em as he sees `em. Spirits--or "doctores"--are simply part of the picture; there is no need to reduce them to projections or myths--they harm and they heal, converse and confuse. As long as we remain aware of the various contexts which structure our encounters, we have every reason to acknowledge and engage the spirits as part of our world--an aspect of nature and consciousness, but also--and this is crucial--an aspect of modernity itself.

In contrast to many Euro-American aya fans, who fetishize the otherness of the Amazonian shaman, Beyer does not characterize the Amazon's techniques of religious ecstasy as archaic residues free from any contamination from today's globalized world. The culture of ayahuasca is both stronger and weaker than that, more expansively eclectic and also more ordinary. Beyer notes that Dona Maria's spirit doctors regularly spoke in "computer language," just as an earlier generation of shamans used metaphors of electro-magnetism and radio to characterize the spirit world. The UFOs found scattered through Pablo Amaringo's paintings are icons of this visionary futurism. But they are equally signs of the syncretic, mix-and-match, opportunistic, and almost willfully contaminated aspects of mestizo culture--which must make itself up as it slips along between jungle and city, modernity and the indigenous forest. That said, Beyer is all too aware of the political, economic, and spiritual costs of the Amazon's deepening imbrication with global flows of capital and culture--an encounter that is increasingly taking place through the medium of ayahuasca tourism, which receives a sharp if too short treatment here.

If shamans are not frozen under glass, they are not squeaky-clean avatars of sweetness and light either. Beyer is very clear: to enter the shamanic world is to enter a world shot through with sorcery, with harms as well as healings. Budding shamans either struggle with sorcerers or join the wickedness; in his fascinating discussion of psychic darts, which healers store in their bodies for a rainy day after extracting them from victims, Beyer explains why the dark side is actually an easier path to take. "Good" shamanism reveals itself to be an intensely ethical discipline, not only in relationship to the community of persons (human and otherwise), but to the darkness within. The shaman's predicament is also grounded in social reality: a successful healer necessarily creates rivalry and envy, and when he fails at his healing task, necessarily creates paranoia and suspicion as well. This accounts for what Beyer calls the "social ambiguity of the shaman," the fact that many of them are sneaky, unstable, and mistrustful. It's a lonely path, anxious and ambiguous all the way down the line.

And the job has only gotten harder, even though there is more cash to be had and the global profile is at an all time high. Beyer closes the book with a pessimistic assessment of Amazonian shamanism's future in a world where the younger generation would rather learn quick techniques from occult books than take on the ascetic rigors of the plant healing path. Beyer knows that conscientious gringos like himself will not fill the gap, especially when the general effect of the exploding Euro-North American interest in Amazonian shamanism is a spectral assault of dream darts soaked in naive assumptions and often narcissistic desires. Hopefully, Singing to the Plants will help us realize that one of the best cures for our own poisons is to learn how to hold them.

Steve Beyer's Singing to the Plants is a fascinating piece of work. In 400 pages he delivers an encyclopedic analysis of ayahuasca shamanism - and does it in extraordinary detail backed up with hundreds of citations to an exhaustive bibliography that stretches on for 60 pages. It's a work of impressive scholarship written in an engaging, conversational tone that is never dry or dense. From start to finish, it is a pleasure to read this book. It's beautifully organized with bold-faced headers for easy access to various topics, which seems to have been done with college textbook-use in mind. And, indeed, it would make a marvelous textbook for anthropology students.

My one quibble with the book is Beyer's noticeable absence from the text. Here is a man intimately familiar with ayahuasca, yet we hear little of his own personal observations. While his writing has an easy gracefulness to it - as if you're chatting with him over coffee - Beyer maintains a kind of scholarly disengagement from his topic. And, frankly, I wondered if this disengagement was actually evasiveness on his part. Nowhere do we get a straightforward discussion of his personal relationship with the spirit of the plant - which is something I was looking forward to. Instead, the closest we get are examinations of such things as the physiology of hallucinations, magical realism in literature, and Jung's concept of active imagination.

All of this could lead many readers to assume Beyer does not acknowledge the reality of Plant Spirits or plant intelligence - that he believes it's all simply hallucinations or imagination. But in a recent interview with Morgan Maher of Reality Sandwich, Beyer was far more upfront. He said the following: "The plants speak in many different ways, I think." ..."All we can do, I think, is to ask ourselves how the sacred plants want us to live, how we can walk this medicine path in a sacred way, in right relationship." ... "I think the plants love us. I have no idea why. We certainly have done nothing - at least recently - to deserve it. I think they want us to be human beings again."

I wish Beyer had been this candid in his book. But undoubtedly he had to make certain concessions in order to be published by a university press. Nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed his book, and will surely read it again someday. In the meantime, I hope someone finds a way to introduce the topic of Plant Spirits into academia - in the same level-headed way that Beyer (and others) have brought legitimacy to a discussion of ayahuasca shamanism.

Singing to the Plants
A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon
By Stephen V. Beyer

Finally, someone has taken the time to write a pretty damned comprehensive book about the world of Amazonian shamanism. Far too often reports of ayahuasca use, the world of plant healing, and the traditions of humans interacting with the spirits of plants and animals and non-ordinary beings are written by people who don't have a context with which to frame those reports, and the result is skewed by a lack of knowledge of the region and the cultures of the people who live within it. Beyer, on the other hand, has spent considerable time in Amazonia, has listened to what the locals and curanderos themselves have to say; has personally worked with ayahuasca and other plant medicines over several years. He's also apparently read and digested everything else ever written on the topic, with an eye to incorporate the historical perspective of people who studied or lived with indigenous peoples who incorporated shamanism into their daily lives.
And Beyer makes his virtual encyclopedia an effortless pleasure to read. He works with a full palate of writing skills, understanding and a fine ear for detail. Coupled with a larder full of anecdotes, Singing to the Plants is as good as it gets if one wants to know what the heck shamanism in the Upper Amazon is all about. Put it this way: Any writer willing to investigate deeply enough in this topic to discover that Tabu cologne is a favorite of the spirit of Ayahuasca, has done his damned homework. Good for him. And, of course, good for us.
Peter Gorman, author of Ayahuasca in My Blood--25 Years of Medicine Dreaming
Ayahuasca in My Blood: 25 Years of Medicine Dreaming

As someone who spent the past 5 years writing about the experience of drinking Ayahuasca (just recently published "Fishers of Men: The Gospel of an Ayahuasca Vision Quest" with Tarcher/Penguin and Evolver), I know how difficult it is to write about this subject matter with both integrity and objectivity. Stephan is an elder in this regard. A gifted writer and academic. An elegant voice. A sincere heart. Singing to the Plants is the most comprehensive examination of Amazonian shamanism ever written. At once personal, accessible, and incredibly intelligent, as a young man blossoming into authorial adulthood I will re-read Singing to the Plants many more times and will continue to trust Stephan as a heart-centered wordsmith of the numinous.

For some years now I have been dipping in to Steve Beyer's long standing blog `Singing to the Plants', so I was delighted with the publication of the book of the same name, at last.....a `portable' version of the blog that could be read anywhere without needing the internet.

But the book is more than a physical manifestation of the blog; just as its namesake it is a well structured and important reference source for the world of Amazonia, covering shamanism, the human - plant interaction, as well as the use of plants for their medicinal and spiritual properties. It has the webpage like sidebar-notes that contain a variety of background information, they add useful texture to the material in the body without breaking up the narrative, an example of this are the sidebar-notes about the local Cumbia Amazonica music that you hear blaring out from bars and cafes in towns, notes such as this adds depth and importantly fixes the spiritual world of the Mestizo shamans in the everyday modern context, they do not live in an idealised world of any sorts. The book contains detailed appendices of colloquial plant and animal names with their scientific identifications including the relevant page references; it is like a `souped-up' index. I indeed found the book to be a very useful reference tool whilst I was working on the book `Ayahuasca Visions of Pablo Amaringo' (forthcoming April 2011).

The book maintains an impressive sense of academic research and study, and that is always its core strength in describing a definitive - (in my view as definitive as you can possibly get) insight into the world of Mestizo shamanism in the Amazon, a place where plants have many different local names. It is not a memoir or a description of a personal spiritual odyssey, but also not a dry academic piece. Scattered through the book are Beyer's personal anecdotes, his description of his early `messy' ayahuasca experience is a highly amusing and a well written read, and certainly something I can relate to. I found the chapter titled `Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience' extremely fascinating, as in this chapter, Beyer explicitly explores the nature of reality and our perception of the world. The chapter addressing sorcery and what many people regard as the dark side of Amazonian culture, an aspect which by the way is often omitted from Western publications, presents a very different and refreshing insight into these phenomena, Beyer brings the `dark-side' into the `light' so to speak.

The only downside that comes to mind is that although portable, the book is big and doesn't fit into my pocket, so I hope that they bring out an eBook / Kindle version of it sooner than later.

Steve Beyer has dedicated the book to his teachers don Roberto, and doña Maria, and regards the purpose of the book as a conveyance for their teachings, that purpose comes through very clearly. He describes in a humorous self effacing way his interactions with them (often being scolded like an errant child) and in these at times sublime exchanges is where the beauty and humanity of his teachers shine through, and in the course of these narratives about don Roberto and doña Maria, Steve Beyer's humility and humanity also shine through.

I whole-heartedly recommend this book for people who are interested in Amazonian mestizo shamanism or any kind of spiritual healing. If you are an experienced ayahuasca drinker this book will help you put context around your experiences. If you are just curious, this book is a trustworthy source of genuine information and will tantalize your curiosity even more.

Based on my personal experiences, I can say the information in this book is genuine and authentic. The book does not make wild claims about the efficacy or appropriateness of shamanic treatment but does meticulously document the techniques and philosophy of mestizo shamanism.

But this book is of interest to a much broader audience than people who are interested in just ayahuasca or just mestizo healing or even just shamanism. This book contains some extremely well-thought-out discussions about the nature of health and illness, the meaning of 'healing,' the nature of 'spirit,' the basis of good and evil in human relationships, and so much more. The background of these discussions is classically shamanic, but the ideas and analyses apply to any serious healing practice.

The one criticism I have of this book is that it is a little too objective. In addressing topics like shamanism, it is easy to focus too much on one's personal subjective experience and devolve into simple story-telling. It's also easy to write in a lazy stream of consciousness (consider Pinchbeck). Beyers does neither. But this book tells us too little about why the author felt a need to write this book.

For example, there is a wonderful passage in the book in which a man comes to Beyer's curandero teacher for healing of severe abdominal distress. At the end of the passage, Beyer asks himself the question whether he believed the curandero could cure an acute appendicitis. Beyer doesn't answer that question and doesn't tell us what eventually happened to the man. I'm sure Beyer did this intentionally: He wants us to think and answer the questions on our own. On one hand, that's one of the good things about this book. On the other, it would be dramatic to hear more personal, subjective parts of the story.

I recently finished reading Beyers "Singing to the Plants" and I have to say that I am very impressed. Not only has Steve covered practically every facet (that I can think of) of Ayahuasca and the Shamans who use it in ceremony, but he has done so with incredible insight and accuracy in regards to the truth. I make this last statement as a person who currently lives in Iquitos, Peru (close to where many Ayahuasca shamans reside and practice),has personally experienced over 100 Ayahuasca ceremonies, and who knows a fair amount of the players involved, at least currently. I have experienced many of the things that Steve's book touches on, from witchcraft to healing to divine knowledge, to name a few. Not only has Steve done an exhaustive study of the shamans, the plants used, the people who participate, etc., but he has participated in many ceremonies himself, and the knowledge gained from this incredible personal experience comes through in the book. If you are interested in understanding the experience of Ayahuasca and all the elements involved, you can do no better than this book, short of having the experience yourself.Highly recommended.

I found this one of the most engaging and illuminating books on the traditional use of psychedelics that I've ever read. Beyer gives us a deeply involving account of mestizo shamanism, stripped of its 'holy' and transcendental Western interpretations and satisfyingly grounded in the perspectivist animism of the Amazon. His phenomenology of the ayahuasca experience itself is equally grounded, acknowledging the scrambled pattern-recognition that underlies its hallucinations while insisting on the inscrutability of their elaborated and evolved forms. And his ethnography of mestizo culture earths the practice of shamanism firmly in the larger, and often darker, picture of the society it serves.

Some reviewers have commented that Beyer doesn't include enough of his own ayahuasca 'journey' in the book. For me, though, the way he pitches his narrative is exemplary. His concise interjections of personal experience anchor his account while avoiding the narcissism which is a frequent unintended consequence of foregrounding the author's personal journey at the expense of the world in which they have immersed themselves. I found this alert, observant, panoramic account far more mind-expanding than the familiar pilgrim's progress.

Incidentally, for those whose interest in this subject coexists with a taste for surf/garage psychedelia, the 'cumbia amazonica' Beyer describes on pp.72-3 is a rare delight.

This eloquent compendium presents us with an encompassing anthropological view of the ayahuasca cult as practiced in a certain region of the Peruvian Amazon today, including personal, cultural, regional, religious, ethical, ethno-botanical, medicinal, zoological, botanical, legal and sociological aspects.

Stephan Beyer spent many years undergoing a formal shamanic apprenticeship with two main teachers, one male, one female, becoming an adept in the process. In a first, theoretical part of the book, we meet these widely esteemed mentors, learn what healing with the sacred plant medicine involves and what effects it has - what it can do and what it does not do - followed by a general discussion of shamanism and of various kinds of magic. Shamans are performers and have often been called tricksters, talking, cajoling or even bullying us into better organization of self, as the author empathically explains. In the mythical otherworld visited by these healers, adventures are traced, visions followed, spirits encountered, remissions engendered and lost souls retrieved. The Amazonian province of the soul has its own flavor and is peopled by many entities unknown to us. That makes it attractive and repulsive at the same time, a fascinating foundation for inner fermentation.

A second part of the book is dedicated to the actual medicine. Ayahuasca or yagé is commonly a mix of two plants - the vine itself and the small-leaved chacruna (Psychotria viridis) but may contain other ingredients, giving rise to individual potions with special effects. Working with any of these brews makes it imperative to know the plants one is about to consume in order to enjoy their beneficial effects or avoid them where deadly. Like in Chinese or medieval European medicine, we are talking correspondances. Acquiring this knowledge the traditional way - essentially fasting and roughing it - Stephan gradually acquaints himself with many different plants, naming and describing them again for us in his plant and animal Vademecum at the end of the book (Appendices A and B).

Chapter by chapter, the world of the mestizo shaman unfolds: we learn about magical sounds, ways of harming and healing, sucking & blowing doctoring, spirits, magic stones and darts, shamanic herbalism, ending up with an overflowing cup of ingredients to bring to the practice of ayahuasca ingestion and its effects.

As anyone acquainted with the medicine will readily confirm, drinking it usually leads to a thorough purge in the form of vomiting and/or diarrhea. That actually sounds worse than it is, since one is wretched with a noble aim in mind. To get well it is necessary to clean out the old and make room for the new. The mareación produced by the "vine of the spirit", i.e. the mental and physical state it induces, may be compared to the effects of the two most popular natural entheogens of the Americas, peyote and San Pedro, except stronger. As usual, dosage is of vital importance.

Part III discusses the history and ritual context of ayahuasca use, taking us into the deep jungle. When exactly it all began, we do not know but it seems safe to assume that the indigenous tribes were familiar with the practice millennia before it reached the white man or even the man of mixed blood. In fact, it took the rubber boom of the late 19th century to bring these ritual healing ceremonies to the fore in order to produce the cults of Santo Daimé, Barquinha or the more individualized healing sessions of the mestizos living on the river banks of the no longer virgin forests. Unfortunately, the shamanic tradition as still encountered not too long ago seems to be disappearing. Like in many other cultures, the young do not want to take upon themselves the hardships of learning the old way, and many consider the healing practices of their elders as outdated. Money rules instead.

This brings us to the present (Part IV), with ayahuasca tourists trampling herd-like along the old river paths in hope of finding a way out of their mental malaise and back home. Some are in serious physical trouble and, just like their local counterparts, could not be helped or healed by Western medicine. That's the lure. Is this globalized stream of well-intentioned Westerners making things better or worse by being there? And what does the law say, for that matter? The author takes a thorough look at the legal situation of ayahuasca and wonders what the future will bring. Fortunately, he is a reporter more than an advocate, making his dense book a captivating read. Not to mention the admiration one feels in the presence of such vast knowledge! And: this would not be a scholarly work if it didn't reveal its sources and give us an index as a beacon for recognition and return.

Susanne G. Seiler

Although there are now a great deal of books written on the subject of Ayahuasca, few have specifically set out to provide an in-depth analysis of the Mestizo shamanic use of ayahuasca for healing and sorcery. Many books are written from the perspective of the western experience of ayahuasca, of the visions that are experienced, and of the philosophical and psychological implications of the phenomena of experiencing shamanic travel to other alien worlds. Many who travel to Peru to experience Ayahuasca do so having perhaps only having read the psychedelic writings of Terrence McKenna, and will therefore have a somewhat distorted or ill-informed view as to the traditional role ayahuasca plays in the healing arts of the indigenous and Mestizo populations.

In 1986, Eduardo Luna set out to fully document the healing practices, beliefs and knowledge of a number of curanderos, shaman who have spent their lives learning how to heal people in partnership with the spirits of the plants. His PhD thesis "Vegetalismo" when published became a much quoted landmark study, and although it is still as relevant today as it was 25 years ago, it is now out-of-print and difficult to find. "Singing to the Plants" is therefore a welcome addition to the study of Mestizo shamanism in the Peruvian Amazon, and fills the gap left by Luna.

It is not an overstatement to say that "Singing to the Plants" is no less than encyclopedic in scope, covering every aspect of mestizo shamanism across 35 chapters. Perspectives taken include anthropology, biology, psychology, pharmacology, and sociology. Tourism to the Amazon region has greatly increased in the last 25 years, as has the number of westerners becoming aware of, and who are taking part in ayahuasca ceremonies. Beyer provides some interesting perspectives towards the end of his study on the impact of this "ayahuasca tourism" as well as legal issues and impact on the indigenous population of this influx.

The core components of the healing practices of the ayahuasca curandero (healer) are the ingestion of ayahuasca for the diagnosis of illness, the use of icaros (sacred songs), soplar (breath) and chupar (sucking) in healing, and the invocation of the spirits of the plants themselves during the healing ceremonies. Beyer has two shamanic practitioners who inform much of the description of these practices, Don Roberto and the late Doña María. Both have been teachers to Beyer, who himself has undergone many initiations to learn these techniques directly. However, Beyer is restrained in filling the book with his own personal accounts of experiences with ayahuasca, providing examples only where absolutely necessary to illustrate a point being made.

One of the great strengths of this book is that while it is certainly scholarly, it is also accessible to any intelligent lay reader, and does not suffer from the overly academic impenetrable conceptual language of the anthropologist or ethnographer, which many accounts of indigenous or "alien" cultures suffer from. However, in attempting to provide a commentary from so many different perspectives, if this book does have any weak links, it is that the psychological analysis of the phenomena was probably touching on the superficial, with little space given to grounding the "gap-filling" and "source monitoring" theorizing into wider psychological frameworks of cognition, consciousness or the neural correlates of consciousness for example. There is a still a massive "explanatory gap" between scientific accounts of activity at the neural level, and accounts of how this translates into cognition, let alone any single agreed upon mechanism of how cognitive activity then translates into experienced phenomena in our normal conscious waking states. I think Beyer could have provided perhaps even just a page or two outlining our current state of knowledge, in order to better position his own very interesting theories.

Beyer, like Benny Shanon who published the first cognitive psychological account of ayahuasca visions in 2002, ends this theorizing by suggesting that the visions are a result of human creativity and natural mechanisms within the visual information processing system. His theory is not the same as Shanon's, but the visions are placed with in a mechanistic model of the brain, where consciousness is vaguely seen as an epiphenomena of neural activity. Left unsaid by Beyer, is the possible ironic conclusion therefore that the visions can not possibly be "true", i.e. they shamans can not possibly have access to other dimensions of reality and they can not therefore be seeing or communing with non-human intelligences or beings.

This was an interesting observation to me, since Beyer has written about ayahuasca with such sensitivity, and with such a seeming deep personal knowledge and experience of the subject matter. I myself have been writing on this very subject for my own Masters Degree dissertation "Ayahuasca Curandero" and therefore I would not wish my comments to be seen as in any way a criticism of Beyer's theories. More it is a case that sometimes I feel that we in the Western world fool ourselves as to just how much we really do know about the mind and the brain, which is described by many a neurologist as the most complex instrument or machine known to mankind.

I found myself only once strongly disagreeing with Beyer, and that is where he asserts on a number of occasions that plants reveal themselves to the shaman in human form. While this is certainly the case, my own experiences as an apprentice curandero has been the entire opposite. In my dissertation I therefore aim to complement the work of both Luna and Beyer by providing a first person account of the experience of a student apprentice curandero, and provide an account of the ever increasing complexity and depth of encounters with and lessons from the plant spirits. This is in the spirit of the late Terrence McKenna who called for a large number of accounts and diaries of shamanic explorers.

Where I perhaps have a slightly different view from McKenna is in his call for the most intrepid explorers to ingest what he called "heroic doses" of natural hallucinogens. While this is certainly one approach to take, the shamanic view of the curandero is that neither the shaman nor the apprentice needs to take heroic doses in order to have the most profound visions. In this respect, Singing to the Plants is bang on in focussing on the key role that icaros play in the development, lucidity and profundity of the visions. So whereas it is of course vital to collect as wide a range of first person reports as possible (despite them containing a great deal of cultural bias and expectation), what is also missing is a library of icaros from the many different tribes and societies in the Amazon basin.

In summary, Singing to the Plants can certainly be regarded as one of the most comprehensive and authoritative accounts of ayahuasca shamanism available, and for someone who has had just a very small amount of experience as an apprentice, really does ring true, unlike many of the other popular writings on the subject. Beyer paints a very realistic picture of modern Mestizo shamanism, one that is being increasingly influenced, for better or for worse by the inevitable influx of westerners to what even recently, was a little known realm of shamanism, quite unlike the shamanic flights of ecstasy painted by Mircea Eliade so many decades ago.

Singing to the Plants all along the way raises many issues, and there is certainly much more to be discussed and explored in this area. However, there is unlikely to be a book written about ayahuasca in many years to come that will compare with the ambition, depth and sensitivity of this amazing work, and I am extremely grateful to Beyer for the monumental work and dedication that so obviously went into the writing.

This is a must read work for anyone with an interest in either ayahuasca or shamanism in general.