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Psychoactive Plants in Living Traditions Around the World

Explore the cultural traditions surrounding psychoactive plants, drawing on anthropological research and the knowledge, practices, and terminology of the communities that use them.

Six painted scenes in two rows. Top: people on a northern seashore singing and dancing beside red, white-spotted mushrooms; a man in the Andes blowing tobacco smoke toward a tall columnar cactus, knife in hand; a woman tending a pot over an open fire beside a thatched house in the forest. Bottom: a woman holding mushrooms in incense smoke before a home altar with saints and flowers; a woman whisking white foam in a metal can with a stick; men around a wide wooden bowl, one mixing kava, another holding a coconut-shell cup. — Scenes from six of the traditions in this collection. AI-generated (GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst), not a photograph.

Questions across traditions

Is the plant a teacher?

From a mushroom in Oaxaca that speaks and names the remedy to a Piaroa shaman who says yopo “is not a teacher.”
Who chooses the healer?

The call comes from ancestors, from healing beings in dreams, from the powers of the hills, or from a gift the healer is born with.
Who takes the medicine, and how does it heal?

Sometimes the healer takes it, sometimes the patient, sometimes both, and in Fiji it is not taken as a cure at all.
Ayahuasca: who drinks, and how does it heal?

Six traditions disagree: some healers insist the patient must not drink, others give a little, and one rule says to refuse no one who asks.

What are these traditions for?

How many of the 26 traditions serve each purpose. Most serve several.

Healing 24 of 26 traditions
Protection from sorcery 17 of 26 traditions
Communicating with spirits 16 of 26 traditions
Diagnosis 15 of 26 traditions
Initiation 15 of 26 traditions
Divination 12 of 26 traditions
Community life 9 of 26 traditions
Worship 7 of 26 traditions
Guidance in life 6 of 26 traditions
Finding what is lost 4 of 26 traditions
Political ceremony 4 of 26 traditions

What each tradition calls its medicine

26 names, A to Z, with the plant or fungus, the tradition, and where it’s used.