To understand the role of the shaman, and to know anything of his genius in using plants, one must be prepared to accept the possibility that when he tells of moving into realms of the spirit, he is not speaking in metaphor. This was perhaps the most difficult lesson for me to learn as an ethnobotanist schooled in science. With the dexterity of a modern chemist, they recognized that the different compounds in relatively small concentrations might effectively potentiate one another. In the case of ayahuasca, some twenty-one mixtures have been identified, including most notably Psychotria viridis. “Now I ask.
