The ancient psychedelics myth: ‘People tell tourists the stories they think are interesting for them’

The narrative of ancient tribes around the world regularly using ayahuasca and magic mushrooms in healing practices is a popular one. Is it true?

Beginning in 2001, the Austrian anthropologist Bernd Brabec de Mori spent six years living in the western Amazon. He first arrived as a backpacker, returned to do a master’s thesis on ayahuasca songs, and eventually did a PhD on the music of eight Indigenous peoples in the region. Along the way, he married a woman of the local Shipibo tribe and settled down.

“I did not have a lot of money,” he told me, “so I had to make my living there.” He became a teacher. He built a house. He and his wife had children. That rare experience of joining the community, he said, forced him to realise that many of the assumptions he had picked up as an anthropologist were wrong.

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