BEYOND VIVA VOCE: TRACING MATERIAL ORALITIES
CEREMONIAL USE OF AYAHUASCA AS MODERN-DAY ORALITY

2023

Stumbling upon a new shop, you sit down and anxiously sip on your five-euro iced latte with pink Himalayan salt crafted by the gods themselves. Ten minutes have gone by, and you can’t help but overhear a dialogue at the table next to you about a trip to the Amazon where the words ego-death, threw up, and I was inside a snake reoccur. You don’t make anything out of this until they precariously ask you “Have you done Ayahuasca?”.

In the past years with the rise of social media and influencer culture, we find ourselves in a position with unlimited amounts of experiences and highly persuasive information, which we are exposed to either visually or through hearsay. Ayahuasca happens to be one of these worldwide phenomena. A plant-based psychedelic that makes its users hallucinate on an exaggerated scale ¹, and with its vivid vocal and visual communicative methods has grown in popularity, creating a culture and community surrounding the after-effects of its consumption.

The word originates from the Quechua language. Pronounced “eye-ah-WAH-ska”, where “Aya” means soul, while “Wasca” means rope, it is usually translated as “vine of the soul“. It is a psychoactive brew formulated by indigenous South Americans of the Amazon basin, that is used socially and ceremonially as a spiritual medicine. The traditional usage of Ayahuasca dates back to 900 B.C, found in artworks and ancient Paraphernalia from the people that used to occupy the archeological site of Chavin in Peru. 2 These artworks depict shamans using psychoactive plants.

Ayahuasca is an experience rooted in cultures that have been using it recreationally for a millennium. Hence, it often results in unintended use when exposed to users unfamiliar with the culture. All the different cultures that have brewed Ayahuasca created it in different ways, consumed it in different dosages, and had various purposes for it. Some would experience different planes of spiritual existence and solve illnesses. While others just bonded socially through these vivid experiences. In Colombia, it was also used for spiritual diagnoses, to learn about nature and the spirits within, or to visit a family when feeling alone while away.3

When exposed to western lenses, it took a different turn, where some described the experience as ‘ego deaths’, and as a sort of rebirth, which alluded to people that it could provide a magical potion-like, easy fix to their problems. There are others who go to the “Ayahuascan rituals” as a way to find insights into their deeper selves and hidden, unresolved traumas.4 It’s become an unspoken language, one in which experiences can only be explained by visuals, and there is no telling how the experience will go until the brew is consumed.

Therefore, it becomes a symbol of orality. Perhaps more so a modern-day example, one in which orality has surfaced in two different contexts; the first regarding its “original” sacred origin, while the other has resulted in an orality surrounding a “salvation” ritual, fueled by the modern-day use of word passing. This creates an intricate dialogue between two networks of information, where a playful culture develops as generational passing and modern-day communication interact with each other.

Isabella Pirro

¹ Walubita, Tubanji. “Cultural Context and the Beneficial Applications of Ayahuasca.” Lake Forest College, 21 Feb. 2020, www.lakeforest.edu/news/cultural-context-and-the-beneficial-applications-of-ayahuasca.

2 Sayin, H. U. 2014. The Consumption of Psychoactive Plants During Religious Rituals: The Roots of Common Symbols and Figures in Religions and Myths. NeuroQuantology,

3 Hay, Mark. “The Colonization of the Ayahuasca Experience” Jstor Daily. 4 Nov. 2020.