Press Release

Another Reason to Like the Rainforest
Singing to the Plants: A Compelling Look at Upper Amazonian Shamanism

An expertise in hallucinogens may not seem the most compelling resume builder for your average corporate litigator, but Stephan V. Beyer’s trajectory from a major Chicago law firm to his tenure as one of the world’s foremost experts on sacred plant medicine has been anything but average. Take Carlos Castaneda, add a university professorship, throw in a law degree and doctorates in psychology and religion, and you begin to get a sense of the scholarly gravitas Beyer brings to Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon (University of New Mexico Press, cloth, $45.00), his fascinating first-hand account of initiation into the magic and mysteries of ayahuasca — one of the most potent shamanic hallucinogens on the planet.

A hallucinogen that’s captured the popular imagination

Beyer’s story is the story of the mestizos, Spanish-speaking descendants of Hispanic colonizers and the indigenous peoples of the Amazon jungle, and their shamanistic use of ayahuasca — a hallucinogen getting its fair share of global attention of late by authors including Paul Theroux, Peter Matthiessen, Isabel Allende, and artists such as Paul Simon, Sting, and Oliver Stone. Partly through their work — as well as through the visionary ayahuasca paintings of Pablo Cesar Amaringo — a flourishing international ayahuasca tourism has developed as travelers, academics, and adventurers venture to visit the isolated Amazon outposts where Mestizo shamans ply their trade performing their sorcery and healing.

Ayahuasca is a hallucinogenic drink made from the stem of the ayahuasca vine and the leaves of any of three compañeros, companion plants — the shrub chacruna, the closely related shrub sameruca, or a vine variously called ocoyagé, chalipanga, chagraponga, and huambisa.

The word huasca is the Quechua term for “vine.” Aya refers to the soul, or to a dead person, and ayahuasca translates either into “vine of the soul” or “vine of the dead.” Whatever it’s called, it’s the mechanism through which the shaman is able to see distant galaxies and planets, the wellbeing of distant relatives, the location of lost objects, the lover of an unfaithful spouse, and the identity of the sorcerer who has caused a patient to become sick.

A compelling inside look at Upper Amazonian Shamanism

Singing to the Plants is “the real deal”, says David Lukoff, Professor of Psychology at the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology and president of the Institute for Spirituality and Psychology. “It’s scholarly and quite compellingly written. Treated as an apprentice, Beyer was able to gain insights into the rituals, beliefs, and practices that form the social context and the inner world of shamanism.”

Singing to the Plants makes this shamanism completely accessible to the lay reader. From precisely what happens at an ayahuasca healing ceremony to the specifics of how plants are used in love magic and sorcery, we’re treated to a wonderfully vivid first-hand account of plant spirits dressed in surgical scrubs, extraterrestrial doctors speaking computer language, all presented within the context of the beliefs and practices common to the Upper Amazon.

The book has been received enthusiastically by readers and reviewers. Anthropologist Bonnie Glass-Coffin, author of The Gift of Life: Female Spirituality and Healing in Northern Peru, writes that it is “a tour de force, soon to be recognized as the definitive work on this topic.” Richard Doyle, author of The Ecodelic Hypothesis: Plants, Rhetoric and Evolution of the Noosphere, calls Singing to the Plants “a rare mixture of exhaustive scholarship and gripping first person account.” Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School, says Beyer is “a consummate scholar, a compelling and elegant writer whose rare combination of qualities gives multiple dimensions to the story he tells — spiritual, anthropological, and political.”

Writer, social historian, and cultural critic Erik Davis writes that Singing to the Plants is “the best book on ayahuasca yet… Beyer has found the sweet spot between scholarly and popular writing, the otherworldly and the disenchanted, participation and observation.” The Midwest Book Review says that Singing to the Plants is “an exhaustively researched and detailed study, unique among its kind, and an absolute ‘must-have’ for college library collections strong in anthropology and information on indigenous religions.”

Destined to become the definitive work on the topic, Singing to Plants is a mind-expanding experience — in the best use of the term. It’s a scholar’s probing look into a different reality, a ticket to the fascinating intersection of anthropology, ethnobotany, psychology, and religion.

High-Resolution Media

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Want to know more? You can read more about the book, or learn more about the author, his other books, and how his journey began.