I have a slight obsession with ayahuasca and the people who take it; probably, at some level, I want to take ayahuasca—along with LSD. I certainly considered the latter about eight years ago, but decided against it and did so mainly on the grounds that I have an intrusive thought where I ram a pencil, point first, into my eye. There is no guarantee that I would not act that out on a trip, and the people who encouraged me to take DMT—debauched female academics transported to Ancient Egypt on each trip to be admonished by the gods—did not seem the sort to stop me if I did so; it would be fair to say that the people who take these drugs are surrounded by the casualties from the experiment, and, as you might expect, they have poor insight; they will abandon alcohol, a low-status middle-class intoxicant, and claim to be free from alcoholism and yet still take an illegal stimulant, a party drug, that makes their heart flutter fit to burst and makes them, for a time, happy.
Ayahuasca fits very neatly with contemporary Western modernity: feminine, consumeristic, quasi-scientific, non-judgemental, and easy. We are a consumeristic feminised culture and we expect whatever spiritual enlightenment we hope for to come in a consumer-friendly form. We fly to South America—fly to the exotic—and pay for an experience. Without any need to engage in ascesis, we are granted spiritual insights: this democratic path requires no masculine restraint and no sacrifice, just a full wallet. As with all consumer products, it is pitched as authentic; it is shamanistic, the path to the oldest religious union with the godhead; and yet Mircea Eliade, authority on shamanism, says that drug-aided shamanic states are decadent; the real shamans never needed drugs. The drug-based path is decadent, and it is no surprise that it attracts Western decadents today.
The drug itself is conceptualised as feminine: Mother Ayahuasca. The political stance adopted by those people who take the drug is broadly leftist, in line with the West’s hegemonic ideology: they want to escape the cruel, harsh, and overly technological patriarchal world—the world of science and capitalism. Possessed by the anima or the feminine—leftist ideology—they do not understand that consumerism, materialism, and technology are usually associated with the feminine, with the lunar realm. For the ayahuasca adherent, men like Graham Hancock, the trip is another blow against “the Man”. The drug makes no judgements, the drug has no demands—although it may show a tripper their darker aspect.
This view dovetails with a broad gnosticism, the idea that Sophia, feminine wisdom, has been suppressed. The witches were burned and the cruel Abrahamic faiths scoured simple plant-based union with God from the earth. This path admires the Cathars—not the more patriarchal Templars—as gnostics par excellence; among their interests, transsexualism and sexual degeneracy. They were very modern.
The ideas shadow broader socialist contentions, ideas that Europe was once a peaceful and beautiful matriarchy—a matriarchy rubbed out by the big bad Christians and their greed. Even Himmler and the National Socialists, more feminist than many would think, fell for this line; they lamented the German witches burnt, apparently in their millions—an Abrahamic holocaust of indigenous European knowledge. Even today, sentimental neo-Nazis promote this line; it turns out the Boomer libertarians were right: these guys really are the femi-Nazis.
There is even a scientific twist in the ayahuasca cult, the DMT realm is said to be convergent with DNA—a phenomenon discovered under LSD influence—and so spirit merges with science, and joins with UFOs too. The escape from technology folds back into technology, for technology is feminine. Can you buy your way to paradise? To an extent; but what ayahuasca offers is a lower form, a lower path—a path implicated and entwined with today’s consumerism, feminism, and mass society. Today, everyone wants the mother’s warm embrace and infinite forgiveness; they flee from the father’s justice.