During the 1980s and 1990s, an underground movement emerged at the crossroads of ethnobotany, psychedelic counterculture, amateur chemistry and experimental spirituality. Inspired by Amazonian ayahuasca traditions, its participants began exploring whether visionary preparations could be recreated using plants from entirely different parts of the world. For Terence McKenna, such experiments belonged to an archaic revival, a rediscovery of humanity’s ancient relationship with psychoactive plants; Jonathan Ott envisioned a Pangaean entheobotanical revival, in which the visionary potential of the world’s flora could be explored beyond its traditional geographical boundaries. Against the backdrop of psychedelic prohibition and what Ott called the pharmacratic inquisition, this emerging culture also represented an assertion of individual autonomy over consciousness itself. Its enthusiasts exchanged botanical knowledge, experimental reports and increasingly elaborate cosmologies through underground publications, seed catalogues, correspondence networks and the early internet. Figures such as McKenna, Ott and Jim DeKorne helped give shape to a decentralised community of psychonauts, amateur ethnopharmacologists and seekers pursuing what might be called a democratisation of vision. The resulting culture of ayahuasca analogues occupied a fascinating territory between scientific inquiry, countercultural resistance, spiritual experimentation and speculative metaphysics, while raising enduring questions about safety, cultural transmission, ecological responsibility and the boundaries of legitimate knowledge. This article traces that movement, its personalities, literature, experiments and extraordinary ideas, as a distinctive chapter in the modern history of psychedelic exploration (Ott, 1994; DeKorne, 1994; Monteith, 2016; Walsh, 2016; Söderberg, 2022).
Contents
This complex has no single people or homeland. Its territories are circuits: the small-press underground of the United States, European natural-products laboratories, Brazilian jurema and ayahuasca networks, Australian Acacia communities, global internet forums and, increasingly, university hospitals. These sites share methods and symbols without sharing one ancestry.
Editors · correspondents · seed exchangers · self-experimenters
Jim DeKorne’s Entheogen Review, founded in 1992, turned private bioassay into a distributed field notebook. Letters, reprinted chemistry, cultivation notes and cautions moved through a low-cost mail network before the web consolidated the scene (DeKorne, 1996).
Jonathan Ott · natural-products experimenters · independent scholars
Ott’s Ayahuasca Analogues (1994) reframed the planet as a pharmacological commons: local plants could fill globally intelligible roles. His later pharmahuasca work formalised first-person experiment as human pharmacology (Ott, 1999).
Terence McKenna · rave/cyberculture · early online psychonauts
McKenna joined DMT, plant intelligence, archaic revival, novelty and intelligent machines in a lecture culture that circulated by cassette, book, sampling and early network media. Psychedelic revelation became compatible with cybernetic futurity as well as pastoral return (Rushkoff, 1994; Turner, 2006; Davis, 2019).
Yatra · Rio psychonaut networks · Daimista and jurema interlocutors
Wanda Maria da Silveira Barbosa (“Yatra”) developed a jurema–rue practice in the Netherlands and carried it to Rio and northeastern Brazil in 1997. It became a site of dialogue, friction and bricolage among psychonautic, ayahuasqueiro and Indigenous jurema worlds: a formation of the 1990s (Grünewald, Savoldi and Collins, 2022; Leite, 2026).
Growers · facilitators · Aboriginal critics · trial researchers
Native wattles support a distinctive local analogue imaginary; Aboriginal authority is another matter. Contemporary Acacia use must be separated from abductive claims about undocumented precolonial entheogenic use and considered alongside Indigenous sovereignty and species-specific conservation (Gearin, 2015; Gearin and Calavia Sáez, 2021).
Participants · therapists · ethics boards · regulators · patent holders
Zurich DMT–harmine studies and a Melbourne Acacia-derived pilot translate the analogue into capsules, buccal tablets, nasal delivery, psychometric scales and therapist dyads. The clinic has a culture of its own: a ritual architecture of permission, measurement and professional authority (Mueller et al., 2025; Bonomo et al., 2025).
| 1967–72 | The Amazonian precedent analysed Before there were analogues there was an explanation of ayahuasca. Ott credits Bo Holmstedt and Jan-Erik Lindgren with the hypothesis that the brew’s β-carbolines protect its DMT from digestion. Analysing Amazonian samples in 1972, Laurent Rivier and Lindgren found substantial DMT in Psychotria viridis leaves and reported that “only DMT, Harmine, Harmaline and Tetrahydroharmine were detected in the decoction”. Their paper does not itself discuss monoamine oxidase; McKenna, Towers and Abbott later demonstrated the inhibition in vitro. The principle the underground would generalise was, in this sense, first a laboratory reading of an Indigenous preparation (Ott, 1999; Rivier and Lindgren, 1972; McKenna, Towers and Abbott, 1984). |
|---|---|
| 1971–75 | La Chorrera and the Timewave In 1971 Terence and Dennis McKenna travelled to La Chorrera in the Colombian Amazon and staged what Erik Davis describes as an experiment shaped by Jungian alchemy, Marshall McLuhan’s media theory and science fiction. The Invisible Landscape (1975) set out the theory the brothers built from it, including the “Timewave” later read as pointing to 21 December 2012. The episode supplied the scene with its founding myth of the plant-mediated revelation (Davis, 2016; McKenna and McKenna, 1993; Hanegraaff, 2010). |
| 1978–85 | Underground bioassay Jeremy Bigwood made a single self-experiment in 1978 that Ott later counted as the starting point for his own. In 1985 the pseudonymous chemists Gracie and Zarkov, writing in their self-published Notes from the Underground, called Syrian rue “a convenient, concentrated and easily obtainable source of beta-carbolines” that might stand in for caapi, and floated the idea of a “synthetic Ayahuasca”. They had only planned the oral experiment; their tests were of smoked rue, by two people. The analogue first appears, then, as a proposal in a xeroxed newsletter (Ott, 2001; Gracie and Zarkov, 1985). |
| 1979 | Entheogen as terminological intervention Carl Ruck, Jeremy Bigwood, Danny Staples, Jonathan Ott and R. Gordon Wasson proposed entheogen for psychoactive substances used to occasion experiences understood as sacred or divine. The term displaced clinical and pejorative vocabularies while making an interpretive claim of its own (Ruck et al., 1979). |
| 1980s–1991 | The archaic revival Terence McKenna connected psychoactive plants, ecological crisis, anti-authoritarian politics and a recovery of premodern modes of relation. His books, lectures and recordings turned psychonautic experience into a countercultural religious and political discourse (McKenna, 1991; Monteith, 2016). |
| 1990 | Pharmahuasca Ott began the series of self-experiments with pure DMT and harmine that he would later publish as “pharmahuasca”, building explicitly on Bigwood’s trial and on Gracie and Zarkov’s “secrets”. The work made the analogue’s defining operation measurable on a single human subject (Ott, 2001; Ott, 1999). |
| 1992 | A correspondence network Jim DeKorne founded Entheogen Review. Reader reports, botanical identifications, chemical literature, seed exchange and warnings made the periodical a distributed research infrastructure outside universities and pharmaceutical firms (DeKorne, 1996; Söderberg, 2022). |
| 1992–93 | From query to bioassay The anthology later drawn from the Review credits a question DeKorne put to his readers in mid-1992 with starting modern analogue research. Within months, Peganum harmala seed had been collected from a Texas highway median (August 1992) and strains of Phalaris grass had been bioassayed with rue (late 1992, published in summer 1993). Contributors wrote under pseudonyms such as David Aardvark, K. Trout, Johnny Appleseed and Doctor Know: the scene’s authorship was collective, playful and legally cautious. The founding idea was stated plainly — that temperate-zone plants carrying the same alkaloids as caapi and P. viridis could make an ayahuasca-like brew — and so was its ethic: “The cultivation and use of these plants is a shamanic discipline” (DeKorne, Aardvark and Trout, 2000; Lux, 2008). |
| 1993 | Australian Acacia A 1992 article in the Sydney student paper Honi Soit, written by an anonymous chemistry student from a 1990 CSIRO publication, led the Australian experimenter known as Nen in January 1993 to what he called “the edge of something massive and unprecedented”. The tree turned out to be Acacia obtusifolia, whose alkaloids were roughly two-thirds NMT and one-third DMT. At least 150 DMT-bearing Acacia species have since been reported. Commercial harvesting in the mid-1990s brought disenchantment within the scene itself (St John, 2017). |
| 1993–96 | Pharmacotheon Ott’s encyclopaedic Pharmacotheon (first published 1993; second edition 1996) called entheogens “sacramental plant teachers of countless generations of the family of humankind” and argued that prohibition is “first and foremost” a limitation on the practice of religion in a broad sense. It became the scene’s reference work and its theology (Ott, 1996). |
| 1994 | Pangaean print formation Ott’s Ayahuasca Analogues: Pangaean Entheogens and DeKorne’s Psychedelic Shamanism consolidated the analogue as both a reproducible pharmacological operation and a programme of self-initiation. Different plants could occupy comparable biochemical roles without becoming culturally identical (Ott, 1994; DeKorne, 1994). |
| 1995 | The Age of Entheogens Ott’s The Age of Entheogens & The Angels’ Dictionary recast Western history around a “Pharmacratic Inquisition” that suppressed ecstatic religion, and foresaw an “Entheogenic Reformation” in which genuine entheogens would replace the “placebo sacraments” of symbolic religion. The accompanying lexicon gave the movement a vocabulary (see The speculative canon) (Ott, 1995; Case, 2007). |
| 1997 | Wattles, tryptamines and Byron Bay Alexander and Ann Shulgin’s TiHKAL discussed the golden wattle among the natural sources of tryptamines. At the Beyond the Brain gathering in Byron Bay, Terence McKenna told an Australian audience that “the Acacia ecology of Australia is jammed with DMT”. Local terms such as “aussiehuasca” and “aussiewaska” followed (Shulgin and Shulgin, 1997; St John, 2017). |
| 1998–2000 | A second editorial generation After six years DeKorne handed the Review to David Aardvark, with Keeper Trout as technical editor; the periodical doubled in size. A second, enlarged edition of the analogues anthology, covering 1992–1999, appeared in 2000 as the first of the Review’s monograph series (Lux, 2008; DeKorne, Aardvark and Trout, 2000). |
| 1999–2003 | Cognitive liberty Richard Glen Boire and Wrye Sententia’s Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics formulated a two-sided right: protection from non-consensual mental intervention and freedom to direct one’s own consciousness. The concept supplied a rights vocabulary for practices that sat outside recognised medicine or religion (Boire, 2000; Walsh, 2016). |
| 1990s–2000s | Network distribution Mailing lists, Usenet, Erowid-style archives, forums and vendor networks accelerated the circulation of botanical and experiential knowledge. Searchable peer archives widened access while weakening editorial control and enabling unsafe claims to travel with well-supported ones. |
| 2003–06 | Changa “Changa was created by Australian Julian Palmer as an alternative to smoking or vaporizing DMT crystal”: a smoking blend of DMT and herbs. The first mixes date from mid-2003 and the name from mid-2004. By 2006 changa had reached the Boom Festival in Portugal, and from there it travelled to Brazil (St John, 2017). |
| 2008 | Print gives way to the forum Jon Hanna introduced changa to Erowid readers, and the Entheogen Review published its final issue at the end of the year. The periodical that had begun as a clearinghouse for “hard-to-find empirical data” was succeeded by online forums such as the DMT-Nexus, where St John locates a DMT culture organised around “plant allies” (Lux, 2008; St John, 2017). |
| 2009 | An Australian encyclopaedia Snu Voogelbreinder’s self-published Garden of Eden surveyed psychoactive flora and fauna from over 1,700 genera, more than 440 in detail: the grower-scholar tradition in its most comprehensive form (Voogelbreinder, 2009). |
| 2010 | Analogue or ayahuasca? Changa’s popularity provoked a debate about names and borrowing. A 2010 Reality Sandwich article by Chen Cho Dorge drew criticism, and Daniel Mirante — the editor of this archive — objected to conflating analogues with ayahuasca and warned of cultural appropriation. The disclosure matters: the archive’s editor is himself one of the scene’s recorded voices (St John, 2017). |
| 2010s | Decriminalisation and medicalisation Reform campaigns challenged criminal penalties while university research and venture-backed firms translated psychedelics into trials, therapist training, intellectual property and investable products. Liberation and institutionalisation ran concurrently (Noorani, 2020; Söderberg, 2022). |
| 2015–17 | The scene historicised Graham St John’s Mystery School in Hyperspace (2015) gave DMT a book-length cultural history, and The World Ayahuasca Diaspora (2017) placed the Australian analogues beside the wider globalisation of ayahuasca. The underground had become an object of anthropology (St John, 2015; Labate, Cavnar and Gearin, 2017; St John, 2017). |
| 2021–26 | Proprietary analogue DMT–harmine combinations, salts, routes and delivery devices entered patent portfolios and clinical studies. The same modularity that enabled countercultural substitution made the analogue legible to pharmaceutical development (Dornbierer, Kosanic and Scheidegger, 2021; Marks and Cohen, 2022; Mueller et al., 2025). |
| 2025 | Death of Jonathan Ott Ott died on 5 July 2025, aged 76. Obituaries remembered the natural-products chemist and translator who had coined “anahuasca” and hosted the Palenque Conversations, and his conviction that the spiritual use of entheogens was “one of the brightest human hopes” in the ecological crisis (Leite, 2025; McKenna, 2025). |
Peganum harmala in flower, wild near Baikonur, Kazakhstan: the Old World rue whose seed the analogue correspondents bioassayed as a substitute for the vine.
Acacia obtusifolia in flower, Woronora Reserve, New South Wales: the wattle of Nen’s 1993 encounter, which opened the Australian chapter.What the chronology records is a modern formation, intellectual and material at once. The knowledge it rests on is Indigenous and Amazonian: oral tryptamine activity produced through β-carboline-bearing vine preparations. What the formation added was abstraction. Plants were reduced to functional roles, and those roles were relocated into non-Amazonian flora, isolated compounds and distributed experiments — first by post, then online.
From the start the formation was ideologically mixed. McKenna offered a prophetic, anti-materialist archaic revival. Ott combined philology, natural-products scholarship and self-experiment with an openly anti-prohibitionist “Entheogenic Reformation”. DeKorne joined practical plant information to occult and Jungian accounts of self-initiation. Later, cognitive-liberty writers translated the sovereignty of consciousness into secular rights language. What these positions shared was opposition to exclusive state, clerical or medical jurisdiction over visionary experience (Ott, 1994; 1996; Monteith, 2016; Walsh, 2016).
A subculture without institutions still has its authorities. In the analogue scene they were authors, editors and self-experimenters whose standing came from publication, chemical competence and a willingness to report on their own nervous systems. Several wrote under pseudonyms, and the scene’s habit of collective, half-anonymous authorship is part of its history. The cards below describe roles as the sources record them; they are not endorsements of the claims each figure made.
Natural-products chemist · translator · psychonaut · lexicographer
A student of Richard Evans Schultes, and through him of Albert Hofmann and R. Gordon Wasson, Ott translated Hofmann’s LSD: My Problem Child, co-proposed entheogen in 1979, and from 1990 ran the self-experiments behind “pharmahuasca” and “anahuasca”, the latter his name for jurema with rue. Pharmacotheon, Ayahuasca Analogues and The Age of Entheogens gave the movement its reference work, its programme and its polemic. Living on a ranch in Mexico, he hosted the Palenque Conversations, which Beatriz Labate has called a precursor of today’s psychedelic conferences (Leite, 2025; McKenna, 2025; Ott, 2001).
Bard and pharmacologist · La Chorrera · the archaic revival
The brothers’ 1971 experiment and The Invisible Landscape made them the scene’s mythographers. Terence became its public voice, carrying hyperspace, plant intelligence and the archaic revival from lecture halls to rave culture. Dennis took the laboratory route: his 1984 paper with Towers and Abbott measured monoamine-oxidase inhibition in Amazonian plants, and his phrase “ayahuasca borealis” named the northern-hemisphere analogue (McKenna, 1991; McKenna, Towers and Abbott, 1984; St John, 2017; Davis, 2016).
Former English teacher · editor · Jungian psychonaut
DeKorne founded the Entheogen Review in 1992 while researching Psychedelic Shamanism, as a clearinghouse for empirical reports on growing, extraction and subjective effects. The periodical was “deliberately edited not to appeal to popular drug-culture expectations”, and his own writing kept a darker register: in 1993 he wrote that DMT’s nature is “to sear away our illusions” (Lux, 2008; DeKorne, Aardvark and Trout, 2000; St John, 2017).
Pseudonymous editors · botanical compilers
Aardvark took over the Review in 1998 and edited it until its final issue in 2008, with Keeper Trout as technical editor. (Lux, 2008; DeKorne, Aardvark and Trout, 2000).
Precursors · underground chemists
Jeremy Bigwood, a co-author of the 1979 entheogen proposal (Ruck et al., 1979), made the single 1978 trial on which Ott later built. Gracie and Zarkov’s newsletters of the mid-1980s turned the idea of a rue-based “synthetic Ayahuasca” into a published proposal (Ott, 2001; Gracie and Zarkov, 1985).
Chemist and lay therapist · TiHKAL
The Shulgins’ 1997 book joined a memoir of tryptamine exploration to a catalogue of compounds, with notes on natural sources and the β-carbolines. It gave the analogue scene a chemical reference written from inside the practice of self-experiment (Shulgin and Shulgin, 1997).
The Australian wattle scene
Nen’s 1993 encounter with Acacia obtusifolia opened the Australian chapter, and Nen later insisted that acacia has “a very different profile to the ayahuascan”. Palmer’s changa carried that chapter to the world, and Voogelbreinder’s Garden of Eden catalogued its botany. Entheogenesis Australis gave the scene a gathering of its own (St John, 2017; Voogelbreinder, 2009).
The inhaled-DMT culture that grew alongside these figures, from Strassman’s clinical studies to the “hyperspace” literature, has its own entry: the psychonautic DMT complex.
The scene’s literature moved from the newsletter to the encyclopaedia to the academic monograph. The table records what each work contributed to the formation; its practical contents are not reproduced here.
| Work | Form and circulation | What it contributed |
|---|---|---|
| Gracie and Zarkov, Notes from the Underground (1985) | Self-published newsletter | The first published proposal of rue as a stand-in for caapi (Gracie and Zarkov, 1985) |
| The Entheogen Review (1992–2008) | Quarterly; mail-order, then online | A distributed field notebook of reader reports, bioassays and cautions (Lux, 2008) |
| Ott, Pharmacotheon (1993; 2nd edn 1996) | Encyclopaedic monograph, small press | The reference work and its theology of “sacramental plant teachers” (Ott, 1996) |
| DeKorne, Psychedelic Shamanism (1994) | Trade paperback, Loompanics | Cultivation joined to a Jungian programme of self-initiation (DeKorne, 1994) |
| Ott, Ayahuasca Analogues: Pangaean Entheogens (1994) | 127-page monograph | Tables of more than 60 plants in each of two roles, “at least four thousand” possible combinations, more than three dozen recorded experiments (Ott, 1994) |
| Ott, The Age of Entheogens & The Angels’ Dictionary (1995) | Essay and lexicon | The Pharmacratic Inquisition thesis and a vocabulary for entheogenic experience (Ott, 1995) |
| DeKorne (ed.), Ayahuasca Analogues and Plant-Based Tryptamines (1996; 2nd edn 2000) | Anthology of the Review | The 1992–99 correspondence gathered as a book (DeKorne, 1996; DeKorne, Aardvark and Trout, 2000) |
| Shulgin and Shulgin, TiHKAL (1997) | Memoir and chemical catalogue | Tryptamines and their natural sources in a single reference (Shulgin and Shulgin, 1997) |
| Ott, ‘Pharmahuasca’ (1999; Spanish 2001) | Journal articles | First-person experiment presented as human pharmacology (Ott, 1999; Ott, 2001) |
| Voogelbreinder, Garden of Eden (2009) | Self-published encyclopaedia, 509 pp. | Over 1,700 genera surveyed (Voogelbreinder, 2009) |
| St John, Mystery School in Hyperspace (2015) | Cultural history | The DMT underground as an object of history (St John, 2015) |
| Labate, Cavnar and Gearin (eds), The World Ayahuasca Diaspora (2017) | Edited academic volume | Analogues placed within the globalisation of ayahuasca (Labate, Cavnar and Gearin, 2017; St John, 2017) |
In this archive, the archaic revival names McKenna’s proposed recovery of forms of knowledge and social relation displaced by industrial modernity: ecstatic ritual, plant-mediated consciousness, animacy, local subsistence and direct experience. “Archaic” functioned as a critical counter-image to bureaucratic, consumer and prohibitionist society, joined in McKenna’s thought to electronic media, cybernetics and speculative futures. Monteith’s account of McKenna’s reception shows how healing discourse, political critique and religious formation converged in the psychonaut networks that carried these ideas (McKenna, 1991; Monteith, 2016).
The analogue gave this critique a material practice. Anti-prohibitionism was enacted through substitution, cultivation, chemical education, anonymous testimony and the circulation of seeds and texts. A controlled molecule might recur in unscheduled plants; a restricted Amazonian preparation might be functionally reassembled from organisms growing on another continent; practical knowledge could be copied at negligible cost. The state’s attempt to confine access met a biological and informational system with many points of entry. Ott’s “Pangaean” vocabulary names this conjunction of planetary phytochemistry and reproducible knowledge (Ott, 1994; Tupper and Labate, 2012).
The political force of the claim has exact limits. The relevant alkaloids occur across numerous taxa and continents, in some plants and not in others, and their abundance says nothing about identity, useful concentration or safety. Governments can regulate DMT, extraction, preparations, importation, possession and intended use even where the source plant itself is unscheduled. Analogue botany complicates prohibition and makes regional plant bans porous; borders and legal power remain.
Ott participated with Ruck, Bigwood, Staples and Wasson in the 1979 proposal of entheogen. The word was intended for substances used to occasion an experience interpreted as divine or sacred, distinguishing such use from the pathology implied by hallucinogen and the psychiatric history carried by psychedelic (Ruck et al., 1979). Its later countercultural use extended beyond a narrow scholarly classification. Naming a plant an entheogen could assert that visionary states had religious, ethical or epistemic value before medical validation.
McKenna and Ott often presented prohibition as more than control of toxic substances: it also delimited legitimate consciousness and protected a materialist account of reality from experiences interpreted as animate, sacred or transpersonal. That diagnosis belongs to their political cosmology; drug-control regimes have multiple historical causes, including racism, geopolitics, administrative expansion, public-health claims and moral regulation. Its importance here lies in how analogue communities understood suppression. The conflict concerned who could alter consciousness and which descriptions of the resulting experience—neurochemical event, symptom, sacrament, encounter or knowledge—public institutions would recognise.
There is no inherited liturgy proper to the whole complex. Instead, analogue practice assembles ritual from four recurring operations. The form can be austere self-experiment, occult psychonautics, borrowed ayahuasca ceremony, Brazilian hybrid religion, therapeutic retreat or clinical session.
Books, zines, plant networks, forums, taxonomy and chemical assays establish authority. The bibliography, vendor list and chromatogram function where a lineage genealogy might function elsewhere.
Plants become extracts, powders or standardised compounds. Chemical literacy becomes ritual competence; bioassay and peer testimony produce a provisional canon.
Domestic altars, darkness, music, eyeshades, facilitator roles or clinical rooms frame what counts as encounter, treatment, revelation or adverse event.
The trip report, forum thread, therapy session or research scale returns private vision to a collective archive. Testimony is both meaning-making and data.
Where analogue ceremony borrows from a living tradition, the borrowing has a history of its own. In north-eastern Brazil the name jurema covers plants, drinks and religious forms at once. Grünewald follows its uses among Indigenous peoples, in catimbó and umbanda, and in a post-modern “neo-juremeiro” psychonautics, and treats these ritual traditions as dynamic and entangled with one another (Grünewald, 2018). The Indigenous end of that field is political as well as religious: the toré ritual was central to the twentieth-century re-emergence of Northeastern peoples once declared officially extinct, mobilising bodies, land, culture and memory as a practice of citizenship (Poets, 2021). At the other end are contemporary esoteric ceremonies in which jurema is mixed with Syrian rue as juremahuasca (Grünewald, Savoldi and Collins, 2022). An exploratory study of 26 participants in “holistic” ayahuasca and jurema rituals found the ayahuasca session higher in temporal quality, ineffability and religious quality on a mysticism scale; ethnographic observation and interviews pointed to the setting as playing a key role in the differences (Savoldi, Roazzi and Sales, 2023).
McKenna’s Gaian futurism. The archaic revival joined rhetoric of cultural recovery to plant intelligence, the Logos, hyperspace, autonomous entities, cybernetics, novelty and machine intelligence. DMT became a communications technology between human language and an animate cosmos (McKenna, 1991; Monteith, 2016; St John, 2018a; Davis, 2019).
DeKorne’s imaginal peril. DeKorne’s world drew on Jung, occultism and shamanic literature. The visionary field could heal and instruct, but it also contained deceptive agencies and psychic danger. Self-initiation demanded discrimination as well as openness (DeKorne, 1994).
Ott’s Pangaean entheogenic reformation. If equivalent compounds occurred across world flora, sacramental access could be open everywhere. “Pangaean” named a global pharmacological commons and an anticipated reformation of consciousness (Ott, 1994; 1996).
Cognitive liberty. In secular form, sovereignty of consciousness becomes the complex’s moral cosmology: persons claim protection against imposed mental intervention and a freedom to alter their own minds. The claim contests prohibition and challenges medical systems that make legitimate access conditional on diagnosis and professional custody (Boire, 2000; Walsh, 2016; González Romero, 2023).
The Pangaean commons. Planetary distribution is imagined as a political property of life: pharmacological possibility exceeds the territorial monopoly of any state or market. The claim concerns recurring biochemical roles; the plants stay distinct, and culturally situated traditions stay their owners’.
Authorised reality. McKenna and Ott read prohibition as an epistemic institution that privileges materialist explanation and disciplines experiences interpreted as sacred, animate or transpersonal. This is a countercultural theory of state power, and one strand in the causal history of drug control (Ott, 1996; Monteith, 2016).
Alongside its botany the scene produced a body of speculation: theories of history, evolution, time and the mind that were argued in books, retold in lectures and repeated on forums until they became common property. They are recorded here as an anthropologist would record a cosmology — for what they meant to those who held them and what work they did — and not as findings. Each is graded conjectural: a reasoned hypothesis without direct evidence. Where scholars have assessed one, the assessment is given beside it. Read together, the theories supply what religions usually supply: a sacred history, an account of human origins, an eschatology, a cosmology, a theory of the soul and a liturgical language. Monteith reads McKenna’s reception as the formation of a “psychonaut religion”; Davis, writing of the brothers McKenna, calls the result a “weird naturalism” (Monteith, 2016; Davis, 2016).
A sacred history: the Pharmacratic Inquisition. Ott’s The Age of Entheogens offers “a radical reexamination of the history of western civilization”. In it, a “Pharmacratic Inquisition” brutally suppressed ecstatic, experiential religions, leaving the West with the “placebo sacraments” of “purely symbolic religions”. The remedy is an “Entheogenic Reformation” that restores genuine entheogens to worship. The vocabulary is borrowed from the Protestant Reformation and turns it against its source: here the reformers return to the sacrament rather than away from it. Rendi Case, reviewing it for Erowid, summed up the book’s appeal as winning back “that real ‘old time religion’: the original, organic practice of direct experience of the spirit through entheogens”. Pharmacotheon had already framed prohibition as “first and foremost” a limitation on religion (Ott, 1995; Case, 2007; Ott, 1996).
A liturgical language: the Angels’ Dictionary. Bound with the same book is a lexicon of 318 words about “sacred inebriants, ecstatic states and kindred topics”: 290 definitions, 445 quotations in six languages, 37 neologisms and 70 entries drawn from 29 non-European languages. Ott presented it as an answer to Wasson’s call for a vocabulary to describe “all the modalities of a Divine Inebriant”. Inventing words is a way of making a world speakable; the dictionary is the scene’s most literal act of religion-making (Ott, 1995).
A myth of origins: the stoned ape. In Food of the Gods McKenna proposed that psilocybin-containing mushrooms in the hominin diet, by sharpening vision, raising sexual activity and occasioning ecstatic experience, drove the rapid reorganisation of the brain’s information-processing capacities. Rodríguez Arce and Winkelman, reviewing the evolutionary literature, conclude that psychedelics were not the “missing link” and that a simplistic version of McKenna’s account “is most certainly false”, though they argue that more careful hypotheses about psychedelics and human sociality deserve examination (McKenna, 1992; Rodríguez Arce and Winkelman, 2021).
A theory of history: partnership and domination. The same book set the archaic revival inside a larger story in which early egalitarian societies organised around plant-induced ecstasy were displaced by a “dominator culture” whose patriarchal and monotheistic institutions suppressed the plants. The story explains the present as a fall and makes the analogue a means of return — the structure of a redemption myth (McKenna, 1992; Monteith, 2016).
An eschatology: Timewave Zero. From the revelation at La Chorrera the brothers derived, in The Invisible Landscape, a mathematical model of “novelty” in time. Hanegraaff traces the millenarian expectation attached to 21 December 2012 to this “Eschaton Timewave”, which charted history as a wave of increasing novelty converging on a single end-point. He reads it as an attempt to make sense of a single overwhelming experience — a pattern familiar from the history of religions (McKenna and McKenna, 1993; Hanegraaff, 2010).
A ritual science: the experiment at La Chorrera. Davis shows how the 1971 experiment drew on Jungian alchemy, McLuhan and science fiction, and on Terence’s unpublished 1969 Crypto-Rap. On his reading, the brothers “esotericized” media theory into an occult apparatus of resonance, sympathy and apocalyptic ontology. The episode is the scene’s model of the experiment that is also a rite (Davis, 2016; Davis, 2019).
A cosmology: hyperspace and its inhabitants. For McKenna, DMT opened onto a “hyperspace” populated by autonomous, self-transforming “machine elves”, and the mushroom was itself a sentient visitor from space. Such encounters were taken as contact with intelligences independent of the person who meets them. St John reads the “breakthrough” as a liminal aesthetic with its own conventions; the fuller phenomenology belongs to the psychonautic DMT complex (McKenna, 1991; St John, 2018a; Monteith, 2016).
A theory of the soul: the spirit gland. Rick Strassman’s hypothesis that the pineal gland produces DMT left the clinic and entered popular culture, where the gland became a “lightning rod of the soul”. St John traces its uptake in Theosophical re-evolutionism and Lovecraftian gothic, and notes that the claim that the pineal gland releases psychedelic quantities of DMT still lacks the evidence it needs (St John, 2016).
An Old World antiquity: haoma as harmel. The Deep Time record above finds no ancient analogue lineage. One hypothesis would supply one. David Flattery and Martin Schwartz argued that the Indo-Iranian sacred drink haoma (Vedic soma) was prepared from Peganum harmala, with ephedra as a lesser ingredient. If it held, the analogue’s β-carboline would have a sacramental history in the Old World. The Encyclopaedia Iranica judges the proposal “open to strong objections” (Flattery and Schwartz, 1989; Taillieu, 2003).
A sacred landscape: the wattle continent. McKenna’s remark that “the Acacia ecology of Australia is jammed with DMT” turned a botanical observation into a promise of abundance. The scene’s own chronicler records the cost of that promise in commercial harvest, and Nen’s caution that acacia has “a very different profile to the ayahuascan”. Claims of precolonial Aboriginal entheogenic use belong to the same imaginative territory and are treated with caution elsewhere on this page (St John, 2017).
The canon’s durability owes more to what it does than to what it proves. It gives a dispersed, legally exposed community a shared past (an inquisition), a destiny (a reformation, an end of history), a home (hyperspace, the archaic) and a language (the Angels’ Dictionary). These are the ordinary materials of new religious movements, and they have been studied as such (Monteith, 2016; Hanegraaff, 2010; Davis, 2016).
“Neoshamanism” here names an unstable field of apprenticeship, borrowing, invention and market exchange. Some contemporary ceremonies are sincere, some are not, and sincerity confers no Indigenous lineage. Analogue specialists often earn authority through experience, chemical competence, charisma, therapeutic training or a network reputation, where Indigenous specialists earn it through kinship and territorial transmission. When Amazonian songs, titles, aesthetics or claims are imported, their displacement must be made visible (Fotiou, 2016; Gearin and Calavia Sáez, 2021).
Clinical translation substitutes another authority-system: screening, ethics approval, standardised compounds, therapist dyads and validated scales. Spirits become imagery, purge becomes tolerability, revelation becomes insight, and lineage becomes protocol. This is a biopolitical change in who may produce extraordinary consciousness, under what conditions, and whose account counts as truth.
Ethnography has also unsettled the assumption that neo-shamanic ritual is simply individualist. Studying ayahuasca neoshamanism in Australia, Gearin found collectivist logics of social action in the ritual practices of ecstatic purging and visions, and read them through the anthropological notion of “dividualism”, in which the person is multiple, partible and exchangeable along social relations of obligation — a challenge to what the article’s title calls the New Age individualism orthodoxy (Gearin, 2017).
Zines · marginalia · botanical plates · seed envelopes
Cut-and-paste pages placed receptor diagrams beside visionary testimony; cultivation notes beside warnings; hand-drawn apparatus beside ethnography. The rough page made specialist knowledge portable and intimate.
Fractals · rave flyers · sampled speech · early web graphics
McKenna’s voice circulated as audio sample and digital oracle. Recursive geometry, biomechanical ornament and virtual reality gave a visual language to “hyperspace” and to the conjunction of archaic plants with technical futures (Rushkoff, 1994; Davis, 2019).
Glassware · scales · jars · playlists · altars
The kitchen and home laboratory collapse medicine, sacrament and experiment into one room. Their objects materialise the complex’s characteristic ambiguity: care and risk, devotion and engineering.
Capsules · nasal devices · EEG · eyeshades · rating scales
The trial room retains soft light, plants, music and reclining bodies while surrounding them with monitoring and documentation. “Set and setting” becomes a reproducible intervention component (Perkins et al., 2021; Bonomo et al., 2025).
Analogue reports are often grouped under “ayahuasca-like,” but DMT is only one of the factors. Plant chemistry, RIMA profile, route, expectancy, nausea, social frame and the absence or presence of a ritual specialist all shape the experience. Caapi, rue, grass, Acacia and isolated compounds can be compared while each keeps its own profile.
Ott’s approximately seventy pharmahuasca bioassays treated subjective experience as disciplined human pharmacology. Their enduring contribution was the demonstration that oral DMT–harmine effects could be repeatably produced and studied outside the canonical brew (Ott, 1999).
A particularly violent Phalaris-derived inhalation led DeKorne to describe “a psychic hydrogen bomb go off in my brain.” It was not an oral analogue session, but the report became a cautionary legend about variable grass chemistry and psychonautic overconfidence (DeKorne, 1996).
McKenna called DMT the “quintessential hallucinogen” and part of a human “birthright.” His influence lay in converting an intense private event—entities, impossible surfaces, visible language—into a public cosmology legible to cyberculture (St John, 2018a).
a psychic hydrogen bomb go off in my brain.DeKorne (1996), recalling an inhaled Phalaris-derived experiment. Salient because it resists the analogue culture’s utopian tendency; it is not a dosage model or a description of oral ayahuasca.
| Form | Typical temporal envelope | Reported character and evidential limit |
|---|---|---|
| Oral plant analogues | Onset often within 20–60 minutes; main effects commonly 3–6 hours. | From gradual bodily threshold to overwhelming vision; highly variable plant chemistry and reporting conditions make these broad orientation ranges only (Ott, 1999). |
| Oral pharmahuasca | Several hours, with a slower rise and longer narrative arc than inhaled DMT. | More reproducible than unassayed plants but still strongly shaped by harmala exposure, absorption, expectation and setting (Ott, 1999). |
| Intranasal DMT + buccal harmine | Approximately 2–3 hours, with a deliberately extended plateau. | In 31 healthy men, the formulation was reported tolerable and controllable; the all-male healthy sample and laboratory frame sharply limit cultural and clinical generalisation (Mueller et al., 2025). |
| Acacia-derived oral formulation | Multi-hour supported clinical session. | Nine experienced healthy volunteers generally judged three formulations similar to ayahuasca. Open-label design, expectancy and the specialised sample prevent claims of equivalence (Bonomo et al., 2025). |
| Inhaled plant extracts | Seconds to minutes; abrupt peak; shorter total course. | Pharmacologically and ritually distinct from an oral analogue. Accounts can be exceptionally intense and chemically uncertain. |
Heat, tremor, pressure, yawning, nausea, autonomic activation and a sense that the body is becoming permeable. Whether emesis is read as adverse effect, cleansing or absent feature depends on the frame.
Geometric filigree, saturated lattices, organic-machine morphologies and internally illuminated surfaces may organise the visual field before fully scenic imagery appears.
Memory replay, moral inventory, grief, shame, attachment and interpersonal scenes acquire unusual vividness and conviction. Therapeutic language calls this insight or emotional processing; other frames call it teaching.
Autonomous scenes, presences, ancestors, animals, architectures, “aliens” or an impersonal intelligence may appear. The noetic force—the feeling that the vision reveals—is often more salient than visual complexity.
Meaning may seem seen, sung or embodied. McKenna’s “visible language” and cyberdelic descriptions of information-rich hyperspace became templates that can also shape later reports (St John, 2018a).
Afterglow, exhaustion, vulnerability and interpretive urgency follow. Integration with a therapist, peer group, journal or forum decides whether the event becomes symptom, revelation, artwork, research datum or life-project.
Removing bitterness, nausea or purge changes more than “delivery.” It changes bodily attention, symbolism, vulnerability and the relation between ordeal and meaning. Likewise, a clinical capsule can reproduce selected compounds while leaving behind ayahuasca as a whole social and more-than-human event.
Analogue culture grew up as a practical opposition to prohibition. Its decisive discovery was that the controlled experiential principle could be reconstituted along many botanical routes: cultivated rue, regional wattles, Mimosa, selected grasses, retained caapi, the canonical leaves and isolated compounds together formed a repertoire of substitutions. Print and digital circulation added a second redundancy. Once the pharmacological roles were public knowledge, the seizure of a shipment, the closure of a supplier or the restriction of one species could simply redirect experimentation (Ott, 1994; DeKorne, 1996; Söderberg, 2022).
This was radical anti-prohibitionism in two senses. It rejected criminal punishment as the organising response to self-directed alteration of consciousness, and it challenged the premise that access required prior authorisation from the state, medicine or a recognised church. Ott’s polemical language of an “Entheogenic Reformation” cast the analogue as a means of breaking clerical and pharmacological monopolies. McKenna’s archaic revival situated prohibition within a wider critique of managed consciousness, consumer culture and ecological alienation. DeKorne’s small-press practice supplied the reproducible, provisional and corrective archive through which those ideas could become material experiments (Ott, 1994; 1996; McKenna, 1991; Monteith, 2016).
Biological distribution frustrates a plant-by-plant model of control, while government borders keep their force in law and practice. States can control a molecule, preparation, extract, act of manufacture or intended use; policing can burden some communities more heavily than others; and unscheduled status can change. The analogue’s political achievement is better described as regulatory redundancy: prohibition faces multiple species, techniques and knowledge pathways (Tupper and Labate, 2012; Walsh, 2016).
Cognitive liberty joins freedom from non-consensual intervention with freedom to investigate, alter and direct one’s own consciousness. Boire’s formulation emerged amid late-1990s concern with psychopharmacology, surveillance and neurotechnology; psychedelic drug policy became one instance of a wider contest over mental self-determination (Boire, 2000; Walsh, 2016; González Romero, 2023). Analogue practice gives the positive liberty claim a material infrastructure: distributed plants, an intelligible combination principle, replicable first-person inquiry and a peer archive.
Democratisation here has several layers. Geographic democratisation reduces dependence on Amazonian travel and imported flora. Technical democratisation translates an apparently singular preparation into functional roles that can be investigated by non-specialists. Epistemic democratisation admits first-person report and community knowledge alongside institutional evidence. Political democratisation treats extraordinary consciousness as a capacity whose legitimate exercise extends beyond patients, research participants and members of exempted religions.
Each layer has exclusions. Plant knowledge, secure space, time, health screening, disability access, legal counsel and the ability to absorb criminal risk are unequally distributed. Online openness can conceal expertise behind confident prose, while race and class shape who is read as an experimenter, a patient or an offender. Local sourcing may reduce a long-distance commodity chain or transfer pressure to a rare species and erase the Indigenous history from which the combination principle became known. An open pharmacological commons requires conservation, attribution, reciprocal benefit and accessible safety knowledge if “democratisation” is to describe more than dispersal.
The contemporary “psychedelic renaissance” converts selected compounds and experiences into medicines, therapy protocols, professional competencies and investment assets. This translation can produce controlled safety data, screening standards, adverse-event response, legal routes of access and public legitimacy. It also narrows the authorised purposes of altered consciousness toward diagnosable illness, measurable outcome and supervised treatment. A person becomes eligible as a patient, where the analogue writers spoke of a citizen claiming cognitive liberty; the experience enters public life through efficacy (Noorani, 2020; Walsh, 2016).
Analogue history complicates corporate accounts of innovation. Decades of illicit or legally ambiguous user practice generated botanical leads, experiential reports, interaction warnings and practical knowledge before venture-backed development. Pharmaceutical firms can formalise parts of this dispersed knowledge as compounds, salts, delivery systems, protocols and patents. Söderberg describes this movement as the conversion of “outlaw user innovation” into protected commercial assets; Marks and Cohen identify risks to competition, access and Indigenous knowledge when weak prior-art records meet expansive psychedelic patenting (Söderberg, 2022; Marks and Cohen, 2022).
Medicalisation is itself a cultural framework. Diagnosis, informed consent, therapist neutrality, psychometric scales, quiet rooms, playlists and integration appointments organise expectation and interpretation. This framework has developed expertise in screening and acute support, yet it can translate sacrament into active ingredient, teacher into drug effect, community obligation into treatment compliance and long-term practice into a limited course of sessions. Costly therapist time, restrictive trial criteria, insurance exclusions and proprietary formulations can make legal access narrower than the rhetoric of a renaissance suggests (Noorani, 2020; Langlitz, 2013).
The analogue critique is directed at exclusivity; it accepts much clinical knowledge. On this view, research and professional care can thrive without a monopoly over legitimate use. A plural governance model could recognise medical treatment, religious exercise, community practice and non-commercial adult self-direction while imposing proportionate standards for consent, advertising, ecological sourcing and facilitator accountability.
Removing professional and geographic gatekeepers leaves the social capacities that make difficult experiences navigable still to be built. Analogue culture often circulates chemical concepts more readily than durable preparation, supervision and aftercare. A forum can identify an interaction or normalise a crisis; a charismatic facilitator can offer continuity or exploit dependence; a borrowed ceremonial form can stabilise attention or misrepresent its authority. The political value of access and the practical need for competent care occupy different axes.
Four infrastructures recur where decentralised practice becomes sustainable: preparation, including medication review, psychiatric and physical-health screening and explicit consent; experienced accompaniment, including boundaries, emergency planning and referral; interpretive plurality, allowing spiritual, psychological and uncertain accounts without compelled belief; and integration, including follow-up, peer support and recognition of adverse or destabilising outcomes. Their absence is a public-health and community-governance problem. Criminal prohibition can worsen it by driving practice underground, discouraging disclosure and making transparent training or quality control legally hazardous (Tupper, 2008; Perkins et al., 2021; Bouso et al., 2022).
McKenna’s and Ott’s anti-materialist arguments treated entheogenic prohibition as regulation of admissible reality. Experiences of plant intelligence, autonomous entities, sacred presence or transpersonal knowledge challenged institutions that recognised only intoxication, hallucination or symptom. In this analysis, criminalisation protected public order and also an epistemic hierarchy: biochemical explanation could be official, while metaphysical interpretation was privatised, medicalised or denied (Ott, 1996; Monteith, 2016).
That argument is most precise when framed as a conflict over interpretive jurisdiction; it does not require modern authorities to share one materialist motive. A neurobiological description and a sacred interpretation can coexist, compete or remain unresolved. Cognitive liberty includes room to interpret an experience without state-mandated metaphysics, clinical coercion or pressure from a ceremonial leader. It also includes freedom from imposed psychoactive states and from compulsory spiritual explanation. The political claim is that no institution should secure exclusive custody of consciousness by defining in advance every legitimate meaning it may bear.
Three decades after the Entheogen Review’s first issue, the formation it helped to found has dispersed in several directions at once. The print correspondence has become the online forum, where DMT culture is organised around “plant allies” and pseudonymity survives as a habit. Changa, an Australian invention, circulates on the festival circuit from Portugal to Brazil. The analogue has become an object of scholarship: cultural histories, an edited volume on the ayahuasca diaspora and studies of ayahuasca’s globalisation beyond the Amazon now read the scene from outside (St John, 2017; St John, 2015; Labate, Cavnar and Gearin, 2017; Tupper, 2009).
The most striking change is institutional. Ott’s pharmahuasca, once a self-experiment, now has clinical descendants in DMT–harmine formulations tested in Zurich and Melbourne and protected by patents, as the research table below records. The critique of borrowing has also moved from the forum to the journal: arguments made within the scene in 2010 against conflating analogues with ayahuasca now sit beside academic accounts of how globalised practice can erase Indigenous shamanism (St John, 2017; Fotiou, 2016).
The founding generation is passing. Ott’s death in July 2025 closed a line of descent that ran from Schultes, Hofmann and Wasson through the 1979 entheogen proposal to the analogue. His obituarists recorded his belief that the spiritual use of entheogens was “one of the brightest human hopes” in the ecological crisis. Whether the formation keeps that hope, settles into the clinic, or remains a plural field of the two is the open question this entry leaves (Leite, 2025; McKenna, 2025).
| Study | What it adds | What it cannot establish |
|---|---|---|
| Mueller et al. (2025) | Thirty-one healthy men received intranasal DMT with buccal harmine; the combination extended effects into a 2–3-hour, controllable window and was tolerated in this setting. | Silent on efficacy, on women and on diverse clinical populations; plants, ceremony and ayahuasca equivalence were outside its design. |
| Bonomo et al. (2025) | First published clinical pilot of purified oral formulations derived from two unnamed Australian Acacia species and P. harmala; nine experienced healthy volunteers, supported by a therapist dyad. | The species were reported only as Acacia A/B. The small open-label sample and expectancy prevent generalisation; one high-dose participant had transient suicidal ideation that resolved with therapist intervention. |
| Suay et al. (2025) | Controlled DMT–harmine work investigated changes in creative dynamics, widening the research focus beyond acute intensity alone. | Laboratory creativity measures leave claims of plant intelligence or therapeutic transformation untested. |
| Aicher et al. (2026) | In 28 healthy men, DMT–harmine reduced post-performance embarrassment and shame in a karaoke paradigm, suggesting a testable social-emotional after-effect. | A small healthy-male experiment: short of an antidepressant trial, and silent on durable social healing. |
| Stojanović et al. (2026) | A scoping review mapped 26 registered interventional trials of ayahuasca, DMT and DMT–harmine, showing rapid institutional expansion and heterogeneous routes and targets. | A registered trial is a plan, and evidence comes with its results; compound studies leave whole-rite ethnopharmacology untested. |
Acacia conservation
Some wattles are common or invasive; others have tiny ranges. Acacia courtii is nationally Vulnerable in Australia and was listed Endangered in New South Wales in 2026. It was not identified as a source in the 2025 clinical paper, which withheld its two species names (Australian Government, 2026; NSW Threatened Species Scientific Committee, 2026; Bonomo et al., 2025).
Mimosa and bark markets
Mimosa tenuiflora is globally assessed as Least Concern, but root-bark removal kills or damages individual plants. Local extraction pressure, provenance and the ethics of commodity chains lie outside that assessment (BGCI and IUCN, 2019).
Reed canary grass and rue are invasive in parts of their introduced ranges, but variable toxic alkaloids, contaminated sites and misidentification remain concerns. Abundance as a weed is no measure of fitness as a medicine (Read et al., 2020).
Caapi supply
Substitution may reduce demand for transported vine, yet it can also preserve “ayahuasca” branding while removing Indigenous cultivators from the value chain. Global endangerment and sustainability both need local evidence.
| Jurisdiction | Current position and analogue-specific problem |
|---|---|
| International | DMT is in Schedule I of the 1971 Psychotropic Convention. The INCB has stated that the plants themselves are not internationally controlled in the same way, and national control of preparations, extraction and possession varies (United Nations, 1971; INCB, 2011). |
| United States | DMT remains Schedule I under federal law. Religious protections for ayahuasca churches are case-specific; analogues, home manufacture and secular cognitive-liberty claims fall outside them (US Government, 2026). |
| United Kingdom | DMT is a Class A, Schedule 1 controlled drug; preparations intended to contain it carry severe legal risk, whatever the plant’s own status (UK Government, 2026). |
| Brazil | CONAD Resolution No. 1/2010 regulates religious ayahuasca use. Juremahuasca, pharmahuasca and substitutions outside recognised ayahuasca practice lie outside its framework (CONAD, 2010). |
| Australia | The 2025 Acacia pilot reports that DMT and harmala alkaloids were Schedule 9 substances available in that study only through research permits, native plant or not (Bonomo et al., 2025). |
Legal information changes and is not legal advice. The analogue complex is particularly exposed to uncertainty because plant, preparation, isolated compound, intention, extraction and religious context may be treated differently.
The DMT–harmala principle is old knowledge and implausible as a new invention. Contemporary patents instead target salts, solubility, delivery routes, kits, devices and therapeutic use. WO2021259962A1, assigned to the University of Zurich, concerns DMT–harmine combinations and non-oral administration; WO2024023274A2, assigned to Reconnect Labs AG, concerns soluble harmine formulations; US11235110B1 claims a vaporisation delivery system for “ayahuasca-like” substances (Dornbierer, Kosanic and Scheidegger, 2021; Dornbierer et al., 2024; Ellis, 2022).
Indigenous combination knowledge can be treated as unownable prior art while a salt, device, route or clinical claim becomes private property. The analogue sits at a sharp frontier between cognitive commons and pharmaceutical enclosure.
These are constituent pages. Each species carries its own ecology, chemistry and cultural history beyond the analogue complex.
Ayahuasca vine; harmine- and THH-rich, with extensive Indigenous and religious biographies of its own.
Harmel / Syrian rue; harmine- and harmaline-bearing seeds with independent medicinal, fumigatory and apotropaic traditions.
Chacruna; a principal DMT-bearing companion to caapi in many Amazonian and Brazilian religious preparations.
Chagropanga / chaliponga; DMT-bearing Malpighiaceae used in north-west Amazonian yagé traditions.
Jurema-preta; chemically recruited into juremahuasca while remaining culturally central to distinct northeastern Brazilian traditions.
Taiwan acacia; widely circulated in global analogue networks. Alkaloid claims must remain tissue- and provenance-specific.
Jam wattle; one focus of Australian analogue culture, demanding attention to chemotype, land relation and sustainable harvest.
A highly restricted wattle listed nationally Vulnerable and in NSW Endangered. Its rarity makes extractive interest especially consequential.
Harding grass; some chemotypes contain tryptamines, but co-alkaloids and livestock toxicity make broad species claims unsafe.
Reed canary grass; cosmopolitan and invasive in some regions, with highly variable and often unsuitable alkaloid profiles.
Illinois bundleflower; a North American native enrolled in the analogue imaginary, though chemical reliability is contested.
Vilca / cebil; seeds rich in bufotenine with minor DMT and 5-MeO-DMT. Its own record is the Andean and Chaco snuff and smoking tradition.
Yopo tree; important as a comparison with deep-time snuff traditions, and rarely an oral analogue constituent.
Unlike canonical ayahuasca, the analogue complex has no universal botanical pair. The large cards identify its most recurrent RIMA and tryptamine-source plants; the smaller field shows canonical crossover plants, regional wattles, grasses and prairie alternatives.
The most widely circulated non-Amazonian source of reversible MAO-A inhibition in analogue practice. Rue brings to the complex its own Central and West Asian medicinal, fumigatory and apotropaic histories.
Many analogues substitute only the tryptamine-bearing partner and retain caapi. Such hybrids preserve the vine’s harmine–tetrahydroharmine profile and sometimes its ritual prestige while moving into new botanical, legal and cultural assemblages.
A major DMT-bearing plant in modern analogue circulation and the source behind the name juremahuasca. Its recruitment into an analogue pair must remain distinct from the far older and culturally specific Jurema religious complex of northeastern Brazil.
One of the most visible wattles in transnational analogue discourse and commerce. Its prominence belongs to contemporary circulation, with no evidenced ancient sacramental lineage; alkaloid claims remain dependent on verified taxon, plant part and provenance.
The principal ayahuasca leaf may be paired with rue. The ceremony, authority and cosmology of an Amazonian rite stay behind unless they are carried over too.
A north-western Amazonian co-principal sometimes recruited into noncanonical RIMA pairings; its culturally dense yagé relations travel only partly with its chemistry.
A focus of Australian analogue culture. Chemotype, land relation, provenance and sustainable harvest matter more than generic claims about “Acacia.”
Some chemotypes contain relevant tryptamines, but pronounced seasonal and chemical variability makes abundance an unreliable guide to composition.
Enrolled in the “local entheogen” imaginary through accessibility, yet tryptamine and co-alkaloid profiles vary radically between populations.
A North American native recruited into the analogue field; the cultural name is more stable than evidence for consistently useful alkaloid expression.
Card scale indicates prominence in analogue literature, exchange networks and practice; safety, chemical reliability and cultural legitimacy are separate questions. Every plant remains a variable biological population.
| Defining operation | A tryptamine-bearing plant and a reversible monoamine oxidase-A inhibitor (RIMA) are brought into one pharmacological sequence, substituting one or both functional roles of the canonical Banisteriopsis caapi–Psychotria viridis/Diplopterys cabrerana assemblage (McKenna et al., 1984; Ott, 1999). |
|---|---|
| Boundary of the complex | Plant-based analogues; hybrid preparations retaining caapi or an Amazonian leaf; and pharmahuasca, in which isolated or synthesised compounds replace the plants. The boundary is functional. |
| Associated compounds | Principally N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), harmine, harmaline and tetrahydroharmine (THH). Depending on species, tissue, season and processing, N-methyltryptamine, 5-MeO-DMT, gramine, hordenine and other alkaloids may complicate the picture (Mack, Mulvena and Slaytor, 1988; Callaway, Brito and Neves, 2005; Santos et al., 2020). |
| Names in circulation | Anahuasca is Ott’s broad term; juremahuasca, acaciahuasca and prairiehuasca name locally available tryptamine sources; pharmahuasca names the isolated-compound logic. These are unstable vernacular categories, and composition varies within each. |
| Preparation principle | Identification and sourcing are followed by some form of assay, transformation or standardisation; the two pharmacological roles are sequenced inside a chosen setting; experience is then narrated and integrated. This page intentionally gives no extraction method, ratio or dose: chemical variability, botanical misidentification and RIMA drug interactions make the recipe-form an irresponsible reduction of the complex. |
| Functional role | Principal plants / compounds | Ethnobotanical and chemical distinction |
|---|---|---|
| Amazonian RIMA vine | Banisteriopsis caapi | Harmine and THH usually predominate; a culturally dense teacher-plant whose ritual identity reaches well past MAO-A inhibition (Callaway, Brito and Neves, 2005; Santos et al., 2020). |
| Pangaean RIMA substitute | Peganum harmala | Harmine and harmaline-rich seeds; long-standing fumigant, medicinal and apotropaic uses precede the analogue complex by centuries (Moloudizargari et al., 2013). |
| Canonical Amazonian leaves | Psychotria viridis; Diplopterys cabrerana | DMT-bearing ayahuasca/yagé companions. The social relations of an Amazonian rite stay behind unless they are carried over too. |
| Jurema source | Mimosa tenuiflora | DMT-bearing root bark; independently central to northeastern Brazilian jurema traditions. Its analogue use is a modern branch of a much older religion (Gaujac et al., 2012; Grünewald, Savoldi and Collins, 2022). |
| Acacia sources | Acacia confusa, A. acuminata and other species | Global and Australian networks use several wattles, but alkaloid profiles vary by taxon, tissue and provenance, so “Acacia” names many chemistries. |
| Grass sources | Phalaris aquatica; P. arundinacea | Cosmopolitan, cultivable and radically variable. Some chemotypes contain DMT or 5-MeO-DMT; gramine/hordenine and livestock toxicity make abundance a poor proxy for safety (Mack, Mulvena and Slaytor, 1988; Read et al., 2020). |
| Prairie source | Desmanthus illinoensis | Associated with “prairiehuasca” in North American networks; evidence for reliable alkaloid yield is less consistent than the name suggests. |
| Isolated pair | DMT + harmine/harmaline | Pharmahuasca removes taxonomic ambiguity and enables controlled pharmacokinetics, while transforming a plant relation into a formulation (Ott, 1999; Mueller et al., 2025). |
Oral DMT is normally metabolised rapidly by monoamine oxidase-A in the gut and liver. Harmine and harmaline reversibly inhibit MAO-A, allowing DMT to reach systemic circulation; DMT’s psychedelic effects are then mediated chiefly through serotonergic receptors including 5-HT2A (McKenna et al., 1984; Riba et al., 2003). Yet the popular metaphor of a simple “key” and “lock” is incomplete. Harmala alkaloids have central effects of their own, THH contributes a different profile, routes of administration reshape the time-course, and whole plants add variable minor alkaloids (Callaway, Brito and Neves, 2005; Rodríguez et al., 2022).
The analogue literature tested this pharmacology by self-experiment. Ott summarised some seventy psychonautic bioassays by eight self-experimenters of “pharmahuasca” — capsules of crystalline DMT with harmine — and of other pairings of tryptamines with β-carbolines, and read them as confirming the 1967 Holmstedt–Lindgren hypothesis that DMT becomes active by mouth when β-carbolines taken with it inhibit monoamine oxidase (Ott, 1999). The first measurements in human plasma came from a ceremony. When hoasca was prepared and given in a ceremonial context to fifteen volunteers, peak psychoactivity coincided with high alkaloid concentrations; DMT reached its peak on average at 107.5 ± 32.5 minutes and its parameters correlated with harmine’s, while tetrahydroharmine, a weak inhibitor of serotonin uptake, followed a course relatively independent of harmine (Callaway et al., 1999). Harmine has actions of its own. A review of its pharmacology lists, beside MAO inhibition, actions at 5-HT2A and imidazoline receptors and inhibition of the kinase DYRK1A and of the dopamine transporter, and records the botanical (“anahuasca”) and synthetic (“pharmahuasca”) substitutes as a recent development in ayahuasca use (Brierley and Davidson, 2012).
RIMAs can interact dangerously with serotonergic and sympathomimetic medicines and drugs. 5-MeO-DMT has a distinct risk profile, and combining it with MAO inhibition is especially hazardous. Rue toxicity, pregnancy risk, psychiatric vulnerability and uncertain grass or Acacia chemistry require expert screening; botanical abundance and online testimony are not safety evidence (Berdai et al., 2014; Bouso et al., 2022).