Uploaded August 2025 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
A romanticised version of ayahuasca as a purely benevolent feminine healing spirit has emerged through the growth of the commercial ayahuasca industry. This presentation explores how the commodified figure of “Mother Ayahuasca” serves to eclipse ayahuasca’s uses in brujería (sorcery/witchcraft) and downplay the significance of shamanic power and agency. It invites us to re-think our gendered divisions and stereotypes and consider a more nuanced approach where male and female, ‘dark’ and ‘light’, are dynamic, shifting dualities, and through which healing can be understood as entailing the balancing of masculine and feminine aspects, and integration of our ‘dark’ side.
Bio:
Emily is an ayahuasca anthropologist whose doctorate research focused on gender dynamics and cosmology in mestizo ayahuasca shamanism in Iquitos, Peru where she lived and worked in ayahuasca centres between 2014 and 2021. She is an activist on sexual abuse in psychedelic medicine contexts and, as a mother, for women and children in psychedelic spaces. She is the Educational Program Co-ordinator for Psychedelic Parenthood Community.
A romanticised version of ayahuasca as a purely benevolent feminine healing spirit has emerged through the growth of the commercial ayahuasca industry. This presentation explores how the commodified figure of “Mother Ayahuasca” serves to eclipse ayahuasca’s uses in brujería (sorcery/witchcraft) and downplay the significance of shamanic power and agency. It invites us to re-think our gendered divisions and stereotypes and consider a more nuanced approach where male and female, ‘dark’ and ‘light’, are dynamic, shifting dualities, and through which healing can be understood as entailing the balancing of masculine and feminine aspects, and integration of our ‘dark’ side.
Bio:
Emily is an ayahuasca anthropologist whose doctorate research focused on gender dynamics and cosmology in mestizo ayahuasca shamanism in Iquitos, Peru where she lived and worked in ayahuasca centres between 2014 and 2021. She is an activist on sexual abuse in psychedelic medicine contexts and, as a mother, for women and children in psychedelic spaces. She is the Educational Program Co-ordinator for Psychedelic Parenthood Community.
