The Riddle Schultes Couldn't Answer

“Schultes spent twelve years in the Amazon and documented the ayahuasca preparation in systematic detail. He never answered the question of how it was discovered. He didn't pretend to.”

Schultes documented the ayahuasca preparation more systematically than any previous Western researcher. He identified the botanical species, the preparation methods, the regional variations, the ritual contexts, and the pharmacological properties.

He did not explain how it was discovered.

In twelve years of fieldwork, Schultes heard the same answer Narby would hear twenty years later: we were taught by the plants. He recorded this in his field notes without elaboration. He was a botanist, not a philosopher of knowledge. The question of how indigenous peoples had identified the two specific plants in a forest of 80,000 species whose combination created an effect that neither plant alone produced was, to Schultes, an interesting question beyond his ability to answer.

He was honest about this in a way that subsequent commentators often are not. The standard 'trial and error over millennia' explanation is not one Schultes endorsed, he knew too much about the pharmacology and the search space to find it convincing. But he did not substitute a better explanation. He documented what was there and moved on.

Narby's Cosmic Serpent is, in part, the attempt to construct the explanation that Schultes declined to attempt. Whether it succeeds is debated. That the attempt was necessary, that the question Schultes declined to answer was real and important, is not.

Sources

• Schultes & Hofmann, Plants of the Gods (1979)
• Narby, The Cosmic Serpent (1998)