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Aussiewaska Complete Guide
Jul
This is a cultural history of changa and ayahuasca analogues in Australia
Introduction To Aussiewaska
While the complexities of the global ayahuasca proliferation have drawn
the attention of scholars in recent years, the cultural career of DMT (N,N Dimethyltryptamine) remains conspicuously under-researched. Most known for
its role in the ayahuasca brew – where it is orally potentiated by beta-carboline
harmala alkaloids contained in the liana Banisteriopsis caapi – the tryptamine
compound DMT has made an independent, if gradual, release into the modern
cultural bloodstream. DMT’s psychopharmacological actions were discovered
in 1956 (Szára, 1956) after which it was identified within psychiatry as a “psychotomimetic,” before its appearance as a recreational drug in the 1960s and subsequent classification as a “dangerous drug” with “no medicinal value.”2
Given these developments, along with its recognized occurrence throughout world flora
and mammals (Shulgin & Shulgin, 1997), its “coming out” in the 1990s–2000s as
an “entheogen” (Ott, 1996) enabling access to higher dimensional “hyperspace”
(McKenna, 1991), and its role in customizable “ayahuasca analogues,” DMT has
had a complex career of its own (see St John, 2015a). Aussiewaska Complete Guide
Continuation..
DMT is responsible for sudden and short-lasting (20- to 30-minute) effects ranging from complex geometric patterns and synesthesia to out-of-body states and encounters with disincarnate beings, and its impact is apparent within a networked cultural movement
of experimentalists, artists, and alchemists. While today recognized as a serotonergic neurotransmitter that crosses the blood-brain barrier, where it has an affinity
with various receptor sites (Hanna & Taylor, n.d.), and where its endogeneity to
humans has prompted its veneration as “the spirit molecule” (Strassman, 2001)
and “the brain’s own psychedelic” (Strassman, 2008), the ubiquity of DMT
throughout nature and its purpose within the human brain remain a mystery.
The enigmatic character of DMT has helped nourish the ambivalent status it
has earned vis-á-vis ayahuasca – from which it has grown independent and to
which it remains attached. This tension has dynamized innovation and characterizes debates that are the subject of this chapter. Addressing the career of an
Australian invention, this chapter explores the characteristics and implications
of this in/dependent tension. Promoted as a “smokable ayahuasca,” enabling the
“ayahuasca effect,” and thereby inheriting the troubled logic of the “ayahuasca analogue,” changa (sometimes referred to colloquially as “aussiewaska,” and
explained in greater detail below) is found to be as much, if not more, a vehicle to facilitate an accessible DMT effect. While the pharmacological synergy
endogenous to ayahuasca – and indeed its iconic vine – is implicit to changa,
the existence of this innovation is reliant on independent, esoteric, and enigmatic
features characteristic to the use and effects of DMT. Before discussing changa
and its purported association with ayahuasca, I first outline interrelated practices
characterizing DMT use within the entheogenic movement. Aussiewaska Complete Guide
ABSTRACT
Since at least the early colonial period, ayahuasca has been crucial to social life for both mestizo and indigenous peoples throughout the western Peruvian Amazon. This psychoactive beverage, containing the ayahuasca vine (Banisteriopsis caapi) and usually other admixtures, especially chacruna (Psychotria viridis), is traditionally utilized by Amazonian peoples for curing numerous ailments, seeing the future, ensuring prosperity in business or love, and divining sources of illness or wrongdoing. Likewise, it takes a central position in the practice of dark shamanism or brujería (sorcery or witchcraft), which is often understood as one of the main sources of illness – especially among indigenous peoples (see Whitehead & White, 2004). Aussiewaska Complete Guide
Its contemporary configuration, stimulated through the Jesuit missionization of Amazonia beginning in 1638, and, later, as a response to the terrors perpetuated against indigenous peoples during the rubber boom, has emerged as a global phenomenon as it has moved out of the Amazon in a diaspora of practices, knowledge, and peoples (Maroni, 1740/1988; Taussig, 1987; Gow, 1996; Brabec de Mori, 2011; Labate & Cavnar, 2014).
Continuation..
This diaspora, in turn, has created new controversies locally in Amazonian urban, peri-urban, and rural communities. This movement has in part been fueled by shamanic tourism throughout the region since at least the early 1970s, with primarily those tourists from Western countries such as the United States, England, and France traveling to the Amazon to partake in the psychedelic brew. 2 Aussiewaska Complete Guide
Today, in urban centers such as Iquitos and Tarapoto, ayahuasca is central to a multimillion-dollar industry that has greatly affected the social lives and economic prosperity of many individuals throughout the Peruvian Amazon. Moreover, ayahuasca shamanism itself has been dislocated from its Amazonian roots through the commodification of its core components, the propagation of its knowledge via the Internet and other media, and the proliferation of ayahuasca sessions in non-Amazonian locales. To refer to these interconnected phenomena – the exponential increase of shamanic tourism focused on the consumption of ayahuasca and the diaspora of ayahuasca shamanism from Amazonia – I utilize the notion of the “ayahuasca boom,” situating it within the context of other historical economic booms related to commodity extraction in Amazonia.
Conclusion
The troubling appeal of “smokeable ayahuasca” has been explored in this chapter.
While being neither DMT nor ayahuasca, changa connotes both pharmacognostic
practices and “traditions.” As a hybrid phenomenon, it is a “perfect embodiment
of ambiguity,” the phrase used to describe ayahuasca, which Saéz (2014, p. xxi)
has suggested “owes its success to being located midway along a scale running
from substances that produce light inebriation to others causing a deeper and more
dangerous plunge into other worlds.” While changa shares this hybrid variability
in common with ayahuasca, it is not simply a transplanted version of ayahuasca.
Emerging from the highly active Australian entheogenic movement, where it
would facilitate a “friendlier” and accessible “DMT effect” while at the same
time reformatting the therapeutic-visionary efficacy implicit in the “ayahuasca
effect,” changa is a unique phenomenon. This confluence of “effects” has resulted
in a variable mechanism, the optimizability of which it shares with ayahuasca
itself, but which can also serve as an accessory to ayahuasca. As Palmer has
stated, changa “is already its own tradition, that sprang out of a certain milieu and
allows people to go deep with the plants” (Julian Palmer, personal communication, November 13, 2014). As a fully customizable tradition suited to the contemporary entheogen user, it appears that, with changa and its variations, the DMT/
ayahuasca effect will continue to evolve. With variations of its aromatic vapors
recognizable in locations worldwide, further investigations are warranted on the
career and effects of this “smokable ayahuasca”/“accessible DMT” hybrid. Aussiewaska Complete Guide
Notes
1 Adjunct Research Fellow, Griffith University, Australia.
2 DMT and preparations containing it are subject to restrictions laid out in the 1971 UN
Convention on Psychotropic Substances, to which most governments are parties, and
where DMT is a Schedule I (i.e., most restrictive) controlled substance. Australia is a
signatory to this Convention, similarly outlawing DMT under Schedule I of its own
Psychotropic Substances Act of 1976, and DMT is currently a Therapeutics Goods
Administration (TGA) Controlled Drug. Aussiewaska Complete Guide
3 The DMT-Nexus: www.dmt-nexus.me/
4 MAO (monoamine oxidases) are enzymes that normally neutralize the psychoactive
effects of tryptamines.
5 These lines were deployed as a voice sample on “Geometric Patterns” by Australian
psytrance musicians Dark Nebula & Scatterbrain (2004).
6 While several underground reports have claimed success in the range of 0.5% DMT
from the phyllodes and bark of A. pycnantha, these claims remain unsubstantiated.
7 Subsequent Palmer quotes are from the same interview unless otherwise indicated.
8 www.psytranceismyreligion.com is now offline (accessed July 1, 2010).
9 While ayahuasca has become the paragon of entheogenic tryptamine folk medicine,
a discussion at the DMT-Nexus has served to uncover a world of folk DMT and
tryptamine use that existed before ayahuasca and continues in a myriad of evolving
forms. Changa is among innovations that “present fertile ground for new modes of
personal healing, reflection, and insight, beyond just ayahuasca and the curandero”
