Chapter 13 “Returning to the path”: The use of iboga[ine] in an equatorial African ritual context and the binding of time, space, and social relationships

“Plantas con madre”: Plants that teach and guide in the shamanic initiation process in the East-Central Peruvian Amazon

“…We also observed the use of the concept "plantas que enseñan" (plants that teach), which is widespread among the inhabitants of the Peruvian Amazon (Luna, 1983(Luna, , 1984aChaumeil, 1993;Desmarchelier et al, 1996a;Jauregui, 2008). The use of some of these concepts has also been observed among Indigenous people in Brazil (Albuquerque, 2001;Ferreira-Júnior et al, 2010), Colombia (Zuluaga, 1998), Venezuela (Rodd, 2002), Mexico (Schultes and Hofmann, 2000), Africa (Fernandez and Fernandez, 2001) and other parts of the world (Frazer, 1922).…”

The ibogaine medical subculture

“…The ritual aim of eating iboga has been 0378-8741/$ -see front matter © 2007 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jep.2007.08.034 conceptualized as "binding"; the binding across time through ancestral contact, or binding participants socially on the basis of a common shared experience of a distinctive consciousness and system of belief (Fernandez, 1982;Fernandez and Fernandez, 2001). In the colonial era Bwiti became a context of collective psychological resistance to the anomie and demoralization related to the strain on indigenous community and family institutions.…”

“…In their comparative analysis of the African Bwiti religious context and an addict self-help scene, Fernandez and Fernandez (2001) identify the construct of personal transformation, guided by insight or new knowledge mediated by iboga/ibogaine, as a common feature of central importance, and reference ibogaine as a "transitional alkaloid". The similarly named Sacrament of Transition (2006) is a ritual context of Western creation that is officially recognized as a religion in Slovenia with a large proportion of participants who took ibogaine for heroin withdrawal.…”

The potential of alkaloids in drug discovery

“…The ethnomedical use of the plant relates to initiation into adulthood in the Bwiti religion (Fernandez andFernandez, 1990, 2001), and efforts are currently underway to examine the potential of ibogaine to act as an antiaddictive agent for heroin, cocaine and alcohol (Alper, 2001). Substantial mechanistic work has already demonstrated that ibogaine acts at multiple sites, and this has led to the concept that in order to develop effective antiaddictive regimens, agents (or a group of agents) which act through a diversity of mechanisms should be used clinically (Alper, 2001).…”