“Mother Ayahuasca” is a name that treats the brew as a feminine being, a teacher or a spirit, rather than a drink. The anthropologist Bernd Brabec de Mori describes the “mother” framing, along with ideas of “teacher” and “master” plants, as a neo-animist rendering that is very popular among Westerners, and reports that in ceremonies he observed in Central Europe the brew itself was worshipped as “mother” (Brabec de Mori, 2021).
Related ideas appear in the Brazilian churches. A US federal court recorded Santo Daime’s account of its founder’s visions of a woman calling herself the Queen of the Forest, and found that followers regard the tea as a holy being in itself (Church of the Holy Light of the Queen v. Mukasey, 2009).
The figure also turns up in DMT reports. In 3,778 coded online accounts, “Gaia, Mother Ayahuasca, or Mother Nature” made up 34 of 1,719 entity encounters, or 2.0% (Lawrence et al., 2022). That the term is widely used is established. What, if anything, it refers to is a question of belief, not research.
Sources
- Brabec de Mori, 2021, Frontiers in Psychology: social attribution and ayahuasca healing
- Lawrence et al., 2022, Scientific Reports: 3,778 coded DMT reports
- Church of the Holy Light of the Queen v. Mukasey, 615 F. Supp. 2d 1210 (D. Or. 2009)
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