Skip to content
INFUSE
THE INITIATIC TRAILS

Step-by-step journeys, from threshold to incorporation. Follow one through.

Fracture · Earth

31 to read

↺ Reset filters
L'Apprentissage des Plantes-Maîtresses

The Amazonian shamanic dieta — a complete guide

In the high Peruvian Amazon, among the Shipibo-Conibo, the Asháninka, the Shawi, the Awajún, there is a discipline that no English translation fully renders: la dieta. Not a diet. A retreat with a master plant, for weeks or months, under strict conditions — no salt, no sugar, no meat, no sex, no alcohol. The plant teaches. The dieter listens. Don Solón Tello Lozano, Pablo Amaringo, the onaya curanderos passed on to us what it was permitted to pass on.

33 min readRead →
L'Apprentissage des Plantes-Maîtresses

Ayahuasca — why INFUSE refuses to sell the vine

Ayahuasca is not a plant. It is a ritual frame inseparable from a living lineage. To sell the vine or the leaves to a buyer with no frame is to extract the medicine from its remedy. INFUSE refuses — and explains, drawing on Amazonian and academic sources.

25 min readRead →
La Voie des Adaptogènes & Champignons

Chaga « Yaga », the resilience of the wounded birch

Inonotus obliquus — not an ordinary mushroom. A parasitic conk that metabolizes for twenty years the defenses of the wounded birch, accumulating betulinic acid, melanin, beta-glucans. Soviet Pharmacopeia 1955. Khanty lineage 12th century, Cree, Ojibwe. Double extraction mandatory to access the complete medicine — non-negotiable.

8 min readRead →
Les Plantes-Sorcières

Mandrake — between medieval pharmacopoeia and modern folklore

Mandragora officinarum is one of the most anciently attested plants of the Western pharmacopoeia. From the Bible to Hildegard, a surgical anaesthetic for 1,500 years. Today reduced to a prop in a children's novel. INFUSE refuses that, and restores her depth.

22 min readRead →
La Voie des Adaptogènes & Champignons

Reishi, the mushroom of immortality

The grand-mère of the mushrooms — of the Shennong Ben Cao Jing (~200 av. J.-C.) à the revolution Mori 1971 (culture comseaciale). More précieux that the or pendant of the siècles. Édit impérial Chen Sung 1004 : tout reishi wild doit being apported au palais. INFUSE sourthis Sibérie wild harvested, profondeur of hiver, doubthe extraction.

18 min readRead →
L'Apprentissage des Plantes-Maîtresses

Ajo Sacha — the Opener: sacred garlic of the Amazon

She smells like garlic — but she grows in the Amazon and has no genetic link to common garlic. The Shipibo-Conibo call her the Opener: the first dieta in the formation of a curandero, the plant that prepares the ground for all the others to truly enter.

6 min readRead →
L'Apprentissage des Plantes-Maîtresses

Ayyu, soul-singing — healing through the voice across traditions

In nearly every documented human tradition, the sung voice is an instrument of care long before it is a stage art. Shipibo icaros that draw illness out. Sufi qawwali that opens ecstasy. African-American gospel born in slavery. Tibetan mantras that reshape attention. Devotional Hindu kirtan that loosens the knots of the heart. Frances Densmore, the American ethnomusicologist of the early twentieth century, documented more than 3,500 Native American songs. Helen Bonny founded Guided Imagery and Music in 1973. What INFUSE holds onto: the human voice is not an ornament of healing — it is one of its first roads.

32 min readRead →
L'Apprentissage des Plantes-Maîtresses

Smudge vs Invitation — the Ethics of Sacred Smoke

The word smudge has become a synonym for spiritual purification. Lighting a white sage bundle in a Brooklyn yoga studio, in Berlin, in Paris. A gesture neutralized, performed, commercialized. Meanwhile the Cherokee, the Lakota, the Diné are publishing calls to stop — the white sage of the Californian desert is endangered by overharvesting. And white sage is only one among dozens of the world's sacred smoke-plants: Zulu Imphepho, Quechua Palo Santo, Maya Copal, European Rue, Asian Mugwort. This article does not say you cannot burn plants. It says there is a civilizational difference between purifying (a gesture of power) and inviting (a gesture of relationship). INFUSE chooses the second.

33 min readRead →
L'Apprentissage des Plantes-Maîtresses

Yauhtli: The Sacred Fog Plant That Was the Aztec Xocoatl's Secret

Her Nahuatl name means 'that which is offered.' Burned for Tlaloc the rain god. Carved on the statue of Xochipilli the Prince of Psychoactive Flowers. Detected in the incense burners of the Templo Mayor. And the secret of the Aztec royal drink Xocoatl — the first ceremonial cacao. Yauhtli is the plant of sacred fog.

4 min readRead →
L'Apprentissage des Plantes-Maîtresses

Ubhubhubhu — the initiating foam

Ubhubhubhu — Helinus integrifolius, plante of entred of the complexe ubulawu among the sangomy zulu and amagqirhhas xhosa. The name isiZulu is onameatopéithat : il imite the bruit of the foam who bulthe when on bat the plant in the water coole. Ubulawu soft and morningathe who prépare the système nerveux à recevoir the enseignement plants more profonof the (Silene capensis, Synaptolepis kirkii). Helinusiof the identified MDPI 2024. Audit éthithat Sobiecki 2008 référencé. Sourcing communautaire Afrithat of the Sud.

13 min readRead →
L'Apprentissage des Plantes-Maîtresses

INFUSE Ethical Manifesto 2026 — our 30 refusals

Thirty plants — and more broadly thirty categories of practice — that we refuse to sell. The INFUSE Ethical Manifesto 2026 gathers all our refusals by category and by lineage. Signature pillar, 6,500 words, named sources, indigenous voices cited.

31 min readRead →
L'Apprentissage des Plantes-Maîtresses

Chuchuhuasi — the Amazonian grandfather tree

In Quechua, he is not named for his beauty, but for what he treats: Chuchuhuasi — the trembling back. In Shipibo-Conibo cosmology, he is the grandfather tree: vast, dark bark, unshakeable, silent. A 2000-year pharmacological record that modern biochemistry is only beginning to decode.

4 min readRead →
Les Plantes-Sorcières

The trial of the plants

For three centuries, in Europe, the women who knew the plants were killed. It was not a superstition. It was a policy. What the pyres burned was not a rival religion — it was an epistemic commons. Your grandmother, and mine, and hers, did not forget herbalism. They were dispossessed of it.

12 min readRead →
Les Plantes-Sorcières

A Pattern Language for the contemporary witch

Christopher Alexander spent his life searching for why some places are alive and others dead. Silvia Federici spent hers understanding why modernity burned the women who knew how to inhabit them. Lewis Hyde showed that the gift circulates differently from the commodity. Set at the same table, the three write a manual of dwelling — addressed first of all to those whom history has stripped of the tools.

13 min readRead →
L'Apprentissage des Plantes-Maîtresses

Three cosmologies of the poison-medicine

For the Greeks, the pharmakon was both remedy and poison — Derrida spent a whole book on it. But before Derrida, and more precisely, Hildegard of Bingen, Stephen Beyer among the Shipibo, and Dale Pendell among the poet-alchemists each wrote, within their own cosmology, the same theorem: the dose is not enough. The ritual is the dose.

13 min readRead →
L'Apprentissage des Plantes-Maîtresses

The Shipibo Cosmology of the Master Plants

Onaya, dieta, icaros, four realms — the Shipibo-Konibo cosmology of the Peruvian Ucayali through Pablo Amaringo, Luis Eduardo Luna, and Don Solón Tello. Bobinsana, Chuchuhuasi, Ajo Sacha: plant pedagogy as it is still passed down today.

25 min readRead →
L'Apprentissage des Plantes-Maîtresses

Commercial White Sage — anatomy of an ecological crisis

Salvia apiana — Californian white sage is in a crisis of commercial overharvest. The Chumash, Tongva and Cahuilla peoples are asking us to stop. INFUSE declines to sell it and offers Imphepho, Mugwort and Rosemary as traced alternatives.

21 min readRead →
Ancient civilizations

The animist manifesto — the plant as a person

Animism is not a religion — it is a grammar. Eduardo Kohn, Robin Wall Kimmerer, David Abram, Bayo Akomolafe, Anna Tsing: seven INFUSE editorial rules for keeping the plant a subject within the sentence.

23 min readRead →
L'Apprentissage des Plantes-Maîtresses

30 Years of Evidence That Plants Think

For thirty years, quietly, biologists around the world have gathered experimental data that force the conclusion: plants learn, anticipate, communicate, choose. Gagliano in Perth, Mancuso in Florence, Trewavas in Edinburgh, Wohlleben in the Eifel — four laboratories, a single epistemological mutation. And one book that holds them together: Buhner.

13 min readRead →
L'Apprentissage des Plantes-Maîtresses

Untraced Palo Santo — the crisis of Peru and Ecuador

Bursera graveolens — listed under CITES Appendix II since 2016. Naturally dead wood + 4-10 years of drying in situ = the medicine. Felling living trees + opaque trade = the present crisis. INFUSE refuses anything untraced, and explains why.

22 min readRead →

Looking for a specific plant? Use the index.

Plant index A → Z →

Walking with the Forest? Drop a story, an encounter, a threshold crossed.

Share a story →