The Amazonian shamanic dieta — a complete guide

Les plantes-maîtresses, approchées par dévotion — ce qu'elles enseignent quand on les laisse être ce qu'elles sont.

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Les plantes-maîtresses, approchées par dévotion — ce qu'elles enseignent quand on les laisse être ce qu'elles sont.

— Les plantes-maîtresses, approchées par dévotion — ce qu'elles enseignent quand on les laisse être ce qu'elles sont.

What a dieta is — beyond the diet

The word dieta comes from Amazonian Spanish and literally means diet, but that translation profoundly betrays the practice. A dieta is not a way of eating — it is a learning retreat with a master plant, under strict conditions that reshape the apprentice's body and attention to make them available to the plant's teaching. The Shipibo word samá renders it better: it evokes at once the diet, the seclusion, the ritual apprenticeship, and the bodily transformation that follows.

The dieta rests on a specific cosmology. Among the Shipibo-Conibo of the Ucayali river, plants are not passive objects to be consumed — they are persons (jonibo, person-beings) with their own intelligence, their own voice, their own lineage. Each master plant (mestrana, or planta maestra in Amazonian Spanish) is inhabited by a mother-spirit (madre, ibo in Shipibo) who can teach — but only those who make themselves available in silence, seclusion, and abstinence. That is what one comes to learn in a dieta: the song the plant teaches, her icaro, which then becomes the curandero's working tool of care.

Stephan Beyer, the American anthropologist and philosopher, after fourteen years of apprenticeship among the curanderos of the Ucayali, writes in Singing to the Plants (2009): the dieta is above all an encounter — not a protocol, not a recipe. Don Roberto Acho Jurama, the Cocama-Cocamilla curandero who was one of Beyer's masters, is said to have told him: the plant chooses the dieter as much as the dieter chooses the plant. This reciprocity is central. One does not decide to diet the Toé because one has read a book about her — one waits for the Toé to show herself, in a dream, in an encounter, in the counsel of a maestro who sees what the body needs.

The twelve classic master plants — a pantheon

There is no fixed list of master plants, but a dozen recur throughout the ethnobotanical literature of the Peruvian Amazon and in the transmissions of recognized curanderos. Ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi) is the best known yet also the most misunderstood in its Western reception — she is never taken alone in the classic dieta, but in combination with chacruna (Psychotria viridis), which carries the DMT, and only under the guidance of a trained curandero. The ayahuasca dieta typically unfolds over several years, broken into regular stays, and forms the heart of an onaya's training.

Chacruna (Psychotria viridis) is the DMT plant, called hoja in Shipibo (the leaf). She is often dieted alongside ayahuasca, to learn the specific songs she teaches — different from those of the vine. Toé (Brugmansia suaveolens) is the plant of the great masters, formidable and feared — her dieta is dangerous, can last several months in complete seclusion, and is undertaken only at an advanced stage of training. The Toé is known for her scopolamines, opens onto extremely powerful visions, but can also shatter the psyche if the preparation is insufficient. Bobinsana (Calliandra angustifolia) is the plant of the heart, gentle, opening, often recommended for first dietas — she teaches tenderness, tends the heart's wounds, and opens the voice for song.

Chiric Sanango (Brunfelsia grandiflora) is the plant of inner cold — her Quechua name chiri means cold. She is traditionally turned to for rheumatism, arthritis, and joint pain, but also to teach patience and solitude. Mucura (Petiveria alliacea) is a plant of protection, dieted to fortify the defences of body and spirit — her garlic scent is held to drive off bad energies. Ajo Sacha (Mansoa alliacea) is her cousin, a wild-garlic plant, a hunting plant traditionally used by the Asháninka to come into contact with the animals of the forest. Camu Camu (Myrciaria dubia) is the berry richest in vitamin C in the world, but in dieta she teaches something subtler — deep cellular regeneration, the renewal of the tissues.

Renaco (Ficus paraensis) is a strangler tree that grows in a spiral around a host tree it eventually absorbs — her dieta teaches rootedness, patience, the transformation of structures. Chuchuhuasi (Maytenus macrocarpa) is the bark of the hunters, a plant of strength and endurance, traditionally macerated in aguardiente for long expeditions. Piri Piri (Cyperus articulatus) is a family of small magical plants (sedge), whose bulbs carry an ergot fungus that produces psychoactive compounds — they are dieted specifically to acquire precise skills (song, hunting, seduction, memory). Lupuna (Ceiba pentandra) is the mother-tree par excellence, the tallest tree of the Amazon, and her dieta is reserved for confirmed maestros — she teaches verticality, the sky-earth connection, power.

There are many others. Pablo Amaringo, in Ayahuasca Visions (1991, co-written with Luis Eduardo Luna), catalogues some fifty master plants he had dieted or watched others diet among his peers. Each curandero has his own pantheon, his own alliances, his own icaros. The dieta is never standardized — it is woven to the person, to the moment, to the need.

The restrictions — anatomy of a discipline

The restrictions of the dieta are strict, and according to the curanderos their transgression has real consequences. The best-known rule is sin sal — no salt — which holds for the whole length of the dieta and often for several weeks after coming out. Salt is held to block the learning: it densifies the body, closes the channels, smothers the voice of the plant. Sin azúcar: no sugar, for the same reason — sugar raises screens of pleasure that pull attention away. Sin alcohol: self-evident, no competing substance. Sin grasa: no fat, no red meat, no dairy — the digestive system must stay light so as not to absorb the plant's energy.

The permitted food is typically very spare: boiled green plátano (unripe plantain), plain white rice, sometimes boiled yuca (cassava), and certain preparations of river fish or chicken boiled without seasoning. The curanderos speak of mariri — the neutralized food, the food that does not disturb the plant. This prolonged frugality weakens the physical body but sharpens attention, makes sleep more porous, dreams more precise. It is in this state that the plant teaches.

Sin sexo: no sexual relations, no masturbation, and ideally no prolonged contact with other people. Sexuality is regarded as a leak of energy that keeps the plant from settling into the body. The curanderos say the plant is jealous — she wants the dieter's complete attention for the length of the dieta. This restriction often includes the prohibition on touching menstruating women, considered especially charged energetically (this belief, present across several Amazonian cultures, is documented by Beyer and by the anthropologists who have worked among the Shipibo and the Awajún).

Sin contacto frío: no bathing in cold waters, no rain on the head, no prolonged exposure to wind. The dieter's body is open, vulnerable — cold can let in what is called aire (wind, ill drafts, wandering spirits). The dieter stays in their tambo (seclusion hut), keeps away from the village, washes with warm water, sleeps a great deal, fasts, listens. It is in this stripped-bare state that the plant can begin to speak.

The icaro — when the plant sings

The ultimate aim of the classic dieta is the learning of the icaro — the song the plant teaches the dieter. Icaro comes from the Quechua ikaray, meaning to blow, to breathe in through song. Among the Shipibo, one says kené when speaking of the song-design (the geometric patterns seen in ayahuasca ceremony correspond to specific songs). The icaro is not a human composition: it is received from the plant, in dream or in ceremony, and then becomes the curandero's principal tool of care. Without icaros, no curandero. Without dieta, no icaros.

Pablo Amaringo explained to Luis Eduardo Luna that each master plant has her family of icaros — some to tend specific illnesses, others to call animals, others to protect, others again to open visions. A curandero who has dieted thirty plants may hold a repertoire of several hundred icaros. Don Solón Tello Lozano, one of the greatest onaya of the late twentieth century (Iquitos, 1916-2014), is said to have held a repertoire exceeding eight hundred songs. Stephan Beyer, who met him in the 1990s, recounts that Don Solón could sing for six hours straight in ceremony without repeating a single icaro.

The icaro is a performative act in the strict sense — it does something. For the curanderos, singing the icaro of the chacruna in the presence of an ailing patient can draw out the illness (chupar), move it (sacar), transform it (limpiar). The song is the tool. The plant is the teacher. The dieter has become the channel. It is this chain that the dieta sets in place — and that no retreat of a few days can reproduce.

The onaya curanderos — the transmission of power

Onaya is the Shipibo term for the great master healer — the one who has accomplished the long dietas, who holds a complete repertoire of icaros, who can sing against sorcery (brujería) as well as tend the gravest illnesses. The word comes from oni, meaning wisdom or deep knowledge. Becoming onaya takes a whole life — not a workshop, not a certification, a life. Don Solón Tello Lozano, Don Agustín Rivas Vásquez, Don Roberto Acho Jurama, Don José Coral Mori, Manuel Córdova Ríos (though his figure is contested), María Apaza Mamani — these are names that recur throughout serious ethnobotanical literature as recognized onaya.

All of them insist on one point: the learning is slow, painful, dangerous, and deeply bound to place. One does not learn ayahuasca in Los Angeles or Berlin. One learns ayahuasca in the forest that grew her, under the guidance of a master who speaks the language of that forest, within a community that knows how to receive someone coming back from a dieta. Coming out of a dieta with no community to welcome you is one of the chief dangers of the contemporary practice — this is what Stephan Beyer denounces in the conclusion of Singing to the Plants: the dieta has been extracted from its social fabric, and that extraction makes it potentially harmful.

Neo-shamanic extractivism — what INFUSE refuses

Since the 1990s, and exponentially since 2010, the Peruvian Amazon has become an ayahuasca tourism destination. Iquitos, Pucallpa, Tarapoto count dozens, even hundreds, of centres offering dietas of 10 to 30 days at prices that can reach several thousand dollars. Many of these centres are run by Western facilitators who have never themselves accomplished a full dieta, who employ underpaid Indigenous curanderos, and who reproduce the very colonial structures of extraction they claim to transcend.

INFUSE refuses this drift. We do not offer dieta retreats. We do not sell Banisteriopsis caapi or chacruna. We document this practice with respect, cite the sources, and direct those who are interested toward structures led by Indigenous curanderos recognized within their community — which today are a minority. The names that recur as trustworthy in the literature and among serious anthropologists: the Temple of the Way of Light, run in collaboration with Shipibo maestras, certain ASOMASHK centres (Asociación de Mujeres Sabias Shipibo-Konibo), and the Sachamama foundation of Don Francisco Montes Shuña. But this list shifts, and caution remains in order.

Nuggets & legends — fragments of transmission

Nugget 1 — Don Solón and the 800 icaros. Stephan Beyer, who met Don Solón Tello Lozano in Iquitos in the 1990s, recounts in Singing to the Plants a ceremony where the maestro sang for six hours straight without repeating a single icaro. Don Solón died in 2014 at 98. Part of his repertoire was recorded by researchers and deposited in archives at the University of Lima, but most of it died with him — he had had no complete apprentice.

Nugget 2 — Pablo Amaringo's Usko-Ayar school. In 1988, Pablo Amaringo founded the Usko-Ayar school in Pucallpa (the name means 'spirit-vision' in Quechua) — a school of visionary art meant to train young Amazonian painters to render their ayahuasca visions. The school trained dozens of artists (Anderson Debernardi, Mauro Reategui Perez, Jaqueline Lopez Pinedo) and stands today as one of the most precious visual archives of contemporary Amazonian shamanic iconography. Amaringo died in 2009.

Nugget 3 — The Renaco dieta. The Renaco (Ficus paraensis) is a strangler tree that grows in a spiral around a host tree it eventually absorbs completely. The curanderos of the Ucayali hold that her dieta teaches the transformation of rigid structures into organic architectures. The classic Renaco dieta lasts three months at minimum. During that time the dieter may cut no plant, may not raise their voice, and must sleep at the foot of a Renaco for at least three nights. It is one of the most demanding dietas of the pantheon.

Nugget 4 — Bobinsana and the open heart. Bobinsana (Calliandra angustifolia) is traditionally the first plant dieted by apprentices — held to be gentle, opening, and especially fitting for those who have lived a recent grief. Her brush-like pink and white flower grows along the banks of Amazonian rivers. The curanderos say Bobinsana teaches the song that opens blocked voices — she is the one dieted when one can no longer weep. INFUSE includes Bobinsana in some of its elixirs.

Nugget 5 — Manuel Córdova Ríos, the contested figure. Manuel Córdova Ríos (1887-1978) was a mestizo curandero whose story — told by F. Bruce Lamb in Wizard of the Upper Amazon (1971) — describes his abduction by the Amahuaca at fifteen and his forced initiation into ayahuasca. The book became a classic, but serious anthropologists (notably Bernd Brabec de Mori) have questioned the authenticity of several elements. The lesson: even in the 'classic' literature on Amazonian shamanism, one must sort between projected Western mythology and the practices actually documented.

Nugget 6 — The word mariri. Mariri designates, in the Amazonian shamanic vocabulary, at once the neutralized food of the dieter and the specific power acquired by certain plants that lets the curandero eject invisible darts (virotes) during ceremonies. This double meaning (food and power) is no accident: the food-mariri prepares the body to receive the power-mariri. It is a cosmological coherence that escapes any simple translation.

Nugget 7 — María Apaza Mamani and the women's resistance. For a long time, Western anthropology presented Amazonian shamanism as a men's affair. Wrong. María Apaza Mamani, María Méndez Putu, and other Shipibo curanderas did crucial work in rehabilitating the female lineages of transmission. The association ASOMASHK (Asociación de Mujeres Sabias Shipibo-Konibo), founded in the 2000s, today gathers more than a hundred curanderas. It has co-organized several international conferences and stands as one of the most trustworthy structures for anyone wishing to live a dieta in an authentic context.

Nugget 8 — Sin sal for six months. Don Agustín Rivas Vásquez, in a late interview, tells of holding a Toé dieta for six months with no salt, no sugar, no fat, no sexual relations, no contact with anyone other than his apprentice, in a tambo isolated four days by canoe from the village. In the third month he began to hear the voices of the trees. In the fifth month he says he saw his own body from the outside for a whole week. In the sixth month the principal icaro of the Toé was given to him. That dieta earned him his status as a full onaya. He was 38. He had begun learning at 14. Twenty-four years to become a maestro.

Principal sources

• Beyer, S. V. (2009). Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 600+ pages.
• Luna, L. E. & Amaringo, P. (1991). Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.
• Luna, L. E. (1984). The concept of plants as teachers among four mestizo shamans of Iquitos, northeastern Peru. Journal of Ethnopharmacology, 11(2), 135-156.
• Narby, J. (1998). The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam.
• Illius, B. (1987). Ani Shinan — Schamanismus bei den Shipibo-Conibo (Ost-Peru). Tübingen: Verlag S+F Studien.
• Brabec de Mori, B. (2011). Tracing Hallucinations: Contributing to a Critical Ethnohistory of Ayahuasca Usage in the Peruvian Amazon. In: Labate & Jungaberle (Eds.), The Internationalization of Ayahuasca, Berlin: Lit Verlag.
• Gow, P. (1991). Of Mixed Blood: Kinship and History in Peruvian Amazonia. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Dobkin de Rios, M. (1972). Visionary Vine: Hallucinogenic Healing in the Peruvian Amazon. San Francisco: Chandler.
• Jauregui, X. et al. (2011). 'Plantas con madre': Plants that teach and guide in the shamanic initiation process in the East-Central Peruvian Amazon. Journal of Ethnopharmacology, 134(3), 739-752.
• McKenna, D. J. (2004). Clinical investigations of the therapeutic potential of ayahuasca: rationale and regulatory challenges. Pharmacology & Therapeutics, 102(2), 111-129.
• Rivas Vásquez, A. (interviews 1990-2010). Compiled in Beyer (2009) and in Charing & Cloudsley (2008), Plant Spirit Shamanism. Rochester: Destiny Books.
• Tello Lozano, S. (interviews 1995-2010). Compiled in Beyer (2009), Singing to the Plants, pp. 295-315.

Secondary sources

• Labate, B. C. & Cavnar, C. (Eds.) (2014). Ayahuasca Shamanism in the Amazon and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Fotiou, E. (2014). On the uneasiness of tourism: Considerations on shamanic tourism in western Amazonia. In: Labate & Cavnar (Eds.), Ayahuasca Shamanism in the Amazon and Beyond.
• Lamb, F. B. (1971). Wizard of the Upper Amazon: The Story of Manuel Córdova-Ríos. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. (To be read critically — cf. Brabec de Mori 2011)
• Charing, H. G. & Cloudsley, P. (2008). Plant Spirit Shamanism: Traditional Techniques for Healing the Soul. Rochester: Destiny Books.
• Buhner, S. H. (2014). Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm. Rochester: Bear & Co.
• ASOMASHK (Asociación de Mujeres Sabias Shipibo-Konibo) — website and publications of the association of Shipibo curanderas. asomashk.org