Final Causes versus Effective Causes

 One of the first obstacles modern science had to deal with was the need to distance itself from the teleological explanations (from the Greek, telos, end, purpose) of Aristotelian scholastic thought. In Aristotle's cosmology, the universe is comprised of five elements—earth, fire, water, air, and aether—arranged like layers of an onion. In this “onion universe” each element has its natural place, according to its essence. Earth, for example, is always at the center, while aether, the quintessential element, belongs in sidereal space (Aristotle ).

The distinction between essential and accidental attributes is a central concern in Aristotle's Metaphysics (). The essence of things involves an intrinsic tendency to seek their natural place in the universe. For example, a stone falls to the ground to find its natural place in the cosmos, which is the Earth as a center. Aristotle called this “final causes” a telos residing within things. For Aristotle and the scholastics, final causes explain the nature of things, while “effective causes”—those which explain movement in cause‐and‐effect relationships—are accidental phenomena, involving an external change in the object, but not concerned with its true essence. But with the arrival of modern science, the balance tilted to efficient causes. For Galileo, the goal was clear: scientific knowledge had to be forged through an experimental method, measuring the properties of objects—expressed as efficient causes—in order to arrive at a mathematical formula—expressed in laws (Galilei ). Natural sciences kept only the efficient causes because they can be objectively observed and measured. By contrast, final causes were considered too metaphysical and subjective.

Galileo put experience at the forefront in what he called sensate esperienze (“sense experience”). For Aristotle, experience was not immediate knowledge, but a process with a singular and personal history, in a chain that connects sensation, memory, and experience. So sensorial experience was not reliable on its own for constructing premises in syllogistic reasoning. This aspect of Aristotelian thought was taken by the scholastics to establish the biblical dogmas as the ultimate truth. In medieval thought, experience and hypothesis were considered useful, but always to serve the eternal truths of the Bible. In contrast, Galileo considered experience as the origin of knowledge—not any kind of experience, however, but one explicitly controlled by an observational method, and exposed by the criticism of scientific peers; that is, observable events that anyone could measure and test with the correct standardized method.

The foundation of science as knowledge dedicated to “effective causes” was a necessary step to escape from certain religious and dogmatic worldviews. It was also necessary to highlight a method based on the dialogue between hypotheses and empirical data. But this distinction was also somewhat artificial, and the notion of a radical paradigm shift between medieval thought and the Renaissance has been relativized by some authors (e. g., Duhem ). The “Whig history of science” (Mayr ) usually considers the scientific revolution as the conflict between scientific mechanism and scholastic organism, but the contexts seem to be more complex than a two‐rival scenario. According to Guillermo Boido (), there was at least one more tradition, neoplatonism, that had a significant influence on Kepler, Galileo, and Paracelsus. However, none of these three traditions abandoned the idea of God: in organism, God was the prima causa of planetary motion; in mechanism, the universe was a machine and God the engineer; in neoplatonism, God was the great mathematician behind the laws of the universe. The idea of God as an intentional agent, with a “divine program,” was present in all three paradigms. These different perspectives on the relation between human rationality and “divine revelation” produced different “historiographies of the truth” (Hanegraaff ).

The Problem of the New Sciences in the Nineteenth Century

In the nineteenth century, the new disciplines concerned with both human and living beings had to deal with the dichotomy between final and efficient causes. While disciplines like chemistry could adapt to the new mechanism paradigm, others like biology had the problem of studying living organisms, with behaviors and attitudes for which simple cause‐and‐effect explanations were not valid. The contradictions between biology and mainstream science were not fully resolved until the discovery of the cell—and the general idea that living creatures have an internal organization—and were finally laid to rest with the discovery of DNA by Francis Crick and James Watson (Monod ). Meanwhile, biology was treated as a “soft science,” and biologists had to work on various hypotheses about the principle that differentiates life from inorganic matter (Jacob ). Vitalism was one explanation, as an enigmatic force within every live being, considered in different approaches from materialistic (electricity, magnetism) to philosophical (e.g., Bergson ). Finally, vitalism did not survive as a scientific theory, and the idea of intentional behavior as an emerging product of life evolution was the final solution that conciliated causal and intentional explanations (Wuketits ; Monod ).

In the social sciences, the difficulties were related to the “qualitative‐quantitative debate” (Guba and Lincoln ). The social sciences followed two main paths to gain recognition as reliable scientific disciplines. The first of these was to emulate the experimental method as conceived by the natural sciences, by adapting the scientific experimental method to the quantitative study of social and cultural phenomena. The second path was to follow the humanities through the ideas of the German neo‐Kantian school and its distinction between natural sciences—concerned with cause‐and‐effect explanations—and human sciences—concerned with understanding representations. The idea was to develop a comprehensive science of human meaning and experience, the first step toward the birth of qualitative methods in sociology and anthropology (Hamilton ). In the course of the twentieth century, both paths—but especially qualitative research methods—would be questioned by the orthodox scientific view.

In psychology, the causal‐versus‐final‐explanations dichotomy varied according to academic school. In experimental psychology the tension was addressed by Wilhelm Wundt, who made the distinction between physiological psychology, studying the elemental sensations of consciousness through experimental methods, and folk psychology, studying superior psychic functions like language and culture through a descriptive method (Cole and Engeström ). In behaviorism, opposition to the use of introspection and the denial of “mind” as a scientific concept led to the one‐way road of mechanistic explanations. In psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud followed the path of interpretation—Deutung—as a tool for exploring the psyche and its symbols, but not in contradiction with mechanism explanations (Moizeszowicz ). However, all these alternatives came from a secular psychology, where consciousness was understood as emerging from the organism (Freud, Wundt) or as a nonexistent phenomenon (behaviorism). There were also other ways of explaining consciousness; for example, as an autonomous entity, relatively independent from organic matter, and with its own ontological foundations. The idea of a spiritual realm or force was popular among scientists from all disciplines, although this notion was not always proclaimed in public.

The Spiritual World in Nineteenth Century Science

The existence of a spiritual world was not an alien idea in nineteenth century scientific circles. One example was the “discovery” of magnetism in the late eighteenth century by Friedrich Mesmer, at a time when psychological science did not yet exist. For Mesmer, magnetism represented an effort to unify spiritual and mechanic ontologies in a common materialistic world, assuming the existence of a subtle physical fluid that fills the universe and connects people, earth, and heavenly bodies. Disease was conceived as an unequal distribution of this fluid in the human body, and healing was understood as achieving a new equilibrium (Ellenberger ). This conception of magnetism had a great impact in academic circles, and chairs on mesmerism were instituted in the German universities of Berlin and Bonn. However, in the decade of 1850 Mesmer's work was discredited, and the therapeutic effects of magnetism were dismissed as products of the “imagination.”

But immediately after the fall of “animal magnetism,” a new movement, spiritualism, was on the rise in the United States. This movement dates back to 1847 in Hydesville, a small village in upstate New York, when the Fox sisters began hearing rappings and noises, which they decided to answer by establishing a communication method with strokes and movements. After a few years, spiritualist sessions had become common practice in social gatherings in Europe and the United States. These events spread the belief in consciousness as a spiritual and “natural” mysterious energy (Albanese ).

Spiritualism had a strong impact in all social environments and countries around the world. Some of the most renowned scientists and philosophers of the time supported these ideas, including William Crookes, Henri Bergson, William James, Alfred Wallace, Charles Richet, and Max Planck. In 1882, the Society for Psychical Research was founded in London, with members such as Crookes, James, and Bergson. In Germany, the term Parapsychologie was first introduced by the philosopher Max Dessoir in 1889 in the occultist journal Sphinx, while in France the term Métapsychique was mentioned by Richet in 1905, after years of studying psychic phenomena (Asprem ). In the twentieth century, the psychologist John Coover studied paranormal phenomena in laboratory settings at Stanford University, and Joseph Rhine founded the first laboratory of parapsychology at Duke University, using the term “parapsychology” for the discipline, and “extra sensorial perception” for the phenomena studied (Kreiman ; Asprem ). According to Egil Asprem (), although the founders of psychical research struggled for the creation of an academic discipline on its own right it was not until the creation of the laboratory at Duke in 1930s that parapsychology became a university discipline. But even in this promising period, this new discipline could not solve the methodological problems and theoretical fragmentation that haunted its predecessors.

Spiritual Ontologies and ASCs: Psychology and Anthropology in the Twentieth Century

 Catherine Albanese () points out the interest in the spiritual realm as part of the common worldview of “nature religions,” which include theosophy, spiritualism, transcendentalism, and a special interest in oriental mysticism. This interest in mysticism and spirituality was an important antecedent for the emergence in the second half of the twentieth century of new academic schools, concerned with spiritual experiences and ASCs. Disciplines such as anthropology and psychology (and also other disciplines dedicated to the study of religion) attributed new meanings to religion, producing the emergence of new forms of religious practices (von Stuckrad ). In psychology, the first steps came from Carl Gustav Jung and his ideas of the psychological value of mystical experiences, and Abraham Maslow and the foundation of humanistic psychology, conceived as an alternative to behaviorism and psychoanalysis. These perspectives gave rise to several schools with a concern for the existential, humanistic, and spiritual dimensions of human experience, such as Alexander Lowen's bioenergetic school, Fritz Perls's Gestalt psychotherapy, and transpersonal psychology.

Perhaps transpersonal psychology takes the closest interest in the human spiritual dimension. Maslow introduced it in 1967 as “transhumanist psychology,” recognizing the spiritual realm of the psyche, and proposing the use of Western and Eastern ASC techniques to access this realm (Walsh and Grob ). The other founder of this school is Stanislav Grof, a pioneer in the clinical study of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), who believed that transpersonal psychology challenged the mechanism paradigm of Western societies by introducing a spiritual dimension of consciousness (Grof ). Transpersonal psychology also posited a new kind of evolution, not biological, but an evolution of consciousness, as part of the spiritual development of humankind, and against Western scientific materialism (Walsh ). The general idea was not to ignore scientific knowledge, but to transform it in a spiritual way, as though it were a kind of “paradigm shift” in Thomas Kuhn's terms (Tart ).

The emergence of these new perspectives must be considered within a post–World War II and Cold War context, with the crisis of the modern Western paradigm of progress, and the rise of countercultural movements in the 1960s. The crisis of modernity had a variety of causes: irresolvable social inequalities, an increasingly competitive and individualistic culture, the growth of environmental problems related to modern technologies, extended bellicose conflicts around the world, the menace of new weapons of mass destruction, and cyclical economic crises. All these problems created a social disenchantment with modern Western culture and its promises of social emancipation, in what Jean‐François Lyotard () called “post‐modernity.” As a reaction, countercultural movements appeared in the form of the hippy movement, feminism, ecologist organizations, and antiwar movements. This general criticism of the Western model of emancipation included a critique of the mainstream scientific materialistic worldview. Scientific commitment to social emancipation was regarded with suspicion, a reasonable attitude if we consider science's involvement with the arms industry, environmental crisis, medical mercantilism, and other social problems.

The biomedical scientific model, for example, was harshly criticized for its commercial nature, as well as its inefficiency and iatrogenic effects. In the search for new alternative medicines, the holistic movement emerged with a range of alternative practices aimed at “getting back to nature,” introducing humanistic medicine, developing a spiritual conception of well‐being, and recovering Eastern and Western heterodox medical practices (Baer ). In the academy, this disenchantment with the “standard view of science” materialized in what Anthony Giddens () called the demise of scientific “orthodox consensus.” In the philosophy of science, the vision of science as neutral, objective knowledge was challenged by Thomas Kuhn in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and in the social sciences qualitative methods, taking different critical approaches, began to gain popularity.

At the same time, the positivistic tradition in anthropology was being displaced by symbolic anthropology as a criticism of the objectivity criteria of modern anthropology, and the discipline's association with colonialism and imperialism. With this criticism came a growing appreciation of non‐Western symbolic worldviews, including an increasing interest in shamanism. Previous interest in this subject had been purely intellectual, when Claude Lévi‐Strauss ([1949] ) and Mircea Eliade () explained the shamanic ritual as an ethno‐psychotherapeutic practice. Both authors transformed the prior understanding of shamans as people who were either mentally ill or quacks into specialists in ethno‐psychotherapy. But in the 1960s anthropologists themselves started to become shamans. In Carlos Castaneda's The Teachings of Don Juan in 1968, a story emerged of the naïve rational Western scientist who is initiated into an ancestral practice and learns of a superior wisdom from an exotic shaman. Later, after his fieldwork in the Amazon rainforest, Michael Harner founded the Center for Shamanic Studies. These initiatives also had a major impact on society, with the emergence of neoshamanic practices in networks of spiritual seekers and psychonauts.

First‐hand ethnographic exploration of ASCs contributed to the discussion about the existence of paranormal phenomena, and anthropologists’ accounts of these experiences started to appear. A classic example is Edith Turner's fieldwork in Africa, where she witnessed spiritual beings (Turner ) and paranormal phenomena (Turner ). Michael Winkelman () addressed the controversy, stating that paranormal phenomena exist and that, although anthropologists frequently witness them, they do not usually publish their experiences out of fear of being discredited by their peers. The comments and replies to the article reflected a range of postures in the anthropological community, from the most critical (e.g., Erika Bourguignon) to supporters like Marlene Dobkin de Rios. More recently, Jeremy Narby and Francis Huxley () highlighted the problem of ethnographers ignoring paranormal phenomena. Harold Ellens () wrote along similar lines about journals devoted to religion, spirituality, and theology, and David Luke () observed the same problem in clinical and anthropological reports on psychoactive substances.

The Popularization of the Brew

 Psychedelics cannot be separated from this history that combines science and spirituality. They have played an important role, mainly after the discovery of LSD by Albert Hofmann, and together with neoshamanism and the new schools of psychology mentioned earlier. In the countercultural milieu, psychedelics were initially conceived as a privileged door to access spiritual realms, and as an important tool for the “revolution of consciousness” (Méndez López ). Since their prohibition in the 1970s, their revolutionary connotations have become less important, but recreational, psychonautical, and spiritual uses have continued against the less controversial background of “new age networks” (Rothstein ).

Although ayahuasca had been recognized in the nineteenth century by Richard Spruce and Manuel Villavicencio, academic interest in the beverage became fashionable after its description by the father of modern ethnobotany Richard Evans Schultes, in the second half of the twentieth century (Williams ), at the same time the first studies on psychedelics were published. However, the chemical compounds of ayahuasca had not yet been clearly identified, and psychedelic laboratory research focused on other more well‐known substances, such as LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline. In anthropology, the first ethnographic studies into ayahuasca came from Gerardo Reichel Dolmatoff () in Colombia, Michael Harner (), who explored its use by the jivaros of Ecuador, and Marlene Dobkin de Rios (), who wrote on the use of ayahuasca in healing practice in Peru. In the 1970s the brothers Terence and Dennis McKenna ([1975] ) developed an interest in the brew, and Luis Eduardo Luna () studied the Peruvian vegetalismo. But it was not until the 1990s that ayahuasca captured international attention. Stephan Beyer () identifies the exact moment in 1991 with the publication of Luna's book Ayahuasca Visions, with paintings of the visions by the Peruvian curandero Pablo Amaringo (Luna and Amaringo [1991] ).

The Brazilian churches Santo Daime and União do Vegetal (UDV) started to spread abroad in the 1990s. These churches related to ayahuasca are syncretic religions influenced in different ways by Umbanda, Spiritism (Allan Kardec´s systematization of spiritualism), popular Catholicism, and/or Amazonian shamanism. For example, the UDV is more rationalistic, allowing spoken questions between participants and “masters” during the session, and denying the possibility of mediumistic possession. Santo Daime forbids the spoken word, but uses dance, hymns, and accepts the incorporation of spirits (Goulart ). As formal and institutionalized religions, they have their own network organizations, with their own centers and pilgrimage sites. But they also interact with therapists and holistic centers, and participate in the scientific community in a variety of ways. In Brazil, many academic researchers are also members of the Santo Daime and UDV churches, and numerous dissertations and scientific articles have been published on the subject of ayahuasca. The UDV church also has an institutional interest in promoting scientific research, and has its own medical department and scientific commission, conceived within the idea of convergence between spiritual knowledge—the science of Solomon—and academic knowledge (Labate and Melo ).

Ayahuasca in Spain

Spain played an important role when ayahuasca first arrived in Europe, perhaps due to aspects of its cultural background that eased the reception of ayahuasca in the country. This background was prepared by the early psychedelic influence, and the posterior arrival of alternative medicines, spiritual practices, and new schools of psychology. The psychedelic movement had an early influence in Spain, both in social and academic circles. Spanish psychiatrists started to study the therapeutic applications of LSD and other psychoactive substances in the early 1950s (Usó ). However, only a few years lapsed before the same researchers who had spoken of their possible therapeutic effects began to alert the population about their toxic and dangerous effects. According to Juan Carlos Usó (), this switch in the message was due to strong political pressure from the United States in the international context, and the commitment of Francisco Franco's dictatorship to policies designed to halt any countercultural initiatives. As in the rest of the world, the psychedelic research agenda was suspended, but recreational and social uses could not be stopped, and places like Ibiza and Formentera became popular points on international psychedelic routes.

Whereas psychedelics arrived earlier, alternative medicines came somewhat late to Spain, at the end of the 1970s (Perdiguero ). The new schools of psychology mentioned previously also began to appear in this period: in 1976 Luis Pelayo founded the Instituto de Terapia Bioenergética Anthos (Anthos Institute of Bioenergetic Therapy); in the 1980s several Gestalt associations were created, such as the Asocación Española de Terapia Gestalt (Spanish Association of Gestalt Therapy) in Madrid and the Institut Gestalt (Gestalt Institute) in Barcelona; in the 1990s transpersonal psychology was introduced by Manuel Almendro.

Ayahuasca arrived in Spain in the 1990s through three major initiatives: the psychology school of Claudio Naranjo, the anthropologist Josep Maria Fericgla, and an addiction treatment center founded by the psychiatrist Josep Maria Fábregas. The three cases are paradigms of how scholars redefine spiritual practices in academic terms: Naranjo as the classical example of the use of psychedelics in the “perennial” background of new spiritual psychologies; Fericgla as the anthropological reformulation of shamanic practices; Fábregas as an example of the dialogue and syncretism between biomedical practices and traditional healing systems. The three cases represent specific ways of integrating alternative medicines, spiritual ontologies, Western academic health practices, and the use of psychedelics.

The life of the Chilean psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo is a perfect example of the intersection between psychology and spirituality in the second half of the twentieth century. His biography combines all the aspects discussed in this article: his training in new psychologies such as Gestalt (in which he is one of the most renowned successors of Perls); his interest in east Asian meditation (Naranjo ); his critique of Western culture and the need for a radical shift of consciousness (Naranjo ); his holistic and syncretic perspective through the Seekers After Truth program; and the idea of altering consciousness with psychedelics to facilitate spiritual self‐healing (Naranjo ). Naranjo's first contact with ayahuasca was in the 1960s, through Schultes and Harner, whose advice guided him to the Putumayo department of Colombia, where he came into contact with the brew and published a pioneering study about its effects (Naranjo ). But it was years later that Naranjo placed greater emphasis on ayahuasca's psychotherapeutic applications, as a result of a profound mystical experience (Naranjo , 28–29). Ayahuasca first appeared in Spain in the late 1980s, after Naranjo met the church of Santo Daime in Rio de Janeiro, and decided to arrange a meeting with the church in Spain as part of the Seekers After Truth program (López‐Pavillard ). He would later decide not to continue working with Santo Daime, mainly because of the formal aspects of the doctrine and sessions. Naranjo's design of the ritual was much more eclectic and flexible than the structured setting of the church. This separation did not stop Naranjo from organizing more ceremonies in Spain and other parts of the world.

The second case is not from psychology but from cultural anthropology. Born in Barcelona, Josep Maria Fericgla grew up at a time when psychedelics were not difficult to find. In anthropology and related disciplines, there was already an intellectual curiosity about the relationship between psychedelics and culture, so it is not unusual to find that one of Fericgla's first papers was about the psychedelic mushroom Amanita muscaria, and its relation with the creation of symbols, myths, and culture (Fericgla ). In the early 1990s Fericgla went to Ecuador to study the use of natem by the Shuar (Fericgla ). On his return to Spain, he founded the Societat d'Etnopsicologia Aplicada i Estudis Cognitius (Society of Applied Ethnopsychology and Cognitive Studies) and organized international conferences about entheogens, bringing together notable scientists in the field such as Albert Hofmann and Jonathan Ott.

Fericgla currently works on a range of activities related to the development of the inner world; these include workshops on holorenic breathwork, awareness of life through the experience of death, learning to love and say goodbye to things and people, and courses on meditation and on psychotherapeutic applications of ayahuasca. His interpretation of the mystical experiences of ayahuasca revolves around the vitalist‐like idea of an energy expressed in every being, conceived as a transcultural human faculty, and articulated in different cultures, for instance in the Chinese idea of chi, and in the ineffable world of shamanism. Through his workshops and courses, Fericgla teaches how to express and let this vital energy flow in order to connect with the inner self and integrate existential values. Fericgla remains strongly critical of Western society, stressing the need to find alternative ways of spiritual and existential self‐awareness.

The third illustration is the Instituto de Etnopsicología Amazónica Aplicada (Institute of Applied Amazonian Ethnopsychology or IDEAA) founded by the psychiatrist Josep Maria Fábregas as a pilot project in the year 2000. Initially located in Belo Horizonte (Mina Gerais, Brazil), it was strategically moved to Prato Raso, a site near Céu do Mapia, the headquarters of Santo Daime/CEFLURIS (Fernández and Fábregas ). IDEAA focused on the use of ayahuasca to treat cases of addiction that proved to be more resistant to conventional therapies. Most of its patients were from Spain, so the isolation and the remoteness of the center were important factors in the therapeutic setting. The center is no longer operating, but a significant number of therapists and professionals learned from this experience, and now continue working with ayahuasca on their own initiative.

The first contact Fábregas had with ayahuasca was in malaria eradication programs in Amazonas. In these programs, interaction with shamans as social authorities was an important factor in gaining better access to communities. In the dialogue between Western medicine and folk healing traditions, some of the substances the shamans used proved effective in the treatment of certain diseases. One of these substances was ayahuasca, and Fábregas started to assess whether it could be used in some resistant cases of addiction. The idea was already being applied in Tarapoto, Peru, by French psychiatrist Jacques Mabit, who founded the Takiwasi center in the late 1980s (Cárcamo and Obreque ). Similarly to Fábregas, Mabit witnessed the usefulness of traditional medicine when working in a hospital in Peru. In a later trip to the upper Amazon, he discovered that the local population used curanderos for addiction problems. This ethnomedical use of the brew inspired him to found Takiwasi (Mabit Bonicard and González Mariscal ). Mabit's initiative was a strong influence in the creation of IDEAA, integrating alternative medicines, east Asian practices, and psychological techniques from the gestalt, bioenergetic, and transpersonal schools. There are also differences, however; while there is a strong presence of the Peruvian Amazon vegetalismo in Takiwasi—not only in the use of ayahuasca, but in the variety of plants found in its herbalist tradition—IDEAA borrowed elements from Santo Daime (Fernández and Fábregas ).

At the present time the uses of ayahuasca in Spain are heterogenic, and come through different routes, people, and organizations. But considering the crossroads between spirituality and science, and also the beginnings of ayahuasca use in Spain, the three cases presented are the most important ones. Claudio Naranjo was the first to bring ayahuasca to the country, and has also had an intellectual influence in psychological and therapeutic circles. Fericgla and Fábregas were perhaps more important, because under their supervision a number of therapists were trained who now lead groups related to ayahuasca. They also had an impact in Spain's contribution to the renaissance of psychedelic studies, promoting a new generation of researchers and studies in the field.

Cultural Translations

 In all the cases described there is “cultural translation” from the original ayahuasca practices to the Spanish context. Original elements, such as the hymns of Santo Daime, or the classic chants and instruments of the Amazonian native healers, are usually combined with elements from other traditions, such as east Asian meditation, ethnic and/or new age music, and psychotherapeutic moments of “integration” after the ceremony. These changes are explicitly made by the professionals because the functions and goals of the ritual are different from the original contexts. Whereas in Santo Daime the ritual is related to a formal and communal religious/mystical/healing practices (cf. Barnard ), and in the mestizo Amazonian culture the curanderos use ayahuasca to treat folk illnesses and witchcraft, in Western ceremonies ayahuasca is used in a psychotherapeutic setting, with a focus on existential and personal conflicts. The elements in the ritual are redefined within the idea of a redefinition of the ritual according to psychotherapeutic goals and our own Western cultural matrix.

These changes involve a “cultural translation” from the original culture to the Spanish context. The translation of symbols and practices is an inevitable part of every intercultural exchange, and is never unilateral. For example, as I described in a previous article, in the exchange between urban holistic centers and Peruvian ayahuasca curanderos the translations go both ways, in a process I called “double assimilation”:

(1) On the Western side, the adaptation of Amazonian vegetalismo to mystic‐esoteric practices reformulated under the therapeutic notions of the New Age and the redesign of the ayahuasca ceremonies to meet the needs and demands of an urban population with existential problems, using insight as a therapeutic tool; and (2) in the case of the Peruvian traditions, the assimilation of the curanderos to a transnational spiritual market system, adapting their practices to the needs of the gringo (white Western people), in a supply–demand relationship that offers good economic returns, and in which the curanderos recruit their public through travels around the world, the creation of healing centers adapted to a Western public, and participation in transnational ayahuasca networks and the world market of beliefs, increasing day by day thanks to globalization and information and communication technologies like the Internet. (Apud , 8)

In fact, the idea of two cultures exchanging is an oversimplification. The mestizo cultural background of the healers of the upper Amazon has included many elements of Western culture since the times of the conquest (MacRae ). For example, in the case of shamanism and other healing traditions, there is a strong influence from Spanish traditional medicine, with practices like baños de limpieza (cleaning baths), and different folk diseases. Moreover, the shamanic practices of the upper Amazon are neither monolithic nor isolated traditions. As Beyer () points out, shamans from different geographic and cultural areas have had fluid contact since pre‐Columbian times through an extensive interethnic navigation network along the Amazon river. Thus the diffusion of knowledge—with its respective cultural translations—is the rule, not the exception (Fotiou ).

Systems, Fields, and Networks

 Some authors have proposed that the cultural background of Amazonian shamanism can be better explained in terms of networks rather than the classic idea of “cultural systems” (Langdon ; Beyer ). The idea of culture as a network is used to illustrate the less systematic and formal nature of symbolic knowledge and cultural practices. In the study of religions, it usually describes those traditions which do not have the formal organization of traditional religions, for example “new age networks” (Rothstein ). But it would be useful to consider whether more formal and structured religions such as Catholicism, Buddhism, Islam, or Judaism could also be described as networks, despite their hierarchical structures and authorities. This question is related to the general debate of what a cultural system is, and whether cultural and social phenomena can be explained in systemic terms.

In classical sociology, the idea of an underlying system can be traced to authors such as Émile Durkheim and Talcott Parsons, who proposed a systematic order in both society and culture. The latter, culture, was considered in terms of its social functions, as a “symbolic order” capable of establishing consensus, and maintaining commitment to social structures. But in the 1960s, constructionist sociology questioned the idea of a social order, focusing on the micro‐social dialectics between society and individuals, and introducing the idea that rules are also broken and redefined by the reflexivity of the social agents. For the case of religion, the sacralization of the world was considered as a “nomic battle” between social actors in the construction of social reality (Berger ). Another alternative was Pierre Bourdieu's concept of social field, as a game with certain rules and agents competing for the legitimacy of their practices and beliefs. Bourdieu applied this idea in both scientific (Bourdieu ) and religious fields (Bourdieu ).

In anthropology, the idea of culture as an organized system is strongly rooted, perhaps because of the German heritance of Wilhelm Dilthey's concept of “worldview”—Weltanshauung—and its influence on the foundation of cultural anthropology since Franz Boas (Stocking ). There is also the influence of sociology—for example, the French tradition from Durkheim to Lévi‐Strauss; or from Parsons to Clifford Geertz in the case of the United States—in that in symbolic anthropology culture acquired autonomy from social systems (e.g., Geertz ). In the 1980s and with postmodern anthropology, the culture system model was criticized and replaced by the conception of culture as a heterogeneous phenomenon. This change was the result of a general criticism of classical ethnographies and their use of monolithic cultural descriptions, considered as ethnocentric and colonialist ways of understanding other societies. To escape from this vision, anthropology started to experiment with new forms of doing ethnography, which included the description of culture as a polyphonic and fragmentary phenomenon. The idea was also reaffirmed with globalization and the interest of anthropology in urban societies, where syncretism and heteroglossia are strikingly evident.

Finally, and more recently, Bruno Latour's () actor‐network theory uses the term “network” in a different sense, strongly influenced by the conception of “rhizome” devised by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In a critique of what the author considers “metalanguage,” categories such as society and culture are discarded. For Latour, there are only translations between mediators, and traceable associations that can be studied as networks. But networks are nothing more that the track the researcher has constructed, and not a real phenomenon per se. Furthermore, actors are the sum of their agencies and not an autonomous ego (Latour ).

All these alternatives to system theories have their strong and weak points. In the case of sociology, Bourdieu's notion of field allows us to analyze both science and religion in political terms. But the problem of this notion is that while it can manage the diversity of agents inside a specific field relatively well, it gives the idea of a certain impermeability from one field to another (Hervieu‐Léger ). And in our specific case, the category “ayahuasca” is in itself a product of the permeability between science and religion, in what Tupper and Labate () call the “ontology of ayahuasca.” On the one hand, in recent decades academic studies have been constructing a scientific object of study known as “ayahuasca,” a category that includes not only different variations of traditional recipes, but also lyophilized powders for experimental research. On the other hand, Brazilian churches have also intervened in the definition, in a bid for political legitimation:

Currently, the extended meaning of “ayahuasca” in global public discourses is somewhat ontologically stabilized as a brew composed exclusively of B. caapi, P. viridis and water. The sacraments of the international Brazilian churches, daime (Santo Daime) and hoasca tea (UDV), have helped fix the meaning of “ayahuasca” to this simple recipe. The UDV's traditions at one time allowed for the use of admixture plants with its hoasca sacrament, but for strategic reasons associated with securing political legitimacy for its religious practices, it ultimately institutionalized the more standardized “pure” brew of B. caapi and P. viridis. However, outside these church settings, a wide range of preparations may be dispensed as “ayahuasca” in contemporary indigenous, mestizo, or hybridized ceremonies, sometimes unwittingly and sometimes knowingly. On the other hand, yage, which is usually made of B. caapi and D. cabrerana in Colombia, or natem, which is made with B. caapi but not necessarily P. viridis in Ecuador, are frequently represented homogeneously as “ayahuasca”. Thus, people reporting on their use of “ayahuasca” consumed in settings other than the Brazilian ayahuasca churches may have encountered a diverse range of brews and assorted admixture constituents. (Tupper and Labate , 73)

So “ayahuasca” can be considered as a conceptual generalization of a heterogenic compound related to different sociocultural practices, including scientific research. In this construction not only academic agents intervene, but also religious institutions such as Santo Daime and UDV. All these social agents constructed the category “ayahuasca” as an abstraction that serves in disputes, negotiations, and legitimations in the drug policies arena.

The Individual as a Node

 One main weakness of sociologic perspectives such as Bourdieu's notion of field is the reduction of religious phenomena to social relationships of legitimation. By contrast, in cultural anthropology the postmodern idea of culture as a plural and polyphonic phenomenon introduced the individual's meanings and narratives as an essential part of the ethnographic accounts. However, anthropology also became reductionist in terms of culture as a “self‐contained phenomenon” (Bloch ), where the subjects end up being prisoners of an “exhaustive cultural transmission” that explains everything (Boyer ). Their autonomy is not saved at all, despite the idea of their reflexivity and the polyphony of their voices. Actor‐network theory is not an exception but a paradigmatic example: agents became a product of their multiple agencies and translations, and their characteristics could only be explained in their agencies with other actors in a network ad infinitum. They are paradoxically singular and active, but also extremely passive and produced by their associations.

In contrast to an epistemological tradition which considers authors and subjects as an effect of epistemic, cultural, and social agencies, I want to mention the importance of the individual as a creative and communicative node, situated in and between networks. Individuals are heterogenic social agents, but this heterogeneity happens in the subject as a psychological unit. And although individuals are “fragmented” in different social roles, they also try to cogently synthesize their own experiences and commitments in their various roles as scientists, therapists, and/or religious/spiritual practitioners. The three cases from Spain could be considered as examples of this: they belong to certain academic traditions and practices, but they also have their own biographic trajectories. Although their activities could be related to certain cultural traditions, their own personal traits are also related to individual psychological characteristics such as their particular charismatic personalities, and their personal spiritual experiences. This statement may sound obvious, but it is neglected not just by a few academic streams, a consequence of their rejection of “psychologism.”

Spiritual Ontologies as Natural Psychological Phenomena

 The rejection of “psychologism” also produced a disavowal of explanations in terms of psychological “innate predispositions,” that is, cross‐cultural cognitive phenomena that cannot be explained solely by cultural transmission. The phenomenon implies universal features of the human mind‐brain, and their direct effect on the spread of ideas (Bloch ). One of these features is the ontological assumption of the existence of “intentional agents,” an evolutionary acquisition of great importance for the recognition of other living beings, and for socialization among other human individuals (Boyer ). The recognition of intentional agents is a necessary condition for animistic and religious beliefs (Guthrie ; Barrett ), so “spiritual ontologies” primarily depend on this ability. In science, the expulsion of “final causes” led to the devaluation of “intentional explanations,” suspected of being metaphysical explanations. It also led to the reduction in the variety of religious, spiritual, and theistic beliefs in terms of dogmatism, within a “Whig” history of science versus medieval thought. But despite these conceptions, the presence of spiritual ontologies continued and will continue in science, expressed public or privately, sustained by individual scientists or by schools and currents of thought.

As I mentioned in the first section, the presence of “ontologies of spirituality” in the scientific field is related to four main issues: (1) the belief in spirituality in a wide sense of the term, including different perspectives and cosmologies; (2) a recurrent relation between these beliefs and ASCs, the last ones giving certain “sense factuality” to the first ones; (3) a scientific reaction against these kind of beliefs since the foundation of modern science; and (4) the persistence of these beliefs in the academic field, despite the mainstream scientific rejection. All of these points can be considered for the case of different academic traditions, including those related to ayahuasca.

First, and considering the history of science over the centuries, renowned scientists and philosophers supported religious ideas such as the belief in spirits, or the existence of vital forces. As we have seen for Spain, the case of ayahuasca could be considered as a novel paradigmatic example, but also with roots in previous academic traditions. Second, ASCs produced by ayahuasca have given factuality to such beliefs, in the same way as different spiritual “methods” and “rituals” gave a sense of factuality to spiritualism in the nineteenth century and neoshamanism in the twentieth century. Third, while it is true that modern science reacted against “final causes,” this could not halt completely the emergence of different “ontologies of spirituality.” Among these ontologies, I have considered certain spiritual perspectives related to ayahuasca, nurtured by previous academic perspectives related to the new psychologies and the anthropological neoshamanic reformulations described in the previous section. The permanence of these perspectives is related to the persistence of “spiritual experiences” and “intuitional beliefs” as natural predispositions of human cognition.