Ancient Wisdom Meets Modern Science: Lessons from Indigenous Plant Medicine for Today’s Psychedelic Renaissance
For over 10,000 years, ancient cultures and Indigenous communities have used plant medicines to heal, connect, and explore consciousness. A striking 2019 discovery in Bolivia offers a concrete window into how these practices actually worked: archaeologist José Capriles of Penn State University and his team recovered a leather bag from a rock shelter called Cueva del Chileno, containing a pouch made of three stitched fox snouts that once belonged to a shaman roughly 1,000 years ago. Chemical analysis led by Melanie Miller, then at the University of California, Berkeley, identified traces of cocaine, bufotenine, harmine, and dimethyltryptamine (DMT), some of the core compounds found in ayahuasca today. “Our findings support the idea that people have been using these powerful plants for at least 1,000 years, combining them to go on a psychedelic journey,” Miller said, noting the find may represent the earliest archaeological evidence of ayahuasca-like preparations yet discovered. Capriles added that it represents “the largest number of psychoactive substances ever found in a single archaeological assemblage from South America.” Because several of the plants involved don’t grow near the site, the shaman likely had access to an extensive regional trade network stretching hundreds of miles.
The Modern Psychedelic Renaissance and Mental Health
Psychedelics such as MDMA, LSD, psilocybin, and ketamine are gaining momentum in the Western world as potential treatments for mental health conditions including depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders. Proponents argue these substances, paired with therapy, may offer relief for what some researchers call “diseases of despair”—conditions like addiction and suicide that remain stubbornly common. Critics counter that the treatments are sometimes over-hyped and carry real risks for vulnerable populations. That caution proved warranted in August 2024, when the FDA declined to approve MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD despite years of promising trial data, citing insufficient evidence of safety and effectiveness as the treatment had been studied—a reminder that enthusiasm for these substances and the regulatory bar for actually approving them remain two different things.
Ancient Uses of Psychedelics: More Than Healing
While modern science explores these substances for therapeutic purposes, Indigenous communities have long treated them as sacred tools rather than medicine in the Western clinical sense. Yuria Celidwen, a researcher of Nahua and Maya Tseltal descent and a senior fellow at UC Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute, has been among the most direct critics of how the Western psychedelic industry has approached this gap. Speaking to Science magazine about the surge of Western interest in these substances, Celidwen recalled her own reaction plainly: “I was seeing all these white people…pretending to know our ways.” In 2022, she convened a group of Indigenous researchers, traditional medicine practitioners, and human rights advocates to publish “Ethical Principles of Traditional Indigenous Medicine to Guide Western Psychedelic Research and Practice” in The Lancet Regional Health – Americas, a paper laying out eight principles for engaging respectfully with Indigenous knowledge in psychedelic research rather than extracting from it.
The Depth of Psychedelic Traditions
Evidence suggests humans have used psychedelics for thousands of years, long before modern psychiatry existed. Archaeologists have found traces of Amanita muscaria use in the Americas dating back to the Ice Age, and use of psychedelic plants like peyote and San Pedro cactus stretches back millennia further still, with some evidence placing San Pedro use in Peru as far back as 8,600 BC. The Codex Vindobonensis, created by the Mixtec civilization between roughly AD 1100 and 1521, depicts communal rituals involving sacred mushrooms—activity that was tied closely to music and art and believed to facilitate both spiritual journeys and creative expression, not treatment of an individual symptom.
Psychedelics as Tools for Collective Wellbeing
In contrast to Western medicine’s focus on individual treatment, Celidwen and her collaborators emphasize that many Indigenous cultures draw no sharp line between the individual and the natural world; spirit medicines are used to restore balance within the person, the community, and the environment simultaneously. Speaking at UC Berkeley, Celidwen described the goal of these ceremonial traditions as healing that extends outward: practices meant “to heal our planet by opening the spiritual gateways to the Ancestors and promote transcendence,” a framing that treats individual relief as inseparable from collective and ecological repair.
Cultural Appropriation and the Western Psychedelic Industry
Despite this deep history, the modern commercial psychedelic industry has frequently developed with little Indigenous leadership or representation at the table. Celidwen has pointed specifically to the disparity in compensation as one of the starkest markers of that imbalance: Indigenous practitioners performing traditional ceremonies are sometimes paid only nominal amounts, while Western-organized retreats built around the same practices can charge participants thousands of dollars. That gap, more than any single market-size statistic, is the concrete evidence Celidwen and her co-authors point to when arguing that the psychedelic industry’s growth has often come at Indigenous communities’ expense rather than in partnership with them.
The Spiritual Element of Psychedelics
Many researchers argue the transformative power of psychedelics can’t be fully understood through a purely clinical lens. Albert Garcia-Romeu, a psychedelic researcher at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, has pointed out that Indigenous ceremonies typically involve communal activity—singing, dancing, shared ritual—that helps participants integrate what they experience and locate it within a larger shared meaning. Western clinical settings, by contrast, tend to treat a psychedelic session as an isolated therapeutic event centered on one patient, with integration handled afterward through individual talk therapy rather than built into the experience itself as communal practice.
The Power of Community in Psychedelic Healing
Ultimately, one of the clearest lessons from Indigenous traditions is that psychedelics were never primarily individual therapy tools. Their documented power, across millennia and unconnected cultures, lies in fostering connection within communities and with the surrounding natural world. As the West continues embracing psychedelics as clinical treatments, the ethical framework Celidwen and her collaborators have proposed—reparations and reciprocity, informed consent grounded in Indigenous protocols, and genuine collaboration rather than extraction—offers a concrete, citable starting point for doing that work honestly rather than repeating the extractive pattern their research documents.
Works Cited
Celidwen, Yuria, et al. “Ethical Principles of Traditional Indigenous Medicine to Guide Western Psychedelic Research and Practice.” The Lancet Regional Health – Americas, vol. 18, 2022, article 100410. Cornish, Audrey. “How to Fold Indigenous Ethics into Psychedelics Studies.” Science, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2022. “Why Indigenous ‘Spirit Medicine’ Principles Must Be a Priority in Psychedelic Research.” UC Berkeley Research. Miller, Melanie J., et al. “Chemical Evidence for the Use of Multiple Psychotropic Plants in a 1,000-Year-Old Ritual Bundle from South America.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 116, no. 23, 2019, pp. 11207–11212. “Ancient Ayahuasca Found in 1,000-Year-Old Shamanic Pouch.” National Geographic, 2019. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Complete Response Letter on MDMA-Assisted Therapy for PTSD. Aug. 2024.
