Page "Ayahuasca" Paragraph 59

In the 16th century, Christian missionaries from Spain and Portugal first encountered indigenous peoples using ayahuasca in South America ; their earliest reports described it as the work of the devil.

In the 20th century, the active chemical constituent of B. caapi was named telepathine, but it was found to be identical to a chemical already isolated from Peganum harmala and was given the name harmaline.

Beat writer William Burroughs read a paper by Richard Evans Schultes on the subject and sought out yagé in the early 1950s while traveling through South America in the hopes that it could relieve or cure opiate addiction ( see The Yage Letters ).

Ayahuasca became more widely known when the McKenna brothers published their experience in the Amazon in True Hallucinations.

Dennis McKenna later studied the pharmacology, botany, and chemistry of ayahuasca and oo-koo-he, which became the subject of his master's thesis.