The Amazon Basin is presented as the native home of plants used to make ayahuasca, a tea whose botanical origins give it a presence in the book even when the narrative’s ceremony takes place far from the jungle. Its significance is therefore both ecological and ritual: the region supplies the plants, while their use carries a sense of place into a setting elsewhere.

Botanical Origins

Ayahuasca is brewed from plants native to the Amazon Basin, typically the vine Banisteriopsis caapi and the leaf Psychotria viridis, also called chacruna. The chacruna contains DMT, but digestive enzymes deactivate the compound unless it is taken with a monoamine oxidase inhibitor such as Banisteriopsis. The tea’s effects thus depend on the combination of plants, not on the leaf alone.

Sacred and Contemporary Use

Ayahuasca is used sacramentally by Indigenous peoples of South America. In the narrator’s account, the plants’ regional origins also inform the ceremony’s language: participants pray to and invoke ayahuasca as the grandmother or plant teacher. The Amazon Basin is not depicted as the location of this gathering; rather, the plants and the ceremony’s invocations bring its distant botanical and religious associations into the room.

The Basin as an Absent Setting

The narrator’s final psychedelic journey takes place with a circle of women and an experienced guide in a yoga studio, not in the Amazon Basin. Traditional icaros, prayers, bells, rattles, shakapas, scents, and smoke shape the gathering into a ceremony in the shamanic mode. The contrast between those ritual forms and the studio’s distance from the jungle makes the Basin an absent but consequential setting: it is the source landscape evoked by the medicine and ceremony, rather than a place the narrative visits.