It's Always More Complicated

The narrative of ancient tribes around the world regularly using ayahuasca and magic mushrooms in healing practices is a popular one. Is it true?:

Brabec de Mori arrived in Peru thinking that ayahuasca had been used in the western Amazon for thousands of years. This is the standard narrative; look up resources on ayahuasca, and you’re bound to run into it. “Ayahuasca has been used in the Peruvian Amazon for millennia, long before the Spanish came to Peru, before the Incan empire was formed, before history,” states the website of the Ayahuasca Foundation, an organisation founded by a US citizen that offers ayahuasca retreats. Yet with time, Brabec de Mori came to see just how flimsy this narrative was. He discovered “a double discourse, which happens in all societies where there is tourism”, he said. “People start to tell the tourists – and I found that most Shipibo people did not distinguish tourists from researchers – the stories they think are interesting for them and not what they really live with.”

(Cite here to my beloved Ronald Hutton, who unpicked the dubious narrative of primeval Siberian shamanism - the ur-narrative, as it were - in the 1990s.)

And on the Central/South American version of this tale, I am feeling like the oldest inhabitant here, but back in the 70s everybody was all over Carlos Castaneda and the Teaching of Don Juan, which it is now fairly widely accepted he made up. There was also the extremely loopy The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.

Why are people so enamoured of the 'ancient primeval ritual' thing?

(This looks particularly sus when policy-makers are happily heading back to pre-germ theory as if miasma is Lost Wisdom rather than Exploded Hypothesis.)

On the enduring power of dubious myths and remedies, today over on bluesky somebody mentioned in passing the touting of 'magnetised rings' for the trials of perimenopause. I have come across these being marketed for pretty much Anything That Ails You well into C20th and was able to find mid-C19th advertising pamphlet.

Also (not sure if this connects on or not), the Deathbed Conversion narrative - again on bluesky somebody linked to a text claiming that Pasteur on deathbed reneged from germ theory to terrain theory, and I at once recalled the case of Darwin's alleged deathbed conversion and I believe that asserting that Famous Freethinkers felt the proximity of Hellfire as their end approached and returned to Belief has been quite a common tale. Yeah, sure.