The Ayahuasca Museum
Where the Wisdom of the Spirit Grows

Located in downtown Iquitos, Peru, the Ayahuasca Museum will quickly become the most intriguing and most visited tourist attraction in the region. High quality interactice displays will educate the public about the benefits of natural medicine and the power available to us through our own personal spiritual evolution. Visitors will guide themselves through the museum, learning about the rich cultural history of the Amazon region and the ancient history of ayahuasca use, the sacred medicine of the Amazon Rainforest.

The Interactive Displays will feature touch screens that show text, audio, and video examples of the topics being demonstrated in the display. Hands on experiences offered at the museum will include visitors touching and holding items like authentic healing tools, mapacho cigarettes, ayahuasca ingredients, and even a bottle of ayahuasca. Displays will focus on the vine itself, and its admixture plants, the cooking of the brew, the healing art and the curandero, the ayahuasca ceremony, the healing tool called a chacapa, the healing songs called icaros, communicating with the spirits, tobacco and the art of soplaying, using phlegm or 'sucking' to heal, the ayahuasca diet and dieting with plants, other important medicinal plants, plant remedies and their preparation, indigenous variations of use, stories told by the curanderos, ayahuasca experience testimonials, and Ayahuasca vision-inspired artwork. However, in the first phase, the displays will be simple and inexpensive, yet informative and imaginative.

An Authentic Ceremony Space will be the main attraction of the museum, as it will look, sound, and feel just like a maloka in the jungle. Inside it will be dark, lit only by the green light of a monitor playing actual footage from an ayahuasca ceremony using an infra-red camera. Visitors will be able to sit in the ceremony space, should they choose to, and experience what a ceremony might be like. There will be two ceremonies played in the maloka each day, with a rotating list of curandero footage, so that each visit is unique.

The Ayahuasca Recording Studio will be located in the ceremony space, called a maloka, with a small editing room attached to one wall of this round hut. Interviews with curanderos and other contributors to ayahuasca research will take place inside this unusual space, allowing for the interview to be comfortable and peaceful even though it is in the city. Ayahuasca ceremonies will also be held in this space and recorded with high quality recording equipment. These recordings will be analyzed in hopes of discovering a better understanding of how the unique music of ayahuasca allows a curandero to connect with spirits and thus heal patients. The recordings will also be made into CDs for sale to support both the curanderos and the Foundation. The ceremonies will also be filmed with an infra-red camera for use in the ceremony display and to document the many different styles of the amazon healers.

The Ayahuasca Sight and Sound Library will compile a growing collection of audio and video related to ayahuasca and plant spirit medicine. Interviews, conference and seminar footage, ceremony recordings, and other related items will be available through a computer database, to be listened to or viewed at a small station with a monitor and headphones. Literature with observations made during recent sound analysis and current theories as to the healing power of the sacred icaros.

The Museum Gift Shop will sell indigenous art related to ayahuasca, paintings inspired by ayahuasca visions, ayahuasca jewelry, t-shirts, CDs, DVDs, medicinal plant remedies, and other curanderismo related items. Profits will be used to support the artists creating the items, and will help to promote the Foundation.

The Ayahuasca Cafe will also be located in the Museum. It will be a small cafe, offering healthy drinks, salads, and light meals, as well as the chance to try a diet meal as one would eat after an ayahuasca ceremony. The special menu will list the meals by curandero, demonstrating the difference in diets between the various schools of healing in the Amazon.

The Ayahuasca Museum will be much more than just a museum, it will be recording studio, sacred ceremony space, research center, library, restaurant, and gift shop. However, without a great deal of support through donations, we will be taking the project one step at a time, which will allow time to gather the materials and knowledge to achieve the next goal. The Museum will be located in a small rental space to while the displays are developed, and then moved to larger location to begin the recording projects, and eventually add the gift shop and cafe, as the displays are updated and improved.