Ayahuasca is a beverage considered sacred, present in various religious lines (Santo Daime, Barquinha, União Vegetal), which often share only the drink itself as a common element. The use of this psychoactive beverage has raised questions about the limits of its restrictive use. This study aims to present, through a literature review, the limitations between the religious and public use of ayahuasca. A division is observable between a "sacred" and a "profane" space, where both are guided and directed by the need for the institutionalized systematization of the numinous experience.
This article reflects on ayahuasca, an indigenous beverage considered by various user groups to be a teacher plant through which knowledge can be obtained. Drawing on the ideas of Boaventura de Sousa Santos, it analyzes the shamanic epistemology underlying the ayahuasca experience, highlighting its contribution to dissolving boundaries between human/animal and nature/culture, thereby engendering other ways of thinking and knowing reality—other epistemologies.