Tribal HarmonixEntheogenic pagan fellowship
Living traditions

The keepers of the sacraments

Almost every sacrament the modern world talks about is kept, today, by a living people or a living church. This page is a short introduction to who they are and what they have asked of outsiders. It is written by guests, about hosts.

Before we begin

Not museum pieces

The traditions below are not relics of a purer past. They are modern, changing, argued-over religions, and they owe us nothing.

It is easy to write about "Indigenous wisdom" as if it were one thing: a lost harmony for the rest of us to mourn. Jay Michaelson, a rabbi who studies psychedelics and religion at Emory, warns against exactly that: against "colonialist imaginings of some 'pure indigenous people.'" The Native American Church blends tribal ways with Christian ones. Maria Sabina prayed to the saints. The Santo Daime sings Catholic hymns. Each of these traditions survived conquest by changing, and each is entitled to keep changing without our approval.

Mona Polacca, a member of the Native American Church and of the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers, has said what many keepers say about the newcomers: "These churches really don't have a long line of practice, discipline, things like ceremony or ritual." That is the right question to ask of anyone who offers a sacrament, including us.

The keepers

Seven traditions, and the sacraments they hold

Not a complete list, and not a guide to joining anything. A way of knowing whose house you are standing in.

PeyoteNorth America

The Native American Church

The peyote meeting is an all-night ceremony around a fire, led by a Road Man, with songs, drumming, tobacco and prayer, held for a purpose: a sick relative, a birthday, a soldier home from war. It ends at sunrise with a shared meal. Incorporated in Oklahoma in 1918, the church now counts some 250,000 members, and its national council is plain about the sacrament's purpose: "not to induce visions," but "to bring people closer to their creator and to facilitate healing and fellowship." The cactus is now listed as vulnerable, and the church faces shortages of its own sacrament. See The peyote road.

MushroomsMexico

The Mazatec of the Sierra

In the mountains of Oaxaca the psilocybin mushrooms are los ninos santos, the holy children, eaten in the velada: a night ceremony of healing and divination, held in the dark, led by a sabio or sabia who sings. At least nine Indigenous peoples in Mexico still keep mushroom ceremonies. Maria Sabina's veladas reached the world in 1957, and her town paid for it; she was shunned, arrested, and her house was burned. See Maria Sabina and the cost of being found.

AyahuascaBrazil

The churches of the forest

Three Brazilian religions drink the vine-and-leaf brew as a sacrament. Santo Daime, founded by Mestre Irineu in the 1930s, sings its hymns, the hinos, in uniform and in rows through services of eight to twelve hours, and understands the Daime as the blood of Christ. The Barquinha followed in the 1940s. The Uniao do Vegetal, founded by Mestre Gabriel in 1961, meets in congregations of fewer than 150 and now counts some twenty-one thousand members in eleven countries. All three are Christian, Spiritist, Afro-Brazilian and Amazonian at once, and all three now supply the brew to Brazilian researchers. See Churches of the vine.

AyahuascaAmazonia

The healers of the Amazon

Long before the churches, and still today, many Amazonian peoples, among them the Shipibo-Conibo, Shuar, Ashaninka, Kofan, Siona and Inga, have drunk the brew under dozens of names, yage, natem and kamarampi among them, for healing, divination and dreaming, guided by the songs called icaros. In the last twenty years ayahuasca tourism has filled stretches of the Peruvian Amazon with retreat centres, some led by trained healers and some by people with a few months' practice, bringing money, overharvesting, and reports of assaults and deaths to the same riverbanks. Some communities welcome outsiders. Others firmly refuse them.

IbogaCentral Africa

The Bwiti of Gabon

In the rainforests of Gabon and its neighbours, the Bwiti religion, first recorded around the turn of the twentieth century and strongest among the Fang, initiates its members with the scraped root bark of the iboga shrub, eaten under the watch of elders through a long night of music and dance, to meet the ancestors. The anthropologist James Fernandez described it as a religion of renewal, weaving ancestor cult and Christianity together in a time of colonial upheaval. Demand from ibogaine clinics abroad has made the slow-growing shrub a target for poachers. See Iboga and the price of a cure.

WachumaThe Andes

The curanderos of the Andes

The tall columnar cactus called wachuma or San Pedro has been part of Andean healing for thousands of years; carvings at the temple of Chavin de Huantar appear to show it. Healers in northern Peru still hold night sessions with the cactus before the mesa, an altar of power objects. In 2022 Peru declared the traditional use of the cactus in the north part of its national cultural heritage. Tourism has raised demand here too, which is why a circle that honours it at Litha grows its own.

UbulawuSouthern Africa

The diviners of the Xhosa and Zulu

Healers and diviners among the Xhosa and Zulu drink ubulawu, frothed preparations of roots and herbs, among them the plant botanists call Silene capensis, to bring the vivid dreams in which the ancestors speak. It is one of the least studied sacraments in the world and one of the most private. We name it here chiefly to say that it is not ours to study further.

What the keepers have asked

Six requests, made again and again

Different peoples, different words, the same requests. Our reciprocity pledge is our attempt to honour them.

  1. Leave peyote to the peyote road.

    "Peyote is sacred medicine crucial to our religious identity and the survival of our community," Steven Benally of the Native American Church has said. "The spiritual healing power it offers is only attainable through Native American protocol." Many decriminalisation laws now leave peyote out at the request of Native leaders. We do not work with it, and we do not treat synthetic mescaline as a way around that.

  2. Do not buy the wild plant.

    Peyote is dug up whole instead of cut, so it never regrows; iboga is uprooted to supply clinics abroad. Where keepers grow their own, support it: the Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative has six hundred acres in Texas, and in Peru the Chaikuni Institute pays Shipibo families to grow the ayahuasca vine in forest gardens.

  3. Do not perform our ceremonies.

    A velada is a Mazatec ceremony, a peyote meeting a Native one, an icaro a healer's song learned over years. We use those words only for theirs, and we build our rites from the European pagan revival's own materials.

  4. Do not make our sacrament a commodity.

    "They're treating it now as if it's a commodity," Mona Polacca has said of the new churches, warning that sacred plants are becoming "no longer accessible to these original people." We sell nothing, supply nothing, and source nothing.

  5. Do not make us a myth.

    Respect means seeing people as they are: modern, Christian or not, divided among themselves, and entitled to their own arguments. Romance is just another way of not listening.

  6. Give back, and defend our rights first.

    Money, credit and political support, in that order of urgency. Chacruna's Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative and ICEERS's Ayahuasca Defense Fund are two places it goes. A tenth of our membership income goes to source communities every year.

The new churches

Six questions to ask any church that offers a cup

Rolling Stone, citing unnamed experts, recently put the number of psychedelic churches in the United States at seven hundred or more. Some are sincere congregations. Some are retreats with a liturgy bolted on. Many are a little of both.

Jeffrey Breau of Harvard Divinity School put the reason for all the church-founding bluntly: "There's no freedom of spirituality." American law protects religion, so spirituality puts on a church's clothes.

  • Does it sell the sacrament?

    A church where a ceremony is bought by the dose is, in Breau's phrase, on the dispensary model. One of the best known was estimated by Forbes in 2024 to take in about five million dollars a year in sacrament sales.

  • Does it screen, and will it say no?

    Ask what it asks about medication and mental-health history, and whether it has ever turned anyone away. A doctor in a Costa Rican surf town told Rolling Stone he treats about twenty bad trips a year, some in visitors who had stopped their medication to come and "get enlightened."

  • How old is it, and who taught it?

    A lineage of decades, a fixed liturgy and named teachers are what the courts look for and what Indigenous elders ask about. A church incorporated last spring has none of them, and that is worth knowing before you drink.

  • Who is sober, and who can stop it?

    Count the sober people at the edge of the room and ask who has the authority to end the night. If the answer is the person who sold you the ticket, think again.

  • What does it promise?

    Cures, miracles, a guaranteed meeting with God. One Costa Rican retreat advertises a "miracle rate" above ninety-eight per cent. Asked about conversions, the Johns Hopkins researcher David Yaden said the data show "quite small changes." Trust the smaller claim.

  • Does it say it is legal?

    No religious exemption is automatic. In the United States a church must petition the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the few that hold exemptions won them in court or in settlements after suing; Soul Quest, a Florida ayahuasca church, was refused in 2021. "We are protected" is a hope, not a fact.

Where that leaves us

A fellowship, not a loophole

Tribal Harmonix is a religious fellowship, and we mean the word. We claim no legal exemption for any sacrament, we sell and supply nothing, our open gatherings are sober, and our members are responsible for the law where they live. The six questions above are the right ones to ask of us too, and we have tried to answer them in public: on the About, Path and Safety pages.

Hunt Priest, an Episcopal priest who in 2025 gave up his ordination rather than give up his work bringing clergy to the mushroom, put it in five words: "Religion is spirituality with rigor." We would add a few of our own. It is also a calendar you keep when nothing is in the cup, a debt you pay to the people who kept the plant, and a door you may walk out of at any time.

Offer before you ask. Give back more than you took.

Read the pledge that turns these requests into commitments.

The reciprocity pledgeThe long memory