Do you think Embrace of the Serpent is real?

Dr. Richard Evans Schulte, from Boston, is considered the father of modern ethnobotany. During his travels through the jungle, he recorded about 2,000 medicinal plants and observed that the ayahuasca of each tribe had different recipes, but the main ingredient was banisteriopsis caapi. He is the author of "The Plants of the Gods:

Their sacred, healing, and hallucinogenic powers (1979)" is still a bestseller today, and the second author of the book, chemist Albert Hofmann, was the discoverer of LSD.

On the technique of intersecting the narrative in two paragraphs. In the Aboriginal mind, time is not a straight line (as general relativity has already told us), but a multiverse working together at the same node. Because the concept of time has been distorted, the boundary between reality and dream has become more elusive.

For the karamakate (and the indigenous tribes), although there are two different scientists, they have always communicated with the same soul. As Karamakate says to Dr. Schulte in the second narrative, "I had a dream once." of a white spirit who did not know how to dream.

he was sick, and the only way he could heal was by learning to dream.”

Some shamans believe that each medicinal plant opens different perceptual doors to help people understand the universe in multiple dimensions. There are also tribal leaders who use this spiritual journey to find solutions to practical difficulties - inter-tribal wars and resistance against foreign invaders. (This is what I saw in the documentary, it has nothing to do with this film, and in my opinion it is also an abuse).

The main reason for choosing black-and-white photography is that the Amazon we see today is no longer the colorful biosphere that scientists documented at the time. There are at least 50 expressions of the color green in the local language. Rather than using digital to achieve an inaccurate image, it is better to restore it through the imagination of the audience.

Allegedly, the shot of white butterflies flying around Karamakat in the jungle is not CGI nor without the help of any props. It is a miracle of harmony between man and nature.

The gospel cult that calls itself the "Messiah" is also a cancer that exists and grows repeatedly in the Amazon jungle. Although the Jodorowsky-esque sequences in the film have made the scalp tingle and the spine chills, the real situation is much worse (there have been hundreds of mass suicides).

The yakruna that the two scientists are searching for in the film is not real, but serves as nothing more than a symbolic (vanishing jungle civilization). But the botanical basis for this miraculous healing effect points directly to banisteriopsis caapi, the main ingredient in the ayahuasca (ayahuasca) we see on the market today.

The reason why ayahuasca is not mentioned in the whole movie is simple. This ritual of herbs is sacred among the local tribes and does not want to be overexploited, and the film is not about the existing anthropological data — the indigenous people don't feel comfortable if we speak of real plants, real myths, real songs because they're sacred. with fiction, however, you can modify these things.

we wanted to arrive at the most profound truth, not the superficial truth of anthropological data."Of course, the more realistic reason is that Ayahuasca contains a large amount of DMT, which is classified as a Class 1 banned drug in many countries.

The accompanying shaman advises the director not to drink ayahuasca during filming, because "if you do it with something so specific in mind, or a specific purpose, then you get punished", a concept that is also repeatedly mentioned in the film - people only have to leave behind everything outside the body without any distractions, In order to truly access the multi-dimensional world of ayahuasca.