Axeti Nete Religious Ritual as Practiced by the CSV
The CSV believes that ritual use of ayahuasca facilitates our members to enter an Altered State of Consciousness (ASC) in our ceremonies that allows the participant to directly experience a state of ecstasy or grace, spiritual healing, physical and mental healing and oneness with humanity and the divine.
Thus, our beliefs are not restricted to reliance on any one person as, with proper preparation and devotion, CSV believes that anyone can achieve this state of grace through right practice and adherence to CSV rituals, teachings, devotions and our values and principles.
Our beliefs have cross-cultural religious and spiritual validity, reflecting common patterns of behavior associated with spiritual healing practices found generally in ancient and contemporary religions worldwide. In the CSV the physiological foundations of our beliefs are engendered by experiencing the biological and evolutionary roots of true human community and the physiological aspects of ASC.
CSV ceremonies engender community bonding, personal healing and may involve emotional vocalizations, ecstatic practices, musical incantations (Axeti Nete Icaros) and rhythmic activities.
The ASC produced through the ritual use of ayahuasca in our ceremonies results in an integrative mode of consciousness that enhance self-awareness and social identity formation in the concepts of souls and spirits and produce a variety of physical and psychological healing processes. CSV religious practices are part of human nature and involve a variety of evolved capacities that have assisted in human adaptation, bonding, community-building, personal healing and survival reaching into pre-history.
The Roots of CSV Beliefs
The concepts associated with our beliefs are quite varied and have shifted over time from an exoticized foreign ‘other’ to a wide range of contemporary and immediately available spiritual healing practices. Our practices stretch across time and culture in such diverse areas as art, dance, healing, ritual, music, spirituality, and many other phenomena linked to the ritual use of ayahuasca to induce ASC which is the foundation of our religious practices. These perspectives are based in the biological origins for the ritual alteration of consciousness and the sociocultural factors that affect the manifestation of these human potentials.
These approaches place the origins of the CSV belief system across time and space of spiritual healing practices in both biological and social evolutionary contexts that emphasize a primordial form of ritual worship associated with hunter- gatherer societies as currently characterized in the practices of the Shipibo Axeti Nete as practiced in the Amazonian basin as well as a transformation of that potential into other forms of healing and spiritual communion with like-minded individuals as a consequence of CSV teachings and devotion and the knowledge gained by practitioners travelling to the Axeti Nete.
Axeti Nete practices are based on factors derived from the ancient phylogenetic roots of ritual as a mechanism for human bonding, communication and social coordination. Our cross-cultural beliefs illustrate that the concepts of our religious practices reflect the existence of similar sacred practitioners which have been found in pre-modern foraging and simple horticultural and pastoral religions around the world. CSV beliefs reflect a worldwide cross-cultural concept of ritualistic primordial religious practices as currently understood and practiced in the CSV as part of a living religious practice that transcends time and space.
Modern CSV Religious Practices
CSV practices and rituals (ceremonies) allow anyone to experience an ASC to interact with the spirits in the Axeti Nete and also introduces CSV members into this practice as a purely experiential and accessible way of understanding spirit and the divinity of mankind.
As such, CSV beliefs and rituals are not solely bound to a central religious figure whose activities are of unparalleled importance in the lives of the members of the community but can be experienced and learned by any practitioner(s) who devote themselves to the ritualistic practices of the CSV and are willing to commit themselves to the CSV teachings, devotions and rituals as brought to our members through our ceremony facilitators.
As such, CSV religious practices unite our cross-cultural community in a ceremony that typically lasts throughout the night. Participating in the group ceremonies while singing, drumming, rattling, and chanting under the influence of ayahuasca allows the spirits to come to the assistance of the individual and the community. CSV rituals exhort the spirits to cease participants’ afflictions or to ask for assistance healing the ill or guiding the activities of the CSV community or group.
A key aspect of the participant’s activities is the ability to enter an ecstatic state or an altered state of consciousness (ASC). The term ecstasy reflects a special perspective on self during the ASC, embedded in its etymology from the Greek ekstasis, meaning ‘to stand outside of oneself.’
The ASC may be produced by many different techniques, but key to the induction are the physiological effects of singing, chanting, drumming and dancing while under the influence of Mother Ayahuasca. These ASC states enable participants to enter into contact with the Axeti Nete, acquire supernatural knowledge and provide a variety of services for the community.
The ASC enables practitioners to heal, to unite the community, communicate with plant and animal spirits and to bring wisdom about events of importance to the group. A central feature of the participant’s ASC—often referred to as ‘soul journey’ or ‘magical flight’—involves experiences in which the participant travels to or interacts with the Axeti. This key aspect of CSV ritualistic ASC is similar to contemporary out-of-body experiences, astral projection, and other experiences of traveling to the spirit world and can be found in ancient religious traditions worldwide.
Cross-cultural experiences illustrate two persistent features of CSV beliefs: while ASC are not part of all CSV ceremonies, participants may indeed experience some aspect of the self separating from the body and these ASC experiences of participants do not involve ‘possession’ by the spirits in the sense of being taken over and controlled by them.
Rather, the CSV ritualistic ASC is a conscious state of entry into another experiential domain in which the participant is self-controlled. The soul flight typically occurs after ritual ingestion of ayahuasca when the participant experiences a departure of the personal soul or spirit from the body, which travels to or interacts with the Axeti.
The Ayahuasca Mother
This ability to travel to the spirit world is part of the CSV ritualistic process and typically involves an encounter with the spirit of ayahuasca or Mother Ayahuasca. The ayahuasca spirit generally manifests in the form of the ayahuasca mother in all her myriad manifestations including as a sharp-faced woman with long flowing hair, ayahuasca vines, a typically black anaconda or other form where the entity is identified or identifies herself as the ayahuasca mother. This is typically experienced but not limited to or by the assistance and guidance of the ceremony facilitator.
Another defining CSV experience may include what is typically referred to as the “ayahuasca death,” which may be subsequently followed by a remembering of the initiate, as the plant spirits reassemble the participant, who is reborn as a stronger and more powerful person.
These experiences give the participant the ability to work directly with the spirit powers themselves using them for a variety of tasks. CSV ceremonies are used to heal, for soul recovery, divinity and to enter a state of grace that shows the highest potential of human beings. Animal and plant spirits may become alter-egos or identities that participants can assume, providing them with numerous powers and supernatural abilities in the performance of their sacred duties.
Central CSV ritualistic practices carry on the traditions of the Axeti Nete religion and the characteristics of CSV ceremonies include:
- A group leader (facilitator) who has been initiated into Axeti Nete religious practices;
- Communal ritual activities involving chanting, music, drumming, and dancing;
- Induction of altered states of consciousness;
- Specific ASC experiences known as soul journeys or soul flight;
- A death-and-rebirth experience;
- A primary source of power involving working with the ayahuasca plant spirit and other spirit allies;
- General abilities of healing, diagnosis, and divination;
- Understanding of illness involving soul loss, trauma recovery, emotional rebuilding and balancing of human energetic processes;
Axeti Nete ayahuasca rituals constitute a clear example of the primordial aspects of experiential religious practices surviving intact until today and continued through the work of the CSV. These special characteristics are found in the biological and evolutionary foundations of these universal aspects of the Axeti Nete and its ritual practices.