Posts Tagged ‘iboga’
Iboga Today: Legality, Safety, and Honoring the Tradition
Iboga has lived many lives. For the Bwiti of Gabon it has always been a sacrament. For much of the twentieth-century West it was an unknown, then a banned curiosity. Now, in our own moment, it is being looked at again — by researchers, by veterans, by people who have run out of other options,…
Read MoreWhat an Iboga Ceremony Involves — and the Safety It Demands
There is a temptation, when speaking of sacred medicine, to dwell only on the beauty of it. But iboga asks for honesty. It is among the most demanding of the plant medicines — physically, emotionally, and spiritually — and an account that leaves out the difficulty, or the genuine risk, does the medicine and the…
Read MoreThe Iboga Plant and the Bwiti People Who Carry It
Long before iboga was spoken of in clinics or studied in laboratories, it was known as a teacher. It grew in the shaded understory of Central Africa’s equatorial forests, and the people who lived among those trees came to regard its root not as a drug but as a doorway. To understand iboga, you have…
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