Yagé

The Andaquí were a people of the upper Caquetá basin and the valleys of the Fragua and Suaza in southern Colombia. Their name is tied to the ritual drinking of yagé, a brew for which the shamans add the flowers of the borrachero tree to meet the ‘spirit of the yagé’. In their myth the borrachero’s giant flower became the sun after the yagé entered and fertilized it.

Shamanic healing was part of the Andaquí trade between the Andes and the forest. They joined the Pijao against a Spanish settlement in 1637 and the general uprising of the Putumayo and Caquetá tribes in 1721, and resisted into the eighteenth century.