Mystic tourism, the basis for William Burroughs’ The Yagé Letters, is becoming big business in the Amazon.

Yagé was strong enough by reputation to tempt Beat Generation writer and junkie William Burroughs to travel to South America in search of ayahuasca, a journey immortalized in the epistolary novel, ‘The Yagé Letters,’ comprising letters written first from Burroughs to Beat poet, Allen Ginsberg, and then vice versa, when Ginsberg retraced Burroughs’ footsteps. The precise origins of the practice of imbibing ayahuasca (which translates as “the vine of the soul”) are unknown. There is little doubt, however, that the “mother of all medicines” has played a role in Amerindian shamanistic medicine long before the first Europeans came across it in the early 1700s. 

From the perspective of the present-day tourism industry, Burroughs could be classified as a pioneer of woolly-sounding ‘mystic tourism.’ Generally, experiences that fall under this umbrella term include visits to locations seen as ‘spiritual,’ the ingesting of natural highs, or, indeed, both of these things at the same time.

Mystic Tourism: Searching for the Yagé in Peru By Chris Allsop, GoNomad.com