From jungle to retreat, a timeline of Kambo's commodification.

From jungle to retreat.
A timeline of Kambo/Sapo into the Western world as well as its urbanisation in Brazil.

The first recorded instance of indigenous practice observed by outsiders was in 1908-1909 by Walter E. Roth.

Published in 1915 in the 30th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, this publication was titled 'An inquiry into the animism and folklore of the Guiana Indians.' It documented frog-related hunting beliefs among Guiana Indians, Arawak, Carib, and Warau people. Focusing more on the mythological frameworks.

Our first Pharmacological observation came 10 years later in 1925 when French missionary Tastevin records on the Muru River the complete practice among the Kachinaua, Kurina, and Kanamari people.

'A frog is tied alive, secretion collected on sticks, animal released, dawn application via small burns, violent purging, then recovery.'

He had timed it with application at 5am, recovery by 7am, one participant out hunting by 8am.

Recorded without pathology or showmanship, this French missionary addressed this practice with the same reverence as he did with the indigenous people milling grain, as in it was just part of the morning routine.

"The sick man gains weight and regains his color, the unlucky one encounters more game than he can bring back; not one animal escapes his keen eyesight."

After our French missionary there was a 45 year gap before the next Western observer appeared. The practice never stopped, it was happening every morning among indigenous people in western Amazonia.

For this period nobody with a pen and a Western audience was watching, until it was picked back up again in the 1970s.

Still at this time it was just western investigation of indigenous practices with Robert L. Carneiro's "Hunting and hunting magic among the Amahuaca of the Peruvian montaña." And Peter T. Furst's "The Toad as Earth Mother: a Problem in Symbolism of Ethnopharmacology."

In Hallucinogens in Precolombian Art, pp. 88–100.

Then everything changed when an amateur researcher (as in led by passion rather than academic recognition) and writer Peter Gorman made first contact with the Matsés in 1984.

During his second trip to Peruvian Amazonia, on a report to write about ayahuasca Gorman runs into a Matsés hunter on the Auchyako River.

"tattooed mouth, cat-whisker face adornments, carrying a bow." Gorman followed him back to camp. Seeing a woman nurse a baby monkey alongside her own child. He is entranced and returns again and again.

In 1986 history experiences its first Western sapo dosing.

Gorman makes friends with a Matsés hunter called Pablo and is invited to the village, Río Lobo.

Pablo burns two small marks on Gorman's forearm and applies the secretion.

Gorman's body heats up, his blood races, he vomits, loses control of his bodily functions, falls to the ground growling on all fours.

Then: heightened hearing, sharpened vision, enhanced smell, immense physical strength lasting days.

He asks AMNH (American Museum of Natural History) anthropologists about it when he returns back to America, none of the members have heard of any tribe using frog secretions transdermally.

His report is "interesting but inadequate" as he failed to bring back a specimen nor a sample.

From 1988–1990 Gorman takes multiple return trips for specimens and samples. Sending half the sample to Charles Myers at AMNH Herpetology, who passes it to John Daly at NIH (the National Institutes of Health, the US federal government's primary biomedical research agency). Also sending a live frog and second sample to Vittorio Erspamer at the FIDIA Research Institute in Rome.

The scientific research into the pharmacology of kambo now begins.

In 1990 Gorman publishes an account of "People of the jaguar" in Shaman's Drum academic journal.

It was the first published account of Matsés shamanic hunting practices involving sapo, in the psychedelic/ethnobotanical press.

In November of 1992 the NIH team publishes the first peer-reviewed pharmacological analysis.

Identifying a 33-amino-acid peptide (adenoregulin) that interacts with adenosine receptors, potential implications for depression, stroke, seizures, Alzheimer's. The paper's title explicitly frames it as "hunting magic in the upper Amazon."

Finally in July of 1993 Peter Gorman publishes "Making magic" in Omni magazine.

This was the hinge document. It contained a first-person account in popular-press linking indigenous use directly to peptide science.

Gorman wrote both the narrative of Pablo's village and interlaced Erspamer's peptide-by-peptide readout to speculatively explain each symptom.

Erspamer's verdict: "No other amphibian skin can compete with it." Seven bioactive peptide families identified.

Gorman named the medical potential and Erspamer explained the mechanisms.

The key findings by Erspamer from the sapo sample:

Caerulein and phyllocaerulein caused gastrointestinal effects, nausea, vomiting, tachycardia. The purge.

Phyllomedusin — affects salivary glands, tear ducts, intestines, bowels. The violent purging.

Sauvagine — blood pressure drop, tachycardia, adrenal cortex stimulation. The heightened senses, the stamina.

Phyllokinin — potent blood-vessel dilator. The blood-rushing sensation.

Dermorphin and deltorphin — opioid peptides 18x and 39x stronger than morphine, but mirroring beta-endorphins.

Lower tolerance, less withdrawal than opiates.

The "magical" effects — animal visions, animas projection. "No hallucinations, visions, or magic effects are produced by the known peptide components." The question remains open to where this comes from but could be attributed to the mystical nature and culture surrounding its use that would likely inadvertently affect the participant's experience — a placebo of these effects.

Stepping back in time to the 1960s, a parallel pathway of commodification had emerged in Brazil's western state of Acre.

Rubber tappers lived alongside and among indigenous Panoan communities for generations.

A rubber tapper named Francisco Gomes, also known as "Shiban", lived among the Katukina on the Liberdade River during the 1960s.

Shiban learned kambo practice directly and eventually became the main person carrying it out of the forest into Brazilian towns.

Through Shiban and others like him, kambo gradually migrated into the cities of Acre, then into São Paulo, Rio, Brasília, and Curitiba.

Brazil has legally recognized syncretic churches built around ayahuasca (Santo Daime and União do Vegetal being the largest.)

These movements already had paved the way for practice of "sacred medicine" with ceremonial spaces, trained facilitators, spiritual frameworks, and middle-class urban congregation frameworks already built for kambo to fit neatly into.

And so kambo slotted in alongside ayahuasca naturally.

One key figure was Sônia Menezes, she was a flower essence therapist, acupuncturist, and Santo Daime member.

She had connected with Shiban's family in 1999, traveled to Acre, and eventually set herself up as the São Paulo hub for kambo application, including as the official representative of the Katukina Association of Campinas (AKAC).

The Katukina people, having seen the rubber tappers and urban holistic practitioners commercialize a practice they considered theirs.

Had decided to petition Brazil's Environment Minister Marina Silva (herself from Acre and a former rubber tapper) to intervene.

Their concerns were that unauthorized people were selling kambo commercially and pharmaceutical companies filing roughly 70 patents on peptides isolated from the secretion without any benefit flowing back to the indigenous communities who developed the knowledge.

In April 2004, ANVISA (Brazil's FDA equivalent) banned all advertising of kambo's medicinal and therapeutic benefits and shut down a website marketing treatments. But the ANVISA ban was on advertising specifically, not on the practice itself.

Enforcement was minimal, and so the urban expansion continued to grow.

Anthropologist Edilene Coffaci de Lima noted that the state couldn't create a "market reserve" for indigenous-only kambo application, even if it wanted to. Lima also identified something precise happening: a "shamanization of kambo" in the urban context — in villages, anyone with good moral standing could apply kambo for hunting or laziness; in the cities, it was being reframed as something requiring "secret knowledge and initiations," turning every practitioner into a kind of shaman and every session into a ceremony.

In 2005, the Ministry of Environment convened a technical seminar in Brasília bringing together indigenous representatives, anthropologists, herpetologists, molecular biologists, and doctors. They discussed intellectual property, the need for clinical trials, frog population management, and training for indigenous practitioners.

The Katukina then adopted the frog as an ethnic identity marker in logos, opening their music CD with frog calls as a way of reclaiming their culture. While simultaneously losing any practical monopoly on its application.As the Katukina were fighting for ownership of their practice in Brazilian courts and government seminars, sapo had already begun its quiet migration into the American psychonaut underground.

By the late 2000s Gorman's name had become shorthand for the origin story of Kambo itself. Anyone in the ayahuasca-adjacent subculture who knew about sapo knew about it because of his article in Omni magazine and his piece in the academic journal Shaman's Drum.

His years of showing up in the Amazon and coming back with stories that read like fiction but checked out pharmacologically.

With the rise of the internet Erowid had become the de facto library for psychonauts, allowing for experiences to be shared by non academic sources.

The earliest experiences listed on erowid emerged in 2009 with two reports. These are not verified sources but can show us some background of the transition to new age spiritual use by non-indigineous thrill seekers.

Author CabocloGuerreiro of Rei Kambô is Master Healer! expressed that the treatment had made his fibromyalgia subside after 20 years of pain and after a week had passed the symptoms were still gone. This author also wrote about having family ties in brazil, where the ceromony took place.

In this report he goes on to state "About 10 years ago, medicine-men from the Katukina tribe visited Santo Daime churches. They were impressed by the strongly specialized ayahuasca use of the church and decided to teach the daimistas how to use the Kambô." Indicating that the Santo Daime church would have had communicated with the indigineous people to getting their guidance and advice of ceromonial to use Kambo. It is not clear if the intention and rite of the ceromony carried over aswell, nor the validity to this explanation.

As this report was published in 2009 this exchange would happened in 1999. Leaving enough time for our second trip report from 2009.

Erik Davis' The bad shaman's sapo is a first persons account of receiving sapo in the living room of a man from new jersey called the Bad Shaman.

No sources validate this claim but one could speculate that from the ayahuasca churches intergration of kambo, western spiritual seekers / psychonauts may have stumbled across this treatment. Additionally with Peter Gormans writeups in High Times and Omni magazine this sacrament may have known to psychonauts already.

In the account of "The bad shaman's sapo" there was no ceremony.

Just a guy with a stick of dried frog secretion, a couch to collapse on and a tile floor that "its okay to puke on".

This report the 'neoshaman' insisted that his participants attempt heavier doses as to get the most of the effects.

One of Davis' crew members went along this and was a sweated mess who's payoff was "the immense relief that he did not, in fact, die."

It's fair to assess the use in this context was a far cry from traditional use and is commodified into some exotic high.

Additionally in 2009 Journalist Hamilton Morris filmed a three-part documentary The Sapo Diaries for VBS (now known as VICE)

Opening the documentary and travelling upriver to find the Matsés people. Morris explains the venom is used for energy during hunting, containing opioid peptides roughly a hundred times stronger than morphine and by his own admission doesn't activate any known psychedelic receptors. However he noted "some people say it's psychedelic." Candidly remarking that he doesn't know what to expect and is nervous about being burned ritualistically.

The crew finally reaches a Matsés host, the frog is caught, strung up by its limbs, provoked, and scraped for its secretion. The boat captain goes first and takes three burns without much reaction apart from walking into the river.

Morris goes next while narrating what the experience feels like in real time.

He describes the peak as dissociative and mildly euphoric, but is explicit that he experiences no visual or psychedelic effects at any point.

No hallucination, no altered perception, just the opioid-purge cycle running its course.

The next morning he reports no lasting benefit: no unusual stamina, no resistance to hunger or thirst, nothing to explain the claims attached to it.

This was the first documentary he made in his career. Over the course of vice his work had blossimed into a far more academic, careful, and source-literate style, and he has since discussed this experince in december of 2021 in a conversation with Peter Gorman on Hamilton's Pharmacopeia.

This happened 5 Months before Gormans passing away.

In April of 2022 Peter Gorman dies at the age of 71. He had returned from his final Amazon expedition in poor health and died at a hospital south of Fort Worth. Hamilton Morris tweets the news. Obituaries retroactively canonize him as the field's founding Western figure.

"He didn't want to waste away at home. He wanted to give the Amazon one last shot."

Before his passing Gorman published Sapo in My Soul in 2015. This book was part memoir and part guidebook.

Gorman being able to turn behind him and reflect on the lineage and his influence of western introduction of this medicine.

An instagram account @sapotreatment in New York City posted a screenshot of email from Gorman responding to an inquiry about fasting and water consumption before a ritual, in this he expresses that the Matsés in his 35 years of knowing them didn't do the ceromony with the expressed goal of a purge, but new age shamans have claimed this to be a key part of the experience.

It is facinating to think about the knowledge that started with Pablo in the village of Río Lobo now has an ISBN and a chain of custody.

This instagram account is an example of a home-visit practitioner model. There are multiple of these accounts operating across america.

Making a once sacred medicine used by communities who lived among the frogs into a convenient spiritual experience for the elite.

Now that Peter Gorman is gone, the practice he had introduced to the west no longer has a link to it's source.

It had slowly developed into an commodified industry with his introduction but now thats essentially all it is.

It is very difficult to find accounts from indigenous use aside from the ones that I have listed above. As the group of communities who natively use it is spread across regions of Peru, western Brazil, and Bolivia. Not all of these groups share the same ceromonies.

The website Retreat.guru alone lists over 369 kambo retreats across more than 15 countries.

They are concentrated in Mexico, the Netherlands, Spain, Costa Rica, and Colombia.

Kambo is rarely sold alone at this level, it is bundled with other plant derived substances like ayahuasca, bufo, ibogaine, psilocybin, cacao ceremonies and even therapudic MDMA.

Aswell as temazcal sweat lodges, sound therapy, massages and whatever wellness needs are thrown into the curated multi-day packages.

The language on these retreat listings code-switches freely between "sacred," "detox," to even just "experience" sometimes within the same paragraph. Pricing ranges from $99 for a single session in Medellín to a $6,000 Private 1:1 / Chosen Family / Custom Earth Medicine Immersion in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. On the $6,000 listing I want to finish this writeup by quoting a section from it word for word to illustrate how far removed we are from our starting point.

"Details of this retreat

"A Note From a Past Guest: “As a CEO, I’m used to carrying pressure with nowhere safe to put it down. In my private retreat with Christopher and Aeon, I finally could. I released years of stress, faced truths I’d avoided, and reconnected with the deeper purpose behind my leadership. I left with clarity, freedom, and an inner strength that changed how I lead—and how I live.”"