How can we understand the current tourist drive towards shamanism? What causes an ever greater number of Westerners to undertake an initiatory journey, to participate in this “ayahuasca fever” that seizes the Peruvian Amazon, absorbing this psychotropic plant at risk of their lives, or at least their mental health? In this very original essay, Jean-Loup Amselle is less interested in the narratives of self-experience than shamanism as a cultural, economic and social fact. The challenges of this survey go beyond the framework of the Peruvian Amazon and its practices to question our Western societies and their problems. How does the South treat the North? What are the driving fantasies of this “shamanism sector”? And how is shamanism reconfigured in the tourist transaction? In conjunction with the massive development of tourism, the shaman becomes a business professional, an entrepreneur combining the esoteric values of the heirs of the New Age and the Beat Generation with the knowledge of the Amazonian healers. Ayahuasca is indeed one of the current religions of the West, with its risks of sectarian drift and alienation of individuals.