In northwest Amazonia, Iquitos, the former center of the Peruvian rubber economy has become an ayawaskha Mecca for spiritual cleansing. Since the 1990s, the loud, sprawling, industrial entrepôt nestled between the Amazon and Nanay Rivers has served as a hub from which numerous international tourists depart for week-long retreats in the forest to drink the entheogenic brew in hopes of personal revelation. Decades before foreign travelers began venturing off to take ayawaskha at retreat centers nestled deep in the forest, rubber tappers brought Amerindian plant medicine from the forest to the city. After the decline of the rubber boom (1880-1910), men considered racially and culturally mestizo, began practicing plant medicine in urban areas of Amazonia for the first time, and such urban shamans told stories of their shamanic initiation under the tutelage of Amerindians as a way of “authenticating” their newly acquired knowledge. The kidnapping of renowned Iquitos vegetalista Manuel Córdova Ríos (18??-1978) is one of the most dramatic and well-known examples of what I call shamanic initiation narratives. In this article, I reconstruct Córdova’s story from a variety of sources—a Peruvian memoir, English-language biographies published in the U.S., and local Iquitos profiles—to expose the centrality of such initiation narratives in Iquitos’s transition from a place of corruption to a place of purification. The way such narratives conceal the connections between the dark past of Iquitos’s extractive industries and its enlightened present in the global tourism economy becomes clear and provides new insight into continuities in the commodification of Amazonia from the late nineteenth century to the present.