Psychoactive plants have been used and highly valued since the early Stone Age. The altered states of consciousness (ASC) that these plants produce were culturally and religiously significant. That changed when Western culture placed them in the category of ‘drugs’ and saw them only in a secular and negative light. Connections between drugs and religion became inappropriate. This not only created biases in Western culture but also slipped into scientific research and created dualisms such as religion-magic, receptive-manipulative, and spiritual-material (§1). The theoretical proposal of this paper, through the definition of religion by Fitzgerald (§2), the embodiment paradigm by Csordas (§3) and the ferocity and technology of the body by Beyer and Fotiou (§4), aims at reducing these biases for further research. The material aspects and the approaches come together in a case study of the ayahuasca-ritual in Amazonian shamanism (§4).