What the Peruvian Shamans Saw for 2026
Every December, on a beach in Lima's Miraflores district, a group of Peruvian shamans (curanderos) gather to do something that our Western culture has forgotten how to take seriously: they sit with plant medicine, they listen, and they speak what they've seen.
Before the cameras arrive the eleven shamans from various regions of Peru including the Amazon meet to drink ayahuasca and San Pedro (wachuma). They work with coca leaves, yellow flowers, incense, and swords. They face the Pacific Ocean and open themselves to visions about global affairs, world leaders, and collective fate.
And then they tell us what they saw.
The 2026 Predictions
The shamans' predictions this year are politically charged which tracks, because when has magic ever been separate from power and the collective?
Trump: Shaman Juan de Dios Garcia proclaimed that "the United States should prepare itself because Donald Trump will fall seriously ill" in 2026. Whatever you feel about this prediction, it's worth noting that the 79-year-old Cheeto’s health has already been a subject of speculation from unexplained bruising to his "preventative MRI" in October. The White House of course insists he's in “excellent health”. The shamans see something different, let’s hope they’re right.
Maduro and Venezuela: Multiple shamans predicted that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro will be removed from power in 2026. Shaman Ana María Simeón stated: "We have asked for Maduro to leave, to retire, for President Donald Trump of the United States to be able to remove him, and we have visualized that next year this will happen." Another shaman, Cleofé Sedano from Loreto, warned of "very serious problems between Maduro and Trump" and suggested a third world war could even break out although the U.S. would ultimately prevail. He predicted Maduro would flee Venezuela rather than be captured.
Russia and Ukraine: The shamans offered conflicting visions which to me feels accurate to the complexity of the situation. Garcia predicted the war would end, saying "I see that the conflict will end. They will raise the flag of peace." But other shamans saw global conflicts continuing without resolution. The group previously predicted the war would end in 2023, which did not come to pass.
Peru: The shamans predicted that Keiko Fujimori thedaughter of the late former President Alberto Fujimori will finally win Peru's presidential election after three previous failed attempts. Garcia saw this through the wachuma: "The woman who dreams of ruling Peru, I have been able to see through the wachuma that Keiko Fujimori will be president in 2026."
Natural Disasters: The shamans also predicted earthquakes and extreme climate phenomena will continue to characterize 2026 globally, though they specified that Peru itself would remain relatively calm through the election period.
What Does This Mean?
I know some of you are wondering: should we take any of this seriously?
The shamans have a mixed track record, as all prophetic traditions do. In 2023, they correctly predicted that former President Alberto Fujimori would die within twelve months and he passed from cancer in September 2024. They also predicted that same year the Russia-Ukraine war would end. It didn't. Last year, they warned of a "nuclear war" between Israel and Gaza. Instead, we did get a ceasefire (although the violence continues).
prophecy has never been about batting averages. When we reduce sacred visionary practices to a scorecard of hits and misses, we miss the entire point.
These shamans aren't trying to win a prediction pissing contest. They're engaging in ancestral collective healing and sitting with sacred medicine that has been used for divination across the Americas for thousands of years. They're performing ritual that asks for peace, that calls for better decision-making from world leaders, that prays incense and flowers into the wind for collective healing.
The ceremony itself is an act of magical intervention.
There's something deeply radical about seeing indigenous practitioners from Peru standing on a beach with photographs of Trump, Putin, Xi Jinping, and Zelenskyy, crossing swords over their images, burning incense, and declaring what the plants revealed about their fates.
In a world where political analysis comes from pundits with polling data and economic models, here are eleven people saying: we drank sacred medicine made from PachaMama, and this is what we saw.
Many westerners will minimize these rituals as “primitive” or just dismiss it entirely because people fear what they don’t understand or dismiss what doesn’t align to their religious views. This is an entirely different epistemology a different way of knowing that has sustained cultures for millennia. The shamans aren't claiming to be infallible. They're claiming to be in relationship with forces larger than themselves. They're claiming that the land, the plants, the ancestors have something to say about what's coming.
Their predictions about ongoing global conflict, natural disasters, and political instability aren't exactly controversial. Climate crisis is accelerating. Authoritarian leaders are aging. Geopolitical tensions are at a fever pitch. You don't need ayahuasca to see that the world is in a state of crisis.
I want everyone to remember that crisis is not destiny. Know that prayer is a technology. That asking for peace is itself a form of making it possible.
As we journey into 2026, consider what the Peruvian shamans modeled: collective ritual that acknowledges the political, that engages with power directly, that uses ancestral tools to speak to present circumstances.
You don't need ayahuasca (please don't take that unsupervised). But you might need to remember that your practice isn't separate from what's happening in the world.
What will you ask for this year? And what are you willing to do to make that asking matter?
Want to go deeper?
This month on Patreon, I’m exploring how to bring political intention into your personal practice, because your altar doesn’t exist in a vacuum and neither do you.
