Christian Rätsch (born 1957) is a German writer ethnopharmacology and psychoactive plants and animals. Rätsch is an anthropologist and author. He was born in 1957 in a Bohemian community in Hamburg, Germany. His father was an opera singer, his mother a ballet dancer. He started learning about shamanism and sacred plants at 10 and had his first drug experience at 12.
Ratsch earned a doctorate in Native American cultures. He conducted field research for three years while living with the Lacandón Indians in Chiapas, Mexico investigating shamanism first-hand, and completed his doctorate on their incantations and spells. Rätsch resides in Hamburg with his wife Claudia Müller-Ebeling. He is the founder and co-editor of The Yearbook of Ethnomedicine and the Study of Consciousness.