Jan Irvin is an independent researcher, author, and lecturer. He is the author of several books, including The Holy Mushroom: Evidence of Mushrooms in Judeo-Christianity, and co-author of Astrotheology & Shamanism: Christianity’s Pagan Roots. He is the curator of the official website for John Marco Allegro, the controversial Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, and in 2009 he republished Allegro’s famous 1970 classic, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, in a fortieth anniversary edition. Jan is the editor of the forthcoming Entheogens & Consciousness: A Comprehensive Overview of the Psychedelic Sciences, a two-volume set of interviews done with about fifty of the world’s leading independent and academic researchers in psychedelic studies, from which this interview is drawn. The original audio interview is available on Jan’s popular Gnostic Media podcast site.

Jan Irvin: Steve, welcome to Gnostic Media’s podcast. How are you today?

Stephan Beyer: I’m just fine. I’m very happy to be here talking with you.

JI: And I’m very excited to have you on the show. I finished reading your new book, Singing to the Plants, last week. I would say that it definitely has raised the bar, as far as research into ayahuasca and South American shamanism. I would put it up there with Benny Shanon’s book, Antipodes of the Mind — I think you’ve done an equivalent job in bringing your data together and the thoroughness of your research.

SB: Well, thank you for your very kind words. I really appreciate that. I’m happy to talk about the book with you.

JI: Why don’t you start out by telling us a little bit about who is Stephan Beyer and your background?

SB: I’m a retired university professor. I’m a retired lawyer.

JI: Where did you used to teach?

SB: I taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I taught at Berkeley. I taught at Graduate Theological Union, back in the ‘70s.

JI: So it’s been a little while?

SB: Oh, it’s been a long time, yes. I’m also a retired wilderness guide. Right now I am a peacemaker and a community builder. And that’s really about it. It’s been a great ride.

JI: Would you define yourself as a practicing shaman?

SB: No. And I’ll tell you the reason for that. I have studied with people I consider to be real shamans. And when I look at the depth of their knowledge and experience, when I look at their ability to suck illness out of the bodies of suffering patients, when I see that they know intimately hundreds of plants and hundreds of sacred songs, I’m barely even a beginner on that path.

JI: Would you say that they’re sucking sickness out of a patient? Is that something real that you’ve seen actually work?

SB: It raises a whole bunch of questions. I’m still trying to sort through those questions myself. Can I tell you a story?

JI: Sure.

SB: Alright. Here’s a story. I was sitting with my teacher, my maestro ayahuasquero, don Roberto, late at night. A canoe pulls up at the landing down by the river near his hut. And two men come up the walk, one holding the other. They tell don Roberto that the sick person has terrible stomach pains. The guy carrying him is his cousin and he’s brought him to don Roberto. So don Roberto does his healing work — what I came to think of as his ten-minute healing. And he did all of the things that an Upper Amazonian shaman does. He blew tobacco smoke into the crown of the sick person’s head. He blew tobacco smoke where the pain was. He shook his leaf bundle rattle, his shacapa, and sang his icaros, his magical songs. And he sucked at the place where the pain was. And he spit the illness, the flemosidad, the darts, onto the ground. And all the time I’m sitting there thinking to myself: ‘Oh my god, what if this guy has acute appendicitis?’ So when don Roberto is finished with his healing, I ask permission from everybody to touch the person he has just been healing. And I check for all of the signs of appendicitis: fever, rebound tenderness, guarding, pain on the right side when pressing on the left — all of those things. And I say to myself, phew, no appendicitis. But that left me with an unanswered question, which is this: Here is don Roberto — my teacher, a man I respect and admire and love — and I have to ask myself: Do I or do I not believe that he is capable of healing acute appendicitis?

JI: Very interesting. Are you familiar with professor Tom Roberts?

SB: Oh yeah.

JI: And you’re familiar with his work on placebo ability, right?

SB: Yeah.

JI: So obviously you’ve considered that as a possibility as well — just placebo ability. Or do you think that it’s deeper than that?

SB: This is a difficult question. Let’s look at the course of most illnesses. Most sicknesses that people suffer are self-limiting. Many other diseases — such as arthritis or multiple sclerosis — are cyclical. They seem to be getting better and then they get worse and then they seem to be getting better. Lots of diseases seem to respond to placebo in most drug trials, as you know. Something like thirty percent of the placebo group get better. But I don’t know whether the placebo effect can heal acute appendicitis.

JI: What gives you the idea that he had acute appendicitis?

SB: Oh, I think he did not.

JI: OK.

SB: And surely whatever he had, it responded to what don Roberto did. My dilemma was a little different. My dilemma was: if he had appendicitis, did I think that don Roberto was in fact healing it? And if I didn’t think so, if I thought this guy was going to die, what should I do? So that raises the question: What is a shaman really doing? To what extent do we think that shamans cure in the same way we think that biomedical doctors cure? Or are they doing something else? Certainly when you talk to shamans, they will say that they are just as interested in healing physical disease as any biomedical specialist is. And I think we have to be very careful about how we use words — like curing and healing — to try to understand, in their own terms, exactly what it is that shamans do when they’re shamanizing. I think one of the advantages of really trying to understand shamanism is that it allows us to look at sickness and at the process of healing, as we experience it in our own culture, from a very different perspective. In the Upper Amazon, I think shamans see disease, see sickness, as having a profoundly social dimension that we don’t think about in biomedicine. We see patients as being discrete, monadic units, somehow isolated from their social setting. In the Upper Amazon, a shaman looks at sickness as indicating a failure of right relationship. Disease, sickness, is always the result of a broken trust, is always the result of envy, resentment, or malice on the part of another human being. And so, there is a social dimension —

JI: That’s such a hard concept for many people to grasp. They don’t understand that these indigenous people — and it’s not just in South America, but throughout the world — don’t believe that a germ comes and gets you sick. Traditionally they believe that sickness was caused by sorcery and things like that. And, as you’re familiar with, I had Neil Whitehead on my show last year. He was a pioneer in that area of research. So many people get this New Age concept of neo-shamanism that is so far removed from what shamanism is really about. To even try and explain it to people causes them to start making all sorts of bizarre ad hominem attacks and things like that instead of trying to realize that Terence McKenna’s definition of shamanism is not really all there is to shamanism.

SB: I agree with what you’re saying. There is, especially in the Upper Amazon, what I have called a tragic cosmovision, which is very different from the view of shamanism which you see in a lot of the popular media. For example, the relationship between hunter and prey in North American indigenous culture is often based on a gift model. In other words, indigenous people in North America frequently express their relationship to animals in the hunt as the animals giving themselves up as a gift to the humans who hunt and eat them, which requires in turn a gift from the people who hunt them — a song, a ritual, tobacco. And so, the hunt is perceived as a gift relationship. And many people take this as normative for indigenous culture generally. But in the Upper Amazon, human and animal relationships, the relationships between people, are not based on a gift model so much as they are based on a predator-prey model. And just as jaguars hunt people, people hunt wild pigs. And the relationships between people in causing disease, in hunting animals, in warfare, are all made part of this same tragic cosmovision. In many Upper Amazonian cultures it’s very clear you can’t cure one person of the disease without causing that disease to go to a different person. And it seems to me that this kind of tragic cosmovision, this sense of the innateness of human aggression and the necessity of tremendous self-control on the part of the shaman to keep from becoming an aggressor him- or herself is something that is very difficult for people in our culture to understand or accept. And that’s why work by people like Whitehead and Brown is so very important.

JI: What got you into studying psychedelics and Amazonian shamanism?

SB: I was interested in wilderness survival, of all things. And I was filled with machismo — you know, drop me naked in the desert and I’ll eat lizards and survive.

JI: Like these guys on Discovery Channel or whatever —

SB: Yes, exactly like that. And I had the benefit of many really good wilderness survival instructors. I first went down to the Amazon to study jungle survival. I had a lot of very interesting adventures doing that.

JI: But you were a professor before you did that, correct?

SB: I was a professor of Buddhist Studies and I did that for twelve years.

JI: I see clearly the direct relation.

SB: I went off after that to become a lawyer. And I was a litigator and a trial lawyer for twenty-five years. And then toward the end of that, I was becoming interested in wilderness survival.

JI: So what happened? You did some mushrooms or some ayahuasca, and something happened?

SB: It went the other way, actually.

That’s the usual trajectory, no question about it. But, as I studied wilderness survival, it became clearer and clearer to me that survival in the wilderness had a spiritual dimension — that if you look at the spirituality of indigenous peoples, it is almost universally based on the need to maintain right relationships, both with the group that you’re part of and with the spirits of the wilderness. They’re also part of your group. And the spirits of the cosmos are also part of your group. So, when I started thinking about that, I became very curious. I wanted to find out more about it. So it was at that point that I started drinking ayahuasca. I did — how many — seven four-day and four-night wilderness vision fasts in the desert — in Death Valley and the Gila Wilderness and in other areas of the Southwest. I participated in ceremonies of the Native American Church, and slowly became drawn into the ayahuasca shamanism of the Upper Amazon and just felt I needed to learn more and more about it. So there was no great revelation. It was a matter of just increasing curiosity, and then, as my curiosity began to be satisfied, my need to understand what was going on in some kind of cultural context. And that’s what led to the book.

JI: Would you like to define shamanism?

SB: Umm, no. People who are a lot smarter than I am have gotten into trouble trying to define shamanism. I’m not at all sure that there is one shamanism. I guess I prefer to talk about shamanisms. And it’s like a Wittgensteinian family resemblance more than anything else. This shamanism resembles that shamanism. That shamanism resembles a third shamanism. And by the time you get to the other end of that chain, the shamanism at the end has very little similarity with the shamanism you started with. Let me put it this way: when lawyers talk about property rights they often use the metaphor of a bundle of sticks. To own a piece of property means that you have the right to sell, lease, share, bequeath, donate, alter, repair, or destroy it. Owning different things, or owning the same thing under different circumstances, may alter the number or type of sticks included in the bundle. And the notion of owning a piece of property is defined by these sticks in a bundle. I like to think about shamanism the same way as a kind of bundle of sticks. One stick is that the shaman has a particularly close relationship with spirits that other people don’t have. Another stick is that shamans know things that other people don’t know. They know what caused a sickness, or they know where game animals are. They know where a lost soul has gone. Another one is that they are performers. Shamans practice, at least some of the time, in public where people can see what they’re doing. The shaman’s power may be encapsulated as a physical object inside the body And you can come up with a list of maybe a dozen of these sticks. And you can say that a shaman in this culture has these six sticks, and a shaman in another culture has these six sticks, of which three are the same as the first one. And you can come up with some kind of a way of thinking about shamans that doesn’t seek for some kind of essence that they all have in common. If I were asked to define shamanism, I would define it in terms of a bundle of sticks.

JI: What are shamanic darts?

SB: Let’s see. In the Upper Amazon, a shaman’s power is conceptualized as being kept inside the shaman’s body, usually in the form of some kind of slimy, sticky substance. And among the mestizo shamans, they use the common Spanish word flemavirot, for phlegm. And in this matrix, there are kept pathogenic projectiles, or the substance may itself be projected outside the body. Among the mestizo shamans, usually these are called virotes, darts. The word virote means a crossbow dart. And when the Spanish invaded, that term was used for the darts that the indigenous people of the Amazon used in their blowguns. Although these pathogenic projectiles are called darts, if you see them having drunk ayahuasca, they can be teeth, scorpions, spiders, the beaks of birds, razor blades. And the sorcerer causes sickness by projecting these darts into the body of the victim. This concept of disease being caused by some pathogenic projectile being inserted into the body of the patient is virtually universal in the Upper Amazon. Just as the cure for this is virtually universal: the healing shaman sucks the dart out. And that’s how the patient is healed.

JI: And we’ll get back to the concept of the phlegm in a moment. I want to come back to your discussion of shamans appearing to suck the disease out of someone. But first I wanted to talk about your research into Gordon Wasson and his interactions with María Sabina.

SB: Well, I wouldn’t even really call it research. It’s a story that has been well told before and I told it again to make a point, which is that people have mistakenly thought of shamans as something like spiritual gurus — as being like Zen monks, or Hindu ascetics, or people who dwell in the bright light and on the mountaintop of enlightenment. And shamans are really nothing like that. Shamans dwell in what James Hillman has called the valley of soul.

JI: I know somebody who has been living in Jimenez since the early 90s. They say that Wasson’s picture of María Sabina and the whole situation was highly distorted.

SB: I think that’s right. He saw her as this perfect spiritual person, the embodiment of spirituality. She was a shaman who lived her own messy life, who dealt with disease and resentment and envy and love affairs gone bad and farms that stopped producing crops and all of the mess of human life. And she healed people by vomiting for them. If the mushrooms didn’t make people vomit, then she would vomit for them and try to heal them that way. She was a person who lived our ordinary, human, messy life and was a healer in this context of, not the mountaintop, but the valley of soul. But Wasson idealized her and made her into this spiritual person. And as you know so well, María Sabina just didn’t understand any of this.

JI: You know that Wasson had actually met several other shamans and had seen them doing the mushroom ritual before he selected María Sabina to be the proper one to show, whom he then presented to the world in Time-Life Magazine. And I’m not sure if you were aware, but he was the head of PR, or public relations — which is spin — for J.P. Morgan Bank. In fact, he was the pioneer of banking spin. And so it’s not surprising that he would look for the most opportune way to spin his story, which just happened, unfortunately, to be María Sabina and the Mazatec.

SB: I’m sure you know that he probably, at least based on what I have read, was less than honest in explaining to any of these people he met, including María Sabina, why he wanted to take the mushrooms.

JI: Oh yeah. He made $40,000 off of the serialization rights of the article. I think he paid María Sabina like a pack of cigarettes and some little trivial items. He was a banker through and through. He certainly had ulterior motives. I’m actually working on another book. In 2008, I published a book called The Holy Mushroom, that revealed a lot of Wasson’s tactics against John Allegro, who is the author of The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. Since writing that book I have come across a lot of new and startling information that merits a whole other book.

SB: I hadn’t heard about the disparity in what he made and what he gave María Sabina. But as you know, that’s an old story. People, gringos, have been doing that to indigenous healers for an awfully long time, and I’m sure you know the story of this guy who tried to patent ayahuasca, leading to a very bitter fight. And that kind of thing has been going on for a very long time. Fortunately, things, I think, are getting better as people become more and more aware. But the exploitation of indigenous healers is a really old and very troubling story.

JI: Are shamans trusted or distrusted?

SB: Shamans are generally mistrusted. In the Upper Amazon — and in many, if not most, shamanic cultures — it’s generally accepted that the power to heal is also the power to harm – they are the same thing. This is especially clear, I think, in the Upper Amazon, where the sorcerer and the shaman use exactly the same means. They use the same plant spirits. They use the same protective plants and animals both to attack and to defend. The means of causing disease overlap with the means of extracting disease. The phlegm which contains the darts of the sorcerer is what the healing shaman uses to protect himself from the darts that have been projected into the patient. So the shaman in the Upper Amazon inhabits this area of ambiguous marginality. People don’t trust shamans. Shamans are killed. If a patient dies, people wonder: Was he really trying hard enough? Was this sorcery under the guise of healing? A French anthropologist, Jean-Pierre Chaumeil, did a study of Yagua shamans in eastern Peru. He tracked the death of shamans over a period of several years. Every shaman who had died did so in one of two ways. Either he had been killed, people said, by a sorcerer, or he had been killed by people who said he was a sorcerer. So, people need shamans, but they distrust them.

JI: They need them but they distrust them. Interesting paradox.

SB: In the Upper Amazon, they say the difference between a sorcerer and a shaman comes down to a matter of self-control.

JI: Well that leads me to my next question. Are shamans that are capable of healing also capable of killing? And what is the separation there?

SB: It’s not a bright line. For example, a shaman sucks pathogenic projectiles — darts, scorpions, snakes, razor blades, piranha teeth. When don Roberto heals, part of the performative aspect is that he makes it very clear that what he is sucking out of the patient is vile and disgusting — he gags, he chokes. It is clear from what he does that he is taking grave risks on behalf of his patient by ingesting into his own body these vile, foul substances that were projected into the body by a sorcerer.

JI: You don’t think it’s just a show though? You think there’s merit to this display?

SB: I have come to think that we make a mistake by simply dividing the world into two boxes. And in one box we put things that are real, and in the other box we put things that are fake. And I think that drinking ayahuasca — participating in the healing culture of the Upper Amazon — makes you question whether there is in fact a bright line difference between things that are real and things that are unreal. When you read accounts of shamans, when you talk to shamans, they will talk about physical things coming into their mouth that need to be spit out. But when the shaman sucks a dart from the body of a patient, what does the healing shaman do with that dart? Sometimes, in some traditions, that dart is put into a rock or thrown toward the sun over the horizon. But that’s a problem because it is still pathogenic. Somebody could stumble on it and become sick. Another possibility is for the shaman to take it into his own phlegm and add it to his store of darts that protect him from attack by sorcerers. A third possibility, which is probably the most common, is that the shaman takes that dart that he has sucked out and projects it back into the one who sent it. Is that healing or is that sorcery? Here’s another example. The darts that are in the shaman’s body are in some sense alive and autonomous. When you have darts in your chest, embedded in the phlegm that’s in your chest, those darts, in many traditions in the Upper Amazon, want to hurt people. They are eager for you to project them out of your body into the body of somebody else. They are in some sense alive and autonomous and you have to feed them tobacco juice. They tempt the shaman to use them in order to harm. And only the most self-controlled shaman can keep those darts under control and be a healer. And my teachers, don Roberto and doña María, prided themselves on following the path they called pura blancura, pure white. They only healed, they said. On the other hand, doña María once said to me, she said: You know, we are gentle people, but sometimes we show our claws. That’s typical doña María.

JI: One point that came to me via David Hillman’s work in The Chemical Muse, and it’s come up in other areas as well, is that practically all plants, depending on the dosage, have the ability to both heal and kill. Are you familiar with that idea?

SB: Oh yes. It goes back to Paracelsus, who said that the dose makes the poison.

JI: And things like hemlock were actually used as inebriants back then — you increase the dosage a little bit and suddenly the user dies. But at very minute doses, they were having a good old time with the stuff.

SB: In the Upper Amazon it goes even beyond dose. You can use the plants for selfish, vengeful purposes, or for protective and healing purposes. And the same plant can harm or heal, depending on the intention of the shaman, who calls the spirit of the plant using the song that the plant taught the shaman.

JI: What is the importance of the shaman’s diet, or dieta?

SB: I think it’s important. People spend a lot of time talking about ayahuasca. And there’s no reason why they shouldn’t. Ayahuasca is fascinating. But I think you have to remember that — especially among the mestizos — ayahuasca is embedded in a whole pharmacopoeia of healing plants. And part of the training of the shaman is to learn not only ayahuasca, but to learn all of the healing and protective plants that the shaman may use and prescribe to patients. And the way in which you learn the plants is by establishing a close, personal relationship with the plant, so that the plant will teach you how to use it, what song to sing to call it, what sicknesses you should prescribe it for. The way the shaman learns that is to go into the jungle and live in solitude over a period of time — maybe with periodic visits by the apprentice’s teacher — and to ingest the plant. Then, in a dream, in a spontaneous vision, in a vision when the apprentice is drinking ayahuasca, in all sorts of subtle ways, the knowledge appears. It may appear in the form of a plant spirit speaking to you. It may appear in the form of a song that you hear in a dream. It may appear in the form of knowledge that forms in your mind. The song may be something that you just spontaneously find yourself singing. But the idea is that the plant is not just a collocation of molecules that you use to treat a specific disease. The plant spirit is a person, an other-than-human person, who may appear in different forms under different circumstances. But the shaman or the apprentice has to form a deep personal bond with the plant, and does that by actually taking it into the body and letting it teach from within. This is learning with the body. So it’s very important that when you go into the jungle and you are learning the plants, you have to keep to a very strict regimen of solitude, of dietary restrictions, and of sexual abstinence. So that you’re in the jungle alone. No salt, no sugar, no sex — this last because the plant spirits can be very jealous. In this solitude, you let the plant teach you in the plant’s own time. And that’s pretty much la dieta. The details vary from teacher to teacher and from tradition to tradition. But that’s basically the idea.

JI: What is the importance of the icaros, or the shaman’s songs?

SB: The songs you learn in a number of different ways. The apprentice begins by learning the songs of his or her master, the maestro ayahuasquero. It’s the songs that allow the shaman to call the spirits of the plants, to call the protective spirits, to do all kinds of things: call the lightning, summon the souls of deceased shamans, protect against rain. There are a thousand uses for these icaros. Once you’ve started to learn the songs of your own master, then the songs come to you while you’re in solitude in the jungle. And you may dream the songs. You may hear them with your ears. Sometimes people will travel long distances to hear the songs of other shamans. A shaman is known in the Upper Amazon for the number and quality of these icaros, these magic songs. They are the basic tool of shamanizing in the Upper Amazon.

JI: Let’s get back to phlegm, or tsentsak I believe is another word that you used. In your book you discuss that this was given to you both through your corona and orally. What is its purpose? Have you noticed a real effect on you from it?

SB: Let me tell you a story. Back when I was doing vision fasts in the desert, I apprenticed to somebody who knew what he was doing, as opposed to me, and I helped put people up on the hill, helped people do their four-day and four-night vision fast. People would go into the desert. They’d have water, but there would be no food, no tent, no fire. We encouraged people not to have a fire unless it was part of a ceremony, and basically to spend these four days really focused on whatever issue in that person’s life had made them want to go out and do a vision fast. And many people went out there because of the stories they had heard and the legends that they had heard, looking for what I came to call the pink neon buffalo. They wanted a big vision — an epiphany, a revelation, a transformative experience. And some of them got it, and many did not. There was this one guy, who after four days of great discomfort in the desert, came back and was distraught. He cried. He had not had a vision. And so I started to talk with him. And I said, Well, tell me, the first day you were there, what did you see? And he said he had gone back into the Eureka Mountains and walked up this wash and found this cave where he stayed. Once there had been bats in the cave and he saw the guano on the floor. He saw a lizard squatting in the shade of a creosote bush. He had seen ravens circling in the sky. And it became clear to me, and eventually became clear to him, that in fact the spirits had been speaking to him the whole time, and he just really hadn’t been listening.

And I think that that’s true of a lot of spiritual events: drinking ayahuasca, getting the phlegm of your master, going out on a vision fast in the desert. People have been conditioned to expect the pink neon buffalo. But I think many things, especially the sacred plants, I think that often, they work very slowly and subtly. And there are no big transformative visions. There are no epiphanies. What happens is that things work very slowly over time. And after six months, or a year, you realize that you have changed and that the sacred plant — the peyote, the ayahuasca, the teonanácatl — has worked in you in ways that you didn’t even expect.

And I think that the same thing is true for getting the phlegm of my maestro ayahuasquero. Don Roberto was always pretty taciturn. It was often doña María who took me under her wing and explained things. Don Roberto said I had to nurture the phlegm that he gave me by smoking mapacho and by drinking ayahuasca — although he realized that doing that was very difficult in North America. Doña María said that now that I had the phlegm of my master, I had a corazon de acero, I had a heart of steel, and I no longer needed to fear any person because this phlegm would protect me. I took that with a grain of salt. Yet over time, I have discovered that I have changed in ways I never expected. I don’t know whether it was the ayahuasca. I don’t know whether it was the phlegm of my master. I don’t know whether it’s just getting older. I don’t know whether it was my family and my friends. But I am different from when I first started studying jungle survival. I’m not a healer in the sense that I’m a curandero: I don’t give plant medicines to people, I don’t suck darts out of people. But as a peacemaker, I have become a healer in a very different way than I would have expected. And my own arrogance and rage, that was part of my love of wilderness survival, has evaporated. And again, I don’t know why. I kind of suspect it has something to do with the phlegm that don Roberto gave me. I have a suspicion that it has something to do with the way that has worked on me and made me feel safe enough so that I don’t have to be angry any more. But I don’t know. And that’s the answer: I don’t know.

JI: What is the importance of mapacho, or tobacco, in South American shamanism?

SB: Mapacho is, in many ways, the most sacred plant in South America. As it is in North America.

JI: And probably the least discussed in that regard as well.

SB: Yes. Tobacco is the most important of the strong, sweet smells — like camphor and cologne — that are considered to be protective in the Upper Amazon. So tobacco smoke is protective. It keeps away the spirits of the dead. It helps protect you from darts that are projected at you. It nurtures your own phlegm and that protects you. In a healing ceremony, the shaman blows smoke into and over the body of the participants. Tobacco is one of the three primary hallucinogens that are used by mestizo shamans. The three primary hallucinogens are tobacco, ayahuasca and toé — which is a variety of species of the genus Brugmansia, the Angel’s Trumpet, a plant very rich in scopolamine, just as ayahuasca is very rich in dimethyltryptamine.

JI: Which is the Datura family, isn’t it?

SB: Yes. Sometimes it’s called tree datura. So it’s related to Jimson Weed and other scopalamine-rich plants. And tobacco is used as a hallucinogen. Now, we generally don’t think of tobacco as a hallucinogen. And I think there are two reasons for that. One is that the tobacco that people smoke in North America has very little nicotine in it.

JI: Which is Nicotiana tabacum, as opposed to Nicotiana rustica which is the more traditional type that’s found everywhere from San Diego all the way through South America.

SB: Yes, absolutely right. South American varieties may have eight times as much nicotine as the kind that’s cultivated for smoking in North America. The second reason is that most Americans smoke for mood stabilization. They smoke because the effect of the nicotine is to calm them down if they’re nervous or excited, or to elevate their mood if they’re feeling sad or depressed. And they stop smoking when that mood stabilization has been achieved. But if you drink a lot of tobacco — for example, you soak green tobacco leaves in water over a period of time and drink the juice — nicotine is a hallucinogen. I don’t recommend trying it without proper supervision because for nicotine, the effective dose for hallucinations is very, very close to the lethal dose. So I wouldn’t recommend it if you don’t have an expert to teach you how to do it. But nicotine is one of the three major hallucinogens in the Upper Amazon. Ayahuasca is a teacher. Tobacco is a protector. And toé, tree datura, Brugmansia, teaches you courage, protects you from sorcery in particular, gives you a closed body that resists the intrusion of pathogenic projectiles.

JI: And that’s one that I’ve never gone out of my way to try. And I can find Datura growing a hundred yards from here.

SB: Scopolamine, Datura, again is not something I would recommend people experimenting with, without a very experienced guide. There is no question that Datura or toé can make people do crazy, stupid, and self-destructive things. The visions that it produces can be terrifying, paranoid, and people can easily get out of control. So that’s another one I would not recommend without appropriate guidance.

JI: I appreciate that you’re not just saying: that’s not one I would recommend. You are saying: without proper guidance. And I appreciate the proper caveat there.

SB: One of the problems I have in communicating my understanding of the shamanism of the Upper Amazon is that there’s a lot of it that people find strange and disturbing. And from our point of view a lot of it is strange and disturbing. It has a tragic view of life. It has a view of human aggressiveness which is very different from the one we find, or we profess, in North America. It has concepts that are very foreign to people. And so I don’t want to be off-putting. On the one hand, I think it is a beautiful, and rich, and very profound tradition. I think people who go down there to drink ayahuasca ought to know something about its depth and its beauty and also something about what it really, really says as opposed to huggy-bunny concepts of what shamans are and what shamans do.

JI: Good analogy. Would you like to discuss Pablo Amaringo?

SB: Sure. I never had the honor of meeting him. I know people who have known him and speak with great respect, not only of his artistic ability and his devotion to his work and to his people and to the jungle environment, but also of his personal qualities. Clearly he has become emblematic. And his art has created an entire school of Amazonian ayahuasca-derived art. I think when he passed away a month or so ago, it was a great loss. And I think he will be missed.

JI: Talk about don Roberto, your maestro.

SB: Don Roberto is my maestro ayahuasquero. I don’t want to say he is very traditional, because Upper Amazonian shamanism is traditionally eclectic, but the kind of shamanism he does, I think, is noticeably similar to the kind of shamanic practice you find in many cultures in the Upper Amazon. He is an ayahuasquero, as opposed to a tabaquero or a toéro, and is a man for whom I have the greatest respect and admiration and love. The man is a true healer. He doesn’t talk much about his life. In the book I give a brief biography. I have watched him heal. I have watched his healing performance on many occasions. He is a man of his community. He is devoted to the people of his community. One of the things I like about how the book took shape is the fact that I was able to work, particularly, with two very different people. Doña María was this wonderful grandmotherly, fussy, generous, scolding, outspoken woman. Walking with her through the jungle was like walking with an encyclopedia. She knew every plant personally. She would walk through the jungle and say, here is this plant, you use it for this, and you prepare it in that way, and it’s used for these diseases. And this one is good for children, and that one is good for adults. I couldn’t keep up with her. And so she’d scold me and tell me I’d better pay attention because she was teaching me all these valuable things. She began, not as an ayahuasquera, but as an oracionista, as a prayer healer. From the time she was seven years old, she had had visions of angels and the Virgin Mary. And the Virgin Mary would teach her how to use the plants for healing. The angels would tell her when there was a sick child in a nearby village and she would go and use the plants the Virgin Mary had taught her to go heal sick children. She was doing this from the time she was seven years old. She had dreams and visions constantly. She didn’t become an ayahuasquera until much later. She began to study under don Roberto when she was, I forget the actual date, twenty-five maybe.

JI: She cured someone of something that came out of the woman’s vagina, didn’t she?

SB: I wasn’t myself a witness, but this was the story she told me. Apparently the woman’s husband had run off with another woman — this is a very common story among mestizos in the Upper Amazon. Her husband had abandoned her and run off with another woman. But this other woman still considered her to be a rival. So she or her husband had hired a sorcerer to do harm to her. And this took the form of an animal in her womb. Now when I first heard about this it struck me as odd. But from subsequent reading and research, it becomes clear that having an animal in your womb, as a result of human or animal malevolence, is not an uncommon condition among Amazonian mestizo women. Doña María used a sweat bath and put sorcery herbs in the sweat bath — emetic and other herbs in the sweat bath. The woman squatted over it and this animal in her womb was driven out with considerable force from the woman’s vagina, as doña María told the story. And she said that this flash of white, like rabbit fur, came out of her vagina like a rocket — whoosh, she said, like that. And the woman started bleeding. And they both started praying to the Virgin Mary. And the woman was healed. This pathogenic intrusion, in this case taking the form of an animal in her womb, had been driven out by the combination of the steam and the herbs and doña María’s prayers and icaros. And the woman was healed.

JI: Why an interest in snakes?

SB: Let me take a step back. People go down to the Amazon to drink ayahuasca. There are two things about many, perhaps most, of these people that troubled me, and were among the reasons I wanted to write the book. One is that people go down there with no commitment to understanding the struggles of the indigenous people from whom they are taking this medicine. They really do not have an idea of the culture that has produced this healing practice that they are trying to tap into. Now, I can hardly blame them because there has, until now, been no single, accessible source that would let them learn something about the healing culture that they’re trying to be part of. One of the reasons I wrote the book, in addition to trying to understand my own experiences, was to try to provide people who may be going down to the Amazon to try ayahuasca with an understanding of the cultural context, the conceptual, the metaphysical context, as well as the struggles of indigenous communities in the Upper Amazon, so that they can understand this and maybe get rid of some of their preconceptions and have a better understanding of the beauty and depth of this tradition.

The other reason is that many of the people who go down to the Amazon don’t like the jungle. They’re afraid of the jungle. They have heard stories about the jungle. Now, I love the jungle. And one of the things I wanted to do was to introduce them to what the jungle is really like. And so I have all of these sidebars in the book. People go down, and they go to a tourist lodge where they’re going to drink ayahuasca. And people put food on their table. They put fish. They put fruit in front of them. And these people who have gone down there to drink ayahuasca have no idea where this food came from — of the hunting and fishing skills that are necessary, of the highly astute and sophisticated forest management skills that produce the fruit that’s on their plate, that produce the plantains that they’re eating. So, a lot of these sidebars are intended just to give some of the information that I have learned about life in the jungle through my study of wilderness survival in indigenous cultures in the Amazon. How do they build a house? How do they hunt? How do they cook? Where does their food come from? How do they fish? What do they use? I had a section on snakes for two reasons. One, because people are scared of snakes. So it makes sense to have some kind of a clear, objective description of exactly what the risks of snakebite are. And the answer is, just like in North America, even where you’re in rattlesnake country, the risks of being bitten are relatively low if you just use your head. And the other reason was because there are indigenous and mestizo snakebite remedies, and I wanted to talk about those a little bit because it may be that they have immunomodulatory effects that might be of interest to people. So I talk a little bit in that section about the traditional snakebite remedies that are used in the Amazon.

JI: Let’s talk briefly about love potions.

SB: Doña María was an expert in love magic, in pusanguería. Pusangas are very widely used in the whole area. In the book, I find the word pusanga, or very similar words, in a wide range of indigenous languages in the Upper Amazon. There are folk pusangas, there are pusangas that are made of various kinds of plants. You can buy pusangas on the Internet. If there is a woman you particularly desire and she has been ignoring you, you can go on the Internet and buy pre-made pusangas. Doña María was famous for her pusangas. She tried very hard to make her use of love potions consistent with her vision, her practices, being the pure white path. She would not use love potions if she figured the effect would be to break up a marriage, for example. There’s an anthropologist named Marie Perruchon who studied the Shuar, and in fact married a Shuar and became an initiated Shuar shaman. It turns out that at one point in their courtship, she and her husband had both, without the other one knowing it, given each other love potions.

So there are folk love potions. There are professional love potions. Doña María makes a love potion that combines ten plants. It’s in a powdered form. If I just mix a little bit of it with, say, aguardiente or with some cologne, and apply it to my face, I, not only become irresistible to women but, doña María said, I would be successful in all of my lawsuits as a lawyer. I would, in effect, seduce juries with this pusanga. And I always wanted to try it and yet I resisted because I figured maybe it wasn’t quite fair to use a pusanga in order to win one of my cases.

JI: Oh, why not. Isn’t being a lawyer based on argumentation and rhetoric anyway, and using all of that?

SB: Well that’s true. There was something about it. You know, as they say, with great power comes great responsibility. So here I had this very powerful, doña María’s best pusanga, and, you know, I have never used it. I don’t know what would happen.

JI: What are some of the various names for South American-Peruvian shamanism?

SB: It’s interesting. One of the reasons I went into this in the book was because in indigenous North America, there has been great resistance among many North American Indians to the use of the term shaman for their healers, people that they often refer to as medicine men. There has been great cultural resistance to the use of the term shaman as being an imposition of a foreign term and concept by a dominant culture. Many defenders of indigenous culture in North America have been very outspoken, and often very bitter, about the attempt to consider their healers to be shamans — and especially the way the term shaman, as applied to North American indigenous healers, has been incorporated into the whole New Age movement.

JI: For sure on that one.

SB: It was interesting to me that in South America, many of the people I knew, including don Roberto and doña María, who had had contact with gringos and gringo tourists, were perfectly happy to be called chamanes, were perfectly happy to be considered shamans. It was of interest to me to see how these various terms that were used were distributed. And apparently there is no consistency to it.

JI: Alice Beck Kehoe, in her book Shamans and Religion, made the point that these other cultures aren’t really practicing the Siberian shamanism where we get the word shamanism from. But at the same time, I see it as a language issue. The English lexicon does not provide us enough terms. It’s like in Sanskrit or in Hindi, there is like ten different words for love and they all have specific meanings. Whereas we have the word love. We don’t really have any longer in our culture terms for these things. Unfortunately, in Alice Beck Kehoe’s book, she doesn’t provide us something that we should use. You can’t without providing a definition of shamanism in each and every instance. Or if you’re going to use curandero or ayahuasquero or brujo or all of these other various terms, you can’t use that word without specifically defining it because most people in our culture aren’t going to know what all of those words mean. The word shamanism is generic, which is why I know that you tip-toed around this issue at the beginning of the interview. It’s become such a generic word in our language that it really has no meaning, except to maybe the New Age crowd who completely misuse and misunderstand it.

SB: I think this is a problem which applies to a lot of terms that come from anthropology. Here’s an example: tattoo. People get tattoos in this country and nobody has challenged them by saying: Wow, you’re using the word wrong. Yet, technically, tatu is a Polynesian word and refers to very specific kinds of facial designs that have profound social meanings. And so, does it make sense to say: Well, no you can’t use the word tattoo because you’re borrowing it from indigenous Polynesian culture and you’re using it in an entirely different social context? And if you look at other anthropological terms that have been broadened from their original context — words like totem, words like taboo — they are words borrowed from very specific cultures. And yet, when people have studied other cultures they have seen practices and ideas that are more or less similar, just as my tattoos are more or less similar to Polynesian tattoos. It becomes a line-drawing exercise.

And I can understand why indigenous North American people do not like their culture being co-opted by New Age movements. And if they want to object to the use of the term shaman in that context, then fine. I can absolutely understand what they are trying to do. On the other hand, there are similarities between what a Siberian healer does and what a Korean healer does. The question then is, are those similarities enough that it becomes convenient to use the term shaman for both? And where do you draw the line? Is Siberian shamanism different from Inuit shamanism? So that we can’t use the word shaman for Inuits, but we can use it for some kinds of Siberians, but not others? That’s why I like my bundle of sticks approach.

JI: Right, and I think that Kehoe’s book actually raised more problems than solutions, unfortunately. And she had a lot of valid points but she doesn’t tell us any solutions to rectify the problem.

SB: In my personal opinion, it is a very ill-tempered book. One of the things that struck me about that book is that she said that the people I have worked with, that I have called shamans, aren’t shamans at all because they take drugs.

JI: And she tries to separate out many of the Siberian shamans, saying that they don’t use Amanita muscaria, when in fact there are many who do use it on a regular basis. But at the time, she didn’t find any that did. Even the BBC, last year, did a video on this tribe that are reindeer herders and their whole culture is based around the use of the mushrooms. But she would point to another culture and she would say, well, this culture thinks that those people over there who use the Amanita, they’re a degraded form. But it’s hard to say how much of that came from Russian-Soviet propaganda trying to get them all on vodka and alcohol and things like that and their own systematic method of destroying those ancient cultures’ heritage. And so that has to be studied and looked at as well.

SB: I think it’s an exercise in line-drawing and in cultural sensitivity. If people I am trying to understand don’t want me to use a particular word for their healing practitioner, then it seems to me only basic courtesy not to use that word. I don’t see any reason to get into a fuss over it. But I think it still makes sense to point out that there are healing practices in indigenous North American cultures that are very similar to healing practices you find in other cultures. For example, the sucking shaman is common to both South American shamanism, at least in the Upper Amazon as I’ve described it, and to indigenous cultures in North America. First nations in North America have had sucking shamans for as long as there have been written records of what their practices are. I don’t think it’s disrespectful to point that out.

JI: What does it mean for a shaman to live under water?

SB: In the Upper Amazon, there are common conceptions — by common I mean common to a number of cultures in the Upper Amazon — about people who live under water. There is a whole mythology built up about dolphins and about the yacuruna, the water people, and how they live in these beautiful cities under water, how they lie on hammocks made of boas and their seats are gigantic tortoises. Under the water, there are dolphins, there are yacuruna, the water people, there are mermaids, sirenas, which sometimes sort of overlap in their characteristics. But they are all sexually seductive. It is a common belief throughout the Upper Amazon, all the way to Brazil, that male dolphins desire to have sex with human women, that female dolphins are sexually voracious and provide a sexual experience for human males that is far beyond the capacity of any human woman to provide, and that the yacuruna, the water people, and the mermaids will seduce men and force them to live under the water. There is an entire underwater mythology that is very important, especially among the mestizos though also elsewhere — for example, the idea among the Shuar that the first shaman, named Tsunki, lives under the water with his entourage and cities of underwater people. It’s very important for shamans to be able to interact with all of these different kinds of underwater people, especially mermaids and yacuruna. Mermaids, for example, are possessors of powerful songs, icaros. A shaman may learn powerful songs from visiting with the mermaids. The yacuruna are held to be great and powerful healers, doctors. And so, many times shamans will learn healing from the underwater people. Because underwater people are sexually voracious, because they capture human beings for sexual and other purposes, it can be very important for a shaman to be able to command the mermaids and the water people to give up their human captives, or to be able to channel the voices of people being held captive under the water so that their relatives know that they are alive and well. There is also a group of shamans, most often I would say called sumi or sumiruna, who have the capacity to actually go visit these underwater kingdoms and dwell underwater at least part of the time. Again, there is a whole mythology built up — and I spend a chapter in the book talking about this mythology of underwater people and how important it is for shamans, as part of their practice, to have access to these underwater realms. And some are specialists in this area more than others.

JI: Can you give a rundown of a few, or some, of the various names used for ayahuasca in the different South American regions?

SB: If you can get hold of it, in Luis Eduardo Luna’s dissertation, there is a list of — I forget how many — forty-odd words for ayahuasca among different indigenous people. Ayahuasca is the term that is usually used in Peru. If you go up to Colombia, the term is usually yagé. Among the Shuar the term is natèm. But there are lots of different words for it. I think the best compendium of those terms is in Luis Eduardo Luna’s original book Vegetalismo: Shamanism among the Mestizo Population of the Peruvian Amazon, which was his dissertation at the University of Stockholm.

If you can get hold of that book, it is worth tracking down through used bookstores or wherever you have to go. Along with the work of Marlene Dobkin de Ríos, that is the pioneering work in this area.

JI: In your opinion, how was ayahuasca discovered?

SB: There has been a lot of discussion. As you know, there are ways of ingesting DMT — and more importantly, plants and plant substances that are rich in DMT — parenterally, that is, bypassing the gastrointestinal tract, usually, in the Orinoco and other areas in the Northern Upper Amazon, by snuff of one sort or another.

JI: Like epená.

SB: Yes, exactly, or like yopo. The problem with ingesting sacred plants that contain dymethyltryptamine orally, is that there is an enzyme in the gastrointestinal tract, MAO, which is designed to inactivate molecules exactly like the class of molecules that DMT belongs to. In the ayahuasca vine are a number of beta-carbolines that act as MAO inhibitors. So when you mix the ayahuasca vine with any of a number of plants that contain, among other things, DMT and drink them together, that allows the DMT to be orally active because the MAO inhibitor inhibits the MAO that inactivates the DMT.

JI: And not only that, but so many different analogues of ayahuasca. I think it’s fascinating. Some argue that it was probably a salad-like mixture or something like that. What do you think about that theory?

SB: I have heard a lot of theories. One theory is that indigenous people have some mystical connection to the plants.

JI: Do they talk to the plants or maybe they were taking some other plant, other hallucinogen, whether it be scopolamine or maybe mushrooms? Certainly a lot of mushrooms grow in the rainforest. Could it have been some other hallucinogen? I’ve had some pretty interesting experiences myself on rare occasions of having the feeling that I was talking to a plant. So I don’t totally dismiss the idea.

SB: And also the people themselves will say: Well, the plants told us. The plants are the ones who teach all their medicinal uses. One theory I came up with, that I give in a little sidebar in the book, is that I think that if you look at the way ayahuasca is used in the context of the Upper Amazon, often it’s used simply as a purgative and an emetic. And that people who take ayahuasca for a purge, la purga, in order to cleanse themselves physically, find the hallucination, the visionary effects to be side effects. Whereas in other uses, other occasions, other people, the purpose of drinking it is for the hallucinations, the visionary effect, and the purgative and emetic effects are the side effects. I think they came up with this because they were looking for a better emetic. Some Psychotria species by themselves may have an emetic effect. I think they were looking for plants to mix in that might have had some kind of an emetic effect themselves. They mixed them together in order to see if, in some way, they could modulate the emetic effects of the ayahuasca vine. They came up with this combination that had, as an effect, vivid, life-like, three-dimensional hallucinations. I have no idea when this happened. I believe the mestizos got the use of ayahuasca from the indigenous people of the Upper Amazon. Peter Gow, an anthropologist for whom I have tremendous respect, who has worked in that area, believes that in fact it went the other way, that it was mestizos who came up with it first and it passed from them into the indigenous people. It’s an opinion that I have to give some deference to. But I think whoever came up with it, and whenever they came up with it, one plausible explanation is that they were mixing plants together to see if they could make a better emetic, either more gentle or more powerful.

JI: I would think that the fact that there are so many different types of ayahuasca used throughout the Amazonian region would negate the idea that it came from the mestizo population into the indigenous. Isn’t it that these people, the indigenous people that have the connection to the jungle, that know and understand all of these plants and their uses and things like that to begin with?

SB: I think that’s right and it’s certainly the way mestizos view jungle Indians.

JI: Right. They don’t say: oh no, we gave our information to the jungle Indians. They say: no, we got our information from them. I don’t want to dwell on this, but I just don’t see a whole lot of basis in flipping that.

SB: I can say that Gow’s hypothesis has not been widely accepted, but I think it’s an alternative you have to consider, especially given that Gow is a very important investigator of this whole region and has done some important work.

JI: Fascinating. I haven’t studied him. I’ll have to look into that.

SB: Peter Gow.

JI: What does ayahuasca taste like and what are the immediate effects?

SB: It tastes more awful than you can imagine. It has been described as being like a toad in a blender. My favorite description.

JI: Personally, I think it’s a little bit worse than that. I could probably handle a toad in a blender all right.

SB: It is difficult to convey to people just how awful it is. It is hard to swallow. It sticks to your teeth.

JI: The tannins. The only thing worse than San Pedro cactus I think is ayahuasca.

SB: It’s worse than anything I can imagine. It has this hint of sweetness that makes you gag. It sticks to your teeth. It’s hard to keep down, but you have to keep it down for as long as you can. Every molecule in your body rebels against taking this stuff inside you. Especially if you’ve drunk it once and you say: Alright, I can handle this. And then after an hour or so, the shaman calls you up and gives you another cup full. And you want to say: No, no more! It really is terrible and it makes you really nauseous.

JI: Not always, but it can.

SB: You can get used to it. But even experienced people, even shamans, will vomit every once in a while.

JI: I’ve had it a few times where I didn’t get any nausea at all, and other times where in fact, one of the best experiences I had, I had one very short, small and, excuse the term, sweet vomit that just went real quick and I was done. I got up and I felt a hundred percent and within five or ten minutes I was feeling very well on many different levels.

SB: In the Upper Amazon, if you drink it and you don’t vomit, something’s wrong with you. Doña María had a special flower bath that she used for people who weren’t vomiting, to open them up and let this out. We gringos, we don’t like to vomit. We consider vomiting to be something shameful, that you go and hide in the bathroom when you throw up. Vomiting in the Upper Amazon is very natural. The Achuar have group vomiting every morning. When you sit in ceremony with mestizo or indigenous people, you hear them vomit, but it’s not a big deal.

JI: It’s not a negative thing. It’s like a cleansing, a purification. You’re getting out the negative stuff, the blockage, whatever. It’s like you’re freeing up your chakra points or something like that. I don’t know quite how to explain it but I know what they’re getting at. And it’s a bizarre feeling when you go through it.

SB: I make horrible, wretched, awful sounds when I vomit because it is so hard for me not to be embarrassed and ashamed. And yet, I think the first thing that the medicine tries to teach you is to give that up, to give up control, to take the plants into your body and let them do their work. And yet, it has always been hard for me. Maybe it has to do with upbringing and the ways people in my generation or in my sub-culture were taught about retention and how retention is good. It may very well be that other people don’t have that kind of experience. As I say in the book, vomiting has become kind of a literary trope among people who write about ayahuasca. Literary artists compete to come up with the most compelling description of how ayahuasca makes them vomit. I mean all the way from William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg to the present, people have been describing the vomiting of ayahuasca in compelling and poetic terms.

JI: Telepathine and telepathy with ayahuasca. Is that something that you’ve experienced at all?

SB: No. I haven’t. Ayahuasca is a teaching plant. In fact, in most traditions, and to a large extent, ayahuasca is not a healing plant at all. What it does is give you the information you need to find out what caused the sickness and, in many cases, what you need to do to get rid of it.

JI: Speaking of that real quick, I remember one time being on ayahuasca and I looked over at a friend and I could see that he was sick and suddenly I could see the problem and I just started telling him: Hey, you need to do this, this and that. And it was nothing I had ever recalled having an ability to do before, but suddenly I could just see all of this person’s ills and exactly what was going on.

SB: I think that that’s exactly right. Ayahuasca is primarily a teaching plant. It is an information-gathering spirit. People who drink ayahuasca, especially shamans, will go on long journeys and see things that are far away. They can detect where game is plentiful. They are shown by ayahuasca where lost objects may be found. If a relative has been gone for a long time, ayahuasca will show the shaman whether that relative is alive or dead, or healthy or not. Ayahuasca will let you see what happened to somebody in the past. If somebody was killed, a shaman can use ayahuasca and can see what the circumstances were. Ayahuasca is an information-giving plant. This includes, in some cases, seeing things that are far away, or distant in time. In that sense, I think that there is some truth in the meme that ayahuasca is telepathic.

JI: I’ve had extreme cases of telepathy with it on one or two, actually two, occasions that were with a couple of other friends, with several sitters in the room and several people witnessing what was going on; us also verbalizing the telepathic thoughts that were happening. But it started out while we were all in different rooms and suddenly we basically mind-locked, like the Vulcan mind meld or something. It was just a pure connection between me and the other partakers of the ayahuasca. None of the sitters were a part of that. Would you talk briefly about Alan Shoemaker?

SB: I devote several pages to Alan and his experience in the context of a discussion of the legality of ayahuasca. I compare his experience with the experience of the Brazilian new religious movements and their more church-like use of ayahuasca. I use Alan’s story just as a way of trying to show how the legal system works in this area and to compare the experience of one person, without a lot of resources, facing the same kind of drug enforcement system that was successfully challenged by, and is still being successfully challenged by, the Brazilian new religious movements. In some ways it’s a cautionary tale, especially because there is still a myth that plant material, chacruna, sameruca, chagraponga, the leaves of DMT-containing plants, are legal. I think that’s just wrong, and I think people can get in trouble because they believe that. The story of Alan is instructive in that regard too because what he was arrested for was chacruna leaves. He wound up having a nightmare experience before he was able to get out and get back to Peru, at the cost of still being a fugitive from American justice. I think it’s an important story for all kinds of reasons. I think Alan, fortunately, is back in Peru and with his family. I think that there is something to be learned from this story in a lot of ways.

JI: One thing that I found interesting in your work that I wanted to touch on here is that — unlike other entheogens: psilocybin, mescaline, LSD — why did you classify ayahuasca as a hallucinogen?

SB: Because I think it is. I think that the primary effect of ayahuasca is to show you things that have been there all along that you haven’t seen. It does this by showing you things, showing you people, showing you objects, that are three-dimensional, solid, present, interactive, and often coordinated with sounds in a space that is three-dimensional and explorable. I think that that is different in significant ways from the depth- or insight-producing effects of LSD or psilocybin.

JI: In your book you say these dimensions or whatever, they’re not other dimensions, there’s only one dimension and that ayahuasca and these substances just open us up and allow us to see that dimension. Is it possible that they’re not really hallucinogens, that these objects and things are just in this, hidden to us in our normal state?

SB: I think that’s absolutely right. As I am sitting in this room right now the walls are covered with tiles — there are a lot of tessellations in the ayahuasca world — brilliant, glowing tiles with minutely detailed fine designs. I just can’t quite see it. I once asked don Rómulo Magin if he could see the spirits all the time. Very experienced ayahuasquero. I asked him if he could see the spirits all the time and he said he can vaguely. But drinking ayahuasca, he told me, is like putting on glasses. I was really struck by that analogy. Right now, there is a window in my wall through which I can look and see a crystal staircase by a blue pool with an escalator going up and down carrying Peruvian schoolgirls in blue and white school uniforms. I just can’t see it right now. That doesn’t mean it’s not there.

JI: Discuss the issue with patents and indigenous shamanism.

SB: That gets kind of technical. I would refer people to the book for that. There’s a whole chapter on the attempt to patent ayahuasca.

JI: It’s such a fascinating story and just so disturbing at the same time. Right now you’ve got these companies, like Monsanto, just running around patenting every living thing they can get their hands on. I personally see it as one of the largest threats that humanity faces today.

SB: I don’t disagree. I think people are becoming more aware of the fact that companies, often foreign companies, come in and attempt to patent indigenous plants and techniques. The Peruvian government has been very active in opposing such patents. I think that’s good. I think that the idea of a law that allows you to patent living things is not a bad idea in itself. I think it’s certainly possible, for example, if I invented a microbe that could clean up oil spills, then I think that I should be encouraged to do so by being allowed to patent my creation. On the other hand, I should not be in a position where I can take a healing plant that’s been used for generations by an indigenous people and patent it so that I get the benefit of their wisdom and they don’t. I think that, again, the story of the ayahuasca patent is instructive as standing for a whole class of cases where I think people need to be more aware of this potential for misuse of what I think is generally a pretty good idea.

JI: What is the future of shamanism?

SB: In the Upper Amazon I think the future is bleak. I think a lot of people are interested in it. I think a lot of those people are interested in it just because they see it as a source of another psychoactive substance they can use, more or less, recreationally, or as a source of a psychoactive substance that they can use in their own personal quest for healing and transformation. I think that there is very little interest on the part of people who generally drink ayahuasca in the struggles and problems of the indigenous communities in the Upper Amazon. And I think that the one thing that is missing is apprentices. There are very few shamans in the Upper Amazon now who are training apprentices. Young people do not want to go through the sufferings, the deprivations, the self-control, the avoidance of sex for months at a time, that can be required in training to be a shaman. So while Amazonian shamanism has always been voraciously absorptive and very adaptive, I am just not sure that it’s going to last without the younger generation taking it up and actually practicing it. I hope I’m wrong.

JI: Well, hopefully books like yours that bring a more realistic approach to the situation — There’s such a movement in European and North American countries into shamanism and neo-shamanism and all of this stuff that hopefully that goes back down into South America and influences the people who are there to focus on what has always been right there for them to begin with and start to pick it up in a serious manner before they get themselves in a position that they can’t recover from.

SB: I hope you’re right. I am not hopeful, but I hope you’re right. I am just not sure the extent to which the interest of foreigners is going to have much influence on young people in the Upper Amazon, except, unfortunately, to the extent that they perceive these foreigners as being useful sources for dollars and may, in fact, have the opposite effect. It will lead people to pretend to be shamans, to learn a few icaros, to learn how to brew up some ayahuasca, and to put themselves forward as healers and shamans for ayahuasca tourists without actually going through the struggle and deprivation that becoming a shaman really requires. I hope I’m wrong.

JI: Have you gone through that deprivation yourself?

SB: Certainly not to the extent that I would ever consider calling myself a shaman.

JI: What is the single most important idea that you would like people to take away from this interview?

SB: The world is magical. The world is full of wonders. There are spirits everywhere. Ayahuasca, if it has any purpose at all, I think, ultimately is to open our eyes to the miraculous nature of the world around us — to teach us that everything in this world is meaningful in a very deep and important way, that we are surrounded by the plants that are singing to us all the time, and that if we can only open ourselves, we can see that the world is filled with wonders and magic and the spirits.

JI: Would you like to give out any website or contact information? And obviously, your book is titled Singing to the Plants. Do you have any other books?

SB: I have three other books.

JI: What are those books’ titles? And also give out any information you’d like to give out about yourself, etc…

SB: The website for the book is www.singingtotheplants.com. That website also has my blog that I have been keeping for several years where I talk about shamanism generally. I talk about the Upper Amazon. I talk about indigenous spirituality generally. The book is Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon. It’s published by the University of New Mexico Press. It’s available on the website. It’s available at amazon.com. It’s available at barnesandnoble.com. The website talks about my other books, which are: The Cult of Tara: Magic and Ritual in Tibet; The Buddhist Experience; and The Classical Tibetan Language, which is a grammar of classical Tibetan.

JI: Well, thank you Steve for coming on and for being a part of the show. And I thank you for your work. Your book is absolutely wonderful and I highly recommend everybody get out there and read it that has an interest in ayahuasca and this whole field, for that matter — whether it be just psychedelics or shamanism or whatever label they want to put it under. I think your book is extremely important for people to read. Thank you for coming on and for participating in the show.

SB: Well thank you for the conversation. I had a really good time. It was really interesting. I appreciate the invitation.

Howard: I read Singing to the Plants several times, and I found it not only an extremely well researched book but also inspirational; it came through to me as a true labor of love. I understand that you originally envisioned the book to address more of an academic, anthropological audience, which is the reason that you wanted it to be published by the University of New Mexico Press; but you have created much more than an academic work. When you talk about your teachers, doña María and don Roberto, your warmth, humanity, and respect for them shines through.

You asked them to describe their history, how they perceive their lives, as a personal mythology in which their stories are portrayed not as a continual flow but as consisting of events and turning points in their lives. You have lived and studied in Tibet, written books about Tibetan Buddhism, had a career as a partner in a major Chicago law firm, and finally worked with medicinal plants, shamanism, and a blog and book of the same title. So my question is: how would you mythologize your life?

Steve: Some people don’t mythologize their lives. Don Roberto didn’t, but doña Marie did see her life as a series of major episodes. I tend think that lives actually go in spirals — at least it seems that mine has. My interest in Buddhism, and in Tibetan Buddhism in particular, was an attempt to understand what it was like… I have a lot of trouble articulating this, because the vocabulary available to me has gathered so much baggage. I want to say that I’ve always been interested in altered states of consciousness.

Howard: That’s an important starting place.

Steve: But the term “altered states” seems to me to be wrong. And it has accumulated so much baggage that it’s very hard to use.

First of all, if you talk about altered states of consciousness, you’re immediately making the assumption that there are ordinary states of consciousness that are somehow in opposition to altered states. I have simply never seen this as an opposition. Let’s think about human experiences. You have the experience of doing mindfulness meditation, climbing a mountain, writing poetry, falling in love, giving birth to a child, or watching someone you love give birth to a child. Human life is so filled with important experiences that grouping them into just two classes, ordinary and altered, is artificial, and filled with built-in value judgments. For example, I can see what a life-changing experience it can be for people to witness the birth of their first child. Then to say that’s somehow an ordinary state of consciousness, as opposed to taking LSD, which for many years has been the paradigmatic altered state of consciousness, is, I think, artificial and misleading.

So, to rephrase what I started to say before, I have always been interested in the range of human experience, including those experiences that are less common in North America. That was one of the reasons I became interested in Buddhism and in Buddhist meditation in particular. At the time I wrote my first book, The Cult of Tara, in 1973, Tibetan meditation had not yet really been explored by Western scholars, and what I wrote about — how Tibetans actually performed meditation, what was going on internally when one performed ritual meditation in the Tibetan tradition — was pretty much new. So this was one of the first books to talk about what it was like to perform Tibetan ritual meditation and the ways in which meditation coordinated with ritual in the context of monastic practice.

And when I first started to think about Amazonian shamanism, that was the model that I was using. I wanted to understand how it worked, what it was like, what the cultural context was.

Howard: I think there’s an important point here; there are two ways to look at this. One way, for example, would be a traditional anthropological perspective — that is, you sit outside and you describe your observations. Then there is another method where you actually participate, so it does not become a scientific Western objective perspective, but rather a subjective experience. And when you write about these things, you’re writing about your personal altered experience.

Steve: I think there’s a trap there. If you follow that path, it’s very easy to come to the conclusion that you are more important than the people you’re writing about. If you approach it from this — let’s call it postmodern — perspective, it’s very easy for the investigator to think that the investigator’s thoughts, reactions, emotional involvements are all much more interesting than the people the investigator is trying to understand. The book is not about me; the book is about my teachers.

And, in particular, about doña María and don Roberto. I tried very hard to use my own very limited kinds of experiences to illuminate something about them and about the kind of shamanism that they practice. Erik Davis, the social historian and cultural critic, in his review of the book, said that I resisted the temptation to turn it into a memoir, which I thought was very astute. I take that as a compliment.

So there is kind of a narrow path you can walk, which I tried to walk, where you use your own experiences to illuminate the people and practices you’re trying to understand, without turning it into a book about yourself.

Howard: Your relationship with doña María and don Roberto does come through without a doubt, and their teachings are central to the book. You have been explicit regarding this. I just want to underscore — without implying that this book is anything resembling a memoir — that your relationship and personal dynamic with them are an essential component of the book. This certainly makes the book more engaging, richer, more textured. Although you resist this point, your role as narrator, their communicator and pupil, makes you part of it, and the vignettes — how at times they treated you as a confidant and other times admonished you like an errant pupil — in my view has really successfully augmented the academic text.

Steve: Well, I really appreciate that. That’s very kind of you.

There is a tendency — and I talk about this especially in relationship to María Sabina — to romanticize and to spiritualize shamans generally, and shamans in the Upper Amazon in particular. I think that does them a disservice. It takes away the depth of their humanity.

Howard: And their suffering, too. This is another important aspect of Singing to the Plants. You show that life in the Amazon is harsh, and in no way is it a soft and easy reality. The tragic death of doña María illustrates this. It is candid and direct, and no attempt has been to make the Amazon world romantic or “cosmic.” In my experience the shamans are not cosmic. They work to help everyday people in their suffering, their illnesses, and their protection. It is about the nitty-gritty of survival, and that’s one of the impressive aspects to your book.

Steve: Shamans are people who are engaged in dealing with envy, resentment, jealousy, disease, sickness, marital problems, business failures, interpersonal conflict. These are people whose job it is to deal with mess.

And they have their own sometimes messy lives. They have the dirty, difficult, and dangerous job of trying to make sick people better. And I think we do them a disservice when we spiritualize them, romanticize them, and try to turn them into some kind of religious icon. They deserve better than that.

Howard: I found your description of your first ayahuasca session and its effects to be something I can relate to. It was amusing and messy, very real. You are not saying “I had this transcendent experience.” You describe the reality of the whole thing: “I was sick as a dog.”

Steve: The unique healing culture of the Upper Amazon is centered on making sick people better; but their concept of what constitutes sickness is, I think, broader than in biomedicine. For example, an unfaithful spouse, a failing business, the patient’s own acts of selfishness and betrayal are all forms of sickness that need to be healed. And sickness in the Upper Amazon is always social. The only reason you get sick in the Upper Amazon is because there has been a breach of the social bond among people. The patient has behaved in a way that violates the norms of generosity, mutuality, and trust to such an extent that envy and resentment on the part of the other person results in this social disruption embedding itself in the body of the patient in the form of a dart. And this dart could be a monkey tooth, a parrot beak, a scorpion, a razor blade, a snake. It is a physical manifestation of a breach of confianza — a breach of the relationship of trust and mutuality that ought to inform all human relationships.

Howard: What you’ve been describing, and putting into a good perspective, is a self-regulating social anarchy system. There’s no form of institutional authority involved in regulating people’s behavior. It certainly for me puts the use and purpose of sorcery in another light. In the Western world, where anarchy is frowned upon, the authorities control our social behavior.

Steve: Right. Sorcery has been said to be a weapon of the weak. It is a way of enforcing social norms of generosity and mutuality. It is a way of subverting hierarchy. It is a way of making sure that people interact in ways that are socially acceptable.

Howard: Westerners treat sorcery or brujería dismissively as a superstitious belief: if you don’t believe in it, they say, it cannot harm you. This is a mistake. There are powers outside of the everyday human intellect which do have an effect, which can heal people and which can harm people. And I think it’s a weakness for a Westerner to go to the Amazon and believe that this kind of sorcery is just some kind of illusion.

Steve: But at the same time I have seen Westerners get caught up, for example, in the sorcery craziness in Iquitos. Part of mestizo culture is the assumption that life is a zero-sum game — that if I get something that you don’t have, I have in some sense deprived you of it. There are constant undercurrents of suspicion. If anything goes wrong, it’s not attributed just to bad luck, it’s attributed to the malevolence of another person. So, sorcery has both positive and negative aspects within mestizo culture. On the one hand, it is the enforcer of norms of generosity, a subverter of hierarchy, and at the same time it creates currents of gossip and speculation about who is using love magic on someone else’s wife, and who is using evil magic to make sure someone else’s business fails. This is constant conversation in Iquitos.

I have seen westerners get caught up in this. If they have a bad experience with ayahuasca, they say, “Oh, it must be brujería.” Or if they almost get hit by one of those motorcycle taxis, they say, “Oh, somebody’s out to get me.” So between these extremes, I think there somehow must be a way for foreigners to understand these cultural assumptions without themselves getting all caught up in paranoia about brujería.

I was once asked how I protected myself from sorcery, and I gave several answers. I said, first of all, that I have the phlegm of my master, which gives me a corazon de acero, a heart of steel, and protects me. The second is that I am, however remotely, an apprentice of my maestro ayahuasquero, so that my teacher is able to protect me and to take vengeance on my behalf. But my most important protection against sorcery is my insignificance. I think that if you are trying to navigate these currents in ribereño culture, you conform to the social norms that sorcery is intended to enforce. In other words, the lesson of sorcery is that you should strive to be in right relationship with everyone you can. You don’t pick fights, you act generously, and, if somebody offends you, you try to work it out. You don’t attack back. Basically, you behave the way a real human being is supposed to behave, and that’s your best protection against sorcery.

Howard: I go along with that. You don’t want to make enemies in the Amazon. I remember being told, “If someone sticks a knife in your back, take it out, and move on.” The message is clear not to get sucked into all this.

Steve: I think that’s what ayahuasca teaches, too. In the Amazon, as you know, you cannot separate out sorcery and healing. There is no bright line that separates them.

Howard: In my experience it is more of a faint boundary. Where does one begin and where does one end? For example, the use of pusangaría, love magic, which often raises an ethical dilemma for a Westerner.

Steve: The same practices are used for sorcery and healing. The same plants are used. The brujo plants are the very ones used for protection against sorcery. The spiny palms are used as offensive weapons by sorcerers, but they are used as protection by healers. And at the same time, the difference between a sorcerer and a healer has a conceptual basis — the difference between lack of control and self-control.

So, I think again what we see is a lot of ambivalence and a very tragic view of human life. Healing and harming, disease and health, life and death are all bound up together. There are no sharp lines between them. For example, in many indigenous cultures in the Upper Amazon, it is impossible for a shaman to heal one person without making another person sick, because the dart has to go somewhere. You can throw it away, but it’s still there where somebody can trip over it, get hurt by it. Most often the shaman will take the dart and project it back at the person who sends it. Is that healing or is that sorcery?

Howard: That’s the ambiguity of the whole thing.

Steve: Don Roberto told me that he never sent back a dart to the person who sent it. He would always simply put it into his phlegm and make it part of his own armamentarium, his own protection. But that’s unusual. The more common course is to send it back.

Howard: Eye for an eye… It can be very raw and harsh.

Steve: As you know, and as Pablo Amaringo has illustrated, this leads to great battles between shamans, and the line is not easy to draw — as in most human life whenever there is a conflict — and say that one person is perfectly right and one is perfectly wrong. Shamanic battles symbolize human conflict, just as the healing shaman takes onto himself a conflict between two people that has caused the sickness to occur.

Howard: Shamans have to be very careful about who they return the darts to, because they might make another enemy for themselves.

Steve: That’s exactly right. Being a shaman, sucking out a dart, is a dangerous thing to do, for all sorts of reasons. In fact, part of shamanic performance in the Upper Amazon is to dramatize the danger and difficulty of doing this. The darts are perceived as being putrid and nauseating and terrible. The shaman — don Roberto was great at this — spits them out on the ground and makes horrible noises, horrible gagging noises, to show that the dart that’s being sucked out is repulsive, and this dreadful thing has to go somewhere. You can throw it on the ground, but still someone may step on it and be hurt by it.

Howard: And the person being healed can see the disgusting or noxious thing removed. They are then engaged in what’s being performed as well. It’s the drama of the show — a performance, like an art. It’s also for the person that’s being healed. They can actually see it, and the healing becomes tangible.

Steve: Although doña María — this is so typical of her — said that sometimes when you suck it out, it’s very sweet, you have a great temptation to swallow it, and then it’s going to get you. So if you suck something out and it’s sweet, you have to be particularly careful to resist it and to spit it out.

Howard: Did doña María or don Roberto use plants such as camalonga or other roots in their mouths as an additional barrier to prevent them from swallowing the noxious virote?

Steve: What they told me was that this barrier was primarily the mariri, the phlegm that rises up in the throat and becomes like air to protect them from the dart going into their body, but instead gets stuck and dissolved into the mariri.

Howard: Right, then they master this power.

Steve: Yes, and then they can project it out. They can put it into their own phlegm for further protection, or they can use it for attack.

Howard: The use of tobacco; that is so interesting. I know you wrote a whole chapter about it. And it’s particularly important in situations of healing.

Steve: I talk about what I call the Big Three. There are three hallucinogens that are of primary importance in mestizo culture. There is ayahuasca; there is toé, or various species of Brugmansia; and there is mapacho, or tobacco. I should add that there has been so much emphasis on ayahuasca that people have lost sight of the fact that ayahuasca is embedded in a whole pharmacopeia of healing plants, each with a different function. The function of ayahuasca is to give you information. The function of toé is to harden your body and make you immune from sorcery. The function of tobacco is to protect you, because it is the paradigmatic strong sweet smell, and strong sweet smells are protective — that means tobacco, agua de florida cologne, camphor. And mapacho is used by tabaqueros and others as a hallucinogen. It’s hard for a North American to think of tobacco as being hallucinogenic.

Howard: Given the fact that tobacco…

Steve: The fact that, one: Our tobacco is very weak. And two: The reason that people smoke tobacco in North America is as a mood stabilizer. If you’re feeling down, tobacco helps you focus, it increases your attention. If you’re stressed, it can calm you down. So people smoke until they’ve ingested enough nicotine to achieve that effect.

Howard: And there’s very little nicotine in commercial cigarettes compared to mapacho, which has a high level.

Steve: That’s right. That’s why if you’re simply seeking mood stabilization, you don’t have to inhale mapacho, because the underside of the tongue is heavily vascularized, and you can ingest enough nicotine for mood stabilization from mapacho just by holding it in your mouth. But tobacco has all kinds of physiological effects in addition to being a hallucinogen. As you know, it’s smoked during the ceremony and has an effect of — how can I put this? Let me take a step back. Schizophrenics smoke a lot. One reason schizophrenics smoke a lot is because nicotine reduces the negative symptoms of schizophrenia. It helps you concentrate, it helps you focus, it keeps you from getting scattered, while it has no effect on the positive symptoms of schizophrenia, such as hallucinations. So tobacco, when used in conjunction with another hallucinogen such as toé or ayahuasca, helps focus, helps calm, without having any effect on the visions.

What’s interesting to me is, as far as I know — and I could be wrong about this, I’m still waiting for someone to come forward with an example — tobacco is one of the most sacred plants in North America, as well as in South America; yet I know of no indigenous people in North America that has used tobacco as a hallucinogen.

Howard: Let’s talk more about tobacco. This is s very interesting and important part of the Amazon world. It is not only the leaves; you talk about how the smoke is used, and the purpose of drinking tobacco in water as well.

Steve: Yes, a cold infusion of tobacco. Shuar drink tobacco the same way. You have to drink green tobacco to keep your tsentsak, your darts; you have to feed your darts with tobacco. Tobacco use is ubiquitous. It’s everywhere.

Howard: What did doña María or don Roberto say about tobacco? Did they discuss any sort of spiritual aspect to the tobacco or some kind of energy or force associated with it?

Steve: I was told by both that I needed to smoke mapacho every day to nurture my phlegm. But they understood that in North America it was hard to get mapacho and it was hard to drink ayahuasca.

Let me step back a minute. When shamans get together, what do they talk about? They do not, as far as I know, talk about great cosmic symbolic metaphysical ideas. They talk about practical things — how much you should charge your clients, how to deal with clients who don’t pay what they promise to pay, what kind of animal skin makes the best drumhead: “Have you heard about this plastic drumhead they use in North America? Have you tried that?” And what plant medicines to use: “I have a patient with this condition, I’ve used this plant and it doesn’t seem to work. Do you have any idea what other plants I might use?” Or in the Upper Amazon shamans will drink ayahuasca together in order to solve a problem or see if they can get some insight into a difficult social situation. They don’t talk metaphysics any more than biomedical doctors at a medical conference are going to talk about the philosophy of medicine. They’re not going to talk about how the AIDS virus symbolizes social disjunction. They’re going to talk about, “Gee, have you tried this new x-ray machine?”

So, as a general rule, I got very little philosophy from either doña María or don Roberto.

Howard: It was pragmatic?

Steve: Very pragmatic. And what was interesting about doña María was that, unlike most shamans, she had started out as an oracionista, a prayer healer. She had a close relationship especially with the Virgin Mary. Much more than don Roberto, she had incorporated folk Catholicism into her practice. Her arcana, her protective song at the beginning of an ayahuasca healing session, was the Ave Maria. She had, on her own, come up with a metaphysics that explained the relationship between the Virgin Mary in Heaven and the work that she was doing on Earth. She had developed a schematization that was satisfactory to her in making sure everything fit together.

Howard: You know, this is interesting. I’ve never seen a group of shamans get together and talk about their practice. They are very protective. Because when I asked them about this, about sharing their use of medicinal plants or an icaro with a fellow shaman, how they use it, and other things, the general response is that to reveal it would weaken the power for them.

Steve: On the other hand, shamans are part of a whole shamanic information network, reinforced in the Upper Amazon by an apprenticeship system that encourages apprentices to study with other shamans, especially shamans in another indigenous people. There is a tradition that mestizo shamans should go study with indigenous healers, because indigenous healers are masters of shamanism. Just as there are traditions of exogamous marriage among indigenous people in the Upper Amazon, where you are supposed to marry somebody from a village that speaks a different language, there is a tradition that the more foreign shamans you study with, the more powerful you become.

Howard: Absolutely. Artidoro, a mestizo shaman, offers a good example. What he said about the power of icaros was interesting: the ones in Spanish are deemed to have less power, the ones in Quechua have more power, but the ones in the indigenous languages, he says, have the most. He told me a great story of his quest to learn the chants from the Asháninca. The Asháninca are hard-line and war-like, and the men are naked. Artidoro had to be naked with them in order to be accepted. It is not as if you can simply say, “Can I come along with you?” They have to accept and trust an outsider.

So it’s a long process to do this, and though it may be tradition, it’s not something that every shaman, or every single ayahuasquero, can or will do. The apprenticeship takes a long period of time. And so, when Artidoro chants, he chants Asháninca icaros, and they’re so exquisite, they have, so to speak, a very different vibration. And this power and sublime nature of the icaros is something that many people do not appreciate.

Steve: There is a tradition that icaros you have brought from a long distance are more powerful than those you have learned locally. Now, doña María, once again, was contrary. She sang mostly in Spanish, she sang loud, and she said, “I don’t hide anything. I let everybody know exactly what I know.”

Howard: That’s different.

Steve: That’s doña María. She was a feisty lady. There is also a tradition that it is difficult for a shaman in one indigenous group to suck out darts that belong to a different indigenous group. So unless I have, say, Shuar darts myself, I can’t suck out Shuar darts from somebody else.

Now that has a couple of functions. One function is that it’s a good excuse if someone being healed happens to die, and the healer has a concern that he might be accused of sorcery, of having himself killed the patient. He can say, “You know, it was a Shuar dart. There was nothing I could do.” But more important, it means that there is dart trading. There is a market in darts; you go and you get darts from as many different people from as far away as you can.

There are some really interesting things about this shaman network. One is that one of the places where shamans from many different parts of Peru come together is in the Peruvian Army. Another is that Protestant missionaries give people rides in their airplanes to these big tent revival meetings. So people from a wide area all come together for the Protestant revival meetings, and that’s where shamans from different regions of the country get together and share information: “How do you do this where you come from?”

There are lots of reasons for a shaman to be part of a network of shamans. I might have a healing problem that I can’t solve. Maybe the brujo who has afflicted my patient is much more powerful than I am. It is important for me to have access to other shamans who are even more powerful than the brujo. People who might attack me need to know that I have powerful friends, and that if they succeed in killing me, at least I will have the satisfaction of knowing that my friends will take revenge on my behalf.

Howard: And that’s a good thought, isn’t it?

Steve: So, yes, there is this combination of secretiveness and trying to protect your proprietary knowledge, while at the same time there is a lot of sharing going on, not only among the mestizo shamans but among mestizo shamans and Shipibo, Huitoto, Asháninca shamans, all these other peoples.

We started out talking about the fact that most Upper Amazonian shamans are not philosophers of shamanism, and that when they get together — just as when biomedical doctors get together — they talk about practical things. Doña María was, in part, an exception, because her path to being an ayahuasquera began when she was very young and was a prayer healer. Pablo Amaringo is a good example of somebody with an intense curiosity and, because of the popularity of his paintings, with the opportunity to meet and interact with all kinds of people. He had a remarkably absorptive mind. He was unusual, I think, in the way that he became a philosopher of mestizo shamanism.

That’s one of the things that made him important, because he was doing something that other people were not doing. And I think in Pablo Amaringo we have somebody who was deeply immersed in his own tradition, but had both the capacity and the opportunity to be able to apply all kinds of other things to this tradition — to express a philosophy of shamanism and how it works, how it can be read cosmologically.

Howard: Absolutely. Pablo is an authority; he not only paints but describes the structure of subatomic particles and how matter is formed. He shows the influences of sound and vibrations, and ultimately he says that everything is just one, massive, eternal sound, one vibration. His mastery of communicating the underlying nature of existence is unique, his paintings inform where linguistics cannot.

Steve: He talks about the Hindu gods, samadhi meditation, the king of the Sakyas — that is, Buddha. He remembers everything he’s ever heard, and he works it into a philosophical system of Amazonian shamanism.

Howard: And beyond. Well beyond.

Steve: I am sometimes asked — because I wrote the book and not because I know anything — in effect to philosophize on behalf of my teachers. Somebody will come up with something, you know, sort of cosmic, and they ask me what I think about it. And I have to answer, “I don’t have a clue.” I would guess that certainly my teachers, and probably most Amazonian shamans, never thought about it at all.

Howard: It’s not in their world at all. It just falls outside their domain. Absolutely, practical matters, you know, “Is my boyfriend cheating on me?” “Why can’t I get a job?” “Why aren’t plants growing properly on my farm?” Practical, everyday matters of life.

Steve: That’s absolutely right. The mess of life.

Howard: One of the things that has come up in this type of discussion, it was about two years ago, at the conference in Iquitos, and the first few days the shamans were introducing themselves, describing what they do so the gringos could decide who they would like to drink ayahuasca with — a sort of “shaman market.”

I recall one shaman talking about how he heals, about his plant mixtures, resins, and so on. But basically, he was saying, “My work is proprietary. It works for me. I heal people.” He was saying this his healing comes from a personal relationship with the plants, with the medicine, and that is the source of his power. A couple of Westerners couldn’t appreciate this. They stood up and said, “Well, if your medicine is so powerful, why don’t you share it with everybody? Why don’t you give it to everybody?” The shaman was literally lost for words. In the West, medicine is pharmaceutical; there is no relationship between the doctor and the medicine. In the shamanic paradigm, healers undergo the discipline of la dieta, and they learn directly from the plants how to heal. So I can really understand that a shaman can say, “I can’t share this with anybody else because it wouldn’t work for anybody else.”

Steve: I think one of the things that we need to think about is whether, in fact, when we say heal or cure we’re talking about the same thing that an Amazonian shaman is talking about when he uses the words heal or cure.

Here is a story. I was with don Roberto in his hut when a boat pulls up by the bank of the river. Two men come up the bank, one helping the other. The man being helped is doubled over, and the man carrying him tells don Roberto that the man is his cousin who has terrible pains in his stomach. Can don Roberto do something about it? So don Roberto does what I came to think of as his ten-minute healing. He shakes his shacapa, his leaf-bundle rattle, all over the man’s body, especially in the area where it hurt. He blows tobacco smoke into the top of his head, all over his body, and onto the place where it is hurting. He sucks the place and spits stuff out and shakes the shacapa some more, and the man said he was feeling a little bit better.

And I was sitting there the whole time, thinking to myself, “My god. What if this guy has acute appendicitis?” So I ask permission from everybody if I can touch him, they say okay. There’s no fever, no rebound tenderness or guarding, no pain on the right side when pressing on the left, nothing special in the lower right quadrant — all the things you look for to see if someone has appendicitis. So I was very relieved, but that only postponed the real question: Here is don Roberto, my maestro ayahuasquero, a man I admire and respect and love. Do I or do I not believe that don Roberto can heal acute appendicitis? If I had acute appendicitis in the jungle, would I want to have don Roberto sucking at it, or would I want to be on a plane to the University of Chicago Hospital?

Howard: Yeah, but that is not a valid question or situation for an average guy in the Amazon. They don’t have that choice.

Steve: Absolutely right. But it raises, I think, in stark personal terms, the question of what is going on when healing is taking place in the Upper Amazon. There is question I ask people. Some Amazonian shamans are very humble, some are very bold. There’s one who says he can cure cancer, he can cure AIDS, he can cure obesity, and he’s got a whole list of things that he claims to cure. It strikes me that if he can do even a fraction of what he says — if he can cure breast cancer, for example — then there ought to be hundreds of doctors studying what he does to find out how it works and to see if it can be reproduced; he should be immensely wealthy and should be teaching in medical schools and hospitals all over the world. And yet this doesn’t happen.

Howard: I’m not sure that I would trust someone who made those claims. As you say, if those claims were proven, he would indeed be world renowned, a shaman to the stars and the wealthy.

Steve: Now, two things occurred to me. One is when Amazonian shamans who deal with a gringo clientele make claims like that about what they can heal, the claims always involve diseases that are socially salient in gringo culture. They always involve the diseases, such as AIDS and cancer, that gringos are most concerned about, that have almost mythic significance.

So I would ask that shaman, “Can you cure gingivitis?” And if he could cure gingivitis, that would mean that all of the old people in his village would have all their teeth. And if he can’t cure gingivitis — if, like everywhere else in the jungle, people have lost most of their teeth by the time they are in their forties — should I think he can cure cancer?

Howard: But we’re talking two completely different paradigms here, and the two just don’t work together. When a Westerner talks about AIDS or cancer, that is a disease from our perspective, but maybe that’s not what they regard as a disease. As you said before, they deal with the results of social imbalance, an illness caused by envidia, the envy of others, or susto, a fear caused by contact with a tunchi or ghost. There are many different factors involved; they can heal the imbalances within their own paradigm, many of which are caused by an external source. Shouldn’t we keep these different domains separate? When we talk about disease from a Western view, doesn’t that that confuse and in some respects contaminate the shamanic paradigm?

Steve: Well, let me respond. Anthropologists have made a distinction between healing and curing. The idea in this distinction is that you cure things like a duodenal ulcer. But when we talk about healing, we’re talking about the making better of a whole person, not only individually, but socially and spiritually. So that the distinction is drawn that if you cure cancer, then there are objective measures by which you can determine whether the cancer has gone away or not. But if you heal cancer, you’re talking about something different. Even if the cancer is not cured, perhaps the person has now accepted the cancer, or the person is able to live with a better quality of life without anxiety over impending death.

But I reject this distinction for a couple of reasons, particularly in the context of healing in the Upper Amazon. One is that if you speak to the shamans, they will claim that they can, and certainly claim that they want to, cure physical diseases. If you had a duodenal ulcer, they will say, “Yeah, we can cure this in exactly the Western sense. It will go away if you use our treatment.” I think that this distinction is a Western imposition, and it is political. Because when a biomedical doctor sets up shop in the jungle, he wants to make a political deal with the shaman, saying, in effect, “I’ll do the curing, you do the healing” — which is the doctor’s way of saying, “You’re not going to do anything at all.”

Howard: But this isn’t just about the individual shaman. We’re talking about plants, about medicinal plants that have healing properties. So traditions and taboos and must have some truth to them, some factual, pragmatic evidence that this healing works, even among people who have no formal education; otherwise they wouldn’t have been there for such a long time. There must be a body of evidence to support the belief that the plant can heal physical illnesses. There are certainly some plants that I would take if I had a physical illness, for example uña de gato, cat’s claw, which is also well known in the West.

Steve: One consideration is that most diseases are self-limited; they get better by themselves. Another consideration is that many even serious diseases are cyclical. Arthritis, for example, can go through a period of getting better, and then go through a period of getting worse. And so the question is: if we’re looking at whether shamans actually heal or cure, we have to separate out the effect of the plants from the effect of a disease being self-limiting or cyclical. We have to have some kind of a metric for deciding when something is healed and when it isn’t. And as far as I know, certainly in the Amazon and for just about every shamanic practice in the world, there has been no study that has done long-term follow-up. I think this is different from trying to understand from within the culture what kind of healing or curing is really going on.

Howard: In some respects we are touching on the allopathic versus holistic systems of healing. In the Amazon, an external influence or “energy” such as malaire —literally bad air — is regarded as a common source of illness. This condition would not be recognized in the allopathic model.

Steve: And malaire is associated with tunchis, the spirits of dead people.

Howard: That’s right, and according to Pablo there are certain plants that create malaire when they decompose. The closest approximation we have to malaire is the term “bad energy.”

Steve: One of my goals in the book generally has been to try to understand this healing system in the Upper Amazon on its own terms, and I have tried to step away from trying to explain it in my terms.

People use terms like energy; just about everybody who is involved in this work at some time or another has used the word energy. But I don’t know what Shipibo term, for example, would be properly translated as energy. Even if I were fluent in Shipibo, I don’t know how I would go about trying to explain the Western concept of energy to them. Even if I tried to explain energy to a mestizo shaman in Spanish, I don’t think I would be able to explain the whole complex of ideas that accompany our concept of energy, its relationship to concepts such as vibration in nineteenth century science, or its relationship to quantum physics. At the same time I am not sure that there is any word that I have heard mestizo shamans use regularly — except perhaps words like energía that they have borrowed from gringos — that I would feel comfortable translating as energy.

So, one of the questions that fascinated me was trying to understand this kind of healing shamanism on its own terms. Now, I say one of the things I was interested in. One of the other things, of course, was trying to understand my own experience and trying to come to grips with the things that I had experienced and seen and participated in, and to see how that related to my own life. But that was not something that I wanted to be in this book.

Howard: Yes, you make that very clear in the book. and it’s a very difficult thing to do, what you described. I know how great a challenge it is, because when I have spoken to a shaman, automatically I’m trying to understand — trying to put my own influences on it, to put it into my way of thinking.

So although a shaman is talking to me about his world, how he understands things, I have to do some kind of translation, some kind of processing to incorporate it. So it takes a lot of care to avoid getting your own personal perspective and comprehension tied up in this. It is a challenge to step outside your own subjective framework of ideas, and try to see it from the other’s perspective. That’s one thing I think you definitely achieved in that book.

Steve: Well, thank you. I was trying to understand what was going on, to take my teachers and place them in a social, cultural, and historical context, and to understand them on their own terms to the extent that I could.

Another reason for writing the book was that there are now a lot of people going down to the Amazon to drink ayahuasca, and they go down there in a state of ignorance. They know nothing about the culture. They may have heard a few things, and they may have heard about sorcery in one of the online ayahuasca discussion groups, but they know nothing about indigenous mestizo culture. They are divorced from the cultural and political struggles of the mestizo and indigenous communities. They are often afraid of the jungle, and will do just about anything to insulate themselves in concrete buildings, because they don’t understand the jungle and they have heard stories about how dangerous the jungle is.

My jungle survival instructor told me that you are safer in the jungle than you are in Lima, because there is virtually no animal in the jungle that will attack you without warning you first. Usually the animal will warn you because you are doing something stupid — you’re getting too close, say, to a wild sow’s piglets. The tourists go to a lodge and food is put in front of them; there are fruits and vegetables and fish and chicken, and they have no idea where this food came from. They have no idea how the people in the jungle fish, or of the kind of sophisticated forest management skills that mestizo and indigenous people use to make sure that they have plantains to eat. So, one of the reasons I wrote the book is to be a sort of guide, because I wanted people to have in their hands something about the culture, the background, so that they could, to some extent, be involved in the culture from which they are taking the medicine.

Howard: That is something which is needed, and is very informative.

Steve: A lot of people go down there for very self-centered reasons. “It’s about me. I am going down for my enlightenment. I am going down for my healing. I am going down there for my very own transformative transcendent experience. I am going down for my epiphany.” And they go down there without any sense of this rich, deep, profound culture that is giving them the medicine that they are taking for their own private purposes.

Howard: I’m not saying that these people are wrong in any way, but they are uninformed about the wider aspects of that world. Most of the literature and Internet material seems to be focused on the more cosmic, transformative, Western perspective on this.

Steve: I would hope that somebody would read this book and say, “Damn. This is really interesting.” These are creative people with a culture that is worth preserving, people who are engaged in long-term struggles for their own culture, for their own land.

Howard: Against the oil corporations and mining companies…

Steve: And are being assaulted from all sides.

Howard: The government, for sure.

Steve: I would hope my readers would say, “Maybe I should go down with an open heart, rather than with a set of motivations that all center on me.”

Howard: There certainly is a self-centered aspect to this. I’m occasionally asked, “How do I become a shaman, who can I apprentice with?” I respond by suggesting that they go there and initially check things out, get in the groove, make some connections with the shamans and so on, but of course that is not what they want to hear. You know, some do go, and if they last three or four weeks, then I’m impressed. But many give up earlier than that, discomfort with insect bites, or basically they couldn’t make friends with the jungle. It’s a very beautiful environment, a total change in the rhythm of life, just day and night.

Steve: Rhythms do change in the jungle. Your sleep patterns change in the jungle because, for people from the temperate latitudes, there’s no twilight. The sun just goes straight down: one minute it’s light and the next minute it’s dark. The darkness comes on very fast. Then you have twelve hours of darkness, which usually changes your sleeping habits — unless you resist the rhythm of the jungle by setting up bright lights to keep you up late.

And, to bring it back around to what we were discussing earlier, there’s a third reason I wrote the book. I wanted to get these ideas out there. Even in just the time since this book was published, there have been all kinds of really interesting discussions, especially online, where people say, “Oh, well, you say this. Here’s my experience.” And the experience is the same, or maybe different. People have corrected some errors I made in the book, which is terrific, and people have challenged some of the ideas I put forward. If we’re lucky, in five or ten years, this book will have been entirely superseded. Hopefully by then people will have read this book and said, “Oh, well, I disagree with Beyer here,” or, “I agree with Beyer, but I can add something here.” I wrote it because there was no book out there like it, where the information was all in one place, and people could add to it, debate it, and correct it.

Howard: You write about the wider popular culture, the unique foods, the drinks, where it all comes from, how it’s made, how it’s transported and so on. It was a pleasure to read, in those informative shaded boxes that feature in the book, about the local cumbia amazónica music that you hear blaring from many bars in Iquitos and Pucallpa.

Steve: Sidebars.

Howard: The sidebars really add the flavor and texture of Amazonian life, and even the dancing girls get a mention — it’s great.

Steve: That was really fun to write. I was very happy because it was the first time in my life I was able to use in a sentence the word callipygian, which is classical Greek for “having a beautiful butt.”

Howard: You do use some words I’ve never seen before. I had to look it up, and, yup, it means “well-shaped buttocks.” By the way, the callipygian dancing girls are called vedettes — just mentioning that to give some texture.

Steve: And not just cumbia amazónica but cumbia music generally is like the hip-hop music of Peru. It’s countercultural underground music. It’s the music of the people.

Too late to get it into the book, there was an art show in a gallery in Lima called Poder Verde, “Green Power,” which is one of the words that they use for the music, cumbia amazónica, but this was an art exhibition, mostly by local artists in Iquitos, the guys who paint murals on the sides of restaurants, who paint pictures of large-bosomed women on the walls of brothels. They had an exhibit of this colorful, exuberant art from the Amazon.

Howard: Have you seen the work of Christian Bendayan?

Steve: Yes! He was one of the people who organized the exhibit and exhibited in this gallery.

Howard: I regard Christian as kind of the founder of that sort of outsider folk art in Iquitos. His work is brilliant and vibrant.

Steve: It’s very powerful, it’s colorful. It’s filled with spirit and sensuality, and the elite in Lima and in Cusco couldn’t care less. They still see the jungle as an arena of exploitation. For example, there was a gastronomy fair in Lima, which featured famous chefs preparing the food of the Amazon. But they did not have the real food of the Amazon. They did not have boiled monkey.

Howard: Or suri, palm beetle grubs, for sure.

Steve: Or suri, absolutely right. What they had was exotic fruit from the jungle, which was made into Western-style desserts. There were, as far as I know, no actual Amazonians there, and the refrain was, “Oh, this grows wild in the jungle for our taking.” There was no understanding of the fact that mestizos and indigenous people are cultivators of the forest with a sophisticated understanding of forest succession, of the ways in which the chacras, even when they are no longer being harvested, provide shelter for animals that they can hunt. There was no mention of the sophisticated jungle management skills that produce these fruits, only the assumption that they are somehow magically there for us to take away.

Howard: The people from the jungle are looked down upon as unwashed and uneducated by the urban bourgeois class in Lima.

Steve: It is racial.

Howard: The natives are not even citizens. They are regarded as being just one step above animals. And the people of Iquitos in their turn look down and discriminate against the river people.

Steve: That’s right. And you hear people say that the wild Indians don’t wear clothes, they eat raw meat, they don’t have salt — and therefore they’re not really there. And so the jungle becomes an area open for exploitation.

Howard: The concept of Manifest Destiny is alive and kicking…

Steve: So people go down to the jungle, and they know nothing of this background. Like the elite in Lima and Cusco, fruits and vegetables appear magically on their plates, and they have no idea where this came from or how it fits into the culture of the Upper Amazon.

Howard: This is the conquistador culture. They just came there, and they just took what they wanted, without any regard for how it’s produced or how it’s made. And that mentality has filtered down through the social structure.

Steve: I talk about this in the book. There is a long, troubled history between mestizos and indigenous people, because, during the rubber boom, not only were mestizos used as itinerant rubber tappers, but they were also used as enforcers by the rubber barons to maintain the servitude of the indigenous people. And of course my belief, for whatever it’s worth, is that the mestizo ayahuasca shamanic tradition is just a hundred years old or so — not much older than that — because it’s a product of the rubber boom.

Mestizos lived by the rivers and used rivers for transportation and or commerce and offered them the opportunity to make a lot of money, supposedly, by chopping down rubber trees and tapping rubber. And they became itinerant rubber tappers, itinerant rubber workers who very quickly became enmeshed in the debt peonage system, because they had to buy their supplies from the company store.

But what it did was to bring these ribereños away from their beloved rivers and move them all east into the jungle, where they came in contact with indigenous people. When they became sick, there was nobody who could look for them because, as itinerant rubber tappers, nobody knew where they were. So they went to indigenous healers, and some of them then studied under the indigenous healers and became healers themselves. When the rubber boom ended, they moved back west and they brought this tradition with them.

Howard: Yes. I think that’s a very important point. For example, we can talk about the barco fantasma, the phantom ship, and how this became incorporated in their world. They were overawed by this invasion of nineteenth-century technology. Steam ships, with their coal burning furnaces producing huge volumes of smoke, making an enormous noise, not just a different noise but one they had never heard before. Up until that moment, the jungle had a whole different sound, and suddenly that had all changed. It’s hard to imagine the impact that the invasion of the rubber barons had on the native world, and how they had to come to terms with it all.

Steve: But look what they did. They incorporated it into their shamanic mythology, the same way they incorporated metaphors of electricity, electromagnetic waves, the way they incorporated flashlights, the way they now have incorporated laser beams and biomedicine. Perfect example: doña María drinking ayahuasca dressed in a long, white coat, like a doctor’s coat, and don Roberto wearing a hat with beads and feathers and Shipibo designs on it and a shirt with Shipibo designs — in effect, symbolizing were two different modes of eclecticism.

Some of the plant spirits who came to don Roberto and doña María would be dressed in hospital scrubs and wearing surgeon’s masks. When they left their bodies and went on journeys through the galaxy, they would visit great spiritual hospitals on other planets and watch the procedures. Remember that to the mestizos, the source of all shamanic wisdom is the indigenous people. It’s hard to think of a mestizo shaman who does not claim somewhere to have been taught by indigenous people.

For example, don Manuel Córdova Ríos, who was a mestizo shaman in Iquitos, told this story about how he had been kidnapped and taken to live with an indigenous people — in effect to where the wild things are. He claimed to have learned the native language through group telepathy sessions when they drank ayahuasca. Eventually he learned all their healing techniques, became their chief, and finally escaped. This is kind of an archetypal story — the civilized person who gets captured by the wild people, learns their language, and comes back and teaches their redemptive secrets to other civilized people. This is a myth that is not only current in the Upper Amazon among mestizos, but this myth is being reenacted by the gringos who go down to the jungle to drink ayahuasca. Here the civilized people go down into the jungle, meet the wise wild people who live there, learn their redemptive secrets, and come back carrying this redemptive wisdom to civilization.

Howard: Joseph Campbell, the myth of the hero.

Steve: That’s right. And this myth of bringing back the healing secrets of the jungle is not only circulated among mestizos, but is now being reenacted by gringos who are going down to the jungle.

Howard: Bring back the gold, bring back the treasure.

Steve: But of course, as you said, this is an ego-feeding kind of thing, because you can say to yourself, “Oh, I’m selected. I’m the gringo to whom these wild people chose to reveal their secrets. That must mean there’s something special about me.” And all of this is divorced from the reality of the jungle, and it’s divorced from the lives of the people and their shamans. It’s divorced from the culture from which these foreigners seek their healing.

Howard: It is important that this way of life be documented in detail, before it goes under the weight of romantic and divorced-from-reality bullshit.

Steve: I think that is another reason. I am very pessimistic about the survival of this tradition.

Howard: Me too.

Steve: I think this rich, deep, profound healing tradition is going to disappear, because there are no apprentices. On one of my podcast interviews we were talking about the loss of this tradition, and I was asked: What about the gringos who have become shamans? I thought that was a really good question, so I gave it a lot of thought, and I said: Well, first, there are very few. Second, they are concentrated in very few places, primarily around Iquitos. And third — and I’m happy to be corrected about this — I do not see these gringo shamans going into mestizo and indigenous communities in order to serve those people. The people they are serving are overwhelmingly gringos.

PART TWO TO FOLLOW

This beautiful guilded painting by David Hewsen, Mother Earth, is 4 X 8 feet and was installed, on the 9th of January, in the entrance of a heart center for a hospital in the United States.  David Hewsen started it about a year ago, inspired by a doing a native ceremony outside of Cusco, Peru.

David Hewsen’s unique artwork carries within it the heart and beauty of the Amazon Jungle, in which he lives, and its inhabitants: plants, animals, people and  mythological beings alike.

More of his art can be found on his web page amaruspirit.org together with links and information about the other aspects of the jungle… the uglier truths of contaminations, roads buildings, injustices and deaths. Well worth a visit!

Peter Gorman has been places. He’s been inside, outside, upside, downside, this side, that side, and the other side. In the words of Dennis McKenna; Peter Gorman has “been way, way beyond the chrysanthemum on many a dark jungle night.” And that’s putting it mildly.

His new book Ayahuasca in My Blood: 25 Years of Medicine Dreaming, is brewed with an enchanting lucidity. To read it is to drink down a story, a whirlwind, a wild fire of spirits and curanderos, pirates and teachers, frogs and vines, snakes and shamanism, plants and visions woven across the arc of a quarter century’s worth of heavyweight Amazonian, Texan and New York City adventures.

Written with the total recall of an expert investigative journalist, prepared with the special flair and flavors of a Master Chef, the book is spun lavishly, elegantly. Reading the book places you deep in the forest, late at night, around a small campfire, listening to a savvy bard recount terrifying ghost stories. Stories you might only barely admit to believing. Thing is, these stories, and the storyteller, are realer than real. Furthermore, the ghosts in these stories appear to you in sharp focus, they surround, they approach, touch, terrify, cajole and, they are ones holding lights up to their faces.

Ayahuasca in My Blood articulates very clearly Gorman’s relationship with the realms of the “way, way beyond”. It must be said, however, that Peter has also been, and remains, very down-to-earth.

The heart of the book concerns Peter’s extraordinary experiences with ayahuasca. However, his struggles with his family, his work, his truck, his ranch in Texas, his life in NYC and his old bar in Iquitos all play major roles in an intense narrative that manages to include magnificent, informal biographies of three of his most important and respected teachers; Moises Torres Vienna, an ex-military man who first takes Gorman out into the deep green, imparting lessons in survival; Pablo, the powerful Matses headman who introduced Peter to sapo—the now legendary frog venom medicine; and of course the story of the humble and potent curandero, Don Julio Jerena.

Ayahuasca books are bursting forth like wildflowers, yet rare is it to find one’s self SCUBA diving through the veins of someone who’s traversed this terrain as long, deep and freaky as Gorman has.

Try as I might to avoid presumptions, or pull cliches, it must be said that Ayahuasca in My Blood is destined to become a classic. In fact it’s already there. More than that, it’s a valuable reflection on the nature of shamanism, a reflection that has not, to my knowledge, ever been illuminated in such a visceral way.

If one considers the spectrum of related literature—take for example William S. Burroughs’ The Yajé Letters, Terence McKenna’s True Hallucinations, Wade Davis’ One River, Jimmy Weiskopf’s Yajé: The New Purgatory, or Steve Beyer’s Singing to the Plants—Peter Gorman’s Ayahuasca in My Blood weighs in amongst these giants and, in many ways, ties them all together.

Like Gorman, William S. Burroughs stumbled into the role of being a precedent setting, right-place-at-the-right-time gringo drawn to the jungle and its medicines long before most of the world even caught a whisper of anything to do with ayahuasca. Terence McKenna went very, very deep and utterly lived (and loved) to tell the tale, however tall and unlikely it may have seemed to be. Wade Davis, the gifted writer and explorer, wove together a story of the jungle, plants, and his friends and mentors Richard Evans Schultes and Tim Plowman. Jimmy Weiskopf courageously detailed his own hell, transformation and learning, and Steve Beyer simply laid it all out in one fell swoop.

Ayahuasca in My Blood is a mix of all of the above. What distinguishes the book is in part due to Gorman’s style as a writer, he’s most certainly and abundantly endowed with the Irish gift of gab, and a memory of unparalleled clarity. However, perhaps more importantly, is in how this book casts, with tremendous verve, the doors of perception wide open, busting them off their hinges, sending them flying into the deepest void you care to imagine, where a great wind sweeps you clean off your feet, rockets you head over heels into a whole other ballgame, brings you back to reality, momentarily, then threatens you, teases you, provokes, challenges and simply never lets up until you find yourself dropped, like some kind of jungle-fied Dorothy, breathless, in the eye of a poltergeist tornado, with a snake in your stomach and bills to pay.

There are very few people alive who have 25 or more years experience with ayahuasca, most of them are the old mestizo and indigenous shamans of South America. Rarer still are those among this experienced group who are willing and able to write about their experiences. Peter Gorman, in opening his heart, his life and his talents, shares a masterwork in this respect; a tremendously earthy, rich, poetic, way-out and honestly magical artifact, gathered from the deepest of depths.

MORGAN MAHER: What first brought you to the Amazon jungle?

PETER GORMAN: I always loved travelling. Starting in high school I began to hitchhike, eventually crossing the U.S. several times and logging about 50,000 miles on my thumb. Feeling like I’d seen a good deal of the U.S., I headed out to Europe and then on to Mexico for a few months.

In Mexico I fell in love with the Lacandon jungle in Chiapas. I’d have gone back but the woman I lived with bought me a book on my return called Headhunters of the Amazon, by a fellow named Up de Graf. I think it was published in 1923, but it dealt with his time in the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon from about 1896-1906 or something like that. Large sections of the book took place on the Yavari River, the border between Brazil and Peru. He painted it as a wild place, a no man’s land. So I decided to go see that river.

The nearest jumping off point was Iquitos, Peru, and so that’s where I went in 1984 with a couple of pals. I returned in 1985 to do a month of jungle survival training with a fantastic guide and teacher, Moises Torres Vienna.

I didn’t get to the Yavari right away, but did get there in 1986, and in 1988 spent some weeks there. A couple of years later I was able to secure my own boat and run the length of that river. It was as wild when I reached it as it sounded like it was for Up de Graf.

Much of the book, and your experiences in the jungle, is inspired and connected to your friend and teacher Don Julio Jerena. Could you tell us about Julio?

Julio…hmmm. Well, he was the local curandero—healer—on the Aucayacu River, about 212 km south of Iquitos, not far from the river town of Genero Herrera. I first met him in 1985, when Moises took me out that way. He was small, strong, handsome. He had a bright smile and ears that were too big for his head. But he had a light in his eyes that I’d rarely seen. He was impish, full of fun, and an amazing healer. He was also the father of a pretty huge brood: I know nine of his children—the youngest born when he was 70—and I’m told there are a few I’ve never met.

In real life, he supported his family with his military pension, which was several hundred dollars a month because he’d been in action in two wars as a young man, and as a fisherman. He was the simplest of men. He loved living on his little river, loved his small fields of yuca and sugarcane, corn and plantains. He loved his boiled fish and plantains. He loved to laugh. He was elegantly humble.

But he was also a man of immense power. When he walked in the jungle he didn’t slash at the underbrush, he sort of waved at it with his machete as though the suggestion that the vines part was enough to get the vines to part. And most of the time it almost seemed as that were true. He healed with a wonderful touch, using ayahuasca to connect with the spirits—the sentient side—of the plants he’d need to utilize to heal a wide variety of ailments. Over the years I saw him work on snakebites, sick children, cancer patients (that one was one of my guests, and she got several more years than she thought she would), fungal infections, parasites—a host of things a lot of medical doctors would have a tough time healing. And he loved doing that.

What lessons did he impart upon you?

How to laugh when kids are driving you up the wall. How to apply patience to jobs to get the work done. To realize that the spirit of ayahuasca and the spirits of the other plants, and the guardian spirits are the doctors and that if we’re lucky enough to get the chance to heal someone sometimes to never believe that we are the doctors. To understand that this world, this universe and the other realities are all connected and that we have the ability to connect with it all.

What lessons, or what kinds of lessons, have the plants taught, or continue to teach you?

That’s not easy to answer. I am just whoever I am. I’m a dad, a journalist, a guy trying to put good healthy food on the table. Someone who has cats and dogs and chickens and ducks and birds and a goat and who tries to remember to feed them all before I feed myself.

Would I be who I am if I’d never gone to the Amazon? If I’d never had ayahuasca? I don’t know. I would still be me, but I’d be a different me. But what part of that can I compartmentalize to say “Oh, that’s the ayahuasca?” versus just plain “Oh, that’s the experience of living, of raising kids” or whatnot?

A great deal of the work that ayahuasca and other plants have done on me, I think, relates to my heart. To the ability to love freely, knowing there’s no shortage of what you can give. To forgive freely, knowing that holding the anger or pain is only going to make you sick and will do no one any good.

I think I also understand the first inkling of healing others. Not that that’s something I can do, like a trick. But when my mother-in-law was dying, the plants let me put my hands on her back and absorb the heat her body was putting out. They allowed me to take it and eliminate it so that she could sleep. It blistered my hands but gave her rest.

There’s really a great deal of learning that’s gone on. It’s the compartmentalizing that’s difficult to do. In other words, I think I’m a better person than I might have otherwise turned out, but when I look in the mirror I see that I’m still full of flaws.

An important person in your life, and in the book, is your jungle teacher Moises Torres Vienna. Could you tell us about Moises.

Like Julio, Moises was one of three extraordinary teachers I have had as an adult. Four if you include my ex, who taught me an immense amount about the jungle she grew up in. But the three were different. I met Moises with my two pals on my first trip to Peru. We’d seen Cuzco and Machu Picchu and hiked in the Cordillera Blanca near Huaraz and had finally gotten down to the jungle in Iquitos, where I was instantly at home. On our first day there, Moises, a ruggedly handsome former trainer of jungle forces for both the Peruvian and American military, was by then retired and a guide. He approached my friends and I on the street in Iquitos and asked if we wanted a guide.

I was so tired of people saying they were guides by that time that I blew him off. I told my friends we should just catch a big riverboat somewhere and we’d wind up in a jungle town and find a real guide there, rather than use this smarmy little guy.

So we did. We took a boat that took us to a little town—at that time—called Requena on the Ucayali River, headwater for the Amazon. It was a fascinating place. But difficult for gringos, which it didn’t get many of. For a hotel we had to take a place where wood partitions ran halfway up the wall and were topped by wire mesh. The guy downstairs kept a burro that brayed all day and night. We were followed by maybe 100 people everywhere we went—which was up and down the single street of the place. No one could change US money, and nobody had food prepared in restaurants. When you came in and ordered, they went out to try to buy a chicken for your meal.

And nobody would take us into the jungle. They were all afraid of ghosts, Indians and jaguars. People went out as far as their chacras, fields, maybe 1000 yards behind the main street but that was pretty much it. Nobody we met in the nine days we spent there would even consider stepping into the canopy behind the last field.

We spent the nine days in that crazy little place—which has grown up a great deal in the last 26 years—because the water was low that time of year and no riverboats coming from further up the river at Pucallpa could navigate. A couple of days of rain raised the river sufficiently though, and just about the time we were acclimating to Requena, we were out of Peruvian money and had to return to Iquitos.

Shortly after we returned to our little hotel—I always took a single room so that I could make trip notes—there was a knock on the door of Larry and Chuck’s room. It was Moises. The guys got me and Moises asked how things had gone. I told him they’d gone great. He laughed. He said he knew we hadn’t gone to the jungle because nobody in Requena went to the jungle. They were all too afraid. But he would take us to the jungle if we liked. Full jungle was how he put it. Then he added the word “ayahuasca?” which none of us had ever heard of. He explained it was an hallucinogen that was a powerful traditional medicine. We could try it during our time in the full jungle if we liked.

We said okay, negotiated a price and then just as we were finished, he looked at my feet and said, “you can’t come. No boots, no jungle. Spine trees on the jungle floor.”

That was a new take. A Peruvian guide turning down a gringo’s money?

Then he laughed. “Don’t worry. I have a pair of boots that will fit you.”

When he returned that evening with a pair of size 10 leather workboots, I was sold.

Over the years we became great friends. He’d take me out on long hikes, teach me jungle survival—like what vines to drink from and which would kill you—how to figure out if a food was good to eat or poisonous, how to build shelters, set traps, avoid snakes or kill them if you had to, brought me to the Matses, helped me put together my first boat for a 30 day trip on the Yavari. He was patient with a lousy student, made certain his lessons were well learned, was tireless at the end of long hiking days when I was too beat to get a fire and food going, and never forgot to bring extra coffee and a couple of spare packs of smokes for me. And he laughed the whole time doing it. Just a wonderful teacher.

Another element of your experiences in the Amazon concerns your friendship with the Matsés. Could you speak a bit about the Matsés, and perhaps about Pablo in particular?

Now you’re on to the third of my three extraordinary teachers, Pablo, the curaka. Pablo, like Julio and Moises, had this fantastic light in his eyes. All three looked like they were chuckling on the inside, enjoying every minute of living, despite all three of them living in the physically difficult Amazon.

Moises and I ran into some Matses on the Aucayako in 1985. A year later I went to one of the rivers they have traditionally lived on, the Galvez River, which drains into the Yavari. We spent about a month on the river on that trip, moving from camp to camp—there were six camps of Matses at that time up there. Pablo’s was the smallest: Just he and his four wives and his friend Alberto and his two wives, and their kids. Maybe 20 kids all told, though I later met a number of Pablo’s older kids and in all he probably had 30.

Moises and Pablo had history. In 1970 or 1971, Pablo had been a young Matses among a band that had raided the city of Genaro Herrera. They stole machetes and axe heads, several women and two young longhaired Franciscan Friars or monks. They later killed the latter, probably when they discovered they weren’t women.

In retaliation, the Peruvian military bombed the Matses camps for four days. During that same time, Moises, then a sargeant in the military, led a ground group against the Matses. Despite being half-indigenous, Moises cared little for indigenous and always described the ferocity with which he killed some of them with a sort of perverse enjoyment. But he said that changed when he saw Pablo and some other Matses trying to down the Peruvian bombers with their bows and arrows. “They were completely unafraid,” he said. “And Pablo was the bravest. I admired his courage and we became friends because he said he admired my courage as well.”

Meeting Pablo was no disappointment. He took me hunting, showed me medicinal plants, gave me my first dose of sapo—frog sweat—and laughed when I was writhing in pain on the ground. He talked with plants and animals and swore they talked back. He’d blow nu-nu, a tobacco and macambo snuff, at the clouds to keep it from raining and damned if it might not be raining all around the little camp but not in it. He really was one of the last of the “antiguas”, the old timers who knew the old ways of the Matses, and those ways involved deep interaction with the jungle in ways that seem mysterious and magic to those of us who witness them but don’t understand them.

For medicines, it seemed—and I knew Pablo over a 20 year period, maybe eight long visits in all—like every plant was a cure. If it wasn’t a cure it provided food or shelter or the material to make hammocks with. He’d use plant medicines like nu-nu to see where to hunt the following day—and he had to hunt well to feed all those wives and kids. He shared everything with me, even tried to get me to go on a raid to a distant village to rob some champi—young girls so that I could have a couple of wives. That was the only adventure on which I turned him down.

He’s the man responsible for the medical breakthroughs now being made using the peptides from his sapo frog—which turned out, when I was able to bring it out of the jungle—to be the phylomedusa bicolor, the giant monkey tree frog. And because of his work—primarily—on plant collecting with me for Shaman Pharmaceuticals in the early 1990s, he’s the reason that all of the Matses are now the only tribal group in all of Peru that now has permanently demarked land along with air, water and mineral rights. That was something Shaman arranged after the second of my very successful medicinal plant collecting trips on the Yavari and Galvez rivers. My trips, but it was Pablo and a couple of others at different camps, who produced the goods for Shaman. I was just the conduit.

I’ve written a lot about Pablo and plant collecting, and someday I would like to just write about Pablo the person. He was just an hilarious character top to bottom.

How has your life changed over the course of more than 25 years learning and working with ayahuasca?

Well, now that you’ve gotten me talking about my three great human teachers, I will add ayahuasca as my great plant-spirit teacher. My life changed? Don’t know because it’s the only life I’ve had. And that includes those guys, that jungle, those rivers, the sounds, the shapes, the food, the rain, the crossing of log bridges… and ayahuasca is a big part of that. But my life also includes being an investigative journalist, a dad, a brother, a plumber when the sink gets clogged, and everything else that goes into living. For me, it’s just a life. Ayahuasca and the jungle are not separate, have not been separate from my normal life since I met them. Sometimes I’m in the U.S, sometimes in the jungle, but it’s all one life.

I really think that ayahuasca, more than anything, has shown me in a very real and concrete way, that things like personal guardians exist, that everything is sentient and must be respected on equal value with everything else. I mean the old coffee grinds as well as the tallest tree, as well as that fly that’s buzzing around you incessantly. It’s showed me the value of life in a way I was taught but didn’t understand. It’s allowed me to see the other realms, to even sometimes operate in them to affect changes in this realm. It’s filled me with wonderment about every single day. I wake up wondering what’s going to be shown to me every morning and I love that.

I might have done that without my three teachers and ayahuasca, but I’m not sure. I do know that I used to push love away, thinking somehow I wasn’t good enough or worthy, and that in the last 10 years I’ve learned to say “give it here! Gimme what you got!” and to give it away freely as well. That’s one place where I think the change in me is noticeable. To me at least.

In what ways has your experience and relationship with ayahuasca affected your day-to-day life?

Well, I like that I can fly now, And having superstrength is a gas….kidding. Ayahuasca is part of my day to day life, so I don’t know, beyond what I’ve said about giving and receiving love, how else it’s changed things. The spirits in general, have been helpful: they’ll sometimes tell me what plants a person needs to use to rid themselves of a physical ailment, or get in my face if I start overreacting to the kids and bring out the dad voice too quickly. They remind me when I’ve had too much to drink and think I can drive just to the corner….and then they’ll make the keys disappear if I try to ignore them. And I am very glad they do those things. I’m very appreciative.

Your book is filled with amazingly detailed descriptions of your ayahuasca visions. Perhaps they could even be described as experiences, in that you tend to go far beyond what may be commonly associated as “ayahuasca visions”. For example you describe going to “The red room. The place where the healing happens”, or the market “where you get the medicines” or Joe’s Café. What do these kinds of places mean to you, and how have they changed your perception reality?

Those places are real places. Something to remember is that our human brain needs to compartmentalize things. Since we’re not brought up dealing with spirits on a day-to-day basis, when we run into one, we tend to give it a human or monstrous shape—a shape it might not have at all. But our brain needs to be able to process things so we give those spirits a shape, a name, a visual we can deal with so our brain won’t explode from not knowing how to process the information.

Now the “red room” is how I see a particular place. That place is an unmeasurably large cavern where all of the pain and suffering, all of the rotten deeds and selfish acts go. And in that place there are spirits who know how to transform that pain and horror into something positive so it can be let out into our world again without hurting anyone anymore. So when I’m called on to take someone’s pain or grief or whatnot, I don’t want to just keep it or it’ll stay with me. So having been shown the red room—and someone else’s brain would have them perceive it entirely differently—I know that’s the perfect place to put that awful stuff I’ve taken out of somebody. So to me it’s a place of transformation for rotten, pain and anguish causing feelings and suffering that’s very accessible in real life terms. I just open the door—which happens to be right next to me when I need it—and ask those spirits to take that junk and transform it into something good.

The market to get the medicines is another interesting place. I’m not someone who knows all the plants—heck I probably know less than the average person. Still, I’m sometimes asked to come up with a remedy for someone. And the guardians—call them guardian angels if that’s more comfortable, though they don’t look like classic angels to me—know that, so they very nicely introduced me to a market filled with plants. And when someone needs something, I go to that market—no, you can’t see it, it’s only in my perception the way it is—and shout out the name of the illness or problem that needs fixing. And the plants are so freaking generous they just sometimes shout out the name or names of those that I’ll need. And then I’ll write them down and relay the information. Ridiculous on the face of it, and I’ll probably be sent to the looney bin for even suggesting what I’ve just said. Still, even when I’m given a plant name I’ve never heard of, I can usually find it on the net and because the plants are so generous, the use of the plant is generally spot on for what needs healing.

Joe’s Café is another spot. Just a little café where you get to see things not normally visible to the human eye. It’s not around all the time, just when I need it.

Now, the most important thing to remember with all these places, these gifts, is that I’ve been warned they can’t be used selfishly. I couldn’t go to Joe’s Café and see who is going to win a ball game tomorrow night. If I did and then bet on the outcome, I’m sure I’d lose, and not only that, I’d probably never be allowed to go to the café again.

Also important to remember is that while this stuff is crazy, it’s not. It’s just accessing other realities that exist but move at maybe a different vibratory speed than the reality in which we exists does.

And facilitating access to those realities are what the plant teachers like Ayahuasca and San Pedro and Peyote do. The codicil—if that’s the right word—is that once you’ve opened the door to those realities, once you’ve broadened the bandwidth of your sight to see those realities or experience them, you probably won’t be able to fully close that door again. And that’s pretty frightening to some people. I mean, to say there are ghosts is one thing. To have them waking you at 3 AM while they clomp around the kitchen is quite another.

What guides you?

A simple sense that this could be a wonderful world if we’d all just pitch in and make it one. In journalism my work involves trying to expose rotten and vile things so that we can see them for what they are and eliminate them. Sometimes that means exposing the horror the war on drugs creates—from politically/financially motivated private prisons to mandatory sentencing laws to property forfeiture, to keeping hemp illegal when it might do so much good if its status was changed.

Other times I’m motivated because I see the poor getting shafted in a million ways, or how the U.S. can manipulate politics around the globe to ensure benefit to private companies at the expense of whole populations.

Those things motivate me and they become my guide posts as well. I’m not going to fix this damned world, but I am damned sure allowed to keep trying in my own way.

Then there are my jungle groups, where I take guests out into the deep green and have them experience the jungle and ayahuasca in a pretty traditional setting. So many of those guests are so ripe for change, so hoping to change their lives—even if they don’t know it—that those trips often are just the thing they needed to either find a new direction in their lives or to give them the courage to deal with their lives in a more positive way. Those people, already good people, mostly just need a little polishing after life has kicked them around some. And I love being able to put them in touch with the things that can polish them up. Cause that makes a better world too.

What is important to you?

My kids, my friends, the under-served, underprivileged, the folks getting the short end of things. And my ex-wife’s new babies. And my granddaughter. And the dog and cats and everything else we take care of. What’s important to me is to keep looking at life like a new thing. To keep working to get the same gleam in my eye over living that Julio, Moises and Pablo always did.

What is the most frightening thing you’ve encountered?

My own selfish behaviour. Watching and being forced to relive some of the stupid, selfish things I’ve done over and over before Ayahuasca will let me vomit them out. The spirits can be demanding and they can be very very frightening, but in the end it’s my own negativity, my own failures, my own stupidity, my own self-centeredness that provokes the greatest fear. And when the medicine tells me we’re going to be working on something related to that on a given night, well, many times I have tried my best to run away from the experience out of sheer terror.

You’ve experienced many different peoples, plants and places. What is it about the Amazon and ayahuasca that continues to captivate you so?

In all my time in Peru, both as a guest and when I lived there and ran my bar, I have never once gone to sleep without having learned something new. That is a very amazing thing to be able to say. And that is something that keeps the Amazon, the jungle, the rivers, the medicine fresh. It just thrills me to be there.

Of course, there’s a lot about it I don’t like. I don’t like the noise of the motorcars, I don’t like the dust in the air and the diesel fuel smells in Iquitos. I can get bored when I have done my work for the day—and when I get bored I want a drink to get a party going, and that’s led to some hilarious and not so hilarious events over the years. But overall, something still happens every day, and I mean every day, that makes me look at the world with just a slightly different pair of eyes when I go to bed than I had when I woke up. That’s a pretty irresistible lure for me.

I’ve asked this kind of question before, and I know you’re a fantastic chef so I’ll ask you, too; You’re out in the jungle, you’ve packed some fruit and vegetables with you and some supplies. You’re hungry, you’ve got a few of your team with you, some of them just returned from hunting, others from fishing. It’s a beautiful day and you’ve all worked very hard. What are you going to cook up?

Well, I’m not much on most jungle meats—I’m just not big on monkeys and sloths and such—but if my guys happened to come on a majas, a large jungle rodent, well, for sure we’re gonna roast some of that. It’s one of the few animals in the jungle that has fat on it, and when that fat starts to drip into the flames, well…..

Now if the guys were attacked by a cayman and had to kill it, we’d cut the tail into thick steaks and grill them, then slather them in lime and garlic…

If the guys fishing happened to bring back a couple of fat piranha’s, well, put those guys on the grill and toss a bit of vinegar on them, and some wild cilantro if we can find some. Piranha are some of the best eating fish in the world.

For fruits, I can always go for a thick slice of jungle papaya with lime juice and a bit of salt.

For starch, I’d try to find a couple of yuca roots. Just boil them simply is good by me, or, if you’ve got a bit of oil, sauté them babies.

For veggies, let’s do a stir fry with ginger, cabbage, cauliflower, green beans, tomatoes, spinach and whatever else we’ve got or can find.

If we have some Ucayali beans—kind of like a pinto bean that comes from the Amazon–with us and we were smart enough to start them early, well, we’d have a little oil with lots of garlic and onion—or onion grass if we don’t have onions—in the pot. When that was just right, I’d fill the pot with water, add the beans when it’s boiling, toss in several diced tomatoes and some acholte or cumin other local spice. And four hours later, when the beans were ready, I’d finish it off with fresh cilantro. If we don’t have any, I’d put some Yerba Louisa, lemon grass, in to give it that final bite.

That sounds like a pretty good meal to me, even if nobody has any majas or cayman tail or piranha.

Your book is fecund, and flowing with amazing stories and experiences. Any stories that you would have loved to fit in, but somehow couldn’t? Anything left untold?

There are a lifetime of stories not in the book. The book concentrates on ayahuasca and my relationship with it. There is some jungle, some damned good adventure, some love, some loss, victories and defeats, but it’s primarily about ayahuasca’s relation to all of that. Each of the two plant collecting trips in my own boats from Iquitos to Leticia to Angamos and up the Galvez—30-plus day trips after the month of finding and rebuilding the old boats I used—could be it’s own book. Trips up the Rio Napo are not even mentioned. A hike from Tamishacu to the Rio Midi is passed over. That was a good one. It was my first time, real time spent on the Yavari River. Moises and I hiked maybe four days to a little town on the Rio Midi, which lets out into the Yavari. Our plan was to make a balsa raft and float to the Yavari and from there, float down to Leticia in Colombia, where we would catch a boat down to Iquitos. Problem was, the river was too low for that. Also, there was very little balsa available.

We arrived in the little town just as they were starting a 3-day celebration of Peru’s Independence from Spain. That was quite a party. People came from all over that part of the jungle to dance, sing, drink and feast nonstop. You’d be given a huge gourd of fermented masato, maybe a quart, and drink it down till it was finished. Everyone would cheer. Then they’d give you another, and another. So you had to vomit out what you drank to make room for more. So everybody was vomiting, and drinking and vomiting….most wonderfully hilarious party I ever attended. And this was good masato—the yuca had been properly chewed and spit out by the women, helping it ferment and giving it just the right texture. Bit of an acquired taste.

At the end of the party, with no raft, we convinced one of the partygoers to take us down to the Yavari and then down to Leticia. The problem was, he had little gas. Just about enough for the few hours it would take his little 15 Hp motor to the mouth of the Midi.

Moises was certain that once we got there we could get gasoline to continue the trip. Well, we went from one little shack—they were pretty well spread out—to another on our first day on the Yavari and came up empty. We had to paddle with one oar as that’s all the man had, most of that day. And that night we got stuck in a very slow whirlpool that simply spun us around and around all night long. We all woke up sick from the spinning.

On the second day, Moises changed tact. He ordered me to carry our shotgun, and he’d approach a little hut owned by some fisherman and I’ve have to point that shotgun in the general direction of someone and he’d demand whatever gas they had. Now most everybody out there had a half a gallon of gas stashed somewhere, so we spent days going half-gallon by half-gallon, essentially stealing everybody’s gas on the river. We promised we’d return it when the boatman came back upriver, but nobody believed us.

So there we were, stealing gas, and our boatman was sure we were gonna leave him stranded in Leticia with no gas for himself and no gas to pay back to people, so he was afraid he was going to get killed when he returned home.

He wasn’t. We were good for our word. In the Brazilian town of Benjamin Constant, right next to Leticia, we stopped at a floating service station and I bought—on credit—two 55 gallon drums of gasoline. The boatman got one for his work, and everybody else was to get double what we took from them at shotgun point.

It wound up working out fine, and everybody remembered me as a good guy when I returned to them in my own boat a couple of years later. We just laughed about it over masato.

There was also no room, or place in the book, for a recent story when I came on an illegal logging operation and some of my team and I, at my direction, cut all the logs in the log raft loose and floated them down to a large lake where they dispersed everywhere. My hope was that the logger would have to spend enough time regathering them that he’d lose his profit and decide not to illegally log anymore, at least on that river.

And there was very little room in the book for talking about being the only gringo in a place like Iquitos to run a bar. And one that was on an old port on the roughest corner in town. There were a million stories out of that place, and I think people still talk about The Cold Beer Blues Bar down there, even when I’m not around. I probably still get 30 emails a year from strangers asking where it is. And it’s been closed for almost 10 years.

And the markets, and having an extended family, and getting friends out of jail and run ins with DEA types and military guys and getting bitten by piranas and flesh eating spider bites and having to do nearly a whole trip on a broken ankle and having an intestine explode in the middle of a trip and what it’s like to hang around the docks in the third world, or fly in little Cessna’s without any instrumentation over that vast forest, or collecting artifacts for the Museum of Natural History in New York, running into huge boas, having a boat of mine attacked by black cayman … there are lots of things in the book, and I hope it’s a great read and all that, but there’s lots more to tell. It’s been one heck of a life.

Peter Gorman’s Ayahuasca in My Blood: 25 Years of Medicine Dreaming is available now in hardcover, paperback and ebook.

]]> http://www.ayahuasca.com/spirit/bloodletting-with-peter-gorman/feed/ 5 http://www.ayahuasca.com/spirit/primordial-and-traditional-culture/self-control/ http://www.ayahuasca.com/spirit/primordial-and-traditional-culture/self-control/#comments Mon, 31 May 2010 11:37:47 +0000 Steve Beyer http://www.ayahuasca.com/?p=428 Steve Beyer, author of Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon, talks about the differences — and similarities — between healers and sorcerers in the Upper Amazon.]]> by Steve Beyer

There is a theme woven through the shamanisms of the Upper Amazon — that human beings in general, and shamans in particular, have powerful urges to harm other humans. The difference between a healer and a sorcerer is that the former is able to bring these urges under control, while the latter either cannot or does not want to.

Thus, what distinguishes a healer from a sorcerer is self-control. This self-control must be exercised specifically in two areas — first, in keeping to la dieta, the restricted diet; and, second, in resisting the urge to use the magical darts acquired at initiation for frivolous or selfish purposes. Shamans who master their desires may use their powers to heal; those who give in to desire, by their lack of self-control, become sorcerers, followers of the easy path.

As simple as the restricted diet seems, it is hard to keep. Food without salt or sugar is bland and boring; I have tried to live on just fish and plantains, and, believe me, the craving for salt or sugar can become intense. Commenting on a similar diet among Achuar apprentice shamans, limited to plantains, boiled palm hearts, and small fish, anthropologist Philippe Descola calls it “dauntingly dull.” In order to be a shaman, one Napo Runa elder says, “one has to suffer much with all this fasting.” Thus, la dieta is a form of self-imposed discipline, which makes the apprentice or shaman worthy of the love of the plants.

Secoya shaman Fernando Payaguaje, speaking of the restricted diet kept when drinking yagé, says: “Some people drink yagé only to the point of reaching the power to practice witchcraft; with these crafts they can kill people. A much greater effort and consumption of yagé is required to reach the highest level, where one gains access to the visions and power of healing. To become a sorcerer is easy and fast.” As anthropologist Françoise Barbira Freedman puts it, shamans who master their emotions and aggressive desires use their powers to heal; apprentices who break the rules of their ascetic training become weak, and therefore become sorcerers.

Similarly, a significant part of the initiation process is for the new shaman to demonstrate the self-control which separates healers from sorcerers. Self-control is manifested in resisting the immediate urge to use newly acquired powers to cause harm. Among the Shuar, there is a general sentiment among the people that becoming a shaman — acquiring tsentsak, magic darts — creates an irresistible desire to do harm, that “the tsentsak make you do bad things.” Shuar shamans themselves dispute this. While the tsentsak indeed tempt one to harm, the desire can be resisted; those who “study with the aim to cure” become healers.

Shuar shaman Alejandro Tsakímp describes one of these temptations as the urge to try out the new darts on an animal — “a dog or a bird, anything that has blood.” Once one does that, once one “starts doing harm, killing animals, one cannot cure,” but becomes a maliciador, a sorcerer. Similarly, the Desana believe that sorcery is very dangerous, apt to rebound on its practitioner, and to be used only in narrowly defined circumstances — for revenge on a sorcerer who has killed a family member, for example. Thus it is the novice, the inexperienced, the untrained person who causes sickness — who lacks the self-control imposed by the shamanic initiation, who experiments with evil spells, who uses them carelessly and irresponsibly, just to see if they work.

This self-control is often expressed in terms of regurgitation and reingestion of shamanic power. Anong the Shuar, after a month of apprenticeship, a tsentsak comes out of the apprentice’s mouth. The apprentice must resist the temptation to use this dart to harm his enemies; in order to become a healing shaman, the apprentice must swallow what he himself has regurgitated. Among the Canelos Quichua, the master coughs up spirit helpers in the form of darts, which the apprentice swallows; here, too, the darts come out of the apprentice’s body and tempt him to use them against his enemies; again, the apprentice must avoid the temptation and reswallow the darts, for only in this way can he become a healer.

This self-control is sometimes also put in terms of turning down gifts from the spirits. The spirits of the plants may offer the apprentice great powers and gifts that can cause harm. If the apprentice is weak and accepts them, he will become a sorcerer. Such gifts might include phlegm which is red, or bones, or thorns, or razor blades. Only later will the spirits present the apprentice with other and greater gifts — the gifts of healing and of love magic.

Self-control is thus central. It is difficult to control lust and abstain from sorcery; even experienced shamans must work hard to maintain control over their powers, which are often conceptualized as having their own volitions.The pathogenic objects that are kept within the shaman’s body, often embedded in some phlegm- or saliva-like substance, are also in some sense autonomous, alive, spirits, sometimes with their own needs and desires, including a need for nourishment, often supplied by tobacco. If not fed properly, they can turn on their possessor, or seek their food elsewhere.

The magic darts kept within the chest of a Shuar shaman, for example, are living spirits, who can control the actions of a shaman who does not have sufficient self-control. The magic darts want to kill, and it requires hard work to keep them under control and use them for healing rather than attack. Similarly, the Parakanã of Eastern Amazonia believe that shamans possess pathogenic agents that cause sickness, called karowara. When animated by a shaman, karowara are tiny pointed objects; inside the victim’s body, they take the concrete form of monkey teeth, some species of beetle, stingray stings, and sharp-pointed bones. Karowara have no independent volition; but they have a compulsion to eat human flesh.

In this way, the pathogenic objects hidden within the shaman’s body enact the Amazonian belief in innate human aggressiveness. To be a healer is to keep this powerful force in check by great effort.

Steve Beyer is the author of Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon. His website and blog is at www.singingtotheplants.com.

“In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery…”
- Cormac McCarthy

Life on this planet lives through virtue of interconnectivity. All of nature exists as an evolving web of consciousness. The light of the sun floods the elemental networks of the planet with energy that builds fractal realms of biological sentience and experience. This world-creation is a sparkling summit of universal complexity.

And yet, modern humanity lives in a state of distraction and fragmentation, lost within an exclusive, secular faith of primitive linear reason, disconnected from the many modes of understanding and perception that bring balance and health. The loss of a harmonious participation with ones bio-region results in a tragic destruction of bio-diversity and diminution of quality of life.

Re-cultivating our full humanness and interconnectivity can assist the wholeness and integrity of our communities and the ecologies we are inextricably one with. Many existing indigenous communities retain traditions that maintain interconnection with the spirits and ancestors of their bio-region. For the ancient indigenous ways are expressions of the land itself, not human creations. Over many hundreds of thousands of years, the ceremonies, medicine, arts and stories generated through shamanic practices have assisted human groups in maintaining harmony between nature and culture, body and mind.

There are many different names across cultures for people who initiate ecological and spiritual knowledge and healing within their communities. Some of these names include Shamans (Tungus, Siberia), vegetalista (Mestizo, Peru), Dukun (Indonesia), Huna (Hawaii). Such people cultivate ways of understanding that employ intuition, creativity, and exploration of the Divine Imagination or ‘Dreaming’. From within their own unique traditions, they traverse the underworlds and heavens of the World Tree to divinate, to cure, to learn. They are often deeply knowledgeable of the medicine of plants, therapeutic touch, and work as helpers and guides at the transformational passages of birth, living and dying. They work as initiators of collective ecstatic ritual.

People living within technological capitalist cultures cannot healthily appropriate or mimic these traditions, but we can still learn much from contact with traditional wisdom and their methods of spiritual development, and ‘Learn How To Learn’ from that wisdom. Such wisdom can help to deepen our own connection with the earth where we stand, honoring the spirit of the land and developing our own rituals, celebrations, healing ceremonies, rekindling our ancestral memory, and reawakening our innate planetary memory…

The Land

Animist cultures view plants and features of their ecosystem as fellow sentient subjects, not as material objects. Plants and fungi are revered in the many Amazonian cultures as ‘plant teachers’, non-human people who are fellow subjects in the universe, communicable, and to be respected.

In Amazonian vegetalismo practices, the ritual consumption of the sacred plant potion Ayahuasca reveals the world of nature multi-dimensional society, a system of spiritual relations in an all-encompassing fertility circuit. From the inner dialog, the vegetalista learns the medicinal and magical properties of plants, and learns to see deeper into the spiritual ecology of the deep forests.

The attitude of dialog even extends to the mineral kingdom and features of the landscape(stone people,crystal realms,earth elementals). Such dialog or ‘eco-sophy’ with ‘more than human’ nature is common to Animist cultures. In Tibetan Bon Po, mountains are considered spiritual mandalas, with the summit being the center-most point where the deity of the mountain is most present. In African Animist cosmology, rivers are presided over by the orisha (spirit, totem) Oshun, present in the currents and eddies of the river where her force moves ever onward…

The deep ecologist Rupert Sheldrake suggests thinking of our bio-regions and ‘places’ in terms of “spheres of action, operation or investigation”. Humans with shamanic awareness do not treat their environment as contemporary humans tend to do, as inert backdrops for their ego-drama, but rather as nested, interacting field of sentience which one must relate to appropriately, with respect and receptivity.

“Places traditionally associated with the presence of nature spirits are not distributed equally across the landscape. They are concentrated in particular areas, such as hill tops,waterfalls, springs, streams and rivers, in and around various trees, in caves and grottoes … these fields must be embedded within larger fields, such as the fields of river systems and mountain chains… and ultimately Gaia and the entire solar system.”

Sacred places would be protected across generations, no one would want to upset the balance as they knew the consequences would ripple throughout the entire web of creation. This way of respect encompasses the animal kingdom and the hunters respect for the spirit of their life givers.

In such a cosmology, the entire universe consists of ‘vibratory organisms’ ranging from elementary particles to galaxies, with each organism participating in every other. Shamans, curanderos, develops a sensitivity, a sympathetic resonance with this vibrant sentient whole. The purpose of cultivating harmonious communication is to maximize the nurture and fertility within the ecosystem and community.

Communal Shamanic Rituals

Compared to the often solitary heroic image of the shaman that capitalist cultures have inherited from new age literature, it is common that shamanic practices operate within groups of close affiliation, extended families and tribes. A communal context supports ecstatic experiences, creates bonding, filial love, and communal cohesion. By communities collectively entering into catharsis and mystical union, differences and conflicts in the community are worked through.

In South America the complex interweaving of many spiritual lines from different cultures have come to mix and be re-formed within the overwhelming natural vitality of the Amazon. Such community traditions include Barquina, Unio de Vegetal and Santo Daime. These shamanic lineages combine elements of African cosmology and ritual with Amazonian plant traditions and the symbology of Christianity (itself a syncretic mythology). They are living traditions, evolving their doctrines (teachings) through songs and chants received in the shamanic ‘miracao’, the realm of visions, akashic memory and contact with spiritual intelligences.

In such lineages, the entire community, not just a solitary shaman, imbibes sacrament, dances, sings, chants, prays, channels spirits and heals. Mystical and transpersonal experiences are held in the ritual vessel through the consecration of prayers and the collective experience of the group. Different spiritual works are developed, some for healing, some for spiritual purification, some for jubilation and festivities.

In such shamanic ceremonies, end is joined with beginning. The shamanic dance connects to the first dances deep in mythic time. In the transcendence of history, one returns to cyclic time, creating a sympathetic bridge to all cultures and peoples across time and space. In the deep ecstatic trance people will dialog with or even physically incorporate spirits of ancestors, of the land, and of higher dimensions. They emerge into the group experience to share wisdom and healing energies. In the African Jurema and Cambondle cults it is common for people to personify and enact representations of the ecosystem, such as Yemanja, the ocean, or ‘Princesa Jurema’, the ‘princess’ of the Jurema tree imbibed in ceremonies.

These new lines of tradition indicate that ancient methods for collective shamanism can migrate and adapt to new conditions in order to work with the specific plants and energies of the bio-region.

Shamanism and Reason

The role of shamanism in the Western world diminished through complex social forces. In the Classic world the role of the shaman sometimes survived the development of agriculture and city-states in the form of gnostic mystery schools. Such groups preserved and cultivated ancient lines of Sumerian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Hebrew and Christian spiritual wisdom, but became dispersed and suppressed by the development and centralization of the Roman Christian Empire, with its vast mandate to standardize religious beliefs, and so the western world lost the intuitive, metaphoric and systemic perceptions of shamanic ecstasy.

The demands for social conformity under the militaristic and economic values of Empire lead to a ‘mono-phasic’ consciousness – a way of life that insisted upon just one limited perceptive mode; rationality, and an essentially materialistic orientation toward the natural world.

“Monophasic consciousness, most often embodied as the scientific method, disavows the validity of any knowledge accessed through transrational processes. Perceptual diversity is important for evolutionary competence and human adaptability. Already, without it, the monophasic consciousness of Western, developed nations has led to loss of cultural diversity and biodiversity.”
- Perceptual Diversity:Is Polyphasic Consciousness Necessary for Global Survival? By Tara W. Lumpkin

Because western civilization suffers from mono-phasic consciousness – the inflexible rigidity of a primitive and linear ‘reason’, which arrogantly exalts itself as a superior approach to existence – we have neglected the intuitive, metaphoric, integrative and non-linear capacities that bring balance to reason and allow a meaningful connection to the natural world and the imaginal realms.

As a counterbalance to the unprecedented split between mind and nature which was the Industrial Revolution, the art and prose of the Romantics inaugurated a quest to break out of the tyranny of ‘Newton’s sleep’. The psychologist Jung, influenced by Romantic and Gnostic lines, exhorted an enrichment of reason “with a knowledge of man’s psychic foundation”, the lower stories of our “species’ house”. Jung encouraged the holding of both reason and the primordial mind in consciousness simultaneously, so a new synthesis could emerge. His work opened the way for a myriad of inquiries into the mysteries of consciousness which has transformed the fields of psychology, ethnography and anthropology.

Establishing a living bridge between the primal and the modern may be the evolutionary task of our time.

Shamanism and Simulcra

The New Age movement represents the desire to reclaim full humanness but often falls into the entrapments of simulation. In seeking to cultivate a ‘shaman-ism’ we often fall into simulcra. In his critique of the modern age, Baudrillard claims that contemporary society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that the modern human experience is of a simulation of reality rather than reality itself.

‘Shamanism’ within the New Age is arguably a simulcra. It is a term invented by anthropologists to refer to the practices of spiritual healers and communal rites of passage in nature-orientated communities. By employed this singular umbrella term, anthropologists, ethnographers, and other Western scholars have simplified and exaggerated the universality of traditional cultures, who have their own names for their sacred practices.

Neoshamanism and ‘core shamanism’ are based on the idea that removing the cultural references and symbology reveals a core system of practice, which can be taught through commercial workshops and courses. This concept overlooks the unique influence of ancestral connection to place, and that symbols and metaphor are of essence to shamanic practices. The weave of symbols used in prayer, invocation and healing interconnect with the bio-region, community, ancestors and spiritual powers.

The symbols and metaphor of shamanic ritual have a powerful integrative potential because they express deep structures of relationships between the false dualism of inner and outer, mind and matter.

Shamanism and Colonialism

Alice Kehoe in her book Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical Thinking, asserts that New Age forms of Shamanism, misrepresent and ‘dilute’ genuine indigenous practices and may also reinforce racist ideas such as the Noble Savage. Many members of traditional, indigenous cultures and religions, such as Native American and First Nations activists, are suspicious of ‘neoshamanism’ and ‘plastic shamanism’, believing it to rely heavily on cultural appropriation and the commodification of their traditions.

Hobson, a Cherokee writer, coined the term ‘the whiteshaman movement’, criticising the trend of ‘white’ authors to assume the persona of Native American shamans in their writings, or else work as interpreters of Native American spirituality, and in doing so inadvertantly reinforce cultural stereotypes and distortions. Adding to this contemporary confusion is that ‘indigenous’ is a colonial concept, as are ‘aboriginal’, ‘native’, and ‘shamanism’.

A promising solution to escape being enmeshed in polarizing colonial terminology is the recognizing of the diversity of original languages and traditions, anchored in the experience of a community within its bio-region. All ancient traditions have arisen from an ancient and unique interconnection with the land and sky, and with the discipline of self-enquiry, a ‘philosophical’ enterprise that must integrate and incorporate all aspects of being, including those so surpressed in our culture, the mythic, symbolic, imaginal, intuitive and creative. And so it is to the land and skies, both inner and outer, that the people living within material technological cultures must look to revive their true being.

Bioregional Shamanic Gnosis

The practices of the shaman, the vegetalista, the kuna, the priest, are each distinct expressions of the experiences of a peoples journey through time and the innate mysteries of the natural world. For people without their own shamanic traditions, the interconnection with the earth and the education it gives exists here and now to be rekindled. Even in our fragmentary technological world, we are still part of ‘The Dreaming’. All creatures, organic and inorganic, human and non-human, live by the Dreamings that play through them. This earth-centered, animist approach to reclaiming full humanity has been called ‘bio-regional animism’ or ‘deep ecology’.

Bio-Regional Animism seeks to re-cultivates the sacred relationship of humans and the eco-systems they inhabit by recognizing the lessons taught by animist cultures worldwide, past and the present, and applying the animist process to our eco-systems. It spiritually relates our modern culture to the forest, rivers, mountains, animals, energies, and scientific principles as individuals with inherent worth and dignity. Knowing where your water and food comes from, social activities of local wildlife, and the medicinal value of indigenous plants, builds the foundation for relating to our ecosystem through ceremonies and meditations. This is achieved by discarding the dualism of modern society, and realizing there is only spirit.

Such an approach, that negates the dualistic concept of mind and matter, spiritual and physical, has been termed ‘co-essence’.

Co-Essence

Co-essence describes how the spiritual essence is shared and flows between beings and realms. Co-essence describes this experience of shared connection, symbiosis, the necessary and extensive interdependence, co-existence, of the Web of life. Co-essence recognizes that our essence is shared, that my essence is as much in you as in me.

Correlates to the concept of ‘co-essence are found in the pan-Mesoamerican beliefs of nagualismo and tonalismo, signifying the transformation of a person into an animal, and a person’s companion animal or destiny, which everyone is believed to possess. Such aspects of co-essence embody peoples ties to the earth, nature, and fate, as mediated by animals and bio-regions.

Co-essence is a body wisdom that is cultivated in many shamanic practices. By inducing altered states of consciousness through the body – prolonged dancing, singing, extreme heat or cold, plant psychedelics, hyper-ventilation – the gates of perception are opened, revealing the systemic co-essence of nature.

The cultivation of systemic perception and the experience of interconnectivity brings about a paradigm in health and living that is fundamentally ecological because we no longer regard nature as ‘other’. We feel, to use chaos physicist and evolutionary biologist Stuart Kauffman’s phrase, ‘At Home in the Universe’.

We come to feel ‘in’ the world rather than on it. We are brought down to our humblest bacterial roots and understand ourselves as channels of the elements in this creative, vivid and mysterious planetary process. We understand ourselves to be more humble than we may have thought, yet simultaneously more, through virtue of our fundamental interconnection with everything else.

This experience re-configures the ingrained and unquestioned mode of thinking of reality in terms of ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’, ‘mind’ and ‘matter’. The transpersonal experience confronts and calls into question these conventional categories with which we cut up and rationalize the flowing mystery of our experience within this world. There dawns an understanding that is much more supple, where the snake bites its tale, and the distinctions between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ become more dynamic and fluid.

We share and are connected in a greater movement we are creating together. Our thoughts are each others thoughts, a collective chorus of life, the unified thoughts of the uni-verse, the One Song. We are all part of each other. As the Huichol say “Todos unidos !” – All united.

After 8 years of integrated research and experiential learning on this topic, I wanted to write this article about the ancient South American shamanic tradition of Ayahuasca dieta. May this article demystify this beautiful practice, clearing up misconceptions and empowering informed relationships with the tradition.

Please do to add questions, differences of opinion, or additional information as you see fit, and it will most likely get integrated into this body of information as it gets passed along.

What is Vegetalismo and Dieta?

Dieta is an ancient traditional practice usually done by curanderos, or Ayahuasca healers (commonly referred to as ayahuasqeros or shamans), from the beginners in training to the experienced masters. It is a way that Ayahuasca has taught humans to develop relationships with certain other, non-psychedelic master healing plants of the Amazonian pharmacopia. Curanderos specializing in dieta are often called vegetalistas.

In a dieta, which may last between a week and 4 months, or in some cases longer, the dieter creates a clear, sacred space inside their body and immediate surroundings by eating only a few basic foods, having extremely limited social contact, and abstaining from all kinds of sex. This creates a private setting in which one can have an intimate and focused encounter with the plants.

The diet usually begins with an Ayahuasca ceremony at night, followed by the consumption of a special tea made from whichever master plant has been chosen for this dieta. This tea is usually drunk every morning for the first 1- 7 days. More Ayahuasca ceremonies are then commonly dispersed through the rest of the diet, a common one being on the last night.

This strict regimens of abstinence, combined with the injestion of the master plant and the insight and guidance of the ceremonies, has a wonderful effect of helping to create a deep and loving relationship with the spirits of these master plants, which can be beneficial in many profound ways.

Why Practice Dieta?

Of course, abstaining from most foods and having only the 4 main dieta foods can be incredibly purifying for a body which has been assaulted by food toxins, chemicals, allergens and the like for most of its life, although this should not be the only reason to do it, as there are other Ayahuasca compatible diets which are much healthier as a cleanse.

Traditionally, dieta has been practiced by those aspiring to become facilitators of Ayahuasca ceremonies, or “curanderos” – Ayahuasca healers. The spiritual alliance with the various master plants, created through many long dietas, is widely considered absolutely essential to developing the important qualities necessary to hold space for others in these ceremonies.

Still, many facilitators run these ceremonies without having practiced dieta at all. I am not necessarily saying that all of these people shouldn’t be doing so, as many years of experience with Ayahuasca alone counts for a lot too. Yet, it’s clear to me that those facilitators are really missing out on some important aspects of the work, and this can be quite problematic sometimes.

With that said, those not intending to run ceremonies still sometimes do dieta for its healing benefits alone! Despite its fallbacks as a health cleanse, the master plants are such powerful healers and teachers, that the experience can be very transformative and beneficial in the individual’s life, and in a lasting way at that!

Many people tend to do dieta just as a way of having a more extended Ayahuasca experience, packing their time with many ceremonies and deepening the effects of the Ayahuasca with the cleansing aspect of the diet.

However, to those people I would recommend another similar practice which does not involve the master plants, and allows a wider variety of vegetables and fruits. This “Ayahuasca diet” is commonly confused with dieta. It is simply, no salt, no refined sugar, no oil or hot spicy foods, no sex, and not too much stimulus or excitement. The foods can be fine tuned with great intention to maintain balance and optimum health.

Can dieta work without Ayahuasca?

Yes. Many people who, for whatever reason, have found that Ayahuasca is not for them, continue to practice dieta for the healing relationship with the master plants.

While Ayahuasca has the ability to hugely bless, assist, and illuminate the process on many levels, it is not necessary for a succesful diet. The insight and mental awareness that the ceremonies may bring to the relationship is helpful, but the interaction is still taking place on a subtle spirit level, wheather you are mentally seeing and understanding it or not.

Do I need a skilled shaman to facilitate my dieta?

For your first dieta, and especially if you don’t have a lot of experience with Ayahuasca, I would strongly recommend working with a skilled and trusted ayahuascero, and allowing them to facilitate the whole process for you.

Once you have some experience with Ayahuasca and are familliar with the best practices of how to make a ceremony and take good care of yourself while doing so, it is better to do the ceremonies alone. This emphasizes the solitude of dieta and gives you the space to learn through personal experience, how to hold the space yourself.

As a sidenote, I do not really recommend doing ceremonies alone outside of dieta until you are at the point of hosting them for others as well. There is really no reason to deprive yourself of a shaman’s important role. In my opinion, money issues are usually not a good reason.

However, even if you do your ceremonies in solitude and are able to make or obtain the Ayahuasca, you might want to make sure your master plant medicine comes from a curandero, as each plant has a very specific way of being prepared, and it also requires knowledge to be able to choose an appropriate plant.

In many cases, any shaman who is making your medicine will also want to host your diet, in order to chaperone your process and help make sure you don’t do anything stupid. At first, that might be greatly helpful as well, and it’s always interesting to watch how these curanderos work dieta.

Once you have done some considerable research about master plants for dieta, and learned the way to prepare the one that you choose for yourself, from a very informed place, I would say that, using this guide, you should be good to go doing dieta without another facilitator.

What are the dieta rules?

From shamanic lineage to lineage, and region to region, the rules of dieta tend to vary a little bit. Some take an extremely strict approach, and others bend some rules and are more laid back about certain things. There is so much conflicting information out there, and many strong opinions.

I have studied primarily along a stricter tradition, but have been informed by my discussions with a variety of other curanderos on the topic, and my continuous Internet research. The rules I present here are foundational to the tradition and are widely accepted.

There are three main foods that are allowed : fresh water fish with scales and teeth, green unripe plantain, and plain white rice. Absolutely no oils, seasonings, salt… etc. may be added. This is a no salt, no sugar of any kind, and very little flavour kind of diet.

There are some who believe you can have just a little bit of sugarless boiled root vegetables near the end of the dieta, but I do not support this and strongly advise against it. Still others support eating fruit during dieta – I believe that this is a dangerous misconception, based on confusion between Ayahuasca diet and dieta.

There are 5 teas that are allowed as well : lemon grass, lemon leaf, chujuhuasca, basil and cat’s claw. Chujuhuasca and cat’s claw also happen to be cancer treating plants.

No sex of any kind, including masturbation, is allowed, and so in that light it is discouraged to spend much time thinking sexy thoughts. Additionally, some stricter traditions do not permit any touching of other people for any reason.

Soap, shampoo and toothpaste are strictly prohibited. Also, better not to use any moisturizers, creams, cleansers, sunscreen, insect repellant, lip gloss, mouth wash, inhalers, body spray… etc. When absolutely necessary, a small amount of all natural disinfectant or itch treatment for bites can be allowed, in moderation.

Any vitamins or prescription drugs of any kind are definitely not allowed. If you have a condition which does not allow you to go without them for the period of a dieta, then you are not a candidate for dieta.

Very important during dieta is solitude and the time and space for rest and reflection. This is the rule that is most commonly bent or broken, as some people fully engage the world in many ways, working, teaching and socializing. Speaking from experience, I strongly advise against such activities while in this very special state.

The strictest form of dieta insists on absolutely no talking to anyone for any reason. This could be an expensive ideal, however, depending on the practicalities at hand. I have adapted this to no talking, except at meal times, when I will have practical interactions with others. A little talking can be fine, but out of respect to the plants, do not talk about the details of your ceremonies or insights with the master plants until the diet is over.

While it’s good to stay relaxed and centered, activities like walking, exercise, dance and yoga are encouraged. You have to do things that keep you from going insane with boredom. Reading, burning insense, practicing an instrument and all that sort of thing are great.

I once asked a curandero if it’s OK to listen to music. He replied that it’s fine, as long as you’re not doing it as a form of escapism. It’s important to stay present and remain focused on your personal journey with the plants, rather than mentally running away from stuff that might be coming up for you. With that being said, TV and movies are highly stimulating, and are therefore discouraged.

What are the consequences of breaking the rules?

Knowingly or ignorantly breaking the rules of dieta without properly ending your diet first (using a ritual which I will describe later) is a serious act of disrespect to Ayahuasca, and the master plant you are working with.

In the case of Ayahuasca, she may respond to this in a variety of ways, inside and out of the ceremonies, and this will depend on your existing relationship with the plants, and the nature and intent of how you broke the rule.

One thing that has been known to happen is a string of intense difficulties coming up in forthcoming ceremonies. Energy blockages and related issues could gather in your system. The medicine could withhold some of her healing benefits or powers. The possibilities are vast.

It would be logical to assume that this would be like a kind of punishment, but I think that is too simplistic of an explanation. Imagine cheating on your spouse during your honeymoon, in their plain view. The problems that could create between you in your ongoing relationship are complex and deeply regretful.

When it comes to the master plants, the consequences may vary from plant to plant. Each one is so unique in its own way and may respond differently. One thing that could happen is that the plant spirit may leave your presence and never return. Additionally, they could withhold their healing assistance, their teachings or their protection.

Other problems are also possible, but it’s very hard to predict ahead of time. The bottom line is, if you’re going to do dieta, do it right. And if you really can’t control yourself, it’s better to end the dieta early than to break the rules, especially those regarding sex and food.

How do I choose which plant to diet with?

There are so many wonderful healing plants in the Amazon and throughout the world, that it would seem easy to choose a powerful master plant for a dieta, and yet, the process is not as simple and obvious as it may look.

Dieta is an ancient tradition that originates not from shamans, but from Ayahuasca. She is the master of dieta, and it’s important to acknowledge that by only dieting with plants which she has specifically instructed you to work with, or which have become traditional dieta plants through her instructions to generations of ayahuasqueros.

For hundreds of years, Ayahuasca has been giving curanderos specific instructions on which plants to use under what circumstances and how to prepare them for dieta. Any good vegitalista should be always in the process of gathering this ancestral knowledge and learning from new experiences, so that they can properly help new dieters to choose their plants.

For this reason, it is best to ask the medicine which plants to work with, and failing any specific answers in your ceremonies, or if you are unsure if the authenticity of what you are getting in your journey (perhaps it’s fuzzy, unclear, or feels you may be imagining it), seek facilitation or advice from a skilled curandero.

The plants have asked me not to mention their names publically on the Internet, even for educational purposes but especially for buying or selling online, as this is a dangerous time for Amazonian plant medicine. Therefore, I cannot give you any more information here.

For how long, and when should I diet?

As mentioned earlier, dietas usually range between one week and 4 months. I know of some who do extremely long ones of a year in length, but that to me seems very extreme and unnecessary, and must require some major rule bending. I will need to research it more.

It’s best to do dietas of one week, two weeks, but not three weeks, a month, two months, three months, or four months. So for example, you would not do 2 and a half months – it would be either 2 or 3. A dieta is like a cycle, so as they get longer, the cycle that you’re following gets bigger.

If at all possible, it’s better to follow the moon cycles to represent your cycle for 2 week diets or longer. Try to start either on a new moon or a full moon, and then of course finish on the same moon.

For some reason, Bolivian shamans tend to follow calendar months, while Peruvians follow the moon, in perfect weeks of 7 days. I encourage moon awareness, but depending on your flow you may find that the calendar month works better. Many people use the calendar so it tunes you in with a collective consciousness. Sometimes you can use both!

If at some point during your dieta you have an accident or become quite sick, or if there is some emergency or you are for some reason required to go to the doctor, break your diet immediately! Do not go to the doctor while dieting, and don’t try to fight off a sickness either – your body will not do well. In that case, timing goes out the window.

For your first dieta, I do recommend a week. It can be harder than you expect, and it’s good to ease gently into the process. Then, slowly graduate to longer and longer ones from there. Another option is to start with a week, and when it’s done you may continue on to a second week if you still feel you can.

A week long diet is a beneficial encounter with the master plant, but if you do two weeks with your Ayahuasca ceremonies only at the beginning and ending (not during the two weeks) the spirit of that plant will be with you for the rest of your life, helping you along the way. This is an enormous gift of healing, protection and assistance.

In a dieta of 1-3 months, I recommend leaving those first two weeks without ceremonies, and beginning your them after that special period of total intimacy with the master plant, as often as you wish.

Once three months has passed, it is said that you will need to begin with a new master plant, as the cycle has completely worked itself out by that point. A four month diet really is very unhealthy, so it’s recommended that you only do this perhaps once, or maybe twice in a lifetime.

Ayahuasca really appreciates slow but steady, consistent and dilligent effort. So if you are on a path with dieta and Ayahuasca, it is recommended that you always do one diet per year. You do not need to do more than that – in fact, it’s possible that it could have a harmful effect on your psyche, as one is a lot to integrate in a year, especially a longer one.

How about dieting with others?

It is fine to do dieta with other dieters, and in some ways, this can strengthen the process for all involved. It’s a little less important to avoid talking with other dieters too. However, it’s advisable to make sure you have a lot of privacy and time alone, as intense emotions can erupt and you do not want to pass these energies between you.

Can I diet outside of South America?

Of course, the tradition of Ayahuasca dieta did originate in South America, making it a very integrated and practically effortless place to arrange a dieta. The foods, conditions and lifestyle are native to this place, so dieta feels very natural here. The heat and the jungle are relaxing and purifying, you can easily access all the plants, and you can recieve quite an intuitive download from the land.

However, if you are not native to South America, it would be wise to consider the ecological footprint of your plane ride and the immense amount of unsustainable fossil fuels this requires. I have heard that one plane trip across the states makes the same amount of emissions as a lifetime of a family car in regular use.

The plantain would have to be imported by plane to arrive in your country, but I would consider this footprint to be less harmful than a two-way trip for yourself.

If you are not from South America but would like to diet once a year, I would say work in your native country until you’re ready for a really long, super special dieta in South America that will foster memories and learning to fuel you for many more years without returning.

Make contacts, have things mailed to you, and set yourself up from where you are as best as you can. If you’re lucky, the medicine may even direct you to work with a master plant native to your region – an innovation that is starting to crop up as Ayahuasca now travels the world.

If Ayahuasca is illegal in your country, you may choose to work without it while there.

Are there any special rituals involved?

There are many special rituals associated with dieta, although most of them are unique to the various shamanic groups and lineages. There are special songs and blessings for the beginning and end of the diet and these vary from group to group. There is only one ritual that I have encountered which seems to be universal.

This one is very important, as it’s the way to properly break your diet. The morning after your last night of dieta, wake up bright and early and fix yourself a plate with a nickel’s sized bit of salt and of sugar, as well as a lime cut in half and a red hot pepper. Eat them all up and then have a little bath in a natural body of water.

This ritual is the perfect way to tell the plants that you are finished, and it also ritually reintroduces you to the four corners of taste. This natural bath could be thought of as a baptism in the waters of the Earth, celebrating this succesful work, as a kind of rebirth.

It’s also common to have a special feast following the breaking of the diet, although speaking from experience, it is very wise to exercise moderation and slowly reintroduce yourself to your normal lifestyle.

What if I want to improve on aspects of the tradition which seem locational or outdated?

Of course, the purpose of tradition is not to become stale or stagnated throughout time, due to the problem of following the letter of the law, rather than the spirit of it. Keep in mind, however, that the plant traditions of south america do have a special ability to stay fresh and alive, as the plants themselves are always still living and actively engaged with the work.

A tradition based on words spoken by a master, and written down, thousands of years ago, has more potential to be misunderstood today than one based on an active and current relationship with plants who have essentially not changed in all this time and are still thriving in their work with humans.

Still, most curanderos have a knowledge base which is a combination and synergy between fresh new understandings based on plant interactions, and information which has been passed down by generations upon generations of humans, based on human-plant relationships of the past. So while the traditions stays fresh, one must always maintain awareness of possible human error.

I do however issue a very strong warning to anyone considering changing or altering the tradition of dieta in some way. I have been blown away by the arrogance of some of the most well meaning and conscious individuals whom I have spoken to on this subject. People somehow seem to believe themselves to know far better than some master shamans, how dieta should be conducted, without much experience, knowledge, or lets face it, wisdom on the matter.

Anyone I have spoken to who has, to me, seemed obviously misguided in their assertions that dieta should be altered in one way or another, have been very well intentioned, good people, who in many ways I have great respect for. So, please, take the time to deeply humble yourself before acting on your careful considerations about some possible slight modifications to the dieta.

Even if it is a very small modification that you would propose, I would say wait until you have completed at least 4 successful diets in the traditional way, of at least 4 weeks in length before putting this into practice. The most common mistake is believing yourself to have reverse engineered the tradition without having the experience practicing it to back that up.

Handy Tips?

If you are in a place where there are lots of mosquitoes, I highly recommend using medicinal alcohol as a way of disinfecting and numbing the itch from their horrible bites. This is allowable during dieta and is highly recommended, as the alcohol evaporates quickly right off the skin.

I find that plantain tastes really good when cut up into chips and fried (without oil of course) on the frying pan. With some lemon grass tea, this is something I would enjoy outside of dieta as a really nice light snack.

If you can get a whole, or partial plant with the leaves, of your master plant that you are dieting with, it is wonderful to have it there with you during your time in solitude, to connect with how the plant looks, feels and smells, and use it to help you enhance the relationship with its more subtle spirit form.

If you are in the native land where your master plant ally is from, you could also purchase one at the market to plant yourself in a special ritual, as a demonstration of your love.

If you have lemon grass, chujuhuasca, or other of the allowable teas, it can be very nice to boil your rice in them for some additional flavour. Sometimes, anything to make the rice taste a little more interesting can make a world of difference.

Addendum

This article is a work in progress, and I hope to improve on it greatly in the coming years. I welcome constructive contributions of all kinds and give thanks that there is still such an untapped resource of information out there for me to keep exploring, even just within my closest medicine allies.

“Kambô circulates in the heart. Our shaman said that when we take Kambô it makes the heart move accurately, so that things flow, bringing good things to the person. It is as if there was a cloud on the person, preventing the good things to come, then, when it takes the Kambô; it comes a ‘green light’ which opens its ways, making things easier”

There is a Kaxinawá legend that tells that the indians of the village were very ill and the Shaman Kampu had done everything that was possible to cure them. All medicinal herbs known were used, but none helped his people’s agony. Kampu then entered the forest and under the effect of Ayahuasca, received the visit of the great God. He brought in His hands a frog, from which He took a white secretion, and taught how to apply. Returning to the tribe and following the guidelines that he had received the Shaman Kampu was able to cure his brothers Indians. After his death, the spirit of Kampu has started living in the frog and the Indians began to use its secretion to stay active and healthy.

The green frog – Phyllomedusa bicolor, called a Kambô frog, is the largest species of the genus of the family Hylidae, found in southern Amazon and throughout the territory of Acre, also being found in almost all the Amazon countries, as the Guyana, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. By extension, Kambô is also the name of this frog resin Kambô frog and its medical application: “We will take Kambô.”

This resin contains peptides substances (dermorfine and deltorfine ) that are analgesic and that strengthens the immune system provoking the destruction of pathogenic microorganisms. The substances in the frog secretion also have antibiotic properties, and strengthen the immune system through the body’s production of antibodies against the poison, also showing great power in the treatment of Parkinson, AIDS, cancer, depression and other diseases. The Deltorfine and Dermorfine today are synthetically produced by pharmaceutical laboratories .

There is also, due to its purgative effect, an obvious process of detoxification of the liver (usually one vomits up bitter bile) of intestine (through evacuations) and of the entire digestive system. The katukina also use it as the antidote in case of snake bite, medicine for many illness, and as a tonic.

But to the native, the main cause for taking Kambô is to fight ‘panema’. ‘panema’ means sadness, lack of luck, irritation: ‘bad aura’ – as someone once well translated. The person is with “panema” when nothing goes right and nothing is good. The basic purpose of Kambô is ‘taking off the panema’ in order to go hunting and to attract women.

And that, however difficult it is to the Western thought to accept, is the main purpose of Kambô: it establishes a spiritual ‘management chock’ in the life of people, a ‘chakra realignment’, a mark for organic and psychological reorganization, from which the person changes attitude and change their future patterns of health.

Out of the 53 Brazilian indigenous groups that used to take the vaccine, today there are only 13. Three of them are big, with reserves in the region of Alto Jurua: The Kaxinawás, the Ashaninkas and Katukinas. There are variations in the rituals and names given to the green frog. The Katukina, however, has more affinity with the Kambô, taking his poison more often than other ethnic groups and have their identity bonded directly by the practice.

The floral therapist and acupuncturist, Sonia Maria Valencia Menezes is a great deal responsible for the dissemination of the Katukina procedures with Kambô, maintaining an office in Sao Paulo together with the tribe – to administer applications – and promoting treatment travels to the Indian reserve in Alto Juruá.

A few years ago, a caboclo use of Kambô arrived, rubber latex extractors from Acre learned this science with the Indians and began to implement Kambô in white people, in the cities of Cruzeiro do Sul and Rio Branco. Their headman was Francisco Gomes (or Shiban) from Cruzeiro do Sul, which lived together with the Indians for years and learned the art of Kambô. Genildo Gomes, son of Francisco Gomes, continued his work of distributing Kambô and created, in 2002, the Juruá´s Association for Extractivist Resources and Alternative Medicine, AJUREMA, main irradiation center for Kambô.

Although it is difficult to find (they get mixed with the leaves), the Kambô frogs can eventually be found near the igarapés, when they sing announcing the rain. The Indians generally do the ‘harvest’ at dawn, also singing. In some traditions, only the shaman ‘crops’ the frog and in others they all hear its call at night. The frogs are extremely poisonous and do not react when captured. Not even move, as if not having predators. Apparently, they are hard to swallow – the snakes, specimens almost always blind, oriented by the heat of prey, spit them out, desperately, when they bite them. The technique for extracting the poison is as old as it is simple. They tie the animal on its feet, shaping an “X” and spit him up three to four times, to irritate it. Secretion released, you need only to scratch it with a piece of wood. The secretion (seems foam) crystallizes up quickly and can be used at any time.

There is no secret in Kambô application: with a piece of ember vine, one burns the arm several times, opening small holes in the skin (called points). The application of the resin diluted in water is carried over the skin and moves quickly to the entire body by the lymphatic vessels.

The amount of points (usually in odd number) through which the poison will be introduced (with a wood spatula), depends on physical stature, the number of times that has already used Kambô, the reason for the application and assessment of the applicator, based on their knowledge.

There are different philosophies between applicators, particularly among katukina and caboclo´s that use it in cities. For caboclos, there are counter-indications for pregnant women, nursing mothers or menstruating ladies, once it can cause hemorrhage due to dilation of blood vessels, as well as children less than ten years and older people with heart problems and high pressure. For Katukina, there is no such restriction and children begin to take Kambô from the age two, just after the period of breastfeeding. The Katukina take up to 100 points in a single application and apply at different times of the year, Throughout their whole life.

In the caboclo use, the basic treatment is three doses, at intervals of time that depend on the development level of the person with Kambô. The first treatment is three months, are three increasing doses (e.g. 5, 7 and 9 points), within 28 days, preferably of the new moons and last quarter.

Then, after at least six months from the last application of the first treatment, you can make one second, now every 15 days, with minor increasing doses(for example: 3, 5 and 7). They also make treatments for 7 days (at any moon other than the full moon) and for 3 days, combined with dietary changes (no solids or salt) and the use of Ayahuasca. The important thing is that the maximum interval between the two applications is a moon, 28 days. “If it takes more time than that between a dose and another, the Kambô will have to work all it had worked before again.”

According to David de Paula Nunes, son of a rubber latex extractor and one the main Amazon therapists, there is no obligation in taking it for three consecutive times and warns: “The Kambô is a vaccine and as such should not be used regularly in low dosages so that the body does not get used to the substances and lose their effect”.

Men generally apply in the arms or the chest. Women implement the points on the leg. In the case of Katukina, in the front of the leg. The caboclos usually, for aesthetic reasons, apply in the side of leg. For the Indians, the mark of the points on the skin is a reason of pride and should not be hidden or put on the back of the body.

Another interesting difference: both Katukina and caboclos require being on diet without solids or salt for at least 12 hours. But while the Indians ingest a large quantity (3 to 5 liters) of corn caiçuma during the night, before taking Kambô, the caboclos prescribe only 2 liters of pure water a few minutes before application.

The reaction of the vaccine lasts five minutes. In that time, the heart fires off, the blood flows accelerated through the veins, blood pressure rises or falls a lot, the person gets dizzy or nauseous. Some people see all white, as if the world were covered by a diffuse fog, or fall on the floor estrenghtlessly. There are also many reports of feeling an electrical current through the skin itching the body. Many users swell, appearing to be similar to a frog. Then, suddenly, the body reacts to the sickness and put everything out. Strong vomit and diarrhea are the most common responses. Only then, little by little, the senses are back to normal. The person feels light, clean, willing, in a good mood. After 30 minutes of application, the person is fit for their normal activities.

My personal experience indicates that water plays a key role in the whole process, not only its ingestion by the patient but also in the dilution of the poison. It seems that a higher number of points in very diluted solutions (homeopathic perspective) is more effective (and with less chance of overdosing) than applications with fewer points and more secretion.

Water is still prescribed for showering after the effects diminishes, not only to be clean from the excesses caused by the sickness (sweat, vomiting, feces) but also, in the symbolic sense, as a complement of Kambô process of cure.

The researchers Edilene Coffaci de Lima (UFPR) and Beatriz Caiuby Labate (UNICAMP) study the spread of Kambô in urban centre, examining, in particular, the discourse of these various applicators (Indians, rubber latex extractors, holistic therapists and doctors) have been preparing on the use of the frog’s secretion. To them, “words are commuting; sometimes lean to a spiritualist explanation, sometimes to a scientific or medical interpretation of the diseases”. It goes from the universal panacea (the cure for all illness) to placebo (a cure through psychological induction). And often these oscillations hide some simplifications. The word ‘panema’, for example, is re-interpreted as ‘depression’ by urban therapists. Or yet a negative energy capable of generating a broad spectrum of diseases.

Moreover, the researchers believe that the production and commercialization of substances take away from the Kambô´s application its most impressive effect. That medicine of science is inseparable from the medicine of the soul (LIMA & LABATE, 2007).

International scientific research, on the pharmaceutical and chemical areas, are being made on the properties of Kambô since the 80´s. Italian, French and Israelis researchers already entered with a request for the patent of dermorfine application. More recently, the University of Kentucky (USA) is searching (and patenting) deltorfine in collaboration with pharmaceutical company Zymogenetics. Several international laboratories are already interested in the venom of the Kambô to develop a drug that can lead to the cure of cancer.

In 2003, some katukina of Cruzeiro do Sul sought the Board of Genetic Heritage Management (CGEN) to denounce the misuse of Kambô. Asked for a solution against the use of Kambô by urban people; they were concerned, too, about their intellectual rights in the case of drugs derived from the substance. It is worth to remember that a patent can take many years until come to eventually turn into a remedy.

On April 29, 2004, the National Sanitary Surveillance Agency (ANVISA) prohibited any advertising of medicinal and therapeutic virtues of Kambô. The Minister Marina Silva decided to treat this as a model case. In order to do so, she appointed a working group of the Ministry of Environment for a joint action. The group, which has been gathering since 2004, brings together representatives of indigenous people, anthropologists, indigenists, herpetologists (biologists who study frogs), molecular biologists and physicians.

But the Kambô is, as we have seen, a complex a slippery object, irreducible to the various scientific discourses (clinical, alternative, pharmacy-chemical, anthropological and so on) and will hardly be regulated or reduced without first redefining the prospects in which it is described up to the moment. When one talks about Kambô and its definition, some are concerned about the forest management of the frog, other chemical patents, others with therapeutic possibilities of its application, but for the Indians, the explanation is much simpler: the Kambô is the spirit of Pajé Kampu accomplishing its mission to protect the health of forest defenders .

Eagle’s Wing

The Magical Art of the Shipibo People of the Upper Amazon

Underlying the intricate geometric patterns of great complexity displayed in the art of the Shipibo people is a concept of an all pervading magical reality which can challenge the Western linguistic heritage and rational mind.

These patterns are more than an expression of the one-ness of creation, the inter-changeability of light and sound, the union or fusion of perceived opposites, it is an ongoing dialogue or communion with the spiritual world and powers of the Rainforest. The visionary art of the Shipibo brings this paradigm into a physical form. The Ethnologist Angelika Gebhart-Sayer, calls this “visual music”.

The Shipibo are one of the largest ethnic groups in the Peruvian Amazon. These ethnic groups each have their own languages, traditions and culture. The Shipibo which currently number about 20,000 are spread out in communities through the Pucallpa / Ucayali river region. They are highly regarded in the Amazon as being masters of Ayahuasca, and many aspiring shamans and Ayahuasqueros from the region study with the Shipibo to learn their language, chants, and plant medicine knowledge.

All the textile painting, embroidery, and artisan craft is carried out by the women. From a young age the Shipibo females are initiated by their mothers and grandmothers into this practice. Teresa a Shipiba who works with us on our Amazon Retreats tells that “when I was a young girl, my mother squeezed drops of the Piripiri (a species of Cyperus sp.) berries into my eyes so that I would have the vision for the designs; this is only done once and lasts a lifetime”.

The intricate Shipibo designs have their origin in the non-manifest and ineffable world in the spirit of the Rainforest and all who live there. The designs are a representation of the Cosmic Serpent, the Anaconda, the great Mother, creator of the universe called Ronin Kene. For the Shipibo the skin of Ronin Kene has a radiating, electrifying vibration of light, colour, sound, movement and is the embodiment of all possible patterns and designs past, present, and future. The designs that the Shipibo paint are channels or conduits for this multi-sensorial vibrational fusion of form, light and sound. Although in our cultural paradigm we perceive that the geometric patterns are bound within the border of the textile or ceramic vessel, to the Shipibo the patterns extend far beyond these borders and permeate the entire world.

One of the challenges for the Western mind is to acknowledge the relationship between the Shipibo designs and music. For the Shipibo can “listen” to a song or chant by looking at the designs, and inversely paint a pattern by listening to a song or music.

As an astonishing demonstration of this I witnessed two Shipiba paint a large ceremonial ceramic pot known as a Mahuetá. The pot was nearly five feet high and had a diameter of about three feet, each of the Shipiba couldn’t see what the other was painting, yet both were whistling the same song, and when they had finished both sides of the complex geometric pattern were identical and matched each side perfectly.

The Shipibo designs are traditionally carried out on natural un-dyed cotton (which they often grow themselves) or on cotton dyed in mahogany bark (usually three or four times) which gives the distinctive brown colour. They paint either using a pointed piece of chonta (bamboo) or an iron nail with the juice of the crushed Huito (Genipa americana) berry fruits which turns into a blue- brown-black dye once exposed to air.

Each of the designs are unique, even the very small pieces, and they cannot be commercially or mass produced. In Lima I met with a woman who had set up a government funded community project which amongst other matters established a collective for the Shipibo to sell their artisan work and paintings. She tells that a major USA corporation (Pier 1 Imports), enamoured by these designs ordered via the project twenty thousand textiles with the same design, this order could never be fulfilled, the Shipibo could simply not comprehend the concept of replicating identical designs.

The Shipibo believe that our state of health (which includes physical and psychological) is dependent on the balanced union between mind, spirit and body. If an imbalance in this occurs such as through emotions of envy, hate, anger, this will generate a negative effect on the health of that person. The shaman will re-establish the balance by chanting the icaros which are the geometric patterns of harmony made manifest in sound into the body of the person. The shaman in effect transforms the visual code into an acoustic code.

A key element in this magical dialogue with the energy which permeates creation and is embedded in the Shipibo designs is the work with ayahuasca by the Shipibo shamans or muraya. In the deep ayahuasca trance, the ayahuasca reveals to the shaman the luminous geometric patterns of energy. These filaments drift towards the mouth of the shaman where it metamorphoses into a chant or icaro. The icaro is a conduit for the patterns of creation which then permeate the body of the shaman’s patient bringing harmony in the form of the geometric patterns which re-balances the patient’s body. The vocal range of the Shipibo shaman’s when they chant the icaros is astonishing, they can range from the highest falsetto one moment to a sound which resembles a thumping pile driver, and then to a gentle soothing melodic lullaby. Speaking personally of my experience with this, is a feeling that every cell in my body is floating and embraced in a nurturing all-encompassing vibration, even the air around me is vibrating in acoustic resonance with the icaro of the maestro. The shaman knows when the healing is complete as the design is clearly distinct in the patient’s body. It make take a few sessions to complete this, and when completed the geometric healing designs are embedded in the patient’s body, this is called an Arkana. This internal patterning is deemed to be permanent and to protect a person’s spirit.

Angelika Gebhart-Sayer, Professor of Ethnology, University of Marburg writes that “Essentially, Shipibo-Conibo therapy is a matter of visionary design application in connection with aura restoration, the shaman heals his patient through the application of a visionary design, every person feels spiritually permeated and saturated with designs. The shaman heals his patient through the application of the song-design, which saturates the patients’ body and is believed to untangle distorted physical and psycho-spiritual energies, restoring harmony to the somatic, psychic and spiritual systems of the patient. The designs are permanent and remain with a person’s spirit even after death.”.

Whilst it is not easy for Westerner’s to enter and engage with the world view of the Shipibo which has been developed far away from our linguistic structures and psychological models, there is an underlying sophisticated and complex symbolic language embedded in these geometric patterns. The main figures in the Shipibo designs are the square, the rhombus, the octagon, and the cross. The symmetry of the patterns emanating from the centre (which is our world) is a representation of the outer and inner worlds, a map of the cosmos. The cross represents the Southern Cross constellation which dominates the night sky and divides the cosmos into four quadrants, the intersection of the arms of the cross is the centre of the universe, and becomes the cosmic cross. The cosmic cross represents the eternal spirit of a person and the union of the masculine and feminine principles the very cycle of life and death which reminds us of the great act of procreation of not only the universe, but also of humanity, and our individual selves.

The smaller flowing patterns within the geometric forms are the radiating power of the Cosmic Serpent which turns this way and that, betwixt and between constantly creating the universe as it moves. The circles are often a direct representation of the Cosmic Anaconda, and within the circle itself is the central point of creation.

In the Western tradition, from the Pythagoreans, and Plato through the Renaissance music was used to heal the body and to elevate the soul. It was also believed that earthly music was no more than a faint echo of the universal ‘harmony of the spheres’. This view of the harmony of the universe was held both by artists and scientists until the mechanistic universe of Newton.

Joseph Campbell the foremost scholar of mythology suggests that there is a universe of harmonic vibrations which the human collective unconscious has always been in communion with. Our beings beat to the ancient rhythms of the cosmos. The traditional ways of the Shipibo and other indigenous peoples still reflect the primal rhythm, and their perception of the universal forces made physical is truly a communion with the infinite.

Article Source: Communion With The Infinite – The Visual Music of the Shipibo tribe of the Amazon

Most indigenous Amazonian populations say they learned how to combine Ayahuasca directly from the plants and plant spirits as received instruction. For many westerners such an assertion is completely beyond their familiar paradigm and experience.

Some modern researchers have therefore appealed to blind chance, ‘coincidence’. Natural selection. Trial and error. An explanation that the scientific mind finds credible, and yet there is something improbable and lazy about the idea, unless factors were at work which raised the odds of the magical medicines discovery…

PARALLEL USE AND CONVERGENCE THEORY

One often touted inaccuracy about Ayahuasca is that both plants have to be combined for psycho-activity. In fact, banisteriopsis caapi is a powerful shamanistic plant teacher in its own right. Many tribes drink the vine on its own.

The vine has been used as a kind of ‘divinator’ for other plant medicines for a long time because it allows the person injesting to get a kind of deep readout of the property of a plant taken in combination with vine.

The Rubiaceae family has many medicinal plants, and perhaps Chacruna may have already been taken medicinally. There are obviously many plants that the indigenous people consume as medicines that are not evidently psychoactive. And many of these plants also have a history of being used within the context of Yage (banisteriopsis caapi) based potions.

There is a medicinal employment of a plant closely related to Psychotria Viridis, called Psychotria Ipecacuanha – i-pe-kaa-guéne, which is said to mean ‘road-side sick-making plant.’ It is used as a treatment for “bloody flux” – dysentery. There is also a Psychotria called Psychotria Emetica – guess what that does.

There is another Psychotria, ‘Sampakatishi’, the leaf juice is squeezed into the eyes for a sharpening of the senses that aids in hunting, and also it is used as a treatment for migraine.

To summarise this idea : Psychotria Viridis was employed as a purgative and intestinal cleanser… the medicinal uses of P.Viridis and Caapi may have been occurring parallel, then at some point their paths crossed. (As for Diplopterys Cabrerana, another primary Ayahuasca plant, is a liana similar in appearance to Banisteriopsis Caapi. It is likely plants of similar taxonomic appearance were reasonably assumed to have similar properties.)

SLOW METABOLISERS OF MAOI/LOW MAO-A PHENOTYPE THEORY

Here is another theory. It occurs to me that physiologically westerners are greatly different from the early inhabitants of the rainforest – in height, fat, and probably even vary with the basic processes of digestion and metabolism, because they had such a very different way of life, a completely different diet.

Is it possible that the early inhabitants, since they did not have a fermented/aged protein-rich diet, had not evolved a powerful MAO-A response ? And that consumption of psychotria, perhaps originally as an amoebic dysentery cure, could have induced some kind of mild psycho-activity in such sensitive beings with very ‘acute’ awareness (which was needed as hunters, gatherers and warriors within such an environment). ?

It is known that westerners have trouble getting strong entheogenic effects from the tryptamine snuffs such as virola and cebil without using very powerful basification and large doses. Similarly the amount of morning glory seeds consumed in traditional sessions are of an order of magnitude less than what Westerners seem to require for any psycho-activity. Could it be that the early forest dwellers were more sensitive to tryptamines because of their way of life as well as lacking a powerful MAO to break down environmental tryptamines ?

…what we think of as very grass roots tribes descended from civilisations such as the Inca or Tirona – had common roots where such knowledge was already established. The true gold of El Dorado was no metal…

Whilst a discovery like Ayahuasca may have occured against astronomical odds in an isolated context, such knowledge may have spread quickly. Tribes connect with each other through trade, through marriage, through war. A lot of tribes that are described as isolated were actually fugitives from the conquests… what we think of as very grass roots tribes descended from civilisations such as the Inca or Tirona – had common roots where such knowledge was already established. The true gold of El Dorado was no metal…

JAGUAR THEORY

On an aesthetic level this is a cute theory : Humans learnt the use of the Vine from the Jaguar.

Jaguar’s chew the leaves of banisteriopsis caapi, the indians believe, to improve its sensitivity for hunting, and the indigenous people took it originally for the same reason. It seems from an evolutionary perspective all sacred medicines have selective advantages in their use, as anti-parasitic, immune-boosting, or increasing ones capacity to acquire more food.

RESONANT INFORMATION THEORY

And now to return to the indigenous assertion that the plants themselves, or spiritual being associated with the plants, revealed the Great Medicine.

It has to be pointed out that there are many variations of Ayahuasca origin myths, varying from tribe to tribe. They may point to an underlying truth, that of an ultimately spiritual ordinance, but the great variety of myth must necessarily lead us out of a singular literalistic view. Its a human tendency to generate narratives and imaginings when the truth is lost in primordial time.

However it is a modern human tendency to dismiss the exquisitely sensitive capacities of our being, to sense the qualities of plants, either in very small quantities, or even through smell or proximity.

In Forest of Visions: Ayahuasca, Amazonian Spirituality, and the Santo Daime Tradition, Stephen Larsen writes:

“I met with one of the jungle pharmacists, a woman who makes potent preparations from indigenous wild plants. In an amazing conversation hampered by my limited Portuguese, I learned how elemental spirits of the rain forest appeared to her, sometimes even before the physical plant was discovered, and helped her understand the pharmaceutical uses of their plant. “Yes, but do they really work?” I heard myself asking, half hating myself for the sceptic’s question. “Yes,” she said simply, “they work.” Here in the jungle, I realized, there is not much room for placebos or double-blind studies — or for remedies that don’t work! Life seems precarious and precious. Healers need to heal well.”

We see throughout the animal communities that monkeys, bears, hedgehogs, peccaries, and birds including eagles, avail themselves of the naturally occurring medicinal plants surrounding them. How do animals know what to munch on ? They have no written pharmacopoeia, or oral traditions. Acquired and learned behaviours are certainly possible, but this does not explain the broad instances of animals using medicinal plants of their bio-regions.

How does the jaguar know about Ayahuasca ? Perhaps they quite simply feel it. And if they can tune into these plants through deep intuition/instinct, then humans in can as well.

How do they know that a plant is good for them ? How does the jaguar know about Ayahuasca ? Perhaps they quite simply feel it. And if they simply feel it, if they tune into these plants through deep intuition/instinct, then humans in bio-centric cultures certainly can as well.

The question is how is such ‘intuition’ possible ?Westerners have inherited a concept of self or mind from a Cartesian framework, which (theoretically and often experientially) severs the mind from body, body and mind from its greater ecological milieu. Consciousness and matter, mind and body, subject and object, process and substance always go together, as a unity, a non-dual duality, which for the indigenous cultures of the world is a lived experience needing no special distinction.

We participate in nature’s process, and are participated within our selves by nature. Alfred North Whitehead’s world is filled with “organisms” from elementary particles to human beings and galaxies. An organism is a focus of unification, a holon (in Arthur Koestler’s language) in which other organisms are nested in various hyper-cycles that constitute and define it, support and maintain it.

Just as the body is a liquid-crystalline continuum which registers our experiences and allows us to then act upon our experiences, with spontaneous choice, Laszlo (1995,1996) has proposed that the universe is a quantum holographic memory-medium, one with the experiences of every being, which in turn feeds back on it. In this way, each being exists due to the influences of the quantum holographic sea of information. This is all another way of saying ‘as above, so below‘.

Dr Mae-Wan Ho :

“It is truly a creative universe in that the future is not pre-ordained but spontaneously and freely made by every being, from elementary particles to galaxies, from microbes to the giant redwood trees, all mutually entangled in a universal wave-function that never collapses, but like a constantly changing cosmic consciousness, maintains and informs the universal whole”

If the universe of all beings co-evolves in a mutually correlated fashion, then certainly Gaia may be understood as a super-organism within which communication and coherence (synchronic order) can be established in ecological relationships. Synergies, symbiosis, and human-plant partnerships become established, as the web of life evolves. There is a self-organising play at work, beyond natural-selection and blind coincidence.

Certainly, many people working with Ayahuasca rediscover sensitivity toward the realm of nature, as if the phantom self had come down from its ivory tower to finally touch the earth, the real. And what the real is, has levels of organisation beyond what we may previously have thought possible. In the collapse of the mundane, cerebro-tonic left-brain dogmas, a new, enchanting and mysterious aspect to the world is revealed, as Thomas Berry put it, “The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects”.

Further reading

Sachahambi

(With thanks to Sachahambi for her balance in this area.)

Ayahuasca: An Ethnopharmacologic History
by Dennis J. McKenna, Ph.D.

IS THERE PURPOSE IN NATURE
Mae-Wan Ho

http://www.cts.cuni.cz/conf98/ho.htm