All Kinds of Magic: One Man's Search for Meaning Across the Material World (33 page)

At the neck of a small valley stood the farmhouse which would be our home for the next few days. Its owners, explained Agata, rented out the space for yoga retreats, five rhythms dancing and occasionally shamanic workshops such as ours. Spain’s rural economy, like many in Europe, has faced massive decline in recent years and it seemed fitting that certain of its inhabitants should seek to fill the gaps like this. A traditional
finca
, it had whitewashed walls, a red-tiled roof and two mongrel puppies that yapped at our arrival.

At the house Agata showed me to a large, low-lit room, with a woodburning stove in one corner. Fifteen or twenty sleeping mats had already been laid out, and those who had arrived were arranging their sleeping bags, pillows and blankets for the night ahead.

I claimed one, lay down and watched the people arriving. Catalans mostly, but there was one girl from Austria and a lawyer from Bern. All of us from different walks of life, some hippies, some business people, all of us with different clothes and aspirations. None of us, in any case, were the people we thought we were. As we would soon discover, the structures we put our faith in were as ephemeral as straw.

The shaman arrived at about 8 p.m. He was an Ecuadorian, a Shuar tribesman from the foothills of the Andes, with feathered white hair which hung down across his back. Physically he was a small man, with a lean bone structure and unobtrusive clothes. He looked around the room thoughtfully before seating himself behind the altar. He took a series of objects from his bag.

First impressions are always difficult, but my immediate sense was that he shared with Juan’s father a hard-earned equanimity. For the Shuar, the shaman is an
uwishin
– meaning ‘one who knows the secrets’. Their journey towards knowledge involves astonishing hardship and deprivation, a mental training we can only dream of.

Even though he was fifty-two years old, he was still considered an apprentice compared to some of the elder
uwishin
of the tribe, Agata told me. Amongst the Shuar, there were several in their late eighties who had reached a stage at which it was believed they knew all the secrets of existence. They held the power to heal or practise sorcery, and their spirit powers allowed them to control
tsentsak
– invisible magical darts that could cause good or harm.

But for now his manner seemed entirely urbane and relaxed. He introduced himself, bade us welcome and encouraged each person in turn to share with the group what they hoped to achieve that night.

‘Intention is important,’ he said, looking each of us in turn in the eye. ‘By speaking your intention aloud, the Mother will hear you. You must gather your focus for the night ahead.’

A young woman at the far end of the room began. The light was dim now, and the warmth from the iron grate comforting against the autumn night. Outside a wind was picking up and the ancient walls seemed to sigh.

‘I’m here to heal the relationship with my mother,’ she began. ‘We’ve always resented each other, for a reason neither of us fully understands. I ask Mother Ayahuasca to help me get through to her, and to heal the years of unhappiness which lie between us.’

The shaman nodded, then gestured for the next person to speak. In this way we continued, a diverse range of needs and expectations ringing out in the room. Many of these people, it turned out, had drunk the brew twenty or thirty times, some of them having spent time in South America drinking intensively. What was becoming clear, too, was that it’s a plant whose effects can be as practical as they are spiritual. Many of these people wanted help with their day-to-day lives, as much as any lofty merging with the universe.

When it came to my turn I spoke nervously, unsure exactly of any intention other than to break through some barrier which had been making me unhappy for a long time.

‘I ask the Mother for knowledge,’ I began. ‘Sometimes I feel like I’m outside of life, peering through a keyhole. I’m looking for a way in.’

When the last person had spoken, the shaman extinguished the final light. Pulling some hot coals from the fire with tongs, he dropped them on to an iron platter before the altar, and began sprinkling herbs on them. They sizzled and popped, and the room filled with an acrid, although not unpleasant, odour.

‘Now I pass round tobacco juice,’ he said, in his thick accent. ‘Place half or one teaspoon of the liquid in your hand and snort it up each nostril. It prepares you to receive the ayahuasca.’

Two jam jars of this black liquid began moving in opposite directions. Each person, I noticed, reacted to their dose by clutching their nose as if they’d been burned. For the Shuar, like many other tribes,
mapacho
(tobacco) is a useful and important sacred plant. They drink it, smoke it, or snort it, sometimes on its own, or in combination with other shamanic plants.

In conjunction with ayahuasca, it has the capacity to open up one’s consciousness to the visionary realms, and I tried to bear this in mind as I snorted what felt like a jet of battery acid into each nostril, my nasal cartilage on fire.

At last it was time to drink. As the shaman took out two large plastic bottles of thick black liquid from his bag, I watched a bubble of fear rise up in the pit of my stomach, then burst with an almost audible pop. Was I really about to drink of the tree of knowledge, and if so was I strong enough to bear the truths it contained within it? With almost a trace of amusement, I wondered if these might be my last few moments amongst the ‘sane’ – whoever they were – before I crossed the River Styx, never to return.

The room was dark. I was conscious only of a body on either side of me on a sleeping mat, and directly in front of me, the shaman, hunched over a single candle flame. Each person in turn left their place to stand before him, and as the girl to my right lay down I realised that the time for reflection was past. It was time to step forward.

A shot glass of bitter black liquid. Not as unpleasant as I’d feared, certainly not the revolting poison that many yage accounts seem to note. Tastes of the earth, traces of tree bark and sap. After I’d drunk I accepted a pinch of herbs which I sprinkled over the coals in offering to the spirits. Then I returned to my mat, lay down and waited for what was to come.

Half an hour passed before I felt anything change. Time spent waiting, breathing, listening to the noises around me. I was lying still in the darkness, sometimes sitting back against the wall. Opening my eyes I saw a rapid shimmer of colour pass across my irises. I closed them, feeling my heart beating faster now, my breath quickening.

Again a flash of colour. I closed my eyes and there it was again. Like flecks of multicoloured paint flicked against a screen, which ran down slowly, then disappeared.

On the other side of the room, the shaman began to play a Jew’s harp. It gave off a droning noise at a constant pitch, but with overtones that shifted as he moved his mouth, stirring up the room’s air.

I was following my breath again. According to the shaman’s advice, it was preferable to use the breath as an anchor, a way of keeping grounded in the body, lest the flood of hallucination sweep one away entirely. As the colours began to multiply and gather strength like fireflies, I could see what he meant. By watching the breath stream, one could observe the visions as a witness, rather than let them take control. It was similar, perhaps, to the way Sufis remain entirely present during their whirling, rather than give in to the trance. Although they whirl until their cognitive minds dissolve, their left feet remain firm, maintaining contact with the world.

The colours changed, began to form recognisable patterns. I was looking at a grid like that on a primitive computer screen: blue squares, lines and crosses.
This is incredible
, I thought lucidly. Then it shifted. The grid tilted to reveal another grid beneath it. The same happened again and beneath the second grid I saw thousands, infinite grids. Which of them was real? Were
any
of them real? On one side of the grid the word ‘time’ appeared, and on the other axis the word ‘space’. Then the whole thing began to dissolve. What was left beyond space and time? Endless worlds, parallel universes, webs of unimaginable complexity. I blinked confusedly, already spinning down through the looking glass.

Putting down the harp, the shaman began to rattle. Made from a gourd or calabash filled with quartz stones, the rattle creates the distinctive music of the shamanic soundscape, and is also one of the most visible tools of the ‘witch doctor’. I’d seen rattles many times, usually in anthropological photographs or museums, but not until this moment did I understand them.

Sssh Sssh Sssh
came the rattle.

I opened my eyes.

Sssh Sssh Sssh

It was as if something had moved the room, displacing the air. This was not
sound
, so much as a physical presence which brushed through one’s consciousness, rustling the very fabric of reality. Sound was no longer a concept but a material fact. Suddenly, the rattle seemed an invention of genius, its true value only realised in the other worlds. Every particle was alive!

Sssh Sssh Sssh

The blue grid of lines stopped moving, then slid apart, like the backdrop of a theatre set dragged away. It was as if my brain was taunting me with one reality, then another, switching them back and forth at lightning speed. I was struck forcefully by the feeling that neither world was more ‘real’ than the other. Both were films projected against a blank wall. Outside the ayahuasca realms, one of them held firm sway. But here, the ayahuasca world seemed just as valid. It was, in fact, far more precisely detailed than the other, its colour spectrum and soundscapes infinitely richer.

The shaman began to sing.
Icaros
are on one level sacred chants, but on another plaintive cries intended for the ears of jungle spirits. They’re believed to have magical properties: the ability to effect energy fields and to heal disease. Lying on my back, my eyes tightly closed, I received the gift of the
icaros
like a life raft. It was like a rope held out in churning waters, and I reached out to hold on to it, allowed it to keep me afloat.

Visions overlaid and replaced each other at a speed beyond understanding. I seemed to be travelling to cyber realms, through fantastical worlds made up of DNA strands and star dust.

At one stage I focused in on a library. On a desk was a book with my name on it and as I recognised that fact the camera pulled upwards to reveal a shelf with a thousand other books on it, then further upwards to reveal a library of several thousand shelves. Upwards again and I was looking down at thousands of libraries, each of them containing infinite numbers of books. This continued until we pulled into clouds, the world below obscured.

Even as the vision passed I felt my heart wrench, and then there was acceptance. Giving up any sense of personal importance was the very first hurdle, and once over it, my own place in the world seemed as irrelevant as a falling leaf in a forest of falling leaves. We were mere atomic particles floating in the void. Nothing that I’d understood to ‘matter’ had any credence here.

To my right someone began to vomit. Before the ceremony all of us had been given plastic bags and I could hear someone rustling theirs now, retching with a force and energy that was partly hideous, partly liberating. The sound made me suddenly aware of my own body again and I snapped back to following my breath, aware of having been lost in the ‘mind’ for some time. How much time had passed? Several hours, seconds, days? The concept of time becomes redundant under yage, a fact particularly recalled by those whose experiences have been unpleasant. Trapped in the face of visions one would rather not see, seemingly outside the fabric of time, the experience can seem close to hell.

The next day dawned cold and clear. We got up slowly, sharing our experiences, some euphoric, others more philosophical. For the first few hours my brain was foggy. I moved in a dream to the kitchen, made a cup of mint tea, then went to sit outside on an old dry stone wall, with the rolling Catalonian fields stretching away. Everything about me was silent.

I felt several things. Relief to be intact, firstly. I was here, no more unbalanced than before. I felt good, actually, for having challenged myself to push the boundaries of reality a little further. But there was something else too: a sense of great humility. Of the four or five hours of visions, the one of the library remained. In the world of ego and personality such a vision would have been painful: reductive, somehow, of who I thought I was. But in the ayahuasca world that lesson came to me as a blessing. How liberating not to have to
be
anything! How freeing to realise that
recognition
was irrelevant, that
time
as I had understood it was irrelevant. It was like realising that an onion was not the skin or the individual layers, all of which could be peeled away. It was something beyond all of that, something formless and eternal.

The day passed quietly, in reflection on what had passed, but also with a sense of mental preparation for what was to come when we drank again that evening. Behind my thoughts, the ayahuasca world still flickered on the edges of this one. It loomed, like the memory of Narnia, which, once they had returned, the four Pevensie children began to doubt they had ever visited. Was it mere hallucination? Or, as the shamans believed, a spirit world, a parallel reality to this one, which those bold enough could return from enriched?