The Cosmic Serpent (2 page)

We were discussing the differences between Ashaninca agriculture and “modern” agriculture. I already understood that, despite their apparent disorderliness, indigenous gardens were polycultural masterpieces containing up to seventy different plant species that were mixed chaotically, but never innocently. During the conversation I praised their practices and ended up expressing my astonishment at their botanical mastery, asking, “So how did you learn all this?”

A man named Ruperto Gomez replied, “You know, brother Jeremy, to understand what interests you, you must drink ayahuasca.”

I pricked up my ears. I knew that ayahuasca was the main hallucinogen used by the indigenous peoples of Western Amazonia. Ruperto, who was not turning down the calabashes of beer, continued in a confident tone: “Some say it is occult, which is true, but it is not evil. In truth, ayahuasca is the television of the forest. You can see images and learn things.” He laughed as he said this, but no one else smiled. He added, “If you like, I can show you sometime.”
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I replied that I would indeed be interested. Ruperto then launched into a comparison between my “accounting” science and his “occult” science. He had lived with the Shipibo, the northern neighbors reputed for their powerful medicine. He had followed a complete ayahuasquero apprenticeship, spending long months in the forest eating only bananas, manioc, and palm hearts and ingesting huge quantities of hallucinogens under the watchful eye of a Shipibo ayahuasquero. He had just spent eight years away from Cajonari, over the course of which he had also served in the Peruvian army—a source of personal pride.

On my part, I had certain prejudices about shamanism. I imagined the “veritable” shaman to be an old wise person, traditional and detached—somewhat like Don Juan in the Castaneda books. Ruperto the wanderer, who had learned the techniques of another tribe, did not correspond to my expectations. However, no old wise person had stepped up to initiate me, and I was not going to be choosy. Ruperto had made his proposal spontaneously, publicly, and as part of a bargain. In return I was to give him a special “advanced” accounting course. So I accepted his offer, especially since it seemed that it might not materialize once the effects of the beer had worn off.

Two weeks later I was back in Quirishari, when Ruperto appeared for his first private lesson. He told me before leaving, “I will return next Saturday. Prepare yourself the day before, eat neither salt nor fat, just a little boiled or roasted manioc.”

He returned on the appointed day with a bottle full of a reddish liquid that was corked with an old corncob. I had not followed his instructions, because, deep down, I did not really take the matter seriously. The idea of not eating certain foods before an event seemed to me a superstition. For lunch I had nibbled a bit of smoked deer meat and some fried manioc.

Two other people had agreed to take ayahuasca under Ruperto's direction. At nightfall, the four of us were sitting on the platform of a quiet house. Ruperto lit a cigarette that he had rolled in notebook paper and said, “This is
toé
.” He passed it around. If I had known at that point that toé is a kind of datura, I would perhaps not have inhaled the smoke, because datura plants are powerful and dangerous hallucinogens that are widely recognized for their toxicity.
⁴
The toé tasted sweet, though the cigarette paper could have been finer.

Then we each swallowed a cup of ayahuasca. It is extremely bitter and tastes like acrid grapefruit juice. Thirty seconds after swallowing it, I felt nauseated.

I did not take notes or keep time during the experience. The description that follows is based on notes taken the next evening.

First Ruperto sprayed us with perfumed water (
agua florida
) and tobacco smoke. Then he sat down and started to whistle a strikingly beautiful melody.

I began seeing kaleidoscopic images behind my closed eyes, but I was not feeling well. Despite Ruperto's melody, I stood up to go outside and vomit. Having disposed of the deer meat and fried manioc remnants, I returned feeling relieved. Ruperto told me that I had probably eliminated the ayahuasca also and that, if I wanted, I could have some more. He checked my pulse and declared me strong enough for a “regular” dose, which I swallowed.

Ruperto started whistling again as I sat down in the darkness of the platform. Images started pouring into my head. In my notes I describe them as “unusual or scary: an agouti [forest rodent] with bared teeth and a bloody mouth; very brilliant, shiny, and multicolored snakes; a policeman giving me problems; my father looking worried. ...”

Deep hallucinations submerged me. I suddenly found myself surrounded by two gigantic boa constrictors that seemed fifty feet long. I was terrified. “These enormous snakes are there, my eyes are closed and I see a spectacular world of brilliant lights, and in the middle of these hazy thoughts, the snakes start talking to me without words. They explain that I am just a human being. I feel my mind crack, and in the fissures, I see the bottomless arrogance of my presuppositions. It is profoundly true that I am just a human being, and, most of the time, I have the impression of understanding everything, whereas here I find myself in a more powerful reality that I do not understand at all and that, in my arrogance, I did not even suspect existed. I feel like crying in view of the enormity of these revelations. Then it dawns on me that this self-pity is a part of my arrogance. I feel so ashamed that I no longer dare feel ashamed. Nevertheless, I have to throw up again.”

I stood up feeling totally lost, stepped over the fluorescent snakes like a drunken tightrope walker, and, begging their forgiveness, headed toward a tree next to the house.

I relate this experience with words on paper. But at the time, language itself seemed inadequate. I tried to name what I was seeing, but mostly the words would not stick to the images. This was distressing, as if my last link to “reality” had been severed. Reality itself seemed to be no more than a distant and one-dimensional memory. I managed nonetheless to understand my feelings, such as “poor little human being who has lost his language and feels sorry for himself.”

I have never felt so completely humble as I did at that moment. Leaning against the tree, I started throwing up again. In Ashaninca, the word for ayahuasca is
kamarampi
, from the verb
kamarank,
“to vomit.” I closed my eyes, and all I could see was red. I could see the insides of my body, red. “I regurgitate not a liquid, but colors, electric red, like blood. My throat hurts. I open my eyes and feel presences next to me, a dark one to my left, about a yard away from my head, and a light one to my right, also a yard away. As I am turned to my left, I am not bothered by the dark presence, because I am aware of it. But I jump when I become aware of the light presence to my right, and I turn to look at it. I can't really see it with my eyes; I feel so bad, and control my reason so little, that I do not really want to see it. I remain lucid enough to understand that I am not truly vomiting blood. After a while I start wondering what to do. I have so little control that I abandon myself to the instructions that seem to be coming from outside me: now it is time to stop vomiting, now it is time to spit, to blow nose, to rinse mouth with water, not to drink water. I am thirsty, but my body stops me from drinking.”

I looked up and saw an Ashaninca woman dressed in a traditional long cotton robe. She was standing about seven yards away from me, and she seemed to be levitating above the ground. I could see her in the darkness, which had become clear. The quality of the light reminded me of those night scenes in movies which are filmed by day with a dark filter: somehow, not really dark, because glowing. As I looked at this woman, who was staring at me in silent clear darkness, I was once again staggered by this people's familiarity with a reality that turned me upside down and of which I was totally ignorant.

“Still very confused, I reckon I have done everything, including rinse my face, and I feel amazed that I have been able to do all this by myself. I leave the tree, the two presences and the levitating woman, and I return to the group. Ruperto asks, ‘Did they tell you not to drink water?' I answer, ‘Yes.' ‘Are you drunk (
mareado
)?' ‘Yes.' I sit down and he resumes his song. I have never heard more beautiful music, these slender staccatos that are so high-pitched they verge on humming. I follow his song, and take flight. I fly in the air, thousands of feet above the earth, and looking down, I see an all-white planet. Suddenly, the song stops, and I find myself on the ground, thinking: ‘He can't stop now.' All I can see are confused images, some of which have an erotic content, like a woman with twenty breasts. He starts singing again, and I see a green leaf, with its veins, then a human hand, with its veins, and so on relentlessly. It is impossible to remember everything.”

Gradually, the images faded. I was exhausted. I fell asleep shortly after midnight.

ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND SHAMANS

The main enigma I encountered during my research on Ashaninca ecology was that these extremely practical and frank people, living almost autonomously in the Amazonian forest, insisted that their extensive botanical knowledge came from plant-induced hallucinations. How could this be true?

The enigma was all the more intriguing because the botanical knowledge of indigenous Amazonians has long astonished scientists. The chemical composition of ayahuasca is a case in point. Amazonian shamans have been preparing ayahuasca for millennia. The brew is a necessary combination of two plants, which must be boiled together for hours. The first contains a hallucinogenic substance, dimethyltryptamine, which also seems to be secreted by the human brain; but this hallucinogen has no effect when swallowed, because a stomach enzyme called monoamine oxidase blocks it. The second plant, however, contains several substances that inactivate this precise stomach enzyme, allowing the hallucinogen to reach the brain. The sophistication of this recipe has prompted Richard Evans Schultes, the most renowned ethnobotanist of the twentieth century, to comment: “One wonders how peoples in primitive societies, with no knowledge of chemistry or physiology, ever hit upon a solution to the activation of an alkaloid by a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. Pure experimentation? Perhaps not. The examples are too numerous and may become even more numerous with future research.”
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So here are people without electron microscopes who choose, among some 80,000 Amazonian plant species, the leaves of a bush containing a hallucinogenic brain hormone, which they combine with a vine containing substances that inactivate an enzyme of the digestive tract, which would otherwise block the hallucinogenic effect. And they do this to modify their consciousness.

It is as if they knew about the molecular properties of plants
and
the art of combining them, and when one asks them how they know these things, they say their knowledge comes directly from hallucinogenic plants.
²

Not many anthropologists have looked into this enigma
³
—but the failure of academics to consider this kind of mystery is not limited to the Amazon. Over the course of the twentieth century, anthropologists have examined shamanic practices around the world without fully grasping them.

A brief history of anthropology reveals a blind spot in its studies of shamanism.

 

IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, European thinkers considered that some races were more evolved than others. Charles Darwin, one of the founders of the theory of evolution, wrote in 1871: “With civilised nations, the reduced size of the jaws from lessened use, the habitual play of different muscles serving to express different emotions, and the increased size of the brain from greater intellectual activity, have together produced a considerable effect on their general appearance in comparison with savages.”
⁴

Anthropology was founded in the second half of the nineteenth century to study “primitive,” “Stone Age” societies. Its underlying goal was to understand where “we” Europeans had come from.
⁵

The problem for the young discipline was the unreasonable nature of its object of study. According to Edward Tylor, one of the first anthropologists: “Savages are exceedingly ignorant as regards both physical and moral knowledge; want of discipline makes their opinions crude and their action ineffective in a surprising degree; and the tyranny of tradition at every step imposes upon them thoughts and customs which have been inherited from a different stage of culture, and thus have lost a reasonableness which we may often see them to have possessed in their first origin. Judged by our ordinary modern standard of knowledge, which is at any rate a high one as compared to theirs, much of what they believe to be true, must be set down as false.”
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