Chapter Three
Vine of Souls
Most human characteristics that are genuinely universal are easily accounted for in evolutionary terms, and the arguments are widely known. For example, we all live in families and societies, because to do so aids our survival and the propagation of our genes. We all have the capacity for love because it is an emotion that promotes family and social life.
We all have laws of one kind or another because these, too, reinforce family and social ties and thus make us stronger and more competitive. We all eat food and drink water because we will soon die if we don’t. We all use the unique human gift of language to communicate more effectively than other species on the planet, top reserve knowledge handed down from previous generations, and to create culture – thus further sharpening our competitive edge.
But there’s one very odd thing that all of us at all periods of history seem to have done that defies an obvious evolutionary explanation. Against logic and reason, lacking irrefutable proof that we are right, and sometimes contrary to our own objective interests, every society that we know about since the appearance of modern humans on the planet has maintained a steadfast belief in the existence of supernatural realms and beings.
Even in this rational and scientific century (the twenty-first since the crucifixion of a supernatural being called Jesus), more than a billion Christians still believe in Heaven and Hell, God and the Devil, angels and demons. Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, the ancient Egyptians, the Maya, the Druids, and the practitioners of all other known religions living and dead have all also entertained similar ideas. The exact nature and multiplicity of the beings may change, the number and character of the realms may change, but in all cases, at root, what unites us are our unproven irrational beliefs of one kind or another in non-material dimensions of reality, inhabited by incorporeal beings that interact with us and frame our destiny in mysterious ways.
Many evolutionary scientists claim that beliefs of this sort are “hardwired” into our brains. This “neurological adaptation” is said to have been selected because, despite some obvious aberrations and exceptions, religious beliefs generally strengthen society and therefore aid the survival of our species – just like our propensity to love, or our universal inclination to live by laws. But even if religion does exactly what the evolutionists say it does, the central problem remains. We may have learned something more about the workings of society and its institutions, but we are no nearer to understanding why the common ground of all religions everywhere should consist of remarkable, unproven and deeply illogical beliefs in spiritual and supernatural levels of reality and their alleged influences upon our daily lives.
I want to re-emphasize that there is no dispute here about the social usefulness of religious beliefs. I take that for granted. The problem is better phrased if we ask why human societies have so consistently opted for
these particular beliefs – in supernatural realms and beings –rather than others that might have served the same function without requiring such a radical disconnection from observed reality. To put the issue in some kind of perspective, one can hardly imagine that lions would be more efficient predators if they lavished large amounts of their time and energy on placating nonexistent beings from other worlds. And what about the gazelles? Would they have any chance of escaping the cheetahs if they kept being diverted by parades of spirits, elves, or angels?
Because it is hard to see the evolutionary advantage of such impractical distractions for animals, it is all the more difficult to understand how they could provide any possible advantage to humans. Yet if they provide no advantage, then how are we to explain the fact that
every human society throughout recorded history in which religion has played an important role – which is as good as saying every society, ever, without exception – has been so thoroughly dominated and entranced by precisely such beliefs?
Shared neurology
There is an anthropological and archaeological theory, briefly outlined in Chapter One, that seems to offer at least a partial answer to this question. According to this theory prehistoric rock and cave art around the world expresses mankind’s first and oldest notions of the super-natural, of the “soul”, and of realms of existence beyond death – notions that took shape in “altered states of consciousness” most likely brought on by the consumption of psychoactive plants.
According to Professor David Lewis-Williams, the leading proponent of the theory, such ideas are not part of the normal, predictable currency of everyday life but arise from the universal human neurological capacity to enter “altered states of consciousness” (ASCs) – i.e. states of deep trance in which extremely realistic hallucinations are seen. Many anthropologists are convinced that as far back as the Upper Paleolithic, our ancestors placed a high value on hallucinations and made extensive use of psychoactive plants to induce them.
In addition, it is well known that rhythmic drumming and dancing, hyperventilation, self-mutilation, starvation, and a variety of other more or less unpleasant techniques can also bring on hallucinations.
In hunter-gatherer societies, such work is typically not the responsibility of all people but only of the shamans– those ritual specialists who are able to make the perilous journey to the hallucinatory otherworld and return with healing knowledge.
Supported by David Whitley, one of the leading North American rock-art specialists, Jean Clottes, the world-renowned expert on the French prehistoric painted caves, and a growing number of other scholars from many different countries, Lewis-Williams takes the view that the first notions of the existence of supernatural realms and beings, the first 'religious' ideas about them, the first art representing them, and the first mythologies concerning them, were all derived from the experiences of hallucinating shamans.
By this theory, the art of Pech Merle and of the300or so other painted caves of south-west Europe is an art of visions– in other words, the extraordinary images that confront us there depict hallucinations seen by shamans in altered states of consciousness. Since both we and the shaman-artists of the Upper Paleolithic share the same modern human neurology, and since ASCs are a universal phenomenon of that neurology, it follows that there may after all be some possibility of a bridge between us and them – some possibility for us to see what they saw and, despite the passage of tens of thousands of years, to gain direct experiential insight into the roots of their beliefs.
The limits of objective research
David Lewis-Williams began to develop his “neuropsychological model” of cave art and the origins of religion in the early 1980s, and has been testing and defending it virtually non-stop since 1988, when he and his co-researcher Thomas Dowson officially put it before their peers in the scholarly journal
Current Anthropology.
As Lewis-Williams admitted when I met him at Witwatersrand University in 2004, however, there is one thing he has not done and is not prepared to do in the name of science, and that is to experiment directly and personally with the altered states of consciousness he has made a career out of researching and writing about. Like many Westerners, he told me, he was too much of a “control freak” to put himself into trance by dancing or drumming, he had no intention of starving himself for 40 days, and he certainly wasn’t going to take any psychoactive drugs– by far the easiest, the most certain and, throughout history, the most common method used by shamans to attain the visionary state.
“Why not?” I asked. Lewis-Williams shrugged: “I don’t want to fry my brains and frankly I’m not in the least bit interested in the experience.”
I protested that as the leading exponent of the visionary theory of Upper Paleolithic art, I would have thought that he of all people should be extremely interested in such experiences, but Lewis-Williams maintained steadfastly that he was not. He pointed out that the scientific literature already contains a huge number of studies of trance states and hallucinations, and that for him to add a few hallucinations of his own would change nothing. Better to stand back, stay objective, and focus on the search for common patterns in the cave art on the one hand and in what the psychiatric and psychological experts have reported about hallucinations on the other.
That was the way to flesh out the neuropsychological theory – with an overwhelming deluge of evidence and common sense. There was nothing to be gained from seeking a personal tour of the shamanic “otherworld,” which –we now know as our ancestors did not – is just a silly illusion.
Though I understood perfectly where Lewis-Williams was coming from, I could not agree with him and objected that we do not know any such thing. We might feel very sure that there is no more to reality than the material world in which we live, but we cannot prove that this is the case. Theoretically there could be other realms, other dimensions, as all religious traditions and quantum physics alike maintain. Theoretically the brain could be as much a receiver as a generator of consciousness, and thus might be fine-tuned in altered states to pick up wavelengths that are normally not accessible to us. Depending on our point of view and our experiences, we might find the proposition that such “other-worlds” are real more or less improbable, but it is important to register that no empirical evidence exists that rules them out entirely.
At this point Lewis-Williams politely expressed impatience at the speculative direction in which he felt I was taking the conversation, and we moved on to discuss weightier matters. At the back of my mind, however, I couldn’t help feeling there was a problem with the way that academic researchers who studied the religious impact of visions were so sure they were just “silly illusions.” Lewis-Williams was probably 100per cent right that they were “mere” hallucinations and figments which had tricked our foolish ancestors into believing in nonexistent other worlds for thousands of years. Still, I thought he was 100per cent wrong to express that view with such force and authority without ever having experienced visions himself. I had reason to believe that such experiences might have influenced his take on the matter; they had certainly influenced mine . . .
South American shamans, on drugs, painting their hallucinations
Six months before the ibogaine session that I described in Chapter One, and three months before I met Professor Lewis-Williams in Johannes-burg, I spent five weeks in the Peruvian Amazon with indigenous Indian shamans, drinking the sacred plant hallucinogen known in the Quechua language of the Incas as ayahuasca. This is a composite word that means, literally, the “Vine of the Dead” or, in some translations, the “Vine of Souls.”
It reflects the alleged capacity of the South American brew, very much like iboga in Africa, to propel those who ingest it into realms that seem convincingly spiritual and supernatural where, very often, they encounter their deceased ancestors. Since I sought to test the hypothesis that the first religious ideas of mankind, and the cave art that expressed them, were inspired by visions induced by psychoactive plants, I was intrigued to learn of the existence of Indian tribal shamans in the Amazon who routinely paint scenes from their ayahuasca visions.
Certain shamans, such as the renowned Pablo Amaringo and his cousin Francisco Montes Shuna, had even gained international renown for their ayahuasca-inspired art – the latter contributing a mural to the Eden Project in Cornwall, England, the former having collections of his paintings exhibited in New York and published in a prestigious art book.
Scientists know why ayahuasca produces visions. It does so because one of its two principal plant ingredients is rich in N,N-dimethyl-tryptamine (DMT), an extremely potent and fast-acting hallucinogen that is also secreted naturally in minute, usually sub-psychedelic quantities by the human brain. Despite being present in our bodies, both DMT in its pure form and DMT in solution in the ayahuasca brew are classified as Schedule 1/Class A illegal drugs in the United States and Britain, and you can go to jail for a long time for possessing them.
In countries bordering the Amazon Basin, however, where ayahuasca has been an integral part of indigenous Indian culture for thousands of years, it is not illegal; on the contrary, in Peru, Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador, its consumption is protected under laws of individual religious freedom. Those good and decent laws, and the relative accessibility of indigenous shamans working as
curanderos– healers –in their local communities, were reason enough for me to do most ofmy ayahuasca sessions in the Peruvian Amazon.
But I also participated in one session in Brazil with a modern syncretic cult known as the Uniao de Vegetal (UdV). It uses ayahuasca as its sacrament, and has brought the archaic shamanic experience of visionary revelation alive for a rapidly expanding community of otherwise very “normal, ”middle-class, well-educated Brazilians.
A number of plants growing in different parts of the Amazon contain the DMT that gives ayahuasca its extraordinary visionary powers, and all of these have long been known to indigenous shamans. One of the most widely used is
Psychotria viridis. It is a bush of the
Rubiaceae family and its leaves release psychotropic quantities of DMT if cooked together with water.
Whether the DMT is extracted from this plant, however, or from one of the half-dozen or so other known sources, there is a problem to overcome. Monoamine oxidase, an enzyme that occurs naturally in our stomachs, so efficiently destroys DMT on contact as to render it entirely orally inactive. It is at this point that the other principal ingredient of the brew – the ayahuasca vine itself– comes into play. Classified scientifically as
Banisteriopsis caapi,
and a member of the
Malpigia family of giant forest lianas, it contains chemicals known as monoamine oxidase inhibitors which cleverly switch off the stomach enzyme and allow the DMT from the
Psychotria viridis leaves (or from any of the other sources) to go to work.
Anthropologist Jeremy Narby comments:
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’s 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.
The renowned ethno-botanist Richard Evans Schultes was struck by the same problem:
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.
So the substance I had gone to South America to drink had a mysterious history. It was intimately connected to religious ideas and to the religious art of the region. Its very existence was biochemically unlikely and contrary to the laws of probability, and the shamans who used it claimed it transported them to supernatural worlds where they encountered spiritual beings of great power. In the pages that follow, I set out the highlights of my own visions, woven into a sequential narrative. I participated in ayahuasca sessions ten times in Peru and Brazil and once in Europe. But no matter where I drank the brew, its extraordinary effects always brought me, pretty soon, to the same complex, internally consistent, and deeply strange universe.
The vine and the leaf
I accompany the shaman Francisco Montes Shuna to the place in the jungle where ayahuasca is prepared. Gathered there on the ground there is already a pile of cut sections of ayahuasca vine, which is a tough, liana-like creeper that hangs from the tall trees. Francisco selects several large pieces, each approximately as thick as my arm, consisting of three or four vines coiled around one another in long, tight knots like mating serpents.
These large pieces are chopped into22segments, each about a foot long. Then we pick approximately 300fresh green leaves of
Psychotria viridis from bushes nearby. Finally, the 22 sections of vine are smashed with a heavy wooden club – methodically smashed, mainly by Francisco, although I inexpertly assist him with three of them.
Once macerated in this way, the inner part of the vine is exposed. It is very fibrous but also damp and turning a red color. Francisco places a thick layer of the smashed vine into the bottom of a large iron cooking pot, on top of this a layer of all the
P. viridis leaves, then another layer of the rest of the vine. Next the whole mass is wedged down beneath two sticks jammed transversely into place, and several liters of cold water from the creek are added until all the contents are covered. This is left to marinate overnight.
The following morning, around 8 a.m., I go to see the brew being cooked. It has already been on the fire for two hours and is bubbling steadily at a slow boil. This first water is eventually decanted into a second large iron pot and fresh water is added to cover the mass of vine and leaves once again. This will happen three more times. Then all the substance-rich water collected in the second pot, many liters, will be boiled slowly down to less than a liter of pure, concentrated ayahuasca. The vines and leaves from the first pot, having now served their function, are thrown away.
The ceremony begins
It is always night when the ceremony begins, around nine or ten in the evening. The rich velvet darkness of the rain forest envelops everything. The setting may be a small, simple hut out on the far edge of Iquitos, or the temple at Sachamama established by Francisco MontesShuna, or a homestead beside a stagnant creek on a remote tributary of the Amazon, or just a clearing in the jungle. Sometimes I’m alone with the shaman; usually my wife Santha is there as well; frequently people from the local community who also want to drink join in.
The shaman is almost always a man, dressed in the nondescript Westernized clothes of the villages. You wouldn’t notice anything particularly special about him if you passed him in the street, but he knows a great deal about the plant medicines of the jungle and how they may best be harnessed for the benefit of human beings. As a practicing
ayahuasquero he is likely to have been drinking the sacred brew since childhood and to have traveled so frequently in the super-natural realms, to which ayahuasca affords a portal, that he is truly the master of all the strange experiences to be encountered there.
He will long ago have acquired his own “spirit animals” who meet him in the hallucinatory otherworld, act as his guides and protectors throughout the trance, and assist him in his vocation as a seer and healer. Sometimes also he has in his possession a number of “power objects” – for instance, pebbles of quartz crystal, a piece of magnet-ized iron, a bundle of feathers, and certain small statuettes of wood, bone or terracotta – which provide additional assistance to him in his struggles in the spirit world.
Wherever we hold the ritual, and whichever shaman is leading it, an essentially similar routine is followed. The shaman puffs on huge hand-rolled cigarettes of sacred tobacco and blows clouds of smoke over himself and the drinkers and into the neck of the bottle containing the ayahuasca. There is much muttering of invocations, brushing of the air with rustling leafy branches, and sprinkling of Agua Florida, a cheap cologne. The shaman clears his throat several times and spits. Then he begins to sing the
icaros, ancient chants and whistles, handed down since time immemorial, to draw in the spirits around our circle.
Usually by the time the ayahuasca is poured more than half an hour has passed. Modes of preparation vary. In some cases – for example the UdV in Brazil – large glasses of a very diluted brew are served. More commonly the ayahuasca is concentrated by repeated boiling into a thick, dark, viscous liquid – of the kind I saw Francisco MontesShuna prepare – and is presented in a small cup.
First in line at the very first session I attend is a middle-aged woman who wants to contact the spirit of her dead husband. She sips. Pauses. Looks down into the cup. Then drains the rest at a gulp. The same grubby china cup is used by all participants, with the shaman seeming to assess each individual carefully (body weight? aura?) before pouring out a dose. In each case he whispers incomprehensible words into the cup before handing it over to the participant. In each case the measure he has poured looks much the same as the last – roughly equivalent in volume to a double shot of spirits.
My turn. I’m sitting on my heels on the grass mat that is spread out in front of the shaman. His lined features are folded like leather into a beatific expression. He weighs me up, pours from the bottle into the cup the standard double shot of ayahuasca, whispers the incomprehensible words, passes the cup over to me.
I take a tentative sip of the vile-tasting liquid – so strong and bitter-sweet and salty, so dark, so concentrated, and so textured as to be repellent. There are jangling discordant notes of cocoa, medicine and jungle rot. And there is the definite sense that I am partaking hereof something formidable and elusive – a “living spirit,” as the old myths say – that announces its presence in the sheer mass and energized heaviness of the brew.
I raise the cup to my lips again. About two thirds of the measure that the shaman poured for me still remains, and now I drain it in one draught. The concentrated bittersweet foretaste, followed instantly by the aftertaste of rot and medicine, hits me like a punch in the stomach. I shudder. Will I throw up? Will I -shite- myself? I have heard that such inconveniences are always a risk with ayahuasca, which, as well as its unsurpassed qualities as a hallucinogen, is also an extremely strong and efficient purgative (indeed, one of the many names and nicknames by which ayahuasca is known throughout the Amazon is La Purga – the purge). Vomiting and diarrhea are common amongst participants in ayahuasca sessions, and one must simply deal with these effects if they strike. Feeling slightly apprehensive, I thank the shaman and wander back to my place on the floor.
Geometry and nets
Time passes, but I don’t keep track of it. I’ve improvised a pillow from a rolled-up sleeping bag and I now find I’m swamped by a powerful feeling of weariness. My muscles involuntarily relax, I close my eyes, and without fanfare a parade of visions suddenly begins, visions that are at once geometrical and alive, visions of lights unlike any light I’ve ever seen –
dark lights, a pulsing, swirling field of the deepest luminescent violets, of reds emerging out of night, of unearthly textures and colors, of solar systems revolving, of spiral galaxies on the move. . .
Visions of nets and strange ladder-like structures. Visions in which I seem to see multiple square screens stacked side by side and on top of each other to form immense patterns of windows arranged in great banks. Though they manifest without sound in what seems to be a pristine and limitless vacuum, the images possess a most peculiar and particular quality. They feel like a drum-roll – as though their real function is to announce the arrival of something else.
I begin to pay attention to one image in particular, or rather to one area of my inner visual field where complex interlaced patterns of geometry prove on more careful inspection to be part of the skin of a snake – a gigantic snake, apparently alive, not dead, with its head and its tail away from me. I zoom in for a closer view. I can make out the individual scales and the way that they overlap each other. They’re rectangular, outlined in black, like windows. There’s a circle in the center of each rectangle. Zoom in again. The circles are purple, spinning like fireworks, glowing with the otherworldly dark light that I’m already getting used to here.
Here? Where is here? Why is it a place where I see colors that donot exist in everyday life?
Closer still. Focus on a single one of the spinning circles. What is it? A sense of familiarity dawns before all becomes clear. It’s the iridescent eye from the display feathers of a peacock . . . It’s a spiral galaxy, swirling and turning in the darkness of space . . .
Then the shaman begins to chant the
icaros again. His perform-ance is very quiet at first but it builds up . . . builds up. For what feels like half an hour, maybe more, the whole atmosphere rustles with melodious chanting and whistling, as though great wings are stirring, and I find myself relaxing into this sound-realm.
Something interesting begins to happen. Quite smoothly, like an automatic gear-change, the parade of patterns and unearthly colors that have assailed me until now, the geometrical pulse, the swirling lights, all begin to beat in time to the underlying rhythm of the chant. I have the sense of rising up through ethereal levels – as though the Gnostics of old were right that reality consists of a series of layers extending upwards from grossest matter to purest spirit.
My whole visual field gets less static and crystalline, more fluid and organic. Suddenly it feels like a night dive. I’m looking up from the bottom of a clear ocean at a mass of purple jellyfish bobbing at the surface. There are so many of them that they all seem joined into a single voluptuous fabric, each one – I now observe – with a ring of luminous pearls, like the landing lights of a miniature space ship, arranged amongst its undulating skirts. As the chants and whistles rise and fall, this vast repetitive pattern glides slowly and majestically overhead – strobing bright and dark, bright and dark, like a well-synchronized
son et lumière.
Other than these amazing visuals, I feel completely down to earth. I’ve experienced some intense moments of nausea, but the worst seems to have passed and I haven’t thrown up yet. There’s no particular sign that I’m going to -shite- myself. And if I open my eyes the visions instantly disappear – whoomph!– like vampires at dawn.
It’s an unsettling sensation to see with my eyes closed a decidedly non-ordinary universe and with my eyes open an absolutely mundane world, and to be able, to a limited degree, to switch back and forth between the two – blink, ordinary, blink, non-ordinary, etc., etc. But I can also feel reason and measure reasserting themselves, and already the quality of supernatural immanence that has characterized my experience so far is beginning to dull and fade.
I look at my watch. It is around one in the morning. Now even with my eyes closed the visions are weak and intermittent. I’m 100per cent back on planet earth, sober, rational, not about to visit any parallel dimension.
I reached the anteroom and saw the wallpaper there. That’s the realistic assessment. I fastened my seatbelt and trundled down the runway but couldn’t build up enough speed to take off. I stood at the doors of perception but didn’t pass through.
Although the prospect is still daunting and horrible, although the mere thought of the taste makes me gag and retch as if I’ve inhaled mustard gas, I resolve to drink another cup of the brew.
I go outside, pee, look at the stars, come back in again, take off my shoes, have a few swigs of water. Drinking ayahuasca is an ordeal –everything about it is difficult, nothing is easy. Yet I have no choice but to persevere if I want to understand this mysterious substance. I know of several examples of people who have taken ayahuasca and experienced nothing very remarkable during their first two or three sessions, only to get the full return ticket to a parallel world on their third or fourth attempt. I shuffle up to the shaman again, tell him I think I’m ready for a second dose. He pours out the usual double-shot measure into the cup and whispers the usual incomprehensible words into it before handing it to me to drink.
I intend to drain it in one gulp, because it’s only a small amount after all. But once again it seems formidable – the way a toad might seem formidable if blended as a beverage and served in a cup. My flesh recoils from it and I hesitate, then take a preliminary sip exactly as before. There’s something unique and indescribable about the taste: ayahuasca from the Amazon. The Vine of Souls. The rancid medicine of the gods . . . I tip my head back, tilt the cup upright, and swig down the remainder of its contents.
As I wander back to reoccupy my place on the floor I’m thinking that with the first dose still presumably in my system, and certainly not vomited out, is it reasonable to hope that this second dose will do the trick? I already know that the answer is “maybe” and that it really does depend – because the effects of ayahuasca differ so much from person to person and from day to day, even from hour to hour.
After about 40minutes the parade of images reappears – the geometry, the nets, ladders and banks of windows, the spirals, the swastikas spinning in the void, the furious zigzags, the kaleidoscope of unearthly colors – and I find myself back in the anteroom to the ayahuasca realm. As before, sound and vision have effortlessly synchronized, and the whole scene pulses and vibrates hypnotically. As before, I have the ability to zoom in on small areas of the scene. As before, I see what looks like the flank of a gigantic serpent and, when I come closer, the patterned rectangles of individual scales – each one of which proves to enclose a swirling, iridescent eye.
For a while not much else happens. Then suddenly, without preamble, I get a display of zigzags, pyramids, tribal masks. One after the other, as though briefly illumined by the brightest spotlight, they seem to jump out of the darkness, then disappear. It’s the grand finale of another visit to the ayahuasca anteroom. As the display fades, ordinary reality replaces it and my consciousness engages itself completely with the material world again.
Vision serpents, light-elves, a celestial temple, and an angry supernatural
During my second session, I know things are going to be different when the opening parade of patterns and geometry gets overlaid with a lot of snakes, like a game of snakes and ladders. The snakes are very large and their whole bodies from head to tail are clearly visible tome. The main colors are browns and yellows.
I’ve been expecting them to show up. Reading round the subject before coming to the Amazon, I’ve learned that people from all parts of the world and many different cultures routinely meet snakes on the ayahuasca journey. The shamans say this is because the spirit of ayahuasca, like the vine itself, takes snake form. In my vision the snakes arrange themselves into patterns of interlaced wheels and spirals. Then they merge into one large mass and finally break apart into pairs of individuals that wind around each other like the DNA double helix.
The nausea comes on strong and I’m out in the dark, puking. The vomiting racks me to the core until I’m drenched from head to foot in sweat and have only dry heaves left. I sink to the ground on hands and knees, slump against one of the support poles of the hut, and then change my mind when I find myself face to face with a large poisonous spider.
My head has cleared. I go back inside, take my place in the circle, close my eyes. More snakes, a recurrence of the geometrical patterns. Then suddenly two beings made all of white light pop up in my face, one behind and to the side of the other. They are quite small – three or four feet tall – but I’m only aware of their upper bodies from the waist up. I don’t see their feet. Their white light faces glow like neon and are approximately heart-shaped with big domed foreheads and narrow pointed chins. Nostrils and mouths, if they have them at all, are just slits in their otherwise smooth features. Their eyes are completely black and apparently without pupils.
They seem to have business with me. They want to communicate. The communication, or communication attempt, feels telepathic, but somehow it is not getting through. I sense eagerness and . . . frustration on their part. Then the nausea comes on again, really strong, and I’m outside for another protracted bout of vomiting and retching. Seated on a tree stump, looking up at the stars, I have a strange sense of being possessed by the spirit of my father, as though he’s inside me somehow, merged with me and my consciousness.
On another night the visions begin very differently. After an initial bout of geometry and ladders I find myself inside a building – a huge structure a bit like the ancient Egyptian temple of Edfu at its entrance but opening out into something quite other. Fantastic architecture onan extraordinary scale. I have a computercam point of view and can fly around, zoom in or zoom out anywhere. I fly up into a vast dome, examine the patterns of nested curves that decorate its ceiling. Then the vomiting takes me again and the visions are gone.
Around the fifth night of my stay in the Amazon, I drink ayahuasca in a natural clearing in the jungle. The name given by the Indians to clearings like this is
supay chakra, which means “the devil’s farm.” Two makeshift benches have been set up near a huge ancient fig tree, and we hang hammocks and mosquito nets at the edge of the clearing. Dark falls, surrounding us with the sounds of the jungle night. We wait until around 8p.m. to start the ceremony.
I begin to vision very mildly after about 45minutes – a dreamlike state enhanced by the weird luminous glow given off by thousands of dead leaves carpeting the forest floor. When my eyes are open I see this real jungle with its glowing floor. When I close them another jungle appears – a jungle of trees, stems, shoots, each traced with a line of fire and overcast with strangeness.
I also see snakes again, not very large this time, but with wide-open mouths. Then a tiny mannequin appears amongst the high jungle plants. It has the outline and size of a gingerbread man, but is glowing all neon-white. It behaves like a puppet operated on strings by a puppeteer who is so far above us as to be out of sight. The mannequin dances through the tall trees. In the morning Don Alberto, the shaman, says that the spirit of the
chakra was with us, watching us the whole time, hiding behind the big fig tree. Apparently he was not happy that we vomited – and worse! – in his
chakra. But Don Alberto reassures us that he intervened on our behalf to make everything OK with this angry supernatural being.
Transformations
January 22: This night I go through what I’ve come to think of as the scrying mirror into the otherworld. I tolerate the ayahuasca well, and about 90minutes pass before I vomit. In my hour of strong visions I’m surrounded by intelligent plants, which seem almost like animals, waving, weaving leaves – in dark colors but with their own fire. Then I meet a big boa constrictor. Its head alone is about two feet long and a foot high. It allows me to stroke it and I hear myself saying in my vision, “It’s a beauty” or “You’re a beauty.” Something like that.
I see a yellow and black spotted butterfly, the size of a dinner plate, flitting from plant to plant in the hallucinatory jungle. I follow it until we reach a clearing where a second huge serpent awaits. There is no butterfly now, only this immense yellow and black serpent radiating sentience and magical force. Before my eyes it spectacularly and mysteriously transforms into a powerful jaguar with yellow and black spots and confronts me face to face. There is a sort of telepathy. Then the creature abruptly turns away and vanishes. For what feels like a long while afterwards I continue to sense its presence still out there, camouflaged amongst the otherworldly jungle plants. At no point do I feel afraid of it or threatened by it.
Both it and the beautiful boa, the butterfly, even the plants, seem filled with vibrant energy and life and communicative intelligence. They also seem utterly and convincingly real – not stuff my brain is just perversely cooking up out of some hitherto unknown jungle-scenes image bank in my temporal lobes, but real perceptions of real beings that ordinarily exist outside the range of my senses.
The visions left me thinking, and the following morning I wrote in my notebook:
Matter and spirit. As above so below. Science teaches us to believe that the material world is the primary and only reality. But from the ayahuasca perspective this is absolutely not the case. What we call the material world, our “consensual reality,” is only part of the pattern – probably not even the primary part. Viewed through the lens of ayahuasca, another “world” becomes visible, another reality, perhaps many of them. And because these worlds interpenetrate our own, effects in this world may turn out to have causes in the other worlds. Perhaps the material world is indeed the creation of spirits but if so then presumably they made it because they need it (for their own experience/evolution/development?).
The material world, if cut off from the spirit world, becomes meaningless and empty. So the material world needs the spirit world too. Ayahuasca, and similar “master plants,” appear to provide a direct means of communication with the spirit realm for sentient beings of the material world. The plants educate us by allowing us to experience in visions the reality of the supernatural – something normally impossible or very difficult for us to do as material-bound creatures.
Purple prose? A bit New Age and over the top? Even lunatic fringe?I don’t deny it, and in a way that’s exactly my point. If I, with all the knowledge and rationalism of the twenty-first century at my disposal, could be so persuaded by the apparently supernatural realms and spirit beings that ayahuasca introduced me to, then what would our ancestors have thought if they had chanced upon similar hallucinogenic plants 30,000years ago and seen similar wonders? What about the two elf-sized “light-beings” I’d met?
What would they have been taken to be in the Upper Paleolithic? What about the serpent transforming into a jaguar? What about the geometry and the architecture? Wouldn’t it have all come together as a seamless otherworld? Not the way we tend to see such scenes now – as some sort of derangement of perception devalued by the modern idea of “hallucinations” – but as a veridical experience of another level of reality?
Introspection
January 24: Don Francisco pours me a generous cupful of dense and rancid ayahuasca, which I almost throw up on the last swallow. The taste and smell are extremely strong, and for some reason I feel nervous and out of sorts this evening. There are waves of nausea, but I control them, breathe into them.
I suppose that half an hour passes before the visions become strong. Tonight I see predominantly snakes, most of them about three or four feet in length. Again the sense I get is that these are intelligent beings who mean us well, not harm. I experience none of the archetypal fear that snakes supposedly evoke. As usual my eyes are closed, but I can “see” my legs and feet below me as though bathed in light. One of the serpents coils around my left calf and then rears its head up from knee level towards my face. Its body and head are colored a deep and brilliant gold. It seems to be inspecting or examining me, but I feel no fear.
I meet a lot of these snakes, coiling round the vegetation and around each other. They are everywhere, in the foreground, and often the background, of all my visions. There are patterns and lights. I see something that looks like a very large inverted bowl rising up into a purple sky, glowing with light. I witness a complex series of transformations of snakes into felines.
I have a sense of flying, as though I am a bird (or riding on a bird?)accompanied by two other birds. I go through what feel like long periods of intense introspection. Something in the ayahuasca leads me to examine my own moral failings and weaknesses in an utterly unsympathetic light – holds them up to my view and shows me how much, in how many ways, I am inadequate, venal, not good. In particular I flagellate myself mercilessly about my father. Why wasn’t I with him those last five days of his life? Why did I feel so driven to go back and finish my work?
There are no excuses. Plain and simple, I should have been there andI wasn’t. Several times I ask to see Dad’s spirit, to meet him again and to talk to him. But this grace the Vine of Souls does not grant me.
Aliens and dragons
January 27: The visions begin with 20minutes of geometry; then suddenly I find myself looking, at very close range, into a shockingly “alien” face, gray in color, with a wide domed forehead and a narrow pointed chin – heart-shaped like the faces of the “light-beings” I’d encountered a few days earlier. But this creature doesn’t look friendly. Its eyes are multi-segmented like those of a fly.
Frankly, it’s the sort of image you’d expect to see adorning some far-fetched
X-Files exposé, and since aliens and ETs have never been interests of mine, I’m really puzzled to experience such a hallucination. In the part of my mind that is still dealing with reasoning, I can already see the way that skeptics who have never taken ayahuasca are bound to read it.
They must argue that there is no mystery in the appearance of entities like this in my hallucinations because, regardless of my lack of enthusiasm for aliens, my brain has had the opportunity to borrow such imagery from popular culture. Still, I feel unaccountably shaken and perplexed by what I’ve just seen.
A short while later, out of a background of shifting geometrical patterns, a beautiful Egyptian goddess appears. I see only her head and headdress clearly. She’s in full regalia. Then she vanishes as abruptly and mysteriously as she arrived.
January 29: Strange and terrifying (briefly), although it didn’t start that way. I drink at 8.05p.m. For the first half-hour, as usual, nothing much happens, just queasy and formless luminescence. Then I begin to see snakes, not a lot and not spectacular. By 9:05I’m feeling more intoxicated, dizzy and nauseous. But still just snakes. Not many. Mid-size. They’re coiling and writhing around a bit more. I begin to wonder(foolish bravado) if this is all I’m going to get.
The nausea increases and the whole visionary experience ratchets up a notch and becomes more sinister. My eyes are closed throughout, but when I “look” up, the visions are “up” and when I “look” down they’re “down.” I have the sense of gazing through a tunnel – a tunnel of vision with serpents coiled at the side of it, close to my eyes, threatening to fall on me.
I throw up over the back of the bench I’m sitting on. As I shift position the serpents shift with me. The visions stay strong while I’m vomiting. As I stop and return to the seated position, everything ratchets up another notch. The serpents morph into Chinese dragons with beards and long serpentine bodies. Serpents and serpentine dragons with beards and rows of teeth. It’s as though a Chinese painting has come to life. And again – where did the ancient Chinese originally mine this imagery from, if not from the visionary world? I’m convinced it’s not a matter of my vision being inspired by Chinese paintings – which I hardly ever think of. I’m getting a glimpse into the same visionary realm that inspired the Chinese artists – and count-less other mythologies in which dragons feature.
Then another upwards crank of the ratchet. The overall atmosphere– I can’t explain why – is now distinctly terrifying and sinister. I seethe gray heart-shaped face of an alien again, but with an even stranger, harsher expression than before. And I see what could be space ships– flying saucers – associated with this commanding, unpleasant alien presence. What’s frightening is something that would be easy to interpret as an abduction experience – the feeling that if I allow the vision to continue I’m going to be taken up into those metal ships.
They rotate and pulse with light from beneath, seeming to rise through a tube or funnel in the universe. I distinctly don’t want to be taken and open my eyes to stop what I’m seeing. But the strangeness persists. I’m back in the real world but just out of sight I can feel serpents, dragons, demonic aliens, and space ships whirling all around.
There’s a sense in which the serpents/dragons morph into the alien who dominates this vision, and a sense in which the alien is different– not so much a serpent/dragon as some sort of huge insect with humanoid features. I also see four or five other insect-like creatures associated with him. They seem more like “workers” – less intelligent, or not intelligent. Like giant ants in a way. These worker beings –and they do seem to be working as a team on something – are about three feet high, I would guess.
Two other images, both of planets, stand out in my memory of this complex vision. In the first the planet is immense and surrounded by rings or discs in the plane of its equator. In the second I see a trans-parent earth sphere with the fragility, texture, and glittering iridescent colors of a soap bubble. Etched on its surface are the outlines of the familiar continents, and I can see through them from one side to the other. The sphere is rotating and seems to float in space between two cupped hands.
Half animal, half human
My final ayahuasca session in Peru is with a 74-year-old Shipibo Indian shaman named Don Leonceo in his tambo in the jungle beyond Iquitos. As well as the usual ingredients of
Psychotria viridis leavesand the
Banisteriopsis caapi vine, his ayahuasca includes datura, another well-known visionary plant, and tastes unspeakably awful.
I have a series of small and certainly not terrifying visions. There are a few snakes. Several times I see multiple rows of green pyramids laid out in long tapering strips. I seem to be flying over these strips. I also see a sphere, a cube, and a triangle, and rows of serpent or alligator mouths full of teeth.
But the single most memorable aspect of my visions this night unfolds over what feels like just a few seconds. I seem to be inside a large, quite dark room with an opened doorway to one side. Light floods into the doorway and through it I can see a beautiful, spacious balcony overlooking what is perhaps a vast river, or a lake, or even the sea.
On the left side of the balcony, at the rear just outside the open doorway through which I’m looking, I suddenly become aware of the presence of a figure. It is an imposing statue, about six feet high and apparently carved in one piece from some green stone – perhaps jade.The sculptor provided excellent detailing of fine robes, and a belt, and something – possibly a sword? – suspended from the belt.
At first this stunning piece of sculpture seems just that – a harm-less, inanimate statue. I’m curious to see more of it and move my point of view a little closer to get a look at its face. To my surprise the statue is half animal, half human. It has the body of a powerful and well-muscled man but the head of a crocodile, like Sobek, the ancient Egyptian crocodile god. And now I suddenly realize it is alive– a living being, a supernatural guardian. At this moment its eyes swivel sideways and it is looking at me, taking note of me.
The look is intelligent, appraising, somehow sly, but yet not threatening. What is this living statue, this being of jade? The vision fades . . .
Shamanism comes to suburbia
After leaving Peru, Santha and I flew to Brazil so that I could attend a session with the Uniao de Vegetal (UdV) in the beautiful district of Ilha de Guarantiba, about one hour’s drive west of the center of Rio de Janeiro.
The
mestre – Master of the ceremony – is Antonio Francisco Fleury. He’s a distinguished, intellectual-looking gentleman in his sixties with a gray moustache. Altogether about 100people attend. It is a family affair with age ranges present from babes in arms, young kids, teenagers, through to grandparents in their seventies. The UdV allows kids to drink ayahuasca (they call it their
cha – tea) once a month from the age of 14, twice a month from age 18.
This is demonstrably a prosperous, middle-class group including many professionals such as doctors, lawyers, and architects. The temple is in a specially dedicated villa overlooking magnificent countryside. It has a kitchen, a dining area, a patio, a large area to one side for cooking the ayahuasca (strictly
Banisteriopsis caapi,
Psychotria viridis, and water), and the temple itself, a large rectangular hall with space for congregations of 100or more, all comfortably seated.
What is striking is the extremely positive atmosphere of friendliness, support, rationality, and love among the congregation. For any Westerner, used to strict drug prohibition, it is quite surprising to discover that these responsible, courteous people and families, all upright citizens, are gathered to take a powerful hallucinogen – and to do so as the basic sacrament of their own intensely philosophicalreligion. All wear a uniform for the session, representing their place in the hierarchy. The men wear white slacks and white shoes. The women wear orange slacks. All wear green, short-sleeved, button-upshirts. Entry rank is signaled by the white letters UdV on the leftbreast pocket. Councilors – the next rank – have the letters UdV andCDC in yellow on the breast pocket. Higher rank is indicated by gold stars. The top rank is the
mestre, signaled by a blue shirt and a star. Visitors are allowed to wear civilian clothes.
The
cha is dispensed from a large glass urn placed at the head ofa central table. The
mestre decides how much each person gets, partly based on body weight, partly on other factors (past experience?). The dispensing of the
cha is done for the top ranks first – the
mestre, then the councilors, then down through beginners, and finally visitors like me. We all line up to have our glasses filled, and wait until everyone is ready, then on a word from the
mestre we all drink. The
cha is watery and about the color of an overbrewed milky tea. The taste as usual is hideous, and at least four people exit to vomit straight away.
The rest of us sit down. One of the councilors reads from several documents about the philosophy and founding of the UdV. Another councilor stands and clarifies certain points. A third councilor intones a hymn.
The first hour is mainly passed in silence, reviewing our visions and thoughts, although occasionally a member of the congregation will raise a hand to ask a question which one of the councilors answers. Sometimes others elaborate.
Later in the session many members of the congregation (one byone) come to the table to stand and address the assembly. Some talk about their visions and thoughts during this session, others about some recent event or idea that has affected them deeply. It is all very earnest, genuine, spiritual, and philosophical. Sometimes CDs of haunting melodies are played. Sometimes the leading councilor intones hymns.
The session runs from 9p.m. until about 1:20a.m. I drink my brew at 9:20p.m. and am having good visions by 9:45. The first hour after drinking – until 10:20– passes in what feels, subjectively, like an instant. My visions are familiar and positive – perhaps more brightly lit (less “darkness visible”) than before. What I remember clearly are large snakes (again!), light-colored boas, huge, coiling around each other and around branches. I also get pyramid shapes built around a lattice or framework of some kind.
But the best part of the evening is when the same Egyptian goddess whom I last saw in Peru reappears – this time on the left side of my visual field. At first she is concealed, in shadow. I look closely and see a slender female figure holding a dark blue mask in front of her face– one of those masks on a stick. Then she removes the mask and I see her face clearly in the instant before she vanishes once more. She glows the color of molten gold.
Where the impossible becomes real
If I were to nominate the single defining quality of the visions I experienced under the influence of ayahuasca, it would have to be their remarkable sense – no matter how “otherworldly” they were – of being real. It is surprising enough to encounter something so improbable as a “light-being,” or an intelligent giant snake that transforms into a jaguar, or a hybrid crocodile-man, or an insect-man like my “aliens”– especially when any thought of such entities is normally very far from one’s mind. But to encounter them in all their strangeness, yet bolstered by an unassailable aura of certainty and solidity, is doubly disturbing and disorienting.
So some months before I met David Lewis-Williams, what I had learned from personal experience in the Amazon had already begun to convince me of the force of his argument. If our ancestors in the Upper Paleolithic had consumed psychoactive plants – and Appendix I demonstrates that there was an excellent candidate available in Europe in the Ice Age that could have produced Ayahuasca-like effects – then because we share the same neurology, it is safe to say that they would have had experiences rather like mine (not in every minute detail, of course, but broadly and with something like the same general atmosphere).
It had begun to seem highly plausible to me, as Lewis-Williams suggests, that hallucinations could have given rise to early religious notions about supernatural realms and beings, and the survival of death by the “soul.” Indeed, where else could our ancestors ever have acquainted themselves with such ideas in the first place if not in the visionary realms where the shamans of all cultures in all periods have always made their “spirit journeys”?
The much more interesting question, however, is the one that David Lewis-Williams was plainly uncomfortable with when I raised it with him at the University of Witwatersrand. What if these spirit journeys are in some sense real? What if the so-called “hallucinations” of shamans are not just “silly illusions” but another modality of perception that allows us to peer into other realms and dimensions? What if the supernatural beings seen in shamanic states of consciousness and depicted in rock and cave art all around the world, really do exist? Author’s note: I had not seen any of Pablo Amaringo’s paintings before experiencing my own ayahuasca visions.
That I was later able to find similarities to my visions in several works by the Peruvian shaman reproduced in this chapter is an illustration of the astonishing common imagery and identical “parallel worlds” that are reported by people from many different cultures who have experienced ayahuasca. We will look further into this mystery in Chapter Seventeen.
I made another 
