Hello, what’s this? I asked myself when, while perusing a recent Book Lounge newsletter, a work with the novel title The Ayahuasca Diaries caught my eye.
Ayahuasca, of course, is a well-known psychedlic herb – but references to it are far and few between in this corner of the world.
Turns out, Sunday Times journo Caspar Greeff went off to South America in search of the kind of consoling that ayahuasca can purportedly give – and he took his father along with him. The result is a memoir unique on the SA Lit scene, which is being launched at the BL tonight, and from which we are pleased to bring you this excerpt:
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This morning Scott brought his .22 rifle to the Internet room at the heart of his magical jungle empire. He strode up the stairs, posed like Buffalo Bill onstage at his Wild West show and aimed the rifle at the ceiling.
POW!
A bat tumbled down, blood trickling out of its little mouth. The creature flapped its wings feebly and died. ‘That bat’s had better days than this one,’ Scott observed.
I don’t want to give the impression that Scott Petersen was a trigger-happy cowboy who enjoyed killing: the shaman shot the bat because it shat on his computer.
Another pilgrim – as Scott calls his clients – had joined us. Ralph, a 58-year-old, bearded, bespectacled builder and Buddhist, lives in Crestone, Colorado. Crestone, on the western shoulder of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range, has a population of 82, but is one of the centres of spiritualism in the United States. The village is home to seven Buddhist temples, two Hindu ashrams, a Zen retreat, a Carmelite monastery, a Tibetan Peace Park, a Cretan labyrinth, and an Assyrian ziggurat.
‘And five brothels,’ added Scott irreverently.
‘And one crystal meth lab and one opium den,’ laughed Ralph, a gentle soul who looked not unlike Jerry Garcia in his Blues for Allah days.
A large turquoise insect was trapped on the green mosquito netting of a window and, experiencing a moment of compassion, an instant of Buddha-mind, I picked it up to free it to the outside world. The insect buzzed furiously and fire shot through my system. My right index finger was aflame, my heart accelerated dramatically. The flamboyantly coloured creature was a wasp, and it had done what wasps do in these situations: stung me.
‘Fuego! Fuego! (Fire! Fire!),’ I yelled in my makeshift Spanish. ‘Jesus, this thing’s got a hell of sting.’
Dad grinned. ‘No good deed ever goes unpunished,’ he said. He believed that.
‘No, that was great,’ I muttered through tears of pain. ‘Exhilarating. I could get addicted to this feeling, keep one of these wasps as a pet and let it sting me whenever I feel less than alive.’
But today I feel alive. So very alive, even before the wasp injected its venom into my system. Maybe it has something to do with last night’s ayahuasca ceremony. Dad, having decided that the potion is poison, stayed in the bungalow, reading, when Scott came to fetch me at 8pm. I heard the shaman’s gumboots squelching through the mud and felt my pulse quicken.
‘Hope I don’t get stuck in Hell,’ I remarked to Dad as I walked out.
‘I’m sure you won’t. I think you’re going to have a breakthrough tonight. Good luck.’
‘Thanks Dad. Good night,’ I replied and joined the shaman on the path to his temple/ceremony room. The ayahuasca had been freshly heated to remove fermentation, and was still warm when I put the cup to my lips. It was a dark russet colour; the colour of rich soil, a hue of autumn.
I looked into the cup and said a short prayer to the goddess of ayahuasca. (‘Please don’t make me go mad.’) Then held the cup up. Toasted the universe. ‘Salud! (Health).’ I downed the potion in two sips. As usual it tasted vile. Horrid, bitter medicine. I ignored the shrieks of protest from my taste buds, went to my place on the wooden bench and waited.
Scott said his customary prayer in Spanish, and extinguished the candles. The moon was full and silver light danced in the room. I waited for the jungle juice to take effect. The waiting was scary – then I saw legions of eyes. The moonbeams stopped dancing and the darkness doubled. I felt as if I was in somebody else’s mind. I was trapped between two realms. The air was charged with magic. A lattice fell from my eyes, and I saw the fine filaments that connect everything. Honeycomb fractals flashed across my vision.
Then the fear. That feeling of mega déjà vu. Mega vu. Mega-view. The knowledge that I had done exactly this millions of times before and would be in this same room in this same ceremony feeling the same emotions and thinking the same thoughts countless numbers of times again. I travelled back to the beginning of time, when a disembodied consciousness created the universe out of loneliness and all history unfolded, then I arrived at Scott’s ceremony room and drank ayahuasca and travelled back to the beginning of time where a disembodied consciousness created the universe out of loneliness, and all history unfolded … and I was looping, over-compensating again.
I reached for my notebook. My hands looked far away and were elongated as if they were underwater: they glowed like they’d been picking beetroots in Chernobyl. I scribbled down two sentences: ‘This has never happened before. And this will never happen again.’
That seemed to help. I felt flooded with compassion and love. I stopped thinking about myself, brought friends to mind, and it felt as if we were communicating on a plane far removed from the physical world.
Walter started singing icaros, and he sang all of creation into existence. My spirit soared. I was filled with awe and gratitude. I had an inkling of what is called ‘shamanic ecstasy’.
According to the late Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade, the shaman:
… commands the techniques of ecstasy – that is, because his soul can safely abandon his body and roam at vast distances, can penetrate the underworld and rise to the sky. Through his own ecstatic experience he knows the roads of the extraterrestrial regions. He can go below and above because he has already been there. The danger of losing his way in these forbidden regions is still great; but sanctified by his initiation and furnished with his guardian spirit, a shaman is the only human being able to challenge the danger and venture into a mystical geography.
I may have been unsanctified by my initiation, I may have been unfurnished with a guardian spirit, but I was certainly venturing into a mystical geography. Vivid pictures flashed through my mind. Scenes transformed and metamorphosed. I saw Moses schlepping up Mount Sinai to fetch commandments inscribed in stone by the wrathful storm deity Yahweh, back in the days when men still heard the voice of God as clear as a tune through an iPod earpiece. I went to a village on a planet in another galaxy where I have another life which I live concurrently with my Earth-life. I had committed a crime there and was imprisoned inside a colossal tree which was called the Axis Mundi – the Centre of the World. I felt my blood turn to sap as the tree absorbed me. Then I was on a bridge over a river which I knew was the Ganges, facing a trio of monkey-faced demons who brayed like donkeys and brandished massive clubs. A blow from one of those clubs would knock my head off. I walked up to the monkey-demons and surrendered completely and they vanished.
I became aware that all life is sacred, that all beings are fragments of one mind.
Someone walked over to me. He had the head of a fish and the body of a man. He wore Scott’s white robe. I looked at him curiously. He blew perfume on me, and gave me a word of advice.
‘Breathe,’ he said.
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Photo courtesy jungleblog
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