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For a while now, I have wanted to take part in a shamanistic Ayahuasca ritual in the Peruvian Amazon. My interest was piqued by an email which I received over the summer from a good friend, describing his experience of such a ceremony. He wrote:
“I am a very scientific, secular and skeptical person, while always hoping somehow that I would get irrefutable evidence that the tooth fairy is more than a story, that there are ghosts to make old castles more romantic, and that the spirits in the trees will help me if I ever get lost in the forest. But as much as the artistic, romantic side of me hoped for this reality, I have not had any experience that could not be better explained with science and a proper understanding of statistics. That is until I took Ayahuasca last Christmas. It was very much a spiritual experience for me, the sensation that you are interacting with something that is not a creation of your own mind is ... well, for the secular among us, a new taste for the world, a flavor of experience that reminds me of being two or three years old again, when everything was alive and magical.”
So, rather than return to Switzerland, I decided that this year I would head to the Peruvian jungle. Perhaps, on some level, I also wanted to replace the umbilical cord with a connection to a nurturing spiritual reality.
I flew to Lima, and from there to Iquitos. On arrival the air was thick and soupy with humid tropical heat. The streets pulse with innumerable ‘moto-taxis’ – motorbikes whose back wheels have been removed and replaced with benches, converting them into a form of rickshaw. I took one of these to the Plaza de Armas where I was due to meet a shaman by the name of Otilia.
IquitosAs I sat waiting in the courtyard of the hotel Casona, the heavens opened, as they would do once at least once a day throughout my week in the jungle. Eventually Otilia arrived. She was a calm, composed, middle-aged woman with broad Andean cheekbones. However, she had none of the jewelry, the nose bones or the wild stares which I associate with shamanism. We shook hands and made small talk while she went to buy some Wellington boots for her daughter, then we took a taxi along the road towards Nauta.
The road was flanked by wooden huts thatched with palm fronds. It was five o’ clock in the afternoon and everywhere portly, half-naked men were reclining in hammocks and stroking their stomachs. The younger men played football on the many compacted earthen football pitches.
The roadside gradually became less populous. After 50km the taxi stopped. Four handsome young Peruvian men – Otilia’s boys - were waiting for us. With their muscular bodies, olive skin and thick dark hair, they bore a striking resemblance to the Native American werewolves in the recent film of Stephanie Meyer’s fang-bang novel, New Moon. They hoisted the water barrels, oil and food which Otilia had bought onto their backs, securing the weight with straps around their foreheads, then they made their way down the path into the jungle.
I followed. The thick mud was reluctant to release my feet. There were a number of small rivulets which had to be crossed – I inched cautiously along the slimy tree trunks which served as bridges. I was soon dripping with sweat and the mosquitoes begun their week long feeding frenzy. The jungle floor was gloomy owing to the extreme height of the trees which towered above. Vines and tendrils hung in my way, motionless in the syrupy air. Underfoot, the intricately twisting roots were traps for the unwary. Some were a bright shiny blood red and others ivory white, like the bones and arteries of the earth itself.
After half an hour I arrived in the jungle clearing which would be my home for the next week. I was shown my hut – a rudimentary construction balanced on stilts on the fringe of the jungle. None of the buildings had running water or electricity. In the communal dining hut I met two Frenchmen and one French woman who had also come to take Ayahuasca. Antoine was in his fifties – he was an old friend of Otilia’s and, after a career in television, he now worked in Paris as a healer. Claude was in her forties and Stephane in his thirties; they had both come to the jungle to be healed. Later I also met an Australian woman who has been living with Otilia for over a year now; she is trying to fight breast cancer using only the medicinal powers of plants.
My HutFor the next three days we ate according to the Ayahuasca ‘dieta’ – fresh fruit and rice but no sugar or salt. On the third day we met at nightfall in the space underneath the floor of the temple building (the building itself was under repair). Otilia and Antoine sat at the large table at one end, lit only by a flickering candle. Claude, Stephane and I occupied the three benches which completed the rectangle, each of us about 5 metres apart. Otilia, dressed in a bright traditional dress, began furiously to smoke thick cigarettes. She came to each of us in turn and blew smoke over us. Then she returned to her table and blew smoke into a plastic bottle containing a brown liquid. She whispered mysteriously throughout.
The Temple BuildingI was the last to be called to her table. She passed me a small earthenware cup containing the brown liquid. I lifted it to my lips and swallowed the contents. Ayahuasca means ‘Vine of the Souls’; it is brewed from the Banisteriopsis Caapi vine. The liquid was viscous and extremely bitter, though not as revolting as I had anticipated. When I had returned to my bench, Otilia blew out the candle. We sat in the pitch darkness in silence. I never felt nauseous myself but occasionally one of the others would vomit. In fact, for two hours I felt nothing at all. Then, slowly, I began to feel a gentle rocking. At about the same time, Otilia began to sing ícaros, the beautiful Spanish melodies which traditionally accompany the ceremony.
I became aware of the sounds of the jungle weaving a rich matrix around me. At the same time everything seemed to brighten, as if suffused with its own internal green luminescence. The ícaros reminded me of nursery rhymes and my mind wandered back to my childhood – I remembered what it was like to be a baby. Occasionally Otilia would interrupt her singing to ask us individually how we were feeling, and whether we were experiencing visiones. I did not experience visiones, but I did become aware of a growing sense of joy within me – the universe seemed like such a great cosmic joke. Soon I was battling to fight back the waves of laughter. At the same time, however, I could hear the sound of others vomiting in the dark. I heard Claude writhing on the floor, alternately groaning, weeping and throwing up. I thought of snakes thrashing around in the squelching mud, locked in some dreadful embrace of death.
While Otilia sang, she accompanied herself by tapping a bushel of leaves. After a while I could have sworn that the sound of the leaves and the sound of the singing were coming from different places. Then, as clear as daylight, I felt a tap on my knee. I extended my arm into the darkness but there was no one there. However, it did feel as if there were other beings around me, beings I could only sense and not see but who had definitely not been there before
Eventually Otilia came to sit down beside me. She continued to sing and started to tap me with the bushel; the taps felt like moths dancing over my fingers. Then she began to tap my stomach and I started to feel a little queasy, though again not sufficiently to vomit. Still in pitch darkness, Otilia made me lie down on my bench and began to massage my stomach. She pressed into my belly button, something which I hate. After a while she told me that I had an internal hernia, whatever that is. She made me repeat after her the names of the fruits and plants which I need to take to effect a cure.
Six hours after drinking the Ayahuasca, Otilia drew the ceremony to a close. The world was no longer lit by pulsating green light, but when I stood up I was very unsteady on my feet. I set off towards my hut but got lost as soon as I was out of sight of the temple. Everything looked different by torchlight and I backtracked a number of times. I was beginning to fear that I would have to spend the whole night stumbling blindly around the jungle when, thankfully, my hut hove into view. I barely slept at all that night; however, lying beneath my mosquito net, I was flooded with a sense of serenity and with an intimation of the mysteries that surround us.
The following day, unusually, Otilia joined us for lunch. I asked her how she had learnt the ícaros, of which she knew upwards of 500. She told me that she had never learnt them, that she was born knowing them. So from your mother, then? I asked. No, she replied; her mother did not know any. Then I asked her how she knew which plants to use to treat ailments. She replied that the spirits come to her and tell her during the ceremonies. So you see the spirits? I asked. She nodded; she said that as soon as the ceremony begins, her own spirit leaves her body. Her body will continue to sit at the table and sing the ícaros, but her mind will go from person to person, sharing their experience. She says she has been telepathic since childhood.
The Shaman and IAt this point Antoine, who has done many ceremonies, told me that he once left his body and observed a dinner party hosted by his housemate in his apartment in Paris. When he spoke to his housemate by telephone the following week, his identification of the guests and the topics of conversation was spot on. But, said Antoine, that was an unusual experience. More frequently he sees people from his past, and occasionally he is able to walk the streets of past civilizations. Those are his visiones.
Having not had any proper visiones myself, I was skeptical of all this. However, my skepticism diminished as Otilia spoke to us about our individual experiences. She obliquely referenced Stephane’s childhood trauma, something which, he later assured me, he had not mentioned to her. And she had a good grasp of my own psychology.
Taken alone, nothing that happened to me in the jungle is incontrovertible evidence of the existence of a spirit world. However, I am more willing than ever to suspend my disbelief. Leaving the jungle, I had a renewed sense of the mysteries and interconnectedness of life. Since my departure from Iquitos I have felt lighter and my mind has been clearer – I certainly think there is potential therapeutic value in Ayahuasca. Strangest of all, I have felt an odd tickling in and around my belly button for the last few days. I intend to ask my doctor about the ‘internal hernia’ that Otilia mentioned. However, it is perhaps no coincidence that one of the original intentions of this trip was the symbolical severing of my own umbilical cord.
