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"Trip of a Lifetime", published in Gentelman´s Quarterly
Written by Caspar Greeff from Capetown Sunday Times
We met the shaman at his office in the Amazonian jungle town of Iquitos. The shaman had sandy hair, blue eyes and a Van Dyk beard. His hands were stained yellow from the wild tobacco he smokes. He was wearing his cowboy boots, and he spoke with the drawl of a gunslinger in a John Wayne movie. The shaman came from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and he had, in fact, once been a cowboy. A real American cowboy riding quarterhorses at shows for money.
He had also been a ski instructor, a champion swimmer, a pool hustler, a psychologist, an anthropologist, a businessman... He'd hung out in California with Neil Young, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson. Now he was a healer, a herbalist, a shaman, a sorcerer, a curandero, an ayahuasquero...
There was at the same time something angelic and sardonic about him. But then, he was a man accustomed to navigating dichotomous worlds, a man who had encountered beings both celestial and demonic. The places he'd been, the things he'd seen... you needed a sense of humour to cope.
The shaman, Scott Petersen, was going to facilitate our journeys to the spirit world said to exist on the other side of consciousness. He was going to do that with the aid of the powerful hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca — the Vine of the Dead — at his healing centre in the jungle, an hour's speedboat ride from Iquitos.
Shamans in Peru, Ecuador and Colombia call ayahuasca "the mother of medicines". They have used it for healing and divination for many centuries.
Ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi) is a liana, or vine. To make the hallucinogenic brew, the vine is combined with the leaves of the chacruna plant (Psychotria viridis), boiled with water for several hours and reduced to a dark pungent liquid.
The chacruna contains dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a powerful psychoactive substance that gives the ayahuasca drinker intense visions, and — so they say — access to the spirit world.
Under the influence of ayahuasca, people see marvellous things, including anacondas, condors, jaguars, strange cities, fantastic planets, aliens, angels, demons, fairies, elves, centaurs, gods, dead people. They can experience heaven and hell, death and dismemberment, ecstasy and exquisite beauty.
Ayahuasca is known by many names: caapi, yagé, natéma, mihi, kahi, pinde and dapa. It is also called La Purga because of its powerful purging effect: it often induces vomiting and diarrhoea.
I was going to drink this strange and frightening substance in the Amazon jungle because... well, because somebody had asked me to.
My friend Shonah in fact. "Come on holiday with me to Peru," she said. "We can go to the jungle and take this stuff I've been reading about on the Internet. It's an hallucinogenic brew called ayahuasca, and apparently it heals you and enlightens you and opens your third eye."
"Why not?" I said, always up for an adventure. We bought air tickets and I did some research.
"Ayahuasca is perceived as a magic intoxicant, of divine origin, which facilitates release of the soul from its corporeal confinement, allowing it to wander free and return to the body at will, carrying with it information of vital import," wrote Charles S. Grob in Sacred Vine of Spirits.
"Universally ayahuasca makes people reflect about their lives and leads them to what they feel is an enhanced psychological understanding of themselves," wrote Benny Shannon, Professor of Psychology at Jerusalem University in The Antipodes of the Mind.
He also had this to say: "Often the things I saw under the influence of the intoxicant impressed me as being so real that the conclusion seemed to be unavoidable: truly existing other realities are being revealed."
This sparked my curiosity and stimulated my interest. Was reality, I wondered, merely a neurological construct? By retuning our brains, can we enter parallel, adjacent realities? Can a psychotropic plant give us access to a "spirit world"? Would ayahuasca open my third eye?
I couldn't answer these questions from my office, and so, a few weeks after her suggestion, Shonah and I found ourselves 10km high on the "Cocaine Express", as the flight from Cape Town to Sao Paulo is known.
Four plane rides later, we were in Scott Petersen's office in the frenetic jungle town of Iquitos, with its swarms of three-wheel motorcycle taxis, and its bizarre colony of expats who could have stepped out of the pages of a Tom Robbins novel.
Shonah had found Scott on the Internet. It's amazing what you can access through the worldwide web these days: shamans, hallucinogenic substances, other worlds... Cyberspace is a magic realm, the Internet is the electronic genie that makes all your wishes come true at the touch of a fingertip.
We went for lunch with Scott at Fitzcarraldo's, on the banks of the Amazon River. (The Werner Herzog movie Fitzcarraldo was filmed in Iquitos.)
Scott was in his early 50s, but had the vitality and appearance of a much younger man. He looked at us with twinkling blue eyes and said he had drunk ayahuasca more than 4000 times.
"Once," he said, "when I was an apprentice to this shaman in Pucallpa, he told me to drink a second cup after the ceremony. I did and then went home and fell asleep. When I woke up about an hour later the ayahuasca had kicked in and I was in a trance state. I was in a movie house and a horror movie was showing. These guys in a big Ford Fairlane were driving through the streets of Detroit, shooting and raping people.
"I thought, 'no I don't want to be here,' so I made myself black out. I woke up again, and the house was so quiet it felt as if the world had stopped. I walked through the house, which earlier on had been full of people. The place was empty. I walked to the last bedroom, and there I saw a corpse on a stretcher, covered with a sheet. I lifted the sheet and looked down at my own body. I felt for the pulse. There was none.
"I thought, 'Oh well, I'm dead. I might as well make the most of it.' And since then it's like I've been living on borrowed time, and every second of life is precious.
"They call ayahuasca the Vine of the Dead because it's about psychological death and rebirth. It helps you lose your fear of death, and when you lose your fear of death you lose your fear of life."
Scott grinned at us, and sank his teeth into his tenderloin sandwich.
Later that afternoon we boarded his speedboat and skimmed along the Amazon River. The river was an enormous brown snake coiling through the jungle. Cumulonimbus clouds billowed operatically above us. We sped past rickety passenger boats that seemed to have been assembled from rotting banana crates. The Titanic IV — "Captain, the unsinkable has happened... again" — bobbed in our wake as we made a right turn into the Tamshiyacu River.
"This is the home stretch," said Scott. "Sometimes I water-ski in from here."
Twenty minutes later we pulled up next to a boathouse and the shaman killed the engine of his craft. We were at Refugio Altiplano — Refuge of the High Plains. We disembarked, climbed up a wooden walkway, and trod a muddy path.
The jungle was all around us, the great green lung of the world. Things here seemed cartoonishly gigantic — some of the trees had leaves as big as spinnakers. A snail the size of a grapefruit slimed across the path. Further along the path the jungle was on the move as thousands of leafcutter ants marched with Prussian precision, each carrying a fragment of leaf.
Butterflies colourburst out of bushes, a hummingbird hovered over a flower and clouds of mosquitos followed us to our maluka, the two-story wooden cottage that would be home for the next 10 days. The cottage was fully screened against the bloodsucking hordes. It had beds with mosquito nets, hammocks and a bathroom. It was simple, stylish and comfortable.
That night at 8.30 we heard Wellington boots squelching down the pathway. It was Scott coming to fetch us for our first ayahuasca ceremony. Shonah and I looked at each other. "What are we letting ourselves in for?" I asked. Shonah giggled nervously and so did I.
We grabbed our torches and walked with Scott to the ceremony house, a spacious two-story wooden structure with a high conical roof. the stairs and entered the ceremony room. There were six other people — Walter Martinez Guimoa, a local shaman with whom Scott worked; two young French couples, and Charlie, a naturopath from a small town near Boulder, Colorado.
We sat down on the wooden bench that hugged the walls. Scott and Walter put on white robes. Scott lit six candles on the floor, then breathed into a bottle full of ayahuasca. He did this for a few minutes, then handed the bottle to Walter, who also breathed into it, making an eerie whistling.
Scott called us up one by one, and poured each of us a measure of ayahuasca. You held the cup between your hands, while uttering a silent prayer ("Please don't make me go insane.") Then you said "Salut" to the room, and — heart pounding — downed the dark bitter-sweet concoction that was as thick as molasses. After we'd all — including the two shamans — downed our ayahuasca Scott said a benediction in Spanish. "Querido Padre Nuestro, gracias por estar aquí con nosotros esta noche," he began.
The shaman lit a mapacho — a handrolled cigarette filled with wild jungle tobacco — and waved it in the four cardinal directions. Then he extinguished the candle flames. The darkness was profound.
Scott walked up to each of us in turn and blew mapacho smoke on our heads and sprinkled agua de florida (perfume made from crushed petals) on us.
We waited in the darkness. For what, I didn't know. Outside, the night was fecund with noise. Leaves thudded to the ground, insects chirped, an owl hooted, things clicked and whirred and chomped and popped. The jungle was intensely alive.
After about 20 minutes I saw strands dangling down like thick cobwebs in the darkness. Coloured symbols — lightning bolts, stars, curved lines — started flashing before my eyes. I felt something coursing through my body. It had intelligence, and I sensed it was curious about me. I felt it penetrating my every cell, I felt its healing power.
There was a strange buzzing sound, like the ceremony was being recorded by technology from another dimension.
Then the ayahuasca kicked in good and strong. Snakes slithered everywhere, and changed into piles of skulls. Alien beings peered at me. Cityscapes unfolded far below as I hurtled through time and space. Colours intense beyond imagination filled my vision. My visions. I was on another planet, there was a shower of stars, there were celestial beings, they were showing me endless strands of possibilities, it was real, there are realms beyond our wildest dreams, we don't need spaceships to travel millions of light years, oh Mama, what have I done, I'm going mad, this is too much.
Emotions overrode the visions. All my peccadillos, my sins of omission and commission rolled through my head, amplified into grotesque wrongdoings. I went to a place described by the late ethnobotanist and psychedelic adventurer Terence McKenna as "the demon-haunted bedrock of being".
The other intelligence inside me was overpowering. I felt sick and vomited — pain and repressed emotions — into the bucket at my feet. Sweet relief. No wonder they call this stuff La Purga.
Walter cleared his throat and started singing. He sang in the Indian language called Shipibo and he sang in Spanish. He sang icaros — the healing songs that shamans say the ayahuasca teaches them. He sang for nearly four hours.
The songs were pure power, and streams of intense colour undulated with Walter's voice. Scott smoked his mapachos and every so often came up to us, blowing smoke and sprinkling perfume. He looked like an angel as he flicked his lighter in the darkness. When he breathed on you, it was like a blessing. You felt joy, ecstasy, relief. You felt healing power coursing through your body. You saw arcane symbols of magic.
Walter sang the strange songs that had been taught to him by a vine. It got weird. I started resisting the ayahuasca and the icaros. Thought I was part of a crazy experiment with two mad magicians. Thought I was in Purgatory, paying penance for my crimes on Earth. Thought aliens were trying to enslave me and put me to work on their space galley. A million years dragged by. It was going to be a long night.
The room was filled with an energy unlike anything I'd ever experienced in my life. The room was suffused with magic. With power. An almighty bang rolled across the jungle. It sounded like the sky had split open. Jesus. What was that.
Another couple of million years passed. Things started returning to normal. I hadn't gone mad. Walter stopped singing, and Scott lit the candles. The ceremony was over.
"This is extreme tourism," I said to Shonah. "How many more of these ceremonies are we signed up for?"
"Six."
"Jeez."
Scott walked us back to our cottage.
"Is being a shaman akin to being a sorcerer?" I asked him.
"We do perform red magic," he said.
"What's red magic?"
"The manipulation of energy."
"Quite a mind-boggling concept."
Scott laughed. "We also practise white magic, which is healing magic. Obviously you've got to know black magic to be able to perform white magic. It takes seven years' study to be a curandero — a healer, a white magician. Black magic you can learn in four months."
"What is magic?" I asked him. By now we were back at our cottage, and Scott walked up the stairs with us.
"Magic is advanced science," he said.
"Scott, what was that bang we heard?" asked Shonah.
"Oh, that was one of the sentries. They've got orders to fire their shotguns every few hours. I'm not into the drama of South America, but I do want people — illegal loggers, bandits — to know that I'm armed and dangerous. There's no police force out here."
"It's the law of the jungle," I remarked. Then I said, "That ayahuasca's very strong medicine. It's not for the faint-hearted."
"No indeed, we don't get many of that type here," chuckled Scott. He hugged us goodnight and walked back into the jungle night.
I undressed and climbed into the cocoon of my mosquito netting
When I looked outside, everything was silver and shimmering. It looked like shining snakes were draped on the trees. Eventually I fell asleep. I dreamed I was looking into the sky at a star made of neon tubing. The star was sucking me into it. I resisted, then let go and flew through it. On the other side of the neon star a group of people welcomed me. "You've died," they told me. "It was easy when you let go, wasn't it."
I woke up, feeling refreshed, revitalised, energised. There was no hangover, like you'd expect after taking a powerful hallucinogenic substance.
Waiting for us on our balcony was a tray of fruit salad, freshly squeezed juice and tea.
A few hours later we were sitting at a table in El Centro, the enormous wooden structure at the heart of Refugio. We had a delicious breakfast of fish soup, followed by a piece of fish and rice. For the next 10 days, our diet would be simple and delicious. Fish, chicken, salads. No salt or sugar, no dairy products, no pork or red meat.
Scott joined us for breakfast, and we discussed the previous night with him.
"I thought I was going to be enslaved by aliens and made to work on their galley," I told him.
"Don't worry Caspar, I would have bought you back," he laughed.
"Do you ever get scared on ayahuasca?" I asked him.
"Shamans never show fear, even when they're scared shitless," he said. "We have to be able to navigate in other realms — realms where schizophrenics and psychotics go. Realms are spectrums of depth. But we operate in this plane, and we've got to be able to come back here.
"You know, I find it best to view whatever happens when I take ayahuasca with an air of detached curiosity. Whatever happens, wherever I go, whatever I feel, I know that four hours later I'll be completely normal again.
"The gift of ayahuasca is sanity. It enhances perception and intuition. It makes you react to any situation like an animal — instinctively, immediately and correctly. We call the ayahuasca ceremonies 'surgery without a scalpel'.
"Ayahuasca is multidimensional medicine. It readjusts your entire immune system. It cleans your blood, repairs damaged neurons, it goes through your spleen and your gall bladder. It repairs psychic and emotional damage. It puts you back in touch with your soul."
Scott told us that a couple of times a year high-rolling stockbrokers from the US come to Refugio. They take ayahuasca and attend one-on-one workshops with Scott. They do this in order to trade more efficiently. They pay $7000 for a week at Refugio. Talk about voodoo economics!
Our days at Refugio passed quickly and effortlessly. We spent the time reading, lying in hammocks, walking through the jungle, and swimming in the river. Relaxing. Recharging. Breathing the cleanest air on earth. We were shown the amazing botanical garden that Scott had put together. A botanical garden with hundreds of healing plants.
At night we drank ayahuasca. I learned how to navigate in the realms where it took me — in the outer limits of the universe. I felt immensely privileged to be taking the sacred medicine in the awe-inspiring jungle.
The ceremonies brought to mind a verse from a Robert Bly poem:
The strong leaves of the box-elder tree plunging in the wind, call us to disappear
Into the wilds of the universe, where we shall sit at the foot of a plant,
And live forever, like the dust.
