All Kinds of Magic: One Man's Search for Meaning Across the Material World (31 page)

My own first forays in shamanism – embarrassingly trite, in retrospect – revolved around the picking of some magic mushrooms from a farmer’s field on the edge of Dartmoor. A friend of mine had returned from Guatemala, where he’d seen mushroom motifs on the ruins of Mayan temples. With these mushrooms, he pronounced, we’d see the future, receive healing, possibly commune with God.

But while these were all likely uses to which the ancient civilisations had put the psilocybin mushrooms, all I received were a few tremulous colour visions and the mother of all stomachaches. We felt spectacularly let down, not least by the copious vomiting which followed. For many years after, I avoided hallucinogens entirely, considering their advocates little more than pleasure-seeking wastrels, far outside any respectable spiritual quest. But more than this, I feared the directions my mind might take me. Long spells of depression left me conservative as regards the substances I subjected myself to, for fear of losing control completely.

When I visited Peru, shamanism reappeared in my life in a way which made me reconsider all this. In South America for some journalism work, I visited the great Tambopata Madidi wilderness on the Peru–Bolivia border, an area two thirds the size of Costa Rica. After my article was finished, I stayed on for a while, keen to explore the jungle. This was a fierce, unruly place, further outside my experience than anywhere I’d ever been. Here intricately coloured beetles landed on one’s hand. Spiders the size of soup plates shimmered from aerial webs. The ‘numinous’ was everywhere, compounded by the knowledge of so many dangers, from plant and animal alike, which bustled and swarmed beneath every leaf. I found it fascinating to imagine what kind of spiritual relationship to the world had evolved here, as opposed to, say, Ladakh, whose ecology was so comparatively barren and empty.

To help me navigate this labyrinth, I engaged the services of a local guide, Juan, who became my friend and confidant for a few weeks. Together, we travelled the Amazon in a metal
peque peque
boat, staying in village shacks, jungle lodges, tents. Juan had grown up in the rainforest and knew his environment from the inside out. For him, nothing existed interdependently of anything else, and the jungle was alive, not merely with flora and fauna, but with spirits. He’d received his knowledge, he said, from his father: a shaman and teacher of plant medicine who’d taken him into the jungle from the moment he could walk, to hunt, pick fruits and medicinal herbs and learn the old stories.

‘My father is an Ayahuascero,’ explained Juan. ‘People from all over the Oriente region come to call on him, and to receive the wisdom of the ayahuasca vine.’

Something stirred in my memory. Several years before I’d met a traveller in India who waxed lyrical about the ayahuasca vine, saying it had changed his life. William Burroughs, too, had written about it in
The Yage Letters
, in which he recounts his search for a near-mythical hallucinogenic plant. For Burroughs, who hoped the plant might be a possible cure for his long-term heroin addiction, yage was to be ‘the final fix’.

‘What is this ayahuasca vine?’ I asked. We were motoring gently along the eastern shore of the great river, in the hope of spotting capybara, a barrel-shaped rodent: something like a giant guinea pig. Above us, the clouds had parted for the first time in days, and all seemed right with the world.

‘In Quechua, ayahuasca means “vine of the soul”,’ said Juan, gruffly. He was a short, weathered man who liked to chew tobacco. He kept his gaze fixed on the river, alert to the movement of currents. ‘It shows us the spirit realms.’

‘Why do you take it?’

‘To learn things. To make problems go away. There are many reasons.’

Juan seemed uncharacteristically surly. Was this an area of knowledge he preferred not to discuss with Westerners, I asked. Were there prohibitions against sharing the secrets of the vine?

Juan lowered the revs of the boat, and the canoe slowed a little against the gurgling current. ‘It is not that,’ he explained. ‘In fact, many gringos come here now to drink the medicine. For some shamans, it is big business. It is merely that this knowledge is sacred. To say what the ayahuasca can do, or what it means to drink, is for a shaman to say. You must ask my father.’

Juan’s reverence for the ayahuasca vine says much about the relationship of indigenous people with the world around them. They consider plants to be living teachers, with a spirit and a personality of their own. Some of the plants teach by bringing visions or strong dreams, others – like trees – bring the student virtues which they display themselves, such as fortitude, or resistance to strong weather. Although the shaman/pupil relationship is important in some tribes, the knowledge itself comes from nature, and the shaman merely offers the tools to receive it. In a non-literate culture there’s an obvious logic to this, but it also poses difficult questions for science. How can a plant teach us something? Or is it merely that to ingest certain plants forces us to perceive the world differently?

Curious to know more, I asked Juan if I could meet his father. He seemed pleased by the request, and said that we would be literally passing his village the following day. The subsequent morning we left at first light. Before us, the Amazon, a river with a total flow greater than the next ten largest rivers in the world combined, moved along in a brackish chop. On either side of the channel, the jungle offered a claustrophobic embrace. Monkeys chattered, technicolour birds fled the treetops, a heron stabbed a wriggling fish on its spear-like beak.

Slow progress that day. Roiling clouds which, at noon, opened violently. Sitting beneath a plastic tarpaulin, Juan and I stopped to watch flaming spikes of lightning hit the water. The river seemed to boil as the rain struck its surface. In the jungle beyond I imagined birds tucking heads beneath their wings, rodents seeking burrows, butterflies hovering, disconsolately, beneath banana leaves. We seemed in the grip of primordial forces and, for the duration of the storm, I found myself considering that this feeling – of being entirely at the mercy of the natural world – was the birthright of everyone born in the jungle. It was the starting point for trying to understand the shamanism that had originated here.

Beneath the rattle of the heavy rain, we ate our sandwiches – processed cheese between limp white bread – and drunk
yerba mate
from a thermos.
Mate
was, strictly speaking, an Argentinian drink, but Juan had acquired a taste for it from his brother, currently working on a stock farm in the pampas of Córdoba. The rain shot the tarpaulin so stridently there was no point in attempting conversation, so for a time we simply watched this menacing rainstorm, and tucked our jackets more tightly against the wet. Within an hour it had eased enough to allow us back on the river. After the storm, the silence was limitless.

Downstream, we came across gold prospectors, shrivelled, hungry-looking men working by the river’s edge. A powerful diesel motor, belching soot into the air, propelled a hammer crusher which broke down rocks from the river.

‘Very bad for the river,’ muttered Juan, staring at them with disgust. ‘They wash the ore with mercury and then flush it away in the river. It kills animals and fish. Eventually, it will probably kill those men too.’

‘How much gold do they find?’

‘For the ones that do it by hand, maybe three or four dollars per day. With that machine, thirty, forty dollars. Small amounts. It’s enough to survive.’

By four o clock, we reached his father’s village. At the water’s edge a group of small children were splashing about, no adults in sight. A grinning boy of about six swam up to the edge of our boat and pulled himself up with scrawny arms.

‘
Holá
, Pablito,’ hailed Juan, patting him on the head. ‘My sister’s child,’ he explained. ‘Very naughty one!’

A short slope led upwards to a muddy track, at which the usual ramshackle dwellings of South American village life began, shacks made of hand-cut planks, corrugated metal, strips of plastic filling the gaps. There were rangy, long-necked chickens in the dirt, as well as tiny black-haired pigs uttering ferocious snorts. A fishing net hung from a tree to dry and, in a streak of brilliant turquoise, a bird crossed our line of sight. It was a paradise tanager, said Juan. It had a throat of violet and a pale-green hood.

This was one of the very few villages along this stretch of river, Juan told me. Further into the jungle there were uncontacted tribes, about whom little was known. On the other side was Puerto Maldonado, the capital of the Madre de Dios region, and an important town in the brazil nut trade.

‘Those who leave the village go there,’ said Juan. ‘They work in logging, brazil nuts, or some in tourism like me. Puerto Maldonado’s full of drugs, prostitution and missionaries. These missionaries come here,’ he grinned, ‘to teach us jungle people about the existence of God. But as you will see when you meet my father, ours is a different God from the one they offer.’

The village was scarcely more than ten houses. From some of them, smiling people offered waves to Juan, from others came the drifting smoke of cooking meat, mewling babies, silence. These people lived gruelling lives – that much was evident in their faces – but there was community here, proximity to nature, laughter. I realised, too, how reliant these people were on traditional healers like Juan’s father, so far from any city or hospital. Pushed up against the jungle, they had evolved to take what they needed from its grasp. It provided food, building materials and medicine, as well as an entire system of belief.

A few weeks earlier, I’d seen great swathes of clear-cut land, like Tolkien’s vision of Mordor, on the edge of the rainforest. Here, more than anywhere in the world, the impact of material progress was tangible; one could measure it in feet and inches, smell the brush burn in the air. All of us in the ‘developed’ world knew about this, read about it sorrowfully over our Sunday newspapers, and yet to
see
it was to move from knowledge to experience. These were the very trenches that lay between the two worlds.

Similarly, the conflict between Western missionaries and the indigenous world-view speaks volumes, not only about First World arrogance, but about the rational versus the enchanted. A typical sixteenth-century account by Spanish navigator Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo described ‘revered’ old men, who used tobacco to ‘worship the devil’. Later visitors would not believe that the shamans were communicating with anyone at all, putting their rituals down to trickery or ‘hocus-pocus’. Even amongst anthropologists it took until the twentieth century before ideas about shamanism began to change. Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade was amongst the first to contend that, at the heart of all religions, was an experience of the sacred. In this, he claimed ‘shamanism is the religious experience par excellence’.

On the far side of the village, Juan’s father came out to meet us. He was eighty-nine and looked sixty, with long silver hair, nut-brown skin and a great quietness about him. His teeth were few, but other than that he appeared to be in radiant health.

Shaking his hand, I found myself in the shadow of a mountain. To look into most people’s eyes is to find questions there, projections and needs that colour our responses. But here there was only attention, perhaps even a certain levity. After he had said hello, he went straight back to what he had been doing, which was sweeping the floor of the hut and feeding a small fire with wood. Our arrival hadn’t surprised him at all.

‘There was a ceremony last night,’ explained Juan, after some words with his father. ‘Some people came from Puerto Maldonado to take the vine.’ He broke some brazil nuts with a hammer, and handed me some.

‘Can I see the plant?’ I asked.

Juan asked his father, who assented and we followed the old shaman to the edge of the jungle. ‘It grows everywhere,’ he said, in a high musical voice. ‘I only have to go a few feet and it is there. It is there to help us.’

I knelt down beside a fairly average-looking sprawl of vivid green leaves. Later I would learn its Latin name,
Banisteriopsis caapi
, and that it’s a jungle vine of the family Malpighiaceae.

‘There are many different colours,’ said the shaman. ‘
Cielo
or the sky plant is a mild ayahuasca. Then there is
trueno
or thunder for the stronger experience. Then there is black, white and red. All offer different experiences. She is the mother of all plants. But she does not awake unless she is mixed with another.’

We walked on into the jungle, leaving the village behind, a hot buzz of flies about my face. Within a few minutes we had reached another humble-looking plant, which he called ‘chacruna’. A relative of the coffee family,
Pschotria viridis
, it provides a potent source of dimethyltryptamine or DMT. To ingest chacruna by itself, however, is to feel nothing. The human stomach easily breaks it down into harmless compounds. When combined with ayahuasca vine, on the other hand, the DMT reaches the brain stem intact. And in that experience, as I would eventually discover some months later, nothing can ever be the same again.

‘This is the most powerful drug I have ever experienced,’ William Burroughs wrote in an unpublished article he sent to Allen Ginsberg in 1956. ‘Yage is not like anything else. It produces the most complete derangement of the senses.’