Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon (41 page)

There is no doubt that ayahuasca makes you vomit. There is some consolation
in the fact that the vomiting will ease with continued experience; shamans seldom vomit. There is more consolation in the fact that the vomiting is considered to be cleansing and healing. But the vomiting is certainly distressing to a
gringo, who has been taught that vomiting is wretched and humiliating.

Ayahuasca vomiting has become something of a literary trope. Poet Allen
Ginsberg has described the physical part of his ayahuasca experiences. "Stomach vomiting out the soul-vine," he writes, "cadaver on the floor of a bamboo
hut, body-meat crawling toward its fate.", William S. Burroughs writes: "I
must have vomited six times. I was on all fours convulsed with spasms ofnausea. I could hear retching and groaning as if I was some one else. "I Novelist
Alice Walker speaks of the effect of ayahuasca on her protagonist-horribletasting medicine, gut-wrenching nausea and diarrhea, "waves of nausea ...
like real waves, bending her double by their force. 113 Chilean American novelist Isabel Allende describes how she was doubled over with nausea, vomiting
bile, "vomiting a foam that was whiter with each retching. "4

Anthropologist Michael Taussig, investigating the shamanism of the
Colombian Putumayo, felt compelled to drink ayahuasca-he uses the
Colombian term gage-as part of his research. "Somewhere," he writes, "you
have to take the bit between your teeth and depict yage nights in terms of your
own experience." And one gets the ineluctable impression that Taussig hated
the experience of drinking ayahuasca, hated the corporeality of its effects,
hated vomiting. He writes, "But perhaps more important is the stark fact
that taking yage is awful: the shaking, the vomiting, the nausea, the shitting,
the tension." It is, he says, "awful and unstoppable." His description of the experience is filled with metaphors of slime and nausea. The sounds he heard
"were like those of the forest at night: rasping, croaking frogs in their millions
by gurgling streams and slimy, swampy ground," "the sound of grinning stoic
frogs squatting in moonlit mud." He writes that the "collective empathizing
of nausea" at the healing session "feels like ants biting one's skin and one's
head, now spinning in wave after trembling wave." He refers again and again
to "the stream of vomit," "the streaming nasal mucus," "the whirling confusion of the prolonged nausea."5

But this is the reaction of a gringo. It is important to note that emetics
and purgatives are widely used among the people of the Upper Amazon, who
periodically induce vomiting in their children to rid them of the parasitic illnesses that are endemic in the region.' Vomiting is often induced in children
and adults using the latex of oje, also called doctor oje, which is widely ingested
throughout the Upper Amazon as a vermifuge; some shamans, such as don
Agustin Rivas, use an oje purge to begin la dieta.7 Vomiting may be induced
in children by giving them piflisma, hen excrement, mixed with verbena or
nucnopichana, sweet broom, along with other horrifying components, including pounded cockroaches and urine.' I have no doubt that this is an effective
emetic.

The Piro believe that eating game leaves residues in the body, which accumulate with time, causing fatigue and depression; vomiting-especially by
drinking ayahuasca-expels these residues from the body.9 Communal vomiting is also found among indigenous Amazonian peoples. The Achuar Indians
drink a hot infusion ofguayusa as a morning stimulant, much as we drink coffee, after which all of them, including the children, vomit together.'° Apparently the vomiting is not due to any emetic effect of the drink but, rather, is
learned behavior.- Here in the jungle, vomiting is easy, natural, expected; the
strangled retching of a gringo like me comes from shame.

Perhaps that is the first lesson I received from el doctor-to open myself
up, let go of shame, give up control, hand myself over to the plant.

THE ROLE OF THE 3-CARBOLINES

There has been a continuing question about the role of the ayahuasca vine in
the ayahuasca drink. As we have discussed, the ayahuasca vine contains three
primary harmala alkaloids-the (3-carboline derivatives harmine, tetrahydroharmine (THH), and harmaline.i Harmine is usually the primary constituent,
followed first by THH and then by harmaline. There is no question that harmine, harmaline, and other (3-carbolines are powerful reversible inhibitors of
MAO.2 And the MAO-inhibiting (3-carbolines in the ayahuasca vine may also
potentiate the actions of psychoactive alkaloids other than DMT-for example, nicotine from mapacho or the primary tropane alkaloids from toe.3

The question is: Apart from these actions, do these (3-carbolines contribute
to the nature or quality of the ayahuasca visionary experience? The accepted
wisdom answers no.4 A study of the ayahuasca drink used by the syncretic
religious movement Uniao do Vegetal in Brazil, for example, concluded that
the harmala alkaloids "are essentially devoid of psychedelic activity" at doses
found in the drink.5

A number of experiments with harmine-the primary (3-carboline in the
ayahuasca vine-would seem to bear out this assessment. Chemist Alexander
Shulgin has reviewed the self-experimentation literature and concludes that
harmine has inconsistent effects, which have in common that not much
either pleasant or interesting happens-pleasant relaxation and withdrawal
in one case; dizziness, nausea, and ataxia in another.' Researchers who have
self-administered harmine have reported an increase in belligerence, fleeting sensations of lightness, transient subjective effects, mild sedation at low
doses and unpleasant neurological effects at higher doses, and no "notable psychoactive or somatic effect." 7 Some researchers have expressed doubts
that harmine is psychoactive at all.'

Jonathan Ott gives several accounts of his own experiences with ingesting
infusions of the ayahuasca vine or other (3-carboline-rich plants without DIM
companion plants. During one shamanic ceremony, he drank an infusion of
the ayahuasca vine mixed only with a small number of guayusa leaves, which
contain caffeine but no tryptamines, which he intended to counteract what
he believed would be the soporific effects of the drink. According to Ott, the
caffeine content was insufficient for that purpose; he had to fight off sleep.
He could see, he writes, why (3-carboline-enriched infusions had been used
traditionally as sedatives.9

There are two reasons, however, to question the common wisdom. The
first is the work of Claudio Naranjo, who administered harmaline-not harmine-to thirty-five volunteers, by mouth and intravenously, under laboratory
conditions.'° Harmaline, he reports, was "more of a pure hallucinogen" than
other psychoactive substances, such as mescaline, because of the number of
images reported and their realistic quality-what Naranjo calls their "remarkable vividness.",, "In fact," he writes, "some subjects felt that certain scenes
they saw had really happened, and that they had been disembodied witnesses
of them in a different time and place."" The volunteers often described landscapes and cities, masks, eyes, and what we elsewhere call elves-vividly realized animal and human figures, angels, demons, giants, and dwarfs.13 If this
study is credible, there are grounds to believe that, among the (3-carbolines, at
least harmaline, at sufficient doses, has independent hallucinogenic properties, phenomenologically very similar to those of DIM.

Shulgin's review of the self-experimental literature with regard to harmaline provides some confirmation of the reports ofNaranjo's volunteers. A 5oomg oral dose produced nausea and a complete collapse of motor coordination-"I could barely stagger to the bathroom," one person reported-along
with eyes-closed eidetic imagery and "tracers and weird visual ripplings" with
open eyes.14

It is even more interesting to look at the effects of Syrian rue, which contains pretty much equal quantities of harmine and harmaline, as opposed to
the proportionally much smaller amount of harmaline usually found in the
ayahuasca vine. Oral ingestion of ground Syrian rue seeds caused intense
eyes-closed hallucinations of "a wide variety of geometrical patterns in dark
colors," which evolved into more concrete images-"people's faces, movies
of all sorts playing at high speeds, and animal presences such as snakes."
Oral ingestion of a fivefold greater dose, as extract, caused "zebra-like stripes of light and dark"-visual effects that had "a physicality unlike those of any
other entheogen I'd experienced." In a second trial at the same dose, the participant saw "strange winged creatures" and traveled to "jungle-like places,
full of imagery of vines, fountains, and animals."IS In the same way, case reports of overdoses of Syrian rue describe its effects as including both visual
and auditory hallucinations.,'

Now the amount of harmaline in any sample of ayahuasca vine or drink is,
as we shall see, extremely variable; it is a matter of controversy whether any
infusion of the ayahuasca vine contains enough harmaline to cause the effects
reported above. Jonathon Ott, whose views deserve respectful attention, says
that the amount of harmaline in a single zoo-ml drink of ayahuasca would be
insufficient to produce the effects reported by Naranjo.'?

Yet the accepted wisdom is challenged by ethnography as well. Among
mestizo shamans, an ayahuasca drink made solely from the ayahuasca
vine is sometimes ingested orally for hallucinogenic effects of a particular
"dark" nature. In addition, ayahuasqueros, virtually universally, say that it
is the ayahuasca vine that provides the fuerza, power, and DIM-rich plants
such as chacruna that provide the luz, light, in the ayahuasca experience. In
Colombia, the shamans say that the companion plant brilla la pinta makes the
visions brighter;" among the Shuar, the companion plant is not considered
to have any hallucinogenic effects but, rather, to make the visions clearer, and
is in fact occasionally omitted.19 Don Manuel Cordova Rios agrees: Chacruna
leaves, he says, "serve only ... to make the visions clearer."" The great ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes reports that certain Colombian Indians
smoke leaves of the ayahuasca vine;21 under certain circumstances, don
Roberto recommends smoking the bark.