A video, embedded below, is circulating the ayahuasca surfers’ realm. It shows, whether true or not, a jaguar feeding on the ayahuasca vine. The jaguar is a very centrally important figure in the cosmovision of many Amazonian ayahuasca cultures, the observations of which continue to spawn many speculations about the various practices and myths around the jaguar (and ayahuasca).
“Ingestion of Ayahuasca usually induces nausea, dizziness, vomiting, and leads to either an euphoric or an aggressive state. Frequently the Indian sees overpowering attacks of huge snakes or jaguars. These animals often humiliate him because he is a mere man. The repetitiveness with which snakes and jaguars occur in Ayahuasca visions has intrigues psychologists. It is understandable that these animals play such a role, since they are the only beings respected and feared by the Indians of the tropical forest; because of their power and stealth, they have assumed a place of primacy in aboriginal religious beliefs.
In many tribes, the shaman becomes a feline during the intoxication, exercising his powers as a cat. Yekwana medicine men mimic the roars of jaguars. Tukano Ayahuasca-takers may experience nightmares of jaguar jaws swallowing them or huge snakes approaching and coiling around their bodies … shamans of the Conibo-Shipibo tribe acquire great snakes as personal possessions to defend themselves in supernatural battles against other powerful shamans.
The drug may be the shaman’s tool to diagnose illness or to ward off impending disaster, to guess the wiles of an enemy, to prophesy the future. But it is more than the shaman’s tool. It enters into almost all aspects of the life of the people who use it, to an extent equalled by hardly any other hallucinogen. Partakers, shamans or not, see all the gods, the first human beings, and animals, and come to understand the establishment of their social order.”
Did the shamans learn from the jaguars to use the plant? Is there a cosmic connection, therefore, through the ayahuasca between the jaguar and people that live with the cats and the ayahuasca plant?
“Ayahuasca is going global“, said a prominent psychedelic researcher recently, and it is also going mainstream as part of journeying across the planet. In the Californian TV series “Weeds” the leading act, Marie-Louise Parker’s character, Nancy Botwin, drinks ayahuasca under rather suspect circumstances with the leader of a drug-, guns- and human- trafficking Mexican mafia, who is also the mayor of Tijuana for added comic value. The ceremony is led by a young shaman who is told by the spirit of the medicinal brew not to give it to Nancy; she is not ready for it, so to speak, but he uses the words “I should not give it to her” and the gangster boss says “that’s alright, I’ll give it to her then”. Not off to a good start, but then again what do those shamans know about what a mobster’s girlfriend needs?
Watch the ayahuasca sequence here:
There are various issues at play here. Firstly, the most obvious one of the slightly forced drinking where the strong male insists that the little girl drinks despite warnings by the learned practitioner. That, however, is not so bad, – perhaps he knew better..
It is still early days of planning, but a small group of people are planning to travel, for the second time, down the Napo river – doing workshops relevant for indigenous peoples’ struggles, such as shamanic civil rights, and healing sessions in communities along the 1000km long and very exciting route from the beginning of the River Napo in Tena, Ecuador to Iquitos (where it meets the Amazon and the Ucayali rivers). The journey goes through one of the most biodiverse regions in the world – right past the Yasuni National Park, before crossing the border into Peru. After visiting The 4th International Amazonian Shamanism Conference: Magic, Myths and Miracles, which will be held in Iquitos, Peru – July 19th – 26th, 2008, we might continue to Pucallpa….
Contemporary developments in the global economy are very significant for the Amazon rain forest. While this might be said to be true for anywhere at any point in time there are nevertheless good reasons for paying special attention to what maybe the last battle for the survival of the largest rain forest in the world, the loss of which it should need no further justification to lament – and that is the basis upon which this invitation is written….
These are notes from an interview with a Kichwa Yachak – a traditional healer of Napo in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Fidel Andy is an “ayahuasquero“, who uses primarily the ayahuasca medicine to heal people. Read the rest of this entry »
This letter was sent in an email to a conference organiser, but it looks like it could be read by anyone interested in these matters:
One of the projects that I am fiddling with here (on the side of my PhD) concerns a network of community-based botanical gardens in the Napo-Ucayali corridor.
As you might be aware, Correa, Lula and Chavez (for instance an oil pipeline to Argentina), as well as of course the Peruvian state, have great plans for “corredores inter-oceanicos” which will essentially, finally, cut the Amazon apart in order to bring cheap consumer goods, in the short term, to the Brasilian cities, and in the long term to all of the continent, of course, –and the last trees and oil and other natural resources back to China, so that they can produce the plastics to come here….
It had been two long days, coming down from the Cordillera Blanca from Huaraz via La Union and Huanuco at the door step to the Peruvian Amazon. As far as the mines, some hours before La Union, there had been decent roads, of course for the trucks carrying away the sub-terranean resources to the Canadian bottom line. The ugly appearance of mining facilities and the steady stream of full-sized lorries carrying ton after ton tears your heart apart, -like the mines tear the heart out of the mountains. The Cordillera Blanca is an outstandingly beautiful area – never quite seen anything like it.
“In 1966, the Alpamayo mountain was declared “the most beautiful mountain in the world” by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization“.
The (swim in the) Chinancocha lake speaks for itself:
But the mining business is growing and the mountains shrinking, and the water quality around the mines – down the rivers far away – becoming an ever more dismal health threat:
Drank ayahuasca tonight, for the fourth time. One thought worth reporting might be explained by way of the great fiction of Carlos Castaneda and his concept of “assemblage point”. Anyone is free to think what they like about his work, but like flies to shit the figures speak for themselves: it is popular. For me the books were instrumental, formative, eye-opening in my early 20s – great metaphors and possibilities for thought patterns, well wrapped in humourous prose in words attributed to Don Juan.
So what did he say? Well…. get off your flippin’ tits, init? Almost.
On reading the previous entry on Ayahuasca a good friend speculated on the plant spirit’s helpfulness in the context of creativity – the big question: what to do next?
This is a kind of reply.
The big questions about taking steps, and about moving through time and space as a creative being, can indeed be reflected on, for want of a better term for the kind of clarity that the plant spirits induces, with Ayahuasca.
Third time drinking ayahuasca with the local curandero. The first two sessions were ritual and moments of acquaintance with each other and with the plant spirit. With concentration and focus we encountered ayahuasca faintly in a dream like trance. El curandero kept saying that there was only one plant in the drink – he only works with one plant at a time, although he is well versed in a wide range of plants, including San Pedro and the dangerous Angel’s Trumpet:
Reflections on the second encounter with the spirit of Ayahuasca and visions of much more to come. The point of departure is transgression, destination unknown.
James Baldwin wrote The Fire Next Time in a transgressive manner, one of coming to terms with the white man’s (and woman’s) oppression of themselves and of all other races, who consequently are subjected, also, to the oppressing force’s self-afflictions, thus a double terror, manifesting throughout history in atrocities that leave fiction no place to roam for novel horror. It was in a revolutionary voice that he wrote, in an oppositional and confrontational voice. It was a call for action:
Last night we had an Ayahuasca ceremony – a psychedelic ritual with a medicine man, a spiritual cleansing; we met a curandero, were touched upon and blessed by, seen by, seen right through, in a sense, by a shaman; we became acquainted with a Yachak. He has a mobile phone, we have his card, and he saw my stomach acid and my bad back and unsurprisingly noted that colona’s energy was pure (or sorted, or whatever the term was).
It kind of figures, somewhere on the agenda, along the lines, if I may, that the conversation ought to wear out its welcome and elephantly touch upon the psychedelic realm – after all, we are in the Ecuadorian Amazon basin, whence many shamanic stories come. Then again, if one looks hard enough, any place will have such accounts (or at least a tapestry of fates Inquisitioned), won’t they?
Have you talked to your soul today? Excuse me, Mister, how is your spirit. “I’m in great spirit!”.
So what is there to tell, what kind of tales can we wag?
The rain came just a few minutes ago – it always comes and it – yes, “IT”, has taken some sort of, dare I say?, sentient form. One finds oneself referring to the rain as a colleague or companion, someone to be reckoned with; for it always comes, at some point, and often times violently so. And it just came like that. I could hear it in the distance, turned to look out of the window and I could see it coming in from the hills. Slowly, steadily and the volume rising threateningly, but also comforting: air condition coming up, Massa! It brings air, oxygen, space to breathe in, – and out, deeeeep in-breath. Ahhh.. The rain, my friend.
Having just medically applied some (non-conformist, afternoon) Shiva meditation to a slight, dizzying lingering feeling of perhaps two Cuba Libres too many last night, it is obvious that all channels were open, no signals crossed, and she, is it a she?, I don’t know, but s/he blazed right through me as the distant sound of the tin roofs enveloped me in a wonderful inferno of pure music (read: the horrible sound of tropical, torrential rain on tin roofs). Wow! I liked that.
That is probably the second spirit I have come across around here. For such a presence must indicate that the rain is a, has a spirit? Or, actually, come to think of it, what is a spirit?
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