Long ago, the tribal wise men of Amazonia made an astonishing discovery. By mixing a certain vine, Banisteriopsis caapi, into a tea with other plants containing dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, they could induce long-lasting visionary states and heal various ailments. Of course, these wise men—shamans, if you must—didn’t use the jargon of modern botany and molecular chemistry. They believed it was the living spirit of the caapi vine itself—ayahuasca, in the Quechuan language—that had unlocked this secret for the benefit of their tribes. And so the brew itself came to be known as ayahuasca: aya meaning “spirit” or “soul” or “death” or “dead body,” and huasca meaning “vine.”
“The shamans’ lack of modern expertise only compounds the credit that is their due.”
The shamans’ lack of modern scientific expertise only compounds the credit they are due. As the French philosopher Michel Henry asked, “How was prescientific humanity, lacking all the tools that modern technology would later provide, able to survive and develop? How was it ever able to produce extraordinary results in many domains, for example those of art and religion?”
Henry answered his own question by pointing to what he called “the knowledge of life,” the basic awareness that precedes and conditions scientific and technical mastery. You might be able to read a book or article containing information about the psychoactive properties of the ayahuasca brew. But in order to do so, you first have to possess the knowledge of life, which “made possible the movements of the hands and the eyes” required for reading. Simple and easy to take for granted, the knowledge of life also encompasses moral and spiritual intuitions without which we feel less than fully human, soul-sick, even physically unhealthy.
Drawing solely on this knowledge of life, the shamans managed to develop a drug that, depending on whom you ask, is a dangerous hallucinogen or the long-sought substitute to our conventional, Big Pharma-dominated mental-health system. That second camp has received a major boost in recent years. This partly owes to the failure of the mainstream system, which gorges itself on some $225 billion a year without noticeably improving the mental condition of Americans. But it is also thanks to the explosive popularity of books by authors like Michael Pollan and Brian Muraresku, who have revivified psychedelic culture in a manner befitting our cynical age: While Pollan seeks to demystify the effects of drugs like ayahuasca by reference to a “plant intelligence,” Muraresku uses the plants to demystify spiritual reality itself, suggesting, for example, that the early-Christian eucharist was a psychedelic practice.
Meanwhile, as I write, ayahuasca is trending on X (the app formerly known as Twitter), with users garnering millions of impressions by posting purported footage of ayahuasca ceremonies, with the Western drug users sprawled out on the jungle floor—drooling, vomiting, or otherwise in apparent distress—while indigenous healers minister to them. In at least one case, the footage in question turned out not to involve ayahuasca at all, but a frog venom called Kambo that is marketed to Westerners as a purgative-cum-cure-all. Factual dubiousness aside, the message of these posts is that ayahuasca-fueled journeys of self-discovery may not go as participants imagine; that the stereotypical venture capitalists or professional-class women who take the trip sometimes end up losing their ambition—and even their very sanity.
In August, I had my own encounter with ayahuasca at a psychedelic retreat center in Mexico. I did it partly out of curiosity sparked by the debates over Pollan’s and Muraresku’s work; and partly at the invitation of a friend, Robert Tod Chubrich, a proponent of psychedelic medicine who—full disclosure—footed most of the hefty bill associated with my being there.
So far I haven’t suffered any of these negative consequences. However, drinking the potion made from the vine of death did induce some of the most profound—and profoundly terrifying—mental experiences in my 39 years of existence. At its most intense, the ayahuasca “trip” felt like the closest I have ever come to waging a full-on spiritual battle, with the stakes being no lower than my life and fidelity to the one God.
Picture me, normally self-possessed and jocular, bursting out of the group ceremonial space at midnight, practically running to my private hut at the retreat center, blasting a recording of Francisco Guerrero’s Regina Caeli on my laptop, reciting the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary out loud, and then staring at an image of of Saint John Henry Newman—all to slow down my heart rate and somehow preserve my inner integrity under ayahuasca’s ego-battering assault. To this day, when I picture this scene, I see it from an “objective,” third-person view, even though I was very much in the first-person thick of it; to attempt to put myself back in that subjective state invariably raises my heart rate and sends the lymph nodes in my neck buzzing unpleasantly.
Yet for all that, the upshot of the experience was overwhelmingly positive. The purgatorial terror lent me a new awareness of my own psychic blind spots. It helped me tame (if not kick completely) a decades-old smoking habit. And strange as this may sound, it impelled me to cling to the message of the Cross more tightly than I ever had before.
I was joined at the retreat by about a dozen people—men and women, young and old, hailing from North America, East Asia, and Europe, and various walks of life. Yet the account that follows is almost entirely about my own experience. The reason is that I can’t form anything close to firm conclusions about anyone’s psychedelic trips but my own. I came to the ayahuasca retreat as a practicing Catholic, with Freudian sympathies when it comes to the science of the mind. I left it with the same convictions. My worldview doubtless colored my trips in ways that were mostly irrelevant to my secular and New Age-ish companions.
After a night in Mexico City, we traveled by van, about two and a half hours westward, to a village near the town of Valle de Bravo. Dusk had fallen, and it was raining gently by the time we arrived at the retreat center, nestled in the verdant mountains that encircle the Mexican capital. Our natural surroundings were glorious, as I would learn in the light of the following morning. But in the blinding dark, the only thing that caught my eyes were the dim forms of the center’s statuary: a female figure with a writhing mass of snakes for legs peeking out from under her robe; a male figure with an imposing beard holding a sort of wizard’s staff; a lithe female torso twisting up to headless shoulders. Add the smoke from a fire used to “cleanse” us upon arrival, and I couldn’t have been blamed for imagining we’d walked onto the set of an Alex Garland folk-horror flick.
In the light of day, the statues appeared merely goofy (but once night fell again, they somehow regained in full their aura of mystery and menace). At breakfast, the food on offer was bland and would remain that way throughout: heavy on fresh fruits and boiled vegetables, nothing too spicy or salty, no red meat. We were supposed to have kept a similar diet—and refrained from sex, alcohol, and conventional psychiatric medications—in the two weeks leading up to the retreat. Likewise, we were to adhere to these restrictions for several days after the retreat. This was all by order of the Peruvian shamans, flown by the organizers to Mexico for the retreat. In their telling, the vine itself had laid down these dietetic restrictions, and if the “patients” violated them, they risked spiritually harming themselves along with the shamans.
Long before they made their first appearance—diplomatic tensions between Mexico and Peru meant that bringing them to the retreat site was a near-miss thing—the shamans were addressed reverently as “maestros.” The term “shaman” was mildly taboo. As I would later learn, this was because shaman implies a practitioner of both light and dark medicinal arts, whereas this group of, well, maestros saw themselves as engaged in the light business only.
I decided to honor this request, as I will do through the rest of this essay, after I came to appreciate how something like the natural law frames these Amazonian healers’ worldview. They maintain a clear distinction between good and evil, and they insist that evil—“selfishness, egotism, hypocrisy,” as one of the maestros put it—is what makes people sick, because it puts us out of tune with our own nature, and thus out of tune with a natural or cosmic whole. This moral background music jarred with the post-moral ideology composed by modern Westerners around the practice of ayahuasca—talk of the world as pure flowing energy and thus beyond good and evil—some of which could also be heard at the retreat.
On the first full day, we were ushered into the ceremonial space, known as the maloca. This was a fairly large circular structure whose wooden beams at the dome formed intricate vine-like patterns. The interstices in the “vines” invited natural light from the outside into the space, even as a glass covering kept out the elements. (In the maestros’ native Amazonian setting, the typical maloca is a simple hut elevated on stilts; ours was a high-end maloca for a chic set.) We sat in a circular arrangement along the circumference, on mats with adjustable backs that could double as beds and chairs. Each of us had an assigned seat that we would also use for the nighttime ayahuasca ceremonies. I would soon come to cherish mine as the cockpit of an aircraft floating through a space of mental insight—and, at times, to loathe it as a prison I couldn’t escape fast enough.
Liz (not her real name), one of the maestros’ pair of 30-something assistants, opened this introductory gathering by quoting one of her Amazonian teachers to the effect that Europeans are “orphans of our own story.” Exploring her own European “lineage,” she had discovered an unending sequence of war and rape and tragedy. This had reaffirmed Liz in her quest to seek out the “intelligence of the Earth” alongside the maestros, whose “altar is their bodies.”
Such postcolonial cant is common in modern ayahuasca practice, which not infrequently involves white assistants serving as mediators between ayahuasca tourists and the indigenous communities that have long cultivated this form of medicine. Partly, it’s born of an earnest awareness of the miseries suffered by these communities at the hands of European conquerors; but partly, I suspect, it’s because the role of these Western mediators can look not a little like “appropriation.” (The moral equities, as is often the case, are murkier and more complicated: While the “official” narrative is that ayahuasca medicine dates to pre-Columbian times, some historians and anthropologists tell us that the ceremony as we know it emerged only in the wake of the Spanish colonization of South America and reflects the influence of Catholic Christianity, albeit blended with indigenous beliefs in the syncretic fashion typical of the region).
Beyond that early talk of “lineages” and European crimes, Liz’s discourse and that of her colleague—I’ll call her Anna—consisted of an impenetrable thicket of New Age patois: “aligning our energy,” “setting intentions with the plant,” “getting in touch with the root,” and much else of the kind. Most of my fellow attendees proved adept at this language, either from prior exposure or, in the case of the newbies, as a result of being immersed in an environment seemingly designed to foster a “holistic” New Age state of mind: from the central structure that housed the maloca, for example, which was shaped like an eagle with its wings spread; to the water-management system that relied upon sensitive microorganisms to process waste (flushing toilet paper was verboten, since it could harm these friendly microbes, though I did it a couple of times out of habit).
Also noteworthy was the prevalence of what might be called the contemporary ayahuasca ideology, though I only recognized it as such afterward, when I read a few of the popular books by Western pioneers. It’s the view that human misery—psychic suffering, as well as physical sickness—stems from trauma: not just the trauma associated with the relentless pace and competitive demands of modern life, but also with parents and even one’s distant forebears (both what ancestors inflict upon us, and what was inflicted upon them in the course of their own lives).
“Colonialism … is what I’m working to heal,” said one attendee, a Western-trained medical researcher with significant ayahuasca experience under her belt. “I’m trying to think through social crisis as an illness,” said another veteran. “I just want to know that we are safe, and we are held, and we are loved, to know myself and love myself,” said yet another.
All that should be familiar enough to students of trauma culture. What sets the ayahuasca ideology apart is the belief that trauma’s imprints can be removed by indigenous experts working in concert with plant power—whether we conceive of this power as influence over primordial spirits (the mystical view) or as the manipulation of energies and plant intelligences still barely understood by modern science (the demystified or “materialist” view). Combining the two perspectives, the heterodox physician Gabor Maté, for example, has written that “in its proper ceremonial setting, under compassionate and experienced guidance, the plant—or, as tradition has it, the spirit of the plant—puts people in touch with their repressed pain and trauma, the very factors that drive all dysfunctional mind states.”
Ceremonial ayahuasca thus promises people a direct, unmediated encounter with trauma and the roots of trauma. Or put another way: The ayahuasca treatment ontologizes trauma as invasive “energies” or “spirits” that put us out of order until they are faced down and expelled, thus realigning our own energetic or spiritual “fields” in the right way.
“Ayahuasca practice and ideology … represent a return to the realm of spirits.”
It’s a thoroughly postmodern project, and I use that term advisedly: The Copernican disciplines of high modernism—Marxism and psychoanalysis, most notably—sought to uncover the contingent, all-too-mundane forces, whether economic or erotic, lurking behind the supposedly “natural” or sacred. Western ayahuasca practice and ideology, by contrast, represent a conscious return to the realm of spirits and a re-sacralized nature, the realm of totem and taboo. Is there a more arresting image of the death of the high modern than jet-setting VCs and highly trained doctors turning to tribal healers wielding plant power or plant spirits?
And yet—it works. Kind of. Psychedelic medicine generally and the study of ayahuasca specifically are at a relatively infant stage. But the early research suggests that ayahuasca can be useful in treating post-traumatic stress, depression, substance abuse, anxiety, and adjacent psychopathologies. (Hence, why I don’t hesitate to use the term “medicine” preferred by the maestros and their assistants to describe the plant.)
People predisposed to psychosis, however, should keep far away from it; in their case, the brew has been known to precipitate full-blown psychotic breaks. At that early stage in the retreat, I still wasn’t sure if I was even going to drink the ayahuasca, and this owing to all the stories I’d heard, including from the veterans in our group, of its potency and scary effects. “The hardest five or six hours of my life” and variations thereof were a frequently heard refrain at the center.
On the second full day, I left the retreat center to hear the Mass at the village chapel, the sort where farmers’ hens and watchdogs casually stroll into the pews and even the sanctuary, appearing to render a mute worship alongside oblivious parishioners—a scene, I thought, fit for Saint Francis of Assisi. Back at the center in the afternoon, we met the maestros ahead of the first ceremony that evening. There would be five ceremonies over the course of a week, with two much-needed break nights built in.
“Buenas tardes,” Maestro David Lopéz Sanchez, the patriarch of our family of medicine men, greeted us upon entering the maloca, with his wife, Maestra Ynes, and two children, Maestros José and Edelin, in tow. They were members of the Shipibo people, who number about 20,000, or nearly 10 percent of Peru’s indigenous population, and are settled on the banks of the Ucayali River in the Amazon rainforest.
Generations upon generations of the Shipibo have used ayahuasca, which they call nishi, as part of a much wider array of medicinal plants. Maestro David’s father (José’s and Edelin’s grandfather) was a meraya, meaning he had attained the highest rank in the tribe’s hierarchy of healers. The meraya’s descendants began the training regimen from an early age, including several years’ worth of grueling plant diets across their lifetimes. Theirs, in short, is a serious tradition (though, again, its precise date of origin is a matter of some dispute).
“How was I to come to terms with someone else’s master?”
All four—the elderly David and Ynes and the middle-aged José and Edelin—were exceedingly short and warmly unassuming. Yet they were treated with a hushed esteem befitting ones possessed of an immense and enigmatic power, or acting as spokesmen for a master discourse beyond themselves. This was immediately discomfiting for me. Normally, there is only one class of persons on Earth whom I revere as the bearers of such a master knowledge, and that would be men in Roman collars. How was I to come to terms with someone else’s master?
Two alternatives presented themselves to me. The first was to react with mocking defiance, to mentally spit at all this primitive hocus-pocus, relics of an early stage in the mental development of our species that had long been transcended by the advent of religion proper (which, in turn, had been left in the dust by modern science, according to Freud’s three-stage account—but never mind that). Mocking defiance didn’t seem quite the thing from the standpoint of charity, however, let alone simple politeness. The second course was to submit to the atmosphere of woo-woo credulity, at least for a week—but that felt like a grave betrayal of the Catholic priesthood. Both paths would involve anguish, and spending eight or nine more days with this lot suddenly struck me as unbearable.
But was there a third possibility? Yes. After much deliberation, I decided to do my best to imitate a Thomist or Maimonidean approach: that is, to take and grapple with the truth wherever it might be found. I recalled the notion of natural revelation, best expounded by the midcentury Catholic anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner and later echoed by Pope Benedict XVI in his book on liturgy. In the latter, the German pontiff observed how the Christian and non-Christian perspectives on the cosmological structure of ritual “are not as mutually exclusive as at first sight they might seem.” Both are characterized by what Benedict called “the pattern of exitus and reditus”—cycles of departure (from the divine or a cosmic whole) and return to the same, often by way of ritual sacrifice, of a going-under or giving something up for destruction.
The Turners, for example, discovered that the central ritual of the Ndembu, a tribe in southern Africa, reenacts the killing of a merciful deity. Though almighty, the god in question acquiesces in his own murder, which becomes an occasion for renewal and reconciliation between the earthly and spirit realms. This ritual process includes the eating of a certain plant associated with the deity—a “love feast” for the Ndembu. For atheist critics, such practices are proof that Christianity is just one self-sacrificing-deity myth among many others of the kind. But for the Turners (as for Pope Benedict), these anthropological discoveries were no barrier to Christian faith. On the contrary, they demonstrated that the cosmos at its deepest layers is cruciform, imbued with the yearning for atonement through the sacrifice of one whose death alone can expiate. Natural revelation can thus be accorded an open-minded respect, provided the believer keeps firmly in mind that the real thing took place in a dusty corner of the Roman Empire a little more than 2,000 years ago.
Yet all that was easier said than done. In reality, I found myself more often than not veering between sotto voce defiance and crowd-pleasing, I-feel-it-too-bro credulity. It wouldn’t be until I was under the full sway of one of the most potent psychoactive agents known to science that I got a sense of what that Thomist-Turnerian approach would demand: how difficult it would be to experience another tradition’s quasi-cruciform rite, while training my eyes on the Cross and the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea.
Meanwhile, a remark from Maestro José, little commented-upon by my companions, caught my ear. “We know that you Westerners like to experience everything for yourself,” he said, “and so we have welcomed you to drink the medicine along with us.” It turns out that in the traditional ceremony, only the maestro would drink the potion, using the visionary insights thereby obtained to treat the patient—by singing a song known as an icaro (pronounced ee-kā-row). To oversimplify: The healer under the influence of the plant would discern what exactly ails the patient and then extemporaneously compose and sing an icaro customized to banish precisely that ailment or evil influence. All that was required of the patient was to accept the healing gift of the icaro.
So why had the Western newcomers to the tradition insisted upon drinking the potion? Is ayahuasca just one more exhilarating addition to the Western psychonauts’ treasury of exotic highs, to be enjoyed under the legitimating aegis of tribal mumbo jumbo? Maestro José was less cynical—or at any rate, more practical. On the one hand, he said, the patient does gain an additional, first-person insight by drinking along with the healer. On the other hand, “sometimes we [maestros] end up having to do extra work”—just to soothe the neophytes tripping balls on ayahuasca.
Whatever the origins of this development in the ayahuasca liturgy, it seemed to offer me an escape from having to drink the scary potion: I can’t indulge in these innovations that threaten the antique integrity of the psychedelic rite. Resolved: I would join the ceremony and receive my icaro but abstain from the ayahuasca. Others made a similar decision, whether owing to preexisting medical conditions or out of the same general apprehension that racked me. This only confirmed my sense that I was doing the right thing.
Icaro, yes; ayahuasca, no.
That is, until shortly before the first ceremony that evening, when the thought came to me that I should do the exact opposite of what I had resolved a few hours earlier: The wiser path was to drink the ayahuasca while steering clear of the indigenous ritual aspects, mainly by asking the maestros not to sing me an icaro.
My new resolution was no doubt animated by the Catholic’s perennial yearning for bright “legalistic” lines amid the blurring of spiritual and cultural boundaries. Start with the drug use. The Catechism of the Catholic Church warns that illicit substances cause “very grave damage on human health and life” and proscribes their use, “except on strictly therapeutic grounds.” The totality of circumstances gave a green light on this front. I knew that ayahuasca is considered the furthest thing from a “party drug” (a reputation that would become all too real for me in a matter of hours). Then, too, the retreat center held itself out as a primarily therapeutic setting, with many of my fellow attendees having arrived in search of relief from legitimate illnesses, including several dealing with chronic and even terminal physical conditions. And I could declare a legitimate and long-standing intent to cut out—or at least, cut back—my tobacco use. Catholic moral theology on psychedelic medicine is scanty, but what little I could find seemed to support my conclusion (that drinking in such a setting cleared the “therapeutic-grounds” threshold).
But participating in the ritual or “sacramental” aspects of the ayahuasca ceremony touched on a moral injunction of an entirely different order of magnitude: namely, the First Commandment. Unfortunately, even the few moral theologians who have weighed in on psychedelic medicine haven’t addressed this problem: namely, the use of psychedelics in their indigenous ritual or ceremonial contexts. Maybe that’s because the question is still fairly novel, I figured, in which case: Do I have an opening to proceed? But then another worry sprang up: Perhaps the Roman sages haven’t discussed this problem because the answer is so obvious, as clear and as searing as the Sinai sun—“I am the LORD your God. Thou shalt not have any other gods before me.”
The answer would turn on whether the art of the maestros involves actual communion with plant spirits, in which case submitting to the ceremonial aspects would implicate those dread no-no practices highlighted by the Catechism: animism, polytheism, idolatry, “spiritism.” Determined to have me receive the icaros, Tod, my guide to this world, insisted on the opposite, demystified reading: namely, that what the maestros do is manipulation not of spirits, but of “energies” and “intelligences” that modern science can’t explain. If that’s the case, then the icaro should really be viewed as an indigenous “technology,” rather than an expression of some alternative cosmology to rival the biblical one. “Besides,” Tod said, tongue half in cheek, “if any global spiritual leader would approve of you doing this, it’s Pope Francis, right?”
“Slipping through some self-carved exception wouldn’t satisfy my conscience.”
Perhaps. But I’d encountered enough references to the plant as a “she”-spirit, and enough talk of the icaro as a form of “spiritual surgery,” to leave me wary of resolving the technology-versus-spirituality ambiguity on my own. And given the gravity of the First Commandment, slipping through some self-carved exception wouldn’t satisfy my conscience. I did sincerely wish that the moral theologians would rule more authoritatively on the ceremonial dimension, especially as ayahuasca practice continues to expand in the West, with many Catholics partaking for legitimate therapeutic purposes. But meantime, to Tod’s great disappointment, I refused to budge from my last-minute decision: ayahuasca, yes; icaros, no.
There was more to this than the Catechism and even the Decalogue. Here’s how I remember putting it to Anna and Liz, the maestros’ assistants: “Just as an orthodox Jew or Muslim declines to shake hands with a strange woman in part out of respect for the woman, so for me, declining to join this ceremony is partly a matter of respect for the maestros’ tradition.” If I took the ayahuasca ceremony to be little more than primitive claptrap, then there would be no harm—and no significance—to my participation in it. But having heard the maestros speak thoughtfully on morality, I couldn’t bring myself to do that. And to show respect for their tradition as a serious tradition entailed also the recognition that it is not my tradition.
A still more momentous thought, unexpressed at the time, concealed itself behind this question of respect: namely, that by treating Shipibo spirituality and cosmology and ritual as “harmless” claptrap, I would implicitly cast doubt on my own, Catholic spirituality, cosmology, and sacramental life. It would be tantamount to admitting that all spirituality is finally inconsequential (even as one might acknowledge its functional therapeutic purposes). That way lay an abyss of nihilism, or else a casus belli between me and the spirit realm. No, no, no.
Flames were dancing above the gas-powered fire pit at the center of the maloca as we filed in for the first ceremony at 8 p.m. Liability forms were filled out and signed, essential objects arranged around each mat: battery-powered headlamps to help us signal distress once the fire was extinguished; pipes and lighters for those who wished to enhance the ayahuasca trip with mapacho, South America’s ultra-potent natural tobacco; shot glasses for drinking the potion; notebooks for those who wished to record their thoughts immediately; and large plastic buckets to collect our vomit (the emetic property of ayahuasca had been repeatedly emphasized in our introductory meetings with the maestros and their assistants).
The atmosphere was tinged with the first-timers’ anxiety, compounded by the perception that the veterans appeared no less anxious. Many of the attendees—there were about 20 of us in all—meditated on their “intentions with the plant” while sitting cross-legged on their mats. I prayed the rosary, counting the Aves and Paters in my head. Afterward, I lit my mapacho and lay back on my mat (I was dying to smoke a conventional cigarette, but these were prohibited at the center).
The maestros entered the maloca by greeting us, “Buenas noches.” Seated at my diametrical opposite, the four puffed on their pipes in absolute silence for about 45 minutes. Then the fire went out, and those who had indicated they wanted to drink stepped up one by one to receive their share. To my own surprise, there was no hesitation in my stride when my turn came. Making my way swiftly across the circular structure, I mouthed the word, “poquito.” The thick, dark-brown liquid, creeping like alien blood from the movies, filled up about a third of my glass. I downed it in one motion, expecting the foulest taste. But it wasn’t that bad. Bitter, yes, but the slightest hint of sourness mitigated the worst. Would I use it to marinate my pork tenderloins? No. But it wasn’t that bad, all told.
“My eyes somehow picked out a trio of interconnected skulls in the vine-like shapes.”
My first trip was gentle—deceptively so, as will be seen. Total silence reigned again once the drinkers, the maestros and their assistants included, had ingested the ayahuasca. This next period of silence lasted for maybe half an hour or a little more, during which I felt absolutely no nausea and only the subtlest bodily buzzing. For some users, ayahuasca produces fantastical visual hallucinations. For example, in his 2017 book, The Fellowship of the River, the physician Joseph Tafur, one of ayahuasca’s Western popularizers, recounted being taken in hand by the plant spirit—a green goddess with vines for hair, “at once terrifying, loving, inspiring, and sexy”—on his first trip. For whatever reason, ayahuasca had few such visual effects on me, even on the far more ferocious trips of subsequent nights. (That said, in the dark, my eyes somehow picked out a trio of interconnected skulls in the vine-like shapes made by the wooden beams of the maloca—a merely unpleasant visualization at first, it would prove downright oppressive during subsequent trips, as we will also see.)
What I felt most strongly during that first trip was a certain quickening of my thoughts, which delighted me. I started jotting down ideas as they came but soon found that my writing hand couldn’t keep up with the speed of thought. Still, what I managed to put to paper appeared remarkably lucid in the light of the following day. I noticed, for example, that the person sprawled out in the mat next to mine—your typical high-powered investor with a psychedelic hobby—was groaning the way you’d expect from a victim of Chinese water torture, with his hands held before his face in a contorted pose, as if in a desperate bid to shield himself from the next drop. Waxing spiritually, I wrote, “Would the one God reduce man to such a pathetic state?” On the following line, after an apparent pause: “Then again, the Damascene road.”
Lest anyone imagine I’m proud of that bit of ayahuasca-induced pseudo-profundity, I should tell you that my thoughts at this point reminded me of what I might have blurted out decades earlier in a dorm room, after passing the bong. And—here’s the ayahuasca twist—I was self-consciously aware of the college-bull-session quality of these early brainstorms. That is, whenever an insight came to me, I could dwell in it, so to speak, and also hold it up to cold scrutiny from a perspective seemingly situated “outside” my immediate or “inside” self. This would be replicated throughout my trips: The inside-outside voice commented—now sarcastically, now in earnest wonder—upon what I was experiencing interiorly, helping me get through some of the worst moments, but usually exacerbating the agony.
I was enjoying this inside-outside duality when suddenly an old woman’s singing flared up from the other end of the maloca, faint at first, then gathering a shrill force, and soon joined by an old man’s droning. It was Maestros Ynes and David singing the opening icaros. Soon, their son’s and daughter’s voices would fortify the parents’, blending four different songs into a soulful sound-medley whose vibrations rippled through the room and our bodies. The subtle buzzing, flowing from my extremities into my heart and back out again, now seemed to sync, as it were, with these ancient songs—among the most haunting pieces of music I have ever heard.
Each maestro had a repertoire of a few distinct melodies that were subject to impromptu lyric variations, with the combinations of melodies and lyric variations giving rise to what I came to call icaro-patterns. In time, I realized that there were only a limited number of these icaro-patterns—meaning that the songs aren’t, in fact, infinitely customizable for each given patient. And this made sense, given the therapeutic logic of the tradition. As Maestro José had explained in our introductory session with his family, the Shipibo healer doesn’t inquire as to the contingent background of trauma (how and by whom it was inflicted, and so on). In his visionary state, he only “sees” certain scars—wounds that form all-too-familiar patterns across time and cultural differences: “You are selfish,” “You carry ancestral baggage,” and so on, as he had put it. The number of the icaro-patterns is correspondingly limited.
Part of the thrill of the icaros was the apparent transcendence of language. Here were words from a language totally unfamiliar to me: neither Indo-European, nor Semitic, nor Turkic, nor still Sinitic—a language purely of the New World. And yet, the songs really did seem to hum from a place of deep and strangely familiar knowledge—Michel Henry’s “knowledge of life”—at once tragic and consoling, relaying the message of generations: This, too, shall pass. Life endures. Misery can’t last. Or something like that. I’m fully prepared to concede that the phenomenon—the somatic “syncing” with the music, the uncanny familiarity of the lyrics—is reducible to the effects of a potent hallucinogen. But the subjective experience of it was real, all the same.
How was prescientific humanity … ever able to produce extraordinary results in many domains, for example those of art and religion?
Following the opening song, meant for the whole maloca, Maestras Ynes and Edelin began singing individual icaros to each patient, moving clockwise across the room, while Maestro José made his way in the counterclockwise direction. Maestro David would remain in his corner through the night, anchoring the proceedings (so to speak). They passed me over, as I had requested. By then, the psychoactive effects of the DMT had mostly subsided, and I was able to observe with clarity what struck me as an astonishing scene.
Among the patients was an upscale Mexican couple from the capital. After receiving her icaros, the wife, her skin pearly white and her features unmistakably those of a Spaniard, would bow deeply before the maestros in gratitude for healing and insight. A historical plot twist for the ages: Here was someone whose distant forebears had probably helped subdue the Americas, pillaging and enslaving, yes, but also imparting the Christian faith to the continent’s inhabitants. Yet now she lay abjectly prostrate, like a Muslim at prayer, before a remnant of a tradition that was supposed to have been repressed. Here was the return, in full force, of the spirit of a totemic age, whose faintest signs Freud had uncovered in the tics and parapraxes of the modern neurotic. “Who has conquered whom?” was what I scribbled in my notebook.
By the time the first ceremony was over, at about 1 a.m., I was completely “sober,” and feeling pretty damn good about myself. I believed I had mastered ayahuasca on the first go-around: no nausea, no scary thoughts or visions, no “ego death.” I looked with pity on the others who were still, at that late hour, writhing on their mats, now vomiting, now groaning, now slipping out little laughs like you might hear at a mental hospital. Perhaps I was simply blessed with a stronger mental constitution, a more robust nervous system, capable of absorbing, and then spitting out, even the Amazon’s deepest magic. My arrogance would be punished severely in sessions to come.
At the second ceremony, I drank a smaller portion of ayahuasca than I had at the first. “Poquito, poquito!” I whispered as I knelt before the maestros, and a chuckling Edelin filled only about a quarter of my shot glass. Down the hatch it went, even easier than the last time around. My intention was to enjoy, for the first hour or so, the same buzzy sensations in my body, the mild enlivening of my visual field, the quickening of my thoughts, and then to kick it back for the rest, taking notes on the condition of the others and their interactions with the healers.
It wasn’t to be. Back at my mat, a curious drowsiness overcame me, and I thought: OK, I wouldn’t mind sleeping through this. Except, remember those interconnected skull shapes that my eyes had picked out of the vine-like patterns on the ceiling? Well, they stood out especially vividly just before I closed my eyes to doze off. Behind my shuttered eyelids, the skulls took on animated life, and multiplied: Dozens of them appeared, one after another, their empty eye sockets expressing menace—like Jack Skellington, except actually evil. They sent my heart pounding. Only, unlike with a bad dream, I couldn’t snap myself out of this. Because I wasn’t exactly dreaming, but roaming some indeterminate borderland between sleep and waking life. The inside-outside voice wasn’t exactly helpful here: You’re having a bad trip. This is what they call a bad ayahuasca trip. You’re fucked, buddy. Another voice: No, this isn’t a bad trip. You don’t have enough experience with DMT to know what a real bad trip might be like. But then: Does that mean things could get much worse? Oh God.
“What interrupted this mental doom cycle was the urge to vomit.”
What interrupted this mental doom cycle was the urge to vomit. Never one for expelling bodily fluids in front of strangers, I skipped the bucket and managed to stumble to the toilet located just outside the maloca. On the short walk there, I overheard one of the attendees say to another, “It’s too strong. It’s too strong.” The other was apparently trying to calm him with a hug. “Too strong, too strong” kept echoing between my ears, until I realized that I was inside the locked bathroom stall and no longer within earshot of that pair; my own mind had adopted the words as a mantra.
The physical purge, despite its great force, yielded only a smattering of bile (recall that we were on a strict diet of bland, boiled food). Still, my condition improved a bit afterward. An axiom of the human body enshrined in ancient-Greek medicine and dietetics: No matter the malady or invading substance, puking always makes you feel better. On my way back to my mat, I noticed a couple of others lined up politely to use the bathroom, and chuckled to myself at how people habitually uphold bourgeois niceties, even when zonked out of their minds.
I was now utterly incapable of calmly observing the writhing torment of the others—because I was deep in it myself. My pulse was reaching what the inside-outside voice warned were dangerous levels (though, to this day, I can’t be sure if this was actually the case, or merely my inaccurate impression). My mind was racing faster than my heart. No titillating visits from the sexy Amazonian nymphs for you, jeered the inside-outside voice, recalling Dr. Tafur’s account of his first trip. Mainly, the spirit of the plant seemed bent on horsewhipping my ego. Like the Ghosts of Christmas, ayahuasca would conjure up, one after another, my closest personal and professional relationships—and remind me of my bad conduct in each.
I won’t go into the details, because they are tedious (and because none of your damn business, as Gov. Tim Walz might say). In the light of the following day, some of these were clearly minor infractions, unduly magnified by my mind under the influence of the drug. But in other cases, the ayahuasca had reminded me of seriously damaged relationships I felt called to repair. The upshot wasn’t pessimism, but a determination to do better. I began jotting down to-do lists in my notebook (“I must call and apologize to So-and-So,” etc.).
But just when this moral inventory-taking and list-making was beginning to soothe my anxiety, a new and unnerving fact presented itself. According to the previous evening’s rough schedule, the maestros should by now have begun to minister individually to the patients. But they were still in their corner, singing the opening icaro meant for the whole group, and fitfully at that (or so it sounded to me). Focusing my eyes on their corner of the maloca, I noticed that Maestra Ynes was lying down—or maybe slouching in a way that was unusual for her—while her children and one or both of the assistants were ministering to her.
The inside-outside voice seized on this scene immediately, venting poison: Holy shit, dude, even the old witch couldn’t handle her own brew. She’s been drinking that shit for, like, seven decades, and even she was floored by this mix. Do you know what that means for you? If she can’t take it, do you understand how fucked you are? Another mental voice interjected: It’s OK. Relax. Just look up and take in the starry Mexican sky. I followed this latter injunction, and was immediately confronted by the trio of interconnected skulls. Nope. I had to get out. Immediately.
The cool air outside—free of that dense mapacho fog—soothed me. So did the rural-Mexican landscape that stretched out in every direction. For a heartbreaking moment, the ordinary stars resembled what I imagined it would look like if these heavenly bodies suddenly and simultaneously went supernova. Someone was doing yoga (the inside-outside voice: How in the fuck is she doing yoga poses, when you’re barely managing to breathe and prevent your circulatory system from collapsing?)
“It’s too strong, too strong.” The words echoed once more in my mind. The inside-outside voice added its own malicious commentary: This is nature. Nature is strong. Or at any rate, nature is too strong for you. But this unsettling idea brought in train a syllogism of sorts that would prove salvific—notwithstanding, or perhaps because of, its idiotic simplicity. I wrote it down: “Nature, in all its glory and mystery, is still subject to God. My God is stronger.” Immediately beneath this, I drew the Chi Rho, the early-Christian symbol for Jesus.
It felt like a revelation. It was a revelation. And I was elated. I ran back to the maloca, turned to the next page in my notebook, and drew an even bigger Chi Rho, etching thick, decisive lines that almost ripped through the paper. After staring intently at the symbol for a while, I went back, happily, to making plans for reviving my strained friendships.
Meanwhile, Maestros José and Edelin had left their corner and were now singing individual icaros for the patients. (We later learned from the assistants that Maestra Ynes had been somehow bowled over by the potion that night, but apparently it wasn’t a big deal.) My elation—at the idea that “my God is stronger”—was accompanied by a new respect for this tradition. While the icaro ministry went on, I asked to speak with Anna, and we stepped out of the maloca together. “I’m the type who has to talk through everything…,” I began, “and, well, I just want to mention that only now do I understand the art of the maestros—what mastery and discipline it takes to be in this mental state and minister to others.” She gave me a look that said, Yeah, no kidding. But her words were more forgiving: “Thank you. Yes. They are masters.”
By the time the ceremony was over, close to 2 a.m., I was in an ecstatic state, brimming with happy plans for the future and raving (interiorly, but also out loud to my companions) about how good it is simply to be alive. The previous five or six hours had indeed proved to be among the hardest of my life: an extended glimpse of Gehenna or purgatory. But the terminus was—unadulterated bliss.
I went to bed in my hut thinking that I had gotten all I needed out of ayahuasca, personally and journalistically. For the remaining ceremonies, I vowed to only micro-dose or not to drink at all. No one, I thought, needs to go through that more than once on this side of the veil of death. In fact, I did end up drinking the potion again.
The next two ceremonies were unremarkable. I didn’t drink at all on the third and, in fact, departed early to address a mounting sleep deficit. This was in violation of one of the rules, because leaving in the middle of the ceremony risked disrupting the energetic fields or whatever (I rolled my eyes at some of this stuff then, and still do today). At the fourth ceremony, I drank such a tiny amount—barely a teaspoon—that the potion had almost no effect on me. Truth be told, the repetitive icaros were beginning to bore me.
Maybe to stave off the boredom, or maybe because it felt like the capstone event, I drank a quarter of a shot glass again on the fifth and final ceremony. Since no two ayahuasca trips are supposedly alike, I reasoned, I couldn’t possibly undergo a similar experience as that second time. I was wrong. The final trip was an identical journey through Gehenna, only more forthrightly theological. For although my Catholicism had figured somewhat in that second ceremony, the fundamental tension between my religion and the ayahuasca cosmology (and its Western interpretations) had been left unresolved.
You might object here that there needn’t have been a tension at all, that the two could have been permitted to coexist side-by-side, if not peaceably, then in mutual apathy. It’s a fair point. Yet having come into proximity with a different mystical tradition—even if I forced myself to see that tradition through the lens of an indigenous “technology”—my mind was bound to force a choice: ayahuasca or Christ, syncretic totemism or the one true faith. Whether I liked it or not, that was how my incorrigibly monotheist, hidebound Middle Eastern brain was bound to operate. I would ultimately settle into the Thomist-Turnerian-Benedict XVI posture that I had set out to strike: one of respect for natural revelation, for the inklings of the light granted to the benighted. But this would come at a price, and only after I struggled through an even more difficult five or six hours of my life than the last.
The trip began with a bout of nausea, though milder than that which had racked me the second night. Then came the equally familiar mental anguish. Only now, the focus was no longer my human relationships (those had been satisfyingly “settled” earlier in the retreat). Nor was I made anxious by the “natural” magic and mystery of the ceremony—but by the state of my relationship with Almighty God.
The icaros rose up from the maestros’ corner, but they were no longer enchanting, nor humming with the knowledge of generations past and generations to come. They didn’t even bore me. The icaros now repelled me: The shrill babble of the heathen, said the inside-outside voice. And I was partaking in their spiritism, their black vigil for Lord-knows-which minor demon. My ayahuasca-yes-icaros-no stance was a transparent sham, the familiar haggling of the sinner with God. The voice: Buddy, even sitting here is a sin—a regression to the pagan.
Here’s what I wrote down in my notebook at this point: “The ayahuasca—once it has granted me certain unquestionable benefits—leaves me with Josiah’s revulsion for the strange gods of the gentes” (I underlined the Latin gentes in lieu of italics).
“I couldn’t stay there for another second.”
I couldn’t stay there for another second. Wrapping myself in a blanket, I left the maloca and plopped down on a couch in the nearby outdoor space. I was wearing shorts and a button-down, but the cold didn’t bother me one bit. It seemed to be doing me a whole lot of good, actually. My mental frenzy quieted considerably—but then another wave of angst washed over me, along with the words of that dread commandment: “I am the LORD your God….” In response, I used the spotty Starlink WiFi to download that picture of Newman dressed in his red cardinal’s robe, and used a cup to hold up my phone on a nearby coffee table—so I could stare at the Victorian saint. Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem.
That, too, did me some good. But not enough, and when Edelin’s shrieking icaro flared up after a lull, I knew I had to put greater distance between myself and the ceremony. I walked up to Anna in the maloca and said: “Well, thank you so much, but I now need to go to my own room to participate in my own faith’s rituals. Don’t worry, I have no trouble walking or finding my way—” No, she shot back firmly. “There are very important energetic things going on, and we all have to stay.” I wondered if this had more to do with basic physical safety than the “energies,” and sheepishly returned to my mat. By then, I was merely annoyed that both the effects of the ayahuasca and the ceremony were bound to go on for several more hours. Forgetting all about the skulls (again), I figured I would pass the time staring at the night sky. And there they were—the oppressive skull shapes.
Oh, fuck no, you had better get out. I gathered my belongings and bolted into the dark, toward my hut. En route, the center’s weird statuary didn’t elicit fear so much as more of that Old Testament rage. I should smash their Asherahs.
Back in my own space, with the lights on, Francisco Guerrero playing on my laptop, and the picture of Newman creating a sort of altar out of my desk, I could see that I’d overreacted a bit, whether to a second “bad trip” or just your average ayahuasca experience (what did “normal” or “average” mean in the context of such a powerfully mind-altering medicine?). I felt the onset of another of those delightful, rapid-fire bursts of thought that, I hoped, might allow me to integrate all this. The conclusions I drew then are more or less the ones I hold today.
“I could see that I’d overreacted a bit.”
For starters, I had to lean away from the demystified view of the ayahuasca tradition: the notion that the Shipibo people’s rich cosmology and mysticism can be abstracted from the ceremony, leaving only an ancient technology for manipulating “energies” and plant “intelligences” that modern science can’t yet begin to comprehend. That view, it seemed to me, did an injustice to a complex belief system, an injustice I wouldn’t wish to have inflicted upon my own faith: It would offend me to hear someone dismiss the theology of the eucharist, for example, while insisting that it nevertheless “works” as a sort of an ancient healing technology long preserved by the Catholic Church.
Here’s what I decided then. The ayahuasca ceremony is a ritual tradition, and as the anthropology of religion tells us, a ritual isn’t a ritual unless informed by some comprehensive account of the cosmos and man’s place in it. But as such, it has much more in common with the dietetic and healing rituals of classical Greece and Rome. “OK,” my line of reasoning went on, “but don’t pagans possess virtue—even great virtue?” Indeed, they do, and they can be granted partial access to truth via natural reason and natural revelation. But remember Saint Augustine’s commentary in The City of God on Regulus. The Roman statesman was venerated for having supposedly opposed peace terms with Carthage on pain of his own torture and death. While praising Regulus, the Bishop of Hippo held up his case as an example of how even the highest virtue of the pagan collapses into futility, unless there be eternal life and the possibility of ascent to the highest good.
But wasn’t I too quick to gloss over the healing virtues of ayahuasca in its ceremonial context, paying lip service to it without reckoning with it in any detail? “Where does its healing power—which the studies tell us are real enough—lie? If it bears the hallmarks of natural revelation, what is the revelation in question?” At a natural level, the ayahuasca tradition is a throwback to an older account of health that sees well-being as about more than maintaining or restoring the organism’s “normal” state, by bombarding lesions (somatic or psychic) with the right molecules. Instead, it frames health as the state of being in a deeper harmony with one’s nature and relations, including intergenerational relations, and with the cycles of life: a season for purging, a season for mourning, a time and place for confronting ancestral sins, and so on.
Of course, even granting all that, the Abrahamic sphere has its own versions of these truths. What makes ayahuasca distinctive is the way it interrogates the “normal” state. Brutally, relentlessly. It is deliberately disorienting—terrifying by design. We all need to have our complacent vision occasionally disrupted, to be able to peer through our own gluttony, our own, fat, repulsive, devouring drive (whether toward rich food or sex or what have you)—we need that disrupted, and this decoction can do that. Oh, it can do that. It draws you close to death’s door, opens it, and invites you to take a peek inside.
But I believe in a God who has already walked through that door, illumined the absolute darkness inside, and returned triumphant. I can affirm this as a matter of faith—without denying the Indians their potion’s salutary properties, their profound knowledge of life. But I cannot pretend that mere nature—even magical nature—can succeed where Regulus failed. For that, heaven sent us a very different maestro. And his act of salvation was perfectly, painfully sober. In his agony, they gave him not wine, but vinegar to drink. We adore you, O Christ, and we praise you. Because by your holy Cross, you have redeemed the world.
The last of the vine of death’s effects having dissipated, I returned to the maloca to observe the closing of the final ceremony, to thank the maestros and bid them safe travels. And I clapped along joyously as a few of my companions danced in circles around the relighted fire pit.