The Yage Organ

A chapter from When Plants Dream

I am delighted to announce the paperback publication of When Plants Dream: Ayahuasca, Amazonian Shamanism, and the Global Psychedelic Renaissance, which I wrote with anthropologist Sophia Rokhlin. The book provides a wide-ranging, highly readable introduction to this amazing plant medicine and the culture surrounding it. You can pick it up at Amazon or request it from a local bookstore. An audio version of the book is also available. Here is a chapter from When Plants Dream — I hope it entices you to read the rest:

THE YAGÉ ORGAN 

In 1953, avant-garde novelist William S Burroughs was not yet the ghostly icon of the bohemian counterculture he would later become. Nearly 40 years old at that point, he was still unknown to the publishing world, an overage trust-fund brat, also a heroin addict and homosexual who accidentally shot his wife through the head, killing her instantly, while playing their version of William Tell. Unable to kick his junk habit, guilt-ridden, crestfallen and junk-sick, Burroughs travelled down to Colombia in search of yagé. He had heard that yagé was “the ultimate fix” – as well as a miracle cure for addiction. The Amazon was not yet a popular destination for psychedelic thrill seekers (“ayahuasca tourism” was not even an idea at that point). His suitcase packed with snake-bite serum, penicillin, a hammock and anti-diarrhoea medication, Burroughs made his way – by bus, mule and canoe – down the Putumayo River, to the town of Mocoa, where he imbibed his first brackish cup of the elusive Amazonian brew. 

William Burroughs in the Amazon.

After a number of misadventures as well as a chance meeting with the legendary ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, Burroughs found his way to the hut of a curandero. In his first session with the vine, Burroughs’ enthusiasm quickly turned to despair. He later described his first journey as “sheer horror”, producing “the most complete derangement of the senses”. In his visions, he explored decadent apocalyptic cities marked by violence, death, plague and festering corruption. He received none of the healing insights or cheerful life-coaching from the spirit that has now become commonplace in trip reports. Yet, courageously, Burroughs didn’t give up. He went back for more. 

In subsequent journeys, he encountered a profusion of visionary mayhem: 

Tithonian longevity serum; black marketers of World War III, pitchmen selling remedies for radiation sickness, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit taken down in hebephrenic shorthand, bureaucrats of spectral departments ... Larval entities waiting for a live one. 

In the end he called yagé “a place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum”. 

In 1963, Burroughs’ correspondence with his friend, the poet Allen Ginsberg, from which these extracts come, were published in The Yage Letters. Their correspondence detailed the murky psychotropic mindscapes encountered by the unwitting beatniks in their search for mystical gnosis – what Ginsberg called in his poem Howl, “the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night”. Their trip reports remind us of what it was like to meet the vine of souls before any New Age gloss or sentimental halo of nature worship or Gaian connectivity suffused the journey. 

Allen Ginsberg sketch from one of his ayahuasca trips

Ginsberg recalled in The Yage Letters the journey he himself made with the vine a few years after Burroughs: 

I felt faced by Death, my skull in my beard on pallet and porch rolling back and forth and settling finally as if in reproduction of the last physical move I make before settling into real death – got nauseous, rushed out and began vomiting, all covered with snakes, like a Snake Seraph, colored serpents in aureole all around my body, I felt like a snake vomiting out the universe ... 

The letters suggest that both Ginsberg and Burroughs, after several sessions, managed to assimilate the more twisted and torturous aspects of the yagé trip to reach some semblance of inner resolution. The visions left an imprint on Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959) and other books. His depictions of turbulent cities and surrealistic war zones read like yagé flashbacks. 

The Beat generation writers were not just psychedelic tourists but consciousness pioneers who approached their exploration of altered states with the dedication of scientists making an experiential inquiry. From The Yage Letters, one gets the lingering impression that these early psychonauts found their forays into Amazonian shamanism more shell-shocking than illuminating. “This almost schizophrenic alteration of consciousness is fearful,” Ginsberg admitted. “I had arrangements to bring [yagé] back to NY but I am almost afraid to – I’m lost myself, and afraid of giving a nightmare I can’t stop to others ...” 

By drinking yagé and writing about their journeys, Burroughs and Ginsberg played a role in a larger story: a saga of early pioneers, meeting the visionary vine of souls and intentionally or inadvertently aiding its escape from its primordial home in the rainforest. This drama continues today, as ayahuasca extends its tendrils into our contemporary, globalized world. Television talk-show hosts like Chelsea Handler film themselves under its influence; innumerable books and films explore Amazonian shamanism and its discontents; mainstream magazines like Harper’s Bazaar, GQ, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker seek to categorize and parse the phenomenon as another fashionable trend. 

In the mainstream media, journalists reporting on ayahuasca over the past decade or two tend to follow a similar trajectory. The articles usually begin with the writer maintaining a smug superior distance from the phenomenon. They end with revelation, retching and reconsideration. Writing about the subjective experience of an ayahuasca journey is an invitation for an author to try their best Hunter S Thompson impression, as Ted Mann did for Vanity Fair in 2011: 

I hear the shaman start to sing; I hear his rattle; the words of his icaros form chains which are incorporated into delicate symbolic arabesques in visions that evolve like life-forms in a world where film with resolution indistinguishable from reality is shot at a speed of one frame a century. Every detail of a vast cliff face, an open-pit mine, composed of copulating salamanders, is presented and recognized and responsive to sound continuously evolving, by what seems like a logical progression, into the detailed hues of the internal organs – this makes me vomit. The visions recede, briefly, and as I pant and drool over a convenient plastic bucket, I feel better. The visions resume with newcomers, self-dissecting aliens presenting themselves, and their internal anatomy, in the turning pages of an abnormal-physiology textbook, published on sheets of fundamental matter, quarks and gluons, massless constituents of the infinitesimal, actually becoming the things they appear to represent. An errant thought, “At least I haven’t seen any snakes”, flickers in my mind, and can’t be taken back, and now is, of course, no longer true. I am invested with intertwined squirming serpents, some slithering kraits, a club-bodied Gaboon viper, a mass of obscenely active serpents in primary colors, some jokers that mimic a barber pole, another brown and lumpy like an old Mars bar, and a mustache cup of albino worms that invade my nostrils, making for the brain. I resolve to believe they are conducting overdue repairs, and I wish them well as I sense them at their business throughout my body. 

Not for all but for some journalists, the traumatic turbulence of an ayahuasca journey temporarily suspends critical distance and cynicism. Over time, writers have developed a set of familiar tropes to describe the visions unleashed by the medicine. This includes Mann’s “self-dissecting aliens” – a homage or riff on Terence McKenna’s DMT description of “self- transforming machine elves”. It is an amusing anthropological game to watch authors and celebrities try to assimilate and spin their unmediated direct experiences of the unpresentable, unfathomable and sometimes unbearable into something that their audience can assimilate and enjoy. 

In One River Wade Davis followed the path of Schultes’ journeys across the rainforest, living with communities, exploring their practices and collecting their botanical knowledge. Much of what Schultes learned about traditional use of the medicine goes against the current cultural mythology surrounding it, which sees it as something only to be taken in group ceremonies presided over by a shaman. This construct is a relatively recent invention. Davis recounts: 

When Schultes asked the shaman how often the people drank yagé his response suggested the question had no meaning: during illness, of course, and in the wake of death; in times of need or hardship; at certain passages in life; when a young boy of six has his initial haircut or when he kills for the first time ... And naturally, the shaman suggested, a youth will drink yagé at puberty ... as a young man he may drink it at his leisure to improve his hunting technique or simply to flaunt his physical prowess. The message that Schultes received was that the Kofan took yagé whenever they felt like it – at least once a week and no doubt on any occasion that warranted it. 

The anthropologist Michael Harner – a critical figure in the modern dissemination of knowledge on ayahuasca and shamanism – did his fieldwork with the Shuar. In an interview entitled “My Path in Shamanism” (2005) he said that the shamans he worked with “felt strongly that normally only one person at a time should take ayahuasca, otherwise the contact with the spirits would be diluted or altered”. This belief is the opposite of modern ceremonies where 20 or more people will all drink together, under a shaman’s watchful eye. 

A graduate of Berkeley, Harner initially intended to be an archaeologist until he “found that the Indians living nearby were like encyclopedias that nobody was opening, and this alerted me to the incredible amount of knowledge that was available just by asking the tribal elders”. He did his doctoral dissertation on fieldwork with the Shuar in the late 1950s. “I suddenly found myself in a society of shamans. About one out of every four adult males and a much smaller proportion of females were shamans.” He learned about ayahuasca from them, but didn’t try it himself until 1960, while studying with Konibo people in Pucallpa, Peru. “I was attempting to get information on their spiritual system,” he recalled later. “The Konibo said there’s only one way to learn about it – you’ve got to take the drink. So I took the drink.” 

That first journey has become part of modern ayahuasca lore – a foundational myth for a burgeoning global community. Up until that point, anthropologists maintained careful critical distance from the spiritual practices of indigenous people. For example, for the famed French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the patterns traced upon the skin of the Amazonian communities he studied evoked the social complexity they might have developed, if they had become as cosmopolitan as Parisian intellectuals, instead of remaining immersed in their jungle cosmology. Lévi-Strauss never considered that these patterns, like the kené patterns covering Shipibo fabrics, might reflect, instead, their direct experience of a visionary reality, accessed through plant compounds. 

When Schultes drank yagé he saw only colours. When Harner drank, he received a complete transmission from the shamanic multiverse – a vision that transformed his life and influenced perspectives on ayahuasca since that time. At one point, as he writes in his book, The Way of the Shaman (1980), Harner found himself on a boat with “large numbers of people with heads of blue jays and the bodies of humans, not unlike the bird-headed god of ancient Egyptian tomb paintings ... I was completely certain that I was dying and that the bird-headed people had come to take my soul away on the boat”. He encountered “giant reptilian creatures reposing sluggishly at the lowermost depths of the back of my brain, where it met the top of the spinal column.” A voice told him that these were extraterrestrials resembling giant pterodactyls who came to Earth aeons ago, escaping their enemies: 

They had created life on the planet in order to hide within the multitudinous forms and thus disguise their presence ... They were the true masters of humanity and the entire planet, they told me. We humans were but the receptacles and servants of these creatures. 

After the journey, he met with missionaries who pointed out the similarity between his visions and passages from the Book of Revelation: “And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth and his angels with him.” But Harner was more impressed when he spoke with a blind old Konibo shaman. When he relayed his visions of these bat-winged aliens who controlled life on Earth, the shaman “stared up toward me with his sightless eyes, and said with a grin, ‘Oh, they’re always saying that. But they are only the Masters of Outer Darkness’.” 

Harner suddenly realized, with amazement, that this shaman possessed a thorough knowledge of these invisible worlds or dimensions. While these other worlds did not exist for the modern West, they could be accessed directly through altered states. “From that moment on I decided to learn everything I could about shamanism.” He later established a school of shamanic studies, applying academic rigour to understand and explicate the multidimensional worldview common to shamanic cultures across the world. 

Harner became a shamanic practitioner as well as an articulate proponent of the validity of the shamanic worldview, exploring many cross-cultural archetypes. In the long retrospective interview with UCLA behavioural scientist Charles Grob and Australian psychiatrist Roger Walsh, “My Path in Shamanism”, published in Higher Wisdom (2005) by Grob and Walsh, he defines a spirit as: 

... an animate essence that has intelligence and different degrees of power. It is seen most easily in complete darkness and much less frequently in bright light, and in an altered state of consciousness better than in an ordinary state. In fact, there’s some question whether you can see it in an ordinary state of consciousness at all. 

The role of the shaman is to be the intercessor between the spirit dimensions and this reality. Harner believed that 

compassionate, healing spirits have a mission to try to communicate their existence to us so that they can get on with their work of trying to reduce suffering and pain in our reality ... But they are in one reality and we’re in another reality, and the only way they can penetrate this reality, except in very rare circumstances, is with help from our side. 

His shamanic journeys also freed him from any fear of death: 

I no longer view ordinary reality as the only reality. There’s a whole other reality, and that reality is the bigger one. This one is just a transitory experience; you’re only here for a certain number of years, but the other one is infinite ... it’s ineffable ecstasy and union ... This material world is basically just a short pit stop. 

As Harner defined in his work, shamanism posits three worlds – Upper, Middle, Lower – which the shaman can move between in visionary trance. Our Earthly plane belongs to the Middle World, which has many kinds of spirit intermediaries flowing through it. 

The Upper and Lower, above and below us, are completely in non- ordinary reality, and beyond pain and suffering. In contrast, the Middle World, in which we live, has both its ordinary and non- ordinary aspects. 

Harner found that the yagé-drinking communities he practised with related differently with the spiritual cosmos. For example, the Shuar were “very much involved with Middle World spirits ... These can be spirits of any beings: animals, insects, or humans.” Black magic was rampant among the Shuar, as Harner noted: “A culture that is stuck with Middle World spirits is a culture that is going to have sorcery.” The Konibo shamans, on the other hand, manifested far less “aggressive behavior,” because they made “much travel to the Upper and Lower Worlds in their shamanic journeys.” 

Marlene Dobkin Del Rios, author of Visionary Vine

Harner ultimately made a complete transition from university anthropologist to shamanic practitioner speaking openly about spirits and other realities. Since the 1960s, a number of other thinkers and writers managed to straddle the line between academic rigour and other-worldly proselytizer. Where earlier researchers focused on the traditional lives of indigenous cultures in the rainforest, anthropologists like Marlene Dobkin de Rios, Michael Taussig and Beatriz Labate have studied the impact of ayahuasca on urban communities and its assimilation into mestizo and modern European culture. 

Mick Taussig in Colombia

Taussig, an anthropologist at Columbia University, wrote about ayahuasca use in the Putumayo region of Colombia in his book Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (1987). He drank yagé dozens of times with Santiago Mutumbajoy, a Colombian shaman. Of his first journey, he wrote: 

I looked back and I saw this tiger sitting in a hammock. Body of a human and feet and legs in pants, the trunk was in-between, but the head – all these stripes and hair hanging down – a tiger sitting in a hammock. I looked away and it was a shaman; I looked back and it was a tiger. And then I vomited. Vomited like hell. 

What most intrigued Taussig about ayahuasca was its capacity to break apart ordered categories of thought, static perceptions and ideologies: 

The yagé experience is always something you can return to (insofar as you can remember it) to re-think all these very basic questions, because you’ve been so pulled apart and because such unusual mixtures of sensations have occurred. In part it’s like having another sense organ opened up, in addition to having eyes, ears, taste, skin, genitalia – now there’s the yagé organ too, and it blasts through consciousness, the exquisite intellectual being of one’s self as well. 

The phenomenology of the ayahuasca experience fascinated the cognitive psychologist Benny Shanon, a professor of psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Shanon first learned about ayahuasca in 1983, while on a hike through the Ecuadorian rainforest. It was 8 years later, during his first Santo Daime ceremony in Brazil, that he finally experienced ayahuasca’s phantasmagoric effects. As he wrote in his book The Antipodes of the Mind (2002), he was taken on an accelerated visionary tour through human history: 

There were slaves rowing a Roman boat ... slaves chained to their seats, and the labour was hard. Yet, it suddenly occurred to me in their debased position in the lower deck the slaves were, in some sense, freer than their masters who were trapped in their games of power and social status ... they were closer to the Divine than their masters were. 

His visions brought him to the Nazi Holocaust where 8 million Jews, gypsies, and other minorities died in the concentration camps. Under the effects of the medicine, he accessed revelatory insights on evil and justice, destiny and redemption, gaining “a new understanding of both the killers and the victims ... it seemed to me that the victims were given the opportunity to reach the highest levels of faith”. 

From that first ceremony, Shanon made the connection between religious mysticism and entheogens. The next morning, he gazed into the forest. It felt to him as if he had returned to the first day of creation: 

I had a glimpse of a heavenly scene, and it seemed to me that the righteous were those who, according to Jewish legend, eat the meat of the great Leviathan. I also had a glimpse of Jesus on the cross. 

Shanon arrived at the Amazon as a self-proclaimed “devout atheist”. This was no longer the case when he left. 

Shanon’s inexplicably startling visions inspired him to undertake a massive research project on the phenomenology of the ayahuasca experience. He compared hundreds of accounts made by drinkers on the various physical sensations, intimations and visionary revelations they experience through drinking the medicine. The results of the study were published in his aforementioned and brilliant book, The Antipodes of the Mind. “Ayahuasca introduces one to the realms that pertain to religion, to faith, to the Divine,” he wrote. 

Shanon began his inquiry in the spirit of science, open to a reductive and purely material explanation for the repeating motifs and images – the “cognitive universals” he found cross-culturally in ayahuasca visions: 

A reductionist would argue that the commonalities in the ayahuasca experience are directly due to neuroanatomical structures and brain processes and hence should be explained in biological terms. 

But this reductive viewpoint proved unsatisfying: 

Would we say, for example, that the reoccurrence of visual elements such as serpents and jaguars, palaces and works of art are due to there being specific brain centers in which such information is stored? 

Through his research, Shanon’s viewpoint shifted from a reductionist view to embrace Carl Jung’s postulate that there must be something like a “collective unconscious”, a repository of images and myths that exist beyond the boundaries of our individual minds, which we can access in visionary experience. He was intrigued, also, by Aldous Huxley’s idea that we value precious stones “because in some way they remind us of something which is already there in our minds”. Somewhere we are vaguely aware of a “paradisal, more-than-real world” at the “back of our heads”, accessible, to most people, in occasional fleeting glimpses. 

Shanon proposes: 

If the commonalities in the ayahuasca experience cannot be accounted for in ordinary psychological terms, then perhaps we have no choice but to shift from the internal domain to the external one and consider the possibility that these commonalities reflect patterns exhibited on another, extra-human realm. 

His training as a cognitive psychologist ultimately leads him to wide-ranging metaphysical speculations on the nature of reality itself, as the ayahuasca potion seems to playfully reveal it. He notes “the supernatural, paranormal nature of the other realities seen in visions”, and the sense that drinkers have that the medicine “brings those who partake of it to realms that are not dependent on time”. In these other dimensions of reality, journeyers often believe “that all that has been known and all that will be known is co- present and potentially available for people in the visionary state to access”. Shanon’s summary of the medicine’s transcendent and transpersonal effect – the intuition it imparts of a pre-existing dimension beyond what we know as time – calls to mind Corinthians in the Bible: “For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.” 

In the 1980s anthropologist Jeremy Narby was doing fieldwork in the Amazon when he drank ayahuasca with the Asháninka in Peru. Much like Harner, he had visionary experiences that challenged his scientific certainties and ultimately transformed his understanding of the world. In a vision, Narby encountered two enormous twined serpents who scoffed at him and told him he knew nothing about the true nature of reality. Later on, Narby discovered ancient serpentine imagery from cultures around the world. In The Cosmic Serpent (1998), he advanced a hypothesis that, through ayahuasca, we can access images emitted as photons by the crystalline structure of our DNA. This idea remains scientifically unverified, but it is one attempt to build a bridge between the realms of science and shamanism. 

Narby has continued his investigation into the intelligence of nature in subsequent books and projects. In 1999, he helped organize a journey to the Amazon for three molecular biologists to see whether they could obtain bio-molecular information in the visions they had in sessions with an indigenous shaman. Under the influence of the medicine, the scientists asked specific questions related to their fields of study. They received intriguingly specific answers. 

One of the biologists worked with the tobacco gene. During her journey, according to Narby’s essay “Shamans and scientists”, she spoke with an entity that identified itself as “the mother of tobacco” who told her that tobacco’s fundamental role was “to serve all living beings”. She wanted to know if it was wrong to modify the DNA of the plant. In her visions, she was shown: 

... a resplendent plant growing in a desert thanks to an extra gene which allowed it to resist drought. She came away from this experience with the understanding that genetic manipulations were best gauged case by case, in a way that takes into consideration the scientist’s intention as well as the way in which the modified plants will be used by society. 

Writing on the results of this experiment, Narby admits the evidence was inconclusive: 

All three said the experience of ayahuasca shamanism changed their way of looking at themselves and at the world, as well as their appreciation of the capacities of the human mind. They all expressed great respect for the shaman’s skill and knowledge. But all of the information received was, they believed, already present in their minds in some form. Nothing they saw proved to them they were interacting with an outside intelligence. They also found the ceremonies to be hard work. “Ayahuasca is not a shortcut to the Nobel prize,” one of the scientists quipped. 

While that may be true, the more that scientists study ayahuasca, the more they are learning about its extraordinary properties. One scientist in Catalonia, Jordi Riba, has discovered that ayahuasca causes neurogenesis - the regrowth of brain cells - in the laboratory. This could have tremendous implications for treating Alzheimer’s and other conditions. 

What seems to be the case is that we have reached a new cultural threshold. We can understand the value of ayahuasca within the indigenous and mestizo traditions that have preserved it until now. We can also understand its risks and dangers in a more comprehensive way. At the same time, many mysteries remain – philosophical, ethical, biological as well as metaphysical ones. In the future, we have the opportunity to take everything we have already learned to help us make the most beneficial use of this medicine, while we seek to explore the questions it still poses for us. 

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My new online seminar starts September 5. Please join us! 

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