UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

FIELDWORK REPORTS 1 & 2

PERUVIAN NORTHWEST AMAZONIA

23^rd March – 9^th May 1998

INTRODUCTION.

Exactly three months after returning to England from my first period of preliminary fieldwork (undertaken between October 30th and December 23^rd 1997- see PART 1: ‘Fieldwork Report for Preliminary Period One’ above) I went back to Peru to continue my practical studies of Amazonian Ayahuasca Shamanism. The second period of fieldwork was to be funded in part by a grant from ‘The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies’ (MAPS, then of North Carolina, now of Florida) and this carried the stipulation that it should be used for study at ‘The TAKIWASI Centre for Drug Rehabilitation and Investigation of Traditional Medicines’ in Tarapoto (San Martin). Prior to my departure from England I had contacted the Director of Takiwasi, Jaques Mabit, through my research supervisor at Cambridge University’s Department of Social Anthropology (Dr. Francoise Barbira-Freedman), and he had welcomed me to the Centre once again (see PART 1). Provisionally it was my intention to spend between five and six weeks at the Centre.

During my first period of preliminary fieldwork I had undertaken a six week introductory Ayahuasca diet at ‘La Sachamama’- an ethnobotanical garden located in the Amazon forest 20 km outside the city of Iquitos where I will conduct the formal fieldwork for my Ph.D. research project (‘An Evaluation of the Role of Near-Death Experience in Ayahuasca Psychotherapies’). The diet had involved my taking Ayahusaca twelve times so I brought to the second period a reasonably extensive experiential knowledge of the intrapsychic effects of Ayahuasca intoxication. However, I was conscious of the fact that all twelve of these ceremonial ingestions had been undertaken in a single location and each under the auspices of the same Ayahuasquero shaman. While this was inevitable given the nature of the diet I had since recognised the need to build a body of comparative experiences which would enable me, from a personal perspective, to assess the affective influences of ‘set and setting’ in the ritual use of Ayahuasca. At the subjective level I wanted to re-engage with the near-death aspects of Ayahuasca hallucinosis in the hopes that I might achieve more completely than I did during the La Sachamama diet an affective/experiential realisation of the ‘death process’ itself. I had come to suspect that the more completely one affectively dies under the influences of Ayahuasca, and the closer one comes as a consequence to the ecstatic core of the experience the more profound must be the insights and marked the associated attitude changes. While my circumstantial experience of near-death phenomena would support this supposition it remained for me to verify personally an affective/experiential equivalence in the hallucinatory contexts of Ayahuasca intoxication. More generally, a period of study at Takiwasi would also enable me to experience firsthand some of the traditional medicine-derived drug rehabilitation protocols currently being implemented and to examine the function of any near-death components in these. Notwithstanding the fact that as a consequence of the Ayahuasca diet at La Sachamama I was now in a position to formulate more specific research objectives for this second period of fieldwork I was aware that they could still only be provisional and might have to be adapted according to circumstances.

I arrived at the Takiwasi Centre in Tarapoto on the morning of March 26th. After a round of introductions I was invited by Jaques Mabit to begin my studies by participating in a ‘Rosa Sisa’ plant purge scheduled for that afternoon. At 4.00 pm I went to the ‘isolation block’ (reserved for new admissions) with two patients and a Peruvian- American ‘relapse prevention’ therapist. Under the auspices of Jaques Mabit’s principal assistant (a young Peruvian healer named Xavier) we four sat under the trees outside the building and were each given a 150 cl measure of Rosa Sisa to drink. We were also presented with large three litre jugs of warm water and an empty plastic bucket. I downed the Rosa Sisa and began to drink the water as instructed. After about a litre I was suddenly gripped by an irresistible urge to vomit which I did copiously before resuming my drinking. For the next hour I drank and purged until I had transferred the contents of two water jugs, via my stomach, into the finally full five litre bucket. I felt very hot and rather dizzy by the time I had finished. When the process was complete we were given certain ‘dietary’ restrictions effective for the next five days: no red meat, no pork, no spices, and no alcohol. In addition all sexual activity was strictly prohibited.

During the first month of a patient’s residence at Takiwasi the treatment emphasises ‘physical purification’- a cleansing of the body of the lingering toxic traces of addiction. This cleansing is effected principally through such plant-induced purges (Rosa Sisa, Yawapanga, etc.). These procedures are seen to prepare the patient physically for the next stage of treatment- the psychological/affective/emotional level where the individual is guided towards the achievement of ‘connection’ with ‘family, emotions, memories, sadness, and their location in the context of humanity’ (from ‘Interview with the Founder of the Takiwasi Centre’, www.csp.org/nicholas/A33.html). The primary means of inducing such a connection and contextualisation (see ‘Fieldwork Report for Prelminary Period One’, above) is the ritual ingestion of Ayahuasca.

At Takiwasi Ayahuasca ceremonies are conducted twice a week (Tuesdays and Fridays) in a purpose-built malocca longhouse a little removed from the central complex. Therapeutically they are the source of the insights which effect the attitudinal alterations around which a patient’s re-adaptive personality configuration is orientated.

On the evening following my arrival I was invited to participate in my first ceremony. As at La Sachamama the ceremony was scheduled to begin at 9.00 pm. A little before this time our party (a total of twelve people comprised of students like myslef, Takiwasi staff, and four patients) made its way from the main building to the malocca. In one half of the malocca a circle of cushions had been arranged on a spread of straw mats. Once we had all taken our places Jaques Mabit explained to us the rules according to which the Ayahuasca ceremonies at Takiwasi are conducted: 1) Unless absolutely necessary talking is forbidden; 2) Smoking is permitted only at the beginning and end of a ceremony as it is deemed to be distracting for the other participants; 3) Lying down is forbidden; 4) Participants are not permitted to leave the malocca during the course of the ceremony unless absolutely unavoidable (i.e. bathroom visits) and permission must be obtained before doing so. Jaques went on to say that although we were taking Ayahuasca as a group we should concentrate exclusively on the content of our individual internal experience and not be distracted by the behaviour of others.

After the relative freedom of the ceremonies at La Sachamama I was rather disconcerted by the apparent stringency of the Takiwasi approach. I rarely spoke during the ceremonies at La Sachamama but the fact that I was free to do so meant that I was not conscious of any constraint in this regard. The freedom to smoke meant that there was no threat of the Ayahuasca experiences being complicated by frustrated desire! ‘Lying down’ was not forbidden at La Sachamama, it was merely suggested that staying upright inhibited sleep and the potential ‘conscious loss’ of important insights or visions. The prohibition on leaving the malocca at Takiwasi also induced a sense of uncomfortable constraint as at certain points in each of the twelve ceremonies I participated in at La Sachamama the need to leave the confines of the Ayahuasca temple and be alone in and with the forest had proved irresistible. Notwithstanding these reservations I could both understand and respect the principal rules of ceremonial conduct at Takiwasi given the location and design of the malocca and the number of participants involved. What I failed to reconcile with my knowledge of the dynamics of Ayahuasca ceremonies was Jaques’ suggestion that we should remain in our own private cells of experience. The often dramatic re-definition of the boundaries of ‘self’ coupled with an inescapable and I believe essential ‘group dynamic’ that I had come to expect from the ritual ingestion of Ayahuasca seemed to preclude the possibility of such an overtly stipulated ‘isolation’. From a personal point of view these restrictions and irreconcilable stipulations conspired to induce in me a feeling akin to claustrophobia- a far from auspicious ‘set’ in a less than conducive ‘setting’.

The experiential content of the twelve Ayahuasca ceremonies I participated in at La Sachamama had been predominantly of a ‘transpersonal’ nature. While ‘biographical’ material proved an important and ever-present concomitant of this perspective it had definitely been secondary. The affective-philosophical focus of these first experiences had centred on matters of universal significance, and particularly those pertaining to meaning. Personal ‘contextualisation’ had been achieved with minimal difficulty and this had enabled me to gain almost instant access to the mystical dimensions of Ayahuasca experience, those that lie beyond the resolution of a personal encounter with the reality of death, and the establishment of an affectively meaningful/explanatory relation between ‘self’ and ‘the totality of all that is’ (Bohm, D. 1980:55).

In striking contrast to this the experiential content of my first ceremony at Takiwasi constituted an agonising return to the most traumatic periods of my childhood and early adult life. These were summoned into the forefront of my conscious experience in unprecedented imaginal and affective detail, and these effects- deliberately accentuated by my drinking a second cup of Ayahuasca after a couple of hours- plunged me inexorably into the deepest hells of myself. I had been quite unprepared for such a perspective but, and in spite of the intense emotional pain, I felt that a negotiation of these aspects of experience was essential if they were to be ‘accepted’, ‘assimilated’, and ultimately ‘transcended’. Notwithstanding Jaques’ preliminary stipulations about confining myself to my own experiences I couldn’t help but notice one of the other participants (a member of staff) who had moved to the centre of the circle and sobbed in a manner suggesting that he too was in great pain. Indeed, I imagined that this is how one might react had the subjectively worst thing in the world just happened. This imagining led me to speculate about what would induce me to cry in such a manner- an undertaking which did little to elevate my mood. The atmosphere was indescribably oppressive and charged with a physically chilling negativity. I envisaged and affectively experienced the pains of the various participants being pooled into a largely uncontrolled collective field of psychic cross-infection.

While I recognise the psychotherapeutic value of having no choice but to confront one’s fears such regressional re-animations of trauma under the influences of Ayahuasca may be as affectively devastating as the actuality to which they pertain. At no stage in the ceremony did the liberating/transcending possibility of an affective death present itself and I was thus constrained to linger in a limbo of unresolvable pain and fear- fear of the pain and its implications with regard to some of my deepest emotional foundations.

The ceremony ended at 3.15 am and following its ritual conclusion Jaques moved among the participants discussing the content of their experiences. When he came to me he introduced some novel ‘Freudian’ explanations for the pain I had just endured and then left me to accommodate these within the broader frameworks of my self-understanding.

As I walked back to my lodging through the empty streets of Tarapoto I felt thoroughly disintegrated. The sense of experiential ‘closure’ I had grown accustomed to feeling at the end of each of the Ayahuasca ceremonies at La Sachamama was completely absent. I slept fitfully, haunted by the experiences of the Takiwasi ceremony which had now become the stuff of dismal dreams. I awoke the next morning in the grip of an intense anxiety which threatened to establish itself as a depression. Not wishing to allow this to happen I decided to return to Takiwasi in order to discuss the ceremony with my fellow participants. I thought it best to confine my investigations to the experiences of the students and members of staff who had participated as it would have been irresponsible to influence the patients in any way.

The first person I spoke to (a student like myself) claimed to have had a series of similarly unpleasant experiences, so much so in fact that this individual was now disinclined to participate in any further Ayahuasca ceremonies at Takiwasi. Conscious that some ceremonies are bound to be more ‘difficult’ than others I decided to extend my inquiries to the experiences of those individuals who had participated in several ceremonies over an appreciable period of time- long-term members of the Takiwasi staff. One of these informants told me that they had been working at Takiwasi for six months but had been unable to bring themselves to participate in Ayahuasca ceremonies for the past three. They had come to Takiwasi seeking the sorts of mystical transcendence I reported for La Sachamama but had found only ‘biographical agony’. Another was still experiencing a depression that had apparently been induced during a ceremony conducted in the previous week.

While this was admittedly a very small sample it was sufficient to suggest that the negativity of my personal experiences the night before was not solely due to some sort of individual ‘phase’ with regard to Ayahuasca. I discussed this with Jaques and he suggested that the biographical pain patients experienced constituted a crucial stage in their evolution towards personal psychological health and in their preparation for access to Ayahuasca’s transpersonal dimensions. This I fully accepted but wondered whether a little more balance might ease the transition. My experiences at La Sachamama had brought me affectively to the edge of insanity, the heart of Hell, and the brink of death but they had never left me feeling quite so enduringly devastated as had my first ceremony at Takiwasi. However, it would have been premature for me to finalise an opinion on the basis of this and so I resolved to drink again on the following Tuesday.

After three days of struggling to piece myself back together in the wake of my first ceremony I attended my second. I was prepared for another night of ‘biographical agony’ and so decided to confine myself to a single measure of Ayahuasca in the hopes that this might tone down the emotional intensity of the experience. As anticipated the biographical focus of the second ceremony was as marked as the first. This enabled me to return to certain areas of particular conflict and address them with a degree of objective detachment not possible during the first ceremony because of my disorientation and excessively intense affective involvement. At the close of the ceremony I felt marginally more coherent in myself again but I was subsequently to feel a deep, self-preservational reluctance to participate in any further ceremonies at Takiwasi.

By good fortune my period of study at Takiwasi just happened to present me with the opportunity to participate in one of the tri- ennial ‘dietary retreats’ organised by the Centre and conducted in the mountains about an hour’s walk from Tarapoto. The next diet was scheduled to begin on the Friday following my second Ayahuasca ceremony and Jaques agreed that my participation would provide me with invaluable insights into Takiwasi’s rehabilitatory programme. After careful consideration, and with particular reference to my experiences of ‘fear’ in the context of the two preceding Ayahuasca ceremonies, he recommended ‘Chiric Sanango’ (Rauwolfia duckei) as the plant preparation most appropriate to my needs.

According to Jaques these forest retreats constitute the most important dynamic in the Takiwasi treatment of drug addiction. A diet involves the patient being sequestered in a small tambo hut for a period of eight days during which time they may subsist on plain rice gruel or, depending upon personal inclination, nothing at all except for ‘raw’ river water and the relevant plant preparation. Human contact is kept to an absolute minimum and the emphasis is on deep reflection and ‘confrontation with self’. There are 32 Plantas Maestras (‘Plant Teachers’) currently in use for these diets and they may be administered on their own or in a variety of combinations depending on the specific effects required.

On the Friday after my second Ayahuasca ceremony I left the Takiwasi compound in a party of fifteen people- ten patients and five staff/researchers including myself. As I walked away from Tarapoto and up into the mountains I was still experiencing a distinctly depressed frame of mind as a consequence of the build up of ‘negative energies’ during the Ayahuasca ceremonies. However, I felt confident that the diet would effect an experience of sufficient intensity to extricate me from my suddenly downcast frame of mind. The attendant anxiety had been significantly increased by my discovering that the diet would be inaugurated with an Ayahuasca ceremony in a new malocca built specifically for the purpose near the site of the diet tambos. I consoled myself with the notion that this malocca would probably be ‘pristine’, no ceremonies having been conducted there yet and it was therefore unlikely to present such a psychically hostile environment as the much-used Takiwasi malocca in Tarapoto.

After and hour’s walk, mostly upwards, we arrived at the diet chacra (‘garden’) and were each allocated a personal tambo in which we would reside for the duration of the diet. I was subsequently guided to tambo ‘COCA’ by one of the chacra’s guardians.

Tambo ‘COCA’ was a rudimentary, if picturesque, hut with two open sides and a palm-thatched roof. Inside there was a bed platform raised above an earth floor pocked liberally with ant-lion craters. Immediately, I hung up a brightly coloured hammock and a mosquito net in an attempt to make things feel a little more ‘homely’.

The inaugural Ayahuasca ceremony in the new malocca was scheduled to begin at 8.00 pm, and so for the next couple of hours I explored my surroundings and then lay in my hammock watching humming birds buzz between the heavy flowers on nearby trees. As darkness fell I continued in my endeavours to come to terms with my recent Ayahuasca experiences and to prepare myself for the imminent eight day ‘ordeal’. At 7.30 I was summoned to the malocca and at 8.30, after Jaques had briefed us all on the rules and grave dangers of our respective diets, the ceremony began.

My experiences during this ceremony were less affectively devastating than the previous two but I was still conscious of being perilously exposed to some far from benign ‘psychic’ influences. Most notable for me was the fact that the ceremony was completely devoid of visions (my teachers in Iquitos judged me to be in possession of uncommon facility in this department). After three hours I started to feel bitterly cold and wrapped myself in a poncho attempting to stem the effect. However, this ‘cold’ seemed to be in some sense within me and the poncho made no difference whatsoever to my condition. For the next four hours I huddled against the wall of the malocca, slipping in and out of consciousness, and periodically aware of anguished moans and sobbing. The dominant affective impression was of ‘a ship of souls’ on its way to Hell. It was with great relief that at 4.30 am I returned to my hut to sleep.

I was awakened at dawn by a knock on the side of my hut and an individual named Orlando administered my first dose of Chiric Sanango- a glassful of muddy green liquid with a bitter, vinegary after-taste. I was instructed to take a bath after five minutes, and with that Orlando went off to continue his rounds. Following my bath in the river nearby I returned to await the onset of the Chiric Sanango’s effects. The first thing I became aware of was a numbing of my lips which gradually increased in intensity and then spread to my throat. Half an hour had now passed since I drank. Over the course of the next hour these effects were augmented by a creeping chill that eventually engulfed my whole body. Notwithstanding the mid-morning warmth of the air I was covered in goose pimples and shivering uncontrollably. These sensations compelled me to seek sanctuary in my bed, but the thick blanket I had been advised to bring with me from Takiwasi provided little comfort. For the next seven hours I languished miserably in a state reminiscent of hypothermia.

Prior to the diet I had been informed by Jaques that in addition to these dramatic physical effects Chiric Sanango produces intensely vivid dreams in the sleeping mind, and in the waking it induces a ‘cleansing’ of negative contents pertaining to the drinker’s past experience, and a state of deep reflection on matters pertaining to the future. The negative accretions of the past are cleaned away from the ‘lens’ of the present in order that a clear and undistorted vision of the future may be attained. This transformation is effected in the experiential context of Chiric Sanango’s ‘cold-fear-death’ psychophysical matrix.

Given the frame of mind established as a consequence of my three most recent Ayahuasca experiences I was already well placed for a reflexive assessment of the ‘negative contents’ of my own past. With these firmly in the forefront of my consciousness the dominant mood of the first twenty-four hours of the diet was one of intense separation anxiety. This articulated itself in the form of a profound sense of ‘homesickness’ which at times filled me with an almost irresistible compulsion to capitulate. My mind presented me with a series of elaborate ‘persuasions’ not least of which being the suggestion that ‘I must be crazy to subject myself voluntarily to this degree of physical discomfort and psychological pain’. However, the future extrapolated from the point of imagined capitulation was so fraught with negative implications that I was constrained to continue with the diet, tapping into a hitherto obscured level of personal resilience. I was obsessively focused on the passage of time and the more I ‘obsessed’ the slower it seemed to pass until the period of the diet suggested an insurmountable eternity. By the end of the first day, as the physical effects of the Chiric Sanango wore off, I felt utterly dejected, desperately alone, and thoroughly miserable. An awareness of ‘self-pity’ accentuated the emotional discomfort and I endeavoured to put things into perspective by reminding myself of the unimaginable suffering of, for example, concentration camp prisoners. This provided me with a firm hold above the abyss of despair I imagined gaping beneath me.

For the first four days of the diet I hung on to this, as though for my life, with my waking and sleeping consciousness gradually blending together until I came to exist in a perpetual state of quasi-hypnagogy. Only intensifying hunger and the bothersome intrusions of mosquitoes maintained an awareness of the physical grounding to this existence. During the hours of both night and day my mind reviewed every conceivable aspect of my past experience in cinematographic detail. This ‘life-review’ assumed a chronological sequence that, given the vast quantity of material to be surveyed, continued, almost without a break, from one day to the next. This process was fuelled by the ingestion of more Chiric Sanango, administered by Orlando once every forty-eight hours. My night dreams were at this stage neither as regular nor as intense as I had expected but then I was sleeping for barely two hours in twenty-four.

Between the fourth and fifth days this seemingly all- inclusive ‘past-review’ attained to a sense of completion. The life- long complex of images, impressions, emotions, and experiences which culminated in my contemporary sense of ‘self’ cohered in a manner that I had hitherto only experienced in the context of certain Ayahuasca ceremonies at La Sachamama. I was mentally and emotionally exhausted but simultaneously aware of an inner calm that smacked of ‘reconciliation’. This was positively enhanced by a feeling of achievement, of having earned the right to reap some as yet unimaginable reward. I imagined I could see clearly how even the darkest experiences of my past were essential components in the ‘miracle’ of my existence in the present and in the now positively assessed promise of this with regard to the future. For the first time in four days I became aware of the fabulous beauty of my mountain forest surroundings. At last I was looking beyond myself and what I saw filled me with profound feelings of ‘integration’, ‘belonging’, and ‘personal value’. I was quite convinced that from this totalised perspective I saw what I ‘meant’ in relation to the Whole, and the ‘meaning’ I perceived linked me into a processual context vastly more extensive than that described within the quotidian parameters of ‘self’. Notwithstanding the fact that I hadn’t eaten anything at all since before the inaugural Ayahuasca ceremony, and was thus feeling physically very depleted, I experienced great surges of psychic energy that suggested I was in some way directly connected to a source of more than personal power. I felt a deep kinship with the trees and vegetation surrounding the tambo and half-humorously imagined that five days of Chiric Sanango had now perhaps qualified me as an ‘honorary plant’. Almost imperceptibly ‘Hell’ had become ‘Heaven’. Apparently, the undistracted mind has no alternative but to work through itself, identifying areas of pain and conflict, and allowing the natural integrative-reconciliatory intrapsychic processes to work their healing magic. I understood now why Jaques attached so much importance to this part of the Takiwasi therapy.

Over the next twenty-four hours, in the wake of this affective transformation, my mind returned to certain experiences that I had already touched upon, dealing with them more thoroughly where necessary until they fitted without tension or conflict into the total systemic patterning of my life-history, a process suggestive of ‘fine-tuning’. By this stage hunger was the most significant obstacle standing between me and complete equanimity (I was persistently, and most specifically, haunted by tantalising hallucinations of vindaloo curries and tubes of ‘Pringles’ crisps). Beyond this the dominant feeling was of being incredibly fortunate to be alive.

For the last two days of the diet my conscious experience was, as I had been led to expect, characterised by ‘a profound reflection on the future’. Having affectively clarified the content of my personal history in its entirety right up to the point where it became my experience of the present I began to extrapolate the possible course of my future from these pre-emptive implications. In some sense I was no longer experiencing my total historical process according to a past-present-future linear continuum. In the same way that the sum of my past configured itself in and as the totality of my present my future was also ‘present’- not in terms of a rigidly determined imaginal representation but rather as an implicately encoded immanence (Bohm, D. 1980). The positively weighted reconciliation I had now established with regard to the content of my past became, when my consciousness turned itself towards the future, a principle of optimism, an optimism which my mind embellished with projective imaginings involving the satisfaction of my deepest desires and ambitions. This locked into my consciousness as a cognitive-affective system of positive feedback which culminated in a sustained mood of ‘oceanic’ euphoria.

At two o’clock in the afternoon on the eighth day Orlando came to my tambo, administered a soplada (blowing of tobacco) to mark the formal conclusion of the diet, and then allowed me to eat three tablespoonfuls of chopped onions. After eight days of starvation this was one of the most pleasurable sensations of my entire life. This pleasure was significantly enhanced when Orlando told me that of the fifteen people who began the diet with me five had left before the end and only three of the remainder (one patient, a Chilean psychologist, and myself) had completed it with a total fast. Jaques had suggested at the beginning that the experience of the diet is most profound when no food is taken for its duration, and it was this that principally informed my decision to fast. Quite simply, I had wanted to go as far as this particular diet would take me.

However, as I walked, or rather shuffled, in the direction of my chicken broth I began to appreciate the cost of such a decision. My physical energy levels were unprecedentedly depleted and the lowness of my blood pressure meant that the act of walking brought me perilously close to blacking out on several occasions. The lack of energy and dramatic loss of weight now became a source of considerable concern, especially with the prospect of an arduous trek with rucksack down the mountain and back to Takiwasi on the following day. The diminution of my stomach meant that the enormity of my appetite was satisfied with surprising rapidity. As I returned to my tambo my earlier euphoria was now crossed with an unanticipated sense of anti-climax, but this, I decided later, was in large measure due to the physical shock of food.

I did not sleep at all during my last night in Tambo COCA but rather tossed and turned through an absolute blizzard of thoughts and impressions as my experiences of the last eight days, indeed of the past three weeks, crescended with a visionary intensity I had hitherto expected only from Ayahuasca intoxication. Towards the end of the night I was confronted by an extraordinary composite entity- a cross between a spotted jaguar and an anaconda- which I followed into the depths of myself (envisaged as a limitless forest) until it vanished. This creature seemed to carry with it everything I had seen during the diet- a symbolic embodiment of insight which I subsequently needed only to re-visualise to bring its implications, and knowledge, back into the forefront of consciousness.

My concerns with ‘the future’ during the diet had included the formulation of a plan of action with regard to the next few weeks in Tarapoto. After my experiences during the Ayahuasca ceremony that began the diet my reluctance to take any more Ayahuasca under the auspices of Takiwasi had become a firm decision to desist. As previously stated one of my principal fieldwork objectives was the accumulation of comparative Ayahuasca experiences. Now that I could no longer take Ayahuasca at Takiwasi I had decided to find an alternative venue. When I got back to my lodging in Tarapoto I met an Argentinian woman who the previous week had taken part in two ceremonies at the nearby ‘SONNCOWASI’ ("The House of the Heart", ‘International School of Amazonian Shamanism’, and hospital of the Director/shaman Dr. Jorge Gonzalez Ramirez). She had nothing but praise for Sonncowasi, as had the members of Takiwasi staff I talked to who had participated in ceremonies there. However, my hopes for a series of ceremonial participations at Sonncowasi were dashed by the fact that Don Jorge had now left, along with eight gallons of Ayahuasca, for a two month tour of seminars in the United States. Feeling somewhat confounded I went to Sonncowasi anyway to see if Don Jorge’s assistant could recommend somewhere else. As soon as I arrived I was enchanted by the place, by the friendliness of Don Jorge’s ‘extended’ family and the the warmth of the welcome I received, and by the imposing Ayahuasca temple at the centre of a garden of beautifully cared for medicinal plants. As I sat and talked with Don Jorge’s assistant, Christina, and an American student, Adam, my disappointment at having missed my opportunity to participate in even one ceremony here became quite palpable. Sensing this Christina offered to hold an unscheduled private ceremony for me that very night. She herself would preside in the absence of Don. Jorge and Adam would assist.

As soon as it got dark Christina, Adam, Benita (Christina’s mother), Deborah (the Argentinian woman), and I arranged ourselves in the Sonncowasi temple in readiness for the ceremony. The temple itself is a purpose-built octagonal structure with a conical thatched roof. We sat ourselves in a semi-circle on a raised wooden platform which surrounds a broad octagonal dance floor of compacted earth. The interior walls of the building are comprised of pillars of white ‘lattice’ bricks each in the form of an ‘H’ (‘House of the Heart’). Apparently, the temple’s design was taken directly by Don Jorge from a personal Ayahuasca vision.

Christina opened the proceedings by dedicating this ‘special’ ceremony to me before preparing the Ayahuasca with a whistled icaro (power song). As I held a glass full to the brim it struck me as an unusual brew- less viscous than I was accustomed to and dark green in colour. It tasted unfamiliar but was nonetheless nauseating. Benita held a bottle of strong-smelling perfume to my nose to help me keep it down. During the course of the ceremony I could ask for another dose if I felt I needed it.

When we had all received our measures, and after a brief period of quiet, Christina began to sing. Those members of staff I had spoken to at Takiwasi who had attended ceremonies at Sonncowasi had remarked on the beauty of Christina’s songs and they were indeed spellbinding. As their magical tones suffused the onset of Ayahuasca intoxication I felt myself relax into a state of calm, joyful, privileged celebration- a deep sense of anticipatory delight reminiscent of the ceremonies at La Sachamama, and in striking contrast with the dark, cold, nightmarish ambience of those at Takiwasi. The intoxication stengthened and I grew bolder, moving on all fours, like a cross between a cat and a spider, into the middle of the dance floor where I played with my shadow in a pool of moonlight now bluing the earth. Adam came over to me to say that I could dance but I was still so weak from the diet that I wasn’t sure whether I could manage it. Anyway, I stood up and began to move tentatively in a slow, loose, ‘bird-like’ manner, hanging on the rhythm of Christina’s icaro. My calf muscles were still painful from the intense cramp I had experienced during the morning’s descent from the mountain and my physical energy levels very low. I returned quite quickly to my place at the side of the temple to recuperate and to see whether I was ready for the visionary component of the intoxication.

After an hour and a half had passed and there were still no marked visions I thought to myself ‘this is a special ceremony for me, I can’t come here again for I don’t know how long so I must get the most out of it; I need to enter the realm of deep visions’. I thus drank another full measure of Ayahuasca which this time really made me shudder with revulsion. Fifteen minutes later I was again dancing my ‘eagle dance’. I’d never danced in this manner before. I just gave myself over to the rhythm of the songs and allowed my body to move as it pleased. I was now dancing in a vortex of intensely vivid visions- fabulously coloured flowers and jungle plants all swirling around my space of consciousness in a whirlwind of staggering kaleidoscopic/fractal beauty. Indeed I felt as though I was dancing at the centre of the Universe, the centre from which all the energies and potentialities of life spin out centripetally and eternally. I was dancing in a tornado of all of life’s most beautiful creations. I was safe and ecstatically content, spiralling ever upwards at the funnels’s core on inexorable currents of vision. I was indeed ‘magically flying’.

The visions themselves were of almost unprecedented intensity (equalled only by certain datura-enhanced experiences at La Sachamama): shifting patterns of flowers, leaves, trees, tunnels, and coils of auroral omni-coloured lights. And I saw so much in the ground, in the earth. At times it was as though I was standing on the surface of a boundless ocean of visions, falling away infinitely beyond and beneath me. Crouching down to look into the earth I saw tangles of ‘reptile people’- strange, primitive, almost alien entities with highly conscious eyes seeming to look at me across aeons from the deepest core of the human reptile brain, the very beginnings of human conscious evolution (cf. Harner, M.J.(1980) 1990: Introduction). I saw into the hearts of ancient jungles coursed with crystalline rivers full of huge ammonite-type shellfish. There were land snails the size of cars and trees large enough to accommodate their outsized dimensions. I imagined I was observing the racapitulation of times when human beings were just a vague, distant possibility in the future systemic-processual unfolding of life. I journeyed into the earth and found I could actually ‘swim’ through its lucid viscosity of visions, exploring ever deeper its other-worldly domains. When I returned again in the opening of my eyes and looked up the temple was full of ‘spirits’, crowding in the shadowy portals between the ‘H’-brick pillars until the entire ritual space appeared surrounded by a seamless, purple-coloured field of ‘demons’, all clamouring unsuccessfully to gain further access. Notwithstanding the fact that I felt quite safe I was rather daunted by the seeming proximity of so much ‘entific malice’. I remember Adam telling me not to worry, ‘this place is a fortress’.

After more dancing, singing, and incredibly intense visions the ceremony was formally concluded at about midnight. As we sat around discussing both individual and collective experiences I was still feeling very much under the influences of the double dose of Ayahuasca. It had been a particularly exhilarating ceremony and its aftermath was marked by a sense of deep gratification coupled with relief- relief that my harrowing experiences during the Takiwasi ceremonies were apparently ‘localised’ phenomena, specific to that set and setting. However, as we prepared to go our separate ways for the night everything changed with alarming suddenness. Quite without warning I felt myself overcome by a wave of fear which manifested itself physically in the form of a deep, deathly, bone-chilling cold. Much to the surprise of the others I collapsed to the floor in an agony of panic. This feeling was rooted in an incontrovertible conviction that I was actually dying. Telling myself that the physical collapse was undoubtedly a reaction to the demands of the Chiric Sanango diet combined with the emotional intensity and physical exertions of the ceremony did nothing to allay my fear. I had been assured before the ceremony that there was no evidence for any adverse reaction occurring between Chiric Sanango and Ayahuasca. Indeed, Adam had recently undertaken a Chiric Sanango diet during which time he participated in two Ayahuasca ceremonies without any ill effects. Nevertheless, I knew that drug synergy in the context of differing physiological constitutions is, in varying degrees, unpredictable. The element of doubt attendant upon this awareness was sufficient to accentuate to the point of conviction my fear that I was possibly experiencing a severe, and potentialy fatal, allergic reaction. The symptomatic feelings of intense cold and fear naturally pointed to the Chiric Sanango which Jaques had told me would still be ‘working’ in me for several weeks after the formal conclusion of the diet (I was yet to learn of ‘the frosty whites of a tryptamine crash’).

I imagined myself to be locked irreversibly into the process of dying and there was nothing anyone could do to prevent it taking its course. I was falling into the ground through the earth of the dance floor as though Hell itself was swallowing me up into an eternal ‘anti-womb’. I was convinced I would remain forever frozen in this ‘space of death’ (Taussig, M. 1987, 1997), far too deep for anyone to be able to find me. In the world above I imagined I would live out the rest of my physical life ricocheting around a padded cell. There were moments when I felt quite completely insane with fear- as though being buried alive and racked by a billion indescribable agonies of emotional pain which added a sense of burning to my torment- burning cold. ‘The House of the Heart’, so recently an experiential heaven, had now become the deepest dungeon in Hell and all I wanted was peace, a cessation of the thoughts and visions that appeared to be tearing my soul apart, unconsciousness,...death. But although death seemed terrifyingly close I couldn’t actually die. The implications of my death for those I love, my relatives and friends, were envisaged in awful detail and this strengthened my resolve to resist annihilation, notwithstanding the excruciations of affective pain. I was thus stalemated between an intense desire to live and an equivalently intense desire to die. At this stage the others helped me to a bed in a room adjacent to the main temple enclosure and there, after a long talk with Adam (the only native English speaker), I fought on with ‘my dying’ until dawn. My desire to live gradually overcame my desire to die as I came to realise that my literally dying would require a consciously willed act of self-destruction. Once I had accepted the ‘reality’ of this fact- that in these particular circumstances whether I lived or died was clearly a mater of personal choice and hence control- I regained a rational perspective on the situation and began to emerge from affectively the closest encounter with death that I have ever experienced.

Notwithstanding the obvious unpleasantness of the latter half of my Ayahuasca experience at Sonncowasi it did provide me with an invaluable opportunity to verify personally the affective equivalence posited as existing between circumstantial and the more extreme forms of ritually/hallucinogenically induced near-death experiences, albeit in this instance with an emphasis on the negative (i.e. ‘resistance’) aspects of such phenomena. While certain of my Ayahuasca experiences during the introductory diet at La Sachamama (see PART 1 above) involved affectively intense confrontions with the reality of death none of them induced in me a sense so completely indistinguishable from a personally endured circumstantial NDE as did the Sonncowasi experience. It might be reasonable to suppose that the conducive factor missing at La Sachamama was a state of severe physical and emotional depletion with which to augment the psychological conviction of death’s imminence.

After the three Takiwasi Ayahuasca ceremonies, the demands of the Chiric Sanango diet, and the singularly traumatic experiences at Sonncowasi I found myself in a very poor state of psychophysical health. I had lost almost two stones in weight and the pre-diet depression had returned with a vengeance, notwithstanding the ultimate affective positivity of the diet experience itself. For the next week I moved disconsolately between Takiwasi and Sonncowasi attempting to relocate a centre of psychological balance. It was a time of intense ‘free-floating’ anxiety- non-specifically directed and stubbornly resistant to my best efforts at resolution. The people at Sonncowasi generously provided me with a home- solicitous company, a semblance of emotional security, and large quantities of excellent food- in which to begin the process of personal re-integration and healing.

During the hours of solitary reflection I spent amid the vines of Sonncowasi’s ‘Ayahuasca garden’ I came to the conclusion that my condition was going to require a cure more radical than any I could hope to find in Tarapoto. Ideally, such a cure would have to be conducted in familiar surroundings with the support of friends. I knew of only one place in Peru that could satisfy all of these demands- my beloved Sachamama.

I discussed my predicament and intentions with Jaques Mabit and he agreed that an ‘Ayahuasca retreat in a natural environment’ would probably be the best solution. He warned me to be very careful as in my post-diet state I would be particularly vulnerable to the psychic machinations of unscrupulous shamans and could become very ill. However, I didn’t think there was much scope for me to become any more ill than I already was after a month in Tarapoto. Without further ado I settled my accounts with Takiwasi and bought a ticket for Iquitos.

Having arrived in Iquitos I left my luggage at a hotel in the city and then went straight to La Sachamama. I had taken something of a gamble in arriving unannounced as I had no way of knowing whether the Director, Don Francisco Montes, would even be there and I had a maximum of only two weeks before I would have to return to Lima. Notwithstanding these uncertainties my walk through the forest from the Nauta road to the ‘sacred hill’ was attended by a distinct elevation of mood, a definite feeling of ‘going home’. A little after I reached the garden Don Francisco appeared and following a delightful reunion we discussed my situation and its attendant sickness. He was, as I had expected, thoroughly familiar with these sorts of affliction, a familiarity which both commended my decision to come to La Sachamama and allayed any doubts I might have had about his being able to effect a cure. Don Francisco prescribed a twelve day period of curacion, or healing, at La Sachamama. This would involve a strict diet of unsalted rice, yucca, and clavohuasca tea, a programme of ritual flower perfume baths, sopladas, and five Ayahuasca ceremonies under the auspices of the La Sachamama shaman, Don Fernando Lachi. There just happened to be a ceremony scheduled for that evening and so my curacion would begin.

The emphasis throughout this programme of psychophysical therapy would be couched in terms of ‘cleansing’. The severe depression I was experiencing was, according to Don Francisco, due to an accumulation of ‘negative energies’ which had apparently begun during the Ayahuasca ceremonies at Takiwasi. The processes of a consolidated psychic infection had been indicated by my experience of intense cold at the last of these. The ‘coldness’ of the Chiric Sanango diet could not be taken as symptomatic as this was an expected feature of the plant’s effects. However, the physical depletions occasioned by the diet coupled with the psychological and emotional trauma of the Ayahuasca ceremony at Sonncowasi would have accentuated the negative influence these energies were exerting in my ‘bodymind’ complex. Within this complex the energies had now established themselves firmly as a self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing feedback system of which my feelings of depression, anxiety, and general malaise were an outward expression. A ritual diet of bland food and clavohuasca would effect a basic cleansing of my material substrate, perfume baths and sopladas would re-equilibrate its disturbed balance of energies, and Ayahuasca would establish a perceptually holistic experiential field in which the systemically emergent healing potentialities of the therapy could be realised. I felt better already.

The first ceremony of my curacion followed the familiar pattern to a fault (see PART 1 above). Don Fernando presided and Don Francisco assisted him, drinking a small measure of Ayahuasca himself to aid in a more detailed diagnosis of my sickness. When it came to my turn I drank with a considerable amount of trepidation as the memories of my Takiwasi and Sonncowasi experiences crowded into my mind. However, this feeling was kept within bounds by my complete trust in the expertise of Don Fernando and Don Francisco, and an unflinching conviction in the efficacy of their healing art. As the ceremony began I was deeply conscious of having delivered my soul, indeed my life, into their hands.

With a tremendous sense of relief I found myself effortlessly re-accessing the visionary domains I had come to associate with La Sachamama during my introductory diet. The imagery was predominantly ‘forest-derived’, the affective content characterised by a feeling of relaxed awe, while cognitively the experience was once again a symphony of systemic insights. Biographical material, which had proved such an oppressive feature of my Takiwasi experiences, was painlessly contextualised in the broader significatory frameworks of a transpersonal perspective. The individual healing phase of the ceremony was for me a more restrained affair than previously and I got the distinct impression that Don Fernando was cautiously assessing my current ‘energific’ state, not wishing to engage too directly with it until he was sure what he was dealing with.

However, there was to be no ‘quick fix’ and I awoke on the morning after this first ceremony in a largely unaltered state of agitation. During my subsequent debriefing Don Francisco said that at the ceremony, under the influence of Ayahuasca, he had seen in me a strong build-up of very ‘dark’ energies that would require considerable effort to clear away. He again assured me that it wouldn’t be a problem, and I have to say there wasn’t a moment when I doubted him.

Each morning and evening (where possible) during the period of the curacion Don Francisco would administer a flower bath and soplada. Stripped to the waist I would sit on a stool in the middle of the dormitory malocca and he would begin by blowing mapacho (organic) tobacco smoke through a large knot of hard red wood and then painted it with a perfume extracted from Ajosacha flowers. I had to clasp this knot in both hands before my chest and keep it there while Don Francisco whistled icaros and whisked my upper body with perfume. He paid special attention to the crown of my head. When he had done this to his satisfaction he removed the knot from my hands, perfumed my palms and told me to wash my face. He then moved back to my crown, sweeping down to my neck and shoulders, and then along my outstretched arms and beyond my fingertips. Each long sweep culminated in his deliberately flicking the shacapa whisk away from my body as though shaking off something undesirable. He would then light a mapacho cigarette and blow smoke into various points on my body selected by the exploratory application of finger pressure. Again the crown of my head received the most attention. After each of these procedures I was left with a vivid, and affectively relieving impression/sensation of having been deeply ‘cleaned’, not in any exclusively physical sense but more in terms of having just experienced a ‘soul bath’. It was as though my total ‘body-mind-soul’ complex had been purificatorily addressed as a systemic whole via the materially embodied aspect. I imagined I could literally feel my consciousness being cleaned of depressive influences, each subsequent bath leaving it a little more transparent until ‘crystalline’ became the adjective most frequently used in my field journal to describe its newfound perceptual clarity. Indeed, towards the end of the curacion I became quite fixated on the qualities of rock crystal.

The second Ayahuasca ceremony of the curacion was dominated by visions and affective impressions of cleaning. After an initial dazzling excursion into a dimension of pure ‘plant spirits’ I started to experience a marked nausea and this was accompanied by a sense of the ‘soul-filth’ I had become infected with in Tarapoto. Imaginally ‘the once clear waters of my soul’ appeared to be full of innumerable plastic barrels seeping highly toxic waste. My mind combined this imagery with a physical need to vomit and by the time I was sick over the back of the bench at the far end of La Sachamama’s Ayahuasca temple it was this bitter filth from Tarapoto that I was purging into the forest- awful poisons that apparently came up from the depths of my being with great physical effort and left my mouth with a taste like petrol. During the stage of individual healing Don Fernando had to work very hard to extract the lingering traces of this filth which I now visualised as an oily essence of darkness. Gradually his songs, ‘shacaparing’, and powerful presence seemed to gather this darkness into a concentrated field of black energy which he then deliberately swept to one side. I actually felt it leaving me to the right, holding on to the last like sticky tar before it was finally disconnected. The moment this happened I experienced my consciousness flood with something very akin to ‘daylight’, an impression affectively attended by a sensation of euphoric, if exhausted, relief.

The third ceremony was to constitute ‘the turning point’ of the curacion. During this ceremony I experienced the final overcoming of my sickness- a dramatic resolution of intrapsychic conflict- and the subsequent re-establishment of an uncompromised, stable state of positive well-being, a state enduringly reflected in both ‘ordinary’ and ‘non-ordinary’ consciousness. The following extract from my field journal, written on the morning after the ceremony, is quoted in full as the most direct means of communicating the nature of this condition:

‘Last night’s ceremony was among the most dramatic of the entire series of nineteen- a night of almost unimaginably powerful transcendental healing. I am only just beginning to appreciate the awesome potency of Ayahuasca ‘bodymind’ therapy, but last night’s experiences constitute something of a ‘quantum leap’ in understanding. For this leap to be possible it was crucial for me to be in a sufficiently severe state of psychophysical sickness. To get to the heart of the shamanic healing process one must actually be healed shamanically. It’s been an incredibly hard, painful lesson but the insights I have attained from observing the cause, course, and cure of this recent sickness are more than worth the terrible agonies that have been entailed. In the process of rebirth effected by the curacion I am now at the point of conception, the beginning of the Universe in little- a timeless moment of infinite possibility awaiting the infallible dictates of Cosmic consciousness. This is ‘the still point’- purest essence of nothing, the crystalline core of ‘No- Mind’, and the ecstatic absolution of Zero. I am deeply conscious of my infinity and my eternity. In being absolutely ‘nothing’ I am simultaneously ‘everything’ awaiting the genomic influences of consciousness to realise it. I am pure future rooted in a pristine present untainted by the legacies of a past- a position of unprecedented sublimity. I am indeed as new and immaculate as the moment it all begins which is of course NOW.’

The final two ceremonies were in effect consolidations of this position. In both of these I was deeply conscious of having reached a point of experiential ‘closure’, the end of an introductory era. There was a notable absence of new material, either in terms of visions or philosophical insights, and instead the experiences took the form of general assessments of my new state and stage. This came as a relief as I had no desire to be presented with anything that would require further radical realignments of ‘self’ nor to embark upon the next phase of transformation. I was content to leave this for my next period of fieldwork, whenever that might be. I felt as though my future had been literally ‘reborn’, successfully delivered into a present where everything once again perceptibly unfolded in perfect harmony and I was utterly content with my fate. I perceived my ‘self-world’ relation in terms of a new order, an order of higher degree, and this because it now included an integrated patterning of my recent dire conflicts in a state of non-pathogenic resolution. My bodymind was exquisitely clean and I saw myself and the Universe as a unity of infinite light- pure consciousness.

Twelve days after arriving at La Sachamama I walked back through the forest towards Iquitos and my flight to the worlds beyond feeling deeply grateful towards Don Francisco and Don Fernando, highly fortunate to have been sick enough to experience personally a shamanic curacion, and vividly alive.

CONCLUSION.

Looking back over my first period of preliminary fieldwork I described the attendant experiences as comprising ‘a study in serendipity’. The unexpected undertaking of a six week introductory Ayahuasca diet involving twelve ritual journeys into ‘the Realm of Visions’ provided me with a body of crucial insights into the workings of Ayahuasca shamanism’s multidimensional therapeutic process. The phenomenological/analytic orientation of my project necessitated a personal embodiment of the experiential knowledge associated with this process, and particularly a personal negotiation of the ‘death-rebirth’ affective assemblage at the heart of which lies a core transformational dynamic which I have come to refer to as ‘The Ecstatic Insight’. The attitude changes consequent to the experiential negotiation of the processual reality of death are seen to be encoded or ‘seminally implicated’ within this insight. Thus the Ayahuasca diet brought me experientially to the point from which my subsequent analyses of the associated biopsychosocial dynamics must begin. The Ecstatic Insight both induces and constitutes a shift in ‘reality perspective’ so fundamental and all-implicating that the experient’s ‘reality relation’ is permanently altered. It is from this radical experiential re-orientation of the perceived relationship between self and world that the re- evaluative/psychotherapeutically conducive attitude changes are seen to unfold.

Having established a pattern of cumulative consistency existing within the experiential framework of a series of ritual intoxications it became necessary to examine the influence of ‘set and setting’ on the intrapsychic effects of Ayahuasca. The opportunity to participate in Ayahuasca ceremonies at the Takiwasi Centre provided an appropriate experiential context for such a comparative assessment. It also provided me with an opportunity to gain firsthand knowledge of the manner in which such Ayahuasca experiences are incorporated within the psychotherapeutic protocols of an operational drug rehabilitation programme.

As I had suspected for a phenomenon within which analytically discrete components must be seen as mutually determining parts of a multidimensional systemic whole a change of context dramatically influences the affective quality of the Ayahuasca experience itself. The effects of such a change of context are demonstrated unequivocally in the foregoing account of my personal experience of ritual Ayahuasca intoxication at Takiwasi when compared with that for the introductory diet at La Sachamama (see PART 1 above).

The Chiric Sanango diet, as described above, was initially seen to be something of a digression from the principal focus of my project. However, in order to gain a clearer understanding of the total therapeutic field provided by Takiwasi it was essential for me to experience personally the manner in which the Ayahuasca dimension of the therapy is integrated with other components. As things transpired the Chiric Sanango diet was to be far from digressional. Rather it provided a temporal and spatial context conducive to an extended and undistracted experiential assessment of near-death phenomena as manifest in traditional Amazonian psychotherapies. The extended nature of the time frame in which the shamanic death-rebirth process is experienced under the influences of Chiric Sanango facilitated a detailed observation of the intrapsychic restructuring dynamics of the process, particularly with regard to ‘biographical’ realignments and the function of these in relation to the experiences of transpersonalism. Again, the ever-broadening scope of the biographical-transpersonal systemic contextualisation appeared to expand from the affective singularity of a core insight into the totality of experience. All subsequent affects and insights associated with the therapy’s transformational processes were seen to constellate around this ecstatic core.

While I would have liked to have been in a position to undertake a series of ritual participations at Sonncowasi the unprecedented intensity of the near-death experiential component of the one ceremony I did manage to participate in enabled me to explore the limits of the equivalence posited as existing between circumstantial and ritual circumthanatological phenomena, albeit from a perspective specific to my own personal psychophysical constitution.

I could not have anticipated that my experiences in Tarapoto would have culminated in a seriously debilitating psychophysical condition. Indeed if I had I would no doubt have attempted to avoid or at least minimise such consequences. However, the establishment of such a state of affliction in the experiential context afforded by Amazonian Ayahuasca shamanism provided me with an ideal opportunity to participate observationally in the field as a ‘patient’. Experiencing firsthand the intrapsychic processes of a traditional shamanic curacion was an extraordinary stroke of luck with regard to my understanding of not only the psychotherapeutic processes involved but also of the relationship between the experience of being healed and the affective rationales underpinning subsequent compulsions to heal others. In addition, the equivalence of the experiential fields encountered during both my first and second sojourns at La Sachamama further confirmed the importance of ‘set and setting’ in relation to the total qualitative characteristics of ritualised Ayahuasca intoxication.

The two periods of preliminary fieldwork I have now undertaken in Peruvian Amazonia, and their extensive ceremonial participations, constitute a personal orientation within the experiential domains within which contemporary Ayahuasca therapies operate. The emphasis throughout has been on a personal experiential familiarisation with the intrapsychic dimensions and affective/attitudinal consequences of Ayahuasca intoxication. From such a point of personal familiarity I am now in a position to broaden the focus of my inquiry to a formal assessment of the psychophysical experiences of other people within the field of ritualised Ayahuasca intoxication and the impact of these on the social matrices in which they are contextualised.

I would like to take this opportunity to extend my thanks to the ‘Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies’ (MAPS, Florida), and particularly Mr. Bruce Pavitt, for the generous pledge of a travel stipend without which this second period of preliminary fieldwork would not have been possible. Thanks are also due to Jaques Mabit and all the staff and patients at the Takiwasi Centre in Tarapoto. The accommodation of my participatory requirements within Takiwasi’s busy rehabilitatory programme is greatly appreciated. A special mention must go to the people of Sonncowasi both for the staging of an unscheduled Ayahuasca ceremony and for providing me with an environment conducive to personal healing. Finally I must express my heartfelt gratitude to the director of La Sachamama Ethnobotanical Garden, Don Francisco Montes, and to the La Sachamama shaman, Don Fernando Lachi. Without their kind consideration and expert administration of a shamanic curacion this second period of fieldwork could not have concluded so positively. Not only did they safely introduce me to the powers of Ayahuasca shamanism during my first period of fieldwork they have subsequently, in this second period, taught me how to survive them. Last, but far from least, more thanks than I can express in words must go to Helen and my family who patiently negotiate both the highs and the lows of my journeys with equal understanding, and support. None of this would have been possible without them.

It was only on returning to England that I came to appreciate the true cost of my post-Takiwasi afflictions and subsequent curacion. Ten days after my departure from La Sachamama my supervisor met Don Francisco in Iquitos. The first thing he asked her, and almost before the conclusion of customary greetings, was ‘how’s Marcus?’ Marcus was in fact fine and still basking in the euphoric afterglow of the most affectively intense near-death experience of his entire life. It was immediately obvious to Dr Barbira-Freedman that the master shaman was not at all well himself. Apparently, the enormous energies he was compelled to expend in re-equilibrating my own had left him severely depleted and it would be several more days before he finally regained his normal demeanour of seemingly inviolable good health. It was then eighteen months before I saw him again, this time in surroundings strikingly alien to the familiar forest contexts of our friendship. He was one of three guest-exhibitors of Ayahuasca- inspired art (‘Inner Visions’) at a private gallery near London’s Russell Square. It was only then that I managed to thank him properly for gathering me back to the world of the living, which is as much as to say for saving my life, a fact I had only fully appreciated long after those desperate nights of visionary battle on the shadowside of magic.

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Marcus C.Y. Lumby, MA, MA, DCH, DHP, ©2000

Bracklyn, Winchfield, Nr. Hook, Hampshire RG27 8BU, England.

E-mail: marcus.lumby@virgin.net