Notes From Exile: The Ayahuasca Chronicles, Pt. III

Originally published via Armageddon Prose: 

(Continued from Pt. I, Pt. II)

If you’d like to get high as a kite for purely recreational thrills, see dragons, probably learn nothing, and, if you’re a woman, get diddled by your “shaman” in the process, I’d recommend signing up for an ayahuasca retreat with any of the hundreds of Charles Manson-like imposters operating in the Amazon, who have sprung up in recent years to service the lucrative cottage industry there.

If you’re into getting the real thing, though, get at me at benbartee@protonmail.com and I’ll point you in the right direction — to a bona fide shaman, with a multi-generational lineage, who does the work like it’s been done for centuries, if not millennia.

By no means is ayahuasca all she does, either. Her service is multi-pronged, in that she harvests plants of all kinds with various therapeutic properties.

There was the kambo — frog poison secretions taken from the back of the giant monkey frog, which I covered in Pt. I.

The jungle people of the Amazon revere tobacco as a sacred “master plant” and smoke giant rolled cigarettes called mapachos (but don’t inhale and instead just blow the smoke around on themselves). In this way, I was granted license to smoke licentiously for health reasons, which struck me as counterintuitive given anti-tobacco propaganda in the West and which I took eager advantage of.

Via Ethnopharmacology (emphasis added):

“Harmful usage of tobacco is a public health problem of global concern and, in many countries, the main risk factor for non-communicable diseases. Yet, in the Peruvian Amazon, the geographical region believed to be tobacco’s historical birthplace, this plant is associated with a strikingly different usage and repute: Tobacco (especially Nicotiana rustica L.) in this area is described as a potent medicinal plant, used topically or via ingestion to treat a variety of health conditions. The goal of this transdisciplinary field study was to investigate clinical applications of the tobacco plant as per Amazonian medicine exemplified in the practice of a reputed Maestro Tabaquero, an Amazonian traditional healer whose medical specialization focuses on tobacco-based treatments.”

Then there was the rapé — not to be confused with the transgressive transitive verb of the same spelling in English — a type of tobacco snuff mixed with various herbs that you snort through the nasal cavity for a hearty kick.

Via EntheoNation (emphasis added):

“Rapé – pronounced ha-PAY – is a preparation of powdered medicinal herbs, often with a tobacco base, that is taken through the nose. This practice of consuming powdered plant medicines through the nose is pre-Columbian and was first observed among the Brazilian indigenous tribes.

In Europe, herbal snuff was introduced by the doctor and botanist Francisco Hernández de Boncalo in 1577 and the elites often took snuff as a headache treatment. During the 18th century inhaling snuff became fashionable among the European aristocracy.”

(A friend of mine down there told me he googled “is rape legal in the United States” and now he’s sure he’s on some government list. I assured him that any man with his salt in this day and age is on a government list.)

For some eye issues I mentioned to her — she asks about whatever it is that you’d like to address in terms of complaints — I was introduced to a concoction called sananda, an extract from some root. (I never got a clear answer as to what it is. Search engine results turned up nothing.)

It burns like the absolute dickens, but amidst the searing pain, an undeniable sensation of it tickling your third eye — the pineal gland — and an ensuing sense of clarity.

At one point, on account of smoking high volumes of mapachos whereas usually I don’t smoke at all, my throat hurt. I relayed this complaint to the shaman, who ordered me to follow her to the edge of the encampment. There she cut a slice into a tree with a knife and put the white foamy discharge on a spoon and fed it to me, which eased the throat tingle. 

I brought all of these products back to Lima with an eager mind to experiment with them on my wife, that being a favorite hobby of mine, who rejected my gifts on account of being too weird. Which is fine — more for me.

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Vice “pharmacopeia” guy Hamilton Morris did a special where he made his own MAOI inhibitor and took it alongside synthetic DMT — in typical Western hubristic fashion, believing himself to be pharmacologically enlightened and capable of doing ayahuasca better than the jungle people who have made it for hundreds and maybe thousands of years using whole plants — with disastrous results.

This is a microcosm of the essential problem with the purely materialist Western worldview; he demonstrated no respect for the spiritual tradition that accompanies the plant medicine and nearly lost his damn mind in the process, by his own admission gaining no real therapeutic value from the experience.

In a similar way, I do yoga in the sense that I do the poses, and do them well with correct form and breathing technique, but I know it’s not true yoga, which is a spiritual tradition that extends well beyond exotic stretching technique; what I do, and what most yoga practitioners in the world do, is merely stretching inspired by yoga, which is not wrong in itself but is a superficial facsimile of the real thing.

Maybe someday I’ll go to India and learn how to do that real thing.

Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

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