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Yajé - El Nuevo Purgatorio

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MARCELA -   A TALE OF THE URBAN CULT OF YAJÉ
BY:  JIMMY WEISKOPF
( dedicated to Mauricio and Stephanie)
originally published in the magazine Ecstacy,  issue no. 2

Introduction

  Yajé (or ayahuasca) is the liquid essence of a psychoactive jungle vine, which,  prepared with other plants, is used by the native peoples of the Amazon basin in shamanic healing ceremonies. Guided by the visions it produces, the Indian shamans are able to discover and work on the hidden causes of illness, which (with the exception of simple injuries, common colds and the like) are thought to come from negative influences in the spirit world. Among others, these include the patient's contact with troubled or malignant spirits of plants, animals or dead people; intentional black magic; troublesome human sentiments, such as envy or inter-family rancours; and a sort of karma in which the patient is paying for past misdeeds.

  One evidence of yajé's power are the many apparently "miraculous" cures effected by its curanderos, for which there exist hundreds of reliable testimonies.  Once we accept that yajé can solve problems of health which orthodox medicine cannot touch and that it does this through the manipulation of ethereal forces which science still does not recognize, then we may grant that it may work other kinds of magic. Traditionally, it was also employed in indigenous societies to, for example, locate sources of game, find lost objects, bring rain and see into the future.  

  Yajé is, above all, a purgative. It provokes attacks of vomiting, diarrhea and dizziness. At times the effects are so strong that the person who drinks yajé may feel the close presence of death. But generally it does not hit those who are in good physical/mental health  so violently and in any case, it has a therapuetic purpose. It would seem that yajé possesses the mysterious capacity to reduce the impurities of our organism to shit and vomit, which, upon being expulsed, help us to recover our health and optimism. These disequilibriums, in turn, are what  block our inner vision.  When one is “drunk” with yajé, one enters into a realm where the spirits are very real. In the visionary stage,  these spirits are clearly seen, by means of what the indigenous peoples call the “pinta” - vivid and concrete images that may range from the tigers and boas of the jungle to mythical beings, Buddhas and Christs and scenes from past lives or encounters with extra-terrestrials.

 With yajé one enters into a state where intuition is much more acute than in normal life. The capacity to see visions  (not hallucinations, which imply a diseased mind) is, say the great masters, innate: it is not the yajé itself which gives the visions. Rather  it removes the continual screen of thought that dulls our consciousness. When the body is completely clean, the mind becomes still and one is able, in the mystical sense, to see.

    The person who does yajé may suffer for a few hours but he is not alone during the yajé session. The job of the shaman or “taita’ is precisely to look out for the welfare of the participants, through his communion with the world of the spirits. Among other techniques, he calls upon the aid of benevolent spirits through his icaros (sacred chants)  or by driving away the focal points of evil/illness with shakes of his leaf-fan..

     The taitas emphasize that yajé is not a drug but a sacred plant which uses chastisement to teach those who take it to become better persons. As well as helping the shaman to literally see the hidden causes of the disease, the pinta or vision reveals, to the patient, the true nature of his personality, making him see, for example, traumatic incidents from his childhood or the consequences of his bad conduct.

   Yajé fascinates many white intellectuals, artists, questers after spiritual truths, etc who have lost contact the spiritual roots of their own western culture. In recent decades there has been a virtual renaiisance in its use, characterized by the visits of such people to remote jungle regions in search of a shamanistic medical tradition that is otherwise dying out. Parallel to this,  through such contacts, some of the traditional shamans are coming to the cities, where they offer yajé cures to a wide variety of urban patients. In Brazil there are two well-organized urban cults of yajé, with thousands of followers. In Colombia, the situation is more informal but it is based on this same alliance between white enthusiasts and native shamans.

  The following story, which is a true account of a yajé session, is an attempt to portray something of the urban cult in Colombia and show that yajé is no longer just an exotic jungle ceremony but a ritual of curation that is adapting itself to our contemporary world.

MARCELA

I went by taxi around nine to Mauricio’s  place,  just  as don Antonio and his wife dona Mercedes,  arrived with their son, Isidoro,  who was lugging a square canvas shopping bag which held the big plastic container of yajé .  The Taita, wearing glasses and his sayo  - a long red and white striped poncho -  over a citified suit ,  sat down  in an expansive mood. He is a big man, with strong Inca features and  so rooted in what he is that he fills the room. The newcomers gathered round,  impressed by their first  contact with  a real shaman and the Taita told stories and made them laugh.  Fifteen sleeping bags with people in or on them filled the room,  giving the impression of  a multitude  in that modest space:  the Taitas  sat  at one end on a broken- down sofa. 

   When it seemed that the preliminaries would  go on forever,  the Taita gave a nod, someone doused the lights and lit a candle and   Dona Mercedes got out the  heavy necklaces  and helped place them round his  neck, together with the longer one that fell over his chest with the animal fangs and shells and seeds.  Last, there was the elaborate crown, with its stiff band  holding upright and trailing feathers in a long crescent. The yajé was poured out into the big  bowl and  Mauricio went round the room blowing copal smoke on  everyone, to frighten away the evil spirits.  It made me want to wretch because it brought back a Proustian memory of my early  agonies with yajé, down in the jungle. The dense cloud  dimmed the outlines of the room, making the moving figure of the taita seem  phantasmal. The fear, the heightening of the senses,  the silence that inevitably fell, though the Taita never asked for it, always gave the delivering of the toast a majestic solemnity, despite the informal setting. “Yajé es yajé”,  he joked, meaning that it is just  as awesome  in the city as in the jungle.   Shaking  the leaf fan over the bowl, he began  singing.: KONA GENTE , PINTA GENTE ,WATERAPINTA, SUMA GENTE . O n and on it went, in Inca., as he did precise, quick little repeated shakes over and across the bowl and then out through the room.

     Mauricio, as host, got the first cup, then Isidoro.   When my turn followed most of the nervousness had gone:  the long wait had got me acclimatized  and in the excitement of the moment you just did what you had to do without thinking too much about it.. After years of doing yajé, the taste was no longer so awful,   more sour than bitter and  even  a bit sweet .  But it  was potent and with the first rush of the vine, the heat and well-being of it, there was the conviction that you were ingesting  an explosive power that  nourished both your body and your soul.. Back in my corner,  I  shut myself off from my surroundings, my only way of dealing with the unpleasant part, the purgative stage which might go on for hours and  bring sensations ranging from the unpleasant and mildly painful to outright  torture. Everyone reacted in his own way, some were withdrawn , others showed their nerves by being overly chatty..  Once everyone had drunk the brew, the Taita started playing the harmonica. 

   After some 20 minutes, there was the first run to the toilets, a  chorus of bumps, exclamations and deep liquid heaving, the sound of the surf on the sea. With yajé, you follow your guts, at least in the early stage.  I had a quick shit,  then a while later another, but still  had no urge to throw up. I kept my eyes open because all you saw with them closed before you vomited was menacing  rigid mocking stick figures that sucked you into their eerie electric world.  As the vine hit me, I perceived a vague atmospheric density,  a spirit static in the air.  Henry  the dentist was showing off  again,   giving a lecture on yajé  to  a group of young women who were doing it for the first time. I tried to hold back my criticisms. If anyone had messed people’s yajé journies up that way over the years, it was I . But when the name of the   Dalai Lama came up for the third time, I told him to shut up. He got mock offended but we were used to taking the piss out of one another.  Around the crown of Mauricio’s head flames of  pinta leapt into the air.  

   The congregation showed fragmented human energies. Some, well and lively,  joined in the music;  a few even danced, but most were quiet.. The girls Henry was talking to were little timid darlings   at the far end of the room.  Women, I remembered, usually didn’t suffer so much: they weren’ t so egoistic or out of tune with their bodies.  Isidoro , dressed in his own feather crown  was rocking back and forth, accompanying his father on the harmonica. The Taita  began the first curing: an indistinct male figure whose bare back faced me, sat on the stool before the altar and received the flicking fan  as the Taita  sung his icaros. The music came into the visions I  was seeing with my open eyes,  strange phantoms  weaving in and out of abstract oily layers of colours against the neutral background of the wall. Around the head of  Isidoro there was a wide layer of the brighter geometrical pinta you got in the deep stage.

  The pressure in my stomach got tighter and tighter:. The copal smoke, while thinner, lingered and in the dark, with the cluster of people, gave the appearance of a forest, tiers of  vegetation with  clearings and knots of flowers and water that ran over the stones that collectively were  the different persons with their respective journies. The wavy lines that ran over  the forms I saw were hurting my vision. I felt like I was breathing a fine burning light out of my eyeballs, but when I closed my eyes  I saw the nauseating stick monsters and  for a moment I was in a real panic, not knowing what to do.

   Then I understood that it had to do  with a deep heavy burning in my guts and I  sat up and headed for the toilet,  knowing it was time to vomit. I stood over the basin and wretched several times and could feel this cement coming up but nothing happened. The toilet bowl came alive : it was writhing with a grid of evil colours  and the water  sang foully. I grabbed for support and tried to vomit but it wouldn’t come and the colours overwhelmed me until, faint and fearful I  was the phenomenon, I became the waves of strident,  snakey lines. I felt humiliated for losing control when I was supposed to be so experienced. But that never counts with yajé. You can do it a million times but if there is a notable imbalance, be it physical, psychological or moral, it reaches out to punish you like this all the same.  Then  ruefully, I figured it out. I was being punished for a mocking reference I had made to a friend a few days before about the way the Indians made such a mystery of the vine at times, got so mean and contrary towards me because I was a white man.. Yes, yes, I cried inwardly to the vine, I acknowledge your sovereignty,  forgive me,  stop the torture!

Some  grain of self awareness  told me to get  more comfortable and breathe.   I knelt down and put my forehead on the ground.  The cold tile was soothing . I  filled my chest with air, let it go, filled it up again and after a while,  I became calmer.

Then the inner lights flashed  again and there was a sharp jolt in my guts. I thought it was the vomit coming but I quickly realized that the disturbance was a  woman’s voice,  a shrill penetrating scream, indistinct, then making words. “GET me out of here. I want to go, Get me out of here. LET me go, you bastards”. 

 Suddenly, distracted by curiosity, the nausea had gone and I went out into the passageway to see what was happening . It was one of the women,  Marcela  (I gathered from the voices around her)    a fair girl of about twenty with a wild mane of frizzy hair and the perverse look of an angel gone wrong.  Her mouth hung loose and her gaze was frighteningly inward, as though in an epilectic fit  but  she was also like a wild she-cat,  as she grappled,  spit and cursed at a group of  my friends who were trying, too gently I thought, to  calm her down.   Every time that someone got near to her, she lashed out in a frenzy,  shouting that she was being murdered.  So loud, in fact, that lights began to come on in the windows of  the neighbouring apartments.  At one point, they had to physically restrain her as she  tried to climb out of the (second-storey) window.  In the midst of all this,  she held a weird dialogue with herself,  expressing, in a variety of childish voices, what were evidently deep-rooted hurts and obsessions,  with a strong religious flavour, references to  sin, death and hellfire.

    I had seen people freaking out on yajé before,  but never as violently as this. Yet, instead of being upset like the others, who  were saddened and at a loss over how to help, I was strangely thrilled.  There was something sublime about this fit,  something  orgasmic in the way Marcela was confronting her  inner devils, an expressiveness,  a letting go that touched a secret source of  deep energy,  as  only women do when they deliver themselves up to the act of love.  It was  like a  storm at sea,  wild and cataclysmic but beautiful for mocking  the  meanness of daily existence.

    Still, she was messing everyone’s trip up and before long, some neighbour might even call the cops, so dramatic was her shouting.  What would they think of  this scene if they arrived -  a woman screaming bloody murder,  a score of spaced-out people vomiting all over the place,  an Indian shaman, dressed in feathers !!    I considered  holding her down, drenching her in cold water, scourging her body with stinging nettles  ( the traditional indigenous way  easing a bad yajé  experience )  but it was impossible. It’s against the tacit rules  of the rite unless you have the person’s permission .  “But what about the Taita ?”,   I asked Mauricio, “ why doesn’t he help ?”   “No,” he said, “ he says she’s too far gone to be cured just now, she just has to let it ride its course. “

   As the others stood round,  perplexed,  I received a surprising message from the yajé:  I  was the man to get her out of it.  Yajé inspires  you to cure and  I and some of the more enthusiastic followers of don Antonio sometimes helped him out ,  joining in the chants as we danced and poured energy over the afflicted person he was curing or, in a more informal way,  giving moral support to companions when they were down.  This was a different case, of course but I felt the same overpowering rush to meddle.  And I saw something else, which I think no one else caught, namely,  that this was not a person we were dealing with,  not  bad trip in the usual sense, but  the trip of person converted into the animal self we all have and which, in one way or another, we all experience with yajé, sometimes in a desperate way and other times sublimely as we get glimpses, in our visions, of the divine totems of the jungle.  Marcela, in this moment, was a tigress,  a hurt, desperate, frightened and very dangerous animal and the only way to get through to her was to approach her with the same caution and sensitivity,  knowing that it was your vibe, body language and tone of voice that counted, not rational, human elements like concern, reason, reassurance. 

   As I took up the challenge,  I felt the thrill of a bullfighter ,  the edge that comes when you come close to an animal danger.  And so,  pushing my way through the knot of people gathered around her, all of them so kind, so reasonable and yet so useless in the circumstances,   I started my show.  Drawing near, ever so delicately,  I told her that I thought she was beautiful, that what she was doing was beautiful, that it was expressive, which is a good way to be with the yajé,  that I often felt as she did, that I wasn’t angry with her,  that I liked her, but would she please try to cool it, because she was bothering everyone else.  I did  it with a humour I genuinely felt,  I laughed ,  I gently mocked.   I advanced a pace, then another and  and then a slight false move set her off again and she backed away and began cursing again.  When she screamed,  I screamed back, harder and so, for a while,  we shouted ourselves hoarse, as the others stood by, astonished.  It seemed to be working but  Mauricio, a normally gentle guy, but now furious as I had never seen him before,  pushed me out of the way. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing,  get the hell out of here ! “    What I hadn’t realized was the strain he was feeling before the possibility of some awful scandal - the cops, the neighbours -  and there was no choice but to give way to his anger, because, like Marcela’s state,  it was a call from the other world.  In the confusion, however, I made one last attempt . Again with the ever so  gentle approach,  I  started towards Marcela but I hadn’t taken one step when,  with the lithe  grace of the tigress , she grabbed hold of a bucket full of vomit that happened to lie near and  hurled  it at me.  Thanks to the yajé, I got out the way just in time.

     I went back to my place and rested under my blanket:  the encounter had been wearing. In the excitement of it all,  my own nauseous bad trip  had  gone and  when, a while later, I had to vomit, it came easily.   Marcela stayed out in the passage,  her madness undiminished,  the taita apparently indifferent, everyone else, by now, weary, desperate and pissed off.  But,  obeying that unconscious order that rules a yajé session,  Isidoro got up just now and  worked his magic on her with the harmonica, making  energy-passes around her body with the leaf-fan.  She didn’t resist him, as she had me, and in the end,  she stopped shouting and returned to the living room. Her face still showed an extreme distress, but at least the racket had ended.

   The rest of the night is a blur now.  I remember that, in a sort of chain reaction, another girl had a bad time, but her friends eased her with embraces and  kindly words.   I didn’t see many visions that night, because of the disturbance, nor, I think, did anyone else,  but we were happy and animated.  We wildly talked  of our yajé-inspirations, danced and sang and let ourselves be cured by don Antonio. Towards dawn, Marcela came out of herself. She leapt up and  impulsively embraced and kissed dona Mercedes, much to the latter’s embarrassment and then the Taita got to her work on her.  When the party broke up in the early morn,   I asked her how she was feeling: she just snarled and turned away.

    It wasn’t till the evening of the following Monday,  when  I paid a visit to the Taita to  rehash the evening’s events,  that I found out what had really been going on.   Marcela, he told me, had stayed bad, but not so violent, the whole of Sunday and in the evening, she came round to his  place and  ( without yajé but elevated a bit by liquor)  he gave her an additional cure and  they had a long talk..  I had suspected that the  problem was sexual in nature,  a sort of acute frustration compounded, perhaps, by a strict Catholic upbringing, with all of its repressions.    But, in fact, it was, as her strange stream of consciousness had indicated,  a matter of devils,  though not in the literal sense.  It turned out that Marcela, 

a sensitive, educated girl who wrote poetry and did theatre, had a very unpleasant job, working , out of social conviction, with street kids in downtown Bogota. This involves a close and constant encounter with  poverty, dirt,  drugs, degradation, violence, abandonment and treachery,  which is sordid enough, but to make things worse, one of her tasks was to recover the corpses of  the kids who had been bludgeoned, knifed or shot to death,  sometimes by their fellows  and  sometimes by the cops: she  took the bodies to the morgue and dealt with the paperwork.  She had been taking tranquillizers to deal with it all,  which only intensified  the psychic waves she was absorbing.  All this shit had gone inside her, where it fermented over months, without her realizing what was going on and the yajé had brought  it out.  So, in a way I had been right,  her break-down had been beautiful, in the sense of  being positive and therapeutic. The Taita  told me that  if all the evil hadn’t come out  that way,   she would have become very very ill, either physically or mentally.

    I  ran into Marcela  on the street about a month  later.. She was smiley and content,   friendly towards me and  not, as I had expected,  completely put off by yajé.  She hardly remembered a thing about what had happened to her that night.  When I urged her to do yajé again, she said she would think about it  but when I mentioned this later to Mauricio  ( whose apartment is where we usually do it, as it’s big and has several toilets),  he said,  “ Forget it.  I know yajé is to cure and  the sicker the person is the more reason to help him, but  after all the agro we had the last time there’s no way I am going to let that crazy woman through my door  again !”