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
!”
